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C&C Meets Akira?
Most of you will probably wonder why there is a page about Akira on the C&C Meets Star Wars website.
Well... I've spent a lot of work on this project, and I even bought a model (read: toy ;) of Kaneda's bike from Akira to finish it, so I couldn't really -not- put it online.
Anyway... the whole thing started when I first started making C&C missions... and I found out the Ion Cannon movie in C&C was called AKIRA.VQA.
At that time, I had never heard of anime, and didn't have a clue what Akira meant. It was only a lot later, when I actually saw the movie Akira, that I realized the link... the makers of C&C got the concept of the orbital laser cannon from the movie Akira.
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A while after that, when playing C&C again, I noticed on the Recon Bike icon that the windshield looked an awful lot like that of Kaneda's bike in Akira. So I started comparing the two...
The first, obvious thing to notice is the front of the bike. That was pretty easy to compare, since I had a really good render of the Recon Bike in my C&C manual.
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As I said, the first obvious similarity is the windshield. Although the end is a bit different, and the Akira bike's windshield is round, the shape is pretty much the same.
But what I was really wondering about at this point was the back wheel... In Akira, you can see the wheel of Kaneda's bike is only connected to the bike itself at one side. I wanted to know how far the Westwood guys had gone in copying the bike.
I found a picture online where the Recon Bike was quite visible:
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As you see, the recon bike picture isn't really clear enough to answer the question about the back wheel. You see some kind of blur there... it looks a bit like a connection, but it isn't clear enough to be sure.
So the search continued... back to the source, the game itself. After watching the few FMV's that have the Recon Bike in it a few dozen times each I finally gathered enough screenshots to cut and paste a full recon bike together.
Somewhere online I found a good schematic of the right side of the bike, so I'll put that here as final comparison. On these pictures you can clearly see all similarities beween the two.
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For the back wheel, you see the blur again. It seems like you can see the outline of the wheel, but I think that's just a shadow. Furthermore, a new render I got from the First Decade pack seem to suggest the bike is 100% symmetrical:
Even though it's blurry, you can see the two white shapes at the back wheel seem to be exactly the same. So I guess that means the bike's wheel connects at both sides. Well, it'd probably be quite far-fetched to copy that unique detail, too. I just wish I had better renders of the C&C bike.
On this picture, you also clearly see the similarities in the middle part of the bike.
You can see here that the front of the two bikes is apparently not the same. The C&C bike has these two lines that look like they're probably radiator grills, and it doesn't have the fairings going straight from the side mirrors to the wheel.
But besides the small differences in the front, the wheel thing (which was a really unique touch in Akira anyway) and of course the fact that Kaneda's bike doesn't have rocket launchers mounted on it, the bikes are pretty much the same.
- Nyerguds, 12-10-2003.
Updated with new information on 14-1-2007