Mirror's Edge originally looked like "every other Unreal game" in 2008, but it literally made people sick: "Moving very fast through the world, you got simulation sickness"

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The Gears of War treatment didn't really work for Mirror's Edge

In the nearly 18 years since its release, Mirror's Edge has built a sparkling reputation for its sparkling buildings and blue skies. This, apparently, wasn't developer DICE's plan.

The parkour game's developers reflect on its now incomparable look and feel in a new interview with Design Room, where they admit Mirror's Edge was originally set to join its apocalyptic siblings – like Gears of War or Fallout 3 – in looking very, let's say, piss yellow. But looking at this corroded version of Mirror's Edge literally made people nauseous.

Even art director Johannes Söderqvist calls the game's initial art "generic," featuring stereotypical signs of dystopia like "more run-down, sort of New York-style rooftops with these water towers" instead of the sleek, futuristic silver skyscrapers it ended up with. Mirror's Edge looked "pretty brown, like a regular game, if you will," he says, which "wasn't bad; it looked good, actually. But there was no style to it, or a fairly generic style."

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Ashley Bardhan
Ashley Bardhan
Senior Writer

Ashley is a Senior Writer at GamesRadar+. She's been a staff writer at Kotaku and Inverse, too, and she's written freelance pieces about horror and women in games for sites like Rolling Stone, Vulture, IGN, and Polygon. When she's not covering gaming news, she's usually working on expanding her doll collection while watching Saw movies one through 11.

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