~: HALL OF FAME :~
THE MALADY OF THE MELODIES
If movie executives weren’t so relentlessly driven by profit over quality, Loom would be the obvious video game to adapt for the big screen. Failure would be nearly impossible, since the groundwork is already there: a superbly written story, a fully realized world, a handful of profound themes, a musical score woven directly into the narrative, and a rich lore ripe for sequels and spin-offs. I want to see this happen.
No — scrap that. What I truly want is to see this world expanded into a fully realized RPG masterpiece: an open world built around an intricate spell-weaving system of tones and melodies. Music would shape and alter the very fabric of reality, making magic inseparable from sound. For once, fast travel would be thematically justified. I need to see this happen in my lifetime.
Such is the inspirational power of Loom, a magical point-and-click adventure developed by Lucasfilm Games that I played in my youth and have never quite left behind. It feels like the seed of a masterpiece waiting to sprout — constrained only by the genre conventions and technical limitations of its time. And yet, even in its original form, Loom is an outstanding game and a genuine work of art. With the advances we’ve since made in storytelling and technology, an RPG set in this universe could become the game of a lifetime.
Who would have the courage, talent, and endurance to attempt it?
STORY AND SETTING
Loom unfolds in a beautiful fantasy world where people live in isolated guilds, separated by vast stretches of wilderness and ocean. Each guild follows rigid traditions, passing down the secrets of its craft from generation to generation. Among them are the Glassmakers, Shepherds, Blacksmiths, Clerics — and, at the center of the story, the Weavers.
The Weavers are the most secretive of all, isolating themselves on Loom Island. They are forbidden to marry outside the guild and remain completely concealed beneath heavy woolen cloaks, their eyes barely visible beneath their hoods. Rumors among the other guilds claim that peeking beneath a Weaver’s hood means certain death.
You play as Bobbin Threadbare, a young member of the Weaver’s Guild, on “the dawn of his seventeenth year,” just as fate begins to unravel. Played without prior knowledge, the story can feel cryptic — in part because Loom originally shipped with a 30-minute audio drama on cassette, detailing the lore and strange circumstances surrounding Bobbin’s birth.
Bobbin is an orphan, raised by the midwife Hetchel as her own. He knows almost nothing about his mother except her name: Cygna. Throughout his life, he has been shunned by the elders and bullied by his peers, yet he remains gentle and compassionate. The elders call him “Loom-child” and foresee only disaster in his future. Since his birth, they claim, chaos has spread through the great pattern that governs their world.
On Bobbin’s seventeenth birthday, he overhears a fierce argument between Hetchel and the guild council. It ends abruptly when a swan crashes through a window and casts a spell that transforms the entire guild into swans. They take flight, passing through the fabric of reality itself and into the afterlife. Bobbin is left behind, clutching a Weaver’s distaff, knowing only a single spell of opening — and carrying Hetchel’s final instruction: “Leave this island.”
And so he does. In his search for the vanished flock, Bobbin encounters the other guilds and uncovers signs that reality itself is beginning to unravel. Everything leads back to the loom — and the pattern that shapes existence.
GAMEPLAY OF A DIFFERENT CLOTH
What follows is a classic adventure game with a uniquely streamlined point-and-click interface. Instead of the familiar LucasArts verb menu and inventory, the only tool at your disposal is Bobbin’s distaff, displayed at the bottom of the screen. Spell-weaving replaces traditional commands, and inventory management is removed entirely.
Puzzle solutions are intuitive rather than opaque. Need to sneak past a guard? Weave the invisibility spell by playing the correct four notes. Spells can also be reversed by playing their melodies backward: “Open” becomes “Close.” At the start, Bobbin knows only three notes, but he learns more as the story unfolds, allowing him to weave increasingly complex spells.
Loom is one of the earliest games to treat gameplay not as a challenge to be conquered, but as a means of narrative participation. Lead designer Brian Moriarty wanted players to feel as though they were weaving spells alongside Bobbin, rather than selecting them from a list. The game could have displayed known spells in a menu, but instead it asks the player to memorize and perform them — a small but powerful act of immersion.
Sound and music are therefore essential. Moriarty drew heavy inspiration from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. In 1990, sound hardware was too limited to support subtle ambient soundscapes, so melodies carried the emotional weight. Swan Lake fits the themes perfectly, lending the game a sense of drama, melancholy, and sophistication that places it far ahead of its time.
RECEPTION AND LEGACY
Fortunately, critics recognized Loom’s qualities on release. It was widely praised for its writing, atmosphere, and artistry, though some criticized it for being short and easy. That criticism is fair — from a gameplay perspective, it offers little resistance. But this was intentional. As the manual famously states: “Loom isn’t meant to be played — it is meant to be completed.” If that philosophy doesn’t appeal to you, the game makes no apology.
Sadly, Loom never sold well enough to justify a sequel, leaving its story somewhat unresolved. Ironically, it may have served as a necessary sacrifice, paving the way for the mature, story-driven games we enjoy today. It arrived before the industry was ready, and for decades afterward we saw few attempts at similarly layered storytelling.
In his GDC postmortem, Moriarty later revealed that players continued to write to him for years, describing the profound impact Loom had on them. As those players grew up and entered the industry themselves, that influence finally began to surface.
A SOURCE OF INSPIRATION
Loom was sophisticated long before games were expected to be so. It is a fully story-driven experience with adult sensibilities, touching on themes of loneliness, abandonment, conformity, and fear of the unknown. Yet it never becomes heavy-handed or verbose. Subtext emerges organically through drama, music, and visual design. Storytelling always comes first; gameplay and longevity are secondary concerns.
Although a CD-ROM version exists with 256-color VGA graphics, the original EGA version deserves special recognition. Artists Mark Ferrari and Gary Winnick worked within a strict 16-color palette, using painstaking manual dithering techniques to simulate additional hues. The result is some of the most memorable imagery in adventure gaming.
The Glassmakers’ Emerald City by the sea, built from translucent green structures, remains a visual standout. The Blacksmiths’ guild is equally striking, as is a surprisingly ambitious 3D death animation late in the game. Above all, it’s the attention to detail that makes the world feel alive. Whenever I play Loom, I find myself staring at the horizons, hoping there might be hidden paths leading beyond them — even though I know there probably aren’t.
What astonishes me most is that Loom was created over thirty years ago, yet I remember every beat of it, despite playing it only a couple of times. Not only that — it continues to evolve in my mind. Seen through a modern lens, it hasn’t aged so much as revealed new possibilities for stories within the same universe. By today’s standards the graphics are crude and the music primitive, but the ideas feel timeless.
I started writing this unsure of how to rate Loom. Maybe it’s a four-star game. Maybe it’s a four-star story trapped inside a one-and-a-half-star game. In the end, I realized it doesn’t matter. Over the course of the day, I decided to make it my first Hall of Fame inductee. Loom doesn’t belong to the quantifiable world of scores and metrics — it belongs to dreams, imagination, and the boundless urge to create. And there, it continues to inspire us to weave our own magic.
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