Hall of Classics: Flashback

These days, the video game industry is fairly narrow. A few big companies dominate the scene, if only because they can pump millions of dollars into the development of what have become professional-level games. The visual design budget alone of any one of these games surpasses the money available for everything in a small studio, so it's practically impossible to compete. It's gotten to the point that ambitious startups are almost automatically dubbed "alternative" or "independent", labels previously applied to film and music that had too small an audience to be considered commercial.

One of the consequences of this increasingly big-studio-centered development trend is a sort of regionalization of game production. These days it's hard to find something that doesn't come from North America or Japan. But back in the Wild West days of gaming, aka the early-to-mid 90's, there were games coming from all over the world. One of the most interesting producers was France. The French game industry was never as widespread and prolific as its counterparts in Asia and America, but what they lacked in quantity they made up in quality. Some very popular, influential games have come out of France, including today's entry in the Hall of Classics, 1992's Flashback.

Flashback is the most successful title produced by Delphine Software. That's not to say much, though. Delphine created very few games and only one other was even a moderate success, an adventure platformer of a similar style called Another World. After setting a new standard in the genre with Flashback, Delphine sunk into obscurity thanks to some infamously bad titles like Shaq Fu in 1994 and Fade to Black, the near-unplayable sequel to Flashback.

Failures and missteps aside, Flashback is a game that holds up even to modern standards. Taking its cues from the revolutionary original Prince of Persia, it combines careful platforming, adventure-style puzzle solving, and action to make the quintessential cyberpunk video game. Players take control of Conrad Hart, a plain-clothes shmoe with a nasty case of amnesia and a world full of bad guys on his tail. The plot cribs from sci-fi classics like Total Recall and the dystopias of William Gibson. As such, Flashback was one of the first properly cinematic video games.

Aside from the smooth gameplay, atmospheric worlds and steady difficulty curve, what really set Flashback apart from the crowd was its excellent rotoscope visuals. For 1992, no game looked as good as Flashback, either in the game itself or in its 3D cutscenes. The environments were hand-drawn and the sprites were designed using a layered tracing technique that has never really been reproduced.

A version of Flashback came out for just about every platform available at the time, and there were a lot between 1992 and 1994. DOS, Amiga, Super Nintendo, 3DO, CD-i, and everything else that had the processing power carried some iteration of the game.

Since Flashback there have been a number of good adventure platformers, the best of which is Oddworld: Abe's Oddyssey. As for the French gaming industry, there is really only one survivor. Ubisoft continues to churn out successful games, but Delphine and its contemporaries are all long gone. Really, nothing but money is keeping games from a wider variety of cultures from being made. If Flashback is any indication, the rest of the world has a lot to offer.