Development
According to Alien vs Predator producer James Hampton, plans for a video game adaptation of Highlander: The Animated Series were realized due to many of the members within Atari Corporation being fans of the Highlander films by Gregory Widen and wanted to develop a project based upon the franchise, with the company later securing the rights to the animated television series as early as December 1993.[5] Lore Design Limited, a UK-based developer who created multiple titles for the Atari Lynx such as Kung Food, were starting to experiment with 3D modeling through their artist Dave Worton that would later prove to be essential before being contacted by Atari Corp. for the upcoming Highlander project in order to do so.[5][6][7][8]
The project began development in May 1994 and was originally intended to be a fighting game akin to Rise of the Robots in terms of visual style but due to technical difficulties and the team being tired of fighting titles in general, the original concept was scrapped and the project was instead retooled into an adventure game similar to Alone in the Dark, with director Stephen "Steve" Mitchell later stating that the initial idea would have not represented the franchise's lore properly.[5][6][7][8] It was also initially intended to be one title but according to Hampton, due to the growing scope of the project as well as a desire to integrate motion capture on the gameplay that would led them in funding a motion capture studio to be built at the headquarters of Lore Design, it was ultimately decided to make it a trilogy for the Jaguar CD add-on spanning three discs.[5][6][7][8]
Highlander: The Last of the MacLeods was developed with 15 team members at Lore Design led by Mitchell alongside Hampton, who acted as both producer and designer of the project alongside Ted Tahquechi, although he is not credited as such in the credits of the game.[3][5][9][10] Ellen Echelman of Bohbot Entertainment, as well as Gaumont Television, Nelvana and other production companies involved with the animated series, also collaborated and aided with the game's development, providing original production material such as scripts, concept art, storyboards and original sound effect recordings.[5][6][7][8]
All of the in-game artwork was pre-rendered with 3D Studio, based on the original designs by Gaumont and displayed using high color format, while the three-dimensional character models such as Quentin himself consist of 300 polygons.[5][6][7][8][12] It also makes use of the various hardware features found within the Jaguar such as Z-buffering, which causes the animated characters to be composited correctly within the pre-rendered artwork.[5][6][7]
The motion capture process for character animation was handled at Lore Design's then-recently built studio. This involved the filming of actors performing moves with retro-reflective markers attached on determined parts of their bodies, using an array of 6 cameras, each with a ring light source around the lens. Commercial software would convert the output of the cameras into a mostly-coherent set of 3d coordinates for each point, moving through time. Once an actor's movement was recorded as a point cloud, a Windows PC-based custom tool set was used to label the points, tidy up the data, and convert it into an animation format designed by Lore. The game engine, written by Lore, applied that animation to a character's 3d model, which moved the model in the scene, and moved the parts of the model. The model was then rendered and composited within the pre-background.[5][6][7][8]
