GZ Interview: The Rage by FluidGames

December 6, 2001

FluidGames brings the
old brawl-style games to the PC with The Rage
– A GZ Interview
By Michael Lafferty

Take an old-fashioned search for
justice, mix in different fighting styles and you have The Rage, a release from
FluidGames.

In Septermber 1999, the team at Fluid
Games began development of the program, finally releasing it to European and
Australian stores in October 2001. It features four characters, six stages with
two-three subsections.

Davide Marcato, Alberto Candussi and
Nicola Candussi recently talked with GameZone about The Rage, and about the
Italian company which developed it.

Question: Tell us a little bit
about The Rage. What is the storyline?

FluidGames: “The Rage is one of
the very few examples of 3D scrolling beat ’em up for the PC and it guarantees a
great playability, never forgotten by old-style arcade gamers. That is why it’s
very easy to play, even for the first time. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a
learning curve however: thanks to the high number of moves, you can challenge
your ability up to the hardest level.

“The story begins on a Saturday
evening, when Sarah, the girlfriend of Bruce (one of the main characters of the
game), buys a drink at a disco and suddenly faints. Then Bruce – together with
Max, Lisa and Alfred (all friends of Sarah) – discovers that a criminal
organization is testing an experimental drug using random young people as
testers. Unfortunately, though, this test version of the drug causes a coma and
there are no known treatments for it. Bruce and his friends realize that only
the chemists of the criminal organization might have a medicine to save Sarah,
so they decide to search the barman who put the drug in her cocktail. Alfred, a
long-time friend of Sarah, joins the team of guys in the quest. The local boss
of the criminal organization gets informed of our heroes’ mission and sends a
bunch of his followers to stop them.”

Q: Tell us a little about the
technology of the game – is there anything new or groundbreaking?

FluidGames: “The basic idea
behind The Rage was to bring the stunning fun and playability of old beat
’em-ups like Final Fight and Streets of Rage to our PC, while benefiting from a
new graphical aspect allowed by today’s powerful 3D hardware. In this way we
have been able to add such effects as particle systems, smoke, vertex skinning,
explosions, light effects, spline interpolated camera position and much more.
And the best thing is that all this stuff works smoothly both on high-end
configurations and on low-cost ones.
Moreover, thanks to the multiplayer
feature, The Rage allows fighting against a lot of bad dudes with your friends
in a cooperative way.”

Q: Please tell us a little bit
about your company.

FluidGames: “FluidGames is an
Italian team; the main members are Alberto and Nicola Candussi but there are
other collaborators who contribute to the team, such as Davide Marcato (our
business manager), Federico Specht (our musician), Diego Ferrarin (artworks) and
many others. FluidGames started working together two years ago, in 1999, and we
hope to release soon many other videogames.”

Q: What is your background in the
world of games?

FluidGames: “This is our first
game under the FluidGames brand. We started some years ago working with DirectX
and OpenGL, making demos and simple projects. Previous games were a Micromachine-like
game and an action game based on the movie ‘Medley.’ ”

Q: What is the cost to play The
Rage? Where can the game be found? What is the timeline for release of the game?

FluidGames: “The Rage is a
mid-price game: since 12th of October 2001, it can be found in European and
Australian videogame stores for about US $15. We’re still negotiating with a few
publishers for North American and Asian licensing, so if you live in one of
those continents and want to play The Rage, we suggest you buy it electronically
at www.gamesarena.com or www.softwarefirst.com.”

Q: What were the biggest challenges
in bringing this game to life?

FluidGames: “We decided to use
DirectX as the underlying graphics API since it had all the features we needed
and it guaranteed a very broad video card support. The hardest challenge was
making all features work with all cards. The release of many demos and the
feedback from players on the Internet helped us a lot.

“Another problem was time. We had
planned to release the final version of The Rage on December 2000, but we had
delays caused by several factors. First of all, this project was much bigger
than the older ones we had worked on and it was very difficult to make a precise
prediction.

“We are proud of two aspects of The
Rage in particular: the gameplay (there are a lot of moves that the player can
handle easily in all situations) and our 3D engine, which allows The Rage to
render complex scenes even on mid-to-low hardware configurations: you can play
The Rage with up to four players on the same computer and you’ll fight in true
brawls with more than 10 enemies.”

Q: What the system requirements for
the game? And is online play available?

FluidGames: “These are the
system requirements: Windows 95/98/2k/Millennium, DirectX 7.0 or higher

Pentium 200 (Pentium 350 recommended), 32
Mb RAM, 3D ACCELERATED video card (8 Mb), 4X CD-ROM drive (8X recommended),
Windows compatible sound card (16-bit stereo recommended), 200 Mb on hard drive.

“As you can see, our optimised gfx
engine allows even not-so-recent PC owners enjoy the adrenaline of 3D street
fighting! A great Network mode is also available: you can play with friends from
all over the world (via the Internet) or via any TCP/IP LAN. It’s based on a
peer-to-peer connection: for this reason, every user is a potential “server” and
players don’t need external dedicated machines.”

Q: When this game is released, what
are the plans of the programmers? Is there another project in the works, is it
time for holidays, or do they continue to work on the game?

FluidGames: “This game was
released in October 2001 on European and Australian market by Midas Interactive.
We hope to find a publisher for American and Asian markets soon (hint, hint!).
We are currently planning some other projects for the future. We’ve been working
on the next generation of the 3D engine for over a year now, so the next public
productions we will release are likely to be some tech demos showing its
whooping capabilities … Stay tuned on http://www.fluidgames.net!”