LudoScience

History of videogames (biography)

Author(s) : Daniel Ichbiah
Editor : Pix'n Love
Publication date : 11-20-2013
Language : french

The biography of Eric Chahi, a famous french creator behind the international hit Another World / Out of this World (1991). Full of pictures, this book details the main events of his career. As he is a talented but shy creator, this book doesn't detail his private life, only the videogames he created. He began when he was still at high-school, by creating games for Oric-1 and Amstrad CPC, such as Le Pacte (1986), a game that pushed him to abandon his studies at the age of 19 to pursue a full time career making videogames. His first professional projects were unfortunately no as good as excepted, until he had the opportunity to creates beautiful graphics for the game Les Voyageurs du Temps / Future Wars - Adventures in Time (1989). Success continues when Eric Chahi decides to spend two whole years to create, alone, one of the most important title in videogame history: Another World / Out of this World (1991). After this success, he goes on with an even bigger game,  Heart of Darkness (1998), whose development unfortunately doesn't go very well, as brilliantly told in the book. Exhausted, he decides to take a nearly 10 years break from videogames, and travels around the world to take pictures of deserts and active volcanoes. This trip seem to have nourished his latest game, From Dust (2011), a beautiful love song to Mother Nature... In the end, this biography allows us to revisit the professional career of Eric Chahi, a talented and unique videogame creator, without entering in his intimacy.