Captain Blood

A spaceship, a cloned pilot falling apart into pieces and aliens with whom you communicate through pictograms: L'Arche du Captain Blood is one of the strangest and most daring adventures ever created. And it came out of France in 1988.

The story is in its own way an existential horror. You are a programmer named Bob Morlock, who is stuck in his own game in the role of Captain Blood, whose being has split into five clones scattered across the galaxy. To survive, you must find and absorb them back, because with every passing moment your body and mind disintegrate further. You travel through space, land near planets and meet bizarre alien species.

The most famous element is the communication system Universal Protocol of Communication and Other Messages, UPCOM for short. Instead of writing sentences you assemble messages from icons that represent concepts, and the aliens answer in the same way. This iconographic conversation was utterly innovative for its time and lent the game an unmistakably alien, unsettling atmosphere where you never quite know whether you understand one another.

Behind the game stand Philippe Ulrich and especially Didier Bouchon, whose visual and technical skill gave rise to remarkable fractal graphics of the planets, which were generated procedurally. Captain Blood became a symbol of the ambitious French gaming scene of the eighties, the so-called touch française, which was not afraid of experiments, the surreal and artistic ambitions far beyond the boundaries of ordinary entertainment.

Today Captain Blood is more of a cult experience for connoisseurs than an easily accessible game. Its pace is slow, its logic alien and its atmosphere cold to the point of anxiety. It is precisely this uncompromising otherness, however, that makes it a fascinating artefact of an era when the gaming medium was still learning how far it could go in storytelling and in evoking emotions.

Why play: A surreal French sci-fi adventure with revolutionary pictogram dialogue and an oppressive atmosphere of disintegrating identity. An artistic experiment without equal.