The Making of The Darkening (Fun Online)

The Making of The Darkening
Production	Privateer 2: The Darkening
Type	Behind the Scenes
Run Time	5m05s
Date	September 1996

The Making of the Darkening is a featurette about the making of [[Privateer 2: The Darkening]. It was produced by Goldhawk Film & Television Productions Ltd. and released by Fun Magazine in September 1996. An alternate version was published by Steve Hilliker in 2020.

• Download: DARKEN-BTS-Fun_Online.mp4

Transcript

NARRATOR: In the summer of 1995 Electronic Arts went into production on four stages at Pinewood Studios to film a new form of entertainment: an interactive movie. The darkening will be released in the autumn of 1996 and represents an unprecedented collaboration between the British film industry and the computer entertainment world. The movie-like game will be pressed on five CDs and played and viewed on a computer. As Electronic Arts negotiated the first interactive agreement with equity a spokesman for the Union said "this change in entertainment could in future be seen as important as the birth of television."

ERIN ROBERTS: We shoot it just like a feature film. We, look, we have basically about 80 to 90 crew members who are working here at any one time. It was very important to do it properly because what we're trying to do is make an interactive movie. We're trying to make a, a game which uses all the right movie elements and uses, and uses them interactively

STEVE HILLIKER: we're shooting on film and tape. The main reason being is that a lot of the action stunts and everything are high speed so we've ot a lot of sort of action sequences which you couldn't do on tape. And the other reason is I had to make it quite clear that it's not a video tape in the accepted sense it's a digital tape format.

NARRATOR: We join the film as the hero Lev Arris has being kidnapped. Earlier in the story he crashed on the planet Crius but survived because he was in a cryopod. However the crash initiated a premature thaw cycle and as a result Arris is left with amnesia. When Arris next awakes he's on the planet Hermes equipped with his Personal Access Directory, a sophisticated personal computer. He selects a destination, a bar called Sinner's Inn and begins his adventure.

JOHN HURT: My role in in the piece is what is a barman but he's a barman in the busiest bar in space. really. it's a pretty rough and tumbly bar which almost everybody drops into at one stage or another so he knows everything that's going on. Basically he's a great fixer and he becomes very, really very friendly with our hero which could possibly of course be the audience. So they'll get to know me quite well because I, uh, I do quite a lot of fixing for him.

NARRATOR: Flight simulation is a significant part of The Darkening's gameplay. There are about 30 ships with distinctive handling characteristics available for the player to choose from, an array of weapons which have their own behavioral characteristics and 50 wingmen plus another 50 pilot and pirate profiles for the player to contend with. This view from the cockpit shows the optional head-up display interface which represents an array of interactive opportunity. Real-time lighting is shown off here as these ships change their position in relation to each other and the light source.

BING GORDON The thing about Darkening is we are replicating many of the kinds of techniques that have pre-existed in Hollywood and that have that have started to make things like films be so special. But with the increasing power of PCs we can replicate basically the processing skills of Industrial Light and Magic on a tabletop in Manchester with world-class talent but total unknowns.

Credits

Role	Name
Executive Producer	Paul Cleary
Producer	Bradley Borum