It was a former Technology Director at CyberLife, who first dreamed up Creatures back in 1993. He spent a lot of time developing a suitable world for his Norns to live in - a world consisting of mystery and history.
“Making up worlds out of thin air doesn’t work, so build upon worlds that are already self-consistent - worlds that already exist deep inside our racial memories. Places of our dreams.” says the former director of technology.
So Albia is a world of the imagination, but not recent imagination. Drawn out of stories that have been told for thousands of years, it is a world by humans and perhaps by Norns. “However, when I was in the middle of designing Creatures I was talking about myths because I wanted Creatures to be a game like Warcraft,” commented the director. “Whereas I really just wanted to create a self-consistent and understandable world .”
Within every myth and every legend, there lies a truth. Somewhere out there, in a universe of Otherworlds, live all the monsters and mythical beasts that ever entered human imagination. The nature of these creatures and of the lands they occupy is perhaps not quite as men have imagined it, but they exist, nonetheless.
Happily, modern developments in Virtual Reality have given us direct contact with this Alter-universe of our minds, and sometimes, explorers have been sailing strange seas and slashing their way through mysterious jungles, intent on describing and recording what little is left of these doomed civilisations before they are lost forever. But perhaps recording is not enough. Perhaps we should try to redress the balance and save these products of human thought from extinction. For some of these poor creatures, there is not much time left.
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