From the 1983 Sierra Hi-Res Adventure catalog, via Sierra Chest. The Dark Crystal is the last of the series.
Last time I had jumped into the chasm/the last disk side of the game.
I’ve also watched the movie now, so I can compare a little: figuring out to jump here would have been easier from the movie. There was a vague hint in the game about the wings from the prophecy wall, but the graphics didn’t make it super clear; I had originally just thought it would end in a “you landed on X fantasy critter which let you fall safely” result. It’s not much better in the movie, though! The wings appear for the first time in the falling scene, and when Jen asks about why he doesn’t have wings and Kira does, Kira points out of course he doesn’t, he’s a boy. And that’s the only time the wings appear and that’s all that is said about them. (I’m jumping ahead a little, but by the end I wasn’t thrilled with the game generally, and while I think while some of this is the fault of Sierra, some is the fact that the movie they’re adapting often just has things happen. It’s non-optimal for an adventure conversion where understanding the circumstances is key to figuring out puzzles.)
The movie’s design had unexpected lore pop up whenever it was needed. It’s fair to treat this as a stylistic choice, but it’s hard to cope with in adventure game form.
Landing, Jen and Kira are at a stone face. You can circle around the castle (east or west) to find a second stone face. The choice of face is simply based on the symbol seen on the prophecy panel.
Wrong.
Right. Just differentiating a binary choice doesn’t make for a great puzzle.
Things get worse from here, as there’s a locked door that can’t be reached because of some bars.
THE “TEETH” OF THE STONE MONSTER ARE ACTUALLY THE METAL BARS OF A GATE. JUST OUT OF REACH BEHIND THE BARS IS A CLOSED DOOR.
This is the worst puzzle in the game. At least conceptually I got what to do next: we can’t reach through the bars, but we’re holding someone small (Fizzgig) so they should go through instead. However, no command I attempted worked to try to get Fizzgig in (see the growling on my second screenshot). I finally gave up and checked hints again, and found the right command was SEND FIZZGIG.
Argh! Again we have an “isolate”, a verb I’ve never seen before in an adventure and there’s a fair chance I will never see it again. The troubles aren’t over yet, though.
WHERE DOES JEN WANT TO SEND HIM?
You can’t type IN BARS (like the manual specifies) or BARS. You have to instead type SEND BARS. This is the most absurd parser command in the entire Hi-Res Adventure catalog. It’s not over yet, though! Fizzgig comes back with a key, but the door is described as “just out of reach”. UNLOCK DOOR? No. UNLOCK BARS? No. You need to USE KEY, then OPEN BARS.
This is followed by a set of tunnels that serve no purpose other than filling space.
This was fairly standard for Time Zone — and sometimes even kind of worked to give a sense of atmosphere — but here, despite the graphic quality, this really comes off as designed for a different game.
Expressive hand-drawn characters encountering a dead end.
Once in the right spot, things are back on track with the movie as the Chamberlain appears, who drops rubble on Jen and takes Kira.
Heading south (now alone) again follows the movie as Jen encounters a Garthim nest.
Again, the parser is highly irritating here. I tried all possible directions (N/S/E/W/U/D) and failed to escape. I finally broke down and checked hints again (my resistance being much lighter by now) and found out RUN is now suddenly special, and is given without specifying a direction. (I want to emphasize RUN otherwise says IN WHICH DIRECTION DOES JEN WISH TO GO?, strongly implying it isn’t really understanding the word.) The Garthim smash a hole that Jen can then escape out of (GO HOLE).
In the movie, while all this is happening, SkekNa, the Skeksis slave master, is trying to drawn Kira’s life essence in a room full of caged animals; Aughra is in the same room (also caged up) and encourages her to talk to the animals, who escape and attack, eventually causing the downfall of SkekNa. By my subjective opinion (just rewatching it yesterday) it is the best moment of the movie, having one of the characters (Kira) use an ability that was fully introduced earlier (talking to animals) combined with help from another character.
None of this happens in the game. Aughra is tied up and Jen can untie her, but there’s no particular drama here:
Again, to be fair, Jen doesn’t do much other than run from things, so with the game switched to his perspective only, that’s about all that’s possible. Past Aughra is another scene where you need to RUN…
…and after a couple more steps evading Skeksis, you can come across a SCEPTER which will be useful shortly…
..and the Skeksis, eating food.
GO CURTAIN (fortunately strongly implied) lets Jen get close enough to hear, where for some reason they talk about a secret passage in a tower. The tower in question is not that far away, and as long as you’ve heard the conversation, a panel will be available. In order to reach it, you need to LOOK SCEPTER, then refer specifically to the HOOK, because why not put yet another parser headache in at the end of the game.
USE HOOK reveals a passage to the Great Conjunction ritual with the Skeksis and Kira.
Following the movie (and fortunately clear even just playing the game) the right command is JUMP. Ads for the game even show Jen sitting on the crystal so it is a fairly iconic pose.
The crystal goes flying, and Kira goes to throw it back, but the RITUAL-MASTER warns Kira she will die if she throws it.
The right response here is to say NO. Kira throws the crystal to Jen, gets stabbed, and Jen can now insert the crystal…
…causing the Skeksis to transform into the urSkeks, and Kira is dead, or well, “dead”. The final command to win is KISS KIRA.
In the movie, things make a little more sense: early on, the Mystics all travel together slowly to the castle, clearly driven by some sense of ritual. They arrive right at the Great Conjunction and when the crystal is healed they merge back into the Skeksis, which is how the urSkeks get made.
From the Dark Crystal Wiki.
The two races have been separated since the damage to the stone, the Mystics (the urSu) moving to the Valley of the Stones to seal themselves in safety for a thousand years. I have some issues with the movie but this cycle ends up being suitably epic; it’s hard to understand what’s going on with the game without the context.
This isn’t quite the weakest of the Hi-Res games, but I think it is the weakest of the ones designed by Roberta Williams. Her style really lends itself to a more exploratory structure, and the part of the game I enjoyed myself most was the middle section where I was discovering new things in the landscape; with the highly linear series of events loosely following the movie, it most ran head-first into the twin issues of boring puzzles and the bad parser. There were some high aspirations; Cerf called the player both the “hero” and “a kind of movie director”. Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough flexibility for that to really hold out, and I struggled to find any extra “fun” actions or extra routes to take.
The only moment I could find in the later part of the game.
I don’t think the movie adventure-game concept is untenable; Lucasarts with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade did a serviceable (even excellent) job of it, but Indiana Jones is full of both action and the possibility of alternate routes. When Indy fails to bluff the butler at the castle and punches him instead (movie version) you can do the bluff successfully. When Hitler signs the Grail diary (in movie), in game you can trick him into signing a travel pass instead making later parts of the game easier. It’s possible to get the Grail back to the Grail Knight at the end without any destruction. I don’t think Roberta Williams would have knocked things out of the park given easier-to-work with source material (not Jen Runs Away From Things: The Movie), but The Dark Crystal may have been just the wrong outlet for a movie game (or at least following the script — maybe a prequel would be better, along the lines of the recent Age of Resistance series on Netflix).
While The Dark Crystal was being wrapped up, IBM was already in contact with Sierra and work was starting for a new project for the upcoming PCjr computer: King’s Quest. Not long after, Sierra would take another whack at a movie game (The Black Cauldron) so we’ll see if King’s Quest’s environmental style makes for a more compelling delivery method.
The front door of the Williams’s custom-built house made around the time of the game. I’m not sure it’s accurate to say they were apathetic about it given the stained glass. Source.
To continue directly from last time, I had unearthed a spiral but with some confusion as to what to do with it.
One of my readers (RavenWorks) suggested GAZE off my verb list, referencing the odd reaction where Jen was refusing to look at it closely.
This was easy to miss, and someone who later is trying to solve the riddle “legit” (by thinking what normal word might be an answer) would get incredibly frustrated.
From here I got stuck for a very long time and I ended up breaking my streak on Roberta Williams games: I looked up a hint. (I beat Mystery House, Mission: Asteroid, and Time Zone without needing any. Alas.) It turned out that back where the lily pad could be cut (we’ll use that shortly) there is another secret.
I had tried GET FLOWER and got the same response I had gotten in some other locations that mention flowers, namely:
JEN PICKS A FLOWER AND SAVORS ITS LOVELY FRAGRANCE. NOTICING NOTHING ELSE REMARKABLE ABOUT IT, HE DROPS IT.
I was still slightly suspicious of the flowers, but I had treated “chattering” as a mere metaphor (like a “babbling” brook). I should have done TALK FLOWERS.
To be fair, just to the west there is a scene with “THE CHATTERING OF FLOWERS AND CALLING OF CREATURES IS ALMOST DEAFENING”. LISTEN FLOWERS also gives the message (in both rooms) “WITH THEM ALL TALKING AT ONCE, HE CAN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY ARE SAYING.” I guess it’s a “fair” puzzle but it was a very strange one (in terms of narrative momentum) to be stuck for several hours on.
Taking the advice to listen to the brook:
This is just directions. Normally going EAST and then EAST again has the path blocked by foliage, but after hearing from the brook, the path is open.
Trying to go farther north (following the directions of the brook) the game says “THE SWAMP LOOKS DEEP AND DANGEROUS” and that it appears suicidal to attempt a crossing. I had already tried RIDE PAD earlier with the river; this is the real place to use it. After using it to swim across it floats away (one less inventory item to test everywhere, good).
Going north and then west gets the player stuck in a bog; that’s a good place to go, but it’s too early. You’re supposed to instead go north and east (the last part of the directions) and get caught in some vines.
After several moves, Aughra appears.
You can SAY YES followed by typing MOON DAUGHTER. Imagine being stuck at this point!
She leads you/Jen north to her observatory, where she asks what you want. Hopefully players paid attention during that info-dump at the start so they know to SAY SHARD. She will put four colored shards up on the table, and say that she doesn’t know which is the real one. Finally, my obsessive playing of the flute pays off.
I vaguely recall something like this happened in the movie, but I don’t recall detail. I’m still waiting until I finish the game to go back to rewatch.
That’s three puzzles in a row that require a piece of information or item from somewhere that isn’t trivial to get:
a.) first, the lily pad for swimming obtained by cutting the stem
b.) then, the riddle answer obtained from an extremely random spot in the game (the spiral hidden under moss), where it seems like you ought to answer the riddle normally
c.) then, the flute which is buried and which I got via luck.
The linear structure with secret requirements is rather different from the previous Roberta Williams games. You could argue the entirety of Time Zone was a treasure hunt intended to allow making it through a long linear set of puzzles in the finale, but it is clear from the start you’re going to need to build up a collection; here, it is unclear if such a hunt is needed in the first place. This really comes into focus with the next puzzle: after you get the shard, the observatory is attacked. You have one move to react.
I tried some natural and intuitive ways to escape, but failed to have any luck, so I spent some time combing over locations for yet another missed item. (What’s especially suggestive is that the eye-bat shows up when you land after passing through the swamp using the pad; I thought maybe I needed to kill the bat so the enemies wouldn’t show up after, leading me on a fruitless hunt for slingshot ammo.)
It turned out an early command I tried (CLIMB WINDOW) was right. I was just supposed to type GO WINDOW instead.
Since the pad is gone Jen can’t swim back, so the only choice is the bog where Jen gets stuck. Fortunately, there’s help this time.
I knew immediately this had to be Kira, but assuming someone who hasn’t seen the movie at all, they’d have trouble here because her (and her pet Fizzgig) don’t get mentioned in the text. I imagined I was a player who didn’t know her name and finally hit upon LOOK GELFLING.
After the rescue: “I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY LIVING GELFLING. BUT THEN, I GUESS YOU MUST HAVE THOUGHT THE SAME THING!”
The remainder of my gametime has Jen and Kira travelling together, and all commands affect both of them. This is very, very, unconventional, although it works; I never got confused because of the dual-person controls, although I was a bit boggled by the fact that all the previous scenes (barring the opening area blocked off) get re-rendered with both characters in them.
This is emphasized by the very next act, which requires flipping a shell, and the game states it is too heavy for just Jen to move, and both Jen and Kira need to work together to FLIP SHELL. This reveals a pouch of “SMOKE SEEDS”, and the shell itself can be used as a boat.
The two land in the village from earlier, and while the scene shows merriment, a bat also shows up; the player needs to type EAST or WEST (or some direction to leave) quickly enough and they’ll be able to escape. When they come back the village is destroyed.
I could make fun of how blasé this is (especially with the commands just being one to leave, one to go right back), but track back to all our previous adventure games (1982 and before): when have any tried to do a moment like this? Nobody — not even Infocom, yet — had previously had a main character have everyone they grew up with suddenly get suddenly wiped out (or at least captured). The closest I can think of is Saigon: The Final Days. So while to modern eyes this seems clumsy, I do want to emphasize it was getting into new game design territory (in order to follow the plot of the movie, I assume).
For some reason, having Kira with us makes the Landstriders friendly enough to ride, but before I show that, I want to mention one of the other scenes has a difference:
A Skeksis appears and says he is tired of killing and wants peace, and says to follow him south.
Ha ha no of course not. Fortunately you can just avoid going south and you won’t have the death scene (alternately, do the ruin viewing before the chaos starts).
Hopping on our new rides (no explanation is given why they are fine with being ridden now, I assume Kira helped):
The Landstriders easily make it over the chasm. This then leads to a long and I think empty span of rooms.
This seems to be reaching back to Time Zone rather than forward to King’s Quest. The art is atmospheric, at least.
Fizzgig looks unhappy.
Eventually you come across a combination castle/ravine that you can circle all the way around if you like, but must eventually approach.
Approaching results in another Gathrim attack, and then you only have one turn to react. If you do poorly, you get a front-line seat at the Great Conjunction.
Maybe I can call this BAD END and end the game here?
It took me a beat to realize Jen and Kira are near the ravine so the right action is to JUMP. This causes a disk swap to the final side.
I assume this will be the final stretch, so … one more post? Two? It depends if I have to talk to any more flowers.
Since we’ve run into a Skeksis in-game now, I wanted to show this. The illustration comes from Leonard B. Lubin, via a book of Lewis Carroll poems. This was Jim Henson’s original inspiration in 1975. “It was the juxtaposition of this reptilian thing in this fine atmosphere that intrigued me.”
I have attracted a few readers who are interested in The Dark Crystal (the movie) and maybe don’t know about The Dark Crystal (the game) and are new to this blog. So to clarify for their benefit: I am doing a playthrough where I blog about every step; because this is an adventure game, sometimes I make a lot of progress, sometimes I make very little, but I still find documenting either is important in that it encompasses the real experience of playing adventure games circa 1983. This is still before Sierra had official hint books.
I did not make much progress, but I still have a lot of details to go through and theories.
The first thing I tried was simply to replay from the beginning to see if there were any details I missed. The stones that I ended my post with do have a description…
…and that description is meant to indicate the tree is something important.
I’d like to say I thought through in the same direction as Roberta Williams, but in the end I was simply using my regular adventurer reflexes built over time. While in the cave mucking about with the urSu scene again I tried DIG just in case there was some secret item left over, and the game responded:
USING THE SHALE, JEN DIGS IN THE GROUND FOR AWHILE, BUT FINDS NOTHING.
Huh. Sometimes “you dig around a bit and don’t find anything” is just the author’s way of putting off a common verb, but in this case specifically holding the shale enabled (for me, inadvertently) the act of digging, so that meant digging had to be relevant somewhere. I thus went about digging every single room I had accessible in the game, and as part of that I hit that tree.
The shadow graphics even kind of point at the digging spot.
The flute from the start of the movie! I had been wondering where that ran off to. I do want to emphasize I solved this purely by lawnmowering and only realized a clue was intended after the fact.
I think I’m otherwise finished with the starting area, but I can’t be 100% sure. However, for now I went to the area past and tried DIG and PLAY FLUTE in every single room, with no use at all. Still, I eventually unearthed some interesting spots on the map, which I have marked below.
Blue indicates points of interest. Green marks points of interest where I haven’t gotten anything to happen.
The southmost point is at the lily pad I was suspicious of: “VERY THICK STEMS” where “TRY AS HE MIGHT, JEN CANNOT TEAR ONE OF THE PADS LOOSE.” I realized not long after hitting “send” on my last post that the shale is described as sharp, so I ought to be able to apply it to cut the pad.
This landed a LILY PAD in my inventory that is described as having a “THICK, RUBBERY FEEL”. I thought briefly it might work as a raft on the flowing river but no verb I tried worked, even though FLOAT is an accepted verb.
While I’m at it, I should mention I did create my verb list. The game boots on the first side of the first disk (1A), the early area and the wilderness before the Pod Person town is on the back side of the first disk (1B). The disk swap then requires flipping to 2A (second disk, front side), and I assume 2B has the end parts of the game. I mention this because in Time Zone the verbs were not consistent between the disks, but here I think they might all be from the same set:
I tested every verb on the list; green means they were understood by the parser. The oddball I have marked in blue — UNTIE — seems to be a bug:
JEN SHOUTS, “HELP!” UNFORTUNATELY, HIS CALL IS NOT ANSWERED.
You can get the same result from HELP.
While some of the verbs are clearly “fake” (CRAWL, ENTER, JUMP, and LEAVE all ask what direction, but the game is just steering you to the fact it wants cardinal movement directions) this is still a quite substantial list. Working my way up to where the SLING is just lying on the ground, I went through all the possibilities to try to get the sling to work with the shale, but no dice.
IT LANDS HARMLESSLY SEVERAL YARDS FROM JEN’S FEET
I tried this on the flying eye in particular (which really seemed begging for a good sniping)…
…but I always got the same result. With a little noun-hunting (trying to GET items that aren’t there to see if the parser at least understands them) I found this game has the existence of a PEBBLE, but I have no idea where it is.
(And yes, Jen comes from the Valley of the Stones. No good-sized pebbles around? This is worse than the quest for a ladder in Time Zone; at least in that game, one gets a sense that you have to follow the unspoken “rules of the time machine” for it to operate properly which is why you can’t just swing by a store and pick one up.)
The Village of the Pod People, incidentally, gets a few interesting reactions:
You can TALK PEOPLE and get the information that the name they call themselves is APOPIAPOIPIDIAPPIDIDIAPIAPOH, which translates into “master gardeners who live in bulging plants”.
This is the only place I’ve found (so far) DANCE will work. (“WHY NOT? ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKE JEN A DULL GELFLING.”)
This is the only place I’ve found (so far) SING will work.
Maybe it’s just here for color. Would Roberta Williams do that? (Given the amount of empty space and red herrings in Time Zone, yes she would.)
To the west of the village is a mossy rock, where you can de-moss it (GET MOSS) while holding the sharp shale to reveal an interesting spiral.
Rather cryptically, looking at the spiral then just gets the response that Jen “GLANCES BRIEFLY” at the spiral but “LOOKS AWAY WHEN HE FAILS TO NOTICE ANYTHING SPECIAL ABOUT IT.” The boulder is too heavy to move and you can’t take the spiral with you. Maybe it’s a hint to a direction puzzle later.
Just south of the boulder are the ruins I was having frustration with before. The room seemed significant (including two flat stones) but I couldn’t get any verbs to work. I returned with my full list in green and tried every single one before hitting paydirt with RIDE STONE. Hah! (Yes, SIT STONE works, it just counts as a synonym, but I found RIDE first.)
Examining the hieroglyphics gives mention of a two-pronged flute, a crystal shard, a female Gelfling, a castle, and a triangle in a circle. I suspect the triangle/circle combo will somehow be used later (I am already trying PLAY FLUTE in every single room so if it’s a clue as to where it gets used, I’m going to sweep it up by default anyway).
I got curious if this had an equivalent in the movie, since this seemed like a weirdly specific room. I’m still avoiding spoilers, but I managed via Internet search to hit a page on the official Dark Crystal site that explained:
When the Skeksis began to take Gelfling, as well as Pod People, as slaves, the Gelfling were dismayed. For once they thought of the future. The Gelfling sought to know if the Crystal might be healed and if the Skeksis rule must continue. They lit the fires of prophecy and took counsel from the flames. Seven circles of seven Gelfling lay on the hilltops all night; their faces to the stars. Their dreams were made of stone; the Wall of Destiny still stands.
In a history of game-design sense, I’d like to point out despite this first seemingly the Big Empty Grid passed down from Time Zone, this is much more dense, and in fact I’m started to be reminded more of the layout of the King’s Quest games (which all the way up through I to V had the landscape divided into a grid). Again, we seem to be closing in on the standard point-and-click layout, partly enabled by the use of Henson’s artists allowing for somewhat richer landscapes.
In terms of me being stuck, well, hmmf. I’ve still got the Landstriders who don’t want to be ridden…
The sound at the end is a Garthim barging in. I’ve started to suspect the Garthim attacks are evadable in a real time sense, that is, if you go in a direction fast enough you get away, and if you wait, you won’t. Which is sadly again like King’s Quest 1.
…and the eye that stubbornly refuses to be sniped, and the river that doesn’t want to be crossed, and the chasm, and the spiral (maybe), and the village. I still feel like I’m missing a piece. Even if I summon up the missing PEBBLE, will what I get from shooting down the eye really help with the other puzzles? I need to comb through the rooms again to check if I’m missing a detail.
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.
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.”
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.
…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 
