Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 250: Loom

Episode Date: October 4, 2019

As Lucasfilm Games began to refine their philosophy of fairness, designer Brian Moriarty doubled down on this concept with his idea of a video game expressly designed to be completed. This would eventually take the form of Loom, an adventure game far different than anything that would come before or after it. With no inventory, no verbs, and music as your only means of interacting with the world, Loom stands some 30 years later as an interesting evolutionary dead end for the genre. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey and Kat Bailey, and Duckfeed.tv's Gary Butterfield as the two explore one of LucasArts' less remembered adventures.

This week on Retronauts, you could ask us about Loom. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackie. And today's topic is the 1990 Lucasfilm Games adventure game Loom. Before I continue, who is our special guest for this episode? It's me, Gary, and then my last name is a part of a sewing machine that I had to look up. I'm not familiar with sewing terminology. I think I learned it all from Loom.

Yeah, we could ask about sewing terminology. I read it on a popular button. Popular button. Was it a singer? Yeah, yeah, probably. That's one. You know, I group around sewing machines. I can't tell you anything about them other than to stay away from them

because they look like they could hurt you. I am surprised. I think that the first time I tried to use one, I would definitely sew my hand into a shirt, a pretty grisly Buffalo Bill-esque experiment. Thankfully, Loom is a fairly, actually there's a lot of violence in Loom. We can get to that later. So, yes, I'm doing sort of an informal mini-series

about all of the LucasArts adventure games in no particular order. And this week's order is Loom, which is not anyone's favorite adventure game, but it is very beloved. And I believe, Gary, you told me you have a soft spot for Loom. Actually, this is the first time I played Loom was for this podcast. Yeah, I think it's no one's favorite, but it's many people's third favorite,

which kind of, you know, in a ranked voting system adds up to something. Yeah, it's not part of a series. I don't see a lot of Loom merch or Loom fan comics or memes or anything like that. But it is part of a very, very important legacy. Do you go back a long way with this game? Yeah, I play this when it came out. When I was kind of first exposed to adventure games, I had an uncle who had a PC

was growing up and got to play several of the classic Sierra and Lucas Arts games, as well as some legend entertainment kind of thing like Gateway, Chirandia, things like that, and played Loom then. And yeah, I just at the time, and my appreciation for it is only really grown

because it is, you know, the fact that it's not part of a series, It's not based on anything. It's its own weird little self-contained world and story. And I think that the interface that it uses is actually like pretty forward thinking in terms of how, you know, scum style interfaces would become simplified. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the design in particular is very self-contained too.

Like it didn't really go anywhere from here. But what it does in this game is super unique. And we can talk about that very soon. But for some basic details to give you guys context out there. So this game was released in January of 1990. for MSDOS and Mac and what's available to you out there on Steam is the talkie CD-ROM version

from 1992 and for some reason there is also a turbographic CD version. I don't know why that exists but that is actually where I found out about Lume. I had a Turbographic 16 and because I had that I was on a bunch of mailing list so they would always send me VHS tapes

and that was one of the tapes had like a clip of Lume on it which is amazing to me. But yeah, if you want to play this game get it on Steam but then download SCUM VM and play it through that because playing it through Steam, I don't know how they do it, but the interface is very bad. It puts a weird filter on things. Scum VM is free.

It has a lot of options for you to play these classic adventure games, so definitely try it that way. Yeah, and you can also put it on, you know, if you have a modded PSP, you can buy the game legally and play it on there, play it on the go. Oh, yeah, Scum VM is for, they've made a version for PSP as well. Mm-hmm. I forgot about that. But yeah, the version that's available now is weirdly based on the FM Towns version. FM Towns is a Japanese microcomputer and it actually makes a few edits

and changes to the original source material based on the creator's GDC talk it seems like the 16 color original 1990 release is the definitive version of this game which and that is not available in any form

legally you have to Google it or you have to you know have it and I mean it is three floppy disks worth of information so it's very easy to Pirates. So if you want to find it, I'm sure it's somewhere and easy to find. But if you want to pay six bucks first, I would just do that. Give Disney a little more money. They're starting a new project soon. They need the help. Like they've got a, you know, I'm hoping they succeed.

If we don't support them, they might not make it. But yeah, Disney does own Loon, by the way, as they own everything. But let's move on a less depressing stuff. So, as you said, Gary, it's a major deviation from LucasArts Adventure Games in general. Like, when you think of this era of games, you think of things like Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island and Day of the Tenicle, where there is a verb bar with a bunch of verbs. You click on things. You click on the verbs. You click on other things.

You form sentences in the game. And this was an evolution of the text parser from text adventure games. But in this game, that is completely out the window entirely. Your only means of input with the world is a distaff, which is actually a musical staff in the game that you play four-note songs on. And based on which songs you play, those are all different interactions with items in the world. Yeah, yeah. And those songs end up being verbs themselves. So in some ways, it is as limited as a regular scum engine, but allows some really tricky kind of things.

So, you know, certain verbs you'll have on the distaff. are palindromic so you cannot you know if you repeat that if you reverse them they're the same forward and backwards but you can do clever things like intuiting that the reverse of open is close yeah i guess you play those notes in a different order and that's kind of the the neat intuitive leap this asked you to do uh you know even before you get into kind of hearing very simple you know four note melodies and picking them out by ear which is you know as i came back to this as an adult and played an expert mode where you don't have the um the notes it was was very fun for me i i don't have an ear for that. I'm glad they gave me some assistance. But yeah, I guess you're right. The verbs

are hidden, but you have to figure them out through context in the game. Like, the first verb you learn or the first song you learn in the game is a song to make an egg hatch. And you have to figure out through the context of the game. Oh, that means open. And when I play it backwards, it means closed. So that is basically how you're taught songs in the game. Like a dripping water plays a song. That means empty. And playing it backwards means full. So it's in very clever ways it teaches you the standard adventure game verbs and terminology. Well, it teaches you. And then also, this is such a relic of its time because the original big box beautiful

version of it, not only came with the backstory, which I'm sure we'll talk about later, but also came with the Book of Patterns, which was this in-universe, kind of these lore descriptions of these different songs, including several that are not in the game, you know, with these kind of woodcut drawings from the history of this actually, like, really kind of rich and detailed original world here they would have and you could, you know, it was like an artifact from the guild

like from the world. So if you had that documentation, you can know a lot of, some of this stuff in advance. It's not provided with the Steam version, but the Book of Patterns is online and it's very, very cool. The original artwork is very cool. And you're meant to write the songs down in the book with pencil because there are

different random arrangements of the notes for certain songs in this game that can be sampled. So it's also meant for you to play along with the book. Yeah, which is awesome when you learn about the designer of this, Brian Moriarty, because that's straight up from his Infocom lineage. That was a huge Infocom thing.

Yeah, we can talk a lot about him. He actually didn't do a lot at LucasArts, but he was there for about five years. So he came from Infocom, and he designed the game's Wishbringer, Trinity, and Beyond Zork. And it's so Loom is a very user-friendly game. It's a game designed to be completed,

which was a crazy idea for a 1990 adventure game. If you look at where he came from, you would say, you know, oh, text adventure games are devious, they're very hard, very tricky, very hard to figure out, but his first adventure game that he made, it was a very popular one called Wishbringer, and in that game

you could essentially cheat just to see the end of the game. You had essentially seven wishes you could use on puzzles, but you can always replay the game to not use that Wishstone or whatever it was called to get a higher score. And through company statistics, Brian figured out, oh, that was one of our most popular games because people

could actually reach the end. And again, that's very forward thinking in terms of the streamlining of this genre, right? Like, you can draw a direct line from that to no fail condition style, you know, telltale, adventure games or the kind of way that, like, adventure games have often, the puzzle elements or the friction elements have been downplayed a lot in modern adventure gaming. Yeah, it was way ahead of its time. Again, games were not designed to be finished. They were designed to challenge you. And rarely you would finish a game like this back in the day. so at LucasArts he didn't do a whole lot unfortunately he worked on mainly unreleased things so

he worked on an educational game based on the Indiana Jones TV show the young Indiana Jones Chronicles and then he worked on the second of three versions of the dig the third one is the one that came out so after not being able to do anything at LucasArts he left and he has not been credited on a game of notes since then although I was looking at his mobile games profile it he's credited with working on design for Alvin and the Chipmunk's squeakwell game and the dog whisperer game both in the same era which is inexplicable

to me but mainly he's a professor of interactive sciences so maybe he was just consulting on weird projects who knows but he has design credits on two weird license games after loom well hopefully we'll get a squeak wall to loom at some point. Yes. Like that since he's wet his toes in the squeak wall and he knows

how to make a squeakwell. There is a fan squeakwell we could talk more about that later but I recommend everyone go out there and it's on YouTube for free. Check out the GDC Post Morton for Loom. I was there in person. And I forgot just how enthralling he is as a presenter. He's a very good presenter. Even if you don't care about

Loom, he will wrap you up into this world of game development and the story of Loom and how much he's into game development. So check it out. A lot of information comes from there. But I do want to talk about the design. So we talked a bit about this. But this is a very, very straightforward

game. In a very, very short game, even for the time. Like, only with a few gentle nudges that I used just to get through the game in an afternoon. I finished it in about two and a half hours. And if you sat me down with Loom and forced me to finish it without outside help, I think I could just do it in a day,

maybe like four or five hours. Yeah, the times when I played it when I was younger, you know, I was young and inexperienced so everything felt, you know, infinite and vaguely insurmountable, you know, adventure games. That was part of the appeal when I was younger. When I, the first time I revisit this,

I played this game three times now. So I played it once, you know, when it came out, once when I first got access to pirating things, and then once for preparation for this podcast. And the first time I went back to it, I was surprised by just how doable it was. And I had gone back to try to play, you know, Chirandia games or Gateway, which I mentioned earlier, which is a legend game, was a big adventure game I played when I was younger, was unable to actually complete those, but was able to beat Maniac Mansion and, you know, Day of the Tenticle and other Lucas

Arts games, Monke Island. And that kind of, that being able to finish it is a weird divider of those companies. Like when you talk about LucasArts versus Sierra, the big thing that always pops up is death or kind of gotcha, you know, things you can miss that can make the game unwinnable for you. Another one is just ease of play. You know, like Monkey Island isn't that hard to complete. Like that's doable.

It's harder than this is. Oh, for sure. But, you know, but they're all on that kind of level where it's like, hey, you're going to get a complete story. You know, and it kind of made something click for me.

there's another GDC talk with Ron Gilbert where he talks about Mannyk Mansion and he talks about how adventure games, the primary aspect of them is the story. Like, there are games where you're supposed to care about the actual narrative. And I thought that was very strange because Maniac Mansion,

I associated it with weird atmosphere and characters and puzzles, but not so much the actual narrative. But that idea that like, hey, you're supposed to actually complete the story. You're supposed to actually get an entire story from the game that's intentional really kind of plays into that.

Yeah, and Brian mentions in his talk that this is something that I had no idea about until I saw the talk live but in the manuals for these early adventure games Lucasfilm games have put a little paragraph in like here's our philosophy we want to be fair we don't want you to get stuck we want to be different than adventure games

you know so they're very upfront about what they were trying to do with Lume they went a step further it says up front in the manual this is a game designed to be completed which I thought was I mean that is every game now in 1990 that was not the case but they were very different

from the standard adventure game, which is why these are the games that are remembered. These are the games that are still played today from that era. And certainly the thing that there's a bigger impact in the genre, like they had a much bigger, much longer tail. You're right about when you're a kid,

if I had a kid brain, I would not be thinking about this game, like, okay, these many variables, this many ways to interact with them. I overanalyze everything now when I sit down to play it. So it does seem very limited. But as a kid, I could see just thinking like,

oh, what would all these songs do if I, you know, play them on this? or if I did it this way. But in reality, this is a very, very straightforward game, almost like you said. You mentioned telltale. I see a lot of similarities there in which compared to something like Monkey Island, at best, there will be like one or two things on the screen to interact with, which is very, very different than even a LucasArts game of the time.

And it gets that depth through that other way, which is really interesting. Because like something, you know, the original idea of the parser or moving to the verb set from the parser is to restrain your options. you know so if you're on a screen in monkey island and you have 10 things you can interact with you know that the only things you can do though are taught get open clothes use you know you're kind of restrained by that by to kind of changing you know limiting the things you can affect but changing your verb to give you a sense of a wider possibility space um you just to achieve like a much different feel like it is very simple because you only know a couple of songs but it feels like you have a world of possibility to you because your tool is music it's not language you're right about that i think like the verbs have much broader meaning when they're not spelled out on the screen yeah and when they're provided in different contexts yeah i mean compared to other adventure games of the time especially monkey island which was released in the same year this is so so so different uh there's no inventory as i said before there are like one

or two things that are interactable on every screen uh there's no backtracking once a chapter is over it pushes you into the next area and you're just there until you hit the next area so there's no way to have to go back if you miss something. There's no real dialogue trees. Characters mainly talk to you via cutscene. And yeah, these are all huge deviations from even a game that would come out in the same year from the same

company. In retrospect, like not only was this something that I think is forward looking, but it just makes this game feel so different in a way that I think is really valuable. You know, and some of those things that seem like they might be, you know, make the game too easy or too simple, I actually think are things that I'm really grateful for now.

So, like, moving forward, just being shunted into the next chapter, what that does is it means that you're never going to be left behind, like, oh, I didn't do, I didn't pick up the glass shard, you know, as the janitor in SpaceQuest or whatever, so I don't get to beat the game. And it means that if I'm trying to solve this puzzle, there's no chance, like, hey, I didn't get the note that I needed back in the day. Like, I know I have everything I need. And that's part of that statement that's in the manual. Like, it's, if you get stuck in this game, the thing you need is nearby. I guess the one way to get stuck is that you basically have to write the songs down when you hear them, the drafts or whatever they're called, because once you're pushed in the next chapter, you might not be able to access that four-note song again, or at least hear it again. That's true. It's a weird design flaw in a game that is very much looking out for those flaws.

But that's the one thing I noticed, let's say, if you miss the drip spell or the empty spell, you can get it to play as many times as you want to within that. room within that chapter. But once you're out of that chapter, you can't access those four notes again. So I think that's why the book of patterns was included to encourage you to write the spells down. Which is neat also because that's what Bobbin is doing as a student, right? Yeah, yeah. You're doing the same thing he does. And I think that what they might do to kind of get around that, and I didn't try to move on without it. But there's kind of a weird kind of hinky thing, the way that songs teach you notes as well. So you can get to the thing where we can learn a draft, but you don't, your distaff doesn't go to a higher or low enough note for it.

You might need to actually use the spell and get that note before you can move on to the chapter. But if you didn't write it down, you're right, like you could forget. That's true. It's not that, you know, it's not the game doesn't get it for you. It's just you forgot to take notes and you need to have it. I think in the easy mode, you just actually pick, you can actually like just pick the draft. Okay, yeah, I only put it on normal. There was no way I was playing an expert after hearing what it wanted you to do.

But, yeah, definitely challenge is the year. I think the main thing this game does to eliminate difficulty is just remove variables. So you are limited to the amount of notes you have access to in the beginning. So you're not just playing around with notes you can't even use. You are pushed out of area so you can't backtrack or go forward. It's all about like here are a limited amount of things. And you have a limited amount of ways to interact with them. Just experiment.

And if you experiment enough, even if you don't know what to do, you'll eventually stumble upon the right thing to do. So I wanted to ask you, you were played through this too? Were there any puzzles that stood out to you as good or bad? I think that the, my favorite kind of stretch of puzzles that, you know, that my favorite intuition is the, um, really pretty early on when you go from the, uh, the shepherds through the dragon, uh, cage, you know, because it's, it's doing, um, unintended consequences in a way that kind of plays with the lighthearted tone of this. Um, you know, so to, uh, you find these, uh, these shepherds, it's another guild. There are sheep in their field and a dragon keeps stealing

them. Um, so you have to make the intuitive leap that, uh, you have a die spell. because your guild originally started as clothmakers who would dye things. So you had to have the intuitive leap like, hey, I can dye wool, green, even while it's still on a sheet. And you do so, and that camouflages the sheep from the dragon, but you're standing there when it happens. So you're the only thing that stands out. So you get kidnapped by the dragon, but that's not a fail condition. You get taken to the hoard, and then when you actually talk to the dragon, she's actually pretty urbane. And then you have to get out of there.

So the way you do it is by turning her gold into straw, which is one of the things where you're have to learn to reverse a spell, like use the reverse of a spell, and then let her go to sleep. So she breathes fire on the straw. I really like that little string of being like, one, you know, you're solving the puzzle to move the state forward, but it's not necessarily a success for the character. And then I love that, you know, again, that intuition of like, hey, I can reverse this. Yeah. And that puzzle actually, I love that puzzle because I stumbled upon an alternate solution. And some of these puzzles do have alternate solutions because the, the verbs are broad enough where they could, you know, presumably be applied in different ways of different puzzles.

Like with that puzzle you're talking about where you have to, so you have to put the dragon to sleep, you turn it's gold into hay, and you said you put the dragon to sleep. I turned into a dragon, which I guess either my fire lit the hay on fire or I scared the dragon and it breathed fire. But either way, the effect was the same. And there are a few other puzzles in the game like that where they sat down and said, well, that could kind of work, so let's make it work, which was not the case with adventure games. Yeah, yeah.

It's like, no, there is one way to solve this. I don't care if you think the item can be used in this way it can't. We say no to you. I like, you know, in that, that GDC talk, which is, you know, I'll just plus one what you said. That is, like, excellent, like, excellent speaker. And also, like, I could tell I was in a little bit of a mood because there's parts where he's talking about it that I kind of, like, missed it up. It's very passionate. And he's just very proud of this thing and really, really, you know, grateful for the attention.

But he draws the comparison to Ocarina in this, which, like, I don't know, you know, we got on the notes here that, like, I don't think Nintendo stole it. don't think so either, but I do think that there are only a few different video games where you interact with the world through songs. And it's neat. Like, it is a neat thing. And I'm, you know, I'm a musical person like I do music. But even if I didn't, I think that that is a verb as like a primary way of interaction is something that's really, really unique and cool. And almost anything that played with that in terms was, was like really stood out to me. Yeah, the, in Ocarino Time and Majors Mask and a few other Zelda games, the idea of playing music to do different effects in the world is cool. But because it's not the only means of interaction with the world it's not nearly as interesting i think there's only a few cases in those games where you play a song in reverse to have something different happen but that's that's the only real major similarity i can see and again i think it is just lateral thinking but it is surprising how few games have really done anything with this idea just sort of sitting there and no one's really doing anything with it I'm going to be the

I'm going to be able to be I'm going to be I'm going to I'm going to So I don't want to talk about the story because it's very weird and that's very weird in that a lot of the story because it's very weird in that a lot of the story of loom. takes place outside of the actual playing of the game loom because the things we're talking about at home you might be asking like what is this game about and my my theory is and this could have been the theory for just adventure game design at the time is they thought of a bunch of puzzles first and then

wrote a game around it i don't know if you had the same feeling about this game upon replaying it yeah i don't know um it's it's kind of hard to say because i think that uh you know when you moriardi had previously kind of worked from the story forward you know and he he talks about kind of the origin of it and it kind of working from the story forward. And some of the things I think the puzzles do feel like they follow the fiction. Okay. You know, like the things like the spinning, spinning straw into gold, like that's very explicitly something that has to do with cloth making like a spinner's wheel.

You know, so that kind of follows. And the thing with the pun of the distaff music staff kind of feels like it follows from the world. But I can definitely see some of the puzzles probably worked backwards. And I think probably at a certain point, if you've made a bunch of puzzle games or adventure games, you can just do these kind of like lock and key puzzles in your sleep. Oh yeah. You know, it's like really easy to kind of throw those into almost any situation. Well, the thing that Brian see most excited about was the recording of that audio drama,

which is online. It's on YouTube, easy to find. Just search for Lume audio drama. And it is very good if you enjoy really overacty theater acting. I got a girl kick out of it. But it does provide a lot of context to Lume that is not in the game itself. Like, who is the main character? Where does he come from? what is happening in this world? Like, what are the states? Exactly. That is also a major thing that is not answered within the context of the game itself. And if you look at the book of patterns, the descriptions of the spells or drafts explain more about the weavers and their purpose in the world and more about the world itself. Like, there are three guilds in this world.

They all do different things. But you kind of just, like, visit each of them as a tourist before going on to the final battle in the game. You don't really talk to a lot of people. You don't really get a chance to, like, look around. pick things up or read anything that would help you learn more about the world. It's all outside of the game itself, which makes sense because this is a very graphically intensive game, has to all fit on three discs. So everything else is offloaded to outside materials. And also just extremely infocom. Yeah. Like that can be underlined enough. And, you know,

he talks about in that talk about how you wanted to do an audio play for a game for like basically his whole career. You know, like he finally got to have that wish granted. And that audio play, I never listened to it other than preparing for this. I kind of knew about it and meant to go back to it. I think the version of I played when this came out, I might have had the tape but didn't care because I was a snot-nosed 10-year-old. But I really love the idea of that, like,

a little piece of ephemera. Like, they're really hard to find now, but there's a cassette tape with just this little 30-minute, really weird, fully produced by BBC actors, you know, legit British actor's backstory of this game. That is, you know, just like a really neat little detail, like a little, here's a little bonus fun physical object you get. And that's also a weird kind of forward thinking thing now

as we move towards digital distribution being the standard because you end up with companies like, you know, like fan gamer or companies that will put out physical boxed versions, limited run games, where they come with these little chotchkes. Like I have a copy of Thimbleweed Park that has a bunch of little chotchkes from the game in kind of an infocom way. And I already have that game,

but this is really appealing to me because I want those little artifacts, you know, and that was also a weird way we've come kind of full circle. I don't even know forward thinking is the right word for it, but we've come kind of full circle.

And I think having that kind of external, it reminds me of Meenak Mansion, like the map or the poster that came with it, that's the has the hints. That's the bulletin board from the college, things like that. Like bringing those outside things into the game, I think is actually extremely cool.

Yeah, and Brian mentions in the GDC talk, Something I've heard from Ron Gilbert himself that these weird things were allowed to happen because the policy at Lucasfilm Games was don't lose money and don't embarrass George Lucas. They were allowed to make moderately popular games and their games were moderately popular. Like Sierra Games, I've said this before on podcast,

talking about LucasArts, but Sierra games were so much more popular than these games in terms of sales and critical reception and just in the general zeitgeist of gaming at the time. Sierra was Adventure Games. LucasArts was a weird little, start that had a cult following, despite the Lucas name. And I kind of want there to be a rich, weird patron of gaming now. I don't think our patrons are as interesting as George Lucas was in the

80s and early 90s. Yeah, yeah, that's a great. Yeah, that's a great point. You know, and it's just, it was kind of, that's what happens when you do something that's forward thinking, right? Because the, the expectation among gamers, like this did not sell real well. And even, you know, Space Quest, like a Space Quest game took a shot at this, making fun of this, because it was, was so out of line. You know, so there's a bargain bin, and they have a parody copy of this called Boom, and they're making fun of all the things that make this game great. Oh, yeah.

It's like a really mean-spirited joke about, like, oh, there's no characters, there's no dialogue, there's no puzzles, you can't die. And it just feels like an edgy teen, you know, making fun of something very wholesome. Actually, I'll put a clip of that in here. The latest bomb from Master's Storyteller, Morrie, Brian Artee. Boom! Is a post-Holocaust adventure set in post-Holacost America after the Holocaust. Neutron bombs have eradicated all life,

leaving only you to wander through the wreckage. No other characters, no conflict, no puzzles, no chance of dying, and no interface. Make this the easiest to finish game yet. Just boot it up and watch it explode. Yes, it's funny to hear Gary Owens, the first voice of space goes, roasting loom, this old man not knowing what he's making fun off in a booth. But yeah, it's very mean.

And actually, Brian did play that during the GDC clip. I got a kick out of it. But Loom is available on Steam. Is Space Quest 4? I don't know. Yeah. I mean, it's available on Gog,

I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, it, those were the expectations. Like,

we had the expectation that games would be like Sierra games, where they're, they're very hard, brutally difficult. Um, you save constantly. Um,

the puzzle solutions are very esoteric. Um, and that was just kind of the expectation at the time. And you, I like Sierra games. Like, I've come around on Sierra. Like,

I think there's room in my heart for both. I think Lewis games are generally a lot better, though. LucasArts games are a lot better and definitely end up having more of an impact. Like, right now, someone, you know, we can have Telltale and we can have an Adventure Game studio put out a callback. Like, you can have your like Wadjet eye games that come out that are kind of callbacks to this. You couldn't put out a game that has, oh, you didn't pick up the, the used Band-Aid and Act 1s. You can't complete the game in Act 4. Yeah, yeah. It just would not be acceptable. The legacy of LucasArts is adventure games today are, uh, obligated to follow the rules they established. Yeah, yeah. Even towards the N. Sierra was just like, okay, I guess we have to do this now. Like, we have to be LucasArts games now. But yeah, more about the world and the story, like, I found that the world outside of the game was a little more self-serious in a fun and interesting way. In the game itself, I think it's a very of the LucasArts Monkey Island-ish kind of sense of humor where there are stakes and there's, you know, death and horror and fantasy.

but it's all with like sort of an eyebrow raised at you. Like it's very self-aware where I don't see that same tone outside of the game itself. Like the villain talks about, you know, I'm going to summon this ultimate lord of chaos. Oh, I better change my stationery, you know, when I change my name. Like that's a very like wry self-aware joke about, you know, office humor within this fantasy world. Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting, though, that kind of dichotomy because Lume, even when you're in the game, like there are those little jokes, but they always feel like they kind of stand out.

a little bit like when replaying it I forgot that Loom even really attempted to be funny you know in my memory it was just this in the notes you have it reminds you a Willow and that you know no wonder I'm in the pocket for it right like yeah yeah I know you like Willow so I mean sure to include that as the world's

premier Willow fan you know other than you know probably you know people made it but the um you know I thought of it like that as kind of light but not humorous you know and in fact it's like kind of humorous and then also becomes heavy, you know, near, near the end.

Like, the stakes at the end, like, this has a downer ending. There is a very violent death that happened, like, uncommonly gory death that happens in it. It's kind of tonally all over the place. Yeah, yeah. Like, I feel like that audio drama in the book are of a different voice than the game, totally. And when I'm playing the game, I felt like I did when I watched Willow. I haven't seen it in a while where it's like, this is all very lighthearted and silly. There's a monster named after Siskel and Ebert.

that's funny, but it doesn't make me want to learn more about this world. Upon hearing the auto drum, I was thinking, you know, I might read a book about this. I might want to hear another episode of this if they ever made one, but the game doesn't give me that sense. It gives me more of a sense of just like feeling around in a fantasy setting without really fully understanding

the world. Yeah, and that has a charm to it too, though. Like, if it wasn't for the dichotomy, I think that would be just an unmitigated strength. Yeah. Because there are tons of just details in the game that suggest a long, larger world. Like, You know, you take a word that you know, like the Weaver's Guild, and we know what those words mean, and we can imagine what that would be like in real life.

And then you find out like, oh, you know, they're literally spinning the tapestry of fate and changing outcomes of things. And they're doing it through songs. And they have, you know, there's this tapestry and it's hanging in their main hall and they follow it, everything. And then you find out, oh, like there are actually the Glassmakers Guild. Like, what do they do? And you find out, like, oh, they can see the future, like anything that, like, visions and everything, and they have a blade so sharp that they're, like, afraid to use it. And all of the stuff that are just really, really the details that fire the imagination without

actually being explicit. Yeah, I'm kind of surprised that Moriart didn't, didn't write a book, like a fantasy novel after this or something. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was, I was very shocked by how little he had done after this when I kind of looked him up, like how a few games and everything. Like, not that he, you know, that's not the only way that you can provide value.

Like, he's a professor. You know, he's a teacher. It's good. but I was I wish that he had done a little bit more with his imagination because I think this is a really kind of unique world like it does feel a little like Willow but I don't know anything you know this kind of matching mundane jobs to this these kind of very disparate magical effects has a I think a pretty unique flavor to it I think the story suffers a little because Bob and Threadbear who is the hero of the story he doesn't know who he is really he doesn't know what he's doing he doesn't know what's happening around him and he's just kind of push from place to place. Like, you float somewhere on a log. You're carried away by a dragon to a different place. You're thrown in prison by another person. Like, you don't have a lot of autonomy as to where you go next. And you sort of just find your way in situations trying to find your way out of them. So it's not the perfect way to tell a story, but a lot more of that is cleared up again in the

audio drama and in the book of patterns that comes with the game. Yeah. It feels like a genre, like almost like a genre thing of having the hapless adventure who stumbles in to adventure, which is kind of a LucasArts deal. Yeah, definitely, Monkey Island, just like, I'm a, kind of a loser who washes up on on shore, like, who am I, what am I, what do I do next? Yeah, house style, but it does, it does clash with these stakes

and stuff, like Monkey Island does not end with half the universe being sucked into another dimension. That's very true, yeah, quite a cliffhanger lead up to a sequel. I guess we can wrap up the discussion, so Moriarty considered two sequels, one called Forge and one called the Fold or Fold,

about the different guilds within the So one would be about the Blacksmith Guild, and one would be about the Shepard's Guild. Fans made a chapter one of a forge game that's available online. As of now, this recording, Chapter 2 is not available. It was newish when Moriarty did the chat in 2015, but so far it's been four years and there's been no Chapter 2. I don't know what the news is on that. But fans like this game enough that they are trying to flesh out the world themselves. And it's, you know, I would love to see something like that happen.

like not necessarily a fan game and that's my own bias that is probably not fair where I see fan game and I'm like ugh you know I don't know what it is I want something official you know

I would love to see it like the end of that that chat he says like hey there are a bunch of people who I think I would trust to have this license you know he talks about Wadgett he talks about a tale

which you know rest in peace he mentions another company I can't remember exactly which one it is but oh I double fine He's like, you know, I would trust them to do this. And I would love to see it kind of expanded because it does, I am tantalized by it. And I can understand why the fans want to see more and create more. Yeah, I had a really fun two and a half hours with it yesterday afternoon.

And I just was like, this is a new experience for me. I've heard about this game a lot, but I kind of just shrugged at it when I saw it because it's not like the silly, you know, cynical LucasArts games. I like the silly satirical games. But it's on Steam for six bucks as of this recording. it's definitely worth it. I did want to mention that this game does have a Thimbleweed Park connection that has beautiful backgrounds and they're by, mostly by Mark Ferrari

and he did the backgrounds on Thimbleweed, so he's still kicking around. He is the master of Sprite-based backgrounds. Oh, yeah. I mean, we should probably just at least briefly talk about how beautiful this game is, kind of in general. Like the color ballot choices, you know, after I started playing it for the show, I took a bunch of screenshots to use as my desktop background. the music is it's all Tchaikovsky so it's not original music but it's really well arranged for the technology at the time you know so at least when when I was 10 I remember being pretty blown away and how much that music and the kind of subdued color palette contributed to that tone yeah and I think we're missing a lot by not having access to the 16 color game because if you look at screenshots of this game in its original form it does not look like an EGA 16 color game they did so much with the colors of

available to them. It's amazing that it looks that good. So I think we're missing out on the context of how good the original version look, one, because we don't have access to it, but two, because we're not living in 1990. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just absolutely like, you know, two or to force, you know, at that time. Like in that talk, Brian, you know, he mentions the, you know, when the villain dies and the very gory death. And he's like, that was the best piece of animation that had been in a computer game up until that point. And he's not, you know, he doesn't come off as braggadocious during the rest of the thing. Like, I can believe it. Like, oh yeah 1990 this was as good as it gets you know and and he points out these backgrounds he's like yeah these were absolutely beautiful and they look beautiful like they look really good and those kind of backgrounds are one of my favorite things that um you know in whenever i revisit old sierra or or lucas arts games like that's one of my favorite little bits you know that is just kind of looking at these like big painterly backgrounds and just it is hard to recognize you know it seems quaint now but think just like oh this contributed so much yeah at the you know 1990

when you had to maybe use a little bit more of your imagination to round things up. They use like advanced compression to fit all these gorgeous backgrounds in the original game and they look so good today. In his talk, he brought up how this game is very largely influenced by the Disney movie Sleeping Beauty. So I feel like it was incredibly ambitious in 1990

to say, let's make our computer game as beautiful as the most expensive Disney movie to ever exist. Like one of the most famously expensive and gorgeous movies. So you get a lot of the same visual stylings. You get the Chikovsky music. You also get Maleficent as the villain, which is just like,

I kind of miss the era in which you could take an existing work and be like, I want my game to look like that. And then you can just do it. And no one would sue you. But now Disney owns both Sleeping Beauty and Loom. So who cares? And you don't get any more of either. So you get a Maleficent movie every once in a while.

Yeah, I think they're making more of those. But, yeah. They extend to Maleficent, the MCU. Yeah. The Blythens in that universe. Hey, we're in it. We're living in it now. Any final thoughts on this, Gary?

It's kind of a, it's a slight podcast for a slight game, but we've said all we could, I think. It just, I feel like if you aren't into these kind of games, this might be the one that you can get into just because it's so different. And even if you're into adventure games, it is still very different than anything you played before. Like, I played so many. And Loom was a very new experience for me. Yeah, I always kind of rooted for it just because, you know, I love, you know, Maniac Mansion. Depending on what day you ask me, you know, Mannyk Mansion is my first. favorite adventure game. I love that game. I really love Monkey Island. I think Monkey Island's

really hilarious and funny and just really good. But even in spite of that, I really have always kind of rooted for Loom because it's, you don't hear about it very often. It's had kind of an underdog flavor. And like the way that I, you know, the company has even treated it that way, you know, with all of the Loom references in Monkey Island games, things like that. Even after it didn't sell very well, there were Loom references well into Monkey Island games, just kind of, you know, them kind of like pulling for it you know and i and i've always kind of felt like it uh it you know need some help almost like i i i want it to do well i want it to succeed because it's it's it's not the best at any individual you know it's not the best game but it is unique and uh it's definitely a worthwhile

experience and it's very very available now so uh please go out and play loom so that's been our podcast on loom i'm happy this series has given me a chance to play games i haven't played before and loom is one of them so yeah i definitely recommend it uh gary thanks for being on the show you do a ton of podcasts. I'm a fan of all of them. Can you please talk to the audience and tell them where they can find you and what you do? Thanks, well.

I am roughly one-half of DuckFeed.TV, which is a podcast network that does, you know, we put out something every day. We have a bunch of different shows. The flagship show that is of most interest to retronauts listeners probably is watch out for fireballs. Where we used to be a retro games club podcast. Now we cover just kind of games in general,

which includes games old and new, but it's like a book club, but for games. and we do a bunch of other shows on the network and we'd love it if you checked us out and if you feel like supporting us and getting bonus episodes you can go to patreon.com slash duct feed TV.

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