Extraction Playing LOOM reminds me of watching old silent movies, like Voyage To The Moon. It's this glimpse at a time when the medium was new and nobody knew what worked and what didn't. Early adventure games were made by packs of people making whatever came to mind, and you glimpse all these directions the industry could have gone. There are always lessons to be learned from that. The tape and the physical Book Of Patterns really made the world feel tangible (as did the disk-swapping, in a way), though that'd be hard to do today now that most people use direct download to play games. Taking ideas from unexpected places is another valuable lesson - much of the game's power comes from the gorgeous music of Swan Lake (it meant I got to hum along during Black Swan, so that's a plus), and classical music is royalty-free so you could easily score your game with opera or ballet. Letting your influences expand beyond just games and movies, but ballet and philosophy and paintings... I'd love to see LOOM's central mechanic expanded to a modern, larger game. The feeling that you could point at anything and sing a sequence of notes at it was thrilling, even if, in the end, there weren't too many results. It felt like you were actually casting , instead of clicking a spell in a menu. The mixture of magic and music proved a potent one as well. The indie scene could easily support a