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The Making of The Longest Journey

Posted by Zonk on from the best-daughter-of-a-dragon-story-evar dept.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun is hosting an interview/retrospective with Ragnar Tørnquist talking about the classic point-and-click adventure game The Longest Journey. The piece starts off with a surprise: the game was originally intended to be a platformer. "I wanted to tell a story, a specific story - and that's why we ended up making an adventure rather than an RPG or an action game ... We were all fans of the classic adventures from LucasArts and Sierra, and I'd made a bunch of text adventures on the Commodore 64 back in the day, so the genre was a natural match. But in the end it was all about the story, and finding the gameplay mechanics to suit that."

3 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. If you want to play it now by stoolpigeon · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you missed it when it came around, you can still get it for less than $8. Follow it up with Dreamfall and you are all set. For the rest you'll have to wait on Dreamfall Chapters

    --
    It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
    1. Re:If you want to play it now by nine-times · · Score: 2, Informative

      You can also get one or both of the "The Longest Journey" games onSteam. I know, some people don't like Steam too much because of the DRM, but some find it convenient.

    2. Re:If you want to play it now by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 4, Informative
      Who modded that insightful?!
      • If valve goes out of business, they will unlock all content control for all games. See this official forum post.
      • If valve cuts off your access to data and you're stuck without a CD, you can just back it up. Steam includes a handy feature that lets you burn a DVD or set of CDs (or just keep the archive files on a hard drive) from any steam game. If you lose your data then just pop in the DVD and it automatically copies the game data. Since it's steam, and games are downloaded as big archives requiring no 'installation' (all settings and cache and things are mapped to the filesystem, and game files have their own virtual filesystem within the archives), it just instantly works after copying. You still need to decrypt it with a key from the server but again see the above post, they can just disable the authentication.
      • You can install any purchased game on an unlimited number of machines. A lot of people give out their steam information to their friends, because everyone can play! You're limited to 1 multiplayer game at a time, but you could all be playing a single player game offline and steam doesn't even care.