Jack the Ripper

Makers:
InterGalactic Development / GameTek
Year:
1995
Systems:
PC (DOS) / PC (SVGA) / Amiga (OCS)
Genres:
Adventure / Puzzle
Tags:
Historical / Mystery / Unfinished
Language:
English
Median Rating:
3/5

Opinion Back Then

Jack the Ripper is a fine example of a good game with limited resources. There are no embarrassing voice actors or painfully bad dialogue. There are no primitive animation sequences, no terrible live action video clips, and no shiny, empty SVGA sprites which cover an intellectual vacuum. There are no pointless departures into old arcade clones, no mazes, no gambling, no Reversi puzzles. […] It goes to show you that a design can always afford to be clever – and that simplicity can be a strength rather than a weakness. […] Essentially, this game is a modern evolution of the old text adventures, low budget but highly entertaining. If you’d like to try a game that tests your wits rather than your reflexes, you should give this one a try.

Arinn Dembo, Computer Gaming World #143 

Thoughts by Mr Creosote (25 Jan 2025) – PC (DOS)

The mystery of Jack the Ripper continues to fascinate generations. The amount of movies inspired by his never solved crimes is close to uncountable. To not even begin with coverage in literature. Many took basic motifs and went off in rather absurd, wildly fictional directions. Others used the backdrop of these murders to tell a story about Victorian society in general. And yet others took approaches close to documentaries. For Ezra Sidran, it had always been clear that his game would belong into the latter category.

The intro certainly sets a good mood
The intro certainly sets a good mood

I still have hundreds of photographs that I took in Whitechapel, and binders full of all the historical data cross-referenced by person, date, location, etc. I also have a very large library of books on the mystery. I always just wanted to figure out who could have done it.

Work on his Ripper game began in the late 1980s. At the heart of it was going to be all this accurate information about people involved or around, their whereabouts at different points in time around the murders, the statements they gave to the police etc. The promise to players being no less than to access all this knowledge through an entertaining game. Experiencing it while fully involved in the investigation rather than searching through all the original, undoubtedly dry-as-bone sources one by one.

Locations can be searched, but most information is fed to the players through character statements. Key points can be recorded into a register with a click of the mouse. Give a speaking name to the note for later reference. Finally, in the quiet of his study, the protagonist tries to piece all those snippets of information together to unmask the killer. Ideally, before he or she claims further victims – or at the very least before the protagonist himself joins them.

Found a clue
Found a clue

The game explicitly models drawing logical conclusions. Finding inconsistencies, logical impossibilities in the statements or observations, exposing these contradictions. Likewise, identifying correlations. Putting such linked facts together (literally in the interface) results in conclusion entries which can then be further combined with other notes or, in the best case, directly reveal the killer’s identity.

This part, the heart of the game in the mechanical sense, is where the game sets itself apart from the bulk of the mystery genre. Typically, such games fall into two categories. Either, the drawing of conclusions happens just inside the players' minds, i.e. outside the game itself. In other cases, players are occupied with mechanical puzzles, from opening doors to awful puzzle boxes, and then the protagonist will simply reveal conclusions by themselves, usually coming out of nowhere and impossible for players to follow. The former, at least, puts solving the mystery in the centre of the game. Jack the Ripper makes it explicit, weaving its core game mechanic around solving the mystery as an intellectual challenge.

Telecomsoft, the publisher of Sidran’s previous games, left the business and it turned hard to find a new one. Finally, GameTek took the game on board. What Sidran didn’t know yet was that this company had another Ripper game in the pipeline. In retrospect, he suspects their primary interest was not in selling his game, but rather to keep competition off the market:

Only too late did I discover that they had their own, similar project and only signed me to bury my game so they could promote their own.

The Amiga demo version illustrates the 1993 state of the game
The Amiga demo version illustrates the 1993 state of the game

In practice, this meant no further investment would be done on finishing up development. In 1993, a version of the game was widely reviewed by the games magazines of the time. Its EGA graphics were criticised as outdated, but the game system received mostly positive comments. Some doubt on the validity of those reviews is warranted, when one for example talks about a scenario randomiser which isn’t even in the game. In fact, the 1993 version of the game was never released.

Instead, it finally received a limited release with little fanfare in 1995. Graphics updated to SVGA and with a CD soundtrack (planned versions for other systems never saw the light of day), it was still the same game, however. That game, when played, revealing its sketchy, unfinished nature.

Five scenarios are in the game, offering five different pre-scripted solutions. Only three of those are actually available. GameTek promised activation of the two remaining ones to registered customers, alas, this is obviously no longer possible, making the final two inaccessible. The choice to only offer set scenarios instead of allowing them to be procedurally or randomly generated, at least, was fully intended by the author:

I pioneered ‘scenario discs’ back in the '80s with UMS: The Universal Military Simulator. I think every wargame I’ve done comes with either scenario discs, or the ability to create your own scenarios.

Why is this not an accepted combination?
Why is this not an accepted combination?

Beginning to play what’s there, the seeming extent, the scope, the details and the game system make a good impression, indeed. That is, until the player finds the solution. This arrives in a completely one-dimensional manner: the culprit is identified purely based on a mismatch of timing in two statements. Suspicious for sure, but nowhere near any level which could possibly be classified as evidence. Another scenario isn’t any better, the only hint necessary to win being a single item conveniently found right under the first body.

Only the second scenario gives a mild glimpse of how the game system was intended to work. There, the players have to follow one lead to find another character, then combine two statements for an intermediate conclusion and use that one to prove someone else’s lie. It’s not particularly deep, but at least something to be considered as a serious attempt to create an introductory level scenario. It is, however, the pinnacle of complexity in the game at hand.

The game contains a large number of information snippets which simply never get used. There are strong indicators that the first victim has actually been killed somewhere else, then just dragged to where it has been found. The presence of a specific policeman who claims not to have been there is hinted at. There are various characters who profess strong motives to have committed the killings. But the game simply leaves all those threads hanging. It all amounts to nothing but smoke screen to temporarily mask the very disappointing solutions.

Of no relevance
Of no relevance

The intricately designed conclusion system is therefore almost for nothing. It hardly gets used, and when it does, it is unnecessarily picky with respect to the one combination of observations it is looking for. Put the two right things in the wrong order, and they will not be recognised as the solution. Put any equivalent statement to the one intended, and it will not work. Typical indicators of a game not having been properly tested.

Nowadays, Ezra Sidran openly admits the published game’s deficiencies:

I wasn’t allowed to do the work that I wanted to on it. This isn’t a game that I’m proud of. It could have been so much more. I had high hopes for the game and creating a new gaming system.

This potential definitely shows, even if it is just a barebones skeleton of a game. The mechanics work on a basic technical level. The interface is intuitive. Graphics and music of this final version are unspectacular, but timelessly pleasing. The massive amount of information present in this game world is impressive. Yet, all of it goes unused. What’s there is just a box which spits out suspect and witness statements from actual historical records, which may be of some interest to read for Ripper die-hard aficionados, but as a playable game, it fails miserably. It’s easy to see why its author sums it up like this:

The whole experience was very sad.

This, from the same Ezra Sidran who earlier had stated:

Good games will always sell. As my old friend, Dan Horn, once said, “Gameplay trumps everything,” and he was right.

Trivia

AOL, through their subsidiary WorldPlay, were looking into creating online mystery games in the 1990s. They contracted Sidran to create those games based on the same engine. Finally, they pulled the plug on the entire project before publication, leaving Jack the Ripper as the only semi-published artefact of what this engine could have been capable of. Below, some impressions of what the online games were supposed to be.

(Thanks to Ezra Sidran for taking the time to provide the insights used in this article!)


  1. puzzle box:

    Historically, literally a box which poses the challenge of opening it by solving a mechanical puzzle, for example by moving certain parts of its surface in the right direction in the right order. In computer games, the term is used to denote mechanical puzzles to which the game zooms in and which take place without any further interaction with the rest of the game world and which often bear little relation to it.  ↩︎

Box

PC (DOS)

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Files

Screenshots

PC (DOS)

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Amiga (OCS)

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Play

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