Trivia / Loom

• Accidental Downer Ending: Ends with the Pattern torn in two and the Weavers only able to protect one half, forced to leave the other half to Chaos and a bleak future. The game was envisioned as the first of a trilogy, with the sequels showing how the people left on Chaos' half fought back, but the sequels were never made.
• Creator Backlash: Though very proud of the original game, Brian Moriarty has had some harsh words for the VGA remaster, which he feels worked against the intended design aesthetic of the EGA version. He also disliked the cut-down dialogue for the CD release and once referred to the project as “an abomination”. Additionally, he had forgotten what a strong cliffhanger the story ended on, and his biggest regret is not pursuing the two sequels more forcefully.
• Dummied Out:
  • A pre-release demo showed a small pond with reeds next to the Elders’ tent. This was drawn out for the final release. Also seen in this demo was a slightly longer wide-shot of the sheperds’ field, with more trees visible on the right.
  • An early screenshot showed a room in the Glassmakers' City with three giant sandglasses, two of which had run out and were sealed up; the last one was open at the top and a worker was pouring sand into it to keep it running. The three sandglasses of course represent the three Shadows, of which the first two have long since passed, and the third is imminent. Some sources say the room was cut to save disk space, while Brian Moriarty claims the room was cut when Crystalguard was redesigned during development. The sandglasses can still be glimpsed in the 16-color version, in the wide shot of the city (though they were painted out in the VGA upgrade).
    • The existence of a puzzle can be deduced: Bobbin was probably going to use the Emptying draft (which you can play by the time you get to Crystalgard) to empty the sandglasses. The running sands mark the time remaining until the Third Shadow: they were being replenished indefinitely, but presumably Bobbin screws that up and reduces the symbolic time until the Apocalypse to nil. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero! Alternately, playing the draft in reverse might have added time before the apocalypse. All Moriarty has said on the subject, to date, is that it would've been a time-travelling puzzle.
  • VGA renderings of the character closeups, first created for the FM-TOWNS release, were planned to be used in the CD-ROM version and are still present in the datafiles. However, except for Chaos, all of them went unused, allegedly due to an inability to create convincing lip-sync animations. (One artist, apparently frustrated by all this work going to waste, actually hid a scathing message in the Elder Atropos closeup - LOOM SUCKS!)
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Both the original EGA version and the FM-Towns port have never been digitally re-released. This despite the fact that both are often considered superior to the later CD release, due to having all the dialogue intact and not having the music confined solely to cutscenes. This is especially frustrating because the GOG release of Zak McKracken includes both the FM-Towns and the original PC release, but Loom doesn't.
  • The prequel audio drama bundled with the EGA release is not included in later releases.
• Multi-Disc Work: The floppy version comes on two or three 3.5'' disks or six 5.25'' ones.
• What Could Have Been: Two sequels were considered, titled Forge and The Fold, focusing on Rusty Nailbender and Fleece Firmflanks teaming up against Chaos, with Bobbin appearing as a swan to mentor the two.

---