I love The X-Files video game! The one with full motion videos from 1998 (aka 3X79: Agrippa). I’m not much of a video game person, but this one recreated the look and feel of the show, and was even a mythology story that fut well with the show’s story in season 3. And not many people know this, but this website got its name from an inside joke from the game.
Here is an interview with game producer and production designer Phil Peters, courtesy of the Hey Danny, it’s Mulder podcast!
Peters was involved with the game from the first preproduction meetings to after the release, with the porting to PlayStation 1, alongside the director Greg Roach.
The entire production took 3-4 years. [It’s not clear when it started: the years 1994, 1995 and 1996 are all mentioned. The game was released in 1998, during season 5 and the run-up to the movie. This could explain why the game is set during season 3, which was produced 1995-96.]
He came to game production design after doing costume design for theatre then film production. He had just finished design on Northern Exposure.
First, Hyperbole Studios did a proposal to Chris Carter and Fox studio for a game. They wrote and shot scenes for that. Jordan Williams (Agent Craig Willmore; RIP) was the original lead, a personal friend of his, he was not recast for the final game.
The film world didn’t have knowledge or interest for video games at the time. Everything they did was new.
The only restriction they had was that it had to feel like an extension of the show.
Richard Dowdy, a personal friend of Carter’s, wrote the script, and often came from San Diego, to keep the spirit of the show. [He was not otherwise involved with the show, actually this was his only credit anywhere, so Carter must have trusted him quite a bit. Carter and Spotnitz are credited for the story.]
They were sent all episodes and binge-watched to get to know the show.
The production (coding) and live action photography took place in Seattle. They drove up the 3 hours to Vancouver several times to visit the main series production.
The series’ second unit director of photography, Jon Joffin [seasons 2-3; later DoP for a handful of season 4 episodes, and part of Fight the Future], came from Vancouver and was their DoP, to make sure it would have the same feel.
It was approximately a 30 day shoot.
He made floor plans and figures, like a paper board game, to try to visualise how the gameplay would be like.
The script and related documents was a fat 6 inch binder. [He doesn’t confirm that it was a 750 page document but it must have been something like it.]
Most construction was done in an ex Navy base, Sandpoint naval base. It had huge hangars, they built sets inside. Filming was approached exactly like film or TV. The glass lab (at the end of the game) was built into brig of the navy facility.
The Tarakan ship was at Ballard (Seattle neighborhood), it was an oceangoing tug that had been seized for drug trade between South East Asia and the US West coast!
The motel was a real motel at Mercer Island.
They shot some 6 hours of footage. They had a huge editorial department and a huge spreadsheet to organise.
The game crew were in their 20s. The film crew was more experienced.
In reviews at the time, gamers said it was not interactive enough, while TV fans loved it.
The interactive movie game genre never took off. They were at the cusp of it. The game was on 7 CDs, and studios were already seeing streaming gaming coming up, but it took 5 years.
After other projects in the Seattle area, with the dot com boom, he went into academia, teaching film and documentary in Florida.
Tags: 1013interviews, heydannyitsmulder, phil peters, thexfiles, videogame
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