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Dark Seed is a computer game in the adventure game genre. It was developed and published by Cyberdreams in 1992. It exhibits a normal world and a dark world counterpart, which is based on the artwork by H. R. Giger. It was one of the first adventure games to use high-resolution (640 pixels wide) graphics, to Giger's demand. A sequel, Dark Seed II, was released in 1995. The original game was released for Amiga, Amiga CD32, DOS, Macintosh, PlayStation and Sega Saturn. The Saturn version was released in Japan and was compatible with the Sega Saturn Mouse. An unlicensed version was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in Chinese language. There was also a version planned for the Sega Mega-CD, but it was cancelled.
Story
The main character, Mike Dawson, is named after lead designer and producer Mike Dawson, who also appears as the character's sprite. The fictional Mike Dawson is a successful advertising executive and writer, who has recently purchased an old mansion in the small town of Woodland Hills. As soon as he moves into the house, he falls asleep and has a nightmare where he finds himself in a place called the "Dark World" where it is inhabited by inhuman creatures called "Ancients". They forcefully hold Mike down and use an alien machine that implants an object called a "Dark Seed" into his skull. After Mike wakes up, he has three days to solve the mystery of the town before the "dark seed" erupts from his brain and the "Ancients" take over the real world.
Legacy
Dark Seed is notable for its impressive graphics but also for its buggy programming and frustrating difficulty.[citation needed] Unlike most adventure games, which give the player time to explore, almost every action in Dark Seed has to fall within precise time limits, or the game will end up in an unwinnable state. As a result of this as well as the game's frequent crashes, one must start over repeatedly to win without resorting to a walkthrough.
An urban legend spread that the intense pressure of designing Dark Seed gave lead designer, Mike Dawson, a mental breakdown. However, he actually left the games industry after completing Dark Seed and moved into television writing until the late 1990s, wrote two books on programming (Beginning C++ Game Programming and Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner) and is teaching game design and programming classes at Stanford University and UCLA.[1]
References
- ^ Gamasutra - Playing Catch-Up: Darkseed's Mike Dawson
External links
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