You are Mike Dawson, manager of an ad company who has decided to become a writer and therefore purchases a solitary Victorian mansion. Arriving there, he falls asleep, dreams that aliens implant something in his head and wakes up with a terrible headache. You have to solve this mystery within three days, or…
The main asset of Dark Seed are the graphics by H. R. Giger, which form a dark, twisted parallel world, where every real-world location is mirrored. Unfortunately, the interesting and innovating concept of this game was marred by poor execution.
The name of the main character already does not bode well. Mike Dawson is the name of the lead designer, who thus put himself the game, even his sprite is a fairly accurate portrait, at least as far as hair style is concerned. There is a barber shop in the game, and you get their phone number, but you can't call them. The official hint book has the following to say about this:
Q. How can I get in the barbershop?
A. You can't! Mike likes to wear his hair long!
Ha, ha, very funny. There is probably a reason that Mike Dawson was never lead designer of another project again.
(Co-designer, by the way, was Michael Cranford, of Bard's Tale fame. He had left Interplay for religious reasons—he was not involved with The Thief of Fate any more—but still did odd jobs here and there. It seems that Dark Seed was the last game he worked on.)
But while this kind of immature humor might easily be overlooked, two things really kill the game, for many players at least: item hunting and pixel hunting. Many items are needed to finish the game, and many of them can only be found very early. Some of them will even be gone if they are not picked up at first chance. And the only way to find them often is to move the cursor slowly across the screen, pixel for pixel.
For many gamers, enjoyable gameplay is something else, so Dark Seed is often regarded with mixed feelings in spite of its undoubtable strong points.
Only after lengthy negotiations has Giger agreed to lend his artwork to the game, provided Cyberdreams used only high resolution graphics mode, in order to avoid the "square and jagged" look of low resolution. The game engine has been in development in-house since September 1990. The Normal World is created by combining imagery pieced together from various architectural sources with original art, whereas the Dark World is constructed from Giger's artwork. One of the significant steps in the art design process involves the development of customized palettes for the Dark World locations. Because of the precedence of biomechanical beings in much of Giger's work, the Dark World's coloring is designed to reflect the ominous mood of Giger's nightmarish imagery.
Cyberdreams have complete access to Giger's artwork library. Some of the works selected and included in Dark Seed are: Work No. 453 "N.Y. city III" (straight), Work No. 350 "Hommage a Bocklin" (1977), and Work No. 251 "Li II" (1974). The images are digitized, then are cleaned up with Electronic Arts Deluxe Paint IIe and Newtek's Digiview 5.0. By using the perspective tool, an image could be manipulated to create doors, walls, floors and characters in the Dark World. Highlights, shadows, and translucent overlays are then added to further enhance each picture. A video camera is employed to capture human movements for use of animations. Live actors are videotaped performing specific actions. An extra six months of development time is taken at the end solely for debugging purpose.
So the designers were contractually obliged to use high-resolution graphics. Interesting enough, their choice fell not on mode 12h, which has a resolution of 640×480 and thus would have offered square pixels, but on mode 10h, which with 640×350 is the most distorted color mode on the PC. It is the mode used for hi-res EGA graphics. There are very few games that use it under VGA, actually, it's the only one I know.
This mode may have been faster, it has two pages, and 12h is a notorious resource hog that raised the system requirements for games like Oxyd or The Incredible Machine significantly. But animations still are rather sluggish.
