One of the most expensive games and the largest commercial failures in the history of video games.
The art treasures featured in Kronos' private car, the Saturn, include:
- "Sin" by Franz von Stuck
- Gustav Klimt's "Malevolent Powers"
- Improvisation 30 (Cannons) by Wassily Kandinsky (painted in 1913)
- "The Red Gaze", painted in 1910 by Arnold Schoenberg
- Constantin Brancusi's Maiastra (painted white)
- "Nude boy playing with musket, with figure of Death behind" by Carl Otto Czeschka (1900)
- A pair of cobra chairs by Carlo Bugatti
- A high-back chair by Charles Rennie Mackintosh
- A fauteuil chair, "The Enchanted Princess" cabinet and writing desk by Kolomon Moser
- A Tiffany floor lamp
No one on the production team knew anything about trains, so they found one of the last remaining sleeping cars of the type that the Orient Express used, took photographs of it, and meticulously recreated the entire train in pre-rendered 3D images.
To create the "art nouveau" animation style effect the production team was looking for, all of the game's possible paths and actions (over 800 scenes) were filmed with 50 live actors wearing special makeup against a bluescreen. The footage was then input into a computer and, using a specially designed process, was processed and turned into black and white line drawings. From there, the footage was meticulously hand painted frame by frame (over 40,000 frames total) to create the final effect.
The game took four years to create.