When Philips Media announced the deal with Virgin Interactive to bring three entertainment titles to CD-i, the deal was about Creature Shock, Lost Eden and ... Heart of Darkness. The last one was never released on CD-i, although it ended up on Playstation. What happened? A CD-i collector recently contacted us with a press demo kit about Heart of Darkness on CD-i, although there was no CD inside, it was just the case. It is, however, a sign that a physical form of demo or prototype exists. Let's dive into the story of Heart of Darkness, which started as a CD-i project, funded by Philips.
According to a tester at Philips some work was done on the cd-i version, but he said thats only what he had heard. Heart of Darkness was one of the triple contract titles Philips signed with Virgin, along with Creature Shock and Lost eden. thankfully, the latter two were actually released on CD-i, but something happened along the trail of development with Heart of Darkness. A spokeperson from Virgin has some very interesting insights: Heart of Darkness had been in development for over four years for both cd-i and cd-rom. The game was being developed by Amazing Studio under a publishing agreement with Virgin.
After a lot of dead-lines and hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs, Philips cut the money-flow and sold the project to Sega. Sega planned Heart of Darkness to be a killer-app for their Saturn console. Our source: "In today's volatile computer gaming industry, it may often take a game a really long time to reach the software store shelves. In recent months I have witnessed numerous occasions when right at the time a game is ready to ship, the distributor has financial woes and either disintegrates or sells off the title or both. Often such a change leads to months or even years of delay as a new distributor is found and the game needs to be reshaped to suit its new masters. Such is the history of Heart of Darkness, a game that took its name from the famous Joseph Conrad novel to which it bears little resemblance.
First announced way back in 1992, in 1993 it began to take shape through the efforts of the French Amazing Studio, best know for the sleeper hit Out of This World. Originally destined for distribution through Virgin Interactive, in early 1997 the deal fell apart, and now it is finally being distributed by Interplay for both the PC and Playstation. I checked back to compare the game features and specifications from the planned Virgin release, and discovered with some surprise that it looks like nothing major has been changed, added, or enhanced since then.
For most games, standing still for a couple of years would be the kiss of death in the rapidly changing gaming marketplace. But Heart of Darkness is not like most games. Although at its core a platform game, it really aspires to be an interactive movie. While in the last couple of years we have witnessed some real classics in the side-scrolling platform genre, especially Monolith's Claw, Epic MegaGame's Jazz Jackrabbit 2, and GT Interactive's Oddworld, none has as lofty hopes for its impact on the gaming consumer as does Heart of Darkness."
When I look at the final Playstation version, I can imagine this was technically too high for CD-i, but I've been surprised more times about what is possible with CD-i, like in Creature Shock and Atlantis: The Last resort. "In the strictest technical sense, Heart of Darkness is not a side-scroller in the manner of most of these typical platform games. In side-scrollers, when you get toward the right or left of a play screen, the vista expands so that you can move further in the direction you are going. In Heart of Darkness, in contrast, when you get toward the edge of a screen a whole new screen appears. That was one approach to get it running on the limited CD-i hardware."
[Thanks, Black Moon Project]