The following is from a press release issued by Microsoft regarding the evolution of Baldur, a god in the upcoming RPG Too Human due to be released exclusively for the Xbox 360.

"Baldur wasn’t always Baldur. In fact, he was originally much less of a god than he is now. When Too Human was first conceived as a cyberpunk influenced science fiction game, Baldur was known as “John Franks” – a somewhat uninteresting moniker for an understated hero. We had wanted Too Human to open up in a very mundane, clichéd manner to lure the player into a sense of “been there, done that” and had set Franks up accordingly as a beat cop whose family was killed and he was looking for revenge.

At this point there was almost no Norse Mythology in the game at all. As the story was written and developed, we began to see more and more of the mythology reflected in the story. Throughout this, Franks changed: had hair, had none; had a goatee, then none, etc. His design fluctuated with the whims of the artists or anyone else - no one had a clear vision of what he should, or shouldn’t, look like.

When the game was shelved, dreams of Franks and the rest of Too Human also fell to the wayside. Too Human wouldn’t be revisited for another 5-6 years -, until a funny thing happened: someone jokingly suggested doing the whole thing as Norse Mythology. Although jaws dropped and heads were scratched, it galvanized interest in the game again and pushed development in a totally different direction.

John Franks was immediately shelved as a character - as was pretty much every bit piece of existing content and ideas relating to the old game. John Franks became Baldur, the sun god from Norse Mythology and his world change from cyberpunk metropolis to the war-torn, ice-encrusted purgatory of the current game. A design was quickly arrived at but there was a lot of controversy over whether he should have horns on his helmet or not.

Horned helmets have become an icon of Viking culture, but real Vikings wore no such thing. Historians agree that the idea of horned helmets came from confusion with the ancient Celts who often wore precariously horned, winged and other wildly decorated helmets. The Vikings were very practical people – horns and other distractions would only have weighed them down unnecessarily and made it harder to fight. Nonetheless, in Viking art, many gods wore winged and horned helmets – gods, not mortals, and so it was fitting that Baldur had horns on his helm. To satisfy both parties, the idea of holographic horns came to the fore. The horns would sweep to the front of the helmet, in front ofbefore Baldur’s eyes, forming a visible display. Both parties would be satisfied, but not for long as the publisher was soon to change.

After Microsoft took over the game, Baldur would change a few more times to suit their vision as a marketable character. For our “default” Baldur – the one that would be used throughout marketing and become the prime image of who Baldur is – we lost the helm altogether. We felt that it it got in the way of presenting Baldur as reduced his humanity by obscuring so much of his personality and made him look like a machine in the process.

It is in the last stages of character design that the most work is done - with subtle, sometimes almost unnoticeable changes taking many hours to visualize and get right. Here, we were less interested with costume and more with the dynamics of the face – making him more charismatic, impressionable, courageous, and ultimately more “human” - a face that could take charge and be serious, yet also emote and show compassion.

Eventually, we felt we had a main character that could live up to his part in the story and yet hold his own on the screen with some of the better known and more recognizable heroes and villains."

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Too Human is due for release 28th August.