Interactive movies… you might say that if you have played one of them, you have played them all. From the humble beginnings with pixelated miniature slide shows up to the fullscreen full motion video titles, all of them have one thing in common: A shallow plot combined with bad acting, interspersed by obscure and out of nowhere puzzles. The game we are going to discuss today, Black Dahlia, tried its best to leave this reputation behind by turning things up to eleven, with really high production values and an even somewhat creative story.
This is an action game which is commonly seen as the great-grandfather of all ego shooters. It was the year 1992 when this virus, disguised as Shareware, was travelling across busy schoolyards and noisy scene parties, spreading from drive to drive. The shooting orgy by American star programmer John Carmack had an irresistable appeal to the teenagers who hadn't yet been cauterised by mass-produced imitations of this ego perspective, and the extra episodes which were available for sale made John Carmack a millionaire overnight.
One could argue Trinity came three years too late. The US Senate refused to ratify SALT II even already a couple of years earlier, the civil Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down out of paranoia in September '83, the Able Archer excercise showed a new quality of macho provocation, and at the end of the same year, the German parliament finally made way for the implementation of the NATO Double-Track Decision, i.e. the stationing of new nuclear missiles right at the iron curtain separating Europe. The most striking example of fictional media coverage of this new height of tension certainly was The Day After, first shown on TV the very same year. In 1986, when Trinity was released, even though the situation certainly was anything but stable, things seemed to be developing in the opposite direction already again. Had Infocom taken too long to deliver their treatment of the mainstream fear of nuclear war?
