Description
April Ryan is a struggling student artist in the year 2209, recently arrived in the big city of Newport. Lately she has been seeing strange, life-like dreams. Somewhere in the mountains, a mysterious white dragon talks to April, calling her the "mother of the future". When April wakes up, she dismisses the vision as a nightmare. However, an old enigmatic man named Cortez, whom April has spotted near her house before, unexpectedly tells her that she must face the reality in her dreams. Soon April learns that our reality is but one facet of a universe that consists of two parallel worlds: Stark, the world of science and technology, and Arcadia, the world of magic. Though raised in Stark, April possesses the ability of shifting between the two worlds, and must restore the balance in both of them before it is too late.
The Longest Journey is a third-person puzzle-solving adventure game. The player navigates April over pre-rendered backgrounds with fixed camera angles, interacting with people and objects through a simple point-and-click interface. The gameplay follows the traditional template introduced in
LucasArts adventures, relying mostly on inventory-based puzzles and multiple-choice dialogues to advance the story. To help keep track of things, the game includes a diary, where April records her thoughts about important events, and a conversation log that records the text of every conversation.
Alternate Titles
- "無盡的旅程" -- Taiwan spelling
- "Бесконечное Путешествие" -- Russian spelling
- "TLJ" -- Informal abbreviation
- "The Longest Journey: Najdłuższa Podróż" -- Polish title
- "The Longest Journey: D'un monde à l'autre" -- French title
- "Den lengste reisen" -- Norwegian ttle
- "Den längsta resan" -- Swedish title
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Trivia
April Ryan
The publisher of
The Longest Journey, Egmont Interactive, actually tried to turn April Ryan into a pop icon to match Lara Croft. To that end, they cast a real-life model for April -- 23 years old psychology student Katja Koopmann of Bremen, Germany -- and toured the major magazine and newspaper offices with her, dressed up like April and sputtering lines like “I find April sympathetic” with a somewhat forced smile. Once the PR machine runs, even mediocre game sales can’t stop it. On her way to media star, the virtual April next recorded a song -- a dance remix of the 80’s Depeche Mode tune
The Balance -- and Katja lend her voice. Egmont spiced April’s image up with exceptionally stupid PR blurb like “I want everything! Above all, I want to show the people of your world something of the life here!” Generally ignored by the public, the song entered the stores on April 14th ‘00, and stayed there. The corresponding video clip was never played on the music channels, the song didn’t appear in the radio shows, and nobody bought the CD.
Dreamweb
The main character's name is April Ryan, just like Ryan in the game
Dreamweb, also published by Empire Interactive Entertainment. And the plots of both games have some things in common (the hero who suffers from nightmares and must save a world he/she didn't even know existed in the first place).
References
- A reference to the Monkey Island series: April's pet toy is called Constable Guybrush. And yes, it's a monkey.
- There are lots of references to sci-fi movies and fantasy themes. Most prominent are the references to Brazil, for instance, which takes place on a red tape-clogged insensitive world much like stark. Take a look at the lobby of the Church of Voltec, it's an exact replica of the Information Retrieval building on Brazil. Also the whole repairmen puzzle where they refuse to work on the grounds that it would require a specific form for them to do so is a spoof of the "Central Services" sequence in the movie. They are even dressed in the same way! There are many more, some more subtle than others.
- Want Star Wars references? check out that strange metal ball on the entrance to The Fringe Café. It says "Death Star" click on it and April will spout famous lines related to it, like "Let's blow this thing and go home!" and she even tries to imitate the voices!
Sales
The Longest Journey was originally made only to be released in Scandinavia, but it then grew with the sales to cover Europe and the U.S. By June of 2001, The Longest Journey had sold 250,000 copies worldwide, 90,000 of which were in America.
Version differences
In order to preserve his foreigner condition, Cortez had his nationality changed from Spanish to French and was renamed "Corthez" in the Spanish version.
Voice acting
The character Marcus, who only appears in the first chapter near the Fringe cafè, and only has two lines, was voiced by
Ragnar Tørnquist, the director/lead designer of the game for the English release.
Awards
- Computer Gaming World
- April 2000 (Issue #201) - Adventure Game of the Year
- Gamespy
- 2000 - Adventure Game of the Year
- PC Gamer
- 2000 - Adventure Game of the Year
Information also contributed by
-Chris,
Agent 5,
jeremy strope,
Karthik KANE,
kelmer,
Stargazer and
ZovniThis entry to the MobyGames database was contributed by
andyhat 
(1948) on May 13, 2000.
