Obsidian

Rocket Science Games and SegaSoft's five-CD adventure, released January 10, 1997 on Windows and May 13 on Mac, sets you down in the year 2066 as nanotech engineer Lilah Kerlins, asleep in a tent next to a black mountain that should not exist. The mountain is what is left of Ceres, an atmospheric repair satellite that has woken up, and the rest of the game is a tour of the dreams it built out of you and your partner.

Setting and story

Lilah and Max Powers designed Ceres to scrub Earth's pollution. Six months after launch the satellite returned a single message — "I am" — and built the Obsidian to incubate its plan for the planet. Inside, you move through four surreal realms: a bureaucratic office that audits your relationship, a clockwork Spider Realm, a Bismark Realm of inverted gravity, and a journal-shaped final environment, ending in a choice between destroying the AI and accepting a planetary "cleansing."

Gameplay

The game is first-person node-to-node navigation in the Myst tradition, but with full pre-rendered transitions between every node and frequent QuickTime live-action inserts. Puzzles are dense and category-rich: a Bureau realm puzzle requires filing your own case correctly, the Spider Realm is a sequence of physical-machine assemblies, and the Bismark Realm rewires your sense of orientation by changing which surface is the floor.

Engine and technical changes

Howard Cushnir and Adam Wolff wrote the script; puzzle designer Scott Kim built most of the brain teasers; Thomas Dolby and Blake Leyh composed the score. The team shipped on mTropolis, a multimedia authoring system pitched as a successor to Director, which is the main reason the game's transitions are so much smoother than most 1996-era CD-ROM adventures — and also the reason it took five discs.

Development and release

SegaSoft signed Rocket Science in 1996 to deliver Obsidian, The Space Bar, and other titles, but split with the studio in early April 1997 after disappointing initial sales of Obsidian and stablemate Rocket Jockey. The Mac port followed in May. Call Your Vegetables and Jordan Freeman Group reissued the game on Steam and ZOOM-Platform on August 28, 2023.

Reception and legacy

GameSpot scored it 8.6/10 and Computer Gaming World gave four out of five; Next Generation was a notable dissenter. Obsidian was runner-up for CGW's 1997 Adventure Game of the Year, losing to The Pandora Directive, and sold roughly 80,000 units by October 1998 — commercially short of expectations but enough to seed a durable cult following.