A 30-year-old game receives a ‘definitive’ patch out of nowhere, because some developers are just that based

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, a 1995 video game based on a short story of the same name, has received an update out of the blue, making the game more intuitive and fun to play on various modern systems, because some developers still value old titles.

Nightdive Studios, known for its acquisitions and subsequent patches of old and abandoned games, has updated I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, a point-and-click game based on Harlan Ellison’s short story of the same name. Ellison himself worked on the game, first released in 1995, and provided his voice for the AI antagonist AM.

The story is considered a seminal work of science fiction, with Ellison himself praised as one of the biggest figures in the genre, alongside the greatest of the great like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Dan Simmons, Frank Herbert, and Philip K. Dick (among others).

The game itself, played like a point-and-click adventure, has garnered a cult following over the past three decades, with many praising its themes and atmosphere, which is no surprise given the author’s involvement.

Now, Nightdive has stepped in to make the game more readily available to modern audiences, patching up its technical backend and adding “modern menu options,” “improved controller support,” a set of achievements “to encourage exploration and extend replayability,” extra content, and cloud saving. Not a comprehensive set of changes, but one that’ll fundamentally alter how we can play it on our “advanced” machines that just so happen to crap the bed when trying to run old software.

This “definitive update,” as the studio calls it, came basically out of nowhere, and fans have responded overwhelmingly positively to the news. There’s something about seeing developers actually care about the vast library of games that have brought the industry to this point, where it accounts for a large chunk of all entertainment, especially in terms of how much money it generates.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is, ironically, a warning for our kind who pursue limitless progress and seek to optimize warfare in particular through the use of rapidly developed technologies like AI, that might one day spell the end of us. It’s a horrifying story, and a hyperbolic one, true, but still one to take into account when looking at how we’re approaching human-like artificial intelligence.

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