An extended interview with Oddworld’s creator, Lorne Lanning, Ars Technica

(fart noise) –

If you’ve got three hours to kill, we’ll take you on a magical trippy journey.

Directed by Sean Dacanay, edited by Jeremy Smolik. Transcript is still in progress and will be ready in the next few hours.

In December, we ran a “War Stories” video on

the (Oddworld) (series , an unusual s-era adventure / platformer title that sees the player inhabiting the role of escaped factory slave Abe in his quest to avoid being turned into canned food. Filmed with the help of

Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning, the video turned out to be very popular — doubtless because Lanning makes for a damn compelling interview subject.

We’ve gotten a lot of feedback on the video since it aired, primarily asking for more Lorne, and so we’re going to try a bit of an experiment: rather than try to scrub through the original and pull out some more highlights, we’ve just exported the whole nearly-three-hour shoot for you guys.

Highlights for the full interview here include a fuller origin story for Abe, crazy stories from Lorne’s father about disappearing world leaders and famous people on Arctic submarines , and some discussion about drug-fueled motion graphics design.

Lorne goes deep, swears a ton, and takes us through the insane bad luck most of the Oddworld titles experienced on release. He talks about using arcade games to meet ladies, what it was like growing up in a tough household, and working his way up the ladder in the graphics industry.

If this proves to be a reasonably popular piece, we’ll likely release the full versions of other “War Stories” sitdowns over the next year or so. It’s a lot of work to prep these multi-hour videos (which is why the transcript on this one isn’t quite ready at publication time), but if you guys want ’em, we’ll ship’ em!

So give it up for Lorne, folks. He’s odd, but we love him.

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