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Archive A Look Back At Amy Hennig's Career So Far at Game Informer (by Matt Helgeson)

  • Mar 05, 2014 at 11:27 AM
  • By Matt Helgeson, Amy Hennig, and Game Informer

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... After leaving Electronic Arts, she landed at the upstart studio Crystal Dynamics, where she began work in innovative storytelling and game design that would come to define her career. I interviewed her in 2013, and she recalled the early days at Crystal Dynamics:

"I think we could all see all the potential, so there was a lot of energy and enthusiasm around where the console market was heading," she said. "It seemed kind of new, you know? Management really did encourage us to work things out. There wasn't a lot of producers or overhead or anything like that. It was just everybody was knuckling down, working on the projects. There was a lot of things going on, too, because we had external developers [and] internal developers. I think that creates a certain level of energetic excitement, too. That's a huge variety of things all happening at once, as opposed to this one monolithic project that everybody's on - that sort of creates its own energy."

One of Hennig's early accomplishments at the company was working with Silicon Knights, which was creating Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, which would be published by Crystal Dynamics. Behind the scenes, she worked to help polish the game, and many people involved credit her with turning the project into a success.

As a result, when Crystal decided to develop the next Legacy of Kain game internally, she was given the lead role on the project. However, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver actually started as another, unrelated project.

http://media1.gameinformer.com/imagefeed/featured/gameinformer/replay/soulreaver/soulreaver1128-610.jpg

"A few of us came up with [a project] that was codenamed Shifter, which would have been an awful name," Hennig said. "It was not even associated, initially, with the Legacy of Kane franchise. It was just a concept. We had this character...a strange, post-apocalyptic archangel; he's a fallen angel and he's trying to revert. It was very similar to Soul Reaver, but it was based on this idea that we were going to have this open world with streaming all of the level data constantly off the disc, and do the morphing between the material and the spectral worlds. We were sort of naive that we thought that was going to be easy. I remember when we pitched it, everybody loved the idea, but they were like, 'Oh my god, you're crazy. How on earth are you going to do that?' But we did. I'll confess that I think the streaming wasn't working until about two months before we shipped."

Based on the success of Soul Reaver, the Kain franchise became a staple franchise for Crystal Dynamics and Eidos (which acquired Crystal Dynamics in 1998), spawning three sequels. After completing the last, Legacy of Kain: Defiance, Hennig reunited with former Crystal Dynamics employees Evan Wells and Bruce Straley at Naughty Dog. Armed with Naughty Dog's world-renowned engine technology, Hennig would create a new franchise and set new standards in video game storytelling. ...
―Matt Helgeson[1]

References[]

  1. Archive A Look Back At Amy Hennig's Career So Far at Game Informer (by Matt Helgeson)

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