After my previous blog post on the history of Red Dwarf video games a while back, I thought – have the fans looked into this topic themselves? After all, they’re a creative bunch – the amount of good fics on AO3 and Fanfiction.net is proof to that – so some games must have been at least created and in the demo stage. As it turns out, they do exist, although there aren’t many out there.
The Planet Smeg Games
Planet Smeg is one of the many (mostly unmaintained and dead nowadays) Red Dwarf fansites out there which provides scripts for the first 8 series, character bios, and, most importantly, games. Despite the age and deterioration of the website (the Wayback Machine’s earliest record of the website comes from way back in 1998 and a lot of the functions of the website, such as a game exchange and a mail section have long gone, making the website now look like some barely updated project made by a GCSE ICT Student), two of the games surprisingly still work and I’ve had a look at them.
Prince of the Planet Potters
Based on the episode “White Hole”, this game is fairly straightforward. Time is spewing into the universe and you must stop it by firing a planet into it. The game is…average at best. It’s actually quite challenging to get the planet onto the hole itself. However, once you succeed….that’s it. You just restart. As such, it really doesn’t give the game a lot of replay value. Additionally, there are a couple of other improvements that I might suggest. For one thing, the “Start Again” button doesn’t always work, so I sometimes have to press the “Intro” button instead, and I would have liked several different varieties of failure screens and success screens just to make things more interesting. Still, for a fan-made game, it’s not too bad. That said, this isn’t the actual crown jewel of the website, oh no. The real gem on this website is a little game called the “Graphical Adventure Game (GAG)”.
Graphical Adventure Game (GAG)
This game was promoted on the website as an adventure game in the style of Myst where you explore the mining vessel Red Dwarf, collect items for your inventory, and try to fix things.
Playing the game, I consider it to be great, to the point that I find it to be one of the best games for the series, period. It does live up to its promotion on the website as you basically explore Red Dwarf, doing stuff like destroying rogue skutters, booting up Holly, blowing yourself out to space, and forming Kryten out of spare parts found around the place. The game is very accurate to the series, and there were parts where I laughed, such as the bit where Lister’s underwear got loose and you had to lure it with a kebab to get it out of the way in Lister and Rimmer’s bunkroom. My only criticism is that the graphics aren’t the best, but for a fangame first released during the late 1990s, that’s understandable. Be warned though that it has a password save-based system so be sure to remember each password that you get, lest you end up back at the beginning.
The 1996 Red Dwarf Adventure Game
Released by Joseph A. Stanko (through Sacred Trio Software) in 1996, this game is a retelling of the Red Dwarf novel “Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers” in video game form. Specifically, it’s one of those interactive fiction games which used to be popular back in the day. Unfortunately, none of the copies that I found floating around the web included the readme file, which would have provided clear instructions on how to play the game. This, on top of this complex parser of the game (if you want a command achieved, you must have it all uncapitalized, unless it’s something like “look Holly”, which can get annoying at times) led to me getting more and more lost and confused as the game progressed, especially due to my lack of experience in these games. Still, for those with a better understanding of it, it’s a decent enough, if showing its age, game and it does retain the show’s humor, even if most of it comes from direct quotes from the book. You can find it here.
The 2007 Red Dwarf Fangame Demo
Released by Dan N. in 2007, this is an adventure game based on the episode “The End”. To be more specific, it sees Lister come out of stasis, learn that “Everybody’s dead, Dave.”, and try to fix up Holly. It’s extremely short, only having a play-time of several minutes, but it’s an accurate enough depiction of a scene from the episode with its own unique divergences which were hilarious in themselves (Holly’s comment about the skutters having gone on a ten thousand-year holiday did crack me up a little) and it’s undoubtedly a fun way to waste said minutes. There was something also very endearingly retraux about this artstyle to me, which certainly appealed to me. My only criticism (outside of the game’s length) is that Lister feels like he moves too slow at times. Still, you can download it here.
A list of fangames that I couldn’t play
Despite what I could find, there were some that I simply wasn’t able to get my hands on, either because they’re too old for my computer to run them or merely because they have been pulled off the internet. This is what I couldn’t play:
- Red Dwarf Adventure Game – This one was apparently released in 1999 by Michael Dodson and concerned a plot involving Lister tracking down the rest of the crew, who have been kidnapped. It was released in five parts, with the fifth one having you take control of Rimmer, and was apparently a first-person interactive graphic adventure. Unfortunately, no matter what I could do, my laptop would not run it, so it’s off the list. A shame too, because it sounded like a neat game.
- Red Dwarf: The Game: This one was first announced around 2010 by Blobby101 but never got any further than a demo. It was created using the development tool “Adventure Game Studio” and has you play as Kryten, with some puzzle elements in the game. I tried downloading it, but it’s now a broken link. That said, some screenshots were released of the game and it shows something that, whilst still a work-in-progress, nonetheless could have been a fun game.
- The other Planet Smeg games: The games page for the website mentions two other games (Flibble Shoot and Despair Squid) which no longer work due to them no longer working in modern browsers. From what I could find, Flibble Shoot involves, well, shooting at Mr. Flibble, whilst Despair Squid has you trying to shoot at “chillies” (no idea what these were intended to look like), rocks, and the Despair Squid from “Back to Reality”. A pity too, because they sounded fun.
A Short List of Mods
On top of fangames, there does exist several mods for popular video games. Most mods relating to the show typically either add voice bites or allow you to play as the characters or even drive some of the spaceships from the series. Here are the ones I was able to find and which can be still downloaded.
- Starbound – Replaces the human colony ship with Starbug, as well as adding a holographic companion and fuzzy dice.
- Factorio – Adds ruins based on Starbug and Red Dwarf.
- XCOM 2 – Adds voice bites from Rimmer, Lister, Cat, Male Holly, and Kryten across all 12 series.
- Minecraft Forge – Still very early in development, this adds tools used in the series for use in the game, like Starbug and the Matter Paddle from “Meltdown”.
- Space Engineers – Adds Starbug to the game.
- The Sims – allows you to have the characters (Rimmer, Lister, Kryten, Cat, both Hollys, and Kochanski) in the game.
- Virtual Pinball – A table based on the series.
Conclusion
The first thing to note is that there really isn’t that much Red Dwarf fanmade content out there, which I suspect is due to a combination of the relative obscurity of the series and partially due to the general difficulty of the game. Another thing to note is that when they are not mods, they are for the most part adventure games, likely due to their emphasis on story-telling, perfect for a dialogue-heavy sitcom like Red Dwarf. Still, despite the scarcity, it’s nice to know that one of my favorite sitcoms does have some fangames and mods.