The week before the E3 show of '97 saw Rebellion blitzing their project with every drop of creativity they could muster, to get something concrete together to exhibit in Atlanta. FG feels tired just thinking about it...
By Jason Kingsley

Seven days before E3 in Atlanta we took a calculated risk and effectively ditched eight months of work on Alien Vs Predator. Armed only with the knowledge that we had just made a significant decision to restructure the game into ‘true’ 3D, we set about creating something from scratch.

This may seem like an impossible task, but luckily we had ‘future-proofed’ a good deal of our technology for just such an eventuality. This effectively meant that, while our characters had been two-dimensional, our interior levels were already 3D and would now only have to be populated by equally well-rounded characters.

This still left us with a gargantuan task (rather than a totally impossible one), so it was a case of ‘all hands to the pumps’ as we set about building a single level which featured the Predator fighting a squad of marines.

In short, we had to create all the characters (although, as the action was designed to be seen from ‘within’ the Predator, we only really had to create the marine squad), render and texture-map them and then drop them into a working and tested game level.

You often hear about people working through the night to meet a particularly tight deadline, but have you ever heard of anyone working through a week? In what can only be described as a stonking effort some key members of the Rebellion team went almost four days without any sleep whatsoever in order to complete this demo.