Red Dwarf G.A.G Playthrough

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Posted by on 5th February 2020, 20:38

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Many years ago, when a young teenage boy who for some reason liked to call himself “Ian The Smegmeister” first got home internet access, there was only one thing on his mind. But after that, I searched for all the information about my life-long obsession Red Dwarf as I could. I signed up for forums, chatted in chat rooms and delved deep into webrings, which sound a lot more sinister now than they did in the late 90s. It was undoubtedly the first step on a path that led to this place existing, for better or worse, and I’ll always fondly remember and salute our fansite forefathers from that era, such as Smegweb, Red Dwarf World, The Red Dwarf Clearing House, Groovetown, and Planet Smeg among others.

Inevitably, most of those are long gone now (although the Wayback Machine is always useful), but the exception is Planet Smeg, which I accidentally stumbled across a few months ago while looking for something else, and was amazed to see was still online. Its USP back in the day was its collection of unofficial Red Dwarf games, lovingly created by site owner Greg Haywood. I had vivid memories of playing his magnum opus, the Red Dwarf Graphical Adventure Game (GAG), a javascript-based in-browser point and click adventure. ‘There’s no way that will still be online and functional in modern browsers’, I thought. I was wrong. I fired it up and it was just how I remembered, only much wider.

So then I closed it down, and waited until Danny Stephenson was next visiting G&T Towers with his podcasting equipment. We played it through together, ably abetted by Jo Sharples, and recorded the whole damn thing. If you have an hour and fifteen minutes that you never want back, then we’ve got just the video for you.

(480p seems to be the optimum quality for this size of player if you want to read the text, but you’re probably better off viewing it in full res on YouTube.)

A huge round of applause for Greg Haywood, for not only making this game, but keeping it online for around twenty years. We may have had a laugh with it while playing, but it’s a genuinely brilliant thing – so much creativity, ingenuity and most importantly love running through it, for no other reason than to celebrate Red Dwarf and entertain fellow fans. The platforms and the possibilities may have changed in the last two decades, but the spirit of fandom was always there.

24 comments on “Red Dwarf G.A.G Playthrough”

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  • When you were mousing over all those lockers, I wondered whether it was necessary to check all the ones on the right hand side: the fact the moving skutter didn’t start exactly on the right edge of the screen made me think that maybe those extra locker graphics only show up in widescreen. (But I think the skutter’s starting position is further to the right than the edge of the 4:3 wall graphics in the cargo room. I suppose this means the game is partially safe for widescreen!)

    Have you told Greg Haywood you’ve done this? Maybe through his website’s feedback form?

    It looks like Planetsmeg.com has been updated again since you played this: the design is a bit different, and now the pages show © 2020.

  • When you were mousing over all those lockers, I wondered whether it was necessary to check all the ones on the right hand side: the fact the moving skutter didn’t start exactly on the right edge of the screen made me think that maybe those extra locker graphics only show up in widescreen.

    This is an excellent point, but as you can tell those lockers really began to affect my state of mind pretty quickly.

  • i remember playing this a lot when i was younger. i’d still say the GAG is probably the best Red Dwarf game that’s been made. considering it’s going up against the likes of the XI game, which was never finished, the XII game, which is just Temple Run with Ziggy Briceman, and the really shit Flash game on TOS, that’s not exactly saying much. it is good fun though, and you can tell a lot of effort was put into it.

    also remember there being a series of Red Dwarf games made in RPG Maker, which were inexplicably about Lister and the others ending up in a strange fantasy world with goblins and stuff (presumably the person who made them didn’t feel like designing any new graphics for the games, so just used the default RPG Maker tilesets) not sure if those games are still about anywhere, but i definitely remember playing those years ago on some website where you could also download unedited versions of the US pilots (the upload of the second pilot on youtube has all of Kryten’s scenes cut out for some reason)

  • This falls into the category of ‘things I probably won’t watch until my girlfriend’s away’, so this evening, on my own, faced with a choice of a film or this, I watched this.

    Lovely stuff. Enjoyed it a lot. I would have absolutely loved this game had I found it back in the day.

    Also really wasn’t expecting Ed Bye on video.

  • That was a test to see if anyone would make it to the end. You’re the first, congratulations, I think.

  • My takeaway from briefly playing this is that the writing is often annoyingly try-hard quirky in a way that feels like it’s trying to emulate the narration style of the novel but not really pulling it off.

  • Designing a text adventure where players have to blindly choose a cardinal direction to go in and one of the directions instantly kills them should be punishable with prison time.

  • There’s a bit I always remembered from the Garbage Podcast of Alex describing what it was like to play this game, and it was essentially exactly what happened to me.

    Is it too late to change my username to Bliss Freak?

  • I forgot to mention this, but the game inexplicably starts on the actual planet Saturn and not Mimas and that is a deeply baffling change.

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