Dark Seed II - Death Scenes
Dark Seed II failure compilation. All Game Over animations from Dark Seed 2 (ダークシードII).
Dark Seed players wanted to see more of hero Mike Dawson's nightmarish journey into Giger's Dark World, and so Cyberdreams brought in game producer David Mullich to create the sequel. Not only had Mullich developed other adventure games with dark psychological themes such as The Prisoner and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, he also admitted to being a Giger fan since high school, when he bought an Emerson, Lake and Palmer album with a cover designed by the Swiss surrealist. With the goal of surpassing the high standards set by the original Dark Seed, he assembled a development team of the most talented and demented minds working in interactive entertainment.
Since Giger's disturbing images have had such a profound impact on science fiction literature and cinema — he designed creatures appearing in the films Alien, Poltergeist II and Species — it seemed fitting that the sequel should have a literary quality. Designer Raymond Benson, whose software credits include Stephen King's The Mist, Ultima VII -The Black Gate, Return of the Phantom and Are You Afraid Of The Dark?, was commissioned to write a story that continued Mike Dawson's horrifying adventures. Instructed that the sequel also must take Mike Dawson from our Normal World into Giger's Dark World, Benson crafted a psychological murder mystery that begins in a quirky, "David Lynchian" small town and draws us into a terrifying alternate universe that is a metaphor for madness. Those who reach the game's chilling conclusion will appreciate how well Benson's tale allegorizes what Giger says about his art: "I expel these creatures, and their pain, by painting them onto a surface, trapping them forever. In a somewhat symbolic manner, I also free myself."
Giger later requested that the sequel Include Images that had recently been haunting him. including a sled carrying a vat down the banister of an endless staircase (inspired by Giger's "Shaft" pieces). Since Benson had moved on to other projects. Cyberdreams consulted science fiction author John Shirley (The Eclipse Trilogy, and the screenplay for "The Crow") on how to fit Giger's visuals into the sequel, and he also contributed many additional ideas for fleshing out the Dark World. To put the finishing touches on the game dialogue. Cyberdreams brought in Keith Herber, a horror author who edited the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game and is an expert on H. P. Lovecraft.
Once the game design was completed, Cyberdreams hired Destiny Software Productions of Vancouver, Canada to implement it. For the original Dark Seed, Giger had insisted that Cyberdreams use a high resolution VGA graphics mode (640 by 360 pixels, 16 colors) to avoid the "square and jagged" look found in most computer games of the time. So that the sequel would also be visually cutting edge, Destiny's programming team enhanced their graphics routines to support an even more advanced graphics mpde, SVGA (640 x 480 pixels, 256 colors), while running under a Windows or Windows 95 environment.
To create the character animations of Mike Dawson and the other Normal World denizens, Destiny photographed the movements of live models with a high speed camera, scanned the photographs into digital form, and played images back as animations. In addition to professional performers, some of Destiny's staff members volunteered to be character models. By a happy coincidence, artist Chris Gilbert was a dead-ringer for the Mike Dawson character from the original Dark Seed.
The art team at Destiny also proved to be skilled at combining a variety of imagery from Giger's fantastic artwork and using both 2-D and 3-D techniques to create new Dark World backgrounds. Several months into the project's development, Munich, Cyberdreams' art director Peter Delgado, and Destiny artist Gregg Haggman visited Giger's home in Zurich to show off their progress. Giger was very impressed with the graphic improvements over the original Dark Seed, and offered many helpful suggestions about scaling, placement and composition. One of his most significant contributions was the placement of metal catwalks throughout the Dark World, so that Mike Dawson would always feel in peril, being continuously suspended over a bottomless pit.
So that the Normal World would have an equally distinct look, Cyberdreams enlisted the talents of artist Jeff Hilbers to create the Normal World backgrounds. Hilbers, who has previously served as art director on producer Munich's projects when both were at The Walt Disney Company, brought his unique sense of the macabre to Mike Dawson's home town. The quaint images of what superficially appears to be a pleasant community proves on closer inspection to be infected with perversity, symbolizing the Dark World's growing influence on Crowley, Texas.
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