The game is due in 1998, but slips past that date. It seems that it is being shuffled around internally and undergoing some major fundamental changes throughout development, only to eventually disappear from the public eye completely. It remains fondly remembered on forums internetwide, in part based on impressive early footage from E3.

I think we all know the game I'm talking about.

Prey.

What, you had something else in mind?

At the time, Prey was getting a lot of attention. I certainly remember eagerly anticipating its release. The game's unique "portal" technology was incredibly impressive, the Native American main character was an interesting hook, and, well, it was from the Duke Nukem guys. All these years later, it really felt like a blast from the past when it was revealed in the runup to E3 2005 that Prey was once again in development. Not only that, it had actually been in closely guarded development since 2001 by Human Head Studios, the team behind Rune. The long teaser video shown at E3 evoked the cancelled project but was clearly its own beast.

I recently had the chance to check out Prey and speak a bit with Human Head co-founder Chris Rhinehart, the game's current project lead. It turns out 3D Realms' George Broussard got his hands on Rune and liked it enough to propose a collaboration between the two dev houses. Human Head happened to be looking for a new project at the time. "Then George said, 'What do you think about resurrecting Prey?'" recalled Rhinehart. "We really liked the idea of it, so we bounced some ideas back and forth." Though the basic concept of the game already being in place, Rhinehart noted that "we kind of had carte blanche with it" after the development agreement was made.

To some extent, Prey's protagonist was born out of a desire to create a strong contrast to Duke Nukem, the archetypal gung-ho buck-stops-here video game character. That's a goal that has carried through the various stage's of Prey's life, despite a few name changes along the way. Tommy Tawodi is indeed an archetypal antihero. Indifferent to his Cherokee heritage, he works as a garage mechanic on his tribe's reservation. Both his grandfather and his girlfriend are very much in tune with their Native American traditions, but he remains disillusioned, willfully cut off from his spiritual side.

This is the backdrop when the videogamey stuff starts happening and they, along with plenty of other humans, are abducted onto an enormous alien spacecraft. Fortunately for the player, Tommy manages to free himself, but unfortunately for Tommy, his girlfriend and grandfather remain the prisoners of the alien invaders. It's not long before he starts building up an arsenal and gets a badly needed de facto crash course in self-assertiveness. Over the course of the game with the guidance of his grandfather, he will also become more attuned with his Cherokee culture. This confers a variety of eventual gameplay mechanics as well.

The ship itself seems to be one of the main antagonists in the game. It is itself a living organism, a giant sphere surrounding a burning sun at its core. This leads to a muscle-meets-metal kind of visual design (a particularly fleshy door was excitedly described to me as a "sphinctdoor"), as well as some interesting impact on the gameplay. "We're trying to set up the whole game world as a hazard itself," explained Rhinehart. This takes various forms. For example, the ship produces aggressive "antibodies" when a hostile foreign entity--ie, you--is detected. These huge sluglike creatures will actually come out of the ship and attempt to do you in.

Other environmental obstacles are less straightforward. The game takes a more lax approach to gravity than you may be accustomed to. In most games, as in our comparatively mundane world, down is down; whichever way points to the center of our celestial rock is the way we're going to be pulled. In Prey, however, the direction of gravitational force can be changed on the fly. Scattered throughout many areas of the game are switches that will reorient gravity to the surface on which the switch is placed. So if there's a hole in the ceiling, there's a good chance you'll be able to go through it by flipping gravity around and turning that ceiling into the floor. This can be done with walls as well, rotating everything by ninety degrees. Many puzzles make use of this mechanic, ranging from obvious "bypass the obstacle" affairs to more intricate manipulations of the world.

Gravity is cheapened even more with wall walking, essentially a climbing mechanism that makes the ladder obsolete. The game is littered with glowing paths that start on the floor and climb up walls and ceilings; when traversing on these paths, you are able to simply walk along the surfaces they scale. Wherever your happen to be stepping at any given moment is "down" for gravitational purposes, meaning the entire game world appears to be orienting itself around you. I asked Rhinehart if he'd played the Milkman Conspiracy level in Double Fine's Psychonauts, which makes use of similar hijinks. "Yeah!" he replied enthusiastically, "Yeah, that was great. It was very similar to this, I thought it was very cool." It's a little more startling than the Psychonauts example, because it takes place largely indoors (meaning that the entire screen is full of rotating geometry) and because the angles are so extreme. The first time you step onto one of these things is a rather unique feeling. Combined with the way the levels are designed, the overall effect can be disorienting, in a good way.

This really wouldn't be Prey without crazy interspatial portals, the technology featured prominently in the original E3 videos. Basically, portals are 2D windows that open up in space, through which another area is visible. They can be shot through or walked through, as well. There seems to be a large degree of versatility in the portals' use. One room daisy chains a whole string of invisible portals at all sorts of angles, resulting in something like a crazy house of mirrors maze. It's possible not only to see yourself in the interconnected portals (from varying angles) but to follow yourself, and even shoot yourself through the portals as well (pro tip from the devs: "If you end up following yourself, you're going the wrong way."). Think of Halo's Chiron TL-34 multiplayer map, but much less stupid. And also on acid.

It's hard to get a full grasp on all of the way portals will be used in the full game, and it's even harder to explain it in text, but Human Head seems to be doing a good job of tying all of these tricks together without succumbing to what must be the tempting route of going balls out and throwing crazy crap all over the place. The team is hoping for a game that is well balanced and integrated in terms of its puzzles and its running and gunning, integrating the two elements in as natural a fashion as possible without letting it get too overwhelming. "We're trying to go for a real density of experience here," said Rhinehart. "There's always something new in the game; I'm very excited about that."

Don't You Shoot Stuff?

Of course, you also shoot stuff. The arsenal of Prey carries on the biologically-infused aesthetic of the game's environments, with many of the guns breathing or dripping with organic matter. Each weapon has both an alternate fire mode and a melee attack; for the record, I am practically militant about the necessity of including melee attacks on weapons in modern first person shooters, so chalk one up for the team there. In the vein of organic systems rather than magazine-loaded ones, there is no reloading in the game, though some weapons overheat after constant use in order to create an artificial reload time.

Besides those bits of thematic design, many of the weapons operate basically as you'd expect them to operate. There's a rapid fire rifle whose alternate fire is a sniper rifle with a zooming eye-mounted scope. There's a gun which fires quick bursts of energy, whose secondary fire is a lobbed concussive blast. On the slightly less orthadox side, the grenades come in the form of squirming three-legged alien creatures called crawlers. Rather than pulling off a triggering pin, you pull off the unfortunate being's legs and toss it at your soon to be exploded target. The alternate fire only pulls off two of the legs, which turns the thing into a sticky proximity mine. A separate weapon, the crawler launcher, has a primary fire of--what else--launching crawlers. The secondary fire grinds up the little beasts into a dust that temporarily blocks all fire, friendly or hostile. The last weapon I got to see is the leech gun, which can make use of a variety of different kinds of scarce ammo found in wall-mounted nodes.

Oh, and you've always got a light if you need it, Doom 3 engine notwithstanding.

What Else?

Human Head is working to make the AI as complete and natural as possible. Obviously, Prey sports quite a few unorthadox elements, and your enemies know how to utilize them to their advantage. They may deactivate a wall walking pathway while you're sauntering along the ceiling, bringing you crashing down. They'll also attempt to make use of the floor-mounted health stations if they need them. Some enemies are less proactive. There are zombie-like mutilated abducted humans who are benign until you aggravate them, after which they will have no qualms with ripping you to bits.

You do have a clear advantage in the form of spirit walking. At any time, you can leave your body and assume spirit form, at which point you become armed with a limited ammo but incredibly powerful bow. When in spirit form, you can still fully interact with the world, though enemies are much less likely to notice you. It can be used for a tactical advantage, for example upon entering a room filled with enemies that might be hard to take on in your less mighty earthly incarnation. It also comes in very handy when solving puzzles. In spirit form, you'll be able to pass through obstacles such as force fields that are impenetrable to a physical being. You might be required to leave your body at barrier, then scout around with your spirit form to find the controls to remove that barrier.

If you do end up biting the dust, however, don't sweat it. You're not really dead, per se. "In most games, when you die, you just die and you have to reload a save," said Rhinehart, "With Prey, we're kind of sick of that, so we wanted to find a way to integrate death in a way that fits with the mythology we're using... We wanted to continue the immersion." To achieve that goal, the team implemented death walking; when you die, you are transported to a spirit realm with your trusty bow. In what seems to be some kind of desert plateau, you must shoot as many flying wraiths as possible in the few seconds before you are returned to the material world. The number of wraiths you hit determines your health points upon resurrection. In a nice touch, enemies will at first not expect you to come back to life (why would they?) so you'll have the element of surprise when you get back up and start wreaking havoc. Over time, though, they'll get used to it, so don't get too sloppy.

For those twitching quick save addicts, quick save and quick load are still present in the game.

And?

The original name for Tommy's character in the early version of Prey was Talon Brave, intended to be a franchise hero like Duke Nukem. That particular moniker was lost, but in a nod to the game's heritage, Tommy is accompanied on his quest by an hawk spirit guide named Talon. Talon has various roles. He'll serve as a brief distraction for enemies, doing little to no damage but sometimes giving Tommy the split second he needs to turn an encounter in his favor. Early on in the game, Talon begins to translate alien text for Tommy, allowing him to read text on computer terminals and elsewhere.

Human Head has also been sure to put some nice little touches throughout the game for extra atmosphere. The arcade cabinets that are seen being beamed up to the ship in the E3 video can actually be found and played in the game, for one thing. There are also radio broadcasts being picked up from Earth, which are one way the story is told contextually. By listening in, the player can get an idea of what's going on back home. In a particularly inspired turn, the team actually hired Coast to Coast radio host and nationally known UFO theorist Art Bell. At various points throughout the game, Bell and his notoriously fanatical call in guests can be heard discussing the invasion.

Prey on Xbox 360

There's not really much to be said about the Xbox 360 version of Prey. It's shipping simultaneously with the PC version, and based on the builds I saw it looks very much the same. There's still some fine tuning to be done with the controls--adding appropriately subtle auto-aim and that sort of thing--but necessary console tweaks aside it seems to be the same game. They're shooting for a consistent 30 frames per second throughout. Prey on 360 is being handled by Venom Games, a Take-Two-owned studio based out of the UK.

MultiPrey

Prey's multiplayer component is going by the original late-90s MultiPrey name. Perhaps it's appropriate that the name is slightly goofy, because this is some extraordinarily weird multiplayer. Remember how I mentioned earlier that there's a necessary sense of restraint being used in the game's level design, to keep all of the reality-bending elements in check? Well, much to the game's benefit, that sense of restraint seems to have been cautiously discarded by the multiplayer--I'm sorry, MultiPrey--level designers. I played three different maps, and each had something of a theme. One had a lot of portals, one is filled with all kinds of crazy wall walking, and one is build around two moons, each with their own gravitational field. Those first two are fairly self explanatory; I'm sure you can roughly imagine what they might be like, with labyrinthine portals leading all over the place and twisting walkways leading up and around every which way.

The third level was the craziest, though. There are plenty of ordinary rooms and corridors (well, ordinary plus walking on walls, you know) but in the middle of everything are two moons, one small and one large. Since each has its own gravity, you can jump onto them from any angle and end up running along the constantly-adjusting "ground." It's quite a trip.

The multiplayer is definitely overwhelming at first. Running around these absurd environments (where it's perfectly normal to see ammo on the ceiling then pull a Fred Astaire to go grab it) while being hunted by other people who are popping out of invisible portals, running upside down over you, and leaping between moons is definitely not something to which I'm accustomed. However, it was a relief that I somehow managed to adjust to it rather well early within the first round, even winning once.

Spirit walking is still available in MultiPrey, but is understandably on a limited time basis given the power it confers. While in spirit form, your actual body is still very much at risk of being casually blasted by opposing players, however, so your greater mobility bow come with a tradeoff.

On the other hand, death walking is thankfully not part of MultiPrey. When you die, you respawn as you would in another multiplayer deathmatch.

It's hard to imagine MultiPrey ever being a hardcore professional FPS of choice due to its pure insanity factor, but it's very easy to imagine people hopping on for a bit of bizarre mayhem. Oh, and I can't even wait to see what the mod community manages to figure out with this thing.

And There You Have It

And that's about all I know. In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that visually Prey does have a great deal of similarity to its engine-buddy Quake 4. Part of it is the lighting model, and part of it is the industrial/organic theme, which is hard not to compare to Quake's Strogg. It's not exactly a totally new aesthetic in games. That said, most of the rest of Prey's elements are new in games, and there's enough of that there to clearly distinguish it from its peers. The Escher-esque architectural design, the arbitrary gravity, and the spirit walking mechanics are very unique and seem well implemented. If the whole game delivers the constantly changing experience that's been promised, Prey should be one hell of a ride.

Prey is developed by Human Head Studios, produced by 3D Realms, and published by 2K Games. Its official release date is "When it's done," but will likely ship in early June.