Gearheads: The Unthinkable Prophecy
In my freshman year of college, I worked in the cafeteria, waiting for
juice bags to run out and change them when they did. This job meant a
lot of waiting, so my imagination spun a little, lonely, beautiful
world out of a casual desktop computer game I'd been enjoying -
Gearheads, by Philips Interactive Media. The game involved sending
copies of twelve wind-up toys across a playfield in an attempt to get
twenty-one to the other side. I imagined a whole murder mystery for
these mechanical beings and a setting for it to take place in. A murder
is tragic enough normally, but for this tiny civilization of twelve,
each death is a tremendous contraction of the known world. So the
murders had to be stopped.
I typed up several scenes of this tale before classwork and its
mandatory nature brought the project to a halt. Their structure was
loosely inspired by the sequence of levels in the game, in which every
third level is a bonus level featuring just one character with a visual
theme appropriate to them. These scenes were going to be
character-building flashbacks.
Introduction
Scene 1: The Orator's Platform
Scene 2: Clucketta and Kangaruffian
Scene 4: Ziggy and Handy
Scene 5: Deadhead, Presto and Orbit
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