Pathways Into Darkness
Encyclopedia
Pathways into Darkness is a first-person adventure
video game developed and published by Bungie Software Products Corporation (now Bungie
) in 1993, exclusively for Apple Macintosh
personal computers. Players assume the role of a Special Forces soldier who must stop a powerful, godlike being from awakening and destroying the world. Players solve puzzles and defeat enemies to unlock parts of a pyramid where the god sleeps; the game's ending changes depending on player actions.
Pathways began as a sequel to Bungie's Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete
, before the developers created an original story. Jason Jones
programmed the game, while his friend Colin Brent developed the environments and creatures. The game features three-dimensional texture mapped
graphics and stereo
sound on supported Macintosh models. Pathways was critically acclaimed and won a host of awards; it was also Bungie's first major commercial success, enabling the two-man team of Jason Jones and Alex Seropian
to move into a Chicago office and begin paying staff.
and adventure game
. The game interface consists of four windows. The primary "World View" shows the player character's first-person perspective. Players move, dodge fire, and use weapons and items using the computer keyboard
. The "Inventory" window displays items players have acquired. The "Message" window relates information, and the "Player" window displays health and energy information.
In the game, players fight various monsters as they explore the pyramid's halls and catacombs. Players may pick up weapons and ammunition left behind by others to supplement their arsenal. As additional levels are unlocked, new weapons become available, including machine guns and grenade launchers. Players can absorb a certain amount of damage, but once their health reaches zero, they must resume their progress at the last saved checkpoint. Resting in place replenishes health but saps game time and leaves the player open to attack. Scattered throughout the levels are other items players may use. Potions have different effects: rare blue potions, for example, rid the player character of poison and damage. Otherwise items provide points or cash; every four points increases the player character's maximum health by two units. Crystals can be used against enemies to freeze, burn, or otherwise harm them.
Through the use of the yellow crystal, players can converse with Previously Living Sentient Beings or "PLSB". Conversations give players puzzle information, provide strategies to defeating monsters, and story background. Rather than relying on a branching tree of conversation options, players type keywords into a dialogue box. When a certain keyword (typically found in a previous statement by the dead person in question) is entered, the dead person will give a response. The manual gives a starting point by mentioning that all dead people respond to "name" and "death", by giving their name and describing how they died, respectively.
. Days before, a diplomat from the alien J'Jaro appeared to the President of the United States and informed him that in days, an ancient godlike being would awaken and destroy the Earth. The only way to prevent this catastrophe is to prevent the god from awakening. The eight-man Special Forces team carries a nuclear weapon
, with the goal of entering an ancient pyramid, descending to the bottom level where the god sleeps, and activating the bomb to stun the god and bury it under tons of rock. Before the game begins, players' parachute fails to open. Awakening hours later, players find almost all their equipment inoperable. Reaching the pyramid on foot hours after the rest of the team entered the structure, the player must complete the team's mission before the god awakens in five days. In the pyramid, the player finds bodies of their squad-mates, the remains of Spanish-speaking
treasure hunters, as well as fallen members of a Nazi
expedition from the 1930s
who were looking for a secret weapon, but never returned.
The game's ending changes depending on whether the player has a radio beacon
to call for extraction, and when the nuclear device is set to explode. Forgetting to set the bomb, or setting it to explode at any time past the awakening of the dreaming god, results in Earth's destruction. The device's detonation before the player reaches a minimum safe distance results in a pyrrhic victory
. The most favorable endings are achieved by leaving the pyramid with a beacon at least twenty game minutes before the device is set to go off; if the game ends with enough time for the player to escape on foot, the player survives without a beacon.
Pathways was Bungie's third title, after their previous game, Minotaur: The Labrynths of Crete, sold around 2,500 copies. In the summer of 1992, Jones was living in dorms at the University of Chicago
when he saw Wolfenstein 3D
, a shooter game
with three-dimensional (3D) graphics. Inspired, Jones created a rough 3D graphics engine for the Mac that simulated walls with trapezoids and rectangles. Originally, Bungie intended Pathways to be a straightforward 3D version of Minotaur, but they quickly found that the top-down perspective of their previous game did not mesh with the 3D presentation. An additional consideration was that the developers wanted to create a game that did not rely on then-rare networks and modem
s, an issue in marketing Minotaur. The rest of 1992 was spent tweaking the graphics engine.
Work on the game's storyline and levels began in January 1993. Jones recalled that starting from cliché plots they moved towards "very interesting and unique but extremely difficult to understand stories". One of the more complicated stories cast the player as one of a group of Roman soldiers who discovered a mountain spring that extended their lives. Every seven years one soldier would be picked to descend into the caves and bring back more water. If the leader died, a new one would be selected to undertake the journey to ensure their survival. "It was a very interesting plot since your quest wasn't necessarily virtuous, it didn't involve doing good things or saving the world," Jones said. "It was just you were chosen, more or less against your will, to become the next leader of this freak cult of immortals." The final plot occupied a middle ground between the simple and complex stories, because the developers did not want to force players to become deeply involved in the story.
While Bungie founder Alex Seropian
handled the business aspect of Bungie and produced the game's box art and promotional material, Jones programmed the game, wrote the story line, and contributed to the game's manual. Whereas Jones had single-handedly coded Minotaur, the small staff for Pathways was due to no money for a large team. To speed implementation, Jones built a level editor for the game that allowed him to add objects, monsters and walls to the levels. The game's levels and mazes span 40 million scaled square feet. Jones' friend, Colin Brent, did much of the art and creature design, reducing Jones' workload and, in the programmer's opinion, improving the art. Each monster was drawn by hand in three states: stationary, moving, and exploding. They were then scanned into the computer and added to the game; if there were problems, they were redrawn. Once the final drawings were complete, the images were colorized in 24-bit color using Adobe Photoshop
. Despite the game's advanced graphics, Pathways was designed to work on any Macintosh model; it was one of 30 applications that ran natively on Apple's PowerMacs on launch day.
By July 1993 the game was behind schedule; only the above-ground portions of the pyramid were complete. Jones put in eighteen-hour days for the month leading up to the MacWorld Expo where the game was to be sold; he finished the game in a relatively bug-free state just before the Expo, and Bungie had 500 shrinkwrapped copies of the game available for sale at MacWorld.
s Steven Levy commented that the gameplay and graphics were extremely smooth. He singled out the creatures for specific praise, likening them to "something that might have come from a brain-merge of Tim Burton
, Anne Rice
and Hieronymus Bosch" instead of simple line drawings. Complaints and criticisms of the game included the difficulty level; Blum found some segments too difficult and that it was possible to spend hours playing before realizing that the player had made an irreversible mistake. Jones admitted that the game was harder than he intended. The title received several awards, including Inside Mac Games' "Adventure Game of the Year", Macworlds "Best Role-Playing Game", and was listed on the MacUser
100.
Pathways sold more copies than expected, making it Bungie's first commercial success. It was the third bestselling Macintosh title of the first half of 1994 after Myst
and Sim City 2000, with projected seven-figure sales for the year. The game made Bungie enough money that the company was able to move from Seropian's apartment to a dedicated office in Chicago
's South Side
. At their new location, the Bungie team expanded and began work on another first-person shooter, Marathon
. Interviewed by Inside Mac Games, Jones said that he did not believe that there would ever be a sequel to Pathways. "There's a lot of reasons for that, one of them being that I tend to dislike sequels," he said, "A lot of cool things have happened with the rendering technology since Pathways shipped, and it suggests some different products which don't really fit into the Pathways world."
Adventure game
An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenge. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media such as literature and film,...
video game developed and published by Bungie Software Products Corporation (now Bungie
Bungie
Bungie, Inc is an American video game developer currently located in Bellevue, Washington, USA. The company was established in May 1991 by University of Chicago undergraduate student Alex Seropian, who later brought in programmer Jason Jones after publishing Jones' game Minotaur: The Labyrinths of...
) in 1993, exclusively for Apple Macintosh
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...
personal computers. Players assume the role of a Special Forces soldier who must stop a powerful, godlike being from awakening and destroying the world. Players solve puzzles and defeat enemies to unlock parts of a pyramid where the god sleeps; the game's ending changes depending on player actions.
Pathways began as a sequel to Bungie's Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete
Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete
Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete is a 1992 Macintosh computer game produced by the founders of Bungie Studios, Jason Jones and Alex Seropian. It is a sharply detailed dungeon crawler similar to many other computer role-playing games and adventure games...
, before the developers created an original story. Jason Jones
Jason Jones (programmer)
Jason Jones is a game developer and programmer who co-founded video game studio Bungie with Alex Seropian in 1991. Jones began programming on Apple computers in high school, assembling a multiplayer game called Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete...
programmed the game, while his friend Colin Brent developed the environments and creatures. The game features three-dimensional texture mapped
Texture mapping
Texture mapping is a method for adding detail, surface texture , or color to a computer-generated graphic or 3D model. Its application to 3D graphics was pioneered by Dr Edwin Catmull in his Ph.D. thesis of 1974.-Texture mapping:...
graphics and stereo
STEREO
STEREO is a solar observation mission. Two nearly identical spacecraft were launched into orbits that cause them to respectively pull farther ahead of and fall gradually behind the Earth...
sound on supported Macintosh models. Pathways was critically acclaimed and won a host of awards; it was also Bungie's first major commercial success, enabling the two-man team of Jason Jones and Alex Seropian
Alex Seropian
Alexander Seropian is an American video game developer, one of the initial founders and later president of Bungie Software Products Corporation, the developer of the Marathon, Myth, and Halo video game series. Seropian became interested in computer programming in college and teamed up with fellow...
to move into a Chicago office and begin paying staff.
Gameplay
Pathways into Darkness is a first-person shooterFirst-person shooter
First-person shooter is a video game genre that centers the gameplay on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through first-person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other...
and adventure game
Adventure game
An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenge. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media such as literature and film,...
. The game interface consists of four windows. The primary "World View" shows the player character's first-person perspective. Players move, dodge fire, and use weapons and items using the computer keyboard
Keyboard (computing)
In computing, a keyboard is a typewriter-style keyboard, which uses an arrangement of buttons or keys, to act as mechanical levers or electronic switches...
. The "Inventory" window displays items players have acquired. The "Message" window relates information, and the "Player" window displays health and energy information.
In the game, players fight various monsters as they explore the pyramid's halls and catacombs. Players may pick up weapons and ammunition left behind by others to supplement their arsenal. As additional levels are unlocked, new weapons become available, including machine guns and grenade launchers. Players can absorb a certain amount of damage, but once their health reaches zero, they must resume their progress at the last saved checkpoint. Resting in place replenishes health but saps game time and leaves the player open to attack. Scattered throughout the levels are other items players may use. Potions have different effects: rare blue potions, for example, rid the player character of poison and damage. Otherwise items provide points or cash; every four points increases the player character's maximum health by two units. Crystals can be used against enemies to freeze, burn, or otherwise harm them.
Through the use of the yellow crystal, players can converse with Previously Living Sentient Beings or "PLSB". Conversations give players puzzle information, provide strategies to defeating monsters, and story background. Rather than relying on a branching tree of conversation options, players type keywords into a dialogue box. When a certain keyword (typically found in a previous statement by the dead person in question) is entered, the dead person will give a response. The manual gives a starting point by mentioning that all dead people respond to "name" and "death", by giving their name and describing how they died, respectively.
Plot
Pathways casts players as a member of a US Army Special Forces team sent on a mission to the Yucatán PeninsulaYucatán Peninsula
The Yucatán Peninsula, in southeastern Mexico, separates the Caribbean Sea from the Gulf of Mexico, with the northern coastline on the Yucatán Channel...
. Days before, a diplomat from the alien J'Jaro appeared to the President of the United States and informed him that in days, an ancient godlike being would awaken and destroy the Earth. The only way to prevent this catastrophe is to prevent the god from awakening. The eight-man Special Forces team carries a nuclear weapon
Nuclear weapon
A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission or a combination of fission and fusion. Both reactions release vast quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter. The first fission bomb test released the same amount...
, with the goal of entering an ancient pyramid, descending to the bottom level where the god sleeps, and activating the bomb to stun the god and bury it under tons of rock. Before the game begins, players' parachute fails to open. Awakening hours later, players find almost all their equipment inoperable. Reaching the pyramid on foot hours after the rest of the team entered the structure, the player must complete the team's mission before the god awakens in five days. In the pyramid, the player finds bodies of their squad-mates, the remains of Spanish-speaking
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
treasure hunters, as well as fallen members of a Nazi
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
expedition from the 1930s
1930s
File:1930s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: Dorothea Lange's photo of the homeless Florence Thompson show the effects of the Great Depression; Due to the economic collapse, the farms become dry and the Dust Bowl spreads through America; The Battle of Wuhan during the Second Sino-Japanese...
who were looking for a secret weapon, but never returned.
The game's ending changes depending on whether the player has a radio beacon
Electric beacon
Electric beacons are a kind of beacon used with direction finding equipment to find ones relative bearing to a known location .The term electric beacon includes radio, infrared and sonar beacons.- Radio beacons :...
to call for extraction, and when the nuclear device is set to explode. Forgetting to set the bomb, or setting it to explode at any time past the awakening of the dreaming god, results in Earth's destruction. The device's detonation before the player reaches a minimum safe distance results in a pyrrhic victory
Pyrrhic victory
A Pyrrhic victory is a victory with such a devastating cost to the victor that it carries the implication that another such victory will ultimately cause defeat.-Origin:...
. The most favorable endings are achieved by leaving the pyramid with a beacon at least twenty game minutes before the device is set to go off; if the game ends with enough time for the player to escape on foot, the player survives without a beacon.
Development
| Operating System | System 6.0.7 System 6 System 6 is a graphical user interface-based operating system for Macintosh computers. It was released in 1988 by Apple Computer and was part of the Mac OS line of operating systems. System 6 was shipped with various Macintosh computers until it was succeeded by System 7 in 1991. The boxed... System 7 System 7 System 7 is the name of a Macintosh operating system introduced in 1991.System 7 may also refer to:* System 7 , a British dance/ambient band* System 7 , 1991 album* IBM System/7, a 1970s computer system... † |
|---|---|
| Memory | 2 MB RAM |
| Other | Color Macintosh 4 MB disk space |
| †System 6.0.7 is required for three-channel sound; stereo sound requires Sound Manager Sound Manager The Sound Manager is a part of the classic Apple Macintosh operating system, in Mac OS. It is used to control the production and manipulation of sounds on Macintosh computers. The Sound Manager is also used by other parts of the Macintosh system software that produce sounds, such as the Speech... 3.0 (which shipped with the game) and System 7.0. |
|
Pathways was Bungie's third title, after their previous game, Minotaur: The Labrynths of Crete, sold around 2,500 copies. In the summer of 1992, Jones was living in dorms at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
when he saw Wolfenstein 3D
Wolfenstein 3D
Wolfenstein 3D is a video game that is generally regarded by critics and gaming journalists as having both popularized the first-person shooter genre on the PC and created the basic archetype upon which all subsequent games of the same genre would be built. It was created by id Software and...
, a shooter game
Shooter game
Shooter games are a sub-genre of action game, which often test the player's speed and reaction time. It includes many subgenres that have the commonality of focusing "on the actions of the avatar using some sort of weapon. Usually this weapon is a gun, or some other long-range weapon". A common...
with three-dimensional (3D) graphics. Inspired, Jones created a rough 3D graphics engine for the Mac that simulated walls with trapezoids and rectangles. Originally, Bungie intended Pathways to be a straightforward 3D version of Minotaur, but they quickly found that the top-down perspective of their previous game did not mesh with the 3D presentation. An additional consideration was that the developers wanted to create a game that did not rely on then-rare networks and modem
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
s, an issue in marketing Minotaur. The rest of 1992 was spent tweaking the graphics engine.
Work on the game's storyline and levels began in January 1993. Jones recalled that starting from cliché plots they moved towards "very interesting and unique but extremely difficult to understand stories". One of the more complicated stories cast the player as one of a group of Roman soldiers who discovered a mountain spring that extended their lives. Every seven years one soldier would be picked to descend into the caves and bring back more water. If the leader died, a new one would be selected to undertake the journey to ensure their survival. "It was a very interesting plot since your quest wasn't necessarily virtuous, it didn't involve doing good things or saving the world," Jones said. "It was just you were chosen, more or less against your will, to become the next leader of this freak cult of immortals." The final plot occupied a middle ground between the simple and complex stories, because the developers did not want to force players to become deeply involved in the story.
While Bungie founder Alex Seropian
Alex Seropian
Alexander Seropian is an American video game developer, one of the initial founders and later president of Bungie Software Products Corporation, the developer of the Marathon, Myth, and Halo video game series. Seropian became interested in computer programming in college and teamed up with fellow...
handled the business aspect of Bungie and produced the game's box art and promotional material, Jones programmed the game, wrote the story line, and contributed to the game's manual. Whereas Jones had single-handedly coded Minotaur, the small staff for Pathways was due to no money for a large team. To speed implementation, Jones built a level editor for the game that allowed him to add objects, monsters and walls to the levels. The game's levels and mazes span 40 million scaled square feet. Jones' friend, Colin Brent, did much of the art and creature design, reducing Jones' workload and, in the programmer's opinion, improving the art. Each monster was drawn by hand in three states: stationary, moving, and exploding. They were then scanned into the computer and added to the game; if there were problems, they were redrawn. Once the final drawings were complete, the images were colorized in 24-bit color using Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems Incorporated.Adobe's 2003 "Creative Suite" rebranding led to Adobe Photoshop 8's renaming to Adobe Photoshop CS. Thus, Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the 12th major release of Adobe Photoshop...
. Despite the game's advanced graphics, Pathways was designed to work on any Macintosh model; it was one of 30 applications that ran natively on Apple's PowerMacs on launch day.
By July 1993 the game was behind schedule; only the above-ground portions of the pyramid were complete. Jones put in eighteen-hour days for the month leading up to the MacWorld Expo where the game was to be sold; he finished the game in a relatively bug-free state just before the Expo, and Bungie had 500 shrinkwrapped copies of the game available for sale at MacWorld.
Reception
Pathways was a critical success. Inside Mac Games reviewer Jon Blum wrote that Pathways was "one of the best Macintosh games I've ever played". MacworldMacworld
Macworld is a web site and monthly computer magazine dedicated to Apple Macintosh products. It is published by Mac Publishing, which is headquartered in San Francisco, California...
s Steven Levy commented that the gameplay and graphics were extremely smooth. He singled out the creatures for specific praise, likening them to "something that might have come from a brain-merge of Tim Burton
Tim Burton
Timothy William "Tim" Burton is an American film director, film producer, writer and artist. He is famous for dark, quirky-themed movies such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet...
, Anne Rice
Anne Rice
Anne Rice is a best-selling Southern American author of metaphysical gothic fiction, Christian literature and erotica from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her books have sold nearly 100 million copies, making her one of the most widely read authors in modern history...
and Hieronymus Bosch" instead of simple line drawings. Complaints and criticisms of the game included the difficulty level; Blum found some segments too difficult and that it was possible to spend hours playing before realizing that the player had made an irreversible mistake. Jones admitted that the game was harder than he intended. The title received several awards, including Inside Mac Games' "Adventure Game of the Year", Macworlds "Best Role-Playing Game", and was listed on the MacUser
MacUser
MacUser is a biweekly computer magazine published by Dennis Publishing Ltd. and licensed by Felden in the UK.In 1985 Felix Dennis’ Dennis Publishing, the creators of MacUser in the UK, licensed the name and “mouse-rating” symbol for MacUser to Ziff-Davis Publishing for use in the rest of the world....
100.
Pathways sold more copies than expected, making it Bungie's first commercial success. It was the third bestselling Macintosh title of the first half of 1994 after Myst
Myst
Myst is a graphic adventure video game designed and directed by the brothers Robyn and Rand Miller. It was developed by Cyan , a Spokane, Washington––based studio, and published and distributed by Brøderbund. The Millers began working on Myst in and released it for the Mac OS computer on September...
and Sim City 2000, with projected seven-figure sales for the year. The game made Bungie enough money that the company was able to move from Seropian's apartment to a dedicated office in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
's South Side
South Side (Chicago)
The South Side is a major part of the City of Chicago, which is located in Cook County, Illinois, United States. Much of it has evolved from the city's incorporation of independent townships, such as Hyde Park Township which voted along with several other townships to be annexed in the June 29,...
. At their new location, the Bungie team expanded and began work on another first-person shooter, Marathon
Marathon Trilogy
The Marathon Trilogy is a science fiction series of first-person shooter computer games from Bungie, originally released for the Macintosh. The name Marathon is derived from the giant interstellar colony ship that provides the setting for the first game; the ship is constructed out of what used to...
. Interviewed by Inside Mac Games, Jones said that he did not believe that there would ever be a sequel to Pathways. "There's a lot of reasons for that, one of them being that I tend to dislike sequels," he said, "A lot of cool things have happened with the rendering technology since Pathways shipped, and it suggests some different products which don't really fit into the Pathways world."
External links
- Classic games gallery at Bungie.net
- Pathways Into Darkness at Bungie.orgHalo.Bungie.OrgHalo.Bungie.Org, often referred to as HBO, is a fansite created in 1999 by Claude Errera and two associates as a news site for the Bungie video game Halo: Combat Evolved. The site was started in 1999 as Blam.bungie.org based on the project's development name before it was called Halo...