It seems to me that no game is better suited for opening the video game section on our website than Full Throttle from 1995. It’s classic. It’s about bikers. It’s full of rock. And she shakes. So – Full Throttle!
This game was made by LucasArts – yes, the one that George himself founded and sold Darth Vader to Mickey Mouse Lucas. It was the first game that LucasArts made for a promising OS called Windows, as well as the first to be distributed only on CD-ROMs. Tim Shafer was the project leader, as well as the screenwriter and designer, so, in fact, this is his author’s game. Tim is a moderately well-known figure in gaming circles. Some of his decisions can be called at least controversial, but anyway, Shafer has a couple of ideas and views for which he can be respected, as well as half a dozen games to his credit that have deservedly earned universal recognition. Full Throttle is one of them.
It's time to break all the rules!
“One day I heard a story about how someone spent the summer in Alaska. They were hanging out at some biker bar with guys named, for example, Smiling Rick and Big Phil. And I thought, wow, what a crazy world this is. He’s so far away from our daily routine, and at the same time he’s right here, so ordinary in his own way. And that’s where Full Throttle started.”
Shafer was telling me. Tim approached the matter responsibly and decided to study biker culture before starting the game, in particular based on Hunter Thompson’s book Hell’s Angels.: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (which was translated into Russian without bothering just by the Hells Angels). Probably, everyone who makes, writes or makes a game about bikers mentions this book, and Comrade Shafer was no exception.
Luke Skywalker, known internationally as Mark Hamill, voices three characters in this game at once: trucker Emmett, cutie Todd Newlan and the main villain Adrian Ripburger.
During the development process, according to Tim’s recollections, the LucasArts management reacted mostly negatively.
“We can’t believe we paid you to write this.”
That was just one of the phrases that stuck in Shafer’s head. “They hated this game,” Tim said at the time. It’s hard to imagine exactly what Full Throttle would be like without LucasArts attacks, but here’s a well-known example of a cut scene: at one point, the player was asked to accompany the protagonist in an interactive hallucinogenic trip under peyote. Of course, the developers could not come to an agreement with the publisher, and the drug was cut from the game. Therefore, Full Throttle may not be brutal and violent enough for something inspired by the Hells Angels book, but this is almost the only possible claim.
So, in the end, it turned out to be a great graphic adventure with a classic point-and-click control interface at that time. The game takes us to an alternative world, which is very devastated and resembles a kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland (with a touch of futurism a la Fallout, but without retro elements). Tim Shafer drew attention to this point at the time, saying that “this world was never conceived as a post-war world or anything like that.” This gives us the perfect setting: we don’t have cities or even settlements here, but lonely houses connected by long, neatly paved roads. Of course, it’s a pleasure to be a biker in such a world, and that’s exactly what our protagonist Ben, the leader of the Ferret gang, is. And that’s all I can tell you without inadvertently plunging into spoilers, because being a graphic adventure, Full Throttle is, in fact, an interactive book or, if you like, a movie that almost instantly transports us into the depths of a short, extremely simple, but at the same time very exciting plot.
Almost synonymous with the words ‘graphic adventure’ is the word ‘quest’, and Full Throttle is no exception: most of the time we try to figure out exactly where to point the mouse to do what needs to be done. At the same time, the game, as a rule, is not particularly friendly with the word “logic”, and very often it is not so easy to figure out what exactly they want from us. If you can complete Full Throttle without ever looking at the walkthrough, then you are honored and praised. I made it to the Corley Motorcycle factory (by the way, the last motorcycle manufacturer in the country according to the game’s plot). But if there is still a way to get through the factory, then when you get to the moment with the computer, which offers us a huge menu of choices from which you need to choose two correct ones, I bet you won’t be able to do without a hint.
The second longest pastime will be trying to choose the right dialogue in order, again, to move further along the plot. But if it can be boring to wander back and forth, trying to find the right pixel on the screen, then in the dialogues it’s the other way around. The well-chosen voice actors are excellent at reading out the most gorgeous dialogues – damn me, but even when I saw the obviously correct answer, I still called out all the wrong and non-narrative ones first, just to listen to all these characters. God knows, I knocked on Todd’s closed trailer door for ten minutes just to hear what else Ben would say and how Todd would send him away. The excellent character voice acting is one of the trump cards of this game, which cannot be overestimated.
Only a small part of Ben's gorgeous dialogues with Todd is an excellent indicator of how much charisma can be contained in just a few words.
From time to time, the attempt to find the right thing on the screen and conversations between the characters are interrupted by interactive scenes, which, for the most part, simply infuriate all the players. Mainly because of the need to know exactly what to do and how to do it, and it is extremely difficult to figure it out because the word ‘logic’ is still difficult to use. But if the fights on the Old Shakhterskaya Road are at least fun, have cool screensavers, subtly resemble Road Rage in miniature and you can easily overpower most of your rivals in them, then the derby at Corley Stadium naturally made every player gnash his teeth.
The Corley Motors Smash-A-Torium Amateur Driver Ultimate Destruction Maximum Carnage Marathon as it is called in the game. It's just a fucking Darby. Pisses everyone off, without exception.
And another integral part of Full Throttle is its almost constant adherence to the steepness rule. There are a lot of cool things in this game, from Ben’s bike with its crazy exhaust pipes to the final cutscene. We play as a character who looks and has a brutal voice that can give Arnold Schwarzenegger a head start on his best days – and many things around him are exactly the same, turned out to be 11. Even the painted landscapes in the background are somehow impressive – and this is even without taking into account the fact that it’s mostly desert and rocks. And the music, damn it! Full Throttle is one of the few LucasArts games that used not only a soundtrack recorded in its own studio, but also several licensed tracks. In our case, these are the songs of the rock band The Gone Jackals – and they definitely decorate the game and win a few more points in favor of Full Throttle… but at the same time, composer Peter McConnell did his best! This is not to say that the soundtrack is based on the songs of The Gone Jackals, and the title track of the game can hardly be overestimated –Chitlins, Whiskey & Skirt.
Increased Chances – Chitlins, Whiskey And Skirt
Of course, by all the rules, such a game should have had a sequel, and it was planned as many as two times: in the form of Full Throttle: Payback and Full Throttle: Hell On Wheels. Unfortunately or fortunately, both projects did not make it to release: by the time Hell On Wheels was developed, almost the entire team responsible for the original game had already left LucasArts (including Shafer, who left before the development of Payback began). In addition, Roy Conrad, who voices Ben, died in the same year 2002, in which Hell On Wheels was announced, which could be another reason for the closure of the planned sequel. I think that after the acquisition of LucasArts by the ubiquitous Mickey Mouse, we can give up all hopes for any continuation.: as you know, Disney doesn’t really do anything good and at the same time it gives away copyrights very reluctantly. At the moment, all LucasArts projects are frozen, and the company exists with only a couple of bureaucrats as employees to be able to act as a licensor.
On the other hand, Double Fine Productions, led by Tim Shafer, released a remaster of the original game in 2017, which included not only updated graphics and music, but also the ability to switch to the original drawing and sound (which I enjoyed using, so I can’t really say anything about the quality of the updated scenes and landscapes). The voices of the voice actors were taken from the original recordings of the 90s, plus the controls were tightened in Double Fine and the ability to listen to developer comments was added. The stinky moments remained stinky, so, in general, the remaster turned out to be good: in fact, the same Full Throttle, but with bonuses and is installed on new computers without problems.
As in every good game, the local girls get on a bike along with the guys and are always ready to either punch someone in the face or hit the ridge with a tire iron. Here it is, real equality!
And as a conclusion, I will offer you a hand-picked extract from the soundtrack of the game: the archive at the link includes tracks unpacked from the archives of the original game, as well as several tracks recorded by me personally from the remaster menu and the official mini-soundtrack from The Gone Jackals (as well as their album Bone To Pick as a bonus):
If you like what you hear, well, I strongly advise you to get a Full Throttle somewhere. The game is short – you will finish it in three evenings maximum. But it will be worth every minute spent on it.
