Twenty-five years on, PLANESCAPE: TORMENT is still one of the most talked-about RPGs of all time. This is the story of how it was created as a ‘stay-busy’ project by a small team at Black Isle Studios

By Robert Zak

Sigil, The City of Doors, isn’t like other cities. It’s not a place of orderly brick walls and cobbled streets, fuggy taverns and candlelit keeps. It’s not inspired by myths, fairytales, or folklore, and it can’t be contained in a single aesthetic; steampunk, biopunk, dieselpunk look sensible and uniform next to Sigil’s rusting, jagged architectures; an inn may look like a chitinous fossil, a shop of curiosities may be framed by massive blades that look like they were designed to deter the grasp of a wrathful deity. And that alley over there? Watch closely, and it may just give birth to a new street before your eyes.

Even though you can eventually become familiar with Sigil’s web of dreamlike rules—where a door might be a bloodstained cloth, or a key takes the form of a feeling —a thousand questions still remain: Who is the mysterious governess of the city, The Lady of Pain? What are her motives? How was Sigil created, and why is it floating like a planetary ring atop an impossibly tall mountain in the middle of an spatially shifting wasteland?

The Modron Maze is a semirandomized spoof of old-school dungeon crawling.

While much of the Planescape setting remains a mystery, its videogame iteration is well charted, and something of a holy site for PC gamers, who regularly make the pilgrimage through Sigil and its neighboring planes as The Nameless One and his not-so-merry band of companions. Zeb Cook’s Planescape setting may predate the game, but it’s only through the game that tangible form was given to a world that defies convention.

Like the setting, Planescape: Torment’s development also didn’t play by typical rules. It was a side-project by a self-described B-team of developers at Black Isle Studios, many of whom had little experience in game development, little familiarity with the Planescape setting, and yet coalesced to create one of the greatest RPGs in PC gaming history. This is the story of how it came together.

BLACK SHEEP, BLACK ISLE

In 1997, Interplay Entertainment was fomenting a CRPG revolution. The prolific publisher was simultaneously overseeing development of Fallout, Planescape: Torment and Baldur’s Gate. At the heart of this was Interplay producer Feargus Urquhart, who in 1996 founded Black Isle Studios and was also tasked with leading the RPG division at Interplay, ensuring that development was progressing smoothly across these projects.

But the beginnings of Torment were anything but smooth. “I was just trying to figure everything out, and I noticed that there were three Planescape projects that all had like four people on them,” Urquhart recalls. This was a time when 3DFX cards were picking up momentum, and developers were swarming to create new 3D games using their own engines. One of these Planescape projects was to be such a game—a first-person 3D-accelerated dungeon crawler—while “almost no work was being done” on one of the other Planescape titles. Urquhart scrapped these disparate projects and rolled them into one.