It Came from the Desert: The B-Movie as Game

The best thing in It Came from the Desert is a clock, and the clock is fifteen days long, and it runs whether you are doing something about the giant ants or standing in a bar in Lizard Breath, California, wondering who to talk to next. That is the entire design in one sentence, and it is the reason this is the Cinemaware game worth arguing about.

Cinemaware had been chasing the same idea since 1986: a game that felt like a film. The Amiga made the pitch plausible — a machine that could throw around big, painted, digitised imagery while every other home computer was still counting sprites — and the company built its whole identity on it. The catalogue reads like a rack in a video shop. Swashbucklers, aerial combat, feudal Japan, American football, pulp heroics. Every one of them opened with a title card and a credit roll.

The trouble was that most of them stopped there.

The Defender of the Crown problem

I have been rude about this before over at Defender of the Crown, so I will be brief. Cinemaware’s 1986 debut was the most beautiful thing on the Amiga and one of the thinnest games on it: gorgeous painted screens, a map of England, a strategy layer with about four decisions in it, and sword fights and jousts that resolved into a couple of arcade tricks you could learn in an evening and then perform for the rest of your life. The presentation was doing all of the work. Once you saw through the pictures there was nothing underneath them holding your attention.

That is a specific failure and it is worth naming precisely, because the Amiga era is littered with it. A game can spend its entire budget on the first ninety seconds. Shadow of the Beast is the other monument to it — thirteen layers of parallax and a soundtrack people still hum, wrapped around a hostile, shallow platformer that existed to sell hardware. Both games were doing something genuinely new with a machine. Neither had worked out what the player was supposed to be deciding.

It Came from the Desert, three years later, is Cinemaware finding the answer. The joke is that they found it by picking the daftest possible fiction.

Fifteen days in Lizard Breath

The setup is a 1950s giant-insect picture rendered with total sincerity, which is the correct way to do a pastiche. A meteorite has come down near a small California desert town. Something in the ground has got very large. You are a geologist, the town’s authorities are the town’s authorities, and your problem for the next fortnight is that nobody believes you.

The structure is where the design lives. The game gives you a real-time fifteen-day clock and an island of a map — a town, outlying farms, mines, a dam, a radio station — with people in it who know things. You drive from place to place. You talk to a rancher who has lost stock, a doctor who has seen a bite, a teenage gang who will fight you, a bar full of people with opinions. Evidence accumulates. Somewhere in there is enough of it to make the mayor declare an emergency, and the ants keep expanding regardless of how your afternoon is going.

The clock works as a currency, and the game charges you for everything in the same unit. Driving across the map costs hours. Talking to the wrong person costs hours. The day ends and you sleep and the ants have taken more ground.

And then the move that made me sit up when I was fourteen and still makes me sit up now: when you lose a fight, you wake up in hospital.

Hospital time is the whole thesis

Here is a game about giant ants in which serious combat failure does not kill you. It puts you in a hospital bed for a few days, and those days are taken out of the fifteen, and the ants use them.

I cannot overstate how unusual that is for 1989, or how much better it is than the alternative. Every other action game of the era resolved failure as death and death as a reload. The state of the world snapped back to a save point and the failure was erased. It Came from the Desert makes failure into a fact the world absorbs. You lost the knife fight, you spent three days unconscious, the map is worse now, and the run continues.

Look at what that buys the design:

The tension moves off the individual fight and onto the schedule. A fight you might lose is a fight that might cost you a fifth of the game, so you weigh it, and the weighing is where the drama actually is. The arcade sequences — the driving, the scraps with the local hoodlums, the ants in the mine tunnels — are individually nothing special, and they do not need to be, because their function is to place a bet against the clock.

Failure stops being punishment and becomes narrative. A B-movie protagonist who gets knocked out and wakes up in a hospital bed while the situation deteriorates is doing exactly what the genre says he should. The mechanic and the pastiche are the same object, which is the thing Defender of the Crown could never manage. Defender’s jousting was a minigame wearing a film’s clothes. The hospital is a film beat that is also a resource transaction.

Better still, you can break out. The hospital stay is playable: there is a sequence where you escape the ward early and get back to work, trading a lie-down you cannot afford for a bit of nerve. That is the design closing its own loop. Failure costs days, days are the resource, so the game gives you a lever to claw some back and charges you a risk for pulling it. Every element in the chain refers to the same currency.

The same logic runs through the rest of the town, which is why the conversation system holds up better than it has any right to. People give you leads, leads point at places, places take driving time to reach, and a few of them are dead ends because a rumour in a bar is a rumour in a bar. The authorities need convincing, and the evidence you have gathered is weighed when you make your case. Push too hard with too little and the town decides the geologist has lost his mind — and there is a version of that failure where you end up sectioned, in a ward, watching the clock you were trying to beat. The pastiche and the punishment agree with each other again. That is a 1950s B-movie plot beat implemented as a game-state transition, and it lands because the game has one unit of account and spends it consistently.

And the town keeps its shape. Because the world is running on its own clock, the place you did not visit was still there having a Tuesday. That is a very cheap illusion — the game is tracking a handful of variables — and it is completely convincing, because the one thing that sells a living world is evidence that it moved while you were elsewhere.

What it descends from, and what descends from it

The ancestor is Sid Meier’s Pirates! from 1987: an open map, a real clock, a set of small arcade sequences hung off a simulation that ages you while you play. Cinemaware’s contribution was to weld that structure to a tight fiction with a deadline, and a fortnight is a much better dramatic unit than a career.

The descendants are everywhere, and mostly they have forgotten the lesson. Persona’s calendar, Pentiment’s chapters, Outer Wilds’ twenty-two minutes, Majora’s Mask’s three days — every game where the clock is the antagonist is running an It Came from the Desert argument, whether it knows it or not. The ones that work all share the same property: the time you spend is a choice with an opportunity cost, and the world spends its own time whether you spend yours well or badly. See also the more recent Pacific Drive and its insistence that damage is something you live with rather than reload out of.

The version to play is the Amiga original. There is a Mega Drive port from 1992 that restructures a good deal and loses the digitised faces that gave the thing its cheerful low-budget conviction. The original is a multi-disk affair, which in 1989 meant swapping, and emulation handles that now. Expect the arcade bits to feel their age within ten minutes. Expect the clock to have you by the second day.

Cinemaware’s whole company was a bet that games should be films. It is faintly funny that the game where the bet paid off is the one where the film in question is about ants the size of a Buick. The reason it worked is that a B-movie has structure a game can borrow: a ticking deadline, an expert nobody listens to, a town that has to be convinced. The prestige material Cinemaware kept reaching for had none of that. Knights and samurai gave them pictures. The ants gave them a system.