Core Gamers - COReplay - The Dark Eye

III. INTERVIEW WITH RUSS LEES

As a product, THE DARK EYE was a moderate success and in spite of the unanimous and emphatic reaction from the critic that underlined many of its qualities, the game was submerged into forgetfulness, along with many of the adventure titles from the digital age. After 13 years of its release in 1995, I’ve contacted its author, Russ Lees, with meagre hope to receive any answer. I was presented with his remarkable cordiality and kindness when he replied to the questions I proposed to him – from which the follow interview was made. I beg the reader to pay attention to the profound vision of this artist, as well as the originality of the concepts he managed to include in his first market-released title.

COREGAMING : Looking closely at your career, you’ve managed to combine the work of a writer and that of a game designer. As you no doubt realize, there aren’t many game designers in this industry, with real knowledge of software, that are also responsible for the creation of famous contemporary plays- in fact, most playwrights seem to ignore this medium. What’s behind your interest in videogames?

RUSS LEES : I have led a varied and eclectic life. My first career was as an electronic engineer – I designed digital X-ray machines. However, I come from a family full of theatre artists and have always done live theatre (acting, directing, and playwriting) as an avocation. After some years, I became dissatisfied with the sterility of engineering and quit to seriously pursue playwriting. About that time, I got the opportunity to work for Inscape. It occurred to me that interactive games were a new art form, and that it would be exciting to contribute to that discussion in the early years. Also, it allowed me a medium that would combine my technical and creative experience.

CG : THE DARK EYE is an exceptionally well-planned game, which clearly reveals the amount of work spent planning it. Could you tell us how this project started?

RL : The beginning of DARK EYE was quite serendipitous. Michael Nash (the founder and CEO of Inscape) had been a childhood friend of mine. One day, I was visiting him in Los Angeles and he showed me a computer game he had helped produce, Freak Show by the Residents (do you know it?). I'd never seen anything like it and I started coming up with lots of ideas that the medium could allow you to pursue. Michael said, "Well, I'm thinking of starting my own company ... why don't you write some of these ideas down and we'll consider them?" I sent him maybe five ideas, including "the player enters the tales of Edgar Allan Poe." A few months later, he called me and said "we're thinking of doing the Poe project. Why don't you move out to Los Angeles for a few weeks and mock up a prototype?" Well, I had absolutely no idea what "the player enters the tales of Poe" actually would mean, so I had to quickly come up with a plausible way to make that meaningful.

The initial proto-type was the Narrator's version of Tell-Tale Heart, which Michael liked, so Inscape committed to the entire project. It's almost ironic that you describe it as "well-planned" because as we were making it, you wouldn't have made that claim. We had a fairly short production cycle (much less than a year) and really very little idea of how the over-all game would look.

There were many late night arguments about what "interactivity" really meant. Should the player be allowed to change the ending of a tale, for example? (Remember, that was back when branching narratives were a bit of a rage, and many games would advertise "over 20 different endings!"). At one point we thought that maybe the player could start to combine the tales to create a whole new one. We were pretty far into production before the idea of creating our own central story that we could branch off of occurred to us.

CG : While playing The Dark Eye I had this question in my mind: the variety of styles and aesthetics here is uncommon among videogames. The characters are animated in traditional stop-motion, the backgrounds are pre-rendered using computer software, the cut-scenes include photo montage, paintings, drawings, sketches, etc, which somehow manage to create a unitary style. Why the remarkable heterogeneousness of artistic resources?

RL : We were especially lucky on the Dark Eye to have Rebekah Behrendt as Art Director. She was (and is) extremely talented and was knowledgeable about what artists might be available for our project. The idea of stop-motion animation was hers. What you describe is a result of a truly remarkable collaboration of many out-sourced as well as in-house artists under her direction.

Also, our principle in-house artist was Bruce Heavin. We based most of the visual tone off of his intense vision. Plus, Inscape was the kind of company where someone could say, "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we had text on the walls?" and we'd go ahead and try that.

CG : One of the most surprising elements in the game is the fact that the player is free to decide the order in which he plays the different stories. But as a designer, you must have faced the harder task of selecting among dozens of memorable stories from Edgar Poe. What made you pick these ones?

RL : Yes, I read the entirety of Poe's work (I've forgotten how many he wrote: something like 100 tales and many poems). I carefully selected those that seemed to lend themselves to the interactive aspect of the game -- that is, the player would have to actively do things (like brick someone up) rather than just have the tale unfold. I also focused on tales which I felt that interactively exploring the psychology of the characters would be the most interesting.

Originally we wanted to do seven tales interactively, and I actually wrote scripts for ‘Hop-Frog’, ‘King Pest’ and, I think, ‘The Black Cat’. We had very little time for production, and it became clear that we couldn't possibly include all these tales, so we cut it down to the ones we felt would work best from a player perspective.

CG : One of the central themes in the game is death, a common element to Poe’s work. However, in each of the stories, you give the player the possibility not only to be the perpetrator, much like it happens in the original stories where the narrator is the criminal, but you allow him to be the victim. Could you explain what is behind this pioneering decision?

RL : Yes, it really was a good idea! However, I'm afraid the impetus was more practical than creative. With a game like THE DARK EYE, we had the problem that pretty much everything the player does requires unique assets -- that is, we had to create new environments and objects for every tale and every interaction. With most games, there is some basic recurring game-play that drives the game. That is, once you get the mechanics of shooting something or fighting something right, those interactions will be basically the same throughout the entire game.

But DARK EYE doesn't work like that. In order to re-use some of our assets, I had the idea that the player could play through the same environment twice -- once as villain and once as victim. I was very pleased with this idea, because it did allow me to go more deeply into the tales than a single perspective would have done. The game also allows you to "soul jump" from one character to another in the middle of a tale. I borrowed this idea from another Inscape project: BAD DAY ON THE MIDWAY (also by the Residents). I have to say in retrospect, this feature worked very well for the Bad Day game, but I would have preferred we hadn't used it in DARK EYE because it confuses the flow of the player experience.

CG : While I don’t have the numbers, I’m quite sure that this was a great production which gathered a team of talents and accomplished artists. For instance, how did Thomas Dolby or William S. Burroughs get associated with this project? What were their ideas about the medium of videogames?

RL : At the time, Thomas Dolby ran a company (Headspace) that produced music for interactive games. It was located in Los Angeles as were we, so it was very convenient to use them. I must say, Mr. Dolby and his in-house composers were highly professional (not always true in the Game world -- nor the Rock and Roll world for that matter!) and a delight to work with.

We actively pursued William S. Burroughs because we felt we needed a famous-yet-offbeat "name" to attach to the game. I flew out to Kansas, where Burroughs lived, to record him. It was a real adventure! He had absolutely no idea what an interactive game was, and couldn't have cared less. He did appreciate Poe, though, which was all that mattered.

The other actors simply sent tapes in based on sample scrip_ts we'd left with some agents. We got excellent actors, I think because many of them just wanted to do something that required "real acting" and not just selling a product. The actual production team was an ad hoc group of highly dedicated folks with not-all-that-much experience. We were really just very lucky on that score.

CG : The game also features an original central storyline which is in perfect consonance with the rest. Is this story also adapted from Poe's work or is it original?

RL : The central storyline (which we called "Malevolence" in-house) was written by me. I took Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher" and changed it radically to echo all the themes in the Poe tales we were using.

CG : The nameless character’s progression towards insanity is illustrated by these different perspectives of other characters who, like the killer in Tell-Tale Heart, suffer from deep mental disorders. What do you find is so fascinating about characters at the edge of their saneness?

RL : Well, it's certainly a well-developed idea in Poe. His narrators are so convincingly on the edge of a breakdown that critics have wondered if Poe himself was half-mad. It is true that this is an aspect of Poe's work that attracts me to him. I think explorations of madness make for compelling drama: certainly Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams exploited it, as does Moliere from a comic perspective – since often it is just a slight exaggeration in point of view from a "sane" perspective. I've always felt that madness lurks just beneath the surface for everyone.

CG : What, in your opinion, hasn’t been said about your game?

RL : One of the great virtues of video games is their ability to immerse the player in another time and place via exploration of an environment. It was my idea that the player could also immerse himself by exploring the mind of a central character. It is this aspect of the game that I'm most disappointed almost no one has pursued. There is, in fact, a rather pernicious idea in game design that in order to make the player identify most fully with the "player character" in the game, you must not give that character much personality, since it may clash with the personality of the player himself. This is a deeply wrong headed notion and has led to many, many games cursed with a completely bland protagonist.

There's been an on-going discussion about "can a video game make you feel an emotion?" and "are video games art?" Questions that I feel games like THE DARK EYE (and certainly ICO) should have put to rest long ago. But the industry's skittishness about providing psychological depth to the player character, the most important character in the game!, is holding it back on this front.

CG : After some time playing Zoesis Studio’s games I keep thinking that, however amusing and interesting these projects are, you’re far away from the genre of game you explored in THE DARK EYE. Do you ever think about doing something on the scale of this game again?

RL : Yes, the Zoesis projects were of a completely different type. Those called on my technical skills more than my artistic skills and were about creating a truly responsive character as opposed to telling a story. I do think a lot of very interesting ground was broken with THE DARK EYE that hasn't been pursued by mainstream games (one exception is ETERNAL DARKNESS: SANITY’S REQUIEM). With every project I undertake, I look for opportunities to expand on some elements of DARK EYE, but so far, I haven't gotten the chance. I think the game industry has to expand its notion of what a "game" is for me to return to those experimental times (I do believe that this will happen).

CG : Looking back, so many things have changed in the videogame industry these past years. As someone who’s deeply connected to other areas of artistic expression, what do you think about videogames, in general, as well as the progression they’ve made so far?

RL : There was something highly exhilarating about working on games in the mid-90s -- nobody knew what would sell, so pretty much any idea could be taken seriously. Games fell quickly into genre-specific clones of successful predecessors (mostly due to the expense of producing an A-level game). I feel that only recently has the industry returned to taking risks and expanding the repertoire of games. I'm quite optimistic about the future of games, actually. I think gamers are getting pretty savvy about formulaic content and that producers are going to have to respond with more adventuresome game-making.

CG : Finally, if I asked you to choose the best examples of videogame excellence, apart from your own work of course, what other games would you name?

RL : There are many highly artful games. And I'm a little hesitant to make a list, since I'm not a compulsive player and haven't played many famous games at all. Certainly on my list would be Fumito Ueda's ICO, which I found deeply moving (and uses almost no dialogue!). More recently, I enjoyed the world of BIOSHOCK, even though I don't really play first-person shooters, because I felt that the aesthetic experience of the player was brilliantly thought through.