Popular movie stars would soon be vying to appear in interactive movies which would boast the same production values and storytelling depth as traditional movies, but which would play out on computer instead of movie-theater or television screens, with the course of the story in the hands of the ones sitting behind the screens. It claimed that the rich multimedia affordances of CD-ROM would inevitably lead to a merger of interactivity with cinema. At that time, the conventional wisdom inside the established games industry about gaming’s necessary future hewed almost exclusively to what we might call the Sierra vision, because it was articulated so volubly and persuasively by that major publisher’s founder and president Ken Williams. Let us turn the clock back to late 1993, the moment of Toonstruck‘s genesis. Toonstruck, our subject for today, is a classic example of what can happen when the world in which a game is conceived is dramatically different from the one to which it is finally born. A lot can happen in the world of media in the span of two years or more - not coincidentally, the type of time span that more and more game-development projects were starting to fill by the mid-1990s. The other becomes increasingly prevalent as projects grow more complex, and the window of time between the day they are begun and the day they are completed grows longer as a result. One is that the people who decide what projects to green-light always have a tendency to look backward at least as much as forward new market paradigms are always hard to get one’s head around. There are two reasons why this phenomenon occurs. And then, of course, we have the graphic adventures of 1996 - the year after the release of Phantasmagoria, the last million-selling adventure game to earn such sales numbers entirely on its own intrinsic appeal, without riding the coattails of an earlier game for which it was a sequel or any other pre-existing mass-media sensation. I would argue, for example, that more great text adventures were commercially published after 1984, the year that interactive fiction plateaued and prepared for the down slide, than before that point.
The same sort of thing has happened on multiple occasions in gaming. Wings won the first ever best-picture Oscar two years after The Jazz Singer had numbered the days of soundless cinema Duke Ellington’s big band blew up a storm at Newport two years after “Rock Around the Clock” and “That’s All Right” had heralded the end of jazz music at the top of the hit parade. Then I thought about it some more, and I decided that it wasn’t really so strange at all.įor when we cast our glance back over entertainment history, we find that it’s not unusual for a strain of creative expression to peak in terms of sophistication and ambition some time after it has passed its zenith of raw popularity. How poignant and strange, I thought to myself. The genre has never seen such a lineup since.
These were games of high hopes, soaring ambitions, and big budgets. But you know what? Looking at the lineup of games released that year, I found it difficult to argue with him. This rings decidedly counterintuitive, given that 1996 was also the year during which the genre first slid into a precipitous commercial decline that would not even begin to level out for a decade or more. Some time ago, in the midst of a private email discussion about the general arc of adventure-game history, one of my readers offered up a bold claim: he said that the best single year to be a player of point-and-click graphic adventures was 1996.