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David Fox Talks Classics, the Future 12 Apr, 2004 / Comments: 12

By Jake


LucasArts veteran David Fox (known mostly for Zak McKracken, but also worked on Last Crusade, Maniac Mansion and Labyrinth) recently gave a talk at The Gathering (some sort of Norse geek get-together), and was interviewed by them. He talks about Zak, Sam & Max 2, dying in adventure games, and what he's been up to recently, all while wearing a Zak sweatshirt.
Have you in any way influenced the fact that it usually is almost impossible to die in most Lucas Arts adventure games?
Probably not much. I'd give most of the credit for this to fellow Lucas designer Ron Gilbert. He spent a lot of time playing Sierra adventure games and really disliked the way they used death as a way to impede the player and prolong the game... worse, you could die from doing simple things that in real life would never kill you. For example, while playing one of their games I remember picking up a piece of a broken mirror, cutting myself and dying. It felt like the designer had either taken the lazy way out by coming up with lots of silly ways to die so you'd have to waste time going back to an earlier saved game and trying again. All this rather than spending more time coming up with creative, challenging, yet solvable puzzles.
Thanks to Slashdot Games for the link. For more about David Fox, check out this website he runs with his wife, which lists many of their previous projects.
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12 Comments

  • csenosiain on 14 Apr, 2004, 19:52…
    IN other news, Grim Fandango has been inducted into the hall of fame at Gamespy.
  • Lord Savage on 13 Apr, 2004, 13:46…
    Oooh! Mr. Fox has a lovely Powerbook.
  • LGH on 13 Apr, 2004, 12:57…
    "Bottom line, until another adventure game makes a lot of money (say, like
    Myst), you may not see many being made. But that will never happen if none are being made!"

    How ironic... but very true to life ;-)

    Fortunately, there ARE some good adventures coming out right now, so buy them and stop this vicious circle!
  • cappuchok on 13 Apr, 2004, 04:36…
    Quote: The Gathering (some sort of Norse game geek get-together)

    Most European geeks (not gamers) would be offended by such a description of The Gathering, because they feel (as do I) that it's becoming more and more of a LAN-party each year, with more and more clueless FPS-gamers sneaking their way into the otherwise programming-savvy and hard-working population of the party.

    Actually, "The Gathering" is not a gamers conference. It is, in all likelyhood, currently the biggest demo scene party in all of Europe. The demo scene in Europe carries a large overlap with the games industry, and the companies are using it as a very good talent pool (check www.scene.org, and don't fall for their April Fools joke). Team 17, Digital Illusions (The Silents), Remedy Entertainment (Future Crew) and many more big and famous developer houses are all mainly comprised of immensely well-known demo sceners.
  • Jake on 13 Apr, 2004, 12:15…
    Ok, I'll take the word "game" out of there then :)
  • Marek on 13 Apr, 2004, 11:44…
    Right now I'm too lazy busy to really dig into that website. What's the "demo scene" like? Is it something like Indie Game Jam, where lots of people hack together prototypes? Are these demos of gameplay concepts or of solutions for technical problems?
  • Mad Lord Snapcase on 13 Apr, 2004, 14:06…
    A "demo" is more of a demonstration of programming/artistic skill than anything else. Basically the programmers create a number of aesthetically pleasing scenes with little or no connection that they then string together and (usually) compress them into a teensy tiny exe file for a "let's see how ridiculously much we can cram into a small file" competition. Many of them are quite impressive, but of course no gameplay is involved, making them interactive would really balloon file size.

    The Gathering for me is generally the place where Press Play On Tape record their live stuff, and one of the SID hotspots of europe. But then I'm really more of a music geek.
  • 2Tall on 20 May, 2004, 02:41…
    To me, being part of the "demo scene" for a number of years, it was always about going beyond just "playing" games, but actually doing something creative with your machine. It was always about using whatever talents you had, coding, graphics, music etc. to create something creative, going beyond being entertained to entertaining and competing with others with your machine. Then, put these together elements together to create a "demo". However, I would say that many demos were quite nice designed in which all elemnents blended together to form an impressive (oldies like Desert Dream and State of the Art are perfect examples). It was also about performance, like you mentioned. "Let's see what other impossible thing we can do next time." You'd be surprised by the things people have done with a Commodore 64.

    For live streaming demos of all kinds, check out http://193.109.142.19:8000/;stream.nsv (or search for Demoscene.TV in the Internet TV section of WinAmp).
  • dax on 08 Jun, 2004, 07:42…
    The official of demoscene.tv stream is
    http://stream.demoscene.tv:8074/listen.pls
  • Mad Lord Snapcase on 13 Apr, 2004, 14:08…
    Decent site about the history of Demo Coding (things look much more impressive these days, of coure):

    http://www.mlab.uiah.fi/~eye/demos/
  • Remi O on 13 Apr, 2004, 10:44…
    So yeah, some sort of Norse geek get-together.
  • Udvarnoky on 12 Apr, 2004, 15:43…
    Oooh, more early game goodness. I like.