The Secret Project thread

[ATMachine]

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.

[Jake]

AT it’s just as likely that you are making up a read behind those photos as the author of that Twitter account is. Like in the Outlaws thread you basically made up that the document was for two separate games (I guess citing Last Crusade as precedence, despite the action game not being an in house project in that case), and then continued to pile evidence on top of that as if it was true, and repeatedly challenged people who might claim otherwise - with no additional evidence other than how well it fits into your theory, which is not actually evidence. You cannot both invent the foundation yourself, and refute other people citing flaws in the foundation, without additional hard evidence that strengthens that foundation itself. (How well it enhances other ideas further downstream from that foundation is not further evidence of the validity of that foundation, that’s not how it works.)
 

Your pattern seems to be: Create a hypothesis/foundation and then declare “if that is true, it gives new meaning to all these other things,” which is often very interesting and lets us see previously unrelated things in a new and possibly-interconnected light, but if your foundation is also your hypothesis you absolutely have to be more graciously accepting of challenges to the hypothesis. Indy could just as easily be questioning the snake might be real, and given his pattern of fearing snakes it’s more likely what is happening than his entire character being misrepresented by him being “revenant” to a snake. But that would disrupt your own ideas downstream of that hypothesis so you give it no credence, despite like you it being posted by a fan. 
 

Your arguments will forever be weak if you take this defensive approach.
 

It seems like you are more interested in building up your own theories than pursuing the truth. 

[ATMachine]

 

17 minutes ago, Jake said:

Your arguments will forever be weak if you take this defensive approach.
 

It seems like you are more interested in building up your own theories than pursuing the truth. 

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.

Edited August 17, 2020 by ATMachine

[elTee]

7 minutes ago, ATMachine said:

 

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.

If this conspiracy extends to anyone who's worked with LucasArts alumni then there's no way that it wouldn't have come out by now. 

[ATMachine]

 

3 minutes ago, elTee said:

If this conspiracy extends to anyone who's worked with LucasArts alumni then there's no way that it wouldn't have come out by now. 

 

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.

Edited August 17, 2020 by ATMachine

[elTee]

2 minutes ago, ATMachine said:

 

 

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.

 

Why does it need to be secret at all? 

[ATMachine]

2 minutes ago, elTee said:

 

Why does it need to be secret at all? 

 

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.

[ATMachine]

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”.

[Jake]

8 minutes ago, ATMachine said:

 

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.

I’ve written a few posts in here saying the theory is bullshit - because it is - but deleted them because just saying that alone didn’t seem like it would be enough. I thought just saying “this is BS” would be less helpful than what I ultimately did say. But apparently I was wrong, as you only quoted the last sentence of my reply to try and throw it back at me, but didn’t engage with any of the substance of the post.

 

Multiple people have already said in this thread what I would have said myself: Game development (and making commercial entertainment in general) is a messy process. I’ve never been on a project that was guided precisely by some master hand, aiming to reach a long agreed on goal. That’s just not how it has ever worked. As you make something, the act of making changes it. Your goals change. You learn and refine what the strengths of tour project are as you make it. Anyone who chases the same perfect goal from beginning to end without adjusting as they go will make a bad game, film, whatever. This applies at the studio level too: Different teams are not ideological entities but are closer to porous buckets in the loose shape of the games they are working on, with different team members pouring from one bucket to another as the different games need different resources over the course of their development. If there is a master hand at work here it is only management trying their damndest to keep things held together enough to ship, to make sure games have enough people on them at the right time to literally be content complete, get QA, etc. The idea that there is some big philosophy from the top down is almost impossible to imagine, since all the work that actually goes into what makes the games what they are happens bottom up, from the hands and minds of the people making the games.
 

Marketing and PR messaging sent out to the fans and investors tries it’s best to tell the story of designers’ visions and to map the games along some meaningful trajectory or company goal, but that is the work that is truly reactionary - responding to the games the teams are creating (through some combination of initial goals, re-assessed goals, technical and financial limitations and of course the makeup of the people on the team itself) and trying to craft a message of meaning and intent behind it. 
 

That my posting in here to tell you you’re wrong somehow “confirms” anything to you other than you being wrong, should be evidence enough to people reading this thread that it is in fact a conspiracy theory. 

[s-island]

Quote

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.

It's left as a joke. Try to type "smash cave" and the game replies with ""Maybe next game. We're behind schedule."

[ATMachine]

Just now, s-island said:

It's left as a joke. Try to type "smash cave" and the game replies with ""Maybe next game. We're behind schedule."

 

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.

[ATMachine]

 

2 minutes ago, Jake said:

Multiple people have already said in this thread what I would have said myself: Game development (and making commercial entertainment in general) is a messy process. I’ve never been on a project that was guided precisely by some master hand, aiming to reach a long agreed on goal. That’s just not how it has ever worked. As you make something, the act of making changes it. Your goals change. You learn and refine what the strengths of tour project are as you make it. Anyone who chases the same perfect goal from beginning to end without adjusting as they go will make a bad game, film, whatever. 

 

All of this is true - but it doesn't mean that the Secret Project isn't real, either.

 

2 minutes ago, Jake said:

That my posting in here to tell you you’re wrong somehow “confirms” anything to you other than you being wrong, should be evidence enough to people reading this thread that it is in fact a conspiracy theory. 

 

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:

 

50 minutes ago, Jake said:

Your arguments will forever be weak if you take this defensive approach.
 

It seems like you are more interested in building up your own theories than pursuing the truth. 

 

"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.

[s-island]

People don't behave according to how they should in your mind. You're not God.

 

You can't base entire theories on how you think people behave in every situation and take every deviation of that as proof that something nefarious is going on.

[Jake]

NutriSpecs were held back because of a web game the marketing team was working on which was supposed to reveal them, but that marketing stuff got canceled. Only the little youtube trailer that unveiled them got released, but the rest of it never happened. Those guys were really bummed out that they weren't able to build all of it, to my memory, but I wasn't doing a lot of marketing on season 3 so I don't know the exact reason why they got shelved. I had hoped NutriSpecs would get patched back in for the DVD release (and I think I said as much on here or the TTG forums at the time) but that didn't happen, I think because Telltale was traditionally very conservative about patching for fear it'd introduce new bugs.

[ATMachine]

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

[Jake]

2 minutes ago, ATMachine said:

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

 

4 minutes ago, Jake said:

that didn't happen, I think because Telltale was traditionally very conservative about patching for fear it'd introduce new bugs.

 

To be more clear, I believe that the version of 301 that shipped does technically have nutrispecs included, but they can only be unlocked via online connectivity to the ARG that was never completed. So there is code in 301 waiting to hear something from a website that was never built outside those initial API hooks. Changing it to being "simply" unlocked would have required a patch, which was decided to be not worth the cost and risk of introducing new bugs and doing a new QA cycle for a new build.

[ATMachine]

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?"

 

[elTee]

1 minute ago, ATMachine said:

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?"

 

 

I think the person looks a BIT like Ken Branagh. But Ken Branagh also looks a BIT like Alec Guinness.

 

A "secret project" would be called so precisely because it doesn't have a name, surely? After it has a name you can refer to it by name...

 

If Tim Schafer had made secret library games, why WOULD he mention this?

[ATMachine]

6 minutes ago, elTee said:

 

A "secret project" would be called so precisely because it doesn't have a name, surely? After it has a name you can refer to it by name...

 

If Tim Schafer had made secret library games, why WOULD he mention this?

 

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.

Edited August 17, 2020 by ATMachine

[Udvarnoky]

13 minutes ago, ATMachine said:

 

An untitled game wouldn't be "secret" on its design document, at least in the normal course of game development.

 

This is one of many examples of you just asserting things as if they are self-evident, when they are not. Cheekily referring to an untitled game as a "secret project" may strain credulity for you, but I daresay it's not so great a leap for most people.

[Udvarnoky]

2 hours ago, ATMachine said:

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.

 

This is an insane post.

[Skinkie]

8 hours ago, ATMachine said:

 

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.

 

Speaking as a software developer, depending on the time frame, the laziest hackiest ways are often the most likely to remove half finished content. Especially if you think there's any chance to get back to it later down the line

[CaliMonk]

17 hours ago, Udvarnoky said:

 

This is an insane post.

 

 

Most accurate description ever

[ThunderPeel2001]

19 hours ago, ATMachine said:

Really? But at first you didn't say I was wrong at all. Which would have been the natural and normal reaction.

 

 

Everyone is being respectful towards you because we all like and respect you. Your knowledge on LucasArts stuff is wonderful, and I'm sure I'm not alone in enjoying perusing your website over the years. I happily say thanks for all that cool stuff that you've collected and shared over the years. It's great. 

 

It seems no matter how anyone reacts to your theory however, it's always taken as "proof" that the theory is true. No matter what. I think it's normal for anyone presenting a theory to say (and genuinely believe) that they could be wrong. I think that might be a good place for you to get to internally. Maybe, just maybe, this isn't true... It's a fun distraction, and interesting thought experiment, but maybe there isn't any truth to it.

 

I'll just say that I'm not convinced by your theory. I think the most daring and unusual thing LucasArts ever tried to do was launch a TV show, a comic book, and a NES game all at the same time. And that project (Defenders of Dynatron City) was pretty dull.

Edited August 18, 2020 by ThunderPeel2001

[Jenni]

11 hours ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

Defenders of Dynatron City was pretty dull.

I never watched the pilot or played the game, but Gary Winnick's comics were pretty enjoyable.