breaks the experience. The idea was that you’d just sit down and play, and when you
stopped playing, you could just quit and go to dinner, or use the computer for something
else, or whatever. And when you go back to playing, it should automatically put you
back to where you left off. And if you make a mistake, you should be able to rewind, like
rewinding a videotape, go back to the point where you think you went wrong, and begin
playing from there. And I think it works. The six different colored eggs were inspired
by, I guess,Monopolywhere you can choose which piece you want: the hat, or the car...
The idea was that if you have a family of six, everybody will have their own egg, and
when someone wants to play they can just switch to their own egg and pick it up where
they left it off. People who complain that you can only have six saved games, or that you
have to use colors instead of filenames, are fixated on the conventional save-game file
system; they’ve missed the point. An egg file isn’t a saved game; it’s essentially a vid-
eotape containing not just your latest save point, but also all the points along the way
that you didn’t stop and save. You can usually rewind to within three to five real-time
minutes of the desired point.
Music also seems to have been effectively used inLast Express. It shifts depend-
ing on what’s going on in the game, as opposed to music in most adventure
games that just plays in the background, never changing. How did you
approach the game’s musical aspect?
We knew that music would be very important to the texture of the game, and finding the
right composer was very important. And we found him: Elia Cmiral, a very talented film
composer from Czechoslovakia, who, by the way, is not a computer game player, had
never scored a computer game, and I think even to this day has never played a com-
puter game. We approached it as a story, as situations, and once he understood that
there were mutually contradictory situations possible in the same story — that in one
outcome Cath gets stabbed and killed and in another outcome he gets past that and goes
on with the story — he had no problem scoring the different variations. (Elia has since
achieved success as a Hollywood composer with scores forRonin, Stigmata, and other
films.)
Actually, although the cliché is that the composer always wants to add more music
and turn down the sound effects so the music can be louder, Elia is very disciplined
about the role of music. For scenes where I thought he would put a big dramatic chord
or at least a little bit of underlining, he’d say, “No, that’s corny, it plays better without
it.” So he was really reducing the number of situations, saving the music for places
where it could really add something. We don’t have any wallpaper music inLast
Express; there’s no point at which music is just repeating in the background, waiting for
you to do something. The real music ofLast Expressis the noise of the train. You
become very attuned to subtle shifts in the ambience: a door opens, the train noise gets
louder, or you hear a door close somewhere, or you hear a rumble of thunder in the dis-
tance, or the train slows down as it arrives at a station. All of that almost comes to the
foreground in the sound track, so that when the music does appear it’s really noticeable.
And in the dramatic scenes, the cut-scenes, we scored those as you would in a film,
using music, I hope subtly, to bring out the different characters and situations. The fact
that Anna, the leading lady, is a violinist, gave Elia a major instrumental motif for the
score. There’s a few hours of gameplay on the second day where Anna is practicing in
336 Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner