This Week in Retro: I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream [1995] (Patreon)

October 31, 1995: Harlan Ellison Delivers Terror At the End of the World

by Diamond Feit

It is traditional this time of year to embrace horror in its many forms as Halloween is in the air, but I've struggled to find a taste for the macabre in 2020. I don't think I need to explain why; we're in the midst of a global panic right now, one that’s hitting Americans extra hard. My sister shared a photo of a flag-covered field memorializing the casualties of COVID-19 in New York. Each flag represented one death, and there were more flags than I could ever count. With real death hanging over us, I'm less interested in pursuing the darker side of entertainment right now. Nevertheless, in order to commemorate the 25th anniversary of a landmark science-fiction/horror title, I dared to delve into I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

While the video game was released on Halloween 1995, the roots of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream are much older. It was originally a Hugo Award-winning short story, allegedly written in a single night, by Harlan Ellison back in 1966. That story first saw publication in 1967, and it’s been in print ever since (although it doesn't take much internet sleuthing to find versions of it online, for free). At just 13 pages in length, it can be read in a matter of minutes, but in those 13 pages Ellison paints a terrible picture of a world destroyed by an automaton. A master computer, designed to defeat its enemies, decided one day to destroy all human life instead—all human life save for five people, who are kept alive by the computer and tortured. Forever.

The villainous supercomputer is called AM. It formerly had been known as A.M. but now is simply AM: A name the computer adopts based on the ancient adage, "I think, therefore I am." The story begins with the fate of the world already sealed and the five human survivors living in the 109th year of their cursed existence. It is unclear how AM has extended their life, but it seems to have complete ownership over their bodies; their blood can be drained and their physiques reshaped. Yet they remain alive, ageless, and in agony.

Ellison offers little backstory to explain why these particular five people ended up as prisoners held underground by a deranged A.I. All that’s clear is the fact that the computer is so powerful and so angry that it needs someone to rule over, or else it would lose whatever mind it has remaining. Beyond physical torture and mutilation, AM seems to delight in sending them on long quests underground with the promise of food or other rewards, only to give them nothing worth their hardship. Ultimately, four of the five humans find escape through the only loophole left to them—death—while the fifth survives his wounds but is rendered by AM into "a great soft jelly thing," eternally unable to move or speak or, as the title says, scream.

The game, produced nearly 30 years after the story was first written, necessarily expanded on the original premise. AM is still a subterranean A.I. holding five people captive for eternity, but he is now a full-fledged character who speaks directly to the humans. The game opens with a title screen, which leads directly to a monologue from AM about how much he hates people—especially these five, whom he then introduces to the player one by one. The player is then free to select which character will "play" with AM in a scenario of the mad computer's making.

Just as the original short story was reflective of Cold War paranoia in the 1960s, the computer game I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream reflects the era in which it was produced: the 1990s. It is a point-and-click adventure, fully voiced, where trial-and-error is typically the only way to proceed and death potentially lurks behind every wrong move. Each of the five humans has their own unique story which can be completed in any order. If any of them "die," AM restores their bodies, and the player can attempt that individual’s quest again from the beginning.

It is during these custom-made scenarios that the player learns both a backstory for each character and gains insight into how and why AM tortures them. In the original tale, the survivors are threadbare. We learn Ellen is a Black woman and Benny was a handsome gay man before AM deformed him, but the other three are little more than names on a page. This expanded version of the story was written in conjunction with Harlan Ellison himself, according to designer/producer David Mullich in a 2012 interview with Game Informer: "The question [co-designer David Sears] posed to Harlan that got them started was ‘Why were these people saved? Why did AM decide to save them?’"

Building up the characters gave them individual personalities, quirks, and failings, though the results are mixed. Nimdok gains the most in moving from page to screen, as he becomes a full-on Nazi scientist who experimented on Jews (much in the same way AM now experiments on him). Ellen fares less well: As the only woman in the group, she gets saddled with a psychosis stemming from a past sexual assault. In a most unfortunate edit, Benny's homosexuality is completely lost in the video game version; there is no mention of his sexual identity, and there is even an image of a woman who appears to be a former lover. Why did the half-ape man need to be straight?

In the final game, Mullich, Sears, and Ellison are all credited as "designed by," with Ellison also taking the juicy role of voicing the malevolent AM; his performance must be heard to be believed. Ellison wasn't known for his acting, but he was certainly outspoken. I can recall seeing him in televised vignettes on the Sci-Fi Channel talking directly to the camera about tropes in fiction which annoyed him. At the time, I did not know why he had earned the right to do this on television, but now we live in a world where everyone, not just award-winning authors, can complain on camera. I don’t know if that counts as progress.

Beyond his literal voice, Ellison's metaphorical voice is deeply imbrued in the final product. As he told The Guardian in 2013: "I did a video game called I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, and I created it so you could not win it. The only way in which you could 'win' was to play it nobly. The more nobly you played it, the closer to succeeding you would come, but you could not actually beat it. And that annoyed the hell out of people too." This claim is, as was his wont, a slight exaggeration. It is true that most endings in I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream resemble the tragic ending of the original story, but it is possible to outsmart AM in the game's finale which leads to not only the salvation of one of the five survivors, but also the rescue of a colony of frozen humans hidden on Earth's moon. As David Sears told Game Informer in 2012: "We can’t have only negative, punishing endings. We can have an optimistic ending."

Harlan Ellison departed our reality in 2018 at the age of 84, leaving behind nearly seven solid decades of written work (including the basis for what is widely regarded as the best episode of the original Star Trek). I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream remains in print to this day, both as a short story and as a video game: Original developer Cyberdreams folded years ago, but the rights were purchased in 2013. The game is now digitally available on Steam, Good Old Games, and was even ported to smartphones.

It's definitely a tough game to complete, as the win conditions are very specific. I couldn't manage to get that optimistic ending myself despite using two walkthroughs and a YouTube longplay. But, of course, the happy ending is hardly the best ending in this case; Harlan Ellison wrote a tale about humanity at its worst in a world destroyed by technology run amok. Maybe it's for that best that my playthrough ended with a Nazi turned into an immortal vegetable. Hell, from a certain standpoint, that could even count as optimistic.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan and is an active Twitter user.