Story & Gameplay in Flashback: The Quest for Identity

by Luis Levy
Staff Writer

Gameplay is the game’s mechanics and rules. It includes the many ways the player can interact with the game and the kind of challenges that he/she must face to get to the end.

Story is the backdrop where the game takes place. It can be science fiction; it can be an accurate historical background. But story is also the plot – what happens in the game. The story is responsible for the player’s immersion in the game’s universe, creating living worlds out of ideas, concepts and dreams.

Gameplay        =         what I can do

Story                =         what’s happening / happened / will happen

Gameplay        =         mechanics

Story               =         drama

Being a kind of sequel to the hugely entertaining Out of This World, Flashback borrowed from its ancestor the game engine and the sci-fi theme, but had a completely different plot. In this one, Special Agent Conrad Hart gets in the middle of an alien conspiracy much like the John Carpenter movie They Live, fighting through the solar system and beyond.

We are treated to marvelous sights: Saturn’s moon, Titan, the underground city of New Washington and a 22^nd century Earth with flying cars and neo-Egyptian architecture. Not to mention the amazing “Death Tower” sequence, a nod to Ah-nold’s Running Man.

Today Flashback is regarded as a breakthrough for the Sega Genesis. It was advertised as “a cd game on a cartridge” because of the incredible graphics for the time, complete with hand-draw animation and polygonal vector graphics. Flashback was also packed with a comic book (produced by Marvel) telling the game’s background story – Delphine really invested its time into the cinematic approach.

Concerning gameplay, Flashback is a side-scrolling platform jumper in the tradition of Prince of Persia and Rolling Thunder. The game was divided in many fixed screens; each had to be “solved” in order to advance. It’s interesting to point out that despite having lots of action, Flashback had clever puzzles too, a trait quite uncommon for the genre.

The player had a full inventory: hand gun, force field, anti-grav generator and other varied sci-fi themed gadgets - and had to use all of them wisely.  For example, after taking some hits, the force field (or “shield generator” in Flashback’s terminology) needed to be recharged; this triggered a trip to the next recharge station. But it wasn’t an automatic process: the player had to choose the force field in the inventory and “use” it on the recharger (this was much similar to the new graphic adventures that were blossoming at the time). The recharge process was then illustrated by a beautiful cutscene.

This example is precisely where story and gameplay intersect in Flashback. Cutscenes were spread around the game, breaking the tradition of being only at the beginning / end of stages. The story was literally told “in-game” – you never new where a new cutscene would appear. The fact is that Delphine managed to attain a superior balance between the strong story-line and engaging gameplay, to a point where it’s almost impossible to separate them.

Story and gameplay create the game’s experience. As this is an almost alchemical process, it’s easy to mess up and end with a stinker. Too much story drowns gameplay; too much gameplay – and not a single drop of story – makes it impossible to attain immersion. It’s a question of vision, planning and commitment, to design a game, top to bottom, in a way that story and gameplay become one. Not everyone can do it, but it sure seems like a nice objective.