Now I don't have the fancy book learnin' to know what can change the nature of a man, but there sure are a lot of factors that can change the nature of a game. In a retrospective feature for upcoming issue 390 (402 for our friends across the pond), contributor Robert Zak dug into the strange history of Planescape: Torment by talking to members of the unlikely Interplay team that made it happen.
"I was just trying to figure everything out, and I noticed that there were three Planescape projects that all had like four people on them," recalled Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart. These were the heady years of 1996-'97, when Interplay was simultaneously publishing Baldur's Gate while internally developing Fallout and, eventually, Planescape: Torment. Urquhart was head of Interplay's RPG division, which was then coalescing into the publisher's well-loved subsidiary, Black Isle Studios.
Another member of this team Donley described as Interplay's "Dirty Dozen" was Eric Campanella, who sculpted and animated many of Torment's main characters despite only having had experience in 2D art, not the 3D modeling [[link]] that formed the basis of PST's sprites. Artist Dennis Presnell, now working on Avowed at Obsidian, described himself as a "college dropout" who learned his digital art tools for Torment "just by pressing buttons and seeing what it did."
This team would eventually do some real magic though. An early indication of that came when Black Isle staff flew out to BioWare HQ in Edmonton to show off the game. After demoing Torment's opening in-engine scene, Donley recalled BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka turning to a programmer and saying, "You guys told me we couldn't have that many frames of animation. How come the game looks so good?"
You can read Robert Zak's full retrospective feature on Planescape: Torment in issue 390/UK 402 of . You can also subscribe to the mag via MagazinesDirect in both the and the .