When those didn’t work, Ellison dug into Sears’ interests. The writer would offer Sears distractions, such as recommending that he go out onto the home’s balcony and enjoy the view. Since Ellison was responsible for steering the adaptation’s creative direction, Sears found himself with free time in that first week while he waited for Ellison’s notes. It was an early attempt to tackle genuinely mature subject matter in an era where “mature” typically meant showing a heroine in a bra. “Each one dealt with a very strong theme.” Some of the issues the game explored included the nature of guilt, sexual assault, and, perhaps most famously, the Holocaust. “Harlan wanted to touch on controversial themes,” Mullich recalls. “I went to work, and I started making my notes, but he had to go first and come up with a premise,” Sears says. Over the next few days, Ellison and Sears began fleshing out each of the five characters, creating deeper histories for them and delving into why they were selected. “And then he immediately sat down and started typing on his Olympic manual typewriter.” “That was going to be the premise of the game – finding out why these characters had been chosen by AM to be tortured and resurrected endlessly and forever,” Sears says. The story would be split into five vignettes, each based on one of characters. Realizing they were onto something, the pair began working on their concept. Ellison was put off by the question, which he told Sears he’d never been asked before. “The question David posed to Harlan that got them started was ‘Why were these people saved? Why did AM decide to save them?’” recalls David Mullich, who produced the game. The breakthrough came with a simple question. The story ends with four of the characters dead, with the remaining survivor transformed into a shapeless mass of goo (see sidebar). Now came the tough part: turning a tale set in a hopeless world featuring five characters with no real histories into something playable. “I don’t want to damage his reputation, because I’m sure he spent decades building it up, but he’s a real rascal with a heart of gold – but he doesn’t tolerate idiots,” Sears says. Sears’ fears of being seen as a fanboy or as being ignorant were unfounded. ![]() The two talked for a while about Ellison’s writings, science fiction, and other areas of common interest. Sears says that Ellison immediately made him feel welcome. Geiger collaboration Dark Seed led to a job writing a clue book for the adventure game in the pre-Internet era of 1992, which in turn led to the current offer: Spend a week with the notoriously prickly author Ellison and distill his iconic work – one of the top 10 most reprinted stories in the English language – into his first game-design document. Previously, he was a writer and assistant editor at Compute magazine. To make the task even more daunting, this was Sears’ first job in game development. “And they said, ‘No, it’s ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,’ and I was like ‘What?’ At the time, in the game-development community, people said, ‘Oh I love Ellison’s stories, but there’s no way you could turn that into a game.’ I thought, ‘Wow, what have I gotten into?’” “I was thinking ‘Oh, it could be ‘Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman’ or maybe ‘A Boy and His Dog’ and it’s going to be some kind of RPG or something,’ Sears recalls. When David Sears heard that publisher Cyberdreams was adapting one of Harlan Ellison’s short stories into a game, the longtime fan’s mind began racing. ![]() ![]() Here’s the story of how Ellison and a pair of designers transformed the story into one of the most disturbing point-and-click adventure games of all time. Despite its sparse characterization and lack of a traditional narrative, it was adapted into a computer game of the same name in 1995. Harlan Ellison’s 1967 short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” is an early landmark, offering readers an unimaginably bleak look at humanity’s future, with five desperate souls enduring the constant torture of a deranged AI. While some younger readers might find it hard to believe, our culture’s interest in post-apocalyptic settings didn’t originate with the Fallout series. Here's our behind-the-scenes look at the game's development, which first appeared in issue #225 of Game Informer. His short story "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" was adapted into a PC adventure game in the early 1990s, which maintained the source material's grim view of humanity. Science-fiction author Harlan Ellison recently passed away, leaving a legacy of work that includes classic episodes of Star Trek and the Outer Limits as well as a dizzying array of novels and short stories.
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