Where did they come from?
What are they for?
So where did these giant elevators come from?
And why do developers keep putting them in their games?
I set out to answer both questions, and went somewhere unexpected.
Surely if anyone knows about this sort of thing, I thought, its a company called Niche Lifts.
There are loads of these rickety cliff lifts dotted all over the world.
The modern equivalent of these is probably the incline elevators that have been popping upat underground train stations.
But funiculars and incline elevators arent quite what Im looking for.
The closest thing to a classic video-game giant lift is probably theThree Gorges Dam ship elevator in China.
Its the biggest elevator in the world, but its also distinctly wet, and definitely not diagonal.
So where did all these diagonal game elevators come from?
Subconsciously they turned to things theyd absorbed from anime and manga.
So do game developers actually call them Akira lifts, then?
I think its an age thing.
But there were several people who were like, Yep, I know exactly what you mean.
An Akira lift features in the 2016 Rebellion gameBattlezone, slowly raising the players tank into the battle arena.
It was intended as a sort of introduction to the game, May said.
So you get gradually released into the environment.
Actually getting the lift to work was tricky, too.
Then when the lift reached the top, the physics component was teleported to the top of the shaft.
It sounds like lifts are pretty tricky things to implement.
Are they as hard asmaking doors, say?
They have a lot of similar issues, I suppose, said May.
Does the lift stop?
Does the player die?
Does the lift just sort of move through as if you’re a ghost?
So why put something that hard to make in games in the first place?
May can think of a few reasons.
You used to see that in things like sideways brawlers.
You’d fight in a little arena for a few minutes, and then move on.
In other words, just like those dreaded Mass Effect lifts, giant elevators also mask loading times.
That is what that lift is all about in Akira, May noted.
It’s about like, Oh shit, we’re going down somewhere really scary.
And the fact that nothing looks like them in real life surely only adds to their allure.
After all, RPS readers recently said theypreferred elaborate corridor architecture to funicular fights.
