X Files

My esteemed colleague, while reading a postmortem on the X Files game, found this choice titbit in the “what went wrong” section:

4. The Password Puzzle

One of the first puzzles that the user was confronted with in the game was the infamous password puzzle. The FBI computer that the player used in the game (as Craig Willmore, FBI agent) was password protected. To enter the computer, the player needed to discover the character’s full name and his password. The password was ‘Shiloh’ (for those of you who intend on playing the game, write this down , a famous civil-war battle. Willmore, being a civil war nut, had posted a map of the battle on the bulletin board of his office. The player was to learn that Willmore liked the civil war, see the map on the bulletin board, and thus make the connection with the password.

Players and reviewers alike complained that an FBI agent should know his own password. Issues of game logic aside, the puzzle was difficult at best, and in actual game-play it had the effect of shutting uninquisitive players out of their computer, and stumping players in the first sequence of the game. A week after the game’s release, Fox Interactive had posted the password in big bold letters on their X-Files tech-support web page to help stem the tide of support calls they were getting about it.

There were many attempts made by several developers throughout development to get this puzzle removed from the game. These attempts were met with heavy resistance from the designers, and the decision was made to keep it in.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 6:36 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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