Decades back, in the mid-’90s, I was the developer for the Mutant Chronicles roleplaying game for Target Games in Sweden. It’s a dark future setting in which corporations rule the solar system and strive to protect us from demonic/alien forces of mind-bending evil invading from beyond. It’s been featured in RPGs, board games, and collectible card games and was even the subject of a 2009 movie starring Tom Jane and Ron Perlman, for which I wrote the novelization.
It also made its way to comic books in the form of a miniseries for Acclaim, called Mutant Chronicles: Golgotha. My old roommate William King (from when I lived in Nottingham, working for Games Workshop) wrote it, with interiors by Davide Fabri and covers by Simon Bisley.
What isn’t widely known is that I was contracted to write a follow-up miniseries based on Dark Eden, the new name for the spoiled Earth in the Mutant Chronicles setting. My college roommate Bryan Winter designed a collectible card game for this new region, based on his Doomtrooper game, and Target and Acclaim were eager to cross-promote a comic with it.
They hired me to write a four-issue miniseries set in Dark Eden, based on a concept that Jeff Connor and Nils Gullikson concocted. I finished all four scripts as was paid for them, but unfortunately, the comic never saw the light of day. Paolo Parente (for whom I wrote a novel–Blood and Thunder–for his miniatures game Dust) was slated to draw the interiors, and I saw some of his work for it at one point. It was flat-out gorgeous.
People in the know have asked me about this countless times over the years. Some of them have even wondered aloud if I could share the script with them. Because Target owned those scripts wholesale, I didn’t have the rights to do that though, so the scripts simply sat on a series of computers for all that time.
Recently, though, I was chatting about this with Fred Malmberg, the original owner of Target Games and the current owner of the Mutant Chronicles through his new company, Cabinet Entertainment. There’s a shocking bit in that first issue’s script that he still remembers and talks about to this day. (You’ll probably know it when you see it.) He said, “Go ahead and put the first issue up on your website. See what people think.”
So… I actually managed to excavate the script, but I discovered that I’d written it in a version of Word that’s no longer supported. Despite that, I managed to extract the text from it, and then I reformatted it in Scrivener and exported it as a PDF. It took a bit of doing, but it’s complete and reads much like it originally did.
Because of all that, if you click on the image below, you can now–for the first time ever, 24 years since I wrote it–read the script for Mutant Chronicles: Dark Eden #1 and (I hope) enjoy it.
