Video: To make 1997?s Blade Runner, Westwood first had to create the universe

But by the end of the decade the wheels had come off the cart, and it was clear that the genre was being eclipsed by the rise of the first-person shooter.Further ReadingWar Stories: Serious Sam almost didn’t happen—until crates saved the dayWith the economic realities of the adventure game market in the mid-'90s becoming apparent, Castle's pitch to create an adventure game set in the Blade Runner universe that would look and feel almost indistinguishable from the film itself might have seemed a little barmy. Worse, in order for the game to justify the amount of time and money required to meet that level of fidelity, the title wouldn't just need to sell well—it would need to become one of the best-selling adventure games of all time (a difficult thing to do when your target genre has clearly aged past its prime).Castle's team faced a considerable number of challenges in bringing the cinematic world of Blade Runner to life using the technologies of the day, most of which stemmed from having to invent, from whole cloth, a way to seamlessly mesh their pre-rendered world with animated voxel characters (it turned out to be vastly more complicated than simply sticking a sprite in front of the background).