DARK EARTH: The horrible future that we were promised then forgot about but now remembered

In 1997, Kalisto Studios released Dark Earth, a post-cataclysmic action adventure game for PC, which has a really compelling look. For me, it really sets the standard for this sort of spiky rusty concrete worldbuilding.

Inspired by games like Bioforge and Alone in the Dark, Kalisto set out to create that new type of game: an action game, that was also, an adventure game. In Dark Earth's gloomy future, a catastrophic meteor strike has caused most of our world to be covered with clouds of ash - with a few remaining places where people can live, called Stallites, where sunlight penetrates the cloud. Dark Earth is set in such a citadel, Sparta, ruled by monastic sun worshippers, and features an upper and lower city, outskirts, and the cursed Darklands beyond. You play as Arkhan, a warrior-cop who, in the beginning, is a respected guardian of the city, but who in the course of things is corrupted by a dark curse, and transforms into a creature, and gets cast out into the wasteland to search for a cure and to discover forbidden secrets.

Since it's only available for PC and it's from 1997, it can be hard to find a way to run it on modern hardware - but Collection Chamber has had a installer up since 2017 that worked for me just now, it's running in a Win95 emulator in DOSBox on my Windows 11 PC, but I didnt have to work out any of that stuff, I just ran Biffman's installer and I didn't have to set anything up manually.




Kalisto also developed Dark Earth as a tabletop RPG, but it's out of print and only in French. There are two editions of the tabletop game, and the first edition document that I have uses art from the video game, so I'm assuming that the video game came first. The esteemed ZebraDestroyer3000 on reddit has collected a good number of pdfs from the tabletop game, that are up here. I don't read french, but ChatGPT does, so i'm working thought those slowly.

Mostly I wanted to talk about the sort of visual worldbuilding of Dark Earth. For me this is a coveted memory of a world I glimpsed as a child, and while all the stuff I liked is in there, it's a little tinny, a little goofy, and I'm trying to sort of approach it slowly and carefully in case it's not all as brilliant as I remember.

On of the pieces of key art for the PC game is this one, I'm not sure if that's supposed to be Arkhan, I think of this guy as just Dark Earth Man.

So that's on the cover, it's on the disk. Then the second disk has this:

 

Which, I guess If I'm going to talk about the visual language I should mention this sort of thing. Kalisto in the interviews talks about Dark Earth as a game designed to appeal to men and women both. I like to look at a sexy lady as much as the next person, and I don't want to appeal to the notion that you can't do this sort of thing anymore because of woke, certainly in the current climate some want to make it so you can't really see anything sexy anymore, and the push for that comes from a conservative place, about like what's family friendly, and that's fascism, no bones about that. But this bronze-nipple-pasty tits out lady feels anachronistic and egregious to me, the 2024 reader, and, idk, it's whatever. It's not really what I'm talking about when I say I like the visdev of this game. I think the sort of 90s French Comics aesthetic includes having your tits out and being a perv, that it should have that, and honestly I wish I knew how to use that in my own work, this sort of thing is both marginalized and dope. But here it feels unfortunate to me, it's not doing it for me. They chose this to be the key art for a reason, they wanted this to be a part of the appeal and the marketing strategy for the game. The slave leia stuff is in there, but as far as I'm concerned it's not really about that. It's whatever. It's not a huge draw for me.

What I like about Dark Earth is this shit:

Yeah. Give me that animated pre-rendered rusted metal menu screen, you saucy little minx.

I love the way the furniture is designed:

(concept art by Frédéric Menne)

I want to say that nobody does this anymore, but I know all the objects in video games and movies are carefully designed by somebody. What I mean is nobody does it quite like this anymore. Something about the way the sort of carefully detailed adventure comic concepts for these hand-hammered objects interact with the pre-rendered lighting, the concrete textures with the blown-out bump mapping, the grainy dither on the crafted accents. It's so lush.

This is at odds, then, with how it feels to control and navigate the thing. 1997 presents us with such a mix of old and new design sensibilities. Some things feel very modern, some things feel positively ancient. You move the guy with tank controls, the backgrounds are pre-rendered and the cameras are static. The combat in particular is very janky. For every gorgeous well-realized environment there's a weird cramped one. But when it hits it hits.

That's the stuff.

evidence for joi being a real person

-in the scene where she's in the rain, in contrast to the scene previous where she's reenacting preprogrammed behaviours, she seems to be creating new animations for being in the rain in real time. shes not really interacting with the environment in a physical way, but she is adapting new behaviours to react to new stimulus, adopting new behaviours that are not intended by the company, and imo she does this not to impress k but because she has her own wants, like wanting to feel wet, to be real, and tries to fulfill those as best she can

-mariette (the mackenzie davis sex worker character) interacts with joi as though she's competition - the joi ai competes for space with real sex workers, and mariette speaks to joi as though she believes that the ai is simple and hollow inside, unlike mariette herself - but she says this to joi as though she's trying to hurt her feelings, not just anthropomorphising an object, unlike the way you'd argue with an appliance - she's trying to affect a change in joi's opinion, the way you might with a person, contradicting what she's saying to her

-when k's car is crashed in the wasteland joi screams at him to get up and protect himself event though he's unconscious and can't see or hear her

-k has told joi about his implanted memory over and over again, to the most intimate detail, which is contrasted with his telling his superior officer, who has to prompt him and order him to tell her this, and he still retains pertinent details. joi enables k to express a truer and more intimate self.

-initially, joi's conversation with k speaks about k's work euphemistically, in the initial scene where she cosplays as a housewife - but increasingly over the course of the film joi takes a specific interest in the case in a way that isn't a programmed behaviour you'd expect from a companion ai, analysing the changing situation and making inferences about new clues as they show up. she takes an interest in the outcome, and she takes an active role in the investigation. she's not programmed to do that.

-we see joi making her own choices - she chooses to believe that k is a man and not a replicant, against k's stated preference - and this shouldn't be a pre-programmed behavior by the wallace corporation. why would they wish to convince replicants that they were human?

-she chooses to have the backup of her memory erased. she does this to protect k, and this is perhaps a reasonable software behavior - like a phone that erases its data when stolen - but she also explicitly chooses here that, should the portable version of her memory be destroyed, that she would really be gone, 'like a real girl' - this is joi choosing metaphorically and literally to become mortal. and while she asks k to do this for her, it's clearly her choice not his.

-the clearest evidence that joi is merely a product of the wallace corporation and not a real person is luv's account (silvia hoeks' agent character) - the way that luv speaks of joi. but in luv's confrontation with the madam (robin wright's police lieutenant) she makes it clear that she takes a special pleasure in lying, and in execution - and as a product of wallace herself, programmed not to lie, willing to lie to wallace, we can see that there's some wiggle room here between what wallace believe its products are capable of vs what they might actually be doing

-as well as this, wallace's assertion that its products aren't people is suspect in the clearer case where it claims replicants aren't people when they clearly are people. so if they're wrong about that, they might reasonably be wrong about this also

-in the scene where k is confronted with the advertising hologram of joi, when she's gone, this new joi undermines the case that joi was ever really a person, or that k's version of joi is unique at all. the advertising joi calls him 'joe', just like the real joi did. so was she ever really real? I think the movie has to make both cases for us. the mystery of 'is joi a person or not' wants to be an enduring mystery, something to argue about. i'm arguing about it here. but i think this scene really makes the case that joi cannot be replaced. k cannot simply start again with a new joi. she's gone and he's right to mourn her. the advertising hologram doesnt get wet in the rain. it wouldn't be the same joi.

-similarly (if we allow this sort of comparison) the movie makes the case in the immediately previous scene, when wallace offers deckard a new, recreated version of rachael, and deckard rejects her, that this would not be the same person and such a thing can't happen. the movie has a take on this.

in general, in every scene she's in, she asserts with all of her being that she's real, her drive as a character is to be or to become real, to have a real relationship with k-joe, to love and be loved for real. she cares, she loves, she exists. the movie wants you to love her, to mourn her, to think of her as a tragic martyr for a the cause of human liberation from the slavery of the world it presents. it wants you to believe she's real, and not just so it can pull the rug and reveal that she's not, actually. joi's a real lady. it is the thing about her.

the game ideas that there are

 psychic constructs, psychic landscapes

robot programming

military gun fetishism

glitches and exploits but youre supposed to do them to get to the real stuff

possessing characters to gain their powers

ikaruga again (change colors to interact with that color)

only casting gross and sick spells

planes

warfare as a sport

the life of a simple grunt within a much larger conflict

pinball platformer

pinball with endless procedurally generated boards

explore life inside a fascist dystopia or inside an idealised fascist utopia (or both)

you get worse instead of better/optimise the worst build for optimal worstness

explore the run on effects of character death (land of the dead game, what happens to people we left behind game, etc)

life inside the computer, eg as like a little guy who delivers emails or something

a game but its co op

this is like that

ive never been a huge fan of the comments you get posting things online. im writing in a void where noone really comments on my stuff and thats not super encouraging, i would like to write in some kind of feedback loop where i can shape what im writing towards some shared community outcome, comments in theory are the mechanism by which you can achieve this end

but the opposite thing im trying to address here is that comments are bad, not a fan of comments, here is an example

bad types of comments: this is like that

when i was on the forums one day there was a thread to post game ideas. i said it’d be fun to have a game where your character has a stack of ideas, like three ideas. when you pick up a new idea, you have to drop an old one. someone replied “that’s like dizzy”. 

now, this comment’s not false. i understand this impulse. youre like making a connection. but the effect of this comment, the totality of this comment is like, someone already did that, on the commodore 64, in the 1980s, fully exploring this idea, so there’s no need for it in this thread now, its done. its done been done. whether thats the intent of this comment or not it contains this counter and shuts down that opportunity, to explore this idea and to be some expression of this idea. because its been done already, the oliver twins did that one.

i think this is a bad comment specifically because any useful or good idea must needs be done over and over again. each single expression of a specific idea must needs be different from each other expression of that idea. when you do your version of the thing its not going to be the same. it can’t really be. if its a good idea it basically needs to be done again. we shouldnt stop making doom roguelikes simply because someone has already made the doom roguelike, if the doom roguelike is a good idea then it should be attempted over and over, each expression of that will have its own local flavor, you dont know that the 23rd one isnt going to be the truest most best version  of the thing, or the 1001st.

you can’t really remove this from discourse, people are going  to want to make comparisons, im even doing it right here, saying all of these comments are fundamentally the same when really the intent and content is different each time. but there’s something wrong and bad about saying this thing is like that thing impulsively when someone is trying to tell you a thing

dumping some stuff from abulafia

i used to use this wiki called abulafia what was up at random-generator.com, it was a cool resource because you could write generators sort of in plaintext-ish tables, in the source of a page on the wiki, and if someone went to that page it would generate output, the contents of that page, based on those tables, so it was, for a while, a really cool resource for tabletop rpg dorks. it fell into unusability when mediawiki updated their software one year, but for a while the pages were still up on there and you could still extract the data, but not really anymore

you can still pull the data off of archive.org here as of this writing. but what you get is an xml dump of the whole wiki, which gives you the whole wiki in a big file (like 500meg) and text editors cant really read that real good.

so like, i have a compsci degree, i could probably write a python script to pull apart a xml file, or i could set up a mediawiki and import the data into it, but instead what i did was i downloaded this tool ltfviewer that opens pretty big files ok, so im just reading through the large file that contains the whole wiki, very slowly

anyway, here's some of the data i was trying to find, for the articles Village and People of Dust (which i wrote)

SCAMP and BRAMBLEVALE liner notes

i posted my current homebrew system yesterday, thats available in the post before this one, in two documents, SCAMP which is the combat system, and BRAMBLEVALE which is everything else

i wrote most of scamp a couple months ago and the original scamp document got a bit heavy with design notes that eventually spun out bramblevale, which is a sort of basic fantasy companion rpg for scamp. splitting it up this way means scamp gets to remain a thin combat system and bramblevale can hold the parts of the larger system that aren't spelled out in the scamp doc, and bramblevale is sort of interchangable for other setting docs, which might care about different stuff. but bramblevale can be the template for what kind of stuff they'd have.

anyway in tightening up these two docs for publication i've lopped the old scamp design notes from the earlier draft, but there's good stuff in there, so i've reproduced them below. bramblevale has a cleaned up version of a lot of this stuff in it.

...

SCAMP is like LANCER if it was KNAVE

I've been working on a new system for doing combat after playing Lancer with a group locally. I think Lancer is a fine system, I like kitting out those robots, but the combat runs long, because the turns are long, so maybe you get one turn every hour or so, so I wanted a system with FAST TURNS so you get to do more stuff!

So I wrote a scrappy little combat system, that can work as a bag on the side of another game. It could replace the combat in BLADES in THE DARK which (I find) is a bit thin, for example. SCAMP is very general purpose in this way, it doesn't specify the form of the weapons and powers that the players are using, so that it can work for fantasy or scifi or what have you. So here's the current draft, I'd very much like some feedback on it, its shaping up into something that I think I might like to publish.

SCAMP, the game where you do one thing on your turn

SCAMP doesn't really have any opinion about the part of the game what is not combat. But I also wrote a little solo RPG to test it with, which will help if you want to present an adventure for just one player or really with as many as you like, probably. I like the idea of nesting games that work either together or in isolation, so you could run SCAMP on its own or attach different story modules to it.

Anyway here's the other game I've been working on, this one has a lot of chatGPT text, its just a thin client to put some structure around the out of combat parts of the game. but it has good bones I think.

GRIMWORLDR BRAMBLEVALE

I like the ghost bag mechanic that I've presented there, which gives you a fun system for interacting with spirits.

Anyway those are some RPG fragments that I've been working on recently, I hope you can make use of these, they are small but powerful apparatuses and it brings me pleasure to be able to present them here.