Oliver will soon find out that it’s actually more of a “museum of the history of mental patients treatment”, as he soon discovers to be trapped inside, as the game begins. The former hospital has now been transformed into a sort of museum of psychiatric history. The player steps in the shoes of Oliver Metcalf, the son of the last superintendent of a psychiatric hospital that has just reopened after many years. So, with the help of Bob Bates of Legend Entertainment, who gets co-writing and designer credits, the graphical adventure game based on the dreary world of the people of Blackstone (New Hampshire) is finally released to the public, just in time for the Halloween season of 1998. Even while writing the series as a fully episodic chronicle, basically inspired by what Stephen King did with The Green Mile, he felt that the material was perfectly suited for the gaming world. Clarke did the same with Sierra’s sci-fi adventure Ramaand so did John Saul, writer of Blackstone Chronicles.Īs stated in the manual’s introduction, he has always been a fan of adventure games, “since the days of textual adventures”. Harlan Ellison got directly involved with the development of I have no mouth and I must scream, Arthur C.

Indeed, this is something that has gradually stopped happening, or maybe it is not such a big marketing feature anymore, but there are still several examples of graphical adventures from the two decades that had the original writers on board. And not just simply hired to mentor the then-real writers, but to help along the process of converting their original books in gaming form. Ever since the eighties, and continuining in the nineties, it was normal for many novelists to be directly involved in the process of developing a story for videogames.

The blackstone chronicles