I’ve spent the past several weeks mildly obsessed with Pluribus, the new Apple TV show from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan. A highlight of the series is the arresting performance from lead actor Rhea Seehorn, who plays one of the only normal humans left after most of the world suddenly merges into an eerily polite gestalt consciousness.
Seehorn is best known for starring alongside Bob Odenkirk in Better Call Saul, but her work stretches back into the ’90s. As it turns out, one of her earliest live action roles was in, of all things, a Magic: The Gathering game by Microprose.
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It is as hilarious, blurry, and gloriously low-budget as you’d hope. All the hallmarks of cheesy ’90s PC game fantasy are on proud display here, with the actors superimposed over primitive CG backgrounds.
The full tutorial appears to contain well over an hour of dictated instruction and probably isn’t the best way to learn a notoriously complex card game (especially since this is nearly 30 years old), but it’s admirably committed to the bit. Any video of the tutorial is now festooned with comments mentioning Seehorn’s character in Pluribus, jokingly factoring the role into the show’s canon.
You might know the game as Shandalar, since there are all sorts of digital Magic: The Gathering adaptations and this one took place in, well, Shandalar. Unlike most MTG videogames, it featured a full singleplayer campaign where you run around defeating magic users and building a deck with each victory. It’s a game PC Gamer contributing writer Dominic Tarason called “mind-bendingly expansive” for the time in his article on some of PC gaming’s unsung heroes.
Seehorn talked about her role in Shandalar briefly in an interview with NPR, where she said the whole thing was “so low-budget that they didn’t have shoes, but they wanted us to look like we were wearing kind of gladiator sorcerer boots or whatever, so we’re just wearing tube socks with electrical tape in criss cross fashion.” When the interviewer mentioned the tutorial was easily accessed on YouTube, Seehorn burst into laughter and reeled back in her chair.
She continued in the interview: “I was so excited that my photo was on the back that I went to Best Buy … and I was like ‘This is me! Oh my God, I did that, that’s me!’ And I was like, ‘Would you give me a copy?’ and they were like, ‘No. What is wrong with you?'”
