Mirage (video game)

Lore & Background

Mirage was claimed to be one of the first games from Atlantis Interactive, an offshoot of Vivid Entertainment, but no such connection exists in established canon. The game's plot follows Lieutenant Shooter on a mission to rescue his wife Jenny from bandits in a fictional desert. The gameplay is a first-person point-and-click adventure with pre-rendered scenes, similar to Myst, and shifts between seemingly disconnected locales in a surreal manner. The developer, originally listed as 'The Dream Designers' led by brothers Christopher and Philip Booth, has no known record in the game industry.

Reader's Guide

Mirage is notable as an early attempt by an adult film company to enter the mainstream video game market, adapting its own film content into a family-friendly adventure. Its reception was overwhelmingly negative: Next Generation gave it one star out of five, criticizing random death areas and tedious hotspot searching. Wired called it a Myst rip-off and possibly the worst CD-ROM ever made, describing it as a 'dadaist exercise in meaninglessness.' Despite this, Femme Fatales reported in April 1996 that the game had sold nearly 75,000 copies. The game's legacy lies in its status as a commercial failure and a cautionary example of cross-media adaptation from the adult industry, as well as its place among the many Myst clones of the mid-1990s.

Did You Know?

• Mirage was originally claimed to be adapted from the 1994 Vivid film 'Shame', but no such film exists in any known Vivid catalog.
• The game had a budget of approximately $500,000 USD.
• A 3DO version was planned but never released.
• The claim that 'The Dream Designers' previously worked with Vivid on the erotic title 'Love Bites' for the 3DO is false, as no such game was released for that platform.