ATMachine

Considering there are a bunch of missing rooms in the MI1 resource files, I wouldn't be so cynical. (Though I might be if the whole Secret Project thing was actually true and I were a developer with a financial incentive not to talk about it. But that's clearly insane.)

They might have been bold text at the bottom of the screen like in the finale.

An untitled game wouldn't be "secret" on its design document, at least in the normal course of game development. And LucasArts generally didn't put warning labels on its design documents. And weirdly enough, I was actually posting online about my time capsule theory at the time FT Remastered came out. Maybe Tim saw it.

There are still underlying questions and conundrums here. Why does someone who looks like Kenneth Branagh show up in an ad for LucasArts' Jedi Knight? Why was "no one interested" in making the LOOM sequels despite a large number of people offering to do exactly that? How could a game titled "The Secret Project" at the very same time "have no name"? And why would Tim Schafer mention the existence of a "Secret [Library Archive] Project?"

That still doesn't make any sense, considering that they could've been simply dumped into the game like they were on PS3.

All of this is true - but it doesn't mean that the Secret Project isn't real, either. Really? But at first you didn't say I was wrong at all. Which would have been the natural and normal reaction. In fact, what you said was something quite different: "Your argument would be better served if you went on the offensive." Which sounds almost like an invitation to point out that I suspect you've been privy to this thing for more than a decade. As I recall, back in 2010 when Telltale made The Devil's Playhouse, there was a commotion about the NutriSpecs being cut from the PC version of the game, allegedly for the sake of an Alternate Reality Game that didn't materialize. In hindsight, that sounds exactly like the sort of thing that might be used to describe the Secret Project.

I do think it would've made more sense just to cut the whole thing in any case. Lori & Corey put jokes on the chopping block in other cases, such as the Saurus Repair Shop in Quest for Glory 2.

Quest for Goblins: So You Want To Make A Fangame In 2014, within months of each other, two games inspired by Sierra’s Quest for Glory came out: Quest for Infamy, a Kickstarter title by Infamous Quests, and Heroine’s Quest, a freeware game by Crystal Shard Productions. As part of Quest for Infamy’s Kickstarter stretch goals, an underground maze of dwarven mining tunnels was added. At one point the maze includes a massive chasm meant to be crossed by class-specific solutions. Heroine’s Quest also has an underground maze of tunnels in the Dark Elf realm of Svartalfheim. And – at one point the maze includes a massive chasm meant to be crossed by class-specific solutions. Both mazes are nods in the direction of the original Quest for Glory, which had an underground maze area of goblin tunnels that was cut from the published game. In fact, the EGA release still allows you to “search” for the entrance to the Goblin Maze in the Goblin Combat Ground area of the forest: Which is very strange. If the goblin caves were cut form the published game, why keep the ability to “search” for them at all? Developer laziness? Maybe, but cutting out such a large bit of the game would have required significant changes in any case. Perhaps it's because they survive in builds of the game in the Secret Project – complete with an underground chasm of some sort. So not only did both fangames have the idea to render homage to a missing section of the original Quest for Glory game – both of them included a giant chasm inside it for the protagonist to cross as part of a puzzle. How did this happen? Maybe it was just standard cross-pollination. Sharing ideas. Or maybe there were team members on one or both groups who had means of access to the Secret Project. After all, both Infamous Quests and Crystal Shard had already released adventure games of note (VGA remakes of Space Quest II & King’s Quest III, and A Tale of Two Kingdoms). In that case, the developers might have obtained access to builds of QFG1 that included the goblin maze – and hence learned about particular puzzles within it. Not to mention other games in the Secret Project archive. Which reminds me: in Quest for Infamy, the town’s farrier and apprentice blacksmith is a fellow named Niels, who’s wheelchair-bound. Niels is based on a Kickstarter backer of the game, who uses a wheelchair in real life. But making the character a farrier and blacksmith-in-training calls to mind Volund the blacksmith in Norse mythology, who was hamstrung and imprisoned by King Nithung before escaping on artificial wings. (That same Volund shows up as a character in Heroine’s Quest.) Frankly, a mythological blacksmith is just the sort of person I’d expect to be an influence on the story of apprentice blacksmith Rusty Nailbender in the LOOM sequels. Especially as Rusty isn’t the main protagonist of the third game, so he wouldn’t need to walk around, and could even be given a disability as part of the plot. Niels has green and blue tapestries hanging on the wall behind him, and wears a purple shirt. Rather like the Guild of Weavers, who keep their purple tapestries in pride of place next to the Loom, with green and blue wall hangings in lesser spots. (A set of colors that evokes ancient Byzantium, where the Green and Blue teams of chariot racers competed over the Emperor's favor, with the Blues generally more successful.) Oh, and besides the adventure games they’ve officially announced as of this writing (Order of the Thorne: Fortress of Fire and Quest for Infamy: Roehm to Ruin), Infamous Quests is also working on an additional Sierra-style adventure game, whose existence they don’t even acknowledge publicly outside of their $5 Patreon level. I’ll leave the game’s official title as a bonus for subscribers – but instead of the game’s real title, the Patreon page habitually refers to it by the codename (what else?) “The Secret Project”.

I honestly don't think it does, nowadays. But I suspect one of the early rationales behind the Project was probably the divide between the family-friendly company Lucasfilm had become known as, and the more adult-oriented films George Lucas and his collaborators wanted to make.

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if there were ongoing financial incentives for people who contribute to the Secret Project to keep their mouths shut about it. I recall that in one promo for Star Citizen Mark Hamill mentioned that he was working a project where he got paid NOT to talk about it.

The truth? You yourself must know the truth, Jake, since you've worked directly with several of the LucasArts alumni concerned in this very thread. Quite frankly, the fact that you didn't just say "this is complete and utter bullcrap" from the get-go is a confirmation in itself.

As much as I love that Twitter account, it's very much unofficial. And neither version of the snake-statue scene is in the script that's online, so it's unclear how it was intended. In fact, that moment with Indy touching the snake seems like the sort of thing that might have been improvised as an alternate scene on set - becoming a full-blown Secret Project idea by the time of the Last Crusade deleted scene with Indy fearing spiders (reversing the idea from the Raiders prologue). Like how Sallah's aborted execution in Raiders isn't in the script but became a big deleted scene.

The Games Group also had different buildings for the art and programming teams during Moriarty's The DIG. Not sure that's too significant. Interesting that you bring up a FORGE outline by Jenny Sward and Clark & Stemmle, to contrast with that of Streicher & Ebert. I hadn't heard of that before, but this is exactly what happened after Moriarty left The DIG, too - Dave Grossman came on board to "fix" the game, but apparently Hal Barwood did also? If I had to guess, I'd say that a major motif in Secret Project games was individuality - the way in which different authors' voices affect the game design. This likely led to creating groups of variant designs for the same game, whose differences in detail show how the individual artists' work shines through. EG, Wilmunder's vs. Pinney's work on Iron Phoenix. In the case of the LOOM sequels, I'd guess the two different outlines likely reflect two different adaptations of Moriarty's own game design, similar to the LOOM revised talkie CD with Orson Scott Card dialogue. Likewise for both Grossman and Barwood revising The DIG after Moriarty left that project.

Are you sure they weren't two separate proposal ideas? I haven't seen him post on Twitter anything to clarify.

To be precise, it's a proposal with ideas for BOTH an adventure game and an action game, like with the Last Crusade adventure/action games.

My theory is that Lucas Learning was used by Lucasfilm in the early 1990s as the custodian for its Secret Project materials. As I said earlier, they didn't actually release any games until 1998. In the FT commentary Tim Schafer says "You guys over at Lucas Learning were doing... Remember the Secret Project? The Secret Library Archive Project? There was a... you guys were doing one where the interface popped up near the cursor." If "one" means "one game", then that suggests the possibility of multiple games being under the Secret Project aegis. Like Wilmunder, Streicher & Ebert's "nameless" "Secret Project" game, aka Second Genesis. And of course Brian Moriarty officially transferred to Lucas Learning about the time one might expect him to work on the LOOM sequels.

Rum Rogers asked me on Discord to post this for reference, so here's a link to the bit of the FT Remastered Commentary where Tim Schafer mentions "the Secret Project".

Spiders. Why did it have to be spiders? Everyone knows Indiana Jones is afraid of snakes. His herpetophobia is as famous as his hat and whip. Except maybe to Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford. There’s a deleted scene in Temple of Doom where Indy finds a snake statue in the underground Thuggee temple and touches it with reverence. The final cut replaced this with a more comprehensible scene where Indy just fearfully nods in its direction. But why would they shoot a scene with Indy admiring a snake statue in the first place? After all, the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark had established that Indy was deathly afraid of snakes – but not at all of spiders. Except… what if that phobia was the other way around? Imagine a Secret Project alternate universe where Indiana Jones feared spiders but not snakes. That would explain the Temple of Doom deleted scene – it’s from a parallel Secret Project cut of the film. It would also explain a deleted scene in Last Crusade. In the second Grail Trial, Indy steps on a wrong letter and it breaks under his feet, making him nearly fall to his death in a chasm beneath the floor. But originally, the penalty for the mis-step was somewhat different: a giant spider landed on Indy instead, and he froze in fear. Now, the spider doesn’t seem all that menacing, and it’s understandable why the original version of the scene might be changed. But imagine how that scene would have played out if a snake fell on Indy instead and he had to master his phobia – the snake would be scary, because the audience understands Indy’s fear and sympathizes with it. So this deleted scene from Last Crusade would work… in a parallel universe where Indy’s phobias were swapped. And that’s not the only time this Indy with an alternate phobia has manifested. In Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, at one point Indy fights the giant Aztec serpent god Quetzalcoatl. He also takes on Communists, giant robots and ice demons, as mentioned in LucasArts’ Winter 1999/2000 Company Store catalog. But the Fall 1998 and Spring 1999 catalogs have a rather different entry. There an additional boss fight is mentioned, one that didn’t make the published game: “the venomous Spider Idol.” Just the sort of thing that might replace the Quetzalcoatl fight if Indy was afraid of spiders. A special game build for the Secret Project, perhaps, like the special "Spiderverse Indy" film cuts above.

Ah, I'd forgotten that bit. Still interesting to see him and Wilmunder being connected on that project.

LucasArts' Adventurer #5 mentions that LANDRU is the cut-scene engine used in X-Wing. It was also used in TIE Fighter (as well as Dark Forces later on).

Jedi Knight: Behind the Veil Sariss’ single-player model in Jedi Knight manages to have three different hairstyles at once. On the back of her head, she wears a barrette (like Judy Robbins in Brian Moriarty’s The DIG). But below that she has a chignon with hair that’s brown rather than blonde (as in some early concept art). And on the sides of her head, there’s a veil of sorts, of a design that rests on her ears and hangs down the back of her head. It can be glimpsed in Peter Chan’s storyboards for the game intro. Having two clashing hair designs at once might be chalked up to a texture error. Three at once? That looks deliberate. Sariss wearing three hairstyles is reminiscent of the three-faced Satan at the center of Hell in Dante’s Inferno – bringing to mind that perennial Secret Project game The DIG. But more interestingly, it isn’t the only place that back-of-the-head veil design shows up. It appears in various designs the X-Wing Rogue Squadron comics from 1995-89: it’s worn by pilot Plourr Ilo, who also happens to be Princess of the planet Eiattu. A version with beads even shows up on a minor character in Garth Ennis’ Preacher comics, from that same time period. I suspect it may show up as a royal crown of sorts in Secret Project Star Wars films. It’s the sort of thing that you might get if you married the male-pattern-baldness style of the samurai chonmage haircut with the lapis-lazuli beaded wigs or cloth hairdresses worn by Hollywood Egyptian pharaohs. A very Star Wars cultural fusion, that.

But was the programming on The DIG really so abysmal as is made out? Gary Brubaker remained in position as lead programmer on Noah Falstein, Brian Moriarty, AND Sean Clark's versions. You'd think that Clark at least would have cleaned house in that regard after two allegedly failed prior designs. And Falstein's DIG did, as far as I know, use the SCUMM engine. Yet another contradiction. Also, Landru/StoryDroid wasn't new: it had been developed by Ed Kilham for the X-Wing games. The "stubborn campaign to bring The DIG to a successful finish" makes the alleged gap year between Falstein and Moriarty's designs even more puzzling. But if this thesis holds any water at all, then everything the LucasArts developers have said in public has to be taken with a large grain of salt.

It's from a preview of Gabriel Knight 2 in the digital magazine Interactive Entertainment, issue #10, February 1995.

Below I’ll post things that appear to me to be likely evidence of Secret Project activity or other related material. I'll also answer as best I can any questions people have. LOOM 2: Steampunk Boogaloo It’s been said – most notably by Brian Moriarty himself - that the reason the LOOM sequels were never released is that nobody at LucasArts besides Moriarty wanted to work on them: “The reason the sequels weren't made is because I decided I wanted to work on other things, and nobody else wanted to do them, either.” And also: “nobody else felt strongly enough about the games to make a commitment.” Even our own Jason has noted that “There seems to be some disparity, whether deliberately or not, in Moriarty's comments about how far from "just talk" the sequels got.” But Aric Wilmunder published the first page of a design document for FORGE by Kalani Streicher and Mike Ebert – his partners on Secret Project game Second Genesis. (Why post just the first page? Why not the whole thing, as he did with other design docs? Unless somebody was actually hoping to publish FORGE some day...) And in 2015 Dave Grossman noted that lots of background art was created for FORGE: “It was more about the making and breaking of things […] A bunch of art was done for it. It was all fiery and red and fun.” So clearly the LOOM sequels had people willing to develop them, who did work on them for a time. Something else we can add to the web of contradictions and obfuscation spun by LucasArts developers. So what happened? The Secret Project, perhaps. At the very least, the LOOM sequels were on LucasArts developers’ minds. The opening notes of the Monkey Island 2 main theme are the Transcendence Draft. The DIG’s gap year The “Ghosts of Digs Past” credits in the published version of The DIG are mostly in alphabetical order – but Joe Pinney is listed under J rather than P. And Ron Gilbert shows up also, though to my knowledge he never worked on The DIG at all. It might make more sense if his name were replaced by his SCUMM co-creator, Aric Wilmunder. But if so, why would Wilmunder and Pinney be both singled out by “corrupted credits” in such a fashion? Perhaps they were working on The DIG during the “gap year” between Noah Falstein and Brian Moriarty’s designs. A hidden fourth The DIG design, rather like Moriarty’s hidden fourth astronaut. And if so, that isn’t the only time their names would come up together. Aric Wilmunder may have been project lead on Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix – but when I asked Bill Tiller about that game back in 2003, he told me that Joe Pinney had been project leader on it. Which makes it quite unusual – not to say suspicious – that Wilmunder didn’t so much as mention Pinney’s name in the big Mojo featured article on Iron Phoenix. So did Wilmunder and Pinney work on a “secret” version of The DIG, then go on to work on Indy Iron Phoenix – a game whose inclusion of Zombie Hitler made it unpublishable in Germany, and hence was itself perhaps a game made expressly for the Secret Project? Food for thought. Gabriel Knight, meet Gabriel Knight Here’s a blatant example of the sort of thing that seems likely to be a Secret Project offering on Sierra’s end. Gabriel Knight 2 stars Dean Erickson as the titular hero in the game’s FMV cutscenes. But early promotional articles – which I suspect were often used as a way of calling attention to potential Secret Project material – feature someone totally different as Gabriel, and in a completely different costume. And nobody from Sierra has ever mentioned this in interviews. Frankly, recasting your lead sounds like the sort of traumatic thing that would definitely show up in anecdotes about the game. That is, if it weren’t done deliberately as some sort of bizarre time capsule project. Jedi Knight: Ken Katarn This advertisement for Jedi Knight (originally created in English, here shown in a French translation) depicts someone in Kyle Katarn’s FMV outfit who looks extraordinarily like Kenneth Branagh. Here's Ken (plus beard) as he looked in the mid-1990s, for reference: At the time Jedi Knight came out, Branagh was heavily rumored to be playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in the upcoming Star Wars prequels. And the SW prequels used the same total-greenscreen set techniques that were also used to create Jedi Knight’s FMVs. So did Ken Branagh play young Obi-Wan in unreleased Star Wars films for the Secret Project, and then pop over to LucasArts for a few days to play Kyle Katarn also? Perhaps so – similar to Sierra’s alternate Gabriel Knight above. And all this is seriously making me wonder about the version of Back to the Future with Eric Stoltz. (Executive producer: Steven Spielberg.)

Some of you (OK, probably most of you) know that I’ve been blathering away about this idea on Twitter for a long time now. But I figure it’s probably time to put my thoughts down all in one place so that a bigger overall picture might emerge. The thesis of this argument is: 1) that starting some time not too long after the 1977 release of Star Wars, Lucasfilm and other companies began work on a time-capsule archive of sorts; 2) with a purpose of fostering up-and-coming creative talents, and also providing a wellspring of ideas for them to draw on; 3) while also tapping into the zeitgeist of meta-game treasure hunts that were very popular in the 1980s; 4) which eventually included computer games from both LucasArts and Sierra, as well as probably other companies – and came to house several of LucasArts’ most notorious unreleased games. But for me, at least, it’s best to begin the story with The DIG. Part 1 – “When You Eliminate The Impossible…” Why did Brian Moriarty’s The DIG fail? Or, more accurately, why wasn’t a good-enough, cheap-and-cheerful version of it kicked out the door after Moriarty left LucasArts in 1993, at a point when the company had already been working on the game for nearly half a decade? The answer certainly isn’t that LucasArts didn’t have talented people who could do just that. Quite the opposite. Several interviews at old Mojo hosted site The Dig Museum suggest Dave Grossman (who previously worked on Noah Falstein’s DIG) took over the project after Moriarty left, intending to revise it and potentially get it out the door. On the other hand, LucasArts’ Adventurer #7 magazine tells a similar story, but suggests it was Hal Barwood who took over the project. This theme of contradicting and overlapping stories will become a familiar one. In any case – that wasn’t what happened. Sean Clark took over the project in mid-1994, and eventually gave the project a major graphical and structural overhaul that resulted in its being delayed by over a year. Which is hardly what you’d expect if LucasArts just wanted to “get the damn thing done”. Nor, come to think of it, is the timeframe leading up to Moriarty’s own takeover of the project all that logical. Noah Falstein worked on The DIG in 1990-91 – contemporary with Monkey Island 2 and Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis – basing it on an idea from movie mogul Steven Spielberg, not the sort of thing LucasArts was going to take lightly. But when Falstein’s project itself allegedly came to grief, what did LucasArts do with this hot project idea from Steven Spielberg? They sat on it for a year and had nobody work on it. At least that’s what the official histories say. But again, it’s not like there was a shortage of designers available. For instance, there was Aric Wilmunder, who would later head up Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix. In fact, Wilmunder had been pitching game designs since the Last Crusade era. An undated game design document by Wilmunder, Kalani Streicher, and Mike Ebert – a SF game that could be described as “The A-Team in space” - includes a “What Is” verb among the suggested verb options, a relic of early SCUMM games that was discarded by the time of Monkey Island 1. A 2015 retrospective about LucasArts featuring an interview with Dave Grossman suggests that game eventually took on the title of “Second Genesis.” But the initial pitch for it had a different title: “The Secret Project: Or, The Game Which Currently Has No Name.” Which raises the question: how could a game titled “The Secret Project” not have a name? Another contradiction. And one that’s key to unraveling this whole mystery. Part 2 – Lies, Damn Lies, and Secret Budgets The designers of The Curse of Monkey Island preferred including a five-second kilt joke to a satisfying ending. At least, that’s what they told Mojo. To quote Jonathan Ackley: “We had a big battle cutscene at the end planned, and we cut it for budget reasons. We knew we could do two big scenes, and we picked the shipwreck in the middle of the game. Probably not the best choice, but it had this great Kilt joke we wanted. Truth is, we probably could have done the ending. I think management expected us to go over budget as it was our first project as producers so I think they probably had some secret budget for overages hidden somewhere that would have allowed us to do the scene.” So… given the choice between a somewhat lame joke about a Scotsman struggling to keep down his kilt and a proper ending cutscene, they opted to axe the ending cutscene? Unlikely. But what’s this about LucasArts having a “secret budget”? That is very interesting. In March 2003, Bill Tiller gave an interview to The Inventory magazine in which he talked at length about Brian Moriarty’s The DIG, and revealed for the first time the identity of fourth crewmember Toshi Olema. In that interview – where he also mentioned the Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix project in public for the first time – Tiller had this to say: “Brian's version, (The Dig 2.0), had four characters- Judith, Brink, Boston, and Toshi. Judith's name was later change to Maggie because Sean and I were big fans of the TV show Northern Exposure. There was an actress in it whose character was named Maggie. "Toshi Olema was a Japanese businessman who financed the shuttle trip to the asteroid, because NASA's funding was at an all time low. I thought that was an odd idea, because if the Earth were in mortal danger wouldn't the entire world pony up the dough to pay for their salvation? Why would you need a Japanese businessman to cover the costs? I think there was a lot of fear of Japanese business might back then- they were buying up all the LA skyscrapers, Rockefeller center in New York, the Seattle Mariners baseball teamand like one of Brianís favorite writers, Michael (Rising Sun) Chriton, I think Brian too was trying to tap into that current feeling. "On The Dig 3.0, Sean changed that make up of the main characters for a few reasons. First, the inspiration for the game was the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and that had a three-character dynamic, not four. So Sean, rightly I think, tossed out Toshi. Plus it also saved money on the animation. All in all a good move. I tip my hat to Sean for that one. I didn't care for the character much because I didnít think he was needed and I didn't care for his name. Olema just isn't a Japanese name. Brian said he had a funny background story for it, but I never heard it.” Tiller makes much of Toshi’s non-Japanese surname being strange and baffling, but the reason behind it is a very simple one. It’s an homage to the similarly oddball surname of Hikaru Sulu on Star Trek. Which is plain enough (especially to the sort of nerds who make computer games) that Tiller ought to have known that all along. And it’s not as if he was unfamiliar with this sort of Trek reference. In other interviews he’s acknowledged that the initial name of the StoryDroid engine used by Moriarty’s DIG – LANDRU – was a nod to an evil computer in a TOS episode: The program we were using on The Dig was Landrou […] named after the evil computer on one of the old Star Trek episodes. So he knew what sort of classic Star Trek jokes the LucasArts teams were throwing around. But why would Tiller want to make the story behind Toshi Olema’s name seem strange and odd and inexplicable? It seems like an adventure game puzzle of sorts. Perhaps even a meta-puzzle. Something like what the 21st century might call an Alternate Reality Game. Or a Secret Project. Part 3 – The Masquerade In a 2015 talk in Argentina (whose only available version on YouTube is unfortunately missing the original tail end of the segment), Brian Moriarty said that his The DIG involved a larger “meta-game”. “It had to do with mathematics.” Perhaps that’s just a fancy way of saying: “look at all this stuff that doesn’t add up.” Toward the end of his talk, Moriarty declared, “I don’t have anything from The DIG at all that I can show, because that would be wrong.” And then, at the very end, he had everyone shut down their cameras while he showed them something related to that topic. Writers are liars, after all. Embedding meta-games within computer games, or other media, wasn’t a new idea in 1993. In fact, a wild craze for just that sort of thing had happened ten years earlier. The Digital Antiquarian blog already told the story far better than I can, but a short summary will suffice here: A British publisher approached artist Kit Williams to create a children’s book which would have clues to a treasure hunt embedded in it: a treasure hunt whose prize was a real-life golden hare buried somewhere in Britain. The clues, which Williams derived entirely on his own, were a total mess, but that didn’t matter: Masquerade was a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Its success led to a craze for meta-game treasure hunts, of all sorts, including in computer games. Some of them were virtual treasure hunts, where an item was notionally “buried” somewhere without actually requiring the players to visit their theorized locations and dig into the soil. One could call this a 1980s Alternate Reality Game. Buried treasure of that sort, real or theoretical, would be a time capsule of sorts. And if done in secret, it could be called a Secret Project. Part 4 – When Star Wars Wasn’t Disney Remember “the Secret Project” game that became Second Genesis? It initially “had no name” – despite bearing the “Secret Project” label. Perhaps it was envisioned as being made expressly to be deposited in a larger Secret Project repository. Which would mean that at some point the Secret Project participants went from putting early and alternate versions of movies/games/etc. to creating works of art specifically for that archive. Not very profitable. But then again, George Lucas’ mandate to LucasArts was “Don’t lose money.” Not “Make as much money as you possibly can.” Still… Why would Lucasfilm sign on to such a project? Keep in mind that it wouldn’t have begun with computer games: it would have begun with movies, books, and such that were made but unreleased. So it would’ve been of paramount (har) importance to the movie side of Lucasfilm first of all to come up with a reason for such an effort. Why then? For one thing, it would result in creating a talent academy of sorts: a series of projects where up-and-coming actors, directors, writers, and creative artists could hone their talents without the pressure of having their products immediately come into the public eye. For another, it could offer a common pool of ideas for other authors to draw on, one that wouldn’t be plagued by copyright lawsuits because the works within it weren’t publicly available. I suspect the above reasons alone made it attractive to companies besides Lucasfilm. Just within the realm of video games, for example, Sierra On-Line seems like a very likely participant. (For example, although Space Quest IV was the first game in that series to give protagonist Roger Wilco blond hair instead of brown, variant builds of both Space Quest II and III exist with a blond Roger – not the sort of thing one would expect from happenstance.) There might also be more personal artistic reasons. Steven Spielberg, an avid gamer who did things like getting into mouse fights with Ron Gilbert on visits to the LucasArts offices, might want to do it just for the fun of making a treasure-hunt like Masquerade. But what about George Lucas, who by all accounts has never been a gamer? The history of Star Wars might explain that. In the 1983 book Skywalking, Lucas told biographer Dale Pollock: “You can make this picture for teenagers, late teenagers, early twenties, or you play it for kids, and that’s what we’re going for, eight- and nine-year-olds. This is a Disney picture.” The early drafts of the first Star Wars film bear out that Lucas was thinking of going another direction, one more teenager-oriented and with more of a Conan the Barbarian than Walt Disney flavor: there’s sex, nudity, and violence that would probably have garnered the film an R rating. And if the SW prequels proved anything, it’s that George Lucas doesn’t like to let go of ideas, even the questionable ones. Thus, an archive like the Secret Project would allow Lucas to make Star Wars movies of the more adult-oriented kind he’d originally envisioned, while maintaining his public reputation as a family-friendly media mogul. After all, you could always pay for it with Ewok action figures. And perhaps Lucas even had some sort of more fanciful mythic idea in mind, drawing on the influence of King Arthur on the original SW narrative. Like Parsifal asking the Fisher King about the Grail and being adopted as his heir, perhaps George Lucas meant to give whoever unlocked the vaults of the Secret Project a Willy Wonka-style Golden Ticket. In the early 1980s Lucas was thinking about expanding his family: he and his first wife Marcia adopted a child, then he adopted two more as a single parent after his divorce. Maybe he wanted to go further: to find budding kindred spirits who could think enough like him to have fun solving a crazy riddle he had fun creating. This may be why the Secret Project was apparently at first under the aegis of the Lucas Learning division of Lucasfilm. Publicly, Lucas Learning was dormant until 1998, when it released the game Star Wars: Droidworks. But Brian Moriarty officially transferred to Lucas Learning in 1990, right after making LOOM, and right when one might reasonably have expected him to want to finish that series. And on the Full Throttle Remastered commentary, Tim Schafer mentions “the Secret Library Archive Project” – SLAP for short, a fitting LucasArts-y acronym – which he says fell under the purview of Lucas Learning. (And, of all places, that particular bit of commentary shows up in the secret basement vault belonging to Melonweed’s junkyard owner Todd, voiced by Mark Hamill.) Of course, Lucasfilm belongs to Disney now. Whatever Parsifal dreams George Lucas might have had turned out to be just pipe dreams. But the Secret Project might not be dead. After all, the last Disney Star Wars movie ended with a resounding thud, with the redeemed Ben Solo killed off anticlimactically and Rey left as half of a broken dyad. Shamelessly cynical as that movie is, I could see it contributing an alternate ending with Ben Solo surviving to the Secret Project archives. The lowest of low-hanging fruit, as it were. And if the Project is alive? Dum spiro, spero. While there’s life, there’s hope. “In the dead of space, something is alive.” Conclusion – whither Mixnmojo? Assuming all this to be true – what do we do about it?That’s a riddle I’m still in the process of unraveling. But posting all this evidence here in one place seems like a good start.