The Youkols obviously take a lot of inspiration from Arctic native tribes. I can only imagine that these will never be final or stopped.
But Kate Walker is an intelligent and free woman: her motto is “Adventure!”, which is included in her love choices. What will be her ups and downs? The directions she will be taking? it's probably a bit early to say. I am currently creating for Kate Walker a love story that will take place in Syberia 4.
So I do not imagine that the adventures of Kate Walker could never benefit from a romantic engine as powerful as love and sexuality. Could you expand on that?Īll stories are love stories. When we spoke about Syberia 3 at GDC, you vaguely alluded to something about questions about Kate Walker's sexuality. Only if one is going to seek his inspiring raw material deep inside, in what one has most secret and more intimate, hoping that in spite of all it interests the greatest number. How do you create empathy between him and the characters we imagine.Īnd above all, to intrigue, confuse, and make him laugh or to cry: in short to create emotion.īut all that only works if you stay true to yourself. Yet, between the two genres, there are nonetheless immutable dramaturgical rules: how do you take the reader or player by the hand and guide him into the universe that is offered to him. If, of course, the writing is very different, it nevertheless remains that I continue in video game to do what I have always done: create imaginary worlds set a scene with great care and tell visual stories. I consider myself as a video game author as one could be novelist or film director or cartoonist. I never imagined playing video games as a medium of expression in its own right. What overlap do you see in your work as a comic artist and a game designer? What skills do you bring from one profession to the other that you think others could learn from?
But as the artist for Syberia it really is your world and your vision, you draw something and get to make it into a videogame. Oftentimes in the videogame world, artists are seen as important but secondary players, painting someone else's vision for a game. I guess I was looking at life differently! Kate Walker was imagined more than twenty years later after that time. I always had the concern to diversify myself. But I was afraid to find myself prisoner of this character’s success and not be able to address other themes and other kinds of stories. Canardo was a parody of this genre I probably had some significant teenage concerns and a dark humor to go with it. At the time, I was reading a lot of detective novels. I created Canardo at a very young age, I was 23. What inspired you to move in that direction? Crucially, you went from a protagonist who was a comically lecherous male to ones who were genuinely strong, serious women in both Syberia and Paradise. But with Syberia you moved into a kind of supernatural fantasy that was less cynical and more hopeful at its core. Looking at Canardo there's obviously a darkly humorous sensibility about it-an alcoholic duck detective who hates his job but keeps solving mysteries in a strange anthropomorphic world. I offered to my comic book publisher to produce, with these new types of images, a short story: what was called at the time "an interactive CD-ROM." I got caught up, the beginning of my ambition grew further and with a very small team, we worked during four years to develop “L'Amerzone.” For me, it was only the natural evolution of my trade: that of storytelling but only the tools changed. By watching movies like Jurassic Park or Titanic, I had a kind of love at first sight for this technology that made it possible to render "hyper-realistically" things directly coming from the imagination of its creator or things that had totally disappeared. Soon, I was interested in 3D computer generated images. I was quite naturally going back and forth from one to the other following the development of technology which allowed me first to colorize my comic strips with the help of a computer and to rather laboriously create small drawings with a mouse. You've worked as a graphic novelist and cartoonist since the 1970s, and were a contemporary of some other well known Belgian cartoonists in a country renowned for its comic tradition how did you go from Inspector Canardo to making videogames?