The Big Game Idea: Skyscrapers - A 1UP classic from Sep 18, 2006

Below is a series that I originally ran on 1UP in 2006. In it I proposed an original video game based on the Incredible Hulk. I called it "The Big Game Idea." Over a few weeks I described the graphics, game play, visuals, and plot from beginning to end, including bonus features. I made a few minor edits, but it is more or less exactly the same as it was almost 20 years ago. I hope you enjoy it.

Heya peeps, I hope you all had a great weekend. Mine was a little busy but mostly relaxing near the end. So now I'm recharged for another week of work. Before I get to that let's go back to the game idea.

The next Hulk game isn't going to feature a sandbox environment. Instead we're going to see smaller, linear levels with some sandbox features. Possibly the most interesting will be the ones based on New York. We don't want to spend time developing the 80 square miles of landscape featured in the Superman Returns videogame, when there are many other levels to fill. The burroughs in the Hulk game are going to be smaller and capture a flavor of New York at fraction the size of the levels featured in Superman Returns or Ultimate Spider-Man.

What makes the downtown area in the next Hulk game unique would be the added interactivity with the skyscrapers. In the Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, there would be textures of footprints and explosions that would follow the Hulk around when he ran on buildings. This was nice, but of course these details would soon disappear as neither the Xbox or PS2 had enough memory to remember his path of destruction. One type of building (the Division Headquarters) would collapse if it had acquired enough damage.

The skyscrapers in the next game have to be more interactive. It's not believable to have super-powered characters running and jumping on buildings that are indestructible. You can throw cars and missiles into buildings in other comic-based games and the building doesn't suffer any visible damage. The downside is that realistic damage, physics and textures on skyscrapers would tax the resources of any system, including the PS3 and Xbox 360. So I suggest building simple polygon models of skyscrapers and "cheating" the effects of damage by creating texture maps that mimic the effects of damage.

In the next Hulk game, as with any super-powered character, I envision epic battles. If the Hulk goes into a fight with the Iron-Man then chances are both characters will be knocking each other into buildings, if not completely through them. If a character is knocked into a building they would create a small crater on the face of the building. The crater is just a small modification to the polygon model with a texture of crumbling cement and broken glass placed over the polygon model. A stronger attack would actually create a tunnel about halfway into the skyscraper. The tunnel is another simple modification to the polygon model. The texture inside of the tunnel would be of office furniture, broken plumbing, steel beams and electrical sparks.

The characters can actually run and fight inside of these tunnels of or throw opponents into them. If a character is thrown into a perpendicular side of a tunnel then both tunnels will meet in the middle and create an elbow. Characters can cut the corners of off buildings. These simple polygon models would deform to create the missing corners. These clippings would have a texture that shows us the damaged inside of the building. All of these textures would spare the developers from going to the trouble of creating actual models of furniture for each and every floor of the skyscraper.

The best thing that these skyscrapers support is the ability to have characters go completely through them and create a tunnel of destruction from one side, out the other. The building would remain standing if the tunnel was made above the midpoint of the tower. If, however, the tunnel was made at the base level then the building would topple over. It wouldn't simply disappear after collapsing. The players could still throw each other into the fallen tower until it completely was destroyed.

Epic battles in comic book and animated adventures have featured knock down, drag out fights, where super-powered beings have been thrown through buildings. Unlike the preset animations of destructible level design in the Dragon Ball Z Budokai games, the levels in the Hulk game are completely open during a fight. That's not to say that the DBZ games were bad, they showed Western audiences how amazing a fight between super-powered beings really would be. DBZ influenced the final battle between Agent Smith and Neo in the Matrix. The next Hulk game would allow us to easily top that battle. After 25 years of comic book games we are at the point where we can actually give audiences a fight they will remember.

I don't want to hear about how difficult it would be to create such levels either. What I ask for is in theory, less complicated than the building models used by Jaffe in War of the Monsters. The buildings in WotM could be destroyed, their faces would crumble and we could actually count the floors on the models themselves. The parts of the building that collapsed could be picked up and thrown at other monsters. I'm not asking for that much detail in the next Hulk game. The characters are always center stage and the level would be their arena, at no point would their arena take more importance than the characters themselves.

That's how I see it anyhow. I hope you have a great Monday.

Do you have a favorite environment that you could destroy in a game? Tell me in the comments section. As always if you enjoyed this blog, and would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!