0e2523a8a9
A Sierra-style adventure in the Police Squad!/Naked Gun universe, on MRPGI — which reimplements AGI, the engine Sierra shipped Police Quest on. The premise: Police Quest's pedantic procedure x Police Squad!'s farce. The game grades you on correct procedure with a straight face, and the reward for perfect procedure is catastrophe anyway. Per John, the famous Police Quest II bugs are shipped deliberately as canon gags. - RESEARCH.md — all six Police Squad! episodes, all four films (incl. Neeson's Frank Drebin Jr, 2025), the recurring cast, and the ZAZ comedy grammar. - DESIGN.md — the joke engine, the two Drebins across three eras (Drebin Sr's 1982 cases render in a monochrome EGA subset for the 1950s M Squad look), an eleven-case campaign, and the PQ2 glitch-to-feature table. - cases/case-01-substantial-gift — playable. Five rooms, 100 points, full win path verified headlessly at 95/100 plus four authored Sierra deaths. Procedure gates, dusting for latents, and Miranda rights in the correct order are all pure JSON; no engine features were invented for it. - tools/sprites.py — all 24 sprites generated locally on MODELBEAST (flux_local -> bg_remove_local -> trim/downscale), reproducible by seed. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
8.8 KiB
Source material — Police Squad! and The Naked Gun
Research notes behind the game design. Everything here is canon from the six TV episodes and four films. Design decisions built on it live in DESIGN.md.
1. The canon, in order
| # | Work | Year | Drebin | Villain | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | Police Squad! (6 eps) | 1982 | Leslie Nielsen | one-off | ABC. Cancelled after 4 aired. |
| 1 | The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! | 1988 | Leslie Nielsen | Vincent Ludwig | Plot skeleton lifted from Telefon |
| 2 | The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear | 1991 | Leslie Nielsen | Quentin Hapsburg | Energy policy |
| 3 | Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult | 1994 | Leslie Nielsen | Rocco Dillon | Drebin retired |
| 4 | The Naked Gun | 2025 | Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr. | Richard Cane | 88% RT, Critics' Choice Best Comedy |
The 1982 series was created by Zucker–Abrahams–Zucker straight off Airplane!, and was a direct parody of M Squad (1957–60, Lee Marvin) and Felony Squad — 1950s hardboiled cop TV. This matters: the "1950s Frank Drebin Sr" idea isn't an invention, it's the form the joke was originally cut from.
2. Police Squad! — all six episodes
Each is a self-contained case. Perfect mission-sized units.
| Ep | Title | Guest star murdered in the titles | Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A Substantial Gift (The Broken Promise) | Lorne Greene | Credit union manager shot. Teller Sally Decker did it — stealing to pay orthodontist bills — and framed a customer. |
| 2 | Ring of Fear (A Dangerous Assignment) | Georg Stanford Brown | Boxing corruption. Frank goes undercover as a fight manager; a boxer's wife is kidnapped to force a dive. |
| 3 | Rendezvous at Big Gulch (Terror in the Neighborhood) | Florence Henderson | Protection racket. Frank and Norberg open a locksmith shop as a front. |
| 4 | Revenge and Remorse (The Guilty Alibi) | William Shatner, Dr. Joyce Brothers | Courthouse bombing; Eddie Casales framed. |
| 5 | The Butler Did It (A Bird in the Hand) | Robert Goulet, Tommy Lasorda | Kidnapping of a businessman's daughter during a birthday party. |
| 6 | Testimony of Evil (Dead Men Don't Laugh) | William Conrad, Dick Clark | A comedian dies; Frank infiltrates a nightclub drug ring. |
(Ep 5's guest was originally John Belushi, replaced after his death.)
The recurring cast
- Det. Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) — narrates in hardboiled voiceover while doing something idiotic on screen.
- Capt. Ed Hocken (Alan North; George Kennedy in the films) — the briefing.
- Officer Nordberg (Peter Lupus in the series, "Norberg"; O. J. Simpson in the films) — exists to be injured.
- Ted Olson (Ed Williams) — lab scientist. Explains forensics while doing something wildly unsuitable involving children present in the lab.
- Johnny the Snitch (William Duell) — shoeshine man. Knows everything.
- Al (Tiny Ron Taylor) — an officer so tall his head is permanently above the top of frame. Never commented on.
- Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln — credited in the titles, never in an episode.
3. The films — plot beats worth stealing
The Naked Gun (1988)
Beirut cold open: Drebin single-handedly breaks up a summit of America's enemies (Gorbachev, Gaddafi, Khomeini, Arafat, Castro, Idi Amin). Home in LA, Nordberg is shot on a heroin boat run by shipping magnate Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalbán). Hocken gives Frank 24 hours to clear Nordberg before Queen Elizabeth II visits. Frank visits Ludwig's office and accidentally reveals Nordberg survived. Ludwig sets his assistant Jane Spencer (Priscilla Presley) on Frank; they fall in love. Ludwig is being paid $20m by Pahpshmir to kill the Queen using a beeper that triggers post-hypnotic suggestion — anyone becomes an unwitting assassin. At the Queen's reception Drebin mistakes a ceremonial musket for an attack, causes chaos, gets fired. Climax at Anaheim Stadium: Frank sneaks in, becomes the home plate umpire so he can frisk players, and Ludwig activates Reggie Jackson. Ludwig falls from the stadium, is flattened by a steamroller, then trampled by a marching band.
The Naked Gun 2½ (1991)
Energy policy. Dr. Albert Meinheimer will recommend renewables; oil man Quentin Hapsburg (Robert Goulet) swaps him for a lookalike, Earl Hacker. Frank spots the fake because the double lacks Meinheimer's photographic memory. Set pieces: the Blue Note bar where Frank drowns his sorrows; a SWAT tank driven through a house and into the zoo, releasing animals; assassin Hector Savage killed with a fire hose; the squad infiltrating the Press Club dinner dressed as a mariachi band; a nuclear device disarmed by tripping over its power cord. The escaped lion kills Hapsburg. Frank proposes to Jane.
Naked Gun 33⅓ (1994)
Frank is retired, in marriage counselling, and bored. Bomber Rocco Dillon (Fred Ward) is in prison; Frank goes undercover as "Nick the Slasher McGurk" to get into his cell, and escapes with him through a tunnel to Rocco's mother Muriel. Rocco's plan: a bomb in the Best Picture envelope at the Academy Awards. Famous sequence: Frank repeatedly giving samples at a sperm bank to avoid being recognised by Tanya Peters.
The Naked Gun (2025)
Lt. Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson), LAPD Police Squad. Opens with Frank foiling bank robbers while dressed as a schoolgirl — unaware he's the distraction for the real theft: the P.L.O.T. Device (Primordial Law of Toughness). Tech billionaire Richard Cane (Danny Huston) intends to use it to revert humanity to a primitive state, cull the population, and ride it out in a bunker. Frank investigates the "suicide" of engineer Simon Davenport and teams up with his sister, novelist Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson). Capt. Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser) and Chief Davis (CCH Pounder) round out the squad; henchman Sig Gustafson (Kevin Durand). Police Squad is decommissioned. The climax is a New Year's ball drop at the "Ponzi-scheme.com Arena"; Frank loses his trousers retrieving the device. His dead father's spirit arrives as an owl, airlifts him, and blinds Cane with excrement. Ending: "Internal Affairs" turns out to be a tropical resort.
The father is canon. The 2025 film explicitly makes Leslie Nielsen's Drebin the Sr. to Neeson's Jr., and gives Sr. a literal supernatural cameo. A two-Drebin game is not a liberty — it's the franchise's own structure.
4. The comedy grammar (the part that actually matters)
Plot is scaffolding; ZAZ jokes are built from a small number of repeatable machines. These are what the game has to reproduce.
- Deadpan. Nobody acknowledges anything is funny. Nielsen played it exactly as Lee Marvin would have. Never wink.
- Literalism. The joke is a word taken at face value. "Cigarette?" — "Yes, it is." / "Doctor" — "Yes?" — "Nurse" — "Yes?"
- Background gags. Foreground dialogue plays straight while something catastrophic happens behind it, uncommented.
- Escalating property damage. Frank parks, and something enormous is destroyed off-screen with a crash.
- Literalised metaphor. Someone says "he was in over his head" and there is a man in a swimming pool.
- The narration/action gap. Hardboiled voiceover over visibly pathetic action.
- Nordberg suffers. Continuously, escalating, uncommented.
- Al's head is out of frame. Nobody has ever mentioned it.
- Johnny knows everything. Asked about a case, he also fluently explains astrophysics, ballet, or macroeconomics — and everyone queues to ask him.
- The freeze-frame ending. The cast laughs and holds still — while things keep visibly moving and going wrong inside the "frozen" shot.
Rule for writing this game: the game must never think it's funny. Text stays police-procedural and flat. The comedy is in what the flat text is describing.