One of the great challenges of designing The Dark Crystal was to create a world that had never been seen and yet could be instantly accepted as a real place with a history and an ancient philosophy. I created a cosmology with meaningful symbols that could penetrate the very fabric of the costumes and the film’s architecture, every visual element important information of this particular world’s past, its ideas, and its destiny. It had always been our intention to create a tale with the weight of myth; a story that felt as though it had been told many times before to another land.
— Brian Froud from The World of The Dark Crystal, 2020 reprint
Jim Henson had his initial concept for the feature film The Dark Crystal start to form in 1975; through the rest of the 70s he did world creation and visualization with the artist Brian Froud, and made a initial script while waiting out a snowstorm. He made the feature film The Muppet Movie first, and was only able to get initial funding on The Dark Crystal by agreeing to make a Muppet film follow-up (The Great Muppet Caper). Work from co-director Frank Oz on The Empire Strikes Back also intervened.
A thousand years ago the Dark Crystal was damaged, starting an age of Chaos; during this time the world was ruled by lizards known as the Skeksis. Jen, an orphan from the oppressed race known as Gelfings, is sent on a quest for the missing shard in order to save the world. Poster source.
These delays meant shooting didn’t happen until 1981. It’s tempting to think, then, that the production was “tortured” — especially given the technical hurdles of a live-action movie made entirely from puppets — but it’s more accurate to say it was a slow burn due to financial priorities. Still, the final movie was and is polarizing, somehow being declared magnificent and terrible at the same time. I think the best explanation of what happened can be seen with an excerpt from the test-screening voice track to the movie. The video lasts two-and-a-half-minutes and while it’s usually just fine to breeze on by whenever I drop a video clip, in this case I highly recommend a watch before moving on.
The clip has the Skeksis — the villains of the movie — gathering around the dying Emperor. All the dialogue is hissing in the Skeksis language, with no subtitles. This was Jim Henson’s original vision, and it is the one that showed in the “first edit” that played to an audience in Washington, DC. Henson wrote in his journal:
First preview Dark Crystal in Washington DC – not great.
He had already been warned beforehand that trying to have the Skeksis only talk in their own language without subtitles (with people understanding it “like an opera“) was not going to go well, but the baffled audience of March 19th, 1982 reinforced this; the script underwent a round of edits to have English dialogue added to dub over the fantasy language, where the words had to be lip-synched the best the team could.
Annotations by Jim Henson (on top) and Frank Oz (on bottom).
Still, these changes happened after the scenes were filmed, meaning the essential action was already locked into place. Given that the goal was to have the scenes understandable without knowing the words, the scenes were already done in an “elemental” way, and the dub-over process could not help being awkward. Perhaps more importantly, it was well within Jim Henson’s vision to have parts of the movie understood only partially, where the mood and the world universe was more important than individual lines of dialogue. (If you want to try the original March 1982 experience, there’s a fan reconstruction online called The Darker Crystal.)
Even after these changes the studios involved still wanted modifications, and Jim Henson ended up buying the movie outright with his own money (obtained via Muppet merchandising) for $15 million so he could release it on his own terms. Still, just based on the limits of feature-film length, the deep backstory didn’t really make it to the film as intended; Froud notes what ended up on screen was only “a fragment of this other world.”
Jen the Gelfling, from the original movie.
At the same time as the original test screening, Sierra On-Line finally came out with Time Zone, a game intended for the prior holiday season. That was Roberta Williams’s attempt at a magnum opus, a game that would go on forever. (Concatenating my time spent, I beat it in 24 hours, but it was over a period of two months.) During this same time Sierra was trying to reach past their free-wheeling early years into something more “professional”.
The first few years of Sierra could be described as total anarchy. It is easy to survive (and, thrive!) when you have no competition and your customer base is experiencing explosive growth. And, to be fair, at the very beginning, most of Sierra’s employees were barely out of high school. The party atmosphere was probably appropriate to the time.
By 1982, it was obvious that the “free for all” craziness of Sierra was not going to work. We needed discipline.
— Ken Williams, Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings
While the growth of the emerging market competitors was scaring Ken Williams, he was also spooked by a lawsuit with Atari. In 1981 Sierra had released the game Jawbreaker for Apple II, one of the many many Pac-man clones, and Atari went after clones with a giant legal hammer. Sierra won on the basis of differentiating themselves from the “look and feel” of Pac-Man; in order to justify this they brought a full-sized Pac-Man machine in court along with giant Pac-Man posters to compare with Jawbreaker’s branding.
To be fair, I think Sierra had a point. Pictures from Mobygames and eBay.
However, winning also involved legal fees, and in January 1982 Ken Williams cites having to spend $30,000, and remarked
It’s been real expensive to fight Atari. I don’t know whether I would do it again. If they decide to come after me with appeals, at some point I might have to lie down and die.
which is a frankly odd admission to be making in public, but I think gets a good sense that Ken knew there was the potential for tangling with larger forces on the horizon.
In the spring came a call from Jackie Morby of Boston-based TA Associates offering a million dollars for a percentage of the company and a place on the board. Roberta Williams was hesitant at the possibility of losing some independence, but as Ken writes:
I, on the other hand, thought that it would be good for us. There was a side of me that knew that, for the company to realize whatever potential it had, it would need to stop just being “kids behind a print shop” and take steps to become a real company. Also, Ms. Morby was promising something I dearly needed; someone to talk to about business. I would be free to pick her brain and to speak with the heads of the other companies she invested in.
Ken also mentions, somewhat ominously: “Once we had accepted venture capital, it became like any other drug. No one stops after the first hit.” Even more ominously, quoting Jackie Morby from 1984: “There are investments that only double in value: they aren’t very exciting.”
The two end results were the aforementioned “professionalization” as planned, but also — at the coaxing of the new board — an entrance into the cartridge realm. This was where the “real money” was; for Atari 2600s alone, there was an install base of more than 15 million by this time. (For context, Sierra’s main platform of the Apple II eventually reached an install base of about 6 million… by 1990. Picking one of the more generous estimates I’ve seen, by the end of 1982 Apple had sold less than half a million.)
Jawbreaker got an Atari 2600 version already by the end of 1982, but through a different publisher; Sierra started making their own cartridges in 1983. This ended up being right when the market crash started so while profit doubled the year before, the whole fiasco ended up almost sinking the company with unsold cartridges, but that’s a story for another time.
The elevated profile of Sierra On-Line also extended to film companies. For The Dark Crystal, the instigator of contact was Christopher Cerf, longtime songwriter for Sesame Street.
Trivia: Cerf got named in a lawsuit over the song above when the Beatles catalog was owned by Northern Song of Australia (desired payout: $5.5 million) but then Michael Jackson bought the company and the lawsuit was settled for $500.
Cerf was an Apple II superfan and by 1979 had already given the Apple II bug to Jon Stone (writer for Sesame Street) and Jerry Juhl (writer for The Muppet Show); both started using a word processor for their scripts.
It became a familiar sight to see Jon Stone on the set directing a “Sesame Street” episode with a rolled up copy of the latest script, hot off his Epson printer, in his back pocket.
Cerf had a professional connection to Sierra as the publicity firm he worked with also had Sierra as a client. He convinced the Henson group to connect with Sierra On-Line for the project, and flew to California with Mary Ann Horstmeyer (project manager for Henson) to meet Roberta Williams directly. Cerf called the resulting product “interactive fiction”.
Quoting from a 1982 TV interview with Ken and Roberta:
Roberta Williams: He [Jim Henson] has a new movie coming out called The Dark Crystal and it’s coming out in December and him and a few of his friends have played my adventure games in the past and really liked them a lot and they thought that they wanted an adventure game based on their movies. So they’ve been working with me on the design of this game. Their artists have been doing the pictures, and they’ve supplied me with all the information I could ever ever need, and it follows the storyline of the Dark Crystal really really close.
Three points from that last sentence worth isolating:
a.) Their artists have been doing the pictures
We no longer have Roberta Williams herself or a lone 19-year old producing a gigantic amount of art. Quoting Williams from a different interview:
This adventure isn’t like any we’ve done before. Jim Mahon, the art director at Henson Associates, sketches each page of the action and sends it to me. My people translate the sketches onto the Apple with graphics tablets.
Then the hi-res pages are sent to Jim Mahon for his approval and suggestions. Actually, everyone in New York helps out. Harriet [Yassky], Mary Ann [Horstmeyer], and Chris [Cerf] all review each screen and make suggestions
This is good to highlight because you will see a marked jump in quality compared to Sierra’s previous work.
b.) they’ve supplied me with all the information I could ever ever need
As I’ve already alluded to, Henson Associates created truckloads of backstory; and Sierra got their hands on it. Ken Williams was “shocked at the number of binders full of drawings that provided the minute details behind the movie.”
A Skeksis from the cover of The World of the Dark Crystal, a book by Brian Froud of conceptual art.
Ken also writes that:
Every character had a character sheet providing a full description of the character, their back story, illustrations of how they would look in various clothes and animations, and even samples of how they might speak.
The important thing to highlight (for our story) is that there was more to draw on than what made it to screen, which ties into…
c.) it follows the storyline of the Dark Crystal really really close.
In the same interview Roberta returns to the idea of “how close an adaptation is it”.
…it is primarily based on the movie. The storyline is there and you definitely get the feeling of the story and what’s happening just like in the movie, but a lot of the time there are puzzles that I added that weren’t in the movie but still have the same feeling of the story. There might be things that did happen in the movie but I changed them around a little bit so the same the basic stories there but but obviously we didn’t want them watching the movie and then just come home and play the game and solve it.
Christopher Cerf again:
You run into all the characters from the movie, and you can reply to them in different ways. But you can do things differently than the way they happen in the movie. Your game can end differently than in the movie. You can try out other possibilities. You can say, “What would happen if I tried this.”
While The Dark Crystal was not the first official movie-tie in game (both Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. for Atari 2600 came out in 1982, and you can extend an argument to Superman from 1979) it was the first one on a platform where it was possible to follow the plot of the movie in a step-by-step way; this turned out to be an overarching concern, either spoiling the movie plot by playing the game, or having the game follow the movie plot closely enough to be spoiled. Henson Associates were agreeable to the idea of modifications to the story, but given how early this is in videogame history, this isn’t an obvious standpoint to have. Two years later, this became a giant pain point with Disney as Sierra was working on their adaptation of The Black Cauldron.
A week later Al [Lowe] and Roberta received back their design, with major portions of it removed. Many of the removals were because they had included things that “didn’t happen in the movie.” For example, if there was a ladder in a room, and in the movie the central character never climbed the ladder, then Disney’s representatives didn’t understand why they should be able to do it in the game.
All this became relevant for my playthrough. Roberta Williams claimed it was fine to either watch the movie first or play the game first. My memory of the movie is from 25 years ago when I last saw it, so I don’t remember internal details; I remember being confused, or to paraphrase one review, it felt made up as it went along. Hence, I’ve sort of both watched and not-watched the movie at the same time. I refreshed my memory up to where the main character Jen gets his quest, but I’ve stopped there by the theory the game is supposed to be solvable without mimicking what was seen on screen. This may end up being a bad idea, but it’s the sort of thing I’m here to test.
Regarding “1982”, this game slipped the Christmas season just like Time Zone. A mention at the The American Toy Fair in February 1983 calls it a “preview”; it seems to have hit shelves not long after.
As the manual indicates:
…you will become Jen, hero of “The Dark Crystal.” You must find and restore a shard to its rightful place in the Crystal before the Great Conjunction of the Three Suns. Fail, and the world is doomed to live forever under the rule of the ruthless Skeksis. … The computer becomes your hands and feet, eyes and ears.
This game marks, importantly, the Sierra shift to a third-person perspective. Jen is visible in all scenes. All that’s needed is more direct character movement and a more zoomed-out perspective (akin to Castles of Darkness) in order to arrive at the King’s Quest 1 style perspective that would remain the paragon of standard point-and-click games ever after.
No flute, even though Jen has one at the start of the movie.
No matter what you type, the next scene is forced:
That’s all the directions you get. I originally thought we’d have a linear design from here (like Mission: Asteroid) but this is back to Roberta Williams doing a wide-open space, and it is quite easy to go the wrong way.
You start in a 3×3 area where as far as I can tell all of it is scenery…
It’s not obvious there’s an object here, but you can take some shale.
…but if you go farther north (and it isn’t marked this will happen) you end up taking a one-way trip (“JEN FALLS HEADS OVER HEELS DOWN A STEEP SLOPE”).
If you avoid seeing urSu long enough the game will end because he will not pass on the important knowledge about stopping the end of the world, but you’re already softlocked if you’re past the one-way arrows anyway. (His “counterpart” is skekSo the Emperor, the Skeksis who died in that no-English-or-subtitles scene I linked earlier. According to the official site, the lore goes that urSu “allowed himself to die” because this also would kill the Emperor.)
After enough alternate-Jen lives I mapped things out and found out I was supposed to be going due west (no hint, really!) to find the cave which also shows up in the movie.
You can LOOK BOWL to see an image of a crystal, but TALK URSU is needed to get an explanation. It’s in all-caps Apple II style, so I’ve made it a little more readable:
urSu sighs and says, “At the time of the Last Conjunction, or coming together, of our world’s three suns, the evil Skeksis gained control of the Great Crystal that rules our destiny. The Crystal cracked and darkened. And Dark it will remain until a piece that broke off — the Crystal Shard — is restored.
“There is a prophecy that the shard can be replaced only by Gelfling hand, and only at the time of the next Great Conjunction. If this prophecy is not fulfilled, the Skeksis will grow even more powerful, and their reign will last forever.
“Jen, to you has fallen the task of healing the crystal. And it is time for your quest to begin, for very soon the three suns will once again be joined in a Great Conjunction. You will find Aughra, Keeper of Secrets and Watcher of the Heavens. She may have the shard you seek.
We’re not done! Next screen:
“Gelfling, I leave you with a final puzzle: what do the Sun Brothers quarrel about?”
“Find the answer to this mystery and present it to Aughra. Only then can you gain entrance to her observatory.”
“And now Gelfling, our roads must curve apart. We may meet in another life … but not again in this one …”
With these words, urSu dies, and his lifeless body vanished from the sleepframe.
This doesn’t come off that bad written out on a normal screen, but on an Apple II — to my modern eyes — it looks like an info-dump. I’m unsure if there was a better way to handle the scene, though.
I haven’t found anything else in the starting area, but it’s easily possible I’m missing another object like the shale. However, moving on for now, the only way forward is past the one-way barrier on the map.
The purple markings indicate disk swaps. Not only are we in another open area, but rather arbitrarily the game instructs you to swap from disk 1, side B over to disk 2, side A, and while exploring this might mean flipping back and forth multiple times in quick succession.
When entering the Village of the Pod People, I wanted to immediately turn around and go south again, resulting in a disk swap back. I incidentally have found nothing yet I can do here. Maybe the movie would help but we are past the point (roughly 7.5 minutes in) I stopped watching.
There are two monsters that appear, in the style of Roberta’s beloved Crowther/Woods adventure. First is a Garthim, a creature that serves the Skeksis.
You can flee the first encounter safely, but not the second.
Second is a crystal bat with an “eye” that follows. You wander a bit and it goes away. I’m not sure if it has a particular effect in a particular room, or if you’re meant to leverage it to help with a puzzle.
The only item I’ve found (other than the shale) is a sling. You might think the sling would help with either encounter; I can SHOOT SHALE but either “IT LANDS HARMLESSLY SEVERAL YARDS FROM YEN’S FEET” (with the bat) or “TOO LATE!” (with the Garthim; I suspect you can only run).
It may be that both encounters are meant simply to be avoided. With things mapped out it isn’t necessary to hang out long, but I truly am stuck so I don’t want to discount anything. My only two potential points of progress are a chasm…
…and a GREAT RIVER with a SWIFT CURRENT that may not be traversable at all.
There are a couple more places where I am suspicious there is more to do, most primarily a hill with LANDSTRIDERS. You can type RIDE LANDSTRIDERS and the response is “THEY KEEP THEIR DISTANCE AND WON’T LET JEN APPROACH”.
This also shows the bat, which is following along.
There’s also some ruins with two flat stones that look like they ought to mean something but stubbornly refuse to be helpful.
You can try to CLIMB TREE in some places, and I’ve also found spots where TAKE FLOWER and TAKE LILY work, but none have been helpful either.
This is suspicious, at least.
I won’t discount a random seemingly-bland filler room containing a secret item (like with the SHALE) so I need to comb over everything again carefully. Despite the negative parts (bizarre opening where you can get lost and lose right away, rapid disk swaps from just moving around the landscape) the art is genuinely pleasant at times and I do get the vibe of Weird I got from the original Dark Crystal. Mind you, I could just keep the movie playing and it’d get all the way to the end without me understanding everything, and here that likely is not the case.
Hopefully over the chasm next time!
Still noticeably Sierra with the occasional jank, like the Pod People faces from earlier, but the professional artists help immensely.
Renga in Blue 
Funnily enough, in the Atari magazine ANALOG Computing #13 (September/October 1983), Sierra’s Dark Crystal game was reviewed by future Infocom & LucasArts designer Brian Moriarty:
https://archive.org/details/analog-computing-magazine-13/page/n66/mode/1up
nice! (I’m going to save looking at it until after I’m done with the game, it’s better to compare against my own opinion, but I was already thinking about doing a compare-and-contrast conclusion since there’s enough reactions out there)
I’ve played this game, but it was a long time ago and I remember nothing about how to solve it. In the movie the Crystal Bats are basically the Skeksis’ spy drones and a character knocks one out of the sky by slinging a stone at it, so I would guess that is possible here and either you just haven’t done it correctly, or it’s not Jen but another character who does it.
First is a Gathrim
Garthim.
It looks like SLING OBJECT work but nothing I have brings the eye down
PEBBLE is a recognized noun but I can’t find one anyhwere
There’s at least one other instance of “gathrim” that you didn’t fix yet.
If a bat sees you for a sufficient number of consecutive turns, a garthim will appear. The bats are always pretty high overhead, though, so if you can get under cover (in a cave or forest or whatever) the bat will get bored and go away.
Did you try to CUT LILY with shale?
I did (about an hour after making this post) and yes, that one’s right
don’t know what to do with the lily pad though
Hm, not having read the next post, I wonder if it could be ridden in the rushing stream.
(Confession: I’m leaving this comment partly to check whether I can comment under my WordPress ID.)
Pingback: The Dark Crystal: They Lit the Fires of Prophecy and Took Counsel From the Flames | Renga in Blue
Hi Jason, super excited to follow this one. I played this as a kid. First, an interesting but unrelated tidbit. A few years back I looked up Ken and Roberta’s Coarsegold, CA house on one of the real estate sites (e.g. Zillow). I was able to find interior photos of the house and they actually have stained glass at the front door of the Dark Crystal.
Also I was an am a big fan of the original movie. I don’t think it’s unfair to have watched the full film before playing the game because most likely that was the intent. However I do remember becoming quite frustrated by aspects of the game which did not follow the movie and this made the puzzles more frustrating. I specifically remember the moment where Jen arrives at Aughra’s observatory and is caught by vines. In the film this resolves without Jen having to do anything but I believe there is an action you have to take in the game to progress. I also remember a similar issue outside the castle of the dark Crystal. In the film I believe they just find a small entrance but in the game there’s a puzzle in place. I can definitely see Roberta’s logic at play in these cases. I personally remember being frustrated by these experiences because I felt the game should be following the film.
Lastly with regard to the art, that’s super interesting that the Henson team provided the artwork to Sierra. Of course it makes a lot of sense considering the amateurish artwork all of their prior games had. It’s also interesting that The dark Crystal Marks the end of Sierra’s “Hi-Res Adventure” series. I have to wonder how Ken and Roberta were going to move forward without a team of Henson artists assisting them. It would be interesting to know if this was part of the drive that pushed them towards King’s quest.
regarding watching the movie first: if you watch that video I linked, the interviewer asks the specific question about watching the movie first or playing the game first, and roberta williams responds you can do either
So I’m testing that statement specifically
I was planning on putting the stained glass picture in one of my later (the last?) posts
Yes I read that comment from Roberts but was just offering my perspective from someone who played this game and was a fan of the film at the time both were released. There’s certainly value in testing that claim since the game was designed by those who were familiar with the movie. But I have to wonder how many 1983 Apple ][ nerds had not seen The Dark Crystal. Seems like it would be a near 100% venn diagram overlap to me.
Completely fair! It’s interesting how much conversation there was around the idea at the time (including “how close should a movie game be to the movie”).
As I recall, The Dark Crystal was not hugely successful on release, and gained its following later via home video. So it’s not unreasonable that there would be a significant number of people who hadn’t yet seen the film, but who were willing to take a chance on any high-end adventure game that was commercially released
When you get to King’s Quest, it would be interesting to hear about the transition from this game. I have to imagine they had a subsequent Hi-Res Adventure idea in place butvthey had to be thinking “how can we go back to stick figures with smiley faces”. At the very least they would have to have hired professional artists to keep up with the Henson standard and I wonder if that entered their discussion. Ken does reply to emails so you could ask him, but when I emailed him a link to your Time Zone blog he said to me effectively “the artwork holds up”. Which indicates to me that perhaps they may not have had the self awareness (or artistic chops) to objectively criticize their own work.
Have you ever come across any interviews on their ideas about this?
I have not researched too deeply yet. But one interesting data point is that this was only sort-of their last Hi-Res Adventure game. Mickey’s Space Adventure (designed by Roberta Williams) seems to have come _after_ King’s Quest (even though most players didn’t have a PCjr so couldn’t play) but has the usual third-person screens similar to Dark Crystal. Different interface (they’d experiment with Black Cauldron too) with picking words off a menu. However, the graphics on that one look actually normal:
https://www.mobygames.com/game/7273/mickeys-space-adventure/screenshots/
even has Terry Pierce on the art team, who had done the lion’s share of Time Zone
Very interesting… That would seem to reinforce this idea that K&R were conscious of the idea that they had to one-up themselves by not going back to producing games with smiley-faced stick figures.
If you look at Sierra’s library you see lots of stodgy non-innovation. For example the Hi-Res Adventure era is basically the same style of game reskinned. Their contemporaries were adding things like spot animations, beautiful graphics with penguin software, and infocom’s parser was stunning. Dark Crystal is hardly innovative when you had Rick Incrocco’s gorgeous work a year before.
But then consider the King’s Quest era- yes they created a new standard which is certainly an achievement. But they effectively did the same thing that they did with Hi-Res Adventure. They created a system and effectively reskinned it multiple times. This era played with the form more (I remember Manhunt being quite unusual for the time. But I’d argue that it took Monkey Island to “correct” everything that was stodgy and problematic with Sierra’s games, which they likely never saw as problems themselves.
I’ve never heard K&R directly address the impact Monkey Island has on them personally (especially Roberta). If you do end up interviewing them for a future blog post, please pose this question to them 🙏
I assume you mean The Muppet Movie!
I think I had “based on the Muppet Show” at one point but it went awry in editing. Thanks.