EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH BLIND MICE STUDIO

THE BLIND DIGGING MICE
By Santiago Mendez

I talked to Kendra Empey, one of the three primaries at Blind Mice Studio, about their work of designing the package for The Dig. Blind Mice Studio also made lots of other LucasArts packages and catalogues.
Kendra was very kind on answering the questions and providing this "inside" story, which certainly is small but nevertheless very interesting. So here we go:

Since you designed the game´s package. Why does the game credits goes to "Soo Hoo Design"? Was that your previous name?

Mark Empey, Rod Forney and myself worked with Terri Soo Hoo at Soo Hoo Design back in 1995. (There were 5 of us at Soo Hoo.) Mark and I decided to leave and began Blind Mice Studio in 1997 while Rod continued with Terri Soo Hoo until she closed its doors.

With whom at The Dig staff have you worked at the time of doing your design?

We worked with Mary Bihr and Tom Byron.

What was your approach to this work?

The illustration was finished so early in the game's design, the original illustration had 4 spacemen around the light. We had to photoshop out the fourth guy because someone decided to kill him off before they found the box in the story.

Any anecdote of that work?

An interesting thing happened when we found out that sales were kind of slow for this title with the existing illustration. We explored new printing techniques to interest buyers.We were the first designers to try to print on a holographic substrate and worked out all of the kinks to do that with Everett Graphics by using a white overprint on the darker areas of the box. After buyers saw the box on the holographic substrate, sales took off. I even remember it being up for best software game packaging design, but I think it lost to the Simpsons.

And finally. Have you played the game? What do you think about it?

I played the game, I'm not sure if Rod or Mark did, but the game was not available for play until after the packaging was complete. Sorry, I didn't have the patience to finish the game.

November 3, 2004
Copyright © 2005 Santiago Méndez.

Well, that´s it. Thanks a lot to Kendra Empey, Mark Empey, Rod Forney and everyone else at Blind Mice Studio. If you ever need marketing services go to them, they are highly creative, and very nice people. You may visit them at: