Category Archives: Modern Times

I’m afraid I don’t have a standard article for you this week. I occasionally need to skip a Friday to store up an independent writer’s version of vacation time, and the beginning of a five-Friday month like this one is a good time to do that. That said, this does make a good chance to give you some updates on the latest goings-on here at Digital Antiquarian World Headquarters, and to solicit some feedback on a couple of things that have been on my mind of late. So, let me do that today, and I’ll be back with the usual fare next Friday. (Patreon supporters: don’t worry, this meta-article’s a freebie!)

First and foremost, I’m pleased to be able to release the latest volume of the growing ebook collection compiling the articles on this site, this one centering roughly — even more roughly than usual, in fact — on 1991. Volume 13 has been a long time coming because the last year has brought with it a lot of longer, somewhat digressive series on topics like Soviet computing and the battle over Tetris, the metamorphosis of Imagine Software into Psygnosis, the world of pre-World Wide Web commercial online services, and of course my recently concluded close reading of Civilization, along with the usual singletons on individual games and related topics. This ebook is by far the fattest one yet, and I think it contains some of the best work I’ve ever done; these are certainly, at any rate, some of the articles I’ve poured the most effort into. As usual, it exists only thanks to the efforts of Richard Lindner. He’s outdone himself this time, even providing fresh cover art to suit what he described to me as the newly “glamorous, visual” era of the 1990s. If you appreciate being able to read the blog in this way, feel free to send him a thank-you note at the email address listed on the title page of the ebook proper.

Next, I want to take this opportunity to clear up the current situation around Patreon, something I’ve neglected to do for an unconscionably long time. Many of you doubtless remember the chaos of last December, when Patreon suddenly announced changes to their financial model that would make a blog like this one, which relies mostly on small donations, much less tenable. I scrambled to find alternatives to Patreon for those who felt (justifiably) betrayed by the changes, and had just about settled on a service called Memberful when Patreon reversed course and went back to the old model after a couple of weeks of huge public outcry.

Despite sending some mixed messages in the weeks that followed that reversal, I haven’t ever implemented Memberful as an alternative funding model due to various nagging concerns: I’m worried about tech-support issues that must come with a bespoke solution, not happy about being forced to sell monthly rather than per-article subscriptions (meaning I have to feel guilty if due to some emergency I can’t publish four articles in any given month), and concerned about the complication and confusion of offering two separate subscription models — plus PayPal! — as funding solutions (just writing a FAQ to explain it all would take a full day or two!). In addition, a hard look at the numbers reveals that a slightly higher percentage of most pledges would go to third parties when using Memberful than happens with Patreon. It’s for all these reasons that, after much agonized back-and-forthing, I’ve elected to stay the course with Patreon alone as my main funding mechanism, taking them at their word that they’ll never again do do anything like what they did last December.

I do understand that some of you are less inclined to be forgiving, which is of course your right. For my part, even the shenanigans of last December weren’t quite enough to destroy the good will I have toward Patreon for literally changing my life by allowing me to justify devoting so much time and energy to this blog. (They were of course only the medium; I’m even more grateful to you readers!) At any rate, know that except for that one blip Patreon has always treated me very well, and that their processing fees are lower than I would pay using any other subscription service. And yeah, okay… maybe also keep your fingers crossed that I’ve made the right decision in giving them a second chance before I hit the panic button. Fool me once…

So, that’s where we stand with the Patreon situation, which can be summed up as sticking with the status quo for now.  But it’s not the only thing I’ve been a bit wishy-washy about lately…

As a certain recent ten-article series will testify, I fell hard down the Civilization rabbit hole when I first began to look at that game a year or so ago. I’ve spent quite some time staring at that Advances Chart, trying to decide what might be there for me as a writer. I’m very attracted to the idea of writing some wider-scale macro-history in addition to this ongoing micro-history of the games industry, as I am by the idea of writing said history in terms of achievement and (largely) peaceful progress as opposed to chronicles of wars and battles won and lost.  Still, I’ve struggled to figure out what form it all should take.

My first notion was to start a second blog. It would be called — again, no surprise here for readers of my Civilization articles! — The Narrative of Progress, and would be structured around an Advances Chart similar but not identical to the one in the Civilization box. (Intriguing as it is, the latter also has some notable oddities, such as its decision to make “Alphabet” and “Writing” into separate advances; how could you possibly have one without the other?) I even found a web developer who did some work on prototyping an interactive, dynamically growing Advances Chart with links to individual articles. But we couldn’t ever come up with anything that felt more intuitive and usable than a traditional table of contents, so I gave up on that idea. I was also concerned about whether I could possibly handle the research burden of so many disparate topics in science, technology, and sociology — a concern which the Civilization close reading, over the course of which I made a few embarrassing gaffes which you readers were kind enough to point out to me, has proved were justified.

But still I remain attracted to the idea of doing a different kind of history in addition to this gaming history. Lately, I’ve gravitated to the Wonders of the World. In fact, Civilization prompted my wife Dorte and I to take a trip to Cairo just a month ago — a crazy place, let me tell you! — to see the Pyramids, the Egyptian Museum, and other ancient sites. I think I could do a great job with these topics, as they’re right in my writerly wheelhouse of readable narrative history, and it would be hard to go wrong with stories as fascinating as these. Up until just a couple of weeks ago I had schemed about doing these kinds of stories on this site, but finally had to give it up as well as the wrong approach. I would have to set up a second Patreon anyway, as I couldn’t possibly expect people who signed up to support a “history of interactive entertainment” to support this other stuff as well, and running two Patreons and two parallel tracks out of a single WordPress blog would just be silly.

All of which is to say that I’m as undecided as ever about this stuff. I know I’d like to do some wider-frame historical writing at some point, almost certainly hosted at a different site, but I don’t know exactly when that will be or what form it will take. Would you be interested in reading such a thing? I’d be interested to hear your opinions and suggestions, whether in the comments below or via email.

Whatever happens, rest assured that I remain committed to this ongoing history as well; the worst that might result from a second writing project would be a somewhat slower pace here. I’m occasionally asked how far I intend to go with this history, and I’ve never had a perfect answer. A few years ago, I thought 1993’s Doom might be a good stopping place, as it marked the beginning of a dramatic shift in the culture of computer games. But the problem with that, I’ve come to realize, is that it did indeed only mark the beginning of a shift, and to stop there would be to leave countless threads dangling. These days, the end of the 1990s strikes me as a potential candidate, but we’ll see. At any rate, I don’t have plans for stopping anytime soon — not as long as you’re still willing to read and support this work. Who knows, maybe we’ll make it all the way to 2018 someday.

In that meantime, a quick rundown of coming attractions for the historical year of 1992. (If you want to be completely surprised every week, skip this list!)

• Jeff Tunnell’s hugely influential physics puzzler The Incredible Machine
• the seminal platformer Another World, among other things a beautiful example of lyrical nonverbal storytelling
• a series on the evolution of Microsoft Windows, encompassing the tangled story of OS/2, the legal battle with Apple over look-and-feel issues, and those Windows time-wasters, like Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Hearts, that became some of the most-played computer games in history
• William Gibson’s experimental poem-that-destroys-itself Agrippa
• Shades of Gray, an underappreciated literary statement in early amateur interactive fiction which came up already in my conversation with Judith Pintar, but deserves an article of its own
• Legend’s two Gateway games
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
• Electronic Arts in the post “rock-star” years, Trip Hawkins’s departure, and the formation of 3DO
• The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, which might just be my all-time favorite Holmes game
• Interplay’s two Star Trek graphic adventures
• the adventures in Sierra’s Discovery line of games for children, which were better than most of their adult adventure games during this period
• Quest for Glory III and IV
• the strange story behind the two Dune games which were released back-to-back in 1992
• Star Control II
• Ultima Underworld and Ultima VII
• Darklands

Along with all that, I’ve had a great suggestion from Casey Muratori — who, incidentally, was also responsible for my last article by first suggesting I take a closer look at Dynamix’s legacy in narrative games — to write something about good puzzles in adventure games. I’ve long been conscious of spending a lot more time describing bad puzzles in detail than I do good ones. The reason for this is simply that I hesitate to spoil the magic of the good puzzles for you, but feel far less reluctance with regard to the bad ones. Still, it does rather throw things out of balance, and perhaps I should do something about that. Following Casey’s suggestion, I’ve been thinking of an article describing ten or so good puzzles from classic games, analyzing how they work in detail and, most importantly, why they work.

That’s something on which I could use your feedback as well. When you think of the games I’ve written about so far on this blog, whether textual or graphical, is there a puzzle that immediately springs to mind as one that you just really, really loved for one reason or another? (For me, just for the record, that puzzle is the T-removing machine from Leather Goddesses of Phobos.) If so, feel free to send it my way along with a sentence or two telling me why, once again either in the comments below or via private email. I can’t promise I can get to all of them, but I’d like to assemble a reasonable selection of puzzles that delight for as many different reasons as possible.

Finally, please do remember that I depend on you for support in order to continue doing this work. If you enjoy and/or find something of value in what I do here, if you’re lucky enough to have disposable income, and if you haven’t yet taken the plunge, please do think about signing up as a Patreon supporter at whatever level strikes you as practical and warranted. I run what seems to be one of the last “clean” sites on the Internet — no advertisements, no SEO, no personal-data-mining, no “sponsored articles,” just the best content I can provide — but that means that I have to depend entirely upon you to keep it going. With your support, we can continue this journey together for years to come.

And with that, I’ll say thanks to all of you for being the best readers in the world and wish you a great weekend. See you next week with a proper article!

From the Publications Department:

Those of you who enjoy reading the blog in ebook format will be pleased to hear that Volume 12 in that ongoing series is now available, full of articles centering roughly on the year 1990. As usual, the ebook is entirely the work of Richard Lindner. Thank you, Richard!

From the Security Department:

A few days ago, a reader notified me of an alarming development: he was getting occasional popup advertisements for a shady online betting site when he clicked article links within the site. Oddly enough, the popups were very intermittent; in lots of experimenting, I was only able to get them to appear on one device — an older iPad, for what it’s worth — and even then only every tenth or twelfth time I tapped a link. But investigation showed that there was indeed some rogue JavaScript that was causing them. I’ve cleaned it up and hardened that part of the site a bit more, but I remain a little concerned in that I haven’t identified precisely how someone or something got access to the file that was tampered with in the first place. If anything suspicious happens during your browsing, please do let me know. I don’t take advertisements of any sort, so any that you see on this site are by definition a security breach of some sort. In the meantime, I’ll continue to scan the site daily in healthily paranoid fashion. The last I thing I want is a repeat of the Great Handbag Hack of 2012. (Do note, however, that none of your Patreon or PayPal information is stored on the site, and the database containing commenters’ email addresses has remained uncompromised — so nothing to worry too much over.)

From the Scheduling Department:

I’ve had to skip publishing an article more weeks than I wanted to this year. First I got sick after coming home from my research trip to the Strong Museum in Rochester, New York. Then we moved (within Denmark) from Odense to Aarhus, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell most of you what a chaotic process that can be. Most recently, I’ve had to do a lot more research than usual for my next subject; see the next two paragraphs for more on that. In a couple of weeks my wife and I are going to take a little holiday, which means I’m going to have to take one more bye week in June. After that, though, I hope I can settle back into the groove and start pumping out a reliable article every week for a while. Thanks for bearing with me!

From the Long-Term-Planning Department:

I thought I’d share a taste of what I plan to cover in the context of 1991 — i.e., until I write another of these little notices to tell you the next ebook is available. If you prefer that each new article be a complete surprise, you’ll want to skip the next paragraph.

(Spoiler Alert!)

I’ve got a series in the works for the next few weeks covering the history of computing in the Soviet Union, culminating in East finally meeting West in the age of Tetris. I’m already very proud of the articles that are coming together on this subject, and hope you’re going to find this little-known story as fascinating as I do. Staying with the international theme, we’ll then turn our attention to Britain for a while; in that context, I’m planning articles on the great British tradition of open-world action-adventures, on the iconic software house Psygnosis, and finally on Psygnosis’s most enduring game, Lemmings. Then we’ll check in with the Amiga 3000 and CDTV. I’m hoping that Bob Bates and I will be able to put together something rather special on Timequest. Then some coverage of the big commercial online services that predated the modern World Wide Web, along with the early experiments with massively multiplayer games which they fostered. We’ll have some coverage of the amateur text-adventure scene; 1991 was a pretty good year there, with some worthy but largely forgotten games released. I may have more to say about the Eastgate school of hypertext, in the form of Sarah Smith’s King of Space, if I can get the thing working and if it proves worthy of writing about. Be that as it may, we’ll definitely make time for Corey Cole’s edutainment classic The Castle of Dr. Brain and other contemporary doings around Sierra. Then we’ll swing back around to Origin, with a look at the two Worlds of Ultima titles — yes, thanks to your recommendations I’ve decided to give them more coverage than I’d originally planned — and Wing Commander II. We’ll wrap up 1991 with Civilization, a game which offers so much scope for writing that it’s a little terrifying. I’m still mulling over how best to approach that one, but I’m already hugely looking forward to it.

(End Spoilers)

From the Accounting Department:

I’ve seen a nice uptick in Patreon participation in recent months, for which I’m very grateful. Thank you to every reader who’s done this writer the supreme honor of paying for the words I scribble on the (virtual) page, whether you’ve been doing so for years or you just signed up yesterday.

If you’re a regular reader who hasn’t yet taken the plunge, please do think about supporting these serious long-form articles about one of the most important cultural phenomenons of our times by signing up as a Patreon subscriber or making a one-time donation via the links to the right. Remember that I can only do this work thanks to the support of people just like you.

See you Friday! Really, I promise this time…

As the subject line says, just wanted to let you all know about the latest goings-on here at Digital Antiquarian corporate headquarters. My Patreon supporters know already that I visited Rochester a couple of weeks ago to spend more time in the archives of the Strong Museum of Play. This time I spent an entire week going through their recently acquired collection of papers from Brian Fargo and Interplay. What I’ve come back with will do a lot to inform future articles. It’s really interesting and occasionally exciting stuff.

Unfortunately, everything went a little sidewise on the week of my return. I came back sick — it was cold in Rochester, even compared to Denmark! — and then my wife Dorte had a bunch of complications from a root canal and ended up having to spend a night in the hospital. So, we made something of a sorry pair last week. I guess we’ve had a little preview of what it will be like when we’re a decrepit old couple.

We’re both doing better now, but I did lose a lot of working time. What that means for you is that what I had originally planned as a one-week hiatus somewhere around this time has turned into a two-week hiatus. I did write an article this week, but my approach for the last year or so has been to hold articles for a week to look at them one more time with fresh eyes prior to publication, and I’d like to get back to that rather than jump the gun now; I think it’s really done a lot for the end result, even as you all continue to help me with the typos and small errors that do creep in in spite of my best efforts. Just bear with me for one more week, then, and all will be back to normal.

Thanks as always for your support!

I’d like to bring some exciting news to your attention today. Bob Bates, author of classic games for Infocom and Legend Entertainment and a great friend of this blog, is Kickstarting a new text adventure.

I played the game last year in its alpha state. Bob is very much aware of the ways which text adventures have evolved since the days of Infocom and Legend, and has come up with a great blending of modern and classic here. It’s funny, fun, and occasionally challenging, but always in the right ways. And it’s written with TADS 3, so it’s as technically sophisticated as one could ask for.

I hope some of you will want to join me in helping him to get it polished up and out the door for a variety of platforms. You can learn more on the game’s Kickstarter page or on its home page. Welcome back, Bob!

From the Publications Department:

I’m pleased to say that the latest edition of the ebook series collecting the articles published here is now available. Volume 11 centers roughly on the year 1989. (Yes, this means we are now moving into the 1990s, which is quite a milestone. Little did I imagine this blog would turn into what it has when I started it five and a half years ago.) As always, we owe big thanks to Richard Lindner for putting these together.

From the Quality Control Department:

As anyone who’s delved seriously into the history of computer games and videogames will attest, concrete sales numbers were closely-held secrets back in the day and can still be damnably difficult to dig up today. Given that, I’m sometimes forced to make surmises based on the preponderance of the evidence. And, inevitably, sometimes those surmises turn out to be wrong.

Some time ago, I credited SSI’s Pool of Radiance, which I know sold precisely 264,536 copies thanks to internal sales figures found in the SSI archive at the Strong Museum of Play, as the best-selling single CRPG of the 1980s. Well, I recently found — in the March 1991 issue of Questbusters of all places — some official Electronic Arts figures for the first Bard’s Tale game: a very impressive 407,000 copies sold. This of course means that it easily eclipses Pool of Radiance for the title of best-selling (Western) CRPG of the 1980s. I’ve changed my articles dealing with Pool of Radiance and the Bard’s Tale series to reflect this, as credit is certainly owed where it’s due; Volume 8 (1986) and Volume 10 (1988) of the ebooks have also been updated. My thanks to my fellow historian Alex Smith, who tried to get me to look at this question again back when I first made the claim in my Pool of Radiance article. You were right to be skeptical, Alex.

From the Referrals Department:

As long as we’re on the subject of CRPGs, I’d like to pass along a recommendation for a tool that I’ve really come to love. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past searching for an alternative to graph paper and a pencil when it comes to mapping old-school dungeons. Everything I came across was either too sketchy or way too over-the-top, designed for making elaborate decorative maps for tabletop RPGs rather than mapping as you go from a computer game. But at last some months ago I found just what I was looking for: Grid Cartographer by David Walters. It’s not often I see such a polished and usable application in such a niche area as this. You do have to pay for the full version, but I’ve found it to be well worth it. I have no affiliation with David and have never even corresponded with him; I’m just a happy customer passing along a recommendation. I’ve long since come to suspect that many of you love old-school CRPGs much more than I do (it tends to be a genre, as many of you know, that tries my patience pretty quickly these days). You will doubtless be able to get even more use out of Grid Cartographer than I have.

And for text-adventure mapping, of course, there’s Trizbort, which is totally free and open source. I can hardly express how much more playable both tools make the moldy oldies in their respective genres.

From the Planning Department:

To wet your whistle, here’s a quick look at what you can expect in the months to come; those of you who prefer to be totally surprised by each new article will want to jump down to the next heading now. In other words, spoiler alert!

We’re entering another of those periods of transition where many publishers and developers fall by the wayside. So, after we finish the series we started on Friday, we’ll start a new series writing the last word about some companies who have been with us for quite a while, but who, alas, won’t be with us any longer. Lest that sound too depressing, know that the stories of these deaths manage to cover a huge amount of interesting ground, including patents from hell, the first color handheld videogame console, more early experiment with CD-ROM and full-motion video, and even more nefarious deeds by our favorite villain around these parts, Jack Tramiel. Death, so the philosophers tell us, begets life, so after that we’ll look at the birth of Legend Entertainment, the heir to Infocom (another recently deceased company of the 1980s, come to think of it). Speaking of which: we’ll stop by the amateur text-adventure scene to cover the early history of TADS, the first freely distributed development system capable of making adventure games as polished and complex as those of Infocom. Then an examination of early academic experiments with hypertext fiction, especially Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story. Next we turn to Lucasfilm Games (soon to become LucasArts), who truly came into their own as adventure developers in 1990 with not one but two of the genre’s stone-cold classics. We’ll check in with Sid Meier, who also published two games in 1990, one an immensely influential strategy classic, the other… well, not so much. But both are very instructional. Then more on SSI and their coveted Dungeons & Dragons license, an interesting experiment in accessible family-oriented multi-player gaming from Sierra, and a visit to Origin for Ultima VI and another era-defining game that, improbably, actually became even more popular than that latest installment in Richard Garriott’s seminal CRPG series. Somewhere in there we’ll also take time out for a technical article on the much-ridiculed 640 K limitation of MS-DOS and how developers finally got around it. (Did Bill Gates really say, “640 K should be enough for anyone?” Stay tuned to find out!)

Whew! I know I’m excited, and I hope you are too. Which brings me to…

From the Accounting Department:

No one has ever tried to write a history of these topics of the scope and depth of the one I’m attempting. To continue to do so, I continue to need your support. To keep this site clean and fast-loading and to protect my neutrality and your privacy, I keep it ad-free. But that does mean that you’re all I’ve got when it comes to financial support. If you’re already a supporter, my heartfelt thanks. If not, and if you’re a regular reader who’s come to value what I do here, please do think about pitching in with a one-time donation (see the button to the right) or, even better, by becoming a Patreon patron at whatever level you can easily afford and that feels right to you. As I’ve said before, for the cost of a good cup of coffee each month you can make a material difference to the cause of serious gaming history, and ensure that you have an entertaining, interesting new article to read (almost) every Friday as well for years to come.

Speaking of which: see you this Friday with the next installment in the ongoing saga of Mick Mannock. Thanks for being the best readers anywhere!

(UPDATE, November 28 2016: As Leigh points out in the comments below, I accidentally left an article out of the new ebook. This has now been corrected, so you’ll likely want to download that volume again if you want to read about Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur offline.)