I Hope This Doesn’t Hurt: Quantum Gate, the novel, Part 1

1993 somehow became a very long time ago.

Pinning down an exact date can be difficult. My copy is version 1.2 and appears to have been created on January 18, 1995, but the latest date on the actual content (rather than the installer and support libraries) is November 8, 1993, so let’s go with that.

It is November 8, 1993. America is still reeling from the deaths of Vincent Price and River Phoenix in the past few weeks. The Maastricht Treaty came into effect last week, one of the foundational treaties creating the European Union (“When was the EU founded?” is an even murkier question than “When did Quanum Gate come out?” but the Maastricht Treaty’s start date of November 1, 1993 seems like maybe as good a date as any). Roger Moore is recovering from prostate removal; New York is recovering from having elected Rudy Guilliani as mayor. I’m sure he’ll prove entirely respectable and not a huge public embarrassment on the world stage.

At the top of the Billboard Hot 100 this week is Meat Loaf’s “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” followed by Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants”. Also in the top ten are “Shoop” and “Whoomp”. It’s a ’90s thing; you wouldn’t understand. Out on home video this week are The Muppet Christmas Carol and Sliver, the successful but not very good erotic thriller starring Sharon Stone that isn’t Basic Instinct. In actual theaters, at least a few, I assume, are Look Who’s Talking Now and Robocop 3.

On the small screen, the 1992 animated Addams Family series ends its run, though if you’re starved for the family, Addams Family Values will be out in theaters around the middle of the month. The Nanny premiered last week. Other shows with new episodes include Cafe Americain (A dumb show about expats in France which I occasionally think of because of a joke involving ice cream made from all natural mint, chocolate, and Chip), The Mommies (a shockingly bad sitcom built around a very good comedy duo who had a series of very successful and hilarious commercials for cling-wrap. Hollywood would fail to learn their lesson and later try to turn the Geico Cavemen into a sitcom as well), Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman and Walker, Texas Ranger. Star Trek the Next Generation this week is “Attached“, the one where Crusher and Picard get mind-linked for some reason. Deep Space Nine gives us “The Rules of Acquisition“. For the kids, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers takes this week off, but will return next week with “Calamity Kimberly“, tragically not the one set in the wild west (but it does have an inexplicable scene of the clay-golem henchmen dressed as waiters). This may be the first time I’ve had the opportunity to link to Samurai Karasu’s currently idle Power Rangers review blog, and given the time window his blog covers, it might well be the last, so I’ll darned well take the chance. Rosie O’Donnell hosts Saturday Night Live.

Japan receives Mega Man 6; the US will have to wait until April. Sam and Max Hit the Road arrives for DOS machines. At the moment, DOS’s successor isn’t quite a viable game platform yet, but it’ll edge slightly closer Thursday, when Microsoft releases Windows 3.11. And this.

Or rather, not this. Not quite.

Hyperbole Studios was founded by Greg Roach in 1990 to explore this amazing new interactive medium that could create virtual narratives unlike anything seen before which totally weren’t those lowbrow proletarian bleep bloop “video games”, but rather a new form of Interactive Cinema. Look, the pretension gets to me as well, but back then, everyone was talking like this. I assume the money liked it. Anyway, if you’re a follower of The Spoony One, you might know Hyperbole from their first major release, The Madness of Roland. Later, they’d have their biggest hit with 1998’s The X-Files Game. Between those two, they released a pair of FMV games titled Quantum Gate and Vortex: Quantum Gate 2.

They are terrible. Many of you probably just took that for granted when I said “FMV Games”. But I like FMV games. I actually think it’s a great loss to the video game medium that the form was basically completely abandoned a decade before it was technologically feasible to actually do them. I find it slightly daunting that in the year of our lord 2020, people marvel at the technological ability to use computers and science and spandex body-suits with ping-pong balls on them to… Make a famous actor look almost but not quite like they do in real life, only dead-eyed and slightly creepier. I unironically love the idea of using the basically perfected science of digital photography to incorporate actual real-life non-computer-generated scenes in interactive media.

I also ironically love the the over-the-top audacity of trying to lego together an interactive experience out of three-second low resolution quicktime clips of local community theater actors in front of a greenscreen, slapping it on a hypercard stack, and inserting a subplot about parallel universes to justify the fact that your game engine can’t track state properly. And there’s still a little part of me that remembers the incredible knock-your-socks-off experience of seeing television-style real-live-action appear in a little frame on a computer screen in 1993. It was like a magic trick. My parents were early adopters of home computers in the 8-bit era; my first computer was a TI-99/4A. But having made the investment, we stuck in the 8-bit era a bit longer than most, so my first PC was a 386, and, in a really weird bit of historical anecdata, my first specifically-PC video game was, of all things, Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, a 1991 ICOM adaptation of the board game using full-motion video.

Anyway, it was about 1996 or so when I first encountered Quantum Gate. I bought it, Critical Path (another terrible FMV game, where you save Tia Carrere from death traps in a post-apocalyptic banana republic by typing three digit codes into the local despot’s automated security system), and another FMV game called Chaos at the K-Mart in Stevensville for two dollars a piece. Quantum Gate was a particular combination of cumbersome to get working, conceptually interesting, hammy, broken, and obviously just a trailer for the “real” game that it stuck in my head for several years until I managed to track down the “sequel”. Which was also bad but at least had an illusion of meaningful choice.

Fast forward about a quarter century (holy shit, I am old) and one of my favorite Internet Video Game Streaming Personalities, supergreatfriend (or “Mr. Greatfriend” as my daughter calls him) happens upon Quantum Gate and Interacts his way Through it for his thrice-weekly game stream. And in the course of his playthrough, the fun and friendly gang of people who watch his gaming stream dug up the interesting facts that Vortex: Quantum Gate 2 has a soundtrack album (Not making this up: if you have Amazon Music Unlimited, say “Alexa, Play the soundtrack to Vortex Quantum Gate Two.” She’ll do it. Really) and the first game was novelized.

Well, we have long since established that I have a small amount of disposable income and no taste, so of course I bought the book. Of course I did. I’m that kind of idiot.

Prima Publishing prints (or printed, as they have been online-only since last year) video game strategy guides. You’ve probably heard of them. I think I had the Prima guide for one of the Zelda games. For some part of the ’90s, they dipped their toes into video game-related fiction, producing hardback novels associated with the FMV Laywer game In the 1st Degree (this is the first time I’ve ever heard of it. Maybe this will inspire someone to play it) and The 7th Guest, and paperbacks connected to The Pandora Directive, Realms of Arkania, Star Control, X-COM, and Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller. Well, I know what’s going on my Quarantine Reading List (The answer is nothing because I have two young children and it often takes me a whole week to read a single page of text).

It is well known, and Greg Roach openly admits it, that Quantum Gate and The Vortex were not actually meant to be two games; the publisher pressured them to get something to market early. So they pulled a Metal Gear Solid V and chopped the first act off of a game originally titled No One Dreams Here to become the short, teaser-ish Quantum Gate, while the bulk of the story continued to be developed into the much longer The Vortex. As such, it’s a little weird that only the first game received a novelization. Weirder still, Greg Roach’s forward to the novel claims that this is the “real story” – the version he always wanted to tell had it not been for those evil game publishers (Roach’s vitriol at Media Vision is not unwarranted. Another thing which happened in November 1993 was that Food Network came into existence, and if they were hard up for content at the beginning, they shoulda made a show about Media Vision on account of how much they were cooking the books) and the short-sighted proletariat who “Couldn’t conceive of anything other than a game,” (Pretentious twat) forcing him to compromise his artistic vision.

Some of this is explained by another revelation from the forward: There’s another version of this game. Quantum Gate started life as an “Interactive Sci-Fi Storyplace” in issue 2.3 of Hyperbole’s e-zine. Today we’d probably call it a Visual Novel. It’s a clumsy black-and-white animation in Macromind Director (an ancestor of Shockwave) that covers roughly the last ten minutes of Quantum Gate along with a massive text dump that establishes the main character’s backstory. So it does seem that the events of the second game weren’t part of the initial concept. It’s likely that the idea for where the cliffhanger ending of the first game was to lead was developed later. Certainly, The Vortex pursues its overall themes with a different character than Quantum Gate. The first game, for its trappings and ambiguities, is primarily a conspiracy thriller; the second is more of an existential mystery.

But as usual, I’ve gone fifteen hundred words without actually getting into what the book is about. So let’s fix that. Quantum Gate the novel was written by Jane E. Hopkins, who you might know from such books as… Quantum Gate. Yeah, this is her only novel, at least under this name. That’s promising.

So what is Quantum Gate about? What is the epic and mind-bending plot that Greg Roach brought forth to revolutionize interactive entertainment? How can I possibly capture such a deep and complex story in just a few words here?

It’s Avatar. It’s just straight-up Avatar. It is so Avatar that if you told me that one day in 1990, Greg Roach happened upon a time machine and he used it to travel forward twenty years for just long enough to take in a big budget blockbuster at the local IMAX, I would totally believe you.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not word-for-word, and there are substantial differences. But, like, you could easily imagine The Asylum buying the film rights to this and retitling it “No Avatars Dream Here”. The plot is the same as Avatar in the same way that The Lion King is similar to Hamlet: they differ in really important ways, but enough of the key elements are identical that you’d assume notes on a cocktail napkin after a night of drinking featuring Greg Roach and James Cameron were involved.

It’s 2057, and the Earth is doomed. Depending on how in-touch you are, it might seem prescient that a game written in 1993 would predict the Earth on the cusp of total environmental collapse in the nearish future, or it might seem like, yeah, everyone actually did see it coming that far ahead and it’s really a bummer that thirty years later, we’ve done approximately Sweet Fuck All about it. Anyway, Earth’s only hope for salvation is a new process called “fusion washing” that can repair the environment given large amounts of the incredibly rare mineral unobtanium iridium oxide, which is only found on the far-off planet Pandora AJ3905, which is inconveniently inhabited by a race of unsubtle analogies who are pretty much just straight up Native American Peoples except that they are blue have wings. The story follows a young soldier who has shipped out to Pandora AJ3905 following a tragic and life-changing accident, and who, through his experiences on the native world, will learn to heal his emotional trauma and eventually go native and side with the locals.

Now all that said, the big way in which Quantum Gate diverges from Avatar is that while all the stuff I described above happens in both stories, it is basically the plot of Avatar, but in Quantum Gate, it’s really more of the setting. These things are going on, but the main character has very little agency in events. And not just in the “This is a bad video game and the plot is on rails” sense: rather, this is not a story about a person with a lot of agency. A series of contrivances position Drew at key events, but Drew’s actions don’t really guide or influence or direct those events. In The Vortex there is basically one moment where Drew can decide how things play out, and even then, it’s just down to success or failure. Push the right button or push the wrong button. All the other choices Drew makes only affect his own point of view: the war will go the same way regardless, but the player can control where Drew ends up afterward.

On a mechanical level, one big difference from Avatar is the gate itself. Because AJ3905 is not, strictly speaking, a “far off planet”. Rather, AJ3905 is the counterpart to Earth in a parallel universe. The titular “Quantum Gate” is a dimension-hopper. This element doesn’t appear in No One Dreams Here; there, it’s just one of several planets the Earth government is doing nefarious conspiracies on (Exactly why they are there is not explained in the original version either; there’s no mention of iridium oxide mining, and it’s plausible that this is simply an openly acknowledged war of conquest). Its importance in Quantum Gate is subtle: there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it mention that the gate produces a fuckton of pollution, which implies questions about the viability of the plan (The fact that AJ3905 is a parallel Earth is both told to us straight-out at the beginning of the story and also treated like a shocking revelation later). It’s much more relevant in The Vortex, because of the way the story’s focus changes over its evolution.

See, all four versions of the story have the same major theme. In the foreword, Greg Roach explains that his original inspiration was watching news footage of the first Gulf War and being struck by the possibility of the footage being faked (Now, that actually is kind of a prescient, given the rise of deepfakes). And in every version of the story, the central question of the narrative is how much Drew can trust what he is experiencing. In No One Dreams Here, because of how the plot is laid out, this theme is focused on the extent to which Drew’s recent emotional trauma is affecting his judgment, with the whole alien planet invasion thing mostly as a metaphor for that. By Quantum Gate, Drew’s trauma still looms large, but it’s become muddled in its presentation, while greater focus is given to the military conspiracy: what is their true mission on AJ3905? The game proposes several possibilities, and the ultimate reveal is somewhere in the middle among them.

When we get to The Vortex, the nature of the Quantum Gate becomes more important, as the thematic focus shifts toward the metaphysical, culminating in the implication that reality itself is utterly subjective: the gate does not quite move a person between realities, but rather, a person simultaneously occupies many realities all the time, and the gate only changes which one is perceived as real. That could be a neat game concept in the hands of someone who wasn’t quite so contemptuous of the concept of “video games” – the player experiencing alternate realities is a major plot element in, say, Bioshock Infinite (I’m having a hard time thinking of games which use parallel universes as a mechanic rather than a plot element, though that seems like a natural fit, similar to things like time travel mechanics). In the hands of Greg Roach, it’s more of an excuse for the game – sorry Interactive Cinema Experience – to have only a very loose notion of cause-and-effect, and a clusterfuck of joke endings such as “The director gets angry and storms off the set because you’re ruining the movie” and “An elderly couple is confused and wonders where Dean Stockwell was because they thought they were watching Quantum Leap.”

The gameplay, such as it is, of Quantum Gate is interactive in a mostly technical sense. The story is presented as a linear and fairly straightforward narrative that’s heavily punctuated by asides and flashbacks, most of which aren’t weird in-and-of-themselves, but are so contextless in their presentation that the overall effect borders on surreal. And this basic structure is mirrored in the novel. The opening sequence of the game consists of a VFX shot of the titular gate as Drew’s voice actor says, “I hope this doesn’t hurt,” followed immediately, without any audible pause or break, by a loud scream. I hope the humor is intentional. I’m not quite sure (Probably, because it gets echoed in one of the joke endings). The prose version is five pages long, and surprisingly hard to follow because of the way it meanders between the plot and exposition that is delivered in the form of flashback. The game version contains a massive amount of exposition, and the primary source for it is just a big pile of documents to click through or cutscenes to sit through. The book has the advantage that it can pace that exposition out and present the right parts of it at the right times – indeed that it can present all of it, while the game, as part of its refusal to be a “game” rather than “Interactive Cinema”, doesn’t allow you to exhaust conversation trees, so you literally can’t tease all the exposition out in a single playthrough.

But this advantage is largely squandered by the fact that the book is lackadaisical about its point of view and drifts into flashback without segue. A note: I’m going to call him “Drew” because that is what he is called in the games. In fact, almost every character you meet in the game leads off by asking if you mind being called by the diminutive. They proceed to call you Drew regardless of whether or not you say you’re okay with it, because tracking state is for video games and this is Interactive Cinema. But the novel refers to the protagonist consistently by his last name, even in his own inner monologues. We start with Private Andrew Griffin next in line as his friend Private Michaels enters the Quantum Gate, but then one paragraph is randomly privy to Michaels’s inner monologue. Then, with no transition we spend two pages back a day to cover the harried packing up and briefing that Phoenix Company goes through before their trip to Fort Chicago as a framing device to explain that Drew and his comrades are members of a private army owned by the Beatrice corporation, assigned to the UN, but they have not been told where they are going or what their mission is, because it is all secret and covert and evil.

Yeah, this is one of those dystopian sci-fi stories where the UN is an evil one-world government. I assume the Secretary-General is a Romanian named after a geographic feature with a pentagram birthmark. It’s weird how people can view the UN as a major threat that is clearly up to something, but not take the precaution of learning enough about them to see that “The UN becomes an evil totalitarian power” is ridiculous.

We also get a bit of worldbuilding in the flashback. The trip to the gate facility passes through a landscape where, “Even the laboring, polluted sky looked dirty, and it was impossible to believe that the corrupted soil had ever supported life. No wonder so few windows looked out at the violated land – newer buildings, like this hangar, had no windows at all.” Which is a more subtle way of telling us that the Earth is environmentally fucked, except that… It’s also not very good writing. It manages to be overwrought without actually saying anything more specific than, “It looks bad.” What does it mean for a sky to be “laboring”? And the structure of the sentence makes it sound like it’s surprising that a polluted sky should look dirty. Plus, the whole thing has a tone of surprise to it that would be fitting for a modern viewer driving through a superfund site, but surely, if things are as bad as they want us to believe, Drew should be accustomed to sights like this. And for that matter, do hangars usually have windows? I feel like a hangar without windows would not be something I’d interpret as a sign of a blighted landscape.

When the flashback reaches the point where Phoenix Company arrives at the hangar, we’re also introduced to Artificial People, who are apparently androids with luminous eyes. They’re a thing in this world. It won’t be important, really. They just drop humanoid robots into this world for no particular reason than, “Because it’s the future”. In the game, Artificial People are only ever seen on screens, which I assumed meant they were computer simulations – basically just Siri with a face, which is an easier jump to make than freaking Commander Data. Also, in the game, Artificial People always have a caption under them identifying them as such, which feels like a very realistic touch, the sort of thing the lawyers of the future might require to prevent fraud.

Eventually, we return to the present. Michaels has vanished and Drew is guided into the gate. Given the sublime perfection of, “I hope this doesn’t hurtAAAAAAAAAAGH!”, there wasn’t much chance prose would do it justice. Here’s how it looks on the page:

The huge gold petals, spread out around him, seemed to quiver slightly. His pulse beat in his throat. The platoon had been told not to eat for twelve hours before this trip, and now he knew why.
Around him, the air began to glow. It was starting. I hope this isn’t going to hurt, he thought. As if in mocking answer, the roar suddenly increased, his vision went white, and pain screamed through his body.
A rising column of white bubbles of light pulling him nowhere and everywhere, growing larger and brighter. He was stretched toward every glowing orb and rose through them, torn apart slowly like a sectioned orange, and nothing existed, nothing except the pain. He screamed but could not hear himself. He fell upward into nothing. He was dying. He was living five lives. He heard voices, saw flashes of images, and thought the thoughts of other people. And over it, and under it, and through it was stunning, blinding, brightened agony.

 

“Torn apart slowly like a sectioned orange,” is a pretty good simile, but otherwise this is a lot like the landscape description. A lot of words to not say much. The first time we get a description that isn’t more words than details is when Drew awakens in his quarters on AJ3905 and uses the terminal to view a map. We’re told that the layout is typical of high-end UN hardened bases, but we’re also given a detailed inventory of the base and details of its layout. Good to know where your priorities are, Jane Hawkins.

On the other hand, the clunkily over-detailed description of the base is sandwiched between some decent stuff. Drew wakes up in his cabin after blacking out from the gate trip, and finds that his things have been unpacked, then realizes that he remembers unpacking: he hadn’t been unconscious, but in a fugue state for an unspecified amount of time. An uncertainty about whether Drew is “really awake” is a recurring motif in the series, very strongly in the second game. Then, Drew tries and fails to find a map of the local terrain, prompting him to spend a few paragraphs trying to work out just where he is. This gives a very organic opportunity to introduce the fact that space travel in this world is limited to a moonbase and space station, and that there’s an armed conflict in Rangoon.

To Be Continued…