When it launched in 1994, Midnight Stranger was billed as an unprecedented "interactive social experience."

The CD-ROM game was groundbreaking at the time, allowing players to simulate a night out in an anonymous city and interact with characters played and voiced by real actors.

Now, its Ottawa-based designers want to relaunch Midnight Stranger for a new generation — and they recently held a crowdfunding campaign in the hopes of making that plan a reality.

"There wasn't quite anything like it before. And I do have to say, there really hasn't been anything quite like it since," said Jim Botte, the technical director of the 2016 reboot, to All In A Day host Alan Neal earlier this week.

A 'pioneering effort'

When Midnight Stranger came out 22 years ago, it was hailed by the Toronto Star as a "pioneering effort" and "interactive entertainment as you've not seen it before."

One of the elements that made Midnight Stranger so distinctive at the time was its "mood bar" — a coloured spectrum that hovered at the bottom of the screen and let players guide their conversations with the game's characters.

The green part of the bar signified a positive response, while the red part a negative one. Although players couldn't write their own dialogue, the story of their night out evolved based on where they clicked on that spectrum.

A screenshot from the 1994 computer game Midnight Stranger. Twenty-two years after the "interactive social experience" was released, its Ottawa-based creators have launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring it back. (CBC Ottawa)

"The illusion is that they're actually talking to you and answering your questions, or having a conversation with you," Midnight Stranger's writer and director Jeff Green told the CBC back when it was released.

"It's kind of startling — I've noticed people ... quite taken back by that first illusion, that momentary feeling that in fact they are in conversation with someone who seems to be genuinely there."

Keeping classic 1990s look

More than two decades after the release of Midnight Stranger, Botte and Green are preparing to re-release the game to a new generation, complete with those classic mid-1990s hairstyles, fashions and streetscapes.

That's more due to circumstance, however, than anything else — when the company that originally released Midnight Stranger went bankrupt, all the footage disappeared with it.

"We haven't got any of the source material, so we can't actually update it. All we can do is make it available to people as it was, in the day," Green told All In A Day this week.

"We're looking at putting it online for free so that anybody can download it to their device and play around with it on the bus. Right now, the distribution patterns are limitless."

Midnight Stranger's writer and director Jeff Green, seen here in 1994, is hoping to have the game re-released — for free — by the end of 2016. (CBC)

While the Kickstarter campaign fell short of its $13,000 goal, Botte and Green say they're not giving up.

A successful campaign would have let the pair devote the majority of their time getting Midnight Stranger into the hands of new and former players.

Instead, they'll instead be making the reboot a "part-time effort," writing the code when they're not working on projects that pay the bills, Botte said on Friday.

They hope to have Midnight Stranger available by the end of 2016, he added.