“It's roughly equivalent to... well, you'd have to imagine momentarily that a bunch of people had been waiting for the rebirth of Jesus Christ and he just happened to be Taylor Swift: people were incredibly pleased and jumping. I crowd-surfed out of the building.” Comedian John Robertson is describing what it was like when somebody finally escaped The Dark Room, his live-action text adventure. He’s been performing the show since 2012, taking it all over the world – from dark basements at the Edinburgh Fringe to stages in Greece, Berlin, and Australia. He’s even taken it to a burger bar in Cambodia – "Did you know they had burger restaurants in Cambodia? I didn’t". And this Friday Robertson is bringing The Dark Room to London’s SOHO Theatre.
The Dark Room parodies the mercilessly cruel text adventure games on the 1980s. The way it works is that a member of the audience is chosen to play the adventure, picking actions from a list projected onto a screen onstage. Many of the choices lead to death, all of them to some cutting remark from Robertson, who acts as the game’s dungeon master. Only two people have ever survived the dungeon and in the last two years no one has made it to the second level.
The whole thing started after a standup gig at an anime convention began to go badly, Robertson tells me. “I was on stage in front of about 3,000 people and I was just starting to get heckled by about 3,000 people. Which is a lot of people to be heckled by.” Remembering a joke he’d made the day before about how cruel text adventures in the ‘80s were, he shouted out to the auditorium 'you awake to find yourself in a dark room’. “The crowd rioted,” he recalls. They immediately got the reference and took it in their stride. “Someone screamed 'I find the light switch, I get out'” but Robertson would reply 'It is a dark room, how can you find the light switch?' They would respond and he would respond. “We got all the lights turned off in this 3,000 seat theatre and for about 45 minutes I just tortured this audience.”
It was a huge success.
Shortly after Robertson made a YouTube version of the adventure. It, too, became a massive hit:
Robertson took the show to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2012 where it get great reviews and started to draw in larger audiences as word spread. On one night, Robertson remembers, “a silver haired figure” came up to him and said “I invented the thing you’re parodying. It was Ian Livingstone, author and co-creator of the Fighting Fantasy choose your own adventure books, founder of Games Workshop, and life president of Eidos Interactive. He loved the show and told more people, and those people told more people.
Robertson's been touring the show ever since.
Listening to Robertson talk, it's clear that The Dark Room isn't about being cruel and mocking to the audience – well, not entirely. He loves the interaction and the effect evoking these old games has on them. For many people older than 30, the first game they played was a text adventure. It may even have been one of their first experiences of using a computer. Puzzling out how to make the game do what you want is something Robertson is trying to capture.
Granted, while wearing an Xbox controller around his neck and dressed in something that wouldn't look out of place on the Legion of Doom:
“It was one big outpouring of nostalgia,” Robertson tells me, talking about creating the game at the heart of his show. “I didn't need to go back and look at the source material at all. It was all there. The first video game I ever played was when me and my friend Tom found a sort of abandoned computer – it was like the start of an '80s kids show – we found an abandoned computer outside the back of our classroom. We turned it on and managed to get a game running. You were in a cave but it made no sense at all. You would just die if you did anything. You could find a map but when you said 'Pick Up Map' it would say 'You grow weaker'. Everything just killed you. That stayed with me.
“I've taken the nostalgia of our childhood and tried to keep the experience as purely like that as possible. Instead of it being just a cruel text adventure, it's also what it was like to play a text adventure as a child – just bewildering.”
Robertson compares that to a trend in games now that really bothers him: “There was a point where I realized things had changed when I was playing LA Noire and I got to one of the few parts of that game that actually requires manual dexterity. I died three times and this message came up saying 'You seem to be having some difficulty with this bit. Would you like to skip it?'. I thought 'Well, frick you.' Go back to a text adventure and if you got stuck behind a wall then you were stuck behind that wall until such a time as you figured out what to do, which might have meant reset and start again entirely. Also, how lovely that a part of old school games was drawing your own map while a new school one is I bought the cheat or went online and someone had done the walkthrough. Someone else's map is nothing, doing your own, now that's fun.”
And the game can be won. Though, the two people who won, they came back lots of times to do it. The first guy who won, Brendon, “he'd come to the show 16 times and wrangled his way to playing each time and on the 17th go he won.”
Persistence doesn’t always pay off, Robertson tells me. “There's this one guy, Gareth, who I think has come to the show 30 times and has played about 20 times. Gareth is no closer to the end then he was when he started but he seems to enjoy it.”
September, 2020 update
We spoke to Robertson about the show back in 2015, but things have changed a little since then, and instead of preparing for another summer in Scotland, he’s taken the show online. For now, The Dark Room is a strictly virtual affair, but rather than limit its potential for comedy, lockdown has provided both the show and its creator some unique new opportunities.
On a mechanical level, not much has changed since the game’s inception eight years ago - levels have been moved around to help keep the odds firmly in the house's favor, but the structure remains largely the same as ever. Instead, it’s the community around the game that “got bigger, and got wonderfully stranger.” Robertson says that he’ll appear at conventions and find attendees cosplaying as his character. He boasts that “if I stand in any UK town long enough, someone will eventually scream a catchphrase at me.” Fans of the show have established their own communities, while others have created their own lore for the game.
But when your livelihood is the stage and a pandemic has shut down every conference center and theatre between EGX and the Edinburgh Fringe, there’s only so far a dedicated community can take you. Like many others, when lockdown hit, Robertson found himself with a job that was suddenly illegal. And like many others, he turned to Twitch, a platform he’d only ever broadcast from once, in 2014 - “a remarkable experience,” but one that he hadn’t repeated in more than half a decade.
https://clips.twitch.tv/CleverTransparentLarkPeoplesChamp
His first foray back to Twitch was ‘Late Night with Robbo’, a parody primetime talk show. Movie nights and chats with other comedians followed, but viewers have helped shape much of the schedule, like ‘Sunday Lunch with Your Dad’. Originally conceived as a cooking show, it evolved into a roleplaying opportunity in which Robertson is a divorced father and the audience are children living in their mothers’ custody. The headline act remains The Dark Room, which Robertson says has translated to Twitch “stupidly well.” An interactive experience that’s easy to implement into Twitch’s software, it’s immediately arresting, pulling viewers in and keeping them there as they try to work out the spectacle unfolding on the screen in front of them. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing - neighbors’ reactions to a very loud, very aggressive comedy show happening in the next room over lead to a crash course in soundproofing - but Robertson praises both the platform and his community for helping keep the show alive.
The Dark Room’s long road to success seems to have come as something of a surprise to Robertson, whose comedy career started in 2003, nine years before the fateful show that would eventually grow into The Dark Room. “I started doing comedy 17 years ago because I thought I was an alienated weirdo. And then you find yourself with this tiny franchise, and realize ‘Jesus, I’m semi-legit.’” In recent months, that semi-legitimacy has transported Robertson off the stage and into the (virtual) boardroom. During lockdown, a number of AAA studios have asked for his comedy expertise. The nature of his non-disclosure agreements with those studios means that he can’t tell me who he’s been working with, but alongside private Dark Rooms, Robertson says that he’s been asked about bringing comedy into the design process.
The size of those studios was unexpected, “but your big cinematic games do need a good line or two, and they need to know what you can do that a player can find - emergent comedy. Everyone wants to know how to make games funny, but they want to know how to make games funny without being overbearing.” 2014’s Sunset Overdrive stands out - “it was constantly trying, but not a single punchline lands. Then you play Animal Crossing - ‘I picked up a hermit crab. I think it wanted to be left alone’ - that’s a dumb joke, it’s a one-liner, but I could see it 1,000 times and still be charmed by it.” The Dark Room thrives in the audience’s ability to feel part of Robertson’s game, and that idea shows its face when speaking to developers - “you want people to find the funny thing they can do. It’s the difference between talking about a joke that you’ve made, and making the joke but making the player feel like they’ve made it.”
The amusing nature of the relationship between Robertson and a game developer is difficult to ignore. The Dark Room is based on classic text adventures, but over time even its analogue reimagining of those ideas has had to grow in a way that’s not unlike a videogame, and its creator is now advising in the industry he makes fun of for a living. It’s not always plain sailing, as the dead-eyed stares of exhausted producers and the uncertainty of higher-ups can attest to, but broadly, people are prepared to lean into the silliness of the entire situation.
Even after theatres reopen, Robertson says he’ll be sticking with Twitch. “When I go back to touring, we’ll lose the occasional show, but the show will be at a theatre.” He’s keen to highlight the power of the platform as a fundraising tool. Earlier this year, a 48-hour Dark Room marathon raised £25,000 for Mind and NHS Charities Together - “how would I get to do a show for 48 hours if Twitch didn’t exist? I can’t even get an hour on the BBC.” Lockdown has been disastrous for live comedy venues, but digital platforms can hold up as vehicles for that scene; "the comedians just have to learn what they’re doing. A Zoom gig where everyone has their mic on is a live show. On a good day on Twitch, I feel like I’m hosting a party. I’m sticking with it because it's nice to be connected to people, to get into their homes. The community I've got is supportive and interesting. It's an opportunity to do work that's satisfying for me and made more of a difference for various causes than anything else I've ever done.”
