The Voyage of Magellan, Chapter 17: A Philippine Thanksgiving
And a quick programming note as well: I’m afraid I won’t have an article for you on this site next week, folks. I’ll see you in two weeks instead. Thank you for your patience!
Monthly Archives: October 2024
The Truth Is Out There, Part 4: The Downside of Belief
The fifth season of The X-Files, spanning from 1997 to 1998, marked the absolute zenith of the show’s popularity, when it put up the best average ratings in its history. Everybody seemed to want a piece of its action; even William Gibson and Stephen King submitted scripts that season.
As we learned in an earlier article, The X-Files was always two shows in one. One show consisted of the “mythology” episodes: a heavily serialized, ever more convoluted tale of extraterrestrial interference in the affairs of humans and a myriad of conspiracies deriving therefrom, in which the stakes were, it had by now been revealed, positively apocalyptic in scope, involving alien plans to exterminate the human race and repopulate the planet with their own kind. The other show consisted of one-off “monster of the week” episodes, which were freer to go to unexpected places in terms of form and content and to not always take themselves so darn seriously. The hardcore X-Files fandom that had sustained the show through its first couple of seasons had been built on the back of the first type of episode, and this was still the type that got the most attention even in the glossy mainstream press. Yet there’s a strong critical consensus today — a consensus with which I heartily agree — that almost all of the most enduring episodes are actually of the “monster of the week” sort.
It was and is almost impossible to reconcile the coexistence of the two types of episode in the same fictional universe. Doing so demands that we accept that Mulder and Scully periodically decide to take a holiday from saving humanity from extinction in order to check up on rumors of Yet Another Freaky Serial Killer in Podunk, Idaho. The creators themselves were by no means unaware of the cognitive dissonance. One argument they deployed in response was a plea to treat Mulder and Scully like Superman, Nancy Drew, or Kirk and Spock had once been treated: as characters who simply have adventures in the abstract, without sweating the details of chronology. “Who knows in what order the fictional lives of Mulder and Scully take place?” said producer-director Rob Bowman. “We never said that that was week two and this is week three in their lives. We are just saying that this is episode two and this is episode three and it happened whenever.” Such hand-waving may have been thoroughly out of step with obsessive X-Files fandom, but it does indeed seem like the most satisfying way to approach the series today, not least because it allows us to appreciate the best of the standalone episodes as the little self-contained marvels they are.
I speak of episodes like Chris Carter’s own “The Post-Modern Prometheus,” whose name is a play on the subtitle of Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. It’s a funny and sad retelling of that story, moved to twentieth-century small-town America and shot in stark black and white, the better to evoke the old monster movies from which the show drew so much inspiration. But it’s more than just an homage; the “postmodern” in the title is amply justified. The story is barreling along toward its inevitable tragic climax when Mulder decides that tragedy just won’t do. He demands to see the writer, who turns out to be a chubby teenager who’s drawing a comic book. And suddenly the entire gang — Mulder, Scully, the monster, and your stereotypical gaggle of pitchfork-wielding villagers, who were getting ready to string the last-named up from the nearest tree a minute earlier — are taking a road trip to see Cher, the monster’s favorite singer. She sings “Walking in Memphis,” his favorite song, and Mulder and Scully dance together with big smiles and glowing eyes while the monster shakes his booty right up there onstage. It’s weird and sweet and funny and yet still achingly sad at its core, and just thinking about it leaves me with a tear in my eye. I’ve just about decided that it’s my favorite episode of The X-Files ever. And it turns out that I’m in pretty good company there: both Chris Carter and David Duchovny have said the same.
Vince Gilligan’s “Bad Blood” is another standout from the fifth season. It has Mulder and Scully investigating an apparent vampire on the loose in a small Texas town — not exactly revolutionary subject matter for the show. Yet Gilligan turns the episode into a riff on Rashomon, letting us see the story from the points of view of both Mulder and Scully. For example, the sheriff of the town seen through Scully’s admiring eyes is the epitome of a handsome Southern gentleman, through Mulder’s jealous ones a bucktoothed hick. Once again, I find myself in good company in highlighting this episode. Gillian Anderson has named it as her own all-time favorite: “It was fun and challenging to film and even more fun to watch.”
Just because a vampire has to buy plastic fangs in a novelty shop, it doesn’t mean he isn’t real.
The fifth-season finale led right into the big X-Files feature film, which had actually been shot almost a year before, during the break between the fourth and fifth seasons. It was a mythology episode blown up in length by a factor of about two and a half, and was neither notably better nor worse than that description would imply. The movie was perhaps most notable for existing at all; it was highly unusual to make a theatrical film set in the world of a television series that was still on the air. Chris Carter and Fox had been inspired by the success of Star Trek Generations, featuring the cast from Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that film and its sequels had come out only after the television series in question had wrapped for good. There was some thought that The X-Files too might transition into a purely cinematic franchise at some point, although it wasn’t clear when or how that might happen. “Hopefully,” said Gillian Anderson in an interview at the time, “the film will be so successful that the series will trail off and we’ll just be doing movies once in a while.”
Despite the limitations which its tight connection to the serialized mythology of the television show would seem to place on its mass appeal, the X-Files movie grossed $84 million in the United States alone, enough to make it the twentieth biggest film of the year there. All told, it was a solid performance, if not quite the gangbusters one that might have prompted Fox to think of turning The X-Files into a spectacle available exclusively on big rather than small screens sooner rather than later.
Even with all of its success, however, the show was navigating some logistical turbulence. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson had both signed five-season contracts at the outset, and Duchovny wasn’t at all sure he wanted to renew his as the fifth season was winding down. He had aspirations of making the leap from television star to becoming a sought-after leading man in movies that weren’t named The X-Files, but this would be hard to do if he had to be off in Vancouver playing Mulder for all but a few months of every year. Further, he had just gotten married to the actress Téa Leoni, whose role on the sitcom The Naked Truth bound her to Hollywood. Duchovny gave Fox an ultimatum: he would join Gillian Anderson in signing a two-year contract extension if and only if the entire production was moved to Southern California.
It was a tough call — the move would make the show dramatically more expensive to produce each week — but nobody could imagine The X-Files without Mulder, and certainly nobody thought the show had run its course as of yet, not when it had just enjoyed its biggest season ever. So, Duchovny got his way. The folks who were working on the show in Vancouver were given a choice between relocation and severance packages. These dozens of people who had their lives so disrupted so that one man could have the arrangement that pleased him might be forgiven for concluding that David Duchovny was a self-entitled jerk. He didn’t do his reputation among them any more favors in the aftermath of the move, when he went around disparaging their hometown of Vancouver and its “400 inches of rain per day” in interviews on the talk-show circuit. But so be it; the show must go on.
The results of the move to California were evident from the first shot of the first episode of the sixth season: a desert landscape baking under a clear blue sky. That wasn’t the sort of shot you were ever going to get in Vancouver. The default tone of the show brightened in tandem with the sunshine quotient, prompting derision from some quarters of its hardcore fandom, who labeled this new Southern Californian incarnation “X-Files Lite.”
But these people do not speak for me. For all that I wouldn’t leap to defend David Duchovny from anyone who said he was a bit of a tool at this stage of his life, I’m afraid I can’t get behind those other criticisms. In fact, I’ll go way out on a limb and say that I like the sixth season the best of all of them, and that at least some of the seventh season isn’t that far behind it in my esteem. To my mind, the standalone episodes got warmer and wiser and smarter and funnier than they had ever been before. Granted, most continue to play with established mass-media archetypes. If not usually original in conception, though, they’re sly and clever in execution, with that good old Mulder and Scully charm and with more willingness than ever to stretch and bend the formal boundaries of the show. In their willingness to burrow deep into the universals of life and fate, I daresay that some of them remind me of nothing so much as the masterful short stories of Ted Chiang.
Vince Gilligan’s “Drive” opens with a helicopter’s eye view of a car chase that is obviously intended to evoke the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase over the highways of Los Angeles. Indeed, it initially presents itself as a special news broadcast that’s airing in place of your normally scheduled X-Files episode; these seasons do a lot of this sort of mucking about with credits sequences, etc., as if the fiction is escaping from the cage in which it is meant to be contained. The episode evolves into The X-Files’s take on the tautly wound 1994 film Speed. Here as there, the plot hinges on a vehicle that cannot stop if dire consequences are to be avoided. In this case, though, it’s Fox Mulder who’s behind the wheel, with a man behind him in the backseat who will die if he doesn’t keep moving. The reason why he will die may be down to the usual conspiratorial mumbo-jumbo, but that has little bearing on the propulsive problem at hand. This was arguably the first time The X-Files went full-on action movie — and, lo and behold, it does it rather brilliantly. (In a meta sense, “Drive” is also famous as the episode where Vince Gilligan first met Bryan Cranston, the man you see in the backseat above. Cranston would go on to become the star of Breaking Bad, Gilligan’s own acclaimed television show.)
At first glance, the most surprising thing about Chris Carter’s “Triangle” may seem to be that it took The X-Files this long to get around to doing an episode about the Bermuda Triangle. It was worth the wait. Defying a promise Carter made in the early days of the show to never fall down the wormhole of time-travel fiction, the script does indeed send Mulder back in time, to the first days of the Second World War, where he winds up aboard a passenger ship that’s about to be commandeered by some of its Nazi passengers. Doppelgängers of both Cancer Man and Scully are aboard, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. The important thing is that this gives William B. Davis the chance to try on an SS uniform that suits him to a tee, and gives Gillian Anderson the opportunity to try her hand at playing a hard-edged femme fatale straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel. The episode is fast-paced and frothy and a little bit campy. Perhaps most of all, though, it’s a tour de force of technical film-making: in conscious emulation of Alfred Hitchcock’s experimental classic Rope, its 45 minutes consist of just 24 ultra-extended single-camera takes. (By way of comparison, the average X-Files episode contained around 1000 switches of perspective.) “To watch ‘Triangle’ now,” writes the critic Emily St. James, “is to remember a time when this was the most daring show on television.”
The two-parter “Dreamland,” written by Vince Gilligan, John Shiban, and Frank Spotnitz, opens with Mulder and Scully on yet another nighttime drive to Area 51 to meet yet another shadowy contact who may or may not be who he says he is. In what can all too easily be read as a meta-fictional message to a certain kind of rabid X-Files fan, Scully idly wonders whether the two of them will ever outgrow this stuff and make better, fuller lives for themselves. Shortly thereafter, they get waylaid by the authorities, the infamous Men In Black who are always lurking around places like this. But then a test of an alien spacecraft creates a quantum disturbance that swaps Mulder’s consciousness into the lead MiB’s body, and vice versa. Much discomfort and hilarity ensues, as Mulder learns that being an MiB is just a government job like any other. While he tries to adapt to life as a paunchy, middle-aged family man, his alter ego embraces with gusto the swinging-bachelor lifestyle that Mulder’s looks have always cut him out for. Lessons are learned on both sides, until a way is found to reverse the trend. In other words, this episode turns all of the stuff about aliens and conspiracies into an excuse to tell a more resonant, universal story about life choices, opportunity costs, and roads not taken. Plus it’s really, really funny.
The ghosts in Chris Carter’s “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas” are played by Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin, two stars from an earlier era of television who probably would never have appeared on the show if The X-Files was still shooting in Vancouver. The episode is another meditation on life choices, this one with a spooky Dickensian vibe, with some crackerjack comic-tragic dialog. But my favorite part is the ending, when Mulder and Scully hunker down in the Mulder’s cozy apartment to exchange the gifts they promised one another they wouldn’t buy. It’s hard to imagine an earlier incarnation of the show embracing the spirit of the holidays in such a forthright, non-ironic way.
“Monday,” written by Vince Gilligan and John Shiban, is another episode that concerns time travel — once that genie had been let out of the bottle, it was hard to stuff it back in — along with, yet again, choices and consequences. It’s The X-Files’s version of Groundhog Day. We see the same day play out over and over, a day in which a desperate man with a bomb decides to rob a bank and Mulder and Scully keep getting caught in the crosshairs in different ways.
“Arcadia” by Daniel Arkin is The X-Files meets The Stepford Wives. Mulder and Scully go undercover as a married couple, moving into a white-bread Middle American neighborhood where residents whose lives are insufficiently tidy have a nasty habit of disappearing. The commentary on the horrors of suburban conformity isn’t groundbreaking by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s great fun to watch Mulder and Scully play house for the benefit of the neighbors, passive-aggressively needling one another all the while. It almost goes without saying by this point that the monster at the heart of the case they’re investigating is the least interesting part of the episode.
One of the ways the show’s brain trust tried to keep their stars engaged during the later seasons was to offer them the opportunity to contribute behind the camera as well, by submitting scripts of their own. This sort of gesture doesn’t always turn out well, but David Duchovny at least proved a surprisingly soulful and agile writer, putting his earlier life as a graduate student in literature to good use. In “The Unnatural,” which he directed as well as wrote, he cleverly juxtaposes The X-Files’s standard version of aliens with aliens of another type: the Black baseball players who braved scorn and violence to desegregate the sport in the 1940s. It’s a lovely, luminous episode that oozes the magical-realist quality the show was embracing so successfully by this point. Sure, it owes a lot to Field of Dreams in tone and feel, but it’s hard to disparage it for that. Given the choice between conspiracy theories and the crack of wood on cowhide on a starry summer night, I’ll take the latter every time.
As we saw in an earlier article in reference to the alien-autopsy documentary, The X-Files loved nothing better than to satirize its parent network’s tackier tendencies. One of the urtexts of Fox’s brand of tabloid journalism was the series called Cops, an early example of “reality” television in which a camera crew rode along in the backseat of a police cruiser on the mean streets of a big American city. (Rather astonishingly, Cops is still on television to this day, being in its 36th season as of this writing.) Vince Gilligan’s “X-Cops” is a picture-perfect re-creation of the show, from the Cops theme song and credits sequence that take the place of the standard X-Files version of same to the shaky handheld camerawork, from the suspects and witnesses who live in a liminal space between sympathy and ridicule to the know-it-all police officers who give us the benefit of their hard-won wisdom in running commentaries. Into this hard-bitten milieu are dropped Mulder and Scully on the trail of a monster of the week. It’s incongruous and bizarre and most of all hilarious, another of those episodes that are so brave and cheeky and completely out of the box that it’s hard to believe they were actually made. Who would ever have imagined during the first season of The X-Files that the premise would someday be bent far enough to yield episodes like this one?
Lately I’ve been indulging in a thought experiment, or maybe more of a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Wouldn’t it have been neat if The X-Files had taken a bow already after a sixth season that was absolutely spectacular? Said season would have been created by junking all of the increasingly tiring and tiresome mythology episodes from the extant sixth and seventh seasons and then throwing out the handful of clunkers among the standalone episodes as well. Do all that, and you’d end up with what I’m going to have the audacity to call one of the best single seasons of television ever created. Such a victory tour would necessarily conclude with Vince Gillian’s “Je Souhaite,” the last standalone episode of the real seventh season, an episode that’s as universal as a fairy tale — which is almost literally what it is, come to think of it. Here Mulder and Scully meet a genie — yes, complete with the bottle — who has the power to grant three wishes. We all know how stories like this tend to go. Be very, very careful what you wish for, kids! When Mulder gets his chance to wish, he asks for peace on Earth — not a good choice, because the easiest way to achieve that is to simply remove the species that has been causing all of the chaos on our planet all these centuries. But then, after using his second wish to undo his first and repopulate the planet, he hits upon the perfect third wish, by looking at the genie herself with eyes of empathy. The best way to change the world, he realizes, is by showing kindness to the people who are right there in front of you. What a perfect grace note that would have been for the show to go out on…
Whether you love or hate the sun-kissed X-Files of the sixth season and beyond, there can be no question that it marked a commercial turning point for the show — and not in a good way. By the end of the sixth season, the average episode’s viewership had dropped by almost 25 percent from what it had been just one year earlier. Measured by the standard metrics, The X-Files was still a popular show, but it no longer took pride of place at the center of the zeitgeist, no longer garnered shiny awards and glossy magazine covers and navel-gazing think-pieces from critics and pundits. It had reached the top of its mountain of destiny a year earlier, and now it was on the downward slope that lay just beyond.
What were the reasons for its decline? I’m tempted to say it had something to do with the mythology episodes that had always dominated in public discussion of the show. These had by now grown so convoluted and ridiculous that it was becoming hard for even the most sanguine optimist to believe they were going anywhere coherent. (Scully is abducted by aliens! Scully is back! Scully has incurable alien-caused brain cancer! Scully is cured! The aliens aren’t real, they were just a carefully engineered distraction all along! No, belay that, actually the aliens are real! Mulder is abducted! Mulder is back!) “The mythology was becoming an awful lot for people to continue to keep track of,” admits X-Files executive producer and writer Frank Spotnitz.
At the same time, though, this objection hardly began with the sixth season. The more encompassing explanation for the show’s decline in popularity is likely the simple fact that even the biggest cultural phenomena always run their course and then give way to fresh things. To wit: right in the middle of The X-Files’s sixth season, the cable-television channel HBO aired the first episode of The Sopranos, a heavily serialized mobster drama that was free of most of the strictures of broadcast television, among them restrictions on language, violence, and sexual content, a rigid 45-minute running time for every single episode, and the need to churn out twenty episodes or more every single season. The Sopranos inaugurated the fifteen-year stretch that some critics today like to call The Golden Age of Cable Television, during which the medium eclipsed theatrical films in many respects to become the most prestigious and satisfying of all forms of moving image. In illustrating that long-term serialized storytelling could attract a mass audience on television in genres other than the soap opera, The X-Files was an important forerunner to shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. But it was not one of their peers.
The gradual decline of The X-Files’s popularity continued in the seventh season. Chris Carter and his colleagues actually went into the season thinking it would probably be the last. Not only were the ratings getting slowly but inexorably worse, but the contracts of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were due to run out once again when the season was over, and Duchovny was less interested than ever in renewing his. In fact, he was suing Fox and Chris Carter personally for allegedly selling syndication rights to the show to a subsidiary network for less than their full market value, which impacted his own residual earnings. As one would expect, the legal battle “didn’t help the creative energy,” as Carter put it.
This late in its run, the show had just one surefire way of making headlines again, however briefly. In light of this, the makers’ handling of the transition of Mulder and Scully from platonic partners to a romantic couple is as bizarre as any monster of the week that ever appeared on the show. In Vince Gilligan and Frank Spotnitz’s “Millennium” — an episode whose main function was providing closure for the semi-spinoff series of the same name, which had been abruptly cancelled after three seasons — Mulder and Scully celebrate the arrival of Y2K by sharing their first ever onscreen kiss. Thirteen episodes later, in “All Things,” which was written and directed by Gillian Anderson, it’s off-handedly revealed that the two are now sleeping in the same bed. And that’s it. Restraint has its virtues, but come on! Shippers who had been waiting 150 episodes for the other shoe — or perhaps some other articles of clothing — to drop were rewarded with this damp squib. I have no idea why the makers didn’t turn “Mulder and Scully finally do the deed!” into a mass-media event. As it was, they squandered their last bit of dry powder from their glory days in about as anticlimactic a fashion as can be imagined.
The show easily could have — and probably should have — ended after the seventh season. Yet it didn’t. David Duchovny agreed to settle his lawsuit with Fox, and then shocked everyone by agreeing as well to play Mulder just a little bit longer — for another half of a season, to be precise. The powers that were at Fox decided that was good enough for them, especially given that they didn’t have any strong candidates to hand to air in place of The X-Files on Sunday nights. And so it was on to the eighth season. It was decided that Mulder would be absent for the first half of the season, having been abducted by aliens. (What other explanation could there possibly be?) Then he would return for the second half, so that the show could finish strong.
An actor named Robert Patrick won the unenviable role of Special Agent John Doggett, the replacement for one of the most iconic television characters of recent history. This may explain why everyone was at such pains not to call him a replacement. “Robert Patrick is an addition to the show,” insisted Chris Carter. When David Duchovny did come back halfway through the season, he immediately began to complain loudly about having become “peripheral. Mulder’s story was one of three stories going on and it didn’t feel like the same show to me.” At the risk of editorializing too much, I must say that my mind is fairly boggled by the egotism on display in this comment. What did he expect would happen?
By the last episode of the eighth season, when Mulder and Scully had a baby together, the proverbial shark had been pretty well jumped. And yet the second half of the season, after Duchovny’s return, actually managed to slightly outdraw the end of the previous one with the viewing public. The show got renewed yet again, even though Duchovny now declared himself to be gone for good — no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
The first episode of the ninth season had yet to air when, on September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked four American passenger planes, flying two of them into the World Trade Center in New York City and one into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. (The hijackers of the fourth airplane, which was intended for the White House, met with heroic resistance from the passengers, and that plane wound up crashing over Pennsylvania, killing everyone onboard.) The X-Files was something of a shambling anachronism already by that point in the eyes of most television viewers, but this tragic day of infamy cemented that status. The mood of the nation changed on a dime; just like that, the epoch that some now call “The Long Nineties” came to a smashing end.
The 1990s had been the Age of Irony, when an anthemic hit single could be named after a brand of teenybopper deodorant, when videogames like Duke Nukem 3D were reveling gleefully in senseless violence amidst the trashy detritus of conspicuous consumption. And why should it have been otherwise, during a decade whose biggest ongoing news story was the dot.com bubble? “We’re the middle children of history, man,” said Brad Pitt of Generation Slacker in Fight Club. “We have no Great War, no Great Depression.”
Earnestness made a big comeback after September 11. Suddenly people had a cause again, Wanted to Believe again — not in the existence of aliens, conspiracy theories about which now seemed like the childish diversions that they had always been, but in the very government and military the conspiracy theorists had spent so many years questioning if not reviling. By September 21, the approval rating of President George W. Bush, who had lost a national popular vote to Al Gore just ten months earlier but squeaked out a controversial win in the Electoral College, had soared to 90 percent, the highest ever recorded.
It was difficult to imagine how any show could be more out of step with the changed times than The X-Files was. “The X-Files is the product of a time that is passed,” wrote the columnist Andrew Stuttaford. “It is a relic of the Clinton years, as dated as a dot.com share certificate, a stained blue dress, or Kato Kaelin’s reminiscences.” All of which is to say that it was all but foreordained that its ninth season would be its last before said season ever aired its first episode. The new standard bearer of the American zeitgeist was 24, another serialized show about a law-enforcement agent, but this time one who had no doubts whatsoever about the righteousness of his country or his government, a two-fisted true believer who wasn’t above a spot of torture when it was the only way to foil the Axis of Evil. Pop music and videogames too heeded the call: Celine Dion’s nerve-jangling rendition of “God Bless America” climbed the charts as the lead single of a charity album of the same name, while Duke Nukem yielded to Call of Duty.
Amidst it all, The X-Files shambled through its last season as best it could. (Raising a defiant middle finger to the scoffers, the makers even named one episode “Jump the Shark.”) David Duchovny, whose career as a cinematic leading man wasn’t going quite so well as he had thought it would, agreed to rejoin the cast for a 90-minute series finale, which endeavored to wrap up the mythology story lines about as neatly as could be done in that span of time. “It gives viewers answer after answer, until it feels like we’re reading somebody’s Geocities fan page for wild theories about the show,” writes Emily St. James of the finale. “But it’s also dramatically, death-defyingly boring.” When all was said and done, Cancer Man got blown up by a helicopter and everyone else rode off into the sunset of a changed America.
But they didn’t go away forever. Anyone at all familiar with the post-millennial media landscape knows that nothing ever seems to go away forever. There have been two attempts to date to revive The X-Files since that last hurrah of 2002.
In 2008, Chris Carter got the old gang back together for a movie. The X-Files: I Want to Believe had a budget less than half the size of the first X-Files film before adjusting for inflation. “It’s funny, but on the series we prided ourselves each week with making a little movie,” muses Carter. “Then, when it came time to do the second X-Files movie, we were given the money and the opportunity to make, literally, a little movie.” Probably smartly, he chose to do an expanded monster-of-the-week episode rather than reopening the Pandora’s box of the mythology. Even so, it was hard to figure out what reason the film really had to exist; it came a little too soon to be a full-blown nostalgia play, even as its moody atmosphere still felt badly out of joint with the times around it during that summer of 2008, when Barack Obama’s “Yes, We Can!” was the slogan of the moment. The critics were not impressed, and its box-office receipts were less than a third of the first film’s — again, without adjusting for inflation.
Seven and a half years later, Carter made a more concerted effort to revive the show, this time as another television series on Fox — albeit one with dramatically truncated episode counts in comparison to those of its original run. By now, the times were falling more into step with The X-Files’s tendency to see everything in the world through the lens of conspiracy. (More on that subject momentarily.) Nevertheless, the new episodes never quite landed like a lot of observers expected them to. The scripts felt underwhelming, the alien stuff way past its sell-by date, and one at least of the two leads seemed a little bored and distracted. Ironically, it was Gillian Anderson now who wasn’t at all sure she wanted to be there, and who most obviously turned in performances that reflected this ambivalence. The fact was that she was a more sought-after actor than David Duchovny this far along in their respective careers, with a larger number of interesting roles in both her past and her future.
Darin Morgan, the man who first made The X-Files safe for comedy, came back to pen “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” one of the few episodes where the revival found some creative traction. The lizard-man in tighty whities who serves as the monster of the week here turns out to be a normal lizard who got bit by a human. After spending some time on a job peddling mobile-phone plans in an anonymous strip mall, all he wants to do is become a lizard once again. And who can blame him?
The revival sputtered out in 2018, after two seasons with a total of sixteen episodes between them. As of this writing, The X-Files’s legacy is once more being left in peace. But never say never, especially in these current times of ours when nostalgia is a bigger business than it has ever been.
And what can we say about the legacy of The X-Files now, a quarter-century after its high time in the zeitgeist?
Well, as I think that even many of its most zealous boosters will admit by now, it was a show subject to wild swings in quality, not just from season to season but from week to week. When all is said and done, The X-Files probably produced only about 20 to 25 episodes — that is to say, about one season’s worth of them, in the course of nine seasons — that might legitimately be called classics. Still, that’s a lot more than nothing, and a better batting average than the vast majority of television shows achieve. And betwixt and between its standout moments of brilliance, The X-Files offered plenty more episodes that remain perfectly watchable today despite their flaws, especially if you’re one of those who can enjoy just hanging out with its two charming leads.
On the broader canvas of television history, The X-Files occupies an important position. It wasn’t the first show to have survived thanks largely to the activism of a relatively small group of passionate fans — the original Star Trek leaps immediately to mind as a much earlier instance of same — but it was the first to be joined at the hip from the get-go with Internet fandom. In this sense, it was a harbinger of a new reality, in which almost every artifact of traditional media would have to adjust to a life spent in a symbiotic relationship with cyberspace.
Then, too, as I already noted, the mythology episodes paved the way for the Golden Age of Cable Television by serving as a demonstration of both the power of long-form storytelling on television and, less happily but no less usefully, of some of the ways it can go wrong. The conspiracy angle in The X-Files quickly became, to steal a phrase from the Cold War historian David Martin, a “wilderness of mirrors.” Partly this was down to aesthetic intent, but it was equally down to practical necessity. The only way to keep the conspiracy story arc going was to just keep putting more and more mirrors in the heroes’ way. Later serialized shows — not all of them by any means, but a lot of them — would use more limited seasonal episode counts, or in some cases entire runs that were planned as limited from the start, to do better on this front. We should never forget that, in this respect as in a number of others, The X-Files was a pioneer, with few if any examples to follow; we therefore shouldn’t be overly surprised that it did so much wrong. Indeed, the media world into which it was born made it effectively impossible for it to do some of what shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad later did so well. In short, The X-Files’s creators played the cards they were dealt as well as they knew how, and there’s never any shame in that.
All that said, there does remain another sense in which The X-Files seems today less like a brave pioneer and more like one of the shadowy agents of evil who featured so prominently in so many of its episodes, and it’s this elephant in the room with which I feel sadly obliged to close this series of articles.
Chris Carter most definitely didn’t invent conspiracy theories; the roots of the modern fixation on evil cabals manipulating events behind the scenes can be traced back at least as far as 1903 and the infamous antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Yet conspiracy theories have been weaponized in the years since The X-Files went off the air to a degree arguably not seen since the Nazis used them as a partial justification for the Holocaust. Carter himself was never a committed believer in UFO conspiracies; he saw them first and foremost as a cool set of ready-made fictions around which to build his show. Many or most fans of said show doubtless saw them the same way. But, by doing so much to break conspiracy culture into the American mainstream, The X-Files must shoulder some small portion of the blame for what seems to be an increasingly post-truth United States, where uncomfortable facts like electoral defeats can be hand-waved away with claims of voter fraud, where essential public-health measures like vaccines can be imagined to be agents of mind control, where people can convince themselves to kill in the cause of thwarting an international pedophile ring being run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor, and where duly elected members of Congress can tell us that the current administration in the White House is attacking the parts of the country that it doesn’t like with bespoke hurricanes. This is the poison pill lurking behind that iconic poster hanging on Mulder’s wall. If everyone decides that just “wanting” to believe is justification enough for doing so, this world of ours is going to wind up in a very bad place. It strikes me as deeply unfortunate that, in all of its 218 episodes and two movies, The X-Files never saw fit to address the deeper psychological dilemma of such a smart man who would tack such a dumb poster to his wall. On the contrary, as late as the first revival season in 2016, the show was presenting in a fairly heroic light a conspiracy monger who is quite plainly based on Alex Jones of InfoWars, a pernicious huckster of dangerous, reactionary nonsense. In a recent survey of X-Files fan attitudes conducted by the academic researcher Bethan Jones, one anonymous respondent said that “I always thought of The X-Files in retrospective as an (incidental?) instrument [in] getting people to become paranoid of their government, which is an instrument of the real power to manipulate democracies.” This seems to me a fair assessment.
Of course, The X-Files is at the very worst a small proximate cause of the situation in which we find ourselves today. And yet even its tiny portion of the blame is enough to cast a faint shadow over any retrospective like this one. It took us a long time to go from the alien-autopsy film to QAnon, but it seems safe to say that The X-Files had a hand in propagating both of them. The best we can do now is hope the day will come when it can be remembered as just a groundbreaking television show again, with no further prevarication required. Until then, it will have to remain both a victim and a proof of a force that is more insidiously frightening than any alien invasion: the law of unintended consequences.
Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.
Sources: The books “Deny All Knowledge”: Reading the X-Files, edited by David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Marla Cartwright; Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to The X-Files by Peter Knight; Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files by Zack Handlen & Emily St. James; X-Files Confidential: The Unauthorized X-Philes Compendium by Ed Edwards; Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum; The Legacy of The X-Files, edited by James Fenwick and Diane A. Rogers; Opening the X-Files: A Critical History of the Original Series by Darren Mooney; and The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman. Computer Gaming World of August 1998.
Online sources include “X-Files Creator Wants You to Chill Out on the Conspiracy Theories” by Jordan Hoffman at Vanity Fair.
The Truth Is Out There, Part 3: The Game of Belief
If traditional film is a river, the viewer of that film sits on the bank and watches the water flow by. We wanted to take that viewer and turn them into a fish and put them down into that river.
— Greg Roach, Director of The X-Files Game
Given the demographics of X-Files fandom, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that the show’s parent network Fox started to think about making a computer game that was officially based on it quite quickly. Already early in the second season, before the big breakthrough at the Golden Globe Awards, Fox began making inquiries on the subject with game developers. This was the peak of the interactive-movie era, when games that blended interactivity with video clips starring real human actors were widely believed to be the necessary future of the medium. Fox’s search thus led it to HyperBole Studios, a company whose name positively screams 1990s — note the sticky capital “B” in the middle of it — every bit as much as The X-Files itself. With a name like that, how could the studio be anything but a loud and proud advocate of the so-called “Siliwood” approach to game making?
HyperBole had actually been around for half a decade by that point, evolving alongside the hype over multimedia computing. It was the brainchild of one Greg Roach, who had gotten his first Apple IIc home computer in 1985, when he was still a university student majoring in theater and philosophy in Houston, Texas. He had tried to play the text adventures of the era, but found that they didn’t agree with him. What should have been “portals to a different world” struck him as balky, pedantic, and dull.
A few years later, when he was employed as an associate director at the Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston, he got his first glimpse of HyperCard on the Apple Macintosh. It was a revelation. “Here was the answer I’d been looking for,” he says. Like a lot of other starstruck HyperCard zealots from unusual, often non-technical backgrounds, he founded a company to bring his hypertext experiments to the world. Initially, he did not envision HyperBole as anything so gauche as a games studio: it was rather to be the publisher of a bimonthly multimedia magazine on two floppy disks. The magazine never quite met that bimonthly schedule, but Roach and his friends did manage to put out nine issues between 1990 and 1992. Each was an eclectic mix of hypertext narratives, comics, visual art, video clips, poetry, and opinion pieces. “The writing can sometimes be a little idiosyncratic,” wrote MacUser of the endeavor, “but it’s never boring.” The magazine’s most ambitious project was The Madness of Roland, an “interactive novel” by Roach himself that ran in installments in the first six issues. Sprouting from The Song of Roland, the towering Medieval epic about a chivalrous knight-errant in the time of Charlemagne, it quickly evolved — or devolved, depending on your point of view — into a stream-of-consciousness postmodern pastiche of the sort that was very popular among academic hypertext theorists at the time. It was eventually released in an enhanced version as a standalone product.
The hard truth was, however, that work like this was more interesting to the literary theorists than it was to ordinary computer owners; you certainly weren’t going to be able to sustain a software company of any real size on it, not even one that catered to the artsy, well-heeled Mac user base. Being a man with commercial as well as intellectual aspirations, Roach decided to add the revolutionary new storage medium of CD-ROM to his technological stack and replace interactive books with interactive movies. He ended the magazine and moved to Seattle, both to be closer to the West Coast tech titans and to take advantage of the city’s underrated theater and film- and video-production communities. No shrinking violet, he branded himself “the Spielberg of multimedia” and “a theorist of virtual cinema,” and commenced cold-calling anyone who would pick up the telephone. For example, he talked his way into sharing a stage with Sid Meier for a debate over “Multimedia versus Game Design” at the 1994 Computer Game Developers Conference, where he discussed the importance of things like “a geometric understanding of the spatial possibilities of what the media represents.” (Such tangled phraseology left Meier scratching his head; he kept trying to bring the conversation back around to the best ways of making games that were, you know, fun.)
Roach charmed enough venture capitalists to hire some programmers, who helped him to create a system for making interactive movies called, naturally enough, VirtualCinema. In another tribute to his energy and persuasiveness, HyperBole became the first games studio to be signed by Hollywood’s Agency for the Performing Arts — the most prestigious talent agency in Tinseltown — as a client.
The first of HyperBole’s VirtualCinema games was one of the last to be published by a shady outfit called Media Vision, which had gotten its start in sound cards and was now attempting to build a larger empire on boxed games of its own and, wherever and whenever these failed to deliver the goods, lots and lots of accounting fraud. According to Roach — admittedly, not always the most reliable witness — Media Vision yanked a half-completed interactive movie out of his hands and rushed it onto store shelves when the financial house of cards began to show signs of instability. Be that as it may, the game called Quantum Gate was followed just nine months later by one called The Vortex: Quantum Gate II that picked up right where it had left off. By that time, however, the house of cards at Media Vision had collapsed, so the sequel was published by HyperBole themselves. As a result, it had little retail presence and sold hardly any copies at all.
If nothing else, these games served to prove the wisdom of the move to Seattle; in terms of their acting performances and overall production values, they really did stand out from most of the sub-B-movie competition in their space. Unfortunately, Roach’s scripts were less impressive, being a nearly incomprehensible mishmash of science-fiction clichés and New Age malarkey. The interactivity wasn’t up to much either: just some deserted corridors to wander from a Myst-style first-person perspective, some menus that popped up in conversations but made minimal difference to the larger arc of the story, and, most lamentably and inexplicably of all, a thoroughly botched attempt to re-implement the old arcade classic Battlezone.
Despite their shortcomings, the Quantum Gate games wound up serving HyperBole well after a fashion. For when Fox started looking around for someone to make an X-Files game, HyperBole’s Hollywood talent agency could submit them as demo reels. Roach claimed in 1998 that, upon being formally invited to submit a bid for the project, he almost turned the opportunity down: “I’d never seen The X-Files at that point. But then I watched the show. The creative possibilities were intriguing, so we went back to Fox and affirmed our interest.”
It soon became clear that the idea of an X-Files game was being driven by the suits at Fox, not by the team that was in the trenches making the television show from week to week. Chris Carter was at best ambivalent. “What can you do that I can’t?” he asked Roach at their first meeting. Slowly, Roach talked him around, at the same time that he convinced his bosses at Fox that the VirtualCinema engine was just the tool for the job. Eventually, Carter agreed to provide a story outline which HyperBole would then turn into a game. By the end of 1995, when the show was in the midst of its third season, the deal was done. Barely three years removed from making an underground multimedia magazine in his basement for a few hundred subscribers, Roach was now to be entrusted with one of the hottest properties on television, watched by tens of millions of people every week. Truly these were strange times in gaming.
That said, it wasn’t going to be practical to build the entire game around Mulder and Scully; David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were busy enough as it was. At the same time, though, any alleged X-Files game from which they were completely absent would surely be pilloried. Carter’s story outline rather cleverly solved the problem by giving the player control of another, newly introduced FBI agent by the name of Craig Willmore, who would be set on the trail of the usual twosome after they mysteriously disappeared in the middle of an investigation. Duchovny and Anderson would appear only near the end of the game, as the player’s reward for getting that far. All things considered, it seemed like a reasonable compromise.
After much fraught negotiations with the two stars’ representatives, it was agreed that they would come to Seattle for about a week to film their scenes. Mitch Pileggi, who played Assistant Director Walter Skinner, Mulder and Scully’s immediate superior at the FBI, signed on as well. Ditto the actors who played The Lone Gunmen, a trio of eccentric computer hackers who helped Mulder and Scully out from time to time on the show. Even William B. Davis, otherwise known as Cancer Man, agreed to a cameo appearance.
Greg Roach (right) on the set with William B. Davis.
Getting all of this arranged took months and months. “Working with a company like Fox is a lot like talking to a person with multiple-personality disorder or Alzheimer’s,” says Roach. “They never remember from one minute to the next what they’ve agreed to. We had to deal with the legal division, marketing department, Fox Interactive, the TV division, and Chris Carter. Each of them has their own fiefdom and their own veto capacity that only extends so far in certain areas.” Most creative decisions required the approval of Carter, but it was made all too clear by his average response time to queries that the X-Files game was not high on his priority list. In all, another year and a half went by before the design document, script, and all of the assorted acting contracts were far enough along that shooting could begin.
This milestone coincided with the end of the show’s fourth season, when it was nearing the absolute pinnacle of its popularity and cultural cachet. A typical 24-episode season was shot at a pace of roughly one episode every ten days, meaning that Duchovny and Anderson could expect to spend a good two-thirds of each year playing Mulder and Scully. This year they were even busier, however, because an X-Files feature film was to be shot between the fourth and fifth seasons, to premiere in movie theaters right after the latter had finished airing. And on top of all this, the two were now expected to come to Seattle during the two-week gap between the fourth-season wrap party and the beginning of work on the film in order to help Greg Roach get his computer game done. Understandably enough under the circumstances, they arrived tired and decidedly unenthusiastic. Because of the scheduling issues, Mulder and Scully’s scenes were to be filmed first — a true baptism by fire for the cast and crew. “After that, the rest of the shoot seemed relatively easy,” says Roach.
Duchovny, who had aspirations of becoming a Hollywood leading man of the sort who could carry a major non-X-Files film on his own, had been growing restless on the television show of late. It isn’t hard to imagine what he thought of the notion of appearing in a videogame, a still less respected medium than television. HyperBole did their best to make him happy, even going so far as to place a private yoga instructor at his beck and call throughout his stay in Seattle. Nonetheless, he did the bare minimum required of him during the time he was contractually obligated to make himself available, then jetted off without a backward glance to enjoy what was left of his holiday.
Greg Roach directs David Duchovny.
Gillian Anderson, on the other hand, went above and beyond the call of duty. Once the concept of the game was explained to her, she became genuinely interested in what HyperBole was trying to do, and put in a lot more effort than she needed to. She even agreed to stay on a few extra days after Duchovny left, to shoot some extra scenes that Greg Roach hastily wrote to take advantage of her unexpected graciousness. “I like the Four Seasons hotel in Seattle,” she said as a way of deflecting everyone’s gratitude. If you’ve played the game, you probably noticed that you see a lot more of Scully in it than Mulder. Now you know why.
The entirety of the filming took seven weeks, all of them spent at locations in and around Seattle. A goodly chunk of the crew’s time was spent at the old Naval Station Puget Sound at Sand Point, a Navy base and airfield — the first airborne circumnavigation of the Earth had ended there in 1924 — that had recently been decommissioned as part of the peace dividend for winning the Cold War. It was in every way a classic X-Files set. “It had to be big, it had to be scary, it had to be a Byzantine maze with corridors and machinery,” says Roach. “At Sand Point, they’d built a new brig, and then a year later the base was shut down. So we had this huge, brand spanking new, governmental, high-tech facility that provided the perfect shell for the secret base.” The local maritime training academy and its primary training ship, formerly an ocean-going icebreaker and tug, were more thoroughly X-Files-looking places. All were shown to maximum advantage, thanks not least to Director of Photography Jon Joffin, who had held the same title for eleven episodes of the television show during its fourth season. He became known as “the smoke Nazi” around HyperBole for his ability to conjure up that trademark X-Files murk.
Once the filming wrapped, it was back to the office for the HyperBole principals. There they used the VirtualCinema system to turn the video footage that had been shot, along with still photographs of the various locations, into a game. As this work proceeded and the likely timeline for its completion firmed up, Fox decided how to incorporate the game into its marketing plans for The X-Files in general. The summer of 1998 was already to be The Summer of The X-Files; a shocking, bravura finale to the fifth season on May 17 would lead right into the movie hitting theaters on June 19. The game seemed a nice adjunct to these plans; indeed, it was decided that it should be released on the very same day as the movie’s premiere. To emphasize its kinship with what most people were calling “the X-Files movie” — its official name was just The X-Files — Fox Interactive branded HyperBole’s effort simply The X-Files Game, which was certainly descriptive if not very original.
Gillian Anderson further endeared herself to Fox Interactive and HyperBole by agreeing to come to the E3 trade show in May of 1998 to sign autographs and promote the soon-to-be-released game.
When June 19 arrived, those eager fans who stopped by a software store on their way to or from their friendly local movieplex got, alongside more X-Files than was probably good for anyone in such a compressed span of time, a game that was exceptional in some ways but ultimately unable to overcome the limitations of its format. By 1998, those limitations were already causing the games industry to move sharply away from the interactive-movie conceit and all it entailed. The appearance of The X-Files Game this late in the day was more a tribute to its long gestation time and the power of licensing than any strong demand for more games of this type in the marketplace. In fact, The X-Files Game was the very last splashy production of its kind to hit store shelves, the last gasp of a confused but earnest movement in game development that really had once seemed like the future of the medium writ large. (Three other stragglers of the same breed — The Journeyman Project 3, Black Dahlia, and Tex Murphy: Overseer — had shown up earlier in 1998.) Game developers like Greg Roach and HyperBole, who had irrevocably married themselves to the idea of a grand alliance between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, would find themselves out of a job going forward. One can only hope that it was fun for them while it lasted.
As the last of its kind, The X-Files Game ought to be an exceptional example, the highest iteration of the interactive-movie conception. And in some ways at least, it really is. It sprawls across no fewer than seven CDs. That space is used for video that looks far better than the norm — almost, dare I say it, of DVD quality. (It’s a mystery why this game was never released on DVD; it could have benefited greatly from that then-new technology, if only to cut down on the disc swapping.)
The live-action segments also impress in ways that transcend mere audiovisual fidelity. Their production values are superb by comparison with almost any other interactive movie. They make no use of green-screening: the practice of painting pixel-arts “sets” in behind human actors who have said their lines on empty sound stages, an approach which was used in the vast majority of other games of this type because it was much, much cheaper than filming on proper sets. Roach claims that it cost $6 million in the final reckoning to make The X-Files Game. A good chunk of the budget was doubtless swallowed up by the complicated corporate logistics of the project; David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson would soon be signing contract extensions on the television show that paid them six-digit sums for every single episode they appeared in, and one has to assume the salaries they were paid to appear here were comparable if not even more excessive. Still, there’s no denying that this game looks as good as any typical episode of the show. It genuinely feels like The X-Files. Of course, it helped to shoot in Seattle, a city whose climate is much the same as that of gray-and-rainy Vancouver, its neighbor just on the other side of the border to its north.
The acting here acquits itself reasonably well too. Yes, Duchovny looks a little bored and irritated, but Anderson is fine in a role whose tics and mannerisms she has down flat, as is Mitch Pileggi. The unfamiliar actors who are expected to carry the balance of the game don’t do much if any worse than your typical guest star on the show. Jordan Lee Williams, who plays Agent Craig Willmore, carries out his ersatz Mulder assignment about as well as one can ask. Ditto Paige Witte, who plays the Seattle police detective who becomes Willmore’s partner in investigation, his equivalent of Scully.
Alas, the part of The X-Files Game that is supposed to put the “interactive” in an interactive movie is less impressive and more problematic. Before I get to that, though, I do need to note that one accusation which has been repeatedly leveled against this game from just after its release right up until the present day actually isn’t fair at all. When you first arrive at the Seattle FBI office as Agent Willmore, you need to log into your computer, which in turns requires a password. Lackadaisical reviewers have been writing for decades now that you’re expected to guess this password from Willmore’s enthusiasm for the history of the American Civil War and a whole lot of lateral thinking. This would indeed be an awful puzzle to start (or end) any game with, not to mention nonsensical in terms of verisimilitude. (You’re supposed to be Willmore, after all. Why would he need to puzzle out his own password?) But it’s not a puzzle: the password you need is written in the manual. The fact that this caused such confusion is itself a sign of changing times in gaming. Just a few years before The X-Files Game, gamers were poring over manuals as a matter of course; by a few years after, manuals had all but disappeared. This game found itself caught in the middle, making assumptions about its player base that no longer held true.
In reality, the problems here don’t come down to nonsensical puzzles. Greg Roach never had much interest in puzzles anyway, and, even if he would have, Fox had made it clear that this product must be accessible to people who had never played a computer game before, who were attracted strictly by the name of the television show on the box. All of which means that, although The X-Files Game plays superficially like a Myst clone when you aren’t watching video clips or clicking through dialog trees, it can’t offer up the usual array of arbitrary set-piece puzzles to gate your progress. And that’s a fine, even welcome development in itself; Lord knows, we had all seen enough slider puzzles to last a lifetime by this point. Yet it gradually becomes clear that neither Roach nor anyone else at HyperBole has anything to hand with which to replace arbitrary puzzles. This investigation turns out to require shockingly little thought on your part. Go where the game wants you to go and click on everything there. Rinse and repeat, and in due course you win.
Now, even this isn’t awful in itself. There is plenty of room in my heart for a game that’s not really interested in challenging me, that just wants to sweep me away on the wings of an exciting story. But there are two more downfalls here. One has a remedy; sadly, the other does not.
The first is the “clicking on everything” part of the equation. The X-Files Game may have decided to abandon arbitrary puzzles and to replace pre-rendered 3D scenes with carefully shot photographs, but it still has all the other infelicities of the Myst-style first-person, node-based approach to navigation. You never know quite where all you can look, and your degree of rotation when you turn is wildly inconsistent from node to node. It’s disarmingly easy to get confused just trying to weave your way through the FBI office. And when the game sends you off to a sprawling warehouse with darkened nooks and crannies everywhere… oh, my. Here you have to scour every single node and viewpoint for the tiny pieces of evidence that you need to collect to jog the plot wheels back into motion. There’s nothing fun about this. It makes the game hard in the most annoying of all possible ways; I’ll take slider puzzles any day over fake mazes and pixel hunts.
Thankfully, the game does give you a way of avoiding most of these stumbling blocks. You can turn on something called “Artificial Intuition” to gain access to a hint system and, most importantly, activate an icon that will swirl suggestively whenever you’re “in close proximity to information vital to the investigation.” I advise you to spare yourself a world of frustration by taking advantage of it.
But my other overarching complaint has no similar remedy. It goes to the story itself, which is… well, it’s just not that good, certainly not good enough to maintain the player’s interest in the absence of compelling gameplay. Greg Roach’s script from Chris Carter’s story outline is most kindly described as workmanlike — X-Files by the numbers, without the flashes of subversive wit and human warmth that marked the television series’s best episodes.
There are linchpins of the plot that just don’t make much sense. When you finally locate Scully, you learn that she’s been cooling her heels for several days in a sanitarium — a perfectly innocent one, that is, not the type you can’t check out of — without bothering to tell anyone at the FBI where she is. Meanwhile Mulder has gone charging off on the trail of yet another government conspiracy involving aliens without ever bothering to tell his partner what he’s up to, much less the agency that employs him. Even by the usual standards of these two, that’s some terrible communication.
Other weaknesses are inherent to the very nature of the project. The X-Files Game was always destined to be a bit player in the larger X-Files saga. The “Mulder and Scully have been kidnapped!” plot tries its best to get you invested, but these are, after all, the two most incompetent agents at the FBI, who rush heedlessly into danger and nearly get themselves killed every single week. We know perfectly well the game isn’t going to let them die, as we also know that nothing all that important to the larger mythology of the show is going to be revealed by this ancillary production. The stakes never feel very high because we’ve seen all of this so many times before. In the X-Files movie, Scully is kidnapped and Mulder must effect a rescue; once you find Scully here, it becomes a mirror image of that scenario. And so, as Joni Mitchell sang, it’s “round and round and round in the circle game.”
The date which appears onscreen at the opening of the game places it in the past of the current X-Files chronology at the time the game was released: all the way back in the third season, which was, not coincidentally, the season during which Chris Carter wrote the story outline. At that time, the mythology episodes were revolving around the “black oil,” a kind of parasitic alien consciousness that could infect human hosts and take them over, Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style. But that plot line had long since been put to bed by the time the fifth season rolled around, the better to make way for the latest existential threat to humanity. Here, however, we’re mired in the stuff once again, in a way that must have felt painfully anticlimactic to those hardcore X-Files fans who rushed out to pick up the game upon its release.
In lieu of a plot that goes anywhere particularly interesting, the script dangles the promise of meeting Mulder and Scully in the flesh as the most tangible reward for slogging through the mazes and pixel hunts. From a certain perspective, this was clever. But it doesn’t do anything to make The X-Files Game a game that can stand on its own, divorced from the television show that spawned it. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The game begins with the iconic opening-credits sequence from the show, which serves as a fine demonstration of the exceptional video fidelity. The cast credits are not updated; David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson are still listed as the only stars. “What are we?” demand Jordan Lee Williams and Paige Witte. “Chopped liver?” Well, kind of, yeah…
Agent Craig Willmore, who, we learn from perusing his office and his apartment, is a recently divorced father of one with a fondness for the American Civil War and the Ramones. His name is lifted from the third-season episode “Syzygy,” where it’s mentioned unfavorably by two telekinetic teenage girls who are terrorizing a small town: “Hate him, hate him, wouldn’t want to date him.” (Sheesh… as if it wasn’t hard enough already to step into Fox Mulder’s shoes.) The script is littered with little in-jokes and callbacks like this.
In another example of the game’s fan service, you find a copy of Jose Chung’s book from the much-admired third-season episode of the same name. The dilemma to be pondered, I suppose, is where you draw the line between fan service and identity crisis.
Navigation is of the node-based first-person stripe that was popularized by Myst, but the scenes are all built from photographs of real sets rather than being the output of a 3D modeller. Just look at how this scene and the one below are lit. The game absolutely nails the X-Files visual aesthetic.
Ken Starr had nothing on this guy. Informed by Assistant Director Skinner of Mulder and Scully’s disappearance, the question that Agent Willmore most emphatically wants an answer to is whether they are now knocking boots or have ever done so. To be fair, the same question obsessed a substantial chunk of the X-Files fan base.
In a clear sign of this game’s long gestation time, Agent Willmore keeps tabs on events in the field with an Apple Newton. Apple discontinued its innovative but flawed “personal digital assistant” a few months before The X-Files Game was released.
Hunting a pixel in the dark back room of a warehouse means that we have to squint at the world through the narrow beam of a flashlight. This sort of thing is the source of the game’s only real challenge. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is really no fun at all.
Agent Willmore in full jerk mode. Meeting an Asian man near a potential crime scene, he immediately leaps to questioning his immigration status. And then… what accent? Although The X-Files Game acquits itself well on some fronts, it’s full of little inconsistencies like these that mark it as not quite ready for prime time. (“James Wong,” by the way, is the name of a regular X-Files scriptwriter, responsible for the early standout episode “Ice” among many others.)
Scully in da house! And it only took until the sixth disc out of seven to meet her.
Remind you of anything? The shadow of the alien-autopsy film still looms large.
Canned video clips may have seemed inherently more “dramatic” than conventional computer graphics to people like Greg Roach, but they’re a horribly blunt instrument to try to build a game around, leaving no room for emergent behavior whatsoever. The last disc of of The X-Files Game is a fine example of this. It ought to be a series of heart-pounding action sequences, but, because the only things the game can show you are things that have been filmed, it turns instead into a tedious exercise in figuring out what sequence of events were written down beforehand in the script. Doing anything else leads to a summary judgment of instant death for the crime of failing to read the scriptwriter’s mind.
As if the anachronistic quality of its interactive-movie conceit hadn’t been problem enough, the commercial prospects of The X-Files Game were badly damaged by yet another factor. It had been Fox Interactive and HyperBole’s intention all along to release the game in June of 1998 not only for Windows and the Mac, but also in a version for the Sony PlayStation. Doing so would have broadened its potential customer base almost exponentially. But, lacking expertise on the more constrained, finicky console, HyperBole made the fateful decision to outsource the port to a third party, who rewarded their faith by dropping the ball entirely. There was no alternative but to release on computers only and then try to do the PlayStation port in-house. Thanks to heroic efforts on the part of their programmers, HyperBole did get it done, delivering a port that doesn’t look or play all that much worse than the computer versions — a remarkable feat indeed, considering the disparities of hardware involved. Yet it took them until well into 1999 to get it ready, by which time the game only seemed like that much more of an anachronism.
Despite it all, Greg Roach claims that The X-Files Game sold “in the region of” 1 million copies when all was said and done. I suppose that such a figure isn’t completely out of the bounds of possibility when the console version and bargain bins are taken into account; the PlayStation had such mass popularity and market penetration at this time that a turd in a box with the Sony logo on it would probably have shifted a few hundred thousand units. Whatever the real numbers, though, there was never any serious talk during the remainder of the television show’s run of funding another X-Files game, of the interactive-movie or any other style, made by HyperBole or anyone else. This alone is ample evidence that the first game wasn’t a rip-roaring success.
The cultural moment that could spawn studios like HyperBole was well and truly past by 1998; the company never won another contract of anywhere close to this one’s prominence and size, in fact never made another boxed computer game of any sort. A downsized HyperBole subsisted on small Web-development contracts and the like for a while, before closing up shop for good in 2005.
By that time, Greg Roach was well on the way to his next big thing. He says that he experienced a “tremendously powerful spiritual awakening” in 1998, when he celebrated shipping The X-Files Game with a trip to Egypt to see the Pyramids of Giza. There he was contacted by a group of trans-dimensional beings of pure energy whom he has come to call the Council of Light. (He adopted this appellation after his first name for them, the White Brotherhood, proved to have all the wrong connotations.) The shuttering of HyperBole coincided with his founding of Spirit Quest Tours, offering “life-changing spiritual travel” to those who, like Fox Mulder, really, really Want to Believe. As of this writing, you can find enlightenment for twelve days in Peru for just $7950, not including airfare, meals, single supplement, or “personal expenses.” Nobody ever said that The Truth Out There would come cheap.
Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.
Sources: The books The X-Files Game: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba and Writing for Interactive Media: The Complete Guide by Jon Samsel and Darryl Wimberley. Computer Gaming World of June 1994, July 1994, February 1995, August 1998, and September 1998; Edge of January 2011; MacUser of December 1992; CD-ROM Today of August/September 1994; InCider of September 1991; PC Games of September 1998; Extreme PlayStation of August 1999 and September 1999. My thanks to reader Busca for digging up a few of these magazine sources for me!
Online sources include GameSpot’s vintage review of the game, the old HyperBole site, Greg Roach’s personal site, his Spirit Quest Tours site, “Greg Roach Wants You to Make a Spiritual Pilgrimage” by Christine Desadeleer at Matador Network, Roach being interviewed by Dr. Sarah Larsen, and an old “making of” reel for the game.
Where to Get It: The X-Files Game has never been re-released for digital purchase, doubtless due to the complications of licensing deals. The easiest way to play it today is to download the pre-packaged version at The Collection Chamber.
