Dark Seed (computer game)

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Dark Seed

Developer(s)	Cyberdreams
Publisher(s)	Cyberdreams
Release date(s)	1992
Genre(s)	Adventure
Mode(s)	Single player
Platform(s)	DOS, Macintosh, Amiga, Amiga CD32, PlayStation, Sega Saturn
Media	3½" Floppy disk, CD-ROM
System requirements	DOS 20 MHz 386 640 KB RAM 500 KB Hard disk space MS-DOS 3.x
Input	Keyboard, mouse, or joystick

Dark Seed is a computer game in the adventure game genre. It was developed and published by Cyberdreams in 1992. It exhibits a normal world and a dark world counterpart, which is based on the artwork by H. R. Giger. It was one of the first adventure games to use high resolution (640 pixels wide) graphics, to Giger's demand. A sequel, Dark Seed II, was released in 1995. The original game was released for DOS, Macintosh, Amiga, Amiga CD32, PlayStation and Sega Saturn.

Players control "Mike Dawson", a successful advertising executive and writer, who has recently purchased an old mansion in the small town of Woodland Hills. As soon as he moves into the house, he falls asleep and has a nightmare about an alien machine implanting an object into his skull. He has three days to solve the mystery of the town before the "dark seed" erupts from his brain.

Dark Seed is notable for its impressive graphics but also for its buggy programming and frustrating difficulty. Unlike most adventure games which give the player time to explore, almost every action in Dark Seed has to fall within precise time limits or the game will end up in an unwinnable state. As a result of this as well as the game's frequent crashes, one must start over repeatedly to win without resorting to a walkthrough.

[edit] Trivia

In the town cemetery, one of the tombstones reads "G. Threepwood" a reference to Guybrush Threepwood from The Secret of Monkey Island adventure series.

An urban legend spread that the intense pressure of designing Darkseed gave lead designer, Mike Dawson, a mental breakdown. However, he actually left the games industry after completing Darkseed and moved into television writing until the late 1990's, wrote two books on programming (Beginning C++ Game Programming and Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner) and is teaching game design and programming classes at Stanford University and UCLA.^[1]