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A Word on Akalabeth and Chronology

02 Dec

Just to demonstrate how thoroughly rotten my commercial instincts are, for my first post after returning from my little holiday hiatus I’m going to go all meta and esoteric on you and talk about a truly burning question: the exact dates of events in Richard Garriott’s early career as a game designer. I have a couple of reasons for picking these particular nits. The first and most self-interested is that I’m about to begin looking at old Richard, whom you might better know as Lord British, as my next big subject for discussion, and I want to preemptively defend myself against hordes of Ultima fans taking issue with my dating of events. The other is that this little tale may serve as an example of the process I go through to come to (my version of) historical truth, as well as the advantages and drawbacks of different sorts of sources. If you’re an historian, a reporter, or a researcher, you’re likely all too familiar with trying to reconcile separate pieces of credible evidence that nevertheless contradict each other. If you’re not, though, maybe you’ll be interested to know just what a digital antiquarian has to go through these days.

Garriott’s life and career has been better documented than that of all but a handful of game designers. In addition to countless magazine and Internet profiles, much of the book Dungeons and Dreamers was devoted to him, and the various editions of Shay Addams’s The Official Book of Ultima all fawned over him and his history with abandon. Given that, I was surprised to find myself so uncertain about the dating of Garriott’s first game, Akalabeth.

The story of Akalabeth has been told many times; if you haven’t heard it yet, stay tuned for my next post, wherein I’ll get back to historical narrative and tell you all about it. For now, though, the short version is that Garriott wrote it on his Apple II in the summer of 1979, while he was working at an Austin, Texas, ComputerLand store between high school (which he’d finished that spring) and starting at the University of Texas. His boss saw the game and suggested that he package it and sell it in the store, which Garriott did. Within days a copy had made its way — probably through the magic of piracy — to California Pacific, a major early software publisher. They flew young Richard out to California to sign him to a distribution deal, and Akalabeth became a huge hit, selling 30,000 copies and netting Garriot some $150,000 — not a bad nest egg for a kid to carry off to college. This is the story told in both of the books I mentioned above, and the one that Garriott has repeated in interviews stretching back literally decades. As the guy at the center of all these events, Garrott certainly ought to know. Yet when we start to dig into some primary sources the waters quickly muddy.

By far the best way I know to track the month-by-month doings of the early computer industry is via the magazines. In them we can watch as products are introduced and trends come and go, all with hard dates indelibly stamped right there on the covers. Sometimes, as in this case, the things we find there can upset chronologies that have come to be accepted as unchallenged fact.

Softalk magazine is one of the best resources on the early Apple II market. Surprisingly, Akalabeth does not appear there until the January, 1981, issue. Once it does, however, it appears in a big way, with a prominent mention in an article on California Pacific, a feature review, a listing at position 23 in Softalk‘s list of the top 30 Apple II software bestsellers, and the inauguration of a contest to deduce the real identity of Akalabeth creator Lord British (i.e., Garriott). Allowing for the typical magazine lead time of a couple of months, everything would seem to indicate that Akalabeth was in late 1980 a brand new product (at least on the national stage), more than a year after the standard narrative says Garriott wrote it. If we accept that, we are left with two possibilities, both of which to some extent contradict Garriott’s story. Either Akalabeth was not in fact picked up by California Pacific until more than a year after its creation, languishing in that time in obscurity while Garriott did the college thing, or it was not created in the summer of 1979, after his senior year in high school, but rather in the summer of 1980, after his freshman year at university. Howard Feldman recently scanned a copy of an original ComputerLand Akalabeth for his superb Museum of Computer Adventure Game History. That edition bears a copyright of 1980, which leaves me pretty confident that the latter scenario is in fact the correct one; Garriott himself as well as the conventional histories are off by fully one year. Further, I also find myself doubting Garriott’s sales claims. An article in the September/October, 1982, issue of Computer Gaming World tells us that The Wizard and the Princess, a game that was a Softalk top 10 perennial throughout late 1980 and 1981, had by mid-1982 sold just 25,000 copies. It’s hard to imagine how Akalabeth, which sneaked into the bottom parts of the top 30 only a few times during that period, could have ended up with the sales figures claimed.

Which of course leaves me wondering why Garriott has for so many years been saying things I’m almost certain are not true. While anyone who went around calling himself “Lord British” without a trace of apparent irony is maybe not quite the self-effacing sort, I’ve never seen anything to indicate that Garriott is dishonest. Indeed, in every interview I’ve seen he seems very level-headed and trustworthy. And it’s hard to see a reason why he might choose to knowingly falsify his dates. If having Akalabeth out in 1979 rather than 1980 maybe makes him seem slightly more of a pioneer, Garriott’s real record of accomplishments is certainly strong enough that it needs no boosting. Nor does an earlier release date give him a claim to any additional firsts; a 1979 Akabaleth is still far from the first CRPG, and his game is still not even all that impressive against the likes of Temple of Apshai, a much more ambitious and sophisticated piece of software already released by that summer of 1979. And as for sales… well, Garriott’s later games would sell in such quantities that he hardly needed to inflate the numbers for Akalabeth to assert his claim to importance.

So, no, I don’t believe that Garriott is knowingly lying to us. I do believe, however, that the human memory is a tricky thing. Much as the current fad for all things neuroscience annoys me, I found this episode of Radiolab about the workings of memory pretty fascinating. It describes remembering as an act of imaginative recreation rather than a mere retrieval from storage, and makes the counter-intuitive claim that the more we remember something, the more we dwell on it, the more distorted and inaccurate it can become. That’s one reason I’m very sparing in my use of direct interviews (another reason of course being that plenty of people have better things to do than talk with me anyway). It’s very easy for a person to start to believe his legend, whether it originated with his own early press releases or elsewhere, and to insert that version of events into his memory in lieu of reality. Ironically, I find that less heralded figures such as Lance Micklus often offer the most trustworthy recollections, as their versions of the past have not been distorted by years of repeating the same deeply engrained stories.

Anyway, this provides an example of the process I go through in trying to get to historical truth, balancing sources against one another and trying to reconstruct the most viable version of the past. The most frustrating cases are those for which I just can’t gather enough evidence, as in the case of the Eamon timeline, in which I had a creator who refuses to talk about his creation, a major figure (John Nelson) absolutely certain of one timeline of events, a single magazine article which would seem to imply another timeline but which doesn’t do so quite definitively, and otherwise a complete void of credible information. That’s when I have to just throw up my hands and admit I just don’t know — which is frustrating, because if I can’t document this stuff it may never get done.

Actually, that raises a good point: the “so what?” aspect of all this. In the end it’s maybe not of world-shaking importance to know whether one game designer released his first creation in 1979 or 1980, nor whether it sold 30,000 or 3000 copies. But in another way it’s important to me to get this stuff right, and not just because of the trite but true maxim that anything worth doing is worth doing right. Interactive entertainment looks certain to be the defining media of the 21st century, and therefore to be something eminently worth studying. Those who write about videogames have generally done the form few favors — just another aspect of a form of media that seems to have a hard time growing up and realizing its potential. Whatever you think of books of lists, I can’t help but compare the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die or 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die books with 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die. The former are thoughtful, filled with a defensible if not absolute canon of genuinely great films and music; the latter is a mishmash of titles apparently plucked out of thin air, with commentary that often reads like it was lifted straight from the box copy. I’m not at all sure there even are 1001 videogames you “must” play, but surely there’s been enough good work produced in the last 35 years or so that we can do it a little bit better justice. I don’t want this to turn into a rant on the state of game journalism, so I’ll just say that I think we can do a better job of chronicling this medium’s history, and that this blog is my humble contribution to that ambition.

In addition, it’s kind of exhilarating to dig through the past and turn up things you didn’t expect. That’s already happened a number of times for me in the months I’ve been researching this blog, as when I discovered that Scott Adams had written eight of his “classic dozen” adventures before the 1970s were even over, or that the TRS-80 sold so well in its first couple of years that it left all the other platforms (including the legendary Apple II) fighting over the tiny non-Radio Shack scrap of the PC market. Put another way: primary sources rule. And hey, if stuff like that doesn’t interest you you probably never made it through this post, much less this blog. Let’s wallow in trivia together, shall we?

 
 

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17 Responses to A Word on Akalabeth and Chronology

  1. Felix Pleșoianu

    December 2, 2011 at 8:30 pm

    Personally, I’m perpetually amazed that in a mere half a century computing has birthed such a tremendous amount of culture that it already needs historians. Simply reading a selection of Usenet humor is like plunging down a scarily deep rabbit hole. So I agree with you that this is worth doing. and well. Keep up the good work!

     
    • Rafael Aguiar

      April 29, 2019 at 2:36 pm

      Naive statement. 50 years is a hell of a time, bro.

       
  2. george

    December 2, 2011 at 10:01 pm

    Indeed, I don’t really see this as trivia at all. Another good article!

     
  3. S. John Ross

    December 3, 2011 at 3:30 am

    Don’t forget to allow some leeway for the way magazines tend to be off-date by weeks or months, which still happens today but was even more exaggerated in the late 70s and early 80s. Wasn’t unusual at all in those days for a magazine to be finalized for print in November, in the hands of mail-subscribers in January, on retail shelves in February and bear a cover date of “March” or even “April.”

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      December 3, 2011 at 11:11 am

      Yes, the discrepancy between cover date and actual release date could get truly ridiculous. I think what happened is that one magazine would start releasing a given month’s issue early to appear the “fresher” entry on the newsstands. Its competitors would follow suit, perhaps with an extra few days for good measure. And pretty soon you had April issues on newsstands before February was out.

      Softalk, however, always said in its monthly top 30 sales listings what actual month was in question. So, the January 1981 issue states that its top 30 listing is for November 1980. Since Akalabeth first appears on that list, it’s a pretty good surmise that it was released by California Pacific in late October or November 1980. This dovetails pretty nicely with the accepted narrative, if we stipulate that it was in the summer of 1980 rather than 1979 that Garriott began selling Akalabeth in that ComputerLand store. (The Apple II software market was small enough in 1980 that almost any new, nationally released, relatively high-profile program would probably at least crack the top 30 on its introduction.)

       
  4. Victor Gijsbers

    December 3, 2011 at 11:06 am

    I would go as far as to say that these trivia are the most important things you could be doing right now, because these are the things that might be hardest for future historians to do as well as you can do them now.

     
  5. Richard Garriott

    December 10, 2011 at 2:02 am

    First I am very pleased that my long past work warrants such analysis! Second, the author is half correct! Akalabeth was indeed published in the year 1980. However, I wrote it in 1979 at the end of high school, before college. Then with the encouragement of friends and most importantly John Mayer the owner of the local Computerland, where I worked summers, I invested in my own zip-lock version of the game, which sold 12-25 units. Shortly after I was contacted by California Pacific who offered to distribute it nationally. They did in fact sell 30K units.

    Down through the years, I have occasionally stated both 1979 and 1980 as the release date of Akalabeth. Clearly 1980 is accurate. But the game, in fact was created in 1979. It’s core code was in fact made on a PDP 11 (if memory serves) from the few years previous, using a teletype as the output. The final teletype version was called D&D28 becuase I wrote (mostly in notebooks and a few fully typed in) 28 D&D like games. D&D28B was the original name for Akalabeth… in 1979!

    I hope this clarifies the situation some what.
    If you want further comments post requests on my facebook page.

    Sincerily,
    – Dr. Richard “Lord British” Garriott de Cayeux

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      December 10, 2011 at 10:40 am

      Thank you! This clears up at last, definitively, a long-standing nexus of confusion.

       
  6. Bernie Paul

    May 10, 2014 at 11:15 pm

    WOW again for you Jimmy ! For us Retro-Computing nuts, your blog could be awesome even if you quit after your vacation. But after reading this post and “peeking ahead” at the ones that follow, I must say this : you’re without a doubt THE authority on this subject. No one is doing this kind of thing as professionally as you are. GEE, YOU EVEN GOT LORD BRITISH HIMSELF INTERESTED.
    By the way, Richard, your “Ultima Collection” has been one of my killer apps since it came out back in 1997.

     
  7. Mike Taylor

    October 24, 2017 at 11:01 pm

    I find this kind of thing fascinating. I was a teenage adventure-game programmer myself in the early 80s and possibly very late 70s, and I admit I can’t even keep my own chronology straight. All I know for absolutely certain is that my first two published games came out in 1982, and that’s only because it’s the date printed on the cassette inlays.

    Haha! And, having typed that, I went and looked at them again and found that the printed dates actually say 1983, so I’d even remembered that wrong! (See Magic Mirror, the earlier of the two.) Which I think nicely illustrates how hard it is to keep track of this stuff.

     
    • Lisa H.

      October 25, 2017 at 9:15 pm

      From that link, I went and poked around on your site for a while. I was amused at your 1998 (?) rant about Netscape 4.5’s failings, especially the remark at the end that there might be hope since it just became open source. I wonder what you think of Firefox, etc.?

      (I don’t remember whether I used a 4.x Communicator myself; I think I have a box of 1.1 in a closet somewhere and possibly stopped around 3.0 Gold. I have a vague recollection of using sub-1.0 versions of Firefox and Thunderbird…)

       
  8. Jrd

    May 24, 2018 at 5:47 pm

    > not even all that impressive against the likes of Temple of Aphsai

    misspelled Apshai.

     
    • Jimmy Maher

      May 25, 2018 at 6:58 am

      Thanks!

       
  9. Will Moczarski

    September 17, 2019 at 8:24 am

    I tend to disagree with you regarding the differences in quality between the 1001 movies, albums and video games books. All three of them have descriptions aimed at readers with a passing interest and none of them offer analyses or in-depth discussions (or even interesting trivia). This is no apology of the 1001 video games book but rather a severe critique of the other two. They probably all achieve what they set out for, however: to make the readers consume more movies, video games and albums. I reckon that a lot of the decisions for the respective master lists (certainly not all of them, as MUD and Rogue are included) were made in regard to commercial availability. It’s a silly premise to expect either of the three media to have become so much better during the last five years that around 400-500 of the best were released in that time period. This is for readers privileging (technical) audio quality, special effects and graphics & sounds that are state of the art. It‘s not for historians.

     
  10. Jeff Nyman

    October 24, 2021 at 1:30 pm

    Within days a copy had made its way — probably through the magic of piracy — to California Pacific…

    That is one possibility and one that’s often stated. But it seems likely it was due to John Mayer, the owner of the ComputerLand store where Garriott worked. There’s an interview with Richard Garriott from The Wizards Journal (volume 2, issue 1 dated Summer 1984) and it indicates that during a telephone call with CPCC for a software reorder, Mayer mentioned the game which was selling at some of the stores. Apparently he had committed himself to sending them a copy.

    Piracy seems unlikely given the relative lack of sales. Each packaged up game was numbered with a green label on the top right corner which let Garriott keep track of the sales. It was only about eight or twelve packages that were purchased; the others were sitting on the shelf. The mention of eight sales was from Garriott in an interview in 1992. The last one to be sold was the one with green label 12. He also produced ten other copies of the game, from that time, all unsold, all with original contents and green labels attached.

    All of which is to say the game wasn’t really selling that massively and thus it at least seems somewhat unlikely that a major piracy effort was underway with it. Possible, certainly. But given the interview from 1984, the account of Mayer mentioning it and CPCC being curious seems more likely.

     
  11. Jeff Nyman

    October 24, 2021 at 1:42 pm

    selling 30,000 copies…

    There are really two primary versions of the game you have to consider with this claim, though. The first is obviously the version that was sold in the ComputerLand store. We know this version only sold about twelve games at a price point of $19.95.

    The second version is equally obviously the version that was published by California Pacific in 1980 and 1981. Even here you actually two reprints. One is the “Castle edition” and the other is the “Demon edition.” It seems very unlikely, given the magazine sources at the time, that either edition reached 30,000 sales; where numbers seem to indicate a more modest 10,000 or so.

    But there was a third reissue of the game in 1981, which was included in a special Ultima package.

    Between the three editions or versions, that seems to be where the 30,000 number makes a whole lot of sense. You had the two separate editions/versions that were published by California Pacific and then you had more copies sold as part of the Ultima package, also distributed by California Pacific.

    Given converging lines of evidence like that, I think it’s safe to frame Garriott’s memory as essentially accurate, but mainly compressing the various editions into one over the passage of time.

     

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