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Studio: |
Sierra
On-Line |
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Designer(s): |
Al
Lowe |
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Part of series: |
[stand-alone title] |
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Release: |
1986 |
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Main credits: |
Game design: Al Lowe, Roberta
Williams |
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Useful links: |
Complete
playthrough (91 mins.) |
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Unlike Sierra’s
better-known early AGI titles such as King’s
Quest 1-3, Space Quest 1-2, or Leisure Suit Larry In The Land Of The
Lounge Lizards, The Black Cauldron
is one of those games to which I have no nostalgic attachment whatsoever. As
an adventure designed specifically for children, it did not get much
promotion back in 1986, and I first played it probably already well into the
Internet age, as part of George’s Quest
to get acquainted with each and every one of Sierra’s adventure titles. It
was an interesting experience, however, in that I had never seen the Disney
movie on which it was based (or, for that matter, read the books on which the
Disney movie was based) — and found out that I was still able to form a mild
attachment to the game on its own, despite the understandable confusion with
its lore and internal logic. In spite of its shortness and simplicity, and in
spite of being more tightly restricted by its source material than any of
those other early Sierra games, The
Black Cauldron still preserves its own charm, though, admittedly, it is
much easier appreciated in the context of 1986 than any later year in video
game history. While at a certain point in
time following up a commercial blockbuster with one or more video games based
on its universe became a common practice — everything from James Bond to
Harry Potter has been sucked up by the interactive medium — back in the
mid-Eighties this was certainly not the case yet, and those few movie
franchises that did put out a tentacle into the world of digital gaming
usually remained contented with simple arcade products, e.g. Broderbund’s
early Star Wars games where you
just had to shoot up stuff. To the best of my knowledge, The Black Cauldron was not just a unique cooperation between
Sierra and Disney, but, in fact, the very first graphic adventure game to be
explicitly based on a movie (and, as it would turn out, Sierra’s first and
last such experience). This fact alone deserves that the game be at least
enshrined in a museum or something; but there’s actually quite a bit more to
be said! One reason why the game was
so quickly forgotten is that The Black
Cauldron itself — the animated movie, I mean — was received fairly poorly
in its time. Based upon Lloyd Alexander’s acclaimed fantasy series (Chronicles Of Prydain), it boasted
Disney’s hugest budget expenses to-date, featured the studio’s first use of
digital technologies, and had a generally darker tone than most of the stuff
from Disney’s post-war years; but either because of this latter circumstance,
or because the movie was gruesomely cut up by Jeffrey Katzenberg (in the
first of his many crimes against humanity), it flopped both critically and
commercially, and even today remains more of a cult favorite than a properly
revived survivor. Personally, I think that, with a few reservations, it’s
mostly fabulous — much darker and scarier indeed than anything from the
«Disney Renaissance» that followed Katzenberg’s arrival on the scene, not to
mention being one of the very few Disney movies without a single Disney song
in it (that alone should turn it into a sacred cow). But I guess this is not
quite what «family entertainment» was all about in 1985, certainly not for
those who’d previously feasted themselves on the likes of The Fox And The Hound. I am not sure if the Disney
people contacted Al Lowe because they were really thrilled with the idea of
turning a movie into a video game, or out of financial desperation — with the
studio losing money at a tremendous rate, they might have thought they could
at least cut some losses by lending its soul to a different body. In any
case, as Al himself
recollects, "they gave me
complete access to the original hand-painted backgrounds, the original Elmer
Bernstein score, even the original animation cells, which were still
literally lying in heaps, before being sent off to the dump!"
Amusingly, I also remember reading in some other interview with him which I
cannot locate at the moment that the Disney guys were apparently confused
when they learned that some of the player’s choices could result in
consequences different from the movie — the first documented case of a lack
of proper understanding between the «linear» and «non-linear» medium, if you
wish. Fortunately, Al was able to prove the rightness of his ways, or else
the game would have been nothing but a pale shadow of the cartoon. Unlike the other concurrent
Sierra games like King’s Quest and Space Quest, The Black Cauldron had one pre-attached condition: it was to be specifically
oriented at a young kids’ market, apparently including kids who still had
problems with writing (but not reading). This resulted in the game being
somewhat innovative (in its jettisoning the text parser), but also limited
its appeal — another reason why hardly anybody remembers it any more. It is
quite telling, actually, that Sierra never tested those waters again: after The Black Cauldron, its only
«toddler-specific» line of production was Roberta Williams’ Mixed-Up Mother Goose, while all of its
proper adventure titles, even including the «edutainment» line of Eco Quest and Pepper’s Adventures In Time, were clearly family-oriented and
could be enjoyed by kids and grown-ups on an almost equal level. There is no
doubt in my mind that The Black Cauldron
coould have been much better, had it not been designed with a specifically
pre-pubescent audience in mind — then again, I suppose Al Lowe himself
suffered so much from this restriction that he just had to promise to himself
that his next game would be
decidedly oriented at a post-pubescent
crowd. (For a good old culture shock, try beating The Black Cauldron and Leisure
Suit Larry In The Land Of The Lounge Lizards one after the other, then
come to terms with the fact they were written by the exact same person!). Anyway, I don’t even know
if the game managed to recoup its (tiny) budget. It blipped on the PC gaming
radar in a brief flash, then remained exclusively in the memory of a few 1986
kids and avid collectors. To this day, it’d be hard to find a proper review,
and it is not even available for sale on GOG — though, admittedly, it does
not have to be, since you can just download it for free off Al’s personal site. In the
review below, however, I shall briefly try to demonstrate that making it was
not a complete waste of time, and that even today it is quite possible for it
to provide you with half an hour’s worth of lightweight atmospheric fun —
particularly if you’re a 50-year old guy with a 12-year’s old heart inside. |
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Content evaluation |
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In general, The Black Cauldron sticks to the plot
of the Disney cartoon, which was, in turn, condensed from several volumes of
Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles Of Pridain.
Playing as Taran, «Assistant Pig-Keeper» for the old enchanter Dallben, you
are supposed to employ the talents of your Oracular Pig, Hen Wen, to prevent
an evil wish-granting macGuffin (the Black Cauldron in question) from falling
into the hands of the Horned King — and, if it does, be ready to sacrifice
your own life in order to stop the cauldron from working its magic and
granting the King his own personal army of the undead. Along the way, you
meet many friends, such as the weird hungry creature Gurgi, the talentless
bard Fflewddur Fflam, fairies, elves, witches, and a plethora of beautiful
women, including Princess Eilonwy, to each of which you may hopelessly try to
lose your virginity... oops, wrong game. Once again, Al Lowe got me confused. Anyway, if you want to learn about the
actual plot in more detail, go see the movie and / or read the books. Since
it was clear that, by the standards of 1986, Sierra’s game would never even
begin to hope to match the beauty and the terror of Disney’s animated
visuals, Al cleverly decided to compensate in another direction — alternate
plot twists. Being able to solve the same puzzle in several different ways
was already a staple of Sierra games from as early as the first King’s Quest, but The Black Cauldron actually went further than that. From the very
beginning of the game, your quest could unwrap along completely different
trajectories — for instance, you could lose Hen Wen, the pig, to minions of
the Horned King and have to rescue her from the King’s castle (just as Taran
did in the movie), but you could also avoid
the henchmen and bring the pig safely to the proposed hideout, following two
not particularly complicated, but utterly different scenarios. The most important choices came at the
end of the game, where you could also follow the movie path if you so wanted
(Gurgi sacrifices himself for the sake of his friends and is later revived by
the witches), but could just as well trigger a much less uncomfortable ending
(by means of a magic mirror), or, on the contrary, a far creepier one (jump into
the cauldron yourself). There were also additional minor variations in your
final interaction with the witches, so, on the whole, the number of possible
different endings was formally huge — for a game that was supposed to be just
a light footnote to a Disney extravaganza. If only the game itself were a bit more
epic on the whole, this plot mechanics could have turned it into an early
masterpiece for Sierra. Unfortunately, in general there was simply not that
much to do. The entire playable area occupied about a third of the Kingdom of
Daventry (the Horned King’s Castle alone had about as many rooms as the
entire territory of Caer Dalben and its surrounding areas); dialog with most
of the characters was reduced to a small handful of lines of text; and there
was hardly any possibility to take a close look at any of the characters’
personalities. It is almost as if the thrill of «rewriting Disney history»
took over Al so much that he pretty much forgot to do anything else —
including his notorious sense of humor, of which there is not a single trace
anywhere. (Nor, for that matter, is any of the occasional humor in the movie
transferred over to the game — one could at least hope for a secondary
bumbling villain like Creeper to make a few gaffes, but I think the poor guy
doesn’t actually have even one line of dialog to his name). In the end, the game leaves behind an
odd impression. For a kid to play it after having seen the movie and be able
to explore the different endings must have been an interesting experience,
but just how many kids actually saw the movie and bought the game at the time? And for those who did not see
the movie (I only saw it after playing the game, for instance), how exciting
could it be to play a game which quickly introduced you to a whole bunch of
characters with weird Welsh names and unclear American purposes, then came to
an abrupt ending just when you were hoping to actually get to know at least
some of them better? Well... like I said, there’s about half an hour of
genuine intrigue here. |
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Given the game’s specific
age orientation, one should hardly expect a Monkey Island level of challenge, but that does not mean The Black Cauldron is just a breezy
walk in the park. In order to make the game «easier» for children, Al Lowe
introduced a revolutionary mechanic — he abandoned Sierra’s usual text
parser, which could theoretically make him, rather than Ron Gilbert of
LucasArts, into the father of point-and-click mechanics, except there was one
small impediment: in 1986, most PCs still had no mouse support, which meant
that any interaction with objects on the screen still had to be handled via
keyboard. The only solution was to have your character move as close as
possible to the required hotspot, then have him press one of the function
keys to interact with it (F8 to look, F6 to «operate»). The system is not difficult
to get used to in general, but figuring out specific details can be
frustrating. In a regular Sierra game around that time, for instance, when
coming upon a bridge across the river, you knew it always made sense to type
"look under the bridge"
even if the screen itself gave you no hint of anything valuable under it —
there could always be a payoff. In The
Black Cauldron, in order to look under the bridge you have to move into a
very specific position, wading into the water, and press F8. Considering that
most of the locations on the screen will give you a generic response, not a
lot of people — certainly not a lot of children — will even think about such
an option, and, consequently, will miss a very useful object which is not
crucial to winning the game, but can make your life a hell of a lot easier
throughout it. No surprise that the most
«complicated» puzzles in the game are the ones that require finding something
— like the hideout to where you are supposed to bring Hen Wen, or navigating
your way across the rocks at the foothills of the Horned King’s Castle. (All
this maze stuff is, of course, present in other Sierra games as well, but
here it is at the forefront just because everything else is so simple). The
actual object-based puzzles are mostly trivial; the most difficult thing is
arguably not to lock yourself out of the game’s best ending by rushing too
far ahead — ironically, those who would play the game after watching the movie are more liable to fall into that trap
than those who did not, and are therefore not intuitively motivated to
blindly follow the turns and twists of Disney’s plot. A few of the challenges
involve action-style mechanics — for instance, there is a primitive «combat
system» where you have to properly time your sword swing to knock out the
Horned King’s henchmen; a short climbing mini-game where you have to scale
the walls of the castle while avoiding falling boulders; and, of course,
plenty of agility requirements when you have to navigate your character
around tiny twisting paths over moats and precipices. I hate that shit in an
adventure game, and I suppose the kids who played it must have hated it as
well, but Sierra would not budge on its classic principles — whether you’re a
kid or an adult, death is a space of equal opportunity for all of us. An extra impediment is that
Taran actually needs to eat and drink every once in a while — a notable
innovation for Sierra, whose King Graham and Prince Alexander could easily
roam all over Daventry or Kolyma without the need to take a bite — however,
this quickly becomes an annoyance, particularly if you forgot to refill your
flask before infiltrating the Castle, where you can easily avoid all the evil
henchmen only to fall dead in the middle of your escape... from dehydration.
This is precisely the kind of cruel discipline that ultimately cost Sierra
its long-term reputation: people like to be disciplined with their video
games no more than they like to be in real life. Still, as far as 1986 goes,
the quality of the challenges is not that far behind the average King’s Quest (at least, the first two
games in the series; King’s Quest III
was already on another level). Beating the game is not challenging, but
beating it with the full score of 230 points without a walkthrough could take
a few tries even from a grown-up; and as for kids, I cannot state with
certainty that the elimination of the text parser actually makes things all
that easy — unless the kid in question does not know how to write (but they
still have to know how to read).
I’d actually say that the easiest aspect of the game is how short it is — I
guess that Al Lowe regarded the kids of 1986 as having the same IQ as
grown-ups, but a shorter attention span... which, come to think of it, may
not have been far from the truth. |
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Unfortunately, this is
where being based on a Disney movie — a good,
if thoroughly underrated Disney movie — really hurts the game. When it comes
to the Kingdom of Daventry, there is no single, direct prototype which it is
based upon, and so you can sort of regard it as a little CGA universe in
itself; the land of Prydain, however, is a straightforward projection from
the cartoon, and there was no way that the beauty and the terror of classic
Disney animation could even faintly be evoked in a video game around 1986
(Sierra would remember that dream, though, and come close to finally bringing
it to life with King’s Quest VII eight
years later). When your Horned King looks more like a roast chicken on two
legs and your three evil witches look like a 3-year old’s drawings, you gotta
have one hell of a power of imagination to compensate for the distance
between the game and the movie. Still, an interactive game
is an interactive game, and immersing yourself in the character always helps.
In designing the map, Al clearly relies on the experience of Roberta
Williams, who had already excelled in delimiting between the «safe» and the
«dangerous» zones of the Kingdom of Daventry, with subtle transitional
buffers in between. Here, too, you begin the game frolicking in the cozy,
cuddly green meadows of Caer Dallben, before the need to save Hen Wen or kick
the shit out of the Horned King brings you to the swampy and forested areas,
where it can be pretty unnerving to make your way through the evil-grinning
purple trees. Overall, the contrast between «safe» and «dangerous» zones
works here just as fine as it does in the old King’s Quest games — and for a game specifically designed for 10-year olds, I would say that the
level of scariness is just alright. I know I felt that familiar sense of relief each time I got out of the
forest / swamp and back to the green grass of Caer Dallben, and I played the
game while being at least twice as old as its recommended age! It is too bad that the
atmosphere could not be supported by meaningful dialogue; even though it
would have technically been quite possible to make the characters’
interaction a bit more sophisticated than it is, Al never goes beyond the
bare minimum, way below even the dialog in the movie, let alone the books. One
could suggest that it was specifically due to making the game accessible to
younger players, but the truth is that it actually has precisely the same
level of verbal sophistication as the King’s
Quest games, which were explicitly targeted to everybody. Indeed, such
was Sierra’s style at the time, and while Al would soon push those boundaries
forward a bit with the Larry games,
here he was perfectly happy to take Roberta as his role model in this area as
well. Alas, it’s just a bit difficult to form a «bond» with «your friend»
Gurgi, if pretty much the only thing you ever hear, er, read out of his mouth
is "Hi! I’m Gurgi. Do you have any
munchings and crunchings for me?" |
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Technical features |
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In terms of visuals, Black Cauldron is neither bad nor
outstanding for its time — the art is handled by Sierra’s chief early artist,
Mark Crowe, and is hardly all that different from his work on King’s Quest. In fact, the land of
Prydain looks very much like Daventry (or Kolyma), at least as far as the
«safe», green zones are concerned; for the «evil» zones, Mark chose a deep
purple palette which, along with the sickly green water in the moat around
the Castle, gives the Evil part of this world a slightly more psychedelic
flavor than anything he did for King’s
Quest. (Some of the assets, however, were blatantly recycled from that
franchise — for instance, the alligators in the moat were «borrowed» directly
from the moat around King Edward’s Castle at the beginning of King’s Quest I). And I may be wrong,
but I think that on the whole, there is a bit more of a concentrated attempt
to dazzle the young player with the dashing colors — check out the final
screen, for instance, where the heroes, echoing the finale of the movie, walk
into the sunset: dark and light green grass, blue mountains, purple flowers,
yellow-tinged clouds reflecting the setting sun (and they’re gliding across the screen!), and a mix
of blue and purple for the sky. This kind of «CGA scenery porn» can hardly be
found in any of the King’s Quest
games to that point. The smaller details,
unfortunately, remain as sketchy as always: for inevitable technical reasons,
sprite models of Taran as well as various NPCs bear not the slightest
resemblance to their prototypes in the movie, although at least Crowe had to
design a variety of new sprites (the Horned King, Creeper, Gurgi, Hen Wen,
the three witches, etc.) which had no direct precedent anywhere. And he does
try relatively hard — it is cute, for instance, how the sprite of Princess
Eilonwy looks just a little bit hunched, just the way she walks in the movie
(for that matter, she’s also strictly flat-chested, unlike, say, the sprite
of Princess Rosella in King’s Quest III),
or how funnily — and how fast — Gurgi waddles across the screen. These are
all, of course, just minute historical details, but it is instructive
sometimes to pay attention to all the subtle graphic tricks those early
artists and animators had to resort to in order to make those 320x200 pixel screens
come to life. |
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Okay, so this section will
inevitably be kept to a minimum. The entire game has but TWO very brief
musical themes, dutifully adapted for PC speaker from the original Elmer
Bernstein score (strangely enough, he is not actually credited in the game) —
one dark (the Horned King and the Cauldron!), one light (the green pastures
of Caer Dallben!), plus a few tinkly-dinkly sound effects here and there,
mostly recycled from other games as well. I suppose that Al himself must have
programmed the themes, being a musician and all, but given that, as he
himself recognizes, the studio was given full access to the complete score, I
feel he could have profited from it a bit more. That dark opening theme does
sound pretty decent when transposed from PC Speaker to MIDI, anyway. |
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Interface As I already mentioned in
the «Puzzles» section, the Black
Cauldron interface is pretty unique in Sierra history — this is,
essentially, a parser-based game whose parser skills have been cut off, much
like the tongue out of a mouth of an annoying blabberer. While I think it was
an interesting decision at the time, I am not even sure if it was really and sincerely caused by the desire to save the young and innocent
toddler from the need to learn how to spell the word ‘cauldron’, or if the
real reason behind it was that Al and his team were pressed for time and had
no desire to write even brief descriptions for the many objects on the screen
that the young and innocent toddler could be curious about. In any case, the
result was a system that could not have been anything but confusing for the
toddler. In this interface, you
«look» at things with F8 and «operate» on them with F6 — why F8 and F6?
Because F5 and F7 had traditionally been reserved for Saving and Restoring the
game in the Sierra engine. F1 is Help; F2 turns the sound on and off. What
about F3 and F4? These, even more confusingly, were reserved for «selecting»
an object from your inventory (F3) and «using» it (F4) on yourself (if it is
a food object, for instance) or your adversary (if it is a sword). So this
means that if the Horned King’s henchman approaches you and you have to cut
him down, instead of simply writing ‘hit guy with sword’, you have to press
F3, select the Sword from the newly opened inventory window, press Enter,
then wait until the henchman is in reach and press F4. Uh... okay. You can get used to it. The question is,
why should you? To add insult to
injury, there are three different
ways of handling your inventory — see a simple list of all the stuff you’re
carrying by pressing TAB; «see objects» by selecting this option from the
menu, where you can actually scroll through the same list and bring up small
pictures and descriptions of the objects; and the F3 «select object» command.
Poor young and innocent toddlers. In short, it does not take
a genius to see why this approach would not be adopted by Sierra for further
games, and why the elimination of the parser would have to wait until a
proper point-and-click interface would be elaborated four years later. Yet
there is still something to say about dead-end experiments like those — at
the very least, unlike a successful, well-tested and comfortable formula
repeated from game to game, they tend to stand out in memory (like the
much-maligned combat systems of the first Witcher
and Mass Effect games, abandoned
for their inconvenience to players but still remembered with a mix of hate
and curiosity for at least trying to be innovative). |
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Only a professional video game historian (that’s not me) or a
nostalgic fan of Sierra On-Line (that’s more like me) could ever bother these
days about replaying or even remembering The
Black Cauldron, yet this is not because it was a bad game — more because
its goals were so noticeably humbler than those of the titles surrounding it.
Short, highly derivative of both the movie it partially recreated and the
artistry of the far superior King’s Quest
titles, replacing the text parser with an even clunkier interface, and
explicitly oriented at younger audiences, it couldn’t even begin to hope to
compete with Sierra’s main lines of production at the time. I don’t think it
was ever included in any of Sierra’s anthologies, and even GoodOldGames does
not regard it as worthy of being sold for money (so Al Lowe just gives it
away for free), so why bother at all? Still, I don’t think it would be right to claim that the game does not
have its own «soul». Almost any product from the dawn of PC gaming has at
least a bit of it, and The Black Cauldron
is no exception. It was, after all,
one of the first attempts at transforming an animated movie into a video
game, a task that was taken seriously and with respect to the difference in
potential of the two types of media — all those branching paths and alternate
endings for which Al had to fight with the Disney people were very symbolic
of the opposition between «linear» and «choice-based» approaches to
storytelling in video games, and should necessarily be present in any
historical account of that struggle. With a slightly larger budget and a
little more respect, The Black Cauldron
could have easily beaten King’s Quest
in terms of lore, sympathetic characters, and plot tension; unfortunately,
neither Disney nor Sierra were wise enough to recognize this opportunity. |
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