Oni

File:Oni box art-front.jpg

See Credits for a complete list of the names behind Oni as well as links to interviews with key members of the Oni team, and see Rights for the list of companies involved with Oni's development and distribution.

Oni was developed by Bungie West, a division of Bungie Studios, and released in January 2001 for Windows, Mac OS, and PlayStation 2.

Development

Work on Oni began in 1997 when Bungie decided to found a second studio, Bungie West. The concept for their first project was devised by Brent Pease, whose primary influence was Mamoru Oshii's animé film Ghost in the Shell¹ (adapted from Masamune Shirow's manga series). The name "Oni" (originally intended only as a codename during development) is evidence of the connection; Pease considered its meaning to be "Ghost"².

The designs for Konoko and Commander Griffin can be seen to resemble the characters of Motoko Kusanagi and Daisuke Aramaki. Early development even presented Konoko as a cyborg, which, together with the tech-crime-fighting setting, bore a strong similarity to the premise of Ghost in the Shell. In August of 1999, Hardy LeBel was brought in as Design Lead, and revamped the story³. The final version of Oni abandons the cyborg heroine and instead introduces original concepts such as Daodan and SLDs.

Oni was originally expected to be released in the fourth quarter of 1999, but as that date approached, the release date was pushed back. This occurred repeatedly, until finally the rumored release date was as late as March 2001. Much of the uncertainty over Oni's status came from Bungie's well-known reluctance to disclose or adhere to fixed release dates. Some of the delay may have come from staff turnover; Pease left at the end of 1999 (with the Project Lead position being filled by Michael Evans, one of the programmers) and Bungie West also lost one of their two level designers and replaced the AI programmer in the same six-month period between the summer and the end of 1999.

A possible additional factor was the acquisition of Bungie by Microsoft, which was announced in June of 2000 (the details of this are explained in the "Post-release" section below). It is possible that the process of selling the company and the acquisition of Oni by Take-Two Interactive also interfered with any plans for a more timely release.

Hype

The earliest online hype was deeply rooted in the existing Bungie community, particularly Marathon fans⁴. As the Oni project gained popularity, a dedicated online community emerged in the form of Oni Central and its forum (see History of the Oni community for details).

Interviews conducted with the staff of Bungie West promised various ambitious features such as smart AI, sophisticated melee combat, realistic level architecture, complex particle dynamics, battles with a large mech (the "Iron Demon") and multiplayer abilities.

Trailers and screenshots were analyzed eagerly for evidence of Oni's ground-breaking features. Two trailers were made for Oni, one in 1998 and one in 1999, reflecting the two different visions for the game during its time in development; they are analyzed on the Trailers page.

At E3 1999, Oni received the Game Critics Award for "Best Action/Adventure Game", even though the game was still in pre-beta stage at that point.

Ultimately, the game would look somewhat different from what was seen in the trailers. Characters were altered in appearance, and levels were redesigned and re-textured. The Pre-Beta Content article provides many before-after comparisons.

Due to the delays in Oni's development, Bungie suspended the advertising of the game for a time, so as not to spend the budget before the game was even released. In the meantime, the game under development at Bungie's HQ in Chicago, which was previously known only by its code name "Blam", came to be known as Halo and slowly drew attention away from the oft-delayed Oni as images and trailers for it began to appear.

As Oni finally neared completion, Bungie resumed their advertising, now partnered with Take Two, who were in the process of taking over the Oni IP as Bungie prepared to join Microsoft. Promotional artwork was produced by Lorraine Reyes McLees and a 4-volume comic was produced under T2's supervision and published by Dark Horse.

Release

After a few months of beta testing, Oni was released much later than originally expected -- on January 26, 2001 in Europe, and January 28th in the U.S. The PS2 version, ported by Rockstar, came out on January 29th in the U.S., and March 9th in Europe. Oni was translated into other languages, including Russian (by Buka), German (see the section on "beta 5" in Mac betas), and Japanese . These localizations were critical to building Oni's fan base, which today is largely based outside of nominally English-speaking countries.

Oni's storyline is fairly straightforward, although it has been called "understated". Because the story takes place over about a week and a half in the game's timeline, there is little room to develop the characters or setting, although large amounts of additional information are to be found in consoles scattered throughout the levels. (The Chapters page links to plot summaries by level, and the Console Quotes page lists all the text from the game's consoles.)

The developers achieved a unique blend of gunplay and hand-to-hand combat, with fluid controls and a camera that ensures that the action is always visible. Gunplay is fairly standard for the action genre, with some added emphasis on realism (Konoko only carries one weapon at a time, and a gun's ammo is tracked persistently whether it is being handled by the player or an enemy).

The melee component of the game is particularly complex, using over 2000 unique animations, and is frequently the main element that fans point to when praising the uniqueness of the gameplay (the short list of games with comparably deep melee includes GUNNM, Lugaru, and State of Emergency). See the Gameplay article for more information.

Oni also uses a custom graphics engine optimized for handling levels with lots of open space, and the levels were designed by actual architects, giving them a much more realistic feel than many game worlds. The actual texturing in the game is minimalist, a style chosen to try to match the look of animé.

Reception

The overall consensus of the critical reviews was that the game was good, but not great; Oni has a metascore of 73/100 from critics, but a 9.6/10 from the website's voters. See the Reviews article for a list of links to reviews.

Professional critics tended to dislike the ambitious melee element, complaining of counter-intuitive or unresponsive controls (if they found the game too hard), or the easily accessible basic combos (if they found the game too easy). Some reviewers were unimpressed by environment graphics that were not as rich as other games of the time (the simple look of Oni was partly due to the attempt to mimic animé backgrounds, and partly a result of the game mostly taking place in offices and other man-made, realistic structures).

Upon Oni's release, many felt cheated because the game did not deliver on all of its promises (a not uncommon issue in game development). The most notable shortcoming was the absence of LAN multiplayer, which had been demoed at hands-on booths at Macworld Expos in mid-1999 and early 2000. In May of 2000, it was announced that multiplayer was being removed from the game due to concerns over latency issues.

Some previously-hyped features were missing, such as smart gunfire dodging and alarm behavior on the part of the AI. On the Oni Central Forum, Design Lead Hardy LeBel blamed this on Oni's original AI programmer, saying "She made a lot of boastful claims about what the AI would end up being able to do that she couldn't deliver on". Interestingly, some hidden AI abilities have been found in Oni's engine, either disabled, slightly buggy, or not utilized by the game's mission scripts.

Some of the game's content was cut as well. This included at least one entire level (BGI HQ), and the highly anticipated Iron Demon, the large mech shown in-game in the 1999 trailer. Gaps in the numbering of the game files indicate that at least five chapters were cut before release, but, besides the BGI HQ level that was cut from the story, this was simply due to content that was moved around or consolidated into other levels.

Finally, Bungie did not hold to their usual practice of releasing level-building tools for their games, since a professional and costly CAD program was used to produce Oni's levels. As Oni's release neared, it was pointed out by Matt Soell, Bungie's PR person, that since Bungie no longer owned the game, they were unable to release whatever supplementary tools had been developed. Early statements about Bungie West at least releasing the file formats were not followed through on. This factor, coupled with the lack of multiplayer, meant that Oni's full potential was not obvious.

Thus, it was left to the fans to create their own modding tools, after investigating the inner workings of the game on their own. For information on the ways in which the engine has been patched by fans, and disabled code reactivated, see A History of Oni Modding and the list of Windows Oni and Mac OS X Oni patches.

Post-release

Oni and the makers of Oni went their separate ways. First we look at the company post-release, then we come back to the game.
Bungie
When Bungie was going to be bought by Microsoft in 2000, there was one big catch: Seropian and Jones did not fully own their company; they had already sold 19.9% of it to Take Two previously. In order to reclaim that stake and be able to sell 100% of Bungie to Microsoft, Bungie traded Myth's and Oni's IP and publishing rights to Take Two in exchange for getting their stock back.

At first, Take-Two intended to make both an Oni 2 (for PS2) and an Oni prequel (for WAP-enabled cell phones), but the games were canceled at an early stage of development, possibly because Oni itself did not meet T2's expected sales quotas.

The acquisition of Bungie by Microsoft also coincided with the dissolution of Bungie West as Bungie moved their employees to Redmond, Washington. Some Oni developers stayed with Bungie and went on to work on the Halo series, while others ended up at independent game studios, such as Giant Bite (co-founded by Chu & Evans) and Tyrant Studios (founded by LeBel).

In October of 2007, Bungie separated from Microsoft and moved from Redmond to the nearby city of Kirkland.

Oni
While Bungie merged into Microsoft, and Take Two was assuming command of the Oni IP, Mac users were in a delicate position: transitioning to Mac OS X. Having been in development years before OS X released, the original build of the Oni application was a Carbon app, meaning it was written primarily for Mac OS 9 with only basic OS X compatibility. Unfortunately the Carbon build was not without issues when running in OS X.

Then, at the end of 2001, Omni Group released a Cocoa (native OS X) build of the game which they had produced for free. However, Apple would later switch to Intel processors, moving away from the PowerPC chip that Oni was written for. This and other elements of the OS and hardware have changed over the years, making the Omni port unable to run on modern Macs without more and more fan-devised patches. Recently, Feral (the Mac version's distributor outside of the U.S.) has expressed an interest in putting out an Intel-native build of Oni in 2011.

Meanwhile, on the Windows side, Oni has also shown its age, but it continues to run in the latest version of the OS, provided the player uses the Daodan patch.

Finally, since Oni's release, the fan community has been working on mods and writing gameplay and modding tools for the game.

The future of the property

Take-Two has sold off some dormant franchises to outside developers, although there is no evidence that Oni is one of them. Upon the separation of Bungie from Microsof, there wa fervent speculation about Bungie returning to their older franchises (since, after all, Bungie could buy back an IP from Take-Two if they desired). In an interview, Bungie's CEO, Harold Ryan, was asked specifically about Oni:

4Players

Since we're on the subject of strong franchises: is there perhaps a chance to bring back Oni?

Harold Ryan

(laughs) Oni isn't currently one of those projects we're looking at, but one should never say never.
We'd be happy to work with the individuals who made Oni.

One thing is certain: the current Bungie staff has little in common with the Bungie West that produced Oni (there are seven members⁵ still working at Bungie as of March 2011). There is probably little sentimental or monetary incentive for Bungie to produce a sequel. Furthermore, it was announced in May 2010 that Bungie was developing a new IP, to be published by Activision under a ten-year contract.

However, there are fan projects which may or may not become unofficial "Oni 2"s.

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¹Pease discusses his role as Oni's creator and GitS' influence on the game here.

²The meaning of "oni" is usually given by those familiar with Japanese myths as either "demon" or "ogre". See the Oni (demon) page for an exploration of the word and possible connections to the game's content. Pease explains the origin of the name here, and seems to still think the word means "ghost"; however, Hardy, his eventual replacement, indicates here and here that he understood "oni" to mean "demon" and had re-written the story with that in mind.

³The time of Hardy's entry into the Oni project is mentioned in this interview, which contains other interesting tidbits such as some words from him about the cancellation of multiplayer.

⁴Oni discussion on the Marathon Story Page. Bungie fans first started talking about the newly-announced Oni (and the E3 1998 trailer) back in May-June 1998, unaware that it would not release for another two and a half years.

⁵The employees in Oni's credits that still work at Bungie are Butcher, Dunn, the McLees, O'Donnell, Staten and Wu.