Publisher: Rocket Science Games
Developer: Rocket Science Games
Release: 1994
To anyone who wasn’t paying attention to the gaming industry during the early 90s, Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine is easy to dismiss as just another crappy FMV game for the Sega CD, barely registering next to more famous games like Night Trap, Sewer Shark, and basically anything Digital Pictures produced.
In reality, Loadstar is the ultimate example of the failed experiment that was “Sili-wood.” Yes, that was a real term back in the day, meant to represent the merging of Silicon Valley and Hollywood that was supposedly driving the future of interactive entertainment.
Developer Rocket Science Games was one of the most prominent members of the games industry in 1994, before it had even released a single game. Rocket Science had been branded as a Sili-wood super group – the video game equivalent of Crosby, Stills & Nash or Damn Yankees. Investors were tripping over themselves to give RSG money. Sega itself got in on the act with a joint investment to the tune of $12 million alongside BMG that included a distribution deal. The media could not give this group enough ink. Rocket Science was featured on the cover of Wired Magazine, the pages within talking about how the Sili-wood upstart was there to revolutionize video games, to show Sega and Nintendo what they’d been doing wrong.
The talent at Rocket Science was a bit overwhelming. The CEO Steve Blank was fresh off his success at SuperMac Technology, famous for its Macintosh hardware peripherals. Ron Cobb, whose design work can be seen in Star Wars, Alien, Conan the Barbarian, The Last Starfighter, Total Recall and more. Mike Backes from films like Rising Sun, Congo and Jurassic Park. A producer from Industrial Light & Magic, music video and television production crew, an art department staffed by Oscar-nominated personnel and comic book veterans, and on and on and on.
Super group.
The heart of Rocket Science was Peter Barrett. Barrett was a SuperMac alum, and basically a superstar in his own right. Most gamers will probably be familiar with one of his products – Cinepak. This video codec was used across multiple game systems for years as CD-ROM technology took hold. Sega in particular used it heavily during the Saturn years.
Have you noticed something, yet? Absolutely none of the people in the past couple of paragraphs had any practical experience making video games. To be fair, a couple of LucasArts alums were on staff as well – Brian Moriarty and David Fox, who had titles like Loom, Indiana Jones and Zak McKraken to their credit.
In reading the Wired article it becomes pretty clear that Rocket Science were tech darlings not only for the ridiculous amount of Hollywood talent they’d hired, but because of something called “Game Science.” This was a game development tool Barrett was creating that, by the sounds of it, would let designers rapidly prototype their video-based games. Also it was meant to make their games “platform agnostic,” easily port-able to multiple system architectures. Almost sounds similar to Unity today. Talk about the actual games in development in the article gets glossed over and shrugged off if the focus moves away from the story or visuals.
There’s a good reason for that. According to CEO Steve Blank’s blog, as he was concentrating on raising more capital and selling the Rocket Science brand (almost too successfully), anytime he showed concern about the actual games being built he was reassured by Barrett that he’d been playing games for years and he knew what he was doing. Blank, who admittedly didn’t know anything about games (same with the entire board of directors) went along with it.
Even after hiring a VP of marketing from Sega who tried to warn him on multiple occasions that the games being made at Rocket Science were really bad, Blank for some reason did not pay attention. It seems the talent at Rocket Science was blinded by its own press.
So how is Loadstar? Terrible. For something that took so much time and money to complete, it’s nothing more than three WAY too long Sewer Shark, on-rails shooting levels surrounded by relatively high-quality cut scenes. And compared to Sewer Shark, I’d say the game play here is actually worse – the difficulty is too high too quickly, and it’s far too easy to lose time thanks to an idiotic design decision to aim and shoot simultaneously with the d-pad. Need to move your cursor to the right to hit that enemy bearing down on you? Better hope there isn’t a right-hand fork in the road, ’cause if there is, that’s where you’re going.
Oh, and the projectiles from your gun aren’t actually visible on the screen. Your cursor just kind of spins a bit when you shoot.
The acting talent is pretty good – Barry Primus and Ned Beatty lead the cast – so I guess that’s something. Of course, though, The Legend of Tully Bodine was conceived as a trilogy, so even if you finish the game you get no resolution to the somewhat lacklustre story.
And there would never be a resolution, because Rocket Science Games didn’t stick around long enough to produce any of the sequels. After dismal sales of their first three games – all FMV affairs – Rocket Science shifted focus to more traditional PC game fare, and was funded by SegaSoft. Unfortunately RSG was only able to get two more games out before being shuttered in 1997, three years after the release of their first game.
