Weird Weekend
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday feature where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
It’s easy to think about the development of videogame graphics as a linear progression sequence, where rendering techniques have incrementally, inextricably improved along time’s arrow. 8-bit to 16-bit, 2D to 3D, baked lighting to dynamic lighting, real-time ray-tracing to DLSS.
But this is to trim history’s tree of the many branches which have grown from that central trunk, to discount the alternatives, experiments, and evolutionary dead ends like voxels and vector graphics. One of the most unique examples appeared in the early ’90s, when developers were still figuring out exactly how 3D graphics rendering could work. Between the 2.5D corridors of Doom and the 3D verticality of Quake, one British studio posited that the future of 3D graphics lay not in triangles, but balls.
That developer was Andrew Spencer. A UK programmer who cut his teeth in the Britsoft era making sports games for the Commodore 64, Spencer eventually founded his own studio (creatively named Andrew Spencer Studio) at the tail end of the ’80s. Together with a small team, Spencer spent five years making his most famous game, the fantasy survival horror Ecstatica.
Ecstatica was built in a bespoke engine that was different from pretty much any game technology made before or since. Rather than using polygons to render the characters in its world, it used ellipsoids, letting developers build models out of spheres, ovals, and balls.
At the time, Spencer explained the logic of the system in an interview with Next Generation, stating that the goal was to create more “organic looking” characters. “Triangles tend to make hard, robotic-looking figures, whereas ellipsoids can be used to create more rounded, human alternatives. Ellipsoids can also be more efficient because you can make a much better-looking character out of fewer shapes.”
But it wasn’t just Spencer who was responsible for how Ecstatica looked. Credit is equally due to French animator Alain Maindron. In an interview with Time Extension, Maindron explained that Spencer’s ellipsoid technology enabled smoother animation transitions than polygon-based techniques. “Andrew had created a 3D editor where I could work the 3D without much code knowledge,” Maindron explained. “I could create backgrounds and characters and animate them pretty easily. Then he improved the engine, and I could even code the behaviour of characters.”
You need to put yourself in the mindset of a player encountering this in 1994.
Looking at screenshots of Esctatica today makes this idea seem ridiculous, especially given the game is supposed to be a grimdark survival horror. But you need to put yourself in the mindset of a player encountering this in 1994. Doom has been out for less than a year, and here Esctatica is showing players characters whose sprites don’t spin around when you do.
Even so, Spencer himself stated that Ecstatica was merely a testing ground for the technology, a baseline upon which to build something more ambitious. This eventually coalesced into the studio’s next project—Urban Decay.
Like Ecstatica, Urban Decay combined Spencer’s ellipsoid tech with a dark, mature videogame setting. This time, however, that setting wasn’t a medieval fantasy world, but a modern-day urban scenario, with players blasting goons and gangsters in a violent US ghetto.
Interestingly, Urban Decay’s tech paralleled the progression of traditional polygon rendering. Urban Decay used double the number of ellipsoids in its character models, while also supporting SVGA graphics and featuring advanced face and hand animations. According to composer Mike Clarke, Urban Decay even featured a very early version of rag-doll physics, with enemies that “would fall down stairs after you shot [them].”
The available screenshots of Urban Decay show a game with a more consistent, confident art style than Ecstatica, even if, to modern eyes, the characters still look like they would burst if you pricked them with a pin.
Unfortunately, Urban Decay never saw the light of day. According to programmer Ken Doyle, the game went through “endless requests for design and style changes” which included abandoning the ellipsoid style for “a more regular poly look”. This ultimately led to the departure of the game’s primary creative force, animator Eamonn Butler, and the project was put on hold.
With Urban Decay in limbo, Andrew Spencer Studio turned to building a sequel to Ecstatica. This basically took the technological innovations the team had pursued with Urban Decay, then incorporated them in a straightforward follow-up to Ecstatica. Straightforward in concept, anyway. Structurally, Ecstatica is infamous for its baffling puzzle design, though this didn’t stop it from reviewing well on its launch in 1997.
By this point, though, the fate of ellipsoid graphics had already been sealed. The ingenuity of Spencer’s tech was that it relied wholly on software rendering, but games were increasingly relying on hardware to boost the power of triangles. In an interview with Edge prior to Ecstatica 2’s launch, Spencer lamented the challenges of porting the sequel to PlayStation, stating that the console was “geared toward triangles, not ellipsoids” and that “ellipsoids are mostly software-driven, which the PlayStation doesn’t like.”
This isn’t to suggest that we somehow missed out due to the death of ellipsoid graphics, though I am curious to know what games would look like if you scaled the number of balls to modern polygon counts. Rather, the point is that not every technological innovation is indicative of progress, the next step in an unstoppable march toward the future. Sometimes new tech is complete balls, destined to be left behind.
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