... of gas-lit comfort and contentment, of perfect dignity and grace.

August 23, 2022 7:59 PM

"In addition to being a tribute to Sherlock’s wide-ranging curiosity, it’s a vastly more effective virtual museum of Victoriana than the real one that stands at that London address today. Spend some time here just rummaging about, and maybe follow some of its leads with some independent research of your own, and you’ll begin to feel the frisson of life in this amazing city, the melting pot of the Western world circa 1885."

A small sample of the exhibits on hand:

• A portrait of the now largely forgotten abolitionist hero Henry Ward Beecher, who was arguably the most famous American in the world for a decade or two.
• A portrait of General Charles George Chinese Gordon, the brave if not brilliant commander who earned his nickname helping to put down the Taiping Rebellion and later died defending Khartoum in 85.
• Some of Londons many newspapers, which, though ephemeral, are among the wonders of the age, being the first near-instantaneous form of mass media, the finger on the pulse of the worlds greatest metropolis, humming with all of its news, gossip, and scandal.
• Music by such less remembered composers as Pablo de Sarasate, Eduard Franck, and Jacques Offenbach, placed here to serve as a reminder that the Romantic music scene of the late nineteenth century included more names than Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner.
• A book by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, the inventor of the mug shot as a tool for law enforcement.
• More books, including Mommsens masterful history of Rome, C.F. McGlashans grisly account of the Donner party, and a particularly inept translation of The Brothers Karamazov.
• Pictures of the convicted and executed murderers Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, William Palmer, and Louis Lingg (the last of whom may very well have been innocent), assembled as part of the dogged but consistently fruitless Victorian effort to scientifically discern character through facial features.
• An early wax-cylinder phonograph, marking Sherlock as his eras version of those early adopters who in 1996 were playing this game on the latest personal computers.

Jimmy Maher, "The Digital Antiquarian", (previously on the blue) tells us about the 1996 sequel to an overlooked gem from 1992, a Sierra-like game you can revisit today with the help of the Internet Archive:

The Lost Files Of Sherlock Holmes: The Case Of The Rose Tattoo.

posted by mhoye (3 comments total)

hmm in-browser play doesn't seem to be working on this computer at least, will give downloading & running it a shot from a beefier one later.
posted by juv3nal at 10:47 PM on August 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Holy shit!

I have an uncommonly close relationship with the development of the original 1992 game, and an even closer involvement with its sequel.

I’m reluctant to elaborate, but it is an astoundingly unsettling — and gratifying — coincidence to see it here on the Blue, some 30 years later.
posted by darkstar at 11:53 PM on August 23, 2022 [7 favorites]

Well, on re-read, that seems like a crappy teaser, so I’ll say that I worked for Mythos, the software development company that made these games. I was more intimately involved with the sequel in a number of roles, and many of my friends and family are featured as video actors in the game.

My closest friends worked on that game with me. Two of my colleagues on the game development are still in my weekly gaming group, over a quarter-century later.

These games were a labor of love from a small, scrappy development house. They really are amazingly rich, and if you’re a fan of Sherlockiana, I can definitely recommend them.
posted by darkstar at 6:39 AM on August 24, 2022 [15 favorites]