Most readers come away from George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 with the same singular desire: to inhabit the world of the book by playing a late ’90s first-person puzzle-adventure PC game that includes a “zero-g training sphere” for some reason. In 1998, publisher MediaX set out to satisfy that widespread literary desire with Big Brother, an officially licensed “sequel” game set in the 1984 universe.
After appearing as a demo at E3 1998 and receiving some scattered press coverage, the Big Brother project fell apart before the game could see a full release. Now, though, you can experience a small taste of this ill-fated literary sequel thanks to a newly unearthed demo that was recovered and posted to the Internet Archive over the weekend.
War is Peace
The Lost Media Wiki has a bit more info on the history of Big Brother, which was announced in May 1998 as the first game ever from multimedia CD-ROM maker MediaX. In that announcement, the company said the game would move focus away from 1984‘s Winston Smith and to new character Eric Blair, who’s on a search for his missing fiancée Emma (sure, why not) in “a completely changed world dominated by the Thought Police.”
The pre-rendered introduction for the demo ignores the missing fiancée plotline entirely and instead places Eric in the center of a resistance movement on the run from the Thought Police:
“Eric, the Thought Police have been tracking down our brotherhood leaders in hopes of destroying our resistance movement. We have only a few hours left, we must do something to get the police off our trail. As a MiniPac soldier, you should be able to get into the ministry and create a diversion. The bigger the distraction you can create, the better.”
It’s unclear how any diversion would be enough to sufficiently distract the all-encompassing monitoring and thought control network that Orwell describes in 1984, but we digress.
Quick, to the training sphere!
The Big Brother announcement promised the ability to “interact with everything” and “disable and destroy intrusive tele-screens and spy cameras watching the player’s every move” across “10 square blocks of Orwell’s retro-futuristic world.” But footage from the demo falls well short of that promise, instead covering some extremely basic Riven-style puzzle gameplay (flips switches to turn on the power; use a screwdriver to open the grate, etc.) played from a first-person view.
It all builds up to a sequence where (according to a walk-through included on the demo disc) you have to put on a “zero-g suit” before planting a bomb inside a “zero gravity training sphere” guarded by robots. Sounds like inhabiting the world of the novel to us!
Aside from the brief mentions of the Thought Police and MiniPac, the short demo does include a few other incidental nods to its licensed source material, including a “WAR IS PEACE” propaganda banner and an animated screen with the titular Big Brother seemingly looking down on you. Still, the entire gameplay scenario is so far removed from anything in the actual 1984 novel to make you wonder why they bothered with the license in the first place. Of course, MediaX answers that question in the game’s announcement, predicting that “while the game stands on its own as an entirely new creation in itself and will attract the typical game audience, the ‘Big Brother’ game will undoubtedly also attract a large literary audience.”
We sadly never got the chance to see how that “large literary audience” would have reacted to a game that seemed poised to pervert both the name and themes of 1984 so radically. In any case, this demo can now sit alongside the release of 1984’s Fahrenheit 451 and 1992’s The Godfather: The Action Game on any list of the most questionable game adaptations of respected works of art.