The Residents: Freak Show

This CD-ROM takes you on a strange and wild ride through the carnival of the Freak Show, based on the work of the band The Residents. 4 years in the making and released in 1994, this a path-breaking piece of early interactive fiction, filled with visits to each freak in the carnival, gorgeous graphics, and songs from The Residents.

Source:

BringYourBrain.com

HURRY, HURRY, RIGHT THIS WAY...

The Residents' Freak Show CD-ROM transforms your computer into an amazing animated twilight zone, unlike anything you've ever experienced. Meet Tex the Barker, Herman the Human Mole, Harry the Head, Wanda the Worm, Jelly Jack, Benny the Bump, and those freaks of contemporary art, The Residents. See their incredible performances and navigate through bizarre backstage worlds.

Freak Show's Big Top offers amazing spectacles, but the Freaks' stranger-than-fiction stories come magically to life when you sneak behind the circus tent and into their trailers. Discover fetishes, fantasies, rituals, and tragic secrets through photos, comics, music, music videos, and animation. You can even explore the history of freaks. Your fascination with "difference" will ultimately illuminate many other paths through this theme park of the imagination. Featuring spectacular animation design my Jim Ludtke, Freak Show is a revolutionary new audio-visual experience, envisioning the future of interactive stories, music video, and digital art.

The Residents, based in San Francisco, have created pioneering music, music videos and performance art since 1972. They are regarded as one of the world's most innovative audio-visual concept groups.

Jim Ludtke, also based in San Francisco, is an award-winning animator and illustrator whose work has been presented by a variety of venues including the Museum of Modern Art and Nickelodeon.

Source:

Back of Box - Win3.x (US)

The freaks on this disc are imaginary, but their onscreen images are so evocative, they seem real. You'll be wiping your hands often, as if their creepiness were oozing through your keyboard."--c|net online "The most arresting and innovative interactive CD-ROM...a multimedia masterpiece." -- CD-Review

"The Residents' Freak Show is the best original CD-ROM piece around...It's one of the most entertaining works of contemporary short narrative fiction -- in any medium." -- New Media

We couldn't believe it when we heard that one of our favorite art/rock bands wanted to do a CD-ROM based on their Freak Show album. The locale is the macabre world of the carnival, with the real action to be found by sneaking out of the Big Top and into the trailers of the freaks themselves. As we made our way through the nooks and crannies of this animated twilight zone we could see why Freak Show was four years in the making. We have never seen computer-generated artwork so gorgeous, and so truly strange: sweat gleams, candles flicker, flesh quivers. Claymation meets Tales from the Crypt. Not surprisingly, the Residents break new ground intellectually as well as esthetically: this is a work of fiction, driven by character to a degree that's pretty unheard of in this medium.

Each trailer is home to a creature only the Residents' warped sensibilities could have cooked up. Harry the Head looks out fetchingly from his jar of formaldehyde; Wanda reveals the lurid secret that led to a life of sucking worms; bouncing Benny echibits his Bump; the eyeball-headed Residents, freaks themselves, perform onstage. Each trailer is also a puzzle. No tour guides stand by to help us navigate this maze of weirdness, where a click of the electronic eyeball might trigger ghoulish revelations and transform us from voyeurs to uneasy confidantes.

Freak Show is also an interactive tour of the Residents' entire career, featuring album covers, clips from their music videos, and memorabilia. It's dark, it's eerie, it's a good time. Enter this world in the spirit in which the Residents' dedicated it to P.T. Barnum, "whose legacy of 'suckers' and 'freaks' defined the yin and yang of popular culture."

Source:

Official game's website