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202 - Steven Spielberg’s The Dig (Patreon)

Published:
2025-08-13 06:00:09
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

The lads grab their engraved rods and play with some loose bones as they cover the LucasArts’ 1995 xenoarchaeologist point-and-click adventure: The Dig. Topics include the gaming prowess of Steven Spielberg, the incredibly fraught production process, and what it means to have have a point and click adventure imprint upon you as a child that requires you to turn a turtle into a bomb.

Want more TWOAPW? Get access to our full back catalogue of premium/bonus episodes by subscribing for $5/month at Patreon.com/worstofall!

Media Referenced in this Episode:

The Dig. LucasArts. 1995.

A Conversation with Gary Brubaker. Tech Talk with Daniel Albu. April 6th, 2025.

“The Dig is a weird LucasArts adventure dreamed up by Steven Spielberg” by Andy Kelly. PC Gamer. May 15th, 2020.

The Dig by Jimmy Maher. Digital Antiquarian. July 23rd. 2021.

“Exclusive Interview with Noah Falstein” by Santiago Mendez. The Dig Museum. December 27th, 2004.

“Interview with Brian Moriarty” by Paco García. Aventura y CÍA. March 2006.

“LucasArts Secret History #11: The Dig Bills Tiller and Eaken”. The International House of Mojo.

“LucasArts Secret History #11: The Dig Sean Clark’s Recollections of Joy”. The International House of Mojo.

Original Design Document for The Dig

“So, a Giant Asteroid is Heading for Earth…Again…” by Luke Plunkett. Kotaku. November 2nd, 2011.

“Steven Spielberg Apparently Won’t Play Uncharted Because He’s a Big PC Gamer and Only Likes Mouse and Keyboard” by Kat Bailey. IGN. October 2nd, 2024.

TWOAPW theme by Brendan Dalton: Patreon // brendan-dalton.com // brendandalton.bandcamp.com

Interstitial: “Brink” // Written by A.J. Ditty // Featuring A.J. Ditty as “Professor Ludger Brink”

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Comments

Evie Moriarty

For me the adventure game that stuck with me was Sam and Max Hit the Road and I would LOVE you to talk about that - it's so deeply weird it deserves to be remembered

Em Gravesong

I just wanna say, the "Dig In" bit was a microcosm of one of my favorite things about this show; the very distinct ways that any two of you antagonize the third. AJ and Josh vs. Brian always has a distinct tenor from Brian and AJ vs. Josh, is also always distinct from AJ and Brian vs. Josh. Y'all form a very fun Venn Diagram.

BarFly

The adventure game that reshaped my mind was Grim Fandango, which seemed like it had been made especially for me. Fun fact: Brink from Brink! was played by Erik von Detten, which sounds like an alias of Brink from The Dig.

Bee

I recently played an adventure game called The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo that I highly recommend! Some of the puzzles are a bit obtuse and it's kind of short but the real winning feature is the hand drawn animation. It's a very whimsical charming little game. It came out a couple of years ago so it's nice to see the genre still get some love!

Al Fair

i’m only just starting the episode but my first adventure games were sierra, specifically space quest and leisure suit larry. let me tell you i was the only 9 year old girl i knew who could spell ‘prophylactic”, a direct result of having to spell it correctly in LSL in the days before point and click.

Derek W

LOOM and The Secret of Monkey Island are the games that have been burned into my brain for 30 years now.

EJPA_151639

Love these adventure game eps, and would love to hear a Grim Fandango episode from you guys! That game is in the core of my soul.

Josephine

I did not expect to hear elon musk in a podcast about a game I have never heard of and probably will never actually play what a malignant pox this man is

Kevin M

I had genuinely never heard of this game before! It's great to find something completely new and unexpected. BTW if anyone else is on an adventure kick, The Drifter came out a few weeks ago and (beside being a great point and click adventure) has quietly slipped into my top 3 games of the year.

Dergon

Can't believe videogames had a failed "pivot to video" before the internet.

Adi

Man the only point and click game I got to play as an actual child was fuckin Clue Finders Fourth Grade Adventures

Adi

As an adult though I’m pretty attached to Shardlight

Dergon

I played one of those in like a Tibet type area? I remember a puzzle involving weaving. I also played the heck out of Super Solvers Gizmos and Gadgets

Bentivegitantus

This was such a lovely chronicle of the AJ and Mr. Ditty relationship. It was very sweet to hear about it, and I appreciate you sharing. If only Mr. Ditty had not been killed by those commandos during his trip just prior to AJ's conversion. At least they didn't capture him alive...

The Worst of All Possible Worlds

FMV went totally metastatic. There were huge, expensive productions like the Star Trek and X Files and it was all totally forgotten by like 2005

John Leavitt

I’m sure any fans of the genre have heard of it but “thimbleweed park” is the spiritual sequel to maniac mansion done by a lot of the same people and it’s full of LucasArts/Sierra in-jokes and references (also as a backer I’m in the phone book! If you call the number you can hear me being a numbers station)

Iain Standing

Just gotta say RE: Orson Scott Card - the man is almost completely a heinously bad author except for the first two sequels to Ender’s Game. I really dislike that first book, but Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide are so spiritually un-Mormon and kind of gnostic while presenting a very harmonious view of radical empathy for all life. They’re astoundingly good and the books Card actually wanted to write until he realized no one would get the story if he didn’t write Ender’s Game first as a prequel. Then he wrote 170000 other sequels that are all equally dogshit

Mulloy

Oh my God my molded game is Zack mckracken lol. The puzzles make no fucking sense and i love all of them. Figuring out those puzzles with only a bbs and a couple friends was amazing.

KotR

Lovely episode, I was introduced to point and clicks by my dad early on but I never really got gripped by any of them, so its nice to catch up with them like this. I have however really enjoyed the japanese take on the same kind of genre in Ace Attorney and Kotaro Uchikoshi's various works recently and really been enjoying them, idk if any of you guys have any relationship with those games but I'd love to here your take

Nick Fontaine

Having Read Orson Scott Card's Xenocide (3rd in the Ender's series), the ending of that book is almost entirely the same as the 6th dimension stuff, up to and including somehow bringing two people back to life. I know Card was brought in to do dialogue, but I can't imagine it's a coincidence that Xenocide was published in 1991

Iain Standing

Something I think a lot about with Sci Fi specifically and am really fascinated by is how much it’s driven by concepts and you can get so into a concept that the actual things around it matter less. Sci Fi has some of the best written books of all time within it as a genre (any book by M John Harrison), but I think so often about the concepts held within random science fiction novels that don’t even respect your intelligence as a reader because right at the heart is an interesting concept, and those stick with me more than anything. I mean, read any Philip K Dick novel and the writing is pretty subpar, but the man was a savant when coming up either as many interesting ideas as possible. I think that’s where the Dig lies: when it’s at its best, it’s throwing like twenty completely disengaged ideas at the wall and failing to do anything with them, so all I can do as a player is think about how cool these ideas should be and it supplants the actual experience

Donald

The width and breadth of your deep dives into the media you analyze is just so damn good. Great stuff as always fellas.

Jonathan V. Cann

"My" adventure game was SegaSoft's Obsidian (the one with That Commercial) - I still talk about it to this day - but The Dig was the game that taught little kid me DOS. When I tried to run it in Windows, it was so slow that each shift of those door shapes happened frame by frame. The only way to make the family computer reserve enough memory to run it at normal speed was to create a boot disk and load the game off DOS commands without loading Windows at all, and there was still some occasional slowdown (imagine an unintentional long freeze frame on Boston's face in that late FMV when Maggie falls off The Eye). I don't know if I'd have understood or enjoyed the game without the guide, but with it, my sister and I were able to treat it as a sandbox for telling our own stories. We even made a "tram" in our backyard by hanging a basket on what was basically a clothesline, and I'm pretty sure she wrote a bunch of what we'd now call Dig fanfiction. I really hope y'all do more episodes about adventure games! Last thought: did any of you try calling Brink or Maggie on the PDA just before the Spacetime 6 sequence? *Doodaloodee* "He's dead." *Doodaloodee* "She's dead." You can seemingly make Boston say this deadpan observation as many times as you want.

Ghostly

With the destruction of PBS it could be a fun time to look at some the movies it has produced through the years. One of their first was The Laithe of Heaven, and adaptation of Ursula K Le Guin’s novel.

Various Ailments

The Kermit seeing Miss Piggy "it's the pig" "I'm going to try enlarging that hole" combo was so stupid I nearly fell off my bike laughing.

Michael Notkin

I think if you wanted to make an episode about a newer adventure game, I would recommend something from Wadjet Eye Games, in particular Avowed is really good.

Rhowena Rhobot

My one exposure to Orson Scott Card was the really weird and bad Iron Man comic he did for Marvel's old Ultimate line. I barely remember it, but from what I recall, Tony Stark's whole body had brain matter scattered throughout it, and they had to coat him in some blue shit to prevent him from concussing himself any time he touched something. It was so dumb, and immediately disregarded by the next guy to write something with him in it.

Mason Stark

My version of the point and click adventure game that stuck with me from childhood were the Her Interactive Nancy Drew games, and they’re still making those lol

David Fisher

That was an interesting point you had at the beginning, about having a point-and-click adventure game from childhood that casts an exact model of itself in your brain. My immediate reaction was "What? I don't know about that. I don't think I have any -- OH MY GOD IT'S SAM AND MAX."

Wilko

The first video game I fell in love with as well as one of the first ones I ever played, full stop, was an advertising game for BIFI (the mini salami, in case you're not familiar). BIFI Adventure, I think. Takes place in a movie studio and is pretty well done, considering what it is. I played it with my cousin and I have very fond memories of it. Actually, all the games I remember playing as a child, I did with friends. I totally understand why playing The Dig with your dad would leave a lasting impression. BTW. I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you like story-focused adventure games please give "The Drifter" a try. It is one of my favorite games this year so far.

Jonathan David

My earliest exposure to LucasArts and the overall CompUSA experience was 1996’s “Mortimer and the Riddles of the Medallion,” which I think would make for a fantastic episode

Just a Fish

In the closing comments, you mention that gameplay has "moved past" adventure games, and ALL I could think about was the Elder Scrolls Skyrim puzzle where you had to rotate an item in your inventory to see the lock combination to a door (I actually thought of it when you were talking about engraved Rodneys (how is 'Rodney' pluralized?). How visual item inspection is still a mechanic so many years later, but it completly flummoxed so many people. Also on guidebooks as a THING. I was once a disappointed owner of a Final Fantasy IX guidebook, which referred you to their Online guide, marking the apex and complete collapse of "Guidebooks" as a thing.