Gateway (video game)

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Gateway
Single-player

Frederik Pohl's Gateway is a 1992 interactive fiction video game released by Legend Entertainment, and written by Glen Dahlgren and Mike Verdu. It is based on Frederik Pohl's Heechee universe. It was followed by a sequel Gateway II: Homeworld, in 1993.

In 1996 Legend Entertainment made the game available for free download from its website.[2]

Gameplay

Screenshot of Barracks and Main interface in Gateway I

Synopsis

Setting

A century in the future, humans land on

Heechee
, but little else is known about them until an explorer discovers a Heechee ship, intact and operational, in one of the tunnels.

Rather than report his findings, he climbs in and activates it. The ship launches and goes into "TAU Space," a faster-than-light travel method. It arrives at a huge space station carved out of an asteroid floating halfway between Venus and Mercury, which is full of thousands of similar ships, but otherwise empty. However, the explorer is unable to figure out how to return to Venus, and faced with a lack of supplies, figures out how to detonate the fuel cell of the ship he came in. The detonation kills him, but also attracts the attention of a NASA tracking station, who send an expedition to investigate.

The discovery of the station and its ships allow humanity to travel into

reverse engineer
the Heechee technology, they can use the ships' stored destinations and the station becomes humanity's "Gateway" to outer space, hence the name. This almost leads to war among the superpowers of Earth over ownership, until a compromise is finally worked out. A co-operative called the Gateway Corporation is formed, with the superpowers each holding one quarter of company stock.

The alien ships that are found still function, but their built-in destinations are a mystery. Navigation is accomplished by using 5 digit codes with the ships' computers, but there is no way to tell what codes go where. Volunteers called prospectors come to Gateway to test the codes and pilot the ships to their destination, explore and report back what they find (as well as bring anything interesting back). A large majority of the prospectors return with little or nothing, a tenth never return, but the remaining 1.5% return with artifacts or knowledge that make them incredibly rich.

Plot

The player character has won a one-way ticket to Gateway, membership as a prospector in the Gateway Corporation and 10 days of provided life support along with a small amount of money. The player begins as a Prospector and follows procedures in order to know Gateway better and afterwards begin exploring Heechee coordinates. The findings are important enough to get him secure 'Green Badge' status; prospectors of that status are sent to explore only known destinations, with considerably higher probabilities of Heechee finds.

Exploration in one such planet brings a Heechee 'computer' which makes him rich; however, after being analyzed by the Gateway Corporation, it reveals that a hostile alien race, dubbed the Assassins threatens all advanced civilizations in the universe, and the Heechee managed to evade them. Leonard Worden, the deputy chief of the exploration program, informs the player that even after all those years, reactivation of the Heechee technology by humans would only make them detectable to the Assassins. However the same computer provides coordinates to an interplanetary shield device.

The game plot then sends the player to four planets in order to activate a shield device that would 'cloak' the technology signal from the Assassins.

The game's climax occurs on a world of the Assassins, dubbed "Watchtower" where the player is sent to activate the mechanism. There he will meet a Heechee artificial intelligence entity and also an electronic Assassin entity which will trap the player in a VR environment. Following the Heechee AI's guidance, the player is tasked to escape them by creating paradoxes and afterwards upload the Heechee AI.

The game ends with the player's return as a hero and the fear that the threat of the Assassins still exists.

Relationship to the novels

The games are based on Frederik Pohl's novels, but deviate significantly.[citation needed] Gateway shares its premise with Pohl's first book, of a poor space prospector who arrives on the eponymous space station with the intent to use the dangerously poorly understood alien crafts that are based there to explore distant worlds and strike it rich. The similarities soon end as the game introduces original elements, changes (in the novel's terms: travel times are negligible, Gateway has Earth-normal gravity, all ships are ones and bastard control panels are the norm) and material from the later books.

Reception

Spellcasting 101, but enjoyed its graphics, music and story. He concluded that for those "looking for weeks of game play and puzzle solving it may seem a disappointment, but for an entertaining story it hits the spot."[4]

References

  1. ^ "LEGEND Company Information". Archived from the original on 1997-01-10. Retrieved 2019-12-24.
  2. Imagine Media
    . p. 28.
  3. ^ Ardai, Charles (October 1992). "Pohl Position: Legend's Gateway". Computer Gaming World. No. 99. pp. 32–33. Retrieved 4 July 2014.
  4. ^ Ellsworth, Greg (September 1992). "Gateway; A Virtual Venus". Computer Games Strategy Plus (22): 44.

External links

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