The Dig would turn into a slow-motion fiasco that crushed experienced game developers under its weight with the same assiduity with which the earthquake collapsed Oakland’s Nimitz Freeway. Perhaps Falstein and his colleagues should have taken it as an omen. Soon after that bit of business was taken care of, remembers Falstein, “we felt the room start to shake - not too unusual, we’d been through many earthquakes in California - but then suddenly it got much stronger, and we started to hear someone scream, and some glass crash to the floor somewhere, and most of us dived under the mahogany conference table to ride it out.” It was the Loma Prieta Earthquake, which would kill 63 people, seriously injure another 400, and do untold amounts of property damage all around Northern California. In the course of proceedings, Noah Falstein, a designer and programmer who had been with the studio almost from the beginning, learned that he was to be given stewardship of an exciting new project called The Dig, born from an idea for an adventure game that had been presented to LucasArts by none other than Steven Spielberg. assembled in the Main House of Skywalker Ranch for one of their regular planning meetings. To avoid confusion, I use the name “LucasArts” throughout this article. On October 17, 1989, the senior staff of LucasArts LucasArts was known as Lucasfilm Games until the summer of 1992. Sean Clark, fifth (and last) project lead on The Dig It would have been a lot easier to join the party. It was like trying to cram for a physics final during a dorm party. Another challenge was cultural - we were trying to build this game in an environment where everyone else was building funny games, telling jokes, and being pretty outlandish. But anyway, it was also a challenge to maintain the tone and some semblance of a dramatic arc. You can’t cover up a bad puzzle with a funny line of self-referential dialog. As you would imagine, a lot of the things you can do in a comedy game just don’t work when trying to remain serious.
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