A Discworld Mystery

For nearly 25 years, I’ve wondered about a small picture on box of the 1995 point-and-click adventure game Discworld. The game is based on Terry Pratchett’s comic fantasy novels of the same name, and is very much a classic of the genre; detailed pixel artwork, funny dialogue, and unnecessarily difficult solutions to puzzles.

On the back of the box, (for younger readers, video games used to be distributed in coffee table book sized boxes), there several screenshots from the game.

One of the screenshots depicts a scene where the player character - the cowardly wizard Rincewind - stands before the city gates of Ankh-Morpork, waiting to continue his adventures across the Discworld.

Guarding the gate are book series regulars Carrot and Nobby. Nobby appears to be asleep, whilst the “Sergeant” appears to be pontificating the finer points of guard duty from atop the guard-tower.

However, in the game the scene plays out differently:

Nobby is awake, whilst the Sergeant is asleep in the guard-tower.

We’re the City Guard, mister… There’s me, and the Sergeant - who’s a bit under the weather as account of making an arrest of a large quantity of lager.

When you play the game, there is no way to wake the Sergeant character up.

Like a lot of games released in the 90s, the games subtitles are stored in a simple text file you can open and read. I’ve been through the entire subtitle file, and there is no obvious dialogue lines that appear to belong to the character of the Sergeant.

So… what happened?

I assumed that the screenshots on the back of the box must have come from the final game, or at least late enough in development to reflect the final look of the game. In the box art screenshot, Nobby is asleep whilst the Sergeant is awake. Perhaps the character models were swapped late in the game? This seems unlikely.

As I said, this has bugged me for the best part of 25 years. So, I reached out to the game’s Writer and Director, Gregg Barnett.

Much to my delight, he replied to my query:

I can’t for the life of me come up with an answer to your question. All back of box shots were taken from the final game, so not sure why there’d be a discrepancy.

To be fair it is an a really quite obscure query about something he worked on almost 30 years ago. So, as of publication, this mystery remains unsolved.