J. Allen Williams (above left), who goes by Jeff, will be the first one to tell you that Darkstar isn't really a videogame. Even though, yeah, it kind of is. But Williams isn't necessarily hip to what constitutes a videogame. He considers it a point of pride that he hasn't played one in ten years, and it shows. His description of Darkstar sounds a lot like the interactive movies that fell out favor in the 90s. Could Darkstar be a renaissance for that medium? Can cinematic games be a creative middle ground and distribution channel for aspiring filmmakers? Or is Williams a throwback to a Myst clone mentality in a YouTube/Hulu era?

I don't have the answer. And, really, no one will until Darkstar comes out. But I can say talking to Williams was a fascinating look at the sort of guy who not only refuses to play by the rules, but willfully ignores them. I got a very Mark Borchardt vibe from Williams, and I don't mean that to be condescending. The guy feels passionately about what he's created, he's completely invested in it, and he knows full well he's working outside the system.

Beyond Williams' conviction, the notable thing about Darkstar is that it involves talent you can't simply ignore. In fact, if I didn't know about the involvement of various Mystery Science Theatre veterans, Peter Graves, and Rush, I probably wouldn't have tracked Williams down for the following interview, which will be posted in installments over the next few days.

Up first, how Darkstar evolved from an interactive lung simulation into 29 ways to die.

Tom Chick: Tell me a bit about your background.

J. Allen Williams: My background is in animation. You know, TV commercials. Music video. That kind of thing. I've not really done any work on feature films. But industrial films and animations and that kind of thing.

TC: What lead you to do something interactive like Darkstar?

JW: I had the idea to do a short film. Actually, it's kind of interesting, my initial idea was to do some little bumpers for the Sci Fi Channel. Because back in the day, when I was starting this in the mid-to-late 80s, early 90s, Sci Fi Channel had some little bumpers they were using and it had little spaceships flying around blowing things up and I thought they were awful. I thought I could do something better. I thought I'd do something fun and send them out to them. So I started working with this animation process. This storyline I was working with would be broken up into these bumpers. And eventually I came up with this treatment for a story, which turned into an idea for a short film.

At the time I was working on some interactive projects for Glaxo Smith Kline, a pharmaceutical company, for a breathing thing. It was called the Spelunger, which is really disgusting if you think about it. It was this little character we created who would go down in the lungs and explore the inside of the human body. It was for children to understand their asthma. So the first thing this character does is goes down into the lungs and slips on something and falls.

So anyway, I had this idea with Darkstar to do either a short film or a full-length film, I didn't know what I was going to do. And realizing that living in the Midwest and being outside the Hollywood system that the chance of anyone ever seeing it outside of a film festival was next to nil. So then I got the idea to do it as an interactive project from doing this Spelunger thing. I thought, well, I can turn this into a new thing. And at the same time I became aware of some of the Cyan releases. Myst and Riven and some of those things. I researched it. I'm not a gamer at all. I checked it out. And I liked what I saw. I liked the way it created an environment you were in. It's kind of moody. And it wasn't about running around and shooting things. It was more about the exploration, the adventure, the danger, the imminent "something could happen at any time". So that's what I decided to do.

TC: So it sounds like Darkstar has been in development for a long time.

JW: Yeah, like I say, this early stage of it, this treatment was in the mid 90s. And then right at 2000, I decided I was going to do something and I began production. And it just got bigger and bigger and bigger to the point that it kind of did itself. It kind of went out of control. I just wrote the thing and because I'm just one guy doing most of this - I mean, I've probably involved a hundred people to help me, doing sound and camera and all different things, but I bring them in as contract type stuff. But I'm kind of hands-on with every single thing, so that's the bottleneck. One guy being OCD and having to keep control over the whole thing.

TC: Before we talk about the premise and some of the talent you've assembled, tell me a bit about the gameplay. You mentioned the Cyan games like Myst. Is that the basic gameplay model that you're using? Namely, that you tell a bit of story and then there's a puzzle that unlocks more story? Explain to me how Darkstar plays.

JW: I want to be very careful when we use that comparison, because it seems to lead people down a raod that's not how Darkstar really is. Every time I present this to someone I've been describing it to, it's never what they thought it was. Really the only similarity to those kinds of games is just the feel you get of going to another place. It's really a totally different execution. It tries to look like a film all the time. So when you turn and walk somewhere, it's all pre-rendered. It's not in a game engine, so you're following pathways. There are pre-rendered walks from here to there. You can look around in 360 degrees, straight up and straight down. There are things to pick up. One of the things that occurs as you're moving around the environment is that the camera view breaks out of first-person constantly and shows Clive Robertson [the lead actor] as you, wandering around this starship that's broken and trying to figure out things. There are little story points as you move around. It tries to keep that flow.

Jeff Yapp, he was one of the big CEOs at MTV, he loved it. He sent me to Jerry Bruckheimer, because he said Jerry needs to see this, this is exactly what he's trying to do right now, you've done it right. He spent several million dollars building a game called The X-Files and he said this is what he was trying to do and didn't quite hit the mark. So he says this is what I was trying to do and you've hit it.

It tries to feel like a movie. There's a lot of collecting music in it. It's got a lot of weird humor in it, as you can probably guess by some of the cast. It's a weird dark story.

TC: A couple of things come to mind here, Jeff. It sounds like you want to present an idea of exploration, of finding a new place. But I've seen from screenshots a few things that look like puzzles.

JW: There are a few of those. I put that in there for the gamers. And I am not a gamer. Matter of fact, since I've started the project, I have purposely stayed completely antiseptic to games. Other than I've been to the E3 three times, and GDC, and kind of in the background I see some of the stuff they're doing in trailers. But I've really tried to stay out of that. But the puzzle thing was a little bit of a tip of the hat to the Myst things. But there's a big difference. The one thing I didn't like about the Myst games - and I never want to say anything bad about them because I think they're really innovative and very cool. Those guys are really smart guys. And they did it guerrilla style like I have, you know, out of a shed in their back yard. That's kind of how I got started. But their puzzles were very difficult. Matter of fact, they're kind of deal-breakers. Once I had to go out and buy the solution book in order to navigate through the damn thing. And I felt like it interrupted the story flow. They had an opportunity to tell a lot more story. But I think they were wanting to do something different, so I'm not criticizing it. I wanted mine to be more story based, an adventure, and eye candy. Lots of cool animations. Lots of neat sequences and events. So the puzzles were just something to challenge your mind for a bit, make it to where you couldn't just, you know, run through the thing. You have to stop, think. The puzzles relate to control panels, and things that relate to the ship, and they tell you a little bit about the story, too, in most cases.

TC: While you're playing Darkstar, can you fail?

JW: Absolutely. There are 29 forks in the plot, each of them leading to a certain death. And you want to do them. They're my favorite part of Darkstar. Getting killed. Because they're really cool things. And that's where Peter Graves comes in. He's kind of the Rod Serling of the Twilight Zone of Darkstar. He uses that thick rich diatribe that Serling would use when he talks about the fate of somebody at the end of a Twilight Zone. There's one of those at the end of each of the 29 death sequences where he's describing what you did wrong. It's a lot of fun.

TC: You sit down to watch a movie and you expect you're going to get maybe two hours of entertainment. You sit down to play videogames and it can be anywhere from six hours to sixty hours. How long do you expect the average person to spend with Darkstar?

JW: That's a good question and as you probably know, that kind of depends on the person. What their motivation is. What they want to see and what they don't. There are ten back story chapters that, as you unlock these biolocks, you get to see these movies. Now you may or may not be interested in seeing them. I would think you would be. If you like Darkstar, you've going to like the cinema. That adds an hour right there. Just the back story is about an hour long.

We've clocked the internal straight video out to at least five hours. If you did nothing but watched the death sequences, all the little movies, the back story, there's five hours right there. And if you add on the gameplay of moving around, solving everything, flying down to the planet, going through the alien temple, finding the bad guy's space ship, confronting him there, going back to the Westwick, repairing it, and then flying to Darkstar, you're talking about 22 hours.

TC: So you mention fighting a bad guy. In a game like this, how do you handle a combat sequence? Is there any interactivity when you fight?

JW: No, nothing like that. This is not that. It's not a slide show either. You confront your nemesis and you make a choice. Some of these games, you can pick an action, like one of three. Say yes, or no, or do that. There's a few times when that occurs. At the end sequence, you confront a guy, and there's three choices of what you can do. And the choice of what you need to do is probably not what you'd think it would be. But this has no flight simulators in it, you're not shooting anybody, there's no swords in combat. It's not that kind of game. This is like watching a killer sci-fi movie, and yet you are going anywhere you want at any given time. It's not like you're watching a movie until you get to a plot fork and decide which way you want to go. Every place you stop, you're living alive. Trace Beaulieu of Mystery Science Theatre said to him it was the closest to being on a real spaceship as he's ever been.

Tomorrow: Trace Beaulieu? Yep. Also, find out what Brad Pitt and Chuck Barry have to do with Darkstar.