Trivia / The Dig (1995)

• Development Hell: The game that got released was actually the third version of The Dig that LucasArts had worked on. The earlier two iterations of the project never got finished due to assorted difficulties in development. All told, about five years elapsed from the initial game idea pitch by Steven Spielberg to the release of the final Dig. Not unusual for today's market, but a lot at the time.
• Recycled Set: Several of the cave locations reuse locations from the caves you wander through in the darkness in Loom, down to the last ledge and stalagmite, just with a graphical update and in a different order.
• Referenced by...: An Easter Egg in The Curse of Monkey Island has a small recreation of Robbins and the spider monster.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Spielberg originally imagined the story for his anthology series Amazing Stories, then as a film he would have made with George Lucas, but it would have been far too difficult and expensive to portray the story via live action and CGI so he proposed it as a video game. The idea of making it into a film has never been officially shot down, but it hasn't gone forward at all either.
  • Two prior iterations of the game were scrapped. The first, created by Noah Falstein of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis fame, is set in the far future, where Faster-Than-Light Travel takes the crew to the newly discovered planet Ozymandias, which appears to be desolate and contain the remains of a dead alien civilization. The expedition leader Major Tom goes missing, and the player character, a Russian man named Tesarov and an Australian woman named Fox, are to look for him, and discover what happened to the aliens.
  • The second iteration, by Brian Moriarty of Loom fame, more closely resembles the final product, but includes a fourth expedition member, Toshi Olema, a Japanese businessman who funded the mission. The game contains more Technobabble dialogue and graphic violence, and Olema would eventually meet his death in an Acid Pool. It also uses a new engine called Storydoid which offers a wider range of graphical effects than SCUMM.

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