Alone in the Dark

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".

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.

> 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?

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

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.

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.

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.)

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Then they immediate ruined the franchise with the second.