| |
|
What if Alan Moore didn't write for DC Comics?
In 1983, Alan Moore's future turned in a different direction when his Swamp Thing series wasn't picked up by DC Comics. Still wanting to do something "different", Moore became enthralled with the text-based video games coming out of the US. Games like Zork interested Moore, in the same way that comics had enthralled him in the past. Citing his interest in an interview in 2000 AD, Sierra owners Ken and Roberta Williams courted Alan Moore to work on their latest game, King's Quest. IBM approached Sierra to develop a new type of game that would showcase the new IBM PCjr. For the first time gamers controlled an on-screen character that interacted with a color, three dimensional environment.
Kings Quest I: V for Vendetta is a vengeful tale of the knight dressed in a Guy Fawkes mask and his quest to overthrow the Kingdom of Daventry. You play Eve, who is both alternatively a damsel in distress and a woman to re reckoned with. The crowning feature is the torturous dungeon that Evey has to endure, in order to come out of the game alive. Moore reinvented the Fantasy genre, while at the same time revolving his plot around tough topics (the arms race, racism, nuclear waste (in the form of "magic polution", etc.).
In Moore's other work, King's Quest II: The Golem, a magical knight from the same kingdom realizes that he is no longer a knight, but a creature of magic and nature. Moore displayed great depth and insight in this work, demonstrating that he was able to write on a wide range of topics and situations. Moore's games set the pace for the "Sophisticated Gaming" for years to come.
The success of the original King's Quest (subsequently ported to other platforms) spurred them into creating numerous adventure game series based on the Quest theme. In the years to come Moore work would remain on the forefront of groundbreaking computer game design, sometimes creating large blockbusters and other times, failed experiments. Moore revealed openly that their main rival is television and that their aim is to rescue young people from couch potato-ism.
In 1986, Moore quietly came out with "Knight's Quest III: The Watchmen", a fantasy game that redefined the video game medium, and changed the tone of fantasy literature to this very day. Watchmen's complex game provided a realistic portrayal of knights and sorcery in a magical world setting that neither understood, nor trusted them. Considered by some to be the greatest game ever produced, Moore was riding on a high. Though not winning any awards, Watchmen proved to be the standard to which gaming revolved around for years to come.
However, Moore was very unhappy with the fact that he didn't own the rights to Watchmen, nor did he feel that he was receiving adequate royalties from the game that was earning quite a lot for IBM jr and Sierra Games.
Furthermore, at the time there were discussions of implementing a video games ratings system, of which Moore was firmly against. In the late 80's, Moore left Sierra to work strictly for the smaller, independent game publishers.
Once free of Sierra, Moore began several projects. In 1988, Moore set up his own video game publishing imprint called Mad Love Publishing. Moore began working on a video game with Sex Pistols manager, Malcolm McLaren, called Fashion Beast, though the film never came about.
He also began work on Big Numbers with comic book artist Bill Sienkiewicz about a small England town where you play one of 8 characters in the game that concentrates on the how a new shopping mall is going to affect a town. Though limited in success, Big Numbers proved to be another turning point in Moore's career. The next game From Hell reconstructed the Jack the Ripper murders in meticulous detail where you play a variety of characters, including Jack the Ripper. This game was banned in the US and in Canada, but garnered great acclaim in Europe and Japan for it's innovative use of perspective and game mechanics that not only recreated the atmosphere of England at the turn of the century, but also critiqued that recreation through puzzles and games inbedded within the game. The annotation game book alone was over 500 pages of detailed notes and was a best seller in Japan and Great Britain for years after.
His next two games went in a similar direction with "Voices of Fire" (which presented you as a cave man in early times to Alan Moore himself in Northhampton going through a normal day) and League of Extraordinary Gentleman (which allows you to become one of 8 great literary figures trying to solve the Puzzle of the Inscruitable Asian). Both games (along with From Hell and Watchmen) were reissued in America through Will Wright's Maxis , and also shone as a beacon for how non-violent video games could be produced in America (Moore, a devout Pacifist, framed these games with alternative means of conflict resolution, resulting in more than just a "shoot 'em up" game), leading to a very fruitful partnership with both Will Wright and english luminary Douglas Adams.
Currently, Moore's Mad Love Imprint morphed into America's Best Creations (ABC), under which he's once again paving new territory with several new video games: Promethea (a mythological-themed creation that teaches about magic through game-play and interaction...which also involves Alan Moore speaking on two or three of the hidden Easter Eggs in the Game), Tom Strong (a thinly-veiled Superman/Doc Savage character produced for kids that teaches about quantum mechanics and nano-machines), Top Ten (a serialized video game played online).
Alan Moore currently lives in Northampton, England where he is currently developing a Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game with Douglas Adams and Will Wright called "Top Ten Heroes", a Superhero game that combines the best of Marvel and DC Comics and Hill Street Blues. |
|
|
