The galaxy is a big place. In several of his planets lie your remaining clones, beings ripped from your body, causing gradual cellular degeneration unless you find and extract the vital fluid from each one 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. Superior clones or numbers can only be found by interrogating the many alien species that inhabit the galaxy. There’s just one problem: you have no idea what they’re saying.
Sounds like the premise of that weird indie game you have on your Steam wishlist. But it’s not. This is the plot of Captain Blood, the huge 1988 hit by French publisher ERE Informatique. And like many games of the 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 hit it off, so when I got the Atari ST before anyone else, I gave it to Didier to explore the innards of this new beast.” Neither of them had much experience in commercial computer game design or programming, but when Ulrich returned to his friend a few weeks later, the seed of their first game together was planted. “I visited him in his study and he started programming the map generated by the fractal seed on the ST. After a few glasses of Brouilly and a few drawings on a restaurant tablecloth, we envisioned placing this map on a sphere.” From this seed, the pair could store an entire galaxy’s worth of planets onto a 512K ST diskette using a procedural terrain generator to create each unique world.
These worlds are represented by a rolling landscape and a canyon. And at the end of some – rather comfortably – sits an alien, ready to talk to Captain Blood. Remember, Blood is trying to find the five remaining clones and get their vital fluid so he can live. “The idea of a hero who accidentally clones himself and has to find his clones came naturally,” explains Ulrich. “We were fed comics, novels and a cyberpunk movie to the beat of Kraftwerk’s perfect beat.”
The 11-page short story Captain Blood begins not in space, but on Earth, in the home of derelict computer programmer and major gamer Bob Morlock. A chance encounter with Charles Darwin (stay with me) inspires Morlock to create the Ark in his game, a spaceship equipped with an organic on-board computer and his own digital doppelganger, Captain Blood. Finally, months later, Morlok is ready to test his new game. He enters an important instruction – RUN – and immediately blinks out of 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 option: track them all down, drop a probe onto the planet’s surface, teleport them to his cryonization container, Fridgitoria, and extract the vital fluid, causing the clone to decompose. But first he must find them, and here, far from fancy fractal graphics, is the core of Captain Blood.
“Captain Blood’s mission was to create a universal text-based adventure game that could be played by every player on the planet and that transcended languages,” notes Ulrich. “I liked the icon-based language, like ‘I love you’ and ‘You’re beautiful, you’re strong’. It worked in every 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 game 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 rare coordinates of inhabited planets.”
There are 16 sentient alien races in Captain Blood. Each species has overarching traits: the long-tongued Izwal, for example, are cultured, peaceful, and intelligent; the insectoid Yukas are aggressive and not to be trusted; the dreamy, beautiful Ondoyantes are highly attractive to those they admire, hideous monstrosities to those they hate.
Within each race, individuals often have their own characteristics. Managing the conversation so that Blood gets information about other coordinates is imperative. “If you don’t know the coordinates of inhabited planets, you’re doomed to wander the galaxies,” explains Ulrich. “You have to talk to the characters, be polite, negotiate and show them kindness to find them out.” However, the aliens don’t always give the same answer – perhaps frustrating, but realistic. “You had to tame them, show your humanity or aggression, 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 conjunction 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. We showed him Captain Blood one night 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 – fittingly – 25 different languages, and Ulrich asked for permission to use four bars from the album for Captain Blood’s score. Music samples, even in disc games, were rare at the time because of the memory they took up. Ulrich and Bouchon invented a tool to compress and process samples, so several minutes of music with only a few seconds of their sample. Ulrich continues: “When I played the results 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 do.'” Ulrich and Bouchon soon received a telex from Jarre’s publisher, confirming the rights .
Aesthetically, Captain Blood has two distinct cinematic influences. Complete with a stable and monolithic tone, the fascinating hyperspace sequence is clearly inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, and there’s Blood’s spaceship, the Ark, informed by a completely different kind of science fiction. “HR Giger fertilized a generation with the seed of an alien monster,” smiles Ulrich. “Nobody walked away from Alien unscathed, and Giger’s biomechanical artistry certainly inspired us.” The accompanying story booklet further cements this association by referring to “the Nostromo affair” and “old Mrs. Rippley”.
Captain Blood surrounded the lives of those behind him, taking almost two years to develop. “We were in constant creation—the sky was not the limit,” says Ulrich. “The development didn’t end and neither did the game. But Christmas was coming and we were tired. Didier was at the end of his strength, working day and night. We had to say stop.” Finally, Captain Blood debuted in the spring of 1988 and was widely praised. “Every once in a while a new game arrives on the ST that leaves everything else in its wake. Without a doubt, Captain Blood is one of them,” stated Mark Smiddy in Atari ST User magazine. “The graphics are breathtaking and the digitized music is great. Even the script sounds like the plot of Larry Niven’s bestselling sci-fi book.” The result was an incredible score of 10/10, which was confirmed by the English version two months later.
The wait was worth it, despite the abandonment of many elements, such as the player hallucinating when talking to certain species. No matter: despite the relative lack of action and unclear gameplay, Captain Blood was a hit even among Atari ST fans. “After it was released, people called me and talked to me in Bluddian,” laughs Ulrich. “And I even saw players using icon sounds to express themselves. My idea went even further: I dreamed of giving icons sounds and notes so you could sing a melody to express a phrase or message.”
Towards the end of Captain Blood’s development, French mega-publisher Infogrames bought ERE Informatique, leading to Ulrich’s creation of the Exxos label and moving ERE and Infogrames into the position of publishers looking to maximize profit from the game: conversions for the Commodore Amiga, PC, Commodore 64 and even the ZX Spectrum subsequently appeared. For Philipp Ulrich, it’s a journey that started with the Sinclair ZX80 and Rodney Zaks’ famous book Programming The Z80 and continues to this day. “My career since 1980 has seen a global shift towards digital,” he reflects as our conversation ends. “It was stunning. Amazing. Beautiful. Terrifying!” That seems, I suggest, an appropriate set of words to sum up Captain Blood, a singularly odd space quest whose goal is essentially to find—and kill—itself. Five times.