Saturday, January 04, 1997
Shadowpact (Murder Of Crows)
After toiling away in the ranks of the computer game industry for a few years, I had the bright idea of starting my own company.
(The company name always required a lot of explaining -- a "murder of crows" being the name for a group of crows, like a "pod of whales" or a "gaggle of geese" -- but it got people's attention. This had its down side, though, as we received more than our fair share of strange e-mails from people lambasting us for inciting corvicide...)
Our first project was a real-time strategy/role-playing game called Shadowpact, but unfortunately after two years we were forced to close shop and Shadowpact was consigned to that great graveyard where unfinished games go to die. Which is a shame. Aside from what would have been a fairly novel play mechanic that incorporated a heavy narrative element into the traditionally story free real-time strategy genre, Shadowpact also had an interesting aesthetic that we dubbed "techno-occult," a bastard child of William Gibson and Umberto Eco. We even had Portishead lined up to do the music. To get an idea of what it might have been like, you can read a short story -- an homage to the style of G. K. Chesterton -- that I wrote to introduce marketing and sales to the game, or download the opening titles/credits.
Content
- Shadowpact Background ("The True and Secret History") [PDF]
- Shadowpact Titles (motion graphics by Keefe Boerner and Chip Mosher at Pixel Perfect, music by Portishead) [7.7MB ZIPPED MOV]
Links