The Dig (1995)
The Dig is a 1995 point-and-click video game made by LucasArts.
An asteroid is drifting toward Earth, and a three-person crew rides a shuttle up to nudge it off course. Boston Low, a veteran astronaut, goes with a journalist and a geologist, expecting a straightforward job. The rock has other ideas. Dreamed up by Sean Clark with Steven Spielberg and scored like a lonely radio signal, The Dig is slow, quiet science fiction: sparse dialogue, real physics puzzles, and a mounting sense that the crew is very far from home and very much alone. Point and click, but somber.
Quick answers
What is The Dig about?
An asteroid is drifting toward Earth, and a three-person crew rides a shuttle up to nudge it off course. Boston Low, a veteran astronaut, goes with a journalist and a geologist, expecting a straightforward job. The rock has other ideas. Dreamed up by Sean Clark with Steven Spielberg and scored like a lonely radio signal, The Dig is slow, quiet science fiction: sparse dialogue, real physics puzzles, and a mounting sense that the crew is very far from home and very much alone. Point and click, but somber.
When was The Dig released?
The Dig was released on 30 November 1995.
Who made The Dig?
The Dig was made by LucasArts.
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Explore The Dig guides
The Dig in our writing
- Companion guide: LucasArts: The SCUMM Adventures & the Star Wars Empire
A few thoughts on The Dig
For the same awe of stepping onto something vast and clearly built by someone else, Rendezvous with Rama sends explorers into a silent alien craft and lets the mystery breathe. The Black Hole shares the eerie, isolated deep-space mood, more dread than action.
The same story, off the screen
The Dig has its own novelization, and it reads like the cerebral science fiction it borrows from. Start there, then follow the thread to Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke's classic of quietly exploring a mysterious alien object, and the speculative unknowns of Threshold and The Aftermath. Slow, thoughtful, human-scale space.
Stranded far from home
The Dig leaves its crew alone on an alien world with a mounting sense they may never leave. These sit in that same cold isolation, the drifting dread of Infini and Teleios, the creature-stalked dark of Galaxy of Terror and Dead Space: Downfall, and the eerie silence aboard The Black Hole. Deep space, no rescue coming.
An asteroid and one last mission
It all starts with a rock drifting toward Earth and a small crew riding up to nudge it off course. These open on similar stakes, Armageddon's do-or-die space mission and the animated catastrophe of Gall Force 2, with Alien Expedition and R'ha turning a routine job into something far stranger.
Animated space wanderers
Scored like a lonely radio signal, The Dig is really about a crew adrift among the stars. These carry that drifting, contemplative mood into animation, the jazz-tinged bounty runs of Cowboy Bebop, the stranded teenagers of Infinite Ryvius, and the wandering crews of Star Wars Rebels and Heavy Metal 2000. Sci-fi with a heavy heart.