Today, we pull up a chair and talk
to what could be the world's biggest fan of Chrono
Trigger. While some are content to merely profess their
love for this epic Super NES adventure game, Nathan
Lazur put his money (and hundreds of manhours)
where his mouth was and brought the game into the 21st century
with a polygonal remake for personal computers. In this
edition of The Brews Brothers, Nathan shares the
details of Chrono Resurrection's development... along
with the tragic demise of this ambitious
project.
GRB: What were your plans
for Chrono Resurrection?
LAZUR:
From the start, the plan
was to re-create ten scenes from Chrono Trigger into a
nicely packaged demo as a tribute to the original game. Some
other fan-made homebrew games out there regularly set
impossible goals that are unattainable because lack of
resources, experience, and/or funds. We wanted to make sure we
didn’t shoot ourselves in the foot and set easy-to-achieve
goals that allow iterative development. We were planning to
release a playable version of the demo to the public in
Christmas 2004, but the cease and desist from Square-Enix’s
law firm unfortunately prevented that from
happening.
GRB: Was
the game intended as a sequel to the original Chrono Trigger,
or a remake?
LAZUR:
Chrono
Resurrection is a remake of Chrono Trigger. Of course, we
added a bit of our art style into the mix and changed the
story a bit to make sure that the demo play-through flowed
well. But for the most part, the demo was meant to replicate
the feel of the 16-bit classic while enticing the player with
current-generation graphics, sound, and animation.
GRB:
What programming tools and
experience were necessary to make the
game?
LAZUR:
The entirety of
the engine, tools, and game code were written by me – all from
scratch. Re-inventing the wheel is usually frowned upon in the
coding community, but it was justified because the experience
of developing an entire game from start to finish has
tremendously allowed me to grow professionally. My personal
goal was to learn how to make a game in it’s entirety for
contextual reference at work.
As for the experience necessary to make the game – It’s
tough to judge exactly how many years would be necessary to do
what we did. You see, just about everyone on the development
team make games for a living at game development studios
around the world. When we created the demo, we were all pretty
much the same age (22-24) and roughly had about the same
amount of experience professionally (2½ years professionally,
up to 5 years of development at home). It takes many years of
passion and hard work to be able to create a final result that
is appealing. For instance, our art director, Luis Martins,
has been drawing his entire life and only started to truly
have his skills mature and his work improve when he joined the
industry.
Another key factor is who you work with and how well
you work with them. If you have a connection with the people
you work with, you can achieve great results. This especially
is true when you can work with some of the team members in
person. Fortunately, we made a small studio in my apartment in
Montreal, when I lived there, to be able to cooperatively
develop the demo after work in a motivating environment. It
also didn’t hurt that we were die-hard Chrono Trigger fans.
GRB:
How many people worked on this
game?
LAZUR:
When we first
started, it was just me, our musician, and a contract artist.
As development of the engine and game framework progressed, we
enlisted more team members. Just before the cease and desist,
we had 9 people on the team.
GRB: What
was Square-Enix's response when they discovered that you were
working on the game?
LAZUR:
Well, their public
response was a Cease and Desist in September 2004. But it’s a
little peculiar if you ask me. When we went public with the
demo media just before E3 2004, we unexpectedly received tons
of press and fan response. While looking through the Web logs,
we noticed a lot of square-enix.co.jp proxy IP’s and they were
downloading *a lot* of data. At the time, we thought it might
have been low-level employees, such as programmers, artists,
etc. because there were no e-mails telling us to stop
development. This barrage of traffic from Square-Enix lasted
for 3 months before the eventual Cease and Desist. And of
course, the Cease and Desist was a legal obligation for Square
to protect their IP, so we really don’t know what anyone from
Square-Enix thinks from a creative point of view.
GRB: What
is the future of fan-made tributes to popular video games?
LAZUR:
That depends on
the publisher. Valve and Rockstar had no problem endorsing
fan-made tributes to their games. Other companies such as
Nintendo and Square frown upon fan-made tributes as shown by
their numerous Cease and Desists.
My personal opinion is that anyone can make anything
they want. If you want to release it publicly and the IP is
someone else’s, you might have complications with potential
copyright infringement. If not, then you can privately enjoy
something that you always wanted to do and to be able grow
while creating it. I think that’s the most important aspect of
home-brew tribute development.
GRB: What
compromises can fans and corporations like Square-Enix make to
ensure the continued development of fan-made tributes to
popular video games?
LAZUR:
I’m not sure there
is much fans can do because all of the power, by law, is held
by the IP owner. We’ve had numerous petitions to ask Square to
re-instate the project that amounted to nothing, even though
they were very flattering. Fans must understand that a company
like Square-Enix created a property that took time, money and
talent to create the original game and that it is their right
to be able to say what does and doesn’t fly. Some publishers
accept free press from re-makes; some may think it could
damage the perception of the original game if it ends up
sucking. A lot of that depends on the skill and experience of
the development team.
The only compromise I can think of is for the fan-made
tribute development team to privately create a polished demo
and then present it to the publisher in question. That way it
can be dealt with a more traditional business
procedure