3666

Dark Helmet!

3667

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace: The Full Frontal Adventure???

3668

I cheated because I was pretty sure I didn’t play this, based on the publisher. (I was right.)

It is somewhat familiar looking, so I must have seen an ad for it or something, or just saw the name floated around in reviews.

3669

Dark Sun?

3670

This is the winner. Dark Sun feels like the title here.

3671

Nope. I think the member that posted about this in 2010 was @rezaf – who hasn’t posted in three years. Final hint (text since not at computer): shares a name with a famous album.

3672

Clearly Dark Side of the Spoon

3673

Meddle? Animals? Wish You Were Here?

3674

Man, I had a nice long post about this game and the site updated and ate it. Grrrr…

Anyhow, yeah, it is Dark Side of the Moon, a “Video Reality” (read: FMV) title from SouthPeak Interactive released in 1998.

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It was the first of two games I worked on at SouthPeak Interactive, the second being 1999’s Wild Wild West: Night of the Steel Assassin. It was the second game to use that engine, the first being Temujin and the last being Wild Wild West (though heavily modified) and one cancelled title, 20,000 Leagues.

Lee Sheldon (Blacke’s Magic, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Riddle of Master Lu) wrote it. I was a programmer and also credited with design as I went through the spaghetti-like mass of dialog choices, branching narrative, failure states, etc. and helped find and plug holes. To prevent the code from becoming an awful mess I created a “milestone” system that tied game actions’ (dialog, video, items, etc.) availability to predecessor actions complete (or not) state. Basically a giant graph but it made fixing issues and identifying bad states much easier. The code was in Flow, a VB-like language with some cool features like call X after N ms.

The best part of working on the game (other than going to E3 1998 in Atlanta and two GDCs including the awesome one on the Queen Mary in Long Beach) was working with the creative people that produced UI elements, sound effects, etc. Sure, I was just coding, but it was so cool to see it all come together. I miss that now that I’ve been back in the business programming world for nearly two decades.

At some point I should take (and post) pictures of the milestone graph (I drew it out by hand like an old school Infocom map), the shelf-breaking script (with many different colored sheets for the various revisions), and the prop or two I bought after production wrapped (like the “Kiashae Crystal” – quartz stained with purple paint).

Anyway, wasn’t sure whether to post this (admittedly obscure) game, but figured what the heck – I’d already posted Wild Wild West in Frame Game a number of months ago.

Someone take it from here, don’t care who. =)

3675

Not I, I specifically guessed wrong.

I think @CaseyRobinson won.

3676

I tried to avoid that, but sure, I’ll take it.

3677

Cool write up! I would be interested to see that milestone graph.

3678

Haha, this is all awesome!

3679

I’ll see if I can get some pics up soon of that and some of the other stuff from that game.

What was hard about the whole situation is it was 1998 or so and FMV was clearly on its way out as early 3D games were starting to really wow gamers. Most of us programmers, though we enjoyed working on games, felt like the efforts were a bit misdirected tech-wise. Epic had just released Unreal and Tim Sweeney came in to pitch using their engine for our games (as they are only a couple of miles away). Leadership listened to him but they felt that it’d be decades before 3D could match filmed (at 320x240!) footage. SouthPeak was built on a film studio type of model and had some great facilities (that are still in use to day to film commercials, short films, etc.) that they wouldn’t have abandoned anyhow. Oh well.

3680

Hey @CaseyRobinson, we going to get new box art today?

3681

This was funny.

3682

Recursively funny. ;)

3683

3684

Timely like always.

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3685

The crickets aren’t guessing. Maybe you should?

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