Game 73: Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective - Introduction (1991)

Written by Joe Pranevich

The butler did it! (Again.)

I think it’s become something of a joke how excited I get when I’m about to start a game, but I am excited! I’m not sure that I’m about to play a fantastic game, but I am sure that I am about to play an influential one. Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective will be the first adventure that we’ve played that is firmly on the CD-ROM and “full-motion video” bandwagon. Other games have included a bit of video here or there or audio narration (although the latter often enough only in a subsequent update of the game), but this one is-- I believe-- video from end to end. I only know this from brief research, but we’ll be finding out soon enough.

ICOM Simulations, the game designer, has a history of making influential (but not necessarily good) adventure games and we’ve already played four: Déjà Vu (1985), Uninvited (1986), Shadowgate (1987), and Deja Vu II (1988). The clearest way to see how industry-leading these games were is to look at their numbers: Déjà Vu and Uninvited are games 4 and 9 on our blog, respectively. Will this one live up to those legacies? Or will this be a speedbump on the way to the 7th Guest (1993) and the CD-ROM adventures yet to come? I have no idea! I honestly had never heard of this game before volunteering to play it.

This is what I do know: this is a game, based on a gamebook, based on a fictional detective, and created by an influential game development house. It’s probably going to be a long introduction...

I wear a deerstalker. Deerstalkers are cool.

Let’s start with the stuff you probably already know: Sherlock Holmes is one of the earliest and most influential fictional detectives, inspiring generations of authors and real detectives. It is not too much of a stretch to suggest that modern police forensics owes more than a little to this fictional forebearer! Holmes was created in 1887 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; his first novel was A Study in Scarlet, published in Beeton's Christmas Annual. In all, fifty-six short stories and four novels were published between 1887 and 1927. Doyle’s works have been adapted into stage, screen, and television as well as dozens of computer games. While this is the first Sherlock Holmes game that we have played for the blog, I’ve found at least eight reasonably professional text or illustrated adventure games that preceded this one that we might get to cover some day as Missed Classics. Of those, Melbourne House’s Sherlock (1984) and Infocom’s Riddle of the Crown Jewels (1987) are the most famous. I had given some thought to playing both of them before this game, but time slipped by me.

I should mention that I am not coming into this blind. While I am not a card-carrying Sherlockian, I have read nearly all of the short stories and novels and have a very nice collection with the original Sidney Paget illustrations on my bookshelf. I’m a big fan of Steven Moffat’s recent Sherlock adaptation, but I haven’t seen Elementary yet. In other words, I know enough to know who Mycroft and Moriarty are, but also enough to know that Mr. Doyle hardly ever had recurring plots; elements like these-- so common in adaptations-- are almost completely absent in the original stories.

Original 1980s game cover.

Until I started to dig, I did not realize that this is a double adaptation. The original Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective was a series of gamebooks, the first of which was released in 1981 by Sleuth Publishing. Calling it a “gamebook” doesn’t quite do it justice and it is very difficult to describe. The whole package arrived at my house in a three-ring binder with pockets. The main text looks a bit like a choose-your-own-adventure with sections that you can jump to easily, but there is a separate smaller rule book, a clue book, newspapers, a map, and other things. My copy came with ten separate Holmes adventures, three of which appear to be the same as in the computer game. I’ll take a look at the pen-and-paper game later, once I experience what the software version has in store. The original game was designed by Raymond Edwards, Suzanne Goldberg, and Gary Grady-- although I can’t quite tell whether those are the original designers of the concept, whether they contributed some of the initial cases of the game, or both. The gamebook series released several updates with new cases over the years, but they are exceptionally rare today. West End Adventures, Mansion Murders, and The Queens Park Affair are all selling for upwards of a hundred dollars each on the secondary market. Ystari Games purchased the rights for the original books a few years back and released an updated version in 2012. I’ve ordered a copy and will compare it to the original at some point down the road. New material and reprints of old modules are still being released, but Ystari is releasing them in French first and translating them to English later.

Our first acting credits in an adventure game?

Although this is our fifth ICOM game, it is the first made without the collaboration of their founder/designer/CEO, Tod Zipnick. He passed away in 1991, before this game was released, and his name does not appear in the credits. Instead, the three leads on this game are Ken Torolla, the director; Laurie RoseBauman, the scriptwriter; and Kathy Tootelian, the designer. All three of them would return for both sequels, but at that point they started to go their separate ways. Ken and Kathy would work together on Dracula Unleashed in 1993, but only Ken would remain in adventure gaming after that point. We’ll get to the rest of his games in 1994 when we close out MTV: Club Dead and Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of Orpheo's Curse. Most of Laurie’s game credits from here will be educational games, while Kathy will make her career in large part building Scooby Doo games. The lead actors in the game, Peter Farley and Warren Green, have only worked on this series, according to IMDB. The only “famous” actor that I am aware of that participated in this game is Bill Corbett, Crow and Brain Guy from Mystery Science Theater 3000. He plays a character named “Philip Travis” and I will watch for him with anticipation!

Consulting Detective marks another turning point for ICOM. After this, they will take the Adventure International route and concentrate almost exclusively on licensed properties: two Consulting Detective sequels (in 1992 and 1993), Dracula Unleashed (1993), MTV: Club Dead (1994), and Beavis and Butt-Head in Virtual Stupidity (1995). All except the last of those appear to be FMV-based adventure games of some sort and I look forward to seeing how the company progresses. ICOM will be acquired by Viacom New Media in 1993 and a number of team members will transition onto their games. (Orpheo's Curse, for example, will be a Viacom game rather than an ICOM one.) Viacom will spin them back out in 1997, but their independence will be short lived as they closed in 1998. In more recent news, some of the original developers managed to acquire the rights to this and other ICOM games in 2012 and formed a new company, Zojoi. Remastered editions of Consulting Detective and a reboot of Shadowgate (2012) have been released and are available on Steam and other platforms. I’ve been in contact with Zojoi and I’m hoping they can shed some light on the development of this game and its remake.

The Manual & Introduction

Mirror, mirror, on the wall… who is the greatest detective of them all?

The game features a fairly vanilla manual as well as a great video introduction. There’s a lot in there about the interface, but I’m not sure I understand it yet as it’s not like any adventure I’ve played before. I’m sure it will make sense when I’m actually playing, so I’ll cover it when we get there. The intro begins with a short message from Sherlock Holmes himself, explaining that, “London is not a beautiful city… four million souls just trying to survive, mostly off of each other.” It sets the stage, then transitions into Holmes discussing his most important resource: the London Times. He claims it has an “unbiased eye and razor-sharp accuracy”-- if only we had such wonderful newspapers today! Other than the newspaper, Holmes says that we will need to take advantage of two groups of individuals in the city: the Baker Street Irregulars and the Baker Street Regulars. The former appeared in three of the original stories, but the latter seems to be an invention for the series.

A cast of original characters!

The Regulars appears to be a group of NPCs that I can turn to in my investigations. Inspector Lestrade is the only one I immediately recognize from the stories (he appeared in thirteen); all but two of the rest are inventions for the series. The two real characters from the canon are “Porky” Shinwell (a criminal-turned-informant from “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client”) and Langdale Pike (a gossip from “The Adventure of the Three Gables”). The rest of them are:

• O’Brien - Contact at the Office of Records 
• Ellis - Foreign news editor for the Times 
• Murray - Scotland Yard criminology lab 
• Hall - A young barrister, whatever that means. 
• Hogg - Crime reporter for the Times 
• Meek - Chief Medical Examiner 

There’s also the London Library that I can visit and some place called “S.H.” that has records such as wills and deeds.

Unbiased journalism!

The final element of the game is a set of newspapers that represent Holmes’s personal archive. They aren’t just “feelies”, they contain critical clues for the plot! Just reading them straight-through would be tricky as there are nearly 300 mini-articles in there spread across eight “days”. The date range on the papers go from 1888-1890.

One final bit of clarification: I will be playing the final patched version of this game (“Release 4”) from 1993 rather than as it originally appeared in 1991. The upgrade appears to be limited to bug fixes and adding “VCR-like” controls to allow you to pause, fast-forward, and rewind the in-game videos. The manual addendum with that version clarifies one other thing: the “score” to the game is essentially backwards! The goal of the game is to complete each mystery with the lowest score. The score is really just a timer; the faster you solve the case, the better.

With that, it’s time for me to make some predictions and for you to guess the score. To help you out, here are the scores for the ICOM games so far: Deja Vu (45), Uninvited (30), Shadowgate (35), and Deja Vu II (33). That gives us an average score of 36, but a trendline that is not quite in the positive direction.

My Predictions:

• Three episodes, but they will connect in some way. 
• Mycroft, Moriarty, Irene Adler, or some other minor Holmes character will get a role. 
• The butler will do it in at least one of the stories. 

At this point, I don’t feel like I know anything: I don’t know how this game will play, I don’t know how like a traditional adventure game it is, nor do I know how like the gamebook it is. The manual and introduction are a bit confusing and so the only way to see what happens next is to play. Onwards to the first case!

One more announcement: the nice people at Zojoi has suggested that they will provide a contest prize for our guess-the-score competition: a copy of the remastered game on Steam! We’re still working out the details, but all the more reason for you to think hard about your guess. Good luck!

Our first case! Looks spooky!

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There's a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no CAPs will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. As this is an introduction post, it's an opportunity for readers to bet 10 CAPs (only if they already have them) that I won't be able to solve a puzzle without putting in an official Request for Assistance: remember to use ROT13 for betting. If you get it right, you will be rewarded with 20 CAPs in return. It's also your chance to predict what the final rating will be for the game. Voters can predict whatever score they want, regardless of whether someone else has already chosen it. All correct (or nearest) votes will go into a draw.