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| Barnstorming circa 1992 |
Before buying Stunt Island I hadn't read anything about it and YouTube had zero videos of the game (owing to the fact it didn't exist yet). My decision to buy the game was based entirely on the information on the back of the box and how heavy it was in my hands. The manual was thick with instructions and it "thumped" into the sides of the box when I shook it. In 1992, I often considered a PC game's worth by the weight of the box and the sound of all the "extras" sliding around inside, so basing a purchase on this criteria wasn't unusual.
The game itself was well outside the kind of games I played. (i.e. It wasn't an adventure game.) Though the game came packed with a series of stunt plane events, the focus of Stunt Island was making your own stunts and movies by building sets (or making use of existing ones, like Stone Henge), adding custom sound files, and being the director of pretty much everything via a relatively intuitive user interface. Even better though was that each movie could be exported and played on another computer without having to install the game on that computer. So, I spent hours upon hours fine tuning "Farmer Bob's Ballistic Pig"1 then showed it off to anyone I could convince to watch it, usually trying to sell it with, "Check out this Gouraud shading! It's incredible!" despite not knowing what Gouraud shading actually was.
But more often than not, the Gouraud shading held the audience in rapt attention.
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| Time to find a ramp to drive off... |
Jump forward to Present Day with the PC release of Grand Theft Auto V and I'm suddenly experiencing Stunt Island flashbacks.
GTA V misses being a Stunt Island reboot by the narrowest of margins. Both have loads of pre-made sets, a focus on vehicle stunts, the ability to edit recordings together to create a film, and both have (or had, in the case of Stunt Island) a modding community that has let the horses out of the barn and set those horses on fire or turned them into hammerhead sharks and dropped them out of the sky. The cap is off of the Toothpaste of Creativity and the community is stomping on the tube and we all get to brush our teeth with it.
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| A city of imagination awaits! |
But it's not quite up to the standards set by Stunt Island when it comes to a full editing suite.
Stunt Island had a number of features built-in that GTA V just can't deliver on, some of which is undoubtedly the result of copyright holders. Sometime back in 2004, Marvel filed a lawsuit against the companies behind City of Heroes claiming their copyrights were being infringed because some players were recreating Marvel characters as their avatars. Now imagine that I take it upon myself to recreate "Goodfellas" using GTA V but import sound files directly from the movie, then upload my masterpiece to YouTube. I'm not sure who, but someone would be suing somebody or at least threatening legal action. SI let users make their own audio recordings and import them into the game for use in films. I don't think we'd ever see a feature like this from Rockstar.
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Players should be able to stitch together a scene like this
on their own or at least edit this one.
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The available tools in Director Mode and the Rockstar Editor (and they're good, don't get me wrong) alone just don't feel robust enough to parallel the kind of options that Stunt Island offered. SI featured multiple cameras (with programmable instructions) that allowed for a single take to be stitched together to form something truly cinematic and exciting. The Rockstar Editor allows for camera moves, filters, explosions, film speed, etc. (so did SI!) but it doesn't feel as intuitive as SI, especially because creators are forced back and forth between screens to make proper edits rather than presenting a source deck and a final cut deck, but maybe that's just my rose-coloured nostalgia talking. There are some really creative videos out there created with the Rockstar Editor and I'd expect to see way more in the future, it just feels like as far as Rockstar took the options they could have taken it just a little bit further to give creators even more control.
So, while GTA V isn't the reboot of Stunt Island that I've always wanted, it comes pretty close and maybe with modders on the case we'll all get to cross that fuzzy boundary that's separating us from 1992.
- Aaron Simmer
Follow @EmpireArmchair
1 "Farmer Bob's Ballistic Pig" has been lost to the ages. The 3.5" floppy containing the Playone file is missing and presumed erased and besides, even if I still had it, who still has a 3.5" floppy drive? And a proper version of DOS?↩
