A DARK LEGACY
DARK SEED’S PORTS AND SEQUELS
In an unusually prolific streak for a PC point-andclick game, Dark Seed spread across the home computer platforms (Amiga, Macintosh) the Amiga CD32, and even came to Sega and Sony’s shiny new consoles in 1994, over two years after its original launch. The Amiga version had a superior soundtrack to the PC version, albeit without voiced dialogue, while the Amiga CD32 version had voiced dialogue and a richer music track.
The Playstation and Saturn versions only came out in Japan, with the former having the highestquality sound across all versions of the game. Interestingly, both console versions, however, were lower-resolution than the PC original, therefore deviating from Giger’s demand that the game use a higher resolution.
Visually, Dark Seed was an advanced game for its time, and an 8-bit Nintendo version probably wasn’t a priority for a studio that had its eyes on launching the game for upcoming 32-bit consoles. But thanks to Chinese studio Mars Production (best known for pirate-porting Pokémon Gold to the NES in 1999), a heavily diluted version of the game came to Nintendo’s seminal Eighties console as well.
The unlicensed game had a maddening 15-second loop of classical composer Carl
Czerny’s Op 821 No 61 (whose music was also used in Pokémon Gold), a brown colour palette and graphics simplified from the Amiga version. A terrible game by any objective measure, but nonetheless fascinating. On the bright side, the sparse environments made key items more visible and some of the awkward puzzles easier to solve.
The mid-nineties was the golden age of uncanny-valley digitisation and FMV, which was a natural fit for Dark Seed. The sequel, Dark Seed II, sees Mike Dawson make a return, this time in his hometown of Crowley, Texas, following the murder of his childhood sweetheart.
The game is bigger, stranger and had even more involvement from Giger, who again provided his existing art for integration but this time wanted to also include imagery that, according to the manual “had recently been haunting him”. This included the image of a sled carrying a vat down a seemingly endless staircase, inspired by his Shaft series.