Cult '90s Adventure The Dig Is A Sci-Fi Classic
Most people know about Steven Spielberg's connection to WW2 shooter Medal of Honor: that he came up with the idea during the filming of Saving Private Ryan after watching his son playing GoldenEye 64. But years earlier Spielberg was instrumental in the creation of another, lesser known video game: The Dig. This classic 1995 point-and-click adventure, developed by genre masters LucasArts, is the story of a group of scientists and astronauts trapped on a mysterious faraway planet. While searching for a way home they uncover the secrets of a fallen alien civilization—which is where the 'dig' part of the title comes from—and are corrupted by something they find there.
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If you love old movies and that premise reminds you of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, well, it's supposed to. When Spielberg conceived the story he wanted to cross that classic '40s Western with influential sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet. The original plan was to make it an episode of his Amazing Stories anthology series, but he couldn't quite stretch his meagre TV budget far enough. So, with the help of LucasArts, it became a game instead. Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis designer Noah Falstein were among the point-and-click adventure veterans hired to bring his story to life, and the result is one of the best sci-fi games ever made.
When the game begins, a colossal asteroid is on a cataclysmic collision course with Earth. The governments of the world come up with a plan to knock it off course—the same premise Michael Bay would deploy in apocalyptic cheese-fest Armageddon just three years later. But unlike Bay's motley crew of scrappy miners, The Dig's
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