Malevolence

The Dark Eye - an interview with Russ Lees

This Coregamers article was originally published on March 15th, 2008.

I. ONE ACT , SIX SCENES AND TWO HALVES

For Russ Lees, THE DARK EYE was an opportunity for experimentation. Drawn to the universe of video game production by an old friend, this part engineer, part playwright spearheaded one of the most ambitious endeavors ever in the field; an essay whose hesitant beginnings would culminate in a product of exquisite vision and refinement. Exploring the expansive genre of graphical adventures, then galvanized by the emerge of the CD-ROM and its seemingly endless multimedia potential, he and his team at Inscape chose to pay homage to the preeminent American romanticist Edgar Allan Poe, in what was one of the very first transpositions of his bloodcurdling fiction into a digital format. Thus, THE DARK EYE struck a blow for independent-minded game creation by allowing itself to penetrate into the darkest corners of the Human mind, unreservedly.

Inspired by 'The Fall of the House of Usher', Lees wrote the outline of a story and presented it to his longtime friend Michael Nash, uncertain of what would come from it. His handwritten words described a house isolated by surrounding waters as the starting point to a spiritual journey of an anonymous character, whose presence is bound to set off a series of tragic occurrences among an already unstable family nucleus; events that spawn within him an anomalous predisposition to establish contact with lost memories of death, pain and dementia, as symbolized by a series of sundry objects scattered through the dwelling.

From the character’s introductory contemplation: “For the wild narrative which I’m about to tell, do neither expect nor ask for belief: it would be mad to ask for such a thing, in a case where my own senses reject their evidence. And yet I’m not mad, and I surely do not dream.”

A passionate reader of Poe’s works, the entirety of which he read, Lees analysed dozens of tales and poems while trying to determine which were most appropriate to the reactive nature of a game scenario, where a simple press of a button can incite a multitude of possibilities. Notwithstanding, the protagonist’s digressions into the minds of restless psyches were purposefully designed to go beyond the written accounts found in Poe’s stories - where the perspective is narrowed to the homicidal instinct -, by allowing the player to experience the same tale from the victim’s viewpoint. This unique device postulated a new format of coherent narrative, one relying on an alternative sense of intuition as players make measured progress through the various chapters, sustained by their subjective correlation of the fatal incidents.

The artistic triumph of THE DARK EYE derives not only from the complex web of its chronicle, but also from its exceptional audiovisual timbre, made possible by the -contributions of art director Rebekah Behrendt, the composer Thomas Dolby and his musical production studio, Headspace. Another highlight comes from voice work performed by ‘beat’ author William S. Burroughs, the atypical voice heard in the two poetry sequences. The reunion of talents behind the production and the environment of free expression lived during production equally enabled the game to boast a wide range of techniques of painting, design and sculpture; ranging from 3D computer rendering of the backgrounds and objects, monochromatic and colored illustrations and photo-montages. Equally impressive and laborious was the ‘stop motion’ character animation work, which was its own potent source of added agitation and anxiety.

Wine cellar scene from Poe’s seminal The Cask of Amontillado.

II. PERSONAS

THE DARK EYE begins in the utmost serenity. The inexpressive and blunt visage of our character contemplates its own reflection over the water, a contrast to the cold and disquieting reception at the house by his uncle, an old man absorbed in his musings and bizarre painting habits. A warmer reception is provided by the older brother, a frequent traveler through distant parts of the world, at last determined to settle for his passion, the old uncle’s daughter and his own cousin.

After greeting both in the piano room, our character seems to fall to a strange indisposition which alternates his reality to another dimension of transfigured space. It is in such digressive moments where the player is able to encounter the vestigial memories, echoes of horrendous events from another time and space, residing in pairs of objects: each of them a portal the boundaries of the murdering or murdered mind.

The game experience doesn’t impose any particular rules to the player’s conduct in these moments of abstraction, whereby the completion of an act makes drives the main intrigue one step further. The progressive balance is obtained by achieving developments of both narrative dimensions, only punctuated by a few optional moments, intimately linked to the main story, where the player watches illustrated enactments of two singular poems authored by Allan Poe.

The supportive theme to the interactive current is vast and provoking, mirroring a considerable portion of the same human characteristics portrayed by the illustrious writer throughout his career. Besides death, recurring theme in all the visited scopes of the game, madness, or the climb towards mental insanity, is the impulse to the evolution of the central character and that of the multiple personalities he embodies. Each of them, despite their different sicknesses and motivations, display a form of psychological frailty which narrows the barrier between sanity and the instinctive extremism coercing them to carry out acts of insanity. The obsession for objects or physical characteristics of the victims, the duality of feelings towards them, or even the unending enunciation of grudges are presented as pseudo-rational validations by the criminal minds the player takes over, moments before they subside.

A cleaver stabbed into fish lying on a kitchen table. Whenever the protagonist catches a glimpse of his own complexion in an object, hiss mirrored image can be touched to be transported into the mind of the murderer or the victim from one of Poe’s famous crime stories.

Other than the immediate and inglorious death by act of cruelty, death exists in this game in another form often cited in Poe’s prolific work: that which stems from infirmity, tuberculosis in particular. This prolonged decline is uniquely pronounced by the inclusion of his poem ‘The Red Death’, openly related with an in-game character, an allegory to the symptom which defines this nearly irreversible plague of the time. Russ Lees also established original solutions to enhance the spirit of the historical period in which the game is set, such as the varied references to the obsolete scientific discipline of Phrenology, alluded to in the map of events, each occupying a different subdivision of the human brain.

Phrenology is a pseudo-scientific discipline, now extinct, which divides the brain area in portions according to their representative property. Along with Craniometry and Phisiognomy, these obsolete areas of knowledge have birthed many theories about criminal psychology in their time.

Part of the absolute effect of torment lived in THE DARK EYE comes from the spatial oscillation between the seclusion of the interior spaces to the open spaces of unknown streets, or the confusing labyrinth of a damp cellar. The nearly complete absence of objects to interact focuses the player in the central objectives, not allowing many diversions, at the same time it produces a deep sense of emptiness: symbols of the shallowness of the house/life led by the character’s uncle The accumulation of these components results in a brief experimental model, according to the current game length tendencies, though able to bring into disrepute most any contemporary conception of how a literary adaptation to video game should be performed. What liberty is granted to the player in the resolution of its acts is as the opposition of the vigorous and pervasive element of destiny - the irreversible conclusion for this wild narrative, as verbalized by a plural subject.

In the words of playwright Tom Stoppard, look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

Poe’s work is ubiquitous within THE DARK EYE, enough to delight any connoisseur. Yet it doesn’t stand in the way of the original characters and their singular surroundings, nor does it stifle the game’s structure by commanding a rigid course of actions to be undertaken. Narrative elements have sufficient thematic autonomy to stand on their own, irrespective of how choices may influence the order in which they transpire. With his ingenious and poetic writing, Lees has attained the degree of superiority which is scarcely found within the medium, standing to this date as one of the paradigms of play-writing for virtual stages.

III. INTERVIEW WITH RUSS LEES

As a product, THE DARK EYE was a moderate success and in spite of the unanimous and emphatic reaction from the critic that underlined many of its qualities, the game was submerged into obscurity. Today, thirteen years after the game’s release, I contacted the author with little hope of receiving an answer. Instead, my inquiries were met with remarkable cordiality and kindness – without which the following interview could not have been possible. I beg the reader to pay attention to the profound vision of this artist, as well as the originality of the concepts he managed to include in his first incursion into the domains of the digital.

COREGAMING : Looking closely at your career, you’ve managed to combine the work of a writer and that of a game designer. As you no doubt realize, there aren’t many game designers in this industry, at least not with real knowledge of software, that are also responsible for the creation of famous contemporary plays- in fact, most playwrights seem to ignore this medium entirely. What’s behind your interest in video games?

RUSS LEES : I have led a varied and eclectic life. My first career was as an electronic engineer – I designed digital X-ray machines. However, I come from a family full of theatre artists and have always done live theatre (acting, directing, and playwriting) as an avocation. After some years, I became dissatisfied with the sterility of engineering and quit to seriously pursue playwriting. About that time, I got the opportunity to work for Inscape. It occurred to me that interactive games were a new art form, and that it would be exciting to contribute to that discussion in the early years. Also, it allowed me a medium that would combine my technical and creative experience.

CG : Could you give us further insight into the origins of the game and your relationship with Inscape?

RL : The beginning of DARK EYE was quite serendipitous. Michael Nash (the founder and CEO of Inscape) had been a childhood friend of mine. One day, I was visiting him in Los Angeles and he showed me a computer game he had helped produce, Freak Show by the Residents (do you know it?). I'd never seen anything like it and I started coming up with lots of ideas that the medium could allow you to pursue. Michael said, "Well, I'm thinking of starting my own company ... why don't you write some of these ideas down and we'll consider them?" I sent him maybe five ideas, including "the player enters the tales of Edgar Allan Poe." A few months later, he called me and said "we're thinking of doing the Poe project. Why don't you move out to Los Angeles for a few weeks and mock up a prototype?" Well, I had absolutely no idea what "the player enters the tales of Poe" actually would mean, so I had to quickly come up with a plausible way to make that meaningful.

The initial prototype was the Narrator's version of Tell-Tale Heart, which Michael liked, so Inscape committed to the entire project. It's almost ironic that you describe it as "well-planned" because as we were making it, you wouldn't have made that claim. We had a fairly short production cycle (much less than a year) and really very little idea of how the over-all game would look.

There were many late night arguments about what "interactivity" really meant. Should the player be allowed to change the ending of a tale, for example? (Remember, that was back when branching narratives were a bit of a rage, and many games would advertise "over 20 different endings!"). At one point we thought that maybe the player could start to combine the tales to create a whole new one. We were pretty far into production before the idea of creating our own central story that we could branch off of occurred to us.

CG : I could hardly contain my enthusiasm as I discovered the variety of styles and aesthetic styles it contains. The characters are animated in traditional stop-motion, the backgrounds are pre-rendered using computer software, the cut-scenes include paintings, drawings, sketches, collages etc, which somehow manage to work together toward a unitary stylistic identity. Why the remarkable heterogeneity of artistic resources?

RL : We were especially lucky on THE DARK EYE to have Rebekah Behrendt as Art Director. She was (and is) extremely talented and was knowledgeable about what artists might be available for our project. The idea of stop-motion animation was hers. What you describe is a result of a truly remarkable collaboration of many out-sourced as well as in-house artists under her direction.

Also, our principle in-house artist was Bruce Heavin. We based most of the visual tone off of his intense vision. Plus, Inscape was the kind of company where someone could say, "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we had text on the walls?" and we'd go ahead and try that.

CG : One of the most surprising elements in the game is the fact that the player is free to decide the order in which he plays the different stories. But as a designer, you must have faced the harder task of choosing only a few from among dozens of memorable stories penned by Poe. Tell us about the selection process.

RL : Yes, I read the entirety of Poe's work (I've forgotten how many he wrote: something like 100 tales and many poems). I carefully selected those that seemed to lend themselves to the interactive aspect of the game -- that is, the player would have to actively do things (like brick someone up) rather than just have the tale unfold. I also focused on tales which I felt that interactively exploring the psychology of the characters would be the most interesting.

Originally we wanted to do seven tales interactively, and I actually wrote scripts for Hop-Frog, King Pest and, I think, The Black Cat. We had very little time for production, and it became clear that we couldn't possibly include all these tales, so we cut it down to the ones we felt would work best from a player perspective.

CG : One of the central themes in the game is death, a recurring element in Poe’s work. However, in each of the stories, you give the player the possibility not only to be the perpetrator, much like the original stories where the narrator is the criminal, but also the victim.

RL : Yes, it really was a good idea! However, I'm afraid the impetus was more practical than creative. With a game like THE DARK EYE, we had the problem that pretty much everything the player does requires unique assets -- that is, we had to create new environments and objects for every tale and every interaction. With most games, there is some basic recurring game-play that drives the game. That is, once you get the mechanics of shooting something or fighting something right, those interactions will be basically the same throughout the entire game.

But THE DARK EYE doesn't work like that. In order to re-use some of our assets, I had the idea that the player could play through the same environment twice -- once as villain and once as victim. I was very pleased with this idea, because it did allow me to go more deeply into the tales than a single perspective would have done. The game also allows you to "soul jump" from one character to another in the middle of a tale. I borrowed this idea from another Inscape project: BAD DAY ON THE MIDWAY (also by the Residents). I have to say in retrospect, this feature worked very well for the Bad Day game, but I would have preferred we hadn't used it in THE DARK EYE because it confuses the flow of the player experience.

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary" - the obscure and distorted figure framed in a wall summons Poe's great poem, 'The Raven'.

CG : While I don’t have the numbers, I’m quite sure that this was a great production which gathered a team of talents and accomplished artists. For instance, how did Thomas Dolby or William S. Burroughs get associated with this project? What were their ideas about the medium of videogames?

RL : At the time, Thomas Dolby ran a company (Headspace) that produced music for interactive games. It was located in Los Angeles as were we, so it was very convenient to use them. I must say, Mr. Dolby and his in-house composers were highly professional (not always true in the Game world -- nor the Rock and Roll world for that matter!) and a delight to work with.

We actively pursued William S. Burroughs because we felt we needed a famous-yet-offbeat "name" to attach to the game. I flew out to Kansas, where Burroughs lived, to record him. It was a real adventure! He had absolutely no idea what an interactive game was, and couldn't have cared less. He did appreciate Poe, though, which was all that mattered.

The other actors simply sent tapes in based on sample scripts we'd left with some agents. We got excellent actors, I think because many of them just wanted to do something that required "real acting" and not just selling a product. The actual production team was an ad hoc group of highly dedicated folks with not-all-that-much experience. We were really just very lucky on that score.

CG : The game also features an entirely original central story line, which is in perfect consonance with the segments directly adapted from P short stories. Was this equally inspired by Poe, or were there other authors that influenced its creation?

RL : The central story line (which we called Malevolence in-house) was written by me. I took Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher" and changed it radically to echo all the themes in the Poe tales we were using.

CG : The nameless character’s progression towards insanity is illustrated by these different perspectives of other characters who, like the killer in Tell-Tale Heart, suffer from deep mental disorders. What do you find is so fascinating about characters at the edge of their saneness?

RL : Well, it's certainly a well-developed idea in Poe. His narrators are so convincingly on the edge of a breakdown that critics have wondered if Poe himself was half-mad. It is true that this is an aspect of Poe's work that attracts me to him. I think explorations of madness make for compelling drama: certainly Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams exploited it, as does Moliere from a comic perspective – since often it is just a slight exaggeration in point of view from a "sane" perspective. I've always felt that madness lurks just beneath the surface for everyone.

CG : What, in your opinion, has yet to be said about your video game?

RL : One of the great virtues of video games is their ability to immerse the player in another time and place via exploration of an environment. It was my idea that the player could also immerse himself by exploring the mind of a central character. It is this aspect of the game that I'm most disappointed almost no one has pursued. There is, in fact, a rather pernicious idea in game design that in order to make the player identify most fully with the "player character" in the game, you must not give that character much personality, since it may clash with the personality of the player himself. This is a deeply wrong headed notion and has led to many, many games cursed with a completely bland protagonist.

There's been an on-going discussion about "can a video game make you feel an emotion?" and "are video games art?" Questions that I feel games like THE DARK EYE (and certainly ICO) should have put to rest long ago. But the industry's skittishness about providing psychological depth to the player character, the most important character in the game!, is holding it back on this front.

CG : After some time playing Zoesis Studio’s games I keep thinking that, however amusing and interesting these projects are, you’re far away from the genre of game you explored in this your debut. Do you ever think about doing something on the scale of this game again?

RL : Yes, the Zoesis projects were of a completely different type. Those called on my technical skills more than my artistic skills and were about creating a truly responsive character as opposed to telling a story. I do think a lot of very interesting ground was broken with THE DARK EYE that hasn't been pursued by mainstream games (one exception is ETERNAL DARKNESS: SANITY’S REQUIEM). With every project I undertake, I look for opportunities to expand on some elements of DARK EYE, but so far, I haven't gotten the chance. I think the game industry has to expand its notion of what a "game" is for me to return to those experimental times (I do believe that this will happen).

CG : Looking back, so many things have changed in the videogame industry these past years. As someone who’s deeply connected to other areas of artistic expression, what are your thoughts about the medium, in general, as well as how it has been evolving?

RL : There was something highly exhilarating about working on games in the mid-90s -- nobody knew what would sell, so pretty much any idea could be taken seriously. Games fell quickly into genre-specific clones of successful predecessors (mostly due to the expense of producing an A-level game). I feel that only recently has the industry returned to taking risks and expanding the repertoire of games. I'm quite optimistic about the future of games, actually. I think gamers are getting pretty savvy about formulaic content and that producers are going to have to respond with more adventuresome game-making.

CG : Finally, if I asked you to choose the best examples of video game design excellence, apart from your own work of course, what titles come to mind?

RL : There are many highly artful games. And I'm a little hesitant to make a list, since I'm not a compulsive player and haven't played many famous games at all. Certainly on my list would be Fumito Ueda's ICO, which I found deeply moving (and uses almost no dialogue!). More recently, I enjoyed the world of BIOSHOCK, even though I don't really play first-person shooters, because I felt that the aesthetic experience of the player was brilliantly thought through.