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AGs, with unmatched original plots?

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I cant tell how many AGs plots are/were presented with such original ideas and plots, that no other storytelling medium had the privilege to match..

I think of Grim Fanadgo outta the top of my head, and maybe because it still is, makes it so unique.

LSL as much as it is predictable and cliched, but it wasnt until the 90s that there were movies made with same strong profanity and sexual innuendos as it; about a man seeking to get laid (i might be wrong tho)

Gemini Rue hits me as a winning movie script (if made) that might live up to the legendary (Sci-Fi) Hollywood Movies-with-twist-endings that are cherished for lifetime.

I cant think of much else now, but i know are many more than i just mentioned now, i just need to go thru some big list and start remembering.

     

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I have to go with most Lucas art stories for originality:
>Monkey Island is probably one of the most original things ever. With the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise ripping it off, is easy to forget how amzaing the world it invented was. One should play the first game in it’s original version to understand why it’s the best of all. Not only the main plot, but pretty much every tiny detail was super original and interesting. The second game was also amazing, setting it’s creator as perhaps the most important name in the genre.
>Maniac Mansion was a cliché of a B horror movie: a bunch of kids enter a wicked house to rescue a friend. But the Wacky world of the Edison family had a type of humour that makes it super original. You have to understand that it was 1 year before Beetlejuice, and a few before Edward scissorhands.
>The second part, Day of the Tentacle, is a master piece. The plot is the best it has along with the graphics. It’s really amazingly crafted and it really manages to get it’s twisted humour into the puzzles themselves as no other.
>Making a decent Indiana Jones plot has proved to be super difficult: out of 4 movies, 2 hace crappy stories. Still, the game Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis, with much less budget, was able to deliver a story that would go with the best 2 movies. It was able to stay in the Indiana Jones universe, while bringing a fantastic Atlantis to live.
>I also second Grim Fandango. While in it’s core is just a film noir, everything is wrapped in a very original afterlife world.
>The Last express, is probably one of the best games ever made. The story is full of stuff that may not look that original but the game itself is super original and was never replicated. The character’s are way more mature that anything you’ve seen in games, discussing marxism and other stuff.
>Perhaps the most appealing version of Robin Hood that I’ve seen comes from the not widley known Sierra’s game: “The conquest of the longows”. The game has a great story.
>Broken Sword I may not seem super original, but at the time, the closest thing to it was Indiana Jones and maybe the books of Umberto Eco. It blended a mistery with the history of the templars. The characters were greatly done and the game was prefect. A huge cliché was later build on top of it.
>Originality may come in several forms, “The neverhood”, is a very abstract game in a different world. While I don’t love this game, it’s really original.
>The Larry series, specially 6 and 7 were pretty strange. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a comedy that only dealt with picking up girls. If you didn’t used a condom you’d die of AIDS. I feel it’s under appreciated.
>The 2 Darkseed games are very original and interesting. Perhaps it’s more of stetic thing thought, than a story thing.
>Bad Mojo, of a crappy human that dies and rincarnates in a cocorouch was pretty interesting too.
>Gabriel Knight, Sins of the father, has a great story. The 3 chapter wasn’t super original in it’s story, but the ending made all the statements that the DaVinci Code use to shook the world (and more), several years before the crappy book come out.

     
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Nice list calpolican, and welcome to this nice community.

I agree with most of it too, ex[cpet GK which was inspired by Angel Heart (the movie) that came out a few years before GK release.

And it is true that LucasArts surpassed any other company in making it’s own original plots and idea, much much more than sierra that almost always relied on famous themes and fairy tales.

     
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Maybe you meant original settings rather than original plots? I also wanted to mention LucasArts, only the first game that came to mind was Loom. Everything about it is absolutely unique, including the very idea of some guild weaving time and space. I also find Full Throttle more original than Day of the Tentacle (in fact Sierra released Pepper’s Adventures in Time the very same year). And in FT we have a futuristic Wild West inhabited by rival gangs of bikers. Yeah, a bit similar to Mad Max, but the game itself is very different. I can think of other unique universes. Woodruff, anyone? Cool Or Zork, a grand underground empire with its own rules, beasts, mythology, even dictionary.

     

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You must be right, but then as much as i understand the difference, its confusing yet, for in my tongue, they are the same, but however, it doesn’t matter as much as we are talking about original (groundbreaking maybe) aspects of/from our genre that might til this day never been seen at any movie, and while Hollywood is repeating itself whether by the similar ideas or even with straight sequels and whatnot we still have universes no one discovered but us, so whatever suits you; Plot, Settings, Atmosphere.. etc; they should all be at same league of originality.. i guess!

     
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calpolican - 09 January 2020 05:30 PM

I have to go with most Lucas art stories for originality:
>Monkey Island is probably one of the most original things ever. With the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise ripping it off, is easy to forget how amzaing the world it invented was. One should play the first game in it’s original version to understand why it’s the best of all. Not only the main plot, but pretty much every tiny detail was super original and interesting. The second game was also amazing, setting it’s creator as perhaps the most important name in the genre.

Someone’s going to say it sooner or later: It would have been very impressive for Pirates of the Caribbean to rip off Monkey Island in 1967.

>Bad Mojo, of a crappy human that dies and rincarnates in a cocorouch was pretty interesting too.

Again, if no one mentions Kafka in response to this, I’d be surprised.

>Gabriel Knight, Sins of the father, has a great story. The 3 chapter wasn’t super original in it’s story, but the ending made all the statements that the DaVinci Code use to shook the world (and more), several years before the crappy book come out.

GK, Broken Sword, DOTT, Conquest of the Longbow, I don’t find many of these original. The Neverhood, yes, and maybe Dark Seed. But even that was strongly influenced by HR Giger. I found the 80s and 90s were a fairly unoriginal period for adventure games, if you remove text adventures from consideration.

Games with plots I do find somewhat original:
-Toonstruck: If a “real person in cartoon world” has been done before, I can’t think where. Sure it’s a variation on Alice in Wonderland, but very specifically oriented towards animated cartoons.
-The Sexy Brutale: It would be a spoiler to even hint at what makes the plot original, but the parallels to legitimate psychological phenomena related to trauma set it apart for originality.
-SOMA: Tackles the oldest of philosophical and religious questions: what it means to be. The originality comes from putting us in a position where such a question becomes more than intellectual.
-Counterfeit Monkey: Manipulating language to convert one object to another.
-Violet: Has there been another work of fiction about procrastination?
-Other possibilities: The Norwood Suite, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Trinity, Bureaucracy, Spider and Web, Photopia, INSIDE, The Dream Machine.

 

     
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cyfoyjvx - 09 January 2020 09:13 PM

Games with plots I do find somewhat original:
-Toonstruck: If a “real person in cartoon world” has been done before, I can’t think where. Sure it’s a variation on Alice in Wonderland, but very specifically oriented towards animated cartoons.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit was released in 1988, almost a decade before ToonStruck. Not only that, Christopher Lloyd who was the protagonist in ToonStruck also was in the cast of that movie!

So ToonStruck is very much ripping off Roger Rabbit, not that it makes it a bad game, it’s one of the most underrated gems ever, but it’s hardly an original idea back in 1996, even less now.

To expand the idea just a little bit, The Muppet Show had real human guests in a puppet world in every episode. Admittedly, it’s not an animation, but the basic situation is the same.

     

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Well, it really depends what you mean by original. If you were neat picky Toonstruck was already super done at the same time it came out, Roger Rabbit (88), Cool World(92), etc. it was a trend. But that doesn’t mean that Tunstruck is not original despite that.
Of course I also understand that the idea of reincarnatioin is older than hinduism, and that ghost pirates are as old as, well… pirates. I’m just saying that if you look at the Pirate’s ride of the 60’s you’ll see that the movie looks way more inspired in monkey island than the ride. What did Monkey Island brought to the table? I dunno, was it just the ghost appeal? the crazy voodoo objects? was it the dialogues? The 4th wall? Ultimataley what matters is that it found a way to make it work in a way in wich it amazed it’s public.
It really depends on each one to decide either if Hypnospace is more original than Gone Home or papers please.
At the end of the day, everyone interprets the topic very differently and it’s cool to see the list we’re all producing.

     
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calpolican - 10 January 2020 05:32 AM

Well, it really depends what you mean by original. If you were neat picky Toonstruck was already super done at the same time it came out, Roger Rabbit (88), Cool World(92), etc. it was a trend.

Indeed.
Let’s not forget that the crossover worked both ways, there were even animated characters interacting with the real world too, like in the series Beavis and Butt-Head, which ran in the 90’s. They even had a hit music video with Cher, and two point-and-click games which everyone here probably knows.

It also depends on how we define animation. Even before Roger Rabbit there was Tron (1982), which used human actors in computer animated settings in a story that takes people inside a computer. While being somewhat different from the ToonStruck premise, the basic concept is almost identical. A programmer who gets into a computer program vs. a cartoonist who gets into a cartoon world.

     
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I’m rather taken by the Forever Lost trilogy, granted we made it but still, I think it’s pretty good Wink

https://www.foreverlostgame.com/

In all honesty though, we do still get emails almost weekly nearly 8 years after release ( of the first ep, concluding ep was about 4 years ago I think? ) of people playing and replaying it because of the story, still asking us questions.

     

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The Journeyman Project is pretty unique and strikes me as one of the most realistic uses of time travel (in terms of what I think would really happen if time travel actually existed).  If somebody discovered time travel, most likely it would be under government funding.  So obviously as soon as the time machine is proven to actually work the government will declare time travel illegal, conceal the fact that they ever built a time machine, and setup a secret agency to ensure no one else ever uses time travel.  After all with time travel “nothing is ever safe.”  I’ve still never seen a time travel movie whose story I like as much as this game.

I often find time travel movies a bit disappointing because they only show time travel to the past and not the future.  Technically Journeyman Project also adheres to this rule, but the “present” of the Journeyman Project is so far in the future that all of the “past” time periods you travel to are still the future from our perspective. 

The 2nd game broached the interesting topic of how humans developing time travel would affect their political relationships with other alien races who don’t have time travel.  The 3rd game’s story, while I like it, is unfortunately not particularly original (the discovery that ancient mythical civilizations like Atlantis and El Dorado were all founded by aliens… definitely heard that one before…).

     
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cyfoyjvx - 09 January 2020 09:13 PM
calpolican - 09 January 2020 05:30 PM

>Bad Mojo, of a crappy human that dies and rincarnates in a cocorouch was pretty interesting too.

Again, if no one mentions Kafka in response to this, I’d be surprised.

YOU mentioned him. Congratulations.  Tongue
Actually, the only thing Bad Mojo has in common with the short story about Gregor Samsa is the transformation from man to vermin. In the case of Roger Samms (what’s in a name) it’s only temporary and he does not die.  Franz, the cat’s name, is also clearly a reference to the famous author you mentioned. But that’s it. Totally different story. Reducing Bad Mojo to this novella is not fair.

     

See you around, wolf. Nerissa

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GateKeeper - 10 January 2020 03:41 AM
cyfoyjvx - 09 January 2020 09:13 PM

Games with plots I do find somewhat original:
-Toonstruck: If a “real person in cartoon world” has been done before, I can’t think where. Sure it’s a variation on Alice in Wonderland, but very specifically oriented towards animated cartoons.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit was released in 1988, almost a decade before ToonStruck. Not only that, Christopher Lloyd who was the protagonist in ToonStruck also was in the cast of that movie!

So ToonStruck is very much ripping off Roger Rabbit, not that it makes it a bad game, it’s one of the most underrated gems ever, but it’s hardly an original idea back in 1996, even less now.

To expand the idea just a little bit, The Muppet Show had real human guests in a puppet world in every episode. Admittedly, it’s not an animation, but the basic situation is the same.

Thanks for the info, clearly my knowledge of animated film/TV leaves much to be desired (something I’m not ashamed to admit).

Karlok - 10 January 2020 07:16 PM
cyfoyjvx - 09 January 2020 09:13 PM
calpolican - 09 January 2020 05:30 PM

>Bad Mojo, of a crappy human that dies and rincarnates in a cocorouch was pretty interesting too.

Again, if no one mentions Kafka in response to this, I’d be surprised.

YOU mentioned him. Congratulations.  Tongue
Actually, the only thing Bad Mojo has in common with the short story about Gregor Samsa is the transformation from man to vermin. In the case of Roger Samms (what’s in a name) it’s only temporary and he does not die.  Franz, the cat’s name, is also clearly a reference to the famous author you mentioned. But that’s it. Totally different story. Reducing Bad Mojo to this novella is not fair.

Yes, you’re right. And by that logic, it’s not fair to reduce Toonstruck to a retread of Who Framed Roger Rabbit either.

I think we may need to define what original means. For some, Monkey Island is original while for others it’s hard to think of anything more unoriginal.

     
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cyfoyjvx - 10 January 2020 07:43 PM

I think we may need to define what original means. For some, Monkey Island is original while for others it’s hard to think of anything more unoriginal.

Exactly. I had read many pirate novels before playing Monkey Island, but it still felt very unique. There’s a whole comedy Caribbean universe to explore, nothing like I’ve seen before. Monkey Island is Monkey Island, not some stupid Disney attraction.

     

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Doom - 10 January 2020 10:01 PM
cyfoyjvx - 10 January 2020 07:43 PM

For some, Monkey Island is original while for others it’s hard to think of anything more unoriginal.

Exactly. I had read many pirate novels before playing Monkey Island, but it still felt very unique. There’s a whole comedy Caribbean universe to explore, nothing like I’ve seen before. Monkey Island is Monkey Island, not some stupid Disney attraction.

But in all fairness, Disney did have comedic cartoon pirates in Peter Pan back in 1953, not only that, but there was also a Japanese animation series made in 1989. It’s very easy to see similarities at least in the pirate antagonist there.

     

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GateKeeper - 11 January 2020 03:58 AM
Doom - 10 January 2020 10:01 PM
cyfoyjvx - 10 January 2020 07:43 PM

For some, Monkey Island is original while for others it’s hard to think of anything more unoriginal.

Exactly. I had read many pirate novels before playing Monkey Island, but it still felt very unique. There’s a whole comedy Caribbean universe to explore, nothing like I’ve seen before. Monkey Island is Monkey Island, not some stupid Disney attraction.

But in all fairness, Disney did have comedic cartoon pirates in Peter Pan back in 1953, not only that, but there was also a Japanese animation series made in 1989. It’s very easy to see similarities at least in the pirate antagonist there.

Not to mention the creator has said he got the idea from the Disney ride. I don’t know what else you need to know what its origins were.

     

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