I really only have two memories associated with this game, and one of them is “Huh, I liked Deja Vu, but geez I’m just not getting this one at all” and that’s why the comic is about something you discover in like, the second room of the game.

The other is set in the Electronics Entertainment Expo in 1999. My editor had sent me to go cover some crappy PC racing game that nobody cared about but instead of going to that meeting me and my friend decided, hey, we’re in Los Angeles for the first time ever, let’s duck out of the show and try to find a place to actually buy some video games. So a half an hour cab ride later we found ourselves in some dirt-covered K-Mart in the middle of nowhere where I bought Super Mario Bros. DX (which was awesome) and Shadowgate (which I had never played before, but figured at the least I could review it for GameSpot and make my money back). Then we realised that we were stuck in the middle of nowhere and had no idea how to get back to the hotel, let alone the convention centre. Somehow we managed to figure out how to us an American payphone (My friend was visiting from Canada and I was a plucky Australian, you know) and ordered a cab.

After waiting half an hour with the thought that not turning up to this meeting was probably a bad move, career wise, a cab pulled up and we got in.

This would have been fine if it was actually a cab and not, you know, a guy in a van pretending to be a cab driver. After locking us in he starts driving the wrong way and ignoring us. We figure out pretty quickly that this is a situation we don’t really want to be in any more, and start demanding to be dropped off.

“DO YOU HAVE FAMILY NEARBY? ARE THEY RICH? DO THEY HAVE MONEY?” he demanded of us.

Well, we didn’t, and they sure as hell don’t because otherwise I would have been a doctor instead of a broke-ass game reviewer.

“GOD DAMN YOU! YOU WASTE MY TIME!” he spits at us before pulling over on the side of the highway and yelling at us to get out (but not before asking us if we have guns for some reason).

To this day we have no idea what God forsaken thing we narrowly avoided, but it made us not complain about the long walk back to the hotel, and I didn’t even mind getting fired for missing that meeting that much.

Oh yeah Shadowgate was good I guess.