The Journeyman Project

To do: Document the differences from the 1992 Macworld demo and pre-release screenshots (such as the Address Book item)

The Journeyman Project was one of the earliest CD-ROM adventure games, following Spaceship Warlock and predating Myst by several months. Journeyman was a groundbreaking game that earned accolades from the Macintosh community but was overshadowed by the success of Myst over the next year.

The Windows version of Journeyman was also bundled with many Packard Bell PCs, which is where most people who played the game probably remember it from.

Like Spaceship Warlock, The Journeyman Project was created with Macromedia/MacroMind Director, a multimedia authoring tool that wasn't meant to be a game engine but became one pretty much instantly.

Unused item#

Taking the Gas Canister item at the beginning of NORAD VI instantly jumps to the "Incarcerated" game over scene. This is hardcoded into the pickup script for the Gas Canister. If you leave the starting room of NORAD with the Gas Canister already hacked into your inventory, this will also trigger the "Incarcerated" ending.

However, the Gas Canister is a fully defined item. The description on the Object Analysis screen suggests that the canister was built around 200 years after the NORAD time period, which helps explain that Dr. Sinclair's Poseidon robot contaminated the air supply in order to infiltrate NORAD VI.

This high-pressure gas canister is made of latesized alumisteel, a 'smart' alloy not invented until 2307.

The fact that the Gas Canister is a full-fledged item suggests that, originally, the player may have been meant to remove it from the NORAD ventilation system. However, in the final game, the player navigates the contaminated NORAD base using their Oxygen Mask instead. This could have been changed for narrative consistency, since removing the sleeping gas to make it safe to explore NORAD would have also woken up NORAD security, allowing them to arrest you. The Gas Canister is also the only item in The Journeyman Project which has no functional purpose, which may have been confusing.

Early intro animation#

The Director movie file "Sepiatone 01," which contains the introduction sequence for The Journeyman Project, also contains leftovers from an early version of the intro from the demo version of The Journeyman Project distributed at MacWorld 1992.

In the 1992 demo, rather than showing a static sepia-tone image of the Pegasus time machine, the intro showed a color animation of Pegasus in operation. The graphics for this animation were left in the movie file but are unused. A modified version of this animation with additional polish is used in the final game to show the activation of Pegasus on a monitor inside the machine.

Hidden Shared Cast file#

In most Macromedia Director games, common assets and scripts are stored in a movie file titled Shared Cast. However, in The Journeyman Project, Presto tried to obfuscate the shared assets by storing them in a file named Mars ESG Upper 03, which was intended to blend in with other unrelated support files.

The script for Mars ESG Upper 03 opens with a message from the developers:

--General Shared Cast Macros
--If you've succeeding in finding this code(it wasn't THAT difficult, was it?), please have fun trying to figure out what we at
--PRESTO probably won't be able to understand one month from now.  Please keep in mind that
--ALL CODE ON THIS CD-ROM IS THE PROPERTY OF PRESTO STUDIOS, INC.  YOU MANY NOT DUPLICATE OR USE ANY OF THE
--CODE WITHOUT THE WRITTEN CONSENT OF PRESTO STUDIOS, INC.
--©1992 PRESTO STUDIOS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Unused eighth BioChip#

The player's BioChip bank has room for eight BioChips, but there are only seven BioChips in the game. There are no videos or graphics that show the Chip Bank holding more than seven BioChips, and there is no definition for an eighth BioChip item. However, there are several leftovers suggesting that an eighth "V" BioChip was intended for the game.

"BioChipV" video#

Although there are no graphics showing an eighth BioChip in the Chip Bank or in the player's inventory, there is an unused video file for BioChipV, which would have been shown in the Object Analysis screen. This file is present in all Macintosh versions of The Journeyman Project, including the Turbo re-release.

Code for loading eight BioChips#

Additionally, the code for managing save data in Mars ESG Upper 03 has functionality for loading up to eight BioChips, which is never used.

ChipArrayFromTextFile("gChipNameArray", 8)    --*** Array

macro ChipArrayFromTextFile nameofarray, howmanyitems
global gChipNameArray
global file, FileIO
repeat with mycounter = 1 to 8
    set oneline = line mycounter of field "User Data"
    do nameofarray & "(mPut, " & mycounter & ", " & Quote & oneline & Quote & ")"
end repeat
put empty into line 1 to 11 of field "User Data"
put empty into char 1 of field "User Data"

If you edit a save file to include an eighth BioChip, the chip can be clicked on and activated, but it won't be displayed in the Chip Bank.

Hidden credits (Macintosh v1.2)#

The header info for the Macintosh release of The Journeyman Project v1.2 contains a hidden credit:

Quadra Interactive 10-4-93
Brian John Kramer

Quadra Interactive developed the PC port of The Journeyman Project but is not credited for the Macintosh version. The box and manual for Mac v1.2 do list Quadra Interactive as the game's publisher, so the evidence suggests that Quadra quietly took over as The Journeyman Project's publisher (or distributor) for the game's multiplatform release.

References#