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After signing up to write this retrospective, it dawned on me that I might not have time to replay Loom. I looked at my schedule and saw that I'd left myself a single evening in which to struggle through a 90s LucasArts adventure. You know, those games notorious for their fiendishly difficult puzzles and dozens of red herrings. I still have nightmares about that forest in Grim Fandango.But it's been so long since I last played Loom I'd forgotten that Loom was designed to be completed. This phrase was written in the manual when the game released in 1990, and recently reiterated by Brian Moriarty during Loom's 25th anniversary GDC lecture . For someone struggling to fit more and more games into less and less free time, hearing those words is like a spoonful of ambrosia.
Loom was designed to be completed. Yet this isn't what makes it exceptional. That stems from how LucasArts set about implementing the idea, lacing it through the game like a thread through a tapestry. Loom took all the elements of LucasArts adventures up to that point; storytelling, humour, contextual interaction and puzzles - along with a brand new element - sound, and wove them together using a single system that even today astounds through its simple, exquisite ingenuity. Loom is not only the name of the game or the subject of the story. It's a concept that influences every facet of the design.
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