If Tim Burton and MTV designed a video game, it would be Secret of Evermore. This game deserves to be remembered.
My uncle smuggled Secret of Evermore to Taiwan in 1995, as a Christmas gift to me and my sister. It was the first American game I'd ever played. It also turned out to be the only game Squaresoft's American studio ever designed. I was nine years old, illiterate in English, and depended on my sister to translate everything.
The mood was not lost to me, though. It's the cheekiest game among Square's hyper-earnest canon. The tropes were classic American sci-fi – time travel, new age colonies, utopian universes gone awry – and the whole game smelled of a musty Californian hobby shop. You start in a American suburb called Podunk (yes), and end up, through a machine, in four utopian worlds your geeky neighbors dreamed up.
The game got so many things right:
The moody sountrack
"Secret of Evermore" was composer Jeremy Soule's first major project. He later made music for "Harry Potter" and "Elder Scrolls."
