“A little shooter game” from Rare evolved to a lifesaver
Former Rare employee talks about a videogame demo
There are quite a few things that come to mind when discussing the Xbox 360. Games like Halo and Gears of War are amazingly popular, and fans/dissenters love joking and ranting about what’s become titled as the Red Ring of Death. However, the 360 can add “fighting against heart disease” in its long list of qualifications for its imaginary resume, thanks to Simon Scarle, a former Rare employee.
A program called Heartworks, the “first functioning interactive heart model”, serves as being able to assist scientists in performing complicated heart research. Thanks to the processing power of the Xbox 360, Heartworks is able to “calculate millions of mathematical equations relating to the proteins, cells, and tissues of the heart.” What makes this more interesting is that the 360’s processing power delivers these statistics “5 times faster and ten times cheaper” than PCs.
“Okay,” you might be thinking right now, provided you’ve gotten this far, “what does this have to do with Rare, exactly?” Good question. Dr. Simon Scarle is the answer. A Senior Programmer of Engineering at the University of Warwick in England, he originally found what the 360 can do thanks to his former job at Rare. During his time there, he created what he called “a little shooter game” where the player shoots enemies in an arena shaped like a heart. “I did a game-ified version of my old cardiac code. I could actually present some ‘proper’ science [based on] the cool things us game developers do,” Scarle added.
Well, there you have it. While it’s safe to say that Perfect Heart was just meant to be a prototype instead of a game planned for release (XBLA probably would’ve been ideal, considering the use of the word “little”), it’s always interesting to know what could’ve been, in terms of what lies behind closed doors in Twycross that normal folks will never be aware of. Plus, now whenever you hear people saying that videogames are the cause of all the evil in the world, you can now sound intelligent when you retort by saying that the 360 is used for science and medicine.
Somehow related news
- Rare considers Natal will change development approach ()
- Perfect Dark 2 canceled, may have evolved into something else ()
- Was a new Perfect Dark shown last month behind closed doors? ()
- Will Perfect Dark Return? ()
- PDZ and Conker in 2006 top 20 for Xbox systems ()
2 Comments
I’ve never had the RROD and I’ve had my 360 for years kinda weird
Comment by Saicambanjo — 08.Oct.09 @ 1:59 am
its all good until it RROD hahahahahaha…. seriously…..
Comment by Jack — 07.Oct.09 @ 11:12 pm