“Ripper”—The Inside Story of the Egregiously Bad Videogame

Christopher Walken and I were standing on a dark, deserted street in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district at 4 in the morning. This was the summer of 1995, back when workers actually packed meat in the neighborhood, in the midst of a heat wave that would deliver a record-breaking 102-degree day later that afternoon. As the aroma of garbage, urine, and rotting cow carcasses choked the air, the actor issued a demand—of course rendered in his trademark clipped delivery reminiscent of his “gold watch” monologue from Pulp Fiction.

“I need a car, and I need it to take me to Connecticut,” he said. The car we had called for Walken was already idling in front of us. I was idling too; I assumed Walken was headed to his Manhattan address, but he sprung the Connecticut destination on me as I was escorting him to the curb.

I didn’t have enough money on hand to get the Oscar-winning actor out of state. But it was my job to get him whatever he wanted—I was the production coordinator on the videogame Ripper, my first real job out of college, and Walken was the game’s star actor. Though Ripper’s budget was in the millions, the production office was oddly low on petty cash.

I stalled and stammered. “I thought you were going uptown?” I asked a second time, hoping for a different answer.

“I need a car, and I would like it to take me to Connecticut,” Walken said again. He could be forgiven for being annoyed. The videogame shoot had begun at 9 in the morning the day before. Staying on set for 19 hours would put anybody in a bad mood, and it didn’t help that we had to turn off the rattling air-conditioning during takes to capture clean audio. The studio was sweltering.

It was still dark when a sweaty John Antinori, one of Ripper’s writers, finally returned with cash from an ATM. We gave it to the driver. With that, Walken was able to head off to Connecticut. It was embarrassing, especially on a project being bankrolled by a rich kid that was supposed to herald videogames’ big move to Hollywood.

For those who’ve forgotten or were not yet born when it was released in February 1996, the gore-filled Ripper was a much-hyped videogame that interspersed scenes of full-motion video with 3D-graphical gameplay. There was great excitement around full-motion video at the time; the technique was supposed to be the next evolution in games. Reviews at the time noted Ripper’s fluid first-person walking scenes, high tech clues, and eclectic all-star cast, including Walken, Karen Allen, Jimmie “J.J.” Walker, John Rhys-Davies, Ossie Davis, an unknown Paul Giamatti, and Burgess Meredith in his last performance. As Meredith told an Associated Press reporter, it was a performance he would never see because he didn’t own a computer.

Two-year-old startup Take Two Interactive Software, the studio behind Ripper, teased the game with a press release promising intricate puzzles, combat sequences, and four different endings, each with its own plot twist. The multiple endings were a ploy to give Ripper replayability—an elusive element that makes somebody want to play again, the brass ring of any videogame.

Ripper was a single-player cyberpunk-noir thriller set in a grim New York City of the year 2040. Pointing and clicking advanced the action as you navigated through its 3D world, occasionally arriving at the video scenes with actors. During these interstitials, prompts would appear at the bottom of the screen and present the player with a menu of options. Which pieces of dialog the player picked would determine the game’s path through its choose-your-own-adventure world.

The main character is Jake Quinlan (played in the video portions by then-newcomer Scott Cohen), a crime reporter tasked with finding out who is responsible for the Jack the Ripper–style murders gripping the city. You could click on the prompt “Ask about Catherine’s case.” Walken, cast as the salty and corrupt detective Vincent Magnotta, who chomped on a cigar and wore a fedora, would answer, “Just because you two played Tiddlywinks in your birthday suits doesn’t mean I’m going to open police files for you.” These gameplay choices resulted in the varied endings, each one with a different character being revealed as the killer.

Because of the enormous popularity of the surreal and meditative blockbuster MYST, the adventure game genre—with its digital journeys, brain-teasers, and immersive worlds—was booming. The A-list stars and the new full-motion video technology were expected to take the genre further. Ripper director Phil Parmet was a cinematographer who had previously directed another full-motion videogame, Loadstar: The Legend of Tully Bodine. Ripper was shot on a real soundstage just like a Hollywood film. An assistant director would even call “Action!” before each take. I told all of my friends I was working on something big: the future of gaming.

The production was given a $4 million budget—huge for games back then—and when its six CD-ROMs hit the shelves in their shiny black and bright green shrink-wrapped box, the game was well received. It enjoyed the hard sell of a huge media blitz, and Take Two claims it made its money back. You could even buy the 320-page supplemental Ripper Official Strategy Guide to figure out all its complex puzzles, diversions, and secrets.

But sales quickly slowed, and the game suffered a short shelf life. The promised console version for the Sony PlayStation never materialized. And then, in less than a year, poof … it was gone. The life of another videogame had snuffed out.

Its disappearance highlights something peculiar about videogames: Other forms of pop culture stick around. I can easily stream Scream, Fargo, Swingers, or any other movie from 1996. I can crank “Macarena” on Spotify right now. George R. R. Martin’s bestseller A Game of Thrones (A Song of Fire and Ice) is still reverberating through pop culture. 1996 doesn’t seem so far away.

But try to fire up a videogame of that vintage, and you’ll realize how distant the near past really is. If physical deterioration hasn’t rendered the CD-ROM unreadable, it would take hours of labor to get the game working. You’d need some obsolete hardware or a modern machine running an emulator, a piece of software that lets you run programs originally written for another, usually outmoded system.

And no matter how many person-hours were spent creating their detailed and intricately rendered worlds, old games are swiftly abandoned, their code left to rot. It’s absurd to equate videogames with the sacred Sand Mandala, a work of art created by teams of Tibetan Monks who spend weeks laying down brightly colored sand with tiny instruments before ceremoniously destroying it, so the impermanence of the piece becomes the whole point of its existence. But videogames, in a perverse way, share a similar fate. Their ones and zeros might as well turn to sand.

I remember Quinto (who back then went by Quinno) Martin, one of Ripper’s 3D artists with his long hair, muscles, and tattoos, some of them self-inked, as the moody artist on set. When I caught up with him by phone recently, I asked him about working on the game. “You couldn’t pan, and you really didn’t want the actors to move,” he says. There wasn’t even a fight sequence because the backgrounds were static and the camera was locked in place on a tripod. The actors stood in front of a blue screen where the 3D artists would overlay live composites of the current scene’s background. This created Ripper’s disparate locations like the morgue or the detective’s office in real time and allowed the camera operators to better frame the actors in each scene. The set was briefly thrown into panic when Meredith arrived with several pairs of blue-rimmed glasses. The octogenarian needed the glasses to read his cue cards, but because of the color closely matched the blue chroma key screen, the glasses made the top half of his face disappear. The crisis was averted by Meredith’s son, who happened to bring along a set of neutral-toned frames.

“We were making it up as we went along,” Martin says. “We worked around the clock. People thought we were drunk, but we were just sleep-deprived. We could have used 10 more people. At first it was just the two of us, Bill Petras and I, doing the graphics.” Three more 3D artists eventually joined the team in New York. (Petras, who declined to be interviewed for this story, is now senior art director for Overwatch at Blizzard Entertainment, makers of World of Warcraft.)

A typical movie script averages around 120 pages, but Ripper’s was 317 pages and a full four inches thick. Each scene required the actors to do multiple takes with the different lines that would enable the player to go off in various directions. “Walken would do the same scene with all these different bits of dialog,” head game designer and writer F. J. Lennon tells me. “You needed all those different lines. The big thing for us was hours of play.” The shoot was so complex that the writers were on set at all times, often making changes as they went along.

The cast and most of the crew were union members, so there were mandatory meal breaks and work hour limits. If the days ran long, which they often did, we all made overtime. But the non-union folks—Take Two’s 3D artists, game designers, and writers—never stopped working. The 3D artists had it especially hard, as they had to wait for each scene to render, a time-consuming process where multiple 3D images are created, complete with lighting, shadows, color, and effects. “When we went back to the hotel, we would be up all night rendering,” Martin tells me.

During the shoot, I thought Martin was a bit of a diva. One day, frustrated and exhausted, he walked off the set and had to be coaxed back to the studio by F.J. Lennon. We could have lost a day of shooting. But looking back, I realized he was already burned out when we started the shoot, and I still feel bad about the amount of pressure he endured. I remember the endless lines of cables, computer monitors, and hard drives. There in the middle of it was Martin.

And while those of us in the production crew knew the exact date our names would show up on the call sheet for the last time, the Take Two team was just getting started on the almost Sisyphusian task of post-production. “During that period, I worked nearly 24 hours a day, no weekends off, no holidays off.” Martin recalls. “It was like slave labor.”

When I took the job, I knew few things about Take Two’s founder, Ryan Brant. I knew his new stepmom was supermodel Stephanie Seymour, and there was an unconfirmed rumor around the office that he was Donald Trump’s godson. Brant liked to walk into the production office and toss the keys to his Porsche to some nervous production assistant, asking them to park the car. I didn’t know until later that the quiet man with the shellacked black bowl cut that sometimes sat next to me in the production office, often gazing out at the set through our office’s long glass window, was Brant’s father, Peter.

The then-billionaire Peter Brant made his fortune building his father’s paper business into a sprawling pulp-to-newsprint conglomerate. He was also the publisher of several prestige magazines like Art In America, The Magazine Antiques, and the now-folded Interview. The Queens-reared elder Brant was Trump’s childhood friend and served 84 days in jail in 1990 for federal tax violations. He was every bit as Vanity Fair described him: “a more dashing Buddy Hackett.” He was also an investor in his son Ryan’s company. The younger Brant had founded Take Two just two years prior, at the age of 21. He was unapologetic about his modus operandi; as more than one Take Two employee told me then and recently, he boasted that he didn’t pay people until they sued him. (For the record, I was paid in full.)

Catherine Heald, then Catherine Winchester, whose company InterOptica, and the high profile shareholders it had attracted, was acquired by Take Two in 1994, became Take Two’s first president. She remembers the phones at the company’s 575 Broadway office ringing all day long. “They were always bill collectors,” she says. She tells me she will never forget sharing an elevator with an angry Grace Jones, who did voiceover work on an earlier Take Two game called Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller. Jones had come into the office to get paid and was leaving empty-handed. As the singer-actor rode the elevator down with Heald, she screamed, “Fuck you, Ryan!” over and over again.

Still, back then Ryan Brant was thought of as an innovator. Lennon remembers when some in the videogame industry were betting on full-motion video as the Next Big Thing. Take Two had just done Hell, and that had one scene with full-motion video with Brant’s stepmother Stephanie Seymour. Then Origin Systems’ $4-million-budgeted Wing Commander 3, the full motion video flight simulator game starring Mark Hamill and adult film star Ginger Lynn Allen, came out. It was a hit, going on to gross more than $15 million. “And at that moment, Ryan was onboard with going all in. We didn’t want to miss out,” Lennon recalls.

It was the start of the 1990s tech bubble, and companies in every industry, from publishing to aviation, were opening interactive divisions. Everyone was getting in on games. With their short shooting schedules and big paydays, stars wanted to be part of this new world. Older actors saw full-motion video as a way to reboot their careers. Trade publications tried to label the new marriage with catchy sobriquets: Hollywired, Silliwood.

“I don’t think Walken even knew what we were making. Maybe none of the actors did.” Lennon says. Walken read his lines off a teleprompter and would tell now defunct Fusion Magazine that the experience was close to that of being on Saturday Night Live, where the actors read cue cards. He also admitted that he didn’t even know how to turn on a computer.

During breaks, Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear the Reaper, which was licensed by Take Two for Ripper’s theme song, would blast from the speakers as the crew sneaked off to play the just-released Doom II, which was all 3D graphics and no video interstitials. Lennon says that it was apparent to him right then that the experience of playing Doom II was always going to be far superior to a game with full-motion video: “I remember thinking a game was not a movie. And a movie was not a game.”

Before Ripper was even finished, Martin left Take Two to work out in LA on the not-for-kids full-motion video and animation adventure game Toonstruck, starring Christopher Lloyd of Back to the Future fame. The $8 million game came out in late 1996 and was considered a flop. Origin Systems’ video-heavy Wing Commander IV was also released at the end of that year and failed to replicate the success of Wing Commander III.

Take Two would make one other full-motion videogame, Black Dahlia, using unknown actors and shooting on a set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that had more of a dinner theater vibe. Lennon remembers that full-motion video became a dirty word in gaming almost immediately. In 1997 the company went public, and Take Two got out of the full motion video business after Black Dahlia’s release in early 1998. In March of that year, it would acquire a property that would become its blockbuster, a top-down scroller called Grand Theft Auto.

I kept in touch with the Ripper gang. Lennon moved out to LA and stayed in game design. Antinori left games for creative design work, and I spent the rest of my twenties in TV production. We all watched Take Two’s meteoric rise. There was more than a little bitterness, as we all left the company before it went public. So it was with a touch of schadenfreude that we learned the SEC charged Ryan Brant with being the architect of massive financial fraud, a scheme that included back-dating stocks and lying to investors. In 2007, he plead guilty to felony criminal charges of falsifying business records in the first degree, paid over $7 million in fines, and was sentenced to five years probation. He was also barred from ever serving as an officer or director of a public company again.

And what became of Ripper? YouTube.

Years ago, video playthroughs of Ripper began popping up on YouTube, the de facto purgatory for abandoned games. Now, you can sit back and watch someone play the entire game, going through the motions as reporter Jake Quinlan. Christopher Walken’s corrupt detective Magnotta, wielding his cigar less like a prop and more like an appendage, cycles through lines of corny hard noir dialog that have only ripened with age. “It’s not just the killing he’s into. He’s into the power—the intimacy of going inside when a heart still pumps and feeling the skin tight like a canvas and warm blood spraying masterpieces for us to wonder at, and he’s going to go on and on unless I stop him.” Or, “You’re lucky I’m in a good mood today, Quinlan, because you’re this close to finding out what it’s like to be a human shish kabob rotating at one of our fine penal institutions.” Or my favorite, “The pile of bodies is getting bigger. I’ve got crazies coming out of the woodwork to confess. This Ripper has been spotted more times than Elvis.”

“As cheesy as the thing was, at least we were future-forward with it.” says F.J. Lennon, the writer. Some of the game’s visions of the near future turned out to be prescient. There’s the virtual newspaper The Virtual Herald, a VR headset that looks like today’s Oculus Quest, and the handheld communication and scanning device called a WAC that looks and acts so similar to the modern iPhone, someone made it into a meme.

Giamatti sells the purple prose better than anyone in the cast. “What’s funny is Paul Giamatti was there to say these exposition lines, but he was so good it worked beyond that,” Antinori recalls. (Giamatti declined to be interviewed for this piece, and Walken’s reps didn’t respond to requests for an interview.) Another gem is the lovely sing songy way Meredith says the word “cyberspace,” as if he’s speaking another language.

In 2015, the news and entertainment culture site UPROXX’s Vince Mancini discovered the Ripper cache on YouTube and wrote a story with the headline “This Christopher Walken Performance In A 1996 Video Game Belongs In A Museum,” calling it, “a masterpiece in Christopher Walkenness.”

And here’s the thing: Ripper actually is in a museum. The game is part of the collection at The National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas.

“We have it, but we don’t have anything to play it on,” says Sean Kelly, the museum’s cofounder and director. “I think people watch Ripper now out of morbid curiosity.” He adds, “When I think of full-motion video, I think of Night Trap. That’s the one I remember.” The infamous Night Trap, starring Different Strokes’ Dana Plato, made headlines for its role in the 1993 Senate Hearings on Violent Video Games where the Ed Wood-ian B-movie jiggle fest was brought out as an example of how videogames degraded women.

Those hearings were the basis for what would become the ESRB Entertainment Software Rating Board, which slaps ratings and parental warnings on games. And yet the game endures: Last year the 25th anniversary edition of Night Trap was made available on Steam, PS4, and the Nintendo Switch.

Even Toonstruck got a second wind: In 2015 it was re-released as a download on GOG.com. If YouTube is limbo, Gog (formally Good Old Games) is heaven. Maybe Take Two should bring Ripper back too? Or maybe it can’t. Last year at the Library of Congress’ Rulemaking Public Roundtable, James Clarendon, who used to work at 2K Games, a Take Two Company, gave testimony that when the company was seeking to reissue its megahit BioShock after a period of about five years, they realized that no archive of the game existed. “We had to scour people’s machines, artists, engineers, everybody’s machines to find the missing pieces and put it back together. The version that was re-released was not the same version that had been originally released because of that,” Clarendon testified. Take Two declined to participate in this story so it’s not known if they still have the elements for Ripper.

“What would have shocked me was if Take Two had the elements,” Alex Handy tells me. Aside from being a former WIRED contributor, Handy is the director and founder of the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, an organization with a collection of more than 5,300 playable titles that bills itself as, “the only all-playable video museum in the world.”

And while Ripper is not part of MADE’s vast collection, if I brought in my CD-ROMs—and yes, I held onto them—to the Oakland, California museum, I could play the game on one of its old Windows PC systems. There are other videogame museums, like New York’s Strong Museum of Play, and the National Videogame Museum. All of these institutions see their mission as archiving and being stewards of their historical collections. MADE, however, is all about keeping the games playable on more than 40 systems, everything from the Atari 2600 to the Macintosh Classic. As Handy sees it, “A videogame museum without playable games is like an art museum with the lights off.”

When I mentioned how Ripper—now known for its campy feel and Walken’s over-the-top performance—had attracted an audience on YouTube, Handy wasn’t surprised. “Adventure games weren’t a great genre, but the Silliwood games are like the sci-fi films from the ’50s. There’s joy in watching them.”

Abandoned games on CD-ROM, floppy disk, or console cartridges can be purchased online at auction sites, or in person at one of the many retro gaming conferences, but the physical media the games are stored on are in constant danger of degradation.

That’s where emulation comes in. The emulation community has been making old game files run on new hardware for decades, thus helping to preserve these old titles and save them from total extinction. Using some free software downloads, I could set up my MacBook Air with the tools necessary to play Ripper all the way through to all four endings—and if I didn’t happen to own the original discs, I could download a copy of the actual game.

While videogame museums are doing their best to preserve old code, much of the real preservation work is being done by pirates. “You can say what you want about pirates, but they’re not lazy,” Handy says. “They make an effort to preserve the largest corpses. Illegal yes, but they save the source code.”

David Gibson, the technician at the Library of Congress tasked with preserving videogames, tells me that this is sometimes the case. “Some of the collection at the Library of Congress came through roundabout ways. There might have been a projectionist who loved a film so much they took the print home and then his kids gave the film to the Library.” Perhaps this will be how videogames are saved as well.

Most videogames carry a copyright that makes duplicating them illegal, and the files are often protected by digital rights management software, making it technically challenging to copy them. In most cases, circumventing a game’s DRM or access checks, even for the purposes of archiving the files, is illegal according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

But recent rule changes have expanded what counts as “fair use” when it comes to videogame preservation. Last October, the Library of Congress agreed to exempt archiving efforts for “approved cases” like those trying to preserve aging digital works, but reengineering and hacking are still not allowed. Still, if an institution obtains a game’s source code legally, they can have the game on site at their museum, library, or university without the maker’s permission.

In theory, this should be easy; the Library of Congress asks game makers to submit their source code when applying for copyright per its online Recommended Format Statement. However, not one of America’s game makers, an industry that took in $42 billion in revenue last year in the US alone, has complied with that request. Here’s another thing: Not all video games have a copyright. While Take Two has taken out over 400 copyrights, I couldn’t find one from them for Ripper or their other full-motion video game, Black Dahlia, though Gibson was able to find a copyright for Ripper’s original treatment script. I couldn’t find one for Burst’s Toonstruck either. Gibson says this is not uncommon for games in that era.

I tell Handy in our phone call that perhaps not every game is worth saving. Maybe things die for a reason? “We don’t get to choose what the future enjoys,” he says.

Take Two has grown substantially over the 23 years since Ripper’s release. Five of its games, including Grand Theft Auto, are in the collection at the Library of Congress. Ripper, even with its all-star cast and its boast of containing the first audible “fuck” in a videogame, didn’t make the cut. The last time I heard about Ryan Brant, he had made headlines for writing bad checks to pay for a painting he bought at a charity auction. The fundraisers had to sue Brant to get him to settle up. And then in March of 2019, tragedy struck: Brant, a father of four, died of cardiac arrest. He was 49.

Take Two claims its latest title, Red Dead Redemption II “is the second-highest grossing launch of all time.” But before the title debuted last year, an article published in New York magazine detailed the game’s intense production cycle and spurred controversy among employees. Dan Houser, cofounder of Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take Two, talked about the “100-hour weeks” he worked in the final stage of game development. Employees took to social media, sharing stories of months of “crunch” time, in which long hours and weekends on the clock are expected. Rockstar fielded similar complaints, and even a petition-style post from employee spouses, in 2010 just before the release of the original Red Dead Redemption.

Handy sees an industry in need of a reckoning. “It’s not amenable to society or to workers. There can’t be a 120-hour work-week. The only way we’re going to get out of this is preservation.” Handy believes that videogame archiving and a healthier work environment are inextricably linked. His thesis is that if the gaming industry built up assets, they could be reused. Then, the tools that are currently proprietary and licensed could be released as open-source software. Each game wouldn’t have to be built from scratch, and that would save everybody time. This already happens in other industries. “There are banking applications out there written in Cobol that are older than we are.”

I kept thinking back to the memories of Quinto Martin, Ripper’s 3D artist. “I went out to LA and work was 100 percent of my life. I did 3D work for a bunch of games. It’s all this labor that just spits you out. I worked on Freakboy, Propaganda, and Escape from LA, which were all cancelled after years of development,” he says. “One night I was hanging out with my roommate and we were talking about how there has to be more to our lives than what we were experiencing. That’s when I made the decision to get out.”

Martin moved to Pittsburgh, where he ran a tattoo parlor. In 2008, he started teaching online classes in game art and design and is also an instructional designer at Seton Hill University, a small liberal arts college about 30 miles east of Pittsburgh. “I think about the work I did, and it’s just bits. There’s nothing tangible.” Now a father of seven, Martin tells me he doesn’t play videogames anymore. “They’re too much of a time suck. I can see the schematics right away, the illusion of choice, and honestly the games all look alike now.”

For the last seven years Martin has spent his free time in the impressive barnlike workshop he built behind his house where he has found his passion in smithing metal. He wanted to craft something with his hands, something that lasts. “Now,” he says, “I make knives.”

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