Most readers come away from George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 with the same singular desire: to inhabit the world of the book by playing a late ’90s first-person puzzle-adventure PC game that includes a “zero-g training sphere” for some reason. In 1998, publisher MediaX set out to satisfy that widespread literary desire with Big Brother, an officially licensed “sequel” game set in the 1984 universe.
After appearing as a demo at E3 1998 and receiving some scattered press coverage, the Big Brother project fell apart before the game could see a full release. Now, though, you can experience a small taste of this ill-fated literary sequel thanks to a newly unearthed demo that was recovered and posted to the Internet Archive over the weekend.
War is Peace
The Lost Media Wiki has a bit more info on the history of Big Brother, which was announced in May 1998 as the first game ever from multimedia CD-ROM maker MediaX. In that announcement, the company said the game would move focus away from 1984‘s Winston Smith and to new character Eric Blair, who’s on a search for his missing fiancée Emma (sure, why not) in “a completely changed world dominated by the Thought Police.”
The pre-rendered introduction for the demo ignores the missing fiancée plotline entirely and instead places Eric in the center of a resistance movement on the run from the Thought Police:
“Eric, the Thought Police have been tracking down our brotherhood leaders in hopes of destroying our resistance movement. We have only a few hours left, we must do something to get the police off our trail. As a MiniPac soldier, you should be able to get into the ministry and create a diversion. The bigger the distraction you can create, the better.”
It’s unclear how any diversion would be enough to sufficiently distract the all-encompassing monitoring and thought control network that Orwell describes in 1984, but we digress.