Windows

Blair Witch, Volume I: Rustin Parr

Trivia

In Burkittsville's general store, a few interesting boxes can be seen on top of a counter. These are two of Terminal Reality's games; 'Nocturne' and 'Fly!'.

The back cover of the box and the CD case has a screenshot showing off the spectacular "lens flare" effect from the flashlight, one of the features which distinguished the Nocturne engine. However in the actual game the "lens flare" effect is disabled, considerably watering down the flashlight beam's appearance. It is possible to re-enable it by editing the game's .ini file, but the good folks at Terminal Reality tech support advise against it for stability reasons, stating it could crash your game, erase your save files, and even possibly wipe your BIOS (although the last one's a bit of a stretch).

When you finally meet up with Robin Weaver, she's holding a civil war uniform which she says belonged to a man named Lazarus (the protagonist of Blair Witch II). However, if you play Blair Witch II, Lazarus' uniform is destroyed through burning by Weaver's granny near the beginning of the game because it was caked with blood (not to mention 20 years old). So much for continuity.

Blair Witch 1 is (for all intents and purposes) Nocturne Act V. "Doc" Holliday is in the starring role with the Stranger as a supporting character and cameos by Svetlana, Col Hapscomb, and the Spookhouse staff. Nocturne's ending occurs in 1935 and BW1 is set in 1941, so there's plenty of room in the timeline for Nocturne 2. And (NOCTURNE SPOILER AHEAD) we can rest easy knowing everyone lived through Nocturne's ambiguous ending.

Well before the game's release, there were all sorts of interesting bits of stuff floating arount the internet. One item was that the game would be utilizing the Unreal engine. This is, and always was, completely false. The game does, however, utilize the engine from Nocturne. I just thought it was kind of funny that this was a "legend" based loosely upon a movie about a legend. Is that ironic or what?

This is the first in a series of 3 games. What's interesting about that is that the publisher is the same, but three different developers were signed up to do each different volume.