Trivia / Drowned God

• Colbert Bump: While it was mildly successful at the time, since Richard Horne wasn’t very well known outside of the UK the game fell into obscurity until 2021 when the Internet mystery channel Nightmare Expo made a video discussing it, and while Drowned God was only talked about as a part of the larger story of its creator, the game nonetheless received more attention than ever.
• Copiously Credited Creator: Richard Horne is listed in the credits and game manual as the main creator and writer, director, co-art director, music/audio effects producer, motion-capture artist, voice actor (and is shown in the behind-the-scenes video as doing the voice direction as well even though he wasn't credited for it), and writer/artist of the manual. He had a direct hand in practically every aspect of Drowned God.
• Died During Production: The planned sequel, CULT, never actually went into production partially because of the difficulty Horne had while making the first game and partially because the cult activity in the 90's from groups like Aum Shinrikyo and The Order of the Solar Temple made him too uncomfortable to visit that sort of subject matter again, although in the early 2000's he expressed that he might someday like to revisit the idea again and claimed Rockstar Games approached him about it, but a sequel never came about.
• Follow the Leader: In a way. Horse stated in interviews that when he was introduced to games like Myst and The 7th Guest, he didn’t care much for the stories, but he loved the immersion and so he felt the medium of video games would be the best way to tell the story he’d been holding onto since the early 80’s.
• Lying Creator: In the Mondo 2000 interview linked below, Harry made the bogus claim that some of the radio transmissions in the game, in particular the ones with alien-sounding distortion, were real radio transmissions that he just so happened to be recording for Drowned God. This is easily disproven because the voices in those radio shows are very audibly the same handful of actors that have been showing up throughout the whole game up to this point. This was par for the course for Harry Horse, who was known to tell tall tales to both amuse himself and get attention for his works. Even the whole game's premise comes from a lie he told back in the 80's!
• Orphaned Reference:
  • When Arthur's voice appears to you following the flashback visions in Binah, he tells you to seek Merlin beneath his Oak and heal the land; however, while you do go to Merlin's Oak, you never actually meet Merlin, only Morgana. With Arthur's line and some other hints left behind in the final game, it seems Merlin and perhaps Arthur were supposed to play a bigger part, such as a map in Din showing an icon of Merlin's head beneath the Oak and a line within the coding referring to an event called "Merlin's Retort." It's unknown what role Merlin would have played, but it seems he was meant to be a counterpart to Morgana, as two posters depicting them are side-by-side in the Theatre of Memory and the manual references Morgana sealing Merlin away before the game.
  • The Woman on the Phone's full message in the Hacker's Caravan has her plead with you that you'll have to get past "The Hanging Man", implying that this is supposed to be a character the player was meant to encounter in Chokmah, but because of how cut-short the final realm ended up being, it's still unknown as of now exactly what or who he was supposed to be. A map of Chokmah found within the game has a similar icon appearance to the Hanged Man Tarot card, which had the same VO as Osiris is usually depicted with in the cards and the rest of the game, but it's not known if "The Hanging Man" was supposed to be some resurrected form of Osiris or something else.
• What Could Have Been:
  • William S. Burroughs was approached to do voice work for the game, having done some narration for a previous Inscape game called The Dark Eye, but he was unavailable.
  • The behind-the-scenes video as well as other things such as how many of the files were numbered indicates that Chesed was supposed to be the first realm visited instead of Binah, but for whatever reason the two were switched by the game’s release, which might explain a lot of the confusion around the game’s story since there is information dumped onto the player in Binah that is only given context in Chesed.
  • Horne envisioned having 9 separate endings for each of the numbers, but only three made it into the final game. It’s unknown what the other six endings entailed.
  • Richard Horne wrote in response to fan mail linked below that at one point The Relic Hunter was the original "storyteller" of the game and he was supposed to be the one who would tie up the loose ends, although it is unknown how that would have played out, and in the final product he only shows up in Din. If true, this would explain why the character is given such an in-depth backstory in the manual that has no bearing on the main plot.
  • He also slightly clarified what some of the cut content in Chokmah included, with the other areas the player would visit being the underground tunnels mentioned on the radio where horrific experiments on humans are taking place, and the Pyramids of Giza which was where the Ark of the Covenant was supposed to be; also, the Cult of Child Horus that are mentioned briefly in a couple of the Hacker's files would have been involved somehow.
• Word of God: The documentary linked in the front page as well as a 2000 interview with Gamespot that’s been archived helps to clarify some of the story elements that remain vague, such as Atlantis being the same as the Garden of Eden, and that humans are the result of genetic alteration by the aliens. An archive of Horne's responses to fan mail are the source of much of the information in What Could Have Been.
  • An interview with the cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000 confirms something that isn't made very clear in the final game: that the player character is assuming the roles of their past lives in order to traverse the realms. Kether does at one point tell the player that their memories "may or may not aid them" in their journey, but as he is often an Unreliable Narrator, it's useful to have outside confirmation.

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