Ask me about LOOM

Title Screen

LOOM came in a large box with six 5.25" floppy disks or three 3.5" floppy disks, the User's Manual, the Book of Patterns, a red transparent filter to read the copy protection symbols, and an audio cassette containing the audio drama, a trade in offer for the opposite type of floppy disks and an upgrade offer for the Roland MT-32 sound upgrade.  Also, you probably got a catalog or even The Adventurer #1 with your copy, depending on when you bought it.

Full Box Contents (courtesy of TheFloppyDisk.com)

So LOOM is an example of "the whole package" presentation of PC games.  The boxes were often stuffed with disks and manuals and other "stuff", making those big boxes somewhat justifiable.  To experience LOOM "whole" requires you to go through those items, one by one, until you get to the disks themselves and install the game.

Loom Island

As has been mentioned before in this blog, there are three major versions of LOOM, the PC disk version with 16-color graphics, the FM Towns CD version with 256-color graphics, and the PC CD version with 256-color graphics.  Of all the versions you could play, I would recommend the PC disk version.

Loom Sanctuary

The PC disk version has several advantages over the other versions.  First, it can be played with just about any computer and graphics adapter except Hercules (unofficially Hercules can play the game with the SimCGA program). Second, the game supports all the common sound device options of its day, the PC Speaker, Tandy, Ad Lib MSC, CMS Game Blaster and Roland MT-32.  Third, even with the Roland MT-32 upgrade, the whole game will take up no more than 2.15MB.  Fourth, if your vintage computer lacks a hard drive, you can swap floppies.  Fifth, loading times are non-existent with the disk version in most systems with a hard drive, but if you have to play with a CD, you will have the frequent short wait while the CD seeks a track or section within a track.  Lastly, the singular vision of Brian Moriarty is completely encompassed here.

Crystalguard

The floppy disks are well arranged for disk swapping, even for the 5.25" floppy disks.  Disk 1 contains the main executable and the introductory screens.  Disk 2 is primarily for Loom Island, Disk 3 is for the Glassmakers, Disk 4 for the Shepherds and the Dragon's Cave, Disk 5 for the Blacksmiths and Disk 6 for the Clerics and end-game.  The 3.5" disks combine Disks 1 & 2, Disks 3 & 4 and Disks 5 & 6, further reducing the need for swapping.   However, it was not intended that you swap disks if you wanted to use the Roland MT-32 music on the upgrade disk, which came in both sizes.  You were supposed to install the game to a hard drive to enjoy the MT-32 music.  I suppose LucasArts probably thought that if you were rich enough to afford an MT-32, you were rich enough to have a hard drive in your PC.  Savegames with the Roland MT-32 patch cannot use another sound option.

Shepherd's Meadow

The audio drama is on a compact cassette and can be found on both sides in stereo.  The drama runs 29 minutes, 9 seconds.  Side One is encoded in Dolby B NR (noise reduction).  Side Two is encoded with Dolby S.  Dolby B was prominent from the 1970s as a noise reduction system and widely supported, while Dolby S was a much newer (1989) noise reduction encoding system that required special support with high end cassette playback devices.  Dolby S recordings could be played back on Dolby B-supporting devices, but there would be less benefit.  Dolby B could be played back on low-end cassette playback devices that did not support any Dolby encoding, but there would be less benefit.

Dragon's Cave

LOOM is not unique in containing a cassette with spoken audio for adding value to the game.  Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer had a tape of Yeager talking about his career and giving aviation advice. Corruption had a tape where you could hear two versions of a conversation, the full conversation and a conversation edited to frame you.  The President is Missing contained audio supplements to the game.  None of these games had a full-cast audio drama to give the background for the story.  LOOM used professional voice actors and recorded them at Skywalker Ranch.  They also recorded them reading their lines together instead of separately as is the more common practice.  The script for the audio drama can be found on pages 32-38 of the LOOM Hint Book.

Forge Interior

In the standalone PC disk versions, the copy protection requires you to look for the correct guild symbol and then click on the four notes given for one of the four patterns.  There are twelve guild symbols and four patterns for each guild (throw, beat treadle and rest).  Unlike most games that will boot you to DOS if you fail the copy protection, LOOM will allow you to play the game in Demo mode, at least to a certain point, and you cannot save or restore a game.  If you have the version of the game contained in the LucasArts Classic Adventures collection, the copy protection has been removed and you will never see the copy protection screens.

Cathedral Balcony

Much of the visual attraction of LOOM can be attributed to one man, Mark Ferrari.  Ferrari did the front cover box art as well as all the backgrounds for the game and contributed to the animation.  LOOM has some of the most beautiful backgrounds ever done for a 16-color PC game.  The work of this one man was redone by four artists in the CD versions, with varying results.

Shore of Wonder

The musical inspiration for LOOM goes to an unimpeachable source, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.  Moriarty loved the ballet Swan Lake and incorporated certain movements of it wholesale into LOOM.  Even the little music which is not directly taken from Tchaikovsky's work is adapted from it.  While I cannot see LOOM as being a computer game adaptation of the ballet, the ballet's idea of humans turning into swans is an influence on the game, which features the same thing.  Every guild has its own theme taken from the music to the ballet.  Here is a chart of showing the themes in LOOM and their corresponding place in Tchaikovsky's ballet :

Loom Theme	Swan Lake Name	Location in Swan Lake	Notes
Overture	Scène: Moderato	Act II, Numbers 10 & 14	Roland MT-32 Only
Opening/Loom Island	Pas de Trois: Intrada/Allegro	Act I, Number 4, Movement 1
The Elders/Closing	Danse des Petit Cygnes: Moderato	Act IV, Number 27
Crystalguard/Glassmakers	Danse des Cygnets: Allegro Moderato	Act II, Number 13, Movement 4
Meadow/Shepherds	Pas D'action	Act I, Number 6
Forge/Blacksmiths	Pas de Trois: Moderato	Act I, Number 4, Movement 4
Cathedral/Clerics	Pas de Trois: Andante Sostenuto	Act I, Number 4, Movement 2
Final Confrontation/Dead Ones	Scène: Moderato	Act II, Numbers 10 & 14	More of an arrangement

LOOM may have been intended (depending on when Moriarty commented on the matter) to be the first part of a trilogy of games or the trilogy was left open as an option.  The second game was going to be called Forge and feature the adventures of Rusty Nailbender to try and save his guild.  The third game was going to be called The Fold and follows the adventures of Fleece Firmflanks to try to restore the world.  However, Moriarty and his team were busy working on other projects and the  drive was not there at LucasArts to complete the trilogy and eventually the moment had passed.  However, there were guilds and drafts mentioned in the written materials and the game which were not used in LOOM, perhaps the sequels may have used some of these ideas.

Guilds mentioned in the Book of Patterns or in the game and not featured include :

Seismologists
Embalmers
Undertakers
Florists
Career Politicians
Assassins
Miners
Umbrella Openers
Dancers
Psychotherapists
Shepherds
Organists
Nannies
Conductors
Firefighters
Statisticians
Bookbinders
Woodcutters
Vintners
Mages

There are twelve guild symbols used for the copy protection :a quill pen in an inkpot, a crook with a sheep, a spinning loom, a pair of scissors, a drinking goblet, a toy horse, a T-square, a three-pronged staff, an abacus, a hammer and anvil, a wavy line and a magnifying glass.  I would suggest these represent Career Politicians, Shepherds, Weavers, Tailors, Vintners, Toymakers, Architects, Clerics, Statisticians, Blacksmiths, Seismologists (or Mages) and Psychotherapists.

Drafts mentioned in the Book of Patterns but not used in the game include :

Summoning
Tongues
Tremblor
Shrinkage
Desire
Waterproofing
Folding
Confusion
Warmth
Aphrodesia
Extinguishing
Blessing
Rending

The drafts use the musical notes across a scale from C-C'.  You can use sixteen drafts in the game.  Two drafts, Opening and Transcendence, do not change from game to game, but the rest do.  All the other drafts have three possible note combinations.   However, you only need to write down only eight drafts to get to the end of the game.

Bobbin Threadbare

The first game was designed to be completed.  It was not made so difficult as to require an obligatory hint book purchase or be left on the shelf and forgotten in frustration.  This may explain why LOOM's hint book is rather more difficult to find than other LucasArts' hint books.  The puzzles in this game have solutions that make sense and the clues are easy to grasp if you pay attention.  At times the game will give you hints if you are not doing something quite right.

Mother Hetchel

LOOM's can be put in an unwinnable state if you forget to transcribe a draft or transcribe it incorrectly and cannot go back to the point where you can hear it again. Backtracking is limited in this game.  Some puzzles have more than one solution as well.  The Expert mode will really test your note identification abilities, there are no visual cues usually present.  It does reward you with a neat scene toward the end of the game.

Elder Atropos

Did you know that the end credits change depending on the hardware you are started a game on the disk version with?  You will see one of the following lines in the end credits, depending on the sound hardware you used :

Roland Stereo Soundtrack by George Alistair Sanger and David Warhol
AdLib™ Soundtrack by Eric Hammond
CMS Stereo Soundtrack by Eric Hammond
Tandy Soundtrack by Dave Hayes and David Warhol
IBM PC Soundtrack by Dave Hayes and David Warhol

Hetchel as a Swan

And a little later in the credits :

Tandy Edition by Aric Wilmunder (if running the game on a Tandy 1000 computer), otherwise
IBM PC Edition by Aric Wilmunder

Master Goodmold

LOOM is one of the first PC games where a player can really feel that he is driving the plot.  Earlier games were content to let you go off and explore with the general plot making an appearance from time to time, but LOOM is a game that is squarely focused on its plot.  As the protagonist, you drive the story and your actions have consequences.  The game is rather intimate in that you have fairly frequent interaction with the other characters in the game.  The more important characters have animated portraits and distinctive dialogue to give them personality.

Fleece Firmflanks

LOOM can be seen as something of a Greek tragedy.  Bobbin has been destined from birth to cause chaos to erupt in the Pattern.  No matter what he does, he inevitably is the spark that causes the Pattern to be torn open and allow for Chaos and the Dead Ones to invade the world of the living.  The Elders tried to stop chaos by trying to banish Bobbin to the Shore of Wonder, but were thwarted before they could act.  Ironically, Bobbin's mother, who brought Bobbin into the world to forestall the coming of chaos, prevented the Elders from possibly forestalling chaos.  Finally, no one really wins in LOOM, Bobbin and the Weavers fight Chaos to a draw at best or make a retreat.  Bobbin, who is still a seventeen year old "child" has to pay the price for his destiny by Transcending well before his time.

It is no accident that the Elders are named Atropos, Clothos and Lachesis, which are the names of the three Fates of Greek Mythology.  Like the Greek Fates, who dictate the destiny of every mortal from birth to death, the Elders control access to the Loom, which contains the pattern of all life and death in its threads. The Greek Clotho uses a Distaff and Spindle to spin the thread of life.  The Loom Clothos is the least hostile of the Elders to Hetchel.  The Greek Lachesis measures the thread of life with a rod, while the Loom Lachesis is the one to denounce Hetchel, implying her thread has reached its end  Finally, the Greek Atropos cuts the thread of life, indicating the doom of the person.  Elder Atropos from Loom is the the one who casts the draft of Transcendence on Hetchel, symbolically ending her physical life.

The Dragon

As everybody knows, the PC CD version added fully spoken dialogue to the game.  They put all the voice acting, music and sound effects on one large CD audio track following the game data.  The CD audio track is 54 minutes and 39 seconds long.  Everything was lumped into one CD track because the CD standard only supports 99 tracks, which is insufficient for all the cues in this game.

Rusty Nailbender

Why didn't LucasArts just digitize the speech like it did with Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Day of the Tentacle?  That would have allowed them to include a great deal more speech, but this would have come at the loss of quality.  Indy and Day's speech is encoded in 8-bit and no greater than 22.050KHz. LOOM's speech is at 16-bit and 44.1KHz.  Moreover, Indy and Day require a Sound Blaster for speech playback while LOOM only requires a CD-ROM drive.  In 1992, CD-ROM drives and Sound Cards were still expensive, and it was not guaranteed that someone would own both.  Moreover, at this point LucasArts' voice acted games were still using MT-32 and General MIDI for music.  On LOOM, while the music is not always distinct from the dialogue, it sounds much better than the MT-32 of the disk version.

Master Stoke

Despite the loss of much of the more humorous dialogue, the CD voice acting is professionally done.  In addition, LucasArts managed to obtain most of the voice actors who had done the audio drama for cassette.  This was during a time when much of the voice work and acting for CD-ROM games was done on the cheap by the programming team and the company staffers instead of professionals.  To its credit, LucasArts never really went down that route.

Bishop Mandible

The redone artwork for the portraits is exceptionally well-done.  Unfortunately, you will almost never see it in the PC CD version.  Because the dialogue was shortened, those portraits would have gone by too quickly.  They are seen normally in the FM Towns version.  There are a pair of animated cutscenes unique to the PC CD version, but they look rather ugly and out of place compared to the rest of the game.

Cob

The PC CD version has an unfinished feel to it.  No one bothered to recolor the distaff to bring it up to 256 color standards, even though a recolored distaff was in the FM Towns version.  Less defensible is the fact that the item closeups have not been redone either.  Neither the FM Towns nor the PC CD corrected this leftover from the PC disk version.  Nor did they update the graphics when you look into the crystal spheres in these versions.

Rusty Nailbender as a Ghost

What about the FM Towns version?  The FM Towns computers are very rare and expensive, even the FM Towns Marty consoles are hardly common, even in Japan.  Obtaining an authentic FM Towns hardware experience will be very expensive.  While UNZ does a serviceable job emulating the system and has English-translated menus to make things easy to get running, emulation only gets you so far.

Lady Cygna Threadbare

One better known issue with the FM Towns version is that there are two sets of music tracks.  While both tracks were composed with synthesizers, the first set of tracks sound a lot more orchestral than the second set.  Yet it is the second set that loops after both sets are played.  They should have axed the second set altogether, it is totally inferior when it comes to reproducing the music of Swan Lake.

Chaos

One lesser-known issue with the FM Towns version is that the aspect ratio is not correct.  The FM Towns version takes the artwork designed for a vertically stretched 320x200 resolution and adds 40 lines of black on the bottom of the screen without adjusting the graphics themselves.  On a PC, most people stretch their monitor's height so that the visible edges of the screen come close to touching the monitor bezel.  The end result makes the "spheres" in the game have a nearly spherical ratio in either the PC disk or PC CD versions. Without aspect ratio correction, the crystal spheres in the FM Towns version look like ovals.

Loom FM Towns

Loom PC CD (Aspect Ratio Corrected)

The last  issue with the FM Towns version is that they did not convert the item closeups to 256 colors, just like with the PC CD version.  It rather takes away from the fantasy when you see a symptom of "get it out by Christmas".

Anything else you want to know?