Hello, thanks for stopping by to read this week’s Odd Piece of the Week.
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I’ve always found old interviews, developer diaries, news articles and other features written about the Oddworld series and creators to be goldmines for lore and theories, and what better place to start than with a classic interview?
Nathan Interviews Lorne Lanning Again, first published
6th December 2012 by our own OWF admin Nate.
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In August 2011, I found myself in California and spent a few days in the San Francisco Bay Area. Lorne Lanning generously offered to meet me and answer questions from the Oddworld Forums and other Oddworld fans. The following conversation took place in a sushi restaurant in Berkeley.
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The interview is probably among the longest published interviews with Lorne Lanning, the creator of the Oddworld series, and as such it covers a
lot of ground.
At the time of the interview in mid-2011, Oddworld Inhabitants was in the early stages of its rejuvenation in partnership with Just Add Water, and New ‘n’ Tasty (known then as Abe HD) had recently been announced. While Abe HD doesn’t get much attention in the interview, the discussion springs off to talk about many of the ideas behind the series, and answers many fan questions about unexplained or as-yet unseen characters and creatures in the series, from the backstory of Mudokons:
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Nathan: You’ve said in the past that before they were enslaved, the Mudokons were not good people, per se, or not perfectly good. That they took sides in the various culture wars. Are you able to elaborate at all on what their culture was like before being enslaved?
Lorne: Let’s look at most indigenous cultures – and, really, the Mudokons are not modelled after one in particular, but a combination of them all. The saddest thing I’ve seen, travelling around the world, going to Tahiti, Bora Bora, the Hawaiian islands and other places, the saddest thing is seeing that the native populace is trying to get their MTV. That’s what’s so shocking is that we say “We should preserve the Amazon!” but when you get down there, you have an enlightened contingency saying “This is how we’ve lived, this is where our children used to swim but now they can’t” and you have the rest saying “Hey man, we want to have cars and guns too”. All across the world it’s a common pattern. What happens is that the elderly, the wise of the tribes, largely get exterminated first and then they’re just lost people.
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The size and composition of Oddworld:
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Nathan: This is one that’s had so many arguments about, I can’t even begin to tell you. You said a while back that Oddworld is ten times as large as Earth, which is why the cultures spread so slowly and…
Lorne: And the gravitational relationship of that makes no sense!
Nathan: Hence the arguments! So it’s surface area you meant?
Lorne: Yes, surface area. So, on Earth we live on a water planet. Oddworld is not a water planet, it’s a mostly dry planet. And there’s another layer to that… Have you ever read the theories of the Hollow Earth? It’s really far out stuff and I’m not in to it, but I’ve read it and it’s interesting as a theory. What I wanted to do is that I wanted to have cities that were underground. I wanted a world where such turmoil had taken place naturally that it had formed in to huge volcanic outside crusts and then shrunk again, so that shell stayed there but collapsed into big holes.
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To the mysterious Khanzumers:
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Nathan: (from forum member Sekto Springs) Are Khanzumers a species or a class like the outlaws are?
Lorne: They’re Mudokons […] And they’re other species. But they’re all fat, enormously fat. They sit in front of TVs, they listen to the news, they eat TV dinners. They’ve become their own species even though they’re made out of many.
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And some of the weirder stuff going on within Industrialist ranks…
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Nathan: (from Leonardo Munzlinger) In Stranger, how do the Gloktigi disappear and reappear; is it technology or mystical?
Lorne: That would be occultism […] This gets in to more mystical practices within that controlling elite. The Industrials, at the highest levels, are actually still connected to their ancient roots, but in a more diabolical way. They’re not shamanic, but more demonic […] That’s why I really want to make the movies, so I can go in to the real depths of craziness of what is going on, even if it’s just for a scene and you go “What the fuck was that?!”, where they’re sacrificing Mudokons and spreading their innards out on the table to get signs to do stock forecasting.
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Meanwhile, Lanning was also developing a new project called Xmobb, a social media service built around viewing and sharing TV-style content together:
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Nathan: In the same way as, say, putting on a DVD and sitting right next to each other?
Lorne: Exactly! Except now we can do that all over the world. Our new effort, Xmobb, is, basically, people-powered TV. Different themes, different ideas, different friends, different relationships; what do you like? We create virtual theatres, share any content you want, you can create your own theatre and we give it to you. It’s all free. You just start creating and you say “I want to create a channel called ‘Neural Network Passions’ and the description is ‘Anything to do with Brain Science and computers, fan gathers here”. We give you a dimensional theatre; we have a 2d version that is no-download and you can upgrade to a 3D version, which lets you customise your space. Make it like a nightclub, like a movie theatre, like a stadium. Then people start sharing, similar to turntable.fm. They’re doing what we’re doing, but we’re doing it with video; it’s a much more complicated problem.
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The full interview is an illuminating read for any Oddworld fan for how much information about the wider Oddworld we’ve yet to see in the game. Several long-running fan questions from this forum were answered
Read the full interview: OddBlog – Nathan interviews Lorne Lanning again
Read the original OWF thread:
Oddworld Forums – My second Interview With Lorne Lanning.
Odd Piece of the Week: Nathan Interviews Lorne Lanning Again
