A complete rundown of lessons learned throughout the making of Munch’s Oddysee has been publicly available for some time. It’s called Stranger’s Wrath. The hero this time was a creature of cruelty rather than a victim, an unkempt, navel-gazing sharpshooter with a unique take on the term ‘live ammo’. He was a hardcore solution to the Xbox problem, the game juggling contradictions that would ruin most. Adventurous and disciplined, pensive and playful, it gunned down an Edge 9 with ease.

“Games at the time were getting more hardcore, not more casual,” observes Lanning. “All this talk today of: ‘Casual games are huge, blah blah blah’. Well, not on consoles they’re not. Bullshit, just bullshit. What happens is that your big publishers say: ‘These are our games that sell really well – what do you have that will sell like them?’ And you look and it’s like: shooting, shooting, shooting and shooting. Then maybe bombing and shooting. Then shooting. Then The Sims. It’s the war shelf, not the game shelf.

“I felt, with Abe starting off as this non-violent personality, it would be a good time to divest into something more action-driven. But there was a very practical reason for doing it as well, which is that, when you build an adventure/puzzle type of game with high-fidelity graphics and audio, the code effort is more than building a really good shooter. Every turn and new screen has to have a twist, and what that really means is new code. When you’re dealing with a shooting engine, it’s much easier to ramp up your challenge and complexity factor.”

Over three years on, that trip to Gizzard Gulch remains our last to Oddworld, its creator still to announce details of its new opus, Citizen Siege, widely believed to be part game, part something else, perhaps even a movie and TV show. There’s also a new Oddworld, inadvertently announced during a university lecture by none other than Maxis co-founder Jeff Braun, Lanning’s surprising new collaborator. Lanning himself talks passionately about new forms of multimedia (on Valve’s Team Fortress 2 shorts: “Look at those and you’re looking at the future”), which makes some form of Oddworld movie seem almost inevitable. It’s been a long time coming, we remark.

“We never wanted to lose control of the property, which pretty much cancelled any idea of leasing it out to some company for $100,000,” he explains. “The easily forgotten history is that GT were going out of business as soon as they started, and they owned half our company. So half the time I’m trying to get a game done and half the time I’m on the road, looking for new partners and clients. Then they sold to Atari, and Atari was a disaster of a magnitude that’ll never be told or else someone’s getting sued. That debacle was just unbelievable. We got in with EA – that was a disaster. So we were just pulling our hair out.

“When we were building Munch, a guy named Brian Burk, who for the most part no one had heard of, wanted to do the movie. And we never even had the time to read a treatment from this guy who loved Abe and who wanted to shop in Hollywood. To cut a long story short, he just finished the movie Cloverfield and his partner, who we’d also never heard of, is JJ Abrams [creator of Lost]. But because we were dealing with these idiotic, dysfunctional publisher relationships, we were never able to engage. And that’s why, in my opinion, no game companies have ever really transcended to taking on TV shows.

“But, if we can maintain the integrity of the franchise and the quality of the brand, if we can keep the fans not necessarily supplied but aware, and confident that what we release will be high quality, with a certain signature that they’ll like, we’ll always be OK. So we’re focusing on the film and TV fronts right now, but we’re doing it our way.” He chuckles. “The hard way.”