Wizard Confidential
Seattle, 1927. You’re a private eye in a city drenched in secrets. Bootleggers run speedboats over the border to supply speakeasies and jazz clubs; gangs shoot it out in dark alleys; and the coppers are even more crooked than the crooks. Crime isn’t the only thing lurking in Seattle’s misty streets: there are werewolves, vampires, and wizards. The wise citizen avoids the dark.
It started with a connection made at the 2024 Nebula Conference. Jason Stevan Hill from Choice of Games was looking for writers interested in writing interactive fiction. That someone, it turned out, was me. We bounced around a few ideas, and ended up with a little fantasy noir set in an alternate Prohibition-era Seattle.
All told, the game took a little over a year to write and about half a year to revise and edit. This was by far the biggest project I’ve ever been a part of, and I am extremely thankful for the support Jason and the rest of the Choice of Games team have given me.
Too bad for them that you’re not wise enough to back down—and that you’re a darn good wizard yourself. You crack the cases that nobody else can, and right now, you’ve got some big ones. City Hall wants you to investigate an out-of-town union leader who’s much more than meets the eye. The Dry Squad wants you to help track down a notorious gang of bootleggers before the Feds move in. And you? You want to find your partner, who’s gone missing under circumstances more mysterious than any of your other cases.
You can read a little more in an interview I did about the game. One thing I discovered that I loved about this project was the research. There was the noir, of course. If I wanted to channel a style, I needed to give it a much deeper reading. Then, there was the history. I devoured every Prohibition-era Seattle source I could get and found whole websites dedicated to specific aspects of the period.
One of my favorites was Bill Bryson’s One Summer, which isn’t specifically Seattle, but inspired the inclusion of Charles Lindbergh and the airplane industry. As a Minnesotan I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to use Lindbergh, but that guy got pretty problematic later on in his life. Bradley Holden’s Seattle Prohibition, Bootleggers, Rumrunners, and Graft in the Queen City was one that I read early and formed a lot of the ideas that turned into Wizard Confidential. That was where I really started to learn about how speed boats were developed on the sound and how booze traffic started a kind of arms race with the Coast Guard.
I can’t list all the websites I read, but a few of the more interesting ones were pages dedicated to hat styles, Prohibition-era cocktails, and those that describe The Seattle General Strike. That last one in particular was interesting to me because it wasn’t a successful strike. It’s failure would be in the minds of those living in 1927 when Wizard Confidential takes place.
But bigger than all those other problems put together is the rogue wizard who’s been popping up around town. Who is he? Why does he always appear just when something major is going down? What does he want? And most importantly, what does he know that you don’t? The city’s future is at stake, and you’re the only one who can save it.
I have one confession to make. Music plays a prominent part of this story, and for the most part I tried to keep things appropriate for 1927. I made one exception. Which Side Are You On? in the real world was written by Florence Reece in 1931. I know I’m fudging the timeline a little, but it was such a perfect song for the scene I decided that the timeline needed to warp a little.
I’m not sorry.
To make it up, here’s the version of the song as performed by the Dropkick Murphys. Every time I read that section of the game, this is the version I have in my head. Anachronistic? Maybe. But it just shows how relevant this song is in modern times.
Wizard Confidential is now available. You can find it in the Choice of Games app on Apple or Android, on Steam, or right on the Choice of Games website.
