Loom (computer game)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Loom
Loom Logo.png
Studio Lucasfilm Games
Publisher worldLucasfilm Games soft gold
GermanyGermany
Senior Developer Brian Moriarty
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 1990
platform Amiga , Atari ST , CDTV , IBM PC , FM Towns , Macintosh , PC Engine
Game engine SCUMM
genre Adventure
Game mode Single player
control Keyboard , mouse or joystick
medium Floppy disk , CD-ROM , download
language German, English, Japanese
information Speech output is only available in the English CD version for IBM PC.

Loom Ⅰ is a graphic adventure published in 1990 by Lucasfilm Games (now LucasArts ), which has a storyline in a fairy tale setting. In contrast to the previously known Lucasfilm games, they are not controlled via action verbs, but via melodies to which certain actions are assigned.

action

background

Loom takes place in a fictional fantasy world. The prehistory is told in a radio play enclosed with the game : After two apocalyptic events, the so-called shadows, had passed over humanity, a time of mechanization began. Due to the strong industrial competition among nations , skilled workers were in increasing demand . That is why the artisans of the world gradually formed guilds to protect their secrets and interests . Some of these communities, such as the blacksmiths and clergy , sought power and influence, established city-states, and built their own armies . In this age of great guilds, such influential communities eventually ruled world trade .

Not so, however, the Weavers ' Guild , which, with its small number of members, is far from politics , wars and taxes, focusing on its independence and its craft. According to the rules of the guild, only weaver's children were allowed to become part of their community and marriage to strangers was ultimately forbidden. Outsiders despised this closed society, but the weavers' guild was able to preserve and refine its talents over the generations. Over time, the community produced high quality fabrics . Later, the weavers were even able to weave patterns of influence into their fabrics: the fabrics were given magical abilities that, for example, helped the sick to recover or averted disaster.

The guild finally overcame the physical limits of artisanal weaving and spun their patterns directly into the fabric of time and space with light and music. The ignorant feared this as witchcraft , so that many weavers were hunted and some were hanged . The guild retired to the small, remote island of Loom to keep its survival and secrets. In their isolation , the weavers worked to perfect their arts, while elsewhere wars and plagues raged, great guilds disintegrated and new ones rose in power. 1000 years passed during which the weavers' guild was slowly forgotten.

The old rules of the introspective weavers had brought a curse on the guild and reduced its number to about 20 members - almost all children are stillborn or are deformed . The guild is now run by the Council of Elders Atropos, Clothos and Lachesis. They shy away from using the large loom on the island that could save the endangered guild by influencing the fabric. Lady Cygna Threadbare, a weaver who recently sustained a stillbirth , wants to end the suffering and rebels against the rules and the elders. She secretly changes the weave on the big loom and gives birth to a newborn boy instantly. For this, Cygna is transformed into a swan by the elders and banished from the island.

The elders decide to let the “child of the loom” grow up outside the weaver's community and only decide about his fate 17 years later. The old lady Hetchel picks up the boy and gives him the name Bobbin. Every year on his birthday, Bobbin is visited for a brief moment by the transformed Cygna - without knowing that the swan is his biological mother. The elders fear Bobbin and associate his birth with a newly appeared anomaly in the weaving of the loom: the dissolution of the pattern in the tapestries , which reveals the fulfillment of fate for all, interpret them as the end of the world. Since Bobbin's thread in the pattern indicates a crucial role in the event, the High Council denied him access to the knowledge of the Guild. Behind the elders' back, however, his foster mother, Hetchel, begins to instruct the boy in the art of magical weaving.

Game plot

The player takes on the role of Bobbin Threadbare, who climbs alone on the rocks on the coast on his 17th birthday to wait for the swan again. Before a meeting can take place, he is called to the great loom by the council of elders. After his return to the village, Bobbin witnesses how his foster mother is accidentally turned into a swan egg after a judgment by the council of elders. From a swan flying in, Hetchel's judges are then transformed into swans that fly away from the island. Bobbin succeeds in hatching Hetchel in the shape of a black swan, but as the otherwise last person left on the island, he then has to go looking for his enchanted fellow human beings on his own. Here he helps his Webstab (a distaff ), which acts like a magic wand, with whose help he can change by magical tunes its environment. In the course of the story, Bobbin meets the guilds of shepherds , glassmakers , blacksmiths and clerics, magical beings like a dragon and the spirits of the deceased, and comes across a conspiracy.

Game principle and technology

In Loom , unlike previous LucasArts titles, the player does not act by choosing activity terms. Rather, each action (e.g. opening, coloring, emptying) is assigned a melody of initially four notes, which the player has to play on Bobbin's staff (which serves as an instrument) in order to carry out the action. If the melody is reversed, the action is also reversed (opening becomes closing, for example, coloring becomes bleaching, emptying becomes filling). As the game progresses, the number of notes increases. Despite these clear differences to previous games, the SCUMM engine version 3 was used again.

The game is divided into different levels of difficulty. The difficulties are determined by the help in recognizing the melodies. In the leichtesten stage you can see the notes on staves for explanation and the bar lights up in the right places when a melody is played. At the most difficult level, you only hear the magic melodies and you have to find out the tones by ear.

Production notes

Brian Moriarty claims that he was inspired by the ambiguity of the English word loom Ⅰ when writing the story . The idea for a fantasy game he planned came to him while looking at the term in a hardware print ad in a computer magazine, after which he spent an afternoon writing down the plot.

The game was released in 1990 for IBM PCs and was also implemented for Amiga , Atari ST , CDTV , FM Towns , Macintosh and PC Engine (TurboGrafx 16 in North America).

There is a CD-ROM version for IBM PCs with VGA graphics, English speech output and digital CD music. Due to the difficulties in synchronizing image and sound, this version does not include many close-up shots of characters and some cut scenes. This version appeared both as a full version (with games box) and as an OEM version (only CD-ROM and instructions). The OEM version was sold on the American market together with some CD-ROM drives.

The original game was accompanied by a music cassette (or audio CD) with a radio play that explains the story until shortly before the start of the game. This radio play - originally produced in English - has been translated into German, French and Japanese.

The FM Towns version was produced before the CD-ROM version for IBM PCs. It contains the entire game including close-ups of the characters in VGA graphics and digital CD music, but no voice output. This version was only released in Japan and contains one version of the game in Japanese and one in English. The audio CD included with this version contains the radio play in Japanese and English. In the PC CD-ROM version, the character Chaos is female, while in all other versions she is male. This is because the narrator was spoken by a woman.

music

For background music of the game six numbers are from the Swan Lake - ballet by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky . The melodies are assigned to certain game sections to support the dramaturgy.

successor

Loom was originally intended to be the first part of a game trilogy. The development of the second part under the title Forge took place from 1991-1992 at LucasArts under the direction of Mike Stemmle and Sean Clark. The story was supposed to connect directly to Loom and the planned title hero, the blacksmith Rusty Nailbender known from the first part, was supposed to have to save his father in the world divided between the living and the dead. For the game, the use of some spells that were already known from Loom , but not required there, was planned. The third part, entitled The Fold and the shepherdess Fleece as heroine, should have resolved the conflict.

The successor was never completed because Moriarty had lost interest in the project. In the premises of the Glasergilde in Loom there is an allusion to the planned successor Forge .

reception

Comparison of sales figures for earlier LucasArts Adventures
game Sales figures
  
> 250,000
Loom
  
> 500,000
  
> 100,000
  
≈ 25,000
  
> 1,000,000
  
≈ 80,000
  
1,000,000
  
300,000
reviews
publication Rating
Amiga DOS
Advanced computer entertainment k. A. 845/1000
ASM k. A. 6/12
Power play k. A. 54%
Zzap! 64 83% k. A.
Meta-ratings
GameRankings k. A. 75%

According to Moriarty, Loom has sold over half a million physical copies for various platforms since it was first released in 1990. From six aggregated reviews, the game achieved an average rating of 75% on GameRankings .

Awards

In contrast to the other classic adventure games from LucasArts, Loom has not received any awards. The trade magazine Adventure Gamers placed the game in 2011 in its list of Top 100 All-Time Adventure Games in 61st place.

Later reference and influence

In The Secret of Monkey Island , the loom figure Cob sits dressed as a pirate in the scumm bar. He has a button that says “ Ask me about Loom ”. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade there is a painting in the painting storage room at Brunwald Castle that portrays the beach scene in front of Chrystalgard. In Space Quest IV there is a parody of Loom called Boom on a software vendor's digging table , which is about the missing interface and the like. a. makes fun.

The game researcher Jeff Howard described the musical magic system in Loom as a pioneer for Nintendo's action adventure The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time from 1998. There, too, the player has to use the controller to enter notes that the character plays on a wind instrument and thus achieved magical effects. In a book edited by Tony Mott it was found that the musical systems of Ocarina of Time and Loom are "not entirely dissimilar", but that this is implemented in Nintendo's publication "much more complex". Clara Fernández-Vara described the learning of melodies while playing in the temporal context of Loom as "novel mechanics" that later appeared in other publications such as Ocarina of Time . The scientist Tim Summers also drew parallels, since in both games you are taught melodies by non-player characters . The first comparison between the two games in scientific discourse was made in 2003 in a publication edited by Amy Scholder and Eric Zimmerman.

Web links

Remarks

ⅠThe title has several meanings and can be interpreted as a noun and translated as “ loom ”. Taken as a verb , the word means something like "rise" ("appear as a strange, imposing or frighteningly large figure") or "threaten" or "emerge" ("take shape as an imminent, great event") .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Judith Lucero Turchin, Brian Moriarty et al .: Transcript of Loom Audiotape . In: Loom Hint Book . LucasArts Entertainment Company , January 1990, pp. 32-38 ( archive.org ).
  2. ↑ a b Brian Moriarty . (April 28, 2015). Classic Game Postmortem: LucasFilm Games' Loom . Game Developers Conference ( Informa ). March 31, 2020. 12:04 pm.
  3. ↑ Alexander Faschon: Digital Games: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Discourse Fields, Staging and Music . Ed .: Christoph Hust, Ineke Borchert. transcript, 2018, ISBN 978-3-8376-4002-1 , pp. 325-336 .
  4. ↑ Forge ( English ) mixnmojo.com. Archived from the original on April 1, 2009. Retrieved November 7, 2011.
  5. ↑ The Fold ( English ) mixnmojo.com. Archived from the original on February 9, 2010. Retrieved November 7, 2011.
  6. ↑ MixnMojo.com: LucasArts' Secret History: Loom. Retrieved September 4, 2017 .
  7. ^ Noah Falstein: Past Projects . The Inspiracy. 2012. Retrieved March 9, 2020.
  8. ↑ a b c Jason Harang, Chris Capel: LucasArts' Secret History: Loom - Trivia, Downloads and Resources. The International House of Mojo, May 29, 2008, accessed March 9, 2020 .
  9. ↑ Beth Winegarner: The Adventures of a Videogame Rebel: Tim Schafer at Double Fine . In: SF Weekly . San Francisco Media Company. May 23, 2012. Accessed March 10, 2020.
  10. ↑ a b c Master of Unreality . In: Edge . No. 204 . Future Publishing , August 2009, p. 85-86 ( [1] [2] ).
  11. ↑ Richard Bartle, Chris Bateman, Noah Falstein, Michelle Hinn, Katherine Isbister, Nicole Lazzaro, Sheri Grainer Ray, Joseph Saulter: Beyond Game Design: Nine Steps Towards Creating Better Videogames . Ed .: Chris Bateman. Cengage Learning, 2009, ISBN 978-1-58450-671-3 , Step 9: Include Structures that Adapt to Player Needs, p. 228-229 .
  12. ^ LucasArts Entertainment Company Milestones . LucasArts Entertainment Company . Archived from the original on February 14, 1998.
  13. ↑ Loom . In: Advanced Computer Entertainment . No. 33, June 1990, p. 81.
  14. ↑ Torsten Blum: So small and already a loom . In: ASM . July 1990.
  15. ↑ Anatol Locker : Loom . In: Power Play . September 1990.
  16. ↑ Loom . In: Zzap! 64 . No. 70, February 1991, p. 42.
  17. ↑ a b GameRankings.com: Loom. Retrieved September 4, 2017 .
  18. ↑ AdventureGamers.com: Top 100 All-Time Adventure Games. Retrieved August 26, 2016 .
  19. ↑ Michael Plasket: Loom. Hardcore Gaming 101, January 31, 2010, accessed May 19, 2020 .
  20. ↑ Jeff Howard: Game Magic: A Designer's Guide to Magic Systems in Theory and Practice . CRC Press , Boca Raton 2014, ISBN 978-1-4665-6787-0 , Loom and Music as Magic, pp. 66 .
  21. ↑ Helena Baser, Frank Ritter, Simon Ward et al .: 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die . Ed .: Tony Mott. Cassell Illustrated, London 2010, ISBN 978-1-84403-681-3 , Chapter 3: 1990s - Loom.
  22. ^ Clara Fernández-Vara: Introduction to Game Analysis . Routledge , New York City 2015, ISBN 978-0-415-70326-0 , Appendix I: Sample Analyzes, pp. 230 .
  23. ↑ Tim Summers: Understanding Video Game Music . Cambridge University Press , Cambridge 2016, ISBN 978-1-107-11687-0 , Musical Play and Video Games: Musical Interfaces and Musical Performance, pp. 178 .
  24. ↑ Amy Scholder, Eric Zimmerman (Eds.): Re: play: Game Design + Game Culture . Peter Lang , New York City 2003, ISBN 978-0-8204-7053-5 , pp. 68 .