by David Craddock

In the mid-1700s, long before horror pioneers like Alfred Hitchcock, films such as Dracula and Frankenstein, and even cinema itself, the predecessor to horror cinema was born in a tiny coffee shop in Leipzig, Germany. The proprietor of the shop, Johann Schropfer, welcomed patrons with a warm beverage and an invitation to shoot the breeze and some stick in his adjoining billiards room. But the extra attraction of running a table after a long workday didn't do much to boost Schropfer's steadily declining patronage. In an effort to drum up business, Schropfer cast out pool tables and converted the billiards parlor into a séance chamber. Steadily, the simple attraction grew to incorporate more elements of the supernatural. Buzz concerning the performances increased in parallel, as did Schropfer's patronage.

By the late 1760s, Schropfer's once-deserted shop had evolved into a hotspot where patrons gasped in awe at ghostly images projected onto smoke, chilling music, ambient sounds, and burning incenses whose aromas were evocative of malevolent forces. The masterful performance put on by Schropfer proved so lucrative that the coffee-shop-owner-turned-showman took his show on the road throughout Europe until 1774, at which time Schropfer, perhaps haunted by the specters he alleged to call forth from the afterlife, took his own life.

The 1780s saw the release of books written by men of science that debunked the performances Schropfer had claimed were real. Many readers embraced the authors' intended conclusions that Schropfer's act was nothing more than stagecraft, and looked with disdain on what they had believed was legitimate. Others saw the books as something else altogether: reference materials. Over the next several decades into the 1800s, Schropfer's creation was taken up by expert showmen all around the world who evolved his concept into a theatrical production involving live actors who played martyred heroes or unique roles; séance rooms that burst into flames or were entered into via derelict venues such as cemeteries; masks; ventriloquism; and the projection of three-dimensional apparitions. As the shows evolved and were embraced by audiences worldwide, they finally received a proper name: Phantasmagoria.

In the early 1990s, famed Sierra On-Line co-founder and game designer extraordinaire Roberta Williams, who had conceptualized and designed many of Sierra's biggest hits including the critically and commercially successful King's Quest series, was familiar with the phantasmagoria shows of yore. Delighted with their dark tone and eager to delve into the realm of terror, Williams began plotting a new adventure game with a horror theme. The name of the title would be Phantasmagoria, paying homage to the eponymous theater productions.

To fans who weren't familiar with the prolific designer's pre-King's Quest work, the move seemed strange for one whose fame had arisen after creating family-friendly games. "I am known for doing games which are 'totally different'," Williams said in an interview with Adventure Classic Gaming, who implied that more mature content was out of Williams' comfort zone. "Everybody thinks of 'King's Quest' when they think of me, but I've also done several murder mysteries: 'Mystery House,' and the 'Laura Bow' mystery series - all of which involved 'gruesome' murders and detailed plot twists."¹

Released in 1980 for the Apple II home computer, Mystery House had set a new bar for adventure games by wrapping two-dimensional line-based graphics around an equally simplistic text parser. In 1984, Sierra innovated yet again with King's Quest, which allowed users to maneuver their avatar, Sir Graham of the kingdom of Daventry, in a pseudo-3D space. Around the same time, arcades were infiltrated by Dragon's Lair, a fully animated game by former Disney animator Don Bluth. In Dragon's Lair, players controlled Dirk the Daring, a brave knight in search of an imprisoned princess. At every step of their journey, players had to make crucial decisions that were either successful, or ended in a cartoonish yet grisly demise. All consequences to player-driven decisions were displayed as fluidly animated full-motion video (FMV) clips that, thanks to Bluth's skill as an animator, rivaled any full-length animated film or television show.

While Dragon's Lair was a harsh journey that required quarter after quarter to finally master, the animated sequences were so appealing that players were equally as entranced by mistakes as they were victories. Its FMV technology, which easily surpassed the primitive graphics of other video games of the time, was used sparingly until the beginning of the CD-ROM game era of the early 90s. FMV technology advanced in parallel with CD-ROM tech, which provided storage large enough to allow developers to create video clips that were longer than a few seconds or minutes. In games such as Mad Dog McCree, Night Trap and Jurassic Park, live actors fully or partially replaced animated characters, allowing video and computer games to truly become cinematic experiences.

As the popularity of FMV games grew, more and more developers embraced the trend to varying results. Sierra, with veteran designers such as Roberta Williams, was interested in the technology, but determined to do it right. Sitting down to conceptualize her story and its gameplay elements, Williams penned her largest script yet: a massive 550 pages, approximately four times the size of most screenplays. The story was solid, as all Williams-helmed narratives seemed to be; but this time one crucial difference existed.

"As far as looking for actors to fill a role, you can try to define who they are, and what they may look like, but that's somewhat limiting," Williams explained. "Rather than actually trying to define what they may look like, you instead think of their general age, gender, attractiveness, and personality...but, you don't tie yourself down too much. Rather, it's better to keep your mind open when auditioning actors for roles. Many times, someone who you wouldn't have considered when writing a script is really perfect, or a certain actor will just have that 'certain something' which you could never script in."²

Sierra held numerous auditions with the intent of finding exactly the right actor for each role. Williams herself had a hand in casting each part but one: that of the lead character, Adrienne. "Ironically, the only actor I did not have a hand in choosing was Victoria Morsell who played the role of Adrienne," Williams said. "The reason for that is because I never saw the "perfect" actress for the role of Adrienne, and while I was subsequently on vacation, Mark Seibert saw Victoria audition and immediately chose her for the role. I learned about her hiring after I got back from vacation. Mark said to me, 'Trust me, she's perfect for the role.' Even though, I trusted Mark implicitly, I admit I was somewhat nervous, but the minute I met her I knew he had been right; she was a perfect Adrienne."³

Though animating a video game and all its many parts is certainly a complex task, the burden of an animator is often lessened by the very nature of his job: many animations are usable in many different scenarios. A character's walking animation, for example, needn't be changed unless the character assumes different clothing or armament that would affect the animation. The process of creating an FMV game is not nearly as simple. Even bit actors may be required to film dozens of scenes, because in a video game, the designer -- unlike a movie or television director -- can never assume that the player will do one thing and not another. Phantasmagoria lead actress Victoria Morsell spent months in front of a blue screen filming hundreds of scenes: what would happen if the player were to first click on one item and then another? What if the player chose the second item before the first? In a typical game, a handful of animations could have been used to create the results of most scenes; but the production of an FMV title requires each and every action, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, to be filmed -- many of which may never be seen by most players. The sum total of hours of filming, captured scenes, and learning the process of creating an FMV-powered game resulted in an adventure game reminiscent of other Sierra- and Roberta Williams-created megahits, yet was still something all its own.

Phantasmagoria's story opens with a trite yet properly spooky premise: a young couple, Don and Adrienne, have just moved into an old mansion. Adrienne, a novelist, decides to go poking around the old house and its surrounding grounds while Don works on converting one of the residence's many bathrooms into a dark room for his photography work. During her explorations, Adrienne stumbles upon a curse that transforms male residents of the mansion into wife-murdering psychotics. When Don's sudden moodiness degenerates into lethal anger, Adrienne realizes she must free herself and her husband from the clutches of the curse before both are lost to darkness.

Early on in the life cycle of the King's Quest series, story was fairly limited: the goal was to solve puzzles and marvel at the interactivity of the colorful world portrayed in the games. With Phantasmagoria, Williams knew that story, along with the emotion that comes with becoming invested in a narrative, was critical. "In order for horror to succeed the player needs to be passionate and committed," Williams stated. "The build-up of suspense is all emotion. Being 'scared' is gut wrenching. Even though it's always been important to me that players would be personally committed to all of my games, it was even more important for them to become very emotionally involved with Phantasmagoria in order to create the suspense and terror necessary for a successful horror story."⁴

The gradual accumulation of suspense and fear in Phantasmagoria often culminated in controversial and grotesque scenes made all the more real by the fact that real actors, not animated characters, were involved. Dozens of bad choices on the part of the player brought about gory consequences for Adrienne. In one death sequence, an imprisoned demon bursts through a door, grabs Adrienne's face with both of its powerful claws, and pulls in either direction, effortlessly ripping her head into bloody bits of flesh, bone, and brain matter. In another, Adrienne's possessed paramour ties her to a chair and throws a lever, prompting a scythe to swing down and split her head not-so-neatly down the middle. In the same scene, players can cause Adrienne to commit suicide by pulling the lever themselves. As Adrienne learns more about the fallen housewives slain at the hands of their formerly loving husbands, Adrienne is accosted with horrific visions revealing exactly how the women were killed. In one, a housewife is bound to a table, and a funnel is stuffed into her mouth. Her husband approaches with a platter of raw animal entrails which are individually crammed into the funnel until the housewife, her body bloated, her eyes bulging, finally chokes to death.

Easily the most controversial scene was an act of rape inflicted on Adrienne by her husband. Though Williams confessed that she could have removed the scene, she chose not to do so for one simple reason: "That scene is very essential to the plot. I knew it would be controversial and could have taken it out at any time. I kept it in because it was the pivotal point in the plot where Adrienne suddenly realizes that something is terribly wrong with Don. Up to that point, she knows that Don isn't 'feeling well' - but she attributes that to the bump on his head or to stress from moving or with his work. We know that he's possessed by some sort of demon, but she doesn't. This is the way I wanted to let Adrienne know that something is very wrong with Don, and that he's capable of hurting her. I wanted her to start being afraid of him and to abruptly kick her out of her comfortable world and into a world of horror. That scene does that."⁵

For adventure gamers born and raised on the tradition of being figuratively stranded in a game with nothing to rely on but their wits and multiple save files, Phantasmagoria was notorious for an entirely different reason. Players still guided the protagonist from scene to scene, held conversations with supporting characters, and visited a wide variety of vistas, including dozens of rooms within the mansion; yet something was missing -- several things, in fact. Absent from the interface were familiar action icons such as look, take, open, and operate -- actions that had been available to gamers beginning with King's Quest V in 1990 and used in subsequent Sierra adventure games such as Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. Instead, players moved the cursor around the screen to locate "hot spots," areas that would cause the cursor to turn red, at which point clicking the mouse would cause something to happen. Furthermore, Phantasmagoria was almost entirely devoid of puzzles. The focus was entirely on creating an involving drama replete with mystery, suspense and terror.

Williams is aware of the complaints filed by the core adventure game crowd, but she believes the reason for their disappointment was not due to Phantasmagoria being a poor gaming experience, but rather the adventure crowd not understanding that, quite simply, the game wasn't made for them. "Just as I ... once designed Mixed up Mother Goose in order to give pre-schoolers a good game to play ... I thought that I would design a game for people who wouldn't necessarily play a computer game because they are too daunting or intimidating for them. Why not? Don't they deserve a game too? That was my way of looking at it."⁶

Regardless of the hardcore adventure crowd being hesitant to embrace it, Phantasmagoria's release in 1994 was met with resounding success, causing it to become Sierra's best-selling game yet. Released on an astounding seven CD-ROMs, the million-selling title haunted hard drives and CD trays the world over, mesmerizing audiences with its terrifying settings and disturbing cinematics. In parallel to the game's commercial success, Phantasmagoria also stands as the one game Roberta Williams feels best represents her illustrious career as a computer game designer, yet she is quick to point out that King Graham and his progeny will always occupy a special place in her heart.

"If I could only pick one game," Williams said in response to Adventure Classic Gaming's inquiry as to which game best represented her career, "I would pick Phantasmagoria, as I enjoyed working on it immensely and it was so very challenging (and I love to be challenged!). However, in my heart, I will always love the King's Quest series and, especially, King's Quest ... since it was the game that really 'made' Sierra On-Line."⁷

"Smoke, Mirrors, and the Phantasmagoria"
Source Notes

1. http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/127
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/198
5. http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/127
6. Ibid.
7. http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/198