Building An Afterlife That Doesn't Go To Hell

A look back at Lucasarts' heavenly and hellish sim

Heaven and Hell are on fire again, and it's all my fault.

My advisers, a chirpy cherub named Aria and a sardonic demon in a suit named Jasper, have both tendered their resignations. It seems I've gone so far into the red that the powers that be have sent four demons on surfboards to ride a wave of lava across hours of hard work while twangy surf rock mocks my failure.

I'm 10 years old, I'm playing a game called Afterlife and I have no clue what I'm doing.

If you're like me, you're a nerd that grew up with a Mac. That may seem all fine and dandy to people who had an IBM or HP, but for me, the ’90's gaming landscape was bleak at best. You don't know pain until you've been left alone with the likes of Orion Burger or Isaac Asimov's The Ultimate Robot while your friends were enjoying King's Quest VI.

The only gaming companies that fully supported the Mac seemed to do so out of some misguided pity, and at the end of the day you were really left with two companies that stood above the rest: Lucasarts and Blizzard. When one of them put out a game, I played the ever-loving hell out of it, because that's all I really had. So I guess it's not surprising that I'm one of the few people that has fond memories for the black sheep of the Lucasarts library: Afterlife.

Afterlife is a game with a seemingly simple premise: Take Sim City 2000, double it, and make it about juggling Heaven and Hell at the same time. You play not a god, but a Demiurge who's tasked by the nebulous "Powers That Be" to manage the hereafter of an alien planet. Souls come in and you manage their eternal reward based on each of the seven deadly sins and virtues. If you do something wrong, your little angel and demon adviser tell you what's up and you fix it. Tide goes in, tide goes out: Simple enough, right?

Wrong. Afterlife is far more complex than meets the eye. For starters, you're told outright that the roads in hell can't be efficient: The damned must walk millions of excruciating steps across burning hot pitch, whipped by demons before they can reach their mandated torments. You're also told that you have to train your own angels and demons in little tiny ethereal colleges, otherwise you're spending money shipping in supernatural commuters from a neighboring kingdom come. Oh, but don't train too many: if you do, your idle and unemployed workforce will start waging war, leading to disaster and destruction.

Further complicating this is having to deal with the belief systems of the creatures on the planet. When creatures in the game die, they get exactly what they believed in when they were alive, which are then summed up in long, complicated, and silly sounding acronyms that effect the ecosystem of your Afterlife. A Christian for example, would be a HOHOSUSAALFist : a being that believes Heaven Or Hell Only await them, that Souls Undergo Singular Afterlifes and that the Afterlife Lasts Forever.

Again, I was 10 when I played this game. As a result, I would typically last about an hour or so before all my money was on fire and the ethereal realms went tits-up while a giant demon named Vinnie disco-danced on my grave.

So why slog through a game if it's this mind-numbingly difficult? Because it turns out the game is funny. Like, really funny. Each torment and virtue has it's own name and description, from "The Only Non-Sleezy Singles Bar in Creation" to "The Worst Little Whorehouse in Hell". The currency is called “Pennies from Heaven.” If you cheat too much, the Death Star destroys your afterlife. The game even gives you the option to look at the randomly-generated biography of one of the fictional souls that walk through your pearly and/or ebony gates.

It's like the Divine comedy, if the Divine Comedy was written by massive nerds.

I went back to Afterlife earlier this year, FAQ in hand, determined to get as far as I could without dying. I learned a few things. I learned that the best way to ensure a stable population on your planet is to curse them with Lust and Peace, turning them into horny hippies that wanna make love-children, not war, man. Nipping atheists and people who believe in reincarnation in the bud also helps, and there's also a strategy that involves ignoring hell for about half of recorded history until you have the funds to do it right.

To my surprise, I also found out that the designer of the game, Michael Stemmle, left a little Easter egg in the game for those willing to find it. It's a note in the form of a building called the "Mother Shak", made by laying down a specific sequence of tiles in a 7×7 grid.

It reads as follows:

"I believe, without reservation, that there is more to existence than the reality we are subjected to each and every day of our lives. I believe that we are more that the sum of our DNA and our memories, and that there is something, immeasurable and immortal about all of us. I believe that when we die, this part of us (heck, let's just call it a "soul") goes someplace else. Maybe it eventually comes back.

Why do I believe these things?

Because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate. If we are just all "happy accidents" of nature, randomly bouncing our way through a random universe, then I want nothing to do with it. A life without purpose (no matter how nebulous, whimsical or inscrutable) is a wasted life, and a universe without purpose (no matter how nebulous, whimsical or inscrutable) is equally useless.

Well, that's my opinion anyway.

Mike

PS. I also believe in UFOs, Bigfoot, The resurrection of Christ, and the Loch Ness Monster, so you'd probably be well advised to take the above statement with a grain of salt."

Thanks Mike, for letting me play in your bizarre, Omnitheistic world. And thanks Lucasarts of yesteryear, for making my adolescence that much weirder.