Flashback: The Quest for Identity, released just as Flashback in some countries, is an action-adventure platform game developed by Delphine Software of France, a now defunct company, and published by U.S. Gold in America and Europe, and Sunsoft in Japan. The game was released in 1992. Later a version on CD-ROM with new cinematic scenes was released. Flashback is listed in the Guinness World Records as the best-selling french game of all time.

Flashback was released on IBM PC, Amiga, Apple Macintosh, Acorn Archimedes, CD-i, SNES, 3DO, Mega Drive/Genesis, Sega CD and Atari Jaguar. The CD-ROM editions of the game featured better animation inbetween the levels and added voice actors to the character's dialogue.

It features fully hand-drawn backdrops and for its time remarkably fluid rotoscoped animation of walking, running and jumping movements, reminiscent of Prince of Persia. Despite this coincidence in look and release date of this game, the rotoscoping technique of Flashback was invented independently of Prince of Persia utilizing a more complicated method of first tracing video images onto transparencies.

The game began as a licensed adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola's movie The Godfather, but eventually strayed away from this theme as development proceeded.

A sequel, named Fade to Black was produced in 1995. This game has completely different gameplay and generated mixed reviews from critics that felt that it was too different from the original game. Flashback is often mistaken for a sequel to Another World.

Storyline

The game is set on the planet Titan (and later Earth and an alien spaceship) in the year 2142 and details the journey of Conrad B. Hart, an agent for the Galaxia Bureau of Investigation, and his attempts to recover his lost memory and save the world. Fitting into the cyberpunk genre, there are government conspiracies, bleak world views, and cybernetic enhancements, all squeezed into the dystopian society the game presents. The game also seems to borrow themes from certain films, i.e. the deadly spheres in Phantasm, and many of the dystopian themes developed in Blade Runner and in Total Recall. The story is also somewhat reminiscent of They Live, including glasses that allow one to see aliens.

During one of his investigations, Conrad discovers a plot to take over Earth involving aliens called Morphs who disguise themselves as government officials. Conrad records a holocube for himself and makes a copy of his memory as a precaution against it being erased. As he feared, the Morphs eventually kidnap Conrad and erase his memory but he manages to escape and is left disoriented on an alien planet.

Conrad finding the cube he recorded earlier, he eventually regains his memory (in the titular 'flashback') and finds out that the people he used to work for have killed his girlfriend to make sure no one would report Conrad missing. In the end, he foils the alien's plans, once and for all, but at the cost of having to go into suspended animation in space and hope that he is picked up by someone. The sequel, Fade to Black, has Conrad being picked up by his old enemies.

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