The Milky Way is a big place. Within several of its planets lie the remaining clones, creatures ripped from your body that will cause gradual cellular degeneration if you don’t locate and extract the vital fluid before it’s too late. There are only five left, but you don’t know where they are, and there are thousands of planets to explore. The excellent clones, or ciphers, can only be found by interrogating many of the alien species that populate the galaxy. There’s just one problem: you have no idea what they’re saying.
It sounds like the premise of that weird indie game you have on your Steam wishlist. But that’s not true. This is the plot of Captain Blood, the 1988 big hit from the French publisher ERE Informatique. And like many games of that era, it started life as a tech demo. “One day I met Didier Bouchon at an exhibition,” begins Philippe Ulrich, lead designer of Captain Blood. “We quickly grew to like each other, so when I was the first to get an Atari ST, I gave it to Didier to explore the bowels of this new beast.” Neither had much commercial computer game design or programming experience, but when Ulrich returned to his friend a few weeks later, the seed was sown for their first game together. “I visited him in his study and he had started programming a map generated by a fractal seed at the ST. After a few glasses of Brouilly and some drawings on a restaurant tablecloth, we set out to create this card on a sphere.” From this seed, the pair could store an entire galaxy’s worth of planets on the ST’s 512K floppy disk, using a procedural terrain generator to create each unique world.
These worlds are represented by a scrolling landscape and a canyon. And at the end of some – rather conveniently – sits an alien, ready to talk to Captain Blood. Recall that Blood is trying to locate the five remaining clones and obtain their vital fluid so he can continue to live. “The idea of a hero who accidentally clones himself and has to find his clones came naturally,” Ulrich explains. “We were fed comics, novels and cyberpunk cinema to the rhythm of Kraftwerk’s impeccable beat.”
Captain Blood’s eleven-page short story begins not in space, but on Earth, in the home of unkempt computer programmer and master game player Bob Morlok. A chance meeting with Charles Darwin (stick with me) inspires Morlok to create the Ark in his game, a spaceship equipped with an organic on-board computer and his own digital doppelgänger, Captain Blood. Finally, months later, Morlok is ready to test his new game. He types the memorable instruction – RUN – and immediately disappears from existence, transported to his game. Then, after a nasty hyperspace accident, 30 clones are freed from the Captain, an army of fakes spread across the galaxy. Blood has one choice: track them all down, launch a probe to the planet’s surface, teleport them in turn to his cryonization container, the Fridgitorium, and extract the vital fluid, disintegrating the clone in the process. But first he has to find them, and here, away from the fancy fractal graphics, lies the heart of Captain Blood.
“Captain Blood’s limitation was to create a universal text adventure game, playable by every player on the planet and transcending languages,” notes Ulrich. “I loved the icon-based language, like ‘I love you’ and ‘You beautiful, you strong’. It worked in any language and I realized that by combining a hundred words/icons you could express a real scenario with humor .” This means of communication, called the Universal Protocol of Communication – UPCOM – became the main gameplay of Captain Blood. “We simulated intelligence using big data – I wrote hundreds of sentences with icons representing the characters’ knowledge, history, secrets and of course the precious coordinates of inhabited planets.”
In Captain Blood there are 16 sentient alien races. Each species has overarching characteristics: for example, the long-tongued Izwal is civilized, peaceful, and intelligent; the insectoid Yukas are aggressive and not to be trusted; the dreamy, beautiful Ondoyantes are very attractive to those who admire them, horrific monsters to those who detest them.
Within each breed, individuals often have their own characteristics. Handling the conversation in such a way that Blood gets information about further coordinates is absolutely necessary. “If you don’t know the coordinates of inhabited planets, you are doomed to wander the galaxy,” Ulrich explains. “To figure them out, you have to talk to the characters, be polite, negotiate and please them.” However, the aliens don’t always give the same answer – frustrating perhaps, but realistic. “You had to tame them, show your humanity or aggressiveness, and the answers would depend on the psychology of the character you were dealing with.”
For Atari ST owners, the evocative journey is preceded by a suitably haunting theme, created in collaboration with world-renowned composer Jean-Michel Jarre. “Jarre was preparing for a concert in Japan where he wanted to project pixel art onto the sides of buildings. One evening we showed him Captain Blood at his recording studio in Chatou. He loved it.” Ulrich says proudly. Jarre had just released his seventh studio album, Zoolook, an electronic record full of samples and – appropriately – 25 different languages, and Ulrich asked permission to use four bars from the album for Captain Blood’s music. Music samples, even in disc-based games, were rare at the time due to the memory they took up. Ulrich and Bouchon devised a utility to compress and process samples, allowing several minutes of music to be created using just a few seconds of their sample. Ulrich continues: “When I played the results back to Jean-Michel Jarre, he was amazed and told us that ‘with all the equipment I have in the studio, I can’t do what you did.'” Ulrich and Bouchon soon received a telex from Jarre’s publisher, confirming the rights.
Aesthetically, Captain Blood has two strong cinematic influences. The mesmerizing hyperspace sequence, complete with a steady and monolithic tone, is clearly inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, and there’s Blood’s spaceship, the Ark, informed by a very different kind of science fiction. “HR Giger has inseminated a generation with the seed of an alien monster,” smiles Ulrich. “Nobody came out of Alien unscathed, and of course Giger’s biomechanical art inspired us.” The accompanying story booklet further reinforces this association, referring to the ‘Nostromo affair’ and ‘old Rippley lady’.
Captain Blood enveloped the lives of those behind it and took almost two years to develop. “We were in an eternal creation – the sky was not the limit,” says Ulrich. “There was no end to the development, and neither did the game. But Christmas was coming and we were tired. Didier was at the end of his rope and working day and night. We had to say stop.” Ultimately, Captain Blood debuted in the spring of 1988 to high praise from all quarters. “Every now and then a new game arrives on the ST and leaves everything else floating in its wake. Captain Blood is undoubtedly one of them,” said Mark Smiddy in Atari ST User magazine. “The graphics are breathtaking and the digitized music is superlative. Even the screenplay sounds like a plot from a science fiction bestseller by Larry Niven.” An incredible score of 10/10 was the result, a score that was repeated two months later in the English version.
The wait had been worth it, despite the omission of many elements, such as the player hallucinating while talking to certain species. No matter: despite its relative lack of action and dark gameplay, Captain Blood was also a hit with Atari ST fans. “After the release, people called me and talked to me at Bluddian,” Ulrich laughs. “And I’ve even seen players using the sounds of icons to express themselves. My idea went even further: I dreamed of giving icons sounds and notes so that you could sing a tune to express a phrase or message to express.”
Towards the end of Captain Blood’s development, French mega-publisher Infogrames bought ERE Informatique, which led to Ulrich’s creation of the Exxos label and relegated ERE and Infogrames to the position of publishers looking to maximize profits from the game: conversions to the Commodore Amiga, PC, Commodore 64 and even ZX Spectrum appeared next. For Philippe Ulrich, it’s a journey that started with the Sinclair ZX80 and Rodney Zaks’ famous book, Programming The Z80, and continues today. “My career has seen a global shift to digital since 1980,” he muses as our conversation ends. “It was mind-blowing. Beautiful. Beautiful. Terrifying!” That seems, I think, an appropriate set of words to sum up Captain Blood, the uniquely strange space mission to essentially find (and kill) yourself. Five times.