Initially released in Japan in May 1995 and subsequently in the West, D is renegade studio WARP’s breakout title that put them and their maverick boss Kenji Eno on the video game map. In Western territories, this two-disc game bears the shortest (and shortest possible) title of any Saturn game; in Japan, it was properly titled Ｄの食卓 (D no syokutaku; D’s Table or D’s Diner).
D is a full-motion-video horror adventure game. It’s an exemplar of a game style that, for better or for worse, has since disappeared into the sunset. Computer rendered FMV games simply aren’t made anymore but for a few years in the 1990s these games were regarded as extremely sophisticated and advanced. Rendered video was visually far, far superior to what could be achieved on the fly with sprite or polygon rendering. It is worth remembering that D released when the Genesis and Super NES were in their prime, and one need only look at the top games of the year for examples of where the bar for game visuals rested. Notwithstanding that rendered graphics have aged horribly, seeing D in 1995 was mind-blowing. Think of moviegoers seeing Jurassic Park and all its’ realistically-rendered dinosaurs and contrasting that to a film that used stop-motion miniature animation to convey the same visual scene. This is an important fact to remember, because whilst today D looks absolutely amateurish and simplistic, it was truly bleeding-edge in its’ day.
So what is D? D is the story of two hours of the life of Laura Harris, daughter to world-renowned Dr. Richter Harris, currently serving as director of the Los Angeles Hospital. Dr. Harris appears to have snapped and gone on a killing spree in the hospital. Police have surrounded the facility, but with Dr. Harris holding numerous hostages, their options are limited and they are merely maintaining a perimeter. Enter Laura, who upon hearing the dreadful news, immediately set out for Los Angeles to discover the truth behind what was going on.
The player isn’t exactly told why the police permits young Laura entrance into the hospital alone and unarmed, but enter she does. Quickly surveying the scene and finding multiple bodies, she is overcome with shock. It is then that she sees a shimmering… something down one of the hospital corridors, and as any of us would do in her place, decides to reach out to touch it with her hand…
… and finds herself in a medieval-looking dining room, with no idea what had just happened. Peering around, she immediately feels her father’s presence and he addresses her as an ethereal ghost-head, warning her not to proceed any further in looking for him. She is in an alternate reality of his mind’s making and staying too long will have irreversible consequences. A specific, real-time two hour limit is then imposed on the player – fail to complete the game under two hours, and Laura will be trapped in his horrifying unreality forever. Undeterred, our silent heroine ignores her father’s warnings to go back, and presses onwards to solve the mystery of her mild-mannered father’s inexplicable, murderous rampage.
That’s the introduction to the story. Complex and certainly mysterious, and most definitely much more mature than virtually all contemporary 1995 games. The game wastes no time in letting the player know it isn’t about collecting 100 rings or defeating Shao Kahn. This is a game about solving a mass murder, and it flirts with psychological and paranormal nuances to boot.
First time players must quickly accept that there is no pause or save function, or even any game options. Immediately following the introduction sequence, the clock begins to tick down two real-time hours and short of completing the adventure, there is no stopping it. In a practical sense, there is little point to playing this game unless a full two hours can be dedicated to the experience, which in today’s busy, on-demand world, is quite restrictive. However, this limitation is part of the game’s charm – few other games demand this kind of commitment from players. This game takes itself seriously.
Laura has access to a very basic menu where the few items that can be acquired during the adventure are displayed, along with two permanent items: a clock and her compact. Because there is absolutely no in-game overlay, the player must access the clock via the item menu each time they wish to see how much game time remains. If this was done intentionally then it was a wise design choice; this way, the player has zero on-screen distractions as they attempt their way through the adventure.
Her compact is the second permanent item in Laura’s sparse inventory. Cleverly, the compact acts as a completely optional hint device. A stumped gamer can select the compact and when Laura opens it, the mirror inside very briefly displays a small visual clue as to what needs to happen next or where Laura should go. The catch is that with each use, a crack appears in the mirror, and after three uses, the mirror shatters and the compact is useless.
These two items aside, Laura is able to find keys and other miscellaneous items required to progress in her quest and they appear in this inventory. Once in position, the item menu is called and the item activated. If the wrong item is selected or the player attempts to use an item in the wrong area, nothing at all will happen. Although most items are required to be found to progress in the game, there are a few optional discoveries as well. Hidden in the game are mysterious glowing bugs and when Laura finds one it triggers an intense flashback sequence. Laura must confront repressed childhood memories which shed light on her past and have relevance to her current predicament. They are not necessary to get to the end of the game, but all four must be found to view the ‘best’ ending.
Moving around in D’s world in 2019 takes a bit of adjusting, especially as the 1995 environments were made to look as cutting-edge realistic 3D as possible. Today’s gamer will initially confuse these for poorly textured 3D environments, but of course they are pre-rendered images. Laura’s movements are therefore extremely restricted and this will be jarring for those expecting free reign in the game world. Personally, having never played D prior to 2019, I (Peter) had to fight the urge to look, move, see, touch and explore everything within sight. The best way to think of moving around in D is to imagine there being invisible rails and endpoints throughout the rooms and halls that Laura explores, and her only being able to move along those rails and stop at those endpoints. As soon as I had this visual in my mind, my frustration for not being able to move around at will was allayed. I realized that anything Laura couldn’t access was inconsequential to the game’s progression and could be safely ignored.
Speaking of moving around, Laura moves slooooowly. This becomes a pain point as the player is working against the two-hour time limit. For any initial time through an area this is not an issue as the player is experiencing it for the first time and paying attention to surroundings, details, etc. but it irritates on any subsequent visit. Anyone who has read any of Jackson and Livingstone’s excellent 1980s Fighting Fantasy choose your own adventure books (my favorite was The Keep of the Lich Lord), will see this as comparable to reading a section carefully the first time through, but simply skimming if not outright skipping it entirely if the adventure redirects you to the same passage. In D, the player is left watching the FMV sequence without any means to skip or speed up the process.
Progressing through the castle requires the player to solve consecutive puzzles. To WARP’s credit, these puzzles are for the most part well balanced. Never obtusely difficult yet rarely obvious, they will tax a first time player just appropriately. The easier ones simply involve locating keys, the tougher ones require interacting with objects at various endpoints in the castle, whilst the toughest are logic puzzles. The interaction puzzles are ultimately easier than they appear simply because as an FMV adventure, there really is only so many endpoints at which interactions are possible. If you find a book that feels like it belongs somewhere in the reading room, there are only so many places Laura can stop off in that area. The logic puzzles are the most challenging, requiring players to observe various details in order to progress past them. Good stuff to satisfy a craving for an intellectual, mature horror game when a couple of hours are available to play. In that sense, D is less action oriented and more cerebral than a horror game like Resident Evil. There are a very, very few number of scenes that become slightly more than simple interactions – areas where button presses must be timed, akin to a primitive quick-time event, however these instances are really sparse. For the most part, gameplay consists of moving from scene to scene and interacting at the endpoints.
There isn’t much background music playing in the game, with the occasional crescendo when a particularly grisly scene is discovered. The music and sound effects attempt to augment the feeling of suspense and fear and they succeed, but somewhat marginally. Walking into a room full of corpses produces a jolt of sound and elicits a spike of fear in the player, but the fear never lingers as long as it perhaps should in order to be effective.
Visually, D fares a bit better in setting a fearful atmosphere. Scenes intended to elicit shock do so, although the more macabre scenes are far more effective than those meant to be outright shocking. Seeing corpses impaled on spikes is one thing, but figuring out the combination to a lockbox and finding a cadaver’s hand inside, and having to remove the ring from one of the fingers, is much better at creating a very creepy mood.
The visuals themselves are of course extremely dated. The renders are very basic and relatively low-color, although the video moves at a good framerate. Where the illusion is spoilt the most in in Laura’s facial expressions. They are hit and miss – sometimes being very well done and at other times being robotic. In particular, there is a scene where Laura finds herself running from a giant rolling boulder, and she has as much expression as if she were reading the dictionary. Actually, her running in this scene reminds of the T-1000 chasing after the Terminator and young John Connor, with this metallic hook hands. He has the same sort of expression as Laura does in her boulder chase sequence.
One last note on the visuals: the video is extremely bordered on all sides. The player will view the FMV in a box on their screen. The original graphics were rendered on Amiga 4000 PCs and it shows. It is important to remember that for the time they were cutting-edge, and that D followed in the footsteps of – and indeed, innovated over – predecessor adventures such as Myst.
Being spread across two discs, D employs a neat feature to enable the jump from one disc to the next. The game creates a small save file immediately upon the completion of disc 1, and when the second disc boots, the game looks for this file in order to continue the adventure. As soon as the game resumes, the system actually deletes the save file, so that the integrity of the two hour time limit is preserved. Should you fail whilst on disc 2, there is no re-starting from the mid-point of the game! If file is missing when attempting to launch disc 2, the player simply gets a screen asking to insert disc 1. Sneaky, sneaky! Now, of course, logical gamers will quickly copy the save file from their internal memory to a memory cartridge before launching disc 2, but where’s the fun in that?
The game contains four possible endings. The first occurs when Laura fails to clear the adventure in the two hour time limit. The three endings available at the conclusion of the adventure depend on whether all of the glowing bugs have been found, and on how Laura’s ultimate interaction with her father unfolds. This extends the game’s replay value slightly, especially for completionists. That said, once the adventure is completed there is very, very little to invite subsequent playthroughs. As soon as the mystery is solved, the game becomes incredibly shallow. The surprises, frightening scenes and the overall story simply do not have any impact once the player knows what is going on. It would be very accurate to say that this truly is a game ‘best before’ three or four hours have been sunk into it.
Ultimately with all factors considered, how does D measure up in 2019? D is a product of its’ time more so than almost any other game. Gameplay conventions have advanced so far that a first-time player will be confused in playing it, visuals today are rendered on-the-fly at hundreds of times the detail contained in the pre-rendered scenes of D, and the lack of replay puts this game squarely into the ‘play once, never again’ category. Acclaimed upon its’ release, the game has withered away under the harsh light of time.
And yet… D is an important game. It brought a realism and maturity to videogames that had seldom been explored prior, and helped pave the way for what ultimately became the survival horror genre. Having played the game for the very first time this year, I can say that it was an educational experience more than it was a fun one. Those that have never tried it should do so, of course, but watching a let’s play of this game would provide almost the exact same experience as actually playing it. D is important in the same way as the original Street Fighter in the long history of video games: a crucial progenitor no longer relevant in the grand scheme of video games.
Shiro Challenges
Well, there is only so much that can be done in a game like D, but here we go…
- Find all four glowing beetles during your adventure. This is the key to getting the best of the possible endings.
- Complete the game without using any guides or online clues. A game like this is only surprising once, so don’t spoil it for yourself!
Sony’s betrayal – HANDLED
Kenji Eno was not your typical Japanese studio head. Brash, loud and outspoken, he was never one to shy away from controversy. After D’s initial success on the 3DO, WARP ported the game to both the SEGA Saturn and the Sony PlayStation. The Saturn game went on to be a great success, shooting up to the top of Saturn sales charts in its’ first week. Sony, however, placed a low priority on the game and instead of the promised 100,000 units, told Eno that they were pressing only 40,000 copies… and actually pressed merely 28,000. This enraged Eno. At a subsequent PlayStation-only game event in 1996, Eno was presenting his upcoming game Enemy Zero, and when the presentation was over, the PlayStation logo he had at the end of his video morphed into a SEGA Saturn logo, and after telling the delegates how he felt about Sony, declared that Enemy Zero all future WARP titles would be exclusive to the SEGA Saturn. At a PlayStation event. Yes, this actually happened. Eno did Segata Sanshiro proud, and gave Sony the public poke in the eye it so richly deserved!
Like a Boss
Kenji Eno was Indie back when nobody even knew indie was a thing you could do.
Blizzard Senior Producer Andrew Vestal, Twitter, 2013
Ever the wily producer, the Warp boss wanted to include gory scenes in D, including scenes of cannibalism. Nervous that cannibalism would not make it past the censors yet adamant to include it, he submitted his game without these scenes for approval. Once approved, he deliberately failed to submit the master of the game on time for mass production – a move that required, by penalty, that he personally hand-deliver the masters to the production facility in the United States. Whilst en-route to do so, he swapped out the approved version of the game with the one containing the cannibalistic scenes. Eno handled this situation like the boss that he was.
The Many Faces of Laura – WARP’s Digital Actress Extraordinaire!
WARP’s games were generally centered around one main character, ‘played’ by what the studio called a ‘digital actress’. Laura is the female lead in WARP’s games D (3D0, Saturn, PlayStation, PC), Enemy Zero (Saturn, PC), and D2 (Dreamcast). She is the same digital actress, although she bears a different last name in each game, and the characters she ‘plays’ are unrelated in any way. Include pics of the three Lauras.
Listen up! D is heavily discussed in SEGA Saturn, Shiro!’s Season 3 Episode 2 2018 Halloween Episode – have a listen; it’s a great podcast featuring K, Patrick, Peter and special guests Gamesmaster Chaz and Samuel, the Southern SEGA Gentleman.
Fun Fact: The North American manual gives you hints on how to enjoy this game (turn off lights, etc.) because nothing like this had ever really existed prior.
3D0 games that ported to Saturn
D was initially released for the fledgling 3D0 format and after attaining some level of success on the platform, was ported to the Saturn (it also saw a more limited release on the PlayStation). D is one of literally dozens of games that have found their way from the 3D0 over to the SEGA Saturn. In some cases, the original 3D0 games were the superior version, in other cases the differences were negligible, whilst in other cases still, the Saturn was the clear winner. Here, in no particular order, are the games that appeared on both systems:
World Cup Golf: Hyatt Dorado Beach was renamed World Cup Golf: Professional Edition for the Saturn. A golf game of its’ time that sports a faster frame rate on the Saturn, it was also available on PlayStation, Phillips CD-i, and PC.
Battlesport: Published by the 3D0 Company for the 3D0, Saturn, and PlayStation, this 1995 game is a mixture of foosball and assault rigs. Rated well on 3D0, the game was less and less well regarded as it hit subsequent platforms.
Brain Dead 13: A cartoon FMV game where Fritz must escape a castle. Think QTEs where wrong choices equal death. Also on PlayStation, Jaguar (!), PC, Mac, Phillips CD-i, and as of 2010, iPhone. The game’s framerate was better on Saturn compared to the 3D0.
Casper: a cute 2D adventure based on the 1990s movie, this Interplay title saw release on 3D0, Saturn, PlayStation, and definitely NOT to cash in on the movie license, the Game Boy Color. This is not a bad game to be honest, and performs just as well across Saturn and 3D0.
Creature Shock: Part 3D space shooter, part FMV Sewer Shark clone, this is another exemplar of developers of the day trying new concepts. Also played on PlayStation, Phillips CD-i, PC. Comparing Saturn and 3D0, users report slightly smoother video in the 3D0 version.
D: similar across all platforms, again reportedly less grainy on the 3D0 compared to Saturn.
Defcon 5: A resource-management / corridor game crossover featuring a sci-fi plot, Defcon 5 only hit the 3D0 in PAL territories. Opinion again marginally favors the 3D0 iteration of the game. Also found on PC.
Doom: World-famous and available on virtually every platform known to mankind, the Saturn and 3D0 ports are generally considered two of the weakest. That said, the Saturn is still superior to the 3D0 in this case, with more levels, larger screen, and even smoother frame rate.
Gex: A really good little platformer, Gex served as a bit of a showpiece for the 3D0 when compared to SNES and Genesis platformers… until it was ported to the Saturn, PlayStation, and PC! More recently, this game has appeared on modern PlayStation iterations. The Saturn and 3D0 versions are identical except for one critical feature: the 3D0 saves progress to memory whereas the Saturn issues passwords. Grrr… just by that virtue, the 3D0 version is better.
The Horde: A neat top-down resource management action game. Virtually identical between the two systems, except that the 3D0 features useful FMV sequences which, on the Saturn, became still screens. Hmm. Early copies of the 3D0 would auto-delete save files in the 3D0’s memory to make room for The Horde’s save file. Needless to say, the publisher soon issued updated copies which did not include this ‘feature’. Also found on the PC and the FM Towns (!).
Johnny Bazookatone: Perhaps the greatest platformer of all time (I jest), this ‘masterpiece’ is equally ‘brilliant’ on either console. Also to be avoided on PlayStation and PC.
Myst: Another title available everywhere, you would think this game would be equal across all competent platforms, yet the 3D0 version outperforms the Saturn due to…
The Need for Speed: The progenitor of this long-running franchise, the Saturn manages a much better frame rate. Also on PlayStation and PC.
Off World Interceptor (becoming Off World Interceptor Extreme on Saturn): is an off-road car combat game. Both platforms have their strengths with this title, but the Saturn generally has more of them than the 3D0. Also for PlayStation.
Olympic Soccer: An average soccer game based on the summer Olympics in Atlanta, it generally performs better on Saturn. Play it as well on your PC and PlayStation.
Pebble Beach Golf Links: This golf game is good, and features the immortal Graig Staddler. Again, we have better overall performance on the Saturn. Play it loud on the SNES; Genesis Does this game as well, and finally, on PC.
Primal Rage: The arcade port of 1:1 dinosaur combat is available everywhere, from mainstream systems to obscurities such as the Amiga. Heck, even the Genesis 32X got a port! Generally speaking, the Saturn port is considered the best of the bunch.
Road Rash: A classic. This was a 3D0 head-turner, featuring real 3D perspectives and licensed music in some parts of the game. The 3D0 version ended up on both Saturn and PlayStation, and the versions are quite similar.
Shanghai: Triple Threat: Classic Maj-jong solitaire tile game. This being so easy on both machines makes them equal in performance. Also for PlayStation, SNES, FM Towns, Sharp X68000 (!).
Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels: Based on the Warhammer games, this title performs well on both systems. Also to be found on PlayStation and PC.
Star Fighter: this 3D flight / shooting game is markedly better on the 3D0. The Saturn port is quite butchered. Find it also on PlayStation, PC and Mac, but 3D0 really is the best version.
Alone in the Dark 2: One Eyed Jack’s Revenge: A progenitor to the survival horror genre, this game looks quite a bit better on the 3D0. Also ported to PlayStation, the FM Towns, the PC and the Mac.
Lucienne’s Quest: The 3D0’s ONLY JRPG (!) this Microcabin game (studio behind Riglordsaga / Mystaria: The Realms of Lore / Blazing Heroes) saw a Japan-only Saturn release under the title Sword & Sorcery. Aside from the fact that English players won’t understand the Saturn game, it is another title that fared best on the 3D0. The Saturn game featured many changes that resulted in a worse overall product.
Corpse Killer: Released as Corpse Killer: Graveyard Edition on the Saturn, this is a conundrum. The Saturn game runs full-screen whereas the 3D0 does not, and features extra options, levels, etc. Overall much better on Saturn… however, the 3D0 version (and ALL other versions) feature light gun support whereas the Saturn is the only version that doesn’t. Also on SEGA CD and SEGA 32X CD, as well as Mac.
Cyberia: An odd in-the-cockpit shooting game that was also on PlayStation, PC, Mac, and FM Towns. Virtually identical across platforms.
Winning Post: The first in a series of horse management sims from Koei (not even joking), this mostly Japanese game saw releases on SNES, PlayStation, FM Towns, SEGA CD, Sharp X68000, and PC. Only the Saturn version released in the West.
Note: some of the screenshots in this post have been adjusted for contrast. D is stubbornly dark!
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