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Category Archives: Interactive Fiction

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.



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


Sources: The books “Deny All Knowledge”: Reading the X-Files, edited by David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Marla Cartwright; Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to The X-Files by Peter Knight; Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files by Zack Handlen & Emily St. James; X-Files Confidential: The Unauthorized X-Philes Compendium by Ed Edwards; Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum; The Legacy of The X-Files, edited by James Fenwick and Diane A. Rogers; Opening the X-Files: A Critical History of the Original Series by Darren Mooney; and The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman.

Footnotes

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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Posted by on September 20, 2024 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

Tags: ,

The Truth Is Out There, Part 1: The Will to Believe

The idea that there are visitors to the planet, that they are not only visiting now but have been visiting since prehistory, and how it affects us is a very interesting idea. I suppose, just looking up into the night sky at all those millions of stars up there, you wonder if it’s possible. I have a pet theory that everyone wants to have that experience where they’re driving down a desert road at night, and they see something and can’t explain what it is. I think it’s all about religion. Not necessarily Christian religion, but it’s about beliefs — and meaning and truth and why are we here and why are they here and who’s lying to us. Encountering a UFO would be like witnessing a miracle.

— Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files

In July of 1993 — or maybe it was 1992 — a British music archivist named Ray Santilli traveled to Cleveland, Ohio, a city which had been a hotbed of early rock and roll three and a half decades previously, hosting concerts by everyone from Bill Haley to Elvis Presley. Now, Santilli was hoping to unearth some buried treasures of that era for the sake of posterity and profit: audio recordings, pictures, or, best of all if possible, video footage of one of the most important cultural movements of the twentieth century in its nascent stage.

Santilli put an announcement in a local newspaper, explaining who he was and what he had come for, dangling the prospect of generous compensation for any artifacts that fit the bill. Amidst a lot of dross and false leads, he received a call from a fellow whose 82-year-old father, so the caller claimed, had just what the energetic Briton dreamed of finding here in the American heartland. The elderly man in question, whom Santilli would later identify only as “Jack B.,” had worked a big open-air concert in Cleveland in 1957 as a cameraman. While some of the footage he had shot there was already a part of the public record, he had some additional reels of heretofore unseen film stashed in his attic in Florida, the state to which he had retired some years ago.

Santilli secured an invitation to visit Jack in Florida the next time he came to the United States; luckily, this was to happen in just a few months. When he arrived at the former cameraman’s snug little home, he was gratified to learn that his host was a straight shooter. Just as promised, Jack produced footage of a lean and hungry Elvis Presley giving the staid America of the Eisenhower era a good solid rocking and rolling. The transaction was quickly concluded: Santilli handed Jack a wad of cash, and Jack handed over the film, which Santilli would go on to include in a videotape compilation of early Elvis and Johnny Cash concert performances.

He was packing his suitcase in his hotel room the next morning, feeling quite pleased with himself at having gotten what he had come for, when Jack unexpectedly rang him up again. “Ray, are you interested in other material as well?” asked the old man at the other end of the line. Santilli said cautiously that he might be, depending on what it was. “Then come over here again,” said Jack. “I have something here that may be even more interesting than the Elvis film.”

Intrigued despite himself, Santilli swung by the house on his way to the airport. Jack sat him down on the couch and pointed to a raggedy cardboard box that sat on the living-room floor. It was full of 16-millimeter film canisters. “Ray, have you ever heard of the Roswell incident?” asked Jack. Santilli shook his head. “Well,” said Jack, “a UFO crashed in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. I filmed the salvaging.”

Jack went on to explain that he had been drafted into the United States Army during the Second World War, but that a childhood bout with polio had rendered him unfit for combat duty in the eyes of the military. Instead he had worked as a cameraman for the Army during and after the war; he hadn’t left the service until 1952. During his near-decade in uniform, he had filmed various top-secret projects and tests, including the very first explosion of an atomic bomb in another part of the New Mexico desert. But nothing compared to the day in 1947 when he was sent to Roswell to document everything that was going on there. He filmed extensively at the crash site of the UFO. And then he was flown to a military base near Dallas, Texas, to film the autopsies of two alien corpses that had been recovered from the wreckage. This was the footage that he had been storing in his attic all this time. According to him, the Army had simply forgotten to send anyone around to pick it up. Now, at long last, he had decided to sell it, in order to pay for a big wedding for his favorite granddaughter. He wanted $150,000 in cash — “owing to the taxes, you know. You get the film. I get the money. And you tell nobody where you got the film from.”

Santilli told Jack that he wasn’t the sort of person to buy anything sight unseen. Acceding to the wisdom of this policy, Jack set up the same projector on which they had watched Elvis’s gyrations the day before, pulled the curtains down over the windows, and started the machine clack-clacking into motion. On a clear patch of wall in front of him, Santilli saw the flickering images that would transfix the world a couple of years later. A humanoid but plainly inhuman corpse lay on a bare metal table. It had a bulbous head and eyes and a shrunken, childlike body with a distended belly that caused him to wonder if it was pregnant. It had two arms and two legs, but six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. It appeared to be completely hairless, its skin vaguely fish-like in pallor and texture. Two presumably human doctors, their faces hidden beneath the hooded contamination suits they wore, examined and then cut the body open while a third man in a face mask looked on from behind a pane of safety glass.

Passionate about music though he was, Santilli recognized immediately that this was more important — and vastly more valuable — than all of the lost rock-and-roll footage in the world combined. If, that is, it really was what Jack claimed it to be.

The reels were stamped with the Kodak name. So, Santilli placed a call right then and there to that company’s headquarters in Rochester, New York, and asked to be forwarded to the records department. “I have some old 16-millimeter film which is supposed to date back to 1947,” he said to the man who came on the line. “How can I tell whether this is true?”

“We have a simple system for that,” answered the man from Kodak. “There should be a geometric code on the edge of the film. What symbols do you see there?”

“A square and a triangle,” said Santilli.

“Good. Just a moment… yes, that was 1947.”

Santilli was satisfied. Unfortunately, though, he wasn’t a wealthy man; he certainly didn’t have $150,000 in his pocket to hand to give to Jack there and then. Telling the old man that he would get in touch again just as soon as he could, he flew home to London to start beating the bushes for the funds.

It proved harder to raise the money than he had ever anticipated. Even leaving aside how absurd this claim of an alien-autopsy film sounded on the face of it, few would have been eager under any circumstances to pony up $150,000 for a source whose real identity they didn’t even know, for a piece of merchandise that only Santilli himself had seen. Convinced that he was on the cusp of a coup that would make the revelations of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein seem like small potatoes, Santilli called every number in his Rolodex in a near panic. For he knew that Jack’s health was not particularly good, and he lived in fear that the old man would die on him before he could come up with the money. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until November of 1994 that he was able to convince a German music producer named Volker Spielberg to finance the purchase. That same month, Santilli made the round trip to Florida again, returning this time with the 22 reels of film in his luggage.

Ray Santilli and his financial backer Volker Spielberg.

Being nearly 50 years old and having been stored in less than ideal conditions throughout that time, many of the reels were in extremely bad shape. Santilli therefore sent them first to a conservator, to be restored as much as possible and then copied onto other media for long-term preservation. Once that had been done, it was finally time to announce the film’s existence to the world.

On March 11, 1995, Santilli invited to a London movie theater a bizarre cross-section of public figures: serious journalists along with not-so-serious entertainers; prominent UFO believers along with skeptics; noted scientists along with representatives of most of the world’s major religious faiths; even the former head of the British Ministry of Defence’s controversial, recently concluded “UFO Project.” That project had declared in its final summary that it could find no evidence that extraterrestrials had ever visited our planet, much less that any terrestrial government had conspired to cover up such an event. Perhaps its director would now feel compelled to revisit the matter.

Or maybe not. “The result [of the first screening] was absolute, total rejection,” lamented Santilli later on. “They all considered it a swindle. Some even left in the middle of the show.”

Undaunted, Santilli kept right on knocking on doors. Most of the news organizations he contacted wanted to do a full forensic examination of the film before they would agree to license it; this Santilli did not wish to allow. Rupert Murdoch, however, was not so scrupulous.

Already at that time, Murdoch was the worldwide king of tabloid journalism and much else in mass media besides. He was by then well along in the process of building a staggering fortune out of the understanding that many or most consumers of “news” don’t want objective facts; they want news that will entertain them, at the same time that it confirms the worldviews to which they are most predisposed. His fortune would only continue to grow over the decades to come, as he continued to put this understanding into ruthless practice.

Murdoch came out of a private screening of the alien-autopsy film knowing that he simply had to have it. He prepared a contract which made Santilli and his largely silent partner Volker Spielberg rich men overnight. Then he made plans to show the film to maximum advantage all over the world — including in the biggest media market of them all, the country of its alleged origin. He passed the film to Robert Kiviat, the coordinating producer of an American “documentary” series called Encounters. Airing on Murdoch’s young and scrappy Fox television network, Encounters dealt in alien abductions, crop circles, ghosts, Bigfoot, and similar paranormal and/or conspiratorial fodder.

On Tuesday, August 28, 1995, Fox broadcast a program called Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?, whose one-hour running time — or rather 45 minutes with commercials — included about four of the nineteen and a half minutes of footage which Santilli had provided to Murdoch. The balance of the time was spent talking about the film, plus the long-rumored UFO crash at Roswell whose veracity it might prove.

The host of the program was Jonathan Frakes, the actor who had played Commander Will Riker of the starship Enterprise on the recently concluded television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, and was thereby presumed to have some special insight into aliens from outer space. Although the title of the show seemed to describe it as an inquiry into the authenticity of the film, the affirmative case was given a lot more air time than the negative. “It was not what you would expect from a major network that thought it was broadcasting a history-making film,” noted the magazine Skeptical Inquirer later on. “It was, however, what you would expect from a network trying very hard not to spoil an illusion.” The show’s field director, John Jopson, claims today that he was told in no uncertain terms to can it when he persisted in asking too many questions of Ray Santilli. “Cut the Perry Mason act and finish the show,” is what he says that Robert Kiviat told him. “It was made clear to me that, if the footage was exposed as a hoax, the ratings would suffer,” he elaborates. (Kiviat denies that these exchanges ever took place.)

In place of a hard-hitting interrogation of Santilli, an expert from Kodak testified that the film stock  appeared to stem from 1927, 1947, or 1967 (it turned out that the geometric codes were periodically reused); a former military cameraman who had worked during the same era as Jack B. testified that the film was consistent with the equipment and shooting techniques he had employed; the prominent pathologist Cyril Wecht testified that the men seen performing the autopsy in the film were, judging from the procedures they followed, “either [themselves] pathologists or surgeons who have done a fair number of autopsies”; the Hollywood special-effects guru Stan Winston testified that “my hats are off to the people who created it — or [to] the poor alien who is dead on the table.”

Like his fellow Star Trek alumnus William Shatner before him, Jonathan Frakes wasn’t one to look the gift horse of a paying gig in the mouth. “Patrick Stewart turns all this shit down,” he told journalist Emily Nussbaum decades later. “Because I’m such a whore, I took this, and the producer hired me for another couple of jobs.” He even became an executive producer and occasional guest star on a scripted television series called… you guessed it, Roswell.

The program proved every bit the cultural bombshell and ratings bonanza Rupert Murdoch had thought it could be. It became the most-watched show in its time slot that evening, a major achievement for Fox, which normally still lagged well behind CBS, NBC, and ABC, the older “Big Three” American networks. From one day to the next, the water-cooler discourse in the country switched from such comparatively prosaic matters as the Oklahoma City bombing and the O.J. Simpson murder trial to aliens and UFOs and Roswell, Roswell, Roswell. The demand from those who had missed the program’s first airing was so enormous that Fox showed it again a week later, with three precious additional minutes of footage from the film appended onto the end. Even more households tuned in to watch this encore.

Meanwhile Murdoch was using his far-flung media empire to bring the same show to other markets, with much the same results. The buzz eventually reached all the way to the ears of the most powerful man in the world. On November 30, 1995, during a state visit to Northern Ireland, President Bill Clinton was asked by a twelve-year-old boy what he knew about Roswell and the alien-autopsy film. Cracking an awkward smile, he answered, “If the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn’t tell me about it.”

Skeptical voices had a hard time cutting through the excitement. Even they had to acknowledge that, if it was a fake, the film wasn’t an entirely inept or thoughtless one. For example, the clock and the telephone that could be seen on the wall of the examination room, even the metal tray used to hold the doctors’ saws and scalpels, were period correct.

All the same, there were some serious discordances to be espied as well, discordances which only became clearer once it was possible to view all nineteen and a half minutes at once on the inevitable home-video release. “Ufologists” wondered why the aliens in the film didn’t fully agree with the eye-witness accounts of people who had supposedly seen the bodies after the crash at Roswell; their aliens had no ears and four fingers, whereas these ones had small ears and six fingers. Scientists wondered at the strange suits worn by the doctors, which could have protected them from neither radiation nor biological contaminants; the one useful purpose they did seem to serve was to conceal the faces and thus the identities of the doctors themselves. And then, you didn’t have to be a ufologist or a scientist to wonder why an historic event such as this one would have had only four witnesses including the cameraman, why the autopsy was done as if everyone involved had someplace else he urgently needed to be in an hour or so, and why the cameraman was so gosh-darned bad at his job, allowing his camera to go out of focus and stay that way every time he zoomed in for a closeup.

For that matter, where was the cameraman anyway? Even if Ray Santilli himself refused to share any further information — thus honoring, so he said, the promise of anonymity which he had made to the old man — couldn’t any competent private investigator track down a man in his mid-eighties who currently lived in Florida, had formerly lived in Ohio, had contracted polio as a child, and had been drafted into the Army during the Second World War and continued to serve until 1952? Many investigators tried, but none could locate him.

To make matters worse, the details of Santilli’s story kept changing, much to the dismay of those who craved just one set of facts to check. For example, as I alluded to at the beginning of this article, sometimes it was 1992 and sometimes 1993 when he first encountered the film. His story wasn’t even internally consistent when you really stopped to think about it. Why was Jack B. worried about taxes when he expected to be paid under the table with a proverbial unmarked envelope full of cash?

More information emerged from Kodak, revealing that the film they had examined had consisted only of five frames of blank leader, a tiny snippet of celluloid which could have come from anywhere: “Sure, it could be an old film, but it doesn’t mean it is what the aliens were filmed on.”

Arguably the most devastating criticisms came from a legion of pathologists, who, in marked contrast to their credulous colleagues on the Fox special, saw all sorts of oddities and inconsistencies in the footage.[1]It turned out that Cyril Wecht, Fox’s chosen pathologist, had a penchant for conspiracy theories long before the alien-autopsy special was aired. In 1978, he was one of four pathologists who were allowed to reexamine all of the material gathered during the John F. Kennedy autopsy; he was the only one who insisted that the president’s wounds were inconsistent with the conclusion of the Warren Commission that there had been only one shooter. He went on to write several books on the subject, and served as a consultant to Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, which pushed the theory of an inside job by the CIA. They said that the doctors held their instruments awkwardly and seemed to have no method whatsoever to their madness, making random slices and scooping out the aliens’ organs willy-nilly. Speaking of which: the aliens themselves seemed more like grotty Halloween piñatas than formerly living organisms, mere sacks filled with amorphous lumps of viscera. “I cannot fathom that an alien who had external organs so much like ours could not have some sort of definitive structural organs internally,” said one pathologist by the name of Ed Uthman. Similarly, special-effects experts — the ones not contacted by Fox — said that, while the film was not a terrible fake by any means, these dead aliens were nevertheless well within the scope of their craft to provide to a filmmaker of even modest means. Based on testimony like this, even many ardent ufologists became convinced that the film was a fraud, possibly deliberately planted by a government that was eager to discredit their avocation.

Finally, there was the central absurdity that always dogged all of the talk of Roswell: that these aliens had made their way to Earth over distances of which the human mind can scarcely conceive, avoiding meteors and black holes and all sorts of other cosmic perils that are equally far removed from our capability to even imagine, only to get a stray pigeon or something stuck in their spaceship’s engine grille and wipe out in some farmer’s field. It could happen, one had to assume, but boy, did the odds seem stacked against it.

Despite all of these commonsense objections, the public consensus that the film was as likely real as not held for quite some time across much of the Western world. Interestingly, the one outlier here was Germany, a country which had lived through another embarrassing hoax at the beginning of the previous decade, when a rogue journalist from the respected magazine Stern and an underworld document forger had produced a set of purported diaries written by Adolf Hitler that had equally entranced the world. Call it a case of once bitten, twice shy; both Stern and its arch-rival Der Spiegel came out stridently against the film’s authenticity from the start. Obviously relishing the chance to pour a bit more salt into an old wound, Der Spiegel explicitly called the alien-autopsy film the 1990s equivalent to the Hitler diaries. Stern didn’t go quite that far, but it did roundly chastise the film’s peddlers. “If you want to fool us, you have to try a little harder,” it wrote with the hard-won wisdom of experience.

The Germans and the other skeptics were right, of course. The origin story I passed on to you at the beginning of this article — at least everything after Santilli’s acquisition of his footage of Elvis Presley in concert — is a complete lie. Facing increasing pressure to explain the many aspects of his story that didn’t fully make sense, Santilli committed a blatant self-own in 1997, when he showed pictures of the canisters in which, so he claimed, the film had been stored when he acquired it. (He was still refusing to provide the artifacts themselves for forensic examination.) The canisters were neatly labeled, “Property of the Department of Defense.” But, sadly for him, no agency of the American government had yet existed under that name at the time the autopsy was supposed to have been conducted.

And so the fever dream broke. Switching tacks without missing a beat, Fox in 1998 included the film in a television special called World’s Greatest Hoaxes, as if they had had nothing to do with this hoax’s dissemination. The producer and mastermind of that show was… Robert Kiviat, the man behind the original alien-autopsy special. You can’t make this stuff up.

In 2004, long after the cultural moment that had produced the alien-autopsy sensation had passed into history, Ray Santilli finally came clean — partially, at any rate. He admitted to the British television presenter Eamonn Holmes that he and a few friends had faked the film in a vacant London flat, using “aliens” that had been made out of plaster and stuffed with sheep brains, chicken entrails, and other assorted offal picked up at a local butcher shop. (The smell in the apartment, the hoaxers said, was “horrendous.”) After the filming was complete, they had cut what was left of the aliens up into small pieces and dropped them into dumpsters all over the city, as you do when you’re looking to hide the evidence of a crime.

Plainly worried about his legal exposure for perpetrating this fraud that had made him a millionaire, Santilli hedged his bets by insisting that he really had bought an alien-autopsy film from Jack B. in Florida, but that the reels that held it had literally crumbled into dust within a few days of being exposed to the air in London. (Was pollution particularly bad that year?) The film he had sold to Rupert Murdoch had been a “reconstruction” of what he had seen on the original reels. “It’s no different from restoring a work of art like the Mona Lisa,” he insisted. This might be true — if, that is, an art restorer’s job involved painting from scratch a new version of a work he had once glimpsed briefly, then passing it off as the original. As it is, this process goes by the alternative name of “forgery” in most circles. Even Santilli could hardly keep a straight face as he spouted this nonsense to a wide-eyed Eamonn Holmes. His tell is his smirk.

The reason Santilli suddenly decided at this late date to share even this much of the truth is equally plain. A new scripted cinema film was in the offing, entitled simply Alien Autopsy, telling a heavily fictionalized, comedic version of his story. There was now more money to be made from the truth than from the lie, in other words.

Since then, the forgery that made Santilli rich has well and truly passed into history as a classic piece of 1990s kitsch. Der Spiegel was correct; the alien-autopsy film did indeed become the 1990s’ closest equivalent to the Hitler diaries, complete with the same “what the hell was everyone thinking?” quality when looked back upon from the perspective of posterity. Unlike the two main perpetrators of that fraud, both of whom did time in West German prisons, Ray Santilli and his partners have never suffered any legal or financial consequences for their actions. For all that far worse criminals have gone equally unpunished, one still can’t help but feel that there is some injustice in this. The fact is, however, that Rupert Murdoch’s operation had no reason to pursue the matter. They had gotten many times their purchase price out of the film, whose authenticity had never been of any real concern to them. Only the rubes were duped. Ah, well… at least the 2006 cinema film was a flop. Its subject matter felt as outmoded by then as grunge music and Britpop.

Today only the most committed of UFO evangelists still believe in the original alien-autopsy film. Getting the burden of proof hopelessly muddled, these folks now demand that Santilli substantiate not his old claim that the film is genuine but his new one that he faked it. Naturally, his ongoing failure to do so demonstrates that he must have been intimidated by shadowy government agents into concocting the bogus tale of forgery. There’s something touching about people who want to believe so very, very badly, people for whom aliens have become a sort of religion.

To the jaded eyes of the rest of us, on the other hand, the conspiracy theories of the 1990s now seem charmingly quaint. We might even be tempted to see them as proof of an axiom that, when we humans lack sufficient stuff to worry about, we invent worries to fill that space. In a time when North America and Western Europe were at peace, were as wealthy as they had ever been, and seemed to have definitively demonstrated that liberal democracy and free markets were political perfection achieved — “the end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama so infamously put it — what else was there to satisfy their citizens’ need to worry than alien abductions, alien technologies, and a myriad of equally improbable government conspiracies surrounding it all? Then, as soon as September 11, 2001, showed that history just keeps marching on and that we actually had had something substantive to worry about during the previous decade, if only we had recognized it, all of that stuff blew away like tinfoil hats in the wind.

For all that this point of view is inevitably oversimplified, I do feel like there’s a kernel of truth there. More unnerving, however, is the structural pattern of 1990s conspiracy theories, a pattern which has proved more enduring than their content. Like the tabloid-news outlets which did so much to feed them, they blurred the lines between entertainment and information. People believed them mostly, it seems to me, not so much because they needed something to worry about as because they were fun. It was fun to speculate about what the next layer of the onion might be, fun to feel oneself to be privy to so many secrets and lies. For many people, it was fun as well to have a longstanding suspicion that “the system” had always been out to get them confirmed. Despite all their nefarious deeds and actors, conspiracy theories, then as now, were a sort of comfort food, keeping the truly difficult questions in life and politics, which don’t tend to have such bright neon lines separating good from evil, firmly at bay.

When all was said and done, did their adherents during the 1990s really believe aliens were everywhere? From the outside, it was hard to say for any given individual — and maybe from the inside as well. Following the tales about Roswell and crop circles and human abductions and all the rest became a form of fandom, not that far removed from the fannish dissection of each new episode of, say, Twin Peaks — or of The X-Files.

Yes, we have finally arrived at the real elephant in this particular room. While the alien-autopsy film was only a blip on the pop-culture radar, grist for the mill of Jeopardy! and Trivial Pursuit in the decades that followed, The X-Files, which likewise aired on Rupert Murdoch’s young Fox television network, became a veritable way of life for its most committed fans. Its first episode was broadcast in September of 1993, two years before the alien-autopsy special. By popularizing the ideas of alien visitations and government conspiracies to conceal their existence — ideas which it did not invent, but which were largely confined to the cultural fringe prior to its arrival on the scene — it laid the groundwork for Ray Santilli’s hoax. Then it continued on for years after that bit of excitement had come and gone, to become not just a footnote to but an enduring icon of 1990s pop culture, guaranteed to appear on any top-ten list of the decade’s biggest hits.

The X-Files is that rare show that seems to exist both in the time it aired and in the present,” notes Emily St. James, the coauthor of a recent book about the series. “It is, beyond all reason, timeless, despite being perhaps the ultimate TV show of the 1990s.” The X-Files changed the nature of television, the nature of popular entertainment writ large — and, for good or for ill, it also changed us, as people and as a people. A poll conducted by Time magazine and the news channel CNN in 1997 found that 64 percent of Americans believed that aliens were in the habit of visiting Earth. Absent The X-Files, the number would surely have been a small fraction of that size.

The story of The X-Files as a cultural phenomenon is something of a postmodern Gordian knot. The show borrowed much of its central mythology from fringe conspiracy theories. Then it went on to popularize such theories to such an extent that they could be introduced into the mainstream real-world discourse via organs like Ray Santilli’s film. And then, the show’s ongoing fiction began responding to the very same real-world currents which it itself had set in motion.

On November 24, 1995, just three months after the alien-autopsy special, Fox aired the X-Files episode “Nisei.” In it, FBI Agent Fox Mulder, the more credulous by far of the show’s two protagonists, has purchased an alien-autopsy film via mail order, prompting his more skeptical partner Dana Scully to complain that it is “even hokier than the one that aired on the Fox network.”  (Her skepticism is ill-founded: in the universe of the show, the footage is real.) To provide the final dollop of irony, the real-world Fox network ran commercials for yet another repeat showing of the alien-autopsy special during the episode in question. The world had never seen a feedback loop quite like this before. It was an early example of a weird hyper-reality that has since become commonplace, such that mediated experiences of all descriptions have become more subjectively real to many of us than the objectively real people and places around us.

Another example of postmodern hyper-reality, from the grandiosely titled International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico. The biggest single exhibit in the place is a diorama which proudly depicts the scene in Santilli’s film, despite the fact that the latter has been so widely dismissed even by most ufologists. Is the museum meant to get at the truth of what happened in Roswell in 1947, or is it really about reveling in all the fantasies that have been spun from what was almost certainly a fallen espionage balloon? One senses that even the proprietors of the museum aren’t quite sure anymore. One thing only is crystal clear: that the museum and the town of Roswell make a lot of money from being the UFO capital of the world.

Next time, then, we will delve into the origin story of this other 1990s media artifact, whose influence was so pervasive throughout the decade — including in computer games, my usual beat around here. Take heart, for I can tell you that the truth is sometimes out there: this origin story will actually be true. Would I lie to you?



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


Sources: The books UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here — and Out There by Garrett M. Graff; “Deny All Knowledge”: Reading the X-Files, edited by David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Marla Cartwright; The UFO Invasion: The Roswell Incident, Alien Abductions, and Government Coverups, edited by Kendrick Frazier, Barry Karr, and Joe Nickell; Beyond Roswell: The Alien Autopsy Film, Area 51, & the U.S. Government Coverup of UFOs by Michael Hesemann & Philip Mantle; The UFO Diaries: Travels in the Weird World of High Strangeness by Martin Plowman; 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, The Little Book of Aliens by Adam Frank, Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum, and Selling Hitler: The Classic Account of the Hitler Diaries by Robert Harris.

Online sources include Ray Santilli’s story of his acquisition of the alien-autopsy film at Aquarian Age Information Central and “How an Alien Autopsy Hoax Captured the World’s Imagination for a Decade” by Nathalie Lagerfeld at Time. Video sources include the 2004 episode of Eamonn Investigates in which Ray Santilli and friends finally come (partially) clean, the original Fox alien-autopsy special, and the full nineteen-minute alien-autopsy film.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 It turned out that Cyril Wecht, Fox’s chosen pathologist, had a penchant for conspiracy theories long before the alien-autopsy special was aired. In 1978, he was one of four pathologists who were allowed to reexamine all of the material gathered during the John F. Kennedy autopsy; he was the only one who insisted that the president’s wounds were inconsistent with the conclusion of the Warren Commission that there had been only one shooter. He went on to write several books on the subject, and served as a consultant to Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, which pushed the theory of an inside job by the CIA.
 
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Posted by on September 6, 2024 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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Sanitarium

If someone were to ask you at the beginning of 1998 which studio was most likely to release a little-sung adventure game that year that would go on to become a well-loved cult classic, you probably wouldn’t think of the little Pennsylvania outfit known as DreamForge Intertainment. For DreamForge’s track record with the adventure genre — or with any other genre, for that matter — was the opposite of imposing.

The studio was founded in 1990 under the name of Event Horizon Software. The people behind it were Jim Namestka, Tom Holmes, and Chris Straka, a trio of programmers recently employed by Paragon Software, a company best known for Marvel Superheroes action games and for conceptually ambitious but functionally half-baked CRPGs, most of which were based on the tabletop properties of Game Designers’ Workshop. After leaving Paragon in a huff over what they described as profound disagreements with the “creative direction” being taken there, Namestka, Holmes, and Straka proceeded to specialize in… yet more conceptually ambitious but functionally half-baked CRPGs, at first without the benefit of a license. In 1993, they remedied the latter problem at least by signing on with SSI to make Dungeons & Dragons computer games. The same year, they changed the name of their company. “We used the word ‘dream’ because that’s what we make, ‘forge’ because it implies craftsmanship, and ‘Intertainment’ with an ‘I’ because it represents the next big thing — interactive entertainment,” said Namestka just after the switch. More important than all that, however, the name change avoided confusion with a pornography purveyor that was also called Event Horizon.

DreamForge’s first Dungeons & Dragons game is their best remembered today (not that this is a particularly high bar to meet). Three years before Diablo, Dungeon Hack tried to deliver an infinitely replayable hack-and-slash CRPG through the magic of procedurally generated dungeons that were new each time out. While it cannot be compared to the dangerously addictive Diablo in any sense but its core concept, some found it a lot of fun at the time.

In these latter days of the Dungeons & Dragons license, SSI’s focus had shifted from quality to quantity. DreamForge was, for better or for worse, a good fit for that ethic. Thus they followed up Dungeon Hack with three more Dungeons & Dragons action-RPGs in remarkably short order. As a 1994 profile in Computer Gaming World magazine put it, DreamForge saw their principal competitive advantage as the way “they managed to put out products in a six-month development cycle rather than the more leisurely pace [of] other software houses.” They certainly weren’t a studio known for innovation, but, if you just needed a serviceable game that worked off of an established template, and especially if you needed it delivered quickly, they could do that for you as well as just about anyone.

After the Dungeons & Dragons license was gone for good, DreamForge continued in this mode for SSI and other publishers, making games like War Wind I and II, some of the very first clones of Blizzard Entertainment’s ultra-successful Warcraft II to hit the market. DreamForge was happy to jump on just about any trend. For example, the same year that they made Sanitarium, their aforementioned cult-classic adventure game that will be our main subject for today, they made TNN Outdoors Pro Hunter, which was inspired by Deer Hunter, the schlockiest game ever to sell millions of copies.

Sanitarium, however, was different enough to stand out like the proverbial sore thumb in a catalog chock full of workmanlike games made for hire. The only other DreamForge game other than it that might be credibly described as a passion project rather than a business contract fulfilled is, perhaps not coincidentally, also the studio’s only other point-and-click adventure game. Here I speak of 1996’s Chronomaster, a noble effort in its way that sadly turned out a bit of a mess.

Chronomaster.

Chronomaster’s creative pedigree was undeniably impressive: its audacious central conceit, involving private pocket universes owed by the rich tech-bros of the far future, was just about the last idea ever dreamed up by the science-fiction author Roger Zelazny before his premature death from cancer. Once Zelazny’s illness had made it impossible for him to continue, the script was finished off by his romantic partner and fellow writer Jane Lindskold. Unfortunately, though, DreamForge didn’t bother to sweat the details on their end. The game’s interface is unbelievably convoluted, requiring you to rummage through a menu just to move your character from one point to another on the screen. And the game design is even worse than the interface, being littered with nonsensical puzzles, unclued sudden deaths, and hidden dead ends — not to mention one of the most irritating mazes ever to appear in a graphic adventure. The protagonist mutters, “Swell! A maze!” and then sighs theatrically when you encounter it. DreamForge clearly knew that this would be the player’s reaction as well. So… why include it???? The mind boggles…

Passion project or not, nothing about Chronomaster lent much hope for DreamForge’s return to the adventure genre with Sanitarium. Which is precisely why the latter game is such a pleasant surprise.

Sanitarium was, one senses, an indulgence, a reward granted by the small studio’s founders to their hard-working employees, who had for more than half a decade been cranking out a steady two games per year — games that might not have been masterpieces, but neither were they, with the arguable exception of Chronomaster, disasters. For once, the folks on the front lines at DreamForge were given a chance to let their imaginations run wild over a blank canvas. Within reason, that is: DreamForge was not a wealthy studio, so the game would have to be finished on a fairly tight budget, within a fairly short amount of time. Cognizant of this, the employees envisioned a very traditionalist point-and-clicker.

A measure of constraint is by no means always a bad thing. In this case, it caused DreamForge to steer clear of the trend toward “interactive movies” featuring digitized video clips of real actors. The mixture of pixel art and pre-rendered 3D that they relied upon instead may have seemed dismayingly old-fashioned to some at the time, but today we can say that Sanitarium’s visuals have aged far better than many a more expensive production of the era. Rather than anything released more recently, LucasArts’s five-year-old Day of the Tentacle became DreamForge’s model in terms of technology and puzzle design. Definitely not in terms of mood, though: Tentacle was a cartoon comedy, which has always been the low-hanging fruit of the genre, for all that LucasArts was masterful at executing it. Sanitariums atmosphere was to be dark and grim, a braver thing to attempt and a trickier one to pull off. The game was to combine classic and contemporary psychological horror, having a list of inspirations that included The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Jacob’s Ladder, Se7en, and 12 Monkeys.

The core gang of four that coalesced around the game consisted of design lead Mike Nicholson, writer Chris Pasetto, head programmer Chad Freeman, and art director Eric Rice. The team was unusual in that, although almost every single one of its members would enjoy a long later career in mainstream commercial game development, none would ever make another adventure game.

Luckily for us, DreamForge made their second and last time at bat with the genre count. Every problem Chronomaster had has been fixed in Sanitarium. The interface is clean and simple: right click and hold to walk around the screen, right click over your avatar to bring up a radial menu of the objects he’s carrying, left click to interact with things out in the environment. Then, too, DreamForge embraced LucasArts’s “no deaths and no dead ends” philosophy of design. To this they married a wide variety of puzzles that are not too hard but not too easy either, being balanced nicely to keep you engaged without ever stopping your progress through the plot for too long. If there was an award for most improved maker of adventure games, DreamForge would surely deserve the prize for 1998 on the basis of Sanitarium’s surface qualities alone.

Having said that, though, I also have to tell you that its surface qualities are not the reason Sanitarium is a game that sticks with you long after you’ve finished it. It’s the story and the themes that are really special. As a critic, I hate to use this word, but sometimes it’s unavoidable: this game has soul.

Mind you, this quality of soulfulness is not exactly front and center from the beginning. Your first glance at the blood and guts that are strewn across its environments may make you think of a hundred other 1990s videogames which love ultra-violence for its own sake. The story too initially seems decidedly unpromising. It does, after all, revolve around amnesia, that most clichéd of all the tools in a fiction writer’s toolbox.

You play a fellow known only as Max, whom an apparent car accident has recently left in a coma. Instead of a hospital bed, you awaken from your long sleep in the titular sanitarium, a place straight out of a Victorian penny dreadful. Nothing around or on your person is of much help in remembering who you are: you’re wearing only a set of anonymous nurse’s scrubs, and your whole head is so swaddled in bandages that you can’t even see what you look like. Your objective in the game is, naturally, to figure out who you are, how you arrived in this horrible place, and how you can escape your predicament. You pass through a series of dream sequences, over the course of which you slowly begin to piece these things together. (This vignette structure is one of the ways the game keeps a lid on its difficulty, by ensuring that the combinatorial explosion of available puzzles and objects never gets out of hand.) And a surprising thing happens as you venture deeper into the game: what started out as just another exercise in B-movie-style horror and surrealism slowly reveals itself to have much more on its mind and its heart than first appeared to be the case. It addresses some very sensitive topics — among them child abuse and the death of a child — with more empathy and compassion than I would ever have dared to expect.

Sanitarium does walk a fine line at times between the overwrought and the profound; even when I was halfway through the game, I still wasn’t entirely sure which side of that line it would ultimately land on. When all is said and done, though, it dodges the worst of the traps it’s laid for itself by sticking the ending in a way that games like this too seldom do. Sanitarium, you see, goes against the surrealistic tide by pretty thoroughly explaining all of its weirdness. “I felt very strongly that, having invested so much in the characters, an unresolved ending would feel extremely cheap to the player,” says Mike Nicholson. You are absolutely correct, Mike; kudos to you for staying the course and delivering an interactive story that’s fully realized in the Aristotelian sense. The player does get to find out what is really going on, and even gets to enjoy a happy ending.

So, my advice to you, my good readers, is to trust the game even when it seems dubiously worthy of your trust, to give it a chance to reveal its real self at its own speed. If you do so, I think you’ll find that it repays your patience and willingness to withhold judgment handsomely.


At first, Sanitarium can seem like it just wants to be gruesome, in an all too typical videogame sort of way. But first impressions can be deceiving…

The game dwells on the theme of childhood innocence endangered as obsessively as Holden Caulfield. Even your selections from the utility menus — save and load, etc. —  are repeated by a creepy, disembodied chorus of children’s voices.

This is neither the first nor the last adventure game to feature a macabre circus. Here, however, its shock value is shot through with real sadness, as Max takes on the persona of the childhood sister whom he lost. At moments like these, the game transcends its grindcore surface qualities.

This cut scene, in which Max remembers his failure to fulfill his dying sister’s last wish, cuts to the bone with a rusty blade of truth.

Ancient Aztecs are hardly strangers to adventure games. Again, though, this game is weirdly good at transcending its many clichés — beginning, of course, with the amnesiac protagonist.

The puzzles are numerous and varied: inventory puzzles, conversation puzzles, a few action-oriented tests of timing, plus some set-piece Myst-style puzzles like this one.

Screenshots like the one above show that DreamForge’s budget and time were not unlimited. This is supposed to be an isometric view, but the “camera” angle is too extreme, so that it ends up looking like a cutaway view of the floors of the house. Adventure gamers would have to learn to forgive such little infelicities if the genre was to stay alive at all. It’s not too big a thing to ask, in my opinion.



Sanitarium is by no means a AAA game. It was made in just sixteen months, on a sharply limited budget. “We worked with the time and budget we had,” says Mike Nicholson. Fair enough; no one can ask for more. That said, its creators’ limited resources do show through: the game’s graphics are far from the state of the art even for 1998, its voice acting marked by a limited number of actors and by the inherent limitations of some of them — including the one playing Max himself, whose histrionics are sometimes more than a little bit over the top. Yet, even when setting aside its unusually weighty thematic ambitions, Sanitarium remains a well-crafted, even well-polished game within the set of restrictions that are its lot in life. If it does nothing really new, it does the tried and true very, very well. In that sense, it offered hope back in 1998 for a genre that was increasingly in need of it.

There’s a standard narrative about the history of adventure gaming, which you can read of here and there on this site as well as plenty of other places. It describes how adventures rose to become arguably the hottest of all gaming genres during the first half of the 1990s. And then, with dizzying abruptness, the genre “died,” for a whole range of reasons that different chroniclers choose to emphasize to differing degrees: too many games in general, and especially too many with a poor grasp on the fundamentals of good adventure design; a lack of innovative new design ideas; the terrible economics of paying $50 or more for a game that you would be done with after just five to ten hours; an inability to compete with the fast-paced, visceral nature of the latest first-person shooters and real-time strategies; the challenges of distribution in a marketplace where the number of games was growing far faster than the available shelf space at retail, even as online digital distribution was not yet practical for asset-heavy games like these.

All of these reasons are valid when considered in their appropriate context. Nevertheless, the standard narrative masks an important fact. Although adventure games definitely went into a pronounced commercial decline after 1995, definitely became niche rather than mainstream products in gaming’s new world order, they never actually “died” at all. Even in the very worst years for the genre, new adventures were still released. And in the due course of time, the adventure game learned to reckon with its relegation to niche status, found ways to survive and even to be modestly profitable as part of a long tail of games that trucked along behind the razzle-dazzle of Quake, Unreal, and Starcraft.

Adventures’ means of living on after their alleged death were varied. Most obviously, they entailed reduced budgets, even though that meant accepting reduced production values, and reduced price points, even though that cut into an already precarious bottom line. More and more in the course of time, they would include moving production out of North America and Western Europe to Asia and Eastern Europe, where artists and programmers were willing and able to work much more cheaply. This new breed of adventure game would not be advertised in the front pages of glossy magazines and featured in flashy end-cap displays inside stores, as their predecessors had been. These adventure games were thrilled if they could just secure a bottom shelf somewhere for themselves; when they couldn’t, there were always the mail-order and Internet-based storefronts, who, unlike the brick-and-mortar retailers, were in a position to stock any and every game in their warehouses, no matter how niche its appeal.

As a game produced on a modest budget, with correspondingly modest commercial expectations on the part of its developer, Sanitarium can be seen as an early example of these trends, coming along even as the last of the bigger-budget adventure games from the big studios — titles like Black Dahlia, The X-Files Game, Grim Fandango, and Gabriel Knight 3 — were still either in the pipeline or fresh on store shelves.

And Sanitarium serves as an early riposte to a lot of the assumptions behind the standard histories of adventure games in yet one more way. I, for one, am not at all convinced that the genre’s decline in prominence actually led to worse games. When adventures were no longer flagship titles on which the stock prices of their corporate parents depended, there was less pressure to release them before their time. When the people making them were doing so strictly out of love for the genre instead of because they were chasing the trendy flavor of the month, said people were more willing to sweat the details of design. Likewise, when the budget couldn’t be stretched enough to create an audiovisual spectacle, the only way to stand out was through excellent writing and puzzles. And when the old “Siliwood” vision of adventure games as interactive movies populated by real actors was thrown onto the dustbin of history, studios were able to return to older approaches that were often more satisfying than watching reams of grainy green-screened video. So, not only did a year never go by without producing at least a few new adventures, but at least one or two of those adventures were always pretty darn good, just like Sanitarium is. Not bad for a dead genre.

The obvious comparison to make is with the graphic adventure’s evolutionary forefather, the text adventure, which went through a similar boom and bust about a decade before its progeny. By the early 1990s, the text adventure really was dead as a commercial proposition, deader than the graphic adventure would ever be. And yet the text adventure writ large did not die. Its disappearance from store shelves rather left the field open to impassioned amateurs, who programmed tools for making them that were more sophisticated than anything any of the commercial houses could ever lay claim to. Then, being freed by the absence of economic pressure to focus on design, writing, and innovation, the amateurs used these tools to create games that were not just as good as but in many ways better than the best of the 1980s. The major difference in the case of graphic adventures was that the latter were able to maintain a low-key commercial presence, even as open-source authoring systems like Adventure Game Studio would eventually allow amateurs to create remarkably sophisticated games of this style as well. The beginning of that scene is still a few years removed from the point at which we now stand in these histories, but I do look forward to covering it alongside the professional graphic adventures — and the amateur text adventures, of course — in the future.

In the meantime, though, there is Sanitarium, the advance guard that pointed the way to where the genre as a whole would have to go within the next couple of years. To have a future, adventure games would have to reconnect with their past, pretending the Siliwood craze had never happened and refocusing on the fundamentals. This is exactly what Sanitarium does, to fine effect.



The rest of the story of Sanitarium and DreamForge Intertainment is far briefer than that of the adventure game in general. Instead of DreamForge’s usual partner SSI, Sanitarium was published by the relatively brief-lived American Softworks Corporation, something of a dumping ground for second-tier games like this one that didn’t much interest the glitzier publishers. Needless to say, Sanitarium wasn’t a big seller.[1]Gazing back through the rose-tinted glasses of memory, Mike Nicholson guesses that Sanitarium sold around 300,000 copies. Based on my knowledge of the industry and the game’s public profile, I suspect that this figure is inflated by a factor of two to five. If it were correct, Sanitarium would stand as the best-selling game DreamForge ever made by a huge margin, raising the question of why they didn’t immediately invest in another adventure. For all that much of the form and spirit of the post-millennial adventure game can be seen here in a nascent form, it would take cleverer publishers than ASC to figure out how to sell the games consistently at a (modest) profit — another story for another time.

As it was, this weirdly aberrant game in the DreamForge catalog justified that description by becoming the last of its kind from them. In fact, the studio finished only one more game of any type after Sanitarium and TNN Outdoors Pro Hunter, their odd couple of 1998: that game being the more typically workmanlike Warhammer 40,000: Rites of War of 1999. With DreamForge’s traditional business model of making derivative games that were just good enough becoming harder and harder to sustain in the changing industry, the company was dissolved not long after.

Sanitarium stands today as their one real moment of glory, their one game that truly deserves to be discovered and appreciated by a new generation of gamers. Thankfully, its presence on modern digital storefronts allows this. Personally, I rank it alongside Journeyman Project 3 and Tex Murphy: Overseer as one of my three favorite graphic adventures of 1998. While the former two titles both represent the end of an era of adventure gaming, Sanitarium is the dawning glow of a new one. I submit it to you as Exhibit Number One for my case that the adventure game’s life after death will be in its own way every bit as exciting as its lusty youth.



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: Computer Gaming World of January 1994, April 1996, and September 1998; Retro Gamer 132. Plus the SSI archive at the Strong Museum of Play.

Where to Get It: Sanitarium is available for digital purchase at GOG.com.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 Gazing back through the rose-tinted glasses of memory, Mike Nicholson guesses that Sanitarium sold around 300,000 copies. Based on my knowledge of the industry and the game’s public profile, I suspect that this figure is inflated by a factor of two to five. If it were correct, Sanitarium would stand as the best-selling game DreamForge ever made by a huge margin, raising the question of why they didn’t immediately invest in another adventure.
 
 

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1997 Ebooks

Hi, folks…

As I’ve already warned my patrons, I don’t have an article for you this week. I do, however, finally have the 1997 ebook for you, with all of my coverage for that year. I hope it will help to soften the blow.

You can download it, along with all of the earlier volumes, at the usual place on this site. As always, my thanks go to Richard Lindner for providing the tools and advice that let me make these .epub and Kindle editions.

Thank you for continuing to be the best readers in the world. See you next week with a proper article!



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Tex Murphy and the Coming of the DVD (A Shaggy-Dog Story)

In his expatriate memoir Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson describes what a false picture of the world’s geography you would end up with if you were to try to surmise it from British mass media. Britain, you would probably assume from the crazy amount of attention the United States gets in that country’s press, must lie somewhere just off the coast of North America, perhaps about where Cuba lies in reality. It would be the rest of Europe that is separated from Britain by a wide, daunting ocean.

The retro-gaming scene of today can give a similarly false picture of the geography of gaming’s past — one that is not so trivial to correct. Take the case of the fondly remembered studio Dynamix, a major name in gaming from 1984 until 2001. Do you know what Dynamix’s most profitable game of all was? It was not any of the ones that are still discussed today: not Arcticfox or Rise of the Dragon, not The Red Baron, not The Incredible Machine, not Betrayal at Krondor, definitely not Rama. No, it was a little something called Trophy Bass, which sold many more copies from the outdoor sections of Middle American Wal-Mart superstores than it did from computer and gaming stores. As of this writing, Trophy Bass has precisely zero reviews on the central fandom database MobyGames. And yet it was absolutely huge in its day — eclipsed, in fact, only by the unrivaled king of Wal-Mart software: Deer Hunter, the butt of a million hardcore-gamer jokes, whose publisher laughed all the way to the bank.

Indeed, Deer Hunter must be solidly in the running for the title of most profitable single computer game of the twentieth century, easily outdoing such hardcore contemporaries of the late 1990s as Quake, Diablo, and Starcraft in terms of the amount of money it cost to create versus the amount of money it brought in. Its only real challenger by this metric may be the unstoppable juggernaut that was Myst, another game that was made on a shoestring and then proceeded to sell and sell and sell some more, despite being widely scorned by the hardcore crowd. Then again, there is Barbie Fashion Designer to consider as well. Guess how many MobyGames reviews it has… Suffice to say that targeting the people who self-identify as “gamers” has seldom if ever been the best way to make a lot of money in games.

With that in mind, let me spin you a yarn about Access Software, which existed in or close to Salt Lake City, Utah, from 1983 until 1999, at which point it was acquired by that biggest whale of all in the software scene, Microsoft itself. Today, Access is remembered by retro-gamers mostly as the home of Tex Murphy, a trenchcoat-and-sneaker-clad detective of a noirish future who was played onscreen by Access’s chief financial officer Chris Jones in five installments spanning from 1989 to 1998. Yet it wasn’t Tex, whose commercial profile never exceeded the fair-to-middling range during his heyday, who convinced Microsoft that Access was an investment worth its time. That service was performed by Links, a long-running series of golf simulations that got slightly more attractive and sophisticated every year throughout the 1990s, and was rewarded by becoming a staple of another demographic that stayed far away from most computer games: the middle-aged corporate-executive set, the same people who could be seen out on the world’s real golf courses.

From first to last, Tex Murphy was an indulgence which Bruce Carver, the founder of Access, permitted to Chris Jones, his longest tenured and most valued employee, who had been with the company from its earliest days as a maker of Commodore 64 action games. This is not to say that Tex didn’t assemble a fan base of his own, most of them people who would never have touched a golf simulation. He really hit his stride with the third game of the series, 1994’s Under a Killing Moon, which earned its label of “interactive movie” by using live-action video clips of real actors rather than crudely digitized still photographs to carry its narrative water. This was also the point where a fellow named Aaron Conners came aboard as scriptwriter and Jones’s design partner, engendering a quantum leap forward on those fronts as well. Technologically innovative and yet thoroughly lovable in an enthusiastic community-theater sort of way, Under a Killing Moon became the most commercially successful Tex Murphy game ever, selling almost 500,000 copies. Such numbers may have paled beside those put up by Links, but they were sufficient to permit the series to continue to exist as a sideline to Access’s mainline in simulated golf.

Unfortunately, that equation got upended by 1996’s The Pandora Directive. The fourth Tex Murphy game and second full-fledged interactive movie pushed harder and farther along all the trails blazed by its immediate predecessor: its play time was longer, its plot more convoluted, and its formal storytelling ambitions more pronounced, with a welter of different endings on offer depending on how you chose to play the dubiously great detective. All that notwithstanding, once cast adrift in a changing marketplace where interactive movies were now a dime a dozen and already encountering the first worrying signs of a gamer backlash, it sold only about a third as many copies as Under a Killing Moon, not even enough to pay for its own production cost.

By all rights, that should have been that for Tex Murphy. Bruce Carver may have been an indulgent man, but he would have had to be a terrible businessman indeed to let his CFO’s passion project go on actively losing his company money. As it happened, though, Tex got thrown a lifeline from a most unexpected source. To understand the circumstances that led to his rescue, we need to take a quick look back at the history of, of all things, the storage media that were used to deliver software to consumers during the first quarter-century of the personal-computer era.



By the mid-1990s, the computer industry had already passed through two fairly earthshaking transitions in storage media: the linear medium of cassette tapes had been replaced by random-access floppy disks, which had in turn been largely superseded by CD-ROMs that could hold over 400 times as much information as what had come before. It’s interesting to note that the first and third links in this chain first came to prominence not in association with computers but as music-delivery technologies. While the application of cassette tapes to the very first personal computers of the late 1970s was a happy accident, the inventors of the CD took to heart from the start a brilliant insight of the early computing researcher and theorist Claude Shannon: that all data is ultimately just data; the difference exists only in the way you interpret it. Thus when the CD made its debut in 1983, Philips and Sony, the Dutch and Japanese electronics giants behind the new format, envisioned music delivery as only the first of a whole range of applications. For, being a digital storage medium, all a CD contained at bottom was a string of ones and zeroes, which could presumably be applied to whatever purpose you liked: computer code and data, video, you name it.

In the end, though, the proud parents’ hopes and schemes for the format were realized only partially. After an agonizingly long gestation period, CD-ROM drives for computers finally broke through to become a ubiquitous reality circa 1993. Yet the territory of home video remained resolutely unconquered by the little silver discs. In 1993, people were still buying and renting movies on VHS videotapes (and, in much smaller numbers, on laser discs, an almost equally aged storage medium despite its futuristic appearance). The principal problem holding the CD back was that of capacity. The 650 MB or so that could be stuffed onto a CD were enough to provide 75 to 80 minutes of high-fidelity music, more than enough for a symphony or even most double record albums. When it came to video, however, the numbers didn’t look so good. It just wasn’t possible to put enough decent-quality video onto a CD to compete with VHS. Not that people didn’t try: a number of initiatives sought to make up the difference through hyper-aggressive compression algorithms, but none of them were very satisfying and none of them went much of anywhere in the developed West.[1]Despite the many compromises inherent to the concept, video CDs did become quite popular in the still-developing regions of Asia and Africa, where they often took the form of bootleg discs sold at street markets and the like. On computers as well, video-centric games like Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive were soon bumping into the limits of the CD; the latter shipped on no fewer than six discs, and yet the quality of its video snippets was far below what you would expect from an ordinary television broadcast.

It didn’t take a genius to see what was needed: a new optical storage medium much like the CD in form and spirit, but much more cavernous. It was so obvious, in fact, that by the end of 1994 two separate successor standards were in development, one from the old CD consortium of Philips and Sony, the other from Toshiba, each with more than half a dozen other major names in home electronics signed on as supporters. The stage seemed to be set for a repeat of the VHS-versus-Betamax format war of the early years of videotape. VHS had finally won that conflict to become the universal standard, but it hadn’t been quick, easy, or cheap. As with most wars, everyone involved would probably have been better off if it could have been avoided.

No one was more worried about the prospect of a Second Video Format War than the big players of the computer industry. They assumed that, just as they had adopted CD technology to their own use-case scenarios, they would do the same with this successor technology. Two dueling formats, however, would be a nightmare for them. They wanted — no, needed — a single standard; the alternative was too chaotic to contemplate. Apple, Compaq, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun therefore came together in April of 1995 to create a working group whose marching orders were to put pressure on the feuding parties in the adjacent home-electronics industry to join forces and come up with a single standard.

In a telling testament to the computer industry’s growing clout in this burgeoning new Internet Age, the pressure campaign was successful in relatively short order. On December 12, 1995, the basic specifications of the DVD were formally agreed upon by everyone concerned. The format inherited parts of both research projects to wind up with an optical disc capable of holding more than 8.5 GB of data, which could constitute up to four hours of crisp video and audio, compressed using the nearly lossless MPEG-2 standard — or, alternatively, the data on the disc could be used for whatever other purpose you had in mind, just as with a CD. The DVD would be slightly thicker than a CD, but would otherwise have the same form factor, such that it would even be possible to read CDs in DVD drives. Like the technology itself, the acronym was a classic product of corporate compromise. It wasn’t really an acronym at all: the parties couldn’t agree whether “DVD” stood for “Digital Video Disc” or “Digital Versatile Disc,” so they decided that a DVD would just be a DVD, full stop.

The standard’s progress from prototypes to products was almost derailed by the Hollywood film studios, who wanted a delivery medium that was, unlike VHS, secure against piracy. A variety of copy-protection mechanisms had to be implemented to placate the studios, including a system of regional locks whereby DVDs could only be played in that part of the world where they had been purchased. At last, on November 1, 1996, the very first DVD players from Matsushita and Toshiba, the honor guard for the hundreds of millions that would follow, went on sale in Tokyo’s legendary Akihabara electronics district. Americans had to wait until the following February for the first units from Panasonic and Pioneer to arrive. Within four months, 30,000 of them had been sold. From there, the numbers swelled exponentially. By the end of 1997, 340,000 standalone DVD players had already been sold in the United States alone, along with a million or more movies on disc to watch with them. It was just the beginning of what would soon be credibly labeled “the most successful consumer-electronics entertainment product of all time.”

On computers, however, the DVD’s forward march was more halting. Singapore’s Creative Labs, which had made its name and its fortune fueling the multimedia-computing revolution with sound cards and CD-ROM drives, introduced its first DVD-ROM upgrade kit in April of 1997, but it was rendered nearly unusable by a lack of driver support in Microsoft Windows. Oddly, considering how hard it had worked to ensure that the DVD standard was a standard, the computer industry seemed caught flat-footed by the actual presence of the technology it had shepherded out in the wild. It seemed not to have adequately considered the complications involved in combining DVDs with personal computers — especially when it came to using DVDs for their most obvious purpose of all, as repositories for high-quality video.

The embarrassing fact was that even most of the high-end microprocessors of the day didn’t have enough horsepower to be able to decompress the MPEG-2 video fast enough as it streamed off the disc. The only viable solution to this problem was the one used by standalone DVD players: another layer of hardware in addition to the interface between the computer and the DVD drive itself, a set of specialized circuits that could decompress the data coming off the DVD fast enough to get it to the screen in real time.

Enter Intel, the maker of most of those CPUs that weren’t quite up to the job of handling DVD video on their own. Although it hadn’t been part of the computer industry’s initial push to force a DVD standard, Intel had grown very bullish indeed on the format since then. During his keynote address at the January 1997 edition of Comdex, the industry’s biggest annual trade show, Intel’s CEO Andy Grove played snippets of Space Jam from a DVD drive connected to a computer. He and his associates envisioned a DVD player as the key component of a multimedia set-top box for the living room, sort of like a games console but also something more — an idea which never seemed to die, despite the failures of many previous entrants into this space, from Commodore to 3DO. As a first step toward this fondly imagined future, Intel set out to make a new line of upgrade kits for existing computers, to consist of a DVD drive and a new video card containing the hardware needed to get MPEG-2 video efficiently to the screen.

Strange though it may sound, these initiatives became Tex Murphy’s momentary savior.

It is a longstanding truism in computing that hardware is useless without software. Translated into the language of consumer electronics, this means that, if you want people to buy your shiny new gadget, you need to make sure they can also acquire compelling things to do with it. This was the reason that it was so important to win Hollywood’s acceptance of the DVD standard — important enough to delay the first DVD players’ release and to redesign the whole specification, just to ensure that exciting, sought-after movies arrived on store shelves alongside those first DVD players. Intel found itself in a similar bind when it considered its foray into interactive DVDs: there was currently no software out there to make use of them. What, any potential customer would ask very reasonably, am I supposed to actually do with this thing?

This was anything but a new problem for the computing and gaming industries. Luckily, it wasn’t an insoluble one either, as long as you had sufficient foresight and money. Two decades previously, Atari had solved it by having its own people make a range of fun games for the Atari VCS console before the latter ever went to market; then, when it did, Atari packed one of the best of those games — the soon-to-be-iconic Combat — right into the box with the console. A decade and a half later, third-party “pack-in” games became standard in the multimedia upgrade kits of companies like Creative, for the same reason Combat had shipped with the Atari VCS: to give people something to do with their new toy right away. When accelerator cards for 3D graphics became available a few years later, the purveyors of same paid game publishers a lot of money to make special versions of hit titles that were optimized for their particular cards. Activision, for example, programmed at least half a dozen separate versions of MechWarrior 2 for the different would-be graphics-accelerator “standards” that were floating around at the time. Such pack-ins could be of enormous importance to everyone concerned: the profits that Activision raked in from MechWarrior 2 helped to set one of gaming’s most venerable brand names back on the road to ubiquity after an ugly bankruptcy at the beginning of the decade.

Now, Intel wanted to prime the pump of interactive DVD with a showcase pack-in title that would demonstrate to everybody what the technology was capable of, and that would give customers something to do while everyone waited for a real software ecosystem to develop around the product. Somebody inside the mega-corporation was evidently a fan of Tex Murphy, thought that Chris Jones and Aaron Conners and their colleagues at Access Software were the perfect people to put interactive DVD through its paces. By no means was it an untenable deduction; no more credible stabs at interactive movies on CD existed than Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive. What might Access be able to do with DVD-quality video?



Thus one day a lifeline for Tex Murphy fell out of the clear blue sky, when Intel came to Access with an offer that would have been difficult for anyone to refuse. Intel would pay all of the production costs of a third Tex Murphy interactive movie. The only requirements were that the finished game had to run from DVD and had to be given to Intel to include as a pack-in with any and all of its interactive-DVD products. Access, for its part, would be allowed to sell the game on its own in a conventional retail box, keeping whatever revenues it generated thereby; if it chose, it could also make a version that ran from CD and sell that as well. Intel wasn’t even all that worried one way or the other about how much the game would cost to make, given that, whatever the final budget wound up being, it was guaranteed to be chump change for the biggest maker of computer chips on the planet. There was just one sticking point: Intel needed the game within one year. Time, in other words, was more important than money.

Being in no position to look a gift horse like this one in the mouth, Jones and Conners accepted all these terms without a second thought. Only after they had signed the contract did they sit down to consider just what it was they had agreed to. The last two Tex Murphy games had each taken twice as long to make as the amount of time Intel was giving them to make this one. They had sketched out only a rough outline of a plot for a possible next game in the series. Their chances of turning this into a finished script and then turning that script into a finished game they could be proud of within a single year seemed nonexistent.

At this point, Chris Jones came with a suggestion. Why not remake Mean Streets, the very first game in the series from 1989? They could dust off the old design document, flesh it out here and there, and present it as the origin story of the current incarnation of Tex Murphy, Private Investigator. Aaron Conners, who had never even played Mean Streets, said it sounded fine to him.

He was less sanguine when he did try the game, an awkward melange of flight simulator and point-and-click adventure which made it abundantly clear why Jones had felt the need to find a proper writer to join him for Under a Killing Moon. The first no-brainer decision was to throw the flight simulator right out. And then, says Conners:

I went to [Chris] and I said, “We can’t redo this game. This is terrible. You’ve got more jokes from third grade in here than I’ve ever seen in a game.”

I took the basic thread of the story and rewrote everything around that. I rewrote the script from top to bottom. And so, when people say Tex Murphy: Overseer was just a redo of Mean Streets, I want to throttle them, because I worked harder on that than I did on Pandora.

Adrian Carr, who had directed the live-action video in The Pandora Directive, returned to do the same for Tex Murphy: Overseer. (The new name reflected Access’s belated realization that borrowing the title of one of Martin Scorsese’s most beloved films was a recipe for consumer confusion if not legal peril…) The casts of both of the previous games had been a blend of Salt Lake City locals with a handful of moderately recognizable film actors — people like Margot Kidder, Barry Corbin, Kevin McCarthy, Tanya Roberts; even James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader, had agreed to join Under a Killing Moon as the narrator. Overseer continued this tradition, leaning perhaps a little harder than before on the Hollywood crowd at the expense of the locals. (It was, after all, being made on Intel’s dime.) The big coup this time was the highly respected veteran of stage and screen Michael York, who even as the game was in production was making a splash with a whole new generation of moviegoers thanks to his role in the hit James Bond spoof Austin Powers. Here he played the villain, albeit an unusually complex and tortured one, whose final monologue might just be the best thing Aaron Conners ever wrote.

Everyone involved with Overseer speaks of it as a more regimented project than the ones before, a case of making a plan and sticking to it. With so little time to work with, there was hardly any other way to approach it. The filming in particular took on the rhythm of a conventional Hollywood shoot, with the actors cycling through like clockwork to do their scenes one after another over the course of about a month. (The only actor present throughout the shoot was the star of the production, the unlikely amateur Chris Jones.) In all facets of the project, the Access folks kept the faith and worked like dogs. And they got it done, delivering Tex Murphy: Overseer right on schedule in the first weeks of 1998.

The game’s fiction stays on familiar territory. The setup is pure film noir: Tex is visited in his office by a femme fatale named Sylvia Linsky, who will, as those of us who played the other games know, eventually become his wife and then his ex-wife. Right now, though, she explains that she is suspicious about her father’s recent untimely death; he is supposed to have thrown himself off the Golden Gate Bridge in a fit of despair, despite having never displayed any signs of depression or suicidal tendencies before. Tex’s investigation leads him down the standard rabbit hole of a world-spanning and potentially world-ending conspiracy, involving secret brain implants that can be used to control the minds of millions of people. All of this may be par for the course for a Tex Murphy game, but this is by no means a bad execution of the standard formula. As usual, comedy and drama sit side by side in a way that would be awkward in most storytelling situations, but something in the Tex Murphy special sauce allows it to work far better here than it has any right to. And then, as I already mentioned, there’s some real pathos and gravitas to the villain’s arc, qualities which are elevated that much further by the performance of Michael York, one of those Shakespearean-trained British actors who would sound pretty great reading the phone book aloud.

It is true that Overseer lacks the divergent paths and multiple endings of The Pandora Directive. That said, I must also say that I’m a bit of a curmudgeon about such formal experiments in otherwise traditional adventure games anyway, rarely finding them worth the additional disc space and development time they entail. I’m perfectly happy with one satisfying story line, which is plenty hard enough to offer up. Overseer manages that feat, and that’s good enough for me.

In lieu of a branching plot, there is one really interesting wrinkle in the game’s approach to its narrative. It’s explicitly framed as a story which the present-day Tex, a more jaded figure than his earlier incarnation, is telling to his current love interest Chelsee over the course of an evening out. If you screw up or get Tex killed — which are usually one and the same, come to think of it — you see a little clip of his present-day self telling Chelsee, “No, that’s not really how it happened!” In his review for Computer Gaming World magazine, Charles Ardai took exception to the approach, complaining that the existence of Tex in this later time means that “the outcome is not in doubt. Tex must prevail, or he wouldn’t be sitting here talking to Chelsee.” That’s true as far as it goes, but I must say that it doesn’t go all that far with me. Has anybody ever played any Tex Murphy game under the misapprehension that the hero might not win out in the end? Not since Infocom’s Infidel created a backlash in 1983 had anyone dared to make an adventure game with a non-telegraphed tragic ending. Personally, far from being dissatisfied with it, I only wish that Overseer leaned into its storytelling conceit a little more. It could, for example, automatically send you back to the juncture in the story where you messed up after you reach one of the bad endings, rather than dumping you back to the menu to manually load the saved state you hopefully remembered to create. This game is ultimately all about its story, so why not make it as effortless as possible for us to play with the stuff of the story?

The gameplay itself is tried and true for this series. Once again, you spend most of your time either interrogating suspects via a menu of conversation topics or exploring locations and solving puzzles from a free-roaming first-person perspective — no Myst-style fixed movement nodes here! Whether you’re alternately crouching and standing on tiptoes in order to search every hidden corner of a room for clues or dodging hit men or killer robots in a surprisingly dynamic possibility space, the stuff you do when you aren’t watching canned video clips is what elevates the Tex Murphy series above almost all of its interactive-movie peers. For these are interactive movies that truly work as games — as rich, generous adventure games, with challenging but meticulously fair puzzles and even a modicum of emergent qualities when the action starts to heat up.

Although Overseer doesn’t reinvent any of its predecessors’ wheels, the evolution of computer technology has made the presentation everywhere that much sharper and crisper in comparison to what came before, especially in the video snippets — only appropriately, given that they were the whole point of the endeavor from Intel’s point of view. Indeed, I find I want to say that Overseer is actually better than its rather middling reputation within modern Tex Murphy fandom. It’s a little shorter than Under a Killing Moon or especially The Pandora Directive, but it’s not all that short in the abstract; there are still a good five to eight hours of fun to be had here.

The worst thing I can say about Overseer is that it’s just a little bit less Tex Murphy than its predecessors in senses other than length. The more conventionally professional performances and even presentation can be a double-edged sword, detracting just slightly from that giddy community-theater quality that made the earlier games so ridiculously charming. There aren’t many games or game series about which I would make such a statement — camp is most emphatically not my thing in general — but Tex Murphy has always been special in that regard, simply because there’s so darn much amateurish “we’re making an (interactive) movie!” joy to be found there, because the whole thing is so darn open-hearted and guileless. With Overseer, though, there is just a hint of ennui threatening somewhere out there on the horizon.

Still, and for all that this isn’t the place I’d recommend that anyone start with Tex Murphy — you should definitely play the classic 1990s trilogy in release order, beginning with Under a Killing Moon — Overseer remains from first to last an entertaining, well-crafted, and thoroughly enjoyable adventure game, just like its companion pieces. I’m happy to give it a place alongside them in my personal Hall of Fame. If more 1990s interactive movies had been like these ones, the world may or may not have been a better place, but adventure-game fans would for sure have had a lot more fun in it.


Michael York plays the tortured, tragic villain, the wheelchair-bound billionaire J. Saint Gideon. Aaron Conner counts York saying to him out of the blue one day that the role of Gideon was a little bit “Shakespearean” as one of the great thrills of his life.

The journeyman Australian stuntman and martial artist Richard Norton played Big Jim Slade, a more hands-on sort of heavy than Gideon. Norton was a great find, portraying Slade with a humorous panache that Conner hadn’t really written into his script. Many of his best lines were ad-libbed on the spot.

The name of Delores Lightbody, the former fiancée of Sylvia Linsky’s deceased father, is a piece of third-grade humor from Mean Streets that somehow survived into Overseer. The tired fat-shaming tropes on display here are among the few aspects of the Tex Murphy series that have aged decidedly poorly. Ah, well… to her credit, actress Micaela Nelligan attacks the role with relish. “Incredible!” said Rick Barba, who wrote the strategy guide for the game. “I found myself attracted to this big woman!” (I’m sure you’re a downright Adonis yourself, right, Rick?)

Out and about in the world. The interface is notably less clunky than in the previous two games. Now you can access your inventory on the fly just by moving the cursor to the side of the screen, instead of having to freeze the view in place and enter a separate object-manipulation mode.

There are also occasional set-piece mini-games.

In marked contrast to his hard-boiled detective heroes, Tex never fails to look painfully awkward whenever the possibility of a seduction arises. Far from being a weakness, this is a big source of the series’s goofy Mormon lovability.



When the folks from Access delivered Tex Murphy: Overseer, a game of which they felt justifiably proud, they were brought up short by an ironic turn of events that would have amused Tex himself at his most cynical. To put it bluntly, Intel didn’t want the game anymore. While Access had been beavering away at it, Intel had belatedly begun to ask itself some hard questions about where — or rather whether — its vision for interactive DVD actually fit. In reality, standard DVD was already far more interactive than the linear medium of VHS. A new era of movie watching was dawning, in which viewers could jump to favorite scenes instantaneously, could listen to directors’ commentaries and alternative soundtracks while they watched, could enjoy additional interviews and “making of” featurettes included on the same disc as the movie, could switch up languages and subtitles on the fly. Some companies were even experimenting with making the direction of the movie itself interactive, the cinematic equivalent of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books. All of this was possible using the standard DVD specification running on any everyday DVD player. Did people want to pay for additional hardware in order to run a full-fledged video-based adventure game like Overseer? Intel had a dawning suspicion that they did not. Certainly there could be no denying now that CD-based games of this style were in marked commercial decline, having been trampled by the latest crazes for 3D action and real-time strategy, not to mention the Deer Hunters and Trophy Basses of the world.

And then, for the final irony, Intel’s custom DVD technology was fast becoming irrelevant even for the purpose of watching ordinary movies on your computer. It was a case of the corporation’s right hand not being fully aware of what its left was up to: Intel’s latest Pentium II CPUs had sufficient grunt to be able to handle MPEG decoding unaided, without requiring any other specialized circuitry in an add-on video card or a set-top multimedia box.

So, Intel decided to drop its most ambitious plans for DVD and focus on the chips that had gotten it this far. With the facility that is the luxury of a giant corporation, it wrote off its multi-million-dollar investment in Tex Murphy: Overseer as just another idea that had seemed good at the time but hadn’t panned out. Access, Intel said, could do whatever it liked with the game.

At first blush, this might have sounded like unbelievably good news to Chris Jones and Aaron Conners. Thanks to Intel, they had a new Tex Murphy game which had literally cost their own company nothing to make, which they could now go out and sell without sharing any of the revenue with anyone else. When you thought about it a little harder, though, the waters were quickly muddied. Access, a company more interested in golf simulations than adventure games for the very understandable reason that the former made it lots and lots of money while the latter did not, must now try to sell Overseer all by itself in a marketplace that was growing ever more prejudiced against this kind of game. There was ample cause to wonder whether the company’s marketers would really give it their all.

Alas, such concerns were amply justified when Access shipped Tex Murphy: Overseer in March of 1998, with both the DVD version and a version on five CDs filled with grainier video in the same box. Overseer was, as far as I’ve been able to determine, the first ever computer game to be made available from its day of release on DVD. (A number of older games of the multiple-CD stripe had been or soon would be repackaged for DVD, including Wing Commander IV, Riven, and Zork: Grand Inquisitor.) But that claim to fame wasn’t enough to overcome desultory promotion and, most of all, the overwhelming sense in gaming culture that games like this one had become painfully passé. Overseer sold considerably worse than The Pandora Directive. Although the money it did bring in was almost pure profit thanks to the largess of Intel, that happy accident did nothing to undermine the business case against making another game of this type, at least in the absence of another patsy to pay for it.

In a fit of optimism, when their heads were dancing with images of Tex Murphy reaching a whole new audience on Intel’s hardware and with Intel’s marketing machine behind him, Jones and Conners had decided to end Overseer on a cliffhanger. Having just finished telling the story of his first case to Chelsee, Tex flies away into the neon night in the back of an air taxi with her at his side — and then the driver turns and appears to shoot both of them at point-blank range. Needless to say, Jones and Conners would not have ended the game that way had they known that they weren’t going to be able to return to Tex Murphy for a long, long time — not until something called Kickstarter came along to offer an alternative way of funding games.

For the time being, the last nail seemed to have been hammered into Tex Murphy’s coffin in April of 1999, when Microsoft acquired Access in a deal whose details have remained secret. This latest mega-corp to come around flashing its money was, admits Aaron Conners, “oblivious to Tex Murphy. They bought us for Links.” Chris Jones was told by his new masters every time he broached the possibility of a revival that there was no place anymore for Tex: “It’s not really an Xbox product, and it’s way too big for casual gaming. Adventure games have died off. We don’t see where you fit.” And that was that.



But while Tex Murphy shambled off into an unwanted early retirement — or perhaps a worse fate, given the ending to Overseer —  the new technology to which he owed his final star turn was going from strength to strength. By the end of 1998, there were 1 million DVD players in American homes, and the format was beginning to make inroads in Europe as well. The American DVD market alone would be worth $4 billion in 2000, $8 billion in 2002, $12 billion in 2004, $16 billion in 2007. VHS would follow the opposite trajectory; the very last Hollywood film to be released on videotape was David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence in 2006.

Gaming platforms lagged behind, but not by that much. The latest generation of games, which tended to rely on 3D graphics that were rendered on the fly rather than lots of pre-rendered video, were ironically less demanding of storage space than those that had come before, making the need for an alternative to the CD seem somewhat less urgent for a while. Still, this “while” was fairly brief-lived; as 3D graphics grew in resolution and polygon count, and were supplemented by more and more ambitious soundscapes, the size of games in terms of raw data soon began to increase once again. In 2000, Sony’s decision to use a DVD instead of a CD drive in the PlayStation 2, the successor model to the most popular games console in the history of the world to that point, marked a watershed for games on DVD. Within a couple of years, the format ruled the games roost too.

The impact the shift from CD to DVD had on the nature of games was more subtle than that of the shift from floppy disk to CD; there was a difference of kind about going from 1.5 MB to 650 MB of storage space that was not present to the same degree when going from 650 MB to 8.5 GB. DVDs just helped games to become a little bit more: more aesthetically pleasing, more complex, more approachable. (No, these last two qualities are not in conflict with one another; in many cases, they go hand in hand.) It was, we might say as we strain nobly to bring this back around to Tex Murphy, the difference between Mean Streets and Under a Killing Moon versus the difference between The Pandora Directive and Tex Murphy: Overseer. The difference, that is to say, between a revolution and an evolution. Yet revolutions are often overrated, what with all the chaos and consternation they cause. Evolution can be just fine if it keeps us moving forward. And this the DVD most certainly did for gaming in general, if not for poor old Tex.



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Sources: The books Tex Murphy: Overseer: The Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba, DVD and the Study of Film: The Attainable Text by Mark Parker and Deborah Parker, and DVD Demystified (second edition) by Jim Taylor. Computer Gaming World of November 1995, August 1996, January 1997, February 1997, June 1997, October 1997, and January 1998; Retro Gamer 160.

Online sources include the archive of interviews at the old Unofficial Tex Murphy Web Site and a documentary film on the Tex Murphy series that was put together as part of the Kickstarter campaign for 2014’s Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure.

Tex Murphy: Overseer is available for digital purchase on GOG.com. Fortunately, this is the DVD version. Unfortunately, it’s temperamental on modern versions of Windows. PC Gaming Wiki offers some solutions and workarounds for common problems.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 Despite the many compromises inherent to the concept, video CDs did become quite popular in the still-developing regions of Asia and Africa, where they often took the form of bootleg discs sold at street markets and the like.
 
 

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