The Voyage of Magellan, Chapter 18: Sex, Politics, and Religion
Grim Fandango
My one big regret was the PlayStation version [of Broken Sword]. No one thought it would sell, so we kept it like the PC version. In hindsight, I think if we had introduced direct control in this game, it would have been enormous.
— Charles Cecil of Revolution Software, speaking from the Department of Be Careful What You Wish For
One day in June of 1995, Tim Schafer came to work at LucasArts and realized that, for the first time in a long time, he didn’t have anything pressing to do. Full Throttle, his biker movie of an adventure game, had been released several weeks before. Now, all of the initial crush of interviews and marketing logistics was behind him. A mountain had been climbed. So, as game designers do, he started to think about what his next Everest should be.
Schafer has told in some detail how he came up with the core ideas behind Grim Fandango over the course of that summer of 1995.
The truth is, I had part of the Fandango idea before I did Full Throttle. I wanted to do a game that would feature those little papier-mâché folk-art skeletons from Mexico. I was looking at their simple shapes and how the bones were just painted on the outside, and I thought, “Texture maps! 3D! The bones will be on the outside! It’ll look cool!”
But then I was stuck. I had these skeletons walking around the Land of the Dead. So what? What did they do? Where were they going? What did they want? Who’s the main character? Who’s the villain? The mythology said that the dead walk the dark plane of the underworld known as Mictlān for four years, after which their souls arrive at the ninth plane, the land of eternal rest. Sounds pretty “questy” to me. There you have it: a game.
“Not cool enough,” said Peter Tscale, my lead artist. “A guy walking in a supernatural world? What’s he doing? Supernatural things? It just sounds boring to me.”
So, I revamped the story. Adventure games are all fantasies really, so I had to ask myself, “Who would people want to be in a game? What would people want to do?” And in the Land of the Dead, who would people rather be than Death himself? Being the Grim Reaper is just as cool as being a biker, I decided. And what does the Grim Reaper do? He picks up people who have died and carts them over from the other world. Just like a driver of a taxi or limo.
Okay, so that’s Manny Calavera, our main character. But who’s the bad guy? What’s the plot? I had just seen Chinatown, and I really liked the whole water-supply/real-estate scam that Noah Cross had going there, so of course I tried to rip that off and have Manny be a real-estate salesman who got caught up in a real-estate scandal. Then he was just like the guys in Glengarry Glen Ross, always looking for the good leads. But why would Hector Lemans, my villain, want real estate? Why would anyone? They’re dead! They’re only souls. What do souls in the Land of the Dead want?
They want to get out! They want safe passage out, just like in Casablanca! The Land of the Dead is a transitory place, and everybody’s waiting around for their travel papers. So Manny is a travel agent, selling tickets on the big train out of town, and Hector’s stealing the tickets…
The missing link between Full Throttle and Grim Fandango is Manny’s chauffeur and mechanic Glottis, a literal speed demon.
This, then, became the elevator pitch for Grim Fandango. Begin with the rich folklore surrounding Mexico’s Day of the Dead, a holiday celebrated each year just after Halloween, which combines European Christian myths about death and the afterlife with the older, indigenous ones that still haunt the Aztec ruins of Teopanzolco. Then combine it with classic film noir to wind up with Raymond Chandler in a Latino afterlife. It was nothing if not a strikingly original idea for an adventure game. But there was also one more, almost equally original part of it: to do it in 3D.
To hear Tim Schafer tell the story, the move away from LucasArts’s traditional pixel art and into the realm of points, polygons, and textures was motivated by his desire to deliver a more cinematic experience. By no means does this claim lack credibility; as you can gather by reading what he wrote above, Schafer was and is a passionate film buff, who tends to resort to talking in movie titles when other forms of communication fail him. The environments in previous LucasArts adventure games — even the self-consciously cinematic Full Throttle — could only be shown from the angle the pixel artists had chosen to drawn them from. In this sense, they were like a theatrical play, or a really old movie, from the time before Orson Welles emancipated his camera and let it begin to roam freely through his sets in Citizen Kane. By using 3D, Schafer could become the Orson Welles of adventure games; he would be able to deliver dramatic angles and closeups as the player’s avatar moved about, would be able to put the player in his world rather than forever forcing her to look down on it from on-high. This is the story he still tells today, and there’s no reason to believe it isn’t true enough, as far as it goes.
Nevertheless, it’s only half of the full story. The other half is a messier, less idealistic tale of process and practical economics.
Reckoned in their cost of production per hour of play time delivered, adventure games stood apart from any other genre in their industry, and not in a good way. Building games entirely out of bespoke, single-use puzzles and assets was expensive in contrast to the more process-intensive genres. As time went on and gamers demanded ever bigger, prettier adventures, in higher resolutions with more colors, this became more and more of a problem. Already in 1995, when adventure games were still selling very well, the production costs that were seemingly inherent to the genre were a cause for concern. And the following year, when the genre failed to produce a single million-plus-selling breakout hit for the first time in half a decade, they began to look like an existential threat. At that point, LucasArts’s decision to address the issue proactively in Grim Fandango by switching from pixel art to 3D suddenly seemed a very wise move indeed. For a handful of Silicon Graphics workstations running 3D-modelling software could churn out images far more quickly than an army of pixel artists, at a fraction of the cost per image. If the graphics that resulted lacked some of the quirky, hand-drawn, cartoon-like personality that had marked LucasArts’s earlier adventure games, they made up for that by virtue of their flexibility: a scene could be shown from a different angle just by changing a few parameters instead of having to redraw it from scratch. This really did raise the prospect of making the more immersive games that Tim Schafer desired. But from a bean counter’s point of view, the best thing about it was the cost savings.
And there was one more advantage as well, one that began to seem ever more important as time went on and the market for adventure games running on personal computers continued to soften. Immersive 3D was more or less the default setting of the Sony PlayStation, which had come roaring out of Japan in 1995 to seize the title of the most successful games console of the twentieth century just before the curtain fell on that epoch. In addition to its 3D hardware, the PlayStation sported a CD drive, memory cards for saving state, and a slightly older typical user than the likes of Nintendo and Sega. And yet, although a number of publishers ported their 2D computer-born adventure games to the PlayStation, they never felt entirely at home there, having been designed for a mouse rather than a game controller.[1]A mouse was available as an accessory for the PlayStation, but it was never very popular. A 3D adventure game with a controller-friendly interface might be a very different proposition. If it played its cards right, it would open the door to an installed base of customers five to ten times the size of the extant market for games on personal computers.
Working with 3D graphics in the late 1990s required some clever sleight of hand if they weren’t to end up looking terrible. Grim Fandango’s masterstroke was to make all of its characters — like the protagonist Manny Calavera, whom you see above — mere skeletons, whose faces are literally painted onto their skulls. (The characters are shown to speak by manipulating the texture maps that represent their faces, not by manipulating the underlying 3D models themselves.) This approach gave the game a look reminiscent of another of its cinematic inspirations, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, whilst conveniently avoiding all of the complications of trying to render pliant flesh. A win-win, as they say. Or, as Tim Schafer said: “Instead of fighting the tech limitations of 3D, you have to embrace them and turn them into a style.”
But I’m afraid I’ve gotten slightly ahead of myself. This constellation of ideas, affordances, problems, and solutions was still in a nascent form in November of 1995, when LucasArts hired a young programmer fresh out of university by the name of Bret Mogilefsky. Mogilefsky was a known quantity already, having worked at LucasArts as a tester on and off while he was earning his high-school and university diplomas. Now, he was entrusted with the far more high-profile task of making SCUMM, LucasArts’s venerable adventure engine, safe for 3D.
After struggling for a few months, he concluded that this latest paradigm shift was just too extreme for an engine that had been created on a Commodore 64 circa 1986 and ported and patched from there. He would have to tear SCUMM down so far in order to add 3D functionality that it would be easier and cleaner simply to make a new engine from scratch. He told his superiors this, and they gave him permission to do so — albeit suspecting all the while, Mogilefsky is convinced, that he would eventually realize that game engines are easier envisioned than implemented and come crawling back to SCUMM. By no means was he the first bright spark at LucasArts who thought he could reinvent the adventuring wheel.
But he did prove the first one to call his bosses’ bluff. The engine that he called GrimE (“Grim Engine,” but pronounced like the synonym for “dirt”) used a mixture of pre-rendered and real-time-rendered 3D. The sets in which Manny and his friends and enemies played out their dramas would be the former; the aforementioned actors themselves would be the latter. GrimE was a piebald beast in another sense as well: that of cheerfully appropriating whatever useful code Mogilefsky happened to find lying around the house at LucasArts, most notably from the first-person shooter Jedi Knight.
Like SCUMM before it, GrimE provided relatively non-technical designers like Tim Schafer with a high-level scripting language that they could use themselves to code all of the mechanics of plot and puzzles. Mogilefsky adapted for this task Lua, a new, still fairly obscure programming language out of Brazil. It was an inspired choice. Elegant, learnable, and yet infinitely and easily extendible, Lua has gone on to become a staple language of modern game development, to be found today in such places as the wildly popular Roblox platform.
The most frustrating aspects of GrimE from a development perspective all clustered around the spots where its two approaches to 3D graphics rubbed against one another, producing a good deal of friction in the process. If, for example, Manny was to drink a glass of whiskey, the pre-rendered version of the glass that was part of the background set had to be artfully swapped with its real-time-rendered incarnation as soon as Manny began to interact with it. Getting such actions to look seamless absorbed vastly more time and energy than anyone had expected it to.
In fact, if the bean counters had been asked to pass judgment, they would have had a hard time labeling GrimE a success at all under their metrics. Grim Fandango was in active development for almost three full years, and may have ended up costing as much as $3 million. This was at least two and a half times as much as Full Throttle had cost, and placed it in the same ballpark as The Curse of Monkey Island, LucasArts’s last and most audiovisually lavish SCUMM adventure, which was released a year before Grim Fandango. Further, despite employing a distinctly console-like control scheme in lieu of pointing and clicking with the mouse, Grim Fandango would never make it to the PlayStation; GrimE ended up being just too demanding to be made to work on such limited hardware.[2]Escape from Monkey Island, the only other game ever made using GrimE, was ported to the more capable PlayStation 2 in 2001.
All that aside, though, the new engine remained an impressive technical feat, and did succeed in realizing most of Tim Schafer’s aesthetic goals for it. Even the cost savings it apparently failed to deliver come with some mitigating factors. Making the first game with a new engine is always more expensive than making the ones that follow; there was no reason to conclude that GrimE couldn’t deliver real cost savings on LucasArts’s next adventure game. Then, too, for all that Grim Fandango wound up costing two and a half times as much as Full Throttle, it was also well over two and a half times as long as that game.
“Game production schedules are like flying jumbo jets,” says Tim Schafer. “It’s very intense at the takeoff and landing, but in the middle there’s this long lull.” The landing is the time of crunch, of course, and the crunch on Grim Fandango was protracted and brutal even by the industry’s usual standards, stretching out for months and months of sixteen- and eighteen-hour days. For by the beginning of 1998, the game was way behind schedule and way over budget, facing a marketplace that was growing more and more unkind to the adventure genre in general. This was not a combination to instill patience in the LucasArts executive suite. Schafer’s team did get the game done by the autumn of 1998, as they had been ordered to do in no uncertain terms, but only at a huge cost to their psychological and even physical health.
Bret Mogilefsky remembers coming to Schafer at one point to tell him that he just didn’t think he could go on like this, that he simply had to have a break. He was met with no sympathy whatsoever. To be fair, he probably shouldn’t have expected any. Crunch was considered par for the course in the industry during this era, and LucasArts was among the worst of its practitioners. Long hours spent toiling for ridiculously low wages — Mogilefsky was hired to be the key technical cog in this multi-million-dollar project for a salary of about $30,000 per year — were considered the price you paid for the privilege of working at The Star Wars Company.
Even setting aside the personal toll it took on the people who worked there, crunch did nothing positive for the games themselves. As we’ll see, Grim Fandango shows the scars of crunch most obviously in its dodgy puzzle design. Good puzzles result from a methodical, iterative process of testing and carefully considering the resulting feedback. Grim Fandango did not benefit from such a process, and this lack is all too plainly evident.
But before I continue making some of you very, very mad at me, let me take some time to note the strengths of Grim Fandango, which are every bit as real as its weaknesses. Indeed, if I squint just right, so that my eyes only take in its strengths, I have no problem understanding why it’s to be found on so many lists of “The Best Adventure Games Ever,” sometimes even at the very top.
There’s no denying the stuff that Grim Fandango does well. Its visual aesthetic, which I can best describe as 1930s Art Deco meets Mexican folk art meets 1940s gangster flick, is unforgettable. And it’s married to a script that positively crackles with wit and pathos. Our hero Manny is the rare adventure-game character who can be said to go through an actual character arc, who grows and evolves over the course of his story. The driving force behind the plot is his love for a woman named Meche. But his love isn’t the puppy love that Guybrush Threepwood has for Elaine in the Monkey Island games; the relationship is more nuanced, more adult, more complicated, and its ultimate resolution is all the more moving for that.
How do you create real stakes in a story where everyone is already dead? The Land of the Death’s equivalent of death is “sprouting,” in which a character is turned into a bunch of flowers and forced to live another life in that form. Why shouldn’t the dead fear life as much as the living fear death?
Tim Schafer did not grow up with the Latino traditions that are such an inextricable part of Grim Fandango. Yet the game never feels like the exercise in clueless or condescending cultural tourism it might easily have become. On the contrary, the setting feels full-bodied, lived-in, natural. The cause is greatly aided by a stellar cast of voice actors with just the right accents. The Hollywood veteran Tony Plana, who plays Manny, is particularly good, teasing out exactly the right blend of world-weary cynicism and tarnished romanticism. And Maria Canalas, who plays Meche, is equally perfect in her role. The non-verbal soundtrack by Peter McConnell is likewise superb, a mixture of mariachi music and cool jazz that shouldn’t work but does. Sometimes it soars to the forefront, but more often it tinkles away in the background, setting the mood. You’d only notice it if it was gone — but trust me, then you would really notice.
This is a big game as well as a striking and stylish one — in fact, by most reckonings the biggest adventure that LucasArts ever made. Each of its four acts, which neatly correspond to the four years that the average soul must spend wandering the underworld before going to his or her final rest, is almost big enough to be a self-contained game in its own right. Over the course of Grim Fandango, Manny goes from being a down-on-his-luck Grim Reaper cum travel agent to a nightlife impresario, from the captain of an ocean liner to a prisoner laboring in an underwater mine. The story does arguably peak too early; the second act, an extended homage to Casablanca with Manny in the role of Humphrey Bogart, is so beautifully realized that much of what follows is slightly diminished by the comparison. Be that as it may, though, it doesn’t mean any of what follows is bad.
The jump cut to Manny’s new life as a bar owner in the port city of Rubacava at the beginning of the second act is to my mind the most breathtaking moment of the game, the one where you first realize how expansive its scope and ambition really are.
All told, then, I have no real beef with anyone who chooses to label Grim Fandango an aesthetic masterpiece. If there was an annual award for style in adventure games, this game would have won it easily in 1998, just as Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle would have taken the prize for 1995. Sadly, though, it seems to me that the weaknesses of both games are also the same. In both of their cases, once I move beyond the aesthetics and the storytelling and turn to the gameplay, some of the air starts to leak out of the balloon.
The interactive aspects of Grim Fandango — you know, all that stuff that actually makes it a game — are dogged by two overarching sets of problems. The first is all too typical for the adventure genre: overly convoluted, often nonsensical puzzle design. Tim Schafer was always more intrinsically interested in the worlds, characters, and stories he dreamed up than he was in puzzles. This is fair enough on the face of it; he is very, very good at those things, after all. But it does mean that he needs a capable support network to ensure that his games play as well as they look and read. He had that support for 1993’s Day of the Tentacle, largely in the person of his co-designer Dave Grossman; the result was one of the best adventure games LucasArts ever made, a perfect combination of inspired fiction with an equally inspired puzzle framework. Unfortunately, he was left to make Full Throttle on his own, and it showed. Ditto Grim Fandango. For all that he loved movies, the auteur model was not a great fit for Tim Schafer the game designer.
Grim Fandango seldom gives you a clear idea of what it is you’re even trying to accomplish. Compare this with The Curse of Monkey Island, the LucasArts adventure just before this one, a game which seemed at the time to herald a renaissance in the studio’s puzzle designs. There, you’re always provided with an explicit set of goals, usually in the form of a literal shopping list. Thus even when the mechanics of the puzzles themselves push the boundaries of real-world logic, you at least have a pretty good sense of where you should be focusing your efforts. Here, you’re mostly left to guess what Tim Schafer would like to have happen to Manny next. You stumble around trying to shake something loose, trying to figure out what you can do and then doing it just because you can. By no means is it lost on me that this sense of confusion arises to a large extent because Grim Fandango is such a character-driven story, one which eschews the mechanistic tic-tac-toe of other adventure-game plots. But recognizing this irony doesn’t make it any less frustrating when you’re wandering around with no clue what the story wants from you.
Compounding the frustrations of the puzzles are the frustrations of the interface. You don’t use the mouse at all; everything is done with the numeric keypad, or, if you’re lucky enough to have one, a console-style controller. (At the time Grim Fandango was released, virtually no one playing games on computers did.) Grim Fandango’s mode of navigation is most reminiscent of the console-based JRPGs of its era, such as the hugely popular Final Fantasy VII, which sold over 10 million copies on the PlayStation during the late 1990s. Yet in practice it’s far more irritating, because you have to interact with the environment here on a much more granular level. LucasArts themselves referred to their method of steering Manny about as a “tank” interface, a descriptor which turns out to be all too descriptive. It really does feel like you’re driving a bulky, none too agile vehicle through an obstacle course of scenery.
Make no mistake: the 3D engine makes possible some truly striking views. But too often the designers prioritize visual aesthetics over playability.
In the final reckoning, then, an approach that is fine in a JRPG makes just about every aspect of an old-school, puzzle-solving adventure game — which is what Grim Fandango remains in form and spirit when you strip all of the details of its implementation away — more awkward and less fun. Instead of having hotspots in the environment that light up when you pass a mouse cursor over them, as you do in a SCUMM adventure, you have to watch Manny’s head carefully as you drive him around; when it turns to look in a certain direction, that means there’s something he can interact with there. Needless to say, it’s all too easy to miss a turn of his head, and thereby to miss something vital to your progress through the game.
The inventory system is also fairly excruciating. Instead of being able to bring up a screen showing all of the items Manny is carrying, you have to cycle through them one by one by punching a key or controller button over and over, listening to him drone out their descriptions over and over as you do so. This approach precludes using one inventory object on another one, cutting off a whole avenue of puzzle design.
Now, the apologists among you — and this game does have an inordinate number of them — might respond to these complaints of mine by making reference to the old cliché that, for every door that is closed in life (and presumably in games as well), another one is opened. And in theory, the new engine really does open a door to new types of puzzles that are more tactile and embodied, that make you feel more a part of the game’s world. To Tim Schafer’s credit, he does try to include these sorts of puzzles in quite a few places. To our detriment, though, they turn out to be the worst puzzles in the game, relying on finicky positioning and timing and giving no useful feedback when you get those things slightly wrong.
But even when Grim Fandango presents puzzles that could easily have been implemented in SCUMM, they’re made way more annoying than they ought to be by the engine and interface. When you’re reduced to that final adventurer’s gambit of just trying everything on everything, as you most assuredly will be from time to time here, the exercise takes many times longer than it would using SCUMM, what with having to laboriously drive Manny about from place to place.
Taken as a game rather than the movie it often seems more interested in being, Grim Fandango boils down to a lumpy stew of overthought and thoughtlessness. In the former category, there’s an unpleasant ideological quality to its approach, with its prioritization of some hazy ethic of 3D-powered “immersion” and its insistence that no visible interface elements whatsoever can appear onscreen, even when these choices actively damage the player’s experience. This is where Sid Meier can helpfully step in to remind us that it is the player who is meant to be having the fun in a game, not the designer.
The thoughtlessness comes in the lack of consideration of what kind of game Grim Fandango is meant to be. Like all big-tent gaming genres, the adventure genre subsumes a lot of different styles of game with different priorities. Some adventures are primarily about exploration and puzzle solving. And that’s fine, although one does hope that those games execute their puzzles better than this one does. But Grim Fandango is not primarily about its puzzles; it wants to take you on a ride, to sweep you along on the wings of a compelling story. And boy, does it have a compelling story to share with you. For this reason, it would be best served by streamlined puzzles that don’t get too much in the way of your progress. The ones we have, however, are not only frustrating in themselves but murder on the story’s pacing, undermining what ought to be Grim Fandango’s greatest strengths. A game like this one that is best enjoyed with a walkthrough open on the desk beside it is, in this critic’s view at least, a broken game by definition.
As with so many near-miss games, the really frustrating thing about Grim Fandango is that the worst of its problems could so easily have been fixed with just a bit more testing, a bit more time, and a few more people who were empowered to push back against Tim Schafer’s more dogmatic tendencies. For the 2015 remastered version of the game, Schafer did grudgingly agree to include an alternative point-and-click interface that is more like that of a SCUMM adventure. The results verge on the transformational. By no means does the addition of a mouse cursor remedy all of the infelicities of the puzzle design, but it does make battering your way through them considerably less painful. If my less-than-systematic investigations on YouTube are anything to go by, this so-old-it’s-new-again interface has become by far the most common way to play the game today.
The Grim Fandango remaster. Note the mouse cursor. The new interface is reportedly implemented entirely in in-engine Lua scripts rather than requiring any re-programming of the GrimE engine itself. This means that it would have been perfectly possible to include as an option in the original release.
In other places, the fixes could have been even simpler than revamping the interface. A shocking number of puzzles could have been converted from infuriating to delightful by nothing more than an extra line or two of dialog from Manny or one of the other characters. As it is, too many of the verbal nudges that do exist are too obscure by half and are given only once in passing, as part of conversations that can never be repeated. Hints for Part Four are to be found only in Part One; I defy even an elephant to remember them when the time comes to apply them. All told, Grim Fandango has the distinct odor of a game that no one other than those who were too close to it to see it clearly ever really tried to play before it was put in a box and shoved out the door. There was a time when seeking the feedback of outsiders was a standard part of LucasArts’s adventure-development loop. Alas, that era was long past by the time of Grim Fandango.
Nonetheless, Grim Fandango was accorded a fairly rapturous reception in the gaming press when it was released in the last week of October in 1998, just in time for Halloween and the Mexican Day of the Dead which follows it on November 1. Its story, characters, and setting were justifiably praised, while the deficiencies of its interface and puzzle design were more often than not relegated to a paragraph or two near the end of the review. This is surprising, but not inexplicable. There was a certain sadness in the trade press — almost a collective guilt — about the diminished prospects of the adventure game in these latter years of the decade. Meanwhile LucasArts was still the beneficiary of a tremendous amount of goodwill, thanks to the many classics they had served up during those earlier, better years for the genre as a whole. Grim Fandango was held up as a sort of standard bearer for the embattled graphic adventure, the ideal mix of tradition and innovation to serve as proof that the genre was still relevant in a post-Quake, post-Starcraft world.
For many years, the standard narrative had it that the unwashed masses of gamers utterly failed to respond to the magazines’ evangelism, that Grim Fandango became an abject failure in the marketplace. In more recent years, Tim Schafer has muddied those waters somewhat by claiming that the game actually sold close to half a million copies. I rather suspect that the truth is somewhere between these two extremes. Sales of a quarter of a million certainly don’t strike me as unreasonable once foreign markets are factored into the equation. Such a figure would have been enough to keep Grim Fandango from losing much if any money, but would have provided LucasArts with little motivation to make any more such boldly original adventure games. And indeed, LucasArts would release only one more adventure game of any stripe in their history. It would use the GrimE engine, but it would otherwise play it about as safe as it possibly could, by being yet another sequel to the venerable but beloved Secret of Monkey Island.
As I was at pains to note earlier, I do see what causes some people to rate Grim Fandango so highly, and I definitely don’t think any less of them for doing so. For my part, though, I’m something of a stickler on some points. To my mind, interactivity is the very quality that separates games from other forms of media, making it hard for me to pronounce a game “good” that botches it. I’ve learned to be deeply suspicious of games whose most committed fans want to talk about everything other than that which you the player actually do in them. The same applies when a game’s creators display the same tendency. Listening to the developers’ commentary tracks in the remastered edition of Grim Fandango (who would have imagined in 1998 that games would someday come with commentary tracks?), I was shocked by how little talk there was about the gameplay. It was all lighting and dialog beats and soundtrack stabs and Z-buffers instead — all of which is really, really important in its place, but none of which can yield a great game on its own. Tellingly, when the subject of puzzle design did come up, it always seemed to be in an off-hand, borderline dismissive way. “I don’t know how players are supposed to figure out this puzzle,” says Tim Schafer outright at one point. Such a statement from your lead designer is never a good sign.
But I won’t belabor the issue any further. Suffice to say that Grim Fandango is doomed to remain a promising might-have-been rather than a classic in my book. As a story and a world, it’s kind of amazing. It’s just a shame that the gameplay part of this game isn’t equally inspired.
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Sources: The book Grim Fandango: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide by Jo Ashburn. Retro Gamer 31 and 92; Computer Gaming World of November 1997, May 1998, and February 1999; Ultimate PC of August 1998. Plus the commentary track from the 2015 Grim Fandango remaster.
Online sources include The International House of Mojo’s pages on the game, the self-explanatory Grim Fandango Network, Gamespot’s vintage review of the game, and Daniel Albu’s YouTube conversation with Bret Mogilefsky.
And a special thank-you to reader Matt Campbell, who shared with me the audio of a talk that Bret Mogilefsky gave at the 2005 Lua Workshop, during which he explained how he used that language in GrimE.
Where to Get It: A modestly remastered version of Grim Fandango is available for digital purchase at GOG.com.
Footnotes
The Truth Is Out There, Part 4: The Downside of Belief
The fifth season of The X-Files, spanning from 1997 to 1998, marked the absolute zenith of the show’s popularity, when it put up the best average ratings in its history. Everybody seemed to want a piece of its action; even William Gibson and Stephen King submitted scripts that season.
As we learned in an earlier article, The X-Files was always two shows in one. One show consisted of the “mythology” episodes: a heavily serialized, ever more convoluted tale of extraterrestrial interference in the affairs of humans and a myriad of conspiracies deriving therefrom, in which the stakes were, it had by now been revealed, positively apocalyptic in scope, involving alien plans to exterminate the human race and repopulate the planet with their own kind. The other show consisted of one-off “monster of the week” episodes, which were freer to go to unexpected places in terms of form and content and to not always take themselves so darn seriously. The hardcore X-Files fandom that had sustained the show through its first couple of seasons had been built on the back of the first type of episode, and this was still the type that got the most attention even in the glossy mainstream press. Yet there’s a strong critical consensus today — a consensus with which I heartily agree — that almost all of the most enduring episodes are actually of the “monster of the week” sort.
It was and is almost impossible to reconcile the coexistence of the two types of episode in the same fictional universe. Doing so demands that we accept that Mulder and Scully periodically decide to take a holiday from saving humanity from extinction in order to check up on rumors of Yet Another Freaky Serial Killer in Podunk, Idaho. The creators themselves were by no means unaware of the cognitive dissonance. One argument they deployed in response was a plea to treat Mulder and Scully like Superman, Nancy Drew, or Kirk and Spock had once been treated: as characters who simply have adventures in the abstract, without sweating the details of chronology. “Who knows in what order the fictional lives of Mulder and Scully take place?” said producer-director Rob Bowman. “We never said that that was week two and this is week three in their lives. We are just saying that this is episode two and this is episode three and it happened whenever.” Such hand-waving may have been thoroughly out of step with obsessive X-Files fandom, but it does indeed seem like the most satisfying way to approach the series today, not least because it allows us to appreciate the best of the standalone episodes as the little self-contained marvels they are.
I speak of episodes like Chris Carter’s own “The Post-Modern Prometheus,” whose name is a play on the subtitle of Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. It’s a funny and sad retelling of that story, moved to twentieth-century small-town America and shot in stark black and white, the better to evoke the old monster movies from which the show drew so much inspiration. But it’s more than just an homage; the “postmodern” in the title is amply justified. The story is barreling along toward its inevitable tragic climax when Mulder decides that tragedy just won’t do. He demands to see the writer, who turns out to be a chubby teenager who’s drawing a comic book. And suddenly the entire gang — Mulder, Scully, the monster, and your stereotypical gaggle of pitchfork-wielding villagers, who were getting ready to string the last-named up from the nearest tree a minute earlier — are taking a road trip to see Cher, the monster’s favorite singer. She sings “Walking in Memphis,” his favorite song, and Mulder and Scully dance together with big smiles and glowing eyes while the monster shakes his booty right up there onstage. It’s weird and sweet and funny and yet still achingly sad at its core, and just thinking about it leaves me with a tear in my eye. I’ve just about decided that it’s my favorite episode of The X-Files ever. And it turns out that I’m in pretty good company there: both Chris Carter and David Duchovny have said the same.
Vince Gilligan’s “Bad Blood” is another standout from the fifth season. It has Mulder and Scully investigating an apparent vampire on the loose in a small Texas town — not exactly revolutionary subject matter for the show. Yet Gilligan turns the episode into a riff on Rashomon, letting us see the story from the points of view of both Mulder and Scully. For example, the sheriff of the town seen through Scully’s admiring eyes is the epitome of a handsome Southern gentleman, through Mulder’s jealous ones a bucktoothed hick. Once again, I find myself in good company in highlighting this episode. Gillian Anderson has named it as her own all-time favorite: “It was fun and challenging to film and even more fun to watch.”
Just because a vampire has to buy plastic fangs in a novelty shop, it doesn’t mean he isn’t real.
The fifth-season finale led right into the big X-Files feature film, which had actually been shot almost a year before, during the break between the fourth and fifth seasons. It was a mythology episode blown up in length by a factor of about two and a half, and was neither notably better nor worse than that description would imply. The movie was perhaps most notable for existing at all; it was highly unusual to make a theatrical film set in the world of a television series that was still on the air. Chris Carter and Fox had been inspired by the success of Star Trek Generations, featuring the cast from Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that film and its sequels had come out only after the television series in question had wrapped for good. There was some thought that The X-Files too might transition into a purely cinematic franchise at some point, although it wasn’t clear when or how that might happen. “Hopefully,” said Gillian Anderson in an interview at the time, “the film will be so successful that the series will trail off and we’ll just be doing movies once in a while.”
Despite the limitations which its tight connection to the serialized mythology of the television show would seem to place on its mass appeal, the X-Files movie grossed $84 million in the United States alone, enough to make it the twentieth biggest film of the year there. All told, it was a solid performance, if not quite the gangbusters one that might have prompted Fox to think of turning The X-Files into a spectacle available exclusively on big rather than small screens sooner rather than later.
Even with all of its success, however, the show was navigating some logistical turbulence. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson had both signed five-season contracts at the outset, and Duchovny wasn’t at all sure he wanted to renew his as the fifth season was winding down. He had aspirations of making the leap from television star to becoming a sought-after leading man in movies that weren’t named The X-Files, but this would be hard to do if he had to be off in Vancouver playing Mulder for all but a few months of every year. Further, he had just gotten married to the actress Téa Leoni, whose role on the sitcom The Naked Truth bound her to Hollywood. Duchovny gave Fox an ultimatum: he would join Gillian Anderson in signing a two-year contract extension if and only if the entire production was moved to Southern California.
It was a tough call — the move would make the show dramatically more expensive to produce each week — but nobody could imagine The X-Files without Mulder, and certainly nobody thought the show had run its course as of yet, not when it had just enjoyed its biggest season ever. So, Duchovny got his way. The folks who were working on the show in Vancouver were given a choice between relocation and severance packages. These dozens of people who had their lives so disrupted so that one man could have the arrangement that pleased him might be forgiven for concluding that David Duchovny was a self-entitled jerk. He didn’t do his reputation among them any more favors in the aftermath of the move, when he went around disparaging their hometown of Vancouver and its “400 inches of rain per day” in interviews on the talk-show circuit. But so be it; the show must go on.
The results of the move to California were evident from the first shot of the first episode of the sixth season: a desert landscape baking under a clear blue sky. That wasn’t the sort of shot you were ever going to get in Vancouver. The default tone of the show brightened in tandem with the sunshine quotient, prompting derision from some quarters of its hardcore fandom, who labeled this new Southern Californian incarnation “X-Files Lite.”
But these people do not speak for me. For all that I wouldn’t leap to defend David Duchovny from anyone who said he was a bit of a tool at this stage of his life, I’m afraid I can’t get behind those other criticisms. In fact, I’ll go way out on a limb and say that I like the sixth season the best of all of them, and that at least some of the seventh season isn’t that far behind it in my esteem. To my mind, the standalone episodes got warmer and wiser and smarter and funnier than they had ever been before. Granted, most continue to play with established mass-media archetypes. If not usually original in conception, though, they’re sly and clever in execution, with that good old Mulder and Scully charm and with more willingness than ever to stretch and bend the formal boundaries of the show. In their willingness to burrow deep into the universals of life and fate, I daresay that some of them remind me of nothing so much as the masterful short stories of Ted Chiang.
Vince Gilligan’s “Drive” opens with a helicopter’s eye view of a car chase that is obviously intended to evoke the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase over the highways of Los Angeles. Indeed, it initially presents itself as a special news broadcast that’s airing in place of your normally scheduled X-Files episode; these seasons do a lot of this sort of mucking about with credits sequences, etc., as if the fiction is escaping from the cage in which it is meant to be contained. The episode evolves into The X-Files’s take on the tautly wound 1994 film Speed. Here as there, the plot hinges on a vehicle that cannot stop if dire consequences are to be avoided. In this case, though, it’s Fox Mulder who’s behind the wheel, with a man behind him in the backseat who will die if he doesn’t keep moving. The reason why he will die may be down to the usual conspiratorial mumbo-jumbo, but that has little bearing on the propulsive problem at hand. This was arguably the first time The X-Files went full-on action movie — and, lo and behold, it does it rather brilliantly. (In a meta sense, “Drive” is also famous as the episode where Vince Gilligan first met Bryan Cranston, the man you see in the backseat above. Cranston would go on to become the star of Breaking Bad, Gilligan’s own acclaimed television show.)
At first glance, the most surprising thing about Chris Carter’s “Triangle” may seem to be that it took The X-Files this long to get around to doing an episode about the Bermuda Triangle. It was worth the wait. Defying a promise Carter made in the early days of the show to never fall down the wormhole of time-travel fiction, the script does indeed send Mulder back in time, to the first days of the Second World War, where he winds up aboard a passenger ship that’s about to be commandeered by some of its Nazi passengers. Doppelgängers of both Cancer Man and Scully are aboard, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. The important thing is that this gives William B. Davis the chance to try on an SS uniform that suits him to a tee, and gives Gillian Anderson the opportunity to try her hand at playing a hard-edged femme fatale straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel. The episode is fast-paced and frothy and a little bit campy. Perhaps most of all, though, it’s a tour de force of technical film-making: in conscious emulation of Alfred Hitchcock’s experimental classic Rope, its 45 minutes consist of just 24 ultra-extended single-camera takes. (By way of comparison, the average X-Files episode contained around 1000 switches of perspective.) “To watch ‘Triangle’ now,” writes the critic Emily St. James, “is to remember a time when this was the most daring show on television.”
The two-parter “Dreamland,” written by Vince Gilligan, John Shiban, and Frank Spotnitz, opens with Mulder and Scully on yet another nighttime drive to Area 51 to meet yet another shadowy contact who may or may not be who he says he is. In what can all too easily be read as a meta-fictional message to a certain kind of rabid X-Files fan, Scully idly wonders whether the two of them will ever outgrow this stuff and make better, fuller lives for themselves. Shortly thereafter, they get waylaid by the authorities, the infamous Men In Black who are always lurking around places like this. But then a test of an alien spacecraft creates a quantum disturbance that swaps Mulder’s consciousness into the lead MiB’s body, and vice versa. Much discomfort and hilarity ensues, as Mulder learns that being an MiB is just a government job like any other. While he tries to adapt to life as a paunchy, middle-aged family man, his alter ego embraces with gusto the swinging-bachelor lifestyle that Mulder’s looks have always cut him out for. Lessons are learned on both sides, until a way is found to reverse the trend. In other words, this episode turns all of the stuff about aliens and conspiracies into an excuse to tell a more resonant, universal story about life choices, opportunity costs, and roads not taken. Plus it’s really, really funny.
The ghosts in Chris Carter’s “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas” are played by Ed Asner and Lily Tomlin, two stars from an earlier era of television who probably would never have appeared on the show if The X-Files was still shooting in Vancouver. The episode is another meditation on life choices, this one with a spooky Dickensian vibe, with some crackerjack comic-tragic dialog. But my favorite part is the ending, when Mulder and Scully hunker down in the Mulder’s cozy apartment to exchange the gifts they promised one another they wouldn’t buy. It’s hard to imagine an earlier incarnation of the show embracing the spirit of the holidays in such a forthright, non-ironic way.
“Monday,” written by Vince Gilligan and John Shiban, is another episode that concerns time travel — once that genie had been let out of the bottle, it was hard to stuff it back in — along with, yet again, choices and consequences. It’s The X-Files’s version of Groundhog Day. We see the same day play out over and over, a day in which a desperate man with a bomb decides to rob a bank and Mulder and Scully keep getting caught in the crosshairs in different ways.
“Arcadia” by Daniel Arkin is The X-Files meets The Stepford Wives. Mulder and Scully go undercover as a married couple, moving into a white-bread Middle American neighborhood where residents whose lives are insufficiently tidy have a nasty habit of disappearing. The commentary on the horrors of suburban conformity isn’t groundbreaking by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s great fun to watch Mulder and Scully play house for the benefit of the neighbors, passive-aggressively needling one another all the while. It almost goes without saying by this point that the monster at the heart of the case they’re investigating is the least interesting part of the episode.
One of the ways the show’s brain trust tried to keep their stars engaged during the later seasons was to offer them the opportunity to contribute behind the camera as well, by submitting scripts of their own. This sort of gesture doesn’t always turn out well, but David Duchovny at least proved a surprisingly soulful and agile writer, putting his earlier life as a graduate student in literature to good use. In “The Unnatural,” which he directed as well as wrote, he cleverly juxtaposes The X-Files’s standard version of aliens with aliens of another type: the Black baseball players who braved scorn and violence to desegregate the sport in the 1940s. It’s a lovely, luminous episode that oozes the magical-realist quality the show was embracing so successfully by this point. Sure, it owes a lot to Field of Dreams in tone and feel, but it’s hard to disparage it for that. Given the choice between conspiracy theories and the crack of wood on cowhide on a starry summer night, I’ll take the latter every time.
As we saw in an earlier article in reference to the alien-autopsy documentary, The X-Files loved nothing better than to satirize its parent network’s tackier tendencies. One of the urtexts of Fox’s brand of tabloid journalism was the series called Cops, an early example of “reality” television in which a camera crew rode along in the backseat of a police cruiser on the mean streets of a big American city. (Rather astonishingly, Cops is still on television to this day, being in its 36th season as of this writing.) Vince Gilligan’s “X-Cops” is a picture-perfect re-creation of the show, from the Cops theme song and credits sequence that take the place of the standard X-Files version of same to the shaky handheld camerawork, from the suspects and witnesses who live in a liminal space between sympathy and ridicule to the know-it-all police officers who give us the benefit of their hard-won wisdom in running commentaries. Into this hard-bitten milieu are dropped Mulder and Scully on the trail of a monster of the week. It’s incongruous and bizarre and most of all hilarious, another of those episodes that are so brave and cheeky and completely out of the box that it’s hard to believe they were actually made. Who would ever have imagined during the first season of The X-Files that the premise would someday be bent far enough to yield episodes like this one?
Lately I’ve been indulging in a thought experiment, or maybe more of a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Wouldn’t it have been neat if The X-Files had taken a bow already after a sixth season that was absolutely spectacular? Said season would have been created by junking all of the increasingly tiring and tiresome mythology episodes from the extant sixth and seventh seasons and then throwing out the handful of clunkers among the standalone episodes as well. Do all that, and you’d end up with what I’m going to have the audacity to call one of the best single seasons of television ever created. Such a victory tour would necessarily conclude with Vince Gillian’s “Je Souhaite,” the last standalone episode of the real seventh season, an episode that’s as universal as a fairy tale — which is almost literally what it is, come to think of it. Here Mulder and Scully meet a genie — yes, complete with the bottle — who has the power to grant three wishes. We all know how stories like this tend to go. Be very, very careful what you wish for, kids! When Mulder gets his chance to wish, he asks for peace on Earth — not a good choice, because the easiest way to achieve that is to simply remove the species that has been causing all of the chaos on our planet all these centuries. But then, after using his second wish to undo his first and repopulate the planet, he hits upon the perfect third wish, by looking at the genie herself with eyes of empathy. The best way to change the world, he realizes, is by showing kindness to the people who are right there in front of you. What a perfect grace note that would have been for the show to go out on…
Whether you love or hate the sun-kissed X-Files of the sixth season and beyond, there can be no question that it marked a commercial turning point for the show — and not in a good way. By the end of the sixth season, the average episode’s viewership had dropped by almost 25 percent from what it had been just one year earlier. Measured by the standard metrics, The X-Files was still a popular show, but it no longer took pride of place at the center of the zeitgeist, no longer garnered shiny awards and glossy magazine covers and navel-gazing think-pieces from critics and pundits. It had reached the top of its mountain of destiny a year earlier, and now it was on the downward slope that lay just beyond.
What were the reasons for its decline? I’m tempted to say it had something to do with the mythology episodes that had always dominated in public discussion of the show. These had by now grown so convoluted and ridiculous that it was becoming hard for even the most sanguine optimist to believe they were going anywhere coherent. (Scully is abducted by aliens! Scully is back! Scully has incurable alien-caused brain cancer! Scully is cured! The aliens aren’t real, they were just a carefully engineered distraction all along! No, belay that, actually the aliens are real! Mulder is abducted! Mulder is back!) “The mythology was becoming an awful lot for people to continue to keep track of,” admits X-Files executive producer and writer Frank Spotnitz.
At the same time, though, this objection hardly began with the sixth season. The more encompassing explanation for the show’s decline in popularity is likely the simple fact that even the biggest cultural phenomena always run their course and then give way to fresh things. To wit: right in the middle of The X-Files’s sixth season, the cable-television channel HBO aired the first episode of The Sopranos, a heavily serialized mobster drama that was free of most of the strictures of broadcast television, among them restrictions on language, violence, and sexual content, a rigid 45-minute running time for every single episode, and the need to churn out twenty episodes or more every single season. The Sopranos inaugurated the fifteen-year stretch that some critics today like to call The Golden Age of Cable Television, during which the medium eclipsed theatrical films in many respects to become the most prestigious and satisfying of all forms of moving image. In illustrating that long-term serialized storytelling could attract a mass audience on television in genres other than the soap opera, The X-Files was an important forerunner to shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. But it was not one of their peers.
The gradual decline of The X-Files’s popularity continued in the seventh season. Chris Carter and his colleagues actually went into the season thinking it would probably be the last. Not only were the ratings getting slowly but inexorably worse, but the contracts of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were due to run out once again when the season was over, and Duchovny was less interested than ever in renewing his. In fact, he was suing Fox and Chris Carter personally for allegedly selling syndication rights to the show to a subsidiary network for less than their full market value, which impacted his own residual earnings. As one would expect, the legal battle “didn’t help the creative energy,” as Carter put it.
This late in its run, the show had just one surefire way of making headlines again, however briefly. In light of this, the makers’ handling of the transition of Mulder and Scully from platonic partners to a romantic couple is as bizarre as any monster of the week that ever appeared on the show. In Vince Gilligan and Frank Spotnitz’s “Millennium” — an episode whose main function was providing closure for the semi-spinoff series of the same name, which had been abruptly cancelled after three seasons — Mulder and Scully celebrate the arrival of Y2K by sharing their first ever onscreen kiss. Thirteen episodes later, in “All Things,” which was written and directed by Gillian Anderson, it’s off-handedly revealed that the two are now sleeping in the same bed. And that’s it. Restraint has its virtues, but come on! Shippers who had been waiting 150 episodes for the other shoe — or perhaps some other articles of clothing — to drop were rewarded with this damp squib. I have no idea why the makers didn’t turn “Mulder and Scully finally do the deed!” into a mass-media event. As it was, they squandered their last bit of dry powder from their glory days in about as anticlimactic a fashion as can be imagined.
The show easily could have — and probably should have — ended after the seventh season. Yet it didn’t. David Duchovny agreed to settle his lawsuit with Fox, and then shocked everyone by agreeing as well to play Mulder just a little bit longer — for another half of a season, to be precise. The powers that were at Fox decided that was good enough for them, especially given that they didn’t have any strong candidates to hand to air in place of The X-Files on Sunday nights. And so it was on to the eighth season. It was decided that Mulder would be absent for the first half of the season, having been abducted by aliens. (What other explanation could there possibly be?) Then he would return for the second half, so that the show could finish strong.
An actor named Robert Patrick won the unenviable role of Special Agent John Doggett, the replacement for one of the most iconic television characters of recent history. This may explain why everyone was at such pains not to call him a replacement. “Robert Patrick is an addition to the show,” insisted Chris Carter. When David Duchovny did come back halfway through the season, he immediately began to complain loudly about having become “peripheral. Mulder’s story was one of three stories going on and it didn’t feel like the same show to me.” At the risk of editorializing too much, I must say that my mind is fairly boggled by the egotism on display in this comment. What did he expect would happen?
By the last episode of the eighth season, when Mulder and Scully had a baby together, the proverbial shark had been pretty well jumped. And yet the second half of the season, after Duchovny’s return, actually managed to slightly outdraw the end of the previous one with the viewing public. The show got renewed yet again, even though Duchovny now declared himself to be gone for good — no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
The first episode of the ninth season had yet to air when, on September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked four American passenger planes, flying two of them into the World Trade Center in New York City and one into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. (The hijackers of the fourth airplane, which was intended for the White House, met with heroic resistance from the passengers, and that plane wound up crashing over Pennsylvania, killing everyone onboard.) The X-Files was something of a shambling anachronism already by that point in the eyes of most television viewers, but this tragic day of infamy cemented that status. The mood of the nation changed on a dime; just like that, the epoch that some now call “The Long Nineties” came to a smashing end.
The 1990s had been the Age of Irony, when an anthemic hit single could be named after a brand of teenybopper deodorant, when videogames like Duke Nukem 3D were reveling gleefully in senseless violence amidst the trashy detritus of conspicuous consumption. And why should it have been otherwise, during a decade whose biggest ongoing news story was the dot.com bubble? “We’re the middle children of history, man,” said Brad Pitt of Generation Slacker in Fight Club. “We have no Great War, no Great Depression.”
Earnestness made a big comeback after September 11. Suddenly people had a cause again, Wanted to Believe again — not in the existence of aliens, conspiracy theories about which now seemed like the childish diversions that they had always been, but in the very government and military the conspiracy theorists had spent so many years questioning if not reviling. By September 21, the approval rating of President George W. Bush, who had lost a national popular vote to Al Gore just ten months earlier but squeaked out a controversial win in the Electoral College, had soared to 90 percent, the highest ever recorded.
It was difficult to imagine how any show could be more out of step with the changed times than The X-Files was. “The X-Files is the product of a time that is passed,” wrote the columnist Andrew Stuttaford. “It is a relic of the Clinton years, as dated as a dot.com share certificate, a stained blue dress, or Kato Kaelin’s reminiscences.” All of which is to say that it was all but foreordained that its ninth season would be its last before said season ever aired its first episode. The new standard bearer of the American zeitgeist was 24, another serialized show about a law-enforcement agent, but this time one who had no doubts whatsoever about the righteousness of his country or his government, a two-fisted true believer who wasn’t above a spot of torture when it was the only way to foil the Axis of Evil. Pop music and videogames too heeded the call: Celine Dion’s nerve-jangling rendition of “God Bless America” climbed the charts as the lead single of a charity album of the same name, while Duke Nukem yielded to Call of Duty.
Amidst it all, The X-Files shambled through its last season as best it could. (Raising a defiant middle finger to the scoffers, the makers even named one episode “Jump the Shark.”) David Duchovny, whose career as a cinematic leading man wasn’t going quite so well as he had thought it would, agreed to rejoin the cast for a 90-minute series finale, which endeavored to wrap up the mythology story lines about as neatly as could be done in that span of time. “It gives viewers answer after answer, until it feels like we’re reading somebody’s Geocities fan page for wild theories about the show,” writes Emily St. James of the finale. “But it’s also dramatically, death-defyingly boring.” When all was said and done, Cancer Man got blown up by a helicopter and everyone else rode off into the sunset of a changed America.
But they didn’t go away forever. Anyone at all familiar with the post-millennial media landscape knows that nothing ever seems to go away forever. There have been two attempts to date to revive The X-Files since that last hurrah of 2002.
In 2008, Chris Carter got the old gang back together for a movie. The X-Files: I Want to Believe had a budget less than half the size of the first X-Files film before adjusting for inflation. “It’s funny, but on the series we prided ourselves each week with making a little movie,” muses Carter. “Then, when it came time to do the second X-Files movie, we were given the money and the opportunity to make, literally, a little movie.” Probably smartly, he chose to do an expanded monster-of-the-week episode rather than reopening the Pandora’s box of the mythology. Even so, it was hard to figure out what reason the film really had to exist; it came a little too soon to be a full-blown nostalgia play, even as its moody atmosphere still felt badly out of joint with the times around it during that summer of 2008, when Barack Obama’s “Yes, We Can!” was the slogan of the moment. The critics were not impressed, and its box-office receipts were less than a third of the first film’s — again, without adjusting for inflation.
Seven and a half years later, Carter made a more concerted effort to revive the show, this time as another television series on Fox — albeit one with dramatically truncated episode counts in comparison to those of its original run. By now, the times were falling more into step with The X-Files’s tendency to see everything in the world through the lens of conspiracy. (More on that subject momentarily.) Nevertheless, the new episodes never quite landed like a lot of observers expected them to. The scripts felt underwhelming, the alien stuff way past its sell-by date, and one at least of the two leads seemed a little bored and distracted. Ironically, it was Gillian Anderson now who wasn’t at all sure she wanted to be there, and who most obviously turned in performances that reflected this ambivalence. The fact was that she was a more sought-after actor than David Duchovny this far along in their respective careers, with a larger number of interesting roles in both her past and her future.
Darin Morgan, the man who first made The X-Files safe for comedy, came back to pen “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” one of the few episodes where the revival found some creative traction. The lizard-man in tighty whities who serves as the monster of the week here turns out to be a normal lizard who got bit by a human. After spending some time on a job peddling mobile-phone plans in an anonymous strip mall, all he wants to do is become a lizard once again. And who can blame him?
The revival sputtered out in 2018, after two seasons with a total of sixteen episodes between them. As of this writing, The X-Files’s legacy is once more being left in peace. But never say never, especially in these current times of ours when nostalgia is a bigger business than it has ever been.
And what can we say about the legacy of The X-Files now, a quarter-century after its high time in the zeitgeist?
Well, as I think that even many of its most zealous boosters will admit by now, it was a show subject to wild swings in quality, not just from season to season but from week to week. When all is said and done, The X-Files probably produced only about 20 to 25 episodes — that is to say, about one season’s worth of them, in the course of nine seasons — that might legitimately be called classics. Still, that’s a lot more than nothing, and a better batting average than the vast majority of television shows achieve. And betwixt and between its standout moments of brilliance, The X-Files offered plenty more episodes that remain perfectly watchable today despite their flaws, especially if you’re one of those who can enjoy just hanging out with its two charming leads.
On the broader canvas of television history, The X-Files occupies an important position. It wasn’t the first show to have survived thanks largely to the activism of a relatively small group of passionate fans — the original Star Trek leaps immediately to mind as a much earlier instance of same — but it was the first to be joined at the hip from the get-go with Internet fandom. In this sense, it was a harbinger of a new reality, in which almost every artifact of traditional media would have to adjust to a life spent in a symbiotic relationship with cyberspace.
Then, too, as I already noted, the mythology episodes paved the way for the Golden Age of Cable Television by serving as a demonstration of both the power of long-form storytelling on television and, less happily but no less usefully, of some of the ways it can go wrong. The conspiracy angle in The X-Files quickly became, to steal a phrase from the Cold War historian David Martin, a “wilderness of mirrors.” Partly this was down to aesthetic intent, but it was equally down to practical necessity. The only way to keep the conspiracy story arc going was to just keep putting more and more mirrors in the heroes’ way. Later serialized shows — not all of them by any means, but a lot of them — would use more limited seasonal episode counts, or in some cases entire runs that were planned as limited from the start, to do better on this front. We should never forget that, in this respect as in a number of others, The X-Files was a pioneer, with few if any examples to follow; we therefore shouldn’t be overly surprised that it did so much wrong. Indeed, the media world into which it was born made it effectively impossible for it to do some of what shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad later did so well. In short, The X-Files’s creators played the cards they were dealt as well as they knew how, and there’s never any shame in that.
All that said, there does remain another sense in which The X-Files seems today less like a brave pioneer and more like one of the shadowy agents of evil who featured so prominently in so many of its episodes, and it’s this elephant in the room with which I feel sadly obliged to close this series of articles.
Chris Carter most definitely didn’t invent conspiracy theories; the roots of the modern fixation on evil cabals manipulating events behind the scenes can be traced back at least as far as 1903 and the infamous antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Yet conspiracy theories have been weaponized in the years since The X-Files went off the air to a degree arguably not seen since the Nazis used them as a partial justification for the Holocaust. Carter himself was never a committed believer in UFO conspiracies; he saw them first and foremost as a cool set of ready-made fictions around which to build his show. Many or most fans of said show doubtless saw them the same way. But, by doing so much to break conspiracy culture into the American mainstream, The X-Files must shoulder some small portion of the blame for what seems to be an increasingly post-truth United States, where uncomfortable facts like electoral defeats can be hand-waved away with claims of voter fraud, where essential public-health measures like vaccines can be imagined to be agents of mind control, where people can convince themselves to kill in the cause of thwarting an international pedophile ring being run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor, and where duly elected members of Congress can tell us that the current administration in the White House is attacking the parts of the country that it doesn’t like with bespoke hurricanes. This is the poison pill lurking behind that iconic poster hanging on Mulder’s wall. If everyone decides that just “wanting” to believe is justification enough for doing so, this world of ours is going to wind up in a very bad place. It strikes me as deeply unfortunate that, in all of its 218 episodes and two movies, The X-Files never saw fit to address the deeper psychological dilemma of such a smart man who would tack such a dumb poster to his wall. On the contrary, as late as the first revival season in 2016, the show was presenting in a fairly heroic light a conspiracy monger who is quite plainly based on Alex Jones of InfoWars, a pernicious huckster of dangerous, reactionary nonsense. In a recent survey of X-Files fan attitudes conducted by the academic researcher Bethan Jones, one anonymous respondent said that “I always thought of The X-Files in retrospective as an (incidental?) instrument [in] getting people to become paranoid of their government, which is an instrument of the real power to manipulate democracies.” This seems to me a fair assessment.
Of course, The X-Files is at the very worst a small proximate cause of the situation in which we find ourselves today. And yet even its tiny portion of the blame is enough to cast a faint shadow over any retrospective like this one. It took us a long time to go from the alien-autopsy film to QAnon, but it seems safe to say that The X-Files had a hand in propagating both of them. The best we can do now is hope the day will come when it can be remembered as just a groundbreaking television show again, with no further prevarication required. Until then, it will have to remain both a victim and a proof of a force that is more insidiously frightening than any alien invasion: the law of unintended consequences.
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Sources: The books “Deny All Knowledge”: Reading the X-Files, edited by David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Marla Cartwright; Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to The X-Files by Peter Knight; Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files by Zack Handlen & Emily St. James; X-Files Confidential: The Unauthorized X-Philes Compendium by Ed Edwards; Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum; The Legacy of The X-Files, edited by James Fenwick and Diane A. Rogers; Opening the X-Files: A Critical History of the Original Series by Darren Mooney; and The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman. Computer Gaming World of August 1998.
Online sources include “X-Files Creator Wants You to Chill Out on the Conspiracy Theories” by Jordan Hoffman at Vanity Fair.
The Truth Is Out There, Part 3: The Game of Belief
If traditional film is a river, the viewer of that film sits on the bank and watches the water flow by. We wanted to take that viewer and turn them into a fish and put them down into that river.
— Greg Roach, Director of The X-Files Game
Given the demographics of X-Files fandom, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that the show’s parent network Fox started to think about making a computer game that was officially based on it quite quickly. Already early in the second season, before the big breakthrough at the Golden Globe Awards, Fox began making inquiries on the subject with game developers. This was the peak of the interactive-movie era, when games that blended interactivity with video clips starring real human actors were widely believed to be the necessary future of the medium. Fox’s search thus led it to HyperBole Studios, a company whose name positively screams 1990s — note the sticky capital “B” in the middle of it — every bit as much as The X-Files itself. With a name like that, how could the studio be anything but a loud and proud advocate of the so-called “Siliwood” approach to game making?
HyperBole had actually been around for half a decade by that point, evolving alongside the hype over multimedia computing. It was the brainchild of one Greg Roach, who had gotten his first Apple IIc home computer in 1985, when he was still a university student majoring in theater and philosophy in Houston, Texas. He had tried to play the text adventures of the era, but found that they didn’t agree with him. What should have been “portals to a different world” struck him as balky, pedantic, and dull.
A few years later, when he was employed as an associate director at the Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston, he got his first glimpse of HyperCard on the Apple Macintosh. It was a revelation. “Here was the answer I’d been looking for,” he says. Like a lot of other starstruck HyperCard zealots from unusual, often non-technical backgrounds, he founded a company to bring his hypertext experiments to the world. Initially, he did not envision HyperBole as anything so gauche as a games studio: it was rather to be the publisher of a bimonthly multimedia magazine on two floppy disks. The magazine never quite met that bimonthly schedule, but Roach and his friends did manage to put out nine issues between 1990 and 1992. Each was an eclectic mix of hypertext narratives, comics, visual art, video clips, poetry, and opinion pieces. “The writing can sometimes be a little idiosyncratic,” wrote MacUser of the endeavor, “but it’s never boring.” The magazine’s most ambitious project was The Madness of Roland, an “interactive novel” by Roach himself that ran in installments in the first six issues. Sprouting from The Song of Roland, the towering Medieval epic about a chivalrous knight-errant in the time of Charlemagne, it quickly evolved — or devolved, depending on your point of view — into a stream-of-consciousness postmodern pastiche of the sort that was very popular among academic hypertext theorists at the time. It was eventually released in an enhanced version as a standalone product.
The hard truth was, however, that work like this was more interesting to the literary theorists than it was to ordinary computer owners; you certainly weren’t going to be able to sustain a software company of any real size on it, not even one that catered to the artsy, well-heeled Mac user base. Being a man with commercial as well as intellectual aspirations, Roach decided to add the revolutionary new storage medium of CD-ROM to his technological stack and replace interactive books with interactive movies. He ended the magazine and moved to Seattle, both to be closer to the West Coast tech titans and to take advantage of the city’s underrated theater and film- and video-production communities. No shrinking violet, he branded himself “the Spielberg of multimedia” and “a theorist of virtual cinema,” and commenced cold-calling anyone who would pick up the telephone. For example, he talked his way into sharing a stage with Sid Meier for a debate over “Multimedia versus Game Design” at the 1994 Computer Game Developers Conference, where he discussed the importance of things like “a geometric understanding of the spatial possibilities of what the media represents.” (Such tangled phraseology left Meier scratching his head; he kept trying to bring the conversation back around to the best ways of making games that were, you know, fun.)
Roach charmed enough venture capitalists to hire some programmers, who helped him to create a system for making interactive movies called, naturally enough, VirtualCinema. In another tribute to his energy and persuasiveness, HyperBole became the first games studio to be signed by Hollywood’s Agency for the Performing Arts — the most prestigious talent agency in Tinseltown — as a client.
The first of HyperBole’s VirtualCinema games was one of the last to be published by a shady outfit called Media Vision, which had gotten its start in sound cards and was now attempting to build a larger empire on boxed games of its own and, wherever and whenever these failed to deliver the goods, lots and lots of accounting fraud. According to Roach — admittedly, not always the most reliable witness — Media Vision yanked a half-completed interactive movie out of his hands and rushed it onto store shelves when the financial house of cards began to show signs of instability. Be that as it may, the game called Quantum Gate was followed just nine months later by one called The Vortex: Quantum Gate II that picked up right where it had left off. By that time, however, the house of cards at Media Vision had collapsed, so the sequel was published by HyperBole themselves. As a result, it had little retail presence and sold hardly any copies at all.
If nothing else, these games served to prove the wisdom of the move to Seattle; in terms of their acting performances and overall production values, they really did stand out from most of the sub-B-movie competition in their space. Unfortunately, Roach’s scripts were less impressive, being a nearly incomprehensible mishmash of science-fiction clichés and New Age malarkey. The interactivity wasn’t up to much either: just some deserted corridors to wander from a Myst-style first-person perspective, some menus that popped up in conversations but made minimal difference to the larger arc of the story, and, most lamentably and inexplicably of all, a thoroughly botched attempt to re-implement the old arcade classic Battlezone.
Despite their shortcomings, the Quantum Gate games wound up serving HyperBole well after a fashion. For when Fox started looking around for someone to make an X-Files game, HyperBole’s Hollywood talent agency could submit them as demo reels. Roach claimed in 1998 that, upon being formally invited to submit a bid for the project, he almost turned the opportunity down: “I’d never seen The X-Files at that point. But then I watched the show. The creative possibilities were intriguing, so we went back to Fox and affirmed our interest.”
It soon became clear that the idea of an X-Files game was being driven by the suits at Fox, not by the team that was in the trenches making the television show from week to week. Chris Carter was at best ambivalent. “What can you do that I can’t?” he asked Roach at their first meeting. Slowly, Roach talked him around, at the same time that he convinced his bosses at Fox that the VirtualCinema engine was just the tool for the job. Eventually, Carter agreed to provide a story outline which HyperBole would then turn into a game. By the end of 1995, when the show was in the midst of its third season, the deal was done. Barely three years removed from making an underground multimedia magazine in his basement for a few hundred subscribers, Roach was now to be entrusted with one of the hottest properties on television, watched by tens of millions of people every week. Truly these were strange times in gaming.
That said, it wasn’t going to be practical to build the entire game around Mulder and Scully; David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were busy enough as it was. At the same time, though, any alleged X-Files game from which they were completely absent would surely be pilloried. Carter’s story outline rather cleverly solved the problem by giving the player control of another, newly introduced FBI agent by the name of Craig Willmore, who would be set on the trail of the usual twosome after they mysteriously disappeared in the middle of an investigation. Duchovny and Anderson would appear only near the end of the game, as the player’s reward for getting that far. All things considered, it seemed like a reasonable compromise.
After much fraught negotiations with the two stars’ representatives, it was agreed that they would come to Seattle for about a week to film their scenes. Mitch Pileggi, who played Assistant Director Walter Skinner, Mulder and Scully’s immediate superior at the FBI, signed on as well. Ditto the actors who played The Lone Gunmen, a trio of eccentric computer hackers who helped Mulder and Scully out from time to time on the show. Even William B. Davis, otherwise known as Cancer Man, agreed to a cameo appearance.
Greg Roach (right) on the set with William B. Davis.
Getting all of this arranged took months and months. “Working with a company like Fox is a lot like talking to a person with multiple-personality disorder or Alzheimer’s,” says Roach. “They never remember from one minute to the next what they’ve agreed to. We had to deal with the legal division, marketing department, Fox Interactive, the TV division, and Chris Carter. Each of them has their own fiefdom and their own veto capacity that only extends so far in certain areas.” Most creative decisions required the approval of Carter, but it was made all too clear by his average response time to queries that the X-Files game was not high on his priority list. In all, another year and a half went by before the design document, script, and all of the assorted acting contracts were far enough along that shooting could begin.
This milestone coincided with the end of the show’s fourth season, when it was nearing the absolute pinnacle of its popularity and cultural cachet. A typical 24-episode season was shot at a pace of roughly one episode every ten days, meaning that Duchovny and Anderson could expect to spend a good two-thirds of each year playing Mulder and Scully. This year they were even busier, however, because an X-Files feature film was to be shot between the fourth and fifth seasons, to premiere in movie theaters right after the latter had finished airing. And on top of all this, the two were now expected to come to Seattle during the two-week gap between the fourth-season wrap party and the beginning of work on the film in order to help Greg Roach get his computer game done. Understandably enough under the circumstances, they arrived tired and decidedly unenthusiastic. Because of the scheduling issues, Mulder and Scully’s scenes were to be filmed first — a true baptism by fire for the cast and crew. “After that, the rest of the shoot seemed relatively easy,” says Roach.
Duchovny, who had aspirations of becoming a Hollywood leading man of the sort who could carry a major non-X-Files film on his own, had been growing restless on the television show of late. It isn’t hard to imagine what he thought of the notion of appearing in a videogame, a still less respected medium than television. HyperBole did their best to make him happy, even going so far as to place a private yoga instructor at his beck and call throughout his stay in Seattle. Nonetheless, he did the bare minimum required of him during the time he was contractually obligated to make himself available, then jetted off without a backward glance to enjoy what was left of his holiday.
Greg Roach directs David Duchovny.
Gillian Anderson, on the other hand, went above and beyond the call of duty. Once the concept of the game was explained to her, she became genuinely interested in what HyperBole was trying to do, and put in a lot more effort than she needed to. She even agreed to stay on a few extra days after Duchovny left, to shoot some extra scenes that Greg Roach hastily wrote to take advantage of her unexpected graciousness. “I like the Four Seasons hotel in Seattle,” she said as a way of deflecting everyone’s gratitude. If you’ve played the game, you probably noticed that you see a lot more of Scully in it than Mulder. Now you know why.
The entirety of the filming took seven weeks, all of them spent at locations in and around Seattle. A goodly chunk of the crew’s time was spent at the old Naval Station Puget Sound at Sand Point, a Navy base and airfield — the first airborne circumnavigation of the Earth had ended there in 1924 — that had recently been decommissioned as part of the peace dividend for winning the Cold War. It was in every way a classic X-Files set. “It had to be big, it had to be scary, it had to be a Byzantine maze with corridors and machinery,” says Roach. “At Sand Point, they’d built a new brig, and then a year later the base was shut down. So we had this huge, brand spanking new, governmental, high-tech facility that provided the perfect shell for the secret base.” The local maritime training academy and its primary training ship, formerly an ocean-going icebreaker and tug, were more thoroughly X-Files-looking places. All were shown to maximum advantage, thanks not least to Director of Photography Jon Joffin, who had held the same title for eleven episodes of the television show during its fourth season. He became known as “the smoke Nazi” around HyperBole for his ability to conjure up that trademark X-Files murk.
Once the filming wrapped, it was back to the office for the HyperBole principals. There they used the VirtualCinema system to turn the video footage that had been shot, along with still photographs of the various locations, into a game. As this work proceeded and the likely timeline for its completion firmed up, Fox decided how to incorporate the game into its marketing plans for The X-Files in general. The summer of 1998 was already to be The Summer of The X-Files; a shocking, bravura finale to the fifth season on May 17 would lead right into the movie hitting theaters on June 19. The game seemed a nice adjunct to these plans; indeed, it was decided that it should be released on the very same day as the movie’s premiere. To emphasize its kinship with what most people were calling “the X-Files movie” — its official name was just The X-Files — Fox Interactive branded HyperBole’s effort simply The X-Files Game, which was certainly descriptive if not very original.
Gillian Anderson further endeared herself to Fox Interactive and HyperBole by agreeing to come to the E3 trade show in May of 1998 to sign autographs and promote the soon-to-be-released game.
When June 19 arrived, those eager fans who stopped by a software store on their way to or from their friendly local movieplex got, alongside more X-Files than was probably good for anyone in such a compressed span of time, a game that was exceptional in some ways but ultimately unable to overcome the limitations of its format. By 1998, those limitations were already causing the games industry to move sharply away from the interactive-movie conceit and all it entailed. The appearance of The X-Files Game this late in the day was more a tribute to its long gestation time and the power of licensing than any strong demand for more games of this type in the marketplace. In fact, The X-Files Game was the very last splashy production of its kind to hit store shelves, the last gasp of a confused but earnest movement in game development that really had once seemed like the future of the medium writ large. (Three other stragglers of the same breed — The Journeyman Project 3, Black Dahlia, and Tex Murphy: Overseer — had shown up earlier in 1998.) Game developers like Greg Roach and HyperBole, who had irrevocably married themselves to the idea of a grand alliance between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, would find themselves out of a job going forward. One can only hope that it was fun for them while it lasted.
As the last of its kind, The X-Files Game ought to be an exceptional example, the highest iteration of the interactive-movie conception. And in some ways at least, it really is. It sprawls across no fewer than seven CDs. That space is used for video that looks far better than the norm — almost, dare I say it, of DVD quality.
The live-action segments also impress in ways that transcend mere audiovisual fidelity. Their production values are superb by comparison with almost any other interactive movie. They make no use of green-screening: the practice of painting pixel-arts “sets” in behind human actors who have said their lines on empty sound stages, an approach which was used in the vast majority of other games of this type because it was much, much cheaper than filming on proper sets. Roach claims that it cost $6 million in the final reckoning to make The X-Files Game. A good chunk of the budget was doubtless swallowed up by the complicated corporate logistics of the project; David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson would soon be signing contract extensions on the television show that paid them six-digit sums for every single episode they appeared in, and one has to assume the salaries they were paid to appear here were comparable if not even more excessive. Still, there’s no denying that this game looks as good as any typical episode of the show. It genuinely feels like The X-Files. Of course, it helped to shoot in Seattle, a city whose climate is much the same as that of gray-and-rainy Vancouver, its neighbor just on the other side of the border to its north.
The acting here acquits itself reasonably well too. Yes, Duchovny looks a little bored and irritated, but Anderson is fine in a role whose tics and mannerisms she has down flat, as is Mitch Pileggi. The unfamiliar actors who are expected to carry the balance of the game don’t do much if any worse than your typical guest star on the show. Jordan Lee Williams, who plays Agent Craig Willmore, carries out his ersatz Mulder assignment about as well as one can ask. Ditto Paige Witte, who plays the Seattle police detective who becomes Willmore’s partner in investigation, his equivalent of Scully.
Alas, the part of The X-Files Game that is supposed to put the “interactive” in an interactive movie is less impressive and more problematic. Before I get to that, though, I do need to note that one accusation which has been repeatedly leveled against this game from just after its release right up until the present day actually isn’t fair at all. When you first arrive at the Seattle FBI office as Agent Willmore, you need to log into your computer, which in turns requires a password. Lackadaisical reviewers have been writing for decades now that you’re expected to guess this password from Willmore’s enthusiasm for the history of the American Civil War and a whole lot of lateral thinking. This would indeed be an awful puzzle to start (or end) any game with, not to mention nonsensical in terms of verisimilitude. (You’re supposed to be Willmore, after all. Why would he need to puzzle out his own password?) But it’s not a puzzle: the password you need is written in the manual. The fact that this caused such confusion is itself a sign of changing times in gaming. Just a few years before The X-Files Game, gamers were poring over manuals as a matter of course; by a few years after, manuals had all but disappeared. This game found itself caught in the middle, making assumptions about its player base that no longer held true.
In reality, the problems here don’t come down to nonsensical puzzles. Greg Roach never had much interest in puzzles anyway, and, even if he would have, Fox had made it clear that this product must be accessible to people who had never played a computer game before, who were attracted strictly by the name of the television show on the box. All of which means that, although The X-Files Game plays superficially like a Myst clone when you aren’t watching video clips or clicking through dialog trees, it can’t offer up the usual array of arbitrary set-piece puzzles to gate your progress. And that’s a fine, even welcome development in itself; Lord knows, we had all seen enough slider puzzles to last a lifetime by this point. Yet it gradually becomes clear that neither Roach nor anyone else at HyperBole has anything to hand with which to replace arbitrary puzzles. This investigation turns out to require shockingly little thought on your part. Go where the game wants you to go and click on everything there. Rinse and repeat, and in due course you win.
Now, even this isn’t awful in itself. There is plenty of room in my heart for a game that’s not really interested in challenging me, that just wants to sweep me away on the wings of an exciting story. But there are two more downfalls here. One has a remedy; sadly, the other does not.
The first is the “clicking on everything” part of the equation. The X-Files Game may have decided to abandon arbitrary puzzles and to replace pre-rendered 3D scenes with carefully shot photographs, but it still has all the other infelicities of the Myst-style first-person, node-based approach to navigation. You never know quite where all you can look, and your degree of rotation when you turn is wildly inconsistent from node to node. It’s disarmingly easy to get confused just trying to weave your way through the FBI office. And when the game sends you off to a sprawling warehouse with darkened nooks and crannies everywhere… oh, my. Here you have to scour every single node and viewpoint for the tiny pieces of evidence that you need to collect to jog the plot wheels back into motion. There’s nothing fun about this. It makes the game hard in the most annoying of all possible ways; I’ll take slider puzzles any day over fake mazes and pixel hunts.
Thankfully, the game does give you a way of avoiding most of these stumbling blocks. You can turn on something called “Artificial Intuition” to gain access to a hint system and, most importantly, activate an icon that will swirl suggestively whenever you’re “in close proximity to information vital to the investigation.” I advise you to spare yourself a world of frustration by taking advantage of it.
But my other overarching complaint has no similar remedy. It goes to the story itself, which is… well, it’s just not that good, certainly not good enough to maintain the player’s interest in the absence of compelling gameplay. Greg Roach’s script from Chris Carter’s story outline is most kindly described as workmanlike — X-Files by the numbers, without the flashes of subversive wit and human warmth that marked the television series’s best episodes.
There are linchpins of the plot that just don’t make much sense. When you finally locate Scully, you learn that she’s been cooling her heels for several days in a sanitarium — a perfectly innocent one, that is, not the type you can’t check out of — without bothering to tell anyone at the FBI where she is. Meanwhile Mulder has gone charging off on the trail of yet another government conspiracy involving aliens without ever bothering to tell his partner what he’s up to, much less the agency that employs him. Even by the usual standards of these two, that’s some terrible communication.
Other weaknesses are inherent to the very nature of the project. The X-Files Game was always destined to be a bit player in the larger X-Files saga. The “Mulder and Scully have been kidnapped!” plot tries its best to get you invested, but these are, after all, the two most incompetent agents at the FBI, who rush heedlessly into danger and nearly get themselves killed every single week. We know perfectly well the game isn’t going to let them die, as we also know that nothing all that important to the larger mythology of the show is going to be revealed by this ancillary production. The stakes never feel very high because we’ve seen all of this so many times before. In the X-Files movie, Scully is kidnapped and Mulder must effect a rescue; once you find Scully here, it becomes a mirror image of that scenario. And so, as Joni Mitchell sang, it’s “round and round and round in the circle game.”
The date which appears onscreen at the opening of the game places it in the past of the current X-Files chronology at the time the game was released: all the way back in the third season, which was, not coincidentally, the season during which Chris Carter wrote the story outline. At that time, the mythology episodes were revolving around the “black oil,” a kind of parasitic alien consciousness that could infect human hosts and take them over, Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style. But that plot line had long since been put to bed by the time the fifth season rolled around, the better to make way for the latest existential threat to humanity. Here, however, we’re mired in the stuff once again, in a way that must have felt painfully anticlimactic to those hardcore X-Files fans who rushed out to pick up the game upon its release.
In lieu of a plot that goes anywhere particularly interesting, the script dangles the promise of meeting Mulder and Scully in the flesh as the most tangible reward for slogging through the mazes and pixel hunts. From a certain perspective, this was clever. But it doesn’t do anything to make The X-Files Game a game that can stand on its own, divorced from the television show that spawned it. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The game begins with the iconic opening-credits sequence from the show, which serves as a fine demonstration of the exceptional video fidelity. The cast credits are not updated; David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson are still listed as the only stars. “What are we?” demand Jordan Lee Williams and Paige Witte. “Chopped liver?” Well, kind of, yeah…
Agent Craig Willmore, who, we learn from perusing his office and his apartment, is a recently divorced father of one with a fondness for the American Civil War and the Ramones. His name is lifted from the third-season episode “Syzygy,” where it’s mentioned unfavorably by two telekinetic teenage girls who are terrorizing a small town: “Hate him, hate him, wouldn’t want to date him.” (Sheesh… as if it wasn’t hard enough already to step into Fox Mulder’s shoes.) The script is littered with little in-jokes and callbacks like this.
In another example of the game’s fan service, you find a copy of Jose Chung’s book from the much-admired third-season episode of the same name. The dilemma to be pondered, I suppose, is where you draw the line between fan service and identity crisis.
Navigation is of the node-based first-person stripe that was popularized by Myst, but the scenes are all built from photographs of real sets rather than being the output of a 3D modeller. Just look at how this scene and the one below are lit. The game absolutely nails the X-Files visual aesthetic.
Ken Starr had nothing on this guy. Informed by Assistant Director Skinner of Mulder and Scully’s disappearance, the question that Agent Willmore most emphatically wants an answer to is whether they are now knocking boots or have ever done so. To be fair, the same question obsessed a substantial chunk of the X-Files fan base.
In a clear sign of this game’s long gestation time, Agent Willmore keeps tabs on events in the field with an Apple Newton. Apple discontinued its innovative but flawed “personal digital assistant” a few months before The X-Files Game was released.
Hunting a pixel in the dark back room of a warehouse means that we have to squint at the world through the narrow beam of a flashlight. This sort of thing is the source of the game’s only real challenge. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is really no fun at all.
Agent Willmore in full jerk mode. Meeting an Asian man near a potential crime scene, he immediately leaps to questioning his immigration status. And then… what accent? Although The X-Files Game acquits itself well on some fronts, it’s full of little inconsistencies like these that mark it as not quite ready for prime time. (“James Wong,” by the way, is the name of a regular X-Files scriptwriter, responsible for the early standout episode “Ice” among many others.)
Scully in da house! And it only took until the sixth disc out of seven to meet her.
Remind you of anything? The shadow of the alien-autopsy film still looms large.
Canned video clips may have seemed inherently more “dramatic” than conventional computer graphics to people like Greg Roach, but they’re a horribly blunt instrument to try to build a game around, leaving no room for emergent behavior whatsoever. The last disc of of The X-Files Game is a fine example of this. It ought to be a series of heart-pounding action sequences, but, because the only things the game can show you are things that have been filmed, it turns instead into a tedious exercise in figuring out what sequence of events were written down beforehand in the script. Doing anything else leads to a summary judgment of instant death for the crime of failing to read the scriptwriter’s mind.
As if the anachronistic quality of its interactive-movie conceit hadn’t been problem enough, the commercial prospects of The X-Files Game were badly damaged by yet another factor. It had been Fox Interactive and HyperBole’s intention all along to release the game in June of 1998 not only for Windows and the Mac, but also in a version for the Sony PlayStation. Doing so would have broadened its potential customer base almost exponentially. But, lacking expertise on the more constrained, finicky console, HyperBole made the fateful decision to outsource the port to a third party, who rewarded their faith by dropping the ball entirely. There was no alternative but to release on computers only and then try to do the PlayStation port in-house. Thanks to heroic efforts on the part of their programmers, HyperBole did get it done, delivering a port that doesn’t look or play all that much worse than the computer versions — a remarkable feat indeed, considering the disparities of hardware involved. Yet it took them until well into 1999 to get it ready, by which time the game only seemed like that much more of an anachronism.
Despite it all, Greg Roach claims that The X-Files Game sold “in the region of” 1 million copies when all was said and done. I suppose that such a figure isn’t completely out of the bounds of possibility when the console version and bargain bins are taken into account; the PlayStation had such mass popularity and market penetration at this time that a turd in a box with the Sony logo on it would probably have shifted a few hundred thousand units. Whatever the real numbers, though, there was never any serious talk during the remainder of the television show’s run of funding another X-Files game, of the interactive-movie or any other style, made by HyperBole or anyone else. This alone is ample evidence that the first game wasn’t a rip-roaring success.
The cultural moment that could spawn studios like HyperBole was well and truly past by 1998; the company never won another contract of anywhere close to this one’s prominence and size, in fact never made another boxed computer game of any sort. A downsized HyperBole subsisted on small Web-development contracts and the like for a while, before closing up shop for good in 2005.
By that time, Greg Roach was well on the way to his next big thing. He says that he experienced a “tremendously powerful spiritual awakening” in 1998, when he celebrated shipping The X-Files Game with a trip to Egypt to see the Pyramids of Giza. There he was contacted by a group of trans-dimensional beings of pure energy whom he has come to call the Council of Light. (He adopted this appellation after his first name for them, the White Brotherhood, proved to have all the wrong connotations.) The shuttering of HyperBole coincided with his founding of Spirit Quest Tours, offering “life-changing spiritual travel” to those who, like Fox Mulder, really, really Want to Believe. As of this writing, you can find enlightenment for twelve days in Peru for just $7950, not including airfare, meals, single supplement, or “personal expenses.” Nobody ever said that The Truth Out There would come cheap.
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Sources: The books The X-Files Game: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba and Writing for Interactive Media: The Complete Guide by Jon Samsel and Darryl Wimberley. Computer Gaming World of June 1994, July 1994, February 1995, August 1998, and September 1998; Edge of January 2011; MacUser of December 1992; CD-ROM Today of August/September 1994; InCider of September 1991; PC Games of September 1998; Extreme PlayStation of August 1999 and September 1999. My thanks to reader Busca for digging up a few of these magazine sources for me!
Online sources include GameSpot’s vintage review of the game, the old HyperBole site, Greg Roach’s personal site, his Spirit Quest Tours site, “Greg Roach Wants You to Make a Spiritual Pilgrimage” by Christine Desadeleer at Matador Network, Roach being interviewed by Dr. Sarah Larsen, and an old “making of” reel for the game.
Where to Get It: The X-Files Game has never been re-released for digital purchase, doubtless due to the complications of licensing deals. The easiest way to play it today is to download the pre-packaged version at The Collection Chamber.
The Truth is Out There, Part 2: The Power of Belief
Chris Carter.
When I was sitting in my office in my surf trunks, barefoot, playing ball with the dog every twenty minutes, writing the pilot for The X-Files, I never imagined that they would be making X-Files underwear and that 10,000 people a week would be logging onto the Internet to talk about the show…
— Chris Carter, 1995
Chris Carter, the creator of The X-Files, couldn’t have been more different from your stereotypical scrawny, pasty-skinned, basement-dwelling conspiracy theorist. Born in 1956 in a suburb of Los Angeles, he was more like your stereotypical beach bum, who learned to surf almost before he learned to walk. Upon graduating from university with a degree in journalism, he went to work for Surfing magazine, rising to the post of senior editor while still in his mid-twenties. “I went around the world surfing,” he says. It was in every way a charmed life for a young man.
Not long after getting married in 1983, however, he started to think about finding a less travel-intensive career, one that might be able to sustain him even after his hardcore surfing days were behind him. He decided to try his hand at screenwriting; he was certainly living in the right part of the world for it, after all. And once again, he proved lucky or talented at his chosen profession — or, more likely, both. He broke into the business in remarkably short order, writing scripts for various TV movies along with other piecework. His longest-lasting gig was in the writers’ room of Rags to Riches, a quirky but wholesome hybrid of musical, sitcom, and family drama that ran for two seasons on NBC in 1987 and 1988. Such light-hearted, borderline saccharine material gave no hint that he had something like The X-Files in him. “I actually became known as a comedy writer,” he says. “That’s what people kept wanting me to write.”
It’s a longstanding truism in television that every workaday writer in the field dreams secretly — or not so secretly — of having a show all his own. Chris Carter was no exception. He thought his best chance of fulfilling his dream lay at Rupert Murdoch’s new Fox network, an upstart that was trying to claw out a space for itself alongside CBS, NBC, and ABC, the Big Three in American broadcast television ever since the era of the idiot box began. Fox had enjoyed its greatest success to date with programming that was a little too edgy for the stodgier established networks, but which the advertiser-coveted younger demographics adored. Shows like the rapier-witted adult-oriented cartoon The Simpsons and the decidedly non-wholesome family sitcom Married… with Children were the necessary antidote to NBC’s sugary-sweet Cosby Show, the biggest program of all on American television. Carter thought that a horror series might fit in well with the Fox lineup.
As has been recounted many times over the years since, the inspiration that started Carter down the road to The X-Files was a television obscurity from 1974, a series called Kolchak: The Night Stalker that had been allowed just one season of twenty episodes on ABC before it was cancelled. Despite its short run, its tales of a lone Chicago journalist exploring an underworld of vampires, werewolves, and other things that go bump in the night, whilst dealing with an almost equally unfriendly city government that didn’t want any of his horrifying discoveries to come to light, had struck a deep chord in the young Chris Carter. “Basically, I just wanted to do something as scary as I remembered The Night Stalker being when I was in my teens,” he says. “I remembered being scared out of my wits by that show as a kid, and I realized that there just wasn’t anything scary now on television.” It seemed like a gap that Fox, which reveled in boundary-pushing content, might be thrilled to fill.
There were no aliens in The Night Stalker, nor in Carter’s earliest vision of The X-Files. Soon enough, though, a friend clued him into the underground world of ufology. Perusing the reams of poorly xeroxed newsletters, badly dubbed videocassettes, and obscure Usenet newsgroups that were the loosely organized cult’s primary means of communication, Carter realized that here was a whole ready-made milieu and mythology for his show, which could make it more than just a series of one-off encounters with the creepy and paranormal. For he wasn’t such a fan of The Night Stalker that he couldn’t see its limitations: “I think having a ‘monster of the week’ reduced the longevity of its storytelling capabilities.”
Soap operas had been indulging in long story arcs that spanned many episodes or even seasons for decades. Other genres of shows, however, had generally felt compelled to return the situation to a status quo at the end of every episode. Only recently had that begun to change. Still unsure how much they could get away with asking of their audience, most shows that were experimenting with longer story arcs were hedging their bets by mixing them up with more traditional, strictly episodic storytelling. The X-Files would be no exception. It would wind up producing “mythology” episodes about the alien menace only about one-quarter to one-third of the time, then rounding out the rest of its seasons with mostly self-contained “monster of the week” episodes.
The truth or fiction of the conspiracy theories from which Carter borrowed so liberally was not so much unknown as irrelevant to him. A child of the Watergate era for whom distrust of authority came naturally, he was drawn to write aliens into his show for the same reason that, one has to suspect, so many other people were writing newsletters about them: because they felt so simultaneously dangerous and alluring, in such marked contrast to most government scandals. Whatever else you could say about them, the Roswell crash, flying saucers, alien abductions, and the government coverups surrounding them all were a hell of a lot more fun than the Iran-Contra affair, the current White House’s scandal du jour.
As if that wasn’t grounds enough, Carter also had good reason to believe that the presence of aliens would make it easier to sell The X-Files to the suits at Fox. In the fall of 1991, just as he was beginning to put his pitch together, Fox debuted a program called Sightings, at first as a series of sporadically appearing specials. When these became unexpectedly popular, it was turned into a regularly scheduled weekly show in April of 1992, “investigating” all of the usual suspects: crop circles, cattle mutilations, alien-abduction accounts, and of course Roswell. Sightings was, in other words, the seed from which eventually sprang the alien-autopsy “documentary” — the start of a thriving cottage industry of cheaply made pseudo-documentaries dealing with aliens, conspiracies, and the paranormal that carefully avoided making claims to incontrovertible Truth but that always displayed a bias toward the believers’ rather than the skeptics’ side of the ledger. “Marketed correctly, these productions managed to be simultaneously authentic and phony, news and anti-news, without that feeling like any kind of contradiction,” writes television historian Emily Nussbaum. A scripted show dealing with the same subject matter, thought Chris Carter, might do even better.
Any such program could all too easily have become as kitschy and ephemeral as the likes of Sightings. It was the range of other influences which Carter brought to bear on The X-Files that would allow the show to transcend its humble origins, to become a shaper of the zeitgeist rather than a mere symptom of it. All were unusual to see on network television of the time: the Universal monster movies of the 1930s; film noir of the 1940s; the sci-fi B-movies of the 1950s; the cinéma vérité documentaries of the 1960s; the cynical post-Watergate conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s. To this list can be added blockbuster movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Silence of the Lambs (The X-Files liked its serial killers almost as much as it did aliens), and especially David Lynch’s heavily serialized, surrealistic television series Twin Peaks, which in its eight-episode first season in 1990 seemed to demonstrate that you could get away with asking a great deal indeed of your audience before it fell off the tightrope it had been walking and tumbled messily to earth during season two. Additionally, the television critic and historian Emily St. James makes a case for the influence of, of all things, the romantic “dramedy” series Moonlighting, which had a habit of upending all of its own formulas and indulging its experimental side for entire episodes at a time, taking “sidelong swerves into absurdism.” (I think St. James makes a reasonable case, although I do also think that these qualities are more in evidence a bit later in The X-Files’s run than they are at the beginning.)
As it evolved in its creator’s mind, The X-Files came to center on a tiny branch of the FBI whose assigned beat is “unusual” — read, apparently paranormal — cases. The two agents assigned to the branch were to be named Fox Mulder — the sort of name that could exist only in fiction, whose first part was an apparent homage to the network that would hopefully deign to permit him to exist — and Dana Scully. It was hardly unusual in network television at the time to throw an attractive man and woman together in a working relationship replete with will-they-or-won’t-they sexual tension — see the aforementioned Moonlighting — but Carter did defy gender stereotypes by making the male Mulder the credulous member of the pair and the female Scully the hard-eyed skeptic. Together, they would take on the sorts of cases that none of their colleagues would touch, which would often place them in conflict with shadowy forces inside their own government and their own agency who would prefer that any Truth that happened to be Out There remain hidden.
In December of 1992, Fox gave Carter a fine Christmas present indeed by ordering a pilot episode of the show. Now the pace increased exponentially.
And now Chris Carter got very, very lucky, by finding two stars for his show that were absolutely perfect. “We lucked out getting the chemistry we did,” he says. If anything, this is understating the case. For it really is difficult to overstate how important David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were to The X-Files’s success. They were the special sauce that the show’s imitators would never be able to duplicate.
The 32-year-old David Duchovny, who earned the part of Fox Mulder, was an up-and-comer in Hollywood who was then best known for Red Shoe Diaries, a soft-core erotic series of the sort that flourished on late-night cable television in those days before the Internet put pornography on tap for everyone at the click of a mouse. He was almost scarily good-looking, the living embodiment of the phrase “tall, dark, and handsome,” but his secret weapon was his way with a desert-dry one-liner that undercut his Homecoming King face and figure. Like the character he played, Duchovny was smart as well as beautiful. He had been hard at work on a Yale PhD in English literature when he had stumbled into a casting call for a beer commercial at age 27 and emerged with a full-blown case of the acting bug.
The X-Files writing staff would have great fun with the contradictions in Duchovny’s alter ego in the years to come, making Mulder a guy who lived from paycheck to paycheck in a shabby little apartment, with no social life and no women in his orbit beyond his platonic partner Scully — unless you counted the actresses who starred in the pornography that, it would be slyly hinted more and more, he consumed voraciously when not trolling the Internet for tales of alien abductions. Many an X-Files guest star would shake his head that a guy who looked like that could live like this. Duchovny himself, whose choice of projects before and after The X-Files make it clear that he wasn’t afraid of indulging the id, kind of thought the same. “I’d like to see Mulder die one day,” he said once to a journalist. “Not soon, but one day. He should get laid, and then die.”
Gillian Anderson, who was cast as Dana Scully, was even less experienced than her counterpart, being just 24 years old at the time, newly arrived in Hollywood with a freshly minted acting degree from DePaul University and only a few theatrical credits to her name as a professional. A certain superficial resemblance to Jodie Foster, who had played a young FBI agent in The Silence of the Lambs, may very well have been a factor in her casting. Even if so, though, she quickly proved herself to be much more than just another pretty face. Granted, she was a bit stiff on occasion in the early episodes — the other cast and crew speak tactfully of a “learning curve” on the set for this actress who had hardly ever stood before a camera before — but she would find her groove as Scully soon enough. Gender dynamics being what they are, it would have been easy for the relentlessly logical and scientific Scully to come off as a shrewish spoilsport, but this is seldom the case. Anderson learned to make Scully her own, finding deep currents of warmth and humor beneath her scientific surface. A 2022 survey of American women with careers in STEM fields found that an extraordinary 63 percent of those of them who grew up during the heyday of The X-Files saw Dana Scully as a role model.
By a few seasons in, it would be obvious that these two characters who rarely touched one another and never called one another by their first names nevertheless loved one another in a far more believable way than the vast majority of couples who were doing the horizontal tango with regularity on television screens. They made a great team on and off the job. As the academic critic Erin Siodmak has written, “Scully kept it together while Mulder was overemotional, his judgment clouded by his obsessive search for the truth. She eye-rolled his quirks and most absurd theories, and she mocked his masculinity and bravado. Mulder respected Scully’s intellect, valued her work as a scientist, and offered the safety to be vulnerable without judgment.” I can’t emphasize enough how important this relationship was to The X-Files; it was the grace note the show needed to transcend its ripped-from-the-tabloids formula. I like to think it might have proved enlightening to some of the many young male fans of the show, by demonstrating how vibrant and exciting a relationship of equals between a smart man and a smart woman can actually be, whether they’re having sex or not. Be that as it may, Mulder and Scully are widely and deservedly numbered today among the most iconic onscreen couples in television history.
Needless to say, though, Fox had no idea what the series and its stars would become in these, their formative stages. The network’s big bet for the fall 1993 season was The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., a big-budget, high-concept, tongue-in-cheek steampunk Western crafted in the spirit of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. The X-Files, by contrast, was envisioned as little more than a quickie spinoff from Sightings and its ilk. The budget Chris Carter was given to film his pilot reflected this.
“We came to Canada for the forests,” Carter would later say. In reality, that was only the smaller part of its appeal; the bigger draw was the money that could be saved. The pilot’s script involved, inevitably, an alien abduction, which it described as taking place in a forest in Oregon. Unable to find a spot that fit the bill in Southern California, and unable to afford a location shoot in Oregon, Carter hit upon Vancouver as the solution to his problem. The unbalanced exchange rate between the American and Canadian dollar would work hugely to the show’s advantage, even as the city government of Vancouver was offering a lot of other perks and incentives in a bid to attract productions just like this one. In this case, they worked better than those who initiated them could ever have dreamed; having come to Vancouver to shoot a pilot on the cheap, The X-Files would remain there for five seasons, 117 episodes, and one feature film. By the end of those five years, it would be difficult to find a place in the city where The X-Files hadn’t filmed at one time or another. “Around every corner I come upon an image from the show,” mused Chris Carter during a return visit in 2018. “Alleys we shot from every angle. Remarkably, from one high vantage, I can scan at least twenty locations where I directed David and Gillian in episodes and a movie.” To this day, the show’s hardcore fans continue to descend upon Vancouver to scope out the street where this chase scene took place or the building where that monster prowled.
The city became far more than just a way for the show to save money. The look of Vancouver — outside of its short but glorious summer, that is — became the look of The X-Files. “From September to late spring,” says Carter, “you can count on gray days in low light.” Even though the episodes were ostensibly set across the width and breadth of North America, as carefully explicated by a caption at the beginning of each one, they too were always marked by gray days and dark nights. An inordinate amount of rain followed Mulder and Scully around, regardless of where they went, enough so as to make you wonder if they were reincarnations of the “Rain God” Rob McKenna from Douglas Adams’s So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. The murky visuals served to emphasize the show’s murky truths and moralities. (Ironically, the one type of landscape that was hardest for the show to simulate from wet and rainy British Columbia was the parched desert of the American Southwest, home to both Roswell and the second favorite site of UFO conspiracy buffs, the top-secret Air Force base known as Area 51, where the military supposedly test drives the technology recovered from extraterrestrials at Roswell and possibly elsewhere. In thus forcing the show to shy away somewhat from some of the most overtly obvious plot lines and locations suggested by its premise, this may have been no bad thing.)
The pilot episode which Chris Carter delivered to Fox in the spring of 1993 was compromised, as pilots usually are, by the need to do too much at once. It needed both to set up the conditions and characters of the weekly series that would hopefully follow and to demonstrate how a more typical episode would play out from week to week. On the whole, though, it did a serviceable job under the circumstances of bringing Mulder and Scully together at the FBI and sending them out on their very first case of hundreds to come. It even introduced the otherwise anonymous figure who became known as “Cancer Man” or the “Cigarette-Smoking Man” to fans, thanks to the bad habit in which he is constantly engaged; he would become the show’s most longstanding recurring villain, shadow-boxing against the protagonists’ efforts to uncover the truth about the American government’s contact with aliens and much else besides throughout its lengthy run. The pilot ended on what would become a very typical X-Files note, when all of the evidence Mulder and Scully had collected about the alien abduction at its heart literally went up in smoke, the victim of a mysterious fire back at their hotel. In time, this sort of thing would become intensely frustrating, a transparent dodge on the part of the writing staff to keep the wheels of the conspiracy plot lines spinning without ever actually moving them forward. This early on, though, it felt bracing in a television ecosystem where neatly wrapped-up happy endings were still the norm.
By way of further cementing the connection to tabloid programming like Sightings, the pilot episode of The X-Files opens with the claim that it is based on “actual documented accounts.” Strictly speaking, that means nothing whatsoever in terms of veracity; if I tell you a lie and you write it down, that is an “actual documented account.” Still, the show was probably wise not to show this card again after the first episode. I suspect that its existence here was largely at the behest of Fox — the network, that is, not the FBI agent.
Fox pronounced itself satisfied with the pilot. It agreed to fund a full season, albeit at a cut-rate budget of less than $1 million per episode.
So, the pilot was broadcast with little fanfare on September 10, 1993, followed by 23 more episodes over the next months. In a testament to Fox’s relatively low expectations, the show was relegated to Friday nights. Friday was, along with Saturday, one of the two most undesirable evenings of the week, a traditional dumping ground of shows whose potential was considered limited, since so many of the young adults who were most coveted by advertisers tended to be anywhere other than at home sitting in front of their televisions on those evenings. (This rule of television programming had held true for decades; students of Star Trek history will remember that it was NBC’s decision in 1968 to move that show to Friday nights that sealed its fate after just three seasons.)
The X-Files attracted only scattered, usually lukewarm reviews during its first year on the air. It was often described as a sort of low-rent copy of Twin Peaks, which was perhaps a partial truth but by no means a complete one. (To add grist to this mill, David Duchovny had actually had a small role in Twin Peaks, playing against his looks in a different way as a transgender law-enforcement agent.) The show put up mediocre ratings against weak competition in its inauspicious time slot.
In truth, it’s hard to argue that the critics were overlooking any deathless art in that first, comparatively little-watched season of The X-Files. Looking back on those early episodes from the perspective of today, I see a show that’s just good enough to make me wish it was a little bit better. Our current streaming era has, whatever its own infelicities, served to underline the weaknesses of the old broadcast-network formula all too plainly. Every X-Files episode has to wrap up in exactly 45 minutes, meaning that its scripts occasionally feel bloated and meandering, more often compressed, deprived of the space they need to breathe. Meanwhile the sheer quantity of episodes that the network demanded in a season meant that new ones had to be churned out at a tempo of one every eight to ten days. An uneven standard of quality is a virtual guarantee under such conditions. “When I was doing 24-episode [seasons],” says X-Files scriptwriter Glen Morgan, “we knew that three were going to suck, just because you couldn’t focus that much. People get annoyed with me for saying this, but, in all honesty, four [episodes] were great, most were okay, and some of them sucked. And that’s just how it goes!”
The first season was the phase when The X-Files was taking its core premise most literally. There’s little of the daring willingness to break its own rules that would come to mark the show in later years. In keeping with Chris Carter’s original mission statement, the show mostly just wanted to scare you in the beginning. And yet I must confess that I find its parade of aliens, monsters, and preternatural serial killers rather less terrifying than they want to be. It may be telling that my favorite episode of the season, the one called simply “Ice,” is largely a rewrite of John W. Campbell’s wonderfully creepy 1938 novella “Who Goes There?”
A stalemate in an Arctic research station in “Ice.” This early psychological thriller of an episode was unique for the way it turned Mulder and Scully against one another, something that would become almost unimaginable a little later in the show’s run.
To my mind, the first season stands out more for its visual aesthetics than for its writing. With so little money in the budget for shiny visual effects, the creators counted on the viewer’s imagination to fill in blanks that were hidden beneath an awful lot of rain and fog and smoke and darkness. The show used jittery photography to fine effect, a living embodiment of the nervous mood of the scripts; tight closeups in claustrophobic spaces were the norm. The X-Files may have been only dubiously good in the broad strokes at this stage, but it certainly had its own personality right from the start.
The show was saved from going down in history as a one-season wonder like its inspiration Kolchak: The Night Stalker by a happy coincidence involving a different, newer form of media than television. The very same month that the pilot episode was broadcast, Marc Andreessen of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana, Illinois, released the first version of his NCSA Mosaic Web browser for personal computers running MacOS and Microsoft Windows. Mosaic was the most effortlessly usable browser to appear to that point, with a killer feature that would transform the look and feel of the nascent World Wide Web forever: it could display pictures on the screen alongside text. The arrival of Mosaic marked the moment when the Web went from being an esoteric tool for scientists and hackers to a revolutionary communications medium for everyone. In its wake, new websites sprang up in unprecedented numbers, as the first rumblings of what would become the dot-com explosion of the later 1990s began to make themselves heard. An inordinate number of these sites dealt with The X-Files, which was perfectly pitched to appeal to the legions of brainy, plugged-in, usually male university students who were Mosaic’s most prominent early adopters. There was a time when it seemed that every tenth site on the Web was an X-Files site.
The X-Files became the first example of a new phenomenon in traditional media, the first television show whose popularity was almost entirely a credit to the new medium of the Internet. On their personal websites and in the freewheeling discussion forums of Usenet, the self-proclaimed “X-Philes” declared their love, stated their opinions, and argued endlessly over matters large and small. The monster-of-the-week episodes were all well and good, but it was the mythology episodes that really got them revved up. These were dissected on an almost frame-by-frame level of detail — far more detail, if we’re being honest, than they deserved, given the extent to which the writing staff was winging it as they went along. Some of the hardcore fans were disposed to believe in actual government conspiracies, while some were not. But all of them relished the ones seen on the show, wanted to believe as badly as Mulder did that there was a detailed master plan to the mythology locked up in some office at Fox. In truth, of course, no such thing existed then nor ever would.
The obsessive tendencies of the most devoted fans could be almost as disconcerting as they were gratifying to the people who made the show. David Duchovny remembers stumbling into a heated discussion of why the petite Scully is never shown adjusting the car seat after taking over driving duties from the tall and lanky Mulder. “That was probably the last time I ever looked at the Internet, because that kind of frightened me,” he says, only half in jest.
Buzz over The X-Files gradually spilled over to other groups whose Venn diagrams overlapped with that of the early Web denizens. One of those with the biggest overlap, and thus another of the groups where the show made its presence known first, happens to be a special interest of this website: computer-game players and developers. Before the show’s first season had even concluded, the first game to bear the stamp of The X-Files had already appeared on American store shelves.
The Britain-based brothers Julian and Nick Gollop and their tiny studio Mythos Games had started working on a strategy game they called UFO: Enemy Unknown, about a full-blown alien invasion of Earth, a good year and a half before the show made its debut. But by virtue of drawing from many of the same underground ufological sources as The X-Files writing staff, they ended up with similar-looking extraterrestrials and an almost uncannily similar brooding, ominous atmosphere — this despite the fact that the Gollops had never even seen the show, which wouldn’t air in their homeland for the first time until six months after their game was released. Nonetheless, the Gollops’ publisher MicroProse played the similarities up for all they were worth in the United States, going so far as to rename the game there to X-COM; suffice to say that the shared “X-” prefix was not a random happenstance.
Hints of The X-Files would continue to show themselves in many games for the rest of the decade, from the Tex Murphy series to Fallout. And small wonder: Friday-evening X-Files viewing parties became a bonding ritual at countless games studios, the perfect way to celebrate the conclusion of another working week. The same ritual was enacted by millions of ordinary gamers.
The early fan enthusiasm, combined with a rock-bottom budget and the lack of anything else to put into its Friday-night time slot, were enough to get The X-Files renewed by Fox for a second season that began in September of 1994. (Poor Brisco County, on the other hand, had seen its ratings collapse after a strong start and was cancelled after its first season.) Yet the moment when it became clear that The X-Files was really breaking through didn’t arrive until that December, when the show was unexpectedly nominated for a Golden Globe Award in the category of Best Television Drama. And then, even more incredibly, it won the award the following month, beating out such prestigious critics’ darlings as ER and NYPD Blue. To this day, nobody can quite explain how this happened. At the time, nobody was more shocked than the people who made The X-Files. “When we won, you could hear a pin drop,” says the show’s co-producer Paul Rabwin of the reaction in the auditorium. “It was like the longest shot in the world coming in, and everyone was dumbfounded.”
Suddenly The X-Files had a serious buzz about it. By the end of season two, it was regularly winning its time slot. While the numbers it put up still weren’t huge in the abstract, they were an advertiser’s wet dream in terms of demographics. The prototypical X-Files viewer was described as “male, 25 to 34 years old, college educated, residing in the northeastern United States, a moderate television viewer but also a Star Trek fan, and an Internet user.” Millions of people who resembled at least some parts of this description were willing to plan their Friday evenings around catching the latest episode of the show. The pump had been well and truly primed for the alien-autopsy special that aired on Fox that August.
Whatever was fueling the show’s growing popularity, it certainly wasn’t a case of full-scale reinvention. Going into the second season, Chris Carter had made it clear that his core vision was unchanged. “Ultimately,” he said, “my goal [is] the same that it’s always been: to create 22 to 24 really scary shows. I just want to scare the hell out of the audience. That’s all.”
Unsurprisingly, then, the second season of The X-Files isn’t hugely different from the first in style and spirit. The Cancer Man is still smoking in the shadows in the mythology episodes, and serial killers are still the monsters of the week as often as not. That said, there are some signs that the show is changing. The episode “Die Hand Die Verletzt” is a slightly tongue-in-cheek story of a cabal of Satanists who double as a local school board. It draws more from the farcical, partially Dungeons & Dragons-fueled Satanic panics of the 1980s than it does from more respectable Satanic horrors like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. Fox had once been all over that stuff, much as it was all over the UFO stuff now. More and more as time went on, The X-Files would be sending up the tackier tendencies of its parent network.
Mulder and Scully about to be sacrificed by a clean-cut cabal of suburban Satanists.
But the episode that really threw open a window to let some fresh air into the show’s hermetically sealed world appeared two months later. The script for “Humbug” was the first to be credited solely to Darin Morgan, who would go on to become one of The X-Files’s standout writers. Its setting, an encampment of carnival sideshow performers, was plainly inspired by the unnerving 1932 B-movie Freaks. In this context, however, it was used in the service of something perilously close to full-on comedy. This was a first for the show, one which had prompted much debate and soul-searching among the production staff and at the network before the episode was green-lit. The circus performers spend most of their time taking the piss out of Mulder, this mental Hephaestus in the body of an Adonis. And when the script isn’t making fun of him through them, it’s making fun of some of the core premises of the show itself. By no means were all of the fans pleased by this development; it seemed to some of them a slippery slope from mocking the show that they adored to mocking them. Even the fact that the episode aired the night before April Fool’s Day, thus indicating that a comedy installment might become no more than an annual indulgence at worst, wasn’t enough to mollify all of the viewers who liked their X-Files dark and po-faced.
“Well, why should I take offense? Just because it’s human nature to make assumptions about people purely on the basis of their physical appearances? Why, I’ve done the same thing to you, for example. I’ve taken in your all-American features, your dour demeanor, your unimaginative necktie design, and concluded that you work for the government… an FBI agent. But you see the tragedy? I have unconsciously reduced you to a stereotype, instead of regarding you as a specific, unique individual.”
“But I am an FBI agent…”
For my part, though, I say it was about time. After all, The X-Files is a pretty ridiculous show on the face of it, riven from top to bottom with cognitive dissonance. Mulder and Scully are simultaneously the two busiest and the two most incompetent agents in the history of the FBI, who have apparently never heard that most important piece of advice for anyone trapped in a horror movie or in a law-enforcement training course: Don’t split up! They’re constantly rushing alone into danger without bothering to tell each other what they’re doing, much less telling any of their other colleagues, and constantly getting themselves almost killed, being saved only by the plot armor provided by their place at the top of the credits list.
Unanswerable questions abound. Why does a government whose conspiratorial tendrils reach into every conceivable aspect of life not just kill these two rogue agents in its midst? Why does Scully insist anew at the beginning of every single episode that, no, this latest case surely doesn’t involve anything supernatural, when by the end of the episode it almost always does? Isn’t her perverse resistance to extraordinary evidence in some way the opposite of the scientific method?
By slyly cluing us in to the fact that the show’s own creators were aware of all of this — that they were actually much smarter than the likes of Sightings — “Humbug” gave us permission not to take the show so seriously. We know it’s silly and you know it’s silly, it seemed to say, so feel free to laugh if you want to. Or, if you like, feel free to take the show seriously but still not quite literally. Vintage television is sometimes described as a character- rather than a plot-driven format. We watch mainly in order to hang out with characters that we know and like; what they actually get up to there on the screen is just the excuse for giving them a show. Happily, and despite the novel ambitions of the mythology plot lines, The X-Files had two leads strong enough to make the show work on this level. Mind you, this would not keep some fans from trying to slot every little anecdote into some master canon of an X-Files universe — and more power to anyone who enjoys that sort of thing. But it was and is a nice message for the less literal-minded among us to hear. As the first episode willing to unabashedly embrace the “meta,” “Humbug” might just be the most important — not the best, but the most important — episode of The X-Files ever made.
By the third season, more X-Files episodes — especially the ones written by Darin Morgan — were abandoning the usual formulas to begin mining richer veins of myth and magical realism. “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” for example, gives us a man who has been cursed to foresee the whens and hows of the deaths that await every single one of us someday. One of the most touching moments in the show’s history comes when Scully asks him how she will die. “You don’t,” replies veteran character actor Peter Boyle in a voice touched with mercy, with an expression on his face that tells us all too clearly that he’s lying. Such are the lies that we all tell ourselves and one another in order to get through this thing called life.
And then there’s “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” a suitably odd name for an incredibly odd episode. Here The X-Files goes full-on postmodern avant-garde for the first time, wrapping truth and fiction and the liminal spaces in between into a hopeless tangle that’s shot through with allusions to everything from Star Wars to Close Encounters to Twin Peaks. Jose Chung himself is a riff on Truman Capote, writing a version of In Cold Blood involving aliens. His presence, along with a cameo by Alex Trebek, the host of the television game show Jeopardy!, is an elaborate callback to David Duchovny’s turn on Celebrity Jeopardy!, which he lost to author Stephen King in the final round when he couldn’t remember the name of Capote’s novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And so it goes, and so it goes, around and around in a fashion guaranteed to delight any post-doc in postmodern literary theory.[1]The first full-length academic book deconstructing The X-Files appeared already in 1996, while the third season was still airing. The contents are sometimes insightful, sometimes hilariously banal in that special way that only academic writing can be. A sample of the latter type:
“These episodes not only establish a comparison between Mulder and various tragic truth seekers but also reveal the erotics of the search through repeated imagery of penetration. The extraterrestrial energy-being of ‘Space’ painfully possesses Colonel Belt, the silicon-based parasite erupts from the throats of its cave-explorer victims like a phallus, the subatomic particles ‘come into’ Banton’s body. The ‘penetrating answer’ turns upon, penetrates, and destroys its finder. The logic of the show repeatedly represents the object of desire, the much-cited truth, as itself a phallic power with a will of its own.”
You heard it here first, folks: the Truth that is Out There is really a giant penis just waiting to skewer you like a pig on a spit.
In this episode, The X-Files comments for a second time in the course of a single season on the real-world alien-autopsy sensation for which it itself had laid the groundwork. The moment when Scully conducts her own autopsy on an alien, only to snag her scalpel on a zipper — it turns out that it’s just a dead guy in an alien suit — is as hilarious as it is subversive. Ditto the way the show, just one year removed from its first tentative steps in this direction in “Humbug,” now dares to directly and unabashedly mock a portion of its most hardcore audience, personified as a young man living in his parents’ basement who wants desperately to be carried away by aliens so that his dad will stop hounding him to get a job. “Roswell! Roswell!” he shouts apropos of nothing when all other words and logic have failed him.
“There are those who care not about extraterrestrials, searching for meaning in other human beings,” Jose Chung tells us at the end. “Rare or lucky are those who find it.” It’s strongly implied that they are the most enlightened ones, regardless of their ultimate success rate — a strange message for a show invented to exploit interest in UFOs to convey, but by no means an unwise or unwelcome one.
At the beginning of the fourth season, Fox finally saw fit to move The X-Files out of the Friday graveyard slot and over to Sunday evenings. The twelfth episode of that season aired just after the Super Bowl on January 26, 1997, becoming thereby the most-watched single installment of the show ever, seen by almost 30 million American households. From its humble roots, The X-Files had grown up to become a show that absolutely everybody at least knew of. “You cannot get an issue of TV Guide or Entertainment Weekly or People without someone referring to the show,” marveled Paul Rabwin. “There have been political cartoons, references in the funnies, and newspaper headlines. It’s no longer something that needs explanation.”
Yet the show definitely wasn’t dumbing itself down to please the masses. Foucault’s Pendulum has nothing on the conspiracy theorist’s magic brownie that is the fourth season’s “Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man,” in which we learn that Cancer Man not only personally carried out the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King but has been fixing the Grammy Awards and the Super Bowl all these years as well. (He has a special dislike for the Buffalo Bills.) We even see him watching the pilot of The X-Files approvingly, implying that the whole show we’ve been viewing is yet another piece of government misinformation. The mind boggles…
It turns out that Cancer Man is a frustrated author who has a vendetta against the world because he can’t get a story published.
It’s clever, yes, but is it anything more than that? There’s only so far you can take this sort of thing before it becomes masturbatory — empty tricksterism for its own sake, without much to say to us beyond well-worn grad-school clichés about the “instability of truth” and the “illusion of the objective” and all the rest of that tired lot.
Enter one Vince Gilligan, who had started writing for The X-Files already in the second season but didn’t really begin to come into his own until the fourth, when he claimed the title of the show’s most consistently interesting scriptwriter from Darin Morgan. As if to highlight this passing of the guard, the latter stepped in front of the camera to star in Gilligan’s “Small Potatoes,” playing a schlubby loser named Eddie who has the power to take on the appearance of any man he wishes to be. Predictably enough, he uses this power to seduce women left and right. Inevitably, he winds up becoming Mulder, and is closing in for the kiss with Scully which we’ve been waiting the better part of four seasons to see when the real Mulder bursts in on the two. Like so many of Gilligan’s scripts that are still to come, it’s funny and thought-provoking but also warm and sweet and a little melancholy, operating almost on the level of parable, a million miles removed from the gritty horror which the show was always trying to project in its earliest days. I think I see a kindred soul in Vince Gilligan: someone who is less fascinated by the plot machinery of the show’s myriad conspiracies than he is by this man who’s decided to devote his life to chasing chimeras and by this woman who, it’s pretty clear by now, loves him deeply and is loved by him in return. “I was born a loser, but you’re one by choice,” says the once-more schlubby Eddie to Mulder at the end. “You should get out and live more.”
Pre-coitus interruptus.
More extreme incarnations of people like me and perhaps Gilligan were becoming prominent in X-Files fandom by now. They were called the “shippers,” as in “relationshippers.” The most obsessive analyzed every stray glance that Mulder and Scully cast at one another every bit as exhaustively as another type of fan pored over fleeting shots of aliens and every randomly dropped aside by Cancer Man. Some shippers preferred to keep to the terrain of speculation, while others wrote exactly how it would go down once Scully finally agreed to give Mulder’s sadly underused but doubtless impressive manly member a good solid shakedown trial. The majority of the shippers were women, who were flocking to the show in increasing numbers now.
Indeed, by the end of the fourth season, The X-Files was at its zenith of popularity and cultural influence. It was the biggest show on Fox by a wide margin and the fourth most popular drama on all of network television. (Within that category, it trailed only ER, Touched by an Angel, and NYPD Blue.) Its tag lines — “The Truth Is Out There”; “I Want To Believe” — were being repeated everywhere, sometimes in earnest and sometimes in jest, much as on the show itself. Chris Carter’s Millennium, a semi-spinoff from The X-Files about an FBI agent who could read the minds of criminals, had just finished its own first season to positive reviews and solid ratings. Never a man lacking in ambition, Carter was making plans to conquer a whole new realm by shooting an X-Files feature film between the fifth and sixth seasons.
And oh, yes… there was to be an X-Files game as well — a game, that is, that wasn’t just influenced by the show but actually sported its name on the box.
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Sources: The books “Deny All Knowledge”: Reading the X-Files, edited by David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Marla Cartwright; Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to The X-Files by Peter Knight; Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files by Zack Handlen & Emily St. James; X-Files Confidential: The Unauthorized X-Philes Compendium by Ed Edwards; Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum; The Legacy of The X-Files, edited by James Fenwick and Diane A. Rogers; Opening the X-Files: A Critical History of the Original Series by Darren Mooney; and The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | The first full-length academic book deconstructing The X-Files appeared already in 1996, while the third season was still airing. The contents are sometimes insightful, sometimes hilariously banal in that special way that only academic writing can be. A sample of the latter type:
“These episodes not only establish a comparison between Mulder and various tragic truth seekers but also reveal the erotics of the search through repeated imagery of penetration. The extraterrestrial energy-being of ‘Space’ painfully possesses Colonel Belt, the silicon-based parasite erupts from the throats of its cave-explorer victims like a phallus, the subatomic particles ‘come into’ Banton’s body. The ‘penetrating answer’ turns upon, penetrates, and destroys its finder. The logic of the show repeatedly represents the object of desire, the much-cited truth, as itself a phallic power with a will of its own.” You heard it here first, folks: the Truth that is Out There is really a giant penis just waiting to skewer you like a pig on a spit. |
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