Edgar, a mild-mannered window washer, is daydreaming of the girl he loves. In his dream, they meet in a nightclub straight out of Casablanca, flirting from across the room.
The scene, lovingly rendered in hand-drawn animation on an iPad, is controllable: By swiping your finger right or left, you can control the boldness of Edgar’s flirting. Swipe too hard and Edgar will gyrate wildly, causing her to recoil in terror. But swipe slowly, and Edgar will ease on the charm, pantomiming some smooth dance moves that win him the girl of his dreams.
The Act, released last month for iOS, is a game with a remarkable history. Development on the game began over nine years ago and involved dozens of former Disney animators that had worked on films like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. Its animation was created the old-school way: pens and paper. And after The Act was completed, it came very, very close to never coming out at all.
The seed of The Act was planted in Omar Khudari’s mind in 1986. A computer programmer for an educational gaming company, Khudari was looking for the next big thing. He was fascinated by Dragon’s Lair, the arcade game that used animation by Don Bluth stored on a LaserDisc. But the game didn’t live up to his expectations.
“It looked like a movie, but it didn’t seem like [one] when you were playing it,” said Khudari. The player wasn’t involved in the story, he just pressed buttons to make Dragon’s Lair‘s hero jump and dodge.
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