Kieron Gillen’s Workblog

Sacrifice

[Wrote this for PC Gamer earlier this year. It’s one of their long-play pieces, where we either re-visit a game and critically reappraise it or write about the glory of something everyone else seems to have missed. This is the former. I approached Sacrifice with its considerable reputation in mind - that it was one of those quirky classics everyone references. After re-playing it, I realise that undersold its charms. I left thinking it was among the Top 10 PC games ever.]

Sacrifice makes me sad.

It’s not that it didn’t get a sequel. It’s not that it didn’t sell at all. It’s not that despite its critical appeal, it’s barely referenced today despite having innovated a number of mechanics and technologies. It’s not that now, six years later, Shiny are a laughing stock among gamers’ for the various Matrix misadventures when once they were this good. Hell – it’s not even that due to gamers’ goldfish memories that Shiny’s entire history has been tarnished, being Stalinistically revised to always being hopeless.

Sacrifice makes me sad for even bigger reasons.

Sacrifice is an action-strategy game, a sub-genre that often received highs-core plaudits only ever found an sizeable audience in its most-militaristic first-person shooter incarnations (Starting with Rainbow Six, in a road that lead to Brothers in Arms). Set in a bizarre fantasy world, with five miffed deities waging war against each other, you play a wizard. Not a floppy-hat wizard – but a childhood fever-dream nightmarishly warped wizard.

In the manner directly inspired by eight-bit Spectrum classic Chaos, you’re capable not only of zapping people with thaumatological attacks but summoning followers to war for you. Freshly created, you can order them in an RTS fashion, telling them to go attack distant places, protect things and so on. Its resource-management is built tightly into the skirmish. You war over mana-fonts, which provide the magical energy to power your abilities. The size of your armies is limited to the number of souls you have – your own of which can be recycled from the bodies of the fallen or the enemies harvested from the corpses of the enemy by a soul-doctor spell. It’s not much of a high-level strategy game, and more about group tactics and the chaotic melees. Going in with your army arrayed around you, trying to make a difference inside the scrum, summoning the sort of soldiers who’d best take down the opposition…

And playing now, it’s amazing what you’ve forgotten. It’s a game which has kind of found itself in the Top 100 every year through its reputation rather than an active familiarity with it. Last great Shiny game, looked really weird, blah-blah-blah. Except it’s painfully better than that. Take one obvious thing that never gets mentioned among the “Hieronymus Bosch does Command and Conquer”-isms: It’s funny. Really funny. While the similar period Giants gets remembered as being packed full of gags, the brilliantly-voice acted and sharply scripted Sacrifice gets no credit. “Of course I don’t want to destroy the world,” the Death God Charnel argued pointedly, “that’s where all the good slaughters happen”. “Haven’t we all had enough of war?” speaks James, the voice of reason in the heavens. “NO!” ripostes everyone else in perfectly-timed shouted chorus. Away from the world-play, it manages the highest calibre of slapsticks. One of James’ highest level spells is an in-gag reference to Earthworm Jim, where the wizard fires a several hundred ton cow into the sky. Thirty seconds or so later it returns, a single target annihilated beneath this beef-missile.

The name of the spell? Bovine Intervention.

Technologically speaking, it was the first time its debut in Messiah where Shiny managed to get their tessellation technology really working, radically scaling the level of detail in the graphics according to the distance. Absolutely standard now, but then an innovation – in fact, so well implemented that while obliviously ageing technology, on full whack is a highly acceptable visual experience.

But it’s the mechanics which throw you. Why do we credit Black & White with pushing its gesture control system when Sacrifice did a subtle, low-key version of it a year earlier? Here the pop-up menus being gradually forgotten about as you discover merely tracing a shape in the air is enough to cause the same effects, seamlessly ordering your followers into defensive positions. It’s an elegant control system, in that it supplements then supersedes rather than merely replacing a more traditional system.

With the mouse-tracing system, the mechanics of “souls” being the game’s economy, being a radical take on RTS-ideas and general timbre of unbridled creativity, the most obvious modern parallel to Sacrifice is Darwinia… and while there’s a mirror in their lack of their deserved commercial success, thinking about Sacrifice makes me sadder than Introversion’s game. Because Darwinia seems like a game with a future – that it’s going somewhere, is a role-model for a whole load of underground creators and another step in Introversion’s plan for whatever the hell it is Introversion want to do.

Sacrifice on the other hand had no future. It was an ending. It was the end of Shiny as a true creative force. It was the end of a certain period of PC games, where a budget to allow real production values was spent on something so self-evidently quirky. In other words, there’s the nagging sensation in the same was as they’ll never be another Nietzsche or Bowie or Amiga Power, we’ll never see its like again. The world which allowed its creation is simply gone forever… and the future that Sacrifice tried to foretell was a more interesting one than the one which we got.

Perversely, as the console-generation clock ticks around, a full six years after its release it – at its best – feels more next generation than the majority of new games. The maximum level magic powers remain overwhelmingly impressive. A full active volcano erupting beneath you, ground swelling up like a boil of tectonic flesh before cracking open and a hot steam of lava shoots defiantly into the air, all and sundry running. Being snatched up by a whirlwind, spinning around in the ether while still stumblingly trying to control your forces. A towering embodiment of Death, striding the earth and killing indiscriminately. Spiked plants of death lashing out at all and sundry, impaling and lobbing them high into the sky. The bore circling away from its target, etching a spiral into the ground before the very soil itself falls away into the infinite void. We’ve seen things that have aspired to this sort of devastation in classical strategy games, but it’s completely different from the first person. Compared to this poetry of annihilation, a world where a G36 is the height of violence wrought is a little depressing. Seeing glass explode when they could use the same technology to rend mountainsides asunder… put simply, I haven’t seen anything on the X360 which is even a fraction as impressive.

Sacrifice reminds me exactly how good, how imaginative, how brilliant it’s possible for a videogame to be and it’s clear that no-one’s going to spend serious money on making a game like it ever again.

That doesn’t just make me sad. It makes me suicidal.

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When I first read that, I thought that you’d nailed it on the head.

Several months later, I still think that.

I actually bought Sacrifice on the advice of PCGamer, and thouroughly enjoyed it.

Now I want to play it again. Excuse me while I retrieve it…

Nice article. Did enjoy that innovative little game though the gameplay itself felt just a little too repetitive to make it a classic. Bovine Intervention is fondly remembered though, as is the volcano.

Got a Hostile Waters piece planned by any chance KG? Keep meaning to do a video feature on that splendid little game but I have a habit of getting bogged down in the technicalities instead of just snagging loads of clips then throwing them together with some VO.

Oddly, Sacrifice was a much BETTER game for me 5 years after it came out. Originally I found it over hard and a little repetitive. Now, I just “got” it a lot more, and the fluidity of expression I was managing made everything tie together. I’m not sure if it’s my improved skill as a gamer or the general education of the world around it or what, but it makes even more sense in 2006.

And, yes, I suppose I should go back and “do” Hostile Waters.

I’m doing The Bard’s Tale (1985-version) right now. Man!

it was among the Top 10 PC games ever

Word.

The last level was exceedingly arse, though. I remember going away from the game with a real feeling of disappointment because of that.

Also, I found most spells were quite difficult to target due to the camera being quite fiddly, meaning I never got on with the play of any of the factions except Gaea.

I also vaguely remember it suffering from a case of baddemoitis…

Too bad, really. I liked it.

In other words, there’s the nagging sensation in the same was as they’ll never be another Nietzsche or Bowie or Amiga Power, we’ll never see its like again. The world which allowed its creation is simply gone forever… and the future that Sacrifice tried to foretell was a more interesting one than the one which we got.

And what comes next?

Change.

The sad thing about unremembered pieces of nostalgia from way back when is that they always make the present seem so much grimmer. At the same time, they can also bequeath hope, for although the climate at the present moment is not immediately conducive, the fact is that out there in the underground, ideas are happening and change is born.

I think in many ways that the true generations of videogames are actually to do with people rather than hardware. Hardware is just the box that plays the thing, but it’s people that make the thing happen in the first place. The first generation of game development lasted from Atari to around about the turn of the millennium, and then, like rock and roll, lost its way.

Modern games have become the equivalent pretentious 80s spandex rock, the years in which the form and its creators have departed so far from any form of grounded reality that they are entertaining only as a Spinal Tap commentary (and somebody needs to make that game development Spinal Tap movie for sure). Yet even as the worst excesses of those spandex years bore their grim fruit, the latter half of the 80s began to bear new fruit. A new generation rose, bringing us raw sounds like the Pixies, which rolled into the 90s, grunge, and on it went.

So too with the videogame. We are currently in the spandex mode, the late period of the first generation when everything has lost its way. Yet that is changing. We have some green shoots. We have Introversion, we have Second Life. Give it a little while longer and we will have a new philosophy, a new reason to do what we do and new ways to do them. These are dark times and they will likely grow darker still.

That doesn’t mean that there is no hope. It simply means that change is on the way. This period, like all others, shall pass. New minds will find their way soon enough, and a second generation will be born. Not through formats, not through fancy new controllers, but through new ideas, new philosophies of why a game should be created and what that means. We are on the verge KG. Have some home.

Hope!
Damn.

Tadhg: The Sacrifice article may be a dry run for something bigger i’ve been thinking about writing, arguing that 98-2001 period (Begining: Half-life end… oh, probably a James Bond game or something) as a Golden Age of PC Gaming.

The Golden Age is a little deceptive - it doesn’t imply that there’s other Golden ages to come (or that it’s the only Golden Age the PC has passed through) and there’s not things I’m interested in happening now.

(I mean, the near future indie-game direct-sale stuff by Steam or whatever is packed with enormous potential for a renassiance of a certain scale. As you note, and I hint at by hailing Darwinia)

But that period was personified a point where the biggest budgets weren’t so enormous that they demanded a multi-million seller just to justify them existing. A mainstream - not a botique game, not a small-budget but a mainstream - game could be based around a concept and execution as oddball as Sacrifice.

That doesn’t happen now. It won’t happen in the future, as long as budgets stay as they are.

That a game like Sacrifice could be the mainstream is gone forever. That’s what I’m lamenting.

But - yeah - here’s to the future. It’s only just begun.

“Oddly, Sacrifice was a much BETTER game for me 5 years after it came out. Originally I found it over hard and a little repetitive. Now, I just “got” it a lot more, and the fluidity of expression I was managing made everything tie together. I’m not sure if it’s my improved skill as a gamer or the general education of the world around it or what, but it makes even more sense in 2006.”

You know, I’m getting a dissapointinly not-so-strange case of déjà vu here, but once again I find myself reading an article of yours on the game which I got, but never ‘got’. But that quote, that statement, rings so true, that again I am compelled to retry it.

And again I realise that my current PC, for all its technological enhancements in contrast to the setup I tried Sacrifice on originally, point-blank refuses to let me play it.

As - if not more - frustrating than the fact I can no longer play Worms, XCOM Apocalypse, Thief 2 or Deus Ex on said machine.

Damn modernisation.

Does this mean I have to build a pre-XP PC to go with my DOS PC? My room is rapidly running out of space.

That doesn’t happen now. It won’t happen in the future, as long as budgets stay as they are.

Sure, but the budgets won’t stay as they are out in the online realm because there’s no need to. I think that the next big wave of interesting games on the PC is what Danc of Lostgarden calls “village games”. (see here)

Basically, the idea is that loyalty and specialised interest in the new frontier of PC gaming. This is also where Manifesto have aimed their crosshairs.

It’s from out of efforts like those that new thinking will arise. In many ways your Golden Age will not come back, but that is as much to do with philosophy and ideology as it is with raw numbers. If the budget rise had stopped in its tracks in 2001, I think we would still be in the same position as we are in today anyway, because what really happened to the industry was that it became highly mechanised in the way that retail and distribution operated. Always chart-focussed, it has become even more so, and the argument could be made that the players shifted in their mindset. Quirky gaming fiction went into a recession all by itself to be replaced with a combination of retro ideas with all new skins, genre targeting (especially in the west) that turned the whole field into a factory and also reactionary actual retro.

The whole of western culture has been on a retro-genre kick for about 7-8 years because that’s where the marketing dollars have lain.

My contention is that to actually move forward means that we have to learn to think differently. What games are for, what their place can be in the cultural spectrum, these are the two questions have stood still ideologically for a decade (”fun” and “escapism” being the one-word answers) but that simply isn’t good enough any more. That’s mechanisation. For the first generation of game developers it was enough because they grew up with it and helped to define the original memes. For the second generation, those motivations are bordering on the irrelevant because the question that follows next is “and?”

Fun is where games start. It’s the basis of the medium much as rhythm is the basis of music. What we choose to do with that fun is what matters. Escapism? Maybe, but people have been doing that a long time, and you know what, it’s old. It’s done. What’s next?

Change.

I think I played Sacrifice last year for the first time since release, and mulled over some thoughts in pretty much the same vein.

My only major gripe is still that overall it didn’t quite do it’s misty-eyed ideas that much justice in the actual gameplay. That although all the things you point out are right - it’s hilarious, clever, exciting and visceral - I never really got much out of the story, or felt that I was being ‘told’/experiencing something that I would ultimately care about a decade later. It’s a wry and quirky take on gods and god warfare but that’s about as far as it goes.

Then again, ignoring narrative and story elements, the passion with which they embraced an original concept and hammered it out rather sucessfully is still pretty touching.

But it should have been the kickstart to a string of career greats. You can speculate wildly as to why that never happened.

The only thing I remember about Shiny is MDK, which was also pretty awesome.

The sequel was garbage.

I remember Sacrifice, It didn’t seem to special at the time. However, I was young, and it was a demo, so I’ll give it a revisit. Does anyone know where I can get the whole game for free, y’know in vein of criminal activity and the internet…

Got to second that vote on the Golden Age of PC gaming.
This isn’t a criticism as such but I remember thinking a while back something along the lines of “Y’know, the esteemed Mr. Gillen hasn’t really written anything on par with the Great Reviews Of Our Time, (those being, most immediately-springing-to-mind-ly, the Deus Ex and Medieval: Total War reviews, among others)” followed immediately and inevitably by “Well, it’s not like he’s had games of that calibre to write about since then, is it?”
Your basic ingredients for a Golden Age are the combination of Big Ideas and the competent fulfillment of same.
Deus Ex, to use a completely throwaway example from its heaving sack of greatness, defined the conversation interface for most 3D games. I was playing Neverwinter Nights 2 the other day and itsuddenly struck me that I was conversing with exactly the same interface as Deus Ex. Sure, it’s basically only letterboxing, high-res text and cutting between the talking characters, but Deus Ex was the first (or most memorable) game to use it.
[tedious and endless waffle cut. I do go on]
Yeah.

Tadhg, your music metaphor is right-on - we’ve maxed out the big-budget market to the point where developers are strapped to meet production costs. Now it’s time for a renaissance of small, artistic, independent productions. Like early punk music, they may be rough around the edges, but they’ll still be a breath of fresh air in a medium dominated by Madden NFL 2007 and Halo 2.

Lowering marketing and distribution costs is definitely part of that, but also finding an innovative way to deal with the spiraling increase in content expenses. I suspect that the new emperor will be wearing old clothes - we might see some really interesting and radically new things attempted in the guise of “classic” formats.

[…] r read of mine, and on Tuesday he posted up an article on the Shiny game Sacrifice. It was part tribute, part lamentation, and I loved every word of it. Myself and a couple friends at that […]

the golden age of pc games is surely gone, considering all those disappointments these days, yet there are better times to come.
sacrifice is truly the most innovative and intriguing game i have ever played and it shal remain forever!
so says me, full of melancholy and depression.

Hard to believe that it is 2007 and I *still* play Sacrifice multiplayer online. There’s just a ragtag fleet of us left but this game still rules more than any other I’ve played. We used to hope for a Sacrifice 2 but those hopes have sadly dwindled, along with our online population. It is beyond me how this game is overlooked as one of the best of all-time, and I have been around since the days of Wizardry, Zork and the like. The word “addictive” doesn’t do it justice. I pretty much agree with your entire article, and am glad that there are others that can appreciate this game and how sad it is that it somehow got overlooked in so many ways. Thanks for the semi-tribute!

yeah im also one of the few that still play this spectacular game. for 6 years now i ve been trying to find a new game better then sacrifice but i havent found one i might get addicted to another game for a few weeks but my heart alwayas finds its way back to sacrifice. if anyone wants to play this game go to sacrificeplanet.net a purchase a copy (they are like 2 dollars) or download it illegally whatever floats your boat. but check out that site mentioned above and you’ll se that even though there aren’t a boat load of us we are still very active as a community.

This is just incredibly sad, i read this article in PCG i was okay with it then, but now…

By the way i don’t play it online so often but it’s shure very fun playing with other people

Sacrifice is one of the best games of all times. This game needs to be played over and over!!!

Brilliant article and game. The game I look back on with the most fondness. Really sad that, for whatever reason, critical mass was not reached to make sacrifice a critical success.

“Under the many heavens and in the many worlds, there where darker things that made me dream of…”

I never played Sacrifice as it had been a game.. For me, it was a way of life.

For those of you looking for a copy of Sacrifice, if you’re too cheap to spend a few bucks, you are missing out.

http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?ht=1&from=R4&satitle=sacrifice&sacat=1249%26catref%3DC6

…Shiny are a laughing stock among gamers…

F**k that. Shiny is, to this day, my favorite gaming company of all time and by a large margin. I dunno who did those Matrix games, but it wasn’t Shiny. I jealously guard all cartridges and discs that house the indisputable genius of that lost company.

[…] Sigan aquí. […]

“Guard me!”

Great article. I stopped playing Sacrifice as I found it too difficult at the time, but I did appreciate its quirkiness and the “Gesture” controls. Giants Citizen Kabuto seemed to get the lions share of the praise for humor, but Sacrifice was very very funny. Cheers mate!

Thanks for the article, I’d easily find a place for Sacrifice in my personal top 10 PC games, it was smart, innovative and FUN.

We’re all a little bit poorer because that game never really grew the legs it deserved. Had it taken off, perhaps we’d be seeing a less homogenised industry today.

I am overjoyed to find that many people share the same views on this game as me. When I found it in a box of ancient pc games I was absolutely stunned and the quality or the game and finished quickly only to be disappointed by and badly written ending. This game could have been great…. instead it was only good

I remember my Dad bringing it home one day as a gift for me, quite a few years ago.

My PC didn’t run it properly at the time. I tried and tried, because it looked so intriguing. Then I left it under my bed to gather dust for several years.

The last time I tried to play it, I remember getting very frustrated at the way the campaign works. Choose a God, do a mission for him, then choose another God, do a mission for him and so on. This kind of bugged me, as I prefer a more streamlined campaign system with RTS games, as the decision making is in the gameplay.

I stumbled across this when I was searching for a sequel to the game and was very, very surprised to find there wasn’t one. At the very least I think Shiny should re-design one of the levels as tech demo, with up to date graphics, physics, e.t.c.

I still love Sacrifice. Every year without fail, I dust it off, and run through it again.

I am still so disappointed that there was never a sequel. Or at the very least, an expansion with new missions.

I loved this game so much that I played it for every god and watched every ending. Winning after you make certain “bad” choices was incredibly hard.

The truth is the game was just too hard. I got it and once I did I couldn’t stop playing but I couldn’t get many of my friends into because they didn’t want to take the time to learn it.

Apologies for necro-ing an old post but I have just finished replaying the game and I feel the need to talk about it.

Every few years I rediscover Sacrifice and every few years I realise that this is one of the greatest pc games ever. I am happy to report that even today in late 2008 the game looks, sounds and plays beautifully. This was actually my first ever run through as pure Charnel. I guess I have generally avoided him before because he is a bit nasty. My impressions - most of his units are a bit meh (although deadeyes rock), his spells on the other hand are rather good so it balances out.

I feel your pain. I share your pain. This is a game that does not deserve to be forgotten.

Some good news: I notice Sacrifice is one of the launch titles for Good Old Games (gog.com). Could this be the trigger for a Sac revival?

if only there was a sacrifice based version of total war

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