Full Throttle: The Adventure That Wanted to Be a Film

Full Throttle opens with a title sequence. An actual one: a bike on a black desert road, credits, and the Gone Jackals coming in over the top like the film has already started without you. Roy Conrad growls a few lines of narration in a voice made of gravel and cigarettes, and by the time control lands in your hands you have been sold a genre, a hero and a mood in under two minutes.

In April 1995, on a PC with a CD-ROM drive, this was an event. LucasArts had been getting steadily better at cinematic staging for years, and Tim Schafer — running lead design solo for the first time, after co-designing Day of the Tentacle with Dave Grossman — walked straight past “cinematic staging” and made something that behaves like a ninety-minute biker picture you occasionally operate.

It is a superb ninety-minute biker picture. It is also, by some distance, the thinnest adventure game LucasArts shipped in its good years, and the two facts are the same fact. This is the game where the studio found out what cinema costs.

The bike is the character

Ben leads the Polecats. Malcolm Corley runs Corley Motors, the last American motorcycle manufacturer, and Malcolm’s vice president Adrian Ripburger — Mark Hamill, doing an oily corporate hiss that is one of the best pieces of voice acting in the era — wants the company making minivans. Ben gets framed for a murder. Ben rides.

Every choice in the setup exists to justify motion. The road is the level design. The plot is a chase. The supporting cast are people you meet at junctions. Compare the mansion in Day of the Tentacle, which is a box you learn until you know every cupboard: Full Throttle refuses to give you a box at all, because a biker who stays in one place is a biker who has stopped being a biker.

That commitment produces the best-directed adventure game of the nineties. The camera moves. Scenes are blocked. There are cuts inside conversations. When Ben rides out of Melonweed the game holds a wide shot for longer than a game had any business holding one in 1995, and the reason it works is that Peter McConnell’s score and the Gone Jackals’ “Legacy” are doing what a film score does — telling you how to feel about a shot with no information in it.

The Gone Jackals were an Oakland bar band, and licensing their record Bone to Pick rather than commissioning pastiche was the right instinct by a mile. Original music written to sound like a biker band sounds like a biker band. A biker band sounds like men who have played a room where someone got hit.

The verb coin was a real solution

SCUMM’s verb list had been shrinking for years — from Maniac Mansion’s fifteen-odd verbs down to a manageable handful — because the verbs were furniture, and furniture eats screen. Full Throttle deleted the list entirely and replaced it with the verb coin: hold the button on something and a small ring of icons blooms around the cursor. Eyes to look. A hand to use. A mouth to talk. A boot to kick, because Ben is a man who kicks things and the interface knows it.

This is genuinely excellent design and the industry took the lesson: The Curse of Monkey Island used a coin two years later, and radial menus went on to eat the entire medium. Three reasons it works. It gives the screen back to the art, which matters enormously in a game this concerned with composition. It puts the verbs where your hand already is, so the interaction is one gesture rather than a trip to the bottom of the screen and back. And the icon set is characterisation — a game whose available actions include kicking is telling you who you are playing.

The cost is precision. A verb list is a promise that these are all the things you can ever do; the coin is a promise that these are the things you can do here, which means the game has to be sure, and a designer being sure is a designer removing options. You can feel Full Throttle deciding on your behalf. That is the trade cinema always demands, and the whole game is that trade in miniature.

The action sequences are the confession

There are two of them and they are the part everyone argues about.

The Old Mine Road fight is a weapon-matching duel at speed: bikers pull alongside, you have a chain or a board or a boot, and the right answer beats the wrong answer and you take the loser’s weapon for next time. It is a small, clean rock-paper-scissors economy — the design is legible, the escalation works, and the fiction of building an arsenal off other people’s mistakes fits Ben exactly.

The demolition derby is worse. It is a ramming minigame in a stadium, and it exists because the plot needed Ben to acquire something and the designers wanted a set piece.

Here is what I actually object to, and it has nothing to do with these being action. It is that they are timed, and timing is the one thing the LucasArts fairness doctrine had spent a decade removing. The studio’s whole position — the position Ron Gilbert wrote down in 1989 and Day of the Tentacle enforced absolutely — was that a player should be able to stop, think and try anything without punishment. The Old Mine Road punishes you for thinking. It is a reflex test wearing an adventure game’s clothes, and it is in the game because films have chase scenes and Schafer wanted a chase scene.

You can trace this ambition back cleanly. Another World had already proved in 1991 that a game could be a film by stripping out everything a film cannot do — no HUD, no dialogue, no inventory, just staging and death. Full Throttle wants the film without the stripping. It wants the title sequence, the licensed soundtrack, the voice cast, the cuts and the inventory puzzles, and what it discovers is that you can have both as long as you accept less of each.

Six hours, and the arithmetic behind them

The reputation is that it is too short. Reviewers said so at the time, and they were counting: a few evenings, and the credits.

The runtime is a symptom rather than the disease. Adventure games are long because puzzles are cheap and art is expensive — a good puzzle costs a designer a fortnight and reuses rooms you have already paid for, which is why Day of the Tentacle gets eight hours out of one mansion drawn three times. Full Throttle is a road movie. Every hour needs new road, new characters, new voice sessions, new animation, and none of it can be reused because you never come back. The budget went into the pictures, so there was less left over for the puzzles that would have made it last.

And the puzzles it kept are noticeably softer than the studio’s best. Several are single-object, one-room affairs. The famous stumper — the one about getting past an obstacle on a stretch of road, where the answer arrives from a direction the game barely signposts — is hard in a way that comes from thin surrounding context rather than clever construction. There is nothing here with the three-century cascade of the wine-into-vinegar trick. There is nothing with the bureaucratic double meaning Grim Fandango would find three years later.

What there is instead is a game with no fat on it at all. Nothing in Full Throttle is padding. The pacing is immaculate, precisely because Schafer stopped when the story stopped rather than inventing another wing of the mansion to fill a box. Set that against a modern eighty-hour open world and ask which one respects your life more honestly.

What it was worth

Full Throttle sold well — better than Day of the Tentacle, better by a distance than Grim Fandango would three years later — and it demonstrated that a game could be cool without irony, which almost nothing on a PC in 1995 could claim. It gave the medium the verb coin. It gave Schafer the confidence to attempt a four-act structure next. It gave a generation of designers the idea that a licensed record could do the work of a score.

The thing it could not do was be both. Cinema wants you to sit still and receive an image at the director’s tempo. An adventure game wants you to stop the world and turn every object over in your hands. Full Throttle runs at cinema’s tempo and asks you to solve puzzles inside it, and every time the two pull apart you can feel the join.

Play the 2017 Double Fine remaster, which redraws the art and leaves the design alone. Six hours. It moves like nothing else from that shelf, and the argument it lost is the argument the whole medium has been having ever since.

Spoilers below

The plot is a clean noir and the game plays it straight. Ripburger murders Malcolm Corley — his own boss, a man who built the company — and pins it on Ben, because a dead founder and a criminal biker gang are the two things standing between him and a minivan factory.

Maureen Corley is where the game gets interesting. Malcolm’s estranged daughter, a mechanic, working in a yard, wanting nothing to do with the family firm. The reason she matters structurally is that she is the only person in the story with a legitimate claim to Corley Motors and no interest in it, so the plot cannot resolve by handing her the keys. She has to choose the thing she left.

Ben’s own arc is smaller and better. He starts as a man who wants his bike back and his gang unmurdered, and he ends up defending a motorcycle company he does not own out of something he would never call principle. Roy Conrad plays it without a single moment of stated sentiment, and that performance is the reason Ben reads as a person where most nineties protagonists read as a haircut.

The ending — the confrontation at the Corley Motors shareholder gathering, Ripburger going over the edge, the Polecats riding out — is exactly the ending a biker film has. Which is the whole point and the whole limit. Schafer had made the film he wanted. What he had not yet worked out was how to make it last, and that problem is what Grim Fandango exists to answer.