Guest Feature: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

This column is a guest author feature, written by a friend of the site whose work I am thrilled to host at Retro XP. This entry is from Exalclaw’s Wallace Truesdale. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.“Art should always be harder. You should pull it out with some pain. It should cost you something to produce art. Otherwise, it ain’t art. It’s mediocrity.” – Harlan Ellison in a May 1995 interview with Interactive Entertainment CD-ROM magazine1995’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, developed first at Cyberdreams before being shifted to The Dreamers Guild, carries a peculiar burden compared to point-and-clicks both then and now. As an adaptation of one of the most famous short stories ever — with the original author Harlan Ellison co-designing the game, writing all of its initial dialogue, and voicing the sadistic supercomputer AM himself no less — it can carry expectations not so dissimilar from a child whose parents spent decades on magazine covers and…