Does Anyone Remember... Pinhead Games?

Back in the mid noughties, I played videogames on my parents’ old PC. This meant that I was limited to playing online flash games, and my favorites were room escape adventures. I burnt through those pretty quickly though, so I spent some time looking for more. In this time, I found Nick Bounty: A Case of the Crabs. This was my first foray into the point-and-click adventure game format, and I was instantly in love.

Nick Bounty follows the story of a private detective who is delivered fresh crab and murder right to his front door. Literally, the opening cutscene sees salesman Arthur Griffen stabbed in the doorway, dropping a box containing a crab. The game sees Nick solve this murder, through witty dialogue and absurd puzzle solutions. At one point, you scare a squid with a crab to get ink so you can fingerprint someone for a entry card to a restaurant.

I think he got the point

Nick Bounty: A Case of the Crabs had a sequel: Nick Bounty: The Goat in the Grey Fedora, in which our quick-witted PI is tasked with finding a ceramic goat. Following on from the last game, the solutions to the puzzles are absurd and the situations are even more so. The most memorable moments are the puppet newspaper salesmen (you need to be a part of their show to get a magazine) and a great joke about bullets. I won’t relay it here, but if you’ve played the game you know what I’m talking about.

This second game saw a drastic change in art style, from newspaper comic style hand drawings to 3D models. This was because of the step-up in production between the first and second games, with many more people working on the second game. It was decided that making the game using 3D rendered images would allow more people to create sets and animate to finish the game faster.

Just give them the watch, Nick

These games come from a studio known as Pinhead Games, and when I finished up the two Nick Bounty games, I went to Google to look for more. I found Tales of the Odd: Brain Hotel, a drastically different game stylistically, but still with the utterly bizarre situations. In it, you play a delivery guy who needs to drop-off a package to someone in a hotel that is playing host to a sci-fi convention. Tales of the Odd uses it’s ridiculous setting and grounds them perfectly with a very dry protagonist.

But whatever happened to Pinhead Games?

I lost touch with Pinhead Games after a while, but at the time I knew they were working on a new 2D adventure game, Nelly the Wonder Dog. However, since the success of the Nick Bounty games, Pinhead had set the bar too high and weren’t happy with the quality that they were making. Expecting the game to go way over budget in order to reach the level of quality they wanted, Nelly was scrapped.

The less I say about this image, the better

Recently, I learnt that the company was mostly Mark Darin, who moved on to Telltale Games shortly after I first started playing his games. Currently Creative Director, he’s also been a programmer, designer, game director, voice director and writer for the company, writing the second episode  of The Walking Dead: Series One.

I asked him via email if there’ll ever be another Nick Bounty game, and while he said there’s no current plans, he has a couple scripts that have the potential to be the next Nick Bounty adventure. Which makes me excited: since playing Darin’s games I’ve been infuriated by countless adventure games, but I’d love to go back to Nick Bounty and solve another mystery.

In the meantime, I’ll just have to keep enjoying his work at Telltale, and keep checking back in on Nick Bounty every so often, just when I forget the solutions to the weirdest puzzles.