Darkness holds one of the primal fears of mankind. But why are we afraid of it? We are afraid, because something might be lurking in the utter blackness and when it is trying to harm us we will not see it coming. Since it easier for us to deal with the tangible than with the abstract, we tend to antropomorphise our feelings. And this leads to the birth of the bogeyman, our manifested anxieties. Especially children with their more vivid imagination combined with all their insecurities – born out of inexperience – are prone to conjuring them up. And since your fear can be turned against you, parents use it to make their children behave – as cruel as this might be. Yes fear is a powerful tool: Whomever you are afraid of has control over you. And this is one of the main themes of Bogeyman.
Thinking about Sierra Entertainment, one of the last things which would probably come to one's mind would be that they took risks. They just kept releasing new installments of their endless series, each with a loyal, defined audience. Fairly secure investments, but no surprises to be expected there. Back when they were still called On-Line Systems, there was no established home computer games market yet, however. So basically any new release was a risk by definition, because each broke new ground in some way. The biggest business risk they took must have been Time Zone, for which a (for the time) large team was tasked to create it over the period of more than a year. Ten salaries bet on the success of one game, released only on one single system to a market which was still fairly small. What was it that required this unprecedented amount of workforce?
The time has come. The night of all nights has arrived, where I will dive into darkness. Evil awakens and a nightmare comes true: Dracula rules our city of New York and the lord of darkness is also the head of the local corporation for cyber-genetics, cyber-space, cyber-surgery, cyber-technology, cyber-weapons and cyber-surveillance. Appropriately, it has been a very long time since the city has seen any light; we are in an apparently endless night.
