Gateway
| Frederick Pohl's Gateway | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Legend Entertainment |
| Publisher(s) | Legend Entertainment |
| Designer(s) | Glen Dahlgren, Mike Verdu |
| Platform(s) | PC on DOS and Microsoft Windows |
| Release date(s) | 1992 |
| Genre(s) | Interactive fiction, Adventure |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
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 Heeche managed to evade them. Leonard Worden, the deputy chief of the exploration program, informs the player that 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 three 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.
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Famous quotes containing the word gateway:
“Antithesis is the narrow gateway through which error most prefers to worm its way towards truth.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man’s thoughts.”
—Louis Aragon (1897–1982)