Casper

Overview

• Full Name: Casper
• Code:
• Type: Action, Adventure
• Developer: Logicware, Funcom
• Publisher: Interplay Productions
• Language: English
• Release Date: 1996
• Region: NA
• Barcode: 040421291519
• Local Title:
• Rarity: 1
• Notes:

Overview

Based on the Casper film, the game pits you in the role of the friendly ghost trying to make a friend and a second chance at life instead of scaring everyone away.

The plot centers around the "spoiled, grasping inheritor of Whipstaff Manor" - Carrigan Crittenden. She's after the treasure she thinks is hidden in the walls. Casper will need the help of Dr James Harvey - therapist to the dead - if he has any hope of succeeding in his adventures.

Casper will also have to deal with his uncles - Stretch, Stinkie and Fatso, who just love to scare "Fleshies" and thwart Casper's efforts. The gameplay is 3d - and is mostly puzzle solving, with Casper able to take a variety of forms and manipulating objects.

Game Play

Casper plays as a top-view action-adventure game with pre-rendered graphics. The game features an alternate rendition of the film's plot (with some of its dark elements retained) spread across three acts, consisting of Casper finding tokens of friendship for Kat and Dr. Harvey, then finding the pieces for the Lazarus machine (which the Ghostly Trio had disassembled to prevent Casper from using it) and finally finding the Cellular Integrator with which to restore Dr. Harvey (which is stolen by Carrigan, leading to the final challenge), while exploring the mansion, collecting jigsaw pieces to solve puzzles for morph icons, eating food for morph points and dealing with the Ghostly Trio. Unlike other versions, other than the Ghostly Trio and Carrigan, there are no enemies. The game instead focuses mainly on solving puzzles. Once again, Casper and his uncles were reprised by their respective voice actors, while Kat and Dr. Harvey were voiced by Tanya Krievins and Blair Bess (again replacing Ricci and Pullman), with Bess providing narration for each act's introduction as well as reading out several hint parchments found throughout the game. Carrigan's voice actor remains uncredited (due to her appearing at the end and her only line being "I'll take that!").

Development

Silicon Graphics workstations using Alias software were used to generate the character graphics and backgrounds.

Reception

Reviewing the 3DO version, Electronic Gaming Monthly's team of four reviewers criticized that load times are frequent, it is easy to get lost, and that the puzzles are often obscure or even don't make sense. They nonetheless had a generally positive response to the game, with Sushi-X deeming it a strong last hurrah for the 3DO. They cited the stunning graphics and wide variety of gameplay elements. A critic for Next Generation agreed that the graphics are exceptional, noting in particular the ghosts which have true transparency (an effect generally thought to be impossible for the 3DO). While also agreeing that some of the puzzles don't make sense, he felt the game was generally easy enough for its young target audience, and concluded it to be a solid though not amazing game. The magazine's brief reviews of the PlayStation and Saturn versions made similar comments.

Magazine Reviews

Name	Date	Region	Rating	Notes
SuperGamePower	Dec 96		80%	O fantasminha camarada está pedindo a minha ajuda! Casper mora numa mansão com os tios. Há muito tempo os fantasmas mantêm todo mundo longe da mansão, mas agora uma mocinha teimosa comprou a case e quer um tesouro escondido na mansão. Como os fantasmas mal a deixam entrar na casa, ela decided acabar, com eles. Para isso chamou o Dr. James Harvey, psicanalista de mortos que foi morar com a filha na mansão. Você é Casper e tem de ganhar a confiança dos caça-fantasmas para livrar sua pele. A primeira coisa a fazer é presentear o Dr. Harvey e Kat com itens que você acha pela casa. Se conquistar Kat, passou de fase. Daí, sempre que precisar de ajuda, Kat vem dar uma força.
Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM)	Aug 96		60%	Younger kids should eat this up, if they can get a strategy guide to go with it.
Next Generation	Sept 96		60%	Think of it as a "My First Graphic Adventure," and it wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen to your 3DO, by any stretch.

• - Need review page

Other Versions

A Sega Saturn and Playstation version were also released, alongside a scaled down version for the Gameboy Color that only had puzzles and morph icons being the ones required to reach the ending and the sound and graphics are rendered for handheld.

Credits

Interplay Productions

• Executive Producer: Alan Pavlish
• Director: Mark Nausha
• Producer: Justin Siller
• Audio Director: Charles Deenen
• Music Composed by: Richard Band
• Music Editing: Ron Valdez, Brian Luzietti
• VO editing: Chris Borders, Sergio Bustamante, Craig Duman
• VO & SFX mastering: Craig Duman, Sergio Bustamante
• Music mastering: Jason Arnold at Tower Mastering
• Mastering: Craig Duman
• Sound effects by: Pfeifer Digital Services
• Director of QA: Jeremy S. Barnes
• Asst Dir of QA: Darren Monahan
• Lead Tester: Derek Bullard
• Testers: Savina Greene, Daniel Huffman, Larry Smith, Jim Dodds, Marvic Ambata, Aaron Meyers, Aaron Olaiz, Cory Nelson, Dave Hendee, Darrell Jones, Phuong Nguyen, Steve Theskin, Daryl Quetzkow, Chris Keenan, Marc, Duran, Jeff Woods Michael Motoda, Alan Barasch, Bill Delk, Dan Forsyth
• 3D Digitizing: Dave Carroll
• Package design: Dave Gaines
• Manual text: Kelly O'Guinn
• Thanks to: Anisa Aven, Brian Christian, Richard Doerksen, Mike 'Paco' Greene, Rob Holloway
• Voice Casting & Dialogue Director: Jamie Thomason
• Voice Talent Coordinator: Julie Morgavi
• Casper: Malachi Pearson
• Fatso: Brad Garrett
• Stretch: Joe Nipote
• Stinkie: Joe Alaskey
• Dr. Harvey / Narrator Blair Bess
• Kat Harvey: Tanya Krievins

Funcom

• Creative Director: Erik Gloersen
• Project Manager: Tormod Mansaker
• Lead Programmer: Eivind Hagen
• Lead Artist: Chester Lawrence
• 3D Models & Animations: Tommy Strand
• Platform Programmers: Eivind Hagen, Jan Ove Haaland, David Foolitt
• Additional 3D Models: Meal Boyd, Hans-Jorgen Kjaernet
• Additional Animations: Joachim Barrum, Mikael Hoguchi
• Additional Design: Bjorn Arve Lagim, Gaute Godager, Tommy Sydsaeter Level Editor Programmer: Jan Ove Haaland Lead QA: Henning Solberg Assistant QA: Alf Yngve Producer / *Designer: Ragnar Tornquist

• Additional Programming by Logicware
• Biz: Steve Parsons
• Master Programmer: Bill Heineman

Disc Archaeology

Findings from a byte-level analysis of the US retail disc image (210,026,496 bytes / 102,400 blocks). A LogicWare/Rebecca "Burger Becky" Heineman port (the disc includes a dedicated LogicWare.stream credit film). The headline find: the disc's padding preserves fragments of the machine that mastered it.

Cheat strings

The executable contains the password ARBADACARBA — "abracadabra" mirrored, the actual magic word from the 1995 Casper film — alongside a second code, K1FUNCOM, and the character roster (Fatso, Stinkie, Stretch, Carrigan, and others).

Developer fingerprints

• Every 3DO library linked into the disc carries the build stamp (port2_5) stan@warrior — a 3DO engineer's username and machine name, frozen into the retail pressing.
• The NVRAM storage manager embeds name/description pairs for a dozen other games' save files, so its storage screen could label them: Crash 'n Burn, Escape from Monster Manor, Stellar 7, CPU Bach, Super Wing Commander, Mad Dog McCree, Battle Chess, Who Shot Johnny Rock?, The Incredible Machine, John Madden Football (EA_JMFB94) and The Horde.

Mastering leftovers in unallocated space

20,948 blocks (~42 MB, 20% of the disc — blocks 81451–87768 and 87770–102399) belong to no file. Instead of the usual iamaduck filler, this region contains raw recycled data from the mastering workstation's storage, pressed onto every retail copy:

• Fragments of the 3DO Toolkit itself — the Macintosh application used to master 3DO discs. The region contains 68k machine code with classic Mac function epilogues, the version string 3DOToolkit 1.5.5b3 (twice, e.g. at offset 0xC77D56E), and an intact dialog from the Toolkit's NTSC hot-color fixer: "Please choose the method to remap the hot colors: By reducing luminance / by reducing saturation / Repeat till all pixels fixed." The tool that mastered the disc accidentally pressed pieces of itself onto it.
• Windows development files — long runs of windows.h-family header text (including compobj.h complete with its #pragma message deprecation warning, plus commctrl.h and cpl.h fragments) and large alphabetized Win32 API symbol dictionaries, present as two near-identical copies. Likely a compiler symbol/browse database from a PC development setup. (A stray IMAGE_FILE_MACHINE_POWERPC string here is a Windows NT constant, not console-related.)
• Deleted audio — the majority of the 42 MB is headerless 16-bit PCM waveform data plus at least one orphaned AIFF COMM chunk: remnants of deleted source audio files, plausibly working copies of the soundtrack.

The Mac-plus-Windows mix suggests the padding was sourced from an unwiped scratch volume that both environments had touched. No Casper source code or Interplay documents were found in the region — but every retail Casper disc nonetheless carries a small core sample of Interplay's 1996 production environment.

Media

Press Releases

7th Nov 1996 - Casper, Cutting-Edge Action/Strategy Game Appears On 32-Bit Console Platforms

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