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Monthly Archives: June 2015

A Digital Antiquarian Hall of Fame

I’ve just added a new feature to this site: a sort of canon, if you will, of really worthwhile games and other interactive works that balances historical importance with those concerns about playability and fairness that are always so important to me as well. I must admit that I’ve created this list as much for myself as for anyone else, having realized that I’ve now written about so many works that I’m in danger of losing all track of which ones I really consider to be the great ones. That said, I hope some of you may find it interesting and/or useful as well. It will of course continue to grow as we continue on our little journey through history here in the blog proper. You can always get to it by clicking the link over on the right-hand sidebar or selecting it in the sub-menu under “About Me” above. Some further justifications and explanations can be found on the page itself, so I won’t belabor the subject any more here.

Thanks so much for your continuing support, especially those of you who have been generous enough to sign on with Patreon or donate through PayPal. It’s making a big difference in the amount of time I can devote to this work, as I hope the end results show!

 

Accolade Gets Distinctive

Only a few publishers managed to build a reputation to rival that of Epyx as masters of Commodore 64 graphics and sound. Foremost amongst this select group by 1987 was Accolade, riding high on hits like Dam Busters and Ace of Aces. Both of those games were created by Canadian developers Artech, who in 1987 would deliver to Accolade two more of their appealing “aesthetic simulations” of history. Chosen this time were the glory days of NASA for Apollo 18 and of the French Resistance for The Train. Yet Accolade’s big hit of the year would come not from Artech but from another group of Canadians who called themselves Distinctive Software.

Don Mattrick and Jeff Sember, the founders of Distinctive, were barely into their twenties in 1987, but were already has-beens in a sense, veterans of the peculiar form of celebrity the home-computer boom had briefly engendered for a lucky few. The two first met in their high school in late 1981 in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby, bonding quickly over the Apple II computers that both had at home. During their summer break, Mattrick suggested to Sember that they should design their own game and try to sell it. Thus, while Mattrick worked at a local computer store to raise money for the endeavor, Sember wrote a simple little collection of action games called Evolution in all of three weeks. Its theme was an oddly popular one in 1980s gaming, a chronicle of the evolution of life through six rather arbitrary phases: amoeba, tadpole, rodent, beaver (a tribute to the duo’s home country), gorilla, and human. They took the game to the Vancouver-based Sydney Development Corporation, a finger-in-every-pie would-be mainstay of Canadian computing whom we’ve met before in connection with Artech. Sydney liked Evolution enough to buy it, giving it its public debut in October of 1982 at a Vancouver trade show. With this software thing taking off so nicely, Mattrick and Sember soon incorporated themselves under the name Distinctive Software.

A very young Don Mattrick and Jeff Sember on CBC's Front Page Challenge, March 20, 1983.

A very young Don Mattrick and Jeff Sember on CBC’s Front Page Challenge, March 20, 1983.

They had arrived on the scene at the perfect zeitgeist moment, just as Canada was waking up to the supposed home-computer revolution burgeoning to its south and was beginning to ask where Canadians were to be found amongst all the excitement. These two young Vancouverites, personable, good-looking, and, according at least to Sydney, the first Canadians ever to write a popular computer game that was sold in the United States as well as its home country, were the perfect answer. They became modest media celebrities over the months that followed, working their way up from the human-interest sections of newspapers to glossy lifestyle magazines and finally to television, where they appeared before a panel of tedious old fuddy-duddies on CBC television’s game-show/journalism hybrid Front Page Challenge. The comparisons here come easily, perhaps almost too easily when we think back to the other software partnerships I’ve already chronicled. It’s particularly hard not to think of David Braben and Ian Bell, who would soon be receiving mainstream coverage of much the same character in Britain. Mattrick was the Braben of this pair, personable, ambitious, and focused on the bottom line; it was he who had gotten the ball rolling in the first place and who would largely continue to drive their business. Sember was the Bell, two years younger, quieter, more technically proficient, and more idealistic about games as a creative medium.

It’s not clear to what extent all of the hype around Mattrick and Sember translated into sales of Evolution. On the one hand, it apparently did well enough on the Apple II for Sydney to fund ports to a number of other platforms and to advertise them fairly heavily across Canada and the United States. And most of the big trade magazines, prompted to some extent no doubt by Sydney’s advertising dollars, saw it as a big enough deal to be worthy of a review. On the other hand, most of those reviews were fairly lukewarm. Typical of them was Electronic Games‘s conclusion that it was okay, but “not really one of the world’s great games.” Nor is it all that well-remembered — whether fondly or otherwise — amongst gaming nostalgics today.

Regardless, after the hype died down Sydney ran into huge problems as the home-computer market in general took a dive. Looking to simplify things and reduce their overhead in response, they elected to get out of the notoriously volatile games-publishing business. Thus the follow-up to Evolution, promised by Mattrick and Sember in many an interview during 1983, never arrived. Their fifteen minutes now apparently passed, it seemed that they would become just one more amongst many historical footnotes to the abortive home-computer revolution.

But then in 1985 Distinctive unexpectedly resurfaced. Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead, having recently founded Accolade, released their own first in-house-developed games, and begun a fruitful developer/publisher partnership with Artech, were looking for more outside developers. They were very receptive to the idea of continuing to work with Canadian developers, believing that they had begun to tap into a well of talent heretofore ignored by the other big publishers. Not the least of their considerations was the Canadian dollar, which was now reaching historic lows in comparison to the American; this meant that that talent came very cheap. When Distinctive’s old connections with Sydney and by extension Artech brought them to Accolade’s attention, they soon had a contract as well.

That said, in the beginning Distinctive was clearly the second-string team in comparison to the more established Artech, hired not to make original games but rather to port Accolade’s established catalog to new platforms. But after some months of doing good work in that capacity, Mattrick, whose sales skills had been evident even in that first summer job working at the computer store — his first boss once declared that he could “sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo” — convinced Miller and Whitehead to let his company tackle an original project of their own.

Over the course of a long career still to come in games, Mattrick would earn himself a reputation as a very mainstream sort of fellow, a fan of the proven bet who would be one of the architects of Electronic Arts’s transformation following Trip Hawkins’s departure in 1991 from a literal band of “electronic artists” to the risk-averse corporate behemoth we know today. Seen in that light, this first game for Accolade, as ambitious as it is boldly innovative, seems doubly anomalous. Given what I know of the two, I suspect that it represents more of Sember’s design sensibility than Mattrick’s, although both are co-credited as its designers and I have no hard facts to back up my suspicion. The game in question is called simply Comics — or, to make it sound a bit less generic, Accolade’s Comics. It is, the box proclaims, the “first living comic book.” “First” anything is often a problematic claim, particularly when it appears in promotional copy, but in this case the claim was justified. While a few earlier games like the licensed Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future had dabbled in a comic-book-style presentation, none had tried to actually be an interactive comic book like this one.

Accolade's Comics. Notice the arrow sticking out of Steve Keene in the top left panel. If you think that's so stupid it's funny, you'll probably enjoy this game. If you think it's just stupid, probably not.

Accolade’s Comics. Notice the arrow sticking out of Steve Keene in the top left panel (“I got your message…”). If you think that’s so stupid it’s funny, you’ll probably enjoy this game. If you think it’s just stupid, probably not. In the same spirit: your boss runs a “Pet Alterations” shop, which is the reason for the poster of the fish with legs at top right.

At its heart, then, Comics is a choice-based narrative which is presented not in text but in comic form, an under- if not completely unexplored approach even today. You make choices every few panels for Steve Keene, a likable but not entirely competent secret-agent sort of fellow who trots the globe on the trail of a kidnapped cable-television inventor or reproducing fire hydrants — no, this isn’t a very serious game. Every once in a while the story will dump you into a little action game which you must get through successfully — you have five lives in total, which you expend by failing at the action games or making choices that result in death — to continue. Like the rest of Comics, these are fun but not too taxing. The look was retro even in its time, drawn to evoke Archie Comics during their 1960s heyday; the price of 20 cents on the virtual front cover that opens the story is a dead giveaway. There’s even a gag based on those perennial old back-of-the-comic-book advertisements for remedies for bullies kicking sand in one’s face and making off with one’s girl. Indeed, there are lots and lots of gags here, most really stupid but in a really clever sort of way. Mileages are notoriously variable when it comes to humor, but personally I find it thoroughly charming.

It’s very difficult to convey the real spirit of the game through words or even through still screenshots, so here’s a movie clip that shows it off to better effect. Old Steve Keene looks a bit like an orangutan in the beginning because I’ve just completed an action game that had him swinging across bars above a pool of water containing something best described as a sharktopus (don’t ask!).

 

There are a couple of things I’d like you to pay attention to in the clip above, starting with the high production values of the thing (by which I mean the game, sadly not the clip). Note that the music plays while the disk drive loads the next panel, a tricky feat that you simply wouldn’t have seen in an earlier Commodore 64 game. Note how the art, despite the low resolution and the limitation of 16 colors, manages to ooze personality; you’ll never mistake this game for any other. Note the aesthetic professionalism of the whole, as seen in the way each new panel is drawn in with a transition effect rather than just popping into place, the page-flipping animation that introduces a new chapter of the story in lieu of a jarringly abrupt screen-blanking, and the way the music themes also fade out and in during transitions rather than cutting out abruptly.

And then there’s another great gag in the sequence above, one of my favorites in the game. The portrayal of the all too typical American abroad displays a lot more cultural knowingness than one might expect from a couple of sheltered Canadian kids barely out of their teens — as does, for that matter, the decision to reach back so far into comics heritage for inspiration. Comics is filled with dumb jokes, but they don’t really feel like dumb teenage jokes. As someone who’s been exposed to all too much in-game teenage humor in researching this blog over the past years, that may just be the best compliment I can give it.

By the standards of a Commodore 64 game, Comics is an absolutely massive production, spilling across six disk sides and containing almost 400 unique panel illustrations (many with spot animations), a couple of dozen different musical themes, and eight arcade games that each had to be coded from scratch. The team that made it was correspondingly huge for the times, including five artists, a composer, and four programmers in addition to Sember — quite a logistical and financial achievement for a still tiny company run by a 22- and a 20-year-old. For all that, though, Comics hardly feels epic when you play it. It is by design a casual trifle to be enjoyed over the course of just a couple of evenings — one for each of its two completely separate stories that branch off from the very first decision point in the game. That’s fair enough from the perspective of today, but, not for the first time, it was almost untenable in light of the way that commercial software was actually distributed in the 1980s. Upon its release in February of 1987, reviewers noted that Comics had lots of charm, but also noted, reasonably enough, that its price of $35 or more was awfully steep for a couple of evenings’ light entertainment. Many adventure-game purists, not always the most tolerant bunch, complained as well about the action games and the casual nature of the whole endeavor. Shay Addams of the respected Questbusters newsletter, for instance, pronounced that what it really needed was fewer action games and “more puzzles,” proof of the way that genres were already beginning to calcify to a rather depressing degree. Comics had been built with a view to turning it into a series, but, especially in light of how expensive it had been to make, it proved to be a commercial disappointment and thus a one-off in a market that just didn’t quite have a place for it. It nevertheless remains one of my favorite forgotten Commodore 64 gems, and, despite all of its silliness, an interesting experiment in interactive narrative in its own right.

With Comics having failed to set the world alight, the indefatigable Don Mattrick buckled down to try to deliver to Accolade a guaranteed, can’t-miss hit that would establish the Distinctive brand once and for all. At the same time, he began the process of easing Sember out of the company; the latter’s name begins to disappear from Distinctive’s credits at this time, and Mattrick would soon buy him out entirely to take complete control. For his part, Sember would continue to work independently for more than a decade with Accolade as a designer and programmer, most notably of their long-running Hardball series of baseball simulations, before dropping out of the industry around the millennium. As for Mattrick, his first game as a solo designer would be a blueprint for his long future career, evolutionary rather than revolutionary, extrapolating on known trends rather than leaping into the blue. While perhaps not as interesting to revisit via emulator today as its predecessor, it would prove to be much more important in the context of the commercial history of the games industry and, indeed, of Distinctive and Mattrick’s own futures. It would be called Test Drive.

On the road in Test Drive. Note the police in my rear-view mirror.

On the road in Test Drive. Note the police in my rear-view mirror.

Commercially calculated as it was, Test Drive was also an oddly personal game for Mattrick, very much inspired by his own obsessions. It becomes almost uncomfortably clear on the first page of the manual that you’re living his own personal fantasy: “Your lifelong quest has been to drive one of the world’s most exotic sports cars. Now’s your chance. You just made your first million going public with your software company.”

Don Mattrick has always loved fast cars. One can practically chart the progress of his career merely by looking to what he had in his garage during any given year. He used his first royalty check from Evolution for the down payment on a Toyota Supra; the scenario of Test Drive, of driving as quickly as possible up a twisty mountain road whilst avoiding or outrunning the fuzz, was inspired by his own early adventures therein. By 1987 Distinctive’s success as an Accolade porting house had enabled him to step up to a Porsche 944. But already, as Test Drive‘s manual attests, he was dreaming of an IPO and of leaving his poor man’s Porsche behind to get behind the wheel of a real supercar. I hope I’m not spoiling the story if I reveal that he would indeed soon have a Ferrari in his garage. Decades later, when he was head of Microsoft’s Xbox division and thus one of the most powerful and well-compensated people in gaming, he would reportedly have a ten-car garage stuffed with exotic European metal. If Test Drive represents the dream of every young man, Mattrick would be one of the few to get to actually live it.

Yes, the genius of Test Drive — or, if you like, the luck of the thing — was that Don Mattrick’s personal fantasy was also an almost universal one of young men all over the world. In retrospect, perhaps the most surprising thing about it is that no one had done it before. Driving games of various stripes had been a staple of the arcades for years; Outrun, for instance, arguably the biggest arcade hit of the year prior to Test Drive, had prominently featured a Ferrari Testarossa. Yet virtually no one had created even an alleged simulation of driving, a state of affairs that seems doubly odd when one considers how crazily popular aircraft simulations were, with two of them of 1980s vintage, SubLogic’s Flight Simulator and MicroProse’s F-15 Strike Eagle, eventually exceeding one-million copies in sales in an era when such numbers were all but unimaginable. A car simulation was low-hanging fruit by comparison. As Mattrick himself once said, “A car still has more controls than you’ll find on a joystick, but the components of movement and your choices are fewer.” And yet it just never seemed to occur to anyone to make one.

Test Drive

Test Drive would correct that oversight, resoundingly and for all time. At the same time, however, Mattrick and his small team at Distinctive lavished at least as much attention on the lifestyle fantasy as they did on the mechanics of the game. Each of the five featured supercars — the Porsche 911 Turbo, Ferrari Testarossa, Lotus Esprit Turbo, Lamborghini Countach, and Chevrolet Corvette — gets its own loving literal and statistical portrait like the one above, while the dash and interior layouts in the game proper also change to reflect the model you’ve chosen to drive. Test Drive is pure, unabashed car porn. As such, it was tremendously appealing to the demographic that tended to buy computer games.

Still, some reviewers couldn’t help but notice that there just wasn’t really that much to the game. Despite the aspirations to simulationism, it’s hard not to notice that, say, the heavy Corvette with its big, torquey American iron in the front doesn’t drive quite as differently as one might expect from the lighter, notoriously spin-prone Porsche 911 with its buzzy little high-revving engine in the rear. In fact, all of the cars handle rather disconcertingly like they’re on rails, until they suddenly derail and you fall off the side of the mountain. And then there’s the fact that there’s just not that much to really do in Test Drive; you just get to drive up the same mountain over and over again, avoiding the same cops and presumably trying to improve your personal time, with no multiplayer options and no other challenges to add interest. And yet for hundreds of thousands of car-mad kids it just didn’t matter. Test Drive in its day was peculiarly immune to such practical complaints, proof just as much as the works of Cinemaware of just how much the experiential side of a game — the fantasy — can trump the nuts and bolts of gameplay.

Previewed at that same 1987 Summer Consumer Electronics Show to which we’ve been paying so much attention lately and released in plenty of time for Christmas, Test Drive became a hit. More than a hit, it spawned a franchise that is still at least ostensibly alive to this day (the last game to bear the title was released in 2012). More than a franchise, it became the urtext of an entire genre, the automotive-simulation equivalent to Adventure. After going public, buying that first Ferrari, and making his own personal Test Drive fantasy come true, Mattrick sold out to Electronic Arts in 1991, where he morphed Test Drive, whose intellectual property he had left behind with Accolade, into the even more successful Need for Speed series, another franchise that seems destined to continue eternally. At the core of Need for Speed and the several showrooms’ worth of contenders and pretenders that have joined it over the years is that same lifestyle fantasy that Test Drive first tapped into, of having access to a garage full of really sexy cars to inspect and drool over and drive really, really fast. As long as there are young and not-so-young people whose dreams are redolent of well-weathered leather, hot metal and oil, and sunlight on chrome, their continuing popularity seems assured.

(Sources: Questbusters of June 1987; Retro Gamer 59; Computer Gaming World of March 1987, June/July 1987, and February 1988; Compute!’s Gazette of October 1983 and March 1989; Electronic Games of December 1983; Kilobaud of June 1983; The Montreal Gazette of December 15 1982. See also The Escapist’s online article on Mattrick and Distinctive.

Most of the copies of Comics floating around the Internet have one or more muddy disk images. I’ve assembled a set that seems to be 100 percent correct; you’re welcome to download it. It still makes for a very unique and enjoyable experience if you can see fit to install a Commodore 64 emulator to run it. Test Drive, on the other hand, is probably best left to history. Given that, and given that it’s an entry in a still-active franchise, I’m going to leave you on your own to find that one if you want it.)

 

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The Evolution of the (Epyx) Games

The American home-computer industry entered 1987 feeling more optimistic than it had in several years. With the bloodletting of 1985 now firmly in the past, there was a sense amongst the survivors that they had proved themselves the fittest and smartest. If the ebullient a-computer-for-every-home predictions of 1983 weren’t likely to be repeated anytime soon, it was also true that the question on everybody’s lips back in 1985, of whether there would even still be a home-computer industry come 1987, felt equally passé. No, the home-computer industry wasn’t going anywhere. It was just too much an established thing now. Perhaps it wasn’t quite as mainstream as television, but it had built a base of loyal customers and a whole infrastructure to serve them. And with so many companies having dropped by the wayside, there was now again the potential to make a pretty good living there. The economic correction to a new middle way was just about complete. The industry, in other words, was beginning to grow up — and thank God for it. Even Atari and Commodore, the two most critical hardware players in the field of low-cost computing, had seemingly gotten their act together after being all but left for dead a couple of years ago; both were beginning to post modest profits again.

The mood of the industry was, as usual, reflected by the trade shows. The second of the two big shows that served as the linchpin of every year on the circuit, the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago in June, was a particularly exciting place to be, with more and more elaborate displays than had been seen there in a long, long time. Compute! magazine couldn’t help but compare it to “the go-go days of 1983,” but also was quick to note that “introductions are positioned to avoid any repeat of the downturn.” “Excited but wiser” could have served as the slogan of the show. But an even better slogan for entertainment-software publishers in particular might have been, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

I’ve been writing quite a lot in recent articles about the new generation of 68000-based machines that were causing so much excitement. Yet the fact is that the Apple Macintosh, Atari ST, and Commodore Amiga were little more than aspirational dreams for the majority of the mostly young people actually buying games. The heart of that market remained the cheaper, tried-and-true 8-bit machines which continued to outsell their flashier younger brothers by factors of five or ten to one. And the most popular 8-bit machine had remained the same since 1983: the Commodore 64. A chart published in the December 1986 Compute! gives a sense of the state of the industry at the time.

U.S. Home Computer Market -- 1986

If anything, this chart undersells the importance of the Commodore 64 and its parent company to the games industry. Plenty of those IBMs and Apples, as well as the “Other” category, made up mostly of PC clones, were being used in home offices and the like, playing games if at all only as an occasional sideline. The vast majority of Commodore 64s, however, were being used primarily or exclusively as games machines. Many a publisher that dutifully ported their titles to each of the six or seven commercially viable platforms found that well over half of their sales were racked up by the Commodore 64 versions alone. No wonder so many made it their first and sometimes only target. Not all were thrilled about this state of affairs; with its antiquated BASIC, chunky 40-column text, and molasses-slow disk drives the Commodore 64 was far from a favorite of many programmers, so much so that a surprising number developed elaborate cross-compiler setups to let them write their 64 programs anywhere else but on an actual 64. Many others who had had personal dealings with Commodore, particularly in the double-crossing bad old days of Jack Tramiel, simply hated the company and by extension its products on principle. Yet you couldn’t hate them too much: fact was that the 64 was the main reason there still was any games industry to speak of in 1987.

Already the best-selling microcomputer in history well before 1987, the Commodore 64 just kept on selling, with sales hitting 7 million that year. Meanwhile sales of the newer Commodore 128 that could also play 64 games cruised past 1 million. This continued success was a tribute to the huge catalog of available games. As Bing Gordon of Electronic Arts put it, “The Commodore 64 is the IBM of home computing; no one thinks you’re dumb if you buy it.” Of course, this aberrational era when a full-fledged computer rather than a games console was the most popular way to play games in the country couldn’t last forever. Anyone sufficiently prescient could already see the writing on the wall by wandering to other areas of that Summer CES show floor, where an upstart console from Japan called the Nintendo Entertainment System was coming on strong, defying the conventional wisdom of just a year or two before that consoles were dead and buried. But for now, for just a little while longer, the Commodore 64 was still king, and Summer CES reflected also that reality with a final great flowering of games. Love it or hate it, programmers knew the 64 more intimately by 1987 than they possibly can the complex systems of today. They knew its every nook and cranny, its every quirk and glitch, and exploited all of them in the course of pushing the little breadbox to places that would have been literally unimaginable when it had made its debut five years before; plenty of games and other software stole ideas from the bigger, newer machines that simply didn’t yet exist to steal in 1982.

Starting today, I want to devote a few articles to chronicling the Commodore 64 at its peak, as represented by the games and companies on display at that 1987 Summer CES. We’ll start with Epyx, whose display was amongst the most elaborate on the show floor, an ersatz beach complete with sand, surfboards, Frisbees, and even a living palm tree. It was all in service of something called California Games, the fifth and newest entry in a series that would go down in history as the most sustainedly popular in the long life of the Commodore 64. If we were to try to name a peak moment for Epyx and their Games series, it would have to be the same as that for the platform with which they were so closely identified: Summer CES, June 1987.

You can get a pretty good sense of the advancement of Commodore 64 graphics and sound during its years as the king of North American gaming just by looking at the Games series. In fact, that’s exactly what we’re going to do today. We’re going to take a little tour of four of the five Games, hitting on just a couple of events from each that will hopefully give us a good overview of just how much Commodore 64 graphics and sound, along with gamer expectations of same, evolved during the years of the platform’s ascendency. These titles were so popular, so identified with the Commodore 64, that they strike me as the perfect choice for the purpose. And they also occupy a soft spot in my heart as games designed to be played with others; they’re really not that much fun played alone, but they can still be ridiculously entertaining today if you can gather one to seven friends in your living room. Any game that encourages you to get together in the real world with real people already has a huge leg up in my critical judgment. I just wish there were more of them.

Let’s start by taking another look at the original 1984 Summer Games, a game I already covered in considerable technical detail in an earlier article. Its graphics — particularly the fluid and realistic movements of the athletes themselves — were quite impressive in their day, but look decidedly minimalist in light of what would come later. Also notable is the complete lack of humor or whimsy or, one might even say, personality. Those qualities, allowed as they to a large extent are by better and richer audiovisuals, would arrive only in later iterations.

 
Few concepts in the history of gaming have lent themselves as well to almost endless iteration as the basic Games concept of a themed collection of sporting minigames. Thus after Summer Games turned into a huge hit more Games were inevitable, even if they wouldn’t be able to piggyback on an Olympics as Summer Games had so adroitly managed despite the lack of an official license. The first thought of Epyx’s programmers was, naturally enough, to follow Summer Games with a similar knock-off version of the Winter Olympics. By this time, however, it was late 1984, and Epyx’s marketing honcho Robert Botch said, probably correctly — he tended to be correct in most things — that a winter-sports game would be a hard sell when they finished it up in six or eight months; at that time, you see, it would be high summer. So they instead turned their attention to Summer Games II, consisting of eight more events, many of which had been proposed for the original collection but rejected for one reason or another. It proved to be if anything a better collection than its predecessor, with more variety and without the cheat of inserting two swimming events that were exactly the same but for their differing lengths. Graphics and sound were also modestly improved.

But the first really dramatic leap forward in those areas came with the next iteration, the long-awaited Winter Olympics-themed Winter Games that followed hot on the heels of Summer Games II. With Epyx’s in-house programmers and artists still busy with the latter, Winter Games was outsourced along with detailed specifications provided by Epyx’s own designers to another developer called Action Graphics. The partnership between the Silicon Valley-based Epyx and the Chicago-based Action Graphics was apparently a somewhat troubled one, with delays caused by poor communication threatening to scupper the planned Christmas 1985 launch. The project’s savior proved to be one Matt Householder, a recently arrived refugee from Atari who would play a huge role in the series going forward. Upon his hiring in July of 1985, his first role became that of Epyx’s official liaison to Action Graphics; he spent many weeks in Chicago pushing the game along to completion. A programmer himself with much experience with videogames, Householder suggested lots of extra little touches, sometimes helped out with technical problems, and, with the deadline ever looming, occasionally advanced the timetable via some artful deletion.

The bobsled was a particularly problem-plagued event. The original conception would have had the riders pushing the sled to get it started, just like in the real thing, but no one could quite figure out how to make it work. Householder made an executive decision to just excise that element entirely in favor of making the rest of the event as good as possible. Note in the video below how the clouds in the sky also move when the bobsled goes through a curve. This late Householder-prompted addition is a classic example of a little touch of the realistic whose presence might not be noticed but whose absence almost certainly would — perhaps not consciously, but only as a feeling that something is somehow “off” with the experience. Note also the music that now plays before this and all of the other Winter Games events to leaven the somewhat sterile feel of the original Summer Games.


The bobsled is actually quite graphically spare in contrast to some of the other events in Winter Games. See for example the biathlon, the most time-consuming single event to appear in any of the Games games and one of the most strategic. The speed of the targeting cursor in the shooting sections — and thus the difficulty of each shot — is determined by your heart rate when you arrive. Success is all about pacing yourself, setting up a manageable rhythm that keeps you moving along reasonably well but that also lets you make your shots. According to Householder, “It was put in there to make something completely different. It breaks up the pace of the other events, which are more tense, action/reaction type of things. You have to learn a different set of skills.” Barely a week before the deadline, Householder, bothered that the shooting just somehow didn’t feel right, suddenly suggested adding a requirement to eject the spent round and cock a new one before firing. They managed to shoehorn it in, and it does go a long way in adding verisimilitude to the experience. It’s not so important to make a game like this realistic per se, but to make the player feel like she’s really there, to capture the spirit of the event, if you will.


The original plan for the graphic depictions of this event was, as with the bobsled, somewhat more ambitious than the final version. The skier was to be shown from different angles on every screen, a scheme that Householder quickly excised in favor of a consistent if less graphically interesting side view. The lush backgrounds were inspired by photos of the actual event taken at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, recreated freehand by artist Steve Johnson. I must say that I love the winter-wonderland atmosphere this event and, indeed, much of Winter Games conjures up. Like the opening and closing ceremonies, the bobsled, and a couple of other events in Winter Games that clearly take inspiration from the Sarajevo Olympics, the biathlon is made bittersweet today by the knowledge of what was in store for so many of those sites and, more importantly, for the people who lived near them.

Having now covered most of the Olympics events that seemed practical to implement on a Commodore 64, there was some debate within Epyx on the best way to consider the series after Winter Games; it had turned into such a cash cow that no one was eager to bring it to a close. Marketing director Robert Botch suggested that Epyx effectively create their own version of the Olympics using interesting non-Olympic sports from all over the world, under the title of World Games. Householder ran with the idea, proposing turning the game into a sort of globe-trotting travelogue that would not only let the player participate in the unique sports of many nations but also get a taste of their cultures.

World Games

You’ll notice in the World Games screenshot above an advertisement for Continental Airlines, perhaps the first of its kind in a game that wasn’t itself blatant ad-ware and yet another example of Botch’s prescience as a marketer. If the times were changing, though, they were still changing slowly: Continental was able to buy this exposure in a game that would end up selling hundreds of thousands of copies by providing Epyx with nothing more than a handful of free tickets to Disney World for use in contests. On the other hand, perhaps Continental paid a fair price when one starts to consider demographic realities; the young people who made up the vast majority of Epyx’s customers generally weren’t much in the market for airline tickets quite yet.

Much as the documentary tone of the travelogue-style descriptions might lead you to believe otherwise, the Epyx design team was made up of a bunch of young American males who weren’t exactly well-traveled themselves, nor much versed in global sporting culture. They chose the majority of the sports in World Games by flipping through books and magazines, looking for things that seemed interesting and implementable. They then designed the events without ever having actually seen them in real life. This led to some bizarre decisions and outright mistakes, like their choice of barrel-jumping (on ice skates!) as the supposed national sport of Germany; absolutely no one in Germany had any idea what they were on about when the game came out. Their original plan to make soccer penalty kicks Germany’s national sport would have hit closer to home, even if a love for soccer is hardly confined to that country. But it proved to be technically infeasible.

With Epyx’s in-house programming team once again too busy with other projects to take it up, World Games was again contracted to outside programmers. This time a company called K-Byte did the honors, albeit under much closer supervision, with the art and music supplied by Epyx’s own people. Freed as they were from the rigid strictures of traditional Olympic disciplines and a certain fuddy-duddy air of solemnity that always accompanies them, the designers, artists, and programmers were able to inject much more creative whimsy, even humor. See for example what happens when you screw up badly in Scotland’s caber toss.


Speaking of screwing up: Epyx’s designers managed to completely miss the point of the caber toss. Athletes participating in the real sport are judged on aesthetics, on how cleanly and straightly they toss the caber. The objective is not, as in World Games, to simply chunk the bloody thing as far as possible.

The music tries its best — if, again, only within the limits of Epyx’s international awareness —  to echo the “national music” of each country represented. The bagpipe sound is quite impressive in its way; listen for the initial “squawk” each time the instrument changes pitch, so like the real thing.

But Mexico’s cliff-diving provides perhaps the best illustration of how far Epyx had come already by the time of World Games. It’s superficially similar to the diving event from Summer Games, as seen in my very first video above, but the difference is night and day. I speak not just of the heightened drama inherent in jumping off a rocky cliffside as opposed to a diving board, although that’s certainly part of it. Look also at the improved graphics, the addition of music, all of the little juicy touches that add personality and interest: the way the diver fidgets nervously as he waits to take the plunge, the way you can send him careening off the rocks in various viscerally painful ways, the seagull at the bottom of the cliff who will turn and fly off if you wait long enough. (Rumor has it that it’s possible to hit the seagull somehow if you botch a dive badly enough, but I’ve never succeeded in doing so.)


California Games, the fifth entry in the series and the culmination of the audiovisual progression we’ve been charting, was done completely in-house at Epyx. Indeed, it was also inspired much closer to home than any of the games that had come before. Walking through Golden Gate Park one weekend, watching bicyclists and skateboarders doing tricks for the crowds, Matt Householder’s wife Candi suggested that Epyx should use those sorts of sports in their next Games game.

But there’s a bit more than that to be said about California Games‘s origins, in terms of both universals and the specific context of the mid-1980s. In the case of the former, there’s the eternal promised land of California itself that’s been a part of the collective mythical landscape of Americans and non-Americans alike almost from the moment that California itself existed as a term of geography: Hollywood, Route 66, Disneyland, the Sunset Strip, the Beach Boys, palm trees, hot rods, surfboards, and of course bikinis and the sun-kissed beach bunnies who fill them out so fetchingly. (Botch wouldn’t be shy about incorporating the latter elements in particular into his marketing campaign.) “Go west, young man!” indeed. California Games combined this eternal California with a burgeoning interest amongst the young in what would come to be called “extreme sports” that saw many a teenager picking up BMX or half-pipe skateboarding. The first proposal that Householder submitted actually skewed much more extreme than the eventual finished product, including wind-surfing, hang-gliding, and parachuting events that were all excised in favor of some more sedate pursuits like Frisbee and Hacky Sack. He also proposed for the collection the almost instantly dating appellation of Rad Games; thankfully, Botch soon settled on the timeless California Games instead.

Which is not to say that California Games itself is exactly “timeless”; this is about as clearly a product of 1987 as it’s possible for a game to be. At that time the endlessly renewable California Dream was particularly hot. Even the name California Games, timeless or no, also managed to evoke the zeitgeist of 1987, when California Coolers and the California Raisins were all the rage. The manual includes a helpful dictionary of now painfully dated surfer and valley-girl slang.

LIKE (lik) prep. Insert anywhere you like, like, in any sentence, in, like, any context. Used most effectively when upset: “it’s, like, geez…” Or the coolest way to use “like” is with “all” (for more description). “It’s, like — I’m all — duuude, you’ve got sand in your jams.”

Replacing the chance to represent a country, Olympics-style, that had persisted through World Games are a bunch of prominent 1987 brands, some of which have survived (Costa Del Mar, Kawasaki, Ocean Pacific, Casio), some of which have apparently not (Auzzie Surfboards and Ray-D-O BMX, my favorite for its sheer stupidity). All paid Epyx to feature their logos in the game, with those willing to invest a bit more getting more prominent placement. Yes, Botch was figuring out this in-game-advertising thing fast. See for instance the logos plastered behind the skateboarding half pipe.


California Games was the first title in the series for which Epyx could draw on a fair amount of direct personal experience. Enthusiasts of the various sports inside the company demonstrated their skills for the cameras, the resulting video used as models for their onscreen versions. Some of the less athletic programmers and designers also had a go by way of getting into the spirit of the thing. Householder notes that “I nearly broke my skull a couple of times” on a skateboard in the Epyx parking lot.

To see how far Commodore 64 games came in less than four years, look at the colorful-in-both-senses-of-the-word surfing video below, with its gags like the shark. (A cute dolphin also shows up from time to time, albeit not so often as the shark and never, alas, when you’re trying to make a video.) Notice how the music, a rock song this time, plays during the action now to elevate the whole experience. The bagpipes and the like may have been impressive, but rock and roll was to be the sound of California Games, with Botch even managing to officially license “Louie Louie” for the title screen. And notice how the little surfer dude is an individual with his own look and, one might even say, personality, in comparison to the faceless (literally!) papier-mâché silhouettes of Summer Games.


California Games became an even bigger international hit than the previous four games in the series, one more symbol of the power of the California Dream. Epyx now had 200 employees, and was possessed of an almost unblemished record of commercial success that made them the envy of the industry, their catalog including not only hit games but also their Fast Load cartridge that many Commodore 64 owners considered indispensable and a very popular “competition-quality” joystick. But California Games would mark the end of an era. The downfall of this company and series that had been able to do no wrong for years would happen with stunning speed.

Nor could the Commodore 64 itself keep going forever. Having reached its peak at last in mid-1987, with programmers beginning to get a sense that it just wasn’t possible to push this little machine, extraordinarily flexible as it had proved to be, much further, the downward slope loomed. We, however, will stay perched here a little longer, to appreciate in future articles some more of the most impressive outpouring of games ever to grace the platform.

(Sources: Family Computing of September 1987; Commodore Magazine of July 1988 and August 1989; Commodore User of February 1986; Compute!’s Gazette of December 1986; Compute! of December 1986 and August 1987; Retro Gamer 46 and 49.

Such was the popularity of the first five of the Games that the property still holds some nostalgia value to this day, seeing periodic re-releases and revivals. The latest of these is from the German publisher Magnussoft, who have versions available for Windows, Macintosh, and Android. I must say, however, that there’s little left of the original feel in such efforts. I prefer to just play them in an emulator on the old Commodore 64. An intrepid fan who calls himself “John64” has packaged all five titles onto a cartridge image who loads and plays almost instantly in an emulator like VICE. I take the liberty of providing the cartridge here as well along with all of the manuals.)

 

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Topologika

Topologika

When Acorn Computer foundered on a financial iceberg in 1985, one of the first and saddest victims was Acornsoft, their software arm. Acornsoft was destined to go down into history first and foremost as the house that set British gaming on its head with Elite, but David Braben and Ian Bell, having already made their exodus to Firebird and taken their game with them, were hardly the ones most affected by the collapse. Those developers who didn’t have an easy escape hatch to hand had far more cause for worry. Among them were Peter Killworth and his colleagues from Cambridge University, who had over the previous few years brought a taste of the unique adventuring culture of their university’s Phoenix mainframe to the little BBC Micro by porting some of those games (Philosopher’s Quest, Kingdom of Hamil, Quondam, and Acheton) and writing new ones in their spirit (Castle of Riddles and Countdown to Doom).

Acheton

Making the sudden loss of a publisher even more disheartening was the fact that the Cambridge professors had only recently pulled off a technical coup for the ages. All of the Phoenix ports except the last had been just that, hand-made translations into ultra-compact BBC BASIC that were often accomplished only by making painful cuts to the original designs. The last game, however, was different. For it, John Thackray and David Seal chose the biggest whale of all, Acheton, the very first of the Phoenix games and by far the largest. They devised an interpreter to read and play the adventure’s compiled database file, written on the mainframe using their own T/SAL adventure-making programming language, on a 32 K BBC Micro equipped with a disk drive. Acheton‘s database alone was so large that it filled almost every byte of space on a disk side, forcing them to place the interpreter and boot code for the game on the other side of the disk. Showing a bit of mercy to players about to confront one of the most infamously difficult adventure games ever made, they used the extra space on the disk’s boot side for a graduated hint system that included more than 250 individual questions. That number gives some sense of the sheer scale of Acheton, as do its totals of more than 400 rooms to be mapped and more than 160 individual manipulable objects. Acheton was trumpeted by Acornsoft as the largest single adventure game ever written. It’s still amongst the leaders in that category today in terms of breadth if not depth of interaction; the ratio of rooms to objects alone illustrates what a very, very old-school game it is, its countless empty rooms as often as not grouped into fiendishly elaborate mazes of one stripe or another.

Murdac got a splashy title screen on the CPC.

Murdac got a splashy title screen on the CPC.

Olivetti, Acorn’s new owners, sold Acornsoft’s existing contracts and software to an outfit called Superior Software in 1986. Superior, however, wasn’t much interested in text adventures, so the Cambridge professors were eventually able to negotiate back ownership of the games they’d published through Acornsoft. In the meantime, they decided to bring another of the Phoenix games, Jon Thackray and Jonathan Partington’s Murdac, to the popular new Amstrad CPC line of computers. The CPC had a comparatively generous 64 K of memory, while Murdac was one of the smallest of the Phoenix games. These two facts together meant that an outside contractor named Richard Clayton, whose claim to fame was nothing less than having written the BASIC built into the CPC, was able to fit the entire Phoenix database file plus an interpreter into the memory of a cassette-based CPC. After an initial deal with Amsoft, Amstrad’s equivalent to Acornsoft, fell through, they signed a contract at last with Global Software to sell Murdac as Monsters of Murdac; the new prefix was apparently judged to give the game a bit more of that Dungeons and Dragons feel that the kids craved. Even in 1986 a Phoenix game like Murdac felt rather behind the times to many; this was after all the year that Magnetic Scrolls was knocking ’em dead with The Pawn. Amstrad Action columnist Steve Cooke, better known by his handle of “The Pilgrim” and in general one of the more thoughtful and perceptive voices in adventuring gaming, wrote a typical review, saying “it’s not hard to see why” Amsoft had decided to take a pass: “This is a text-only game of a rather old-fashioned nature where you trundle around underground solving puzzles and collecting valuable items.” He also took time like other reviewers to complain about Murdac‘s lack of an “examine” verb. This particular description, this particular complaint, and even this particular columnist would become all too familiar to the Cambridge colleagues in the years to come. For now, though, Monsters of Murdac didn’t make much impression, and the relationship with Global Software was soon severed. The third publisher would prove the charm.

That arrangement was born of an unsolicited phone call that Peter Killworth made to Brian Kerslake about the state of British educational software. It was certainly a topic that Kerslake knew a lot about, having made it into his life’s work. He and his wife Maddy, schoolteachers both, had formed an educational-software developer and publisher called Chalksoft back in 1982. For a few years they had cranked out software covering all sorts of subjects for many age groups, from ABC and basic arithmetic drills for grade schoolers to French, German, and Spanish practice for adult tourists. Chalksoft, however, had never quite found their footing with schools’ purchasing departments, by far the best and most reliable customers for this sort of thing, and had been swept away like Acornsoft by the British computer industry’s mid-decade travails. Undaunted, the Kerslakes were determined to take what they had learned and try again, this time under the name of Topologika Software.

In their initial conversation, it was Killworth who did most of the talking. Specifically, he was talking — or complaining — about a hugely popular educational text adventure called L – A Mathemagical Adventure, an effort at teaching basic concepts in mathematics that had been written by the Association of Teachers of Mathematics themselves and was now a fixture in British schools. Simply put, Killworth thought he could do better. If he could, replied Kerslake, Topologika would love to publish it. Peter Killworth seldom needed to hear a challenge like that twice. A few months later, he handed them Giant Killer.

Giant Killer

Published for the BBC Micro as Topologika’s first product in April of 1987, Giant Killer is “loosely based” on the old British fairy tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. The choice of names (sometimes also written as Giantkiller by Topologika and others) is obvious based on the subject matter, but may also be a sly dig at L, the educational giant Killworth intended to slay. That said, it’s not all that noticeably different from its inspiration and nemesis in form or content. Like L, it’s a simple text adventure whose various set-piece puzzles can all be clearly seen by a trained mind like Killworth’s as mathematical “investigations” exploring various fundamental properties. For a decidedly untrained mind like mine, they’re just a pretty good collection of logic puzzles, a few of them trivial, most of them straightforward but enjoyable, one or two quite tricky even for an adult (the bottle-sorting puzzle that turns up early bogs me down every time). Surprisingly in light of the reputation of its creator, Giant Killer is if anything somewhat simpler to get through than L, certainly at least noticeably more linear. Occasional references to “Venn cubes” and the like aside, the game never beats you over the head with the ideas you’re allegedly learning. It’s enough to make you wonder what really separates this game from lots of other abstractly puzzley text adventures beyond the extensive manual, meant for teachers, that carefully steps through every stage and puzzle in the game. I tend to want to say that Giant Killer teaches logical thinking more so than mathematics per se. But then I suppose some would argue that the two are one and the same.

Whatever the nature of its educational value, Giant Killer immediately became very, very popular, joining its rival L as a fixture for many years in schools across the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Like The Oregon Trail in the United States, these games are inescapable memories for Britons who attended primary school from the late 1980s to well into the 1990s. For the Kerslakes, Giant Killer became exactly the sort of reputation-establishing title they had been unable to find as Chalksoft, paving the way to the sustained success of Topologika as an educational publisher; they wouldn’t bring the company in for a soft landing until a quarter-century later. Giant Killer proved so popular that Topologika not only added to their catalog versions for many other platforms but also an add-on “support disk,” which presented the more intricate puzzles in graphical form for students to tinker with on the computer in lieu of pencil and paper before returning to the main game to enter their solutions.

Ironically, Giant Killer, by an order of magnitude the most widely played game to come out of the Phoenix adventuring culture, has been largely overlooked or dismissed in histories of that culture. While the original BBC Micro version of the game was done in BASIC on that machine itself, the database used in the ports was rewritten in the T/SAL adventure language on the Phoenix mainframe and run on each target machine through an interpreter. Whatever else it is, it’s very clearly an adventure in the Phoenix tradition, if also a much, much gentler experience than any of its stablemates.

With Giant Killer proving to be such a rousing debut for Topologika the educational publisher, the Kerslakes were more than happy to provide Killworth and his colleagues a stable home at last for their other adventure games as a sideline. In that first year of 1987 alone Topologika republished four of the old Acornsoft titles, whose rights the Cambridge professors had by now been able to secure again: Philosopher’s Quest, Kingdom of Hamil, Acheton, and Countdown to Doom. They were even able to boast that three of the four were “new and expanded” versions. The disk-based interpreter that Seal and Thackray had developed for Acheton allowed them to move the full versions of Philosopher’s Quest (known as Brand X on the mainframe) and Kingdom of Hamil onto microcomputers directly from the Phoenix mainframe, while Killworth rewrote and expanded Countdown to Doom in T/SAL for its Topologika release.

Countdown to Doom

These games with their cool intellectualism and rigorous minimalism paddled defiantly against the current of adventure games in the late 1980s, which were evolving to place ever more emphasis on story, texture, and accessibility via more and more text, better and better parsers, and better and more pictures that would soon come to replace text and parsers entirely. It’s jarring just to see a review of one of the Topologika games in a magazine filled with pictures of scantily-clad barbarian maidens, well-oiled action heroes, and explosions galore. The people excited by those things, one senses, just aren’t likely to get too excited about spending hours plotting out the mechanics of intricate spatial and mathematical puzzles described in a bare few, albeit generally well-chosen sentences. The problem of an audience being stolen away by other, shinier genres was admittedly one that most text adventures were beginning to face, but with the Phoenix games it was exacerbated to the extreme; these games could be off-putting to even the most dedicated fans of the genre. Most of the reviews hammered on the same few phrases: “old-fashioned,” “no story,” “poor parser,” “difficult puzzles,” and, most of all, “no examine,” which alone could be read as shorthand for everything most adventure-game players wanted from their games by 1987 that the Phoenix games adamantly refused to give them; I’ll try to explain why in just a moment.

But one thing made the Phoenix games unique in comparison to other sketchily implemented games: their sketchiness arose from — or at least was claimed to arise from — a considered design position rather than a simple lack of time, will, resources, or technical skill. That’s perhaps a bit convenient given that these games were made on a shoestring compared to the likes of Magnetic Scrolls or even Level 9, much less Infocom, but it was nevertheless a position that Killworth and even Brian Kerslake were prepared to argue with considerable force and passion. A fascinating debate erupted between the Topologika crew and “Pilgrim” Steve Cooke after the latter gave Philosopher’s Quest and Countdown to Doom less than glowing reviews, hitting in the course of them on most of the themes listed in my previous paragraph. Turning to the December 1987 issue of Amstrad Action, I want to consider a letter Killworth wrote to Cooke in response to his reviews along with Cooke’s own replies at some length because I think they offer much food for thought, not only in the context of the Phoenix games but of the art of interactive fiction in general.

Killworth makes some decidedly dubious assertions in his letter, such as the claim that recently developed conveniences like “ramsave,” used to quickly stash an undo point in memory, are unnecessary in Topologika games because saving is “well-nigh instant anyway, since this is a disk-based game.” To that one can only reply that: a) users of the single-drive 8-bit systems that made up so many of Topologika’s customers, forced as they were to swap disks twice and enter a filename with every save, apparently had a different definition of “instant”; and b) it’s always a dangerous practice under any circumstances for a software developer to lecture users on why they really don’t need the feature they’ve just requested.

Killworth’s assertion that better parsers don’t allow more complex and interesting puzzles also strikes me as rather transparently ridiculous.

The original mainframe Zork is a good example. It’s still around, and in cut-down micro versions, not because of its parser (which has, as do all fancy parsers, lot of infelicities — I know of only one puzzle in one adventure that needs a fancy parser); not because of its graphics (it has none); but because it’s witty, with some interesting puzzles. Well, we strive for wittiness, but that’s in the eye of the beholder; but we do achieve interesting puzzles.

I can only speculate that, if Killworth hadn’t seen more than one example of better parsers leading to better puzzles in Infocom’s games in particular, he hadn’t played very many (any?). The Phoenix games are often remarkable for how many interesting puzzles they are able to coax out of their limited parsers and world models, but this is merely a product of artful designing around the engine’s constraints, not proof that better parsers don’t allow more varied and interesting puzzles and gameplay in general. Cooke’s very reasonable response:

I must disagree heartily on this one. I agree that the majority of games (even those claiming fancy parsers) can be satisfactorily played using simple inputs. This is, however, a point against poorly designed games, and not against complex parsers. To give a few examples of powerful parsing adding considerably to gameplay, I would cite (1) Level 9’s ability to command a character to carry out actions while you get on with something else; (2) the relative positioning in Magnetic Scrolls games, with solutions such as “smear x on y” or “look under z”; (3) for sheer convenience, the “go to,” “follow,” and “find” commands now used by some companies; and (4) as a personal favourite, the use of the “hide” command in Infocom’s Suspect.

But Killworth is on firmer ground in at least some senses when we come to the oddly specific topic to which the whole debate surrounding the Topologika games seems to continually return: their lack of an “examine” verb. Killworth:

Much of your review of my games Countdown to Doom and Philosopher’s Quest is taken up with the complaint that you expect “examine” to work in all games. My philosophy has always been — and always will be — that the computer is your senses and hands. Anything that you see should and must be passed on to the player immediately. I can’t see the point of:

There is an X here.

Examine X.

You find a Y.

when

There is an X here. It has a Y attached… (or whatever)

is what you, the player, actually see when you look at the blessed thing. Another example which gets my goat is:

There is a piece of wood here.

Examine wood.

It is Y-shaped, and would make a fine catapult if it had elastic.

(almost verbatim from one bestselling game). Why not:

There is a Y-shaped piece of wood here. It resembles a catapult without the elastic.

or words to that effect? So I and my colleagues have always eschewed the use of “examine” — it’s a waste of player time and furthermore is really programmer dishonesty: it creates a potential puzzle “free” because the player might forget to do an “examine.”

Cooke’s response:

I quite understand your argument and am even inclined to agree with you — there’s no point in an “examine” that simply serves to draw out the gameplay to no real purpose. However, I feel that in real life we do “examine” objects to see if there is more to them than meets the eye, and in an adventure I believe that occasionally the “examine” command is vital in enhancing the atmosphere of a game. A good example would be the books in the library in Guild of Thieves, where you can “read” (i.e., examine) a large number of objects and have fun doing so. However, there’s no doubt that some puzzles have come to depend too much on the “examine” command, like the catapult you mention. On the other hand, I feel that excluding the command altogether, as you do, is moving too far to the other extreme.

Applied to games in the Phoenix style, I find Killworth’s argument that “examine” is unnecessary convincing enough, even as I find unconvincing his argument that a storyworld without “examine” better simulates our experience of reality. The fact is that we do usually choose where to focus our attention when we enter a new space that’s not entirely or nearly empty. The important difference between Topologika games and those from others was that rooms in the former were entirely or nearly empty as an almost universal rule, but the latter were beginning by this point to simulate richer, more complex spaces. Thus the former don’t need “examine,” but the latter do. I think this is an important distinction to consider because it moves us closer to understanding what’s really going on in this debate in general.

Cooke seemed unable to keep himself from connecting the lack of “examine” to everything else he didn’t like about the Topologika games. See for example the prevalence of unclued sudden deaths, like this one in Countdown to Doom:

In one location near the start, there’s a blob-like thing that slithers across the path towards a cliff. If you just watch it, it soon disappears over the edge (presumably forever) and since you assume that it has some significance in the game you feel reluctant to let it go. You can’t “examine” it, so the only thing to do is to “get” it. This is instantly fatal.

Killworth’s reply:

On the subject of “examine” and the “dangerous blob,” fatal to get: what information would you expect “examine blob” to produce that would tell you that touching it is fatal? Tell me what there is about an earthly jellyfish (which would be long extinct by the time Doom happens) that would tell you not to touch it if you’d never come across one!

This continued fixation on what would happen in the real world is rather missing the point entirely, especially given that rigorous realism is hardly among the Phoenix games’ strengths. The real point is of course that this sort of sudden death is just annoying and cruel, as many other game designers were coming to understand at last by 1987. Cooke:

My concern about the fatal blob was not altogether due to the absence of an “examine” command and if I gave that impression (I don’t have the review to hand) I apologise for being misleading. It’s just that I have never been enamoured of having curiosity in a game rewarded with death without some form of warning. Some software houses get round this by asking quite directly, “Do you wish to continue?” or “Are you sure you want to do that?”. Although a bit feeble, this at least gives the player cause for thought. Better by far to introduce the warning into the gameplay. For example — if there was a stick to hand I might use it to prod the blob first, whereupon seeing the stick sizzle and burst into flame would enable me to save my skin and congratulate myself on being a clever dick into the bargain!

It’s one of Killworth’s concluding statements that I find to be his most perceptive and most interesting, being as cogent an explanation as we’re likely to find of why he and Cooke so often seem to be talking past one another.

Looking back at your comments, what I think I read is that you like to “live” in the games you play as a primary motive, while solving them is secondary. For example, you like to talk to characters; I don’t. I believe that good plotting and good puzzles are what keep a game going over the years.

It’s the old conundrum of the crossword versus the narrative — game as abstract puzzle or game as embodied experience. Killworth remained doctrinally, ideologically wedded to the former while Cooke was eager to see games in the latter light. Read in the light of this reality, this debate that keeps returning over and over to “examine” takes on a whole new level of meaning. Cooke complains about the lack of an “examine” command. Killworth responds, reasonably enough, that there’s really no need for an “examine” command in Topologika games. Cooke remains unsatisfied because a game so minimalist that it doesn’t need “examine” isn’t a game he wants to play. The lack of “examine,” in other words, isn’t the disease but a symptom of the deeper problem that Cooke can’t quite articulate. Most gamers shared his preference for more experiential games; the medium in general had been moving in this direction for years. And that in a nutshell is why Topologika adventure games weren’t ever going to set the world on fire.

Subsequent exchanges among Cooke, Killworth, and eventually also Brian Kerslake, which continued for some eighteen months, grow progressively more petty and less illuminating, serving mainly as an object lesson to creators that there’s little to be gained in attempting to rebut criticism. In the meantime, new Topologika adventures continued to appear. Killworth wrote and published two sequels to Countdown to DoomReturn to Doom and The Last Days of Doom, in 1988 and 1990 respectively, and in 1989 came Jonathan Partington’s Shakespeare-themed Avon, which had been available to Phoenix users for seven years. Both Avon and The Last Days of Doom also included an additional “B-side” adventure: a republished Murdac in the case of the former, another old Phoenix game called Hezarin in that of the latter. Topologika funded ports of the T/SAL interpreter and thus their entire adventure catalog to quite a number of disk-drive-equipped platforms other than the BBC Micro, including the Amstrad CPC and PCW, the IBM PC, the Sinclair Spectrum, the Acorn Electron and Archimedes, and the Atari ST. The end of the line didn’t come until 1992, with the publication of Spy Snatcher, a Thackray/Partington game that had been one of the last new adventures made available to players on the Phoenix mainframe circa 1988. I’d be tempted to also name Spy Snatcher as the last all-text game to be sold as a conventional boxed product on store shelves, except that by 1992 the Topologika games were so poorly distributed that just about the only way to get one was to call up Topologika themselves and ask for one. All of the old adventures remained notionally available, in the sense that you wouldn’t find them in Topologika’s catalogs but they would sell you a copy from their warehouse stock if you asked them, until 1999, when Graham Nelson and Adam Atkinson convinced the Kerslakes and the Cambridge professors to release the whole collection as freeware. Those gentlemen and others have since done stellar work preserving not only the Topologika versions but also the Phoenix mainframe originals.

Spy Snatcher

Even in their commercial heyday, such as it was, the Topologika adventures were never more than cult titles, beloved by an enthusiastic but tiny base of players. And by “tiny” I mean really tiny; some later Topologika adventures never made it to four digits in total sales. Given this, and given that they were downright reactionary in their refusal to evolve with the times — one can’t help but think of former silent-movie stars railing against the talkies when reading some of Killworth’s comments — you might well be wondering why I’ve chosen to give them as much attention as I have. The historical argument is that T/SAL represents the first specialized adventure-authoring language to be made available to the public — assuming your definition of “public” is inclusive enough to stand in for “people with access to Cambridge’s Phoenix mainframe” — and the first game made with it, the monstrous Acheton, was also the first text adventure to be made in Britain, the starting point of a whole national tradition. As such, the later history of T/SAL and the games it spawned is well worth documenting.

The aesthetic argument is more subtle but also more compelling. The Phoenix games represent the most uncompromising examples ever of a certain school of text-adventure design that would see the genre as one of the world’s ultimate tests of logic, organizational ability, and sheer dogged willpower. You don’t so much play a Phoenix game as you assault it, problem by problem, maze by maze, restarting again and again to optimize your play and mapping out meter by hard-fought meter your path to victory against a game that wants to kill you every chance it gets. That’s not quite what most of us are looking for when we sit down to play a game. Yet there’s a certain purity to the Phoenix games’ refusal to allow distractions like story texture and player convenience to obscure their diamond-hard spine. They’re like the Lloyd’s building in London, pipes and wiring exposed to see and celebrate. While they are extremely difficult and gleefully unforgiving, they also contain surprisingly little of the bullshit that normally marks such minimalist efforts: no guess the verb, no random puzzle solutions pulled out of thin air. The logic is there, somewhere; it’s just a matter of finding it. According to their own lights if not those of our modern times, they’re playing tough — very tough — but fair with you.

If that sounds like something for you, I recommend you start with Giant Killer and see how it goes. The other Phoenix games share more than a little of Giant Killer‘s intellectual — one might even say pedagogic — flavor, and Giant Killer‘s preferred type of puzzle will be very familiar to anyone who has experience with those other games: intricate set-pieces often spanning many rooms that demand pencil and paper and systematic, holistic thought. The antithesis, in other words, of “use this object here.” It’s just that those other Phoenix games, having been written by graduate students and PhDs in some of the most difficult disciplines in the world for their peers in one of the most demanding universities in the world, are much, much more rigorous exercises. And of course Giant Killer doesn’t kill you without warning every other turn. There is that.

Still, playing it should give you a good idea of whether you want to explore further. If you’re one of the few on the right wavelength, you’ve got months or years of masochistic fun to look forward to. And if not, you can breathe a sigh of relief, safe in the knowledge that no one dares make ’em like this anymore.

(Sources: 8000 Plus of June 1988, July 1988, December 1988, February 1989, April 1989, August 1989, November 1989, and January 1990; Amstrad Action of December 1985, August 1986, November 1987, December 1987, February 1988, September 1988, December 1988, February 1989, April 1989, December 1989, June 1990, November 1990; Crash of May 1988, June 1988, July 1988, and August 1988; Games Machine of September 1988 and September 1990; Your Sinclair of July 1988; Home Computing Weekly of April 12 1983, May 24 1983, September 27 1983, October 30 1984, April 2 1985, April 23 1985, and April 30 1985; Laser Bug of January 1983, June 1983, July/August 1983, and September 1983; ZX Computing of April/May 1985; Acorn Programs of August/September 1984; Acorn User of December 1984; Computer and Video Games of March 1985. See also the feature on the Phoenix games in SPAG Magazine #58.

To play Giant Killer, you can either download the original BBC Micro version from here or the MS-DOS port from Topologika’s ghost of a home page. The latter will unfortunately not run on 64-bit versions of Windows, so you’ll need to use DOSBox or something similar to get it going. The other games discussed in this article are all available on the IF Archive in one form or another.)

 

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KAOS

In a hole in a mound there lived an orc. Not a clear, dry, sandy hole with only spiders to catch and eat, nor yet a comfortable hobbit hole. It was an orc hole, and that means a dirty, clammy, wet hole filled with bits of worms and a putrid smell.

It had a perfectly round garbage heap, blocking the doorway, with a slimy yellow blob in the exact middle for spitting practice. The doorway opened onto a sewer-shaped hall — a deeply unpleasant tunnel filled with smoke, with secret panels, and floors snared and pitted, provided with treacherous chairs and lots and lots of booby traps — the orc was fond of visitors.

But what is an orc? Orcs are not seen much nowadays, since they are shy of human beings. They are a pungent people, little bigger than overweight elves, with the charisma of blow flies and the appetite of gannets. Orcs have little or no magic, except a rudimentary skill with knives and strangling cords and, in short, they are evil little pits.

This orc was unusually ugly, even for an orc. His name was Grindleguts.

Grindleguts had lived in the neighborhood of The Mountain for about a year and most people considered him two steps lower than a tapeworm, not only because of the smell and the plague, but because he kept eating their household pets.

— Knight Orc

Level 9 signs with Rainbird. From left: Nick Austin, Tony Rainbird, Paul Byrne, Pete and Mike Austin.

Level 9 signs with Rainbird. From left: Nick Austin, Tony Rainbird, Paula Byrne, Pete and Mike Austin.

The Austin family who ran Level 9, suddenly Britain’s other great adventure house, would have had to have been almost incomprehensibly magnanimous not to have resented just a little bit Magnetic Scrolls’s breathtaking ascent to prominence on the back of The Pawn. By the time they too signed with Rainbird in 1986 Level 9 had been selling adventure games for four years, amassing a stellar reputation for their ability to pack a staggering amount of text and gameplay into the likes of a little 48 K cassette-based Spectrum. Their games had their problems in terms of puzzles that really needed more thought or at least more hints, but that was such par for the course at the time that British gamers barely seemed to notice whilst marveling over their expansive worlds and the pictures the Austins were soon managing to shoehorn in on top of everything else.

What the Austins couldn’t seem to manage, however, was that single breakout hit that would separate itself from their catalog. This wasn’t hugely surprising in itself; the British adventure market was largely a niche market. Only once every year or two did an adventure like The Hobbit or Sherlock become a force to be reckoned with outside of the magazines’ specialized “Adventure” chart listings. Level 9’s best-selling single game to date had been their least typical. Published by Mosaic rather than Level 9 themselves at the height of the British bookware boom, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 was essentially a Choose Your Own Adventure version of Sue Townsend’s comic epistolary novel of the same name, which was a popular literary sensation in Britain at the time. The ludic version consisted of episodes lifted directly from the novel glued together with unsightly globs of Pete Austin text trying rather too hard to recreate the voice of Townsend’s fussy hypochondriac of a teenage boy. No matter — the license alone was strong enough to push sales well past 150,000 and prompt a second, somewhat less successful game based on the next book in the burgeoning series.

When Level 9 opted to forgo publishing their own parser-driven adventures and signed a contract with Rainbird in early 1986, it was with some hope that the latter could foster the big hit that had so far eluded them and make a name for them in the fabled land of milk and honey known as North America, where money rained from the sky and punters picked it up and plunked it down to buy computer games costing $40 or more. Tony Rainbird’s right-hand woman Paula Byrne whilst working for Melbourne House had brokered the deal that had brought The Hobbit to North America in a deluxe package under the Addison-Wesley imprint, where it had done almost as well as it had in Britain. Thus the Austins could feel reasonably hopeful that she might be able to do something similar for their next game. How disappointing, then, when Rainbird’s big transatlantic hit of an adventure game turned out to be one from a company no one had ever heard of before the launch. To be fair, it was awfully hard for Level 9’s crude vector graphics to compete with the beautiful hand-drawn pictures in The Pawn, and equally hard for the three boffinish Austin brothers to win any attention from the mostly young male trade press when the alluring Anita Sinclair was available for questions somewhere else on the same show floor.

Jewels of Darkness on the Amiga. The graphics didn't compare too favorably to those of The Pawn.

Jewels of Darkness on the Amiga. The graphics didn’t compare too favorably to those of The Pawn.

It also didn’t help that Level 9’s first game for Rainbird was a retread. Jewels of Darkness packaged together their first three games, their so-called “Middle Earth” trilogy, with the Tolkien fan-fiction serial numbers filed away; it was actually something of a small miracle that Level 9 hadn’t been sued by the Tolkien estate already. Level 9 added vector graphics to the text-only originals and, this being a Rainbird game, a novella to set the scene. While it was politely received by reviewers in Britain, sales were doubtless impacted by the fact that many of the hardcore adventurers most likely to buy the somewhat pricy collection already owned one or more of these games in the original. In North America, where Jewels of Darkness became the first ever Level 9 game to be sold, the reception was less polite. Without the historical context or the requisite warm haze of nostalgia in which to view these fairly primitive games, reviewers were left to nitpick the collection’s shortcomings and dwell on the fact that the first game of the trilogy, Colossal Adventure, was essentially an uncredited ripoff of the original Adventure. It was by no means the first version of Adventure to be sold without permission from or reparation to Crowther and Woods, mind you, but its being sold at this late date and under another name fueled a belated sense of outrage on the part of many. When not accusing the Austins of plagiarism, reviewers just talked about how bad the pictures were in comparison to those in The Pawn.

Level 9’s second game for Rainbird, Silicon Dreams, was another collection, this time of their “Eden” trilogy of science-fiction titles that had begun with Snowball, still perhaps their most innovative and interesting game to date. But few took the time to notice the charms of Snowball or either of the other included games. Without controversy to win it even a modicum of attention, Silicon Dreams just vanished.

The underwhelming performance of the two trilogies is understandable, but I’d be doing Level 9 a disservice to join so many contemporary reviewers and gamers in dismissing them completely. As primitive as the games themselves are, you see, the interpreters in which they run on the bigger, newer machines like the Atari ST and Amiga are anything but. Level 9 took advantage of the acres and acres of unused memory available to them on those platforms to implement a number of conveniences that go beyond even what Magnetic Scrolls was doing at the same time. Rather than constantly blocking your machine, pictures load and draw as background tasks whilst you continue to interact at the command line, even on machines that don’t normally support multitasking. You can save a game quickly in memory instead of on disk to come back to it later by using the “ramsave” and “ramload” commands. You can scroll backward and forward through your command history using the arrow keys. And, most impressive of all, you can undo up to about a dozen turns by simply typing “oops.” When you enjoy these sorts of features on a modern interactive-fiction interpreter, you’re enjoying ideas pioneered by Level 9. To take the time to credit Level 9 for them here can feel a bit like celebrating the guy who devised a new bolt to hold your car together, but these sorts of innovations are important in their own right in making text adventures more enjoyable and accessible. So, credit where it’s due. These are conveniences the like of which Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls would never implement to anything like the same degree; neither, for instance, would ever offer more than single-level undo, and even that would be long in coming.

Indeed, Magnetic Scrolls, sexy pictures or no, can feel like quite the hidebound traditionalists in relationship to the late works of Level 9. Nowhere is the difference starker than when we get to Level 9’s third game for Rainbird, an original work at last. Boy, was it original. While Magnetic Scrolls was polishing up a more perfect Zork in the form of Guild of Thieves, Level 9 was seemingly trying to blow up just about every assumption ever held about the genre with Knight Orc.

Knight Orc

Released in July of 1987, Knight Orc is a glorious hot mess of a game that introduced Level 9’s newest adventure engine: KAOS, the Knight Orc Adventure System. No, the acronym doesn’t quite match the name, but I think we can forgive them a bit of fudging because never has an acronym better fit to a game’s personality. Rather than the static worlds that were still the norm in adventure games, KAOS worlds were to be filled with active characters — potentially dozens of them — moving about following agendas of their own. Each is effectively your equal, able to do anything you can instruct your own avatar to do. In fact, learning to use these characters as alternatives to the character you directly control is key. Once you bring a character under your sway, whether through bribery or coercion or plain old kindness, you can issue commands to that character through the mouth of your own, get that character to do just about anything your own can do — and sometimes a bit more, if she has abilities your own does not. You can issue long strings of commands to your minions that might take ten turns or more to carry out. The more complex problems you encounter can require using this capability to orchestrate the actions of several non-player characters working in carefully plotted concert with your own.

Level 9 also announced that beginning with Knight Orc they were just so over mapping, quite a reversal indeed from this company that had previously felt obligated to put at least 200 locations into each of their games. KAOS games would still consist of a grid of discrete rooms, but the right-thinking player would use a handy in-game map or list of notable landmarks to get around by using “go to” in lieu of tedious compass directions.

It all added up to the most radical single reimagining of the text adventure of the genre’s commercial era. Infocom had played with more dynamic, responsive storyworlds of their own, particularly in their first trilogy of mystery games, but never on a scale like this. Perhaps the only games that really compare are Melbourne House’s The Hobbit and Sherlock, which offer much the same Looney Tunes, even-the-programmer-has-lost-control-of-this-thing experience as Knight Orc. Pete Austin actually called Knight Orc Level 9’s “Hobbit basher” before its release. Yet, impossibly, Knight Orc is even stranger. Not even The Hobbit let you orchestrate the activities of multiple minions, like a strategist sitting at the center of a web of action and reaction. What the hell was Level 9 thinking?

Well, whatever they were thinking, it was something of a thoroughgoing theme by this period in their history. The Austins had spent much of their time during 1985 and 1986 on a quixotic project to create a multiplayer text adventure similar to but much more advanced than Richard Bartle’s M.U.D. This was a fairly logical leap to make from single-player text adventures, one Level 9 was hardly alone in contemplating; Infocom, for instance, also spent considerable energy on a proposed online version of their interactive fiction during their salad days. Level 9’s plans, however, were unusually grandiose by anyone’s standards. Avalon was to be based on the Arthurian legends, and was to play in a virtual world consisting of 10,000 locations and 1000 non-player characters — all the standard cast like Arthur, Merlin, and Morgana included — in addition to the many real humans who would also be logged in and wandering about. It would offer an “incredible number of puzzles” for them to solve in traditional text-adventure fashion in the beginning, but Level 9 anticipated that as a player grew in wealth and power her experience would gradually transform, as in some high-level Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, into one of strategy, politics, and resource management. The whole thing would run on a network of souped-up Amigas and/or Atari STs attached to banks of modems.

It was all hopeless, of course. Level 9, still a tiny family company, didn’t have anything like the resources to pull it off, even assuming they could answer the million practical questions raised by even the quick summary I’ve just given. (What happens when all those puzzles have been solved by eager players? What happens to this Arthurian mythos when some enterprising player kills Arthur? Etc., etc.) Avalon was quietly abandoned by the end of 1986.

KAOS was not, as one might initially suspect, a single-player consolation prize that went into development after Level 9 realized that Avalon just wasn’t going to work. The two projects were actually in development in parallel for some time. Indeed, both were manifestations of deeper predilections that had been with Level 9 for a very long time now. Their very first attempt at an adventure game, written in BASIC for the Nascom kit computer well before Colossal Adventure, had been called simply Fantasy. The game itself seems to have been lost to time, but its description reads like a dry run for Knight Orc. Pete Austin:

It was a game with about thirty locations. It had people wandering about and essentially it was one of the few games where the other characters were exactly the same as the player and they were all after the gold as well. What made it amusing was that they had quite interesting characters, each had a table of attributes, some of them were cowardly, some of them were strong — that kind of thing and we gave them names. There was one called Ronald Reagan and one called Maggie Thatcher and so on, so you could wipe out your least favourite person!

This desire to find a way to let you share your adventure with others, whether in the form of dynamic non-player characters or other flesh-and-blood humans, had obviously never left Level 9.

Level 9’s seemingly sudden abandonment of mapping and traditional navigation was similarly not quite so sudden as it appeared. As early as Snowball with its 7000 rooms set inside a vast generation ship in interstellar space, they had begun to show an interest in more organic, realistic storyworlds where success didn’t depend on methodically visiting every location and plotting it all on paper but rather going where the situation — the plot — led.

And what a plot and situation Knight Orc had to offer! If the quote that opened this article makes you laugh half as much as it does me, you’re on this game’s wavelength. Now consider this: you play the benighted orc Grindleguts. Much of the credit for the… um, unique atmosphere of Knight Orc must go to one Peter McBride, a talented writer who sparked up a friendship and, soon, a working relationship with Pete Austin circa 1984 that would turn him into the most significant single contributor to Level 9’s games without the last name of Austin. A computer hobbyist and self-taught programmer in his own right, McBride already had quite some experience combining computers and writing before meeting the other Pete, authoring books and many a simple BASIC program for the Spectrum. His first major job for Level 9 was to write the novellas, almost 50 pages each, that accompanied Jewels of Darkness and Silicon Dreams. After that he wrote the novella for Knight Orc, of which the introduction above is just the beginning. It’s been described by Robb Sherwin as “the finest piece of authorized fiction ever to accompany a game,” and offhand I certainly can’t think of a better to use in disagreement. Just as importantly, McBride played a big role in crafting the game itself, writing or rewriting much of its text.

Knight Orc

Knight Orc on the Amiga.

Where to start with the walking, talking collection of lowest common denominators who inhabit Knight Orc, all squabbling after the treasures lying about the place and inflicting their petty little cruelties on poor little… well, okay, Grindleguts is equally loathsome. Maybe with the jousting horse who looks like “a flatulent barrel.” Or with the fighter who looks like “a butcher’s shop on two legs.” Or the ant-warrior Kris who looks like “an ogre-sized fried roach.” Or the town layabout, “a lanky, twitchy-fingered nicotine addict.” The most cutting statement of real-world politics comes with the village priest:

He is a sweaty paedophile, quite happy to swarm on about the meek inheriting the Earth, turning the other cheek and the love of you know who... until you mention liberation theology, disarmament, or anyone other than male humans becoming ministers.

And then there’s the knight. God, I love the knight in all his sub-Chaucerian splendor.

>examine knight
"A handsome, parfait knight, great-muscled, fit and slim.
Almost a giant in height, and long and straight of limb.
Clad all in green is he, and green his skin and hair.
His eyebrows are mossy, bright emerald his stare.
No shield, helm or plastron, nor bright chain mail has he.
Of armour has he none. Just, in one hand, holly.
Storm-like and strong, he seems. And swift to strike and stun.
Dreadful his blows, one deems. Once dealt, true death has come."

In other words, he is a bully of the worst type.

The green knight puffs himself up and stares down scornfully from the back of his overgrown pony.

"If thee be brave, not coward base,
Then thee must now my challenge face.
With this, my axe, strike blow for blow.
I'll let thee strike first. Have a go!"

He indicates his mighty axe.

>hit horse with axe
With a surprisingly dextrous stroke you behead the horse. The green knight shouts in surprise, but, before he can retaliate, the massive steed has fallen on him!

That’s such a delicious scene, pretty much exactly what I want to see someone do every time the battle improbably stops around Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings movies so he can make another speech about Courage and Honor. Cheaters always win and and karma doesn’t exist in Knight Orc. This combined with the focus on dynamic characters makes the game an experience all its own. There are some set-piece puzzles that could have been dropped into almost any adventure game, but they’re in the minority. The majority of the problems you face must be solved by interacting with the others — often, as in the case above, treacherously and to their considerable detriment.

When you die you’re taken to Orc Heaven, revived, and spit back out into the game. The same goes for all of the various other characters, whether killed by you or by each other. This only adds to the Bizarro World personality of the game. If Level 9 had imagined that their active characters would make the game more realistic, would advance them toward that ultimate dream of making the player feel she had (to paraphrase Infocom) “woke up inside a story,” their efforts can only be judged a failure. For one thing, you can’t really talk to any of your minions at all beyond saying “hello”; you can only order them about, using them like automatons at your beck and call. Level 9 themselves would come to talk about their “characters on rails,” a phrase which gives a pretty good sense of the experience of playing Knight Orc. I don’t really say this to criticize, merely to try to describe just what a deeply weird experience it is.

Knight Orc is really, really funny, but it’s also really, really broken. Let me give an example, involving the most low-rent possible version of an English gentleman hunter. Every time you come to a certain crossroads, he bursts out of hiding to harass you:

A mounted hunter bursts through the trees and spurs his nag towards you. Repeated shouts of "Yoiks! Tally ho!", together with his choice of red as camouflage, demonstrate his hunting skill. The fool is waving his lasso and clinging on for dear life.

Not surprisingly, the hunter gets hopelessly entangled in his lasso and misses you completely. Unfortunately, his horse has better luck when it lashes out with one huge hoof.

Woops! That hoof sends you to Orc Heaven.

My eventual solution to this dilemma was to get the hunter to kill someone called Denzyl in my stead, “a right gullible and stupid-looking person” who’s just gullible enough to take me as his friend.

>denzyl, kill hunter
Denzyl says, "No sooner said than done."

The hunter strikes out wildly with his whip. As is traditional when orcs or their allies are attacked by humans, his blow is deadly. Odin enters from the southwest. Not surprisingly, the hunter gets hopelessly tangled in his lasso and misses you completely. Unfortunately, his horse has better luck when it lashes out with its huge hoof.

In spite of that last sentence which would seem to imply the contrary, I’m still alive at this point, standing there with a suddenly passive hunter and his horse who’s now willing to trade me his lasso — the real point of this whole exercise — for a bit of treasure. Problem solved, right? Well, yes, except that this whole solution was dependent on some combination of emergent behavior and simple bugginess; as best I can tell, the game seems to have been confused by the fortuitous arrival of Odin (don’t ask!) just as the hunter’s horse was about to kill me. The “official” solution to this puzzle is to tie a rope to some signposts, thereby tripping the hunter’s horse and sending him sprawling along with his lasso. I like to think that this little example illustrates everything that’s so good and so infuriating about Knight Orc. I got lucky this time in that “solving” the puzzle in this way didn’t break anything elsewhere. Break one of the middle links in a longer chain of causality in such a way, though, and you might not be so lucky, leaving the game in an unwinnable state that will be all but impossible to track down and correct. Building a dynamic, simulation-oriented game in lieu of just a set of set-piece puzzles is a tremendously demanding endeavor in that everything in that world — even things the programmer has never anticipated — has to work right. Knight Orc too often fails that test. It’s a complicated, difficult game that you can’t trust as a player — a fatal situation.

Unlike Magnetic Scrolls, who chose to demand a disk drive on the 8-bit machines and thus had recourse to virtual memory, Level 9 chose or felt compelled to continue to support the little 48 K cassette-based machines on which they’d built their reputation. Thus Knight Orc is artfully split into three smaller games that each load into memory separately. The first of these revolves around making a long rope to get Grindleguts back into the orc stronghold outside of which he’s been trapped by a long string of very amusing happenstance detailed in McBride’s accompanying novella. He does this by tying together every vaguely ropelike thing he can find, including the aforementioned lasso and even Goldilocks’s hair, which, in one of the most amusing bits of the game, he rudely hacks off like the sniveling little reprobate he is. This first part of the game is fairly manageable, one dodgy puzzle involving a thorny hedge and a welcome mat aside. Once you get to the stronghold, however, the complexity ramps up dramatically. Amongst other things, you need to collect and use no fewer than 21 spells, many found in the most improbable of places. As always, Level 9’s ability to squash a crazy amount of game into 48 K is impressive — maybe a little too impressive. Combined with all of the bugs, it’s enough to make the game as a whole all but unsolvable even if playing straight from a walkthrough, what with all of the wandering characters constantly mucking with everything, never being where you want them, and always stealing items from you just when you were about to use them for something. I’m told that the whole thing is eventually revealed to have taken place in a simulacrum of a fantasy world, similar to the ending of Adventure. Ah, well… Level 9 had ignored that original ending in Colossal Adventure in favor of grafting a bunch more gameplay onto the end, so I suppose they earned the right to use it here.

Knight Orc received a notably cool reception in British adventuring circles, with reviewers dwelling at some length on how all but impossible it was to actually get anywhere with it. Others seemed put off by the sheer bloody-mindedness of it all, apparently preferring their fantasy fantastic and their heroes heroic, while plenty more just wanted the sort of traditional adventure game that Knight Orc most definitively was not. Even the pictures that were included with the 16-bit versions sparked a surprising amount of vitriol. Rather than resorting to vector graphics again or drawing directly on the computer, Level 9 digitized a set of watercolor paintings provided by Godfrey Dowson. The end results have a soothing, almost Impressionistic quality that clashes with the carnal tone of the game itself, but they hardly strike me as worth getting so upset over. They’re rather nice pictures really.

Knight Orc

Nor was Knight Orc destined to be the big break Level 9 dreamed of in North America. A milquetoast Computer Gaming World review made the very cogent observation that the puzzles “are too uneven” — “When random bad luck can spoil a well-thought-out solution, it’s hard to be sure if you’re on the right trail.” — and damned the game with the faint praise of “above average.” Most of the other magazines didn’t even notice Knight Orc, which like its two predecessors vanished quickly from the store shelves.

And so now all of Level 9’s games for Rainbird had proved to be commercial disappointments, while the British gaming press was now indulging in unabashed schadenfreude, saying that Level 9 had lost their mojo to their intra-label rivals Magnetic Scrolls. The Rainbird/Level 9 relationship collapsed under mutual recriminations. Level 9 said with some degree of truth that Rainbird had always favored Magnetic Scrolls, had given their games exactly the sort of promotional push, especially in North America, that Level 9 had never received. They claimed that any enthusiasm Rainbird had had for adventure games not from Magnetic Scrolls had ended with the departure of Tony Rainbird. Rainbird could reply with an equal degree of truth that Level 9 hadn’t given them all that much to promote: just two musty classics collections and one radical departure from their past that was wildly original but also kind of unplayable. A middle ground between retread and innovation would have been welcome at some point. By mutual decision, the two parted ways. Level 9 was now fully on their own again, forced to publish and market their next game for themselves. By 1987 that was a fairly uncomfortable place for a little family shop like theirs to find themselves in, but needs must. They would never regain the commercial mojo they had lost — or had stolen from them — in 1986.

Their best games, however, were actually still in front of them.

I’ve had a difficult relationship with Level 9 since starting this history. As the major interactive-publisher I knew least, they were the one I was most excited to learn more about, but they’ve left me feeling again and again like Charlie Brown on the football field, as their big ideas and interesting fictional concepts proved again and again to be riddled with nonsensical puzzles and fundamental issues of playability. I was ready to give them one final article today and be done with them. But then some of you encouraged me to have another look, I noticed that the games that followed Knight Orc were substantially better reviewed, and I came across this welcome statement from Pete Austin in a late interview:

It is worth saying that in the later ones when it is finished we play through it and we now have about a month’s play testing and we do take the results of the play testing quite seriously. This is from Gnome Ranger [the game that followed Knight Orc] onward. We also, where people find puzzles hard, put hints around the place or make them easier.

It seems that Knight Orc‘s obvious failings finally prompted changes at Level 9. I’ve investigated some of their games still to come, and found works that incorporate many of Knight Orc‘s innovations into more sober, accessible, solvable designs. I’m thus happy to say that there are still articles worth writing about Level 9.

In the meantime, I do encourage you to have a look at Knight Orc. It’s still one of the most unique text adventures I’ve ever played, and you can experience that uniqueness more than well enough in the reasonably playable first part. Whatever else you can say about it, it’s good for one hell of a laugh.

(Sources: Retro Gamer 6, 7, and 57; Amtix of June 1986; Page 6 of July/August 1988; Your Computer of October 1987; Questbusters of November 1987; Sinclair User of May 1985; ZX Computing of September 1986; Crash of February 1988; Amstrad Action of May 1986; Computer and Video Games of July 1986; ACE of December 1987; Computer Gaming World of April 1988.

Feel free to download Knight Orc to give it a try. The zip file contains two versions of the game: as a disk image for use with an Amiga emulator, or, in the “game” folder, as data ready for use with a Level 9 interpreter that’s available for many platforms. Open “gamedat1.dat” in the interpreter and everything should Just Work from there.)

 

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