Hijinx and Deconstruction

The last of the adventure genre’s greats (Interactive Storytelling, Part 1)

When I wrote the previous article on so-called interactive storytelling, I was repeatedly reminded that while I had taken a year to finally look at Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, that work’s genre deconstruction had missed the boat by a quarter century. 1993 saw the release of two important entries into the adventure game genre: Sam & Max Hit the Road (S&MHtR) and Gadget: Invention, Travel, & Adventure (Gadget).

It’s worth mentioning Myst was also released in 1993. The game was a sales juggernaut, moving over 6.3M units worldwide. Despite this impressive market penetration, I am not alone in counting Myst a massive step backwards, not only for the genre, but for games as a whole. Next Generation magazine termed it “gaming’s bleakest hour”.¹ There’s some gatekeeping nonsense about how Myst’s fans aren’t real gamers, but the gist of the actual criticism runs:²

[B]ehind its slick graphics and enigmatic sense of mystery, Myst was hopelessly shallow. The entire game consisted of puzzles locked behind puzzles, and while those enigmatic riddles were devious, they were also limited.

The interaction consisted of things like going to one room, seeing a door that needs to be opened, backtracking to a different room, throwing a lever, returning to the first room and noting the result… over and over forever. And, as noted above, the payoff for solving a puzzle was yet another puzzle:³

The puzzles are based exclusively on trial and error: the epitome of poor game design. […] The designers were good at creating a facade of mystical nonsense: you weren’t stuck because the game was bad, but because you just didn’t “get it.”

So, from a gameplay standpoint, the game falls well short of elevating the genre. Even three years on, one critic said:⁴

Myst led many publishers to believe that pretty screens meant more than pace and logic. We’re still recovering.

Having lived through this era, I can confirm the wrong lessons were learned by management in the games biz. The success of Myst served to further amp up the usual focus on flashy trash.

Myst is even regarded as having negatively impacted the success of actually good games in the genre like S&MHtR.⁵

PC gamers who had cut their teeth on Myst found it difficult to switch mental gears from the funereal elegance of Cyan’s work to the cartoonish whimsy of Sam & Max Hit the Road.

S&MHtR continued the tradition of LucasArts’ SCUMM-engine games, of which The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) remains the best entry. I already mentioned some of the important gameplay improvements present in this series. Monkey Island even directly referenced lame genre tropes, for instance, having a literal Red Herring inventory item. To be clear, this refers to items that seem to be useful, but are not. Appropriately, in Monkey Island, the item goes to feed a troll.

I was a fan of Sam & Max from its first incarnation as a funny book during the indie comix explosion of the mid-’80s. It was a standout for originality, humor, and amazing art. These elements are carried through to the game, making it excellent as well.

The self-aware humor is amped up, with the protagonists taking every opportunity to reference being in an absurd video game. There are fourth wall-breaking moments aplenty, including one where repeatedly directing Sam to pick up an item results in him starting to cry, and Max addressing you directly:⁶

Max: Now you’ve done it! You’ve broken Sam’s spirit with your stupid attempts to pick up that silly object!

Still, I’ll admit the hijinx of Sam & Max aren’t for everyone. In fact, though they made it to the small screen in 1997, their animated adventures were canceled after a single season, retaining cult status.

But the best work deconstructing the interactive narrative form for my money is Gadget. Its gameplay is fairly standard to the genre, and if anything, is more linear as it doesn’t present the usual false choices.

Where the game really shines is in the atmosphere its discordant soundscape, deliberately uncanny-valley visuals, and rambling, sometimes incoherent dialogue creates:⁷

Each second of the game is filled with paranoia and dread. Every cryptic story about mind control, every abandoned and unexplorable railway station, and every allusion to an apocalyptic future builds on a suspenseful and overpowering darkness.

The reason for this is Shōno Haruhiko (庄野 晴彦) came at the whole project from a different direction:⁸

[T]he work’s emphasis was not on action or gameplay, but to give a strong sense of presence to the game world and its environment. With the oppressive atmosphere and the preservation of tension and mystique, I was aiming to derive a quiet catharsis, based heavily on an element of ambiguity.

I can make no claims as to Shōno’s awareness of Umberto Eco’s definition of the open work (opera aperta)—that’s not something we ever discussed—but he definitely hit on one of the important elements here.

Although Gadget failed to find a big audience outside Japan, its influence can still be felt. One of the game’s spinoffs was The Third Force: A Novel of Gadget, penned by Mark Laidlaw and eedited by yours truly. Laidlaw’s name might ring a bell if you’re familiar with the Half Life series which he went on to write for. I certainly detected some distinct Gadget flavor when I first played Half Life, and put two and two together when I read the credits.

Strangely, the game and its ancillary items, particularly the art book Inside Out With Gadget, found an eager audience in Hollywood, including directors Guillermo del Toro and David Lynch.⁹ Indeed, this is how I came to (briefly) work with the latter.

I’ll spoil Gadget’s ending—it’s a 21-year-old game, so get over it. It’s one of the best twists I’ve ever encountered in a game. In games, and particularly adventure games, as a player, you generally need to buy into their premise, no matter how far-fetched. When you follow all the clues and reach the final scene in Gadget, you learn you are the 13th patient, and the mind-control experiment performed on you is declared successful. Of course, this is only my reading, as it’s ambiguous.

Five years later came the absolute death knell of the adventure game in the form of Grim Fandango (GF). A critical darling bedecked with accolades, it bombed so hard commercially, not only LucasArts, but their main rival Sierra Online—of which Blizzard was a subsidiary when I worked there—canceled their planned offerings in the genre.¹⁰ Indeed, lacking the knowhow to retool for other game types, these giants would walk the earth no more.

GF’s reviewers praised the characters, setting, and story, but weren’t so accepting of the actual mechanics:¹¹

Charming as the characters are, I found “Grim Fandango’s” gameplay intermittently grating. Some of the puzzles in the game are so idiosyncratic that they seem predicated less on the deployment of practical reasoning than on the achievement of a mystical mind-meld with the game’s project lead, Tim Schafer […] I sometimes found myself mashing the interact button while Manny patrolled a tiny area searching for the appropriate pixels.

While Gadget’s linearity and limited interactivity compared to that of GF might seem to make for a worse game, it doesn’t. The level of gameplay in Gadget is consistent with the rest of the game, and the elements work together to create the type of experience Shōno was interested in. As for GF, players may have taken issue with the inconsistency between its gameplay and the sophistication of its other elements.

Read previous articles in the Interactive Storytelling series

Part 1: Lizzie’s Game

Part 2: Those Frumious Jaws

Notes

1. “Crib Sheet”, Next Generation, November 1996.
2. Jeremy Parrish, “When SCUMM Ruled the Earth”, 1UP.com, June 2011.
3. Next Generation, 1996
4. Ibid.
5. Parrish, 2011.
6. Sam & Max Hit the Road, 1993.
7. Phil Salvador, “GADGET: Invention, Travel, & Adventure”, The Obscuritory (website),
8. Dieubussy, “Haruhiko Shono: A Prophet of the Digital Age”, Sorrel Tilley, trans.,  CoreGamer, January 2009.
9. Salvador, 2014.
10. “Adventure Series: Part III Feature”, The Next Level. November 28, 2005.
11. Christopher Byrd, “Grim Fandango Remastered review: A witty but tedious classic”, Washington Post, February 2015.