Haiku Quest: A Haiku Text Adventure, Starring Christopher Walken
Posted by Joshua_Kopstein on Monday, Aug 30, 2010
Even if game developer John Szczepaniak had decided just to make an RPG-style text adventure about searching for the perfect haiku, it would have been awesome. But this already-clever premise was taken to new heights when John, expecting to be ignored outright, managed to get in contact with the agent of one Christopher Walken. As it turns out, the legendary actor himself was so intrigued by the idea of an adventure game about Japanese poetry that he took time out of his day to record a rough voice-over for the game.
“… On a whim which I never expected to work, I emailed Christopher’s agent and, intrigued by the idea of a non-profit independent game based on Japanese poetry, he took five minutes from his schedule to record the lines on someone’s laptop and emailed me a giant WAV file to cut up.
If his voice sounds a little off, it’s because he was pressed for time (he apologises) and it wasn’t done in any kind of sound booth. I did my best to clean it up though.The poems are generally free-form, but I tried to adhere to most of the rules for writing English haiku. Since only fellow game players are likely to take an interest, all the poems were based on well-known videogames. I suppose the great failing of this endeavour is that you need a background in games to understand them. Christopher mentioned he only got a couple of the references."
For many of us, there is no person on Earth we’d rather hear as a voiceover than Chris Walken, in a videogame or otherwise, so you’ll be pleased to learn that you can download the full Walkenated game, Haiku Quest, for free from the developer’s blog.
via GameSetWatchFiled under:
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Electronic musician and computer culture journalist. Contact: josh ◢at◣ motherboard ◐dot◑ tv
