Ragnar Tornquist

You’ve previously said that the game contains three worlds. We know of Stark and Arcadia, but what’s the third?

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Like I’m gonna tell you? Secrets are the foundation of any good story. And this is one of them. You won’t find out until you’ve played the game through to the end, and that may take a while!

Please choose. The adventure genre is: dead / alive / asleep / handicapped.

Handicapped. Not too much has happened with the genre since the early 90’s, and whatever Myst did, it didn’t help the traditional adventure game much at all. A large number of average and downright crappy games flooded the shelves, and people got tired of the genre. So what we need is a couple of big hits—like The Longest Journey, hopefully, and Gabriel Knight 3—coupled with a willingness on the part of the developer community to explore new avenues within the framework of the genre.

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Do you think the small touches of humor (April’s occasional sarcastic remarks and the many inside jokes) will work well within the serious story?

A serious story needs humour to be a good story. The more serious it is, the funnier it needs to be. That’s a dichotomy, true, but a necessary one. Nobody likes to be serious all the time. So we’ve injected a lot of humour into TLJ, to loosen it up between the “heavy” bits. Besides, we’re trying to entertain people, not depress them! As you get further into the story, though, there are definitely fewer jokes.

The marketing departement has intentionally kept things a bit quiet around the game. Will we see The Longest Journey properly featured in mainstream gaming press any time soon?

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Yes. With the release on the imminent horizon, there will certainly be more coverage. In territories like France, where UbiSoft is publishing the game, the Benelux countries, and Scandinavia, they’re gearing up for big advertising and press coverage in the very near future. As for the rest of the world? It’ll happen. Soon.

Looking beyond TLJ, do you think there is potential for a sequel, or perhaps a new Funcom adventure?

The storylines for possible sequels exist. It’s really just a question of how well the game sells. As for future adventures? Personally, I’d say yes, but not in the traditional sense. I’ve got something really exciting in mind, but it’s too early to say anything about it. It’s definitely an adventure, though. Well, kinda. 🙂

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How much of the game is completed at the moment. When will the journey end for you and begin for us?

We’re about 95% done. Bug-fixing and cleaning up stuff we’re not happy with, like bits of graphics here and there, and some animations and sound effects, is what occupies the bulk of our long days and weekends. The game-testers are working mucho overtime to locate all the bugs—in a game this size, there are literally thousands of them—and the team is working similar hours to clean them all up. But we’re close. Very close. It’s difficult to make any promises seeing as we’ve still to secure a publisher for North America, but in Europe at least the game will probably appear on shelves during November or December, depending on the territory and the language.

What’s you dream for the future?

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Peace on Earth, a manned mission to Mars, and a new Monkey Island game! Aside from that? Hmmm, I’d love for The Longest Journey to sell over a million copies, become a worldwide phenomena, and spawn lots of sequels and fluffy toys.

More realistically, however, I want to start working on my next game. It’s a really interesting concept that’s been brewing in my head for six months now, but I haven’t had much time to really sit down and focus on it. I look forward to doing that.

Is there anything else you would like to say, that we didn’t cover in our questions?

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Thanks a bunch to you and the other adventure-gaming sites for keeping the torches burning! The genre isn’t dead, it’s just dormant, and its influence is very visible in games like Half-Life, System Shock 2, and Tomb Raider, where story, characters and puzzles are all used to create complex and interesting worlds—exactly what adventure-games are all about. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be any more old-school, traditional point-and-click adventures, however. I really think The Longest Journey (and, of course, Gabriel Knight 3) is just a harbinger of things to come, and that a new generation of gamers will wake up and smell the coffee.

It’s a nice thought, anyway 🙂