Lorne Lanning is an American game designer, director, writer, and voice actor. He is co-founder and creator of Oddworld Inhabitants. He is best known for creating the Oddworld series including the games Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, and Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty. The next Oddworld game titled Oddworld: Soulstorm will be released on April 6, 2021.
Initially studying photo-realism and commercial illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Lanning soon attended the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, where he graduated with a BFA in Character Animation.
Working as a Technical Director at TRW, Lanning later moved to Rhythm & Hues Studios in Hollywood, where he would later meet producer Sherry McKenna, who helped co-found Oddworld Inhabitants.
Topics Discussed In This Episode:
- Lorne’s journey from fine art into developing video games
- The change of perception within art
- Perceiving the value of art
- Art as a form of commerce
- “Fragility of the perishable”
- The dark side of globalization
- Lorne’s passion for environmentalism
- The genesis of emerging technology in the late 80s
- The power of visualization and how to sell big ideas
- Making your own luck
- Lorne working for a military defense company
- Marketing yourself as an artist
- Following an intuitive pursuit
- Staying hungry within your craft
- Understanding “what your audience is eating”
- Being a talent vs. being a creator
- Finding business opportunities
- Video games
- Artists’s unique perception and ability to express that
- The symbiosis of engineering and art
- Compromising with a team while making a video game
- Understanding various subjects and adjacent industries
- Empathy within video games
- Game speak
- The impact of George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm” on Lorne’s storytelling process
- “Lo-brow access points to high art.”
- Emulating the player interacting with real-world objects.
- Self-publishing
- Oddworld’s latest release, “Soulstorm”
- The depth of character creation, controls, and tone of the story
- The new generation of gaming technology
- Systems of monetization within emerging technologies