It’s been a lifetime since I read George Orwell’s 1984 – a tale of mass surveillance, indoctrination and repression nowadays invoked to describe everything from Trump’s Twitter ban to Pizza Express telling you that jelly-beans aren’t a topping – but I will always remember how it combined role-playing with adventure gaming and brought the “detail of Riven into the real-time world of Quake”. Oh, forgive me, I’m actually remembering Big Brother, a video game sequel to Orwell’s book, which I have never played, because it never made it to shelves.
Online sleuths have just dug up and published an ancient E3 demo for this mysterious game. Here it be, and here be some footage for any unpersons concerned that downloading the files might get them shipped off to a joycamp by thinkpol.
As passed on by the Lost Media Busters, Big Brother was in development at American company MediaX (the originators of the Riven/Quake marketing line) in the late 1990s. Announced in May 1998, it won awards at trade shows and was in the final stages of production as of September 1999, but then appears to have met with financial difficulties.
The developers somehow lost the rights to the title, with rights holder Newspeak (argh) subsequently approaching other publishers to pick up the near-finished game. Lost Media Wiki users have tried to contact MediaX founder Matt MacLaurin and former art director Mark Gilster to verify all this, to no avail. Maybe Miniluv got to them.
The wizened gurus of Time Extension have a summary of Big Brother’s plot. The game would have swapped the book’s protagonist Winston Smith for a new character, Eric Blair – this being George Orwell’s real name. Eric’s goal was to rescue his fiancee by helping revolutionaries bring down the Thought Police. And completing environmental puzzles. It was broken into 12 levels designed to last five hours apiece.
It all sounds fairly, well, videogamey, next to the book’s scenes of state-engineered psychosis and inward torture. The mission briefing in the video puts me in mind of G-Police, which I guess had its Orwellian moments. Still, it seems a lot more considered than the typical 1990s licensed adaptation process of Virgin Interactive executives doing lines of cheezewiz and yelling “BUT WHAT IF LITTLE DORRIT HAD DINOSAURS”.
MediaX were a colourful bunch, inasmuch as I can extract their DNA from the internet’s swamp of malreporting and doublethink. Time Extension credit them as the creators of Queensrÿche’s Promised Land, in which you reassemble a totem at the behest of a prog rock band, and On the Road With BB King, an interactive biography of a famous blues guitarist. Slightly reminiscent of Troy McClure’s back catalogue, perhaps, but I like the range.
There have been many Orwellian video games in the years since MediaX’s Big Brother slipped under the carpet. I quite enjoyed Orwell’s Animal Farm from Reigns developers Nerial. Thanks to googling for hints about MediaX’s long-gone project, I’ve also just learned about a forthcoming 1984 adaptation from Tom Jubert, the narrative designer of Subnautica, Talos Principle and FTL. It’s described as “part walking simulator, part adventure, and part survival game”, and is about gathering the means for rebellion while keeping up your day job, with actions “largely narrated from Orwell’s original prose”.