The tale of Johnny Castaway: the legendary screensaver from the 90s
A case study on a brilliant storytelling product.
Everybody speaks about storytelling. It has become a thing. No one is just a marketer; no one writes plain resume; no one just builds products anymore. Everyone is now telling a story. Everybody understands that the biggest challenge is to get the attention of the audience while competing all the time with other stories, messages, content, etc. No wonder the core elements of this platform — Medium — are called stories, and not articles or posts.
Stories are not a new thing of course; they are part of humanity since the dawn of civilization. The first stories were called myths and were passed orally from generation to generation. These stories had two primary purposes: to teach a moral lesson, and to entertain. These myths were more than just stories; they explained the world to their audiences and built the narratives for given groups of people that shared these myths. It was the basis for creating a common set of faiths which led to the forming of religions as we know them today.
And today, everybody is free to choose whether to believe in stories or just to enjoy them as a form of art. In any case, for a story to engage the listener, there are basic rules and guidelines that need to be followed, regardless of the field we deal with. These rules make use of the human psychology, and therefore are universal and do not depend on a specific language or culture. I would like to outline these rules and guidelines through a brilliant product, which I am sure is well known to the older readers. It’s the Johnny Castaway screensaver.
To those of you who have not lived through the ’90s (or were too young then), here is a short background:
Johnny Castaway is a screensaver released in 1992 by Sierra-Online/Dynamix, and marketed as “the world’s first storytelling screen saver”.
The screensaver depicts a man, Johnny Castaway, stranded on a small island with a single coconut tree. It follows a story that is slowly revealed through time. While Johnny fishes, builds sand castles, and jogs regularly, other events are seen less frequently, such as a mermaid or Lilliputian pirates coming to the island, or a seagull swooping down to steal his shorts while he is bathing. Johnny repeatedly comes close to being rescued, but ultimately remains on the island as a result of various unfortunate events.
The screensaver was distributed on a 3½-inch floppy disk and required a computer with a 386SX processor and Windows 3.1 as its operating system (which was the first commercial MS-Windows operating system). A letter that accompanied the original floppy disk said: “Stop everything! Only when you quit working, do I have a chance to escape this forsaken island. So please, do it for me — kill some time to save an old salt!”
Johnny Castaway was a huge success from the beginning. The reason why lies I think in the fundamentals of good storytelling, which I would like to describe here:
- It was SO funny. There was so much humor in it. I would sit and laugh out loud watching it.
- It was subversive by the fact that in order to enjoy the story, one had to stop working and avoid touching the mouse.
- It was always surprising and unpredictable. The story unfolded randomly, so one would never know what will happen next. It was exciting!
- It had its own pace — one could not control it or push it forward in any way. It could be quiet for a long time, and then without any warning, the plot would start moving again.
- The hero was more of an anti-hero. He was sloppy, not so smart, always unfortunate, always looked to the wrong side. Nevertheless, he struggled. He never gave up. In this sense, he was inspiring.
- The story did not obey to any usual structure. In a regular story, there is a start, middle, and ending. In Johnny Castaway’s story, there was no beginning — we meet him on the island as if he was always there, we don’t know how and why he got there. The story also had no ending (at least one could not be sure if there was one), so for Johnny there was only here and now, a continuous present.
- The story was elegant and compact. I mean, the whole plot leaned on a man, a small island, and a coconut tree (plus a few guests here and there — a fish, a bird, a mermaid). It was a genius screenplay.
Above all, there was a drama. The writer William Archer said that “drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty”. With Johnny, one felt a whole range of feelings and emotions — laughing when a bird stole his pants when he was bathing, anxiety when an airplane passed unnoticed in the sky. I remember it was hard for me to shut off the computer at the end of the day, leaving Johnny alone (it was before the laptops era, so one could actually leave work behind when going home…). It was an emotional journey.
Johnny Castaway was loved because it was a good story. Good stories touch the soul, move something inside us. With good stories we feel alive.
Further resources
Khan academy and Pixar — storytelling
Masterclass — Neil Gaiman teaches storytelling
Masterclass — David Sedaris teaches storytelling and humor
Masterclass — Malcolm Gladwell teaches writing
