Quote:
Living statue.
These photos are from 1996
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Actually a bit of a correction, those images are all from the Connor mac Lyrr, son of a Fisherman stage (1995-1996 or so). It's when Connor was first established as a peasant. I have the magazines the images came from.
No artwork from the statue stage (the character didn't have a name at that point) has been released. That prototype idea was actually late 1994-1995 brainstorming around the time Phantasmagoria was in development (way before they even started working on designing any game models). So that idea never went very far, and was quickly replaced with an early version peasant Connor.
Those magazines also speak of "changing armor", so what you see in the image is actually just a placeholder, starting outfit, or one of the armors he finds along the way. Its unclear. But even back then, they had plans for much of what you see in the finished game. The game just would have been even longer, had more battles.
What you don't see in those images, but show up in some of the others from the magazines at that time, is that same model, standing around with monsters, that he would have fought. They didn't even have a playable game at that point, they were just using the level editor from Dynamix (and placing "objects" in the world), there was no animation, or interactivity.
You can see the level editor in use here as well as some of the enemies;
Making of video
The above video seems to show interviews from various points during the development around 1995-1996 (during the boardroom meeting, during the prototype art stage, and level editing stage). Some of those ideas (like the large world) were dropped pretty early on as well, as being too ambitious for the technology they had.
You can even see, in that video some of her staff kept on telling Roberta her ideas were too ambitious and couldn't be done with the technology they had. That was some of the start of the problems where others in the staff were undermining her control.
If you want to hear the most details explanations about the development difficulties Roberta was having (and material that was cut), listen to her own words;
Interview 1
Interview 2
Both are pretty long, but interesting. There was a part three that specifically about cut material and development nightmares in great detail, but unfortunately that's missing.