Trivia
On your first day at Illsmouth, try to examine (using the 'L' key) Curtis Hambelton (who lives near the harbour) or Wilbur Hambelton (you can find him at the general store) to see something... "Very odd, indeed!".
The rather ghastly meaning of what you'll see will become clear to you at a later part of the game.
Here is an interesting note on how the storyline of "Shadow of the Comet"
changed before the makers decided on the final version. The text and dialogue
used in the game - just like all its data - is packed and hence "invisible" if
you just try to view the game files, but by dumping memory contents while
(or after) playing the game, you can read the parts that are used at certain
points in the game (You can also extract the game's sounds, but that's another
story). Doing this with the demo reveals some interesting information about
the history of the game. First of all, we can find out that our protagonist
was originally named John T. Carter instead of Parker (the company forgot
to change this in the text that made its way to the box cover). Also, he
was an astronomer, not a journalist. Tobias Jugg's (the librarian) original
name was Rugs, and the town was named neither Illsmouth, nor Innsmouth, but...
Isthmuth (a real tongue twister). But the most amazing discovery is that
the demo - and perhaps even the game itself - was originally supposed to
have a cameo by Howard Phillips Lovecraft himself! From what I found, it
seems that HPL would be hiding behind the curtain-covered door in Jugg's
house. He was supposed to have a few lines of dialogue - here it is, extracted
from the memory dump: "You're there, are you? No... Don't go away. It has been
so long since I had a chance to talk. My name is HOWARD PHILLIPS. We're going
to follow the unusual story of a young and brilliant astronomer, JOHN
T. CARTER. The adventure takes place in the most peaceful fishing port you
can imagine, a place called ISTHMUTH...". Unfortunately, HPL's cameo (or at
least the means of activating it) seems to have been removed from the demo.
The writer, however, "lends" his face to Dr Underwood in the full game (which,
for that matter, makes use of quite a few faces known well to horror fans -
Vincent Price as Dr Cobble is probably the easiest one to notice!). Also, all
the locations, screens and music from the demo appear in the full version
of the game.
The disk version of the game had a novel copy protection system; A small card "Invitation to Arkham Planetarium" which folded out into a box with a magnifying glass at one end and a miniature star chart at the other end. You had to squint through the glass and match star formations with ones onscreen. Despite its inventiveness, it had a tendency to hurt your eyes and be slightly irritating.
Shadow Of The Comet is licensed by Chaosium, making it an 'official'
H.P. Lovecraft product.
The development team stated that the game is based on two of Lovecraft's
short stories; 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' and 'The Dunwitch Horror'.
However, there aren't really any similarities between the events in the game
and the events in either of the stories. Also, 'Illsmouth', the town in the
game, is nothing like Lovecraft's town, Innsmouth. (Despite these points
though, I personally think SOTC is a great adaptation of Lovecraft's work.)
Before the release of the game, Infogrames released a demo, which included
a playable section and a rolling demo. The rolling demo featured a lot of
scenes and animations from the game. Strangely, though, almost none of the
material in the rolling demo actually made it to the final game. The demo's
music and title screen were also not included in the final product. For fans
of the game, the demo makes for very interesting viewing.
While in development, many of the game's characters and places had different
names. For instance, Parker was called Carter, Jugg was called Rugs and
Illsmouth was called Isthmuth.
Quite a lot of the characters in the game look very similar to certain
famous movie stars. Some are easier to recognise than others, though...
Lovecraft himself is also cast as one of the characters. He 'plays the part'
of Underhouse.
The CD-ROM version of Shadow Of The Comet (released in 1994) has the
following extra features:
- Full speech
- Mouse control system (although the less said about this, the better ;)
- New intro sequence
- Bonus program: "Visit To The Lovecraft Museum": This program lets you walk around a small museum and examine various artefacts on display, from Lovecraft's stories. It uses the same control system and presentation as the actual game.
Infogrames also claimed that the CD-ROM version added more characters,
puzzles and locations to the game. This is not true. There
are two extra
people walking round the village (a woman and a child), but you only see
them briefly, you can't talk to them, you never find out anything about
them, and they don't appear after the second day of the game. There are no
new puzzles or locations.
Referenced in:
Alone In The Dark
There were a couple of books you could pick up and read in AITD that
described some of the plot of SOTC.
Sequel:
Prisoner Of Ice
