Recently I was inspired to create my own rendition of the Chameleon JumpSuit from the 1998 adventure game The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time, one of my favorite PC games when I was younger. Maybe I'm looking at the game through nostalgia-tinted glasses, but I remember Legacy of Time combining interesting puzzles, a decent story, and often hilarious writing (primarily for the main character's AI companion, Arthur) into an overall entertaining adventure. The game can currently be purchased at GOG.com and I would highly recommend it to any fan of older adventure/puzzle games, especially those featuring fmv.
The Chameleon JumpSuit allows the wearer to assume a holographic form of any person they come across in a given timezone. This allowed for a number of puzzles involving the player interacting with other non-player characters under the guise of another character. After all, you wouldn't want to travel thousands of years into the past and freak out a Tibetan monk or Atlantian with your time traveling suit.
The only CG characters in Legacy of Time were a handful of aliens. Much like other games released around the same time such as Myst and many of its sequels, all human characters were portrayed by live actors superimposed into CG environments. Consequently, the game's iconic time travel jumpsuit was a practical effect worn by an actor during cutscenes. Since the Chameleon JumpSuit never got the 3D treatment, I decided to do my best at creating a modern rendering of the game's distinctive piece of art.
The Chameleon JumpSuit was designed by Phil Saunders, the creative director of Presto Studios, and constructed by Emmy award-winning special effects artist Don Pennington. Presto Studios, the development team behind the Journeyman Project series, among other titles, disbanded in 2002. The suit itself, however, was later donated by former members of Presto Studios to UC San Diego's Science and Engineering Library.
Finding reference images for the suit ended up being a little tricky. Since Legacy of Time is 15 years old, there aren't many high-resolution images of the game available on the web. The games cutscenes are pretty low-res, and proved too fuzzy to serve as adequate reference material. Thankfully, I was able to find a number of more recent photos of the suit displayed at UC San Diego. Even then, I never found a decent image of the back of the suit, so I had to make the best of what I had.
The left image depicts the suit in an in-game cutcene and the
right image shows the life-size suit on display at UC San Diego.
Disclaimer: The Chameleon JumpSuit, The Journeyman Project, and Legacy of Time are property of Presto Studios, Inc. I am in no way affiliated with Presto Studios, Red Orb Entertainment, or The Journeyman Project series in any way. This artwork was created for strictly non-commercial purposes.
