Builder of Odd Worlds
A visual-effects director who co-founded Oddworld Inhabitants with Sherry McKenna, then made a meat-factory worker’s escape a test of how many others he brings out.
Builder of Odd Worlds
Lorne Lanning moved from painting through missile-defence animation to Hollywood visual effects, then left effects to make games about the creatures at the bottom of a food chain. In Abe’s Oddysee a meat-factory labourer learns that his own people are to be the next product. With a handful of spoken words he can talk other workers into following him out, and the ending judges him by how many he saves. Lanning described Oddworld as a cracked mirror for our own world. With Sherry McKenna as co-founder and a studio of animators, designers and programmers, he spent the next three decades testing how far that mirror could bend: into 3D, into a bounty-hunter western, and back to Abe as an independent company.
Lanning trained first as a painter. In the early 1980s he studied photo-realism and commercial illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York and paid his way as studio manager and assistant painter to the artist Jack Goldstein. Oddworld’s own biography says the still image came to feel too confining, and that Goldstein’s work pushed him towards film, effects and animation. He went on to the California Institute of the Arts, graduating with a BFA in character animation.
His first animation job was unusual for a future game-maker. At the TRW Visualization Center in Redondo Beach he was technical director of computer animation on films that visualised aerospace concepts, including the Strategic Defense Initiative. Looking back in 2019, he told Newsweek that a small team turned scientists’ jargon into pictures for military leaders, and that the experience left him seeing the world as fragile and full of problems.
He then moved to Rhythm & Hues in Hollywood, chosen for its computer-animated commercials, films, station identifications and motion-simulator rides. There he rose from technical director to art director, creative director and visual-effects supervisor, on work that included attractions for Euro Disney and MCA/Universal. The habits of an effects house, where design is solved on paper before expensive rendering begins, came with him into games.
At Rhythm & Hues Lanning met Sherry McKenna, already an established producer of commercials and effects. He persuaded her first to join the studio and then, over two years, to start a games company with him. By Oddworld’s own account she found games ugly, confusing and loud, and agreed only when he promised a beautiful, intuitively controlled game with a meaningful story that they could also fund, build and get published. Oddworld Inhabitants was founded in September 1994 and settled in San Luis Obispo, California, with McKenna as chief executive and Lanning as president and creative director. As Lanning later told Edge, neither of them had made a game before.
The plan was a Quintology: five games, each introducing a hero who would join a growing band of rebels against the exploitation of people, cultures and land. It would end in a consumer metropolis but begin with the lowliest worker in a meat factory. In an interview for his publisher’s Oddworld website, given while Exoddus was being made, Lanning described the method: wrap deforestation, extinction and over-harvesting in an unworldly fantasy, then add “humorous additives” so the hard material goes down more easily. He designed each species by asking where it stood in the food chain and what its evolution had made it want. He insisted the studio had never seen the Glukkon bosses and Slig guards as simply evil.
He also brought an effects-house production model. Chris Ulm, his assistant director, worked with him on story; production designer Farzad Varahramyan’s department drew every creature and building on paper before anyone touched a computer; animators including Scott Easley and Angie Jones built characters in Maya, while matte paintings made in Photoshop became the backgrounds. Varahramyan joked to IGN in 2000 that when Lanning called a sheet of designs “a good start”, it meant the team was nowhere near finished.
The game was shown privately at E3 in 1996 as SoulStorm. GT Interactive took on publishing that September and, on its advice, the title became Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee. It reached PlayStation in September 1997 and Windows that November, directed by Lanning, produced by Frank Simon and designed with Paul O’Connor and Jeff Brown, among a much larger team. Abe works at RuptureFarms, a meat-processing plant whose Glukkon owner, facing falling profits, plans a new product made from Abe’s own people, the Mudokons.
Abe cannot fight. He moves through single, hand-composed screens and survives by watching. The defining tool is GameSpeak: holding a button and pressing another lets him greet a Mudokon, tell it to follow or wait, or ask it to pull a lever. Chanting opens bird portals through which followers escape. It also lets Abe take control of a Slig guard, gun and all, although flying chant suppressors stop him in the most dangerous areas. There are 99 Mudokons. Abe can reach the end without them, but only saving at least 50 earns the good ending. Leaving others behind is easier, and the ending notices.
Lanning was frank about the flaws. In May 1998 he told Gaming Age, “we fell short on the ‘save’ feature”. Checkpoint saving forced players to repeat hard sections, and some puzzles could only be learned by dying; infinite lives were meant to offset that. Abe’s Exoddus, released in November 1998, was his correction. It added proper saves, had whole groups of Mudokons follow Abe instead of one at a time, and allowed him to possess nearly every creature. It also gave the workers moods (angry, depressed, even suicidal) that required new GameSpeak. Its story follows a consequence of the first game: closing RuptureFarms cut off the bones used by the SoulStorm Brewery, so the Glukkons start mining a Mudokon burial ground.
Exoddus was never meant to be part of the Quintology. Lanning explained that the true second episode, Munch’s Oddysee, needed real-time 3D, and that PlayStation-era hardware could not deliver it without sacrificing the animation and character appeal that had led them to make a “2 1/2-D” game in the first place.
Munch’s Oddysee was meant to be the great leap. In 1999 Lanning told Master Gamer it would move beyond puzzle gauntlets to “world simulation”, modelling the life cycles of characters, communities and landscape, with GameSpeak used to direct crowds. Munch, the last of a species harvested for lung transplants, could possess machines as Abe possessed creatures. The project moved from PlayStation 2 to Xbox, and from GT Interactive, which had been taken over by Infogrames, to Microsoft. When it was released in November 2001, the studio’s own history says, time and technical limits meant it fell far short of the original vision. Oddworld then set the Quintology aside.
Stranger’s Wrath, published by Electronic Arts for Xbox in early 2005, kept Oddworld’s world but changed its hero and genre. Lanning told UGO that Abe and Munch were “on hiatus” and that the new ideas suited a new character. He drew on Sergio Leone’s westerns and the Man with No Name for a taciturn bounty hunter. The player switches at will between a third-person view for running, jumping and brawling and a first-person view for aiming a wrist-mounted, double-barrelled crossbow. Its ammunition is alive. Chippunks shout insults that lure an outlaw to a chosen spot, Bolamites wrap a target in silencing web, and Stunks, as Lanning put it, induce “horrendous vomiting”.
The design choice that ties it to Abe is the bounty. Lanning and lead designer Erik Yeo told Total Video Games in 2004 that outlaws are worth more alive than dead, so picking off enemies quietly and capturing them pays better than charging in. Lanning wanted the drawn-out “shoot-out” of a western, with stealth and bait-and-trap tactics, rather than simply shooting; in 2005 he said the live ammunition made the game “more a strategic ‘shoot-out’ than a shooter”. Abe had to be persuaded to save others. The Stranger is strong enough to kill, but the game’s economy still rewards keeping enemies alive. That reading is Dæmon’s, but it follows directly from the mechanics Lanning described. Later that year he called Stranger’s Wrath his favourite Oddworld game and credited a crew that had “synergized in a way that is quite rare”.
Its commercial life was less happy. EA had planned a PlayStation 2 conversion by other developers and cancelled it in 2004; Lanning told TeamXbox the decision was “solely EA’s”. In April 2005 he told GameSpot that EA then cut the advertising and marketing budget. He said “we’re not bitter about it” and that it was not the reason for Oddworld’s next move. That month the company closed its internal development studio in San Luis Obispo and relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area. It planned to work like a film production company, developing properties for games, television and film with outside partners. A follow-up built on Stranger’s technology, The Brutal Ballad of Fangus Klot, was announced with Majesco and then abandoned. Lanning later told Game Informer that the arrangement with EA had become “unworkable”.
In 2005 Lanning had pointed to Valve’s Steam as a model for creators reaching players directly. Oddworld began selling its older games through digital stores in 2008. At the 2009 Game Developers Conference he met Stewart Gilray of the small studio Just Add Water. Because Oddworld owned its engine, tools and source code, Just Add Water could remaster Stranger’s Wrath in HD for PlayStation 3 and PC. Gilray told Gamasutra in 2010 that a digital release was far less risky than a disc.
Oddworld: New ’n’ Tasty (2014) rebuilt Abe’s Oddysee from the ground up. Just Add Water developed it, Lanning served as creative director, and Oddworld financed it without a traditional publisher. At GDC in 2014 Lanning set out the arithmetic in public: 250,000 sales would fund a remake of Exoddus, and another 250,000 something new. He called crowdfunding a wholly new game “a little deceptive and a risk”, estimating that a new Oddworld title would cost no less than five million dollars.
That Exoddus remake became Oddworld: Soulstorm (2021). It was announced as a remake in 2015 and grew into a reimagining of the second story, keeping only a few of the original’s characters and levels. Oddworld Inhabitants self-published it and developed it with partner studios, notably Frima Studio and Fat Kraken Studios. It launched on PlayStation and the Epic Games Store, followed by an Enhanced Edition. In 2019 Lanning told Newsweek that the series would now diverge from his original Quintology plans and that his idea of what drives exploitation had changed. Oddworld’s own biography, as archived in June 2026, says he is working on an unannounced new project.
Begin with Abe’s Oddysee, or New ’n’ Tasty if the 1997 checkpoints feel too punishing, and count the Mudokons you bring out. Then play Stranger’s Wrath to see the same values priced into a shooter. Last, set Soulstorm beside Exoddus to watch Lanning retell one of his own stories more than two decades on.
