Champions
About
Hero The game design was more in line with adventure games than with traditional computer role-playing games. Players would be allowed to choose from ready-made characters or create their own using Champions' very flexible character-creation rules, which allow for a wide variety of superhuman powers and skills. The game itself was broken into chapters (or "issues" in the game's idiom). Players would take their characters into the world, have a secret identity, a day job, a personal life. They would solve the crime of each issue, some of which would be interconnected. Combat took place from an isometric perspective, in either real-time or turn-based (predating many isometric turn-based strategic combat games like X-COM, and wildly predating real-time/turn-based hybrids like X-COM Apocalypse). The game promised everything that made comic books popular: the melodrama, the incredible combat, the detailed storylines. And those who were shown the game in the early days liked what they saw. The game was a big favorite at the Consumer Electronics Show in May 1991. And it was a big favorite the next year. But then Champions disappeared from the radar. The cancellation of Champions has been the subject of much speculation and a number of rumors. The most common of those is that the game was finished, but was deemed too open-ended by focus groups. As the story goes, players could travel anywhere in the huge game world, conversing with hundreds of NPCs who may or may not have anything to do with the plot. Gamers who played this legendary final version reportedly found themselves hopelessly lost in a game world that was deemed "too real." But as GameSpot found out, this rumor bears little truth. We talked to Steve Peterson, one of the designers of both versions of Champions, to get the real story. |
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