Dark Seed

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dark Seed
Studio Cyberdreams
Publisher North AmericaNorth America Cinemaware Cyberdreams Gaga Communications
EuropeEurope
JapanJapan
Senior Developer Mike Dawson, HR Giger
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 1992
platform Amiga , Amiga CD32 , Mac OS , MS-DOS , PlayStation , Sega Saturn
genre Point-and-click adventure
Game mode Single player
control Keyboard & mouse , joystick
medium 3½ " floppy disk , CD-ROM , download
language German, English, Spanish
Age rating
USK released from 6

Dark Seed is a computer game , developed and published by Cyberdreams in 1992. The horror point-and-click adventure is about the parallel existence of a dark counterworld to our own reality. The design of the game is based on the work of the Swiss artist HR Giger ( Alien ). A successor called Dark Seed II was released in 1995.

action

Mike Dawson is a successful advertising executive and writer who recently purchased an old mansion on Ventura Drive (named after Ventura Boulevard ) in the small town of Woodland Hills . On his first night at the house, Mike has a nightmare that he is trapped in a machine that is implanting an alien embryo in his head. He wakes up with a severe headache and starts exploring the house after taking a few headache pills and a shower. He finds clues about the previous owner's death that reveal the existence of a parallel universe called Dark World, ruled by vicious aliens called The Ancients.

On the second day, he travels through a mirror in the living room into this parallel universe and meets the so-called Guardian of the Scrolls, a friendly inhabitant of the Dark World. She reveals to him that his nightmare was real and should it actually come to the birth of this embryo, the eponymous dark seed , he and all of humanity would be wiped out. The only way to prevent this is to destroy the old people's energy source.

On the third and final day, Mike implements an elaborate plan that leads to the departure of the ancients' spaceship from the Dark World, thus robbing them of their source of energy. The mirror portal is destroyed, which seals access to the normal world for the elderly. The game ends in the normal world with the city librarian visiting Mike, who gives him some pills that she found in her handbag. A recipe addressed to him says that they would relieve him of severe headaches, which apparently means killing the alien embryo. An animation makes it clear that the librarian is the normal worldly equivalent of the guardian of the scrolls. It ends with a comment from Mike that he begins to understand.

Game principle and technology

Dark Seed is a point-and-click adventure . From Sprites composite characters act before hand-drawn, some animated scenes. The player can use the mouse to move his character through the locations and use the mouse buttons to initiate actions that allow the character to interact with his environment. Mike Dawson can find objects and apply them to the environment or other objects, as well as communicate with NPCs in multiple-choice dialogues . As the story progresses, more locations will be unlocked. Unlike most point-and-click adventures, which give the player a lot of time to explore, almost every action in Dark Seed has to take place within a precisely defined time frame, otherwise the game ends in an unsolvable dead end. This and regular program crashes led to the result that you had to start the game over and over again and resort to solution aids was difficult.

The “normal world” of the game consists of post-processed photos of real buildings and landscapes as well as hand-drawn elements. The “dark world”, on the other hand, consists entirely of works by Giger.

Production notes

Dark Seed was Cyberdreams' first game and was originally developed for the Commodore Amiga and MS-DOS , later the versions for Amiga CD32 and Mac OS followed . The young startup company around Cyberdream President Patrick Ketchum tried to stand out from the competition by engaging well-known artists. Therefore, Ketchum paid HR Giger a large sum to participate in the project. However, the development team was still under construction, which meant a lot of work for the few involved in order to cope with the pressure to succeed and to finish the game in time for Christmas business.

The main character Mike Dawson is named after the lead designer and producer of the game, who also provided the template for the character's fuel graphics . The name was originally supposed to be just a placeholder and an inside joke, but Ketchum liked the idea and therefore decided that the name should be kept. Michael Cranford ( The Bard's Tale ) was responsible for the programming . At the request of HR Giger, it was one of the first point-and-click adventures to use high-resolution graphics with 640 × 400 pixels. The works of Giger that were used for the "Dark World" include NY city III , Hommage a Bocklin and Li II . The original works were digitized and post-processed with Deluxe Paint . The animations of the main character Mike Dawson, Alter EGo of the producer Mike Dawson, were created by filming actual movements of Dawson and transferring them to individual animation steps.

In addition to the computer versions, there are variants for the Sega Saturn and PlayStation game consoles , which, however, were only published in Japan. In the case of the Saturn version, this was only done with translated subtitles and without adapting the English-language synchronization. The Saturn version also supports the Sega Saturn Netlink mouse. However, these ports have been criticized for doubling the time, and the playback of the soundtrack has also been accelerated.

A version for the Sega Mega-CD was also in development and was already advertised for a US release, but was never marketed by publisher Vic Tokai. An unlicensed version was released in Chinese for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) .

There is a metropolitan legend that lead designer Mike Dawson suffered a nervous breakdown due to the pressure of developing Dark Seed . In fact, after Dark Seed quit the game industry, he worked as a television screenwriter (including several episodes for Family Matters ) until the late 1990s , and wrote four books on programming (including Beginning C ++ Game Programming and Python Programming for the Absolute Beginners ) and teaches game design and programming at Stanford University and UCLA .

reception

Dark Seed was tested in 1992 in issue 188 of the role-playing game magazine Dragon by Hartley, Patricia and Kirk Lesser for the column The Role of Computers and received 3 out of 5 points. The Japanese magazine Famicom Tsūshin awarded 24 out of 40 points when the Saturn version was published. German magazines mostly gave mediocre ratings. Michael Erlwein from Amiga Games awarded 68%, Joachim Nettelbeck from Amiga Joker 79%, the Power Play for the diskette versions for Amiga and DOS 66% each, for the CD-ROM version 56%.

In 1997, the trade magazine Adventure Classic Gaming stated in a retrospective that the game's mechanics could make a negative impression on the player. The animations of the characters are slow and it is easy to die in the game, which can frustrate the player. In 2006, Gametrailers.com listed Dark Seed as the 7th scariest game of all time, ahead of Clock Tower , System Shock 2, and Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ GamersWithJobs.com: Dark Seed. Retrieved December 8, 2018 .
  2. ↑ a b c AdventureCallsicGaming.com: Dark Seed. Retrieved September 20, 2019 .
  3. ↑ a b c Alistair Wallis: Playing Catch Up: Darkseed's Mike Dawson . In: Gamasutra . Think Services. September 28, 2006. Retrieved June 14, 2013.
  4. ↑ a b http://www.kultboy.com/index.php?site=t&id=8390
  5. ↑ Segagaga
  6. ↑ http://programgames.com/
  7. ↑ Hartley Lesser, Patricia Lesser & Kirk Lesser: The Role of Computers . In: Dragon . No. 188, December 1992, pp. 57-64.
  8. ↑ NEW GAMES CROSS REVIEW: ダ ー ク シ ー ド. Weekly Famicom Tsūshin. No.343. Pg.31. July 14, 1995.
  9. ↑ http://www.kultboy.com/index.php?site=t&id=15
  10. ↑ http://www.kultboy.com/index.php?site=t&id=8185
  11. ↑ http://www.kultboy.com/index.php?site=t&id=9036
  12. ↑ http://www.kultboy.com/index.php?site=t&id=6049
  13. ↑ Gametrailers Top Ten Scariest Games