Recently we met Tony Rowe, a member who worked at Interweave Entertainment. We learnt earlier from David McElhatten (who was the president of Philips Media Games) that Voyeur 2 was in fact not developed by Philips POV as is stated on the box, but it was made by Interweave. (More on that in a different article). Let's first hear Tony: "I was one of two testers at Interweave Interactive working on the game. We weren't in the credits because by the time we started on the project, they had already mastered the credits video and they refused to edit it.
The studio dogs got in the credits but we didn't. We developed the Mac, PC, and Philips CD-i versions of the game at the same time. We had three different programmers and they each handled one of the versions of the game. I tested all three versions, depending on what was needed in a particular day.
The CD-i version was completed by the time I left, but Philips CD-i business was also imploding at the same time. I assumed for years that all three versions had shipped but discovered later that it looks like the CD-i version never made it to the store shelves.
I had a lot of game consoles at the time (now I have a lot more!) but didn't have a CD-i (still don't), so I had never tried to find a copy. I never got a free copy of the game. I do remember that we showed a demo of the game at E3 earlier in... 1996?
I had a lot of game consoles at the time (now I have a lot more!) but didn't have a CD-i (still don't), so I had never tried to find a copy. I never got a free copy of the game. I do remember that we showed a demo of the game at E3 earlier in... 1996?
And with 'we', I mean InterWeave Entertainment. The studio was a repurposed ranch home in the San Fernando Valley with a full sound studio built in the back yard. The programmers worked out there. I think they liked it because it was so quiet."
Everybody on the team worked on every version of the game, really. Only the programmers concentrated on one version each. You can find the credits list on Mobygames. This was a point-and-click FMV game so the standard CD-i joystick/remote control wasn't very good but I
found that the kid's Roller Controller worked better, so I usually used it for testing. All of the video scenes were filmed and edited long before I started. I tested the game part time with another tester for about four months, I think, before the game was ready.
I did visit Philips' office in LA once on the job, but don't remember much about it. As I remember, the CD-i version of the game didn't present many problems and the video quality was great. The Mac version used Quicktime, I think. The PC version gave the programmer on it a lot of trouble and the video quality was the worst of the three until we started using a then-new video format (MPEG-2?) that gave a much better picture resolution. The strangest bug I found was an issue that only triggered on a single frame at the end of the game:
You win the game collecting video evidence of a murder plot and stopping it by firing a rifle (??!!) through the window of the intended victim's house and interrupting the murder attempt. There was one frame of video where if you fired the rifle, you should have a victory
but instead get a different outcome (arrested for shooting someone, I think, even though it was a clear miss). The programmers didn't believe me, so I had to try to reproduce the bug (which required playing the entire game and clicking on the right 1/30 of a second).
The programmers instead blamed my persistence of vision playing tricks on my eyes, making me think I saw one thing when the screen displayed another. I was incensed. Finally, I used video capture to prove what I'd been telling them. They checked the data and found and found that yes, the data for one single frame of the game was set to the wrong value. They never questioned my vision again. Developers, listen to your game testers
[Thanks, Tony Rowe]