Like many ’90s adventure games, DreamForge’s small team had created the point-and-click horror adventure Sanitarium, but little did they know what they were doing.
Most of them had just graduated from art school, and the studio leader was a little older. When the game debuted in his 1998, the narrative-driven horror market was already filled with Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, Phantasmagoria, and The 7th Guest. sanatorium (opens in new tab) It was a little different. It was within the still familiar and tried-and-true adventure genre that DreamForge had already experienced (veil of darkness It was the first other big horror hit), but it had a psychological peg.
Sanitarium was one of the first point-and-click adventures I played that felt like a natural extension of 80’s and early 90’s pop culture. A true product of its time, it pays homage to everything from classic sci-fi to old Zippy. pinhead comics.
The journey begins with a jarring opening cinematic of a man in a horrific car accident (originally from Metallica’sWelcome home (sanatorium)I had hoped the team would be able to get the rights to the song, but very sadly it didn’t happen. Max wakes up in a sanitarium. Afterwards, you find yourself tumbling down a rabbit hole of a fantasy “episode” or realm where you must struggle to understand your identity, your trauma, and how to deal with it. Hmm. escape.
The problem is that Max doesn’t really know what’s true and what’s not.
After the game shipped, DreamForge’s new staff reached out to writer/artist/designer Mike Nicholson to tell him how much he appreciated the circular room design and its relationship to psychological theory. “I wanted to take the compliment, but unfortunately I had to explain that the only reason the opening was circular was because when I first started designing the space, it was rectangular.” Nicholson says. “Our boss saw it and said the square play space was too old/traditional for isometric adventure games. To appease him, we redesigned the area to be a large circle instead. did.”
According to Nicholson, Sanitarium was a true case of a group of young developers with little or no experience who decided to create a fun game they wanted to play themselves. We didn’t really have a standard playtesting methodology at the time, so we relied on each other to tweak the game.
Nicholson, who was working for a small advertising agency in Pittsburgh in 1994, said: A then-girlfriend found an ad for a local computer his game developer while job hunting on a job ad. “They were looking for a fantasy artist to create art for video games. No experience required,” he says. “I went to the interview with a sketchbook and enthusiasm. Thankfully, those days were enough to get me in the door. I felt like I had found a winning lottery ticket. In many ways, I am now But I feel it, just like I did.”
The Sanitarium team just met after hours to discuss common interests and what kind of game they wanted to make. They loved “the episodic and highly creative side of the classic Twilight Zone” and “Jacobs his Ladder-like spooky film.” Ultimately, they came up with the idea of a hub-based story and were able to really expand the themes and locations.
My favorite chapter of the game was The Hive. It’s a far-future alien landscape filled with meaty organic gristle and insect cybernetics (where there’s bugs, of course, there’s also the obligatory Starship his trooper quotes). The characters here have an almost claymation-style quality. most gorgeous puzzle Never seen an adventure game before. This started as Nicholson inks one of his drawings before the art team converted it to his 3D. “I wanted to design a puzzle that fits in that area. I liked the idea of light passing through an insect’s wings to reveal a pattern,” he says.
At the time, Dreamforge was located in Janet, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. famous glass factory Its abandoned ruins served as the driving force behind several scenes in the game. Janet was, in Nicholson’s words, “a gloomy little town,” and the haunting specter of the giant desolate Janet Glassworks felt like it affected the team’s commute.
On one of the dark drives home, Nicholson eventually came up with the concept of a cross-sectional dollhouse diorama for the game’s mansion chapter. choking.
“Inspiration always comes, I honestly can’t remember why, but it was one of those late night drives,” he says. “The next day, I took the idea to the team and they loved it. It’s been a development experience and that’s probably why I still remember the day.”
Sanatoriums don’t always reach these highs. It’s not a bastion of realism when it comes to the minutiae of ancient Aztec culture or mental health. In 1998, the games industry was still relatively new, experimenting with evolving visual technologies, evolving practices, and storytelling techniques. All of this makes the Sanitarium a truly fascinating time capsule of the very distinct clusters of interests and influences that have entered it.
“Our research was frankly pretty shallow,” admits Nicholson with a laugh. He also remembers having difficulty finding publishers that were open to accepting an essentially “faceless” protagonist. “At one point, Max’s head was wrapped in bandages so players could not identify with Max’s main character, and it was suggested that they be removed. You can imagine our reaction to
When I ask Nicholson what he could have done differently, the first thing he says is that he would have had real management training himself. It’s a real miracle that the game crossed the finish line,” he says. “I have benefited from the otherworldly and definitely unwarranted patience from the team and studio leadership, for which I am forever grateful.”
Creatively, he wanted to dig deeper.
“My sense of design was based almost entirely on my previous life experiences, and when I started at 28, it certainly wasn’t that much,” he says. Then, narratively, I think it has more scope and depth of characterization.” After that, Nicholson focused on UI/UX work. He spent his 14 years at Blizzard working on his UI for Diablo 3 and the art for other games. He still keeps adventure games up to date.
“I enjoyed designing and presenting the narratives of games such as The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and What Remains of Edith Finch.” In the meantime, Sanitarium stands as an unparalleled example of late 90s game art, unafraid of being weird and raising the aesthetic bar for the entire adventure genre.
The Hive scene of the antagonist Gromna giving his “televised” speech is a good one, complete with footage of a fascist rally flanked by a giant translucent bee torso.
In the town of June, the portrait of each mutant child was a labor of love.
And a bed of writhing maggots. A thick door lock puzzle studded with transparent slime pods.
Revisiting this strange and messy realm (an almost visual anthology with ways to navigate through different themes and styles) is a breath of fresh, rotten air and a welcome introduction to a game world where photorealism is better. Well worth remembering if you’ve never felt that way.