Halcyon Sun

"certainly better than much of the tripe on our TV screens" -- Eurogamer

"Ally McBeal in space"
-- Gamerweb

Halcyon Sun was a revolutionary new idea that combined the internet with television: a science fiction TV series where the viewer took part in the action. The story was downloaded in episodic packages, each building on the other to add more virtual sets, characters and items. The average episode was 45 minutes long, about half of which was gameplay, the rest of which was dialogue-driven drama. For the writers, Simon Jowett and I, the challenge was to write a 300-page script that could be divided into 12 episodes, when not only the action but also the available cast members and scenery escalated with each episode.

The developers at Kuju Entertainment were true to their word; they wanted TV quality so they paid TV money. They came to me because of my experience in translating Japanese animation, and Japanese computer games with similar branching storylines. It was my first big scriptwriting gig, and has since led to other things. I wrote six of the episodes, including the two-part grand finale, in which a space pilot with nascent telepathic powers leads a sneak attack on a ruthless alien fleet. There was plenty of scope for character development; our co-ed military fleet was modelled on that in Joe Haldeman's Forever War, with marriages as temporary contracts in the style of Larry Niven's Known Space. Leading man Dru Avery was conducting a not-so-clandestine affair with Rae Sherard a military attaché with the untrustworthy allied race, the Eridani. Dru's boss was falling for Rae's liaison officer. It was all going to end in tears.

With animation limited by the size of the available episodes, the onus for originality lay on the script itself. We made sure that the audience was kept guessing, that no character was safe and no opportunities for skulduggery went unused. The series gained a small but loyal following, particularly among Babylon Five newsgroups, who mistakenly believed that the writers were followers of the show.

It did, however, die a death, chiefly through poor distribution. The release company kept shifting the dates of new episodes, which made a mockery of the episodic format. Fans on newsgroups were eventually reduced to posting hacks on the billboards to allow viewers to get new episodes in spite of the distributors' efforts not to distribute. Although released in three languages, despite being a groundbreaking show in the history of the internet, I doubt whether the final episode of Halycon Sun was seen by more than a dozen people.

Halcyon Sun was eventually re-released as a CD-ROM from Brightstar Games. Its removal from the original distribution format turned it into a dated-looking, relatively low-resolution space shoot-'em-up, with non-game scenes that went on for far too long. My episode 5, Edge of Darkness, for example, began with 20 minutes of footage before the gameplay started: this was great if you were a viewer, presumably less fun if you just wanted to get on with shooting stuff out of the sky.

Several years on, nobody has heard of Halcyon Sun. In this world of Grand Theft Auto and Final Fantasy Online, Halcyon Sun has been forgotten; an also-ran, a Betamax in the history of online gaming. It was fun, though, and was largely responsible for funding the year I spent working on the Anime Encyclopedia.