A Looking Glass Half Empty, Part 1: Just Lookin’ for a Hit
This article tells part of the story of Looking Glass Studios.
There was some discussion about it: “Wow, gosh, it’d sure be nice if we were making more money and selling more copies so we could do crazy games of the type we want, as opposed to having to worry about how we’re going to sell more.” Hey, I’d love it if the public was more into what I like to do and a little less into slightly more straightforward things. But I totally get that they’re into straightforward things. I don’t have any divine right to have someone hand me millions of dollars to make a game of whatever I want to do. At some fundamental level, everyone has a wallet, and they vote with it.
— Doug Church, Looking Glass Studios
Late in 1994, after their rather brilliant game System Shock had debuted to a reception most kindly described as constrained, the Boston-based studio Looking Glass Technologies sent their star producer Warren Spector down to Austin, Texas. There he was to visit the offices of Looking Glass’s publisher Origin Systems, whose lack of promotional enthusiasm they largely blamed for their latest game’s lukewarm commercial performance. Until recently, Spector had been directly employed by Origin. The thinking, then, was that he might still be able to pull some strings in Austin to move the games of Looking Glass a little higher up in the priority rankings. The upshot of his visit was not encouraging. “What do I have to do to get a hit around here?” Spector remembers pleading to his old colleagues. The answer was “very quiet, very calm: ‘Sign Mark Hamill to star in your game.‘ That was the thinking at the time.” But interactive movies were not at all what Looking Glass wanted to be doing, nor where they felt the long-term future of the games industry lay.
So, founders Paul Neurath and Ned Lerner decided to make some major changes in their business model in the hope of raising their studio’s profile. They accepted $3.8 million in venture capital and cut ties with Origin, announcing that henceforward Looking Glass would publish as well as create their games for themselves. Jerry Wolosenko, a new executive vice president whom they hired to help steer the company into its future of abundance, told The Boston Globe in May of 1995 that “we expect to do six original titles per year. We are just beginning.” This was an ambitious goal indeed for a studio that, in its five and a half years of existence to date, had managed to turn out just three original games alongside a handful of porting jobs.
Even more ambitious, if not brazen, was the product that Looking Glass thought would provide them with their entrée into the ranks of the big-time publishers. They intended to mount a head-on challenge to that noted tech monopolist Microsoft, whose venerable, archetypally entitled Flight Simulator was the last word — in fact, very nearly the only word — in civilian flight simulation. David-versus-Goliath contests in the business of media didn’t come much more pronounced than this one, but Looking Glass thought they had a strategy that might allow them to break at least this particular Microsoft monopoly.
Flight Unlimited was the brainchild of a high-energy physicist, glider pilot, and amateur jazz pianist named Seamus Blackley, who had arrived at Looking Glass by way of the legendary Fermi Laboratory. His guiding principle was that Microsoft’s Flight Simulator as it had evolved over the last decade and a half had become less a simulation of flight itself than a simulation of the humdrum routine of civil aviation — of takeoff permissions and holding patterns, of navigational transponders and instrument landing systems. He wanted to return the focus to the simple joy of soaring through the air in a flying machine, something that, for all the technological progress that had been made since the Wright brothers took off from Kitty Hawk, could still seem closer to magic than science. The emphasis would be on free-form aerobatics rather than getting from Airport A to Airport B. “I want people to see that flying is beautiful, exciting, and see the thrill you can get from six degrees of freedom when you control an airplane,” Blackley said. “That’s why we’ve focused on the experience of flying. There is no fuel gauge.”
The result really was oddly beautiful, being arguably as close to interactive art as a product that bills itself as a vehicular simulation can possibility get. Its only real concession to structure took the form of a 33-lesson flying course, which brought you from just being able to hold the airplane straight and level to executing gravity-denying Immelman rolls, Cuban eights, hammerheads, and inverted spins. Any time that your coursework became too intense, you always had the option to just bin the lesson plans and, you know, go out and fly, maybe to try some improvisational skywriting.
In one sense, Flight Unlimited was a dramatic departure from the two Ultima Underworld games and System Shock, all of which were embodied first-person, narrative-oriented designs that relied on 3D graphics of a very different stripe. In another sense, though, it was business as usual, another example of Looking Glass not only pushing boundaries of technology in a purist sense — the flight model of Flight Unlimited really was second to none — but using it in the service of a game that was equally aesthetically innovative, and just a little bit more thoughtful all the way around than was the norm.
Upon its release in May of 1995, Flight Unlimited garnered a rare five-stars-out-of-five review from Computer Gaming World magazine:
It’s just you, the sky, and a plane that does just about anything you ask it to. Anything aerobatic, that is. Flight Unlimited is missing many of the staple elements of flight simulations. There are no missiles, guns, or enemy aircraft. You can’t learn IFR navigation or practice for your cross-country solo. You can’t even land at a different airport than the one you took off from. But unless you’re just never happy without something to shoot at, you won’t care. You’ll be too busy choreographing aerial ballets, pulling off death-defying aerobatic stunts, or just enjoying a quiet soar down the ridge line to miss that stuff.
Flight Unlimited sold far better than System Shock: a third of a million copies, more even than Looking Glass’s previous best-seller Ultima Underworld, enough to put itself solidly in the black and justify a sequel. Still, it seems safe to say that it didn’t cause any sleepless nights for anyone at Microsoft. Over the years, Flight Simulator had become less a game than a whole cottage industry unto itself, filled with armchair pilots who often weren’t quite gamers in the conventional sense, who often played nothing else. It wasn’t all that easy to make inroads with a crowd such as that. Like a lot of Looking Glass’s games, Flight Unlimited was a fundamentally niche product to which was attached the burden of mainstream sales expectations.
That said, the fact remained that Flight Unlimited had made money for Looking Glass, which allowed them to continue to live the dream for a while longer. Neurath and Lerner sent a homesick Warren Spector back down to Austin to open a second branch there, to take advantage of an abundance of talent surrounding the University of Texas that the Wing Commander-addled Origin Systems was believed to be neglecting.
Then Looking Glass hit a wall. Its name was Terra Nova.
Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri had had the most protracted development cycle of any Looking Glass game, dating almost all the way back to the very beginning of the company and passing through dozens of hands before it finally came to fruition in the spring of 1996. At its heart, it was an ultra-tactical first-person shooter vaguely inspired by the old Robert Heinlein novel Starship Troopers, tasking you with leading teams of fellow soldiers through a series of missions, clad in your high-tech combat gear that turned you more than halfway into a sentient robot. But it was also as close as Looking Glass would ever come to their own stab at a Wing Commander: the story was advanced via filmed cutscenes featuring real human actors, and a lot of attention was paid to the goings-on back at the ranch when you weren’t dressed up in your robot suit. This sort of thing worked in Wing Commander, to whatever extent it did, because the gameplay that took place between the movie segments was fairly quick and simple. Terra Nova was not like that, which could make it feel like an even more awkward mélange of chocolate and peanut butter. It’s difficult to say whether Activision’s Mechwarrior 2, the biggest computer game of 1995, helped it or hurt it in the marketplace: on the one hand, that game showed that there was a strong appetite for tactical combat involving robots, but, on the other, said demand was already being fed by a glut of copycats. Terra Nova got lost in the shuffle. A game that had been expected to sell at least half a million copies didn’t reach one-fifth of that total.
Looking Glass’s next game didn’t do any better. Like Flight Unlimited, British Open Championship Golf cut against the dark, gritty, and violent stereotype that tended to hold sway when people thought of Looking Glass, or for that matter of the games industry writ large. It was another direct challenge to an established behemoth: in this case, Access Software’s Links franchise, which, like Flight Simulator, had its own unique customer base, being the only line of boxed computer games that sold better to middle-aged corporate executives than they did to high-school and university students. Looking Glass’s golf project was led by one Rex Bradford, whose own history with simulating the sport went all the way back to Mean 18, a hit for Accolade in 1986. This time around, though, the upstart challenger to the status quo never even got a sniff. By way of damning with faint praise, Computer Gaming World called British Open Championship Golf “solid,” but “somewhat unspectacular.” Looking Glass could only wish that its sales could have been described in the same way.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see all too clearly that Neurath and Lerner crossed the line that separates ambition from hubris when they decided to try to set Looking Glass up as a publisher. At the very time they were doing so, many another boutique publisher was doing the opposite, looking for a larger partner or purchaser to serve as shelter from the gale-force winds that were beginning to blow through the industry. More games were being made than ever, even as shelf space at retail wasn’t growing at anything like the same pace, and digital distribution for most types of games remained a nonstarter in an era in which almost everyone was still accessing the Internet via a slow, unstable dial-up connection. This turned the fight over retail space into a free-for-all worthy of the most ultra-violent beat-em-up. Sharp elbows alone weren’t enough to win at this game; you had to have deep pockets as well, had to either be a big publisher yourself or have one of them on your side. In deciding to strike out on their own, Neurath and Lerner may have been inspired by the story of Interplay Productions, a development studio which in 1988 had broken free of the grasp of Electronic Arts — now Origin System’s corporate parent, as it happened — and gone on to itself become one of the aforementioned big publishers who were increasingly dominating at retail. But 1988 had been a very different time in gaming.
In short, Neurath and Lerner had chosen just about the worst possible instant to try to seize full control of their own destiny. “Game distribution isn’t always based on quality,” noted Warren Spector at the end of 1996. Having thus stated the obvious, he elaborated:
The business has changed radically in the last year, and it’s depressing. The competition for shelf space is ridiculous and puts retailers in charge. If you don’t buy an end-cap from retailers for, say, $50,000 a month, they won’t buy many copies.
Products once had three to six months. The average life is now 30 days. If you’re not a hit in 30 days, you’re gone. This is predicated on your association with a publisher who gets your title on shelves. It’s a nightmare.
With just three games shipped in the last two and a half years — a long way off their projected pace of “six original titles per year” — and with the last two of them having flopped like a wet tuna on a gymnastics court, Looking Glass was now in dire straits. The only thing that had allowed them to keep the doors open this long had been a series of workaday porting jobs that Warren Spector had been relegated to supervising down in Austin, while he waited for the company to establish itself on a sound enough financial footing to support game development from whole cloth in both locations. Ten years on, after Looking Glass had been enshrined in gaming lore as one of the most forward-thinking studios of all time and Spector as the ultimate creative producer, the idea of them wasting their collective talents on anonymous console ports would seem surreal. But such was the reality circa 1997, when Looking Glass, having burnt through all of their venture capital, was left holding on by a thread. “I remember people walking into the office to take back the [rented] plants which the studio was no longer able to pay for,” says programmer and designer Randy Smith.
As for Neurath and Lerner, they had swallowed the hubris of 1995 and were now doing what the managers of all independent games studios do when they find themselves unable to pay the bills anymore: looking for a buyer who would be able to pay them instead. But because Looking Glass could never seem to do anything in the conventional way even when they tried to, the buyer they found was one of the strangest ever.
The Boston firm known as Intermetrics, Inc., was far from a household name, but it had a proud history that long predated the personal-computer era. Intermetrics had grown out of the fecund soil of Project Apollo, having been founded in March of 1969 by some of the engineers and programmers behind the Apollo Guidance Computer that would soon help to place astronauts on the Moon. After that epochal achievement, Intermetrics continued to do a lot of work for NASA, providing much of the software that was used to control the Space Shuttle. Other government and aerospace-industry contracts filled out most of the balance of its order sheets.
In August of 1995, however, a group of investors led by a television executive bought the firm for $28 million, with the intention of turning it into something altogether different. Michael Alexander came from the media conglomerate MCA, where he had been credited with turning around the fortunes of the cable-television channel USA. Witnessing the transformation that high-resolution graphics, high-quality sound, and the enormous storage capacity of CD-ROM were wreaking on personal computing, he had joined dozens of his peers in deciding that the future of mass-market entertainment and infotainment lay with interactive multimedia. Deeming most of the companies who were already in that space to be “overvalued,” and apparently assuming that one type of computer programming was more or less the same as any other, he bought Intermetrics, whose uniform of white shirts, ties, and crew cuts had changed little since the heyday of the Space Race, to ride the hottest wave in 1990s consumer electronics.
“This is a company that has the skills and expertise to be in the multimedia business, but is not perceived as being in that business,” he told a reporter from The Los Angeles Times. (It was not a question of perception; Intermetrics was not in the multimedia business prior to the acquisition.) “And that is its strength.” (He failed to elaborate on exactly why this should be the case.) Even the journalist to whom he spoke seemed skeptical. “Ponytailed, black-clad, twenty-something multimedia developers beware,” she wrote, almost palpably smirking between the lines. “Graying engineers with pocket protectors and a dozen years of experience are starting to compete.” Likewise, it is hard not to suspect Brian Fargo of Interplay of trolling the poor rube when he said that “I think it’s great that the defense guys are doing this. It’s where the job security is now. It used to be in defense. Now it’s in the videogame business.” (Through good times and bad, one thing the videogame business has never, ever been noted for is its job security.)
Alas, Michael Alexander was not just a bandwagon jumper; he was a late bandwagon jumper. By the time he bought Intermetrics, the multimedia bubble was already close to popping under the pressure of a more sustained Internet bubble that would end the era of the non-game multimedia CD-ROM almost before it had begun. As this harsh reality became clear in the months that followed, Alexander had no choice but to push Intermetrics more and more in the direction of games, the only kind of CD-ROM product that was making anyone any money. The culture clash that resulted was intractable, as pretty much anyone who knew anything about the various cultures of computing could have predicted. Among these someones was Mike Dornbrook, a games-industry stalwart who had gotten his start with Infocom in the early 1980s. Seeking his next gig after Boffo Games, a studio he had founded with his old Infocom colleague Steve Meretzky, went down in flames, Dornbrook briefly kicked the tires at Intermetrics, but quickly concluded that what he saw “made no sense whatsoever”: “They were mostly COBOL programmers in their fifties and sixties. I remember looking around and saying, ‘You’re going to turn these guys into game programmers? What in the world are you thinking?'” [1]Dornbrook wound up signing on with a tiny startup called Harmonix Music Systems, which in 2005, after years of diligent experimentation with the possibilities for combining music and games, altered the landscape of gaming forever with Guitar Hero.
Belatedly realizing that all types of programming were perhaps not quite so interchangeable as he had believed, Michael Alexander set out in search of youngsters to teach his old dogs some new tricks. The Intermetrics rank and file must have shuddered at the advertisements he started to run in gaming magazines. “We are rocket scientists!” the ads trumpeted. “Even our games are mission-critical!” When these efforts failed to surface a critical mass of game-development talent, Alexander reluctantly moved on to doing what he should have done back in 1995: looking for an extant studio that already knew how to make games. It so happened that Looking Glass was right there in Boston, and, thanks to its troubled circumstances, was not as “overvalued” as most of its peers. Any port in a storm, as they say.
On August 14, 1997, a joint press release was issued: “Intermetrics, Inc., a 28-year-old leading software developer, and Looking Glass Studios, one of the computer gaming industry’s foremost developers, today announce the merger of the two companies’ gaming operations to form Intermetrics/Looking Glass Studios, LLC. Through the shared strengths of the two entities, the new company is strategically positioned to be a major force in the computer-game, console and online-gaming industries.” Evidently on a quest to find out how much meaningless corporate-speak he could shoehorn into one document, Michael Alexander went on to add that “Looking Glass Studios immediately catapults Intermetrics into a leading position in the gaming industry by giving us additional credentials and assets to compete in the market. Our business plan is to maintain and grow our core contract-services business while at the same time leveraging our expertise and financial resources to be a major player in the booming interactive-entertainment industry.” The price paid by the rocket scientists for their second-stage booster has to my knowledge never been publicly revealed.
The acquiring party may have been weird as all get-out, but it could have worked out far worse for Looking Glass, all things considered. In addition to the obvious benefit of being able to keep the doors open, at least a couple of other really good things came directly out of the acquisition. One was a change in name, from Looking Glass Technologies to Looking Glass Studios, emphasizing the creative dimension of their work. Another was a distribution deal with Eidos, a British publisher that had serious retail clout in both North America and Europe. Riding high on the back of the massive international hit Tomb Raider, Eidos could ensure that Looking Glass’s games got prominent placement in stores. Meanwhile this idea of the Looking Glass people serving as mentors to those who were struggling to make games at Intermetrics proper — an excruciating proposition for both parties — would prove to mostly be a polite, face-saving fiction for Michael Alexander; in practice, the new parent company would prove largely content to leave its subsidiary alone to do its own thing. Now the folks at Looking Glass just needed to deliver a hit to firmly establish themselves in their new situation. That was always the sticky wicket for them.
The first game that Looking Glass released under their new ownership was Flight Unlimited II, which appeared just a few months after the big announcement. Created without the input of Seamus Blackley, who had left the company, Flight Unlimited II sought simultaneously to capitalize on the relative success of Looking Glass’s first flight simulator and to adjust that game’s priorities to better coincide with the real or perceived desires of the market. Looking Glass paired the extant flight model with an impressively detailed depiction of the geography of the San Francisco Bay Area. Then they added a lot more structure to the whole affair, in the form of a set of missions to fly after you finished your training. The biggest innovation, a first for any civilian flight simulator, was the addition of other aircraft, turning San Francisco International Airport into the same tangle of congested flight lanes it was in the real world. These changes moved the game away from being such a purist simulation of flight as an end unto itself. Still, there was a logic to the additions; one can easily imagine them making Flight Unlimited II more appealing to the sorts of gamers who don’t tend to thrive in goal-less sandboxes. Be that as it may, though, it didn’t show up in the sales figures. Flight Unlimited II sold better than Terra Nova or British Open Championship Golf, but not as well as its series predecessor, just barely managing to break even.
This disappointment put that much more pressure on Looking Glass’s next game to please the new boss and show that the studio could deliver a solid, unqualified hit. In a triumph of hope over experience, everyone had high expectations for The Dark Project, which had been described in the press release announcing the acquisition as “a next-generation fantasy role-playing game.” Such a description might have left gamers wondering if Looking Glass was returning to the territory of Ultima Underworld. As things worked out, the game that they would come to know as simply Thief would not be that at all, but would instead break new ground in a completely different way. It stands today alongside Ultima Underworld in another sense: as one of the three principal legs — the last one being System Shock, of course — that hold up Looking Glass’s towering modern-day reputation for relentless, high-concept innovation.
The off-kilter masterstroke that is Thief started with a new first-person 3D engine known as The Dark Engine. It could have powered a “low-brain shooter,” as the Looking Glass folks called the likes of the mega-hit Quake, with perfect equanimity. But they just couldn’t bring themselves to make one.
It took a goodly while for them to decide what they did want to do with The Dark Engine. Doug Church, the iconoclastic programmer and designer who had taken the leading role on System Shock, didn’t want to be out-front to the same extent on this project. The initial result of this lack of a strong authority figure was an awful lot of creative churn. There was talk of making a game called Better Red than Undead, mixing a Cold War-era spy caper with a zombie invasion. Almost as bizarre was Dark Camelot, an inverted Arthurian tale in which you played the Black Knight against King Arthur and his cronies, who were depicted as a bunch of insufferable holier-than-thou prigs. “Our marketing department wasn’t really into that one,” laughs Church.
Yet the core sensibility of that concept — of an amoral protagonist set against the corrupt establishment and all of its pretensions — is all over the game that did finally get made. Doug Church:
The missions [in Dark Camelot] that we had the best definition on and the best detail on were all breaking into Camelot, meeting up with someone, getting a clue, stealing something, whatever. As we did more work in that direction, and those continued to be the missions that we could explain best to other people, it just started going that way. Paul [Neurath] had been pushing for a while that the thief side of it was the really interesting part, and why not just do a thief game?
And as things got more chaotic and more stuff was going on and we were having more issues with how to market stuff, we just kept focusing on the thief part. We went through a bunch of different phases of reorganizing the project structure and a bunch of us got sucked into doing some other project work on Flight [Unlimited] and stuff, and there was all this chaos. We said, “Okay, well, we’ve got to get this going and really focus and make a plan.” So we put Greg [LoPiccolo] in charge of the project and we agreed we were going to call it Thief and we were going to focus much more. That’s when we went from lots of playing around and exploring to “let’s make this Thief game.”
It surely comes as no revelation to anyone reading this article that most game stories are power fantasies at bottom, in which you get to take on the identity of a larger-than-life protagonist who just keeps on growing stronger as you progress. Games which took a different approach were, although by no means unknown by the late 1990s, in the decided minority even outside of the testosterone-drenched ghetto of the first-person shooter. The most obvious exponents of the ordinary-mortal protagonist were to be found in the budding survival-horror genre, as pioneered by Alone in the Dark and its sequels on computers and Resident Evil on the consoles. But these games cast you as nearly powerless prey, being stalked through dark corridors by zombies and other things that go bump in the night. Thief makes you a stealthy predator, the unwanted visitor rifling through cupboards and striking without warning out of the darkness, yet most definitely not in any condition to mow down dozens of his enemies in full-frontal combat, Quake-style. If you’re indiscreet in your predations, you can become the cornered prey with head-snapping speed. This was something new at the time.
Or almost so. Coincidentally, two Japanese stealthy-predator games hit the Sony PlayStation in 1998, the same year as Thief’s release. Tenchu: Stealth Assassins cast you as a ninja, while Metal Gear Solid cast you as an agent of the American government on a top-secret commando mission. The latter in particular caused quite a stir, by combining its unusual gameplay style with the sort of operatically melodramatic storytelling that was more commonly associated with the JRPG genre. That said, Thief is a far more sophisticated affair than either of these games, in terms of both its gameplay and its fiction.
The titular thief and protagonist is a man known only as Garrett, who learned his trade on the streets of The City, a mixture of urban squalor and splendor that is best described as Renaissance Florence with magic — a welcome alternative to more typical fantasy settings. Over the course of a twelve-act campaign, Garrett is given a succession of increasingly daunting assignments, during which a larger plot that involves more than the acquisition of wealth by alternative methods does gradually take shape.
Although the mission tree is linear, nothing else about your experience in Thief is set in stone. It was extremely important to Looking Glass that Thief not turn into a puzzle game, a series of set-piece challenges with set-piece solutions. They wanted to offer up truly dynamic environments, environments that were in their own way every bit as much simulations as Flight Unlimited. They wanted to make you believe you were really in these spaces. Artist Daniel Thron speaks of the “deep sense of trust we had in the player. There isn’t a single solution to Thief. It’s up to you to figure out how to steal the thing. It’s letting you tell that story through gameplay. And that sense of ownership makes it unique. It becomes yours.” In the spirit of all that, the levels are big, with no clearly delineated through-line. These dynamic virtual spaces full of autonomous actors demand constant improvisation on your part even if you’ve explored them before.
Looking Glass understood that, in order for Thief to work as a vehicle for emergent narrative, all of the other actors on the stage have to respond believably to your actions. It’s a given that guards ought to hunt you down if you blatantly give away your presence to them. Thief distinguishes itself by the way it responds to more subtle stimuli. An ill-judged footstep on a creaky floor tile might cause a guard to stop and mutter to himself: “Wait! Did I just hear something?” Stand stock still and don’t make a sound, and maybe — maybe — he’ll shrug his shoulders and move on without bothering to investigate. If you do decide to take a shot at him with your trusty bow or blackjack, you best not miss, to steal a phrase from Omar Little. And you best hide the body carefully afterward, before one of his comrades comes wandering along the same corridor to stumble over it.
These types of situations and the split-second decisions they force upon you are the beating heart of Thief. Bringing them off was a massive technical challenge, one that made the creation of 3D-graphics engine itself seem like child’s play. The state of awareness of dozens of non-player characters had to be tracked, as did sound and proximity, light and shadow, to an extent that no shooter — no, not even Half-Life — had ever come close to doing before. Remarkably, Looking Glass largely pulled it off, whilst making sure that the more conventional parts of the engine worked equally well. Garrett’s three principal weapons — a blackjack for clubbing unsuspecting victims in the back of the head, a rapier for hand-to-hand combat, and a bow which can be used to shoot a variety of different types of arrows — are all immensely satisfying to use, having just the right feeling of weight in your virtual hands. The bow is a special delight: the arrows arc through the air exactly as one feels they ought to. You actually get to use your bow in all sorts of clever ways that go beyond killing, such as shooting water arrows to extinguish pesky torches — needless to say, darkness is your best friend and light your eternal enemy in this game — and firing rope arrows that serve Garrett as grappling hooks would a more conventional protagonist.
Looking Glass being Looking Glass, even the difficulty setting in Thief is more than it first appears to be. It’s wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that Thief is really three games in one, depending on whether you play it on Normal, Hard, or Expert. (Looking Glass apparently wasn’t interested in the sorts of players who might be tempted by an “easy” mode.) Not only do the harder settings require you to collect more loot to score a passing grade on each mission, but the environments themselves become substantially larger. Most strikingly, in a brave subversion of the standard shooter formula, each successive difficulty setting requires you to kill fewer rather than more people; at the Expert level, you’re not allowed to kill anyone at all.
Regardless of the difficulty setting you choose, Thief will provide a stiff challenge. Its commitment to verisimilitude extends to all of its facets. In lieu of a conventional auto-map, it provides you only with whatever scribbled paper map Garrett has been able to scrounge from his co-conspirators, or sometimes not even that much. If your innate sense of direction isn’t great — mine certainly isn’t — you can spend a long time just trying to find your way in these big, twisty, murky spaces.
When it’s at its best, Thief is as amazing as it is uncompromising. It oozes atmosphere and tension; it’s the sort of game that demands to be played in a dark room behind a big monitor, with the phone shut off and a pair of headphones planted firmly over the ears. Sadly, though, it isn’t always this best version of itself. In comparison to Ultima Underworld or System Shock, both of which I enjoyed from first to last, Thief strikes me as a lumpy creation, a game of soaring highs but also some noteworthy lows. I was all-in during the first mission, a heist taking place in the mansion of a decadent nobleman. Having recently read Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus and written quite a lot about Renaissance Florence, my receptors were well primed for this Neo-Renaissance setting. Then I came to the second mission, and suddenly I was being asked to fight my way through a bunch of zombies in an anonymous cave complex. Suddenly Thief felt like dozens of other first-person action games.
This odd schizophrenia persists throughout the game. The stealthy experience I’ve just been describing — the boldly innovative experience that everyone thinks of today when they think of Thief — is regularly interspersed with splatterfests against enemies who wouldn’t have been out of place in Quake: zombies, rat men, giant exploding frogs, for Pete’s sake. (Because these enemies aren’t human, they’re generally exempt from the prohibition against killing at the Expert level.) All told, it’s a jarring failure to stick to its guns from a studio that has gone down in gaming lore for refusing to sacrifice its artistic integrity, to its own great commercial detriment.
As happens so often in these cases, the reality behind the legend of Looking Glass is more nuanced. Almost to a person, the team who made Thief attribute the inconsistency in the level design to outside pressure, especially from their publisher Eidos, who had agreed to partially fund the project. “Eidos never believed in it and until the end told us to put in more monsters and have more fighting and exploring and less stealth, and I’m not sure there was ever a point [when] they got it,” claims Doug Church. “I mean, the trailers Eidos did for Thief were all scenes with people shooting fire arrows at people charging them. So you can derive from that how well they understood or believed in the idea.”
And yet one can make the ironic case that Eidos knew what they were doing when they pushed Looking Glass to play up the carnage a little more. Released in November of 1998, Thief finally garnered Looking Glass some sales figures that were almost commensurate with their positive reviews. (“If you’re tired of DOOM clones and hungry for challenge, give this fresh perspective a try,” said Computer Gaming World.) The game sold about half a million copies — not a huge hit by the standards of an id Software or Blizzard Entertainment, but by far the most copies Looking Glass had ever sold of anything. It gave them some much-needed positive cash flow, which allowed them to pay down some debts and to revel in some good vibes for a change when they looked at the bottom line. But most importantly for the people who had made Thief, its success gave them the runway they needed to make a sequel that would be more confident in its stealthy identity.
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Sources: The book Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd. ed.) by Richard Rouse III; Next Generation of March 1997 and June 1997; PC Zone of December 1998; Computer Gaming World of September 1995, June 1996, August 1997, April 1998, and March 1999; Retro Gamer 117, 177, and 260; Los Angeles Times of September 15 1995; Boston Globe of May 3 1995.
Online sources include the announcement of the Intermetrics acquisition on Looking Glass’s old website, InterMetrics’s own vintage website, “Ahead of Its Time: A History of Looking Glass” by Mike Mahardy at Polygon, and James Sterrett’s “Reasons for the Fall: A Post-Mortem on Looking Glass Studios.”
Where to Get Them: Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri and Thief Gold are available for digital purchase at GOG.com. The other Looking Glass games mentioned this article are unfortunately not.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | Dornbrook wound up signing on with a tiny startup called Harmonix Music Systems, which in 2005, after years of diligent experimentation with the possibilities for combining music and games, altered the landscape of gaming forever with Guitar Hero. |
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DOS Game Club
I had a long talk recently with some nice folks at the DOS Game Club podcast. Our subject was one from the early days of this site, the Infocom game Planetfall. Maybe some of you will find it interesting. You can get it from the DOS Game Club homepage, or more than likely wherever you get your other podcasts. My thanks to the hosts for their kind invitation, and to the other guests for their patience with my historical rambling! (I’m told that this is the longest episode of the podcast ever.)
See you tomorrow with some fresh written content!
Outcast
The Outcast box was styled to look like a movie poster. Riffing on the same theme, Infogrames’s head Bruno Bonnell called it “the first videogame that really tries to be an interactive movie,” leaving one to wonder whether he had somehow missed the first nine years of the 1990s, during which countless games tried desperately to be just that. Ironically, Outcast actually has very few of the characteristics that had become associated with the phrase: no rigidly linear plot, no digitized human actors, no out-of-engine cutscenes after the obligatory opening one. It’s a game rather than a movie through and through, and all the better for it.
As longtime readers of these histories know already, I’ve never been overly enamored with the so-called “French Touch” in vintage computer games, that blending of elevated aesthetic and thematic aspirations — some might prefer to use the word “pretensions” — with a, shall we say, less thoroughgoing commitment to the details of gameplay and mechanics. So, I approached Outcast, a 1999 game by the Francophone Belgian studio Appeal, with my prejudices held out in front of me like a shield. The descriptions I read of Outcast were full of things that set my spider sense tingling: a blending of wildly divergent, usually mutually exclusive gameplay genres (it’s hard enough to get one type of game right, much less multiple types); a relentlessly diegetic interface that embraces even such typically meta-activities as saving state (it’s hard enough to get an interface right without also trying to extend it into the world of the game); a fiendishly and seemingly needlessly convoluted premise (whereas bad Anglophone games make Donald Duck seem like Shakespeare, bad French ones all seem to be trying to be Victor Hugo and Marcel Proust rolled into one). In fact, I did my level best to avoid writing about Outcast at all, even though I knew it to be one of the better remembered cult classics of the millennial era. But when my reader Deckard asked me to cover it with “big pleading puss-in-boots eyes,” I felt like I owed it to him and all of you to at least give it a look.
Well, then, there’s no point in burying the lede any deeper than I already have: I did play Outcast. Much to my own surprise, I wound up playing it all the way through, and kind of loving it. By no means was I left without nitpicks and niggles, but on the whole it proved to be not just one of the more interesting games I’ve encountered recently but one of the more fun as well. It succeeds on most of the divergent vectors it dares to venture down, delivering a unique, evocative, even moving experience that I won’t soon forget. I owe Deckard a hearty thank you for giving me the push I needed. Read on to find out all the reasons I have to be grateful, plus a little something about where Outcast came from.
Yves Grolet, Yann Robert, and Franck Sauer.
At bottom, Outcast was a labor of love by three fast friends who had been working and playing together for years by the time they started to make it. One of the trio, named Franck Sauer, was a visual artist, sound designer, and rudimentary musician, while the other two, named Yves Grolet and Yann Robert, were accomplished programmers who specialized in high-performance graphics. When they were first coming up in the industry, the Commodore Amiga was still Europe’s premier gaming platform. They first made a reputation for themselves via two audiovisually innovative, mechanically rote shoot-em-ups of the sort that were a dime a dozen on the Amiga at the time: 1990’s Unreal (no, not that one) and 1992’s Agony. Each sold around 20,000 copies in a crowded market.
Worried about the Amiga’s long-term future as a platform — and justifiably so, as it would turn out — the friends then decided to look elsewhere. They applied and were approved for a business-development grant from the government of France — this was made possible by the fact that Yann Robert was a citizen of that country rather than Belgium — and embarked on an ambitious plan to make standup-arcade games, a branch of the industry that was enjoying its last flash of rude health before the unceasing evolution of digital technology for the home rendered it moot. Art & Magic, as they called their company, succeeded in shipping four such games during 1993 and 1994; the actual hardware was manufactured by a Belgian firm known as Deltatec. The first of their games, Ultimate Tennis, performed the best, with some 5000 cabinets sold. Those that followed did steadily less well, and soon the friends decided to jump ship from the softening arcade market just as they had from the Amiga.
Determined to continue making games despite the lukewarm financial rewards their efforts thus far had yielded, they started another company, which they called Appeal, and considered where to go next. With DOOM having recently swept the world, 3D graphics were all the rage in gaming circles. Unconvinced that they could compete head-on with John Carmack and the other talented programmers at id Software, who were already hard at work on Quake, Grolet and Robert opted to try something different on the same Intel-based personal computers that id was targeting. Instead of embracing polygonal 3D rendering, as id and everyone else were doing, they thought to make an engine powered by voxels: essentially, individual pixels that each came complete with an X, Y, and Z coordinate to place it in a 3D space independently, untethered to any polygons. The approach had its limitations — it was less efficient than polygonal graphics in many applications, and far less amenable to hardware acceleration — but it had some notable advantages as well. In particular, it ought to be good at rendering large, open, sun-drenched landscapes, something that the polygonal engines all struggled with. Whereas they favored symmetrical straight lines that were best suited for buildings and other human-made scenery, voxels could do a credible job of rendering the more chaotic, convex splendors of nature.
The friends made a trip to France to pitch the game they called Outcast to the two biggest publishers in Francophone gaming, the Paris-based Ubisoft and the Lyon-based Infogrames. The former turned them down flat; the latter agreed to buy a minority stake in Appeal and to fund the project after just a few days of talks. Grolet, Robert, and Sauer set up shop in the Belgian town of Namur and embarked upon what would turn into a four-year odyssey, alongside a development team that would grow to about twenty people at its peak.
Outcast was created in this nifty-looking building in Namur, above a ground floor of shops.
In the beginning, Outcast was a project driven almost exclusively by its graphics technology, just like everything else the friends had done prior to it. To whatever extent they thought about the gameplay and the fiction, it was as a way to showcase the potential of voxel graphics to best effect. That meant large outdoor spaces to set it apart from the DOOMs and Quakes of the world. The first draft of the plot took place in the jungles of South America, casting the player as a vigilante who goes to war with a gang of drug smugglers. But the friends soon concluded that an alien environment would be better, in that it would show off the visuals without drawing attention to the many ways they could fail to deliver an accurate rendering of the flora and fauna of our own planet; voxels were better at impressionism than photo-realism. Then someone had the idea that, if one outdoor environment would be good, a collection of them to hop among, each with its own aesthetic personality, would be even better. For a good two years, the fiction and the gameplay failed to advance much farther than that, while Appeal worked on their tech and built out the environments in which the game would take place.
There was a danger in letting any such technology-first project drag on for so long, in that consumer-computing hardware in the second half of the 1990s was very much a moving target. When work on Outcast began, most games were still running under MS-DOS, using unaccelerated VGA graphics running at a typical resolution of 320 X 200. The next few years would see Windows 95 and its DirectX libraries finally replace the MS-DOS command line that had been so familiar to gamers for so long, even as SVGA graphics running at a resolution of 640 X 480 or higher became the norm and 3D graphics accelerators became commonplace. Appeal had to reckon with and adjust to these sweeping changes as best they could. They made the switch to Windows, but their voxels were not able to make use of 3D-acceleration cards. In order to keep frame rates reasonable, they had to settle for the rather odd resolution of 512 X 384, a middle ground between the past and present of computer-game graphics.
Outcast’s graphics weren’t terribly impressive in the numeric terms by which such things were usually judged: resolution, texture density, etc. Yet they have an impressionistic beauty all their own. After living with the dark, rather sterile graphics that dominated at the time, booting up Outcast was like opening the curtains in a dark room to let in the light of a gorgeous summer day.
From about the halfway point in its development, Outcast began to expand its horizons, to become something much more than just another graphical showcase. This was accompanied by the arrival of some new characters from outside the somewhat insular world of French gaming. They would come to have an enormous impact on the finished product.
Alongside their French artiness, the core trio were possessed of a huge fondness for big-budget American action movies and their typically bombastic scores. Franck Sauer especially wanted Outcast to have a bold, striking soundtrack to accompany its unique visuals; he cited John Williams, Alan Silvestri, and Danny Elfman as appropriate points of departure. Knowing that such a feat of composition was well beyond his own modest musical talents, he placed an advertisement in some American film-industry magazines, and eventually settled on a Hollywood-based composer named Lennie Moore. Moore was given permission just to go for it. The music he came up with was sometimes wildly, almost comically over the top — he names the pull-out-all-the-stops operas of Richard Wagner as one of his most important influences — but it was like nothing else that had been heard in a game before.
Best of all, Moore happened to have a relationship with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. The peculiar economics of post-Soviet Russia, where institutions like the aforementioned orchestra had been cast adrift without the state patronage under which they had thrived in previous decades, meant that they were often willing to take on “low-culture” music like videogame scores that no similarly credentialed Western cultural standard bearer would have touched, for a price it would never have countenanced. So, Lennie Moore and Franck Sauer found themselves traveling to Moscow in the summer of 1997, to spend a week recording the soundtrack with an 81-piece orchestra and a 24-member vocal choir, conducted by another American named William Stromberg. Sitting in an empty auditorium listening to the music being performed for the benefit of the tape recorders, Sauer could hardly believe his ears; he still calls it “an experience of a lifetime.”
The Moscow Symphony Orchestra arrives to record the Outcast soundtrack.
Outcast was suddenly taking on a decidedly multinational personality. Indeed, Moore’s score made use of a variety of exotic instrumentation in addition to the orchestra and choir, such as an Armenian duduk, Indian tablas, and African congas. The choir sang passages from Virgil’s Aeneid in the original Latin.
Around the same time that Lennie Moore and William Stromberg came onboard, Appeal hired yet another American, a writer and game designer by the name of Douglas Freese who would spend the next two years with them in Belgium. His assignment was to come up with an overarching plot to join together the six disparate voxel-driven environments that had already been created, and then to write all of the dialog for the many characters the player would encounter there. For it had been decided that Outcast would be, despite its Francophone origins, an English-language production first and foremost, one that could then be localized back into French and other languages as necessary. Writing from my own selfish standpoint as a native English speaker who prefers to play games in that language, this strikes me as a pivotal decision. It means that the Outcast which I know isn’t afflicted with the layer of obfuscation that tends to make playing even well-translated games — to say nothing of the bad translations! — like peering at their worlds through a window coated with a thin rime of frost.
Is the story of Outcast a good story? That depends on how you look at it. In the broadest strokes, it’s both clichéd and convoluted. You play a former Navy SEAL by the name of Cutter Slade — has there ever been a more perfect action-hero name in the history of media? — who is part of the first team of Earthlings ever to use a newly invented piece of mad-scientist kit that enables one to visit a parallel universe. (The influence of Stargate SG-1, a very popular television show at the time, is strong with this one.) But this is no casual research trip for the team: a black hole has been created in our own dimension by an unmanned probe that was sent previously into the alternate one. The rift can be closed only by locating the probe and returning it to the dimension where it belongs.
Your alter ego Cutter Slade. While the backgrounds are rendered using voxels, foreground characters and objects are rendered using more traditional polygons. Even here, however, Appeal found a way to be innovative. The game was one of the first, if not the first, to use a texture-mapping technique called bump-mapping to render action-hero musculature.
Alas, something goes haywire on your trip between dimensions as well, and the four members of your team arrive on the world of Adelpha at widely scattered points in not just geography but also time, with their equipment — including Cutter Slade’s action-hero arsenal of advanced weaponry — likewise scattered hither and yon. And so the game proper begins. In the role of Cutter, all you really want to do is locate your three companions, locate the probe, and return along with them and it to your home dimension, but it turns out that in order to do that you have to defeat a dictator who has taken over Adelpha and is suppressing its alien inhabitants with standard dictatorial glee. This is the task to which you’ll find yourself devoting the vast majority of your time and energy.
As I already noted, this story is as contrived as any in the videogame space, not to mention riddled with plot holes bigger than the inter-dimensional rift itself. (If the probe is such a problem for the stability of the multiverse, why doesn’t the other Earth equipment that’s been scattered everywhere on Adelpha seem to be any cause for concern?) The saving grace is in the details. Cutter Slade at first seems like just another one of the musclebound onscreen ciphers in which Arnold Schwarzenegger once specialized, but, once you get to know him, he turns out to conform more to the Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford archetype. (The voice actor who plays Cutter in the French localization is actually the same one who dubbed over Willis’s voice in the French Die Hard.) He’s always quick with a quip, expressing appropriate exasperation every time he’s given Yet Another Fetch Quest to carry out by one of the huge number of characters who inhabit the six regions of Adelpha, but he’s a soft touch at heart. He proves to be good company for his player, thus fulfilling the first and most important requirement for any videogame avatar. He’s so likable that you really want to bring his story to a happy ending.
Cutter Slade is a fish out of water much but not all of the time on Adelpha: being a former Navy SEAL, he’s pretty good at swimming as well as running, crawling, hitting, and shooting. “As far as Cutter is concerned, I had an easy time with his dialog because we both were in alien lands — him Adelpha, me Belgium — and we both had something to accomplish,” says Douglas Freese.
You can move from one of the six wildly disparate regions of Adelpha to another one only via the teleportation portals you find scattered about. The first region is a small training area, but the others are sprawling open spaces that show off the capabilities of the voxel engine to maximum advantage. Your main goal in each is to find a MacGuffin called a “mon,” of which you need all five in order to liberate the planet. But getting each mon will require working your way through a whole matrix of puzzles and other, preliminary quests given to you by the local inhabitants, members of a humanoid species known as the Talan. Most of the quests are self-contained within each region, but every once in a while the game switches it up and demands that you do something in another region to meet a local challenge. The whole design is impressively nonlinear; you can go almost everywhere right from the start, can tackle the regions in any order you wish. A short time after you find a mon, the game fires off a larger plot event involving your search for your missing teammates and sends you scurrying off to put out a fire somewhere and learn some more about What Is Really Going On on Adelpha. In this way, Outcast manages to balance a high degree of player freedom with a more conventional plot, with a coherent beginning, middle, and end.
The Talan are the most shiftless bunch of aliens ever. Some of them explain that they’re pacifists who cannot possibly shed blood themselves, yet they’re perfectly okay with you doing the blood-shedding for them. (Certain parallels from the real world of 2025 inevitably leap to mind, but it’s probably best if I don’t point them out here.)
Solving the many and diverse problems afflicting Cutter and his new Talan friends often entails combat; this is where the other, less cerebral side of the game’s identity comes to the fore. You can fight either from a third-person, behind-the-back perspective, Tomb Raider style, or from a first-person perspective, Quake style. Either way, you have half a dozen different weapons to experiment with — assuming you can find them and keep them fed with ammunition — and always have your sturdy action-hero fists available as a fallback option.
I found the combat in Outcast to be a blast — literally so, in the case of one of my favorite weapons, a handheld grenade launcher that makes as enjoyable an explosion as I’ve ever encountered in a game. By no means is it entirely free of jank — I had a persistent issue with getting hung up behind the bodies of my fallen enemies, whom Cutter’s SEAL training has apparently not taught him to step over — yet it seldom failed to put a smile on my face. One of the most satisfying tactics is to forgo weapons and just run up and beat the snot out of the evil Talan soldiers, Three Stooges style — one hand holding your victim by the collar, the other whaling away on his face. (For extra fun, use the one you’re beating up as a meat shield against the ones who are shooting at you.) I have to give special props to the artificial intelligence of your opponents, who do a remarkably effective job of coordinating with one another in a firefight, who are even capable of luring you into deadly ambushes if you aren’t careful.
As most of you know, this style of gameplay isn’t usually in my wheelhouse. Yet I had more genuine fun with Outcast than with any action game I’ve played for these histories since Jedi Knight. Just as is the case with that game, Outcast is full of big explosions and flying bodies, but it never gets morbid about it: there’s no blood to be seen, and corpses simply disappear after a few minutes in a puff of energy. (There’s probably some in-story explanation for that, but who can be bothered to look it up?) Meanwhile the difficulty is pitched perfectly for me, occasionally challenging but never crazily punishing, rewarding smart tactics as much or more than fast reflexes.
The eternal videogame pleasure of making stuff go boom…
While it’s very easy for a review like this one to slip into talking about Outcast as a game of two halves, it doesn’t really feel that way in practice. One of its most amazing achievements is how seamless it is to play; one never gets the feeling of shifting from “adventure mode” to “shooter mode,” as one tends to do in so many cross-genre exercises. Everything takes place within the same interface, and everything you do is connected to everything else. There are plenty of dialog puzzles and object-oriented puzzles of the sort you might find in an adventure game, but there are also some physics-based puzzles that wouldn’t have been possible in a point-and-click engine: shoot a pendulum at just the right point in its sway to make it move faster and faster, drop a bomb perfectly into the bottom of a well. Solving a fetch quest might require you to fight or sneak your way past some soldiers to get what you need; then, in turn, the outcome of the quest might be to weaken the enemies you fight later by taking away some of their food supply or reducing the power of their weapons. Most of your enemies do not respawn. This means that, if you invest a lot of time and effort into cleaning up a region, it generally stays that way. Adelpha is a truly reactive world that allows for considerable variance in play styles. You can flat-out go to war on behalf of its oppressed peoples, or you can sneak around, resorting to violence only when absolutely necessary. It’s entirely up to you.
The commitment to verisimilitude in all things led the designers to attempt to provide diegetic explanations for even Outcast’s gamiest aspects. The fact that the Talan you meet are all males — presumably a byproduct of a limited voice-acting budget in the real world — is here the result of a segregated alien society, in which women and children live in a separate enclave except during mating season, when everyone comes together to get their grooves on. The fact that the Talan all know how to speak English is explained as… ah, that would be spoiling things. Moving back onto safer territory, it’s studiously related in the manual that Cutter Slade carries a “miniaturization backpack” around with him, thus explaining why it is that he can hold an infinite quantity of stuff in his inventory. The onscreen HUD as well is explained as merely the view through the “direct bio-neural interface” which Cutter wears at all times.
Of course, this sort of thing can quickly get silly: if the above hasn’t convinced you of that already, the in-game “Gaamsaav” (groan!) crystal that lets Cutter capture a snapshot in time surely will. On the other hand, even it is cleverer in design terms than it first appears. Cutter has to stand still for several seconds in order to use it, which makes it inadvisable to pull out in the middle of a firefight. In this way, Outcast deftly heads off the overuse of a save function which can rob all of the tension out of a game, without annoying and inconveniencing the player too unduly through more draconian remedies like fixed save points.
As this example illustrates, Outcast provides more than just an unusually reactive and thoughtfully realized world: it also succeeds really well as an exercise in playable game design. This is not to say that fomenting a revolution on Adelpha is easy; there is little hand-holding in this wide-open world beyond a useful if sometimes cryptic quest log. Yet the game is never unfair either. If you explore diligently and follow up on all of the information you’re given, it’s perfectly soluble. I got through it without a single hint, although it did take me a few weeks of evenings and weekend afternoons to do so. The mere fact that I was motivated enough to put in the time says a lot. I had the feeling throughout that this was a game that had been played by lots of people before it was released, that it earnestly wanted to be played and enjoyed by me now, that it was a game whose designers had thought deeply about the player’s experience. What might first seem like an aggressively uncompromising game proves to be full of thoughtful little affordances for the player who deigns to pay careful attention to what’s going on, such as the portable transporter devices that you can use to jump around to arbitrary points within a region and the handy lexicon of unfamiliar alien phrases that is automatically compiled for you as you talk to more and more Talan. It isn’t even necessary to finish all of the quests in order to finish Outcast; much of the content is optional.
Exploring Cutter’s inventory.
I’ve expended a fair number of words on Outcast by now, but I’m not sure I’ve succeeded in capturing the sui generis quality that makes it so memorable. Needless to say, no game arises in a vacuum, and we can definitely find precedents for and possible influences upon this one if we look for them. Most obviously, it can be slotted into the long and proud European tradition of open-world action-adventures, dating back to 1980s classics like Mercenary and Exile. Then, too, it’s not hard to detect a whiff of Tomb Raider’s influence in its behind-the-back perspective and its occasional jumping puzzles. Outcast’s unflagging commitment to verisimilitude and diegesis brings to mind Looking Glass’s brilliant System Shock. The fetch quests might have come out of an Ultima game, some of the puzzles out of Myst. Yet Outcast blends it all in such a seamless way that it ends up entirely its own thing. It is, if you’ll forgive the cliché, more than the sum of its incredibly disparate parts. It shouldn’t work, but it does. It’s interactive narrative at its purest, in which the gameplay exists to serve the story and the world rather than the other way around.
“Outcast is a game made with passion, with no constraints of being tied to a particular genre or to please a particular group of people,” says Franck Sauer. “We just did the game we wanted to make, and that was it.” The end result is as groundbreaking and inspiring an attempt to make an action game where the action feels like it matters as is Half-Life. Indeed, if we’re being honest, I had a heck of a lot more fun with Outcast than I ever did with Half-Life. Personally, I’ll take the chatty and funny Cutter Slade over Gordan Freeman the stoic cipher any day.
Despite all of Appeal’s efforts to give Outcast appeal across the Atlantic Ocean by making it an English-first production, and despite a significant Stateside advertising campaign, it proved a hard sell in an American market where successful games were by now largely confined to a handful of hard-and-fast genres. It sold only about 50,000 copies in the United States after its release in the summer of 1999. Thankfully, it did considerably better in Europe, where it sold 350,000 copies. Combined with a relatively low final production bill — Sauer estimates that Appeal brought the whole game in for about €1.5 million, even with the cost of hiring an entire symphony orchestra and choir for a week — this total was enough to place the game right on the bubble between commercial failure and success.
After dithering for a while, Infogrames agreed to fund a sequel, on the condition that Appeal would make a version for the Sony PlayStation 2 as well as for personal computers, with more action and less adventure. That project muddled along for a little over a year, only to be cancelled by the publisher in 2001 as part of a program of corporate retrenching. Appeal shut down soon after, and that seemed to be that for Outcast.
Yet the game retained a warm place in the hearts of the three friends who had originally conceived it, as it did in those of a small but committed cult of fans, some of whom discovered it on abandonware sites only years after its release. Franck Sauer, Yves Grolet, and Yann Robert were eventually able to win back the rights to the game from their old publisher. In 2014, they made a lightly remastered version called Outcast 1.1; in 2017, they made a full-fledged remake called Outcast: Second Contact; in 2024, there came the long-delayed sequel, Outcast: A New Beginning. Being stuck in the ludic past as I am, I haven’t played any of these, but all have been fairly well-received by reviewers. Kudos to the creators and the fans for refusing to let a very special game die.
As for me, I’ll try to keep Outcast in mind the next time I’m tempted to pass judgment on a game without giving it an honest try. For games, like people, deserve to be judged on their own merits, not on the basis of their peer group.
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Sources: The books Principals of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation (3rd ed.) by Michael O’Rourke and Outcast: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide by Joel Durham, Jr.; Computer Gaming World of November 1999; PC Format Gold of Winter 1997; PC Gamer of November 1997 and April 1998; Next Generation of January 1998; PC Games of December 1998.
Online sources include the old official Outcast site, an old unofficial Outcast fan site, a presentation given by the Appeal principals on Outcast’s graphics technology and aesthetics, a vintage “making of” documentary produced by Infogrames, an Adventure Classic Gaming interview with Doug Freese, a Game-OST interview with Lennie Moore, and a capsule biography of William Stromberg at Tribute Film Classics. Most of all, I drew from Franck Sauer’s home page, which is full of detailed stories and images from his long career in game development.
Where to Get It: There are two versions of Outcast available for digital purchase: the remastered Outcast 1.1 and the remade Outcast: Second Contact. If you buy the former, you gain access to the original 1999 version of the game — the one that I played for this article — as a “bonus goodie.” Should you decide to play this version, do note that it’s afflicted by one ugly glitch on newer machines, involving the lighthouse in the region of Okasankaar. (Strictly speaking, you don’t absolutely have to solve this puzzle to finish the game, but doing so does make it easier.) Your best bet is to make momentary use of the cheat mode when you find yourself needing to repair the lighthouse in a way that Lara Croft might approve of. On my computer at least, every other part of the game worked fine, the occasional bit of random graphical jank excepted.
Choose Your Own Adventure
In 1999, after twenty years and many tens of millions of books sold,[1]A truly incredible figure of 250 million copies sold is frequently cited for the original Choose Your Own Adventure series today, apparently on the basis of a statement released in January of 2007 by Choosco, a company which has repeatedly attempted to reboot the series in the post-millennial era. Based upon the running tally of sales which appeared in Publishers Weekly during the books’ 1980s heyday, I struggle to see how this figure can be correct. That journal of record reported 34 million Choose Your Own Adventure books sold in North America as of December 1, 1989. By that time, the series’s best years as a commercial proposition were already behind it. Even when factoring in international sales, which were definitely considerable, it is difficult to see how the total figure could have exceeded 100 million books sold at the outside. Having said that, however, the fact remains that the series sold an awful lot of books by any standard. Bantam Books announced that it would no longer be publishing its Choose Your Own Adventure line of children’s paperbacks. So, since these histories currently find themselves in 1999, this seems like a good time to look back on one of the formative influences upon the computer games I’ve been covering for so many years now, as well as upon the people who played them — not least, yours truly. Or maybe that’s just an excuse for me to finally write an article I should have written a long time ago. Either way, I hope you don’t mind if I step out of the chronology today and take you way, way back, to steal a phrase from Van Morrison.
The first and most iconic of all the Choose Your Own Adventure books involved spelunking, just as did the first and most iconic of all computer-based adventure games.
These books were the gateway drugs of interactive entertainment.
— Choose Your Own Adventure historian Christian Swineheart
My first experience with interactive media wasn’t mediated by any sort of digital technology. Instead it came courtesy of a “technology” that was already more than half a millennium old at the time: the printed book.
In the fall of 1980, I was eight years old, and doing my childish best to adjust to life in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, where my family had moved the previous summer from the vicinity of Youngstown, Ohio. I was a skinny, frail kid who wasn’t very good at throwing balls or throwing punches, which did nothing to ease the transition. Even when I wasn’t being actively picked on, I was bewildered at my new classmates’ turns of phrase (“I reckon,” “y’all,” “I’m fixin’ to”) that I had previously heard only in the John Wayne movies I watched on my dad’s knee. In their eyes, my birthplace north of the Mason Dixon Line meant that I could be dismissed as just another clueless, borderline useless “Yankee,” a heathen in the eyes of those who adhered to my new state’s twin religions of Baptist Christianity and Friday-night football.
I found my refuge in my imagination. I was interested in just about everything — a trait I’ve never lost, both to my benefit and my detriment in life — and I could sit for long periods of time in my room, spinning out fantasies in my head about school lessons, about books I’d read, about television shows I’d seen, even about songs I’d heard on the radio. I actually framed this as a distinct activity in my mind: “I’m going to go imagine now.” If nothing else, it was good training for becoming a writer. As they say, the child is the father of the man.
One Friday afternoon, I discovered a slim, well-thumbed volume in my elementary school’s scanty library. Above the title The Cave of Time was the now-iconic Choose Your Own Adventure masthead, proclaiming it to be the first book in a series. Curious as always, I opened it to the first page. I was precocious enough to know what was meant by a first-person and third-person narrator of written fiction, but this was something else: this book was written in the second person.
You’ve hiked through Snake Canyon once before while visiting your Uncle Howard at Red Creek Ranch, but you never noticed any cave entrance. It looks as though a recent rock slide has uncovered it.
Though the late afternoon sun is striking the surface of the cave, the interior remains in total darkness. You step inside a few feet, trying to get an idea of how big it is. As your eyes become used to the dark, you see what looks like a tunnel ahead, dimly lit by some kind of phosphorescent material on its walls. The tunnel walls are smooth, as if they were shaped by running water. After twenty feet or so, the tunnel curves. You wonder where it leads. You venture in a bit further, but you feel nervous being alone in such a strange place. You turn and hurry out.
A thunderstorm may be coming, judging by how dark it looks outside. Suddenly you realize the sun has long since set, and the landscape is lit only by the pale light of the full moon. You must have fallen asleep and woken up hours later. But then you remember something even more strange. Just last evening, the moon was only a slim crescent in the sky.
You wonder how long you’ve been in the cave. You are not hungry. You don’t feel you have been sleeping. You wonder whether to try to walk back home by moonlight or whether to wait for dawn, rather than risk your footing on the steep and rocky trail.
All of this was intriguing enough already for a kid like me, but now came the kicker. The book asked me — asked me!! — whether I wanted to “start back home” (“turn to page 4”) or to “wait” (“turn to page 5”). This was the book I had never known I needed, a vehicle for the imagination like no other.
I took The Cave of Time home and devoured it that weekend. Through the simple expedient of flipping through its pages, I time-traveled to the age of dinosaurs, to the Battle of Gettysburg, to London during the Blitz, to the building of the Great Wall of China, to the Titanic and the Ice Age and the Middle Ages. Much of this history was entirely new to me, igniting whole new avenues of interest. Today, it’s all too easy to see all of the limitations and infelicities of The Cave of Time and its successors: a book of 115 pages that had, as it proudly trumpeted on the cover, 40 possible endings meant that the sum total of any given adventure wasn’t likely to span more than about three choices if you were lucky. But to a lonely, hyper-imaginative eight-year-old, none of that mattered. I was well and truly smitten, not so much by what the book was as by what I wished it to be, by what I was able to turn it into in my mind by the sheer intensity of that wish.
I remained a devoted Choose Your Own Adventure reader for the next couple of years. Back in those days, each book could be had for just $1.25, well within reach of a young boy’s allowance even at a time when a dollar was worth a lot more than it is today. Each volume had some archetypal-feeling adventurous theme that made it catnip for a kid who was also discovering Jules Verne and beginning to flirt with golden-age science fiction (the golden age being, of course, age twelve): deep-sea diving, a journey by hot-air balloon, the Wild West, a cross-country auto race, the Egyptian pyramids, a hunt for the Abominable Snowman. What they evoked in me was as important as what was actually printed on the page; each was a springboard for another weekend of fantasizing about exotic undertakings where nobody mocked you because you had two left feet in gym class and spoke with a stubbornly persistent Northern accent. And each was a springboard for learning as well; this process usually started with pestering my parents, and then, if I didn’t get everything I needed from that source, ended with me turning to the family set of Encyclopedia Britannica in the study. (I remember how when reading Journey Under the Sea I was confused by frequent references to “the bends.” I asked my mom what that meant, and, bless her heart, she said she thought the bends were diarrhea. Needless to say, this put a whole new spin on my underwater exploits until I finally did a bit of my own research about diving.)
Inevitably, I did begin to see the limitations of the format in time — right about the time that some of my nerdier classmates, whom I had by now managed to connect with, started to show me a tabletop game called Dungeons & Dragons. Choose Your Own Adventure had primed me to understand and respond to it right away; it would be no exaggeration to say that I saw this game that would remake so much of the entertainment landscape in its image as simply a better, less constrained take on the same core concept. Ditto the computer games that I began to notice in a corner of the bookstore I haunted circa 1984. When Infocom promised me that playing one of their games meant “waking up inside a story,” I knew exactly what they must mean: Choose Your Own Adventure done right. For the Christmas of 1984, I convinced my parents to buy me a disk drive for the Commodore 64 they had bought me the year before. And so the die was cast. If Choose Your Own Adventure hadn’t come along, I don’t think that I would be the Digital Antiquarian today.
But since I am the Digital Antiquarian, I have my usual array of questions to ask. Where did Choose Your Own Adventure, that gateway drug for the first generation to be raised on interactive media, come from? Who was responsible for it? The most obvious answer is the authors Edward Packard and R.A. Montgomery, one or the other of whose name could be seen on most of the early books in the series. But two authors alone do not a cultural phenomenon make.
“Will you read me a story?”
“Read you a story? What fun would that be? I’ve got a better idea: let’s tell a story together.”
— Adam Cadre, Photopia
During the twentieth century, when print still ruled the roost, the hidden hands behind the American cultural zeitgeist were the agents, editors, and marketers in and around the big Manhattan publishing houses, who decided which books were worth publishing and promoting, who decided what they would look like and even to a large extent how they would read. No one outside of the insular world of print publishing knew these people’s names, but the power they had to shape hearts and minds was enormous — arguably more so than that of any of the writers they served. After all, even the most prolific author of fiction or non-fiction usually couldn’t turn out more than one book per year, whereas an agent or editor could quietly, anonymously leave her fingerprints on dozens. Amy Berkower, a name I’m pretty sure you’ve never heard of, is a fine case in point.
Berkower joined Writers House, one of the most prestigious of the New York literary agencies, during the mid-1970s as a “secretarial girl.” Having shown herself to be an enthusiastic go-getter by working long hours and sitting in on countless meetings, she was promoted to the role of agent in 1977, but assigned to “juvenile publishing,” largely because nobody else in the organization wanted to work with such non-prestigious books. Yet the assignment suited Berkower just fine. “As a kid, I read and loved Nancy Drew before I went on to Camus,” she says. “I was in the right place at the right time. I didn’t have the bias that juvenile series wouldn’t lead to Camus.”
Thus when a fellow named Ray Montgomery came to her with a unique concept he called Adventures of You, he found a receptive audience. Montgomery was the co-owner of a small press called Vermont Crossroads, far removed from the glitz and glamor of Manhattan. Crossroads’s typical fare was esoteric volumes like Hemingway in Michigan and The Male Nude in Photography that generally weren’t expected to break four digits in total unit sales. A few years earlier, however, Montgomery had himself been approached by Edward Packard, a lawyer by trade who had already pitched a multiple-choice children’s book called Sugarcane Island to what felt like every other publisher in the country without success.
As he would find himself relating again and again to curious journalists in the decades to come, Packard had come up with his idea for an interactive book by making a virtue of necessity. During the 1960s, he was an up-and-coming attorney who worked long days in Manhattan, to which he commuted by train from his and his wife’s home in Greenwich, Connecticut. He often arrived home in the evening just in time to put his two daughters to bed. They liked to be told a bedtime story, but Packard was usually so exhausted that he had trouble coming up with one. So, he slyly enlisted his daughters’ help with the creative process. He would feed them a little bit of a story in which they were the stars, then ask them what they wanted to do next. Their answers would jog his tired imagination, and he would be off and running once again.
Sometimes, though, the girls would each want to do something different. “What would happen if you wrote both endings?” Packard mused to himself. A long-time frustrated writer as well as a self-described “lawyer who was never comfortable with the law,” Packard began to wonder whether he could turn his interactive bedtime stories into a new kind of book. By as early as 1969, he had invented the classic Choose Your Own Adventure format — turn to this page to do this, turn to that page to do that — and produced his first finished work in the style: the aforementioned Sugarcane Island, about a youngster who gets swept off the deck of a scientific research vessel by a sudden tidal wave and washed ashore on a mysterious Pacific island that has monsters, pirates, sharks, headhunters, and many another staple of more traditional children’s adventure fiction to contend with.
He was sure that it was “such a wonderful idea, I’d immediately find a big publisher.” He signed on with an agent, who “said he would be surprised if there were no takers,” recalls Packard. “Then he proceeded to be surprised.” One rejection letter stated that “it’s hard enough to get children to read, and you’re just making it harder with all these choices.” Letters like that came over and over again, over a period of years.
By 1975, Edward Packard was divorced from both his agent and his wife. With his daughters no longer of an age to beg for bedtime stories, he had just about resigned himself to being a lawyer forever. Then, whilst flipping through an issue of Vermont Life during a stay at a ski lodge, he happened upon a small advertisement from Crossroads Press. “Authors Wanted,” it read. Crossroads wasn’t the bright-lights, big-city publisher Packard had once dreamed of, but on a lark he sent a copy of Sugarcane Island to the address in the magazine.
It arrived on the desk of Ray Montgomery, who was instantly intrigued. “I Xeroxed 50 copies of Ed’s manuscript and took it to a reading teacher in Stowe,” Montgomery told The New York Times in 1981. “His kids — third grade through junior high — couldn’t get enough of it.” Satisfied by that proof of concept, Montgomery agreed to publish the book. Crossroads Press sold 8000 copies of Sugarcane Island over the next couple of years, a figure that was “unbelievable” by their modest standards. Montgomery was inspired to pen a book of his own in the same style, which he called Journey Under the Sea. The budding series was given the name Adventures of You — a proof that, whatever else they may have had going for them, branding was not really Crossroads Press’s strength.
Indeed, Montgomery himself was well able to see that he had stumbled over a concept that was too big for his little press. He sent the two extant books to Amy Berkower at Writers House and asked her what she thought. Having grown up on Nancy Drew, she was inclined to judge them less on their individual merits than on their prospects as a franchise in the making. A concept this new, she judged, had to have a strong brand of its own in order for children to get used to it. It would take her some time to find a publisher who agreed with her.
In the meantime, Edward Packard, heartened by the relative success of Sugarcane Island, was writing more interactive books. Although their names were destined to be indelibly linked in the annals of pop-culture history, Packard and Montgomery would never really be friends; they would always have a somewhat prickly, contentious relationship with one another. In an early signal of this, Packard chose not to publish more books through Crossroads. Instead he convinced the mid-list Philadelphia-based publisher J.B. Lippincott to take on Deadwood City, a Western, and Third Planet from Altair, a sci-fi tale. These served ironically to confirm Amy Berkower’s belief that there needed to be a concerted push behind the concept as a branded series; released with no fanfare whatsoever, neither sold all that well. Yet Lippincott did do Packard one brilliant service. Above the titles on the covers of the books, it placed the words “Choose your own adventures in the Wild West!” and “Choose your own adventures in outer space!” There was a brand in the offing in those phrases, even if Lippincott didn’t realize it.
For her part, Berkower was now more convinced than ever that this book-by-book approach was the wrong one. There needed to be a lot of these books, quickly, in order for them to take off properly. She made the rounds of the big publishing houses one more time. She finally found the ally she was looking for in Joëlle Delbourgo at Bantam Books. Delbourgo recalls getting “really excited” by the concept: “I said, ‘Amy, this is revolutionary.’ This is pre-computer, remember. The idea of interactive fiction, choosing an ending, was fresh and novel. It tapped into something very fundamental. I remember how I felt when I read the books, and how excited I got, the clarity I had about them.”
Seeing eye to eye on what needed to be done to cement the concept in the minds of the nation’s children, the two women drew up a contract under whose terms Bantam would publish an initial order of no fewer than six books in two slates of three. They would appear under a distinctive series trade dress, with each volume numbered to feed young readers’ collecting instinct. Barbara Marcus, Bantam’s marketing director for children’s books, needed only slightly modify the phrases deployed by J.B. Lippincott to create the perfect, pithy, and as-yet un-trademarked name for the series: Choose Your Own Adventure.
Berkower was acting as the agent of Montgomery alone up to this point. There are conflicting reports as to how and why Packard was brought into the fold. The widow of Ray Montgomery, who died in 2014, told The New Yorker in 2022 that her husband’s innate sense of fair play, plus the need to provide a lot of books quickly, prompted him to voluntarily bring Packard on as an equal partner. Edward Packard told the same magazine that it was Bantam who insisted that he be included, possibly in order to head off potential legal problems in the future.
At any rate, the first three Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks arrived in bookstores in July of 1979. They were The Cave of Time, a new effort by Packard, written with some assistance from his daughter Andrea, she for whom he had first begun to tell his interactive stories; Montgomery’s journeyman Journey Under the Sea; and By Balloon to the Sahara, which Packard and Montgomery had subcontracted out to Douglas Terman, normally an author of adult military thrillers. Faced with an advertising budget that was almost nonexistent, Barbara Marcus devised an unusual grass-roots marketing strategy: “We did absolutely nothing except give the books away. We gave thousands of books to our salesmen and told them to give five to each bookseller and tell him to give them to the first five kids into his shop.”
The series sold itself, just as Marcus had believed it would. As The New York Times would soon write with a mixture of bemusement and condescension, it proved “contagious as chickenpox.” By September of 1980, around the time that I first discovered The Cave of Time, Publishers Weekly could report that Choose Your Own Adventure had become a “bonanza” for Bantam, which had sold more than 1 million copies of the first six volumes, with Packard and Montgomery now contracted to provide many more. A year later, eleven books in all had come out and the total sold was 4 million, with the series accounting for eight of the 25 bestselling children’s books at B. Dalton’s, the nation’s largest bookstore chain. A year after that, 10 million copies had been sold. By decade’s end, the total domestic sales of Choose Your Own Adventure would reach 34 million copies, with possibly that many or more again having been sold internationally after being translated into dozens of languages. The series was approaching its hundredth numbered volume by that point. It was a few years past its commercial peak already, but would continue on for another decade, until 184 volumes in all had come out.
Edward Packard, who turned 50 in 1981, could finally call himself an author rather than a lawyer by trade — and an astonishingly successful author at that, if not one who was likely to be given any awards by the literary elite. He and Ray Montgomery alone wrote about half of the 184 Choose Your Own Adventure installments. Packard’s prose was consistently solid and evocative without ever feeling like he was writing down to his audience, as the extract from The Cave of Time near the beginning of this article will attest; not all authors of children’s books, then or now, would dare to use a word like “phosphorescent.” If Montgomery was generally a less skilled wordsmith than Packard, and one who displayed less interest in producing internally consistent story spaces — weaknesses that I could see even as a young boy — he does deserve a full measure of credit for the pains he took to get the series off the ground in the first place. Looking back on the long struggle to get his brainstorm into print, Packard liked to quote the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “Every original idea is first ridiculed, then vigorously attacked, and finally taken for granted.”
Although Packard at least was always careful to make his protagonists androgynous, it was no secret that Choose Your Own Adventure appealed primarily to boys — which was no bad thing on the whole, given that it was also no secret that reading in general was a harder sell with little boys than it was with little girls. Some educators and child psychologists kvetched about the violence that was undoubtedly one of the sources of the series’s appeal for boys — in just about all of the books, it was disarmingly easy to get yourself flamboyantly and creatively killed — but Packard was quick to counter that the mayhem was all very stylized, “exaggerated and melodramatic” rather than “harsh or nasty.” “Stupid” choices were presented to you all the time, he noted, but never “cruel” ones: “You as [the] reader never hurt anyone.”
Although Packard always strained to present an “AFGNCAAP” protagonist (“Ageless, Faceless, Gender-Neutral, Culturally Ambiguous Adventure Person”), when the stars of the books were depicted on the covers they were almost always boys. Bantam explained to a disgruntled Packard that it had many years of market research showing that, while little girls were willing to buy books that showed a hero of the opposite gender on the cover, little boys were not similarly open-minded.
One had to be a publishing insider to know that this “boys series” owed its enormous success as much to the packaging and promotional skills of three women — Amy Berkower, Joëlle Delbourgo, and Barbara Marcus — as it did to the literary talents of Packard and Montgomery. Berkower in particular became a superstar within the publishing world in the wake of Choose Your Own Adventure. Incredibly, the latter became only her second most successful children’s franchise, after the girl-focused Sweet Valley High, which could boast of 54 million copies sold domestically by the end of the 1980s; meanwhile The Baby-Sitters Club was coming up fast behind Choose Your Own Adventure, with 27 million copies sold. In short, her books were reaching millions upon millions of children every single month. Small wonder that she was made a full partner at Writers House in 1988; she was moving far more books each month than anyone else there.
Of course, any hit on the scale of Choose Your Own Adventure is bound to be copied. And this hit most certainly was, prolifically and unashamedly. During the middle years of the 1980s, when the format was at its peak, interactive books had whole aisles dedicated to them in bookstores. Which Way?, Decide Your Own Adventure, Pick-a-Path, Twisted Tales… branders did what they could when the best brand was already taken. While Choose Your Own Adventure remained archetypal in its themes and settings, other lines were unabashedly idiosyncratic: anyone up for a Do-It-Yourself Jewish Adventure? Publishers were quick to leverage other properties for which they owned the rights, from Doctor Who to The Lord of the Rings. TSR, the maker of that other school-cafeteria sensation Dungeons & Dragons, introduced an interactive-book line drawn from the game; even this website’s old friend Infocom came out with Zork books, written by the star computer-game implementor Steve Meretzky. Many of these books were content with the Choose Your Own Adventure approach of nothing but chunks of text tied to arbitrarily branching choices, but others grafted rules systems onto the format to effectively become solo role-playing games packaged as paperback books, with character creation and advancement, a dice-driven combat system, etc. The most successful of these lines was Fighting Fantasy, a name that is today almost as well-remembered as Choose Your Own Adventure itself in some quarters.
The gamebook boom was big and real, but relatively short-lived. By 1987, the decline had begun, for both Choose Your Own Adventure and all of the copycats and expansions upon its formula that it had spawned. Although a few of the most lucrative series, like Fighting Fantasy, would join the ur-property of the genre in surviving well into the 1990s, the majority were already starting to shrivel and fall away like apples in November. Demian Katz, the Internet’s foremost archivist of gamebooks, notes that this pattern has tended to hold true “in every country” where they make an appearance: “A few come out, they become explosively popular, a flood of knock-offs are released, they reach critical mass and then drop off into nothing.” It isn’t hard to spot the reason why in the context of 1980s North America. Computers were becoming steadily more commonplace — computers that were capable of bringing vastly more flexible forms of interactive storytelling to American children, via games that didn’t require one to read the same passages of text over and over again or to toss dice and keep track of a list of statistics on paper. The same pattern would be repeated elsewhere, such as in the former Soviet countries, most of which experienced their own gamebook boom and bust during the 1990s. It seems that the arrival of the commercial mass-market publishing infrastructure that makes gamebooks go is generally followed in short order by the arrival of affordable digital technology for the home, which stops them cold.
In the United States, Bantam Books tried throughout the 1990s to make Choose Your Own Adventure feel relevant to the children of that decade, introducing a more photo-realistic art style to accompany edgier, more traditionally novelistic plots. None of it worked. In 1999, after a good twelve years of slowly but steadily declining sales, Bantam finally pulled the plug on the series. Choose Your Own Adventure became just another nostalgic relic of the day-glo decade, to be placed on the shelf next to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, a Jane Fonda workout video, and that old Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set.
Appropriately enough, the very last Choose Your Own Adventure book was written by Edward and Andrea Packard, the latter being the grown-up version of one of the little girls to whom he had once told interactive bedtime stories.
As of this writing, Choose Your Own Adventure is still around in a way, but the only real raison d’être it has left is nostalgia. In 2003, Ray Montgomery saw that Bantam Books had let the trademark for the series lapse, and formed his own company called Chooseco to try to revive it, mostly by republishing the old books that he had written himself. He met with mixed results at best. Since Montgomery’s death in 2014, Chooseco has continued to be operated by his family, who have used it increasingly as an instrument of litigation. In 2020, for example, Netflix agreed to settle for an undisclosed sum a lawsuit over “Bandersnatch,” a bold interactive episode of the critically lauded streaming series Black Mirror whose script unwisely mentioned the book series from which it drew inspiration.
A worthier successor on the whole is Choice Of Games, a name whose similarity to Choose Your Own Adventure can hardly be coincidental. Born out of a revival of the old menu-driven computer game Alter Ego, Choice Of has released dozens of digital branching stories over the past fifteen years. In being more adventurous than literary and basing themselves around broad, archetypal ideas — Choice of the Dragon, Choice of Broadsides, Choice of the Vampire — these games, which can run on just about any digital device capable of putting words on a screen, have done a fine job of carrying the spirit of Choose Your Own Adventure forward into this century. That said, there is one noteworthy difference: they are aimed at post-pubescent teens and adults — perhaps ones with fond memories of Choose Your Own Adventure — instead of children. “Play as male, female, or nonbinary; cis or trans; gay, straight, or bisexual; asexual and/or aromantic; allosexual and/or alloromantic; monogamous or polyamorous!” (Boring middle-aged married guy that I am, I must confess that I have no idea what three of those words even mean.)
Edward Packard, the father of it all, is still with us at age 94, still blogging from time to time, still a little bemused at how he became one of the most successful working authors in the United States during the 1980s. In a plot twist almost as improbable as some of his stranger Choose Your Own Adventure endings, his grandson is David Corenswet, the latest actor to play Superman on the silver screen. Never a computer gamer, Packard would doubtless be baffled by most of what is featured on this website. And yet I owe him an immense debt of gratitude, for giving me my first glimpse of the potential of interactive storytelling, thus igniting a lifelong obsession. I suspect that more than one of you out there might be able to say the same.
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Sources: Publishers Weekly of February 29 1980, September 26 1980, October 8 1982, July 25 1986, August 12 1988, December 1 1989, July 6 1990, February 23 1998; New York Times of August 25 1981; Beaver County Times of March 30 1986; New Yorker of September 19 2022; Journal of American Studies of May 2021.
Online sources include “A Brief History of Choose Your Own Adventure“ by Jake Rossen at Mental Floss, “Choose Your Own Adventure: How The Cave of Time Taught Us to Love Interactive Entertainment” by Grady Hendrix at Slate, “The Surprising Long History of Choose Your Own Adventure Stories” by Jackie Mansky at the Smithsonian’s website, and “Meet the 91-Year-Old Mastermind Behind Choose Your Own Adventure“ by Seth Abramovitch at The Hollywood Reporter. Plus Edward Packard’s personal site. And Damian Katz’s exhaustive gamebook site is essential to anyone interested in these subjects; all of the book covers shown in this article were taken from his site.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | A truly incredible figure of 250 million copies sold is frequently cited for the original Choose Your Own Adventure series today, apparently on the basis of a statement released in January of 2007 by Choosco, a company which has repeatedly attempted to reboot the series in the post-millennial era. Based upon the running tally of sales which appeared in Publishers Weekly during the books’ 1980s heyday, I struggle to see how this figure can be correct. That journal of record reported 34 million Choose Your Own Adventure books sold in North America as of December 1, 1989. By that time, the series’s best years as a commercial proposition were already behind it. Even when factoring in international sales, which were definitely considerable, it is difficult to see how the total figure could have exceeded 100 million books sold at the outside. Having said that, however, the fact remains that the series sold an awful lot of books by any standard. |
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