Québec is a quirky little Canadian province where most people speak French regardless of the fact that they are drowning in American culture. It is a land of contradiction but one of resourcefulness and creativity.
While we did watch the same movies as our American neighbors, ours were translated. To this day, the movie theater in my home town refuses to play movies in English as demand is negligible. Imagine a world where Harrison Ford is voiced by different actors from movie to movie. Bruce Willis might be voiced by the Harrison Ford voice actor in one movie and sound like Eddie Murphy in the next. It`s a complete mindfuck but to those born to this mess, these memories are just as strong and indelible as the "real stuff".
In my idyllic journey towards adolescence, I had but one goal : I wanted to watch the Real Ghostbusters cartoons on TV, in its original language. In addition to watching a sh*t-ton of untranslated American cartoons, life decided to put Sierra On-Line on my path.
Down the rabbit hole we go...
Sexy from the Start
My first computer game was Leisure Suit Larry 2 : Looking for Love in Several wrong places.
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| Leisure Suit Larry 2 |
Time Travel Advice #1 : If you ever find yourself in Québec in the 1980s, don't be surprised if people call it Larry Suit Larry. As far as these people are concerned, the extra letters in the word Leisure might just be a fancy way of writing Larry.
I distinctly remember everyone freaking out; apparently Leisure Suit Larry was 18+ and could not even be discussed in public as it was so vile.
My dad was not a big fan of bullshit and gladly explained to anyone willing to listen that : "There is more sex on daytime TV than in this. Besides, the kid doesn't even understand what sex is."
I wish that my dating life were as nostalgic about these moments.
Due to DOS architecture, I remember most games as their executable file name. As far as I knew, this was LSL2.BAT. It added an air of mystery about games of that era, something which modern interfaces (even command-line ones) have somewhat erased.
The language barrier
In order to properly illustrate the issue, let's focus on an experience I've had with the original King's Quest (KQ1.COM). King Graham walks through a peaceful meadow, my young mind interpreting the pixel patterns on the screen as rocks, trees, bushes and grass blades. Noticing a reddish object on the ground, my wish was for Graham to pick "it" up.
Bear in mind that I didn't read, speak or understand a single word of English at this point.
In such a situation, a few problems quickly manifest themselves to the non-English reader :
- you don't know what this object is from the blob of pixels representing it
- you don't know what word you could use to identify the object
- you don't know what verb you could use to tell your character to pick it up
You've learned to type in "LOOK" on every screen but the textual descriptions of the rooms are 99% gibberish. Any form of literary wit or flowery detail is completely lost on your alien mind.
You pick up a dictionary. You look up the definition of every single word in the room`s description and try to make sense of it just so you can pick up that...that thing! Aha! The description tells you explicitly that there is a bowl lying on the ground.
You learn that "GET", "PICK UP" and "TAKE" are synonyms. You learn that you don't have to learn adjectives as long as you can identify the noun. It doesn't matter if it's a shiny bowl or a slimy bowl; it's your bowl now!
You also learn the main trick of Sierra adventure games : USE.
Whenever I became unable to progress in the game, I'd do the sensible thing and try to "use" everything on everything else until something yielded a clue or actually did something useful.
Thus my understanding of language, humor and grammar were improved beyond the level that was expected of kids my age; In my 6th grade English course, I had managed to obtain a perfect score : 100% for the whole year!. Nobody else in the school even came close. All thanks to Sierra.
Thus my understanding of language, humor and grammar were improved beyond the level that was expected of kids my age; In my 6th grade English course, I had managed to obtain a perfect score : 100% for the whole year!. Nobody else in the school even came close. All thanks to Sierra.
Looking back : These games are shit
I went to bed yesterday with a book entitled The Guide to Classic Graphic Adventures. That book made me angry.
I find that the book is full of grammatical errors, typos and just wonky sentence structures. It feels thrown together and lacks the polish that such a compilation should respectfully deserve. I am fully aware that the same could be said about the article you are currently reading but the main difference is that I'm not asking for your money in exchange for the privilege of reading my blog.
Aside from the book's writing, the games it describes are reviewed on their narrative merits or the difficulty of their puzzles. They are analyzed through the eyes of a 2013/2014 human.
Here's my problem with this approach : to me and to countless others, these games were more than just games. Analyzing them logically reveals nothing about the game worlds we've spent countless hours exploring and ultimately growing up in.
LucasArts vs. Sierra
I love LucasArts adventure games as much as the next person. I concede wholeheartedly that they are better games in terms of design and flow than their Sierra-built counterparts but I've always felt like they weren't as magical.
The LucasArts games were generally easier and less violent than the competition as they did not feature gruesome death scenes. The worlds depicted in these games also felt, to me anyways, much flatter than the game worlds of Sierra games, mainly due to the lack of textual descriptions and streamlining of controls, character paths, etc. Believe it or not, Sierra fans actually spent time trying to read every description the game had to offer, in a strange way, trying to maximize their investment by experiencing everything that the game had to offer.
Whatever you saw or interacted with in a LucasArts game was usually described or commented on by the main character. Non-player characters would also chime in to block your way or tell you not to touch this or that. The characters were mechanical instruments of the game; they rarely felt like real characters to me.
The early Sierra games on the other hand had a more personal connection with the player, constantly addressing the player in the second person ("you"). "You pick it up and carry it with you.", "You see a majestic waterfall.", "You can smell the farts of a thousand gnomes.". Maybe I invented some of those but "You can't tell".
It was the voice of the designer, as if he or she was writing to you directly. To complete the comparison, I think that this is much closer to the tone of most modern indie games.
I remember what a PR-24 nightstick because of Police Quest. I remember the word prophylactic from Leisure Suit Larry 1. Most of what many may refer to as my "general culture" comes straight from Sierra games. LucasArts games, on the other hand, fall into the same category as my Transformers fetish or my Star Wars obsession; entertainment and identity but not life-changing education.
That being said (Thank you, Larry David.), LucasArts games were and still are comedic goldmines and remain incredibly fun to play. I think that the modern game industry owes much to the classic LucasArts formula and the language that these games have pioneered.
As an example, the Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle remakes remain very faithful to the originals while the King's Quest remake adopts a completely different approach, even rewriting the classic games' stories and in my opinion, completely missing the point of the originals.
The LucasArts games were generally easier and less violent than the competition as they did not feature gruesome death scenes. The worlds depicted in these games also felt, to me anyways, much flatter than the game worlds of Sierra games, mainly due to the lack of textual descriptions and streamlining of controls, character paths, etc. Believe it or not, Sierra fans actually spent time trying to read every description the game had to offer, in a strange way, trying to maximize their investment by experiencing everything that the game had to offer.
Whatever you saw or interacted with in a LucasArts game was usually described or commented on by the main character. Non-player characters would also chime in to block your way or tell you not to touch this or that. The characters were mechanical instruments of the game; they rarely felt like real characters to me.
The early Sierra games on the other hand had a more personal connection with the player, constantly addressing the player in the second person ("you"). "You pick it up and carry it with you.", "You see a majestic waterfall.", "You can smell the farts of a thousand gnomes.". Maybe I invented some of those but "You can't tell".
It was the voice of the designer, as if he or she was writing to you directly. To complete the comparison, I think that this is much closer to the tone of most modern indie games.
I remember what a PR-24 nightstick because of Police Quest. I remember the word prophylactic from Leisure Suit Larry 1. Most of what many may refer to as my "general culture" comes straight from Sierra games. LucasArts games, on the other hand, fall into the same category as my Transformers fetish or my Star Wars obsession; entertainment and identity but not life-changing education.
That being said (Thank you, Larry David.), LucasArts games were and still are comedic goldmines and remain incredibly fun to play. I think that the modern game industry owes much to the classic LucasArts formula and the language that these games have pioneered.
As an example, the Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle remakes remain very faithful to the originals while the King's Quest remake adopts a completely different approach, even rewriting the classic games' stories and in my opinion, completely missing the point of the originals.CGA-tinted glasses
As an adult, I do not have the time to try every object on every other object when I become stuck in one of those classic games. I expect the modern niceties of game design to guide me along the way so I can get more entertainment out of my game.
To be frank, I don't play Sierra games anymore. I still have most of them installed and ready to go via DOSBOX but I can never find the time to sit through them, even for nostalgia's sake. I'd rather watch a Let's play on youtube.
I do remember thinking that there was so much more to these worlds than what appeared on screen. That cityscape in LSL2; I was convinced that one day, the story would take me beyond what I now know is just a backdrop meant to further a flimsy illusion. They didn't really draw the entirety of L.A. They didn't really plan out everything that you could type into the parser.
At the time, I really did think that they had, though. The limits were blurry in these worlds of language and it is that magic which I vainly try to recapture with games today. That feeling of freedom and pure exploration which I now realize is the viewpoint of a child, learning to explore the human experience in a naive and magical way.
I've grown old, wonder lies elsewhere...
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