We all remember 2020, right? I’m told the world was hit with some sort of virus and everybody had to stay at home. Weren’t allowed to touch each other, visit, or even breathe in someone’s general direction.
That’s what they tell me. I didn’t really notice, because I’m not a very social person. The only thing I noticed was that I suddenly had a lot more time for video games. The important people at my job weren’t sure how to handle the situation yet either, and since we spend a lot of time packed together in TV control rooms, a lot of clients cancelled.
For me, this meant I was playing games faster than they could make them and I suddenly ran out of stuff to play. I looked around for a bit and saw my girlfriend’s copy of 50 Shades Of Grey lying on her desk.
“I used to write stuff,” I thought, “I can do that and do it better.”
Yeah, turns out I can’t. That’s not to say I didn’t have a lot of fun. I was writing so fast that in record time I wound up with 900 pages of breasts and drivel. It yielded some fun characters and maybe someday I’ll go back to put them in something readable, but once again, I saw this for the bad idea it was.
Still, it got the machine creaking into motion again and I began to think of a better story I could maybe write. Make a real plan, instead of aimless meandering in the hope a story will appear.
Hey, so, do you want artificial suspense here? I can do some, but it seems a little pointless. We both know I’m about to think of the game I tried to write in 2016. I’m just gonna go ahead and skip the suspense-nonsense.
I had half a story ready. Seemed like quite enough runway to take off from.
Turns out adventure games don’t translate to books as easily as you’d think. Many of the puzzles I had devised didn’t work in book form. A lot of times, book-Eddie went back and forth between the same two locations to get a puzzle done, which, if read instead of played, is just tedious.
For the sake of brevity, a lot of quests had to be cut too. I particularly liked one where Eddie has to get across a bridge to a fantasy fair, but is blocked by, of course, a troll who later turns out to be Christa. The real joke there was that you could offer her a dead herring you found in the lake (if you’ve played the first Monkey Island, you’ll know). Obviously, she doesn’t want some smelly fish you’ve been keeping in your pocket. To cross the bridge, you have to help her get a date with the receptionist from Century Motors.
That whole storyline had to be cut, which is why you’re wondering if I didn’t mean the receptionist of Phoebe Insurances. Nope. Nita Perez didn’t make the cut, and I still wound up with 120k of words.