I miss Prince.
When he died in 2016, a huge hole was left in the entertainment world. I had been a Prince fan since the early 1980's. He released a staggering 39 albums during his career, and supposedly had dozens more full albums completed that are stored in a vault.
In the mid-1990's, he was going through a very challenging time in his life. He was having a massive with his record label. It got to such a point that he legally changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol so he could control the release of his music. In the middle of all this, the folks at Graphix Zone - a company specializing on "enhanced CD's" - decided to release a game based on the world of Prince.
Prince: Interactive is an interactive multimedia experience that is part museum and part Myst-style puzzle game.
When you start the game, after a couple splash screens, you are brought to a video screen, just hit the "play" button, and you are welcomed to the experience by the NPG (New Power Generation, Prince's backing band at the time) Operator.
You then get to see a performance of the song "Interactive". As I have no idea if Prince was involved in this project at all (he isn't mentioned anywhere, and there is no new content in the game with him in it), I doubt this song was actually meant for this game. It's just a happy accident.
Behold that video quality!
Once the song is over, you are deposited into this strange forest area.
Just follow the path which leads to the front door.
Ummm...ok...
Once you enter, you are met with a much more normal scene.
Well, normal for Prince, I guess.
The basic concept of the game is extremely simple. Prince's symbol has been broken up into six pieces and is spread around the building. You have to root around, discover the puzzles, then solve them to put the symbol back together. This is truly a Myst- or 7th Guest - lite.
The game boasts over 500 "experiences", but I believe they count everything, including clicking on the various bowls in the main room as an experience.
Oh, hi...bowl woman!
Click around enough places, and a few doors will open, leading to other rooms.
This hallway leads you to...
...outer space?
Anyway, descend the staircase, play with the mic stand at the bottom of the stairs a bit, and enter Prince's music studio.
In this room, you can play around with a very bizarre graphic equalizer. I'm telling you, in 1994, this was amazing. You could remove the bass from a Prince track!
Once you've taken a couple minutes to play with this, you can enter into the studio itself.
Of course, before you go, you have to check out the Magic Eye poster (My goodness this thing drips 1990's).
Oh hey! Bowl lady is back!
I bet you'll never guess what the image is.
There are several interactive stations. There's a plaque on the wall that shows a list of songs Prince wrote for other people...
Plus there are places that highlight Prince's vocals, guitar licks, and piano playing. Not much interactive in here, but some cool clips from some rarities can be found.
The highlight is the Prince metronome...
I wonder what this blurry picture of Diamond and Pearl is hiding???
Once you find a piece of the symbol, you are returned to the video screen room you saw at the beginning of the game. Only this time, you can click on the symbol in the upper left hand corner to warp around the building (which, you should now realize is symbol-shaped). There does seem to be a graphical glitch here.
The next section I want to highlight is the club, which you can access by an elevator.
Here in the club, some of the experiences you can have include watching short interviews with other artists about Prince's influence, a really terrible turntable mixing room, and a video wall with some live clips.
Besides Little Richard and Miles Davis, you can also hear comments by George Clinton and Eric Clapton.
This looks like it should be a puzzle, but is in fact where you access the other interviews.
The balcony lets you watch the video wall. As mentioned in the studio, "Kiss" on this list is the full song.
Hiding under the stairs is the mixing room, in case you struggle in finding it, this image should be a giveaway.
In the mixing room, there is a CD rack. Just pick a CD, drag it into the player, then warp the song with the two turntables. Unfortunately, this just does not work well. All you do is make the song skip a second, or slow down for a second. It's not a viable mixing tool.
If you pick the right songs, though, you can bring up a video of a female dancing.
Going back to the mansion, there is a long hallway with two small alcoves on either side (just look at the symbol, you'll know where these are. On one side is a library room where the highlight is a book of photos.
You'll never guess which book it is...
The other side of the hall, I can only describe it as the easiest puzzle in the history of puzzles ever. I normally don't like spoiling answers to puzzles, but seriously...this one deserves to be spoiled.
You walk up to an altar with a 5-stick candelabra. You find 4 of the flames alight. What should you do? Exactly, click on the 5th candle. It lights up, the beginning to Let's Go Crazy plays, the picture on the wall morphs, and you get a piece to the puzzle.
So now you've got 3 pieces of the symbol. Let's head back to the main mansion. At the end of the long hallway is a door with the symbol on it, but the symbol is greyed out...so let's head to the hallway on the left.
At the top of the stairs, we have a very important choice...
Which one will you "touch"? If you choose poorly...
You are sent to an empty room and mocked by maniacal laughter. If you are worried about having to replay a lot of the game, or trying to find your way out of a maze...don't worry, the door kicks you back out to the bottom of the stairs. Gaining access to the room lets you into Prince's bedroom.
Wandering around, you can find a closet of Prince's clothes.
If you can figure your way around the room just right, you can find yourself lying on Prince's bed, watching his tv. The choice of channels is faily limited to clips of some of Prince's slower jams.
I wonder what the Up/Down button does?
Oh... his bedroom has its own dungeon. Interesting...
The FINAL section of the mansion has my two favorite puzzles. They are dead simple card sliding games, think those old plastic sliding puzzles, except instead of 15 tiles, there are only 6. Once you complete these puzzles, you are rewarded with full length videos. If you go to the "White" room, you are rewarded with "Diamonds and Pearls".
Go to the other side, it's a very different vibe, and you get to watch the video for my FAVORITE Prince song of all time "Gett Off".
You then have to finish a very basic matching game. If you've paid attention at all during the game, this should be easy. Even if you didn't, there is no penalty for missed guesses...so just go until you get them all right.
No symbolism here, nope, none at all.
So, you should have 5 symbol pieces...except, by getting 5, you actually got the 6th. If you head back to the door with the greyed out symbol, it's now got the top circle filled in.
Enter the door, and you go back outside, but it's more space-like than the forest from the beginning of the game.
Out there, you meet a woman who tells you something. Unfortunately, that seems to be glitched as she is silent. Eventually she disappears and you walk out the bridge.
An elevator pod. Interesting...
A spacecraft?
Enter the room, and you see...that same video screen you've seen several times already (still with the graphical glitch). A new video starts playing.
Disembodied bowl lady again! Hiiii!!!
The door closes...
You take flight over the building (which again, shows it's the shape of Prince's symbol if you didn't know this by this point.
Then a music video begins. The video is a version of "endorphinmachine" which was eventually released on The Gold Experience in 1995. The version on here is an early studio version from 1993. The video was meant to be shown on the UK series Top of the Pops, but was never aired. In my opinion, this version of the song is MUCH better than the one on The Gold Experience, and it's one of my favorite songs on there (it's also my favorite Prince album, so go figure).
That's basically the game. You can go back to the mansion and explore the various interactive bits, but that's about all there is to the game.
I owned this game back when it was nearly new in the 90's. I probably played through it 2-3 times. Even though it had been nearly 30 years since I played it, I still remembered where every symbol piece was and how to unlock them. It took me about 30 minutes to blow through the game. I would expect it to take most experienced gamers 60-75 minutes, maybe 2 hours if you get stuck on the one puzzle that is tricky.
The only real downside of this game for me is the graphical quality. It's early CD technology, so the videos are terribly compressed, as are most of the images. I would love to see this remastered. I do kind of wish there was more "puzzle" to the game. I think all but one of the puzzles is super-easy to solve. I would love a bit more challenge, or just more puzzles in general.
Prince: Interactive was released on Mac and Windows 3.1. I played it using eXoWin3x . I did have an issue capturing screenshots (which is why that stupid menu bar is on most of the images). Is it worth a play? For Prince fans, yeah, it's worth spending an hour or two in this weirdness. If you were never a fan, go ahead and skip it.
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