Gadget: Invention, Travel, & Adventure

After finishing the hit adventure game Myst (1993) in 1994, I started looking for my next adventure based, 3D pre-rendered, CD-ROM fix. Faced with a wave of "Myst clones" flooding the market, the first title I chose to purchase was Gadget (1993).

I read the reviews beforehand so I wasn't disappointed to discover that Gadget wasn't a true interactive game but more of an interactive movie with a very linear plot. What attracted me to this game was the industrial steampunk art direction, the intricately designed 3D models and the creepy, isolated atmosphere. It was an influential title as I noticed similar themes in Valve's Half-Life 2 which was released over a decade later. You can read a good review of Gadget at ACG.

Although it had an ambiguous ending, which I find typical for many Japanese games, my main issue was the unsightly dithering used for the 8-bit images. Most of the images that I examined upon close inspection amounted to a measly 80 of a possible 256 colors. In contrast, Cyan chose to use an adaptive pallet for their 8-bit images to closely mimic full color, 24-bit images for Myst.

Recently, while watching the movie Barton Fink (1991), I noticed some strangely familiar, visual similarities in the set designs. On a hunch, I popped in my Gadget CD-ROM on my PC and sure enough, I wasn't misremembering things. It looks like the developers of Gadget were "inspired" by the Coen brothers film! No credit was given on the CD-ROM game however.