Take-Two Interactive in 1996 was not yet the company that would eventually give the world Grand Theft Auto. They were, at this point, a publisher willing to put Christopher Walken in a cyberpunk murder mystery spread across four CD-ROMs and charge full price for it. In hindsight this was an extremely promising sign about their instincts, even if the execution was somewhat uneven.
Ripper is set in a near-future New York where someone is committing Jack the Ripper-style murders, except the murders are happening in cyberspace, which in 1996 was considered a fresh and alarming concept rather than the premise of a fairly standard thriller. You play Jake Quinlan, journalist, who investigates. Walken plays a detective. Burgess Meredith and Karen Allen are also there. Blue Öyster Cult are on the soundtrack. This is all real.
The Setup
The world of Ripper is a fairly standard mid-90s vision of the near future: neon, grimy, full of cyber-junkies and suspicious AI and a general sense that technology has made everything worse in interesting ways. The murder mystery unfolds across New York’s various unpleasant corners, and the investigation involves talking to a rotating cast of characters who range from genuinely menacing to clearly enjoying themselves enormously at the expense of anyone watching.
The Ripper’s identity is not fixed. The game has a branching narrative that routes differently depending on which suspects you interrogate and what evidence you find, meaning the killer in your playthrough may not be the killer in someone else’s. For a mid-90s point-and-click adventure this was a genuinely ambitious design decision, and it holds up as one of the things that makes Ripper worth more than a single playthrough, assuming you have the patience for multiple playthroughs, which we will get to.
The Gameplay
Point-and-click investigation, mostly. You explore locations, pick up evidence, analyse it, and interrogate suspects through dialogue trees that matter more than they might initially appear to. The interface is not the most intuitive thing ever committed to a CD-ROM, with a tendency to bury options inside other options and icons that require a small act of faith to interpret correctly. You will click on the wrong thing. This will happen frequently and the game will not always make clear that you have done so.
The puzzles are where Ripper earns its reputation for being difficult. Some are logic-based and fair, once you’ve worked out the game’s internal rules. Others are ciphers and codes that will send you to a notebook or, in a contemporary playthrough, a walkthrough, without much shame involved. The action sequences scattered through the game are clunky in ways that feel like they arrived from a different, worse game and were inserted without quite enough consideration for whether they belonged.
None of this is disqualifying. Adventure games of this era were frequently punishing and frequently obtuse, and there was a particular type of player who responded to that as a feature rather than a flaw. Ripper is very much a game for that player.
Christopher Walken
It would be dishonest to discuss Ripper without spending some time on Christopher Walken, who plays Detective Vince Magnotta and who approaches the role with the specific energy of a man who has read the script, understood it completely, and decided to do something else instead. His performance is not subtle. It is not meant to be subtle. He delivers lines with pauses in places where pauses have no obvious grammatical function, shifts between threatening and almost affectionate within a single scene, and at several points appears to be conducting a private experiment to see how long he can hold eye contact with the camera before something happens.
It is one of the great FMV performances and also possibly one of the great performances of Walken’s career if you are measuring by pure entertainment value per minute of screen time. The rest of the cast are also committed: Burgess Meredith brings a weary authority to his role, Karen Allen is sharper than the material probably deserves, and the supporting players lean into the camp with varying degrees of self-awareness. The overall effect is of a B-movie with a genuine A-list cameo that somehow makes the whole thing better rather than more incongruous.
The Look and Sound of It
The pre-rendered backgrounds have the dim, compressed quality of most mid-90s FMV work, and the cyberspace sequences go harder on the glitchy neon aesthetic in ways that are dated but not unpleasantly so. The visual language is confident even when the resolution isn’t, which matters more than you’d think. There’s a genuine sense of a world here, grimy and specific, even if the technical means to fully render it weren’t quite there yet.
The soundtrack is worth noting separately because it is, by some distance, better than it needed to be. Blue Öyster Cult contributed tracks, which is an unusual creative decision for a PC adventure game and one that pays off. The combination of eerie synthesised ambience and actual rock music gives Ripper an audio identity that most games of this type simply don’t have. It sounds like something, which is not a given.
How It Landed
Reviews at the time were mixed in the specific way that ambitious but flawed games tend to generate mixed reviews: genuine praise for the cast and atmosphere, genuine criticism for the interface and the more obscure puzzle design. It sold modestly. The FMV format was already losing ground by 1996, and Ripper arrived at a point where the audience for this kind of thing was contracting rather than growing.
There is a long piece on Wired about the making of Ripper that is worth reading if you want the full story of how a game this strange got made and why it ended up the way it did. The short version is that it was complicated, expensive, and not entirely what anyone involved originally planned. This is fairly standard for ambitious projects and does not make the result less interesting.
What it is now is a cult object, which suits it better than mainstream success probably would have. Ripper is genuinely odd in ways that feel intentional and odd in ways that probably weren’t, and the combination of those two things is most of what makes it worth going back to. If you have four evenings, a walkthrough bookmarked, and an appreciation for Christopher Walken doing whatever Christopher Walken decides to do in a given scene, it holds up.
Ripper Release Details
| Release Date | 1996 |
| Platform(s) | DOS, Macintosh |
| Genre | Adventure |
| Developer | Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. |
| Publisher | GameTek UK Ltd. Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. |
