If I’m going to talk about storytelling in video games, I can’t pretend that I can give a detailed and authoritative history of how stories have progressed through time. While I have played a ton of games in my life, I still can’t call myself an expert in their history. What I can do, though, is relate my experiences through my own playing history, and detail what I’ve seen and how the medium has evolved in my lifetime. And I can’t think of any better place to begin than with the genre that has defined the storytelling experience in games: the adventure games.
My experience with stories in games goes back to the earliest games of my childhood. I remember when I was around 5 years old (so around the late eighties), my parents brought home an IBM PC. It would be considered an antique relic by today’s standards, but it was awesome back then. I had no idea what most of the functionality of the machine was. It didn’t know how it would improve word processing, or financial tracking and planning, or any other facet of our daily lives. All I knew was that it could play games. Well, really it was one game. That game was called Freddy’s Rescue Roundup. It was a platformer where you controlled some dude who ran around and collected what I believe were roadrunners. I should point out that this was not my first real experience with stories in games. That game was still awesome, though. One day, I saw my Dad playing a different game. One I hadn’t seen before. This was King’s Quest II, and it was the start to a long love affair with adventure games.
King’s Quest II and Space Quest were the two adventure games I remember most from those days. Those franchises were the staples of the Sierra adventure games, and my brothers and I must have played them a couple dozen times each. King's Quest was your fantasy affair, with King Graham avoiding sorcerers and witches while looking for keys that would unlock magical doors that would lead him to his future wife. Space Quest followed the adventures of Roger Wilco, a janitor who somehow avoids being massacred with the rest of his crew, and ends up chasing after the evil aliens in an attempt to save his homeworld. While the stories in these games weren't exactly superb pieces of writing, they worked well enough for what the games were in those days. The franchises would grow, and the storytelling grew with them, leading to my two favorites in the two series: King's Quest 6 and Space Quest 5. While neither of these contained completely original stories, they were still two great examples of storytelling in games. King's Quest 6 took many familiar themes and characters from classic stories like Alice and Wonderland and put its own twist on how to deal with them, leading to an exciting finale that made the game stand on its own. Space Quest always took a more humorous approach to its stories, choosing to parody and lampoon the most famous science fiction franchises. Space Quest 5 saw you become captain of your own ship (even if it was a garbage scow) with your own crew, and had you face off against your rival, Captain Raemes T. Quirk. The jokes may have been pretty corny sometimes, but it still holds a special place in my heart.
These were adventure games. They told a story, and had the player interact with the world to solve puzzles that would allow the story to progress. As the genre grew in popularity, the expectations of the stories grew with them. If the story was no good, why would the player invest the time into seeing the payoff? And if the ending was terrible, then that would color the perception of the whole game that preceded it. This is exemplified well in the mid-90s FMV adventure "Ripper". This was a game that got some big name actors to play in it's cast, including Christopher Walken, Karen Allen, John Rhys Davies, and even Burgess Meredith! How the heck these guys ever got Burgess Meredith to be in their ridiculous game about a cyber-Jack the Ripper will forever boggle my mind. The story in this one is just plain silly (unintentionally, but silly all the same), but when you've got Walken in the cast, you're at least due for some good entertainment. The ending was utterly unsatisfying, though, as it didn't provide any real resolution. You had to make a choice as your final act, and the ending will play a short movie referring to the choice you made. But if you go back and make a different choice, you'll see that there is no wrong choice, meaning there's no "right" ending to the game. In some games, this is not a problem and is actually smiled upon. But when your game is a murder mystery where any kind of resolution hinges on figuring out who the murderer is, ending your game the way the Ripper does is just kind of a slap in the face. It's like, "Eh, we couldn't decide on who dunnit, so we just let the player decide and then say, 'Hey, you're right!'" Heck, maybe they even could've found a way to make that interesting, but the path they took was just boring and made the game seem really lame in the end.
You see, the story is crucial to the adventure game experience. The gameplay itself in these games usually boils down to picking up items and using them or combining them in order to progress. You just have to figure out which item to use at the appropriate time. Occasionally, you'll have to talk with someone, but this usually just unlocks the next item or puzzle. When you throw the story in there, though, suddenly it makes sense that you're putting a ladder in your pants and talking to some drunken clown in an alleyway. The story helped to put this stuff in context, even if the context was ridiculous. The games created by Lucasarts thrived on ridiculous puzzles. Some of their most beloved games used original humor and characters, and are still remembered fondly to this day. Creators like Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer figured out what you needed to do in order to tell a funny and engaging story within a video game. And if I'm going to bring up Lucasarts, I have to talk about The Secret of Monkey Island. Monkey Island revolved around the young Guybrush Threepwood, who dreamed of becoming a pirate. Guybrush was a generally naive character who had a strange knack for talking his way out of problems and using bizarre items in ways they were never inteded to be used. The quest to be a pirate turned into a love story which turned into a rescue mission as Guybrush would clash with the dread ghost pirate LeChuck. This was a silly and humourous game that instead of going the pardoy route (like the Space Quest series), developed its own humor and gags, such as the infamous rubber chicken with a pully in the middle. Sure, parodies would find their way in at times, but most of the humor could be claimed as the game's own. Five sequels have been made, with many of the characters returning in one way or another, and each game building on the story of the previous game, so that there is now a Monkey Island continuity of all things (Well, except for the fourth game, which the new game seems to ignore). The fifth sequel was a modern revival of the series that came out last year, and when you find yourself geeking out over the appearance of Murray, the talking skull, you know that the original games had something special in them. The stories of the Monkey Island, while goofy, are still some of gamings best examples of how to tell your story right.
But sometimes you don't need a long and detailed narrative. Maybe your story doesn't need lengthy dialogue sequences or a large cast of characters. One game in particular changed the way people looked at adventure games, and had a large impact on the direction the genre would take, for better or for worse. I'm talking about Myst. Even if you don't care about video games, chances are you've heard about Myst. This game was a huge hit, and for good reason. Even if if you're someone who hates the series, you have to admit the game was groundbreaking. This game threw aside most of the adventure game conventions and simplified things to a great extent. Not that this was a simple game. Not by any means. But instead of item collection and character interaction, Myst isolated you to an extreme extent. You play the game from a first-person perspective, with the intent of making you feel like you're the main character. You explore these strange locations which are entirely devoid of any other person. This leads to an eerie and often creepy atmosphere, which was enhanced by the game's soundtrack. Something just feels wrong throughout most of the game. The only other people you interact with for most of the game are two brothers who are trapped within books in the main island's library. When you first find the books, you can barely understand either of the brothers. You have to travese the lonely realms of the game to find pages to the books to make each book clearer. As you do this, though, you get the impression that neither of the brothers are all that...wholesome, to say the least. Each brother accuses the other of being evil and demand that you set them free to set things right, and you have to decide if you can trust either of them. With a very minimal story, the game remains incredibly memorable for how "immersed" you felt while playing it, if I can use the cliched expression.
Yet, if I can be honest, there is one adventure game for me that, in terms of story, stands above any other. While I can't say that it's the best game I ever played, even though it is pretty darn good, the story was so well crafted and told that I have to consider it one of the best gaming stories I've ever come across. This was Jordan Mechner's masterpiece called The Last Express. I don't blame you if you've never heard of it. I hadn't until Gametap put it on their service a couple years back. I admit that I had to cheat by looking up walkthroughs more often than I would have liked, but I really wanted to see what happened next and was just frustrated by the puzzles that were keeping me from doing so. The game places you on the Orient Express in 1914, just days prior to the assasination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and puts you through a murder mystery dripping with political intrigue on the train's last trip before the outbreak of WWI. Your character, the American Robert Cath, sneaks on board the train, which has already departed by the way, and goes to meet with his friend who has reserved their room. Only when you get there, the friend is dead. And since you're the only one who's not supposed to be on the train, you will likely be the prime suspect if you get caught. So you hide the body and pose as the murdered man as you set out to find out who killed him. Along the way, you interact with characters who represent the major European nations of the era, and their interactions reflect the the tensions of those days. Everyone has a complex backstory, especially Robert, and the whole story is well executed with smart twists and plot developments. Heck, the story ends up revolving around the Russian folk tale of The Firebird of all things! That's not your typical source material for a video game, guys!
The Last Express takes place in "real-time", which means that conversations and events will occur at set times in the game whether you're around to witness them or not. Many of these things are not crucial to finishing the game, but some of them are. If you happen to miss them, the game has a rewind feature that allows you to go back in time within the game and try to do things differently. However, this also leads to some moments late in the game where you might not have something you needed from earlier in the game, which meant rewinding a long ways back and replaying a significant portion of the game all over. Hence my reliance on walkthroughs. That's a minor complaint for such a great game. It's really the narrative that I love about this game, and that's why I regard it so highly. I think even Agatha Christie would be proud of the story constructed here. My only real complaint is that it didn't sell very well, so some teases about Robert's past that would have been ripe for exploration in a sequel will likely never be revealed. Dang it, someone make a movie based on this game so I can finally learn what this dude's deal is!
There was a span of time recently when adventure games were pretty much dead. They weren't making the money they used to, and consumer focus was (and still is) on more action-oriented titles leading most developers to abandon the genre. There were developers that still made adventure games, but the vast majority of them were Myst clones that couldn't really capture what was great about the first game. Things have been looking up recently though, with some pretty good Sherlock Holmes games from Frogwares and some great products from Telltale Games. Telltale has been especially good at recapturing the nostalgic spirit of the past in bite size chunks, keeping the experience seeming fresh and not too frustrating at any one point. They were the ones responsible for the latest Monkey Island game, and have scored big with their Sam and Max series (another one of Lucasarts' old gems). But on the whole, it seems the adventure genre has evolved into other genres. In the past, the type of narrative structure in adventure games could only be fit into that kind of game. But with the state of technology today, developers have found a way to work that kind of character interaction and story progression into more action focused titles, bring you the best of both worlds. This is especially evident in Mass Effect 2, which crosses a ton of genres and at times seems to conquer them all. Horror games have taken a lot of inspiration from the adventure genre, with a lot of emphasis on exploration and mystery solving (I've already talked at length on horror games, though, so go check it out if you're interested). And games like Silent Hill: Shattered Memoriesand Heavy Rain are new forms of adventure games, that allow you the player to direct the story with your actions and try to get you emotionally invested in how things play out. I'll talk more about these games later on when I dive into the modern state of storytelling in games, but I'll just say that in a lot of ways, the state of stories is pretty good right now. And a big cause is due to the heritage of the adventure game. I didn't even touch on classics like Zork, or even some of my other personal favorites like Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle. Needless to say, adventure games have been setting the storytelling trend for games for a couple of decades, and they're still a joy to explore today.
An excerpt from the blog of Kratos, Ghost of Sparta, renowned god-killer, and former God of War:
ZEUS! FATHER! YOU COWARD!! YOU SHALL DENY ME NO LONGER!! I SHALL HAVE MY REVENGE!!
Guys, you have no idea how much that old man has been riding me. He’s all, “You’re such a disappointment! I should have killed you when you crawled out of that harlot’s womb,” and I’m all, “Yeah, ya think?! Well too late, Dad! Coulda woulda shoulda. Ya snooze, ya lose.” God, he makes me so mad! I ripped the heads off of at least twenty skeleton warriors in the span of thirty seconds, but that didn’t help make me any less mad! So I fought this centaur warrior, stabbed him a bunch and then split open his belly so his intestines spilled out. But that smelled really bad and only made me even angrier!
He just doesn’t understand! Yeah, so his Dad was a 100 foot Titan who ate all his siblings in an attempt to change his fate and not be murdered. So what?! Did Zeus murder his wife and child?! Did he suffer for years due to a cruel trick, and be forced to go do the bidding of the gods for a decade?! NO!! HE HAS MORE CHILDREN THAN HE CAN COUNT! WELL THIS ONE WILL KILL HIM!! HE WILL DIE AND BURN IN THE FIRES OF HADES FOR ALL ETERNITY WHILE I LAUGH AT HIM AND SHOW HIM WHAT MY VENGEANCE TRULY LOOKS LIKE! THEY ALL WILL BURN!!
…OK, I know you can’t tell cause you’re reading this after the fact, but I’ve just been away from this post for like ten minutes watching my kitty (The Glory of Olym-puss! That’s his name! Get it? Puss! Awesome, I know. Props to my BFF Hermes for coming up with that one…who’s now dead cause I killed him. That kind of sucks now that I think about it) freaking out over a piece of string. It was seriously the funniest thing ever. I should have snapped some pics and posted them on lolcats cause that would be the greatest post ever posted for reals.
So anyways, Zeus is a real toolbox. Someone responded to one of my last posts where I was raging against Zeus and wondered why I was so mad at him. They were all, “He’s your dad, right? Can’t you forgive him and just move past all of it? Family first, bro.” Oh really? Well did your dad ever trick you into giving up your god-powers and then stab you with a sword so you’d go to Hades and be tormented forever?! Huh?! I didn’t think so. And it’s not just me! He’s being a jerk to everyone. Ask Hephaestus, or Daedalus, or Pandora! He’s been a real jerkwad to those three, believe me! And there are so many others! Sure, I may have dropped a ship’s captain down the throat of a dead Hydra just so I could get his key, but that was justified! This was just Zeus being a paranoid freak! I HATE HIM! HE DOESN’T DESERVE THE BREATH IN HIS LUNGS!!
Man, you guys, I recently popped back in Linkin Park’s first album. I forgot just how good that one was. I don’t think anyone has ever topped that album. Those guys just get it, man, like in a way that no one else gets it. “CRAWLLLLLL-ING INNNN MY SKIIIIIIN!!! THESE WOUUUUUUNDS THEY WILLLLL NOT HEALLLLLLL!” You said it guys. You said it. Anyways, some real hot chick just walked by, so I’m gonna go try to get her digits and show her the true “Rage of the Spartans”, if you know what I mean. Till next time, Peace out for real.
(This post really has nothing to do with my feelings about God of War III, which is an awesome game. Or it’s story, which is pretty awesome too. I just thought it would be funny to have Kratos blogging. I hope you agree.)
