The Omega Factor

The Omega Factor was an unusual drama for the BBC: a paranormal thriller produced by BBC Scotland, it sparked a sudden controversy upon release before being essentially buried by the broadcaster for more than two decades. It has only been since a recent DVD release that modern audiences have had the opportunity to discover it.

The series was created by George Gallacio, a former production manager for Doctor Who who had moved to Edinburgh to take up a permanent position there as a staff producer. Gallacio was initially commissioned to produce the second season of The Standard, a 13-part newspaper drama that had been launched in 1978 with great fanfare. With that series facing flagging ratings, however, Gallacio was ordered to abandon pre-production for that show and instead develop a new drama series himself.

Q*Bert (1982)

There is a purity to early videogames that ensures their continued popularity, either on a small-scale level of cult appeal, or with a much larger pop culture cache. These games were programmed on computers that are by today’s standards ridiculously limited, yet the limitations provided a structure within which some of the most enjoyable gaming experiences ever were successfully created.

This isn’t an attempt to claim that all early videogames are enjoyable. Truth be told, a lot of them are dreadful – either dull retreads and ripoffs of other more successful titles, or quite simply straight-out bad games.

When all of the elements are well designed, and one of these early titles has a unique and iconic look, memorable and original gameplay, and challenging and interesting design, then generally that game is going to be remembered and re-played for years to come.

I have a lot of favourites from the early days of videogames: Frogger, Galaga and Ms Pac-Man immediately come to mind. Another favourite is Q*Bert, a strange-looking but wonderfully addictive American arcade game from 1982.

Secret of Mana (1993)

A young man recovers a magical sword from a stone, inadvertently releasing a horde of monsters into the lands around his village. As a result he is banished from his home, and winds up travelling the world visiting the eight mystical Mana Temples in order to replenish his sword’s magical energy and prevent an evil sorcerer from taking over the world.

It’s pretty tedious stuff when read from a page – certainly it was pretty tedious stuff while I was writing it down. It’s the basis, however, for Secret of Mana, a 1993 Japanese role-playing game (RPG) released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). For most of the people who have played it, it is one of the most fondly remembered games of the SNES era. For fans of Japanese RPGs, it remains an absolute classic of the genre.

So why, if the story is so derivative, is Secret of Mana so fondly remembered? Like most videogames, the quality of the story took a back seat to the quality of the gameplay, the graphics and the sound. In these respects Secret of Mana excelled. At the time there really wasn’t a game available for the SNES that combined such high quality images and music with such a wonderfully immersive gaming experience.

Hackers (1995)

At the start of Hackers, eighteen year-old Dade Murphy has spent seven years legally barred from using a computer after a hacking incident when he was eleven. Back at the keyboard, he dives straight back into cyberspace as Zero Cool. When he encounters Kate Libby, aka Acid Burn, their battle of the sexes extends both on and off the computer. The two must put aside their differences, however, to prevent a master hacker known as the Plague from crashing a corporate network and stealing $25 million dollars.

Screenwriter Rafael Moreu first encountered the concept of ‘hacking’ while studying at college. ‘I was immediately intrigued,’ he said. ‘When people become so obsessed by a single activity, there has to be a story, and I wanted to investigate further.’

Moreu’s investigations brought him into contact with several of America’s most talented and notorious computer hackers, several of whom were already under surveillance by the police for illegal activities. Moreu compared the phenomenon to a 1960s-style counterculture revolution. ‘These kids were beginning to realise that they’d been handed the keys to the kingdom, and now had to deal with the responsibilities that came with it.’ 

Rather than write a direct and fact-based depiction of hacker culture, Moreu elected to exaggerate the phenomenon into a strange, slightly self-aware version of reality. The film may have been titled Hackers, but the characterisation and technology was vastly different to what one might encounter in the real world. ‘I wrote my own “screenplay hack”,’ Moreu argued, ‘a kind of Trojan Horse program, where I could present these more serious issues in a script that also delivers the hackers’ inherent sense of anarchic humour.’