Scrolling on Bluesky last Tuesday afternoon, I came upon a post by user Mel Stefaniuk about an FMV adventure game called The Sydney Mystery. This happenstance post led me down a Google rabbit hole, desperate to play this unique and seemingly lost piece of Australian game development from the turn of the century.
For nearly three years I ran one of the biggest games sites in the country, and part of my job was discovering obscure Australian games. I’d never heard of The Sydney Mystery before.
Shit’s on in Kirribilli
Made by a long-defunct studio called Twilight Software and released in 2003, The Sydney Mystery is a full motion video (FMV) point-and-click adventure game about a kidnapping in Sydney, made by a solo developer named Brendan Reville.
Reville made The Sydney Mystery entirely in AGE, or Adventure Game Engine, which he built and coded himself. He also served as the game’s designer, lead writer and programmer, principal photographer, composer, sound designer, and QA. He also built a demo and ran all of the PR for the game ahead of its release. An entry filing from the Independent Games Festival of 2002 cites a total production budget of just $500.
The game revolves around a woman who has just returned to Sydney after a period spent abroad. She arrives at home in the incredibly affluent inner city suburb of Kirribilli to find that her uncle, a retired private detective, has left a voicemail on her landline. He sounds scared and says he has something to tell her, but can’t say what it is over the phone. She’ll have to come to his house nearby where he can tell her in person.
Heading across the highway in North Sydney reveals that her uncle is missing, and no one seems to know what happened to him. At the same time, the city is reeling from a series of bombings on the Sydney Opera House. There’s an air of fear and suspicion in this game that was unique to the early 2000s. At the time, there was a real fear that Australia was a prime target for terror attacks in the wake of 9/11 and the Bali Bombings in 2002. The Sydney Mystery trades on that fear, making it the backdrop of its broader mystery.
An Australian approach to FMV
FMV games were almost always the province of either American studios trying to cash in on a fad from the 90s, or European studios trying to create an interactive film – however rudimentary. The Sydney Mystery seems to fall into the latter category, but with several differences.
The FMV sequences are as charming as they are kind of hokey. Travelling between certain locations triggers an establishing shot of your next stop. These videos are quite clearly filmed on a digital video camera – slowly panning across familiar buildings and city tourist spots – while the still photography was captured with an SLR. Both cameras were apparently borrowed from friends.
It’s a mark of the era that there’s no attempt to manage the continuity of the photography between areas. Town Hall is lit with bright afternoon sunlight, but walking down to Martin Place has you arriving in the morning, the area still half in shadow. A visit to the Opera House shows a bright sunny day, but talking to an NPC at The Rocks not 500 metres away shows a cloudy late afternoon.
Every still features the kind of scorching white balance you can only get from the early digital cameras of the era. People weren’t thinking about things like studio-tier lighting back then, because consumer-grade digital cameras were still very new. They looked GREAT at the time.
Reville also didn’t hire actors to play the characters the player interacts with. According to a now-ancient PC Gameworld interview around the game’s release, Reville says everyone who appears in the game is a friend or relative. This isn’t to say they aren’t good or effective; they just seem like normal people who’ve been asked to read some lines, and Reville says that’s exactly what he was going for.
“I hope this actually makes the game more engaging,” Reville told PC Gameworld at the time. “These are real Aussies in real places! Having seen a lot of games with ‘professional’ actors taking everything very seriously, I think it’s actually more fun to have a bunch of people who don’t quite know what they’re doing!”
This stands in contrast to the kind of performances you see in other FMV games, which are often cartoonish or larger-than-life in some manner. Reville’s approach creates a surreal, dreamlike version of Sydney, where everyone you meet is just a bit off, but not so off that they become a cartoon character.
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The Sydney Mystery‘s design and inspirations
The Sydney Mystery also leans on point-and-click adventure tropes, like collecting obscure and seemingly unrelated items for use in later puzzles. Some of these recall the deliberately backward logic of old LucasArts games, which Reville cites as influences.
One puzzle involved a screwdriver down a grate. Once I figured out how to retrieve the screwdriver, I realised it could be used to remove the grate entirely, revealing a second puzzle underneath. At the risk of spoiling part of The Sydney Mystery, consider tipping some beer down there. See what happens.
The occasional obtuseness of the puzzles extends The Sydney Mystery’s total play time, sending you hoofing across the Bridge and back looking for items you might have missed. By not noticing that I could look at the bedside table in my bedroom, it meant I missed a roll of sticky tape and a pair of scissors that became necessary for progress in the second act. The game offers few hints, occasionally telling you what you need but not how to get it, and it took me ages to figure out what I’d missed.
The result is a game that holds up surprisingly well given its age. Its grasp of point-and-click design is unexpectedly strong and, though its conversations occasionally become info dumps, it portions out more significant hints with clarity. The FMV footage that The Sydney Mystery deploys as its central gimmick is used wisely, linking scenes together or having characters respond to Bioware-style conversation prompts.
Players can also return to NPCs or important places to hear information again – much more in line with an RPG than traditional FMV adventures. Reville talks about this in the PC Gameworld interview, saying that traditional FMV games were “usually nothing more than hours of video footage with tiny bits of ‘gameplay’ thrown in between.”
“It’s really a first-person adventure game that just happens to have been photographed and filmed on location.”
Now and then
The Sydney Mystery is a time capsule of Sydney in the early 2000s. The CBD seems under-developed compared to the tangled warren it is today. The Opera House didn’t have the Toaster pushing up against its front steps. The widely hated Crown Sydney didn’t exist yet, and even Martin Place looks positively dead. The game’s sense of geography is also loose at best, placing the Blue Mountains somewhere south of Padstow.
Even the idea of the main character living in an older 1980s home in Kirribilli, a location that now commands property prices north of $5 million, is absurd. I think her uncle’s North Sydney address has long since been bulldozed to make way for a corporate park where the Nine Network’s national headquarters now resides.
Everywhere you look in The Sydney Mystery is a frozen glimpse of the past. Late 90s and early 2000s cars line the streets (and not in the kind of choking numbers the city battles today). Every click brings you to locations that have been radically redeveloped in the years since or are, in the case of the heritage-listed sites, exactly the same. For born Sydneysiders of a certain age, the added sense of nostalgia will be a big part of The Sydney Mystery’s charm.
But it’s the access that Reville appears to have gotten to make The Sydney Mystery that is the most startling. Early in the game’s second act, our heroine must speak to an older woman in her home. This woman, who claims to be a Dame, lives in a palatial residence. The bottom floor of this home is fully explorable in-game, as well as the property’s spacious backyard and pool area. I don’t know who owned this home, or how Reville convinced anyone to let him come in and take photos of it. This is a property that would have been worth millions back then. How did he get in there?
The same goes for an office the player visits, which is also in the second act. A dingy, underlit place tucked away in a small Circular Quay building, if you told me that Reville had found a workplace he liked the look of and asked if he could do a bit of photography, I’d believe you.
The Early 2000’s DIY spirit of the entire project is perfectly encapsulated in this sequence – the only lighting is the stark white fluorescent bulbs of the office itself. The camera is placed at an unflattering angle to the woman’s right. What might be a boom mic or possibly someone’s elbow drifts in and out of frame.
A mystery himself
I managed to track Reville down on LinkedIn and reached out to ask him about his creation. His portfolio contains no further contact information.
It’s been over 20 years since he made The Sydney Mystery and I wasn’t sure he’d want to talk about it. Documentation for an earlier game made by Reville in 1992, a top-down arcade shooter called Xerix, indicates he was 15 at the time of its creation.
Based on this, Reville would have been around 26 by the time The Sydney Mystery launched. According to his LinkedIn, it appears he went into software engineering after that, working at Microsoft on the Xbox 360 team in the US. These days, he appears to work for a nonprofit that pushes for good coding and computer science courses in schools.
Reville did not reply to my messages before press time. Fair enough. If he ever does, I’ll see if we can get this piece updated because I’d love to include his thoughts.
Indie spirit
Australian creatives have always made exciting art with whatever they had lying around. Nowhere is that more true than in our national game development scene. They are frequently underfunded, working out of bedrooms and libraries and cheap or hand-me-down technology, always doing more with less and finding success all the same.
The Sydney Mystery exemplifies this spirit of invention. A guy with an idea and a love of game design picked up a camera and went out to see if he could make a point-and-click FMV adventure game set in his own backyard. And he did it.
If you’d like to play The Sydney Mystery for yourself, the Windows PC version can be found on MyAbandonware. The ISO version should run perfectly on Windows – just make sure you turn Compatibility Mode on.
