Omikron: The Nomad Soul
The idea of being in the body of a guy and making love to his wife — when she believes you’re her husband, even though you’re not — was a very strange position to be in. That’s exactly the kind of thing I try to explore in all my games today.
— David Cage, speaking from the Department of WTF
The French videogame auteur David Cage has been polarizing critics and gamers for more than a quarter-century with his oddly retro-futurist vision of the medium. He believes that games need to cease prioritizing “action” at the expense of “emotion,” a task which they can best accomplish, according to him, by embracing the aesthetics, techniques, and thematic concerns of cinema. You could lift a sentence or a paragraph from many a post-millennial David Cage interview, drop it into an article from the “interactive movie” boom of the mid-1990s, and no one would notice the difference. The interactive movie is as debatable a proposition today as it was back then; still more debatable in many cases has been Cage’s execution of it. Still, he must be doing something right: he’s been able to keep his studio Quantic Dream alive all these years, making big-budget story-focused single-player games in an industry which hasn’t always been terribly friendly toward such things.
Cage’s very first and least-played game was known as simply The Nomad Soul in Europe, as Omikron: The Nomad Soul in North America; I’ll go with the latter name here, because that’s the one under which you can still find it on digital storefronts today. Released in 1999, it’s both typical and atypical of his later oeuvre. We see the same emphasis on story, the same cinematic sensibility, the same determination to eliminate conventional failure states, even the same granular obsessions with noirish law enforcement, the transmigration of souls, and, well, Blade Runner. But it’s uniquely ambitious in its gameplay, despite having been made for far less money than any other David Cage production. It’s a combination of Beneath a Steel Sky with Tomb Raider with Mortal Kombat with Quake, with a soundtrack provided by David Bowie. If you’re a rambunctious thirteen-year-old, like our old friends Ian and Nigel, you might be thinking that that sounds awesome. If you’re older and wiser, the alarm bells are probably already ringing in your head. Such cynicism is sadly warranted; no jack of all trades has ever mastered fewer of them than Omikron.
David Cage was born in 1969 as David de Gruttola, in the Alsatian border town of Mulhouse, a hop and a skip away from both Germany and Switzerland. He discovered that he had a talent for music at an early age. By the time he was fifteen, he could play piano, guitar, bass, and drums, and had started doing session gigs for studios as far away as Paris. He moved to the City of Light as soon as he finished school. By saving his earnings as a session musician, he was eventually able to buy an existing music studio there that went under the name of Totem. A competent composer as well as instrumentalist, he provided jingles for television commercials and the like. These kinds of ultra-commoditized music productions were rapidly computerizing by the end of the 1980s; it was much cheaper and faster to knock out a simple tune with a bank of keyboards and a MIDI controller than it was to hire a whole band to come in or to overdub the parts one by one on “real” instruments. Thus Totem became David de Gruttola’s entrée into the world of digital technology.
Totem also brought Gruttola into the orbit of the French games industry for the first time. He provided music and/or sound for five games between 1994 and 1996: Super Dany, Timecop, Cheese Cat-astrophe, Versailles 1685, and Hardline. Roll call of mediocrity though this list may be, it awakened a passion in him. By now in the second half of his twenties, he was still very young by most standards, but old enough to realize that he would never be more than a competent musician or composer. Games, though… games might be another story. Never one to shrink unduly from the grandiose view of himself and his art, he would describe his feelings in this way a decade later:
I remember how many possibilities suddenly opened up because of this new technology. I saw it as a new means of expression, where the world could be pushed to its limits. It was my way of exploring new horizons. I felt like a pioneer filmmaker at the start of the twentieth century: grappling with basic technology, but also being aware that there is everything left to invent — in particular, a new language that is both narrative and visual.
Thus inspired, Gruttola wrote a script of 200 to 250 pages, about a gamer who gets sucked through the monitor into an alternative universe, winding up in a futuristic dystopian city known as Omikron. The script was “naïve but sincere,” he says. “I was dreaming of a game with an open-world city where I could go wherever I wanted, meet anybody, use vehicles, fight, and transfer my soul into another body.” (Ian and Nigel would surely have approved…)
Being neither a programmer nor a visual artist himself, he convinced a handful of friends to help him out. They first tried to implement Omikron on a Sony PlayStation, only to think better of it and turn it into a Windows game instead. Late in 1996, more excited than ever, Gruttola offered his friends a contract: he would pay them to work on the game exclusively for the next six months, using the money he had made from his music business. At the end of that time, they ought to have a decent demo to shop around to publishers. If they could land one, they would be off to the races. If they couldn’t, they would put their ludic dreams away and go back to their old lives. Five of the friends agreed.
So, they made a 3D engine from scratch, then made a first pass at their Blade Runner-like city. “The demo presented an open world,” recalls Oliver Demangel, who left a position at Ubisoft to take a chance with Gruttola. “You could basically walk around in a city and have some limited interaction with the environment around you.” With the demo in hand and his six-month deadline about to expire, Gruttola started calling every publisher in Europe. Or rather “David Cage” did: realizing that his surname didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, he created the nom-de-plume by appropriating the last name of Johnny Cage, his favorite fighter from Mortal Kombat.
The British publisher Eidos, soaring at the time on the wings of Tomb Raider, invited the freshly rechristened game designer to come out to London. Cage flew back to Paris two days later with a signed development contract in hand. On May 2, 1997, Totem morphed into Quantic Dream, a games rather than a music studio. Over the following month, Cage hired another 35 people to join the five friends he had started out with and help them make Omikron: The Nomad Soul.
Games were entering a new era of mass-market cultural relevance during this period. On the other side of the English Channel, Lara Croft, the heroine of Tomb Raider, had become as much an icon of Cool Britannia as the Spice Girls, giving interviews with journalists and lending her bodacious body to glossy magazine covers, undaunted by her ultimate lack of a corporeal form. Thus when David Cage suggested looking for an established pop act to perhaps lend some music to his game, Eidos was immediately receptive to the idea. The list of possibilities that Cage and his mates provided included such contemporary hipster favorites as Björk, Massive Attack, and Archive. And it also included one name from an earlier generation: David Bowie. Bowie proved the only one to return Eidos’s call. He agreed to come to a meeting in London to hear the pitch.
David Bowie bridges the generations with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.
More than a decade removed from the peak of his commercial success, and still further removed from the unimpeachable, genre-bending run of 1970s albums that will always be the beating heart of his musical legacy, the 1990s version of David Bowie had settled, seemingly comfortably enough, into the role of Britpop’s cool uncle. He went on tour with the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Morrissey and released new albums every other year or so that cautiously incorporated the latest sounds. If the catchy hooks and spark of spontaneity — not to mention the radio play and record sales — weren’t quite there anymore, he did deserve credit for refusing to become a nostalgia act in the way of so many of his peers.
But almost more relevant than Bowie’s current music when it came to Omikron was his deep-seated fascination with the new digital society he saw springing into being around him. He had started to use a computer himself only a few years before: in 1993, when his 22-year-old son Duncan gave him an Apple Macintosh. At first, he used it mostly for playing around with graphics, but he soon found his way onto the Internet for the first time. This digital frontier struck him as a revelation. He became so addicted to surfing the Web that he had to join a support group. He seemed to understand what was coming in a way that few other technologists — never mind rock stars — could match. He became the first prominent musician to make his own website and to use it to engage directly with his fans, the first to debut a new song and its accompanying video on the Internet, the first to co-write a song with a lucky online follower. Displaying a head for business that had always been one of his more underrated qualities, he started charging fans a subscription fee for content at a time when few people other than porn purveyors were bothering to even try to make money online. By the time he took the meeting with Eidos and Quantic Dream, he was in the process of setting up BowieNet, his own Internet service provider. (Yes, really!) He had also just floated his “Bowie Bonds,” by which means his fans could help him to raise the $55 million he needed to buy his back catalog, remaster it, and re-release it as a set of deluxe CDs. From social networking to crowd-sourcing, Bowie was clearly well ahead of the curve. “I don’t even think we’ve seen the tip of the iceberg,” he would say in 2000 in a much-quoted television interview. “I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.” Subsequent history has resoundingly vindicated him, although perhaps not always in the ways that his inner digital utopianist might have preferred.
One thing David Bowie was not, however, was a gamer. He took the meeting about Omikron largely at the behest of his son Duncan, who was. He arrived at Eidos’s headquarters accompanied by said son; by his wife, a former supermodel who went by the name of simply Iman; and by his principal musical collaborator of the past decade, the guitarist Reeves Gabrels. They all sat politely but noncommittally while a very nervous group of game developers told them all about Omikron. “Okay, then, what do you need from me?” asked Bowie when the presentation was over. An unusually abashed David Cage said that, at a minimum, they were hoping to license a song or two for the game — maybe the Cold War-era anthem “‘Heroes'” or, failing that, the more recent “Strangers When We Meet.” But in the end, Bowie could be as involved as he wanted to be.
It turned out that he wanted to be quite involved indeed. Over the next couple of hours, Quantic Dream got all they could have dreamed of and then some. Carried away on a wave of enthusiasm, Bowie and Gabrels promised to write and record a whole new album to serve as the soundtrack to the game. And Bowie said he was willing to appear in it personally in motion-captured form. Maybe he and Gabrels could even perform a virtual concert inside the virtual world. Heads were spinning when Bowie and his entourage finally left the building that day.
Iman and David Bowie both appear in Omikron in motion-captured form.
As promised, Bowie, Iman, and Gabrels came to Paris for a couple of weeks, where they participated in motion-capture and voice-acting sessions and saw and heard more about the world and story of Omikron. Then they went away again; Quantic Dream heard nothing whatsoever from them for months, which made everyone there extremely nervous. But then they popped up again to deliver the finished music — no fewer than ten original songs — right on time, one year almost to the day after they had agreed to the project.
The same tracks were released on September 21, 1999, as hours…, David Bowie’s 23rd studio album. Critics greeted it with some warmth, calling it a welcome return to more conventional songcraft after several albums that had been more electronica than rock. The connection of the music to the not-yet-released game was curiously elided; few reviewers of the album even seemed to realize that it was supposed to be a soundtrack, the first of its type. That same autumn, the veteran progressive-rock group Yes would debut a single original song written for the North American game Homeworld, but Bowie’s contribution to Omikron was on another order of magnitude entirely.
The 1999 David Bowie album hours… was, technically speaking, the soundtrack to Omikron: The Nomad Soul, but you’d have a hard time divining that from looking at it.
Omikron itself appeared about six weeks later. Absolutely no game critic missed the David Bowie connection, which became the lede of every review, thus indicating that the cultural dynamic between games and pop music had perhaps not reached a state of equilibrium just yet. But despite the presence of Bowie, reviews of the game were mixed in Europe, downright harsh in North America. Computer Gaming World got off the best zinger against the game it dubbed Omikrud: “We could be coasters, just for one day.” The magazine went on to explain that “the concept of wrapping an adventure game around a David Bowie album is a cool one. The problem here is with the execution. And your own execution will look more and more desirable, the longer you attempt to play this game.” Rude these words may be, but in my experience they’re the truth.
But what if I don’t want to say yes?
Omikron boasts a striking and memorable opening. When you click the “New Game” button, a fellow dressed in a uniform that looks like a cross between Star Trek and T.J. Hooker pops onto the screen and starts talking directly to you, shattering the fourth wall like so much wet plaster. “My name is Kay’l,” he tells you. (His full name will prove to be Kay’l 669, because of course it is.) “I come from a universe parallel to yours. My world needs your help! You’re the only one who can save us!”
Kay’l wants you to transfer your soul into his body and journey with him back to his home dimension. “You must concentrate!” he hisses. To demonstrate how it’s done, Kay’l holds up his hands and doubles over like a constipated man on a toilet. “You’ve done it!” he then declares with some relief. “Now your soul occupies my body.” (If my soul occupies his body, why am I still sitting in front of my monitor watching him talk at me?) “This is the last time we’ll be able to speak together. Once you’ve crossed the breach, you’ll be on your own. I will take over my body when you leave the game and hold your place until you return.” Thus we learn that Omikron intends to go all-in all the time on diegesis. Lord help us.
You-as-Kay’l emerge in an urban alleyway, only to be set upon by a giant demon that seems as out of place here as you do. This infernal creature is about to make short work of you, thereby revealing a flaw in Kay’l’s master plan. Luckily, a police robot shows up at this juncture and scares away the demon, who apparently isn’t all that after all. “You have been the victim of a violent attack,” RoboCop helpfully informs you, seemingly not noticing that you’re dressed in the uniform of a police officer yourself. “Go home and re-hydrate yourself.”
Trying to take his advice, you fumble about for a while with the idiosyncratic and kind of idiotic controls and interface, and finally manage to locate Kay’l’s apartment. There you discover that he’s married, to a fetching woman whose closet is filled only with hot pants and halter tops. (In time, you will learn that this is true of almost all of the women who live in Omikron.) Seeming unconcerned by the fact that her husband has evidently suffered some sort of psychotic break, disappearing for three days and returning with his memory wiped clean, she lies down on the bed to await your ministrations. You lie down beside her; coitus ensues. Oh, my. Less than half an hour into the game, and you’ve already bonked your poor host’s wife. One wonders whether the fellow is inside his body with you watching the action, so to speak, and, if so, whether he’s beginning to regret fetching you out of the inter-dimensional ether.
Kay’l’s wife will later turn out to be a demon in disguise. I guess that makes it okay to have sex with her under false pretenses. And anyway, these people can do the nasty without having to take their clothes off, just like the characters in a Chris Roberts movie.
I do try to be fair, so let me say now that some things about this game are genuinely impressive. The urban environs qualify at first, especially when you consider that they run in a custom-coded 3D engine. It takes some time for the realization to set in that the city of Omikron is more a carefully curated collection of façades — like a Hollywood soundstage — than a believable community. But once it does, it becomes all too obvious that the people and cars you see aren’t actually going anywhere, even as the overuse of the same models and textures becomes difficult to ignore. There’s exactly one type of car to be seen, for example — and, paying tribute to Henry Ford, it seems to be available in exactly one color. Such infelicities notwithstanding, however, it’s still no mean feat that Quantic Dream pulled off here, a couple of years before Grand Theft Auto III. That you can suspend your disbelief even for a while is an achievement in itself in the context of the times.
Yet this is not a space teeming with interesting interactions and hidden nooks and crannies. With one notable exception, which I’ll get to later, very little that isn’t necessary to the linear main plot is implemented beyond a cursory level. The overarching design is that of a traditional adventure game, not a virtual open world at your beck and call. You learn from Kay’l’s wife — assuming you didn’t figure it out from his uniform — that he is a policeman in this world, on the hunt for a serial killer. (Someone is always a policeman on the hunt for a serial killer in David Cage games.) You have to run down a breadcrumb trail of clues, interviewing suspects and witnesses, collecting evidence, and solving puzzles. The sheer scale of the world is more of a hindrance than a benefit to this type of design, because of the sheer quantity of irrelevancies it throws in your face. By the time you get into the middle stages of the game, it’s becoming really, really hard to figure out where it wants you to go next amidst this generic urban sprawl. And by the same point, your little law-enforcement exercise has become a hunt for demons who are on the verge of destroying the entire multiverse, as you crash headlong into a bout of plot inflation that would shock a denizen of the Weimar Republic. The insane twists and turns the plot leads you through do nothing to help you figure out what the hell the game wants from you.
But I was trying to be kind, wasn’t I? In that spirit, let me note that there are forward-thinking aspects to the design. One of David Cage’s overriding concerns throughout his career has been the elimination of game-over failure states. If you get yourself killed here, the game will always find some excuse to bring you back to life. Unfortunately, the plot engine is littered with soft locks, whereby you can make forward progress impossible by doing or not doing something at the right or wrong moment. I assume that these were inadvertent, but that doesn’t make them any more excusable. This is one of several places where the game breaks an implicit contract it has made with its player. It strongly implies at the outset that you can wing it, that you’re expected to truly inhabit the role of a random Joe Earthling whose (nomad) soul has been sucked into this alternative dimension. But in actuality you have to meta-game like crazy to have a chance.
A save point.
The save system is a horror, a demonstration of all the ways that the diegetic approach can go wrong. You have to find save points in the world, then use one of a limited supply of “magic rings” you find lying around to access them. In addition to being an affront to busy adults who might not be able to play for an extra half-hour looking for the next save point — precisely the folks whom David Cage says games need to become better at attracting — this system is another great way to soft-lock yourself; use up your supply of magic rings and you’re screwed if you can’t find some more. There is a hint system of sorts built into the game, but it’s accessible only at the save points, and requires you to spend more magic rings to use it. In other words, the player who most needs a hint will be the least likely to have the resources to hand by which to get one. This is another running theme of Omikron: ideas that are progressive and player-friendly in an abstract sense, only to be implemented in a bizarrely regressive, player-hostile way. It bears all the telltale signs of a game that no one ever really tried to play before it was foisted on an unsuspecting public.
And then there are the places where Omikron suddenly decides to cease being an adventure game and become a beat-em-up, a first-person shooter, or a platformer. I hardly know how to describe just how jarring these transitions are, coming out of the blue with no warning whatsoever. You’ll be in a bar, chatting up the patrons for clues — and bam, you’re in shooter mode. You’ll be searching a locker room — and suddenly you’re playing Mortal Kombat against a dude in tighty-whities. These action modes play as if someone once told the people who made this game about Mortal Kombat and Quake and Tomb Raider, but said people have never actually experienced any of those genres for themselves.
I struggled mightily with the beat-em-up mode at first because I kept trying to play it like a real game of this type — watching my opponent, varying my attacks, trying to establish some sort of rhythm. Then a friend explained to me that you can win every fight just by picking one attack and pounding on that key like a hyperactive monkey, finesse and variety and rhythm be damned.
Alas, the FPS mode is a tougher nut to crack. The default controls are terrible, having nothing in common with any other shooter ever, but you can at least remap them. Sadly, the other problems have no similarly quick fix. Enemies can shoot you when they’re too far away for you to even see them; enemies can spawn out of nowhere right on top of you; your own movements are weirdly jerky, such that it’s hard to aim properly even in the best of circumstances. Just how ineptly is the FPS mode of Omikron implemented, you ask? So ineptly that you can’t even access your health packs during a fight. Again, it’s hard to believe that oversights like this one would have persisted if the developers had ever bothered to ask anyone at all to play their game before they stuck it in a box and shipped it.
The jumping sequences at least take place in the same interface paradigm as the adventure game, but the controls here are just as sloppy, enough to make Omikron the most infuriating platformer since Ultima VIII tarnished a proud legacy. And don’t even get me started on the swimming — your character is inexplicably buoyant, meaning you’re constantly battling to keep his head underwater rather than the opposite — or the excruciating number of times you’ll see the words “I don’t know what to do with that” flash across the screen because you aren’t standing just right in front of the elevator controls or the refrigerator or the vending machine. Even David Cage, a man not overly known for his modesty, confesses that “I wanted to mix different genres, but I wouldn’t say that we were 100-percent successful.” (What percentage successful would you say that you were, David?)
Then we have the writing, the one area where we might have expected Omikron to excel, based on the rhetoric surrounding it. It does not. The core premise, an invasion by demons of a city lifted straight out of Blade Runner, smacks more of adolescent fan fiction than the adult concerns David Cage yearns for games to learn to address. As I already noted, the plot grows steadily more incoherent as it unspools. Interesting, even disturbing elements do churn to the surface with reasonable frequency, but the script is bizarrely oblivious to them. As the game goes on, for instance, you acquire the ability to jump into other bodies than that of poor cuckolded Kay’l. Sometimes you have to sacrifice these bodies — murdering them from the point of view of the souls that call them home — in order to continue the story. The game never acknowledges that this is morally problematic, never so much as feints toward the notion of a greater good or ends justifying the means. This refusal of the game to address the deeper ramifications of its own fiction contributes as much as the half-realized city to giving the whole experience a shallow, plastic feel. Omikron brings up a lot of ideas, but seemingly only because David Cage thinks they sound cool; it has nothing to really say about anything.
Mind you, not having much of anything to say is by no means the kiss of death for a game; I’ve played and loved plenty of games with nothing in particular on their minds. But those games were, you know, fun in other ways. There’s very little fun to be had in Omikron. Everything is dismayingly literal; there isn’t a trace of humor or whimsy or poetry anywhere in the script. I found it to be one of the most oppressive virtual spaces I’ve ever had the misfortune to inhabit.
Among the many insufferable quotes attached to Omikron is the claim by Phil Campbell, a senior designer at Eidos who went on to become creative director at Quantic Dream, that the soul-transfer mechanic makes it “the world’s first Buddhist game.” A true believer who has drunk all the Kool Aid, Campbell thinks Cage is an auteur on par with François Truffaut.
Even the most-discussed aspect of Omikron, at the time of its release and ever since, winds up more confusing than effective. David Cage admits to being surprised by the songs that David Bowie turned up with a year after their first meeting. On the whole, they were sturdy songs if not great ones, unusually revealing and unaffected creations from a man who had made a career of trying on different personas. “I wanted to capture a kind of universal angst felt by many people of my age,” said the 52-year-old singer. The lyrics were full of thoughtful and sometimes disarmingly wise ruminations about growing older and learning to accept one’s place in the world, set in front of the most organic, least computerized backing tracks that Bowie had employed in quite some years. But the songs had little or nothing to do with Cage’s game, in either their lyrics or their sound. Cage claims that Bowie taught him a valuable lesson with his soundtrack: “It’s important that the music doesn’t say the same thing that the imagery does.” A more cynical but possibly more accurate explanation for the discrepancy is that Bowie pretty much forgot about the game and simply made the album he felt like making.
The one place where Omikron’s allegedly open world does reward exploration is the underground concerts you can discover and attend, by a band called the Dreamers who have as their lead singer a de-aged David Bowie. The virtual rock star’s name is a callback to the real star’s distant past: David Jones, the name Bowie was born with. He flounces around the stage like Ziggy Stardust in his prime, dressed in an outfit whose most prominent accessory is a giant furry codpiece. But the actual songs he sings are melancholy meditations on age and time, clearly not the output of a twenty-something glam-rocker. It’s just one more place where Omikron jarringly fails to come together to make a coherent whole, one more way in which it manages to be less than the sum of its parts.
That giant codpiece on young Mr. Jones brings me to one last complaint: this game is positively drenched in cheap, exploitive sex that’s more tacky than titillating. It’s this that turned my dislike for it to downright distaste. Strip clubs and peep shows and advertisements for “biochemical penis implants” abound. Of course, all those absurdly proportioned bodies and pixelated boobies threatening to take your eyes out look ridiculous rather than sexy, as they always do in 3D games from this era. At one point, you have to take over a woman’s body — a body modeled on that of David Bowie’s wife Iman, just to make it extra squicky — and promise sexual favors to a shopkeeper in order to advance the plot. At least you aren’t forced to follow through; thank God for small blessings.
The abject horniness makes Omikron feel more akin to that other kind of entertainment that’s labeled as “adult” — you know, the kind that’s most voraciously consumed by people who aren’t quite adults yet — than it does to the highbrow films to which David Cage has so frequently paid lip service. I won’t accuse Cage of being a skeezy creep; after all, it’s not as if I know the guy. I will only say that, if a skeezy creep was to make a game, I could easily imagine it turning out something like this.
Omikron’s world is the definition of wide rather than deep, but the developers were careful to ensure that you can pee into every single toilet you come across. Make of that what you will.
Once ported to the Sega Dreamcast console in addition to Windows computers, Omikron sold about 400,000 copies in all in Europe, but no more than 50,000 in North America. “It was too arty, too French, too ‘something’ for the American market,” claims David Cage. (I can certainly think of some adjectives to insert there…) Even its European numbers were not good enough to get the direct sequel that Cage initially proposed funded, but were enough, once combined with his undeniable talent for self-marketing, to allow him to continue his career as a would-be gaming auteur. So, we’ll be meeting him again, but not for a few years. We’ll just have to hope that he’s improved his craft by that point.
When I think back on Omikron, I find myself thinking about another French — or rather Francophone Belgian — game as a point of comparison. On the surface, Outcast, which was released the very same year as Omikron, possesses many of the same traits, being another genre-mixing open-world narrative-driven game with a diegetic emphasis that extends as far as the save system; even the name is vaguely similar. I tried it out some months ago at the request of a reader, going into it full of hard-earned skepticism toward what used to be called the “French Touch,” that combination of arty themes and aesthetics with, shall we say, less focus on the details of gameplay. Much to my own shock, I ended up kind of loving it. For the developers of Outcast did sweat those details, did everything they could to make sure their players had a good time instead of just indulging their own masturbatory fantasies about what a game could be. It turns out that some French games are generous, just like some of them from other cultures; others are full of themselves like Omikron.
To be sure, there are people who love this game too, even some who call it their favorite game ever, a cherished piece of semi-outsider interactive art. Far be it from me to tell these people not to feel as they do. Personally, though, I’ve learned to hate this pile of pretentious twaddle with a visceral passion. It’s been years since I’ve seen a game that fails so thoroughly at every single thing it tries to do. For that, Omikron deserves to be nominated as the Worst Game of 1999.
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Sources: The books The Complete David Bowie by Nicholas Pegg, Starman: David Bowie, The Definitive Biography by Paul Trynka, and Bowie: The Illustrated Story by Pat Gilbert. The manual for David Cage’s later game Fahrenheit; PC Zone of November 1999; Computer Gaming World of March 2000; Retro Gamer 153.
Online sources include “David Cage: From the Brink” at MCV, “The Making of Omikron: The Nomad Soul“ at Edge Online, “Omikron Team Interviewed” at GameSpot, “How David Bowie’s Love for the Internet Led Him to Star in a Terrible Dreamcast Game” by Brian Feldman for New York Magazine, “Quantic Dream at 25: David Cage on David Bowie, Controversies, and the Elevation of Story” by Simon Parkin for Games Radar, “The Amazing Stories of a Man You’ve Never Heard of” by Robert Purchese for EuroGamer, “David Cage : « L’attitude de David Bowie m’a profondément marqué »” by William Audureau for Le Monde, “David Bowie’s 1999 Gaming Adventure and Virtual Album” by Richard MacManus for Cybercultural, “Fahrenheit : Interview David Cage / part 1 : L’homme orchestre” by Francois Bliss de la Boissiere for OverGame.com, “Quantic Dream’s David Cage Talks about His Games, His Career, and the PS4: It Allows to ‘Go Even Further'” by Giuseppe Nelva for DualShockers, Quantic Dream’s own version of its history on the studio’s website, and a 2000 David Bowie interview with the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman.
Where to Get It: Omikron: The Nomad Soul is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com.
Homeworld
This article tells part of the story of real-time strategy.
The first-person shooter and the real-time-strategy game, those two genres that had come to absolutely dominate mainstream computer gaming by the end of the 1990s, were surprisingly different in their core technologies. The FPS was all about 3D graphics, as aided and abetted by the new breed of hardware-accelerated 3D cards that seemed to be getting more powerful — and also more expensive — almost by the month. A generation of young men whose fathers might have spent their time tinkering with hot rods in the garage could be found in their studies and bedrooms, trying to outdo their peers by squeezing a little bit more speed and fidelity out of their “rigs”; in this latest era of hot-rodding, frame rate and resolution were the metrics rather than quarter-mile times and dynamometer results.
The technology behind the RTS was fairly traditional by comparison; these games relied on sprites and pixel graphics that weren’t that dissimilar in the broad strokes from the graphics of the 1980s. Running them was less a continuum — less of a question of running a game better or worse — and more a simple binary divide between a computer that could run a given game at an acceptable speed and one that could not. If you happened to be a fan of both dominant genres, as plenty of people were, your snazzy new 3D card had to sit idle when you took a break from Quake or Half-Life to fire up Command & Conquer or Starcraft.
Still, one didn’t have to be much of a tech visionary to see that the unique affordances of 3D graphics could be applied to many other gameplay formulas beyond running around and shooting things from an embodied first-person perspective. The 3D revolution offered a whole slate of temptations to RTS makers and players. Instead of staring down on a battlefield from a fixed isometric view, you could pan around to view it from whatever angle made most sense in the current situation. You could zoom in to micro-manage a skirmish in detail, then zoom out to take in the whole strategic panorama. Embracing the third dimension in graphics promised to bring a whole new dimension of play and spectacle to the RTS. Already in 1997, RTS games like Total Annihilation and Myth: The Fallen Lords were making some use of 3D technology to bring some of those features to the table.
But it wasn’t until Homeworld, a game developed by Relic Entertainment and published by Sierra in late 1999, that an RTS went all-in on 3D, moving the battlefield from the surface of a planet to the infinite depths of space, where up could just as easily be down, or left, or right. Such an experiment was surely inevitable; if these folks hadn’t done it when they did, someone else would have soon enough. What feels far less predestined is how fully-formed this first maximally 3D RTS was, so much so that it would never be comprehensively surpassed in the opinion of some fans of the genre. This is highly unusual in game development, where innovations more typically make their debut complete with plenty of rough edges, which need a few iterations to be sanded down to friction-less perfection. Homeworld, however, was a seemingly immaculate conception, the full package of technology and design right out of the gate. It frustrated the competition by leaving them with so little to improve upon. And it did something else as well, something guaranteed to endear it to me: in an era and a genre in which narrative was widely debased and dismissed, it showed how much a well-presented, intelligent story could do to elevate a game.
The folks from Relic Entertainment who made Homeworld. Alex Garden is at center right, wearing blue jeans and a black pullover.
Most games begin with a gameplay genre: I want to make an FPS, or an RTS, or a CRPG. (Gamers do love to make an alphabet soup out of their hobby, don’t they?) But some games — including many of the most special ones — begin instead with an experience their makers wish to offer their players, then let that dictate the mechanics. It feels appropriate that Homeworld, notwithstanding its status as the canonical first 3D RTS, started the latter way, in the head of a 21-year-old Canadian named Alex Garden in the spring of 1997.
Despite his tender age, Garden thought of himself as a grizzled industry survivor, having been involved with games for five years. He had first been hired as a games tester at Distinctive Software, based right there in his hometown of Vancouver, after he met Distinctive’s founder Don Mattrick in the frozen-yogurt shop where he was working at the time. Half a decade later, he had become a software engineer at Electronic Arts Canada, the new incarnation of Distinctive, working primarily on the Triple Play series of baseball games. But Garden was a young man with big ideas, equipped with a personality big enough to sell them. He was already itching to strike out on his own and try to bring some of them to fruition.
Garden was a big fan of the old but sneakily influential 1978 television show Battlestar Galactica. One of the first pieces of media to capitalize on the craze for science fiction ignited by the original Star Wars, it was irredeemably cheesy in many respects, boasting characters with names like “Apollo” and “Starbuck” and the obligatory insufferable kid with a robot dog. But its visual effects were exceptional for the era; it offered up the most exciting pictures of combat in space that anyone had seen on a screen since its inspiration had dazzled moviegoers a year earlier. Then, too, there was a vein of myth that ran beneath all of the surface cheese to lend the show an odd sort of gravitas. Creator Glen A. Larson was a devout Mormon, and he based his semi-serialized story on that of the twelve wandering tribes of Israel, as well as the so-called Mormon Exodus, the overland trek of Brigham Young and his followers from Illinois to Utah in the mid-nineteenth century. In the show, a “ragtag fleet” of humans who look just like us seek a new home after their planet has been destroyed by the evil Cylons, a robotic race of aliens who continue to harry them even now. This new planet the humans search for is called — wait for it! — Earth, purported to be the home of a legendary “thirteenth tribe of humanity.”
You might be inclined to dismiss it all as just the usual claptrap about “ancient astronauts” and the like, one more misbegotten spawn of Erich von Däniken’s wildly popular book of pseudo-archaeology Chariots of the Gods, and I wouldn’t rush to argue with you. But to Star Wars-loving youngsters, all those portentous voiceovers gave the show a weighty resonance that even their favorite film couldn’t match. Battlestar Galactica lasted just one season on the air; its ratings weren’t terrible, but were deemed not sufficient to justify the $1 million per episode the show cost to produce. Yet it had a profound impact on some of those who saw it, both during its short prime-time run and during the decades it spent as a fixture of syndicated television thereafter. Among these people was our old friend Chris Roberts, who lifted its conceit of “World War II aircraft carriers in space” for Wing Commander, the biggest computer-game franchise of the early 1990s. And to that same list we can now add Alex Garden, who would appropriate less its surface trappings and more its deeper theme of ragtag refugees searching for a home.
To hear Garden tell the tale, the trip from Battlestar Galactica to Homeworld was a quick and logical one.
I was having a conversation with some friends about how much we loved Battlestar Galactica, and wouldn’t it be great if it was back on TV. We were also talking about how much we loved X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, but how all you could do was pull back, pull left, and so on. So I started thinking to myself, “Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a 3D game that looked like you were watching Star Wars but had a story line like Battlestar Galactica?” And the game just came to me. Like a flash.
The idea, then, was to use 3D graphics in a different way from the norm, liberating you from a single embodied perspective and letting you roam free around and through a space battle, the way that the cameras of George Lucas and Glen Larsen were allowed to do. But at the same time, there would be more than spectacle to Homeworld. The story was key to Garden’s vision in a way that it wasn’t for most working in the RTS genre, where the single-player campaigns often seemed like mere training exercises to prepare you for the real point of the endeavor, the online multiplayer component.
Garden may have been young and unproven, but he could be very persuasive, and the blueprint for a 3D RTS that he was selling was both bracing and a fairly obvious next technological step for the suddenly ascendant genre as Warcraft II and Command & Conquer were tearing up the sales charts. On the strength of “two whiteboard presentations and no demo,” he signed a contract with Sierra On-Line, freshly pried out of the clutches of its founders Ken and Roberta Williams and ready to leave its roots in adventure games behind and go where the present-day action in gaming was. Sierra would endure a wild roller-coaster ride during the 28 months that Homeworld would spend in development, encompassing a vexed merger, a massive financial scandal, and finally another sale. Yet all of this affected Relic Entertainment, the little studio that Alex Garden founded above a nightclub in Vancouver in order to make Homeworld a reality, less than one might expect. He and the twenty or so compatriots he gathered around him just kept their heads down and kept on keeping on. Garden evinced a wisdom far beyond his years when he described his approach to leadership: “Figure out what you’re good at, assume you’re lousy at everything else, hire people to do all the things you’re lousy at, and get out of their way.”
Anyway, they had way too much to worry about in the realms of technology and design to pay much attention to corporate politics. Although most of the core gameplay concepts in Homeworld would be familiar to any RTS veteran, their implementation in 3D was uncharted territory. All past games that had tried to model space combat from an admiral’s point of view, dating back to tabletop classics like Star Fleet Battles, had struggled with the third dimension, consigned as they were to playing out on a 2D canvas. The most typical solution had been to more or less ignore the dimension of depth, to present space combat as if these were dreadnoughts floating on an ebony ocean rather than the inhabitants of an environment where up, down, left, and right were all available options at all times, and all strictly a matter of one’s current perspective on the battlefield. Needless to say, this wouldn’t do for Homeworld. How to present this three-dimensional battlefield in a way that human gamers, sad terrestrial creatures that they were, could grasp and manipulate?
They settled on an interface that stayed invisible most of the time. The screen was filled entirely with the open vista of space, through which you would ideally roam by taking advantage of one of the more baroque mice that were just starting to replace the basic two-button rodents on many new computers. You rotated the view by holding down the right button and moving the mouse; zoomed in and out using the mouse wheel; set the camera to follow a ship by clicking it with the middle button. You issued orders to your vessels by left-clicking them to select them and then right-clicking to bring up context menus — or, even better, by learning the keyboard shortcuts to the various commands. Initially, it could make for a disorienting mixture of old and new. “We found players who had very little exposure to top-down RTS games had an easier time learning the controls to Homeworld,” admits Erin Daly, lead designer of the game and the very first employee hired by Relic to join Alex Garden there above the nightclub. Once you spent some time with it, though, the interface began to seem less baffling and, indeed, the only reasonable one.
Homeworld was built as a multiplayer game first, in order to get the core gameplay working without having to think above the vagaries of artificial intelligence. Yet Alex Garden’s determination to make it a compelling, immersive fiction in addition to a place to fight with your buddies never wavered. He entrusted the world-building to a 27-year-old anthropologist, archaeologist, and part-time science-fiction writer named Arinn Dembo, the manual and the in-game script to a 32-year-old games journalist named Martin Cirulis. They made the setting and the story as rich as Garden could possibly have hoped for — in fact, far outdistancing Battlestar Galactica in detail and coherency. The eventual manual would open with 40 pages of “historical and technical briefings” in small type. At the end of the day, Homeworld may still have been a game about blowing things up in outer space, a theme handed down from the original Space Invaders, but it was going to try its darnedest to give the explosions some contextual resonance.
This isn’t to say that the story was the first thing that leaped out at the legions of eager gaming scribes who started to write about Homeworld in the magazines already more than a year before its release. And in truth it’s hard to blame them: even in its formative stages, Homeworld looked absolutely amazing, like nothing else out there. It remains a wonderland of heavenly delights for screen-shooters, presenting an endless series of striking tableaux that are each unique, because each of them stems from your game and no one else’s.
The many published previews provide us with a rare window into Homeworld’s development. Most of all, they tell us how stable the core tenets of the design remained; by the time the first journalists came through the door, all of the fundamentals of the gameplay were in place, leaving only the endless labor of refining, refining, refining. “We had the basic control scheme nailed on day one,” laughed Alex Garden later. “Ironing out the details of that basic scheme was a simple two-year task…”
The structure of the campaign is the one place where the design was overhauled in a more dramatic way. It was first envisioned as a somewhat non-linear affair that would let players literally pick their battles as they guided their fleet from star system to star system in search of home. In the end, though, this meta-game was abandoned in favor of a more standard fixed ladder of increasingly difficult scenarios. But one important twist on the standard RTS campaign formula did survive: instead of starting each scenario from scratch, researching the same technologies and building a fleet of the same old units, you would be able to take both your current tech tree and your current fleet with you from scenario to scenario. This makes a huge difference to the overall experience, about which more in a moment.
Undoubtedly the strangest outcome of the mounting hype over Homeworld was a partnership with, of all people, the venerable rock group Yes. Prior to this point, it had been game developers who had sought comparisons and collaborations with rock stars, not the other way around. In this case, however, the initial overture came from the musicians’ side. It seems that Jon Anderson, Yes’s lead singer, had decided that an association with a computer game might be a good way to promote his band’s next album. He directed his publicist to shop the idea around the industry. It was an odd avenue of promotion on the face of it, but not completely inexplicable when you thought it through. After a reign as one of the most popular progressive-rock bands on the planet during the heyday of that style in the 1970s, releasing albums where the ten-minute tracks were sometimes the short ones, Yes had managed to pull off an opportunistic transformation in the 1980s, into sleek, New Wave-inflected pop hit-makers. Alas, the 1990s had been less welcoming, seeing Yes caught between their two identities amid ever-shifting personnel lineups, awakening only indifference outside of their dwindling hardcore fan base. With their days of getting radio play long behind them, it perhaps wasn’t so unreasonable to try to capture the attention of computer gamers, whose Venn diagram was known to have a significant overlap with that of prog-rock listeners.
Jon Anderson’s inquiries eventually led him to Sierra, who passed him on to Relic Entertainment. He came out to Vancouver to spend a day looking at Homeworld and discussing the story, although it’s questionable how deeply he understood either; he “loved” the story, he later said, because “the story line was very similar to thoughts common to human beings. We’re all trying to find our way home.” But for a songwriter famous for his nonsensical lyrics (“In and around the lake, mountains come out of the sky and stand there…”), it probably didn’t matter all that much one way or the other. He patched together several shorter songs to make one long one called, appropriately enough, “Homeworld.” (“Just what keeps us so alive, just what makes us realize, our home is our world, our life, home is our world…”) “It was really all about getting people who had enjoyed Yes in the ’70s to come back,” Anderson says. And indeed, the track does feel more like fan service than a vital artistic statement, a description which can be applied to most of the band’s latter-day efforts.
One of these people doesn’t belong here: Alex Garden, center, visits Yes in the studio. Jon Anderson, left, speaks for his bandmates, who positively radiate their disinterest.
Be that as it may, “Homeworld” was the lead-off track on Yes’s album The Ladder, which was released on September 20, 1999. A demo of the game was included on the CD. When the full game shipped just a week later, it included promotional materials advertising The Ladder as “a striking return to form for the band” (the same words that would be used to describe every subsequent Yes album for the next quarter-century, as it happened). The song played over the game’s credits sequence. When all was said and done, it seems doubtful whether the odd cross-promotional strategy did much of anything for either Relic or Yes. Homeworld sold over half a million copies in its first six months; The Ladder sold rather less well.
But if the Yes song turned out to be kind of pointless, there was very little else in the game about which one could make the same statement. Homeworld is a marvel of focused design, a game which knows exactly what it wants to do and be, and achieves every one of its goals with grace and verve. I must admit that I didn’t finish it, but that says more about the player than it does about the game; as most of you know by now, I have no natural affinity or talent whatsoever for the RTS genre, and in the end I just had too many other games on the syllabus to spend any more time struggling with this one, which becomes very challenging by its middle phases.
Given how rubbish I am at the genre, I’m woefully unqualified to write in detail about Homeworld’s mechanical merits as an RTS; suffice to say that, while the learning curve is a bit steep for my tastes, Homeworld is amazingly mature for being the first of its 3D breed. What I’d like to drill down on here is something closer to my heart: the incredible extent to which it succeeds as a lived fictional experience. To my knowledge, no other RTS of its era comes close to it in this respect. Command & Conquer, Warcraft I and II, even to a large degree Starcraft… all had campaigns that served more as excuses for their scenarios — or, in the case of Command & Conquer, excuses for the creators to make the deliriously campy B-movies of their dreams — than compelling fictions in their own right. Homeworld is not like that. Even once the gameplay had worn me out, I still had to see the story through on YouTube, simply because I wanted to know what would happen. There are very, very few ludic fictions, from any gameplay genre, about which I can make such a statement.
Homeworld is about a group of humans from a planet called Kharak, for whom the “ancient astronauts” theory promulgated by Erich von Däniken here on Planet Earth turned out to actually be true. For there came a point when the steady march of their science “revealed a disturbing lack of commonality between our biochemical makeup and that of most Kharakid life.” Their satellites found “unusual pieces of metallic debris in high orbit,” containing “trace elements and isotope combinations unknown on Kharak.” Finally, the remnants of an enormous interstellar spaceship were found buried beneath the surface of the planet. Amidst the wreckage there was unearthed the “Guidestone,” an artifact engraved with a map of the known galaxy, highlighting Kharak and another planet labeled as Hiigara, a word meaning “Home.”
Using knowledge scavenged from the wreckage, the Kharakids spent more than a century constructing an interstellar vessel of their own, a “Mothership” capable of carrying up to 600,000 souls, suspended in cryogenic sleep, to this lost home world of Hiigara. The Mothership is a mobile factory as well as a colony ship, able to produce more, smaller ships from mined materials. (Anyone who has ever stood within ten feet of an RTS can probably sense where this is going…) It is controlled by a neuroscientist named Karan Sjet, who has volunteered to have her own brain wired into its computer systems. Karan Sjet is you, of course.
So, the campaign is about the Mothership’s search for home. The fact that your fleet and your research progress carry over from scenario to scenario makes it feel like one seamless story, epic in a way that smacks more of Civilization than Starcraft. Major plot developments occur within the scenarios more often than between them, further breaking down the standard RTS drill of mission briefing, mission, and victory screen. Individual ships become known to you for their exploits, even as they learn to fly and fight better over time. You develop a real attachment to them in much the same way you might to, say, the soldiers you send into battle in XCOM; you’ll find yourself looking out for them, trying to minimize their exposure to danger just as any humane real-world admiral would. In my admittedly limited experience, none of these feelings are at all typical of the RTS genre.
That said, a disarming amount of Homeworld’s success as a fiction comes down to its aesthetic presentation. In a genre known for its frenetic pace, built around scenarios that are considered to have overstayed their welcome if they stretch out to more than half an hour, this game is willing to take its time, with scenarios that can take several hours to finish. Everything is slower, more stately, allowing you plenty of opportunity to… well, to simply contemplate the scene before you, to think about where you have been and where you are going. The vibe is more 2001: A Space Odyssey than Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica, weird as that may sound for a game that is ultimately still about blowing things up in space. Relic made the bold choice of building the soundtrack around moody synths, strings, and choral voicings, eschewing the clichéd heavy-metal guitar riffs and techno beats that dominated the RTS scene. The choice lends the game a timeless dignity. Its real theme song isn’t the busybody Yes tune, but rather the elegiac strains of Samuel Barber’s 1936 Adagio for Strings, the only other piece of music in the soundtrack not composed by Paul Ruskay of Vancouver’s Studio X Production Labs. Combined with the visuals, which radiate their own stately beauty, the music makes Homeworld feel like the lone adult in a genre full of screeching adolescents. Even the voice-acting is more subdued and mature than the RTS norm — no sign of Starcraft’s cigar-chomping space marines here. In a genre known for having all of its aesthetic dials set to eleven all the time, Homeworld understands that grace notes can be more affecting than power chords.
I want to tell you about what I found to be the most jaw-dropping moment of the game, but, in order to do so, I do need to spoil the first stage of the campaign just a little bit. So, if you haven’t played Homeworld, think you might want to, and want to go in completely cold, skip to just beyond the video below….
The first two scenarios of the campaign are essentially extensions of the tutorial, in which you take the Mothership on a shakedown cruise before embarking on the long voyage in search of Hiigara. In the third scenario, you return to Kharak to take the colonists aboard and make final preparations for the real odyssey. But you are greeted there with the rudest of all imaginable awakenings: your people’s return to interstellar space has activated an ancient tripwire, prompting a race of aliens known as the Taiidan to come to your defenseless planet and pound it into uninhabitability. You’re thrown into a race to collect as many as possible of the cryogenic modules holding the sleeping colonists, which have already been fired into orbit, before the attackers destroy them as well. But this happens, like almost everything else in Homeworld, at an almost paradoxically stately pace, leaving plenty of the aforementioned room for contemplation. A wind of tragedy that Aeschylus would have understood blows through the whole thing. There is no triumphant fanfare at the end, just the quiet words, “There’s nothing left for us here. Let’s go.” Wow.
Thinking back on it, I realize that I want to set Homeworld up alongside Half-Life and FreeSpace 1 and 2 as a sort of late-1990s triptych of games that dared to do more with their fictions than anyone could ever have expected of them. All three of these titles are unabashedly difficult games aimed pretty firmly at the hardcore cognoscenti, working within action-oriented genres not particularly known for their aesthetic or thematic sophistication. And yet they all found ways to make us care about what we were seeing on the monitor screen on a deeper level than that of high scores and bragging rights. They have, for lack of a better word, gravitas. Less ideally, all three make me wish I had the time to get better at their individual forms of gameplay, so I would be better equipped to experience them as they were meant to be. But even failing that, it makes me happy to know that the old Infocom ideal of “waking up inside a story” still lived on amidst the deathmatches and corporate mergers of the turn of the millennium.
If you’re an RTS fan, you owe it to yourself to give Homeworld a shot. And if you’re not… well, you should probably play at least some of it anyway, just to get a taste of its incredible audacity and uncanny beauty. Art, after all, is where you find it.
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Sources: The books Close to the Edge: The Story of Yes by Chris Welch and Game Design: Secrets of the Sages (2nd ed.) by Marc Saltzman; Computer Gaming World of September 1998 and January 2000; Sierra’s customer newsletter InterAction of August 1998 and Spring 1999; Game Trade 23; Next Generation of August 1998; PC Zone of July 1998, February 1999, and November 1999.
Online sources include a video advertisement for Yes’s Ladder album and one dealing more directly with the “Homeworld,” a Homeworld retrospective by John Beford for Eurogamer, “Games That Changed the World: Homeworld“ at the old Computer and Video Games site, and a tribute to Glen A. Larsen by Jim Bennett at Deseret News.
Where to Get It: A Homeworld Remastered Collection at GOG.com includes the unaltered original game as a bonus, should you want to play it as people did back in 1999. And you might just want to: the remaster makes some significant gameplay changes which don’t thrill everybody.
Huge for the Holidays: Epic Interactive Fiction of the Millennial Period
This article tells part of the story of post-commercial interactive fiction.
After fighting the tendency for decades, I’ve finally learned to accept that I’m a bit of a conservative, if not a downright Luddite, when it comes to my interactive fiction — or my text adventures, as I still persist in calling them. Despite its name, parser-based interactive fiction doesn’t actually strike me as all that good at plot-heavy storytelling. What it does excel at is setting.
And this is just fine with me. Give me an interesting environment that I can sink my teeth into, filled with puzzles to solve and relations to tease out and exploit, and I’m all over it. Bigger is better here, as far as I’m concerned. I love a text adventure that I can live with for weeks or months, that I can leave open on a separate virtual desktop and let ruminate in the back of my mind while I’m doing other things, popping into it from time to time to try out a brainstorm or add another few rooms to the steadily expanding map of the world that I keep open in another window. Other people use Tetris as a mental palate-cleanser; I use The Mulldoon Legacy. What can I say? As you readers must surely have recognized by now, I’m kind of a weirdo.
Unfortunately for me, by the end of the 1990s, the types of text adventures I like best were beginning to fall out of favor with the post-commercial interactive-fiction community. Amidst much excitement over the newly “literary” paths the medium was blazing, a background chorus of atavistic throwbacks just like me bemoaned the dwindling number of new big games. The annual Interactive Fiction Competition, which at that time strongly encouraged its authors to limit themselves to games that could be played to completion in two hours or less, was widely blamed for the drift toward snacks instead of full meals. There is undoubtedly a lot of truth to this, but to that truth must also be added the simple reality that making a big text adventure is hard, and by this point there had long since ceased to be any tangible reward in it beyond the praise and approbation of a small group of diehards. Small wonder that so many people began to opt for shorter games; making even one of those well is more than hard enough.
Still, there has always, through all eras, been the occasional crazy person who is ready and willing to make a text adventure that is big and crunchy and unabashedly gamey in that old-school way that is guaranteed to warm this aging Luddite’s heart. There was actually a small cluster of such games around 1999. These are games to snuggle down with like your favorite blanket, perfect companions to long winter nights with a cup of tea by your side. So, I hope you’ll indulge me as I make this last article of 2025 another of my periodic homages to the humble text adventure, the first form of digital gaming I learned to love and the one I will surely never entirely leave behind until the day I die. We’ll get back to the glitzier computer games and the cutthroat commercial industry that produced them in the new year. The holiday season seems to me the ideal time for something more cozy and personal.
Once and Future by Kevin Wilson
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“Therefore,” seyde kynge Arthur unto sir Bedwere, “take thou here Excalyber, my good swerde, and go wyth hit to yondir watirs syde; and whan thou commyste there, I charge the throw my swerde in that water, and com agayne and telle me what thou syeste there.”
“My lorde,” seyde sir Bedwere, “youre commaundement shall be done, and lyghtly brynge you wordagayne.”
So sir Bedwere departed. And by the way he behylde that noble swerde, and the pomell and the hauffte was all precious stonys. And than he seyde to hymselff, “If I throw thys ryche swerde in the water, thereof shall never com good, but harme and losse.” And than sir Bedwere hyd Excalyber undir a tre, and so as sone as he myght he came agayne unto the kynge and seyde he had bene at the watir and had throwen the swerde into the watir.
“What sawe thou there?” seyde the kynge.
“Sir,” he seyde, “I saw nothyng but wawis and wyndys.”
“That ys untruly seyde of the,” seyde the kynge. “And therefore go thou lyghtly agayne, and do my commaundemente; as thou arte to me lyff and dere, spare nat, but throw hit in.”
Once agayne Sir Bedwere came and toke the swerde in honde. And yet hym he could not throw hit away. Once agayne Arthur called hym false and told hym to do hys byddyng.
Than sir Bedwere departed and wente to the swerde and lyghtly toke hit up, and so he wente unto the watirs syde. And there he bounde the gyrdyll aboute the hyltis, and threw the swerde as farre into the watir as he myght. And there cam an arme and an honde above the watir, and toke hit and cleyght hit, and shoke hit thryse and braundysshed, and than vanysshed with the swerde into the watir.
So sir Bedwere cam agayne to the kynge and tolde hym what he saw.
“Alas,” seyde the kynge, “helpe me hens, for I drede me I have taryed over longe.”
Than sir Bedwere toke the kynge uppon hys bak and so wente with hym to the watirs syde. And whan they were there, evyn faste by the banke hoved a lytyll barge wyth many fayre ladyes in hit, and amonge them all was a quene, and all they had blak hoodis. And all they wepte and shryked whan they saw kynge Arthur.
“Now put me into that barge,” seyde the kynge.
And so he ded sofftely, and there resceyved hym three ladyes with grete mournyng. And so they sette hem downe, and in one of their lappis kyng Arthure layde hys hede. And than the quene seyde,
“A, my dere brothir! Why have ye taryed so longe frome me? Alas, thys wounde on youre hede hath caught overmuch coulde!”
And anne they rowed fromward the londe, and sir Bedwere behyle all tho ladyes go frowarde him. Than sir Bedwere cryed and seyde,
“A, my lorde Arthur, what shall becom of me, now ye go frome me and leve me here alone amonge myne enemyes?”
“Comforte thyselff,” seyde the kynge, “and do as well as thou mayste, for in me ys no truste for to truste in. For I muste into the veil of Avylyon to hele me of my grevous wounde. And if thou here nevermore of me, pray for my soule!”
Barracks, at the card table
Dark and dirty, this tent is where you spend most of your time, waiting for Charlie to attack. The pale lamp casts dark shadows across the room and onto your faces, even as this war does the same to your souls. You sigh as you see the scars in the eyes of your three friends: Joe, Rob, and Mark. There is a piece of paper tacked to the wall.
You see a card table here.
Some games are impossible to separate from their origin stories. Fourteen years ago, what would a review of Duke Nukem Forever have been which didn’t bother to point out that this game had been in development for longer than some of people who might be expected to play it had been alive? And if the Star Citizen money-spinner ever results in an official Version 1.0, we all know what the reviewers’ lede will be. In its far more modest way, Once and Future is the same sort of thing.
As those of you who read my last text-adventure roundup may remember, Kevin Wilson is one of the principal reasons that an interactive-fiction community still exists today. Truly a community-builder par excellence, in the mid-1990s he used his bottomless reservoirs of enthusiasm and energy to start up SPAG magazine, for many years the community’s essential journal of record, and the Interactive Fiction Competition, to this day the event around which the community’s entire calendar revolves. Less enduringly but no less impressively, he forged ties with Activision, the often neglectful steward of Infocom’s legacy, and even convinced the old dogs Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn to write up one final Zorkian trick in pure text. Amidst it all, he was working on a game of his own called Avalon, which was to be the biggest, most awesome thing ever, at least to hear him tell the tale.
Avalon was classic vaporware with all the trimmings, perpetually just around the corner — due next month, next season, early next year. This went on for a good long while — about five years, which somehow felt like a much more ridiculous span of time for a game to be in development back then than it does today. While everyone waited, Kevin Wilson just kept talking it up more and more, and the scale and scope of what Avalon would eventually achieve just kept growing in the telling. Inevitably, it all became a bit of a joke; many strongly suspected that no game would ever emerge, that good old “Whizzard,” as he was known, would never find it in himself to pronounce his brainchild finished.
In the end, though, Avalon was released, under a different name and unexpected circumstances. Mike Berlyn was so inspired by the experience of co-authoring Zork: The Undiscovered Underground in 1997 that he decided to start a company of his own to try to revive the market for commercial interactive fiction. This would probably have been a quixotic endeavor even if the enterprise had been well funded, promoted, and managed, which it was most definitely not. Cascade Mountain Publishing released just two text adventures before closing up shop with no more fanfare than it had arrived with. One was Mike and Muffy Berlyn’s Dr. Dumont’s Wild P.A.R.T.I., a game which comes and goes without leaving much impression on this reviewer. The other was Kevin Wilson’s Once and Future, renamed thusly to avoid possible confusion or legal trouble with the dozens of other media properties that used the name “Avalon” in one way or another. On November 28, 1998, SPAG devoted a special issue just to reviewing it, from no fewer than six different critical perspectives. (No one complained; everyone could agree that Kevin Wilson had done so much for the community that he could be forgiven a little bit of self-dealing — and anyway, he wasn’t even the magazine’s editor anymore by that point.)
Alas, it turned into a sad case of much ado about nothing. Promotion and retail distribution were nonexistent from Cascade Mountain’s side, and it seems unlikely that either of their text adventures ever sold more than 100 copies. As revivals go, it was a pretty thin gruel. It turned out even most of the existing interactive-fiction community didn’t care to plunk down $25 for a text adventure that came on an actual disk in an actual box.
So, Once and Future, which had had a legitimate claim to being the most hotly anticipated game within the community for several years, vanished into the memory hole with breathtaking speed. A year after that special issue of SPAG, you would be hard-pressed to figure out from the discussions on the community newsgroups that a game called Once and Future — or Avalon, for that matter — had ever existed. A belated release as freeware in January of 2001 did little to help its profile. It got short shrift even then, being written off as an awkward relic of the community’s recent past, too old to be exciting but too new and too unpopular to activate the nostalgia gene.
I’m not quite prepared to call Once and Future’s neglect a crime against the ludic arts. If Kevin Wilson actively wanted to drive off potential players, he could hardly have come up with a better way to do so than by opening his game with a lengthy (and unattributed) quotation from Le Morte d’Arthur in the original Middle English. (I’m sorry I had to subject you to that, by the way.) In many ways, Once and Future comes off as exactly what it is, a game written by a bright but less than culturally sophisticated fellow who was still in his teens during most of the years he worked on it. It’s all too easy to write the game off as a grab bag of the pop culture the young Kevin Wilson was consuming, assembled with little regard to how well the pieces fit together, or rather fail to do so. The Vietnam War plays a supporting role to King Arthur, and the whole thing wraps up with the player thwarting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, leaning hard into the exasperating, deeply ahistorical Baby Boomer fantasy that doing so would automatically have prevented Vietnam and much else that went wrong over the ensuing decades. Structurally, the game is a slavish tribute to Brian Moriarty’s Trinity, straining to evoke the same sense of historical tragedy, without as much success. And it’s conspicuously unfinished to boot. The geography of the climax, which was once envisioned as a companion piece to Trinity’s masterful re-creation of the first test of an atomic bomb, is just a handful of nearly empty rooms with optimistic names like “Inside the Texas School Book Repository.”
And yet I just can’t bring myself to dislike Once and Future in the way that my inner critic says I ought to. (Those looking for a foolish consistency in these reviews should note that there’s a game below that I like much less than I ought to, so it will all balance out before we’re through.) Even at its most gawkish, Once and Future never ceases to be likable. It just wants so badly to show you a good time, wants so badly to be awesome. Even with its literary infelicities and occasional sketchiness of implementation, it remains surprisingly playable. Although it’s a very big game, its bigness is divided into discrete areas that never feel overwhelming. The puzzles found within each of them are nicely balanced between trivial and frustrating — fun to solve, without ever making you work too hard. There’s little danger of locking yourself out of victory unless you’re being aggressively irresponsible. In many ways, in other words, Once and Future is actually more modern in sensibility than it first seems.
To be sure, this is a game that resoundingly fails to put its best foot forward. Yet the overwrought writing above — “the pale lamp casts dark shadows across the room and onto your faces, even as this war does the same to your souls”; oh, my lord — gradually gets a lot better as you go on. Some have suggested that this is a byproduct of the game’s long gestation and Kevin Wilson’s steady improvement as a writer over the course of it, a theory which strikes me as completely reasonable. It may be going too far to say that Once and Future transcends itself — it remains intermittently gawkish from start to finish — but at certain times and places Wilson connects with a deeper vein of myth. He finds an Avalon that is not the one of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, nor even The Once and Future King, the book from which this game obviously draws its final title. It’s a before-time of primordial mist, a literal landscape of myth: “The forest and the land seem to thrum beneath the gentle caresses of the wind, singing you a tender lullaby. Far, far away you can catch the faintest hint of a flute player, blowing a soothing air that you can almost, but not quite, recognize.”
I’m just about willing to accept that all of this might be a product of free association on my part, that my critical faculties might have been irreparably undermined by my love for all those mystical 1980s records of Van Morrison. But still: Once and Future delighted and even moved me from time to time, in between inadvertently making me giggle. Not many games can produce such a combination of reactions. So, don’t read too much into the well-nigh unreadable extract you see above. Check the game out; give it a chance. You might just like it in some of the same ways that I did.
The Mulldoon Legacy by Jon Ingold
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Tangled trees whip past your face as you run, stumbling and tripping through the bushes in the forest. Your breath is coming in short gasps. Not far behind are the shouts and clatter of the men chasing you. You are a young boy, and you have just shot one of the King’s deer. In your hand you clutch the piece of blue coral, snatched from the neckband of the beast.
Tangled Forest (as a young boy)
You know the woods backwards, the shaded bowers, the winding roots and scurrying creatures in damp earth. But now you are lost, or not looking where you go as you run. The sunlight flickers through the green leaves like the flash of blades. The only sounds you hear are your own laboured breathing, your pumping heart and your pursuers; getting closer.
The Mulldoon Legacy is another text adventure written by a precocious teenager who would go on to a long career in another field of gaming; whereas Kevin Wilson wound up designing board games for Fantasy Flight Games and others, Jon Ingold co-founded Inkle, a maker of award-winning narrative-driven digital games like Sorcery!, 80 Days, and Heaven’s Vault. He tells us in his introductory notes for this, his very first game, that he “wrote this when he really should have been getting on with his A-levels.” The air of tossed-off casualness is perhaps affected, for this is hardly a casual affair, but rather an enormous puzzlefest that is polished, tantalizing, and well-written in equal measure. Once and Future often feels like the work of a teenager; The Mulldoon Legacy, not so much. Where the one is gushy and excitable, the other is cool and collected.
There’s a mystery here to be slowly uncovered, but this game is really all about the setting and the puzzles. The former is a sort of magical museum, a place of intrigue and deception where anything can happen and nothing is quite what it seems. The latter are staggering in their sheer quantity and variety, being of every conceivable type and level of difficulty.
It’s abundantly obvious right from the start that Graham Nelson’s landmark Curses! was a massive influence on The Mulldoon Legacy. The same sense of whimsical magical unreality pervades this game. The sturdy structure as well is the same. After the introductory dream sequence shown above — a sequence which might lead you to expect a more plot-heavy experience than you will actually get — the game proper begins with you standing outside the museum, with access to only a couple of locations. From first to last, this game’s definition of progress is refreshingly literal: you spend most of your time seeking ways to open up the next piece of its geography. Once you penetrate a new space, you invariably find a new set of puzzles, along with some more objects and clues to help you make progress here or, more commonly, with one of the other real or metaphorical locked doors you’ve been banging your head against elsewhere in this ever-growing museum. Sometimes — again, much like in Curses! — you exit the confines of the museum to enter other dimensions of time and space, where you can suddenly find yourself in the role of a James Bond-like secret agent or the captain of a spaceship. But you always come back to the museum in the end, to ferret out some more of its secrets and force the score counter up a little more toward your goal of 256 points. These are dealt out sparingly, in ones and twos, and every one you are given feels well-earned.
As it does in Curses!, tying progress writ large to geography here works really, really well. It keeps The Mulldoon Legacy from ever feeling quite as daunting as its size suggests it should, helps to avoid that sinking feeling of wandering around through dozens of rooms and poking at dozens of puzzles without knowing where to begin. Even as it learns from the master, however, The Mulldoon Legacy lets us know that it was written more than half a decade after Curses!. It tries — perhaps not entirely successfully, but it tries — to keep you from stumbling into the walking-dead situations that I found so frustrating in Curses!, and it’s better about giving feedback and subtle nudges as you experiment with the environment. Even when I was incredibly frustrated, I had the desire to stick with it in a way I didn’t when I played Curses!.
Indeed, this game pretty well consumed me for quite some weeks last summer. I solved it without a hint, a fact of which I am inordinately proud. It wasn’t easy; my Lord, was it not easy. Do you want to know how determined I became to beat this game on its own terms? So determined that I brute-forced one math problem by typing in each of several hundred combinations, one by one, until I stumbled upon the right one. My wife looked at me like I was insane when she saw what I was doing, and she was right to do so; a productive use of my time this was not. But such are the wages of obsession. (For the record, I still don’t understand the math problem…)
If you truly want to test your mettle as a puzzle solver, The Mulldoon Legacy is an excellent game to do it with. The puzzles are often hard, but I can’t call any of them blatantly unfair. (No, not even the math problem.) In that sense, it’s a 1990s version of Infocom’s Spellbreaker — only much, much bigger. Even though I played it in the bright days of summer, I find that I associate it in my mind with Christmas; it’s something to do with the atmosphere of a cold, dark winter’s night, not to mention the inverted Christmas tree you find hanging in the museum’s lobby. Call it a Christmas game, then, in the same sense that Die Hard is a Christmas movie. But whatever time of year you choose to tackle it, The Mulldoon Legacy will give you all you can handle and then some.
Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina by Jim Aikin
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It’s Christmas Eve. Rather late on Christmas Eve.
Just this afternoon your darling 7-year-old daughter Samantha announced that fully a week ago she mailed a letter to Santa Claus asking for Sugar Toes Ballerina, the unbelievably sought-after, impossible-to-find fad doll of the decade. Unwilling to see little Sam heartbroken on Christmas morning, you frantically phoned every toy store in town. Miraculously, you found a shop that claimed to have a Sugar Toes Ballerina in stock!
But that was two hours ago — before the flat tire. Now it’s getting dark, and icy weather is closing in. The address you were given, on the outskirts of town, has proven to be that of a dilapidated and disreputable-looking shopping center — not a modern chrome-and-neon strip mall, either, but a hulking two-story structure that looks to be the ill-favored offspring of a fairy castle and a canning factory. The shopping center is tucked well back from the street among brooding skeletal trees. Other than a few dim yellowish lights that show no trace of holiday spirit, the building is shrouded in gloom, and yours is the only car in the parking lot.
The Parking Lot
Except for your car and the dirty snowdrifts in the corners, this broad expanse of pavement is entirely empty. The wind whistles a little, and instinctively you hunch your shoulders and turn up your collar. The dark bulk of the shopping center squats in decaying splendor to the south, and a paved walkway leads in that direction.
Jim Aikin has been the interactive-fiction community’s resident lovable curmudgeon for a good long while. An accomplished cello and keyboard player, former editor of the now-defunct Keyboard magazine, author of fantasy and detective novels, and unrepentant grammarian, he knows for a fact that he can write much better than you can, whoever you happen to be. I’ve been dropping into his blog from time to time for what seems like forever, just to see what he’s been getting up to. Somehow it’s nice to know that he’s still plugging away at his creative interests, even as he’s constantly complaining about the lack of remuneration and recognition they bring him. He’s mostly on the same side as me when it comes to the Big Issues of the day that he takes up, but he does tend to ram his opinions home with a pile-driver where a softer touch might prove more persuasive. He’s a world-class grump with a heart of gold. A man with the preternatural ability to spot the one cloud lurking at the margins of any given clear blue sky, he’s been vacillating between denouncing the text adventure as a bastardized, inherently unsatisfactory form of media and releasing new text adventures of his own for as long as I’ve been aware of him.
All of that began with Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina, which popped out of nowhere in 1999, just a few months after The Mulldoon Legacy. (This is kind of a trend for epic text adventures: as often as not, they seem to be the work of completely unknown authors who arrive out of the blue from what might just as well be an alternative dimension.) Like Jon Ingold, Aikin was inspired by Curses! to make a game of his own. You can spot its influence not least in the way that his game too makes a magical-realist mountain out of the most ordinary of molehills: here, the buying of a Christmas gift for your daughter replaces a hunt in your attic for a map of Paris. Yet Aikin was far less aware than Ingold of the dialog that had been going on in interactive-fiction circles since Curses!. He has since admitted that he filled his game with mazes — about half a dozen of them, constituting hundreds of empty rooms in the aggregate — because he honestly didn’t know that the cognoscenti now considered them beyond the pale. Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina was in no sense of the word fashionable, even in 1999, but it has a lot to recommend it if you love to untangle an intricate web of tough, crunchy puzzles.
For me, the simultaneously best and most disappointing aspect of the game is the setting, a down-at-the-heels shopping mall just after closing time on Christmas Eve. If anything, it feels more resonant today than it must have back then, what with the decline of retail capitalism that has left the United States littered with so many zombie shopping malls. My disappointment comes from the fact that, for all that Aikin describes the mall with vivid precision, he never leans into the theme the way he might have, never tries to draw out a deeper critique of the culture of conspicuous consumption that produced and then abandoned these spaces, whose sense of vacant sterility is only increased by miles of Christmas lights and piped-in Mariah Carey songs. He’s content to use his mall as merely a setting for an adventure game, with tons of opportunities for puzzles tucked within its twenty or so separate shops of every imaginable description. And this is of course fine. A reader isn’t entitled to criticize a writer for failing to ride his preferred hobby horses. (Thus says your humble critic, having just done so.)
When all is said and done, then, Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina is about its puzzles, which are as numerous, as varied, and as frequently difficult as those of The Mulldoon Legacy. One of the very first that you need to solve in order to get anywhere at all involves converting numbers between the familiar base-ten system and two other bases. (No, computer programmers, these aren’t base-sixteen or even base-eight.) If an exercise like that sounds like fun to you, know that there’s a lot more fun of a similar nature to be had here. If it doesn’t, it’s probably best that you stay far, far away from this one. The same dynamic applies to sitting down to map some absolutely ginormous mazes.
The mazes aren’t my biggest issue with this game; I actually find the things oddly soothing to map out from time to time. But Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina does have two other weaknesses that cause it to fall down a bit in my estimation when I compare it with The Mulldoon Legacy. The one is the decision to open up a huge swath of the world after the player has solved only a few preliminary puzzles; this makes it feel confusing and overwhelming in precisely the way that The Mulldoon Legacy mostly manages to avoid, sending you trekking endlessly back and forth over the map trying to figure out where you should be focusing your efforts. (It doesn’t help that there’s an inventory limit, meaning that you can’t even carry everything with you everywhere, but have to make the rounds in relays from wherever you’re stashing your loot.) The other problem is the multitude of opportunities to lock yourself out of victory. I’m not sure that any of these traps were really intentional on Jim Aikin’s part, but neither does he seem to have expended much energy trying to steer you away from them in the way that Jon Ingold did. The knowledge that you might do something now that will leave you stuck hundreds of moves later is a kind of stress that very few players enjoy.
On the other hand, Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina does do one better than The Mulldoon Legacy in another respect: it sports a comprehensive hint system built right in. So, you can kind of set your own rules for how you play. For instance, you might give yourself permission to look at the first, vague hint relating to each puzzle as a matter of course. I’m a big supporter of games of all types that let you play them your way.
That said, I must admit that I did bounce off Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina before I collected more than a quarter of the points. The issue may have been one of simple timing. I jumped into this game right after finishing The Mulldoon Legacy; maybe I just wasn’t up for another drawn-out intellectual death struggle. I can say, however, that I still feel a little bit bad about failing to stay the course. I might just revisit this game at some point, if I can ever find the time. Maybe in my dotage, when I will have need to something to keep the old synapses firing properly. If ever there was a game to fill that bill, it is this one.
Worlds Apart by Suzanne Britton
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Lost.
Something is lost -- something that permeated through to the deepest waters of the ocean. You feel a tingling, then a burning at the back of your neck, a burning that spreads throughout your body as gills struggle for oxygen that isn’t there any longer. The silence within turns into silent panic. You try to ascend to the surface, but the not-water closes in around you with the weight of solid rock. It is at once solid and suffocatingly empty, and there is no channel of escape.
Readers, this is the most painful of these reviews for me to write because I know going in that it won’t do justice to the game in question. Worlds Apart, a text adventure released by Suzanne Britton during the last fortnight of the twentieth century, is a genuinely important work in the interactive-fiction canon, with a critical reputation that has only grown over the years. It is currently the second highest-rated game of the 1990s on The Interactive Fiction Database, behind Michael Gentry’s perennial Anchorhead. There is no doubt in my mind that it deserves its reputation, being a rare member of a nearly nonexistent breed, a huge text adventure that isn’t a puzzlefest at bottom. Yet neither can it be dismissed as just another short story — or rather novel in this case — where you have to type something from time to time in order to be given permission to read the next page. Worlds Apart presents a true interactive world for you to explore. But it shames and saddens me to say that I just can’t bring myself to care about it the way I should.
All readers have blind spots. (Your humble critic says, knowing he needs to mount some sort of defense of himself.) One of mine is a certain stripe of fantasy fiction — embarrassingly enough, the more serious and literary stripe, the kind that prides itself on not just being a gloss on some historical earthly culture or established set of tropes, that tries to present a new world with absolutely no relation to our own. I recognize the creative effort that goes into such fictions, but I have no interest whatsoever in reading them. I find them utterly irrelevant to my life as a human being on Planet Earth.
Sadly for me (and for those of you expecting a proper review), Worlds Apart is this kind of fantasy fiction. “For over twenty years, I dreamed about an alternate universe I called the Higher World,” Suzanne Britton tells us. “For three of those years, I poured almost all of my creative energy into a novel-length story set in that universe.” Playing Worlds Apart, it’s easy to believe that it would have taken that long to make. The prose is consistently vivid, particularly when it comes to the descriptions of nature. (I wasn’t all that surprised to find out that Britton is an excellent nature photographer as well as writer.) Britton has invented a full-fledged alien society, complete with castes and classes and social mores, which resembles none of the ones found on Earth in any but the most tangential ways. Her characters are not humans, not even terribly human-like in the way of your stereotypical elves and dwarves and hobbits, and yet they act believably within the framework she’s set up. All of this is extraordinarily difficult to do at all, much less do well. And Suzanne Britton does do it well.
Because I could see from the outset that Worlds Apart is objectively Good, I gave myself a stern talking-to going into it, ordering myself not to be dismissive. I went so far as to open a window for note-taking — notes which entailed not lists of puzzles and objects and clues, as they usually do, but rather lists of characters and a lexicon of the strange words I encountered. In the end, though, the creeping sense of ennui did me in, as it always does when I try to force myself to care about this type of fantasy fiction. This is 100-percent my problem, not the game’s or its author’s.
By way of offering some kind of relevant criticism, however, I will just note that the game isn’t completely free of the issues which always tend to dog the more forthrightly literary, puzzle-less or puzzle-lite strains of interactive fiction. At times, I found myself stuck in conversations that I couldn’t figure out how to end, hunting about for an arbitrary keyword or just waiting for an arbitrary number of turns to elapse. And I found some of the puzzles that do exist quite obscure, a matter more of figuring out what the author wanted to happen next in the story than asking myself what I would do in the situation before me. I do harbor a vague suspicion, as I do so often when I run into these kinds of works, that Worlds Apart might have turned into an even better version of itself if it had ditched the parser and gone with a hypertext engine. Then again, my inability to work up much of an interest in the story and setting surely made me less patient with its foibles than I might ideally have been.
So, don’t let my carping put you off too much. Some people have described playing Worlds Apart as thoroughly entrancing, an immersive journey like nothing else they have ever experienced in an interactive work. I normally don’t include games that didn’t grab me in these occasional interactive-fiction roundups, simply because I write no more than one or of them per year, and I’d much rather accentuate the positive when I do get the chance. But with Worlds Apart, the problem is so clearly with the player rather than the game that I’ve made an exception. If you’re at all interested in interactive fiction, you owe it to yourself to give this game a try. The potential rewards are too immense not to.
Augmented Fourth by Brian Uri!
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“In ye go!” With a heave and shove, two burly guards in matching green tights toss you into Orchestra Pit. As the earthen sides rush past you and sunlight dims, you have the sinking sensation that perhaps “Ode to a Duck” was not the best choice from your repertoire...
Orchestra Pit, in Midair
The earthen sides of this pit look loose and near the consistency of mud. They seem to rush past as the speed of your descent increases.
Augmented Fourth is another fantasy game, but it is light-hearted and easygoing where Worlds Apart is ambitious and demanding. Philistine that I am, I got on much better with it.
This game never aspires to be anything more than a romp, but what a fun romp it is. Like its author, who was studying music, computer science, and mathematics at Virginia Tech when he wrote it, its protagonist is a trumpeter. In this world, however, music is magical. (Well, okay, it’s magical in our world as well, but here the magic is far more concrete.) Boiled down to brass tacks, Augmented Fourth is Infocom’s Enchanter, but with the spells in your spell book replaced by magical refrains you can play on your trumpet. Fortunately, it’s a sturdy conceit to build an adventure game around. And even more fortunately, Augmented Fourth is as clever and charming as the Infocom classic that so plainly inspired it.
This is by a considerable margin the smallest of the allegedly epic games I’ve covered today — maybe five hours or so if you’re taking your time, enough to call it fairly large by modern standards, but on nothing like the scale of the four games I’ve already written about. It’s also, by an even greater margin, the least taxing of the group. The puzzles here are all quite straightforward, but that doesn’t prevent the solutions from being loopy fun. This is one of those games that keeps you trucking along just to see what amusing nonsense it’s going to come up with next. It’s sharp and smart and funny without ever feeling like it’s trying too hard, which is not something I can say all that often about would-be humorous ludic fantasy.
Augmented Fourth evinces a crazy level of polish. The latest version dates from 2020, twenty years after the first release; this says something about Brian Uri!’s commitment to sanding off every single rough edge. I’ve heard a few people over the years say that it might go too far in this direction, if you can imagine such a thing is possible — that there’s an air-tightness about the implementation that some wish to conflate with soullessness. But these people are not me; knowing the sheer amount of work that goes into making something that feels as breezy and effortless as this does, I can only applaud the author for his efforts.
This is the only game on this list that I would recommend — would recommend full-throatedly, in fact — to someone who hasn’t played a lot of interactive fiction, or hasn’t done so recently. If all of those giant games above seem way too intimidating, fair enough: give this one a try. It won’t change your life, but it will make you smile. And sometimes that’s all you really need, isn’t it?
And now for something completely different…
Aisle by Sam Barlow
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Late Thursday night. You've had a hard day and the last thing you need is this: shopping. Luckily, the place is pretty empty and you're progressing rapidly.
On to the next aisle.
Interesting... fresh Gnocchi -- you haven't had any of that since... Rome.
The aisle stretches to the north, and back to the south. The shelves on either side of you block your view of the rest of the supermarket, with only the brightly coloured aisle markers visible.
You have stopped your trolley next to the pasta section, bright plastic bags full of pale skin-tone shapes.
There is a brunette woman a few metres ahead, filling her trolley with sauces.
Just as the evolution of computing technology came to mean that the only effective barrier to the size of a text adventure was the energy of its creator, a rather perverse counter-movement started up, determined to see how small you could make a work of interactive fiction and still deliver a reasonably coherent experience. The first Competition of 1995 featured a game that took place entirely in one room, and it wasn’t even the first of its kind. In 1999, Sam Barlow pushed this trend to its ultimate extreme, by making a “game” that consisted of just a single turn.
Some of you may recognize Sam Barlow by name. Like Kevin Wilson and Jon Ingold, he’s one of a surprising number of authors from interactive fiction’s amateur scene who went on to careers in more commercially viable forms of gaming. Barlow has been making a heroic effort in recent years to resuscitate on a sounder basis the old 1990s vision of the interactive movie that is built from live-action footage of real human actors. Although I haven’t played any of them myself — too many old games on the syllabus! — each of Her Story, Telling L!es, and Immortality has garnered strong reviews.
Long before any of that, though, there was Aisle. As you all have doubtless gathered by now, I tend to be rather skeptical of interactive fiction’s avant garde, but this game really works for me. The scene is the interior of a grocery store just before closing time, when most of the shoppers have gone home to their families, leaving only lonely stragglers like you to haunt the aisles, filling up their carts with microwave dinners and beer. In this aisle of the store your attention is attracted by two things: a woman you’ve never met and a bag of gnocchi, which reminds you of a trip to Rome. You have one turn to do something.
In truth, calling Aisle a one-turn game is a bit of a cheat. It explicitly tells you that it’s meant to be played over and over. You can only begin to properly interrogate your relationship with Clare, the woman you were with in Rome, once you’ve learned that name from one of the ending paragraphs.
Aisle isn’t an internally consistent story space, and this is arguably its biggest weakness. While most of the endings cast you as a jilted lover, some of them rather jarringly rejigger that picture so that you and Clare are still a happy couple. A few others cast you as an addled religious fanatic, or just a plain old psychopath. I don’t know quite how I feel about this; it seems to some extent a betrayal of the central premise. On the other hand, maybe it reveals a deeper truth, about how unknowable and unpredictable the life and thoughts of any random person we might see in a grocery store really are. It’s not as if the game isn’t upfront about its approach; it says at the outset that “not all of the stories are about the same man.”
All I can say for sure is that Aisle intrigues and moves me more than I would think it would if you just told me about it. For the record, the most evocative ending that I’ve found is this one, what with the ocean of isolation and loneliness it reveals, the modern condition of way too many of us in this strange hyper-digital age of ours.
>x trolley
The trolley is a small cage of steel with bent rubber wheels. Full of your shopping: meals for one, drinks for one (well, drinks for several, but hey, who's counting?).
Gnocchi for one wouldn't really work. You settle for spaghetti and continue on to the next aisle.
Happy holidays, everyone. In the coming year, may we all find ways out there in the real world to lessen our own isolation and that of others.
Mr. Roberts Goes to Hollywood, Part 2: The Producer
This article tells part of the story of Chris Roberts.
With the Wing Commander movie having gone down in flames, there was nothing left for Chris Roberts and the rest of Digital Anvil to do but go back to making games. This undoubtedly pleased Microsoft, which had been waiting for some return on its generous investment in what it had thought was a new games studio for more than two years now. Yet Microsoft must have been considerably less pleased by the actual states of the game projects being undertaken by Digital Anvil. For they rather belied Roberts’s repeated assurances that doing the special effects for the movie wouldn’t affect the games at all. Of the five game projects that had been begun before the movies came calling, Robert Rodriguez’s Tribe had ended with his departure and Highway Knight had also been quietly abandoned. Two of the other projects — the real-time-strategy game Conquest and the crazily ambitious alternative-life-in-a-box Freelancer — were spinning their wheels with no firm timetable.
That did at least leave Starlancer to stand out as a rare example of good sense. At the height of his brother’s movie mania, Erin Roberts had flown to Britain, to place his Starlancer design documents in the hands of a new outfit called Warthog, located in the Robertses’ old hometown of Manchester. The first tangible product to result from Microsoft’s investment in Digital Anvil would thus come from a sub-contractor rather than from the studio itself.
Starlancer shipped in April of 2000, whereupon it became clear that, while Warthog had done a competent job with it, they hadn’t been able to make it feel fresh or exciting. “An interest-killing combination of ennui and déjà vu snakes through the whole endeavor,” wrote Computer Gaming World. In terms of presentation, it most resembled a higher-resolution version of Wing Commander II, the last game in the series before digitized human actors entered the picture. It too made do with straightforward mission briefings and the occasional computer-generated cutscene. By no means ought this to have been an automatically bad thing. Yet Starlancer lacked the spark that might have let it challenge the previous year’s Freespace 2 for the title of the 1990s space sim’s crowning glory. It sold like the afterthought it felt like.
In the meantime, Chris Roberts had picked up the pieces after the disappointment of the Wing Commander movie’s reception and unleashed his prodigious capacity for enthusiasm upon the Freelancer project. As he told gaming magazines and websites throughout 1999 and 2000, his goal was to create a “detailed, dynamic, living world” — or rather a galaxy, in which you could travel from planet to planet in your customized spaceship, doing just about anything you could imagine.
Freelancer is way beyond anything I’ve done in the Wing Commander universe. It’s going to be a fully functioning, living, breathing universe with a whole ecosystem. You can see the promise in something like Privateer, but this is geometrically [exponentially?] beyond that game. It’s like building a city. [?] Compared to Privateer, the scope, the dynamic universe — it’s all 3D — is much more interesting. There’s much more intrigue the player can get involved in. Everything’s rules-based versus scripted. Commerce happens, trade happens, and piracy happens because of what’s going on in the game universe and not because of scripted events.
Freelancer could be played alone, but would well and truly come alive only when played online, as described by Computer Gaming World:
Freelancer’s multiplayer game will be a massively-multiplayer universe where thousands of players will be able to fly around and interact with each other in a variety of capacities. Digital Anvil envisions a dynamic, socially-oriented game that features the single-player game’s politics and clans as a backdrop. This multiplayer game will also permit you to ally with one of the main houses in the game, or go it alone.
Perhaps the coolest potential feature is the ability to own your own base…
Any of you reading this article who have been following the more recent career of Chris Roberts will readily recognize the themes here. Roberts is not a designer with a huge number of grand conceptual ideas, but once he has one he likes, he holds onto it like a dog does a bone.
Alas, by the summer of 2000 Microsoft was finally running out of patience. Seeing Digital Anvil’s lack of concrete progress toward finishing Freelancer as their fourth anniversary as a studio approached, the mega-corp was becoming restless. Even Erin Roberts seemed to be losing patience with his brother. With Chris’s acquiescence, he set up his own studio in Austin, called Fever Pitch Studios, to finish Digital Anvil’s long back-burnered real-time-strategy game Conquest. It would emerge in August of 2001 under the name of Conquest: Frontier Wars, the second Digital Anvil game that had had to leave its place of birth in order to come to fruition. It would prove no more successful than Starlancer, drowning in a sea of similar games.
Well before then, Microsoft reluctantly concluded that Chris Roberts, the whole reason it had invested so heavily in Digital Anvil in the first place, was the primary reason that the studio couldn’t finish a single game on its own. Still not wanting to raise a scandal the year before the Xbox launched to signal an even deeper commitment to games, it “offered” to buy Roberts out, a transaction which would give it a majority stake in the studio. On December 5, 2000, the press release went out: “Microsoft has reached a preliminary agreement to buy Digital Anvil. The acquisition will strengthen our commitment to producing top-quality PC and Xbox titles.” Roberts was to be given the face-saving ongoing role of “creative consultant” on Freelancer, but the reality was that he had been fired from his own company for his inability to keep to a schedule and hold to a plan. His time at Digital Anvil had resulted in one commercially failed and critically panned movie, plus two games that had had to be sub-contracted out to other developers in order to get them finished; both of them as well had been or would become commercial failures. Yet Chris Roberts walked away from Digital Anvil much wealthier than when he had gone in. He told the press that he would “take some time off to kind of rethink what I want to do in the interactive-entertainment field.” When he was done thinking, he would decide to go back to movies instead of games.
In the meantime, Microsoft installed a new management team down in Austin, with orders to sort through the unfocused sprawl that Freelancer had become and find out if there was a game in there that was worth saving. Perhaps surprisingly, they decided that there was, and turned the project over to a producer named Phil Wattenberger and a lead designer named Jörg Neumann, both Origin Systems alumni who had worked on the old Wing Commander games. At Microsoft’s behest, they steered Freelancer in a slightly more casual direction, making the player’s ship easily — in fact, optimally — controllable using a mouse alone. The mouse-driven approach had actually originated during Roberts’s tenure, but there it had been tied to a customizable and upgradable “Neuronet,” an onboard artificial intelligence that was supposed to let you vibe-sim your way to glory. That got jettisoned, as did many other similarly unwieldy complications. The massively-multiplayer living galaxy, for example, became a single-player or locally multiplayer one that wasn’t quite so living as once envisioned.
When it finally shipped in March of 2003, Freelancer garnered unexpectedly strong reviews; Computer Gaming World called it “the best Chris Roberts space sim Chris Roberts didn’t actually make.” But it wasn’t rewarded commensurately in the marketplace. Even with its newfound accessibility, it was hard for it to shake the odor of an anachronism of the previous decade among gamers in general; meanwhile the dwindling number of TIE Fighter and Freespace enthusiasts had a tendency to reject it for being irredeemably dumbed-down. Instead of marking the beginning of a new era for the space sim, it went down in history as a belated coda: the very last space sim to be put out by a major publisher with real promotional efforts and the hope — unrealized in this case — of relatively high sales behind it.
As for Digital Anvil: it was shut down by Microsoft once and for all in November of 2005, after completing just one more game, a painfully unoriginal Xbox shoot-em-up called Brute Force. Two games finished in almost nine years, neither of them strong sellers; the most remarkable thing about Digital Anvil is that Microsoft allowed it to continue for as long as it did.
By the time his games studio shuffled off this mortal coil, Chris Roberts had been living in Hollywood for a number of years. And he had found a way to do pretty well for himself there, albeit in a role that he had never anticipated going in.
The decade that Chris Roberts spent in Hollywood is undoubtedly the least understood period of his career today, among both his detractors and his partisans. It is no secret why: documentation of his activities during the decade in question is far thinner on the ground than during any other time. Roberts arrived in Hollywood as just another semi-anonymous striver, not as the “game god” who had given the world Wing Commander. No one in Tinsel Town was lining up to interview him, and no one in the press paid all that much attention to what he got up to. Still, we can piece together a picture of his trajectory in which we can have reasonable confidence, even if some of the details remain hazy.
Roberts moved to Hollywood in the spring of 2001 with his windfall from the Digital Anvil buyout burning a hole in his pocket. Notwithstanding the fiasco that had been Wing Commander: The Movie, he still harbored serious ambitions of becoming a director, probably assuming that his ability to finance at least part of the budget of any film he was placed in charge of would give him a leg up. He even brought a preliminary script to show around town. It was called The American Knight, being a cinematic reinterpretation of another computer game: in this case, Origin Systems’s 1995 game Wings of Glory, which was itself yet another variation on the Wing Commander theme, dealing with the life of a World War I fighter ace in the air and on the ground. In an even more marked triumph of hope over experience, Roberts also nursed a dream of making a live-action Wing Commander television series. He founded a production company of his own, called Point of No Return Films, to forward both of these agendas. January of 2002 found Point of No Return at the Sundance Film Festival; according to E! Online, they “threw an after-hours shindig that attracted 250 revelers, with Treach and De La Soul among them.” It really did help Roberts’s cause to have some money to splash around.
But Roberts soon found that the people he met in Hollywood knew Wing Commander, if they knew it at all, only as a misbegotten flop of a film. And they weren’t much more interested in his World War I movie. They were, on the other hand, always ready to talk backroom business with someone who had some number of millions in his pocket, as Roberts did. What followed was a gradual but inexorable pivot away from being a filmmaker and toward being a film enabler, one of those who secured the cash that the creative types needed to do their thing. A watershed was reached in March of 2002, when Point of No Return Films morphed into Ascendant Pictures, whose focus was to be “improving film value in foreign territories (presales), attracting top talent and film projects, and generating equity investment in films.” It wasn’t the romantic life of an auteur, but it did show that Chris Roberts was learning to talk the talk of back-office Hollywood, aided and abetted by a network of more experienced hands that he was assembling around him. Among them was a German immigrant named Ortwin Freyermuth, who would become the most important and enduring business partner of Roberts’s post-Origin career.
Ortwin Freyermuth, right, discusses a director’s cut of Das Boot with the film’s original editor Hannes Nikel circa 1997. Like Chris Roberts, Freyermuth really does love movies.
Freyermuth was renowned in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms of Hollywood for having pioneered an incredibly useful funding model for American films. It hinged on a peculiarity of German tax law that had been intended to encourage local film-making but instead wound up becoming a demonstration of the law of unintended consequences, played out on an international stage. The original rule, as implemented by the German Ministry of Finance in the 1970s, stated that any money that a German resident invested into a film production could be immediately deducted from his or her taxable income as if it was a total loss. It was hoped that this would encourage more well-heeled Germans to invest in homegrown movies, in order to combat the creeping mono-culture of Hollywood and ensure that Germans would have films to see that dealt with contemporary life in their own country. In time, this well-meaning measure would produce just the opposite result.
Enter Ortwin Freyermuth, a lawyer who enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the mid-1980s to study international copyright law. When he stumbled across the German law I’ve just described in the course of his studies, he noted with no small excitement what it didn’t say: that the films that were deemed eligible for the tax deduction had to be German films. He arranged to fund the 1990 movie The Neverending Story II almost exclusively with German money. This first experiment in the field was not so egregious compared to what would come later, given that the movie was also shot in Germany, albeit using mostly American actors. Then again, it was only a proof of concept. Freyermuth co-founded Capella Films thereafter to make German financing a veritable way of life for Hollywood. “In the best Hollywood tradition,” wrote Variety in 1994, “the company is rife with layers of relationships, both contractual and personal, here and abroad, such that an organizational chart, if one existed, would have more lines and intersections than fractal math.” Such byzantine structures, which had a way of obscuring realities upon which people might otherwise look askance, were standard operating procedure for Freyermuth.
The Freyermuth model spread throughout Hollywood as the 1990s wore on. It seemed like a win-win, both to those in California and to the Germans who were suddenly funding so many of their movies. In some cases, you could just borrow the money you wanted to invest, use your investment to reduce your taxable income dramatically, then pay off the loan from the returns a year or two later. And there was nothing keeping you from doing this over and over, year after year. Large private-equity funds emerged in Germany, pooling the contributions of hundreds of shareholders to invest them in movies, 80 percent of them made outside of the country. These Medienfonds became as ordinary as any other form of financial planning for Herr und Frau Deutschland. They were great for people on the verge of retirement: make an investment just before retiring, then enjoy the return afterward when your tax rate was lower. They were great for spreading out and reducing the tax liability that accompanied a major windfall, great for parents wishing to move money into the hands of their grown children without getting hit by high inheritance taxes. For Hollywood, meanwhile, they turned into a money spigot like no other. Insiders took to calling it “stupid German money,” because the people behind the spigot tended to take it in stride even if the films they were investing in never turned much of a profit. The real point of the investment was the tax relief; any additional profits that emerged were just gravy. The highest tax bracket in Germany at the time was about 51.5 percent. If you were in this tax bracket, then as long as you got at least half of your money back, you came out ahead.
The sheer ubiquity of these media funds placed the German people’s elected representatives in Berlin in a delicate situation; a growing number of their own constituents were benefiting from the current state of the law. Nevertheless, in 1999 the Ministry of Finance made an attempt to stop the madness. It revised the rules to bring them into closer alignment with those that governed other, superficially similar European incentive schemes: to qualify, a film now had to either be made in Germany at least partially or have a German copyright owner. (A law of this sort in Luxembourg was the reason that the Wing Commander movie had been shot in that country.) But stupid German money was now too entrenched as a modus operandi for people on either side of the Atlantic to walk away from it without putting up a fight. Artful dodgers like Ortwin Freyermuth realized that they could sell the copyright to a Hollywood production to a German media fund, whilst inserting into the sales contract a right to buy it back at a future date for an agreed-upon price. Far from being hobbled by the change in law, they realized that they could use it to charge a premium for the tax relief they were providing to the citizens of Germany. For example, the Germans paid $94 million to Paramount Pictures for the copyright to the 2001 videogame adaptation Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. When they sold it back, the Germans were paid only $83.8 million. The tax benefits were so great that it was still worth it. By now, half of all the foreign money pouring into Hollywood was coming from the single country of Germany: $1.1 billion in 2004 alone.
Despite their ongoing popularity among the well-heeled classes, the media funds became more and more controversial in Germany as the young millennium wore on. Germany was, it was more and more loudly complained, effectively subsidizing Hollywood using money that ought to have been going to roads, schools, hospitals, and defense. Stefan Arndt, the producer of the rather wonderful German movies Run Lola Run and Good Bye Lenin!, noted that he had had to go outside his homeland to finance them because his fellow citizens all had their gazes fixed so firmly on Hollywood. “It’s crazy,” he said. “Every other country in the world ties strings to its film subsidies.” Even a group of hardcore Tolkien fans sleeping in line the night of the premiere of The Return of the King, the third film in Peter Jackson’s disproportionately German-funded Lord of the Rings trilogy, thought the situation a little bit absurd when they were told about it: “I don’t think that’s good, because I think that the three films carry themselves, that they put in enough money, that it doesn’t necessarily have to be financed with taxes.”
Whether we wish to see him as a devil tempting a young Faust named Chris Roberts, or just as a savvy man of business who found a mentee he deemed well worth his time, Ortwin Freyermuth showed our once and future game developer how this particular game was played. In April of 2004, Roberts was credited onscreen for the first time in a finished wide-release film as an executive producer. As if to underscore the transition he had made from creator to enabler, it was not a terribly Chris Roberts sort of movie. The Punisher was based on a Marvel Comics character, but it was no family-friendly superhero movie either. It was a grim, dark, and brutally violent revenge fantasy that made Dirty Harry look cute and cuddly. “At the end,” wrote the late great Roger Ebert in his review, “we feel battered down and depressed, emotions we probably don’t seek from comic-book heroes.” Whatever else you can say about Wing Commander, it does care deeply about the nobler human virtues which The Punisher submerges under fountains of blood, even if Chris Roberts is often irredeemably clumsy at presenting them.
Although The Punisher may have had a B-movie attitude, it wasn’t a B-movie, any more than Wing Commander had been. It was made for a budget of $33 million, with a cast that included John Travolta. (Admittedly, he sleepwalks through his performance as if he can barely be bothered to learn his lines, but one can’t have everything.) However joyless fuddy-duddies like yours truly and Roger Ebert may find movies like this, there was and is a market for them. The Punisher earned $20 million more than it had cost to make at the box office even before the long tail of cable-television showings and home-video rentals was factored into the equation.
Chris Roberts was off and running as a backstage Hollywood player. At the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2005, his name could be seen alongside those of George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh among the producer credits for The Jacket, an arty but flawed science-fiction film starring Adrien Brody, Keira Knightley, Kris Kristofferson, and the future Agent 007 Daniel Craig, with a soundtrack by Brian Eno. Again, these names are not the stuff of B-movies.
After The Jacket, Ascendant Pictures graduated from being an ancillary source of funding to becoming one of the primary production houses behind four reasonably high-profile independent features during 2005 and 2006. None of Lord of War, The Big White, Ask the Dust, or Lucky Number Slevin has gone down in film history as a deathless classic. Yet all of them could boast of A-list actors: Nicolas Cage, Jared Leto, Ethan Hawke, Robin Williams, Holly Hunter, Woody Harrelson, Colin Farrell, Salma Hayek, Donald Sutherland, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, and Bruce Willis can all be found amongst their casts.
As you have probably guessed, all of these films were funded primarily with German money. The aggregate return on them was middling at best. Lord of War and Lucky Number Slevin did pretty well; The Big White and Ask the Dust flopped miserably. As already noted, though, the fact that most of their investors were more concerned about the tax benefits than a more conventional return on investment made this less of an issue than it might otherwise have been. Then, too, like mutual funds on the conventional stock market, the German media funds put money into many movies in order to avoid a single point of failure. A film that became an unexpected hit could easily offset two or three duds.
Chris Roberts had arrived in the Hollywood inner circle — perhaps still the outer edge of the inner circle, but still. He had come a long way from that nerdy bedroom coder who had bumped into an artist from Origin Systems one day in an Austin games shop. Now he was living in a luxury condo in the Hollywood Hills, with one live-in girlfriend and a former one stalking him. (Oddly, it would be the latter whom he would wind up marrying.) I’ve been pretty hard on Roberts in these articles, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to be so again — harder than ever, in fact — before we’re finished. But two things he most definitely is not are stupid or lazy. I wrote at the outset of this pair of articles that few people have ever stretched so thin a thread of creative talent as far as he has. Let me amend that bit of snark now by acknowledging that he could never have done so if he wasn’t smart and driven in a very different sort of way. And let me make it crystal clear as well that nothing I’ve written about Roberts’s tenure in Hollywood so far should necessarily lead us to criticize him in any but the most tempered of ways. In exploiting a loophole in German tax law for all it was worth, he wasn’t doing anything that tons of others — a full-fledged cottage industry worth of them, on both sides of the Atlantic — weren’t also doing. But there’s more to the story in his case. Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth were actually near the center of one of the biggest financial scandals in modern German history, where dubious ethics crossed over into outright fraud.
Hollywood accounting is never simple. In that spirit, Ascendant Pictures spun off another company not long after its own founding. The wholly-owned subsidiary Rising Star Pictures was created to “closely cooperate with VIP Medienfonds Film and Entertainment”; this was the largest of all the German media funds, which collected almost half a billion Euros every year from its shareholders. Rising Star’s purpose was to be VIP’s anointed agent on the left side of the Atlantic, directing that fire hose of stupid German money around Hollywood. This meant the films of Ascendant, yes, but also those of others, to which Rising Star presumably charged a brokering fee. The final incarnation of Ascendant’s website, which is for some reason still extant, claims that Rising Star was involved in the funding of fourteen films in 2003 alone. A version of their site from March of 2005, accessible today via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, heavily stresses the relationship with VIP, calling Rising Star the latter’s “primary placement agent.” This was a big, big deal, given the sheer quantity of money that VIP was taking in and paying out; more than $250 million came into Rising Star from VIP during 2003. The speed and scale of Chris Roberts’s rise in Hollywood becomes even more impressive when figures like these are taken into consideration.
Andreas Schmid
Unfortunately, Andreas Schmid, the head of VIP, was arrested for tax fraud in Cologne in October of 2005. It seemed that he had not been putting most of the money he collected into movies with even ostensibly German owners, as the law required. At regular intervals, Schmid dutifully gave his shareholders a list of films into which he claimed to have invested their contributions. In actuality, however, VIP used only 20 percent of their money for its advertised purpose of funding movies. Schmid deposited the remaining 80 percent into his bank, either parking it there to earn long-term interest or sending it elsewhere from there, to places where he thought he could get a higher rate of return. He then sent fake earnings reports to his shareholders. By defrauding both the government and his clients in this way, he could make a lot of money for himself and his partners in crime. There is reason to believe that Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth were among said partners, working the scam with him through Rising Star. I’ll return to that subject shortly.
For now, though, know that Schmid may have gotten so greedy because he knew the jig was soon to be up. Rumors were swirling in both Hollywood and Berlin throughout 2005 that the German Ministry of Finance had just about had enough of watching its tax money fly out of the country. The VIP Media scandal proved the last straw, if one was needed. In November of 2005, just one month after Schmid’s arrest, it was announced that blanket tax write-offs for film investments of any stripe were a thing of the past. Going forward, Hollywood would have to find another golden goose.
Even if they weren’t in on the fix, so to speak, the arrest of Schmid and the elimination of their primary funding mechanism could only have had a deleterious effect on Ascendant Pictures. Just when they had seemed to be hitting the big time, the ground had shifted beneath their feet. Those films that were already paid for by Germans could still be made, but there would be no more like them. The last Ascendant movie from the salad days to emerge from the pipeline was Outlander, their most expensive one ever and arguably also their worst one yet; not released until 2008 due to a whole host of difficulties getting it done, it managed to lose $40 million on a $47 million budget.
Deprived of the golden eggs, Ascendant blundered from lowlight to lowlight. They had to renege on a promise to Kevin Costner to line up the financing for a movie called Taming Ben Taylor, about “a grouchy, divorced man who refuses to sell his failing vineyard to the golf course next door.” Costner, who had been so excited about the movie that he had co-written the screenplay himself, sued Ascendant for $8 million for breach of contract; the case was settled in March of 2008 under undisclosed terms.
The first and only film that Ascendant helped to fund without German money only served to advertise how far down they had come in the world. Keeping with the golf theme, the low-rent Caddyshack ripoff Who’s Your Caddy?, which made Wing Commander look like Hamlet, was released in 2007 and failed to earn back its $7 million budget. It’s best remembered today for an anecdotal report that Bill Clinton loved it. By this point, Ascendant was little more than Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth; everyone else had jumped ship. (Freyermuth seems genuinely fond of Roberts. He has stuck with him through thick and thin.) The company would nominally continue to exist for another three years, but would shepherd no more movies to completion. Its final notices in the Hollywood trade press were in association with Black Water Transit, a locus of chaos, conflict, and dysfunction that culminated in a film so incoherent that it would never be released.
Over in Germany, Andreas Schmid was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison in November of 2007. Yet the fallout from the VIP scandal was still ongoing. Shortly after his conviction in criminal court, 250 former shareholders in his fund, from whom the German government was aggressively demanding the taxes they ought to have paid earlier, launched a civil lawsuit against Schmid and the UniCredit Bank of Munich, where he had been depositing the money he claimed was being used to fund movies. The case hinged on a single deceptively simple question: had the information that Schmid sent to his shareholders in the reports issued by his fund been knowingly falsified? Some of the documents from these court proceedings, which would be decided in favor of the plaintiffs on December 30, 2011, can be accessed online at the German Ministry of Justice. I’ve spent some time going over them in the hope of learning more about the role played by Roberts and Freyermuth.
It’s been a challenge because the documents in question are not the trial transcripts, transcripts of witness interviews, nor the detailed briefs one might wish to have. They are rather strictly procedural documents, used by the court to schedule its sessions, outline the arguments being made before it, and handle the other logistics of the proceedings. Nonetheless, they contain some tantalizing tidbits that point more in the direction of Roberts and Freyermuth as co-conspirators with Schmid than as his innocent victims. I’ll tell you now what I’ve been able to glean from them as a non-lawyer and non-accountant. I’ve also made them available for download from this site, for any readers who might happen to have a more nuanced command of the German language and German law than I do.
The claimants in the lawsuit show great interest in Ascendant’s daughter company Rising Star, which they believe had no legitimate reason for existing at all, a judgment which is confirmed by the court in a preliminary draft of the final ruling. A document dated June 27, 2008, contains the startling charge that Rising Star “never produced films, but were merely an intermediary layer used for concealment,”[1]Diese produzierten nie Filme, sondern waren lediglich eine zur Verschleierung eingeschaltete Zwischenebene. citing emails written by Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth to Andreas Schmid between 2003 and 2005 that have been submitted into evidence. (Sadly, they are not included among these papers.) Another document, dated May 15, 2009, calls Rising Star “an artificially imposed layer.”[2]Eine künstlich dazwischen geschaltete Ebene. The final judgment concludes that Rising Star was an essential conduit of the fraud. What with Rising Star being “the primary placement agency for VIP,” as was acknowledged on the Ascendant website, all of the money passed through it. But instead of putting the entirety of the money into movies, it only used 20 percent of it for that purpose, funneling the rest of it back to the UniCredit Bank of Munich, Andreas Schmid’s co-defendant in the shareholder lawsuit. Even the 20 percent that stayed in Hollywood was placed with other production companies that took over the responsibility of overseeing the actual movies. Rising Star, in other words, was nothing but a shell company, a false front for getting the money from the investment fund into Schmid’s bank.
Both Roberts and Freyermuth were interviewed at least once, presumably in the United States, by investigators from the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office; this must have been done in the run-up to Schmid’s earlier, criminal trial. They were witnesses in that trial rather than defendants, yet the facts from their testimony that are cited here leave one wondering why that should be the case. From a document dated May 15, 2009: “The structure provided by VIP was a ‘pro forma transaction,’ solely intended to achieve a certain tax advantage. This was also explained by witness Freyermuth.”[3]Die von VIP vorgegebene Struktur sei ein „Pro-Forma-Geschäft“ gewesen, alleine mit der Zielsetzung einen gewissen Steuervorteil zu erreichen. Dies habe auch der Zeuge Freyermuth so erläutert. The claimants cite the testimony of Roberts and Freyermuth as evidence that “the fund managers therefore instructed their American partners to submit inflated estimates.”[4]Die Fondsverantwortlichen hätten deshalb ihre amerikanischen Partner veranlasst, überhöhte Schätzungen abzugeben. Likewise, it is written that Roberts and Freyermuth confessed to a falsified “profit distribution for the film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, which, according to the fund’s information, was 45 percent produced by VIP. In reality, the profit distribution did not correspond to the alleged 45-percent co-production share; it was significantly less favorable.”[5]Insoweit greift die Klageseite auf eine Gewinnverteilung (sog „waterfall“) für den Film „Das Parfum“ zurück, der nach den Fondsangaben zu 45 % von VIP 4 produziert worden sei (sog. Coproduktion). Tatsächlich habe die Gewinnverteilung keinesfalls dem angeblichen Co.-Produktionsanteil von 45 % entsprochen, sie sei wesentlich ungünstiger gewesen. Even with the most open of minds, it is very hard to read statements like this and conclude that Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth were anything other than active, willing co-conspirators in a large-scale, concerted fraud perpetrated on German investors and ordinary taxpayers.
In a document dated May 17, 2010, it is stated that Freyermuth and Roberts are being summoned to appear as witnesses before this court, on the morning and afternoon respectively of July 16, 2010. But a report dated July 8, 2010, states that “the hearing scheduled for July 16, 2010, is cancelled after witness Freyermuth informed the court that he could not appear on such short notice, and the summons for witness Chris Roberts was returned to the court as undeliverable.”[6]Der Termin vom 16. Juli 2010 wird aufgehoben, nachdem der Zeuge Freyermuth mitgeteilt hat, nicht so kurzfristig erscheinen zu können, und die Ladung des Zeugen Chris Roberts als unzustellbar wieder in den Gerichtseinlauf gekommen ist. On August 3, 2010, the court states that they will be ordered to appear again, this time on September 20, 2010, saying that Freyermuth will be told to inform Roberts, who apparently still cannot be reached, about the summons.[7]Zu diesem Termin sind die Zeugen Freyermuth und Roberts, letzterer über Freyermuth, zu laden. However, the paper trail ends there. It seems most likely that the two never did come to Munich to answer questions before the court.
Assuming all of this really is as bad as it looks, the final question we are left with is why and how Roberts and Freyermuth escaped prosecution. This question I cannot even begin to answer, other than to say that international prosecutions for financial malfeasance are notoriously difficult to coordinate and carry off. Perhaps the German authorities decided they had the ringleader in Andreas Schmid, and that was good enough. Perhaps Roberts and Freyermuth were given immunity in return for their testimony about the mechanics of the fraud in the United States. Or maybe there were some extenuating circumstances of which I am not aware, hard as it is to imagine what they might be.
In July of 2010, Roberts and Freyermuth sold Ascendant Pictures and all of its intellectual property to a film studio, film school, film distributor, real-estate developer, venture-capital house, and children’s charity — never put all your eggs in one basket! — called Bigfoot, located in, of all places, the Philippines. Roberts had left Hollywood some weeks or months before this transaction was finalized; thus the undeliverable court summons from Germany, addressed to the old Ascendant office. I do not know whether or how much he and Freyermuth ended up profiting personally from the VIP Media affair when all was said and done. I can only say that he does not seem to have been a poor man when he moved back to Austin to think about his next steps in life.
Most of you probably know what Chris Roberts got up to after leaving Hollywood, but a brief precis may be in order by way of conclusion, given that it will be many years at best before we meet him again in these histories.
Man of good timing that he was, Roberts started looking for fresh opportunities just as the new Kickstarter crowd-funding platform was tempting dozens of figures from the old days of gaming to launch new projects. In 2012, he joined together with a number of his earlier business partners, from both Digital Anvil and Ascendant Pictures — Erin Roberts, Tony Zurovec, and Ortwin Freyermuth were all among them — to found Cloud Imperium Games and kick-start Star Citizen, the “virtual life in space” game that he had once thought Freelancer would become. Brilliantly executed from a promotional standpoint, it turned into the biggest crowd-funded game ever, raising hundreds of millions of dollars.
As of this writing, thirteen years later, Star Citizen is officially still in the early alpha stage of development, although it is actively played every day by tens of thousands of subscribers who are willing to pay for the privilege. A single-player variant called Squadron 42 — the Starlancer to Star Citizen’s Freelancer — was originally slated for release in 2014, and is thus now eleven years behind schedule. Cloud Imperium promises that it is coming soon. (If and when it finally does surface, it will include motion-captured footage, shot in 2015, of Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson, Andy Serkis, and Gary Oldman.)
Having long since exhausted its initial rounds of crowd-funding, Cloud Imperium now pays its bills largely through pay-to-win schemes involving in-game spaceships and other equipment, often exorbitantly priced; Ars Technica reported in January of 2024 that buying the full hangar of ships would set up you back a cool $48,000, almost enough to make you start looking around for the real spaceship in the deal. By any standard, the amount of money Cloud Imperium has brought in over the years is staggering. Assuming the whole thing doesn’t implode in the coming months, Star Citizen seems set to become the world’s first $1-billion videogame. While we wait, Wing Commander IV, the last game Chris Roberts actually finished, looks forward to its swift-approaching 30-year anniversary.
Naturally, all of this has made Cloud Imperium and Chris Roberts himself magnets for controversy. The loyal fans who continue to log on every day insist that the scale of what Star Citizen is trying to achieve is so enormous that the time and money being spent on it are unavoidable. Others accuse the game of being nothing but a giant scam, of a size and shameless audacity that would put a twinkle in even Andreas Schmid’s jaundiced eyes. Some of those who think the truth is most likely somewhere in between these extremes — a group that includes me — wonder if we should really be encouraging people to upload so much of their existence into a game in the first place. It seems to me that games that are meant to be enjoyed in the real world are healthier than those that set themselves up as a replacement for it.
Even if everything about Star Citizen is on the up-and-up, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that breathtaking incompetence has played as big a part as over-ambition in running up the budget and pushing out the timeline. I tend to suspect that some sort of spectacular collapse is more probable than a triumphant version 1.0 as the climax of the Star Citizen saga. But we shall see… we shall see. Either way, I have a feeling that Chris Roberts will emerge unscathed. Some guys just have all the luck, don’t they?
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Sources: Computer Gaming World of November 1999, August 2000, and May 2003; PC Gamer of November 2000; Los Angeles Times of August 14 2008; Der Spiegel of June 13 1993; Variety of February 24 1994 and November 13 2007; Los Angeles Daily News of March 5 2008; Billboard of April 19 2005, May 10 2005, September 20 2005, October 4 2005, and October 11 2005; Austin Business Journal of April 20 2001; Die Welt of December 6 2009; Deutsches Ärzteblatt of May 2 2003; New York Times of December 13 2004; Forbes of May 31 2019.
Online sources about games include a 2002 Wing Commander retrospective by the German website PC Player Forever; a 2000 GameSpot interview with Chris Roberts; Freelancer previews on ActionTrip and Games Domain; the old Freelancer News site; and the GameSpot review of Freelancer. Vintage reports of Digital Anvil’s acquisition by Microsoft can be found on GameSpot, IGN, Microsoft’s home page, and EuroGamer.
Online sources about movies include “Send in the Clowns (But Beware of Their Funny Money)” by Doug Richardson, Roger Ebert’s review of The Punisher, a profile of Ortwin Freyermuth at Alumniportal Deutschland, “How to Finance a Hollywood Blockbuster” and “Hollywood’s Big Loss” by Edward Jay Epstein at Slate, the current zombie version of Ascendant’s website and the more incriminating 2005 version, Bigfoot’s 2011-vintage website, E! Online’s report from the 2002 Sundance festival, “Medienfonds als ‘Stupid German Money'” by Dr. Matthias Kurp at Medienmaerkte.de, “Filmfonds für Reiche” at ansTageslicht.de, “Was sind Medienfonds?” at Investoren Beteiligung, and “Stupid German Money” by Günter Jagenburg at Deutschlandfunk. I made extensive use of the Wing Commander Combat Information Center, and especially its voluminous news archives that stretch all the way back to 1998.
As noted above, I’ve made the documents I found relating to Rising Star in the class-action lawsuit against Andreas Schmid available for local download. By all means, German speakers, dive in and tell me if you can find anything I’ve missed! I retrieved them from the official German Federal Gazette, or Bundesanzeiger.
My invaluable cheat sheet for this article, as for the last, was “The Chris Roberts Theory of Everything” by Nick Monroe from Gameranx.
But my superhero and secret weapon was our own stalwart commenter Busca, who used his far greater familiarity with the German Web and the German language to find most of the German-language sources shown above, and even provided some brief summaries of their content for orientation purposes. I owe him a huge debt of gratitude. Do note, however, that the buck stops with me as far as factual accuracy goes, and that all of the opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are strictly my own.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | Diese produzierten nie Filme, sondern waren lediglich eine zur Verschleierung eingeschaltete Zwischenebene. |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Eine künstlich dazwischen geschaltete Ebene. |
| ↑3 | Die von VIP vorgegebene Struktur sei ein „Pro-Forma-Geschäft“ gewesen, alleine mit der Zielsetzung einen gewissen Steuervorteil zu erreichen. Dies habe auch der Zeuge Freyermuth so erläutert. |
| ↑4 | Die Fondsverantwortlichen hätten deshalb ihre amerikanischen Partner veranlasst, überhöhte Schätzungen abzugeben. |
| ↑5 | Insoweit greift die Klageseite auf eine Gewinnverteilung (sog „waterfall“) für den Film „Das Parfum“ zurück, der nach den Fondsangaben zu 45 % von VIP 4 produziert worden sei (sog. Coproduktion). Tatsächlich habe die Gewinnverteilung keinesfalls dem angeblichen Co.-Produktionsanteil von 45 % entsprochen, sie sei wesentlich ungünstiger gewesen. |
| ↑6 | Der Termin vom 16. Juli 2010 wird aufgehoben, nachdem der Zeuge Freyermuth mitgeteilt hat, nicht so kurzfristig erscheinen zu können, und die Ladung des Zeugen Chris Roberts als unzustellbar wieder in den Gerichtseinlauf gekommen ist. |
| ↑7 | Zu diesem Termin sind die Zeugen Freyermuth und Roberts, letzterer über Freyermuth, zu laden. |
