Would you pay $170 for a 2 ½ hour game?
This would have been my piece for the third issue of Buttonhook. Unfortunately, the zine only ever had one issue, so this would have remained unpublished, but I decided to share it with you guys anyways! As you can see, I had an Experience playing this game and it cheesed me off so bad, that I had to write this.
Gadget – Invention, Travel, & Adventure is a “major interactive film experience” released in 1993, the same year as Myst. It featured the latest technology, such as 8 bit sound, 256-color graphics, and QuickTime movies. Playing this on a modern machine via DOSBox makes for a very, shall we say, “crusty” experience.
I only learned of this “game” when I saw that Guillermo del Toro stated it was one of his favorite games of all time. And I honestly cannot see why. You’re tasked with finding a scientist and you do so by taking a train, getting off at every stop, talking to a stranger or two who opines on the scientist’s weird experiments, and then you’re told your mark is now somewhere else, so, get moving. There’s only one puzzle in the entire game, which any Myst player will instantly recognize. Luckily, it is way less painful, as there’s only 3 rooms to this maze.
The story includes a last-minute twist that, theoretically, recontextualizes everything and warrants a second play-through to view the work with this new lens. But there’s just no reason to. Most of the “story” is in supplemental materials that came out after the original game release. There’s no hidden rooms or side quests that give you more information. There isn’t even a giant wall that takes seven minutes to walk by! There’s only the one, linear story, which can easily be done in one sitting, and it’s a confusing and uncompelling one.
What really bugs me is that it retailed at $79.99. Taking inflation into account, that’s around $170. It was on a single CD-ROM, which was a piece of hardware most people’s computers didn’t have at this point, if they had one at all. Luckily, it’s available for free on sites like the Internet Archive and includes Past as Future, a remaster with 16-breathtaking bits of color and sound, along with additional materials that can help you piece together a story.
Assuming you want to watch an entire movie and read a 200 page artbook in Japanese.
But with such an empty world and flat characters, there’s no draw to do so much homework. It’s no wonder why Myst, with its literally-empty worlds and physically-flat characters, became a household name and Gadget has been relegated to a footnote in video game history.
