The Dig - Development

Development

The project leader was LucasArts' Sean Clark, Industrial Light and Magic created some of the CG imagery, it is based on a story idea by Steven Spielberg and has writing credits for Spielberg, author Orson Scott Card (who wrote the dialogue), and the well-known interactive fiction author Brian Moriarty (whose previous Lucas engagement was with Loom).

The Dig was originally conceived by Spielberg as an episode of Amazing Stories (and later as a film), but was concluded to be prohibitively expensive. During the game's release, the director did not deny the possibility of making it into a movie. However, over a decade later, no progress has been made on a film version of the story.

The Dig had by far the longest development length of all LucasArts adventure games. Work began in 1989 but the game was not released until 1995. During its development there were four successive project leaders, starting with Noah Falstein, followed by Brian Moriarty, then Dave Grossman, and finally Sean Clark who managed to get the game released.

The first preproduction involved a storyline that took place in the distant future. A crew of explorers in a space ship visit an abandoned planet and discover signs of very intelligent life with powerful technology and artifacts. It is first assumed that the occupants of the planet had died off, seeing as there is no sign of them left, but as the story progresses, the player discovers something very different.

When Brian Moriarty took over, he decided to start again from scratch. This version of the game was similar to the actual game that was released, but it had one extra character, a Japanese science-hobbyist business tycoon named Toshi Olema, who funded the Attila project as long as he was a part of the crew. Toshi would have met a gruesome death when he stumbled into a cavern with acid dripping from the ceiling, with the other astronauts being unable to safely retrieve his body to bring him back with life crystals. He was later completely removed from the story. This version of the game was also very bloody and adult, and although Steven Spielberg thought this feel was very fitting, he had received quite a bit of complaints about the first Jurassic Park film, from parents who had ignored the PG-13 rating and brought their young children to see the movie because it was about dinosaurs, only to discover that the movie contained blood and graphic violence. So, worrying that parents would purchase the game for their rather young children, he requested that it be toned down a bit.

Other notable design ideas which were dropped during the game's production include a survival angle, which forced you to keep water and food supplies for life support and exploration of entire huge cities on the planet.

Some fans of the game had attributed the turbulent development history of the game to "The Dig curse". This term was coined because the game's design team met for the first time at the Skywalker Ranch on the day the 1989 San Francisco earthquake struck. It was said that this started a bad omen for the project that persisted throughout.