The Making Of: The X-Files

Veteran game designer Greg Roach muses thoughtfully on the past. ”There was a time,” he tells us, “when ‘interactive movie’ wasn’t a dirty word.” Back in the 1990s, when CD-ROMs were cool and gamers were still being seduced by the siren call of full-motion video clips, Roach was one of the pioneers in his field. Called “the Steven Spielberg of multimedia,” the Texan theatre director turned videogame designer believed that games could do something deeper than just “give someone sweaty palms or throw a bunch of silly-assed puzzles at them.”HyperBole had offices in Seattle. In the lobby stood a huge reproduction of Salvador Dali’s canvas The Hallucinogenic Toreador. “It was the first thing you saw when you stepped off the elevator,” says Roach, “and I’d often ask new hires to meditate on it.” With its array of optical tricks, it was a fitting totem. Here was a videogame company that believed full-motion video (FMV) could make art.But in videogames, much like cinema, art is often mediated by the demands of commerce. Traditionally it’s a fight that leaves most creative talents feeling decidedly bruised. When Quantum Gate, an avant-garde interactive sci-fi movie, was first released, HyperBole’s publisher Media Vision wasn’t happy. “They said to us, literally: ‘We want more guns and tits in the title’,” Roach says.Convinced that interactive cinema should privilege character and emotion over assault rifles, he despaired. He wanted to make movies you could live inside, worlds that wrapped around players’ heads. So when Fox Interactive called looking for someone to make the first X-Files game, he jumped at the chance.It’s 1994 and Roach is sitting in a boardroom at Twentieth Century Fox with Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files. The cult TV show is only in its second series, but it’s already snowballing into a phenomenon. FBI agents Mulder and Scully are becoming household names. Viewing figures are rocketing, and Fox Interactive wants a tie-in game.http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont...-X-Files-5.jpgOnce again, not everyone is happy, least of all Carter. “In our first meeting, we sat down with Chris Carter, producer Frank Spotnitz and all the reps from Fox Interactive,” Roach remembers. “The first words out of Chris’s mouth were ‘What can you do that I can’t?’ I thought, how the **** do I answer this without totally blowing it?” After Roach explained that he wouldn’t presume to write an X-Files TV episode, but that he did know how to craft an interactive experience, the atmosphere softened. Carter, intrigued by the potential of FMV, agreed to write a plot outline for the game.Development took four years and $6m, a significant investment for Fox. What sold the publisher was HyperBole’s proprietary VirtualCinema system. “It was primarily a media engine,” explains Jason VandenBerghe, a programmer on The X-Files Game, “a set of scripting tools to let you do point-and-click adventure games, but with full rich media. It’s like the Avid editor for games. You didn’t have to be a programmer to use it because you could do all the gameplay logic inside the engine, assemble different types of media clips and have them play at different places.”Unlike many FMV games, which often used live action as nothing more than wallpaper backdrops, The X Files presented you with a universe to explore. It was a fully fledged world that felt like stepping into one of the TV show’s episodes. Playing as FBI Agent Craig Willmore you’re tasked with tracking down Mulder and Scully who’ve vanished, mid-case. Using stitched-together JPEG images, the game lets you explore locations Myst-style, but with more human protagonists to interact with.“If traditional film is a river, the viewer of that film sits on the bank and watches the water flow by,” says Roach. “We wanted to take that viewer and turn them into a fish and put them down into that river.” A sense of agency was pivotal. Guiding Willmore through this rich media world, you can interrogate supporting characters and employ equipment from lock picks to a trusty Newton PDA. Find a document with a phone number on it and you can call it. Pull a gun on assistant director Skinner and he’ll be spectacularly unimpressed.

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