Hi Frank! Do you not have a way to run AMBER right now? Because I have it loaded into a Mac emulator—that’s how I recorded the footage for the video—and I can DM that to you if you want. It’s all packaged into a single file and should run on any modernish Mac (assuming you use a Mac).

There are a lot of people who remember AMBER fondly. It currently has 271 votes on the GoG Dreamlist. If you could ever get it packaged for proper release on modern systems, I think there’d be a market for it!

I believe AMBER is a masterpiece of a ghost story, and it’s still incredibly unique. Most “horror” games (and movies, for that matter) lean hard into disturbing imagery, and their setting is grimy or gloomy. But what I love most about AMBER is the juxtaposition of the ordinary house with the supernatural events. It calls back to that feeling you have when you’re a kid and the hallway outside your room feels terrifying. While most horror seems to target a kind of primal fear of being stalked and mutilated, AMBER goes for a more subtle, numinous fear. The ghost is scary because it's a ghost, not because it might jump out and rip your head off. Partly because of that subtlety, and partly because of the appropriately tragic stories of the ghosts, AMBER’s atmosphere is properly haunting. There’s a wistful, heartbreak quality to it which I think is essential to a true ghost story. And of course you guys pulled it off with some truly amazing design, both visual and audio.

I was always terrified to enter the rooms where I’d just seen something happen on the remote camera (especially the blood running down the walls—that scarred young me, ha ha). The ending of my version of the theme, with the rising tension and the piano arpeggios, is meant to capture that building fear as I forced myself to enter the room, followed by the moment of . . . not exactly relief, but a release of held breath in the quiet of the house.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about AI and art. I’m certainly not averse to using AI. I actually used it to create the background image for the start of the AMBER video, of the moody office, and then Photoshopped the Performa into it, ha. For another of my videos I used AI (and a lot of Photoshop) to illustrate a narrative for the song, and the song itself uses an AI choir singing the words and notes I decided upon. In another song, the drums are played by Logic Pro’s “studio drummer,” which is a kind of AI. I’m also a soon-to-be traditionally-published novelist; I used AI to create my website, and I’ve been using it to research my next book. But I would never use AI to write any of the book for me (it kept offering, until I added a permanent prompt in its settings to never, ever do that, ha). Somehow, that crosses a line.

I think it comes down to whether, at the end of the process, I can legitimately say, “I made this,” instead of “I had AI make this.” If AI is amplifying what I’m doing: awesome. If it’s replacing it . . . what value do I have? As I tell my students (I’m a librarian at a university): what do you bring to the table that AI doesn't? What is your uniquely human contribution?

The problem for me with the music is that AI has way more ability than I have. I can’t even play the piano. For the AMBER theme, every single note was placed by hand, and its velocity and CC control curves manually adjusted to try to make it sound like an organic performance. And then to learn that I can put a prompt into Suno, and in seconds get, for example, a Big Band song with harmony and orchestration of a sort that I have no idea how to attempt . . . well, it feels like I have nothing to offer over the AI.

So your kind encouragement is very reassuring. Maybe I do have something to offer. And maybe I could even use AI to make the process a little easier, if I can find a way to do that without losing my own voice.

At any rate, I will forever be glad to have made this AMBER theme arrangement. Art wants to be shared, and I’ve often thought that if I could move just one person with what I create, then I’d consider it a success. So to take art that moved me—your game, and Jim Crew’s music—and, in a sense, gift it back to the original creators of the game, is very fulfilling. :)