To kick off G4tv.com’s new 2005 season, hosts Laura Foy and Tina Wood have a very special guest planned for the next episode, "When Titans Clash"--and his name is Lorne Lanning. Lanning is the man behind the Oddworld gaming series and the President/Creative Director of the award-winning video game development company Oddworld Inhabitants. He has nearly 20 years experience in computer graphics and digital media, and has an Honorary Doctorate Degree from the San Francisco Academy of Art College. He also serves as the Executive Committee Vice Chairman for Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences (AIAS), and is a member of the Visual Effects Society. But most of us know him as the genius that created what promises to be one of the most badass games of all time, Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, the newest entry in the franchise.

One of the most unique things about Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath is the multi-textured world the inhabitants reside in. In addition to the unfolding plot-lines and characters, the universe itself has a life all its own and players can spend hours just cruising around this incredibly detailed creation.

To get y'all warmed up for his on-air interview with Tina and Laura, I conducted this exclusive lil' pre-interview with Mr. Lanning about his inspirations for the Oddworld universe--from gaming to TV to movies--and his take on video games past and present. Be sure to watch him on G4TV.com's "When Titans Clash," which premieres this Friday, Jan. 21 (10pm ET / 7pm PT) and airs throughout the week. Enjoy!

G4TV.com: Oddworld has such amazing characters and so much creative imagery. What influenced you as a kid that helped steer you in this direction and influenced you and Oddworld?
Lanning: One of my all-time personal favorites was Star Wars… but that was before the new movies came out. But the first three just blew my mind and hugely inspired me. Another thing that was a huge inspiration to me was the Muppets, and what Jim Henson created and how he was able to get emotion and personality out of these characters. The Muppet Show was a huge hit amongst the biggest actors. They were begging to get on that show. That’s just amazing that they would want to be on a show with puppets.

What I was attracted to was the worlds that had been created that had very unique visual signatures. So today that would be Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. Tolkin’s The Lord of the Rings was a rich intellectual experiences, but Peter Jackson turned that into a rich, visual experience so, again, it had a unique visual signature.

We were going to use computer graphics to birth our universe and, at the time, computer graphics for the most part, except for how it was being used for visual effects in movies, was still very plastic- and young-looking. What we wanted to do was gritty it up and create a visual signature in this medium that identified our universe. A lot of what I was looking at at the time was European graphic novels, which is really European comic books. But the difference is that they are hard cover, every page is a full painting, and there’s a lot of artistry that goes into them. It was a very unique type of signature that you weren’t seeing much of in the world. In many ways, that was the visual inspiration, and the intellectual inspiration was, as a format, the Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings trilogies and what Warner Brothers had done with Looney Tunes in its own way. On a plot and thematic level, it was the things that are wrong in our world that we’re not really talking about because the people who are supposed to be communicated to us, informing us, are making too much money to keep us in the loop, so we’re being misinformed. And in the process of being misinformed in the modern world, which is a very dangerous place to be, you have all these amazing stories that are too strange to believe. In many ways, THAT was a huge inspiration on myself.

What were your favorite video games in your early days as a kid or teen?
Oddly enough, one of my favorite games is still Asteroids, the original version. I still play it on my computer. It has a timeless chemistry and is beyond brilliant in its simplicity, and I can still beat my old high scores...which is amazing! I mean, I can still try to beat a score I had 20 years ago. I had a paper route and a lot of quarters--you get paid in quarters--so I was always in the arcade. It started with pinball and then one of my favorite games was Grand Prix racing, the one where you could spin the wheel. Again, a great simple chemistry.

But then, as games started to mature form the old Atari days, personally I wasn’t that interested. I was growing up, but I felt like the games weren’t. And I wasn’t a computer person at that time, so I wasn’t playing computer games, or maybe I would have found the text-driven games intriguing. It wasn’t until I started seeing that games could use the medium I was really attracted to and working in at the time, 3-D computer graphics. That’s when I started to put the writing on the wall and see what I thought was the future with the interactive medium, and then it got a lot more exciting. One of those games that really blew me away at the time was the coin-op box for the Terminator 2 game, because they were actually scanning in the footage from the movies and using it in the shooter game box at the arcade. That was impressive and very indicative as to what was to come on the console systems. When the Sega Genesis came out, it was very interesting to see this kind of power pushed for this low-a-dollar at the retail store. It was pretty cheap for that kind of graphics performance. While we were still using silicon graphics machines at $120,000 a piece, here’s a $120 game machine that’s actually showing promise.

What current video games do you think are interesting or do you enjoy?
A game I think is an incredible piece of work -- it’s not a perfect game, it has its flaws -- is Ico. The team that created that are real talents to watch for in this business. That was an experience where it was too difficult for me to even play through.  I don’t care for games where I get stuck in a room for an hour -- and I’ve been guilty of creating a few of those myself -- so I sat down and played it with the cheats all printed out from the Web. But as a beautiful experience where film meets gaming, I think that it is still one of the all-time most elegant types of visual production design and emotional gaming experiences that’s been made to date. It’s not for everybody, but these are really interesting guys to watch.

In recent years, Halo really blew me away in two-player mode, playing through a story with two players. Last Thanksgiving I blew all my time off with Need For Speed Underground 2 and was really angry I picked up that game because it just ate up all the time that I planned on relaxing… and didn’t! (Laughs)

What games inspired Oddworld?
The games that inspired us to create Oddworld came out of Europe. I thought Flashback and Out Of This World were really incredible games. The reason I thought that, as a designer and an artist, was that the characters had a greater sense of life in those games above any games I had seen before. That started to show me that the games could begin to feel more like lifeforms and less like pushing pieces of art around. That was exciting.

What is next for the Oddworld franchise? Where can it go from here?
We have a number of things on the drawing board, but it’s too soon to talk about any of that now. One thing that we learned was that we really don’t want to talk about anything too soon.

Are you working on any other non-Oddworld games or projects?
There are. We are looking to birth another universe that is not Oddworld. That doesn’t mean we’re leaving Oddworld, we’re just excited about the opportunity to create another universe. But it’s too early to talk about the details of that.

What’s your New Year’s resolution for 2005?
Be a better person and be healthy. Nah, that’s too boring! I’ll say, keep on building better games!

G4tv.com: "When Titans Clash" premieres Friday, Jan. 21, 10pm ET / 7pm PT.