In recent years, the news on the PC adventure gaming front has often been discouraging, as one development studio after another has closed up shop or downsized. But there have been some exceptions to these hard times. Beginning with their first Sherlock Holmes game, Mystery of the Mummy, through to their upcoming new 3D game, 80 Days, Frogwares has not only survived, but produced a steady stream of progressively more ambitious titles. Frogwares is poised to take another step forward when their new game releases this week. To find out more about 80 Days and what lies ahead, Adventure Gamers talked with Frogwares' outspoken CEO, Waël Amr. We think you'll enjoy his candor and provocative thoughts.


In Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne contrasts the "wonders" of the mechanized age with the potential for dehumanization of man. Although provocative, these are somber concepts that are a bit heavy for gameplay. How did you take these philosophies and end up with what appears to be a campy, lighthearted game experience?

There are two sides to Jules Verne's writing. One side which is the positive one of progress and the creativity of human beings and the fact that machines are serving man. The other side is what we can read of Paris in the 20th century — that machines are enslaving men, that they are de-humanizing them. So there is a parallel between this kind of thought and today's thoughts, about the permanent struggle for money, success, and our system which is always pushing us to the top. When we made the game, we wanted to show both sides of this.

Yes, progress is nice and cool and all that. On the other hand, it makes people less interesting, more selfish. In the game we have what we call the WTO or the "World Transport Organization". This is of course a parody of the World Trade Organization. People working for the WTO are completely lost within this huge organization, taking everything into account. So the game is overall very positive, but there are also little critiques and a sense of irony about the world we live in, despite the fact that this is all supposed to take place one hundred years ago.

Are there other cultural or historical references in the game that provide this layer of irony?

Yes, the world around us is a source of inspiration. You must have money, wherever you are, whether you like or not. The WTO is in the game to remind us what a globalized world it is, with all the positive and negative aspects; that people are different and yet still say the same things. The world is a series of differences and similarities; positive, negative, funny and ironic ones.

Your hero, Oliver Lavisheart, and game characters like Stewart Fix also seem to be stereotypical or almost caricatures of certain "types".

We tried to represent a full world as it is through the countries that we visit, and also through the differences we can get from these other nations. For example, we have a German archeologist, an Indian actress, an American cowboy and a businesswoman, people from Scotland trying to sell their kilts throughout the world. We tried to represent all the nations, to their positive and some not so positive ways. There is a lot of cliché done with this. But they are pleasant clichés. I think it does help to think that nobody is perfect in this world, whatever nation you belong to. There is a lot of similarity between people, even if they are from different countries.

These characters appear to have a great deal of personality. Do they have their own backstories? If so, how is this communicated in the game to the player?

There are many characters, so it leaves some space to tell the lives of these people. Of course we'll see the evolution of Oliver himself, because who he is at the beginning of the game and then at the end is not the same person anymore. We learn some other things about Oliver's uncle Matthew and the other people during the game. As we have a lot of dialogue, we have time to discuss a little about each of them. I believe it is interesting to have some details about their lives and the way the people you meet are thinking. So we tried to give these possibilities to the people who play the game. At the same time, all the dialogues are funny, so you can listen to them without paying a lot of attention, just taking into account the good jokes.

Humor is always so personal or cultural. You have people playing this in Germany, the UK, and even Bombay. How did you create humor with a universal appeal? Did you throw in a little something for everyone that different players will identify with and find funny to them, or did you isolate common jokes or things that are universal and should appeal to a lot of people across cultures?

We did a game as we liked it, humor included, and the dialogues reflect the irony of many things of our world: an alcoholic circus director, dominating and controlling women, obsessed Fix… we all know people like that and it's funny to find them in the game situations which are far from being realistic but still correspond to reality.

There are a great many characters in this game of varied nationalities and personalities. What can you say about the voice work?

The voice work was done with a lot of different actors. We had to do a huge casting. We preferred to work with English speaking natives who were from each of the countries where the game takes place. For example, for Yoko, we worked with someone who was living in Japan, who knew exactly the accent people from there would have and even add some words in the middle of the sentences that they would use. It was very interesting. It required a lot of work to complete this casting. But it was really very pleasant.



How would you contrast Oliver with the original protagonist, Phileas Fogg of Verne's book?

Oliver is alone, while the original protagonist of Verne was not alone. Phileas was a caricature of the rich, English bourgeois, who has nothing else to do than wake up in the morning and go to his club to spend the day. He has no opinion about anything. He is completely driven by his precepts. He fired his previous employee because the temperature of his shaving water was one degree too high. So he wasn't a human being, he was a satellite, making an orbit around the planet, which is the way Jules Verne described him.

On the other side, there is Passepartout, who is a French firefighter and acrobat. He is always creating problems. They are both balancing themselves from one moment to the next. That is interesting to notice, because it is like that in the book, but it has never been shown in life, like in the movie versions. No one dared to use such a boring Phileas Fogg, so most people have this idea of Phileas Fogg as a gentleman. In fact he is not; he was absolutely an under-average person. He becomes human only when he decides finally that the bet wasn't so important. He found love during his travels, so he is born again somehow. But this doesn't happen until almost the very end of the book.

I wanted to have this balance between the two characters, directly inside one character. So Oliver is good; he is young, ambitious, English and so on. He has a lot of different emotions. He can be naïve, sarcastic, ironic, and he can manipulate people. So he is deep and interesting enough to cover the range of emotions that were needed for the game.

Do you think this makes it easier for the player to bond with Oliver?

Yes, I think so. One person and one player; it's easier, at least for me, and two heroes means two separate actions and a different timeline, which would have been impossible in our case.

With all these great characters, which is your favorite?

I think it's Audacious Giraffe, the Indian chief. Every time I hear the dialogue I laugh, I can't help it. This is due also to the remarkable talent of John Bell, the voice actor.

Inspector Fix suffers from a condition, that you call "Foggophobia". What is this and how did it come to afflict him?

Inspector Fix was "fixed" on one idea, that Fogg was guilty of a burglary of the Bank of England. When he sees that Oliver is doing his travel around the world on the same dates and places as Phileas, he becomes very angry at him. His anger makes him an evil nemesis, an arch-villain creating a lot of obstacles in Oliver's travels. They will meet many times, but in different situations. At the beginning, they meet very simply. Then as the game continues, the crossing paths of the two characters goes deeper and deeper into the story of each other, so it is very interesting.

The four game areas in 80 Days are turn of the 19th century Cairo, Bombay, Yokohama, and San Francisco. How did you capture the look and feel of these places?

The actual cities were taken as examples. We went to Kyoto, in Japan, to re-create Yokohama, the old city – a religious city, where all the temples are present. The modern Yokohama wouldn't help us very much to create the Japan of one century ago. For San Francisco, we used the cable train, all the nice hills and colorful Victorian American houses. We have some archeological places and the streets of Cairo in the game. We also went to Delhi, to help create Bombay. In India, there are a lot of temples and animal deities, which are represented a little bit all over the city. Of course, do not expect to find the exact same things that are in these cities.

You actually went to each of these places to do research for the game locations?

Yes, we went ourselves to each of these countries. We took something like 4,000 photos in order to re-create each city as we wanted to. Of course, we didn't make them exactly as they are, we made them more colorful and more interesting. We pushed the envelope on the brightness and the positives of the places. My favorite one is Yokohama, where you can really feel the quiet, poetic, and peaceful Japan.