Ep.299 – Ground Pounders: Breaking Down the Wall That Built First-Person Shooters with Red Faction
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Ep.299 – Ground Pounders: Breaking Down the Wall That Built First-Person Shooters with Red Faction
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In 2001, a mid-sized studio in Champaign, Illinois released a first-person shooter that let players blast through walls nobody told them they could blast through. \Red Faction\ was built by a team that had lost the game they originally set out to make, working from the bones of a cancelled Descent sequel and quietly convinced the whole thing was going to fail. What they built instead was GeoMod, a geometry modification engine that inserted real, walkable, fireable holes into surfaces the game had never scripted to break. It was the first commercial game to offer unscripted real-time geometry destruction, and it arrived on Mars, wrapped in a story of corporate exploitation and workers' rebellion, made by a programmer turned studio founder who named his company from a dictionary at midnight. Join David and Rob as they trace the story of Volition from Parallax Software to Red Faction, from the ground pounder nobody believed in to the pioneer Alan Lawrance still believes in today, on today's trip down Memory Card Lane.
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