
Alone in the Dark - myth_drannon
https://www.filfre.net/2019/08/alone-in-the-dark/
======
bsdubernerd
Little Big Adventure is painted down in the article, but it is also a
masterpiece. It plays uniquely, in a way that's hard to express.

I happened to find a copy in a discount bin almost a decade after it was
released. Despite the dated graphics, the charm of the game feels absolutely
tangible throughout the game. I completed the game and did so again after
another 5 years through dosbox. I bought the sequel (LBA2) because of this, of
which I have mixed feelings.

The controls of Alone and LBA always felt natural to me, so I cannot share
this sentiment of confusion. The sudden camera jumps in Alone in the Dark can
be confusing, but then again I actually played "Resident Evil" _before_ Alone
(it was only then that I became interested in the genre).

I have to say that there are several french games that really stood out to me
due to the artistic and general playstyle in general.

"Heart of Darkness", from Chahi of Another world fame stays true to his style.
The "Gobliins" series from Coktel vision are similar to lucasart's games, but
have a completely different humor/feel to them. Coktel Vision did several
positively weird games (Inca 2, for example).

I played most of these games decades after they were made just for curiosity,
simply going by the "I liked this game, let's see what the author/s also did".
Sometimes you do really hop into masterpieces that stand the test of time.

If you have youtube channels that dig into this sort of stuff, I'd love to
hear about it. I follow some retro channels, but I didn't see those really
mentioned anywhere aside from the usual "Another World" and "Price of Persia".

~~~
dmix
Little Big Adventure was released by a french game company (in an "enhanced"
version) in 2015 and is now available on Steam and elsewhere:
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/397330/Little_Big_Adventu...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/397330/Little_Big_Adventure__Enhanced_Edition/)

~~~
bsdubernerd
Looking at the screenshots and description, I was immediately thrown off by
the "enhanced gameplay" and the fact that interactive items in the level seem
to be highlighted with the magnifier icon.

Being a fan of this game, I'd say that unless you can turn those off, play the
original.

The fixed throw distance plays a crucial role in several of the puzzles.
What's the point of interacting with the environment if you can go directly at
the spot and pickup everything? There are, again, sections where only speaking
with the villagers hints you at the right locations. This is _very_ important
for the gameplay mechanics.

~~~
dmix
They can't help but mess things up can they. Although I've found some enhanced
games like Resident Evil have managed to do it properly. But you have to have
someone who really appreciate the original doing the update. Someone
opinionated on the matter like yourself.

~~~
bsdubernerd
There have been countless bad games where players have to resort to a "probe
everything" approach in order to find items which are needed to progress in
the game.

But "good games" generally strike a balance between all the gameplay mechanics
and that's precisely how they came to be known to be good.

You wouldn't change the way mario jumps in order to reach higher places and
call it "enhanced gameplay".

Similarly you wouldn't show every hidden question box with a blaring icon so
that you'll always know where all the secret boxes are.

These two elements are defining features of the game. You don't change that.

I think the current approach is to make games so approachable to "casual
gaming" that anything deep loses meaning. Many old games that I consider
beyond "good" wouldn't fly today. But adapting these games to a more modern
hand-in-hand approach will simply destroy them.

~~~
dmix
Agreed, games are turning into a Disney themepark tours of cool cinematic
experiences.

This is why indie game people are doing so well, they are limited in scope and
are forced to make actual games.

I still think the gaming scene is in a good place though. Always tons of good
stuff around.

------
jupiter90000
I used to love this game and all but forgot about it til I saw this pop up
here. When I was about 12yo or so I emailed Infogrames asking about the game's
development as I was interested in games programming back then, one of the
developers emailed back and forth with me a few times, pretty cool.

Back then the cool library I found for developing games was Allegro for the
DJGPP C/C++ development env for DOS. My brother and I started creating video
games. It was so much fun trying to figure everything out and research things
online. I seem to remember Yahoo kind of had curated directories of sites
related to games programming.

My brother ended up working in the games industry for years, whereas somehow I
ended up doing more web and data programming stuff. It pays better but
sometimes I get excited about what it may have been like going the route of
games dev. Ah, life.

~~~
johnchristopher
> one of the developers

Wasn't the game developed by a single dev (Frédéric Reynald)?

~~~
ekianjo
yes it was Frederick Raynal who made it. I don't think he was alone, a team
called Adeline Software (a wink at Delphine Software) worked on it for the
first episode at least.

~~~
distances
It's all laid out in the article. Adeline was the Delphine studio Raynal
joined when leaving Infogrames, after Alone in the Dark was published.

------
ggambetta
> Raynal’s lifestyle was becoming so unbalanced that his family was beginning
> to worry about him. One day, he ran out of his room in a panic, telling them
> that all of the color had bled out of his vision. His mother bustled him off
> to an ophthalmologist, who told him he appeared to have disrupted the
> photoreceptors in his eyes by staring so long at a monitor screen.
> Thankfully, the condition persisted only a few hours. But then there came a
> day when he suddenly couldn’t understand anything that was said to him; he
> had apparently become so attuned to the language of computer code that he
> could no longer communicate with humans. That worrisome condition lasted
> several weeks.

This sounds hard to believe. A lot more people use computers nowadays, for
equally long periods of time if not more, and neither of these symptoms seem
to be a thing. So... what's going on here? Embellishments to the legend?

~~~
hrktb
Burnout perhaps ?

I think depression can cause color perception loss (not complete, but colors
fade out).

Also when getting used to a second or third language (i.e. french _ english)
one can temporarily get overwhelmed and have difficulty to switch to either of
them. I never came accross literature on this, but personaly experienced
periods of a day or more where I felt I just couldn’t speak anything. Asking
friends moving to foreign countries some of they hit the same issue.

At that time at least in France “specialist” would tell the most random
diagnostics with a straight face and it was pretty normal to go get a second
opinion for anything more than a cold. Nowadays they know patients have at
least googled symptoms and try to ecplain more of their thinking behind
diagnostics IMO.

~~~
renaudg
> At that time at least in France “specialist” would tell the most random
> diagnostics with a straight face and it was pretty normal to go get a second
> opinion for anything more than a cold.

Huh, what part of France are you from ? There was and there still is nothing
wrong with the quality of care or doctors training in the country, compared to
other places (quite the contrary, in fact)

------
nope96
There's also a great "Classic Game Postmortem" video from 2012 by Frederick
Raynal, too:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2lgEyNaop4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2lgEyNaop4)

------
glandium
If I remember correctly, after I upgraded my PC, Alone in the Dark was the
only game where I had to turn the Turbo button off to be playable... otherwise
it would be so fast that the first monster would come at you from the window
within seconds. And of course, walking was running like Usain Bolt.

~~~
dylan604
As a kid, I never understood how the CPU could be too fast for the software.
I'm not sure I do now either though. I get timing issues on ROM emulators for
the old games using quirks due to NTSC/PAL issues. I know there were other
programs that did not work with the Turbo button engaged that were not games
where timing might be much more crucial.

~~~
peripitea
You have to explicitly write your code to prevent this from happening. You
typically have an engine that is executing all of your logic (rendering, game
logic, AI, etc.) in cycles. By default, it will execute these cycles as
quickly as possible. So for anything with real-time components, faster CPU =
enemies move faster.

I forget which game first introduced a fix for this, but the solution is to
have the engine run on time-based ticks -- you wait to execute the next cycle
until the requisite time has passed.

~~~
repsilat
Another alternative is to say, "How much time has passed since the last
frame?" and update the game state based on that.

When your computer can't hold a constant framerate, the game doesn't slow
down.

------
Endy
I agree on all major points but one: I genuinely enjoyed Shadow of the Comet.
Then again, I've also played CoC in campaigns based on that adventure. Never
ran it yet as a Keeper, though. Alone in the Dark, Lovecraftian as it might
be, definitely represents several turning points in my life. The turn to an
appreciation of slow horror, of appreciating the safety of real isolation. And
while he's mostly demonized, I have to thank the boss at Infogrames who
insisted that Alone in the Dark run on a 286. I didn't have a 386 or a 486
when it came out. AitD was my first brush with 3d, and while it did send me
back to 2d for a long while just out of mortal terror, I've come around
realized that like all art forms, there's a time and place for both in the
world.

------
acheron
Wow, unexpected reference to Popcorn. I had no idea it was connected to
anything else, let alone Alone in the Dark. I remember trying to puzzle out a
lot of Popcorn’s menus and documentation since it was all in French. It was
like Arkanoid, with power-ups designated by a letter, but all for French words
— “V” for an extra life is one I remember. I made myself a little cheat sheet
to keep by the computer. This was on an XT/CGA era DOS computer.

(Also the Alone in the Dark backstory is fascinating as well, but the Popcorn
reference caught me off guard.)

------
bpizzi
This hits home, being born and growing as a kid in Lyon, having played AITD on
the family's 386 in 1993/4 or so, and later practiced rowing for years on the
Saône river right in front of Atari's ship-shaped buildings, even giving some
rowing lesson's to Atari/Infogrames team during a company event (and to Bruno
Bonnel himself, who has been later into robotics and today in... politics).

------
kieckerjan
Filfre is a great resource, an exhaustively researched one man work of love
and a veritable rabbithole for who grew up on games in the eighties. Check out
at the very least the articles about The Hitchhiker's Guide, about Elite and,
one of my favs, about the curious creation story of Neuromancer (the game),
which surreally enough involved LSD guru Timothy Leary.

~~~
gwern
I made a list of Filfre pages I liked after reading through the entire
archives: [https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2017/06#the-digital-
antiqua...](https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2017/06#the-digital-antiquarian)

------
wolfspider
Alone in the Dark was very similar to an H.P. Lovecraft story and if that was
what you were looking for that is what you would find. Relentless Twinsen’s
Adventure was an intense fever dream of a fantasy that kept the player going
on pure suspense and wonder. It had the dramatic finesse of Loom or a good
sci-fi novel. When I purchased it I had only assumed it to be mindless
entertainment. It turned out to be a statement on the human condition that was
too valuable to let everyone know about. I diligently played it after school
for many days giving the game my full attention. When I was finished I felt
like I grew up a little and society at large did not let me down concerning
the harsh truths revealed in this game. This is why I’ll never forget
Relentless- the general malaise and apathy of the time in history it was
released deeply contrasted against the wake-up call contained within the
lessons of its gameplay. Both games we’re ahead of their time and technically
very impressive.

------
byron_fast
Not mentioned: It was apparently possible to complete the game in a "pacifist
run". Every fight could be avoided with exceptional attention to the fiddly
details that the article rightly criticizes.

I managed to get as far as the kitchen without shooting any zombies (put the
bowl of food on the table, duh), but couldn't figure out anything beyond that.

------
djmips
A friend and myself pitched a game idea for similar to this at DSI Vancouver
(soon to be EAC) around 1990. It didn't hit fertile ground where I guess
sports games were the go to idea. 3D, Lovecraftian, same camera ideas. I'm
glad this one was made.

------
tjr225
Amazing article. As a teenager, I'd always looked back at emulations of this
game with a wonder of how the graphics and visuals came to be.

Surely it set the stage for a decade of fixed-set-pre-rendered games such as
final fantasy and resident evil. Very cool.

------
haolez
Everyone in my neighborhood had the demo version of this game. It’s awesome,
but we could never leave the first room (and it wasn’t for sale in my
country).

I might as well play it today to overcome this childhood frustration :)

~~~
gbraad
Where would that be?

~~~
haolez
Brazil

------
tiagobraw
I loved this game when I was young. I finally had access to three floppy disks
and tried in my 286, only to be frustrated that my CGA monochrome monitor was
not supported...

I would play at my friend's house... good times

~~~
ryan-allen
I couldn't figure out how to play it, I just kept dying constantly but I was
intrigued none the less.

I plan to one day give it another go as an adult :) Fortunately it's available
on GOG! [0]

[0]
[https://www.gog.com/game/alone_in_the_dark](https://www.gog.com/game/alone_in_the_dark)

------
hestefisk
I fondly remember this. It scared the bejesus out of the 8 yo me.

------
ricardobeat
Is there a way to play the game today, with a CRT screen emulator? I imagine
the graphics will hold up a lot more faithfully to memory.

~~~
rasz
>with a CRT screen emulator

Game is VGA only. VGA did line doubling. There are no black bars every other
line people mostly associate with using CRT TV.

~~~
ricardobeat
I played the game on a CRT monitor back in the day, would like to emulate that
look. You’re correct, there were no visible black bars on VGA PC monitors.

The screen was fuzzy so it actually looked a lot better than it does in an LCD
monitor due to a natural “aliasing” effect from bleed/blur/glow.

I know video game emulatores like MAME have good ones but didn’t know there
was a filter for DOSBox, will try that!

------
JoeAltmaier
I actually remember when it came out. Played it briefly with my sons (8-10).
We couldn't get past the opening scenes, died so many time in the first hour
of playing, for no apparent reason with no apparent solution, that we gave up
and never played it again.

So I don't have any fond memories of it whatsoever.

~~~
dmix
Sounds like how most of my favourite games of all time started.

------
petepete
I played the Acorn 3000 port of this in the mid-nineties as a eleven or twelve
year old. The early part where zombies are coming through the trapdoor and
window were really scary for me at the time, but what a game. Only finished it
when I revisited it years later.

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layoutIfNeeded
Here’s a Let’s Play series for those who want to get nostalgic:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXSB1azTTGuh7yAw1QtJ2...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXSB1azTTGuh7yAw1QtJ2aaXr8I3bCRKN)

------
chipmonkey75
Nice; thanks for the throwback, I played the dickens out of that game.

------
evanweaver
Oh man, I played Popcorn on our 386sx with grayscale screen. Haven't thought
of that game in almost 30 years.

------
tzakrajs
Then they immediate ruined the franchise with the second.

