Cyberdreams

» see cyberdreams.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Cyberdreams was founded in California in 1990 by Patrick Ketchum, who had already built and left Datasoft, one of the larger publishers of the eight-bit era. The new company had a single strategy and stated it openly: license a famous artist or writer from outside the games business and build an adventure game around whatever that person was already known for.

In 1990 this was not an obvious thing to do. Games were still largely made by people who had grown up inside games, and the prestige flowed the other way, toward film licenses that the film industry regarded as merchandising. Cyberdreams went after people who had reputations to protect and got a surprising number of them to say yes.

Dark Seed shipped in 1992 with artwork by H.R. Giger, whose Alien designs had already made him the most recognizable nightmare illustrator alive. CyberRace followed in 1993 with vehicles designed by Syd Mead, the man responsible for how Blade Runner looks. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream came in 1995, adapted from Harlan Ellison's 1967 short story, with Ellison himself involved in the writing and providing the voice of AM, the computer that had exterminated humanity and kept five people alive to torture.

By early 1997 the company was gone.

~ the dossier ~

~ the giger problem ~

Giger did not want his work rendered in the standard PC graphics mode of the time, which was 320 by 200 pixels in 256 colors. He looked at it and called it square and jagged, and he was right. So Cyberdreams rebuilt Dark Seed at 640 by 350, roughly four times the pixel count, and paid for it by dropping the palette from 256 colors down to 16.

The result is a game that looks like almost nothing else from 1992, biomechanical and washed-out, assembled from Giger pieces that included Li II on the box. Computer Gaming World said it had the most effective feel for a horror adventure yet made and then complained that the real-time clock was brutal, which it was. Amiga Format gave it 72 percent and called the gameplay its weakest element, and it still took a Codie award for best fantasy adventure in 1993.

~ the ellison game ~

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is the one that outlived the company. The Dreamers Guild developed it, Ellison co-wrote the expansion of his own story, and the design refused to do the thing adventure games normally do. There was no winning by cleverness. Each of the five survivors had to be walked through the specific psychological wound AM had spent a century engineering for them, and the best available outcome was a kind of dignity rather than an escape.

It was too bleak to sell in the numbers a publisher needed, and it has been in print in one digital storefront or another almost continuously since, which tells you the audience existed and was simply smaller than the retail model required. Ellison's story was published in 1967 in an American science fiction magazine and stayed an American science fiction reference point. It was never a thing people around me had read, so the name on the box that was supposed to do the selling did no selling here at all.

~ the turnaround team ~

In 1995 the investors removed the founding management and installed a turnaround team meant to move Cyberdreams from making its own games to publishing other people's. Ketchum sold half his interest to owner Rolf Klug and left in 1996, with Paul Licari taking over as general manager. Ketchum went and became a photographer.

Dark Seed II and Noir: A Shadowy Thriller went out in 1995 and 1996 into a market that was finished with the genre. Myst had already taken the oxygen and both LucasArts and Sierra were about to discover that the adventure game had stopped being a business. A publisher whose entire cost base was licensing famous people also had the most expensive possible way to make one. The company went defunct early in 1997, roughly two years after shipping the best thing it ever made.

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