Torin's Passage Misc
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Reviews
- https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/17594
- https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/torins-passage-review/1900-2559962/
- http://www.gameboomers.com/reviews/Tt/Torinsbysyd.htm
- http://www.metzomagic.com/showArticle.php?index=134
Easter Eggs
Psychedelic mode
Press Ctrl-p at any time during the game to toggle "psychedelic mode" on and off.
Alternate death message
Use the bagpipes on Lycentia after entering her house.
Zippy trick
After Torin gives Zippy the hat, the wand and the silk kerchief in the amphitheater, Zippy repeatedly tries to pull Bags Bunny out of the hat... but instead pulls out Dreep!
- There is a portrait of Elvis Presley above the Bitternuts' fireplace.
- The skunks' names are a loving reference to the LucasArts (and now Telltale Games) stars, Sam and Max.
Backstage Musical References
There are several musical references backstage in the Tenebrous Theater:
- Girl in the Tower (from King’s Quest)
- Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist theme
- Leisure Suit Larry theme (which quickly ends with a cymbal crash, Al Lowe sputtering, "B-b-b-but? Aww..." and a walk offstage)
- Cellblock Love from Leisure Suit Larry 6
- Consumite Furore, the Phantasmagoria title song
- Music from Escarpa.
- Near the end of the game, in the chamber of crystals in Lycentia’s house, the characters imprisoned inside the crystals are
- Hotaru (from Sailor Moon)
- Darth Vader & Yoda (from Star Wars)
- Charlton Heston (from Planet of the Apes)
- Al Lowe (from, uh, here?).
There is another Sailor Moon egg that artist Bryan Wilkinson put in, but it’s nearly impossible to find. He describes it here:
Bryan Wilkinson[2] wrote:Date: Thu, 31 Jul 1997 04:03:01 -0700 (PDT) From: Bryan Wilkinson <uni@wolfenet.COM> To: sos_comm@dau.physics.sunysb.edu Subject: Torin's Passage Sighting explained :)
Hi, you might be wondering why Hotaru is hidden in Torin's Passage.Well, that was the work of a Sailor Moon fan on the project, namely me.
At the time I was working at Sierra On-Line as an Art Technician (see my resume at http://www.wolfenet.com/~uni if you are curious about what that entailed). Among other things, I did the color models for the main characters of the game and worked between the artists, animators and programmers. A number of what we call "easter eggs" are often hidden in Al Lowe's (creator of Torin's Passage, Leisure Suit Larry) games, little things the creators of the game hide as in-jokes.
Near the end of the project, I was busy relaying correspondence between the old Sailor Moon mailing list (back when it was the only one in the US ^_^;), the newsgroup alt.fan.sailor-moon, and Janice Sonski, Sailor Moon Co-Producer at DIC. She gave lots of insight into the US production and told us ahead of time about many of the changes, and why they were made, and later explained why the Doom Tree Series was delayed in the first run (they had hoped to get it to run on a network as a miniseries). I and a small number of other fans had made contact with DIC a few months before the US release out of support for the importing of the series, and I had been maintaining this contact since. (I'm a slight old-timer anime fan myself, having been into anime since the late '70s--I first became attracted to Sailor Moon through reading the original manga first ^_^;).
Anyway, at this point, the background artist went and placed the figures in the crystals you see in the foreground: Darth Vader, Yoda, Charleton Heston from Planet of the Apes (the background artists, Bruce Sharp and Don Hazeltine--the latter being the painter here, were making fun of this movie a lot at the time...don't ask me why ^_^;), and Al Lowe in front (we had to put him in SOMEWHERE ^_^). On the left are characters from the game's plot: Torin's parents, and his pet/friend, Boogle. When these backgrounds came to me, I was merely supposed to reduce the color palette and file it in the game database. However, I snuck in an image of Hotaru I scaled down from a trading card before doing so. It was caught later, but was allowed to stay in (after I explained what it was). There were no other anime fans on the team, so I think they figured one anime in-joke was harmless enough. ^_^
Actually there *IS* another Sailor Moon egg in Torin's Passage. But it's nearly impossible to get to. You have to work Torin into a invisible maze that goes over into the lower left corner of a lava screen. If you do so, his legs will disappear and as he walks in the corner, "Sailor Moon" in Japanese will appear in place of his legs as he walks there. This was something I put in for my own amusement and is almost impossible to do if you don't know the spot where the maze starts. ^_-
Lastly, there's a slight Sailor Moon egg in Al Lowe's next game, the adult game "Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail". There's a nude pool, and one of the animators (Al Eufrasio) did a caricature of me in it wearing Scuba gear and doing the "I Will Punish You" pose. But that one's not MY fault...
I'm no longer working at Sierra, so please don't ask me to put more in their future games... ^_-
Congrats to Adam for spotting my handiwork. That's a great image you guys have of the shot, too--I may have to put a link to it on my page now ^_^;;;.
Warm Regards, Bryan Craig Wilkinson
uni@wolfenet.com http://www.wolfenet.com/~uni
