Dark Seed (Floppy Version)
Press Keyboard right side: Alt+Enter keys to switch to full screen game play, and Alt+Enter keys to return.
How to play Dark Seed (Floppy Version)
Each game uses different controls, most DOS games use the keyboard arrows. Some will use the mouse.
Dark Seed (Floppy Version) Description
Dark Seed is a computer game in the adventure game genre. It was developed and published by Cyberdreams in 1992. It exhibits a normal world and a dark world counterpart, which is based on the artwork by H. R. Giger. It was one of the first adventure games to use high-resolution (640 pixels wide) graphics, to Giger's demand. A sequel, Dark Seed II, was released in 1995. The original game was released for Amiga, Amiga CD32, DOS, Macintosh, PlayStation and Sega Saturn. The Saturn version was released in Japan and was compatible with the Sega Saturn Mouse. There was also a version planned for the Sega CD, but it was cancelled.
The main character, Mike Dawson, is named after lead designer and producer Micke Dawson, who also appears as the character's sprite. The fictional Mike Dawson is a successful advertising executive and writer, who has recently purchased an old mansion in the small town of Woodland Hills. As soon as he moves into the house, he falls asleep and has a nightmare about an alien machine implanting an object into his skull. He has three days to solve the mystery of the town before the "dark seed" erupts from his brain.
Dark Seed is notable for its impressive graphics but also for its buggy programming and frustrating difficulty. Unlike most adventure games, which give the player time to explore, almost every action in Dark Seed has to fall within precise time limits, or the game will end up in an unwinnable state. As a result of this as well as the game's frequent crashes, one must start over repeatedly to win without resorting to a walkthrough.
An urban legend spread that the intense pressure of designing Dark Seed gave lead designer, Micke Dawson, a mental breakdown. However, he actually left the games industry after completing Dark Seed and moved into television writing until the late 1990s, wrote two books on programming (Beginning C++ Game Programming and Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner) and is teaching game design and programming classes at Stanford University and UCLA.