Troels Pleimert

Haha! What a great post. I especially like the challenge at the end. :)

:drool:

So far, there's an official Facebook page - http://facebook.com/guysfromandromeda And a Twitter - http://twitter.com/andromedaguys Not exactly forums, but it's a way to convey your thoughts directly. :)

Someone did mention the name Gary in a recent conversation I had.

I'll be keeping the Roger Wilco profile on G+ updated - http://gplus.to/rogerwilco - but it would be great if Jess came out of the woodworks and opened the floodgates. It's back to being 17 again. ;)

Hi, guys. I have a dirty secret. For the past couple of weeks, I have been in contact with Scott Murphy. He e-mailed me because of the rumor that Replay Games had announced that he was on board for their recapturing of the Space Quest license. The rumor, as it turned out, is false. What is true, however, and what I have been sitting on my hands trying hard not to let loose, is that Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe are no longer estranged Andromedans, living separate lives in separate parts of that there American country, resting on the laurels of their former glory. Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe are officially again The Two Guys from Andromeda. Don't believe me? Check out http://www.guysfromandromeda.com.

Ken Allen did most of the music, yeah. The way I heard it from Mark was that he did contribute a few pieces here and there. And as Music Producer he edited all the music before it went in the game. Also, Orpheus Hanley is listed in the credits for "additional music," or something to that effect. Along with a couple of other guys.

The actors in SQ6 were, apart from Scott Murphy in the Cyberspace easter egg, professional actors. I'm not sure they were such an improvement over the Sierra cast, to be perfectly honest. But there you go. In SQ4, every character apart from Roger and the narrator were voiced by Sierra employees. I don't think I can remember them all, but here are a few: Roger Jr. was played by Stuart Moulder, who was producer on SQ1VGA. Kelli Spurgeon was Zondra. She and her husband Rick Spurgeon were sound designers. The Sequel Policemen were played by Mark Seibert and Orpheus Hanley, who also did the music for the game. Barry T. Smith played the Hz So Good salesbot and the Monochrome Biker ("mister look at me, I'm in VGA!"). He was an artist. He's also the host of the Current Inside Copy video on the Space Quest Collection. Neil Matz was the pickle. And an artist. He's got the funniest voice in the entire game. "I taste like crunchy toejam sauteed in vinegar." And Scott Murphy played that guy. The blue skin. No, wait ...

KQ5 and SQ4 were mainly voiced by Sierra employees. In SQ4, music director Mark Seibert played one of the Sequel Policemen ("some people just won't follow instructions"). Jane Jensen, Gabriel Knight designer, played Mae-Bot in the Galaxy Galleria ("that'll be 60 buckazoids, sicko"). Lead programmer William Shockley was the ketchup ("did you know there's more sugar in me than an ice cream? It's a fact"). And yes, Josh Mandel's in there, too, as "the gruff, unpersonable manager of Monolith Burgers" ("this is so easy, a human could probably do it"). They probably weren't told to ham it up; they just did what comes naturally. ;) The SQ4 Roger voice has no excuse, though. He was a professional actor they hired.

To a layman like me with no real programming experience, it just seemed like such a magical easy step, now that SCI is supported by ScummVM (meaning somebody went through the damn thing and somehow made it work). I didn't know those people have since moved on. Shucks. I'd help out, but like I said, I can barely wrap my head around Adventure Game Studio.

"We lost 9 minutes! Er, and three years. Scully, are you listening? Look, Y.M.C.A. Your turn."

Well, there is that ...

... 2009? What the hell was I thinking? :|

Holy hell, Scott Murphy on board for a restart if they can wrangle the rights? I'm jaw-dropped. This is my jaw, dropped. :drool: And drooling, apparently. 2009 is just turning out to be the year adventure games rose again. First the Telltale Gilbert/Schafer game, then Tex Murphy, then Leisure Suit Larry, then Jane Jensen's new Pinkerton Road studio, now Space Quest! That sound you just heard was me farting with joy.

I never noticed that. Great! ;)

I agree about SQ5. Maybe we could mount a fan-made voice pack for it. SQ5 runs SCI, and we know Dynamix was planning a voice pack during development (says so in the SQ5 hint book), so the SQ5 software should be geared for it. All we need is someone to reverse engineer it and someone who knows SCI. Piece of cake, right? ;) I think SQ6 had a lot going for it, actually. I thought it was refreshing that it tried something new (Josh's original plan was to have Roger bopping around organs like planets, instead of the much more limited journey that ended up in the final game). Sure, SQ6 sometimes feels like an incomplete game (and it was). But considering the agonizing development it had, I'm surprised it turned out as good as it did. On a grand scale, though, I still think it was a different beast than the early games where the focal point wasn't on plot but on meta-poking the adventure game genre in the ribs. SQ5 is guilty of this, too, though. I'm not going to say "the last great Space Quest game was SQ4," but I'll go so far as saying SQ4 was the last of the original Space Quests. After that, things sort of went their own ways. Not that that's a bad thing. But it's almost like "the expanded universe" began with SQ5, if you know what I mean. No, thank you. I never thought of that before, but it makes perfect sense. Well, apart from visceral shock value like the zombies, I also meant the general mood of the game. Everything and everyone are out to kill you and you always have very little time to get out of harm's way. Okay, I suppose that's stretching the definition of "shock" a bit. ;)

I feel like reiterating my point that SQ4 relies on shock value. SQ5 is a bit like the movie Airplane! - a serious plot in a really, really dumb setting. SQ6 somehow feels even more like an odd man out, probably because it goes the SQ5 route without having the same kind of cohesive plot. (Let's face it - SQ6 seems to go everywhere and nowhere until you escape the DeepShip halfway through the game. And even then you're not really sure what the hell you're doing.) I love the point that SQ4 is a satire of Sierra's excessiveness, though. It's perfectly illustrated in the box for King's Quest 38 in the Galaxy Galleria bargain bin - how many floppies does it come on, again? ;)

Again, I know exactly what you mean. Except I was 16. Nyah, nyah, nyah. ;) Thanks. :) It was wine, actually ... and I'll confess it already had an open twin brother next to it at the time of filming. And I had a flu when I recorded the second video. Maybe I should get stoned or hang myself upside down for the third one. Okay, I see what you're saying. With a little remark or two in SQ3, or even just as a fancy, subtle retcon in SQ5, I agree the whole scenario could've been saved. But it wasn't intentional. Mark Crowe confessed it was a quick way to tie SQ3 into the rest of the series and that the "free" bit had simply slipped their memory. So we know it wasn't intentional, but seeing as we're apparently the only people left who care about this, we could all just agree it was intentional all along and no one would be the wiser. ;) I agree completely. That one was entirely intentional. Mark Seibert's brilliant "some people just won't follow instructions" delivery just nails it.

Turns it it was Mark Crowe after all.

Group hug.

I know exactly what you mean. :) I just want to break character for a moment and thank you guys. It's like I never left. I suddenly remember why hanging around the Broomcloset back in the day was so much damn fun, even though we were technically wasting our lives on complete non-issues. But that's what being a huge nerd is all about. So thank you! I am going to very gently echo this sentiment. And not just because I gave the VSB team a bit of friendly flak for having too many Monkey Island-references in their beta. ;) I mean the general vibe of the game is much more "light-hearted" (look, there we go again) than, say, Incinerations. Even though they're both undeniably Space Quest-y and I think they both did a wonderful job carrying on the spirit. This is an not entirely unimportant point to make, and I want to highlight it because it beautifully mirrors my sentiment about my favorite SQ games, as explicated in painful detail here. Meaning that the meta-humor of Space Quest has somehow gotten a bit lost since the heyday of SQ3/SQ4 -- the point was never really to satirize other games, but to satirize gaming in general, particularly the dusty Sierra conventions that The Two Guys were covertly rebelling against. My own view of Space Quest -- and I realize this will differ vastly from other's view of the series -- is that, at its best, it's a rebellious, almost punk-ish middle finger to the very bosom from which it grew. Things like "plot" and "consistency" only seemed to matter as an afterthought. Later, however, once we got to SQ5 and particularly SQ6, suddenly things like "characters", "plot" and the externalization of satire became much more important. That's another thing, too. Space Quest had the guts to take the mickey, first and foremost, out of itself. I mean, the narrator (in SQ2-4, at least) really, truly hates Roger. Even the friggin' narrator of the game doesn't expect the hero to make it. He delights in Roger's failures and misfortunes, and that's all the more funny when the abuse comes from Gary Owens' voice. Later games externalized the satire and started poking fun at other games. The original spirit of Space Quest, at least how I remember it, was to mess with the holy sanctums of established adventure game royalty. King's Quest wanted us to go on a fairy fantasy ride to a magic kingdom where our pitiful everyday lives didn't matter. Space Quest wanted to tear the throne off the floor and piss on it. Again, this is purely subjective. I think I'm really just talking out loud on some demented voyage of self discovery about what I ever saw in these games in the first place. ;) No argument here. The only reason why we're still talking about this is because Scott accidentally dropped that nugget in an interview once. When you think about it, that's just not what happens during that final showdown. I fell for it, too. So I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to anyone who ever listened to me trying futilely to make that "Vohaul's still alive on the floor of the Super Computer"-thing stick.

Er, well, Vohaul talks about the sissy-pant scientist community on Xenon that ocstracized him for being an evilminded douchebag. And the SQ2 narrator describes him as "being human at one point." So, yeah, he's an alien in the same sense that Roger's an alien, because they're both from the planet Xenon. But they're the same species, so to speak. Presumably with the same skin tone as well, but if we're going to go into Xenonian genealogy about how they might have evolved a race of blue-skinned people due to atmospheric radiation or some shit, I'm out of this conversation. ;) The whole Quirk's dad thing: I thought we agreed the Companion story could go blow itself out of an airlock. :)

Also, even I tend to forget that SQ3 and SQ4 are two of the most prized examples of meta-humor in gaming. Not even Monkey Island 2 was this self-aware. The plots of these games were really secondary to the fact that The Two Guys were really out for one thing, and one thing only: as the first Collection's manual said, "enthusiastically bite the hand that fed them." SQ3 and SQ4 therefore stand as my favorite games, mainly because they're as rebellious a duo of games as they come. Colloquially speaking, they just did not give a fuck. When people talk about Space Quest as a series that satirized the rest of the computer game industry, most people think of the many references to other science fiction classics. Datadog even had a mile-long list of references to other games Incinerations parodied or drew influence from. None of the other games, however, stabbed so deeply into the heart of gaming itself as SQ3 and SQ4. That's probably what resonated with me the most, subconsciously, and that's probably what I really miss the most. I'm not going to bring up my own acutely self-referential game at this point, but I guess I just did.

I think much of SQ5's perceived "lightness" also has to do with the art style. But let's not go down that road now, 'cos there lies madness. Story-wise, I agree with Datadog that SQ4 is considered the "dark" chapter of the series. But much of that has to do with shock value, I think. Right off the bat, you're in a post-apocalyptic setting with zombies and things trying to kill you at every turn. The actual plot, however, is just as ridiculous and silly as the genetically engineered life insurance salesmen in SQ2. If we want to talk about serious plots, then SQ1 - in all its loving, plagiariz-- I mean, tribute-giving glory - has the darkest plot of all: Your sun is dying. Everyone is going to die. Everyone who could save the day is dead. It's up to you, and no one expects you to succeed, least of all yourself. But SQ2, SQ3 and SQ4 took a much more comedic turn with their plot lines - probably because The Two Guys were finally starting to build an actual character around the protagonist. By that I mean that if it wasn't for all the snidey sarcasm in the SQ1 narrator dialogue, maybe Roger was just narcoleptic and happened to fall asleep while everyone else were getting slaughtered. SQ2 defined him as a bumbling idiot right off the bat with the "the broom floats away, never to be used again - that makes the third one this week" line. By SQ5, however, rules changed. Roger's world suddenly got serious, and he got even dumber. SQ6 carried on this tradition by having a pretty serious plot revolving around a protagonist who in no way was up to the challenge, but somehow scraped along anyway. I might add that the two fan games, Incinerations and Vohaul Strikes Back, carry on in this tradition. I'm not saying one approach is preferable over the other. But I'll look forward to the day when someone makes a Space Quest game that brings back the "silliness in an acid wrapper" feel of SQ2/SQ3/SQ4.

That sounds pretty good to me. ;) A not wholly unimportant side note is that the SQ games themselves weren't exactly big on consistency. We hardly need to mention the Gippazoid whistle at this point, right? You'd think so, but Scott himself professed he didn't know about the "outstanding solo job" blurb on the back of the SQ6 box until he got his packaged copy of the game. And there's the wonderfully quaint story of the first Sarien Encounter boxes where the picture of the Two Guys somehow got reversed (and had its colors screwed up) for the first batch. In short, we can't expect the box art, the comic book art or any of the other artwork that wasn't directly related to the games themselves to have met with actual creator approval. Now that makes good sense, and, as was also pointed out elsewhere: He's not referring to his skin tone at all. So we can argue all about consistency, but fact is, no one in the game ever actually makes a point about his skin color. If I may be so bold, allow me to summarize the many good points that have been made about this topic in the way I think makes the most sense: If we have the "ta-daa" screen as our starting point, then Vohaul's skin color is a result of low lighting in his control room, the fact that he's a diseased blob of dying/dead flesh, and the fact that SQ2 had a grand whopping total of 16 colors to party with. As the graphics in SQ2 were drawn exclusively by Mark Crowe, it's safe to assume that only Mark really knows if Vohaul was intended to have a constant blue tint, or if he was just being clever, perhaps too clever, with the artistic lighting. As a result, other artists have taken this screen more literally, rendering Vohaul in future illustrations in a loving blue tone. Somewhere along the way, everyone sort of agreed that's a pretty good look for him, and it's stuck ever since. Summa summarum: Vohaul's not "blue." He's a diseased blob that, in any other light, would just look like a human turd with wires sticking out of it. In that sense, VSB's choice to make Robot Vohaul blue could easily be taken to mean that his body was, at this stage, in a much more advanced stage of decay, to the point where his skin was basically dead and his internal organs are kept alive purely with cybertronics. Skin goes grayish blue when it's dead and diseased; just look at our old pals, the Borg. Er, the Bjorn, I mean. And the fact that Vohaul's parents are blue in his mind's eye could just be a really intricate meta-joke. Please approach the counter for your complimentary biscuit.