Adventure Gamers - Forums

AG Community Playthrough #69: The Dig





The game

The Dig is a LucasArts game that’s a bit of an oddball in their catalogue. Unlike most of their other outings, this isn’t a comedy game. In fact it’s quite the opposite, being a serious sci-fi game with very few characters. Don’t go in expecting Monkey Island or even Full Throttle.
The story is based on a concept Steven Spielberg came up with. He had wanted to make a movie out of it, or an episode of his ‘Amazing Stories’ series, but it was deemed impractical and too expensive, so it got turned into a game instead.
The game went through a couple of iterations before it became this version. Before Sean Clark was showrunner, Brian Moriarty had put in some work (and one of the darkest, most gruesome moments in the game came from this version). Sci-fi author Orson Scott Card (known for his book Ender’s Game and for Monkey Island’s insult swordfighting) also wrote some dialogues for the game.


The story

An asteroid is discovered that’s on a crash course with Earth. NASA sends a team of astronauts to the asteroid to nudge it on a safer orbit with nukes. Once done, the trio of astronauts make an examination of the asteroid’s surface, but inadvertently trigger a mechanism that launches them across the universe to an alien planet. They must now try to survive on a strange world and find a way back home…


Where can you get it?

The Dig can be found on both Steam and GOG, so you can pick your preferred platform.
If you already have the disc, the game is fully supported by ScummVM and plays perfectly on new systems. Both the GOG and Steam versions use ScummVM as well.

If you need any help getting it to run, please don’t hesitate to contact me.


How does it work?

Since the game uses ScummVM, the option screen (to Save, Load, Quit, etc.) is brought up with F5.
As for in-game, the user interface is extremely basic: there’s a pointer, and left-clicking performs an action. Right-clicking brings up the inventory, as does left-clicking the ‘I’ icon in the bottom left corner as well as pressing ‘I’ on the keyboard.
To examine objects, there’s a magnifying glass in the inventory, or you can use ‘E’ on the keyboard to bring it up automatically (effectively changing the cursor in an ‘Examine’ cursor).

And that’s pretty much it.


Deaths and dead ends

Since this is a LucasArts game, and not one of their earlier outings, you can’t die in the game and there are no dead ends, so you can relax when playing the game.


Playthrough format

The game is quite linear, but breaking it up in neatly outlined sections isn’t all that easy. There are however a couple of significant moments in the game that make for good stopping points and I’d like to use the ones that fit best while also making sure the sections aren’t too short. For this reason, I’m only breaking the game up in three parts, with a longer period for the middle section, since that will be the longest part to complete.

Tentative schedule:
Until Friday, December 17th: get the game and play the first part
Until Monday, December 27th: play the second part
Until Monday, January 3rd: finish the game

First section

Things to do this week:

1. Buy and/or install the game
2. Let us know when you have it up and running
3. Play until you first reach the underground ‘Nexus’, a large circular room with a lot of doors. It looks like this:

You have until Friday, December 17th to do so.

And while you’re at it, do inform us whether or not you’ve played the game before, and if so, when.

Should you need help with any puzzles, don’t hesitate to ask (although that’ll be more likely in the following sections since this is the easiest and shortest of the three parts).

I have the game up and running and have reached the stopping point.

Fame runs great and looks great so far.

Jdawg445 - 11 December 2021 10:35 AM

I have the game installed and running never deleted it from my last play through. I still own my original cd disc and run it through scummvm.

Same here. I have no idea how many times I’ve played the game already. I’m just sure I’ve reached double digits…
This is my most replayed game after Fate of Atlantis.

As this is my first Community play through do we just post comments on what we think of the game, can i answer questions because I’ve done a lot of research about the game. how does it work?

We discuss what we think of the game, focusing on what happens in the section we’re playing at the moment.

I know a lot about the game as well, but I’d be happy to learn new things as well. Any insights you have are very welcome. All I had planned on mentioning was a couple of shout-outs in the game (especially referring to Robert Patrick, who voices Boston Low, and his role in Terminator 2: Judgment Day), and a small bit about Brian Moriarty’s version of the game. Feel free to chime in as well!

Also great stopping point, I figured you would have stopped when you first get to the alien planet. I’m very intrigued to see where you break the parts up as a whole.

I was looking to break the game in three more or less equal parts from the get-go, to not have the CPT go on at a glacial pace.
I replayed the game this week to find the best break points. Initially I wanted to go a bit further than the current stopping point, but there were no really good points shortly after this one, I found. So I took this particular one, making the first section a tad shorter.
Stopping when we reach the planet would’ve been too short, I feel.

Fun fact: the part on the alien planet until you reach the nexus was originally the demo for this game. It was included in the LucasArts Archives Vol. I boxset that was released back in ‘95 (which also included the talkie version of Fate of Atlantis, Sam & Max: Hit the Road and Day of the Tentacle).
It made me notice The Dig, to the point of it being a day-one purchase back then…

Adv_Lvr - 11 December 2021 12:01 PM

I have the game up and running and have reached the stopping point.

That was fast!
Have you played the game before?

Fame runs great and looks great so far.

I’ve always loved the intro for this game (as well as all other cutscenes, and especially the music by Michael Land).

The moment in the intro where Boston Low goes “We have exactly one chance, we have to do it right. May all your prayers be with us.” and the music swells, and we see the sun coming out from behind the asteroid. Very strong stuff.

If anyone’s interested, a fan has done a HD remake of the game’s intro a couple of years ago.

See here.

all revved up and ready to go

TimovieMan - 11 December 2021 09:22 AM

Sci-fi author Orson Scott Card (known for his book Ender’s Game and for Monkey Island’s insult swordfighting)

This seems like an unfinished sentence, did you mean to say he wrote dialogues? Because he did according to mobygames (I didn’t know that!). And he also co-wrote Loom, some interesting relationship between him and LucasArts. Now I miss that era even more, so many professional sci-fi writers contributed to the genre, we were so lucky.

As for The Dig, I played it back in the 1990s. It was part of some LucasArts collection, but it was a full game, not just a demo. I fell in love with it from the first sight, it was stunning, epic, breathtaking, the soundtrack was jaw-dropping, the game had some very tense moments and very hard puzzles. I think I spent a couple of months playing it, thought I would never beat it. I also tried to replay it some years later, got stuck and dropped out. And then spent another couple of years nominating it for a community playthrough)) I don’t remember all that much besides some cool and not very cool moments (the turtle!), so I’m preparing for a great, wild ride. I got my version from GOG since I don’t own that collection anymore.

Doom - 11 December 2021 01:39 PM

TimovieMan - 11 December 2021 09:22 AM

Sci-fi author Orson Scott Card (known for his book Ender’s Game and for Monkey Island’s insult swordfighting)

This seems like an unfinished sentence, did you mean to say he wrote dialogues? Because he did according to mobygames (I didn’t know that!). And he also co-wrote Loom, some interesting relationship between him and LucasArts. Now I miss that era even more, so many professional sci-fi writers contributed to the genre, we were so lucky.

Well spotted. I fixed my sentence. And yes, that was exactly what I was going to say.

It’s actually his LucasArts connection that made me check out his books. Ender’s Game, The Lost Boys and his short story collection Unaccompanied Sonata are top works. The guy’s an excellent writer.
He has some contemptible views IRL, though.

Jdawg445 - 11 December 2021 01:42 PM

I also love the intro and the first hour or so of gameplay, it really gets you in the mood, great opening. let me ask you this do you think the developers made the opening puzzles a little too easy and that’s why a lot of Gamers think the puzzles are too hard, once you get to the planet?

I don’t think it was intentional.

Maybe the part in space was deliberately made a bit easier to get players invested in the game faster. After that it’s just standard puzzle fare, with a bunch of good well-clued-in puzzles and a couple of harder ones.

I know the turtle puzzle is renowned for its difficulty, but that’s one I never had any issues with.
Getting the power back on, on the other hand, took me a good long while to solve…

A lot of the difficulty has to do with the fact that we’re on an alien world with alien technology, so it’s not always clear what you’re supposed to do.

The easy interface and relatively limited inventory makes it easy to brute-force most of it, though.

Maybe they added the first puzzles because they expected to reach a broader audience. It was quite the production with a lot of professionals from different fields. Not to take anything away from the games that came before The Dig, but this seems of a different scope.

Tutorial-style introductions are quite common nowadays. A lot of older AGs just threw you in the deep. There had been all kinds of developments (more home computers, more younger and older players, new technical possibilities, parser to point & click etc), but it was still kind of a nerd culture phenomenon.

I think this game came out at a time when adventure games, or video games in general, were gaining traction. A lot creatives saw the development, the possibilities and maybe hoped that this phenomenon could be (almost) as big as the movies. AGs can be equally well designed, look and sound as good (well.. in the future) and they’re interactive!

So we haven’t even begun yet and I’m already VP’ing up this thread. 

Even though I have Scumm installed on my computer with OS 10.11, my disk files won’t transfer because the game has to be played in Mac classic.  I have to clear off a space to set up my laptop but will get to it after dinner.

I have played the game twice before, but not in at least 10 years.  I like the idea of the longer playthough sections.  It keeps the flow going.

Vegetable Party - 11 December 2021 04:47 PM

Maybe they added the first puzzles because they expected to reach a broader audience. It was quite the production with a lot of professionals from different fields. Not to take anything away from the games that came before The Dig, but this seems of a different scope.

But it was already in development for five years before it was finally released (due to the different project leads it had). That may not sound like much now, but back then that was highly unusual.
And it was released after Full Throttle.

By 1995 standards, the regular gameplay graphics were practically outdated already. It still looked great of course, due in no small part to the mastery of Bill Tiller.

The cutscenes were exquisite, though. They had Industrial Light & Magic help with that. You know, the guys that did the visual effects for the Star Wars films and Jurassic Park…