Windows

The Longest Journey

Trivia

By June of 2001, The Longest Journey had sold 250,000 copies worldwide, 90,000 of which were in America.

In order to preserve his foreigner condition, Cortez had his nationality changed from Spanish to French and was renamed "Corthez" in the Spanish version.

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.

08-11-2001 - The Longest Journey is the forth GOLD CDROM of FX Interactive with more than 50.000 copies sold

Contributed by DarkDante (3731) on Jul 26, 2005.

Earlier versions of TLJ came on 4CDs. The new versions come on 2CDs(just like the new versions of Planescape Torment) thanks to the magic of compression.

The Longest Journey was originally made only to be released in Scandinavia, but it then grew with the sales to cover Europe and the U.S.

The original version of the game was Norwegian, starring a lot of famous Norwegian actors from the national theatre, and also, in some parts of the score, including fully orchestrated music performed by the National Symphony Orchestra.

Getting such talented and famous people to work on a game can't have been cheap, though the actual cost remains undisclosed.

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 (but hey, she was a nice one! ;-) 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. Did I just hear Lara snicker?

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!

When you get access to the city green in Marcuria (chapter 4) plant the leaf of organic plastic on the rightmost flowerbed, you'll then unlock "The Book of Secrets". Now go back to the main menu, click on the drawing with the dragon on it and you'll be taken to a menu where you can select to see conceptual artwork and sketches, as well as hear unused music and some pretty funny audio outakes.

Funny reference to the Monkey Island series: April's pet toy is called Constable Guybrush. And yes, it's a monkey (tough remember he doesn't like to be called that! :))

Won PC Gamer and Computer Gaming World's adventure game of the year award.

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)