Douglas Adams said that each time he told the the history of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he contradicted himself. Eventually, in the introduction to an omnibus edition, he decided to set the record wrong, once and for all.
Now, Bleating Sheep Theater is no Hitchhiker’s Guide, and I’m certainly no Douglas Adams. But people have asked me about the origins of Drinking With God — and I am, quite frankly, sort of vague on the subject. So, with that tenuous connection firmly established, on to what might very well be the history of Drinking With God. And where it is inaccurate, it is at least definitively inaccurate.
One night I was lying in bed trying to come up with an original story idea for a computer game. I already knew that I wanted to create a short, simple interactive conversation. My objective was to provide myself with a context in which to build up a set of general tools and techniques for cinematic interactive storytelling. But who would be talking to whom in this conversation? And about what? And why?
One thing that I knew I didn’t want to create was a courting game. Or at least, not a courting game in which the player character was a young male, attempting to win the attentions of a young female. This was mainly because I felt that such a game would almost certainly degenerate into a male adolescent wish fulfillment fantasy. (You know, like Final Fantasy VII. Which, if this parenthetical statement is your introduction to the Final Fantasy series, probably isn’t what you think it is.)
Not that there’s anything wrong with adolescent wish fulfillment fantasies, but that simply wasn’t what I was after at the time. A romantic comedy would have been fine, or even a straight romance, but I wasn’t sure I was up to tackling either of those with any sufficient degree of sophistication.
So it appeared that the boy-meets-girl idea was out. No matter; how about the myriad other aspects of human experience? Surely, somewhere within, there existed material to be mined. There was even the possibility of originality. Sure, at this point pretty much every possible story has been done to death — but that’s in other media. In videogames, the idea that two characters might smile at one another instead of beating each other up is still something of a novelty.
So, yeah. Didn’t need to do boy-meets-girl. There were a ton of other ideas to go with.
Like… say… girl-meets-boy! Yeah! That was the ticket! Girl-meets-boy! And isn’t really that impressed! But has to cope anyway.
And, hey, what if the boy in question happened to be God?
The idea popped into my mind in a sudden flash. So I leaped out bed, raced to my computer, and began typing. Before long a branching screenplay began to take form, with hyperlinks connecting decision points to the continuation of the script.
After only an hour or two (or was it a day or two?), the screenplay was complete. At fifteen pages, with only two characters and virtually no set, I figured the game should take me only a month of two to put together, leaving me with a nifty tool set to use for all sorts of other exciting cinematic interactive narrative stuff down the line.
So I sat down and got right to work — on the Sheep, a character who didn’t even appear in the script. But, hey, you can’t have Bleating Sheep Productions without a Sheep that walks across the screen and then bleats. Right?
So, a year and a half later, here we are. I finished the game about two weeks ago.
Quite a story, no?
No? Okay, I got a better one. Or at least a different one.
Because it might have happened the other way around. The whole God-trying-to-pick-up-a-girl thing might have just popped into my head apropos of nothing, triggering a mental “hey, maybe this would work for the cinematic interactive conversation thingy that I want to do.”
You might be wondering why I’m trying to confuse you like this. Is this, you are no doubt asking yourself, some sort of strange dual-realities experiment?
But no, it’s nothing as interesting as that. The problem is that I don’t actually really remember where the idea came from or why I decided to write it down. For all any of us knows, both of the histories related above are complete fabrications.
But they sound convincing enough. And that’s what counts, right?