Watch the Footage archive

Here's something which I thought you all might enjoy... some of the characters that ALMOST made it it, were even brainstormed (and in the case of Dracula, outlined), but for one reason or another got the boot. So here we go:

Javert (Les Mis)
Arc: Would wake up in Las Vegas, become horrified with the town, become police chief and cause so much chaos in our favorite center of debauchery.

Dracula (Dracula)
Arc: Get stuck in a dead-end job at a blood bank, becoming more and more depressed. Similar to what we did with the witch, but not quite the same. There are echoes of what we were thinking for him in his letter.

Robin Hood (Robin Hood)
Arc: Robin Hood would, of course, become horrified with capitalism, and try to start a second Occupy Wallstreet movement (When the game first started being planned, he could have been involved in the first.)

Tom Sawyer (Tom Sawyer)
Arc: Tom was a Cabal Member. He'd use his con artist skills to actually start himself quite a business, and be the primary source of funding for the Cabal. Also, obviously, be in direct conflict with Robin Hood.
I remember one of his refictionalization tropes was "Briefcase Full of Money"

Jane Eyre (Jane Eyre... wow a bit of a theme here)
Arc: Her arc was a general character evolution, similar to what we did with Romeo and Juliet, but less of a train wreck. Evolution from traditional values to more modern, feminist ones.

Sun Wukong (Journey to the West)
Arc: ...We really, really wanted to use this character, as our entire cast was western canon... unfortunately, being all, well, western, we were all more familiar with the second hand stories than the original. So we wound up stumbling on this one.

Gilgamesh (Epic of Gilgamesh)
Arc: This was mainly Tom. I think he has a crush on the guy.

Those last two make me so sad. That would have been cool to see. And I could have trolled good old Gil with F/SN references.

GILGAMESH IS THE BEST.

Also, I'm still kicking myself for not realizing how fun Miss Marple would have been.

We really wanted more female characters, but classic English-language stories from public domain = male dominated. We worked really hard to include some (did you notice that real-world characters, like Joan Lawson or Mme Widdecombe, tended to be female in higher proportions?)

Don't think I'm ever going to forgive myself for not thinking harder about Marple though. God!

Oh god...
These are all awesome, but out of the list: Wukong and Gilgamesh almost made it?! They should have been here! Maybe next time?

Ultimately, I wish these all could have been in )= But the ARG was already a pretty massive undertaking, so some of them had to go.

We also snuck in multiple references hinting that non public domain characters main be active. By we, I mean mostly me. See if you can find them all.

Tom wrote:GILGAMESH IS THE BEST.

Also, I'm still kicking myself for not realizing how fun Miss Marple would have been.

We really wanted more female characters, but classic English-language stories from public domain = male dominated. We worked really hard to include some (did you notice that real-world characters, like Joan Lawson or Mme Widdecombe, tended to be female in higher proportions?)

Don't think I'm ever going to forgive myself for not thinking harder about Marple though. God!

Damn, I would have loved Gilgamesh to be in this.

They are all video game references, and none of them canonically crossed -.-

Tom wrote:(did you notice that real-world characters, like Joan Lawson or Mme Widdecombe, tended to be female in higher proportions?)

I am told that Joe was nearly female as well.

We auditioned women and men for Joe's part, yes.

Sun Wukong also almost challenged the Wall, but we didn't want to do both him and Anansi because they were similar.

Dana wrote:They are all video game references, and none of them canonically crossed -.-

That's not true at all. The first part, I mean =P

And actually our Runner Up for Joe was female, if I remember correctly.

Yep.

What about Inspector Jacques Clouseau?

He's not public domain

(I don't think?)

Oh man, I would have loved a Son Wukong twitter. I think of all the "didn't happen" stuff I've seen since the postmortem started this is the one that most makes me go "aw, damn it." And he's always so balls-out that I'm sure there would have been some awesome/hilarious endgame moments.

Also, talking monkey.

It would also have been nice to have more geographical variance with the characters' origins, but ultimately we had to go with the stories we knew and loved enough to work on for a year and a half.

Javert would have been awesome and probably tempted me into action, but I suppose some of them had to go. Hood would have been cool as well, but again, only so much you could do.

I donno, of these I personally miss Sawyer the most, despite being a huge Les Mes fan. Childish corrupt business executive is cool to me.

His dynamic with Hood would have been great.

I miss Javert. He was gonna be done entirely with security cam footage.

Dana wrote:I miss Javert. He was gonna be done entirely with security cam footage.

I forgot about that! ...the ambition of our youth.

Dana wrote:I miss Javert. He was gonna be done entirely with security cam footage.

You have no idea how sad I am that that was NOT included now. That would have been SO awesome....

(Though I see why he was cut. WOW that would be a lot of work.)

Only with security cam footage, eh? Sounds like an interesting idea.

I would have loved to have seen your take on Tom Sawyer. All your other interpretations were wonderful!

Thank you Yankee!

There was one other that I wanted to do - Sarutobi Sasuke. However, as fun as it would be, I was afraid that it would have lead to rampant silliness with people trying to get him and Long John Silver to fight over that goofy ninja vs. pirate debate. I was afraid it would sidetrack the game too much, so I didn't even suggest him to anyone else. I only included him as a red herring on Experiments in Food Preparation.

I would've been extremely excited to see Javert, since I have an ambition to play him one day (Damn you Russell Crowe, one of these days!) Tom Sawyer and Robin Hood also sound like really interesting characters, and I think they could've played off each other to an extent.