32-Year-Old ‘Ellipsoid’ Horror Game Ecstatica Gets PC Re-Release Today, Showing Us an Alternative Timeline in Which Polygonal 3D Never Became Dominant

Eeek, where have all the corners gone?

One of my favourite hobbies is digging up older pieces of gaming tech or software know-how and asking myself: “man, what would the world have been like, if every GPU were made out of Gorgonzola?” Or less silly words to that effect. Nostalgia aside, it’s useful to revisit historical alternatives in the face of very rich people who would have us believe that only their trillion-dollar boondoggle is “the” future.

The code running 1994 horror game Ecstatica probably isn’t going to topple Unreal Engine anytime soon, but look at this article’s header image, and tell me you aren’t fascinated. Why is everything so… pert? I will tell you why: Ecstatica’s graphics make heavy use of ellipsoids. They’re the basis for everything from werewolf buttocks to the grain of castle flagstones. You can experience this terrifying bubble-wrap reality for yourself in today’s Steam and GOG re-release of both Ecstatica and its sequel, care of SNEG गेम्स.

I myself know about Ecstatica thanks to Jasper Byrne, developer of the brilliant Lone Survivor, whom I spoke to yonks about “de-making” and monolithic progress narratives. Byrne mentioned it as an example of a road-not-taken in videogame graphics production and aesthetics. Or at least, a road-not-taken-very-far.

Created by Andrew Spencer Studios, Ecstatica uses ellipsoids with actual volumes for characters, most objects, and much of the environment – all of it running on the CPU. It schlops and schlurps the ellipsoids together into more complex, rounded masses. Look at the slightly nauseating ovoid grit of those dungeon walls. It’s like somebody wallpapered their kid’s bedroom with xenomorph eggs. Ugh, I’m getting Yedoma Globula flashbacks.

As such, Ecstatica cuts against what would become the dominant trend of using polygons for 3D visuals, though the game’s engine is capable of rendering polygons for square or flat objects such as doors and crosses. As for what you actually do, in this appallingly bulbous simulation: you are an unfortunate wanderer who’s strayed into a village full of monsters. There are many ways to die. Released two years before the original Resident Evil, Ecstatica is an early example of fixed-perspective survival horror, splintering off from adventure games. It’s puzzle-driven with a lot of “absurd British humour”, as the Steam and GOG storepages for the re-release explain.

I’m not sure who exactly worked on this port, but publishers SNEG were founded in 2000 by former GOG staffers, with the goal of restoring or, at least, republishing and resurfacing various forgotten PC games. The Ecstatica rebuild includes controller support and three graphics modes, changeable on the fly: one for the original DOS version of the game, one for the 1997 re-release on Windows 95, and a “real-time high resolution render”. I’m not sure if any of the original devs are involved – they broke up after Ecstatica 2, midway through development of their third game Urban Decay. The latter was also ellipsoid-based, but the devs switched to a more familiar polygonal look before the project ran out of gas.