In the nearly 18 years since its release, Mirror's Edge has built a sparkling reputation for its sparkling buildings and blue skies. This, apparently, wasn't developer DICE's plan.
The parkour game's developers reflect on its now incomparable look and feel in a new interview with Design Room, where they admit Mirror's Edge was originally set to join its apocalyptic siblings – like Gears of War or Fallout 3 – in looking very, let's say, piss yellow. But looking at this corroded version of Mirror's Edge literally made people nauseous.
Senior producer Owen O'Brien explains that "Mirror's Edge started off looking like every other Unreal game, to be honest." But here's where listening to your body is important. O'Brien says, "we found that when you were moving very fast through the world, you got simulation sickness very quickly. We discovered that it was lessened if you made the world cleaner and less detailed."
So players' subconscious selves demand prettier, squeakier video games, I guess. But these instructions from their third eyes were ultimately beneficial to Mirror's Edge, which would have otherwise looked like every other game in 2008.
Even art director Johannes Söderqvist calls the game's initial art "generic," featuring stereotypical signs of dystopia like "more run-down, sort of New York-style rooftops with these water towers" instead of the sleek, futuristic silver skyscrapers it ended up with. Mirror's Edge looked "pretty brown, like a regular game, if you will," he says, which "wasn't bad; it looked good, actually. But there was no style to it, or a fairly generic style."
