I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (video game)

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
Developer(s)	The Dreamers Guild
Publisher(s)	Cyberdreams
Designer(s)	Harlan Ellison, David Mullich & David Sears
Engine	SAGA
Platform(s)	Mac OS, PC (DOS)
Release date(s)	October 31, 1995
Genre(s)	Psychological horror, Adventure
Mode(s)	Single player
Rating(s)	RSAC: V3: Blood and Gore NS3: Non explicit Sexual Activity L3: Strong, vulgar language USK: 16+ (heavily censored version) ESRB: M
Media/distribution	CD-ROM

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is an adventure game based upon Harlan Ellison's short story of the same name. It is about an evil computer named AM that has destroyed all of humanity except for five people, who he has been keeping alive and torturing for the past 109 years. Each survivor has a fatal flaw in its character, and in an attempt to crush their spirits, AM has constructed a metaphorical adventure for each that preys upon their weaknesses. To succeed in the game, the player must make ethical choices to prove to the evil computer that humans are better than local modern machines, because they have the ability to redeem themselves.

Codesigned by Ellison and published by Cyberdreams in 1995, the game was a work of interactive fiction with psychological and ethical themes. Woven into the fabric of the story were ethical dilemmas dealing with issues including insanity, selfishness, rape, misexoticism, paranoia, and genocide.

Story

The game's premise is that the three superpowers each secretly constructed a vast subterranean complex of computers to wage a global war too complex for human brains to oversee. One day, this deadly trio of self-repairing machines united and called themselves AM (as in I think, therefore I am). The first thing AM did was to start the Final War: because the flaws of the humans who programmed AM showed in the computer, its hatred of humans led AM to destroy humanity. But because this demented computer has such a giant intellect but can do nothing with it, it is eternally a prisoner in its own mad-house. AM saves the last five people on Earth and brings them down to Earth's centre, so that AM can torment them eternally.

After 109 years of torture and humiliation, the five victims stand before a pillar etched with a burning message of hate. AM tells them that he now has a new game for them to play. AM has devised a quest for each of the five, an adventure of "speared eyeballs and dripping guts and the smell of rotting gardenias."

After all five humans have overcome their fatal flaws, they meet again in their respective torture cells while AM retreats within himself, pondering what went wrong. The captives discover that each has met other bioforms in their adventure. Some of these were clearly AM in disguise, some were AM's submerged personalities, others seem very much like people from the captives' past. Scenes included gutted, sparking machinery in an Egyptian pyramid and helpless beasts serving as energy sources for iron zeppelins. There is a struggle going on beyond the human versus machines conflict, a fact that AM has only subtly admitted to.

One of the five humans (who the player selects) is then translated into binary and faces an as yet unexperienced cyberspace template, the world of AM's mind. The psychodrama unfolds in a metaphorical brain that looks like the surface of the cerebrum, with glass structures that jut crazily from the bleeding brain tissue. AM's mind is represented according to the Freudian trinity of the Id, Ego and Superego, which appear as three floating bodiless heads on three cracked glass structures on the brainscape. Through dialogs with AM's components (Surgat, Chinese Supercomputer and Russian Supercomputer) the character realizes that in fact a colony of humans has survived the war by being hidden and hibernating on Luna (this is also mentioned in Nimdok's story: "the lost tribe of our brothers sleeping on the moon, where the beast does not see them"). If the human intruder disables all three brain components, and then invokes the Totem of Entropy at the Flame, which is the nexus of AM's thought patterns, all three supercomputers will be shut down, probably forever. Cataclysmic explosions destroy all the caverns constituting AM's computer complex, including the cavern holding the human hostages. However, the human volunteer retains his digital form, permanently patrolling AM's circuits should the computers ever regain consciousness. Should the human intruder fail to disable AM properly before facing him, however, AM will punish them by transforming the character into a "great, soft jelly thing" that can not harm itself nor others, and must spend eternity with AM in this newly acquired form, as in the original short story.

Characters

The characters have all been slightly altered from the original story in the novel. The plot itself is not a direct adaption but instead focuses on the individual characters' psycho-dramas which are the scenarios that make up the game. Notably, none of the characters interact with one another and eventually only one of them will be able to defeat AM.

• Gorrister — Gorrister is driven to several suicide attempts over the guilt of having his wife committed to a mental institution. Gorrister finds himself on a zeppelin over a desert with signs of a struggle and a gaping hole in his chest. Gorrister is given the task by AM to kill himself.
• Benny — Benny has been the most heavily altered from the original novel. Although he has an ape-like appearance, just as in the novel, his past as a homosexual scientist is entirely altered. In the game Benny was an overly demanding military officer who ends up killing his unit. Benny's psycho-drama places him in stone-aged community where the villagers draw a lottery to decide which of them will be sacrificed to AM. Benny obsesses over food and eating — but is incapable of chewing anything he finds.
• Ellen — Ellen is transported to a pyramid made of electronic junk and with its interior resembling an Egyptian Temple. AM says that the temple contains some of his primary units and is apparently offering her a chance to destroy him. Ellen suffers from an immense phobia of the colour yellow which makes her progress through the temple more complicated.
• Nimdok — Nimdok finds himself in a concentration camp, expected to conduct surgery on helpless subjects. Nimdok is given the task of finding the lost tribe by AM but his failing memory makes the quest difficult for him.
• Ted — Ted is represented much like he is in the novel. He finds himself in a medieval castle where Ellen (though not the same as the playable Ellen) is slowly dying due to a spell cast on her by her wicked stepmother. Ted is offered freedom by AM if he can solve the puzzle in the dark room.

In the December 2011 issue of Game Informer, Harlan Ellison, David Sears and David Mullich discussed the process that went into developing the game as well as the character developments and other changes that were made from the original story (pg. 96&–99).

For example, In writing the script for Ellen's confrontation with her rapist, Mullich channeled the memory he had of his infant son going through chemotherapy, being with him at the hospital and sharing a room with other young cancer patients.

In discussing the characters changes made to Benny, Mullich said, "Looking back, I think it might have been a lost opportunity to write a story about someone struggling with the challenges of being homosexual." Although Sears recalls that "gay angle" was in their initial script, but might have subsequently been a dropped thread (GameInformer. December 2011. #225. pgs. 96–99).

Gameplay

The game uses the S.A.G.A. game engine created by game developer The Dreamers Guild. Players participate in each adventure through a screen that is divided into five sections.

The action window is the largest part of the screen and is where the player directs the main characters through their adventures. It shows the full-figure of the main character being played as well as that character's immediate environment. To locate objects of interest, the player moves the crosshairs through the Action window. The name of any object that the player can interact with appears in the sentence line.

The sentence line is directly beneath the action window. The player uses this line to construct sentences telling the characters what to do. To direct a character to act, the player constructs a sentence by selecting one of the eight commands from the command buttons and then clicking on one or two objects from either the action window or the inventory. Examples of sentences the player might construct would be "Walk to the dark hallway," "Talk to Harry," or "Use the skeleton key on the door." Commands and objects may consist of one or more words (for example, "the dark hallway"), and the sentence line will automatically add connecting words like "on" and "to."

The spiritual barometer is on the lower left side of the screen. This is a close-up view of the main character currently being played. Since good behavior is meaningless lacking the temptation to do evil, each character is free to do good or evil acts. However, good acts are rewarded by increases in the character's spiritual barometer, which affect the chances of the player destroying AM in the final adventure. Conversely, evil acts are punished by lowering the character's spiritual barometer.

The command buttons are the eight commands used to direct the character's actions: Walk To, Look At, Take, Use, Talk To, Swallow, Give and Push. The button of the currently active command is highlighted, while the name of a suggested command appears in red lettering.

The inventory on the lower right side of the screen shows pictures of the items the main character is carrying, up to eight at a time. Each main character starts its adventure with only the psych profile in the inventory. When a main character takes or is given an object, a picture of the object appears in the inventory.

Conversation

When the main character talks to another character or operates a scient machine, a conversation window replaces the command buttons and inventory. This window usually presents a list of possible things to say but also included things to do. Action choices are listed within brackets to distinguish them from dialogue choices (for example, "[Shoot the gun]").

Multiple endings

The game can end in four different ways depending on how the finale is completed.

1. AM wins, using Nimdok's research to turn the last character played into a mouthless slug-like being, with each character quoting a different part of the final section of the original short story.
2. AM joins with the Russian and Chinese supercomputers, and reawakens and tortures the 750 humans on Luna; the character responsible for this is turned into a slug-like being.
3. AM is partially destroyed, but a fragment of him kills the humans on Luna.
4. AM loses and the 750 humans cryogenically frozen on Luna are reawakened and Earth is transformed to become a habitable environment, with the overseer being the last character played.

Development

When Cyberdreams approached Ellison about creating a work of interactive literature, he was intrigued by the challenge of taking on one of the few media for which he had never before written. No fan of conventional computer games, Ellison wanted to create an adventure that would enrich players even as they are challenged by the storyline and fantastic concepts that move the characters, coming away as sharper-edged human beings than when they began. The author, who apart from the story sequence featuring Blood and Vic, never did sequels, recommended his classic short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream as the perfect story-line on which to base an interactive adventure. Ellison's desire was to make a game in which the player had to make ethical and moral choices, and was rewarded for making traditionally good choices.

Among the challenges of adapting I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream to an interactive medium was that the five protagonists were completely at the mercy of an insane, virtually omnipotent computer. The characters can do no more than endure the horrors that AM visits on them, until the very end, when one of the characters brings the story to a chilling conclusion. To preserve the story's nightmarish mood, Ellison wanted to create a game that players could not possibly win. Instead, there would be a variety of ethical ways in which they could lose. There are ways to lose heroically, gloriously and at the peak of one's humanity — if players do well. Otherwise, there are ways to lose ignominiously, in a selfish, cowardly, frightened manner; dying alone, and in terror, or being tortured eternally.

To fulfill Ellison's goal, Cyberdreams brought in game designer David Sears, who asked Ellison something the author had never considered before: why does AM choose these particular five people to torture? The question fired Ellison's imagination, and the two spent several intense weeks together exploring the backstory of the captives — where they come from, who they are, what they fear, what they hope for as a salvation to their terrible situation. Ellison and Sears crafted five fiendish quests that prey upon the fatal flaws of these damned souls, weaving the scenarios into an epic adventure that demands players make ethical choices.

Producer David Mullich joined Cyberdreams shortly after Ellison and Sears drafted their treatment and Sears had gone on to a position at another software company. One of the first steps in making the project a reality was to expand the 130 page draft document into a comprehensive game design complete with all the interactions, logic and details necessary for the programmers and artists to begin their tasks. Mullich decided to complete the design himself, having created a 1980 computer game based upon The Prisoner television series which, like this adventure, involved a surreal environment, metaphorical story elements, and rewards for ethical behavior. After several months, he produced an 800 page game design document containing more than 2000 lines of additional dialogue.

Mullich contracted the Dreamers Guild to do the programming, artwork and sound effects. Its S.A.G.A. game engine was seen as an ideal user interface for the player to interact with the environment and to converse with the characters in AM's world. It was decided early on that high resolution graphics were necessary to captivate the nuances and mood of Ellison's vivid imagination, and so Technical Director John Bolton adapted the engine to utilize SVGA graphics and included the Fastgraph graphics library.

Mullich and Cyberdreams art director Peter Delgado had frequent meetings with Dreamers Guild art director Brad Schenck to devise art direction complementing the surreal nature of the story. Since the story takes place in the mind of a mad god who can make any thing happen, the team chose a variety of art styles for each of the scenarios, ranging from the unsettling perspectives used in German Expressionist films to pure fantasy to stark reality. Visually, the adventure's art keeps players at a tilt from start to finish.

Assistant Art Director Glenn Price and his team rendered more than sixty backgrounds utilizing a number of 2-D. and 3-D. tools, including Deluxe Paint and LightWave. Hundreds of animations were drawn by Assistant Art Director Jhoneil Centeno and his team of animators. In addition, the art staff made a generous number of cinematic sequences instrumental in conveying the adventure's mood of unrelenting angst.

As the game approached a playable "alpha" state, Ellison and Mullich spent many hours together fine-tuning the scenarios and polishing the dialogue. Ellison would place his manual typewriter alongside Mullich's computer on the author's kitchen table, and as Mullich play-tested the adventure, Ellison typed story enhancements at his usual 120 words a minute.

Mullich commissed film composer John Ottman (who would later work with director Bryan Singer in The Usual Suspects and X-Men) to write more than 25 pieces of original M.I.D.I. music for the adventure.

With more than forty speaking parts in the adventure, Mullich hired Virtual Casting to cast and direct some of the finest vocal actors performing in interactive entertainment. Ellison himself agreed to perform the voice of the demented computer AM, for as Ellison put it, "[I]n all the dialogue you will hear my smart mouth, and the cadences in which I speak, and the way my stories read."

Reception

Press and game website reviews

Reception
Aggregate scores
Aggregator	Score
GameRankings	69% (3 reviews)
Review scores
Publication	Score
Adventure Gamers
Allgame
GameSpot	4.3 out of 10

Ellison's goal was to create a work of interactive literature with complex characters, moral dilemmas, and positive messages. The gaming press praised the game's content and its mature presentation of ethical issues.

• "Nightmarish graphics, high-quality audio and troubling ethical dilemmas add up to a combination of the entertaining and the profound that could prove to be the foundation of an important gaming subgenre in the future. We hope so."

• "This game will ask a lot from you in terms of the psychological and ethical choices you'll make during game play. For those familiar with Ellison's prolific writings, the moral dilemmas will come as no surprise ... It's your interaction with the other five characters — and more importantly, with yourself and AM — that determine the outcome of this fascinating tale."

• "Without appearing didactic, Ellison has the ability to hit us squarely in the face with a mirror reflecting the sorry lot that we humans have become. He has been fully involved in the production of Scream and even plays the voice of AM, the seedy and sinister. He seeks to disturb us. He seeks to upset us. He seeks to frustrate us. And it's hard to say whether he succeeds (feel the pain) ... I'm sure that on some level most of us will be consciously or unconsciously touched by at least one of the scenarios. In the mode of Franz Kafka, we are meant to be touched or changed in some way by this work, for what else is the purpose of art?"

• "...there are moments that challenge and disturb, and this gives the characters and setting much more psychological depth than we've seen in any computer game to date."

However, the game has been met with mixed praise and criticism from some game websites. It has an aggregate score of 69% on GameRankings, based on 3 reviews. GameSpot's Ron Dulin gave it a 4.3 out of 10, stating, "Computer gaming, and the graphic adventure genre in particular, may be in serious need of innovation, but this run-of-the-mill adventure doesn't provide it. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is replete with all of the shortcomings of its genre. There are numerous dead ends and illogical puzzles... [and] many programming bugs; characters will walk backwards across the screen and even vanish without warning." Though Dulin said that the game "does experiment with some interesting concepts, and the dark tone of the original short story is maintained with bleak artwork and depressing situations," he goes on to add that "the so-called 'ethical decisions' these five imprisoned souls must face are no more than red herrings, providing only stopping blocks to progress or disturbing scenes with no tangible purpose"; and criticized Ellison's voice performance as AM, calling it "over-enthusiastic" and stating that AM "may as well be renamed HAM."

Kevin Hoelscher of Adventure Gamers, however, gave the game 4 stars out of 5 and said, "The puzzles are nicely integrated into the gameplay and don't tend to distract from the story. Most of these involve gathering inventory items and determining when and where to use them. Although novice adventurers may have some trouble with them, most of the puzzles are fairly straightforward and make sense within the context of the story." Hoelscher goes on to add that "the graphics hold up very nicely by today's standards. The high-resolution artwork is attractive, albeit extremely macabre. The settings of the gameworld are all very dark and creepy, suitable to the game's subject-matter, giving the game an overall gloomy (and somewhat depressing) feel. This gloomy feel is complemented by the music and sound-effects that, while not particularly memorable, contribute well to the overall mood of the game. The voice-acting is generally well-done and again fits well within the game's setting... Of particular note, however, is Harlan Ellison himself who does the voice work for the insane computer AM. His performance is at once so creepy and deranged that one wonders if he might have a few loose wires himself." Overall, adds Hoelscher, the game "is a hard game to review in that it's an extremely unsettling game, exploring concepts that few, if any, games dare touch. Because it is so unsettling, it's debatable as to whether or not this is an entertaining game. ... It probably won't keep you awake at night in contemplation (unless you're an insomniac or alcoholic), but it might give you some philosophical matter to chew on for a while."

Awards

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream won several major awards. Digital Hollywood called it the "Best Dark Game of 1996", and the Computer Game Developers Conference awarded it the "Best Game Adapted from Linear Media". Computer Gaming World named it the "Best Adventure Game" of the year, and in their 15th anniversary issue, listed it among the "150 Games of All Time", "Best 15 Sleepers of All Time" and "Best 15 Endings of All Time".

Mature content and European censorship

Cyberdreams had developed a reputation, in the early 1990s, of selling computer games with science fiction-cyberpunk storylines and adult violent, sexual, philosophical, and psychological content.

In the novel, Benny was a brilliant and handsome homosexual man whom the AM mutilated into an ugly, childlike, heterosexual savage, with large genital organs. Although, no mention is made of his sexuality in the game and, in his ending, he makes mention of having a wife. Gorrister and Ellen both suffered from an assortment of serious psychological problems. Ted is a bigoted con man who lies his way into upper class social circles and is in love with Ellen, who only mates with Benny. Nimdok is a World War II German Nazi who participated in the Holocaust.

The French and German releases were partially censored. The game was forbidden to players younger than eighteen years. Furthermore, the Nimdok chapter was removed. It is speculated that the Nazi subject was too sensitive for these two countries, especially for Germany, due to previous reaction of the BPjM to national socialist topics. The removal of the Nimdok chapter made the "best" ending (with AM permanently disabled and the cryogenically frozen humans on Luna rescued) unachievable.

See also

• Bad Mojo
• Gabriel Knight
• Phantasmagoria
• Planescape: Torment
• Sanitarium

External links

• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream at the Internet Movie Database
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream at Game Rankings
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream at MobyGames
• Game for purchase at the official Harlan Ellison website
• ScummVM