Posted in: Games, Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh, Movies, Video Games | Tagged: cyberpunk, entertainment, games

Burn: Cycle, A Cyberpunk Game Wot I Wrote – Look! It Moves! By Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh writes:

My old friend, the musician Simon Boswell got back in touch with me recently to tell me he was holding a concert in London this coming week. Simon has serious form as a soundtrack composer and provided the soundtrack to several of Dario Argento's Giallo thrillers, who also worked with my friend Richard Stanley and composed the soundtracks to Hardware, Dust Devil and, well, all of Richard's movies and documentaries, really. Simon also worked with Alejandro Jodorowsky and scored Santa Sangre, with Clive Barker on the soundtrack of Lord of Illusions, Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave, Hackers and many other movies and TV shows. He also wrote the soundtrack to Zinky Boys Go Underground, the Russian gangster short film I wrote.

Simon will be playing the scores of many of the titles he scored at his concert, and he told me that the video game that he and I worked on back in the 90s, Burn: Cycle, would probably be included. He also told me that someone had compiled the footage together into a feature length movie on YouTube.

So what better time to link to the movie than now? Never let it be said that we don't give you nice things around here.

Burn: Cycle was written and directed by my friend Eitan Arrusi, who would go on to be a filmmaker and screenwriter in London. Back in the early 1990s, when I was still in film school and back in London for the summer, Eitan told me he was working on a Cyberpunk adventure game for the Philips CD-i. We were both heavily into William Gibson and Neuromancer and Eitan managed to get his pitch for this game greenlit. They were shooting live actors in front of a blue screen and the creating the sets and locations by CGI. Amazing to think that this was back in the days when Blue Screen dominated Special Effects and no one had thought of Green Screen yet.

At one point, Eitan asked me to come in for an afternoon and help with the script. He already had the cast, the props, including a big SciFi-looking rifle, the sets and the Blue Screen studio time booked, and with his head on the whole production, he needed an extra hand getting the dialogue written. The plot was already laid out and he just needed the lines written. So there we were in his tiny office space in Soho just writing away. We wrote the dialogue script in a single afternoon. I never thought to take any credit because it was his story and I was preoccupied with my own projects to shoot for when I got back to filml school that autumn anyway. And anyway, Eitan bought me dinner.

To be honest, I never played the game. I didn't have a CD-I or a good enough computer at the time. I never thought about how long the story was exactly, so it was interesting to see that without the hours of play, fails and restarts, the total running time for the cutscenes came down to 79 minutes. That makes sense, given that it took us a single afternoon to write all the dialogue. Watching it now brings back memories – I'd forgotten the wild ideas that were in the script, the corporate warfare, the existential dark humour, some crazy metaphysical stuff and a bunch of wild ideas that still aren't really used in mainstream Science Fiction movies or TV nowadays. I just watched the movie compilation, listened to Simon's music, looked at the 90s Cyberpunk look that we were still terribly excited about in those days, and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Every now and then I see video games write-ups that list Burn: Cycle as a favourite or a cult game, as an example of adventure games in their prime. With the Philip CD-I now obsolete and even current software OS way ahead of the data capacity of this little game, it seems to have become a piece of abandonware, a cult curio, a relic from gaming history and a footnote in Cyberpunk.

With a great soundtrack.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GQTfMDlLf8[/youtube]

(You probably need to set the resolution to 360p in order to watch it. That's how old and low the resolution is.)

Jacked in, jacked out, jacked off at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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