Hello,
I haven’t posted here in a while, but I recently discovered something that I felt was worth relating to other people who have played Shivers.
SCI Studio (http://bripro.com/scistudio/index.php) is a program that allows you to view the resource files of Sierra’s various SCI games. It has also recently released a version that allows you to view various resource files from VGA games as well, and remarkably, Shivers 1 can be viewed as well!
I’ve been looking at the game’s files, and I’ve made several interesting discoveries.
For example, the following view numbers…
View12221
View16905
View50700-50900
View51300-52010
View52100-52200
View52300-53101
View54000
…appear to be simple renditions of the game’s puzzles that look almost as if they were done in MS Paint. It’s interesting to see them in the final game. You’d think that the programmers would have removed them. 12221 looks like an early blueprint of one of the museum’s floors, and 16905 is an early version of the note you find on the theater’s podium (interestingly, Beth and Merrick’s handwriting styles have swapped places in this version).
One of the background shots, Pic20441, has a view of the left column by the stone sarcophagus (closed) in Tombs and Curses with large red lettering reading “NEED SHOT” scrawled on it. Perhaps it was a plea for a shot of the same scene with the sarcophagus open.
View39262 was the most shocking find, however. It looks like an animation of the sparking wire in the endgame with a word written in each frame. Strung together, they spell “Marcia Bales is a moron.”
Marcia Bales was the designer of Shivers. This must have been the work of a truly disgruntled animator. Did word of this scandal ever get out?
Also, I found a bizarre animation of one of the walls in the tower morphing to become this huge, octopus-like thing and “float” away. I haven’t encountered this, no matter how many times I visited the spot where this seems to appear (2 clicks up from the door). Maybe it was cut from the game.
Two last observations:
What the heck were those eyes you see when leaving the subterranean world exhibit? The crackling noise makes it seem like it is the thunder and lightning Ixupi, but if you don’t move when they appear (which a couple of the walkthroughs I glanced at strongly advised against), the eyes merely vanish, with no loss of life essence on your part.
Secondly, is the identity of the character who did all the exhibit descriptions ever revealed? It was a bit unnerving to keep hearing this voice and wondering who it belonged to in the context of the game world. I was expecting to find a journal entry from Windlenot saying, “I’ve hired this fellow to provide museum-goers with recorded introductions for all of my fine exhibits”, but no dice.