What Is Fearful Fox Exactly?

 

Antique Bandit Interactive Written Log Server - Created June 1st, 1978 

Log 2 - June 9, 2022

Employee Name: Anonymous Employee #515223

Favorite Color: Orange

Favorite Song: Deluka - Cascade

(Note that any real life elements are not relevant to anything that is said or done at this company, but rather the tastes of employees.)

So, here's a fun fact: from what I recall, we used to use pseudonyms that were based on the titles of songs. As you can guess, that got super weird super fast. Anyway, you're certainly not here to learn about that. What you're curious about is Fearful Fox. If you've been keeping up with edits to the website and Tumblr, you might have seen things about something called Fearful Fox. If you've watched the YouTube videos and listened to the radio broadcasts, you've probably also heard about it. But, what is it exactly?

Fearful Fox started life as a game back in 1994 or 1995. Around the time development on the new Nintendo console was being done. If you're wondering, of course we weren't a developer Nintendo looked at. We hardly even existed. It's hard to explain, but ABI basically exists in a half-universe, on a plane between your universe and an alternate universe. That's why we can communicate with you guys, and why we are able to acknowledge elements from your universe. It's unclear if we had our own gaming behemoths in an alternate universe, and simply don't remember. 

Anyway, the company CEO, Mr. Error, wanted to make a 3D game. This was after making some text adventures that only half-exist, and some failed 2D game projects. Mr. Error thought we could do it though. In our universe, there's this crummy company called HEPA, or Humans Efficiently Protecting Animals or something. It's not a good company, like at all. So, it's not like we were attacking some innocent company. However, we're a very unknown company. I don't know what Mr. Error was thinking when he told us to make a game to go after that company.

That wasn't one of the only reasons for the game, though, but I'll get into that in a future post. The point is, we were working on the game. Unlike other 3D games though, Mr. Error wanted this game to be ambitious. He wanted it to include everything. If you've heard how development for Duke Nukem Forever went, that's basically what we went through. When Nintendo introduced the microphone peripheral with Hey You, Pikachu!, we were told to incorporate that into the game somehow. It wasn't as hard as you might think though. This is because the game engine incorporated a very advanced AI that was based on a then-new AI we had made, named admina.

admina is this AI that was based on an older AI that just formed out of nowhere one day. admina is basically a very advanced, refined version of that. With Fearful Fox, we were using a much less advanced AI, but the idea was the same. The AI would generate levels and change geometry and story elements and whatnot based on how the player played. Very advanced. It's a wonder we even got into the game creating phase. However, that did come at the cost of us taking forever to work on it. Even worse, Mr. Error wanted us to port the game to the Dreamcast, then the PS2, hey, the Gamecube's out, port it to that, and might as well port it to the Xbox as well. When he suggested we port it to the Gameboy Advance and DS, and even the Super Nintendo and Genesis, we had to tell him that those consoles couldn't handle such a large project, so we were told to make a 2D version for those platforms. We also were instructed to try and port the game to the Neo Geo Pocket Color, the CD-i, the 3DO, and other CD "consoles." Then there was a bunch of peripherals that would connect your console to the internet or something. Meant to allow the game to communicate to you still. 

By 2004, Mr. Error realized the game was never coming out, so he decided to cut his losses. The game was apparently scrapped or something. I don't have any assets from it, sorry. Of course, in the 2010s, when the nostalgia wave hit, people started looking into old and unreleased games, and of course somebody found some assets from the Fearful Fox project.

From what I recall of the game, you played as Fearful Fox. His goal was to guide 25 other alliteratively named animals out of a factory. Or that was one version, anyway. I think there's another version with a design doc showed off in some video, I can't remember. However, back in 2020 or 2021, a reboot of the game was started. This time, it had a much more advanced AI. The logs I mentioned previously should delve more into that. In the meanwhile, I shall get to work discussing another reason for making Fearful Fox, or trying to.