The Director Should've Shot You by Alan Dean Foster

Author:Alan Dean Foster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

SHADOWKEEP (1984)

As video games became more complex and the computing power that was available to their designers became cheaper and faster, simple games like Pong rapidly fell by the arcade wayside. Like any other player I had my favorites. Space Invaders drove me nuts. Centipede was a big favorite, perhaps because I’ve always been deeply interested in arthropods. Donkey Kong eventually became a game of choice, maybe because the eponymous simian actually displayed something resembling tangible reactions to his surroundings.

As an example of a game that drew increasingly on very minimal animation but was a step up from Pong, my wife owns the only console version of the arcade game Frogs I’ve ever seen. No, not Frogger. Frogs. Contained within a green and white cabinet was a black and white monitor that weighed only slightly less than a Volkswagen. Surrounding it was dimensional painted-on-board artwork most nearly resembling rejects from Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo. A simple joystick allowed the user to manipulate the frog’s tongue to catch insects moving across the monitor screen. A true antique now, as primitive in comparison to a contemporary video game as a wind-up telephone is to a versatile cell phone.

From these initial humble exercises in pixilated creature consumption sprang the first games to embrace story as well as action. Entire seriously researched, intricately analytical histories have been written of their origins, from the first cackled “waka-waka” up to the virtually cinematic, complex iterations that are so common and time-consuming today.

Standing out from the rest of its quarter-devouring brethren was a game called Dragon’s Lair. Featuring full Disneyeseque hand-drawn animation by Don Bluth Productions (The Secret of Nimb, The Land Before Time), it was breathtakingly beautiful compared to its competitors. But the arcade game had problems. Once a player memorized the game’s moves, there was no need to play it again. And the laserdisc-based technology had a disconcerting habit of causing the animation to stutter. Also to break, and it was expensive to fix.

Despite these problems, the game had made a lot of money. Bluth had the notion of making a sequel featuring the same characters, or even a feature-length film. I was brought in to help with a possible story, meeting with both Don and Gary Goldman.

Since the lead character, Dirk the Daring, didn’t speak throughout the entire video game (Douglas Fairbanks Sr. would have been proud), I had the idea of putting him, at the beginning of the new game/film, under a curse that rendered him mute. Simultaneously, the same magic would inadvertently give all the animals around him the power of speech. The result would be a hero who had to communicate in gestures while his often frustrated animal helpers did all the talking. Round about February of 1984 I submitted the full film treatment for Dragon’s Lair—The Ring of Truth to Bluth and Goldman. I thought it could be ground-breaking.

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