First, the player has to connect to the target machine – preferably by routing his connection through as many different computers as possible so that he won’t be too easy to find. Hacking is quite an involved process in Uplink. Everything on the screen represents what the player character sees as he reads e-mails and news (the game’s way of delivering its storyline), buys upgrades for his machines and, of course, breaks into other computers. Uplink is an immersive game, played through a diegetic interface – you start it by registering as an agent of the eponymous Uplink Corporation, you play it by using your in-universe computer and it ends when your character either manages to break it or gets disavowed by Uplink. While the game does look similar to how movies portray hacking, it does so without relying on cutscenes, scripted setpieces and linearity – it’s all seamlessly integrated into its fairly open-ended gameplay. Like the graphics, those effects are nothing too fancy on their own but when combined with everything else about the game’s audiovisual aspect they serve an important role in creating Uplink’s trademark ‘Hollywood hacking’ feel.Īll this talk about how Uplink feels remarkably similar to 1980s and 1990s hacker films fortunately doesn’t mean that the game has anything to do with the ‘cinematic experience’ trend in modern video games. Uplink’s sound effects consist of various high-pitched beeps and phone dialling noises as well as occasional speech samples when hacking voice identification systems. They’re all pretty great, especially Karsten Koch’s track ‘Blue Valley’. Unsurprisingly for tracker-based music, all the songs were composed by people and groups related to the demoscene movement.
UPLINK HACKER ELITE STORY REVELATION 0.7 SOFTWARE
The game’s atmosphere is further enhanced by its soundtrack which consists of electronic/IDM/ambient music created using software known as trackers. It’s nothing technologically fancy – just a a bunch of buttons and menus, small text, a world map, a few static images and a dark background – but it nails the ‘computers in films’ look perfectly with its stylized interface, black and blue (with occasional red and green indicating failure and success respectively) color scheme, animated text and the occasional use of real photographs.
UPLINK HACKER ELITE STORY REVELATION 0.7 MOVIE
This was undoubtedly achieved in part by the game’s strong art direction: from start to finish, Uplink looks like a playable version of a hacker-themed movie like WarGames or Sneakers. While Uplink might not be the first ‘hacking simulator’ ever created ( System 15000 predates it by over 15 years), it’s probably the most important one as it codified most of the elements of this (admittedly pretty small as most games that feature the concept of hacking generally reduce it to a simple minigame) genre and popularized it among gamers. The only way for Introversion to succeed was by making the kind of games nobody else was making – and this is exactly what they did, developing unique games about things ranging from hacking to administrating a prison to annihilating humanity in a thermo-nuclear war. When they made their first game, they couldn’t compete with big-budget projects as creating contemporary-looking games required manpower and technology they didn’t have but they also couldn’t just rely on nostalgic gamers looking for something more oldschool as the retrogaming market was much smaller than it is now (not to mention that current definition of “retro” is much broader than the one from the beginning of the century). Introversion Software, the company behind Uplink (not to be mistaken with a Half-Life standalone expansion by the same title) is quite an unusual one: a small British software house created after most of the small British software houses dissolved and the market became dominated by AAA developers but before the indie boom and the popularity of crowdfunding which made businesses like that profitable again.
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