7 ms·

Alone in the Dark

253 points by myth_drannon 7y ago

tjr225 7y ago
Amazing article. As a teenager, I'd always looked back at emulations of this game with a wonder of how the graphics and visuals came to be. Surely it set the stage for a decade of fixed-set-pre-rendered games such as final fantasy and resident evil. Very cool.
evanweaver 7y ago
Oh man, I played Popcorn on our 386sx with grayscale screen. Haven't thought of that game in almost 30 years.
chipmonkey75 7y ago
Nice; thanks for the throwback, I played the dickens out of that game.
nope96 7y ago
There's also a great "Classic Game Postmortem" video from 2012 by Frederick Raynal, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2lgEyNaop4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2lgEyNaop4
haolez 7y ago
Everyone in my neighborhood had the demo version of this game. It’s awesome, but we could never leave the first room (and it wasn’t for sale in my country). I might as well play it today to overcome this childhood frustration :)
- gbraad 7y ago
  Where would that be?
  - haolez 7y ago
    Brazil
- vcoelho 7y ago
  I relate to this and made an attempt a few years go. Unfortunately, the controls threw me off rapidly. Then I watched someone playing it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSwYY2eoKhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSwYY2eoKhQ
Endy 7y ago
I agree on all major points but one: I genuinely enjoyed Shadow of the Comet. Then again, I've also played CoC in campaigns based on that adventure. Never ran it yet as a Keeper, though. Alone in the Dark, Lovecraftian as it might be, definitely represents several turning points in my life. The turn to an appreciation of slow horror, of appreciating the safety of real isolation. And while he's mostly demonized, I have to thank the boss at Infogrames who insisted that Alone in the Dark run on a 286. I didn't have a 386 or a 486 when it came out. AitD was my first brush with 3d, and while it did send me back to 2d for a long while just out of mortal terror, I've come around realized that like all art forms, there's a time and place for both in the world.
tiagobraw 7y ago
I loved this game when I was young. I finally had access to three floppy disks and tried in my 286, only to be frustrated that my CGA monochrome monitor was not supported... I would play at my friend's house... good times
- ryan-allen 7y ago
  I couldn't figure out how to play it, I just kept dying constantly but I was intrigued none the less. I plan to one day give it another go as an adult :) Fortunately it's available on GOG! [0] [0] https://www.gog.com/game/alone_in_the_dark https://www.gog.com/game/alone_in_the_dark
hestefisk 7y ago
I fondly remember this. It scared the bejesus out of the 8 yo me.
petepete 7y ago
I played the Acorn 3000 port of this in the mid-nineties as a eleven or twelve year old. The early part where zombies are coming through the trapdoor and window were really scary for me at the time, but what a game. Only finished it when I revisited it years later.
ricardobeat 7y ago
Is there a way to play the game today, with a CRT screen emulator? I imagine the graphics will hold up a lot more faithfully to memory.
- gattilorenz 7y ago
  Dosbox, I guess. But I have never tried this CRT emulator, so I can't vouch for it. https://mattiasgustavsson.itch.io/dosbox-crt https://mattiasgustavsson.itch.io/dosbox-crt
- bgeeek 7y ago
  Have a look at what RetroPie provides for the RPi. It's brilliant for emulation and will hopefully improve with the RPi4 4GB :)
- ekianjo 7y ago
  DosBox or you can also play the console version on the 3DO. I believe GOG has a proper installer that packages Dosbox for you on Windows.
- rasz 7y ago
  >with a CRT screen emulator Game is VGA only. VGA did line doubling. There are no black bars every other line people mostly associate with using CRT TV.
  - ricardobeat 7y ago
    I played the game on a CRT monitor back in the day, would like to emulate that look. You’re correct, there were no visible black bars on VGA PC monitors. The screen was fuzzy so it actually looked a lot better than it does in an LCD monitor due to a natural “aliasing” effect from bleed/blur/glow. I know video game emulatores like MAME have good ones but didn’t know there was a filter for DOSBox, will try that!
jupiter90000 7y ago
I used to love this game and all but forgot about it til I saw this pop up here. When I was about 12yo or so I emailed Infogrames asking about the game's development as I was interested in games programming back then, one of the developers emailed back and forth with me a few times, pretty cool. Back then the cool library I found for developing games was Allegro for the DJGPP C/C++ development env for DOS. My brother and I started creating video games. It was so much fun trying to figure everything out and research things online. I seem to remember Yahoo kind of had curated directories of sites related to games programming. My brother ended up working in the games industry for years, whereas somehow I ended up doing more web and data programming stuff. It pays better but sometimes I get excited about what it may have been like going the route of games dev. Ah, life.
- johnchristopher 7y ago
  > one of the developers Wasn't the game developed by a single dev (Frédéric Reynald)?
  - jupiter90000 7y ago
    Here is a list of credits, and to be honest I can't recall who it was: https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/alone-in-the-dark/credits https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/alone-in-the-dark/credits
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    yes it was Frederick Raynal who made it. I don't think he was alone, a team called Adeline Software (a wink at Delphine Software) worked on it for the first episode at least.
    - distances 7y ago
      It's all laid out in the article. Adeline was the Delphine studio Raynal joined when leaving Infogrames, after Alone in the Dark was published.
- npsomaratna 7y ago
djmips 7y ago
A friend and myself pitched a game idea for similar to this at DSI Vancouver (soon to be EAC) around 1990. It didn't hit fertile ground where I guess sports games were the go to idea. 3D, Lovecraftian, same camera ideas. I'm glad this one was made.
layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
Here’s a Let’s Play series for those who want to get nostalgic: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXSB1azTTGuh7yAw1QtJ2aaXr8I3bCRKN https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXSB1azTTGuh7yAw1QtJ2...
bpizzi 7y ago
This hits home, being born and growing as a kid in Lyon, having played AITD on the family's 386 in 1993/4 or so, and later practiced rowing for years on the Saône river right in front of Atari's ship-shaped buildings, even giving some rowing lesson's to Atari/Infogrames team during a company event (and to Bruno Bonnel himself, who has been later into robotics and today in... politics).
glandium 7y ago
If I remember correctly, after I upgraded my PC, Alone in the Dark was the only game where I had to turn the Turbo button off to be playable... otherwise it would be so fast that the first monster would come at you from the window within seconds. And of course, walking was running like Usain Bolt.
- dylan604 7y ago
  As a kid, I never understood how the CPU could be too fast for the software. I'm not sure I do now either though. I get timing issues on ROM emulators for the old games using quirks due to NTSC/PAL issues. I know there were other programs that did not work with the Turbo button engaged that were not games where timing might be much more crucial.
  - westmeal 7y ago
    The developers didn't use fixed time points to update their games logic, they just updated the logic at the same speed of the proc, which leads to some interesting things.
  - peripitea 7y ago
    You have to explicitly write your code to prevent this from happening. You typically have an engine that is executing all of your logic (rendering, game logic, AI, etc.) in cycles. By default, it will execute these cycles as quickly as possible. So for anything with real-time components, faster CPU = enemies move faster. I forget which game first introduced a fix for this, but the solution is to have the engine run on time-based ticks -- you wait to execute the next cycle until the requisite time has passed.
    - repsilat 7y ago
      Another alternative is to say, "How much time has passed since the last frame?" and update the game state based on that. When your computer can't hold a constant framerate, the game doesn't slow down.
ggambetta 7y ago
> Raynal’s lifestyle was becoming so unbalanced that his family was beginning to worry about him. One day, he ran out of his room in a panic, telling them that all of the color had bled out of his vision. His mother bustled him off to an ophthalmologist, who told him he appeared to have disrupted the photoreceptors in his eyes by staring so long at a monitor screen. Thankfully, the condition persisted only a few hours. But then there came a day when he suddenly couldn’t understand anything that was said to him; he had apparently become so attuned to the language of computer code that he could no longer communicate with humans. That worrisome condition lasted several weeks. This sounds hard to believe. A lot more people use computers nowadays, for equally long periods of time if not more, and neither of these symptoms seem to be a thing. So... what's going on here? Embellishments to the legend?
- hrktb 7y ago
  Burnout perhaps ? I think depression can cause color perception loss (not complete, but colors fade out). Also when getting used to a second or third language (i.e. french _ english) one can temporarily get overwhelmed and have difficulty to switch to either of them. I never came accross literature on this, but personaly experienced periods of a day or more where I felt I just couldn’t speak anything. Asking friends moving to foreign countries some of they hit the same issue. At that time at least in France “specialist” would tell the most random diagnostics with a straight face and it was pretty normal to go get a second opinion for anything more than a cold. Nowadays they know patients have at least googled symptoms and try to ecplain more of their thinking behind diagnostics IMO.
  - ggambetta 7y ago
    > At that time at least in France “specialist” would tell the most random diagnostics with a straight face Right, this does make the story (if not the underlying causes) sound more realistic.
  - sizeofchar 7y ago
    The random diagnostics is still a thing in Brazil.
  - 7y ago
bsdubernerd 7y ago
Little Big Adventure is painted down in the article, but it is also a masterpiece. It plays uniquely, in a way that's hard to express. I happened to find a copy in a discount bin almost a decade after it was released. Despite the dated graphics, the charm of the game feels absolutely tangible throughout the game. I completed the game and did so again after another 5 years through dosbox. I bought the sequel (LBA2) because of this, of which I have mixed feelings. The controls of Alone and LBA always felt natural to me, so I cannot share this sentiment of confusion. The sudden camera jumps in Alone in the Dark can be confusing, but then again I actually played "Resident Evil" before Alone (it was only then that I became interested in the genre). I have to say that there are several french games that really stood out to me due to the artistic and general playstyle in general. "Heart of Darkness", from Chahi of Another world fame stays true to his style. The "Gobliins" series from Coktel vision are similar to lucasart's games, but have a completely different humor/feel to them. Coktel Vision did several positively weird games (Inca 2, for example). I played most of these games decades after they were made just for curiosity, simply going by the "I liked this game, let's see what the author/s also did". Sometimes you do really hop into masterpieces that stand the test of time. If you have youtube channels that dig into this sort of stuff, I'd love to hear about it. I follow some retro channels, but I didn't see those really mentioned anywhere aside from the usual "Another World" and "Price of Persia".
- cousin_it 7y ago
  Dune and Flashback as well.
  - onemoresoop 7y ago
    Yea, was a big fan of both games at the time.
- dmix 7y ago
  Little Big Adventure was released by a french game company (in an "enhanced" version) in 2015 and is now available on Steam and elsewhere: https://store.steampowered.com/app/397330/Little_Big_Adventure__Enhanced_Edition/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/397330/Little_Big_Adventu...
kieckerjan 7y ago
Filfre is a great resource, an exhaustively researched one man work of love and a veritable rabbithole for who grew up on games in the eighties. Check out at the very least the articles about The Hitchhiker's Guide, about Elite and, one of my favs, about the curious creation story of Neuromancer (the game), which surreally enough involved LSD guru Timothy Leary.
- gwern 7y ago
  I made a list of Filfre pages I liked after reading through the entire archives: https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2017/06#the-digital-antiquarian https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2017/06#the-digital-antiqua...
acheron 7y ago
Wow, unexpected reference to Popcorn. I had no idea it was connected to anything else, let alone Alone in the Dark. I remember trying to puzzle out a lot of Popcorn’s menus and documentation since it was all in French. It was like Arkanoid, with power-ups designated by a letter, but all for French words — “V” for an extra life is one I remember. I made myself a little cheat sheet to keep by the computer. This was on an XT/CGA era DOS computer. (Also the Alone in the Dark backstory is fascinating as well, but the Popcorn reference caught me off guard.)
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
I actually remember when it came out. Played it briefly with my sons (8-10). We couldn't get past the opening scenes, died so many time in the first hour of playing, for no apparent reason with no apparent solution, that we gave up and never played it again. So I don't have any fond memories of it whatsoever.
- dmix 7y ago
  Sounds like how most of my favourite games of all time started.
byron_fast 7y ago
Not mentioned: It was apparently possible to complete the game in a "pacifist run". Every fight could be avoided with exceptional attention to the fiddly details that the article rightly criticizes. I managed to get as far as the kitchen without shooting any zombies (put the bowl of food on the table, duh), but couldn't figure out anything beyond that.
wolfspider 7y ago
Alone in the Dark was very similar to an H.P. Lovecraft story and if that was what you were looking for that is what you would find. Relentless Twinsen’s Adventure was an intense fever dream of a fantasy that kept the player going on pure suspense and wonder. It had the dramatic finesse of Loom or a good sci-fi novel. When I purchased it I had only assumed it to be mindless entertainment. It turned out to be a statement on the human condition that was too valuable to let everyone know about. I diligently played it after school for many days giving the game my full attention. When I was finished I felt like I grew up a little and society at large did not let me down concerning the harsh truths revealed in this game. This is why I’ll never forget Relentless- the general malaise and apathy of the time in history it was released deeply contrasted against the wake-up call contained within the lessons of its gameplay. Both games we’re ahead of their time and technically very impressive.
tzakrajs 7y ago
Then they immediate ruined the franchise with the second.

253 points by myth_drannon 7y ago

Amazing article. As a teenager, I'd always looked back at emulations of this game with a wonder of how the graphics and visuals came to be. Surely it set the stage for a decade of fixed-set-pre-rendered games such as final fantasy and resident evil. Very cool.

evanweaver 7y ago

Oh man, I played Popcorn on our 386sx with grayscale screen. Haven't thought of that game in almost 30 years.

chipmonkey75 7y ago

Nice; thanks for the throwback, I played the dickens out of that game.

nope96 7y ago

There's also a great "Classic Game Postmortem" video from 2012 by Frederick Raynal, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2lgEyNaop4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2lgEyNaop4

haolez 7y ago

Everyone in my neighborhood had the demo version of this game. It’s awesome, but we could never leave the first room (and it wasn’t for sale in my country). I might as well play it today to overcome this childhood frustration :)

gbraad 7y ago
Where would that be?
- haolez 7y ago
  Brazil
vcoelho 7y ago
I relate to this and made an attempt a few years go. Unfortunately, the controls threw me off rapidly. Then I watched someone playing it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSwYY2eoKhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSwYY2eoKhQ

Endy 7y ago

I agree on all major points but one: I genuinely enjoyed Shadow of the Comet. Then again, I've also played CoC in campaigns based on that adventure. Never ran it yet as a Keeper, though. Alone in the Dark, Lovecraftian as it might be, definitely represents several turning points in my life. The turn to an appreciation of slow horror, of appreciating the safety of real isolation. And while he's mostly demonized, I have to thank the boss at Infogrames who insisted that Alone in the Dark run on a 286. I didn't have a 386 or a 486 when it came out. AitD was my first brush with 3d, and while it did send me back to 2d for a long while just out of mortal terror, I've come around realized that like all art forms, there's a time and place for both in the world.

tiagobraw 7y ago

I loved this game when I was young. I finally had access to three floppy disks and tried in my 286, only to be frustrated that my CGA monochrome monitor was not supported... I would play at my friend's house... good times

ryan-allen 7y ago
I couldn't figure out how to play it, I just kept dying constantly but I was intrigued none the less. I plan to one day give it another go as an adult :) Fortunately it's available on GOG! [0] [0] https://www.gog.com/game/alone_in_the_dark https://www.gog.com/game/alone_in_the_dark

hestefisk 7y ago

I fondly remember this. It scared the bejesus out of the 8 yo me.

petepete 7y ago

I played the Acorn 3000 port of this in the mid-nineties as a eleven or twelve year old. The early part where zombies are coming through the trapdoor and window were really scary for me at the time, but what a game. Only finished it when I revisited it years later.

ricardobeat 7y ago

Is there a way to play the game today, with a CRT screen emulator? I imagine the graphics will hold up a lot more faithfully to memory.

gattilorenz 7y ago
Dosbox, I guess. But I have never tried this CRT emulator, so I can't vouch for it. https://mattiasgustavsson.itch.io/dosbox-crt https://mattiasgustavsson.itch.io/dosbox-crt
bgeeek 7y ago
Have a look at what RetroPie provides for the RPi. It's brilliant for emulation and will hopefully improve with the RPi4 4GB :)
ekianjo 7y ago
DosBox or you can also play the console version on the 3DO. I believe GOG has a proper installer that packages Dosbox for you on Windows.
rasz 7y ago
>with a CRT screen emulator Game is VGA only. VGA did line doubling. There are no black bars every other line people mostly associate with using CRT TV.
- ricardobeat 7y ago
  I played the game on a CRT monitor back in the day, would like to emulate that look. You’re correct, there were no visible black bars on VGA PC monitors. The screen was fuzzy so it actually looked a lot better than it does in an LCD monitor due to a natural “aliasing” effect from bleed/blur/glow. I know video game emulatores like MAME have good ones but didn’t know there was a filter for DOSBox, will try that!

jupiter90000 7y ago

I used to love this game and all but forgot about it til I saw this pop up here. When I was about 12yo or so I emailed Infogrames asking about the game's development as I was interested in games programming back then, one of the developers emailed back and forth with me a few times, pretty cool. Back then the cool library I found for developing games was Allegro for the DJGPP C/C++ development env for DOS. My brother and I started creating video games. It was so much fun trying to figure everything out and research things online. I seem to remember Yahoo kind of had curated directories of sites related to games programming. My brother ended up working in the games industry for years, whereas somehow I ended up doing more web and data programming stuff. It pays better but sometimes I get excited about what it may have been like going the route of games dev. Ah, life.

johnchristopher 7y ago
> one of the developers Wasn't the game developed by a single dev (Frédéric Reynald)?
- jupiter90000 7y ago
  Here is a list of credits, and to be honest I can't recall who it was: https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/alone-in-the-dark/credits https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/alone-in-the-dark/credits
- ekianjo 7y ago
  yes it was Frederick Raynal who made it. I don't think he was alone, a team called Adeline Software (a wink at Delphine Software) worked on it for the first episode at least.
  - distances 7y ago
    It's all laid out in the article. Adeline was the Delphine studio Raynal joined when leaving Infogrames, after Alone in the Dark was published.
npsomaratna 7y ago

djmips 7y ago

A friend and myself pitched a game idea for similar to this at DSI Vancouver (soon to be EAC) around 1990. It didn't hit fertile ground where I guess sports games were the go to idea. 3D, Lovecraftian, same camera ideas. I'm glad this one was made.

layoutIfNeeded 7y ago

Here’s a Let’s Play series for those who want to get nostalgic: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXSB1azTTGuh7yAw1QtJ2aaXr8I3bCRKN https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXSB1azTTGuh7yAw1QtJ2...

bpizzi 7y ago

This hits home, being born and growing as a kid in Lyon, having played AITD on the family's 386 in 1993/4 or so, and later practiced rowing for years on the Saône river right in front of Atari's ship-shaped buildings, even giving some rowing lesson's to Atari/Infogrames team during a company event (and to Bruno Bonnel himself, who has been later into robotics and today in... politics).

glandium 7y ago

If I remember correctly, after I upgraded my PC, Alone in the Dark was the only game where I had to turn the Turbo button off to be playable... otherwise it would be so fast that the first monster would come at you from the window within seconds. And of course, walking was running like Usain Bolt.

dylan604 7y ago
As a kid, I never understood how the CPU could be too fast for the software. I'm not sure I do now either though. I get timing issues on ROM emulators for the old games using quirks due to NTSC/PAL issues. I know there were other programs that did not work with the Turbo button engaged that were not games where timing might be much more crucial.
- westmeal 7y ago
  The developers didn't use fixed time points to update their games logic, they just updated the logic at the same speed of the proc, which leads to some interesting things.
- peripitea 7y ago
  You have to explicitly write your code to prevent this from happening. You typically have an engine that is executing all of your logic (rendering, game logic, AI, etc.) in cycles. By default, it will execute these cycles as quickly as possible. So for anything with real-time components, faster CPU = enemies move faster. I forget which game first introduced a fix for this, but the solution is to have the engine run on time-based ticks -- you wait to execute the next cycle until the requisite time has passed.
  - repsilat 7y ago
    Another alternative is to say, "How much time has passed since the last frame?" and update the game state based on that. When your computer can't hold a constant framerate, the game doesn't slow down.

ggambetta 7y ago

> Raynal’s lifestyle was becoming so unbalanced that his family was beginning to worry about him. One day, he ran out of his room in a panic, telling them that all of the color had bled out of his vision. His mother bustled him off to an ophthalmologist, who told him he appeared to have disrupted the photoreceptors in his eyes by staring so long at a monitor screen. Thankfully, the condition persisted only a few hours. But then there came a day when he suddenly couldn’t understand anything that was said to him; he had apparently become so attuned to the language of computer code that he could no longer communicate with humans. That worrisome condition lasted several weeks. This sounds hard to believe. A lot more people use computers nowadays, for equally long periods of time if not more, and neither of these symptoms seem to be a thing. So... what's going on here? Embellishments to the legend?

hrktb 7y ago
Burnout perhaps ? I think depression can cause color perception loss (not complete, but colors fade out). Also when getting used to a second or third language (i.e. french _ english) one can temporarily get overwhelmed and have difficulty to switch to either of them. I never came accross literature on this, but personaly experienced periods of a day or more where I felt I just couldn’t speak anything. Asking friends moving to foreign countries some of they hit the same issue. At that time at least in France “specialist” would tell the most random diagnostics with a straight face and it was pretty normal to go get a second opinion for anything more than a cold. Nowadays they know patients have at least googled symptoms and try to ecplain more of their thinking behind diagnostics IMO.
- ggambetta 7y ago
  > At that time at least in France “specialist” would tell the most random diagnostics with a straight face Right, this does make the story (if not the underlying causes) sound more realistic.
- sizeofchar 7y ago
  The random diagnostics is still a thing in Brazil.
- 7y ago

bsdubernerd 7y ago

Little Big Adventure is painted down in the article, but it is also a masterpiece. It plays uniquely, in a way that's hard to express. I happened to find a copy in a discount bin almost a decade after it was released. Despite the dated graphics, the charm of the game feels absolutely tangible throughout the game. I completed the game and did so again after another 5 years through dosbox. I bought the sequel (LBA2) because of this, of which I have mixed feelings. The controls of Alone and LBA always felt natural to me, so I cannot share this sentiment of confusion. The sudden camera jumps in Alone in the Dark can be confusing, but then again I actually played "Resident Evil" before Alone (it was only then that I became interested in the genre). I have to say that there are several french games that really stood out to me due to the artistic and general playstyle in general. "Heart of Darkness", from Chahi of Another world fame stays true to his style. The "Gobliins" series from Coktel vision are similar to lucasart's games, but have a completely different humor/feel to them. Coktel Vision did several positively weird games (Inca 2, for example). I played most of these games decades after they were made just for curiosity, simply going by the "I liked this game, let's see what the author/s also did". Sometimes you do really hop into masterpieces that stand the test of time. If you have youtube channels that dig into this sort of stuff, I'd love to hear about it. I follow some retro channels, but I didn't see those really mentioned anywhere aside from the usual "Another World" and "Price of Persia".

cousin_it 7y ago
Dune and Flashback as well.
- onemoresoop 7y ago
  Yea, was a big fan of both games at the time.
dmix 7y ago
Little Big Adventure was released by a french game company (in an "enhanced" version) in 2015 and is now available on Steam and elsewhere: https://store.steampowered.com/app/397330/Little_Big_Adventure__Enhanced_Edition/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/397330/Little_Big_Adventu...

kieckerjan 7y ago

Filfre is a great resource, an exhaustively researched one man work of love and a veritable rabbithole for who grew up on games in the eighties. Check out at the very least the articles about The Hitchhiker's Guide, about Elite and, one of my favs, about the curious creation story of Neuromancer (the game), which surreally enough involved LSD guru Timothy Leary.

gwern 7y ago
I made a list of Filfre pages I liked after reading through the entire archives: https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2017/06#the-digital-antiquarian https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2017/06#the-digital-antiqua...

acheron 7y ago

Wow, unexpected reference to Popcorn. I had no idea it was connected to anything else, let alone Alone in the Dark. I remember trying to puzzle out a lot of Popcorn’s menus and documentation since it was all in French. It was like Arkanoid, with power-ups designated by a letter, but all for French words — “V” for an extra life is one I remember. I made myself a little cheat sheet to keep by the computer. This was on an XT/CGA era DOS computer. (Also the Alone in the Dark backstory is fascinating as well, but the Popcorn reference caught me off guard.)

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

I actually remember when it came out. Played it briefly with my sons (8-10). We couldn't get past the opening scenes, died so many time in the first hour of playing, for no apparent reason with no apparent solution, that we gave up and never played it again. So I don't have any fond memories of it whatsoever.

dmix 7y ago
Sounds like how most of my favourite games of all time started.

byron_fast 7y ago

Not mentioned: It was apparently possible to complete the game in a "pacifist run". Every fight could be avoided with exceptional attention to the fiddly details that the article rightly criticizes. I managed to get as far as the kitchen without shooting any zombies (put the bowl of food on the table, duh), but couldn't figure out anything beyond that.

wolfspider 7y ago

Alone in the Dark was very similar to an H.P. Lovecraft story and if that was what you were looking for that is what you would find. Relentless Twinsen’s Adventure was an intense fever dream of a fantasy that kept the player going on pure suspense and wonder. It had the dramatic finesse of Loom or a good sci-fi novel. When I purchased it I had only assumed it to be mindless entertainment. It turned out to be a statement on the human condition that was too valuable to let everyone know about. I diligently played it after school for many days giving the game my full attention. When I was finished I felt like I grew up a little and society at large did not let me down concerning the harsh truths revealed in this game. This is why I’ll never forget Relentless- the general malaise and apathy of the time in history it was released deeply contrasted against the wake-up call contained within the lessons of its gameplay. Both games we’re ahead of their time and technically very impressive.

tzakrajs 7y ago

Then they immediate ruined the franchise with the second.