THE PLOT OF ODDWORLD: ABE'S Oddysee reads like a mashup of Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Abe, member of the enslaved Mudokon race, toils away in a meat plant until he uncovers a plot by the ruling Glukkons to grind all Mudokons into meat products. Determined to free his people, Abe foments revolution; players aid in his bid for freedom by controlling him across a series of platforming levels.

"I believe it’s the artist’s role to create new myths that are relevant to the changing times of our world; to bring some shining direction to our more troubling challenges," Lorne Lanning, creative director of Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, told me in a previous interview.

Like many of his peers who made a name for himself in the 1990s, Lanning did not start his career intending to make video games. He received classical training as a painter of fine art but realized consumers were turning increasingly to electronic mediums to consume stories. Lanning graduated from California Institute of the Arts with a degree in Character Animation and worked in Hollywood, where he met producer Sherry McKenna, established as a producer of feature films. Lanning kept up with all forms of entertainment and concluded that video games had untapped potential for narratives. The agency given to players offered far more potential storytelling potential than linear media.

Over two years, Lanning persuaded McKenna to co-found a game studio with him. McKenna proved a hard sell. She found video games ugly and bombastic. After Lanning promised her they could create visually pleasing titles with deep stories, McKenna agreed, and the duo co-founded Oddworld Inhabitants. Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, designed for PlayStation, was their first venture. With McKenna at the helm as producer, Lanning concentrated on creating a rich narrative and detailed characters modeled in 3D and converted into fluid, 2D sprites.

"We saw the opportunity to create properties using 3D computer graphics with the gaming medium. I wanted to tell stories and I loved great games. It was a natural evolution," Lanning continued.

Pre-rendered characters appealed to Lanning's artistic tastes. Polygons on systems like the PlayStation and Sega Saturn were blocky, jagged, and muddy. Converting three-dimensional characters into two-dimensional sprites produced more detailed models. "The funny thing is that we actually got the money for the company because of our 3D expertise, but then we made a 2.5D game," explained Lanning. "The real time 3D of the current gen was, at best, still pretty crappy. But its bit map ability was better than anything before it. So we pre-rendered everything and then used the pre-renders as sprites. It gave us a game that looked 3D, was lit and textured in 3D, but played in 2.5D."

Lanning's influences extended beyond his artist's senses. He had played and enjoyed 2D platform games such as Prince of Persia, Out of This World, and Flashback, all of which had dazzled him with their combination of in-game storytelling and stylish graphics. Characters moved gracefully, a purposeful contrast to the aesthetics of their protagonist. Gangly and a bruised shade of green and gray, Abe was the opposite of rugged and handsome heroes like the eponymous Prince of Persia. He was an everyman, a character designed to evoke emotion at the effort he expends to overthrow his oppressors. "[That's] definitely how I felt," Lanning admitted, "like I was just some little chump living with the fallout of disinterested corporations and governments who could give a shit about little people, or about anything beyond their own self-serving interests."

Unlike most games of the era, Abe's Oddysee featured two endings. Players' actions during the game determined whether they saw a selfless epilogue, or a selfish one. "We always wanted to do more endings, but if we got two polar endings with the amount of time, money, and resources we had available to us… well, then at least we had a game to ship. It’s amazing how those pesky realities tend to shape the worlds we create," said Lanning.

Abe's Oddysee spoke to players and critics when it released in September 1997, selling through one million copies in its first four months and drawing acclaim for its puzzles, graphics, and platforming. Confident and justified in their investment, the Oddworld team embarked on Abe's Exoddus, the second in a planned quintology of Oddworld stories, also on PlayStation. For the third entry, Munch's Oddysee, the team planned to go big: fully 3D instead of 2D, more vibrant and expansive environments, and moving from the PS1 to PlayStation 2.

To the surprise of fans, Oddworld parted ways with Sony and publisher GT Interactive and announced a partnership with Microsoft in the fall of 2000. "Munch was the first big game we signed after the Valentine's Day massacre," says Ed Fries, Microsoft's vice president of game publishing. "The lawyers stayed up all night to do this deal so we could announce it at an event the next day."

The deal was Microsoft's biggest acquisition yet. Per its contract with Oddworld, Microsoft received worldwide exclusive rights to publish four Oddworld games on its Xbox platform. At first, both parties were satisfied. Lanning and McKenna partnered with a publisher whose resources guaranteed the continuation of their quintology, and the Xbox team wooed a venerable studio and franchise—which by that time had sold over four million copies and garnered over 100 awards between the first two Oddworld games—out from Sony.

"The opportunity to bring the full force of our publishing and marketing resources to bear on such a popular game series as ‘Oddworld’ is a major coup," Fries said in a press release announcing the deal.

As always, Fries viewed the opportunity to work with a talented developer as the real prize. "Working with Lorne Lanning was really a dream. The press loved the guy. We could put him up in front of anybody. He did all the voiceacting in the game, all those crazy character sounds. It was a win-win in the sense that we had taken that game away from Sony and put it on our platform, and a game with an established console heritage."

Fries viewed Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee and Bungie's Halo: Combat Evolved as Microsoft's two thoroughbreds amid roughly 20 other titles slated to launch on Xbox. While both titles held potential, he felt Lanning's talent at playing impresario with the press gave Munch an edge. Jason Jones over at Bungie was smart and creative, but not much of a spokesperson.

As launch approached, the feature sets of both games took shape. Halo touted sprawling outdoor battlefields, an arsenal spanning human and alien firearms, and support four up to four players on the same Xbox or over a network. Munch's Oddysee was heavy on exploration and let players switch between Abe and Munch, who boasted unique abilities such as Abe's talent for lifting characters and controlling their movements, and Munch's knack for swimming.

In terms of marketing, Microsoft put most of its marketing muscle behind Munch's Oddysee and Halo. Internally, developers, marketers, and executives picked favorites. "There were filler games for Xbox, and feature games," says Ed Ventura, product planner in Microsoft's games group. "Halo started as a filler game that ended up being a mega-hit."

We knew it was one of the best apps we had," says Fries regarding Halo. Still, Microsoft hedged its bets. "When it came to allocating our marketing funds, we split the baby. Only our top games, maybe three, got TV advertisements. They were probably Halo, Munch, and Project Gotham Racing. More money went to Munch and Halo, and we gave those titles an equal amount of TV spending. That's one objective way to say how we felt about them. We were conflicted and decided to support them equally and see what happened. The gameplay, we loved," Fries says of Halo. "It was the game people were playing internally more than any other game leading up to launch. People were playing late at night."

"They would look at our stuff, and anyone who saw Halo was like, 'Holy crap,'" remembers Xbox marketing director Don Coyner. "I don't know what Oddworld's hook was. I never quite understood what would make that the killer game. It became clear pretty quickly that Halo was the right horse to ride."

Others were less certain. "Remember that at the time, everybody said shooters wouldn't work on a console," says Seamus Blackley. "That was a big deal at the time: Shooters had to have the fine controls of a mouse, and you needed to be sitting up, and so shooter games would never work. It wasn't a natural thing."

Jerry Holkins, Mike Krahulik, creators of the popular Penny Arcade web comic, remained dismissive of Halo through launch in November 2001. "We knew the Penny Arcade guys," Fries says. "They were just down the street from us, and they were not Halo fans. They were proven wrong on that one, but they had their point of view."

Even Bungie caught a vibe of doubt coming from within Microsoft. "You think about Halo as this multibillion-dollar thing, but back then we were a company of 50 people who had three game teams," says Michael Evan, programmer at Bungie. "There were certainly some deep believers at Microsoft, but I remember this sentiment from Microsoft's marketing division that Halo was not going to be a breakout success."

Some reticence from the press centered on Microsoft's history in PC games. Halo had started as a Mac game, then Bungie converted it to PC. Did Microsoft know Halo had to play like a console game? Did it even know how to make console games? And to say Halo underperformed at E3 2001 would be as gross an understatement as saying Super Mario Bros. gave the North American video game market a nudge back toward relevance.

Although Blackley believed in Halo, he knew what players and press expected out of consoles. "Big console games were always platformers. It was like you were going to fail unless your system had your Crash Bandicoot or your Mario. 'Where's your Mario? You have a driving game and a shooter? You're fucked. You're fucked!'"

Personally, however, Blackley gave every second of free time during his exhausting global promotional tour to Halo. After one particularly long day toting his Xbox development kit and early prototypes of software around to show press and publishers, he returned to his hotel, stripped down to his underwear, and fired up Slayer with two other Xbox group members, who had to share rooms because Microsoft had botched their accommodations. Nobody seemed to mind Blackley's informal dress code. They were having too much fun.

"We stayed up playing Halo in all night," Blackley says. It just seemed really clear. Halo was a thing I had with me that I played. I watched it come together, and it just became super-obvious that it would be the thing that launched this platform."

In the weeks before the launch of Xbox and Halo, Microsoft's games veteran Stuart Moulder paid a visit to Bungie's building. He found developers either hunched over their keyboards fixing bugs to complete the game's gold master disc, or playing multiplayer. Half a dozen or so developers gravitated to Moulder and chatted. "You know," he said. "I think Halo might be the best game we've ever shipped," he said.

John Howard, the game's lead designer, was stunned. "But you guys shipped Age of Empires 2," he countered. "We're just, like, trying to get this done."

Unfortunately for Microsoft and Oddworld Inhabitants, Munch's Oddysee failed to impress at launch. Glitches and buggy features resulted in middling to poor reviews, and a decision by Lanning and McKenna to set the quintology aside and pursue other games until the time seemed right for Abe and Munch to return.

Oddworld's team pointed to technical and time restraints as the main culprits behind Munch's disappointing reception. They also cited creative differences with Microsoft, whose lieutenants, they claimed, wanted to attract a more casual audience by renaming the game Abe & Munch's Fun Adventures. Lanning also expressed disappointment with the Xbox's price of $400 in some markets, which put the console--and thus Munch's Oddysee--out of reach of players who had been able to afford the much more affordable PS1 and its software.

Meanwhile, critics and players were in agreement: Halo was a marvel. Despite some criticism for the last few levels being recycled versions of early-game environments--a product of Bungie racing against the clock to finalize the game--the game became the Xbox console's first system seller. Through January, over 50 percent of consumers who bought an Xbox also purchased a copy of Halo. In five months, Bungie and Microsoft reached the coveted one-million-sold milestone.

"We had the highest benchmarking score in terms of fun out of any title the Microsoft lab had ever tested," says John Howard of Microsoft's user testing group. "It was Stuart Moulder's encouragement, and those scores, that made me think, Maybe we've done something really good, here. Maybe we've made something truly memorable. But in the middle of development? You don't know. You're in the middle of a hurricane."