JEAN-PAUL DERRIDA, I PRESUME?
As I try to wrap my head around Mindscape’s 1991–92 action puzzler D/Generation, I realize its premise closely resembles a completely different kind of game — one that wouldn’t enter the spotlight until nearly a decade later: the immersive sim. It shares so many structural and thematic elements with games like System Shock and BioShock that I suspect D/Generation must have inspired them on some level — if only it hadn’t been so thoroughly forgotten. It’s as if it never existed at all.
You begin the game as an unnamed courier in the near future, trapped near the top of a Singapore skyscraper under lockdown. Your task is simple: deliver a package to a man named Jean-Paul Derrida. Inside the building, however, everything has gone catastrophically wrong. The security system identifies you as a threat, turrets lob grenades in your direction, electrified floor grids fry you on contact, and bouncing laser beams kill you instantly if you fail to avoid them.
As if that weren’t enough, genetically engineered bioweapons pour out of air ducts and hunt you relentlessly. Through brief encounters with surviving employees, fragments of the truth emerge, leaving you to piece together the larger picture. It all points toward moral bankruptcy driven by corporate greed. To finish the game, you must reach the top floor, deliver the package, and restore some semblance of order.
With only minor adjustments, this description could apply to many later immersive sims. Those games are almost exclusively presented from a first-person perspective. D/Generation, however, uses an isometric viewpoint — a perspective that makes immersion and fear notoriously difficult to achieve. As a distant observer, you’re removed from the immediacy of danger; characters and monsters feel too small, too abstract, almost cute.
Yet the constant ambient drone in the Amiga CD32 version, combined with the dark visual palette, strongly suggests that horror was the intended tone. Designer Robert Cook may simply have been ahead of his time. When System Shock arrived a few years later — benefiting from the FPS revolution — it was genuinely terrifying. Given the technical limitations of the early 1990s, the only viable way to make D/Generation truly frightening might have been to present it as a dungeon crawler in the vein of Dungeon Master, seen directly through the hero’s eyes.
Fortunately, Cook got many other things right. The limited color palette is used to excellent effect, with bright objects sharply contrasted against deep black backgrounds to guide the player’s attention. Controls are smooth, animations are surprisingly expressive, and some NPCs are given distinct personalities through exaggerated gestures. The ten levels are tightly designed, featuring clever door-and-switch puzzles that require precise laser aiming. Difficulty ramps up at a reasonable pace — until a sharp spike in the final levels introduces an unexpected and unforgiving time limit.
Rescuing surviving staff members grants extra lives. Since you begin with only five — nowhere near enough — this effectively turns rescue into a necessity rather than an optional objective. Time pressure is constant, as enemies follow fixed movement patterns and will devour any survivors left unattended. Once an area is secured and its floor ducts sealed, survivors will follow you to the exit. Some reward you with corporate secrets, rare equipment, or passwords for hacking terminals.
In 1992, dialogue options in an action game felt refreshingly novel. While they don’t form a traditional narrative arc, they establish tone, rhythm, and motivation. Who is Jean-Paul Derrida? What does “D/Generation” actually mean? The game provokes curiosity — my first real exposure to a form of environmental storytelling that would later gain widespread acclaim in titles like BioShock and Dark Souls.
That said, D/Generation is far from a flawless retro experience. At several points, progress is impossible without rare items such as bombs or shields that may be easy to miss. Waste or overlook them, and you can end up in an unwinnable state, forcing a full restart. This design philosophy may appeal to fans of early Sierra On-Line adventures — I am not one — and very few others.
Another Sierra-esque annoyance comes in the form of unavoidable deaths. One enemy encounter, which I’ll leave unspoiled, guarantees at least one death due to its sudden introduction. Some levels even begin with enemies already on top of you, giving you only seconds after loading to react. Since death merely restarts the room, this is more irritating than devastating — though one could argue (not convincingly, in my view) that it makes narrative sense for a rogue security system to behave this way.
Enemy design is minimalist to a fault. Your most common foe is a red bouncing sphere, resembling a human-sized clown nose. The second most frequent enemy is a blue bouncing cylinder. Only one other regular enemy stands out — and it’s so inventive that I’ll leave it unmentioned. Combat itself is brisk and lethal, with one-hit kills on both sides. Enemies outnumber you, but your laser gun is brilliantly designed: its beams ricochet off walls, allowing you to kill foes around corners with surgical precision.
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida — the obvious inspiration for Jean-Paul Derrida — pioneered the concept of deconstruction. Keeping that in mind prepares you for the game’s final level, which becomes deeply subversive in a way reminiscent of how Hideo Kojima concluded Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty a decade later. Both games were critically praised, yet in both cases I suspect players weren’t quite ready to deconstruct their own experiences. Sons of Liberty, once the black sheep of its series, has since been widely reevaluated. D/Generation was not so fortunate, slipping quietly into obscurity on the wrong side of the 2D/3D divide.
Everything has its time, and the early 1990s were unkind to D/Generation. It offered the narrative ambition of a 2000s game, but wrapped it in an isometric presentation reminiscent of 1980s ZX Spectrum puzzlers. Even a 2015–16 remake for Windows and consoles failed to attract much attention. I believe it deserved better. With different timing and a bit more luck, Robert Cook’s name might have stood alongside visionaries like Ken Levine and Warren Spector, pioneers of the immersive sim. It simply wasn’t meant to be.
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