Back in the 80's games didn't have much of a story to them. They were all kind of like Space Invaders, Chisholm Trail, Zaxxon, Blasto, Pac-Man and the like. Then, slowly, games for my Commodore-64 started trickling in that had a bit of meat to them. Bard's Tale II, Below the Root, Castle Wolfenstein and others. But the first game that really got me going with the amount of background story it had was the old LucasArts classic, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders.
I remember the game fondly. My mom wouldn't let us play with the C-64 for all that long, and on top of that, the 1571 floppy drive for the machine was NOTORIOUS for overheating. As a result, I had a lot of time to read manuals and such. The main character in Zak McKracken is a tabloid writer, so the game came with a little "issue" of the magazine he supposedly wrote for, the National Inquisitor.
The manual had hints for the game, like a story about how a kid put an egg in a microwave on an airline flight and got the flight grounded because they thought it was a gunshot. So, you reach a point in the game where you're on a plane, and you find yourself with an egg, and an unattended microwave...put 2 and 2 together, and you're now able to walk about the cabin and pick up all the items on the plane that you normally wouldn't be able to get in your inventory because the stewardesses won't let you leave your seat. A mini-FAQ thinly disguised as excellent reading material...well played, LucasArts...well played.
And It All Started When I Saw That 2-Headed Squirrel
Our story starts with our protagonist, Zak, arguing with his boss over the stupid stories he's got to write for the mag. His boss tells him to write one more article, and then he can write his famous novel. Zak relents and heads off to sleep, where he has a dream involving people in nose glasses, women, and Atlantis.
After taking a flight to check out the 2-headed squirrel, and write a story about the first UFO sighting 50 years ago at Mt. Ranier, he finds a blue crystal exactly like one of the three he had seen in his dream. He takes it back and drops it in the deposit slot of the Society for Ancient Wisdom, and meets up with the woman from his dreams earlier...and she's wearing the same clothing! She fills Zak in on the nature of the crystal and its purpose, and so begins his adventure that will pit Zak against the evil Alien organization and "The King", evil mega phone-conglomerate TPC, and help him figure out how to raise his consciousness and lower his golf scores.
Gameplay
This is the point-and-click style that LucasArts pioneered with Maniac Mansion, (I believe they were calling it the SCUMMTM system back then.) You could highlight an object, and it'd give you the most obvious adjective to place with it at the current time if you clicked on it, or you could scroll your cursor down to the big box of actions at the bottom of the screen and string the words together to get a different command like, "Use blue crystal on two-headed squirrel".
The puzzles in the game were exceptionally wacky, too. Part of the game has you heading up to Mars, and you'll find a big locked door. So, Zak goes to a pawnshop just up the block, buys a toolbox, which comes with wire cutters. A little further up the street, there's a giant bobby pin sign that's hanging from the local locksmith's. So you cut that down, and head to Mars, and use the bobby pin sign to pick the lock. Another one requires you to piss off the local French bakery owner until he drops a stale loaf of French bread from the second story of his bakery at you. You then pop the bread in your garbage disposal and use the bread crumbs from it to attract a bird, who you mind control with a crystal so you can fly around in the Andes mountains. Crazy stuff...but it was mostly intuitive, and funny to boot.
You control 4 different characters in Zak McKracken, and you needed to switch between the 4 of them at many points during the game in order to complete puzzles. (I remember having to open an airlock with one character and shut it with the other to make sure their cabin didn't depressurize.) This was pretty interesting because none other games, with the possible exception of Maniac Mansion, even approached this idea.
Unlike the Sierra games that would follow, you had to try really hard to get yourself killed in a LucasArts adventure. The idea was that they wanted you to spend more time enjoying the game, not getting pissed off because you slipped off a ledge or ran into someone with your car, and had to reload off of a save. I distinctly remember playing Space Quest I on Fastest speed, making it to the very end of the game, and then dying because of something that happened to me on the second screen of the game. That kind of burned.
With LucasArts, you had to really, really want to die. Like in Maniac Mansion, the only way I remember you being able to die would be to drain the pool, put a character at the bottom, switch to another character, and refill the pool. Zak McKracken is equally hard to die in, and for that, I think I appreciate these old LucasArts games more than I liked the old PC Sierra adventures. Just because I was actually playing to enjoy the game and solving the puzzles, not just reloading because my finger slipped.
Graphics
If you look at this game now, it's not going to bowl you over. But considering the time, I remember this being kind of like the FFVII of the day, where the graphics blew everything else out of the water on the ol' Commodore 64. Plus it had "cutscenes" which I don't remember seeing in any game prior to this. You had a movie at the beginning and end, but never anything in the middle.
Sound
Back in the days of the C-64, sound for this game was awesome. The theme song at the beginning of the game is excellent. I remember it used to get stuck in my head, and now that I've started playing it again, it's lodged itself back inside my brain. Gotta love that early synth/techno. But there were all sorts of different ambient effects for footsteps, wind blowing, clocks, etc. This was all fairly impressive for a game that was using floppy disks.
Overall
I'd have to say that this is probably one of the top 5 adventure games I've ever played, with the only ones on the list that top it also being LucasArts games. It's really a shame that nobody writes these games as well as they used to. I mean, every once in a while you get occasional flashes of wittiness like the, "Max...you're a video game" sequence from Max Payne, but for the most part, no company not named LucasArts has really put together a really solid, witty, intelligent adventure game for a long, long time.
I'm hoping that 2005 somehow finds at least a niche return to a few more games like this, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandango where a well-written, funny story that doesn't involve shooting more people than were killed in Desert Storm II: Desert Harder With A Vengeance To Kill can actually flourish as a fun and enjoyable video game. Maybe they'll even do a sequel for this game someday. We can only hope. And write petitions.
The one complaint I did have about this game was huge, though...the disks went bad and I could never finish it!! Well, not until I eventually picked the game up for the PC, and just steamrollered through it, years later when I was in college. True gamers never leave a great game unfinished!
But if that doesn't happen, you can do yourself a favor, and head on over to download the latest Commodore 64 emulator, complete with a floppy disk drive emulator that won't overheat. Then when you're done there, pick up the greatest in Commodore gaming history at C64.com. Zak McKracken is currently the 8th most popular d/l over there. Everyone's got to remember the old school...it's how we got where we are today.
