The press release Empire Interactive sent around yesterday — announcing their new DS game, Unsolved Crimes — raised a couple of questions. First, who in the hell are Empire Interactive? Second, would it have narration by Robert Stack? The answers came swiftly. Empire Interactive made the Jackass videogame. Ugh. I also realized these are unsolved crimes and not mysteries. Also, Robert Stack is dead.
Humor and pedigree aside, Unsolved Crimes has an ace up its sleeve with an eminently cool setting: New York in the 1970s. The dank, crime-ridden NYC of thirty years ago is prime real estate for a game with both action and point-and-click adventure play. More importantly, 1970s New York is just downright uncommon for a videogame setting.
Excepting classic PC gaming’s diverse palette, videogame designers typically stick to the staples of swords-and-sorcery fantasy, science fiction, and real-or-specualtive militarism for its narrative and aesthetic trappings (when they don’t, they lean towards cartoonish abstraction.) But Unsolved Crimes is one more recently announced title that’s plumbing 20th Century America for new ideas. Look at Deep Silver’s Ride to Hell. The game sounds like something of GTA clone but it’s based in 1960’s California biker culture (think more Easy Rider than Thompson’s Hell’s Angels). Then there’s Deadline Games’ Faith and a .45, another duck-and-cover shooter with an emphasis on partner play a la Army of Two. Faith, however, is a love story with Bonnie-and-Clyde protagonists on the run in the Depression-era south. Developers branching out is an undeniably good thing — thirty years of elves and bald space marines is a little wearying, after all. These three games, and the relatively small size of their publishers/developers, signify something greater for the future of games, though: new ideas are becoming financially viable.
Looks like the past is the brave, new future.