Interviews

Just Adventure Speaks With Terry Dowling
Conducted by Randy Sluganski and Robert Washburne

Unfortunately, a lot of our North American readers will probably not be familiar with Australian Terry Dowling, which is a shame as he is easily one of this generation’s best horror, fantasy and science fiction authors. Yet – for some inexplicable reason – he is virtually unpublished in the U.S.

Besides being the acclaimed author of award-winning books such as Rynosseros, Wormwood, The Man Who Lost Red and An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, he is also a reviewer, a musician and songwriter - with eight years of appearances on ABC's Mr. Squiggle & Friends, Australia’s longest running children’s series - and a Communications lecturer at a large Sydney college.

The awards he has been honored with include the Bram Stoker (1987), the Ditmar (12 times) and the Aurealis (3 times)

Now, I hear a lot of you asking, “This is all fine and dandy, but what does it have to do with adventure games?”

Well, besides being a huge supporter and fan of Just Adventure, Terry Dowling is also the author of a few games that are critical favorites in the adventure community – Sentinel: Descendents in Time, Mysterious Journey: Chameleon and Schizm.

And that information is what we will use as our starting point…

· Why haven’t there been more established authors in the game industry?

TD - I think it mostly has to do with the mechanics of how a writer goes about hooking up with game developing studios. How do writers do that if they’re not approached first? More importantly, how does a game developer approach a writer who has any sort of track record – without surrendering too much control over their project? Let’s face it, if you’re a game designer, chances are you’ve had to become an all-rounder just to survive, a multi-talented sort of person with definite ideas on things. This is your project, a huge commitment of time and resources. You quite rightly want to use your own story ideas or collaborations brainstormed with your own design team. You also want to own the intellectual property as much as you can. It’s like with the earlier Myst games from Cyan. You get a lot of it laid out yourself then bring in whatever outside help you need to story-doctor it, give input. You keep it small if you can. But that sort of crossover is starting to happen: Marc Laidlaw working on Half-Life 2, John Saul getting involved in The Blackstone Chronicles project and so on.

At the moment it’s far more likely that it will go the other way, that game writers will develop careers as traditional writers for themselves as natural spin-offs of their game work – Jane Jensen novelising Sins of the Fathers, for instance, then going on to non-game novels like Dante’s Equation.

There’s a perception problem at work here too. Sometimes writers can be a bit like some film actors – they can be prima donnas and not know when to let go. Both the original Star Trek and the original The Outer Limits series tried using established SF writers and they weren’t always that easy to work with. It should have worked better than it did. Writing for games is like writing for film and television – you have to be prepared to let go to a greater or lesser extent. That isn’t always easy for a writer to do.

· How did you, an Australian, enter into a business relationship with Detalion, a game company from Poland?

TD - The most wonderful coincidence really. I fell in love with the adventure game as a medium the moment I saw Myst on a friend’s PC back in 1997. I was immediately hooked. This seemed a perfect vehicle for storytelling. But being a working writer I just couldn’t afford to spend hours making my way through the average game, much as I wanted to. So I started keeping walkthroughs handy so I could have the gamestory experience, go on the journey without getting bogged down too much in aspects of gameplay that delayed or spoiled story too much. Dedicated puzzle solvers have an entirely different view on this, of course, but for me puzzles should feel like parts of the gameworld.

When I was stuck on a timed puzzle in Reah, Detalion’s first interplanetary adventure for L.K.Avalon, I emailed the developers, introduced myself and asked if they could help. I really wanted to continue that journey, you see, and my machine at the time just wasn’t powerful enough to let me complete that puzzle. Maciej Miasik very kindly replied and provided the puzzle solution. He had also checked out my home page and asked if I’d be interested in coming up with a title, story and script for this new game they were working on: the one we now know as Schizm: Mysterious Journey (or Mysterious Journey: Schizm in North America). It meant doing a full story outline and the ‘shooting script’ for at least twelve or so characters needed for the game. A lot of the visuals, level design and game code (including the dual protagonist idea) were already in place, but Maciej felt that their existing storyline wasn’t suitable. I was delighted to assist. I love SF stories about First Contact and came up with the Mary Celeste idea. That not only allowed the planet to be uninhabited, but made a strong and intriguing story premise and promotion hook.

As well as the story and script, I started working out the alien geography and ecology for Argilus too. I produced an elaborate map of the planet, naming the continents and oceans and locating the different settings our characters visit, even showing the different science bases, balloon fields and floating cities, though we really only get to visit one of each. A lot of this additional backstory material was never seen in the final game itself, certainly not in the packaging for the version made available to North America, England and Australia. But if you look at the Schizm soundtrack, you’ll see that the themes are named after the various continents – Julianna, Carolina, Mariana, Aurora, etc – and other geographical features like the Kitris Balloon Field, the Singing Towers, and so on. Some European versions came with a beautiful lift-out antique-looking map of the planet showing many of these features, as well as including photographic profiles for the main characters. It was all so exciting to do for me as a writer – actually seeing things visualized like that.

This is where it’s probably useful to remind gamers who may not be aware of it just what localization involves, how a game, like a successful book or movie, gets licensed as an international property. North America is a large and lucrative market, but it’s still just one market in a huge global industry. A sufficiently popular game will probably be localised for those other markets. That doesn’t just mean having the script dubbed in the appropriate local language, but also different packaging design, different cover art and inserts, marketing campaigns etc. In practical design terms, it also means avoiding the use of written journals for presenting backstory in the game itself, a la Myst, since not only would foreign language versions of those texts have to be done and substituted, but anticipated in the first place. Schizm, for instance, was developed in Rzeszow, Poland, written in Sydney, Australia, published by a Dutch company first in Polish and Dutch, then Italian, French, German, English and so on. Chameleon and our latest title, Sentinel, was developed in Poland, written in Australia (what we’ve been calling Detalion Down Under), voice recorded and published in Canada, then made available in French, Italian, Polish, Spanish, German, Czech, possibly Russian and other languages.

The various game versions themselves can differ too. The original Polish (and European) version of Schizm had an elaborate FMV (full motion video) opening with Sam Mainey and Hannah Grant being interviewed on a major television news program called World News and recalling their mission to Argilus. This featured extensive footage of the actors you catch a brief glimpse of at the end in the North American version and whose faces you see at the bottom of the screen throughout the game. Sam and Hannah were played by good actors (Hannah was especially fine) using their own accented English. During the interview, we cut away to flashback animations of the original science ships arriving; then see Sam and Hannah arriving aboard Angel, see their panic as engines and life support fail and they have to eject in separate escape pods. You even see those pods heading for different touchdown points on the planet. It was a much more substantial and ‘human’ opening, though some felt – and perhaps rightly – that it damaged the suspense, letting the gamer know that our heroes do get off Argilus successfully. For me, how they went about doing that and what they learnt doing it were far more important than the fact that it happens. It was a trade-off I was happy to go with. As a writer, you learn to trust your instincts.

We were ahead of our time using a DVD format too, and that was the version that earned us a fine review here at Just Adventure, plus the Seal of Excellence at Adrenaline Vault and won Detalion a prize at Utopiales 2001 in France. That same DVD original (released in the US with the voices re-dubbed but minus the FMV opening) had continuous animations throughout, not just during the transitions. It had all the mission logs active with FMV backstory from the various scientists who went missing, showing their panic and concern. The whole thing was quite edgy. The population had vanished; now their own scientist colleagues were disappearing too. What was causing it? Who would be next? The beautiful settings suddenly became very sinister. You felt you were constantly being watched.

Unfortunately, a lot of gamers still couldn’t run DVD games then, and for compression reasons the transfer to a CD ROM format meant that most of the mission log FMV sequences had to be cut. So at least 50% of the backstory, the continuous animations and a lot of creepy atmosphere just aren’t there and a lot of the edginess is gone. No wonder many gamers were left wondering what was going on. The most important mission log of all, that of Angela Davis in Bosh’s Tunnels, is blank in the CD version. It broke my heart to see it, especially when the mission logs that were active often featured the weaker actors. But the dual protagonist arrangement needed so much storage space. Needless to say, I’ve been through the CD ROM version only once. It’s a bit too painful.

Anyway, that’s how it all came about, purest chance. After the first collaboration, we continued with Chameleon, and now Sentinel. It’s all been tremendously exciting and very satisfying.

 

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