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Author Archives: Jimmy Maher

A Conversation with Andrew Plotkin

For some of you, Andrew Plotkin will need no introduction. The rest of you ought to know that he’s quite an amazing guy, easily one of the half-dozen most important figures in the history of post-Infocom interactive fiction. By my best reckoning, he’s written an even dozen fully realized, polished text adventures in all, from 1995’s A Change in the Weather, the co-winner of the very first IF Competition, to his 2014 Kickstarter-funded epic Hadean Lands. While he was about it, he made vital technical contributions to interactive fiction as well; perhaps most notably, he invented a new virtual machine called Glulx, which finally allowed games written with the Inform programming language to burst beyond the boundaries of Infocom’s old Z-Machine, while the accompanying Glk input-output library allowed then to make use of graphics, sound, and modern typography. Over the last ten years or so, Andrew — or “Zarf,” as his friends who know him just a little bit better than I do generally call him — has moved into more of an organizing role in the interactive-fiction community, taking steps to place it on a firm footing so that its most important institutions can outlive old-timers like him and me.

Andrew was kind enough to sit down with me recently for a wide-ranging conversation that started with his formative years as an Infocom superfan in the 1980s, went on to encompass some of his seminal games and other contributions of the 1990s and beyond, and wound up in the here and now. I hope you’ll enjoy reading this transcript of our discussion as much as I enjoyed chatting with Andrew screen to screen. He’s refreshingly honest about the sweet and the bitter of being a digital creator working mostly in niche forms.

One final note before we get started: Andrew is currently available for contract or full-time employment. If you have need of an experienced programmer, systems architect, writer, and/or game designer whose body of work speaks for itself, you can contact him through his website.


The munchkin Zarf, 1971.

Perhaps we should start with some very general background. Have you lived in the Boston area your whole life?

No, not at all! I only moved to Boston in 2005.

I was born in 1970 in Syracuse, New York, a place that I don’t remember at all because my family moved to New Jersey when I was about three. We lived there for a couple of years, then my father got a job in the Washington, D.C., area. I went to primary school through high school there.

And when and where did you first encounter interactive fiction?

It must have been around 1979. My father’s company had a “bring your family to work” day. A teletype there was running Adventure. My father plunked me down in front of it and explained what was going on. I thought it was the best thing in the universe. I banged on it for a couple of hours while everybody else was running around the office, although I didn’t get very far.

For the next few months, Dad was playing it at work, illicitly — that was how everybody played it. He would bring home these giant sheets of fan-fold printer paper showing his latest progress. As I recall, I suggested the solution to the troll-bridge puzzle: giving the golden eggs to the troll. That was great, the first adventure-game puzzle I solved.

When did you first get a computer at home?

Around 1980, we got an Apple II Plus. We acquired the first three Scott Adams games and Zork, which was newly available, plus Microsoft’s port of Adventure to the Apple II.

Andrew’s bar mitzvah cake took the form of an Apple II.

That started my lifelong attachment to Infocom. I played all the games as they came out. I begged my folks to buy them for me. Later, I spent my own money on them.

You played all of the Infocom games upon their first release?

Pretty much, up until I went off to college. I remember that I did not play Plundered Hearts when it came out.

That one was a hard sell for a lot of young men — although it’s a brilliant game.

Yeah. I didn’t play it because I was a seventeen-year-old boy.

I also didn’t play Zork Zero or the [illustrated] games that came after it because I had gone off to college and didn’t have the Apple II anymore. But I did catch up with all of them a few years later.

You mention that you did get some adventure games from other companies when you first got the Apple II. Did that continue, or were you exclusively loyal to Infocom?

Well, I was haunting the download BBSes and snarfing any pirated game I could. I played Wizardry and Ultima. I didn’t play too many other text adventures. I knew they existed — I had seen ads for Mike Berlyn’s pre-Infocom stuff — but I didn’t really hunt them down because I knew that Infocom was actually better at it. I remember that we had The Wizard and the Princess, which was just clunky and weird and not actually solvable.

I know that you also wrote some of your own text adventures on the Apple II in BASIC, as a lot of people were doing at this time.

Yes. The first one I did was a parody of Enchanter. I called it Enchanter II. It was a joke game that I could upload to the BBSes: “Look, it’s the sequel!” It was very silly. It started out pretending to be an Infocom game, then started throwing in Doctor Who jokes. The closing line was, “You may have lost, but we have gained,” the ending from the Apple II Prisoner game. It was terrible.

But I did write it and release it. Unfortunately, as far as I know it’s lost. I’ve never seen it archived anywhere.

I did Inhumane after that. That was another parody game, but it was meant to have actual puzzles. It was inspired by the Grimtooth’s Traps role-playing books. I liked the idea of people dying in funny ways.

Inhumane is obviously juvenilia, but at the same time it shows some of what was to come in your games. There’s a subversive angle to it: here’s a game full of traps where the objective is to hit all the traps. That’s the way I play a lot of games, but inadvertently. Here that’s the point.

Were you heavily into tabletop RPGs?

No. Tabletop role-playing I was never into. I get performance anxiety when I’m asked to come up with stories on the fly. I just don’t enjoy sitting at a table and being in that position. It’s not my thing.

But I was interested in role-playing scenarios and source books. First, because of the long-term connection to [computer] adventure games, second because they had so much creative world-building and storytelling, just to read. So, yeah. I was interested in tabletop role-playing games but not in actually playing them.

A surprising number of people have told me the same: they never played tabletop RPGs much but they liked the source books. For some people, the imagination that goes into those is enough, it seems.

So, you go off to university. Why did you choose Carnegie Mellon University?

I got rejected by MIT! It was second on the list.

Were you aware that Infocom was connected so closely to MIT?

No. I knew that they were in Cambridge because I subscribed to the Status Line newsletter. There was a running theme of them mentioning stuff around Cambridge. And I’d played The Lurking Horror. But I didn’t have the full context of “these were MIT students who made Zork at MIT.”

I guess it would have made the rejection even more painful if you’d known.

At university, you’re exposed to Unix and the Mac for the first time.

Yes. And to the Internet. And I started learning “real” programming languages like C.

Did you also play games at university?

Yes. I ran into roguelikes for the first time.

Which ones did you play?

I played a fair bit of Advanced Rogue, but I never got good at it. There were people playing NetHack, but it was clear that that was a game where you had to put in a lot of time to make any serious progress. Rogue was a little bit lighter.

Yeah. I never was willing to put in the hours and hours that it takes to get good at those games. Now especially, when I write about so many games, I just don’t have the time to devote 200 hours to NetHack.

You’ve since re-implemented one of your own programming experiments from university, Praser 5.

That was not originally a parser-based text adventure. It was a puzzle stuck inside the CMU filesystem. Every “room” was a directory, connected by symlinks. You literally CDed into the directory and typed “ls,” and the description would pop up in the file listing. Then you would type, “cd up,” “cd left,” whatever, to follow symlinks to other directories. It was an experiment in using the tools of a shared computer system to make an embedded game. The riddles were a matter of running a small executable which was linked in each directory. I used file permissions to give people access to more things as they solved more puzzles.

Much later, after I had learned Inform 6, I did the parser version.

What did you do right after university?

I graduated in 1992, but I wanted to stick around the Pittsburgh area because a lot of my friends hadn’t graduated yet. I got a job in the CMU computer-science department and shacked up with a couple of classmates in a rundown apartment.

That was great. I bought my first Macintosh and started writing stuff on it. That’s when I started working on System’s Twilight. I figured it was time for me to get into my games career. I decided to write a game and release it as shareware to make actual money. So, I bought a tremendous number of Macintosh programming manuals, which I still have.

System’s Twilight has the fingerprints of Cliff Johnson of Fool’s Errand fame all over it.

Yes. It was an homage.

When did you first play his games? Was that at university?

Yeah. Those came out between 1988 and 1992, when I was there. I had a campus job, so I could afford a couple of games. I played them on the campus Macintoshes.

I remember very well being in one of the computer clusters at two in the morning, solving the final meta-puzzle of The Fool’s Errand. I had written down all of the clues the game had fed me on papers that were spread out all over the desk. Every time I used one of the clues, I’d grab the piece of paper, crumple it up, and throw it over my shoulder. When I finished, the desk was empty and I was surrounded by paper.

We had an amazing experience with The Fool’s Errand as well. My wife fell in love with it. It was our obsession for two weeks. When I talked to Cliff Johnson years ago, my wife told me to tell him that he was the only man other than me that she could see herself marrying. I wasn’t sure how to take that.

What were your expectations for System’s Twilight?

I intended to make some money. I didn’t know how much would show up or whether it would lead to more things. It was just something I could do that would be a lot more fun than the programming I was doing in my day job.

Now that you had your own Macintosh and a steady income, I guess you started buying more commercial games again? I know you have a huge love for Myst, which came out around this time.

I was actually a little bit late to Myst. I didn’t play it until 1994, when everybody was already talking about it.

But when you did, it was love at first sight?

Yeah. The combination of the environment and the soundscape was great and the puzzles were fun. It felt like someone was finally doing the graphical adventure right. I’d never gotten into the LucasArts and Sierra versions of graphical adventures because they were sort of parodic, and the environments weren’t actually attractive. They were very pixelated. They just weren’t trying to be immersive. But Myst was doing it right.

As long as we’re on the subject: I guess Riven absolutely blew your mind?

Yes, it did. It was vastly larger and more interesting and more cohesively thought-through than Myst had been. I played it obsessively and solved it and was very happy.

At what point did you get involved with the people who would wind up being the founders of a post-Infocom interactive-fiction community?

In 1993 or 1994, someone pointed me to an open-source Infocom interpreter. I hadn’t really been aware of the technology stack behind Infocom’s games. But now you could pull all of the games off of the Lost Treasures disks and run them on Unix machines. That was kind of interesting.

I don’t remember how I encountered the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup. But when I did, people were talking about reverse-engineering the Infocom technology. I wrote an interpreter of my own for [Unix] X Windows that had proportional fonts, command-line editing, command history, scroll bars — all the stuff we take for granted nowadays. I released that, then ported it to the Macintosh. That was my first major interaction with rec.arts.int-fiction.

It must have been around this time that Kevin Wilson made a very historically significant post on Usenet, announcing the very first IF Competition. You submitted A Change in the Weather and won the Inform category. Did you write that game specifically for the Comp?

Let me back up a little bit. In early 1995, I got an offer from a game company in Washington, D.C, called Magnet Interactive, to port games from 3DO to Macintosh. So, I moved to Washington — I was very sad to leave Pittsburgh behind — and rented a terrible little rundown apartment there. I was also making some money from System’s Twilight, and had started working on a sequel, which was to be called Moondials. It was a slog. I had some ideas for puzzles, but the story was just not coming together.

So, when Kevin Wilson said, “Hey, let’s do this thing,” I said, “I’m going to take a break from Moondials and write a text adventure very fast.” The process started with downloading Inform 5 and the manual and reading it. I think I blasted through the manual five times in a week.

The start of the Competition was a little weird because we didn’t yet have the idea of all of the games being made available at the same time. Kevin just said, “Upload your games to the IF Archive.” So, all of the games trickled in at different times. For the second Comp, we settled very firmly on the idea of all games being released at the same time because the 1995 experience was not very satisfactory.

I know that it’s always frustrating to be asked where ideas come from. But sometimes it’s unavoidable, so I’m going to ask it about A Change in the Weather.

I think I was drawing on the general sense of being an introvert and not making friends easily — being separated from people and feeling alienated from my social group. My college experience wasn’t solidly that. I was an introvert, but I was at a computer college, and there were a lot of introverts and introvert-centered social groups. I had friends, had housemates after college, as I said. But I still struggled somewhat with social activities. It was a failure mode I was always aware of, that I might end up on the edge not really talking to people. I drew on that experience in general in creating the scenario of A Change in the Weather.

That’s interesting. From my outsider perspective, I can see that much more in So Far, your next game. It really dwells on this theme of alienation and connection, or the lack thereof. That also strikes me as the game of yours that’s most overtly influenced by Myst. Just from the nature of the environment and the magical-mechanical puzzles. It’s not deserted like Myst, but you can’t interact in any meaningful way with the people who are there — which goes back to this theme of alienation.

I wasn’t thinking of Myst specifically there, but it was part of my background by that point. The direct emotional line in So Far was breaking up with my college girlfriend. That was a couple of years in the past by this point. That had been in Pittsburgh. A lot of the energy for working on System’s Twilight came from suddenly being stuck at home after that relationship ended. I channeled my frustrations into programming.

But then I tried to drop it into So Far as a theme of people being separated. None of the specifics of what had happened were relevant to the game — just the feeling.

By the time of So Far, you were as big as names get in modern interactive fiction. Your next game Lists and Lists was arguably not a game at all. What made you decide to write a LISP tutorial as interactive fiction? Do you have a special relationship with LISP?

Yes! I hate it! I had taken functional-programming courses in college and learned LISP. But I just did not jibe with it at all.

That’s ironic because Infocom’s programming language ZIL was heavily based on LISP.

Right. It was an MIT thing, but it was not my thing. Nevertheless, the concept of building it into the Z-Machine with a practical limit of 64 K of RAM — or really less than that — seemed doable. And I had written a LISP interpreter as a programming exercise during my first or second year in college. So, I was aware of the basics. Doing it in Inform wasn’t a gigantic challenge, just a certain amount of work.

Were you already starting to feel restless with the traditional paradigm of interactive fiction? Right after Lists and Lists, you released The Space Under the Window, which might almost work better if it was implemented in hypertext. It’s almost interactive poetry.

I wasn’t bored with traditional games, but I did want to try different things and see what could be done. And writing in Inform was simple enough that I could just whip out an idea and see whether it worked. That was inspiring the whole community at this point. That was the lesson of the first IF Comp: you can just sit down and try an idea, and a month later people will be talking about it. There was a very rapid fermentation cycle.

Yes. It led to much more formal experimentation. Before the Comp came along, everybody was trying to follow the Infocom model and make big games. But if you have an idea that’s more conceptual or avant garde, it’s often better suited to a smaller game. The Comp created a space for that. If you do something and submit it to the Comp, even if it’s highly experimental, it will get played and noticed and discussed.

Now we come to The Big One of your games in many people’s eyes. And I must admit that this applies to me as well. Spider and Web is such a brilliantly conceived game. I’m in awe of this game. So, thank you for that.

You’re welcome. It’s always tricky to have a game which is so purely built out of a single idea because then, when you try to write another game, you think you have to come up with another idea that’s as good, and it’s never possible.

Was this idea born out of any particular experience, perhaps with other media?

I don’t think it was. I was prying into what we would now call the triangle of identities — prying into the idea that what the game’s text is telling you is a point of view that might have biases behind it. There is a dialog between what the player thinks about the world and what the game thinks about the world, and there can be cracks in between. That led to the idea of using the storytelling of the game to tell a lie, and that there is a truth behind it which can be discerned.

I started with that kernel and started coming up with puzzle scenarios. Here is an outcome that is verifiable. But there’s two different versions of what happened that could have led to that outcome. I’m going to tell one, but the other is going to be the truth. I strung together a few different versions of that. Then I said, okay, if we’re lying, then the introduction of the game has to introduce the lie. So I folded that in from the start. I knew that I wanted a two-part structure: you learn what’s going on, then you make use of all of the information.

The moment of transition between the two is often referred to as simply The Puzzle. It’s been called the best single text-adventure puzzle ever created. Did you realize how special it was at the time?

No. I figured it would be a puzzle. I didn’t understand how much of an impact it would have. I knew that I wanted to surprise players by having a possibility suddenly become available. Here’s a thing that I can do, and I will do it. Any kind of good puzzle solution is a surprise when you think of it. Afterward it seems obvious. I knew I had a good combination of elements to make it work, but I wasn’t thinking about the way that it would reorient the entire history of the game in the player’s head in one fell swoop. I don’t know. Maybe I had an inkling.

What I love is that the game is called Spider and Web. Suddenly when you solve that puzzle, those two categories get reversed. Who is really the spider and who is caught in the web?

The reason I called it Spider and Web was actually the old idiom “What a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive.” The notion of deception was meant to be part of the title, and the spider was there just to go with the web. But yes, it’s multi-valent.

I know you’re a big reader of science fiction and fantasy. I wouldn’t picture you reading a James Bond novel. What made you decide to go in the direction of spy fiction here?

Honestly, I thought of it as science fiction. The spy fiction was merely because the story was about deception, and somebody had to be fooling somebody. But conceptually, I had it pinned as a science-fiction scenario from some kind of dystopian cold war, but with magically advanced technology.

You entered Hunter, in Darkness into the 1999 IF Comp. It’s a riff on Hunt the Wumpus, which is about the most minimalist imaginable text adventure, if you can even call it that. Your game, by contrast, is a lushly atmospheric, viscerally horrifying fiction. Were you just being cheeky?

Yeah, I was. I just wanted to put in all the stuff that Wumpus didn’t have, without getting away from the core concept. I thought it would be a funny thing to do. I worked really hard on the claustrophobia and the creepy bats. I remember crawling under a chair to try to get the feel of being in a narrow passage and not being able to move around — just to get the bodily sense of that.

Then we have Shade from 2000, which is another of my favorites of your games. Even more than Hunter, in Darkness, it has a horror vibe.

Yes. I leaned into it harder in Shade.

There are all kinds of opinions about what is really going on in Shade. I know you like to let people draw their own conclusions about your games, so I won’t press you on that…

I don’t think there’s a lot of disagreement on the main point, that you’re dying and this is all a hallucination.

Yeah, that was absolutely my take on it, that you’re dying of thirst in the desert. I saw it pointed out in a review that everything you’re trying to do is the opposite of the real problem you have. You’re trying to get out of your apartment in the hallucination, but your real problem is that you are out, lost in the desert. Was that something you were consciously doing, or are we all reading too much into it?

Well, neither. I don’t think I was consciously thinking that way, but that doesn’t mean that you’re reading stuff into it. It’s deliberately ambiguous. I had a lot of images in my head that I threw out at random. I did have the notion that this environment in your apartment was from your past. You really had packed up your apartment and called a taxi and gotten out, and reiterating it was… inappropriate but real. It was in your head while you were having this terrible experience, and it was being replayed by your brain in a broken way. You’re in a place of blinding light — it’s very hot — and the experience you’re replaying is very dim and dark, except that when light occurs it’s painful.

A rare 1999 meeting in the flesh of interactive-fiction luminaries. From left: Andrew Plotkin, Chris Klimas, David Dyte, and Adam Cadre.

Although your games of the 1990s are fondly remembered and still played, you were also making major technical contributions. Probably most important was the Glulx — sorry, I can’t say that word! — virtual machine to let Inform games expand beyond the strictures of Infocom’s old Z-Machine. How did that come about?

No one knows how to pronounce it!

I started to think about it in probably 1996, when Graham [Nelson] came out with version 7 and 8 of the Z-Machine. Version 8 was big — big enough for Graham’s Jigsaw — but it was still just a stopgap. It was only twice as big as Infocom’s version 5. There were all kinds of things that didn’t scale. It seemed worthwhile to make a fresh design that would be 32-bit from the start. I just didn’t want to deal with more incremental changes. And being able to jettison all of the weird legacy stuff about the Z-Machine seemed like a win too — being able to rethink all of these decisions in a technological context that is not 1979.

One of the things I wanted to do was to separate out the input-output layer. I had already written Z-Machine interpreters for X Windows and Mac that used Mark Howell’s ZIP engine with different interface front-ends. When TADS went open-source around 1997, I made an interpreter for that. So, now I had this matrix, right? I’ve got an X Windows front-end and a Mac front-end, and they both slap onto the Z-Machine and the TADS virtual machine. In a pretty clear way, these things are just plug and play. All the virtual machine does is accept text input and generate text output. I mean, yes, there’s the status line, maybe sound and graphics, but fundamentally that’s what it’s doing. And the front-end presents that text in a way that suits the platform on which it’s running. I was doing the same thing that Infocom did, just slicing it into more layers. Infocom had an interpreter and a game file. I said, we’re going to have an interpreter engine and an interpreter front-end. Thus there will be more flexibility.

I designed the front-end first, the Glk library. I made an implementation for Mac and for X Windows and for the Unix command line. Then I started thinking about the virtual machine. I ripped apart the Inform 6 compiler so it could compile to Glulx from the same game source code.

As I recall, the Glulx virtual machine is bigger than the Z-Machine — for all practical purposes, its capacity is infinite — but also simpler. There’s less of the hard-coded stuff that Infocom included, like the object tables.

Yes, exactly. I figured the more generic and simple I could make it, the better. It would be simpler to design and simpler to implement. It adds complexity to the compiler, but the compiler already needs code to generate object tables in a specific format. It would still be doing that, but there wouldn’t be any hardware support for them. I’d just have to include veneer routines to handle object tables in this format. Then, if we ever need to change the format, no problem. We just change the compiler. We don’t need to change the virtual machine.

When did you publish the Glulx specification?

April 1, 1999.

Were you still living in Washington, D.C., at this time?

I had moved around a lot, actually. The job in D.C. only lasted about a year and a half. After the porting project I had been doing finished up, the company dropped me onto a project to do a Highlander licensed game, which we had absolutely no concept of how to do. This would have been like a 3D action game. That project got canned.

Then I worked for a document company in Maryland for a while. Then I moved back to Pittsburgh and worked for a startup. The startup got acquired by Red Hat, and they moved us down to North Carolina. That was from like 1999 to 2000. Then Red Hat fired us and I moved back to Pittsburgh. From 2000 to 2005 I worked for a filesystem company in Pittsburgh.

You took a break from writing interactive fiction for a few years after Shade. Then there was a little bit of a shift in focus when you did come back in 2004 with The Dreamhold. Your earlier games don’t try too hard to be accessible. When you returned, you seemed more interested in outreach and accessibility. What was the thought process there?

Only the obvious one. It’s true that all of my previous games were written very much for the community. They were written for people who knew how IF worked. But The Dreamhold was specifically an outreach game. I wanted to try to expand the community. We’d been doing this for about ten years at that point, and it was kind of the same crowd of people. I thought to create an outreach game as a total wild-ass experiment to try to bring in people from other parts of the gaming world. I didn’t know whether it would work, but I figured it was worth a try. So I designed a game specifically for that purpose, built around explaining how traditional interactive fiction worked to people who didn’t know how to play it.

That meant doing some wacky stuff. There are some rooms in The Dreamhold that you enter by going north, but to go back you have to go east, because I figured, this is really uncomfortable, but people are going to run into this if they get into IF, so they should be familiar with the concept. I’ll try to introduce it as smoothly as possible by putting messages like, “The corridor turns as you head to the north.” Then put in the [room] description, “You can go back the way you came, toward the east,” to try to make it more tangible. But I wanted to introduce complicated maps and darkness and all of the hardcore stuff that the community was used to. And also make it fun.

There were a number of these outreach efforts at the time. Some people were taking IF games to more conventional game jams. There were cheat sheets of “how to play IF” going around. My impression is that these efforts weren’t super successful. Is that your impression as well?

Yes, it is. None of it actually worked. It’s great that we made the on-ramps and it’s good that we still maintain them, but there was not a huge influx of new people coming onto the scene at that point.

My impression is that the community didn’t really start to grow until it opened itself up to non-parser-driven games: the Twine games and ChoiceScript games and so on. Presumably some percentage of those players became willing to try the parser games as well.

Yeah, but that was a little bit later, after 2010 or so. There was still a gap. I decided, well, The Dreamhold didn’t make an impact, so I’m just going to go back to writing wacky puzzle games.

Of course, in 2007 Inform 7 came out. I would say that drew people into creating games, because it was much more approachable for people who were not C programmers. There was a bit of a revolution there. It was just harder to see because it was new authors rather than new players.

The time around 2010 was an exciting one for you personally as well as the community. In addition to the ongoing buzz about Inform 7, Jason Scott released his Get Lamp documentary, and you launched a Kickstarter to make a game called Hadean Lands soon after.

Yes. In 2010, Jason Scott premiered Get Lamp at PAX East. He had interviewed me two or three years earlier — probably in 2007.

Yeah, he worked on that movie for almost ten years.

Exactly. It’s kind of funny to look back at 2007 and see me talking about releasing commercial interactive fiction.

But in 2010, all of the old Infocom guys showed up at PAX East. I was on that panel, sitting with Dave Lebling, Brian Moriarty, and Steve Meretzky. I was going… [genuflecting]

PAX East, 2010. From left: Dave Lebling, Don Woods, Brian Moriarty, Andrew Plotkin, Nick Montfort, Steve Meretzky, and Jason Scott. (Photo by Eric Havir.)

I’m not worthy!

Exactly.

Jason Scott brought Get Lamp to a game class at Tufts University a few weeks later. Since I was living about half a mile away, I came in and said, “Hi, I’m in this movie.” Afterward, I went up to Jason and said, “You know, people are talking about interactive fiction for the first time in fifteen years outside of our little community. Do you think I should do a Kickstarter for a giant IF game?” And Jason looks at me like I’ve got bananas growing out of my ears and says, “Yes, you should!”

He’s the most enthusiastic person in the world.

Yes. And of course, he’d just done a Kickstarter for the Get Lamp release. This was early for Kickstarter. There had been gaming Kickstarter projects before, but no really gigantic ones. So, getting $30,000 for an IF Kickstarter was kind of a big deal in 2010. So I went to the boss at my day job and said, “Well, I guess this is it for us. I’m quitting.” I knew that $30,000 wasn’t actually going to last me very long, living in Boston. But of course, I’d been in the software industry for decades by this point, so I had a fair amount of savings cushion built up. And I had a pile of Red Hat stock which was worth some money. I could live on it while I found my footing as an indie developer.

The Dreamhold had taken me nine months. I thought Hadean Lands would take me a year. Ha! It turned out that writer’s block is a hell of a thing. Hadean Lands kept getting sidelined. I got totally knocked over by the idea of doing a hypertext MUD. I spent a year writing that. That was Seltani, which was hugely popular for about two months in the Myst fan community; I did it as a Myst fan game and presented it at a Myst convention. Everybody loved it. But I wasn’t writing Hadean Lands, and eventually my KickStarter backers started to get upset about that.

I did slog through it. I got Hadean Lands done [in 2014]. I don’t feel like the story is hugely successful, but I’m very happy with the puzzle structure and the game layout.

As you know as well as I do, there’s a whole checkered history of people trying to monetize IF. A few years ago, Bob Bates of Infocom and Legend fame released Thaumistry. I was a beta-tester on that game. The game was very good, but these things just never work. It’s always a disappointment in the end. Nobody has ever cracked that code.

If you look at the Thaumistry Kickstarter and the Hadean Lands Kickstarter, you see that they made almost the same amount of money from almost the same number of backers. It’s the same crowd showing up: “Yeah, we still love ya!” But they’re not enough to make a living from…

The problem is getting outside of that crowd.

It’s no wonder that people like Emily Short have long since decamped, saying, “I have to work on different kinds of games with a larger reach.”

What about you? Do you think you will ever return to parser-based interactive fiction?

That’s a fair question. I’ve had a lot of starts toward things that I thought might be interesting. I started working on a framework for a kind of text game that’s not parser-based but also not hypertext in the sense that Twine is. It’s more combinatoric. I got two-thirds of the way done with building the engine and one-third of the way done with writing a game, then I kind of lost it. But I still think it’s interesting and I might go back to it. I don’t think it would go big the way Twine did, but it might reach a different audience. It’s a different way of thinking about the game structure.

Would you care to talk about your partnership with Jason Shiga to turn his interactive comic books into digital apps? I have played Meanwhile, the first of those.

Sure. I’d been aware of Jason Shiga ever since I started hanging out with Nick Montfort at MIT after I moved to Boston. Nick had a bunch of his early self-published stuff. He had the original printing of Meanwhile, as a black-and-white hand-cut book. I thought it was really neat.

Totally by coincidence, Meanwhile got picked up by a publisher just before that 2010 PAX East we talked about. A nice big hardback version of it was published. It was being sold at PAX East. I thought, man, this is great, I’d really love to do an iPhone version. This was 2010; iPhone games were big.

A little later, I did the Hadean Lands Kickstarter and quit my job. I needed to have more projects than just one text adventure, so I wrote to Jason Shiga and said, “Hey, I’m a big fan. I’d love to do an app version of your book.” Jason was amenable, so we had the usual conversations with lawyers and agents and signed a contract. I worked on that at the same time that I was planning out Hadean Lands. The iPhone app came out in 2011.

So, the finances of making a go of it as an independent creator of digital content without a day job didn’t quite pan out for you in the end. I feel your pain, believe me. It’s a hard row to hoe. What came next?

After Meanwhile and Hadean Lands, I felt very stuck. Jason [Shiga] was off working on non-interactive comics, so there wasn’t anything to do there. I bummed around for a while trying to find something that would make any kind of money at all, but I was not successful.

I’m skipping over huge chunks of time here, but in 2017 Emily Short and Aaron Reed were working on a project to do NPC dialog as a commercial product. It was essentially taking Emily’s old ideas about threaded dialog in parser games and turning them into a plugin which game designers could use in any game to have interesting multi-threaded conversations. I spent a couple of years working on that project with them. But it turned out that management at that company sucked and everybody bailed.

Since then until this year, I’ve been working for big and small games studios, working on the dialog parts of their games.

Coding dialog engines or writing dialog?

I’ve been a software engineer, working on the coding part, but working with the writers.

Also during this period, Jason Shiga started writing what he calls “Adventuregame Comics,” which are shorter Meanwhile-style books. I’ve started porting those. The Steam port of The Beyond and the iOS and Steam port of Leviathan are available now. The iOS port of The Beyond will be coming later.

Since Hadean Lands, you’ve stepped into more of an organizing role in the IF community.

Yes. I’m very proud to have transitioned from being a hotshot game writer to someone who is doing community support, building structures and traditions and conferences. I never wanted to be a person who was only famous for writing games, especially after I started writing fewer games. I really didn’t want to be a person who was famous for having been a big game writer in the 1990s. That’s a sucky position to be stuck in. There needs to be a second act.

It’s maybe a maturation process as well. When you get a little bit older, you realize that some things are important in a way you may not have when you were a young, hotshot game writer.

Yeah. I slowed down writing games because I started to second-guess myself too much. When you’ve written a lot of games that people got really excited about…

Then you’re competing with your own back catalog.

It doesn’t feel good. I’ve had trouble getting away from that.

You’ve done most of your organizational work in the context of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, so maybe we should talk about that more specifically. I’ll give you my impression of the reasons for its founding, and you can tell me if I’m right. You and some other people decided it would be wise to institutionalize things a little bit more, so that the community is no longer so dependent on individuals who come and go. With a foundation and a funding model and all of these institutional aspects, hopefully you set up the community for the long haul, so that it can survive if a server goes down or someone goes away.

Yeah, that’s exactly where it started. We’d been running for decades on people just setting up a server somewhere and saying, “Hey, I’ll run this thing!” That was the original IF Archive, the Usenet newsgroups, IF Comp, the Interactive Fiction Database, the IF Forum. It was workable, but everything was being paid out of somebody’s pocket. There wasn’t a lot of discussion about who was doing what or how much it cost. There was no fallback plan and no thinking about what would come next if somebody stopped doing something. Like, there was a long period when IFDB wasn’t getting any updates because Mike Roberts had a day job. Some things about it were clunky and hard to use, but you couldn’t fix them.

So, in 2015 or early 2016, Jason McIntosh, who was running the IF Comp at that point, had a conversation with somebody who said, “Why don’t you have a non-profit organization to support the IF Comp? Then you could get donations from people.” And Jason started running around in circles with a gleam in his eye, saying, “Yes! We should do this! We should do this! Whom do I know who can help?” He started talking to other people who were longtime supporters of things in the community. That included Chris Klimas, who had been supporting Twine for three or four years, and me — I’d been supporting the IF Archive for a while. Then Carolyn VanEseltine and Flourish Klink joined. Flourish was the only one who knew how to set up a non-profit. They had run a Harry Potter fan conference as a teenager, and, being excited and not knowing things were hard, had just done it.

We got into contact with the same lawyer Flourish had used. The lawyer told us what we needed: forms, bylaws, etc. Jason was the first president, I was the first treasurer. We went down to my bank and opened a business account for the organization. Then we wrote to the IRS to become a 501 C3 non-profit. We set up a website, found someone to give us a basic Web design and a logo. Then we announced it.

At the start, we just did the IF Comp; we collected about $8000 that first year for a prize pool. But over the course of the first couple of years, we added Twine and the IF Archive. The IF Forum was the next big addition. Then the IF Wiki and IFDB. Today each has its own steering group. And we have a grants committee now.

The NarraScope conference is another IFTF project. Would you like to tell a bit about that?

That was my idea. I’d always been keen on the idea of having a narrative-game-oriented conference. I’d been going to GDC for many years. GDC has a sub-track, a narrative-game summit, which is where people like Emily Short and Jon Ingold hang out. But it’s a very tiny slice of what GDC is. And of course GDC is expensive, so it’s hard to bring in the hobbyists and the indie people and the people who write IF Comp games. They just can’t afford GDC. I wanted to provide an alternative that was more approachable and affordable and friendly.

Once we as an organization had steady members and contributors and could bring in money, I said, “It’s time to think about a conference. Our first de novo project.” So, I talked to people I knew who had been involved in conferences, like the Myst fan conference, which is a very tiny thing that happens every year, like 100 people. But it’s been going for years and years. And of course Flourish had run a fan conference.

In 2017 or 2018, I went to GDC with a bunch of business cards that said, “We want to run an interactive-fiction, adventure, and narrative-oriented game conference. Want to help us?” I handed one to everybody I talked to. I found a bunch of people who were interested in helping. Nick Montfort said he could get us a space at MIT for the event relatively cheap. We put up a call for speakers, a website, etc. We were coordinating with the IFTF Education Committee, which is run by Judith Pintar, who goes all the way back to Shades of Gray.

Yeah, I had a great talk with Judith some years ago now.

I had strong opinions about how a friendly conference should feel. We had to bring in lunch so people would sit around and have conversations rather than splitting up and running all over Cambridge. I wanted long breaks between talks so people would have space to socially interact. I wanted badges that didn’t distinguish between speakers and attendees; we’re all here, and we’re not going to have superstars. I wanted an open and honest tone.

We made sure to have a keynote speaker who wasn’t an old fart. We didn’t want somebody like Scott Adams coming in and talking about what it was like back in the 1980s.

You didn’t want to become a retro-gaming conference.

Right. And we deliberately made the scope larger than just interactive fiction as found in the IF Comp or the IFDB. We didn’t want to limit the conference to those topics. We kept the admission price down to about $85.

That was 2019. We had about 250 people, and everything miraculously went perfectly. The worst disaster was when the Dunkin’ Donuts guy was dropping off coffee and hot cocoa. One of the urns blew its spout and dumped gallons of cocoa all over the floor. Someone said, “I know where there’s a mop,” and went and got the mop and cleaned it up. Great, let’s have the rest of the conference!

Local game companies made contributions, maybe $500 or $1000. Between that and the registration fees, the conference broke even. I admit that I threw in $2000 myself to make it balance, but that was because we splurged out and rented a bar on Sunday night. I said, okay, I’ll cover that, so that everybody can go out and have pizza and beer.

A dream achieved: Andrew closes the 2019 NarraScope conference in Boston. Time for pizza and beer!

It was a huge success. We said we would do it again next year. But of course next year was 2020. You know how that story goes.

But it was exciting enough that we wanted to keep going anyway, so we had an online event in 2020. We skipped 2021, then came back in 2022 with an online conference. Then we had a hybrid model for 2023 in Pittsburgh and 2024 in Rochester. And that’s the history of the thing in a nutshell. By now I’ve become just an advisor, which is a great relief.

How many people have attended the later conferences?

It’s very easy to attend an online conference, so about 500 or 600 people signed up for those. But in person in Pittsburgh, there were about 100, either because people didn’t want to travel in the pandemic era or because we were offering an online option, so a lot of people who could have showed up decided to stay home and watch the stream instead. This year was a little higher, like 120.

You were at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester this year?

Yeah. The space was spread out, which turned out to be a win, because we had to walk through the museum and walk past all the cool exhibits. People were jumping out between talks to explore the museum. It was a really neat space — but unfortunately more expensive than a university.

And there will be another conference in 2025?

There absolutely will. It’s going to be in Philadelphia at Drexel University. NarraScope has not yet become big enough to replace GDC, but we’re optimistic. [smile]

I don’t think you want that. It becomes very bureaucratic and soulless.

Yeah, obviously. But Justin Bortnick, who is the current IFTF president, has been talking to GDC about booth space to present IFTF on the show floor. The Video Game History Foundation had a booth there this year. We thought, we’re educational too! We could do that! It may actually happen.

Maybe we can wind up this conversation by talking about the current status of the IF community itself. For many years, it seemed to be quite stagnant in terms of numbers. We already talked about the outreach efforts that took place around 2005 and largely did not succeed. But about five years later, the hypertext systems started to come online. There was a big jump at that point. If you look at the number of games entered in the Comp, they actually trend down through the 2000s, then suddenly there’s a big spike around 2010 to 2012. They’ve stayed at quite a high level since then. Do you have a sense of whether these new, presumably younger people are jumping over to the parser-based stuff as well?

There are new faces on both sides. There is now an active group of retro-fans interested in parser games. That is, people who are excited about making new games and running them on Commodore 64s and the like. We had to update Inform to fix the support for the version 3 Z-Machine, which had been broken over time as everybody was writing bigger and bigger games. Now people want to write small games again.

And there is more interest in hybrid systems, intermediate models which are neither pure hypertext nor pure parser. For years and years, there were no new parser tools. I thought the last great parser development systems had already been implemented; people would stick with TADS 3 and Inform 7 forever. Then a parser system called Dialog appeared, which is a little bit different from them.

But there is certainly more energy on the hypertext side, especially because a lot of us old farts have drifted away. I’m not writing games anymore, Emily Short isn’t writing text games anymore, Jon Ingold and Aaron Reed went off and did their things, Adam Cadre went off to work on film scripts. There are new people writing new games, but I think the pool is going to shrink over time. But that’s okay. Everything that Jon Ingold has done at Inkle Studios is informed by the early text games he worked on and how he wanted to expand that to reach a bigger audience. Everything Sam Barlow has done — Her Story, Telling L!es, Immortality — is informed by his experience writing text games. The same goes for Emily Short. It’s still part of the conversation. It’s just not the center of it anymore.

Yeah. This is a discussion I’ve had from time to time since I started this site. My opinion is that when our generation dies that will probably mark the end of parser-based text adventures. You can say that’s tragic if you want to. At the same time, though, nobody’s writing plays like Shakespeare anymore, but Shakespeare’s plays are still out there.

And there’s still theater.

Yeah. Trends in interactive media, just the same as others forms of entertainment and art, come and go. They have their time, and then their time is over. I’m quite at peace with that.

I’m sort of handicapped by the fact that I haven’t played IF Comp games in quite a while.

I haven’t either. To be honest, I’ve played almost nothing made in the last ten years, just because I have so many old games on the syllabus for this site. Having too many games to play is not the worst problem to have, but it’s made me kind of a time traveler. I live in the past in that sense.

I do know that this year’s IF Comp winner was by Chandler Groover. I don’t think he’s our age. Ryan Veeder is younger than us.

I do look at the Comp website sometimes to see what’s going on. I’ve noticed that it still seems to be a parser-based game that actually wins the thing most of the time. That’s a sign of something, I guess.

Yeah. Maybe it’s a sign of old farts hanging on too long? But seriously, I think there is a new generation of parser-game authors. Whether it’s big enough to sustain itself after you and I are doddering in a nursing home, I don’t know.

There’s been so much progress with computer understanding of natural language. A lot of it is associated with large language models, of course, which is a fraught subject in itself. But I could imagine a system — a front-end — that could take natural language and translate that into something a traditional parser could more readily understand, then funnel it through even an old text adventure. I’m kind of surprised I haven’t heard of anything like that.

Someone did do that as an experiment and posted about it on the forum. Experimenting both with using LLMs on the input side to translate natural language into parserese, and also on the output side to translate generic room descriptions into more flowery, expanded text. I’m more interested in the input side because I like hand-crafted output, but that’s getting into the whole question of AI.

Yes, I have no interest whatsoever in reading AI-generated text in any context.

I think there wasn’t a lot of uptake on that idea just because the kind of people who are excited about AI aren’t excited about parser games in the first place. There have been several attempts to make an AI-generated text adventure, but they’ve all been by people who were not good at text adventures and didn’t know what they wanted out of it. There’s AI Dungeon, which uses an LLM to pretend to be a parser game. But because it’s all AI generated, it doesn’t really produce anything interesting.

The people who are interested in making parser games are mostly old-fashioned artisans who want to hand-craft everything and are not motivated to dive into AI as a shiny new pool. It might be different if someone who was an established parser-game author jumped in and wholeheartedly tried to make it happen. Revolutions are the result of one person getting involved and building something that takes off. Someone has to actually do the work. And to this point, nobody has done that. It’s very possible the whole AI thing will collapse in six months anyway.

I think that’s a very good possibility, but I think that if it does, it will leave behind some pieces in the rubble that are actually useful. Maybe a solution to our parsing problems can be one of them.

But I’ve kept you long enough. Thanks so much for the talk!

Thank you!



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This Week on The Analog Antiquarian

The Voyage of Magellan, Chapter 19: The Battle of Mactan

 
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Posted by on November 29, 2024 in Uncategorized

 

Retro No More: Interactive Fiction of the Early Comp Era

In 2002, Paul O’Brian, a prolific author, reviewer, and commentator on the contemporary interactive-fiction scene, attempted to compile a list of those people who had done the most to help text adventures live on beyond the death of Infocom. Among the names he listed were those of Mike Roberts and Graham Nelson, the creators of TADS and Inform; Andrew Plotkin, who contributed crucial technical innovations of his own and authored a number of perplexing, intriguing games; and Adam Cadre, who wrote the single most-played text adventure of the post-Infocom era. None of these names will come as a surprise to anyone who has been even a casual tourist of the interactive-fiction scene over the years. But another of them very well might: that of Gerry Kevin “Whizzard” Wilson. And yet one can make an argument that his skill set was the most unique and thus the most essential of them all.

It will presumably come as a shock to no one when I write that those folks who were still happy to play games consisting of nothing but text in the era of multimedia and 3D tended to be as quiet and bookish as the games themselves. Such personality types are not overly known for their organizing or marketing acumen. The burgeoning interactive-fiction community was thus incredibly lucky to have Wilson, who was the exception to the rule of introversion. An Infocom superfan who just couldn’t bear to see text adventures go gentle into that good night, he became an activist and community organizer par excellence.

In May of 1994, when he was just eighteen years old, Wilson published the first issue of an electronic newsletter which he called SPAG: “Society for the Preservation of Adventure Games.” Later, when it was concluded that text adventures as a species were no longer actively endangered, the word “Preservation” was changed to “Promotion.” By whatever name, SPAG served as the journal of record of the community from 1994 until 2010, a clearinghouse for reviews of the latest games along with news, announcements, and commentary. (Yours truly was the last long-serving editor of SPAG, just before I became a digital antiquarian…)

It was Wilson as well who reached out to Activision, the corporate inheritor of the Infocom legacy. He found an ally there in one Laird Malamed, the project leader of Zork: Grand Inquisitor, Activision’s third and last graphical Zork adventure game. Together, Wilson and Malamed sneaked half a dozen recent amateur-authored text adventures onto the Masterpieces of Infocom shovelware collection. The writers of same even received actual, albeit small, royalty checks for their efforts, meaning that they were, technically speaking, amateurs no longer.

Then Wilson convinced the ex-Infocom authors Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn to write one last text-only Zork, which he himself implemented using Graham Nelson’s Inform programming language and which Activision officially released as a free taster for Grand Inquisitor. These efforts helped to inspire Berlyn to start a new company called Cascade Mountain Publishing; a commercial game from Kevin Wilson and one from Mike Berlyn and his wife Muffy became its only two digital releases. (I’ll have more to say about that ambitious if doomed effort in a later article.) It’s hard to image anyone else in the amateur community orchestrating such sweeping outreach to the world of games beyond the Usenet newsgroups where the Infocom diehards hung out.

But for all the other things he accomplished through his sheer energy, likability, and enthusiasm, the core of Wilson’s claim to being the Indispensable Man in the community will always come down to a single one of the hundreds of messages he posted to Usenet during the 1990s. On June 26, 1995, he announced “The First Annual Text Adventure Authorship Competition,” whose purpose was “to inspire authors to write something, however small, and make it available for people to play. Interactive fiction as a hobby cannot survive unless there are people out there writing and playing it. Hopefully, some of the people who enter the competition will enjoy it, and decide to write more on their own.”

Entrants had to be submitted by September 1 of that year, which in and of itself precluded them from being very long, assuming that each author began his game just for the competition. The entrants were divided into two categories, one for those created with TADS, the other for those created with Inform. The final tally was six entrants in each of the categories, for a dozen new games in all, a massive bounty by the standards of the time. The winners, determined by a popular community vote after a month in which to play the games had elapsed, were Magnus Olsson’s Uncle Zebulon’s Will on the TADS side and Andrew Plotkin’s A Change in the Weather on the Inform side.

Already in this very first year, the entrants bore many of the hallmarks of Comps to come. Some of them were unabashedly experimental in form: Gareth Rees’s The Magic Toyshop took place entirely within a single room; C.E. Forman’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 Presents “Detective” (say that three times fast!) was a meta-textual roasting of a really bad earlier game; Neil deMause’s Undo expected you the player to work around the bugs in another terrible, broken game, a (meta-)fictional one this time. Such games would almost certainly never have come to exist without a Comp to give their authors permission to work on a smaller scale, one that lent itself to such single-concept creations. It encouraged authors to pursue other goals than that of simply being as good as Infocom at the things which Infocom had done best. In this sense, the advent of the Comp marked the beginning of the end of what I referred to as the community’s “neoclassical” phase in an earlier article.

The next year, the same event, now known as The Interactive Fiction Competition, was held again, without the rather pointless division into TADS and Inform categories; authors could now freely choose to use either of those development systems or any other, knowing their games would be judged alongside their peers without favor or prejudice. Another significant change was that the Comp was now more explicitly branded as being for short games, ideally “playable in two hours or less.” This time, it attracted no fewer than 26 entrants, and was won by Graham Nelson’s The Meteor, the Stone, and a Long Glass of Sherbet.

Kevin Wilson unplugged himself from the community after 1998, to aim his prodigious energies in other directions. He became a prominent designer of hobbyist board games, ones that usually had a pronounced narrative thrust and that sometimes borrowed their names and themes from popular digital games like DOOM, Warcraft, and Civilization. Yet his legacy lives on in interactive fiction in the form of the IF Comp, whose 30th installment has been recently concluded as of this writing. Throughout the last three decades, it has remained the essential event on the community’s annual calendar, the sun around which everything else revolves. For community stalwarts, its arrival each year has become as indelible a marker of autumn as the changing color of the leaves, pumpkins on display on roadside stands, and the first nips of Old Man Winter on the breeze.

The positives and negatives of building a community around the IF Comp have been discussed and debated ad nauseam over the years. On the one hand, it surely did encourage many people to take a stab at writing a text adventure who would not have done so back in the days when these games were expected to be as big as one of Infocom’s if they were to be taken seriously. Then, too, as we’ve already seen, it actively encouraged experimentation and innovation. The late 1990s were chock-a-block with games that departed radically from the points-for-treasure model of Zork: self-consciously literary games, games written in bizarre forms of language, one-room games, even a very well received one-turn game.

On the other hand, however, the Comp came to suck up so much of the communal oxygen that some authors felt obligated to enter it in order to get their games noticed at all. And this in turn caused them to write to the specific set of constraints which it encouraged. Although games lasting longer than two hours were never outright disqualified in the official rules, they were guaranteed to provoke some degree of anger among harried judges for being “too long for the Comp,” with some voters giving them bad scores on principle for that sin alone. This produced a not-so-subtle pressure not to make bigger games at all anymore.

On the other other hand, though, the extent of that pressure was probably exaggerated by some. Certainly a steady dribble of big games did continue to appear outside the Comp throughout the latter half of the 1990s. Indeed, an article which I’m planning to write for this site next year will focus on the surprising number of absolutely huge games — most of them far bigger than any made by Infocom — that appeared in 1998 and 1999 alone.

Having said that, I must admit that I do have my fair share of issues with the sorts of games that the Comps of the late 1990s tended to produce. For all that this period may have been a necessary phase for the community to pass through if it was to begin to escape the long shadow of Infocom, a lot of the games themselves really haven’t aged all that well in my opinion. When works in any creative medium start to prioritize meta-textual cleverness — when they become primarily commentaries on the nature of the medium itself instead of the wider world around it — insularity tends to be the result. It’s hard to exempt the interactive-fiction community from this charge — not by the time it was releasing elaborate in-jokes like J. Robinson Wheeler’s Being Andrew Plotkin, which replaced the hero of the film Being John Malkovich with the titular author of modern text adventures. The cliquish — not to say incestuous — feel of games like this did nothing to welcome newcomers into the fold.

Of course, such complaints by no means apply to every single Comp entrant of this period. I’ve brought them up here mainly in order to explain why some types of games will not be much in evidence in the rest of this article, nor in any others on these subjects that might follow it in the future. The late 1990s also brought its share of fine games that are complete in themselves, with no knowledge of the community and its personalities or any of its raging debates about the theory and practice of interactive fiction required. In fact, 1998 can be reasonably called the interactive-fiction community’s best single year in all its history, in that it produced no fewer than three of the most widely played post-commercial text adventures of all time, all of which are included in the little roundup that follows. Each of the games below is possessed of its own authorial voice, distinct from that of any of the people who worked for Infocom. And yet each is as finely calibrated a marriage of plot, place, and puzzles as any of the best games of Infocom — with just one exception, that is, whose reasons for appearing on this list nevertheless will be made clear in due course.

In short, whether it’s your first text adventure or your thousandth, I do think you can enjoy any of the games on this roundup. In the former case, you will have to put in a bit of effort to familiarize yourself with the conventions of the form — but trust me, it’s not all that hard and it’s eminently worth it.

So, why not pick a game and give it a shot? What have you got to lose? Of all the virtues of the text adventures of the 1990s and beyond, the most undeniable is the fact that almost all of them are entirely free. You can try any of these games directly in your browser by clicking the “PLAY ONLINE” link. If you decide to stay with it, you may want to download an offline interpreter and the story file. For the former, I recommend an application called Gargoyle, which will play all of the games below. For the latter, you’ll want to look on the right side of the Interactive Fiction Database page for each game, which you get to by clicking on its title below. (You always want the latest release, generally the first on the list.) Trizbort is a handy application for making maps of the territory you explore. I find filling in a map to be a joy of its own.

I’ve included below a very rough guess as to how long it might take the typical person to play each game. But keep in mind that it’s only a guess. All of these games deserve to be savored for however long strikes you as appropriate.


She’s Got a Thing for a Spring by Brent VanFossen
Estimated Play Time: three hours
PLAY ONLINE

"This is it!" he says as he dodges the last pothole and brings the truck to a stop. After twenty miles of the worst washboard road the country has to offer, you're just happy to have arrived.

You place your sandaled feet on solid ground and take a deep breath. The smells of autumn are at once sweet and earthy and full of the aroma of moisture and living things. A cool breeze blows in your face, soft and gentle. What a nice change, what a welcome relief from the tension and hustle of all you've left behind this weekend. It's just you and your husband, as he promised over a month ago.

You look around. What passes for the road you just traveled ends abruptly here. Over the last hour, bad asphalt gave way to gravel, which gave way, in turn, to the rutted two-track you see beside you. Ahead, the ruts continue, but it'll be on foot if you're to go any further. The old beater truck stands here, engine off but still ticking from the trip. Your husband closes the driver's door and comes around the rear to join you.

"How's my pretty lady?" he asks as he wraps his arms around you and places a kiss on your cheek from behind. "Tired, huh? Come on. Let's get the stuff. We'll be able to relax better once the tent's up."

He takes the two packs from the back of the truck and helps you into yours, then leads the way through the brush to the north. You roll up on the balls of your feet and give your pack a nudge, then pull the waist strap tight. Without looking back, you follow.

That was last night, and you hiked a short trail to a campsite off in the woods. Together you set up the tent, fixed a quick dinner, and fell asleep in each other's arms...

You wake with a start, something's missing, and you notice the sleeping bag is empty beside you. On his pillow is a handwritten note, which you collect. He must have crawled out early, as the sky is only now beginning to lighten.

You dress quickly, slip out of the tent, and follow the trail to the east.

Aspen Grove
You stand in the middle of a grove of aspen, which extends in all directions. Slender white trunks reach for the sky with long thin fingers, stroking the clouds that blow in the autumn breeze. Leaves of gold rattle as the winds shift, and here and there one floats to the ground to join others that crackle underfoot when you move. A narrow path disappears east into the trees, and a camping area is visible through a small opening to the west. North is a wide meadow.

I was better equipped to appreciate She’s Got a Thing for a Spring when I played it fairly recently than I was when I first encountered it quite some years ago. For it seems that the older I get, the more I just want to be outside walking. In fact, I replayed this game while my wife and I were on a walking holiday in Tuscany, on a morning when the rain was coming down so heavily that there wasn’t anything for it but to stay at our hotel. I sat there on our covered balcony for several hours with my laptop and She’s Got a Thing for a Spring, while the rain pattered and the thunder boomed. I can’t imagine a more perfect soundtrack for this game. Then the storm blew itself out and we went walking again for real.

In She’s Got a Thing for a Spring, which took fourth place in the 1997 IF Comp, you play a wife whose husband has arranged a special treat for your fifth wedding anniversary: a visit to a hidden hot spring somewhere in Colorado or thereabouts. Just to keep it interesting — and to give us a game — he’s first challenged her to find the spring for herself. The stakes are no higher than that. Nor, it must be said, do they need to be.

There’s more personal experience behind this particular interactive fiction than is commonplace in the genre. Beginning one year before and continuing for fourteen years after he released it, our author Brent VanFossen lived full-time with his wife Lorelle in a motor home, exploring the natural wonders of the Americas. He wrote She’s Got a Thing for a Spring, he tells us in his “about” text, as a gift for Lorelle on her birthday. His love for nature and for his wife comes through in every word. There’s a distinct whiff of sensuality to his descriptions of both; said wife is, after all, trying to join him at a hot spring for a secret, skinny-dipping, midnight tryst. In some other games where a male author has tried to embody a female protagonist, it’s gone horribly wrong, coming across as handsy adolescent leering. But this is not that. It’s sexy but not raunchy, sensual but not exploitive. Just the way these things ought to be, in other words.

She’s Got a Thing for a Spring garnered a lot of attention back in the day for the one non-player character with whom you can interact extensively, who is actually not the husband. (He shows up in the flesh only for the last couple of turns.) Said character is rather a humble fellow named Bob, a grandfatherly sort who’s retired to a quiet life in a little cabin in the woods. You can talk to him about an impressive number of topics, both relevant and irrelevant to your quest, as he putters about his house, sweeping the porch, repairing an old rocking chair, picking lettuce and tomatoes and strawberries, making sandwiches for lunch and strawberry shortcake for dessert, fixing a loose plank and re-caulking his windows, painting a picture in watercolors. Throughout, he natters away pleasantly about his chores and about bigger subjects, such as the wife he lost (“Cancer got her, and we never even knew it until it was too late”) and the brother who is coming for a visit soon (“Joe’s an engineer, works on all those commercial jet airplanes in the Northwest”). This is a man who has clearly known pain and loss, yet also one who is completely at peace with himself and his life. Some of that serenity rubs off on the player who spends time with him — or it did on this player, at least. Plus, his strawberry shortcake really is excellent; I tried the recipe that is described step by step in the game after we came home from Italy.

But as special and technically impressive as Bob is, the real magic of this game is the immersion in nature that it provides, which is as complete as the protagonist’s eventual immersion in the spring of its title. You start off with a book — A Field Guide to the Natural History of the Mountainous Regions — already in your possession. You can look up in its pages any of the flora and fauna you encounter during your hiking, to learn a bit more about it from a scientific point of view. Or you can forget about science and its facts and figures for once in your life and just take in the natural world that’s all around you.

The puzzles here do their job by giving structure and motivation to your wanderings. They’re fun to solve whilst being very much in tune with the pastoral atmosphere of their surroundings. There are a few jarring deaths that might have been better elided — you can get yourself gored to death by a bull moose if you aren’t careful — but those are about the only places where the author puts a foot wrong. This is a game about the quiet moments, about peace and beauty and love rather than war and strife and hatred, about the best parts of us rather than the worst. It’s a pity that it’s the only piece of interactive fiction that Brent VanFossen ever wrote. We could use a lot more games like it.


Babel by Ian Finley
Estimated Play Time: four hours
PLAY ONLINE

Black.
White. Cold.
Dry.
The sun is just about to rise on latitude 74. In the darkness the last stars
pierce the air and the arctic wind is a dying songbird. Below the snow dunes,
you are waking. Something is wrong.

North End
One by one, your senses speak to you. There is one absolute: cold. The
hard surface you're lying on is cold, the thin gown thrown over your body is
cold, the disinfectant-tinged air is cold, the darkness around you is cold.
Even your mind is cold and empty. Where are you? Who are you? You feel the
warm edge of a memory, but it fades as you approach. Slowly, your joints
bulging with ache, you get to your feet and look around.

You're standing in a cold, dimly lit hall which runs south toward a feeble light and terminates at a door to the north, out of which juts a weird device. Next to the door, in the northeast corner, is a heavy bulkhead, and you can just make out a third door on the west wall.

Babel is the first of three games that were authored between 1997 and 2000 by Ian Finley, a professional playwright, actor, and theater instructor. As a game with points and puzzles and most of the other standard accoutrements of the traditional text adventure, it is by far the most conventional of the trio. It placed second in the 1997 IF Comp.

Babel’s setting and premise verge on the clichéd. It takes place in an isolated polar research complex where Horrible Things transpire, a staple premise for science fiction and horror stretching back many, many decades. Yet the game serves as proof that execution will always trump whole-cloth invention. Few works of narrative art have done claustrophobic dread better than this one.

There is an interesting twist to the premise here. The Horrible Things in question have already happened as the game begins, when you come to consciousness shivering in the frigid air inside a complex that is now inhabited only by the corpses of your former colleagues. (Yes, an amnesic protagonist is an even more hackneyed cliché than the isolated research complex gone wrong, but remember what I said about execution.) As you begin to explore, knowledge of what happened comes back to you in the form of sudden flashes of memory that are like psychotic breaks, so jarring and traumatic are they. The sense of foreboding — of dawning knowledge that you’d prefer not to have — mounts and mounts as you solve a series of quite simple, straightforward puzzles to gain access to more and more of the complex and unlock more and more of your own unconscious. At last, it all comes to a head in a hair-raisingly twisted ending.

Babel did garner some criticism in its day for taking the easy way out with its storytelling. Relying on the classic gambit of uncovering a backstory rather than participating in a full-blown drama in the here and now lets it sidestep most of the difficulties of doing elaborate plotting through the mechanisms of text and parser. Yet what another critic might call a cop-out, I call making smart use of the tools at one’s disposal; ironic though it is to say this about a medium that likes to go by the name of “interactive fiction,” novelistic storytelling isn’t what parser-driven games tend to do best. Tying Babel’s story so closely to exploration — something interactive fiction does do very well — strikes me as thoroughly sensible.

I certainly can’t argue with the results here. Babel is a masterclass in tension, dread, and atmosphere, the perfect game to play in front of the fire on some cold, dark winter night when the snow is piling up alarmingly high on the other side of the window.


Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin
Estimated Play Time: four hours
PLAY ONLINE

On the whole, it was worth the trip. The plains really were broad and grain-gold, if scarred with fences and agricultural crawlers. The mountains were overwhelming. And however much of the capital city is crusted with squat brick and faceless concrete hulks, there are still flashes of its historic charm. You've seen spires above the streets -- tiny green parks below tenements -- hidden jewels of fountains beyond walls. Any bland alley can conceal balconies wrought into iron gardens, fiery mosaics, a tree or bed of flowers nurtured by who knows who.

This alley, however, is a total washout. It ends in flat bare dirty brick, and you've found nothing but a door which lacks even the courtesy of a handle. Maybe you should call it a day.

End of Alley
It's a narrow dead end here, with walls rising oppressively high in three directions. The alley is quite empty, bare even of trash. (Your guidebook warned you: the police are as efficient about litter laws as about everything else they do.) You can retreat to the south.

A plain metal door faces you to the east, near the alley's end. It's firmly shut.

Following the example of Paul O’Brian, I don’t hesitate for a moment to stand Andrew Plotkin up alongside Mike Roberts and Graham Nelson as one of the people who did the most to keep the humble text adventure alive during the 1990s and beyond. In addition to a whole raft of vital technical and administrative contributions, he has written more important and highly lauded games over a longer span of time than anyone else. Many of them are slyly subversive; he has a gift for translating the interior of his protagonists’ minds into landscapes that aren’t quite what they appear to be. If I was forced to point to a weakness in his work, however, I might say that he has sometimes made his player work a little too hard for her experience, especially during the early phase of his career. A minimalist by instinct, his early games don’t exactly bend over backward to welcome the player in. “Here I am,” they seem to say. “Come inside if you like. I don’t really care one way or the other.”

But Spider and Web doesn’t have that problem, if problem it be. The deft opening above, seemingly written from the point of view of an adventurous tourist on a visit to an unnamed Eastern European country during the Cold War era, definitely has no trouble capturing my interest. Coincidentally or not, this game, which Plotkin released in February of 1998, is still regarded by many or most text-adventure aficionados as his masterpiece. I count myself among their number.

Spider and Web is an exploration of the old fictional trope of the unreliable narrator, carried out in a way that would be impossible in a non-interactive medium. I can best explain some of what it’s doing by describing how its first handful of turns are likely play out for you. In the role of the tourist, you poke and fiddle with the inscrutably blank door in front of you for a while, until, seeing no way to get through it, you walk off to discover what else lies to the south. As soon as you do so, a “glaring light” appears before your eyes, and you find yourself in an interrogation chamber. “Don’t be absurd,” says your interrogator. “You’re no more a sightseer than the Old Tree in Capitol Square; and if you’d had enough sense to walk away from that door, you wouldn’t be here. You’re going to start by telling me how you got through that door.”

And then you’re thrown back to the start of the game. But this time the opening text is subtly different.

On the whole, it was worth the trip. The plains really were broad and grain-gold, if scarred with fences and agricultural crawlers. The mountains were overwhelming. And however much of the capital city is scarred with squat brick and faceless concrete hulks, there are still flashes of its historic charm.

This alley, however, has no time for charm. It ends in flat bare dirty brick, and a door which lacks even the courtesy of a handle. Not that you'll wait on courtesy.

End of Alley
It's a narrow dead end here, with walls rising oppressively high in three directions. The alley is quite empty, bare even of trash. (You're sure the police are as efficient about litter laws as about everything else they do.) You can retreat to the south.

A plain metal door faces you to the east, near the alley's end. It's firmly shut.

From here on, you keep trying to tell your interrogator a story that minimizes your exposure as a foreign agent and saboteur, and he keeps calling you out on it, forcing you to change the details.

Until, that is, deep into the game, when you arrive at the moment that changes everything. People tend to refer to this moment as simply The Puzzle. It’s not an enormously difficult puzzle, but it’s nonetheless been called, with no hyperbole whatsoever, the best text-adventure puzzle of all time, all of the games of Infocom included. It’s far too brilliant to spoil here, but suffice to say that, when the light bulb does goes off in your head and you feverishly type the necessary command and see that you were right, you’ll be jumping out of your chair and pumping your fist as if you’ve just defeated the last boss in Dark Souls. The roles of the spider and the insect trapped in its web will have reversed themselves, and it will feel amazing.

After that, Spider and Web is just a chase scene, albeit a very well-executed one. But my, what a genius conceit comes before it, and what a genius puzzle to bring the conceit to its perfect fruition. Epistemology was never so much fun.

(A quick programming note: an extended interview with Andrew Plotkin is coming to this site soon.)


Anchorhead by Michael Gentry
Estimated Play Time: ten hours
PLAY ONLINE

November, 1997.

You take a deep breath of salty air as the first raindrops begin to spatter the pavement, and the swollen, slate-colored clouds that blanket the sky mutter ominous portents amongst themselves over the little coastal town of Anchorhead.

Squinting up into the glowering storm, you wonder how everything managed to happen so fast. The strange phone call over a month ago, from a lawyer claiming to represent the estate of some distant branch of Michael's family, was bewildering enough in itself... but then the sudden whirlwind of planning and decisions, legal details and travel arrangements, the packing up and shipping away of your entire home, your entire life...

Now suddenly here you are, after driving for the past two days straight, over a thousand miles away from the familiar warmth of Texas, getting ready to move into the ancestral mansion of a clan of relatives so far removed that not even Michael has ever heard of them. And you've only been married since June and none of this was any of your idea in the first place, and already it's starting to rain.

These days, you often find yourself feeling confused and uprooted.

You shake yourself and force the melancholy thoughts from your head, trying to focus on the errand at hand. You're to meet with the real estate agent and pick up the keys to your new house while Michael runs across town to take care of some paperwork at the university. He'll be back to pick you up in a few minutes, and then the two of you can begin the long, precarious process of settling in.

A sullen belch emanates from the clouds, and the rain starts coming down harder -- fat, cold drops smacking loudly against the cobblestones. Shouldn't it be snowing in New England at this time of year? With a sigh, you open your umbrella.

Outside the Real Estate Office
A grim little cul-de-sac, tucked away in a corner of the claustrophobic tangle of narrow, twisting avenues that largely constitute the older portion of Anchorhead. Like most of the streets in this city, it is ancient, shadowy, and leads essentially nowhere. The lane ends here at the real estate agent's office, which lies to the east, and winds its way back toward the center of town to the west. A narrow, garbage-choked alley opens to the southeast.

“Anyone who had ever read anything by H.P. Lovecraft, or even stood downwind of someone who has, will immediately recognize his influence throughout this game,” writes Michael Gentry in his introductory notes for Anchorhead. And indeed, this sprawling game, which Gentry released in May of 1998, is to my mind the definitive work of digital Lovecraftia, easily outdoing the likes of The Lurking Horror and Alone in the Dark.

Like all of the best Lovecraft homages, Anchorhead succeeds by embracing the best parts of its inspiration and binning the worst. Our protagonist here is a strong, capable woman, something that was well beyond the most fevered imaginings of old Howard himself. Along with the rampant misogyny, gone too is the almost unbelievably virulent racism that is at the core of so much of the man’s output. And I’m almost equally happy to be able to say that Gentry is adept at capturing the flavor of Lovecraft’s prose without descending into the pseudo-eighteenth-century word salads for which his inspiration is so famous. Yet the horror at the heart of Anchorhead is the same existential dread, the same indelible product of the modern secular condition onto which Lovecraft stumbled. It isn’t the horror of malevolent godlike entities; it is the horror of godlike entities who care about human beings no more than we care about the ants we trample underfoot.

You play a young wife, married less than half a year, whose husband, a soft-spoken professor of history, has just received an unexpected inheritance from relatives he never knew he had in the New England harbor town of Anchorhead. So, the two of you have upped stakes to move halfway across the country, into a palatial if rather sinister-looking abode at the edge of town. But now your husband is starting to behave strangely, almost as if he’s fallen under some sort of spell.

The core of this game’s strange allure is the downtrodden town of Anchorhead itself. As you play, you can see its sad gray walls and cobblestones under its sad gray skies; hear the forlorn cawing of seagulls and the background hum of the waves; feel cold rain on your hair and wet moss on your hands; taste the sour sea breeze; smell the stale tobacco of the sulky old men who spend their days drinking up the gloom in the world’s least cozy tavern. Few places in interactive fiction have ever been as thoroughly realized as this one. It’s deliciously repulsive.

Add onto this geographical framework the plot, which is the definition of a slow burn. You spend the first half or more of the game mainly conducting research, uncovering more and more ominous details about your husband’s cursed heritage. Finally, your mounting forebodings explode into some frantic scenes of terror. Even in the game’s latter half, however, Gentry understands that effective horror is a matter of tension and release. He knows when to pour it on and when to ease the pressure, to let you catch your breath and recover your frazzled wits before your next peek into the abyss.

Anchorhead does a superb job of integrating its puzzles, if that’s what we wish to call them, into this vivid setting and unfolding plot. They’re never arbitrary, but consistently driven by your need to find out more. Then, once you’ve found out all too much, you have to find a way to survive the forces unleashed against you, to save your husband from a fate worse than death, and possibly to save the entire planet while you’re at it. If you read through the fruits of your research carefully and do the thing that seems most logical in some admittedly awful circumstances, you’ll find that that thing generally works about as well as can be expected.

Play it, live it, and learn to love its eldritch blasphemies. Scary text adventures — heck, ludic horror in general — simply don’t get any better than Anchorhead, folks.

(Do note that, in addition to the free version from 1998, Michael Gentry made available an enhanced twentieth-anniversary edition of this landmark game in 2018, with additional scenes, puzzles, and details, plus 50 illustrations to accompany the text. He’s also tinkered with the design to remove some unwinnable situations and added some features to make the game more newbie friendly in general. I haven’t played this version yet, but I have no reason to doubt that it makes a great game even better. If I was playing Anchorhead for the first time, this is definitely the version I’d go for. The price of $10 is very reasonable for a game of this size and scope.)


The Plant by Michael J. Roberts
Estimated Play Time: five hours
PLAY ONLINE

You're just starting to doze off when a jerking motion brings you back to
alertness. You look over to see your boss, Mr. Teeterwaller, struggling to
steer the car onto the shoulder as the engine dies. You can see that all of
the dashboard lights are on as the car jerks to a stop.


This is turning into a fine business trip. First Mr. Teeterwaller insists on
making the five-hour car trip in the middle of the night so the company won't
have to pay for a hotel, then you spend an hour stuck behind a convoy of slow
trucks on Teeterwaller's two-lane supposed short-cut, and now his aging
bargain-basement car strands you out in the middle of nowhere.

Teeterwaller turns off the headlights and turns on the hazard lights. "I just had this thing in the shop," he mumbles.

In the car
The Toyunchknisk Piglet was imported from Blottnya during the brief period
between the fall of the old iron-fisted regime and the ethnic unrest that
divided the tiny country into several even tinier countries whose names you
can't recall, since the press lost interest several years ago. The car is
almost comically spartan, so it's just like your boss to own one. The only
amenity the dashboard offers is a glove compartment; no radio, no air
conditioner, no console armrest, no cup-holders.

You're sitting in the rather uncomfortable passenger's seat. The driver's door is closed, and your door is closed.

Sitting on the back seat is a jacket, a map, a Project Tyche manual, and a magazine. The ignition seems to contain a car key.

Your boss Mr. Teeterwaller is here.

You're carrying your temporary ID card.

Mike Roberts’s The Plant, which took third place in the 1998 IF Competition in spite of a considerable number of complaints that it was “too big for the Comp,” is in some ways the most old-school game in this roundup, a sturdy puzzlefest without any overt agenda beyond that of entertaining you. In another sense, though, it’s the most inextricably bound to the late 1990s. For it positively radiates the influence of The X-Files, which was right at the zenith of its popularity at the time this game was released. In terms of plot and setting, The Plant plays like one of the show’s more comedic, postmodern episodes — perhaps one of those written by Darin Morgan or Vince Gilligan, the sort where you never quite know where earnestness ends and satire begins.

The plant of the title isn’t the kind that grows in dirt, but rather a strange factory complex that you stumble upon on a road trip with your boss, the skinflint Mr. Teeterwaller, in the latter’s Toyunchknisk Piglet, a car which makes a Yugo seem like a Mercedes. The tropes of 1990s conspiracy culture are rolled out one by one: desolate desert highways, convoys of unmarked trucks driving through the dead of night carrying who knows what, anonymous men in black, impossible technologies that seem unlikely to be of terrestrial origin, riddles piled upon mysteries piled upon enigmas. A ufologist magazine you find, demanding “an investigation into a previous investigation of an alleged coverup,” might easily have been found in the X-Files episode “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space.”

It’s all fodder for a well-crafted, good-natured, slightly goofy text adventure of the sort at which Mike Roberts excels. There are a lot of really enjoyable puzzles here, not too hard but not too trivial either, and always meticulously fair. The Plant breaks no new ground whatsoever, but it does provide a rollicking good time from start to finish. Its secret weapon is Mr. Teeterwaller, who follows you around over dune and dale, up ladders and elevators and scaffolds, mumbling and fretting all the while but never abandoning you. He seems useless — until suddenly he isn’t.

In his review of The Plant, Paul O’Brian recommended it most of all to those who were “a little impatient with all the growing that the medium of interactive fiction is doing, and long for a good old-fashioned Infocom-style thrill ride.” Although O’Brian’s overall review is very positive, that sentence is too dismissive by half; the sort of game we have here is exactly the one that the medium of text and parser was invented to provide, and is still the one for which it is most intrinsically suited. The Plant’s stolid old-school approach has aged better than that of many of the games that once thought they represented the future of the medium.


Photopia by Adam Cadre
Estimated Play Time: one hour
PLAY ONLINE

Speeding down Montgomery Boulevard
The streetlights are bright. Unbearably bright. You have to squint as hard as you can to keep your retinas from bursting into flame.

"Welcome back to the land of the LIVING, bud," Rob says. "You planning to stick around for a while or you gonna pass out again? Cause one thing I've learned about chicks is that they actually DON'T LIKE IT when you pass out on them in the middle of gettin' it on. You hear me? So if that's, like, your PLAN, then I'm droppin' you off and showin' up solo."

You don't exactly remember where the day went, but as you listen to Rob rant on, bits of it start to float back to you: a day on the slopes, the brisk February wind against your face; polishing off a keg back at the lodge; those two girls you and Rob had hit it off with, the ones who'd given you their address in town. "We all should get together sometime!" they'd said. Of course, Rob insisted that by "sometime" they'd meant "later tonight." You hadn't been so sure, but then you'd blacked out before you could argue the point.

How Rob came to be driving your car you're not exactly sure. Apparently he couldn't wait till you were sober enough to drive it yourself. From the way he's weaving all over the road, he also apparently couldn't wait till HE was sober enough to drive it, either.

Rob checks himself out in the rearview mirror. "Man, I am one handsome dude," he says approvingly.

And so we come to the smallest game on this list, which is nevertheless The Big One of 1998, even more so than Spider and Web or Anchorhead. In fact, Adam Cadre’s Photopia is without a doubt the best-known and most-played parser-based interactive fiction of the entire post-Infocom era. The winner of the 1998 IF Comp, it has today twice as many ratings as any other game on The Interactive Fiction Database, and has been written up countless times in magazines and websites that normally don’t cover this sort of thing. Thousands upon thousands of people over the years have found it a profoundly moving work of literature. I would never presume to tell these people that they’re wrong to feel as they do. Yet I do have to say that I’m somewhat less smitten.

Photopia is about a teenage girl named Alley, but you never inhabit her directly. Instead you see her from the perspectives of other people in her life. You spend the most time as Wendy, a much younger girl whom she babysits. The two make up stories together in which Wendy is an astronaut or an undersea explorer. As they do so, Alley effectively becomes the computer game with which you are interacting, a gimmick which hearkens to the text adventure’s origins in the shared story spaces of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons. “Read you a story?” asks Alley of her charge. “What fun would that be? I’ve got a better idea: let’s tell a story together.”

But there are also vignettes from the real world, in which you see Alley through the eyes of her mother, her father, and the boy at school who has a crush on her. Most searingly, you briefly inhabit Wendy’s father, who is driving Alley home from her babysitting gig when his car gets side-swiped by a drunk driver, killing his young passenger instantly.

Photopia is almost completely puzzle-less. That said, the one interaction that might be construed as a puzzle is the most transcendent moment in the game. As with The Puzzle in Spider and Web, the solution to this one comes in a dazzling rush of insight. It serves as the ideal therapy for anyone who’s tired to death of the boring, drop-em-and-map-em mazes that are found in so many old-school text adventures. To say any more would be to spoil another of the most magical moments in all of interactive fiction.

Otherwise, though, Photopia falls a little flat for me, no matter how hard I try to love it like so many other people do. Its one amazing puzzle and the meta-textual cleverness of the story you and Alley tell together can’t overcome the emotional immaturity of the fiction as a whole. This is the poison pill that comes with taking text adventures up-market. When you invite me to consider your piece as a game, I compare it with other games; when you invite me to consider it as deathless fiction, I start to compare it with truly deathless fictions.

At bottom, Alley is as much a male-adolescent fantasy as Lara Croft. She’s a nerd-friendly version of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl: “She’s beautiful and nice and she likes science!” We never learn a single bad or even ambivalent thing about her. She’s sweet and loving to her parents, the kind of girl who likes to do science projects in the garage and lie on a blanket at night beside her father cataloging the stars overhead. She navigates the savage politics of high school with preternatural aplomb, being friends with all and cruel to none. And, as we’ve seen, she’s never too tired or distracted to spin endlessly imaginative yarns for the little girl she babysits. Simply put, she’s too perfect to be real. Has she no discontents at all? Is she never in a bad mood? Has she any inner life at all? To mow down this Hallmark movie version of a teenage girl with a drunk driver at the end smacks more of bathos than pathos.

Adam Cadre was a very young man when he wrote Photopia. I fancy that it shows. Tellingly, the most successful part of the story is the one written from the point of view of a character who is, I suspect, the closest to the author himself: the boy in Alley’s school who’s crazy about her. I can remember seeing the girls I crushed on when I was his age in just the way he does: as magical creatures, as far above the mundane day-to-day of life as the angels painted on the ceiling of a cathedral. What I didn’t understand back then was that, in insisting on seeing them this way, I was refusing to see them as fully actualized flesh-and-blood human beings just like me. I don’t get the feeling that Cadre fully understood this yet at the time he wrote Photopia.

Still, stickily sentimental though I find Photopia to be, by no means do I want to discourage you from playing it. Even if you come away seeing it as a snapshot of a certain stage in male rather than female adolescence, as I tend to do, that too has a resonance all its own. (Ah, to be sixteen again… an age at which I would probably have adored this game, had it existed then.) Then, too, there’s no denying Photopia’s importance to the history of its medium. And it has the virtue of being short, with that one magical moment that’s well worth investing an hour of your life to experience. As for the rest of it… who knows? You might find that you unabashedly love it. Plenty of people whose opinions are every bit as valid as mine do.



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Posted by on November 22, 2024 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

 

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Grim Fandango

My one big regret was the PlayStation version [of Broken Sword]. No one thought it would sell, so we kept it like the PC version. In hindsight, I think if we had introduced direct control in this game, it would have been enormous.

— Charles Cecil of Revolution Software, speaking from the Department of Be Careful What You Wish For


One day in June of 1995, Tim Schafer came to work at LucasArts and realized that, for the first time in a long time, he didn’t have anything pressing to do. Full Throttle, his biker movie of an adventure game, had been released several weeks before. Now, all of the initial crush of interviews and marketing logistics was behind him. A mountain had been climbed. So, as game designers do, he started to think about what his next Everest should be.

Schafer has told in some detail how he came up with the core ideas behind Grim Fandango over the course of that summer of 1995.

The truth is, I had part of the Fandango idea before I did Full Throttle. I wanted to do a game that would feature those little papier-mâché folk-art skeletons from Mexico. I was looking at their simple shapes and how the bones were just painted on the outside, and I thought, “Texture maps! 3D! The bones will be on the outside! It’ll look cool!”

But then I was stuck. I had these skeletons walking around the Land of the Dead. So what? What did they do? Where were they going? What did they want? Who’s the main character? Who’s the villain? The mythology said that the dead walk the dark plane of the underworld known as Mictlān for four years, after which their souls arrive at the ninth plane, the land of eternal rest. Sounds pretty “questy” to me. There you have it: a game.

“Not cool enough,” said Peter Tscale, my lead artist. “A guy walking in a supernatural world? What’s he doing? Supernatural things? It just sounds boring to me.”

So, I revamped the story. Adventure games are all fantasies really, so I had to ask myself, “Who would people want to be in a game? What would people want to do?” And in the Land of the Dead, who would people rather be than Death himself? Being the Grim Reaper is just as cool as being a biker, I decided. And what does the Grim Reaper do? He picks up people who have died and carts them over from the other world. Just like a driver of a taxi or limo.

Okay, so that’s Manny Calavera, our main character. But who’s the bad guy? What’s the plot? I had just seen Chinatown, and I really liked the whole water-supply/real-estate scam that Noah Cross had going there, so of course I tried to rip that off and have Manny be a real-estate salesman who got caught up in a real-estate scandal. Then he was just like the guys in Glengarry Glen Ross, always looking for the good leads. But why would Hector Lemans, my villain, want real estate? Why would anyone? They’re dead! They’re only souls. What do souls in the Land of the Dead want?

They want to get out! They want safe passage out, just like in Casablanca! The Land of the Dead is a transitory place, and everybody’s waiting around for their travel papers. So Manny is a travel agent, selling tickets on the big train out of town, and Hector’s stealing the tickets…

The missing link between Full Throttle and Grim Fandango is Manny’s chauffeur and mechanic Glottis, a literal speed demon.

This, then, became the elevator pitch for Grim Fandango. Begin with the rich folklore surrounding Mexico’s Day of the Dead, a holiday celebrated each year just after Halloween, which combines European Christian myths about death and the afterlife with the older, indigenous ones that still haunt the Aztec ruins of Teopanzolco. Then combine it with classic film noir to wind up with Raymond Chandler in a Latino afterlife. It was nothing if not a strikingly original idea for an adventure game. But there was also one more, almost equally original part of it: to do it in 3D.

To hear Tim Schafer tell the story, the move away from LucasArts’s traditional pixel art and into the realm of points, polygons, and textures was motivated by his desire to deliver a more cinematic experience. By no means does this claim lack credibility; as you can gather by reading what he wrote above, Schafer was and is a passionate film buff, who tends to resort to talking in movie titles when other forms of communication fail him. The environments in previous LucasArts adventure games — even the self-consciously cinematic Full Throttle — could only be shown from the angle the pixel artists had chosen to drawn them from. In this sense, they were like a theatrical play, or a really old movie, from the time before Orson Welles emancipated his camera and let it begin to roam freely through his sets in Citizen Kane. By using 3D, Schafer could become the Orson Welles of adventure games; he would be able to deliver dramatic angles and closeups as the player’s avatar moved about, would be able to put the player in his world rather than forever forcing her to look down on it from on-high. This is the story he still tells today, and there’s no reason to believe it isn’t true enough, as far as it goes.

Nevertheless, it’s only half of the full story. The other half is a messier, less idealistic tale of process and practical economics.

Reckoned in their cost of production per hour of play time delivered, adventure games stood apart from any other genre in their industry, and not in a good way. Building games entirely out of bespoke, single-use puzzles and assets was expensive in contrast to the more process-intensive genres. As time went on and gamers demanded ever bigger, prettier adventures, in higher resolutions with more colors, this became more and more of a problem. Already in 1995, when adventure games were still selling very well, the production costs that were seemingly inherent to the genre were a cause for concern. And the following year, when the genre failed to produce a single million-plus-selling breakout hit for the first time in half a decade, they began to look like an existential threat. At that point, LucasArts’s decision to address the issue proactively in Grim Fandango by switching from pixel art to 3D suddenly seemed a very wise move indeed. For a handful of Silicon Graphics workstations running 3D-modelling software could churn out images far more quickly than an army of pixel artists, at a fraction of the cost per image. If the graphics that resulted lacked some of the quirky, hand-drawn, cartoon-like personality that had marked LucasArts’s earlier adventure games, they made up for that by virtue of their flexibility: a scene could be shown from a different angle just by changing a few parameters instead of having to redraw it from scratch. This really did raise the prospect of making the more immersive games that Tim Schafer desired. But from a bean counter’s point of view, the best thing about it was the cost savings.

And there was one more advantage as well, one that began to seem ever more important as time went on and the market for adventure games running on personal computers continued to soften. Immersive 3D was more or less the default setting of the Sony PlayStation, which had come roaring out of Japan in 1995 to seize the title of the most successful games console of the twentieth century just before the curtain fell on that epoch. In addition to its 3D hardware, the PlayStation sported a CD drive, memory cards for saving state, and a slightly older typical user than the likes of Nintendo and Sega. And yet, although a number of publishers ported their 2D computer-born adventure games to the PlayStation, they never felt entirely at home there, having been designed for a mouse rather than a game controller.[1]A mouse was available as an accessory for the PlayStation, but it was never very popular. A 3D adventure game with a controller-friendly interface might be a very different proposition. If it played its cards right, it would open the door to an installed base of customers five to ten times the size of the extant market for games on personal computers.

Working with 3D graphics in the late 1990s required some clever sleight of hand if they weren’t to end up looking terrible. Grim Fandango’s masterstroke was to make all of its characters — like the protagonist Manny Calavera, whom you see above — mere skeletons, whose faces are literally painted onto their skulls. (The characters are shown to speak by manipulating the texture maps that represent their faces, not by manipulating the underlying 3D models themselves.) This approach gave the game a look reminiscent of another of its cinematic inspirations, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, whilst conveniently avoiding all of the complications of trying to render pliant flesh. A win-win, as they say. Or, as Tim Schafer said: “Instead of fighting the tech limitations of 3D, you have to embrace them and turn them into a style.”

But I’m afraid I’ve gotten slightly ahead of myself. This constellation of ideas, affordances, problems, and solutions was still in a nascent form in November of 1995, when LucasArts hired a young programmer fresh out of university by the name of Bret Mogilefsky. Mogilefsky was a known quantity already, having worked at LucasArts as a tester on and off while he was earning his high-school and university diplomas. Now, he was entrusted with the far more high-profile task of making SCUMM, LucasArts’s venerable adventure engine, safe for 3D.

After struggling for a few months, he concluded that this latest paradigm shift was just too extreme for an engine that had been created on a Commodore 64 circa 1986 and ported and patched from there. He would have to tear SCUMM down so far in order to add 3D functionality that it would be easier and cleaner simply to make a new engine from scratch. He told his superiors this, and they gave him permission to do so — albeit suspecting all the while, Mogilefsky is convinced, that he would eventually realize that game engines are easier envisioned than implemented and come crawling back to SCUMM. By no means was he the first bright spark at LucasArts who thought he could reinvent the adventuring wheel.

But he did prove the first one to call his bosses’ bluff. The engine that he called GrimE (“Grim Engine,” but pronounced like the synonym for “dirt”) used a mixture of pre-rendered and real-time-rendered 3D. The sets in which Manny and his friends and enemies played out their dramas would be the former; the aforementioned actors themselves would be the latter. GrimE was a piebald beast in another sense as well: that of cheerfully appropriating whatever useful code Mogilefsky happened to find lying around the house at LucasArts, most notably from the first-person shooter Jedi Knight.

Like SCUMM before it, GrimE provided relatively non-technical designers like Tim Schafer with a high-level scripting language that they could use themselves to code all of the mechanics of plot and puzzles. Mogilefsky adapted for this task Lua, a new, still fairly obscure programming language out of Brazil. It was an inspired choice. Elegant, learnable, and yet infinitely and easily extendible, Lua has gone on to become a staple language of modern game development, to be found today in such places as the wildly popular Roblox platform.

The most frustrating aspects of GrimE from a development perspective all clustered around the spots where its two approaches to 3D graphics rubbed against one another, producing a good deal of friction in the process. If, for example, Manny was to drink a glass of whiskey, the pre-rendered version of the glass that was part of the background set had to be artfully swapped with its real-time-rendered incarnation as soon as Manny began to interact with it. Getting such actions to look seamless absorbed vastly more time and energy than anyone had expected it to.

In fact, if the bean counters had been asked to pass judgment, they would have had a hard time labeling GrimE a success at all under their metrics. Grim Fandango was in active development for almost three full years, and may have ended up costing as much as $3 million. This was at least two and a half times as much as Full Throttle had cost, and placed it in the same ballpark as The Curse of Monkey Island, LucasArts’s last and most audiovisually lavish SCUMM adventure, which was released a year before Grim Fandango. Further, despite employing a distinctly console-like control scheme in lieu of pointing and clicking with the mouse, Grim Fandango would never make it to the PlayStation; GrimE ended up being just too demanding to be made to work on such limited hardware.[2]Escape from Monkey Island, the only other game ever made using GrimE, was ported to the more capable PlayStation 2 in 2001.

All that aside, though, the new engine remained an impressive technical feat, and did succeed in realizing most of Tim Schafer’s aesthetic goals for it. Even the cost savings it apparently failed to deliver come with some mitigating factors. Making the first game with a new engine is always more expensive than making the ones that follow; there was no reason to conclude that GrimE couldn’t deliver real cost savings on LucasArts’s next adventure game. Then, too, for all that Grim Fandango wound up costing two and a half times as much as Full Throttle, it was also well over two and a half times as long as that game.

“Game production schedules are like flying jumbo jets,” says Tim Schafer. “It’s very intense at the takeoff and landing, but in the middle there’s this long lull.” The landing is the time of crunch, of course, and the crunch on Grim Fandango was protracted and brutal even by the industry’s usual standards, stretching out for months and months of sixteen- and eighteen-hour days. For by the beginning of 1998, the game was way behind schedule and way over budget, facing a marketplace that was growing more and more unkind to the adventure genre in general. This was not a combination to instill patience in the LucasArts executive suite. Schafer’s team did get the game done by the autumn of 1998, as they had been ordered to do in no uncertain terms, but only at a huge cost to their psychological and even physical health.

Bret Mogilefsky remembers coming to Schafer at one point to tell him that he just didn’t think he could go on like this, that he simply had to have a break. He was met with no sympathy whatsoever. To be fair, he probably shouldn’t have expected any. Crunch was considered par for the course in the industry during this era, and LucasArts was among the worst of its practitioners. Long hours spent toiling for ridiculously low wages — Mogilefsky was hired to be the key technical cog in this multi-million-dollar project for a salary of about $30,000 per year — were considered the price you paid for the privilege of working at The Star Wars Company.

Even setting aside the personal toll it took on the people who worked there, crunch did nothing positive for the games themselves. As we’ll see, Grim Fandango shows the scars of crunch most obviously in its dodgy puzzle design. Good puzzles result from a methodical, iterative process of testing and carefully considering the resulting feedback. Grim Fandango did not benefit from such a process, and this lack is all too plainly evident.

But before I continue making some of you very, very mad at me, let me take some time to note the strengths of Grim Fandango, which are every bit as real as its weaknesses. Indeed, if I squint just right, so that my eyes only take in its strengths, I have no problem understanding why it’s to be found on so many lists of “The Best Adventure Games Ever,” sometimes even at the very top.

There’s no denying the stuff that Grim Fandango does well. Its visual aesthetic, which I can best describe as 1930s Art Deco meets Mexican folk art meets 1940s gangster flick, is unforgettable. And it’s married to a script that positively crackles with wit and pathos. Our hero Manny is the rare adventure-game character who can be said to go through an actual character arc, who grows and evolves over the course of his story. The driving force behind the plot is his love for a woman named Meche. But his love isn’t the puppy love that Guybrush Threepwood has for Elaine in the Monkey Island games; the relationship is more nuanced, more adult, more complicated, and its ultimate resolution is all the more moving for that.

How do you create real stakes in a story where everyone is already dead? The Land of the Death’s equivalent of death is “sprouting,” in which a character is turned into a bunch of flowers and forced to live another life in that form. Why shouldn’t the dead fear life as much as the living fear death?

Tim Schafer did not grow up with the Latino traditions that are such an inextricable part of Grim Fandango. Yet the game never feels like the exercise in clueless or condescending cultural tourism it might easily have become. On the contrary, the setting feels full-bodied, lived-in, natural. The cause is greatly aided by a stellar cast of voice actors with just the right accents. The Hollywood veteran Tony Plana, who plays Manny, is particularly good, teasing out exactly the right blend of world-weary cynicism and tarnished romanticism. And Maria Canalas, who plays Meche, is equally perfect in her role. The non-verbal soundtrack by Peter McConnell is likewise superb, a mixture of mariachi music and cool jazz that shouldn’t work but does. Sometimes it soars to the forefront, but more often it tinkles away in the background, setting the mood. You’d only notice it if it was gone — but trust me, then you would really notice.

This is a big game as well as a striking and stylish one — in fact, by most reckonings the biggest adventure that LucasArts ever made. Each of its four acts, which neatly correspond to the four years that the average soul must spend wandering the underworld before going to his or her final rest, is almost big enough to be a self-contained game in its own right. Over the course of Grim Fandango, Manny goes from being a down-on-his-luck Grim Reaper cum travel agent to a nightlife impresario, from the captain of an ocean liner to a prisoner laboring in an underwater mine. The story does arguably peak too early; the second act, an extended homage to Casablanca with Manny in the role of Humphrey Bogart, is so beautifully realized that much of what follows is slightly diminished by the comparison. Be that as it may, though, it doesn’t mean any of what follows is bad.

The jump cut to Manny’s new life as a bar owner in the port city of Rubacava at the beginning of the second act is to my mind the most breathtaking moment of the game, the one where you first realize how expansive its scope and ambition really are.

All told, then, I have no real beef with anyone who chooses to label Grim Fandango an aesthetic masterpiece. If there was an annual award for style in adventure games, this game would have won it easily in 1998, just as Tim Schafer’s Full Throttle would have taken the prize for 1995. Sadly, though, it seems to me that the weaknesses of both games are also the same. In both of their cases, once I move beyond the aesthetics and the storytelling and turn to the gameplay, some of the air starts to leak out of the balloon.

The interactive aspects of Grim Fandango — you know, all that stuff that actually makes it a game — are dogged by two overarching sets of problems. The first is all too typical for the adventure genre: overly convoluted, often nonsensical puzzle design. Tim Schafer was always more intrinsically interested in the worlds, characters, and stories he dreamed up than he was in puzzles. This is fair enough on the face of it; he is very, very good at those things, after all. But it does mean that he needs a capable support network to ensure that his games play as well as they look and read. He had that support for 1993’s Day of the Tentacle, largely in the person of his co-designer Dave Grossman; the result was one of the best adventure games LucasArts ever made, a perfect combination of inspired fiction with an equally inspired puzzle framework. Unfortunately, he was left to make Full Throttle on his own, and it showed. Ditto Grim Fandango. For all that he loved movies, the auteur model was not a great fit for Tim Schafer the game designer.

Grim Fandango seldom gives you a clear idea of what it is you’re even trying to accomplish. Compare this with The Curse of Monkey Island, the LucasArts adventure just before this one, a game which seemed at the time to herald a renaissance in the studio’s puzzle designs. There, you’re always provided with an explicit set of goals, usually in the form of a literal shopping list. Thus even when the mechanics of the puzzles themselves push the boundaries of real-world logic, you at least have a pretty good sense of where you should be focusing your efforts. Here, you’re mostly left to guess what Tim Schafer would like to have happen to Manny next. You stumble around trying to shake something loose, trying to figure out what you can do and then doing it just because you can. By no means is it lost on me that this sense of confusion arises to a large extent because Grim Fandango is such a character-driven story, one which eschews the mechanistic tic-tac-toe of other adventure-game plots. But recognizing this irony doesn’t make it any less frustrating when you’re wandering around with no clue what the story wants from you.

Compounding the frustrations of the puzzles are the frustrations of the interface. You don’t use the mouse at all; everything is done with the numeric keypad, or, if you’re lucky enough to have one, a console-style controller. (At the time Grim Fandango was released, virtually no one playing games on computers did.) Grim Fandango’s mode of navigation is most reminiscent of the console-based JRPGs of its era, such as the hugely popular Final Fantasy VII, which sold over 10 million copies on the PlayStation during the late 1990s. Yet in practice it’s far more irritating, because you have to interact with the environment here on a much more granular level. LucasArts themselves referred to their method of steering Manny about as a “tank” interface, a descriptor which turns out to be all too descriptive. It really does feel like you’re driving a bulky, none too agile vehicle through an obstacle course of scenery.

Make no mistake: the 3D engine makes possible some truly striking views. But too often the designers prioritize visual aesthetics over playability.

In the final reckoning, then, an approach that is fine in a JRPG makes just about every aspect of an old-school, puzzle-solving adventure game — which is what Grim Fandango remains in form and spirit when you strip all of the details of its implementation away — more awkward and less fun. Instead of having hotspots in the environment that light up when you pass a mouse cursor over them, as you do in a SCUMM adventure, you have to watch Manny’s head carefully as you drive him around; when it turns to look in a certain direction, that means there’s something he can interact with there. Needless to say, it’s all too easy to miss a turn of his head, and thereby to miss something vital to your progress through the game.

The inventory system is also fairly excruciating. Instead of being able to bring up a screen showing all of the items Manny is carrying, you have to cycle through them one by one by punching a key or controller button over and over, listening to him drone out their descriptions over and over as you do so. This approach precludes using one inventory object on another one, cutting off a whole avenue of puzzle design.

Now, the apologists among you — and this game does have an inordinate number of them — might respond to these complaints of mine by making reference to the old cliché that, for every door that is closed in life (and presumably in games as well), another one is opened. And in theory, the new engine really does open a door to new types of puzzles that are more tactile and embodied, that make you feel more a part of the game’s world. To Tim Schafer’s credit, he does try to include these sorts of puzzles in quite a few places. To our detriment, though, they turn out to be the worst puzzles in the game, relying on finicky positioning and timing and giving no useful feedback when you get those things slightly wrong.

But even when Grim Fandango presents puzzles that could easily have been implemented in SCUMM, they’re made way more annoying than they ought to be by the engine and interface. When you’re reduced to that final adventurer’s gambit of just trying everything on everything, as you most assuredly will be from time to time here, the exercise takes many times longer than it would using SCUMM, what with having to laboriously drive Manny about from place to place.

Taken as a game rather than the movie it often seems more interested in being, Grim Fandango boils down to a lumpy stew of overthought and thoughtlessness. In the former category, there’s an unpleasant ideological quality to its approach, with its prioritization of some hazy ethic of 3D-powered “immersion” and its insistence that no visible interface elements whatsoever can appear onscreen, even when these choices actively damage the player’s experience. This is where Sid Meier can helpfully step in to remind us that it is the player who is meant to be having the fun in a game, not the designer.

The thoughtlessness comes in the lack of consideration of what kind of game Grim Fandango is meant to be. Like all big-tent gaming genres, the adventure genre subsumes a lot of different styles of game with different priorities. Some adventures are primarily about exploration and puzzle solving. And that’s fine, although one does hope that those games execute their puzzles better than this one does. But Grim Fandango is not primarily about its puzzles; it wants to take you on a ride, to sweep you along on the wings of a compelling story. And boy, does it have a compelling story to share with you. For this reason, it would be best served by streamlined puzzles that don’t get too much in the way of your progress. The ones we have, however, are not only frustrating in themselves but murder on the story’s pacing, undermining what ought to be Grim Fandango’s greatest strengths. A game like this one that is best enjoyed with a walkthrough open on the desk beside it is, in this critic’s view at least, a broken game by definition.

As with so many near-miss games, the really frustrating thing about Grim Fandango is that the worst of its problems could so easily have been fixed with just a bit more testing, a bit more time, and a few more people who were empowered to push back against Tim Schafer’s more dogmatic tendencies. For the 2015 remastered version of the game, Schafer did grudgingly agree to include an alternative point-and-click interface that is more like that of a SCUMM adventure. The results verge on the transformational. By no means does the addition of a mouse cursor remedy all of the infelicities of the puzzle design, but it does make battering your way through them considerably less painful. If my less-than-systematic investigations on YouTube are anything to go by, this so-old-it’s-new-again interface has become by far the most common way to play the game today.

The Grim Fandango remaster. Note the mouse cursor. The new interface is reportedly implemented entirely in in-engine Lua scripts rather than requiring any re-programming of the GrimE engine itself. This means that it would have been perfectly possible to include as an option in the original release.

In other places, the fixes could have been even simpler than revamping the interface. A shocking number of puzzles could have been converted from infuriating to delightful by nothing more than an extra line or two of dialog from Manny or one of the other characters. As it is, too many of the verbal nudges that do exist are too obscure by half and are given only once in passing, as part of conversations that can never be repeated. Hints for Part Four are to be found only in Part One; I defy even an elephant to remember them when the time comes to apply them. All told, Grim Fandango has the distinct odor of a game that no one other than those who were too close to it to see it clearly ever really tried to play before it was put in a box and shoved out the door. There was a time when seeking the feedback of outsiders was a standard part of LucasArts’s adventure-development loop. Alas, that era was long past by the time of Grim Fandango.

Nonetheless, Grim Fandango was accorded a fairly rapturous reception in the gaming press when it was released in the last week of October in 1998, just in time for Halloween and the Mexican Day of the Dead which follows it on November 1. Its story, characters, and setting were justifiably praised, while the deficiencies of its interface and puzzle design were more often than not relegated to a paragraph or two near the end of the review. This is surprising, but not inexplicable. There was a certain sadness in the trade press — almost a collective guilt — about the diminished prospects of the adventure game in these latter years of the decade. Meanwhile LucasArts was still the beneficiary of a tremendous amount of goodwill, thanks to the many classics they had served up during those earlier, better years for the genre as a whole. Grim Fandango was held up as a sort of standard bearer for the embattled graphic adventure, the ideal mix of tradition and innovation to serve as proof that the genre was still relevant in a post-Quake, post-Starcraft world.

For many years, the standard narrative had it that the unwashed masses of gamers utterly failed to respond to the magazines’ evangelism, that Grim Fandango became an abject failure in the marketplace. In more recent years, Tim Schafer has muddied those waters somewhat by claiming that the game actually sold close to half a million copies. I rather suspect that the truth is somewhere between these two extremes. Sales of a quarter of a million certainly don’t strike me as unreasonable once foreign markets are factored into the equation. Such a figure would have been enough to keep Grim Fandango from losing much if any money, but would have provided LucasArts with little motivation to make any more such boldly original adventure games. And indeed, LucasArts would release only one more adventure game of any stripe in their history. It would use the GrimE engine, but it would otherwise play it about as safe as it possibly could, by being yet another sequel to the venerable but beloved Secret of Monkey Island.

As I was at pains to note earlier, I do see what causes some people to rate Grim Fandango so highly, and I definitely don’t think any less of them for doing so. For my part, though, I’m something of a stickler on some points. To my mind, interactivity is the very quality that separates games from other forms of media, making it hard for me to pronounce a game “good” that botches it. I’ve learned to be deeply suspicious of games whose most committed fans want to talk about everything other than that which you the player actually do in them. The same applies when a game’s creators display the same tendency. Listening to the developers’ commentary tracks in the remastered edition of Grim Fandango (who would have imagined in 1998 that games would someday come with commentary tracks?), I was shocked by how little talk there was about the gameplay. It was all lighting and dialog beats and soundtrack stabs and Z-buffers instead — all of which is really, really important in its place, but none of which can yield a great game on its own. Tellingly, when the subject of puzzle design did come up, it always seemed to be in an off-hand, borderline dismissive way. “I don’t know how players are supposed to figure out this puzzle,” says Tim Schafer outright at one point. Such a statement from your lead designer is never a good sign.

But I won’t belabor the issue any further. Suffice to say that Grim Fandango is doomed to remain a promising might-have-been rather than a classic in my book. As a story and a world, it’s kind of amazing. It’s just a shame that the gameplay part of this game isn’t equally inspired.



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Sources: The book Grim Fandango: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide by Jo Ashburn. Retro Gamer 31 and 92; Computer Gaming World of November 1997, May 1998, and February 1999; Ultimate PC of August 1998. Plus the commentary track from the 2015 Grim Fandango remaster.

Online sources include The International House of Mojo’s pages on the game, the self-explanatory Grim Fandango Network, Gamespot’s vintage review of the game, and Daniel Albu’s YouTube conversation with Bret Mogilefsky.

And a special thank-you to reader Matt Campbell, who shared with me the audio of a talk that Bret Mogilefsky gave at the 2005 Lua Workshop, during which he explained how he used that language in GrimE.

Where to Get It: A modestly remastered version of Grim Fandango is available for digital purchase at GOG.com.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 A mouse was available as an accessory for the PlayStation, but it was never very popular.
2 Escape from Monkey Island, the only other game ever made using GrimE, was ported to the more capable PlayStation 2 in 2001.
 
 

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