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Monthly Archives: August 2023

From Mechs to Mopar

18 Aug

The future is boring.
— Zack Norman

Prologue: Scenes from an Italian Restaurant

One day in the fall of 1995, two Activision game designers by the names of Sean Vesce and Zack Norman went out to lunch together at their favorite Italian joint. Both had just come off of MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat, an action-packed “simulation” of giant rock-em, sock-em robots that took place in the universe of the popular tabletop game BattleTech. They had done their jobs well: slick and explosive, MechWarrior 2 had become the game of the hour upon its release the previous August, the perfect alternative for players who had been entranced by the Pandora’s Box of 3D mayhem that had been cracked open by DOOM but who were growing a little bored with the recent onslaught of me-too DOOM clones.

There was only one cloud on the horizon: Activision knew already that they wouldn’t be allowed to make a MechWarrior 3. Their rights to BattleTech were soon to expire and were not going to be renewed, what with FASA, the company which owned the tabletop game, having decided to start a studio of its own, FASA Interactive, to produce digital incarnations of its tabletop properties. Activision’s owner Bobby Kotick, who was quickly making a name for himself as one of the savviest and most unsentimental minds in gaming, had accordingly issued orders to his people to milk MechWarrior 2 and its engine, which had required a great deal of time and expense to create, for all they were worth while the opportunity was still there. This would result in two expansion packs for the core game before the curtain fell on the license. Meanwhile Vesce and Norman were tasked with coming up with an idea for another “vehicular combat game” that could be developed relatively quickly and cheaply, to take advantage of the engine one last time before it became hopelessly out of date. They had gone to lunch together today to discuss the subject.

Or Vesce had, at any rate. Norman was still basking in the bonus he had earned from MechWarrior 2, the biggest check he had ever seen with his name on it. A diehard Mopar fanboy, he had just about decided to buy himself a vintage muscle car with his windfall. He had thus brought an Auto Trader magazine along with him to the restaurant, and kept flipping through the pages distractedly while Vesce threw out game ideas, none of which quite seemed right. (“What about a helicopter sim?”) But Norman suddenly stopped turning the pages when he came across a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda. “Is that the car?” asked Vesce, a little disinterestedly.

Then he saw the look on Norman’s face — the look of a man who had finally seen something that had been staring him in the face for most of the last hour. It was, after all, a vehicular combat game they had been tasked with making. “No,” said Norman. “That’s the game!” And so Interstate ’76, one of the freshest and cleverest mass-market computer games of the late 1990s, was born.

Part 1: I, Robot

The road to that memorable lunch stretches all the way back to 1980, when the excitement around Dungeons & Dragons was inspiring many tabletop gamers to start companies in the role-playing space which it had opened up. Among their number was a pair of Chicago boys named Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock. They formed FASA that year; the acronym was an elaborate high-school joke that owed a debt to the Marx Brothers, standing for “Freedonian Aeronautics and Space Administration.” They scrounged together $300 in seed capital, just enough to run off a bunch of copies of an adventure module they had created for Traveller, the most popular of the early science-fiction RPGs. Then they took their adventure to that year’s Gen Con to sell it, sleeping in their van in the parking lot for lack of the funds to pay for a hotel room.

From those humble beginnings, FASA scraped and clawed their way within two years to landing a stunner of a deal: to make a tabletop RPG based on Star Trek. It shipped in 1983, whereupon critics lauded the system for its simplicity and approachability, and for the way it captured the idealistic essence of Star Trek at its best, with its ethos of violence as a last rather than a first resort. (A comparison might be mooted with Call of Cthulhu, another tabletop RPG that turned the Dungeons & Dragons power-gaming approach on its head in the service of a very different mission statement.) “To make Star Trek: The RPG a Klingon shoot would be in violation of everything the series represented,” said Guy W. McLimore Jr., one of the game’s trio of core designers. “Man-to-man-combat and starship-combat systems were important, and had to be done right, but these were to take a backseat to the essential human adventure of space exploration.”

FASA supported their Star Trek RPG lavishly, with rules supplements, source books, and adventure modules galore during the seven years they were allowed to hang onto the license. Many a grizzled tabletop veteran will still tell you today that FASA’s Star Trek was as good as gaming on the Final Frontier ever got. When you did engage in spaceship combat, for example, the game did an uncanny job of putting you in the shoes of your character standing on the bridge, rather than relegating you to pushing cardboard counters around on a paper map in the style of Star Fleet Battles.

Still, if you were more interested in shooting things than wrestling with ethical dilemmas, FASA had you covered there as well. The same year as the Star Trek RPG, they published Combots. Inspired by Japanese anime productions that enjoyed no more than a tiny following in the United States as yet, it was a board game of, as the name would imply, combat between giant robots, co-designed by Jordan Weisman himself and one Bill Fawcett.

They refined and added to the concept the following year with a miniatures-based strategy game called Battledroids. A year after that, Battledroids became BattleTech in response to legal threats from Lucasfilm of Star Wars fame, who felt the term “droid” rightfully belonged to them alone. (“I politely wrote back,” says Weisman, “to point out that Isaac Asimov had been using the word ‘android’ since something like 1956. They wrote back to point out that they had a lot more lawyers than we did.”)

By now, the wave of Japanese giant robots had fully broken Stateside; the Saturday morning cartoon lineup showcased Transformers prominently, and that show’s associated line of action figures was flying off store shelves even faster than their Star Wars brethren. BattleTech was the right game at the right time, perfect for people who were too old to play with action figures that were intended as mere toys but still young enough at heart to appreciate duels between gargantuan armor-plated “mechs” bristling with laser cannons, missile launchers, and just about every other imaginable form of futuristic destruction.

From the beginning, BattleTech incorporated some RPG elements. It came complete with a detailed setting whose history was laid out in a timeline that spanned over a millennium of humanity’s future. Likewise, players were encouraged to keep and slowly improve the same mech over the course of many battles. At the same time, though, the game required no referee and was quick to pick up and play, keeping the focus squarely on the combat. In 1986, FASA released a supplement called MechWarrior that moved the system further into RPG territory, for those who so desired, adding the missing referee back into the equation. It placed players in the roles of individual mech pilots, a new breed of knights in shining armor who had much in common with their Medieval ancestors, being fixated on chivalry, noblesse oblige, and blood feuds. BattleTech and MechWarrior spawned a cottage industry, one which by the late 1980s rivaled the Star Trek RPG in terms of its contributions to FASA’s bottom line as well the sheer quantity of supplements that were available for it, full of background information, scenarios, and most of all cool new mechs and mech kit, things its fans could never seem to get enough of.

FASA had had the opportunity to study up close and personal the way that a huge property like Star Trek sprawled across the ecosystem of media: television, movies, books, comics, toys, tabletop and digital games. They saw no reason that BattleTech shouldn’t follow its example. Thus they commissioned a BattleTech comic, and hired the tabletop-gaming veteran Michael Stackpole to write a series of BattleTech novels. If the latter read like a blow-by-blow description of someone’s gaming session, so much so that you could almost hear the dice rolling in the background… well, that was perhaps a feature rather than a bug in the eyes of the target audience.

Only three of his hastily loosed missiles made their target, but those hit with a vengeance. One exploded into one of the Rifleman’s autocannon ejection ports, fusing the ejection mechanism. The other missiles both slammed into the radar wing whirling like a propeller above the ‘Mech’s hunched shoulders. The first explosion froze the mechanism in place. The second blast left the wing hanging by thick electrical cables…

Then, too, FASA didn’t neglect the digital space. From 1987, Jordan Weisman devoted most of his energy to the creation of “BattleTech Centers,” which played host to virtual-reality cockpits where players could take on the role of mech pilots far more directly and viscerally than any mere tabletop game would allow. A radically ambitious idea that wasn’t at all easy to bring to fruition, the first BattleTech Center didn’t open until 1990, in Chicago’s North Pier Mall. But it was very successful once it did, selling 300,000 tickets for time in one of its sixteen cockpits over its first two years. After a cash injection from the Walt Disney family, this proof of concept would lead to at least 25 more BattleTech Centers in the United States and Japan by the turn of the millennium.

And then there was also digital BattleTech for the home. FASA signed a deal with Activision in 1987, giving them the right to make BattleTech games for personal computers for the next ten years. The first fruit of that deal appeared in late 1988 under the name of BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception. It was published under the Infocom imprint, but that storied text-adventure specialist, a somewhat reluctant member of the Activision family since 1986, had little to do with it; the real developer was Westwood Associates. In its review, Computer Gaming World magazine called The Crescent Hawk’s Inception a cross between Ultima and the BattleTech board game, and this strikes me as a fair description. You wandered the world, following the bread-crumb trail of the story line, building up your finances and your skills, recruiting companions, and improving your collection of mechs, the better to fight battles which were quite faithful to the tabletop game, right down to being turn-based from an overhead perspective. It wasn’t a bad game, but it wasn’t an amazing one either, feeling more workmanlike than truly inspired. All indications are that it sold fairly modestly.

One year later, Activision returned with another BattleTech game. Developed by Dynamix, MechWarrior borrowed the name of FASA’s RPG expansion to the core tabletop game, yet was actually less of a CRPG than its predecessor had been. You still wandered from place to place chasing the plot and searching out battles, but the latter were now placed front and center, and had more in common with the still-in-the-works BattleTech Centers than the tabletop game, taking place in real time from a first-person perspective. MechWarrior sold much better than The Crescent Hawk’s Inception, proving that many others agreed with Computer Gaming World‘s Johnny L. Wilson when he said that this was the kind of BattleTech computer game “I was looking for.”

It was followed another year later by another Westwood game, a direct sequel to The Crescent Hawk’s Inception entitled The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge. In spite of its sequel status, it dispensed with the CRPG aspects entirely, in favor of a simple branching mission tree. These were shown once again from an overhead perspective, but played out in real time rather than in turns. These qualities make the game stand out as an interesting progenitor to the full-fledged real-time-strategy genre, which Westwood themselves would invent less than two years later with Dune II. In the meantime, Computer Gaming World declared it “the game every BattleTech devotee has been waiting for.”

Unfortunately for everyone, Activision imploded just weeks after publishing The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge in late 1990, brought down by an untimely patent-infringement lawsuit and a long string of bad decisions on the part of CEO Bruce Davis. The company was rescued from the brink of oblivion by the opportunistic young wheeler and dealer Bobby Kotick, who had been itching for a computer-game publisher of his very own for several years already. He declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, moved the whole operation from Silicon Valley to Los Angeles, cut its staff from 150 to eight, and kept it alive by digging deep into his capacious bag of tricks to wheedle just a little more patience out of its many creditors, a few months at a time.

It is one of the little-known ironies of modern gaming that Bobby Kotick’s Activision — the same Activision that brought in revenues of almost $9 billion in 2021 — owes its ongoing existence to the intellectual property of Infocom, a company which in its best year as an independent entity brought in $10 million in revenue. Casting about for a product he could release quickly to bring in some much-needed cash, Kotick hit upon Infocom’s 1980s text-adventure catalog. He published all 35 of the games in question in two shovelware collections, The Lost Treasures of Infocom I and II, the first of which alone sold at least 100,000 copies at $60 a pop and a profit margin to die for. He followed that triage operation up by going all-in on Return to Zork, a state-of-the-art graphic adventure that capitalized equally on the excitement over multimedia CD-ROM and older gamers’ nostalgia for the bygone days of a purely textual Great Underground Empire.

But if the Lost Treasures stopped the bleeding in 1992 and Return to Zork took the patient off life support in 1993, it was MechWarrior 2 in the summer of 1995 that announced Kotick’s Activision to be fully restored to rude health, once again a marquee publisher of top-shelf gamer’s games that didn’t need to shirk comparisons with anyone else’s.

That said, actually making MechWarrior 2 had been a rather tortured process. Knowing full well that the first MechWarrior had been the old Activision’s last real hit, Kotick would have preferred to have had the sequel well before 1995. However, Dynamix, the studio that had made the first game, had been bought by Activision’s competitor Sierra in 1990. Kotick thus decided to do the sequel in-house, initiating the project already by the end of 1992. It was ill-managed and under-funded by the still cash-strapped company. Artist Scott Goffman later summed up the problems as:

  1. Over-eager PR people hyping a game that was not even close to being done. This led to forced promises of release dates that were IMPOSSIBLE to make.
  2. Lack of a design. There was no clear direction for the first year and a half on the game, and no solid style.
  3. Featuritis. A disease that often afflicts game developers, causing them to want to keep adding more and more features to a game, rather than debugging and shipping what they already have.
  4. Morale. As they fell further and further behind schedule, the programmers and artists felt less and less inclined to produce. This led to departures.

By early 1994, the entire original team had left, forcing Activision to all but start over from scratch. The project now had such a bad odor about it that, when producer Josh Resnick was asked to take it over, his first instinct was to run the other way as fast as he could: “I actually thought this was a demotion and went so far as to ask if I had done something wrong.”

To his credit, though, it all started to come together after he bit the bullet and took control. He brought Sean Vesce and Zack Norman aboard to tighten up the design, combining elements of the last two licensed BattleTech computer games to arrive at a finished whole that was superbly suited to the post-DOOM market: the first-person action of MechWarrior 1 and the no-nonsense, straightforward mission tree of The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge. (Or rather missions trees in this case: MechWarrior 2 had two campaigns, each from the point of view of a different clan.) And everything was suitably updated to take advantage of the latest processors, graphics cards, and sound cards, of course.

It had now been almost five years since the last boxed BattleTech game for personal computers. In the interim, FASA, having lost their Star Trek license in 1989, had made the franchise their number-one priority. It was more popular than ever, encompassing more than 100 individual tabletop-gaming products, plus novels and comics, a line of toys, and even a televised cartoon series. Meanwhile a downloadable multi-player BattleTech computer game, developed by the online-gaming pioneer Kesmai, was doing very good business on the GEnie subscription service. So, there was a certain degree of pent-up demand among the FASA faithful for a new BattleTech computer game that you didn’t have to pay to play by the minute, even as there was also a fresh audience of rambunctious young men who had come to computer gaming through the likes of DOOM, who might not know BattleTech from Battle Isle, but who thought the idea of giant battling robots was hella cool in its own right.

MechWarrior 2 disappointed the expectations of neither its creators nor its consumers; it exploded out of the gate like a mech in its death throes, generating sales that made everything Bobby Kotick’s Activision had done before seem quaint. The party continued in 1996, when Activision released a free add-on that made online multiplayer games a possibility, thus destroying the Kesmai BattleTech‘s market at a stroke. When the first hardware-accelerated 3D graphics cards began to appear in the summer of 1996, MechWarrior 2 was there once again. With his customary savvy, Kotick went to the makers of these disparate, mutually incompatible cards one by one, offering them a special version of one of the most popular games of the era, optimized to look spectacular with their particular card, ripe for packing right into the box along with it. All they had to do was pay Activision to make it for them. And pay they did; MechWarrior 2 became the king of the 3D-card pack-in games, a strange species that would exist for only a sharply limited period of time, until the switch from MS-DOS to Windows 95 as computer gaming’s standard platform made the need for all these custom builds for incompatible hardware a thing of the past. But it was very, very good for Activision while it lasted.

And then there was that other game that was to be made using the MechWarrior 2 engine. I must confess that it’s with that game that my heart really lies, and so it’s there that we’ll turn now.

Part 2: Feel Like Funkin’ It Up

When Sean Vesce and Zack Norman stood up from what had proved to be an inordinately long lunch, they had a pretty good idea of what they wanted Interstate ’76 to be. It was to be “a game with soul,” as Vesce puts it — soul in more ways than one. They wanted to make a tribute to the television shows of the 1970s, in which irreverent two-fisted heroes with names like Rockford and Ponch had scoured the nation’s highways and byways of ne’er-do-wells, sharing top billing in the minds of the audience with the vehicles they drove. Children of the 1980s that the two friends were, those shows had been one of the entertainment staples of their youth, to be enjoyed along with a cold soda and a sandwich as afternoon reruns after a long day at school. “We wanted to make a game that could capture a mood in a way that goes beyond just lighting things on fire and blowing them up,” says Norman, in a not-so-oblique reference to the game he worked on just before Interstate ’76. The new game’s soul was to be found as much as anywhere in the soundtrack, which was to draw from the 1970s heyday of blaxploitation flicks in the theaters as well as television.

In short, Vesce and Norman wanted to steer clear of all the usual gaming clichés, even as they embraced a whole pile of older ones, like tires that inexplicably squealed on dirt roads. They were adamant that, although it would feature battling automobiles, this was not to be yet another post-apocalyptic exercise; surely games had milked The Road Warrior enough by now. No, in their dystopian wasteland the bad guys would be OPEC and their mobster cronies, who were starving the nation of the gasoline it needed to keep its Mopar Hemis humming. It was to be, in other words, an exaggerated version of what was really going on in 1976, when the last of the muscle cars were being strangled by federal fuel-economy standards and the mad scientist’s tangle of emissions dampeners that was now required under each and every American hood. Only in this timeline vintage American muscle might just be able to win out rather than shuffle quietly off to extinction.

All of this may not have been a recipe for high art, but it was as foreign a notion for the increasingly risk-averse, perpetually lily-white executives of the games industry as an avant-garde character study would be to Jerry Bruckheimer. Vesce and Norman had a damnably hard time selling it to the suits; Vesce admits that “the first pitch meeting was disastrous.” But slowly they made headway. After all, they noted, it wasn’t as if the young males who constituted the heart of the gaming demographic wouldn’t get where they were coming from; plenty of them had grown up with the same afternoon television as Vesce and Norman. And by reusing the MechWarrior 2 engine, keeping the scope modest, and avoiding such misbegotten indulgences as live-action cut scenes, they could get by with a relatively small development team, a compressed development cycle, and a reasonable development budget. Thanks to MechWarrior 2‘s success, Activision finally had a little bit of cash on hand to take a flier on something a little bit different, without the fate of the whole company hanging on the outcome. First the Director of Creative Affairs saw the light. Then, one by one, his colleagues in business suits fell into line. The game got the green light.

Making Interstate ’76 proved a happy experience for everyone involved. And in the end, they delivered exactly the game they had promised, more or less on time and on budget. It was released by Activision in the spring of 1997, garnering very favorable reviews and solid if not stupendous sales, despite graphics that were the state of the art of two years ago.

The only reason to play the game today is its story mode — or, the “T.R.I.P.” (“Total Recreational Interactive Production”), as it prefers to call it. This T.R.I.P. takes us to the desolated landscapes of West Texas and New Mexico (whose lack of such complications as trees makes them much easier for the engine to render). Your avatar is a white soul brother by the name of Groove Champion, with a rather glorious handlebar pornstache and a preference for huge collars and unbuttoned shirt fronts. His sister Jade — “Jade was always a better racer than me, man,” he confesses — has just been violently killed. Groove has inherited her car, a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda like the one Zack Norman stumbled across in that Auto Trader on that memorable day in an Italian restaurant. (Well, it’s actually called a “Picard Piranha” in the game; all of the cars were rebranded for legal reasons, but all are based on real-world models that the aficionado will readily recognize.) Groove is no natural-born killer, and it takes quite some cajoling from Jade’s best friend, a spiffy dude named Taurus, to convince him to hit the road to find her killer and avenge her death.

Groove Champion, proving that real men drink Slurpees.

Taurus is the funkiest cat ever to appear in a game. Vesce calls him “the embodiment of the attitude and soul we were trying to inject into the game. He was Shaft, Super Fly and Samuel L. Jackson all rolled into one. Plus, he was a poet.” Indeed, one of your options in your car is to “ask Taurus for a poem.” The verses he intones over the CB radio when you do so are… not too bad, actually.

Looking out the window of your room onto a wet rainy day
Main street under a slate grey afternoon sky
The light on your face is soft and dim under the lace curtain
And the streets are empty
In the distance, there is a flash and a rumble
Clouds sail the sky like giant wooden ships
On a blackened evergreen sea
Capped with foam

(All of the poems are the work of Zack Norman.)

Taurus, who takes his Slurpees red.

Soon after meeting Taurus, you meet the story’s third and final good guy, a seemingly slow-witted country bumpkin of a mechanic named Skeeter who, in one of the game’s best running gags, turns out to have a savant-like insight on the things that really matter. Add in Antonio Malochio, the oily Mafia don and OPEC stooge who eventually emerges as Jade’s murderer, and the cast of characters is complete. Interstate ’76 is a masterclass in tight, effective videogame storytelling, giving you exactly what you need to motivate you through its seventeen missions — or “scenes,” as it prefers to call them — and nothing that you don’t. (In this sense as in many others, it’s the polar opposite of Realms of the Haunting, the hilariously piebald everything-but-the-kitchen-sink “epic” I wrote about in my last article.)

From the moment you start the game, everything you see and hear draws you into its world; nothing jars with anything else. The soundtrack is credible 1970s funk, where the booty-shaking bass lines do the heavy lifting. It was a side gig for Arion Salazar, the bassist for Third Eye Blind, whose first hit single was climbing the music charts at the same time Interstate ’76 was on the games charts. As its pedigree would suggest, the music was recorded in a real studio on real instruments by a solid band of real pros.

A Gallery of Fine Motorized Transport

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If you can name all of the vehicles above, your gearhead credentials are impeccable.


In order to keep everything seamless, Vesce and Norman originally wanted to have the cut scenes run in the game engine itself, presaging the approach that Half-Life would employ to such revolutionary effect more than a year later. When this proved impractical, they deliberately made the cut scenes look like they were coming out of the same engine. Somehow the characters here, lacking though they may be such purportedly essential details as eyes and lips, have more character than the vast majority of photo-realistic gaming specimens, proof that good aesthetics and high resolutions are not one and the same. By keeping its visuals all of a piece, the game makes the standard loop of “play a level, watch a cut scene,” which was already becoming tedious in many contexts by 1997, feel much more organic, like it really is all one story you’re living through.

Everything else is fashioned in the same spirit. Everything is diegetic. You upgrade your car between missions by talking it over with Skeeter; your in-mission map had been scrawled on an empty bag of fast-food takeout; even the options menu appears as the check from a roadside restaurant.

Having given praise where it is richly due, I must acknowledge that the gameplay itself is rather less revelatory than that which surrounds it. Unsurprisingly given the origins of the gameplay engine, the cars themselves behave more like BattleTech mechs than real automobiles, even when making allowances for the machine guns and flame throwers that are bolted onto their chassis. Vehicles bounce off of one another and the terrain like Matchbox cars; collisions that ought to leave your Barracuda nothing put a pile of twisted wreckage result in no more more than an artfully crinkled fender. Likewise, the engine doesn’t entirely transcend MechWarrior 2‘s aspirations toward being a real simulation; the controls are a bit fiddly, more Wing Commander than WipEout, and this does clash somewhat with the easygoing immersion of the story line. The worst frustration is your inability to save within missions, some of which are fairly extended exercises. It isn’t much fun to play the first ten minutes of a mission over and over in order to get to the part that’s giving you trouble.

Asked in 1999 about what he would like to have done differently in Interstate ’76, Vesce expressed regrets with which I wholeheartedly agree.

If  I could turn back time and do it again, the first thing I would do is make the game more action-oriented, with easier controls, clearer mission objectives, and greater and more frequent rewards. I would greatly simplify the game’s shell, most importantly the vehicle repair screen that players accessed between missions. I talked to a lot of people who were completely baffled the first time they went through. It was far too complex and difficult to use without the manual. I would split some of the missions into multiple missions (especially the first one), and offer a way to save at any point in the game.

Like a number of games I’ve written about recently, Interstate ’76 could have benefited from being released in the era of digital distribution, when the marketplace would have allowed it to be its best self: a four to six hour romp, to be undertaken more for the joy of the thing than the challenge. As it is, the nature of the engine and bygone expectations about value for money and what boxed games “ought” to be gum up the works from time to time even if you play on “Wimp” level, as I was more than happy to do. We probably could have done entirely without the then-obligatory skirmish and multiplayer modes, which pretty clearly weren’t where the developers’ hearts were.

Yet the way that the game recognizes and even leans into its limitations does soften the blow. It makes an inside joke out of the fact that you can’t ever get out of your car, because the engine wasn’t designed for that sort of thing. Jade, Skeeter tells us, made one fatal mistake: “She got out of the car. Don’t ever get out of the car.” Needless to say, he doesn’t need to worry that Groove will do the same.

Interstate ’76 is a breath of fresh air for any 1990s gamer — or 21st-century digital antiquarian — who’s grown tired of the typical strictures of game fictions, of the endless procession of dragons and spaceships and fighter jets and zombies and, yes, even giant robots. In an article written in 1999, Ernest Adams noted that, two years after the release of Interstate ’76, “Taurus may be the only black character with a central role in any computer game today.” That of course speaks to a colossal failure on the part of the industry as a whole, but at least we have this welcome exception to point to.

If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to close this review with two personal anecdotes that might begin to explain why this game hits me right in my sweet spot.

Anecdote #1: I spent the early 1990s working in a record store, back when such places still existed. This was the heyday of grunge, and in the name of pleasing the customers I was forced to listen to way too much flannel-clad whinging, backed by pummeling rhythm sections who thought swinging was something you did on a playground. At the end of a long day of this, it was always a joy for me and my soul sister Lorrie to put on some Althea and Donna or some Spoonie Gee and the Sequence and groove for a while as we closed the store. Coming across this game whilst writing these histories brought the same sweet sense of vive la différence!

Anecdote #2: My second car was a 1965 Ford Mustang, which wound up costing me every bit as much money and trouble as my father told me it would when I bought it. Weirdo that I was, I graduated after selling it to weird foreign cars: a Volkswagen Beetle and camper van, a Datsun 280Z, a Volkswagen GTI. But I had friends who stayed wedded to American muscle, and I was always able to appreciate the basso profondo of a finely tuned V8. I stopped messing around with cars when I moved to Europe in 2009; today I confine my mechanical endeavors to keeping our lawn tractor in good working order. Yet a throaty exhaust note heard through an open window, or just the smell of gasoline in a dimly lit garage, can still take me back to those days of barked shins and grease under the fingernails as surely as a madeleine transported Proust. Add this game to that list as well. I realize now that I lived through the tail end of a period that can never return; we absolutely must wean ourselves off of our addiction to fossil fuels if we’re to continue to make a go of civilization on this long-suffering planet of ours. And that’s okay; change is the essence of existence, as Heraclitus knew more than 2500 years ago, when he wrote that one can never step into the same river twice. Still, there’s no harm in reminiscing sometimes, is there?

All that is just me, though. A more impersonal argument for Interstate ’76 might point to it as a case study in how the best games aren’t really about technology at all. A low-budget affair based on an aging and imperfectly repurposed engine, it was nevertheless all kinds of awesome. For it had that one magic ingredient that most of its wealthier, more attractive peers lacked: it had soul, baby.

Hot rubber eternally pressing against a blackened pavement
A wheel is forever
A car is infinity times four

Postscript: Yesterday, When I Was Young

MechWarrior 2 and Interstate ’76 both proved to be peaks that were impossible to scale a second time, each in its own way.

Activision was indeed forced to give the digital rights to BattleTech to FASA’s new computer-games division, but the latter never managed to thrust its own games into the central spotlight that MechWarrior 2 had enjoyed. FASA itself closed up shop in 2001. “The adventure-gaming world has changed much, and it is time for the founders of FASA to move on,” wrote the old friends Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock in a farewell letter to their fans. BattleTech, however, lives on, under the auspices of WizKids, a new company set up by Weisman. MechWarrior games and other BattleTech games with different titles have continued to appear on computers, but none has ever become quite the sensation that MechWarrior 2 was back in those heady days of the mid-1990s.

Interstate ’76 got one rushed-seeming expansion pack that added support for 3D hardware acceleration — a feature oddly missing from the base game, given its engine’s history — and 20 missions that weren’t tied together by any story line, an approach which the core gameplay arguably wasn’t strong enough to support. Then, in 1999, it got a full-fledged sequel, Interstate ’82, which tried to do for the synth-pop decade what its predecessor had for the decade of funk. But it just didn’t come together somehow, despite Zack Norman once again taking the design reins and despite a much prettier, faster engine. While Interstate ’76 lives on as a cult classic today, Interstate ’82 is all but forgotten. Chalk it up as yet more evidence that advanced technology does not automatically lead to a great game.

If you were to ask my advice, I would suggest that you enjoy Interstate ’76, the only computer game I’ve written about today that transcends the time and circumstances of its creation, and consign the rest to history. But remember: whatever you do, don’t get out of the car.

Where to Get Them: Due doubtless to the complications of licensing, all of the BattleTech and MechWarrior computer games described in this article are out of print. Interstate ’76, however, is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com. Unfortunately, it can be a frustrating game to get working properly on modern Windows, and the version that’s for sale does less than you might expect to help you. In many cases, it seems to degrade rather than fail outright, often in pernicious ways: missions are glitched so as to become impossible to complete, etc. There are solutions out there — I’d suggest starting on the GOG.com forums and the PC Gaming Wiki — but all require some technical expertise. Further, different solutions seem to work (and not work) on different computers, making it impossible for me to point you to a single foolproof set of instructions here. I wish it were otherwise, believe me — this game deserves to be played — but I thought it best to warn you right here. It breaks my heart to say this, but if you aren’t ready to roll up your sleeves, this may be one to just watch on YouTube.


Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.

Sources: The book Designers & Dragons: The 80s by Sheldon Appelcline. Next Generation of November 1996 and November 1998; Computer Gaming World of January 1989, December 1989, November 1990, February 1991, June 1992, July 1995, August 1996, June 1997, July 1997, July 1998, and January 1999; Space Gamer of July/August 1983; Dragon of March 1988. Online sources include Online Gaming Review‘s interview with Internet ’76 producer Scott Krager, an “overview” and “history” of MechWarrior 2 at Local Ditch Gaming, early MechWarrior 2 programmer Eric Peterson’s beginning of a history of his work on the game, Polygon‘s interview with Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babcock, and the Interstate ’76 wiki. Also Sarna.net’s surveys of The Crescent Hawk’s Inception, MechWarrior 1, the first would be MechWarrior 2, the finished MechWarrior 2, the MechWarrior 2 soundtrack, and the Mercenaries expansion for MechWarrior 2.

 
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Posted by on August 18, 2023 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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Realms of the Haunting

04 Aug

I like to imagine that Realms of the Haunting, Gremlin Interactive’s bizarre 1996 mélange of first-person shooter, point-and-click adventure, and interactive movie, was the brainchild of Ian and Nigel, students at Thomas Hughes Secondary School in Stow-on-the-Water.

Ian was sitting in a sheltered nook after school one day, sketching notes for a Call of Cthulhu scenario, when Nigel, the local football star, came barreling down the lane on his bicycle. Spotting his nerdy classmate, he dismounted in his customary way, by leaping off the still-moving bike, whose forward progress would have been arrested by Ian’s legs if he hadn’t swung them hastily aside. Nigel then joined his mode of transportation in marching up to see what Ian was up to, not without provoking some consternation from the latter, who wasn’t at all sure how this exchange was going to go. “What’cha up to, dude?”

Ian pushed his spectacles further up his nose. Even under the best of circumstances, he never quite knew how to respond to Nigel’s mix of Americanisms and Cockney, which he found almost incomprehensible at times. But he rallied. “Well, it’s sort of a scenario for a game…”

“A game? What kind of game?”

“Call of Cthulhu. It’s sort of a horror game. You get together with some mates, and one of you is sort of the referee. The others are all investigators who learn about this creepy old mystery. First they find this old bunch of letters — letters between some sort of cultist and his girlfriend…” Ian trailed off. He could sense that this was already going horribly wrong.

But it appeared that Nigel had heard only the words “horror” and “girlfriend.” “Dude, I know what you mean!” he cried. “Like Duke Nukem! You know that one? You can shoot blokes in the head with a shotgun, and the blood goes everywhere! And you meet strippers! You can pay’em to get out their titties for you.”

Ian did not know Duke Nukem. His father, a line engineer for British Telecom, was possessed of a streak of patriotism that precluded the purchase of any American personal computer. He insisted the family could get by perfectly well with their homegrown Acorn Archimedes, which advertised its stolid Britishness by means of its incompatibility with everything else. Still, Ian dearly wanted this conversation not to get onto the wrong track, so he nodded, whilst pushing his glasses up once again. “Yes… sort of…”

Any sign of hesitation was lost on Nigel. “Dude, we could work together on it!”

“Um, okay…”

“So, maybe you start in a haunted house — you’ve got to start somewhere, right? — but then it just keeps getting bigger and bigger! You find, like, one of those snakehole thingies and go to other dimensions and stuff, with wickeder and wickeder monsters to fight. And there’ll be a bunch of bosses to fight too. A bloke who’s dressed up like a doctor, like he wants to do human experimentation on you and all, and a creepy evil priest in sunglasses –”

“Wait… why sunglasses?”

“Why not?” shrugged Nigel. He was in the habit of dwelling on the abstract cool in life, not on the details.

Ian felt his blood stirring despite himself. Maybe he should think bigger for once. “Maybe you could sort of go to ancient Egypt,” he piped up cautiously. He’d always loved those ancient-archaelogy picture books his dad collected, so much so that he’d been begging for a trip to Egypt for years. “Just imagine the sort of interesting puzzles we could have around the pyramids…”

“Sure, sure, dude,” said Nigel. All things were possible in his world. “But it’s got to be bigger than that even, you know? I know… maybe in the end you’ve got to go right down into Hell and kill Satan! That would be awesome! I’m sure no one’s ever made a game where you’ve got to kill Satan.”

Again, his words set Ian thinking. They were reading Paradise Lost in his honors literature course this semester, and The Divine Comedy was waiting in the wings. And then he’d read this less respectable thing called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail last summer. “We could sort of pull a lot of the story right out of the Bible and Milton and Dante,” he said. “Sort of build on them. Even have the Garden of Eden in there. And Knights Templar. You’ve always got to have Knights Templar.”

Nigel looked unusually pensive for a moment, so much so that Ian almost thought he was giving serious consideration to the advantages and pitfalls of building a new mythology on the scaffolding of older ones. But he was soon disabused of that notion. “We’re going to need a chick,” said Nigel contemplatively.

“Sure, alright,” said Ian. “She can be sort of your companion, who’ll know a lot more than you do about all the mythology, and can sort of help to explain…”

But again, Nigel had only caught a word or two. “Companion, what?” he leered. “I like the sound of that.”

“Say,” said Ian suddenly, “have you been in the computer lab lately?” When Nigel unsurprisingly shook his head no, he rushed on. “They’ve got this computer version of Connections there. Have you seen that one on the telly?” Another shake of the head. “It’s a show about how everything in history is interrelated –”

“Inter- what? Dude, what are you on about?”

Ian decided to elide further details. “Anyway, the point is that they put the host of the show right in the computer game. I mean, the real host. We could do the same — have real actors in the game.”

Nigel looked dubious. “How will that make it cooler?”

“Well, it would make it seem more real… sort of more believable with real people.” Nigel still looked doubtful. So Ian tried another tack. “Just think how cool all those bosses would look as real people, sort of like they’re in a real horror movie. And then to play your companion we can get a real chick,” he said, pronouncing the word as naturally as he could, like an earnest foreigner trying out his French on the natives.

Nigel was sold. “Right, then, we gotta have that too,” he said. “We’ll look like wankers if we don’t.”

And so it went. Through the sylvan afternoon, Ian and Nigel raised their castle in the air to ever loftier heights, adding battlements and wings and dungeons until the whole edifice teetered in the merest hint of a breeze. When they were finally winding down, Nigel got unexpectedly thoughtful again. “Maybe it’s a bit much,” he mused, expressing a sense of moderation which neither Ian nor any of the adults in his life had ever suspected might lurk within him. “Maybe you shouldn’t actually kill Satan after all…”

Ian nodded. They had gotten rather carried away, hadn’t they? Obviously they would have to rein things in a little. Or a lot.

“We’re gonna need some material for the sequel, right, mate?” Nigel grinned. “And anyway, we got to leave Marilyn Manson a Satan to sing about. Am I right, what?” he queried with a friendly fist jab.

Ian wasn’t sure whether he was right or not, but he could always see the wisdom in restraint; his whole life to date had been a study in it. “Okay, we have enough already without Satan. Maybe too much. But if it does get to be too much, we could always just sort of say it was all in someone’s imagination at the end, like in the last episode of St. Elsewhere.” That last reference spoke to how comfortable he was beginning to feel with his rambunctious design partner. His mother had an eccentric fondness for soapy American television which she’d imparted to her son, but normally he would die before sharing this passion with any of his peers.

Nigel was unfazed, if also uninterested. “Sure, dude. Truth.” He held out his hand for a fist bump, which Ian navigated with only a little awkwardness. It seemed they were now fast friends, but it was also time for Ian to get home for dinner; his mother did scold so when he was late. Nigel nodded his acquiescence, digging his bicycle out of the bushes where it had landed a couple of hours before. “Check you later, mate,” he said as he swung one leg over the saddle.

“Yes… mate” said Ian. “Our game’s going to be… awesome.” He smiled to himself as Nigel rode off into the sunset. He rather liked the feel of the word on his tongue.

One week later, the boys sent their design document to Gremlin Interactive.

Fair warning: this article spoils the “shocking” denouement of Realms of the Haunting as well as some other plot details.

Alas, the real origin story of Realms of the Haunting is somewhat more prosaic. The game’s individual pieces mark it as a thoroughgoing product of its time; it’s only their amalgamation in one place that makes it so bat-guano insane.

The project began when Gremlin Interactive joined three-quarters of the other games studios on the planet in beating the bushes for a DOOM-like 2.5D engine in the wake of that game’s extraordinary success. They wound up sourcing the “True3D” engine — which was actually no more true 3D than DOOM had been — from Tony Crowther, a legendary British games programmer whose career’s beginning predated Gremlin’s own 1984 founding. Crowther also offered Gremlin two ideas for a game to make with his engine. One was a “generic monster game,” as he puts it, while the other had a “devil theme.” Gremlin chose the latter. So far, so DOOM-like, in theme as well as technology.

But here’s where it starts to get weird. Gremlin, virtually alone among the many studios working with engines like this one, thought that theirs could be twisted to suit the needs of a puzzle-based adventure game instead of being strictly a vehicle for first-person carnage. And the odd thing is, they were kind of right. After production had already started on Realms of the Haunting, another team at Gremlin used the True3D engine to create a non-violent comedy adventure in the LucasArts tradition, to surprisingly good effect. Normality‘s ramshackle 2.5D visual aesthetic proved a good fit with its cock-eyed protagonist’s stoner-dude perspective on the world, while its puzzle design was as buttoned down as the rest of the affair was comfortably casual. Despite being started after Realms of the Haunting, it came out months before it in 1996. Unfortunately, it garnered few sales. One senses that, in addition to being confused by the look of the thing, gamers just didn’t quite get its jokes. Nor did it help that the market was flooded with bigger, more expensive adventures from American studios that year, the last in which the adventure genre was still widely perceived as one of the industry’s AAA standard bearers.

Through it all, the Realms project trundled on, determined to be both a kick-ass first-person shooter and a brain-tickling adventure game. Writer Paul Green wanted the story to be “epic.” And indeed, it just kept growing and growing. Then someone got the bright idea to jump on yet another indelibly mid-1990s trend: the “full-motion-video” game, incorporating clips of real actors filmed in front of green screens, which backgrounds were filled in after the fact with conventional computer graphics. Gremlin hired Bright Light Studios, an outside video-production house, to cast and carry out the shoots, then spent much time and money massaging the end results into their Frankenstein’s monster of a game. By the time it came out in Britain, about a week before the Christmas of 1996, Realms of the Haunting had spent a good two and a half years in development — one year longer than had been intended — and had become by far the most expensive game Gremlin had ever made.

Programmer Greg Staples, engine architect Tony Crowther, and writer and designer Paul Green.

And what did they get for their money? Oh, my… where to begin? With the beginning, I suppose…

The very first impression Realms of the Haunting gives is of reaches exceeding grasps, establishing a leitmotif that will persist throughout. It opens with an epigraph that’s attributed only to “anonymous”: “Goodness reflects the light and evil bears the seed of all darkness. These are mirrors of the soul, reflections of the mind. Choose well.” This reads like pieces of other, better epigraphs cut and pasted together into a meaningless word salad. Yet it actually serves its purpose of being a harbinger of what is to come in two separate ways. Realms of the Haunting itself will play like chunks of other, better games cut and pasted together. And everyone you meet in the game will talk just like that epigraph is written.

Next we have the bravura eight-minute opening movie, in which we meet our protagonist Adam Randall, in the back of a taxi on his way to answer a mysterious summons to a deserted house out in the middle of nowhere — a visit he’s decided to make in the middle of a dark and stormy night, of course, as you do in these situations. When I first heard Adam speak, I thought it strange that Gremlin had opted to cast an American actor in the role, given that the actual text of the script shows every indication he ought to be British; the summons to the haunted house came from a self-purported colleague of his recently deceased father, who we’re told was “the pastor in a Cornish village.” But then I started noticing oddities in Adam’s vowels and in his “Ts” that didn’t fit with an American accent either. In the end, I decided he must be Canadian. (Hey, at least that puts him inside the Commonwealth!) But then, after I was finished with the game, I watched Gremlin’s short “making of” video, and all became clear: the actor was a Brit putting on an American accent. But… why, especially when it doesn’t make any sense in the context of the plot? I can only conclude that Gremlin believed they’d have a better chance of cracking the all-important American market with an American-sounding protagonist — plot fidelity be damned. Anyway, not much else about the plot will wind up making much sense. Why should this?

The actor in question is one David Tuomi, who has managed the neat trick of leaving no digital footprint whatsoever in all the years since. It’s as if he was immaculately created just to play Adam Randall, then returned to the dust from which he had been made as soon as shooting wrapped. To this day, his profile on The Internet Movie Database has exactly one entry: Realms of the Haunting. He doesn’t even enjoy the cult celebrity of someone like Dean Erickson, whose acting résumé is almost as scanty and similar long-abandoned, but who still pops up to give an interview from time to time about that one time he got to play Gabriel Knight. No, David Tuomi is just… gone. It seems he took his right to be forgotten seriously.

This is made still weirder by the fact that he really isn’t that bad here. He may not be Laurence Olivier, but he’s a good-looking, likable young man who doesn’t palpitate with nervousness when he speaks his lines, which puts him well ahead of Dean Erickson and many of his other peers in the full-motion-video field. The problems with this game’s storytelling aren’t down to him.

In fact, for all of its haunted-house clichés, the opening movie as a whole strikes a pensive note that raises the hopes of a writerly type like me. The Adam we meet in the back of that taxi is haunted by metaphorical rather than literal demons; he’s filled with regrets about all of the things he never said to his father, all of the times he could have picked up the phone to call him but didn’t. This sense of guilt is joined by other, bitterer sentiments: “He was well-liked. Had time for everyone. Except his son.” (Those might just be the most cogent lines in a script with very few of them.) You can almost begin to believe that, like all the best classic horror, this story will really be about the fears and worries and secret shames that are part and parcel of being a human being, those occasional dark nights of the soul that keep even those of us who don’t believe in ghosts wide awake from time to time. But never fear, would-be demon blasters: the game will never strike a note like this one again, and Adam will never again betray any sign of having an inner life that goes beyond the exigencies of the moment.

Adam pays the taxi driver and enters the house. As he does so, the doors shut behind him with a crash, like the sealing of a tomb. He doesn’t so much as twitch in response to this event. On the one hand, this is a typical discordance of these sorts of productions: the David Tuomi acting in front of a green screen had no slamming doors to react to, because both the sight and the sound of them were painted in later. But it also establishes a precedent in another way. Adam will stumble through everything to come comically unfazed by it all. Even now, at the outset, he just shrugs as he wanders the corridors of a house with glowing pentagrams splashed over the walls and doors, portraits that blink at him with livid red eyes, a fly-encrusted suit of armor that appears to contain a human corpse, decapitated animal bodies strewn randomly about the place, and a typewriter that’s typing “We live!” over and over again of its own accord. Unflappable doesn’t begin to describe this guy. “A rat. No head,” he mutters to himself, and moves on. In the case of the typewriter, he confines his observations to, “Ink ribbon’s missing.” Right. Better buy a new one in the morning, once I’m through with all this tedious business of demon blasting. Which Adam will soon be doing with laconic aplomb, mowing through his enemies like Duke Nukem — until it’s time for a cut scene, at which point he reverts to being the slim, harmless-looking guy we met in the taxi.

Could this library look any more Lovecraftian?

The aforementioned demons show up only after you’ve solved a puzzle or two and found your way into the house’s library, that natural repository of secrets. In the best tradition of a Call of Cthulhu scenario, you find a clutch of 70-year-old letters between a cultist and his paramour, talking about some ominous ritual they’re attempting to enact. And, even more disconcertingly, you meet Adam’s father’s ghost, entwined in chains that make him look like a parody of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol.

Then you open the inevitable secret door that’s hidden behind the bookcase, and the first demon comes running at you. With head-snapping speed, we’ve gone from pensive psychological horror to Gothic horror to a vaguely Lovecraftian story to a B-grade zombie flick.

And so it will go for the next couple of dozen hours. The designers’ response to any and all suggestions seems to have been, “Sure! Put it in there!” Realms of the Haunting is a study in excess, a game that wants so very badly to be all things to all people, evincing all of the sweaty desperation in pursuit of that goal that Adam so noticeably fails to display. It just goes on and on and on and on. Most games that tell pre-scripted, set-piece stories have around four or five chapters; this one has twenty.

Sometimes, however, less is more. Perhaps more so than any other game I’ve played, Realms of the Haunting descends linearly in quality — in all measures of quality, from writing to production values to gameplay — as it unspools from beginning to end.

That said, the descent doesn’t happen at the same pace along these different vectors. It’s the story that goes off the rails first. The central problem here is all too typical in videogames: stakes inflation. It’s not enough for this to be a tale of a father and son’s sins and redemption, not even enough for the fate of a family or a town or even a nation to hinge on Adam’s actions. No, the fate of the entire world — no, make that the fate of the entire universe! — has to be borne on the fashionably padded shoulders of Adam Randall.

The flames of Hell are so bright, Florentine’s got to wear shades.

It soon becomes clear that Paul Green has no idea how storytelling works at the most fundamental level. Instead of giving us one central villain to hate, he dilutes the impact with a whole rogue’s gallery of weirdos whose relationships to one another are almost impossible to keep track of: the creepy priest who seems to have been modeled on Rasputin, the guy who runs around in a doctor’s outfit, the guy dressed up like he’s auditioning for a Sam Spade flick who’s always flipping through a deck of cards and giggling like a low-rent Joker. If this was a Nintendo-style level-based videogame, these folks might work as a series of bosses. But as an interactive story told primarily through about 90 minutes of live-action video, it never gives anybody enough screen time to make you care. It’s not a problem of the acting; like David Tuomi, all of the actors perform what’s being asked of them serviceably enough, intoning their lines like the Shakespearean creatures of the British theater scene they probably were. It’s a problem of the writing.

This fellow looks like an evil Tex Murphy.

Your allies are no better. Again, there’s just too many angels and archangels and God knows what else running around, all talking in symbolic gibberish that brings to mind the game’s horrid opening “quotation” and never telling you what you actually want to know. At one point, one of them apologizes for “speaking in metaphors” — which is hilarious because absolutely everybody in this game speaks in nothing but metaphors, and terrible mixed ones at that, until you want to pull out your big old shotgun, point it at their foreheads, and demand a straight fricking answer, for once. The would-be drama has a way of shooting its gravitas in the foot at every turn. Your guardian angel Hawk, for example, runs around in an artfully crumpled tee-shirt that makes him look like a model in a Gap circular. Another character, one who has something or other to do with the Knights Templar, is named “Aelf” — pronounced as far as I can tell just like “Alf,” which always sets me giggling to myself about cat-loving anthropomorphic aliens.

The character you spend the most time with is Rebecca, a fetching lass in a chic pantsuit more appropriate for a day behind a desk in the City than a night in a haunted house. (She’s played by one Emma Powell, who unlike David Tuomi went on to a long and fruitful career as a supporting and voice actress in movies, television, and videogames.) Our avatar of indifference Adam comes across her in the library at the end of Chapter 2, inexplicably just sitting there, and, true to form, never bothers to ask her how she ended up there. For the bulk of the game thereafter, she serves as his sounding board and advisor as he wanders about, offering hints and commentary on the environment and adding a little spark of life to what would otherwise be a decidedly lonely experience. In that sense, she’s not a bad addition at all.

Emma Powell and David Tuomi

Indeed, the gameplay generally declines less precipitously than the writing — with one caveat. That comes in form of the interface, which will first flabbergast you with its inscrutability and then annoy you like a dull foot ache for all the hours to come. Some of this game’s confusions for the modern player exist in many first-person shooters that came out between 1993 and 1998, including to some extent even (un-modded) DOOM itself. These were the years before the control schemes that have been the standard for the last quarter-century had quite stabilized.

Still, Realms of the Haunting‘s problems in this department extend well beyond the lack of mouse-look or the unfamiliar default key mappings. The adventuring interface is fiddly almost beyond belief; everything you try to do is ten times harder than it would be if you were doing it in real life. Using or examining an object entails pressing “I” to bring up the inventory screen, then finding its stamp-sized icon among the four separately sorted categories of junk you’re carrying: “general items,” “weapons,” “mysterious or magical items,” or “documents.” (No, it isn’t always immediately obvious what the game considers to belong in what category.) For some reason, all of this is allowed to fill no more than a quarter of the screen. So, if it’s a document you’re interested in reading, you get to do so by dragging it around inside a small window; it’s like reading a book through a telescope. If you want to try to use an object on something in the world, you first have to place it in Adam’s left hand — his left hand, mind you; the right is reserved for weapons — then exit the inventory system completely before you can click on the target. This is so annoyingly convoluted a process that I’m going to tarnish my cred as a hardcore adventurer by strongly suggesting that you play this game, if you choose to do so, in “easy” adventuring mode, where it automatically uses the correct object in the correct place, as long as you have it in your inventory. What’s truly bizarre about all this is that Normality, the other Gremlin game that was built with the True3D engine, has a fast, elegant popup radial menu for examining and using objects. What on earth were these developers thinking?

You can almost always tell whether the makers of any given game have given it to anyone to actually play before they released it. These ones most definitively did not, as evidenced by the constant unnecessary niggles. When you find a new key, for example, you never know where it will appear among the twenty others you’re already carrying around with you. Why not dispose of the ones that have already served their purpose?

Still, if you can get past the torturous interface, the first chapters, when you’re still exploring the house itself, acquit themselves fairly well. The shooting parts serve their purpose well enough, while the puzzling parts can be surprisingly satisfying, revolving mostly around finding keys that let you open up more and more of the house for exploration. Realms of the Haunting is at its best at this stage, just about making you believe that its chocolate-and-peanut-butter combination of genres has something to recommend it after all. And, while I would by no means call it scary in a “I don’t want to play this alone” kind of way, its aesthetic does qualify as enjoyably creepy.

It’s only after you leave the house to start dimension-hopping about seven chapters in that things begin to fall apart on the gameplay front as well. An engine that can portray shadowy hallways to fairly good effect is less suited to conveying the splendor of ancient Egypt, the beauty of the Garden of Eden (yes, you really do travel there), or the horrors of Hell (yes, you really do travel there as well). All of these environments are much bigger, sprawling places than the house, with unfortunately less inside of them to see and do, a sure sign that constraints of budget and time were catching up with the designers’ ambitions. Even the normal spaces become hard to find your way around in; you are provided with helpful maps of most of them, but consulting them involves scrolling them around in that absurd little inventory window, a process so excruciating that you won’t want to bother until you’re truly at wit’s end. And then there are the deliberate mazes… oh, Lord, save us from the mazes in this game, which are scarier than any of its demons. There are three of them, extended, hair-pulling monstrosities all.

The game gives you maps of most of the larger areas, which is very kind and progressive of it. But then it makes you peer at them through a pointlessly tiny window. And every time you bring a map up again, it resets the view to the top left. The cruel irony here is that the full document seems very close to the size of your monitor screen. This is not rocket science, Gremlin.

As the game wears on, the puzzles become increasingly surreal, to say the least. For example, you run through one of the mazes collecting little brains to shove into a giant brain machine, apropos of nothing that comes before or after. And you’ll spend an inordinate amount of time constructing a bong so one of the angelic beings you meet can toke up properly. (I assume that all of the obvious jokes about what the folks at Gremlin were doing when they made this game have already been told, so I won’t bother.) If you’ve made it this far without ragequitting, you must long since have adopted Adam’s attitude. Just shrug your shoulders and go with it.

It gradually becomes clear that significant chunks of the story are simply missing in action, presumably due to budget shortfalls or space limitations; Realms of the Haunting shipped on four CDs as it was. At one point, Adam and Rebecca stand on the verge of a dramatic showdown with one of the ceaselessly rotating lazy Susan of villains. After everyone has engaged in the usual speechifying that precedes such things, the screen fades to black, a scream sounds, and you flex your mouse hand and get ready for battle… and suddenly Adam is in a prison cell, while Rebecca has somehow escaped and is trying to rescue him from outside the door. The game never explains how any of this happened. Just go with it.

At long last, you get to the very end and save the universe/multiverse/whatever. And then… you join a straitjacketed Adam in a mental hospital, as he finishes telling his tale to a skeptical doctor and a nurse with a syringe at the ready. Oh, my. You can almost hear the writers slapping one another on the back for being so clever. At least now we know why one of the villains was dressed up like a doctor. And perhaps, come to think of it, why we’ve never heard another peep from David Tuomi…

The dominant impression Realms of the Haunting leaves you with is that of bits that don’t fit together. This applies as much at the most granular levels of detail — as in the way that Adam’s reactions never quite seem to be in line with what is actually happening to him — as it is in the big picture. Rebecca, for instance, shows up in the movie bits, and is on-hand to offer commentary in the adventure-game bits, but simply doesn’t exist in the shooter bits. Likewise, we never see the veritable Fort Knox of weaponry Adam is carrying around with him when we see David Tuomi portraying him in the movie bits. Of course, Realms of the Haunting is hardly the first or the last game to hand-wave away inconvenient details like these. If it succeeded on at least one of its three levels — whether as a shooter, a puzzle-driven adventure game, or a well-scripted interactive movie — I’d be more inclined to overlook such inconsistencies. As it is, though, it’s failing everywhere by the time you make it halfway through: the shooter bits have become samey and janky, the adventure bits samey and illogical, the story samey and flat-out incomprehensible. This game is the inversion of the reviewer’s cliché about the creation under review being “more than the sum of its parts.” As bad as these parts are, the whole manages to be less than their sum. Every part of the game actively diminishes every other part.

And yet as hot messes go, this one is as intriguing as they come. Whatever else you can say about Realms of the Haunting, there’s never been another game like it. It’s amazing to think that a purportedly responsible management team ever approved such an outlandish monstrosity as this one. In fact, there’s a melancholy aspect to that: long shot that it was to get made even in 1996, it’s even harder to imagine this game appearing any later in the decade. For as gaming moved into the last third of the 1990s, genres were calcifying into fixed categories with inviolate sets of expectations. Soon absolutely no one would be taking fliers on crazy cross-genre experiments like this one anymore.

To know why, we need only look to Realms of the Haunting‘s commercial performance. Its British release date was not ideal, coming too late to reap the proper benefit of the Christmas buying season. And the circumstances of its American release, in the dog days of March of 1997 under the imprint of an unenthusiastic Interplay Entertainment, were no more auspicious. Yet a game with true mass appeal can overcome such factors — as, for example, Diablo did when it was shipped to American stores between the Christmas and New Years of 1996. Unfortunately, Realms of the Haunting was the antithesis of Diablo, being as clunky, fiddly, and scattered as Blizzard’s juggernaut was frictionless, polished, and laser-targeted. As Computer Gaming World put it in an (overly) generous 4.5 star review, Gremlin’s game had natural appeal to “action gamers looking for some adventure” and “adventure gamers looking for some action.” But just how many people meeting these descriptions were there? Not very many at all, it would appear. Realms of the Haunting was dead on arrival, selling less than 500 units in its first week on the market in Britain. Its high cost combined with its abject commercial failure had much to do with Gremlin’s subsequent collapse, which resulted in the company being bought out by the burgeoning French giant Infogrames in 1999.

Even today, however, some of the delusions of grandeur that allowed this game to be made still persist. Steve McKevitt, Gremlin’s former communications chief, blames its failure on “a backlash against full-motion video.” He claims that the developers “got just about everything right: the script, subject matter, story line, pacing. It was years ahead of its time. More The Last of Us than Quake.” Uh, no, Steve. Just no.

Yet, easy though it is to make fun of, Realms of the Haunting is a hard game to totally hate. It’s just so earnest in pursuit of its lofty ambitions, so fixated on being epic, man. How can you hate something that’s trying this hard to be the best game ever? Chalk it up as a last artifact of an older games industry that frequently had more vision than competence, of a time when budgets were small enough to take a chance on something crazy and just see what happened. In the years to come, both of those equations would be reversed. The result would be tighter, more polished experiences, but very few games that dared to throw out all the rules, whether wisely or unwisely. Instead of logical shorthands to bracket discussions, genres would begin to look like the straitjacket Adam Randall is wearing when we catch our last glimpse of him.

And it’s for that reason really that I’ve chosen to write about this game, even though I’m not at all in the habit of writing about bad games that didn’t sell well and didn’t have much influence on the field. There’s something kind of beautiful about Realms of the Haunting‘s passionate incompetence. I’m not usually an adherent of the “so bad it’s good” school of criticism, but I can almost make an exception in the case of this game. Many critics before me have argued that it would have been a far better game if it had been content to stay inside the haunted mansion and leave off with the apocalyptic fever dreams. They’re almost certainly right, but at the same time I’m not sure I would be talking about it today had anyone involved with it understood the virtues of restraint. Realms of the Haunting is a final holdover from a messier, more freewheeling time, when everyone was still making it all up as they went along. And so, having paid our last respects to the old ways, we can now march onward, into a future that could never give us anything as amateurish, ill-considered, excessive, and lovable as this.


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(Sources: the book A Gremlin in the Works by Mark James Hardisty; Retro Gamer 24 and 108; Computer Gaming World of January 1997 and May 1997; Edge of July 1996; PC Format of December 1996; PC Power of December 1996. Online sources include Sascha Kimmel’s Realms of the Haunting fan site, Jdanddiet’s interview with the aforementioned Sascha Kimmel, Retro Video Gamer‘s interview with Tony Crowther, and a retrospective of the game at The Genesis Temple.

Realms of the Haunting is available as a digital download from GOG.com.)

 
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Posted by on August 4, 2023 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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