The Dig

About The Dig

The Dig (1995) is LucasArts' sombre science fiction adventure, based on an idea Steven Spielberg devised for Amazing Stories, in which astronauts sent to divert an asteroid are carried to a long-abandoned alien world.

The Dig in Depth

A radio telescope spots an asteroid, dubbed Attila, on a collision course with Earth, and a five-person crew flies the shuttle Atlantis to plant explosives that will push it into a stable orbit: Commander Boston Low, voiced by Robert Patrick; German archaeologist and geologist Ludger Brink, voiced by Steve Blum; linguist and reporter Maggie Robbins; pilot Ken Borden; and NASA technician Cora Miles. The charges work, but Low, Brink and Robbins find the asteroid hollow, and when they enter its central chamber it turns into a dodecahedron pod and carries them to an alien planet. There they find signs of a vanished civilisation, life crystals that can raise the dead, and Brink's growing addiction to them, as they use xenoarchaeology to decipher alien text and find a way home.

It is a point-and-click adventure in which the player uses the mouse to look at and interact with people and objects, collect and use items and talk to characters, running on the SCUMM engine, the eleventh LucasArts game to do so and the last on MS-DOS. Unlike LucasArts' usual comedies, it takes a serious tone. Drawn 2D art is combined with limited pre-rendered 3D clips created by Industrial Light & Magic, and the communicator hides an "Asteroid Lander" minigame like Lunar Lander.

Making The Dig

Spielberg conceived it as an Amazing Stories episode and then a film, but it was too expensive to shoot, so it became a game. It had the longest development of any LucasArts adventure, passing through four project leaders, Falstein, Brian Moriarty, Dave Grossman and finally Sean Clark; Moriarty restarted it from scratch with a bloodier version for adults, and dropped ideas included survival mechanics with food and water and exploring alien cities. Announced for 1992, it was released in December 1995. Michael Land's score, a Kurzweil K2000 synthesiser enriched with samples of Wagner, was universally praised. The Dig sold 300,000 copies by early 1998, LucasArts' best-selling adventure at release, though Bill Tiller said management saw it as a letdown after the hype. Reviews were mixed to positive: critics found the puzzles harder than usual and the graphics and dialogue uneven, but praised its atmosphere and cut-scenes, PC Magazine saying it brought "a true cinematic style to your earthbound PC". Alan Dean Foster wrote a novelisation.