JRT wrote:As far as stuff being publically revealed, there was the Hunters of Ralk weird SF game that was going to be released from Cyberdreams before they went under. Gary also had chess variants on his old web site.
At the risk of once again irritating those who feel I shouldn't be posting here, I have some information on Hunters of Ralk that I doubt anyone else has.
After I left TSR in 1989, I had a bunch of FL contracts with them but was mostly intent on getting into computer games (I'd gotten the bug before leaving TSR, co-designing the Pool of Radiance game in 1988). A few years later, I did some editing/re-writing work on a short computer game based on Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" story, for a company out in LA called Cyberdreams.
A little while after I completed that for them, they called me up about another project. They asked me if I'd ever worked with Gary and I confirmed that I had. They said they had a problem project for me, one they were going to pass on unless I could do something with it. I agreed, signed an NDA, and they filled me in. They said they'd contracted with Gary to write the story for a computer RPG called "Hunters of Ralk." What they got from him was, they said, massively overwritten and not something they could work with. They said they were going to send the manuscript to me.
A few days later, my wife called down to me (I worked out of an office at home at the time) and asked if someone had FedExed me some weights. I came up and there was a large, very heavy package waiting for me. I opened it and found 1,500 pages of documents, what Gary has sent Cyberdreams as a story/design document.
After reading through it, I understood why Cyberdreams couldn't deal with it. I hope no one here is offended (though I'm sure some will be) when I say that Gary didn't know how to write a story/design document for a computer RPG. It was written like a long, long story, instead of being broken up into sections of topics (such as Characters, Environments, Story Summary, and so on). The latter is much more useful for a computer/video game doc, as team members in different disciplines can much more readily access the info that pertains to their function. There were also a number of instances of very overblown, way-too-long speeches from characters. There were speeches that literally went on for 3-4 pages, way too long for a computer game player to wade his/her way through.
In Gary's defense, Cyberdreams may not have given him specific parameters for him to tailor a story/design doc to the needs of the folks who were going to build the game. OTOH, they might have tried and he either brushed it off or didn't understand the need. I honestly don't know which was the case, but it is true that writing a doc of this sort is a different process, and requires a different skill set, than writing a novel or a paper RPG module. Whatever the reason or reasons, the doc was unworkable for a team trying to make a computer game.
To give an approximate date to this, Cyberdreams flew me out to LA and put me up in a hotel for a week very soon after they sent me the ms. They also flew out a couple of programmers from Finland(!) who were representing a small team that would be writing the code for the game. I would be hard-pressed to tell you what year this was, except I remember being astonished at how everyone in LA was following the OJ Simpson trial. In the Midwest, it was a one-day wonder and then faded to the background. But people in LA were glued to the TV set all day, watching Judge Ito and the flying circus. Anyway, so that's about when Hunters of Ralk was going on.
I worked on the ms for about two months and finally had it down to about 300 pages, organized in a way the teams could use, and the scope pared down to something that was reasonable for a computer RPG. When they first approached me about this project, I very specifically asked if Gary knew they had sent this to someone to revise. I asked because I recalled being told at TSR that Gary did not like revisions to his writing (though to be fair, Frank Mentzer assured me this wasn't true; others were equally sure it was). Anyway, the producer at Cyberdreams assured me that Gary did know it was going to be revised and that it didn't actually matter since the contract stipulated that he didn't have any veto power over revisions. I expressed some surprise at this but was assured it was so.
Two months or so later, I turned the pared-down ms over and got the rest of the money I was owed. A few weeks later, the producer called me up and glumly informed me that the game would not be coming out. I asked why and he said that they'd sent the revised ms to Gary and he told them he wouldn't accept any revisions. They informed him that the contract stipulated that he had no choice and he informed them that they were wrong. Turns out that no one who was dealing directly with Gary had actually
read the contract and it did indeed say Gary had the right to refuse any changes to his work, which is what I wondered all along.
The upshot was that Gary refused to allow the changes and Cyberdreams felt they couldn't create a computer game out of what he had written. So the project was canceled. I wasn't that upset, as I'd already been paid for my work and I wasn't sure that I would have received credit for it anyway.
I mostly wanted to clear up the timeline that had been posted earlier. Cyberdreams was still in business when they decided not to publish "Hunters of Ralk." They did go out of business within a year or so of that time, however. Frankly, I'm surprised that anyone but me ever heard or remembered the name.
There was something perjorative that the producer claimed Gail had done in all this, but I hesitate to post it as I have no first-hand knowledge of it, only that the producer claimed it happened.