This article needs additional citations for verification .(August 2016) |
Dust: A Tale of the Wired West | |
---|---|
Developer(s) | CyberFlix |
Publisher(s) | GTE Entertainment |
Producer(s) | Andrew Nelson |
Programmer(s) | Bill Appleton |
Artist(s) | Jamie Wicks Michael Gilmore |
Writer(s) | Andrew Nelson |
Composer(s) | Scott Scheinbaum |
Engine | DreamFactory [1] |
Platform(s) | Windows, Macintosh |
Release | 1995 |
Genre(s) | Adventure game |
Mode(s) | Single-player |
Dust: A Tale of the Wired West is a computer game made for PC and Macintosh. It was released on June 30, 1995, and was produced by CyberFlix and published by GTE Entertainment.
The game is a point-and-click adventure in which the player, playing a character called The Stranger, travels around a virtual old western desert town in the New Mexico desert in 1882. In addition to the main gameplay, there are several minigames in Dust, including blackjack and poker games where the player can choose to play honestly or cheat, and a shooting range which helps prepare the player for a later segment of the game.
The characters encountered in Dust are rendered by way of photographs of professional actors given limited animation in sync with dialogue. A later game produced by the same company, Titanic: Adventure Out of Time , uses the same technique and contains several references to Dust, including a reappearance of the character Buick Riviera.
Dust: A Tale of the Wired West—The Official Strategy Guide (Prima Publishing, 1995; re-released by the author, 2019) was written by Steve Schwartz in cooperation with CyberFlix.
Set in 1882, the game opens by introducing the mysterious protagonist known only as "the Stranger", who is playing cards with a fictionalized version of Billy the Kid in an unknown town in the American West. The Stranger discovers that The Kid is cheating, and The Kid draws his gun and begins firing. After stabbing The Kid with an ornate Plains Indian dagger, The Stranger runs out of the saloon and escapes. In the early morning hours, The Stranger finds himself in the desert town of Diamondback, New Mexico, whose inhabitants treat him with suspicion. The Stranger discovers that there is a target range, a general store, a saloon, a brothel, and a mining camp with a cockfighting ring (though the mining camp cannot be visited). The Mayor's daughter, Marie Macintosh, recognizes The Stranger. It is revealed that The Stranger has some renown for fighting in the Comanche Wars.
The Stranger trades for a new pair of boots which were recovered from a corpse. He then learns that local sheriff William Purvis was recently murdered, and that a local resident who immigrated from Malmö, Sweden has Purvis' six-shot revolver concealed in the bucket of the well from which he waters his pigs. During the night, The Stranger takes the stolen revolver for himself. Later, The Stranger uses a distraction to steal a cache of ammunition from Levon Deadnettle by giving him some risqué burlesque photographs to put in his collection. The Stranger has to save "Help", a Chinese storekeeper, whose shop is about to be burnt down by brothers Cobb and Dale Belcher, drunkard troublemakers who come from a battered family. The two were motivated to drive out "Help" because U.S. President Chester A. Arthur had recently signed the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Stranger uses force to stop the two men, winning support from much of the town and receiving the post of town sheriff. In doing so, however, The Stranger attracts the attention of The Kid, who travels to Diamondback.
A woman whom locals call "Sonoma", one of the few remaining members of the fictional Yunni Tribe, asks The Stranger to recover five sacred objects belonging to her tribe, in exchange for helping him find the legendary Devil's Breath silver mine. Other tasks for The Stranger include helping Nate Trotter, a local rancher, treat his melancholia and saving the life of Herodotus Mezamee. Mezamee is an African-American poker player who is being hunted by corrupt bounty hunters because he killed a white man in self-defense.
The Kid arrives, sending in gunmen ahead of him to kill The Stranger, but The Stranger eliminates the attackers and kills The Kid in the duel that follows. Then he returns the Yunni objects to "Sonoma". Keeping her word, Sonoma helps the player gain access to the Devil's Breath silver mine, the entrance to which is hidden under the town's abandoned schoolhouse.
In the mine, The Stranger encounters a mysterious Guardian who reveals that The Stranger's actual name is Ahote—in reality a Hopi name meaning "restless one". The Guardian discloses that The Stranger is a member of the Yunni tribe who was separated at birth, and is destined to help restore the Yunni tribe. The Guardian tasks him with one final puzzle while also urging Ahote to remove a box that appears. He explains that early Spanish colonists massacred much of the Yunni tribe in their attempt to steal the box. Ahote solves a puzzle, which reveals that the box is filled with treasure, but then Ahote is held at gunpoint by Radisson Bloodstone-Hayes, a wealthy English aristocrat who seeks to take the treasure for his own gain. Making use of mystical Yunni rituals, Ahote performs an invocation to summon the Yunni Thunderbird. The apparition strikes Hayes down and kills him.
Upon leaving the mine with the treasure, Ahote finds the town gathered to meet him. He is offered five choices on what to do with the treasure. The game's five endings depend on what choice the player picks. Ahote can go into the ranching business with Nate Trotter, go into the lead business with Mayor Cosimo Macintosh, run away with Marie to live in opulence, leave town with the treasure, or give the treasure to Sonoma to help rebuild the Yunni tribe.
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (August 2021) |
Dust was built from a script of 400 pages. [2]
Publication | Score |
---|---|
Next Generation | [3] |
MacUser | [4] |
NewMedia | "Thumbs Up" [5] |
Electronic Entertainment | [6] |
Publication | Award |
---|---|
Macworld | Best Multimedia Game 1995 [7] |
Inside Mac Games | Best Adventure Game 1995 (finalist) [8] |
Dust was a commercial failure; [9] Chris Hudak of GameSpot later wrote that it "drew high praise from critics but still somehow sold less than 50,000 copies". [10] According to Jack Neely of Metro Pulse , its sales reached roughly 30,000 units by 1999. [9]
Reviewing the Macintosh version, a critic for Next Generation summarized that "Dust fulfills all the requirements for a successful adventure: largely nonlinear, multiple solutions to problems, multiple story endings, no hand-holding (yes, you can die), and a strong but not constricting plotline." He said that the characters having only their mouths animated looks "hokey" but is an acceptable sacrifice for more dialogue and gameplay (since presenting all the dialogue in full-motion video would have been impossible due to space constraints). Additionally praising the fully 3D environment and the real-time interactions between characters, he gave the game four out of five stars. [3]
The editors of Macworld gave Dust their 1995 "Best Multimedia Game" award. Steven Levy of the magazine summarized, "All in all, Dust is a high-spirited period romp that puts the fun back in computer adventuring." [7] Recommending the game in PC Magazine 's 1995 Christmas buyer's guide, Bernard Yee called Dust "a refreshing mix of adventure and first-person action." [11] Writing in the 1996 edition of The Macintosh Bible, Bart Farkas stated that "PowerPC technology has allowed computer games to venture ever closer into the realm of virtual reality. No game comes as close as Dust". [12]
Monkey Island is a series of adventure games. The first four games were produced and published by LucasArts, earlier known as Lucasfilm Games. The fifth was developed by Telltale Games with LucasArts, while the sixth was developed by Terrible Toybox with Lucasfilm Games and Devolver Digital.
Starship Titanic is an adventure game developed by The Digital Village and published by Simon & Schuster Interactive. It was released in April 1998 for Microsoft Windows and in March 1999 for Apple Macintosh. The game takes place on the eponymous starship, which the player is tasked with repairing by locating the missing parts of its control system. The gameplay involves solving puzzles and speaking with the bots inside the ship. The game features a text parser similar to those of text adventure games with which the player can talk with characters.
Descent is a first-person shooter (FPS) game developed by Parallax Software and released by Interplay Productions in 1995 for MS-DOS, and later for Macintosh, PlayStation, and RISC OS. It popularized a subgenre of FPS games employing six degrees of freedom and was the first FPS to feature entirely true-3D graphics. The player is cast as a mercenary hired to eliminate the threat of a mysterious extraterrestrial computer virus infecting off-world mining robots. In a series of mines throughout the Solar System, the protagonist pilots a spaceship and must locate and destroy the mine's power reactor and escape before being caught in the mine's self-destruction, defeating opposing robots along the way. Players can play online and compete in either deathmatches or cooperate to take on the robots.
Myst is an adventure video game designed by Rand and Robyn Miller. It was developed by Cyan, Inc., published by Broderbund, and first released in 1993 for the Macintosh. In the game, the player travels via a special book to a mysterious island called Myst. The player interacts with objects and traverses the environment by clicking on pre-rendered imagery. Solving puzzles allows the player to travel to other worlds ("Ages"), which reveal the backstory of the game's characters and help the player make the choice of whom to aid.
Mario Is Missing! is a 1993 educational game developed and published by The Software Toolworks for MS-DOS, Nintendo Entertainment System, and Super Nintendo Entertainment System, later released on Macintosh in 1994. The player controls Luigi, who must travel around the world to find and return stolen treasures as part of a quest to find his brother, Mario, who has been captured by Bowser. Mario Is Missing!, part of a series of educational Mario games, was Luigi's second starring role in a video game, following the 1990 Game Watch game Luigi's Hammer Toss and preceding the 2001 GameCube game Luigi's Mansion.
The Fool's Errand is a 1987 computer game by Cliff Johnson. It is a meta-puzzle game with storytelling, visual puzzles, and a cryptic treasure map. It is the tale of a wandering Fool who seeks his fortune in the Land of Tarot and braves the enchantments of the High Priestess. A sequel titled The Fool and His Money was released October 25, 2012.
Titanic: Adventure Out of Time is a 1996 point-and-click adventure game developed by CyberFlix and published in the United States and United Kingdom by GTE Entertainment and Europress respectively, for Windows and Macintosh. It takes place in a virtual representation of the RMS Titanic, following a British spy who has been sent back in time to the night Titanic sank and must complete a previously failed mission to prevent World War I, the Russian Revolution, and World War II from occurring. The gameplay involves exploring the ship and solving puzzles. There are multiple outcomes and endings to the game depending on the player's interactions with characters and use of items.
Nocturne is a 1999 action-adventure survival horror video game set in the late 1920s and early 1930s – the Prohibition and Great Depression era. The player takes the part of The Stranger, an operative of a fictional American Government secret organization known as "Spookhouse", which was created by President Theodore Roosevelt to fight monsters. He investigates four strange cases and saves people from classic monsters such as werewolves, zombies, and vampires.
Moonmist is an interactive fiction game written by Stu Galley and Jim Lawrence and published by Infocom in 1986. The game was released simultaneously for the Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Apple II, Atari 8-bit computers, Atari ST, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, TRS-80, TI-99/4A, and Mac. It is Infocom's twenty-second game. Moonmist was re-released in Infocom's 1995 compilation The Mystery Collection, as well as the 1996 compilation Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces.
The Faery Tale Adventure is a 1987 action role-playing video game designed by David Joiner and published by MicroIllusions for the Amiga, and later ported to the Commodore 64, MS-DOS, and Sega Genesis. The MS-DOS version is titled The Faery Tale Adventure: Book I. Microillusions also released a "Book 1" version for the Amiga which was going to be the start of a series of games, according to Talin, but bankruptcy prevented it. The initial version was produced for the Amiga 1000 and featured the largest game world to that date. A sequel, Faery Tale Adventure II: Halls of the Dead, was released in 1997.
Tass Times in Tonetown is an adventure game published by Activision in 1986. It was designed by Michael Berlyn and Muffy McClung Berlyn and programmed by Rebecca Heineman of Interplay in cooperation with Brainwave Creations.
Jump Raven was the second game released by Cyberflix, in 1994. The game's technology is similar to that of Lunicus, released by Cyberflix one year prior, but this time employs a more detailed storyline and environment. In an opening sequence of the game, we see future New York City, which has fallen into horrible disrepair in the aftermath of global warming and rising sea levels and a bankrupt federal government. The premise of the story is that gangsters, neo-nazis, and various other thugs have acquired large stores of weapons from the government, and have ransacked New York's store of cryogenically-frozen DNA of endangered species. The player's job as a bounty hunter is to retrieve them.
Amber: Journeys Beyond is an American computer game released in 1996 for Apple Macintosh computers and Windows 95. It is the only game produced by Hue Forest Entertainment, founded by Frank and Susan Wimmer.
CyberFlix Incorporated was a computer game company founded in 1993 by Bill Appleton. CyberFlix was based in Knoxville, Tennessee. They made many interactive story-telling games in the 1990s, but stopped any and all productions in 1998 before finally going out of business in 2006.
Lunicus is a 1993 video game developed by Cyberflix and published by Paramount Interactive. It shares many traits in both graphical style and gameplay with some of Cyberflix's other games, like Jump Raven. It was rated as 1993 CD-ROM game of the year in the magazine MacWorld.
Redjack: Revenge of the Brethren is an action-adventure video game developed by Cyberflix and released by THQ for Windows and Mac OS in 1998.
The Magic School Bus is a series of educational software video games developed by Music Pen and published by Microsoft via their Microsoft Home brand. The interactive adventures are part of the larger franchise and based with The Magic School Bus original series books and public television series.
Andrew Nelson is a writer and professor living in New Orleans. He worked as a senior producer of Britannica.com, a creative director for Cyberflix, a visiting professor at Loyola University New Orleans, and a Public Relations and Social Media Account professional at Peter A. Mayer Advertising in New Orleans. Two computer games he developed for CyberFlix – Titanic: Adventure Out of Time (1996) and Dust: A Tale of the Wired West (1995) – were bestselling PC game and Macintosh Games of the Year. In 2007 he was awarded a Lowell Thomas Award for his work with the Society. He is a writer-at-large for Salon, National Geographic Traveler, ReadyMade, The New York Times, Via magazine, Weekend Sherpa and San Francisco Magazine.
Mummy: Tomb of the Pharaoh is a point-and-click adventure video game released on August 31, 1996, by Interplay Productions on Windows and by MacPlay, a division of Interplay Productions at the time, on Macintosh. It is a sequel to Frankenstein: Through the Eyes of the Monster. The game was developed by Amazing Media, directed and produced by Jeff McDonald, Keith Metzger, and Loring Casartelli, written by McDonald and Metzger, and composed by Márcio Câmara. Malcolm McDowell stars as Stuart Davenport, one of the main characters of the game.
Skull Cracker is a 1996 supernatural beat 'em up video game developed by American studio CyberFlix and published by GTE Entertainment on Macintosh and Windows. It is sometimes considered a spiritual successor to the 1991 title Creepy Castle, which the game's head of technology William Appleton had previously written for Reactor Inc. Skull Cracker was conceptually designed by Ben Calica.