George Orwell’s 1984 as a ’90s PC game has to be seen to be believed
Quick, to the training sphere!
The Big Brother announcement promised the ability to “interact with everything” and “disable and destroy intrusive tele-screens and spy cameras watching the player’s every move” across “10 square blocks of Orwell’s retro-futuristic world.” But footage from the demo falls well short of that promise, instead covering some extremely basic Riven-style puzzle gameplay (flips switches to turn on the power; use a screwdriver to open the grate, etc.) played from a first-person view.
Sample gameplay from the newly unearthed Big Brother demo.
It all builds up to a sequence where (according to a walk-through included on the demo disc) you have to put on a “zero-g suit” before planting a bomb inside a “zero gravity training sphere” guarded by robots. Sounds like inhabiting the world of the novel to us!
Aside from the brief mentions of the Thought Police and MiniPac, the short demo does include a few other incidental nods to its licensed source material, including a “WAR IS PEACE” propaganda banner and an animated screen with the titular Big Brother seemingly looking down on you. Still, the entire gameplay scenario is so far removed from anything in the actual 1984 novel to make you wonder why they bothered with the license in the first place. Of course, MediaX answers that question in the game’s announcement, predicting that “while the game stands on its own as an entirely new creation in itself and will attract the typical game audience, the ‘Big Brother’ game will undoubtedly also attract a large literary audience.”
We sadly never got the chance to see how that “large literary audience” would have reacted to a game that seemed poised to pervert both the name and themes of 1984 so radically. In any case, this demo can now sit alongside the release of 1984’s Fahrenheit 451 and 1992’s The Godfather: The Action Game on any list of the most questionable game adaptations of respected works of art.
George Orwell’s 1984 as a ’90s PC game has to be seen to be believed Read More »