Blade Runner

Moby ID: 341
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

The game is based on the movie bearing the same title (which, in turn, is based on Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). In the grim world of the future, cities lie in darkness, and nature gave its way to artificial, bio-mechanical production of all creatures - including human beings. Those artificial humans are called replicants, and are treated as servants unworthy of being "true" humans. The police officer Ray McCoy is a "Blade Runner", whose special job is hunt down replicant rebels. During his investigations, McCoy also gets to see their side, and his vision of the world and society begins to change.

Blade Runner is an adventure game with an emphasis on detective work rather than on puzzles. There are very few "real" puzzles in the game, and the gameplay mainly consists of questioning suspects, gathering evidence, etc. There are also some action sequences, and throughout the game the protagonist has the ability to use his gun. The player's decisions can (and will) influence the outcome of the story, bringing the game to one of the six possible endings.

Spellings

  • 銀翼殺手 - Traditional Chinese spelling
  • 银翼杀手 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

232 People (231 developers, 1 thanks) · View all

Cast
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 86% (based on 39 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.1 out of 5 (based on 172 ratings with 12 reviews)

A member of my personal "Hall of Fame"

The Good
Of all the games I've played in my life, Blade Runner is one of the best. It has been a few years since I played it, but I remember watching the movie (again) afterwards. During the movie, as good as it was, I felt there was something missing. The "missing" pieces were things I had done in the game!

If you are familiar with the story, you know that McCoy's main mission is to determine who is a human and who is a replicated-human, or "Replicant". With each new game, the engine determines which of the characters are humans and which are replicants - even you. Some of those can change as you make decisions during gameplay - others will remain constant. This makes for a game that is changeable with every new start. I have been told that there are 13 different versions of the story in all and 4 or 5 possible endings. I, myself, played it three times and found different things each time. I loved the fact that it was replayable.

Gameplay is full of futuristic, detective-type investigation. You'll be searching crime scenes, analyzing data, taking photographs and analyzing them, uploading and downloading data from a mainframe computer as well as questioning suspects and witnesses. There are some shooting scenes that depend upon timing and aim. The difficulty of those scenes depends upon whether you set your game to Easy, Medium or Hard when you started.

While talking to people, McCoy's attitude will affect what questions can be asked as well as how they will answer. I mostly played the game using McCoy's nicer "attitude" but changing that can help or hinder you - possibly even get you killed!

Overall, the interface had almost no learning curve. I liked the handy Travel Map for jumping between known or visited locations.

The Bad
Objects can be a little hard to find in the scenes, but you learn fairly quickly to search very carefully to find everything.

I don't particularly like "timed" segments in games, but those in Blade Runner were necessary and I understood the reasoning behind them.

The Bottom Line
I consider Blade Runner to be one of "the greats". Others have said that the game was too short. I disagree. I thought the length was perfect, especially since you can play it multiple times. Playing it a second time was even more fun than the first, believe me! Don't pass up this title. It is a worthy addition to any game library.

Windows · by Jeanne (75956) · 2009

Another game that didn't live up to its potential.

The Good
Blade Runner was one of the most beautiful games I have seen in a while. I was shocked how good it was when I viewed the first crime scene. Plot was terrific, and most of the game had me at the edge of my seat wanting to see more. Overall the music was great and the puzzles had just the right difficulty. Voice acting could have been a little better, but I think that the people that did the acting did the best that they could. (I.E. it would have been better to have well known acting talent do the voiceovers.)

The Bad
....After saying all that what could be wrong? Well the problem is that once you bring up my excitement you have to be able to end the game in a way that leaves me feeling good, Blade Runner didn't do that. At the end the possible outcomes didn't please me at all.

 I haven’t seen all the endings yet but the ones that I saw were shocking.  I cant really explain why I was shocked without giving away the ending.  needless to say I didn't like it.  If you know of a few different ways to end the game email me, I would like to know what the other endings were like.



The Bottom Line
Great game, but it never lived up to my expectations.

Windows · by William Shawn McDonie (1131) · 2001

Whether or not you saw the movie, it doesn't matter

The Good
Based on the movie of the same name, you are “Rep-Detect” Ray McCoy who is hired by the Los Angeles Police Department to retire a series of replicants. The game is spread across five acts that has Ray searching a crime scene and gathering any evidence that tells him that murder was committed by reps. The first crime scene is Runciter's Animals where two men, believed to be reps, slaughtered birds and trashed the place.

Before I played this game, I saw the movie several times (the director's cut, not the 1982 original) in order to understand fully what it was about, but little did I know that the game is slightly different but still retains the plot. There are some similarities between the two mediums. The main one being that five of the actors who were cast in the movie lend their voice in the game. Also, during the game, Ray uses the ESPER machine to zoom in and pan around a 3D image to look for clues. Some of the locations that were in the movie (eg: Chinatown, Animoid Row) also feature in the game.

New characters are introduced. Some of them may help you, some of them will get annoyed at who you are. There are five modes that you can play the game at. Each mode will determine what a true Blade Runner you are. You can start a conversation with the characters, and pick any topic that you want to start with first as long as you play the game at “User's Choice” level. You can change modes in the game. This means that you can start off as a polite person but later in the game change into a more erratic or more aggressive person. The bottom line is whatever mode you are at will determine what McCoy says and does.

Blade Runner has several endings, some of them have minor adjustments. Which ending that you will view depends on what you do in the game such as shooting replicants or saving them (because you have a soft spot for them.) with all the critical decisions that you must make in the third act. Before you start a game, Blade Runner decides which characters are human or replicants. The game is replayable, mostly to see how many endings you can view and see which characters the game picks out as humans or replicants.

The game has no puzzles, which is good for people like me who are annoyed at solving them. There are some timed sequences, requiring you to either pursue a character quickly before you lose him or run away from an area where you are going to get killed. Blade Runner also has a number of cut-scenes, which usually shows a character talking to another character. More often than not, their conversations add more depth to the game, and you are anxious to see how these cut-scenes affect it. When you are at a location that requires you to turn corners, the game zooms in onto what is around it, and this is a technique not seen in any adventure game.

The voice acting is superb. As I mentioned earlier, some of the actors from the movie lend their voice for the game, and each play their respective characters. They include Sean Young, William Sanderson, Brion James, and James Hong. With the exception of Young and James, most of the actors have the same type of voice as their one in the movie. I could not recognize the rest of the voices as being the original.

The type of music in the game varies. When you are in McCoy's apartment, for instance, a jazz melody is played. But when you enter a scene that is likely to have more action in it than others, than heavy metal and techno music is heard. Some of the music is well composed. As for the sound, they are good. I like the chime that plays when McCoy picks up something.

The Bad
Nearly all the characters are a bit blocky when they walk toward the player.

You have the opportunity to engage in target practice which occurs in the police station. I found that the targets never come out on a state-of-the-art system, meaning that you would never achieve a better score.

The Bottom Line
Gamers who have not watched the movie need not worry. Blade Runner is a complete rehash of the story. It introduces new characters, locations, and objectives, and there are several modes to play the game at. These modes determine what personality Rep-Detect McCoy has, what he does, and what he says. In addition, there are several endings, and the ending that you will view will depend on the actions that you take. The game decides at the very beginning which suspects are human and which suspects are replicants. Because of this, the game can be played over and over again.

There are some similarities. One location is taken straight out of the movie, and some characters return, voiced by the same actors from the movie. The cut-scenes, voice acting, and sound effects are excellent. The game is suitable for people 15 or over because there is a fair dose of nudity and violence, but those who were entertained watching the movie will be entertained playing the game.

Windows · by Katakis | カタキス (43092) · 2007

[ View all 12 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Is it really randomized? BurningStickMan (17917) Apr 28, 2010
Which Version Do I Have? mobiusclimber (235) Jul 2, 2008

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Blade Runner appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Blade Runner legend

Here's an interesting, if unprovable, bit of legend behind Blade Runner the movie and the game. The original movie was noted for having many numerous corporate sponsors seen throughout the film. (e.g. Coca-Cola, Pan-Am, Atari, etc...) After the films release many of these corporations suffered huge financial losses, some like Pan-Am filed for bankruptcy and have since ceased to exist. This has been known as the Blade Runner Curse. The curse, it seems, did not end there. The game was produced by Westwood Studios in 1997, less than a year later they would be acquired by Electronic Arts. By March of 2003, Westwood Studios ceased to exist when Electronic Arts shut down its operations after several of its titles such as Command & Conquer: Renegade failed to meet sales expectations.

Blade Runner similarities

Blade Runner made is based upon the Blade Runner movie from 1982. The movie was based on Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The novel story happens somewhere around '90s, since that was distant future for the author, but when the movie was about to be made, they had to increase the time-line and post it on the beginning of the 21st century, since '90s wasn't much of an unknown future for the time movie was made, back in 1982.

Most of actors that played in Blade Runner movie gave their voice talents to some characters in Westwood's Blade Runner, first 3D real-time adventure game, and some of the characters were made as same as movie characters look. Not to mention how many locations in a game looks exactly like the ones from a movie.

Globally speaking, the plot is almost exactly the same as the movie. Sure, the names are different, there are a few more locations, but that's about it.

Compression

Uncompressed Blade Runner with all the polygons, perfectly clear animations and everything at its highest level was over 400 gigabytes which took Westwood's mastership to compress all this on only four compact discs (there is also a DVD version of Blade Runner), so basically, other then main characters are in much less polygons and detailed, and even on McCoy pixelation can be noticed on some locations (lift, for example).

Endings and quality assurance

There are actually 12 different endings to this game.

Some of the endings are somewhat random, at certain locations during the game, an event will take place. The outcome of the events, as well as which events happen, will help determine which ending you receive.

This game was a testing nightmare, random events and 12 endings meant a tiresome test cycle. The Westwood Studios Quality Assurance Department played through the game over 2500 times.

Installation

The maximum installation takes 1,4 GB, which was enormous for the time.

Music

Vangelis, the composer of the movie soundtrack, did not compose anything for the game. Even the short parts of his pieces in the game are not played by Vangelis himself.

Pictures

Look in the folders on the CD There should be some graphics with some weird names. Click on them. You have a few (amusing) pictures of the Westwood staff.

References

  • In the police station, look at the score board : there's Deckard (Deckard is the main character of the movie).
  • As you can see on the screenshots, there is a Command & Conquer: Red Alert game in the arcade center.
  • In the movie. Deckard visits the fish lady in Animoid row to find out if the scale is from a fish or from something else.

When you pay a visit to Izo in his pawnshop at Hawker's circle (Animoid row), he'll use the flash of his camera to blind you and escape. When you run the picture he has taken of you through an Esper, you can see Deckard in the background when he is talking to the fish lady. * The game opens with a crime scene at a pet shop owned by a man called Runciter (the shop in question is named after him). This is a nod from the developers to Phillip K. Dick, author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) (the book from where Blade Runner is based), since Runciter is also the name of one of the protagonists in another novel written by PKD called Ubik. Coincidentally, there was a game based on Ubik developed by Cryo Interactive Entertainment. * Throughout Blade Runner there are numerous references to the source material, such as the movie, and Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, however the game designers threw in one subtle reference to another movie not related to either of these. At the beginning of Chapter 4, send Roy McCoy up the tunnel with the train tracks. On the right side of the tunnel are the letters CHUD. A obvious reference to the 1984 horror movie about Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers. * The poetry Clovis leaves on McCoy's answering machine at the end of the first day is the first four lines of A Poison Tree by William Blake.

Secrets

  • For a good laugh: Click on McCoy or hit ESC to view the KIA and type POGO.
  • Start Blade Runner with the command line option SITCOM. (in command line: blade.exe SITCOM) After some sentences spoken in dialogs you will hear applause or laughter.
  • Start blade.exe with the parameter SHORTY. (from commandline: blade.exe SHORTY). All characters are shorter and speak with a pitched voice.

Speedrun

The game is beatable in 41 minutes if you skip through all the dialogue and know exactly where to go, what to do, who to talk to, and what to say.

Trilobyte

Originally Trilobyte had first thought of aquiring the rights to make a game out of Blade Runner. But they ultimately abandoned the idea for the "lack of creative control" dealing with licensed material would cause.

Voice Actors

Nearly all of the characters who appear both in the movie and the game are voiced by their original actors. These include James Hong as Dr. Chew, Brion James as Leon, Sean Young as Rachael, Joe Turkel as Eldon Tyrell and William Sanderson as J.F. Sebastian. Edward James Olmos did not reprise his role as Gaff.

Information also contributed by Goteki45, Michael Palomino, Itay Shahar, Juan Pablo Bouquet, MAT, ROFLBLAH, Shogun, Timo Takalo Yeba and Zovni

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by robotriot.

Linux, Macintosh added by Plok.

Additional contributors: emerging_lurker, Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, Zeppin, CaesarZX, Picard, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack.

Game added October 31, 1999. Last modified March 19, 2024.