Noctropolis
A bookstore owner becomes his comic book hero.
Noctropolis is a 1994 MS-DOS third-person adventure game developed by Flashpoint Productions and published by Electronic Arts. The player assumes the role of Peter Grey, a lonely bookstore owner who finds himself transported into the world of his favorite comic book, where he discovers he is destined to become the comic's hero. The game is notable for its use of digitized analog footage of real actors placed within 2D digital environments, a technique that gave its characters a distinctive live-action look.
Quick Facts
- Title
- Noctropolis
- Developer
- Flashpoint Productions
- Publisher
- Electronic Arts
- Producer
- Roland Kippenhan III
- Designer
- Brent Erickson / Shaun Mitchell
- Programmer
- Colin McLaughlan
- Artist
- Shaun Mitchell
- Composer
- Ron Saltmarsh / Andy Warr
- Platforms
- MS-DOS / Microsoft Windows / Linux / macOS
- Released
- MS-DOS · December 1994 · Microsoft Windows · 3 September 2015 · Linux, macOS · 27 October 2017
- Genre
- Adventure game
- Modes
- Single-player
Facts from the source article.
Lore & Background
Noctropolis was released in 1994 for MS-DOS, blending third-person point-and-click gameplay with cut scenes. Players must locate items and carefully choose dialogue to gather information and progress. The game's characters were created by digitizing analog footage of real actors, placing them into hand-drawn 2D digital backgrounds. This technique gave the game a unique visual style that combined live-action performances with comic-book-style environments. The story follows Peter Grey, a bookstore owner who is pulled into the world of his favorite comic and learns he must take on the role of its former hero.
Reader's Guide
Noctropolis received mixed critical reception. Charles Ardai of Computer Gaming World praised the game's visual style and detailed art but criticized its simplistic interface and reliance on juvenile shock value through gratuitous violence and sexual content, which he felt distracted from a lack of substance in the story. He also noted the game was highly derivative of both comic books and other computer games. In contrast, a reviewer for Next Generation highly praised the story, abstract and challenging puzzles, comic-book-style backgrounds, digitized character animation, soundtrack, and dark atmosphere. While noting that some dialogue was silly for a Mature-rated game and that many puzzles required illogical leaps of intuition, the reviewer concluded it was one of the best graphic adventures of the season. In 2015, Night Dive Studios acquired the rights and recovered the source code from the original developer. The assembly code was ported to C++ with the help of the original developer, and an enhanced version was released on Steam in September 2015 and on GOG.com in January 2016. This remastered version featured full compatibility with modern computers, a remastered soundtrack, improved keyboard/mouse support with rebindable keys, bug fixes, and the removal of dead-end situations that could make the game unwinnable. Linux and macOS versions followed in October 2017. Notably, players who pirated this version would see their character imprisoned on the game over screen instead of the standard animations.
Did You Know?
- The game's characters were digitized from analog footage of real actors.
- Night Dive Studios recovered the source code from the original developer to create an enhanced port.
- Players who pirated the remastered version see their character imprisoned on the game over screen.
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