For whatever reason I just found myself thinking about Rise of the Dragon, a 1990 point-and-click adventure game developed by Dynamix (which at that point had recently been acquired by Sierra). This game takes all the best elements of Blade Runner and, uh, Blade Runner to present a nightmarish future vision in which Los Angeles is overrun with crime, drugs, and pollution, if you can imagine such a thing.
The game features cool graphic novel-style cut scenes to advance the story. In the first of these, we see a nice young woman taking some street drugs that function sort of like a nicotine patch from hell, killing and horribly mutating her.
Turns out this girl was the mayor’s daughter, and he doesn’t want it getting into the papers that she was mixed up in crime and drugs, so he hires you, private investigator Blade Hunter, to discreetly look into her death. Aside from two stupendously bad side-scrolling action sequences, the game is played from a first-person viewpoint and uses a drag-and-drop interface, which was cutting-edge stuff back then. One of the first things you do in the game is get dressed by dragging your clothes onto a picture of your character.
You can actually leave your apartment without getting dressed, in which case you’re immediately arrested for indecent exposure (and lose the game). This establishes a pattern that will repeat itself throughout Rise of the Dragon. You will lose the game. Over and over. A lot. Did you not say exactly the right thing to any character? Lose the game. Mouth off or pick a fight with anybody, anywhere? Get beat up and lose the game. (See that exquisitely muscled torso? Don’t be fooled. Anyone in this game can beat you up.) Fail to show prophetic insight into where you should be at any given instant? Lose the game. This game is INSANELY frustrating. Practically every puzzle requires that you fail (and lose the game) a few times in order to figure out what you’re supposed to do. You proceed by trial and error, and this game introduced me to the dubious pleasure of clicking everything on everything to see if anything happens. Lots of events in the world don’t happen until a particular time, which makes them easy to miss (and lose the game), so you spend a lot of time wandering around with nothing to do because some critical event hasn’t happened yet, and you’re constantly tempted to just let time pass and see if anything happens, but of course that risks missing the critical event (and losing the game). And of course, if you don’t make it back to your apartment by bedtime, your character will simply go to sleep on the sidewalk, where he is promptly mugged (and you lose the game).
So why would anyone ever play this game? Two reasons. 1) Because you’re an adolescent with nothing better to do and a near-pathological commitment to solving puzzle games, and 2) Because there is some cool, creepy, messed up shit in this game. King’s Quest this ain’t.
For example, you quickly track down the guy who sold the tainted drugs that killed the mayor’s daughter. This drug dealer’s associates in the Chinese mafia are displeased with him for bringing them to the attention of the mayor, so they express their displeasure by tying him up and covering his body with drug patches, which causes his skin to melt off.
You then find yourself at odds with a local mob boss. There’s also some prophecy about how you’re going to have to fight a dragon who’s been imprisoned for the last 5,000 years. An old wise man gives you three good luck charms: a book of ancient wisdom, a blessed stone, and a flak jacket. The book and stone are completely worthless, but the vest will stop bullets. That’s pretty funny.
Then the mob boss kidnaps your girlfriend, and you bust into his office building to save her. You find her strapped to a chair with a collar around her neck that in just a few seconds is going to inject her with fatally mutation-inducing sludge.
Failing to save her results in one of the most famously disturbing scenes in all of video games.
Oh what the hell. You’re curious, right? It looks like this:
Failing to save your girlfriend is actually one of the very few actions you can take in the entire game that doesn’t cause you to lose the game. You just end up getting the “sad ending.”
Anyway, shortly after you rescue your girlfriend (or don’t), you find yourself in a basement/cave where a bunch of cultists are worshiping the mob boss, who right before your eyes transforms into a frickin’ dragon, man. That’s also pretty creepy, the way it’s drawn:
Then you kill him.
So anyway, that’s Rise of the Dragon. The pros: Good graphics (for the time), cutting edge interface (for the time), pretty good story, and lots of freaky, freaky shit, man. The cons: Insanely frustrating, kinda short. Definitely one-of-a-kind, though.
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