Famed game designer Eric Chahi shared an interesting yet somewhat terrifying anecdote about his legendary action-adventure Another World during his GDC talk today. It seems Another World nearly ended up being essentially another game.
According to Chahi, when he got to the point of shopping the game around to potential publishers, he initially approached (the now defunct) Virgin Interactive. The company proceeded to try and sway him to rework the game into a point-and-click adventure since "that's what was popular at the time."
Given the amount of work he'd already done on the game and the formidable task it would have been to re-tool all of it, Chahi decided to Another World alone. He went on to work with Delphine Software, which he described as being "very supportive" of the game as it was -- and how it will appear on iOS devices later this year.
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Timed to coincide with the conclusion of Eric Chahi's GDC 2011 postmorterm on his adventure classic Another World, comes the announcement that the game is being ported to iPone and iPad, courtesy of DotEmu and publisher BulkyPix. The game won't hit iOS until later this year, but is evidently up-and-running according to Chahi himself. "The first prototype looks beautiful on iPad; they are doing a great job on it," he said in the announcement.
It's unclear whether the iOS version will be based on the 1991 original or the 2006 15th anniversary remastering (or both!), although DotEmu founder Xavier Liard promises his team will "put a lot of love and care to insure that the gamers get best user experience playing this game on iOS."