Jimmy Maher (maher@filfre.net)

The Digital Antiquarian
Infocom Omnibus
Comments Edition

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This eBook was converted on
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Contents

1. Will Crowther’s Adventure, Part 1

1. Comments

2. Will Crowther’s Adventure, Part 2

1. Comments

3. The Completed Adventure, Part 1

1. Comments

4. The Completed Adventure, Part 2

1. Comments

5. The Completed Adventure, Part 3

1. Comments

6. The Roots of Infocom

1. Comments

7. Zork on the PDP-10

1. Comments

8. The Birth of Infocom

1. Comments

9. ZIL and the Z-Machine

1. Comments

10. Selling Zork

1. Comments

11. Parser Games

1. Comments

12. Exploring Zork, Part 1

1. Comments

13. Exploring Zork, Part 2

1. Comments

14. Exploring Zork, Part 3

1. Comments

15. Sentient Software

1. Comments

16. Infocom: Going It Alone

1. Comments

17. Zork II, Part 1

1. Comments

18. Zork II, Part 2

1. Comments

19. Ludic Murder

1. Comments

20. Britain’s Occult Uncle

1. Comments

21. The Dennis Wheatley Crime Dossiers

1. Comments

22. Deadline

1. Comments

23. Playing Deadline, Part 1

1. Comments

24. Playing Deadline, Part 2

1. Comments

25. Playing Deadline, Part 3

1. Comments

26. Playing Deadline, Part 4

1. Comments

27. The Zork Users Group

1. Comments

28. Zork III, Part 1

1. Comments

29. Zork III, Part 2

1. Comments

30. Starcross

1. Comments

31. Suspended

1. Comments

32. The Top of its Game

1. Comments

33. The Witness

1. Comments

34. Planetfall

1. Comments

35. Enchanter

1. Comments

36. Infidel

1. Comments

37. Sorcerer

1. Comments

38. Seastalker

1. Comments

39. Masters of the Game

1. Comments

40. Cutthroats

1. Comments

41. Douglas Adams

1. Comments

42. The Computerized Hitchhiker’s

1. Comments

43. Hitchhiking the Galaxy Infocom-Style

1. Comments

44. Suspect

1. Comments

45. Down From the Top

1. Comments

46. Wishbringer

1. Comments

47. Fooblitzky

1. Comments

48. A Mind Forever Voyaging, Part 1: Steve Meretzky’s Interiors

1. Comments

49. A Mind Forever Voyaging, Part 2: Don’t Go Back to Rockvil

1. Comments

50. A Mind Forever Voyaging, Part 3: Through Strange Seas of Thought, Alone

1. Comments

51. Spellbreaker

1. Comments

52. Ballyhoo

1. Comments

53. Out of the Frying Pan…

1. Comments

54. Trinity

1. Comments

55. T Plus 5: Bombs in Space

1. Comments

56. T Plus 4: Bombing Nevada

1. Comments

57. T Plus 3: Edward Teller and His Superbomb

1. Comments

58. T Plus 2: The Bomb at the Crossroads

1. Comments

59. T Plus 1: Bombing Japan

1. Comments

60. T Plus 0: The Fulcrum of History

1. Comments

61. T Plus 6: All Prams Lead to the Kensington Gardens

1. Comments

62. Trinity Postscript: Selling Tragedy

1. Comments

63. Moonmist

1. Comments

64. Leather Goddesses of Phobos (or, Sex Comes to the Micros — Again)

1. Comments

65. Hollywood Dave’s Hijinx

1. Comments

66. Bureaucracy

1. Comments

67. …and Into the Fire

1. Comments

68. Stationfall

1. Comments

69. The Campy Cosmic Horror of H.P. Lovecraft

1. Comments

70. The Lurking Horror

1. Comments

71. MIT and GUE (or, The Annotated Lurking Horror)

1. Comments

72. Nord and Bert

1. Comments

73. Plundered Hearts

1. Comments

74. Beyond Zork

1. Comments

75. Border Zone

1. Comments

76. Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels

1. Comments

77. The Bruce Youth

1. Comments

78. Zork Zero

1. Comments

79. Shogun

1. Comments

80. Journey

1. Comments

81. Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur

1. Comments

82. Moving to California

1. Comments

83. New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 1: Digging the Trenches

1. Comments

84. New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 2: Hacking Deeper (or, Follies of Graham Nelson’s Youth)

1. Comments

85. New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 3: A Renaissance is Nigh

1. Comments

Will Crowther’s Adventure, Part 1
May 18, 2011

What remains to be said about Adventure? It has long and rightfully been canonized as the urtext not just of textual interactive fiction but of a whole swathe of modern mainstream videogames. (For example, trace World of Warcraft’s lineage back through Ultima Online and Richard Bartle’s original MUD and you arrive at Adventure.) It’s certainly received its share of scholarly attention over the years, from Mary Ann Buckles’s groundbreaking 1985 PhD thesis “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame Adventure” to Dennis Jerz’s superb 2007 article for Digital Humanities Quarterly, “Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave.” Still, since this blog has kind of turned into a history of early digital narratives without my entirely realizing it, it’s worthwhile to talk about its background. And having recently played it in its original Crowther-authored form as unearthed by Jerz in the course of researching his aforementioned article, I join Jason Dyer in having a few things to say about the experience. Finally, I’d like to make it as painless as possible for you to experience it in that authentic form as well, if you’re interested.

The outline of Adventure’s history is probably familiar to many reading this, but in a nutshell it goes like this:

Back in 1975 a programmer and spelunker named Will Crowther had just gotten divorced. Missing his children and feeling somewhat at loose ends generally, he started to write a game in his spare time with the vague idea that he could share it with his two daughters, who now lived with their mother and whom he missed desperately. The game, which he named Adventure, combined his three biggest interests at the time: programming, caving, and playing a new tabletop game called Dungeons and Dragons.

How so? Well, the player would explore a geography loosely based on the Bedquilt branch of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, a place Crowther had spent years laboriously exploring and mapping; she would encounter treasures and creatures drawn from D&D in the process; and to win she would have to solve intricate puzzles while always maintaining close attention to detail, just like a programmer. Crowther had just invented the world’s first text adventure, in the process prototyping much that remains with the form to this day.

Those are the broad strokes. But let’s back up for a moment. Just who was Will Crowther? Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon’s history of the development of the ARPANET (predecessor to the modern Internet), paints a pretty good picture of Crowther. His eccentricities have become so associated with the hacker mentality that they almost read like items on a checklist today. To wit:

He was almost disturbingly non-verbal, and rarely displayed any affect at all. He refused to dress up for any reason, even visiting the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon in sneakers. And “he was a notoriously finicky eater (anything beyond the culinary level of a plain bologna sandwich was a risk), making him an impossible dinner guest or dining companion.” For all that, though, Crowther was a very unusual computer nerd in at least some ways. For one, he loved outdoor adventures, particularly rock climbing and of course caving. As befits an adventurer, he kept himself in excellent shape, in part by hanging by his fingers for hours on the frame of his office door. And most shockingly of all, he “never touched” soda.

Of course, what allowed Crowther to get away with eccentric behavior was the brilliance of his mind. Crowther’s Wikipedia page says as of this writing that, “He is best known as the co-creator of Colossal Cave Adventure.” That’s true enough, but it’s a bit unfair in a way to Crowther that Adventure and caving so dominate the page, for Crowther’s importance in computer history would be assured even had he never created Adventure.

Crowther was an absolutely key player on the tiny team that, beginning in the late-1960s, laid the foundation of the modern Internet. He wrote the software that ran on the Interface Message Processors (IMPs), the set of computers that shunted data around the nascent ARPANET; in other words, he wrote the firmware for the world’s first routers. He was one hell of a programmer, “regarded by his colleagues as being within the top fraction of 1 percent of programmers in the world,” with a particular genius for writing incredibly compact and efficient code, a valuable skill indeed in those days of absurdly limited memory and processing power. If he had a fault, it was that he was more interested in prototyping, in showing that things could work and how, than in doing the hard, often tedious work of polishing and refining that results in a truly finished, production-ready program.

When we add all of this together, we can begin to see how Crowther could have birthed IF in such a complete form almost on a whim… and then abandoned it on another whim when (presumably) a more interesting problem came along.

Comments
11 Responses

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- Jim Gerrie

December 13, 2014 at 3:39 am

Just re-coded the Fortran source into Basic for my favourite 8-bit the TRS-80 MC-10. Had to wedge it into 20K so some of the descriptions got “edited” a little, but I transferred all the map info from the data file into data statements, so its a completely accurate rendition of the original map. Only made a very few tweaks where directions were quite clearly messed up. Working on the rooms in the Bedquilt (“Under Construction”) area I really could sense where his patience petered out. Very fun project. Ended up adding a few unique elements of my own to “complete” what is obviously an unfinished work just begging for elaboration and completion. I can understand what tempted Woods…

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- Martin

July 8, 2016 at 4:33 pm

Jim, I’m not sure if this is the right place to post this but did you give any mention to WANDER is any of your blogs? ie this link:

https://ahopeful.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/wander-1974-a-lost-mainframe-game-is-found/

- Jimmy Maher

July 11, 2016 at 3:06 pm

That surfaced after I’d already covered this era I’m afraid.

- Mike Taylor

October 16, 2017 at 10:35 am

I’m sure I am not alone in saying: I would love to read what you have to say about WANDER and CASTLE. So if you ever want a break from the wacky world of 68000-based video gaming and fancy an amble back into prehistory, please consider it!

- Jim Gerrie

February 12, 2019 at 2:56 am

Thanks Martin. I do now. Here’s my post about my reprogramming of Colossal Cave with an addendum.
https://jimgerrie.blogspot.com/2014/12/will-crowhers-adventure-ported-to-8-bit.html
Thanks for the link.

- Derek

July 30, 2018 at 5:26 am

I don’t know where else to put this, so I guess I’ll just put it here at the beginning of the blog’s adventure-game coverage. This blog is really fascinating for how vividly it describes an era of gaming that I knew nothing about. Despite having a long familiarity with the adventure-gaming world of the 1990s, and having seen at least the openings of Adventure and most Infocom games, I knew very little about Infocom’s history and even less about the computing world that birthed Adventure and its early successors. There’s something weirdly enthralling about the world of PDP hackers, California software hippies, and Trash-80s that awkwardly pioneered the computer-driven world we now live in. Though I may be disdained for saying so here, I was never able to get into text adventures—but this blog’s discussions of them make me able to appreciate them on an intellectual level, if not as a player. Many thanks, Jimmy Maher, for all your work on this site.

- Will Moczarski

April 21, 2019 at 8:01 pm

one of hell of a programmer -> one hell of a programmer

Assuming you still value hints at (albeit old) typos in the comments.

- Jimmy Maher

April 23, 2019 at 8:41 am

Of course. Thanks!

Will Crowther’s Adventure, Part 2
May 24, 2011

Crowther’s original Adventure consists of relatively complete implementations of the above-ground section and the first underground level of the complete game that so many would come to know later. It peters out around the “Complex Junction” room, where a sign stands announcing, “CAVE UNDER CONSTRUCTION BEYOND THIS POINT. PROCEED AT OWN RISK.” It’s not kidding; things start to go haywire with some of the room connections at this point, such that navigating in some directions inexplicably returns you to above-ground locations. Beyond the ever-present challenges of navigation, there’s not really that much of a game here. Still, Crowther has laid down the basics of the thousands of text adventures that would follow, and even manages to include a few simple puzzles — and, yes, a maze.

In fact, one could say that the whole of Adventure is really one big maze. By far its biggest challenge is coming to understand and get around in the interconnected nodes (i.e., “rooms”) that make up its world. Even its few simple puzzles revolve around movement: we must deal with the snake to be allowed to progress beyond The Hall of the Mountain King; must find an alternative exit from the cave that will allow us to take the gold with us; etc. This may seem odd, unappealing, perhaps annoying to us when we play the game today — at least, that is, to those of us steeped in the culture of modern IF, with its emphasis on crafting an enjoyable narrative experience for the player. But was Crowther trying to craft a narrative experience at all? I don’t think so, actually.

Crowther is an extremely private person who is not much prone to revisiting the past or discussing his work, so there isn’t much direct evidence as to what he was thinking when he crafted Adventure. We might, however, find some clues in his game’s HELP text:

“I KNOW OF PLACES, ACTIONS, AND THINGS. MOST OF MY VOCABULARY DESCRIBES PLACES AND IS USED TO MOVE YOU THERE. TO MOVE TRY WORDS LIKE FOREST, BUILDING, DOWNSTREAM, ENTER, EAST, WEST, NORTH, SOUTH, UP, OR DOWN. I KNOW ABOUT A FEW SPECIAL OBJECTS, LIKE A BLACK ROD HIDDEN IN THE CAVE. THESE OBJECTS CAN BE MANIPULATED USING ONE OF THE ACTION WORDS THAT I KNOW.”

It’s interesting that Crowther foregrounds the geographical so obviously, and only then goes on to mention the possibility of manipulating just “a few special objects.” As a dedicated hacker, Crowther would almost certainly have come across Hunt the Wumpus. I think there’s a pretty good case to be made that Adventure started as another iteration on Yob’s idea of a “topological computer game,” and quite likely continued largely in that vein in its author’s mind right up until he abandoned its development. It’s very possible, even likely, that compass directions were a fairly late addition, that Crowther initially intended to have the player navigate entirely by working out keywords for getting from place to place, thus making navigation even more of the central chore. (While Dennis Jerz spoke to some who claimed to remember compass directions from the beginning, it’s possible they were misremembering; from reading the source it certainly seems that compass directions were a late — possibly almost a last — addition, perhaps upon realizing just how unworkable keyword navigation was likely to get over the course of a sprawling underground complex populated by dozens of similar rooms.) As a caver, meanwhile, geography would have been constantly on Crowther’s mind, not only as a point of factual interest but literally as a matter of life or death while underground; the in-home teletype connection through which Crowther likely developed Adventure was the same one that he used to enter survey data and construct maps of the real Mammoth Cave for the benefit of other cavers.

How much does it really matter how Crowther conceptualized his game? Perhaps not a lot. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind that expectations of both players and authors were very different back in the day, and that this can explain some things that authors did and players apparently enjoyed which we might find infuriating today. It’s certainly a point I’m likely to revisit again when I look at other historical works. Some scholars have recently advanced the idea that computer games are most of all about the experience of space, even going so far as to call them a form of architecture. It’s an interesting idea, and one that gains a lot of credence when I consider it in the light of these early works of IF. I’m not yet sure how to reconcile that idea with some of my other notions, but it’s more on my radar than ever in light of my experience with Adventure.

Abstractions like that aside, though, there is a certain stately appeal to this early iteration of Adventure which I find hard to explain. Crowther was by neither talent nor inclination a writer, but his terse, matter-of-fact descriptions bear the stamp of someone who knows the environment of which he writes. That gives his game, almost in spite of itself, a certain verisimilitude that would be lacking in many of the more polished efforts that would follow in later years. I want to look at how Woods expanded on this solid kernel next.

Comments
14 Responses

- Jason Dyer

May 24, 2011 at 8:15 pm

I’m skeptical about the Wumpus connection. This kind of armchair spot-the-influence is a dangerous game, and results in all sorts of plausable theories that turn out to be wrong (see the long-standing theory about The Wizard of Oz being a parable about the gold/silver standard, or the contention that Don Woods got ideas from Dungeons and Dragons). This kind of theorizing was also what lead to the myth that the Crowther version of Adventure was solely a cave simulator.

I’m especially skeptical of your second-level guess (that Adventure originally didn’t have compass directions). The rooms-cued-to-words are very spread out and their use as verbs seems to be more of a shortcut than a navigation system (and according to the Jerz article being a shortcut is why XYZZY was put in in the first place)

Zork has a direct reference to Wumpus so feel free to run with that.

- Jimmy Maher

May 25, 2011 at 5:39 am

Regarding the Wumpus connection: I agree that it’s dangerous when reading any kind of text to push speculations like these too far. Certainly I would never push this idea as absolute truth without a lot more evidence. Still (and this is really my main point), I think there’s good reason to believe that Crowther himself was not fully aware of the potential and the ramifications of what he was creating as a new kind of narrative, that he saw it as just a “topological computer game.”

On compass directions: Here I am on somewhat firmer ground, as I haven’t pulled quite EVERYTHING out of my posterior. :) In the data files that accompany the FORTRAN source, the compass directions were apparently some of the last movement verbs added. This could mean, as Jerz tentatively concluded in his article, that they were originally included in the FORTRAN source itself, then moved into the data file at a very late date in the interest of keeping everything clean and consistent. It does, though, strike me as odd that Crowther would put them directly into his FORTRAN code in the first place, considering that the code contains no other vocabulary. (Of course, that’s also an argument for why, if he HAD put them there for some reason, he might move them to the data file at a late date. Way to argue both sides, Jimmy…)

See the thread “Fortran 4 and Adventure” on alt.sys.pdp10 and rec.arts.int-fiction for some deeper discussion of all this, including some really interesting code analysis from DKleinecke that also argues in favor of compass directions as a late edition. Unfortunately, his ideas also tend to pull against my theory that Adventure was conceived as fundamentally a game of navigation, so don’t take them too seriously. :) Still, interesting reading.

- Dennis Jerz

May 27, 2011 at 1:49 am

The description of room 9 includes a compass direction. It seems we could get another data point if we checked the map table to see whether there are any room connections that absolutely require the player to type a compass direction.

- Jimmy Maher

May 27, 2011 at 9:55 am

Very good idea!

All of the lower-numbered rooms — almost certainly those implemented first — can be navigated using keywords. This begins to change at room 27, “WEST SIDE OF THE FISSURE IN THE HALL OF MISTS.” From here, one can enter “WIDE LOW PASSAGE PARALLEL TO AND NORTH OF THE HALL OF MISTS” (room 40) and “WEST END OF HALL OF MISTS” (room 41) only by using compass directions. From that point on there are lots of rooms with no keywords implemented.

Another interesting point: the earlier rooms uniformly have the compass connections listed in the data file AFTER the keyword connections. For example, one can navigate from room 1 (END OF ROAD) to room 3 (INSIDE BUILDING) by typing (remembering that inputted words are truncated to five characters): ENTER, DOOR, GATE, BUILD, BLD, HOUSE, INWAR, INSID, IN, EAST, or E. They appear in that order in the data file. Even where keywords appear in the latter 50 rooms, on the other hand, they appear AFTER rather than before the compass directions in the data file, perhaps indicating that the keywords became the secondary means of navigation to Crowther from that point.

Based on this, my Final Answer would be that Crowther started out with a mixture of keyword navigation, relative directions, in and out, etc., realized this was becoming hopelessly unworkable when he got well into the underground areas, and so implemented compass directions as his primary means of navigation from there, while also retrofitting them to the already completed sections. This also does the neat trick of at least partially reconciling the fact that the evidence of the source seems to point to compass directions as a later addition while players insist they were there all along. It’s very possible that no one actually played the game until it was far enough along to include them.

But without the ability to Phone a Friend (i.e., Crowther) who probably forgot all about this 30 years ago anyway, speculation is all we’re left with — and, as Jason rightfully cautioned, that can be a dangerous game. While your ideas about his likely working style sound plausible enough, I’m a bit reluctant to run too far with notions of what we think he might have done based on our (undoubtedly superficial and incomplete) understanding of his personality.

- Mike Taylor

October 11, 2017 at 5:49 pm

If only Will Crowther could talk, what stories he could tell us!

- Dennis Jerz

May 27, 2011 at 2:34 am

Crowther was a rock climber before he was a caver, and seems to have broken off from the caving community around the time of his divorce from Pat. Your assessment (in part 1) of Crowther’s character and efficient creation techniques may actually support the idea that Crowther may have included cardinal compass directions as the most efficient way to navigate, then added the room labels after watching users (ordinary mortals lacking his unique talent for navigation and brevity) struggle. Without any witness testimony that the compass directions were added, the notion that the compass directions were added late is speculative. Think about it… Given what we know of Crowther as a chess player, a mathematician, a tight coder, and a cartographer, and his less-than-verbose communication habits, is it more likely that he would start with room labels and add compass as an afterthought for the benefit of his playtesters, or vice-versa? This is of course just a thought experiment, but it does suggest the more likely explanation (given the evidence we have).

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- Borys Jagielski

March 24, 2017 at 4:35 pm

You write: ” Some scholars have recently advanced the idea that computer games are most of all about the experience of space, even going so far as to call them a form of architecture.”

Could you please give some reference to an article or a paper about this idea? I would like to read about it!

- Jimmy Maher

March 26, 2017 at 12:47 pm

You might want to look into the work of Marc Bonner. His background is the history of architecture, but he’s turned his attention to the nature of architectural space in videogames. He’s German, however, and I’m not sure how extensively he’s published in English.

- anon

August 21, 2018 at 10:21 pm

Typo:
It’s very possible, even likely, that compass directions were a fairly late edition,

It’s very possible, even likely, that compass directions were a fairly late addition,

Love your blog, thanks for writing it.

- Jimmy Maher

August 22, 2018 at 8:18 am

Thanks!

- Jeff Nyman

June 23, 2019 at 6:09 pm

I’m late to this post, but regarding all the talk of whether compass directions were or were not included, doesn’t the help text that’s quoted directly indicate this. The quoted text says:

“I KNOW OF PLACES, ACTIONS, AND THINGS. MOST OF MY VOCABULARY DESCRIBES PLACES AND IS USED TO MOVE YOU THERE. TO MOVE TRY WORDS LIKE FOREST, BUILDING, DOWNSTREAM, ENTER, EAST, WEST, NORTH, SOUTH, UP, OR DOWN.”

That is literally listing compass directions to try. Or is the suggestion that this help text was added later?

- Jimmy Maher

June 24, 2019 at 7:37 am

Exactly, the presumption is that the help text was one of the last things Crowther added. Certainly compass directions *were* present in the version of Adventure inherited by Don Woods. The only speculation is whether Crowther had them in mind from the beginning. The alternative navigation methods may be artifacts of an earlier period before compass directions.

- Nate

April 16, 2020 at 7:02 pm

I’ve come back to re-read this series after playing Adventure again, this time with my 4-year-old. It works surprisingly well to read him a room description and then type his commands for him, though he’s definitely getting stymied by the limited parser (“Ok, when we see the dwarf again, give him back the gold nugget and his axe and say we didn’t know he wanted them and then he won’t be mad at us any more.” Hehe.)

My primary memory of Adventure is spatial, and I think that’s what made it particularly endearing. Even if it wasn’t his primary focus, just the feeling of moving through different rooms in your imagination and discovering new sights made an impact on me. When I play it, I’m back in the familiar locations, seeing passages and rock stretch out in all directions. But I’m also back in the study of the creaky old Victorian house we’d visit. I’m sitting in a dining table chair in front of a CP/M machine with a green screen and my older cousin is mapping everything on fanfold paper.

But it’s also a linguistic memory, like Lewis Carroll. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was learning caving lingo. Words like Swiss cheese, bedquilt, hall, crawl, debris, and cobbles all sounded strange but compelling in this adventure. I thought the author had made up this terminology to sound more fanciful, and it added a layer of fun. The whimsy of Woods (a vending machine in a deep cave?) also fit well with these unintentionally magical sounding words.

I’ve had to pause my trips through Adventure with my son because he was waking up with intense dreams. Like many at the time, he became a bit too obsessed with the world and it was interrupting all of our sleep. But we’ll be back soon.

Thanks again for all your writings.

The Completed Adventure, Part 1
June 2, 2011

Don Woods was a graduate student in computer science at Stanford University when he first heard about Adventure in early 1977 from another student who had found it on, of all places, the Stanford Medical Center’s computer system. How it got from Crowther’s employer at the time he wrote it, BBN Technologies in Boston, to northern California is likely to remain a mystery. We do know, however, that Woods was intrigued enough by the game to secure a copy and install it on the PDP-10 minicomputer at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), the place where he spent most of his time hacking. After plumbing its (limited) depths as a player, Woods conceived the idea of picking up where Crowther had left off and finishing the thing. Unfortunately, he had only the binary executable, not the FORTRAN source code. What followed is one of the legendary anecdotes of hacker lore, but it’s amusing enough that I’ll repeat it here.

Crowther’s program — as you can verify for yourself if you like — contains only one clue about its origin. In the in-game instructions it says, in Crowther’s inimitable terse diction, “ERRORS, SUGGESTIONS, COMPLAINTS TO CROWTHER.” Crowther had apparently never anticipated the program, at least in this incomplete state, getting beyond the small circle of BBN hackers who would immediately know who “CROWTHER” was and how to contact him. To make things even more difficult, Crowther had left BBN by the time Woods discovered Adventure, and was now employed by Xerox in California. (Perhaps Adventure actually came west with him?) Woods’s solution was to attempt to send an email to crowther@xxx, where “xxx” represented every single current domain on the Internet. In addition to laying claim to being the first spammer, Woods found Crowther at Xerox and secured his permission to complete the game and, most importantly, the precious source code. The Internet was a smaller place in those days…

Woods was not yet 23 when he discovered Adventure, but he had already secured a place for himself in hacker history by co-creating the joke programming language INTERCAL, one of the more bizarre and elaborate examples of hacker humor. In Hackers, Steven Levy makes much of the alleged contrast between East Coast and West Coast hacker culture:

“The difference began with the setting, a semecircular concrete-glass-and-redwood former conference center in the hills overlooking the Stanford campus. Inside the building, hackers would work at any of sixty-four terminals scattered around the various offices. None of the claustrophobia of Tech Square. No elevators, no deafening air conditioning hiss. The laid-back style meant that much of MIT’s sometimes constructive acrimony — the shouting sessions at the TMRC classroom, the religious wars between grad students and hackers — did not carry over. Instead of the battle-strewn imagery of shoot-’em-up space science fiction that pervaded Tech Square, the Stanford imagery was the gentle lore of elves, hobbits, and wizards described in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth trilogy. Rooms in the AI lab were named after Middle Earth locations, and the SAIL printer was rigged so it could handle three different Elven type fonts.”

My own feeling is that Levy probably overemphasizes the cultural divide between the alleged crew-cut-wearing, conservative Heinlein fans clustered around MIT and the gentle Tolkien dudes of Stanford. Certainly the groups shared common preferences in hardware (DEC PDP systems), operating systems (TOPS-10), programming languages (no BASIC please!), and the general way that computing “should” be done that gave them much more in common with each other than either group had with the populists of the People’s Computer Company. I do think, however, that we can see some differences in the approaches that Crowther and Woods took to programming, differences which are not so much down to geography as temporality. Before I explain that, though, let me back up quickly and introduce some technical background.

Adventure ran on a DEC PDP-10 under the TOPS-10 operating system. As I’ve already mentioned in passing, DEC’s machines were the unqualified favorites of hackers for at least 20 years, from 1960 to 1980. Both the machines and the company that produced them were consistently innovative, large enough to get the job done but small enough to be flexible. Most importantly, DEC not only understood hacker ideals but embraced them, using cutting-edge research facilities like MIT and Stanford as laboratories to refine and even develop both software and hardware, and sometimes hiring the best and the brightest from that world to come work for them directly. The contrast to a condescending and stodgy behemoth like IBM could hardly have been more stark. TOPS-10, meanwhile, was as beloved as the hardware, having been developed and refined by DEC consistently since the late 1960s with the active assistance of the hacker community. Until Unix and DEC’s own successor OS TOPS-20 took its place, something that was already slowly beginning to happen in 1977, TOPS-10 was simply the hacker OS.

Adventure was written in FORTRAN (Formula Translating System), which was already a very old programming language when Crowther and Woods used it. It was in fact the very first significant high-level programming language to appear, having been introduced by IBM on its mainframe systems in the late 1950s. The version Crowther and Woods used obeyed the so-called FORTRAN IV standard, which dated from 1965. For all the grief that hackers gave BASIC, FORTRAN IV wasn’t much better, requiring as it did line numbers and copious use of the dreaded GOTO statement to get anything done. It was if anything particularly unsuited for writing a text adventure, including as it did almost no text storage or manipulation abilities whatsoever. That’s the reason Crowther chose to put all of the game’s text into an external file; it was just easier to deal with that way. Ironically, FORTRAN 77, a major expansion of the language that included proper string variables and heaps of other improvements, appeared the same year that Woods completed Adventure — but too late to be of use for that project.

So, then, why FORTRAN? Well, beyond FORTRAN and assembly language, in which a program like Adventure would have been tedious indeed to implement, normal TOPS-10 programming languages at this time included only the scorned BASIC and the perhaps even more loathed COBOL, a rigidly inflexible language designed for non-interactive batch processing — i.e., dull billing jobs and other rote calculating tasks that hackers found utterly uninteresting. Displaying plenty of vitriol if not much diversity of wit, Edsger Dijkstra made almost the same statement about COBOL as he had about BASIC: “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.” So, FORTRAN it was.

Crowther and Woods may both have been working in the same language, but the differences in their coding styles are immense. Crowther’s original source is itself a “maze of twisty little passages,” a huge pile of spaghetti code that is commented only sporadically and tersely. Efficient it undoubtedly is, but readable and maintainable, at least for anyone other than Crowther, it isn’t. Woods’s final version of Adventure is, by contrast, a model of clarity: commented frequently and at length, and structured as cleanly and logically as the limited tool that is FORTRAN IV will allow. Given the limitations Woods was working under, it’s a joy to read. Indeed, its clarity might help explain why Adventure was so quickly and so frequently ported to other languages and platforms; Woods’s code makes doing so almost a mechanical exercise.

Of course, we are comparing a complete with an incomplete program, and that is not entirely fair to Crowther. Certainly it’s unlikely that Woods’s code was so clean and readable during development as it became when the time came to release. Still, I think there might be something else going on here as well. Partly we might see a difference in personalities; Crowther had a reputation as a brilliant but a solitary programmer, after all, and doesn’t strike me as the kind of fellow interested in explaining himself or coddling those who followed in his footsteps. In addition, though, Crowther and Woods came from different hacker generations. Crowther came up in the 1960s, when the rules of “proper” coding were still largely unwritten and the emphasis was on just getting things done in whatever way the primitive hardware of the day could be coaxed into doing it. Woods came up in the 1970s, when the importance of structure, readability, and maintainability were becoming clear, and computer scientists were laying down the rules of good programming practice which we still follow — with a few additions, of course — today.

Next up, some observations on actually playing the completed Adventure.

Comments
9 Responses

- Sniffnoy

October 21, 2011 at 9:15 pm

A thought: Would ALGOL have been available? Do you by any chance know how widely used it was at the time?

- Jimmy Maher

October 21, 2011 at 9:40 pm

I had to look up ALGOL to know what it was, so I may not be the best person for that question. :) I’ve never heard it discussed as a language for PDP-10 development, but beyond that I just don’t know.

- Mike Taylor

October 11, 2017 at 7:18 pm

I’d have thought PL/1 would be a more likely alternative. It was certainly widely available by the time Kernighan and Plauger wrote The Elements of Programming Style in 1974. It was in every respect a better language than FORTRAN, and would have been a much more obvious choice for implementing Adventure.

- Ken Schunk

June 24, 2012 at 2:18 pm

ALGOL10 was available on the TOPS-10 PDP-10 at Eastern Michigan University in 1975, so I would expect that it was available. My software reference manual from way back in the day indicates a copyright of 1971 with updates thru 1974 – version 3B, with a shocking price of $7.50 for the book. On the other hand, the fact that you had to look it up to even know what it was would tell you about the relative popularity of the language.

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- Will Moczarski

April 23, 2019 at 5:43 pm

Crowther and Wood -> Crowther and Woods

- Jimmy Maher

April 25, 2019 at 3:08 pm

Thanks!

- Brad Miller

August 2, 2020 at 5:29 pm

Two nits (love your blog, only discovered it yesterday!), the PDP-10 was considered a mainframe, not a minicomputer, and while TOPS-10 may have been “a” hacker OS, “the” hacker OS had to be ITS… (which spawned Zork).

- Jimmy Maher

August 4, 2020 at 3:02 pm

The proper categorization of the PDP-10 is a bit of a neither-fish-nor-fowl dilemma. DEC called it a mainframe because it was the largest computer in their lineup, but it resembled an IBM or Amdahl minicomputer more than the monstrosities to which those companies applied the mainframe label. This article is early days; a bit later on I took to addressing — or rather avoiding — the problem by being careful not to call the PDP-10 either one. ;)

The Completed Adventure, Part 2
June 3, 2011

(Warning: spoilers galore in this one, folks.)

Woods replaced virtually none of Crowther’s original text in Adventure, but simply built upon it, by fleshing out Crowther’s minimalist help text and of course adding many more locations to explore. The contrast in the two men’s coding styles has no parallel in their prose, as Woods ably continues in Crowther’s terse but just-evocative-enough style. The player notices no obvious point where Crowther left off and Woods picked up, and, indeed, would probably never guess that the latter parts were written by a different person entirely.

If we insist on finding differences, we might point to Woods’s willingness to indulge in more fantastic and anachronistic elements, as well as a willingness to allow himself a bit more poetic license here and there. As an example in the former category, the vending machine selling batteries feels like something Crowther would never have added. (Of course, it’s also true that Crowther’s lamp never ran out of batteries in the first place, because it was almost certainly conceived by him as a carbide lamp of the sort he took with him on his caving expeditions rather than a battery-powered job; in this case the very different backgrounds of the two men do affect the finished work.) (Edit: Actually, it seems the lamp was electric in Crowther’s original. See the response to rub: “RUBBING THE ELECTRIC LAMP IS NOT PARTICULARLY REWARDING.” Lucky I qualified my “certainly” with an “almost…”) In the latter category, we have the most elaborate and extended room description in the entire game, for the “Breath-Taking View” located deep, deep within the cave complex:

YOU ARE ON THE EDGE OF A BREATH-TAKING VIEW.  FAR BELOW YOU IS AN
ACTIVE VOLCANO, FROM WHICH GREAT GOUTS OF MOLTEN LAVA COME SURGING
OUT, CASCADING BACK DOWN INTO THE DEPTHS.  THE GLOWING ROCK FILLS THE
FARTHEST REACHES OF THE CAVERN WITH A BLOOD-RED GLARE, GIVING EVERY-
THING AN EERIE, MACABRE APPEARANCE.  THE AIR IS FILLED WITH FLICKERING
SPARKS OF ASH AND A HEAVY SMELL OF BRIMSTONE.  THE WALLS ARE HOT TO
THE TOUCH, AND THE THUNDERING OF THE VOLCANO DROWNS OUT ALL OTHER
SOUNDS.  EMBEDDED IN THE JAGGED ROOF FAR OVERHEAD ARE MYRIAD TWISTED
FORMATIONS COMPOSED OF PURE WHITE ALABASTER, WHICH SCATTER THE MURKY
LIGHT INTO SINISTER APPARITIONS UPON THE WALLS.  TO ONE SIDE IS A DEEP
GORGE, FILLED WITH A BIZARRE CHAOS OF TORTURED ROCK WHICH SEEMS TO
HAVE BEEN CRAFTED BY THE DEVIL HIMSELF.  AN IMMENSE RIVER OF FIRE
CRASHES OUT FROM THE DEPTHS OF THE VOLCANO, BURNS ITS WAY THROUGH THE
GORGE, AND PLUMMETS INTO A BOTTOMLESS PIT FAR OFF TO YOUR LEFT.  TO
THE RIGHT, AN IMMENSE GEYSER OF BLISTERING STEAM ERUPTS CONTINUOUSLY
FROM A BARREN ISLAND IN THE CENTER OF A SULFUROUS LAKE, WHICH BUBBLES
OMINOUSLY.  THE FAR RIGHT WALL IS AFLAME WITH AN INCANDESCENCE OF ITS
OWN, WHICH LENDS AN ADDITIONAL INFERNAL SPLENDOR TO THE ALREADY
HELLISH SCENE.  A DARK, FOREBODING PASSAGE EXITS TO THE SOUTH.

It’s somehow hard to imagine Crowther writing that; it’s a long way indeed from the humble wellhouse by the roadside in Kentucky at which the player began. It’s often been compared with the descriptions of Mount Doom found in The Return of the King, but Woods, while admitting he had read Tolkien before working on Adventure, has denied using him as a conscious inspiration. Oddly, this room has no practical function whatsoever. Perhaps Woods conceived of it as a reward of sorts for the persistent player who made it this far underground.

And what sort of challenges must a player who made it so far have overcome? Well, I divide them into three categories.

First there are the logistical challenges — or, if you prefer, the emergent challenges. These involve the practical difficulties of getting about in the 140 intricately interconnected rooms that make up Adventure’s storyworld and returning all 15 treasures found therein to the wellhouse: managing the lamp’s limited power reserves, dealing with the limited carrying capacity of the player’s avatar, and, most of all, mapping, mapping, mapping. A player who wants to get anywhere in the game has to plan her underground expeditions much like one of Crowther’s caving teams would have. I’ve already stated my belief that, at least in Crowther the caver’s mind, this was the real heart of the game, its real challenge. If that seems a stretch, imagine playing Adventure for the first time in 1976 or 1977, with no knowledge about how text-adventure geographies are supposed to work; imagine trying to figure out how to map that maze when the old dropping-items-in-each-room trick wasn’t second nature. Modern IF may have largely rejected many of the tropes found under this category, but they are a fundamental part of what Adventure really is, and, I would argue, even an important part of the appeal it held for so many back in the days of yore.

Then there are the good puzzles. These are simple, straightforward challenges, solvable with a bit of basic logic and common sense. So, you must find another exit from the cave since you can’t carry the gold nugget (must be one hell of a nugget!) up the stairs; you must employ the trident to pry open the giant clam shell; etc. In contrast to the sort of conundrums Infocom and others would be offering up in just a few years, these are gentle indeed.

But then we come to the bad puzzles. There aren’t too many of them, but they’re a scary lot. There’s the dragon puzzle: when the player types, “KILL DRAGON,” the game responds, “WITH WHAT? YOUR BARE HANDS?” Whereupon she must type, “YES,” to get the reply, “CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE JUST VANQUISHED A DRAGON WITH YOUR BARE HANDS! (UNBELIEVABLE, ISN’T IT?)” In presaging some of the ridiculous puzzles in the inexplicably delightful The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy of many years later, this is almost amusing enough to be forgivable. Not so the climactic puzzle, in which the player is expected to intuit a heretofore nonexistent property of the black rod she’s been toting around almost since the game began. She’s expected to “BLAST” the control room of what has now been revealed to be a sort of amusement park rather than a natural cave complex. She can only “BLAST,” mind you. No “BLAST WITH ROD,” no “WAVE ROD.” Unless I’m missing something, this action and this phrasing of it are utterly unmotivated. It’s perhaps the most egregious example of guess the verb and just about the worst puzzle in general I’ve ever seen, playing like a satire of the worst of old-school text-adventure tropes.

Upon encountering such delights, one is left shaking one’s head and trying to figure out how we got from category-two to category-three puzzles, with no gradation in between. It’s particularly surprising to encounter puzzles like these in light of the fact that in some ways Adventure is surprisingly friendly and progressive; consider, for example, the automated hint system that dispenses clues here and there when the player has floundered long enough in one of its trickier sections.

We might find an answer if we consider the capabilities of the Adventure program itself. Woods was working with an extremely simplistic world model joined to a two-word parser. Such a system imposes a real limit on how intricate a puzzle an author can devise. Even some of Adventure’s better puzzles are made more frustrating than they should be by parser limitations. Consider the case of the bear that the player can tame and lead around to scare away the troll. It’s kosher enough as a puzzle — except that the player must divine the syntax “TAKE BEAR” (presumably not quite what she’s actually doing) to accomplish it. Perhaps Adventure’s underlying technology can really only support two kinds of puzzles: the extremely simple and the blatantly unfair. Guess the verb, after all, is always easy to code.

And of course we have to consider cultural differences. There seems to have been a real sense on everyone’s part that Adventure should be hard, that getting to the end of it should be a huge accomplishment. Thus all the emphasis the game places on scoring points. Like with the coin-op arcade games of the day, players would compare scores for sessions that resulted in eventual “defeat,” and would be satisfied with at least getting further than the rest of the office had managed. Less competitive types, meanwhile, could form teams to work on the game together, a natural result of the social environment in which PDP-10s were inevitably placed.

Finally, the enterprising could always turn to the freely distributed source code. Considering that most of the first people to play the game were hardcore hackers, I suspect that this was the way that the absurd “BLAST” puzzle first got solved. (EDIT: Or perhaps with a machine-language debugger. Tim Anderson states in Infocom’s “History of Zork” that this was the method used to figure out how to get the “last lousy point.” It does appear from anecdotes like these that Adventure was first distributed only in binary format, and that the source came afterward.)

I’ve gone on about these things at length because I think they will be relevant not just for understanding Adventure but also for understanding many of the games that would come afterward, many of which would be so infuriating that plenty of people even today can’t mention text adventures without cursing. Next time I’ll finish up this little miniseries on Adventure by talking about the game’s rapturous reception and legacy — and I’ll provide a final tally of exactly who was responsible for what parts of the final design, so you can know to whom to send your bouquets and your brickbats.

Comments
21 Responses

- Andrew Plotkin

June 3, 2011 at 9:33 pm

I don’t agree with your comparison of the Adventure puzzles with Infocom’s.

First: while Adventure had some good puzzles based on physical properties, it had just as many based on arbitrary and unintuitive restrictions. I’m not fond of the oyster, for example. Why the trident and not the axe? Or the platinum pyramid — shouldn’t that make a good wedge? It’s hard to visualize being unable to carry (only) a nugget up a climbable pit, or an egg-size stone through a narrow crack.

Infocom was *mostly* better about that sort of puzzle; they grounded their restrictions better in reality, or else used explicit magic. (Although they did borrow the narrow crack.)

As for the rod… you missed a clue. You’ve been toting the familiar “THREE FOOT BLACK ROD WITH A RUSTY STAR ON ONE END” for so long that when you encounter a “THREE FOOT BLACK ROD WITH A RUSTY MARK ON ONE END”, you assume it’s the same object. It’s not. That one-word difference doesn’t give you much clue as to what it *is*, but it is a precisely-metered indication that the item is new and significant.

- Jimmy Maher

June 4, 2011 at 8:06 am

“I don’t agree with your comparison of the Adventure puzzles with Infocom’s.”

I’m not sure we disagree at all. Certainly I agree that Adventure’s world model is so simplistic that it sometimes feels like it’s barely even there, often devolving into arbitrary relations like the clam and the trident. For another example: if the nugget of gold is really so bulky that I can’t carry it up a set of stairs, why does it behave in all other respects (my inventory limit, etc.) like any other object?

I will stand by my assertion that there’s no reasonable way for a player to get from “THREE FOOT BLACK ROD WITH A RUSTY MARK ON ONE END” to “BLAST,” however. :)

- Arthur

October 31, 2012 at 6:53 pm

I agree that the BLAST “puzzle” is ridiculously unfair, but I’d like to infodump some background trivia for anyone who hasn’t played the game (or just hasn’t teased out all its secrets).

– “Adventure” may have started the trend of adventure games responding to dirty words. Typing FUCK yields the response “Watch it!”. (Later expansions added other cuss words; David Long’s “Adventure 6” has distinct specialized responses for PISS and SHIT, with and without exclamation points.)

– Typing the milder curse BLAST anywhere *except* the endgame repository yields the snarky response “Blasting requires dynamite.” So players in the right frame of mind might be aware of the existence of the verb before getting to the repository.

– In the endgame repository, in addition to the two types of rods, empty bottles, cages, birds, snakes, dwarves, beanstalks, grate, and mirror, there is also a bed of oysters. Picking up an oyster produces the message “Interesting. There seems to be something written on the underside of the oyster.” It’s a hint, and it costs you 10 points: “There is something strange about this place, such that one of the words I’ve always known now has a new effect.”

– IGNITE, DETONATE, and BLOWUP are synonymous with BLAST. The verb can optionally take an (ignored) object; for example, IGNITE ROD or BLAST GRATE.

– It’s possible that Crowther’s original audience of cavers would have been more likely to BLAST or DETONATE their way past obstacles than a modern adventure-gamer used to immutable dungeons. I don’t really assign a lot of weight to this point, but there must be *some* reason that Crowther originally (pre-Woods, pre-repository-puzzle) felt the need to include DIG, EXCIVATE [sic], and BLAST as verbs. (DIG/EXCAVATE never became relevant, even in Woods’ version.)

– And of course this *was* the “Master Game”, designed to keep normal people from winning the game. Unfairness was intentional at this point. I’m with Andrew Plotkin in naming the trident/clam puzzle the unfairest of the lot (if you don’t count the Last Lousy Point, of course).

– At least one port of “Adventure” I’ve played (although I don’t remember which) describes the second rod as “a RED rod with a rusty mark on the end”, which is a much bigger nudge in the direction of dynamiting things.

- King Lysandus

April 29, 2019 at 4:37 am

I have to disagree on the whole “using a trident to open a clam and not an axe is a bad puzzle” sentiment. A clam and a trident are both nautical, that is what is supposed to be a hint.

- Felix Pleșoianu

June 4, 2011 at 9:51 am

Dunno, I made a homebrew text adventure engine with a two-word parser (for kicks, mind you) and it was easy enough to come up with fair puzzles. Then again, I had decades of accumulated IF wisdom to build upon…

- Jason Dyer

June 4, 2011 at 1:45 pm

I’ve played enough two word parser games to know the puzzles don’t have to be too hard or too easy. I think novice IF writers in general have trouble avoiding the extremes, though.

re: the oyster opening to the trident but not the axe, that sort of thing _still_ seems to be an issue in most IF. For any physical action it always feels like there’s at least five items that could reasonable accomplish it but the author only codes one or two.

- Jimmy Maher

June 4, 2011 at 2:36 pm

It’s certainly a debatable point whether Adventure could support more difficult puzzles without falling into outright unfairness. We should, however, remember that there are two things happening here: a primitive parser AND a primitive world model. (Well, more primitive — obviously, when compared with everyday natural language and the real world around us both are ALWAYS primitive.) For instance, Adventure lacks the concept of supporters, and models containment only sketchily. (The bottle is essentially hacked in rather than being a natural result of the underlying world model.) Things like this introduce restrictions of their own.

I don’t plan to make the grand tour you are on, but I do want to play some other important early games soon. I’ll be interested to see whether their puzzle have similar problems.

- Felix Pleșoianu

June 4, 2011 at 3:00 pm

The primitive parser and the primitive world model are definitely connected. It would be a bad idea to have a full containment model when you can’t say “put bottle on table”. That definitely limits one’s options as to what puzzles at possible at all, never mind the difficulty.

- Jimmy Maher

June 4, 2011 at 5:39 pm

To some extent, of course. Certainly the two generally go hand in hand to one extent or another. At the same time, though, games with 2-word parsers often make assumptions to support more complex actions than “should” be possible. For example, in Adventure typing THROW AXE in the presence of a dwarf is assumed to mean THROW AXE AT DWARF; typing OPEN CLAM while carrying the trident is assumed to mean PRY CLAM WITH TRIDENT; etc. And yes, too much of this sort of thing can quickly devolve into guess-the-verb nonsense…

- Jason Dyer

June 4, 2011 at 5:25 pm

I think it’d be definitely worth your while to hit Zork (mainframe version), especially if you can dig out an earlier version than the ones floating around if-archive.

Also for somewhat selfish reasons I think you should try Warp (1979-1982) which is ONLY available in its HP mainframe version. It was an attempt to top the Zork parser and it does some things with the parser even modern games don’t do (like macros and conditionals). Your TOPS-20 in a box was excellent, perhaps do the same thing for an HP mainframe?

- Rotonoto

June 4, 2011 at 3:08 pm

In the first version I played, IGNITE was allowed instead of BLAST.

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- Remillard

July 31, 2015 at 8:30 pm

I’d call the dragon puzzle wholly amusing, but perhaps only because of my memory of solving it.

I was born in 1971, and in about 1980-81 (es, my dad (a farmer) bought an Apple ][+ ostensibly to do farm records with. We had Visicalc and whatnot. It also came with all the promotional pack software including Apple Writer, and Apple Adventure (a port of Adventure).

I played Apple Adventure off and on for years, getting further here and there. My cousins who lived far off would visit in the summertime, and the computer was still a novelty, and THEY played Apple Adventure and we’d sort of crowd around the monitor in the kitchen (which is where this machine was located).

Anyhow, one of my cousins was not especially technical and she was also a bit of a smartass. We’d banged on this dragon thing for a long time. Finally at one point at the WHAT? WITH YOUR BARE HANDS? response, she gets fed up and types YES. Lo and behold, puzzle solved, and a family moment was born (at least among us cousins).

Anyhow, from a purist perspective, using the parser in a conversational way instead of a command delivery method may be unfair, but at least here I think it did exactly what it was intended to. A pure comedic moment.

- Mike Taylor

December 19, 2018 at 11:29 am

I understand why the end-game puzzle is the way it is!

Lightning struck when I was reading Jertz’s (2007) “Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky”, which says:

For example, Crowther’s original responds to the command “BLAST” with the message “BLASTING REQUIRES DYNAMITE,” but none exists in his game. Woods, however, incorporates “BLAST” into the finale.

When Woods wrote that end-game puzzle, he was working in a context where he expected his players to already be familiar with Will Crowther’s original ADVENTURE, and with the “BLASTING REQUIRES DYNAMITE” message. For those players, seeing something that looks like a stick of dynamite would be much more likely to trigger the relevant connection. What’s happened since then — very quickly after the first Crowther & Woods release, in fact — is that the cultural context in which the game is played has changed. Now, the C&W version is almost always the first version people encounter, so they don’t come to the game with the existing knowledge of the “blast” response.

I’m not saying this make it a good puzzle; but it makes it explicable.

- Jimmy Maher

December 19, 2018 at 12:27 pm

It’s a neat idea, but I don’t quite buy it. ;)

It could certainly be argued that Don Woods was writing, unconsciously if not self-consciously, to a small peer group of elite computer-science researchers at major universities, who all attended the same conferences and knew the same games, a milieu where everyone knew everyone else within a couple of degrees of separation. But what’s lost is how *extremely* obscure Crowther’s original Adventure was. He toyed with it a while but never seems to have told anyone about it. He apparently put it up on a file repository not out of any conviction that it had real value, but just because that’s what you did with stuff; it was an ingrained part of the hacker ethic of sharing to which he adhered. Woods was quite probably the only person ever to discover it. The original Adventure was so obscure that for several decades it was assumed lost, until Dennis Jerz unexpectedly turned it up. For Woods to make a puzzle harking back to Crowther’s original Adventure just wouldn’t make a lot of sense. Literally nobody would get the joke.

And, absent this explanation, I wouldn’t say I find the existence of this puzzle inexplicable at all. It’s the product of a fundamentally different mindset, which posited that endgames should be *hard*, that beating a game should be a veritable major life achievement, complete with major bragging rights, that entire *groups* of players might need to make a coordinated assault on a game to succeed. With such limited technological tools at the designer’s disposal to make more *logically* complex puzzles, hardness almost inevitably tipped over into unfairness – guess the verb, etc.

Another design aesthetic — the one I espouse on this blog — has it that an adventure game should be more fun than frustrating, a good time spent in an imaginary world rather than a battle to the death with a sadistic designer. This is the philosophy of most thoughtful designers today — not least in the endgame, which is generally recommended to be if anything a bit easier than what came just before, on the assumption that the player will know she’s in the homestretch and will be excited just to push on and *win*, not to spend hours pondering difficult puzzles. But it would take a long time for the older philosophy to fall completely out of fashion. You can still see some of it, for example, in Graham Nelson’s landmark Curses!, which is indebted as much to the institutional-text-adventure heritage as it is to Infocom; Nelson once confessed that he was surprised at how many people had finished Curses!, a game designed, one senses, to keep most players from doing so.

In light of all this, Adventure is actually more remarkable for how fair it is on the whole rather than the opposite. This puzzle aside, it remains surprisingly playable today, far more so than most of its immediate successors. When you consider that Don Woods had literally no examples of good or bad design to work from, that really is remarkable.

- Mike Taylor

December 19, 2018 at 7:20 pm

I hear you, but I think I’m going to stick with my theory. Yes, the early distribution of ADVENTURE was limited — though surely nowhere near as limited as “Woods was quite probably the only person ever to discover it”, since Woods apparently discovered the Colossal Cave Adventure game by accident on a SAIL computer in 1976 (stated in Wikipedia but with no primary source cited). The point is, however limited Crowther’s v1 was, Woods had no reason to expect that his v2 would spread any further. He would, I imagine, have been writing for the people who had played and enjoyed v1, aiming to give them more of what they liked.

Of course, it should be possible to just ask him. As far as I know he’s still alive; but his web-page at http://www.icynic.com/~don/ is down. Do you know a way to contact him?

- Jimmy Maher

December 20, 2018 at 5:39 am

Sorry, no. I’ve never had any direct contact with him.

- Will Moczarski

April 24, 2019 at 5:18 am

as well a willingness -> as well as a willingness

(just reading your blog again; if my corrections are bothering you, just tell me! Still a fantastic blog the second time around!)

- Jimmy Maher

April 25, 2019 at 3:10 pm

Not at all. Thanks!

- Will Moczarski

April 24, 2019 at 5:20 am

the very different backgrounds does -> background or do

- Will Moczarski

April 24, 2019 at 5:51 pm

Regarding hard endgames: The company Med Systems whose games I‘m currently playing through one by one were advertised as being the hardest on the market (that was around 1981). On the one hand, this goes back to the mentioned challenge of the endgame to mark a win down as a major achievement, on the other hand another reason for difficult IF was apparent on the home/micro computer market: enhancing the amount of hours it took to beat these games. It didn‘t matter if they were unfair as long as they gave you your money‘s worth. Sierra did some similar things with their graphic adventures (stairs, stairs and more stairs). I wouldn‘t say that it was already a cause for frustration back then but game designers certainly had more than one reason to make their games hard as nails as approved by their audiences.

The Completed Adventure, Part 3
June 4, 2011

The PDP-10 system on which Don Woods completed Adventure was an expensive resource shared by many; Stanford did not purchase it to enable virtual spelunking. Perhaps to head off the inevitable complaints of his superiors, Woods built into the program the concept of “Cave Hours.” If someone tried to play during times of peak demand — by default from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm, excluding weekends and holidays — she was allowed only to take a “short exploration,” limited (by default) to 30 minutes and without the option to save her progress. Some design choices also seem calculated to encourage players to play in shorter sessions over a period of weeks or months rather than binging for hours at a time. For instance, during non-peak periods a player can save her progress, but she is forced to immediately quit the game upon doing so, and cannot restore her session and resume playing for 90 minutes. (Of course, things like this also served, in keeping with the philosophy described in my last post, just to make the game hard.)

These restrictions could be altered by an administrator by entering “MAGIC MODE” at an in-game prompt. If she responds correctly to what follows she becomes a sort of root user, able to change the program’s settings:

MAGIC MODE

ARE YOU A WIZARD?

YES

PROVE IT!  SAY THE MAGIC WORD!

DWARF

THAT IS NOT WHAT I THOUGHT IT WAS.  DO YOU KNOW WHAT I THOUGHT IT WAS?

NO

NODDG

BMAFH

OH DEAR, YOU REALLY *ARE* A WIZARD!  SORRY TO HAVE BOTHERED YOU . . .
DO YOU WISH TO SEE THE HOURS?
YES

Mon - Fri:  Open all day
Sat - Sun:  Open all day
Holidays:   Open all day
DO YOU WISH TO CHANGE THE HOURS?
NO
DO YOU WISH TO (RE)SCHEDULE THE NEXT HOLIDAY?
NO
Length of short game (null to leave at 30):

NEW MAGIC WORD (NULL TO LEAVE UNCHANGED):

NEW MAGIC NUMBER (NULL TO LEAVE UNCHANGED):

Latency for restart (null to leave at 90):

DO YOU WISH TO CHANGE THE MESSAGE OF THE DAY?
NO
OKAY.  YOU CAN SAVE THIS VERSION NOW.

BE SURE TO SAVE YOUR CORE-IMAGE...
CPU time 0.01   Elapsed time 33.98

EXIT

The administrator must work out the proper response using a complex cipher algorithm based not only on the randomly chosen sequence of characters the game sends to her but also on the exact current system time. This portion of the source code is obfuscated as much as possible for obvious reasons, although I’m sure the sufficiently determined could work it out. Presumably the algorithm must have been passed secretly among administrators, but this is one aspect of Adventure I’ve never heard too much about. If anyone knows anything more about how this was generally handled, by all means leave a comment to tell us about it.

One interesting aspect of the cave hours system is the way that it treats Adventure not as a narrative or even as a game, but rather as a location — specifically, as a sort of virtual amusement park. The visitor who attempts to enter during peak hours is told, “I’M TERRIBLY SORRY, BUT COLOSSAL CAVE IS CLOSED,” followed by details of its “open hours.” This idea is echoed in the endgame, as the player suddenly finds herself dropped into the control room of this underground park. It all serves to emphasize again that Adventure is ultimately all about location, location, location — and that Don Woods apparently had a bit of an amusement-park fetish.

Whatever its other implications, system administrators would soon have reason to bless Woods for including cave hours, even as they probably cursed him for ever unleashing Adventure upon them in the first place. Because, you see, Adventure turned out to be popular — really, really popular. Solving it became the obsession of hackers across the country and, eventually, all over the world; legend has it that IT departments and university computer-science departments pretty much stopped doing much of anything else until they had won. Even disallowing play during business hours is after all of limited utility when all of the people who are supposed to be accomplishing useful things during said business hours are passed out at their desks after playing Adventure all night. One apocryphal quote claims that Adventure set the entire computing industry back by two weeks.

And once that crisis was passed, lots of hackers in lots of places promptly started trying to make their own versions. Adventure-like games became Adventure games became adventure games, and a genre was born. For several years the most complex examples of the new form continued to appear on larger institutional systems in places like MIT University, the Stockholm Computer Center, and Cambridge University. Jason Dyer has been doing a great job of covering that aspect of early adventure gaming, digging into some largely forgotten works as well as the heavy hitters like Zork. At least for now, though — and, as always, as time permits — I want to look at how the innovations of Crowther and Woods, not to mention those of Gregory Yob and Don Rawitsch and so many others, began to come home, on the first practical home computers that were appearing at the same time that Adventure was paralyzing the world of the institutional computer.

Before I say goodbye to Adventure, here’s a final tally of who created what.

Crowther:
basic concept of the text adventure
compass directions
the dwarves
“Maze of Twisty Little Passages, all alike”
geography and some puzzles up to the “Complex Junction”

Woods:
inventory limit
“Maze of Twisty Little Passages, all different”
cave hours
geography and puzzles from the “Complex Junction”
scoring system
save system
the pirate
limited lamp battery life

You have a lot to answer for, Don Woods! But we love you anyway… at least you didn’t implement any hunger timers.

Comments
9 Responses

- Harry Kaplan

June 7, 2011 at 11:05 pm

What you are doing with these early storygames skirts perilously close to archaeology. You locate the site (find the code), examine it to get an overall sense of its expanse and function (play the game), and finally study it carefully layer by layer to see how it evolved over time (read the code, identifying the kernel and deducing how it was rewritten and expanded during its development lifetime). Next step, carbon dating. Oh, I forgot – you’re already married.

- Jimmy Maher

June 8, 2011 at 7:50 am

So what you’re gently trying to tell me is that I should have been “The Digital Archaeologist,” heh? I hate it when I get my metaphors wrong…

- Harry Kaplan

June 8, 2011 at 10:02 am

All kidding aside, a stance that’s tough for me to take, archaeology might be an interesting paridigm for your researches into early storygames if you bind all this material together in a book some day.

- Charles Richmond

February 13, 2012 at 10:41 pm

The “magic mode” incantation only works right at the beginning of the game. Otherwise, the user gets the response “I don’t know the word magic”.

After the game starts and asks if you want instructions, it says:

YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING.
AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND
DOWN A GULLY.

At that time, you type “magic mode”… and the sequence you wrote about is followed.

- Giuseppe

February 19, 2013 at 9:22 pm

I’ve been reading your articles, in order, starting with the beginning, and I just have to ask something: why is the player character always referred to as a “she”?

I may not be a native English speaker, so maybe I don’t get it, but it sort of seems unusual. It stands out.

Sorry if this question has been already answered elsewhere, but I haven’t read everything. Yet.

- Jimmy Maher

February 20, 2013 at 5:55 am

Just one of my ticks as a writer. Since people usually make everyone male by default, I decided to do the opposite. There’s another comment somewhere around here where I talk about it in more detail. Blame it on my graduate-school indoctrination. :)

- Mike Taylor

December 18, 2018 at 10:30 am

“tics”, not “ticks” :-)

- Tobias V. Langhoff

February 1, 2020 at 8:33 pm

It felt very natural to me, since Crowther wrote the game to be played by his daughters!

- Hans der Hase

January 10, 2018 at 1:04 pm

Just started reading through your articles. Great work man! Extra credit for also making them available in EPUB format for reading on my ebook reader!

Regarding the “magic mode”:

ifarchive.org has a DOS implementation of Adventure by Don Ekman: https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/adv350de.zip

It contains a rather lengthy description/manual of how the “magic mode” works: WIZARD.HOW

It also seems like Don Ekman took the heroical task of sorting out the Fortran code into handy little pieces. The “magic mode” part is in the file WIRZARD.FOR for those who are interested in the nitty gritty details of the implementation.

Since Im a total copyright noob I cowardly refuse to paste some extracts into this comment… Boy what lousy wimps we’ve become since the old “free as in software” days, didnt we?

The Roots of Infocom
January 1, 2012

In November of 1980 Personal Software began running the advertisement above in computer magazines, plugging a new game available then on the TRS-80 and a few months later on the Apple II. It’s not exactly a masterpiece of marketing; its garish, amateurish artwork is defensible only in being pretty typical of the era, and the text is remarkably adept at elucidating absolutely nothing that might make Zork stand out from its text-adventure peers. A jaded adventurer might be excused for turning the page on Zork’s “mazes [that] confound your quest” and “20 treasures” needing to be returned to the “Trophy Case.” Even Scott Adams, not exactly a champion of formal experimentation, had after all seen fit to move on at least from time to time from simplistic fantasy treasure hunts, and Zork didn’t even offer the pretty pictures of On-Line Systems’s otherwise punishing-almost-to-the-point-of-unplayability early games.

In fact, though, Zork represented a major breakthrough in the text-adventure genre — or maybe I should say a whole collection of breakthroughs, from its parser that actually displayed some inkling of English usage in lieu of simplistic pattern matching to the in-game text that for the first time felt crafted by authors who actually cared about the quality of their prose and didn’t find proper grammar and spelling a needless distraction. In one of my favorite parts of Jason Scott’s Get Lamp documentary, several interviewees muse about just how truly remarkable Zork was in the computing world of 1980-81. The consensus is that it was, for a brief window of time, the most impressive single disk you could pull out to demonstrate what your new TRS-80 or Apple II was capable of.

Zork was playing in a whole different league from any other adventure game, a fact that’s not entirely surprising given its pedigree. You’d never guess it from the advertisement above, but Zork grew out of the most storied area of the most important university in computer-science history: MIT. In fact, Zork’s pedigree is so impressive that it’s hard to know where to begin and harder to know where to end in describing it, hard to avoid getting sucked into an unending computer-science version of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” To keep things manageable I’ll try as much as I can to restrict myself to people directly involved with Zork or Infocom, the company that developed it. So, let’s begin with Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, a fellow who admittedly had more of a tangential than direct role in Infocom’s history but who does serve as an illustration of the kind of rarified computer-science air Infocom was breathing.

Born in 1915 in St. Louis, Licklider was a psychologist by trade, but had just the sort of restless intellect that Joseph Weizenbaum would lament the (perceived) loss of in a later generation of scholars at MIT. He received a triple BA degree in physics, mathematics, and psychology from St. Louis’s Washington University at age 22, having also flirted with chemistry and fine arts along the way. He settled down a bit to concentrate on psychology for his MA and PhD, but remained consistently interested in connecting the “soft” science of psychology with the “hard” sciences and with technology. And so, when researching the psychological component of hearing, he learned more about the physical design of the human and animal auditory nervous systems than do many medical specialists. (He once described it as “the product of a superb architect and a sloppy workman.”) During World War II, research into the effects of high-altitude on bomber crews led him to get equally involved with the radio technology they used to communicate with one another and with other airplanes.

After stints at various universities, Licklider came to MIT in 1950, initially to continue his researches into acoustics and hearing. The following year, however, the military-industrial complex came calling on MIT to help create an early-warning network for the Soviet bombers they envisioned dropping down on America from over the Arctic Circle. Licklider joined the resulting affiliated institution, Lincoln Laboratory, as head of its human-engineering group, and played a role in the creation of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), by far the most ambitious application of computer technology conceived up to that point and, for that matter, for many years afterward. Created by MIT’s Lincoln Lab with IBM and other partners, the heart of SAGE was a collection of IBM AN/FSQ-7 mainframes, physically the largest computers ever built (a record that they look likely to hold forever). The system compiled data from many radar stations to allow operators to track a theoretical incoming strike in real time. They could scramble and guide American aircraft to intercept the bombers, enjoying a bird’s eye view of the resulting battle. Later versions of SAGE even allowed them to temporarily take over control of friendly aircraft, guiding them to the interception point via a link to their autopilot systems. SAGE remained in operation from 1959 until 1983, cost more than the Manhattan Project that had opened this whole can of nuclear worms in the first place, and was responsible for huge advances in computer science, particularly in the areas of networking and interactive time-sharing. (On the other hand, considering that the nuclear-bomber threat SAGE had been designed to counter had been largely superseded by the ICBM threat by the time it went operational, its military usefulness is debatable at best.)

During the 1950s most people, including even many of the engineers and early programmers who worked on them, saw computers as essentially huge calculators. You fed in some numbers at one end and got some others out at the other, whether they be the correct trajectory settings for a piece of artillery to hit some target or other or the current balances of a million bank customers. As he watched early SAGE testers track simulated threats in real time, however, Licklider was inspired to a radical new vision of computing, in which human and computer would actively work together, interactively, to solve problems, generate ideas, perhaps just have fun. He took these ideas with him when he left the nascent SAGE project in 1953 to float around MIT in various roles, all the while drifting slowly away from traditional psychology and toward computer science. In 1957 he became a full-time computer scientist when he (temporarily, as it turned out) left MIT for the consulting firm Bolt Beranek and Newman, a company that would play a huge role in the development of computer networking and what we’ve come to know as the Internet. (Loyal readers of this blog may recall that BBN is also where Will Crowther was employed when he created the original version of Adventure as a footnote to writing the code run by the world’s first computerized network routers.)

Licklider, who insisted that everyone, even his undergraduate students, just call him “Lick,” was as smart as he was unpretentious. Speaking in a soft Missouri drawl that could obscure the genius of some of his ideas, he never seemed to think about personal credit or careerism, and possessed not an ounce of guile. When a more personally ambitious colleague stole one of his ideas, Lick would just shrug it off, saying, “It doesn’t matter who gets the credit; it matters that it gets done.” Everyone loved the guy. Much of his work may have been funded by the realpolitik of the military-industrial complex, but Lick was by temperament an idealist. He became convinced that computers could mold a better, more just society. In it, humans would be free to create and to explore their own potential in partnership with the computer, which would take on all the drudgery and rote work. In a surprising prefiguring of the World Wide Web, he imagined a world of “home computer consoles” connected to a larger network that would bring the world into the home — interactively, unlike the passive, corporate-controlled medium of television. He spelled out all of these ideas carefully in a 1960 paper, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” staking his claim as one of a long line of computing utopianists that would play a big role in the development of more common-man friendly technologies like the BASIC programming language and eventually of the microcomputer itself.

In 1958, the U.S. government formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency in response to alleged Soviet scientific and technological superiority in the wake of their launch of Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, the previous year. ARPA was intended as something of a “blue-sky” endeavor, pulling together scientists and engineers to research ideas and technology that might not be immediately applicable to ongoing military programs, but that might just prove to be in the future. It became Lick’s next stop after BBN: in 1962 he took over as head of their “Information Processing Techniques Office.” He remained at ARPA for just two years, but is credited by many with shifting the agency’s thinking dramatically. Previously ARPA had focused on monolithic mainframes operating as giant batch-processing “answer machines.” From Where Wizards Stay Up Late:

The computer would be fed intelligence information from a variety of human sources, such as hearsay from cocktail parties or observations of a May Day parade, and try to develop a best-guess scenario on what the Soviets might be up to. “The idea was that you take this powerful computer and feed it all this qualitative information, such as ‘The air force chief drank two martinis,’ or ‘Khrushchev isn’t reading Pravda on Mondays,” recalled Ruina. “And the computer would play Sherlock Holmes and conclude that the Russians must be building an MX-72 missile or something like that.”

“Asinine kinds of things” like this were the thrust of much thinking about computers in those days, including plenty in prestigious universities such as MIT. Lick, however, shifted ARPANET in a more manageable and achievable direction, toward networks of computers running interactive applications in partnership with humans — leave the facts and figures to the computer, and leave the conclusions and the decision-making to the humans. This shift led to the creation of the ARPANET later in the decade. And the ARPANET, as everyone knows by now, eventually turned into the Internet. (Whatever else you can say about the Cold War, it brought about some huge advances in computing.) The humanistic vision of computing that Lick championed, meanwhile, remains viable and compelling today as we continue to wait for the strong AI proponents to produce a HAL.

Lick returned to MIT in 1968, this time as the director of the legendary Project MAC. Formed in 1963 to conduct research for ARPA, MAC stood for either (depending on whom you talked to) Multiple Access Computing or Machine Aided Cognition. Those two names also define the focus of its early research: into time-shared systems that let multiple users share resources and use interactive programs on a single machine; and into artificial intelligence, under the guidance of the two most famous AI proponents of all, John McCarthy (inventor of the term itself) and Marvin Minsky. I could write a few (dozen?) more posts on the careers and ideas of these men, fascinating, problematic, and sometimes disturbing as they are. I could say the same about many other early computing luminaries at MIT with whom Lick came into close contact, such as Ivan Sutherland, inventor of the first paint program and, well, pretty much the whole field of computer-graphics research as well as the successor to his position at ARPA. Instead, I’ll just point you (yet again) to Steven Levy’s Hackers for an accessible if necessarily incomplete description of the intellectual ferment at 1960s MIT, and to Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Matthew Lyon and Katie Hafner for more on Lick’s early career as well as BBN, MIT, and our old friend Will Crowther.

Project MAC split into two in 1970, becoming the MIT AI Laboratory and the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS). Lick stayed with the latter as a sort of grandfather figure to a new generation of young hackers that gradually replaced the old guard described in Levy’s book as the 1970s wore on. His was a shrewd mind always ready to take up their ideas, and one who, thanks to his network of connections in the government and industry, could always get funding for said ideas.

LCS consisted of a number of smaller working groups, one of which was known as the Dynamic Modeling Group. It’s oddly difficult to pin any of these groups down to a single purpose. Indeed, it’s not really possible to do so even for the AI Lab and LCS themselves; plenty of research that could be considered AI work happened at LCS, and plenty that did not comfortably fit under that umbrella took place at the AI Lab. (For instance, Richard Stallman developed the ultimate hacker text editor, EMACS, at the AI Lab — a worthy project certainly but hardly one that had much to do with artificial intelligence.) Groups and the individuals within them were given tremendous freedom to hack on any justifiable projects that interested them (with the un-justifiable of course being left for after hours), a big factor in LCS and the AI Lab’s becoming such beloved homes for hackers. Indeed, many put off graduating or ultimately didn’t bother at all, so intellectually fertile was the atmosphere inside MIT in contrast to what they might find in any “proper” career track in private industry.

The director of the Dynamic Modeling Group was a fellow named Albert (Al) Vezza; he also served as an assistant director of LCS as a whole. And here we have to be a little bit careful. If you know something about Infocom’s history already, you probably recognize Vezza as the uptight corporate heavy of the story, the guy who couldn’t see the magic in the new medium of interactive fiction that the company was pursuing, who insisted on trivializing the game division’s work as a mere source of funding for a “serious” business application, and who eventually drove the company to ruin with his misplaced priorities. Certainly there’s no apparent love lost between the other Infocom alumni and Vezza. An interview with Mike Dornbrook for an MIT student project researching Infocom’s history revealed the following picture of Vezza at MIT:

Where Licklider was charismatic and affectionately called “Lick” by his students, Vezza rarely spoke to LCS members and often made a beeline from the elevator to his office in the morning, shut the door, and never saw anyone. Some people at LCS were unhappy with his managerial style, saying that he was unfriendly and “never talked to people unless he had to, even people who worked in the Lab.”

On the other hand, Lyon and Hafner have this to say:

Vezza always made a good impression. He was sociable and impeccably articulate; he had a keen scientific mind and first-rate administrative instincts.

Whatever his failings, Vezza was much more than an unimaginative empty suit. He in fact had a long and distinguished career which he largely spent furthering some of the ideas first proposed by Lick himself; he appears in Lyon and Hafner’s book, for instance, because he was instrumental in organizing the first public demonstration of the nascent ARPANET’s capabilities. Even after the Infocom years, his was an important voice on the World Wide Web Consortium that defined many of the standards that still guide the Internet today. Certainly it’s a disservice to Vezza that his Wikipedia page consists entirely of his rather inglorious tenure at Infocom, a time he probably considers little more than a disagreeable career footnote. That footnote is of course the main thing we’re interested in, but perhaps we can settle for now on a picture of a man with more of the administrator or bureaucrat than the hacker in him and who was more of a pragmatist than an idealist — and one who had some trouble relating to his charges as a consequence.

Many of those charges had names that Infocom fans would come to know well: Dave Lebling, Marc Blank, Stu Galley, Joel Berez, Tim Anderson, etc., etc. Like Lick, many of these folks came to hacking from unexpected places. Lebling, for instance, obtained a degree in political science before getting sucked into LCS, while Blank commuted back and forth between Boston and New York, where he somehow managed to complete medical school even as he hacked like mad at MIT. One thing, however, most certainly held true of everyone: they were good. LCS didn’t suffer fools gladly — or at all.

One of the first projects of the DMG was to create a new programming language for their own projects, which they named with typical hacker cheekiness “Muddle.” Muddle soon became MDL (MIT Design Language) in response to someone (Vezza?) not so enamoured with the DMG’s humor. It was essentially an improved version of an older programming language developed at MIT by John McCarthy, one which was (and remains to this day) the favorite of AI researchers: LISP.

With MDL on hand, the DMG took on a variety of projects, individually or cooperatively. Some of these had real military applications to satisfy the folks who were ultimately funding all of these shenanigans; Lebling, for instance, spent quite some time on computerized Morse-Code recognition systems. But there were plenty of games, too, in some of which Lebling was also a participant, including the best remembered of them all, Maze. Maze ran over a network, with up to 8 Imlac PDS-1s, very simple minicomputers with primitive graphical capabilities, serving as “clients” connected to a single DEC PDP-10 “server.” Players on the PDS-1s could navigate around a shared environment and shoot at each other — the ancestor of modern games like Counterstrike. Maze became a huge hit, and a real problem for administrative types like Vezza; not only did a full 8-player game stretch the PDP-10 server to the limit, but it had a tendency to eventually crash entirely this machine that others needed for “real” work. Vezza demanded again and again that it be removed from the systems, but trying to herd the cats at DMG was pretty much a lost cause. Amongst other “fun” projects, Lebling also created a trivia game which allowed users on the ARPANET to submit new questions, leading to an eventual database of thousands.

And then, in the spring of 1977, Adventure arrived at MIT. Like computer-science departments all over the country, work there essentially came to a standstill while everyone tried to solve it; the folks at DMG finally got the “last lousy point” with the aid of a debugging tool. And with that accomplished, they began, like many other hackers in many other places, to think about how they could make a better Adventure. DMG, however, had some tools to hand that would make them almost uniquely suited to the task.

Comments
14 Responses

- Jason Scott

January 2, 2012 at 7:58 am

Now we’re cooking with gas.

- gnome

January 3, 2012 at 4:27 pm

Another excellently excellent article, and, well, Happy 2012!

- honorabili

January 3, 2012 at 5:14 pm

Thank you for posting their history.

- Todd

January 4, 2012 at 5:06 am

I always look forward to your posts, keep up the awesome work..

- Ziusudra

January 30, 2015 at 9:38 pm

who eventually drove the country to ruin with his misplaced priorities.

So, it was Vezza. I always thought it was Reagan.

- Jimmy Maher

January 31, 2015 at 9:13 am

That Vezza was an evil jerk, wasn’t he? I heard he strangled kittens just for fun. Thanks!

- Leecolins

September 1, 2018 at 1:24 am

Mmm. Gas.
But, you know, the good cooking gas.

- Erik Mason

January 12, 2019 at 10:48 pm

“…SAGE remained in operation from 1959 until 1983, cost more than the Manhattan Project that had opened this whole can of nuclear worms in the first place,…”

So the Third Reich nor the Soviet Union were not working on their own “Manhattan Projects”?

The “Manhattan Project” was the only nuclear research going on in the entire world at this time, never occurred to any country engaged in world domination?

Stick to facts and keep the politics out of a simple history of Infocom.

- Jeff Nyman

June 21, 2021 at 7:24 pm

Agreed. This kind of thing in these articles can be a little off-putting. It’s also not even historically accurate. The Tube Alloys project in the United Kingdom (working with Canada) to develop nuclear weapons and this was before the Manhattan Project. And, of course, there was the German Uranprojekt, started well before either of the above projects. The Soviet program never really got off the ground, particularly after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. But no doubt they would have continued that work.

This is the danger of being (or at least sounding) selective with history.

- Will Moczarski

September 28, 2019 at 5:32 pm

Loyal readers of this blog may also recall that BBN is also where Will Crowther was employed

This seems like one also too many.

— A loyal reader of this blog ;-)

- Will Moczarski

September 28, 2019 at 5:34 pm

Lick was by temperment an idealist.

-> by temperament?

- Jimmy Maher

October 1, 2019 at 6:53 am

Thanks!

- Ben

April 22, 2020 at 6:31 pm

such Ivan Sutherland -> such as Ivan Sutherland

much to with artificial intelligence -> much to do with artificial intelligence

game’s division work -> game division’s work

- Jimmy Maher

April 23, 2020 at 8:11 am

Thanks!

Zork on the PDP-10
January 3, 2012

One distinguishing trait of hackers is the way they never see any program as completely, definitively done; there are always additions to be made, rough edges to be smoothed. Certainly Adventure, impressive as it was, left plenty of room for improvement. On top of all that, though, one also has to consider that Adventure came to MIT from Don Woods of Stanford’s AI Lab, perhaps the only computer-science program in the country with a stature remotely comparable to that of MIT. MIT students are fiercely proud of their alma mater. If Stanford had done the adventure game first, MIT’s Dynamic Modeling Group could still do it better. And it didn’t hurt that the heritage of Project MAC and the Laboratory for Computer Science, not to mention the DMG itself, gifted them with quite some tools to bring to bear on the problem.

Adventure had been implemented in FORTRAN, a language with no particular suitability for the creation of a text adventure. Indeed, FORTRAN wasn’t even natively designed to handle variable-length strings, leaving Crowther and Woods to kludge their way around this problem as they did plenty of others. Both were of course very talented programmers, and so they made the best of it. Still, the hackers at DMG, whose opinion of FORTRAN was elevated about half a step above their opinion of BASIC, couldn’t wait to design their own adventure game using their own pet language, MDL. Not only did MDL, as a language at least partially designed for AI research, boast comparatively robust string-handling capabilities, but it also offered the ability to define complex new data types suitable to a specific task at hand and even to tie pieces of code right into those structures. Let me try to explain what made that so important.

We’ll start with the opening room of Zork, the game the DMG eventually produced in response to Adventure. Its description reads like this to the player:

West of House
This is an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
A rubber mat saying 'Welcome to Zork!' lies by the door.

Here’s the original MDL source that describes this room:

<ROOM "WHOUS"
"This is an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door."
"West of House"
<EXIT "NORTH" "NHOUS" "SOUTH" "SHOUS" "WEST" "FORE1"
"EAST" #NEXIT "The door is locked, and there is evidently no key.">
(<GET-OBJ "FDOOR"> <GET-OBJ "MAILB"> <GET-OBJ "MAT">)
<>
<+ ,RLANDBIT ,RLIGHTBIT ,RNWALLBIT ,RSACREDBIT>
(RGLOBAL ,HOUSEBIT)><

Just about everything the program needs to know about this room is nicely encapsulated here. Let’s step through it line by line. The “ROOM” tag at the beginning defines this structure as a room, with the shorthand name “WHOUS.” The following line of text is the room description the player sees when entering for the first time, or typing “LOOK.” “West of House” is the full name of the room, the one which appears as the header to the room description and in the status line at the top of the screen whenever the player is in this room. Next we have a list of exits from the room: going north will take the player to “North of House,” south to “South of House”, west to one of several rooms that make up the “Forest.” Trying to go east will give a special failure message, saying that the player doesn’t have a key for the door, rather than a generic “You can’t go that way.” Next we have the items in the room as the game begins: the front door, the mailbox, and the welcome mat. Then a series of flags define some additional properties of the room: that it is on land rather than overrun with water; that it has light even if the player does not have a lit lantern with her; that (being outdoors) it has no walls; that it is “sacred,” meaning that the thief, a character who wanders about annoying the player in a manner akin to the dwarfs and the pirate in Adventure, cannot come here. And finally the last line defines this room as being associated with the white house, or if you will a part of the house “region” of the game’s geography.

Each item and character in the game has a similar definition block explaining most of what the game needs to know about it. Notably, even the special abilities or properties of these are defined as part of them, via links to special sections of code crafted just for them. Thus, once the scaffolding of utility code that enables all of this was created (no trivial task, of course), adding on to Zork largely involved simply defining more rooms, items, and characters, with no need to dive again into the engine that enables everything; only special capabilities of items and characters needed to be coded from scratch and linked into their hosts. In forming their world from a collection of integrated “objects,” the hackers at DMG were pushing almost accidentally toward a new programming paradigm that would first become a hot topic in computer science years later: object-oriented programming, in which programs are not divided rigorously into code that executes and the data it manipulates, but are rather built out of the interaction of semi-autonomous objects encapsulating their own code and data. Regarded for a time as the ideal solution to pretty much everything (possibly including the attainment of world peace), there is today a (probably justified) push-back in some quarters against the one-size-fits-all imposition of OOP theory found in some languages, such as Java. Be that as it may, OOP is pretty much ideal for crafting a text adventure. To show what I mean, let’s look at the alternative, as illustrated by the very non-OOP FORTRAN Adventure.

Each room in Adventure is given a number, from 1 (the starting location outside the small brick building, naturally) to 140 (a dead end location in the maze, less naturally). To find the long description of a room, shown when the player enters for the first time or LOOKs, the program digs through the first table in an external data file, matching the room number to the entries:

1
1    YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING.
1    AROUND YOU IS A FOREST.  A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND
1    DOWN A GULLY.

Another table defines the short description shown upon entering an already visited room:

1    YOU'RE AT END OF ROAD AGAIN.

And now it gets really fun. Another table tells us what lies in what direction:

1    2    2    44    29
1    3    3    12    19    43
1    4    5    13    14    46    30
1    5    6    45    43
1    8    63

The first line above tells us that when in room 1 we can go to room 2 by typing any of three entries from yet another table, this time of keywords: “ROAD or HILL” (entries 2); “WEST” or “W” (entries 44); or “UPWAR” (pattern matching is done on just the first 5 characters of each word), “UP,” “ABOVE,” or “ASCEN” (entries 29). Definitions for items are similarly scattered over multiple tables within the data file. Thus, while Adventure does make some attempt to abstract its game engine from the data that makes up its world (placing the latter as much as possible within the external data file), modifying the world is a fiddly, error-prone process of editing multiple cryptic tables. Early adventuring engines created on microcomputers, such as those of Scott Adams, work in a similar fashion. Although it is of course possible to develop tools to ease the burden of hand-editing data files, the MDL Zork system is flexible and programmable in a way that these systems are not; with no ability to build code right into the world’s objects, as it were, crafting non-standard objects in Adventure or a Scott Adams game generally required hacking on the engine code itself, an ugly proposition.

So, MDL was just better for writing an adventure game, capable of cleanly representing a huge world in a readable, maintainable way. It was almost as if MDL had been designed for the purpose. Indeed, if you’ve used a more modern IF programming language like Inform 6, you might be surprised at how little their approach to defining a world has changed since the days of MDL Zork. (Inform 7, one of the latest and greatest tools for IF development, does drift away from the OOP model in favor of a more human-readable — even “literary” — rules-based approach. Suffice to say that the merits and drawbacks of the Inform 7 approach is a subject too complex to go into here. Maybe in 20 years, when the Digital Antiquarian finally makes it to 2006…)

And the DMG hackers had still another ace up their sleeve.

MIT had a large body of research into natural-language understanding on the computer, stretching back at least as far as Joseph Weizenbaum and his 1966 ELIZA system. If that program was ultimately little more than an elaborate parlor trick, it did inspire other, more rigorous attempts at getting a program to parse plain English. Most famously, between 1968 and 1970 Terry Winograd developed a program he called SHRDLU, which simulated a model world made up of blocks. The user could ask the program to manipulate this world, shifting blocks from place to place, placing them on top of each other, and so on, all by typing in her requests as simple imperative English sentences. She could even ask the computer simple questions, about what was placed where, etc. Rather overvalued in its time (as so much AI research tended to be) as a step on the road to HAL, SHRDLU nevertheless showed that when held within a very restricted domain it is very possible for a program to parse and genuinely “understand” at least a reasonable subset of English. Working from the tradition of SHRDLU, the DMG hackers crafted an adventure-game parser that was arguably the first to be truly worthy of the term. While Adventure got by with simple pattern matching (as betrayed by the fact that “LAMP GET” works as well as “GET LAMP”), Zork would have a real understanding not only of verb and direct object, but also of preposition, indirect object, conjunction, punctuation, even article. Helping the process along was once again MDL, which as a language designed with AI research in mind had superb string-manipulation capabilities. The parser they ended up with is a remarkable creation indeed, one that would stand alone for several years — then as now an eternity in the world of computer science. But now we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The road to Zork began in late May of 1977, when Dave Lebling put together a very simple parser and game engine quite similar to Adventure’s, from which Marc Blank and Tim Anderson built their first four-room game as a sort of proof of concept. At this point Lebling went on vacation for two weeks, while Blank, Anderson, and Bruce Daniels hacked like crazy, crafting the basic structure of Zork as we know it to this day. The name itself was a nonsense word floating around MIT that one might use in place of something, shall we say, stronger in stressful situations: “Zork the bloody thing!” when a piece of code just wouldn’t work correctly, etc. The file holding the game-in-progress got named “Zork” as a sort of placeholder until someone came up with something better. Every programmer tends to have a few names like this which she uses for programs, variables, functions, etc., when she’s just experimenting and can’t be bothered to come up with something better. (My own go-to placeholder, for reasons too embarrassing and idiosyncratic to elaborate on here, has been “fuzzy” for the last 25 years.) In the case of Zork, though, a proper name was slow in coming. And so Zork the game remained for the first six months of its existence.

By the time Lebling returned from that vacation to resume working on the game, a solid foundation was in place. Everything about the design was modular, meaning not only that (as demonstrated above) it was easy to add more rooms, items, and puzzles, but also that parts of the underlying technology could be easily removed, improved, and inserted again. Most notably, the parser gradually progressed from a two-word job “almost as smart as Adventure’s” to the state-of-the-art creation it eventually became, mostly thanks to the efforts of Blank, who obsessed over it to the tune of “40 or 50” iterations.

In later years Infocom would develop an elaborate if comedic history and mythology around Zork and its “Great Underground Empire,” but in these early days they were interested in the game’s world only as a setting for cool if ridiculously disparate scenery and, of course, puzzles to solve, very much in the tradition of Don Woods’s approach to Adventure. In fact, Zork’s world paid homage to Adventure almost to the point of initially seeming like a remake. Like in Adventure, you start above ground next to a small house; like in Adventure, there is a small wilderness area to explore, but the real meat of the game takes place underground; like in Adventure, your goal is to collect treasures and return them to the house that serves as your base of operations; etc., etc. Only deeper in the game did Zork diverge and really take on its own character, with imaginative locations of its own and much more intricate puzzles enabled by that magnificent parser. Of course, these parts were also crafted later, when the development team was more experienced and when said parser was much better. I’ll be having a detailed look at Zork the game in its microcomputer rather than its PDP-10 incarnation, but if you’re interested in learning more about this original shaggy-dog implementation I’d encourage you to have a look at Jason Dyer’s detailed play-through.

Like Adventure, Zork ran on a DEC PDP-10. Unlike Adventure, however, it ran under the operating system which also hosted the MDL environment, the Incompatible Timesharing System (named with a bit of hacker humor as a sarcastic response to an earlier Compatible Timesharing System; once again see — sorry to keep beating this drum — Levy’s Hackers for a great account of its origins). ITS was largely unique to MIT, the institution that had developed it. There was something very odd about it: in extravagant (some would say foolhardy) tribute to the hacker tradition of total openness and transparency, it had no passwords — in fact, no security whatsoever. Absolutely anyone could log on and do what they pleased. This led to a substantial community of what the MIT hackers came to call “net randoms,” people with nothing to do with MIT but who were blessed with access to an ARPANET-connected computer somewhere who stopped by and rummaged through the systems just to see what all those crazy MIT hackers were up to. DMG’s machine had collected quite a community of randoms thanks to the earlier Trivia game. It didn’t take them long to find Zork, even though it was never officially announced anywhere, and get to work adventuring. Soon the game-in-progress was developing a reputation across the ARPANET. For the benefit of this community of players the development team started to place a copy of U.S. News and Dungeon Report in one of the first rooms, which detailed the latest changes and additions to this virtual world they were exploring. The randoms as well as other, more “legitimate” MIT-based users (John McCarthy, the father of AI, among them) served as a sort of extended beta-testing team; the implementers could see what they tried to do, not to mention what they complained about, and adjust their game to accommodate them. Many of the parser improvements in particular were undoubtedly driven by just this process; anyone who’s ever put a text adventure through beta testing knows that you just can’t predict the myriad ways people will try to say things.

Still, Zork’s growing popularity raised obvious concerns about overloading the DMG’s PDP-10 system — which was funded by the Defense Department and theoretically needed for winning the Cold War, after all — with all of these gamers. Meanwhile, others were asking for their own copies of the game, to install on other machines. Although developed and used primarily under ITS, there was as it happened a version of the MDL environment that ran on yet another PDP-10 operating system, TOPS-20, first released by DEC in 1976 and positioned as a more advanced, user-friendly version of TOPS-10. Unlike ITS, TOPS-20 was widely used outside of MIT. The DMG hackers therefore modified Zork as necessary to run on TOPS-20 and began distributing it to any administrator who requested a copy. By that fall, machines all over the country were hosting Zork, and the maintainers had even set up an electronic mailing list to keep administrators aware of expansions and improvements.

The DMG hackers were generous, but not quite so generous as Don Woods had been with Adventure. They distributed Zork only as encrypted files that were runnable in an MDL environment but were not readable (and modifiable) as source code. They even went so far as to patch their famously insecure ITS development system, adding security to just the directory that stored the source. Hackers, however, won’t be denied, and soon one from DEC itself had penetrated the veil. From Infocom’s own official “History of Zork“:

[The security] was finally beaten by a system hacker from Digital: using some archaic ITS documentation (there’s never been any other kind), he was able to figure out how to modify the running operating system. Being clever, he was also able to figure out how our patch to protect the source directory worked. Then it was just a matter of decrypting the sources, but that was soon reduced to figuring out the key we’d used. Ted had no trouble getting machine time; he just found a new TOPS-20 machine that was undergoing final testing, and started a program that tried every key until it got something that looked like text. After less than a day of crunching, he had a readable copy of the source. We had to concede that anyone who’d go to that much trouble deserved it. This led to some other things later on.

About those “other things”:

At some point around the fall of 1977, the DMG hackers had decided that their creation really, really needed a “proper” name. Lebling suggested Dungeon, which excited no one (Lebling included), but no one could come up with anything better. And so Dungeon it was. It was shortly after this that the security breach just described took place — thus, the game that that DEC hacker recovered was not called Zork, but rather Dungeon. Shortly after that, MIT heard legal rumblings from, of all places, TSR, publishers of Dungeons and Dragons — and of a dungeon-crawling board game called simply Dungeon! TSR was always overzealous with lawsuits, and the consensus amongst the MIT lawyers that the DMG hackers consulted was that they didn’t have a legal leg to stand on. However, rather than get sucked into a lengthy squabble over a name none of them much liked in the first place, they decided to just revert to the much more memorable Zork. And so by the beginning of 1978 Dungeon became Zork once more, and retained that name forevermore.

Almost. Remember that source that “Ted” had liberated from MIT? Well, it made its way to another hacker at DEC, one Robert Supnik, who ported the whole thing to the more common and portable (if intrinsically vastly less suitable for text adventures) FORTRAN — a herculean feat that amazed even the DMG hackers. Since the game described in the MDL source he had access to was called Dungeon, Dungeon this version remained. Supnik originally did the port with an eye to getting Dungeon running on the DEC PDP-11 (not, as its name might seem to imply, a successor to the PDP-10, but rather a physically smaller, less powerful, less expensive machine). With Supnik’s FORTRAN source free distributable, however, it was a short hop from the PDP-11 to other architectures. Indeed, during these early years Supnik’s Dungeon was probably more widely distributed and thus more commonly played than the DMG’s own Zork. When PCs appeared that could support it, Dungeon inevitably made its way there as well. Thus by the latter part of the 1980s the situation was truly baffling for those without knowledge of all this history: there was this free game called Dungeon which was strangely similar to the official commercial Zork games, which were in turn very similar to this other game, Adventure, available by then in at least a dozen free or commercial versions. To this day Supnik’s Dungeon is available alongside the free-at-last MDL source to the PDP-10 Zork.

Back at MIT, development continued on Zork proper, albeit at a gradually diminishing pace, through 1978. Apart from some minor bug fixing that would go on for another couple of years, the last bits of Zork were put into place in February of 1979. By this point the game had grown to truly enormous proportions: 191 rooms, 211 items, a vocabulary of 908 words including 71 distinct verbs (not counting synonyms). The implementers were just about out of new puzzle ideas and understandably a bit exhausted with the whole endeavor, and, as if that weren’t justification enough, they had completely filled the 1 MB or so of memory an MDL program was allowed to utilize. And so they set Zork aside and moved on to other projects.

The story could very well have finished there, with Zork passing into history as another, unusually impressive example of the text adventures that flourished on institutional machines for a few brief years after Adventure’s release; Zork as another Mystery Mansion, Stuga (UPDATE: not quite; see Jason Dyer’s comment below), or HAUNT. It didn’t, though, thanks to the DMG’s very non-hackerish director, Al Vezza, who decided a few months later that the time was right to enter along with his charges the burgeoning new frontier of the microcomputer by starting a software company. Little did he realize where that decision would lead.

Comments
28 Responses

- Howard M. Lewis Ship

January 3, 2012 at 4:12 pm

A little typo:

At this point Lebling when on vacation for two weeks, while Blank, Anderson, and Bruce Daniels hacked like crazy,

- Jimmy Maher

January 4, 2012 at 8:21 am

Fixed. Thanks!

- Felix Pleșoianu

January 3, 2012 at 10:14 pm

We had to concede that anyone who’d go to that much trouble deserved it.

If only the typical response to modern piracy was so reasonable…

- Jimmy Maher

January 4, 2012 at 11:35 am

While I share your view that the approach most media producers — in all forms of media — take to fighting piracy is not the most productive, I’m a little uncomfortable with this comparison. The DEC hacker merely “pirated” the source code to a game the DMG hackers were already giving away for free in executable form. Later, when pirates were copying games they were trying to sell for $30 or $50, Infocom’s reaction was not so blase.

- Wayne

January 5, 2012 at 1:23 pm

Which is how it should be – I have exactly zero problem with people getting shafted with ridiculously huge lawsuits when they’re trying to make money off of someone else’s IP. I’m much more worried when they go after folks who are simply sharing their music collection – maybe easier and better than the old mix tapes, but (at least to me) philosophically/conceptually identical.

- Tom

January 16, 2021 at 4:18 am

It’s a matter of scope. A dedicated tape trader was still limited by his network of fellow traders, physical media storage, the time required to duplicate a tape, etc.

Whereas today, when you can download an entire artist’s body of work in mere seconds, and can distribute it to literally millions of people just as quickly – it becomes a drastically different thing in practice.

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- Sniffnoy

January 4, 2012 at 7:31 pm

I assume <GET-OBJ “MAILB”< should be <GET-OBJ “MAILB”> ?

- Jimmy Maher

January 5, 2012 at 7:49 am

So it should. Thanks!

- Phil Unger

January 6, 2012 at 6:07 pm

I first played Adventure and Zork in the late 70’s or early 80’s on an IBM mainframe system running the VM operating system. I remember also once having source code in Fortran.

- Steve Metzler

August 25, 2015 at 12:11 pm

Yep. My first adventure game was Dungeon on a DEC MicroVax running VM, ca. 1985. My company had bought the machine mostly to use as an Intel 8085 cross-assembler/E-PROM blower.

A colleague and I spent 3 months of evenings playing Dungeon and got very close to the end. It was only years later I was to find out that solving a puzzle very early in the game the ‘easy’ way locked you out of the endgame. Sierra may have perfected the ‘long dead end’, but it was the roots of Infocom that invented it :-\

- Jason Dyer

January 7, 2012 at 5:47 am

Stuga isn’t exactly in the same company as the other two you listed; it went commercial, sold quite well and could be called the Zork of Sweden.

- Jimmy Maher

January 7, 2012 at 8:22 am

Oh, thanks. I’d avoided mentioning Acheton in that category for just that reason. I didn’t realize (or had forgotten) that the same was true of Stuga.

- Jeff Claar

November 15, 2017 at 9:21 pm

Been a lurker here for awhile, and this article inspired me to look up the MDL source code, which in turn inspired me to port it to C++. If anyone is interested, there’s a full port of the final 1981 616-point version of the MDL implementation of Zork at https://jclaar3@bitbucket.org/jclaar3/zork.git.

- Jimmy Maher

November 16, 2017 at 6:11 am

Wow! Very cool!

- Jeff Claar

December 2, 2017 at 1:11 am

Thanks…the internet is an amazing place. Not only is all the MDL source available, I used Michael Dornbrook and Marc Blank’s “MDL Programming Language Primer” from 40 years ago, as well as Steve Meretzky’s very sadly named “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Writing Interactive Fiction But Couldn’t Find Anyone Still Working Here to Ask” to learn about ZIL. Infocom sounded like a dream job when I was in junior high, and reading all these articles here is fascinating, albeit melancholic.

Still have many fond memories of playing Dungeon at home when my dad would bring home his thermal paper terminal from McDonnell Douglas, and how my brother and I would plug the phone into the acoustic coupler to play for hours on their PDP-10 (much to my mother’s fury when we tied up the phone line). If you’ll excuse me for a moment I have a sudden urge to go out front and yell at kids to get off my lawn.

Anyway, I think I got (most of) the bugs out, and if you don’t want to go through the whole nightmare of configuring a C++ compiler to build things, there are Windows and Linux builds at https://bitbucket.org/jclaar3/zork/downloads/.

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- Sebastian Echeverria

June 26, 2019 at 3:24 pm

Awesome article, as all posts found in this site. Thanks so much for keeping up the good work after so many years!

Some small typos:

“you might be surprised at how little the their approach to defining a world has changed..”
>
“you might be surprised at how little their approach to defining a world has changed…”

“By this point the game had grow to truly enormous proportions”
>
“By this point the game had grown to truly enormous proportions”

- Will Moczarski

October 1, 2019 at 8:21 pm

how little the their approach to defining a world

-> how little their approach

- Will Moczarski

October 1, 2019 at 8:27 pm

something, shall we say, stronger in stressful situation

-> situations perhaps?

- Jimmy Maher

October 2, 2019 at 7:17 am

Thanks!

- Will Moczarski

October 1, 2019 at 8:40 pm

Thus by the latter part of the 1980s

Should this be the 1970s?

- Will Moczarski

October 1, 2019 at 8:44 pm

Of course not. Sorry, must have read it with a too tired mind.

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- Marc Niegowski

December 15, 2020 at 9:18 pm

Typo:

“By this point the game had grow to truly enormous proportions: 191 rooms, 211 items . . . “
I believe you meant to write “. . . had grown . . . “

- Jimmy Maher

December 16, 2020 at 7:43 am

Thanks!

- Marc Niegowski

December 17, 2020 at 11:32 pm

You’re welcome, BTW – fantastic blog!

I go all the way back from IBM 1401, 360, 370, 390 – to today’s Z series. I still write assembler for several architectures IBM Z, z80, x86, etc. Mostly operating system bits. Started in the mid 70’s with a (already then) vintage 1401. I had my own TRS-80’s I, III, and 4, but I never owned an apple because I did not like the 6502. It was slow with such a minimal instruction set that one had to burn so many CPU cycles to get the slightest thing done.

Today, I love my Intel based MacBook Pros. I also use Windows workstations, and IBM Z mainframes.

- Jeff Nyman

June 21, 2021 at 8:52 pm

“… the hackers at DMG were pushing almost accidentally toward a new programming paradigm …”

I don’t know that it was “almost accidentally” at all if we take into account the history they were living and it really wasn’t even all that new Those ideas had been in the air for a bit.

Ivan Sutherland — who is mentioned in the overall Infocom history here — came up with Sketchpad around 1961 and 1962 and it foregrounded many of the ideas that would come to be understood as “object-oriented.” The objects in his program were data structures and the idea of “masters” (dynamic delegates) was basically inheritance. Instances of the objects were called “occurrences.”

The first programming language widely recognized as “object oriented” was Simula. That came about before the term object-oriented programming itself was used by Alan Kay, which was around 1966 or 1967. Smalltalk, whose development began in 1969 (but didn’t really see the light of day until 1972) was even more object-oriented than Simula.

LISP itself had the concept of “objects” even if wasn’t the idea of objects in a programming paradigm that referred to object-orientation. Objects in the LISP context were defined as symbols with property lists. Property lists were pairs of keys and values. Those are basically the data structures. LISP used conses, strings and symbols and provided abstractions that were defined by operations that constructed, accessed and manipulated those structures in a way that you could argue treated them as “objects.”

MDL first appeared around 1971 so I think it was building on the ideas that were swirling around and its design seems quite deliberate in terms of its antecedents.

The Birth of Infocom
January 5, 2012

As the Dynamic Modeling Group put the final touches on Zork and put it to bed at last, it was beginning to feel like the end of an era at MIT. Marc Blank was about to graduate medical school and begin his residency in Pittsburgh, which would make extensive MIT hacking impossible even given his seemingly superhuman capacities. Others were finishing their own degree programs at MIT, or just running out of justifications for forestalling “real” careers with real salaries by hanging around their alma mater. In fact, a generational exodus was beginning, not just from the DMG but from MIT’s Laboratory for Computer and AI Lab in general as well. Pressures from the outside world were intruding on the hacker utopia inside MIT at last, pressures which in the next few years would change it forever. Much of the change stemmed from the invention of the microcomputer.

Most in established institutional hacking environments like MIT were initially nonplussed by what’s come to be called the PC revolution. That’s not so surprising, really. Those early microcomputers were absurdly limited machines. The homebrew hackers who bought (and often built) them were just excited to have unfettered access to something that, however minimally, met the definition of “computer.” Those privileged to find a place at an institution like MIT, however, not only had unfettered or nearly unfettered access to the systems there, but said systems were powerful enough to really do something. What charms did an Altair or even TRS-80 have to compare with sophisticated operating systems like TOPS-10 or TOPS-20 or ITS, with well-structured programming languages like LISP and MDL, with research into AI and natural-language processing, even with networked games like Maze and Trivia and, yes, Zork? The microcomputer world looked like a hopelessly uncultured and untutored one, bereft of a whole hacking tradition stretching back two decades or more. How could anyone try to build complex software using BASIC? When many institutional hackers deigned to notice the new machines at all, it was with withering contempt; Stu Galley called “We hate micros!” the unofficial motto of the DMG. They regarded the micros as little more than toys — the very same reaction as most of the general population.

By the spring of 1979, though, it was becoming increasingly clear to anyone willing to look that the little machines had their uses. WordStar, the first really usable microcomputer word processor, had been out for a year, and was moving more and more CP/M-based machines into offices and even writer’s studies. At the West Coast Computer Faire that May, Dan Bricklin demonstrated for the first time VisiCalc, the world’s first spreadsheet program, which would revolutionize accounting and business-planning practice. “How did you ever do without it?” asked the first pre-release advertisement, hyperbolically but, as it turned out, presciently; a few years later millions would be asking themselves just that question. Unlike WordStar and even Scott Adams’s Adventureland, VisiCalc was not a more limited version of an institutional computing concept implemented on microcomputer hardware. It had been conceived, designed, and implemented entirely on the Apple II, the first genuinely new idea in software to be born on the microcomputer — and a sign of a burgeoning changing of the guard.

The microcomputer brought many, many more users to computers than had ever existed before. That in turn brought more private-industry investment into the field, driven by a new reality: that you could make real money at this stuff. And that knowledge brought big changes to MIT and other institutions of “pure” hacking. Most (in)famously, the AI Lab was riven that winter and spring of 1979 by a dispute between Richard Greenblatt, pretty much the dean of the traditional hacker ethic at MIT, and a more pragmatic administrator named Russell Noftsker. Along with a small team of other hackers and hardware engineers, Greenblatt had developed a small single-user computer — a sort of boutique micro, the first of what would come to be called “workstations” — optimized for running LISP. Believing the design to have real commercial potential, Noftsker approached Greenblatt with a proposal to form a company and manufacture it. Greenblatt initially agreed, but soon proved (at least in Noftsker’s view) unwilling to sacrifice even the most minute hacker principle in the face of business realities. The two split in an ugly way, with Noftsker taking much of the AI Lab with him to implement Greenblatt’s original concept as Symbolics, Inc. Feeling disillusioned and betrayed, Greenblatt eventually left as well to form his own, less successful company, Lisp Machines.

It’s not as if no one had ever founded a company out of MIT before, nor that commerce had never mixed with the idealism of the hackers there. The founders of DEC itself, Ken Olson and Harlan Anderson, were MIT alumni who had done the basic design for what became DEC’s first machine, the PDP-1, as students there in the mid-1950s. Thereafter, MIT maintained always a cozy relationship with DEC, testing hardware and, most significantly, developing much essential software for the company’s machines — a relationship that was either, depending on how you look at it, a goldmine for the hackers in giving them perpetual access to the latest technology or a brilliant scheme by DEC for utilizing some of the best computing minds of their generation without paying them a dime. Still, what was happening at MIT in 1979 felt qualitatively different. These hackers were almost all software programmers, after all, and the microcomputer market was demonstrating that it was now possible to sell software on its own as prepackaged works, the way you might a record or a book. As a wise man once said, “Money changes everything.” Many MIT hackers were excited by the potential lucre, as evidenced by the fact that many more chose to follow Noftsker than the idealistic Greenblatt out of the university. Only a handful, such as Marvin Minsky and the ever-stubborn Richard Stallman, remained behind and continued to hew relentlessly to the old hacker ethic.

Infocom’s founders were not among the diehards. As shown by their willingness to add (gasp!) security to ITS to protect their Zork source, something that would have drawn howls of protest from Stallman on at least two different levels, their devotion to the hacker ethic of total sharing and transparency was negotiable at best. In fact, Al Vezza and the DMG had been mulling over commercial applications for the group’s creations as far back as 1976. As the 1979 spring semester wrapped up, however, it seemed clear that if this version of the DMG, about to be scattered to the proverbial winds as it was, wanted to do something commercially, the time to get started was now. And quite a lot of others at MIT were doing the same thing, weren’t they? It wouldn’t do to be left behind in an empty lab, as quite literally happened to poor old Richard Stallman. That’s how Al Vezza saw the situation, anyway, and his charges, eager to remain connected and not averse to increasing their modest university salaries, quickly agreed.

And so Infocom was officially founded on June 22, 1979, with ten stockholders. Included were three of the four hackers who had worked on Zork: Tim Anderson, Dave Lebling, and the newly minted Dr. Marc Blank (commuting from his new medical residency in Pittsburgh). There were also five other current or former DMG hackers: Mike Broos, Scott Cutler, Stu Galley, Joel Berez, Chris Reeve. And then there was Vezza himself and even Licklider, who agreed to join in the same sort of advisory role he had filled for the DMG back at MIT. Each person kicked in whatever funding he could afford, ranging from $400 to $2000, and received an appropriate percentage of the new company’s stock in return. Total startup funds amounted to $11,500. The name was necessarily nondescript, considering that no one knew quite what (if anything) the company would eventually do. The fractured, futuristic compound was much in vogue amongst technology companies of the time — Microsoft, CompuWare, EduWare — and Infocom just followed the trend in choosing the name “least objectionable to everyone.”

As should be clear from the above, Infocom did not exactly begin under auspicious circumstances. I’d call them a garage startup, except that they didn’t even have a garage. Infocom would exist for some months as more of a theoretical company in limbo than an actual business entity. It didn’t even get its first proper mailing address — a P.O. Box — until March of 1980. Needless to say, no one was quitting their day jobs as they met from time to time over the following months to talk about what ought to come next. In August, Mike Broos had already gotten bored with the endeavor and quit, leaving just nine partners. Everyone agreed that they needed something they could put together relatively quickly to sell and really get the company off the ground. More ambitious projects could then follow. But what could they do for that first project?

The hackers trolled through their old projects from MIT, looking for ideas. They kept coming back to the games. There was that Trivia game, but it wouldn’t be practical to store enough questions on a floppy disk to make it worthwhile. More intriguing was the Maze game. Stand-up arcades were booming at the time. If Infocom could build a version of Maze for arcades, they would have something unprecedented. Unfortunately, getting there would require a huge, expensive hardware- as well as software-engineering project. The Infocom partners were clever enough, but they were all software rather than hardware hackers, and money was in short supply. And then of course there was Zork… but there was no way to squeeze a 1 MB adventure game into a 32 K or 48 K microcomputer. Anyway, Vezza wasn’t really comfortable with getting into the games business on any terms, fearing it could tarnish the company’s brand even if only used to raise some early funds and bootstrap the startup. So there was also plenty of discussion of other, more business-like ideas also drawn from the DMG’s project history: a document-tracking system, an email system, a text-processing system.

Meanwhile, Blank was living in Pittsburgh and feeling rather unhappy at being cut off from his old hacking days at MIT. Luckily, he did have at least one old MIT connection there. Joel Berez had worked with the DMG before graduating in 1977. He had spent the last two years living in Pittsburgh and working for his family’s business (which experience perhaps influenced the others to elect him as Infocom’s President in November of 1979). Blank and Berez made a habit of getting together for Chinese food (always the hacker’s staple) and talking about the old times. These conversations kept coming back to Zork. Was it really impossible to even imagine getting the game onto a microcomputer? Soon the conversations turned from nostalgic to technical. As they began to discuss technical realities, other challenges beyond even that of sheer computing capacity presented themselves.

Even if they could somehow get Zork onto a microcomputer, which microcomputer should they choose? The TRS-80 was by far the best early seller, but the Apple II, the Cadillac of the trinity of 1977, was beginning to come on strong now, aided by the new II Plus model and VisiCalc. Next year, and the year after that… who knew? And all of these machines were hopelessly incompatible with one another, meaning that reaching multiple platforms must seemingly entail re-implementing Zork — and any future adventure games they might decide to create — from scratch on each. Blank and Berez cast about for some high-level language that might be relatively portable and acceptable for implementing a new Zork, but they didn’t find much. BASIC was, well, BASIC, and not even all that consistent from microcomputer to microcomputer. There was a promising new implementation of the more palatable Pascal for the Apple II on the horizon, but no word of a similar system on other platforms.

So, if they wanted to be able to sell their game to the whole microcomputer market rather than just a slice of it, they would need to come up with some sort of portable data design that could be made to work on many different microcomputers via an interpreter custom-coded for each model. Creating each interpreters would be a task in itself, of course, but at least a more modest one, and if Infocom should decide to do more games after Zork the labor savings would begin to become very significant indeed. In reaching this conclusion, they followed a line of reasoning already well-trod by Scott Adams and Automated Simulations.

But then there was still another problem: Zork currently existed only as MDL source, a language which of course had no implementation on any microcomputer. If they didn’t want to rewrite the entire game from scratch — and wasn’t the point of this whole exercise to come up with a product relatively quickly and easily? — they would have to find a way to make that code run on microcomputers.

They had, then, quite a collection of problems. We’ll talk about how they solved every one of them — and pretty brilliantly at that — next time.

Comments
9 Responses

- DZ-Jay

February 8, 2017 at 10:46 am

Hi, there,

This is an exceptional blog. I found it by accident (or referenced from somewhere, I can’t recall), and I have been enthralled by it since. I’ve been reading every single article in the Table of Contents, in sequence, finding myself on this one by now, and daunted by the remaining count. Nonetheless, I am as excited as I am interested in finding out the rest.

I truly appreciate you taking the time to research and write all this information. It will certainly set a mark in future research.

There is one small(ish) comment I feel compelled to make. I have accepted your idiosyncratic use of the female pronouns, but unfortunately I cannot get passed your cavalier use of the term “nonplussed.” The Oxford Dictionary (American or British, take your pick) define the word as “(of a person) surprised and confused so much that they are unsure how to react.”

As such, the meaning of a sentence such as “Most in established institutional hacking environments like MIT were initially nonplussed by what’s come to be called the PC revolution,” is completely the opposite to the sense you imply.

The use of “nonplussed” in current “web parlance” to mean something like “unfazed” or “unperturbed” typically comes from the assumption that the “non” prefix suggests a negative connotation. However, this is not the case. You can think of it as one of those web revisionist-neologisms such as the now-common use of “literally” as a superlative of “figuratively,” that (for whatever reasons) change the meaning of words and inadvertently distort the semantic context of so many extant literary works.

I’m sorry for pointing this out, and I really do not wish to sound like a language pedant (well, perhaps a little), but it really jars me out of the narrative of such an otherwise fantastic, natural, and elegant prose style.

Would you at least consider using a more appropriate term? :)

Once again, thank you for the great historical account. It all seems not only brilliantly accurate and readily quotable, but absolutely interesting and fascinating.

Thanks,
-dZ.

- Jimmy Maher

February 8, 2017 at 1:25 pm

Thank you!

There is a counterargument to be made that languages are fluid things, and words do change meanings over time; witness the history of “disinterested” and “uninterested.” But of course that argument only goes so far, and I loathe the misuse of “literally,” which I seem to be hearing more and more from educated people who really ought to know better. So, words do have meanings, and we should respect their meanings. Somewhere between these two points of view ought to lie a happy medium, but we’ll all draw that line differently I suppose.

To your specific point, though: I think I already have come around on “nonplussed.” I’ve used it a couple of times in recent articles, and I believe I’ve used it in the sense that you prefer. While I hugely appreciate your description of my prose in these early articles as “fantastic, natural, and elegant,” I do think that writing thousands of words every week, as I’ve done since starting this blog, has made me a much better writer now than I was then. There’s much that makes me cringe a bit in these early articles — perhaps even a misuse or two of “literally.” Of course, I’m sure I’ll be saying the same thing about my writing of today another five years down the road. Such is the way of things — and, I think, the way it ought to be.

- DZ-Jay

February 9, 2017 at 2:59 am

Dear Mr. Maher,

Thank you for the very thoughtful response (and for taking the time to responding at all). I appreciate all the work put into this blog, and I hope I didn’t sound like I was trying to put your efforts down.

I’m still catching up on the entire series, now up to the chapter on Softporn (I’m reading an article here and there as I get a break from work and life), and I can’t wait to read more. This stuff is really fascinating! :)

Perhaps you’ve already considered this before, but I would strongly urge you to compile all these stories into a comprehensive volume and submit it for print publishing. The history of video games in general, and of Interactive Fiction in particular, is indeed a fascinating subject; and your prose style and witty commentary on the state of affairs at the time makes it very interesting and approachable.

Cheers!
-dZ.

- Gideon Marcus

November 29, 2018 at 3:28 am

Haha! Softporn is how I found this site.

I suspect filfre is going to be referenced quite a bit in about 15 years… (my site is a similar project, but currently in 1963).

Filfre is definitely an endeavor to be admired and emulated.

- no

May 28, 2017 at 11:08 am

> I’ve been reading every single article in the Table of Contents, in sequence, finding myself on this one by now, and daunted by the remaining count.

Glad to know I’m not the only one doing this…

- Todd B.

July 23, 2017 at 10:47 pm

Me too! What a fantastic blog….

- Mike Taylor

October 3, 2017 at 2:10 pm

Fascinating stuff, thank you so much for writing it all!

Do you have any idea why Bruce Daniels was not an Infocom shareholder?

- Jimmy Maher

October 3, 2017 at 2:30 pm

He moved to California to work for Apple around the time Infocom was formed. Infocom was strictly a moonlighting gig for everyone until 1982, and fully participating from the other side of the country would have been a challenge.

He did, however, continue to stay in touch and help out for a while. He wrote the first Z-Machine interpreter for the Apple II. At Apple, he became one of the principal architects of the Lisa.

- Mike Taylor

October 3, 2017 at 2:30 pm

That is a pretty sweet career! Thanks.

ZIL and the Z-Machine
January 7, 2012

When we left off last time, Marc Blank and Joel Berez were considering how to bring Zork to the microcomputer. Really, they were trying to solve three interrelated problems. At the risk of being pedantic, let me lay out them for you:

1. How to get Zork, a massive game that consumed 1 MB of memory on the PDP-10, onto their chosen minimum microcomputer system, an Apple II or TRS-80 with 32 K of RAM and a single floppy-disk drive.

2. How to do so in a portable way that would make it as painless as possible to move Zork not only to the Apple II and TRS-80 but also, if all went well, to many more current and future mutually incompatible platforms.

3. How to use the existing MDL source code to Zork as the basis for the new microcomputer version, rather than having to start all over again and implement the game from scratch in some new environment.

If you like, you can see the above as a ranking of the problems in order of importance, from “absolutely, obviously essential” to “would be really nice.” That’s not strictly necessary, though, because, as we’re about to see, Blank and Berez, with the eventual help of the others, actually solved them all pretty brilliantly. I wish I could neatly deal with each item above one at a time, but, as anyone who’s ever tackled a complicated programming task knows, solutions tend to get tangled up with one another pretty quickly. So instead I’ll have to just ask you to keep those three goals in mind as I explain how Blank and Berez’s design worked as a whole.

When faced with a game that is just too large to fit into a new environment, the most obvious solution is simply to make the game smaller — to remove content. That’s one of the things Infocom did with Zork. Stu Galley:

Dave examined his complete map of Zork and drew a boundary around a portion that included about 100 or so locations: everything “above ground” and a large section surrounding the Round Room. The object was to create a smaller Zork that would fit within the constraints established by the design of Joel and Marc. Whatever wouldn’t fit was to be saved for another game, another day.

By cutting Zork’s world almost in half, Infocom were able to dramatically reduce the size of the game. 191 rooms became 110; 211 items became 117; 911 parseable words became 617. It wasn’t a complete solution to their problems, but it certainly helped, and still left them with a huge game, about the same size as the original Adventure in numbers of rooms but dwarfing it in terms of items and words, and easily bigger than any other microcomputer adventure game. And, as Galley notes above, it left them with plenty of raw material out of which to build a possible sequel.

There were more potential savings to be had by looking at the MDL compiler. As a language designed to perform many general-purpose computing tasks, many of MDL’s capabilities naturally went unused by an adventure game like Zork. Even unused, however, they consumed precious memory. Infocom therefore took a pair of pruning shears to MDL just as they had to Zork itself, cutting away extraneous syntax and libraries, and retaining only what was necessary for implementing an adventure game. They named the new language ZIL, for Zork Implementation Language; the compiler that enabled the language, which still ran only on the PDP-10, they called Zilch. ZIL remained similar enough to MDL in syntax and approach that porting the old MDL Zork to ZIL was fairly painless, yet the new language not only produced tighter, faster executables but was much cleaner syntactically. In fact, ZIL encouraged Infocom to not just port Zork to the new language but to improve it in some ways; the parser, in particular, became even better when implemented in the more sympathetic ZIL.

Here is Zork’s lantern in MDL:

<OBJECT ["LAMP" "LANTE" "LIGHT"]
["BRASS"]
"lamp"
<+ ,OVISON ,TAKEBIT ,LIGHTBIT>
LANTERN
()
(ODESCO "A battery-powered brass lantern is on the trophy case."
ODESC1 "There is a brass lantern (battery-powered) here."
OSIZE 15
OLINT [0 <CLOCK-DISABLE <CLOCK-INT ,LNTIN 350>>])>

And here’s the same item in ZIL:

<OBJECT LANTERN
(LOC LIVING-ROOM)
(SYNONYM LAMP LANTERN LIGHT)
(ADJECTIVE BRASS)
(DESC "brass lantern")
(FLAGS TAKEBIT LIGHTBIT)
(ACTION LANTERN-F)
(FDESC "A battery-powered lantern is on the trophy
case.")
(LDESC "There is a brass lantern (battery-powered)
here.")
(SIZE 15)>

Just for the record, I’ll give a quick explanation of the ZIL code shown above for those interested. The first line simply tells us that what follows will describe an item — or, in ZIL terminology, “object” — called “lantern.” The next line tells us it is in the living room of the white house. Then we see that it can be referred to by the player as “lamp,” “lantern,” or “light,” with the optional adjective “brass” (which might come in handy to distinguish it from the broken lantern found in another part of the game). The so-called short description — more properly the name under which it shows up in inventory listings and other places where it must be plugged into the text — is “brass lantern.” The TAKEBIT flag means that it is an item the player can pick up and carry around with her; the LIGHTBIT means that it casts light, illuminating any dark room in which it is placed or carried. LANTERN-F is the special action routine for the lantern, a bit of code that allows us to write special “rules” for the lantern that apply only to it, such as routines to allow the player to turn it off and on; as I discussed earlier, this level of programmability and the associated object-oriented approach really make MDL, and by extension ZIL, stand out from other adventure-game development systems of their era. The FDESC is the description of the lantern that appears before it has been moved, as part of the room description for the living room; the LDESC appears after it has been moved and set down somewhere else. Finally, the SIZE determines the size and weight of the lantern for purposes of deciding how much the player can carry with her at one time. The rather messier MDL source I’ll leave as an exercise for you to translate…

So, at this point Infocom have largely addressed problem #3, and at least come a long way with problem #1. That left them still with problem #2. You might think it would be easy enough to design an adventure-engine / database partnership like that Scott Adams came up with. However, this was problematic. Remember that one of the things that made Zork’s development environment, whether it be MDL or ZIL, so unique was its programmability. To go to a solution like that of Adams would force them to sacrifice that, and ZIL in the process. For ZIL to work, it needed to be able to run code to handle those special interactions like turning the lamp on or off; it needed, in other words, to be a proper, Turing-complete programming language, not just a data-entry system. But how to do that while also having a system that was portable from machine to (incompatible) machine? The answer: they would design a virtual machine, an imaginary computer optimized just for playing text adventure in the same way that ZIL was for coding them, then code an interpreter to simulate that computer on each platform for which they decided to release Zork.

Virtual machines are everywhere today. The apps you run on your Android smartphone actually run inside a virtual machine. You might use something like VMWare on your desktop machine to let you run Linux inside Windows, or vice versa. Big mainframe installations and, increasingly, high-end servers running operating systems like Linux often run in virtual machines abstracted from the underlying hardware, which amongst other benefits lets one carve one giant mainframe up into a number of smaller mainframes. Scenarios like that aside, virtual machines are so appealing for essentially two reasons; virtually (ha!) everyone who decides to employ one does so for one or the other, or, often, both. First, they are much more secure. If malicious code such as a virus gets introduced into a virtual machine, it is contained there rather rather than infecting the host system, and code that crashes the virtual machine — whether it does so intentionally or accidentally — crashes only the virtual machine, not the host system as a whole. Second, a virtual machine allows one to run the same program on otherwise incompatible devices. It is “write once, run everywhere,” as Java zealots used to say. In their case, each target platform need only have a current implementation of the Java virtual machine (not necessarily the language; just the virtual machine). Virtual machines do also have one big disadvantage: because the host platform is emulating another computer, they tend to be much, much slower than native code run on the same platform. (Yes, technologies like just-in-time compilation can do a lot to alleviate this, but let’s not get any further afield.) Still, computing power is cheap and ubiquitous these days, so this generally doesn’t present such a problem. In fact, the modern situation can get kind of ridiculous; my Kindle version of The King of Shreds and Patches is actually built from one virtual machine (Glulx) running inside another virtual machine (the Java virtual machine), all running on a tiny handheld e-reader — and performance is still acceptable.

Even in 1979 the virtual machine was not a new idea. Between 1965 and 1967, a team at IBM had worked in close partnership with MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory to create an operating system called CP-40, under which up to 14 users were each able to log into their own, single-user computer — simulated entirely in software running on a big IBM mainframe. CP-40 eventually became the basis of the appropriately named VM operating system, first released by IBM in 1972 and still widely used on mainframes today. In 1978, a Pascal implementation known as UCSD Pascal introduced the P-Machine, a portable virtual machine that allowed programs written in UCSD Pascal to run on many disparate machines, including even the Apple II following the release of Apple Pascal in August of 1979. The P-Machine became a major influence on Infocom’s own virtual machine, the Z-Machine.

In opting for a virtual machine they would of course have to pay the performance penalty all virtual machiness enact, but this wouldn’t be quite as big as you might expect. Just as they had optimized ZIL, Blank and Berez made the Z-Machine as light and efficient as they possibly could, including only those features really useful for running adventure games. They would implement each platform’s interpreter entirely in highly optimized assembly language, with the result that Zork would, even running inside a virtual machine, still run much, much faster than the BASIC adventures that were common at the time. Anyway, the processing powers of the micros, limited as they were, had never been their real concern in getting Zork onto them — memory was the bottleneck. Yes, they would have to sacrifice some additional memory for the interpreter, but they could save even more by building efficiencies into the Z-Machine. For instance, a special encoding scheme allowed them to store most characters in 5 rather than 8 bits, and to replace the most commonly used words with abbreviations in the code. Such text compression was very significant considering that text is, after all, most of what makes up a text adventure. With such compression techniques, along with all of the slicing and dicing of the game itself and the ZIL language, they ended up with a final game just 77 K in size, not counting of course the virtual-machine interpreter needed to run it; this latter Infocom called Zip (not to be confused with the file-compression format). The 77 K game file itself, which Infocom took to calling the “story file,” is essentially a snapshot of the virtual machine’s memory in its opening state.

When we talk about the storage capacity of a computer, we’re really talking about (much to the confusion of parents and grandparents everywhere) two separate figures: disk capacity and memory (RAM) capacity. An Apple II could store 140 K on a single floppy disk, while the TRS-80 actually did a bit better, managing 180 K. Thus, Infocom now had a game that could fit quite comfortably along with the necessary interpreter on a single disk. RAM was the problem: even if we forget about the necessary interpreter, 77 K just doesn’t go into 32 K, no matter how much you try to force it. Or does it?

It was not unheard of even at this time to use the disk as a sort of secondary memory, reading bits and pieces of data from there into RAM and then discarding them when no longer needed. Microsoft had used just this technique to fit Adventure into the 32 K TRS-80; each bit of text, all stored in a file external to the game itself as per Crowther and Woods’s original design, was read in from disk only when it needed to be printed. However, Infocom’s more sophisticated object-oriented system necessarily intermingled its text with its code, making such a segregated approach impractical. Blank and Berez therefore went a step further: having already designed a virtual machine, they now added an implementation of virtual memory to accompany it.

The concept of virtual memory was also then not a new one in the general world of computer science. In fact, virtual memory dates back even further than the virtual machine, to an early supercomputer developed at the University of Manchester called the Atlas, officially commissioned in 1962. In a virtual-memory system, each program does not have an “honest” view of the host computer’s physical memory. It rather is given a sort of idealized memory map to play with, which may have little to do with the real layout of its host computer’s physical RAM. When it reads from and writes to pieces of this map, the host automatically translates the virtual addresses into real addresses inside its physical memory, transparently. Why bother with such a thing, especially as it necessarily adds processing overhead? Once again, for two main reasons, both of which are usually taken as applicable to a multitasking operating system only, something that was little more than a dream for a microcomputer of 1979 or 1980. First, by effectively sandboxing each program’s memory from every other program’s memory, as well as that being used by the operating system itself, virtual memory assures that a program cannot, out of malice or simple bugginess, go rogue and trash other programs or even bring down the whole system. Second, it gives a computer a fallback position of sorts — an alternative to outright failure — should the program(s) running on it ask for more physical memory than it actually has to give. When that happens, the operating system looks through its memory to find pieces that aren’t being used very often. It then caches these away on disk, making room in physical RAM to allocate the new request. When cached areas are accessed again, they must of course be read back into RAM, possibly being swapped with other chunks if memory is still scarce. All of this happens transparently to the program(s) in question, which continue to live within their idealized view of memory, blissfully unaware of the huffing and puffing the underlying system is doing to keep everything going. Virtual memory has been with us for many years now in the desktop PC world. Of course, there inevitably comes a point of diminishing returns with such a scheme; if you’ve ever opened lots and lots of windows or programs on an older PC and seen everything get really, really slow while the hard disk grinds like a saw mill, now you know what was going on (assuming you didn’t already know, of course; we assume no default level of technical knowledge here at Digital Antiquaria Central).

For the Z-Machine, Berez and Blank employed a much simpler version of virtual memory than you’ll find in the likes of Windows, Linux, or OS X. While such important dynamic information as the current position of the items in the game world must of course always be tracked and updated dynamically, most of the data that makes up a game like Zork is static, unchanging: lots and lots of text, of course, along with lots of program code. Berez and Blank were able to design the ZIL compiler in such a way that it placed all of the stuff that could conceivably change, which we’ll called the dynamic data, first in the story file. Everything else, which we’ll call the static data, came afterward. As it turned out, the 77 K Zork story file contained only 18 K of dynamic data. So, here’s what they did…

The dynamic data — memory the virtual machine will write to as well as read — is always stored in the host computer’s RAM. The static data, however, is loaded in and out of RAM by the interpreter as needed in 1 K blocks known as pages. Put another way: from the perspective of the game program, it has fully 77 K of memory to work with. The interpreter, meanwhile, is frantically swapping blocks of memory in an out of the much more limited physical RAM to maintain this illusion. Like the virtual machine itself, this virtual-memory scheme obviously brings with it a speed penalty, but needs must. On a 32 K system with 18 K reserved for dynamic data, Infocom still had 14 K left over to host the VM interpreter itself, a small stack (an area where programs store temporary information needed for moment-to-moment processing), and a page or two of virtual memory. Sure, it was a bit sluggish at times, but it worked. And, when run on a system with, say, 48 K, the interpreter could automatically detect and use this additional memory to keep more static data in physical RAM, thus speeding things along and rewarding the user for her hardware investment.

With the ZIL / Z-Machine scheme as a whole, Infocom had created a robust, reusable system that could have life far beyond this one-time task of squeezing Zork onto the TRS-80 and Apple II. I trust I’m not spoiling anything if I reveal that that’s exactly what happened.

With this technical foundation, we’ll look next time at the process of actually getting Zork onto the market.

Comments
6 Responses

- ZUrlocker

January 8, 2012 at 1:41 am

Great explanation of the Z-Machine architecture! Thank you.

- Joshua Buergel

January 8, 2012 at 5:32 am

A minor correction: technically, the VM inside Android is a Dalvik VM, not a true Java VM. The compiled Java bytecodes are actually translated to Dalvik compatible instructions before moving over. It makes no practical difference to end users, and indeed to the majority of developers working on the platform, but it is kind of interesting.

- Jimmy Maher

January 8, 2012 at 8:47 am

Ah, thanks. I’ve just been dipping into Android development recently, and still have much to learn.

- Wade

January 8, 2012 at 1:35 pm

I had to come up with my own version of this virtual-memory-on-floppies scheme to get my Eamon game Leadlight to run.

In using APPLESOFT I was limited to accessing the first 64kb of RAM of a 128kb machine. Then, the latest 8-bit Apple II OS — ProDOS — had to be in memory all the time, leaving me with something like 33kb RAM for the program and the dynamic variables.

The game is about 280kb overall (2 floppies) and there’s no text compression available in Applesoft. In the end, I had to remove all English language PRINT statements from the program and farm them out to random disk access, too. The disk(s) spins super frequently while playing. The code is a chore to read as all messages are represented by numbers that you have to look up in a database. But it’s super RAM efficient.

- Geoff

January 8, 2012 at 7:39 pm

Jimmy – just a note to say how much I enjoy your articles. I love the technical explanations as well as the information about the historical and other contexts. I look forward to posts on your site, and often read them twice. I’m a bit of an old software buff, so this stuff is great for me. Thanks!

- Mike

January 9, 2012 at 8:28 am

I just wanted to say that it really makes my day when you put up a new post. I’m a bit too young to have “lived through it” (besides playing Oregon Trail on an Apple II), but your unique combination of history and technical detail makes for absolutely engrossing reading. Thanks for all the hard work.

Selling Zork
January 11, 2012

When we left off, it was late summer, 1979, and seven of the nine partners involved with Infocom were living in Boston, working various day jobs, and discussing as time allowed just what the newly minted company should actually do. Meanwhile, the other two partners, Marc Blank and Joel Berez, were living in Pittsburgh and doing something more practical about the question, designing — entirely on paper at this stage — a system for getting Zork (or at least half of it) from the PDP-10 to the microcomputer. As Blank and Berez continued their work that fall, they became more and more convinced that, yes, this could actually work, and so began lobbying the others back in Boston to make Zork Infocom’s first project. Their case was compelling enough that even a reluctant Al Vezza finally agreed.

As it happened, Berez had been accepted for a graduate business program at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He moved back to Boston that November for that — and to take the title of President of the still largely theoretical Infocom. Faced with being trapped in Pittsburgh all by himself while his friends implemented his designs, Blank made the rather personally momentous decision to drop out of his medical residency and come to Boston as well. Thus, as 1980 dawned the proverbial gang was all back together again, and work on a new Zork was proceeding apace.

With their connections at MIT and DEC, PDP-10 computer time was not hard to come by even for those at Infocom who had officially left MIT. Indeed, for all that their ultimate goal was to sell Zork on the micros, Infocom continued at this stage to do their work entirely on the PDP-10; perhaps the old motto of “We hate micros!” was still not entirely dead. Blank and Lebling wrote on the PDP-10 the complete ZIL development system, including the compiler and, for testing purposes, the first working Z-Machine virtual machine. Remarkably, the conceptual design that Blank and Berez had sketched out on napkins and scrap paper turned out perfectly workable in reality. As I noted in my last post, the reimplementation in ZIL even gave them the opportunity to improve on the original Zork in some ways.

Even when the time came to leave the PDP-10, Infocom’s biases showed through; the second Z-Machine implementation was not for a Radio Shack or an Apple, but for a DEC PDP-11. While the PDP-10 was DEC’s flagship model, big and powerful enough that it probably deserves to be labeled a mainframe rather than a minicomputer, the PDP-11 was the company’s smaller, cheaper bread-and-butter model. DEC is estimated to have sold over 170,000 of them during the 1970s alone. Relatively portable (if being able to move a computer with only a single van can count as “portable”) and requiring no raised floor or other data-center machinations, PDP-11s were everywhere: in factories, in laboratories, in air-traffic control centers — and in Joel Berez’s bedroom(!). The PDP-11 already had a Zork in a sense, having been the first target platform of that FORTRAN port of Dungeon, but that didn’t stop Infocom from making PDP-11 Zork their first commercial product. Relatively ubiquitous as the PDP-11 was, the market was not exactly a commercial gaming stronghold; Zork reportedly sold less than 100 copies there. (One of which recently surfaced on eBay; see Jason Scott’s Get Lamp site for a scan of the surprisingly thorough — albeit typewritten and mimeographed — manual.) Clearly, Infocom needed to get Zork onto the microcomputers.

In that spirit, Infocom purchased a TRS-80 system, and Scott Cutler, one of the few partners with any real microcomputer experience, set to work with Blank’s help to build a Z-Machine for it. The moment of truth came at last:

Scott and Marc demonstrated that Zork I was alive in it by starting the game and actually collecting points with the incantation “N.E.OPEN.IN.” (It’s certainly no less inspiring than “Come here, Mr. Watson; I want you!”)

It’s always a fraught moment when a programming project finally comes to life and does something. I remember my excitement when my own Z-Machine interpreter, Filfre, first printed out the opening text to the first game I elected to test it with, Infidel. I can only imagine Blank and Cutler’s excitement, when all of this was so new and the stakes were so much higher. Anyway, the Z-Machine concept worked. Once the game was completely playable, Infocom, heirs to an institutional computing tradition of doing things the right way, did something virtually unprecedented for a microcomputer game: they put their new game through rigorous, repeated testing. Their star tester was an MIT student named Mike Dornbrook, who fell in love with the game and obsessed over it endlessly, crafting lovingly detailed maps of its geography and working to iron out not just technical problems but dodgy puzzles and parser difficulties. (If only On-Line Systems, Scott Adams, and other developers had a similar patience and commitment to quality in these early days…)

Ongoing testing aside, Infocom had a real, marketable product. Now they just needed to decide how to sell it. One option was to do what Ken Williams was deciding to do at about this time, to go it alone. With little experience or knowledge of the young microcomputer industry, however, that seemed risky, and no one was excited about trying to devise packaging and duplicating thousands (hopefully!) of disks. They therefore began shopping Zork to publishers. An approach to Microsoft was rebuffed by the marketing department; they already had their own text adventure, Adventure itself, and apparently felt one was enough for any publisher. Later Bill Gates, who was a fan of the PDP-10 Zork, heard about the offer and tried to reopen the subject, but by then Infocom was already in talks with Dan Fylstra of Personal Software, leaving a Microsoft Zork to history as a fascinating might-have-been.

Personal Software has largely been forgotten today, but at the time it was the brightest star of the young software industry, easily eclipsing Microsoft. Founded by Peter R. Jennings and Fylstra, a founding editor of the seminal Byte magazine, PS hit a goldmine in 1979 when it reached an agreement with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston to publish VisiCalc for the Apple II. Aided by some smart PS advertising that properly emphasized the revolutionary nature of this truly revolutionary product, VisiCalc was by the time Infocom came calling the talk of the business world and the software hit of the young microcomputer industry, eventually selling in the hundreds of thousands. VisiCalc not only made PS the biggest software publisher on the planet and the subject of profiles by the likes of Time magazine, but also gave them huge power within the industry. This power extended even to Apple itself; countless customers were putting the cart before the horse, buying Apple IIs just to have a computer to run their new copy of VisiCalc on. It was the first “killer app” of the PC era, and sold all of the Apple IIs that that label would imply. With money and power like that, PS certainly seemed not a bad way for Infocom to get their new game out there. Fylstra had attended business school at MIT, and was acquainted from there with both Vezza and the PDP-10 version of his product. It didn’t take Berez and Vezza much time to get a deal done which even included a sorely needed advance on future royalty payments, what with Infocom having pretty much spent their initial $11,500 on hardware, testers, and PDP-10 time.

In between their other tasks, the other partners wrote a couple of magazine articles to help drum up anticipation. “How to Fit a Large Program into a Small Machine,” a cagey explanation of the concepts of the virtual machine and virtual memory, appeared in Creative Computing that July; “Zork and the Future of Computerized Fantasy Simulations,” a more theoretical article on the burgeoning art of the text adventure, appeared in Byte’s big “adventure” issue in December. Having not yet come up with the elegant name of “interactive fiction,” Lebling saddled Zork and its peers with the rather unwieldy “computerized fantasy simulations” (“CFS”) label in the latter. As it appeared the TRS-80 version of Zork was just coming onto the market under the PS imprint.

Initial sales were not overwhelming; the TRS-80 version sold about 1500 copies in its first nine months. This figure can perhaps be partly attributed to the unimaginative and halfhearted marketing of PS, who in the wake of the VisiCalc juggernaut were increasingly uncertain whether they wanted to be involved with games at all. It’s also true, however, that the TRS-80 software market never really thrived in the way that sales of TRS-80 hardware might make you expect. A big culprit was Radio Shack’s own policies. They insisted on selling in their stores only software published under their own imprint. Yet they offered developers a very paltry royalty compared to the rest of the industry, and refused to even properly credit them on the software itself, preferring the image of an all-benevolent Tandy Corporation that apparently dropped immaculate software creations out of its rear end. Owners of other computer stores, meanwhile, such as the ComputerLand outlets that were exploding across the country, left Radio Shack to sell and service its own machines, instead concentrating on other platforms. It’s likely that the TRS-80 Zork fell at least partially into this distributional black hole that was already in danger of making the TRS-80 an also-ran in contrast to the young microcomputer industry’s newly anointed darling, the Apple II. In fact, that very December Apple went public, making its founders and about 300 others instant millionaires — the first big tech IPO, and a sign that soon the “microcomputer industry” would just be the “computer industry.”

Speaking of which: Bruce Daniels, the only member of the original Zork team who hadn’t joined Infocom, had accepted a job with Apple and moved to California after graduation. He agreed to create a Z-Machine for the Apple II under contract. Apple II Zork was released in February of 1981, and it did much better than the TRS-80 version, selling a steady 1000 copies per month. Infocom now had a steady stream of revenue at last, along with the basic technological infrastructure — ZIL and the Z-Machine — that would define the company for the rest of its life. Things were starting to look pretty good — but twists and turns were just ahead.

We’ll talk about them soon enough, but next time I want to leave the historical reality behind for a while in favor of virtual reality. Yes, we’re going to take a little tour of Zork’s Great Underground Empire.

Comments
12 Responses

- Nathan

January 11, 2012 at 8:45 pm

What, no patch file to convert Zork I release 88 into release 1?

- Jimmy Maher

January 12, 2012 at 8:22 am

I’ve been working with Release 15, Serial Number UG3AU5 on the Apple II. That’s a version 2 story file, and the earliest I’ve been able to find for the Apple II. I do have a version 1 story file for the TRS-80, however. My suspicion is that by the time Infocom released the Apple II version the Z-Machine had already been updated to version 2.

While I try to bring some technical depth to these articles, I try to avoid technical minutiae. :) Thus I haven’t gotten into Z-Machine versioning, release numbers, etc. But I’m always happy to discuss such topics in the comments.

- Mark V

January 12, 2012 at 6:22 am

Really enjoying this series. One quick correction:

Filfre link should be
http://maher.filfre.net/filfre/
instead of
http://maher.filfre.net/Filfre (404s)

- Jimmy Maher

January 12, 2012 at 8:06 am

Thanks! Fixed.

- Tale

January 13, 2012 at 10:08 pm

Great. I have heard a lot about the things surrounding Zork, but very little about the game’s actual contents. This is gonna be interesting.

- Tateru Nino

January 17, 2012 at 4:26 pm

“Initial sales were not overwhelming; the TRS-80 version sold about 1500 copies in its first nine months. This figure can perhaps be partly attributed to the … “

The fact that the local stores retailed it for AUD$130 might have had something to do with it too. And oh, yes. I bought it. Eventually.

- Brandon Campbell

November 5, 2014 at 9:07 pm

Around 1986 or 87, my family bought a used TRS-80 Model 4P, and one of the programs that came with it was Zork! Lots of great memories there, although my sister and I never managed to complete it without downloading the walkthrough off of CompuServe. Our TRS-80 definitely had a nicer screen to play it on than our Commodore 64 or the upper-case-only Apple II.

- Don Alsafi

December 26, 2014 at 7:10 am

It’s a shame all these CSD archive links have expired…!

- Jimmy Maher

December 26, 2014 at 2:58 pm

Thanks for pointing that out. After many, many years, Peter’s site suddenly went offline recently. I’ve replaced the links with working versions from the Wayback Machine.

- Pingback: The source code for the Zork and other Infocom Games using ZIL #Gaming #VintageComputing #RetroComputing « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!

- Cro-Iba

January 11, 2021 at 12:08 am

Looks like the manual scan is a dead link.

- Jimmy Maher

January 12, 2021 at 9:16 am

Thanks!

Parser Games
January 16, 2012

I’ll be diving into Zork in some detail in my next post, but before I do that I just felt behooved to return in a bit more rigorous way to a subject I broached in my first post in this series: how impressive Zork was in the microcomputer world of 1980-81. I have a point I’m driving toward, one which involves a little bit of theory (uh oh!). But first let me set the stage with a few choice quotes from Jason Scott’s Get Lamp project.

“There were two products that sold more computers than anything else: VisiCalc and Zork.” — Mike Berlyn

“We would go after school to this store and play whatever games were available, type games in, and I remember Zork coming out and playing it on an Apple II, and we were just completely blown away.” — Andrew Kaluzniacki

“People would see Zork and say, ‘I gotta have me one of them, that’s all. Who do I make the check out to?'” — Mike Berlyn

“I think there was a time period, probably ’80 to ’84 sort of range, where, for a lot of the machines, compared to anything else out there, there was just nothing that compared.” — Mike Dornbrook

Yes, Berlyn’s placing Zork on a pedestal with the industry-defining VisiCalc is a bit over the top, but you get the picture. Statements like these read as ironic and maybe even a bit tragic today. Within a few years after Dornbrook’s 1980 to 1984 timeline, interactive-fiction publishers and fans would be lamenting IF’s lack of immediate, obvious appeal as the main reason for the genre’s declining commercial fortunes, amidst plenty of griping about the adolescent illiteracy of the typical videogame demographic and the like.

So, what did those early players find so immediately appealing about Zork? Certainly its world was not only bigger but modeled in a more rigorous, sophisticated way than anything that had come before. Certainly its writing, while often necessarily terse due to space constraints, showed a wit and nuance and, well, attention to basic grammar and spelling that eluded its competition. And certainly its design was, if still beset by infuriating mazes and some more-than-dodgy puzzles, also fairer than the norm. But these are things that text-adventure afficionados notice, the sort of things that only become clear after spending a few hours with Zork and (at least) a few hours with other games of its period. As the quotes above illustrate, people were playing Zork for a few minutes in shops and buying it in awe — and perhaps, Berlyn’s hyperbole aside, sometimes also buying the Apple II system they needed to play it. Why? I think the answer is bound up with the adventure game’s love-hate relationship with the parser.

In Joysprick, a book about James Joyce, Anthony Burgess divides authors into two fundamental categories. (Feel free to insert your own “two types of…” joke here; I’ll wait. Ready? Okay…) Class One authors are concerned exclusively with the storyworld — the virtual reality, if you will — that lives “beneath” their words. “Content being more important than style, the referents ache to be free of their words and to be presented directly as sense data.” “Good” writing, under this rubric, is writing that exists solely to serve the setting and the story it reveals, that evokes them as vividly as possible but that also gets out of the way of the reader’s imaginative recreation of the underlying virtual reality by diligently refusing to call attention to itself. Class Two authors, meanwhile, are concerned about their language as a end unto itself. Their books are “made out of words as much as character.” Sometimes, as in the case of Finnegans Wake or the “Siren” chapter of Ulysses, language seems like all there is — the writing is all “surface.” Some might say that being successful on this second level, or at least striving to be, separates “literature” from mere “fiction.” But let’s stay away from that can of worms. In fact, let’s try not to make any value judgments at all as we apply some of this to interactive fiction.

I don’t want to apply these ideas so much right now to the text that an IF game outputs to the player, but rather to the text that the player inputs — to the parser, in other words. One way to approach IF is as a rich virtual reality to be inhabited. In this view, that of the Class One player, the parser exists only as a conduit for her to inject her choices into that world, just as a Class One reader views the text as a window — hopefully as transparent as possible — through which she views the action in the storyworld. This has always been my basic approach to IF as a player and a writer. Since I seem to be indulging in a lot of direct quoting in this post anyway, let me get a bit pretentious and quote an earlier version of myself. I wrote the following as a comment on Mike Rubin’s blog back in 2008:

I think many people, myself included, did indeed play Facade as a comedy, trying ever more outrageous actions to see what happens, and, indeed, at some level trying to “break” the system. I would say, though, that when a player begins to do this it’s a sign that the game designer has failed at some level. I began to play Facade for laughs after trying several reasonable approaches and having the game respond either not at all or in a way that was clearly inappropriate to my actions. The mimesis broke down for me then and I began to treat the system as a clever toy rather than an immersive interactive narrative. There’s no shame in Facade’s failure, of course. It’s a revolutionary conception, and bound to need many more iterations before even approaching complete believability.

This does raise a point, though: I don’t think games can maintain their mimesis by scolding the player, telling her in no uncertain terms that she shalt NOT when she attempts to eat her sword or hit her friends. Rather, we should strive to make our writing so good and our environments so believable and our interactions so smooth that our player is drawn into our story, and it never occurs to her to eat her sword or hit her friends, any more than it would to her avatar. In other words, we must enable her to truly BECOME her avatar for the little while she plays.

As soon as the game starts to break down, so to speak, for the player… that’s when she remembers it’s just a silly text adventure, and that’s when she starts playing it for laughs and trying to break the system even further. I do it every year with at least a dozen of the Comp games, PURLOINING doors and buildings and generally running amok through the storyworld. Entertainment is where you find it, after all.

Some players will of course come to every game determined to break it. Some might find IF in general more interesting as a system to be played with than as a story, although I think other genres of gaming would scratch this particular itch much better. To those players, I say, fine, have your fun. However, I think most people who play IF do come to it wanting to be immersed and to experience a storyworld and, yes, a coherent story through someone else’s eyes for a while. The rewards of that must be far greater than those of trying random actions to see where the boundaries of the simulation are (entertaining as that can be).

(Did we say something about not making value judgements? I forget…)

Still, those folks who marveled at Zork in computer stores were not responding to it as a deep and immersive piece of fiction, nor even as a really sophisticated adventure game. Their awe was all bestowed at the level of the parser itself, as an object — a toy — unto itself. For all of the space restrictions they were laboring under, Infocom reserved room for witty rejoinders to the sort of crazy or nonsensical inputs people might walk up and enter in a computer store.

WEST OF HOUSE
YOU ARE STANDING IN AN OPEN FIELD WEST
OF A WHITE HOUSE, WITH A BOARDED FRONT
DOOR.
THERE IS A SMALL MAILBOX HERE.
>FUCK
SUCH LANGUAGE IN A HIGH-CLASS
ESTABLISHMENT LIKE THIS!
>SHIT
YOU OUGHT TO BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF.
>TAKE ME
HOW ROMANTIC!
>ZORK
AT YOUR SERVICE!
>XYZZY
A HOLLOW VOICE SAYS 'CRETIN'.
>FIND HOUSE
IT'S RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU. ARE YOU
BLIND OR SOMETHING?
>FIND HANDS
WITHIN SIX FEET OF YOUR HEAD, ASSUMING
YOU HAVEN'T LEFT THAT SOMEWHERE.
>FIND ME
YOU'RE AROUND HERE SOMEWHERE...
>CHOMP
I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THAT. I WIN IN
ALL CASES!
>WIN
NATURALLY!
>SIGH
YOU'LL HAVE TO SPEAK UP IF YOU EXPECT ME
TO HEAR YOU!
>REPENT
IT COULD VERY WELL BE TOO LATE!
>WHAT IS A GRUE?
THE GRUE IS A SINISTER, LURKING PRESENCE
IN THE DARK PLACES OF THE EARTH. ITS
FAVORITE DIET IS ADVENTURERS, BUT ITS
INSATIABLE APPETITE IS TEMPERED BY ITS
FEAR OF LIGHT. NO GRUE HAS EVER BEEN
SEEN BY THE LIGHT OF DAY, AND FEW HAVE
SURVIVED ITS FEARSOME JAWS TO TELL THE
TALE.
>WHAT IS A ZORKMID?
THE ZORKMID IS THE UNIT OF CURRENCY OF
THE GREAT UNDERGROUND EMPIRE.
>YELL
AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!

This is playing Zork as Eliza: seeing what response this or that input gives, and of course probing for the limits. As some recent experiments have demonstrated, this mode of interaction is still pretty much the default when the uninitiated are confronted with a work of IF for the first time. Back in 1981, when computers were not so well understood and for most people still seemed vaguely magical (if not sinister), the idea of typing something, especially something off the subject or just plain inappropriate, and being understood was a much more powerful one, bringing to mind HAL and the Enterprise’s talking computer.

All of which is apropos of… what? I’m not sure there are any grand lessons to take away here. After a pretty short while, toying with the parser and trying to break things loses its appeal, and the player either starts to engage with the storyworld and its fiction or just goes on to something else; thus the impatience I express above with players who just can’t seem to get past their triumph that, yes, they can break the parser and probably even the world simulation without too much effort. Over a decade after Zork, a graphical adventure called Myst became for some years the bestselling computer game of all time. It was often labeled the least-played bestseller ever. People bought it to show off their new graphics cards, sound cards, and CD-ROM drives in the midst of the “multimedia PC” boom of the early 1990s, but I’d be shocked if even ten percent seriously engaged with its intellectually intricate puzzles or made a real effort to finish it. Similarly, I suspect that plenty of copies of Zork existed more as something to pull out at cocktail parties than an abiding passion.

But let’s not start printing our “I appreciate Zork on a much deeper level than you” tee-shirts quite yet, because it’s also true that none of us ever wholly become Class One players. One more Get Lamp quote, this time from Bob Bates, captures some of the back and forth that forms a big part of the delights of the text adventure:

“A lot of games only program the ‘if,’ which is that main path I was talking about earlier. If the player does this and everything’s right, then you do this and the game goes on. But there’s always that ‘else.’ What if the player doesn’t do what you expected? What if he comes up with this weird idea or that strange input or that other, off-the-wall thing that he wants to try, just to see if the game breaks. Just to see where the edges are. That’s part of the fun of playing a text adventure, and that’s part of the fun — a great deal of the fun — that I had in creating them, in that imagined dialog with the player, so that at the end of the day when the player does this very weird thing, and he says, ‘Oh, nobody would ever think of trying this,’ he says, ‘Oh, my goodness! There’s a non-default response there! The author actually thought about that!’ That helps form that bond between you and the author. ‘That guy’s just as strange as I am. He and I think the same way.'”

So, a motto for text-adventure success: attract and charm them with your parser, retain them with your storyworld. In the spirit of the latter, we’ll put our Class One players’ hats on and venture into the Great Underground Empire next time. No, really, this time I promise.

Comments
14 Responses

- Vyacheslav Dobranov

January 16, 2012 at 3:22 pm

For last several months (after reading “Let’s Tell a Story Together”) I wait your every post with growning impatience. Thanks for this pieces of history.

- matt w

January 16, 2012 at 7:46 pm

It seems like, when you first get into text adventures, the parser messages are a source of delight — there’s a smartass response to “dig” even if digging doesn’t do anything on that particular occasion. But the more you play, the less charming they get — if only because it becomes apparent that it’s just a default response, and the game hasn’t really translated your input into an action. This is exacerbated because, thanks to Inform 7, a lot of the smartass responses are now the same from game to game. (When I first betatested a game I wrote something aggrieved to the author about getting “What a wonderful idea!” in response to “think.”)

Maybe instead of “neutral library messages” we should have “funny the first time library messages”?

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2012 at 8:50 am

Yes. I wouldn’t be the first person to point out that Inform’s default messages, with their dryly droll English humor, sometimes clash horribly with the rest of the game they live within. Infocom never developed a standard library, but rather developed each game from the bones of the previous game to which it was “most similar.” What with the default responses in that skeleton already presumably somewhat appropriate for the genre and with them not being secreted away in a separate library (and thus more accessible and noticeable to authors), the Infocom games tended to do better in this area. And then Infocom, for all their experimentation and genre-hopping, did have a sort of house editorial style that made their games differ much less wildly stylistically than those of, say, the typical annual IF Competition.

- matt w

January 18, 2012 at 3:38 am

But I think the problem exists even when the default messages are lovingly handcrafted. If you’ve played IF for a little while, you’ll experience a thrill of delight the first time you see (say) Broken Legs’ “There’s nothing like that here. You’d think Bridger would keep things around.” So in character! The second time you see it you’ll process it just as if it were “You can’t see any such thing.”

My idea is that the bloom comes off the rose of even hand-crafted default messages very quickly; at the beginning it’s exciting that they thought enough about it to program a response beyond “I don’t understand that sentence,” but pretty soon you start wishing that they’d programmed an action instead of simply a response. which is to say, “attract and charm them with your parser, retain them with your storyworld.”

- Jason Scott

January 16, 2012 at 9:45 pm

What part of Berlyn’s statement is over the top? People certainly bought machines just to play Zork and they certainly bought machines to be able to use Visicalc.

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2012 at 8:00 am

Oh… you didn’t read that quite the way I intended it, which is probably my fault. I’m going to make a minor edit in the post itself to make it more clear.

I have no doubt that people bought machines just to play Zork. It’s just that many, many, many more bought them just to run VisiCalc. The problem with the statement is that it rather overstates the importance — great as it was, as I’ll be the first to argue — of Zork.

VisiCalc was simply HUGE. It sold over 700,000 copies in less than six years. As your sales chart shows, that’s about twice the numbers of the bestselling single Zork game. Indeed, it’s an astonishing number considering the size of the PC industry of the time and the fact that VisiCalc retailed for at least $99 (and usually more). It was all over the press, and — literally, even though “revolutionized” is an overused word — revolutionized the way companies did business. In a very real way, it gave these little microcomputers for the first time a reason to exist in the eyes of those who were not entranced by them as ends unto themselves. It’s the urtext of the commercial business/productivity software market in the same way that Adventure is of digital ludic narrative.

Zork, important as it was to ludic history, simply doesn’t compare. If you must compare a game to VisiCalc a better choice would actually be Wizardry, a game I’ll be getting to shortly, which outsold Zork and caused even more of a stir upon its initial release. But much better would be to simply say games in general, which were the great hidden driver of PC sales for years. (Many for some reason didn’t want to admit that they spent all this money and time playing games; the U.S.’s collective Puritan guilt complex in action, perhaps.)

In short: Zork was big, but placing it on a pedestal with VisiCalc as a driver of Apple II sales is… over the top. Videogame history has generally been written from a fan’s perspective, which leads to a lot of hyperbolic statements just like this passing unscrutinized. So, when they come up, I try to administer a little corrective. It’s not meant to take anything away from the real achievements of Infocom or Berlyn himself.

- Jason Scott

January 17, 2012 at 2:35 am

From Visicalc and the Rise of the Apple II:

“The program went on sale in November of 1979 and was a big hit. It retailed for US$100 and sold so well that many dealers started bundling the Apple II with VisiCalc. The success of VisiCalc turned Apple into a successful company, selling tens of thousands of the pricey 32 KB Apple IIs to businesses that wanted them only for the spreadsheet.”

This clip from Triumph of the Nerds makes the effect of the program and the purchasing of Apple IIs related to it very clear, especially after the third minute.

Finally, as this sales chart shows, many, many copies of Zork I, II and II were sold, to great effect. How many caused purchases can’t be gleaned from here, but it’s significant.

- David Cornelson

January 17, 2012 at 6:06 am

I too am excited to see each blog post about the history of Infocom in an almost diary fashion. You can almost see these guys coming together and then thinking about how the z-machine came to life is really an astonishing achievement. All for a silly text adventure.

The one argument about purchased PC’s and dust-collecting Zork boxes is that people continued to buy each Infocom game as they came out. I think this means people really did play the game and it wasn’t just a conversation piece. I remember it was hard to find the early games. It wasn’t until later that they didn’t quite fly off the shelves as quickly. But even the later Zork games always seemed to disappear, even with Atari and graphical PC games on the rise.

I do agree with the assertion that the MIT folks implemented default responses better than we do even today. We can thank the easy development tools for that. We’re not _forced_ to actually write the code for default responses, which lends itself to laziness. One of the reasons web-based IF is so interesting to me is that if we can develop a following, we can use command tracking to review default responses and user’s reactions to them….and adjust accordingly.

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2012 at 8:54 am

“The one argument about purchased PC’s and dust-collecting Zork boxes is that people continued to buy each Infocom game as they came out.”

On the other hand, each succeeding Zork sold fewer copies than its predecessor, and, with the exception of Hitchhiker’s (a special case of its own), no other Infocom game ever came close to Zork’s sales. Based on all this, I think a fair number were probably sold as essentially novelty items. Hopefully, of course, some came for the parser novelty and ended up sticking around — and buying more — for the meat.

- wrm

January 17, 2012 at 7:32 am

Which reminds me of a quote from (google goole) http://www.xyzzynews.com/xyzzy.8g.html (on beta testers)

> Give them a fork in the road, and they will likely take
> neither path, but attempt to EAT SPAGHETTI WITH FORK.

- Gravel

January 17, 2012 at 10:09 pm

This is still an awesome series that is awesome.

(But my joke wasn’t a “two types of”. I was too busy sniggering about “Joysprick”.)

- Michael Waddell

April 10, 2013 at 5:57 pm

By neglecting to sell “I appreciate Zork on a much deeper level than you” t-shirts, you are passing up a small fortune, my friend. (This assumes that the wrath of Disney and Onion lawyers is not roused…)

- Mike Taylor

October 3, 2017 at 4:12 pm

That was my immediate thought, too!

- Jeff Nyman

June 27, 2021 at 3:47 pm

“Their awe was all bestowed at the level of the parser itself, …”

This feels like reading the intent of masses of people from a historical distance. Which is fraught with peril. No doubt the parser in Zork was better. Historically it can be hard to tell, however, if people just saw this as a spectrum along the lines of what was possible. So was it “awe” at the parser? Or was there something else going on?

I think much more historically accurate is to recognize that Zork was one of the first games that referenced itself, the most obvious being the leaflet. There was a self-awareness to Zork that certainly guided how people explored it. Zork provided an odd comedic aspect to the adventure, and some ironic elements in its responses, that purposely asked the player to join in that comedy or irony. This allowed for a self-awareness that was not present in other games.

Did the parser enable that? Possibly. But CRPGs at the time could have done something similar; they just didn’t.

Beyond this, as you explored more about Zork, you got the feel of a lived in world, as it were. And that lived in world had some history but that history could seem a little comedic in terms of its inhabitants or the incongruity of the rooms you stumbled into.

All of *that*, to me, seems much more relevant in discussing Zork and may be only tangentially related to the fact that Zork used a parser. Zork provided a world you felt you were stepping into that had a history and a persistence distinct from you, but bounded by self-awareness of playing a game (such as the response to typing “Win” or “Lose” or swearing). “Zork” — the “Dungeon Master” as code — was along with you on your journey and commenting on it. A clear nod to how people tended to play RPG style games.

I think more of what made this possible was not so much the parser but rather the approach of the Z-Machine which allowed space to carry out these ideas. Most of the *ideas* in Zork could have been conveyed even with a two-word Scott Adams-like parser and certainly all the *descriptions* were distinct from a specific parser. What allowed it all to be possible was the space provided.

Exploring Zork, Part 1
January 18, 2012

I’ve personally never found detailed accounts of other people’s experiences in videogames all that compelling. Like a Chris Farley interview, they mostly tend to end up as all anecdote and little narrative substance. I’ve therefore shied away from that approach for this blog. I do, however, want to examine Zork in some depth, and in a way that goes beyond just a review. So, I thought I would write these posts as a sort of guided tour of the game. You can just read along and get a pretty good idea of the experience of a player, or if you’re more ambitious you can play along with me. I do spoil some puzzles, but pretty much only the bad ones, so this might even make a nice way to experience the game, pitched somewhere between going it completely alone and just typing from a walkthrough. The approach is inspired by the old Computer Gaming World articles of Scorpia.

Infocom took their dedication to quality to extremes almost unheard of amongst game developers of their era. Zork was updated about a dozen separate times between 1980 and 1984, to add polish and/or to fix bugs. When players tackle it today, they naturally tend to end up playing the final, definitive version that is the most widely distributed today. For this project, however, I wanted to see the game the way players originally would have. This playthrough is therefore based on what I believe to be its first release on the Apple II, the platform where it first achieved widespread popularity.

There’s some question as to whether the Zork games should be considered freely distributable or not. Activision, the company that owns the Infocom intellectual property, released them for free some 15 years ago as part of a promotional campaign for the graphic adventure Zork: Grand Inquisitor, but there’s room for debate about whether they really meant that to be a permanent, free forevermore sort of thing or just a limited window of opportunity. Such questions are a bit more than academic because, despite not having done much with the Infocom games in some 15 years, there are signs that Activision still regards them as having some value, unlike other games of their era that I haven’t hesitated to make available on this site. Still, sites like the Infocom Homepage have been hosting the Zork games for years with no apparent repercussions. Because of that, and because I’d really like for anyone who wants to follow along with what follows to have access to the same older version of Zork that I’m using, I’m going to make it available here, as either an Apple II disk image (for the ultimate retro-experience) or a standalone story file you can load into a modern interpreter. Or you can even play it right in your browser.

But not, I’m embarrassed to have to say, my own Filfre. This is what’s known as a version 2 story file, a very early standard that Infocom soon updated to version 3, a standard they stayed with for many games thereafter. Because the early Zorks were quickly replaced by their version 3 counterparts, I never got around to adding support for earlier versions, seeing these as of only historical interest. Ah, the irony bites deep… I really need to get on that. Anyway, Frotz will do you just fine in the meantime, as will plenty of others.

When we first boot Zork on our trusty Apple II, we’re greeted with one of the most famous openings in gaming history, the white house with the mailbox.

You’ll notice that the screenshot above and the transcript excerpts that follow are written in ALL CAPS. The Z-Machine specification supported lower case right from the beginning, but, rather shockingly, the Apple II’s standard display hardware still did not at this stage. (Lower case did not become a standard feature on the Apple II until the release of the IIe in 1983.) Thus the interpreter has to translate the text into capitals for output. I’ve preserved this in the interest of giving the full, authentic experience; I hope it’s not too annoying.

Inside the mailbox is a leaflet.

>READ LEAFLET
WELCOME TO ZORK
ZORK IS A GAME OF ADVENTURE,
DANGER, AND LOW CUNNING. IN IT YOU WILL
EXPLORE SOME OF THE MOST AMAZING
TERRITORY EVER SEEN BY MORTALS.

NO COMPUTER SHOULD BE WITHOUT ONE!

THE ORIGINAL ZORK WAS CREATED BY TIM
ANDERSON, MARC BLANK, BRUCE DANIELS, AND
DAVE LEBLING. IT WAS INSPIRED BY THE
ADVENTURE GAME OF CROWTHER AND WOODS.
THIS VERSION WAS CREATED BY MARC BLANK,
DAVE LEBLING, JOEL BEREZ, AND SCOTT
CUTLER.

(C) COPYRIGHT 1979 & 1980 INFOCOM,
INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Interestingly, this specific acknowledgment of the debt Zork owes to Adventure would go away in later releases. But then we don’t need the leaflet to make us aware of that debt. As I stated in a previous post, the similarity of Zork and Adventure, particularly the opening sections of each, is pronounced enough that the former can almost seem a remake of the latter. In Zork the white house (“A BEAUTIFUL COLONIAL”) stands in for Adventure’s well house, but there’s still plenty of difficult-to-map forest surrounding it.

As we explore, you might want to expand the map above and those that follow in another window to help you to follow along.

In keeping with a general theme of doing Adventure better than Adventure itself, Zork’s above-ground area does have a bit more of interest to offer. Up a tree we find a jewel-encrusted egg, the first of 19 treasures we will need to collect to win. (Personal Software’s promotional copy, which talked about the “20 treasures of Zork,” didn’t even get this figure right.)

>U
UP A TREE
YOU ARE ABOUT 10 FEET ABOVE THE GROUND
NESTLED AMONG SOME LARGE BRANCHES. THE
NEAREST BRANCH ABOVE YOU IS ABOVE YOUR
REACH.
BESIDE YOU ON THE BRANCH IS A SMALL
BIRD'S NEST.
IN THE BIRD'S NEST IS A LARGE EGG
ENCRUSTED WITH PRECIOUS JEWELS,
APPARENTLY SCAVENGED SOMEWHERE BY A
CHILDLESS SONGBIRD. THE EGG IS COVERED
WITH FINE GOLD INLAY, AND ORNAMENTED IN
LAPIS LAZULI AND MOTHER-OF-PEARL. UNLIKE
MOST EGGS, THIS ONE IS HINGED AND HAS A
DELICATE LOOKING CLASP HOLDING IT
CLOSED. THE EGG APPEARS EXTREMELY
FRAGILE.

The egg is also the key part of one of the cruelest puzzles; more on that much later.

The egg illustrates an aspect of Zork that can be somewhat jarring, even comical. Most of the environment is described very tersely indeed, as was typical in games of this era (“THIS IS A DIMLY LIT FOREST, WITH LARGE TREES ALL AROUND.”) Yet every once in a while, as with the egg shown above, the implementors relax and indulge their literary sensibilities a bit. The effect when playing is surprisingly akin to triggering a cut scene in a modern game. Here’s another of those moments from the outdoors, the “CANYON VIEW.”

CANYON VIEW
YOU ARE AT THE TOP OF THE GREAT CANYON
ON ITS WEST WALL. FROM HERE THERE IS A
MARVELOUS VIEW OF THE CANYON AND PARTS
OF THE FRIGID RIVER UPSTREAM. ACROSS THE
CANYON, THE WALLS OF THE WHITE CLIFFS
JOIN THE MIGHTY RAMPARTS OF THE FLATHEAD
MOUNTAINS TO THE EAST. FOLLOWING THE
CANYON UPSTREAM TO THE NORTH, ARAGAIN
FALLS MAY BE SEEN, COMPLETE WITH
RAINBOW. THE MIGHTY FRIGID RIVER FLOWS
OUT FROM A GREAT DARK CAVERN. TO THE
WEST AND SOUTH CAN BE SEEN AN IMMENSE
FOREST, STRETCHING FOR MILES AROUND. A
PATH LEADS NORTHWEST. IT IS POSSIBLE TO
CLIMB DOWN INTO THE CANYON FROM HERE.

Woods created some of the same effect in Adventure as well, most notably with the “BREATH-TAKING VIEW,” but in Zork these “cut scenes” come much more frequently.

There’s not a whole lot more we can do outside at the moment, so we’ll make our way into the house. Going up into its attic brings what may just be the best remembered Infocom trope of all: the grue.

KITCHEN
>U
IT IS PITCH BLACK. YOU ARE LIKELY TO BE
EATEN BY A GRUE.

“Grue” is tossed out from time as the name of a monster (“man, ocular bat, the unusual hoon”) in the Dying Earth story cycle of fantasy and science-fiction writer Jack Vance. However, it’s never really described as anything more than something the characters apparently find very frightening. Lebling, who like Gary Gygax of Dungeons and Dragons fame was a big fan of Vance, borrowed the name and the general idea of a mysterious creature that haunts the dark as a solution to a design problem. Trying to move around or do much of anything in the dark in Adventure would lead the player to fall into a pit in the cave and die. Lebling wanted the same mechanic in Zork, but had the problem that such a death was not always realistic in that game’s more diverse environment; the attic of the house, for instance, was presumably not riddled with sinkholes like the surface of a cave might be. The grue provided a handy, one-size-fits-all solution for any conceivable dark area. In the first build after the grue was added to the PDP-10 Zork, the U.S. News and Dungeon Report that was always kept in the white house mentioned that Bruce Daniels had spent weeks wandering around the underground filling in all of the pits.

Despite its very practical origins, the idea of a deadly slavering creature that no one has ever actually seen — grues die instantly if exposed to light — was immensely appealing to Infocom as both horror and comedy. There’s an almost mythical quality to the grue, as of the unknown monster that every child is convinced lurks under her bed. Grues make appearances in virtually all of their early games, and still live on today in hacker culture — even if one sometimes wishes they wouldn’t, as most of the grue jokes that crop up when one mentions text adventures in the wrong company were stale 25 years ago. You can decide for yourself whether MC Frontalot’s homage belongs in this category. (Personally, I’m more a fan of “The Pr0n Song.”) One final strange fact: my Firefox spell checker knows “grue,” but doesn’t know “Zork.”

Like Adventure’s well house, the white house will serve as a de facto staging area for our underground explorations, as well as the place where we collect our treasures. Zork’s trophy case makes this purpose even more explicit.

>W
LIVING ROOM
YOU ARE IN THE LIVING ROOM. THERE IS A
DOOR TO THE EAST, A WOODEN DOOR WITH
STRANGE GOTHIC LETTERING TO THE WEST,
WHICH APPEARS TO BE NAILED SHUT, A
TROPHY CASE, AND A LARGE ORIENTAL RUG IN
THE CENTER OF THE ROOM.
ABOVE THE TROPHY CASE HANGS AN ELVISH
SWORD OF GREAT ANTIQUITY.
A BATTERY-POWERED BRASS LANTERN IS ON
THE TROPHY CASE.

The entrance to the underground in Adventure, you may remember, was through a grate set into the ground in the forest. Zork has a similar grate, but it serves only as an homage to its inspiration and a red herring; the real entrance is right here in the living room, beneath the rug.

>MOVE RUG
WITH A GREAT EFFORT, THE RUG IS MOVED TO
ONE SIDE OF THE ROOM. WITH THE RUG
MOVED, THE DUSTY COVER OF A CLOSED
TRAP-DOOR APPEARS.
>EXAMINE WOODEN DOOR
THE ENGRAVINGS TRANSLATE TO 'THIS SPACE
INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.'
>OPEN TRAP-DOOR
THE DOOR RELUCTANTLY OPENS TO REVEAL A
RICKETY STAIRCASE DESCENDING INTO
DARKNESS.
>D
THE TRAP DOOR CRASHES SHUT, AND YOU HEAR
SOMEONE BARRING IT.
IT IS PITCH BLACK. YOU ARE LIKELY TO BE
EATEN BY A GRUE.
YOUR SWORD IS GLOWING WITH A FAINT BLUE
GLOW.

And so we are underground. We’ll continue our explorations there next time.

Comments
15 Responses

- Robb Sherwin

January 18, 2012 at 5:35 pm

This is my favorite game… and it’s eye-opening just how much I don’t know about its origins. Thanks again for the great article, Jimmy.

- Andrew Plotkin

January 18, 2012 at 9:19 pm

“Grue” is a real word, albeit one that mostly survives in English only as part of “gruesome”. So it’s not surprising that spell checkers know it.

Also, the grate only counts as a red herring in the early stage of the game. (Take this as a quibble about the meaning of “red herring”, not of your point. :)

Also, I always figured the map was the twentieth treasure.

- Dannii

January 18, 2012 at 9:54 pm

You could include this link for the masses: http://iplayif.com/?story=https://www.filfre.net/misc/zork.z2

- Jimmy Maher

January 19, 2012 at 8:02 am

Very cool! I’ve included the link in the post. Thanks for making me aware of this.

- Jake

January 19, 2012 at 2:51 pm

Because the early Zorks were quickly replaced by their version 3 counterparts, I never got around to adding support for earlier versions, seeing these as of only historical interest.

Some might disagree with you.

- Cliffy

October 23, 2017 at 12:43 am

“Grue” is also a term in use in philosophy to mean (there are various formulations) something green that you observe between now and Thursday and something blue you observe from Thursday onwards. Nelson Goodman coined it in the ‘50’s. So a Brussels sprout I have for dinner today is grue, but one I have for dinner next week isn’t. An evergreen tree might be grue or not, depending on when I see it. The concept is useful in epistemology and the philosophy of language. It’s such a good word for a creature that is visually undefined, I often wondered if Lebling or the other imps encountered the term in a Phil elective at MIT — at the time, it (surpringly) had one of the most prestigious philosophy departments in the U.S.

- Allan Holland

February 3, 2018 at 3:38 am

I’m sure I’m not the only one among us who will be disappointed if Spielberg leaves Zork out of the film adaptation of Ready Player One. No sign of it in the trailers that I can recognize.

- Soh Kam Yung

March 20, 2018 at 1:11 am

Just a heads-up that Zork I, r5 (the version released originally released for Apple ][ by Personal Software has been uploaded to the Internet Archive and playable in the web browser.

The link is [ https://archive.org/details/ZorkI_r5_4amCrack ]. Enjoy.

This twitter thread [ https://twitter.com/a2_4am/status/975818151396040706 ] has more information on the release.

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- Joe Bryan

August 18, 2019 at 7:47 pm

I remember we could type the command “verbose” and get the full rather than abbreviated responses. Worth mentioning here methinks.

- Lisa H.

August 19, 2019 at 12:02 am

I always play in verbose mode since it helps me keep better track of where I am on the map.

- Grant

August 19, 2019 at 4:01 am

It might be worth using text-transform: uppercase in the CSS to get the all-caps, and have the text in a more natural form, to make it more friendly for screen readers.

- Michael

December 23, 2019 at 11:46 pm

“Infocom’s took a dedication to quality to extremes almost unheard of amongst game developers of their era.”

I’m pretty sure this is intended to be written without the ” ‘s” after “Infocom,” although it’s still a difficult sentence to parse even without it.

- Jimmy Maher

December 25, 2019 at 11:15 am

Thanks!

Exploring Zork, Part 2
January 20, 2012

Today we’ll tackle the meat of Zork’s Great Underground Empire, shown on the map below.

Exploring south from the cellar where we left off yields our second treasure and our first way out of the underground; we can carry exactly two items out with us via the fireplace in the living room of the white house. (But we can’t go back down that way; “ONLY SANTA CLAUS CLIMBS DOWN CHIMNEYS,” the game tells us, in a classic bit of adventure-game logic.) As we explore we’ll continue to find more and more — and more and more convenient — means of ingress and egress. Eventually, even the unknown nasty who keeps closing and barring the trapdoor behind us will stop it.

We also find a second note — oops, an “OWNER’s MANUAL” — south of the cellar. It conveys some of the wonder of this little, functioning world Infocom have constructed.

>EXAMINE PAPER

CONGRATULATIONS!
YOU ARE THE PRIVILEGED OWNER OF A
GENUINE ZORK GREAT UNDERGROUND EMPIRE
(PART I), A SELF CONTAINED AND SELF
MAINTAINING UNIVERSE. IF USED AND
MAINTAINED IN ACCORDANCE WITH NORMAL
OPERATING PRACTICES FOR SMALL UNIVERSES,
ZORK WILL PROVIDE MANY MONTHS OF
TROUBLE-FREE OPERATION. PLEASE CHECK
WITH YOUR DEALER FOR PART II AND OTHER
ALTERNATE UNIVERSES.

Like the title page shown in my previous post, the note also shows that Infocom were also already planning at least a Zork 2 at this stage, even if their naming rubric could still use some work. More interestingly, it also shows that they were already envisioning parlaying ZIL and the Z-Machine into a whole line of other, original games. In including an advertisement for other games within this one, Infocom were following the lead of Scott Adams, who always seemed to find space to plug one or two other current or upcoming games even within his tiny 16 K creations.

When we proceed north from the cellar, we run into a sort of perfect storm of bad luck.

>N
THE TROLL ROOM
THIS IS A SMALL ROOM WITH PASSAGES TO
THE EAST AND SOUTH AND A FORBIDDING HOLE
LEADING WEST. BLOODSTAINS AND DEEP
SCRATCHES (PERHAPS MADE BY AN AXE) MAR
THE WALLS.
A NASTY-LOOKING TROLL, BRANDISHING A
BLOODY AXE, BLOCKS ALL PASSAGES OUT OF
THE ROOM.
A SEEDY-LOOKING INDIVIDUAL WITH A LARGE
BAG JUST WANDERED THROUGH THE ROOM. ON
THE WAY THROUGH, HE QUIETLY ABSTRACTED
ALL VALUABLES FROM THE ROOM AND FROM
YOUR POSSESSION, MUMBLING SOMETHING
ABOUT "DOING UNTO OTHERS BEFORE.."
THE TROLL'S MIGHTY BLOW DROPS YOU TO
YOUR KNEES.
THE THIEF SLOWLY APPROACHES, STRIKES
LIKE A SNAKE, AND LEAVES YOU WOUNDED.
>KILL TROLL WITH SWORD
I CAN'T SEE ANY SWORD HERE.
>KILL TROLL WITH KNIFE
A GOOD STROKE, BUT IT'S TOO SLOW, THE
TROLL DODGES.
THE TROLL'S AXE REMOVES YOUR HEAD.
IT APPEARS THAT THAT LAST BLOW WAS TOO
MUCH FOR YOU. I'M AFRAID YOU ARE DEAD.

**** YOU HAVE DIED ****

What’s happened here is that we’ve simultaneously met two of the other inhabitants of the underground, the troll and the thief. The former stays in place, but the latter is Zork’s response to the pirate and the dwarfs of Adventure, a classic Dungeons and Dragons-style “wandering monster.” He roams throughout the underground, and not only takes the occasional poke at us with his stiletto, but — worse — picks up items we might have left here or there for safekeeping and scatters them randomly about. Even worse, he takes treasures for himself, hiding them away (more on that later). And worst of all, he’s happy to steal things off our own person. Woe to the adventurer whom he leaves in the dark without a lamp! In this case, he steals our sword just as we kind of need it to fight him and the troll and all, leaving us with only the much less effective knife. The end result is predictable.

The credit (or blame) for the combat engine belongs to Lebling:

Dave, an old Dungeons and Dragons player, didn’t like the completely predictable ways of killing creatures off. In the original game, for example, one killed a troll by throwing a knife at him; he would catch the knife and gleefully eat it (like anything else you threw at him), but hemorrhage as a result. Dave added basically the full complexity of DD-style fighting, with different strengths for different weapons, wounds, unconsciousness, and death. Each creature had its own set of messages, so a fight with the thief (who uses a stiletto) would be very different from a fight with the troll and his axe.

The danger of all this dynamism and emergent behavior is that it can lead to exactly the sort of thing that just happened to us, where the player is killed capriciously, without ever really having a chance. Eamon players never seemed to mind that sort of thing, but it didn’t sit well with Infocom. They would back well away from randomized combat in later games, a bias that the modern interactive fiction community has generally taken to heart. The main sign of this road not taken in the later Infocom canon is the “DIAGNOSE” verb, introduced in Zork to give the player a quick rundown of her current wounds, which persisted in later games as a rather pointless oddity generally yielding a generic response. Notably, “DIAGNOSE” is the only standard verb of the Infocom system that was not adapted by more modern IF languages like Inform and TADS.

Anyway, we restore a time or two, get a bit more lucky with our die rolls, kill the troll and avoid the thief, and move on into the reservoir area and, eventually, Flood Control Dam #3, one of the more memorable Zork landmarks. The relatively sober descriptions of the grand, long abandoned edifice itself are contrasted with the silliness of the guidebook we find inside the lobby.

>EXAMINE GUIDEBOOK
"FLOOD CONTROL DAM #3
FCD#3 WAS CONSTRUCTED IN YEAR 783 OF
THE GREAT UNDERGROUND EMPIRE TO HARNESS
THE MIGHTY FRIGID RIVER. THIS WORK WAS
SUPPORTED BY A GRANT OF 37 MILLION
ZORKMIDS FROM YOUR OMNIPOTENT LOCAL
TYRANT LORD DIMWIT FLATHEAD THE
EXCESSIVE. THIS IMPRESSIVE STRUCTURE IS
COMPOSED OF 370,000 CUBIC FEET OF
CONCRETE, IS 256 FEET TALL AT THE
CENTER, AND 193 FEET WIDE AT THE TOP.
THE LAKE CREATED BEHIND THE DAM HAS A
VOLUME OF 1.7 BILLION CUBIC FEET, AN
AREA OF 12 MILLION SQUARE FEET, AND A
SHORE LINE OF 36 THOUSAND FEET.
WE WILL NOW POINT OUT SOME OF THE MORE
INTERESTING FEATURES OF FCD#3 AS WE
CONDUCT YOU ON A GUIDED TOUR OF THE
FACILITIES:
1) YOU START YOUR TOUR HERE IN
THE DAM LOBBY. YOU WILL NOTICE ON
YOUR RIGHT THAT .........

Much of Zork’s literary character, which comes through quite distinctly despite the relatively limited number of actual words in the game (it’s mostly been the very longest descriptions that I’ve been quoting here), arises from this juxtaposition of melancholic, faded glory and unabashed silliness. I’ll let you decide whether that was a real aesthetic choice or the accidental result of having too many cooks (writers) in the kitchen. In any case, we find another prime example of said silliness in the dam’s maintenance room.

>N
MAINTENANCE ROOM
THIS IS WHAT APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN THE
MAINTENANCE ROOM FOR FLOOD CONTROL DAM
#3. APPARENTLY, THIS ROOM HAS BEEN
RANSACKED RECENTLY, FOR MOST OF THE
VALUABLE EQUIPMENT IS GONE. ON THE WALL
IN FRONT OF YOU IS A GROUP OF BUTTONS,
WHICH ARE LABELLED IN EBCDIC. HOWEVER,
THEY ARE OF DIFFERENT COLORS: BLUE,
YELLOW, BROWN, AND RED. THE DOORS TO
THIS ROOM ARE IN THE WEST AND SOUTH
ENDS.
THERE IS A GROUP OF TOOL CHESTS HERE.
THERE IS A WRENCH HERE.
THERE IS AN OBJECT WHICH LOOKS LIKE A
TUBE OF TOOTHPASTE HERE.
THERE IS A SCREWDRIVER HERE.

The “EBCDIC” reference is a bit of hacker humor that might, depending on your background, require some explanation. During the early 1960s most computer makers agreed on something called ASCII (“American Standard Code for Information Interchange”) as a system for encoding textual characters on computers. Since computers can ultimately understand only numbers, ASCII is essentially a look-up table that the computer can use to know that when it encounters, say, the number 65 in a text file, it should print the character “A” to the screen. A standard was necessary to ensure that computers of different makes and models could easily exchange textual information amongst themselves. Just as everyone had settled on ASCII and thus solved a rather vexing problem, however, IBM suddenly chose to abandon the standard on its mainframes in favor of something called EBCDIC (“Extended Binary-Coded Decimal Interchange Code”). Its reason for doing so, at least according to DEC hackers, was a deliberate effort to make its machines incapable of exchanging data with those from other manufacturers, in the belief that doing so would lock its customers into using only IBM products for absolutely everything. To make things worse, EBCDIC was just a bad system in comparison to ASCII. In ASCII “A” numerically precedes “B” which precedes “C,” etc.; in EBCDIC each letter is assigned a number willy-nilly, with no apparent rhyme or reason. This makes, say, looping through the alphabet, a scenario that comes up quite often in programming, much more difficult than it ought to be. And then there was IBM’s habit of constantly revising EBCDIC, making it even incompatible with itself in its various versions. Still, it persists even today on the big legacy mainframes. Among hackers, EBCDIC came to stand in for any incomprehensible bit of language or jibberish, the hacker equivalent of saying (with apologies to anyone who actually speaks Greek), “It’s Greek to me!” And that, to make a long explanation not much longer, is the reason that the dam’s buttons are labelled in EBCDIC.

We solve a clever puzzle at the dam to adjust the water level on its two sides, thus opening up the river and the northern part of the underground for exploration. Before we do that, though, we’ll have a look at the temple to the southeast. We find there an ivory torch that, in addition to being a treasure, functions as an inexhaustable light source. This bit of mercy is even more appreciated than the extra batteries we can find in Adventure, particularly since using it doesn’t cost us points. We just need to be sure we conserve enough lantern-life to get us through the coal mine, about which more in a moment.

The sceptre, a treasure we find under the temple in the “EGYPTIAN ROOM,” is at the heart of the first really bad puzzle of the game. We are expected to take it to the rainbow outside and wave it to cross and reveal the inevitable pot of gold.

>WAVE SCEPTRE
SUDDENLY, THE RAINBOW APPEARS TO BECOME
SOLID AND, I VENTURE, WALKABLE (I THINK
THE GIVEAWAY WAS THE STAIRS AND
BANNISTER).
>E
ON THE RAINBOW
YOU ARE ON TOP OF A RAINBOW (I BET YOU
NEVER THOUGHT YOU WOULD WALK ON A
RAINBOW), WITH A MAGNIFICENT VIEW OF THE
FALLS. THE RAINBOW TRAVELS EAST-WEST
HERE.

If you’ve played a few adventure games, of course, you fully expected to walk on that rainbow. The question is how you’re supposed to arrive at this particular way of doing it. The one real hint is external to the game: Adventure featured a rod that it was possible to wave to cross a similar (albeit rainbow-less) chasm. Thus we have yet another point where Zork simply seems to assume previous knowledge of Adventure — although even given that knowledge solving this puzzle requires quite an intuitive leap.

After exploring the region beyond the rainbow, we return underground and eventually wind up in… Hades.

>D
ENTRANCE TO HADES
YOU ARE OUTSIDE A LARGE GATEWAY, ON
WHICH IS INSCRIBED
"ABANDON EVERY HOPE, ALL YE WHO
ENTER HERE."
THE GATE IS OPEN; THROUGH IT YOU CAN SEE
A DESOLATION, WITH A PILE OF MANGLED
BODIES IN ONE CORNER. THOUSANDS OF
VOICES, LAMENTING SOME HIDEOUS FATE, CAN
BE HEARD.
THE WAY THROUGH THE GATE IS BARRED BY
EVIL SPIRITS, WHO JEER AT YOUR ATTEMPTS
TO PASS.

Some of the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink feel that characterized the original PDP-10 Zork also comes through here. For all of the original mythology found in Lord Dimwit Flathead, zorkmids, and Flood Control Dam #3, we’ve also got here Hades from Greek mythology with a Dante paraphrase to boot. (Indeed, this feels more like the Christian Hell than the mythological Hades; its chilling tone provides yet another contrast to the more jokey sections.) Soon enough, we’ll also be meeting a nineteenth-century American coal mine and an Odysseus-fearing cyclops. And we’ve already visited (and plundered) the tomb of Ramses II. There’s of course a puzzle to solved in this Hades as well, but I’ll leave that one to you. Afterward, we’ll return to the vicinity of the dam for a trip down the river.

The Frigid River section was the work of Marc Blank, who added it quite early in Zork’s development. Its key component is the inflatable boat that we must use to navigate it. This implementation of a vehicle arguably marked the first point where Zork’s makers really showed their willingness to go beyond their inspiration of Adventure by modeling a much more intricate, believable storyworld. It also brought with it some harsh lessons in design. Tim Anderson:

In the original game, there were rooms, objects, and a player; the player always existed in some room. Vehicles were objects that became, in effect, mobile rooms. This required changes in the (always delicate) interactions among verbs, objects, and rooms (we had to have some way of making “walk” do something reasonable when the player was in the boat). In addition, ever-resourceful Zorkers tried to use the boat anywhere they thought they could. The code for the boat itself was not designed to function outside the river section, but nothing kept the player from carrying the deflated boat to the reservoir and trying to sail across. Eventually the boat was allowed in the reservoir, but the general problem always remained: anything that changes the world you’re modelling changes practically everything in the world you’re modelling.

Although Zork was only a month old, it could already surprise its authors. The boat, due to the details of its implementation, turned into a “bag of holding”: players could put practically anything into it and carry it around, even if the weight of the contents far exceeded what a player was allowed to carry. The boat was two separate objects: the “inflated boat” object contained the objects, but the player carried the “deflated boat” object around. We knew nothing about this: someone finally reported it to us as a bug. As far as I know, the bug is still there.

I wasn’t able to reproduce this bug in this early Apple II implementation. More’s the pity; a bag of holding would be nice to have in this game. (Update: Turns out this bug is still there. I just wasn’t clever enough to figure out how to exploit it. See Nathan’s comment below for the details.)

After the Frigid River, which turns out to connect with the Aragain Falls outdoors, we next explore north beyond the reservoir. The coal mine was the result of the other Zork team members specifically asking Bruce Daniels for “a particularly nasty section.” His response originally involved a huge maze similar to the other huge Zork maze which we’ll get to in my next post. The team decided that enough was enough, however, and edited it down to a fairly manageable four rooms. Tim Anderson nevertheless notes this as “a late example of making things hard by making them tedious.” Still, the coal mine we’re left with actually isn’t all that “nasty.” It has some tricky but manageable puzzles, as long as we aren’t stupid enough to carry an open flame — i.e., the torch — inside. One of the outcomes is a diamond. (In another choice Get Lamp interview, David Welbourn notes how every adventure-game coal mine always seems to contain a diamond; would that it were the same in real life.)

Discounting only the maze area to the west, we’ve now completely explored the underground and solved all of its puzzles but one. We still have the “LOUD ROOM” to deal with.

>D
LOUD ROOM
THIS IS A LARGE ROOM WITH A CEILING
WHICH CANNOT BE DETECTED FROM THE
GROUND. THERE IS A NARROW PASSAGE FROM
EAST TO WEST AND A STONE STAIRWAY
LEADING UPWARD. THE ROOM IS DEAFENINGLY
LOUD WITH AN UNDETERMINED RUSHING SOUND.
THE SOUND SEEMS TO REVERBERATE FROM ALL
OF THE WALLS, MAKING IT DIFFICULT EVEN
TO THINK.
ON THE GROUND IS A LARGE PLATINUM BAR.
>GET BAR
BAR BAR ...
>BAR BAR
BAR BAR ...
>GET BAR BAR
BAR BAR ...
>L
L L ...
>LOOK
LOOK LOOK ...

This room feels like something of a throwback to more primitive games whose two-word parsers and limited world models forced them to replace relatively sophisticated environmental puzzles with guess-the-word games. The Zork team had specifically wanted to avoid the pitfalls of the early parsers with their frustrating non-specificity. Blank, speaking of Adventure: “It really bothered us that if you said ‘Take bird’ it would put the bird in the cage for you–sort of doing things behind your back.” All of which makes this puzzle and its solution — “ECHO” — feel like the betrayal of an ideal of sorts.

But its frustrations are nothing compared to the maze, one of the largest and nastiest of its type in adventure-game history. We’ll tackle that monster, and finish up, next time.

Comments
20 Responses

- Nathan

January 21, 2012 at 8:26 am

I was able to reproduce the “Bag of Holding” bug in release 15 without any problem. Just collect a whole bunch of stuff together in one place, more than you can hold at a time. Then put some of it in the raft, deflate the raft, then you can pick up the pile of plastic and the rest of your stuff. Just don’t accidentally put the pump in the raft; that happened to me on the first try! IIRC, you also need to avoid putting in anything that will puncture the raft, like the sword or torch.

- Jimmy Maher

January 21, 2012 at 11:03 am

Ah, okay. You’re a smarter man than I. I kept trying to put things into the deflated boat, which didn’t work, or to put things in the inflated boat and carry it around. That worked in a sense, but didn’t get me anywhere because I was still subject to the carrying weight limit.

- Jake

January 22, 2012 at 5:18 pm

All of which makes this puzzle and its solution — “ECHO” — feel like the betrayal of an ideal of sorts.

You’re clearly not the only one who felt that way, since later versions of Zork implemented a solution which made use of the hydrodynamics of the situation instead (namely: the roar which makes it impossible to think is caused by the dam spillover. You can engineer things so that there briefly is no spillover and the room is quiet).

- Duncan Stevens

January 23, 2012 at 9:59 pm

That was definitely a better solution, though it would have been better still had the game’s geography not been so twisted and incoherent. It’s far from obvious that the sound you hear in the Loud Room is coming from the dam; all it says is that there’s a “undetermined rushing sound.” Yes, the dam is a few moves away, but so are the troll room, the balcony over the torch room, etc. There’s no clear and consistent sense of proximity among adjacent rooms.

- Jon Blum

June 15, 2017 at 10:38 pm

For what it’s worth, the “dam spillover” solution has further clues within the game — if you try to visit the Loud Room after you’ve opened the floodgates, the rushing-water noise is now so deafening that you immediately flee the room. Closing the floodgates (after the water level has dropped) then stops the flow and the noise.

- Mike Taylor

September 7, 2017 at 9:06 am

I found the engineering solution to this puzzle long before someone told me about ECHO. The magic-word solution is indeed lame, and should really have been taken out completely, given how elegant the engineering solution is. I was happier with Zork (though I am still very happy!) before I found out about ECHO.

- Holger

April 9, 2014 at 1:03 pm

I found the echo puzzle the easiest to solve in Zork. The solution came just naturally, because that’s exactly what we used to yell when there was an echo of some sorts. To gain entrance to Hades was much more difficult, because the three items you need meant nothing to a German speaker like me, there is no German equivalent to the English expression. The irony being that there is a German band with it’s English bandname consisitng of exactly that expression.

- Ziusudra

February 5, 2015 at 11:48 pm

Huh, release 88/840726 doesn’t have the EBCDIC labels, just the buttons and their colors.

Perhaps they decided the joke was too esoteric… or that people thought it was a hint to the puzzle.

- Mike Taylor

September 7, 2017 at 8:56 am

A trivial typo that you may want to fix: “In ASCII “A” numerically follows “B” which follows “C,” etc.”. Of course, it’s the other way around.

BTW., I am loving this site, which I only discovered a few days ago. Many thanks for writing all this — keep up the good work!

- Jimmy Maher

September 7, 2017 at 9:04 am

Amazing that lasted unnoticed this long. Thanks!

- Pingback: Revisiting Flood Control Dam #3 | The Reinvigorated Programmer

- Spike

January 24, 2018 at 6:21 am

I learned of the solution to the sceptre/rainbow puzzle from Conquest of Quendor, one of the CYOA Zork books written by Steve Meretzky. I don’t know how I would have come up with the solution otherwise.

Those four CYOA Zork books of Meretzky’s contained (if I remember correctly) solutions to a handful (several?) of the puzzles from the Zork games. An alternative version of Invisiclues, I suppose, for those who knew where to look.

- Lisa H.

January 24, 2018 at 9:39 am

even if their naming rubrick

I was brought back to this old post by the above comment from Spike, but – “rubric”.

(Indeed, this feels more like the Christian Hell than the mythological Hades; its chilling tone provides yet another contrast to the more jokey sections.)

True enough; though I think it’s reasonable to suppose things were added to this mainly on the rule of “Dude, that sounds so cool, let’s put it in!”

- Jimmy Maher

January 25, 2018 at 11:59 am

Thanks!

- Allan Holland

February 3, 2018 at 3:35 am

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the bell, book and candle puzzle heretofore. Is it derived from the movie with the same name from the late 50s starring Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak? Or the much older catholic rite of excommunication? Either way, it seems you have to be either a film buff or devout Catholic to have a clue about this puzzle. And the twelve-year old me who originally scratched his head on this one was neither.

- Anonymous

September 18, 2020 at 3:57 pm

There is a clue in the game if you read the book. After reading, TURN PAGE IN BOOK will reveal the correct order of things to do to open the gate.

- Corey Klemow

July 11, 2019 at 8:56 pm

I played Zork at age 13 with my dad and he’s the one who solved the “Bell, Book and Candle” puzzle, which I would have absolutely not gotten! He cited the movie, which I also had not heard of, when solving the puzzle.

We were stuck on the scepter/rainbow puzzle for a very, very long time because I was absolutely, 100%, unshakably convinced the solution had to do with Poseidon’s trident. Poseidon, king of the sea, rainbow, water. Logical! The scepter? Totally out of left field. It became the very first Infocom game hint I ever looked up (via a walkthrough on CompuServe), and the only one we used to get through Zork I (having spent months on the game). I would not be so patient when playing future games. :)

- Pedro Timóteo

May 19, 2020 at 4:28 pm

The page linked at the end of the article, as “Blank”, is no longer there. However, by googling (in quotes) for the text, I found another version here: http://infocom-elsewhere-org.cypherpunks.ru/scheyen/Articles/softalk.html

- Jimmy Maher

May 20, 2020 at 6:26 am

Thanks! Replaced it with the archive.org version, which should be most reliable.

- Jonathan O

December 18, 2020 at 3:48 pm

Going back to the Loud Room problem:- had the Internet meme about duck quacks not echoing existed then, maybe QUACK would have been a solution?

Exploring Zork, Part 3
January 22, 2012

Today we’ll finish up with Zork. That means plunging into the only big, completely traditional maze in the Infocom canon. And it’s a nasty one; apparently they decided that if you’re only going to do one, you might as well do it up right.

In keeping with the thief’s role as a stand-in for Adventure’s pirate, the maze is where he has his lair. This fact, even more than its sheer size, is the root of its difficulty: as you wander about inside dropping items and mapping, chances are good that the thief will show up to scatter your carefully placed items about and leave you hopefully confused. Like the combat sequences, success here requires luck and careful saving and restoring more than skill. Nowhere else does Zork so thoroughly justify Robb Sherwin’s statement that it “hates its player.”

Within the maze is the “CYCLOPS ROOM.”

SE
CYCLOPS ROOM
THIS ROOM HAS AN EXIT ON THE NORTHWEST,
AND A STAIRCASE LEADING UP.
A CYCLOPS, WHO LOOKS PREPARED TO EAT
HORSES (MUCH LESS MERE ADVENTURERS),
BLOCKS THE STAIRCASE. FROM HIS STATE OF
HEALTH, AND THE BLOODSTAINS ON THE
WALLS, YOU GATHER THAT HE IS NOT VERY
FRIENDLY, THOUGH HE LIKES PEOPLE.

There are two possible solutions to the cyclops problem, one basically acceptable and one easily the worst in the game. For the former, we can give him the lunch we found in the house at the beginning of the game, followed by the bottle of water. The latter is another guess-the-word affair that makes the loud room look like design genius: we can type “ODYSSEUS.”

ODYSSEUS
THE CYCLOPS, HEARING THE NAME OF HIS
FATHER'S DEADLY NEMESIS, FLEES THE ROOM
BY KNOCKING DOWN THE WALL ON THE EAST OF
THE ROOM.

But never fear, there is a “clue” to this solution. Reading a prayer book we found in the temple yields the following:

EXAMINE BOOK
COMMANDMENT #12592
OH YE WHO GO ABOUT SAYING UNTO EACH:
"HELLO SAILOR":
DOST THOU KNOW THE MAGNITUDE OF THY SIN
BEFORE THE GODS?
YEA, VERILY, THOU SHALT BE GROUND
BETWEEN TWO STONES.
SHALL THE ANGRY GODS CAST THY BODY INTO
THE WHIRLPOOL?
SURELY, THY EYE SHALL BE PUT OUT WITH A
SHARP STICK!
EVEN UNTO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH SHALT
THOU WANDER AND
UNTO THE LAND OF THE DEAD SHALT THOU BE
SENT AT LAST.
SURELY THOU SHALT REPENT OF THY CUNNING.

On the original PDP-10 implementation, reading the first letter of each line yields “ODYSSEUS.” On the 40-column Apple II screen, however, this rather breaks down. It’s an awful “puzzle,” but the fact that Infocom give the player a more reasonable alternative really marks them, for all their continuing design pratfalls, as unusual text-adventure developers for this era. Scott Adams or Roberta Williams would have just stuck the easy-to-implement “ODYSSEUS” puzzle in and dreamed of all the hint booklets they were about to sell.

Beyond the cyclops lies the thief’s lair. Giving him his reckoning feels sweet indeed after all the trouble he’s caused us, not to mention restoring to us whatever treasures he’s stolen.

U
YOU HEAR A SCREAM OF ANGUISH AS YOU
VIOLATE THE ROBBER'S HIDEAWAY. USING
PASSAGES UNKNOWN TO YOU, HE RUSHES TO
ITS DEFENSE.
THE THIEF GESTURES MYSTERIOUSLY, AND THE
TREASURES IN THE ROOM SUDDENLY VANISH.
TREASURE ROOM
THIS IS A LARGE ROOM, WHOSE EAST WALL IS
SOLID GRANITE. A NUMBER OF DISCARDED
BAGS, WHICH CRUMBLE AT YOUR TOUCH, ARE
SCATTERED ABOUT ON THE FLOOR. THERE IS
AN EXIT DOWN A STAIRCASE.
THERE IS A SUSPICIOUS-LOOKING
INDIVIDUAL, HOLDING A BAG, LEANING
AGAINST ONE WALL. HE IS ARMED WITH A
VICIOUS-LOOKING STILETTO.
THERE IS A SILVER CHALICE, INTRICATELY
ENGRAVED, HERE.
THE THIEF RAMS THE HAFT OF HIS BLADE
INTO YOUR STOMACH, LEAVING YOU OUT OF
BREATH.
>KILL THIEF WITH AXE
YOU ARE STILL RECOVERING FROM THAT LAST
BLOW, SO YOUR ATTACK IS INEFFECTIVE.
YOU PARRY A LIGHTNING THRUST, AND THE
THIEF SALUTES YOU WITH A GRIM NOD.
>KILL THIEF WITH AXE
THE THIEF IS STRUCK ON THE ARM, BLOOD
BEGINS TO TRICKLE DOWN.
THE THIEF STABS NONCHALANTLY WITH HIS
STILETTO AND MISSES.
>AGAIN
THE BLOW LANDS, MAKING A SHALLOW GASH IN
THE THIEF'S ARM!
THE THIEF TRIES TO SNEAK PAST YOUR
GUARD, BUT YOU TWIST AWAY.
>AGAIN
THE BLOW LANDS, MAKING A SHALLOW GASH IN
THE THIEF'S ARM!
THE THIEF SLOWLY APPROACHES, STRIKES
LIKE A SNAKE, AND LEAVES YOU WOUNDED.
>AGAIN
THE THIEF IS STRUCK ON THE ARM, BLOOD
BEGINS TO TRICKLE DOWN.
THE THIEF STABS NONCHALANTLY WITH HIS
STILETTO AND MISSES.
>AGAIN
YOU CHARGE, BUT THE THIEF JUMPS NIMBLY
ASIDE.
THE THIEF STABS NONCHALANTLY WITH HIS
STILETTO AND MISSES.
>AGAIN
THE FATAL BLOW STRIKES THE THIEF SQUARE
IN THE HEART: HE DIES.

But wait… remember when I mentioned way back at the beginning of this adventure that the jeweled egg we found in the forest was key to the cruelest puzzle in the game? Well, I’m afraid we need to get the thief to do something for us before we kill him. We need to let him open the egg for us, for, as subtly hinted when we try to do it ourselves, we “HAVEN’T THE TOOLS OR EXPERTISE.”

With the maze explored and the thief employed and then promptly dispatched, we face only one last puzzle — but it’s another nasty one, a late addition that we could just as well have done without. From time to time while wandering in the forest, we “HEAR IN THE DISTANCE THE CHIRPING OF A SONG BIRD,” a message originally included as just a bit of flavor text. Tim Anderson:

Many people on the net had long since solved the game, but went back in and did any new problems that came along; one of them had played DD with Dave, and called him up about a day after the egg was announced. "I've gotten the egg opened, but I assume you losers have some nonsense where you do something with the canary and the songbird. Dave, no fool, said "Cough, cough, ahem, of course," and immediately went off and added the brass bauble.

Specifically, we need to wind the clockwork canary we found inside the egg to attract the songbird, which in turn drops a brass bauble at our feet — the 19th and final treasure. We place the lot in the trophy case, which magically opens up a new path outside.

SW
STONE BARROW
YOU ARE STANDING IN FRONT OF A MASSIVE
BARROW OF STONE. IN THE EAST FACE IS A
HUGE STONE DOOR WHICH IS OPEN. YOU
CANNOT SEE INTO THE DARK OF THE TOMB.
>W
AS YOU ENTER THE BARROW, THE DOOR CLOSES
INEXORABLY BEHIND YOU. AROUND YOU IT IS
DARK, BUT AHEAD IS AN ENORMOUS CAVERN,
BRIGHTLY LIT. THROUGH ITS CENTER RUNS A
WIDE STREAM. SPANNING THE STREAM IS A
SMALL WOODEN FOOTBRIDGE, AND BEYOND A
PATH LEADS INTO A DARK TUNNEL. ABOVE THE
BRIDGE, FLOATING IN THE AIR, IS A LARGE
SIGN. IT READS: ALL YE WHO STAND BEFORE
THIS BRIDGE HAVE COMPLETED A GREAT AND
PERILOUS ADVENTURE WHICH HAS TESTED YOUR
WIT AND COURAGE. YOU HAVE GAINED THE
MASTERY OF THE FIRST PART OF THE GREAT
UNDERGROUND EMPIRE. THOSE WHO PASS OVER
THIS BRIDGE MUST BE PREPARED TO
UNDERTAKE AN EVEN GREATER ADVENTURE THAT
WILL SEVERELY TEST YOUR SKILL AND
BRAVERY!
PLAY "ZORK: THE GREAT UNDERGROUND
EMPIRE, PART II".
YOUR SCORE WOULD BE 350 (TOTAL OF 350
POINTS), IN 1313 MOVES.
THIS SCORE GIVES YOU THE RANK OF MASTER
ADVENTURER.

And that, my friends, is Zork, a flawed creation but a tremendous advance over what had come before. And Infocom were just getting started.

I’ll have much, much more to say about Infocom in the future. But next, something completely different.

Comments
17 Responses

- Tale

January 22, 2012 at 10:55 pm

Is there any way to heal the player from wounds sustained in combat?

- Andrew Plotkin

January 23, 2012 at 1:16 am

Just waiting for twenty or forty turns will heal your wounds. Of course you’d want to wait somewhere lit and turn off your lamp, so as not to waste the battery power.

As for the “two possible solutions” to the cyclops, you do realize that using the food-and-water option makes the game unwinnable, right?

- Jimmy Maher

January 23, 2012 at 6:46 am

Really? How so? I used the “Odysseus” option just for convenience on my main playthrough, and finished with both food and water unused. The only disadvantage I saw was that the convenient direct passage between the living room and the cyclops room doesn’t get opened up.

- Will

February 7, 2012 at 6:31 pm

Trying not to be too spoiler-y here, on the off chance that someone hasn’t actually played through Zork.

As I recall, there was an item in the sack (a part of the lunch) that you need to have in order to move past a certain point elsewhere in the game. I would assume that if the cyclops eats all the items before you’ve accomplished the other task, you would not be able to finish. (I don’t recall an alternate way around the other puzzle.)

- Jimmy Maher

February 7, 2012 at 7:20 pm

Yes, there are two items in the sack, and I believe — from a very old memory, now — that it’s possible for the cyclops to eat both if you give them to him. And yes, this would make the game unwinnable.

- Classic Craig

September 1, 2015 at 3:27 pm

The sandwich reeks of garlic and gets you past the vampire bat that grabs you in the mine and drops you in the maze — from what I remember. If you have the sandwich, the bat (“a reject from WUMPUS”) holds its nose and doesn’t attack.
I always dealt with the cyclops after I was done in the coal mine, so I could use the sandwich or the magic word. I don’t think losing the sandwich makes the game unwinnable unless you haven’t gotten the treasure from the Bat Room.

- Nathan

January 23, 2012 at 7:50 am

I don’t remember the lunch being needed for anything either, but if you want to have it you could always GET IT right after giving it to him.

- ZUrlocker

January 23, 2012 at 3:04 am

No wonder I never got that far in this game!

- Seedy

January 23, 2012 at 12:53 pm

There is an alternate solution to the Loud Room. It involves the dam and Reservoir.
Also there are certain weapons that are most effective against each creature. The nasty knife is the most effective against the thief and the sword is the best choice to defeat the troll.

- Duncan Stevens

January 23, 2012 at 7:03 pm

“The latter is another guess-the-word affair that makes the round room look like design genius.”

I think you meant the LOUD ROOM, but agreed on the substance. Also agree that the game isn’t technically unwinnable if you use the food, but I seem to recall that the cyclops wakes up again pretty promptly, so you effectively only get one shot at the thief’s lair. If, say, you couldn’t carry all the treasures that the thief’s collected away, you’re out of luck. (And of course you have to troop back through the maze, unless you had the even-more-guess-the-verb insight of typing “TEMPLE” to get out of the lair.)

- Jimmy Maher

January 23, 2012 at 8:49 pm

Yes, should be “loud room.” Changing that now. Thanks!

- Lisa

January 24, 2012 at 9:29 pm

Having the granite walls work by touch like the mirrors would have been more intuitive.

- Pingback: Blogging Infocom: Zork I | 6502 Lane

- Kuwa

February 7, 2012 at 3:56 am

sorry, I am a Japanese.
although English can be read, cannot write.
since — I will write in Japanese.

ここは素晴らしいblogですね。IFとRPGの歴史について、とても良く調べられているので、参考になります。

私はZork I(Japanese translation)がとても好きになったので、IFを遊ぶようになりました。
文学的な嗜好のIFはZork seriersとはかなり違っていましたが、別の楽しさがありました。

しかし、英語であるので、物語にわからないところが出てきてしまいます。

1980年代の日本では、Computerによる日本語の解釈の難しさによって、text adventureはほとんど作られず、翻訳もされませんでした。

1990年初頭に、System Softという会社によってPlanetfall、Enchanter、Moonmist、Zork Iの4つが翻訳されましたが、その時代にはGraficalなGameが主流だったので、これらの作品は、ほとんど売れなかったのです。
この頃から、日本のPC game市場は縮小しており、Adult Games が市場のほとんどを占めるようになっていきました。

こういった理由により、日本でのtext adventure(IF)は、完全に終了した分野となっています。

InformやTADSのような開発言語も、もちろん日本語には対応していません。言語形態が非常に異なるため、対応させるのは難しいでしょうし、需要もほとんどありません。

しかし、それでも、IFのInterpreterを改造し、日本語に対応させる方法を、私は考えています。

- Jimmy Maher

February 7, 2012 at 1:20 pm

A quick translation, courtesy of Oren Ronen:

This is a wonderful blog. The research on IF and RPG history is very well done, and became a point of reference for me.

I started playing IF after really enjoying Zork I (Japanese translation). Literary-style IF are different from the Zork series, but they’re also a separate kind of fun.

But, since they are in English, there are many things in the stories I don’t understand.

During the ’80s, interpreting Japanese text on a computer was very difficult, and so there weren’t many text adventures made, not were there many translations of western games.

In the beginning of the ’90s, a company called System Soft translated Planetfall, Enchanter, Moonmist and Zork I, but at that time graphical games were already the mainstream, so they didn’t sell very well.
These days, Japan’s PC games industry is shrinking, and comprised mostly of adult games.

For these reasons, in Japan, the text adventure is a field that has come to a complete stop.

Programming languages such as Inform and TADS do not target the Japanese language, of course. Since Japanese syntax is completely different from English, it is difficult to adapt them. There is not much demand for it.

Nevertheless, I am thinking about ways to modify IF interpreters and make them work in Japanese.

- Ziusudra

February 6, 2015 at 2:23 am

That thief is pissing me off:

>e
Gallery
This is an art gallery. Most of the paintings have been stolen by vandals with exceptional taste. The vandals left through either the north
or west exits.
Fortunately, there is still one chance for you to be a vandal, for on the far wall is a painting of unparalleled beauty.

>get painting
You can’t see any painting here!

>l
Gallery
This is an art gallery. Most of the paintings have been stolen by vandals with exceptional taste. The vandals left through either the north
or west exits.

>

Or it may be a bug, since it never mentions the thief. It happened once with the pot of gold, too.

- Lisa H.

February 6, 2015 at 3:58 am

Any object you have seen, the thief of course has a chance to take (whether to store in his treasure room or to drop elsewhere), but I’ve never seen it happen while I was actually standing in the room at the time without it describing the Thief. Bizarre.

Sentient Software
April 26, 2012

In 1979 a 30-year-old aspiring science-fiction writer named Mike Berlyn bought an Apple II. He had already finished and delivered his first two novels to Bantam Paperbacks, who would release them under the titles The Crystal Phoenix and The Integrated Man the following year. Now about to start on a third, he had heard that these new PCs were going to change the way writers wrote, and was eager to find out for himself. In the long term, the prediction was of course not wrong, but Berlyn quickly found that the technology of 1979 was, as they say, not quite there yet. The Apple II didn’t even yet support lower-case letters at this point, necessitating all sorts of kludges in early word processors that took them about as far away as you can get from the ideal of what you see is what you get. He ended up writing his third novel, eventually published by Ace Paperbacks as Blight under the pen name Mark Sonders in 1981, the old-fashioned way.

Still, Berlyn was far from disappointed with his purchase. The Apple II may still have been problematic from a practical standpoint, but Berlyn, like so many before and after him, found it an endlessly fascinating toy. When not writing that third book, he spent most of his time exploring his new machine. He found text adventures particularly compelling, but was disappointed by the obvious lack of literary skill of most of the people creating them. Being an enterprising sort, Berlyn decided when the third book was finished that, rather than start right away on a fourth, he’d like to try making a text adventure or two of his own. The result of that aspiration was Sentient Software, a company founded by Berlyn and his wife Muffy with the help of some other partners also located near the Berlyns’ Colorado home. Sentient published two games in 1981, Oo-Topos and Cyborg. Both were written and programmed entirely by Berlyn with a bit of help from his wife, and both were science-fiction adventures involving a damaged spaceship.

In many ways these games are very typical of their era. Technically, they are most similar to Softporn of the games I’ve already discussed on this blog; they are built from a BASIC program with a two-word parser that fetches text and details of the storyworld as needed from data files stored on the disk. They are, in other words, about equivalent to the Scott Adams games in their parser and in the depth of their world modeling, but their use of the disk drive gives them space to be much more loquacious (certainly an important attribute for a “real” writer like Berlyn) and to have much bigger geographies. Indeed, their worlds are quite big ones, but made up mostly of empty rooms, connected via undescribed exits that necessitate painstaking mapping — and that’s outside the obligatory mazes. And of course, the parser makes many puzzles much harder than they ought to be. (Finding out what the correct verbs are, Cyborg tells us, is “half the fun.” Um, no.)

Yet in other ways these games represent something new and significant. Berlyn was the first author to come to the text adventure from the world of traditional fiction. He was interested in the form not, like the hackers who preceded him, as an interesting technical challenge, but rather as a potential new form of storytelling. The packaging of the games emphasized that they were not about “treasures” or “score,” but about “character development,” consistency, and plot. Some of those claims may have been more than a bit of a stretch, but Berlyn was trying, and that is significant in itself.

The plot of Cyborg, the more thematically audacious of the two games, casts you as, well, a cyborg, a human who has been physically and mentally merged with a robot. When play begins, you have amnesia, an adventure-game trope that would soon become a cliché but that may just see its first appearance here. Robbing your avatar of her memory allows Berlyn to place the two of you in the same mental situation. You both spend the game piecing together what brought you to this state, marooned on a stricken spaceship in orbit around a strange planet. Although you are expected to eventually repair the spaceship and lead your people — whom you eventually realize are colonists stored in suspended animation aboard the ship — to the planet below, the vast majority of the plot is not really story per se, but rather backstory, a frame to contain the game’s traditional puzzle- and mapping-oriented play. Within that frame, however, the game’s environments are indeed consistent and believable in a way that hadn’t been seen before. Like amnesia, Cyborg’s piece-together-the-back-story approach to plotting would soon become an adventure-game cliché. Still, it became a cliché because, at least in these earlier, less jaded days, it worked. Here it allows Berlyn to present a much richer fictional experience than would normally be possible given the primitive technology on-hand to him. His use of it marks him as — and I don’t use this word lightly — a visionary, someone thinking about the medium’s potential in a very progressive way.

One of the most interesting aspects of Cyborg is its handling of the player / avatar split. You play a disembodied human intelligence who must communicate with another, synthetic entity to accomplish absolutely everything. The idea of a split or disembodied consciousness was one that Berlyn found endlessly intriguing; his first two novels both dealt with similar themes, and he would return to it yet again (and most famously) in his next game, Infocom’s Suspended. Here he gets huge mileage out of his concept, including using it to account for the limitations of his parser:

I MAY NOT SEEM VERY HELPFUL AT TIMES BUT I DO WHAT I CAN. MY VOCABULARY IS PRETTY LARGE CONSIDERING THE STATE MY CHIPS ARE IN. THE CIRCUITS USED TO MAKE LOGICAL DECISIONS AND CARRY OUT ORDERS ARE DIFFERENT THAN THOSE USED TO DESCRIBE LOCATIONS. I TELL YOU THIS SO YOU WILL UNDERSTAND THAT ALTHOUGH I MAY USE A WORD IN ONE SENSE THAT DOESN’T MEAN I’LL UNDERSTAND IT IN ALL CASES. IT WILL HELP US BOTH IF YOU ARE AS SPECIFIC AS POSSIBLE WHEN COMMUNICATING WITH ME. AVOID WORDS LIKE “USE” OR “CONTINUE.” IF YOU WANT TO DO SOMETHING I SAY WE CAN’T TRY A SIMILAR VERB.

The game’s simple hint system is likewise integrated into the fiction. You can ask your computerized companion what he thinks about locations or items, and occasionally — very occasionally — will get a helpful suggestion.

This unusual concept makes Cyborg one of the few (only?) text adventures ever written in the first-person plural. And again, it’s reflective of some unusually sophisticated thinking about the medium and its possibilities. Scott Adams and others had previously described the player’s avatar as her “puppet,” and at times seemed to give it a separate consciousness, at least if we can judge from the occasional snappy comebacks it gave to nonsensical or dangerous inputs. But no one had previously devised a scenario where even parser frustrations fitted into the scenario so seamlessly. Cyborg marks the first of a long line of games — and almost as many articles in game theory — to explicitly, consciously (ha!) play with the identities of player and avatar. Berlyn even extends the conceit to the verbs permitted. For instance, you cannot LOOK but must SCAN, and an INVENTORY becomes a BODY SCAN.

Given their obviously limited resources, Berlyn and company did the best they could marketing Oo-Topos and Cyborg. For packaging they used a very minimalist cardboard folder, but did commission some nice science-fiction art for the covers.

Still, and as Chuck Benton was discovering at about the same time, it was getting harder for the bedroom hacker without connections to distributors and the like to get his software into stores. Cyborg received an absolutely glowing review in the influential Softalk magazine: “Cyborg introduces the most exciting advances in adventuring since the original Adventure began the whole wonderful thing.” Yet even that wasn’t enough to overcome Sentient’s distributional problems and make the game a success.

Berlyn designed a couple more games for Sentient in 1982, albeit less ambitious arcade-oriented fare, called Gold Rush and Congo. They similarly didn’t make much of an impact. At this point Berlyn and his partners had some sort of falling out which led him to walk away from the company. Over the next couple of years, said partners funded ports of Berlyn’s adventures to the Atari 400 and 800, the IBM PC, and the Commodore 64, before allowing Sentient to fade quietly out of existence. Berlyn, however, was just getting started in interactive fiction, as we’ll see in later posts.

Cyborg is as fascinating conceptually as it can be frustrating to actually play, but it’s well worth a look by any student of the art of interactive fiction. I’ve therefore made the Apple II disk image available for you.

Next time: we’ll take our first tentative steps across the big pond.

Comments
10 Responses

- Robb Sherwin

April 26, 2012 at 5:00 pm

Last year, at the Oklahoma Video Game Expo, Rob “Flack” O’Hara and I set up some old computers with text adventures for the public to play. We had Oo-Topos up on an Apple II.

One of the things that amused me was that I tried for three or four minutes to get out of the first room in Oo-Topos without any success. And I had actually gotten far into the game when it was new!

I assumed the game would just be locked in the jail for the entire show. However, by the time we started to pack up, the crowd had, as a collective entity, gotten themselves out of the jail and into the spaceship proper. :)

- matt w

April 27, 2012 at 1:36 am

Jason Devlin’s Legion is a much later first person plural text adventure.

- Felix Pleșoianu

April 27, 2012 at 1:24 pm

I remember reading about a graphical adventure from 1994 with the same name and premise. It was marketed as an interactive movie, though it had no FMV, but rather very good (for the era) 2.5 graphics, possibly using similar technology to Blade Runner. Could be a remake?

- Jimmy Maher

April 27, 2012 at 6:46 pm

I’m sure it wasn’t an official remake, although it may of course have been heavily “inspired” by Cyborg. On the other hand, Cyborg was a very obscure game, so it’s more likely just coincidence…

- iPadCary

December 13, 2012 at 11:16 am

This industry needs more Mike Berlyns & way, way, way less “Madden Combat XCII”s ….

Luckily,iOS seems to be nurturing the age of the “Boutique Developer” all over again.
A TON of the App Store’s biggest hits are done by either just one guy by himself or a team made up of but a literal handful of people.

- Steve

March 25, 2017 at 6:35 pm

Amazing. Games literally made by people no bigger than your thumb!

- fred

May 18, 2013 at 10:35 am

artura – sentient was crap on 64

- Pingback: Det strategiska textäventyret – Go North – Ett digitalt museum om textäventyr till C64

- Ben

June 11, 2020 at 9:16 pm

proceeded -> preceded

- Jimmy Maher

June 12, 2020 at 7:10 am

Thanks!

Infocom: Going It Alone
May 21, 2012

With Zork on the market and proving to be a major hit, it was time for Infocom to think about the inevitable sequel. The task of preparing it fell to Dave Lebling. At first glance, it looked straightforward enough. He needed only take the half of the original PDP-10 Zork that had not made it into the PC version, label it Zork II, and be done with it. In actuality, however, it was a little more complicated. The new game would at a minimum have to have some restructuring. For example, the goal of the PDP-10 Zork, like the PC version, was to deliver a collection of treasures to the white house outside of which the player started the game. Yet in Zork II said house would not exist. Perhaps motivated at first largely by necessity, Lebling began to tinker with the original design. Soon, inspired by the new ZIL technology Infocom had developed to let them port Zork to the PC, technology that was actually more flexible, more powerful, and simpler to work with than the MDL behind the original Zork, Lebling began to dramatically reshape the design, interspersing elements from the original with new areas, puzzles, and characters. In the end, he would use only about half of the leftover PDP-10 material, which in turn would make up about half of Zork II; the other half would be new. Lebling thus became the first implementer to consciously craft an Infocom game, for sale as a commercial product on PCs.

To the outside world, Infocom now began to establish the corporate personality that people would soon come to love almost as much as their games — a chummy, witty inclusiveness that made people who bought the games feel like they had just signed up for a “smart persons club.” Rather than one of the Zork creators or even one of the Infocom shareholders, the organizer and guider of the club was Mike Dornbrook, a recent MIT biology graduate who had come to Zork only in 1980, as the first and most important playtester of the PC version.

More than anyone else around Infocom, Dornbrook was a believer in Zork, convinced it was far more than an interesting hacking exercise, a way to get some money coming in en route to more serious products, or even “just” a really fun game. He saw Zork as something new under the sun, something that could in some small way change the world. He strongly encouraged Infocom to build a community around this nascent new art form. At his behest, the earliest version of Zork included the following message on a note in the artist’s studio:

Congratulations!
You are the privileged owner of a genuine ZORK Great Underground Empire (Part I), a self contained and self maintaining universe. As a legitimate owner, you have available to you both the Movement Assistance Planner (MAP) and Hierarchical Information for Novice Treasure Seekers (HINTS). For information about these and other services, send a stamped, self-addressed, business-size envelope to:

Infocom, Inc.
GUE I Maintenance Division
PO Box 120, Kendall Station
Cambridge, Mass. 02142

Joining the smart-persons club was at this stage still quite a complicated process. The aforementioned self-addressed envelope would be retrieved by Stu Galley, who dutifully visited the post office each day. He then sent back a sheet offering a map for purchase, as well as the ultimate personalized hint service; for a couple of dollars a pop, Infocom would personally answer queries.

The map was adapted from Lebling’s original by Dave Ardito, an artist friend of Galley’s who embellished the lines and boxes with some appropriately adventurous visual flourishes. Dornbrook, who had some experience with printing, used his MIT alumni status to print the maps in the middle of the night on a big printing press that normally produced posters and flyers for upcoming campus events. He enlisted his roommate, Steve Meretzky, to help him.

Meretzky was also an MIT alum, having graduated in 1979 with a degree in construction management. He may have gone to the most important computer-science university in the world, but Meretzky wanted no part of that world. He “despised” computers and hackers. In ’sGet Lamp Infocom feature, Dornbrook described Meretzky’s introduction to Zork. Dornbrook was testing the game, and had borrowed a TRS-80 and brought it home to their apartment, where he set it up on the kitchen table.

He [Meretzky] came in the back door and saw the computer and said, “Away!” as only Steve could. I started telling him, “Steve, you’re going to love this!” I was trying to explain to him how to start the game up, and he puts his hands over his ears and starts screaming so he can’t hear me.

But apparently he heard enough. Over the course of the next several weeks, I started noticing when I’d come home and was about to start testing again that the keyboard might have moved half an inch or my notes had moved slightly. I realized Steve was playing the game but wasn’t willing to admit it. One night he finally broke down and said, “Alright! Alright! I need a hint!” And that was the beginning of the end for Steve.

Meretzky soon signed up as a tester, and also joined Dornbrook in his other Infocom-related projects.

There’s a great interview amongst the Get Lamp extras with David Shaw, an MIT student who wrote for the campus newspaper, whose offices were just above the press Dornbrook and Meretzky were surreptitiously borrowing. Shaw was confused by the fact that the press “always seemed to be running,” even when there were no new campus events to promote: “There were always the same two or three guys down there. They were printing something out that clearly wasn’t a movie poster, but they were also being very cagey about what it was they were printing.” One day Shaw found Dornbrook and Meretzky’s apparent “discard pile” of Zork maps and realized at last what was going on.

While the maps were a team effort, hints fell entirely to Dornbrook. He hand-wrote replies on ordinary paper. After a time he found it to be quite a profitable, if occasionally tedious, endeavor. Because most of the queries were variations on the same handful of questions, crafting personal answers didn’t take as much time as one might expect. (See the Infocom section of the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities for scans of the original maps and, even better, a couple of Dornbrook’s handwritten replies to hint requests.)

Then Dornbrook was accepted into an MBA program at the University of Chicago, scheduled to begin in the fall, meaning of course that he would have to leave Boston and give up day-to-day contact with the Infocom folks. No one else felt equipped to replace Dornbrook, who had by this point become in reality if not title Infocom’s head of public relations. Dornbrook, concerned about what would happen to “his” loyal customers, tried to convince President Joel Berez to hire a replacement. Impossible, Berez replied; the company just didn’t yet have the resources to devote someone to nothing but customer relations. So Dornbrook pitched another idea. He would form a new company, the Zork Users Group, to sell hints, maps, memorabilia, and even Infocom games themselves at a slight discount to eager players who joined his new club, which he would run out of Chicago between classes. Infocom in turn would be relieved of this burden. They could simply refer hint requests to Dornbrook, and worry only about making more and better games. Berez agreed, and ZUG was officially born in October of 1981. It would peak at over 20,000 members — but more about that in future posts.

Through much of 1981, Infocom assumed that Personal Software, publisher of the first Zork, would also publish Zork II. After all, Zork was a substantial hit. And indeed, PS responded positively when Infocom first talked with them about Zork II in April. The two companies went so far as to sign a contract that June. But just a few months later PS suddenly pulled the deal. Further, they also announced that they would be dropping the first Zork as well. What happened? wondered Infocom.

What had happened, of course, was VisiCalc. Dan Fylstra, founder of PS, had nurtured Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston’s creation from its very early days, donating an Apple II to the pair to help them develop their idea. Once released in October of 1979, VisiCalc transformed the microcomputer industry — and transformed its publisher. PS, formerly a publisher of games and hobbyist programs, was suddenly “the VisiCalc publisher,” one of the hottest up-and-coming companies in the country. As big as Zork was, it didn’t amount to much in comparison to VisiCalc. By 1981 games and hobbyist software made up less than 10 percent of PS’s revenue. Small wonder that Infocom often felt like their game was something of an afterthought for PS. Now the IBM PC was on the horizon, and PS found itself being courted even by the likes of Big Blue themselves, who needed for VisiCalc to be available on their new computer. Just as Microsoft was also doing at this time, PS began to reshape themselves, leaving behind their hacker and hobbyist roots to focus on the exploding market for VisiCalc and other business software. They began doing in-house development for the first time, rolling out a whole line of programs to capitalize on the VisiCalc name: VisiDex, VisiPlot, VisiTrend, VisiTerm, VisiFile. The following year PS would complete their Visification by renaming themselves VisiCorp, en route to disappearing up their own VisiBum in one of the more spectacular flameouts in software history.

In this new paradigm Zork was not just unnecessary but potentially dangerous. Games were anathema to the new army of pinstriped business customers suddenly buying PCs. Companies like PS, who wished to serve them and be taken seriously despite their own questionable hacker origins, thus began to give anything potentially entertaining a wide berth. The games line would have to go, victim of the same paranoia that kept Infocom’s own Al Vezza up at night.

This rejection left Infocom at a crossroads. It wasn’t, mind you, a disaster; there would doubtlessly be plenty of other publishers eager to sign them now that they had a hit game under their belt. Yet they weren’t sure that was the direction they wanted to go. While there was a certain prestige in being published by the biggest software publisher in the world, they had never really been satisfied with PS. They had always felt like a low priority. The awful Zork “barbarian” packaging PS had come up with made one wonder if anyone at PS had actually bothered to play the game, and promotion efforts had felt cursory and disinterested. Certainly PS had never shown the slightest interest in helping Infocom and Dornbrook to build a loyal customer base. If they wanted to build Infocom as a brand, as the best text adventures in the business, why should they have another company’s logo on their boxes?

But of course becoming a publisher would require Infocom to become a “real” company rather than one that did business from a P.O. Box, with more people involved and real money invested. In a choice between keeping Infocom a profitable little sideline or, well, going for it, the Infocom founders chose the latter.

Several of them secured a substantial loan to bankroll the transition. They also secured a fellow named Mort Rosenthal as marketing manager. He lasted less than a year with Infocom, getting himself fired when he overstepped his authority to offer Infocom’s games to Radio Shack at a steep discount that would get them into every single store. Before that, however, he worked wonders, and not just in marketing. A natural wheeler and dealer, he in Stu Galley’s words secured “a time-shared production plant in Randolph, an ad agency in Watertown, an order-taking service in New Jersey, a supplier of disks in California, and so on,” all in a matter of weeks. He also found them their first tiny office above Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall Marketplace. The first two salaried employees to come to work there became Berez, the company’s most prominent business mind, and Marc Blank, the architect of the Z-Machine who had already more than a year before set aside his medical internship and moved back to Boston to take a flyer on the venture.

Showing an instinct for public perception that’s surprising to find in a bunch of hackers, Infocom made one last deal with PS — to buy back PS’s remaining copies of Zork and prevent them from dumping the games onto the market at a discount, thus devaluing the Zork brand. They needed to have Zork II out in time for Christmas, and so worked frantically with the advertising agency Rosenthal had found to craft a whole new look for the series. The motif they came up with was much more appropriate and classy than the old PS barbarian. In fact, it remains the established “look” of Zork to this day.

Ironically for a company whose games were all text, Infocom’s level of visual refinement set them apart, not least in the classic logo that debuted at this time and would remain a fixture for the rest of the company’s life. But speaking of text: in Zork II’s advertising and packaging we can already see the rhetorical voice that Infocom fans would come to know, a seemingly casual, humorous vibe that nevertheless reflected an immense amount of care — this at a time when most game publishers still seemed to consider even basic grammar of little concern. In comparison to everybody else, Infocom just seemed a little bit classier, a little bit smarter, a little bit more adult. It’s an image that would serve them well.

Next time we’ll accept the invitation above and dive into Zork II itself, which did indeed make it out just in time for Christmas.

Comments
3 Responses

- Pingback: Jogo5 – Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz – Diretório C:Jogos

- Will Moczarski

February 3, 2020 at 7:28 pm

They could simply refer hints request to Dornbrook

-> hint requests?

- Jimmy Maher

February 4, 2020 at 4:00 pm

Thanks!

Zork II, Part 1
May 25, 2012

There’s a phenomenon we music fans often talk about called the “sophomore slump.” Before signing a record deal and recording that first album, bands generally spend years honing their craft and forging their musical identity. When they go into the studio for the first time at last, they know exactly who they are and what brought them here, and they also have the cream of all those years of songwriting at their disposal — polished, practiced, and audience tested. Yet when it comes time for the second album, assuming they get to make one, things are suddenly much more uncertain. All of those great songs that defined them were used up last time around, and now they’re left to pick through the material that didn’t make the cut and/or craft new stuff under time pressure they’ve never known before. Further, a sort of existential crisis often greets them. What kind of band do they want to be? Should they continue to work within the sound that got them this far, or should they push for more and get more experimental? Many try to split the difference, resulting in an uneven album unwilling to definitively do either, and full of songs and performances that, while perhaps perfectly competent, lack a certain pop, a spark of freshness compared to what came before.

I see some of the same thing in Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz. Lebling and Infocom took some real, significant steps forward here, beginning to move beyond the “collect treasures for points” structure of the first game, but the whole thing feels a bit tentative. Infocom’s parser and world-modeling remain streets beyond what anyone else was doing, but they no longer carry quite the same shock of discovery. The writing gets sharper, funnier, and more consistent in tone, but, at least in the first release we’ll be looking at, the game suffers a bit from the need to have it out before Christmas, with an unusual (for Infocom) number of little bugs, glitches, and parser frustrations. There are some wonderful puzzles here along with some puzzles that just need an extra in-game nudge to be wonderful — in fact, far more of both than in Zork I — but also some absurd howlers, including the two most universally loathed in the entire Infocom canon. They’re proof that, while Lebling felt he should make Zork II harder than its predecessor, he wasn’t yet quite clear on the best way to accomplish that. So, like so many second albums, Zork II is a mixed bag. You can see it in very different ways depending on what you choose to emphasize, and, indeed, you’ll find very diverse opinions about its overall merit.

As I did with Zork I, I’m going to take you on a little tour of Zork II. The map above may help you to follow along. I’m also again making available the somewhat rare original story file for those seeking the most authentic historical experience. You can play it right in your browser thanks to the good folks behind Parchment, or download it to play in an interpreter that supports the Version 2 Z-Machine. Or you can choose the Apple II disk image.

We begin Zork II just where we presumably left off, inside the barrow which collecting the last of the treasures in Zork I opened up to us. Unlike in the PDP-10 Zork, the barrow has sealed behind us upon entrance, an obvious concession to the need to keep Zork I’s chocolate separate from Zork II’s peanut butter. We do have our two most faithful companions from Zork I, our lantern and our sword. (The lantern is also, thankfully, fully charged again for some unexplained reason.)

As soon as we begin to move deeper into the game from our initial location at the extreme north of the map, we see one of the more obvious and welcome signs of progress over its predecessor: Lebling now has no interest at all in making the geography itself into a puzzle. Everything connects with everything else in a consistent, straightforward manner, a far cry from the beginning of Zork I, where we were first challenged to spend an hour or two laboriously mapping all of the twisty intersections of the forest. Zork II doesn’t even feature the heretofore obligatory maze, at least in the conventional sense. (What replaces it is annoying enough that one is left wishing for a good old straightforward maze, but more on that later…)

Soon we have our first encounter with the man who will be our nemesis throughout the game: the Wizard of Frobozz.

A STRANGE LITTLE MAN IN A LONG CLOAK
APPEARS SUDDENLY IN THE ROOM. HE IS
WEARING A HIGH POINTED HAT EMBROIDERED
WITH ASTROLOGICAL SIGNS. HE HAS A LONG,
STRINGY, AND UNKEMPT BEARD.
THE WIZARD DRAWS FORTH HIS WAND AND
WAVES IT IN YOUR DIRECTION. IT BEGINS TO
GLOW WITH A FAINT BLUE GLOW.
THE WIZARD, IN A DEEP AND RESONANT
VOICE, SPEAKS THE WORD "FERMENT!" HE
CACKLES GLEEFULLY.

YOU BEGIN TO FEEL LIGHTHEADED.

The Wizard is one of Lebling’s innovations for the PC Zork II, and interesting on several levels. He appears more frequently and is characterized much more strongly than Zork I’s thief. While the thief was a mere impediment and annoyance, our central goal in Zork II is to overcome the Wizard; thus his pride of place in the game’s subtitle. But never fear — the Wizard is also every bit as annoying as the thief ever was. He pops up from time to time to cast a randomly chosen spell on us, all of which begin with “F”: Filch, Freeze, Float, Fall, Fence, Fantasize, etc. Some of these, like Ferment, which makes us unable to walk straight for a (randomly chosen) number of turns, are mere inconveniences. Others — like Filch, which causes a randomly chosen item to disappear from our inventory, or Fall, which can kill us instantly if cast on, say, a cliff-side — leave us no recourse but to restore from our last save. What with our expiring, non-renewable light source, even the less potent spells become a problem in forcing us to waste precious turns waiting for their effects to expire. We pretty quickly get into the habit of just restoring every time we get spelled.

Every player will have to decide for herself whether the Wizard is funny enough to outweigh this annoyance factor. But the bumbling old Wizard, whose spells occasionally misfire in amusing ways, is genuinely funny.

THE WIZARD DRAWS FORTH HIS WAND AND
WAVES IT IN YOUR DIRECTION. IT BEGINS TO
GLOW WITH A FAINT BLUE GLOW.
THERE IS A LOUD CRACKLING NOISE. BLUE
SMOKE RISES FROM OUT OF THE WIZARD'S
SLEEVE. HE SIGHS AND DISAPPEARS.

Zork has always had a split personality. Authors give us either unabashedly silly, mildly satirical comedy, or an aged, now deserted world possessed of a lonely, faded grandeur. As the product of multiple authors writing pretty much to suit whatever whims struck them, Zork I itself pioneered both approaches, vacillating between them with no apparent concern. For every majestic Aragain Falls view, there was a cyclops to be fed hot peppers. With Zork II, however, Lebling has clearly decided to craft a “funny Zork.” And so we get various shoddy contraptions labeled as products of “The Frobozz Magic <insert item here> Company,” sort of the Wizard’s equivalent of Wile E. Coyote’s Acme Corporation. And we get lots of silly anecdotes about the excesses of the royal Flathead family and its patriarch, Lord Dimwit himself. Lebling shows a real gift for light comedy throughout, knowing how to craft jokes without trying too hard and beating us over the (flat)head with them.

In a gazebo in the garden, one of Lebling’s new additions, he places an homage to the original Zork, a copy of U.S. News and Dungeon Report.

** U.S. NEWS AND DUNGEON REPORT **

FAMED ADVENTURER TO EXPLORE GREAT
UNDERGROUND EMPIRE

OUR CORRESPONDENTS REPORT THAT A
WORLD-FAMOUS AND BATTLE-HARDENED
ADVENTURER HAS BEEN SEEN IN THE VICINITY
OF THE GREAT UNDERGROUND EMPIRE. LOCAL
GRUES HAVE BEEN REPORTED SHARPENING
THEIR (SLAVERING) FANGS....

"ZORK: THE WIZARD OF FROBOZZ" WAS
WRITTEN BY DAVE LEBLING AND MARC BLANK,
AND IS (C) COPYRIGHT 1981 BY INFOCOM,
INC.

You may remember that a magazine of the same title used to always sit inside the white house of the PDP-10 Zork to announce the latest news and additions to the online community that sprung up around the game.

Like its predecessors, Zork II imposes a pretty harsh inventory limit, forcing us to choose a base of operations to keep all of the stuff we collect. A good choice is the Carousel Room, a central hub around which the game’s geography — literally — revolves. (The game always chooses a random direction for us when we leave the Carousel Room; we can solve a puzzle to stop its rotation.) Indeed, there’s a definite combinatorial explosion that adds greatly to the difficulty. The map is a large one, and largely open from the start, leaving us to pick through piles of unsolved puzzles looking for the ones which we can actually solve at any given point. Just figuring out what we should be working on is much of the challenge.

Southeast of the Carousel Room is the appropriately named Riddle Room. In front of a sealed door we read the following:

WHAT IS TALL AS A HOUSE,
ROUND AS A CUP,
AND ALL THE KING'S HORSES
CAN'T DRAW IT UP?

The answer is a well.

Riddles aren’t really approved practice in interactive-fiction design these days, largely because they’re just so dependent on intuition and all too often very culturally specific, and thus notoriously variable in difficulty from player to player. There’s also a certain element of cheapness about them, a quality they share with mazes. A designer in need of a puzzle can throw in a riddle in a matter of minutes, then watch contentedly as at least some subset of her players agonize for hours. Still, as adventure-game riddles go this one isn’t awful, and there is an undeniable thrill in getting a riddle in a flash of insight — much like when solving other, better respected sorts of adventure-game puzzles. In Twisty Little Passages, Nick Montfort names the riddle as the text adventure’s most important literary antecedent. I’m not entirely convinced of that, but if true it does present the opportunity to view Zork’s riddle as this new form already glancing back to its roots. Not that I believe for a moment that anything of the sort was on the designers’ minds.

Beyond the Riddle Room is the Circular Room:

CIRCULAR ROOM

THIS IS A DAMP CIRCULAR ROOM, WHOSE
WALLS ARE MADE OF BRICK AND MORTAR. THE
ROOF OF THIS ROOM IS NOT VISIBLE, BUT
THERE APPEAR TO BE SOME ETCHINGS ON THE
WALLS. THERE IS A PASSAGEWAY TO THE
WEST.

THERE IS A WOODEN BUCKET HERE, 3 FEET IN
DIAMETER AND 3 FEET HIGH.

With a little thought, not to mention some consideration of the riddle we just solved, we can conclude that we are standing at the bottom of a well. It turns out that it’s not just a well, but a magic well; if we pour some water into the bucket, it will hoist us up to a new area at its top. I mentioned earlier that a number of puzzles in Zork II are just a nudge away from being excellent. This one is a good example. While there’s a certain elegant logic to it, we aren’t told that it’s a magic well until we reach the top and see the “Frobozz Magic Well Company” logo. It’s just a little bit too much of a stretch in its present form. Or maybe I’m supposed to be able to find some clue in these etchings found at the bottom:

O  B  O

A  G  I
E L

M  P  A

If anyone can figure out what that’s on about, let me know.

At the top of the well is the so-called “Alice” area. Lewis Carroll would prove to be a great favorite of adventure-game writers because his blend of surrealism, logical illogic, and love of puzzles fit the genre so well, making his works just about as perfect as any traditional literature can be for adaptation to the adventure-game form. Before any official adaptations, however, Infocom paid him homage here. (Like the well area, the Alice area was present in the PDP-10 version, and thus dates to approximately 1978.) We find some cakes with the expected effect on our size, and once appropriately shrunken visit a pool of tears lifted straight from Chapter 2 of Alice in Wonderland. It all makes for some lovely puzzles. It’s sort of amusing that we must travel up a well to visit the Alice area in Zork II, while Alice fell down a well to start her adventures in the book. Of course, there’s also quite a similarity between the premise of the Zork games as a whole and that of the Alice books. Both include vast magical landscapes accessed via the most mundane of gateways, and both are all about puzzles and play rather than plot.

As already demonstrated via the Wizard, Zork II does have a modicum more interpersonal interaction than its predecessor, making adventuring in these dungeons feel just a bit less lonely. For the first time (discounting the PDP-10 version) it allows us to actually talk to other characters, entering into some fraught territory that still bedevils IF authors today. Zork II’s system is still pretty awkward: we can only “TELL <someone> ‘<something>’,” with the quotes a necessity. It does, however, allow for a pretty impressive demonstration of Infocom’s technology, in the form of a little robot also located at the top of the well whom we can order about just as if he were, well, us. (Like Zork I, Zork II happily jumps from science-fiction robots to fantasy monsters to present-day elements with no compunction whatsoever.) The robot is key to another of those puzzles that just needed a little bit more work to be great.

There’s a magical sphere that we’d really like to loot, but it’s protected by the “Frobozz Magic Alarm Company.” When we try to take it, a cage drops around us, the room fills with a poison gas, and we die after a couple of turns. Trying to get the robot to take the sphere for us doesn’t work. The cage crushes the poor little guy rather than merely trapping him for some reason, in a scene oddly reminiscent of a famous incident from Infocom’s later Planetfall. The sphere, meanwhile, disappears (presumably it’s inside the cage). The solution is to have the robot in the room with us when we trigger the trap, then have him “GET CAGE” to get us free before the gas asphyxiates us. In the abstract it’s not a bad puzzle. However, it’s so fraught with implementation problems that it’s well-nigh impossible to deduce what’s really going on. The game gives us no sign that we can still interact with the robot at all from inside the cage. Even if we make that cognitive leap on our own, it still refuses to make anything easy for us.

>GET SPHERE
AS YOU REACH FOR THE SPHERE, A STEEL
CAGE FALLS FROM THE CEILING TO ENTRAP
YOU. TO MAKE MATTERS WORSE, POISONOUS
GAS STARTS COMING INTO THE ROOM.
CAGE
YOU ARE TRAPPED INSIDE A STEEL CAGE.
>TELL ROBOT "GET GAS"
I DON'T KNOW THE WORD 'GAS'.
>TELL ROBOT "HELP"
I DON'T KNOW THE WORD 'HELP'.
>TELL ROBOT "N"
"WHIRR, BUZZ, CLICK!"
YOU CAN'T GO THAT WAY.
>L
CAGE
YOU ARE TRAPPED INSIDE A STEEL CAGE.
>EXAMINE CAGE
I SEE NOTHING SPECIAL ABOUT THE STEEL
CAGE.
>TELL ROBOT "BREAK CAGE"
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BREAK THE CAGE WITH?
>ROBOT
TRYING TO DESTROY THE STEEL CAGE HAS NO
EFFECT.
>TELL ROBOT "GET CAGE"
THE CAGE SHAKES AND IS HURLED ACROSS THE
ROOM. IT'S HARD TO SAY, BUT THE ROBOT
APPEARS TO BE SMILING.
DINGY CLOSET
THERE IS A BEAUTIFUL RED CRYSTAL SPHERE
HERE.
>GET SPHERE
TAKEN.

I’ve edited out from the above the dying every couple of turns.

Questions abound. Where actually was the sphere when we were inside the cage, since it was apparently neither inside nor outside? Why does “GETting” the cage cause the robot to break it, and “BREAKing” it get us nowhere? It’s issues like this that sometimes make Zork II, at least in this first released version, feel a bit undercooked.

Comments
15 Responses

- jima

May 25, 2012 at 12:05 pm

I believe the etchings are supposed to be the words “FROBOZZ MAGIC WELL COMPANY” with the left and right sides of the inscription worn away.

- Jimmy Maher

May 25, 2012 at 12:11 pm

That didn’t take long. :)

- Nathan

May 25, 2012 at 1:25 pm

In fact, at the top of the well, the whole inscription is readable.

- Nathan

May 25, 2012 at 4:18 pm

The final version of Zork II, release 48/840904, added the other syntax for ordering the robot around, as in ROBOT, GET CAGE.

- Jimmy Maher

May 25, 2012 at 4:50 pm

Yeah, a lot of these little niggles were cleaned up in later versions. The more abstract design problems weren’t quite so easy to correct after the fact, however.

- Duncan Stevens

May 25, 2012 at 5:09 pm

Pretty sure that riddle is not original. I seem to recall that, when I first played Zork II at age 7, I knew the answer instantly, which suggests that I’d seen it before (it’s not the sort of thing that’s intuitively obvious to anyone).

That didn’t help me with the well itself, about which I had no clue, though I agree that there’s a logic to it. Two objections to the well: (1) the etchings really should be on the floor, not the walls (because the remaining etchings give you the entire inscription from the top of the well if you’re looking straight down; as it is, there’s no reason why the whole inscription should be readable from the top of the well), and (2) getting back down the well by picking up the water requires that one set aside one’s knowledge of how liquids work. (If you pour a teapot’s worth of water into a 3-foot-diameter wooden bucket, it’s probably all going to soak into the bucket. At most, you might get a few drops.)

- Jimmy Maher

May 25, 2012 at 6:22 pm

“(2) getting back down the well by picking up the water requires that one set aside one’s knowledge of how liquids work. (If you pour a teapot’s worth of water into a 3-foot-diameter wooden bucket, it’s probably all going to soak into the bucket. At most, you might get a few drops.)”

Yeah, there are quite a few particularly absurd examples of adventure-game physics in Zork II. The balloon is another. There’s no way a single burning newspaper with no other fuel should inflate an entire hot-air balloon, and keep it inflated in perpetuity.

- Duncan Stevens

May 25, 2012 at 6:58 pm

True. Also, glass that is strong enough to hold in a large quantity of water is probably not going to break when a sword is thrown at it, and an explosive powerful enough to kill you if you’re in the room is probably not going to politely open the cover of a box and leave the contents intact.

- Lisa

May 25, 2012 at 7:09 pm

“Frobozz Magic Well Company” logo. It’s just a little bit too much of a stretch in its present form. Or maybe I’m supposed to be able to find some clue in these etchings found at the bottom:

O B O

A G I
E L

M P A

If anyone can figure out what that’s on about, let me know.

F R O B O Z Z
M A G I C
W E L L
C O M P A N Y

It’s the center portion of the logo with the edges worn away, or something like that. (It’s talked about in the Invisiclues.) How the player is supposed to work it out, I’m not sure; it depends on the exact description in the game text, I guess. If it hints that other letters appear to be worn off then perhaps the player is expected to start treating it like a game of Hangman, and guess other letters that might fill in before and after, to arrive at the hint “magic well”?

- Lisa

May 25, 2012 at 7:13 pm

d’oh, whoops, didn’t see there was already a reply about this.

- Adam Thornton

May 30, 2012 at 2:20 am

The baseball maze: left-handed pitchers are traditionally called southpaws, so therefore home plate is in the west.

Not that I’m defending the puzzle design.

- Pingback: Random nonsense #2 « Recursed

- Michael Waddell

April 11, 2013 at 12:54 pm

Infocom’s parser and world-modeling remain streets beyond what anyone else was doing…

If you have to ask what “streets beyond” means, you’re streets behind, right? ;)

- Ben

June 13, 2020 at 8:21 pm

reminescent -> reminiscent

- Jimmy Maher

June 15, 2020 at 8:55 am

Thanks!

Zork II, Part 2
May 28, 2012

We left off last time with the Alice area at the top of the well. Let’s continue now with the rooms that sprawl around the Carousel Room, which are now much easier to get to since we’ve stopped the carousel’s rotation by switching it off from the Machine Room.

In the Dreary Room off to the north is the first recorded instance of a venerable adventure-gaming cliché: a locked door with a key in the keyhole on the other side. What follows would quickly become a pretty rote procedure for seasoned adventurers, almost like a maze, but taken without all of the baggage of games to come it’s a fresh and clever puzzle.

>PUT MAT UNDER DOOR
THE PLACE MAT FITS EASILY UNDER THE
DOOR.
>PUT OPENER IN KEYHOLE
THE LID IS IN THE WAY.
>OPEN LID
THE LID IS NOW OPEN.
>PUT OPENER IN KEYHOLE
THERE IS A FAINT NOISE FROM BEHIND THE
DOOR AND A SMALL CLOUD OF DUST RISES
FROM BENEATH IT.
DONE.
>GET MAT
AS THE PLACE MAT IS MOVED, A RUSTY IRON
KEY FALLS FROM IT AND ONTO THE FLOOR.
>GET KEY
TAKEN.

This puzzle was also present in the PDP-10 Zork; thus my relative confidence in proclaiming it the first of its kind. Interestingly, in the original game the mat that was needed was the welcome mat found all the way back outside the front door to the white house. In the PC version Lebling instead placed a handy place mat in the gazebo alongside the U.S. News and Dungeon Report.

There’s also a dragon underground, the slaying of which is a tricky but not untenable puzzle. The dragon was holding a princess captive — a princess who can retrieve a key from a certain unicorn back in the garden, solving a problem that has been frustrating us since we first wandered in. The game subtly but effectively cues us that we need something from her, and that we should be following her.

>EXAMINE WOMAN
THE PRINCESS (FOR SHE IS OBVIOUSLY ONE)
SHAKES HERSELF AWAKE, THEN NOTICES YOU
FOR THE FIRST TIME. SHE SMILES. "THANK
YOU FOR RESCUING ME FROM THAT HORRID
WORM," SHE SAYS. "I MUST DEPART. MY
PARENTS WILL BE WORRIED ABOUT ME." WITH
THAT, SHE ARISES, LOOKING PURPOSEFULLY
OUT OF THE LAIR.
>OPEN CHEST
THE HINGES ARE VERY RUSTY, BUT THEY SEEM
TO BE STARTING TO GIVE. YOU CAN PROBABLY
OPEN IT IF YOU TRY AGAIN. THERE IS
SOMETHING BUMPING AROUND INSIDE. ALL
THIS RUMMAGING AROUND HAS STARTLED THE
YOUNG WOMAN.
THE PRINCESS IGNORES YOU. SHE LOOKS
ABOUT THE ROOM, BUT HER EYES FIX ON THE
SOUTH.
THE PRINCESS WALKS SOUTH. SHE GLANCES
BACK AT YOU AS SHE GOES.
>S
DRAGON ROOM
THERE IS A DISHEVELLED AND SLIGHTLY
UNKEMPT PRINCESS HERE.
THE PRINCESS WALKS EAST. SHE GLANCES
BACK AT YOU AS SHE GOES.
>E

It’s another puzzle that needs that little nudge… no, wait, this puzzle has that little nudge. If only they were all this way…

But enough with good puzzles. Let’s talk about the first of Zork II’s two legendarily bad ones: the Bank of Zork. In his review of the game on IFDB, Peter Pears actually called this puzzle “beautiful.” In a way I can see what he means, but for me it’s undone once again by a lack of sufficient cues as well as a lack of feedback and parser difficulties. The bank consists of several rooms, but the heart of it is the Safety Depository.

SAFETY DEPOSITORY
THIS IS A LARGE RECTANGULAR ROOM. THE
EAST AND WEST WALLS HERE WERE USED FOR
STORING SAFETY DEPOSIT BOXES. AS MIGHT
BE EXPECTED, ALL HAVE BEEN CAREFULLY
REMOVED BY EVIL PERSONS. TO THE EAST,
WEST, AND SOUTH OF THE ROOM ARE LARGE
DOORWAYS. THE NORTHERN "WALL" OF THE
ROOM IS A SHIMMERING CURTAIN OF LIGHT.
IN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM IS A LARGE
STONE CUBE, ABOUT 10 FEET ON A SIDE.
ENGRAVED ON THE SIDE OF THE CUBE IS SOME
LETTERING.
ON THE GROUND IS A SMALL, WORN PIECE OF
PAPER.

As you might expect, that “curtain of light” is actually another exit. However, we can’t go that way simply by typing “N.” That just leads to, “THERE IS A CURTAIN OF LIGHT THERE,” which is in turn likely to lead us to give up on that direction of inquiry. Yet it turns out we can “ENTER CURTAIN.” Similar parser problems dog us at every stage in the bank, but even they aren’t the worst of it. To make a long and convoluted puzzle short, the place where we go after entering the curtain of light is dictated by the direction we last came from before entering. This is never explained or even hinted at at any point, and it’s obviously a very subtle and tenuous connection to make. Most players who “solved” the Bank of Zork did so only through sheer persistence, moving everywhere and trying everything, and were left with no idea of what they had actually done or how the puzzle really worked. Like Zork II’s other notorious puzzle (of which more in a moment), the Bank of Zork specifically informed an entry in Graham Nelson’s “Player’s Bill of Rights”: the player should “be able to understand a problem once it is solved.”

Next we explore the volcano area to the west, which we accomplish largely via a hot-air balloon. Many of the puzzles and situations in Zork were designed around the capabilities of the technology used to create the games. Having created the programming for vehicles once for the boat found back in Zork I, the designers continued to use it again and again. Like the well, the balloon puzzle first involves deducing what it — “A LARGE AND EXTREMELY HEAVY WICKER BASKET” with “A RECEPTACLE OF SOME KIND” in the center and “AN ENORMOUS CLOTH BAG DRAPED OVER THE SIDE” — actually is. We need to burn something, like the U.S. News and Dungeon Report, in the receptacle to inflate the bag. The idea that burning something as small as a newspaper could do the trick doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the real world, but adventure games have always had physics all their own, as Duncan Stevens and I briefly discussed in the comments section of my last post. Of more immediate concern are the parser frustrations that once again make this puzzle more difficult than it was likely designed to be.

And so we come to the Oddly-Angled Room, better known as the infamous baseball maze. At first it appears to be a conventional maze, but we soon realize that it defies all attempts to map it. Every connection is literally random, changing constantly according to no rhyme or reason. The diamond-shaped windows in the floor of each room don’t seem to offer much help. The key clue is the “club” we find:

A LONG WOODEN CLUB LIES ON THE GROUND
NEAR THE DIAMOND-SHAPED WINDOW. THE CLUB
IS CURIOUSLY BURNED AT THE THICK END.
>GET CLUB
TAKEN.
>EXAMINE CLUB
THE WORDS "BABE FLATHEAD" ARE BURNED
INTO THE WOOD.

We’re expected to “run the bases”, moving diagonally through the rooms starting from home plate, which is located at the west end of the “ballpark”: southeast, northeast, northwest, southwest. The windows give us a slight clue when we are on the right track, lighting up more strongly for each correct movement we make. Even so, this is all deeply problematic on a couple of levels. Firstly, Zork eventually spread well beyond the United States, to players who had no clue about the game of baseball, inspiring the most amusingly specific of all Nelson’s Player’s Rights: a player should “not need to be American to understand hints.” But of course, even many Americans aren’t interested in baseball at all and know next to nothing about it. This right could be better rewritten as a prohibition on requiring any sort of esoteric or domain-specific outside knowledge. Yet the puzzle is even dodgy for someone like me, who loves baseball. From what I can see, there is no way to deduce that home plate in this particular ballpark is located at its western side, and thus no way to know which way to go in running the bases, at least outside of the extremely, shall we say, subtle cues offered by the windows. The baseball maze wasn’t in the PDP-10 Zork, but was devised by Lebling specifically for the PC version. He’s repeatedly apologized for it over the years since, noting that it stemmed from his boredom with mazes and desire to do something different with the general idea. Needless to say, we’d have been better off with a standard maze.

Up to this point we’ve been amassing treasures and scoring points for collecting them, but, unlike in Zork I, we’ve found no obvious thing to do with them. In the PDP-10 version, these treasures were simply more loot to be collected in the white house’s trophy case. In this game, of course, that’s not possible, what with the barrow having sealed itself behind us and the white house consigned to Zork I. The most obvious solution to this problem would have been to just give us another trophy case somewhere. That’s not, however, what Lebling chose to do. Instead he decided to devise an actual purpose for our collection beyond looting for looting’s (and points’) sake. Like other elements of Zork II, the need to restructure things for practical reasons here led Lebling to take a step in the direction of story.

Now, late in the game, we penetrate the Wizard’s inner sanctum at last. Amongst other fun and puzzles, we can summon a demon here by making use of the three magic spheres we’ve collected earlier — the one in the Alice area which the robot helped us to collect, the one behind the locked door in the Dreary Room, and one which we find in the aquarium inside the wizard’s inner sanctum itself. But demons, of course, don’t work for free. To do us a favor, he demands payment in the form of ten treasures. Yes, it’s all very pat and convenient, but combined with other innovations like the Wizard himself it gives Zork II a shred of plotting and motivation that both Zork I and the PDP-10 Zork lack. Count it as a step on Infocom’s road from text adventures to interactive fiction.

Once the demon is satisfied, we have a favor at our disposal. Unfortunately, it’s easy neither to figure out what that favor should be nor how we should go about asking for it. If we manage both, though, we’re greeted with this:

>SAY TO DEMON "GIVE ME WAND"
"I HEAR AND OBEY!" SAYS THE DEMON. HE
STRETCHES OUT AN ENORMOUS HAND TOWARDS
THE WAND. THE WIZARD IS UNSURE WHAT TO
DO, POINTING IT THREATENINGLY AT THE
DEMON, THEN AT YOU. "FUDGE!" HE CRIES,
BUT ASIDE FROM A STRONG ODOR OF
CHOCOLATE IN THE AIR, THERE IS NO
EFFECT. THE DEMON PLUCKS THE WAND OUT OF
HIS HAND (IT'S ABOUT TOOTHPICK SIZE TO
HIM) AND GINGERLY LAYS IT ON THE GROUND
BEFORE YOU. HE FADES INTO THE SMOKE,
WHICH DISPERSES. THE WIZARD RUNS FROM
THE ROOM IN TERROR.

And so the tables are turned. I feel a little bit sorry for the poor fellow. He seems more playfully insane than evil. But then again, I feel sorry for a lot of the monsters I have to kill in Wizardry, so count me as just a big softie.

We now have a magic wand at our disposal — a very cool thing. The immediate temptation is to go around waving it at anything and everything, trying out each of the Wizard’s arsenal of spells. Yet for inexplicable in-story reasons but all too explicable technical reasons, only one actually works: Float, which lifts a boulder for us to unblock an entrance in the Menhir Room and retrieve a final key item. I particularly wanted to spell a certain three-headed guard dog in the Cerberus Room, but, alas, my efforts to Ferment, Freeze, and even Filch the hound proved in vain. Only Float gave any sort of appropriate response at all: “THE HUGE DOG RISES ABOUT AN INCH OFF THE GROUND, FOR A MOMENT.” If the implementation here is kind of sketchy, the idea of having a collection of spells at one’s disposal is still a very compelling one, and one that obviously remained with Lebling and his colleagues: they would later produce a trilogy of games that revolved around that very mechanic.

We now make our way into the final room of the game, the crypt. We also now have all 400 points — and yet the game doesn’t end. We in fact have one final puzzle to solve. We need to extinguish the lantern within the crypt, using some grue repellent we found lying around to protect ourselves. In the darkness we can see the “FAINT OUTLINE” of a “VERY TIGHT DOOR,” the way forward into Zork III. It’s yet one final example of a clever little puzzle that just needed a little bit more of a nudge; the solution is arguably hinted at, but much earlier in the game, and so subtly it’s almost impossible not to overlook. For the really unlucky, the game here also unveils its nastiest trick of all. One of the spells the Wizard — luckily, seemingly very rarely — casts is Fluoresce, which causes one to glow with light, apparently in perpetuity. What a lucky break, one thinks; no more worrying about that expiring lantern! Until, of course, one comes here and can’t finish the game. Infocom may have been making them better than anyone else already, but they were still making them pretty damn cruel at times.

But that’s Zork II for you — more sophisticated technically and thematically than its predecessor, but also with more design issues and a wider mean streak. Of course, in evaluating works we always have to be mindful of the milieu that created them. Adventure games in 1981 were cruel and difficult as a matter of course. Infocom in the years to come would be largely responsible for showing that they could succeed as art and challenge as games without hating their players, but they weren’t quite there yet. Likewise, they would show that they could be about more than treasures, puzzles, and points, but Zork II merely nods in that direction rather than striding down that road with purpose. Neither a masterpiece nor an outright failure, Zork II stands as an important way-station rather than a definitive landmark.

Still, those looking for a game changer should just stick around. Infocom’s next release would not completely sort out the adventure-game design issues I’ve been harping on about for many posts now, but it would completely upend the traditional definition of what an adventure game was and what it could do.

Comments
26 Responses

- Nathan

May 29, 2012 at 3:07 am

I always used the club for balloon fuel. Not terribly realistic, but still better than a newspaper.

- Joshua Buergel

May 29, 2012 at 5:38 am

As if the baseball knowledge needed to solve the maze wasn’t bad enough, you actually needed one more piece of knowledge: home plate has always traditionally been situated to the west. That means the batter isn’t staring into the setting sun for evening games. It also gives rise to “southpaw” (in a possibly apocryphal fashion), since a left-handed pitcher throwing at a traditionally arranged plate has his throwing arm to his south. Sounds good, anyway.

Being a little bit of a latecomer to home computers, Zork 2 was the first text adventure that I ever played, and it has stuck with me like few other games have. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

- Jimmy Maher

May 29, 2012 at 2:29 pm

I didn’t know that bit of baseball lore. I did suspect there might be some tradition like that, but didn’t see it mentioned in a quick check of the Wikipedia entry for “ballpark.” :)

It’s obviously not followed too religiously. Home-run balls in San Francisco and Seattle frequently wind up in the ocean — WEST of the ballpark.

- Lisa

May 29, 2012 at 7:22 pm

Candlestick Park (by whatever name) is on the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay peninsula. I don’t know what way they orient the diamond, but you’d have to hit quite a pop fly to get it all the way over to the Pacific Ocean in the west. The bay itself is to the east of the park.

- Joshua Buergel

June 6, 2012 at 6:31 pm

Here in Seattle, the plate is in the southwest corner, which is actually more common than just west, because we’re in the northern hemisphere and…well, here’s a picture:

http://www.ballparks.com/baseball/general/facts/diamonds/index.htm

Again, the canonical direction is west, but the reality is southwest, so even if you knew this tidbit about ballpark arrangement, you’d still probably fail the first time since you’d likely assume the plate was in the southwest, not the west.

- matt w

December 31, 2012 at 4:13 am

This is very late, but I found the perfect link for this and had to share. It’s a diagram of the way the batter faces in every major league ballpark:

http://i.imgur.com/iJGkf.png

The median does seem to be pretty much due northeast (so that the plate would be to the southwest), though the center of the range is something like east-northeast.

- Duncan Stevens

May 29, 2012 at 12:12 pm

I recommend casting “Fierce” and “Fear” on Cerberus.

Also, does the game ever hint that the brick is an explosive? That always struck me as rather underclued. Ditto getting the dragon to follow you.

- Jimmy Maher

May 29, 2012 at 2:39 pm

Not that I can think of. Oddly, this puzzle didn’t give me too many problems. I was pretty sure what the brick must be as soon as I found it. It seems to be one of those that people either immediately intuitively “get” or they never solve.

- Lisa

May 29, 2012 at 7:23 pm

without all of the baggage of games to come it’s a fresh and clever puzzle…. This puzzle was also present in the PDP-10 Zork; thus my relative confidence in proclaiming it the first of its kind.

The Invisiclues advise the player to try the “old trick” of slipping something under the door to catch the key. It might be the first appearance in an adventure game, but I guess they thought it was a known method in general. (It was beyond me, of course.)

Yet it turns out we can “ENTER CURTAIN.”

You can also WALK THROUGH NORTH WALL, although I agree it’s a course of action unlikely to occur to a player after the response the game gives to the more conventional “N.” (Another puzzle quite beyond me. Even after reading the hints, I didn’t understand what was going on when I was a teenager. Now I do understand it, but it’s rather fiendish, I think.)
>SAY TO DEMON “GIVE ME WAND”

DEMON, KILL THE WIZARD or DEMON, MOVE THE MENHIR are also possible solutions, although I find the first not very satisfying and the latter of course leaves the wizard free to keep annoying the crap out of you by casting spells on you.

for inexplicable in-story reasons but all too explicable technical reasons, only one actually works: Float, which lifts a boulder for us to unblock an entrance in the Menhir Room and retrieve a final key item.

This might depend on release, I think. I recall a number of other spells functioning (in that they had unique responses which matched the spell name), although I was disappointed that game wouldn’t allow me to point the wand at myself (IIRC).

- Duncan Stevens

May 29, 2012 at 7:51 pm

Asking the demon to kill the wizard or move the menhir would allow you to finish the game in early releases; in later releases, you had to have the wand to finish the game (you died when you tried to descend the staircase). No idea why Infocom made this change; it seems arbitrary.

Also, one of my favorite bits: if you try to attack the princess, the Wizard appears and kills you via the “Fry” spell. That’s a spell the game designers really should have written some funny late-game responses for.

- Duncan Stevens

May 29, 2012 at 8:26 pm

Sorry, I was unclear; it’s asking the demon to move the menhir that (unforeseeably) rendered the game unwinnable in late releases, for no good reason I can see. If the demon killed the wizard, the wand would be left behind, and you could you use it.

- Frédéric Grosshans

August 7, 2017 at 9:19 am

Slipping something under the door to catch the key was a common trick in children books like “The famous five” and “The Secret Seven”

- Rene Damm

June 4, 2012 at 10:33 am

Don’t have anything constructive to add (especially not on the topic of Zork :). Just wanted to say I am enjoying your blog tremendously. Thanks for all the time and energy you are putting into this. Your blogs on the history of computing/gaming are a joy to read.

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- matt w

August 18, 2014 at 5:25 pm

The bitter aftertaste of the Oddly-Angled Room is making itself felt in IF development to this very day.

- Michael S.

February 21, 2017 at 8:12 pm

I recently played this for the first time, largely with help from invisiclues and a walkthrough, and as noted in your article several my biggest frustrations tended to be figuring out the exact wording needed to accomplish certain tasks.

For example, I knew immediately what the hot air balloon was, but had no clue how to activate it. And once I knew what the clay brick was, and deduced that the string was needed, I could not figure out exactly what to say to connect the two items. (“INSERT STRING IN BRICK”)

I love these old games for the nostalgia factor, but sometimes you have to wonder if the writers truly expected you to come up with some of these answers on your own.

- Dave O.

January 20, 2018 at 10:18 am

In an early version of the game, if the wizard and the robot were in the same room, you could tell the robot to get the wand and then give it to you. You could then go straight to the endgame and win with only 60 points. Also, the game treated the wand and collar as “treasures,” so you could get 2 additional points each by giving them to the demon. (You could use “filch” to get the collar back from Cerberus, and he would remain tame and not kill you. You would get the wand back after the demon killed/scared away the wizard.) This way you could complete the game with 404 points instead of 400.

- Allan Holland

January 31, 2018 at 6:46 am

This is, to me, the most fascinating Zork-related response comment I’ve read on Jummy’s blog. And I’ve pored over the entire text from the Zork library Resources Page. Well-shared, sir.

- Allan Holland

January 31, 2018 at 6:47 am

How did that spell-check let Jimmy come out as Jummy? Sheesh.

- Br. Bill

January 23, 2018 at 8:40 pm

Sadly, the article’s link to Graham Nelson’s “Player’s Bill of Rights” has been broken for quite some time. Fortunately, the text is available in this document (page 7).

http://ifarchive.jmac.org/if-archive/info/Craft.Of.Adventure.pdf

- Jimmy Maher

January 24, 2018 at 6:58 am

Thanks!

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- Will Moczarski

February 9, 2020 at 3:01 pm

One instance of U.S. New and Dungeon Report which might be News to you ;-)

- Jimmy Maher

February 10, 2020 at 8:14 am

:) Thanks!

- Will Moczarski

February 9, 2020 at 4:29 pm

Flouresce

Should this be “Fluoresce”?

- Chris Lang

November 23, 2020 at 12:45 am

I mistakingly posted this in the wrong reply section, so I’m copying and pasting it here.

n the version I’m playing, Version 48, there are a few spells you can use with the Wizard’s wand that will do a few things.

First off, there’s ‘Fluoresce’, a spell you’re only likely to know about through a previous session where your lamp went out. You can use it yourself to make any object a light source, like this:

>i
You are carrying:
A Wizard’s magic wand
A card
A white book
A matchbook
A lamp

>point wand at white book
The wand grows warm, the white book seems to glow dimly with magical essences, and you feel suffused with power.

>chant “fluoresce”
The wand glows very brightly for a moment.
The white book begins to glow.

>drop card
Dropped.

>n
Wizard’s Workroom
Sitting on the Wizard’s workbench is:
A black obsidian stand

>n
You are carrying:
A Wizard’s magic wand
A white book (providing light)
A matchbook
A lamp

I suppose this is useful if you’re nearing the end of the game, still haven’t done the Oddly Angled Room (which I agree is probably the worst puzzle in the game because it’s so poorly clued – the vague baseball hints aren’t really enough), and your lamp is getting dim.

You can also cast ‘feeble’ on the three-headed dog for an amusing message. And you can make it ‘float’ but that won’t help solve the puzzle.

Casting ‘Fierce’ on the three-headed dog will give you an amusing death.

‘Fry’ (a spell the Wizard of Frobozz will only use under very special circumstances as part of what TV Tropes calls a Videogame Cruelty Punishment) can also be used on objects to destroy them. However, it won’t work on anything that isn’t portable for some reason – the Wizard can use it to fry you, but you can’t use it to to fry any creatures.

(You could use it to ‘fry’ the dead dragon and the dead sea serpent in a previous version that I played on the C64, but that doesn’t work in Version 48).

Most of the other spells don’t really have any noticeable effects.

Ludic Murder
June 20, 2012

Some time ago now I presented a definition of my term “ludic narrative” and a brief rundown of the development of the form over the course of the history of games in general, moving from the abstract games of old to games that simulated ever more specific contexts with ever more immediacy and detail, finally culminating in the arrival of Dungeons and Dragons, the first full-fledged example of ludic narrative. I want to look at history from another angle today.

All of the terms that we use to describe the sorts of works I’m usually talking about on this blog — “ludic narratives,” “story games,” “interactive fictions,” many others — pretty clearly describe them as being a fusion of two older forms, story and game. From time to time some designer or blogger or other will pop up with a condemnation that derives from this fact, claiming that ludic narratives are the unsatisfying result of splicing two very different art forms together. Stunned by this insight, the Twittering classes go to work, and so the carousel of life on the Internet goes around once again. Yet the idea that an art form is somehow illegitimate or aesthetically depraved if it subsumes other art forms is pretty absurd. During the heyday of Wagnerian opera that form was praised precisely because it incorporated within it virtually every other respectable art form extant at that time: music, theater, literature, the visual arts (in the spectacular stage designs), even architecture (ever been to Bayreuth?). So, and while it may be overly simplistic, let’s at least for today unabashedly accept the idea of ludic narrative as being woven from two strands, that of game and that of story, and let’s not judge that to be a bad thing. In that earlier post I followed the former strand to the point where it met its mate in the form of D&D. Today I’d like to look at the latter. As we’ll see, games and stories have never been complete strangers to one another.

One of the oldest literary forms of all, so old in fact that its origins are lost in antiquity, is the original fusion of game and literature, the riddle. There are some interesting parallels to be drawn between riddles and modern ludic narratives. As with a ludic narrative, a really first-class riddle must succeed as both a game, in being challenging but solvable, tempting, and, well, fun; and as a story, with writing worthy of aesthetic appreciation and some nugget of wisdom or deeper truth to convey. The Riddle of the Sphinx is one of the oldest and probably the most famous riddle in the canon, and a fine example of one that succeeds as both game and literature:

Which creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?

The answer, of course, is “man.” Not only is this riddle an interesting puzzle in its own right, but it conveys something about the fleeting nature of even the longest life in a lovely, metaphoric way. Indeed, in being a puzzle you must solve this riddle possibly makes you ponder that very theme more than you might if it was presented in some other form. Although it probably predates Sophocles’s Oedipus the King (429 BCE) by many years, it was embedded into that larger work of literature, something that I’ll come back to in just a bit.

While riddles, at least at their best, are definitely literary, they usually aren’t really stories. Yet there is also a definite tradition of play in even narrative-oriented “high” literature. I could trace a line from Tristram Shandy through Moby Dick and Ulysses to Gravity’s Rainbow. All are works that present themselves at least partially as puzzles to be cracked, a trend that’s increased dramatically in the wake of the Modernists and Postmodernists. (“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality,” James Joyce wrote.) Maybe I’ll try to look at that tradition at some point. For today, though, let’s set our sights on what may be the most long-lived of all traditions of gamesmanship in storytelling: the detective story, which would appear to be just about as old as jurisprudence itself.

Some versions of the Old Testament Book of Daniel include the story of Susanna, the young wife of a respected elder of the Jews who was as beautiful as she was virtuous. (It’s generally agreed that this tale, along with a few others, was added to Daniel somewhat after the original authorship, and thus its place in the Biblical canon is in some dispute. Catholic Bibles include it, Jewish and Protestant generally do not, although exhaustive editions, such as the King James, often include it with the Apocrypha.) Two other elders take a liking to Susanna. They therefore hide in the garden until she comes in to take her bath, then spring out to offer her a choice: let them have their fun with her, or else have them tell her husband that they found her in the garden with a young lover. Much to their disappointment, she cries out loudly, thus apparently opting for the second choice. They proceed to tell their lie when other villagers rush in to Susanna’s rescue, claiming that her cry was one of surprise at being caught in the act, and that the unknown young man was able to get away before he could be caught or identified. Being respected elders, they are believed. A tribune finds Susanna guilty of adultery, for which the punishment is death. As she is being led away to her fate, the procession passes by the Prophet Daniel. God comes to him at that instant, telling him that Susanna is innocent. With nary a moment to lose, Daniel rushes to stop the procession, saying that he will prove Susanna’s innocence to everyone’s satisfaction. A brief stay is reluctantly agreed to, whereupon Daniel interviews each of Susanna’s accusers separately, asking under exactly which tree Susanna had her tryst. They’ve of course failed to get their stories straight, and each names a different tree. This is proof enough for the tribune, who proceed to execute her accusers in lieu of Susanna.

In contrast to so much in the Bible, it’s odd how contemporary this story sounds to our ears. Remove the explicit prompting of God that put Daniel on the case and the determination to punish every crime with the one-size-fits-all sentence of death, and it could easily be an episode of any of a hundred crime dramas. One can imagine Columbo shambling up to each of the two elders to deliver his questions, complete with lots of mumbled asides and self-deprecations, until… gotcha! Like all those detectives to follow, Daniel essentially treats the crime as a puzzle to be solved using logic and intuition — along with in his case, being a prophet and all, just a little bit of divine guidance.

He plays detective again in another Apocrypha-banished tale, “Bel and the Dragon.” Here the king has rejected his claim that a rival god to Yahweh, the dragon god Bel, is a fraud of his priesthood. The king cites the sacrifice of meat and wine which he leaves in Bel’s sealed temple every night, which is always gone in the morning. Daniel therefore scatters ashes over the floor of Bel’s temple just after the sacrifice is placed and before the temple is sealed. Sure enough, next morning there is a trail of footprints showing how the priests entered from a secret door to retrieve the meat and wine themselves. It’s a story that could easily be a text-adventure puzzle — and a pretty good one at that.

Ancient as it is, the detective story really exploded in popularity during the second half of the nineteenth century, when the idea of Science and Rationality as an answer to all the problems of mankind was also very much in vogue. The classic modern archetype of the form, at least in English, is Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in which he introduces his detective C. Auguste Dupin. There’s much about “Murders” that feels typical of Poe — the florid diction, the long philosophical digression that opens the story, the Gothic darkness that encloses it. (“It was a freak of fancy in my friend,” writes the narrator, Dupin’s version of Watson, “to be enamored of the Night for her own sake.”) Yet, surprisingly from a writer known for his obsession with irrationality and madness, Dupin is ultimately a living testimony to the power of what Poe calls “the analytical facility.” Dupin and the narrator read in the newspaper about a seemingly impossible crime: a woman and her daughter found murdered in an apartment that was still locked from the inside, and witnesses who all report hearing the assumed murderer speaking in a different language. Treating the scant physical evidence and witness reports as pieces of a logic puzzle, Dupin concludes that the murderer was in fact an escaped orangutan, and his “language” meaningless gibbering; tellingly, each witness reported the murderer to be speaking in a language she herself did not understand. Dupin then proceeds to track down the ape and its owner without ever venturing from his apartment, using only the newspaper.

Dupin appears in just three stories by Poe, but his influence on the generations of detectives that followed was immense. Nowhere is it more pronounced than in the most famous detective of all, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. In addition to the character of his detective, even the structure Doyle chose is the same, an everyman narrator describing the adventures of this impossibly brilliant fellow in terms to which you and I can relate. There’s a telling “lady doth protest too much” moment in the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887), where Doyle acknowledges the elephant in the room. Dupin, Holmes tells Watson when the latter points out how similar Holmes’s methods are to those of Doyle’s inspiration, is “a very inferior fellow” compared to him, although his reasons for saying so aren’t exactly rigorously worked out.

At this point I need to pause for a moment to describe what makes the nineteenth-century detective different from those who would follow. In her 1985 PhD thesis on Adventure (one of if not the first to be written about a videogame), Mary Ann Buckles makes an important distinction between “game as literature” and “literature as game”:

The object of the work is the determining factor: if the main goal is for the reader to decipher some veiled meaning or to figure out the answer to a question or puzzle posed by the work, its basic character is game-like. Frank Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger,” mystery/detective literature, and some aspects of hermetic and Baroque poetry can, I believe, be viewed as games. On the other hand, if a puzzle posed in the work is also answered in the work so that the reader is not responsible for the solution, it is not a game. There might be clever, playful literary devices in them that can be considered as little games, but these are used to enhance the meaning or beauty. It is then the depiction or representation of some meaning or aesthetic experience that is the main object.

For all their gamesmanship, the stories of Dupin and Holmes fall into the category of “game as literature” for one reason: they don’t present to us, the readers, any truly solvable puzzles. The chain of logic that leads Dupin to his murdering orangutan is absurd. If we know who the killer is, it’s possible to follow his logic back from its conclusion, but any given link on the chain of logic is equally admitting of dozens of alternate possibilities. As a bemused Poe wrote in response to the praise heaped upon him for his Dupin stories, “Where is the ingenuity in unraveling a web which you yourself have woven for the express purpose of unraveling?”

Doyle is an even worse offender. Not only does Holmes always choose the correct of a myriad of possible explanations for even the most trivial of evidence, but Doyle often keeps his reader in the dark about crucial elements of the cases, letting Holmes solve the case with inside information, as it were. The typical Holmes story begins with someone visiting 221B Baker Street with a seemingly impossible case, proceeds through Watson bumbling around and Holmes being cryptic, and ends with Holmes explaining to everyone, not least the reader, how brilliant he was. The poor reader never has a chance; the games in the Sherlock Holmes stories are all internal to the stories, to be played and solved by Holmes alone while we look on admiringly. Dupin and Holmes are not so much examples of the Power of Logic in the real world as they are of naive faith in logic as a semi-mystical force, more superheroes (“Logic Man!”) than practical examples. One of Holmes’s classic tricks is to give a rundown of a stranger’s character and life circumstances in minute detail, all from observing their appearance and behavior for a scant moment or two. There are a few occasions in the stories where he invites Watson to have a go at the same thing. Watson, not being graced with Holmes’s superhuman Powers of Logic, makes a series of very reasonable inferences and deductions — and, of course, gets everything spectacularly wrong. Suffice to say that we — and anyone living in the real world — would be more like Watson than Holmes.

But what if the puzzles imbedded in these stories were fairer, actually solvable by the reader, so that the reader could play detective right along with the protagonist of the story? It’s not an untenable notion by any means. In 491 BCE Sophocles told in Oedipus the King how Oedipus solved the Riddle of the Sphinx to win the hand of Queen Jocasta. Let’s not dwell on what an ugly match that turned out to be, but instead note that the reader/playgoer has a chance to ponder and solve the riddle right along with Oedipus — or not. It’s game as literature and literature as game intertwined, to be taken as the reader/playgoer chooses. Another famous example is of course the riddle game between Bilbo and Gollum in The Hobbit, which Bilbo ironically wins by ignoring the proper rules of riddling and simply asking, “What have I got in my pockets?” Sometimes the only way to win is to cheat a bit…

In the early twentieth century, some authors started to write tighter, fairer mysteries, where all clues at the disposal of the detective were also available to the reader, and where the killer could be reasonably deduced by following the trail of evidence, however tangled. Eventually, in 1929, one R.A. Knox codified ten rules of good practice that made a fair, solvable detective story. Like Graham Nelson’s later Player’s Bill of Rights, they’re a sometimes hilarious mixture of the general and commonsensical (“All supernatural and preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course”) and the author’s specific pet peeves (“No Chinaman must figure in the story,” a reaction to the absurdities of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels).

While I’m not sure I want to push this point too far, there is a certain parallel between the development of the text adventure and that of the modern detective novel, of unfair early works prompting reactions like those of Nelson and Knox, who began to codify better design policy — at least if we are interested in reading detective novels primarily for their game-like aspects. (Certainly the Dupin and Sherlock Holmes stories have other appeals that have made them more enduring than most of the later, fairer works.) The cruel irony in the case of the text adventure is that such rigorous public discussion of design policy did not take place until the form was already commercially dead, arguably partly slain by the very design sins Nelson belatedly railed against.

The 1920s and 1930s are often called the golden age of detective fiction, when the genre reached a far larger readership than it has before or since. The queen of the era was of course Agatha Christie, the bestselling novelist of all time. She wasn’t always completely fair — she wasn’t above withholding the occasional key bit of evidence known by her detective from her reader, and on two occasions even made the murderer the narrator himself — but she generally gave the reader at least the ghost of a chance of figuring it out for herself. Christie was not interested in plumbing the depths of her character’s souls, but rather moved them around in her books like chess pieces, components of the puzzle that was her real concern. Indeed, there’s a feeling of unreality about classic whodunits that is unusually pronounced even for genre literature. Murder, about the ugliest business there is, becomes just a target for intellectual curiosity. The golden-age whodunit is all about the puzzle.

Given that, a logical next step might be to remove the trappings of the novel entirely, to just throw all of the evidence into the reader’s lap and challenge her to solve the crime herself. We’ll talk about the first person to make that leap next time.

Comments
17 Responses

- Sniffnoy

June 20, 2012 at 5:30 pm

You did a post on these earlier, right? Why can’t I find it now? Or am I thinking of some other blog?

- Jimmy Maher

June 21, 2012 at 5:22 am

I’ve written about this stuff in other places over the years, so that may be what you remember. The closest I’ve come on this blog, however, are the two posts linked at the beginning of this one.

- Duncan Stevens

June 20, 2012 at 8:24 pm

Given that, a logical next step might be to remove the trappings of the novel entirely, to just throw all of the evidence into the reader’s lap and challenge her to solve the crime herself. We’ll talk about the first person to make that leap next time.

Interesting! If it wasn’t Charles Palliser, I’d be interested to hear who it was (and I hope Palliser will get a shout-out).

- Duncan Stevens

June 20, 2012 at 8:26 pm

Also, I believe Christie did the narrator-as-murderer trick on three occasions, if you count one of her novels with a switching narrator.

- Mark

June 25, 2012 at 8:49 am

She did it in the Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This was a novel early in her writing and it really helped make her reputation as a great mystery writer. This a early Hercule Poriot novel.

People still debate if the gimmick was fair. Death off the Cuff is one IF game that is heavily inspired by both Poriot specifically and Christie in general.

- Giuseppe

April 22, 2013 at 3:02 pm

Spoilers, man! Spoilers.

- matt w

June 21, 2012 at 2:26 am

Christie seems to me to be a lot like IF puzzles — the goal isn’t exactly to think of the solution that makes sense, it’s to think of the clever solution that the author has thought of that incorporates every detail. Vide Murder at the Vicarage, summarized here; no one clever enough to carry out that plot could possibly be idiotic enough to think that it would work. But the point is to figure out the clever details Christie has incorporated, or at least to appreciate their cleverness once you’ve seen how they work. Which is how a lot of IF puzzles seem to me.

The riddle is a great analogy here, I think. Riddles aren’t logic puzzles; there’s no system with which you can work them out. The goal of a riddle is to make an intuitive leap to guess what the riddler thought of. Take this one, answered here; T. is clearly right (gur grzcrengher vf uvturfg nebhaq sbhe cz), but that wouldn’t be playing the game. Or the old 53 bicycles wheeze — who has ever called a playing card a “bicycle,” outside the context of that riddle?

I guess what I’m saying is, this stuff isn’t logical. It wouldn’t be fun if it were completely logical. Fairness means the author gives you a glimpse into what she’s thinking, but you have to make the leap into her own way of thinking to accomplish anything. Staying with what makes the most sense to you will get you nowhere.

- Mark

June 25, 2012 at 9:43 pm

Jim,

Would the first person to make that jump by any chance be Mark Blanc? Are you hinting that Deadline is your next review? It was used in your tags I have to wonder.

- Jimmy Maher

June 26, 2012 at 5:19 pm

I’m slowly getting to Deadline, but no, that was not whom I had in mind. Sorry to keep you guys in suspense. I am actually on a little holiday to England at the moment, so it will be a week or so before all is revealed. Blame the dirty purse-peddlers who wasted so much of my time last week.

- Br. Bill

January 23, 2018 at 9:09 pm

Posted this in another blog post’s comments, so might as well include it here. The supplied link for Graham Nelson’s “Player’s Bill of Rights” doesn’t work anymore. I’ve found it in PDF form here, on page 7:

http://ifarchive.jmac.org/if-archive/info/Craft.Of.Adventure.pdf

- Jimmy Maher

January 24, 2018 at 6:55 am

Thanks!

- Will Moczarski

February 22, 2020 at 11:08 pm

Edgar Allen Poe’s
-> Edgar Allan

Also, in the Buckles quote, there‘s an its/it‘s mistake: it’s basic character -> should be its basic character. I don‘t know if it‘s a typo or rather warrants a “sic”.

Finally, “Holme’s” should be “Holmes’s”.

- Jimmy Maher

February 23, 2020 at 10:04 am

Thanks!

- Ben

June 14, 2020 at 8:35 pm

Odeipus -> Oedipus

- Jimmy Maher

June 15, 2020 at 8:54 am

Thanks!

- Eric Hammer

January 25, 2021 at 8:30 pm

In the context of murder mystery as game, John Dickson Carr’s “The Nine Wrong Answers” reminds one of nothing so much as one of those early text adventures that hate its player.

- Fronzel

February 21, 2021 at 6:25 pm

Raymond Chandler’s 1950 essay on detective stories, “The Simple Art of Murder”, may be of interest. It can be found for free here: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20140930

Britain’s Occult Uncle
July 3, 2012

There are some successful writers who are, as Ben Jonson wrote of Shakespeare, “not of an age but for all time.” But there are many more who become rich and famous in their own time only to be forgotten by later generations — or, if and when recalled by academics and diehards, remembered not for their continuing resonance but as curiosities, clues to understanding those strange people who lived all those years ago. Dennis Wheatley, for four decades one of the most bankable bestsellers in the book trade, belongs to this category. Upon his death in 1977, the vast majority of his immense oeuvre went almost immediately out of print even in his native Britain, and that was pretty much that for a fellow whose books even while he was still writing them had begun to seem painfully out of joint with the times.

To modern sensibilities, Wheatley’s life story is perhaps more interesting than his fiction. Born the son of an increasingly prosperous middle-class wine merchant in 1897, he was groomed virtually from birth to take over the business from his father when the time came. In that spirit, he received a respectable if not exceptional English public-school education. Indeed, “respectable but not exceptional” is a good way to describe the young Wheatley. Thanks to his family’s growing influence, he was able to finagle an officer’s billet in World War I and, even more importantly, to get himself posted to an artillery unit rather than the meat-grinder that was the infantry. Thus Wheatley had a comparatively easy war of it, in which, in the words of his biographer Phil Baker, “he did his duty; no less, if no more.” With that behind him, Wheatley, desperately class-conscious in the way that only one of somewhat uncertain status himself (in this case the son of a tradesman) could be, devoted himself to climbing society’s ranks while dabbling just enough in the business to keep his father soothed.

In 1927 his father died, leaving Wheatley in sole charge of the business. Unfortunately, thanks to the Great Depression that arrived a couple of years later and perhaps also to Wheatley’s decision to refocus the business on selling only very expensive wines and liquors to the most exclusive social sets, things started to go badly. Soon Wheatley, now entering his mid-30s, was forced to sell the failing business before it collapsed entirely. Worse, the purchasers upon examining the books began to speak of irregularities with regard to the money that Wheatley personally had taken out of the business. Soon they were threatening legal action in criminal court, and Wheatley was contemplating the prospect of jail time in addition to destitution. This man who had for 35 years been exactly what you would expect him to be now made the one really unexpected, audacious decision of his life. Despite having only his boyhood love of adventure novels and some earlier, unpublished and halfhearted stabs at fiction to his credit, he would write his way out of his financial straits. And so, in 1933, Dennis Wheatley the novelist was born.

In a great bit of damning with faint praise, Baker notes that Wheatley turned out to be only “good at writing books, after a fashion,” but “extremely good at selling them.” The critics, or at least those who didn’t lunch with him at one of his clubs, delighted in eviscerating him, and for many good reasons. His prose was remarkably awful, his characters paper-thin, his politics reactionary. Wheatley was a thoroughgoing manichean. People are either Good (Tories, businessmen, military men, the aristocracy, fascists in the early years) or Evil (communists, socialists, labor, Satanists, fascists after appeasement went out of fashion amongst the British Right, still later hippies and civil-rights activists). As time went on all of these latter groups started to blend into one overarching conspiracy of Evil in his books, communists walking hand in hand with Satanists. Wheatley does not allow the possibility of equally well-meaning people who simply disagree about means as opposed to ends. There is only Good and Evil, the former usually handsome or beautiful, the latter ugly. Subtle Wheatley ain’t.

For all his failings, however, Wheatley did have a flair for exciting plotting. He knew how to layer on the unexpected twists and turns, to get his heroes in and out of jam after jam by the skin of their teeth, each more dangerous and improbable than the last. For readers who shared his politics, and probably even a fair number of guilty-pleasure seekers who did not, his books were reliable comfort reads. To his credit, he never claimed them to be anything more. He replied to bad reviews with a bemused shrug, saying that he had “no pretensions to literary merit”; was “better aware than most of my shortcomings where fine English is concerned.” And anyway, he said, reading his books was at least better than going to the cinema, which was what his customers would otherwise do.

Wheatley took his customers’ wishes very, very seriously. Some of his books ended with a questionnaire, asking what they had thought of the book and what they would like to see in the next: what setting, which of his cast of recurring heroes and villains, even what percentage should be devoted to romance. Apropos this last: one other key to Wheatley’s success was his inclusion of a love story in each novel. This was thought to attract women readers — and, it must be said, he did sell far more books to women than did other writers in the traditionally male-dominated genres of thrillers and adventure stories. Wheatley wrote quickly, ensuring his fans were never kept waiting long for new material. In 1933, his first year as a working writer, he churned out an incredible three novels as well as one nonfiction book (on King Charles II of England, his personal hero) to buy himself out of his legal difficulties. After that outburst he settled into the only slightly more sedate pace of two novels per year, year after year.

But, you might be wondering, what does this fellow have to do with videogames? More than you might expect, actually. Wheatley, despite being very much a character of a different era than my usual concerns on this blog, is nevertheless important to them in two ways. One is somewhat tangential and one surprisingly direct. Let’s talk about the former today.

On Halloween, 1934, The Daily Mail began publishing a new Wheatley novel in serial form. It was called The Devil Rides Out, and concerned a cabal of Satan worshipers out to plunge the world into an at-the-time-still-hypothetical World War II by stirring up opposition to Hitler’s new Nazi regime. There are parts of the book that read just horribly wrong today. The heroes’ talisman of good, for instance, which when hung around the neck functions to protect them against the Satanists much as does garlic against vampires, is a swastika, “the oldest symbol of wisdom and right thinking in the world.” Despite — or perhaps because of — stuff like this, it’s become a kitschy classic of sorts today, the book most of the few who do bother to read Wheatley begin with — and, one suspects, usually end with.

In its own time, Devil became a sensation. Wheatley had been successful before, but Devil took him to a whole new level of fortune and fame, as Britain’s foremost popular pundit on all things occult. The book was in fact broadly if shallowly researched. Wheatley cultivated relationships with such figures as Montague Summers, a loathsome old reprobate of a priest who was convinced that witches in the medieval tradition remained a clear and present danger; and even an aging and ever more ridiculous Aleister Crowley, whose name still left many people in terror for their immortal soul but who in person was more likely to ask to borrow a fiver to feed his various addictions than anything more threatening. Crowley, Summers and a handful of other similarly dissipated, over-privileged Edwardians with too much time on their hands had in the decades before his book been largely responsible for reviving the notion of the occult, previously thought banished to the Middle Ages where it belonged, as an at least theoretically vital force again.

The problem with Satanism, at least from a certain point of view, is that there’s just not a whole lot of there there. Our perception of it through the ages is not down to any actual evidence from Satanists themselves, who seem to have barely existed if at all, but rather the fever dreams of those on the side of Good who claim to be desperate to stamp it out. From the Malleus Maleficarum down to the works of Summer, the scholarship on Satanism and witchcraft consists entirely of what the Good side of the hypothetical debate speculated that those on the side of Evil must be doing. The entire scholarly edifice is built on sand. Wheatley based much of the detail in Devil on Summers, who drew from the Malleus Maleficarum, which drew from… what? The whole is a chain of conjecture and imaginings (and, one suspects, fantasizing) of what a genuine cult of Satanists must be like if anyone ever met one. Direct experience is entirely absent. As we’re about to see, Wheatley just added another link to that chain.

As already described, Wheatley was always eager to give his public exactly what they wanted. And what they wanted, judging from sales of The Devil Rides Out and the excitement it generated, was more novels about Satanism and the occult. And so for the remainder of his life, interspersed with his tremendous output of other novels, he continued to churn them out. He also continued to cultivate his persona as “Britain’s occult uncle,” one on the side of Good who nevertheless had access to Dark Secrets that could be dangerous to lesser men. And he continued the bizarre, and increasingly ridiculous, practice of mixing worldly politics with spiritual struggle as he aged and the world around him agreed less and less with his traditionalist Tory values. “Is it possible that riots, wildcat strikes, anti-apartheid demonstrations and the appalling increase in crime have any connection with magic and Satanism?” he asked in 1971. The answer, as far as he was concerned, was a quite definite yes. He even advocated for a reinstatement of Britain’s anti-witchcraft laws, despite the last of them having only recently been taken off the books. Late in his life Wheatley almost seemed to morph into the now-deceased Montague Summers. He published a non-fiction treatise of his own, The Devil and All His Works, and sponsored the “Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult,” a series of paperback editions that ranged from classic literature (Stoker’s Dracula, Goethe’s Faust) to the ramblings of Crowley and his ilk.

It’s hard to say to what extent Wheatley really believed this nonsense. He loved to sell books, and, while his books on other subjects were very successful, this stuff sold a whole order of magnitude better. It’s hard to understand why, if he thought Satanism a genuine danger to society, he continued to make it sound so damn appealing to so many of his readers via his novels, all of which featured a nubile, naked young virgin almost deflowered on an altar of Satan or similarly charged mixtures of black magic, sex, and sadism. Readers were not clucking over them as warnings about the spiritual dangers around them; no, they were getting off on the stuff. Wheatley therefore shouldn’t have been surprised when one of the elements of modern culture he hated most, a rock band, drew from his work — or, rather, pretty much blatantly ripped him off.

The band in question, Coven, was the first to really cement the link between Satanism and rock and roll. They were, however, far from one of the more talented bands to be accused of witchcraft. Their first album, the ponderously titled Witchcraft Destroys and Reaps Souls (1969), was a very contrived affair, largely the brainchild not of the band (who frankly don’t strike me as the brightest sorts) but of the producer, Bill Traut. He hired an outside songwriter, James Vincent, to put most of the album together:

“Bill brought me a large box full of books about witchcraft and related subjects. He told me to read them and start writing some songs … Sometime before the sun came up, I had completely written all the material requested of me for the entire album.”

It is, as you might imagine from a gestation like that, pretty dire stuff, like Jefferson Airplane with less impressive instrumentalists and very generic songs (apart from the EEEVVVVIIILLLL lyrics, of course). The most interesting track is not a song at all, but rather the 13-minute recording of an allegedly “authentic” Black Mass that concludes the album.

I have to put “authentic” in quotes in the context of a Black Mass because it’s very debatable whether there is such a thing. All evidence would seem to indicate that the Black Mass is not an ancient, timeless ritual, but an invention of the twentieth century. Further, it seems that none other than Wheatley’s erstwhile mentor Montague Summers may have been the man who invented it. Before suffering a spiritual “shock” that led him to God, Summers was himself a budding Satanist, one of the community of occult dabblers that swirled around Aleister Crowley. In his superb Lure of the Sinister, Gareth Medway accords a ritual conducted by Summers at his home in 1918 as “the earliest Black Mass for which there is reliable evidence.” Indeed, the younger Summers was quite a piece of work. A recollection from this era given by an acquaintance, from Baker’s Wheatley biography:

James was not invited to the Black Mass again, but he continued to see Summers socially: heavily made up and perfumed, drunk on liqueurs, Summers would cruise the London streets in search of young men. One day Summers confided his particular taste: “He was aroused only by devout young Catholics, their subsequent corruption giving him inexhaustible pleasure.”

There is evil here, but its source is not the supernatural entities the later Summers was so eager to stamp out.

So, we now have the older Summers feverishly describing and condemning the “ancient” ritual of the Black Mass which he himself likely invented as a younger man. Next, inevitably, we have Wheatley putting all of the “authentic” details into his novels. And then… then along comes Coven. Their recorded Black Mass is hilarious in its own right; for starters, the priest of Satan serving as master of ceremonies has the stentorian voice of a radio DJ, a far cry from the Voice of Evil one might expect. It gets even funnier, however, when you realize that virtually the entire ritual is plagiarized from one of Wheatley’s novels, The Satanist (1960).

The Coven album generated just the sort of controversy it had been intended to provoke. More so, actually; the outcry was so extreme that their record company pulled the album from shelves entirely in fairly short order. Thus in this case the real object of the endeavor, which was (in common with so much of the Satan industry) to make lots of money off cheap sensationalism, didn’t quite pan out. However, other bands, particularly in the emerging genre of heavy metal, now began dabbling in occult subject matter, most notably Black Sabbath. (In an odd coincidence, Coven’s bassist was named Oz Osbourne and the first song on their album was called “Black Sabbath.”) Most of these bands simply wrote about Satanism and the occult — with the usual dodgy research — rather than claiming to be full-on devil worshipers. Mostly it was all just silly fun perfect for teenage boys, and some of it was even pretty good; I’m still known to spin the occasional Iron Maiden. Yet it caused a firestorm of fear and anger from conservative Christians and orthodox Establishment-types who imagined their headbanging children being seduced to Satan through this music. What went unnoticed and unremarked, of course, was that the real source of most of the Satanic tropes they condemned was a man who was in a very real sense one of their own, Dennis Wheatley. One can make a pretty strong case that Wheatley essentially invented Satanism as it has existed in the popular imagination of the last 50 years — not a bad legacy for an otherwise forgotten author.

So, let’s see if we can bring this around to games at last, by looking at the urtext of ludic narrative, Dungeons and Dragons. There’s actually very little occult influence in the original edition of the game. It was, as I described in an earlier post, a product of dedicated wargamers with an interest in fantasy literature; there was nary an occultist among them. Later sourcebooks would begin to introduce somewhat generic devils and demons, and even to outline entire religious pantheons via the Deities and Demigods tome, but TSR was smart enough to stay well clear of any sort of obviously Christian mythos; certainly you won’t find stats for Satan in any of the Dungeons & Dragons rule books. Still, demons and devils and other horrors were in the game, as were spells. Many apparently found these elements hard to place outside of a Christian context. Nor was the artwork always helpful; in a picture, an evil efreeti from the Elemental Plane of Fire and Satan look pretty much the same.

Further, there was a substantial crossover between the kids listening to all this allegedly Satanic heavy-metal music and those playing D&D. While the lure of the forbidden (i.e., Satanism) was certainly part of heavy metal’s appeal, it also gave them grand themes of heroism and villainy, fantasy and history — all just the thing for teenagers looking for an escape from the trials and tribulations of high school. D&D, of course, gave them some of the same things. When concerned elders worried over the lurid heavy-metal posters on Junior’s bedroom walls, then saw that he was also playing this odd game of imagination full of spells and devils, and with similarly lurid artwork… well, it wasn’t a difficult leap to make. D&D and heavy metal must be the new face of Satanism — which, as we have seen and although no one seemed to realize it, didn’t actually have an old face.

The wrath of these crusaders would largely come down on D&D the tabletop RPG, as opposed to its computerized descendents that I’ve been writing about on this blog. Yet even they would not be immune. Richard Garriott received plenty of outraged letters accusing him of being an ambassador of Satan, particularly after Ultima III came out with its particularly Satanic-looking figure on the cover.

All of this controversy ended up playing a significant role in Garriott’s work as well as that of others, and I’ll be returning to it again in the future. However, I don’t want to move too far afield from Wheatley himself at just this moment. You see, he had yet another, completely different role to play in the field — in fact, the one I teased you with in my last post. We’ll pick that up again at last next time.

Comments
14 Responses

- ZUrlocker

July 3, 2012 at 9:47 pm

I think Wheatley is an interesting character, so I did read his first novel “Forbidden Territory” originally published in 1933. As pointed out, it’s not a great book. Characters are thin, plot is contrived and the values are well beyond old-fashioned. But there was a certain charm to it, not unlike an old serial film from a bygone era.
–Zack

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- Matt

July 4, 2012 at 2:34 pm

While German “ö” is often written as “oe” when one does not have easy access to German umlauts, “Göthe” is over-compensation: the real name of the German writer is “Goethe” with “oe”. Take it from a German native spreaker or see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe

- Jimmy Maher

July 4, 2012 at 2:42 pm

I checked with my wife, who is also a native German speaker, and she said she’s never seen it spelled with an umlaut. Good enough for me. I’ve fixed it. Thanks!

- Victor Gijsbers

July 4, 2012 at 6:41 pm

There’s a pile of books on my desk which I picked up last weekend at a second-hand book fair. One of them is “The Curse of the Wise Woman” by Lord Dunsany. What does it say on the cover, in modest though underlined white letters? “The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult.”

A fine coincidence.

- susan

May 14, 2013 at 12:27 pm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A0-bas_(novel)

la bas—published 1891– is a classic French novel that
describes a Black Mass.

- Jimmy Maher

May 14, 2013 at 12:32 pm

Fascinating. I’m embarrassed to say I was totally unaware of that work. I don’t believe that Wheatley’s biographer Philip Baker mentions it either. Would be interesting to know to what extent (if any) this influenced Sumner in his Black Mass ritual…

- Derek

February 17, 2019 at 7:42 am

Actually, the concept of the Black Mass seems to date back to the sixteenth century, although, of course, it was only a product of “the fever dreams of those on the side of Good” at the time. Summers was just the first person (or the first reliably recorded person) to perform one for real.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mass

- Andrew Ralton

August 8, 2013 at 4:58 am

Fascinating piece. Thanks!

Yes, “La Bas” by J K Huysman, also in the Dennis Wheatley Library of the occult under the title “Down There”, details the events of a black mass in late 19th century Paris. It is a very detailed description, which makes you think the author had some very good sources for this. It is well worth reading.

I’ve read a couple of Dennis Wheatley Books, and whilst they were very well researched, and had exciting plots I couldn’t help but think ‘Oh dear!’ When it came to his reactionary politics and paper thin characters.

- Andy

January 29, 2014 at 10:08 pm

“There are parts of the book that read just horribly wrong today. The heroes’ talisman of good, for instance, which when hung around the neck functions to protect them against the Satanists much as does garlic against vampires, is a swastika, “the oldest symbol of wisdom and right thinking in the world.””

I mean, it’s not like he’s wrong – the swastika is indeed still a revered icon in many parts of the world despite the Nazis spoiling it for Western society, which is the point Wheatley makes in that section of the book.

I think you also give Montague Summers more credit than he really deserves. From all I’ve read of him a lot of his schtick was deliberate sensationalism meant to get a rise out of people (and make some fame and money for himself), not some whole-hearted belief in supernatural evil as a prevalent danger. Certainly his status as a “reverend” was entirely made up by him.

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- Jalen Wanderer

January 1, 2018 at 11:56 pm

certainly you won’t find stats for Satan in any of the official literature

Don’t be so certain! If you count Dragon Magazine as part of the “official literature”—and at the time it was basically a TSR house organ, so I don’t see why you wouldn’t—then complete stats for Satan appeared in Dragon #28, the August 1979 issue.

He had 333 hit points and was, of course, “lawful evil”. The oddest thing about his stats, though, was his movement rate: while Belial and Astaroth, appearing in the same issue, had more conventional movement rates, Satan’s move was just “Whatever is necessary”.

Also, while I’m nitpicking, that image you used to illustrate a “generic demon” from D&D is not, in fact, a demon. While certainly there were and are plenty of demons and devils in D&D, the entity pictured on the cover of the Dungeon Master’s Guide is supposed to be an efreeti, a kind of evil genie from the Elemental Plane of Fire.

- Jimmy Maher

January 3, 2018 at 3:22 pm

Wow! That’s interesting. That’s the same month that James Dallas Egbert III disappeared into the steam tunnels under Michigan State University to start the whole “D&D is Satan!” hysteria. I suspect that a few months later TSR wouldn’t have dared.

Corrections made. Thanks!

The Dennis Wheatley Crime Dossiers
July 8, 2012

As a fellow very concerned about his place in society, Dennis Wheatley carefully cultivated friendships with quite a number of people, enough so that one kind of wonders where he found time to maintain his prodigious literary output. One of the most surprising of these was an up-and-comer named Joseph Gluckstein Links, or just “Joe” to friends like Wheatley.

Born in 1904, Links was, like Wheatley, the son of a tradesman. But the similarities ended there. Links’s father was a Jewish refugee from Hungary who owned a business that served the bottom end of the fur trade, dealing in skunk. Links didn’t have the opportunities Wheatley did to finish his education and indulge his whims as a young man-about-town in London. His mother died when he was twelve, and two years later his father learned that he was also terminally ill. With no time to spare, he pulled young Joe out of school to give him a rush course on the fur trade in general and the business he would soon need to run. “I was a sullen and unwilling pupil,” Links later wrote, but “there was the business and I jolly well had to go and earn my living at it.”

Links turned out to be possessed of a shrewd business sense. And, after such an ill-starred childhood, he was lucky at last. Fur, whatever ethical dilemmas it raises today, was exploding in the fashion world of the time; every girl wanted a fur coat, more than one if she could get them. Links was able to move his firm, Calman Links, upscale to meet this demand. Even the Great Depression didn’t stop him. By the 1930s London was the epicenter of a booming luxury fur trade, and Calman Links was one of its most prominent furriers.

As a young man Links was a friend of Nancy Robinson, the wealthy heiress to the Nugget Boot Polish fortune who, in something of a social-climbing coup for Wheatley, became his wife in 1922. It was through Nancy that the two men met, but their relationship far outlasted Wheatley’s first marriage, which ended in 1930. It was a surprising friendship because Links was Jewish; in common with so many in the British Right of this period, there was a strong streak of anti-Semitism in Wheatley’s early novels. Still, Links was urbane, cultured, witty, and discreet, and, as you might expect from one who made his living through fashion, known everywhere as a very snappy dresser. Despite his humble origins and limited education, all of this seemed to come to him effortlessly. Indeed, one might say that Links was a more natural, authentic version of the man that Wheatley worked so hard throughout his life to be. He also shared Wheatley’s taste for luxury, most notably in the form of good cigars and expensive wines. He cut such an impressive figure that not only Wheatley but most of his social circle were willing to forgive him his ethnicity. The friendship was perhaps really cemented as a lifelong one during the personal crisis that precipitated Wheatley’s becoming a writer. At this critical time Links was a huge source of comfort and support, lending Wheatley money to pay his creditors and his lawyers and a secluded cottage to get away from it all and pull his first novel together.

One night over dinner, circa 1935, Links dropped a brainstorm on Wheatley: what if they put together a murder mystery not in the form of a novel but rather as a dossier of reports and clues? Since so much of contemporary crime fiction was really about giving the reader a puzzle to solve, the trappings of the novel were beginning to seem to Links like a pointless intrusion on their real appeal. “Why can’t we just have the facts and the clues?” he theorized readers must be asking.

There had been some attempts before to present mysteries explicitly as puzzles to be solved. In 1928, Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay published the first Baffle Book, consisting of the brief descriptions of fifteen cases that the reader was expected to solve from the clues in the text. These cases read, however, like generic sketches of mystery plots before the scenery and characters were painted in, and thus played more like abstract logic puzzles than participatory mysteries. Links proposed giving readers all the atmosphere and detail of a full-fledged mystery novel, but explicitly asking her to do what had only been implied in the novels for years now: to solve the crime herself. Further, he imagined including much more than text: physical props, the actual pieces of evidence — what a later generation would come to call “feelies” — would be a key component. The dossier would end with a sealed section containing the solution, which the reader should only open when she believed she had solved the case for herself.

Wheatley was for a time unconvinced. Links was a businessman with no background in writing (or game design, for that matter). As for him, he was a writer, of course, but also a very busy one already selling plenty of books, and he had no experience or following in the already overstuffed genre of detective novels. But Links persisted, and Wheatley was finally taken with the same enthusiasm, with the rare opportunity to do something really, truly new. He took the idea to his publisher, Hutchinson. They were, unsurprisingly, very lukewarm. Producing and stuffing the dossiers with all those physical clues, not to mention typesetting telegrams, handwritten letters, and police reports, would be like nothing they had ever done before — and expensive. Yet Wheatley persisted. He was a very valuable author whom it behooved Hutchinson to keep happy, so at last they agreed — on the condition that Links and Wheatley would be willing to accept no royalties at all on the first 10,000 copies sold, and just one penny per copy after that. It’s a marker of how excited Wheatley was by the project that he agreed; he was normally always very careful to get everything financially coming to him. And so Links and Wheatley set to work, Links planning out the mystery and devising the clues and Wheatley writing the actual text. The dossier would be credited to Wheatley, with a “planned by J.G. Links” blurb inserted in smaller letters. The credits should probably have been reversed; Links had the original idea, after all, and the case at root was apparently his. Still, Links was a very private man happy to continue his life of relatively anonymous privilege. And, more practically, Wheatley’s name definitely sold books.

The result was published on July 23, 1936, as Murder off Miami.

A pleasure yacht, the Golden Gull, has just left Miami for a few days of cruising when one of the passengers, a soap magnate named Bolitho Blaine, apparently commits suicide, leading the yacht to return to port just hours after it left. You follow along with the investigation of the detective who meets the boat — through interviews, on-the-scene hunting for physical evidence, etc. In best golden-age-detective-fiction fashion, it quickly transpires that not only was Blaine murdered, but virtually everyone else on the boat has both Dark Secrets to hide and a plausible motive for wanting Blaine dead.

Detective fiction wasn’t Wheatley’s normal gig, but in an odd way he was suited for it, and probably could have done pretty well at it in an alternate reality. Much as he loved to play the cultured libertine, there was also a fussy, detail-oriented side to his personality. Sometimes the two came together in revealing if unappealing ways. His biographer Phil Baker describes a careful list he kept as a young man of every woman he had any sort of amorous contact with, from prostitutes (lots of these) to one-night-stands to proper girlfriends, along with dates and locations and a neat check next to those with which he went all the way. (When he forgot — or never had — names, he just used a shorthand description of the girl.) In Murder, he goes endlessly over suspects and times and locations and alibis, reveling in all this careful, systemic detail in an almost hackerish way; in still another reality, he might have been drawn to programming. If it is hardly revolutionary for a story of its time and genre, the solution to Murder is reasonable (at least by whodunit logic) and satisfying enough, requiring some out-of-the-box thinking that probably comes easier to people steeped in golden-age detective fiction than it did to my wife and me. We came up with a suspect based on an alibi of which the in-story detective seemed a little too trusting, but the answer of course turned out to be something else entirely.

Still, the striking aspect of Murder off Miami is not the case but how it’s presented. In addition to more prosaic text, the dossier contains telegrams, handwritten notes (some of which we had a devil of a time deciphering), photos of crime scenes and suspects, suspect police records, even a blood-stained swatch of curtain.

Like all of Wheatley’s work it’s almost defiantly of its time. For instance, there’s a poor Japanese fellow on the yacht whom no one deigns to call by his real name. He’s just “the Jap,” whom our detective hero warns not to try his “Oriental mind games” on him. Yet it’s still an interesting and unique experience today, even divorced from its historical importance. My wife and I had a lot of fun with it, even if we did fail to crack the case in the end.

Murder off Miami wasn’t something anyone knew quite how to classify. Is it a book or a game? asked reviewers and editorialists in articles that presage some of the discussion that would later swirl around the interactive fiction of Infocom and others. Luckily, Wheatley, you’ll remember, was “very good at selling” books; he tirelessly wined and dined top book buyers during the lead-up to publication to convince them to stock the dossier. Despite no real promotion other than that personally undertaken by Wheatley, Murder off Miami became a minor sensation. It ended up selling over 200,000 copies in Britain in its first year, and was eventually translated into many other languages. Always the royal watcher, Wheatley was delighted to learn that Queen Mary herself bought six copies. Naturally, Links and Wheatley soon set to work on another.

That second dossier, Who Killed Robert Prentice? (1937), is a particularly cold-blooded little number, and as comically dated as ever. Links and Wheatley have fallen afoul of the 1930s rage for Adlerian psychology; the murder victim is defined as a walking, talking bundle of inferiority complexes. Yet the case is more believable and more interesting. Solving it is a three-step process this time, of which my wife and I managed to get two correct. The evidence, meanwhile, is even more impressive than in the first dossier, including more physical props like railway tickets and stamps.

Some of the letters this time were even scented with unique perfumes, providing vital clues about their origins; sadly, this element didn’t survive its journey down through the years to us. Links and Wheatley also show a willingness to get more playful with the format. The centerpiece of the second dossier is a big fold-out newspaper that features not only articles about the case but also real advertisements from various sponsors, another demonstration of Wheatley’s nose for moneymaking opportunities.

There’s also an interview in the newspaper with Wheatley and Links themselves, who do discuss whom they think might have done the crime, but which Wheatley mainly uses as a platform to plug his books. The third dossier would continue to take advantage of Wheatley’s near celebrity in Britain, using him as a character in his own stories in a very postmodern sort of way that’s surprising for this time and this author.

Robert Prentice’s most risque clue was a torn-up photograph of the victim cavorting with a naked woman. The reader had to assemble this, jigsaw-style, in a way that a later generation would soon be doing in a thousand graphic adventures.

The dossiers were not easy to assemble. During the height of the dossier boomlet, Hutchinson’s employed forty girls to cut swatches out of fabric and stain them, spray perfume on letters, tear corners off of envelopes, and, yes, rip up risque photographs. This hand-assembled aspect of the dossiers gives them an additional appeal today; every one is at least a little bit unique.

Robert Prentice was another sizable hit, thus spawning a third dossier for 1938, The Malinsay Massacre. Conventional wisdom holds that this is the point where the series began a dramatic decline in quality, but we didn’t really see that. It is true that the feelies have been dramatically reduced in number, to just one, an allegedly poisoned tablet. Still, said tablet is one of the most impressive of all the feelies. If one eats this tablet, one apparently learns an important clue: that it tastes like peppermint. (We weren’t going to try it after all these years and all the hands it must have passed through…)

The photos in Malinsay do look a bit low-rent, which apparently caused some conflict between the partners. Links managed the photo-shoot while Wheatley was out of town. The location he chose, a local hotel, doesn’t much look like the ancestral Scottish castle where the mystery plays out. Wheatley was very unhappy with the results upon his return.

While the rest of the third dossier contains nothing as impressive as the mock-newspaper from the second, we found the mystery itself the most believable and compelling of all — and, with a bit of thought and care, very solvable. We got this one pretty much right, a very satisfying experience. I’d imagine the experience we had with Malinsay came the closest to what Links and Wheatley envisioned when they first started thinking about making the dossiers.

About the fourth dossier, alas, the conventional wisdom is correct. In reaction to grumblings about the dearth of feelies in the previous dossier, the pair went in the other direction this time: “Five times as many clues as in any of the previous dossiers!” the cover trumpets. Unfortunately, that’s about all it’s got going for it. Produced with much less involvement from Wheatley, who was both ill at the time and getting somewhat tired of the exercise, Herewith the Clues sadly lacks his talent for weaving an interesting potboiler narrative. It has far less text than any of the other dossiers, and is the most explicitly gamelike of them all, reading more like the logic-puzzle mystery stubs of Wren and McKay than Wheatley and Links’s previous dossiers. The whole devolves into deciding which of a group of suspects can be identified as having been in a certain room at a certain time; the one who was not present must be the murderer. For the first time a scoring system is provided along with multiple sheets of paper to record your conclusions, so that “each member of the family may fill one up.” Some of the solutions are made more difficult by the cultural gulf between then and now:

Carlotta Casado can be eliminated because: Exhibit E, a sheet of Papier Poudre, Rachel shade, was found in the waste-paper basket. Carlotta is a black-haired Spaniard, with a sun-tanned skin; and none of the other women in the group even approaches a brunette type. Therefore, the Rachel shade sheet of Papier Poudre must have been used by her.

The “Papier Poudre” just looked like a blank square of stiff paper to us, and otherwise we have no idea what any of that is on about.

Other times the solutions are just stupid. Clever, but stupid.

Mug Masters can be eliminated because: Exhibit F, a screw of plain paper found in the waste-paper basket, has invisible writing on it, which at once becomes apparent if the paper is dipped in water. The writing is a personal note to Masters summoning him to the full group meeting to be held on the night of the 23rd; so obviously it was he who threw this paper into the waste-paper basket in the secret room.

Who the hell would start immersing their clues in water? We didn’t spend too much time on trying to solve this one, and when we flipped to the solution and saw stuff like that we were decidedly glad we hadn’t.

Herewith the Clues was published at a fraught historical moment, just six weeks or so before the outbreak of World War II. For all its flaws as a story and game, it’s perhaps even more interesting than the earlier dossiers as a time capsule, an artifact of a proudly snobbish upper-class London social set that was about to be changed forever by war and by the welfare state that would follow. Wheatley being Wheatley, he’s unable to resist breaking the fourth wall in the caption below the picture of each suspect to announce who is really shown there: lords, ladies, and respected society figures all.

When the war began, that was it for the dossiers. All went out of print, and, whatever appeasement sympathies they may have held in earlier lives, Links and Wheatley both joined up and devoted all their energies to the war effort. After the war, the time that had spawned the dossiers seemed to have passed. Agatha Christie’s continuing popularity aside, the detective novel changed again, away from the puzzle-box designs of the golden age to works that again placed more emphasis on realism and literary nuances. The idea of the mystery as an implied game between author and reader moved again into the background, and Wheatley went back to writing his thrillers and his occult pastiches, with only one more detour into ludic mystery. In 1953 he published a board game called Alibi, which appears to have played like a more sophisticated, narrative-rich version of the family staple Cluedo (Clue in North America). It seems that Alibi was not a success, and copies are extremely rare today. I thus don’t know much more about how it played.

Links, meanwhile went back to the fur business — and to a remarkable new career. A longtime bachelor, he finally married just as the war ended. The couple traveled to Venice for their honeymoon. Links fell in love with the city and with one of its famous sons, the landscape painter Canaletto. Over the years that followed Links cultivated both passions. Showing again that talent for moving in circles where he had by all rights no business going, this fellow who had quit school at fourteen and never attended a single class at university became perhaps the world’s foremost expert on Canaletto, writing books, speaking at countless academic conferences, and curating major exhibitions. He also wrote what has sometimes been called the greatest travel guidebook ever written, Venice for Pleasure (1966). He died in 1997 after what was by all accounts a long, varied, happy, and always discreet life.

As a major commercial success, at least in its earlier incarnations, the Wheatley/Links dossier series spawned some imitators. Most notably, William Morrow in the United States republished the first dossier as Crime File Number 1: File on Bolitho Blane, then continued the series with at least three more Crime Files written by American mystery writers. It’s worth speculating what might have happened to the budding genre had World War II not come along to disrupt it. As it was, though, the genre was not resumed after the war, going into history as a curiosity and a footnote to the careers of Wheatley and Links.

Until about 1980, that is. By that time, with the rise of Dungeons and Dragons, Adventure, and the Choose Your Own Adventure line of children’s books, the idea of this sort of blending of story and game was again beginning to feel in step with the times. Hutchinson published new editions of all four dossiers to modest press notices and modest sales. After a few years, they fell out of print again. However, during that brief window when they were easily available once more, a fair number of contemporary creators found them inspiring. In an obvious response to them, Simon Goodenough published a series of three new dossiers based on Sherlock Holmes stories. You can also see a lot of the Wheatley/Links dossiers in a pair of detective board games published originally around this time by Sleuth Publications, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective and Gumshoe. A bit later two of the dossiers would be directly adapted into rather uninspiring computer games.

But most significantly for our purposes, one Marc Blank of Infocom picked them up, and was inspired to create Deadline, as dramatic a literary leap forward for digital ludic narrative as Zork had been a technical. Having ended this little detour into the 1930s, we’ll pick up with that next time.

(I owe huge thanks for this article to Zack Urlocker, who dug up editions of all four of the Wheatley/Links dossiers from his personal collection, shipped them to me in Norway, and refused to let me pay for any of it. Thank you again, Zack!)

Comments
21 Responses

- juv3nal

July 8, 2012 at 7:24 pm

Oh man I remember reading the 80s re-release of Prentice & Miami and what must have been the first of the ones based on Sherlock Holmes (IIRC the plot basically followed a Study in Scarlet). Nostalgia powers activate!

- Victor Gijsbers

July 8, 2012 at 11:06 pm

Papier poudré seems to be company that is still in existence. See, e.g., here:

http://www.beautyhabit.com/papierpoudre.html

These are apparently pieces of paper that contain skin powder, in different shades for different types of skin.

- Jimmy Maher

July 9, 2012 at 9:15 am

It’s possible that the powder may have dried up on our version…

- rockersuke

July 9, 2012 at 12:13 am

Of these 2 rather uninspiring computer games made in the late 80’s the one about “Herewith The Clues” seems to be practically a direct scan of the original dossier with some links to the pics while the adaptation of “Murder Off MIami” made by the Delta 4 guys for 8 bit computers was a proper parser-based Interactive Fiction work, which could serve as an interesting comparative experience. In fact I was planning an article telling about it all after both “reading” the dossier (I got a copy of the 1979 facsimile reprint) and playing the IF game which I would send to SPAG… but right then SPAG slowly and silently faded out of sight and I lost interest in the project ^_^’

Some pics of my physical copy of MOM for the ZX Spectrum. The poster included had a detailed map of the ship and some character photos from the original book.

Box and tape – contents

- Jimmy Maher

July 9, 2012 at 9:17 am

Yes, I may visit at least the Spectrum game at some point for just those reasons.

- wrm

July 9, 2012 at 2:13 pm

Fascinating, thanks.

(And BTW ITYM “discreet”)

- Jimmy Maher

July 9, 2012 at 2:26 pm

Somehow I’ve managed to survive all these years without knowing there were two versions of “discreet.” Thanks!

- ZUrlocker

July 11, 2012 at 12:30 am

I’ve always been curious about the Wheatley game conversions. Since there are Spectrum emulators for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows, Linux etc, you can find the game binaries here: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0006726

Also, little known fact, Wheatley’s grandson Dominic went into the gaming business and was a co-founder of Domark Software.

- Phil

December 20, 2015 at 9:39 pm

“Like all of Wheatley’s work it’s almost defiantly of its time.”

Should “defiantly” be “definitely”?

- Jimmy Maher

December 20, 2015 at 9:44 pm

No, in this case “defiantly” was intended.

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- Lee Jones

August 11, 2017 at 1:50 am

This apparently is what “Papier Poudre” is:

https://www.beautyhabit.com/collections/papier-poudre

- Lee Jones

August 11, 2017 at 1:51 am

And I just now noticed somebody else already shared that.

- snotty

May 22, 2018 at 7:40 pm

and this is why ‘Rachel shade’
http://cosmeticsandskin.com/aba/rachel.php

- Ben Finney

June 9, 2018 at 10:56 am

“By the 1930s London was the epicenter of a booming luxury fur, and […]” — seems to be a word missing. Maybe “a booming luxury fur trade”?

Elsewhere: “[…] whom no one deigns to call by this real name” — should be “by his real name”.

- Jimmy Maher

June 10, 2018 at 10:34 am

Thanks!

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- Will Moczarski

March 11, 2020 at 6:30 am

Just two small corrections:

typesetting telgrams
-> telegrams

much have been used
-> must have?

- Jimmy Maher

March 11, 2020 at 2:52 pm

Thanks!

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- Pingback: Deadline [1982] – Arcade Idea

Deadline
July 11, 2012

As 1982 dawned, Infocom had two hit games available in new, snazzy packaging under their own imprint along with a growing reputation for being the class of the adventure-game field. The future was looking pretty rosy. That January they moved from their tiny one-room office above Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace to much larger accommodations on nearby Wheeler Street. So large, in fact, that they might have seemed like overkill, except that Infocom had big plans to become a major player in the growing software market. But right now they had just a few full-time employees to house there. One of these was Steve Meretzky, late of the Zork User’s Group, hired as Infocom’s first full-time tester shortly after the move. A much larger crew of part-timers and moonlighters cycled in and out at all hours.

It’s fascinating from the perspective of today to watch as the pieces of the Infocom that so many of us remember and love fall into place one by one. By early 1982 they already had their classic logo and text style, their professional but also friendly and easygoing editorial voice, and their distinctive Zork packaging iconography. As Jason Scott has pointed out, the unsung hero through this process was the advertising agency that Mort Rosenthal hooked Infocom up with during his brief stay with the company: Giardini/Russell — or, more easily, G/R Copy. G/R’s role went far beyond just crafting the occasional magazine ad. They were intimately involved with virtually every aspect of the Infocom experience that wasn’t contained on the actual disks, suggesting and crafting the packaging and the feelies contained therein, even writing large swathes of the instruction manuals. They even named a surprising number of the games, including Deadline, the one I’m going to be talking about today; it bore the much less compelling name Was It Murder? before G/R got a hold of it. Scott puts it succinctly: “A lot of what people think of as ‘Infocom’ is in fact Giardini/Russell.” It’s a classic example of creative, artistic image-crafting that can stand alongside such iconic campaigns as the work that Arnold Worldwide did for Volkswagen around the millennium. Infocom were lucky to have them, and smart enough to give them freedom to work their magic. G/R are the main reason why, even today, Infocom’s games and advertising look so fresh and enticing.

Still, in early 1982 major parts of the final Infocom puzzle were still missing. Most notably, they still hadn’t decided what to call the games, not being comfortable with “text adventures” but having not yet come up with the label “interactive fiction.” The long-term ambition of Al Vezza and at least some of the other founders remained to use games as an eventual sideline, a springboard into the lucrative business software market that was now growing like crazy in the wake of the IBM PC’s introduction. In that light, it felt important to distinguish the games line from the company’s identity as a whole. For now, they could only come up with the rather tepid designation of “InterLogic Adventures,” apparently imagining InterLogic becoming a subsidiary brand within the Infocom empire. In the end, it would be a blessedly short-lived name.

Whatever they called their games, Marc Blank, now with the newly minted title of Vice-President for Product Development, was still showing a restless determination to try new things with them. Having written much of the original Zork, designed and endlessly polished the famed Infocom parser, and then come up with the concept and design of the Z-Machine, he was now working on what would prove to be the most significant leap forward for digital ludic narrative since Zork’s debut on the micros. It started when one or two of the Dennis Wheatley crime dossier reprints came his way. Blank found the idea of solving a crime yourself, of playing a detective in your own mystery story, to be very compelling. And of course it was a natural choice for a text adventure, perhaps a more natural fit than a fantasy romp. After all, and as I described recently, classic mystery novels were really games dressed up as stories. All he had to do was what Wheatley and Links had done, to make the implicit explicit. But by doing that on a computer he could create something much more interactive than the crime dossiers, with their piles of static clues to read to come to a single conclusion at the end of it all. No, on the computer the player would be able to guide every step of the investigation for herself — to really play the detective. He spent the latter months of 1981 and the early weeks of 1982 crafting the game that would become Deadline, “first of the InterLogic Mystery Series from Infocom.”

There were other mysteries of a sort already available on computers — titles such as Jyym Pearson’s Curse of Crowley Manor (published by Scott Adams’s Adventure International as part of their OtherVentures line) and of course Ken and Roberta Williams’s debut, Mystery House. But, while these games included the trappings of mystery, their puzzles and gameplay mark them as standard text adventures, a collection of unrelated, static puzzles; they were Adventure in mystery clothing. Blank was envisioning a work where, just like in a classic detective novel, the story itself is the puzzle. Let me take just a moment to try to make clear what I’m getting at here.

While writing about Time Zone, Carl Muckenhoupt noted how separated each zone in that game is from all the others, then leaped to this:

Maybe it’s just that the author was used to thinking in terms of local effects, because that’s how early adventure games generally worked. The whole idea of non-local effects was a major leap in sophistication for adventure games, arguably more significant than the full-sentence parser.

Let’s run a little bit further with that.

It’s true that all adventure games at some level are, as Zork put it, “self-contained and self-maintaining universes.” Yet adventures prior to Deadline had been curiously static universes. Annoyances like Adventure’s dwarfs and Zork’s thief aside, their designers thought only in terms of local interactions. And, expiring light sources aside, they thought not at all about the passage of time. Early text adventures have environments to explore and (static) problems to solve, but they only occasionally and sporadically contain any sense of plotting, at best limited to an end game that triggers when the player has collected all the treasures or otherwise accomplished most of her goals. Blank, however, proposed to immerse the player in a real story, filled with other characters moving about with agendas of their own, with a plot arc rising to a real climax, and with — necessarily for the preceding to work — realistic passage of time culminating in the deadline from which the game drew its name. Scott Adams’s The Count had done some of this way back in 1979, but it had been inevitably limited by Adams’s primitive engine and the need to fit everything into 16 K of memory. Armed with Infocom’s superior technology, Blank now wanted to do it right. For the first time, the player of Deadline would have to act locally but think globally.

Just to make this very important idea absolutely clear, I’m going to quote at some length from an interview that Blank gave to SoftSide magazine in 1983. It shows that he knew exactly what he was doing in trying to create a new model for adventure games that would let them truly work as stories.

I think the elements of characters, interaction, and time flow are what make an adventure more like a story. Time flow is the critical one. In Zork I, the situation is static — you’re walking around in an effectively dead place. You find these problems and you try to solve them. If you can’t, you go on to some other problem and come back to it later. Nothing’s changed because very little is going on. Deadline, on the other hand, is much more like a story. Things happen at a certain time. The phone rings sometime around nine o’clock. You could pick it up, you could be some other place when it rings, or you could wait to see if someone else picks it up. What you can’t you do is hear the conversation at ten o’clock, because it happened at nine. Because of this event, the story changes — in other words, you’ve left that section of the story and moved on. There are some things you can’t go back to and they are usually time-related.

In a way it is like a novel. In fact, you’re drawn along with the course of things. You can’t just sit. The world is passing you by.

And the story changes. The difference between this and a traditional story is that the story changes, depending on what you do. If you walk into the Robner house and wait in the foyer until seven o’clock, you’ll see people coming and going. People talk to you, the phone rings, and at the end of the day someone comes to you and says you didn’t solve the case. Too bad. The whole story happened. The same thing is not true in Zork.

I won’t go so far as to say that it’s impossible to create an artistically compelling adventure in which the player merely wanders through a deserted environment. There are quite a lot of adventures which do succeed ludically and aesthetically within those constraints. Yet, if that is all that adventures can do, they must be a very limited and specific art form indeed. For adventures to be viable as a new form of literature (something Infocom would soon be talking about more and more), they needed to take this step — even though, as soon as they do, life must inevitably become a whole lot more complicated for the poor souls trying to design them.

Indeed, the sheer difficulty of the task in the face of the still absurdly limited technology at hand was the main reason that no one had created a more dynamic, story-driven adventure before. Even leaving aside the more advanced world-modeling that would be needed, telling a real story would require a lot more text than the bare stubs of descriptions that had previously sufficed. Given the limited disk and memory capacities of contemporary computers, that was a huge problem. Infocom’s Z-Machine was the most advanced microcomputer adventure engine in the world, but even it allowed, when stretched to the very limit, perhaps 35,000 words of text, about the equivalent of a novella. And in a way this figure is even less than it seems, as it must allow for blind alleys and utilitarian responses that a printed novella doesn’t. Looking at the problem, Blank hit upon a solution that would change not only Infocom but the whole industry. It once again came from Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links.

Those crime dossiers are, as I described in my last post, packed with documents and assorted physical “feelies” that describe the case the reader is attempting to solve. A certain portion of this information is effectively backstory, setting up the suspects, the crime, and the scenery before the investigation really begins in earnest. For his computer mystery, Blank realized that he could also move this information off the disk and onto paper. Through interviews with each of the possible suspects conducted by an out-of-game previous investigator, he could establish all the details of the crime as well as the general character of each suspect and her alibi. He could also include coroner and lab reports about the crime. Doing this would leave much more space on the disk for the stuff that really needed to be presented interactively. There were also a couple of other advantages to be had.

Piracy was, then as now, a constant thorn in the side of publishers. By moving all of this essential information out of the game proper, Infocom would make it unsolvable for anyone who just copied the disk. It was of course still possible to make copies of the extra goodies, but this was neither as convenient nor as cheap as it would be today. And there was no practical way in 1982 of preserving the documents digitally for transfer over the pirate BBS networks, short of retyping them all by hand.

Less cynically, the idea of giving the player her own little crime dossier was just plain cool. Working as always with G/R Copy, Blank and Infocom went all out. They packaged everything within an “evidence folder.”

Inside were the disk, the manual, and all of the documents related to the crime, along with a final fun little addition: a few of the pills that the victim had allegedly used to commit suicide. (Shades of The Malinsay Massacre…) Designing and fabricating all of this wasn’t cheap; in fact, it was the reason Infocom charged $10 more for Deadline than they had for their previous two games. But people loved it. Deadline heralded the beginning of a new era of similarly innovative computer-game packaging: cloth maps, physical props, novellas and novels, gate-fold boxes, lengthy and elaborate manuals. All of this stuff would soon be making the actual disks look like afterthoughts. A far cry indeed from the Ziploc baggies stuffed with hand-copied tapes and perhaps a mimeographed sheet of instructions of just a few years before.

Having dispensed with the externals, we’ll dive into Deadline the game next time.

Comments
3 Responses

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- Will Moczarski

March 15, 2020 at 1:49 am

I don’t think it’s fair to write off “Curse of Crowley Manor” as nothing more than “Adventure in mystery clothing”. While “Mystery House” is a pretty cumbersome game, Jyym Pearson’s effort contains a lot of innovations with his ongoing attempts to add more properly narrative elements to text adventures. His games have their own parser with an emphasis on a sensual exploration of the gameworld while “Crowley Manor” already contains a plethora of his trademark “cutscenes”. It’s not an excellent game but a very elegant one, and in many respects (from the opening through to the endgame) it’s very different from the original “Adventure”.

Playing Deadline, Part 1
July 13, 2012

I thought we would dive into Deadline today. But first just a couple of caveats.

I’m not going to provide the game for you to download or play online this time. There are signs that Activision, the current owner of the Infocom intellectual property, perceives their games to still have some commercial value, and I don’t want to ruffle any feathers or jeopardize any possible future plans. I’m sure most of you are enterprising enough to find the game elsewhere online — and, as long as Activision doesn’t make it available by some other means, I don’t blame you for going that route. I just don’t think that hosting it here is a wise choice.

Also, I’m going to spoil Deadline rather more aggressively than I did previous games. I don’t know how to avoid doing that in this game where the story really is the puzzle. So, if you want to try to solve Marshall Robner’s murder on your own, maybe set these posts aside until after you’ve played. They’ll still be here after you’ve finished or given up in frustration. (And believe me, you will be frustrated…)

So, let’s get started!

The documents included with the game set the stage. A wealthy entrepreneur and philanthropist, Marshall Robner, was found dead the previous morning in his library. The cause of death was an overdose of an antidepressant that Robner had recently begun taking; his business had fallen on hard times, and he was very stressed and unhappy about it. The door to the library was still locked from the inside, and the body was unmarked. Altogether, everything seemed to point to suicide. There was just one factor that raised the concern of Robner’s lawyer, Mr. Coates: Robner had called him just three days before to tell him that he was changing his will. Coates had expected him to come to his office very soon with the new will, likely the very day the body was discovered. He has therefore asked us, the “Chief of Detectives,” to poke around the house one more time the day after the regular police finished their investigations with a verdict of suicide. We have just 12 hours, from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM; thus the name of the game. Time passes at the rate of one minute per turn.

Let’s return yet again to this notion of the story itself being the puzzle in Deadline. To solve the game requires coming to an understanding of how the story as a whole plays out, so that you the player can be in the right place at the right time to affect it. It requires, in other words, plotting the flow of the dynamic system that is Deadline as a whole. That in turn requires lots of experimenting, restoring and restarting, and learning from failure as you slowly make up a master plan of exactly what needs to be done and, just as importantly, when, in order to keep advancing toward the winning end. It’s true that Deadline is more realistic and more story-oriented than Zork. However, that very realism is pretty brutal, adding the whole new dimension of time to the player’s concerns. Deadline is no less a puzzle box than Zork. It’s just a different kind of puzzle box, that requires a different sort of thought process. While we could do very well in Zork just solving the individual puzzles as inspiration came, we have to always be thinking about the whole in Deadline. Over the course of many plays, we deduce how the holistic system works and how to manipulate it to our desired ends. It’s nothing less than a whole new paradigm of play for adventure games.

A good first step is to map out the geography of the Robner estate. In a clear sign that this is going to be a different sort of adventure, every single room is accessible to us from the very start, with only one exception which we’ll come to later. It’s also very modest in size compared to the Zorks, only about 50 locations divided between the inside of the house and the outside surroundings. Nor are there any mazes or other time-wasters, just an ordinary house with about what you would expect to find there — in addition to a smattering of vital clues, of course. Much of the geography facilitates emergent behavior. There are, for instance, lots of closets to duck into to avoid being spotted by members of the household as they move down hallways. Rather than being the focus of the game, the geography and even the objects contained therein are the stage and props for the real action in Deadline.

In the midst of exploring and mapping, we also come upon each of our five possible suspects. A little bit of preliminary questioning, combined with the police interviews in the documentation, give a pretty good picture of the field. In standard golden-age fashion, we’ll find secrets and possible motives for murder in most of them over the course of our investigation. Indeed, Deadline is the first adventure game in which conversation plays a prominent role. To the extent that earlier games had conversation at all, it was limited to mouthing passwords and the like, or a simple TALK TO that yielded an infodump. Here, however, we must interrogate each person carefully to ferret out clues, and, later, to turn up the heat and trigger the guilty to out themselves. This also makes Deadline the first adventure to model, albeit in a very rudimentary way, the emotional state of the non-player characters. The list of firsts to which this game has claim is long and varied. Here’s another one for the list: after the rather awkward conversational constructions of Zork II, Blank for this game invented the conversational model that would stay with Infocom for the rest of the company’s lifetime. One can either type a character’s name, followed by a comma, followed by a question or demand (MRS ROBNER, TELL ME ABOUT GEORGE); or use an ASK X ABOUT X or TELL X ABOUT X construction.

Here’s what we know after asking everyone about everyone else and carefully reading through the printed interviews that came with the game:

Mr. Robner’s relationship with his wife was very strained in the years before his death. He was a good man in that he performed extensive public charitable works, but apparently very taciturn and rather a cold fish personally, especially in recent years. She, on the other hand, loves to entertain and socialize, and felt bored with and socially smothered by her husband. We pick up hints that she might have started to step out on old Marshall with other men. She says that it wasn’t unusual for her husband to spend the night working behind the locked door of the library, particularly of late with the business doing so poorly. She says she went to bed at her normal time, well before the time of death of approximately midnight, and slept soundly through the night. She discovered her husband in the morning, when he didn’t answer her knocks at the library door and she finally called the police to bash the door down.

About Mr. and Mrs. Robner’s only son, George, no one has anything good to say. At 26, he’s never held a job or accomplished anything else, and spends his nights boozing and his days sleeping. George is the only person who has an immediately obvious motive for killing Mr. Robner: the latter had finally decided to disinherit him, and this was almost certainly the reason for the change to the will. With strong motive and a universally recognized bad character, he has to be Suspect #1. (Of course, if you’ve read many mystery novels you know that the obvious suspect is virtually never the final killer.) He’s very uncooperative under questioning, but says he spent the entire night in his room except for ten minutes or so spent reading in the living room.

Ms. Dunbar was Mr. Robner’s live-in assistant, involved with every aspect of his work. Beyond being attractive, professional, and very competent she’s a bit of a cipher. She says she was out with a friend on the night in question, returning about 10:30. At 11:00, she brought Mr. Robner some tea, a normal routine. This makes her apparently the last person to see him alive. However, the teacup in the room has already been analyzed, and contained nothing other than the expected traces of tea and sugar.

Mrs. Rourke is the family housekeeper. She’s a matronly sort who’s something of a gossip — which can make her a very interesting information source for us. She says she was in her room all night, which unlike the others is on the ground floor of the house. Since her room is close to the very squeaky staircase, and since she was up until 4:00 with a juicy novel, she can confirm that no one went up or down the stairs after Dunbar brought Mr. Robner his tea and then retired herself — i.e., from roughly 11:00 until 4:00.

Mr. Baxter shows up at the house at 9:55 on the day of our investigation to lend his support to the family and for a reading of the will that is scheduled for noon. He was the business partner of Mr. Robner for some 25 years, yet claims to have considered him a colleague rather than a friend. Still, by all accounts the two men worked well together, and had both been trying desperately to save the business. Like Dunbar, he’s described as reserved, smart, professional, and not much else. He claims to have attended the symphony alone on the night of Mr. Robner’s death, and not to have been at the Robner house for some days before that event.

More soon! And if you haven’t played Deadline and want to guess or speculate about the killer in best Wheatley-crime-dossier style as these posts unfold, feel free.

Comments
9 Responses

- David

July 14, 2012 at 3:16 am

I think Deadline and Suspect were the only Infocom games that I didn’t come anywhere close to completing without heavy reliance on walkthroughs. From the beginning, it was clear in both cases that a numbing number of replays would be required to solve the game unassisted. Even Suspended, which has strong similarities to the mysteries, didn’t seem as punishing. Witness was a much smaller game, in terms of locations and moves to solve, and seemed to get the mystery idea right for my taste. It’s telling that Infocom did most of its experimenting with this story-as-puzzle format early on and abandoned it by the midpoint of its oeuvre. (Sherlock, a late “mystery” entry, was really a treasure hunt in disguise.
I think there’s a case to be made that the story-as-puzzle game wasn’t revived until Andrew Plotkin’s IF Comp winner “A Change in the Weather,” a very short game indeed.

- Jimmy Maher

July 14, 2012 at 10:31 am

Yeah. The mysteries are amongst the most complex and realistic of Infocom’s games as systems (or stories). The problem, to the extent you consider it one, is indeed that it becomes so easy to miss things thanks to the dynamic nature of the storyworld. It’s a problem Infocom never came close to solving.

I’m not sure I would make habit of playing games like Deadline, but I can appreciate a game like this occasionally on its merits, where restarting and restoring and slowly mapping out the story as a system are really the heart of the experience. That sort of play is, however, very unfashionable today, and seems to have grown increasingly unpopular even in Infocom’s time, if we take as evidence the fact that each of the mysteries sold fewer copies than the previous — until, as you say, Infocom just gave up on the format.

- Nathanael

March 6, 2021 at 5:45 am

I never got very far in Infocom’s “big three” mysteries; oddly, in Deadline and Witness I worked out what had happened, but not how to *prove* it. The evidence-collecting side of the puzzle was brutal, and I got stymied by guess-the-command in a late part of Witness. I never even got close to that far in Deadline. Moonmist was far more manageable. The style was gorgeous but their reach exceeded their grasp in the first three mysteries…

- Sven

October 2, 2013 at 9:18 am

Playing the game now for a few hours reminds me of playing Sierra´s “The Colonel´s Bequest”. While not so punishing as Deadline, you could also miss most of the story in this game by simply beeing not at the right place at the right time.

- Rob Lyons

August 2, 2016 at 2:42 am

A bit late to this party, but the site has been a joy to read, and very educational.

Reading about Deadline reminds me heavily of the Sega CD game Night Trap, and I now see what they were really trying to do with Night Trap.

I’ll also admit that I rather enjoyed that game, and it was the first time my 12 yr old self ever did a mapping for a game. Although in Night Trap’s case, it was marking the “time X location” instead of twisting caves.

- Will Moczarski

March 24, 2020 at 3:39 pm

We have have just 12 hours
-> have

In a clear sign that is going to be
-> it is going to be?

- Jimmy Maher

March 26, 2020 at 9:58 am

Thanks!

- Ben

June 22, 2020 at 6:25 pm

Marshal Robner -> Marshall Robner

- Jimmy Maher

June 23, 2020 at 11:06 am

Thanks!

Playing Deadline, Part 2
July 16, 2012

Having gotten the lay of the land and gotten a pretty good picture of the suspects, the victim, and their relationships with one another in my last post, we’ll restart today and begin investigating in earnest in the library, the scene of the crime itself. The body has of course already been hauled away, but otherwise most of what we find there is as expected from the descriptions included with the documentation. Some careful investigating, however, reveals a few vital clues that the police have overlooked.

A close look at the carpet shows a trail of mud leading from the adjoining balcony door to the position where the body was found. Going out onto the balcony, we find that one of the railings has been scuffed. Suddenly the solution to at least the locked-door part of this mystery looks pretty clear. A blank pad of paper is on the desk, along with a convenient pencil. Anyone who’s ever played an adventure game knows what to do when she sees those two things together. Sure enough, rubbing the pad with the pencil unveils fragments of the last message that Mr. Robner wrote on it:

Baxter,

st time
nsist             op       merg
mnidy               Oth
forc
ocumen     y poss
plica     y      Focus s
recons
late!
rsha

Mr. Robner’s desk calendar is still open to the day of his death, showing that he had a meeting that afternoon with Baxter. Turning the page to the next day, we see that he had planned to deliver his new will to Coates on the morning his body was discovered. From all this we can feel pretty confident that it was in fact a murder (as if we were in doubt…), that the murderer entered and exited via the balcony, and that George is a more likely candidate than ever — although it would be nice to know what that note to Baxter said in its entirety.

Rifling through our suspects’ bedrooms — apparently our assignment gives us authority to go and search wherever we like — turns up some seemingly innocuous items that will become important later. In George’s room we find (no surprise) some liquors; in the Robners’ room two kinds of allergy medication prescribed to Mrs. Robner; and in Dunbar’s room some blood-pressure medication along with cough medicine and aspirin.

While we are likely still in the midst of all this, at 9:07, the first of the game’s timed events fires: the phone rings. If we are smart, and near a telephone, we can be the one to answer it.

>answer telephone
You take the phone and hear a man's voice, which you don't recognize, say "Hello? Is Leslie [Mrs. Robner] there?" You start to reply, but Mrs. Robner picks up the phone from another extension and hears you speak. "I've got it, inspector," she says. "Hello? Oh, it's you. I can't talk now. I'll call you back soon. Bye!" You hear two clicks and the line goes dead.

Mrs. Robner now makes for her bedroom to return this obviously very private call. If we realize what she’s doing, we can make our own way to another extension and listen in as she returns the call.

>answer telephone
You can hear Mrs. Robner and a man whose voice you don't recognize. Robner: "...really much too early to consider it."
Voice: "But we couldn't have planned it better. You're free."
Robner: "Yes, but it will... Wait a second ... I think ..."
"Click." You realize that the call has been disconnected.

Very interesting stuff. It looks like Mrs. Robner does indeed have a paramour. “We couldn’t have planned it better” is quite ambiguous, no? Does it mean that Mr. Robner’s death was a happy accident that they couldn’t have planned better, or that their planned murder literally could not have been better, having gone off so perfectly? It seems that Mrs. Robner is guilty of being a cold-hearted bitch. But is she guilty of murder? We shall see…

When my wife and I were playing the Dennis Wheatley dossiers together, we struggled with some things that a contemporary reader probably would not have: cues like the different appearance in photographs of a “safety razor” versus a (rather alarming sounding) “cut-throat razor”. And then there were several feelies in the last dossier in particular which we just didn’t have a clue what the hell they were. Similarly, solving Deadline requires knowing something about how a land-line phone installation functions, and knowing it is possible to listen in on others from other extensions. I suspect that in not too many more years this will be forgotten, making Deadline even more difficult than it was meant to be if it should ever receive its equivalent of the dossiers’ reprint. Maybe there are already young people running around today who lack the necessary knowledge. It’s interesting and a little disconcerting how time marches on.

But speaking of time: at 9:55 Baxter arrives and proceeds to lounge around the living room waiting for the reading of the will at noon. Then, at 10:07, the next important plot event fires: the mail arrives. It’s critical that we be on the front porch at that time to accept delivery of the one letter that comes from the mailman, because we want to see what that’s about before its recipient can get her hands on it. Said recipient is Mrs. Robner; it’s pay dirt, a letter from her lover, who is apparently named Steven. (Not, then, as I first expected, Mr. Baxter.)

>read letter
"Dear Leslie,
I am sorry to learn that Marshall has been despondent again. His obsessive interest in business must be causing you terrible anguish. It doesn't surprise me that he talks of suicide when he's in this state, but he's full of such stupid talk. I think the thought of the business going to Baxter after he's gone will keep him alive.
George has finally gone too far, eh? After all those empty threats, Marshall actually followed through. It serves the little leech right too, if you ask me. This means that should the unthinkable happen, you will be provided for as you deserve.
I'll see you Friday as usual.

Love,
Steven"

While pretty much confirming the affair, the letter if anything tends to weaken any theory of the murder as a conspiracy of the two lovers. Not only did Steven give no hint of any plan in the offing, but the fact that the new will was due to be delivered to Coates gave the lovers every reason to at least delay until that was done, and Mrs. Robner was guaranteed all rather than half of Mr. Robner’s fortune. (There certainly seems to be no love lost between her and her son.) No, this rather tends to point the finger of suspicion back toward George.

At 11:20 the newspaper comes.

>examine newspaper
The Daily Herald is a local paper in two sections. In your cursory look at the first, only a small obituary for Mr. Robner can be found. It retraces some of his career, going into some detail about the formation of Robner Corp. A few years ago, Mr. Robner and the Robner Corp. were given a prestigious award for works in the community. At that time Robner said "I am proud to accept this award for the Corporation. Robner Corp is my whole life, and I will continue to guide it for the public interest as long as I am living." Robner himself had won great public acclaim for his charitable works and community service.

>read second section
In your study of the second section, a small item in the financial section catches your eye. It seems that a merger between Robner Corp. and Omnidyne is set to be concluded shortly. There is a picture of Mr. Baxter with Omnidyne president Starkwell, both smiling broadly. Mr. Baxter is quoted as saying that the deal will enable the financially ailing Robner Corp. to continue to produce the highest-quality products. The article points out that Mr. Marshall Robner, who founded Robner Corp. but no longer is its major stockholder, had been found dead yesterday morning, an apparent suicide victim. Mr. Baxter was quoted as saying that he knew that Mr. Robner was in full agreement with the terms of the merger deal.

That phrase “as long as I am living” sounds ominous, and we’re beginning more and more to have a sense that something was not quite right between Mr. Robner and Baxter.

In the midst of making sure we are at the right place at the right time for these timed events, we should also be completing our careful examination of the house and its grounds. On the latter we find a gardening shed containing a muddy ladder (no pun intended), another innocuous object that will prove very important. We also meet a new character, the crusty old gardener Mr. McNabb, who does not live in the house or have much to do with its inhabitants and who is not considered a suspect. He is, however, vital to our investigation. A little observation will reveal that McNabb is very upset about something, and it’s not Mr. Robner’s death. A little more will reveal that someone apparently trampled all over his rose garden. We need to talk with him to learn where exactly the roses were damaged. He shows us the spot — directly below the balcony of the library. Things are becoming even clearer, especially when we compare the ladder’s feet to two holes we find in the ground there, and get a perfect match.

And now we come to the dodgiest moment in the game, the one place where it crosses from gleeful but fair cruelty (which it possesses in spades) to the sort of unfairness that was so rife in other adventure games of its era. We need to somehow divine that it’s possible to interact with the ground here, and dig three times. Doing that turns up the key clue of the game, a fragment of porcelain of the sort used in the Robners’ teacups. Sure enough, counting the cups in the kitchen reveals that, even accounting for the one still in the library, one is still missing. Everything that follows hinges on finding this fragment. Given how easy it is to miss by even the most diligent player, I suspect that this is the vital piece missed by most who attempt to solve the game, and thus the primary reason for its reputation for extreme difficulty.

So, now we have a pretty good idea how the crime was committed: the tea that Dunbar delivered to Mr. Robner must have been poisoned somehow, by her or someone else, with an overdose of his antidepressant medicine. (Significantly, George was downstairs for 10 minutes while she was making the tea.) Then someone climbed onto the balcony and into the library to replace the poisoned teacup with another, the one the lab already analyzed to find only the expected traces of tea and sugar. This same someone must have dropped the old cup while making his or her way back down the ladder, breaking it. He or she gathered the pieces as best as possible, but missed this one in the dark and stress. The puzzle, of course, is who this someone could have been. Rourke has confirmed that Mrs. Robner, George, and Dunbar must all have been snug in their beds by the time Mr. Robner died, and it’s hard to see Rourke herself climbing a ladder and vaulting a balcony railing.

Luckily, we have another ability at our disposal that I’ve heretofore neglected to mention: we can make use of the police laboratory. When we do so, a hyper-efficient fellow named Sergeant Duffy, who would become a kind of running joke with Infocom, featuring in their later mystery games as well, sweeps onto the scene to carry the object in question off to the lab; 30 minutes or so later he sweeps back in with a report. We can check an object for fingerprints (all suspects are on file), analyze it for oddities in general, or analyze it for a specific substance. As far as I know the first possibility is a red herring; I couldn’t find any useful prints on anything. The second can turn up some useful tidbits, although nothing absolutely vital. The third, however, is vital. Remember all those innocuous ingestables we found in the suspects’ bedrooms? We need to have Duffy analyze the fragment for each of those substances to see if we can learn anything more.

Comments
27 Responses

- Tale

July 16, 2012 at 2:50 pm

Non-native Speaker question: Where’s the pun in muddy ladder?

- Jimmy Maher

July 16, 2012 at 2:59 pm

The pun is “latter” and “ladder,” which both sound the same in spoken English.

- Stephen

July 16, 2012 at 8:11 pm

I’m a native English speaker and I didn’t understand it. Those two phonemes aren’t merged in all (most?) English dialects…

- Anthony

July 16, 2012 at 10:11 pm

I think you mean in English spoken with an American accent.

- matt w

July 21, 2012 at 8:25 pm

It’s not entirely true in North American English either. In my undergrad linguistics class I was taught that when either “t” or “d” occurs between vowels, it’s transformed to a sound called an alveolar flap. The wikipedia article on intervocalic alveolar flapping suggests that this primarily takes place in North American and Australian English.

However, a vowel is lengthened slightly when it occurs before a voiced consonant (one that makes your vocal cords vibrate), and this effect occurs before the consonant is transformed into an alveolar flap. Since “d” is voiced and “t” isn’t, the first vowel sound in “ladder” is slightly longer than in “latter,” even though in North American English the consonantal sounds are the same.

I expect that there’s an Infocom game which makes use of this fact.

- Simon

July 16, 2012 at 11:37 pm

A hint to the thoroughness and care Infocom took for this game: “It’s too bad that the ladder analysis department closes at noon”.

- Lisa

December 12, 2013 at 6:21 am

Simon, could you explain this more? There’s an item in the For Your Amusement section of the Invisiclues about having the ladder analyzed after noon (giving the response you note), which is followed with the parenthetical “(Can you guess why this happens?)”. I’m stumped as to why noon is a dividing line. Does something change elsewhere in the game at noon? I haven’t been able to figure it out.

- ChipH

February 15, 2014 at 3:25 pm

Lisa…

The ladder is needed by one of the characters in one of the possible end games. If Duffy has it out for analysis, it would mess up that scenario. So it’s not available for analysis after noon.

Volker Lanz did an inform 6 port of Deadline (with Activision’s approval) and his source code is a great (albeit lengthy) read. You can find it at the ifarchive: http://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXsourceXinform.html

- Lisa

February 18, 2014 at 8:44 pm

I see, Chip, thanks!

- Christian Moura

July 17, 2012 at 1:14 am

Reading your great playthrough of the game, I can see how much it was an influence on my favourite IF game – Jon Ingolt’s ‘Make it Good’. Nice.

- Mark

July 17, 2012 at 6:38 pm

JIm, a few months ago I wrote a article which was a comparison of Deadlline and Make It Good. I was wondering if you had time to look at my review and offer me suggestions. My review mentioned many of the innovations about deadline that your earlier blog entries mentioned, such as feelies.

Christian you might not agree with my critique of Make It Good. While it is a ambitious attempt there are some flaws in the logic of the story. Particularly regarding the ending.

- Jimmy Maher

July 18, 2012 at 1:15 pm

It sounds to me like you might be rather overthinking this. Why not just make your review/critique public? IFDB (http://ifdb.tads.org) or the Interactive Fiction Forums (http://www.intfiction.org/forum/) are both great venues that will give the opportunity for direct, immediate feedback (something that was painfully absent with SPAG). Feel free to link to your review from the comments here when you do. That should drive quite some additional traffic its way. As you can already see from Christian’s comment, people here are curious what you have to say — and they already know, perhaps more than they want to, what I think about Deadline. :)

- Christian Moura

July 17, 2012 at 10:51 pm

Where can I read your review, Mark?

- Mark

July 17, 2012 at 11:39 pm

It has not been published anywhere. I was hoping that Jim who would look at it paper and offer suggestions for revision.

- J.P. McDevitt

April 16, 2013 at 8:05 am

I have been playing the game sort of in tandem with reading your articles. For what it’s worth, I had very little trouble figuring out to search the soil 3 times. Once we know there’s porcelain there (clue on the first “search”), most players will “get porcelain”, “find porcelain”, “get soil” etc. until they finally just try “search soil” again.

I never got that letter – that’s a much more obnoxious “puzzle” to me than the soil thing. It requires being in the right place at apparently the exact right time. Meaning that the correct gameplay would involve standing in every possible location and “wait”ing the entire game, rinse and repeat. I also did not realize you could read the “second section”, although I do remember that thought briefly crossing my mind.

- Torbjörn Andersson

May 3, 2013 at 7:44 pm

Then someone climbed onto the balcony and into the library to replace the poisoned teacup with another, the one the lab already analyzed to find only the expected traces of tea and sugar.

Actually, the cup only has a trace of tea. The saucer has traces of both tea and sugar, which is another clue that the cup has been replaced. (I seem to recall that being an “aha!” moment for me back when I first played the game, but that may be wishful thinking.)

- Dan Weber

July 17, 2014 at 2:15 am

I’m going through the game myself (having found your Ultima IV review, and clicked through eventually to “Deadline”, and taking your advise to try and solve this game as an adult). Digging in the garden was pretty quick for me to accomplish, once I realized I could get McNabb to show me the holes.

The really hard part was that I didn’t realize how lame my lab is. They won’t identify LoBlo on the teacup or in the body even if I send them a sample of LoBlo — no, I have to tell the lab to analyze the fragment for LoBlo explicitly, and then it all falls together for them. I had to look that one up.

On the teacup, there is also a fundamental disagreement in the source material: according to the feelies it was analyzed in the lab, but in the game it’s lying upside-down at the crime scene. The one in the lab had the fingerprints of Marshall (Robner) and Dunbar. The one on the scene has only Marshall’s fingerprints. I don’t think this a clue, just an oversight in production, and an unfortunate one.

On the ladder: it teleports a lot. At 11:55 it teleports to the orchard path. It teleports there even if Duffy has it for investigation, and when Duffy returns he teleports it back into your inventory. I think there are more teleportations I haven’t figured out yet, especially in (what I think is) the end-game.

On finding the letter: after a few plays I just decided to follow each player around for the entire day. I had already noticed the letter a few times, but it’s pretty explicit how it gets passed between two characters. I’m not sure how necessary it is for game completion since (it seems) that Leslie isn’t a part of it. I might need it for someone else, though.

I’m a little stuck so I’m going through your review part by part looking for little clues.

- Juho

July 13, 2016 at 12:40 am

This was a great series, thanks! Really fun reading this straight after finishing the game.

Having to do the detailed analysis on the fragment was the biggest problem for me too, like for Dan Weber.

Finding the fragment was not a big deal. “search ground” was a very natural command after locating the holes. I was actually hoping to find footprints, but got what was clearly some kind of a hint. The way you figure out it can be done multiple times is that it’s not necessarily an action that needs to be repeated 3 times. The results come up in a random order. So as long as you do multiple searches on separate playthroughs (a reasonable thing), you’ll notice that the results aren’t consistent. From there just experimentation about why the results change will lead you to repeating the command.

The arrival of the letter is also gentler than suggested here; you don’t need to be handed the letter, there’s a decent window during which it can be picked up in the lobby.

- Michael S.

January 31, 2017 at 9:11 pm

Really enjoyed finding this. I loved this game way back when, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who experimented with that absurd things you could make the game do. Here are two I remember, one related to comments upthread about the ladder.

Typically, the game would not allow you to bring the ladder into the house. However, if you were holding it when Mrs. Robner let you in, you could get it in that way. But since the ladder needed to be outside for one of the possible endings to work, Mr. McNabb would appear and take it from you wherever you happened to be — even if you were in an upstairs hallway closet!

Also, the lawyer Mr. Coates would appear for at most 10 minutes to do the will reading. However, you could delay this for hours by repeatedly calling his name. Then, after you spent five hours calling him and him turning to look at you, he would then go on to do the will reading. The description of the will reading would be exactly the same as if it happened at noon, including a reference to George’s reaction — even though at this point in the day, George isn’t even in the room!

- Ben Finney

June 10, 2018 at 11:46 pm

“Mrs. Robner was guaranteed all rather then half of the Mr. Robner’s fortune.” — should be “[…] rather than half […]”.

- Jimmy Maher

June 11, 2018 at 10:40 am

Thanks!

- Torbjörn Andersson

September 30, 2018 at 4:39 pm

The transcript of “read second section” doesn’t use a monospaced font, unlike the other such transcripts. Probably the same problem that was pointed out for part 3 of this article series?

- Jimmy Maher

October 1, 2018 at 12:02 pm

Thanks!

- Will Moczarski

April 19, 2020 at 7:55 pm

all rather than half of the Mr. Robner’s fortune
-> half of Mr. Robner’s?

another ability at are disposal
-> at our / at disposal?

- Jimmy Maher

April 20, 2020 at 1:05 pm

Thanks!

- Michael

July 16, 2020 at 12:00 am

So, now we have a pretty idea how the crime was committed
> pretty good idea?

- Jimmy Maher

July 16, 2020 at 8:47 am

Thanks!

Playing Deadline, Part 3
July 18, 2012

At the end of my last post we started analyzing the broken piece of porcelain we found below the library balcony for any trace of the various substances we found in the suspects’ bedrooms. While we’re keeping Duffy busy with that, the 12:00 will-reading rolls around, and everyone gathers in the living room along with Mr. Robner’s lawyer, Coates. It goes as expected. Because Mr. Robner had not yet delivered the promised new will to Coates before his death, the old must still be taken as in effect, dividing the estate equally between Mrs. Robner and George, who now sees even more lavish parties in his future. Coates does say, “Should a more recent will actually exist and be found within a reasonable period, the present one will be voided.” Sounds like a nudge to me.

We now can have a little fun by making almost everyone very uncomfortable using what we’ve already found out. Let’s start with Mrs. Robner.

>show letter to mrs. robner
"You have certainly stooped to a new low, haven't you, Inspector? Opening people's mail. I think there are laws against that sort of thing, but I guess you wouldn't know. I suppose you also know that Steven is my lover and that we were planning to be married. Don't look so melodramatic: I didn't kill my husband. You think my talk of divorce may have driven him to it? Why don't you leave me alone!"

>ask mrs. robner about steven
"I might as well tell you. Steven and I were lovers. We were going to be married as soon as I could divorce Marshall. I asked Marshall about it, but he became angry and refused. I didn't know what to do. Don't look at me that way. I had nothing to do with my husband's death. Driving him to it with talk of divorce? Hah! You didn't know Marshall, that's for sure! I should have told the police earlier, I suppose, but it's really none of your business."

This passage highlights an interesting aspect of Deadline: despite being ostensibly set in then-current times, it doesn’t feel like 1982. The way that Mrs. Robner is so plainly subservient to her husband; the way everyone is referred to as Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So instead of her first name; the rather patrician lifestyle of the family; the way that Dunbar, a supposedly professional and competent woman integral to the running of Mr. Robner’s business, was still expected to serve him his tea at 11:00 each night; even some of the language choices, such as Mr. Robner being a noted “industrialist” — all make this story feel like an artifact of Dennis Wheatley’s heyday, another sign of the huge influence the crime dossiers had on the whole project. Now we have a husband “refusing” to let his wife divorce him.

And Mrs. Robner is of course right, not only about our mail tampering (which should constitute a federal crime if I’m not mistaken) but about our behavior in general. If all detectives could behave like we do in Deadline, most Law and Order plots would be a hell of a lot simpler. A postmodern implementation of Deadline might let us identify the killer, only to throw the case out and throw us in jail because of all the laws we broke getting there.

Anyway, we’ve discovered that Mrs. Robner certainly had her secrets, but it still doesn’t quite seem to add up to murder somehow. Baxter is even less satisfying, shrugging his shoulders at the fragment of a note, claiming never to have seen it and not to know what it could be about. With George, though, we score:

>turn calendar
It is open to July 8.
There is only one notation here, under the 9AM column: "Call Coates: Will completed".

>show calendar to george
"I ... uh ... I don't really know what to say. I guess that maybe Dad ... but there is no other ... I can't help you ... sorry." George appears to be quite agitated.
"I've... got to be going now. I'll see you later," George says. He starts to leave.
George heads off to the east.

What follows is a delicate cat-and-mouse chase, in which we need to trail George through the house without spooking him so much that he doesn’t do what he wants to do next. Here the emergent possibilities that I mentioned in my first post really come to the fore; we can duck into closets and the like (or not), and George will react accordingly. Like so much in this game, it takes a number of restores and some careful time management to get right. When we do so, however, he leads us to a secret room — naturally, behind the bookshelves in the library. And, if we time our bursting in on him just right, we catch him next to an open safe, Mr. Robner’s new will in hand. Sure enough, it disowns George, leaving the entire estate to his mother. Presumably George meant to destroy it before it was discovered by someone else.

Still, we haven’t really proven much more than that. George apparently didn’t know the new will had actually been completed until we brought it to his attention in the living room. Then, knowing it must be in his father’s secret safe, he acted impulsively and desperately to get rid of it. We’re far from proving murder. George doesn’t seem smart enough to have come up with the subtly diabolical plot the murder increasingly looks to have been. And, barring a co-conspirator, it’s hard to see how he could have pulled it off, given Rourke’s testimony that he didn’t come down from his room after 11:00.

Given all that, of more ultimate importance than the new will are the other papers we find in the safe.

>examine safe
A stack of papers bound together is in the safe.

>examine stack
In leafing through these papers, it becomes obvious that they are documents that incriminate Mr. Baxter in wrongdoings regarding the Focus scandal. They document funds which were embezzled by Mr. Baxter and give a general idea of how the scandal was hushed up. This evidence should be sufficient to convict Mr. Baxter in the Focus case.

There’s a solid motive here. But let’s not jump to conclusions too fast. By this time Duffy’s lab runs have turned up another key piece of information. The fragment of porcelain found in the rose garden contains traces of the blood-pressure medication Dunbar is taking.

>read report
Dear Inspector,

In response to your request for analysis of the cup fragment, we have found a considerable quantity of a drug called Methsparin, which is occasionally sold in this country under the name "LoBlo". It is a blood pressure lowering agent used in Europe, but infrequently used here, which explains the oversight in our blood analysis of the deceased. A review of that blood reveals a high blood level of Methsparin. While the amount of Methsparin in the blood is not dangerous in itself, a strong interaction between it and various other drugs has been well documented. As you may have gathered, one of those drugs is Amitraxin (Ebullion). The effect of Methsparin is to displace drugs from protein binding sites, leaving more free in the blood and simulating an overdose.

Your new evidence leads me to conclude that the cause of death of the deceased is Amitraxin toxicity secondary to ingestion of Methsparin and Amitraxin in combination.

Sincerely,

Arthur Chatworth, Pathologist

Marc Blank’s other life — as you may remember, he graduated from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, only to drop out of his internship to come to Infocom — comes through for him here. I asked my doctor wife, who normally gets as frustrated with depictions of medicine in fictions as I do with depictions of computers and hacking, whether the above made sense. She said it made perfect sense in theory, although she doesn’t know of any drugs with that effect which actually exist.

With two new favorite suspects, we set what we’ve learned before them to see what we can turn up.

>show stack to baxter
He reads slowly and leafs through the pages. "I'm afraid I have not been altogether candid with you. There was some trouble a few years ago with Focus Corp. because of some, let us say, irresponsible dealings on my part. Marshall agreed to cover up my involvement to save the company from bad publicity."

"I can't understand why he would be insisting that I do this or that, though, as it seems to say on that note you showed me. He must have changed his mind, however, since I never received the note."

>ask baxter about merger
"Ah! I didn't realize you had an interest in finance. Before Marshall died, we agreed that the only reasonable way to protect our interests was to be bought out by a larger company which would be able to provide us with more capital for expansion. I had been talking to people at Omnidyne and we agreed in principle on the terms for such an agreement last week. I am hopeful that we can accomplish the deal quickly."

Mrs. Robner, however, already told us that her husband was not in favor of the deal. As for Dunbar, her denial and attempt to cast the blame on everyone’s favorite scapegoat are quite feeble:

>show report to dunbar
She seems stunned but recovers quickly. "He didn't commit suicide, then?" she says. "But LoBlo, that's a pill that I take for my blood pressure." She pauses. "I can tell what you're thinking, but I didn't, couldn't have done it. Why should I? Someone must have taken them, maybe George. He knew I used them."

Flustered, she soon leaves the room. If we follow, we see her conveniently drop a ticket stub — to the same symphony that Baxter claimed to have attended alone on the night of the murder. When we ask each about it separately, we find they’ve failed to get their stories entirely straight.

>show stub to baxter
"Ah, that must be Ms. Dunbar's ticket stub. I should have told you earlier. Ms. Dunbar was with me at the concert on the night that Marshall killed himself. She became ill at intermission time and hired a car to take her back home. You see, Inspector, I know how much Ms. Dunbar appreciates classical music, and I occasionally ask her along with me to my subscription series. I really should have told the other detective, but I didn't think it mattered."

>show stub to dunbar
"Oh, I ... well, I guess I should tell you. You see, Mr. Baxter and I, we go together to concerts, only occasionally, you understand. We went that night, the night Marshall died. And then he took me home and that's it. I should have said something before, I know. I just didn't think it was important, and, well, I didn't think that the others should know that we were seeing each other socially. Our ... nobody knows about it, you know. Please don't say anything!"

What are they hiding? If Dunbar’s version is the truth, Baxter was in fact at the house that night. And in either case, it seems their relationship was much closer than anyone associated with them had previously believed.

At this point the ultimate answer to the puzzle of Mr. Robner’s murder is becoming pretty clear. We’ll lock the case down with one more piece of evidence next time, and also make room for some final thoughts on the whole experience.

Comments
4 Responses

- David Boddie

July 18, 2012 at 3:08 pm

The financial scandal aspect of Deadline reminds me of the plot for Corruption by Magnetic Scrolls. It would be interesting to know if Deadline had an influence on that game, especially since Corruption also revolves around a series of events that occur at certain times.

- Ben Finney

June 10, 2018 at 11:44 pm

Some of the session transcripts are not correctly marked up, they appear the same as normal text:

“>ask mrs. robner about steven
“I might as well tell you.[…]”

“>show calendar to george
“I … uh … I don’t really know […]”

“>examine stack
In leafing through these papers, […]”

“Your new evidence leads me to conclude […]
Arthur Chatworth, Pathologist”

“>ask baxter about merger
“Ah! I didn’t realize you had […]”

“>show stub to dunbar
“Oh, I … well, I guess I should […]”

- Jimmy Maher

June 11, 2018 at 10:44 am

There have been theme changes since this was written. Sigh.

Thanks so much!

- Lisa H.

December 27, 2020 at 10:20 pm

The effect of Methsparin is to displace drugs from protein binding sites

I don’t know whether that is a real mechanism of action in so many words (although it does sound rather like “binds to X receptor and prevents Y transmitter from being taken up by it”), but the idea that Mr. Robner could have fatally overdosed on his usual antidepressant because of this kind of interaction is quite believable. A variety of drugs come with warnings not to eat grapefruit or certain other foods while taking them, because those foods contain an enzyme that inhibits metabolism of the drug, meaning that you can unintentionally “overdose” on your usual dose. In the case of antidepressants specifically, this can lead to “serotonin syndrome” which can indeed be fatal.

Playing Deadline, Part 4
July 20, 2012

We’re now closing in on the end game, tailing our two suspects, Baxter and Dunbar, as they move about the Robner estate. Succeeding at another cat-and-mouse chase lets us observe an urgent, whispered conference between the two inside the garden shed, although we can’t make out the actual words spoken. But that doesn’t matter. We have enough now to ARREST DUNBAR AND BAXTER and win the game. When we do so, Blank gives us the full story in classic Agatha Christie fashion.

Mr. Robner's life was his company, as was attested to by a number of the principals. George knew that Mr. Robner had lost control of the company, and a story in the Daily Herald indicated that Mr. Baxter intended to sell the company to Omnidyne, the multi-national conglomerate, presumably to advance his career. Baxter admitted to the merger plans, but indicated that Mr. Robner was in complete agreement. This is contrary to what George and Mrs. Robner said. The note pad found in the library was Robner's last, desperate attempt to save the company, in which Robner threatened to expose Baxter's involvement in the 'Focus' scandal, whose details are unclear. Baxter denied getting the note, but it was not in the trash. The papers detailing Baxter's criminality in the scandal were kept locked in a safe in a hidden closet near the library. Only George and Robner knew the whereabouts and the combination to the safe.

Baxter planned to murder Robner, playing on the fact that Robner was known to be depressed, even suicidal. He enlisted the help of his lover, Ms. Dunbar, one of whose medicines was found to interact fatally with the medicine Robner was taking. Clearly the relationship of Baxter and Dunbar was kept quiet, although Mrs. Rourke had an inkling of it. After the concert at the Hartford Philharmonic, which both Baxter and Dunbar attended, they returned to the Robner estate. Dunbar placed some LoBlo in Robner’s tea, and Robner died some time later. Baxter, using the ladder from the shed, entered the library after Robner had died and exchanged the incriminating cup for a clean one (counting the cups and saucers in the kitchen reveals that a cup is missing). Coming down the ladder, Baxter presumably dropped the cup and inadvertently left one piece on the ground in the rose garden, nearby where Mr. McNabb found the ladder holes while tending to his roses.

If we fail to arrest Baxter and Dunbar immediately after their conference, he, fearing she is about to confess, goes up to her room and shoots her, then tries to make it look like a suicide (obviously something of a standard modus operandi for him). After that we can only clean up the damage as best we can; at least we can, if we’ve collected sufficient evidence, now arrest him for two murders instead of one. Indeed, and while the full solution is damnably difficult to get to, Deadline does allow for partial success (or failure, depending on how you look at it). It features quite a number of different possible endings. Blank saw this as key to the new adventure paradigm it represented, and a remedy to his biggest frustration with the Wheatley crime dossiers. From a contemporary article in Softline:

Reading the old game books [the Wheatley dossiers], he knew he was on to something, except that at the end, the solution packet was not able to say, “No, you’re wrong; try again”; it simply gave you the answer. It was not interactive.

“We wanted to come up with something where you have action/reaction,” Blank recalls, “where you’re told the part that you’ve missed after you come up with a potential solution, and you can go back and try again.”

Of course, given the game’s legendary difficulty players would be trying again many, many times. In addition to that dodgy rose-garden puzzle, I believe we can point to three factors that make Deadline so hard to crack, perhaps sometimes unintentionally so.

One factor is the very dynamic nature of this storyworld, the same thing that made Deadline so innovative. By having things happen of their own accord, Deadline makes it all too easy to miss those things without even realizing anything ever occurred at all. What happens, for instance, if the player happens to be outside when the phone rings? In trying to craft an adventure that felt more like a real story, Blank ran somewhat afoul of something I’ll call “story logic”: many times in stories the protagonist simply happens to be in the right place at the right time. In a sense the player of Deadline must recreate this story logic, by carefully plotting out the movements of the world around her over many failed plays to deduce where the protagonist needs to miraculously be and when. Whether this is always, absolutely unfair is debatable. It obviously falls into the prohibition against needing “knowledge from past lives” in Graham Nelson’s Player’s Bill of Rights, but if we come to it understanding what kind of rules it’s guided by it can be very rewarding to plot out and crack as a system. This is the puzzle-box mode of play, of coming to understand the game as a system and then devising a plan to guide it where you will.

Another, less positive contributor to Deadline’s difficulty is that it’s very difficult to know where your investigation really stands much of the time. For example, when two suspects contradict one another, as did Baxter and Dunbar there at the end, that often counts as evidence that will weigh into the final verdict after you make your arrest(s). Yet it’s very difficult to determine what the program considers important and what it does not. Nor is there any way to tell whether you have enough to arrest someone without just trying it and seeing what happens. It all leads to a constant feeling of uncertainty and confusion, not just about the case (which is to be expected), but about just what the program knows about the case. Similar problems often dog even modern mystery implementations, although the opacity could be remedied greatly in a modern reimplementation of Deadline by a simple status screen with progress bars showing the progress of evidence collection. But Infocom didn’t have the resources to spare for such niceties.

Lastly, and least positively, there is a constant smattering of low-level bugginess, especially in the early releases of Deadline. It’s much, much harder to debug a dynamic system like Deadline than it was earlier, more static adventures, and Infocom’s QA processes were not yet what they would be in years to come. Sometimes this just leads to amusing oddities, like the “quantity of Scotch” you can pour out of the bottle and carry around with you. Other times it makes you kind of nervous as a player, uncertain whether you can entirely trust Deadline as a system, as when triggers don’t seem to fire and characters don’t react like you expect them to. In this new mode of play which Deadline represents, which absolutely depends on the game being a consistent and logical construct, such distrust can be deadly to the experience. The inconsistencies are perhaps not even entirely down to bugs, but at least in one case seem more the result of a certain authorial laziness. In the climax, it seems that Baxter simply teleports into Dunbar’s room to kill her rather than walking there, a stark violation of the game’s otherwise staunch commitment to realism. (I believe this at least was corrected in later versions.) At best, it all adds to that certain player uneasiness described in the previous paragraph. At worst, it destroys the player’s faith in the game as a solvable, consistent system.

In addition to the outright bugs, there are a million ways in which the game fails as fiction, most coming down, predictably enough, to character interaction. It’s possible to ask the same person about the same thing over and over, with the same response; to talk about one character with another while both are in the same room; to burst in on people in their bedroom or even bathroom without them seeming to notice or care. Still, given how difficult these problems still are for us even today, and given the game’s age and the technology on which it ran, it seems silly to quibble too much about this sort of thing.

No, better to talk about the strange fascination this dynamic little story-system still manages to inspire. Many who never managed to beat it nevertheless speak of it with a certain awe. Emily Short hit on some of its appeal with her review on the Interactive Fiction Database:

What captured my imagination then, and still has a certain appeal, is the recurring sense of excitement from observing without being observed: listening in on phone extensions, looking for secret rooms, following people. There was always the sense that important and significant secrets were hidden under every surface.

That sense of being thrust into an unfolding story was unheard of in adventure games prior to Deadline. Blank, from Softline again:

“In Deadline, we wanted to appeal to the nonfantasy people who would rather be part of a real story; people who always wanted to participate when they read the books. We designed the game to be open-ended and to have a large vocabulary, but at the same time, we didn’t want it too large and too open.”

Deadline demonstrates the first inklings of a deep rather than broad philosophy of design, in which the storyworld is more compact and focused, but filled with more possibilities for interaction and a deeper commitment to mimesis and realism. Few others were thinking about design on this level in 1982.

As something genuinely new under the adventuring sun, Deadline was greeted with great excitement. It became a deservedly major hit for Infocom, selling almost 25,000 copies in the last eight months of 1982 alone and helping to cement the company’s growing reputation as the most sophisticated and adult of adventure publishers. Today it stands as one of the most important of all the company’s games for its many formal innovations.

Next time I want to talk just a bit more about Infocom before we shift to something else for a while…

Comments
18 Responses

- Howard Lewis Ship

July 20, 2012 at 6:09 pm

A riff on Emily Short’s note, about observing interactions without being seen, recurs in more modern games; Deus Ex is my wife’s favorite, given that there are lots of NPC conversations you can overhear. I’m also a fan of the Splinter Cell games where such NPC conversations either add flavor, or are important to completing a level.

- Martin

May 31, 2016 at 1:56 am

Deus Ex actually has a scene early in the game where you might actually check out the women’s bathrooms while someone in in there. If you go in there, she’ll treat you like a creep later on while if you don’t, she treats you like a normal person. Your boss also tells you to keep out of the women’s bathroom too.

- Mark

July 28, 2012 at 4:42 pm

Very interesting review. Do you have a copy of this interview Marc Blank did?

I played this game for the first time last summer. The one thing I find very unfair is where you catch the son opening the safe. First,as you said,it is very easy to be unaware of the fact that this event happens in the first place. Secondly if you come in too soon or too late then you will not be able to find the papers that give Baxter a motive for the murder. And therefore be unable to win. It is not even possible to know that you need to find this. One could play this game without ever knowing that you barged in too soon. This is the biggest flaw in the game.

The second criticism you made about not knowing what the game expects of you is another problem. After showing the ticket and getting two different stories you are supposed to arrest Baxter and Dunbar. Here is the logical flaw I find in this part. There is certainly enough evidence to arrest her but the case against Baxter is circumstantial. The safe papers give a motive for and the contradiction about the alibi gives the possibility of opportunity. Neither one gives proof that he was involved in the murder. Her part might have a motive but we have physical evidence linking her to the crime.

And yes there is a physical evidence of a second person being involved with the broken china and the ladder. However that does not point to Baxter himself. It does suggest the person did not have access to the house but would eliminate the other suspects but this is not taken as proof by the game.

Despite these flaws I think the game actually is pretty good. If it was remade with these problems fixed up it would be a great game instead of a good one.

- Jimmy Maher

July 28, 2012 at 7:26 pm

Do you have a copy of this interview Marc Blank did?

The interview is in the September 1982 Softline, which is archived in PDF form at htp://cgw.vintagegaming.org.

The one thing I find very unfair is where you catch the son opening the safe.

It’s definitely tricky, but I’m not sure I’d call it outrageously unfair in comparison to the rest of the game. I think that the thoughtful player can probably realize that George is up to something when he hightails it from the will-reading, and also, when she bursts in on George struggling with the locked safe, that waiting a few more turns might have been a good idea. Of course, the latter is an outrageous example of learning by death, so if you consider that automatically unfair then so be it. (But then, in that case you’ll find plenty else to gripe about in Deadline.) Within the rules Deadline plays by, though… I think it’s passable. I sure wouldn’t implement a modern game this way, of course, and a modern player working with different expectations would be justifiably livid if she encountered it.

The second criticism you made about not knowing what the game expects of you is another problem. After showing the ticket and getting two different stories you are supposed to arrest Baxter and Dunbar.

Yes, I think you raise a good point here. You really have very little on Baxter, other than motive and opportunity, and little concrete motive on Dunbar. I kept looking for more when I played, which kept giving Baxter time to kill Dunbar. In the end I finally just typed ARREST DUNBAR AND BAXTER, fully expecting to not have enough to get two convictions. Surprisingly, I’d had all I needed all along.

You’re apparently meant to take the fact that Baxter dropped off Dunbar at the house as proof that he way there later, a sort of smoking gun. This seems quite a stretch to me. Even if Dunbar had indeed taken a cab home on her own, what’s to have prevented Baxter from coming by later? And even if he did drop her off, where’s the proof that he hung around until the murder was committed?

Oddly, these holes in the case could have been easily filled if it was just possible to overhear the content of the two’s urgent conversation in the garden shed. Perhaps Blank just judged that that would be making the game too easy. Go figure.

If it was remade with these problems fixed up it would be a great game instead of a good one.

While I cut the game a lot of slack due to its age and pioneering nature, a modern remake that was less persistently opaque about some things would indeed be cool to see.

- Mark

July 29, 2012 at 11:07 pm

The source of this game is available on Baf’s guide and the IFDB. Do you know any company that would be willing to do a remake? Assuming of course that Activision would allow them to do it. But if the source code is public domain it seems they are not too concerned. I would be willing to work on a remake with another person who would need to have much more inform programming experience than myself.

- Harry Kaplan

July 29, 2012 at 11:48 pm

The source code is not in public domain. Here is a link that will explain things – Volker Lanz sort of ported the original to Inform.

http://www.volker-lanz.de/interactive-fiction/infocoms-deadline-ported-inform

- Mark

July 30, 2012 at 7:23 pm

Thanks for the link. This was interesting. However isn’t inform the same language that was used by infocom in creating in Deadline. Graham Nelson basically reverse enginered Infocom’s original language. So except for some modern modifications like the undo command it is really the same language it was written in back in 1981.
So calling it ported is a bit of a stretch.

Maybe I am wrong. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

- Arthur

October 27, 2012 at 12:32 am

The link on Volker Lanz’s site seems to be dead, but his Deadline source code is still available on IFDB. http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=p976o7x5ies9ltdh

@Mark: Graham Nelson’s Inform is not at all similar to Infocom’s original source language. Remember, Infocom started out using MDL (later ZIL), a Lisp dialect. Contrariwise, Inform 6 is a “curly brace language” descended from C. Nelson’s Inform compiler does *output* the same Z-machine bytecode format used by Infocom, but the *input* language is totally different.

I vaguely recall that Nelson had to reverse-engineer the Z-machine’s specs from scratch, and didn’t have any inside information about ZIL; it was only many years later (in Internet terms) that official details of ZIL started appearing in the antiquarian community. :) See for example this internal Infocom manual from 1989: http://www.xlisp.org/zil.pdf

- Dan Weber

July 18, 2014 at 1:52 am

1. general issues

This game has parser problems, and not just from design decisions, like GARDEN and GARDENer being the same thing. When interacting with the ebullion, the game sometimes refuses to distinguish between the “bottle of ebullion tablets” and the “ebullion tablets,” necessitating dropping one of them in another room to properly interact.

As you said, Baxter seems to teleport. If you cheat you way into the bedroom balcony he’s not there, and if you happen to be sitting under the balcony, you can’t ever catch him.

I don’t know how to turn the calendar backwards, only forwards. “CLOSE CALENDAR” gives me a double ‘error’ message: “It’s not worth the effort” and “You must be very clever to do that do the calendar.”

Version 27 is missing critical abbreviations: “G” isn’t “AGAIN” and “Z” isn’t “WAIT”

You can accuse Marshall (the victim) of murder from anywhere.

You can “FOLLOW PERSON” to essentially teleport to them, even if you see them through a second story window.re

Oh, this has a very useful bug I also found in “Infidel”: You can “LOOK AT ALL”. (In “Infidel” you can “EXAMINE ALL”.) It makes finding every single thing in a room very fast.

2. rooms

Directions are very confusing. You can’t always tell in which direction something is. Trying to map the outdoors as going SOUTH then NORTH can land you in a different place.

The room description doesn’t always list exits. If you are in a bathroom, you can’t EXIT or LEAVE (although some rooms, like the dining room, recognize this). You need to say WEST if that’s where the door is, but the room description doesn’t say that.

I’m disappointed that there isn’t a traditional Zork-like map in the Invisiclues bundle.

3. easter eggs:

SNIFF SUGAR: There is no high from sniffing this powder.

MOLEST: You can do this (or something more aggressive) and sometimes the game reminds you of the criminal code, and sometimes you do it, and go to jail.

CLEAN WINDOW: You think you’re clever, don’t you? The window is so dirty that it isn’t easily cleaned.

You can turn the stereo on and off. This can trigger some kind of significant parser error when the song was supposed to end:

The vRobner vnggnt6wp qdoesn’t vsomething vv iare gdkgThere kseems yn has ended (and not soon enough).

I can take the book from Baxter but he still reads it. It seems to exist in a ghost state at this point.

I and Dunbar can both sit on the sofa, but LOOK AT SOFA asys there is nothing on the sofa.

GET ON CHAIR: This isn’t the kind of thing to sit on! (oh, kay.)

4. on the fairness of the game

I remember from my misspent youth that there was a way to make _someone_ panic after the will reading. Your walkthrough helped me remember to show the calendar to George.

I was lucky and on my first playthrough I opened the door on George at just the right time. But between opening it too soon (when he has nothing) and opening it too late (when he has the will) so I think I would have figured out that there was a proper time to open it.

I, too, was surprised that I just needed to say ARREST BAXTER AND DUNBAR. I didn’t even need both of them to be in the room when I said it! I did like the fact that I could feel myself getting closer and closer to the “right solution” when I would read the arrest reports and see just what more was needed for the jury to convict.

The game felt a little short. There was a breadth and difficulty of puzzles, but not much depth. Then again, I don’t think I ever solved it before, so I guess it took me decades to complete.

- Jimmy Maher

July 18, 2014 at 5:52 am

Deadline provides a very good negative demonstration of just how much Infocom’s rigorous testing and polishing regime added to the games, having been created before that regime was in place. I’d say it’s definitely the “roughest” of all the games. The Zorks and Starcross also pre-date the version of Infocom we would come to know and love, but, being much more traditional and less dynamic creations, there’s nowhere near as much to go wrong.

No game written for the standard Z-Machine, however, would have been able to distinguish GARDEN from GARDENER. For technical reasons, the parser only reads the first six letters of each word…

Thanks for sharing your experiences/impressions here!

- Lisa

July 19, 2014 at 5:59 am

I don’t know how to turn the calendar backwards, only forwards.

Turn the calendar to a specific date prior to the one currently showing, e.g. TURN CALENDAR TO JULY 6.

Directions are very confusing. You can’t always tell in which direction something is. Trying to map the outdoors as going SOUTH then NORTH can land you in a different place.

This is true of a number of locations across various Infocom games, though (and indeed IF in general). That said, I found the outdoor geography in Deadline unusually confusing as well.

- Dan Weber

July 19, 2014 at 7:42 pm

Ah, I can “TURN TO JULY 15”. That led to the following fun things:

>turn to july 0
Do you suppose that would be June 30?

>turn to july 31
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November,
All the rest have 31???

Looks like an off-by-one error on how many days in July.

Other fun things I found looking through the source code that weren’t mentioned in the Invisiclues:

>break china with basket
As you reach for the china, you think of the pension awaiting you upon retirement. “Is it worth it?” you think, to be booted off the force for an impulse of anger and stupidity. Fortunately, you calm your temper.

>break china with basket
With a sweep of your hand, you smash all of them! Mrs. Rourke runs into the room, screaming.

>kill baxter with gun
A shot rings out and Mr. Baxter falls to the ground, dead. Good shot.

>play player
You are adept only at playing the fool.

>sigh
It has been a long day, hasn’t it?

>hello
Good day.

- Lisa

July 21, 2014 at 7:07 am

Bug #22 here seems to address the stereo: http://www.microheaven.com/InfocomBugs/deadline.shtml

- Mike Taylor

November 1, 2017 at 11:51 pm

“it seems that Baxter simply teleports into Dubar’s room” — typo for “Dunbar”.

- Jimmy Maher

November 2, 2017 at 8:01 am

Thanks!

- Esrom

June 6, 2019 at 9:10 pm

Ah, Deadline. I still have a lot of nostalgia for this one. And yes, it basically requires you to be in the right place at the right time a LOT. I’m not sure which is the worse in this regard – Deadline or Suspect.

I stumbled upon the solution to the whole ‘George’ thing by accident. After following George, he stayed in his room telling me to leave him alone. Since I was getting nowhere with him, I wandered to the library balcony, and was surprised to see him enter when he thought I couldn’t see him. Up until that point, I hadn’t the slightest clue that what he was REALLY after was in the library and that anything suggesting it was in his room or elsewhere was just a red herring.

As for Baxter ‘teleporting’, well if you go into the master bedroom (directly across from the hall from Ms. Dunbar’s room) and ‘Look into balcony’ you’ll get ‘Mr. Baxter is here’ if he hasn’t already entered the master bedroom (if so, you can look into the master bedroom and get ‘Mr. Baxter is here’). From there, you can do one of three things:

1. surprise Baxter in by entering either the master bedroom or the master balcony before he kills Dunbar and be shot dead on the spot

2. hide in a closet in the hall if you’re there (or in the hidden room or the master bathroom) and then hear a pistol shot close by. Returning to the hall or the master bedroom will result in you seeing Baxter running quickly past without him noticing you. This is one of two ways to prove he committed the second murder.

3. ARREST BAXTER AND DUNBAR and end the case there.

As far as I know, it’s not possible to run into Baxter outside below the master balcony and catch him running down the ladder after killing Dunbar. I think he basically just teleports from up there to somewhere in the immediate outside vicinity.

As for bugs, I reported the ‘Mr. Robner’s ghost’ bug to Graeme Cree’s Infocom bugs list. I’m not sure if that’s still around or not.

Another bug is that you can give things to the characters by putting things inside them. Such as ‘PUT BOOK IN GEORGE’ and then look to see that ‘George is holding: a book’. However, when you try to give things to characters in the normal way (GIVE (whatever) TO CHARACTER), they will usually refuse.

- Will Moczarski

May 21, 2020 at 7:47 am

In the “Softline” quote it says Blanks which should merit a “sic!” or be corrected to Blank.

there are a million way -> ways

- Jimmy Maher

May 21, 2020 at 3:59 pm

Thanks!

The Zork Users Group
July 23, 2012

In an earlier post I described how the Zork Users Group was founded when Mike Dornbrook left Infocom’s Boston home for an MBA program at the University of Chicago, taking what essentially amounted to the company’s customer-relations division with him. ZUG was not alone. An entire aftermarket of companies dedicated to lending aid and comfort to players of other companies’ games was springing up around the same time, a sign of the health of the growing entertainment-software market even in the midst of an ugly recession. ZUG was unique, however, in having such a cozy relationship with Infocom. Many other publishers saw this burgeoning aftermarket as little better than parasites. Some of these attitudes were likely down to economic considerations; who wants to watch someone else sell hints you could be selling yourself? Others seem more down to control-freak tendencies and sheer bloody-mindedness. Luckily, ZUG didn’t have to deal with any of it.

Indeed, to say that ZUG had a privileged relationship with Infocom hardly begins to tell the story. Each Infocom game came with a card that the purchaser could send in to join ZUG. And not only did ZUG sell their own merchandise, but they also became official retailers of the Infocom games themselves, which they distributed through their catalogs along with all the other stuff. But, lest we get ahead of ourselves, let’s pick up the ZUG story from near the beginning.

Dornbrook’s initial plan for ZUG was to continue business as usual, sending out maps and hints from his new apartment in Chicago. However, without his erstwhile partner Steve Meretzky and with all the pressures of graduate school, that promised to be quite a challenge. Then, between leaving Boston and beginning his program in Chicago, Dornbrook spent a week with his parents at their home in Milwaukee. His father had just recently retired, and, seeing the problem, made a proposal: he could handle order fulfillment from the basement of the family home, leaving Mike free to answer hints and work on preparing new products from Chicago. Mike happily accepted, and so ZUG was officially established as a Milwaukee business. Mike’s mother also got involved as the mailing-list maintainer, which consisted at this time of about 1000 names and addresses on paper; as was still typical of these times, nothing about ZUG was computerized.

Once settled in Chicago, Dornbrook enlisted Meretzky to draw up a map for Zork II for sale alongside the existing Zork I map, and once again got his artist friend Dave Ardito to do the illustrations. In early 1982 Meretzky accepted an official job with Infocom as their first full-time play-tester. It was a perfect fit for his other gig as ZUG’s cartographer; he could know everything about the games’ geographies long before they were released. For the Deadline map, Meretzky drew upon his training as a construction manager, departing from the standard matrix of lines and rectangles to present the Robner estate as a set of architectural blueprints.

With a growing, hungry, and loyal Infocom fanbase to feed, ZUG also began branching out into unabashed novelty products. By the end of 1982 they were peddling not just games, maps, and hints, but also posters, tee-shirt iron-ons, bumper stickers, and buttons. In addition to sending out the order forms for their merchandise, they began a roughly quarterly newsletter to reach the fans and tell them about all the latest happenings in the worlds of ZUG and Infocom: The New Zork Times. I noted in an earlier post that much of what people remember as Infocom was really the work of their advertising firm, G/R Copy. Similarly, another big chunk of their public image was forged not in-house but rather by Dornbrook and friends through the auspices of ZUG.

Even as ZUG branched out in other directions, hints remained a constant thorn in Dornbrook’s side. As ZUG’s membership roles increased rapidly, he found it more and more difficult to keep delivering personalized responses to requests for hints on top of his studies and his other ZUG activities. He also found it increasingly dull, since most questions centered on the same handful of trouble spots. The obvious solution was to prepare some sort of standard hint booklet for sale, but he was loathe to do this, fearing it would be too easy for a player to spoil large swathes of the game for herself while looking for the answer to just one or two puzzles. Another, less idealistic concern was the knowledge that someone was certain to photocopy the hint booklets — or type them into their computer — and start passing them around as soon as he began to sell them. Yet it was also clear that manually dealing with hint requests would soon be not just impractical but impossible; if one thing looked obvious, it was that Infocom and ZUG were just beginning to take off. So, Dornbrook started looking for alternatives to a simple printed list of puzzle answers.

He considered using scratch-offs like are used for lottery tickets; offset-printed answers that could only be properly read through a pair of 3-D glasses; a little window that slid up and down the page, allowing the reader to only see a line or two at a time. Nothing proved practical. Then (from the extras DVD of Get Lamp):

I was at a party back in my home town with some friends of mine from high-school days. One of them had gone to pharmacy school at the University of Wisconsin. I was describing that I was trying to create these booklets, trying to come up with an answer. He said, “Why don’t you use invisible ink?”

One of the friend’s professors had used invisible ink for tests; students who didn’t know an answer right away could develop “invisible” hints by running a special marker over the appropriate part of the page, at a cost to their overall score. Dornbrook had actually worked in printing on and off over the years, but had never heard of such a thing. After calling everywhere he could think of to ask about the technology, only to have people think him “nuts,” he finally called the professor’s office directly. An assistant found the name of the company from which the professor sourced the stuff: A.B. Dick. They in turn put him in touch with a printer who had the technology, and InvisiClues were born. The first, written by Dornbrook for Zork I and illustrated as usual by Ardito, arrived in the spring of 1982.

Each InvisiClues booklet contained many questions about the game it covered. The user found the one that pertained to her, then developed the solution by running a special marker over the “invisible” answer. Each answer was itself presented as a series of graduated steps to be developed one at a time, from gentle nudge to the complete solution. Each booklet also included a fair number of dummy questions to further discourage readers from just developing and devouring random answers, as well as to obfuscate what was and was not in the game and thus prevent the reader from spoiling the experience just by reading the questions. If developed, these dummy questions chided the reader appropriately (and sarcastically).

InvisiClues was a ridiculously clever idea, although there were a couple of caveats. They were expensive to make and thus quite expensive to buy; while Adventure International was selling a “Book of Hints” for all twelve of the Scott Adams adventures for $8, an InvisiClues booklet for a single Infocom game would cost you considerably more than that. And, developed hints would begin to fade after about six months. Still, in spite of these disadvantages, InvisiClues were a tremendous hit. They were just fun in a way that the ciphers and look-up tables other companies used to disguise their own hints were not.

Infocom and ZUG’s commercial fortunes skyrocketed hand in hand. Infocom sold 100,000 games in 1982, up from 12,000 the year before. ZUG’s membership rolls, meanwhile, increased from 1000 at the start of the year to 4000 at its mid-point to over 10,000 by its end. Midway through the next year, they had 20,000 members. By this time they had finally computerized the operation (via an IBM PC with a then-exotic 10 MB hard drive), and had three other part-time employees in addition to Mike and his parents. Amusingly, other than Mike not a single one of them had ever played an Infocom game or had any interest in doing so.

There’s much more to say about Infocom’s 1982, but next we’ll travel half a world away to look at another, very different computing culture.

Comments
8 Responses

- Brian Bagnall

February 10, 2017 at 4:35 am

I really love Dave Ardito’s artwork for the Zork I map, similar to Edward Gorey. It hangs in my room.

- Allan Holland

March 16, 2017 at 11:43 pm

I agree. Ardito recently auctioned a signed poster on EBay. His listing suggested to me he’s not aware of how much some folks really appreciate what he did for the Z.U.G. His art was perfect for this milieu.

- John C.

February 22, 2019 at 4:38 am

That’s surprising. Can you elaborate on what was auctioned?

- Allan Holland

December 25, 2019 at 4:14 pm

It was, if I recall, around fall of 2016. The listing mentioned he was the artist for the poster and that he would sign it if asked. It was a mint copy of the original ZUG poster. I think starting bid was $500, I didn’t think to watch or follow it. “Fool!” says a hollow voice.

- billygraphy

November 4, 2017 at 9:48 pm

someone needs to collect an entire scan of each invisiclues!

- Lisa H.

November 6, 2017 at 10:18 pm

The 1996 Activision Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces CD, aka Masterpieces of Infocom, came with a PDF of the Invisiclues/hints for all the games on it that had them, which wasn’t everything, but is a lot: the Zorks, the Enchanter trilogy, Deadline, Witness, Suspect, Lurking Horror, Ballyhoo, Infidel, Moonmist, Starcross, Suspended, Planetfall, Stationfall, AMFV, Bureaucracy, Cutthroats, Hollywood Hijinx, Plundered Hearts, Seastalker, Trinity, Wishbringer, Border Zone, Nord and Bert, Sherlock, and Leather Goddesses.

- Will

December 8, 2018 at 5:44 pm

There is the Universal Hint System that tries to follow the same pattern, too
http://www.uhs-hints.com

I keep on reading all these blog posts sequentially and enjoying them enormously.
I real pleasure to read.
I go slowly at them while I know I have a ways to go as I am reading mid 2012 on Dec 2018, but I dread the time I catch-up and have to wait to the next installment.

Keep up the excellent work !

- Iffy Bonzoolie

February 29, 2020 at 5:41 pm

When I was a young kid, I started getting The Status Line, because I was super into Infocom games, but had missed all the early days due to being too young. It was a great little publication, with articles similar to what you have here, fan art, cartoons, letters, and puzzles.

They had a special offer where you could get a copy of the entire archive of NZT and TSL. I was so excited! It ended up taking a very long time to arrive; months, I think. At that age, time moves very slowly. It was also sort of a black hole; I didn’t know if they got my request, or if they were going to fulfill it, or if they still existed at all. That’s how life was in those archaic times.

But, I eventually got them! (I still have them somewhere…) Reading through the archive is a history in itself. They reveal the journey of ZUG, InvisiClues, Mike Dornbrook going off to business school, the release of each game, softball games, etc, etc…

They are all available online nowadays, for the curious. This blog makes me want to read through them again.

Zork III, Part 1
September 14, 2012

In September of 1982 Infocom released their fourth and fifth games, and their second and third of that year, simultaneously. Starcross, by Dave Lebling, was an outer-space adventure in the mold of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. We’ll get to that shortly. But today I want to talk about Zork III: The Dungeon Master, the next installment in Infocom’s flagship series.

Although its endgame and one rather elaborate puzzle are borrowed from the PDP-10 Zork, the rest of Zork III is an original work of the indefatigable Marc Blank, a fellow whom I’m coming more and more to recognize as perhaps the key influence behind the Infocom Way. This is after all the guy who co-authored the original PDP-10 Zork, who worked tirelessly to make the parser better, who designed the Z-Machine, who expanded the very definition of an adventure game via Deadline. Zork III isn’t so obviously groundbreaking as Deadline, but it’s a better, more mature piece of work — better than anything that had come before, not only from Infocom, but from anyone. That’s not to say that it’s an easy game. No, it’s hard as nails. Yet it’s difficult for all the right reasons. Here you’ll find no mazes or useless geography, no riddles, no parser games, no hunger or light-source timers or inventory limits (that matter, anyway). No bullshit. You’ll just find a small assortment of puzzles that are more intricate and satisfying than anything we’ve seen before, couched in the most evocative of atmospheres.

As I’ve mentioned before, Zork has always had a schizophrenic personality. The series has never quite decided whether it wants to be goofy, mildly satirical comedies full of the over-the-top excesses of the Flathead clan or mournful tragedies played out amidst the faded grandeur of the erstwhile Great Underground Empire. The PDP-10 game and the first PC game vacillated wildly between both extremes, while Zork II, largely the work of Dave Lebling, played up the light comedy. Zork III is not without some well-placed Flathead jokes, but its main atmosphere is one of windy austerity, with a distinct twinge of sadness for better times gone by. It begins thus:

As in a dream, you see yourself tumbling down a great, dark staircase. All about you are shadowy images of struggles against fierce opponents and diabolical traps. These give way to another round of images: of imposing stone figures, a cool, clear lake, and, now, of an old, yet oddly youthful man. He turns toward you slowly, his long, silver hair dancing about him in a fresh breeze. "You have reached the final test, my friend! You are proved clever and powerful, but this is not yet enough! Seek me when you feel yourself worthy!" The dream dissolves around you as his last words echo through the void....

“Your old friend, the brass lantern, lies at your feet,” we are soon told, a sentence that well-nigh drips with Zork III’s new-found world-weariness. And indeed, we’re a long way from the famous white house. If Zork I, with its points-for-treasures plot, is almost the prototypical adventure game, Zork III, just as much as the Prisoner games, is all about subverting our expectations of what makes an adventure game. Its most remarkable, peculiar achievement is to simultaneously be a damn good play within the confines of the genre it happily subverts.

But, onward. Here’s a map of the geography, in case you’d like to follow along as I explore, or (better yet) play along. I’m going to make a real effort not to spoil Zork III as thoroughly as I traditionally have in these analyses; it’s eminently worth struggling with a bit for yourself. My nudges, plus the map and the list of objects to be discovered in each room thereon, will hopefully blunt some of the edges of difficulty while leaving the heart of the experience intact.

From the Endless Stair where we began, we move south into the Junction. Another old friend, our sword, is embedded in a stone here, but there’s no way to pull it out. This “puzzle” is not really a puzzle at all; the sword will come to us, unbidden, when the time comes.

So, we move westward. We climb down a cliff to discover just the thing for an adventurer like us: a treasure chest — albeit a locked one. As we’re fiddling with it:

At the edge of the cliff above you, a man appears. He looks down at you and speaks. "Hello, down there! You seem to have a problem. Maybe I can help you." He chuckles in an unsettling sort of way. "Perhaps if you tied that chest to the end of the rope I might be able to drag it up for you. Then, I'll be more than happy to help you up!" He laughs again.

Every instinct tells us not to trust this guy; Zork I and Zork II have taught us that pretty much everyone in the Great Underground Empire is against us. Surely this fellow just wants to make off with our loot. And what else is an adventure game about if not collecting loot? Sure enough, if we take a chance and do as he asks we learn our suspicions were correct.

The man starts to heave on the rope and within a few moments you arrive at the top of the cliff. The man removes the last few valuables from the chest and prepares to leave. "You've been a good sport! Here, take this, for whatever good it is! I can't see that I'll be needing one!" He hands you a plain wooden staff from the bottom of the chest and begins examining his valuables.

Yet — and here’s where the subversion comes in — the treasure doesn’t matter. The old staff is what we need.

By this point we’ve already noticed something else very strange about Zork III: its scoring system seems completely out of whack. There are just 7 points to be scored, not the hundreds which we’ve come to expect from the earlier games. Further, points are awarded for such innocuous actions as just wandering into a certain completely accessible room, while major breakthroughs go unremarked. It’s possible to have 6 or 7 points and still be completely at sea, nowhere close to actually, you know, solving the game. Once again it seems that Zork III is playing by new rules that we don’t quite understand.

Yet Zork III is a finely crafted adventure as well as a subversive one, the first from Infocom without any howlingly bad design choices. We see this demonstrated in a rather surprising way on the Flathead Ocean. If we stand around here for a randomly determined number of turns, a ship will show up. Then we have one turn to say “Hello, sailor” to receive a potion of invisibility. “Hello, sailor” was a running joke throughout the first two Zork games; thus its appearance here, where it’s finally good for something. For the real oldtimers, there’s also a bit of even more meta meta-humor here: there’s a trivia quiz in the endgame of the original PDP-10 Zork about Zork itself. One of the possible questions is, “In which room is ‘Hello, Sailor’ useful?” The correct answer, in that game, is “None.”

Meta-humor aside, this business on the Flathead Ocean is on the face of it a staggeringly awful puzzle. First we must magically divine that we need to wait around in an otherwise uninteresting location (shades of Catherine the Great’s hairpin from Time Zone); then we must type the One True Thing from a multitude of choices. None of which, of course, would have stopped On-Line or perhaps even an earlier incarnation of Infocom from shoving it in there and being done with it. It’s exactly the sort of puzzle early adventure implementers loved, being trivial to code yet vastly extending the playing time of the game with its sheer obtuseness. Here, however, it’s not actually necessary. The potion only provides an alternate solution to a puzzle in the endgame. Thus the puzzle stands as an Easter egg only for the hardcore who like to plumb every depth and ferret out every secret. I don’t know of a better example of Infocom’s fast-evolving design sensibility than the decision not to make solving this bad puzzle necessary to winning the game.

But there are other, positive rather than negative examples of said sensibility. West of the lake we find what may just be my favorite puzzle in the game, a puzzle which is everything the arbitrary seaside puzzle is not. A magic portal can transport us momentarily not only to another location within this game, but also to locations from Zork I and Zork II. We need to plan for the next phase of our explorations by leaving a light source at a critical location using the portal. This is, at least by some criteria, unfair, as we have to do some learning by death a little later in the game to figure out that we need to do this. Yet it’s also a complex puzzle that grows organically from the sort of intricate, believably modeled storyworld that no one other than Infocom was crafting at this time. Puzzles like this feel shockingly modern in comparison to those of Infocom’s contemporaries.

Interestingly, the portal can also transport us to a fourth Zork game, a preview/advertisement for a work that was obviously already gestating in Blank’s mind. Zork IV, of course, never appeared (at least under that title). It came to me as something of a surprise to realize that Zork on PCs was never conceived by Infocom as a neat trilogy, a reality that seems at odds with the air of doomed finality that becomes more and more prevalent as we get deeper into Zork III. But at this stage Infocom still considered Zork, their flagship series and ongoing cash cow, very much an indefinitely ongoing series. Some players must have wondered just where it was going; the scene from the planned Zork IV is one of the most violent and disturbing in the Infocom canon.

Sacrificial Altar
This is the interior of a huge temple of primitive construction. A few flickering torches cast a sallow illumination over the altar, which is still drenched with the blood of human sacrifice. Behind the altar is an enormous statue of a demon which seems to reach towards you with dripping fangs and razor-sharp talons. A low noise begins behind you, and you turn to see hundreds of hunched and hairy shapes. A guttural chant issues from their throats. Near you stands a figure draped in a robe of deepest black, brandishing a huge sword. The chant grows louder as the robed figure approaches the altar. The large figure spots you and approaches menacingly. He reaches into his cloak and pulls out a great, glowing dagger. He pulls you onto the altar, and with a murmur of approval from the throng, he slices you neatly across your abdomen.

**** You have died ****

This scene would eventually appear, violence intact, in Blank’s next game, where it would jar with the tone of the rest of the game even more dramatically than it does here. However, that game, which did indeed start life as Zork IV, would be wisely retitled Enchanter, situated as its own entity and the first of a new fantasy trilogy.

Zork III is nowhere near so dynamic a system as Deadline. In the ongoing tradition of many adventure games even today, its world is a largely empty, static one. There is, however, one exception. At a randomly determined point of approximately 100 to 150 turns in, an earthquake causes the High Arch above the Aqueduct to collapse. I mention this now because making our escape through the area south of the lake depends on this arch still being intact, as well as the aforementioned light source having been properly placed. (Relatively static it may be, but Zork III nevertheless requires almost as much planning and learning by death as Deadline.) Lest I be accused of praising too much, let me just also note that the aqueduct area contains one of the few stumbles in this otherwise elegantly written game, when Blank suddenly tells us how to feel rather than letting the scenery speak for itself: “You feel a sense of loss and sadness as you ponder this once-proud structure and the failure of the Empire which created this and other engineering marvels.”

At this point we have only more area west of the Junction to explore: the Land of Shadow. Just as the sailor on the Flathead Ocean feels like a puzzle Blank thought better of, turning it into an Easter egg and alternate solution instead, the Land of Shadow feels like it started life as a maze. Within it we meet a strange, apparently hostile figure. The sword we last saw stuck in the stone suddenly appears in our hand, and we are treated for the last time in the Infocom canon to the randomized combat system Dave Lebling developed for the PDP-10 Zork back in the day. Subversion is still the order of the day, however, so we can’t really die. Nor do we really want to kill. Playing the situation the right way results in an unnerving scene that recalls, among other possibilities, the climactic moment of the Prisoner television series.

>get hood
You slowly remove the hood from your badly wounded opponent and recoil in horror at the sight of your own face, weary and wounded. A faint smile comes to his lips and then his face starts to change, very slowly, into that of an old, wizened man. The image fades and with it the body of your hooded opponent. His cloak remains on the ground.

What is going on here will become more clear — at least a little bit more clear — later. But we’ll wrap things up for today on that ominous note. Next time we’ll tackle the area east of the Junction, and the endgame.

Comments
21 Responses

- Lisa

September 14, 2012 at 7:44 pm

no hunger or light-source timers or inventory limits (that matter, anyway).

Not sure which part of that phrase “that matter, anyway” was meant to qualify. Isn’t it possible for the lamp to run out? I leave it behind after positioning the torch with the viewing table, and the torch of course lasts quite long enough with a walkthrough, but I’ve never purposely tried to wait it out.

Further, points are awarded for such innocuous actions as just wandering into a certain completely accessible room, while major breakthroughs go unremarked. It’s possible to have 6 or 7 points and still be completely at sea

Scoring system as described in the Invisiclues:

How does the scoring in this game work?

The scoring is a hint as to what is important.

The points are not “earned” by solving problems or acquiring items. You receive a point when you start on a path where you have a potential for progress in the game. [i.e., when you start down a path of action that can lead to acquiring one of the items you need to become the Dungeon Master]

It is possible to have all seven points without correctly solving any of the problems.

- Lisa

September 14, 2012 at 7:46 pm

See also http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Invisiclues/zork3/chapter8/ for those interested in what actions score points.

- Jimmy Maher

September 15, 2012 at 9:53 am

It was really meant to qualify light-source timers and inventory limits.

Yes, it’s possible for the lamp to run out. I believe the torch, however, is magic and thus inexhaustible. (How else could it still be burning when you discover it in a cavern that has presumably been deserted for decades if not centuries?) At any rate, I carried it around for over 600 turns without it going out or giving any sign (“The torch is growing dimmer,” etc.) that it was likely to. And since you need to get through the area that contains the torch before the earthquake that occurs 100-150 turns in or be locked out of victory, I think it’s unlikely that a dead lamp ever becomes a real issue for most players.

Similarly, there is technically an inventory limit, but you need to be carrying virtually every takeable object in the game to hit it. By that point, it’s pretty obvious that some, like the empty can of grue repellent, are useless and can be tossed away. Both of these restrictions strike me more as the legacy of older games that still existed in the standard library of code than as important parts of THIS design.

As for scoring: that makes sense in retrospect, but it’s highly unlikely that any player not playing straight from the InvisiClues would ever figure that out. From the perspective of a player who has no idea when she’s “started on a path where she has potential for progress in the game,” the scoring just seems, well, capricious or flat-out random. :)

- Lisa

September 18, 2012 at 1:24 am

As I said, I’ve never tried to wait out the torch to see if it’s possible for it to burn out. I think I remember reading that the ivory torch in Zork I was inexhaustible, but as it’s a treasure I obviously wind up putting it in the trophy case and so have never really considered it.

I agree that the scoring is very obscure – just including the quote for the interest of those reading this post.

- matt w

September 15, 2012 at 1:17 am

I just went through what seems like an old-school sequence with the chest, which is to say it made me want to slam my head into my desk:

> tie chest to rope
The chest is now tied to the rope.
The man above you looks pleased. “Now there’s a good friend! Thank you very much, indeed!” He pulls on the rope and the chest is lifted to the top of the cliff and out of sight. With a short laugh, he disappears. “I’ll be back in a short while!” are his last words.
[z/z/z]
A familiar voice calls down to you. “Are you still there?” he bellows with a coarse laugh. “Well, then, grab onto the rope and we’ll see what we can do.” The rope drops to within your reach.
> climb rope
Cliff Base
[which is down from the Cliff Ledge — but i wanted to climb it up!]
[wend my way back to the Cliff]
> climb rope
Cliff Ledge
…A long piece of rope is dangling down from the top of the cliff and is within your reach.
> pull rope
The man scowls. “I may help you up, but not before I have that chest.” He points to the chest near you on the ledge.
> tie chest to rope
You can’t see any chest here.

Now, I screwed up, because I ignored the relatively clear instructions that you can’t climb the rope yourself, but this still betrays a certain lack of state-tracking.

- Jimmy Maher

September 15, 2012 at 9:58 am

Yeah, I actually went through a fairly similar sequence on my play. Infocom’s parser was not yet as good as it would be in another year or two –but still much, much better than any of the competition.

- matt w

September 15, 2012 at 5:26 pm

Sure, absolutely. Even here, the parser isn’t really at fault — most contemporary IF games probably won’t understand things like “climb rope up” and “climb rope down,” and understanding “grab rope” goes beyond the call of duty — what would really help is “undo.” But it was surprising that they had text keyed to the man and chest when the man and chest weren’t there. Also, I wasn’t sure how to envisage the rope — if it extends down past me to the Cliff Base, why can’t I see it?

Overall, even without the mazes and the light timers, the game is a shock to my new-school sensibilities. I spent a hundred turns without encountering anything I can recognize as a puzzle, let alone solving one (the sword and Royal Puzzle seem like red herrings). Now that I know that the goal is to get the hooded figure’s cloak, that’s a bit of a puzzle, but I’m not sure how I’d have been able to do it. Also, he killed me, and when I was resurrected it seemed as though my staff had disappeared, surely a fate worse than death.

- Jimmy Maher

September 16, 2012 at 8:12 am

I came to Zork III from the opposite perspective, having played tons of old, old, old-school adventures for this blog over the past year or so. It therefore struck me as really modern in feel in its complete lack of interest in so many of the old-school tropes. Many of the puzzles in Zork III would fit comfortably into, say, Curses. But then, to a modern player even that game would seem hopelessly old-school.

The sword is a red herring to the extent that pulling it out of the stone is not really a puzzle to be solved. The Royal Puzzle, which I’ll get to in the next post, is however most definitely not. :)

- matt w

September 17, 2012 at 7:42 pm

I just realized that I horribly mangled a sentence in my post — what I meant was, “if [the rope] extends down past me to the Cliff Base, why can I tie something to its end?”

- Lisa

September 18, 2012 at 1:28 am

Because you can grab it at the middle, where you presumably must be if the end is at Cliff Base, haul up the end and tie the chest to it?

Don’t know – I agree this sequence is a little strange because of how the game interprets commands that have suddenly become ambiguous because of multiple ways of climbing that were not available before. Just saying – it’s certainly physically possible in the scenario you’re envisioning.

- matt w

September 18, 2012 at 2:03 am

It’s possible, but it’s still kind of confusing.

Actually, the more I look at the descriptions, the more I think that there’s nothing in them that indicates that the rope reaches all the way to the cliff base. Its description in the Cliff is “A rope is tied to one of the large trees here and is dangling over the side of the cliff, reaching down to the shelf below,” which sure makes it sound as though it ends at the ledge. What I think happened is that they really expect you to type “down” to get from the ledge to the base, but they programmed something like “Instead of climbing the rope: Try going down.” (Except, you know, not in Inform 7.)

- Duncan Stevens

September 16, 2012 at 2:16 am

For whatever reason, when I first played this, I never fiddled long enough with the chest for the man to come along–only discovered that via the hints.

Something you’re hinting at and may be getting to: Zork III is certainly Infocom’s first attempt, and possibly anyone’s first attempt, to develop the PC into something more than the player’s avatar. I.e., the PC–theoretically the same PC who has already gathered two games’ worth of treasure–learns, over the course of this game, that treasure isn’t everything and that mercy has a place. (The prologue, with the old man saying “Seek me when you feel yourself worthy!”, hints at this–feel? what is this “feel” you speak of? there has been no “feeling” up to this point–though the subjective side of the story doesn’t get much attention.) Maybe not so exciting now, but noteworthy in 1983.

- Jimmy Maher

September 16, 2012 at 8:17 am

The whole trilogy could be read as a chronicle of the evolution of adventure games. In the first game, we collect treasures just for the hell of it (or to score points and “win”). In the second, we collect treasures, but ultimately for a purpose (to give to the demon to access the next game). In the third, we’re not interested in treasures at all.

- DaveK

April 10, 2015 at 6:46 pm

The trilogy was not a “chronicle” of the evolution of adventure games; it *was* the evolution of adventure games! It is the (not-) missing link between Colossal Cave and modern IF; the progress that it made is the foundation on which modern IF rests.

- Steve

April 1, 2017 at 12:14 am

The “aqueduct destruction” puzzle was outright terrible game design. It hinges on you somehow surmising that the destruction of this particular old, decaying structure — in a world that is positively FULL of old, decaying structures — only happened in the period since you started the game.

Even if you visited the balcony before the earthquake, the game gives you NO indication that anything the aqueduct has in any way changed before & after the quake: the room description is exactly the same. So when we get to the aqueduct itself later, why would we assume the collapsed arch is a recent development? Even its water channel exit is blocked by “rubble” from the very beginning of the game, another indication that this thing has been decrepit for some time.

So did this remain un-hinted as to arbitrarily up the game’s difficulty level? Or did they just never consider it an issue? Adding a “recently-damaged” to the aqueduct description sure would have been useful in indicating that the only solution to the puzzle was to RESTART THE GAME FROM SCRATCH. Or maybe adding a lingering cloud of dust to the area (centering around the fallen arch after its collapse) if they wanted to be more subtle. Or in the opposite direction, how about an aftershock that collapses another arch while the player is in the aqueduct itself? I mean, practically ANYTHING would have been better than the way it was done.

(Also, the earthquake mechanic itself was clearly implemented as a means to limit museum access for the time travel puzzle; so its mere existence would not necessarily lead one to go looking for places it might have had an effect…)

You do seem to have a soft spot for the game, which might be why you were so willing to give this “puzzle” a pass (also, you must have known the timber was a red herring; else you would have discovered that saying the game has virtually “no inventory limit” was patently wrong!). There was also an amazing laziness in so many of the descriptions: “I see nothing interesting about the [noun].” (This might carry over from the earlier games, but is that even an excuse? You can find nothing interesting to say about a jeweled sceptre, a Crown Jewel of the Underground Empire? Really??)

The game was definitely better-implemented than the ones that came before it, but I was only inspired to comment on this one because your glowing praise (without the usual “for its time” caveats) suggested a much richer game experience than what one actually gets after playing their later games… :)

- Matt Giuca

June 1, 2019 at 9:04 pm

FYI, you’re not stuck if there earthquake has already happened at this point, as long as you don’t drop down to the aqueduct. From the Key Room, Save, then head back west the way you came through the dark cave. There is a small but not insignificant chance of surviving the grues until you get back to the lake. Then you can swim back north, diving down to retrieve the items you were carrying.

Though, I agree it would have been better telegraphed so you actually realise that the aqueduct collapsed during your game, not a long time ago. I certainly assumed it was a static part of the scenery and not a dynamic event.

- Sascha Wildner

March 5, 2018 at 9:11 pm

“The sword we lost saw stuck in the stone” -> “The sword we last saw stuck in the stone”?

- Jimmy Maher

March 6, 2018 at 9:26 am

Thanks!

- Ben

July 25, 2020 at 6:48 pm

negative example of -> negative examples of

- Jimmy Maher

July 26, 2020 at 8:37 am

Thanks!

- Will Moczarski

August 14, 2020 at 12:17 am

“ one of the few stumbles in this otherwise elegantly written game, when Blank suddenly tells us how to feel rather than letting the scenery speak for itself”

That always struck me as a rather bold and successful twist on Blank’s behalf but I guess that preferences may differ. The aforementioned “Enchanter” room always felt like the actual “stumble” to me, as its pulp fantasy vibe clashes with virtually everything that’s so beautiful about “Zork III.”

Also, the scene that makes you think of “The Prisoner” always seemed like a thinky veiled reference to “The Empire Strikes Back” to me. While I prefer “The Prisoner”, of course, the comparison feels like a bit of a stretch to me but of course that’s highly subjective, too.

Your posts about “Zork III” are among my favourite texts of yours – they are beautifully written analyses of a game with beauty aplenty.

Zork III, Part 2
September 17, 2012

Last time we explored the area west of the Junction. Today let’s head east.

There we find the Royal Museum, which houses a time machine that lies at the heart of the last of the intricate new puzzles that Blank crafted just for Zork III. It’s interesting to compare the rigorousness of Zork III’s approach to time travel with that of Time Zone, which despite having time travel as its overarching theme swept most of its ramifications under the rug as just not worth wrestling with. Indeed, and despite the challenges that time travel presents even to authors of static fiction, temporal puzzles would continue to be something of a favorite with Infocom in the years to come.

They acquit themselves pretty well in this first effort; there’s no way to really “break” the simulation, thanks both to some surprisingly complex modeling and to some very clever restrictions on the player that straiten the scope of possibilities. In a bit of broad comedy that does somewhat lighten the generally oppressive tone of the game, we can even come face to face (albeit briefly) with Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive himself, a fellow who’s been an ongoing gag throughout the series thus far:

>push button
You experience a brief period of disorientation. When your vision returns, you find yourself in the middle of some kind of ceremony, with a strange flat-headed man wearing royal vestments about to break a bottle on the bars of an iron cage containing magnificent jewels. He appears somewhat pleased by your presence. He speaks very loudly, nearly deafening the poor civil servant whose duty it is to see that his wishes are carried out. "Aha! A thief! Didn't I tell you that we needed more security! But, no! You all said my idea to build the museum under two miles of mountain and surrounded by five hundred feet of steel was impractical! Now, what to do with this ... intruder? I have it! We'll build a tremendous fortress on the highest mountain peak, with one narrow ladder stretching thousands of feet to the pinnacle. There he will stay for the rest of his life!" His brow-beaten assistant hesitates. "Don't you think, Your Lordship, that your plan is a bit, well, a bit much?" Flathead gives it a second's thought. "No, not really." he says, and you are led away. A few years later, your prison is finished. You are taken there, and spend the rest of your life in misery.

** You have died **

Everything that I discuss from here on has been lifted, pretty much whole cloth, from the PDP-10 Zork. First, just south of the museum, is the Royal Puzzle, an elaborate set-piece logic game that might just be the first of the soon-to-be infamous genre of sliding-block puzzles to appear in an adventure game. This one, however, is more interesting than most of those that would follow. We must push sandstone walls around a grid to discover an important book hidden inside (easy) and make our escape with it (hard). Although one of the later puzzles to be added to the PDP-10 Zork, the Royal Puzzle was geographically located relatively early in the finished game, lying adjacent to the big maze and the thief’s lair. It was primarily the work of the most unheralded of the original Zork team, Bruce Daniels. It was cut out of Zork I for reasons of space, but Infocom obviously decided it was too good to exclude from the PC games, and so placed it here as an adjunct to the Royal Museum.

And it is a good puzzle, requiring some careful planning and even sketching, but eminently solvable. Most importantly, the process of doing so is thoroughly enjoyable. I’ve never quite understood its reputation for extreme difficulty. (An old walkthrough’s sentiment is typical: “Take a deep breath here, because you’re about to enter one of the toughest puzzles in Zork III…”). In reality, the Royal Puzzle requires only patience, careful planning, and, yes, a willingness to restore many times; one wrong push on a wall usually means rendering the puzzle insolvable. It’s not trivial, but much less daunting than some of the other puzzles scattered throughout both the PDP-10 Zork and the first two PC games that rely entirely on, shall we say, intuitive leaps. The Royal Puzzle is even very appealing as a game of its own, divorced from the context of Zork. Some at MIT treated it this way, and competed to see not just who could solve it but who could do so in the fewest number of moves.

With the Royal Puzzle behind us, we’ve now explored and exhausted all of the initially available rooms on the map. In one of its perhaps more questionable design decisions, the game now leaves us to wander about looking for something, anything new to do. Eventually we wander into the Engravings Room and stumble across a sleeping old man, who gives us access to the endgame in return for a bit of bread. Now it all comes down to working our way through a linear series of puzzles lifted from the PDP-10 Zork endgame, designed largely by Dave Lebling. The puzzles here are appropriately challenging, but, like the Royal Puzzle, mostly challenging for the right reasons. The centerpiece is a sort of weird vehicle that we must figure out how to direct. As Jason Dyer noted in his own excellent write-up of the PDP-10 Zork, we find ourselves straining here to visualize an elaborate device described solely in text — described, in fact, in what is likely the longest contiguous infodump to be found anywhere in the trilogy.

Inside Mirror
You are inside a rectangular box of wood whose structure is rather complicated. Four sides and the roof are filled in, and the floor is open.

As you face the side opposite the entrance, two short sides of carved and polished wood are to your left and right. The left panel is mahogany, the right pine. The wall you face is red on its left half and black on its right. On the entrance side, the wall is white opposite the red part of the wall it faces, and yellow opposite the black section. The painted walls are at least twice the length of the unpainted ones. The ceiling is painted blue.

In the floor is a stone channel about six inches wide and a foot deep. The channel is oriented in a north-south direction. In the exact center of the room the channel widens into a circular depression perhaps two feet wide. Incised in the stone around this area is a compass rose.

Running from one short wall to the other at about waist height is a wooden bar, carefully carved and drilled. This bar is pierced in two places. The first hole is in the center of the bar (and thus the center of the room). The second is at the left end of the room (as you face opposite the entrance). Through each hole runs a wooden pole.

The pole at the left end of the bar is short, extending about a foot above the bar, and ends in a hand grip. The pole has been dropped into a hole carved in the stone floor.

The long pole at the center of the bar extends from the ceiling through the bar to the circular area in the stone channel. This bottom end of the pole has a T-bar a bit less than two feet long attached to it, and on the T-bar is carved an arrow. The arrow and T-bar are pointing west.

Dyer describes this puzzle, appropriately if anachronistically, as Myst-like. But of course the elaborate mechanisms of Myst are shown and manipulated graphically. And indeed, one is left just wishing for a picture after reading that mess, even as meticulously described as it is. Already Infocom, the gaming world’s foremost proponents of the power of pure text, were brushing against some of its limitations. (Notably, Bruce Daniels chose to represent the Royal Puzzle with simple ASCII diagrams rather than even trying to describe it in prose.)

Moving on, we meet the Dungeon Master at last. Zork III thankfully omits the Zork trivia quiz that the PDP-10 version requires us to pass to gain access to his inner sanctum, the final area of the game.

"I am the Master of the Dungeon!" he booms. "I have been watching you closely during your journey through the Great Underground Empire. Yes!," he says, as if recalling some almost forgotten time, "we have met before, although I may not appear as I did then." You look closely into his deeply lined face and see the faces of the old man by the secret door, your "friend" at the cliff, and the hooded figure. "You have shown kindness to the old man, and compassion toward the hooded one. I have seen you display patience in the puzzle and trust at the cliff. You have demonstrated strength, ingenuity, and valor. However, one final test awaits you. Now! Command me as you will, and complete your quest!"

The Dungeon Master becomes our partner; we must order him about to solve the final puzzle. Played after Zork II’s similar puzzle involving the robot, one is chiefly struck by how much easier and cleaner it now is to communicate with others, thanks to the new conversation system Infocom developed for Deadline and incorporated here.

Given the description of the Dungeon Master shown above and the fact that we’ve been collecting equipment to “become” him throughout the game — not to mention the brooding, weighty tone of everything so far — the final subversive twist of the game and the trilogy don’t come completely by surprise. Still, when we take our place as the Dungeon Master it brings a chill. We’re a long way from jocular treasure hunts now.

On a desk at the far end of the room may be found stock certificates representing a controlling interest in FrobozzCo International, the multinational conglomerate and parent company of the Frobozz Magic Boat Co., etc.

As you gleefully examine your new-found riches, the Dungeon Master materializes beside you, and says, "Now that you have solved all the mysteries of the Dungeon, it is time for you to assume your rightly-earned place in the scheme of things. Long have I waited for one capable of releasing me from my burden!" He taps you lightly on the head with his staff, mumbling a few well-chosen spells, and you feel yourself changing, growing older and more stooped. For a moment there are two identical mages standing among the treasure, then your counterpart dissolves into a mist and disappears, a sardonic grin on his face.

For a moment you are relieved, safe in the knowledge that you have at last completed your quest in ZORK. You begin to feel the vast powers and lore at your command and thirst for an opportunity to use them.

Much of what’s just happened is still very vague, with, as was so typical of adventure games of this era, the details all left to the imagination. Yet in this case, rather than seeming an artifact of technical constraints or just a lack of talent for fiction, the vagueness works. One senses that careful explanation would only spoil it. Given how powerful this ending is, one has to feel happy that Infocom decided not to cheapen it with a Zork IV. And, as Jason Dyer also noted, it’s hard not to want to read this ending meta-textually: “Here is a new art form, one raw and unrefined, with the potential to be serious and profound.” The last paragraph, which is not found in the original version but only in Zork III, adds to the impression. The last sentence might even apply to the way that Infocom themselves were feeling at just about this moment. And justifiably — they had a remarkable next few years in store.

That, then, is Zork III. As many remarked at the time, sometimes disapprovingly, it’s considerably shorter than either of its predecessors, with a total number of real puzzles that could probably be counted on your fingers. Yet it occupies roughly the same space as the earlier games on disk. In place of sprawl and “cheap” puzzles like mazes and riddles, Blank implemented a smaller number of more intricate, satisfying interactions. He implemented, in other words, deeply rather than widely, beginning a trend that has persisted in interactive fiction right to the present day. This, combined with that pensive, fraught atmosphere that seems to affect everyone who plays it and its subversive thematic focus, make Zork III feel like a leap toward not only a more satisfying approach to adventure gaming but also that ineffable thing called Art.

Comments
16 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

September 17, 2012 at 3:58 pm

I’m glad I’m not the only one who struggles to picture the mirror box. Among the problems:

1. I didn’t understand initially that the thing literally had no floor; simply saying that “the floor is open” and “in the floor is a stone channel” didn’t really get it across. Also, there should be something in the box structure that settles into or is tripped by each compass rose; it’s not obvious why the box stops at each rose. Maybe the long pole does that, but the game never says so.

2. On a related point, the description really needs to refer to wheels or runners or something so that it’s a little clearer that the thing can move. I couldn’t understand why standing in a box and pushing on one end of the box should cause anything to move. Again, it might have helped if I’d realized there was no floor at all, but it still wouldn’t have been clear that the whole thing is moveable by someone standing inside and pushing unless (a) it has runners of some kind or (b) I’m really, really strong.

3. The whole thing would have been a lot simpler if they’d simply said what wall corresponds to which cardinal directions (they might have been able to omit the “T-bar” business). Yes, that would have meant a lot of dynamic room description stuff, and maybe that was beyond their power/memory limits, but the sudden agnosticism about which walls are in which direction makes everything needlessly confusing.

Also, the museum is another good example of the change from the “treasure hunt” mentality: a whole bunch of treasures! But you can only take one, and it’s the least interesting one.

- Keith Palmer

September 18, 2012 at 12:47 am

I’m afraid that when I first played Zork III (via “The Lost Treasures of Infocom”), I pretty much relied on the hint book. Even so, it was an interesting ending to the series. When I played through the “PDP-10 Zork” much later, I was intrigued to see (almost) the same conclusion, and yet it did feel a bit different (indeed perhaps so in part because of the missing final paragraph), a bit more “so here’s your comeuppance” than “you’ve become something other than what you started as.”

- Peter Ferrie

November 24, 2015 at 6:20 am

The Royal Puzzle could also be “solved” by killing oneself after acquiring the book. That act would result in being placed outside of the maze, with possessions and score intact, yet disappointed at not being able to solve it properly, of course.

- Pingback: Playing Enchanter (1983) | The Reinvigorated Programmer

- Dave O.

January 30, 2018 at 6:16 pm

In my early version of the game, it was possible to win with only 5 of the 7 points. You could get the torch across the lake without extinguishing it by putting it inside the chest, thus obviating the need to use the teleporting table. And you could get the ring without having to solve the time machine puzzle simply by typing:

>read ring
(taken)
How can I read a ring?

- Roberto

February 8, 2018 at 10:15 am

Hi there, my first post here! Thanks for your wonderful blog, this is truly a mine of information!
I’m posting here because I’m really surprised by the number of bugs I found in this game, and curiously I didn’t find anything about them on the web. I’m talking about the last version (Release 17 / Serial number 840727).
First, during the time travel puzzle (in 776 GUE):

>l
Jewel Room
You are in a high-ceilinged chamber, in the center of which is a pedestal which is the intended home of the Crown Jewels of the Great Underground Empire: a jewelled knife, a golden ring, and the royal sceptre. The room is, by appearances, unfinished.
Through the door you can hear voices which, from their sound, belong to military or police personnel.

>take pedestal
You can’t reach it through the cage.

>x cage
You can’t see any cage here.

The worst bug was in the Royal Puzzle (I actually thought I couldn’t slide the blocks in the north/south direction because of this).

>push wall
Which wall do you mean, the eastern wall, the western wall, the northern wall, or the southern wall?

>push southern wall
You used the word “southern” in a way that I don’t understand.

>push south wall
The wall slides forward and you follow it….

The last one I found is in the rectangular box:
…The arrow and T-bar are pointing west.

>push red wall
The structure rotates clockwise.
The arrow on the compass rose now indicates northwest.

>push red wall
The structure rotates clockwise.
The arrow on the compass rose now indicates north.
Pushing the red panel isn’t notably helpful.

This happens every time the arrow points north after the push. This one is also important, because someway it gives away that pointing the arrow north is something “special”.

Great game, anyway!

- Peter Orvetti

July 24, 2019 at 10:03 am

I spent many hours wandering around with seven of seven points, wondering why the game wasn’t ending or just what I had to do to get the door open.

- Lisa H.

July 26, 2019 at 7:19 pm

The scoring system is pretty odd. (Even unhelpful, one might argue, although on the other hand maybe tonally appropriate for the game, which is pretty unconventional IMO.) The Invisiclues have this to say:

The scoring is a hint as to what is important.
The points are not ‘earned’ by solving puzzles or accruing items. You receive a point when you start on a path where you have a potential for progress in the game.
It is possible to have all 7 points without correctly solving any of the puzzles.

- Chris Lang

November 3, 2019 at 9:21 pm

In the version I’m playing, Version 48, there are a few spells you can use with the Wizard’s wand that will do a few things.

First off, there’s ‘Fluoresce’, a spell you’re only likely to know about through a previous session where your lamp went out. You can use it yourself to make any object a light source, like this:

>i
You are carrying:
A Wizard’s magic wand
A card
A white book
A matchbook
A lamp

>point wand at white book
The wand grows warm, the white book seems to glow dimly with magical essences, and you feel suffused with power.

>chant “fluoresce”
The wand glows very brightly for a moment.
The white book begins to glow.

>drop card
Dropped.

>n
Wizard’s Workroom
Sitting on the Wizard’s workbench is:
A black obsidian stand

>n
You are carrying:
A Wizard’s magic wand
A white book (providing light)
A matchbook
A lamp

I suppose this is useful if you’re nearing the end of the game, still haven’t done the Oddly Angled Room (which I agree is probably the worst puzzle in the game because it’s so poorly clued – the vague baseball hints aren’t really enough), and your lamp is getting dim.

You can also cast ‘feeble’ on the three-headed dog for an amusing message. And you can make it ‘float’ but that won’t help solve the puzzle.

Casting ‘Fierce’ on the three-headed dog will give you an amusing death.

‘Fry’ (a spell the Wizard of Frobozz will only use under very special circumstances as part of what TV Tropes calls a Videogame Cruelty Punishment) can also be used on objects to destroy them. However, it won’t work on anything that isn’t portable for some reason – the Wizard can use it to fry you, but you can’t use it to to fry any creatures.

(You could use it to ‘fry’ the dead dragon and the dead sea serpent in a previous version that I played on the C64, but that doesn’t work in Version 48).

Most of the other spells don’t really have any noticeable effects.

- Lisa H.

November 4, 2019 at 5:02 pm

I was always a little disappointed by the lack of thorough implementation of the spells, though I can understand space limitations would have to apply because of all the possible combinations. Not being able to point the wand at yourself is a bit strange, though. I do wonder why the nonsense ones like frobozzle that the Wizard fails to cast were done at all, since they don’t seem to have any effect; maybe they just didn’t like the idea of the player turning around and trying a command they’d just seen and having the game reply that it didn’t recognize the word.

- Lisa H.

November 4, 2019 at 5:13 pm

Hang on, this post is about Zork III. Wrong tab, maybe?

- Marco

May 23, 2020 at 5:17 pm

I would agree that of the first six Zork games, III is the best. I remember it as having a level of sophistication and subtlety that is unusual in a text adventure. The Royal Puzzle was the first really challenging adventure game puzzle that I managed to solve myself without getting impatient and resorting to a hint guide, which was very satisfying. One request – could you reupload the map in higher resolution so it’s readable, like the ones for I and II are?

- Jimmy Maher

May 25, 2020 at 8:41 am

You can find a better image here: http://infodoc.plover.net/maps/zork3.pdf.

- Ben

July 26, 2020 at 10:04 am

and and so -> and so they (?)

- Jimmy Maher

July 27, 2020 at 8:34 am

Thanks!

- Will Moczarski

August 17, 2020 at 12:17 am

I’ve always loved the ending of Zork III, especially because it skillfully evokes the young tradition of the adventure game while using a metaphor straight from one of its chief inspirations, namely D&D. Don Woods was the first digital player to turn into a digital Dungeon Master, after all, and the vivid exchange between the implementers and the users during MIT times may have been an inspiration, too (now it’s YOUR turn to create an adventure game, they said, and the creators of Acheton, among others, seemingly took that verbatim).

Starcross
September 19, 2012

For whatever reason, it seems that the Infocom guys just weren’t interested in laughing it up during 1982. Like its simultaneously released companion Zork III, Dave Lebling’s Starcross is amongst the most austere of Infocom’s efforts. Their first science-fiction game, it’s also the hardest science fiction they would ever produce, in the mold of technically and scientifically rigorous authors like Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, and Arthur C. Clarke, whose classic 1972 novel Rendezvous with Rama is Starcross’s most obvious direct inspiration. Like the novel, Starcross tells the story of a mysterious alien generation ship that enters the Solar System, to be met and explored by a very unlikely ship from Earth. The heart of the Rama scenario, of exploring a strange, largely deserted environment and puzzling out the wonders of alien technology, seems tailor made for an adventure game. It’s thus no surprise that games had used it before Starcross, and would continue to do so afterward, including two officially licensed direct adaptations of the novel. Typically enough, however, Infocom approached the scenario in a more rigorous way than anyone had before.

It’s the year 2186, and we are a prospector for quantum black holes that can be harvested as energy sources. (The technology is “based on theories that began as early as the 1970s,” the manual tells us, a reference to Stephen Hawking’s pioneering work.) A sort of wildcatter of the future, we live a lonely life aboard our one-man vessel, the eponymous Starcross, scouring the vast reaches of the Solar System for that lucky gusher that will make us rich for life. Then, one day…

You are sound asleep in your bunk aboard the deep-space black hole prospecting ship "Starcross," operating out of Ceres. Just as your sleep becomes deep and comfortable, an alarm bell begins ringing! It's the mass detector! Instantly you awake. This hasn't been a profitable trip so far, and you don't even have the cash for repairs. This could be the break you've been waiting for.

Our first task is to navigate to the mass, which we accomplish using a map of nearby space included in the game’s box. Working out how to read the map to determine the correct “range, theta, and phi” values to enter into the ship’s computer serves as a unique and interesting puzzle in its own right, one sadly lost in later, cheaper repackagings in such collections as The Lost Treasures of Infocom, which reduced the map to a simple list of destinations and values. Still, the map also represents Infocom’s most obvious attempt yet to use feelies not just to enhance the experience of their interactive worlds but also to combat piracy. The destination is determined randomly from more than a dozen possibilities, which makes simply writing the necessary numbers down and passing them along with a copied disk at least a bit more complicated.

The mass, of course, turns out not to be a quantum black hole but rather something even more spectacular. This whole opening sequence has a dramatic urgency that is new, not only to Infocom but to text adventures in general. We feel caught up in an onrush of events, like we’re really living out a story rather than just exploring a static environment (Zork) or ducking in and out of someone else’s story (Deadline). For the climax, Lebling takes his time, using a number of turns to introduce us to the massive, awe-inspiring spaceship that proceeds to effortlessly capture our pitiful little vessel. Even the fact that there’s nothing for us to really do here works for the scene, which functions as a sort of preview of some of the things we’ll encounter when we actually start exploring inside and outside the ship. What else would you do in this situation but sit and hold your breath and stare?

>wait
Time passes...
Time passes as you journey towards your destination.
Filling space before you is an enormous artifact, more than 5 km long and about a kilometer in diameter. Regularly spaced around its waist are bumps and other odd protrusions. You cannot see the aft end but the fore end sports a glass or crystal dome almost 100 meters across. This dome is brightly lit.
There is a brief burn as the ship matches course with the artifact. You are hanging in space about one kilometer away from the waist of the object. The Starcross's engines shut down. The computer speaks: "Program completed. We are being scanned by low level radiation at various frequencies. Waiting for instructions."

>wait
Time passes...
As the object rotates beneath you, the surface features of a different area are visible through the viewport.
There is an area with a blue dome below. Near the dome is a spherical object which just might be a spaceship. It is held down by silvery ropes.

>wait
Time passes...
As the object rotates beneath you, the surface features of a different area are visible through the viewport.
The area here has a yellow dome. The surface of the object here looks damaged and scorched, and is littered with tangled debris.

>wait
Time passes...
As the object rotates beneath you, the surface features of a different area are visible through the viewport.
This area has a green dome and a long, silvery spaceship tethered nearby.

>wait
Time passes...
As the object rotates beneath you, the surface features of a different area are visible through the viewport.
Below is an area with a red dome which has no ship near it.
Suddenly an odd protrusion near the red dome splits open and a huge articulated metal tentacle issues from it at great speed. It approaches the ship and delicately wraps itself around the hull. You are slammed against your seat as the tentacle accelerates the Starcross to the speed of rotation of the object. Inexorably, your ship is drawn toward the dome. When you are a few tens of meters away, three smaller tentacles issue forth and grapple the ship solidly to the surface of the artifact. The large tentacle retreats into its housing, which closes.

From here — and inevitably given the restrictions in the allowable amount of text under which Lebling labored — things get more traditional. Once we solve the next few puzzles to get inside, it becomes clear that the ship is another large, static environment to be explored and gradually conquered. To his credit, however, Lebling refuses to make Starcross into Zork in Space. In keeping with the game’s hard science-fiction roots, the alien ship is a carefully worked-out environment which, at least as far as such advanced technology can be expected to, makes sense. The ship rotates to provide gravity. Inside it consists of a network of corridors and rooms spanning the underside of its outside hull and a large open cavern in its center, whose outside walls/floor are planted with trees and grass. As one would expect, gravity gets weaker as we get closer to the center by, for instance, climbing one of the taller trees. In fact, this is the key factor in a fairly brilliant climactic puzzle that finds us floating in the very center of the cavern and requires us to devise the most unlikely means of propulsion if we don’t want to be left stuck there permanently.

So, the ship always feels, at least conceptually, like a real and believably alien place, give or take the occasional slip-up like the damaged computer that flashes — in English — “Fault” when we try to turn it on. Again in keeping with the game’s influences, the puzzles mostly involve practical, real-world science and technology, a marked departure from those of Zork. Often we find ourselves needing to translate alien symbology into universal scientific principles, as when we must use our knowledge of basic chemistry and our decided preference for breathing oxygen over methane or ammonia to figure out which button to press to reactivate the ship’s life-support systems.

Repair Room
This is a bright room taken up by two large pieces of machinery. On the leftmost one is a symbol depicting the emission of rays and beside it a yellow slot. The other machine bears a symbol in three parts: the first two parts, in black, are a solid block and a fluid level. The third, in red, is a series of parallel wavy lines. Beside it are three diagrams; under each one is a red slot. The first diagram shows four single dots equally spaced around a six-dot cluster. The second shows two eight-dot clusters in close proximity. The third has three single dots equally spaced around a seven-dot cluster. The only exit is up some stairs.

Starcross is by no means a trivial game; it has a fairly big map and a lot to keep track of, and, as usual for even Infocom games of this era, it’s very easy to lock yourself out of victory by doing things in the wrong order. Still, its puzzles require careful experimentation and practical thought rather than leaps of intuition. We always feel grounded in Starcross; it’s by far the most solvable game Infocom had yet produced, a prime reason I’m declining to spoil it heavily here.

Surprisingly, the ship is not the deserted environment you might expect. In fact, in a marked departure from Rendezvous with Rama, it’s well-nigh teeming with intelligent or semi-intelligent alien life, all captured and held here over the centuries in the same way that we are. There are small creatures who look like “crosses between a rat and an ant”; a hyper-intelligent giant spider who’s been learning English via radio broadcasts from the planet; and some human-sized weasels who have regressed into a primitive and superstitious tribal culture since their ship was stranded here generations ago. And even though Starcross largely transcends being Zork in Space, there are nevertheless grues here, a fact which was doubtless helpful to Infocom in not making them rewrite their standard code for darkness. We even learn through their existence here that the Zork games apparently took place on an alien planet; even hard science-fiction authors have to have a little fun sometimes.

Broken Cage
This cage was apparently forced by its inhabitants before the general deterioration of the zoo equipment. The force projectors are ripped out of their mountings and smashed against the bulkhead, and the whole cage is scratched and dented as though many enraged creatures pounded on it violently for many weeks. There is a somewhat chewed sign to one side of the cage.

>read sign
The sign is a liquid crystal display, and even more oddly, is in English:

" Common Grues (Grue Vulgaris)

The common grue, an inhabitant of the dark underground passages of a forgotten planet, is here exhibited for your pleasure in a typical family group. Note particularly the slavering fangs which reach such impressive size in the adults. Feeding the grues is not recommended."

Inevitably given the sheer quantity of stuff packed into Starcross’s 83 K story file, our scope for interaction with any of this life is decidedly limited. They’re all classic vending-machine NPCs, each possessing some vital object to be coaxed away, traded for, or taken by force.

Indeed, if Starcross really falls down somewhere it’s in failing to adequately convey the grandeur of the experience we’re allegedly having. It comes the closest to evoking a sense of wonder during the introductory sequence I quoted above. After that, however, the text is usually flatly practical and to the point. It gets the job done, mind you, describing some very intricate puzzles, devices, and situations with careful precision. But it hardly feels like it even tries to inspire. That’s particularly surprising given that the game was written by Dave Lebling, who had the reputation of being the most self-consciously “literary” of the original Zork team, and who took his share of ribbing for his purplish prose — and with some justification. (The more wordy and elaborate descriptions in Zork, such as the jeweled egg found in the forest, tend to be Lebling’s.) Perhaps he just didn’t have the space to indulge his literary sensibilities here. Still, Zork III managed to do much more with similarly terse prose. Starcross is a fun, well-crafted adventure in an interesting, meticulously worked-out setting, but it never manages to be more than that, never touches that ineffable something that makes Zork III resonate so.

Our goal in Starcross, we slowly realize, is to repair this ancient and rather battered ship enough to fly it triumphantly back to Earth. It’s only when we’ve finally done so that we realize that the whole exercise has been a test, an experiment conducted by the hyper-advanced aliens who built the ship to see which species is ingenious enough to succeed in this task before the ship leaves their system forever.

The artifact, under your assured control, moves serenely toward Earth, where the knowledge it contains will immeasureably benefit mankind. Within a few years, there could be human ships flying out to the stars, and all because of your daring and cunning...

A holographic projection of a humanoid figure appears before you. The being is tall, thin, and swathed in shimmering robes. It speaks perfectly but expressionlessly in your own language. "Congratulations, you who have passed our test. You have succeeded where others failed. Your race shall benefit thereby." He smiles. "I expect to see you in person, someday." The projection fades.

The idea of the game as a sort of diegetic test for the player’s avatar was one that Infocom fell back on quite a lot in these early years; Zork III, and by extension its prequels, were built on essentially the same premise. It worked there, but it’s not very compelling here. In fact, it undercuts almost everything that came before. Suddenly this believable ship we’ve been exploring, with its battle scars and its aged and malfunctioning systems we’ve lovingly repaired, is revealed as nothing more than an elaborate prop in a game of interstellar eugenics. It feels like Lebling, having so carefully worked out all of the engineering details of the ship’s design and its history of collecting more and more aliens, suddenly didn’t know how to justify its existence in the first place, didn’t know how to answer the Big Question (“Why?”) and end the game. This is the disappointing result. Luckily, Infocom — and Lebling — would get more sure-handed and confident in their storytelling in later efforts.

Infocom’s advertising firm, G/R Copy, once again played a vital role in presenting Starcross to the world in the most memorable possible light. As they had for Deadline, G/R came up with Starcross’s short, catchy name, a huge improvement over the original title of A Gift from Space. And in Starcross’s packaging Infocom and G/R really outdid themselves, packing it all inside a big plastic flying saucer.

Granted, there were no actual flying saucers in the game, but it was certainly unique. Maybe too unique — retailers quickly came to loathe the things, which tended to literally roll away when shelved on racks designed for normal, rectangular boxes. Many ended up hanging the games from the ceiling using string, as a) the most practical solution and b) one that looked pretty cool in its own right. Today the original saucer Starcross is one of the most sought-after bits of Infocom memorabilia. (The plastic used to form the saucer doesn’t tend to age all that well, making a copy in good condition a rare find indeed.) Infocom and G/R didn’t stuff as much inside the box as they had for Deadline, just the aforementioned foldout star map and a fairly terse manual. (For the “gray box” re-release a couple of years later, they added a rather jocular diary painting the protagonist as something of a loser. They should have left well enough alone; it’s one of the least effective of such inserts, jarring with the fairly serious tone of the actual game rather than complimenting it. It feels more suited for Planetfall — or, hell, Space Quest.)

Both Starcross and Zork III –more minimalistically packaged in a blister-pack with only a short manual — were solid hits for Infocom, selling more than 10,000 copies each during the 1982 holiday season alone. Already more games were in the pipeline, including one from a talented new author about which they were very excited. And, on what is in retrospect a more ominous note, they were now established enough to start another project, one completely unrelated to games — a little thing called Cornerstone.

Comments
21 Responses

- matt w

September 19, 2012 at 5:20 pm

“that finds us floating in the very center of the cavern and requires us to devise the most unlikely means of propulsion”

OK, so the only thing I can think of when you say “the most unlikely means of propulsion” involves a can of beans. But I’m guessing from your first sentence that that’s not what happens.

(Helpful comment: I think “worked” in the first sentence is supposed to be “weren’t.”)

- Jimmy Maher

September 20, 2012 at 6:19 am

After 18 months, 149 posts, and 875 comments, I guess we were due for a fart joke. Glad you could provide! :)

And thanks as always to everyone who pointed out my little typos…

- matt w

September 20, 2012 at 5:09 pm

In space, no one can smell you

(at this point Mr. W’s small intestine leapt into his throat and strangled him)

- Lisa

September 21, 2012 at 6:40 pm

Spot the HHG reference :)

- Howard Lewis Ship

September 19, 2012 at 8:30 pm

Typo in the first sentence, “worked” should probably be “weren’t”.

I very much remember playing this game in the 80’s … but I don’t remember finishing it!

- Lisa

September 19, 2012 at 8:33 pm

it seems that the Infocom guys just worked interested in laughing it up

“worked” = weren’t?

the alien ship is a carefully worked-out environment […] The ship rotates to provide gravity. Inside it consists of a network of corridors and rooms spanning the underside of its outside hull and a large open cavern in its center, whose outside walls/floor are planted with trees and grass.

One reason I haven’t yet completed a walkthrough for myself for Starcross is that I find navigating the game map extremely frustrating. Even looking at a map marked with directions, I have always had a hard time visualizing the space, and have never been able to get a good handle on what direction I should type to ensure I get where I’m trying to go (and sometimes time is of the essence, of course). I’m sure the system is a faithful rendering for an object floating in no particular orientation in 3-D space and providing its own gravity, but… still.

which species is ingenuous enough

“ingenuous” = ingenious?

- Jimmy Maher

September 20, 2012 at 6:25 am

I always just arbitrarily choose some point as the “edge” of the map, and proceed to map it all in the traditional way. Despite what the framing scenario would seem to imply, there is no actual time limit other than the need to get the life-support system working again before the air runs out. Once that’s done, you can take your time.

On the topic of navigation, one thing that I probably should have mentioned in the main post, which shows some of the progressiveness of Infocom: although everything is referred to in shipboard directions (“fore,” “aft,” “port,” “starboard”), you are free right from the first release to just navigate using the traditional compass directions. Most other publishers would have happily forced you to do things their way.

- Andrew Plotkin

September 19, 2012 at 8:52 pm

This is certainly unfair, but what I remember most were the limits to the simulation of the world. If you change the atmosphere to ammonia or methane, the weasels and rat-ants keep on obliviously doing their thing.

(From my current perspective as an author, I take that as a tribute to how much the game got right, raising my expectations.)

I remember that when I originally played Starcross, the “all a test” ending cheapened the impact somewhat. However, it’s plausible, at least, to read the alien’s speech as referring only to the challenge of boarding the ship and deciphering the controls. The environmental narrative of the ship’s history — alien ships captured, zoo cages cracked, crystal rods scattered across the interior — is strong enough to hold up as *unplanned* challenge.

(After all, the starship only has four docking points, of which one is now damaged and three occupied. So the creators are not omniscient; they’ve sent out a probe, but it’s failed three times and has suffered in the attempts. You’re its last shot.)

- Jimmy Maher

September 20, 2012 at 6:31 am

The only problem I have with that is that, absent all those challenges that arose from the general chaos inside the ship, actually figuring out the controls isn’t really that difficult, especially given (presumably) at least a few days to do it. Surely this spider fellow could have pulled it off. There’s also the fact that a not so bright test subject could kill everyone on the ship by mishandling the controls. Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun. :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieQZoY9PQlY

- Peter Piers

July 22, 2015 at 4:23 pm

Oh, come on. I was reading this post VERY carefully, to avoid any spoilers, skimming a lot when it looked like the endgame was being discussed, and you just blurt it out like that?

- Just Chuck

September 22, 2012 at 4:11 pm

I have very fond memories of this game, although I never did finish it. Possibly my favorite bit came a few years ago when I could go to the store and buy a mechanical mouse to tidy up my floors. Granted, the collecting of larger bits of rubbish is beyond its powers…

- Mark

September 25, 2012 at 9:41 am

It would be interesting to give a review of the Rendevous with Rama game that Tellirum came out with a few years later and compare it to this game. I just played that game a few months ago. It is interesting to see how in Tellirum’s game there are certain actions are more guess work than logical deduction. The puzzles in starcross are not always easy but they can be reasoned out. The one part which might require a leap of intuition is finding the hidden room and using those tiles. The blue and red tile combination would have been a more fair puzzle if failing to solve did not lead to you be accidently killed.

- Pingback: Infocoms svåraste textäventyr – Go North – Ett digitalt museum om textäventyr till C64

- Martin

June 3, 2016 at 12:31 am

Well the start stole from Rendezvous With Rama and the end steals from 2001 which was also just a test.

- Bert Whetstone

March 17, 2018 at 11:45 pm

Back around 1984 Starcross was the fourth or fifth Infocom game I had played. I remember being very disappointed in one part where you have to deal with the rat-ants by bashing them with an object. To me this brutally violent solution was beneath what I had experienced in other Infocom titles, and while it didn’t ruin the game for me as a whole it did lower my expectations.

Regarding the ending of the game, the tagline on the box strongly hinted at this – you just didn’t take it literally enough.

- Captain N

June 20, 2018 at 5:51 pm

Starcross has a lot going for it as Infocom’s first science fiction game and really the only one to play it straight (Planetfall, Stationfall, and HHGTG all being farcial). I’m kind of glad I didn’t buy this one around the time I first discovered these games (for the Commodore 64). I would obtain it years later with the Lost Treasures collection. Not because it’ a bad game. But, I had already played Tellurium’s Rendezvous With Rama. I don’t remember seeing whether Starcross was a modest success for Infocom or a flop. But I wonder how much the existence of the 1984 Rama text adventure (not to be confused with 1996s FMV game) influenced the sale of Starcross. I must have heard enough about the plot of the game to decide that if I had already played Tellurium’s RWR, there was no reason to buy Infocom’s “serial numbers filed off” version. When I finally played it, I noticed that the alien ship in Starcross was also cylindrical.

I’m kind of dissapointed that Infocom didn’t do more straight science fiction. They could have delved into the worlds of Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Delany, Niven, Pohl, and many others.

- Jimmy Maher

June 21, 2018 at 8:20 am

Starcross sold a little over 90,000 copies over its lifetime, making it Infocom’s seventh best-selling game of all time. It’s hard to imagine that the Telarium game affected its sales, as it wasn’t a notable success and arrived only some two years after Starcross. Certainly Starcross is a vastly better game by any measure except graphics.

Notwithstanding the early-days successes of Starcross and Suspended (Infocom’s sixth best-selling game), Infocom shied away from hard science fiction after the disappointing performance of A Mind Forever Voyaging. Customer surveys were showing a clear preference for fantasy and comedy by that point, and the company wasn’t in a position to gamble on force-feeding their customers things they weren’t really asking for. I agree that it’s a bit of a shame — although I would have found more original science-fiction works much more interesting than adaptations.

- Captain N

June 22, 2018 at 10:28 pm

I’m ashamed for forgetting that Suspended and AMFV were Infocom’s other “serious” SF games. I’m not sure where Trinity belongs, though. I admit that the Tellarium game was disappointing in the sense that it included very little in game text written by Arthur C. Clarke himself. The descriptions were somewhat pedestrian. This is the same problem seen in the EPYX game based on Asimov’s The Robots of Dawn.

I think there was more luck in the 90s when graphics could realize the worlds built in hard SF such as Larry Niven’s Ringworld and Frederick Pohl’s Gateway, both of which got an initial game and a sequel. However, probably because they were played straight, they were modestly successful but never quite as popular as the Kings Quest or Space Quest series.

A Mind Forever Voyaging is one of those games that would probably benefit from a modern remake. But the trick is to do it in a way that’s not overusing graphics and eye candy.

- Ben

July 31, 2020 at 9:00 pm

“Why? -> “Why?”

- Jimmy Maher

August 4, 2020 at 2:56 pm

Thanks!

- Nathanael

March 6, 2021 at 6:14 am

I understand why they replaced the map in later versions. I had the original version, and I *never made it to the alien spaceship*, because I never deciphered the map. Pretty much ruined the game.

I only got to the spaceship when I replayed the Lost Treasures version years later, which gave away the coordinates.

Suspended
March 5, 2013

Mike Berlyn

As earlier posts have hopefully made clear, conventions played a pivotal role for many years in the PC industry. In the early years that meant places like the West Coast Computer Faire and the AppleFests, where hackers and hobbyists would gather to talk about their machines and trade tips along with manufacturers, publishers, and developers; indeed, in this early period the groups could be all but indistinguishable. But 1982 is generally remembered by old-timers as the last year when the likes of Applefest could attract the movers and shakers. Afterward, as the moneyed interests entered en masse and the community of computer users (or even Apple users) grew too large to retain that clubby feeling, such gatherings faded in importance in comparison with the glitzier Consumer Electronics Show and its rivals, where you needed a press badge just to get in. Whatever form the shows took, they were as important for what took place behind the scenes, in back rooms, bars, and hotels, as what was shown on their floors. In gathering people from all over the industry together in one location, they provided essential opportunities for negotiations, deal making, maybe even a bit of intrigue.

Thus it was at the Boston Applefest in May of 1982 that Marc Blank of Infocom had a long talk with Mike Berlyn of Sentient Software, to whom he had been introduced by a mutual acquaintance. As it turned out, each was looking for something the other could offer him. It didn’t take long to make a deal.

Berlyn was by a wide margin the more frustrated of the pair. As you may recall, he had embraced the idea of adventure games as a new form of literary expression very early, and put it into practice as well as his resources allowed in two games he released through Sentient, Oo-Topos and Cyborg. Yet despite an absolutely rapturous review of the latter in the influential Softalk, the two games made nary a dent commercially. Berlyn, a demanding personality who throughout his career would change business relationships almost as often as he churned out games, felt muzzled by partners he felt weren’t as committed as he was and the accompanying lack of promotion and investment. Still, he also realized that in a real sense his best just wasn’t good enough. Both games were written in BASIC, with the two-word parser, simplistic world model, and all the other limitations that implied. Berlyn was a clever self-taught Apple II hacker, but lacked the experience or technical vision to create something more advanced — like, say, Infocom’s state-of-the-art ZIL system.

Blank, meanwhile, had ZIL but wasn’t sure he could take full advantage of it. Since starting to work on the landmark Deadline the previous year, he had started to see Infocom’s games in much the same light as Berlyn — as dynamic, playable stories. Blank, who was rather insecure about his own writerly chops (albeit largely unnecessarily), now viewed Deadline almost as a tech demo, a chance to get tools worked out and to demonstrate some shadow of what might be possible in the hands of a real writer. Berlyn, it must be admitted, was not exactly Norman Mailer or even Arthur C. Clarke. He had just three straight-to-the-dimestore-paperback-rack science fiction novels to his credit, none of which had sold all that well. Still, that was enough to qualify him for the title of “published author,” and was also three more novels than anyone else currently writing adventure games had published. Signing Berlyn would mark a big step toward Blank’s crystallizing vision of Infocom as publishers of interactive fiction rather than mere text adventures, even if it would still be a couple of years before the company would stumble upon that term to describe what they were really about.

The first plan had Berlyn working on a game for Infocom under contract from his home in Colorado. However, what with the complexities of the ZIL system and the state of telecommunications in 1982, that quickly proved impractical. So, within weeks of the Applefest meeting, Berlyn and his wife packed up and moved to Boston, where he became one of the first full-time employees to be hired by Infocom, as well as the first Implementor to be drawn from outside the immediate orbit of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science. What Infocom got for a first project was perhaps not quite what they had expected. Berlyn, Infocom’s supposed literary star, always combined a headstrong creativity with a certain flair for the perverse. He now started in earnest on Suspended, arguably the least literary parser-driven game Infocom would ever release, more a strategy game implemented in text than an interactive fiction.

The premise of Suspended reflects a longstanding obsession of Berlyn with disembodied consciousness; this had already been at the heart of his novel The Integrated Man and his earlier adventure Cyborg. In Suspended, you take the role of, yes, another disembodied consciousness, whose body has been placed in “cryogenic suspension” while her mind takes a 500-year shift as the emergency backup to an automated system which makes life possible on a planet of the future, controlling the weather, food production, and the transportation network. Normally your mind sleeps alongside your body, but you’re to be woken in the case of an emergency which the automated systems are not equipped to handle. As you’ve probably guessed, just such an emergency occurs as the game begins.

With no body of your own, you have six robots to whom you can issue orders and through whose senses you can experience the game’s available geography, which is restricted to a planetary control complex located far underground. Each robot is somewhat, um, specialized in its capabilities. Iris is the only one who can see. Auda can hear. Sensa can detect “vibrational activity, photon emission sources, and ionic discharges.” Poet seems to have no clear purpose, other than to spout bits of poetry that must be deciphered like a code to figure out what is really going on with him. (“All life’s a stage, so just consider me a player,” he says when asked to go somewhere; “It hops and skips and leaves a bit, and can’t decide if it should quit,” when asked to describe his surroundings inside a power station.) The most obviously practical robots are Whiz, who can interface with various computer systems, and Waldo, a general-purpose repair robot.

Over the course of the game a series of escalating crises strike the planet, to which you must respond by making use of all of your robots. There are fairly conventional object-based puzzles to solve, but even once you figure out how to do everything you still face a daunting challenge in scheduling and logistics to juggle all of your robots efficiently and minimize the casualties on the surface. If you succeed in saving the planet at all — no easy task in itself; it will likely take dozens of plays just to get that far — you next can concentrate on doing it without leaving half the population dead. (It’s rather deflating when you “win” for the first time, only to be told that the survivors want to burn you in effigy.) Winning “a home in the country and an unlimited bank account” will likely take at least a few dozen more attempts.

Played today, Suspended feels oddly like a genre of cooperative board games that have become fairly common in recent years. In games like Pandemic, Red November, and Flash Point, players struggle together to maintain a system against a series of shocks, whether they come in the form of waves of global disease, leaks and explosions aboard a very unseaworthy submarine, or a hungry house fire. Further cementing the board-game connection in my mind are the uniquely practical feelies that came with Suspended: a map of the complex in the form of a game board, with a set of counters representing each of the robots. As you get deeper into the game and begin playing to win you’ll soon have multiple robots moving simultaneously about the complex doing various things. Thus the board quickly becomes an essential tool for keeping track of the whole situation, along with some careful notes.

In one sense, Suspended feels visionary, or at least wholly unique in the Infocom canon. The standard text-adventure paradigm of play has been thrown overboard almost entirely. Gone, for example, is the need to map, along with the connection to a single in-game protagonist and any semblance of conventional storytelling. Further emphasizing the strategy-game feeling, Suspended is explicitly designed to be replayable. It has an “advanced” difficulty level you can attempt if you finally manage a good score on the standard, or you can choose the custom starting option, where you can choose the starting location of each robot and control when the various disasters are triggered. The manual suggests that you and friends could use this to “challenge each other” with new scenarios.

Unfortunately, the flexibility Suspended has can rather make us expect more from it than it can deliver. It would be nice if, like those board games I mentioned, Suspended could truly become a different experience every time it’s played by parceling out fortune and misfortune from a randomized deck of virtual cards. But alas, the same events will always occur even in custom mode; the only question is when, and even that is predetermined by the person entering the new parameters. Suspended upends the traditional Infocom approach enough that you wish it could have gone even further, dispensing with fixed puzzles and events entirely in favor of something completely dynamic and replayable. Maybe there’s a project in there somewhere for some modern author…

Visionary as it can feel, Suspended can also paradoxically feel like a bit of a throwback even in the context of its day. When we think of games in text today, we generally leap immediately to Adventure, Infocom, and all of their peers and antecedents. However, it’s important to remember that through the 1970s lots and lots of other sorts of games were implemented in text, simply because that was the only possibility. This included card games, strategy games, simulations, even action games. By the time of Suspended, the two text-only members of the trinity of 1977 (the TRS-80 and the Commodore PET) were fading away, and games other than adventures were expected to have graphics. One is almost tempted to look at Suspended as a text game that really wants to be in pictures, to imagine how cool it might be if the map board was included in the game itself as a graphical playing field. But then you realize that the very premise of having only one robot who can actually, you know, see is dependent on the proverbial magic of text, and a new appreciation for Berlyn’s creativity asserts itself. At any rate, it’s perhaps worth remembering again in light of Suspended’s unusual mode of play that Infocom were not at this stage calling themselves makers of interactive fiction or even adventure games. They were just making games in text which were (they claimed) smarter and more sophisticated than those of anybody working in graphics.

Being such a departure from anything Infocom had done before (or, for that matter, would do later), Suspended pushed and stretched the ZIL system in unexpected new directions, turning development into quite a challenge. To make things harder, Berlyn, while he knew his way pretty well around an Apple II, had none of the grounding in programming and theory of the Infocom founders. Just getting him up to speed on ZIL took some time, and getting this extremely ambitious first project going took more. Yes, some of what was needed had been done already: Dave Lebling had first put together a system for passing orders to other characters for his own robot in Zork II, and Blank had made great strides toward a more dynamic model of adventuring in Deadline. Still, Blank had to work quite extensively with Berlyn to give him the tools he needed. A game of Suspended can have many, many balls in the air, with six robots all moving about following orders, disasters and events happening (or being averted) on the surface, and the player hopping about amidst all the chaos, taking in the scene through this robot’s senses, then issuing orders to that one. Further, the parser had to be substantially reworked to support it all; it’s now possible to issue orders to multiple robots at once, or even to tell two or more robots to work on something together, such as moving something neither one is strong enough to budge on its own. Taken just as a functioning virtual world, Suspended is damn impressive — amongst the most technically impressive worlds that Infocom would ever create.

It’s also damn difficult to penetrate. With its tersely sterile robotic diction, its ironclad adherence to the sensory limitations of each robot, and the time pressures of its cavalcade of disasters, there isn’t an ounce of compromise or compassion in the game. We can only take comfort in knowing that even in its cruelty it’s eminently fair, as uninterested in playing guess the verb or foisting illogical puzzles on us as it is in coddling us. There’s none of the sense here of a design that got away from its designer that plagues, say, the work of Scott Adams or the early work of Roberta Williams. Suspended is hard because it wants to be hard, and it’s hard in exactly the way it wants to be. Which isn’t to say that most players, myself included, are exactly disappointed that Infocom never ventured further down the trail it blazed. I suspect that Suspended is the Infocom game farthest away from the ideal of interactive fiction as it’s perceived and (in Infocom’s case) remembered today.

Suspended was released in March of 1983 in a huge and elaborate box (better to house that big laminated game board) that featured a recessed three-dimensional face mask for a lid. Surprisingly in light of the game’s difficulty and unabashedly experimental mode of play, it was yet another solid hit, selling some 55,000 copies in 1983 alone and eventually flirting with sales of 100,000 over its commercial lifetime. It really did seem that, at least for now, people were willing to follow Infocom wherever they led them. And Suspended was only the first release of 1983, the happiest, most financially successful year in the company’s history. I’ll have much more to tell about that year and the games it produced in the next posts.

(I’m thrilled to be able to say that since my last post on Infocom Activision has rereleased many of their games, including Suspended, for iPhone and iPad. If you don’t have an iDevice, you can certainly find the story file elsewhere on the Internet, but as usual I won’t be hosting it here. Just in case it’s helpful to anyone, here’s a very rough module for the VASSAL board-gaming engine with the Suspended map and counters. Load the save to position the robots as they are at the start of the standard game. If someone more familiar with VASSAL wants to clean it up and upload it to the official module repository, by all means feel free.

I should also note here that Marc Blank’s attitude toward the eternal game vs. story question that always hangs about Infocom and interactive fiction in general seems to have changed over the years. In an interview for Jason Scott’s Get Lamp documentary, he states that he always viewed Infocom’s works as fundamentally games rather than fiction or literature. In contemporary interviews, however, he often expresses the belief that Infocom was creating works that were different from — or, if you like, transcended — games. I believe his current thinking may be somewhat colored by the pain and frustration of Infocom’s later years, and his inability to really move the genre forward in a way that felt right to him.)

Comments
25 Responses

- Felix

March 5, 2013 at 7:05 pm

I can already see a modern version, with six sub-windows tiled on a desktop monitor, each with its own command prompt, and a map overlay. But I’m not sure any existing authoring system is entirely adequate… Perhaps by scaling back the concept a little?

- Andrew Plotkin

March 5, 2013 at 7:27 pm

I7 can do six windows with separate command prompts. (You’d have to think more about the co-op “X and Y, do Z” actions.) I don’t know that it would add all that much, though. The live map (with current and routing marks for each bot) would be a much bigger deal.

- Felix

March 5, 2013 at 8:09 pm

“X and Y, do Z” actions wouldn’t even make sense with a multiple-window interface. But they can be simulated. I’m thinking of the fireplace puzzle in Christminster, and there must be other examples I can’t remember right now.

It was just a random idea anyway. Good to know it’s feasible at least in theory.

- David Cornelson

March 5, 2013 at 9:32 pm

FyreVM/Zifmia could handle the output fairly easily. My brain is stuck on the I7 logic that would manage the state of six PCs. I guess you’d “Change Player” before executing a given command. Brain hurts.

- Brad

March 5, 2013 at 11:20 pm

Well if you had three robots, you could name them Huey, Dewy & Louie.
It’s been done, never mind. :)
…
Maybe I’m confusing with something else, but I seem to remember a mid90s-early2000s game where you had multiple windows that were views of multiple robots performing different tasks. But I don’t think it was a direct rip of Suspended. If it existed at all.

- Dawid Buchwald

March 6, 2013 at 8:04 am

@Brad:

You are probably referring to Space Hulk (PC/Amiga) or Hired Guns (PC/Amiga), but they were completely different games.

Awesome games, by the way, but I’m sure Jimmy will get there and cover them in detail around 2020 :)

- Brad

March 7, 2013 at 12:08 am

Loved Space Hulk (didn’t know that was an Ami game too), at least the first one, the second, not so much.
Don’t know Hired Guns, but the one I seem to remember would be a slower paced game. Now this is really starting to bug me. I’ll have to do some rooting around and see what I turn up.

- Jonathan Blask

March 6, 2013 at 9:22 pm

I only beat Suspended within the last couple years with the help of the ifMUD’s ClubFloyd sessions. It was interesting to finally even get to the point where I could look at it for its optimization gameplay that I had read about in the newsgroups. Having the (sort of) two games in one was pretty clever, although in our case, none of us actually felt compelled to try again for a better score.

Personally, I don’t think the interface could be much improved other than the addition of an in-game map that shows where everybody is. The game works because of its claustrophobic feel, and improvements in control and perception would work against the gameplay, IMO.

Still, while playing on my own, I always thought there’d be some emergent subplot about how the current crisis was somehow caused by your crazy predecessor, Gregory Franklin. Of course, that never happens, but possibly the game could have used a narrative twist like that.

- Josh Lawrence

March 7, 2013 at 9:41 pm

“Which isn’t to say that most players, myself included, are exactly disappointed that Infocom never ventured further down the trail it blazed. I suspect that Suspended is the Infocom game farthest away from the ideal of interactive fiction as it’s perceived and (in Infocom’s case) remembered today.”

I don’t know – out of Infocom’s games I played as a kid (and I played a lot of them thanks to the incredible boon of a nearby computer software RENTAL store), Suspended was one of the ones that made the greatest impression, even if it was hard enough that I often had to turn to Invisiclues. And as hard as it is, I think its puzzles are actually more fair (ogical) than many other Infocom games (though I may be forgetting some particular unfair puzzles that I cheated my way through ;) ).

What was fascinating was figuring out what each individual robot was trying to describe, and then fitting the various robots’ descriptions together – there was a constant meta-puzzle of perception on top of the actual puzzles to be solved. And I really loved the robot’s differing descriptions of the same object.

So, even though it is rooted heavily in simulation and board-game-ness, what Suspended introduced to the medium was the literary technique of multiple points of view. In that sense, I wish more games had followed the trail it blazed – differing points of views providing radically different interpretations of the same rooms/people/objects.

Hitchhiker’s Guide had you switching PCs at certain points, but did not exploit that aspect to the full extent that Suspended did (not that that even really matters for HGTTG, but is just an example of “the road not taken”), and I’m sure there’s some non-commercial IF titles what’ve explored radical POV shifts, but it seems like a powerful tool that could get even more use in IF, especially when applied to more narrative games, instead of the simulation experience of Suspended.

- Healy

March 10, 2013 at 5:17 am

There’s actually quite a few IF titles with multiple points of view. It’s the whole point of Exhibition and Heroes; there are elements of it in Being Andrew Plotkin and Common Ground; Luminous Horizon, the final game in the Earth and Sky series, has you switching between two protagonists; Everybody Dies requires you to make use of three viewpoints to beat the game; Six has an unlockable character which has the same basic scenario but changes everything up; heck, the recent Comp title Escape from Summerland has three switchable protagonists, one of which is a broken robot! I can see wanting more games that play on that idea, but it’s not like it’s an it’s an unexplored concept in IF by any means.

(Also Photopia.)

- Josh Lawrence

March 10, 2013 at 4:14 pm

Yes, sorry,I’ve played Photopia, know about Luminous Horizon, and as I said “I’m sure there’s some non-commercial IF titles that’ve explored radical POV shifts…” – and I’m very happy for that!

But my point was arguing against “Which isn’t to say that most players, myself included, are exactly disappointed that Infocom never ventured further down the trail it blazed. I suspect that Suspended is the Infocom game farthest away from the ideal of interactive fiction as it’s perceived and (in Infocom’s case) remembered today.”

I think Suspended deserves recognition for introducing radical POV shifts as a worthwhile contribution to possibilities of IF, instead of being seen as an odd dead end as it’s kind of presented here. I was trying to argue more for its place in the evolution of IF, than just “I want to play more POV-shift games.” :)

- Bruce

March 9, 2013 at 7:28 am

It’s probably worth noting that the Activision re-release, similarly to their more recent bundles, doesn’t including Hitch Hikers, I believe because of a lapse of licence.

This is a shame.

- William Hern

April 23, 2015 at 1:32 pm

Jimmy,

Did you see the news that Mike Berlyn has been diagnosed with cancer? A former colleague of his is asking for donations to help the Berlyns with the cost of the treatment.

http://www.gofundme.com/skb9h3c

Perhaps you’d consider mentioning this appeal in an upcoming article?

- Jimmy Maher

April 24, 2015 at 5:22 am

Thanks, William. I was planning to write about Mike Berlyn again next week, so this is oddly good timing. I’ll see what I can do.

- Peter Ferrie

December 5, 2015 at 9:57 pm

For multiple PoV titles, Demoniak(?), where you “possess” different people in order to determine what they are thinking and to control their actions.

- Peter Ferrie

December 5, 2015 at 10:01 pm

One interesting aspect of Suspended was that Iris can’t enter the rooms that require the wedge to access, but those rooms have “visual” descriptions, implying that there’s a way to get her there. It can also be achieved by what appears to be a bug – ask Poet to place the wire that allows Iris to see, and then to follow Sensa. Then ask Sensa to move. Poet will not remove the wire, allowing Iris to see every room.

- Pingback: Det strategiska textäventyret – Go North – Ett digitalt museum om textäventyr till C64

- Mike Taylor

March 2, 2018 at 11:02 pm

“There’s none of the sense here of a design that got away from its designer that plagues, say, the work of Scott Adams …”

I’m intrigued by this assessment of Adams’s work. It certainly has its limitations — the engine he used was very constrained in what it could model, and the endless typos and misspellings did nothing to improve the impression his games created. But I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “design that got away from its designer”. If anything, I’d say the designs, impeded by the elementary engine, lagged behind the designer. Can you elaborate?

- Jimmy Maher

March 4, 2018 at 10:02 am

My strong impression is that Adams wanted to add more complexity and difficulty to his games, but the engine just wouldn’t support making more difficult puzzles the *right* way. So, he strayed into guess-the-verb and other nonsense. This is why the first half of his “classic dozen” games have held up much better than the second half, making him a rare example of a game designer who could be said to have regressed rather than progressed over the course of his career.

A more extended discussion of this is found here: https://www.filfre.net/2011/08/a-busy-1980/.

- Mike Taylor

March 4, 2018 at 3:42 pm

OK, that makes sense. I wonder whether the real issue here is that, while Adventureland and Pirate were labours of love, by the time we get to Ghost Town this series of games has become a cash cow. You can see why it would have been more appealing to Adams to just keep on cranking them out, with minimal quality control, that to invest in improving the engine and the plots, not to mention play-testing.

- Sebastian Echeverria

July 21, 2019 at 5:43 am

“Suspended was the only first release …” Maybe should be “Suspended was only the first release …”?

- Jimmy Maher

July 21, 2019 at 10:45 am

Thanks!

- Ben

November 30, 2020 at 7:46 pm

that conventions meant -> that meant

causalities -> casualties

- Jimmy Maher

December 1, 2020 at 12:53 pm

Thanks!

- Jonathan O

December 26, 2020 at 8:54 pm

Might I raise an objection to your comment about IF written in Basic necessarily having 2-word parsers? It would be perfectly easy to write a game in Basic with a more elaborate parser – I know because I’ve done it myself. Admittedly it was BBC Basic V (as implemented on the Archimedes) but I’ve no doubt that it would be possible to do the same in more minimal versions of the language. The reason that 2-word parsers are almost universal in Basic games may have something to do with limited memory, or it might just be that the writers were copying what others had done and didn’t consider the possibility of a more elaborate parser (or think it necessary).

The Top of its Game
March 20, 2013

When Mike Berlyn joined Infocom in the summer of 1982, he became one of the first trickles in a stream of new employees to join Joel Berez and Marc Blank inside the company’s spacious new offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some of those who took up residence on Wheeler Street were from the original founding core. The vast majority, however, were true newcomers whose contributions would be enormous even if their names would often never become so well known as those of the original gang from MIT. Let’s try to remedy that just a bit now for at least one of these folks; we’ll make space for others in later articles.

The bedrock technologies upon which was built virtually everything Infocom later did were of course the Z-Machine virtual machine and the ZIL adventure-specific programming language designed by the founders — with by far the biggest contribution coming from Marc Blank — as the first substantive project of the new company back in 1979 and 1980. Yet Infocom struggled in those earliest years to actually get the Z-Machine onto the smorgasbord of incompatible microcomputers that was the PC market of the early 1980s. While they had a wealth of computer-science talent on tap to design such technology in the abstract, no one among the founders had any particular love for or, truth be told, unusual skill for hacking on micros. Stu Galley’s old slogan of “We hate micros!” still largely held sway. The one member of the original Zork team who did have a fondness for the little machines was Bruce Daniels, who decided to join Apple rather than Infocom; the company had to pay him as a contractor to implement the Z-Machine on the Apple II from his new home in California. As long as they remained staffed exclusively by refugees from the world of institutional computing, Infocom would be unable to fully take advantage of the Z-Machine. Enter one Dan Horn.

In 1982 Horn was working for Scott Adams’s Adventure International near Orlando, Florida, but also doing testing for many other companies, among them Infocom. An outgoing personality who wasn’t shy about sharing his ideas, he developed a good working relationship with Blank, which led to a full-fledged job offer, to come to Boston and set up a new division within Infocom dedicated just to porting and maintaining the Z-Machine on as many microcomputers as could support it. This would allow the founders to wash their hands of the whole business and just concentrate on the games themselves.

Horn’s “Micro Group” soon came to occupy a substantial portion of the offices, and were responsible for Infocom’s soon-to-be legendary ability to get their games onto more platforms more quickly than anyone else. At their peak, they supported more than twenty different incompatible systems, including a few soon-to-be orphans for which Infocom’s games were virtually the only commercial software available. A loft above the offices housed at least one example of every machine available for purchase at that time, along with a selection of prototypes sent directly from manufacturers who, in light of the popularity of the Infocom games and their reputation as masters of the quick port, sent them in the hopes that Infocom could have their full line available as soon as the machines hit the market. Their hopes were generally well-founded. In order to get their games onto the Apple Macintosh in time for its release, Horn’s team dumped entirely the prototype’s buggy pre-release operating system, replacing it with a window manager of their own. On release day a dozen or so Infocom games were the only ones available. A similar scenario was later repeated on machines like the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga. Other, more celebrated employees may have written the games, but Horn’s group brought them to the world. As Horn said in his interview for Get Lamp, you can’t sell a lot of games for a $100,000-plus DEC minicomputer.

Speaking of which: in December of 1982 Infocom made a landmark purchase that signaled they had truly arrived as a company: their own DECSystem-20, the latest iteration of the PDP-10 architecture that had spawned Zork and still ran ZIL. Before this point Infocom had begged, borrowed, or leased time on various systems belonging to MIT or DEC itself. Now they had a machine of their own, one that would soon take a featured spot as the mysterious heart of the Infocom magic in articles written by the microcomputer journalists who visited the offices and reported what they found in the magazines of the day. “The electric bill for just the mighty DEC 2060 computer that blinks and hums away in the basement runs to $1500 a month,” wrote one awed visitor, conjuring images of one of Star Trek’s mysterious planet-controlling computers run amok. In reality, the machine was far from exotic. It was in fact thoroughly typical gear in businesses and universities all over the country, an established everyday workhorse chosen precisely because the core of the company had been working with machines of this design for years. It was just that it normally existed in an entirely different world of computing, one of which hobbyists hacking at home on their Apple IIs or Commodore 64s had little knowledge.

What with the arrival of the DEC system and the establishment of the Micro Group, as 1983 began Infocom was poised to enter its classic era, that short, happy time when the business model and the technology were in place and in full flower and the company was churning along merrily, kicking out another bestselling title every few months. Infocom had gone a long way toward crafting the public image for which they’re still remembered already in 1982 with the aid of a wonderful partner, their advertising firm of G/R Copy. In 1983 they cemented their image as classy purveyors of games which eschewed childish graphics for the deeper, richer, more adult pleasures of text via the two best-crafted and (not coincidentally) best-remembered advertisements they would ever release.

Yet that sense of focus, that absolute surety about who they were and what they were doing which they projected to the outside world was not always reflective of what was going on inside the company. Infocom finally came to the brave decision to double down on text only after a lot of serious internal debate. To understand why, we have to remember that already by 1982 few pure text adventures were still being sold in North America, and of them only those of Infocom were doing at all well commercially. The movement that On-Line Systems had begun with Mystery House and The Wizard and the Princess now dominated the industry. Even Scott Adams felt compelled to add pictures to his minimalist back-catalog, creating the SAGA line. Were Infocom’s games destined to ultimately suffer for their lack of pictures, or were they qualitatively different enough from the competition to survive on their own terms? That was the question Infocom’s management wrestled with.

Infocom was uncertain enough of the answer that they approached Penguin Software, riding high at the time in the wake of their hit Transylvania, to discuss the idea of a partnership, in which Penguin’s Antonio Antiochia (author of Transylvania) would make illustrations for the Infocom line. Antiochia was eager, but Mark Pelczarski, head of Penguin, was somewhat ambivalent. As he told me recently, he actually admired the extant Infocom approach greatly, and shuddered at the idea of Infocom trading their games’ sophistication for the lure of pictures. On the other hand, he was very aware of what the arrangement could do for his own company, and excited by the idea of working closely with the Infocom core, for whom he had immense personal and professional respect. And so the discussions proceeded amidst conflicted feelings on both sides. Within Infocom, the technical architects and game designers, following the example of Marc Blank, tended to line up against graphics, while the company’s emerging business and marketing sides believed them necessary to stay competitive.

In the end, the former opinion won the day, and negotiations with Penguin quietly petered out as G/R Copy set to work on the famous anti-graphics advertising campaign that did so much to define Infocom as they are still remembered today. If nothing else, Blank had compelling technical arguments on his side. Not only would pictures necessarily drain precious computing resources away from Infocom’s best-in-the-industry parsers, world models, and writing, but their entire ZIL- and Z-Machine-based development system was fundamentally unsuited to making games with pictures. The DEC terminals on which the games were actually written could display only text, which would leave as the only option somehow shoehorning pictures in at the interpreter level. This would play havoc with Infocom’s ability to get their games quickly onto such a variety of machines: while all of the target machines could easily accept input from the keyboard and display text in response, their graphics capabilities ranged from impressive to nonexistent, with each machine having its own set of strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. As Infocom soon realized from the discussions with Penguin, getting pictures onto even a small subset of platforms would be an immensely time-consuming, technically ugly exercise, if it could be done at all without ripping out the heart of what made Infocom Infocom, and would play to absolutely none of the company’s technical strengths. And even though everyone liked the folks at Penguin, Infocom as a company always preferred to do things in-house rather than depend on outside partners.

With the final decision made at last to buck the conventional market wisdom, Infocom’s audacious advertising in support of the choice proved so masterful that it not only sustained their own success but also gave rhetorical cover for a modest but noteworthy resurgence of all-text games from others. During the next few years, companies as large and commercially mainstream as Brøderbund and Electronic Arts would release pure-text adventures of their own, a development that would have been exceedingly unlikely without the example of Infocom to say that, yes, games without pictures can still sell (for the time being, anyway).

For the first couple of years following the split with Personal Software, Infocom relied heavily upon G/R Copy to craft not only their advertising but most of the face they showed to the outside world, including their packaging and even the names of their games. (The list of Infocom games that found their final name only when complete and in the final stages of package design and testing is surprisingly long.) In the summer of 1983, however, Infocom began to become less dependent on G/R, thanks to the return of a prodigal son, Mike Dornbrook. As you may remember, Dornbrook had left the Boston area two years before for an MBA program at the University of Chicago, taking his Zork Users Group with him. Since then he had invented InvisiClues and, working closely with friends inside Infocom proper, turned ZUG into a formidable operation. Now Infocom took Dornbrook back on in-house as “Product Manager,” a position that amounted to head of marketing and head of public relations. He brought with him the ZUG operation kit and kaboodle, including the maps and the InvisiClues and the trinkets that they sold as well as The New Zork Times newsletter and, most precious of all, a mailing list of some 20,000 members who formed the rapidly expanding heart of the Infocom fanbase. These were the people who bought every game, who evangelized to their friends, who thought of themselves as members of the Infocom “smart persons club.”

The New Zork Times continued without a pause, now as the official quarterly publication of Infocom itself, the most essential link between company and fans. Its pages were filled with some of the puff pieces and thinly veiled advertisements you might expect from a publication of this stripe, but always executed with wit and charm thanks to Dornbrook’s careful hand. There were also quizzes, jokes, and contests. But most precious to the fans was the picture the newsletter gave of life inside the company, a microcosmic world of clever, wacky people who all genuinely liked one another having a great time every day making great games and getting paid to do it. Fans devoured stories about the latest office shenanigans instigated by Dornbrook and Steve Meretzky, the two biggest jokesters in an office that seemed full of them; about the personal histories behind the various games; about the Infocom softball team’s epic duels with their arch-rivals (both on the field and in adventure gaming) at nearby Spinnaker Software.

The New Zork Times’s picture of life inside Infocom was, at least during 1983 and 1984, quite accurate. The Wheeler Street offices were a genuinely happy place, a great place to be young, technically skilled and/or creative, and gainfully employed. As Graham Nelson wrote, the people who worked there “mostly look back on the heyday as a happy, one-time thing, like a summer romance.” Everyone worked hard, and often for long hours, but there was always something amusing going on: epic tournaments of Uno or Diplomacy; parties to celebrate this or that real or contrived occasion (management provided a party budget of $400 per week); running gags and practical jokes of all stripes; an in-house newsletter (InfoDope) that served as a sort of unexpurgated companion to the official New Zork Times; softball; crab races(!). It’s an overused metaphor, but calling Infocom a family is probably not overstating the case.

Infocom’s game-making operation was broadly divided into four divisions: the Micro Division that got the Z-Machine interpreters working and got the games deployed onto all those machines; quality control, consisting of a core of in-house testers who were also responsible for a larger network of outside volunteers who ensured that, beginning in 1983, Infocom’s new games were released in a much more polished state than those of earlier years, and that the older games were patched up to meet the new standards; Dornbrook’s marketing and PR people; and at the center of it all the so-called Imps (short for “Implementors,” of course) who actually created the games on the big DEC machine. This group, despite constituting a relatively small percentage of the people employed by Infocom, were the ones who got all the attention, who got their names on the boxes and in The New Zork Times and whom everyone from the press wanted to meet. There was some resentment of their status by others in the company, but not as much as you might expect, perhaps because there proved to be just enough mobility among the groups to give hope to an ambitious tester or interpreter coder that she could reach center stage and become an Imp; people from both groups did eventually author their own games. Inter-divisional resentment was also relieved via measures like the weekly Friday parties that brought the whole company together for a few hours to chitchat and discuss business and generally see how the other halves were living.

By the end of 1983, these groups added up to some thirty people, up from all of four full-timers at the time Mike Berlyn joined just eighteen months before. Annual sales increased at a similar rate, from about 100,000 games in 1982 to 450,000 in 1983. Infocom doubled the size of their catalog in 1983, releasing five new games. Every single one was a solid hit. Infocom was a dominant player, very likely the most respected and envied in the games industry of 1983 — even despite the splashy launch of Electronic Arts — and a veritable commercial juggernaut. How veritable, you ask? Well, below you see the bestseller charts of the biggest software distributor of the time, SoftSel, for the week of December 12, 1983.

As you can see, every single one of the ten games Infocom has available is nestled securely inside the top 40, including six within the top 20, three within the top 10, and Zork I at number one. The whole thing rather reminds one of those Billboard charts from 1964 which seem to consist of pretty much all Beatles songs. The top four Infocom titles on the chart all date from earlier years, demonstrating the oft-remarked unusual staying power of Infocom’s catalog titles. Indeed, the continuing success of Zork I baffled even Infocom. It had increased its sales astronomically for every year on the market, approaching 100,000 all by itself in 1983, and sales would jump by more than 50% yet again in 1984.

All of this commercial success brought with it lots and lots of press attention. A big part of this came from the usual suspects inside the computer and gaming trade press, who positively clamored for permission to visit Wheeler Street and interview the inhabitants. But more surprising and (one suspects) more gratifying was the attention from some very unusual suspects. Beginning with a piece by Edward Rothstein for the New York Times Book Review, 1983 was the year that the mainstream media discovered Infocom. The quirky company made a great story for journalists looking for an angle from which to explore the home-computer explosion and the accompanying growth in entertainment software, which seemed to be displacing the old console-based videogames. Lengthy profiles followed in Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine, Discover. Marc Blank, unfailingly eloquent and charming, became Infocom’s go-to spokesman, sort of their equivalent to Electronic Arts’s Bill Budge. That almost became a full-time job in itself. “Sometimes it seems that all I do is interviews anymore,” he was soon good-naturedly sighing when asked about his role at the company. Like Budge, Blank even made it onto network television, demonstrating The Witness, Infocom’s mystery of 1983, for Diane Sawyer and Bill Kurtis on The CBS Morning News.

Most of these ambassadors from the mainstream tended to shy away from Infocom’s most popular game, Zork, in favor of the mysteries, the branch of genre literature most acceptable to an older, middlebrow audience who still generally saw fantasy and science fiction as disreputable stuff for the kids but weren’t averse to a bit of Agatha Christie. Likewise, the connection to Dungeons and Dragons, and even games in general, was deemphasized in favor of the games’ literary antecedents. For a lot of people inside and outside of Infocom, including the editors of SoftSide magazine who had started talking about the potential of “compunovels” back when Scott Adams was the only adventuring game in town, this kind of serious attention to the literary potential of the form must have represented quite a moment of triumph, even if not everyone was sold on the literary qualities of the extant games. (“By literary standards, Infocom’s stories are crude. The characters are two-dimensional, plots are forever clunking to a halt, and the writing tends to be sophomoric,” wrote Philip Elmer-De Witt in Time.) These writers also mostly avoided calling them “adventure games” in favor of “participatory novels,” “computer novels,” or, still considerably before Infocom would officially rebrand their games with the name, “interactive fiction.” It was truly press coverage to die for, which played perfectly into Infocom’s own advertising rhetoric of games for adult tastes and sensibilities. Some of these writers went much farther than Infocom ever officially would in laying claim to the games as a whole nascent new field of literature.

In the midst of all this heady success, there remained in the background the secret project that was really going to open the financial floodgates: the InfoBase, soon to be renamed Cornerstone.

As I’ve noted in earlier articles, Infocom had not been founded as a games company; Zork had merely been seen as a relatively quick first product to get them established and get some money flowing in. Even the early success of Zork I and II didn’t do a lot to change that. On January 12, 1982, Mort Rosenthal, Infocom’s brief-lived but extremely productive manager of marketing, presented to the board two possible strategic directions going forward: to continue to concentrate on games and “consumer software,” or to make a serious push into the business market while remaining a mere “presence” in the consumer market. The board, which included the chief architect of Infocom’s current success in games, Marc Blank, was hardly riven by internal conflict at this stage; they unanimously chose the latter course, tempted by a virgin microcomputer business market that had just been legitimized by the new IBM PC. Now the only question to answer was just what kind of a business product they wanted to create.

Meanwhile two old colleagues from the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, Brian Berkowitz and Richard Ilson, were experimenting with database software. The leading microcomputer database of the time, Ashton-Tate’s dBase II, was powerful but notoriously difficult to use; one had to effectively learn a new, fiddly programming language to get anything useful out of it. Berkowitz and Ilson envisioned a database for ordinary people, simple and menu-driven, that could be quickly set up and used by shopkeepers, medical receptionists, even people looking to catalog a book or stamp collection at home. They felt they had identified a real market need, and when their ideas came to the attention of Infocom’s Al Vezza, Joel Berez, and Marc Blank, all of whom had worked with the pair and had great respect for their capabilities, Infocom agreed. In return, Infocom could offer Berkowitz and Ilson access to their virtual-machine technology developed for their games, which should let them bring their database easily and cheaply onto not just the new IBM PC but a plethora of other, minor platforms where the competition would be nonexistent. It all sounded perfect. In October of 1982, Berkowitz and Ilson were officially hired as the first two employees of Infocom’s new Business Products Division, to work on the so-called “InfoBase.”

Berkowitz and Ilson were both very talented programmers, but things didn’t proceed quite as neatly as the original plan might have implied. They found that it was hardly practical to expect to just sit down and write a database in ZIL and then run it on the Z-Machine, as both had been rather ruthlessly pruned of any functionality not directly useful to writing adventure games. At best these technologies could serve as building blocks and samples on the road to rolling their own, much more complex virtual machine and its associated development tools. Still, by August of 1983 the two had enough to show that the project was deemed viable in the view of Infocom’s five-man board of directors. They decided it was time to expand it from little more than a two-man research project to a full-fledged development effort.

Infocom was doing wonderfully financially, but to fund a major business-software effort like this one would nevertheless require much more money than they were bringing in. They would need loans and/or venture capital. Until now, Al Vezza, the man who had had the original idea of founding Infocom, had remained in his job at MIT, leaving the day-to-day running of the company to Joel Berez. Now it was decided that Vezza would come on full-time beginning that January, as soon as he could wrap up his duties at MIT. Further, under the belief that the older Vezza possessed a gravitas that would sway potential investors, he would replace Berez as CEO on that date.

It was here that the first signs of the internal stresses that would eventually splinter the company began to show. In the beginning it had more to do with personalities than strategic concerns. Many at Infocom, among them Mike Berlyn, Steve Meretzky, Mike Dornbrook, and Dan Horn, disliked the stodgy, academic, rather humorless Vezza intensely. They were not thrilled by the idea of him replacing the popular, easygoing Berez, who had put his future on the line and guided the company to its current success while Vezza hedged his bets and remained at MIT. Vezza, meanwhile, seemed to regard Infocom’s games and (some suspected) its game programmers as distasteful necessities to be dispensed with as soon as he could get a real software business started. Caught somewhere in the middle were Berez himself and Marc Blank, who maybe weren’t quite so excited as they had been eighteen months before about business software in light of Infocom’s current success in games but weren’t quite willing to directly challenge the older, imposing Vezza over the issue. After all, why couldn’t Infocom do both, and keep everyone happy? With Vezza so disinterested in games, Berez would effectively remain in day-to-day control of that part of the company anyway, just like it had always been.

And make no mistake, the business market looked tempting indeed. Shortly after Infocom themselves had moved into the building on Wheeler Street, a tiny startup called Lotus Software that was run by Mitch Kapor, an old acquaintance who had negotiated Infocom’s first contract to sell Zork through Personal Software, moved into another space inside the same building. On January 26, 1983, they released Lotus 1-2-3, a spreadsheet program designed to go head to head with the application that had largely built the business-software industry, VisiCalc. 1-2-3 outclassed VisiCalc so thoroughly that it all but destroyed it in the marketplace within months. Lotus made an incredible $53 million in 1983, and would triple those earnings the following year. Compared to success like that, the $6 million Infocom earned in 1983 seemed downright paltry. With an example of what a major business-software success story could be literally right next door, it’s little surprise that few at Infocom were willing to outright say no to Vezza’s schemes.

With dreams of Infocom as the next Lotus in his eyes, that December Vezza secured a $2 million loan from the Bank of Boston on very favorable terms, in return for stock options and a position on the board for Ray Stata, founder of Analog Devices. Should anyone have been counting, the board was now tilted four to two in favor of business over games, with Vezza, Stata, Chris Reeve, and the rather disinterested J.C.R. Licklider (who rarely bothered to show up at board meetings but gave his proxy to Reeve) on one side, and only Berez and Blank on the other, in spite of the fact that the vast majority of the company was still busy making games. With this first big injection of business-software capital and Vezza about to take the reins full-time, that would change in the new year.

If there were already grumbles about Vezza and the business-software initiative by the end of 1983, it should be understood that they were mild at this point. Infocom was staffed by a lot of young, talented people who had succeeded wildly at everything they had attempted thus far. Their little thirty-person business had a handsome bottom line, and they were being feted not just as commercial successes but as pioneers of a whole new form of interactive literature. Sure, they had worked hard, but it had also all come kind of easily to them. Having succeeded at everything else, why shouldn’t they succeed at business software? In spite of the money they spent on the database project during the year, they still finished 1983 with more than half-a-million in clear profits. All they could imagine ahead was more success, in an ever-expanding consumer market and, soon, a lucrative business market as well. They would have been shocked if you had told them that 1983 would be the last year Infocom would actually turn a profit, or that it would go down as the single happiest, most unblemished year in the company’s history. But for now let’s leave them to enjoy themselves at that pinnacle as we turn to the rest of the games of 1983 that helped to put them there.

(In addition to the links scattered through the article above, be sure to have a look at Down From the Top of its Game for more on the Infocom story from a business perspective.)

Comments
22 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

March 20, 2013 at 1:46 pm

My favorite line about the DEC 20:

The electric bill for just the mighty DEC 2060 computer that blinks and hums away in the basement runs to $1500 a month, “about what it would be,” says vice president Marc Blank, “if you lived in Buckingham Palace, or if you were running an aluminum smelter.”

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/globe84.html

- Jimmy Maher

March 20, 2013 at 5:18 pm

Yeah, it’s hard to know what to make of such bizarre comparisons, isn’t it? One wonders whether Blank, for whom the DEC was a thoroughly plebian tool, was just having a bit of fun at his interlocutor’s expense.

- Duncan Stevens

March 20, 2013 at 7:50 pm

Yeah, not sure. $1,500/month in 1983 dollars does sound like quite a bit to run a single machine, large or not; if that was accurate, I don’t think the DECs would have been as popular as they were. More likely that was for the whole office. But I could be wrong. Still a funny line.

I remember Infocom’s advertising campaign well because it showed up in Games Magazine, which my family subscribed to (I still do). Low-circulation then as now, but exactly the right audience to target.

- iPadCary

March 20, 2013 at 2:41 pm

The praise for Infocom is almost cliché now because of thier supreme awesomeness!

I want to see an Infocom reunion almost as much as I want a Smiths reunion or to see Christine McVie rejoin Fleetwood Mac.

Another great piece, Jimmy, about a game developer whose like we shan’t likely gaze upon again ….

- hitfan

March 20, 2013 at 10:03 pm

I always look forward to reading your articles.

What a sad tale that is corporate bean-counterism which does everything it can to sabotage profitable creativity. I’m almost convinced that these forces resent and hate success.

Infocom had struck gold with a blue ocean strategy by reviving the text-based gaming concept when everybody else seemed to be abandoning it. They had a license to print money, but the know-it-alls who saw the greener grass on the other side thought that games were beneath them.

It was best to leave Infocom as it was. Sure, the market for text-only games wasn’t going to last forever, but one wonders what more they could have achieved if not for what happened to Infocom.

- David Boddie

March 20, 2013 at 11:32 pm

“an established everyday workhouse” -> “an established everyday workhorse”?

- Jimmy Maher

March 21, 2013 at 6:12 am

“Workhouse” does kind of put an uglier spin on it, doesn’t it? :) Thanks!

- Healy

March 21, 2013 at 5:32 am

Now that Cornerstone’s been introduced, I can finally post this Jerk City. (This is about the sum of my knowledge of Cornerstone.)

- Jimmy Maher

March 21, 2013 at 6:14 am

As Dave Anderson said in his Get Lamp interview, “The puzzles were way too hard…”

Mike Berlyn persists in calling it Tombstone to this day, which still cracks me up.

- Keith Palmer

March 21, 2013 at 10:01 pm

I’d had the impression I was more familiar with Infocom’s story than the others being presented here, but the Micro Group (and the apparent corollary of the Implementors concentrating on the DECSystem, I imagine through time-sharing video terminals) and the graphics partnership that might have happened were interesting to learn about. I might have been starting to suspect the allusion to “text adventures” from other companies following Infocom’s lead, though. At the same time, the suggestion of 1983 being Infocom’s happiest year (and that a few years before my family got the one Infocom game we had in the pre-“Lost Treasures” day) does add to that feeling of evanescence about these days of computing (and the usual darker side of the history threatening to add up to a series of stupid decisions when viewed with know-it-all hindsight…)

- ZUrlocker

March 22, 2013 at 2:18 am

Jimmy, great story with a lot of detail that was new. I also appreciate that it’s a balanced perspective. If CornerStone’s architecture, user interface and performance had been better, it probably would have generated 10x what the Infocom games generated in revenues. Reflex and Paradox both generated quite strong revenues in the PC database industry as did the next generation of dBase III and various “dBase clones.”
–Zack

- Ian Schmidt

March 24, 2013 at 1:28 am

Yeah, it’s easy to grab a Sharpie and start doodling a twirling mustache on the likes of Al Vezza. But here in 2013 where the majority platform is a direct descendant of the business-oriented IBM PC running a derivative of the business-oriented Windows NT (and likely with some version of MS Office installed) it’s easy to see how Infocom could be a thriving concern today if they’d gotten Cornerstone right. The strategy was fine, the product wasn’t. It’s one of the classic what-ifs of 1980s computing, alongside “what if the IBM PC had used a 68000?”

As things stand, I think Infocom lasted exactly the reasonable lifetime of commercial interactive fiction. By 1988 companies like Sierra and especially Cinemaware were leveraging newer technology to make games that had impressive enough audiovisuals that the famous Infocom ads no longer applied. I look forward to reading Jimmy’s treatment of that era.

- C.J.Geringer

January 4, 2016 at 5:12 pm

“were filled with some of the puff pieces”

I believe you meant “of the cuff”

- Jimmy Maher

January 5, 2016 at 6:24 am

No, “puff” was intended here.

- Martin

June 9, 2016 at 2:18 am

I’ll admit that i know nothing about the technologies of Cornerstone, so forgive me if i am all wrong but given the previous work of Codd’s relational model, IBM’s System R and the general college level know-how of the Infocom higher ups, why didn’t they design something along the lines of an SQL engine just as Oracle had done?

- Jimmy Maher

June 9, 2016 at 7:34 am

I’m not sure I’m technically qualified to entirely answer this, but the focus with Cornerstone was on making an easy-to-use database for lighter applications. Asking users to learn SQL would have been asking too much. Nowadays, with the hardware we have at our disposal, it’s possible to make a database that’s both easy to use for simple tasks and powerful enough for the most advanced. In the 1980s, it was much more of an either/or proposition.

- Not Fenimore

March 12, 2019 at 1:15 pm

The “One Awed Visitor” link is broken. It’s still on the wayback machine, though: https://web.archive.org/web/20120124004017/http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/globe84.html

- Jimmy Maher

March 14, 2019 at 3:10 pm

Thanks! Link replaced.

- Not Fenimore

November 9, 2019 at 1:14 pm

And, uh, so is the Time Magazine one. Sorry for not noticing both at once. Wayback Machine again to the rescue:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130219003739/http://www.csd.uwo.ca:80/Infocom/Articles/time83.html

- Jimmy Maher

November 9, 2019 at 4:20 pm

Not at all. Thanks!

- Ben

December 5, 2020 at 5:12 pm

doing at well -> doing well

- Jimmy Maher

December 6, 2020 at 9:03 am

Thanks!

The Witness
March 22, 2013

Stu Galley, a man who would come to unabashedly love the games Infocom created, who would author the almost naively idealistic “Implementor’s Creed” to describe the job he and his fellow Imps did, took quite a long time to discover his passion. When he first saw the Zork game that some of the other hackers in MIT’s Dynamic Modeling Group had created, he thought it clever but little else. He had no interest in fantasy fiction or Dungeons and Dragons, and no particular interest in exploring beyond Zork’s first few rooms. Some of his disinterest may have been generational. Already in his mid-thirties when Zork was begun, he was five to ten years older than the people who made it. That’s not a huge gap, but it was enough to place him at a somewhat different stage of life, one where such idle amusements might not have quite so much appeal in light of his wife and young son.

When asked to become a founder of Infocom, he signed on because he had a lot of respect for the talents of the others. He thought they just might come up with something — who knew what? — really great, and he didn’t want to be kicking himself over the lost opportunity in five years. During this early period Galley, like most of the founders, did this or that for the company as time and inclination allowed, but kept it very much ancillary to his main working life. His official role at Infocom was to serve as treasurer. He also pitched in to help with odd jobs here and there: an experienced technical writer, he wrote the original manual for the commercial Zork, and helped Mike Dornbrook to set up and administer the mailing list that would morph into The Zork Users Group. But he mostly remained on the periphery, not quite ready to commit too much energy to the venture. Then came an epiphany.

Very early in 1982 Galley agreed to another of those odd jobs: to do some testing on Marc Blank’s new mystery, Deadline. Galley was blown away by the game for much the same reason it would soon cause a sensation in the world of adventure gaming in general. He still recalls vividly today how, when exploring the Robner house for the first time, he heard a phone ring in the other room but missed the call. Restarting, he made sure to be near a phone when the time came, and heard Mrs. Robner having a clipped conversation with her lover. That “blew his mind.” Here was a realistic, dynamic world to inhabit, one which struck him as far more interesting than the vast, empty dungeon of Zork with its static, arbitrary puzzles. “I could relive this story over and over and eventually, by looking at it from different angles and connecting the dots, find out what was really going on.” Galley was hooked at last.

In light of Deadline’s commercial success, another mystery was obviously warranted. With some input from Dave Lebling, Blank began sketching out plans for a sequel almost immediately. He already had a clever gimmick in mind: the player would be invited to his home by the victim, where she would actually witness the murder in the opening scenes of the game. Nevertheless, it still wouldn’t be clear who was actually responsible. Unfortunately, Blank was absolutely swamped with other work: putting together Zork III, helping Mike Berlyn get up to speed on ZIL and ensuring he had the tools he needed for the game that would become Suspended, doing an ever-escalating series of interviews and PR junkets, sorting out business issues with the board. The game, to be called Invitation to Murder, remained only an outline of a few typewritten pages into the fall. That’s when it occurred to Blank, who was forever looking for ways to cajole his fellow founders into taking a more active role, to offer the outline to Galley, who still had stars in his eyes over his Deadline experience. Galley quickly agreed, and in October of 1982, while still only moonlighting at Infocom, started to work.

Working from a stripped-down skeleton of the original Deadline code, Galley gradually built a playable game over the next few months. Along the way, the project had one of the effects for which Blank had hoped: Galley was so inspired by the new work that he quit MIT and came to Infocom full-time before the year was out. In late January Infocom sat down with their ever-supportive advertising agency of G/R Copy to discuss the upcoming game. Just as they had with Deadline, G/R quickly replaced the original title with something much more punchy and direct: simply The Witness. Both Mike Berlyn and G/R also suggested that the time period and the tone be changed. They suggested that, rather than the ostensible present of Deadline, Galley move the game to the golden age of mystery, the 1930s. In retrospect this was a natural change. As I noted when writing about Deadline, that game felt like a product of the golden age anyway; The Witness would merely make it official. If anything the more important suggestion was to change the style to differentiate the new game from Deadline. If Deadline was a cozy mystery in the tradition of Agatha Christie, The Witness could be Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, a hardboiled tale of noirish intrigue.

Galley didn’t have much experience with this branch of the mystery canon, but, as he later put it, as soon as he started to read The Big Sleep he was convinced. Instead of the stately, blue-blooded Connecticut of Deadline, The Witness would take place in 1938 Los Angeles, at the peak of pre-war Hollywood’s loose glamor and danger. Galley lost himself in period research. In addition to the classic crime fiction of the period, he drew from a Sears catalog and other advertisements from the era, a 1937 encyclopedia, and The Dictionary of American Slang (to get the characters’ language right). He went so far as to track down a radio schedule for February 18, 1938, the evening of the crime, and make sure that the radio inside the house played the correct program from minute to minute.

In the tradition of Deadline, the packaging of The Witness would be a major part of the experience. Accordingly, Infocom began working with G/R on it months before the game’s projected release. Already back when outlining the game Blank had proposed including a newspaper with articles giving background information on the victim and the suspects, another direct lift from the old Dennis Wheatley crime dossiers (a fold-out newspaper had been the showstopping centerpiece of Who Killed Robert Prentice?). With the newfound historical context, G/R now ran with the idea to create one of the most impressive feelies Infocom would ever release. They found a newspaper in the Los Angeles area, The Register of Santa Ana, who agreed to share several editions from the period on microfiche. They then had the whole thing typeset once again, with a couple of new, game-specific articles slyly inserted. As Galley later noted, some of the real stories from the newspaper (“Fear Lost Boy Victim of Cougar”; “Works Many Years with Broken Neck”; “Pajama ‘Parade’ Results as Toy Catches on Fire”) were more bizarre than anything they could have come up with on their own. Printed on perfectly yellowed cheap newsprint, the final result is a triumph.

G/R contacted Western Union for help recreating a telegram from the period. Galley and G/R, who clearly had a great deal of fun with this project, scoured old magazines and catalogs for advertisements to include in the faux-detective magazine that serves as the manual. G/R was even able to get some of their other clients, such as American Optical, to loan their old adverts to the effort.

For the obligatory physical prop, the equivalent to the pills included in the Deadline package, they added a matchbook with a cryptic phone number scrawled on the inside. Taken all together, The Witness outclasses even Deadline in its packaging. It’s almost enough to make the actual game it’s supporting feel just a bit underwhelming in comparison.

It’s not that there’s anything dramatically wrong with The Witness, just that after such a build-up the actual case at its heart is maybe not quite so intriguing as one might wish. The solution, when you uncover it, is thoroughly absurd, not at all unusual in this genre, but not ultimately all that interesting in spite of its absurdity. Perhaps the biggest problem is that there just aren’t enough suspects nor enough juicy secrets to be discovered about them. There are only three possible murderers, and one of those has been caught red-handed fleeing from the crime scene — which, as anyone who’s ever read a mystery novel should know, pretty much rules him out from the get-go. Combined with the smallest map of any Infocom game to date — some 30 rooms, most of them empty and unnecessary to even visit — that’s likely to leave one rather nonplussed at the end, asking, “Is that really it?” It’s certainly one of the shortest games Infocom would ever release.

But that was more of a problem in 1983, when people were spending $30 or $40 to buy The Witness, than it is today, when we can enjoy it on its own terms. And in that spirit there’s a lot to recommend it. Although its case is not so intriguing, I actually found The Witness to be a better, more satisfying experience than Deadline was when my wife and I recently played it, for the simple reason that it’s fair. It’s blessedly solvable with some careful thought and attention, without needing to do anything absurd like DIG for no apparent reason. When we apprehended the killer, sans any hints at all, it was a great feeling, a testament to Infocom’s evolving design craft and the increasing involvement by this point of the in-house and out-of-house testers, who were now shaking down the designs and providing vital reality checks to the Imps. If anything, some might consider The Witness too easy, but that’s always been a more forgivable sin than the alternative of hardness-through-unfairness in my book.

Galley, who had never written a word of fiction before starting on The Witness, does a pretty good job with it here. The opening lines leave no doubt about the genre we’re in for:

Somewhere near Los Angeles. A cold Friday evening in February 1938. In this climate, cold is anywhere below about fifty degrees. Storm clouds are swimming across the sky, their bottoms glowing faintly from the city lights in the distance. A search light pans slowly under the clouds, heralding another film premiere. The air seems expectant, waiting for the rain to begin, like a cat waiting for the ineffable moment to ambush.

The constrained geography and relative paucity of interactable objects have the positive side effect of giving more space for exposition. The opening stages of the game in particular, before you witness the murder that really kicks off the case in earnest, are surprisingly florid, in a way that no previous Infocom game had been. It’s little surprise that so many tended to latch onto The Witness even more than Deadline as a harbinger of a new type of literature.

Still, The Witness’s historical reputation has always suffered in comparison to that of Deadline, likely the inevitable result of being the follow-up to such a great, audacious leap. For another likely reason for its less than stellar ranking in the Infocom canon today we can look again to those wonderful feelies, which were both such an important part of the experience and, in the case of the newspaper, almost uniquely hard to recreate in a PDF document or the like. To the extent that these factors may blind people to The Witness’s real merits — it’s not a masterpiece, but it is a solid piece of craftsmanship — that’s a shame.

Deadline also somewhat overshadowed The Witness on the sales charts. Release in June of 1983, The Witness sold a little over 25,000 copies before the end of the year, then some 35,000 the next, oddly failing to keep pace even when quite new with the older Deadline. Still, those numbers were more than enough to make it profitable for Infocom. And for anyone looking to get started with the Infocom mysteries today just for fun (as opposed to historical research), it’s definitely the one I’d recommend you play.

Comments
17 Responses

- Nathan

March 22, 2013 at 5:47 pm

To someone used to Zork and Deadline, The Witness seems a little like a technological throwback. IIRC, it doesn’t understand GET ALL. There are weird inconsistencies with objects inside containers, and some actions work even in the wrong room! I think this game missed out on some of Infocom’s accumulated wisdom, struggling with technical problems that had already been solved in earlier games.

- Jimmy Maher

March 23, 2013 at 9:43 am

I just checked, and you’re right — The Witness doesn’t know the word “all.” That’s doubly strange when we consider that it was built from the skeleton of the Deadline source, which — yes, I checked that also — does understand “all.”

That said, and in spite of the rather lengthy bug list to which you linked, the first release of Deadline struck me as a player as much more buggy than the first release of The Witness. One thing we should keep in mind when making comparisons like this is that many Infocom games were updated several times post-release to swat bugs and fix glitches. The earliest games (pre-1983) all particularly benefited from this commitment. These games in their original form received comparatively little testing or player feedback before release. Once Infocom got their QA department and a methodical testing regimen in place by the beginning of 1983, these older releases were substantively updated to bring them up to current QA standards. So, we have to check serial numbers before we go too far with comparisons like this, to make sure we’re always comparing apples to apples.

- Adam Thornton

March 22, 2013 at 10:38 pm

It’s also totally possible to win without having figured it out at all.

I played for the first time a few years ago. I didn’t think I had enough information, but I thought that making an arrest (I had a suspect but didn’t think I had anywhere near enough evidence) would lose me the game but also give me a valuable hint about where I should focus my efforts.

Imagine my surprise when I got a conviction.

- Jimmy Maher

March 23, 2013 at 9:46 am

I can see how that could happen. From our exposure to the mystery genre in other media we’re conditioned to expect a smoking gun that seals the case. The Witness doesn’t have that, just a series of smaller data points that add up to point in a particular direction. That’s possibly more realistic, but may also make it less satisfying as a genre exercise.

- Nathanael

March 6, 2021 at 6:39 am

I, quite frustratingly, had figured out the method of the crime and the murderer but had apparently not collected the right piece of evidence to get a conviction. Had to check the hints.

The whole evidence schema was weak in both Deadline and The Witness; understandable that it was eliminated for The Suspect and Moonmist.

- Nathanael

March 6, 2021 at 6:43 am

…and I should add that despite that, I loved The Witness for its incredibly detailed atmosphere. Tone and setting. Going down obviously-hopeless paths like never ringing the doorbell is *interesting*.

- Keith Palmer

March 23, 2013 at 1:42 am

In my first phase of “wanting to know more about these games I hadn’t had a chance to play” (a few years before “The Lost Treasures of Infocom” came out), I came across an article in an old copy of the last issue of Radio Shack’s house publication describing The Witness, Planetfall, and Zork I, the three Infocom games you could buy through them at the time. I suppose that makes it stick a bit more in my memory, helped along by its distinctive setting. I’ve never played very far into any of the big, complicated mysteries, though… maybe it’s not a genre I’m especially interested in in general, or perhaps by the time I first got to them I was feeling bad about always turning to “LToI’s” awkward hint book the first time I got stuck.

- Jimmy Maher

March 23, 2013 at 9:53 am

I’d say your experience was fairly typical. As we’ll see, Infocom saw diminishing commercial returns from each successive mystery. After the novelty of Deadline wore off, it really did seem that most people found the very different demands the mysteries made upon them less enjoyable than the more traditional games. Infocom never was able to find a way around the “play it over and over until you learn where you need to be and what you need to do at each step” model. Many players just really, really dislike having to play that way.

- Healy

March 23, 2013 at 4:32 am

Man I am just reading through the feelies and already I love this game. Such charm, such character! One question: is the phrase “OKLIT VOS FROB VEN-VEN DOOBEL-DEE” in the doctor’s article a reference to anything? It could be nonsense, but it seems from the context it could be a reference to some computer command, or possibly magic words from another game.

(And while I’m on the subject, I just LOVE the detectives’ patronizing attitude towards this guy. You can tell he’s an unwelcome interloper to their ‘zine.)

- Jimmy Maher

March 23, 2013 at 9:56 am

Yeah, The Witness just might have my favorite group of feelies. They’re not as flashy or as obviously clever (read: gimmicky) as some of the others, but if the objective of the exercise is to immerse the player in a certain setting and genre, it’s hard to imagine doing it better. The biggest problem with them is that they’re almost more clever and satisfying than the actual game.

I don’t know what the message means. Knowing the personalities at Infocom, thought, I assume it means something, relates to some in-joke somewhere. But nothing I can apply directly to the game…

- Zurlocker

March 24, 2013 at 6:10 pm

I think The Witness is one of the best from Infocom. Great feelies, good atmosphere and very approachable for newbies. Yes it has it’s quirks and is quite short but still a lot of fun.
–Zack

- David Simon

September 3, 2013 at 12:08 pm

Aw, the “Implementor’s Creed” link is broken. :-(

- Jimmy Maher

September 3, 2013 at 1:14 pm

It seems that Peter Scheyen’s long-lived Infocom site has left us. I fixed the link thanks to archive.org. Will try to do the same for the other links there (of which I suspect there must be quite a few) soon.

- Peter Orvetti

July 24, 2019 at 9:56 am

“The Witness” is the only Infocom game I ever completed without hints or Invisiclues. (I never played the “introductory” games like “Wishbringer” and “Seastalker”, which is odd because we owned almost all the games up to about 1985.)

I remember finishing it about a day after getting it, and being puzzled, thinking there must be more because I wasn’t very good at the games. (I’m still not.)

- Pingback: The Infocom Project: The Witness – Merry Prankster Games

- Ben

December 6, 2020 at 6:45 pm

from get-go -> from the get-go

- Jimmy Maher

December 7, 2020 at 1:33 pm

Thanks!

Planetfall
March 26, 2013

Fair warning: this post spoils Planetfall thoroughly and aggressively. If you want to play it unspoiled, do so now. (Yes, it’s worth playing.) Then come back here.

A hapless lone spacefarer — that’s you — comes upon an aged but now decaying alien artifact. You must ferret out its secrets, discover what it is and how it was meant to work, and finally repair its systems. When you succeed completely in this last the original inhabitants, who were only sleeping as they hoped and waited for someone like you to come along, are revived. You are rewarded for your efforts with fame and fortune on your home planet and beyond, along with the satisfaction of having completed another Infocom game.

Sounds like an Infocom game we’ve already looked at, doesn’t it? Stripped down to basics, it’s rather amazing how similar the plot of Infocom’s eighth release, Planetfall, is to that of their fifth, Starcross. Based upon my summary, one might ask whether Infocom was already running out of ideas. Yet few who have played both games have ever asked that question because when you’re actually playing them the two games could hardly feel more different. Planetfall, you see, marks the arrival of Steve Meretzky, who if (arguably) not Infocom’s best author was certainly the one with the most immediately distinctive voice and design sensibility. He would have a huge influence not only on Infocom’s subsequent works but on adventure gaming in general, an influence that persists to this day. For better (sometimes) or for worse (probably more often), we can still see his brand of madcap whimsy in new games both amateur and professional, both graphical and textual that come out every year. By now his influence is so pronounced that many designers, separated from Planetfall by two or three design generations, don’t even realize whom they’re copying.

I’ve already introduced Meretzky in a couple of articles on this blog. A self-avowed computer hater who was nevertheless chummy with the folks who created Zork at MIT and later founded Infocom, he got the adventuring religion when living as Mike Dornbrook’s roommate. He began to see the possibility of escaping the horrifying prospect of a career in construction management when he began testing Infocom’s games for money with Deadline in November of 1981. He then left construction behind forever in June of 1982, when he became the first salaried member of their new testing department. Meretzky was in Marc Blank’s words “so into it and had so many ideas” that it seemed only natural to let him try his hand at writing a game of his own. In the fall of 1982, at the same time as Stu Galley was starting on The Witness, Meretzky was therefore given carte blanche to write whatever kind of game he’d like. The project he began was a product of his two biggest cultural loves at the time: written science fiction, which he read virtually to the exclusion of anything else, and anarchic comedy on the wavelength of Monty Python, Woody Allen, and Gary Larson.

Planetfall casts you as a lowly Ensign Seventh Class in the Stellar Patrol aboard the SPS Feinstein. The bane of your shipboard existence, the “trotting krip” on whom most of your diary (included in the package) focuses, is Ensign Cadet First Class Blather, who is afflicted with the megalomania of middle managers everywhere. The game begins on just another day aboard the Feinstein, with you wielding your “Patrol-issue self-contained multi-purpose scrub brush” on deck-cleaning duty and trying to stay out of Blather’s way. But then the Feinstein is attacked by forces unknown. You must escape in a life pod, which deposits you next to a research complex of some sort poking above the waves of an otherwise completely water-covered planet. It’s here that your adventure begins in earnest.

The comedies that inspired Meretzky to make Planetfall gain meaning and resonance by saying something about the world in which we live. Monty Python satirizes the hidebound British class system and the prudery of middle-class life; Woody Allen dissects the vagaries of love, sex, and relationships. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams, an author with whom Meretzky would soon be indelibly linked, reveals the manifold absurdities of human social mores, of religion, of how we perceive our place in the universe through his science-fiction comedy of the absurd. Indeed, it’s often been noted that the best science fiction is relevant not so much as a guidepost to the future as for the light it sheds on the way we live and think today. Taking a story out of the here and now allows an author to examine big questions with a clear eye that would be obscured by the vicissitudes of culture and prejudice and emotion if set in our own world.

Planetfall, however, doesn’t really try to follow in that tradition. Instead it appropriates some of the broad tropes from Monty Python or Douglas Adams without finding the kernel of social truth at their heart that makes them relevant. The closest it comes is some gentle satire of bureaucracy (the game is packaged in a faux-file folder stamped “Authorized For Issuance”, “Authorized For Authorization”, “Authorized For Rubber Stamping”) and the over-the-top gung-ho-ness of military-recruitment advertisements (“Today’s Stellar Patrol: Boldly Going Where Angels Fear To Tread”, “The Patrol Is Looking For A Few Good Organisms”). On the tree of satire, this is not exactly the highest-hanging of fruits.

Mostly replacing satire in Planetfall is a sort of good-natured goofiness. You can’t fault it for effort. The feelies in particular throw so many gags at you that a few of them are bound to stick. This bit is the one that always makes me laugh:

In the game itself there’s one consistent source of clever humor, which we’ll get to in a moment. But other gags, like the distorted spelling of the aliens who built the complex, start to wear thin after a while. (“Xis stuneeng vuu uf xee Kalamontee Valee kuvurz oovur fortee skwaar miilz uf xat faamus tuurist spot. Xee larj bildeeng at xee bend in xee Gulmaan Rivur iz xee formur pravincul kapitul bildeeng.”) Meretzky was known in Infocom’s offices for his cutting humor, which he deployed against Ronald Reagan and his conservative revolution, against the occasional concerned parent who wrote in to accuse Infocom of preaching Satanism via Zork, against the hordes of besuited businesspeople that Al Vezza began hiring as the Cornerstone project ramped up. It’s a shame the humor of Planetfall and his later games remained so relatively tepid in comparison.

Still, Planetfall has many other strengths to recommend it. It manages to be a beautifully crafted traditional adventure while also expanding the form in notable ways. It’s archetypical in its basic structure: a constricted opening act aboard the Feinstein and the life pod get you into the action, followed by a long middle section (at least 85 percent of the game) allowing for free, non-linear exploration and puzzle solving, which funnels at last into an absolutely cracking set-piece finale. You spend the first part of the long middle collecting information, gradually coming to learn that the aliens who used to live here are not dead but merely in suspended animation, having placed themselves there to avoid a deadly plague that was sweeping the planet and that will kill you as well eventually. It gradually becomes clear that you need to repair the planet’s malfunctioning systems and restart the central computer, which was on the verge of discovering a cure for the disease before it crashed. Repairing the systems is, once again, rather shockingly reminiscent of Starcross, requiring you to decipher simple alien machinery and status displays built around colored lights and the like. (Apparently red is the universal color for bad, green the universal color for good.)

In other respects, however, Planetfall departs radically from Starcross. For all that that game’s environment was infinitely more logical and designed than the world of Zork, it had an unreality of its own, an elegant adventure-game symmetry about it that was nothing like the real world. Each object had a purpose. You spent most of your time collecting and using a set of colored rods which each slotted into a single place. When you got to the finale, every object had been tidily utilized, every room explored and its puzzles solved.

Planetfall, by contrast, gleefully throws elegance and tidiness out the window. You begin the game with two red herrings already in your inventory, and the situation doesn’t improve from there. Planetfall has a dark area you can never explore because there is no light source in the game; an enticing helicopter for which there is no key; a pile of useless spare parts to go alongside the couple you actually need; a bunch of useless (in game terms) bathrooms. This sort of thing was unprecedented in 1983. Adventure games simply weren’t done this way, if for no other reason than designers couldn’t afford to waste the space. Predictably, it drove — and still drives — some players crazy. Now you can’t determine what might be useful for solving a given puzzle from what objects you haven’t used yet, can’t ever get a clear sense of just what still remains to be done and what is just a distraction. Yet it also goes a long way toward making Planetfall’s world feel believable. Really, and Chekhov’s aphorism of the gun aside, why should every object in a world fall neatly into place by the end? (Perhaps the revelation at the end of Starcross that the whole experience was just an elaborate alien intelligence test, which I criticized in my review, suddenly makes more sense in this light.) Even the most often criticized aspects of the game, its rather sprawling map filled with so many empty or useless rooms and the necessity to eat and sleep, play into the new sense of verisimilitude.

This points to an interesting aspect of Planetfall: for all of the comedic trappings, the scenario and the complex that you explore are quite meticulously worked out. Most things in this world work as they should, sometimes to your detriment; try carrying the magnet at the same time as your magnetic card keys and see what happens. As you get deeper into the story and the tragedy that has happened here starts to become clear, the game deepens, the experience becomes richer. There’s almost a sense of horror that kicks in as you begin coughing and feeling weaker and weaker, and realize you are in a race against time — or, more accurately, against the plague. Here Meretzky departs sharply from Douglas Adams, who never worried about the details of his stories beyond what was needed as a scaffold to support his humor. Planetfall rivals Deadline and The Witness as a lived fictional experience, with the added advantage that it’s not as necessary to constantly restart to see it through.

All of that would be more than enough for one game to add to the established adventure-game template. But of course there’s more. We haven’t even mentioned Floyd.

All of the Infocom games prior to Planetfall had contained non-player characters of one sort or another, but none of those characters had been particularly fleshed-out. Even the mysteries had suffered from the need to include several suspects, which, given the harsh space limitations imposed by the Z-Machine, sharply limited their depth. Planetfall, however, takes place, apart from the brief opening sequence, within a deserted environment. Meretzky realized that he could alleviate the resulting sense of sterility by giving the player a sidekick. Further, this character, being essentially the only one in the game, could have a bit more depth, allow a bit more room for empathy on the part of the player than had been the norm.

Floyd is a “multiple purpose robot” whom you find deactivated in a corner fairly early in your explorations. If you search him before switching him on, you’ll likely wonder why he’s carrying a crayon in one of his compartments. Boy, do you have no idea what you’re in for. Turn him on and he springs to life a few turns later:

Suddenly, the robot comes to life and its head starts swivelling about. It notices you and bounds over. "Hi! I'm B-19-7, but to everyperson I'm called Floyd. Are you a doctor-person or a planner-person? That's a nice lower elevator access card you are having there. Let's play Hider-and-Seeker you with me."

From now on Floyd steals the show. He gets all the best lines. Whenever Floyd is involved, Planetfall becomes as funny as it wants to be. And it becomes something more as well. You fall in love with the little guy.

>play with floyd
You play with Floyd for several centichrons until you drop to the floor, exhausted. Floyd pokes at you gleefully. "C'mon! Let's play some more!"

Floyd notices a mouse scurrying by and tries to hide behind you.

>sleep
You'll probably be asleep before you know it.
You slowly sink into a deep and restful sleep.

...Strangely, you wake to find yourself back home on Gallium. Even more strangely, you are only eight years old again. You are playing with your pet sponge-cat, Swanzo, on the edge of the pond in your backyard. Mom is hanging orange towels on the clothesline. Suddenly the school bully jumps out from behind a bush, grabs you, and pushes your head under the water. You try to scream, but cannot. You feel your life draining away...

***** SEPTEM 7, 11344 *****

You wake up feeling refreshed and ready to face the challenges of this mysterious world.
Floyd bounces impatiently at the foot of the bed. "About time you woke up, you lazy bones! Let's explore around some more!"

Floyd produces a crayon from one of his compartments and scrawls his name on the wall.

>get all
multiple purpose robot: You manage to lift Floyd a few inches off the ground, but he is too heavy and you drop him suddenly. Floyd gives a surprised squeal and moves a respectable distance away.

Floyd rubs his head affectionately against your shoulder.

>s
Machine Shop
This room is probably some sort of machine shop filled with a variety of unusual machines. Doorways lead north, east, and west.

Standing against the rear wall is a large dispensing machine with a spout. The dispenser is lined with brightly-colored buttons. The first four buttons, labelled "KUULINTS 1 - 4", are colored red, blue, green, and yellow. The next three buttons, labelled "KATALISTS 1 - 3", are colored gray, brown, and black. The last two buttons are both white. One of these is square and says "BAAS". The other white button is round and says "ASID".
Floyd follows you.

>save
Ok.
Floyd's eyes light up. "Oh boy! Are we gonna try something dangerous now?"
Floyd pushes one of the dispenser buttons. Fluid pours from the spout and splashes across the floor. Floyd jumps up and down, giggling.

>type 1
The screen clears and some text appears:

"Xe Zoork triloojee, an adventshur klasik, taaks plaas in aa deeliitful but daanjuris undurgrownd seteeng."

"Foor moor deetaald infoormaashun on xis tapik, konsult xe liibrereein foor xe aproopreeit spuulz. Tiip zeeroo tuu goo tuu aa hiiyur levul."
Floyd, peering over your shoulder, says "Oh, I love that game! Solved every problem, except couldn't figure out how to get into white house."

>n
Repair Room
You are in a dimly-lit room, filled with strange machines and wide storage cabinets, all locked. To the south, a narrow stairway leads upward. On the north wall of the room is a very small doorway.
Lying face down at the bottom of the stairs is a motionless robot. It appears to be damaged beyond repair.

>n
It is a robot-sized doorway -- a bit too small for you.

>floyd, n
Floyd squeezes through the opening and is gone for quite a while. You hear thudding noises and squeals of enjoyment. After a while the noise stops, and Floyd emerges, looking downcast. "Floyd found a rubber ball inside. Lots of fun for a while, but must have been old, because it fell apart. Nothing else interesting inside. Just a shiny fromitz board."

>floyd, get board
Floyd shrugs. "If you say so." He vanishes for a few minutes, and returns holding the fromitz board. It seems to be in good shape. He tosses it toward you, and you just manage to catch it before it smashes.

Meretzky may have devoted more text and code to Floyd than had been given to any previous Infocom NPC, but that doesn’t mean it adds up to all that much. Floyd has become a case study in creating more affect with less. In printed form, all of the code and text devoted to Floyd would fill less than ten typewritten pages. There’s very little that you the player can really do to communicate with him or affect his behavior. The gears ought to show through horribly, but somehow they don’t. Floyd’s childlike personality and diction makes it seem a little less weird that he rarely seems to fully understand you when you talk to him. And the relative dearth of text devoted to Floyd can actually work in his favor. We never learn clearly what Floyd actually looks like, although we learn that he has feet (because he can kick us when we fall asleep) and, most strangely, that he can somehow smile. I have a theory that we mentally replace Floyd the robot with whatever strikes us as most appealing — a beloved pet, say, or even a child. Here the medium of text, which lets us all create our own Floyds in our imagination, is key. It makes what eventually happens to him all the more devastating.

There comes another point, like the last one shown above, where you the player are utterly stymied. Once again Floyd comes to the rescue… only this time he pays the ultimate price for his helpfulness.

>look through window
You can see a large laboratory, dimly illuminated. A blue glow comes from a crack in the northern wall of the lab. Shadowy, ominous shapes move about within the room. On the floor, just inside the door, you can see a magnetic-striped card.
Floyd stands on his tiptoes and peers in the window. "Looks dangerous in there," says Floyd. "I don't think you should go inside." He peers in again. "We'll need card there to fix computer. Hmmm... I know! Floyd will get card. Robots are tough. Nothing can hurt robots. You open the door, then Floyd will rush in. Then you close door. When Floyd knocks, open door again. Okay? Go!" Floyd's voice trembles slightly as he waits for you to open the door.

>open door
The door opens and Floyd, pausing only for the briefest moment, plunges into the Bio Lab. Immediately, he is set upon by hideous, mutated monsters! More are heading straight toward the open door! Floyd shrieks and yells to you to close the door.

>close door
The door closes.
From within the lab you hear ferocious growlings, the sounds of a skirmish, and then a high-pitched metallic scream!

>wait
Time passes...
You hear, slightly muffled by the door, three fast knocks, followed by the distinctive sound of tearing metal.

>open door
The door opens.
Floyd stumbles out of the Bio Lab, clutching the mini-booth card. The mutations rush toward the open doorway!

>close door
The door closes.
And not a moment too soon! You hear a pounding from the door as the monsters within vent their frustration at losing their prey.

Floyd staggers to the ground, dropping the mini card. He is badly torn apart, with loose wires and broken circuits everywhere. Oil flows from his lubrication system. He obviously has only moments to live.

You drop to your knees and cradle Floyd's head in your lap. Floyd looks up at his friend with half-open eyes. "Floyd did it ... got card. Floyd a good friend, huh?" Quietly, you sing Floyd's favorite song, the Ballad of the Starcrossed Miner:

O, they ruled the solar system
Near ten thousand years before
In their single starcrossed scout ships
Mining ast'roids, spinning lore.

Then one true courageous miner
Spied a spaceship from the stars
Boarded he that alien liner
Out beyond the orb of Mars.

Yes, that ship was filled with danger
Mighty monsters barred his way
Yet he solved the alien myst'ries
Mining quite a lode that day.

O, they ruled the solar system
Near ten thousand years before
'Til one brave advent'rous spirit
Brought that mighty ship to shore.

As you finish the last verse, Floyd smiles with contentment, and then his eyes close as his head rolls to one side. You sit in silence for a moment, in memory of a brave friend who gave his life so that you might live.

Apart only from the famous white house at the beginning of Zork, this is by far the most remembered scene from any Infocom game. It’s also amongst the most crassly manipulative. Meretzky admits that Floyd’s death was very much a calculated move. Having put so many “eggs in the basket” of Floyd, he asked what the best way would be to “cash in” on that connection. Thus poor Floyd had to die. Planetfall was in final testing when Electronic Arts debuted with the famous “Can a Computer Make You Cry?” advertisement. That made the death scene feel even more appropriate: “There was a little touch of budding rivalry there, and I just wanted to head them off at the pass.”

Perhaps death scenes are like sausages; it’s best not to see how they’re made. Or maybe it doesn’t matter. Floyd’s death still gets me every time, and it seems I’m hardly alone. Significantly, while Floyd’s death is generally described as taking place very near the end of the game, this isn’t always necessarily the case. It’s possible for him to sacrifice himself while there is still quite a bit left to be done before the end-game. Such a scenario might be the most heartbreaking of all, as you’re forced to spend quite a lot of time wandering the complex alone. Without Floyd, it feels sadder and more deserted than ever.

The significance of Floyd and the impact of his death was remarked early and often. Just weeks after Planetfall debuted, Softline magazine shockingly spoiled the game by printing Floyd’s death scene on the front cover(!). Inside was a feature article (“Call Me Ishmael: Micros Get the Literary Itch”) that struggled to come to terms with What Floyd Meant for the evolution of adventure gaming.

The rising level of sophistication in the adventure game — that most sophisticated of entertainments ever to pass through a central processing unit — has fain threatened to take it out of the computer junkies’ realm of private delight and toss it into the center ring of popular culture, along with books, plays, and movies. Can it absorb the culture shock and continue to develop and transcend standards that are already high, or will it be homogenized, simplified, and forced to satisfy the lowest social denominator?

Notably, Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn make a prominent contribution to the article, and here refer for the first time to my knowledge to Infocom’s games as “interactive fiction.”

Floyd was introduced to academia by Janet Murray in 1997’s Hamlet on the Holodeck. Since then he has been a football kicked around in a thousand debates. Some, like Murray, point to him as an example of the emotional potential of ludic narrative, while lamenting that there have been so few similar moments in games since Planetfall. Others, like the ever-outspoken Chris Crawford, point out that Floyd’s death is a pre-scripted, unalterable, non-interactive event, and use it as an example of the fundamental limitations of set-piece storytelling in games. It is, of course, ultimately both.

Less discussed than Floyd’s death — and for good reason — is his return at the end of the game.

A team of robot technicians step into the anteroom. They part their ranks, and a familiar figure comes bounding toward you! "Hi!" shouts Floyd, with uncontrolled enthusiasm. "Floyd feeling better now!" Smiling from ear to ear, he says, "Look what Floyd found!" He hands you a helicopter key, a reactor elevator card, and a paddle-ball set. "Maybe we can use them in the sequel...”

Floyd’s death may have been manipulative, but this is the worst sort of sentimental pandering. It retroactively devalues everything you felt when Floyd made his sacrifice, turning a tragedy into a practical joke — “Ha! Got ya!” I unabashedly hate everything about it. It was added at the behest of marketing, who were in turn responding to distressed playtesters and were concerned about releasing such a “downer” game. As indicated by the extract above, the potential for a sequel starring Floyd was also no doubt in their minds; it had already become clear during testing that players responded to the little fellow as they had to no one in any of Infocom’s previous games. Marketing at Infocom was usually remarkably willing to stay out of the way of artistic decisions. It’s too bad they made an exception here, and too bad Meretzky didn’t stick to his guns and tell them no. As it is, Planetfall goes down as one of a number of Infocom games that fail to stick the landing.

Released in August of 1983, Planetfall was another solid commercial performer for Infocom. It sold some 21,000 copies in the last months of 1983, followed by almost 44,000 the following year, numbers very close to those of The Witness. That’s just a bit surprising in light of Planetfall’s name recognition today; it stands as one of the best remembered and best loved of the Infocom games, almost entirely due to Floyd, while The Witness goes relatively unremarked except amongst the hardcore. Nevertheless, Trip Hawkins got his answer far sooner than he ever expected to, while today Planetfall’s legacy as the first computer game to make us cry stands secure.

(I must thank Jason Scott for sharing with me additional materials from his Get Lamp project for this article. There’s also a very good extended interview with Steve Meretzky in Game Design: Theory and Practice.)

Comments
56 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

March 26, 2013 at 8:38 pm

Among other things: when did we learn that was Floyd’s favorite song? It certainly hadn’t been mentioned up to that point.

- Jimmy Maher

March 27, 2013 at 6:55 am

I can let this go. I sort of assume when playing a game like this that certain things are taking place behind the scenes, so to speak. (When do you go to the bathroom, for instance.) I include more conversation with Floyd in that category. The use of Floyd’s death as an *advertisement* is quite shockingly crass, however, and I’m surprised it’s not remarked more often. Maybe most of the people studying it today don’t have enough grounding in Infocom lore to know just what this non-sequiterish song that suddenly pops up is actually referring to.

- Duncan Stevens

March 27, 2013 at 1:29 pm

Yeah, I guess I took it as silly more than crass. As an advertisement, it’s pretty oblique; chances are those who know it refers to another game don’t need any enticement, and very few people who weren’t already aware of Starcross said “hmmm, this must be about a game I can buy.”

On red herrings: I can live with some of them, and I agree that, to a limited point, they enhance realism. The fake puzzles in Planetfall, however, seem more like baiting the player–the dark room with no light source, other than the lamp that can be retrieved only if you have a radiation suit, except there is no radiation suit, etc. The odd locked door for which there is no key, sure, if it helps set the scene; an elaborate string of tasks that doesn’t lead anywhere, no.

Put another way: as you say, there’s lots of stuff in the background of a game that goes unmentioned. The game’s world would feel very cluttered if it were all in there. Including stray stuff that actively misleads doesn’t really strike a blow for realism, for me anyway. Your mileage may vary.

- Jimmy Maher

March 27, 2013 at 1:50 pm

I actually wonder how many of these blind alleys are there by original intention, and how many are the product of running out of space or just the design getting away from Meretzky (it was his first game, after all). It’s easy to imagine him adding this stuff in good faith, then not having the wherewithal to wire it all up to the game proper, so to speak.

- Ian S.

March 26, 2013 at 8:54 pm

Well-written and thoughtful as usual, Jimmy.

I recently read this post claiming that in the 1980s nobody cared about Floyd’s death outside of the Softline article, and that the modern use of it as a gaming touchstone is a fake nerd culture thing. Now, I know I reacted back in the day, but it’s nice to see additional data that other people (including Infocom’s own testers) did too.

- Jimmy Maher

March 27, 2013 at 6:41 am

Yes, rest assured, Floyd’s death was a big, big deal back in the day, even if it has become almost a cliche in our own time. Most of Infocom’s testers reacted strongly to it, and there’s no reason to believe that players who purchased (or pirated) the game felt any differently.

- Harbour Master

March 27, 2013 at 8:18 am

Ian, I wrote a rebuttal of that at the time. Basically, it’s fine to say perhaps Floyd’s death isn’t going to work as well now, thirty years of game evolution later, but to claim that it was *always* an empty scene – to virtually do the classic “gosh players were so silly back then” – is unfair.

- Ian Schmidt

March 28, 2013 at 2:47 am

Thanks, HM. I’m not actually convinced that storytelling in games has advanced as much as we’d like to think in the intervening 30 years, but that’s another argument entirely.

- Harbour Master

March 28, 2013 at 10:53 am

That’s a bigger discussion I’m not going to wade into here either =) But I think it’s fair to say a newcomer playing Planetfall fresh today might not warm to the death of Floyd as much because the “let’s kill a friendly character” trope has been regurgitated so many times over the years.

Plus, modern interactive fiction doesn’t have the same memory concerns and can afford to be more verbose (I was surprised Planetfall felt a bit lean when I replayed two years ago).

- Ian Schmidt

March 31, 2013 at 4:06 pm

Yup. At that time it was certainly a less common trope across all media, and as far as I’m aware was basically unheard of in computer games. Nowadays if a friendly character dies it just means Joss Whedon was involved somehow ;-)

- Keith Palmer

March 26, 2013 at 11:37 pm

As you worked through the early Infocom canon, I found myself thinking that while I played through all three Zorks, I didn’t play through Deadline, Starcross, Suspended, or The Witness… and then Planetfall beat out Enchanter as “the next one I played through.” I had been contemplating whether Infocom began writing “beginner’s games” at a certain point, but then reminded myself I say “play through” because I kept turning to “The Lost Treasures of Infocom’s” hint book until at last that began to trouble me, and that I wasn’t playing in “production order.” It’s possible, then, that Planetfall resonated with me.

Pointing out the phonetic spelling did remind me of some criticism (mostly on gameplay rather than the story) of the game I once saw. Floyd’s sacrifice was something I remembered (although I’m not quite sure whether there was anything special about my emotional reaction), but I don’t think I was too bothered by his return; it’s possible that science fiction of the casual sort convinced me “robots” are thoroughly resurrectable…

- Jimmy Maher

March 27, 2013 at 7:06 am

I did say that Meretzky drives some people *crazy*, didn’t I? :)

Meretzky himself talked with Jason Scott quite a lot about how the earliest Infocom games are the hardest, and they tended to get easier and easier as time passed. So no, that’s definitely not your imagination.

This was a byproduct of more rigorous testing. The early games, up through about 1982, were played by perhaps two or three part-timers or friends before release. Later games were subject to an ever more rigorous testing regime, which began with as many as ten or so in-house testers and then branched out to several dozen or more outside volunteers. This gave much more opportunity for someone to get stuck on any particular puzzle. When that happened, there was a lot of pressure on the designer to somehow add clues or otherwise make the puzzle easier. Meretzky seems to be of the opinion that this process eventually went too far, removing too much of the challenge that was for many people the main reason they played the games. I can certainly see the trend he describes, but I’m not quite sold yet on that conclusion.

- Jason Dyer

March 29, 2013 at 2:55 pm

Dude, Zork Zero was *hard*. Nord and Bert was REALLY hard. Meretzky was crazy. (Also, Journey was hard, but for unfortunate and annoying reasons.)

Also, I thought the Starcross plug was just a continuity-of-Infocom-universes thing, just like the grue. It doesn’t strike me as an ad at all.

- Jimmy Maher

March 29, 2013 at 4:10 pm

Well, it’s worth noting that Zork Zero did include an in-game hint system. As for Nord and Bert: I can see how it might be really, really difficult. I’m somehow just on its wavelength, and find it a delightful romp. But these sorts of puzzles I’m generally pretty good at. (Never fear, I’m terrible at plenty of others…)

More generally, I think Meretzky (and I) were talking about overall trends rather than parsing game by game. And even the later games that were self-consciously designed to be difficult, like Spellbreaker (and Zork Zero?) were difficult in a different, fairer way than, say, Zork II or Deadline. You won’t find stuff like Zork II’s baseball puzzle or the unmotivated digging of Deadline in the games post-1983.

- Healy

March 27, 2013 at 5:21 am

Ha, my first encounter with the death scene was the parody in the classic Coke is It! If you thought the original was manipulative, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Also, regarding comedy: I don’t think satire or social commentary is an essential element of comedy. Important, yes, but good comedy can and has existed without it. A lot of good sit-coms don’t have it (this goes back to radio; the Jack Benny Program was not about the dangers of greed). Even the comedies that do tend to be pretty oblique about it, including your beloved Monty Python! I can understand being miffed at humor that disappears up its own zaniness, but I think that’s a separate issue entirely.

- Jimmy Maher

March 27, 2013 at 6:50 am

Oh, I don’t mean to say I think all good comedy has to be satire or social commentary. You’re talking to someone who loves the Muppets far, far more than any grown man should.

I do, however, think it’s notable that all of the inspirations Meretzky himself cited had a strong element of both at their core. (Not that Monty Python didn’t, as you say, also indulge in some absurdity for the sake of it.) Planetfall is so obviously derivative of these works, yet missing that core. To me, that can make it feel like rather weak tea by contrast, at least until Floyd arrives.

- matt w

March 27, 2013 at 12:24 pm

Whoa whoa whoa. Sam the Eagle is totally satire and social commentary.

- Jimmy Maher

March 27, 2013 at 1:48 pm

Point granted. :)

- Duncan Stevens

March 27, 2013 at 9:08 pm

Planetfall goes down as one of a number of Infocom games that fail to stick the ending.

Curious what the others are, in your view. Hitchhiker’s certainly didn’t have much of an ending, and AMFV’s is somewhat problematic, ditto Starcross. Can’t think of any others with actively bad endings, though I never did finish Bureaucracy or Border Zone.

- Duncan Stevens

March 27, 2013 at 9:09 pm

Hmmm. Thought I turned off that tag.

- Jimmy Maher

March 28, 2013 at 8:32 am

Those were the ones I was thinking of, subject to later review — I’m playing most of these games now for the blog for the first time in at least ten to fifteen years.

- Duncan Stevens

March 28, 2013 at 12:06 pm

Ah, okay. Will wait to see your reactions. (On further reflection, Spellbreaker’s ending is clever but rather abrupt–the ending text really should have been longer than a few sentences–and there isn’t much of an ending to Suspended, other than “X thousand people died,” but I can’t think of any other bad ones. On the other hand, there aren’t many that do anything really interesting or surprising–Trinity, Infidel, one of the Plundered Hearts endings, and AMFV (even if problematic in its way) are the only ones that come to mind. And maybe Zork Zero.)

- Duncan Stevens

March 28, 2013 at 12:09 pm

One final thought: it amazes me that the same marketing department that insisted that Floyd be resurrected for the ending of Planetfall approved the ending of Infidel the same year.

- Jimmy Maher

March 28, 2013 at 12:22 pm

I’m not sure we should use the verb “insisted.” I think it was more a suggestion, to which Meretzky responded without even really giving it a lot of thought. That, anyway, is the impression I got from his Get Lamp interviews. I certainly didn’t get the impression that there was a prolonged struggle, as there was for example over the name of Spellbreaker, about which David Lebling is still somewhat embittered to this day.

- Duncan Stevens

March 28, 2013 at 4:48 pm

Right, I remember, though I’ve never understood why Lebling was so mad about it. “Mage” is better, but “Spellbreaker” isn’t a bad name. Maybe he felt it was a spoiler?

I also wonder whether there was a similar struggle over the ending of Infidel. Surely the marketing folks had some qualms.

- Jimmy Maher

March 28, 2013 at 5:03 pm

My understanding is he just really liked the unity of the progression of Enchanter –> Sorcerer –> Mage. It kind of conveyed a character’s advancement, D&D style, as each name implies a more powerful sort of magic user. (Perhaps notably, Lebling was the only implementor who had ever played much D&D.) “Spellbreaker” does spoil the ending in a sense, but it’s hard to see it as such until you’ve actually, you know, seen the ending.

On Infidel… stay tuned. More on that soon. :)

- Janice Eisen

March 28, 2013 at 6:56 pm

Thanks for the memories. I’ve only recently rediscovered text adventures after years away, and finding this was a bonus. I still remember Floyd’s death with a pang.

Interesting that it was playtesting that resulted in the ending change. I became one of Infocom’s volunteer beta testers a few years later, and I don’t recall ever commenting on plots. (I do have a good story about changes to Bureaucracy, if you’re interested.)

I always assumed that Infocom’s games got easier and easier because the hard ones didn’t sell as well. I was disappointed about that, but YMMV. My text game baptism, after all, was playing the original mainframe Zork without so much as a hintfile.

- Lisa

March 28, 2013 at 11:47 pm

(I do have a good story about changes to Bureaucracy, if you’re interested.)

I hope he is, because I sure am!

- Jimmy Maher

March 29, 2013 at 8:15 am

Welcome back!

All of the imps mention the huge role that testers played not just in finding bugs but with plotting and puzzle design. Maybe you just needed to be more forthright with your opinions. ;)

And yes, as Lisa says, would love to hear the Bureaucracy story. As you may very well know, that game had the most extended and troubled development of any released by Infocom. The Hitchhiker’s sequel had the most extended and troubled of any not eventually released by Infocom. Not coincidentally, both of these games involved Douglas Adams, the Great Procrastinator.

- Janice Eisen

March 29, 2013 at 9:21 pm

At the time, of course, I had no idea about the problems with Douglas Adams and the development of the game — I wasn’t privy to them. The testing I was involved in for Bureaucracy was unusual: normally I was sent the materials and tested the game at home for a week or so, but this time I was asked to come in and spend a day on site testing, even bringing a friend and fellow Infocom devotee who hadn’t done testing before (presumably most of the testers weren’t available). I suppose they were pushing to meet a release date that, like previous ones, would not be met.

The game I tested was in my opinion better than the one that was eventually released. This version was held together throughout by a thread of conspiracy theories involving the Queen Mother (Elizabeth) — similar to ones that existed in the real world — and in the final part of the game, she did in fact turn out to be behind everything. It was hilarious. The gamer vilain from the released version didn’t exist.

When I saw the released version of the game, I was disappointed, and actually got in touch with my contacts to find out why the Queen Mother had been taken out. Turns out they were afraid that she would die shortly after release and they would look terrible.

Of course, as it turned out, the Queen Mother long outlived Infocom.

Jimmy, having read your evaluation of Bureaucracy, I may have to give the game another chance. I found it so much weaker than the version I’d seen that I was never really able to appreciate it.

- Jimmy Maher

March 30, 2013 at 9:11 am

Thanks for sharing that. And fair warning, I may hit you up again down the road a bit when I get to Bureaucracy on the blog. :)

- Janice Eisen

March 30, 2013 at 8:41 pm

You’re welcome to. I’ll try to remember as many details as possible. (It was long ago, in what seems like another life, and besides the

- Jason Scott

March 30, 2013 at 9:01 am

I have a colleague going through thousands of scanned Steve Meretzky notes for all his created games for Infocom. He was a relentless note-taker and his design notebooks reveal an enormous amount of pre-planning of his games and how items in it are there towards a perceived world-building goal.

It is obvious, looking through his notes for Planetfall, that he was really bent on creating a major overarching timeline of all science fiction (Niven, Clarke, Bradbury) that planetfall’s events would also fit into. This also included Starcross.

So I am less inclined to think the Starcrossed miner song is an actual ad. I’m fairly certain it was meant as a callback.

- Jimmy Maher

March 30, 2013 at 9:21 am

Fair enough. I can see that my original interpretation may have been a bit overly cynical. I made a slight edit to the article to excise that little bit of snark.

- Ori Avtalion

April 1, 2013 at 10:20 pm

Meretzky’s 2008 essay from the Second Person book is available here: The Creation of Floyd the Robot in Planetfall.

I just finished Planetfall. I decided to play it when I saw this article. I’m relatively new to IF, but have a history with graphical adventure games. Here are some of my rambling thoughts.

It wasn’t as exciting as it was made up to be. Perhaps due to my modern viewpoint.

Note: I was already spoiled on Floyd after reading Twisty Little Passages not-to-carefully.

I found the many red herrings extremely frustrating. And if the game wasn’t enough, the InvisiClues also included them!

The fiddling around with access cards and inventory limits felt unnecessary. Why did I have to re-slide the cards so many times?

The only backstory comes from a few terminals in the Library. Which reminded me of The Dig, except that game also had a speaking character.

Floyd itself did not feel very fun. I guess it’s partly due to the game requiring lots of running around, and the automated, repeated responses get old real fast. In contrast, I remember enjoying the pig in Lost Pig. Perhaps because it was a shorter game, and perhaps because you had more interaction with it. It felt more lively.

Before playing, I imagined this game will be very funny. The intro was kind of funny, but that’s it. When I met Floyd, I imagined it would serve as comic relief, since the world is so barren, but there were only a few jokes (the Zork one and the rubber ball, quoted in the article, come to mind).

P.S.
I totally missed Floyd having legs. I imagined it as an R2D2/Short Circuit type.

- Steve Meretzky

August 28, 2013 at 1:09 am

Regarding the distorted native language, that was intended to be humorous. It was just my idea for showing how the language had morphed during the eons during which the planet has been out of touch with the rest of human civilization, while still being readable by the player. It was inspired by an article that I’d read, although I don’t remember when or where. The article was advocating for a completely predictable phonetic version of English, and that’s the system I devised for the native languange. All single vowels are short vowel sounds; all double vowels are long vowel sounds; X (an unnecessary letter) is used for the TH sound; C (another unnecessary letter) is used for the CH sound; etc.

- Steve Meretzky

August 28, 2013 at 1:13 am

Regarding the song, Jason has it about right. I was trying to push a plan that would tie all of Infocom’s SF games together into something I called the Interlogic Future History Series. (“Interlogic” was a made-up marketing word, in vogue at that time, for the Infocom development system.) But the other implementors weren’t interested, and the idea never gelled. But having the reference to Starcross within Planetfall was a manifestation of that idea. It certainly wasn’t an “ad” for Starcross… that would have been a pathetically non-performing ad! Also… I believe that one of the things Floyd does at random times is “Floyd sings his favorite song, The Ballad of the Starcrossed Miner”. Or something like that. So Floyd’s death scene wasn’t the first time that the player heard of the song, just the first time the player saw the full lyrics.

- Jimmy Maher

August 28, 2013 at 7:50 am

Thanks a million for taking the time to comment!

I did a quick disassembly and text search of the Planetfall story file. I assume the bit you’re referring to is “Floyd sings an ancient ballad, totally out of key.” Afraid I never made the connection between that and “The Ballad of the Starcrossed Miner.”

- Steve Meretzky

August 28, 2013 at 1:15 am

Regarding red herrings, they were definitely intentional, not the vestigal residue of puzzles I didn’t have time to finish or rooms that I didn’t have space in the executable to include. I just thought that they made the world more real and more richly textured; the “everything has one and only one use” style of adventure game design seemed too sterile and tidy to me.

- Jimmy Maher

August 28, 2013 at 7:54 am

Fair enough. There is one useless room in Planetfall that actually has contents and a description, but to which it’s impossible to bring light. Thus the player can never read that text that is nevertheless taking up precious space in the story file. That kind of made me suspect it to be a vestige of a grander plan…

- Steve Meretzky

September 4, 2013 at 7:44 am

Interesting — I’m not sure why that would be the case. Maybe because of the danger of a bug, where the room would “think” it was lit, and try to print a room description, and crash if there wasn’t one? But in that case, I’d think that the room description would be as short as possible. Like “This is a boring room.” Especially since I can recall, toward the end, trying to squeeze out a couple of letters here and a word there, in order to keep the file size under 108K (or whatever the exact max size was, which I believe was driven by the Atari 400/800).

- Steve Meretzky

September 4, 2013 at 7:48 am

Actually, you made me curious, so I just searched the code. There’s a room called “Transportation Supply”, and it’s long (verbose) description is “You have just located a serious bug.” Is that the room you’re refering to?

- Jimmy Maher

September 4, 2013 at 8:15 am

Yes, that must be it. I may also have been conflating it just a bit with the Radiation Room, which you can enter but which kills you a few turns later. Obviously this can and presumably does fall more into the category of nasty trick than vestige of grander plans. :) Would still like to know what’s on that green spool…

In the original version of the game, it’s claimed that your uniform protects against radiation, making this room even more confusing. That was changed to (I believe) “mild radiation” in later versions, presumably for just this reason.

- Don Alsafi

February 27, 2015 at 7:59 pm

Regarding Meretzky subtly tying together all the other Infocom SF games, I also noticed that he included a reference to the specialized robots of Suspended!

“Untoold senshureez agoo, entiir teemz uv roobots wur reekwiird tuu purfoorm eevin xe simplist tasks…wun roobot wud handul viszuuwul funkshunz, wun roobot wud handul awditooree funkshunz, and soo foorx. Now, xanks tuu advansis in mineeatshurizaashun, xeez tasks kan bee purfoormd bii singul roobots, suc az xe multiipurpis B-19 seereez.”

- Peter Piers

September 19, 2015 at 11:22 pm

I just finished playing Planetfall. Started yesterday. I was very curious to see how it would hold to up a modern-day player, who’s thoroughly enjoyed such titles as Mulldoon Legacy and Hadean Lands.

Well, it holds amazingly well! When I got to the end and realised that the light source was a total red herring, I found that hysterically funny; the ultimate in humour-by-perverting-player’s-expectations. Knowing in advance that I’d have several timers against me, I played in a save/restore loop, ever optimising, not wanting to put myself in a state where I simply would not have time to finish (as happened to me, quite dreadfully, with Fish!).

The result? I finished the adventure in a day and a half (in-game days). I understand there are a number of days which the adventure can span. This is one of the things I do so love about Infocom – their timers are not *prohibitive*. You *do* have time to explore; you just don’t have time to dally.

The game seemed downright easy, but intensely atmospheric. The sparcity of things to interact with only added to that. At no time did I feel the empty rooms were filler. On the contrary, since I was always very way of time passing, I thought they were designed to waste my time AND to create a feeling of real geography. “People lived here. They played games. Look, this is where they slept. Naturally, there were bathrooms too”.

I loathe red herrings. But somehow, in this game they didn’t feel like red herrings. They felt like significant substance that added to the atmosphere and the feeling of exploration.

I found also a bit of brilliance in the design. First day – getting your bearings, seeing to the immediate needs, possibly get started on fixing the enunciator. I started the second day fresh and hopeful, having mastered the complex and seen to the basic needs, and ready to board the shuttle to explore Whatever Lay Beyond. I went to the room that was my inventory dump and very carefully selected the items that I thought would be most helpful in my expedition. I was mostly right, though I could have left the fuses where I’d found them!

This was an amazing feeling. It was like “All right, I’m packed up, let’s see what else there is for me to discover!”. Somehow, Infocom games (for their most part) are the best at evoking these feelings in me.

The modern player can still enjoy Planetfall thoroughly, as long as they know they are expected to do some move-optimising. Compared to Hadean Lands, and other post-Infocom IF titles, it’s shockingly shallow – in that there are many empty rooms, and in that there’s little to interact with. But that does help you focus on what you need to focus on, and it’s never just filler. Filler gets annoying. These empty rooms are the equivalent of character-building in an NPC.

Really, I found it pretty easy. But very much worthwhile. Coming to the slow realisation of what’s happening; reading about the symptoms of Xe Dizeez; understanding what happened to the inhabitants of the planet and how the various malfunctions caused their current predicaments, and that they are currently waiting to die without even knowing it…

…I mean, that stuff was seriously, genuinely *creepy*. I was too spoiled to take much notice of Floyd’s death (but it didn’t leave me untouched, and afterwards the complex seemed a bit too desolate, too silent, too lonely), but the way in which the player discovers the backstory? And its implications, and the understanding of what’s riding on their actions?

Sheer *awesomeness*!

- Jimmy Maher

September 20, 2015 at 7:36 am

Thanks for taking the time to write this! Now you’re ready for Stationfall. I’d be interested to hear about your experiences with that one…

- Peter Piers

September 20, 2015 at 11:03 am

I’ll be tackling others first. ;) Too much IF, not enough time to play it all, so I’ve a system for sorting the games out (alphabetical). It’ll be a while before I get to Stationfall – next Infocom game I’ll be playing is Plundered Hearts! Don’t worry, if I have thoughts of any Infocom game you’ve covered I’ll be sure to share them.

- Gideon Marcus

February 7, 2017 at 2:33 pm

My favorite Infocom games were the ones with worlds to explore. Planetfall and AMFV, in particular. For instance, I spent many hours making a map of Rockvil with every location on it (give me your email, and I’ll send it to you).

Planetfall was my very first text adventure, which I got when I was 11 along with Enchanter as pirated Atari disks. The concept was totally new — I didn’t have instructions or feelies (Enchanter’s file name was simply “Fork” after the staring location.

I love loved it, solved about 70% of it, then had to have the help of a hints book. Floyd’s death was heart-rending and, unlike you, I adore(d) the happy ending.

Someday, I will have a menagerie of 7 robots: Iris, Auda, Sensa, Waldo, Whiz, Poet, and Floyd!

- Steve

April 6, 2017 at 4:09 am

I was very surprised by how well Planetfall holds up today compared to Starcross and Zork III.

The parser has an amazing array of unique & funny responses programmed in for even the most obscure (and useless) commands, and the game recognizes almost any noun that appears in its many place descriptions. Starcross, on the other hand, had an embarrassingly large number of unimplemented nouns (even as synonyms), including several objects listed as being right in front of you (most glaringly the “asteroid” which dominates your viewscreen during the docking sequence).

Planetfall also does far better in describing its many objects (in what seems to be a much larger game) than the bland and lazy “I see nothing special”-ness of Zork III.

While Floyd might be the main reason the game is remembered today, I think the broad allowances Meretzky made in anticipating player reactions played a big part in how they perceived it at the time. Even more impressive that it came from a first-time implementor!

- Jay Brasch

July 29, 2018 at 10:17 pm

I was inspired by this post to try out Planetfall, and I found it to be as good as advertised.

One quick comment, though, about the red herrings. I didn’t mind the unreachable rooms or the unusable objects; they contribute to the overall atmosphere of the game and make it more realistic. However, the game manual specifically says “Most objects in the story that you can pick up are important for solving one or more of the puzzles you’ll run into.” By my count there are at least 10 items that are essentially worthless, out of about 40 total. Is that ‘most’? I guess it depends on the person…

Anyway, thanks for all your hard work, Jimmy. This is a great site!

- Jimmy Maher

July 30, 2018 at 5:36 am

Technically, in a game with 40 objects 21 useful objects or more constitute “most” of them. ;) But the text you’re referring to was generic, included with every Infocom game. Planetfall is an outlier in this respect; I don’t think Infocom ever made another game with anywhere near this many red herrings.

- Jay Brasch

July 31, 2018 at 4:01 am

Ah, that makes sense.

One small typo, if you’re interested: I think Gary ‘Larsen’ should be spelled with an ‘o’.

- Jimmy Maher

August 1, 2018 at 12:56 pm

Thanks!

- Pingback: Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr (2018) – Meeple Like Us

- Ben

December 8, 2020 at 9:18 pm

ferret outs -> ferret out

be-suited -> besuited

- Jimmy Maher

December 11, 2020 at 9:34 am

Thanks!

Enchanter
April 2, 2013

In his seminal book Hackers, Steven Levy compares the differing cultures of the East Coast hackers at MIT and the West Coast hackers at Stanford during the glory days of 1970s institutional computing by riffing on their literary preferences. The MIT folks, he claims, preferred “the battle-strewn imagery of shoot-’em-up science fiction,” while those at Stanford went in for “the gentle lore of elves, hobbits, and wizards.” He then goes on to describe how these preferences show up the differing cultures inside the institutions. MIT is competitive, practical, a bit traditionalist and perhaps even prudish, a microcosm of the high-strung East-Coast establishment; while Stanford, having imbibed from the remnants of the hippie dream that persisted in northern California into the 1980s, is more laid-back, more willing to dream about the social potential for computers outside the lab. Like most such clever but broad comparisons, it’s ridiculously reductive.

Yet it also may contain more than a few grains of truth. For all that they enjoyed riffing on the Zork milieu with its grues and its Flathead dynasty, amongst the early Implementors only Dave Lebling read much fantasy literature — and that was because Lebling, an omnivorous and voracious reader then as he remains now, read a lot of everything. If there was a consensus literary genre of choice amongst this group, it was science fiction. You can see this clearly by looking at the string of games Infocom released between the fall of 1982 and the summer of 1983. At this stage, with the company ramping up quickly but with a structured marketing department not yet in place to tell the Imps what kind of games they needed to make to fill in empty spaces in a matrix of genres, everyone just wrote the game he wanted to write. The result was that out of five games by five different authors three were science fiction.

Still, Infocom remained the house that Zork had built. To not continue that series, to ignore the fantasy genre that still remained (as it still does today) the preferred genre of the gaming public at large, would have been crazy. Having lived with the idea of an “original Zork trilogy” for so long, it can be surprising and even a bit counterintuitive for us to recognize that neither Infocom nor their customers saw Zork in that way when the original three games were being written and released. As far as they were concerned Zork was an open-ended series of numbered games of the sort that Ultima and Wizardry would become. Nowhere is that made clearer than in Zork III itself. Here Marc Blank, having incorporated bits of Zork I and Zork II into what stands today as the first of an eventual several brilliant Infocom time-travel puzzles, added an additional little Easter egg: a preview of the as-yet unwritten Zork IV in the form of a grisly episode in which the player gets sacrificed by an evil priest of some sort.

Thus, for all their high-brow write-ups in the New York Times Book Review and the pushes they had made into new literary genres and new styles of play, Infocom needed during 1983 to deliver another good old traditional Zork game — and one that incorporated, Mad Libs-style, Blank’s ugly sacrifice scene — even if it felt like something of a step back. Problem was, it wasn’t clear where to go next with Zork. It may not have been consciously designed as the climax of a trilogy, but Zork III did nevertheless have an air of finality about it. At its end the player had completed her existential journey by becoming the being she had spent all three games struggling against, the Dungeon Master. What could follow that?

The game that they eventually created is a testament to Infocom’s skill at balancing artistic credibility with commercial considerations. It began when Lebling, looking for a reason to get excited about a Zork IV, started thinking back to the ending of his previous Zork game, Zork II. There the player, after vanquishing her irritating nemesis the Wizard of Frobozz, could claim his magic wand and try a few spells for herself. It made a relatively tiny part of the game, and not a terribly deeply-implemented part at that, but it was just such an intrinsically cool idea; you just knew Lebling was onto something here that deserved further pursuit. Lebling, the only Implementor with any grounding in Dungeons and Dragons, now worked up an almost D&D-like magic system for Zork IV. Such adaptations from the world of tabletop RPGs were one of Lebling’s ticks as a designer; he was, you may remember, also responsible for the little-loved randomized combat in Zork I.

Fortunately, the magic system he now created is much more fondly remembered. You carry a spell book containing a few beginning spells. Over the course of the game you can collect more spells on scrolls, most of which you can inscribe into your spell book, thus becoming an ever more flexible and formidable magic user. Prior to casting a spell you have to “memorize” it (or load it into your head like a piece of ammunition), just like in D&D. Once cast, a given spell is gone from memory until memorized again. And there is, of course, a limitation to the number of spells you can have in your memory at once.

All told, the magic system was an absolutely brilliant addition to an otherwise standard text-adventure template. Collecting spells and using them proved to just be fun as all get-out. Removing so many puzzles from the realm of the mechanical to that of the arcane even hid many of the implementational seams that usually showed through; when stuck, the player tended to spend her time casting her spells at various objects, a more manageable set of possibilities to deal with than having her try all sorts of crazy physical manipulations. Indeed, Lebling and his co-author, the indefatigable Marc Blank, quickly realized that seeing their spells fail was almost as much fun to players as using them to solve puzzles. Lebling and Blank therefore spent a lot of effort to make sure that, say, casting Nitfol (“converse with beasts in their own tongue”) on any creature in the game got you something appropriate — and usually entertaining — back in return.

At some point fairly early in the new game’s development Lebling and Blank decided that the addition of magic made it feel so qualitatively different from what had come before that releasing it as Zork IV just didn’t feel right. Further, in these heady days when they were being touted as pioneers of a new interactive literature, they were eager to live up to their billing, to demonstrate a certain eclecticism and literary integrity rather than just continuing to crank out the Zork games. They therefore made the brave decision to rename the game Enchanter, first of a new, open-ended series of fantasy games with an emphasis on spellcraft. (As with Zork, Infocom wouldn’t definitively decide this series should be a trilogy until much later.) Having declared their artistic independence, Infocom could then temper things a bit by declaring the new series to be “in the Zork tradition” and by including plenty of callbacks within the game to make it clear that, while this may have been a new series, it took place in the same beloved fantasy world. Thus they thought they could have their cake and eat it too — and in this they were partially if (as we shall see) perhaps not entirely correct.

As Enchanter begins an evil warlock by the name of Krill has been growing in power, and now threatens to conquer the entire world. The Circle of Enchanters was not initially sure how to respond. To send one of their own number to fight Krill would be “ill-omened,” for Krill would sense the intruder’s magical aura as soon as he entered his stronghold and send his minions to destroy him. Therefore, borrowing a plot element from The Lords of the Rings that would subsequently be used by a thousand CRPGs to explain just why your party of first-level nobodies are entrusted with saving the world, they have decided to send you, a “novice Enchanter with but a few simple spells in your book,” instead. They teleport you onto a deserted road close to Krill’s stronghold, and the game begins.

Enchanter’s structure feels very old school when contrasted with the handful of Infocom games that preceded it. Not only is it a very traditional game, lacking the radical formal experimentation of the mysteries and Suspended, but it lacks even the initial narrative thrust of Starcross and Planetfall. Both of those games opened with a dynamic scene to get the plot wheels cranking and set up the non-linear exploration of the long middle. Enchanter, however, simply plops you down in an expansive world and tells you to get started with mapping, collecting objects and spells, and solving puzzles, just like Zork I.

Some of the first puzzles you encounter, before you even get into the castle, involve collecting food and drink. Like Planetfall, Enchanter is the product of a very brief era when Infocom was suddenly enamored with the idea of requiring the player to deal with these necessities. In fact, it’s even more stringent than Planetfall in this respect, implementing eating and drinking as two separate necessities in addition to the need for sleep. Hunger and sleep timers would soon become passé at Infocom (not to mention since Infocom’s era) as pointless annoyances that add little to the games into which they’re shoehorned. Yet, as in Planetfall, they don’t bother me greatly here, and even manage to feel somehow organic to the experience. When you sleep your dreams even deliver vital clues.

Once you get inside Krill’s stronghold you find a brilliant collection of interlocking puzzles that are challenging but solvable. Even better are little touches of whit and whimsy that abound everywhere, a sign of Dave Lebling really coming into his own as an author. Although Enchanter is credited as a joint production of Blank and Lebling, it feels like there is a lot more of the loquacious, playful Lebling than the terser, more stoic Blank here. Indeed, for being yet another struggle of Good vs. Ultimate Evil Enchanter has a remarkably light tone, with only a few discordant touches — most notably the sacrifice scene previously advertised in Zork III, which seems dropped in from another game entirely for the very good reason that it was — to remind you of the stakes. Let me tell you about a few bits that particularly delight me.

On the beach just outside the castle we meet the most prominent of a few animals in the game, a turtle, “his enamelled shell shining with all the colors of the rainbow.” When we dutifully cast Nitfol on him we learn how his shell got that way:

"How do you like my shell? A wizard did that to me about 75 years ago. It's nice to find a human who talks turtle. Not many do, you know. Most people think turtles are boring, just because we talk slowly."

Our new friend turns out to be a droll but helpful old fellow whom I find just about as charming as Planetfall’s Floyd in yet vastly less space:

"Are you a magician? Are you going to do something about that annoying Warlock, then?"

The turtle is the centerpiece of a puzzle that is superficially similar to the one that required us to order a robot about in Zork II, the first Infocom game that allowed us to talk and give orders to others. This time it’s much more fun, however, because, well, it’s our turtle friend who’s helping us rather than a personality-deprived robot. We just need to speed him up before we get started, which we can accomplish with a touch of magic. When his task is finished:

The turtle drops a brittle scroll at your feet. "Not bad, huh?"

I’ve always loved this little guy, as has Lebling; he lists him as one of his favorite creations. The turtle and a few other creatures, all accessible to us thanks to the Nitfol spell, bring life to Enchanter, pulling it a million miles from the windy solitude of Zork III.

But the most remembered character of all in Enchanter is actually you — not the you who is playing the game now, but the you who dutifully marched through the three Zork games to get here. In one area of the castle we find a “Hall of Mirrors,” behind which lies a dim underground labyrinth. In it we occasionally catch a glimpse of “a bedraggled adventurer, carrying a brass lantern and an elvish sword, which is glowing dimly.” He is, of course, our old avatar from Zork. We can use our magic to summon him to the castle.

All at once, the bedraggled adventurer appears before you, brightly glowing sword in hand. His jaw has dropped and his eyes are bulging. His eyes dart this way and that, as if looking for a way to escape.

The game then proceeds to mercilessly but affectionately lampoon this rather dim fellow, along with the old-school design tropes he represents. By far his biggest interest is in collecting valuable objects to put in the trophy case he presumably has back in his white house:

The adventurer offers to relieve you of some of your possessions.

The adventurer asks what you would be needing treasures for.

The adventurer, not overly tactful, asks what you're holding.

In effect we’re seeing the adventurer as the troll, the thief, and their buddies in Zork I must have seen him (us?). He wanders about snarfing every object that isn’t nailed down, fiddling constantly with a weird map (“a convoluted collection of lines, arrows, and boxes”), and serving as an extended in-joke to anyone who spent any time with the Zork games.

The adventurer tries to make some small talk, but only mumbles. He'll have to speak up if he expects you to hear him.

The adventurer waves his sword menacingly in your direction.

The adventurer stares at his possessions as if expecting a revelation.

The adventurer seems to have dropped out of existence. In a voice that seems to recede into the void, you hear his final word: "Restore...." You muse about how a mere adventurer might come to possess a spell of such power.

The adventurer smiles at you like an idiot.

The adventurer asks for directions to Flood Control Dam #3.

The adventurer stops and stares at the portraits. "I've met him!" he gasps, pointing at the Wizard of Frobozz. He doesn't appear eager to meet him again, though. "And there's old Flathead! What a sight!" He glances at the other portraits briefly and then re-checks his map.

The adventurer waves at you and asks "Hello, Sailor?" Strange, you've never even been to sea.

In the spirit of shoe-on-the-other-foot, he also proves annoying in the way many of the non-player characters within the Zork games were, scattering objects hither and yon so you never know just where anything is.

At the risk of ruining a great joke by making of it grist for some theoretical mill, it’s remarkable that Infocom is already playing with the clichés and expectations of the adventure-game form so early, just six years after Adventure itself. This sort of knowing self-referentiality is a very modern phenomenon, one that appeared only after decades or centuries in other art forms. It’s the sort of thing I want to point to when I say that Infocom was more knowing, more sophisticated — just a little bit smarter — about what they were doing than their peers. And yet Infocom is doing it from within what is ultimately a very old-school design of its own, a perfect example of their talent for giving the people what they want, but doing it with a grace and style that eluded most of their competitors.

Enchanter would make an ideal case study in gated puzzle design. Its wide-open map conceals several intricate chains of puzzle dependencies that give the game a structure that Zork, with its mostly unrelated puzzles strewn randomly about its geography, lacked. The adventurer, annoying as he can be, is also a critical link in one of these chains. He gives us our key for solving the “maze.”

A certain fascination with pseudo-mazes is another of Lebling’s design ticks, one which he also passed to Steve Meretzky. He claims to have lost interest in the standard approach to mazes even before his friends at MIT added a couple of monstrously cruel examples of the form to the original PDP-10 Zork. What he delighted in instead was to give us areas that seem to be mazes, but which have some trick — other than the tried-and-true dropping of objects and plotting connections, that is — to solving them. His first pseudo-maze, the baseball puzzle in Zork II, misfired horribly. His second attempt in Starcross was much more reasonable, a labyrinth that could be solved only by convincing someone else to guide you. His third attempt is here in Enchanter in the form of the “Translucent Rooms,” and it’s even more clever. I’m going to spoil here its concept, although not the mechanics of its solution, as an illustration of the marvelous and varied puzzle design inside Enchanter.

So, with the adventurer’s aid we come upon a map which we quickly realize shows the Translucent Rooms.

The map consists of a drawing with nine points, each represented by a strange character, with interconnecting thin pencil lines. Using your native alphabet, it looks like this:

B       J
!      / \
!     /   \
!    /     \
!   K       V
!          / \
!         /   \
!        /     \
R-------M       F
\     /
\   /
\ /
H       P

We also find a magic pencil, using which we can draw in new connections between rooms and also erase them. When we do so, the connections appear not only on the (paper) map but also within the real-life maze. The catch, however — there’s always a catch — is that we have enough lead left to draw just two lines, and enough eraser left to erase just two. That shouldn’t be any problem, right? As you’ve probably guessed, the currently inaccessible room at P contains the item — a powerful spell we can use to banish Krill to “another plane of existence” — that is the point of this whole exercise. Unfortunately, it also contains a powerful entity of eternal Evil who makes old Krill look like a pussycat in comparison. We glean from a book found elsewhere in the game that he was banished there many centuries ago by our magic-using ancestors to save the world (evidently this world of ours tends to need a lot of saving). As soon as we give the entity an escape route to the exit, room B on the map, he’ll start moving toward it. When he’s in a room with us, meanwhile, we’re too terrified to do anything at all. So, the puzzle is to lure the entity out of room P, but to shut off his escape route before he gets all the way out while ourselves getting into room P and then out of the maze — all without using more than two pencil strokes and two erases.

Even in 1983, when adventure-game engines from other companies were beginning to make technological strides, Infocom was the only company who could have made such an intricate, dynamic puzzle with the associated necessity for a parser capable of understanding the likes of “draw line from H to P.” I’ve made this point before, but it’s worth stating again that Infocom’s parser was not just a wonderful luxury; it enabled better puzzles, better game design. This puzzle is a good example of the sort found throughout the game, being fair, challenging but not exasperating, and built with some intricate programming that, like the all the best intricate programming, is likely to go completely unremarked by the player; it just works.

Lest I be accused of overpraising, let me also note here that Enchanter is a product of 1983, and does show some signs of its age. In addition to hunger, thirst, and sleep timers (the first of which gives a hard limit to the time you can spend in the game, since there is only so much food to eat), there is an inventory limit. And there’s a fair amount of learning by death. Whatever you do, don’t get the bright (ha!) idea of casting the Frotz spell on yourself so as to have a constant source of light; since there is no way extinguish this spell and since one puzzle is dependent on darkness, you’ll lock yourself out of victory thereby. Worse, you’ll probably have no idea why you can’t proceed, and when you finally break down and turn to the hints will throw the game against the (metaphorical) wall and hate it forever. The big climax is another offender in this department, although one less likely to force you to replay large swathes of the game. You have only seconds to defeat Krill and the minions he throws at you, and no idea which spells you need to have memorized to do so without dying a few times to gather that information. But other than its past-lives issues in this and a few other places, Enchanter plays very fair. Just remember, as a wise man once said, to save early and often.

It’s probably safe to say that Infocom’s decision to make Enchanter its own thing had commercial consequences. It sold reasonably well, but lagged behind the older Zork games. Released in September of 1983, it sold just over 19,000 copies before the end of that year, followed by a little over 31,000 copies the following year. Enchanter did prove to have longer legs than many older Infocom titles in the company’s later years. All told, it sold over 75,000 copies as a standalone game or as a part of the Enchanter Trilogy bundle. Today it stands as one of the more fondly remembered of Infocom’s games, with more than its fair share of appearances on favorites lists, and has served as the template for some well-regarded games of more modern vintage. Its individual spells, meanwhile, have taken on a life of their own within modern IF circles, being used as the names of interpreters and various other programs and bits of technology — not to mention the name of the domain on which you’re reading this. As my choice of domains may indicate, Enchanter is in my personal top five or so of Infocom games, the first I’ve come to on this blog about which I can say that. Unlike my other favorites, which tend to push the envelope of what a text adventure can be in one way or another, Enchanter stands for me almost as a platonic ideal of an old-school, traditional adventure game, executed with thoroughgoing charm and craftsmanship. I love it dearly.

Comments
19 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

April 2, 2013 at 2:34 pm

My favorite stray adventurer bit:

The adventurer tries to eat his sword. I don’t think it would agree with him.

…a sly reference to one of the library responses.

- Jimmy Maher

April 2, 2013 at 2:58 pm

I thought I remembered that bit, but I never actually saw it in my recent playthrough, so I hesitated to include it in the article. Thanks for confirming its presence!

I think “He’ll have to speak up if he expects you to hear him” is reference to another default response somewhere in one of the Zorks.

- Duncan Stevens

April 2, 2013 at 3:54 pm

Right–hit return with no text, and that’s one of several possible snarky responses.

- Duncan Stevens

April 2, 2013 at 2:41 pm

One of my main memories from Enchanter is spending hour after hour trying to solve the mouse hole puzzle–FROTZing the object in the hole, pouring FROTZed water in the whole, trying to find and NITFOL the mouse, etc.–before a friend wandered in and suggested REACH IN HOLE. (Spoiler, I guess, but it wasn’t in fact a puzzle.) A case of insufficient faith in the parser.

- Duncan Stevens

April 2, 2013 at 3:12 pm

I agree that the tone of Enchanter is lighter than, say, Zork III, but it’s still fairly sober–particularly as the “gray and lifeless” spell starts to spread–leavened with some whimsy here and there. The tone of Sorcerer, by contrast, is considerably more gonzo–much higher concentration of silly–and it never worked for me; I wonder whether it would have had I not played Enchanter first.

- Jimmy Maher

April 2, 2013 at 3:31 pm

Enchanter is certainly more grounded than Sorcerer, but it’s almost the opposite for me — a fairly light and whimsical experience shot through with some darker elements. Now that I think about it, though, there is a lot of both: the spreading grayness, the sacrifice scene, the forlorn village, etc., contrasted with elements like the adventurer, the turtle, the frogs, the portraits, all of the silly things you can get from casting spells at inappropriate objects, etc. It probably should clash horribly and not work at all, but somehow it does for me.

Maybe it’s hard for me to think of Enchanter as dark because it honestly makes me laugh much more than Planetfall or Sorcerer. I just find Enchanter’s humor less forced. Sometimes Meretzky reminds me of Fozzy Bear’s standup routines on the The Muppet Show — he’s just Trying Way Too Hard.

- Sean Barrett

April 2, 2013 at 4:47 pm

Back in the day, it took us forever to figure out how to use the map to the translucent room. I assumed “draw line from H to P” wouldn’t work (multiple indirect object phrases), and, if I recall correctly, doing “draw line from H” wouldn’t prompt you “to what” (or it prompted you, but didn’t accept any answer).

As a result, I figured out that you could say “connect H to P”, but I could never think of a similar contruction for erasing.

Eventually we figured it out, but we might have had to get invisiclues, so much was the single-indirect-object-phrase rule burned into my brain. (So much that I didn’t just *try it* just in case, which seems mind-boggling now.)

- Dan Schmidt

April 2, 2013 at 4:59 pm

It’s been ages since I played it, but also I remember Enchanter as being rather sober, although maybe a little lighter than Zork III. “Gonzo” is a good description of Sorcerer, though I really enjoyed it at the time and still have a soft spot for it. Spellbreaker, meanwhile, seemed deadly serious and entirely devoid of humor, though who knows if I am remembering it correctly.

- Duncan Stevens

April 2, 2013 at 5:48 pm

Spellbreaker was almost entirely devoid of humor–there are some odd funny bits around the edges, e.g., when you’re in midair, falling:

>E
Down seems more likely.

My favorite bit is from when you’ve…
[spoiler]
…turned yourself into a grue:

>SLAVER
You slaver very well for such an inexperienced grue.

I think most of the humor was like that: if you do something silly, the game would (sometimes) play along.

- Jimmy Maher

April 3, 2013 at 5:05 am

There was also quite a fun set-piece scene at the beginning, when the enchanters are all wondering how they are going to bake their bread or make beer without magic. The prospect of life without that last is what really gets everyone stirred up. :)

- Keith Palmer

April 3, 2013 at 12:18 am

Once I’d bought the full package of adventures for the new “Lost Treasures of Infocom” iPad application, the second game I played was Enchanter (after A Mind Forever Voyaging, which I suppose is an anecdote for another time…) I couldn’t remember everything as well as with some of the other Infocom games, however, and spent a while stumbling around parched having missed where to find water before not quite managing to map the Translucent Rooms. That didn’t affect my positive impressions of the game, though.

- matt w

April 3, 2013 at 1:14 am

“This sort of knowing self-referentiality is a very modern phenomenon, one that appeared only after decades or centuries in other art forms.”

‘Twas only 19 years from Pamela to the first volume of Tristram Shandy.

- GeoX

April 3, 2013 at 3:58 am

Yeah, but pre-twentieth-century, how many works of literature took inspiration from Tristram Shandy?

- Jimmy Maher

April 3, 2013 at 4:56 am

Funny you should mention that, I just got completely through Tristram Shandy at last recently. It’s a fascinating book in some ways and exhausting in others, but I think its reputation as the “first work of postmodernism” is a bit anachronistic and exaggerated. Underneath all of the whimsy and humor (much of which was fairly impenetrable due to the cultural gap between then and now), I saw a lot of thoughtful commentary on the artificial nature of any story which is directly relevant to what I do on this blog (where do you begin to make a story out of life?) and a healthy dollop of satire of long-winded early novelists like Richardson. I’m not quite sure, however, that it’s quite as knowing in its deconstruction of the novel as many modern commentators would have us believe. Certainly in its own time it was seen as just a funny (and very popular) trifle. It wasn’t until well over 100 years after Sterne’s death that people started suddenly attaching all this theoretical import. Some of that is probably a case of an overlooked element of genius finally getting its due, but some of it may just say more about the modern age than it does about Tristram Shandy itself. This may, on other words, be a case of critics seeing what they devoutly wish to see in a work.

- Nate

July 20, 2013 at 10:10 am

And don’t forget Northanger Abbey, which is almost entirely a snarky fanfic deconstructing the Gothic novels of Jane Austen’s youth. When I first read it (online of course!) a couple of years ago I was shocked by how snappy and modern the whole thing seemed. The heroine knows how things work because she’s read all the novels, and her diary entries would work almost unchanged as Livejournal posts.

(In fact it reminded me how the blogging/microblogging craze, far from being a new invention, is really only returning us to a state of affairs that existed long before the television era – when people naturally wrote diaries and journals.)

- Lisa

April 3, 2013 at 5:49 am

“RESTORE”! lol, I guess I’ve never hung around the adventurer long enough to hear that one.

I think it’s possible some releases of Enchanter may recognize the EXTINGUISH ME command so that FROTZing yourself isn’t a problem, but I couldn’t quote version numbers.

- Nathan

April 4, 2013 at 4:00 am

No such luck. In versions 10 through 24, the reply is, “You don’t have the you.” In version 29 you get, “You can’t turn that off.”

- Janice Eisen

April 17, 2013 at 12:38 am

I think twee elves vs. shoot-em-up skiffy is an exaggeration — if I recall, there’s more combat in the Zork games than in the early SF games. I wasn’t at MIT until the ’80s, and SF was very popular, but not necessarily the zap-zap kind.

I remember the Enchanter trilogy fondly, partly because, having played the original PDP-10 Zork, I wasn’t that interested in the Zork Trilogy (though I did enjoy the new content in II and IIi). The adventurer saying “Hello sailor” is particularly hilarious to me, because in the original Zork, that was a total and complete (and annoying) red herring — there was nowhere in the game that it did anything. I appreciated that the imps added a moment in one of the Zorks where saying “hello sailor” actually worked.

But yeah, that’s a really nice bit of self-parody. The kind of thing that makes me truly regret that their obsession with doing business software would destroy the company. I would have liked to have seen their future development.

- Peter Piers

August 10, 2015 at 6:50 pm

Here’s another game to add to the tradition of games in the Enchanter mold/universe, the newly finished Scroll Thief!

http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=o6kvclutag67skou

Infidel
April 7, 2013

(This article doesn’t spoil individual puzzle solutions, but does thoroughly spoil the ending of Infidel. Read on at your own risk!)

In the spring of 1983, having released successful games in the fantasy, science fiction, and mystery genres, the Imps of Infocom sat down to ask each other a question they would repeat quite a number of times over the coming years: what remaining literary genres might make a good basis for a game? Mike Berlyn, who had just finished up Suspended, suggested, appropriately enough for an adventure game, the genre of adventure fiction, those tales of manly men braving exotic dangers in exotic locations which has its roots in the likes of H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle and reached its peak, like the mystery, in the 1930s, when pulpy stories filled the dime store shelves and the cinema screens to be consumed by a public eager for escape from economic depression and the looming threat of another world war. It sounded like a great fit to the Imps. The genre was even undergoing something of a commercial revival; Raiders of the Lost Ark had prompted a new interest by Hollywood and booksellers in classic adventure fiction. Somewhat to his chagrin, Berlyn was promptly assigned to write the first game in the new Tales of Adventure line, which the Imps agreed would have the player exploring a heretofore undiscovered Egyptian pyramid found buried under the sands of the Sahara. And so Pyramid, eventually to be renamed Infidel by the ever-helpful folks at G/R Copy, became Berlyn’s second project for Infocom.

It’s not hard to understand why Infocom chose pyramid-delving as the subject of the first Tale of Adventure. The exploration of a deserted environment filled with mechanical traps, tricks, and puzzles is a natural for an adventure game. It’s actually hard to think of a scenario more able to maximize the medium’s strengths and minimize its limitations. Thus quite a few early adventure authors discovered a latent interest in Egyptian archaeology. Greg Hassett, who at just twelve years old wrote and sold King Tut’s Adventure for the TRS-80 in 1979, was likely the first, but Scott Adams (Pyramid of Doom) and an official Radio Shack game (Pyramid 2000) weren’t far behind, as were various others. Somewhat allaying any concerns about a hackneyed premise was Infocom’s commitment to doing ancient Egypt right, with their expected polished writing and technology, and with at least a strong nod in the direction of historical accuracy. To help with this latter, Berlyn, no Egyptologist himself, trekked down to nearby Harvard University and recruited one Patricia Fogleman, a graduate student studying ancient Egypt. She helped him with his Egyptian mythology and with the design of the pyramid itself, which are of course largely one and the same thing.

Still, the game they came up with is mechanically almost shockingly unambitious, a double surprise considering it came from the designer responsible for Suspended, a game which morphed and stretched the ZIL development system more than any game Infocom released before or since. You wake up at the beginning of Infidel in your deserted desert camp. The guides and workers who came out here with you have conveniently (for Berlyn, that is) drugged you and split, leaving you all alone to find the pyramid and explore it. With the exception only of a plane which flies overhead at the beginning to drop a vital piece of equipment and some crocodiles which dwell (thankfully) inaccessibly on the other side of the Nile, Infidel is absolutely devoid of any life beyond your own, the only Infocom game about which that can be said. There is also none of the dynamism that marked Infocom’s other games of the period. After the plane flies away Infidel’s environment is as static as it is deserted — just a set of locations to map and explore and a series of mechanical puzzles to solve. The only notable technical innovation is the inclusion of a knapsack that you can use to carry far more objects than your hands alone would allow. Similar carry-alls eventually started appearing in other adventures as a way to preserve some semblance of realism in not allowing you to carry a ridiculous number of items in your hands while bypassing the tedium of strict inventory limits. Thankfully, they were mostly more painless to use than this one is; here you have to remove the knapsack and set it down, then manually insert or remove items.

The most interesting of the puzzles is a sort of ongoing code-breaking exercise. You find throughout the pyramid hieroglyphs scratched onto the walls and other places. Each symbol — drawn using various dashes, slashes, asterisks, and exclamation points — corresponds directly to an English word in a way that must have horrified Fogleman or any student of language. The feelies provide translations of a handful of these to start you off, but after that it’s up to you to piece together the meanings by collecting the full set on notepaper and trying to determine what means what using contextual clues. Disappointingly or gratifyingly, depending on your tolerance and talent for such exercises, this meta-puzzle is largely optional. The hieroglyphs do give hints as well as additional tidbits about the meanings behind the wonders you encounter, but the game is mostly straightforward enough that the hints aren’t necessary. In the one exception to this rule the translation is quite a trivial exercise. Indeed, solving Infidel is not difficult at all. Players experienced with Infocom’s adventures are likely to march through with few problems, waiting all the while for the other shoe to drop and for this thing to get hard. It never really does.

So, were that all there was to Infidel we would have a competently crafted, solidly written game, but one that stands out as oddly, painfully slight in comparison to its stablemates in the Infocom canon, and this would be quite a short article. However, Infidel turned out to be as conceptually groundbreaking as it is mechanically traditional, leaving angry players and broiling controversy in its wake.

Infidel’s story — its real story, that is, not the mechanics of collecting water, operating navigation boxes, and opening doors — lives mostly within its feelies. In them Berlyn sought to characterize his protagonist to a degree rivaled amongst previous adventure games only by Planetfall. But while that game had you playing a harmless schlub who spent his days swabbing decks and bitching about his superior officer, Infidel casts you as someone less harmless: a frustrated American treasure hunter with an unethical streak as wide as your thirst for money and glory. Your diary tells how you were contacted by a Miss Ellingsworth, an old woman who believes her archaeologist father located something big in the Egyptian desert back in the 1920s. You choose not to report her story to your boss, a well-known, hyper-competent treasure hunter named Craige, but rather to secretly mount an expedition of your own, deceiving Miss Ellingsworth into believing that you’re working in partnership with Craige, the person she really wanted for this quest. Once in Egypt you mismanage everything about your under-capitalized expedition horribly, breaking a vital piece of equipment needed to find the pyramid and mistreating your team of guides and workers. That’s how you come to wake up alone in your tent when the game proper finally begins.

The game proper originally did little to integrate the character described in the feelies with the one you actually control in the game. It occasionally, just occasionally, adapts a scolding or hectoring tone: the opening text describes how you “stupidly” tried to make your crew work on a holy day; examining some thickets near your camp brings the response that they are “just about as yielding as you were with your helpers.” Even less frequently do you get a glimpse of your character’s personality, as when you “sneer” at the “idiots” who didn’t believe in you when you find the pyramid at last. Yet the game that Infocom’s testers received otherwise played like a greedy treasure hunt to warm the protagonist’s heart, climaxing with your penetrating to the innermost vault of the pyramid and coming out with the fame and fortune of which you had dreamed. The testers, obviously a perceptive and sensitive lot, complained about the thematic dissonance. Berlyn took their concerns to heart, and decided to revise the ending to make a major statement.

Much as I enjoy the likes of King Solomon’s Mines and The Lost World, it’s hard today to overlook the racism and cultural imperialism in classic adventure fiction. Invariably in these tales strong Christian white men end up pitted against black, brown, yellow, or red savages, winning out in the end and carrying the spoils of victory back home to a civilization that can make proper use of them. Maybe if the savages are lucky the white men then return to organize and lead their societies for them. It’s the White Man’s Burden writ large, colonialism at its ugliest: kill them and take their stuff. More trivially, the second part of this dictum is also the guiding ethic of old-school adventure games, sometimes without the killing but not always; CRPGs were generally lumped in with adventures as a variant of the same basic thing during this era. Dave Lebling and Marc Blank had already had their fun with the amorality and the absurdities of adventure games in Enchanter by inserting the stupid magpie adventurer from Zork to let us view him from a different perspective. Now Berlyn decided to treat the subject in a much more serious way, making of Infidel a sort of morality tale. He would invert expectations in a downright postmodern way, pointing out the ugly underbelly of traditional adventure stories from within a traditional adventure story, the moral vacuum of old-school adventure games from within one of the most old-school games Infocom would create post-Zork trilogy. Derrida would have been proud. Speaking to Jason Scott, Berlyn noted that Infidel was the first adventure game that “said who you were, why you were there, then slapped you across the face for it. How many times can you walk through a dungeon and steal things and take them with you and plunder for treasure and not get slapped around for it? Well, Infidel was the end of that.” No wonder lots of people got upset.

The following text, more shocking even than the death of Floyd, is what players read in disbelief after they entered the final command and sat back to savor the finishing of another adventure game:

>open sarcophagus
You lift the cover with great care, and in an instant you see all your dreams come true. The interior of the sarcophagus is lined with gold, inset with jewels, glistening in your torchlight. The riches and their dazzling beauty overwhelm you. You take a deep breath, amazed that all of this is yours. You tremble with excitement, then realize the ground beneath your feet is trembling, too.

As a knife cuts through butter, this realization cuts through your mind, makes your hands shake and cold sweat appear on your forehead. The Burial Chamber is collapsing, the walls closing in. You will never get out of this pyramid alive. You earned this treasure. But it cost you your life.

And as you sit there, gazing into the glistening wealth of the inner sarcophagus, you can't help but feel a little empty, a little foolish. If someone were on the other side of the quickly-collapsing wall, they could have dug you out. If only you'd treated the workers better. If only you'd cut Craige in on the find. If only you'd hired a reliable guide.

Well, someday, someone will discover your bones here. And then you will get your fame.

It’s an ugly, even horrifying conclusion; lest there be any doubt, understand that you have just been buried alive. It’s also breathtaking in its audacity, roughly equivalent to releasing an Indiana Jones movie in which Indy is a smirking jerk who gets everyone killed in the end. This sort of thing is not what people expect from their Tales of Adventure. Infocom rarely did anything without a great deal of deliberation, and releasing Infidel with an ending like this one was no exception. Marketing was, understandably, very concerned, but the Imps, feeling their oats more and more in the wake of all of the attention they had been receiving from the world of letters, felt strongly that it was the right “literary” decision. The game turned out to be, predictably enough, very polarizing; Berlyn says he received more love mail and more hate mail over this game than anything else he has ever done.

The most prominent of the naysayers was Computer Gaming World’s adventure-game specialist Scorpia, who was becoming an increasingly respected voice amongst fans through her articles in the magazine, her presence on the early online service CompuServe (where she ran a discussion group dedicated to adventuring), and a hints-by-post system she ran out of a local PO Box. Scorpia was normally an unabashed lover of Infocom, dedicating a full column in CGW to most Infocom games shortly after their release. On the theory that it’s better not to say anything if you can’t say something nice, however, she never gave Infidel so much as a mention in print. But never fear, she made her displeasure known online and to Berlyn personally, to such an extent that when he was invited to an online chat with Scorpia and her group on CompuServe he sarcastically mentioned the game as her “fave rave.” Things got somewhat chippy later on:

Scorpia: Now, I did not like Infidel. I did not like the premise of the story. I did not like the main character. I did not like the ending. I felt it was a poor choice to have a character like that in an Infocom game, since after all, regardless of the main character in the story, *I* am the one who is really playing the game, really solving the puzzles. The character is merely a shell, and after going thru the game, I resent getting killed.

Berlyn: What do you want me to do? I can’t make you like something you don’t like. I can’t make you appreciate something that you don’t think is there. I will tell you this, though, you are being very narrow-minded about what you think an Infocom game is. It doesn’t HAVE to be the way you said and you don’t have to think that in *EVERY* game you play, that YOU’re the main character. A question for you: yes or no, Scorp, have you ever read a book, seen a TV program, seen a movie where the main character wasn’t someone you liked, was someone you’d rather not be?

Scorpia: Certainly.

Berlyn: Okay. Then that’s fair. If you look at these games as shells for you to occupy and nothing more, like an RPG, then you’re missing the experience, or at least part of the potential experience. If you had read the journal and the letter beforehand I would have hoped you would have understood just what was going on in the game — who you were, why you were playing that kind
of character. Adventures are so STERILE! That’s the word. And I want very much to make them an unsterile experience. It’s what I work for and it’s my goal. Otherwise, why not just read Tom Swifts and Nancy Drews and the Hardy Boys?

Oct: May I comment on the Infidel protagonist?

Scorpia: Go ahead, Oct.

Oct: As far as I know (through about 8 games that I’ve played) Infidel is the only one that creates a role (in the sense of a personality) for the protagonist-player. A worthwhile experiment, but I somewhat agree with Scorp that it wasn’t completely successful. The problem is that a game provides a simulated world for the protagonist and just as in life the player must do intelligent things to “succeed” (in the sense of surviving, making progress). If the role includes stupidity or bullheadedness, then the player will not make progress, which in the context of the game means not being able to continue playing. Further, the excellence of the Infocom games is in their world-simulation, but simulating a personality for the *player* is not really provided for in the basic design, the fundamental interaction between game and player. I feel I’ve not articulated too well, but there’s a point in there somewhere!

Berlyn: I never claimed the protagonist works in Infidel. I only claim that it had to be tried and so it was. There are a lot of personal reasons for my disgust (I hate the game, myself) over the whole Infidel project, but none of it had to do with the protagonist/ending problems the game has. Let me put it to you this way: Like anyone who produces things or provides a service — you put it out there and you take a chance. You wait for the smoke to clear and then you listen to people like yourselves talking about whether the experiment succeeded or failed and I could have told you it might have gone either way when I was writing it. There was just no way to know.

Oct: I think I can better summarize the problem with roles, now. Ok?

Berlyn: Go ahead, Oct.

Oct: If you give the player a role, as in the set-up (the journal) and he/she wants to view him/herself that way, ok. The problem is that the only way that can be effectively represented is in how the other actors in the game view/respond to the player. If you try to implement it by saying “You now do this,” you’ve violated a basic premise, namely that *I* decide what I want to do (whether in a role or otherwise). “You now do this” just isn’t part of the game!

Berlyn: I agree. Some of the problems I faced in this game are what kind of a human being would even WANT to ransack a national shrine like a pyramid? And once I asked myself that question, I was sunk and there was no turning back. It wasn’t even a game I wanted to write. I got off on it by putting in all the weirdness, the ‘glyphs, the mirages, the descriptions but I’ve learned from the experience. Marc once said to me, “This is the only business where you get to experiment and people really give you feedback.” He was right. And I appreciate it.

I find this discussion fascinating because it gets to the heart of what a narrative-oriented game is and what it can be, grappling with contradictions that still obsess us today. When you boot an adventure are you effectively still yourself, reacting as you would if transported into that world? Or is an adventure really a form of improvisatory theater, in which you put yourself into the shoes of a protagonist who is not you and try to play the role and experience that person’s story in good faith? Or consider a related question: is an adventure game a way of creating your own story or simply an unusually immersive, interactive way of experiencing a story? If you come down on the former side, you will likely see the likes of Floyd’s death in Planetfall and Infidel’s ugly ending as little more than cheap parlor tricks intended to elicit an unearned emotional response. If you come down on the latter, you will likely reply that such “cheap parlor tricks” are exactly what literature has always done. (It’s interesting to note that these two seminal moments came in the two Infocom games released to date that were the most novel-like, with the most strongly characterized protagonists.) Yet if you’re honest you must also ask yourself whether a text adventure, with its odd, granular obsession with the details of what you are carrying and eating and wearing and where your character is standing in the world at any given moment, is a medium capable of delivering a truly theatrical — or, if you like, a literary — experience. Tellingly, all of the work of setting up the shocking ending to Infidel is done in the feelies. By the time you begin the game proper your fate is sealed; all that remains are the logistical details at which text adventures excel.

Early games had been so primitive in both their technology and their writing that there was little room for such questions, but now, with Infocom advancing the state of the art so rapidly, they loomed large, both within Infocom (where lengthy, spirited discussions on the matter went on constantly) and, as we’ve just seen, among their fans. The lesson that Berlyn claims they took from the reaction to Infidel might sound dispiriting:

People really don’t want to know who they are [in a game]. This was an interesting learning process for everyone at Infocom. We weren’t really writing interactive fiction — I don’t care what you call it, I don’t care what you market it as. It’s not fiction. They’re adventure games. You want to give the player the opportunity to put themselves in an environment as if they were really there.

Here we see again that delicate balancing act between art and commerce which always marked Infocom. When they found they had gone a step too far with their literary ambitions, as with Infidel and its antihero protagonist (it sold by far the fewest copies of any of their first ten games), they generally took a step back to more traditional models.

It’s tempting to make poor Scorpia our scapegoat in this, to use her as the personification of all the hidebound traditional players who refused to pull their heads out of the Zork mentality and make the leap to approaching Infocom’s games as the new form of interactive literature they were being advertised as in the likes of The New York Times Book Review. Before we do, however, we should remember that Scorpia and people like her were paying $30 or $40 for the privilege of playing each new Infocom game. If they expected a certain sort of experience for their money, so be it; we shouldn’t begrudge people their choice in entertainment. It’s also true that Infidel could have done a better job of selling the idea. Its premise boils down to: “Greedy, charmless, incompetent asshole gets in way over his head through clumsy deceptions and generally treating the people around him like shit, and finally gets himself killed.” One might be tempted to call Infidel an interactive tragedy, but its nameless protagonist doesn’t have the slinky charm of Richard III, much less the tortured psyche of Hamlet. We’re left with just a petty little person doing petty little things, and hoisted from his own petty little petard in consequence. Such is not the stuff of great drama, even if it’s perhaps an accurate depiction of most real-life assholes and the fates that await them. If we set aside our admiration for Berlyn’s chutzpah to look at the story outside of its historical context, it doesn’t really have much to say to us about the proverbial human condition, other than “if you must be a jerk, at least be a competent jerk.” Indeed, there’s a certain nasty edge to Infidel that doesn’t seem to stem entirely from its theme. This was, we should remember, a game that Mike Berlyn didn’t really want to write, and we can feel some of his annoyance and impatience in the game itself. There’s little of the joy of creation about it. It’s just not a very lovable game. Scorpia’s distaste and unwillingness to grant Infidel the benefit of any doubt might be disappointing, but it’s understandable. One could easily see it as a sneering “up yours!” to Infocom’s loyal customers.

Infidel’s sales followed an unusual pattern. Released in November of 1983 as Infocom’s tenth game and fifth and final of that year, it exploded out of the gate, selling more than 16,000 copies in the final weeks of the year. After that, however, sales dropped off quickly; it sold barely 20,000 copies in all of 1984. It was the only one of the first ten games to fail to sell more than 70,000 copies in its lifetime. In fact, it never even came close to 50,000. While not a commercial disaster, its relative under-performance is interesting. One wonders to what extent angry early buyers like Scorpia dissuaded others from buying it. Of course, the mercurial Berlyn’s declaring his dissatisfaction with his own game in an online conference likely didn’t help matters either. Marketing, who suffered long and hard at the hands of the Imps, must have been apoplectic after reading that transcript.

So, Infocom ended 1983 as they had begun it, with a thorny but fascinating Mike Berlyn game. With by far the most impressive catalog in adventure gaming and sales to match, they were riding high indeed. The next year would bring five more worthy games and the highest total sales of the company’s history, but also the first serious challengers to their position as the king of literate, sophisticated adventure gaming and the beginning in earnest of the Cornerstone project that sowed the seeds of their ultimate destruction. We’ll get to those stories down the road, but first we have some other ground to cover.

(I must once again thank Jason Scott for sharing with me additional materials from his Get Lamp project for this article.)

Comments
38 Responses

- Felix

April 7, 2013 at 2:00 pm

It’s interesting that you should mention King Solomon’s Mines. While the book is fairly racist, it also struck me as aware of its own racism as an artifact of the time when it was written, and uncomfortable with it. Besides, it’s easy to forgive protagonists that don’t really take themselves too seriously.

In fact, I’ve been far more horrified by the fundamental, unchecked and unconscious racism in Last and First Men, a doorstopper of epic proportions written by a philosopher! and actually intended as an exploration of human nature — to which it dedicates ample space. Doubly so as it was written decades later, at a time when people really should have known better, especially the highly educated.

As for what readers expect from literature, it’s seldom what they claim to. You’d expect they want less handholding and spoonfeeding than, say, your average moviegoer. But in practice they hate being made to think, much less guess; and the relationship between reader, author and protagonist is blurry at best (as we ought to know well here in text adventure land).

In any event, I agree that the experiment had to be made. The reactions to Infidel tell as much about the audience as they tell about the game, and that’s one of the greatest things about art.

- Jimmy Maher

April 7, 2013 at 3:42 pm

I hesitate to condemn too much the authors of such books. What I think people sometimes fail to grasp is how embedded in the culture racist attitudes really were. It’s not like these authors were making an argument, or even asserting conventional wisdom; these attitudes were simply bedrock truths about the way the world fundamentally was, not worth questioning. Deconstruction gets a bad rap for some very good reasons, but it is useful when it lets us tease out these bedrock assumptions that the authors themselves are not even consciously aware of.

Lest we get too smug, obviously cultural evolution continues today. I have a pet theory that in 100 years people will look back on the way we raise and cruelly kill animals to feed our desires (not even our needs) with shock akin to what we feel when we read some of the most egregiously racist passages in these old adventure novels. And I say this as someone who loves meat much more than is good for me.

To another point:

While a majority — perhaps a vast majority — of readers do prefer their fiction light and easy, there’s obviously a subset of people willing to read (and write) more challenging books. I think the tragedy of text adventures/interactive fiction is that the audience as a whole never grew enough, even in the commercial golden age we’re in now here on the blog, to foster a significant number of readers ready to tackle more thematically challenging works. The question of why that didn’t happen is of course an enormous can of worms that I’ll probably have to spend a few dozen lengthy articles trying to address on the blog down the road… :)

- Felix

April 7, 2013 at 4:57 pm

Your words echo something I wrote in an older blog post:

Let this be a cautionary tale. Racism is so deeply embedded in so many human cultures that even someone who is fully aware of the issue (me) has to make a conscious effort to avoid falling back on stereotypes. Back in 1930, even an enlightened philosopher like Olaf Stapledon did not think for a moment that human behavior could be driven by anything but heredity, and that’s scary. How many people still hold such beliefs?

The answer is likely to be unpleasant. :)

- Duncan Stevens

April 7, 2013 at 9:02 pm

Just imagine how well Infidel would have sold if they’d marketed it as a “Tragedy” rather than adventure story! ;-) (But the label actually fits the classical definition, in the sense that the protagonist is undone by a fatal flaw, namely greed.)

Not quite following why Berlyn said he hated the game. Yes, some of the seminal examples of the genre are racist, but it’s not clear to me that racism is inherent; if the protagonist is white (not necessarily so), couldn’t nonwhite characters be allies rather than adversaries, and/or just as smart, loyal, brave, etc. as the protagonist? As for “ransacking,” etc., was it really essential that the protagonist be out to plunder rather than simply discover? Or did Infocom think that would have been too boring?

I played the game more than 25 years ago, so I don’t exactly recall what I thought of the ending, but I do remember thinking, about the various “if only”s, “but you didn’t give me a chance to do any of that!” As you’ve discussed elsewhere, the lack of a true choice makes the ending pretty limited as a morality tale. You can call it a tragedy, but it’s more a tragedy witnessed than participated in.

- Jimmy Maher

April 8, 2013 at 7:56 am

I do think it’s a stretch to call Infidel a tragedy. If we go with the definition of a tragic hero being an otherwise noble person with a single tragic flaw, the hero of Infidel is obviously disqualified because he’s just an all-around jerk, without a single redeeming feature. Greed is only the tip of the iceberg here.

I’m not really sold on that conventional Anglo grade school definition of tragedy anyway. It can be forced to fit with, say, most of Shakespeare with a bit of contortions and straining, but that’s not how the Greeks saw tragedy, and not how the continental European tradition sees it. I’m more sympathetic to the view of tragedy as a correction of something out of harmony in the universe. Think of “The time is out of joint…” from Hamlet. Matter of fact, I’ve removed the line about Infocom not releasing any more interactive tragedies, because now that I think about it they did. I would say the game that uses that line — Trinity — is the one from Infocom that really does feel like an interactive tragedy to me.

As far as Beryln: the only adjective I can use is “mercurial.” That said, I haven’t heard him badmouth Infidel in a long time. When asked recently by Jason Scott, he actually named it as the single game of his he was most proud of. So who knows really. That’s why I didn’t make too much of his professed dissatisfaction with the game at the time in the article, although, since it had a prominent mention in the online chat I dearly wanted to quote, I thought I had to give it a mention.

- Duncan Stevens

April 8, 2013 at 3:01 pm

“Mercurial” should be on Berlyn’s tombstone, yes. But maybe the more literary efforts of latter-day games in general and parser-based IF in particular have given him a different view of Infidel in retrospect.

I’m not necessarily bound to that definition of tragedy either, at least not as restrictively as the Greeks understood it. The “noble” part would probably eliminate most of the relevant Shakespeare plays, and most readers these days probably associate the “tragedy” form with Shakespeare more than ancient Greece anyway. (And what would we call Hamlet, Othello, Lear and Macbeth if we were being strict about it?) The classical label fits Trinity even less, as the protagonist doesn’t really have a characterization there; the only thing we know is that he/she values inexpensive vacation packages.

(Your definition is intriguing, and it does fit a lot of more modern tragedies–say, Things Fall Apart, or Light in August. Though I’m not sure it would capture Othello.)

One further thought: Infidel has the most strongly characterized protagonist of any Infocom game (even if much of the characterization was only through the feelies); the only other PC that comes close, I think, is that of Plundered Hearts, many years later. Given the return to PC-as-cipher in the games following Infidel, it seems like that particular experiment was not viewed as successful among the Infocom folks (and the sales figures probably didn’t help). If so, I wonder whether they overlearned the lesson–a fully characterized protagonist doesn’t *have* to be an antihero.

- Jimmy Maher

April 10, 2013 at 9:27 am

Besides Arthur Dent, who was kind of there by default, there was also Perry from A Mind Forever Voyaging. Interestingly, that was another commercial disappointment which prompted a “Well, not gonna try THAT again” reaction from Infocom. And there was Shogun, but I think Dave Lebling would prefer we just forget that one. :)

- Duncan Stevens

April 10, 2013 at 12:05 pm

Sure, but Perry–by his very nature–doesn’t have much personality, even in the simulations, and while Arthur in the book is a pretty distinct personality, not much of that shows up in the game. You could say the same of Watson in Sherlock.

(I tend to view Shogun in the same light as, say, Battletech and Mines of Titan: Activision’s project, not Infocom’s. I know it’s parser-based, but it’s still not something that Infocom would likely have done willingly.)

- Jason Scott

April 8, 2013 at 6:04 pm

A few quick notes.

Mercurial describes Berlyn exactly – he has had a very up and down relationship with his game-making past. He obviously loves the process of creating games and making something people enjoy, but has not always enjoyed the business side of it. It’s obvious that at the later points of his life he just wants a steady source of income for himself and his wife Muffy (the tale of Michael and Muffy Berlyn is one of the greatest love stories you could tell, if someone took the time to).

He was the first interview conducted for GET LAMP, in 2006, and it was much later in the production he indicated he would prefer not to be in the movie. I asked him what specifically he was worried about, and he was worried I’d paint him as someone who treasured his time at Infocom, when his opinion was one more of having done good work there but under some pretty terrible and incompatible management. I told him I’d cut the movie so he never complimented Infocom’s management or direction, which, if you watch the movie in that context (as well as the Infocom special feature), he never, ever does. (All Infocom alumni had a final approval of final cut, which none of them used to make any changes whatsoever.)

He also indicated to me his interview was more positive than he would have liked, because he was trying to be respectful to this guy making such an effort to fly in and interview him. That said, I think he’s pretty accurate in his description of his work and the motivations.

And I agree strongly – Suspended was so far ahead of its time in terms of changing perception and awareness of what these games could do.

- Keith Palmer

April 8, 2013 at 9:59 pm

Knowing Infidel was coming up, I mused a bit on the “Egyptian archaeology” adventures that had preceded it (along with “Pyramid 2000” and “Pyramid of Doom,” I remembered Sands of Egypt, which seemed familiar among Color Computer users for no better reason than that it was sold at Radio Shack, and whose manual also describes an “abandoned in the desert by your irate expedition” scenario but makes more of a joke of it) and remembered what you’d already said in “Let’s Tell a Story Together” about Scorpia’s negative reaction. Before you pointed out a few examples in the game’s text, I had wondered about a split between “characterization in the manual” and the game itself, which I suppose ties into an issue of “imposing” characterization on second-person text. I then wondered about more recent works of interactive fiction, but had to confront how I don’t play as much of it as I think I “ought to”…

- Duncan Stevens

April 9, 2013 at 4:22 pm

Final observation: In the space of a year, Infocom released Zork III and Infidel, both of which subverted expectations by seeming to offer a treasure hunt and delivering something very different–though Infidel was somewhat more in-your-face about it, didn’t reveal what was going on until the very end, and made things even less appealing by having you play an antihero. I’d say that Zork III is much more fondly remembered than Infidel for those reasons–there may be other reasons as well–but I wonder whether marketing also had concerns about how the unusual pacing and structure of Zork III would go over.

Also, I tend to view Floyd’s death in Planetfall and the ending of Infidel very differently. The former appealed to the player’s emotions; the latter asked for a more cerebral response (why did the game end that way? should it have ended differently? should the game have treated the protagonist as the player’s avatar or as an actual character?). Certainly, to the extent there was an emotional response to the latter, it would be negative, and would be directed at the game itself, not at the story the game was telling. I don’t have a problem with killing Floyd, silly song aside, and there are quite a few problems with Infidel’s ending even granting its conceptual brilliance, but I don’t think they’re cut from the same cloth.

- Jimmy Maher

April 10, 2013 at 2:08 am

I never heard about any marketing concerns relating to Zork III. However, that game came out before the full Infocom machine (so to speak) was up and running. There really wasn’t a marketing department to speak of at that time.

I agree that the death of Floyd and the ending of Infidel are very different moments. I really lump them together only as two shocking moments from the same year that pushed the envelope of what an adventure game was or could be.

- Janice Eisen

April 17, 2013 at 1:03 am

I’m afraid I was one of the fogeys who was annoyed by the ending, although reading this entry now (and after not having thought about Infidel in ages), I see what Berlyn was trying to do. i also have a vague memory of meeting Berlyn briefly once and complaining about the ending. This makes me cringe now, but at the time I had no idea about the hate mail or the Scorpia issue, since I didn’t hang out on gaming message boards. He politely said something along the lines of his argument quoted here and moved along.

This is a discussion that really goes to the heart of whether these games are Interactive Fiction. Like fiction, they can make you feel and think new things, but the fact that the gamer is the protagonist is a real limitation. The Infocom game I think was most successful as art was Trinity, and the protagonist is a cipher.

Hence the cliche of the adventurer starting the game by awaking with amnesia …

- Janice Eisen

April 17, 2013 at 1:04 am

Oh, and $30-$40 was worth a lot more then, kids!

- Jonathan Blask

April 17, 2013 at 5:36 am

Around 1999, Berlyn ported one of his games, Dr. Dumont’s Wild P.A.R.T.I., to Inform, adding a bunch of stuff and selling it when he took his own stab at commercial IF (“GET LAMP” gets his thoughts on this venture). I was lucky enough to betatest the Inform game (lucky since I enjoyed the game a lot), but I thought the ending didn’t have enough “pow!” and told him so. Specifically, I wanted something that rehashed all of the characters you had met in the game.

He threw together a version that did just that, and I remember liking it a lot. Some years later, I played through the final released version, and I’m pretty sure the ending was much closer to the original ending, if not exactly the same.

To its credit, I liked it a lot better the second time I saw it (and will gladly admit that I was wrong about it), but now I wonder if Berlyn threw that other ending together, thinking, ok, this is the cheesiest crap I can think of. If he like this, this guy knows nothing!

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- X

October 6, 2013 at 4:59 am

I’m writing from the distant future (October), where I assure you racism is still very much a thing. I have to say that I find the concept of a game chastising you for decisions you haven’t made pretty distasteful. Unless Infidel has a MAKE BETTER LIFE CHOICES command, it has no business criticizing the bad choices we didn’t even choose. Maybe the game should be directly criticizing the player. Are we not monsters who led the PC to his ignominous death over and over? Enslaved him to do our bidding?

Also: “what kind of a human being would even WANT to ransack a national shrine like a pyramid” is some weak lame stuff. What kind of a human being hacked up a troll and a thief in cold blood? I didn’t lose much sleep over those either. One assumes when one is in a fictional universe that in this universe, this is the way things are done. Suspension of disbelief, you know? If you wanted us to feel bad about sacking a “national shrine”, you have to populate the game with NPCs who pester you about how very holy their national shrine is. You have to have an alternate ending where you decide not to do it! If you want to subvert the conventions of storytelling/gameplay, you have to set up the groundwork for it, not just yank the rug out in the last scene.

- DANoWAR

June 30, 2014 at 6:49 am

I’ve tried to avoid the spoiler in this article, but maybe skimmed too much of the text in order to achieve this.

Isn’t there a way in WordPress where you can visibly spoilertag those parts of the text where the game is spoilered? Maybe hide them? Make the reader click to let the spoilers appear? Make them white text? Bold the text so that you can easily find the place but are able to avoid it if you want?

- Jimmy Maher

June 30, 2014 at 7:24 am

In some cases I do hide spoilers, if it’s just a single puzzle solution, a riddle answer, etc. But the whole thrust of this article hinges on the ending of Infidel; there wouldn’t be much there that *wasn’t* hidden. It’s not like I didn’t warn you… ;)

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- Jubal

July 11, 2015 at 1:24 am

I can see the frustration a lot of people felt with the ending. What I always thought would have made a vast improvement in the way it came across would be if there was an option to head back to civilisation from the first location – possibly after asking for confirmation. It would end the game immediately, with a paragraph about how you stagger back into Cairo, thirsty, exhausted, your career in ruins and in a great deal of trouble. Giving the player that option from the start, even though it would seem like a bad game over, would later turn out to be the best way of playing, facing up to your terrible decisions rather than continuing to ignore them and plunge blindly onwards.

- Jimmy Maher

July 11, 2015 at 9:30 am

That’s actually kind of brilliant. Wish I had thought of it!

- Duncan Stevens

September 10, 2015 at 3:29 pm

Or, after the description of the walls closing in: you wake up, drenched with sweat, in your tent. You lie on your cot for a while, lost in thought. Then you heave yourself to your feet and set off for Cairo, composing an apologetic letter to Craige on the way.

A cop-out? Kind of. (This device always comes across as a cop-out in films.) But it at least offers a modicum of character development.

- Peter Piers

August 11, 2015 at 6:56 pm

Years later Curses! would offer a similar possibility, but turn it into a jokey ending (and yet, it is still the most sensible thing to do, I feel, when presented with those cruel, cruel puzzles. Bugger the whole thing, I’ll buy me a map in Paris).

if Infidel had done it, it would have been even more of a statement, and even more ground-breaking. Ain’t hindsight grand.

BTW, I’ve read about an alternate way to “end” the game… you don’t actually end it. You collect all the treasures except the sarcophagus, then make your way back to the tent, and quit. Bam. No actual reward, other than possibly the smug satisfaction of having avoided that deathtrap…

..which is in keeping with the character of the PC, come to think of it. Cute.

- Duncan Stevens

September 10, 2015 at 3:23 pm

Haven’t you burned some bridges by the time you get to the sarcophagus, though? Like, at least one floor has collapsed behind you (and your handy beam is no longer available).

- Chris Lang

June 7, 2019 at 4:05 am

Actually, the beam is still available, but if you remove it from its current position, you end up burning a bridge back to the Burial Chamber permanently, as the block it’s preventing from falling will end up sealing the area off.

- Peter Ferrie

November 29, 2015 at 11:22 pm

and possibly missing your fingers (you can feed them to the rats in the pit). Don’t ask why I thought to try it.

- Lisa H.

November 30, 2015 at 3:57 am

!

…I basically want to immediately run off and try this.

- Lisa H.

January 1, 2021 at 3:02 am

On the off chance that you see this reply… what specific command should I be using? The game doesn’t recognize the nouns “rat” or “rats”, nor will it let me drop or throw my fingers or hands; oddly, it tells me “You don’t have that” if I try “fingers”. (So it seems, at least in the version I’m playing, that the weird implementation of body parts that is in some Infocom games allowing you to throw bits of yourself and get responses like “the pair of hands sails away” is not at work in Infidel.) I can drop normal objects into the pit, but the response is not very interesting – it just says I hear the object hit the bottom.

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- Ben

December 20, 2020 at 8:44 pm

way of over his head -> way over his head

- Jimmy Maher

December 21, 2020 at 8:54 am

Thanks!

- Hoss F

December 21, 2020 at 8:37 pm

Been 35 or so years since I played and I remember thinking it was a very good came.

Basically there are good puzzles to solve, and you get to the end, and the character you are playing gets his comeuppance. Don’t see why that would be, in any way, a reflection on me. Thought it was interesting and a little gutsy.

I guess some people need the protagonist in the game they are playing to end up with riches and/or fame. People can be weird.

- Jonathan O

December 27, 2020 at 4:30 pm

The answer to this question may be obvious (I haven’t played the game or seen any of the “feelies”) – but do we actually know that the protagonist of Infidel is white?

- Lisa H.

December 28, 2020 at 2:48 am

It’s clear from the feelies (mostly diary entries) that the protagonist is some kind of “ugly American”, but I don’t think there is unequivocal evidence of their being white. The strongest line I could find was “I guess it’s true what they say about us all being brothers under the skin”, suggesting that the protagonist has a different skin color than “the locals” whom they keep othering, although that still affords several possibilities. Even less conclusively, their boss (?) Craige is described as fitting the image of the “great white hunter”.

I cannot say with 100% certainty that there are no references to pale skin or even to sunburn within the game text (not that darker skin tones cannot suffer sunburn), but I feel like there probably aren’t. To make the point about the desert, they turned to other descriptors, like squinting against the sun. You can’t even “examine me” (the response to the command is humorous). Overall I suspect the Imps went to their usual pains to be very noncommittal about the physical characteristics of the player character.

That said, the whole scenario does rather evoke white colonialism and “British Empire” attitudes about Egypt or other “exotic” cultures — for example, the limestone cube and map are provided by a woman from Cambridge, MA (itself probably just one of those Infocom self-references, but there is that kind of old-white-family-with-money whiff there) who inherited it from her ca. 1915-1920 archaeologist father.

- Lisa H.

February 24, 2021 at 10:10 am

some crocodiles which dwell (thankfully) inaccessibly on the other side of the Nile

Try swimming in the Nile and you’ll see how accessible they are.

- Fronzel

March 10, 2021 at 8:23 pm

Any player will surely have died many times before reaching the ending so why is the sudden final death “for real” and the previous deaths “don’t count”? This means the failure and success states of the game are the same; you die. What’s the narrative difference between dying of thirst a few turns in and going to the effort of solving all the puzzles only to end up the same way?

As for the idea the player’s character has a pre-defined (and vicious) personality I think it’s sorely undercut by there being no exercise of this personality *in the game* because there are no other characters. It’s as if the ending is saying it hopes you remember reading the “feelies” however many days or weeks ago (games are played at the player’s pace) because now it’s finally paying off after all that other stuff.

I’m not convinced by the racial punishment angle this article suggests as the laments of the doomed character amount to regretting recklessness and selfishness, not the whole venture itself. If he could do it again he’d still dig up the pyramid; he’d just be taking orders from Craig and be more reasonable with the workers.

Sorcerer
August 26, 2013

Steve Meretzky was a boundless fount of creative energy which couldn’t be contained by even his official projects for Infocom, many and varied as they were, and spilled over into daily life around the office in the form of elaborate themed parties, games that ranged from a multiplayer networked version of Boggle played over the DEC minicomputer to intense Diplomacy campaigns, and endless practical jokes. (“Memo hacking” became a particular favorite as Business Products ramped up and more and more buttoned-down business types started to appear in the office.) The lore and legends of daily life at Infocom, eagerly devoured by the faithful via the New Zork Times newsletter, is largely the lore and legends of Steve Meretzky, instigator and ringleader behind so much of the inspired lunacy.

Yet there was also another, oddly left-brained side to Meretzky. He was a compulsive organizer and even a bit of a neat freak; his meticulous and breathtakingly thorough archives informed much of Jason Scott’s Get Lamp project and, by extension, much of the Infocom history on this site. Mike Dornbrook, Infocom’s marketing director, calls Meretzky the most productive creative person he has ever met, one who evinced not a trace of the existential angst that normally accompanies the artistic temperament. Writer’s block was absolutely unknown to him; he could just “turn it on” and pour out work, regardless of what was happening around him or how things stood in his personal life.

But there was still another trait that made Meretzky the dream employee of any manager of creative types: he was literally just happy to be at Infocom, thrilled to be out of a career in construction management and happy to work on whatever project needed him. And so when Dave Lebling decided he’d like to write a mystery game and Marc Blank wanted to work on technology development, leaving the critical second game in the Enchanter trilogy without an author, Meretzky cheerfully agreed to take it on. When a certain famous but mercurial and intimidating author of science-fiction comedies came calling and everyone else shied away from collaborating with him, Meretzky said sure, sounds like fun. And when Tor Books offered Infocom the chance to make a series of Zork books in the mold of the absurdly successful Choose Your Own Adventure line, and everyone on the creative staff turned up their noses at such a lowbrow project even as management rubbed their hands in glee at the dollar figures involved, Meretzky took the whole series on as his moonlighting gig, cranking out four books that were hardly great literature but were better than they needed to be. Most gratifyingly of all, Meretzky ripped through all of these projects in a bare fifteen months whilst offering advice and ideas for other projects and, yes, getting up to all that craziness that New Zork Times readers came to know and cherish. Meretzky was truly a dream employee — and a dream colleague. One senses that if management had asked him to go back to testing after finishing Planetfall he would have just smiled and kicked ass at it.

Sorcerer, his sequel to Enchanter and Infocom’s first game of 1984, was, like so much of Meretzky’s work in this period, a bit of a thankless task. He neither got to devise the overarching plot and mechanics for the trilogy nor to bring things to a real conclusion, merely to write the bridge between fresh beginning and grand climax. Middle works in trilogies have always tended to be problematic for this very reason, and, indeed, Sorcerer is generally the most lightly regarded of the Enchanter games. I won’t really argue with that opinion, but I will say that Sorcerer is a very solid, entertaining work in its own right. It’s just that it gets a bit overshadowed by its towering companions, together arguably the best purely traditional adventure games ever to come out of Infocom, while also lacking the literary and thematic innovations that make games like Planetfall and Infidel — to neither of which it’s actually markedly inferior in overall quality — so interesting for people like me to write about.

Sorcerer casts you as the same budding enchanter you played in the game of that name. Having vanquished Krill, however, your star has risen considerably; you are now a member of magic’s innermost circle, the Circle of Enchanters, and protege of the Leader of the Circle, Belboz. Sorcerer opens with one of its most indelibly Meretzkian sequences. You are snug in your bed inside the Guild of Enchanters — but you don’t actually realize that for a few turns.

You are in a strange location, but you cannot remember how you got here. Everything is hazy, as though viewed through a gauze...

Twisted Forest
You are on a path through a blighted forest. The trees are sickly, and there is no undergrowth at all. One tree here looks climbable. The path, which ends here, continues to the northeast.
A hellhound is racing straight toward you, its open jaws displaying rows of razor-sharp teeth.

>climb tree
Tree Branch
You are on a large gnarled branch of an old and twisted tree.
A giant boa constrictor is slithering along the branch toward you!
The hellhound leaps madly about the base of the tree, gnashing its jaws.

>i
You are empty-handed.
The snake begins wrapping itself around your torso, squeezing the life out of you...

...and a moment later you wake up in a cold sweat and realize you've been dreaming.

SORCERER: INTERLOGIC Fantasy
Copyright (c) 1984 by Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
SORCERER and INTERLOGIC are trademarks of Infocom, Inc.
Release 4 / Serial number 840131

Your frotz spell seems to have worn off during the night, and it is now pitch black.

Like the similarly dynamic openings of Starcross and Planetfall, albeit on a more modest scale, Sorcerer’s dream sequence can be a bit of a misnomer. The rest of the game is much more open-ended and much less plot-driven than this sequence might imply. As you explore the conveniently deserted Guild — everyone except you and Belboz have gone into town to shop for the Guild picnic — you soon realize that Belboz has mysteriously disappeared. And so the game is on, fueled by the same sort of magic-based puzzles that served Enchanter so well. Indeed, Meretzky copied the code for the Enchanter magic system wholesale into Sorcerer, along with some of the same spells, which had to be a great help for someone working on as tight a timetable as he was. Sorcerer’s one big magical innovation is a set of potions to accompany its spell scrolls, something notably absent not only from Enchanter but also from Lebling’s Spellbreaker, the final game of the trilogy.

Like all of the Enchanter trilogy a very traditional game, Sorcerer is divided into two open-ended areas of exploration, the Guild of Enchanters and a sprawling wilderness and underground map which ultimately proves to house Belboz’s abductor, the demon Jeearr (another thoroughly Meretzkian name, and a character who also turns up in the last of the Zork gamebooks he was writing at the same time). The overall feel is looser than Enchanter, with the first game’s understated humor replaced with a more gonzo sensibility that can rub some players the wrong way. This player, who felt that Planetfall often seemed to be trying just a bit too hard, doesn’t exactly find Sorcerer hilarious but never really found it irritating in the way that Meretzky’s earlier game could occasionally be either. Perhaps the fact that Sorcerer wasn’t explicitly billed as a comedy left Meretzky feeling freer not to force the issue at every possible juncture.

Another Planetfall trait, that of lots of Easter eggs and red herrings, is also notable in Sorcerer, but again to a lesser extent. The useless bits, such as a functioning log flume and roller coaster inside the amusement park inexplicably located almost next door to Jeearr’s infernal lair, are mostly good fun. The sadomasochistic “potion of exquisite torture” is a standout that is just a bit risque for the prudish world of adventure gaming:

>drink indigo potion
The potion tastes like a combination of anchovies, prune juice, and garlic powder. As you finish swallowing the potion, a well-muscled troll saunters in. He whacks your head with a wooden two-by-four, grunting "You are playing Sorcerer. It was written by S. Eric Meretzky. You will have fun and enjoy yourself." He repeats this action 999 more times, then vanishes without a trace.

Another great bit comes if you use the aimfiz spell — “transport caster to someone else’s location” — to try to find Meretzky himself:

>cast aimfiz on meretzky
As you cast the spell, the moldy scroll vanishes!
You appear on a road in a far-off province called Cambridge. As you begin choking on the polluted air, a mugger stabs you in the back with a knife. A moment later, a wild-eyed motorist plows over you.

**** You have died ****

Like any old-school adventure game, Sorcerer is full of goofy and often random ways to die, from wandering into a room that’s missing a floor to getting buried under coins by an overenthusiastic slot machine. Still, Meretzky manages to skirt the letter if not quite the spirit of Andrew Plotkin’s Cruelty Scale through the gaspar spell: “provide for your own resurrection.” Gaspar returns you upon your death alive and well to the place where you last cast it, a handy substitute for the technological rather than arcane solution of restoring a saved game. If nothing else, its presence proves that Infocom was thinking about the arbitrary cruelty of most adventure games and wondering if a friendlier approach might be possible. (Space limitations would, however, always limit how far they could travel down this path. It would always be easier to simply kill the player than try to implement the full consequences of a bad — or simply unplanned for — decision.) Another sign of evolving thought on design comes in the form of the berzio potion (“obviate need for food or drink”), which slyly lets you bid adieu to the hunger and thirst timers of Enchanter and Planetfall. A year later, Spellbreaker would not even bother you with the whole tedious concept at all.

As the presence of amusement parks and casinos next to abducted enchanters and demons would imply, Sorcerer doesn’t concern itself at all with the fictional consistency that marked Planetfall or even, for that matter, Enchanter. Plot also takes a back seat for most of the game. You simply explore and solve puzzles until you suddenly bump into Jeearr and remember why you’re here. Likewise, some of the writing is a bit perfunctory if we insist on viewing Sorcerer as a literary experience. That, however, is not its real strength.

I find Meretzky slightly overrated as a writer but considerably underrated as a master of interlocking puzzle design. Sorcerer is full of clever puzzles, one of which, a relatively small part of the brilliant time-travel sequence in the coal mine, represents the last little bit of content which Infocom salvaged from the remaining scraps of the original MIT Zork. Yet it isn’t even one of the most memorable puzzles in Sorcerer; those are all Meretzky originals. In addition to that superb time-travel puzzle, there’s a fascinating thing that seems to be a maze but isn’t — quite. Both time-travel puzzles and pseudo-mazes were already burgeoning traditions at Infocom; both would remain obsessions of the Imps for years to come. Meretzky does both traditions proud here. I won’t say too much more about Sorcerer’s puzzles simply because you really should enjoy them for yourself if you haven’t already. They’re always entertaining, clever, and (sudden deaths and one tricky sequence involving a timed mail delivery early in the game aside) fair, and don’t deserve to be spoiled by the likes of me.

Sorcerer shipped in March of 1984 in a box that was fairly plebeian for this era of Infocom. The crown jewel was contained inside the box this time, in the form of the infotater, an elaborately illustrated code wheel that was both one of Infocom’s most blatant uses yet of a feely as unabashed copy protection and so cool that it didn’t really matter. The infotater is today among the rarer pieces of Infocom ephemera. It remained in production for just a few months before Infocom switched to a standardized box format that was too small to accommodate it, and were thus forced to replace it with a less interesting table of information on plain paper.

Sorcerer sold decently, although not quite as well as Enchanter or the Zork games. (The steady downward trend in sales of Infocom’s flagship line of fantasy games would soon become a matter of increasing concern — but more on that in future articles.) Lifetime sales would end up in the vicinity of 45,000, with more than two-thirds of those coming in 1984 alone. It’s not one of the more ambitious games of Infocom nor, truth be told, one of the absolute best, but it is a solid, occasionally charming, playable game. If you find yourself in the mood for an enjoyable traditional text adventure that plays relatively fair with you, you could certainly do a lot worse.

(As always, thanks to Jason Scott for sharing his materials from the Get Lamp project.)

Comments
24 Responses

- Steve Meretzky

August 26, 2013 at 8:52 pm

Well, gosh.

- Allan Holland

December 1, 2018 at 6:21 pm

Steve, the fact that Jimmy uses the adjective Meretzkian says it all, as in “Meretzkian game design sensibility.” Sorcerer is a tour-de-force.

- Lisa

August 27, 2013 at 6:57 am

You still have to sleep in Sorcerer, though, which can lead to some amusing results in certain locations or when you’re flying.

- Duncan Stevens

August 27, 2013 at 6:20 pm

I seem to recall the infotater (in the standard gray box) coming in the form of a little booklet, not as fun as the code wheel but better than plain paper.

My favorite funny response from Sorcerer:

>WEAR FLAG
Who do you think you are, Abbie Hoffman?

- Torbjörn Andersson

September 10, 2013 at 7:21 pm

My favorite funny response from Sorcerer:

>WEAR FLAG
Who do you think you are, Abbie Hoffman?

My favorite was probably this one:

>FROTZ GRUE
There’s a flash of light nearby, and you glimpse a horrible, multi-fanged creature, a look of sheer terror on its face. It charges away, gurgling in agony, tearing at its glowing fur.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to find that immensely satisfying.

- Sam Garret

August 30, 2013 at 5:06 am

I find it interesting to note that you place it as the lightest of the trilogy. De Gustibus and all that, but it was definitely my favourite. The complexity of the puzzles was sufficient that you really felt you had accomplished something when you worked it out (Spellbreaker seemed just arbitrarily cruel with puzzles divorced from a narrative arc, though it’s been a while so I may be misremembering from young teenage-hood), and if the ending happened a little abruptly, that was at least in part because I’d just been enjoying myself the whole way and didn’t want it to end.

- Dave Thompsen

August 31, 2013 at 2:59 am

Sorcerer is still one of my all time favorite Infocom games, though I came at it in a bit of a round-about way.
The summer of 1984, I was twelve years old, I’d been saving my allowance, there was a computer store down the street, and so by gum, I walked down to buy the latest Infocom game myself, with my hard-earned moolah, after seeing it advertised in the latest New Zork Times.
So one afternoon I arrived home with my brand spanking new C64 copy of ‘Seastalker.’

Which I finished — that same night. Horribly disappointed, but having been raised on the torture of the Great Underground Empire, Seastalker was no challenge at all, and I felt somewhat cheated, not having really gotten the fact that it was an introductory adventure before plopping down my 45 bucks.
So the next day, amazingly, I managed to convince the guys at the computer store to let me return Seastalker, which probably makes me one of the few who actually managed to return an Infocom title.
To be fair, I didn’t get a refund. I got Sorcerer, the previously released title, instead.
This game I did not finish in one night. Probably took a couple of months.
I love it for so many reasons. First one I beat, myself. First game (and last, until many years later and the invention of eBay) that I had in the folio packaging, which I still have today, though the infotater’s a teeny bit worse for the wear. And the puzzles are brilliant — the completely fair and original maze, the sneaky old gnome, the potions – I loved them all. And the time travel puzzle is still, in my opinion, one of the most well-crafted examples ever seen in interactive fiction.

Thanks, Steve. Hitchhiker’s may have made me pull out more hair, A Mind Forever Voyaging made me think more, but Sorcerer? It set the hook and made me a fan for life.

- Lisa

September 1, 2013 at 12:12 am

You solved Sorcerer by yourself at age 12? …wow. Props. I have never, never solved an Infocom game without help, although I think I did better than average on toughies like Hitchhiker’s Guide because I was familiar with the source material – though OTOH when I first tried Zork I, I was 6 years old and stymied by vocabulary problems like not understanding “ajar” (re: the window on the house). Still though. I was hopeless attempting these games even in my 20s.

(In fact I’m not sure there’s any IF or even graphic adventure game that I have solved without help, outside of the very simple games intended as parodies; despite my love of the genre I am, it seems, just really really bad at puzzle-solving.)

- Dave Thompsen

September 1, 2013 at 1:32 am

To be fair, I’d started on the Scott Adams adventures on the VIC-20 when I was around 9 or 10, the the three Zorks for the Commodore a bit later, so I had a bit of practice.

Still, it took me a long time for Sorcerer. Spellbreaker, on the other hand — yeah, I needed a bit of a nudge on the 12 cube monstrosity, of which I expect Jimmy to get to in a couple of years.

- John G.

November 21, 2013 at 9:04 am

Great articles, but Steve M. overrated as a writer? Come on, Steve Meretzky’s Rockvil is like Fernando Pessoa’s Lisbon.

- DZ-Jay

February 21, 2017 at 10:24 am

Hi there,

Another great article and another brilliant description of an Infocom title.

There’s just one thing I’ve noticed in a few articles you’ve written already. The word “plebian” is a very common misspelling of “plebeian.” I know that the Interwebz are trying to normalize mistakes as just “evolving language”; but sometimes it’s just intellectual laziness. ;)

-dZ.

- Jimmy Maher

February 21, 2017 at 10:59 am

Thanks!

- Steve

April 9, 2017 at 6:32 pm

I wonder how much better the Enchanter games would have sold if they’d named them something along the lines of “Zork: Enchanter.” Sorcerer actually feels more like the original Zork than any of the games that followed, what with the sparse descriptions, giant underground portions with no thematic connectivity, and a “static” feel that makes the world feel cold and lifeless (the many “living” beings you come across are virtually indistinguishable from vending machines).

You are so dead on about the endgame. Neither Belboz nor Jeearr are mentioned from the moment you leave the Guild Hall until you stumble into the final room. The weirdest part is the amulet you get which is supposed to glow the nearer you get to Belboz (and does, if you happen to remember to examine it); it never factors into the game at all. [Though in retrospect, I wonder if it can help you decide which door to open when you near the end.]

The absolute worst part of the game is the sleep timer. It’s pointless. At least in Enchanter, the dreams gave you hints. Sleep serves no purpose in this game; you can pretty much type “SLEEP” at any time with no penalty (though I guess we should be thankful for this) and no other effect at all. The most ludicrous part is how short the timer is. In Planetfall, at least, the game acknowledges that different actions take a different amount of time. In Sorcerer (and Enchanted, for that matter), where every action is one turn, it feels like you are being forced to sleep every 5 minutes.

Also, they just couldn’t resist with their food & drink timers: after a certain amount of turns, the potion runs out! They sure loved their arbitrary and tedious play-time limits…

- Joe

August 20, 2017 at 2:27 am

Years late, but I wanted to comment that you have not quite given Steve Meretzky enough credit. Sorcerer had to accomplish a task so vital that we don’t even think about it now: integrating the Enchanter and Zork series and mythologies.

Enchanter, as it was originally released, was not really set in the Zork universe. Sure, it was called Zork IV and had the adventurer in it as well as the death scene from Zork III, but it wasn’t “really” in the Zork universe. There were no grues, no mention of the Great Underground Empire. It was a new beginning in a new universe; bringing the adventurer in was just a way to say goodbye. (This, btw, is consistent with the original design notes. I suspect this was watered down a bit just before launch as the Zork books tied the series together explicitly.)

Steve had the challenge of integrating the Zork and Enchanter worlds, knitting together a consistent picture that retroactively made the games more connected. I think without his great love of Zork which shined through in every screen of this game, the rest of the series would have turned out quite differently. (Enchanter was retroactively integrated into Zork with the grey box re-release.)

- Mike Taylor

September 19, 2017 at 11:58 am

Here are my own, rather less positive, thoughs on Sorcerer. I rate it a disappointing sequel, most importantly because the arbitrariness of the map prevents the story from feeling serious.

- Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2017 at 12:18 pm

I don’t think our takes are that much different. I do find Sorcerer to be considerably weaker than Enchanter, and largely for the reasons you point to. Meretzky’s trademark gonzo humor has always been a little hit-and-miss for me, the writing isn’t always all that strong by any standard, and the game feels more like interesting bits sandwiched together than a coherent whole. (One part is actually a refugee from the old mainframe Zork, the last piece of same to be re-purposed by Infocom.) But I still find it well worth playing for some very good puzzles — I often prefer Meretzky’s puzzles to his humor — and to set up the final game in the trilogy, which is one of Infocom’s finest hours in my opinion.

- Lisa H.

September 19, 2017 at 8:28 pm

Which area is from mainframe Zork?

- Jimmy Maher

September 20, 2017 at 6:58 am

I admit I’m a little hazy on the exact details myself right now, but according to the third part of Tim Anderson’s “History of Zork” in the summer 1985 New Zork Times, the re-purposed puzzles were “the long slide and sending for the brochure.”

- Mike Taylor

October 3, 2017 at 2:20 pm

Specifically: IIRC, sending for the brochure was the Last Damned Point in the mainframe Zork, while in Sorcerer it’s an absolutely crucial (and time-limited) part of the early game. And the part of the Sorcerer coal-mine where you climb down a rope to reach a room off the slide is lifted from mainframe Zork — though of course in Sorcerer it’s only one part of a much bigger puzzle.

- Ben Bilgri

February 27, 2018 at 8:56 pm

“were part of an already burgeoning tradition” > “were part of an already burgeoning traditions”

- Jimmy Maher

February 28, 2018 at 3:18 pm

Thanks!

- Scott Hughes

January 21, 2021 at 12:52 pm

I recently discovered that Stu Galley lived about a 5-minute walk from my house, and that quite a few of my colleagues (I work at MIT) knew him from his work there after Infocom. That, plus COVID lockdown boredom, have inspired me to work through a bunch of the Infocom games I loved as a kid. One thing led to another, and I ended up finding this incredible collection of writings.

In reading these things while playing the old classics, I was very entertained by the fact that the spell for seeing the future in Sorcerer is called “vezza.” Given the role that Al Vezza played in the company and the “esteem” (ahem…) with which Meretzky held him, I’m a little surprised that the spell basically plays it straight.

- Ben

April 11, 2021 at 7:43 pm

indeliably -> indelibly
two thirds -> two-thirds

- Jimmy Maher

April 12, 2021 at 6:52 am

Thanks!

Seastalker
September 3, 2013

When a starry-eyed youngster heads off to Hollywood to chase her dreams, one of two fates awaits her: she might become one of the small minority that makes it and becomes a star, or she might end up lumped in with the vast majority that struggle and wait tables (seemingly every waiter in Los Angeles is an aspiring actor) for years to no avail. It’s either “Hooray for Hollywood” or “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” writ large. That’s the conventional wisdom anyway. But there’s actually a third possibility: the life of the working character actor, who picks up work where she can find it in the form of whatever small roles are available that don’t need a star to fill them. Just as every kid who picks up a guitar dreams of playing to stadiums full of screaming fans (and don’t let any indie-rock snob tell you different), it’s probably safe to say that no actor sets out to be such an anonymous cog in the Hollywood system. Yet it’s not a bad way to earn a living in the craft you love if stardom eludes you. I’ve long been fascinated by these folks whose names usually appear in the credits only as the audience is filing out of the theater, these working professionals who earn a solid living under the radar of the Dream Factory by learning their lines, showing up on time, and doing whatever’s asked of them and doing it well. This other side of the acting life is the subject of The Dangerous Animals Club, written by one of these bit players, Stephen Tobolowsky. It makes for a great read.

Other forms of media have their own equivalents to Tobolowsky. The publishing industry, for example, has always had people like Jim Lawrence.

Born in 1918, Lawrence began his writing career in 1941 when he was hired by the Jam Handy Organization as a scriptwriter for military training films. From then until the end of his life in 1994 he wrote for seemingly anyone who would pay him. Lawrence himself would be the last person to claim to be a great writer, but he always churned out copy that was, within the scope of the genres within which he worked, solidly crafted and eminently professional. When the project allowed, he even showed a considerable flair for imagination.

Lawrence wrote a staggering variety of stuff over his more than five decades as a working writer, but his specialty and greatest love was always fast-paced action-adventure stories for the young. In that genre, he wrote for old-time radio dramas like The Green Hornet; wrote Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries; wrote a James Bond comic strip for the newspapers; wrote a variety of Marvel comics. His oeuvre includes more than 60 novels alone, virtually none of which bore his own name anywhere in its pages. His most bizarre and disreputable assignment was a series of books about Peter Lance, an alien from the planet Tharb who has come to Earth to study this curious human phenomenon of sex — which he does enthusiastically and at considerable length, thanks to his superhuman stamina and a staggering variety of nubile young women eager to assist him in his research. But the place where Lawrence left his most obvious mark was a series of books about a young scientist/inventor/adventurer named Tom Swift, Jr.

The original Tom Swift was created by publishing pioneer Edward Stratemeyer, founder in the very early twentieth century of the so-called Stratemeyer Syndicate and its accompanying model of children’s book publication — a model that still persists to this day, and one whose echoes we can see in other media from superhero comics to Scooby Doo cartoons. His influence on publishing for adults and young adults was also profound; all those shelves full of Star Trek and Star Wars novels as well as Harlequin romances are, for better or for worse, thoroughly in the tradition of Edward Stratemeyer. His principal innovation was to deemphasize — indeed, to effectively do away with — the importance of the author in favor of the franchise. He published no standalone books, only series based around the recurring adventures of one or more juvenile heroes. All books in a series were allegedly written by the same author, whose name was carefully chosen by Stratemeyer to suit the tone of the series. In actuality, the books were written by teams of publishing B-listers like Jim Lawrence, who must at first usually work from plot outlines provided by Stratemeyer himself. Later, once they had proven themselves a bit, they were often trusted to create their own original stories, as long as they kept well within a detailed set of rules for what the books should and should not include. The best remembered series from Stratemeyer’s heyday today are The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, but many others sold in huge quantities during the first half of the twentieth century.

Among them were the original Tom Swift stories, which reached 40 books and sold over 30 million copies. Swift was the aspirational product of his era, a time when people like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Henry Ford were amongst the most admired in the country. Thus Swift was a teenage genius inventor who solved crimes and stymied his jealous rivals repeatedly using his various gadgets and vehicles. For all their pulpiness, the books included a surprising amount of real science and engineering. Amongst the technologies predicted in their pages were television, fax machines, and handheld movie cameras. Just as many flip-open mobile phones bear a suspicious resemblance to the old communicators from Star Trek, Tom Swift also wound up inspiring some technologies instead of just predicting them. Most famously, tasers were inspired by a Tom Swift story; the name is actually a loose acronym for “Tom Swift’s Electric Rifle.”

The series petered to a close in 1941, by which time Swift had grown up and gotten married. The resulting drop-off in popularity prompted a couple of new rules for the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s other series: heroes should not age and should be kept free of romantic entanglements. The Tom Swift, Jr. stories, which began in 1954, were an attempt to right that mistake and turn back the clock by moving the focus to Tom Swift’s son, the spitting image of his father as a boy. The new series ran for 33 books between 1954 and 1971. The inventions got a bit more outlandish, reflecting the era’s obsession with rocketry and space exploration; the second series’s record of prediction is nowhere near as good as that of the first. The new series also never quite matched the first’s popularity or cultural ubiquity during its heyday. Still, it had its famous fans; Steve Wozniak in particular has mentioned the Tom Swift, Jr. books as inspiring him to become an inventor and engineer. Tom Swift Jr. was allegedly written by one Victor Appleton II, presumed son of the Victor Appleton who wrote the first series. However, most of them were actually written by Jim Lawrence.

Lawrence had long since moved on to other series when one day during his morning coffee he read the first significant article about Infocom to appear in the mainstream media: Edward Rothstein’s piece on Deadline and other “participatory novels” which appeared in the New York Times Book Review of May 8, 1983. Although he had never written for the series, he had followed the birth of the Choose Your Own Adventure line of children’s fiction with more than professional curiosity. But now what Infocom was apparently doing just sounded so much better. Lawrence, whose previous career proved if nothing else that he’d try just about anything once, was intrigued by the possibilities despite knowing nothing of computers or computer games. He called Infocom’s offices and arranged to drive up to Cambridge for a visit from his home in New Jersey.

The 65-year-old Lawrence looked in Stu Galley’s words “like Santa Claus,” and had the same enthusiastic twinkle in his eye when he talked about storytelling. This wise old veteran was certainly a different sort of presence in an office filled with ambitious go-getters in their twenties and early thirties, many of whom had grown up reading the various series to which he had contributed. Infocom, who counted it as a corporate goal to get “real” writers involved with their stories (thus the presence of Mike Berlyn, already working on his second game at the time), were thrilled to sign him to a contract.

Infocom was also, of course, eager to branch out into new genres, and here Lawrence’s particular expertise again seemed perfect. They concocted the idea of a new line of “junior” adventures aimed at a new generation of the same children’s readership that had once devoured the Tom Swift books — and who were currently being introduced to the idea of ludic narrative through the Choose Your Own Adventure books and the many other titles being churned out by the booming gamebook industry. If kids thought Choose Your Own Adventure was cool, wait until they saw an Infocom game! The new line could presumably also serve as a gentle introduction to Infocom for adults, an alternative to being thrown in at the deep end via the likes of Zork. Infocom made their first attempt ever to license an existing property, approaching the Stratemeyer Syndicate about licensing Tom Swift or his son for a series of interactive books for a new generation. The Syndicate was happy to do so — for far more money than Infocom was willing or able to pay.

Thus the decision was made to make the game that would become known as Seastalker a Tom Swift adventure in everything but name. In place of Tom, it asks you the player for your first and last name at the beginning. The full name which then appears on the screen becomes (for example) Seastalker: Jimmy Maher and the Ultramarine Bioceptor, a deliberate echo of the old Tom Swift books, which were invariably named Tom Swift and His (Flying Lab, Jetmarine, Rocket Ship, etc.) — only with you inserted, Choose Your Own Adventure-style, as the hero. The game closely echoes Tom Swift in many other ways beyond the bare fact of your being a genius boy inventor. Tom Swift’s hometown of Shopton, for example, becomes Frobton (one of very few overt references to Zorkian lore), and sidekick Bud is replaced with a doppelganger named Tip.

For all of his flair for storytelling, there was no way that the thoroughly un-technical Lawrence was going to be able to learn to program in ZIL. Infocom thus decided to assign him Stu Galley as a partner. Lawrence would craft the story and write most of the text, while Galley would program it and find ways to make it work as an interactive experience. It seemed a perfect assignment for Galley, one of the best pure programmers in a company full of brilliant technical minds but one who tended to have a bit of trouble coming up with original story ideas. (His first game The Witness, you may remember, had been created from an outline provided him by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling.) This use of development pairs was somewhat uncharted territory for Infocom as Seastalker was begun, but a model they would find themselves using for no fewer than three of the five games they would release in 1984.

Work on Seastalker commenced with a lengthy meeting between Lawrence and Galley at Infocom’s offices, during which they hashed out the basic plot: a genetically engineered sea monster is attacking your friends at the Aquadome undersea research station. Only you and sidekick Tip can save them, using the Scimitar, the experimental two-man research submarine you’ve just designed and built. Lawrence then went back home to New Jersey, and development progressed largely through paper mail and telephone calls, with just a few more in-person meetings to mark milestones. Working this way inevitably slowed the process — at more than nine months, Seastalker would have the longest active gestation of any Infocom game to date — but Galley generally found the project to be, like his gently unflappable collaborator, a delight.

There was a time when we got to the last act of the story, where you, the brilliant young inventor, know what the threat is, know what you have to work with (your own inventions and whatever else is available), know the other characters. How do we devise a game strategy that’s interesting but not too difficult to get you to the end? Jim and I worked on this a whole day in Cambridge. I told him, “I feel like we have a big job in front of us because we’ve set up all this elaborate storyline without really knowing how it’s going to end.” Jim said, “Don’t worry, Stu, I’ve gotten heroes out of much tougher situations than this.”

Unlike many established traditional authors who tried to make the leap to interactivity, Lawrence didn’t struggle hugely with his loss of control over every aspect of plotting and timing. Galley theorizes that he may have been aided by his experience writing for comic strips and comic books, for which he had to start putting stories down on paper long before he could foresee what their endings might be or even which writers for hire might end up writing them.

As one might expect given its pedigree, Seastalker absolutely nails the tone of its inspiration. Its gee-whiz world is full of adventure and excitement, one where no problem cannot be solved with a bit of science and a dollop of all-American bravery and ingenuity. It’s never afraid of going over the top; the package includes a letter from the President congratulating you on your latest invention. As fiction, Seastalker makes for a nice, nostalgic place to return to for some of us dealing with the vagaries of adult life. Yet as a system it’s also amongst the most complex things Infocom had yet attempted. Playing Seastalker really does feel, for the first time in an Infocom game and arguably in an adventure game, like taking the leading role in an adventure novel. Events tumble down around you one after another as the plot comes thick and fast, leaving you constantly scrambling to keep up, to save these people who make it clear they’re depending on you. Seastalker is all about its plot that just keeps pushing you along like a bulldozer. There’s little here that feels like a traditional adventure-game puzzle, little time for such cerebral exercises. Even that staple of adventure gaming, mapping, goes out the window thanks to the blueprints of the Scimitar and the maps of both undersea complexes you’ll be visiting included in the package, a first for Infocom. While Deadline and The Witness have a dynamism of their own, their characters go about their business oddly oblivious to you; your job is essentially to observe their behavior, to come to an understanding of their patterns, and then to force yourself into the plot to redirect it at crucial junctures. No forcing is required in Seastalker; you truly are the hero, the cog around which everything and everybody revolves.

The Commodore 64 version of Seastalker showing the split-screen sonar view

One of the most impressive parts of Seastalker is its implementation of the Scimitar. You have to guide it around Frobton Bay yourself, using your sonar display and a depth map included in the package. Later, the climax of the story is an underwater battle involving the Scimitar, the sea monster, and the jealous rival behind all the chaos that is a genuine tactical struggle rather than an exercise in set-piece puzzle solving. For these sequences Infocom devised the first significant extension to the Z-Machine since its inception more than four years before: the ability to split the screen on certain computers, which Seastalker uses to display a non-scrolling upper window that shows your sonar screen as a simple textual rendering. (The member of the Micro Group responsible for moving this enhancement into the interpreters was the newly hired Brian Moriarty, a name we’ll soon be hearing a lot more of.)

Seastalker’s feelies are, as you might have gathered given the wealth of maps and blueprints I’ve already described, unusually many and varied even for Infocom. There’s a clever set of “InfoCards” with hints printed in a special ink that can only be seen with the aid of an included InfoCard reader — just the sort of little gadget young Tom Swifts are likely to love. But Seastalker’s packaging is most interesting today in that it serves as a sort of test run for much of what would follow just a month or two later, when Infocom converted their entire existing line of games into a new standardized packaging format, the classic and beloved “grey box.” For the first time we see in Seastalker a sample transcript showing how to interact with the game, an invaluable bit of teaching by example that would be included in every grey box to come. And the front of the box calls the game “Junior Interactive Fiction from Infocom.”

Infocom, despite a generally finely honed promotional instinct, had struggled for years to find a good label for what their games really were, wallowing around in unsatisfying pseudo-compounds like “InterLogic” and plebeian descriptives like “prose games.” Some of the Imps had at last begun to casually refer to their games as “interactive fiction” in interviews during the latter half of 1983, notably in a feature article in the September/October 1983 Softline which dwelt at length on Floyd’s death scene from Planetfall. Seastalker, however, marks its first deployment as part of Infocom’s official rhetoric — appropriately enough, given that Seastalker is more worthy of the label than anything that came before. Infocom wasn’t the first to use the term “interactive fiction” in a computerized context; that honor belongs to Robert Lafore, who created a set of simple branching stories to which he gave that label back in 1979. Yet it was perfect for Infocom’s games, the last piece of the rhetorical puzzle they had been assembling with the able assistance of their mates at G/R Copy for a few years now. With the arrival of the grey boxes, all of Infocom’s games would officially be interactive fiction, the name the whole field of literary games in the Infocom tradition continues to go by to this day.

Released in June of 1984, Seastalker initially sold very well: more than 30,000 units in its first six months. But sales tailed off rather quickly after that; its lifetime figure is in the vicinity of 40,000. It may very well have been a victim of Infocom marketing’s conflation of a game for kids with an introductory game for adults. Certainly Seastalker is very short. Any adult at all experienced with adventure games can easily finish it in an evening, any adult totally inexperienced at least within two. One suspects that the arrival in 1985 of Wishbringer, a much better introductory game for adults, ate into Seastalker’s sales in a big way.

But then Seastalker wasn’t really designed for adults. Children, who read more slowly and have the patience to relive something over and over (and over…) will likely get considerably more out of it, especially since there are a fair number of alternate paths to follow and even the possibility to finish without the full score; if you screw the pooch, one of your heretofore helpless friends will often stop hand-wringing long enough to jump in at the last minute and save the day for you. Still, it’s debatable how many parents would have been willing to spend $30 or $40 on the game when they could pick up a Choose Your Own Adventure book for $2.

All of which leaves Seastalker feeling like a bit of a missed opportunity in spite of its perfectly reasonable commercial performance. Stu Galley recalls that Infocom demonstrated Seastalker for a group of schoolteachers at the 1984 Summer CES show to the rapturous response that this sort of thing was “just what they needed” to get their kids reading more. One wishes that Infocom could have found some way to reduce the price and/or work aggressively with schools to get the game into more children’s hands. As it was, they dropped the idea of “Interactive Fiction Junior” and of trying to compete with the Choose Your Own Adventure juggernaut within a year, relabeling Seastalker rather incongruously as an introductory-level game for adults like the aforementioned Wishbringer. Even Lawrence and Galley’s second collaboration, Moonmist, was largely marketed as just another adult mystery game despite being at heart a Nancy Drew story in the same way that Seastalker was a Tom Swift.

If you have a child in that sweet spot of about eight to ten years in your life, you can begin to remedy that missed opportunity by giving her Seastalker and seeing what she makes of it. Like so much of Infocom’s work, it’s aged very little. For the rest of us, it’s a great piece of innocently cheesy fun that’s also quite technically and even formally impressive in its way. Infocom never made another game quite like it, which is alone more than reason enough to play it.

(As always, thanks to Jason Scott for sharing his materials from the Get Lamp project.)

Comments
43 Responses

- ZUrlocker

September 3, 2013 at 4:35 pm

Great story! I had no idea Jim Lawrence had written so much serial fiction.

- matt w

September 3, 2013 at 6:23 pm

Wow, this sounds great! And even for us grownups whose children aren’t old enough yet, lots of those flaws aren’t flaws anymore; now that it’s not $20-30 a game anymore, being able to finish in a day or two seems like a good thing.

- Gilles Duchesne

September 3, 2013 at 9:05 pm

“His ouevre”

That’s spelled “oeuvre”.

- Jimmy Maher

September 4, 2013 at 6:07 am

Thanks!

- Keith Palmer

September 5, 2013 at 1:25 am

I was just the age you suggest for “the sweet spot” when Seastalker was first released, and I was playing adventure games then (if hardly ever managing to win them)… except that I didn’t get to play the game until The Lost Treasures of Infocom 2 came out, at which point it might not have made that much of an impact on me beyond the sonar display, perhaps. Still, the “introductory” adventures Moonmist, Seastalker, and Wishbringer are the only Infocom games I have an impression of finishing without turning to hints. Your description does make me think I could well enjoy it more now; for some reason, it’s pleasant to hear one of its authors really had written the old juvenile series fiction I’d only thought it was “modelled on” (as much as that sort of thought seems to tempt people into too-quick dismissals…)

- Scott M. Bruner

September 19, 2013 at 2:45 am

I remember vividly playing Seastalker when we moved from California to Nebraska when I was…11 or 12? The house was empty as we waited for the movers to catch up and we didn’t even have a desk for the Apple //c, but it sat on my lap as I worked my way through it.

In my memory, it took about 5 days to complete, and I was pretty proud of myself – the other Infocom games, notable Suspect, always seemed a little difficult to fully grasp.

- Peter Piers

April 9, 2016 at 9:25 am

I’ve just played it… and it may be the one Infocom game I haven’t played to completion.

At one point, I couldn’t really ask NPCs about important things. Asking Tip about his idea or asking crew members about the Snark once I’m ready to go at it brings up the “Use the clue sheet if you need help” – and nothing else, no reply from the NPCs. I don’t know whether this is an issue or just copy-protection. Anyway, I’m playing it without access to the clue sheets, so…

And then there’s the confusion when you get to the Aquadome, after you’ve sorted the oxygen thing. Things keep happening, you’re being asked questions and you quickly realise that if you answer YES you move the story along and if you answer NO you don’t, so I was saying “Yes, Tip, Bly told me about the troublemakers” even though she’d done no such thing… I’m swept along, then I’m asked whether I’m ready to go on, I answer YES in a daze mostly because I’m afraid I’ll break something if I say no, then I worry about all the things I may have done to lock me out of victory later.

I suppose the clue sheets are an integral part of the experience, and meant to be used, given the target audience. Well, I had a hard time getting motivated to play this game (I’d tried it years before on a different mobile interpreter, which wasn’t as good as the one I’m using now), and after I’d identified and trapped the traitor I’d pretty much had enough…

Jimmy, what was your experience with all the prompting for the clue sheets? Did they, in your playthrough, also totally replace NPCs’ critical dialog responses?

- Jimmy Maher

April 10, 2016 at 7:13 am

As I recall, I regarded the clue sheets as just that, clue sheets, and didn’t use them either. I don’t recall any missing dialog. Maybe your game somehow went down the wrong track…

- Peter Piers

April 10, 2016 at 8:12 am

Maybe. Testing will be required. Thanks for the input.

- Peter Piers

April 10, 2016 at 8:26 am

Hmmm, the same thing happens in my Windows terp.

“”First, do you think someone tampered with it?” >y
“Does Marv suspect you’ve discovered signs of tampering?” >n
“Then I have an idea how to trap Marv and find out if he’s the traitor!”

>ask tip about idea
(If you want a clue, find Infocard #1 in your SEASTALKER package. Read hidden clue #3 and put “Marv Siegel” in the blank space.)”

…and later the same thing happened when, apparently, I should have asked the crew about the snark’s location

What’s more, the walkthrogh I was now running does say:

“Tip will
appear around this point to ask a series of questions.

Answer his questions however you like and he will say that he may have an idea
how to trap Marv if he is the traitor. “Ask about idea”, and Tip will say to
put the black box where Zoe found it.”

Weird! The version I’m playing is “Revision number 16 / Serial number 850603”, that’s the latest one, innit?

- Peter Piers

April 10, 2016 at 8:30 am

I just re-downloaded this version from an abandonware site, played back the playback file I’d recorded, and got the same result. Sheesh.

- Jimmy Maher

April 10, 2016 at 8:39 am

I think the parser is simply not understanding you, rather than trying to direct you to a specific “clue” containing vital information. I’d try “ask about” or “question tip” — the latter is the syntax given in the manual — rather than “ask tip about.” If I’m right, it’s obviously not ideal that the parser doesn’t understand “ask tip about.” In Seastalker’s defense, that construction wasn’t very common in 1984; it’s since of course become second nature to most IFers. So some of your problem may be anachronistic.

- Peter Piers

April 10, 2016 at 9:02 am

Interesting thought, although I wouldn’t have expected it to be that because the walkthrough I was now following did say “ask about”.

Anyway, it didn’t work, I’m afraid.

“>question tip
“Ask me about something in particular, First.”

>question tip about idea
(If you want a clue, find Infocard #1 in your SEASTALKER package. Read hidden clue #3 and put “Marv Siegel” in the blank space.)

>ask about idea
(If you want a clue, find Infocard #1 in your SEASTALKER package. Read hidden clue #3 and put “Marv Siegel” in the blank space.)”

I didn’t expect it to be this because, up until now, it had been handling ASK ABOUT as gracefully as though it HAD been the intended syntax all along…

- Peter Piers

April 10, 2016 at 9:20 am

Slight correction – no, the walkthrough did not tell me to “ask tip about idea”. Sometimes words just run together and get overlooked, sorry. :) But the output I provided is clear enough anyway, and does include “ask about idea”.

- Jimmy Maher

April 10, 2016 at 10:08 am

Okay, I see the same thing in my old transcript. I think the “idea” Tip has must be intended as extra information — i.e., a hint — rather than something essential. I’m sure I never used the InfoCards, and nevertheless won the game quite easily. The game could certainly have handled this more gracefully, however.

- Peter Piers

April 10, 2016 at 10:38 am

Oh, I completely ignored this and accidently found the traitor another way very easily. That’s also why I thought it was just a clue. Maybe the walkthrough conflated things a bit, too.

Ah well, at least I know it wasn’t just me. You know, for some reason this game really, really got on my nerves. I fought it more than I fought any other Infocom game. Strange, huh?

- Jimmy Maher

April 10, 2016 at 10:43 am

Probably just a mismatch of expectations. It’s very much written for children, and that can easily come off as grating and condescending to an adult. It’s not a particularly beloved Infocom game, although I think it’s a very interesting and significant one for the reasons described in the article.

- Peter Piers

April 10, 2016 at 10:42 am

I think it was the hand-handling. I hate it when games expect you to follow their lead sometimes and go off on your own othertimes. Cutthroats did that, as you know, in the bit where you can easily fail to identify the traitor. In the Aquadome I was being led so obviously, and so clearly expected to answer in a certain way, that I was in a daze most of the time.

- Joe W

January 2, 2017 at 7:44 am

I just finished Seastalker tonight for the first time. Missed it as a kid.

*Spoilers follow*

However, I think I encountered a strange bug. I know that if you take too many turns getting to the Aquadome, the monster will destroy it. By “waiting” I noticed that this happens sometime after turn 400 or so.
However, on my first attempt, I made it to the Aquadome around turn 315. I went inside, and at turn 323, the monster attacked, and destroyed the dome. Nothing I could do prevented that. When I restarted, I waited in the ocean deliberately until after turn 323, and went in the dome at turn 384, and there was no attack. I restarted again and made it to the dome on turn 100. Again, no attack. I could not figure out what was causing the attack to happen inescapably at turn 323 in that one save file, and not in any other attempt. Someone at the IF fansite indicated that it was related to the black box that supposedly caused the monster to attack the dome, but as near as I could tell, that part of the story is not variable and always happens the same way. Weird.

- Lisa H.

January 2, 2017 at 9:32 pm

I think it’s probably not a bug, but that the turn the attack will happen on is picked randomly within a certain range of turn numbers at the start of the game. Compare the earthquake in Zork III, for instance. (I haven’t decompiled code to know for sure; I’m only guessing because of the observed behavior.) I haven’t played Seastalker in quite a while so I’m not sure what you mean about “related to the black box”, but if it’s a thing that can direct you to different sets of coordinates on different playthroughs (similar to how there are different wrecks you can visit in Cutthroats) then perhaps the range of turns the attack can occur on would be different in the different storylines.

- DZ-Jay

February 21, 2017 at 11:49 am

Great write up! I don’t recall playing this game as a kid, but I will run out and play it now. It sounds fascinating. :)

One thing… I cringed when I read “if you screw the pooch.” Eek! Please try not to use such boorish slang in you otherwise perfectly eloquent prose.

-dZ.

- Joe Pranevich

December 30, 2017 at 2:32 am

I know you looked at this years ago, but I am trying to pull together a complete list of books by Jim Lawrence. Thus far, I have identified 62 books, three radio series that he did scripts for, plus five newspaper comics. You can see what I have found here: https://kniggit.net/2017/11/07/jim-lawrences-bibliography/

I do not know if you stumbled on any other books in your research, or if any of your readers may know more. For such an (at times) amazing writer, it seems a shame that we do not have a complete list of his works. (I do not know his personal life and I hope I do not discover that he’s a serial racist or something while researching him. That would be disappointing.)

I have only read one Tom Swift but I recognized the style immediately when playing Seastalker. It seems so close that I’m half-surprised that Infocom didn’t get sued over the similarities.

- Jimmy Maher

December 30, 2017 at 8:58 am

Have you been in contact with his son? I’m not even sure of his name off the top of my head, but he’s apparently very interested in preserving his father’s legacy. He speaks at conferences about his work, etc. Jason Scott has mentioned that he considered interviewing him for the Get Lamp documentary, but didn’t have time in the end.

- Joe Pranevich

December 30, 2017 at 11:19 pm

I have found interviews with his son, but no contact information. I will reach out to Jason to see if he has it.

- Joe Pranevich

March 19, 2018 at 5:39 am

Just to close on this thread, Jason did not have that contact information and the few other threads that I pulled on this have gone nowhere. I hope I’ll be able to find him before I research Moonmist, but I have a few months at least for that.

- Mike Taylor

March 8, 2018 at 4:29 pm

Even that staple of adventure gaming, mapping, goes out the window thanks to the blueprints of the Scimitar and the maps of both undersea complexes you’ll be visiting included in the package, a first for Infocom.

What about Suspended?

- Jimmy Maher

March 9, 2018 at 8:37 am

It’s a debatable point, but I tend to see the Suspended “map” as a qualitatively different sort of thing. Oddly given that it appeared so early in the chronology, Suspended was one of Infocom’s most formally experimental games, really more of a strategy game implemented in text than a text adventure. The map included in the original packaging was actually a game board with tokens for keeping track of the locations of the robots, a way of overcoming the limitation of the text-only presentation.

- Wolfeye M.

September 2, 2019 at 12:26 am

Wow, another bit from my childhood pops up in your blog. My dad had a bunch of Tom Swift Jr. books he got while he was growing up, which he then gave to me. I still have them, in a box somewhere. They’re some of the first books I ever read, and were some of my favorites. I didn’t know they were ghost written. I owe Jim Lawrence for many hours of enjoyable reading. I’ll have to check out the game he wrote.

- Allan Holland

March 11, 2020 at 2:28 am

I’m a huge fan of Steve’s Infocom work. And the 101 series. To be called “the most creative person he’s ever met” by Mike Dornbrook is the highest praise, the kind of character trait of which I can only dream about possessing. Mike, as founder of the Z.U.G., has probably met his fair share of creative people.

- Jonathan O

December 29, 2020 at 10:30 am

Late typo report:

“as well as Harelquin romances” -> “as well as Harlequin romances”

- Jimmy Maher

December 29, 2020 at 4:22 pm

Thanks!

- Ben

April 17, 2021 at 9:24 pm

Chose Your Own Adventure -> Choose Your Own Adventure

closely echos -> closely echoes

finds ways -> find ways

(You may have missed https://www.filfre.net/2013/08/from-automated-simulations-to-epyx/#comment-580679 )

- Jimmy Maher

April 18, 2021 at 10:35 am

Thanks! (Also for the nudge on your previous corrections; got them too now.)

- Steve Pitts

June 2, 2021 at 4:14 pm

“Its is a gee-whiz world” -> “It is a…” or “It’s a…”

- Jimmy Maher

June 4, 2021 at 4:17 pm

Thanks, but as intended actually. ;)

- Steve Pitts

June 5, 2021 at 6:18 pm

OK. I’ve re-read it until the sentence makes sense but I certainly didn’t read it that way to start with. Sorry to bother you :)

- Lisa H.

June 7, 2021 at 6:38 pm

For what it’s worth, I found it kind of confusing too – sort of a “garden path” sentence where the end isn’t what you expected from the beginning and you have to go back and re-read it. I might have phrased it as “Its world is a gee-whiz one full of adventure…”

- Jimmy Maher

June 8, 2021 at 2:28 pm

Fair enough. Thanks!

- Peter Olausson

June 30, 2021 at 10:13 am

Comment (correction?) long overdue: Regarding the title of the book, “Thomas A. Swift and his Electric Rifle”, that eventually turned into TASER. Are you sure about this? I find the “Thomas A.”-form frequently mentioned, but no book with any other title than just “Tom Swift and …” – I think Jack Cover, who invented and named the taser, took the abbreviation TSER and added an “a” on his own.

- Jimmy Maher

July 1, 2021 at 11:07 am

I’m not sure I completely understand your objection. But, if it isn’t something more granular you’re getting at, there are a couple of UK newspaper articles which describe this etymology at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/jack-cover-inventor-taser-stun-gun-1635270.html and https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/30/history-of-word-taser-comes-from-century-old-racist-science-fiction-novel.

- Peter Olausson

July 1, 2021 at 6:52 pm

I agree completely with the etymology. What I refer to is “Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle.” The title of the book is “Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle.” The “Thomas A.”-phrase seems to be made up.

Very, very tiny nitpicking in an excellent article. I went so far as to read some of the book in question. Great writing it ain’t! But is certainly has a certain something.

- Jimmy Maher

July 1, 2021 at 8:42 pm

Ah, okay. I suppose if he *said* it was an acronym for “Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle,” then it was, whether the phrase in question is actually drawn from the book or not. But I made an edit to eliminate any confusion. Thanks!

- whomever

July 2, 2021 at 1:18 pm

I mean…TASAR is a lot more pronounceable then TSAR. May even be a backronym!

Masters of the Game
October 23, 2013

Jon Palace helping to feed the Christmas demand for Zork II, 1984

I started my article on Infocom’s 1983 with an unsung hero, Dan Horn of the Micro Group. Let’s continue that tradition now that we’ve come to 1984 with another: Jon Palace.

As 1984 dawned, Palace was working as a textbook editor for McGraw-Hill Higher Education in New York City. Wanting to live pretty much anywhere else, he scoured the want ads for jobs as far away as Madison, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois. Then he stumbled across an advertisement in the Boston Globe Magazine from a company he had never heard of: Infocom. Palace had no real idea what Infocom did or what an adventure game was or what exactly they might expect him to do, but he duly applied and was granted an interview. He drove up to Boston one snowy day to sit down with Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn. He knew this was a different sort of operation than the staid, corporate McGraw-Hill when Blank asked him how old he was. “You can’t ask me that in an interview!” Palace replied, shocked, “… but I’m 27.” Blank seemed to like that answer; that was about the average age at Infocom, he noted.

Technology companies in those days still had a bit of a reputation. Palace remembered (almost certainly hyperbolic) accounts he’d read of life at Apple in the early days, where the board of directors would supposedly all share a joint or two before meetings. Thus when Stu Galley started to roll a cigarette in front of him that first day he thought the worst — but no, it was just tobacco. Palace went from the interview to the home of a friend of his in Brooklyn who had a computer and some of Infocom’s games to try to figure out what this company who might be about to hire him was actually all about.

If Palace didn’t quite know what Infocom wanted from him, Infocom didn’t really know either. They felt they needed someone who could serve as a sort of professional liaison for each game, to stand at the hub of the wheel and coordinate among the Imps that wrote the games, the Micro Group that deployed them onto the target platforms, G/R Copy and internal marketing who packaged and advertised them, and the logistics folks who scheduled them for release and got them to the customers. What they were really looking for was a producer, but they didn’t know that; in these early days of the games industry that role had yet to be defined. Then Mike Berlyn piped up to say that the sorts of things they were talking about sort of seemed like the stuff his editor used to do for him back when he was writing novels instead of games. And so Infocom was suddenly advertising for what had to be the strangest “editor” job that was ever offered. And Palace, who didn’t even own a computer, just stumbled into it. Infocom hired him to start that April.

Realizing he had lots of catching up to do if he even wanted to understand most of the conversations taking place around him, Palace took to returning to the office in the evening with his wife and some Chinese food to catch up on the Infocom back catalog. Soon he bought a used Apple IIe from Mike Berlyn so they could play at home. When his parents had trouble grasping just what it was he was now doing for a living, he pulled out The Witness to show them, Infocom-style — interactively. They then spent a fun evening trying to figure out who killed Freeman Linder.

Like Stu Galley, who also initially had no big interest in this whole adventure-game thing, Palace became one of the most idealistic about the potential and the worth of the work Infocom was doing. That idealism, combined with his background in writing and publishing, proved to be invaluable. One might even say that Palace became the final piece of the Infocom puzzle. He filled his producer’s role admirably, but, perhaps even more importantly, he pushed everyone to take their craft that much more seriously. Palace served as a buffer between those ever-opposed forces of Creative and Business, making sure no game was released before its time. Indeed, he gently prodded the Imps to spend that little bit of extra time and effort making their worlds believable, making sure their stories made sense, and, most of all, polishing their prose. Steve Meretzky gave Palace one of his few public acknowledgements in the Leather Goddesses of Phobos hint book, using words which speak not just to the roles he played but to the way he was valued — even beloved — by the Imps for the way he went about it: “Thanks to Jon Palace for a host of things, but especially for his help in ‘sensualizing’ the text, and for being a front-line defense against scheming marketeers.” When Jason Scott began planning interviews for his Get Lamp film almost twenty years after Infocom’s demise, the former Imps were almost unanimous in naming Palace as the greatest of all the unknown contributors to Infocom’s success. In his own low-key way he was as important to all of the great work that came out of the company between 1984 and 1988 as anyone whose name actually appeared on the boxes. He became a key reason that the Imps refused to abandon their sense of craft and artistic integrity even as the circumstances around them, as I shall soon have to recount in all too much detail, made that more and more difficult.

But we don’t have to talk about that just yet. We’re just in 1984, after all, a very successful sales year for Infocom — in fact, the biggest such they would ever enjoy, the very apex of the bell curve that is their commercial history. It was also a year of consolidation and systemization; it was the year of the gray box.

Infocom’s trademark lavish packaging had been something of a sore point with retailers for some time now. Everyone loved creations like the Starcross saucer and the Suspended mask when the games were new; many owners hung the former from the ceiling all around their stores. The problem came after the initial hype had died down, when the games became catalog items to be stocked in quantities of just one or two and shelved toward the back of the store. Here the Starcross saucer tended to roll onto the floor, if it would fit on the rack at all, while the Suspended mask ran the risk of getting squashed flat between the other games on the rack. Moreover, such oddball injection-molded packages were expensive to make, particularly after they became catalog items and the quantities being made in each batch dropped dramatically. Infocom had thus already begun to scale things back; after Suspended all of the games were released in relatively more modest, conventional boxes. But even those were all essentially one-offs. By 1984 Infocom’s games ranged from the minimalist blister packs of the Zork games to the absurd flamboyance of Starcross and Suspended, with everything else somewhere in between. Any given game may have been beautifully packaged, but together on a shelf they kind of looked like a jumbled mess. You’d be hard pressed to realize they were all products of the same company. And, as dealers never ceased to tell them, this jumble was wasting space on the shelves that could be given over to stocking more Infocom games. Something needed to be done.

Infocom therefore did something they rarely did (and arguably could have done more often): they looked at what the competition was doing. The model for packaging in the industry at this time was the folio-style package used by Electronic Arts. It was a consistent look that immediately marked a game as a product of EA. Being deliberately evocative of a record sleeve, it also conjured exactly the image that EA, that would-be purveyor of hip, sophisticated entertainment crafted by a new generation of “electronic artists,” wanted to present to the world. Retailers absolutely loved it: it was slim and compact but still attractive, as easy to shelve onto racks spine-outward by the dozen as it was to open up, unfold, and stick in a display window. Infocom, driven particularly by head of marketing Mike Dornbrook, decided they needed something like that. What they came up with in association with the ever-essential G/R Copy was a veritable masterstroke.

The box is, not coincidentally, of about the dimensions and thickness of a typical hardcover novel. With the era of bookware in full bloom and Infocom’s games now showing up on more and more bookstore racks thanks to a distribution deal with Addison Wesley, the packaging and all of its associated rhetoric emphasizes the game’s literary qualities. Said emphasis extends right down to the contents of the disk; you type, for instance, “LOAD ‘STORY’,8” to start a game on the Commodore 64. The cover, meanwhile, prominently displays Infocom’s official new name for their works: not “adventure game,” not “text adventure,” but “interactive fiction.” It also shows where the game fits in a matrix of genres (consisting in the beginning of “Fantasy,” “Science Fiction,” “Tales of Adventure,” and “Mystery”) and difficulties (“Interactive Fiction Junior,” “Standard,” “Advanced,” and “Expert”).

The cover of the box flips open like a book for easy in-store browsing; it isn’t shrink-wrapped. Inside the left cover is a set of testimonials from happy customers. Most are the sort of thing you would expect, but, Infocom being Infocom, one or two bizarre remarks or complete non sequiturs were usually included in every game.

A bound-in booklet — called in-house the “browsie” because it was aimed as much at potential customers browsing in the store as at those same customers after they had brought the game home — begins with something to set the fictional stage: an issue of National Detective Gazette, a Stellar Patrol brochure, “The Great Underground Empire: A History.” The second half of the browsie is given over to a conventional instruction manual that incorporates everything Infocom had learned over the previous several years about teaching people how to play their games as quickly and painlessly as possible. The “Sample Transcript and Map,” an innovation which first appeared in Seastalker, the final pre-gray-box release, is a particular stroke of genius. It shows by example how to play and how to make a map via a fictional game made up just for the occasion by Infocom. Each title got its own sample transcript which takes place in a similar environment to the one found on the disk and demonstrates that title’s general style of play.

The new scheme was welcome not least in that it let Infocom separate each game’s fictional context from technical instructions on how to work it. Previously they had blended everything together, a conceit that must have seemed clever when they first did it for Deadline but that had grown very strained by 1984. (The original version of The Witness is a typical example. Its National Detective Gazette includes an article titled “Investigative Machines of the Future!” explaining this “Computer” that in the “early part of the next millennium” will be “the most important tool of the detective’s trade.”)

After the browsie comes the portion of the package that is sealed, containing the various physical feelies as well the game disk itself, all peeking enticingly through a clear plastic cover for the benefit of in-store browsers.

And finally there’s the back side of the box, which has the expected flavor text for the game as well as a shot of all the feelies on display. Then comes some standard text, a sort of mission statement for Infocom interactive fiction (“It’s like waking up inside a story!”; “You’re more than a passive reader!”), along with an explanation of the difficulty levels.

Converting the entire catalog to the new format was a huge task which consumed lots of resources during the first half of 1984. While much of the material that would go into the gray boxes already existed, it had to undergo considerable reworking in virtually every case to fit into the new format. Just untangling the fictional context from the technical instructions was a time-consuming, delicate task. And much had to be written from scratch, such as a suitably clever sample transcript for every single game. The three Zork games, which had previously shipped in blister packs containing only a disk and a slim manual telling how to play, demanded the most effort of all; a browsie and set of feelies that would be evocative enough to stand alongside those in the other games had to be designed for each from scratch.

Brilliant as the new packaging was, there was some inevitable sadness at Infocom over the loss of the likes of the Starcross saucer and the Suspended mask and a certain individual personality for each title that the old “anything goes” approach to packaging had represented. Certainly compromises — sometimes painful ones — had to be made. Steve Meretzky was particularly broken up about the loss of the infotater from the Sorcerer package; it was just too big to fit into the gray-box feelie tray, and so had to be replaced with a simple booklet.

The matrix of genres and difficulties was as useful to Infocom internally as it was to their customers. A diagram showing its current state — i.e., what current and upcoming games slotted in where — could generally be found on a whiteboard in the marketing department. This allowed them, as Jon Palace puts it, to “figure out where the holes were” in the current product line and not “put too many in one place.” In deciding what games to approve for development, big emphasis would be given to keeping the matrix balanced, making sure there were games for all fictional interests and all experience levels. After the beginning of the gray-box era you wouldn’t see unbalanced stretches like the one in late 1982 and early 1983 when three of five titles were science fiction — or for that matter Seastalker and Cutthroats, two titles released back to back just as the matrix was coming into force that were both nautical “Tales of Adventure” set in contemporary times.

The genres on the matrix were always much more defensible than the difficulty levels, which often seemed like little more than wishful thinking driven by the slot marketing would like for any given game to occupy. Zork I, while not quite so objectionable as Zork II, was a huge game with some very questionable puzzles that never would have made it into a later Infocom game. Just mapping its huge geography full of willfully inconsistent room connections could require hours of patient, dogged work with graph paper, pencil, and eraser. Yet Zork I also remained Infocom’s biggest seller by a country mile, selling more copies every year it remained on the market; it sold more than 150,000 copies in 1984 alone, an absolutely huge figure for the era and enough to account for more then 20% of Infocom’s total sales for the year. Many computer dealers still seemed to regard Zork I as an essential accessory to be taken home by the customer along with printer paper and some blank disks every time they sold a new computer system. Infocom simply couldn’t drive such customers away with an “Advanced” or “Expert” label on this evergreen. So, Zork I became a “Standard”-level game. Similar concerns would soon lead to Infocom’s adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the cruelest game they had released since the days of Zork, Deadline, and Suspended but also one with a potential mass appeal like nothing they had done before, also being given the “Standard” label.

Stranger, because less explicable, were the difficulty levels bestowed on other games. Starcross, by no means a trivial challenge but one full of logical puzzles in a relatively consistent environment, was nevertheless an “Expert” game, while Infidel, the most straightforward game Infocom had yet produced outside of the deliberately easy Seastalker, became an “Advanced” game. One can only presume that, with the “Standard”-level Cutthroats about to be released and Seastalker in the “Junior” slot, Infidel fit the matrix better as an “Advanced”-level “Tale of Adventure.” Ditto for Starcross with Planetfall and the forthcoming Hitchhiker’s, both of which were already crowded into the “Standard” science-fiction slot. In the end marketing likely did themselves few favors with this sort of wishful thinking. Any new player who bought Zork I or Hitchhiker’s and was completely baffled, then looked at the box to see this was only “Standard”-level interactive fiction, “a good introductory level for adults”… well, she probably wasn’t likely to buy another. No one likes to feel stupid. If Infocom couldn’t make the difficulty levels accurate (and, as noted, there were indeed legitimate commercial concerns that made this problematic), they would have been better served to leave them off entirely.

Be that as it may, times in general were good. Infocom was the main reason for the bookware craze that was the hot new trend in entertainment software in 1984, even though, ironically, their own first book adaptation would only appear at the end of the year in the form of Hitchhiker’s. And their reputation extended far beyond the software industry. They were in Mike Berlyn’s words “intellectual rock stars”; it seemed everyone wanted a piece of them. Christopher Cerf, a big wheel with the Children’s Television Workshop, took a few of them out to meet with Jim Henson to discuss creative opportunities. George Romero of horror-movie fame asked them about movie rights to Zork. Timothy Leary wrote Berlyn a gushing letter about Suspended, saying it had “changed his life” and revealed to him the potential of computers with its portrayal of split consciousness. He later visited Infocom in person to discuss a collaboration. He envisioned a “personality” that would live in the computer, observe what you did and how you liked to do it, and adjust the experience of using the computer accordingly. None of these talks ultimately came to anything, but for this bunch of hackers and refugees from academia, who had mostly been kids or teens when Night of the Living Dead was provoking shock and outrage at the Saturday matinees and the Moody Blues were serenading Leary on the radio, it was heady stuff indeed. (Leary did eventually find a willing collaborator in Electronic Arts. Timothy Leary’s Mind Mirror — “Tune in, turn on, boot up” — became one of the strangest products that company would ever release, one that would never have seen the light of day outside of the experimental mid-1980s.)

And then, to cap off a crazy year, Simon & Schuster came calling waving tens of millions in their faces.

The story of the Simon & Schuster negotiation, only recently fully known thanks to the Get Lamp project, begins with one of the most important and controversial figures in publishing of the late twentieth century: Richard E. Snyder. Snyder started at Simon & Schuster in 1960, and had risen to vice president by the time the massive conglomerate Gulf and Western (or, as Mel Brooks dubbed them in Silent Movie, Engulf and Devour) acquired the company in 1975; his biggest claim to fame during these early years was perhaps giving Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward the title for All the President’s Men. After years of chafing against the hidebound practices of Simon & Schuster’s original management, he at last got the chance he had been dreaming of from Gulf and Western, who made him president in 1975 and CEO in 1978. Determined to wrench the company out of the past and into the modern world of media and entertainment, Snyder unabashedly pursued celebrities and big, commercial projects whilst building a reputation as the meanest man in his field, the barbarian at the gate of the tweedy, traditional world of publishing. He took a special delight in firing people, setting aside a room for the purpose that came to be called the “executive departure lounge.” His reputation spread far and wide; he made Fortune magazine’s list of “America’s Toughest Bosses” in 1984 in an article which compared him to the Ayatollah Khomeini — only Snyder had more hostages, Fortune wrote, in the form of an entire company which supposedly quaked in fear of him. He also became known for, in the words of Washington Post columnist Jonathan Yardley, “his assiduous accumulation of executive perquisites unmatched since the heyday of William Randolph Hearst, if not Croesus.” But he got results: in fifteen years he took Simon & Schuster from a $40-million business to a $2-billion business, from a modest trade publisher to the biggest, most diversified publisher in the world.

Much of that growth was fueled by aggressive acquisitions that let Simon & Schuster capitalize on any hot trend that came down the pop-culture pipe. Thus they were only being true to form when they began nosing around Infocom, kicking the tires as it were, as early as late 1983. They were eager to point out (in Mike Dornbrook’s words) “all the wonderful things they could do” for Infocom, which included among other things the chance to make games in the Star Trek universe; Paramount Pictures was also a subsidiary of Gulf and Western, and Simon & Schuster already published the Star Trek line of novels on their Pocket Books imprint. Snyder got personally involved in the latter half of 1984. Like any good publisher, he talked often to people in the bookstore trade. Waldenbooks, the biggest chain in the United States at the time, continued to mention often how well they were doing with this company called Infocom and this thing they made called interactive fiction.

And so Snyder, who could be charming as hell when he wanted to be, decided to try to make a deal personally. He invited Marc Blank and Mike Dornbrook to visit him in his executive suite near the top of a skyscraper in Rockefeller Center. It made, to say the least, quite the contrast to Infocom’s comfortable little home on Wheeler Street back in Cambridge. Dornbrook recalls marveling at the restroom, which “used gold in ways I had never thought of using gold.” The three had lunch in Snyder’s executive dining room at a table big enough to seat thirty — Dover sole, prepared by Snyder’s personal chef and served by three liveried attendants. Snyder stroked them like a master. Dornbrook:

Marc said, “Mike, why don’t you tell Mr. Snyder a little bit about InvisiClues?”

So I described what I’d done. I mentioned the selling price and how many had sold. By that point, late 1984, we’d sold over half a million — the Zork I InvisiClues book alone had sold something like 200,000 copies.

Synder said, “You’ve sold 200,000 copies at $9.95? That’s trade-paperback prices! Do you realize you’re one of the bestselling authors on the planet?”

I said, “What?”

Snyder said, “In terms of dollars you’re at Stephen King level!”

I was totally blown away.

Shortly after, Snyder sent a Gulf and Western acquisitions negotiator and the Simon & Schuster manager he proposed to have oversee Infocom to visit them in Cambridge. They arrived in a limousine to take Blank, Stu Galley, and Al Vezza (who had replaced Joel Berez as planned as Infocom’s CEO in January of 1984) to another opulent lunch. When they got down to specifics at last and made their offer, it was extraordinary: $28 million. To put this in context, understand that Infocom’s board had recently estimated the company’s value at perhaps $10 million, $12 million at the outside.

Yet feelings were mixed on Infocom’s side. While Blank and Joel Berez were reportedly very interested, Galley had taken an immediate dislike to the would-be overseer, feeling certain within minutes that he “didn’t understand” Infocom and never would. And Vezza couldn’t help but feel that if a corporate titan like Snyder, who, say what you would about him, didn’t get where he was by being stupid, was offering that kind of money then in the big picture Infocom must be worth much more. The negotiator’s response to his hemming and hawing only reinforced the impression. In Dornbrook’s recollection, he said, “Look, if it’s just a matter of a few million dollars, I don’t care, I’ll pay you more. But are you or are you not interested in selling?” Still unable to elicit a clear answer to that question, he decided that Vezza was not. Simon & Schuster ended up starting a brief-lived interactive division of their own in lieu of Infocom. Their most high-profile releases became, yes, a few Star Trek adventures.

In light of the course Infocom’s fortunes would soon take, both the people who were there at the time and mere interested parties like you and me will inevitably continue to second-guess the decision — or, perhaps better said, non-decision — for years to come. Jon Palace notes, probably correctly, that there was a certain amount of hubris in Infocom’s rejection of Snyder’s millions, that they couldn’t help but let some of the glowing press go to their heads and really did suspect that Simon & Schuster might just be getting them too cheap at a mere three times their valuation by the company accountants. And certainly interactive-fiction fans who feel the genre died (commercially) far too young are always looking for viable counter-factuals that keep Infocom alive and thriving into the 1990s and hopefully beyond.

Still, it’s hard for me to see this deal turning out all that well for Infocom in the end. Friction almost always results when a small, creative company is bought by, as Dave Lebling describes Simon & Schuster, “a giant soulless corporation.” When the bookware craze died down, as it seems it must whether Infocom was acquired or not, Infocom would have been just an artifact of a trend, one of many that hadn’t taken off quite like Simon & Schuster hoped. You win some and you lose some in business, after all. Nor was Snyder, as famous in the business community as he was hated by Simon & Schuster’s management class for his micromanaging instinct, exactly known as a patient man. A Simon & Schuster Infocom may very well have given us fewer works than did the eventual Activision Infocom; certainly the much larger Simon & Schuster was much more likely to write off an acquisition quickly as a failed bet and move on than was Activision. Even the former Imps, most of whom would have done very well financially by the acquisition, will mostly wryly admit that they look on the Simon & Schuster negotiation wistfully not so much as the potential enabler of many more years of fruitful creativity as an opportunity to cash out on all their hard work, to walk away from Infocom in the end with something more than the salary they’d earned over the years to show for their entrepreneurial efforts. That’s not a feeling we should begrudge them; I’m sure every one of us with mortgages and car payments would look back the same way. But it’s also a long way from the more idealistic what-might-have-beens that tempt us.

And there was always an elephant in the room as the board discussed the merits of Simon & Schuster’s offer: the Business Products division and the Cornerstone database. What had started as a two-man research project in October of 1982 and been officially approved as a viable endeavor ten months later had, since Al Vezza’s arrival as CEO in January of 1984, become Infocom’s strategic priority, consuming all the money the games generated and millions more that they had to acquire through bank loans. Simon & Schuster had no interest in business software, and would have been more than happy just to take the games division for their $30 million. Problem was, Infocom needed the ongoing revenue from the games division to keep Business Products going. Somehow funneling some or all of Simon & Schuster’s millions back into a remade Infocom-as-business-developer would involve tricky, time-consuming accounting shenanigans for which Vezza just didn’t feel he had time; Cornerstone was now entering the final, expensive crunch time, with a planned release in January of 1985. And Cornerstone was the dream of Vezza and at least a few of the other old timers, the reason they had founded Infocom in the first place. If becoming a success in business software is a more prosaic dream than that of inventing a new way of sharing stories, well, hey, it takes the prosaic as well as the poetic to make a world. Who are we to judge?

But the full story of Cornerstone is a story for another article. For now let’s just note that, despite tensions and conflicts that inevitably arose from packing a bunch of game and business developers together in the same increasingly cramped office, things in the big picture were still looking pretty great to just about everyone as they celebrated Christmas 1984. They had sold about 725,000 games that year worth $10 million, up from 450,000 and $6 million the previous year. They were so successful in their field that a whole genre of bookware had sprung up to try to capture some of their success, that their company name risked becoming synonomous, Kleenex-style, with the adventure game — or okay, if you like, “interactive fiction” — itself. And they had some of the more interesting people on the planet coming to them to propose collaborations. Speaking of which: their collaboration with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker’s game had sold some 60,000 copies in its first six weeks or so, a pace out of the gate that none of their earlier releases had even approached. If anything had frustrated Infocom over the last couple of years, it had been their inability to field a title that would break beyond the label of just “very successful” to become a phenomenon like Zork I, which at four years old still outsold any of their other games by a factor of two and had in fact just had its biggest sales year ever. Now it looked at last like they had another Zork. With the next Hitchhiker’s game expected by next Christmas, 1985’s game sales were estimated — very conservatively, they thought — as likely to reach at least $13 million. Add to that the at least $5 million or so they expected from the first year of Cornerstone sales, and it looked likely to be one hell of a year.

Granted, a sober-minded accountant or financial analyst might have looked at things less optimistically. She might have noted that Infocom had managed to maintain their upward sales trajectory even as the home-computer industry in general suffered a disappointing year of slowing hardware and software sales, failed platform introductions, shrinking or disappearing magazines, and a mainstream media that was suddenly as cynical about home computers as they had been ecstatic about them a year before. It was of course great that Infocom was so far bucking the trends — but would it continue? She also might have wondered why this company that was so ridiculously good and successful at this one thing was so determined to branch out into this other thing. After all, every business student learned that a small company should do one thing and do it well, that trying to do too much too soon was usually a fatal mistake. And, most worrisome of all, she might have noted that Infocom’s board had, wittingly or unwittingly, effectively bet the company on this new thing by going millions into debt to finance it. There was no Plan B if Infocom didn’t become successful in business products like they were in games. Indeed, one fact must have glared out at her as soon as she peeked at the books: thanks to Business Products, Infocom had managed to lose $2.4 million in 1984 despite sales increases of some 67%.

But, Vezza and the board would have replied, that was just temporary, just the money Infocom had to spend to make even more money in an industry that dwarfed the one they currently all but dominated. Cornerstone was shaping up to be a great product. It couldn’t fail.

Could it?

(As usual for my Infocom pieces, my secret weapons for this article were Jason Scott’s Get Lamp project materials. Thanks again for sharing, Jason!)

Comments
22 Responses

- Keith Palmer

October 23, 2013 at 10:13 pm

I was sort of waiting for the transition to the “grey boxes”; they were how I first thought of Infocom, given their lone adventure my family had (which I’m expecting we’ll get to in this cycle) came in a grey box. More than that, the catalog in that box (“Passport to the United Products of Infocom”) showed all the games in grey boxes. When we got “The Lost Treasures of Infocom” years later for our nearly-new Macintosh LC II and I decided the games needed individual icons, I clicked out 30-by-32 thumbnails in a paint program and made the later games look like they were in grey boxes, too. However, in the anticipation I did think of something you’ve sort of touched on in this post, that the change away from the folios marked an end in itself… (Having managed not that long ago to see some of those folio manuals with their lack of expected demarcation between “scene setting” and “instructions,” I suppose I was amused by the blend, although I do understand how there could be reasons for getting away from that.)

- Ben

October 27, 2013 at 4:05 am

Infocom being Infoocm

- Jimmy Maher

October 27, 2013 at 1:57 pm

Thanks!

- iPadCary

October 27, 2013 at 10:14 pm

Hey, Jimmy!
I can’t wait until the Kindle Paperwhite 2 comes out in a week so I can dive right into “The Kings Of Shreds & Patches”!

Any new, your own or 3rd parties, Textfyre titles on the horizon?
And how about Textfyre games in the App Store?

- Jimmy Maher

October 28, 2013 at 1:08 am

You’d have to check with David Cornelson over at http://textfyre.com to see what he’s got planned. I may convert some more titles to run on Android, but there won’t be any more Kindle e-ink titles; Amazon’s unfortunately discontinued new development of Kindle Active Content.

- iPadCary

October 28, 2013 at 3:27 pm

Hey, Jimmy!
Thanks for answering.

In the Kindle Store, not for the Kindle Fire, but for the Kindle eReader, there are a ton of games
that are fitted to perform in the Kindle Paperwhite’s [KP] eInk display.

Developing “King Of Shreds”, you know what I mean.
Games like “Scrabble”, “BlackJack”, “UNO”, etc.
I’m guessing that’s what you mean by “Kindle Active Content” [KAC], right?

OK, so just to be clear, are you saying Amazon doesn’t allow KAC apps to be made anymore?

If so, can you give me an approximate date, please, when this happened so I can start a topic on the Amazon Kindle Forum & ask why this has happened?

I ask because I always thought it kinda, for lack of a better word, “sexy” that devs looked beyond just processing text for a Kindle Paperwhite & worked within the framework an eInk’s display constraints to bring about that most wonderful of hacker things.
Something you’ve noted many a time regarding the Commodore64: expanding the function, utility, and capability of a KP and make it do what it’s creators never expected/meant/intended it to do, and that is deliver a satisfactorily substantive gaming experience.

Thanks!

- Jimmy Maher

October 29, 2013 at 6:29 am

Yes, that’s correct. I believe the program was discontinued last spring. Existing apps do remain in the store for the time being, but they’re not accepting new ones.

- iPadCary

October 29, 2013 at 3:18 pm

Thanks for the info, Jimmy!
Man, I wonder why Amazon did such a stupid thing ….?
I had some ideas of my own for some cool KAC.
OK, I’ll go start that Amazon Kindle Forum topic now.

- iPadCary

October 30, 2013 at 5:31 am

Just in case you’d like to take a quick peek, here’s the Amazon Kindle Forum topic: http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle/ref=cm_cd_et_up_redir?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdPage=1&cdThread=TxPIJ46C93S2NH&newContentID=Mx2YT6HU1V13QN3#Mx2YT6HU1V13QN3

- iPadCary

October 30, 2013 at 3:10 pm

I started the topic at the Amazon Kindle Forum
& boy did I get FAST feedback! lol
I think you’d find a lot of kindred spirits there as they
are vehemently anti-Apple devices.

Anyhoo, I was directed to 2 articles:
1] http://www.geekwire.com/2013/amazon-winding-app-developer-program-kindle-eink-readers/
HIGHLIGHT
Responding to GeekWire’s initial inquiry on the topic,
an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement,
“We continue to support the (Kindle Development Kit) and active content for Kindle e-readers.”
After the initial post, the spokesperson responded to the specific statement
that Amazon would no longer approve new Active Content app submissions:
“This is not the case. We continue to approve titles from developers.”

2] http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2013/04/16/amazon-shutting-down-app-developer-program-for-kindle-ereaders/#.UnEPfvmshcY

HIGHLIGHT
I have heard complaints that Amazon’s approval process for Kindle Active Content is so capricious
they make Apple look sane and reasonable.
Amazon has rejected apps for what the developers describe as ridiculous reasons,
blocked app updates with no explanation,
and generally made life difficult for the developers.
I’ve also been told off the record that Amazon plays favorites with developers.
Amazon has reportedly neglected to approve an app from a developer
so a similar app from a preferred developer can be released first.
In any case, now that a developer has called this story into question all I can say is that this situation is far from clear.

It looks like Amazon plays hardball with some devs, so in a
fit of pique & sour grapes, they’re spreading FUD about KAC.

Comment?

- Jimmy Maher

October 30, 2013 at 3:29 pm

I’m sorry, but I’m just not terribly exercised over this topic. Amazon was always super professional and helpful with me. It’s very true that they were very serious about quality control, but in the end that’s hard to really criticize. My app was the better for it. They took a genuine interest in the app, saying it was the most complex and ambitious thing ever done with the KDK, which made me feel quite good. They even sent a few bug reports from deep in the game, and said a number of them around the office were playing it for pleasure.

When it came time to shut down, they were nice enough to call me and explain that they’d still be selling the KDK apps for the foreseeable future, but were effectively mothballing new development — only critical bug fixes would be pushed to the store. If that was all a ruse, so be it.

I can understand their reasoning for discontinuing the program, and I can’t say I miss programming for the KDK. It was one of the less pleasant platforms I’ve ever had to work on. Maybe it’s better to just let the e-ink Kindles do what they do best… On the other hand, I’d be thrilled to work with the folks I dealt with at Amazon again.

I’d have liked to have sold a few more copies of my app, but, hey, a parser-driven game is a hard sell in the 2010s. I had a few reasonably good months, and it still brings in enough to buy my wife and I a nice dinner each month. And it was great experience, and led to a lot of work I’ve done since with mobile devices — work which thankfully pays a bit better. :)

- iPadCary

October 30, 2013 at 3:58 pm

OK, thanks for straightening all of that out, Jimmy.
Sorry to’ve taken up all of your time with it.

I’ve since submitted my own Amazon KAC dev request.
Let’s see what happens ….

- Olivier Guinart

October 28, 2013 at 4:08 pm

Love your stories, would buy your book if there was one out there. I need to get the GetLamp documentary too…

Small thing: “[…] some blank disks every they sold a new computer system.”. **Every** time?

- Jimmy Maher

October 29, 2013 at 6:34 am

You have to allow me a little bit of hyperbole now and then. :)

- DZ-Jay

February 22, 2017 at 6:32 pm

I think he means that you are missing the word “time”: “some blank disks every … they sold”.

Or, as they say in the Interwebz: I think you a noun there. ;)

I was going to post the same note. That and the following:

Another fantastic article! Thanks for doing this blog. I may not agree with all your viewpoints, but I respect that you try to remain neutral and objective about your historical accounts.

And a cliffhanger at the end…! I can’t wait to read the next article! :)

dZ.

- Jimmy Maher

February 23, 2017 at 10:59 am

Thanks!

- Jonathan Blask

March 29, 2014 at 3:58 am

Might the S&S Star Trek game, the Promethean Prophecy, get its own post one day? I’d be interested in one.

- Jimmy Maher

March 29, 2014 at 8:05 am

Yes, I do plan to write about that one. It’s a 1986 game, so probably in the latter half of this year…

- Geoff Bailey

July 19, 2014 at 4:50 am

Sorry to chime in late about spelling errors, but “non sequiter” should be “non sequitur”. (This has been misspelled in a couple of other posts, also; here’s a Google search link for your convenience ( https://www.google.com.au/?gws_rd=ssl#q=sequiter+site:www.filfre.net ).

I just discovered this site a couple of weeks ago, and hope to be caught up soon. Keep up the good work!

- Jimmy Maher

July 19, 2014 at 6:15 am

Not at all. Thanks so much!

- Ben Bilgri

March 16, 2018 at 4:54 pm

“America’s Toughest Bosses” > “American’s Toughest Bosses”

- Jimmy Maher

March 17, 2018 at 8:48 am

Thanks!

Cutthroats
November 1, 2013

Opinions amongst the former Imps vary wildly as to just how easy or difficult it was to work with ZIL, Infocom’s in-house adventure language. Stu Galley calls it “fairly easy”; Steve Meretzky calls it “quite intuitive” and “much easier to pick up” than any other programming language he had attempted before becoming an Imp; Bob Bates calls it “not that complicated,” at least for most tasks. Brian Moriarty, on the other hand, considers it “not particularly intuitive,” something that he learned only through sheer doggedness even as an accomplished assembly-language programmer (the skill which got him a job at Infocom in the first place). Some of those with less technical backgrounds found ZIL even more daunting. In early 1984 Infocom hired a prominent pop-science writer, who shall remain nameless, to become an Imp. Several other former Imps claim that, after he had struggled some six months with ZIL, they literally found him huddled beneath his desk, victim of a complete breakdown of sorts. That, needless to say, was that for him.

ZIL very nearly drove Mike Berlyn to the same state; he still considers actually becoming proficient with the language the biggest single accomplishment of his three years with Infocom. When he first came to the company, he regarded ZIL almost as a betrayal, the antithesis of what Marc Blank had promised him that working with their technology would be:

It was presented to me as, “We have this development system. Anybody can use it, and it’s just crying out for a writer. Why don’t you have a whack at it?”

That was not the case; it was not the truth. It wasn’t anywhere near reality. What they had was a high-level object-oriented language and a series of compilers, run-time interpreters, and virtual machines that were infinitely complex, and very little of it was hidden from the Implementer.

I was a self-taught programmer. I knew BASIC and some 6502 assembler. They sat me down in front of a terminal and said, “Here’s Emacs” — an editor I’d never used. I had no idea. To open a file took like fifteen keystrokes; I developed this claw from trying to press five keys at once. There was no language manual which I could sit down and go through, no tutorials or anything. And this was for any writer off the street? “Here you go, sit down at the terminal and write yourself a game!”

Even after becoming proficient at last, an endeavor he estimates to have required about six months, Berlyn continued to hate programming in the language. That loathing may be key to understanding something that must have driven his colleagues at least a little bit crazy about Mike Berlyn: hired on the basis of his novelist’s pedigree to be Infocom’s first “real writer” of interactive fiction, he always wanted to do anything but write interactive fiction. Of the three adventure games he wrote for Infocom, the only one he could be said to have tackled voluntarily and enthusiastically was the first, Suspended, a game which was arguably the least novel-like work Infocom would ever brand “interactive fiction,” being almost more a strategy game in text or a computerized board game. He had to be cajoled into doing Infidel, with his dissatisfaction showing up in the rather sour atmosphere of the final product. By 1984 he’d gotten involved with the research-and-development side of the company, working on a cross-platform graphics system and brainstorming with Marc Blank new-and-improved versions of Infocom’s core technologies of ZIL and the Z-Machine. He had also begun to design what would become the company’s first non-adventure game and first to use graphics, a multi-player computerized board game called Fooblitzky which would appear in 1985. (In light of Suspended and Fooblitzky, perhaps Berlyn was really a frustrated board-game designer slumming it as a writer?)

When a certain bestselling author by the name of Douglas Adams came to Infocom to propose a collaboration, he asked to work with Mike Berlyn by name. Berlyn turned the proposal down flat, saying he wasn’t interested in sharing power with another designer. With the highest-profile project Infocom would ever have hanging in the balance, Mike Dornbrook was left scrambling to enlist the ever-reliable Steve Meretzky for the project and to convince Adams that he could do just as good a job as the guy who wrote Adams’s favorite Suspended. I want to emphasize here that everyone liked Mike Berlyn, what with his big booming laugh and his knack for taking the piss out of everything in a good-natured way that kept everyone grounded: Suspended became Suspenders; Cornerstone became, prophetically as it would turn out, Tombstone; Choose Your Own Adventure books became What the Fuck Do I Do Now? books. But man, could it be hard to get and keep him on any given task.

Getting Berlyn to do another adventure game for 1984, even sans-Adams, was a challenge. A compromise was eventually reached: he would design the game and write the text, but would not be forced to program it. That should give him enough time to also continue with his other projects. For the actual programming, Infocom turned to one Jerry Wolper, an MIT computer-science graduate who had been doing various jobs for the company since 1982. This sort of development partnership was something that Infocom was grudgingly coming to accept as the only viable way of using writers-turned-Imps, as opposed to programmers-turned-Imps, to create interactive fiction; the science-writer fiasco would mark the last time they would just plant an outside writer in front of a terminal and hope for the best. Partnerships were in fact responsible for three of their five games of 1984, Berlyn’s among them.

The game in question is called Cutthroats. In an odd coincidence that probably wouldn’t have happened if the matrix had come into force a few months earlier, it was not only Infocom’s second “Tale of Adventure” in a row but also has a nautical theme superficially similar to that of the preceding game, Seastalker. You play a down-on-the-luck treasure diver living on Hardscrabble Island. It’s a place of indeterminate actual location — the latitude and longitude shown on a sea chart that is one of the game’s feelies would seem to place it smack in the middle of Africa — but pretty plainly modeled on Florida’s Treasure Coast. Things are kicked off via the lengthiest in-game introduction yet seen from Infocom:

Nights on Hardscrabble Island are lonely and cold when the lighthouse barely pierces the gloom. You sit on your bed, thinking of better times and far-off places. A knock on your door stirs you, and Hevlin, a shipmate you haven't seen for years, staggers in.

"I'm in trouble," he says. "I had a few too many at The Shanty. I was looking for Red, but he wasn't around, and I started talking about ... here," he says, handing you a slim volume that you recognize as a shipwreck book written years ago by the Historical Society.

You smile. Every diver on the island has looked for those wrecks, without even an old boot to show for it. You open the door, hoping the drunken fool will leave. "I know what you're thinkin'," Hevlin scowls, "but look!" He points to the familiar map, and you see new locations marked for two of the wrecks.

"Keep it for me," he says. "Just for tonight. It'll be safe here with you. Don't let -- " He stops and broods for a moment. "I've got to go find Red!" And with that, Hevlin leaves.

You put the book in your dresser and think about following Hevlin. Then you hear a scuffle outside. You look through your window and see two men struggling. One falls to the ground in a heap. The other man bends down beside him, then turns as if startled and runs away. Another man then approaches the wounded figure. He kneels beside him for a long moment, then takes off after the other man.

It isn't long before the police arrive to tell you that Hevlin's been murdered. You don't mention the book, and hours later, as you lie awake in your bed, you wonder if the book could really be what it seems.

You soon fall in with a group of three other treasure hunters. You must assemble supplies and otherwise prepare an expedition to a heretofore undiscovered shipwreck, whilst dodging and thwarting the other ruthless treasure seekers who have already done in your old buddy Hevlin. At last you put out to sea for the actual dive, which, if a certain betrayer amongst your crew doesn’t kill you, could make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.

Cutthroats is perhaps of greatest interest as Infocom’s first experiment with formal structure outside of the radical departure that was Suspended. There are two possible wrecks which might be the target of your treasure hunt: the São Vera, a Portuguese cargo ship loaded with gold that sunk in 1698, or the Leviathan, a sort of fictional hybrid of the Titanic and Lusitania which was sunk by a U-boat in 1916. The game randomly chooses at the appropriate point which one you get.

Like some later Infocom formal experiments, the results here are mixed at best. You can exercise control over which shipwreck you receive only by saving the game shortly before the point where the game announces its decision, then restoring until you get the one you want. Luckily, the dice are thrown, so to speak, only just before the announcement instead of the very beginning of the game, making this process — what with there being only two possibilities — clumsy but not horribly annoying. More problematic is that there is still a whole lot of game to play between the point where you learn which shipwreck you’ve gotten and the beginning of the actual dive. This section plays almost exactly the same for both shipwrecks, making it a somewhat tedious exercise the second time around. It’s hard to determine what purpose Berlyn thought he was serving with this branching structure, other than to experiment just for the sake of it. There are signs that the original plan may have called for four possible shipwrecks; the feelies chart describes four shipwrecks, and the manual says you will “try to salvage a sunken treasure from one of four shipwrecks.” It’s even possible to visit the other two shipwrecks in the game, although you can’t get inside them. The number may very well have been cut in half due to space and/or time restrictions. In some ways four shipwrecks would of course have been even more problematic — you’d now need to replay a big chunk of the game not once but three times to see it all — but would perhaps have been more justifiable as an experiment in branching narrative.

Like Seastalker, Cutthroats evidences Infocom’s new emphasis on creating interactive fictions as opposed to traditional text adventures. There’s a constant forward plot momentum right from the beginning of the game, when a character knocks on your door to invite you to a meeting of would-be treasure hunters, to the climax, the dive on the shipwreck itself. Characters move about the island and, later, the boat on their own schedules, and you must keep to a timetable and be where you’re expected to be to keep the plot moving forward. It gives a feel very different from the static environs of Zork or even the deserted complex of Planetfall.

Less defensibly, especially to modern sensibilities, Cutthroats is not so forgiving in its dynamism as Seastalker. In fact, it’s similar to the mysteries that preceded it in that solving the game requires a certain amount of learning by death, of plotting out the workings of the story through replays, figuring out what you need to do to avert each new disaster only after you’ve seen it once or twice. That said, it’s a much more forgiving exercise than even The Witness on the whole; you usually only need to go back a handful of turns at the most. There’s only one really tricky element that’s likely to send you back almost to square one, a crucial piece of evidence you need to collect on Hardscrabble Island to prevent disaster once you get out to sea. Even with that, Cutthroats is a very playable, solvable game.

Still, I’m not sure I can call it all that satisfying of a game. The other characters remain the crudest sort of archetypes, as you might guess from reading the names of your fellow treasure hunters: Johnny Red, the Weasel, Pete the Rat. (Guess which one sold you out to your rivals…) A winning ending does indeed make you rich, but does nothing to bring the killer of Hevlin to justice:

Johnny slaps you on the back. "Good job, matey!" As you return to the island over the calm, dazzling blue sea, you contemplate your wealth with a touch of sadness. You think of Hevlin and hope his soul is resting a little easier now.

One would presume that Hevlin would really “rest easier” not if you became rich but if you, you know, made some effort to catch the guy that knifed him. Berlyn has apparently learned his lesson from the furor provoked by the comeuppance he delivered to the greedy treasure hunter in Infidel. Rather than challenge our expectations again, he’s back to the adventure-game norm of Greed Is Good. Your character comes across much like the protagonist of Infidel — he’s all about the gold, baby — albeit without that game’s element of subversion and self-awareness.

The best adjective I can think of to describe Cutthroats is “workmanlike.” It’s a thoroughly professional effort — Infocom wasn’t likely to produce anything else by this stage in their evolution — but it’s missing a certain spark, a certain passion. That’s a shame not least because the setting has such potential. You should be able to smell the salt air blowing through this faded community of which not much is left but the old-timers who spend their days drinking at The Shanty, but the text never gets much more evocative than the magnificent name “Hardscrabble Island” itself. Similarly, the shipwrecks are described precisely and grammatically, but little effort is made to convey the atmosphere, which I can only imagine must be mystical and kind of terrifying, of penetrating these watery graves. Much as I appreciate the audacity of Suspended and the Infidel ending, I’m left feeling rather happy that Mike Berlyn would soon step out of the way and let other, more passionate Imps have a crack at things.

As I’ve researched and written these articles I’ve been constantly surprised by how out of line the sales of many Infocom games were with the reputations they hold today. That’s especially true of Cutthroats. Widely regarded as a middling, rather forgettable game today, Cutthroats was quite a big seller in its day: over 50,000 copies in the last few months of 1984 alone, enough to make it the second most successful of Infocom’s five games of that year, behind only the juggernaut The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s hard to know to just what to attribute the success, unless it be an alternative choice for customers who’d have preferred to get their hands on Hitchhiker’s, the hottest game in the industry that Christmas. The attention-grabbing cover art, one of the few photographs standing out in a sea of painted dragons and spaceships on store shelves, also may have played its part. (The packaging in general, with some great feelies that are integrated into the game even more than usual and a True Tales of Adventure magazine full of in-jokes for players of Infidel, is a superb first born-in-a-gray-box effort from Infocom and G/R Copy.) Lifetimes sales approached 80,000, placing it amongst the more successful of Infocom’s corpus as a whole. Mediocrity, it seems, does have its rewards.

Comments
17 Responses

- Robb Sherwin

November 1, 2013 at 6:14 pm

Totally anecdotal, but regarding the sales of Cutthroats!…

A few years ago I was into bidding on shrink-wrapped Infocom games via eBay. The two games that seemed to be in largest supply as unopened, wrapped games were HHGG and Cutthroats!. They made, what, a quarter-million of HHGG so the supply there is understandable. I wonder, though, if something was going on with sales of Cutthroats! versus copies that actually made it into the disk drives of players.

- Jimmy Maher

November 2, 2013 at 8:48 am

In the Infocom sales chart (http://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/2419969220/lightbox/), there’s quite a number of games listed under 1984 and 1985 with a footnote of “x Commodore PLUS/4 included.” I don’t know quite what that might indicate. Maybe Commodore asked Infocom to make a bunch of games and bought them outright themselves to distribute and try to juice a software market for the PLUS/4? If so, and given the fate of that platform, the vast majority would have likely gone unsold. This would account for almost 20,000 of Cutthroats’s almost 80,000 in sales.

Of course, if most of those shrinkwrapped copies you were seeing were for the PLUS/4, that would lend credence to this theory… :)

- Dave Thompsen

November 7, 2013 at 3:42 am

Shrink-wrapped copies of both Cutthroats and Suspect are still somewhat common on eBay to this day, usually the C64/Plus-4 versions.

- Jonathan Blask

November 1, 2013 at 8:30 pm

Of course, it doesn’t negate the fact that Berlyn had a hard time learning ZIL, but in the late 90s, when he ported Dr. Dumont’s Wild P.A.R.T.I. to Inform 6, he was very vocal on the ifMUD about how he’d rather be coding in ZIL. Of course, one will often prefer the thing they are already familiar with.

Still, now that things like the “ZIL manual” are out on the web ( http://xlisp.org/zil.pdf ), it is cool to look at the code that the Imps dealt with.

Plus, of course, there’s Jesse McGrew’s (and others’) work to create a modern ZIL compiler, ZILF ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/zilf/ ).

ZILF (and the current ZIL “library”) are not yet feature-complete, but I had a lot of fun the other month digging into ZIL code just the same. I somewhat chronicled my journey in this thread at joltcountry.com: http://www.joltcountry.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=8860

Overall, I thought ZIL is quite elegant in its handling of some things. I think it would have been very interesting if the ZIL manual had been available throughout the 90s. Inform might have developed a bit differently.

Anyhow, I’m pretty sure I mentioned much of this in a comment to another post, but I feel it’s worth mentioning every time there’s a post about ZIL’s steep learning curve.

- Jimmy Maher

November 2, 2013 at 8:50 am

I suspect that Berlyn may be something of a “grass is always greener” kind of fellow. If he now had to go back to ZIL, he might start complaining and wishing he could use Inform. ;)

- Andrew

November 2, 2013 at 3:44 pm

Great stuff, as always. Just one quibble – I don’t know if one is betrayed by the Weasel or the Rat!

- Jimmy Maher

November 3, 2013 at 8:58 am

Yeah, that was kind of the joke. ;)

- Andrew

November 3, 2013 at 10:24 pm

Ah! I read it like ‘it’s obvious which one sells you out’.

- iPadCary

November 6, 2013 at 2:21 am

Well, my new Kindle Paperwhite 2 [KPW2] arrived via UPS today.
Nice little birthday present to myself!
The first KAC I downloaded onto it was, of course, “King Of Shreds”.
Loving every minute of it!
But I notice “The Shadow On The Cathedral” wasn’t available
as it “isn’t playable” on a KPW2.
Do you know the story on this?

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2013 at 8:39 am

You’ll have to check with David Cornelson of Textfyre on that. I was just the hired help there.

- iPadCary

November 9, 2013 at 2:50 pm

Jimmy, I see blogs are available on KPW2.
Is “Digital Antiquarian”?

- Jimmy Maher

November 10, 2013 at 9:15 am

Sorry, afraid not.

While I certainly am gratified by your interest in my various nerdly endeavors, it might be best if you could contact me privately with this sort of inquiry. That way we could keep the individual article comments from getting cluttered with a lot of stuff having nothing to do with their topics.

- iPadCary

November 11, 2013 at 2:12 pm

You’re right, of course.
I’m glad I read this last response as I was just about to do it again! lol
But I see your email address now, so I’ll use that.
Won’t happen again, I promise.

- Rafael Oliveira

April 6, 2015 at 1:51 pm

I just discovered this blog and I’m completely thrilled and surprised on the backstory of some of my favorite games.

Cutthroats was the first Infocom game I bought, at thirteen or fourteen, and being Brazilian in the eighties, just a barely passable knowledge of english.

I still have my original (opened, very non-mint) gray box for the TRS-80, but the disk is long gone.

On Cutthroats, I got the game based on my two (then) new passions, diving and adventure games, as interactive fiction was an alien concept for someone used to Scott Adams works. I had a hell of a time translating whatever I could, but in the end I felt the game had very little to do with diving, so it was a big disappointment.

- Joe Pranevich

February 12, 2018 at 6:28 am

Five years late to the party, but I am still catching up to you in my own plays of Infocom games.

I believe you made an error when you cited the location of the fictional Hardscrabble Island as in Florida and the map showing it in Africa. The map actually is only giving you the minutes latitude and longitude without listing the degrees (we assume a local knows that information already), so it’s not in Africa but it’s deliberately not defined neatly where it is.

Looking at the “Shipwrecks” book, we learn that the town of Hardscrabble Harbor was founded in 1692. That is too early for Florida which was still under Spanish control. That still leaves everywhere from New England down to the Carolinas which were getting new towns founded on the coast and islands during that period.

If any thought was put into this at all, I have two candidates for the location:

1. Off the coast of Virginia, just south of Chincoteague Island (36° 20’ N, 75° 25’ W). One of the shipwrecks stated that the sailors drifted to “Chocteague” which seems like a misspelling. Downside is that mainland is west, not south as on the map.

2. Off the coast of North Carolina near the mouth of the Pamlico River (35° 20’ N, 76° 25’ W). This has the advantage of being near (modern) ferry lines and it has a landmass to the south. It’s the only spot I can find on the eastern seaboard with the right “minutes” and land to the south.

Ultimately, I expect that this is a fool’s errand since Mike Berlyn didn’t get the location of the Nile correct in “Infidel” and the map actually has latitude minutes running the wrong way. But still, fun enough to try to figure out. No, I’m not crazy enough to look at the depth or tide charts to see what those tell us although I suspect we could find out where they cribbed the chart from if we had a convenient way to look up historic high tide times. (tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov actually will give you high and low tide times for 1984, but searching that is a bridge a bit beyond the crazy that this already is.)

Thanks as always for the fun and informative commentary.

- Ben Bilgri

March 19, 2018 at 12:00 am

“the feelies chart and describe four shipwrecks” – missing noun

“I’m not sure I can it call all that satisfying” > “I’m not sure I can call all that satisfying”

- Jimmy Maher

March 19, 2018 at 9:39 am

Thanks!

Douglas Adams
November 11, 2013

Hardcore fans of Douglas Adams can make the worst of ambassadors for his work. They go too often for the lowest-hanging fruit — like towels, “Don’t Panic!”, or the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a “trilogy” of five novels (a “joke” so thuddingly unfunny that I choose to believe it originated with some harried paperback copywriter rather than Adams himself). Or, God help us, “42.” All of these tropes had already had every last drop of novelty wrung from them thirty years ago. I can’t help but think about those awful teenagers — I should know; I used to be one — who march around repeating every line from their favorite Monty Python sketches verbatim in awful teenage faux-British accents in the belief that repetition is the soul of wit.

For me the real pleasures of Douglas Adams are subtler. He was a genuinely good crafter of sentences who cared about the way he put words onto the page, which is a quality rarer than it ought to be amongst popular writers. Even more unusually, he had a style all his own, crafting strange juxtapositions of words that shouldn’t work but somehow do. Some of the sentences in his books could have come from no one else’s pen. (Who else could have written, “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t”?) His wordplay has drawn occasional comparison with Lewis Carroll:

“You’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”

“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”

“You ask a glass of water.”

Hitchhiker’s as a whole is much more than a collection of intermittently amusing gags and goofy aliens. It’s no more really about outer space than Gulliver’s Travels is about Lilliput and Brobdingnag. At the same time, however, Adams wasn’t sending up or satirizing science fiction itself in the manner of something like, say, Spaceballs. No, he was using his far-out settings and characters to comment on the real world around him: “I am writing about precisely here and now and putting it on an extreme epic cosmic scale to make fun of it.” Most of the best bits in Hitchhiker’s have recognizable analogues in human culture. It’s our sense of recognition, even if it’s subconscious, that makes them so funny. The Vogon captain is a stand-in for Adolf Eichmann and every other officiously bureaucratic little butcher in history. Through the band Disaster Area, “the loudest noise of any kind at all in the galaxy,” Adams mocked the pomposity of arena rock four years before This is Spinal Tap. Or take the resolutely non-sporting Adams’s description of Brockian Ultra Cricket as “a curious game which involved suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason and then running away,” a description that could be applied to most of the team sports we humans play.

Like Jonathan Swift, Adams isn’t interested in peddling what he regards to be false comforts. There’s an unsettlingly nihilistic core to at least the first three and the fifth Hitchhiker’s books. Adams’s universe may be charmingly wacky, but it’s also meaningless and utterly uncaring, even if Adams still professed himself to be an agnostic rather than an atheist through the writing of most of the series. (That changed only in the lengthy gap between the fourth and fifth books, when he met and became hugely enamored of Richard Dawkins. He spent the remainder of his life as an outspoken atheist and anti-theist to rival Dawkins himself.) This is after all a series that begins with the destruction of the Earth and all its billions of inhabitants because a bunch of aliens randomly decide to build a “hyperspace bypass” through its orbit. He is cruel enough to offer a Nietzschean solution of finding meaning in self-actualization through the mouth of the old planet designer Slartibartfast, only to jerk it away as just as deluded as any other route to inner peace.

“Perhaps I’m old and tired,” he continued, “but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. Look at me: I design coastlines. I got an award for Norway.

“Where’s the sense in that? None that I’ve been able to make out. I’ve been doing fjords all my life. For a fleeting moment they become fashionable and I get a major award.

“In this replacement Earth we’re building they’ve given me Africa to do and of course I’m doing it with all fjords again because I happen to like them, and I’m old-fashioned enough to think that they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent. And they tell me it’s not equatorial enough. Equatorial!” He gave a hollow laugh. “What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”

“And are you?”

“No. That’s where it all falls down, of course.”

It can all become a bit exhausting eventually, especially if you’re silly enough to try to devour the whole series in one gulp. Small wonder that Adams himself was prone to bouts of existential angst and depression throughout his life, during which times he admitted he could become embarrassingly like his terminally depressed robotic creation Marvin the Paranoid Android.

The emptiness at the heart of the other Hitchhiker’s books might explain why I like the fourth book, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, so much more than so many people, including on occasion Adams himself, tell me I ought to. The first time Adams tried to write a novel in the conventional way, from scratch (the first three books were all adapted from script treatments), it brings Adams’s hapless human victim-of-circumstances Arthur Dent back home to a resurrected Earth. (Don’t ask how; I’m not sure I even remember. No one reads Hitchhiker’s for the plot anyway.) There Adams lets him fall in love. More shockingly, it’s a disarmingly sweet little love story that, while funny, is funny in a completely different way from what we’ve come to expect. It shows the other side of Adams — the romantic — in passages that demand a noisily joyous soundtrack like, say, a little Raspberries. Or at least anything but Arthur’s album of bagpipe music.

That night, at home, as he was prancing round the house pretending to be tripping through cornfields in slow motion and continually exploding with sudden laughter, Arthur thought he could even bear to listen to the album of bagpipe music he had won. It was eight o’clock and he decided he would make himself, force himself, to listen to the whole record before he phoned her. Maybe he should even leave it till tomorrow. That would be the cool thing to do. Or next week sometime.

No. No games. He wanted her and didn’t care who knew it. He definitely and absolutely wanted her, adored her, longed for her, wanted to do more things than there were names for with her.

He actually caught himself saying things like “Yippee,” as he pranced ridiculously round the house. Her eyes, her hair, her voice, everything …

He stopped.

He would put on the record of bagpipe music. Then he would call her.

Would he, perhaps, call her first?

No. What he would do was this. He would put on the record of bagpipe music. He would listen to it, every last banshee wail of it. Then he would call her. That was the correct order. That was what he would do.

In moving his satirical eye to our own planet, So Long demonstrates how perceptive Adams really is about the world around him. The arguable highlight of the entire book is the biscuit story that Arthur shares with his new love Fenchurch. Unfortunately, it’s just too long to quote here. Instead I’ll share the alleged real-life origin of the story, which Adams later recounted in a speech collected posthumously in The Salmon of Doubt. (He helpfully translates “biscuit” into “cookie” here for the benefit of his American audience.)

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.
Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know… But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, what am I going to do?

In the end I thought nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, that settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice…” I mean, it doesn’t really work.

We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back.

A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies. The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.

Whether in this or the more extended (and, truth be told, funnier) version in So Long, it’s a story that communicates worlds about Britishness. There’s been some doubt cast as to whether the story really happened at all; similar stories have apparently been passed around as urban legends since long before 1976. But then the story’s veracity or lack thereof isn’t actually the point, is it?

The series’s new tone didn’t last very long. When Adams returned to Hitchhiker’s under pressure from his publisher after a long hiatus, it was to write Mostly Harmless, a misanthropic little book that delights in blowing up the Earth and tormenting poor Arthur yet again and doesn’t even have the virtue of being all that funny. Big softie that I am, I prefer to pretend that it all ended with the perfectly tidy conclusion of So Long, with the Earth still intact, Arthur happily hitchhiking the galaxy again with Fenchurch, and Marvin dying — happy(!).

Amongst other things, Mostly Harmless was written as a sort of “Up Yours!” to Adams’s traditional fans, who hadn’t responded all that well to either the shift the Hitchhiker’s series had made in So Long or his Dirk Gently books, a pair of similarly earthbound philosophical detective novels he wrote between the fourth and fifth Hitchhiker’s books. (Some will tell you, and not without justification, that the Dirk Gently books were actually the best things Adams ever wrote.) It was a problem that frustrated Adams throughout his career: he wasn’t quite coming from the same place as most of the people who read what he wrote. While his fan base was rooted in science fiction, Adams never thought of himself as a science-fiction writer, in spite of some accidentally prescient things that sneaked into Hitchhiker’s — the most notable of which was the eponymous electronic guidebook itself, which is essentially Wikipedia running on a tablet, right down to the somewhat questionable veracity of much of what it offers and its editors’ somewhat, shall we say, idiosyncratic priorities.

Here’s what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.

It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

The Guide also tells you on which planets the best Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters are mixed, how much you can expect to pay for one and what voluntary organizations exist to help you rehabilitate afterward. The Guide even tells you how you can mix one yourself…

Cue up the recipes, etc., etc. Earth, meanwhile, is dismissed in another of those jokes we never need to hear again as “mostly harmless.” Similarly, and as described in a recent MIT Technology Review article, Wikipedia lavishes more care on its “List of Pornographic Actresses by Decade” than on some entire countries.

Still, Adams himself noted that “saying I write science fiction is like saying the Pythons make historical movies.” He always thought of himself as a comedy writer who happened to play in a science-fictional setting rather than a science-fiction writer whose work happened to be funny. Being a voracious reader in general, he had read his share of science fiction before creating Hitchhiker’s, but he wasn’t particularly obsessed with the stuff. Certainly his opinions of some of the icons of the field were hardly glowing. He said he “wouldn’t employ Isaac Asimov to write junk mail.” Arthur C. Clarke fared only a little better: he was “a little dull perhaps.” The only two science-fiction authors he spoke of in consistently glowing terms were Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Sheckley. These are also two of the relatively small stable of science-fiction writers who are genuinely, consistently funny, which perhaps shows where Adams’s priorities really lay. When Adams’s agent started booking him for science-fiction conventions in the first blush of Hitchhiker’s success, he was discomfited by the places, and soon asked to stick with traditional bookstore signings. His favorite writer was someone that most of the people who attended those conventions had probably never heard of: the great British wit, satirist, and societal deconstructor par excellence P.G. Wodehouse.

When others — and there have been tons of them, including heaps and heaps writing not books but games — try to write in the “comedy science fiction” genre Adams virtually invented, they tend to get the surface trappings but miss the Wodehousian wit and wisdom that underlie them. Thus you end up with, well, a collection of intermittently amusing gags and goofy aliens. You end up, in other words, with Space Quest. Infocom, however, had the luxury of working with Adams himself on their adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which led to something rather more interesting than most of the ludic works in this genre. Having bored and possibly inflamed you with my opinions, next time I’ll come down more on the side of facts as we look at how that most storied of Infocom collaborations came to be.

(Of the three extant Douglas Adams biographies, Neil Gaiman’s Don’t Panic is the most readable and M.J. Simpson’s Hitchhiker the most factually rigorous. The official biography can’t really be recommended on either count.

In addition to the biographies, I drew information for this article and those that follow from the April 1985 Compute!’s Gazette, the April/May 1985 Commodore Power Play, the April 1985 Electronic Games, and, most valuable of all, an interview a pre-Infocom Adams gave to the October 1982 issue of Your Computer. The image that begins this article was taken from the April 1985 Electronic Games.)

Comments
35 Responses

- David Boddie

November 11, 2013 at 8:54 pm

It looks like someone has helpfully uploaded his Hyperland documentary to YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOsPKjbMvxY&list=PL4D736D136E07009A

- Ian Schmidt

November 12, 2013 at 4:59 am

As one of probably many people who hated the Python movies because I’d heard every remotely good line about 5 billion times before I had a chance to see them, I’m just glad I read most of Adams’ books as they came out, before they fell into the same sort of black hole.

And yeah, strong arguments can be made for Dirk Gently being his best, or at least most coherent, work.

- Felix

November 12, 2013 at 6:58 am

I think you’re being too harsh about what fans took from Douglas Adams’ work. “42” for example is an important concept, basically the modern version of Zen’s “mu” — “the question is wrong”. In fact, Douglas Adams himself was too dismissive of fans finding hidden meaning in his work. His famous line, “I may be a sad person, but I don’t make jokes in base 13”, is telling. We all find hidden meaning in books all the time that the author didn’t intend — that’s because we attach meaning to the Universe in general; it doesn’t have any by itself. (That, incidentally, is why authors shouldn’t try to intentionally put hidden meaning in their books; it doesn’t work that way and it’s pointless in the first place since readers will miss it and find their own instead.)

Remember, tropes are not cliches, and not a bad thing in and of themselves. ;)

- Jimmy Maher

November 12, 2013 at 7:29 am

Oh, I don’t disagree at all that the whole story of Deep Thought and the Ultimate Question is possibly one of the smartest, wisest bits in all of Hitchhiker’s.

The problem I have is that 99% of the people who deploy “42” aren’t engaging with any of that at all. They’re just plastering “42” everywhere as some marker of nerdy inclusion. That’s not witty or droll and certainly not original in the least. It’s just kind of tedious. If you have something to SAY about the Ultimate Question or its Answer, by all means go ahead. But otherwise… just stop. Please.

Adams was always uncomfortable with his most rabid fans, partly because, as related in the article, he was kind of coming from a different place than most of them. But also because having someone worship the ground you walk on is just kind of weird in general. (I’ve had one or two come along like that since I started this blog, and I never quite know how to tell them that, hey, I’m just this guy, you know? I can only imagine how it must have been for Adams.) Also, so many of these fans just wanted more Hitchhiker’s and more 42 jokes when he really wanted to try something else. I think it’s to his credit that he was unfailingly polite to them in his public appearances, if not always bubbling over with warmth.

- Captain N

March 22, 2018 at 7:49 pm

I get what the author is trying to say. Adams wasn’t really a “geek” in the sense that most geeky geeks are. I would say that he wasn’t really a geek at all, anymore than Vonnegut was.

I’m at the point in my life where I’m kind of sick of fanboy wanking, either in myself or others.
Good example, I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve read a journalistic article about space where the author just feels that he needs to remind you that “Space is big…really big…if fact you won’t believe…ect,ect!” If I see that again in one more article about space, I will…

- Helm

November 13, 2013 at 2:13 am

What is a trope but a cliche once it’s identified as a trope and surfaced in an ‘archive of tropes’?

No other disagreements with your post, just this question that doesn’t need an answer.

- @redpola

November 12, 2013 at 12:27 pm

“He was a genuinely good crafter of sentences” made me laugh out loud. Very clever. I hope it was an intentionally-terrible sentence! :)

- Jimmy Maher

November 12, 2013 at 12:51 pm

Unintentionally terrible I’m afraid… and now that you’ve publicly called me out for it I can’t even fix it. :( This whole article is pretty bad, actually. Maybe I should have followed my first instinct and just thrown it in the bin.

- Michael Davis

January 19, 2015 at 4:56 am

It feels awfully silly commenting on this over a year later, but for whatever it’s worth, I genuinely can’t tell what is terrible about the sentence. When taken literally, I can’t personally think of a way to say it better.

- Greg Cox

August 11, 2017 at 12:22 am

For what it’s worth, I’m glad you didn’t. I’d rather have your writing imperfect than non-existant.

- Duncan Stevens

November 12, 2013 at 1:49 pm

My first thought about Adams’s take on other SF authors was to wonder what he thought of Terry Pratchett, whose style is similar in a lot of ways, but as of 2000, at least, he hadn’t read anything by Pratchett.

http://slashdot.org/story/00/06/21/1217242/douglas-adams-answers-finally

- Jimmy Maher

November 12, 2013 at 2:38 pm

From what I know of Pratchett, which is much less than I probably should, I’d say his books aren’t so much about his fantasy world of Discworld, in the way that, say, George R.R. Martin writes about whatever his world’s called, as they are about us. In other words, maybe he’s another humorist and social commentator who just happens to use the trappings of fantasy and science fiction.

- matt w

November 12, 2013 at 5:20 pm

I sort of think Douglas Adams:Terry Pratchett::Raymond Chandler:Ross Macdonald. Both pairs are up to a lot of the same stuff, but where Adams and Chandler are more iconic Pratchett and Macdonald were more productive and, if more workmanlike, developed their worlds more. Discworld is a much more built-up world than Adams’s universe, and I think the same thing is true of Macdonald’s milieu as compared to Chandler’s (but I might not be able to defend that).

Anyway I’d definitely say that from the Pratchett I’ve read you’re right that he’s writing about our world. There’s a Discworld novel parodying Australia, another about the postal service, and the first part of the very first Discworld book is about the destructive force of introducing insurance policies and economics to a fantasy world, not to mention tourism.

- Keith Palmer

November 12, 2013 at 9:43 pm

So far as comparisons to Adams’s work go, I’ve long held in my mind a comment made by Graham Nelson in the Inform Designer’s Manual, “the radio series and novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the Three Men in a Boat of the 1970s”. In the context of the quote, though, I’d be just as willing to agree it’s comparing “cultural impact.”

- Jimmy Maher

November 12, 2013 at 10:52 pm

Clever, but not sure I can entirely agree if we are indeed not talking “cultural impact.” Three Men is just silly fun. Hitchhiker’s is silly, but does have some pretty profound things to say — or at least some wise/cogent observations to make. At risk of getting too grandiose, I’d actually be tempted to plump for Gulliver’s Travels myself.

- Duncan Stevens

November 13, 2013 at 3:34 pm

There’s definitely plenty of social commentary in Pratchett’s novels, though Pratchett also spends a fair amount of time parodying fantasy itself; I wouldn’t call Adams a parodist. (Maybe a satirist? It’s pretty scattershot satire.)

Martin’s books aren’t parody, nor are they social commentary except in a very indirect sense, I believe he’s said that one thing he intended to do with his novels–which are very loosely based on the Wars of the Roses–was to show how horrible medieval warfare was for pretty much everyone involved, and for women in particular. You could take them as a critique of medieval-ish fantasy stories that tend to gloss over the seamier aspects of medieval life; man, does Martin dwell on the seamy.

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- Nick

November 14, 2013 at 1:15 am

Way to suck the life out of some comedic works. Thankfully, regardless of Adam’s message(s), he was and still is far more amusing and pertinent than this pontification.

- Jimmy Maher

November 14, 2013 at 9:25 am

It’s not a very good article, is it?

Although on rereading it I must say that it is kind of impressive of me to manage to shoehorn every one of my worst traits as a writer into a single article…

- Anthony

November 16, 2013 at 7:44 pm

You’re too hard on yourself. I suspect it was difficult to summon the verve to write enthusiastic preliminary remarks about something that’s been flogged to death like Hitchhiker’s has — even though it’s something seminal and something you love. Tricky.

- Peter Smith

August 21, 2014 at 6:26 pm

I actually think this article is quite sharply written and perceptive, for what it’s worth.

- Peter Piers

October 14, 2015 at 6:17 pm

Same here. Don’t knock yourself too hard. I quite enjoyed the article.

- Mike Taylor

March 13, 2018 at 11:55 pm

Agree.

- ZUrlocker

November 14, 2013 at 7:20 am

I read HHGG and the follow-ons when I was in college just a few years after they were first issued in paperback. Adams’ had a comic style that was powerfully funny but also unique in its social commentary.

“This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

However, as once was said, dissecting humor is like dissecting a frog –few people are interested in it and the frog dies. Still you can’t blame Adams for his rabid fans or the myriad of derivative works.

- DJ Hastings

November 19, 2013 at 8:42 pm

When I started read your comments on Adams’ unique style, I immediately thought of the “much the same way that bricks don’t” line. That one really stood out to me when I first read the books. (Sadly, being a teenager at the time, I then went around repeating the line to everyone who would listen.)

- Martin

June 26, 2016 at 3:15 am

Yay! Finally found one!

There Adams lets him fall him love.

Maybe some strange loving is going down but probably a typo.

- Jimmy Maher

June 26, 2016 at 8:26 am

Thanks!

- Mike Taylor

September 28, 2017 at 10:24 am

Glad to find someone who shares my love for the chronically under-rated 4th book. I think it suffered only because people were expecting More Of The Same and got something so radically different. Perhaps SLATFATF didn’t really belong in the Hitch-Hiker series, but it was a fine book in its own right.

I do very much enjoy the Ford Prefect sections of Mostly Harmless, though: all that jumping out of windows and stealing identity cards. Very funny, and very Adams.

- Nathanael

March 6, 2021 at 7:37 am

Oh, there’s a lot of us out here whose favorite is So Long, and Thanks for All The Fish.

I suppose we’re romantics at heart.

I first read it on original publication as an elementary-schooler. It was *unexpected*, given the first three books, but it’s so *sweet*.

- Ben Bilgri

March 19, 2018 at 5:24 am

“Lewis Carroll” > “Lewis Carrol”

“Spaceballs” > “Space Balls”

And even though I’m more than four years late to the party, I’m glad this article is here. Not least because I used to be one of those insufferable teenagers. At least some of us got better.

- Jimmy Maher

March 19, 2018 at 10:11 am

Thanks!

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- Wolfeye M.

September 2, 2019 at 9:46 pm

Ok, I won’t mention “towels” or “42”.
Well, I just did, but I won’t discuss them further. I will, however, mention my favorite bit in all of the Hitchhiker books.
I can’t remember which book, or the exact wording, but it’s the part where Arthur figures out how to fly.

You just fall… and miss the ground.

- Ben

June 20, 2021 at 12:49 pm

Nietzschian -> Nietzschean

also two are of -> also two of

- Jimmy Maher

June 21, 2021 at 6:52 am

Thanks!

The Computerized Hitchhiker’s
November 14, 2013

Born in Cambridge, England, in 1952, Douglas Adams received a good public boarding-school education at Brentwood School before entering Cambridge University to read English in 1971. His dream, however, was not to become a scholar but to write and — and this is often overlooked — perform comedy like his hero, another ludicrously tall and ungainly-looking British comic named John Cleese. Thus Cambridge was attractive not so much because it was one of the two most storied universities in Britain but because it was the home of the almost equally legendary Footlights theatrical troupe, incubator of Cleese and the rest of his mates in Monty Python and, indeed, a whole generation of British comedy. Adams was eventually accepted by the Footlights, but came gradually over the course of several years to the disheartening realization that he was no John Cleese. He just wasn’t much good as a performer. His stage presence was awkward when not nonexistent, and he could never seem to suppress his big, goofy, good-natured laugh, which was literally infectious; it would suddenly ring out in the middle of a sketch, then quickly spread to his fellow players and derail the entire performance. His career in comedy, if he was to have one, would have to be made off the stage.

Adams, whose social gifts are legendary, managed to make the acquaintance of most of the members of Monty Python while still a starving student. After graduating in 1974, he did some writing for the truncated final season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and also had a couple of onscreen cameos that mark his swansong as a performer. Otherwise, however, his mid-1970s were largely a period of disappointment: an aborted television special that was to feature Ringo Starr (meeting whom must at least have been a huge thrill for Adams the rabid Beatles fan); various other failed or stillborn television specials and pilots; various disappointing stage revues. He was about ready to give it up, move to Hong Kong, and become, of all things, a ship broker, when BBC radio bit on his proposal for a science-fiction comedy serial called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The first of its six half-hour episodes, named by Adams “Fits” in homage to Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark,” premiered on March 8, 1978, with no promotion and in a truly horrid time slot: 10:30 PM on a Wednesday night.

Predictably enough, it pulled a 0.0 in audience share, which would seem to indicate that absolutely no one heard it and that it was destined for the same fate as all of Adams’s previous projects. But the rounding error in that figure was apparently a very vocal lot. Entirely due to word of mouth, ratings increased steadily with each additional episode, prompting the BBC to rerun the entire thing to yet better ratings just two weeks after “Fit the Sixth” concluded the serial. Hitchhiker’s was on its way to becoming a full-fledged phenomenon. Ironically, it happened just as Adams also sold a television script to Doctor Who (“The Pirate Planet”) and took the position of script editor for the series. Suddenly he went from knocking on doors to the heart of the BBC machine, with more work than he could handle; he lasted just a year with Doctor Who before it became clear that the smart move was to ride this Hitchhiker’s thing as far as it could take him.

And that, of course, turned out to be very far indeed. Although conceived before the film’s debut, Hitchhiker’s had the good fortune to premiere just after Star Wars made Britain, like the rest of the Western world, wild for anything science fiction. Adams soon found himself sitting at the nexus of an entire cottage industry, as Hitchhiker’s was adapted into seemingly every medium imaginable: novels (three of them in the initial rush); another six-episode radio serial; another audio version released as two double albums; a six-episode television serial; even theatrical performances. Adams was intimately involved with all of these variations and re-packagings, with the exception only of the plays.

It was, to say the least, a heady time in the life of the still very young Douglas Adams. His first Hitchhiker’s novel was published in October of 1979 and within a few weeks was the bestselling paperback in Britain. Suddenly he was a wealthy and even modestly famous man. He later colorfully described this period as “like having an orgasm with no foreplay.” It was even stranger because the role in which he would enjoy his biggest success, that of novelist, had never been anywhere on his career agenda, a fact which perhaps does a great deal to explain why he would struggle so mightily to actually, you know, write books in the years to follow. Initially a strictly British phenomenon, Hitchhiker’s spread to the United States as well within a year or two, when the books were picked up by Simon and Schuster’s Pocket imprint and PBS broadcast the television version. By 1982, when the third book debuted a bestseller, Hitchhiker’s was firmly ensconced as an institution in nerd culture on both sides of the Atlantic, a place it still occupies to this day. And it looked to have the potential of spreading well beyond the nerds: immediately after finishing the third book, Adams moved to Hollywood to begin working on the script for a Hitchhiker’s feature film to be produced by Ivan Reitman of Animal House fame.

Hitchhiker’s wasn’t the only novelty in nerd culture of the early 1980s. There was also the computer, and computer games. These two things inevitably came together quite early. In 1981, a British civil servant named Bob Chappell decided he’d like to write a text adventure based on Hitchhiker’s for his Commodore PET. He wrote to Adams’s British publisher, Pan Books, to ask permission. With little idea just what he was really on about, they said sure, as long as Pan and Adams himself were properly acknowledged. Chappell made his game, a simple treasure hunt which demanded you return five items to the “Five Artefacts Inn” to win; the parser which did the demanding was “Eddie, your faithful computer” from the novels. Chappell sold the game to software publisher Supersoft for “£500 worth of microchips and assorted programs.” However, the British software market was still in its infancy and the market for PET games — the PET being a fairly expensive machine used primarily for business — was a pretty small part of even that. Thus this original version of Hitchhiker’s made little impression, and seems never to have even been noticed by Adams himself or any of his immediate associates.

“Hitchhiker’s” on the BBC Micro

“Hitchhiker’s” on the Spectrum

Eighteen months later, the situation had changed dramatically. Not only was Hitchhiker’s more of a phenomenon than ever, but computer use was also exploding in Britain, with Clive Sinclair the toast of the nation. Supersoft decided to give the game another belated push, in new versions for the Commodore 64, Commodore VIC-20, and Dragon 32. Meanwhile, thanks to the original having been written in easy-to-modify BASIC, clones and variations were starting to pop up on other platforms. At least two companies attempted to sell their own versions: Computer Concepts made one for the BBC Micro, while Estuary Software Products made one for the Speccy and the Apple II.

Those completely unauthorized knockoffs, infringing as they did both on the intellectual property of Supersoft and that of Adams, were easy enough to head off. But the situation with the Supersoft version, thanks to that damned letter from Pan Books, was more complicated. It was pretty obvious to everyone in Adams’s camp that a computer game based on Hitchhiker’s was a natural, what with the demographic intersections at play between computer gamers and Hitchhiker’s fans, but the decision had been made to make any such project a tie-in to the big movie version of the story, for which Reitman and Columbia Pictures had just paid £200,000 and which everyone hoped might be released as early as 1984. “A legal storm is brewing,” announced the British weekly Popular Computing with gleeful anticipation in their April 21, 1983, issue. Sonny Mehta of Pan Books, the people who had created this mess in the first place, said they were “very concerned” about the game. Peter Calver of Supersoft insisted that they had all the permission they needed in that two-year-old letter.

As these things so often do, it all blew over rather anticlimactically. Within two weeks of pronouncing their defiance, Supersoft, apparently deciding it was best not to tangle legally with several companies hundreds or thousands of times bigger than they were, settled out of court, and agreed to remove all Hitchhiker’s references from the game. The game was renamed Cosmic Capers. “Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe” became “Colonel McWimpays, the Fastest Restaurant in the Galaxy”; “Vogons” became “Verrucans”; the “Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal” became the “Barbaric Binge Beast of Bongo”; the “Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster” became the “Burgunzian Shazam Shandy”; etc., etc. It wasn’t a particularly good game with or without the Hitchhiker’s license, and sank at last without leaving much of a trace. But still the game of Whack-a-Mole continued. Fantasy Software soon released a very thinly veiled Hitchhiker’s knock-off for the Spectrum called The Backpacker’s Guide to the Universe which at least had the virtue of being an original piece of code. Once again Adams’s lawyers sprung into action, and Fantasy was forced to re-release it as simply Backpacker and take out a series of advertisements in magazines saying that “Backpacker is in no way connected with the works of Douglas Adams.”

Douglas Adams was paying much more attention as all of this went down for the very good reason that he had himself become an avid computer user in the time since Pan had sent Chappell that troublesome letter. He had been a bit of a gadget freak since his photography classes back at Brentwood, where he found himself fascinated not so much with the art of photography as with the technology — the cameras themselves. Now that he could afford it, he filled his home with cameras, guitars (Adams was something of a frustrated would-be rock star who delighted in palling around with Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, and Paul McCartney’s band), and, of course, cars (he bought his first Porsche with the advance for the first Hitchhiker’s novel and just kept going from there). Computers, when he discovered them, were a natural progression. As with Michael Crichton, another author turned computer enthusiast, his first tentative steps came in the form of a standalone word processor. He’d soon replaced it with a real computer, a DEC Rainbow. Many, many more would follow. More so than even Crichton, for whom hacking was apparently something of a passing phase, Adams would remain a noted computer enthusiast and popularizer for the rest of his life.

Which brings us to Infocom. The story of how Douglas Adams ended up working with them is still somewhat murky. What follows is my best reconstruction of events from the many and occasionally contradictory available sources.

Adams discovered Infocom very soon after he discovered computers. He ended up buying several of their games, developing a particular fascination with Mike Berlyn’s Suspended. He found them a great aid to “not writing” during days in his study; not, as Infocom would soon learn, that he needed much help in that area. One day on a press junket of some sort or another he started discussing computer games with an executive from his American publisher, Simon & Schuster. He said he was rather nonplussed as a whole with what he’d seen, with the exception of this one company, Infocom. Without saying anything more about it to Adams himself, the executive interpreted Adams’s admiration to indicate that he would likely be willing to make a computer version of Hitchhiker’s in partnership with them.

Soon after, Simon & Schuster began to reach out to Infocom with an eye to possibly acquiring them. Whether there is, to borrow from the eventual Infocom Hitchhiker’s game, any causal relationship between these two events is not clear to me; Infocom may already have been on Simon & Schuster’s agenda. What is clear, however, is that Simon & Schuster took Adams’s alleged interest to Infocom when they did reach out, adding the Hitchhiker’s franchise to Star Trek on the list of things they could do for them. It was a tempting proposition indeed. In Mike Dornbrook’s words: “We were interested in both of these things, and we actually had a fairly intense internal debate because we didn’t think we could do both at once.” Then word reached Adams through the grapevine that Simon & Schuster was “dangling him like a carrot” before Infocom. A very unhappy Adams let Simon & Schuster know in no uncertain terms that there was a big gap between an expression of admiration for someone and a proposal of marriage. Adams being the cash cow he was, Simon & Schuster had to keep him happy. They thus had no choice but to go back to Infocom and sheepishly say that, well, the Hitchhiker’s thing might not be such a done deal after all. But hey, there was still Star Trek! The dance between the two companies then continued for many more months.

But Adams was actually not hostile at all to the idea of working with Infocom. He just didn’t like the way that Simon & Schuster had handled it. In fact, there was no legal reason that Simon & Schuster need be involved at all. Yes, they were Adams’s American publisher, but the franchise itself belonged to him, as evidenced by the fact that he had been able to sell the movie rights to Columbia rather than Paramount, who shared with Simon & Schuster the parent company of Gulf and Western. Speaking of that movie: it was starting to look like it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Douglas Adams the scriptwriter had proven underwhelming to Reitman and his colleagues. They said his script was too long, and wasn’t structured the way a three-act commercial blockbuster needed to be. Adams was digging in his heels on the requested changes, and, worst of all, Reitman and Adams mixed like oil and water — or a commercially-oriented Hollywood producer and a quirky British humorist. About the only qualities the two men seemed to share when together in a conference room were stubbornness and arrogance. And then there was Adams’s legendary gift for procrastination. As 1983 ground on and the script failed to progress, Reitman grew more and more infatuated with another far-out comedy that had crossed his desk, a little thing called Ghostbusters which was written by Dan Aykroyd, a Hollywood pro he knew how to deal with. By that autumn he had put Hitchhiker’s on the shelf, where it would linger for many years, much to Adams’s chagrin, to proceed full speed ahead with Ghostbusters. Adams returned to Britain a frustrated man, having just experienced his first real failure since selling that first Hitchhiker’s radio serial. With no need to wait for the movie to make a computer-game version, perhaps an Infocom Hitchhiker’s could serve as something of a consolation prize. After all, apart from film computer games represented about the only medium the franchise had not yet conquered (unauthorized or semi-authorized knockoffs excepted, of course).

Ed Victor, Adams’s agent, therefore contacted Infocom’s Mike Dornbrook through a mutual acquaintance, Christopher Cerf of the Children’s Television Workshop, a fellow who was clearly very interested in interactivity and shows it by continuing to show up as a supporting player to so many of the little dramas I write about in this blog. Dornbrook and Victor hammered out an agreement over the course of several meetings, with only limited input from Adams, who in the words of Dornbrook “would often be at the meetings, but would certainly defer to Ed on any business-related decisions.” Still, a creative problem soon surfaced that, much to Dornbrook’s chagrin, threatened to derail negotiations.

Douglas wanted to work with Marc [Blank] or Mike [Berlyn]. He was dead set on them, because they had written the games that he liked. He really liked Suspended, really wanted to work with Mike Berlyn. Mike Berlyn wanted nothing to do with a collaboration. I was saying, “Oh, my God! We’ve got Douglas Adams desperately wanting to write a game with us! He wants to do Hitchhiker’s with us! There’s no question whether this will be a success!” Who wouldn’t want to work with this incredibly creative guy? But no one wanted to do it.

Just glancing at their relative sales and statures as writers, it does indeed seem incredible that Berlyn would turn down such a career-making opportunity. But these were heady times at Infocom, which prompted many of the still young men who worked there to have a somewhat, shall we say, exaggerated sense of themselves. With the lukewarm, sour-atmosphered Infidel as evidence of the work Mike Berlyn did when pushed into a project he wasn’t enthusiastic about, Dornbrook knew he needed to a) find a new partner for Adams (which was more difficult than it ought to be; Berlyn’s wasn’t the only big ego in the place); and b) sell Adams on whichever Imp he could convince (also no trivial task, given that Adams was another guy flush with commercial success and critical praise who liked things his own way).

At the time, Steve Meretzky was just finishing up Sorcerer. For a next project, Infocom had planned to partner him with science-fiction writer Joe Haldemann on an adaptation of the latter’s 1977 novel All My Sins Remembered. With Haldemann spending a year as a visiting professor at nearby MIT, it seemed the perfect window of opportunity for what would have been Infocom’s first full-on foray into bookware. But Haldemann didn’t seem as enthusiastic as his agent had been, and the project stalled after one or two phone conversations between the two. With Meretzky thus left without an obvious next project, and with the Haldemann project as evidence that he — steady, reliable fellow that he was — would be willing to work as inevitable second fiddle to a name author where the other Imps weren’t, he was the obvious choice. And of course his first game, Planetfall, had been more than a little similar to Hitchhiker’s.

Indeed, Planetfall is so similar to Hitchhiker’s in tone as well as subject matter that most still assume it to have been an homage to Adams’s work from the start. In fact, however, Meretzky had not been aware of Hitchhiker’s at all when writing the game. It was the testers who first told him that, you know, this really feels like something by this guy named Douglas Adams. This prompted him to borrow cassettes of the original series from a friend. He loved them — loved them so much that he added a little tribute in the game, in the form of a towel with “Escape Pod #42” and “Don’t Panic!” stenciled on. That was perhaps a bad move in the long run, because it left many people with the impression that Meretzky had been aping Adams from the start, when it really was just a matter of the proverbial great minds thinking alike. At any rate, as Infocom’s resident comedy-science-fiction Imp Meretzky would seem to have been the natural choice for a partner for Adams from the start. Yet it actually took all of Dornbrook’s charm to sell him on the idea; Adams was apparently entirely unaware of Planetfall, or had dismissed it as yet another cheap knock-off of his work.

Once Adams agreed to Meretzky, the contract was quickly signed. It was quite an ambitious one. Adams and Infocom agreed to do not just one Hitchhiker’s game but six. Given the technical limitations under which Infocom labored, which limited every game to no more than a novella’s worth of total text, each game would cover half of one of the then-extant three Hitchhiker’s books. The deal was signed just as 1983 turned into 1984. The first game should be out in time for Christmas 1984, with another presumably following every year.

Technophile that he was, Adams was hugely excited by the project — probably more excited, in fact, than he was about writing a fourth Hitchhiker’s book, the contract for which he signed at about the same time. He was even briefly taken with the notion of learning ZIL and actually helping to program the game; Meretzky remembers Adams proudly pulling out a simple “3D Tic Tac Toe” game he had written in BASIC to show off his burgeoning programming chops at one of their first meetings. But given Adams’s schedule for the year — which included writing the aforementioned book as well as the game, while also needing to leave time for his many and varied social and recreational pursuits — cooler heads prevailed. In Meretzky’s words: “We’d do the design together, Douglas would write the most important text passages and I’d fill in around them, and I’d do the implementation, meaning the high-level programming using Infocom’s development system.” They would do most of the collaborating electronically using Dialcom, the world’s first commercial email provider, after they spent a week together in Cambridge to get things rolling.

Adams accordingly came to Infocom’s offices in February of 1984 to spend a week hammering out the basic structure of the game with Meretzky. He arrived with no fanfare whatsoever. Stu Galley:

I happened to be walking by the front door when he came in — unescorted, with no one there to welcome him. I had to ask who he was. When he told me, I said, “You probably want to go talk to Joel [Berez] or Marc.”

Looking beyond the obvious commercial attractions, Hitchhiker’s made a pretty great setting for a game. The Achilles heel of any novel-to-game adaptation is generally the plot, specifically the question of what to do when the player deviates from it. But, as Meretzky notes, Hitchhiker’s was more like a grab bag of “characters, locations, technologies, etc., while the story line wasn’t all that important.” Or even more flexibly, as Adams put it in a contemporary interview, “a set of approaches and attitudes, with a few rough ideas about characters.” At first, Meretzky admits that he was “awed” by Adams, while Adams was uncertain about interactivity and how to use it. Meretzky sees this as the explanation for the beginning of the game, which is very linear and quite slavishly follows the opening of the book. Later, however, after the player (as Arthur Dent) and Ford Prefect escape the Earth just as it is destroyed by the Vogons, the game blossoms into its own original, wildly nonlinear design, a reflection of Adams’s growing comfort with the medium and both men’s growing comfort with one another.

Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky, February 1984, with the first Mac Adams ever saw

It was also at Infocom that February that Adams began a love affair that would continue for the rest of his life. As part of his tour around their offices, the Imps took him to the loft above the main floor where the Micro Group kept dozens and dozens of different computers, practically a showroom of all of the significant — and most of the insignificant — microcomputers that were now being or in the recent past had been manufactured. The crown jewel of the collection was a pre-release version of the Apple Macintosh, sent by Apple so that Infocom could have their games on the new machine as quickly as possible. Adams was immediately entranced. He promptly went out to buy one for himself, to take back to Britain with him. He claimed until the end of his life, quite possibly rightly, that this machine was the first Macintosh ever to make it to British soil. By 1985, when he was profiled in MacWorld magazine and thus first began to become known as a zealot for this platform so known for zealotry, he owned three; by 1987, six. The passion never faded. Right up until his death in 2001 he could be found waxing lyrical on the Internet about his collection. By then he required an entire room just to store all his obsolete models. As for the latest models: he “just wanted to hug” them every time he turned them on, just like in the old days. Macs do strange things to some people. Having never caught the bug myself, I’ll say no more, but just get back to 1984.

As everyone at Infocom would learn all too well before the company wound up, counting on Adams to deliver anything on time — or at all, for that matter — was usually a fool’s game. It was typical of him to start a project with huge enthusiasm; thus things went pretty swimmingly over that first week in Cambridge. But once Adams returned to Britain Meretzky found it harder and harder to get any work out of him. He wasn’t the only one: Adams was supposed to be working on that fourth Hitchhiker’s book, also to be in stores in time for Christmas, and had yet to even begin. His various handlers encouraged him to get away from the distractions of a London chock full of far too many shiny objects. So he packed his Saab with books, files, and computers and checked into Huntsham Court, a tiny hotel in Devon. It didn’t help much. In ten weeks there he wrote not a page of the would-be book, although he did develop a new hobby of comparative champagne-shopping and generally enjoyed himself immensely.

In many ways the game was looking quite promising, but there were still huge gaps in the design to be filled. Infocom finally decided to get more confrontational — usually the only way to get any work at all out of Adams after his first blush of enthusiasm for any given thing had faded. In May, shortly after Adams had ensconced himself in his remarkably unproductive writer’s retreat, they sent Meretzky over to join him there for four days, under orders to finish the design at all costs. With the game needing to ship by October to join the Christmas rush and heaps of coding and testing needed before that could happen, it was either that, let Meretzky finish it alone (a bad move politically, especially considering that Infocom hoped to get five more games out of Adams after this one), or postpone it — which would likely mean cancellation in the long run, as it was unlikely that Adams would get any more interested in the future.

Douglas Adams on the beach at Exmoor National Park in May 1984, where he and Steve Meretzky finished the Hitchhiker’s design

Meretzky in person proved to have just the right touch; he managed to keep Adams “pretty focused” on the game despite also allowing time for some sightseeing and for enjoying the “opulent cuisine” of Huntsham Court. The two came up with the final puzzle on the last day of the visit on the beach at Exmoor National Park. Then Adams returned to not writing his book, while Meretzky jetted back to the United States for three more weeks of feverish implementing. By July the game was in the hands of the first testers in roughly complete form. In September Adams dropped by Infocom’s offices to work out answers to some final questions raised by the testing process, and that was that.

Until now we’ve been seeing Adams at his most exasperating. Certainly it’s true that he didn’t have to work that terribly hard to earn his co-authorship credit alongside Meretzky; at least 90% of the actual work that went into the game was the latter’s. Meretzky not only did all the programming but also wrote at least as much of the text as Adams. The latter mostly provided just the text for the direct path through the game, leaving Meretzky to deal with all of the side trips and the incorrect and crazy things the player might try as well as any of the boring bridging passages that Adams couldn’t be bothered about. For all the superficial similarities in their humor, the two men’s working habits could hardly have been more different. Meretzky was disciplined, organized, methodical, seemingly immune to writer’s block and artistic angst, a dream employee for any manager of creative types. Adams was… well, Adams was Adams. Suffice to say that the spaceship captain in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe who just can’t seem to will himself out of his bathtub for years at a stretch was based on Adams himself. Although he is unfailingly diplomatic when describing the experience today, Meretzky must have suffered greatly at being saddled to such a temperament. Yet it’s also true, as Meretzky freely admits, that that unique Douglas Adams sensibility was essential to making the game the off-kilter, vaguely subversive creation it became. Who else on the planet would have thought to make “no tea” and “a splitting headache” an inventory object? Who would have thought to make the game lie to you? Who would have thought to make the player’s random typo from dozens of moves ago an integral part of the story? Adams pushed Meretzky to, as Mike Dornbrook puts it, “break the rules” that he’d thought were inviolate.

If Infocom thought they’d had it bad working with Adams, they could rest assured that the book had proven to be an even more nerve-wracking project. Upon Adams’s return to London late that summer with exactly no progress to show for his ten-week writer’s retreat, a desperate Sonny Mehta of Pan Books moved into a hotel suite with him for two weeks, during which he literally stood over him and forced him to write the book. Thanks to a subsequent mad scramble by both his British and American publishers it arrived in stores slightly ahead of the game. Unsurprisingly given its gestation, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is both shorter than and in most people’s opinion worse than its three predecessors. But as for myself: as I wrote in my previous article, I find the book a refreshing change from its predecessors. Go figure.

Having seen Adams at his worst, if not quite his truly infuriating worst, Infocom would now get the opportunity to see him at his best, to learn why so many people adored the guy even as he continually made their lives hell by not doing what he promised to do. Shortly after Adams’s last visit to Infocom that September, Marc Blank and Mike Dornbrook flew to London to plan the game’s promotional strategy. They had over a week there, which they expected to be largely filled with waiting for a few productive meetings with Adams and his people. They didn’t know Adams that well. He loved nothing better than to play the host and entertainer, and with book and game now both complete he could do so without guilt. He and his girlfriend (later wife) Jane Belson filled “almost every waking hour” the pair spent in London, and charmed the hell out of them in the process. Dornbrook:

We’d drive past a building and he would start telling a story. Now, he knew a lot about English history — but the thing was, Jane knew a lot more! Douglas tended to know the commonly accepted story, but she would know what the latest interpretation of that was. Just driving around the city and hearing all this history, and in a very classy, intellectual way, arguing over the history — it was just amazing.

But most amazing of all were the evenings. On his own Adams was already “probably the most interesting dinner companion you could have,” one of the great raconteurs of his time. Despite his reputation as a funnyman, he wasn’t a joke-a-minute kind of guy at all. What he was was deeply interested in and knowledgeable about all sorts of topics, from the universal to the esoteric, with lots of interesting thoughts of his own but also with a willingness to truly listen to and consider those of others. And then there was his guest list. Adams had taken advantage of the fame and fortune Hitchhiker’s had brought him to make the acquaintance of a dizzying cross-section of cultural, technical, and scientific movers and shakers: names like Alan Kay, Salman Rushdie, Bill Gates, David Gilmour. Evenings in Adams’s drawing room were like evenings spent in a classic Paris salon, or, as Mike Dornbrook put it, a visit to a Hollywood movie of the 1930s: “sparkling conversation by very interesting people talking about interesting subjects,” with wine to die for.

One evening Blank and Dornbrook found themselves breaking bread with Alan Coren (editor of Punch magazine), Terry Jones (of Monty Python), and Clive Sinclair in addition to Douglas and Jane. That dinner party, still remembered by Dornbrook as one of the most amazing evenings of his life, would also make its way into the British tabloid press. Adams had just that day received from Pan Books the very first copy of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. The press, for whom Sinclair could still pretty much do no wrong at this stage, would later report that Uncle Clive had insisted that he be allowed to buy it for a huge donation to charity. That account wasn’t precisely wrong, but the details were perhaps a bit more grubby than it might imply.

Adams was proudly showing the book to his guests when Sinclair, who was possessed of loads of imperiousness but very little social empathy, announced that he would like to have the book, to give to his son for his birthday. Adams, rather taken aback, said that he’d be happy to get another copy to him tomorrow, but this one was quite special to him, etc. Whereupon Sinclair offered “£1000 to the charity of your choice!” On the spot and very aware, as always, of his duties as host, Adams cheekily said fine, his choice would be Greenpeace — just about the last charity in the world to which Sinclair, arch-Tory and bosom buddy of Margaret Thatcher, would happily give money. But Sinclair agreed, and poor Adams saw his precious heirloom vanish into Sir Clive’s satchel.

Later in the evening Sinclair tangled with the less accommodating Marc Blank on one of those topics guaranteed to ruffle feathers in any mixed company: evolution. When Sinclair declared that natural selection was not sufficient to explain everything, Blank told him, at first politely but then increasingly less so, that he didn’t understand what he was talking about, and that he, Blank, with a degree in biology and training as a medical doctor, was better qualified to judge. The argument raged for the rest of the evening, while Douglas and Jane fruitlessly tried to change the subject. Later, Blank and Sinclair shared a cab ride home, with poor Dornbrook sitting uncomfortably between them in the “stony silence.” The two would never meet or speak again.

It’s possible that this argument may have had far-reaching consequences for Adams himself. He may have played the tolerant host at that dinner party, but he listened to the conversation keenly. Later in his life, after he became friends with Richard Dawkins, he himself became a noted (not to say strident) advocate for evolution. His biographer M.J. Simpson speculates that his interest in the topic may date from this evening. If so, two of the defining obsessions of Adams’s later life — his advocacy for evolution and his advocacy for the Macintosh — stem from his relatively few direct interactions with Infocom. (Which is not, of course, to say that he wouldn’t have discovered his interest in either by some other medium had he never come into contact with the Imps at all.)

Steve Meretzky introduces the Infocom Hitchhiker’s to a packed room inside Rockefeller Center

Poor Steve Meretzky, the one who had done most of the actual work on the Hitchhiker’s game, didn’t get to experience the Douglas Adams Salon. He was back in Cambridge at the time, swatting the final bugs and prepping the game for release. At least he got a pretty nice consolation prize. Late in October, Adams came over to begin a publicity junket to promote his new book and game. It kicked off with a joint press conference with Meretzky and Infocom at Rockefeller Center, done just like the big boys in entertainment did it. The usual computer-trade-press suspects were almost lost amidst all of the mainstream-media reporters from places like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and even Playboy. Meretzky, barely two years removed from a career as a construction manager, got to stand at the podium in suit and “Don’t Panic!” button and trade jokes and repartee with Douglas Adams while the flash bulbs went off around them. (“I want you to know that I really enjoyed working on this game,” said Adams, “and I’m not just saying that because I’m trying to sell it. That’s only 90% of the reason.”) They were a good match physically as well as creatively; at 6’4″, Meretzky was about the only person from Infocom who could stand next to the 6’5″ Adams without looking like a dwarf. After the press conference the two jetted off to charm press and customers at the Las Vegas Comdex show and in Silicon Valley. Meretzky found it all very exciting, but found Adams’s now long-established press-conference schtick rather exhausting in time; he told the biscuit story from So Long using the exact same words at virtually every stop. He even told it during his somewhat awkward appearance on Late Night with David Letterman; Dave clearly had no real idea what Hitchhiker’s was, and a clearly nervous Adams rather flubbed the punch line. On the bright side, Infocom did at least get the most cursory of plugs on national television, when Letterman, rattling off the standard canned spiel about extant Hitchhiker’s incarnations, mentioned that it was now “even computer software.”

For Infocom, whose corporate rise had been almost as meteoric as Meretzky’s personal rise, this was truly the top of the mountain. Even as Hitchhiker’s soared to the top of the bestseller charts they were being wined and dined by Richard E. Snyder of Simon & Schuster in his private boardroom. Just a week after the Hitchhiker’s shindig in Rockefeller Center they hosted their second (and, as it would turn out, final) big press conference there, to announce their forthcoming database manager Cornerstone. Their booth at that Comdex, where they passed out thousands of free “Don’t Panic!” buttons to all and sundry, was amongst the most frequented and discussed at the show. They got their name onto National Public Radio stations around the country when they sponsored the first Stateside airing in years of the original Hitchhiker’s radio serials. They had truly arrived, and on multiple fronts at that.

Mike Berlyn clowning around on the Infocom assembly line, November 1984

The Hitchhiker’s game itself was the biggest hit Infocom had ever had, just as Dornbrook had known it would be. They literally couldn’t make them fast enough to meet demand that Christmas. As Meretzky himself recounted in an article for The New Zork Times, Infocom had to take desperate measures. They leased some more warehouse space just to have someplace to put the avalanche of feelies, boxes, manuals, and diskettes coming in for assembly. Ernie Brogmus, Infocom’s production manager, came to Meretzky to ask if he could organize some help from his white-collar colleagues inside the Wheeler Street offices. That evening Meretzky put a sign-up form on the office billboard for twenty volunteers to come to the assembly plant for a seven-hour shift that Sunday. When he arrived the office next morning at 9:30 there were thirty-five names on it. Forty people actually showed up. Soon Infocom organized a Saturday shift as well as evening shifts: “They were turning up with husbands and wives and mothers and sisters and brothers and friends.” Thanks to such dedication and camaraderie, Infocom in November of 1984 shipped more product than in any month before or after: 62,000 games, 6000 promotional “Sampler Packs,” and 21,000 InvisiClues hint books.

Hithchhiker’s went on to sell almost 300,000 units, over 200,000 of them in its first year, to become Infocom’s all-time second biggest seller, behind only Zork I, the game that had gotten it all started. Reviews were uniformly stellar. About the only grumbling came from some of Adams’s original British fans, who complained at his decision to work with an American company and at the fact that the game was never made available for the biggest home computer in Britain, the Sinclair Spectrum. “He’s putting the boot into his own fans, the British computer industry, and for all he cares the country itself,” wrote one particularly exercised ex-fan in Popular Computing. In Adams and Infocom’s defense, Sinclair’s decision not to produce a disk drive for the Spectrum made it impractical to port Infocom games to the platform. Publishers like Level 9 serving the thriving British adventure market were also a bit stung by the rejection, but to their credit largely seem to have taken it as motivation to improve rather than grounds for sulking.

Hitchhiker’s is not only of huge commercial and historical importance to Infocom and the adventure game; it’s also of huge artistic interest, with sections that almost feel like a deconstruction of the traditional text adventure. Accordingly, and having now given you the historic and commercial context, I think we should look at the game itself in some detail. Besides, it’s a fun one to write about, full of bits just screaming out for annotation. So, we’ll make that the next item on the agenda.

(The most detailed history of Adams’s relationship with Infocom from his standpoint is found in M.J. Simpson’s biography Hitchhiker. For the perspective from within Infocom, Jason Scott’s Get Lamp materials were, as usual, key. Also very useful were the April 1985 Compute!’s Gazette, the April/May 1985 Commodore Power Play, the April 1985 Electronic Games, the October 1982 Your Computer, and issues of Popular Computing from April 21, 1983; May 12, 1983; January 17, 1985; and March 28, 1985. And of course Infocom’s own New Zork Times newsletters from around the period. Oh, and thanks to Steve Meretzky for clearing up a question or two via email.)

Comments
29 Responses

- Anonymous

November 14, 2013 at 3:43 pm

“Five Artefacts [sic] Inn”
As far as I’m aware, “artefact” is a legitimate alternative spelling. I think it’s more common in Britain than America.

Great article, as usual. Thanks for writing.

- iPadCary

November 14, 2013 at 3:55 pm

Yeah, and those dummies spell color with a “u”.
They invented the darn language & they can’t even talk it right!

- Jimmy Maher

November 15, 2013 at 6:00 am

Dictionary.com agrees with you that “artefact” is a valid spelling, which is good enough for me. Thanks!

- iPadCary

November 14, 2013 at 3:53 pm

To see these pics of Meretzky & DNA, and knowing the first
Macintosh this legend ever set eyes on is a boxmac —
a MacPlus, I’ll wager — shown to him by no less a legend himself!

I swear I’d give a vital organ to return to those heady days of the Golden Age of Infocom, when the world trembled at the sound of our rock- ….
Sorry.

- Keith Palmer

November 14, 2013 at 11:05 pm

In 1984 I’d suppose the computer to be one of the original suffix-less Macintoshes, with its infamous 128 K of memory. (Adams is quoted in Steven Levy’s Insanely Great as to the difficulties of the early adopters, in love not with the computer itself “but a romantic idea of the machine.”) Having been pedantic, I should also admit to having “the bug” myself, acquiring not that many years ago a Plus with most of the original packaging and manuals of the 512K it had started as.

I suppose I’m more amused by the thought of that minimally authorized “early Hitchhiker’s,” which I’d known about before now, than I perhaps should be. I’d also known of the plans of a sequel to the Infocom game, but not just how many the contract was for. As much as I’m anticipating the discussion of the game itself, the story of its making is interesting and impressive in detail in its own right.

- Felix

November 14, 2013 at 5:14 pm

You know, I’ve had writer’s block (and programmer’s block), people I couldn’t work with — creatively or otherwise — and I’m overly infatuated with my work on top of that. Reading this story, however, I can’t help but wonder how people like Mike Berlyn or Douglas Adams ever got anything done at all.

Your beautiful wife once told me that I’m unusually easy-going. To me, it just seems that most other people are unusually picky… :)

- Lisa

November 14, 2013 at 9:32 pm

“He’s putting the boot into his own fans, the British computer industry, and for all he cares the country itself,” wrote one particularly exercised ex-fan in Popular Computing.

Did you maybe mean “incensed”?

- Jimmy Maher

November 15, 2013 at 5:57 am

While “incensed” would work, I believe that “exercised” also works here. It’s not a super common usage, but means excited, interested, engaged, etc.

- Victor Gijsbers

November 14, 2013 at 10:57 pm

Rushdie’s first name is Salman, not Salmon. :-)

- Jimmy Maher

November 15, 2013 at 5:55 am

Thanks! Must have had dinner on my mind. :)

- matt w

November 17, 2013 at 12:14 am

Or the Salmon of Doubt, perhaps?

- Andrew

November 15, 2013 at 12:09 pm

Fascinating stuff. Also, props for the Table of Contents feature. Handy!

- Dusty

November 15, 2013 at 5:59 pm

Yes, thanks for the Table of Contents. I’ve wanted a way to read through the blog in order and look up particular articles easily for a long time. I’ve read through twice already, as I’ve said before, since my late father was a computer scientist (so we had an Apple ][e in the house from 1983 and I was always one of the few kids in my class to have a computer of some kind until high school) and as a young boy growing in the 80s, I remember some of this (like Wizard and the Princess), and enjoy seeing the insight into the culture my father lived in when he was young and that I saw in his computer science department at the local university.

- Howard Lewis Ship

November 16, 2013 at 6:16 pm

I think you meant “treasure hunt” not “treasure hint”.

- Jimmy Maher

November 16, 2013 at 6:29 pm

Thanks!

- John G

November 22, 2013 at 4:15 am

Speaking as someone who unsuccessfully tried to get a book agent interested in a history of computer games (“too niche,” he told me)…the work you’re doing here is so great.

Oh the lost romance of Infocom! Reading this, I’d rather go back in time to be on the scene with the Dornbeast and Adams at the Rockefeller Center in 1985 than with Bogart and Bacall in ’45.

- Phil

December 26, 2015 at 10:42 pm

“Poor Steve Meretzky, the one who done most of the actual work on the Hitchhiker’s game,”

This should be “who had done”.

- Jimmy Maher

December 28, 2015 at 6:01 pm

Thanks!

- NPC

May 26, 2016 at 2:25 pm

Available to play online
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN2PLZG/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-game-30th-anniversary-edition

- Steve

April 14, 2017 at 1:12 am

Despite his reputation as a funneyman,

…should be “funnyman”?

- Jimmy Maher

April 14, 2017 at 7:08 am

Thanks!

- Mike Taylor

September 21, 2017 at 3:42 pm

I am impressed at your readers’ pedantry :-)

- The Paranoid Mandroid

January 20, 2018 at 11:29 pm

Insistence upon clear, correct English is ‘pedantry’ ?

To paraphrase Adams, ‘This must be some new definition of ‘pedantry’ with which I was not previously

- Joe Pranevich

March 19, 2018 at 5:36 am

I’ve been digging into the 1981 Hitchhiker’s game and… I’m not entirely sold on this timeline. Having played it, I can tell you that while it uses names and locations from the Hitchhiker’s series, it does so often without consideration to what those places actually are or mean in the context of the series.

It’s a bit difficult to describe this without getting too deep into details of the game that no one is interested in, but neither the treasure-hunt quest, nor any of the setting comes from the book. Sure, they call the planets Betelgeuse and Krakafoon, but neither of those resemble their literary counterparts. There’s a bar called Milliways, but it’s just a bar on Betelgeuse. There’s a Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, but it might as well be a hungry dog. There’s a Great Green Arkelseizure, but he’s just a guy you have to get drunk. There is also a ton of name-dropping for room descriptions such as the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation or Megadodo Publishing, but nearly no solution to any puzzle in the game is informed by the books themselves. (The two exceptions are that you buy a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster with a cheque signed by Zaphod Beeblebrox and there is a puzzle that you need a Babelfish to understand what a character is saying in an alien tongue, but that is pretty much it.)

That complaining aside, it’s not actually a terrible game. The parser sucks and most puzzles are solved by either carrying the right object when you enter a room or dropping it when you arrive, but that’s not atypical for the era. I needed a few hints to solve it.

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- Lhexa

April 24, 2021 at 5:05 pm

Douglas Adams wrote a foundational story… and then it turned out his true passion lay in socializing, like Oscar Wilde. It’s so strange.

- Ben

June 23, 2021 at 6:58 pm

ludicriously -> ludicrously

Mereztky -> Meretzky (twice)

- Jimmy Maher

June 25, 2021 at 5:18 am

Thanks!

Hitchhiking the Galaxy Infocom-Style
November 19, 2013

Given that Hitchhiker’s is both one of the most commercially successful text adventures ever released and one that oozes with interesting things to talk about, I thought I would look at the experience in more detail than I have any Infocom game in quite some time. As we’ll see, Hitchhiker’s is not least interesting in that it manages to represent both a step forward and a step back for Infocom and the art of interactive fiction. What follows is a sort of guided tour of the game.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Hitchhiker’s for any original player began long before she put the disk in the drive. It began with the box and its contents. The Hitchhiker’s package is one of the most storied of all from this company that became so famous for their rich packages. It’s bursting with stuff, most of it irrelevant to the actual contents of the disk but all of it fun: an advertising brochure for the titular guidebook;[1]“As seen on Tri-D!”[2]Easily mistaken for an empty plastic baggie.[3]They turn opaque when danger is at hand to avoid upsetting your delicate sensibilities. The ones in the game package are, naturally, made of black construction paper.[4]These were manufactured in huge quantities and given away for some time at trade shows and the like as well as being inserted into game boxes.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.hated the gibbering green planet,[5]Or whatever it’s supposed to be.allowing to buy them at just this time and thus preferred to remain on good terms with, had asked with some urgency that it be there. By the time Adams saw the box there wasn’t really time to change it anyway. And so the planet — and I have to agree with him that it’s pretty hideous — remained.

The game proper begins just where the books and the smorgasbord of other variations of Hitchhiker’s did: with you as Arthur Dent waking up hungover in bed on what is going to be “the worst day of your life.” You immediately get a couple of clues that this is not going to be your typical Infocom game. The first command you must enter is “TURN ON LIGHT,” a typical enough action to take upon waking up in a dark bedroom, perhaps, but one that could momentarily stump a seasoned adventurer, so accustomed to living in an object-oriented world where she can only interact with what the game tells her exists around her; the game, you see, never mentions the presence of a light switch or a light. Hitchhiker’s will continue to occasionally accept or demand inputs that you, the Seasoned Adventurer, just don’t expect to work. And then when you dutifully check your starting inventory, you learn that you have “no tea” and “a splitting headache.” Such mixing of the physical and the metaphysical amongst your possessions will also remain an ongoing theme.

Especially if you’re at all familiar with any of the other Hitchhiker’s manifestations, you probably won’t have too many problems getting out of the house and lying in front of Mr. Prosser’s bulldozer to stop (for the moment) the destruction of your house to make room for a new bypass. If you do misjudge things and get yourself killed, you get an early introduction to another of the game’s throughgoing traits: the narrator, or the computerized “game master” if you will, has a voice and personality all his own. Playing Hitchhiker’s is like having a conversation — often an infuriating one — with him.

>stand
The bulldozer driver gives a quick chew of his gum and slams in the clutch. The bulldozer piles into the side of your home.

Your home collapses in a cloud of dust, and a stray flying brick hits you squarely on the back of the head. You try to think of some suitable last words, but what with the confusion of the moment and the spinning of your head, you are unable to compose anything pithy and expire in silence.

>s
You keep out of this, you're dead. An ambulance arrives.

>don't panic
You keep out of this, you're dead and should be concentrating on developing a good firm rigor mortis. You are put in the ambulance, which drives away.

>pray
For a dead person you are talking too much. As the ambulance reaches the mortuary a fleet of Vogon Constructor ships unexpectedly arrives and demolishes the Earth to make way for a new hyperspace bypass.

We are about to give you your score. Put on your peril-sensitive sunglasses now. (Hit RETURN or ENTER when ready.) >

The narrator doesn’t just tell you what’s happening. He chats with you, messes with you, has fun at your expense, occasionally lies to you. This isn’t precisely new ground for Infocom; their games going back to Zork I had occasionally broken from being the neutral voice of the simulation to offer quips and funny responses. But it’s much, much more pronounced here, an integral part of the experience instead of just the odd response to the occasional misguided or intentionally bizarre input. A similar smart-alecky narrative voice was par for the course with other versions of Hitchhiker’s and, indeed, kind of Adams’s default persona as a writer. Certainly anyone who’s ever read a Dickens novel knows that a second- or third-person voice doesn’t mean the narrator isn’t a character in the work. But seeing it here… well, that feels significant for anyone who’d like to see interactive fiction as a defensible literary form. Chalk that up as a big step forward.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.refuse the towel to force Ford to actually notice your situation and come to the snap decision to take you with him.[6]Ford Prefect’s name, by the way, is one of the subtler jokes in Hitchhiker’s, and one that was entirely lost on American readers. The Ford Prefect, you see, was once a model of automobile in Britain. When the Betelgeusian Ford Prefect chose the name as “nicely inconspicuous,” he did so because he had, as Adams himself later clarified, “mistaken the dominant life form” on the planet.

Ford convinces Prosser to take your place in front of the bulldozer, just like in the other Hitchhiker’s manifestations. You head for the pub, where you consume beer and peanuts to fortify yourselves for the matter transference beam. Then Prosser wises up and knocks down your house after all, prompting you, reenacting the role of the Arthur you remember from the book, to run screaming out of the pub. On the way you meet a hungry dog, who is key to one of the most legendarily cruel puzzles in the game. You need to feed him. As for why… well, that you won’t learn until much later. Then the Vogons show up with appropriate pomp and circumstance, and you and Ford have a bare instant to make your escape.

You wake up in darkness. The puzzle that follows can almost be read as an homage to the original Adventure, which had a maze for which close reading was similarly key. It’s early evidence of another trait of Hitchhiker’s: a tendency to evoke and occasionally subvert the adventuring heritage that preceded it. For instance, it will later hit you with a blessedly fake maze. As David Lebling recently put it, the form by 1984 was old and established enough that it could be parodied.

>z
You can hear nothing, smell nothing, taste nothing, see nothing, feel nothing, and are not even certain who you are.

>z
There's nothing you can taste, nothing you can see, nothing you can hear, nothing you can feel, nothing you can smell, you do not even know who you are.

>z
There's nothing you can taste, nothing you can see, nothing you can hear, nothing you can feel, nothing you can smell, you do not even know who you are.

>z
You can see nothing, feel nothing, hear nothing, taste nothing, and are not entirely certain who you are.

>smell
(darkness)
It does smell a bit. There's something pungent being waved under your nose. Your head begins to clear. You can make out a shadow moving in the dark.

>examine shadow
The shadow is vaguely Ford Prefect-shaped.

Vogon Hold
This is a squalid room filled with grubby mattresses, unwashed cups, and unidentifiable bits of smelly alien underwear. A door lies to port, and an airlock lies to starboard.
In the corner is a glass case with a switch and a keyboard.
It looks like the glass case contains:
an atomic vector plotter
Along one wall is a tall dispensing machine.

Ford removes the bottle of Santraginean Mineral Water which he's been waving under your nose. He tells you that you are aboard a Vogon spaceship, and gives you some peanuts.

That “tall dispensing machine” marks the most famous puzzle ever to appear in an Infocom game, or in any text adventure by anyone for that matter. A whole mythology sprung up around it. Infocom did a booming business for a while in “I got the babel fish!” tee-shirts, while it’s still mentioned from time to time today — sometimes, one suspects, by folks who actually know it only as a trope — as the ultimate in cruel puzzles. Yet I’ve always been a bit nonplussed by its reputation. Oh, getting the babel fish from dispenser to auditory canal is a difficult, convoluted game of Mouse Trap which is made yet more difficult by the facts that the dispenser has only a limited number of fish and you have only a limited number of turns in which to work before you’re hauled off to the Vogon captain’s poetry reading. Still, solving this puzzle is far from an insurmountable task. You’re given good feedback upon each failure as to exactly what happened to intercept the babel fish on its journey, while your scope of possibility is somewhat limited by the fact that this is still quite early in the game, when there aren’t yet that many objects to juggle. I feel like its reputation probably stems from this fact that it’s met so early in the game. Thus even most casual players did encounter it — and, it being the first really difficult puzzle, and one of the first for which prior knowledge of the other Hitchhiker’s manifestations was of no use, many or most of those players likely never got any further. The Imps have often noted that most people never finished most of the Infocom games they bought. What with its mass appeal to people who knew nothing of Infocom or adventure games thanks to the license as well as its extreme difficulty, one would presume that Hitchhiker’s had an even more abysmal rate of completion than the norm.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[7]Or not.

A small upper-half-of-the-room cleaning robot flies into the room, catches the babel fish (which is all the flying junk it can find), and exits.

The original version didn’t have that crucial parenthesis; it was wisely added at the insistence of Mike Dornbrook, who felt the player deserved just a little nudge.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[8]The original Hitchhiker’s radio serial mentions Vogon poetry as the third worst in the universe. The second is that of the Azgoths of Kria, while the first is that of Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Earth. Rather astoundingly, Johnstone is actually a real person, a bunk mate of Adams’s back at Brentwood School who would keep him awake nights “scratching this awful poetry about swans and stuff.” Now, it was kind of horrible of Adams to call him out like that (and probably kind of horrible for me to tell this story now), but it just keeps getting better. Poor Johnstone, who was apparently an earnest poet into adult life but not endowed with much humor not of the unintentional stripe, wrote a letter to Time Out magazine that’s as funny as just about anything in Hitchhiker’s:

“Unfortunate that Douglas Adams should choose to reopen a minor incident; that it remains of such consequence to him indicates a certain envy, if not paranoia. Manifest that Adams is being base-minded and mean-spirited, but it is surely unnecessary for Steve Grant [a journalist to whom Adams had told the story] to act as a servile conduit for this pettiness.”

With Johnstone’s lawyers beginning to circle, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone became Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings in the book and later adaptations.

>enjoy poetry
You realise that, although the Vogon poetry is indeed astoundingly bad, worse things happen at sea, and in fact, at school. With an effort for which Hercules himself would have patted you on the back, you grit your teeth and enjoy the stuff.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. It’s undeniably clever, and almost worth any pain for the great line “worse things happen at sea, and in fact, at school.” But at heart it’s guess-the-verb, or at least guess-the-phrase, a rather shocking thing to find in an Infocom game of 1984. Now maybe my description of Hitchhiker’s as both progressive and regressive starts to become clearer, as does Dornbrook’s assertion that Adams pushed Meretzky to “break the rules.” A comparison with the babel-fish puzzle shows Hitchhiker’s two puzzling personalities at their extremes. For all its legendary difficulty, the babel-fish puzzle feels to me like a vintage Meretzky puzzle: intricate but logical, responsive to careful reading and experimentation. “ENJOY POETRY,” on the other hand, is all Adams. You either make the necessary intuitive leap or you don’t. If you do, it’s trivial; if you don’t, it’s impossible.

In the session I played before writing this article, something else happened in the midst of the poetry-as-torture-device. Suddenly this long piece of text appeared, apropos of nothing going on at the time:

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated. For instance, at the exact moment you said "look up vogon in guide" a freak wormhole opened in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried your words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time. A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'Hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvunt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green, sweet-smelling steam. As a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, the Vl'Hurg challenged his vile enemy to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in its sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words "look up vogon in guide" drifted across the conference table. Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries. Eventually the error was detected, but over two hundred and fifty thousand worlds, their peoples and cultures perished in the holocaust.

You have destroyed most of a small galaxy. Please pick your words with greater care.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Hitchhiker’s Guide using syntax the game didn’t much like.[9]It’s fairly persnickety here; you can only “CONSULT GUIDE ABOUT” things.Hitchhiker’s; it’s lifted verbatim from a passing riff near the end of the book, with only your invalid input replacing the novel’s version of Arthur’s comment that “I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle.”[10]Indeed, it seems to go relatively unremarked just how much text in the game is lifted directly from the novel, another artifact perhaps of the sheer difficulty of getting original prose out of Adams.Hitchhiker’s they scrupulously distinguished between what I’ll refer to as diegetic commands (things that cause things to happen in the storyworld) and non-diegetic — or, if you like, utility — commands (things like “SAVE” or “RESTORE” or, indeed, invalid inputs that don’t affect the storyworld). For instance, time passes in the story and the turn counter advances only in the case of the former. Infocom’s goal had long ago become to separate the undesirable challenge of interacting with the parser from the desirable one of interacting with the storyworld. Now along comes Adams to muddy it all up again. The difference, of course, is that early text adventures confused the layers of interface and simulation because they didn’t entirely know what they were doing. Adams and Mereztky break the formal rules the way artists do — consciously.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[11]Although hopefully not before collecting the essential atomic vector plotterHeart of Gold, thanks to the magic of Infinite Improbability Physics. You end up in Darkness again, a motif that will continue to recur. You come out of it via another of the game’s most storied bits, the first of two incidents of it flat-out lying to you:

>listen
(to darkness)
You hear the deep and distant hum of a star drive coming from far above. There is an exit to port.

>w
You can't go that way.

>n
You can't go that way.

>s
(We were lying about the exit to port.) You emerge from a small doorway...

Entry Bay Number Two
This is an entry bay for the Heart of Gold. A corridor lies aft of here.
There is a sales brochure here.

"This looks like that incredible new Infinite Improbability Drive spaceship, the Heart of Gold!" says Ford, with growing excitement.

"Announcement, announcement. This is Eddie (the shipboard computer). We have just picked up two hitchhikers at an improbability factor of 2 to the 21,914 power to 1 against."

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Heart of Gold, two-headed party fiend Zaphod Beeblebrox and his Earthling girlfriend Trillian, née Tricia McMillan, whom you (Arthur) once tried to pick up at a party in London only to watch her leave with Zaphod.[12]I’ve always found Zaphod a hilarious character because he was such a walking, talking anachronism even in the early 1980s. He’s just so obviously a creature of the 1970s, from his hippy-dippy diction to his easygoing, lackadaisically stoned take on existence. He’d fit right in in Dazed and Confused.Heart of Gold and, eventually, a number of other realities to obtain a collection of tools,[13]Don’t ask.[14]Really don’t ask.Guide with you; you can “CONSULT” it about an impressive number of things. Some of these entries are just meant for fun, although they are once again often just recycled bits from the book. At least a few, however, are essential reading.

The Heart of Gold also contains the second instance of the game lying to you, this one much more extended.

>u
Corridor, Aft End
This is one end of a short corridor that continues fore along the main deck of the Heart of Gold. Doorways lead to aft and port. In addition, a gangway leads downward.

>s
That entrance leads to the Infinite Improbability Drive chamber. It's supposed to be a terribly dangerous area of the ship. Are you sure you want to go in there?

>yes
Absolutely sure?

>yes
I can tell you don't want to really. You stride away with a spring in your step, wisely leaving the Drive Chamber safely behind you. Telegrams arrive from well-wishers in all corners of the Galaxy congratulating you on your prudence and wisdom, cheering you up immensely.

>s
What? You're joking, of course. Can I ask you to reconsider?

>no
Engine Room
You're in the Infinite Improbability Drive chamber. Nothing happens; there is nothing to see.

>l
Engine Room
I mean it! There's nothing to see here!

>l
Engine Room
Okay, okay, there are a FEW things to see here. This is the room that houses the powerful Infinite Improbability Generator that drives the Heart of Gold. An exit lies fore of here.
Sitting in the corner is a spare, portable Improbability Generator.
There is an ionic diffusion rasp here.
There is a pair of hypersonic pliers here.

(Footnote 10)

>footnote 10
I guess it isn't all that dangerous a place after all.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[15]Like (hopefully) the ones I’ve included in this article in homage. Or maybe this is my bid for literary greatness via my own version of Pale Fire.

If you experiment and use the Guide wisely, you’ll eventually find a way to transport yourself into about half a dozen little vignettes, sometimes still in the person of Arthur, sometimes in that of one of your three companions currently slumming it in the sauna. I won’t belabor most of these; this article has to end at some point, after all, and if you do play for yourself you deserve to discover something for yourself. But I do want to talk just a bit about one, or rather two that are closely interrelated, because they involve a puzzle often cited as an example of Hitchhiker’s extreme, downright un-Infocom-like cruelty.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[16]This would seem to belie the Guide’s description of Earth as “harmless,” and even the revised description of it as “mostly harmless.”[17]There’s a joke, or maybe an aphorism, in there somewhere. “Between a Vl’Hurg and a Vogon,” maybe?

War Chamber
Spread before you, astonishingly enough, is the War Chamber of a star battle cruiser. Through the domed canopy of the ship you can see a vast battle fleet flying in formation behind you through the black, glittering emptiness of space. Ahead is a star system towards which you are hurtling at a terrifying speed.
There is an ultra-plasmic vacuum awl here.

Standing near you are two creatures who are gazing at the star system with terrible hatred in their eyes. One is wearing black jewelled battle shorts, and the other is wreathed in a cloud of green, sweet-smelling steam. They are engaged in conversation.

The fleet continues to hurtle sunwards.

If you’re like, oh, about 95% of players, your journey will end abruptly when the battle fleet, which in a fatal oversight on the part of our militant alien friends turns out to be microscopic by the scale of the Earth, is swallowed by a small dog. To prevent this, you needed to have taken the unmotivated (at the time) step of feeding something to the aforementioned dog way back on Earth in the first act of the game, before the Vogons arrived. Horribly cruel, no? Well, yes and no. Another of the vignettes — they appear in random order, thus justifying Meretzky’s assertion that Hitchhiker’s ends up representing one of the “most ruthlessly nonlinear designs we [Infocom] ever did” — has you replaying the opening sequence of the game again, albeit from the perspective of Ford Prefect. You can also feed the dog there. If you fail at a vignette, meanwhile — and that’s very easy to do — you usually “die,” but that’s not as bad as you might expect. You’re merely returned to the Heart of Gold, and can have another go at it later. This mechanism saves Hitchhiker’s repeatedly, and not least in the case of this puzzle, from accusations of relying on extensive learning by death.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Hitchhiker’s is punishingly difficult for even the most experienced of adventurers, the most challenging Infocom release since Suspended and the one with the most elements of, shall we say, questionable fairness since the days of Zork II and Deadline. While it is possible to repeat the vignettes until you solve each overarching challenge, it’s painfully easy to leave small things undone. Having “solved” the vignette in the sense of completing its overarching goal, you’re then locked out of experiencing it again, and thus locked out of victory for reasons that are obscure indeed.[18]Zaphod’s sequence is particularly prone to this, to the extent that I’ll offer a hint: look under the seat![19]I’m thinking particularly of growing the plant here.Heart of Gold you labor away with no clear idea what it is you’re really supposed to be accomplishing. Sometimes vital properties of things go undescribed just for the hell of it.[20]I’m speaking particularly of the brilliantly Adamsian “thing your aunt gave you that you don’t know what it is,” of which it’s vital to know — take this as another tip — that you can put things inside it, even though that’s never noted or implied by its description.hard, and at least as often hard in the way of “ENJOY POETRY” as in the way of the babel fish. The “Standard” difficulty label on the box, which was placed there purely due to marketing needs, is the cruelest touch of all.

So, we must ask just how Hitchhiker’s became such an aberration in the general trend of Infocom games to become ever fairer and, yes, easier. Meretzky noted that trend in his interview for Get Lamp and was not, either back in the day or at the time of his interview, entirely happy about it. He felt that wrestling with a game for weeks or months until you had that “Eureka!” moment in the bathtub or the middle of a working day was a huge part of the appeal of the original Zork — an appeal that Infocom was gradually diluting. Thus Meretzky and Adams explicitly discussed his opinion that “adventure games were becoming a little too easy,” and that Hitchhiker’s could be a corrective to that. Normally puzzles that were exceptionally difficult had their edges rounded during Infocom’s extensive testing process. But that didn’t happen for Hitchhiker’s to the extent that it normally did, for a couple of reasons. First, many of these puzzles had been written not by any ordinary Imp but by Douglas Adams; for obvious reasons, Infocom was reluctant to step on his toes. Additionally, the testers didn’t have nearly as much time with Hitchhiker’s as with an ordinary Infocom game, thanks to Adams’s procrastination and the resultant delays and Infocom’s determination to get the game out in time for Christmas. The testers did a pretty good job with the purely technical side; even the first release of Hitchhiker’s is not notably buggy. But there wasn’t time for the usual revisions to the design as a whole even had there been a strong motivation to do them from Infocom’s side. Any lack of such motivation was not down to lack of complaining from the testers: Meretzky admits that they “strongly urged that the game be made easier.”

The decision to go ahead with such a cruel design has been second-guessed by folks within Infocom in the years since, especially in light of the declining commercial fortunes of the company’s post-Hitchhiker’s era. Jon Palace presented a pretty good summary of the too-difficult camp’s arguments in his own Get Lamp interview:

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was one of the biggest mistakes we made because it introduced a huge audience to a relatively difficult game. The difficulty of the game and its design flaws[21]Palace was no fan of the dog-feeding puzzle in particular.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Hitchhiker’s difficulty or hypothetical lack thereof didn’t make much difference. I suppose your attitude toward these issues says much about what you want Infocom’s games to be: accessible interactive stories with a literary bent or intricate puzzle boxes. It’s Graham Nelson’s memorable description of interactive fiction as a narrative at war with a crossword writ large yet again. For my part, I think interactive fiction can be either, an opinion apparently shared by Meretzky himself, the man who went on to write both the forthrightly literary A Mind Forever Voyaging and the unabashed puzzle box that is Zork Zero. Yet I do demand that my puzzle boxes play fair, and find that Hitchhiker’s sometimes fails me here. And while I have no objection to the concept of a tougher Infocom game for the hardcore who cut their teeth on Zork,[22]See 1985’s Spellbreaker, which unlike Hitchhiker’s was explicitly billed as exactly that and does a superb job at it.Hitchhiker’s should have been that game, for the obvious commercial considerations Palace has just outlined for us.

And yet, and yet… it’s hard to see how some of the more problematic aspects of Hitchhiker’s could be divorced from its more brilliant parts. As a final example of that, I want to talk about — and, yes, spoil — one last puzzle, one of the last in the game in fact. By now you’ve collected all of the various bits and pieces from the vignettes and the narrative of the game has rejoined that of the book; the Heart of Gold has landed on the legendary lost planet of Magrathea. You’ve also managed to brew yourself a nice hot cup of tea. Now you need to get inside the room of Marvin the Paranoid Android to convince him to open the ship’s hatch to let you go exploring.

>s
Corridor, Aft End
This is one end of a short corridor that continues fore along the main deck of the Heart of Gold. Doorways lead to aft and port. In addition, a gangway leads downward.

>w
The screening door is closed.

>open door
The door explains, in a haughty tone, that the room is occupied by a super-intelligent robot and that lesser beings (by which it means you) are not to be admitted. "Show me some tiny example of your intelligence," it says, "and maybe, just maybe, I might reconsider."

>consult guide about intelligence
The Guide checks through its Sub-Etha-Net database and eventually comes up with the following entry:

Thirty million generations of philosophers have debated the definition of intelligence. The most popular definition appears in the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation android manuals: "Intelligence is the ability to reconcile totally contradictory situations without going completely bonkers -- for example, having a stomach ache and not having a stomach ache at the same time, holding a hole without the doughnut, having good luck and bad luck simultaneously, or seeing a real estate agent waive his fee."

>get no tea
no tea: Taken.

>i
You have:
no tea
tea
a flowerpot
The Hitchhiker's Guide
a towel
a thing your aunt gave you which you don't know what it is
a babel fish (in your ear)
your gown (being worn)

>open door
The door is almost speechless with admiration. "Wow. Simultaneous tea and no tea. My apologies. You are clearly a heavy-duty philosopher." It opens respectfully.

I’m not quite sure how you make that intuitive leap precisely fair, but I am pretty sure I wouldn’t want to live without it. Maybe Hitchhiker’s is fine just the way it is. Soon after, you drink that glorious cup of tea, a feat which, in possibly the most trenchant and certainly the funniest piece of social commentary on the nature of Britishness in the entire game, scores you a full 100 of the game’s total of 400 points. Soon after that you step onto the surface of Magrathea, where “almost instantly the most incredible adventure starts which you’ll have to buy the next game to find out about.” That game, of course, would never materialize. The ludic version of Arthur Dent has remained frozen in amber just outside the Heart of Gold for almost thirty years now, giving Hitchhiker’s claim to one final dubious title: that of the only game in the Infocom canon that doesn’t have an ending.

Crazy and vaguely subversive as it is, Hitchhiker’s would have a massive influence on later works of interactive fiction. Contemporaneous Infocom games are filled with what feels to modern sensibilities like an awful lot of empty rooms that exist only to be mapped and trekked across. Hitchhiker’s, on the other hand, is implemented deeply rather than widely. There are just 31 rooms in the entire game, but virtually every one of them has interesting things to see and do within it. Further, these 31 rooms come not in a single contiguous and unchanging block, but a series of linked dramatic scenes. The Heart of Gold, which contains all of nine rooms, is by far the biggest contiguous area in the game. Hitchhiker’s can thus lay pretty good claim to being the first text adventure to completely abandon the old obsession with geography that defined the likes of Adventure and Zork. Certainly it’s the first Infocom game in which map-making is, even for the most cartographically challenged amongst us, utterly superfluous. This focus on fewer rooms with more to do in them feels rather shockingly modern for a game written in 1984. Ditto the dynamism of most of the scenes, with things always happening around you that demand a reaction. The only place where you can just explore at your leisure is the Heart of Gold.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Curses, Jigsaw, and The Muldoon Legacy, have used linked vignettes like those in Hitchhiker’s to send the player hopscotching through time and space. More have followed its lead in including books and other materials to be “CONSULT”ed. Even a fair number[23]Not to mention this post.[24]Tolkien is about the only other generally good author I can think of who has sparked as much bad writing as Adams.

Hitchhiker’s is an original, with a tone and feel unique in the annals of interactive fiction. It breaks the rules and gets away with it. I’m not sure prospective designers should try to copy it in that, but they certainly should play it, as should everyone interested in interactive fiction. It’s easily one of the dozen or so absolutely seminal works in the medium. Fortunately, it’s also the most effortless of all Infocom games to play today, as the BBC has for some years now hosted an online version of it. Yes, there’s lots of graphical gilding around the lily, but at heart it’s still the original text adventure. If you’re interested enough in interactive fiction to make it this far in this article and you still haven’t played it, by all means remedy that right away.

(In addition to the various Get Lamp interviews, Steve Meretzky’s interview in the book Game Design Theory and Practice was very valuable in writing this article.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

“As seen on Tri-D!”

↑2

Easily mistaken for an empty plastic baggie.

↑3

They turn opaque when danger is at hand to avoid upsetting your delicate sensibilities. The ones in the game package are, naturally, made of black construction paper.

↑4

These were manufactured in huge quantities and given away for some time at trade shows and the like as well as being inserted into game boxes.

↑5

Or whatever it’s supposed to be.

↑6

Ford Prefect’s name, by the way, is one of the subtler jokes in Hitchhiker’s, and one that was entirely lost on American readers. The Ford Prefect, you see, was once a model of automobile in Britain. When the Betelgeusian Ford Prefect chose the name as “nicely inconspicuous,” he did so because he had, as Adams himself later clarified, “mistaken the dominant life form” on the planet.

↑7

Or not.

↑8

The original Hitchhiker’s radio serial mentions Vogon poetry as the third worst in the universe. The second is that of the Azgoths of Kria, while the first is that of Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Earth. Rather astoundingly, Johnstone is actually a real person, a bunk mate of Adams’s back at Brentwood School who would keep him awake nights “scratching this awful poetry about swans and stuff.” Now, it was kind of horrible of Adams to call him out like that (and probably kind of horrible for me to tell this story now), but it just keeps getting better. Poor Johnstone, who was apparently an earnest poet into adult life but not endowed with much humor not of the unintentional stripe, wrote a letter to Time Out magazine that’s as funny as just about anything in Hitchhiker’s:
“Unfortunate that Douglas Adams should choose to reopen a minor incident; that it remains of such consequence to him indicates a certain envy, if not paranoia. Manifest that Adams is being base-minded and mean-spirited, but it is surely unnecessary for Steve Grant [a journalist to whom Adams had told the story] to act as a servile conduit for this pettiness.”

With Johnstone’s lawyers beginning to circle, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone became Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings in the book and later adaptations.

↑9

It’s fairly persnickety here; you can only “CONSULT GUIDE ABOUT” things.

↑10

Indeed, it seems to go relatively unremarked just how much text in the game is lifted directly from the novel, another artifact perhaps of the sheer difficulty of getting original prose out of Adams.

↑11

Although hopefully not before collecting the essential atomic vector plotter

↑12

I’ve always found Zaphod a hilarious character because he was such a walking, talking anachronism even in the early 1980s. He’s just so obviously a creature of the 1970s, from his hippy-dippy diction to his easygoing, lackadaisically stoned take on existence. He’d fit right in in Dazed and Confused.

↑13

Don’t ask.

↑14

Really don’t ask.

↑15

Like (hopefully) the ones I’ve included in this article in homage. Or maybe this is my bid for literary greatness via my own version of Pale Fire.

↑16

This would seem to belie the Guide’s description of Earth as “harmless,” and even the revised description of it as “mostly harmless.”

↑17

There’s a joke, or maybe an aphorism, in there somewhere. “Between a Vl’Hurg and a Vogon,” maybe?

↑18

Zaphod’s sequence is particularly prone to this, to the extent that I’ll offer a hint: look under the seat!

↑19

I’m thinking particularly of growing the plant here.

↑20

I’m speaking particularly of the brilliantly Adamsian “thing your aunt gave you that you don’t know what it is,” of which it’s vital to know — take this as another tip — that you can put things inside it, even though that’s never noted or implied by its description.

↑21

Palace was no fan of the dog-feeding puzzle in particular.

↑22

See 1985’s Spellbreaker, which unlike Hitchhiker’s was explicitly billed as exactly that and does a superb job at it.

↑23

Not to mention this post.

↑24

Tolkien is about the only other generally good author I can think of who has sparked as much bad writing as Adams.

Comments
53 Responses

- Victor Gijsbers

November 19, 2013 at 12:36 pm

Another interesting article!

“Soon after you drink that glorious cup of tea […]”

This sentence would read easier if you add a comma between “after” and “you” (to make clear that “you drink that glorious cup of tea” is not a dependent clause for something that is yet to follow).

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2013 at 12:43 pm

Thanks!

- Anthony

November 19, 2013 at 2:19 pm

Excellent guide to the Guide. You’ve given us the flavour of the game and left enough on the plate for us to ENJOY at our leisure. A fitting tribute to an inspiring work of IF.

(Btw, I think the standard spelling is diEgetic.)

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2013 at 2:28 pm

What would I do without you guys to copy-edit for me? Thanks!

- matt w

November 19, 2013 at 2:55 pm

Thanks for the great article! I read with some trepidation about spoilers, because I really ought to give this a good try some day, but I’m pleased to see that the last and biggest spoiler is one that one of my friends already spoiled for me back in the day. Getting told about that puzzle may be my most substantial exposure to interactive fiction pre-2006.

Anyway, a typo and a couple comments: You have “Dazed and Confusion” which should be “Dazed and Confused.” And for footnotes in literature, I recommend The Makepeace Experiment by the dissident Soviet writer Abram Tertz, where the narrator gets into an argument with the footnotes and… I’ve said too much!

More on-topic, it seems to me that the game’s cruelty is probably somewhat necessary for its effect. The HHGtG universe is uncaring and unfair, where horrible things are constantly happening to people for no reason. So why should the player be spared? At least he can try again, maybe even having learned something from the experience. The Vl’hurg puzzle seems like a particularly brilliant example of that; it lets you know that something horrible has happened for no reason based on something you couldn’t have possibly foreseen (and if you’ve read the book you know what happens to the fleet, which perhaps makes the puzzle a bit easier to deal with when you start from the beginning).

Also, the text lifted straight from the books may have been a feature rather than a bug; rabid Hitchhiker fans probably enjoyed seeing our old favorites in the new setting. We certainly didn’t mind repetition of it, judging by the love a, um, friend of mine had of reciting passages off by heart.

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2013 at 3:13 pm

Thanks!

You make more explicit here a point I kind of danced around without ever properly settling down upon in the article itself: that what makes literary sense and what is good, fair game design are not always one and the same. (The narrative and the crossword rear their warring heads again.) It is hard to shake the feeling that Hitchhiker’s would lose much of its personality if all of its crazy, arbitrary bits were thrown away or somehow made more forgiving.

- Lisa

November 19, 2013 at 8:09 pm

Also, the text lifted straight from the books may have been a feature rather than a bug; rabid Hitchhiker fans probably enjoyed seeing our old favorites in the new setting.

That was the case for me. It was both very amusing (I felt like I was in on an inside joke) and somewhat helpful to have already read the books.

- David Cornelson

November 19, 2013 at 3:36 pm

I’m not sure if you’re missing a funny bone or what, but I distinctly remember each step of the Babelfish puzzle and being incapable of breathing I was laughing so hard. The very same experience from parts of the books (getting hit in the small of the back with a house party). This puzzle was brilliant, cruel, and hilarious.

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2013 at 3:43 pm

Um… did I ever say it wasn’t funny?

- David Cornelson

November 19, 2013 at 5:20 pm

My reading is that you note the puzzle’s fame, but you don’t entirely understand the fame. I’m not sure how you style your writing sometimes (factual only?) but mentioning that the puzzle is one of the funniest ever is important. My take is that you didn’t like it.

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2013 at 5:49 pm

No, I like the puzzle fine actually. I’m not sure I’d term it “hilarious,” but it’s more than amusing enough, difficult but fundamentally fair, and very satisfying to solve.

- Anthony

November 19, 2013 at 8:28 pm

I’d respectfully suggest that if you thought the babel fish puzzle was “hilarious” then you’re probably in the minority.

Sure, it was delightful, ingenious, infuriating, creative, amusing, and possibly even comic. But if it actually made you LOL… Are you sure you don’t have one funny bone too many? ;-)

- iPadCary

November 19, 2013 at 6:11 pm

When this came out, my friend Jay said: “If you didn’t read the book, don’t get this, It’s too hard.”
I thought that was rediculous as Infocom would never
sell a game where you had to do something else entirely
outside of the game before you were able to play.
It just made no sense.
So I got the game & go to it’s first puzzle.
Jay was right! lol
And I miss seeing the ads for it in OMNI magazine.
*sigh* ….

- Monty Ashley

November 19, 2013 at 6:33 pm

I’m sure you’ve seen this, but just in case…

You know about the files relating to the Hitchhiker’s sequel, right?

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2013 at 8:19 pm

Yes. There are serious… ethical concerns with the way much of that material was made public, however, and there are still lots of raw nerves among the Imps and others as a result. But we won’t be addressing Bureaucracy and the aborted Restaurant project for a while yet, so I have some time to talk with some people and decide what’s appropriate.

- Lisa

November 19, 2013 at 8:34 pm

I like the footnotes; nice touch. I was playing Stationfall last night and was amused to see that one of the footnotes in that game is about whether the idea was ripped off from Hitchhiker’s, and that “the author” (i.e. Steve Meretzky, I assume) reserved the right to rip off his own ideas!

- Keith Palmer

November 19, 2013 at 10:10 pm

This is it: the single Infocom text adventure I played in the 1980s, the one I experienced the famous “pause to process input, disk access, glorious advancement or casual rebuff” on the Radio Shack Color Computer’s all-caps 32 by 16 screen. (Then, I figured out the transcript would print out in mixed case, and used up a lot of paper immortalizing various sequences…)

Perhaps given in part that I was about ten when I started playing the game, I suppose that after a very brief while I wasn’t so much trying to think through its puzzles as just searching the hints and tips column of the Color Computer magazine “The Rainbow” for pointers. (By my unscientific estimation, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” had the most pointers offered there of any of the comparative handful of Infocom games offered for the Color Computer.) It never quite got around to explaining how to hold “tea” and “no tea” at once (just that you had to), though, and I was in high school in the early 1990s before I happened to hear a friend still had the hint book, and after much effort deciphering the faded remnants of the developed clues realised how I’d never made the mental leap of first recognising one bit of description was an object to be taken and then realising I could “buy” it even at that narrow stage in the game I’d thought Ford Prefect was sort of taking care of me. At long last, I got to the maximum-score ending with a wry sort of “well, that’s it” feeling.

The comments about the game’s difficulty do sort of tie in to my wondering now if things could have been different had I finished the game sooner, if my uncle would have sent my father more Infocom games instead of my just (eventually?) reading the catalog pamphlet and daydreaming about how great it would be to play more of them. Games in any case seemed back then to be more something that just sort of appeared without asking for them (in this case, at least, we got the box, if not the fluff or “Microscopic Space Fleet”). Still, I did eventually get to the point where on seeing “The Lost Treasures of Infocom,” right around when we finally retired our Color Computer 3 and got a Macintosh LC II, I at once sort of strongly implied that would be a very nice game package to have…

- Jimmy Maher

November 20, 2013 at 7:33 am

This was also the first Infocom game I ever played. My parents bought it for me Christmas 1984 to go along with my shiny new Commodore 1541 disk drive. It was hopeless, of course. I’d never played a text adventure before, and I’m not even sure I’d read the books yet. I may not have even got to the Vogon ship before I bought the hint book with my paper-route money a week or two after Christmas, then proceeded to do exactly what the hint book said not to and reveal almost every answer. What with all the subverting and even arguably satirizing of adventure-game conventions here, playing Hitchhiker’s as your first work of interactive fiction is a bit like picking up Ulysses as the first novel you ever try to read. And being that Hitchhiker’s was such a huge hit, I’m sure my situation was hardly unique.

But something must have stuck, because I bought more Infocom games and did a lot better with them, and, well, here we are in 2013. :)

- Scott

November 20, 2013 at 12:34 am

Wow, I never realised there were slated to be so many sequels – that explains the dreadful ending a lot better.

I remember playing this on my C64 with a list of commands my brother had figured out, but that only got me up to the Heart of Gold – from there I was quite lost until I finished the game with a guide years later. I thought it was genuinely funny in parts, especially the narrator.

The embarrassing part, though? I never realised the footnotes could actually be read – I think I tried consulting the guide about them rather than ever just typing “footnote 10”. Now I’ll have to have another go just to read them!

- Andrew Plotkin

November 20, 2013 at 2:11 am

H. P. Lovecraft is the generally bad author who has sparked as much good writing as Adams and Tolkien have sparked bad writing.

(But bad writing too.)

- Sam Garret

November 20, 2013 at 2:58 am

The Final Puzzle had my young teenage self stumped for a good six months until some kind soul put me out of my misery and I was finally able to finish the game. Starcross I knocked off in a week, but this one just escaped me – a form of tunnel vision disabling sufficient lateral thinking, I suppose, and I was a tad embarrassed by the fact I needed help. Prideful little things, teenagers.

Today, of course, the answer is a google search away. I wonder if I would still remember the puzzle so well if the answer had been so readily available.

On a side note – does the Zaphod section really lock you out? I have a vague recollection that you can still go to some shortened version of it involving only the jetski once you’ve finished the main arc, but I haven’t actually double checked.

- Jimmy Maher

November 20, 2013 at 7:37 am

In the original version at least, yes. When you get back into it after “solving” it, you just immediately slam into the cliff in the boat and are thrown back to Darkness. I know because I actually made this mistake on the play I just did for this article.

- Duncan Stevens

November 20, 2013 at 3:02 pm

They all lock you out, in one way or another, so if you don’t get key (apparently stray) objects when you solve them, you can’t finish the game. Most of them just “kill” you and kick you back into Darkness; the Vl’Hurg/brain section actually kills you (in memorably nasty fashion).

- Jason Dyer

November 21, 2013 at 7:28 pm

My first (and only) time playing was with the gold box version with hints, so I didn’t even need Google to help. Those got abused … heavily.

- Andrew Schultz

November 26, 2013 at 4:27 pm

It’s good to read a breakdown of why the game could be unfair. I remember my mother buying my sister and me the invisiclues early on (we were stuck in the dark! Explaining this would be a spoiler) and my feeling was that adults must’ve known a lot of stuff I didn’t to be able to solve these puzzles without a hint book (I was sure they did) and I was looking forward to growing up and understanding all this. Especially how I’d know about the ways you can be locked out of certain puzzles and how the game is mean about that.

The game got me reading the book before my mom bought the invisiclues, and I figured a wild crazy genius like Douglas Adams had a really good reason for doing things that way! I figured understanding all the whys was forbidden territory like jokes adults didn’t let me hear. I’d learn when I was 18, or something. Or not.

Your essay and others have provided a different understanding, but I think the note that the game would lose personality if it lost some of its outright flaws is a great one. Objectively, parts could be cut–but it’s no fun.

- Nicholas Joll

November 28, 2013 at 11:13 pm

Some great stuff in here. I had forgotten about the conjunction of tea and no tea. Thanks!

- Mark Ricard

December 27, 2013 at 5:45 am

A very well written article. Adams style does not really fit in with fair puzzle solving. It is too absurdist so it ends up being read the author’s mind. Maybe having read the book would have helped.

When I played it for the first time about two years ago,I got stuck at the point right before the end. You need to eat the plant to guess the right tool to bring. For some reason I wasn’t able to grow the plant.

- Soh Kam Yung

March 10, 2014 at 3:31 am

The BBC has updated the game for its 30th anniversary.

It is playable in your browser (works in Google Chrome but doesn’t seem to work for Firefox) at this BBC 4 website.

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- Brandon Campbell

November 13, 2014 at 9:33 pm

Andrew Schultz, I know the feeling exactly, about thinking you’ll know everything when you’re an adult! And now I’m 38 and still feel almost as clueless as I did back then…

- Grunion Guy

November 17, 2014 at 1:54 am

I “beat” the game in the sense that I made it onto Magrathea back when the game first came out. I never did figure out the fluff puzzle but through pure stubbornness, and a constantly restored saved game, I eventually left with the right tool to let me out of the ship. It was years before I ever even learned that the pieces of fluff were important.

- Jimmy Maher

November 17, 2014 at 12:35 pm

Interesting. I had thought it was impossible to brute-force that puzzle, as Marvin would always ask for a tool you *didn’t* have if you hadn’t used the fluff and the rest of that contraption to see into the future.

- Grunion Guy

November 26, 2014 at 6:01 am

I remember trying every tool thinking that one would work. Of course, it didn’t. I thought maybe one last try. If the game randomly chose a new tool every time it was reloaded, I would just keep walking out with the awl until it worked. It eventually worked.

- Lisa H.

November 26, 2014 at 6:30 am

Strange. Like Jimmy, I thought it was impossible to brute-force; I think the hints themselves describe how Marvin is supposed to ask for something you don’t have if you haven’t properly solved it. Maybe Infocom intended that but the code didn’t actually turn out to work that way?

- Grunion Guy

November 26, 2014 at 9:29 am

The version I played was on the Apple IIe. I wish I’d made a transcript of the game as I was sometimes wont to do back then. Although it would have been the most boring read with dozens of pages of reloading before the somewhat less than triumphant win.

- Kyle Miller

September 3, 2017 at 8:35 am

I was just looking through a disassembly of the game (release 31), and it turns out the code which chooses the tool you don’t have only fires when you gain foreknowledge, and it is implemented like this: (1) choose one of the ten tools at random, (2) if you don’t have it go to step 5, (3) if we’ve done step 1 more than 50 times go to step 5, (4) go back to step 1, (5) the chosen tool is the one Marvin will ask for.

If you try to give a tool to Marvin without having used the fruit, he’ll just say “That’s not it” rather than “That’s not a thermo-fusion chisel” or whatever the tool is. It is impossible to brute-force the puzzle because whatever object you are giving Marvin is compared to the non-existent object number 0.

If you don’t have all ten tools by the time you gain foreknowledge, then there’s still a chance Marvin will ask for one you do have. Nine out of ten tools leaves an improbability of 200 to 1 against, and eight out of ten is 70000 to 1.

- Grunion Guy

November 26, 2014 at 9:36 am

Checking on Wikipedia, it mentions that if you failed to collect all ten tools, Marvin would ask for the one you failed to find. But having found all ten, perhaps then he just asked for a random tool? That does seem odd to give the player a one in ten shot to brute force it. Or would that be one in one hundred? That would make sense seeing as how I remember trying longer than I should have to force it, even when I just kept picking the awl.

- Lisa H.

December 6, 2014 at 3:06 am

Because I am an incredibly pedantic Virgo nerd, I decided to go looking in the hints for the version of HHG I have (Release 31 / Serial number 871119). MAJOR PUZZLE SPOILER AHEAD, for innocent readers…

How can I open the hatch?
25 hints left -> Have you tried OPEN THE HATCH?
24 hints left -> If sirens and lights went off when you tried to open the hatch, then the ship is still in space. Wait until the ship has landed.
23 hints left -> Do you remember an announcement when the Heart of Gold landed on Magrathea?
22 hints left -> Eddie (the shipboard computer) jammed the hatch to prevent anyone from leaving the ship until he’s checked to make sure the environment is safe.
21 hints left -> If you wait the 14.9 years such a check will take, you’ll probably die of boredom.
20 hints left -> You’ll have to figure out how to override Eddie’s wishes by fixing the hatchway mechanism in the Access Space.
19 hints left -> You don’t have the necessary intelligence for the task.
18 hints left -> Someone else does.
17 hints left -> Marvin. See the question about Marvin to figure out how to get him to open the hatch.
16 hints left -> Once Marvin has agreed to open the hatch, he tells you to meet him in the Access Space in twelve turns. Make sure you’re on hand for that meeting. (Hell hath no depression like a paranoid android scorned.)
15 hints left -> Marvin will ask you for the tool he needs to fix the mechanism.
14 hints left -> You must give him the proper tool or you’ve blown your one chance to get the hatchway open.
13 hints left -> There are a total of ten tools scattered throughout the game. For a complete list of them, see the quesion about the tools in the General Questions section.
12 hints left -> Even if you’ve collected all ten tools, you can only carry one at a time into the Access Space…
11 hints left -> …and you don’t have time to go out and get a different one before Marvin gives up and leaves…
10 hints left -> …and Marvin will NEVER ask for the tool you happen to be holding.
9 hints left -> There’s a way to figure out in advance what tool Marvin will ask you for.
8 hints left -> See the question about the fluff.
7 hints left -> Don’t go on until you’ve seen the fruit.
6 hints left -> Eat the fruit.
5 hints left -> The glimpse of the future provided by the fruit tells you what tool to bring into the Access Space.
4 hints left -> If you meet Marvin there and give him that tool when he asks for it, he will fix the mechanism and open the hatch.
3 hints left -> You’re now awesomely close to the end of the game.
2 hints left -> Go down through the hatch.
1 hint left -> Start waiting for the next exciting Hitchhiker’s game.
[That’s all.]

Soo… it sounds to me like they intended it to not be brute-force/luck-able: “Marvin will never ask for the tool you’re holding” – but of course he does literally do just that if you solved the puzzle and got the foresight. So that says to me that the game checks for whether you’ve eaten the fruit, and if you haven’t, always picks a different tool. As I said in another comment, though, maybe it was intended to work that way but actually doesn’t for some reason?

- Cliffy73

May 23, 2015 at 3:14 pm

One quibble about the difficulty of the “enjoy poetry” problem — “enjoy” is in the list of recognized verbs in the game manual. Taking a look at this list of verbs and noticing the unique ones is one of the first things I do when I’m stumped on an Infocom game. This is a lesson I learned after spending countless hours and a hundred moves stuck in the first “Dark” before I happened to glance at the list by chance and the scales fell from my eyes. Or nose, as the case may be.

The really embarrassing part is that after a long enough time flailing around in the Dark, the game starts giving you prompts. The one I still remember is “Four out of five sensitive people get this one right away.” At the time I thought the game was just making fun of me — which of course it was — but that’s not all it was doing.

- Gerhardus Grobbelaar

August 8, 2015 at 10:19 pm

This was the ONLY text game the wife was willing to go all the way with me as she loves the books, the tv series (which we only saw later) and of course the movie, which IMHO only got Marvin to the T, but rest I can listen to without getting bored, but won’t watch! (Of the topic, never read Mostly Harmless due to Marvin’s ‘state’ at the end of the previous book!) Marvin IS HHGTtG! Any case, we did ‘play’ the game, but with a walktrough that had everything ‘mapped’ out, thus lots of the fun stuff like the narrator speaking to you after you died, consulting the guide for various things, etc., got passed me, but I did later read some transcripts someone made of all the guides entries, footnotes, ‘have you tried this for fun’, stuff, and those! Will be playing it in the near future when I can get that android app to work on my tablet! It does give Paranoid Android a new twist when speaking in terms of tablets!
Thanx yet again for a thoroughly enjoyable article!

- Peter Piers

October 16, 2015 at 6:54 pm

It might interest you to know that Marvin makes a comeback in MH, IIRC. :)

- DZ-Jay

February 23, 2017 at 9:42 pm

Fantastic! As I was reading your comment on how difficult it could be to divorce the brilliant parts from the unfair puzzles, I started wondering where you were going with it.

Then, as I read the transcript, right after the Guide’s notes on intelligence, and I saw “take no tea”… an instant flash of understanding hit upon me with such force I just laughed out loud!

It was precisely at that point when I thought: what a brilliant solution! How could someone even consider editing or ameliorating the pain of such an awfully hard puzzle, when its payoff is infinitely worth the pain may times over? — which is of course your point.

Well done, bravo!

Oh, and by the way, here’s another typo that escaped you: in the penultimate paragraph you have “if you’re interest enough,” which I think should be “interested enough.” (Sorry…)

Thanks for another excellent article. :)

- Joe Dredd

December 9, 2017 at 12:18 pm

Being a huge HHG fan I had to beg my mother to help me scrape together the $60 (AUD) price tag to buy the game. Then I had to save up to get a 1541 disk drive as we only had a tape drive for our C64. I used to sneak the disk back into the computer shop and play it on a lovely SX-64 on display.

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- Sung J Woo

April 10, 2019 at 10:22 am

I can’t believe eleven years have already passed since I wrote this:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/bjork-the-great-underground-musician-adventure

Until I read your Hitchhiker’s piece, I hadn’t actually realized just how much of an influence the game had on me. So much of it is here in this silly little vignette.

Thank you for delving so deeply into the gameplay of this important moment of interactive fiction history. This wasn’t my first Infocom, but it was the most memorable. As dumb as this sounds, what I loved most was just walking around the Heart of Gold. I was on the ship! It was a total dream come true. Also, I was utterly taken with the sections where I could play as Zaphod (driving that boat), Trillian (dealing with Arthur at the party), and Ford (seeing the Vogon attack from his POV). Talk about rule-breaking — did any Infocom title do that before Hitchhiker’s? If so, I can’t recall.

The other bits I still remember 30+ years later: when the babelfish run out and you press the button and it just says “Click.” God, did my heart sink. And the most annoying part of all, the “tiny Arthur Dent” materializing in your brain to kill you in a few moves. That was the cruelest of all.

- DerKastellan

June 8, 2020 at 10:58 am

I had a dig at the 30th Anniversary edition and must say – this is game is not good. One can talk about how influential it was, if it broke new ground, but is it a good game? Is it enjoyable? Fun? Fair?

(The 30th anniversary edition of course has some vital clues. It shows you “no tea” as an inventory object, so it isn’t such a leap to hold “tea” and “no tea” at the same time.)

As it is, even with the author’s own input, largely a derivative work, it ends up not adding much to the Hitchhiker series even in terms of gags to remember. It mostly added the “fame” that the series had a notoriously hard game associated with it.

I just happened to chat with somebody who played the original game back in the day and gave up on the babel fish. I bet many in the 80s double-struggled in Germany with trying to figure out stuff in English and according to the author’s sensibilities, and all of that in text. Consider the asking price – plus how much money that was back in the day!

If lots of players gave up on the babel fish and its half-arbitrary solution already, then the game’s lack of helpful item descriptions, its enormous gaps in the Guide even when it comes to things appearing in the game can’t have helped, either. Empty rooms may have been boring, but an open-ended middle sequence without direction isn’t a great accomplishment, either. It creates a combinatorial nightmare without the advantages of point-and-click.

Also, the mode that Steve Meretzky suggests for playing the game – closing it, letting inspiration hit, come back later and see if you make progress with your idea – that might be a good way to let your mind churn on problems on its own, befitting a maths or CS student, or any serious problem-solver, but is it a great way to play a game? Many games have managed to glue the player to the screen. This one surely doesn’t then. It suggests the game is so obtuse, an illogical puzzle box, that you rely on flashes of inspirations away from the game to solve it. (Or, I suspect, in most cases, a clue book or hint system.)

Is it that what players opted in when buying it? I really don’t think so.

(Also, it’s easy for Meretzky to say this. He didn’t have to solve it. I think the testers had a point. It sounds a lot like the mindset the Wizardry creators were caught in when defending Wizardry’s difficulty. Difficulty is to early games what semi-random quantity and spinning fields were to games that followed soon after. It stretched the time you spent with the content, giving the illusion of more content.)

I didn’t enjoy endless repeat sojourns through the Dark. At some point, the game could have cut that short.

Also, if the game really insists that an action taken early in the game is so important, it could require a restart, then it could have added this scene as something you can revisit during the mid-game. That would be fair. Any other mechanic than “restart and try differently” would have done better.

I mean, you don’t need to map this one. But if you had to return to the beginning to play over for this, you had to map your gameplay to do all of this all over again. How is that different from a map? It’s not that you effed up a scene or even an arc, you effectively redo the game. Thankfully it doesn’t have a map to navigate as well. It takes away the whole satisfaction of “having come that far” by arbitrarily deciding to drop you back before any progress was made – because you might not have done this one thing.

That is the game equivalent of Groundhog Day. Repeat until you do it right, no matter how long it takes. This makes also the save game feature a bit of a sham. If you manage to screw up the beginning, all saves after are fake progress you need to redo. (Of course a save game is always welcome, but the idea of “saving progress you don’t have to redo” is definitely violated here.)

Text adventures weren’t the greatest of media, that seems to be the consensus as early as 1985 when Infocom not only hit dire straights but also this one came out and while selling well, probably also tarnished its reputation. Maybe Infocom as a company would have done a lot better – and the medium it was working on – if it had not insisted on doing this to players. Who would shell out another pile of bucks for an Infocom game after this? I think quite a lot of people got burned on this one, no doubt.

With basically the same hardware that Infocom filled up with to the brim with text Lucas Arts made “Maniac Mansion” two years later, a fun romp that managed to do the same with graphics. The only advantage I see with Infocom (or Sierra graphic adventures) is that they occasionally managed to require the player to enter some ingenious input and respond properly to it, be it rudeness in “Leisure Suit Larry” or be it a few lines in Infocom games. There was an occasional payoff for this medium, but all in all, it isn’t worth it to me.

Some people enjoy the arbitrary difficulty as cleverness, but I think the game mostly telegraphs its problems barely or badly, has a middle stretch of “I have these things, that must be the solution”, and then falls short of a proper finale. Its redeeming qualities were the abolition of mazes (except the Dark, in a sense) and empty rooms, and the idea of presenting vignettes that make you feel part of the unfolding story. (Though frankly, they were arbitrary and not great, either.)

- Lisa H.

June 8, 2020 at 6:46 pm

The original game also has a “no tea” object, which Arthur has in inventory at the beginning of the game (along with “a splitting headache”). There’s a question about it in the general questions of the Invisiclues: Is there any significance to “no tea”?

Also, if the game really insists that an action taken early in the game is so important, it could require a restart, then it could have added this scene as something you can revisit during the mid-game.

If you’re referring to feeding the cheese sandwich to the dog, you do get a second chance mid-game. You can also do this when you return to Earth as Ford and play the other side of the bulldozer scene.

- Doug Orleans

June 9, 2020 at 12:12 am

I got pretty far into it before realizing that I needed the pocket fluff that I had dropped back at the beginning of the game. I quit and never bothered to restart.

- Lisa H.

June 9, 2020 at 12:44 am

Hm, yeah. That’s a pretty nasty dead Earthman walking. I suppose if you drop it outside the house it’s not still magically there when you revisit as Ford?

- Doug Orleans

June 9, 2020 at 4:10 am

I think I might have dropped it on the Vogon ship, for an inventory-limit puzzle.

Yeah, it’s a bad game.

- Ross

June 9, 2020 at 4:47 am

One thing about the Babelfish puzzle is that it basically holds your hand through it one step at a time. But the infuriating unfairness and difficulty comes from the fact that said handholding takes longer than you have, and requires objects you may have missed and have no way to get now.

- Ben

June 28, 2021 at 3:23 pm

plastic empty baggie -> empty plastic baggie

Part of footnote 8 is in the main text.

- Jimmy Maher

June 29, 2021 at 7:27 am

Thanks!

Suspect
November 22, 2013

(This article includes some spoilers. I’ve hidden them in the text, but this will probably only work if you’re reading on the actual site. If you’re somewhere else, such as Planet-IF or an RSS Reader, you may want to click through to the site and read there — assuming you care about spoilers, of course.)

And finally there was Suspect. Dribbled out into Hitchhiker’s huge wake just as 1984 expired, David Lebling’s first exercise in ludic mystery and Infocom’s fifth title of 1984 still carries with it a certain inevitable air of the anticlimactic. But we always try to give every Infocom game its due around here, and Suspect will be no exception.

If you’ve played Deadline or The Witness, or even just read about them, you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from Suspect. Once again this is a game that you must not so much explore as dissect; must not work your way through linearly from introduction to climax but rather assault from every angle. You can expect to finish it successfully only after dozens of restarts, each of them a little fact-finding mission all its own. Then, when you’ve seen all the pieces, you can fit them together and plan your final mission, at the end of which you will hopefully walk away with a guilty verdict (on someone other than yourself, that is). That’s the ideal, anyway; more likely the first few times you try you’ll find you still don’t quite have enough evidence, and thus it’s back to restarting and looking for more.

Suspect completes a neat trilogy of mystery roles. In Deadline you played the detective investigating a murder; in The Witness a witness to a murder; and in Suspect, yes, the prime suspect in a murder. You play a newspaper reporter who’s invited by Veronica Ashcroft, a Maryland blue blood and old friend from university, to her annual Halloween bash. Soon after your arrival Veronica is found murdered in her office — offices are dangerous places in Infocom mysteries; that’s where the crime in all three of them takes place — with the lariat that goes with your cowboy costume wrapped around her neck. You have to find the real murderer before the detective that comes to investigate and his associate, your old friend Sergeant Duffy, arrest you for the crime.

While Suspect, like The Witness, hews very firmly to the sturdy template laid out by Deadline, it does reflect Infocom’s ever-growing sophistication. There are far more characters to interact with than in the earlier games, and far more to see and do. Indeed, the world of Suspect is in many ways the most complex Infocom had yet created. Every character in the game is constantly moving about the rather expansive grounds of Veronica’s estate, and they mostly react believably to events around them, whether said events are set off by you or someone else. Granted, it is kind of odd that no one seems to care all that much when they learn that Veronica’s just been murdered, to the extent that they just continue enjoying Veronica’s own party despite her unfortunate absence. Then again, exactly this sort of behavior is par for the course in many an Agatha Christie novel, so I suppose we can take it as in the spirit of the genre.

Dave Lebling is generally a deft, elegant writer. He doesn’t entirely let us down here, but he is somewhat hampered by the need to describe so many comings and goings. It can all begin to have something of a mechanistic feel, as if all these characters were models moving about the house on tracks.

>s
Long Hall South
This is almost the southern end of the long north-south hall. A large doorway opens into the southern end of the ballroom. Another door on the west is to a small closet.
Ostmann is off to the east.
Alicia heads off to the east.
Smythe heads off to the north.

>s
Long Hall Begins
Here the front hall and a long north-south hall fronting the ballroom intersect. Another hall starts south of here and goes east.
The Werewolf is to the west, heading toward the east.
Linda is to the west, heading toward the east.
Smythe is to the north, heading toward the south.

In his defense, Suspect is hardly alone among Infocom’s mysteries in having this wind-up-toy feel about it. The very depth of the simulation tends to cut against their literary sensibilities.

Still, Suspect also has room for whimsy. Lebling gifts us with more Easter eggs and in-jokes than any game this side of Sorcerer. Shout-outs for hardcore fans are everywhere. One of the party-goers is dressed as a “short, cuddly-looking robot”; another is a grue; moving a rug aside gets you “Under the rug you see a wooden trap door… No, sorry! That’s another story.” Indeed, the more superficial elements are some of the most entertaining. The game is a little time capsule of yuppie life in the early 1980s, from the BMW 320i in the garage to “Karma Chameleon” playing in the ballroom.

The charm extends to the feelies, the main exhibit of which is a little Miss Manners-style guidebook called Murder and Modern Manners. The humor therein bites a bit more sharply than was the norm for Infocom, with at least one paragraph that qualifies as genuine satire, on the subject of “Prison Projects”:

Poetry can be a wonderfully sensitive medium for expressing your remorse and anguish. The study of law will help you improve your oratory skills, a clear benefit when you make vehement pleas to the prison parole board. Writing books can also be quite rewarding: the first eight editions of this book were all highly successful and sold particularly well among guilt-ridden liberals. But perhaps the wisest choice is painting. Prisoners are perceived as having great depths of repressed artistic genius. There are literally thousands of deep-pocketed dilettantes who are willing to pay a fortune for prison art. Especially if the work is being done by prisoners with a background of violent crime.

Infocom and G/R Copy were able to enlist a name artist with a long history in high and commercial art, Alan E. Cober, to illustrate the box and the booklet in his distinctively spare, modern style. The economic woes that would beset the company very soon after Suspect would make such prestigious collaborators a thing of the past.

(Spoiler: I “EXAMINE”d Veronica’s party mask, but never “SEARCH”ed it. If this strikes you as rather a cheap move on the game’s part, I can’t say I disagree.)Suspect is in fact the second very tough Infocom game in a row, following seven very solvable titles between Suspended and Hitchhiker’s. (Hitchhiker’s and Suspect together are almost enough to make me revise my premise that Infocom games trended generally easier as the company grew older.) When you put together the clues which are laced very subtly through the text and the storyworld to divine who’s responsible and how he, she, or they committed the crime, it’s a wonderful moment. Unfortunately, that’s just the first step. Actually proving what you know to the detective’s satisfaction is something else, a task made even more difficult by a lack of feedback; you never really know how close you actually are or which bits and pieces you’ve presented to the detective are actually important. It’s particularly difficult to figure out that you need to monitor one absolutely vital thing, almost managed to solve the murder in my recent playthrough, aided no doubt by vague memories from years ago. I just neglected to do one key thing and therefore was short one key clue.

(Spoiler: I kept trying to find a good reason for Alicia to help Michael murder his wife; as the game itself says if you attempt to arrest her alone, she didn’t have any motive. I naturally suspected an affair between Michael and Alicia, but could find no evidence of this beyond seeing them dancing together briefly in the ballroom. Just as happened with both )Suspect oddly shares with both of the mysteries that preceded it.

Suspect would turn out to mark the end of the line for Infocom’s original, hardcore take on the interactive mystery novel. While they would continue to dabble in mystery, the later games would play more like conventional adventure games. It’s hard to say why a form that caused such excitement back when Deadline first appeared should peter out so relatively quietly. Certainly it’s clear that a significant number of Infocom fans, both then and now, dislike the form of play of the early mysteries intensely, even if enough enjoyed the format — or just let brand loyalty overcome their misgivings — to generate for Suspect fairly typical sales numbers for its period, just shy of 50,000 copies. But there was also perhaps something else: a feeling that, having invented the format with Deadline, Infocom didn’t quite know how to advance it. For all its additional polish, there’s nothing really new that Suspect brings to the table. It would be unfair to say it feels stale precisely, but it shares enough with its predecessors that it can feel a bit anonymous in their company. Suspect is certainly the least loved and least remembered of the three today. Of course, Infocom might have tried to shake up the approach with a hypothetical next game instead of abandoning it; just having the victim not be a blue blood and not die in her office would make a good start. But being as they never did, we’re left with a trilogy of games almost unique in adventuring history, and one which even comes with an overarching thematic progression. The only other role left for the player to enact was that of victim — and I’m not sure how Infocom could have managed that. Maybe by putting the whole format out of its misery, as they did.

An inevitable footnote to any discussion of Suspect must be the gala that Infocom held to promote it at the January 1985 CES. It was by far the largest party the company ever gave, yet another marker of the high-water point this period represents. They invited some 5000 people to the Hartland Mansion in Las Vegas, formerly one of Elvis Presley’s homes, for what must be the largest game of How to Host a Murder ever played. Customized letter openers, previously mailed to invitees, served for tickets as well as party favors; these are today one of the most cherished of all pieces of Infocom memorabilia. One of these also became the murder weapon, in a crime staged by an acting troupe in front of the crowds gathered in the mansion’s ballroom around a huge indoor pool. The next day’s Las Vegas Sun bore the headline “Murder Rocks CES!,” with the important detail that it was all just pretend hidden below the fold. It seemed like great publicity — until it prompted authorities to investigate, whereupon they determined that the house had not been zoned for hosting a public event of such a magnitude. Infocom was forced to return to Las Vegas to testify in court, but thankfully the owners of the house bore the brunt of the pain. Not as sexy as murder, perhaps, but such is life in the real world.

(As usual at this time of year, The Digital Antiquarian will be taking a little hiatus while my wife and I travel back to the good old U.S.A. for Thanksgiving with my friends and family. Will be back at it in two to three weeks, at which time we’ll shift back over to Britain to look at 1984 there. I’ll see you guys then.)

Comments
31 Responses

- David Boddie

November 22, 2013 at 8:51 pm

I’m sure I’ve already mentioned a game with a similar mechanic to this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_%28interactive_fiction%29

And it seems that the final role (protagonist as victim) was done five years later by Level 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapeghost

- Jimmy Maher

November 23, 2013 at 8:02 am

I played Corruption years ago. I remember it as being all but impossibly hard to solve. Will revisit it again of course when we get there. And I’m very much looking forward to Scapeghost, which I’ve never played.

- Robb Sherwin

November 22, 2013 at 8:56 pm

The only other role left for the player to enact was that of victim — and I’m not sure how Infocom could have managed that.

Level 9 did with Scapeghost. :)

Great article, as always. Suspect’s manual is my absolute favorite of any game, ever. I had always wished that Infocom did a game about Dr. Charles Edwards, Emergency Room Surgeon / Murderer.

- matt w

November 23, 2013 at 12:30 am

There’s also the old “Someone has slipped you poison and you have 24 hours to solve the mystery and maybe get the antidote” wheeze. (Looks like this is in the 1950 movie D.O.A., probably among others.) Goes nicely with a turn limit.

- Anon

November 23, 2013 at 4:54 am

Or alternatively, the player could have been the murderer, who now has to destroy, conceal, and alter evidence, and eliminate, turn, or trick witnesses, so as to not be discovered by the investigator.

- Jimmy Maher

November 23, 2013 at 8:05 am

I think I might recall a recent game that worked something like that… :)

- Mark Ricard

January 14, 2014 at 4:04 am

I even remember somebody review of that game in SPAG Magazine issue 61.

- Mark Ricard

January 14, 2014 at 6:12 pm

*someones review.

- Peter Piers

October 16, 2015 at 7:21 pm

Erm… any chance the comment above could be deleted or edited? I’m sorry, but it’s a huge, unprompted spoiler. I happened to play that game, and the realization that we’re talking about here was *crucial* for my enjoyment.

(I then proceeded not continue, because that level of complexity does not suit my tastes at all. But ah well)

- Jimmy Maher

October 17, 2015 at 9:30 am

Edited the comment so you’ll have to go looking for it to find out what game it is.

- Marshal Tenner Winter

November 22, 2013 at 9:34 pm

Hi! You stated ” I “EXAMINE”d Veronica’s party mask, but never “SEARCH”ed it. If this strikes you as rather a cheap move on the game’s part, I can’t say I disagree.”

My 2 cents on this is that you “examine” with your eyes only and “search” with your eyes and hands. This is how I implement it in my games, but I’ve been told to warn my players about it.

- Jimmy Maher

November 23, 2013 at 8:04 am

That’s not how Lebling sees it. :) I think that SEARCH and LOOK IN are pretty much equivalent in most of the Infocom games, this one included. And indeed, the clue is found on the inside of the mask. Still strikes me as needlessly cruel, verging on guess the verb.

- Mark Ricard

January 6, 2014 at 9:10 pm

Jim,I had the same problem about a year and half ago when I first played Dual Transform by Andrew Plotkin. At one point you can only find the object with search instead of examine. It is too bad because that was the only time I needed look at the walkthrough in the entire game. He claims it was a mistake on his part.

- Zurlocker

November 23, 2013 at 7:22 am

Good write up. Personally, I thought the artwork for Suspect was among the ugliest they ever used. But glad to know that it was “art”. :-)

- Giuseppe

November 26, 2013 at 3:05 pm

Yeah, I’m glad to know that it’s ‘art’ too, seeing how I think it’s hideous.

- Torbjörn Andersson

December 1, 2013 at 10:17 pm

There was a different cover illustration for Suspect in one of the Infocom product catalogs. You can see a scan of it at http://gallery.guetech.org/incomplete/incomplete-4.jpg though it’s a bit fuzzy since even the original image was pretty small.

- Felix

November 23, 2013 at 11:33 am

Amazing how much Karma Chameleon has been used as a symbol for 1983-1984. I remember an issue of the New Teen Titans where the eponymous protagonists are walking down the street and the same song is blaring from somebody’s boombox. I can’t think of any cultural product that would define 2013 to the same extent AND be remembered three decades from now. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be…

- Rick Reynolds

January 9, 2014 at 1:09 am

I’m sorry to post so late, but I was going through my Infocom collection of stuff and found a Quitclaim deed that I believe matches info from this game.

It isn’t listed anywhere on the Infocom fact sheet. Was it an extra feelie distributed with the Invisiclue booklet for this game?

- Jimmy Maher

January 9, 2014 at 10:19 am

It doesn’t ring any bells with me. If you were to scan it and post it somewhere, maybe somebody might be able to help.

- Dave Thompsen

March 5, 2014 at 4:18 pm

The “Quitclaim Deed” is the map packaged with the Suspect Invisiclues sold separately from the game.

http://gallery.guetech.org/suspect_invisiclues/suspect_invisiclues.html

- Peter Piers

October 16, 2015 at 7:33 pm

How bizarre – it looks exactly like the sort of feelie Infocom would have been glad to add in the box! I wonder why they “relegated” it to the InvisiClues packaging… Did InvisiClues often have that much extra stuff?

- Jimmy Maher

October 17, 2015 at 9:33 am

Not usually, no. Normally just the hints and a standard boxes-and-lines map of the game. It’s very possible that map was originally made for the game, but then it was decided it was too expensive to include and/or made the game too easy, so it was relegated to the hint booklet. That would be my best guess anyway.

- Peter Ferrie

December 8, 2015 at 12:20 am

And no mention of the bug with the magically appearing body? If you take the shortcut between the halls, you can reach the office one move before the body is placed.

- Joe Pranevich

July 24, 2018 at 6:17 pm

Having just played through this, I had the same problem with not knowing to ask about the weather and completely misreading the clues that I had. I assumed the hair was from a struggle rather than part of the disguise.

I had built an overly-complex schedule so that I could zoom around from place to place and witness all the conversations, Michael and Alicia dancing, etc. I thought that I needed to do it all in one playthrough to get the best ending.

This one was fun and I place it above “The Witness” personally, although in part because I solved that one by accident. It’s a shame they didn’t make any more because the format seems to have so much promise.

- RurouniJames

April 15, 2020 at 4:56 am

This is probably a late reply but I’m curious as to whether or not all of the events/code of Suspect has ever been put out there for public viewing.

I used to play this game a ton when I was a kid. My grandmother has a C64 and it was tradition that every time I visited her house that we’d spend several hours of each night I was there trying to solve it. I think we got close at one point but it was just too much for us. So instead of trying to solve the murder we just started doing all sorts of random things. Highlights include dragging the body throughout the house to show it off (I’m sure almost everyone has tried this though) and watching a literal fight break out on the dance floor between two of the characters (I can’t remember which two). Try as we might, we could never get the fight sequence to happen ever again so for a lot of time I thought maybe I had imagined it. But my grandma still remembers it happening so it’s unlikely that we both just imagined it happening.

I’m curious as to what other weird things could happen in the game, hence my question about whether or not the events from the code were ever posted. Would love to read through it if so.

- Jimmy Maher

April 15, 2020 at 7:09 am

You’re in luck. The indefatigable Jason Scott put all of the original ZIL source code for the Infocom games on GitHub about a year ago. Suspect is here: https://github.com/historicalsource/suspect.

- RurouniJames

April 21, 2020 at 5:39 am

That is awesome. Thanks for the link.

- Peter Orvetti

June 20, 2020 at 6:12 pm

I’ve been puzzling over this one for a while: What is the colorful blob above the Wolfman’s head on the far left side of the cover art intended to be? It does not look like a costume…

- Lisa H.

June 20, 2020 at 7:21 pm

I think it’s the helmet of a spacesuit.

- Peter Orvetti

June 20, 2020 at 8:50 pm

Ah! Indeed it is. Thanks!

- Lisa H.

February 24, 2021 at 9:33 am

The spoiler text isn’t working on Safari (at least on iPadOS) – highlighting the text does nothing and it’s still illegible black on black.

Down From the Top
April 3, 2014

Infocom’s display at the 1985 Winter CES.

Infocom entered 1985 filled with ebullient optimism. They had just released their fastest-selling game ever, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; hosted two splashy Manhattan press conferences, just like the big boys, the first to announce Hitchhiker’s and the second to announce their debut business product, the Cornerstone database; signed a lease to leave the cramped environs of their offices on Wheeler Street and take over an entire floor of a modern, stylish office complex on CambridgePark Drive that had an atrium for God’s sake. That January’s Consumer Electronics Show saw Infocom put out the most lavish (and expensive) trade-show effort they would ever tackle, including a big show-floor display for the games as well as the soon-to-be-released Cornerstone and a memorable murder-mystery party with a cast of thousands to promote their latest game, Dave Lebling’s Suspect.

It was a heady time indeed. Infocom, who had been successful at everything they’d attempted thus far, were going to continue to pioneer a whole new form of interactive literature at the same time that they became the next Lotus-style sensation in business software. They were a smart bunch of people, and every decision they’d made so far had proved to be the correct one. Why should that change now?

Well, it was about to change in a hurry. By year’s end Infocom would be a shell of the company it had been less than twelve months before, in financial free fall and willing to give up all of their higher hopes of January in return for simple survival. It was, to say the least, a humbling experience, as suddenly this bunch who had never known failure seemed to experience little but. To understand that crazy year, understand how Infocom got from here to there, we have to step back again to 1984. Having already told the story of Infocom the Interactive-Fiction Pioneer in 1984, it’s time to tell the shadow history of Infocom the Would-Be Business-Software Company.

Brian Berkowitz shows off his baby at Winter CES.

I’ve described already in an earlier article how Cornerstone — known until quite late in the game as the InfoBase — was first proposed by Brian Berkowitz and Richard Ilson, a pair of programmers the Imps knew well from MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, when Infocom was enjoying the first rush of popular success that followed the Zork games and Deadline. I also told how the InfoBase graduated from research project to major strategic initiative during 1983. In January of 1984 Al Vezza took the title of CEO from Joel Berez, and started planning how to spend the $2 million loan he had just secured from the Bank of Boston to make the InfoBase, still just a bunch of ideas and code and prototypes, a real commercial product.

Vezza was determined to get only the best for his pet project. In March, he hired as head of Business Products John Brackett, yet another MIT alum who had already spent more than twenty years working in the computer industry. Brackett had a technical and, if you like, a philosophical background that seemed perfect for Infocom. His previous company SofTech had been, along with Apple, a licensee of the University of California San Diego’s Pascal-driven P-Machine, inspiration for Infocom’s own Z-Machine. SofTech and Brackett had done good business for several years selling and supporting the P-Machine to application developers, until the arrival of the IBM PC established MS-DOS as the standard for business computing and made cross-platform portability, at least for the time being, less of a priority there.

The InfoBase itself was being built using an expanded version of Infocom’s core Z-Machine technology. Like the game developers, InfoBase developers did their coding and initial testing on the company’s big DECSystem-20 minicomputer. Only occasionally would the code be moved to microcomputers for testing on the new interpreters that were also being developed. When it became clear that the DEC was getting overtaxed by so many users, Vezza signed a lease to bring in a complete new DECSystem-20 in May for the exclusive use of Business Products, a commitment of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile he and Brackett kept hiring; soon Business Products people outnumbered Consumer Products (i.e., games) people, and the inevitable resentments started to fester in earnest.

The games people — even those who actively opposed or just weren’t much interested in the InfoBase itself — had few or no problems with the technical people who worked in Business Products. Those folks were largely in the mold of Berkowitz and Ilson, a couple of MIT hackers with much the same values and working habits as the Imps themselves; if things had gone slightly differently, people like Marc Blank and Dave Lebling must have realized, they could have been writing the database while the database people wrote the games. Both projects were, at their core, just Interesting Coding Projects, every hacker’s lifeblood. No, it was the suits who started to arrive en masse as the InfoBase got closer to release who really stirred up ire. Included in this group were the office managers and the HR directors and the financial planners and no fewer than fourteen well-scrubbed business-marketing experts. “They weren’t even on the same planet,” said Tim Anderson later. “These guys were showing up at work at nine in suits.” Steve Meretkzy became a ringleader of an ongoing subversion of Vezza and Brackett’s attempts to transform Infocom into just another buttoned-down corporation like their role models and everyone’s favorite business-software success story, Lotus. “Memo hacking” was one of his favorite strategies.

A certain HR manager, hired from DEC, arrived with a binder full of “memo templates” to be used for all intra-office communication. She loved memos so much that people were soon just calling her “Memos.” When she sent out a memo instructing everyone on the proper care of their office plants, Mereztky decided enough was enough. He and a few co-conspirators surreptitiously replaced the original memo in everyone’s in-box with another, which said that the company was now offering a service to take care of employees’ house plants; it seemed there was concern in management that, what with the long hours everyone was working, said plants were being neglected. An included multi-page questionnaire asked for the location of each plant as well as such essential information as the song it preferred to have sung to it while being watered. Some people took it seriously, mostly — and much to Meretzky and company’s delight — the poor humorless souls in business marketing and the other more buttoned-down wings of the company. HR rushed around to put a cover sheet on each memo saying it was not to be taken seriously, whereupon Meretzky and company added a cover sheet of their own saying the cover sheet saying not to take the memo seriously should itself not be taken seriously. “Immense confusion” followed.

Not learning her lesson, Memos was soon distributing a “Flowers and Fruit Basket Request Form,” for sending out condolences to employees’ families who were experiencing a bereavement. Meretzky did her one better, creating a “Flowers and Fruit Basket Request Form Form”; the idea would later show up in Stationfall as the “Request for Stellar Patrol Issue Regulations Black Form Binders Request Form Form.”

Al Vezza

While Memos took her lumps, Public Enemy #1 for much of Consumer Products was Al Vezza himself. The humor at Infocom was always irreverent but almost never cruel or crude. That related to Vezza, however, was often an exception; some of the more popular Vezza epithets, which we shan’t get into here, were both. One former employee, normally a model of good temper and equanimity, still says of Vezza today, “There are very few people in my life that I’ve really disliked — and Al is definitely one of them.”

I find with most who engender such negativity that, while it’s hard to argue that it’s not their fault, there’s also something a bit sad about the person in question. Vezza’s professional character was defined by a number of toxic combinations. He was a thoroughly conventional thinker, of the sort who sourced all of his wisdom from business self-help books, yet nevertheless believed himself to be a bold innovator. He was arrogant and dismissive of opinions of others, particularly of those younger than him, yet also deeply insecure. At risk of playing pop psychologist, I’ll posit that some of his attitudes may stem from his experience at the MIT AI Lab. Despite having no advanced degree himself, he had parlayed a role as essentially J.C.R. Licklider’s administrative assistant into one of considerable power and influence, even serving as an undergraduate thesis adviser. Perhaps he learned there that he had to in some sense fake surety and authority despite continuing to feel intimidated by his often brilliant charges. His insecurity manifested itself in a tendency to micromanage that drove everyone around him crazy, while the lack of faith in his people that it implied destroyed morale and created storms of negative feelings. For Vezza the business was all too personal. Infocom was “his” company, first proposed and organized by him, his way to make his mark on the world. He seemed to regard the games and the company’s current reputation, which had been built with little input from him, as a sort of hijacking of something rightfully his. Now he was determined to reclaim his original vision for Infocom.

He also seemed determined that his means to that end should be the original company he had founded in 1979, and under its original name. The Board had held serious debates already during the spring and summer of 1983 about whether it made sense to create both games and business applications under the Infocom banner. In one of his rare Board meeting appearances, even Licklider offered support for making the budding Business Products division a company unto itself. That way, “employees might feel they’re contributing to their own company rather than engaged in rivalry with the other division.” Marc Blank was still more ominously prescient: he was “afraid that [Business Products] division might sink the company unless it’s made more separate.” Vezza, however, was resistant, and the Board seemed reluctant to directly challenge him on this as on many other subjects.

Immediately after Vezza’s ascendancy, Mike Dornbrook paid him a visit in his office to try again:

“Al, I really think it’s a mistake to have this product and the games business all under one umbrella,” I said. “I would honestly not put that out as Infocom. I think Infocom now means adventure games, and it will confuse the people who are buying adventure games as to what we’re all about. And I think it will actually be a detriment to any business product, that it’s coming from a games company.

“You can have the same shareholders. Just divide the company into two entities. We can share the building. We can share computers. But have two separate legal entities, and raise money for the business entity separately, and keep the [Business Products] books separately from the gaming business.”

His response to me was, “You don’t understand finance.” So I walked out of the room thinking, oh well, I tried.

Weeks later, with Brackett installed as head of Business Products and a whole associated bureaucracy falling into place, it would be too late to change course even had Vezza had a change of heart. The decision to do the InfoBase under the Infocom banner would prove to be perhaps the worst of many unwise choices made during Vezza’s reign. Dave Lebling describes the problems that resulted:

When they [Vezza and the Board] went out to look for capital to build [the InfoBase] into a real product or to continue to build the games into an even “realer” product or to move them forward, what they found was that investors who were interested in the business product would look at the other part of the ledger sheet and say, “Why are these games here? What is this about? Are you guys insane?” And the people who were looking at the games part would say, “Oh, wow! Cool ideas! You guys got a great business going here. But what is this stupid business thing?”

In retrospect, with that wonderful 20/20 hindsight we all have, it would have been better to have two companies.

Due to the issues Lebling describes as well as a general closing of the financial spigots in a maturing industry, Vezza and company found venture capitalists much less positively disposed to give Infocom their money than they had anticipated. In the end they would manage to secure only $500,000 in free-and-clear capital, from the state-run Massachusetts Capital Resource Company. Despite the Board’s having given lip service to maintaining at least a modicum of a financial firewall between Business Products and Consumer Products, the former ended up sucking up virtually all of the profits of the latter, leaving precious little funding for a whole range of projects that Blank and Berez felt were essential for Infocom to maintain their position as leading lights in games. Projects to expand the size and complexity of the stories they could tell; to dramatically improve their already industry-leading parser; to build a cross-platform graphics system that would let them add pictures to their games; to experiment with multi-player networked interactive fiction; to expand into entirely new genres beyond adventure gaming — all were starved for funds, forced to be dramatically scaled back or cancelled entirely. Seeing this essential work go so neglected, Berez and particularly Blank argued with the other, business-centric members of the Board with less and less civility, all but paralyzing the company as a whole at times. The newest Board member, Ray Stata, threw his hands up in despair at the June 6, 1984 meeting: “I won’t be polite anymore — company management is terrible!”

When there was no more money lying around for them in Consumer Products, the ever-expanding Business Products division — full-time employees at Infocom would peak at 110 by June of 1985, up from 20 two years before — began financing itself through a series of loans, putting the whole company under a cloud of increasingly dangerous financial obligations and further raising the ire of Berez and Blank.

The InfoBase, now called Cornerstone, shipped at last on January 31, 1985, at a suggested retail price of $500. For all the culture clashes it had engendered, there was more than a little of the Infocom game DNA in its presentation and packaging as well as the DEC-authored, Z-Machine-derived software on the disks themselves. Infocom, with the aid of the invaluable folks at G/R Copy, was really good at putting their best foot forward in presenting their products, and Cornerstone was no exception; just the name alone was a great, classy choice. The packaging was an elaborate affair, a glossy slipcover over a solid plastic box that popped open accordion-style to reveal no fewer than three spiral-bound, 200-plus-page manuals. There was even a feelie, a “Don’t Panic!” button that varied only in color from the one found in the Hitchhiker’s package.

Having never seriously used a relational database in my life, I’m eminently unqualified to offer a thorough review of Cornerstone from personal experience here. However, I feel confident in saying based on my dabblings and the reviews it received in the contemporary press that it’s a somewhat peculiar mixture of the innovative and the misguided. Cornerstone’s mantra, claim to fame, and primary selling point was to be “the database system for the non-programmer.” This rhetoric was quite clearly directed against the leading PC database of the era, Ashton-Tate’s dBase III, an application so quirky and fiddly that it can come off almost like a satire of user-hostile DOS-era application software. Doing virtually anything with dBase III required learning its esoteric, proprietary command language, a process as complicated as that of learning to program in any other language. While it had been in development just a bit too long to embrace the new paradigm of the full-fledged mouse-driven GUI, Cornerstone nevertheless strained to be a friendlier experience than dBase III, with features like automatic command completion, extensive in-program help, menus, even a system of what would later come to be called “Wizards” to walk users through common tasks via prompts and questions.

A certain sort of user fell in love with Cornerstone, in some cases continuing to use it for years after it went out of print. Marc Blank has told of going to his dentist well after his tenure with Infocom finished and realizing that the receptionist was using it to take down his billing information. Andrew Kaluzniacki, who worked in Infocom’s Micro Group during Cornerstone’s development, noticed four years after leaving that his aunt, a veterinarian, was running it in her office. She said “she loved it. It was easy and she was able to do the database work herself without ever really knowing she was using a database.”

Yet for other sorts of users Cornerstone had at least two huge failings. The first was a byproduct of Infocom’s decision to make it an interpreted product, running through a Z-Machine-like interpreter, rather than writing native code. It was a decision that had made a certain amount of sense back when the project had first been conceived in 1982, when the business-computing market was still comparatively wide open, a mixture of CP/M machines and the new IBM PCs and even still a fair number of Apple IIs, Radio Shack TRS-80s, and Commodore PETs. By 1985, however, that had all changed; much as Apple might have liked to see the young Macintosh as a viable challenger, the business market was owned by IBM PCs and clones running MS-DOS. Anyone serious enough about a database to be willing to spend $500 on it was virtually guaranteed to have this setup. On these machines, especially the many lower-end models still using the original 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU, Cornerstone ran noticeably slowly in comparison to the competition. Sometimes more than noticeably: a PC Magazine reviewer simply gave up trying to run their longest benchmark test when their next-to-longest took 3.5 hours to complete. John Brackett had left his previous company SofTech precisely because demand for their own portable P-Machine system had flagged due to the IBM PC’s adoption as the universal business standard. That no one at Infocom, including Brackett himself, made the obvious connection here almost beggars belief. The DECSystem-20 and virtual machines seemed to be so ingrained in Infocom’s culture that no one could imagine an alternative. In the end Cornerstone was never released for a single platform other than the IBM PC. All that money spent on the DEC, all that programming time and energy sunk into designing the virtual machine and writing its interpreters, all that speed lost in the final product — all were for naught. Cornerstone wasn’t poorly designed on a technical level; most everyone involved with Infocom agrees that it was technically rather brilliant. But much of that brilliance was unnecessary, costly brilliance.

Cornerstone’s other crippling flaw was, ironically given its tagline, its lack of programmability. Ease of use is a wonderful thing, but there comes a time when you need to just write a script to get something more complicated done. In Cornerstone, this was impossible. Just months after its release a company called Ansa Software debuted Paradox, a database which for $700 offered similar ease of use along with a built-in programming language for more complicated tasks and the speed benefits of native execution. If there was a final nail in Cornerstone’s coffin, this was it.

Given Cornerstone’s strengths and weaknesses, Infocom might have done much better to position it as a consumer-level application, sort of a “database for the rest of us” for lighter users like the aforementioned dentist and veterinarian, and even for home users who just wanted to keep track of a stamp or record collection. With the home market still divided among at least half a dozen commercially viable but incompatible platforms, its cross-platform portability could have been a real asset here. Infocom did make a last desperate gesture in that direction long after it became clear that Cornerstone would not be challenging dBase III, reducing the price to $100 and promoting it in The New Zork Times as a way for writers to keep track of their sources, for a church to keep track of its congregation (pull out all single members aged between 21 and 30 and invite them to a Young Singles dance!), for a softball league to keep track of its schedule and teams and players — or, yes, for a stamp collector to keep tabs on her collection. As Infocom at last admitted, “Many of the people who would most benefit from Cornerstone just couldn’t afford it [at the original price].” But by then Vezza and the rest of Business Products was gone, and Infocom was just trying to get something — anything — out of a failed product. To the list of Vezza’s mistakes must thus be added his lack of flexibility and his determination to compete only head-to-head with the big boys rather than seeking out the cracks and seams in the market.

Another one for the list: Infocom signed the lease for their new digs on CambridgePark Drive, which carried with them a rent of more than $600,000 per year, six weeks before releasing Cornerstone, and months before they’d have any clear idea of how much of a success it would be. As the Smiths once sang, “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby.” They were simply assuming it would be a hit, and, what with the rent and all the debt, essentially betting the company on that assumption.

125 CambridgePark Drive today. Infocom occupied much of the fifth floor.

For most of the old timers, those days in March of 1985 when Infocom packed up everything inside the Wheeler Street offices and moved it all to CambridgePark Drive were sad ones indeed, in their way even sadder than the final closure of Infocom more than four years later (the latter came almost as a relief for many). Wheeler Street had been a “funky” place that felt right for a small creative company, full of interesting little nooks and crannies and a sense of “artisanship.” It even had a pool, where many office parties ended up. The adjectives the former employees use to describe CambridgePark, however, are all of a very different kind. “Soulless” comes up a lot; “buttoned-down”; “light, but not in a good way”; “colorless”; “not as fun.” Infocom lost something with the move that they would never regain.

Infocom’s expansion and contraction happened so quickly that the two actually intersect with one another. Already within weeks of the move to CambridgePark disappointing sales forced the adoption of what Consumer Products came to cheekily label the “InfoAusterity Program,” which first meant only the loss of such perks as the $400-per-week office-party budget. If those of you working in offices today aren’t exactly bubbling over with sympathy for such a loss, never fear; it would get much, much worse.

Infocom was still hiring as the InfoAusterity measures were put in place, bringing in a last few programmers to work on Cornerstone interpreters for other platforms. Mike Morton started in June of 1985 as a 68000-programming expert, tasked with bringing Cornerstone to platforms like the Macintosh and the new Atari ST. The day before his first day of work, he got a phone call from HR: “We’re all taking a 15% pay deferral for the next six months. Do you still want to start tomorrow?” Morton came in anyway, to work for a bare few months before the 68000 project and all other Cornerstone-related work was cancelled amidst three waves of layoffs that wracked the company through the fall. (An Atari ST version of Cornerstone was apparently largely completed, and was sneaked out of the company by persons unknown to wind up on pirate BBSs. However, it was never officially sold and doesn’t appear to have survived to the present day.) In three months Infocom’s employee rolls went from 110 to 40. To all the other objections about CambridgePark was now added another: the place was suddenly, depressingly half empty. It would remain that way — in fact, increasingly emptier — for the rest of Infocom’s life.

Softball, summer 1985. In six months six of the eight people here would be gone.

As most anyone who’s been through the experience can attest, layoffs are an incredibly painful thing for a company — especially a small, closely knit company like Infocom — to go through. Yes, it was mostly Cornerstone people rather than games people who were let go, but even some of them, like the original parents of Cornerstone Berkowitz and Ilson themselves, had been around for literally years and were liked by everyone. As Marc Blank puts it, there’s “nothing worse, nothing more horrible” inside a company than a layoff. Andrew Kaluzniacki:

At the point you start talking about who isn’t going to make it, who do we really need to succeed… that takes a lot of the fun out of it. There wasn’t anybody at Infocom that I didn’t want to have around. These were all great people.

John Brackett made his exit during this period when the whole Business Products division was essentially shuttered. But the most jarring loss of all was that of Marc Blank, the man who had arguably done more than anyone else to make Infocom what it was by implementing the company’s legendary parser, co-designing Zork and the Z-Machine, writing the landmark Deadline that changed all the rules about what a text adventure could do and be, and, articulate and personable fellow that he was, serving as Infocom’s de facto spokesman and face to the world.

Blank wasn’t actually the first of the old guard to leave. Early in the year Mike Berlyn had quit. It seems he desperately wanted to work with his wife Muffy as his official co-designer, but was prevented from doing so by Infocom’s bar against employing spouses or family. When management refused to bend the rules, he and Muffy decided to start their own design studio, Brainwave Creations. In a sense it was perfect timing; Berlyn got to experience most of the happiest days at Infocom with none of the later, more painful ones. From the standpoint of Infocom’s fans, it may also have been a good move. Berlyn, who could be difficult and stubborn whilst still remaining well-liked, had approached the final two of his three interactive-fiction projects at Infocom with less than complete enthusiasm, and the results had sometimes shown it. His departure opened up opportunities for others who were more excited about the work, while giving Berlyn the chance to do interesting work in his own right with other approaches to adventure games.

Blank’s departure, however, carried with it no hidden blessings for anyone other than Blank himself. As things had gone increasingly sideways over the course of 1985, he had made himself more and more of a gadfly at the Board meetings.

I’d been very unhappy there for a while. I was on the Board of Directors. At the meetings the Business Products people would say, “Well, things are turning around, but we’re still spending a lot of money.”

I would say, “When does it hit a wall? When do we shut it down so that we don’t lose the rest of the company?” No one wanted to discuss it. We needed money for games; we couldn’t be cutting things this close. The response was always to ignore the problem. I got more and more frustrated, saying, “What’s the plan? We’re spending this much money, we’re down to this much cash…” No one really wanted to deal with it.

So I started taking more time off. I started getting into flying more; I’d had a pilot’s license for years.

[My fiancée and I] decided we’d take a trip to Europe. I hadn’t had a real vacation in a while. We went to different places: Switzerland, Germany, Italy. We happened to be in Sardinia at this very nice resort when I got a call.

The caller said that there’d been a layoff, and all these people who’d worked for me had been laid off. And someone else was now VP of Product Development [Blank’s official title at Infocom].

I said, “Okay… what’s my job now?”

“Well… you don’t have a job now.”

I said, “So you’re calling me on vacation to fire me?”

He said, “Well, yeah. It’s too bad, but, you know, things are bad…”

I said, “I’ll come right back!”

He said, “No, no… enjoy your vacation!”

In my experience, when a company is having a lot of trouble and going down people act in very different ways. Some people act very badly; some people do very well; some people try to fight; some people say, “Who cares? Move on!” There was all sorts of that. There were Business Products people who wanted to quit; talks of mutinies and various things. Nobody really knows what to say or do.

But, you know, my head was already out of there. I wasn’t being listened to at the Board level, so it was really frustrating being there. The Business Products people, the managers were… just incompetent. I don’t know what else to say. The business people knew nothing about business, and the marketing guy didn’t know anything about marketing. They were academics trying to run a business.

Realistically, they did me a favor. I didn’t really want to be there. I’ve seen this happen in other places. If you’re a founder of a company, it’s hard to quit. You’re giving up. Nobody wants to walk away from their own thing. What happens in a lot of cases is that people who are ready to go kind of telegraph it. Then they’re done a favor by being fired.

I’d arranged for it to happen. It was for the best under those circumstances.

As Cornerstone-focused as this article has so far been, it’s important at this point to explain that Infocom’s financial problems did not all arise from that failure. Infocom had sold 725,000 games worth $10 million in 1984. They judged that their game sales were likely to continue to steadily increase, especially with the unprecedented new exposure Hitchhiker’s was bringing them. They therefore budgeted for a 30% increase in game sales, to $13 million. For all the talk of Cornerstone as the company’s real future, for all the alleged rumblings in some quarters about giving games up entirely if it succeeded, they budgeted for first-year sales in Business Products of a (they thought) relatively modest $5 million.

Cornerstone missed that goal by more than $3 million. Still, for all the bad decisions and enormous waste it has justifiably come to represent, Cornerstone may have been a survivable lesson learned for Infocom but for one thing: their games sales also fell off dramatically in 1985. Infocom sold about 511,000 games that year, a decline of almost 30% rather than the expected rise.

The sales breakdown for the year makes interesting reading. It actually imparts a surprising lesson: it could have been even worse but for a few big titles. Zork I, while its sales finally began to decline relative to previous years, nevertheless sold over 63,000 copies, while Hitchhiker’s all but carried the rest of the catalog on its back with sales of 166,000. If 1985 looks ugly now, just imagine what it would have looked like had Infocom not managed that high-profile deal. Throw in Wishbringer, by far the most successful of Infocom’s three new works of interactive fiction for 1985, and you’ve accounted for half of the company’s sales right there. The other games from earlier years fell off a veritable cliff, to the extent that the classic, hugely influential Deadline barely broke four digits. This was an ominous sign for a company that had always been defined by strong catalog sales, by games that just sold and sold and sold. It was a sign that the sales base was being whittled down to dabbling stragglers who bought Zork and Hitchhiker’s and (to a lesser extent) the introductory-level Wishbringer alongside a hardcore of perhaps a few tens of thousands who already had the old games and so just bought the new. Infocom, in other words, was no longer growing its loyal customer base. This was in its way as dangerous to the company’s future as the whole Cornerstone fiasco.

The natural thing to do at this point is to ask why this was happening. Much can be explained by the general downturn with which everyone in the industry was struggling. Consumers seemed to be particularly losing interest in text-adventure games, if the performances of bookware lines like Telarium and the Synapse Electronic Novels are any guide. Infocom had seemed virtually immune to trends during previous years, but that was clearly no longer the case now. With graphics and sound getting better and better even on some platforms like the Commodore 64 that had been around quite a while, with new approaches and whole new genres appearing, the subtle pleasures of text were getting harder and harder to sell. It wasn’t as if no one at Infocom had been aware of these changes; Marc Blank in particular had battled desperately to get the Board to properly fund new initiatives that could keep the company competitive. Thus we come around again to Cornerstone, which we should recognize as being most significant not for the money it cost Infocom but for the money it prevented Infocom from using for other things (not that these two interpretations aren’t ultimately largely two sides of the same coin).

Infocom fell a good $7 million short of what they’d expected to earn in 1985 even in a worst-case scenario. By year’s end losses were projected to be in the neighborhood of $4 to $5 million, many times more than the company had made over the course of its entire lifetime. The Bank of Boston suddenly cut their line of credit, forcing some of the founders to mortgage their homes to keep the doors open. As the layoffs went on, Vezza and the Board were forced to start looking desperately for a buyer to save them.

It was a humiliating process. So full of hope and hubris just a year before, now they were forced to go hat-in-hand looking for a lifeline. Still nurturing the dream that Cornerstone could be turned around with a proper injection of capital, Vezza went to his heroes at Lotus, a company that had once been neighbors with Infocom inside the Wheeler Street office complex. They weren’t interested. He went to Simon & Schuster, whose CEO had wined and dined them in his penthouse suite just a year before and tendered an offer they’d kill to receive now. The bookware boom being dead and buried, he wasn’t interested anymore either. Infocom — what was left of it — spent the Christmas of 1985 once again thinking about what the next year would bring. Only now instead of visions of success and prosperity their heads were filled with futile-feeling scheming about how they might somehow survive to see another Christmas. Forget changing the world of literature or the world of business software; at this point, mere survival would feel like a dream come true.

As much of a downer as this article has inevitably been, I do want to conclude by noting that Infocom’s unique culture, this playground for smart, creative people, proved remarkably… well, if not impervious to all the pain and chaos, at least able to rise above it more often than not. No truer sign of that can we find than by looking at Infocom’s games of the year. While reduced — one odd board/computer game hybrid which I’ll also be covering aside — to just three games thanks to all the distractions, each of those three games is an interactive-fiction landmark in its own way. We’ll get into the much happier story of Infocom’s actual games of 1985 next time.

(My two golden geese for this article were my usual two for everything Infocom related: Jason Scott’s Get Lamp interviews and, particularly valuable this time out, Down From the Top of Its Game. Also useful, sometimes in a reading-between-the-lines sense, were contemporary issues of Infocom’s newsletter The New Zork Times.)

Comments
22 Responses

- Rowan Lipkovits

April 3, 2014 at 8:09 pm

if the performances of bookware lines like Telarium and the Synapse Electronic Novels are any guide

Oh no, are we going to leave the bookware boom behind without hitting I, Damiano?

- Jimmy Maher

April 4, 2014 at 8:04 am

Sorry, no, I won’t be covering that one. I understand that these decisions are sometimes difficult — to me as much as you, believe me! — but my intention for the blog as a whole is to write a well-researched and readable history rather than an encyclopedia. Maintaining reasonable forward momentum requires, alas, painful choices which will likely only get more painful and controversial as the field of computer games just expands and expands…

- Keith Palmer

April 3, 2014 at 10:49 pm

Cornerstone was being promoted (at its lower price) at the back of “Passport to the United Products of Infocom,” the catalog that piqued my interest and got me daydreaming about the adventure games other than “Hitchhiker’s Guide.” It seems that from the very moment I started searching out information about Infocom, though, (and definitely from when I read “Down From the Top of its Game”) the database was “the obvious mistake things would have been different (and no doubt better) without” in this particular case… I therefore might have been interested in the possibility of new insights here. Pointing out how it was “the business executives” who “came in at nine in suits” might have qualified there. Having heard about Steve Meretzky’s “memo hacking” before, it was nice to see some examples (connected to “Stationfall,” no less…)

I’d read before about the “new game technologies” that were never developed before, but perhaps there I just resort to contemplating the arc Sierra’s graphic adventures took, still not familiar enough with the “illustrated text adventures” of the late 1980s (one linked to in this post itself). I’m forced to admit it may prickle at me as a “minority platform user” to face how the cross-platform underpinnings of Cornerstone were a blow against it, but there I do contemplate what “8088 versus 6502” arguments I have an impression of existing to consider whether the program “got slower in development” or might indeed have done better as a “low-end database”, and wonder what reception the text-based interface would have got on the 68000 platforms. I hadn’t heard before there was an Atari ST bootleg, though; hearing that amused me.

- Jimmy Maher

April 4, 2014 at 8:10 am

In reference to your comment about “Sierra’s arc”:

Had Infocom been able to invest in the technologies advocated by Blank and Berez while the financial times were good, we may ironically have ended up with fewer works of textual interactive fiction from them, not more. It’s important to recognize that Infocom was never as wedded to the idea of “Infocom as a purely IF company” as most of their fans are today. Thus we really need to pull apart the two questions of “Was there a way for Infocom to survive?” (yes!) and “Was there a way for commercial textual IF to survive?” (without major other counterfactuals in the market as a whole, almost certainly not). None of which means, of course, that they needed to become Sierra to survive.

- Jonathan Blask

April 5, 2014 at 9:12 pm

Last year, when I finally got around to playing Spellcasting 101 (I had played some other Legend Entertainment games years ago), it occurred to me how much the Legend Entertainment format was a continuation of the z6 ideal (of course, the engine was partly designed by Bob Bates, the author of one of the last-known never-finished z6 games at Activision’s Infocom).

If I had the chance to talk to the Imps again, I definitely would like to know if they feel they would have made some of the same decisions Legend Entertainment made (like not using a virtual machine and hardcoding into executables) or if they would have not given up on some of those portability ideals. On one hand, the Legend Entertainment interface is very fun and nice (I particularly like how configurable it is), but I still have to wonder if Infocom had stayed around, would they have done the same thing but *better*?

- Peter Piers

November 17, 2015 at 7:42 pm

I personally see Legend Entertainment as “Infocom after Infocom”.

- Chad

October 1, 2019 at 4:31 pm

I realize this reply is coming insanely late to the party, but would just like to call out that while Infocom may have released fewer IF games, the fact that their culture and morals as a company might have survived for many years to come (who knows). I certainly lament that their are VERY few game developers and fewer publishers in the world today who are more focused on making a truly great game than they are with making a truly great profit.

Of course profit is important…you can’t make more great games if the bottom line isn’t comfortably in the black. However, when I look at games holistically from the early 80’s to today I can’t help, but see the constant push in video games as engines of delivering share value rather than the more simple, humble push of folks who truly loved making them trying to make a living doing something they loved. Micro-transactions/loot chests/etc. have very much a drug dealer-like approach… download for free, but end up spending many times more than you would on a complete game. Not a healthy way for the industry to progress, but I am hopeful that legislation will eventually step in…else we will end up raising an entire generation of addicts and gamblers, since that is mostly what games teach youths today.

A far cry from critical thinking skills that the old adventure games (text or graphic) taught many of us in the 80’s and early 90’s.

/rant

- Jason Scott

April 4, 2014 at 1:37 am

To bring things full circle, I was actually inspired to research adventure games and Infocom as a result of reading “Down from the Top of Its Game”.

- Andrew

April 4, 2014 at 11:53 am

The memos sequence made me belly laugh!

- ZUrlocker

April 4, 2014 at 7:50 pm

Great story. Definitely weird that someone coming with experience of the UCSD P-code performance issues wouldn’t understand the implications in a business app context. But with better management I think Infocom could have withstood that mistake. The hard part is having mistake upon mistake piled on. And clearly rank and file employees as well as co-founders had ideas on how to limit risk. If only the CEO had listened. Tragic.

- John Elliott

April 4, 2014 at 10:34 pm

I had a go at working out the format of the Cornerstone bytecode, way back in 2002, with the vague idea of writing the equivalent of a Z-Machine abuse for it. Never got that far, but I’ve still got the notes I made at the time.

- Jimmy Maher

April 5, 2014 at 9:16 am

Cool. Let us know if you ever get back to it. I’m also quite curious about the internals of Fooblitzky, but not quite curious enough to spend weeks trying to figure it out…

- John Elliott

April 17, 2014 at 12:01 am

I’ve tidied up my notes and the disassembler I’d half-written; here they are.

- Jimmy Maher

April 17, 2014 at 7:32 am

Thanks for this. I’m surprised (but probably shouldn’t have been) about how much the Cornerstone VM departs from the Z-Machine. There’s not a whole lot of Z-Machine DNA left there except the concept itself.

Tried applying your notes to Foobliztky as well, but again I can’t see much kinship between the formats…

- John Elliott

April 17, 2014 at 9:48 pm

A quick look at the Fooblitzky interpreter suggests that it’s closer to Z-Code — for example, the interpreter messages refer to opcodes being 0-ops, 1-ops, 2-ops or X-ops, and instruction operands are encoded the same way as Z-code (0=top of stack, 01-0F=locals, 10-FF=globals).

The opcode numbering scheme looks completely different, though; 00-7F are 2-ops, with bits 5 and 6 giving the type of the arguments, and bits 4-0 giving the opcode.

- Duncan Stevens

April 8, 2014 at 2:13 pm

I love the “memo hacking” story. (Though, not to be pedantic, shouldn’t it have been the “Flowers and Fruit Basket Request Form Request Form”?)

- Jimmy Maher

April 8, 2014 at 2:40 pm

I dunno. Too much recursion just makes my head hurt in human as well as computer languages. :)

- matt k

April 17, 2014 at 12:52 am

Thank you for the thoughtful and consistently excellent posts/articles.

I can’t remember how or why I got my hands on “The Witness” but it drove me to be an obsessive Infocom fan as a kid.. I talked/forced my dad into finding their office on Wheeler St. and taking me there. It was a pretty strange experience; we walked in to the reception/lobby area, they had all their games displayed on a shelf, and my dad and I just stood there for a few minutes and then left. The receptionist smiled at us, I wonder if they got a lot of wide eyed kids wandering in to gawk…

To me, I was so amazed that this building was where these stories and games were created, I don’t know what my dad thought of it, but it was nice of him to play along.

- Rich Shealer

May 2, 2014 at 2:23 am

I remember when Cornerstone was released. I worked in a computer store at the time and I was confused. Why would a game company make business software? I thought at first that it was an elaborate joke and it was really a game.

- Olivier Guinart

June 17, 2014 at 10:18 pm

Still playing catch up. I don’t have anything to add to the topic (I wasn’t exposed to Infocom games), except I enjoyed the story. Thank you for it.

Note: dup “to to” in ” Board seemed reluctant to to directly challenge him on this “

- Jimmy Maher

June 18, 2014 at 9:51 am

Thank you!

- Wolfeye M.

September 6, 2019 at 8:35 am

That’s really sad that Infocom went down that way. It was like reading about a trainwreck. What if the engineer hadn’t gone so fast around the curve? Or, more to the point, what if Infocom didn’t try to mix business and pleasure? Oy vey. 20/20 hindsight. It’s still a shame that they’re not around as a company anymore.

Wishbringer
April 10, 2014

Brian Moriarty, 1985

Brian Moriarty was the first of a second wave of Infocom authors from very different and more diverse backgrounds than the original Imps. Their fresh perspectives would be a welcome addition during the latter half of the company’s history. Some of the second wave all but stumbled through the doors of Infocom, but not Moriarty — not at all Moriarty. His arrival as an Imp in September of 1984 marked the fruition of a calculated “assault on Infocom” — his words, not mine — that had taken over two years to bring off.

Moriarty’s personal history is perfect for an Imp, being marked by a mix of technical and literary interests right from his grade-school years. After taking a degree in English Literature from Southeastern Massachusetts University in 1978, he found a job in a Radio Shack store, where he spent hours many days playing with the TRS-80s. He didn’t buy a computer of his own, however, until after he had become a technical writer at Bose Corporation in Framingham, Massachusetts. It was there in 1981 that a colleague brought in his new Atari 800 to show off. Moriarty succumbed to the greatest Atari marketing weapon ever devised: the classic game Star Raiders. He soon headed out to buy an Atari system of his own.

Along with the computer and Star Raiders, Moriarty also brought home a copy of Scott Adams’s Strange Odyssey. He played it and the other Scott Adams games obsessively, thinking all the while of all the ways they could be better. Then one day he spotted Infocom’s Deadline on the shelf of his local Atari dealer. From its dossier-like packaging to its remarkable parser and its comparative reams of luxurious text, it did pretty much everything he had been dreaming about. Moriarty knew in an instant what he wanted to do, and where he wanted to do it. How great to learn that Infocom was located right there in the Boston area; that, anyway, was one problem less to deal with. Still, Infocom was a tiny, insular company at this point, and weren’t exactly accepting resumes from eager Atari enthusiasts who’d never designed an actual game before.

So Moriarty put Infocom in his long-range planning folder and went for the time being somewhere almost as cool. Back at Radio Shack, he’d worked with a fellow named Lee Pappas, whom he’d been surprised to rediscover behind the counter of the local Atari dealer when he’d gone to buy his 800 system. Pappas and a friend had by then already started a little newsletter, A.N.A.L.O.G. (“Atari Newsletter and Lots of Games”). By the end of 1982 it had turned into a full-fledged glossy magazine. Pappas asked Moriarty, who’d already been a regular contributor for some months, if he’d like to come work full-time for him. Moriarty said yes, leaving his safe, comfortable job at Bose behind; it was “the best career move I ever made.”

A.N.A.L.O.G. was a special place, a beloved institution within and chronicler of the Atari 8-bit community in much the same way that Softalk was of the Apple II scene. Their articles were just a little bit more thoughtful, their type-in programs a little bit better, their reviews a little bit more honest than was the norm at other magazines. Moriarty, a graceful writer as well as a superb Atari hacker, contributed to all those aspects by writing articles and reviews and programs. Life there was pretty good: “It was a small group of nerdy guys in their 20s who loved computer games, ate the same junk foods, and went to see the same science-fiction movies together.”

Still, Moriarty didn’t forget his ultimate goal. Having advanced one step by getting himself employed in the same general industry as Infocom, he set about writing his first adventure game to prove his mettle to anyone — Infocom, perhaps? — who might be paying attention. Adventure in the Fifth Dimension appeared in A.N.A.L.O.G.’s April/May 1983 issue. A necessarily primitive effort written mostly in BASIC and running in 16 K, it nevertheless demonstrated some traits of Moriarty’s later work by mixing a real place, Washington D.C., with fantastic and surreal elements: a group of aliens have stolen the Declaration of Independence, and it’s up to you to track down an entrance to their alternate universe and get it back. A year later, Moriarty continued his campaign with another, more refined adventure written entirely in assembly language. Crash Dive! pits the player against a mutineer aboard a nuclear submarine, a scenario much more complex and plot-heavy than the typical magazine-type-in treasure hunt. It even included a set of Infocom-style feelies, albeit only via a photograph in the magazine.

With two games under his belt, Moriarty applied for a position as a game designer at Infocom, but his resume came right back to him. Then a colleague showed him a posting he’d spotted on the online service CompuServe. It was from Dan Horn, manager of Infocom’s Micro Group, looking for an expert 6502 hacker to work on Z-Machine interpreters. It took Moriarty about “45 seconds” to answer. Horn liked what he saw of Moriarty, and in early 1984 the latter started working for the former in the building where the magic happened. His first project involved, as chance would have it, another submarine-themed game: he modified the Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, and Apple II interpreters to support the sonar display in Seastalker. Later he wrote complete new interpreters for the Radio Shack Color Computer and the ill-fated Commodore Plus/4.

He was tantalizingly close to his goal. Having broken through the outer gates, he just needed to find a way into the inner keep of the Imps themselves. He took to telling Berlyn, Blank, Lebling, and the rest about his ambition every chance he got, while also sharing with them his big idea for a game: a grand “historical fantasy” that would deal with no less weighty a subject than the history of atomic weapons and their implications for humanity. It seemed the perfect subject for the zeitgeist of 1984, when the Cold War was going through its last really dangerous phase and millions of schoolchildren were still walking around with souls seared by the previous year’s broadcast of The Day After.

Moriarty got his shot at the inner circle when a certain pop-science writer whom Infocom had hired to write a game was allegedly found curled up beneath his desk in a little ball of misery, undone by the thorny syntax of ZIL. This moment marks the end of Marc Blank’s dream of being able to hire professional writers off the street, set them down with a terminal and a stack of manuals, and wait for the games to come gushing forth. From now on the games would be written by people already immersed in Infocom’s technology; the few outside collaborations to come would be just that, collaborations, with established programmers inside Infocom doing the actual coding.

That new philosophy was great news for a fellow like Brian Moriarty, skilled coder that he was. The Imps decided to reward his persistence and passion and give him a shot. Only thing was, they weren’t so sure about the big historical fantasy, at least not for a first game. What they really had in mind was a made-to-order game to fill a glaring gap in their product matrix: a gentle, modestly sized game to introduce newcomers to interactive fiction — an “Introductory”-level work. And it should preferably be a Zorkian fantasy, because that’s what sold best and what most people still thought of when they thought of Infocom. None of the current Imps were all that excited about such a project. Would Moriarty be interested? He wasn’t about to split hairs over theme or genre or anything else after dreaming of reaching this point for so long; he answered with a resounding “Absolutely!” And so Brian Moriarty became an Imp at last — to no small consternation from Dan Horn, who’d thought Moriarty had come to Infocom to do “great work for me.”

It’s kind of surprising that it took Infocom this long to perceive the need for a game like the one that Moriarty would now be taking on as his first assignment. Their original matrix had offered only games for children — “Interactive Fiction Junior” — below the “Standard” level. Considering that even the hard-as-nails Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was labelled “Standard,” the leap from “Junior” to “Standard” could be a daunting one indeed. Clearly there was room for a work more suitable for adult novices, one that didn’t condescend in the way that Seastalker, solid as it is on its own terms, might be perceived to do. Infocom had now decided to make just such a game at last — although, oddly, the problematic conflations continued. Rather than simply add a fifth difficulty level to the matrix, they decided to dispense with the “Junior” category entirely, relabeling Seastalker an “Introductory” game. This might have made existing print materials easier to modify, but it lost track entirely of Seastalker’s original target demographic. Infocom claimed in The New Zork Times that “adults didn’t want a kid’s game; in fact, kids didn’t want a kid’s game.” Which rather belied the claim in the same article that Seastalker had been a “success,” but there you go.

Moriarty was a thoughtful guy with a bit of a bookish demeanor, so much so that his inevitable nickname of “Professor” actually suited him really well. Now he started thinking about how he could make an introductory game that wouldn’t be too condescending or trivial to the Infocom faithful who would hopefully also buy it. He soon hit upon the idea of including a magic MacGuffin which would allow alternate, simpler solutions to many puzzles at a cost to the score — literally a Wishbringer. The hardcore could eschew its use from the start and have a pretty satisfying experience; beginners could, after the satisfaction and affirmation of solving the game the easy way, go back and play again the hard way to try to get a better score. It was brilliant, as was the choice not to make using the Wishbringer just a “solve this puzzle” button but rather an intriguing little puzzle nexus in its own right. First the player would have to find it; then she would have to apply it correctly by wishing for “rain,” “advice,” “flight,” “darkness,” “foresight,” “luck,” or “freedom” whilst having the proper material components for the spell on hand, a perfect primer for the spellcasting system in the Enchanter trilogy. The wishes would, like in any good fairy tale, be limited to one of each type. So, even this route to victory would be easier but still in its own way a challenge.

At first Moriarty thought of making Wishbringer a magic ring, but what with The Lord of the Rings and a thousand knock-offs thereof that felt too clichéd. Anyway, he wanted to include it in the box as a feelie, and, cost concerns being what they were, that meant the ring would have to be a gaudy plastic thing like those ones bubble-gum machines sometimes dispensed in lieu of a gumball. Then he hit upon the idea of making Wishbringer a stone — “The Magick Stone of Dreams.” Maybe they could make the one in the package glow in the dark to give it that proper aura and distract from its plasticness? Marketing said it was feasible, and so the die (or stone) was cast. Thus did Wishbringer become the first and only Infocom game to be literally designed around a feelie. Moriarty spent some nine months — amidst all of the Hitchhiker’s and Cornerstone excitement, the high-water mark that was Christmas 1984, an office move, and the dawning of the realization that the company was suddenly in big, big trouble — learning the vagaries of ZIL and writing Wishbringer.

For all that it’s a much subtler work lacking the “Gee whiz!” quality of Seastalker, Wishbringer does feel like a classic piece of children’s literature. It casts you as a postal carrier in the quietly idyllic village of Festeron, which is apparently located in the same world as Zork and shares with that series an anachronistic mixing of modernity with fantasy. (I’m sure someone has figured out a detailed historical timeline for Wishbringer’s relation to Zork as well as geography and all the rest, but as usual with that sort of thing I just can’t be bothered.) You dream of adventure — in fact, you’re interrupted in the middle of such a daydream as the game begins — but you’re just a mail carrier with a demanding boss. Said boss, Mr. Crisp, gives you a letter to deliver to the old woman who is proprietor of Ye Olde Magick Shoppe up in the hills north of town. On your way there you should explore the town and enjoy the lovely scenery, because once you make the delivery everything changes. The letter turns out to be a ransom note for the old woman from “The Evil One,” demanding Wishbringer itself in return for the safe return of her cat: “And now, now it claims my only companion.”

"It's getting Dark outside," the old woman remarks, and you can almost hear the capital D. "Maybe you should be getting back to town."

The old woman hobbles over to the Magick Shoppe door and opens it. A concealed bell tinkles merrily.

"Keep a sharp eye out for my cat, won't you?" She speaks the words slowly and distinctly. "Bring her to me if you find her. She's black as night from head to tail, except for one little white spot... right HERE."

The old woman touches the middle of your forehead with her finger. The light outside dims suddenly, like a cloud passing over the sun.

So, Wishbringer is ultimately just a hunt for a lost cat, a quest I can heartily get behind. But as soon as you step outside you realize that everything has changed. The scenery becomes a darker, more surreal riot reminiscent in places of Mindwheel. Mailboxes have become sentient (and sometimes carnivorous); Mr. Crisp has turned into the town’s petty dictator; a pet poodle has turned into a vicious hellhound. The game flirts with vaguely fascistic imagery, as with the giant Boot Patrols that march around the town enforcing its nightly curfew. (This does lead to one glaring continuity flaw: why is the cinema still open if the whole city is under curfew?) There’s a creepy dread and a creepy allure to exploring the changed town, a reminder that, as the Brothers Grimm taught us long ago, ostensible children’s literature doesn’t necessarily mean all sunshine and lollypops.

Like so much of Roberta Williams’s work, Wishbringer plays with fairy-tale tropes. But Moriarty is a much better, more original writer than Williams, not to mention a more controlled one. (Witness the way that the opening text of Wishbringer foreshadows the climax, a literary technique unlikely to even occur to Williams.) Rather than appropriate characters and situations whole cloth, he nails the feeling, balancing sweetness and whimsy with an undercurrent of darkness and menace that soon becomes an overcurrent when day turns to night and the big Change happens. The closest analogue I can offer for the world of Wishbringer is indeed the Brothers Grimm — but perhaps also, crazy as this is going to sound, Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Wishbringer has that same mixing of playfulness with a certain gravitas. There’s even some talking platypuses, one of very few examples of direct borrowing from Moriarty’s inspirations.

The other examples almost all come from Zork, including a great cameo from the good old white house and mailbox. And of course every Zork game has to have grues somewhere. The grues’ refrigerator light is my favorite gag in the whole game; it still makes me chuckle every time I think about it.

You have stumbled into the nesting place of a family of grues. Congratulations. Few indeed are the adventurers who have entered a grue's nest and lived as long as you have.

Everything is littered with rusty swords of elvish workmanship, piles of bones and other debris. A closed refrigerator stands in one corner of the nest, and something... a small, dangerous-looking little beast... is curled up in the other corner.

The only exit is to the west. Hope you survive long enough to use it.

Snoring fitfully, the little beast turns away from the light of the small stone and faces the wall.

>open refrigerator
A light inside the refrigerator goes out as you open it.

Opening the refrigerator reveals a bottle and an earthworm.

The little beast is stirring restlessly. It looks as if it's about to wake up!

>close refrigerator
A light inside the refrigerator comes on as you close it.

Indeed, while Moriarty is generally thought of as Infocom’s “serious” author on the exclusive basis of his second game Trinity, Wishbringer is full of such funny bits.

Wishbringer is very solvable, but doing so is not trivial even if you let yourself use the stone; this is of course just as Moriarty intended it. You may not even find the stone until a good third or more of the way through the game, and it definitely won’t help you with everything thereafter. Played without using the stone, I’m not sure that Wishbringer is really all that much easier than the average mid-period Infocom game at all. The most objectionable aspects for the modern player as well as the most surprising to find in an “Introductory” game are the hard time limits; you’re almost certain to need to restart a few times to fully explore Festeron before the Change and still deliver the letter in time, and you may need a few restores to get everything you need to done after the Change. An inventory limit also sometimes complicates matters; Infocom had been slowly losing interest in this sort of purely logistical problem for years, but Wishbringer demonstrates that even in an introductory game they weren’t quite there yet. Still, those are design sins worth forgiving in light of Wishbringer’s charms — assuming you think them sins at all. Like the determination to make you work a bit for a solution even if you use the stone, they could be seen as a good thing. Wishbringer, we should remember, was meant to serve as an introduction to Infocom’s catalog as a whole, in which players would find plenty of other timers and inventory limits and puzzles that refuse to just disappear in a poof of magic. Wishbringer’s refusal to trivialize its purpose is really quite admirable; there’s even a (thankfully painless) pseudo-maze.

Wishbringer was released in June of 1985, six full months after Infocom’s previous game Suspect. That gap would turn out to be the longest of Infocom’s productive middle years, and had left many fans worried about the company’s future and whether Cornerstone meant the end of games. Infocom’s idea that there were people potentially interested in interactive fiction but eager for a gentler version of the form turned out to be correct. Wishbringer turned into one of Infocom’s last genuine hits; Billboard software charts from the second half of 1985 show it and Hitchhiker’s regularly ensconced together inside the Top 20 or even Top 10, marking the last time Infocom would have a significant presence there. It sold almost 75,000 copies in its first six months, with a lifetime total perhaps as high as 150,000. To the best of my reckoning it stands as about Infocom’s fifth best-selling game overall.

Sales figures aside, Wishbringer’s “Introductory” tag and its gentle, unassuming personality can make it an easy game amongst the Infocom canon to dismiss or overlook. That would be a shame to do, however; it’s one of the most likeable games Infocom ever did. While not one of Infocom’s more thematically or formally groundbreaking games and thus not one of their more discussed, it continues to be enjoyed by just about everyone who plays it. It’s the sort of game that may not come up that often when you ask people about their very favorites from Infocom, but mention it to any Infocom fan and you’ll almost always get back an “Oh, yes. I really liked that one.” Rather than bury its light charm under yet more leaden pontification, I’ll just suggest you play it if you haven’t already.

(Jason Scott’s interviews for Get Lamp informed much of this article. Interviews with Moriarty of various vintages can be found online at The IF Archive, 8bitfiles.net, Adventura CIA, Electron Dance, and Halcyon Days. Also useful was Moriarty’s “self-interview” in the January/February 1986 AmigaWorld; his picture above comes from that article. Adventure in the Fifth Dimension was published in the April/May 1983 A.N.A.L.O.G.; Crash Dive! in the May 1984 A.N.A.L.O.G., the last to which Moriarty contributed.)

Comments
34 Responses

- Howard Lewis Ship

April 10, 2014 at 2:37 pm

Bose is located “Framingham, MA” (not “Farmingham”). I’m originally from those parts, used to drive by Bose every day during my commute.

- Jimmy Maher

April 10, 2014 at 2:47 pm

Woops! Should be A.N.A.L.O.G. all the way through (I always have trouble with those two), and should indeed be Framingham. Thanks!

- Howard Lewis Ship

April 10, 2014 at 2:39 pm

So you talk about A.N.A.L.O.G. and then switch to A.N.T.I.C. without explanation …

- Duncan Stevens

April 10, 2014 at 3:23 pm

One other design choice that was just a touch harsh for an “introductory” game is to have a wish option (“flight”) that is never useful and loses the game if you do use it (in the tower), and another (“foresight”) that gives you a rather misleading “vision.”

My favorite bit: if you try to take the candle in the pre-transformation chapel, you get: “A voice from above solemnly proclaims, ‘Thou shalt not steal.'” If you try again post-transformation:

A voice from above begins to proclaim something, but a burst of static drowns out the solemn words. Looking up, you notice a speaker in the ceiling emitting sparks.

- Alan

April 10, 2014 at 3:45 pm

I still have my Magick Wishing Stone…

As a teenager, I actually wrote to Infocom about Wishbringer. They published my letter in Volume VII, Number 1 of “The Status Line”

- Jimmy Maher

April 11, 2014 at 6:51 am

Wow! Although Richard Garriott might have had more appreciation for your teenage Dungeon Master Ultima-speak. :)

I think that the Wishbringer stone may just be the most commonly preserved of all the feelies. Maybe because it was a bit more durable than most…

- Duncan Stevens

April 10, 2014 at 5:10 pm

Oh, and I also like this line:

A happy hellhound is thumping its tail nearby.

- iPadCary

April 10, 2014 at 7:18 pm

I dearly love & miss those gentle, New Age themed Infocom games.
Wishbringer, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Trinity ….
Moriarty, Meretzky, Lebling; geniuses all.

Another great piece, Jimmy!

- iPadCary

April 10, 2014 at 7:26 pm

@Alan
I just read your letter here:
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/NZT+TSL/TSL71.pdf

Want more?
Okey-dokey: http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXNZT+TSL.html

- Lisa

April 10, 2014 at 7:39 pm

The grues’ refrigerator is one of my favorite bits too. I guess it’s in the Invisiclues that there was a remark about the milk itself, that it had to be “kept in a warm, well-lighted place to stay spoiled,” or something like that.

- Felix

April 10, 2014 at 8:09 pm

Speaking of darkness in children’s literature and possible sources of inspiration for Wishbringer, I just so happen to have recently read So You Want To Be A Wizard by Diane Duane, and your description of the game immediately reminded me of the book, with its parallel universe version of Manhattan. Interestingly enough, the book was first published in 1983… just in time for Brian Moriarty to have read it during pre-production. Too much of a deduction leap?

- Jimmy Maher

April 11, 2014 at 6:57 am

I’ve never read the book you mention, but this concept of good/evil mirror worlds crops up again and again in children’s literature as well as fantasy and science fiction (see the classic Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror” for just one example; Infocom’s very next game A Mind Forever Voyaging for something rather similar). So, yeah, maybe a bit of a leap. ;)

- Mark Ricard

April 23, 2014 at 4:18 pm

Funny you mention Star Trek. Diane Duane has written a number of Star Trek novels as well. Many of them receiving praise from fans. Most of them are well worth reading. I have not read her wizard series.

- Victor Gijsbers

April 10, 2014 at 9:31 pm

To think of the fairy tales collected by the brothers Grimm as children’s literature is probably rather anachronistic.

I should play this game some time!

- matt w

April 11, 2014 at 2:17 am

Perhaps in that the phrase “children’s literature” did not exist at the time, but given that their famous collection was called “Children’s and Household Tales” it seems like a fair characterization. (And they were apparently criticized at the time for being unsuitable for children, though this was by a rival also named Grimm who was promoting his own book of fairy tales.)

- Keith Palmer

April 10, 2014 at 10:50 pm

Wishbringer was in “The Lost Treasures of Infocom 2,” which means I would have first played it without hints, but I have the strong impression I completed it all the same; that does mean a fair bit to me. It is a charming game, but I’m a little concerned about admitting that bits of the writing early on somehow leave me with an impression of Brian Moriarty still “writing down to his audience,” just a little…

In any case, learning Moriarty wrote the Z-Machine interpreter for the Color Computer (taking a step from the 6502 to the 6809) means I owe him a specific debt. Knowing he wrote for A.N.A.L.O.G., I’ve started looking into that magazine, but haven’t got to the adventures he contributed to it yet.

- Jimmy Maher

April 11, 2014 at 6:58 am

I knew you’d like that anecdote… :)

- Rowan Lipkovits

April 11, 2014 at 4:36 am

My introduction to Wishbringer was the novelization, which must likely stand as a high-water mark for the wretched Infocom novel line. (Well no, that would be The Zork Chronicles. The rest can safely be ignored.)

- Brian Moriarty

April 11, 2014 at 11:09 pm

Thanks for the kind article. Seems like a million years ago now.

- Sven

May 8, 2014 at 1:05 pm

Having just finished Wishbringer an hour ago (and for the first time), I have to say I am a bit disappointed by many aspects of the game. I still don´t really understand the story behind the game, it just doesn´t make a lot of sense to me… why did the town suddenly transform? what did the evil sister really want? where did the good sister get the voilet note from (at the end of the game)? and a lot more questions that made no sense. i only enjoyed killing the princess by pushing the lever in the castle (instead of pulling to free her). but this had no real consequences, too…

- Jimmy Maher

May 8, 2014 at 1:31 pm

Well, realistic plotting isn’t really Brian Moriarty’s forte. Most of his work deals more in — hoping I won’t sound too pretentious here — mythic archetypes and perhaps the collective unconscious. Asking questions about what really went on in Festeron is to me a bit like asking why the big bad wolf was so fixated on eating Little Red Riding Hood or how the Greeks managed to build that big old horse without the Trojans noticing on the middle of a battlefield and then fit an army into it. I think to approach Wishbringer as you would a modern fantasy novel is to kind of miss what Moriarty is all about — which doesn’t mean that what he does has to please you like it does me, of course.

And yes, I do hold something like Wishbringer to a very different — hopefully not lower, but different — standard than something like A Mind Forever Voyaging, which does present itself as a realistic work of hard science fiction.

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- Peter Piers

November 18, 2015 at 8:06 pm

I find it curious that you don’t mention something I hear a lot about the game – if you abuse the wishes, you’ll skip some parts of the game and therefore can easily render the game unwinnable.

Hardly fair for the main gimmick of an introductory game.

Apart from that – an excellent gem of a game. I’ve a soft spot for it. Moriarty is one of my personal favourites – yes, hippo puzzle in BZ notwithstanding!

- Martin

July 5, 2016 at 3:01 am

This does lead to one glaring continuity flaw: why is the cinema still open if the whole city is under curfew?

Didn’t the same sort of thing happen in the Gremlins movie?

- Jason Kankiewicz

January 31, 2017 at 3:01 am

“Lee Papas” should be “Lee Pappas”.

- Jimmy Maher

January 31, 2017 at 9:01 am

Thanks!

- Jason Kankiewicz

February 2, 2017 at 3:25 pm

With “The scenery becomes a darker, more surreal riot reminiscent in places of Mindwheel.” did you mean to write “The scenery becomes a darker, more surreal riot reminiscent of places in Mindwheel.”?

- Jason Kankiewicz

February 3, 2017 at 4:44 am

Nevermind, I get it now.

- Jason Kankiewicz

February 7, 2017 at 1:05 am

“designs sins” -> “design sins”?

- Jimmy Maher

February 7, 2017 at 9:51 am

Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

February 27, 2017 at 10:37 am

>> “you may need a few restores to get everything you need to done after the Change.”

I think “need to done” should be either “need to get done,” or “need to do,” or just “get everything you need after the Change.”

-dZ.

- DZ-Jay

February 27, 2017 at 10:46 am

Thanks for the review. I’ve never cared to play this game (I’m one of those who dismissed it first hand, especially since I’m not much into the whole fantasy bit), but now I am intrigued to try it. It sounds like a lot of fun.

-dZ.

- Jeffery Land

April 25, 2019 at 2:37 pm

Wishbringer was one of my favorites from childhood. In terms of text adventures I think only the Zork series received more play time from me. I think it was the platypuses that hooked me.

- Nathanael

March 6, 2021 at 9:27 am

I absolutely loved Wishbringer — but probably partly because it’s the only Infocom game I ever solved with zero hints. Didn’t use the magic stone, either.

I really think it’s a model for interactive fiction. It’s just tough enough, and long enough to be interesting for some time, but far more accessible than most of the other really good games.

Fooblitzky
April 23, 2014

Games were everywhere at Infocom. By that I mean all sorts of games, not just interactive fiction — although even the latter existed in more varieties than you might expect, such as an interactive live-action play where the audience shouted out instructions to the actors, to be filtered through and interpreted by a “parser” played by one Dave Lebling. Readers of The New Zork Times thrilled to the exploits of Infocom’s softball team in a league that also included such software stars as Lotus and Spinnaker. There were the hermit-crab races held at “Drink’em Downs” right there at CambridgePark Drive. (I had a Lance Armstrong-like moment of disillusionment in scouring Jason Scott’s Get Lamp tapes for these articles when habitual winner Mike Dornbrook revealed the sordid secret to his success: he had in fact been juicing his crabs all along by running hot water over his little cold-blooded entrants before races.) And of course every reader of The New Zork Times was also familiar with Infocom’s collective love for puzzles — word, logic, trivia, or uncategorizable — removed from any semblance of fiction interactive or otherwise. And then there was the collective passion for traditional board and card games of all stripes, often played with a downright disconcerting intensity. Innocent office Uno matches soon turned into “bloody” tournaments. One cold Boston winter a Diplomacy campaign got so serious and sparked such discord amongst the cabin-fever-addled participants that the normally equanimous Jon Palace finally stepped in and banned the game from the premises. Perhaps the most perennial of all the games was a networked multiplayer version of Boggle that much of the office played almost every day at close of business. Steve Meretzky got so good, and could type so fast, that he could enter a word and win a round before the other players had even begun to mentally process the letters before them.

Given this love for games as well as the creativity of so many at Infocom, it was inevitable that they would also start making up their own games that had nothing to do with prose or parsers. Indeed, little home-grown ludic experiments were everywhere, appropriating whatever materials were to hand; Andrew Kaluzniacki recalls Meretzky once making up a game on the fly that used only a stack of business cards lying on the desk before him. Most of these creations lived and died inside the Infocom offices, but an interesting congruence of circumstances allowed one of them to escape to the outside world as Fooblitzky, Infocom’s one game that definitely can’t be labelled an interactive fiction or adventure game and thus (along with, if you like, Cornerstone) the great anomaly in their catalog.

We’ve already seen many times that technology often dictates design. That’s even truer in the case of Fooblitzky than in most. Its origins date back to early 1984, when Mike Berlyn, fresh off of Infidel, was put in charge of one of Infocom’s several big technology initiatives for the year: a cross-platform system for writing and delivering graphical games to stand along the one already in place for text adventures and in development for business products.

It was by far the thorniest proposition of the three, one that had already been rejected in favor of pure text adventures and an iconic anti-graphics advertising campaign more than a year earlier when Infocom had walked away from a potential partnership with Penguin Software, “The Graphics People.” As I described in an earlier article, Infocom’s development methodology, built as it was around their DEC minicomputer, was just not well suited to graphics. It’s not quite accurate to say, however, that the DEC terminals necessarily could only display text. By now DEC had begun selling terminals like the VT125 with bitmap graphics capabilities, which could be programmed using a library called ReGIS. This, it seemed, might just open a window of possibility for coding graphical games on the DEC.

Still, the DEC represented only one end of the pipeline; they also needed to deliver the finished product on microcomputers. Trying to create a graphical Z-Machine would, again, be much more complicated than its text-only equivalent. To run an Infocom text adventure, a computer needed only be capable of displaying text for output and of accepting text for input. Excepting only a few ultra-low-end models, virtually any disk-drive-equipped computer available for purchase in 1984 could do the job; some might display more text onscreen, or do it more or less attractively or quickly, but all of them could do it. Yet the same computers differed enormously in their graphics capabilities. Some, like the old TRS-80, had virtually none to speak of; some, like the IBM PC and the Apple II, were fairly rudimentary in this area; some, like the Atari 800 and the Commodore 64 and even the IBM PCjr, could do surprisingly impressive things in the hands of a skilled programmer. All of these machines ran at different screen resolutions, with different color palettes, with different sets of fiddly restrictions on what color any given pixel could be. Infocom would be forced to choose a lowest common denominator to target, then sacrifice yet more speed and capability to the need to run any would-be game through an interpreter. Suffice to say that such a system wasn’t likely to challenge, say, Epyx when it came to slick and beautiful action games. But then maybe that was just as well: even the DEC graphical terminals hadn’t been designed with videogames in mind but rather static “business graphics” — i.e., charts and graphs and the like — and weren’t likely to reveal heretofore unknown abilities for running something like Summer Games.

But in spite of it all some thought that Infocom might be able to do certain types of games tolerably well with such a system. Andrew Kaluzniacki, a major technical contributor to the cross-platform graphics project:

It was pretty obvious pretty quickly that we couldn’t do complicated real-time graphics like you might see in an arcade game. But you could do a board game. You could lay the board out in a way that would look sufficiently similar across platforms, that would look acceptable.

Thus was the multiplayer board/computer game hybrid Fooblitzky born almost as a proof of concept — or perhaps a justification for the work that had already been put into the cross-platform graphics system.

Fooblitzky and the graphics system itself, both operating as essentially a single project under Mike Berlyn, soon monopolized the time of several people amongst the minority of the staff not working on Cornerstone. Kaluzniacki, a new hire in Dan Horn’s Micro Group, wrote a graphics editor for the Apple II which was used by a pair of artists, Brian Cody and Paula Maxwell, to draw the pictures. These were then transferred to the DEC for incorporation into the game; the technology on that side was the usual joint effort by the old guard of DEC-centric Imps. The mastermind on the interpreter side was another of Horn’s stars, Poh C. Lim, almost universally known as “Magic” Lim due to his fondness for inscrutable “magic numbers” in his code marked off with a big “Don’t touch this!” Berlyn, with considerable assistance from Marc Blank, took the role of principal game designer as well as project manager.

Fooblitzky may have been born as largely “something to do with our graphics system,” but Infocom wasn’t given to doing anything halfway. Berlyn worked long and hard on the design, putting far more passion into it than he had into either of his last two interactive-fiction works. The artists also worked to make the game as pleasing and charming as it could be given the restrictions under which they labored. And finally the whole was given that most essential prerequisite to any good game of any type: seemingly endless rounds of play-testing and tweaking. Fooblitzky tournaments became a fixture of life at Infocom for a time, often pitting the divisions of the company against one another. (Business Products surprisingly proved very competitive with Consumer Products; poor Jon Palace “set the record for playing Fooblitzky more times and losing more times than anyone else in the universe.”) When the time came to create the packaging, Infocom did their usual superlative, hyper-creative job. Fooblitzky came with a set of markers and little dry-erase boards, one for each of the up to four players, for taking notes and making plans, along with not one but two manuals — the full rules and a “Bare Essentials” quick-start guide, the presence of which makes the game sound much more complicated than it actually is — and the inevitable feelie, which as in the Cornerstone package here took the form of a button.

Fooblitzky is a game of deduction, one more entry in a long and ongoing tradition in board and casual gaming. At the beginning of a game, each player secretly chooses one of a possible eighteen items. If fewer than four are playing — two to four players are possible — the computer then randomly (and secretly) picks enough items to round out the total to four. Players then take turns moving about a game board representing the town of Fooblitzky, trying to deduce what the three initially unidentified items are and gather a full set together. The first to bring all four items back to a “check point” wins.

Items start out in stores which are scattered about the board. Also present are pawn shops in which items can be sold and bought; restaurants in which you can work to earn money if you deplete your initial store; crosswalks which can randomly lead to unintended contact with traffic and an expensive stay in the hospital; phone booths for calling distant stores and checking stock; storage lockers for stashing items (you can only carry four with you, a brutal inventory limit indeed); even a subway that can whisk you around the board quickly — for, as with most things in Fooblitzky, a price. Adding a layer of chaos over the proceedings is the Chance Man, who appears randomly from time to time to do something good, like giving you a free item, or bad, like dropping a piano on your head and sending you to the hospital. By making use of all of the above and more, while also watching everything everyone else does, players try to figure out the correct items and get them collected and delivered before their rivals; thus the need for the note-taking boards.

Once you get the hang of the game, which doesn’t take long, a lot of possibilities open up for strategy and even a little devious psychology. Bluffing becomes a viable option: cast off that correct item in a pawn shop as if it’s incorrect, then watch your opponents race off down the wrong track while you do the rest of what you need to do before you buy it back, carry it to the check point, and win. If you prefer to be less passive aggressive and more, well, active aggressive, you can just run into an opponent in the street to scatter her items everywhere and try to grab what you need.

It can all be a lot of fun, although I’m not sure I can label Fooblitzky a classic. There just seems to be something missing — what, I can’t quite put my finger on — for me to go that far. One problem is that some games are much more interesting than others — granted, a complaint that could be applied to just about any game, but the variation seems much more pronounced here than it ought to. By far the best game of Fooblitzky I’ve ever played was one involving just my wife Dorte and me. By chance three of the four needed items turned out to be the same, leading to a mad, confused scramble that lasted at least twice as long as a normal game, as we each thought we’d figured out the solution several times only to get our collection rejected. (Dorte finally won in the end, as usual.) That game was really exciting. By contrast, however, the more typical game in which all four items are distinct can start to seem almost rote after just a few sessions in quick succession; even deviousness can only add so much to the equation. If Fooblitzky was a board game, I tend to think it’d be one you’d dust off once or twice a year, not a game-night perennial.

That said, Fooblitzky’s presentation is every bit as whimsical and cute as it wants to be. Each player’s avatar is a little dog because, well, why not? My favorite bit of all is the dish-washing graphic.

Washing dishes Fooblitzky-style

On the way to the hospital after getting hit by a car

Cute as it is, Fooblitzky and the cross-platform project which spawned it weren’t universally loved within Infocom. Far from it. Mike Berlyn characterizes the debate over just what to do with Fooblitzky as a “bitter battle.” Mike Dornbrook’s marketing department, already dealing with the confusion over just why Infocom was releasing something like Cornerstone, was deeply concerned about further “brand dilution” if this erstwhile interactive-fiction company now suddenly released something like Fooblitzky.

The obvious riposte to such concerns would have been to make Fooblitzky so compelling, such an obvious moneyspinner, that it simply had to be released and promoted heavily. But in truth Fooblitzky was far from that. Its very description — that of a light social game — made it an horrifically hard sell in the 1980s, as evidenced by the relative commercial failure of even better games like my beloved M.U.L.E. Like much of Electronic Arts’s early catalog, it was targeted at a certain demographic of more relaxed, casual computer gaming that never quite emerged in sufficient numbers from the home-computing boom and bust. And Fooblitzky’s graphics, while perhaps better than what anyone had any right to expect, are still slow and limited. A few luddites at Infocom may have been wedded to the notion of the company as a maker of only pure-text games, but for many more the problem was not that Fooblitzky had graphics but rather that the graphics just weren’t good enough for the Infocom stamp of quality. They would have preferred to find a way to do cross-platform graphics right, but there was no money for such a project in the wake of Cornerstone. Fooblitzky’s graphics had been produced on a relative shoestring, and unfortunately they kind of looked it. Some naysayers pointedly suggest that if it wasn’t possible to do a computerized Fooblitzky right they should just remove the computer from the equation entirely and make a pure board game out of it (the branding confusion that would have resulted from that would have truly given Dornbrook and company nightmares!).

And so Fooblitzky languished for months even after Mike Berlyn left the company and the cross-platform-graphics project as a whole fell victim to the InfoAusterity program. Interpreters were only created for the IBM PC, Apple II, and Atari 8-bit line, notably leaving the biggest game machine in the world, the Commodore 64, unsupported. At last in September of 1985 Infocom started selling it exclusively via mail order to members of the established family — i.e., readers of The New Zork Times. Marketing finally relented and started shipping the game to stores the following spring where, what with their virtually nonexistent efforts at promotion, it sold in predictably tiny quantities: well under 10,000 copies in total.

The whole Fooblitzky saga is the story of a confused company with muddled priorities creating something that didn’t quite fit anywhere and never really had a chance. Like Cornerstone’s complicated virtual machine, the cross-platform graphics initiative ended up being technically masterful but more damaging than useful to the finished product. Infocom could have had a much slicker game for much less money had they simply written the thing on a microcomputer and then ported it to the two or three other really popular and graphically viable platforms by hand. Infocom’s old “We hate micros!” slogan, their determination to funnel everything through the big DEC, was becoming increasingly damaging to them in a rapidly changing computing world, their biggest traditional strength threatening to become a huge liability. Even by 1984 the big DECSystem-20 was starting to look a bit antiquated to those who knew where computing was going. In just a few more years, when Infocom would junk the DEC at last, it would literally be junked: the big fleet of red refrigerators, worth a cool million dollars when it came to Infocom in 1982, was effectively worthless barely five years later, a relic of a bygone era.

Because Fooblitzky is such an oddity with none of the name recognition or lingering commercial value of the more traditional Infocom games, I’m going to break my usual pattern and offer it for download here in its Atari 8-bit configuration. It’s still good for an evening or two’s scavenging fun with friends or family. Next time we’ll get back to interactive fiction proper and dig into one of the most important games Infocom ever released.

(Just the usual suspects as sources this time around: Jason Scott’s Get Lamp interviews and my collection of New Zork Times issues.)

Comments
6 Responses

- Jason Scott

April 23, 2014 at 4:06 pm

I have the moment where Dornbrook reveals the juiced crabs cheat to Dave Lebling and Stu Galley on video. It’s a precious moment.

- Not Fenimore

September 11, 2020 at 12:11 am

I wasn’t able to find this on the Internet Archive dump – is it up there? Which interview video is it under? I’d definitely love to see that.

- Andrew Schultz

April 23, 2014 at 7:40 pm

Poh C. Lim, almost universally known as “Magic” Lim due to his fondness for inscrutable “magic numbers” in his code

This line made me laugh, which is hard to do. I never considered the nickname ‘Magic’ could be ironic.

I’ve never really played Foobilitzky–since it requires >1 person to be really fun, so I’m glad to read this.

- Jason Kankiewicz

February 7, 2017 at 2:20 am

“Foobliztky” -> “Fooblitzky”?

- Jimmy Maher

February 7, 2017 at 9:53 am

Thanks!

- Mike Taylor

March 22, 2018 at 3:15 pm

Players then take turns moving about a game board representing the town of Fooblitzky, trying to deduce what the three initially unidentified items are and gather a full set together. The first to bring all four items back to a “check point” wins.

In other words …

In this Adventure you’re to find *TREASURES* & store them away.
Sign “Leave *TREASURES* here, then say: SCORE”

:-)

A Mind Forever Voyaging, Part 1: Steve Meretzky’s Interiors
April 27, 2014

Steve Meretzky earned the right to write A Mind Forever Voyaging. That, anyway, is one way to look at it, and one with which I believe many staffers at Infocom tacitly agreed. After his first game, Planetfall, his next two games had been works created to specifications with cheerful equanimity and breathtaking efficiency and not a trace of artistic angst. First there had been Sorcerer, the necessary second installment in the Enchanter trilogy that freed up Marc Blank to work on technology and Dave Lebling to write Suspect. And then of course there was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which fell into Meretzky’s lap because he was the only available Imp willing to play the subordinate role in a creative partnership with Douglas Adams. That game’s huge sales were almost certainly the only thing that allowed Infocom to survive (after a fashion) their disastrous 1985, thus making Meretzky in some sense the savior of everyone still employed there. Throw in the four contract-fulfilling Zork gamebooks he cranked out betwixt and between the computer games, plus all the help he gave to others with their designs, plus the way he just kept everyone insanely sane during all of the trials of the Cornerstone era with his parties and games and antics… yeah, Meretzky deserved carte blanche to make his next game exactly what he wanted it to be.

As funny a guy as he was, Meretzky was interested in being more than just Infocom’s go-to wacky comedy writer. Indeed, and even setting aside Floyd, anyone really looking at Planetfall can’t help but see an attention to science-fictional realism, even a certain amount of earnest worldbuilding, that its oft-cited similarity to Douglas Adams’s just-in-it-for-the-jokes settings and characters belies. Had he had his druthers, Meretzky’s follow-up to Planetfall may very well have been a carefully researched and very sober historical piece taking place aboard the Titanic. “Meretzky’s Titanic game” hung about Infocom so long and was proposed by him so many times that it became a running joke in itself. The rest of the company never warmed to the idea, feeling it lacked commercial potential — an extraordinary judgment call indeed in light of a certain movie from the following decade. Then again, Meretzky didn’t have Leonardo DiCaprio.

But in the immediate aftermath of Hitchhiker’s in late 1984, with complete carte blanche for the first and only time during his tenure with Infocom, Meretzky decided to go in another direction entirely. Even as he was basking in the glow of Hitchhiker’s huge initial sales and publicity, Ronald Reagan was defeating Walter Mondale in one of the biggest routs in American electoral history; Mondale carried exactly 1 state to Reagan’s 49.

The impetus to start working on it was Reagan’s reelection. I was appalled that he was not only reelected but reelected in a landslide. Everyone was talking about what an absorbing medium computer games in general and particularly interactive fiction was because even when you weren’t playing you were spending all your time thinking about it. You were always working on puzzles. When you were playing you were absorbed in it 100 percent, and when you weren’t playing part of your brain was still working on it, thinking about it.

I thought about how other media were constantly trying to get messages across, change people’s thinking. It seemed to me that interactive fiction could be an even more powerful medium for doing that. So that was my mission. I wanted to show people what a war-mongering, Christian-Right-pandering, environment-trashing, rights-trampling asshole Reagan was.

And of course the game was so successful that we’ve never had another President like that!

The question of just how to convey that message within the context of an interesting, playable work of interactive fiction was rather more fraught than the above description might imply. Could interactive fiction change hearts and minds the way that Art does it, not by offering reasoned arguments but by making the player really see and feel? Whatever else you could say about them, adventure games — even Infocom’s interactive fiction — hadn’t been doing a lot of that sort of thing. They’d been more than content to work within safe, established, inoffensive genre boundaries, a defensible enough choice at a time when just offering, say, a reasonably good interactive facsimile of a forgettable mystery novel could be rightly greeted as an amazing achievement. There had been glimpses of potential to do and be more, like Floyd’s death in Planetfall or Infidel’s shocking ending. But could something like that be maintained over the course of an entire work? Sure, Meretzky could craft a broad satire in which Reagan would stand in for Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive, but he wanted to do something more thoughtful, more expressive.

Interactive fiction is an almost perversely limited medium from the perspective of a writer of static fiction. There are many, many things that it just can’t do well, and any sort of direct facsimile of literary fiction, even literary science fiction, is one of them. Such works invariably end up being either fundamentally un-interactive, the proverbial railroaded novel separated by the occasional command prompt, or impossible to implement; the grand bargains and life choices that are the stuff of literature represent a combinatorial explosion with which interactive fiction is utterly unequipped to deal. This doesn’t mean that interactive fiction can’t move and change us. It does, however, mean that its authors must approach their goals in different, more oblique ways than conventional authors.

Steve Meretzky, about to craft the first largely puzzleless work of interactive fiction ever to be released by a publisher, intuitively grasped this reality that has eluded many would-be “literary” interactive-fiction authors since. The central premise of the game that would become A Mind Forever Voyaging came to him one day at his breakfast table. It was an idea that played perfectly to his medium’s strengths. Interactive fiction does setting incredibly well, perhaps better than it does anything else. Intricate plotting it does painfully and reluctantly and usually clunkily. Therefore why not make the player not so much a participant in the plot as an observer? He would make the player’s avatar a “self-aware computer” observing the effects of Republican policies over a span of decades inside a simulation. There would still be room for player agency, secrets to be found and hidden corners to be investigated. But the larger-scale machinery of the simulation could grind on largely unaffected by this. A cop out? Perhaps, but also a brilliant one. The rest of the story — about the computer, named PRISM, and how he came to be — now began to flow.

Cop out or not, Meretzky’s idea was still hugely ambitious. He wanted to do nothing less than create a whole city in software not once but five times — the same place over a span of five decades. And woven around this central simulation would have to be a lot more material relating to PRISM’s operation and his exploratory mission. The scale of the whole was out of line with anything Infocom had attempted since the original PDP-10 Zork — you know, the one they’d had to chop into pieces to get onto microcomputers. Thankfully, Meretzky had a trump card in the form of a new technology that had been born at Infocom during 1984.

The system would be known to the world as Interactive Fiction Plus, and internally as either the version 4 Z-Machine or just EZIP. (“Extended Z-Machine Interpreter”; ordinary interpreters were customarily called “ZIPs,” a name which has nothing to do with the compression format of the same name.) The Imps had been growing increasingly frustrated with the Z-Machine, with its sharp limitations of 128 K of total code and data (allowing at best a short novella’s worth of text), its maximum of 256 objects (a much more restrictive number than it might appear at first glance when you consider that objects included not only items in the game but also rooms, your avatar and other people and animals, and even various abstractions like compass directions), its support for nothing more elaborate in the way of onscreen formatting than a fixed status line and a scrolling stream of text. They were aching to push their worlds and their parsers further than the cramped Z-Machine could allow.

Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn, who made a surprising but enduring pair of running buddies, worked toward a next-generation technology for interactive fiction even as Berlyn was also heading the cross-platform graphics initiative and designing Fooblitzky and also writing Cutthroats. They dreamed of a parser capable of understanding “kinds and qualities,” capable of facilitating real conversations with other characters. Blank:

We worked on it for quite a while before we realized it just wasn’t getting anywhere. It was too open-ended; it was hard to know where to go with it and what was going to be the interesting part of it. Or were you turning it into a simulation, where you build a big world you can wander around in but not much happens? We kind of hit a wall.

It of course didn’t help that Cornerstone was continuing to suck more and more oxygen away from such blue-sky initiatives, nor that Blank himself was getting more and more distracted and embroiled in his disputes with Al Vezza and the rest of the Board. Berlyn and Blank’s grander plans never saw the light of day. However, the more plebeian technological foundation Blank had laid to support them did as Interactive Fiction Plus.

EZIP extended the basic Z-Machine in a fairly elegant, straightforward way. Maximum story size doubled to 256 K. The maximum number of objects expanded to a number big enough that nobody would ever, ever — even in the modern era — need to think about it again. A modest new set of opcodes building on work that had been begun to facilitate Seastalker’s sonar display gave some new options for text layout and screen formatting. And that was about it really. Still, it should be just enough to let Meretzky build his city.

The luxuries of EZIP didn’t come without a steep price tag. Getting EZIP onto many of the target machines stretched the considerable talents of Dan Horn’s Micro Group to the limit. Andrew Kaluzniacki, for instance, had to invent a new filesystem for the Apple II to increase the capacity of a disk side. Even with such wizardry the new system was simply too much for a huge swathe of the many machines Infocom supported with the standard Z-Machine, like the Commodore 64, the Atari 8-bit line, and the many extant Apple IIs with less than 128 K of memory. The lowest common denominator for EZIP would have to be a machine with 128 K and an 80-column text display.

That looked like a dangerous move, especially in 1984 before the arrival of many of the more powerful consumer-focused machines of the latter 1980s like the Commodore 128 and Amiga and the Atari ST. But even then it wasn’t completely unprecedented. Sierra had elected to make 128 K a requirement for King’s Quest and its sequels, and had done quite well commercially by it. In fact, that game seemed to have discovered an audience of players with higher-speced machines who bought it because it required 128 K and thus was presumably more advanced than others on the market. Perhaps a similar touch of snobbery would rub off on Interactive Fiction Plus.

It was just one more way in which Meretzky’s project was an iffy proposition. Yet he got remarkably little pushback from marketing or anyone else about his game. He had gotten it off the ground at the perfect time, just before the disasters of 1985 would make such a risky project look crazy indeed to the embattled company. By the time the full horror of their financial situation started to become clear around mid-year, the game was far too far along to stop even had anyone seriously wanted to. But it’s far from clear that anyone did. Even Dave Lebling, the most conservative of the Imps and thus the most likely to find Meretzky’s game objectionable, declared that he was fine with the game, that it was a point of view which Meretzky had every right to express.

It was “Hollywood” Dave Anderson, a key tester who would later become an Implementor in his own right, who gave the project its enduring label inside Infocom: “Steve Meretzky’s Interiors.” Interiors, for those of you who aren’t Woody Allen fans, was Allen’s 1978 follow-up to the Best Picture-winning Annie Hall. All of Allen’s previous films had been comedies, if funny in increasingly nuanced ways. Interiors, however, was a complete departure, a somber Bergman-esque character study that begins with a separation and ends with a suicide, with nary a laugh in between. Allen later incorporated the reaction of many of his fans into Stardust Memories, whose filmmaker protagonist is constantly being asked when he’s going to get back to making “funny” movies again. Anderson’s epithet knowingly or unknowingly foreshadowed the similar reaction many of Infocom’s fans would soon have to Meretzky’s great artistic experiment.

Meretzky found a particularly great supporter and booster in Jon Palace, who still names the game today as by far his favorite. Palace, who when hired at the beginning of 1984 had not even known what interactive fiction was, had become one of the foremost proponents within Infocom of the medium’s potential to be meaningful and relevant and beautiful — to be Art. Many of the more experimental games of Infocom’s second half, beginning with A Mind Forever Voyaging, owe Palace an enormous debt for his dedication to the proposition of Infocom interactive fiction as something more than endless Zork rehashes even as times got leaner and commercial pressures mounted. Palace:

I really tried to emphasize the storytelling aspect rather than the puzzle aspect just because that’s what I liked. AMFV started as a story without puzzles, and even though puzzles went back in AMFV was about the story. It wasn’t about the puzzles. I was very, very pleased with that one.

At the same time, its reception was definitely mixed. A lot of the rabid puzzle-loving fans did not like it. They might have liked the politics — or maybe they didn’t like the politics — but some people did not like the lack of puzzles. But for me it was, like, “Great! Look, we can really elicit an emotional response!” — an emotional response which isn’t trite. That for me was the best.

Meretzky hugely valued Palace’s unstinting “advice and support” as he ventured into these uncharted waters, thanking him lastly and most prominently in the acknowledgements of the finished game.

Called simply PRISM through most of its development, A Mind Forever Voyaging’s final name is lifted from a passage in William Wordsworth’s lifetime endeavor, the epic narrative poem The Prelude. There it’s applied to Isaac Newton, a statue of whom stood near the “nook obscure” where the young Wordsworth slept at Cambridge:

And from my pillow, looking forth by light
Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The antechapel where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

The original Apple Computer logo

It’s a passage that already had a place in hacker lore long before Meretzky stumbled upon it in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. The first logo deployed by the nascent Apple Computer, created by the company’s forgotten third founder Ronald Gerald Wayne using pen and ink, consisted of a picture of Newton leaning against a tree, with the end of the passage quoted above running along the border. The very un-Apple-like logo didn’t last long; neither did Wayne, who sold his share back to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak for $800 less than two weeks later.

While the strong political message remained, A Mind Forever Voyaging gradually evolved into a scenario much more complicated than Meretzky’s initial determination simply to out Reagan as an “asshole” might imply. Drawing upon the knowledge of artificial-intelligence theory which the collection of refugees from MIT’s Lab for Computer Science surrounding him possessed in spades, he created a detailed backstory for Perry Simm — i.e., PRISM — as an entity who has unknowingly lived his first two decades inside a computer simulation before suddenly being jerked out of his simulated reality and into the real world, to be assigned the mission of investigating the likely effects of one Senator Richard Ryder’s Plan for Renewed National Purpose on his home town, the fictional Rockvil, South Dakota, ten years in the future. The “present” in the game’s world is 2031, with simulated futures eventually reaching as far as 2081, making A Mind Forever Voyaging one more entry in science fiction’s huge catalog of works that are ostensibly about the future but really about the here and now. The implications and philosophical questions that surround Perry’s simulated version of existence, many of which the game doesn’t directly address and sometimes seems oddly oblivious of, end up being at least as intriguing as its more straightforward political message.

A Mind Forever Voyaging isn’t the unblemished masterpiece many fans accuse it of being. The writing is compelling in many places, cursory in other places, gawky and awkward in yet others — sometimes endearingly so and sometimes just, well, awkwardly so. The sprawling city of Rockvil itself, impressive as it is as by far the largest contiguous space ever to appear in an Infocom game, is also often only sketchily implemented and described. (Much of this is certainly down to the space limitations of even the version 4 Z-Machine; the final game file reportedly has about ten bytes to spare, not enough for even a single extra sentence.) The dystopia that gradually emerges as you progress further into the simulation is, to say the least, rather derivative of Nineteen Eighty-Four; even some of the vocabulary, like “lustfilm” and “hatefilm,” seems lifted straight from a Newspeak dictionary. And as political commentary it’s at best simplistic and heavy-handed.

Yet A Mind Forever Voyaging manages the neat trick of being interesting because of its flaws rather than despite them. It’s a big, messy piece of work that tries to do a lot of things with mixed success even as it sort of accidentally does other things that I’m not entirely sure its maker was even aware of. Its nooks and crannies offer a downright bewildering number of things to talk about, seemingly endless philosophical tangents to wander down. While I can’t promise we’ll get to all of them, we are going to take our time here, not only because it’s one of the most significant games in interactive-fiction history but also because — and more so, really — the ideas it contains are just so interesting to think about. Thus the “Part 1” in this article’s title. With its history and technical logistics behind us, we’ll be ready next time to delve into the game itself.

(This and the following articles are drawn from, in addition to the game itself, my usual Infocom source of Jason Scott’s Get Lamp interview archives. Also useful was the Steve Meretzky interview in Richard Rouse III’s Game Design: Theory and Practice.)

Comments
34 Responses

- Sniffnoy

April 27, 2014 at 8:34 pm

Huh; when you mentioned a Titanic adventure game, I thought of Titanic: Adventure Out of Time. Doesn’t seem offhand that there’s any relation though.

- Victor Gijsbers

April 28, 2014 at 7:55 am

Interestingly, Douglas Adams _did_ get to make a Titanic game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Titanic

- JeramieH

November 8, 2017 at 10:19 pm

My thought was Beyond the Titanic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_Apogee_Software_video_games#Beyond_the_Titanic

- Keith Palmer

April 27, 2014 at 9:51 pm

“Meretzky’s Titanic” also got my attention, although when you mentioned “a certain movie from the following decade” my reaction was that people in the mid-1980s might have thought of Raise the Titanic, a 1980 movie more notable for not making back its own then-large budget. (“It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic!”) That did get me thinking further about how the wreck of the ship was discovered in September of 1985, though, and of the possibility that if Meretzky had completed that other game in the time he’d spent working on A Mind Forever Voyaging it might have been the beneficiary of a lucky coincidence bringing it to the attention of more people, as much as I do understand the ultimate futility of speculating on counterfactuals…

- Jimmy Maher

April 28, 2014 at 5:27 am

I never thought about that film, even though I mention it in an earlier article on this very blog. Yes, that may have affected the way the project was perceived within Infocom…

- Odkin

April 28, 2014 at 4:43 am

Oh, well… another idol self-destructs with a bitter ignorant liberal rant, full of hate and falsehoods.

- GeoX

April 28, 2014 at 7:54 am

You sound fun.

- Dehumanizer

April 28, 2014 at 2:42 pm

“Bitter ignorant […] rant, full of hate and falsehoods”, and HE’s the one full of hate?

- Odkin

May 1, 2014 at 5:17 am

Unlike liberals, I don’t hate people. I hate despicable poisonous rhetoric like “war-mongering, Christian-Right-pandering, environment-trashing, rights-trampling asshole Reagan”. I know liberals have such protection from the media that they cannot understand when they are criticized, but that quote IS hateful.

- GeoX

May 1, 2014 at 3:14 pm

No, really. I’m sure you’re a blast at parties. Otherwise, how would you have come up with something as hilarious as “unlike liberals, I don’t hate people?”

- Victor Gijsbers

April 28, 2014 at 8:21 pm

What more noble and virtuous action could an idol take than to self-destruct? Surely it shouldn’t just passively allow others to stain themselves with the sin of idolatry!

- Jason Scott

April 28, 2014 at 4:54 pm

I have access to materials Jimmy doesn’t have access to (yet) – the full documentation and notebooks of Steve Meretzky’s design work for Infocom (and Boffo too, actually).

What I hope doesn’t get lost in all this is how much harder Steve worked on A Mind Forever Voyaging than any of the previous games he did – the notebook for AMFV is easily twice the size of any other design book, and these things are pretty sizeable numbers. He duplicated academic works on the life of cities, he pulls down information on the psychological experience of “happiness” – he even polls his co-workers and testers on what represents quality of life issues. (For example, he defines a scale of “local theater shows pristine copy of Casablanca” to “local cineplex shows spliced, broken copy of Casablanca”.) The amount of work done just to figure out the full extent of the city and what that represents is huge. There’s also some great work on portraying “the future” – my favorite quote is (roughly) “You can’t just call a bus a ‘space bus’ and be done with it.” It was obvious this was a big, big deal to Steve, and he put his considerable amount of talent and heart into the worldbuilding.

Similarly, too, the notes show the debate underway of making a “political” game and what the pros and cons would be. Again, as Jimmy has indicated elsewhere and as the interviews bear out, the company truly thought of interactive fiction as being the descendant of the book itself… so why not have all the same genres books do? The thought was that while this game might have a liberal slant, future games might have a conservative slant, or be educational, or whatever else – the sky was the limit.

It also helps to remember that the political environment of 1984 is not the same level of toxicity currently rampant online, where apparently a user who hears that Steve Meretzky had political leanings that were in a different sphere would declare him lost and fallen. (Steve’s been pretty consistent politically for all his life – certainly post MIT.) My interviews with him covered a lot of ground (there are hours of them), including the motivations for why do a game like that – which are the quotes Jimmy pulled from for this article. Steve doesn’t turn all conversations political at the drop of a hat (although he does care about issues if you discuss them with him).

But, as I’m sure Jimmy will cover, the resulting non-success of AMFV means that the next two games out of Steve for Infocom are notably safe: A PG-rated sex romp (Leather Goddesses) and a sequel (Stationfall). I wanted to see Steve given more chances to work even more in this medium – he still has some great works in him of this level, but he has to follow the money and the drive for smaller amounts of puzzles or smaller development times in years hence.

- Andrew

April 28, 2014 at 9:17 pm

Fascinating insight adding to a fascinating post, and a beautifully sculpted slapdown of that gun nut. Thanks, Jason!

- John G

April 29, 2014 at 5:37 pm

Any plans to publish excerpts of these notebooks? I’ve always found the conception of the game fascinating.

- iPadCary

April 29, 2014 at 5:51 pm

One of the best computer games EVER made.
And I’ll brook no argument.

- Steve Meretzky

April 30, 2014 at 7:10 pm

Thanks … amazing level of research and accuracy. Just a few corrections:
1) Marrying the Titanic game to the theft of the Mona Lisa wasn’t an idea that came up until brainstorming at Boffo Games in the mid-90s. During Infocom days, it was a straight “survive the sinking of the Titanic” concept.
2) The Apple logo wasn’t how I became aware of the Wordsworth quote … I didn’t even know about the quote on the Apple logo until a few years ago. I just came across the quote while perusing my well-worn Bartlett’s Quotations.
3) The founders of Infocom came out of MIT’s Lab for Computer Science; the AI Lab was a different entity.

- Jimmy Maher

May 1, 2014 at 5:49 am

Thanks so much, Steve. Made appropriate edits in the article.

- iPadCary

May 3, 2014 at 12:13 am

Jeez Louise, the Mæstro himself was drawn to this article!
Well DONE, Jimmy!! 8^ ]

- NPC

December 16, 2015 at 6:01 pm

“Palace, who when hired at the beginning of 1984 has not even known what interactive fiction was, had become one of the foremost proponents within Infocom of the medium’s potential to be meaningful and relevant and beautiful — to be Art”

Super-picky: I think the sentence is technically correct… but I think you intend it all to be in the past tense. Feel free to delete this comment.

- Jimmy Maher

December 17, 2015 at 6:30 am

Yes, you’re right. Thanks!

- Peter Ferrie

December 26, 2015 at 6:36 am

I believe that [referring to Apple II] “increase the capacity of a single disk side from 144 K to about 168 K” is not physically possible. It was not what was done, in any case.

AMFV (and other EZIPs like Bureaucracy) for Apple II ships on two sides of a single floppy. The game engine and static text is on side A; the dynamic text is on side B.

- Jimmy Maher

December 26, 2015 at 10:02 am

I believe that both were done, actually.

The version 4 Z-Machine has a maximum story size of 256 K, of which AMFV used almost every byte. This space is divided into three parts: dynamic, static, and high. The first part can be changed, and thus needs to be memory resident. The second contains most of the actual code to be interpreted, and thus should ideally be resident at all times for reasonably fast operation. The third is usually filled mostly with text, and is the part that can be most easily swapped in from disk when needed.

In the case of AMFV, the first two parts of the story file amounted to about 85 K. These plus the interpreter were stored on the first disk side, from which they were loaded into memory when the game was first booted.

The remainder of the story file, assuming the game wasn’t to constantly prompt the player to flip sides, really needed to be all in one place. (Infocom’s system just wasn’t set up to organize the data into areas corresponding to the player’s progress through the game like, say, the games of Telarium.) This was the challenge that absorbed a great deal of time and effort to re-jigger the disk format sufficiently to make it fit. Andrew Kaluzniacki, a programmer for the Micro Group, considers it something of a Finest Hour for them.

- Peter Ferrie

December 26, 2015 at 11:03 pm

A standard disk is exactly 140kb (35*16*256/1024). Their new system is 157.5kb (35*18*256/1024), the same size as used on many Broderbund titles (but a different implementation). To exceed that size with their encoding would require more tracks (there’s a different encoding that can do it, but it’s extremely complex). There literally isn’t room on a track for the 19th sector that would bring the size to 166kb.

- Jimmy Maher

December 28, 2015 at 5:59 pm

So, am I understanding you to say that Infocom did use a custom format, but it only brought the capacity up to 157.5 K? If so, it could very well be that fuzzy memories just got the numbers a little wrong. For my part, I’m far from an expert on Apple II disk formats — or Apple II anything really. I’m a lot more comfortable with the Z-Machine in the abstract. ;)

- Peter Ferrie

December 29, 2015 at 7:12 pm

Yes, the numbers are just a bit off, but your description is otherwise correct.

- Jimmy Maher

December 30, 2015 at 6:38 am

Okay, removed the hard numbers as they’re not really the most important thing anyway. Thanks!

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- Jason Kankiewicz

February 17, 2017 at 2:59 pm

“Mereztky” -> “Meretzky”?
“cross-platforms graphics” -> cross-platform graphics”?
“Nineteen Eight-Four” -> “Nineteen Eighty-Four”?

- Jimmy Maher

February 17, 2017 at 3:33 pm

Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

February 27, 2017 at 6:19 pm

Just a silly comment but, for years I’ve always wondered, “why does the cover depict Timothy Hutton?” :)

Anyway, all silliness aside, great article on the background of a game I’ve only heard about tangentially and superficially.

-dZ.

- Joe Pranevich

November 25, 2018 at 4:46 pm

I just finished my own draft review of this game before poking around and seeing what others thought and I am amused that we both went to “mustache-twirling villain” for describing Senator Ryder. In a game that was content to have realistic characters with honest, if short-sighted motives, his scene at the end was almost amusingly B-movie.

Curiously, I could never figure out if he had managed to hold onto power after his 16 years as President should have ended. Once you got to 2061, I wasn’t able to find a newspaper or anything to tell me who was currently President. I assumed that he was replaced by a member of the Church of the Word of God, but was frustrated that I couldn’t find that stated.

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- Jason

February 11, 2021 at 10:41 am

“And of course the game was so successful that we’ve never had another President like that!”

Riiiight, about that…

A Mind Forever Voyaging, Part 2: Don’t Go Back to Rockvil
April 29, 2014

Our theme song for today is the inevitable.

During the mid-1980s American liberalism was arguably at its lowest ebb of the century. This was the era of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” when liberalism was viewed as the cause of the economic doldrums of the previous decade and the social unrest of the decade before that, when the de facto voice of the Democratic party for many people was still Jimmy Carter’s handwringing “malaise” speech. While Carter told the people that they needed to fundamentally change their ways of life, to carpool and conserve energy, Ronald Reagan told them the country’s only problem was that they weren’t being American enough. After a somewhat rocky first few years in office, by 1984 the economy was booming as it hadn’t in almost two decades, and Reagan soared to reelection that year. Oddly for an ideology so rooted in tradition and fixated on a mythical America of the past, conservatism felt fresh and vigorous and new, like the future, as the “Greed is Good!” 1980s got rolling at last in earnest. To stand in opposition to Reaganomics was to blow into the face of a hurricane; even counterculture icons like Neil Young were making noises about supporting Reagan. Yet it was at this moment, before the Iran-Contra scandal began to at least reopen a window for debate in the American body politic, that Steve Meretzky penned A Mind Forever Voyaging. Whatever else you can say about it, it was one hell of a brave piece of work.

Meretzky’s stand-in for Reagan — with a bit of Joseph McCarthy thrown in for good measure — is a charismatic senator named Richard Ryder (subtle Meretzky ain’t). It’s 2031, and the United States of North America is once again gripped by economic malaise. Ryder is promoting something called The Plan for Renewed National Purpose to fix all that. I might complain that the name is rather too fascistic-sounding, except that I’m not really sure it sounds any more ominous than The Patriot Act. I might complain that the specifics of the Plan hew a bit too closely to the Republican agenda of 1985, except that the Republican agenda of 1985 is largely still the Republican agenda of today. So why not 2031 as well?

* cut tax rates by fifty percent
* vigorous prosecution of tax evasion
* decentralization of federal responsibilities
* deregulation of all major industries
* reinstatement of the military draft
* emphasis on fundamentals and traditional values in education
* mandatory conscription for troublemakers and criminals
* a strict "USNA First" trade policy
* termination of aid to nations not pro-USNA
* cutbacks on all types of bureaucracy, e.g. registering cars, guns
* termination of government subsidies to outmoded industries

A Mind Forever Voyaging’s criticism of these policies and the mindset that spawned them will grow increasingly strident, as befits a muckraking work meant to shake the people and get them to wake up! But the criticism builds slowly. When we first enter the future Rockvil, in 2041, it seems a pretty nice place.

As Jason Scott noted in his comment to my previous article, Rockvil itself is a major achievement not just for its sheer size but also, more so, for what a believable place it is. Rockvil is a prosperous mid-sized town perhaps about the size and character of a real-world place I once lived, Olympia, Washington. It’s laid out in a way that just feels intuitively right. There’s a tourist district in the north with a zoo, a sports stadium, parkland, concert halls and theaters; a bustling downtown at the city’s center, with residences for city-dwelling hipsters (Perry Simm among them) along its edges; a university in the west surrounded by the expected student hangouts like a bar and a cheap Chinese joint; the obligatory shopping mall and cineplex to the east. Traveling south takes one across “the proverbial railroad tracks” — every city has them — to the less photogenic parts of town: the power station, the skycar factory (“the last surviving smokestack industry in the area”), the city dump, liquor stores and laundromats and gun shops and tenements and reminders of a more industrial past in the form of shuttered factories and warehouses. Surrounding the whole, but beyond “the boundary of this simulation,” are the suburbs.

We spend the majority of the game wandering about Rockvil, and we come to care for the place almost as if we really had grown up there. In 2041 it’s largely a happy, welcoming place for a (presumably) successful young writer like Perry, with just a few ominous signs, if you’re inclined to view them as such, like the growing underclass on the other side of the tracks and the population of Rockvil Reformatory: “From what you’ve heard, the prison is overcrowded, because today’s stricter law enforcement and mandatory sentencing regulations are putting people into the penal system even faster than the military draft can remove them.” The city’s slow decline is horrifying, as the place becomes a nightmare version of itself like Festeron in Wishbringer but without a trace of that game’s whimsy. (It’s funny to think that Infocom released two games back to back that relied on such a similar mechanic, another of a number of odd confluences in their history.) A weird cult-like religion rises and finally takes over the government; infrastructure crumbles and publicly-funded museums close or fall into horrid neglect; the criminals and police both get ever more brutal; the films showing at the local cineplex get baser and uglier, as does the graffiti on the streets; racism becomes institutionalized and celebrated; the credit card in your wallet is replaced with a ration card. There’s much here that’s disturbing and/or heartrending, like the “monkey torturing” that becomes the zoo’s main draw or the eventual use to which the stadium is put: “Execution Matches.” The last version of Rockvil, from 2081, is an apparent post-nuclear wasteland inhabited by roving bands of possibly mutated, certainly cannibalistic savages. We don’t last long there.

There’s a message to this progression that’s as relevant now as it was in 1985: what seems expedient in the short term can be profoundly destructive in the long term. And, without putting too fine a point on it, I can’t help but note a certain extra layer of ominous prescience for those of us playing the game thirty years after it was written. Many of the government’s worst abuses are initially justified in the name of preventing terrorism. The apartment Perry shares with his wife and son is subject to unannounced raids by the “Border Security Force” — Homeland Security, anyone? — even in 2041. A sign in the airport soon reads, “All international travellers must pass through strip-search. No exceptions!”

The apartment is a special nexus of interest in each version of Rockvil. While Perry gets a lengthy backstory in the game’s manual, his wife Jill and son Mitchell are the only people we meet with whom he has a personal relationship. Not that we learn much about either in the bare handful of substantial paragraphs that relate to Perry’s home life: Mitchell is just an average little boy; Jill is a painter who is addicted to trashy romance novels and madly loved by and in love with Perry (perhaps relevantly, Meretzky himself got married just after finishing A Mind Forever Voyaging). But it’s enough to make their final appearance in 2071 the most harrowing scene in the game:

Six or eight heavily armed Church police storm into the apartment. You see a look of horror come over Jill, as she covers her mouth with the back of her hand, as though stifling some silent scream. You follow her gaze, and -- a shock of recognition -- sauntering in behind the police...

The ten years since you last saw him have left scant change on the face of your son. "Mitchell!" you yell, and take a step toward him, but a blow from one of the cops sends your frail, old body flying against the wall.

"She is the one." The voice is Mitchell's, but the tone is cold, unrecognizable, sending shivers through you. He raises a fur-clad arm, pointing at his mother without a hint of emotion. "She spake against the Church; she tried to poison the mind of a child too young to know the Truth." The thugs grab Jill, who reaches toward Mitchell, tears of terror streaming down her face. Totally unresponsive, he turns and walks calmly out of the apartment.

As Jill is dragged, screaming and crying, through the front door, you try to follow, but a cop pummels you in the stomach with his club. You fall to the floor, retching, as the apartment door slams closed, shutting you off forever from the son you cannot understand and the wife you will never see again.

Now, one could argue with some justification that this is rather emotionally manipulative, that the game hasn’t characterized anyone involved well enough to really earn our pathos. But like Floyd’s death, it’s unforgettable and affecting in spite of it all — more so, really, because it fits in so well with the tone of the game around it rather than coming out of nowhere as an aberration in the middle of a science-fiction comedy.

There’s a lot to quibble about in Rockvil. As believable as the city in general is, the writing is sometimes frustratingly perfunctory. Meretzky has a tendency to just tell us what something is in the manner of a tourist guidebook or government brochure rather than give a real physical sense of place. So, we learn that “Rockvil Municipal Stadium is a multipurpose sporting event facility, home of both baseball’s Rockvil Bobcats and soccer’s Rockvil Rockets.” Okay, but what’s it like there? Where am I standing inside? What do I see and smell and hear and feel? This mode of description gets particularly confusing as we go deeper into the future. The game always acts as if Perry knows this place intimately. Yet the whole ostensible purpose of visiting these future Rockvils is to find out what the (simulated) future holds. If I have full access already to the simulated memories of the Perry of the future, why do I need to go there to access them? But here we’re getting into the more problematic if also philosophically interesting parts of the game, which I’m going to reserve for the next article…

I also wish the implementation was less sketchy. There are lots of interesting little Easter eggs, but they’re hard to find because most of the time the game doesn’t much reward actions other than just wandering around and reading the room descriptions. And even when you do stumble upon them they sometimes leave you wanting more. When I played the game before writing these articles, I found in 2041 a delightful little book store where I bought The Wizard of Oz, a favorite from Perry’s childhood. Given the tradition of bookstores in dystopian literature as seats of resistance and beacons of freedom, I went back there in every later time: to see how it had changed, to see how the “kindly” proprietor was doing, to hopefully buy more books that would tell me more about Perry’s state of mind amidst the societal decline. But there was nothing new to see or do, until the place was closed completely and that was that. I of course understand that many of these complaints can be laid directly at the feet of technical limitations. Still, I can’t help but think about how A Mind Forever Voyaging could be even better with better writing and a deeper world to explore.

The other obvious complaint to make is thematic: that A Mind Forever Voyaging isn’t exactly the fairest of political critiques. At risk of sounding too inflammatory, I will say that the game puts its finger on a certain authoritarian impulse that strikes me as a bothersome undercurrent to so much Republican political thought. But still, the game’s message that we’re all going to wind up food for roving cannibalistic mutants if we vote Republican is a bit farther than I’m willing to go. In the last act of the game we meet Richard Ryder himself at last. Consistent with Meretzky’s view of Reagan as an “asshole,” he’s content to just make Ryder a mustache-twirling villain, guilty not only of bad policy but of fundamentally bad faith. There’s literally no division in the game’s universe between a Reagan Republican and a full-blown fascist.

"Now let's get a few ground rules straight, Perelman. Nothing is stopping the Plan. Even if I didn't think your damn tapes were faked, I wouldn't give a damn. A helluva lot of people have a helluva lot at stake in this thing, and so what if a lot of creeps who can't take care of themselves get a little hurt." "I'm very frightened, Senator," says Perelman, his voice laced with sarcasm. "Shut up," Ryder shouts back. "I said that I'm doing the talking here!

"And let me tell you another thing, Perelman. Don't think that just because you've been on the news and been a big hot shot around here, you're gonna get some special consideration, because all that doesn't mean diddly-squat in the kind of power circles I'm talking about!"

Ryder is getting really worked up; his normal, fatherly demeanor is completely gone. "Perelman, you're an even bigger idiot than I imagined if you think we'd let some two-bit egghead scientist and some high-tech whiz bang computer stand in our way! Remember this -- if you were to have some unforeseen accident, you wouldn't be the first person who's gotten crushed by standing in the way of the Plan!" Perelman, with a quick glance in your direction, says, "Quite an oration, Senator. Vintage thug. I wish I could save it for posterity. Would you be willing to go on the record with that statement?" Ryder becomes even more livid. "A real jokester, huh? Lemme tell you this, Perelman -- you'd better stop joking and start listening to my advice, or you're not going to be around to care about posterity, understand?

"So, here's the bottom line, Perelman. My men are going to stay here and keep the lid shut tight on you troublemakers, until the Plan is the law of this land. Nobody leaves, no communications at all, and don't worry about visitors; we'll take care of that. And if I get any trouble out of you, I swear to God I'll personally pull the plug on that goddam wonder machine of yours. Got it?" He stomps out without waiting for a reply, leaving Perelman sputtering in anger. A few seconds later, National Guardsmen enter and escort Perelman away.

Again, and while righteous anger certainly has a power of its own, I sometimes wish A Mind Forever Voyaging had a little more nuance about it.

After we prevent Ryder from pulling PRISM’s plug and thwart his Plan, a sequence which contains the only significant puzzles in the game, we come to the lengthy and justifiably oft-remarked epilogue in a Rockvil of the 2091 of a different timeline, a veritable liberal utopia.

The headline story is about a newly released study which indicates that the average life expectancy for both sexes has now passed one hundred years, and success in the development of regeneratives should send that figure even higher. Despite the dropping mortality rate, global population remains stable at just under two billion, with offworlding now running at a staggering seven million people annually.

To celebrate next month's special twentieth anniversary Disarmament Day, the World Council has passed a bill authorizing fireworks displays in each of the former capital cities of the twenty-two former nuclear powers. The fireworks displays, by Aerialist designer Jean M'gomo, will feature disarmament themes, and will be the largest display of pyrotechnic art in this century.

A story on an inside page catches your eye: "Perry Simm, Noted Author, To Join Crew of Silver Dove," reads the headline. "Perry Simm, author and poet, recipient of the 2089 Mexicana Prize, has been selected from nearly a thousand applicants to be the resident author aboard the Silver Dove, the space colony that is currently being equipped for mankind's first interstellar journey, a trip expected to last a dozen generations."

The epilogue, of which the above newspaper is only a modest part, goes on to show Perry reunited with a healthy and happy Jill and with a clean, prosperous, and peaceful Rockvil in which everyone has excellent health care, access to higher education, support when they need it, and freedom to do and be whatever they wish. And you know what? Having lived for almost five years now in two of the three happiest countries in the world, I have to say that that’s just a better way to run a country. Oh, sure, the epilogue is over the top, so much so that it’s almost hard to take entirely at face value. Yet Meretzky clearly, profoundly cares. In this era of irony and antiheroes and cool detachment, the gawky sentimentality of A Mind Forever Voyaging’s epilogue comes across as brave and inspiring and kind of beautiful. Really, what is so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

Infocom saw A Mind Forever Voyaging as likely to prompt discussion and controversy, just as a similarly strident book-borne critique of Reaganomics would. Far from running from it, they positively courted such a response, a remarkable fact indeed when one considers that they were still desperately trying to sell Cornerstone to a corporate America who thought Reagan was pretty great. The back of the package announced A Mind Forever Voyaging as a “major departure for Infocom,” and the game was announced at a press conference held at the New York Public Library to emphasize its literary qualities. In light of all this, the game’s reception was perhaps the most dismaying possible: nobody seemed to have much of anything substantive to say about it. Astonishingly given how unsubtle it is, many or most reviewers didn’t realize the political critique existed at all — or, if they did, knew better (or their editors did) than to touch on it even in passing. A Mind Forever Voyaging attracted none of the buzz of Chris Crawford’s contemporaneous Balance of Power. The mainstream press was moving on from bookware and with it moving on from Infocom, and everyone inside the industry took it as just another adventure game, albeit one with a weird shortage of puzzles. Sales amounted to no more than 30,000 or so, making A Mind Forever Voyaging Infocom’s least successful game to date (excepting the oddball Fooblitzky). Infocom took this as a rejection of the whole idea of puzzleless interactive fiction, even though their final game of 1985, the much more traditional Spellbreaker, wouldn’t sell much better despite being available on many more platforms. Neither Meretzky nor Infocom would ever attempt anything quite like A Mind Forever Voyaging again.

We, however, aren’t yet done with the game. There’s a whole additional set of ideas here which are if anything even more interesting than the more straightforward political allegory. We’ll get to them next time.

Comments
35 Responses

- Felix

April 29, 2014 at 4:58 pm

I have a couple of gripes with your article. First, if you think neoliberalism is significantly different from fascism, remember what’s been going on in Greece last year, or in Romania the year before, or in the UK not long before that. Today, the riot police will beat you up if you dare protest against austerity policies in the streets. Tomorrow… are you feeling safe at home? Rewatch V for Vendetta one of these days.

Second, I’m tired of hearing social and political messages being criticized as strident. That sounds dangerously like “stop yelling! people will notice I’m raping and killing you”. Subtlety doesn’t work, especially in new media, and certain messages absolutely need to be heard.

In retrospect, what worries me the most is that so few people predicted what a disaster neoliberal policies were going to be; almost everyone used to acclaim Thatcher and Reagan, and look where we are now…

For that alone, Meretzky deserves praise. And history vindicated his message as well as his game design.

- Jimmy Maher

April 30, 2014 at 6:21 am

1. I think you need to be careful not to commit the logical fallacy of stuffing a whole lot of disparate things into a box labelled “Neoliberalism” and declaring that these things are all the same. While there may be a common thread linking the events you mention, lumping them together with the Republican agenda of today, much less thirty years ago, is problematic. Conservatism in America is a different beast from conservatism in Europe: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/04/future-right. We should try to understand each thing on its own terms first, then look for commonalities. For the record, yes, I do think a Reagan Republican is significantly different from a fascist.

2. There’s a place in art for pure cries of rage and frustration, especially in more visceral forms like music (remember Bono yelling “Fuck the revolution!” in the Rattle and Hum version of “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” the last time he seemed like he really cared instead of a rock star playing someone who really cared) and poetry and perhaps even painting. However, if your purpose is to *convince* such an approach is rarely productive. At its worst it just leads to a sort of self-satisfied solipsism, an echo chamber that makes the teller/artist feel better but changes nothing in the world at large. If you want an example of such a message at the extreme, read one of the comments to the article before this one. Did it convince you of anything? If everyone is always shouting, we’re just, well, all shouting at each other.

- Felix

April 30, 2014 at 6:57 am

“Help! They’re beating me to death!”

“Calm down and politely explain what’s bothering you. People will think you’re overreacting.”

“Aaargh! Glg glg!”

“I give up. There’s no way to have a coherent dialogue with you.”

*bleeds to death on the sidewalk*

“And clean up your own messes.”

- R Flowers

July 31, 2014 at 7:05 pm

For the record, yes, I do think a Reagan Republican is significantly different from a fascist.

Uh, thanks… I guess?

- Duncan Stevens

April 29, 2014 at 5:41 pm

Somehow I had never made a connection to the song before. REM released “Reckoning” in April 1984, so it might not be a coincidence. (It was not exactly a chart-topper, but perhaps Meretzky, just a few years removed from MIT, was still listening to college rock.)

You may be getting to this next time, but: it’s made clear, around the edges, that Perelman does not exactly have an open mind about all this. The backstory explicitly says that the PerrySimm project was developed “to deter Senator Ryder and his plan.” Perelman develops the simulation, you go in and record what he wants you to record, and you’re done when you’ve assembled enough “evidence.” In that sense, whether deliberately or not, AMFV is less about the consequences of a certain political program than about the (theoretical) ability of a very determined opponent with good tools to come up with ways to stop that program. (Like, say, an interactive fiction author.)

The sample transcript is an interesting tell. It’s the same sort of thing as the game itself, but in the sample, you’re looking at what will happen if the President’s proposed “Population Control Package,” contents undescribed, which various religious groups are fighting, isn’t passed. It turns out everything becomes terrible, people starve, etc. Now, it’s possible that a “Population Control Package” could be nothing that you or I would find objectionable, but the historical precedents for this sort of initiative aren’t particularly heartening. So there’s an implication that this sort of argument-by-simulation is not entirely free of problems.

- Keith Palmer

April 29, 2014 at 8:52 pm

I’ve noticed before what might be called a “subversive reading” or two of the game to the effect of implying Perry Simm was “set up” by Perelman and company to support the status quo, and in amusing myself with the thought it would be a trivial matter to tweak the game’s structure and create a “conservative AMFV” (although I wonder a little if their own “forecasts of doom” are measured enough to allow even the first flush of apparent prosperity that makes what follows stand out so much) I do just sort of come back to supposing that all authors of fiction have their own advantages when it comes to supporting their points of view.

In seeing the discussion go this particular way, though, I am reflecting on how I first played the game around 1993 or 1994 (before I’d been “prompted” by the discussions of anyone else on how to see it), and wonder if I managed to sort of miss the political statement. I thought it was interesting to be able to just poke around and not have to be always “unlocking doors” (by that point, I suppose I’d come to think I just wasn’t very good at solving the puzzles in Infocom games), and the slow decay that started setting in surprised me and troubled me, such that I just thought “it’s a problem I have to solve!”… except that once I’d managed to warn Perelman, I couldn’t figure out how to stay switched on and set the game aside until I first went on the Internet in 1995 and started looking for information on the Infocom games. (With the discussion of earlier adventures, I suppose now the game was similar to Deadline and the other mysteries in that you had to wait in likely places.)

In any case, while I’ve been amused by the way AMFV’s stature seems to have risen over time with the way perspectives towards interactive fiction have changed and I may sort of “forgive” its “broad puddle” model of implementation as a demonstration that minimalism has its own certain advantages, I may see it myself as much a game that’s “easy to play through” as anything else more profound, because I don’t need to draw a map (or have one ready to hand, beyond perhaps the one in the documentation) or have to remember a whole series of solutions (as I can with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by this point) to finish it.

(Just as a footnote, my understanding of the bookstore is that buying The Wizard of Oz there means that book is mentioned as being torn up with gleeful maliciousness in a Border Security Force raid later on in the simulation.)

- Jimmy Maher

April 30, 2014 at 5:42 am

Your last paragraph does sort of illustrate one of problems I alluded to in the article. The police can only tear the book up if you leave it lying around in your apartment, which most players probably aren’t all that likely to do. So this scene, while perhaps effective, is awfully hard to come by; I only found it by looking through the disassembled game file.

- Torbjörn Andersson

April 30, 2014 at 7:14 am

Isn’t it enough to just buy the book during an earlier simulation? I don’t remember having to do anything more than than when I accidentally stumbled over that book tearing scene.

- Jimmy Maher

April 30, 2014 at 7:27 am

I definitely bought the book during my last playthrough and never saw the book-tearing scene. Something else must need to happen to trigger it. I’d assumed from the text the book would have to be lying in the apartment, but maybe it’s something else…

- Jimmy Maher

April 30, 2014 at 5:52 am

These arguments for a more subversive reading are certainly fascinating, but I don’t think Meretzky had anything like them in mind. Based on Jason Scott’s interviews as well as everything else I’ve ever seen Meretzky say or write about the game, it’s pretty clear that his primary, very straightforward agenda was to offer a forceful critique of Republican policies of the mid-1980s. The fact that the game can support so many other readings, raises so many other issues that have nothing to do with politics, seems almost accidental. Which could easily lead to whole new discussion about schools of literary criticism and the Role of the Author of the Work and eventually lead us, as so many things do, to smack against deconstructionism. But maybe another time… :)

- matt w

April 29, 2014 at 6:28 pm

While we’re talking politics, “vigorous prosecution of tax evasion” can’t be said to be part of today’s Republican agenda; kneecapping the IRA has been a priority for the GOP since the Roth hearings at least.

- Andrew Dalke

April 29, 2014 at 8:18 pm

While I can’t say that it’s a particularly Republican agenda, there have been vigorous prosecutions of overseas tax evasion during the last few years. Caught in the cross-fire are Americans living overseas like me and our host, who are subject to increased reporting requirements, like FACTA, and higher penalties.

- Jimmy Maher

April 30, 2014 at 5:38 am

I assume you mean IRS, not IRA — although I’m sure many Republicans would love to kneecap the IRA too. :)

But “vigorous prosecution of tax evasion” has been a part of the Republican public agenda to the extent that they use it as a (fundamentally unserious) answer to the question of where the money’s going to come from if they implement all of the tax cuts they say they will. Mitt Romney during the last Presidential campaign, for instance, could offer only “close loopholes and catch cheaters” in the way of clear answers to this question.

- Duncan Stevens

April 30, 2014 at 1:40 pm

Well, yes and no. Republicans tend to be very gung-ho on tax evasion when it pertains to the EITC:

http://www.urban.org/publications/900641.html

But less so on corporate taxes and upper-income taxpayers:

http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/jonathan-chait/why-republicans-love-tax-cheats

Pinpointing the source of these different approaches is left as an exercise for the reader.

- Evan Miller

April 29, 2014 at 9:18 pm

Of course, coming across this game for the first time in 2011, without being told beforehand that it was even political – I came to the conclusion that it was critical of both religion and “Big Government”.

And that Big Government was almost certainly liberal – whether I concluded this due to echoes of 1984’s anti-communism, or just my own views on which party has made (slightly) more progress in turning America into a dystopian wasteland, I cannot say.

Sorry, Meretzky. If it’s any consolation to you, I was able to explain to a friend yesterday that Vonnegut wasn’t serious about the Harrison Bergeron thing.

- John G

April 30, 2014 at 7:16 am

Richard Ryder does seem like a bit of a stock, on-the-nose villain, doesn’t he? Especially after the wonderful characterization of Perry Simm in “Dakota magazine.” It sounds like a draft written to meet a deadline and that there was no time to give Ryder a little more nuance.

Ryder reminds me of the bad guy from “The Dead Zone.”

- X

April 30, 2014 at 6:17 pm

Well…. The problem with peace, love and understanding is that it assumes that you’re working with another party who will bargain in good faith. You can lay all the peace and love you want on somebody like Vladimir Putin, and he’ll still snap up Crimea when he feels like it. You can lay down your arms and let the North Koreans take over the whole of Korea and you’ll wind up with millions more people subject to the mess that North Korea is. Sometimes, you have to accept evils (war) for the greater good (defending against tyrants).

Or to paraphrase our greatest philosopher, Mel Brooks: “Evil will always triumph [when] good is dumb.”

Anyway, to bring this back around to gaming, I would say that the ultimate realization of the vision of this game is in Sim City. You really have a place that works like the simulation in aMFV. And you have to follow pretty much the “right” political philosophy to make your city thrive: cleaning up pollution, building schools and libraries, adding mass transit. It kind of makes me wonder why there’s no gaming in the niche between Sim City and Civilization: where you can manage the priorities of a nation but not necessarily try to take over the world.

- Jimmy Maher

May 1, 2014 at 5:52 am

I was actually thinking that maybe if and when I get around to writing about SimCity I should try to recreate Rockvil therein…

- X

May 1, 2014 at 5:03 pm

I guess it just wouldn’t be the same without the social-engineering aspects. You can get some of that in Alpha Centauri (SMAC), where you have the option of declaring your society to be a Police State whose highest value is Will to Power and whose future tech is designed to allow Thought Control. And if the people rise up in opposition to your draconian rule, you can always have them Nerve Stapled.

Actually, now that I think about it, SMAC has some design philosophy in common with text adventures. As you progress through the game, the quotes and videos reveal the story of Planet. You have to read a bit between the lines, but there’s some fascinating stuff there. And as long as you’re going to accept a style of play like aMFV where you’re doing more exploration than puzzle-solving, the lack of puzzle-play in SMAC is no detriment. The addition of a fantastic 4X game is just a bonus!

- Andrew H

May 1, 2014 at 11:32 pm

You might enjoy Shadow President and Hidden Agenda then.

SimCity seems to come from a more conservative mind set than this game, since the main effect on growth rate comes from property taxes. Sims will happily live in a polluted town with no jobs, no services and no water… as long as you don’t try to raise taxes above 0%.

- Jimmy Maher

May 2, 2014 at 5:58 am

Sounds like a Republican paradise! (Sorry, couldn’t resist…)

- iPadCary

May 2, 2014 at 7:44 pm

Jimmy, I swear on all that is Holy & Goode that this was playing as I reread this article…..

http://tinypic.com/r/33w05jo/8

- Jimmy Maher

May 6, 2014 at 5:31 am

A very good choice for any occasion…

- Jon

May 5, 2014 at 7:36 pm

Fate of the World is an interesting game that sort of bridges the political tone of SimCity while having a broader world-view like Civilization.

- G Grobbelaar

August 29, 2015 at 2:44 pm

How the World is so Different Yet the Same, astounds me! (Brings a Moody Blues song to mind)!
I didn’t really wanted to comment on AMFV till part 3, but I decided to post anyway!
AMFV is so “Realistic” in the sense here in SA that it makes “salt water well up in my eyes” I grew up in those years when I thought everything was bliss, but very young I was given the brutal truth of what “Racism” is and how it effects lives! I had my grandfather to thank for it as he taught me the One and Only Truth about Humans: as brutal and loving as the human race can be, its the individual that counts, Thus a Person IS a Person until THAT Person proves You wrong!
This is where SM’s AMFV hit me when I played it! Now I live in a country where the legacy is not about the individual, but a nation! SM’s world is my “Reality” where I have to live on a knifes edge as being a “White” person that is part of the nation that is a whole not an individual!
As for Bono! I wil never have his music as he is the “ashole” here! He said he will gladly sing “Kill a Boer” with a politician that is prominent here!

- G Grobbelaar

August 29, 2015 at 3:13 pm

One last thing: Why is it the Rats goes first when the ship sinks? And those left behind must keep it afloat?

- Jason Kankiewicz

February 20, 2017 at 11:59 am

“I once lived, Olympia” -> “I once lived in, Olympia”?
“And, and without putting too fine a point on it, I” -> “And, without putting too fine a point on it, I”?

- Jimmy Maher

February 21, 2017 at 9:46 am

I think the first is actually okay, but the second certainly isn’t. Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

February 28, 2017 at 10:46 am

>> “the gawky sentimentally of A Mind Forever Voyaging‘s epilogue”

Should that be “sentimentality”? It doesn’t seem like the adverb modifies any verb at all…

-dZ.

P.S. I am now more intrigued by this game and will definitely try it out.

- Jimmy Maher

March 2, 2017 at 3:19 pm

Thanks!

- Tristan

August 16, 2019 at 12:30 am

> “Consistent with Meretzky’s view of Reagan as an ‘asshole,’ he’s content to just make Ryder a mustache-twirling villain, guilty not only of bad policy but of fundamentally bad faith. There’s literally no division in the game’s universe between a Reagan Republican and a full-blown fascist.”

Re-reading this in 2019 is quite a trip! It turned out that the flaw in Meretsky’s political portraits was that he was not cynical or unsubtle *enough.*

- Hyatt

May 25, 2020 at 11:04 am

Or he was a few decades ahead of his time.

Though I can’t truly call him a prophet, as IIRC there’s no pandemic that the government’s incompetence and malice makes a thousand times worse in the game.

- Fronzel

February 18, 2021 at 1:49 am

Alternatively, draw a picture of Ronald Reagan on a napkin, add horns and a pitchfork and write “he is a bad man” underneath.

Genius?

- Ian Crossfield

April 7, 2021 at 5:57 am

The Tube link at the top to “the inevitable” seems to lead to the message “Video unavailable:
This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.”

- Jimmy Maher

April 8, 2021 at 8:17 am

Thanks!

A Mind Forever Voyaging, Part 3: Through Strange Seas of Thought, Alone
May 8, 2014

Let’s begin today with the ending of A Mind Forever Voyaging, with that lengthy epilogue which we discussed last time. Not only does it present a glorious public future modeled on liberal notions of good governance, but an equally glorious personal future for Perry Simm. He and Jill remain blissfully in love, about to head off into space for their last and grandest adventure as members of the first of a dozen generations that will live out their lives aboard the colony ship Silver Dove, “mankind’s first interstellar journey.” Their son Mitchell, in this timeline a marine biologist rather than a fascist, calls to wish them bon voyage with grandchildren and great-grandchildren and in-laws arrayed behind him — a touching scene, even if it is a bit strange that neither Mitchell nor anyone else could be bothered to actually come to Rockvil to take advantage of the last chance they will ever have to see Perry and Jill in person. (I suspect old Mitchell is still a bad seed at heart.) It would all be pretty heartwarming stuff, except for one mantra I can’t seem to excise from my head when I play through it: none of this is real! What are we supposed to make of all this in that light?

The PRISM program that spawned Perry — the name it shares with the recent American mass-survelliance program is presumably coincidental, if ironic in light of the dangers about which Steve Meretzky was so desperate to warn us — is described by its founder and leading researcher, Abraham Perelman, in the edition of Dakota Online included with the game. Earlier attempts at creating artificial intelligence by laboriously coding self-awareness into a machine, he notes, all failed miserably.

“If you recall, the previous attempts had failed not because of the design of their machines, but because of their methods of inputting data.” The Vice-President nodded. “The theory behind our process was to make the programming of the machine as similar to the ‘programming’ of the human mind as possible. We would simulate EXACTLY the life experiences of a human being from the very first day of its life.

“Naturally, it was easier said than done. We had to design inputs that would precisely simulate every human sense. A cluster of five computers, each one nearly as large as PRISM itself, would be needed simply to monitor and control the simulation. Here’s an example of how this soliptic programming process works:

“It’s the earliest stage of the process, and the simulation cluster is feeding PRISM all the impressions of a six-month-old human infant. The visual is providing an image of a set of keys dangling in front of him. The aural is providing the jangling sounds. In response to this stimulus, PRISM decides to grab the keys with what his senses tell him is his tiny fist. The visual shows the tiny fist moving into view toward the keys, and then the tactile begins sending the hard, smooth, and jagged feel of the keys. Just one of a million examples that make up a single day’s worth of experiences.

“With the help of a Williams-Mennon grant, we began building PRISM and the simulation cluster in 2020, and the programming process began a year later.”

As the story opens, Perry has “lived” his first twenty years inside the simulated reality Perelman and his colleagues have so painstakingly prepared for him.

The basic idea here is one that’s been batted around AI circles for decades. It arises from an insight transcendently described by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid a few years before A Mind Forever Voyaging’s release and given a more practical application to AI by Marvin Minsky in The Society of Mind a few years after: that incredibly complex systems, even what we call consciousness, can emerge from the most primitive of building blocks, like a bunch of tiny neurons that can each be either on or off — or a bunch of electrical bits inside a computer that can each be in one of the same two states. We may not be able to program intelligence, but we should be able to grow it like a baby by exposing a sufficiently powerful computer to stimulus.

Or maybe not. With all due apologies to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, it must be said that a human baby is not a tabula rasa. She comes into the world with her pump already well primed, with lots of, if you like, programming already in place. A good example is the process of language acquisition. As Noam Chomsky has persuasively argued, babies emerge from the womb with intellects keenly honed, with lots of programming already in place, for picking up language. This ability then atrophies as early as age five. This explains why we never quite know any language as well as our mother tongue; why it’s the only one we can speak without a trace of an accent; why people like my wife who grew up with two (or more) languages are so unbelievably fortunate; why people like me who need to learn new languages later in life and aren’t preternatural linguistic geniuses like, say, James Joyce often find it to be a lifelong struggle that they can never entirely win. What equivalent can a would-be intelligent computer muster to this biological firmware? And without this nature to prime the pump, how can nurture do its thing? This is just one of the unresolved (unresolvable?) problems that PRISM presents to us who are dutifully trying to take A Mind Forever Voyaging at face value.

There’s a seemingly fanciful idea that some physicists have been discussing for some time now: that we are all actually Perry Simms, entities living inside an inconceivably huge and sophisticated simulation. When you get down to the subatomic level, our rich analog universe does seem oddly digital, ultimately made up of tiny indivisible particles (even if we’re not quite sure yet that we’ve found this tiniest and most basic building block). Less facetiously, philosopher Nick Bostrom has set forth an argument that, as such grandly conceptual arguments go, seems fairly air tight. Moore’s Law being what it is, he says, any race of intelligent beings given enough time must eventually develop the ability to simulate a universe as complex as ours inside a machine. Therefore one of three possibilities must hold true: all intelligent races somehow go extinct before they reach that point; all intelligent races decide for some reason not to continue to obsess over virtual realities the way that we humans do today; or the “real” universe, wherever and whatever it may be, is filled with countless simulated universes — very likely simulations nested within simulations nested within simulations — and our universe is almost certainly one of them.

Now let’s think about that idea within the frame of A Mind Forever Voyaging. One thing on which Bostrom and his hard-science colleagues agree is that we won’t have the computing power to even begin to contemplate such a simulation for many, many generations to come. Yet Perelman has apparently done it in 2020, using a hardware setup that sounds suspiciously like the fleet of red DEC refrigerators that powered Infocom’s development efforts. You might argue that he’s actually only simulating one mid-sized town — luckily for everyone, it seems Perry never developed a yen for travel — but, well, butterflies do flap their wings outside the borders of Rockvil, and that has its effects within the town’s borders. And of course that problematic epilogue busts those boundaries wide open by sending Perry on a journey to the stars. The simulation runs not just in real time, but in better than real time; Perry’s first twenty years required only eleven in the world outside the simulation. For the PRISM project to succeed in its goal of raising a human with all the affect and intuitive knowledge of you and me, the simulated reality must be of absolute fidelity. No crude abstractions will serve the purpose, even if they do offer a tempting excuse for the sometimes sketchy implementation of the Rockvil we encounter through our screens and keyboards. Certainly Perry never remarks that the real world of Perelman and Senator Ryder and the rest that he encounters after his “awakening” is any richer or more believable than the one he knew before, nor that its inhabitants feel any more real.

Let’s think about that last for a moment. Perry has lived for twenty years surrounded by fellow humans who apparently see and feel and talk and live and love just as he does. Here we come to the biggest paradox of all: in order to raise Perry in such realistic surroundings, in order to create the affective construct AI researchers have been dreaming of since before Colossus sprang to life, Perelman would need to be able to create not just an affective AI construct but a whole city — universe? — full of them. It’s the chicken or the egg writ large, an eternal golden braid indeed.

Given that he’s managed to create this magnificent simulated universe hundreds or thousands of years ahead of schedule, why is Perelman so obsessed with one simulated inhabitant named Perry Simm? What distinguishes Perry from anyone else being simulated, other than Perelman’s inexplicable regard? Why does Perelman need Perry to go into his own pocket universe and tell him what’s going on in there? Wouldn’t an impartial researcher be able to view the data more effectively and scientifically from outside the bubble? Did Perelman and his programmers really forget to build a user interface for their program? If so, what have they been doing in the eleven years since they started it running? For that matter, just why does everyone trust this simulation so absolutely that they’re willing to let it decide the fate of the nation by telling them what the likely outcome of Richard Ryder’s plan will be?

As Duncan Stevens noted in a comment to my last article, the most charitable reading you can give to A Mind Forever Voyaging as the piece of hard science fiction it seems to want to be is that PRISM is an elaborate scam concocted by Perelman, who’s exactly the sort of unscrupulous and devious liberal megalomaniac that partisan Republicans are accustomed to seeing behind every bush. No other reading makes any sense at all.

Things don’t make a whole lot more sense if we forget the bigger picture and just look at things from the perspective of Perry. Dakota Online mentions the “shock” and “terror” you would feel upon waking up to realize that you’re nothing but a simulated construct, but in truth Perry seems to experience very little of either. It’s all well and good to talk about a Nietzschean will to power and the forging of one’s own meaning for existence out of whole cloth if necessary, but it’s a lot easier to do that when there’s at least some degree of doubt about the fundamental nature of the universe. Confronted with the unassailable fact that the bogeyman in the closet of centuries of philosophy is in fact real, that the existence of the people I thought I knew and loved are all shams, I think I’d be a quivering mass of existential jelly for quite some years at the least. Perry just shrugs and heads off for the World News Network Feed to watch some TV.

When Perry returns to a Rockvil that he’s now well aware to be a computer simulation this knowledge doesn’t seem to affect his experience at all. When Jill is ripped from his arms by Church thugs to be dispatched to a concentration camp, he never seeks refuge in the thought that at least none of this is really happening. Much of this cognitive dissonance is perhaps down to a persistent confusion about which version of Perry we’re inhabiting — a confusion which dogs all of our experiences in Rockvil. As I noted in my last article, the Perry we control inside the simulation often possesses knowledge that the Perry from the outside world wouldn’t.

And then of course comes that epilogue, in which Perry sails off into the sunset with Jill, blissfully untroubled by the knowledge that he’s devoting the rest of his life to playing the world’s most elaborate and immersive computer game. Ironically, the same scenario has a place in A Mind Forever Voyaging’s earlier stages. The world of 2031 is dogged by a certain amount of low-level controversy about virtual-reality entertainment systems known as “joybooths,” where a disturbing number of people are spending a disturbing amount of time. Joybooths allow them to “escape their worries, even to the point of abandoning their lives.” “Joybooth suicides” are a major thing, claiming nearly 40,000 lives every year. In the first simulated version of Rockvil that we can enter, that of 2041, Perry can experience a joybooth for himself in the local mall. He emerges with “an almost physical longing to return to your fantasy.” The game paints joybooths as a Bad Thing, one of a number of troubling portents hidden by the general economic prosperity of the early post-Plan years. Lest you doubt, consider that Richard Ryder is supported by a pro-joybooth advocacy group called The Joybooth Manufacturers of North America; anything Ryder approves of in A Mind Forever Voyaging is pretty much guaranteed to be wrong and/or evil. Yet what else does Perry do at game’s end but commit the most elaborate and expensive joybooth suicide in history? Poor Dr. Perelman and his colleagues will have to maintain the PRISM computers for decades to come so Perry can enjoy his fantasy. Or maybe not: maybe they pull the plug just as the game ends…

Now, you might say that this article descended into pointless nitpicking quite some paragraphs ago, that a certain amount of handwaving and blasé acceptance is needed to appreciate the larger message of A Mind Forever Voyaging. You might even say that A Mind Forever Voyaging is really a fable or an allegory, not a piece of realistic fiction. But it doesn’t feel like it wants to be a Pilgrim’s Progress for the modern political age. It feels like it wants to be a piece of credible, thoughtful hard science fiction. Why else include all of the backstory about the PRISM project and Perry’s origins, all of those details about AI theory?

Lest I be accused of doing nothing but carp, let me note that there are ways to fix at least some of A Mind Forever Voyaging’s more seemingly intractable problems. Meretzky might have eliminated the whole “Perry Simm waking up to reality” angle and just cast the player as a real-world researcher experiencing the near future through the eyes of an unabashedly simulated Perry qualitatively no different from any of the other inhabitants of Rockvil. This might have cost the game some of the pathos evoked in us by poor Perry’s plight as an AI construct, but would have led to a much more coherent work of fiction. As it is, A Mind Forever Voyaging is, like these last two articles, bifurcated in intent, trying to offer both a compelling and impassioned political argument and a more thoughtful and philosophical exploration of the ramifications of virtual realities and strong AI. It succeeds to a limited extent at the former; it collapses into contradiction and nonsensicality when it comes to the latter. Perhaps because Meretzky knew he would likely get few such carte-blanche opportunities in the future, A Mind Forever Voyaging tries to do far, far too much.

But then again that very overstuffed quality is a big part of its appeal. If a proverbial Great Work is one that gets us thinking and talking and even obsessing over ramifications — even if only in reaction against much of what the work seems to be saying — then judging from the amount of virtual ink I’ve spilled on it A Mind Forever Voyaging would seem to qualify. If we’re feeling extremely kind, we might even postulate that the game is aware of all of its ironies and internal contradictions: that the juxtaposition of the joybooth-suicide plague with the epilogue, for instance, is intentional; even that it’s well aware of a possible subversive reading of Perry’s voyages into the simulated future as a conspiracy spawned by Perelman to put paid to Ryder and his Plan. This would make it a work of stunning subtlety. However, judging from everything I’ve ever heard anyone involved say about the game (which is quite a lot), I’m not buying that argument. The next question, then, is whether self-awareness or lack thereof matters. Does authorial intent trump all, or is a work of art that accidentally does what it does, even one that undermines the very arguments its author wants to make, legitimate on its own terms? Many contemporary scholars would claim the latter, and for what it’s worth I think they might be right in this case at least.

Its artistic merits aside, A Mind Forever Voyaging’s historical importance is unimpeachable, not only as the first predominately puzzleless adventure game but as the first attempt to emphatically use the medium for something more than escapism, to say something important and immediate and real about the world around us. If we can call it a masterpiece only by grading it on a curve as steep as Mount Rushmore, well, so be it. These were early days for ludic narrative still in 1985, and it would have been a bit unrealistic to expect Steve Meretzky to crank out an Anna Karenina. That he had an A Mind Forever Voyaging in him is more than remarkable enough.

Comments
40 Responses

- Jason Dyer

May 8, 2014 at 12:53 pm

Why does Perelman need Perry to go into his own pocket universe and tell him what’s going on in there? Wouldn’t an impartial researcher be able to view the data more effectively and scientifically from outside the bubble?

To search a universe you need a search engine, and Perry is the search engine.

I could easily imagine other reasons why the system requires a hard AI to do any processing. We’re talking about sci-fi technology here; I find plot-hole poking as if we’re not to be kind of unconvincing.

- Duncan Stevens

May 8, 2014 at 3:11 pm

But Perry isn’t acting as a search engine. He’s wandering more or less at random around the simulation. In effect, he’s gathering anecdotes from (presumably) a large amount of data already compiled and put into the sim. It doesn’t make sense to present the anecdotes when you have the data. “The crime rate in Rockvil in 2061 will be X” seems more salient than “an AI in our 2061 simulation got mugged”…

…but you might well take the latter course for propaganda purposes, and if you don’t think the assumptions that underlie your data are going to stand up to scrutiny. Whether intended or not, that’s the picture of Perelman that emerges.

- Jason Dyer

May 9, 2014 at 2:31 am

he’s gathering anecdotes from (presumably) a large amount of data already compiled

How obvious is this data, though? You’re assuming the data is just like a large textual stream, but for hard AI to exist in the first place the environment needs to be super-exponentially more rich. It might require “the next level” of storage (perhaps a quantum computing-related thing) where it may just not be possible to easily pull out random texts.

- Melfina the Blue

January 1, 2016 at 6:11 pm

Never played the game, so I have no idea if this works, but couldn’t they be getting those sorts of numbers anyway and using Perry as a sort of example of what a normal citizen’s life would be like to give those numbers more emotional power. After all, it’s one thing to hear muggings up 30%, and it’s quite another to see or know someone get mugged.

Just a thought.

- Jimmy Maher

January 2, 2016 at 9:41 am

This was the obvious reason for writing the *game* in such a way — to have exactly that impact on the player. It’s just that the in-game explanation for it don’t really make sense, part of a whole scenario that doesn’t make sense when you start to really think about it at all. I consider this a pretty big flaw in a game that presents itself as realistic hard science fiction. Others accept it as something that can be hand-waved away in the interest of the powerful player experience they feel results — which is, of course, fair enough.

- Andrew Plotkin

May 8, 2014 at 7:41 pm

This was also my hedge, and I remember ad-hoccing it as I played the game for the first time. The simulated universe must be running as an opaque blob of data, which Perelman’s computers can iterate on but not analyze. They can only peek into the viewpoint of the “focal character”, Perry. Thus your missions.

It’s only a partial handwave, sure. It commits to the notion that Perry is the only self-aware entity in Rockvil, which brings up all the other happy-ending issues that you mention.

Well, I don’t think we have to draw a boundary between “allegory” and “thoughtful hard science fiction”. The hardest SF has handwavy assumptions. (AI is often the handwaviest.) How metaphorical the setting is is more a matter of the reader’s expertise than of the author’s intent.

- Duncan Stevens

May 8, 2014 at 9:24 pm

I had a similar handwave thought at the time: “our models have generated all this data, but we have no way to look at it except through you wandering around a simulation.” It makes more sense to me, upon reflection, that the models generate perfectly readable data that was plugged into a simulation, and the simulation was used to dramatize the effects of the arguments that Perelman and others were making by more conventional means (evidently with little success).

I can live with the handwave, but the latter hangs together better.

As for how Perry processes all of this, it’s not clear that Perry in the simulations has all of the memories of 2031 “real world” Perry. 2041 Perry could, in this view, simply have another ten years of living in Rockvil in his head, not the experience of “waking up.” That would make the experiences in the simulations real, for him. In effect, a separate copy of the AI was made at the time of “wakeup.” Another handwave, admitedly.

- Anonymous

May 8, 2014 at 9:38 pm

Thanks for jogging my memory; the description of the game (I haven’t played it) reminded me of the movie “Deja Vu” in which some scientists claim to have a machine that can display a recreation of events from the recent past (just a matter of hours), but only from a specific point of view located in close proximity to the machine’s later location. The point of view can be moved so long as it doesn’t stray further away, but the recreation cannot be paused or rewound to allow for multiple run throughs. Of course that’s an obvious lie, and the truth about the machine comes out later.

- Jason Dyer

May 9, 2014 at 2:37 am

I think a good comparison is the recent D-Wave controversy about if there’s even quantum effects going on the first place. It seems like it’d be easy to “look at the stream” but the whole point of qbits is they can exist in multiple states simultaneously making that sort of thing only work indirectly.

Hard AI would require such a giant technological advance that we can’t depend on any of the metaphors/methods that we use for current technology.

- Jason Kankiewicz

February 21, 2017 at 2:48 pm

According to a presentation I saw given by a USC researcher whose goal it was to answer that question, the D-Wave is quantum and the proof is that its output resembles that of a simulated quantum computer.

- Duncan Stevens

May 8, 2014 at 4:05 pm

As to joybooths, I never found that as troubling. Perry is an AI; he *can’t* live in the real world in any meaningful way. The nonsimulated existence he has in 2031 is limited to controlling a few systems in a dedicated project that, presumably, outlived its purpose when Ryder was defeated. I guess, in theory, he could have been wrenched out of PRISM and put into some other system, but it never bothered me that he was allowed to live on in a simulated existence. It seemed like the only alternative was pulling the plug outright, and that didn’t really feel better.

- Jimmy Maher

May 9, 2014 at 5:42 am

But is that really the only alternative? When Perry is first “awoken,” he’s told that validating or invalidating the Plan will be his “first” project. Imagine what a being who combines the intuition and affective qualities of we humans with the number-crunching power of a supercomputer could accomplish and contribute right here in the real world. Instead Perry chooses to float off into a fantasy.

- Matt Wigdahl

May 12, 2014 at 3:47 pm

Are you claiming that Perry is such an entity? I don’t see anything in the game that indicates that he has such capabilities. He can access library information and interface with external systems, but at about the level that a human can using Google or a good home-automation setup.

Perry seems pretty clearly the closest thing Perelman could come to a simulated _human_ mind, and one that operates at pretty close to normal speed at that (not even a 2:1 acceleration factor). Heck, he even needs to sleep! He may have had the type of superhuman potential you imply, but it certainly wasn’t strongly hinted at in the course of the game.

The virtual world he retired to was, to him, the real world, with real relationships and connections that he didn’t at all have in our reality. If I were pulled away from my life and family into a “higher” world and told that my new job was to watch as the home I knew and the people I loved were used as lab rats to prove points in a political spat, I can’t say I’d be thrilled.

The larger issue to me is that no satisfying resolution for Perry seems possible given the frame. He knows he has no privacy; the entire simulation machinery is designed to shape and access his every thought and action. His world and everything he cares about are simulated constructions with (one assumes) no self-awareness. He himself exists at the sufferance of the Simulation Controller and he can never know whether he’s being observed or experimented upon.

Whether he decided to “retire” or not, after Perelman woke him for the first time Perry is damned — truly and forever voyaging on strange seas of thought, alone.

- Peter Piers

November 23, 2015 at 8:53 pm

+1

There were a few things running through my mind as I read this article, and Matt Wigdahl has put them very eloquently.

- Duncan Stevens

May 13, 2014 at 2:28 am

It’s unclear to me that Perry does have the “intuition and affective qualities of we humans” when taken out of Rockvil. His “consciousness” was grown there, but whether he could pass as human outside that setting is a different question. Maybe it could; we’re talking about quantum leaps in AI here, so maybe we should assume one more quantum leap.

Even so…what *does* one do with an AI that has those powers? I can think of useful or interesting tasks it could carry out, but an AI that is capable of boredom and loneliness is likely, to my mind, to spend its life bored and lonely. Letting Perry end his days in the simulation seems kinder.

- Felix

May 8, 2014 at 5:35 pm

In all honesty, Star Trek: The Next Generation has tackled similar themes with the character of Professor Moriarty, and didn’t fare much better; the conclusion of episode Ship in a Bottle is morally dubious at best. I can’t blame them, either. It’s a big and delicate issue even if Meretzky didn’t have a political message to convey at the same time, and that was quite obviously what he really cared about.

As for why Perelman and company needed Perry, it’s because they wanted to truly understand those simulated future worlds, and for that they needed a personal perspective — a bird’s eye view simply isn’t enough. This is wonderfully expressed in another TNG episode, The Inner Light, where Picard is made to experience a (simulated) lifetime in an alien civilization, thus getting to understand those long-dead people and their accomplishments infinitely better than entire libraries of scientific treatises would have allowed. We do that in the real world too, when we try to do things they way (we think) Romans used to: such simulations often yield surprising revelations.

Last but not least, maybe I would find the concept of joybooths to be on about the same level of discourse as the suicide booths in Futurama if there weren’t recorded cases of people who died of playing MMORPGs for 30 hours without a break…

- X

May 8, 2014 at 7:58 pm

If you handwave that gently, you’ll never be able to fly. Perry is different because he’s a simulation of an entire human mind from birth to the present. The rest of the universe is simulated at low fidelity. The people are hyper-advanced Sims, but they don’t have total human brains, just the algorithms that simulate humanity to the level required by the simulation.

Why Perry seems unconcerned about Jill being a lo-fi human, I’m not so sure. Perhaps her simulation is more detailed, since Perry interacts with her at a much greater level. A simulation advanced enough to fool a person into thinking it was real would probably add resolution as needed rather than trying to run everything at a fixed level.

Does the game address Perry’s response to being trapped in the simulation of a dystopia? It seems like a natural response would be to condemn the creator for allowing such a thing to exist. How much interaction does he have with the guys running the simulation later in the game?

- Jimmy Maher

May 9, 2014 at 6:06 am

Perry has a very positive relationship throughout the game with the project’s founder and lead researcher, Perelman. No, he never expresses any real resentment toward the people who made him.

The idea of this being a lower-fidelity universe just doesn’t work for me. If Perry is surrounded by Sim-like beings, even advanced ones, he should be the smartest guy in Rockvil, qualitatively different from everyone around him, but he’s not — just an average fellow. When he comes out of the simulation he should notice that the people “outside” are so much more affective, more vibrant than the ones he knew — but he doesn’t. If the world around him is not being entirely simulated all the time, he should notice occasional glitches and limitations, but he doesn’t. (An example, and another plot hole I didn’t get to in the main article: when we try to leave Rockvil in the game we’re told we’ve reached the “boundary of the simulation.” Did Perry, a curious and somewhat adventurous 20-year-old, never ever try to leave the single mid-sized town in which he was born in his entire life prior to his awakening?) And finally, would a simulated world so focused on Perry’s subjective experience that it goes metaphorically dark in the places he doesn’t inhabit at any given moment also be useful as a more global simulation of the social and economic effects of the Plan? I can’t see how these two things are compatible…

- Keith Palmer

May 8, 2014 at 8:53 pm

After reading “Let’s Tell A Story Together” I did begin to mull over these interpretations of AMFV rather more than I might have before, although they do seem couched a little more benevolently here. The real punch of ambiguity does seem to be packed into the epilogue, and there, as was said, I can see it as “unintended consequences” of trying to suggest the future can be better. I’ve also contemplated a somewhat different conclusion that might carry the same intended message but avoid the ambiguities, but there I do have to admit how seeing other people tossing out “I’d have done it this way” comments just sometimes seems to me to feed dissatisfaction without really accomplishing anything…

The latest time I played through the game, though, I was paying attention to the “joybooth” sequences, and wound up inclined to think the comments that they’re “reading the mind” and generating a rush of pleasant illusion do seem a bit different than the “simulations” to me. I can also imagine the objection that we’re born with “neural programming” in place being answered by saying that it’s easy enough to imagine “mapping the brain” being separated from “programming it through experience.” Nevertheless, the whole “the ‘people’ around Perry are good enough to live with” issue is something that can prey on you…

- Sniffnoy

May 8, 2014 at 10:15 pm

One note — Nick Bostrom is a philosopher, not a physicist.

- Jimmy Maher

May 9, 2014 at 6:13 am

Thanks! That does maybe explain a possible flaw (in a sense) I see with Bostrom’s argument from the point of view of physics: any simulation of enough fidelity to perfectly simulate a given universe would need as much matter/energy as is contained in that universe to form its bits. Therefore, it seems to me, any simulation we made of (for example) our universe would necessarily have to be of lower fidelity. And therefore, if we’re living in a simulation it’s probably a cruder version of someone else’s incomparably more vibrant and vital universe — a slightly disconcerting thought.

- Peter Pears

May 9, 2014 at 10:41 am

Re Perry being deeply affected by Jill’s predicament though he knows it’s not real, and re the epilogue not being real:

a) Having no reason to doubt the accuracy of the simulation, he knows it would be real eventually;

b) The simulation all around him is what nurtured him from his birth, formative years, and early adulthood. He may know it’s not real, on an intelectual level, but on an emotional level – the one we have to accept exists in the SciFI context of this story – it’s THE real world, it’s the one he lived in. The Jill in these simulations are exactly the same woman he fell in love with. The epilogue is, for Perry, decidedly real, and the most real thing in the world for Perry-the-person; Perry-the-machine doesn’t really exist inside the smulations.

c) Even if you know it’s not real, living through an experience like that will not leave you unphased. Ask any method actor, especially early in their careers.

- Peter Piers

November 23, 2015 at 8:58 pm

It’s very weird to re-read stuff you’ve written! a) doesn’t even make much sense!

As for b) and c), the point’s been made – much better! – by Matt Wigdahl some comments above.

- iPadCary

May 9, 2014 at 4:02 pm

Wow!
ONE game, not a topic, gets THREE parts!
Like I say, one of THE greatest games ever made.

- Andrea

May 9, 2014 at 5:23 pm

It is strange that no mention to “Simulacron-3” by Daniel F. Galouye (a novel of 1964), an the varius movie adaptations from it, has been made….

- Hanon Ondricek

May 11, 2014 at 3:29 pm

In other Infocom articles it was mentioned that many of their authors were coders writing fiction instead of authors writing code. Apparently their ideal would have been to be able to seat an established author in front of a computer with their code and have them crank out an interactive fiction. Imagine how much different their output would have been if they’d had access to Graham Nelson and Inform 7!!

- Peter Pears

May 13, 2014 at 9:27 am

You might be interested in earlier posts of this ongoing history, as Maher has covered that ground pretty well, from Infocom’s aborted attempts to Mindwheel and BTZ.

- John G

May 12, 2014 at 9:18 pm

To paraphrase Film Crit Hulk’s seminal take on these kinds of “plot holes,” it’s because “otherwise there would be no game.”

http://badassdigest.com/2012/10/30/film-crit-hulk-smash-hulk-vs.-plot-holes-and-movie-logic/

AMFV is an emotional journey. It works because it uses the “Suspended” conceit of being trapped behind a screen to make you feel the loneliness of being Perry Simm. I think that’s more important than all the plot sleight of hand needed to make you experience the tragedy of Perry: His painful discovery of who he is, his obsession with saving the people he cares about from Richard Ryder. Finally, like the cowboy at the end of a Western, he is fated never to live in the civilization he helped save but to wander strange seas of thought, no longer reachable through the Communications Interface.

- Dehumanizer

May 13, 2014 at 6:03 pm

The question of PRISM caring about Jill and others in a universe that he knows is a simulation reminds me of a quote by one of my favorite fictional “philosophers”, Conan the Barbarian:

“Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”

- Nate

May 18, 2014 at 5:44 am

I remember reading the AMFV grey box in the shop in the late 80s and imediately going ‘Wait, so this guy thinks he’s human but isn’t? Eeeagh that’s creepy and I’m going to have nightmares about that for years.’ And then playing the game in the 90s (Lost Treasures era) and being a bit sad that nothing was ever said about the whole Matrix-like existential crisis at the root of the story. And also noticing how one-sided and heavy-handed the political commentary was; but still loving it.

Side note: Being brought up outside the US, it took me years – until the 2000s, really – before I really understood that in the USA, US political alignments like the Republican trinity of God, guns and greed really existed and weren’t just literary strawmen. This mix really was so alien to my experience; in New Zealand in 1984, for example, the generation-defining election was between a ‘conservative’ incumbent who wanted to build large public works, centrally manage the economy, control imports, support the US military, and use police to ban protests — versus a ‘Labour socialist’ challenger who wanted to privatise state assets, deregulate industry, reduce taxes on the rich, gut the welfare state, legalise homosexuality, return state lands to Maori, and break our military ties to the USA. The political alignments this represents don’t exist anywhere on the US spectrum either in the 1980s or now; it would be like, um. A Libertarian-Democratic coalition vs Republican-Communists.

So you can imagine my confusion at the strange collection of ideas ‘Senator Ryder’ was putting together in his platform, and why AMFV’s author was so passionate about opposing this odd mixture. I kept wondering why he was attacking such an obvious, weird, strawman who held viewpoints nobody I knew supported. Especially since I was playing it during the Clinton years, and all the chatter on the budding Internet seemed to be from atheist-libertarian types, who again, didn’t fit in the Reagan Republican cluster.

And then came Bush W, and *finally* I understood what AMFV had been about, and that yes, that political alignment _really did_ exist. To be honest it actually shocked me.

- Jimmy Maher

May 18, 2014 at 10:17 am

Yeah. AMFV’s most fundamental flaw, which is if corrected would leave me much less inclined to plot-hole poke, is that it brings up so many important questions — about free will, about reality vs. simulation, about sentience and the limits of sentience, about ethics — and utterly fails to address any of them. I’m always a bit nonplussed when I see people talk about how “moved” they are by Perry’s tragic plight, etc., because nothing in the game so much as hints that we’re supposed to feel that way or that it’s even aware of the *possibility* of reading the story that way. I really believe that problematic epilogue is intended to be unambiguously joyous. If I was Perry, I would at the very least be angry at Perelman for having stolen fifty years of my life. (We did just jump from 2031 to 2081, after all. Why not just jump to Perry’s deathbed and save everyone even more time?) It’s frustrating because these unexamined universalities are really much more interesting than the topical, context-specific political arguments.

And yeah, as I noted in a comment to the previous article, conservatives and liberals do not universally have the same priorities or even agree on the same things from country to country. Here in Denmark the farthest right party is actually for much *more* social assistance and government involvement in people’s lives, especially those of the less educated working-class folks who constitute most of their support. But they want these programs only for “real” Danes, and would like to further limit (it’s already pretty limited except for the highly sought after professionals who bring immediate, tangible economic benefits for Danish companies) or entirely halt immigration into Denmark to keep Denmark for the Danes and all that.

- Nate

May 19, 2014 at 12:26 am

For me – even with my initial misgivings about Perry’s existential crisis – the epilogue _did_ play out as unambiguously joyous, and one of the most moving endings I’ve ever played in any interactive media. I’m not sure quite why. I think it was because I’d come to empathise with ‘simuated Perry’ much more than ‘real PRISM’, and after seeing his world and family collapse into misery, it was a necessary counterpoint to see that a beautiful, humane personal future was still possible. Without that, the game would have felt unremititngly bleak – and bleak dystopic futures were the norm in 1980s SF, and still are today. (What was the last unambigously celebratory future setting you saw in a science-fiction movie or TV? Probably Star Trek, and not the recent war-driven remakes.)

I think I parsed it mentally as that when Perry enters Simulation Mode, it’s almost exactly like he dreams. He ‘knows’ in the back of his mind that the ‘waking’ world exists, and that he has a goal to achieve in the dream – but his simulation world feels totally real. And as in our dreams, he enters the simulation with the memories and backstory of the simulated years, so he naturally feels much more at home there.

I always wished though that I could communicate much more meaningfully with Jill, and tell her the truth about my reality. The ‘if this bank of computers is required just to simuate Perry, how can it simulate everyone else?’ problem did bug me; I think I could handwave it that somehow the AI technology is holistic, like a VM cluster that massively shares files, so it can simulate an entire city for the same cost as simulating just one mind (‘it takes a village to raise an AI’). Which explains how come the PRISM project allowed a city-simulation almost as a spinoff. In which case, really ‘Perry’ and ‘Jill’ and everyone in Rockvil are just equal sub-aspects of PRISM’s multifaceted personality, and neither is less real than the other, meaning they can in fact have a real relationship as equals. (There is a recurring strain in real-world philosophy – Huxley’s ‘perennial tradition’ – that suggests that human consciousness might function similarly as a gestalt entity.) And that idea might be a very interesting direction to take a spiritual sequel, I think. But also, I’d love to know how the mere existence of AIs like PRISM might reshape the world of 2031 – and how an abandoned ‘museum piece’ AI, effectively the father of a new lifeform, might react to seeing what his ‘children’ have evolved into in the real world. I guess for symmetry, it would have to be a ‘liberal dystopia’… (A little like Christopher Priest’s ‘The Space Machine’, which is awesome.)

Sidebar: I can’t wait to see what you write about 1986’sPortal, one of the underappreciated gems of the era, and like AMFV, an experiment that didn’t completely succeed, but I still find massively inspiring for what it attempted.

- Jason Kankiewicz

February 21, 2017 at 2:13 pm

“Senator Rider” -> “Senator Ryder”?

- Jimmy Maher

February 21, 2017 at 2:16 pm

Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

February 28, 2017 at 11:44 am

>> “problems that PRISM presents to we”

Should it be “to us”? (My dictionary says that “us” is the first person plural pronoun used after the verb “to be” and after “than” or “as.” It also suggests that full interchangeable use between “us,” “we,” and “our” is a regionalism of the West Indies.)

>> “For the PRISM project to succeed in its goal of raising a human with all the affect and intuitive knowledge of you and me”

Should it be “you and I”?

- Jimmy Maher

March 2, 2017 at 3:18 pm

The first was indeed incorrect. Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

February 28, 2017 at 12:02 pm

I’m not sure what the meaning of “paid” is in this context:

>> “a conspiracy spawned by Perelman to put paid to Ryder and his Plan.”

I’ve never seen that use before and my dictionary does not offer any other meaning than the traditional past-tense verb or adjective.

- Jimmy Maher

March 2, 2017 at 3:16 pm

It’s an idiom: http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/put+paid+to.

- DZ-Jay

March 3, 2017 at 10:43 am

Thanks, I guess it means “to stop or cancel.” Learn something every day. :)

-dZ.

- DZ-Jay

February 28, 2017 at 12:37 pm

OK, I finished reading the three part article on this game and I will say I am fascinated by the author’s commentary (of both: the article and the game). They pose a great many arguments to ponder from various sides and diverse topics, from politics to science fiction; from the nature of consciousness to the merits of interpretation of a work of art as art itself. The mind boggles, and I surely look forward to playing — and experiencing — this game.

I do have some questions, which I’m sure will become clearer once I play the game, but which in my opinion go to the heart of the purpose of such an article intending to provide the historical backdrop and overview of interactive fiction games. For all the strides the articles take in exploring the nuances and the subtext of the game in an overarching way, I still do not have a clear understanding of what goes on in it, the game’s mechanics, nor its settings, other than “there are no puzzles” and that the town’s progress (or lack thereof) is simulated somewhat realistically.

In bits and pieces scattered throughout all three articles, interspersed with lots and lots of interesting subtextual commentary, I’ve managed to piece together the following: That there’s a machine that runs a simulation of the town, a la The Matrix. That there’s a simulated individual consciousness within this world called Perry Simms which takes the role of the player’s avatar. That through Perry Simms’ eyes, the player gets to experience the decay of his world due to the implementation of some government decisions presumably suggestive of the Republican agenda in an attempt to demonstrate the “natural” consequences of such bad policies.

That, lacking puzzles, the purpose of this chronological travel through the simulation is not to “win” but to learn and understand what’s going on, explore the consequences, and acknowledge their inherent badness. And that somehow at the end, there’s some McGuffin where you must stop the government (or fascist president or whatever) from implementing their pet project which would cause the future decay and self-destruction which you have witnessed first-hand via the simulation.

Then, there’s some mention about Perry’s “awakening” and some talk about comparing the simulated reality to the outside world’s reality, which seems to suggest that Perry is not really a simulated consciousness at all, but a person in our world who has been placed into this simulated environment. (?)

I know that this series of articles were written several years ago and that the author may be loath to go back and revisit them at this point; but perhaps it would help if the game experience and mechanics were described more thoroughly by themselves outside the commentary on the message and subtext of the game; you know, like some of the other articles do. As such, it feels as if I should have played the game in order to follow the commentary. As interesting, fascinating, and thought-provoking as said commentary is on its own merits (and I say that most sincerely), I can’t seem to attach it with any substantial relevance to the experience of the actual game without more details of the latter.

As such, it feels largely academic, and somewhat disconnected from the rest of the series. In my eyes (and I admit this could be my faulty understanding from a single reading), it’s more a treatise on interpretations of the subtext of a story which just happens to be an Infocom game, and less about the game itself, its relevance, and why we should care. In other words, I don’t get a clear picture as to how playing the game would lead to such grandiose thinking, other than the author of the article did when he played it.

Nonetheless, great work for sure.

-dZ.

Spellbreaker
May 16, 2014

As Infocom settled into their middle and latter period, their game releases also settled into a fairly predictable pattern that tried to balance innovation with traditionalism. Steve Meretzky:

The hardcore gamers, the people who liked Zork and just wanted more like Zork from Infocom, they were always made unhappy by [games like] A Mind Forever Voyaging or Plundered Hearts or Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It. Anything that we did that was moving in a different direction or in any way experimental, they would always squawk. So the company’s plan was basically to try to do some of each, to always do a game or two every year that would be the “red meat” for those original hardcore players, and then to try to innovate with some of the other games each year.

Our subject for today, Spellbreaker, was the long-awaited third game in the Enchanter trilogy as well as Infocom’s most blatant of all bits of pandering to these traditionalists, who made up a much larger percentage of the company’s fan base than Infocom’s modern reputation for relentless innovation and dedication to the literary aspects of the humble text adventure might seem to imply. An “Expert” level game, it was explicitly created by Dave Lebling as a response to the carping of the hardcore of the hardcore that Infocom’s games had been getting much too easy since the days of Zork. “You want a diamond-hard, traditional puzzlefest?” Infocom asked. “Fine, we’ll give you a diamond-hard, traditional puzzlefest!” Coming out just weeks after the radical departure that was A Mind Forever Voyaging, Spellbreaker could almost be read as an apology to the hardcore for that namby-pamby, touchy-feely effort.

That said, it should also be noted that the concerns about creeping easiness, engendered by an ever more thorough testing process and the thoroughgoing sense of fair play that was always one of Infocom’s noblest traits, were not confined to fans outside the company. Meretzky himself, the perpetrator of A Mind Forever Voyaging, has noted that he also felt concerned as time wore on that at least certain types of Infocom games were losing some of their core appeal, that the struggle and sweat of the Zork games, the compulsion to jump out of bed in the middle of the night to test out some crazy action that just might solve a heretofore intractable puzzle, was the very thing that drew many people to them. Spellbreaker would be Infocom’s attempt to rekindle the masochistic joy of Zork.

There’s always a tendency in all forms of criticism to fetishize innovation over virtually everything else; music critics, for instance, will always favor the Clash, who morphed and relentlessly experimented and soon collapsed under the sheer weight of their artistic ambitions, over their punk-era counterparts Stiff Little Fingers, who have just continued to do what they’re good at for decades. It’s an understandable and even defensible impulse, but I also have to confess that, just as I’m more likely to pull out Stiff Little Fingers’s Go For It! than any Clash album, if you asked me which game among A Mind Forever Voyaging and Spellbreaker I most enjoy just playing every five to ten years, I’d have to name Spellbreaker. Spellbreaker is as constrained a design as A Mind Forever Voyaging is boundary-shattering: constrained by its need to please the puzzle-hungry hardcore, by its need to fit in with the two previous games of the Enchanter trilogy and continue with their spell-based puzzle mechanics and Zorkian fantasy premises. But it’s also an absolutely brilliant specimen of traditionalist adventure gaming, one of the best, tightest examples of pure game design Infocom ever crafted.

As old school as its sensibilities may appear in comparison to its immediate predecessor, Spellbreaker is not devoid of theoretical or historical interest. Far from it. In its quiet way, it asserts a profoundly important idea for the craft of adventure-game design: that fairness and difficulty are two independent scales. If virtually any of Infocom’s contemporaries decided to make a self-consciously difficult game like Spellbreaker, they would have simply filled it with punishing mazes and riddles and guess-the-verb problems and inscrutable puzzles dependent on unmotivated actions. We know this because that’s exactly what they did, over and over again. (For instance, have a look at Scott Adams’s two-part alleged brain-burner Savage Island for everything not to do in an adventure game in one convenient place). Certain designers never could seem to separate fairness from difficulty in their minds. (I can’t help but think of Anita Sinclair, who pronounced on the eve of Magnetic Scrolls’s second release Guild of Thieves that this would be an “easier” game. Actually, no, it turned out to be a very hard game — just one that wasn’t blatantly, repeatedly unfair like its predecessor The Pawn.) Many fans still have trouble with the concept today; I get occasional emails in response to my coverage of notable offenders like Roberta Williams’s The Wizard and the Princess and Time Zone asking why I’m so hard on “difficult” games, forcing me to respond that, no, I’m actually only hard on unfair games. One could advance a fairly compelling argument that the failure of the adventure-game industry at large to grasp this distinction played a big part in the commercial death of the text adventure — how many veteran gamers still remember the form largely for mazes, guess-the-verb, and illogical puzzles? — as well as the longstanding commercial doldrums of graphical adventures, what with their pixel hunts and click-everywhere-and-use-everything-on-everything-else-until-something-happens model of game design.

Spellbreaker is very tough, but it’s also downright noble in its commitment to fairness. There is, if you’ll pardon me, no bullshit here, none of the cheap tricks, designed and implemented in less time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee, that designers have so often used to artificially lengthen games and make players pull their hair out. You don’t even need to draw a map to play Spellbreaker — but never fear, you will likely want pen and paper to sketch and plan and diagram a long series of tantalizing puzzles that have been lovingly crafted over days and weeks. In my book, that’s the way a game like this ought to be. Spellbreaker is a veritable capsule history of adventure-game puzzles (the good ones, that is): intricate pure spatial and mathematical puzzles like those so common in the Phoenix games; clever object-application puzzles; logistical puzzles requiring long-term planning; the best and most satisfying application yet of the spell system invented for Enchanter; the latest and greatest and most intricate in an ongoing series of Infocom time-travel puzzles; even a social-interaction puzzle to keep you on your toes. And there are lots and lots of them. While it runs under the standard 128 K Z-Machine, Spellbreaker stuffs it right to its limit, and will take quite some hours to complete. There are one or two puzzles that I might wish had been a bit less difficult — most notably a certain puzzle that takes place in a lava field and hinges on a property of a certain little box that you’re unlikely to discover until you really have exhausted every possibility for experimentation — but none that I can label truly unfair if we’re willing to give the game a free pass on Graham Nelson’s prohibitions against the occasional need for knowledge of future events and knowledge gained from dying. The key thing is that you can trust Spellbreaker as you try to beat it, can trust that the solution to the puzzle on which you’re currently working can be arrived at through observation and deduction rather than being some random phrase to be typed or senseless action to perform. I can’t emphasize enough what a difference this trust — or, perhaps better said, its absence in so many other games — makes for the player’s experience.

The plot is obviously not the first priority for either player or writer of a game like this, but Spellbreaker’s is in some ways more interesting than it ought to be. Having averted two previous disasters in Enchanter and Sorcerer, you’ve been elevated to head of the Circle of Enchanters. But now suddenly magic itself has begun to fail throughout the realm. The game opens at a conclave of Guildmasters that has been called to address the problem. Lebling was, along with Brian Moriarty and perhaps Jeff O’Neill, the best crafter of prose amongst all the Imps, and his writing is particularly good here, sparkling with subtle wit.

Sneffle of the Guild of Bakers is addressing the gathering. "Do you know what this is doing to our business? Do you know how difficult it is to make those yummy butter pastries by hand? When a simple 'gloth' spell would fold the dough 83 times it was possible to make a profit, but now 'gloth' hardly works, and when it does, it usually folds the dough too often and the butter melts, or it doesn't come out the right size, or..." He stops, apparently overwhelmed by the prospect of a world where the pastries have to be hand-made. "Can't you do anything about this? You're supposed to know all about magic!"

Hoobly of the Guild of Brewers stands, gesturing at the floury baker. "You don't know what trouble is! Lately, what comes out of the vats, like as not, is cherry flavored or worse. The last vat, I swear it, tasted as if grues had been bathing in it. It takes magic to turn weird vegetables and water into good Borphee beer. Well, without magic, there isn't going to be any beer!" This statement has a profound effect on portions of the crowd. You can hear rumblings from the back concerning Enchanters. The word "traitors" rises out of nowhere. Your fellow Enchanters are looking at one another nervously.

Then everyone except for you is abruptly turned into some variety of small amphibian, and your adventure truly begins. Ah, well, what did a committee hearing ever accomplish anyway?

You find yourself pursuing a mysterious antagonist — obviously the source of the magical disruptions — through a whole series of interlinked scenic vignettes, most no more than a few rooms in size (thus the lack of the need for mapping), which you reach by casting the Blorple spell (“explore an object’s mystic connections”) on a series of magical cubes you find. The acquisition of more of these cubes, representing as each does the next waypoint in a grand chase across time and space, turns out to be the main goal of most of the scenes you visit.

While certain aspects of Spellbreaker, like a group of wandering boulders on which you have to hitch a ride at one point, suggest that Lebling may have been reading Roger Zelazny’s Amber novels (as it happens, a subject we’ll get to very soon in another article), the most marked literary influence is Ursula Le Guin’s classic fantasy A Wizard of Earthsea, a great favorite of Lebling’s. Like the young wizard Ged, the protagonist of Spellbreaker realizes at the story’s climax that the shadowy being against whom he has been struggling is in fact a shadow of himself. The discovery is followed by Spellbreaker’s ambiguously profound coda.

The shadow, now as solid as a real person, performs a back flip into the tesseract. "No!" It screams. "Stop! Fool, you've destroyed me! You've destroyed magic itself! All my lovely plans!" Now glowing as brightly as the construction it made, the figure approaches the center. It grows smaller and smaller, and just before it disappears, the hypercube vanishes with a pop, and the "magic" cube melts in your hand like an ice cube.

You find yourself back in Belwit Square, all the Guildmasters and even Belboz crowding around you. "A new age begins today," says Belboz after hearing your story. "The age of magic is ended, as it must, for as magic can confer absolute power, so it can also produce absolute evil. We may defeat this evil when it appears, but if wizardry builds it anew, we can never ultimately win. The new world will be strange, but in time it will serve us better."

Your score is 600 of a possible 600, in 835 moves. This puts you in the class of Scientist.

As with so much of Brian Moriarty’s best work, Spellbreaker’s ending makes more mythic than literal sense. It seems our efforts have only led to the end of the Age of Magic and the beginning of the Age of Science. You can read this in many ways — personal and public, negative and positive. You can cast it as the proverbial setting aside of childish things (while hopefully still leaving space for the occasional computer game), marching into a future of adulthood and responsibility with clear eyes. You can cast it in a melancholy light, as the loss of, well, magic in a modern world where everything is already explored and mapped and monitored. Or you can, as I prefer, cast it as the dawning of a better age free of the prejudices and superstitious dependencies of the past. Any way you cast it, to my mind this textual Rorschach test is one of the strongest endings in the Infocom canon; the contrast of “Scientist” with your penultimate title of “Archmage” is bracing and surprising in all the right ways.

That, then, is Spellbreaker, and a thoroughly admirable effort it is. But I couldn’t conclude this article without also describing the great Spellbreaker vs. Mage feud of 1985, an internal struggle so pitched that it still prompts sheepish half-grins and slight discomfort amongst the principal antagonists, Mike Dornbrook and Dave Lebling, today.

Almost from the point he first accepted the assignment to finish out the Enchanter trilogy, Lebling had planned to call his game Mage. It not only gave the names in the trilogy a nice consonance, what with all being synonyms for a wizard or magic user, but also implied a progression of increasing magical potency. When Dornbrook’s marketing people did some impromptu person-on-the-street questioning, however, they discovered a dismaying fact: most people had never heard the word “mage” and had no idea how to pronounce it. Most opted for either something that rhymed with “badge” or a vaguely French pronunciation, like the second syllable in “garage.” The package designers were also concerned that the name was just too short and bland-looking, that it wouldn’t “pop” like it needed to on a store shelf. So Dornbrook went back to Lebling to tell him that the name just wasn’t going to work; they’d have to come up with another.

This in itself wasn’t all that unusual; games like Wishbringer, which had the perfect name almost from the beginning and kept it until release, were more the exception than the rule at Infocom. Most of the time the Imp responsible realized that his title was less than ideal and was willing to accept alternatives. That, however, was not the case this time. Lebling got his back up, determined that his game would be Mage and only Mage. Dornbrook got his up in response, and a lengthy struggle ensued. The other Imps and the other marketers fell in behind their respective standard bearers, leaving poor Jon Palace caught in the middle trying to broker some sort of compromise for a situation which didn’t really seem to allow for one; after all, in the end the game would either be called Mage or it wouldn’t.

From the perspective of today, the most interesting thing about this whole situation is the fact that so many people didn’t know the word “mage” in the first place. It really serves to highlight how much fantasy (nerd?) culture has penetrated the mainstream in this post-Peter Jackson, post-Harry Potter, post-World of Warcraft world in which we live. In 1985 Lebling’s strongest argument against marketing’s findings, one which strikes me as entirely reasonable, was that Dornbrook and company had simply been polling the wrong people. While the average person on the street may not have known the word “mage,” those likely to be interested in the third game of a fantasy trilogy explicitly pitched toward Infocom’s most hardcore fans almost certainly did. As for the aforementioned person on the street, she wasn’t likely to buy the game no matter what it was called.

As usual with such spats inside any relationship, there was actually a lot going on here beyond the ostensible bone of contention. Dornbrook had been frustrated for years already by what he saw as the Imps’ refusal to properly leverage the most valuable marketing tool at their disposal, the name Zork itself. Back in the company’s earliest days, when he had founded the Zork Users Group, he had simply assumed that Infocom would stamp the Zork brand on everything that would hold still for long enough.

It [the game that became Deadline] would have been Zork: The Mystery, etc. I thought that made sense at the time. We had this incredibly strong brand name. To me they were just going to be Zorks. We were going to own a word like “aspirin.” The name for a text adventure was going to be a Zork, and we were going to own that. But a decision was made while I was in business school and not contributing to the decision-making that we didn’t want to go down that path.

Dornbrook’s frustrations were made worse by 1983’s Enchanter, which everyone had assumed would be Zork IV until very shortly before its release, when Lebling and his coauthor Marc Blank suddenly announced that they didn’t want to be “typecast” by forever doing Zorks. Dornbrook tried fruitlessly to explain that, while it might not make sense that people would buy a game if it was called Zork but not if it was called Enchanter, that was just the way that branding worked. Observing how each game in the new trilogy sold fewer copies than the Zork games had and, even more dismayingly, fewer copies than its immediate predecessor, Dornbrook was soon convinced that the company had sacrificed tens or even hundreds of thousands of sales to the Imps’ effete artistic sensibilities.

I felt that marketing needed to be a little more respected, and if we had a strong feeling about something they [the Imps] shouldn’t just… I mean, the game developers, I got along very well and respected them, but there was a bit of, um… they were a little too full of themselves. A little too self-important. A little too, at times, megalomaniacal. Okay, that’s too strong a word… but it was frustrating sometimes from just a business standpoint. They kind of positioned themselves as, “We’re above all that! We’re artists!” Sometimes it seemed a little too precious.

As the 1980s wore on, Dornbrook couldn’t help but compare Infocom to competitors like Origin Systems and Sierra, who unabashedly milked their flagship brands — Ultima and King’s Quest respectively — for all they were worth via an open-ended series of numbered sequels, and, not coincidentally he believed, by mid-decade and beyond were selling far more games than Infocom. Dornbrook now saw a convenient opportunity to force through a mid-course correction of sorts. He thought about how Enchanter still had the internal inventory code of “Z4” at Infocom, Sorcerer and Lebling’s new game “Z5” and “Z6” respectively.

There was a time later on when I came back and seriously suggested, when there was the big fight over Mage vs. Spellbreaker, why don’t we just call it Zork VI? “You can’t do that! What about Zork IV and V?” I said, “Won’t that create a whole bunch of great questions? Maybe it will help sell Enchanter and Sorcerer if they finally realize, oh, those were Zork IV and V.” I never won that argument.

So Dornbrook still didn’t get his Zork; Lebling, who admits he was “terribly exercised” over the whole situation, wasn’t going to allow him that satisfaction, although he does concede it to have been an interesting idea worth considering today. But Lebling didn’t get his Mage either. The game shipped as another suggestion of Dornbrook’s people, Spellbreaker — not a half-bad name in my book, for what it’s worth. Lebling, however, wasn’t pleased at all, and indulged in an uncharacteristic final bit of sour-grapesmanship by sneaking a new routine into the final version that caused it to call itself Mage in the title line about one time out of every hundred.

The worrisome downward sales trend that Dornbrook had spotted wasn’t halted by Spellbreaker. Like its predecessor A Mind Forever Voyaging, it sold only about 30,000 copies, making these latest games the two least successful Infocom had so far released. There were obvious reasons for the low sales of each attributable to it specifically rather than Infocom’s position in the market as a whole — A Mind Forever Voyaging was highly experimental and required a fairly powerful computer to run, while Spellbreaker was unlikely to appeal to anyone who wasn’t already a hardcore Infocom fan who had already played Enchanter and Sorcerer — but, well, let’s just say that Dornbrook and everyone else had good reason to be worried.

But such external concerns needn’t distract us from playing and enjoying Spellbreaker today. It’s certainly not the place to start with Infocom, but when you’re ready for it it will be there waiting for you. It really is a masterful piece of game design, and even offers some lovely writing as well. It just might be Dave Lebling’s finest hour — and considering that Lebling also co-wrote Enchanter (and considering how much this critic loves that game as well) that’s really saying something.

(Most of the information here is, again, drawn from Jason Scott’s Get Lamp interview archives. The insight about A Wizard of Earthsea’s influence on Spellbreaker I owe to an eight-year-old email exchange with Graham Nelson — to whom I also owe thanks just for getting me to read that book.)

Comments
43 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

May 16, 2014 at 5:56 pm

If you haven’t read all the way to the end of the Earthsea trilogy, do so. You will find a lot of resonances with Spellbreaker in the third book–and while the second doesn’t share any notable similarities, it’s the best of the three, in my view.

- Jimmy Maher

May 16, 2014 at 6:59 pm

Thanks! Been on my to-read list for a long time. Maybe this will bump them up a notch or two in priority.

- Duncan Stevens

May 16, 2014 at 6:02 pm

Also, on the gold box puzzle, I agree that this was under-clued. It would have been somewhat fairer if

(spoilers, I guess)

the game had somehow hinted at a connection between the box and the unusable exit. One way to do this might have been, if you’re holding the box when you’re “inside” the cube (and thus you still can’t use the exit), to say that you can’t force your way through the exit but vary the message somehow. Maybe say the exit “flashes gold” if you try to go through it.

- Rotonoto

June 2, 2014 at 10:26 pm

The reason I always thought the outcropping puzzle was unfair was that you had to drop the box to solve it. Now the only reasons to drop an item in an IF game are (a) if it’s useless – but the box is useful – and (b) if you’re carrying too much – but you can carry everything in the zipper. I got through Enchanter, Sorcerer and most of Spellbreaker without hints, but that puzzle sent me to the Invisiclues.

- Andrew Plotkin

May 16, 2014 at 6:24 pm

Yes, I came up with the same fix for the unusable exit.

While Spellbreaker is my favorite Infocom game on the puzzle axis, I do have to ding it a few points for including the cube-weighing puzzle. That was an old chestnut in the 80s and Infocom’s version didn’t add anything. It didn’t even feel consistent with the rest of the game’s magic, exactly.

(Contrast the rock-riding puzzle: that’s an example of a well-known *class* of puzzle, but it was distinctive, smoothly integrated, and added some fun dialogue.)

- Jimmy Maher

May 16, 2014 at 7:05 pm

I don’t have a big problem with the cube-“weighing” puzzle, although I have heard others make similar complaints before. I thought making you measure their magic potency instead of weight was a clever twist, and — similar to your impression of the rock-riding puzzle, I guess — the urgency of the time limit and all really added something for me. (Even saving is disabled inside the vault!) I’m always almost fist pumping after solving it.

I think Infocom went back to this well yet again in Zork Zero, by which time it *was* starting to feel a bit lazy, but I might be misremembering.

The rock-riding puzzle, for what it’s worth, is virtually a clone of a similar puzzle in Kingdom of Hamil, but, true to the Phoenix games’ reputation, there it’s much more cruel — deadly in fact if you screw up. I doubt this is a case of direct lifting (I don’t think anyone at Infocom was aware of the Phoenix games at the time) as both designers just having a similar library of old-chestnut puzzle books.

- Duncan Stevens

May 16, 2014 at 7:59 pm

No coin-weighing in Zork Zero, but they did use virtually every other puzzle in the canon, including the measuring-out-liquids-with-two-odd-sized-containers one–maybe you’re thinking of that.

- Andrew Plotkin

May 16, 2014 at 10:21 pm

I could have railed against the design cowardice of Zork Zero, but I figured I’d wait until the blog post about it. Which will undoubtedly cover it all in detail even before the comments start. :)

- DZ-Jay

February 28, 2017 at 6:24 pm

In Roberta Williams’ defense, there is a particular archetype of adventure player who imagines the mechanics of learn-by-death and guess-the-verb as a meta-puzzle worthy of solving. They are not interested in developing stories, character arcs, or logical purity (at least not as the overall goal), just the challenge of trying to get into the programmer’s clever (or devious) head.

You and I may call those puzzles “unfair” or “abusive,” but to some they are merely “hard” and clever in the same way that decoding a secret message, translating an ancient script, or reverse-engineering a framework from object-code is to others. I believe they consider themselves “hardcore adventurers” because of this, with an obviously specialized meaning of “hardcore.”

This is Roberta Williams’ target audience. You can view than as unsophisticated boors that have yet to be enlightened by the master works of Infocom or other “real” adventures; but perhaps a more honest and fair assessment is that of people with a distinct predilection to inscrutable puzzle mechanics, who consciously chose their preferred source of games out of their own personal experiences, rather than out of ignorance. They may very well have played Infocom games and decided against them out of their own will. Who are we to judge?

Don’t get me wrong, I am also of the opinion that some of those technics were not inspired due to their inherent interesting or clever qualities, but due to inexperience and primitive tools, a product of a still gestating new genre. However, I can acknowledge that they can be considered and end into themselves by some, as alien as that conclusion may seem to me.

dZ.

- DZ-Jay

February 28, 2017 at 6:25 pm

Whoops! The above was in reply to a comment from Jimmy below, talking about Sierra gamers. Sorry!

- Duncan Stevens

May 16, 2014 at 7:56 pm

Same view of the cube-weighing puzzle. It would have been better if (a) it didn’t pretty much require knowledge of the canonical puzzle–without that, you could spend forever wondering what you’re supposed to be doing with this pile of cubes, and (b) if it hadn’t illogically upped the ante by having the right cube glow either more or less than the others when you cast the magic-detection spell. Why should the only magic object glow *less* than the non-magic objects?

Also agree that this didn’t exactly fit the game–it didn’t feel organic. Most of the puzzles felt like they could have arisen out of circumstance; this one just felt like a soup-can “the villain chooses needlessly complicated ways of thwarting you” puzzle. (I guess the compass-rose puzzle isn’t particularly organic either.)

- TsuDhoNimh

May 16, 2014 at 7:07 pm

I loved Spellbreaker, but hated its copy protection. By the time I finally got past some of the most difficult (for me) puzzles in the game (The chess puzzle and the vault), I ended up being defeated by the copy protection, which kicks in if you answer Belboz’s question incorrectly. Belboz happened to ask me about the one card in the feelies that I’d lost, so I was out of luck without knowing it for most of the game. I never finished the game, nor had the desire to replay it, after that.

- Alan

May 16, 2014 at 10:07 pm

A few years ago I replayed all of the King’s Quest games and wrote up reviews. They were, on the whole, not positive. That was when I discovered that there are even fanboys and fangirls for 20 year old games, people who argued “it’s not for you“, or who insisted that I hold them to lesser standard because that’s how games were, ignoring that far less cruel Enchanter predated the entire King’s Quest series.

- Jimmy Maher

May 17, 2014 at 7:28 am

Yeah, it’s always shocking to me the sheer amount of abuse hardcore Sierra fans accept and even seem to relish. Roberta Williams’s occasional tin-eared comments about how gamers were more intelligent back in her day don’t help the situation. I’m not sure I can equate a willingness to be egregiously mistreated over and over again with intelligence…

- DZ-Jay

February 28, 2017 at 6:30 pm

I posted a response in the wrong thread above. I just wanted my post to be taken in It’s proper context, as a response to this one.

dZ.

- S. John Ross

May 16, 2014 at 10:59 pm

On the matter of conflating difficulty and fairness … I think it’s just as common to see conflation of “innovation” with “novelty” when it comes to that fetishizing of innovation you mention. That’s tangential here, of course … but always just around the corner from so many game-design topics, I find.

- Jimmy Maher

May 17, 2014 at 6:52 am

That’s a very good point, actually, and germane to some of Infocom’s less successful later “innovations” just for the sake of it, like the real-time play in Border Zone.

- Sniffnoy

May 16, 2014 at 11:10 pm

Observing how each game in the new trilogy sold fewer copies than the Zork games had and, even more dismayingly, fewer copies than its immediate successor,

I’m guessing you mean “predecessor” here?

- Jimmy Maher

May 17, 2014 at 6:50 am

Woops! Thanks!

- Keith Palmer

May 17, 2014 at 12:19 am

When I saw the “Extremely Challenging” stamp for Spellbreaker in the Infocom catalog I would flip through and daydream about, my innocent impression was that the difficulty was just a matter of a ferocious time limit before your magic powers vanished altogether. (Later, in a “I wonder if this could be implemented even though I don’t know how” mood, I pondered a game where you can solve the puzzles in any order, but the solution needed for any puzzle gets harder to find the longer you put it off…) As I recall, that was one wrinkle not in the game. I’ve got to admit, though, that by the time I got to Spellbreaker among The Lost Treasures of Infocom, my scruples against turning to the hint book had vanished altogether, so I more just focused on the journey and the story…

I’m afraid my own reaction to knowing about Dave Lebling’s dismay over “Spellbreaker” being selected by marketing is similar to my reaction to knowing about Charles M. Schulz’s over “Peanuts” being selected by the syndicate: I feel sorry for him, but as that wasn’t the first title I was familiar with… The allusion to the conclusions of Brian Moriarty’s work did get my attention, but I know it’ll be a while yet before we’re next talking about that.

- Duncan Stevens

May 17, 2014 at 3:26 am

Most of the puzzles aren’t that difficult, in my view–it’s only the last 20% of the game or so when things get really hair-pullingly hard. (I’m thinking of the outcropping puzzle, the outer vault, the sand room puzzle, and the endgame.) The outcropping puzzle isn’t as well clued as it could be and the vault puzzle only works if you intuit what canonical puzzle was on the author’s mind, but the sand room is as good as it gets: it plays fair, it’s organic to the game, and there’s a real “aha!” feel when you figure out what’s going on. (It’s all the better because–spoiler, I guess–it requires you to take a really counterintuitive step by giving up your spellbook. And that, of course, prefigures the solution to the endgame puzzle. The elegance of those two puzzles is something to behold.)

One other bit about Spellbreaker that I’m very fond of is the way the failure of magic gradually disappears (for you, anyway) as you accumulate cubes; each cube makes one type or another of spell more likely to work properly. And when you get the last cube–wow, all this power! It makes the ending initially counterintuitive but ultimately logical: all this power concentrated in one person isn’t such a hot idea.

- Nathan

May 17, 2014 at 5:06 am

“the compulsion to jump out of bed in the middle of the night to test out some crazy action that just might solve a heretofore intractable puzzle.”

That’s what hooked me on IF! It’s why I still play today.

- ZUrlocker

May 17, 2014 at 1:04 pm

This is off topic, but since you brought it up. I like The Clash and never really got into SLF. I think a lot of The Clash’s material still holds up very well 30 years later, particularly London Calling and the somewhat underrated second album Give ‘Em Enough Rope.

- matt w

May 17, 2014 at 5:44 pm

All the Clash’s material (well, up till Jones left) still holds up for me — OK, not all the dub on Sandinista. (Bankrobber Dub, though, yes.) Even the crazy art-damaged parts of Combat Rock.

Kind of seems like SLF/The Clash might have a bit of the Terry Pratchett/Douglas Adams or Ross Macdonald/Raymond Chandler dynamic I’ve talked about here before — one is more innovative and iconic, the other has a lot more staying power.

- Jimmy Maher

May 18, 2014 at 9:32 am

I actually like the Clash’s later material (pre-Cut the Crap, of course; nobody likes that album) best, mostly because I never found them all that convincing as a really great straightforward rock band. Stiff Little Fingers, who could spark up some great guitar interplay especially live by the time of Go For It!, I enjoy much more on those terms. The Clash album I’m most likely to play these days, more so than any of the proper albums, is actually Super Black Market Clash; I really like all of the dub- and dance-inflected stuff in its second half especially. And Combat Rock is indeed very good; I’m an especial fan of “Straight to Hell.”

- Jason Dyer

May 17, 2014 at 2:34 pm

Have there been any “difficult but fair” graphical adventures within the last ten years? All the well-respected ones I’ve tried have tended to the very easy.

- Jimmy Maher

May 18, 2014 at 9:25 am

I’m far from the best person to ask, but I think the Rhem games, of which I believe there have been some in the past ten years, would qualify.

But yes, the general trend (again, from this mostly bystander’s impression) has been away from the Myst-type puzzle-heavy games and more toward casual, story-focused games. Which is fine in my book. I think it’s ultimately very hard to avoid unfairness in making a difficult graphic adventure, even more so than a text adventure, especially with the ultra-streamlined interfaces that are the norm now; the scope of possibility for such an interface just doesn’t allow for a lot of intricate but fair puzzles beyond the typical sliding-blocks and so on that we’ve all seen a million times by now. I mostly play these games, when I do, for the story and atmosphere more than the puzzles. My wife and I are actually having a really good time right now with the new Tex Murphy game, but the only things that are remotely difficult about it are the hidden-object “puzzles”: i.e., find 9 baseball cards hidden in nooks and crannies inside this house. That sort of thing ceased being interesting for me at least twenty years ago, so we just play in casual mode with the cursor that sparkles over hotspots.

- Brandon Campbell

November 10, 2014 at 9:44 am

Thanks for the SLF recommendation, they rock!

- NPC

March 2, 2016 at 5:07 pm

Micro Live 29th November 1985
A look behind the scenes at Infocom, with an interview with Dave Lebling about his game Spellbreaker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrGt-leyTU8

- Jimmy Maher

March 3, 2016 at 6:23 am

Wow! What a treasure. I hadn’t seen this before. Thanks!

- Matthew Clark

April 13, 2016 at 7:22 am

One of my favorite highlights of the game was using the burin to name the cubes whatever I wanted to name them. I thought I was being pretty cleaver in my entries. Imagine my surprise in the endgame when the game starts naming MY cubes and gathering them together for a nefarious deed. Good times!

- DZ-Jay

February 28, 2017 at 5:47 pm

>> “Lebling was along with Brian Moriarty and perhaps Jeff O’Neall the best crafter of prose…”

I thin that sentence would be easier to read with a couple of commas:

“Lebling was, along with Brian Moriarty and perhaps Jeff O’Neall, the best crafter of prose…”

What do to think?

- Jimmy Maher

March 2, 2017 at 3:15 pm

Thanks!

- Jason Kankiewicz

March 3, 2017 at 9:00 am

“Jeff O’Neall” -> “Jeff O’Neill”?
“Archimage” -> “Archmage”?

- Jimmy Maher

March 3, 2017 at 11:46 am

Thanks!

- Steve

April 12, 2017 at 6:05 am

Surprised to read so much negativity about the Vault puzzle, and only praise about the Sand Room. The Sand Room was for me easily the worst in the game.

[I wasn’t familiar with the “canonical” weight puzzle referenced but thought the idea for solving the Vault was pretty intuitive once you used the detect magic spell.]

The Sand Room though… It was obvious you were going into the past, sure, but I don’t think I would’ve ever divined that my dying had anything to do with the rooms not being reset to a previous state. Not only was it not hinted at in the “death” descriptions, but so much weirdness is happening irrespective of your actions [like the increasing failure of magic, considering this scene comes directly after the Plain (where magic is basically useless) and Dark (your magic light is a liquid now) Rooms, where everything you’ve learned about the world just no longer seems to apply] that I assumed the shadow figure had done something I just hadn’t discovered yet.

Add to this the fact you only had to reset HALF the things to their later state (you could apparently just ignore the broken furniture and torn wall hangings in one room, and the all-consuming flood in the other), made for me a puzzle that seemed hurriedly-implemented as the authors reached the endgame.

No where close to the elegant brilliance of Sorcerer’s time travel puzzle, or even that from Zork III, for that matter.

- Joe

March 25, 2019 at 9:40 pm

I am responding nearly five years after this post went up and two years after the last comment, but I can’t help but want to talk for a moment about this game.

There is a tremendous amount to like. It packed a very tight punch with few unnecessary rooms in the entire game. Even rooms you think are unnecessary come back later. It is very good! But I can’t quite put it in the top shelf with the best games.

My biggest problem with this game is that I never had immersion. The world doesn’t feel real. The best Infocom games use the medium to give me a sense of place and of scale. Zork III, Planetfall, and Wishbringer all have beautiful and evocative worlds. Here, we have a teleporter mechanic which doesn’t connect the locations in any coherent way until the midpoint and even then the connections are partial and don’t really pay off. So you can fly from the avalanche mountain to the guard’s tower on the magic carpet. Great! But you can’t fly back. As a result, I never really became attached to where I was exploring.

The volcano puzzle with the box is frequently cited as unfair and I agree. If the box would have responded in some way at the beginning of the game when you removed the water cube (for example, having the dolphins disappear as soon as the cube was removed), we would have gotten the point that it had something to do with the cubes. As it was, it just seemed a cute storage container when we already had the zipper. And its use as a teleporter was never hinted at in any way. I had assumed the extra exits would come into play later, potentially linking cubes to each other or something similar.

If there was much to solve in the “Sand” puzzles, I did it by accident. I reset each room to how I found it and other than getting killed by the guards and the water a few times, I still have no idea what happens if you get it wrong. (What if you don’t put your spellbook in the cabinet? Or forget the flimsy scroll? Beats me.)

I agree that the puzzles are excellent. I agree that the game is excellent. It’s just missing something that makes me feel like I was having a real adventure rather than playing a disconnected series of mostly linear vignettes.

- Lisa H.

March 25, 2019 at 10:08 pm

I still have no idea what happens if you get it wrong. (What if you don’t put your spellbook in the cabinet? Or forget the flimsy scroll? Beats me.)

Possibly you get killed by a time paradox, like in the coal mine puzzle in Sorcerer?

- Mike Taylor

March 25, 2019 at 10:44 pm

You make an excellent point, Joe. Judged by the quality of the puzzles, I think Spellbreaker is a pretty strong contender for the title of Best Infocom Game, which is saying something. But something about it never quite worked for me, and you’ve helpfully put your finger on what it was. It doesn’t feel like I’m in a place, only in a puzzle. For me, the very best of the Infocom games is Zork II, for precisely the reason that there was such a strong sense of place and atmosphere — which I admit is odd, given what an awful lot of thematic territory the map covers. Still, its sense of interconnectedness (especially once you stop the carousel) makes it feel like a real place, albeit a strange one, and that matters enormously to me. Sequences like following the princess after she awakes make sense this all the more solid.

- Stephen Lorimor

February 3, 2020 at 2:19 am

Does anyone know who did the cover art for Spellbreaker? Bonus question: what ever happened to the original art?

- Phil Strahl a.k.a. pixel Prophecy

July 9, 2020 at 7:04 pm

Found a wonderful look behind the scenes at Infocom at the development of Spellbreaker:
https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/5faadf2f1ba2710d5d17fb3c6d4fba7b (Links to the BBC Micro Live episode #8 in Season 2)

- Not Fenimore

September 13, 2020 at 6:02 pm

Oh wow. That’s pretty neat, esp the glimpse of the Imp lunch with Meretzky and Galley and Moriarty and Anderson (and presumably the others facing away from the camera). I’m curious who the tester is (she looks a little like Briggs, but I don’t think it is? Is this the mysterious Liz Cyr-Jones?)

Also, Lebling is looking at the TELL-WALL code before the tester arrives! My whole suspension of disbelief is ruined!

- Jimmy Maher

September 13, 2020 at 6:05 pm

The tester is Amy Briggs.

Ballyhoo
December 22, 2014

‘Tis true my form is something odd,
But blaming me is blaming God;
Could I create myself anew
I would not fail in pleasing you.

— poem by Joseph Merrick, “The Elephant Man”

This article does contain some spoilers for Ballyhoo!

Ballyhoo, a low-key mystery written by a new Implementor, was the last game ever released by an independent Infocom. When it appeared in February of 1986, Al Vezza and Joel Berez were desperately trying to reel in their lifeline of last resort, a competitor interested in acquiring this imploding company that had fallen from such a precipitous height in just a year’s time. Having come in like a lion with Zork, Infocom, Inc., would go out like a lamb with Ballyhoo; it would go on to become one of their least remembered and least remarked games. We’ll eventually get to some very good reasons for Ballyhoo to be regarded as one of the lesser entries in the Infocom canon. Still, it’s also deserving of more critical consideration than it’s generally received for its unique tone and texture and, most importantly, for a very significant formal innovation. In fact, discounting as relative trivialities some small-scale tinkering with abbreviations and the like and as evolutionary dead ends a blizzard of largely unsuccessful experiments that would mark Infocom’s final years, said innovation would be the last such to significantly impact the art of the text adventure as it would evolve after the commercial glory years of the 1980s.

If Ballyhoo is one of Infocom’s more forgotten games, its creator, Jeff O’Neill, is certainly the Forgotten Implementor. His perspective is conspicuously absent from virtually every history written of the company in the last quarter century. Most notably, he was the one Imp who declined to be interviewed for Jason Scott’s Get Lamp project. For reasons that we won’t dwell on here, O’Neill remains deeply embittered by his time with Infocom. Incredible as this may sound to those of us today who persist in viewing the company’s brief life as a sort of Camelot, that time in his own life is one that O’Neill would rather forget, as I learned to my disappointment when I reached out to him before writing this article. He has a right to his silence and his privacy, so we’ll leave it at that and confine ourselves to the public details.

O’Neill, at the time a frustrated young journalist looking for a career change, was hired by Infocom in the spring of 1984, just one of what would prove to be a major second wave of talent — including among their ranks Jon Palace and Brian Moriarty — who arrived at about the same time. Like Moriarty, O’Neill’s original role was a practical one: he became one of Infocom’s in-house testers. Having proved himself by dint of talent and hard work and the great ideas for new games he kept proposing, within about a year he became the first of a few who would eventually advance out of the testing department to become late-period Imps after Infocom’s hopes for hiring outside writers to craft their games proved largely fruitless.

Whether we attribute it to his degree in Journalism or innate talent, O’Neill had one of the most delicate writerly touches to be found amongst the Imps. Ballyhoo adds a color to Infocom’s emotional palette that we haven’t seen before: world-weary melancholy. The setting is a spectacularly original one for any adventurer tired of dragons and spaceships: an anachronistic, down-at-the-heels circus called “The Traveling Circus That Time Forgot, Inc.” The tears behind a clown’s greasepaint facade, as well as the tawdry desperation that is the flip side of “the show must go on” for performers and performances past their time, have been amply explored in other art forms. Yet such subtle shades of feeling have been only rarely evoked by games before or after Ballyhoo. Ballyhoo, in the words of one of its own more memorable descriptive passages, “exposes the underside of circus life — grungy costumes strung about, crooked and cracked mirrors, the musty odor of fresh makeup mingled with clown sweat infusing the air.” Given what was going on around O’Neill as he wrote the game, it feels hard not to draw parallels with Infocom’s own brief ascendency and abrupt fall from grace: “Your experience of the circus, with its ballyhooed promises of wonderment and its ultimate disappointment, has been to sink your teeth into a candy apple whose fruit is rotten.”

The nihilistic emptiness at the heart of the circus sideshow, the tragedy of these grotesques who parade themselves before the public because there’s no other alternative available to them, has likewise been expressed in art stretching at least as far back as Freaks, a 1932 film directed by Tod Browning that’s still as shocking and transgressive as it is moving today. Another obvious cultural touchstone, which would have been particularly fresh in the mid-1980s thanks to Bernard Pomerance’s 1979 play and David Lynch’s 1980 film, is the story of the so-called “Elephant Man”: Joseph Merrick, a gentle soul afflicted with horrendous deformities who was driven out into the street by his father at age 17 and forced to sell himself to various exploiters as a traveling “human curiosity.” Some say that Merrick died at age 27 in 1890 because he insisted on trying to lie down to sleep — something his enormous, misshapen head would not allow — as part of his fruitless lifelong quest just to “be like other people.”

Ballyhoo’s own collection of freaks is less extreme but can be almost as heartbreaking. There’s Comrade Thumb, the Russian midget who’s been crammed into a Czarist general’s uniform and sent out to do tricks. Like Merrick, whose deformities made speech almost impossible, Thumb can’t even communicate with his fellow humans; he speaks only Russian (I’ve had just a taste of this sort of linguistic isolation at times since leaving the United States, and know how hard it can be). But saddest of all is the case of Tina, the “827 pounds of feminine charm” who’s become the circus’s token fat woman.

>n
West Half of Fat Lady
Dominating this once spacious room, geographic in her enormity, mountainous in her irreducibility, the fat lady sits (though no chair is visible) breathtakingly to the east. Paths around the attraction lead northeast and southeast. The exit is south.

>examine lady
The fat lady is wearing a big top, and the expression on her face is sad and distant, almost Rushmorean. She appears to be holding a small radio up to her ear.

>ne
It's a long haul, the scenery changing little. Eventually you arrive at ...

East Half of Fat Lady
The fat lady sits (though no chair is visible) breathtakingly to the west. Paths around the attraction lead northwest and southwest.

>give granola bar to tina
Tina is quick to confiscate the one-dollar-and-85-cent granola bar from your hand and grinds it up without hesitation. Turning her far-away gaze slowly in your direction, she seems to notice you for the first time this evening.

>tina, hello
She merely sighs wistfully, which creates a gale-force gust, and cranes her wrecking-ball-sized hand over to you.

>take hand
As you take hold, the fat lady's hand becomes relaxed, its full weight now residing in your arms like a sandbag and making your knees buckle.

>shake hand
Though unable to budge the fat lady's hand, your friendly intentions are nevertheless understood. The fat lady appears quite taken by your kindnesses. She clasps both her hands up to her chins, and stares ahead in teary silence.

If these passages, far from politically correct but by no means heartless, make you a bit uncomfortable, well, I like to think that they were meant to. After all, we’re among the sideshow gawkers. I’ve known people like Tina, cut off by their weight or other issues from a normal life, destined always to be noticed but never to be included. I recognize that wistful sigh, that far-off stare, that above-it-all stance that becomes their only defense. As for people like the circus’s manager Mr. Munrab — read the name backward — who we learn elsewhere “orders the roustabout to increase the frequency of her [Tina’s] feeding” every time she tries to go on a diet…. well, I’d like to think there’s a special circle of Hell for him along with Tom Norman, the man who stuck Joseph Merrick in a cage and set it up for the punters on Whitechapel Road.

I don’t want to give the impression that Ballyhoo is all doom and gloom, and certainly not that it’s entirely one-note in its mood. As Tina’s passages show, the game takes place in a vaguely surreal David Lynch-ian realm that’s tethered to but not quite the same as our own reality. This gives ample room for some flights of fancy that don’t always have to make us feel bad. O’Neill’s love of abstract wordplay, the theme around which his second and final work of interactive fiction would be built, also pops up in Ballyhoo from time to time. When you find yourself with an irresistible craving for something sweet, for instance, it takes the form of a literal monkey on your back who drives you to the concession stand. O’Neill also toys with the parser and the player sitting behind it to a degree not seen in an Infocom game since The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Here’s what happens when you come upon a “piece of wood” that turns out to be a mousetrap:

>get wood
You have just encountered that brief instant of time between the realization that you've caused yourself excruciating Pain and the actual onslaught of such Pain, during which time most people speak with exclamation points and ... well, say things like ...

>fuck
Easy there! You're jeopardizing our "G" rating.

>darn
Bravisimo! Once more now, with feeling.

>darn
Cut! Cut! Okay, that's a wrap.

There’s even a fake death message, just the sort of faintly cruel player trickery that would have made Adams proud.

Indeed, there’s a little bit of bite, even a faint note of misanthropy, to O’Neill’s writing that’s largely missing from that of the other Imps. Your fellow circus-goers are uniformly boorish and boring. One or two situations, as well as the logical illogic needed to escape from them, smack of Infocom’s later social satire Bureaucracy, to which O’Neill (amongst many others) would make contributions.

>enter short line
You are now standing at the tail end of the short line.

>z
Time passes...

The face of the man ahead of you lights up as he spots something. "Hey, guys! It's ME, Jerry," he yells to a sizable group nearby, and they approach.

>z
Time passes...

"Haven't seen you turkeys in years. Howda hell are you guys?" They all reintroduce themselves. "Hey -- you clowns thirsty? Get in here, I'll buy y'all beer."

"You sure it's not a problem?" asks the catcher.

"Heck no, just scoot in right here."

With both your resolve and your heaving bosom firm against the crush of interlopers, you are nevertheless forced to backpedal.

>z
Time passes...

Jerry continues backslapping the second baseman.

>z
Time passes...

Jerry continues jiving with the center fielder.

>exit long line
You hear an inner voice whisper, "Do I really want to forfeit my position in the long line?" To which you answer:

>yes
You nonchalantly walk away from the long line.

>enter long line
A lot of other people must not have had the same idea as you, as they virtually hemorrhage over to the short line. Steaming to the front of the line, you get a two-dollar-and-25-cent frozen banana pushed at you and are whisked to the side before you can even count your change.

Ballyhoo was Infocom’s fourth game to be given the “Mystery” genre label. As such, it’s also an earnest attempt to solve a real or perceived problem that had long frustrated players of those previous three mysteries. The first of them, Deadline, had exploded the possibilities for adventure games by simulating a dynamic story with independent actors rather than just setting the player loose in a static world full of puzzles to solve; The Witness and Suspect had then continued along the same course. Instead of exploring a geographical space, the player’s primary task became to explore a story space, to learn how this dynamic system worked and to manipulate it to her own ends by judicious, precisely timed interference. While a huge advance that brought a new dimension to the adventure game, this seemingly much more story-oriented approach also remained paradoxically problematic to fully reconcile to the view of Infocom’s games as interactive fiction, as, as their box copy would have it, stories you “woke up inside” and proceeded to experience like the protagonist of a novel. The experience of playing one of these early mysteries was more like that of an editor, or a film director making an adaptation of the novel. You had to take the stories apart piece by piece through probing and experimentation, then put everything back together in a way that would guide the protagonist, from whom you stood at a decided remove, to the optimal ending. That process might offer pleasures all its own, but it kept the player firmly in the realm of puzzle-solver rather than fiction-enjoyer — or, if you like, guiding the fiction became the overarching puzzle. Even Infocom’s most unabashed attempt to create a “literary” work to date, Steve Meretzky’s A Mind Forever Voyaging, became abruptly, jarringly gamelike again when you got to the final section, where you had to head off a sequence of events that would otherwise be the end of you. In a film or novel based on A Mind Forever Voyaging, this sequence would just chance to play out in just the right way to let Perry Simm escape by the skin of his teeth and save the world in the process. In the game, however, the player was forced to figure out what dramatically satisfying narrative the author wanted to convey, then manipulate events to bring it to fruition, a very artificial process all the way around. Yet the alternative of a static environment given motion only when the player deigned to push on something was even farther from the idea of “interactive fiction” as a layperson might take that phrase. What to do?

Infocom’s answer, to which they first fully committed in Ballyhoo, was to flip the process on its head: to make the story respond to the player rather than always asking the player to respond to the story. Put another way, here the story chases the player rather than the player chasing the story. (Feel free to insert your “in Soviet Russia…” jokes here.) Ballyhoo is another dynamic mystery with its own collection of dramatic beats to work through. Now, though, the story moves forward only when and as the player’s actions make it most dramatically satisfying to do so, rather than ticking along according to its own remorseless timetable. So, for example, Comrade Thumb will struggle to get a drink of water from the public water fountain at the beginning of the game for hundreds of turns if necessary, until the player helps him by giving him a boost. He’ll then toddle off to another location to wait for the player to enter. When and only when she does, he’ll carry off his next dramatic beat. Later, a certain bumbling detective will wander onto the midway and pass out dead drunk just when the needs of the plot, as advanced by the player thus far, demand that he do so. Sometimes these developments are driven directly by the player, but at other times they happen only in the name of dramatic efficiency, of story logic. Rather than asking the player to construct a story from a bunch of component parts, now the author deconstructs the story she wants the player to experience, then figures out how to put it back together on the fly in a satisfying way in response to the player’s own actions — but without always making the fact that the story is responding to the player rather than unspooling on its own clear to the player. Ideally, this should let the player just enjoy the unfolding narrative from her perspective inside the story, which will always just happen to play out in suitably dramatic fashion, full of the close calls and crazy coincidences that are such part and parcel of story logic. Virtually unremarked at the time, this formal shift would eventually go on to become simply the way that adventure games were done, to the extent that the old Deadline approach stands out as a strange, cruel anomaly when it crops up on rare occasions on the modern landscape.

Depending on how you see these things, you might view this new approach as a major advance or as a disappointment, even as a capitulation of sorts. Early adventure writers, including those at Infocom, were very invested in the idea of their games as simulations of believable (if simplified) worlds. See, for instance, the article which Dave Lebling published in Byte in December of 1980, which, years before Infocom would dub their games “interactive fiction,” repeatedly refers to Zork and the other games like it that Infocom hopes to make as “computerized fantasy simulations.” Or see the flyer found in Zork I itself, which refers to that game as “a self-contained and self-maintaining universe.” To tinker with such a universe, to introduce a hand of God manipulating the levers in the name of drama and affect, felt and still feels wrong to some people. Most, however, have come to accept that pure, uncompromising simulation does not generally lead to a satisfying adventure game. Adventure games may be better viewed as storytelling and puzzle-solving engines — the relative emphasis placed on the former and the latter varying from work to work — wherein simulation elements are useful as long as they add verisimilitude and possibility without adding boredom and frustration, and stop being useful just as soon as the latter qualities begin to outweigh the former.

Which is not to say that this new approach of the story chasing the player is a magic bullet. Virtually everyone who’s played adventure games since Ballyhoo is familiar with the dilemma of a story engine that’s become stuck in place, of going over and over a game’s world looking for that one trigger you missed that will satisfy the game that all is in proper dramatic order and the next act can commence. My own heavily plotted adventure game is certainly not immune to this syndrome, which at its extreme can feel every bit as artificial and mimesis-destroying, and almost as frustrating, as needing to replay a game over and over with knowledge from past lives. Like so much else in life and game design, this sort of reactive storytelling is an imperfect solution, whose biggest virtue is that most people prefer its brand of occasional frustration to others.

And now we’ve come to the point in this article where I need to tell you why, despite pioneering such a major philosophical shift and despite a wonderful setting brought to life by some fine writing, Ballyhoo does indeed deserve its spot amongst the lower tier of Infocom games. The game has some deep-rooted problems that spoil much of what’s so good about it.

The most fundamental issue, one which badly damages Ballyhoo as both a coherent piece of fiction and a playable game, is that of motivation — or rather lack thereof. When the game begins you’re just another vaguely dissatisfied customer exiting the big top along with the rest of the maddening crowd. Getting the plot proper rolling by learning about the mystery itself — proprietor Munrab’s young daughter Chelsea has been kidnapped, possibly by one of his own discontented performers — requires you to sneak into a storage tent for no reason whatsoever. You then eavesdrop on a fortuitous conversation which occurs, thanks to Ballyhoo’s new dramatic engine, just at the right moment. And so you decide that you are better equipped to solve the case than the uninterested and besotted detective Munrab has hired. But really, what kind of creepy busybody goes to the circus and then starts crawling around in the dark through forbidden areas just for kicks? Ballyhoo makes only the most minimal of attempts to explain such behavior in its opening passage: “The circus is a reminder of your own secret irrational desire to steal the spotlight, to defy death, and to bask in the thunder of applause.” That’s one of the most interesting and potential-fraught passages in the game, but Ballyhoo unfortunately makes no more real effort to explore this psychological theme, leaving the protagonist otherwise a largely blank slate. Especially given that the mystery at the heart of the game is quite low-stakes — the kidnapping is so clearly amateurish that Chelsea is hardly likely to suffer any real harm, while other dastardly revelations like the presence of an underground poker game aren’t exactly Godfather material — you’re left wondering why you’re here at all, why you’re sticking your nose into all this business that has nothing to do with you. In short, why do you care about any of this? Don’t you have anything better to be doing?

A similar aimlessness afflicts the puzzle structure. Ballyhoo never does muster that satisfying feeling of really building toward the solution of its central mystery. Instead, it just offers a bunch of situations that are clearly puzzles to be solved, but never gives you a clue why you should be solving them. For instance, you come upon a couple of lions in a locked cage which otherwise contains nothing other than a lion stand used in the lion trainer’s act. You soon find a key to the cage and a bullwhip. You have no use for the lion stand right now, nor for the lions themselves, nor for their cage. There’s obviously a puzzle to be solved here, but why? Well, if you do so and figure out how to deal with the lions, you’ll discover an important clue under the lion stand. But, with no possible way to know it was there, why on earth would any person risk her neck to enter a lion cage for no reason whatsoever? (Presumably the same kind that would creep into a circus’s supply tent…) Elsewhere you come upon an elephant in a tent. Later you have the opportunity to collect a mouse. You can probably imagine what you need to do, but, again, why? Why are you terrorizing this poor animal in its tiny, empty tent? More specifically, how could you anticipate that the elephant will bolt away in the perfect direction to knock down a certain section of fence? This George Mallory approach to design is everywhere in Ballyhoo. While “because it’s there” has been used plenty of times in justifying adventure-game puzzles both before and after Ballyhoo, Infocom by this time was usually much, much better at embedding puzzles within their games’ fictions.

With such an opaque puzzle structure, Ballyhoo becomes a very tough nut to crack; it’s never clear what problems you should be working on at any given time, nor how solving any given puzzle is likely to help you with the rest. It all just feels… random. And many of the individual solutions are really, really obscure, occasionally with a “read Jeff O’Neill’s mind” quality that pushes them past the boundary of fairness. Making things still more difficult are occasional struggles with the parser of the sort we’re just not used to seeing from Infocom by this stage: you can MOVE that moose head on the wall, but don’t try to TURN it. There’s also at least one significant bug that forced me to restore on my recent playthrough (the turnstile inexplicably stopped recognizing my ticket) and a few scattered typos. Again, these sorts of minor fit-and-finish problems are hardly surprising in general, but are surprising to find in an Infocom game of this vintage.

Assuming we give some of Hitchhiker’s dodgier elements a pass in the name of letting Douglas Adams be Douglas Adams, we have to go all the way back to those early days of Zork and Deadline to find an Infocom game with as many basic problems as this one. Ballyhoo isn’t, mind you, a complete reversion to the bad old days of 1982. Even leaving aside its bold new approach to plotting, much in Ballyhoo shows a very progressive sensibility. On at least one occasion when you’re on the verge of locking yourself out of victory, the game steers you to safety, saying that “the image of a burning bridge suddenly pops into your mind.” Yet on others it seems to positively delight in screwing you over. My theory, which is only that, is that Ballyhoo was adversely affected by the chaos inside Infocom as it neared release, that it didn’t get the full benefit of a usually exhaustive testing regime that normally rooted out not only bugs and implementation problems but also exactly the sorts of design issues that I’ve just pointed out. Thankfully, Ballyhoo would prove to be an anomaly; the games that succeeded it would once again evince the level of polish we’ve come to expect. Given that Ballyhoo was also the product of a first-time author, its failings are perhaps the result of a perfect storm of inexperience combined with distraction.

Ballyhoo was not, as you’ve probably guessed, a big seller, failing to break 30,000 copies in lifetime sales. It’s a paradoxical little game that I kind of love on one level but can’t really recommend on another. Certainly there’s much about it to which I really respond. Whether because I’m a melancholy soul at heart or because I just like to play at being one from time to time, I’m a sucker for its sort of ramshackle splendid decay. I’m such a sucker for it, in fact, that I dearly want Ballyhoo to be better than it is, to actually be the sad and beautiful work of interactive fiction that I sense it wants to be. I’ve occasionally overpraised it in the past for just that reason. But we also have to consider how well Ballyhoo works as an adventure game, and in that sense it’s a fairly broken creation. I won’t suggest that you tax yourself too much trying to actually solve it by yourself, but it’s well worth a bit of wandering around just to soak up its delicious melancholy.

Comments
29 Responses

- Brian Bagnall

December 22, 2014 at 2:53 pm

Thank you for clearly explaining the massive innovation O’Neill brought to the genre. He really hit on something there. I had a similar experience of being initially attracted to the mood of the game but ultimately wandering around a bit before losing interest.

Oh to be granted a full interview with him! If he has a change of heart it would likely make a good article on its own.

- Jason Scott

December 22, 2014 at 4:58 pm

When interviewing the implementors, many of them were sad to have fallen out of touch with Jeff. It is been a while, but I definitely remember him more than once being referred to as The Lost Imp.

More importantly, though, I just want to stress that not everyone I interviewed had positive memories of their time there. One of the requests by Mike Berlyn was that I not portray him as having admired or respected the company management, and for the time, he considered rescinding agreement to appear in the final documentary. Like everyone else, I gave them a chance to see the film or at least their portrayal in the film before release so they could sign off, and he was happy with how it came out.

(Mike is fighting a cancer battle right now, much love to Mike.)

- Jimmy Maher

December 22, 2014 at 5:45 pm

I’m very sorry to hear of Mike’s illness. I and (I’m sure) everyone who reads this blog wish him all the best.

Steve Meretzky was in contact with Jeff to at least the extent that he had a current email to pass along to me, albeit with the warning that “his memories of Infocom are not happy ones.” Jeff was kind enough to reply, and even to consider an interview, but ultimately decided against it, which is of course his right. But if you’re reading, Jeff, you’re obviously missed by some old friends!

- Lisa H.

December 22, 2014 at 9:28 pm

Incredible as this may sound to those of us today who persist in viewing the company’s brief life as a sort of Camelot

I know what you meant, but my first thought was “You mean, it was a silly place?”

that time in his own life is one that O’Neill would rather forgot

Forget.

he become one of Infocom’s in-house testers.

Became. (having some tense problems here?)

Ballyhoo‘s own collection of freaks are less extreme

You’ve got an odd apostrophe there (an “ayn”, is it?). Also, I think you want “is”, to agree in number with “collection”.

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2014 at 6:51 am

Thanks! Fixed except for the Camelot thing, which I submit is your personal problem. ;)

- Lisa H.

December 24, 2014 at 1:45 am

Yeah, that was just tongue in cheek on my part. :)

- ZUrlocker

December 23, 2014 at 2:21 am

Great post. I always enjoy getting a broader understanding of how Interactive Fiction has evolved. It seems Ballyhoo had more to it than I had thought.

Would be great to hear from all the Infocom authors, whether they were enamored with the company or not. Or maybe especially if not. There’s an insider perspective that is invaluable to understanding the history and evolution.

As a minor point, I found the last sentence of the first paragraph (“In fact… of the 1980s.”) to be almost impossible to parse. Grammatically it may be correct, but I would definitely consider breaking it up and simplifying.

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2014 at 7:29 am

I think there’s a pretty good consensus already on the subject from just about everyone Jason interviewed: loved their colleagues; loved the wing of management represented by Joel Berez; hated the wings of management represented by Al Vezza and later by Bruce Davis of Activision, which unfortunately generally had a lot more say in the really big decisions than did Berez. The main variation is how *personally* they take Infocom’s management’s failings. This ranges from a shrug and a “well, everybody just did the best they could and we should all just leave the past in the past” to active, continuing anger and bitterness. In the case of those inclined more toward the latter, well, I’m obviously fairly obsessive about Infocom, but I don’t see a need to air dirty laundry just for the sake of it (not that I mean to imply that that was necessarily what you were suggesting).

And maybe it comes from having read too much Dickens, but I kind of like to use long sentence like that one from time to time. It’s one of the things that sets my writing apart — in a good way I’d like to think, but, as your reaction shows, mileages may definitely vary. ;)

- Rob

December 23, 2014 at 4:31 am

Joseph Merrick (not John), and George Mallory (not Hillary).

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2014 at 6:52 am

I was having some serious name problems, wasn’t I? Fixed, and thanks!

- Healy

December 23, 2014 at 7:04 am

“I’m such a sucker for it, in fact, that I dearly want Ballyhoo to be better than it is, to actually be the sad and beautiful work of interactive fiction that I sense it wants to be. I’ve occasionally overpraised it in the past for just that reason.”

So, you say you have a tendency to ballyhoo Ballyhoo?

(I’m so sorry.)

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2014 at 7:30 am

:)

- Dehumanizer

December 23, 2014 at 12:04 pm

Insert obligatory “great post, etc.” :)

Minor typo: “Perry Sim” should be “Perry Simm”.

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2014 at 12:17 pm

Thanks!

- Brian Moriarty

December 23, 2014 at 3:25 pm

Thanks for giving Ballyhoo the thoughtful look it deserves.

Jeff and I lived with a handful of other guys in a Concord farmhouse during the Infocom years. An enigmatic personality, private and intense, proud, hard-working, passionate, with the smoldering edge of a black Irishman. Irresistible to those who dared approach.

He was our Kerouac, Brando, Jones Very.

His two games are among the most interesting in the canon. Pity he abandoned the form and fell silent.

Happily, Jeff agreed to a substantial video interview for an upcoming Infocom multimedia project, taking his place in the history of that remarkable company.

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2014 at 8:58 pm

Really glad to hear that Jeff will be giving his perspective at last. And very interested to see this project you mention…

- Jason Scott

December 26, 2014 at 5:22 pm

Oh, great to hear! I’m assuming this is the project that was started along GET LAMP. If so, that thing is going to make GET LAMP’s take on Infocom look like a People magazine article, which is fantastic.

- Victor

March 29, 2019 at 8:11 pm

Did this project get completed? (He asks 5 years late)

- Sniffnoy

December 23, 2014 at 6:36 pm

“Story responding to player” can get very annoying sometimes when the story responds in an arbitrary way (you found the princess, so they’ve finished building that bridge!) but as long as there’s at least some predictability or connection (maybe if I get the guy what he wants, he’ll go somewhere else, and maybe that will be where I need him to be) it’s not so bad…

Also, one writing nitpick: I think the phrase “disinterested and besotted detective” would be clearer if you replaced “disinterested” with “uninterested”; the other meaning of “disinterested” kind of competes here.

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2014 at 8:57 pm

Fair enough. Thanks!

- Duncan Stevens

December 23, 2014 at 10:57 pm

Another parser problem (spoiler):

One of the required commands in the lion cage is WHIP LION, by which the game means that you crack the whip. HIT THE LION WITH THE WHIP elicits an entirely different response.

- Mark Ricard

April 8, 2015 at 5:35 pm

Very informative review. I read a interview where you praised this game and to honest was a bit disappointed by it because some of the puzzles were really obscure. Reading this makes your views more understandable. The mood of the story just seemed cliched to me and it seems that is what you responded to the most about the game. Perhaps that predicates ones enjoyment of Ballyhoo.

Nord and Bert was both a more interesting and original game. Have you written about it yet?

- Jonathan Blask

August 2, 2015 at 5:37 pm

Can’t believe I missed this one. I covered “Ballyhoo” on my Old-School Transcripts site. For the most part, I think I uncovered most of its gems (although it has been brought to my attention that I missed the response to >TAKE SAWDUST ):

http://oldschooltranscripts.blogspot.com/2013/04/ballyhoo-oneill-infocom.html

- Adele

January 25, 2016 at 1:16 am

I am a long-time reader, and I always find your asides and details interesting and worthy of further research (note: I am a librarian, and read your blog during the long hours at the reference desk.)

I tried to read more about Jeff O’Neill, and I found it interesting that there isn’t even a Wikipedia snippet on him. Instead, there are many features on a professional hockey player who shares the same name with the same exact spelling. It’s interesting to me that this man with such an important role in the history of modern computing successfully remains anonymous; aside from his own wishes, it seems like armchair historians and fans would have put more information out there. Thanks for the interesting little breadcrumbs that always make me delve deeper into the history.

And I suppose it goes without saying that the full article is great, outside of the little details that I like to dig up. Thank you for enlightening my reference shifts!

- Jason Kankiewicz

September 23, 2017 at 3:28 am

“in teary silence.” -> “in teary silence.“?
“on at at any” -> “on at any”?

- Jimmy Maher

September 23, 2017 at 9:13 am

Thanks!

- Chris Lang

June 6, 2019 at 11:45 pm

The structure of ‘events being triggered after player does enough things’ certainly lives on post-Infocom in many of the later interactive fiction works such as Christminster up to the popular Ace Attorney series during their ‘investigation’ segments. (There’s a lot of just wandering around, doing stuff and then going back to the detention center to see if your client is available for questioning, or going somewhere else to see if anything’s different – if nothing’s changed, then you haven’t found all the items and exhausted all the most important conversation possibilities yet). And I have to agree that they can be just as dangerous to immersion as the Deadline time structure that requires you to learn by previous sessions.

As much as I liked the game and its setting, the elephant puzzle is one thing that always bothered me. It’s completely unmotivated. There’s no real reason to believe there’s anything in the elephant tent aside from what you expect to find there (and indeed, there isn’t). And indeed, how can we anticipate that our actions here cause the elephant to smash a fence and open up a new location for us to visit?

And furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be any way to ‘fix’ this to make it work.

At least with the lions’ cage, one can imagine Harry (the blind doorkeeper who’s more willing to talk about everything than most of the characters) telling us he heard something got dropped in the cage, or maybe overhearing a conversation in the gambling den along these lines. Something like….

Voices drift over from the poker game. You hear bits and pieces of a conversation. “… heard he dropped it in the lion’s den.” “Probably still there. Roustabout gets lazy, sweeps stuff under rug…” The voices quiet and you can hear no more.

As it is in the game, however, no such hint exists that there’s anything worth disturbing the lions for. The above is me just thinking of a possible ‘fix’ for it on the spot some three decades after the fact.

Sadly, had I been a playtester back then, I don’t know what I would have suggested to fix the elephant problem. I don’t know what could be done to suggest to the player that messing with the elephant could in any way be a good idea.

- Torbjörn Andersson

June 14, 2020 at 9:18 am

“So, for example, Comrade Thumb will struggle to get a drink of water from the public water fountain at the beginning of the game for hundreds of turns if necessary, until the player helps him by giving him a boost.”

Well, once you’ve seen him he’ll stay around for a couple of moves before giving up. Then he’ll leave, whether or not you are there to see it. But it’s true that you can’t miss the event because he’ll always be there the first time you enter that room.

“There’s also at least one significant bug that forced me to restore on my recent playthrough (the turnstile inexplicably stopped recognizing my ticket)”

I’m guessing you were bit by this bug: https://github.com/the-infocom-files/ballyhoo/issues/11

If I understand it correctly, the parser will scan ahead to see if you’re using the words like “head” or “front” in particular ways, and set a flag if you do. This was apparently inherited and extended from how The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy dealt with “put X in front of Y” or “lie down in front of X”. Here it’s probably for things like “go to front of line” etc.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t check if it’s going outside of what was written to the buffer by the current command, so if there’s left-overs there from a previous command it may still interpret “put ticket in slot” as “put ticket in front of slot”.

I still don’t know exactly what kind of commands will trigger the bug, or how long it will persist. The most likely thing I’ve come across so far (which I stumbled over many years ago) is “rimshaw, feel my head”, and that’s close enough to the turnstile for me to be able to reproduce it.

- Lisa H.

June 14, 2020 at 4:53 pm

Interesting stuff!

Out of the Frying Pan…
December 29, 2014

Activision, as embodied by Jim Levy (left), weds Infocom, as embodied by Joel Berez (right).

Activision’s first couple of years as a home-computer publisher were, for all their spirit of innovation and occasional artistic highs, mildly disappointing in commercial terms. While all of their games of this period were by no means flops, the only outsize hit among them was David Crane’s Ghostbusters. Activision was dogged by their own history; even selling several hundred thousand copies of Ghostbusters could feel anticlimactic when compared with the glory days of 1980 to 1983, when million-sellers were practically routine. And the company dragged along behind it more than psychological vestiges of that history. On the plus side, Jim Levy still had a substantial war chest made up of the profits socked away during those years with which to work. But on the minus side, the organization he ran was still too big, too unwieldy in light of the vastly reduced number of units they were moving these days in this completely different market. Levy was forced to authorize a painful series of almost quarterly layoffs as the big sales explosions stubbornly refused to come and Activison’s balance sheets remained in the red. Then came the departure of Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead to form the lean, mean Accolade, and that company’s galling instant profitability. Activision found themselves cast in the role of the bloated Atari of old, Jim Levy himself in that of the hated Ray Kassar. Nobody liked it one bit.

Levy and his board therefore adopted a new strategy for the second half of 1985: they would use some of that slowly dwindling war chest to acquire a whole stable of smaller developers, who would nevertheless continue to release games on their own imprints to avoid market saturation. The result would be more and more diverse games, separated into lines that would immediately identify for consumers just what type of game each title really was. In short order, Activision scooped up Gamestar, a developer of sports games. They also bought Creative Software, another tiny but stalwart industry survivor. Creative would specialize in home-oriented productivity software; ever since Brøderbund had hit it big with Bank Street Writer and The Print Shop publishers like Activision had been dreaming of duplicating their success. And then along came Infocom.

Joel Berez happened to run into Levy, accidentally or on purpose, during a business trip to Chicago in December of 1985. By this time Infocom’s travails were an open secret in the industry. Levy, by all accounts a genuine fan of Infocom’s games and, as Activision games like Portal attest, a great believer in the concept of interactive literature, immediately made it clear that Activision would be very interested in acquiring Infocom. Levy’s was literally the only offer on the table. After it dawned on them that Infocom alone could not possibly make a success out of Cornerstone, Al Vezza and his fellow business-oriented peers on Infocom’s board had for some time clung to the pipe dream of selling out to a big business publisher like Lotus, WordPerfect, or even Microsoft. But by now it was becoming clear even to them that absolutely no one cared a whit about Cornerstone, that the only value in Infocom was the games and the company’s still-sterling reputation as a game developer. However, those qualities, while by no means negligible, were outweighed in the eyes of most potential purchasers by the mountain of debt under which Infocom now labored, as well as by the worrisome shrinking sales of the pure text adventures released recently both by Infocom and their competitors. These were also very uncertain times for the industry in general, with many companies focused more on simple survival than expansion. Only Levy claimed to be able to sell his board on the idea of an Infocom acquisition. For Infocom, the choice was shaping up to be a stark one indeed: Activision subsidiary or bankruptcy. As Dave Lebling wryly said when asked his opinion on the acquisition, “What is a drowning man’s opinion of a life preserver?”

Levy was as good as his word. He convinced Activision’s board — some, especially in a year or two, might prefer to say “rammed the scheme through” — and on February 19, 1986, the two boards signed an agreement in principle for Activision to acquire Infocom by giving approximately $2.4 million in Activision stock to Infocom’s stockholders and assuming the company’s $6.8 million in debt. This was, for those keeping score, a pittance compared to what Simon & Schuster had been willing to pay barely a year before. But, what with their mountain of debt and flagging sales, Infocom’s new bargaining position wasn’t exactly strong; Simon & Schuster was now unwilling to do any deal at all, having already firmly rejected Vezza and Berez’s desperate, humiliating attempts to reopen the subject. As it was, Infocom considered themselves pretty lucky to get what they did; Levy could have driven a much harder bargain had he wanted to. And so Activision’s lawyers and accountants went to work to finalize things, and a few months later Infocom, Inc., officially ceased to exist. That fateful day was June 13, 1986, almost exactly seven years after a handful of MIT hackers had first gotten together with a vague intention to do “something with microcomputers.” It was also Friday the Thirteenth.

Still, even the most superstitious amongst Infocom’s staff could see little immediate ground for worry. If they had to give up their independence, it was hard to imagine a better guy to answer to than Jim Levy. He just “got” Infocom in a way that Al Vezza, for one, never had. He understood not only what the games were all about but also the company’s culture, and he seemed perfectly happy just to let both continue on as they were. During the due-diligence phase of the acquisition, Levy visited Infocom’s offices for a guided tour conducted, as one of his last official acts at Infocom, by an Al Vezza who visibly wanted nothing more by this time than to put this whole disappointing episode of his life behind him and return to the familiarity of MIT. In the process of duly demonstrating a series of games in progress, he came to Steve Meretzky’s next project, a risque science-fiction farce (later succinctly described by Infocom’s newsletter as “Hitchhiker’s Guide with sex”) called Leather Goddesses of Phobos. “Of course, that’s not necessarily the final name,” muttered Vezza with embarrassment. “What? I wouldn’t call it anything else!” laughed a delighted Levy, to almost audible sighs of relief from the staffers around him.

Levy not only accepted but joined right in with the sort of cheerful insanity that had always made Vezza so uncomfortable. He cemented Infocom’s loyalty via his handling of the “InfoWedding” staffers threw for him and Joel Berez, who took over once again as Infocom’s top manager following Vezza’s unlamented departure. A description of the blessed nuptials appeared in Infocom’s newsletter.

In a dramatic affirmation of combinatorial spirit, Activision President James H. Levy and Infocom President Joel M. Berez were merged in a moving ceremony presided over by InfoRabbi Stuart W. Galleywitz. Infocommies cheered, participated in responsive readings from Hackers (written by Steven Levy — no relation to Jim), and threw rice at the beaming CEOs.

Berez read a tone poem drawn from the purple prose of several interactive-fiction stories, and Levy responded with a (clean) limerick.

The bride wore a veil made from five yards of nylon net, and carried artificial flowers. Both bride and groom wore looks of bemused surprise.

After a honeymoon at Aragain Falls, the newly merged couple will maintain their separate product-development and marketing facilities in Mountain View, California, and Cambridge, Massachusetts (i.e., we’ll still be the Infocom you know and love).

Queried about graphics in interactive-fiction stories, or better parsers in Little Computer People, the happy couple declined comment, but smiled enigmatically.

Soon after, Levy submitted to a gently mocking “Gruer’s Profile” (a play on a long-running advertising series by Dewar’s whiskey) prepared for the newsletter:

Hobby: Collecting software-development companies.

Latest Book Read: The Ballyhoo hint book.

Latest Accomplishment: Finding foster homes for all the Little Computer People.

Favorite Infocom Game: Cornerstone.

Why I Do What I Do: Alimony.

Quote: “People often mistake me for Bruce Willis.”

Profile: Charismatic. A real motivator. Looks great in a limousine.

His Drink: “Gruer’s Dark,” right out of a canteen. “Its taste blends perfectly with the sense of satisfaction I feel in knowing that I am now the kingpin of interactive fiction.”

Levy seemed to go out of his way to make the Infocom folks feel respected and comfortable within his growing Activision family. He was careful, for instance, never to refer to this acquisition as an acquisition or, God forbid, a buy-out. It was always a “merger” of apparent equals. The recently departed Marc Blank, who kept in close touch with his old colleagues and knew Levy from his time in the industry, calls him today a “great guy.” Brian Moriarty considered him “fairly benign” (mostly harmless?), with a gratifying taste for “quirky, interesting games”: “He seemed like a good match. It looked like we were going to be okay.”

This period immediately after the Activision acquisition would prove to be an Indian summer of sorts between a very difficult period just passed and another very difficult one to come. In some ways the Imps had it better than ever. With Vezza and his business-oriented allies now all gone, Infocom was clearly and exclusively a game-development shop; all of the cognitive dissonance brought on by Cornerstone was at long last in the past. Now everyone could just concentrate on making the best interactive fiction they possibly could, knowing as they did so that any money they made could go back into making still better, richer virtual worlds. Otherwise, things looked largely to be business as usual. The first game Infocom published as an Activision subsidiary was Moriarty’s Trinity, in my opinion simply the best single piece of work they would ever manage, and one which everyone inside Infocom recognized even at the time as one of their more “special” games. As omens go, that seemed as good as they come, certainly more than enough to offset any concerns about that unfortunate choice of Friday the Thirteenth.

Activision’s marketing people did almost immediately offer some suggestions — and largely very sensible ones — to Infocom. Some of these Mike Dornbrook’s marketing people greeted with open arms; they were things that they had been lobbying for to the Imps, usually without much success, for years now. Most notably, Activision strongly recommended that Infocom take a hard look at a back catalog that featured some of the most beloved classics in the young culture of computer gaming and think about how to utilize the goodwill and nostalgia they engendered. The Zork brand in particular, still by far the most recognizable in Infocom’s arsenal, had been, in defiance of all marketing wisdom, largely ignored since the original trilogy concluded back in 1982. Now Infocom prepared a pair of deluxe limited-edition slip-cased compilations of the Zork and Enchanter trilogies designed not only to give newcomers a convenient point of entry but also, and almost more importantly, to appeal to the collecting instinct that motivated (and still motivates) so many of their fans. Infocom had long since learned that many of their most loyal customers didn’t generally get all that far in the games at all. Some didn’t even play them all that much. Many just liked the idea of them, liked to collect them and see them standing there on the shelf. Put an old game in a snazzy new package and many of them would buy it all over again.

Infocom also got to work at long last — in fact, literally years after they should have in Dornbrook’s view — on a new game to bear the Zork name. While they were at it, they assigned Meretzky to bring back Infocom’s single most beloved character, the cuddly robot Floyd, in the sequel to Planetfall that that game’s finale had promised back in 1983 — just as soon as he was done with Leather Goddesses, that is, a game for which Infocom, in deference to the time-honored maxim that Sex Sells, also had very high hopes.

The Infocom/Activision honeymoon period and the spirit of creative and commercial renewal it engendered would last barely six months. The chummy dialogue between these two offices on opposite coasts would likewise devolve quickly into decrees and surly obedience — or, occasionally, covert or overt defiance. But that’s for a future article. For now we’ll leave Infocom to enjoy their Indian summer of relative content, and begin to look at the games that this period produced.

(Largely the usual Infocom sources this time out: Jason Scott’s Get Lamp interviews and Down From the Top of Its Game. The Dave Lebling quote comes from an interview with Adventure Classic Gaming. The anecdote about Vezza and Levy comes from Steve Meretzky’s interview for Game Design, Theory & Practice by Richard Rouse III.

Patreon supporters: this article is a bit shorter than the norm simply because that’s the length that it “wanted” to be. Because of that, I’m making it a freebie. In the future I’ll continue to make articles of less than 2500 words free.)

Comments
12 Responses

- Alex Smith

December 29, 2014 at 7:03 pm

Great article as always! I really have no comments on this piece, which captures the spirit of the “merger” quite well; I just wanted to offer a word about where this whole thing is inevitably going in another couple of posts.

In the course of my own research, I am probably the only person that has interviewed both Jim Levy and Bruce Davis (heck, I may be the only person that has ever done a historical retrospective interview with Davis about Activision). Davis is — to be polite — a controversial figure in interactive fiction circles, so I wanted to preemptively say a word or two before you turn your expert attention to that topic. I can, of course, offer no sourcing on any of this right now, but I am not asking for the inclusion of specific facts in your post; I just want to set a general mood.

According to our talk, Levy really did see the Activision-Infocom merger as a partnership. His thought was that Activision had some of the best game designers in the business (people like David Crane and Steve Cartwright) and Infocom had some of the best writers in the business, and by joining forces, they could move interactive entertainment forward together. He never planned to isolate Infocom as a separate entity doing its own thing. He knew as well as anyone that interactive fiction was the past, not the future, but he did believe the implementors could help lead us into that future hand in hand with Activision game designers. Based on your characterizations in previous posts, we might see this as Activision 2.5, or even 3.0.

I think this is the point Davis failed to grasp. Levy tasked him with integrating Infocom with Activision shortly before the management change, but “integration” to Davis just meant standardizing business practices, production, sales, and all that jazz. He had no desire to see Infocom fail (despite what all the implementors seem to think), but if Infocom was going to succeed, it would have to do so on the backs of its own products. Rather than forming a partnership, Davis created a parent-subsidiary relationship. Too wounded by the losses on Cornerstone and the decline in sales of interactive fiction, Infocom was unable to migrate to a graphical platform in time to catch the new wave of adventure products and fell apart.

Would Levy’s plan have worked? The answer is maybe. It’s certainly a compelling idea. However, with both Activision and Infocom running at a loss, one does wonder if Activision could have really made a meaningful investment to create this dream. Certainly Dick Lehrberg, another interview subject who was VP of product development for Activision at the time, viewed the acquisition as a mistake and felt it would have been better to collaborate with Infocom without buying the whole thing.

In my interview with Davis, he comes across as a well-meaning guy faced with a volatile market that made some good choices (bringing Activision into the NES market, pushing CD-ROM with the Manhole, developing a close relationship with Sega) and some bad choices (focusing productivity software development on the IIGS and Hypercard, supporting the Atari market just a hair too long) and just did not quite know how Infocom fit into his plans (whether those plans were a good idea is a whole other topic beyond the scope of this comment). Therefore, I feel some of the extreme demonizing of him is a little unfair, though he certainly still needs to be held accountable for his mistakes. You have always taken a balanced look at the industry, so I trust you will do so when it comes to this thorny topic as well.

- Jimmy Maher

December 30, 2014 at 7:29 am

Thanks for this.

Some of Levy’s (apparent) comments to you do strike me as perhaps Monday-morning quarterbacking, always a danger with personal interviews. It’s a bit hard for me to picture this as a merger of great writers being paired with great designers because a) none of Activision’s designers had ever worked with narrative-oriented games and b) the Imps themselves were actually pretty great designers in their own rights and, with the exception of Brian Moriarty and perhaps Jeff O’Neill, really only competent writers. Certainly this is nothing like the expectations Infocom themselves had of the merger (which may point to part of the eventual problems that would develop, but there you go).

Bruce Davis has become along with Al Vezza one of the two great villains of Infocom’s history. Unlike Vezza, for whom some of the Imps express a certain sympathy and understanding as for a guy just pursuing the wrong dream in the wrong company, virtually no one can even mention Davis’s name without obvious rancor. To describe the relationship that developed as toxic is almost an understatement. In my experience, it almost requires two unreasonable parties to reduce a relationship to that level. While most of the materials to which I have access definitely do tell the story of the Infocom/Activision relationship from the point of view of the former, I’m well aware that there are two sides to every story. I’ll certainly try to do due diligence to Activision’s side. What was Activision *supposed* to do with this money-losing maker of text adventures in an era when fewer and fewer people were buying text adventures? And there was definitely a side of Infocom that just Didn’t Play Well With Others.

That said, it wasn’t Infocom alone who saw Davis as a soulless personality with a certain contempt for Activision’s customers. David Crane, who left Activision almost immediately after the Davis reign began, also retains an intense dislike for him. He definitely had a knack for rubbing people the wrong way…

I may contact you privately, if that’s okay, to get your insights before writing more on this history (which will actually be several months down the road).

- Alex Smith

December 30, 2014 at 3:31 pm

Sure, feel free to contact me. As for Levy, I agree that a true merging of these different cultures would have been a stretch to implement (honestly, Activision never leveraged Gamestar as well as it could have in sports and that was a less complicated culture shock), but I believe the sentiment. I thought your Activision 2.0 article really captured Levy’s thoughts on the computer game market well and jived with the views he expressed in our interview. He saw Activision as a trendsetter and tastemaker and wanted to be on the cutting edge artistically. Of course, the flip side of that was that he ignored both military simulations and CRPGs (famously calling the Bard’s Tale, which could have been an Activision product, “nicheware for nerds” according to Dick Lehrberg), which is where the real money was in mid-1980s computer gaming. I believe integrating the companies would have been incredibly difficult, which is probably why Davis never did it, but I am fairly convinced that’s what Levy wanted based on his track record, general philosophy, and the merger spin during the acquisition itself. Obviously the board was not so enchanted by this vision in the end.

As for Davis and Crane, Crane usually talks about his dislike for the creative direction of the company, but in one interview he mentioned a salary dispute. This is how Davis characterized it as well without any prompting. Davis thought Crane’s salary was high for a struggling company and wanted to go to an incentive-based scheme. Crane felt insulted as a founder and successful designer. I believe that was a misstep on Davis’s part. There is no doubt Davis rubbed some of the creative people the wrong way.

- He who shall not be named

May 7, 2015 at 7:54 pm

Are you serious?

Davis freaking SUED Infocom’s officers while they continued to work there, for overstating the “good will” value of the company.

He basically said “they shouldn’t take it personally.” He didn’t think suing Berez while Joel was trying to run the company, would effect how Infocom worked.

I was there and it had to be the most bizarre thing I ever observed in the game business.

To Infocom’s credit they produced some beautiful titles during this period (Shogun comes to mind) but Davis’s bad opinion on all things Infocom ruined it all.

Bobby Kotick gets a lot of heat, but at least he saw the value in Infocom, too late to save the company as Bruce had already shut it down by then.

Davis engaged in so much recreational litigation that it would come back to bite him and almost kill the company, in regards to the Baer patent judgement in 1990.

In the most ironic of ironies, Activision ‘discovered’ CYAN in 1988, published their first two games, then Davis stiffed them on payments in 1990.

They, of course, ended the relationship … went to Broderbund, and released MYST, the most successful computer game of it’s day.

Lack-o-Vision for sure.

- Bernie

July 10, 2016 at 12:39 am

” His thought was that Activision had some of the best game designers … and Infocom had some of the best writers … ”

“Would Levy’s plan have worked? ”

– Well, maybe not for Activision in 1986-87 but Lucasfilm proved the point in 1990 with Loom, which was as graphical and musical as adventure games get and was authored by Brian Moriarty, famous Infocom veteran, aided by a team that included graphic-adventure maestros Gary Winnick and Steve Purcell.

Had Levy been given more time and money, he surely would have managed get the Implementor’s to fully embrace the new adventure gaming paradigm. Davis could have adopted a management style similar to Microprose’s, where they “milked” a catalog of conventional titles but also gave Sid Meier freedom to create true classics. The Garriott family at Origin did something similar endlessly repackaging old hits and publishing lackluster new titles to give Richard and his team latitude to craft the next Ultima, which, as dictated by company policy, had to break new CRPG ground and substantially expand upon its predecessor’s gameplay.

- Jason Scott

December 30, 2014 at 9:07 am

Good luck renovating Bruce Davis’ reputation as anything but a lawyer who was a harbinger of how far the games industry would sink, Alex.

- Alex Smith

December 30, 2014 at 4:56 pm

Not to get too far off the topic of this thread, but if there is a thesis that has been developing in my own work, its that there is an inherent tension between the creativity required to create an excellent game and the business acumen necessary to make a game successful and that when either side dominates the other, it creates problems.

Activision represents both sides of this extreme. During the Activision 2.0 years, Jim Levy fostered great creativity at the company with games like Little Computer People, Alter Ego, and Portal. These were all avant garde products pushing the envelop creatively, but were generally sales disappointments. Meanwhile, Activision missed the boat on CRPGs, military simulations, and graphical adventures, which is where the real money resided. As a result, the company continued to post losses and never fully recovered from the crash.

The company required a change, and the board made one. Davis, however, swung the company too far in the other direction. He took a “singles and doubles” approach to the market, releasing products in popular genres that were low risk with a decent, though not exceptional return. This brought Activision back to profitability (barely), but at the cost of a lot of creativity. Activision needed to be more in tune with the market to remain a going concern, but it is a shame that the majority of the product line became very pedestrian. Most of the company’s output from this period is forgettable, which runs counter to the reputation of the Activision brand in other time periods. I consider that unfortunate, and Davis certainly deserves his share of the blame.

People tend to overlook a few things about Davis, however. First, the company did turn a profit after sixteen consecutive quarters of losses. Now to be fair, Davis achieved this by doing a final big writeoff, which Levy could have technically done too, so that’s not quite as impressive as it sounds. Still, his company released products people were interested in buying, and that is something a publicly traded company needs to do even if its not always artistically palatable.

Second, he did foster innovation in certain areas. He was the person who saw The Manhole in a catalog and decided to sign the product to get Activision into CD-ROM, which makes him an early adopter. He is also the person who recognized the franchise potential of Shanghai and asked for a sequel with new game variants. He took very few risks in games, but he was not completely against pushing boundaries.

Third, there is a lot of negativity about his decision to get into business/productivity products, but as this very blog post points out, it was Levy that started that shift, not Davis. It was not unreasonable for a software company in the late 1980s to want to tap into the productivity market, where Broederbund had a lot of success, as did EA for a time with Deluxe Paint. Activision actually had some innovative products in this area, including one that was PowerPoint before PowerPoint, but Davis made a decision to concentrate on underserved, graphical platforms, the Apple IIGS and Hypercard, which failed miserably and took Activision’s products with them. Clearly, Davis read the market poorly.

Now, of course, Activision is led by Bobby Kotick. You probably will not like me saying this, but Kotick’s Activision represents creativity and business largely in balance. Yes, much of what Activision does is sequel and retread, but every few years there is a Tony Hawk, or a Modern Warfare, or a Skylanders, or a Warlords of Draenor that does innovate and move the market forward (even though the company then tends to iterate to death, which killed the Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero franchises). In short, Activision makes boatloads of money, releases games enjoyed by millions, and occasionally releases something cutting edge. That’s not a perfect system by any means, but it is the reason why the company is still around today when most of its early competitors are not.

I know that personally I wish every game that appeared was an artistic triumph with an interesting story and/or game mechanics. I purchase very few sequels and retreads. I also understand, however, that game development is expensive, and it’s those sequels and retreads that fund the games I like. Davis tried to strike a balance between creativity and financial success, but he chased too many of the wrong platforms and alienated some of his best creative talent along the way. This ultimately made his tenure unsuccessful. Therefore, he was a well-meaning executive that read the market wrong, not “a harbinger of how far the games industry would sink.” This is the kind of hyperbole I am hoping Jimmy will avoid.

- Jimmy Maher

December 30, 2014 at 5:31 pm

Activision under Levy actually was fairly active in graphic adventures, releasing Tracer Sanction, Mindshadow, Borrowed Time, Murder on the Mississippi, and Tass Times in Tonetown over the span of just a couple of years. But otherwise, yeah, I don’t really disagree.

One other problem they had was with fairly fundamental quality control, which you can dump into the “business” side or make a category of its own as you will. Many of their games were buggy and/or just not that playable, the incomplete germs of what could have great games. Murder on the Mississippi, for instance, was all but unsolvable because the programmer forgot to render the graphic of an item vital for solving one of its puzzles. The fact that nobody caught this tells me that, as was depressingly typical of adventure games at this time, absolutely no one at Activision had even *played* the game all the way through before shoving it out the door. People like Levy who tried to draw direct parallels between, say, games and music often failed to account for the fact that games absolutely *need* heaps and heaps of polishing, no matter how brilliant they are conceptually. Spontaneity as we know it from music just doesn’t have an equivalent in game design. A Husker Du album might actually be the better for some tape hiss and general sloppiness in the production and performance. An equivalent game is literally unplayable.

This was one area where Infocom was the class of the industry. Their determination to sell no game before its time, and to test the hell out of each and every title and take testers’ feedback *seriously*, is perhaps the biggest reason that their games stand up so well today, while others from the talented, well-meaning folks at Synapse, Telarium, and elsewhere come off so poorly in comparison.

- Jason Scott

December 30, 2014 at 7:16 pm

In the interest in not derailing Jimmy’s blog comments, I’m not contributing further to this thread.

- William Volk

May 7, 2015 at 10:15 pm

It was myself and Sherry Whitely who championed “The Manhole” which, to Davis’ credit … approved.

I was hired out of Aegis in 1988 to help with the technology image of Activision, and Manhole and Manhole CD-ROM were a big part of.

I’ll leave it to others to reveal how Activision lost Cyan.

- William Volk

May 7, 2015 at 10:18 pm

Bobby deserves a lot of credit, for letting us build “The Return to Zork” after the failure of LGOP2.

This turned out to be a wise decision.

I believe I’m the only senior management person who survived the Davis->Kotick transition … partly because I knew Bobby during the mid ’80’s when I was at Aegis.

- Amasius

December 31, 2014 at 7:34 am

That’s a pity, Jason. This discussion is fascinating and while it may be a derail from the actual post it certainly is exactly what Jimmys Blog as a whole is about.

I guess you disagree with Alex and don’t want to start a controversy but thats unavoidable when writing about the past. People remember things and judge them differently. Nothing wrong with that as long as all participants try to keep it civil.

Trinity
January 7, 2015

During 1983, the year that Brian Moriarty first conceived the idea of a text adventure about the history of atomic weapons, the prospect of nuclear annihilation felt more real, more terrifyingly imaginable to average Americans, than it had in a long, long time. The previous November had brought the death of longtime Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and the ascension to power of Yuri Andropov. Brezhnev had been a corrupt, self-aggrandizing old rascal, but also a known, relatively safe quantity, content to pin medals on his own chest and tool around in his collection of foreign cars while the Soviet Union settled into a comfortable sort of stagnate stability around him. Andropov, however, was to the extent he was known at all considered a bellicose Party hardliner. He had enthusiastically played key roles in the brutal suppression of both the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the 1968 Prague Spring.

Ronald Reagan, another veteran Cold Warrior, welcomed Andropov into office with two of the most famous speeches of his Presidency. On March 8, 1983, in a speech before the American Society of Evangelicals, he declared the Soviet Union “an evil empire.” Echoing Hannah Arendt’s depiction of Adolf Eichmann, he described Andropov and his colleagues as “quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice,” committing outrage after outrage “in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices.” Having thus drawn an implicit parallel between the current Soviet leadership and the Nazis against which most of them had struggled in the bloodiest war in history, Reagan dropped some big news on the world two weeks later. At the end of a major televised address on the need for engaging in the largest peacetime military buildup in American history, he announced a new program that would soon come to be known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars: a network of satellites equipped with weaponry to “intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reach our own territory or that of our allies.” While researching and building SDI, which would “take years, probably decades, of effort on many fronts” with “failures and setbacks just as there will be successes and breakthroughs” — the diction was oddly reminiscent of Kennedy’s Moon challenge — the United States would in the meantime be deploying a new fleet of Pershing II missiles to West Germany, capable of reaching Moscow in less than ten minutes whilst literally flying under the radar of all of the Soviet Union’s existing early-warning systems. To the Soviet leadership, it looked like the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse, with Reagan in the role of Khrushchev.

Indeed, almost from the moment that Reagan had taken office, the United States had begun playing chicken with the Soviet Union, deliberately twisting the tail of the Russian bear via feints and probes in the border regions. “A squadron would fly straight at Soviet airspace and their radars would light up and units would go on alert. Then at the last minute the squadron would peel off and go home,” remembers former Undersecretary of State William Schneider. Even as Reagan was making his Star Wars speech, one of the largest of these deliberate provocations was in progress. Three aircraft-carrier battle groups along with a squadron of B-52 bombers all massed less than 500 miles from Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, home of many vital Soviet military installations. If the objective was to make the Soviet leadership jittery — leaving aside for the moment the issue of whether making a country with millions of kilotons of thermonuclear weapons at its disposal jittery is really a good thing — it certainly succeeded. “Every Soviet official one met was running around like a chicken without a head — sometimes talking in conciliatory terms and sometimes talking in the most ghastly and dire terms of real hot war — of fighting war, of nuclear war,” recalls James Buchan, at the time a correspondent for the Financial Times, of his contemporaneous visit to Moscow. Many there interpreted the speeches and the other provocations as setting the stage for premeditated nuclear war.

And so over the course of the year the two superpowers blundered closer and closer to the brink of the unthinkable on the basis of an almost incomprehensible mutual misunderstanding of one another’s national characters and intentions. Reagan and his cronies still insisted on taking the Marxist rhetoric to which the Soviet Union paid lip service at face value when in reality any serious hopes for fomenting a worldwide revolution of the proletariat had ended with Khrushchev, if not with Stalin. As the French demographer Emmanuel Todd wrote in 1976, the Soviet Union’s version of Marxism had long since been transformed “into a collection of high-sounding but irrelevant rhetoric.” Even the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, interpreted by not just the Reagan but also the Carter administration as a prelude to further territorial expansion into the Middle East, was actually a reactionary move founded, like so much the Soviet Union did during this late era of its history, on insecurity rather than expansionist bravado: the new Afghan prime minister, Hafizullah Amin, was making noises about abandoning his alliance with the Soviet Union in favor of one with the United States, raising the possibility of an American client state bordering on the Soviet Union’s soft underbelly. To imagine that this increasingly rickety artificial construct of a nation, which couldn’t even feed itself despite being in possession of vast tracts of some of the most arable land on the planet, was capable of taking over the world was bizarre indeed. Meanwhile, to imagine that the people around him would actually allow Reagan to launch an unprovoked first nuclear strike even if he was as unhinged as some in the Soviet leadership believed him to be is to fundamentally misunderstand America and Americans.

On September 1, 1983, this mutual paranoia took its toll in human lives.  Korean Air Lines Flight 007, on its way from New York City to Seoul, drifted hundreds of miles off-course due to the pilot’s apparent failure to change an autopilot setting. It flew over the very same Kamchatka Peninsula the United States had been so aggressively probing. Deciding enough was enough, the Soviet air-defense commander in charge scrambled fighters and made the tragic decision to shoot the plane down without ever confirming that it really was the American spy plane he suspected it to be. All 269 people aboard were killed. Soviet leadership then made the colossally awful decision to deny that they had shot down the plane; then to admit that, well, okay, maybe they had shot it down, but it had all been an American trick to make their country look bad. If Flight 007 had been an American plot, the Soviets could hardly have played better into the Americans’ hands. Reagan promptly pronounced the downing “an act of barbarism” and “a crime against nature,” and the rest of the world nodded along, thinking maybe there was some truth to this Evil Empire business after all. Throughout the fall dueling search parties haunted the ocean around the Kamchatka Peninsula, sometimes aggressively shadowing one another in ways that could easily lead to real shooting warfare. The Soviets found the black box first, then quickly squirreled it away and denied its existence; it clearly confirmed that Flight 007 was exactly the innocent if confused civilian airliner the rest of the world was saying it had been.

The superpowers came as close to the brink of war as they ever would — arguably closer than during the much more famed Cold War flash point of the Cuban Missile Crisis — that November. Despite a “frenzied” atmosphere of paranoia in Moscow, which some diplomats described as “pre-war,” the Reagan administration made the decision to go ahead with another provocation in the form of Able Archer 83, an elaborately realistic drill simulating the command-and-control process leading up to a real nuclear strike. The Soviets had long suspected that the West might attempt to launch a real attack under the cover of a drill. Now, watching Able Archer unfold, with many in the Soviet military claiming that it likely represented the all-out nuclear strike the world had been dreading for so long, the leaderless Politburo squabbled over what to do while a dying Andropov lay in hospital. Nuclear missiles were placed on hair-trigger alert in their silos; aircraft loaded with nuclear weapons stood fueled and ready on their tarmacs. One itchy trigger finger or overzealous politician over the course of the ten-day drill could have resulted in apocalypse. Somehow, it didn’t happen.

On November 20, nine days after the conclusion of Able Archer, the ABC television network aired a first-run movie called The Day After. Directed by Nicholas Meyer, fresh off the triumph of Star Trek II, it told the story of a nuclear attack on the American heartland of Kansas. If anything, it soft-pedaled the likely results of such an attack; as a disclaimer in the end credits noted, a real attack would likely be so devastating that there wouldn’t be enough people left alive and upright to make a story. Still, it was brutally uncompromising for a program that aired on national television during the family-friendly hours of prime time. Viewed by more than 100 million shocked and horrified people, The Day After became one of the landmark events in American television history and a landmark of social history in its own right. Many of the viewers, myself among them, were children. I can remember having nightmares about nuclear hellfire and radiation sickness for weeks afterward. The Day After seemed a fitting capstone to such a year of brinksmanship and belligerence. The horrors of nuclear war were no longer mere abstractions. They felt palpably real.

This, then, was the atmosphere in which Brian Moriarty first conceived of Trinity, a text adventure about the history of atomic weaponry and a poetic meditation on its consequences. Moriarty was working during 1983 for A.N.A.L.O.G. magazine, editing articles and writing reviews and programs for publication as type-in listings. Among these were two text adventures, Adventure in the Fifth Dimension and Crash Dive!, that did what they could within the limitations of their type-in format. Trinity, however, needed more, and so it went unrealized during Moriarty’s time at A.N.A.L.O.G. But it was still on his mind during the spring of 1984, when Konstantin Chernenko was settling in as Andropov’s replacement — one dying, idea-bereft old man replacing another, a metaphor for the state of the Soviet Union if ever there was one — and Moriarty was settling in as the newest addition to Infocom’s Micro Group. And it was still there six months later, when the United States and the Soviet Union were agreeing to resume arms-control talks the following year — Reagan had become more open to the possibility following his own viewing of The Day After, thus making Meyer’s film one of the few with a real claim to having directly influenced the course of history — and Moriarty was agreeing to do an entry-level Zorkian fantasy as his first work as an Imp.

Immediately upon completion of his charming Wishbringer in May of 1985, Moriarty was back to his old obsession, which looked at last to have a chance of coming to fruition. The basic structure of the game had long been decided: a time-jumping journey through a series of important events in atomic history that would begin with you escaping a near-future nuclear strike on London and end with you at the first test of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945 — the Trinity test. In a single feverish week he dashed off the opening vignette in London’s Kensington Gardens, a lovely if foreboding sequence filled with mythic signifiers of the harrowing journey that awaits you. He showed it first to Stu Galley, one of the least heralded of the Imps but one possessed of a quiet passion for interactive fiction’s potential and a wisdom about its production that made him a favorite source of advice among his peers. “If you can sustain this, you’ll have something,” said Galley in his usual understated way.

Thus encouraged, Moriarty could lobby in earnest for his ambitious, deeply serious atomic-age tragedy. Here he caught a lucky break: Wishbringer became one of Infocom’s last substantial hits. While no one would ever claim that the Imps were judged solely on the commercial performance of their games, it certainly couldn’t hurt to have written a hit when your next proposal came up for review. The huge success of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, for instance, probably had a little something to do with Infocom’s decision to green-light Steve Meretzky’s puzzleless experiment A Mind Forever Voyaging. Similarly, this chance to develop the commercially questionable Trinity can be seen, at least partially, as a reward to Moriarty for providing Infocom with one of the few bright spots of a pretty gloomy 1985. They even allowed him to make it the second game (after A Mind Forever Voyaging) written for the new Interactive Fiction Plus virtual machine that allowed twice the content of the normal system at the expense of abandoning at least half the platforms for which Infocom’s games were usually sold. Moriarty would need every bit of the extra space to fulfill his ambitions.

The marker at the site of the Trinity test, as photographed by Moriarty on his 1985 visit.

He plunged enthusiastically into his research, amassing a bibliography some 40 items long that he would eventually publish, in a first and only for Infocom, in the game’s manual. He also reached out personally to a number of scientists and historians for guidance, most notably Ferenc Szasz of the University of Albuquerque, who had just written a book about the Trinity test. That July he took a trip to New Mexico to visit Szasz as well as Los Alamos National Laboratory and other sites associated with early atomic-weapons research, including the Trinity site itself on the fortieth anniversary of that fateful day. His experience of the Land of Enchantment affected him deeply, and in turn affected the game he was writing. In an article for Infocom’s newsletter, he described the weird Strangelovean enthusiasm he found for these dreadful gadgets at Los Alamos with an irony that echoes that of “The Illustrated Story of the Atom Bomb,” the gung-ho comic that would accompany the game itself.

“The Lab” is Los Alamos National Laboratory, announced by a sign that stretches like a CinemaScope logo along the fortified entrance. One of the nation’s leading centers of nuclear-weapons research. The birthplace of the atomic bomb.

The Bradbury Museum occupies a tiny corner in the acres of buildings, parking lots, and barbed-wire fences that comprise the Laboratory. Its collection includes scale models of the very latest in nuclear warheads and guided missiles. You can watch on a computer as animated neutrons blast heavy isotopes to smithereens. The walls are adorned with spectacular color photographs of fireballs and mushroom clouds, each respectfully mounted and individually titled, like great works of art.

I watched a teacher explain a neutron-bomb exhibit to a group of schoolchildren. The exhibit consists of a diagram with two circles. One circle represents the blast radius of a conventional nuclear weapon; a shaded ring in the middle shows the zone of lethal radiation. The other circle shows the relative effects of a neutron bomb. The teacher did her best to point out that the neutron bomb’s “blast” radius is smaller, but its “lethal” radius is proportionally much larger. The benefit of this innovation was not explained, but the kids listened politely.

Trinity had an unusually if not inordinately long development cycle for an Infocom game, stretching from Moriarty’s first foray into Kensington Gardens in May of 1985 to his placing of the finishing touches on the game almost exactly one year later; the released story file bears a compilation datestamp of May 8, 1986. During that time, thanks to the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev and Perestroika and a less belligerent version of Ronald Reagan, the superpowers crept back a bit from the abyss into which they had stared in 1983. Trinity, however, never wavered from its grim determination that it’s only a matter of time until these Pandorean toys of ours lead to the apocalyptic inevitable. Perhaps we’re fooling ourselves; perhaps it’s still just a matter of time before the wrong weapon in the wrong hands leads, accidentally or on purpose, to nuclear winter. If so, may our current blissful reprieve at least stretch as long as possible.

I’m not much interested in art as competition, but it does feel impossible to discuss Trinity without comparing it to Infocom’s other most obviously uncompromising attempt to create literary Art, A Mind Forever Voyaging. If pressed to name a single favorite from the company’s rich catalog, I would guess that a majority of hardcore Infocom fans would likely name one of these two games. As many of you probably know already, I’m firmly in the Trinity camp myself. While A Mind Forever Voyaging is a noble experiment that positively oozes with Steve Meretzky’s big old warm-and-fuzzy heart, it’s also a bit mawkish and one-note in its writing and even its themes. It’s full of great ideas, mind you, but those ideas often aren’t explored — when they’re explored at all — in all that thoughtful of a way. And I must confess that the very puzzleless design that represents its most obvious innovation presents something of a pacing problem for me. Most of the game is just wandering around under-implemented city streets looking for something to record, an experience that leaves me at an odd disconnect from both the story and the world. Mileages of course vary greatly here (otherwise everyone would be a Trinity person), but I really need a reason to get my hands dirty in a game.

One of the most noteworthy things about Trinity, by contrast, is that it is — whatever else it is — a beautifully crafted traditional text adventure, full of intricate puzzles to die for, exactly the sort of game for which Infocom is renowned and which they did better than anyone else. If A Mind Forever Voyaging is a fascinating might-have-been, a tangent down which Infocom would never venture again, Trinity feels like a culmination of everything the 18 games not named A Mind Forever Voyaging that preceded it had been building toward. Or, put another way, if A Mind Forever Voyaging represents the adventuring avant garde, a bold if problematic new direction, Trinity is a work of classicist art, a perfectly controlled, mature application of established techniques. There’s little real plot to Trinity; little character interaction; little at all really that Infocom hadn’t been doing, albeit in increasingly refined ways, since the days of Zork. If we want to get explicit with the comparisons, we might note that the desolate magical landscape where you spend much of the body of Trinity actually feels an awful lot like that of Zork III, while the vignettes you visit from that central hub parallel Hitchhiker’s design. I could go on, but suffice to say that there’s little obviously new here. Trinity’s peculiar genius is to be a marvelous old-school adventure game while also being beautiful, poetic and even philosophically profound. It manages to imbed its themes within its puzzles, implicating you directly in the ideas it explores rather than leaving you largely a wandering passive observer as does A Mind Forever Voyaging.

To my thinking, then, Trinity represents the epitome of Infocom’s craft, achieved some nine years after a group of MIT hackers first saw Adventure and decided they could make something even better. There’s a faint odor of anticlimax that clings to just about every game that would follow it, worthy as most of those games would continue to be on their own terms (Infocom’s sense of craft would hardly allow them to be anything else). Some of the Imps, most notably Dave Lebling, have occasionally spoken of a certain artistic malaise that gripped Infocom in its final years, one that was separate from and perhaps more fundamental than all of the other problems with which they struggled. Where to go next? What more was there to really do in interactive fiction, given the many things, like believable characters and character interactions and parsers that really could understand just about anything you typed, that they still couldn’t begin to figure out how to do? Infocom was never, ever going to be able to top Trinity on its own traditionalist terms and really didn’t know how, given the technical, commercial, and maybe even psychological obstacles they faced, to rip up the mold and start all over again with something completely new. Trinity is the top of mountain, from which they could only start down the other side if they couldn’t find a completely new one to climb. (If we don’t mind straining a metaphor to the breaking point, we might even say that A Mind Forever Voyaging represents a hastily abandoned base camp.)

Given that I think Trinity represents Infocom’s artistic peak (you fans of A Mind Forever Voyaging and other games are of course welcome to your own opinions), I want to put my feet up here for a while and spend the first part of this new year really digging into the history and ideas it evokes. We’re going to go on a little tour of atomic history with Trinity by our side, a series of approaches to one of the most important and tragic — in the classical sense of the term; I’ll go into what I mean by that in a future article — moments of the century just passed, that explosion in the New Mexico desert that changed everything forever. We’ll do so by examining the same historical aftershocks of that “fulcrum of history” (Moriarty’s words) as does Trinity itself, like the game probing deeper and moving back through time toward their locus.

I think of Trinity almost as an intertextual work. “Intertextuality,” like many fancy terms beloved by literary scholars, isn’t really all that hard a concept to understand. It simply refers to a work that requires that its reader have a knowledge of certain other works in order to gain a full appreciation of this one. While Moriarty is no Joyce or Pynchon, Trinity evokes huge swathes of history and lots of heady ideas in often abstract, poetic ways, using very few but very well-chosen words. The game can be enjoyed on its own, but it gains so very much resonance when we come to it knowing something about all of this history. Why else did Moriarty include that lengthy bibliography? In lieu of that 40-item reading list, maybe I can deliver some of the prose you need to fully appreciate Moriarty’s poetry. And anyway, I think this stuff is interesting as hell, which is a pretty good justification in its own right. I hope you’ll agree, and I hope you’ll enjoy the little detour we’re about to make before we continue on to other computer games of the 1980s.

(This and the next handful of articles will all draw from the same collection of sources, so I’ll just list them once here.

On the side of Trinity the game and Infocom, we have, first and foremost as always, Jason Scott’s Get Lamp materials. Also the spring 1986 issue of Infocom’s newsletter, untitled now thanks to legal threats from The New York Times; the September/October 1986 and November 1986 Computer Gaming World; the August 1986 Questbusters; and the August 1986 Computer and Video Games.

As far as atomic history, I find I’ve amassed a library almost as extensive as Trinity’s bibliography. Standing in its most prominent place we have Richard Rhodes’s magisterial “atomic trilogy” The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun, and Arsenals of Folly. There’s also Command and Control by Eric Schlosser; The House at Otowi Bridge by Peggy Pond Church; The Nuclear Weapons Encyclopedia; Now It Can Be Told by Leslie Groves; Hiroshima by John Hershey; The Day the Sun Rose Twice by Ferenc Morton Szasz; Enola Gay by Gordon Thomas; and Prompt and Utter Destruction by J. Samuel Walker. I can highly recommend all of these books for anyone who wants to read further in these subjects.)

Comments
43 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

January 7, 2015 at 7:17 pm

Looking forward to these posts.

One other book that doesn’t deal primarily with the Trinity test but that does capture something of the spirit of the early atomic age is Operation Crossroads: The Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll. In particular, the book captures the total insouciance about radiation that characterized the early testing; ships were anchored in the Bikini lagoon during the first test, for example, and after the detonation the crews were sent right back onto those ships that hadn’t sunk to, you know, scrub things down a bit.

I should note that the author is a lawyer who represented the natives of Bikini Atoll for more than 30 years in their (ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to obtain compensation for the irradiation of the atoll (which persists to this day, and is expected to persist for at least another 30 years or so). I worked with him on that representation in its last few years.

- Sniffnoy

January 7, 2015 at 9:29 pm

Nitpicking: “Twisting the tale” should be “twisting the tail”.

- Jimmy Maher

January 8, 2015 at 6:53 am

Thanks!

- FilfreFan

April 30, 2016 at 6:27 pm

Bereft of context, “twisting the tail” brought to mind the not-unrelated story of Louis Alexander Slotin, slain by the Demon Pile after “tickling the tail” of the dragon. He might have thought the better of it, as that same Demon Pile had already taken the life of his colleague, Harry K. Daghlian Jr., just a year or so earlier.

- FilfreFan

May 1, 2016 at 12:08 am

LOL, when I posted, I had only read this far and didn’t imagine that this comment would be well covered in future posts.

*Sigh*

Sorry for the duplication.

- Lisa H.

January 8, 2015 at 12:37 am

Trinity definitely landed among my favorites once I was old enough to really understand it.

You can watch on a computer as animated neurons blast heavy isotopes to smithereens.

Neutrons, surely, not “neurons”? Or is this error in the original?

- Jimmy Maher

January 8, 2015 at 6:52 am

Nope, that was mine. Thanks!

- Asterisk

January 8, 2015 at 8:38 am

Nitpick: Moriarty’s visit in July of 1985 would have coincided with the fortieth, not the thirtieth, anniversary of the Trinity tests.

- Jimmy Maher

January 8, 2015 at 8:50 am

Right you are. Thanks!

- Xerxes

January 8, 2015 at 1:56 pm

A single fusion device could be “thousands of kilotons of thermonuclear weapons”, so that’s not a very impressive turn of phrase. At peak, the Soviets probably had about 10 million kilotons.

- Jimmy Maher

January 8, 2015 at 2:43 pm

Fair enough. Thanks!

- ademct

January 8, 2015 at 5:12 pm

One of the very best satirical fiction works about the nuclear era is “This is the Way the World Ends” by James Morrow. I urge anyone who hasn’t read it to rush out and read it right now. While fiction, it also has some interesting details about the, quite literally, MAD policies of the time.

- Peter Piers

December 24, 2015 at 12:18 pm

I had to read the next article to know you’re not saying those policies were insane, but actually about Mutually Assured Destruction. :)

- Hanon Ondricek

January 8, 2015 at 9:00 pm

TRINITY is one of my weird favorite Infocom games ever. When I played I was young enough to have heard of the Cold War but didn’t completely understand it. Still, somehow the game hooked me. Probably for the hub landscape with a sky “the sad color of antique brass” and for teaching me what a “gnomon” is. Killing the tiny lizard was traumatic after having carried it around feeling I’d found a pet.

- Lisa H.

January 8, 2015 at 9:56 pm

Oh, and one of my favorite bits from the Invisiclues, referring to the gnomon’s screw threads:

My threads clash. What do I do?
1. Get a better tailor.

- Scott M. Bruner

January 8, 2015 at 10:06 pm

Having also read “Thirteen Days” as a child, and growing up on military bases, I’ve always thought perhaps the greatest proof there’s alien life is that we didn’t annihilate ourselves during the Cold War – that there exists some protective life-forms who keep shaking their head and intervening at the last minute.

I have spent a lot of time with “Trinity” – and I honestly think it’s greatest asset, as a piece of IF, is its ability to starkly affect the reader/player/interactor with its overwhelming, sense of futility. I can’t say much more with spoiling it.

It’s one of a few pieces – like AMFV – where you have to ask what the implementor is actually saying. After hearing this anecdote about Moriarty’s trip to Alamo (which I hadn’t read before), it’s amazing how well “Trinity” actually takes you into that nightmare headspace/cognitive dissonance. Strangelove as game, I guess.

The museum is called the Bradbury museum?!

- Scott M. Bruner

January 8, 2015 at 10:07 pm

* its

- Paul A.

March 7, 2017 at 3:43 am

The Norris E. Bradbury Science Museum, named after Oppenheimer’s successor as director of the Lab.

(And not, although this was my first thought and I’m guessing may have been yours, after the guy who wrote all those science fiction stories about humanity wiping itself out in nuclear conflagrations.)

- Nate

January 11, 2015 at 7:30 pm

Interesting idea for a series. May I also suggest the other nuclear-themed games of the same era (Chernobyl comes to mind)? I don’t mean Red Storm Rising or similar non-original games.

As a kid in the 80s, I did a research paper on energy generation via nuclear reactors. My home town was farm country, so our library was out-of-date. I read quite a few Tom Swift novels from the 40s and 50s, where, in the future, everything was nuclear powered. Quite an odd alternate history.

- Jimmy Maher

January 12, 2015 at 6:56 am

Interesting. I hadn’t seen that one before.

But for this series I do want to stay with Trinity. I have a lot to say about that game and a pretty good plan how to say it all…

- Johannes Paulsen

January 15, 2019 at 6:32 pm

Not an alternate history at all if you live in France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France

- ZUrlocker

January 12, 2015 at 6:08 am

Great to get the background on Trinity and I look forward to the next post.

BTW, maybe I am too much of an Infocom fanboy, but why not put together all the infocom-related blog posts (plus additional stuff on bookware) and have a whole book just on the history and impact of Infocom? I’d buy it!

- Jimmy Maher

January 12, 2015 at 6:57 am

Yes, themed books on Infocom and other topics are definitely a possibility. No need to consider it until the Infocom history is finished, though…

- Victor

March 29, 2019 at 8:35 pm

+1.. take my $$ please.

- iPadCary

January 20, 2015 at 2:22 pm

One of THE best games ever done ….

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- Peter Piers

December 24, 2015 at 11:36 am

The background here is downright scary. Yes, hindsight is 20/20, but all the same, all those provocations at such a nervous time… That drill after the 007 Flight disaster… Maybe this is typical post-Atom Bomb thinking (between the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb, it’s amazing how the 20th century changed the minds and might of the world – always through war), but it seems dangerous, irresponsible, reckless, and all the other similar adjectives you want to tack on. Bravado like that gets innocents killed in the thousands.

- Peter Piers

December 24, 2015 at 12:10 pm

Funny I’m still thinking about how it changed us. It’s like we were children – all through civilization, we were children, playing a game of society, taking what nature had to offer and bettering it when we could. We lived in a world of make-believe, not unlike – to get a specific example – the English class system in its heyday. WW1 and its fallout was a rude awakening there, it indicated the make-believe was over and there were, in fact, harsh realities to face and the dream couldn’t be kept up…

…and it’s like the bomb did that to the whole world. We were playing with fire, as children do – and we finally got burned. We got burned so bad we finally grew up, grew out of naïvetè and childhood. We became aware of our consequences. As an under-informed child, the term “atom children” conjured thoughts of horrors, radiation malformations, and nuclear wastelands. Now, I think I am proud to call myself, and the rest of the human race, atomic children – we have learned (hopefully), and are still learning.

- CdrJameson

April 18, 2016 at 8:31 am

(I’m catching up, so sorry about commenting on an old-post)

Nitpick – References to ‘the Kensington Gardens’ and ‘the Lancaster Walk’. These places are just ‘Kensington Gardens’ and ‘Lancaster Walk’, no ‘the’ required.

I can just imagine the answer someone looking for ‘the’ Lambeth Walk would get, other than directions to Lambeth Walk.

- Jimmy Maher

April 18, 2016 at 8:52 am

Thanks!

- Gideon Marcus

February 3, 2017 at 5:05 am

Beautiful. Thank you so much for this. For all its flaws, Trinity is so dear to me. It was the game that brought me and my wife together, in fact.

- Jimmy Maher

February 3, 2017 at 8:50 am

Wow. You should share that story, if you don’t mind.

- Iain Shepherd

May 24, 2019 at 9:01 am

What Jimmy said. I would love to hear it!

- DZ-Jay

March 7, 2017 at 11:42 pm

A few possible typos:

>> “Indeed, almost from the moment that Reagan had took office…”
Should that be “had taken”?

>> “… maybe they had it shot it down…”
Seems like an extra “it” in there…

- Jimmy Maher

March 8, 2017 at 10:18 am

Thanks!

- Oliver Naujoks, Germany

November 19, 2019 at 8:54 am

My first post here.

I just read your wonderful “Let’s tell a story together” and your articles about Trinity, a game which I loved and am in awe of. I am one of those former C-128 owners who loved the opportunity to have some Infocom games especially for my machine, even though I would still call AFMV as the artistic peak of Infocom, not Trinity.

Why I’m writing here: I recently (last year) did another playthrough of Trinity and one thing kept bugging me more than ever before: Trinity has so much to say and does some things so brillantly and then – do we really need all that zorkian stuff? So much of that? Far too much of that? It really started to bug and annoy me this time how many ridiculously tough Zork riddles I had to endure just to get to the ‘good’/atomic stuff of the game. You wrote in your essay that this is a nice sort of wraparound (my rephrasing of your words) for the subject, I’m not so sure I agree.
What do I want to say? I know that Infocom worked with the auteur-rule, but had they used more game producers and that would have been my job, I probably would have told Mr. Moriarty (Brian, not Professor): Please cut back the Zork stuff.

—
In closing, sometime it’s strange what kind of effects things have. When I played the game the first time, I was a student in Germany (and the nuclear threat was much more present in our minds) and because i was fascinated by just one quote in the game, I picked up reading Alexander Pope. :-)

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2019 at 9:20 am

I’m not sure what you mean by “Zorkian stuff.” I’m actually not aware of any specific Zork references in Trinity. Do you mean puzzles in general? While one could certainly argue that the timing of the endgame is too tight, I think the puzzles in Trinity complement the narrative more often than not. The gnomon puzzle, the umbrella, the killing of the skink, etc., all help to bring out the game’s themes of historical time, historical culpability, and historical inevitability. I’d go so far as to call Trinity a textbook example of puzzles that serve literary ends rather than serving strictly as diversions in themselves, or merely serving to keep the player from finishing too quickly. (Although the last function can be important too in an interactive work; I’d argue that A Mind Forever Voyaging has significant pacing issues arising from its lack of puzzles. But then, I consider that game an earnest but flawed effort rather than Infocom’s masterpiece.)

Several people have pointed out in the years since I wrote these articles that I didn’t spend enough time on Trinity’s puzzle design. This is, for what it’s worth, a very fair criticism…

- Oliver Naujoks

November 22, 2019 at 11:26 am

I’m afraid my phrasing “Zorkian” was misleading. What I meant was: When I play a game about the Atomic Age and the Atomic Bomb, why do I have to spend so much time wandering around another Fantasy-land(tm)?

I guess I know what Mr. Moriarty was thinking, he needed some means in the story to connect the many places and times he wanted his players to visit (like the Animus in modern Assassin’s Creed games) but a little less time spent there would have helped the game, at least for me. I love Fantasy, but I would have liked to spend more time in historical places in the game; don’t you agree?

BTW, I probably placed AMFV on such a pedestal because I played it when I was 14-15 years old. Playing it today and thinking about it, I couldn’t help but notice that the political leanings are not exactly transported in a very subtle way..

- Jimmy Maher

November 22, 2019 at 11:39 am

Not really, no. Yes, the magical land serves a practical function as a conduit between times and places, but it’s not just a fantasy grab bag a la Zork. Some of the most affecting imagery in the game is found here. For instance, realizing that each mushroom represents an atomic blast, then looking off toward the horizon and seeing how the mushrooms multiply… that instant of understanding may just be the most chilling moment in the entire game. It’s imagery like this that elevates the game from a mere series of historical vignettes to something more… poetic.

- Oliver

November 27, 2019 at 8:52 pm

Ok, you’re right, the scene with the mushrooms was brillant, no argument there. Maybe I’m just frustrated because I found the puzzles quite challenging when I (re-)played the game last year.

- Niall

April 8, 2021 at 9:23 am

I’ve always thought that the few design flaws in this otherwise marvellous game could be solved in one single stroke: abolish the inventory limits. Change that one line of code and suddenly the player doesn’t need to preternaturally know to take the breadcrumbs, lantern, walkie-talkie and lemming to New Mexico with them (though personally, I never visit New Mexico without a lemming).

To reach the later stages of that section, only to realise that you need an object you left on the far bank of the Styx and hence have to reload yet again, was the only point of frustration in what was otherwise a perfectly fair and balanced game. (I will allow the sudden death in outer space because a) you live long enough to see the crescent moon, cluing you in immediately to the area’s purpose and b) it makes you wonder how the hell you’re going to solve what, on the face of it, seems an impossible conundrum.)

It’s curious that, while people give out endlessly about eating and sleeping loops in Infocom games, inventory limits seem to be accepted by and large. Personally, I’ve never been that bothered by having to eat something in a game. In Planetfall, I’d argue that filling up your flask each morning gives the days a bit of routine, a breakfast moment that helps place you in its world a little more.

But managing my inventory with a text parser is always a chore. Even in the Enchanter series, where you could easily make the argument that you have some magical way to have the objects float alongside you, they still force you build grim little item mounds: totems to unnecessary drudgery.

- Jimmy Maher

April 8, 2021 at 9:51 am

Yes, there are a few things that could be done to make Trinity vastly more welcoming — things any good modern designer would see as fairly commonsense. Personally, I’d make failure in one of the historical vignettes bounce you back to the dreamworld to try again instead of killing you dead. And I’d make it impossible to enter a vignette without the things you’re going to need there. Neither of these steps would stretch the boundaries of the game’s magical realism unduly. Then I’d make the climax and perhaps the prologue as well run on plot time rather than clock time. While Trinity is a very cleverly structured traditional text adventure, its real identity rests in the theme it explores. It strikes me as a shame to block people from experiencing its literary qualities with a lot of petty “gamey” frustrations, but I know from comments I’ve received over the years that this had indeed happened in many cases.

Infocom evolved quickly throughout its brief lifespan, and thought more seriously about design than any 1980s adventure studio with the possible exception of Lucasfilm Games, but for all that the Imps were never entirely able to shed the old-school ethos of Zork. Trinity is an example of that: looking toward the future, but still stuck in some ways in the past.

T Plus 5: Bombs in Space
January 16, 2015

Earth Orbit, on a satellite

The satellite you're riding is about twenty feet long, and shaped like a beer can.

>z
Time passes.

A red flash draws your eyes to the ground below, where the contrail of a missile is climbing into the stratosphere.

>z
Time passes.

The maneuvering thrusters on the satellite fire, turning the nose until it faces the ascending missile.

>z
Time passes.

The satellite erupts in a savage glare that lights up the ground below. A beam of violet radiation flashes downward, obliterating the distant missile. Unfortunately, you have little time to admire this triumph of engineering before the satellite's blast incinerates you.

Trinity aims in 256 K of text adventure to chronicle at least fifty years of humanity’s relationship to the atomic bomb, as encapsulated into seven vignettes. Two of these, the one dealing with the long-dreaded full-on nuclear war that begins with you on vacation in London’s Kensington Gardens and the one you see above involving a functioning version of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative (a proposition that all by itself justifies Trinity’s “Fantasy” genre tag, as we’ll soon see), are actually speculative rather than historical, taking place at some point in the near future. The satirical comic that accompanies the game also reserves space for Reagan and his dream. It’s a bold choice to put Reagan himself in there, undisguised by pseudonymous machinations like A Mind Forever Voyaging’s “Richard Ryder” — even a brave one for a company that was hardly in a position to alienate potential players. Trinity, you see, was released at the absolute zenith of Reagan’s popularity. While the comic and the game it accompanies hardly add up to a scathing sustained indictment a la A Mind Forever Voyaging, they do cast him as yet one more Cold Warrior in a conservative blue suit leading the world further along the garden path to the unthinkable. Today I’d like to look at this “orbiting ‘umbrella’ of high technology” that Trinity postulates — correctly — isn’t really going to help us all that much at all when the missiles start to fly. Along the way we’ll get a chance to explore some of the underpinnings of the nuclear standoff and also the way it came to an anticlimactically sudden end, so thankfully at odds with Trinity’s more dramatic predictions of the supposed inevitable.

In November of 1985, while Trinity was in development, Ronald Reagan and the new Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev met for the first American/Soviet summit of Reagan’s Presidency. The fact that the summit took place at all was almost entirely down to the efforts of Gorbachev, who quite skillfully made it politically impossible for Reagan not to attend. It marked the first time Reagan had actually talked with his Soviet counterpart face to face in his almost five years as President. The two men, as contemporary press reports would have it, “took the measure of each other” and largely liked what they saw, but came to no agreements. The second summit, held in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October of the following year, came to within a hair’s breadth of a major deal that would have started the superpowers down the road to the complete elimination of nuclear armaments and effectively marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. The only stumbling block was the Strategic Defense Initiative. Gorbachev was adamant that Reagan give it up, or at least limit it to “laboratory testing”; Reagan just as adamantly refused. He repeatedly expressed to both Gorbachev and the press his bafflement at this alleged intransigence. SDI, he said, was to be a technology of defense, a technology for peace. His favorite metaphor was SDI as a nuclear “gas mask.” The major powers of the world had all banned poison gas by treaty after World War I, and, rather extraordinarily, even kept to that bargain through all the other horrors of World War II. Still, no one had thrown away their gas-mask stockpiles, and the knowledge that other countries still possessed them had just possibly helped to keep everyone honest. SDI, Reagan said, could serve the same purpose in the realm of nuclear weapons. He even made an extraordinary offer: the United States would be willing to give SDI to the Soviets “at cost” — whatever that meant — as soon as it was ready, as long as the Soviets would also be willing to share any fruits of their own (largely nonexistent) research. That way everyone could have nuclear gas masks! How could anyone who genuinely hoped and planned not to use nuclear weapons anyway possibly object to terms like that?

Gorbachev had a different view of the matter. He saw SDI as an inherently destabilizing force that would effectively jettison not one but two of the tacit agreements of the Cold War that had so far prevented a nuclear apocalypse. Would any responsible leader easily accept such an engine of chaos in return for a vague promise to “share” the technology? Would Reagan? It’s very difficult to know what was behind Reagan’s seeming naivete. Certainly his advisers knew that his folksy analogies hardly began to address Gorbachev’s very real and very reasonable concerns. If the shoe had been on the other foot, they would have had the same reaction. Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger had demonstrated that in December of 1983, when he had said, “I can’t imagine a more destabilizing factor for the world than if the Soviets should acquire a thoroughly reliable defense against these missiles before we did.” As for Reagan himself, who knows? Your opinion on the matter depends on how you take this famous but enigmatic man whom conservatives have always found as easy to deify as liberals to demonize. Was he a bold visionary who saved his country from itself, or a Machivellian schemer who used a genial persona to institute an uglier, more heartless version of America? Or was he just a clueless if good-natured and very, very lucky bumbler? Or was he still the experienced actor, out there hitting his marks and selling the policies of his handlers like he had once shilled for General Electric? Regardless, let’s try to do more justice to Gorbachev’s concerns about SDI than Reagan did at their summits.

It’s kind of amazing that the Cold War never led to weapons in space. It certainly didn’t have to be that way. Histories today note what a shock it was to American pride and confidence when the Soviet Union became the first nation to successfully launch a satellite on October 4, 1957. That’s true enough, but a glance at the newspapers from the time also reveals less abstract fears. Now that the Soviets had satellites, people expected them to weaponize them, to use them to start dropping atomic bombs on their heads from space. One rumor, which amazingly turned out to have a basis in fact, claimed the Soviets planned to nuke the Moon, leading to speculation on what would happen if their missile was to miss the surface, boomerang around the Moon, and come back to Earth — talk about being hoisted by one’s own petard! The United States’s response to the Soviets’ satellite was par for the course during the Cold War: panicked, often ill-considered activity in the name of not falling behind. Initial responsibility for space was given to the military. The Navy and the Air Force, who often seemed to distrust one another more than either did the Soviets, promptly started squabbling over who owned this new seascape or skyscape, which depending on how you looked at it and how you picked your metaphors could reasonably be assumed to belong to either. While the Naval Research Laboratory struggled to get the United States’s first satellite into space, the more ambitious dreamers at the Air Force Special Weapons Center made their own secret plans to nuke the Moon as a show of force and mulled the construction of a manned secret spy base there.

But then, on July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower signed the bill that would transform the tiny National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics into the soon-to-be massive National Aeronautics and Space Administration — NASA. While NASA’s charter duly charged the new agency with making any “discoveries” available for “national defense” and with “the preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology,” those goals came only after more high-toned abstractions like “the expansion of human knowledge” and the use of space for “peaceful and scientific purposes.” NASA was something of an early propaganda coup at a time when very little seemed to be going right with astronautics in the United States. The Soviet leadership had little choice but to accept the idea, publicly at least, of space exploration as a fundamentally peaceful endeavor. In 1967 the United States and the Soviet Union became signatories along with many other nations to the Outer Space Treaty that enshrined the peaceful status quo into international law. By way of compensation, the first operational ICBMs had started to come online by the end of the 1950s, giving both superpowers a way of dealing impersonal death from the stratosphere without having to rely on wonky satellites.

This is not to say that the Cold War never made it into space in any form. Far from it. Apollo, that grandest adventure of the twentieth century, would never have happened without the impetus of geopolitics. The Apollo 11 astronauts may have left a message on the Moon saying they had “come in peace for all mankind,” may have even believed it at some level, but that was hardly the whole story. President Kennedy, the architect of it all, had no illusions about the real purpose of his Moon pronouncement. “Everything that we do ought to be really tied into getting onto the Moon ahead of the Russians,” he told NASA Administrator James Webb in 1962. “Otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money because I’m not that interested in space.” The Moon Race, like war, was diplomacy through other means. As such, the division between military and civilian was not always all that clear. For instance, the first Americans to fly into orbit, like the first Soviets, did so mounted atop repurposed ICBMs.

Indeed, neither the American nor the Soviet military had any interest in leaving space entirely to the civilians. If one of the goals of NASA’s formation had been to eliminate duplications of effort, it didn’t entirely succeed. The Air Force in particular proved very reluctant to give up on their own manned space efforts, developing during the 1960s the X-15 rocket plane that Neil Armstrong among others flew to the edge of orbit, the cancelled Dyna-Soar space plane, and even a manned space station that also never got off the drawing board. Planners in both the United States and the Soviet Union seemed to treat the 1967 Outer Space Treaty as almost a temporary accord, waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the militarization of space to begin in earnest. I’ve already described in an earlier article how, once the Moon Race was over, NASA was forced to make an unholy alliance with the Air Force to build the space shuttle, whose very flight profile was designed to allow it to avoid space-based weaponry that didn’t yet actually exist.

Yet the most immediate and far-reaching military application of space proved to be reconnaissance satellites. Well before the 1960s were out these orbiting spies had become vital parts of the intelligence apparatus of both the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as vital tools for the detection of ICBM launches by the other side — yet another component of the ever-evolving balance of terror. Still, restrained by treaty, habit, and concern over what it might make the other guys do, neither of the superpowers ever progressed to the logical step of trying to shoot down those satellites that were spying on their countries. If you had told people in 1957 that there would still be effectively no weapons in space almost thirty years later, that there would never have been anything even remotely resembling a battle in space, I think they would be quite surprised.

But now SDI had come along and, at least in the Soviets’ view, threatened to undermine that tradition. They need only take at face value early reports of SDI’s potential implementations, which were all over the American popular media by the time of Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, to have ample grounds for concern. One early plan, proposed in apparent earnest by a committee who may have seen The Battle of Britain (or Star Wars) a few too many times, would have the United States and its allies protected by squadrons of orbiting manned fighter planes, who would rocket to the rescue to shoot down encroaching ICBMs, their daring pilots presumably wearing dashing scarves and using phrases like “Tally ho!” A more grounded plan, relatively speaking, was the one for hundreds of “orbiting battle stations” equipped with particle-beam weapons or missiles of their own — hey, whatever works — to pick off the ICBMs. Of course, as soon as these gadgets came into being the Soviets would have to develop gadgets of their own to try to take them out. Thus a precious accord would be shattered forever. To the Soviets, SDI felt like a betrayal, a breaking of a sacred trust that had so far kept people and satellites in space from having to shoot at each other and in doing so had just possibly prevented the development of a new generation of horrific weaponry.

And yet this was if anything the more modest of the two outrages they saw being inflicted on the world by SDI. The biggest problem was that it could be both a symptom and a cause of the ending of the old MAD doctrine — Mutually Assured Destruction — that had been the guiding principle of both superpowers for over twenty years and that had prevented them from blowing one another up along with the rest of the world. On its surface, the MAD formulation is simplicity itself. I have enough nuclear weapons to destroy your country — or at least to do unacceptable damage to it — and a window of time to launch them at you between the time I realize that you’ve launched yours at me and the time that yours actually hit me. Further, neither of us has the ability to stop the missiles of the other — at least, not enough of them. Therefore we’d best find some way to get along and not shoot missiles at each other. One comparison, so favored by Reagan that he drove Gorbachev crazy by using it over and over again at each of their summits, is that of two movie mobsters with cocked and loaded pistols pointed at each others’ heads.

That well-intentioned comparison is also a rather facile one. The difference is a matter of degree. Many of us had MAD, that most fundamental doctrine of the Cold War, engrained in us as schoolchildren to such a degree that it might be hard for us to really think about its horribleness anymore. Nevertheless, I’d like for us to try to do so now. Let’s think in particular about its basic psychological prerequisites. In order for the threat of nuclear annihilation to be an effective deterrent, in order for it never to be carried out, it must paradoxically be a real threat, one which absolutely, unquestionably would be carried out if the order was given. If the other side was ever to suspect that we were not willing to destroy them, the deterrent would evaporate. So, we must create an entire military superstructure, a veritable subculture, of many thousands of people all willing to unquestioningly annihilate tens or hundreds of millions of people. Indeed, said annihilation is the entire purpose of their professional existence. They sit in their missile silos or in their ready rooms or cruise the world in their submarines waiting for the order to push that button or turn that key that will quite literally end existence as they know it, insulated from the incalculable suffering that action will cause inside the very same sorts of “clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices” that Reagan once described as the domain of the Soviet Union’s totalitarian leadership alone. If the rise of this sort of antiseptic killing is the tragedy of the twentieth century, the doctrine of MAD represents it taken to its well-nigh incomprehensible extreme.

MAD, requiring as it did people to be always ready and able to carry out genocide so that they would not have to carry out genocide, struck a perilous psychological balance. Things had the potential to go sideways when one of these actors in what most people hoped would be Waiting for Godot started to get a little bit too ready and able — in short, when someone started to believe that he could win. See for example General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command from its inception until 1965 and the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove’s unhinged General Jack Ripper. LeMay believed to his dying day that the the United States had “lost” the Cuban Missile Crisis because President Kennedy had squandered his chance to finally just attack the Soviet Union and be done with it; talked of the killing of 100 million human beings as a worthwhile trade-off for the decapitation of the Soviet leadership; openly campaigned for and sought ways to covertly acquire the metaphorical keys to the nuclear arsenal, to be used solely at his own dubious discretion. “If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I’m going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground,” he once told a civil-defense committee. When told that such an action would represent insubordination to the point of treason, he replied, “I don’t care. It’s my policy. That’s what I’m going to do.” Tellingly, Dr. Strangelove itself was originally envisioned as a realistic thriller. The film descended into black comedy only when Stanley Kubrick started his research and discovered that so much of the reality was, well, blackly comic. Much in Dr. Strangelove that moviegoers of 1964 took as satire was in fact plain truth.

If the belief by a single individual that a nuclear war can be won is dangerous, an institutionalized version of that belief might just be the most dangerous thing in the world. And here we get to the heart of the Soviets’ almost visceral aversion to SDI, for it seemed to them and many others a product of just such a belief.

During the mid-1970s, when détente was still the watchword of the day, a group of Washington old-timers and newly arrived whiz kids formed something with the Orwellian name of The Committee on the Present Danger. Its leading light was one Paul Nitze. A name few Americans then or now are likely to recognize, Nitze had been a Washington insider since the 1940s and would remain a leading voice in Cold War policy for literally the entire duration of the Cold War. He and his colleagues, many of them part of a new generation of so-called “neoconservative” ideologues, claimed that détente was a sham, that “the Soviets do not agree with the Americans that nuclear war is unthinkable and unwinnable and that the only objective of strategic doctrine must be mutual deterrence.” On the contrary, they were preparing for “war-fighting, war-surviving, and war-winning.” Their means for accomplishing the latter two objectives would be an elaborate civil-defense program that was supposedly so effective as to reduce their casualties in an all-out nuclear exchange to about 10 percent of what the United States could expect. The Committee offered little or no proof for these assertions and many others like them. Many simply assumed that the well-connected Nitze must have access to secret intelligence sources which he couldn’t name. If so, they were secret indeed. When the CIA, alarmed by claims of Soviet preparedness in the Committee’s reports that were completely new to them, instituted a two-year investigation to get to the bottom of it all, they couldn’t find any evidence whatsoever of any unusual civil-defense programs, much less any secret plans to start and win a nuclear war. It appears that Nitze and his colleagues exaggerated wildly and, when even that wouldn’t serve their ends, just made stuff up. (This pattern of “fixing the intelligence” would remain with Committee veterans for decades, leading most notably to the Iraq invasion of 2003.)

Throughout the Carter administration the Committee lobbied anyone who would listen, using the same sort of paranoid circular logic that had led to the nuclear-arms race in the first place. The Soviets, they said, have secretly abandoned the MAD strategy and embarked on a nuclear-war-winning strategy in its place. Therefore we must do likewise. There could be no American counterpart to the magical Soviet civil-defense measures that could somehow protect 90 percent of their population from the blasts of nuclear weapons and the long years of radioactive fall-out that would follow. This was because civil defense was “unattractive” to an “open society” (“unattractiveness” being a strangely weak justification for not doing something in the face of what the Committee claimed was an immediate existential threat, but so be it). One thing the United States could and must do in response was to engage in a huge nuclear- and conventional-arms buildup. That way it could be sure to hammer the Soviets inside their impregnable tunnels — or wherever it was they would all be going — just as hard as possible. But in addition, the United States must come up with a defense of its own.

Although Carter engaged in a major military buildup in his own right, his was nowhere near big enough in the Committee’s eyes. But then came the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. Reagan took all of the Committee’s positions to heart and, indeed, took most of its most prominent members into his administration. Their new approach to geopolitical strategy was immediately apparent, and immediately destabilizing. Their endless military feints and probes and aggressive rhetoric seemed almost to have the intention of starting a war with the Soviet Union, a war they seemed to welcome whilst being bizarrely dismissive of its potentially world-ending consequences. Their comments read like extracts from Trinity’s satirically gung-ho accompanying comic. “Nuclear war is a destructive thing, but it is still in large part a physics problem,” said one official. “If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it. It’s the dirt that does it,” said another. Asked if he thought that a nuclear war was “winnable,” Casper Weinberger replied, “We certainly are not planning to be defeated.” And then, in March of that fraught year of 1983 when the administration almost got the nuclear war it seemed to be courting, came Reagan’s SDI speech.

The most important thing to understand about SDI is that it was always a fantasy, a chimera chased by politicians and strategists who dearly wished it was possible. The only actual scientist amongst those who lobbied for it was Edward Teller, well known to the public as the father of the hydrogen bomb. One of the few participants in the Manhattan Project which had built the first atomic bomb more than 35 years before still active in public life at the time that Reagan took office, Teller was a brilliant scientist when he wanted to be, but one whose findings and predictions were often tainted by his strident anti-communism and a passion for nuclear weapons that could leave him sounding as unhinged as General LeMay. Teller seldom saw a problem that couldn’t be solved just by throwing a hydrogen bomb or two at it. His response to Carter’s decision to return the Panama Canal to Panama, for instance, was to recommend quickly digging a new one across some more cooperative Central American country using hydrogen bombs. Now, alone amongst his scientific peers, Teller told the Reagan administration that SDI was possible. He claimed that he could create X-ray beams in space by, naturally, detonating hydrogen bombs just so. These could be aimed at enemy missiles, zapping them out of the sky. The whole system could be researched, built, and put into service within five years. As evidence, he offered some inconclusive preliminary results derived from experimental underground explosions. It was all completely ridiculous; we still don’t know how to create such X-ray beams today, decades on. But it was also exactly the sort of superficially credible scientific endorsement — and from the father of the hydrogen bomb, no less! — that the Reagan administration needed.

Reagan coasted to reelection in 1984 in a campaign that felt more like a victory lap, buoyed by “Morning Again in America,” an energetic economy, and a military buildup that had SDI as one of its key components. The administration lobbied Congress to give the SDI project twice the inflation-adjusted funding as that received by the Manhattan Project at the height of World War II. With no obviously promising paths at all to follow, SDI opted for the spaghetti approach, throwing lots and lots of stuff at the wall in the hope that something would stick. Thus it devolved into a whole lot of individual fiefdoms with little accountability and less coordination with one another. Dr. Ashton Carter of Harvard, a former Defense Department analyst with full security clearance tasked with preparing a study of SDI for the Congressional Budget Office, concluded that the prospect for any sort of success was “so remote that it should not serve as the basis of public expectations of national policy.” Most of the press, seduced by Reagan’s own euphoria, paid little heed to such voices, instead publishing articles talking about the relative merits of laser and kinetic-energy weapons, battle stations in space, and whether the whole system should be controlled by humans or turned over to a supercomputer mastermind. With every notion as silly and improbable as every other and no direction in the form of a coherent plan from the SDI project itself, everyone could be an expert, everyone could build their own little SDI castle above the stratosphere. When journalists did raise objections, Reagan replied with more folksy homilies about how everyone thought Edison was crazy until he invented the light bulb, appealing to the good old American ingenuity that had got us to the Moon and could make anything possible. The administration’s messaging was framed so as to make objecting to SDI unpatriotic, downright un-American.

And yet even if you thought that American ingenuity would indeed save the day in the end, SDI had a more fundamental problem that made it philosophically as well as scientifically unsound. This most basic objection, cogently outlined at the time by the great astronomer, science popularizer, space advocate, and anti-SDI advocate Carl Sagan, was a fairly simple one. Even the most fanciful predictions for SDI must have a capacity ceiling, a limit beyond which the system simply couldn’t shoot down any more missiles. And it would always be vastly cheaper to build a few dozen more missiles than it would be to build and launch and monitor another battle station (or whatever) to deal with them. Not only would SDI not bring an end to nuclear weapons, it was likely to actually accelerate the nuclear-arms race, as the Soviet Union would now feel the need to not only be able to destroy the United States ten times over but be able to destroy the United States ten times over while also comprehensively overwhelming any SDI system in place. Reagan’s public characterization of SDI as a “nuclear umbrella” under which the American public might live safe and secure had no basis in reality. Even if SDI could somehow be made 99 percent effective, a figure that would make it more successful than any other defense in the history of warfare, the 1 percent of the Soviet Union’s immense arsenal that got through would still be enough to devastate many of the country’s cities and kill tens or hundreds of millions. There may have been an argument to make for SDI research aimed at developing, likely decades in the future, a system that could intercept and destroy a few rogue missiles. As a means of protection against a full-on strategic strike, though… forget it. It wasn’t going to happen. Ever. As President Nixon once said, “With 10,000 of these damn things, there is no defense.”

As with his seeming confusion about Gorbachev’s objections to SDI at their summits, it’s hard to say to what degree Reagan grasped this reality. Was he living a fantasy like so many others in the press and public when he talked of SDI rendering ICBMs “impotent and obsolete?” Whatever the answer to that question, it seems pretty clear that others inside the administration knew perfectly well that SDI couldn’t possibly protect the civilian population as a whole to any adequate degree. SDI was in reality a shell game, not an attempt to do an end-run around the doctrine of mutually assured destruction but an attempt to make sure that mutually assured destruction stayed mutually assured when it came to the United States’s side of the equation. Cold War planners had fretted for decades about a nightmare scenario in which the Soviet Union launched a first strike and the United States, due to sabotage, Soviet stealth technology, or some failure of command and control, failed to detect and respond to it in time by launching its own missiles before they were destroyed in their silos by those of the Soviets. SDI’s immediate strategic purpose was to close this supposed “window of vulnerability.” The system would be given, not the impossible task of protecting the vast nation as a whole, but the merely hugely improbable one of protecting those few areas where the missile silos were concentrated. Asked point-blank under oath whether SDI was meant to protect American populations or American missile silos, Pentagon chief of research and engineering Richard DeLauer gave a telling non-answer: “What we are trying to do is enhance deterrence. If you enhance deterrence and your deterrence is credible and holds, the people are protected.” This is of course just a reiteration of the MAD policy itself, not a separate justification for SDI. MAD just kept getting madder.

The essential absurdity of American plans for SDI seems to have struck Gorbachev by the beginning of 1987. Soviet intelligence had been scrambling for a few years by then, convinced that there had to be some important technological breakthrough behind all of the smoke the Reagan administration was throwing. It seems that at about this point they may have concluded that, no, the whole thing really was as ridiculous as it seemed. At any rate, Gorbachev decided it wasn’t worth perpetuating the Cold War over. He backed away from his demands, offering the United States the opportunity to continue working on SDI if it liked, demanding only a commitment to inform the Soviet Union and officially back out of some relevant treaties (which might very possibly have to include the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that forbade nuclear explosions in space) if it decided to actually implement it. Coupled with Gorbachev’s soaring global popularity, it was enough to start getting deals done. Reagan and Gorbachev signed their first substantial agreement, to eliminate between them 2692 missiles, in December of 1987. More would follow, accompanied by shocking liberalization and reform behind the erstwhile Iron Curtain, culminating in the night of November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall, long the tangible symbol of division between East and West, came down. Just like that, almost incomprehensible in its suddenness, the Cold War was over. Trinity stands today as a cogent commentary on that strange shadow conflict, but it proved blessedly less than prescient about the way it would end. Whatever else is still to come, there will be no nuclear war between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

If the end of the Cold War was shockingly unexpected, SDI played out exactly as you might expect. The program was renamed to the more modest Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and scaled back dramatically in 1993, by which time it had cost half again as much as the Manhattan Project — a staggering $30 billion, enough to make it the most expensive research program in history — and accomplished little. The old idea still resurfaces from time to time, but the fervor it once generated is all but forgotten now. SDI, like most of history, is now essentially a footnote.

A more inspiring closing subject is Mikhail Gorbachev. His Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding, he strikes me as someone who hasn’t quite gotten his due yet from history. There are many reasons that the Cold War came to an end when it did. Prominent among them was the increasingly untenable Soviet economy, battered during the decade by “the Soviet Union’s Vietnam” (Gorbachev’s phrase) in Afghanistan, a global downturn in oil prices, and the sheer creaking inertia of many years of, as the old Soviet saying went, workers pretending to work while the state pretended to pay them for it. Nevertheless, I don’t agree with Marx that history is a compendium of economic forces. Many individuals across Eastern Europe stepped forward to end their countries’ totalitarian regimes — usually peacefully, sometimes violently, occasionally at the cost of their lives. But Gorbachev’s shadow overlays all the rest. Undaunted by the most bellicose Presidential rhetoric in two decades, he used politics, psychology, and logic to convince Reagan to sit down with him and talk, then worked with him to shape a better, safer world. While Reagan talked about ending MAD through his chimerical Star Wars, Gorbachev actually did it, by abandoning his predecessors’ traditional intransigence, rolling up his sleeves, and finding a way to make it work. Later, this was the man who didn’t choose to send in the tanks when the Warsaw Pact started to slip away, making him, as Victor Sebstyen put it, one of very few leaders in the history of the world to elect not to use force to maintain an empire. Finally, and although it certainly was never his intention, he brought the Soviet Union in for a soft landing, keeping the chaos to a minimum and keeping the missiles from flying. Who would have imagined Gorbachev was capable of such vision, such — and I don’t use this word lightly — heroism? Who would have imagined he could weave his way around the hardliners at home and abroad to accomplish what he did? Prior to assuming office in 1985, he was just a smart, capable Party man who knew who buttered his bread, who, as he later admitted, “licked Brezhnev’s ass” alongside his colleagues. And then when he got to the top he looked around, accepted that the system just wasn’t working, and decided to change it. Gorbachev reminds us that the hero is often not the one who picks up a gun but the one who chooses not to.

(In addition to the sources listed in the previous article, Way Out There in the Blue by Frances FitzGerald is the best history I’ve found of SDI and its politics.)

Comments
35 Responses

- Juan Castro

January 16, 2015 at 8:44 pm

I have a theory about why (in addition to Gorbachev’s political skill) the USSR became the only dictatorial empire in all of human history to dissolve gracefully. You may or may not agree with it, but I do think it played a factor:

They were atheist.

No matter how dogmatic Soviet communism was, one thing they absolutely were NOT was In A Mission From God. They didn’t expect Heaven as a reward if they all died “for their country”. They were convinced there wouldn’t be a superpowered deus ex machina ensuring that they would win the End Times War. Therefore, they came to the conclusion the only rational alternative was to fold.

- Felix

January 17, 2015 at 8:53 am

You know, this is an interesting perspective…

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2015 at 9:49 am

Yes, it is indeed interesting. The obvious counterargument would be the one you allude to: that they essentially made their religion Marxism, with Lenin as its prophet, to the point of embalming his body and putting it on permanent exhibit for the True Believers in the Kremlin. And of course there are similarities between, say, Chrisianity’s version of end-times eschatology and Marxism’s promise of an eventual worker’s paradise. But then the missing belief in the supernatural or an afterlife definitely mark some real differences. Yeah… interesting.

- Duncan Stevens

January 17, 2015 at 3:06 pm

But by 1989-90 it was a Marxist revolutionary state only in name. Hard to find a lot of ideological fervor in the leadership of the late-stage Soviet Union.

- Ken

January 23, 2015 at 9:36 pm

I think a much likelier explanation is that Gorbachev – the servant of a state birthed in massacre, sustained by massacre, and governed by massacre to a far greater extent than any other empire since the Aztecs – was in a greater position than any other leader in history to realize that massacre as state policy simply wouldn’t help.

- Lisa H.

January 16, 2015 at 11:05 pm

Most of us had MAD, that most fundamental doctrine of the Cold War, engrained in us as schoolchildren

Depending on whom you mean by “us,” I suppose! This would seem to be making an assumption about the age of your readership.

which might very possibly have to include the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that forbid nuclear explosions in space

I think you want “forbade” there.

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2015 at 9:41 am

I kind of thought that kids even today would get a lot about MAD in their history classes, as it is pretty much the fundamental doctrine of 40 years of Cold War. Maybe not, though. I replaced “most” with “many,” which will hopefully soften the blow for anyone who’s heretofore managed to miss the delights of MADness. ;)

- Jason Dyer

January 17, 2015 at 1:08 pm

There’s too much history. Everything after WWII tends to get squeezed in right at the end of the school year.

Incidentally, there’s a book (Prisoner’s Dilemma) about the brief period when the US had the bomb but the USSR didn’t. There were serious calls for pre-emptive nuking.

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2015 at 1:46 pm

Yeah, that’s a fascinating period that I’ll get into a little bit in a future article. Along with calls for preemptive nuking, there were many saying that the U.S. should share the bomb with the Soviets and everyone else as a show of good faith, still others saying the bombs should all be thrown away and the industrial apparatus that made them destroyed before an arms race started. Definitely one of those crossroads of history…

- Odkin

January 17, 2015 at 3:16 am

Oh, for Christ’s sake what a load of revisionist liberal horseshit.

- Tom

April 19, 2020 at 5:52 pm

Hear hear.

- Iffy Bonzoolie

April 23, 2020 at 12:15 am

I’d be interested to read a nuanced counterpoint.

- Lewis

January 17, 2015 at 7:07 am

I enjoyed this piece. Today after playing Microillusions’s earnest and strangely evocative 1988 fantasia Romantic Encounters at the Dome, I wondered if we might see a similarly well-researched article on here exploring that title’s mysterious origins in West Coast sex therapy, New Wave swinger fantasies and not-bad writing from some playwright named Lee Thomas.

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Romantic_Encounters_at_the_Dome_1988

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2015 at 9:50 am

That one was on my short list, but had looked like it wouldn’t make the cut. I’ll take your vote into consideration, though, and see if I can find a way to squeeze it in.

- matt w

January 17, 2015 at 6:18 pm

Too true about Gorbachev not getting his due. The other day I saw a piece about Obama’s legacy subtitled “He will go down as America’s Gorbachev.” Its main title was “Why History WIll Eviscerate Obama.”

Typo patrol: I think “While NASA’s charter dully charged” should be “duly.”

- Jimmy Maher

January 18, 2015 at 9:35 am

I really need to learn the difference between “dully” and “duly.”

The article in question is a bit hyperbolic in that all-too-typical political pundit way and has a dodgy relationship with history in its own right. To say that Bush II’s ranking went from “low” to “rock bottom” only after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, for instance, is just factually incorrect. There were heaps of articles and polls of historians coming out already by 2007 naming Bush II the “worst President ever.” Nor do I think Clinton’s consensus legacy has really fallen all the way to “below average,” or even that people generally blame him all that much for the mortgage crisis (I don’t know enough about it personally to say if they’re justified in that).

I’d guess Obama will go down into history as a slightly more successful version of Carter: heart usually in the right place, but lacking some essential knack for realpolitik and (ironically) communication needed to get things done. That’s of course somewhat unfair in light of the unprecedented intransigence he’s faced, but after all of the drone strikes and the NSA revelations I must admit that the amount of sympathy I can muster is limited. He’ll probably be remembered in 100 years more for the social change he *represents* as the first black President than for anything he actually did in office.

- Duncan Stevens

January 18, 2015 at 1:44 pm

Response to that article:

The basis for the comparison in the article seems to be this:

Obama’s reputation will also have something in common with that of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who believed history and technology have a direction and that his job was to align his country with it, no matter how illogical or undesirable it might appear to his countrymen. Like Gorbachev, Obama will be esteemed in certain quarters a generation from now, but probably more by foreigners than fellow citizens, and more by his country’s enemies than its friends.

The first sentence amounts to “he’s like Gorbachev because he wanted to do things that some people disagreed with,” and the second is just weird hyperbole, especially considering that the article doesn’t even talk about foreign policy. I guess it indicates that, in some quarters, “Gorbachev” is shorthand for “adopted policies detrimental to the country’s interests,” but it’s a dumb shorthand; it’s not as if the Soviet Union was on sound, sustainable footing before he got there. “Had no choice but to acknowledge the inevitable” is less catchy but more accurate.

Here’s a response to that article: http://justice.gawker.com/why-history-will-eviscerate-obama-annotated-1679715328

- matt w

January 19, 2015 at 1:06 am

I wasn’t really trying to make a point about the merits of Obama’s presidency–only to point out the weirdness of making a comparison to Gorbachev as a bad thing. The burden of the comparison, I suppose, is that Gorbachev ended his country’s empire (and in fact set the stage for the dissolution of his country), and if you think that Obama will lead to the downfall of the US’s global influence in that way you might well think that that would make Obama a bad president. But it just seems jaw-droppingly amoral for someone, especially a conservative American, to make that comparison without acknowledging that it was a good thing that Gorbachev brought an end to his country’s empire.

But if we’re bringing up Obama’s legacy vs. other presidents’: Jimmy, I agree with what you say about Bush and Clinton, but I think it’s not going to be accurate to say that Obama won’t be best remembered for what he did. The health care reform is a really big deal. There’s a possibility that it won’t last–though the most likely route is for the Supreme Court to trash subsidies on the federal exchange on a transparently terrible pretext, and in that case I think Obama might be remembered as the president who got victimized by the return of the Lochner court.

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- Melfina the Blue

January 8, 2016 at 7:16 pm

“between the time I realize that you’ve launch yours at me and the time that yours actually hit me.” launch should be launched.

Great article. I vaguely remember MAD being mentioned in my high school American History class (along w/ my teacher’s circumcision story, he was a very odd man), but it was right at the end of the year. My AP Euro class got to the start of WW2 and we had to read the rest on our own, but I did learn about the Defenestration of Prague which comes in really handy for trivia contests!

- Jimmy Maher

January 12, 2016 at 6:00 am

Thanks!

- Adele

February 3, 2016 at 1:55 am

“talk about being hoisted from one’s own petard”

I might be wrong, but I think it’s by one’s own petard (and maybe even with) but not from. And thank you for dusting off this lovely phrase.

- Jimmy Maher

February 3, 2016 at 9:51 am

It is “by” in at least the most common edition of Hamlet, but the “from” was intentional to give it an anachronistic flair. Shakespearean humor… gotta love it, no?

- Paul A.

March 7, 2017 at 5:00 am

The thing is, “from” isn’t anachronistic in context, it’s just wrong. As Adele said, one is hoisted *by* a petard, or possibly *with* a petard: it’s the petard that does the hoisting. Being hoisted *from* a petard sounds like one is being rescued from it in the nick of time, like those movies where the guy gets off the land mine just before it explodes – and I don’t think that’s the image you were going for.

- Jimmy Maher

March 7, 2017 at 8:05 am

Fair enough. Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

March 8, 2017 at 12:09 pm

Fascinating as always!

By the way, a typo:
>> “… they couldn’t find any evidence of whatsoever of any unusual civil-defense programs…”

An extra “of” before “whatsoever.”

- Jimmy Maher

March 10, 2017 at 4:10 pm

Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

March 8, 2017 at 12:23 pm

Another one…
>> “… offering the United States the opportunity to continuing working on SDI if it liked…”

“Continuing working” perhaps should be “continue working.”

- Jimmy Maher

March 10, 2017 at 4:09 pm

Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

March 8, 2017 at 12:27 pm

Given that history is the study of past events, not the events themselves, should the following:

>> “SDI, like most history, is now essentially a footnote.”

be instead “most of history”?

-dZ.

- Jimmy Maher

March 10, 2017 at 4:08 pm

Thanks!

- Brandon

September 11, 2017 at 3:32 pm

I’ve been reading all of your posts through in e-Book form. You are an excellent writer, and I have enjoyed consuming your text on an almost daily basis for a few months now. But I think this was the first article I read of yours that was unintentionally comical and had me literally laughing out loud. You are certainly welcome to share your political opinions in the form of revised history if you wish, but it’s a good thing my first exposure to your blog was on a different topic, as it would be hard to take you seriously on any history if I had read this drivel first.

- tedder

December 22, 2017 at 2:16 am

SDI also led to Iridium, strangely enough. They used the sat-to-sat “mesh networking”.

Amused by the commenters freaking out about you -gasp- touching politics.

- Iffy Bonzoolie

April 23, 2020 at 12:37 am

Politics has always been contentious, but it’s become so toxic now that any expression of political opinion is going to cause a severe defensive reaction in someone…

Coming from the future, I can only say that it has gotten much, much worse.

So, people look for means of escape, like reading about the history of adventure games. And they get upset when people bring politics into their form of escapism. At least, when they are the ones who have to them defend their worldview…

But, it’s relevant. Games got political. Maybe less so, now, because it’s (arguably) bad for business. Fallout, maybe?

It’s interesting that I’m reading this at this point at the same time the CRPGAddict is getting similar reactions over treatment of Ultima VII, which also got decidedly political.

- Alistair

February 5, 2018 at 4:55 am

Amusing. I read this post because I remembered the old Trinity game. Good times.

Unfortunately, you have several misconceptions on orbital mechanics (the idea that a moonshot soviet bomb could somehow circumlunar and survive earth re-entry is hilarious), _Gamma_ (NOT X-ray) lasers (we can build X-ray lasers), and some general engineering matters regarding weapon assembly and use. These are all forgivable, because you’re obviously writing from a pop-sci perspective rather than that of a proper engineer.

Rather less forgivably is your inability to properly relate deterrence (so called MAD). Here you make all the usual layman mistakes about the “impossible use” paradox. You need to understand the basic game theory better. It’s about tolerance of risk in face of uncertainty.

Obviously no one will push the button saying “blow the world up”. But they might push a button saying “1% chance blowing the world up”. Or 10%. The idea is (was) that an adversary could not guarantee a rational opponent with perfect control. An accident could happen. It’s dangerous to escalate. In fact, its dangerous to stay where we are. A stochastic multi-round game of chicken plays completely differently to a one-round deterministic one.

Recommend you read and understand Lawrence Freedman, Herman Kahn, and Schelling at the very least. And then read contemporary Soviet nuclear doctrine. A mature strategic (proper use of term) understanding of deterrence in the context of both sides warfighting doctrine would avoid the rather childish caricature you present. It is important to realise that neither the US or Soviets imagined WWIII to be the popular “Wargasm” of mass immediate city-busting. A nuclear war might have been a far more protracted but limited affair.

By the way, it may be my reading but you are also far too kind to the Soviet Union, a regime more murderous than the Nazi’s run by a succession of dictators which killed, imprisoned, terrorised, and impoverished literally 10’s of millions of its own citizens and those of other countries. Did they have anything to do with explaining the events 1945-1990? Or is it just nice western liberals (and perhaps Gorbachev?) who have moral agency?

T Plus 4: Bombing Nevada
January 23, 2015

Underground

You're in a narrow underground chamber, illuminated by an open door in the east wall. The walls and ceiling are gouged with deep spiral ruts; they look as if they've been routed out with heavy machinery.

A large cylinder occupies most of the chamber. The maze of cables and pipes surrounding it trails west, into the depths of a tunnel.

>w
Underground

The cables and pipes lining the tunnel's walls look like bloated veins and arteries in the splinter's flickering glow. Deep tunnels bend off to the east and west.

Some careless technician has left a walkie-talkie lying in the dirt.

>get walkie-talkie
Taken.

>turn on walkie-talkie
You turn on the rocker switch.

>z
Time passes.

A tinny voice, half-buried in static, says "Two."

>z
Time passes.

"One."

>z
Time passes.

The walkie-talkie clicks and hisses.

>z
Time passes.

For a brief moment, the tunnel is bathed in a raw white glare.

The most subtly chilling vista in Trinity is found not inside one of its real-world atomic vignettes, but rather in the magical land that serves as the central hub for your explorations. This landscape is dotted with incongruous giant toadstools, each of which, you eventually realize, represents a single atomic explosion.

As your eyes sweep the landscape, you notice more of the giant toadstools. There must be hundreds of them. Some sprout in clusters, others grow in solitude among the trees. Their numbers increase dramatically as your gaze moves westward, until the forest is choked with pale domes.

The scene is a representation of time, following the path of the sun from east to west. The toadstools choking the forest to the west presumably represent the nuclear apocalypse you’ve just escaped. If we subtract those toadstools along with the two somewhere far off to the east that must represent the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts, we’re left with those that represent not instances of atomic bombs used in anger, but rather tests. A few of these we know well as historical landmarks in their own right: the first hydrogen bomb; the first Soviet bomb; that original Trinity blast, off far to the southeast with the rising sun, from which the game takes its name and where its climax will play out. Like the bombs used in anger, these don’t interest us today; we’ll give them their due in future articles. What I do want to talk about today is some of the blasts we don’t usually hear so much about. As the landscape would indicate, there have been lots of them. Since the nuclear era began one summer morning in the New Mexico desert in 1945, there has been a verified total of 2119 tests of nuclear bombs. Almost half of that number is attributed to the United States alone. Yes, there have been a lot of bombs.

At the close of World War II, the big question for planners and politicians in the United States was that of who should be given control of the nation’s burgeoning nuclear arsenal. The Manhattan Project had been conducted under the ostensible auspices of the Army Air Force (the Air Force wouldn’t become its own independent service branch until 1947), but in reality had been something of a law unto itself. Now both Army and Navy were eager to lay claim to the bomb. The latter had dismissed the bomb’s prospects during the war years and declined to play any role in the Manhattan Project, but was nevertheless able to wrangle enough control now to be given responsibility for the first post-war tests of the gadgets, to be called Operation Crossroads. The tests’ announced objective was to determine the impact of the atomic bomb on military ships. Accordingly, the Navy assembled for atomic target practice around Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands a fleet made up of surplus American ships and captured German and Japanese that would have been the envy of most other nations. Its 93 vessels included in their ranks 2 aircraft carriers, 5 battleships, and 4 cruisers. The 167 native residents of Bikini were shipped off to another, much less survivable island, first stop in what would prove to be a long odyssey of misery. (Their sad story is best told in Operation Crossroads by Jonathan M. Weisgall.)

From the start, Operation Crossroads had more to do with politics than with engineering or scientific considerations. It was widely hyped as a “test” to see if the very idea of a fighting navy still had any relevance in this new atomic age. More importantly in the minds of its political planners, it would also be a forceful demonstration to the Soviet Union of just what this awesome new American weapon could do. Operation Crossroads was the hottest ticket in town during the summer of 1946. Politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists — everyone who could finagle an invitation — flocked to Bikini to enjoy the spectacle along with good wine and food aboard one of the Navy’s well-appointed host vessels, swelling the number of on-site personnel to as high as 40,000.

Unprotected sailors aboard the German cruiser Prinz Eugen just hours after it was irradiated by an atomic bomb.

The spectators would get somewhat less than they bargained for, many of the sailors considerably more. The first bomb was dropped from a borrowed Army Air Force B-29 because the Navy had no aircraft capable of carrying the gadget. Dropped on a hazy, humid morning from high altitude, from which level the B-29 was notoriously inaccurate even under the best conditions, the bomb missed the center of the doomed fleet by some 700 yards. Only two uninteresting attack transports sank instantly in anything like the expected spectacular fashion, and only five ships sank in total, the largest of them a cruiser. As the journalists filed their reams of disappointed copy and the Navy’s leadership breathed a sigh of relief, some 5000 often shirtless sailors were dispatched to board the various vessels inside the hot zone to analyze their damage; as a safety precaution, they first scrubbed them down using water, soap, and lye to get rid of any lingering radiation. The operation then proceeded with the second bomb, an underwater blast that proved somewhat more satisfying, ripping apart the big battleship Arkansas and the aircraft carrier Saratoga amongst other vessels and tossing their pieces high into the air.

The second Operation Crossroads shot, July 25, 1946.

Operation Crossroads was emblematic of a Navy leadership that had yet to get their collective heads around just what a paradigm-annihilating device the atomic bomb actually was. Their insistence on dropping it on warships, as if the future was just going to bring more Battles of Midway with somewhat bigger explosions, shows that they still thought of the atomic bomb as essentially just a more powerful version of the bombs they were used to, a fundamentally tactical rather than strategic device. Their complete failure to take seriously the dangers of radioactive fallout, meanwhile, may be the reason that the sailors who took part in Operation Crossroads suffered an average life-span reduction of three months compared to others in their peer group. These were early days yet in atomic physics, but their state of denial is nevertheless difficult to understand. If the horrific photographs and films out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — some of which apparently are shocking enough to still be classified — hadn’t been warning enough, there was always the case of Los Alamos physicist Louis Slotin. Less than six weeks before Operation Crossroads began, Slotin had accidentally started a chain reaction while experimenting with the atomic core of the same type of bomb used in the tests. He stopped the reaction through quick thinking and bravery, but not before absorbing a lethal dose of radiation. His slow, agonizing death — the second such to be experienced by a Los Alamos physicist — was meticulously filmed and documented, then made available to everyone working with atomic weapons. And yet the Navy chortled about the failure of the atomic bomb to do as much damage as expected whilst cheerfully sending in the boys to do some cleanup, ignoring both the slowly dying goats and other animals they had left aboard the various ships and the assessment of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists of the likely fate of any individual ship in the target fleet: “The crew would be killed by the deadly burst of radiation from the bomb, and only a ghost ship would remain, floating unattended in the vast waters of the ocean.”

Just as President Eisenhower would take space exploration out from under the thumb of the military a decade later with the creation of NASA, President Truman did an end-run around the military’s conventional thinking about the atomic bomb on January 1, 1947, when the new, ostensibly civilian Atomic Energy Commission took over all responsibility for the development, testing, and deployment of the nation’s atomic stockpile. The Atomic Energy Commision would continue to conduct a steady trickle of tests in the remoter reaches of the Pacific for many years to come, albeit none with quite the bizarre spectator-sport qualities of Operation Crossroads. But the twin shocks of the first Soviet test of an atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950, which came equipped with a raging debate about whether, how, and when the United States should again use its nuclear arsenal in anger, led weapons developers to agitate for a more local test site where they could regularly and easily set off smaller weapons than the blockbusters that tended to get earmarked to the Pacific. There were, they argued, plenty of open spaces in the American Southwest that would suit such a purpose perfectly well. On December 18, 1950, Truman therefore approved the allocation for this purpose of a 680-square-mile area inside the vast Nellis Air Force Gunnery and Bombing Range in the Nevada desert some 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The first test there, marking the first atomic bomb to be exploded on American soil since the original Trinity device, took place astonishingly soon thereafter, on January 27, 1951. By the end of the year sleeping quarters, mess halls, and laboratories had been built, creating a functioning, happy little community dedicated to making ever better bombs. The saga of the Nevada Test Site had begun. In the end no fewer than 928 of the 1032 nuclear tests ever conducted by the United States would be conducted right here.

One of the many test shots seen from the Las Vegas Strip during the 1950s.

The strangest years of this very strange enterprise were the earliest. With money plentiful and the need to keep ahead of the Soviets perceived as urgent, bombs were exploded at quite a clip — twelve during the first year alone. At first they were mostly dropped from airplanes, later more commonly hung from balloons or mounted atop tall temporary towers. The testing regime was, as test-site geophysicist Wendell Weart would later put it, very “free-form.” If someone at one of the nation’s dueling atomic-weapons laboratories of Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos determined that he needed a “shot” to prove a point or answer a question, he generally got it in pretty short order. Whatever else the testing accomplished, it was also a hell of a lot of fun. “I guess little boys like fireworks and firecrackers,” Weart admits, “and this was the biggest set of fireworks you could ever hope to see.” Las Vegas residents grew accustomed to the surreal sight of mushroom clouds blooming over their cityscape, like scenes from one of the B-grade atomic-themed monsters movies that filled the theaters of the era. When the bombs went off at night, they sometimes made enough light to read a newspaper by.

This era of free-form atmospheric testing at the Nevada Test Site coincided with the era of atomic mania in the United States at large, when nuclear energy of all stripes was considered the key to the future and the square-jawed scientists and engineers who worked on it veritable heroes. The most enduring marker of this era today is also one of the first. In 1946, not one but two French designers introduced risque new women’s bathing suits that were smaller and more revealing than anything that had come before. Jacques Heim called his the “atome,” or atom, “the world’s smallest bathing suit.” Louis Réard named his the bikini after the recently concluded Operation Crossroads tests at Bikini Atoll. “Like the bomb,” he declared, “the bikini is small and devastating.” It was Réard’s chosen name that stuck. In addition to explosive swimwear, by the mid-1950s you could get a “Lone Ranger atomic-bomb ring” by sending in 15 cents plus a Kix cereal proof of purchase; buy a pair of atomic-bomb salt and pepper shakers; buy an “Atomic Disintegrator” cap gun. Trinity’s accompanying comic book with its breathless “Atomic Facts: Stranger than Fiction!” and its hyperactive patriotism is a dead ringer for those times.

Showgirl Lee Merlin, Miss Atomic Bomb 1958.

Said times being what they were, Las Vegas denizens, far from being disturbed by the bombs going off so close by, embraced them with all of their usual kitschy enthusiasm. The test site helpfully provided an annual calendar of scheduled tests for civilians so they could make plans to come out and enjoy the shows. For children, it was a special treat to drive up to one of the best viewpoints on Mount Charleston early in the morning on the day of a shot, like an even better version of the Fourth of July; the budding connoisseurs  cataloged and ranked the shots and compared notes with their friends in the schoolyard. Many adults, being connoisseurs of another stripe, might prefer the “Miss Atomic Bomb” beauty pageants and revues that were all the rage along the Strip.

Showgirl Sally McCloskey does an “atomic ballet” in front of a shot.

The official government stance, at the time and to a large extent even today, is that the radioactive fallout from these explosions traveled little distance if at all and was in any case minor enough to present few to no health or environmental concerns. Nevertheless, ranchers whose sheep grazed in the vicinity of the test site saw their flocks begin to sicken and die very soon after the test shots began. They mounted a lawsuit, which was denied under somewhat questionable circumstances in 1956; the sheep, claimed the court, had died of “malnutrition” or some other unidentified sickness. That judgment, almost all of the transcripts from which have since been lost, was later overturned on the rather astonishing basis of outright “fraud on the court” by the government’s defense team. That judgment was in its turn vacated on appeal in 1985, more than thirty years after the events in question. Virtually all questions about the so-called “Downwinders” who were affected — or believe they were affected — by fallout from the test site seem to end up in a similarly frustrating tangle.

What does seem fairly clear amid the bureaucratic babble, from circumstantial evidence if nothing else, is that the government even in the 1950s had more awareness of and concerns about fallout from the site than they owned up to publicly. Radioactive debris from those very first tests in early 1951 was detected, according to test-site meteorologist Philip Wymer Allen, going “up over Utah and across the Midwest and Illinois, not too far south of Chicago, and out across the Atlantic Coast and was still easily measured as the cloud passed north of Bermuda. We didn’t track it any further than that.” Already in 1952 physical chemist Willard Libby, inventor of radiocarbon dating and later a chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was expressing concerns about radioactive cesium escaping the site and being absorbed into the bones of people, especially children. A potential result could be leukemia. Another, arguably even graver concern, was radioiodine particles, which could be carried a surprising distance downwind before settling to earth, potentially on the forage preferred by sheep, goats, and cows. Many people in rural communities, especially in those days, drank unprocessed milk straight from the cow, as it were. If enough milk containing radioiodine is ingested, it can lead to thyroid cancer. Children were, once again, both particularly big drinkers of milk and particularly prone to the effects of the radioiodine that might be within it. When environmental chemist Delbert Barth was hired in the 1960s to conduct studies of radioiodine dispersion patterns at the site, he was asked to also make historical projections for the atmospheric shots of the 1950s — a request that, at least on its surface, seems rather odd if everyone truly believed there was absolutely nothing to fear. Similarly odd seems a policy which went into effect very early: not to conduct shots if the winds were blowing toward Las Vegas.

The radioactive exposure — or lack thereof — of the Downwinders remains a major political issue inside Nevada and also Utah, which many claim also received its fair share of fallout. Most people who were associated with the site say, predictably enough, that the Downwinders are at best misguided and at worst would-be freeloaders. Studies have not established a clear causal link between incidences of cancer and proximity to the Nevada Test Site, although many, including Barth, have expressed concerns about the methodologies they’ve employed. What we’re left with, then, are lots of heartbreaking stories which may have been caused by the activities at the site or may represent the simple hand of fate. (For a particularly sad story, which I won’t go into here because I don’t want to sound exploitative, see this interview with Zenna Mae and Eugene Bridges.)

The first era of the Nevada Test Site came to an abrupt end in November of 1958, when the United States and the Soviet Union entered into a non-binding mutual moratorium on all sorts of nuclear testing. For almost three years, the bombs fell silent at the test site and at its Soviet equivalent near Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. But then, on September 1, 1961, the Soviets suddenly started testing again, prompting the Nevada Test Site to go back into action as well. Still, the public was growing increasingly concerned over what was starting to look like the reckless practice of atmospheric testing. While Las Vegas had continued to party hearty, even before the moratorium the doughty farmers and ranchers working still closer to the site had, as Lawrence Livermore physicist Clifford Olsen rather dismissively puts it, “started to grumble a bit” about the effect they believed the fallout was having on their animals and crops and possibly their own bodies and those of their children. And now an international environmentalist movement was beginning to arise in response to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. In one of his last major acts before his assassination, President Kennedy in October of 1963 signed along with Soviet General Secretary Khrushchev the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that required all future nuclear tests to take place underground.

But never fear, the good times were hardly over at the Nevada Test Site. The scientists and engineers there had been experimenting with underground explosions for some years already in anticipation of this day that the more politically aware among them had begun to see as inevitable. Thus they were more than prepared to continue full-speed-ahead with a new regime of underground testing. The number of shots actually increased considerably during the 1960s, often clipping along at a steady average of one per week or more. Las Vegas, meanwhile, was still not allowed to forget about the presence of the test site. Residents grew accustomed to tremors that cracked plaster and made high-rises sway disconcertingly, phenomena that came to be known as “seismic fallout.” As the political mood shifted over the course of the decade, the number of complaints grew steadily, especially after a couple of big shots of well over 1 megaton in 1968 that caused serious structural damage to a number of buildings in Las Vegas. One of the most persistent and vociferous of the complainers was the eccentric billionaire recluse Howard Hughes, who was living at the time on the top two floors of the Desert Inn hotel. Hughes marshaled lots of money, employees, and political connections to his cause during the late 1960s, but was never able to stop or even slow the testing.

As for the environmental impact of this new breed of underground tests, the news is mixed. While neither is exactly ideal, it’s obviously preferable from an environmental standpoint to be exploding atomic bombs underground rather than in the open air. A whole new applied sub-science of geophysics, the discipline of nuclear “containment,” evolved out of efforts to, well, contain the explosions — to keep any radioactive material at all from “venting” to the surface during an explosion or “seeping” to the surface during the hours, months, and years afterward. And yet the attitudes of the folks working on the shots can still sound shockingly cavalier today. About 30 percent of the underground tests conducted during the 1960s leaked radioactivity to the surface to one degree or another. Those working at the site considered this figure acceptable. Virtually everyone present there during the 1960s makes note of the positive, non-bureaucratic, “can-do” attitude that still persisted into this new era of underground testing. Linda Smith, an administrator at the site, characterizes the attitude thus: “There is such a strong bias to get it done that overrides everything. Is there any profound discussion of should we or shouldn’t we? Is this good for the country? Is it not? There’s no question. You are there to get it done.” Clifford Olsen says, “We were all pretty much sure we were doing the right thing.”

What to make of this lack of introspection? Whatever else we say about it, we shouldn’t condemn the people of the Nevada Test Site too harshly for it. There were heaps of brilliant minds among them, but their backgrounds were very different from those of the people who had worked on the Manhattan Project, many of whom had thought and agonized at length about the nature of the work they were doing and the unimaginable power they were unleashing on the world. The men and few women of the Nevada Test Site, by contrast, had mostly come of age during or immediately after World War II, and had been raised in the very bosom of the burgeoning military-industrial complex. Indeed, most had had their education funded by military or industrial backers for the singular purpose of designing and operating nuclear weapons. This set them apart from their predecessors, who before the Manhattan Project and to a large degree after it — many among that first generation of bomb-makers considered their work in this area essentially done once the first few bombs had been exploded — tended to focus more on “pure” science than on its practical application. A few Brits aside, the Nevada Test Site people were monolithically American; many on the Manhattan Project came from overseas, including lots of refugees from occupied Europe. The Nevada Test Site people were politically conservative, in favor of law and order and strong defense (how could they not be given the nature of their work?); the Manhattan Project people were a much more politically heterogeneous group, with a leader in Robert Oppenheimer who had worked extensively for communist causes. Someone with a background like his would never have been allowed past the front gate of the Nevada Test Site.

Whatever else it was, the Nevada Test Site was just a great place to work. Regarded as they were as the nation’s main bulwark against the Soviet Union, the atomic scientists and all of those who worked with and supported them generally got whatever they asked for. Even the chow was first-rate: at the cafeteria, a dollar would get you all the steaks — good steaks — that you could eat. When all the long hours spent planning and calculating got to be too much, you could always take in a movie or go bowling: a little self-contained all-American town called Mercury grew up with the test site there in the middle of the desert. Its population peaked at about 10,000 during the 1960s, by which time it included in addition to a movie theater and bowling alley a post office, schools, churches, a variety of restaurants, a library, a swimming hall, and hotels — including one named, inevitably, the Atomic Motel. Or you could always take a walk just outside of town amidst the splendid, haunting desolation of the Nevada desert. And for those not satisfied with these small-town pleasures, the neon of Las Vegas beckoned just an hour or so down the highway.

But just as importantly, the work itself was deeply satisfying. After the slide rules and the geological charts were put away, there still remained some of that old childlike pleasure in watching things go boom. Wendell Weart: “I would go back in a tunnel and see what happened to these massive structures that we had put in there, and to see how it manhandled them and just wadded them up into balls. That was impressive.” Nor was the Nevada Test Site entirely an exercise in nuclear nihilism. While weapons development remained always the primary focus, most working there believed deeply in the peaceful potential for nuclear energy — even for nuclear explosions. One of the most extended and extensive test series conducted at the site was known as Operation Plowshare, a reference to “beating swords into plowshares” from the Book of Isaiah. Operation Plowshare eventually encompassed 27 separate explosions, stretching from 1961 to 1973. Its major focus was on nuclear explosions as means for carrying out grand earth-moving and digging operations, for the creation of trenches and canals among other things. (Such ideas formed the basis of the proposal Edward Teller bandied about during the Panama Canal controversy of the late 1970s to just dig another canal using hydrogen bombs.) Serious plans were mooted at one point to dig a whole new harbor at Cape Thompson in Alaska, more as a demonstration of the awesome potential of hydrogen bombs for such purposes than out of any practical necessity. Thankfully for the delicate oceanic ecosystem thereabouts, cooler heads prevailed in the end.

So, the people who worked at the site weren’t bad people. They were in fact almost uniformly good friends, good colleagues, good workers who were at the absolute tops of their various fields. Almost any one of them would have made a great, helpful neighbor. Nor, as Operation Plowshare and other projects attest, were they bereft of their own certain brand of idealism. If they sound heartlessly dismissive of the Downwinders’ claims and needlessly contemptuous of environmentalists who fret over the damage their work did and may still be doing, well, it would be hard for any of us to even consider the notion that the work to which we dedicated our lives — work which we thoroughly enjoyed, which made us feel good about ourselves, around which many of our happiest memories revolve — was misguided or downright foolish or may have even killed children, for God’s sake. I tend to see the people who worked at the site as embodying the best and the worst qualities of Americans in general, charging forward with optimism and industry and that great American can-do spirit — but perhaps not always thinking enough about just where they’re charging to.

A plume of radioactive debris vents from the Baneberry shot.

The golden age of free-and-easy atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site ended at last on December 18, 1970. That was the day of Baneberry, a routine underground shot of just 10 kilotons. However, due to what the geophysicists involved claim was a perfect storm of factors, its containment model failed comprehensively. A huge cloud of highly radioactive particles burst to the surface and was blown directly over a mining encampment that was preparing the hole for another test nearby. By now the nature of radioactivity and its dangers was much better appreciated than it had been during the time of Operation Crossroads. All of the people at the encampment were put through extended, extensive decontamination procedures. Nevertheless, two heretofore healthy young men, an electrician and a security guard, died of leukemia within four years of the event. Their widows sued the government, resulting in another seemingly endless series of trials, feints, and legal maneuvers, culminating in yet another frustrating non-resolution in 1996: the government was found negligent and the plaintiffs awarded damages, but the deaths of the two men were paradoxically ruled not to have been a result of their radiation exposure. As many in the Downwinder community darkly noted at the time, a full admission of guilt in this case would have left the government open to a whole series of new law suits. Thus, they claimed, this strange splitting of the difference.

The more immediate consequence of Baneberry was a six-month moratorium on atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site while the accident was investigated and procedures were overhauled. When testing resumed, it did so in a much more controlled way, with containment calculations in particular required to go through an extended process of peer reviews and committee approvals. The Atomic Energy Commission also began for the first time to put pressure on the scientists and engineers to minimize the number of tests conducted by pooling resources and finding ways to get all the data they could out of each individual shot. The result was a slowdown from that high during the 1960s of about one shot per week to perhaps one or two per month. Old-timers grumbled about red tape and how the can-do spirit of the 1950s and 1960s had been lost, but, perhaps tellingly, there were no more Baneberrys. Of the roughly 350 shots at the Nevada Test Site after Baneberry, only 4 showed any detectable radiation leakage at all.

The site continued to operate right through the balance of the Cold War. The last bomb to be exploded there was also the last exploded to date by the United States: an anticlimactic little 5-kiloton shot on September 23, 1992. By this time, anti-nuclear activists had made the Nevada Test Site one of their major targets, and were a constant headache for everyone who worked there. Included among the ranks of those arrested for trespassing and disruption during the test site’s twilight years are Kris Kristofferson, Martin Sheen, Robert Blake, and Carl Sagan. Needless to say, the mood of the country and the public’s attitude toward nuclear weapons had changed considerably since those rah-rah days of atomic cap guns.

A tunnel waits in readiness, just in case.

Since the mid-1990s the United States, along with Russia and the other established nuclear powers, has observed a long-lasting if non-binding tacit moratorium on all types of nuclear testing (a moratorium which unfortunately hasn’t been observed by new members of the nuclear club India, Pakistan, and North Korea). Stories of the days when mushroom clouds loomed over the Las Vegas Strip and the ground shook with the force of nuclear detonations are now something for long-time Nevada residents to share with their children or grandchildren. With its reason for existence in abeyance, the Nevada Test Site is in a state of largely deserted suspended animation today, Mercury a ghost town inhabited by only a few caretakers and esoteric researchers. One hopes that if Mercury should ever start to buzz with family life and commerce again it’s because someone has found some other, safer purpose for the desert landscape that surrounds it. In the meantime, the tunnels are still kept in readiness, just in case someone decides it’s time to start setting off the bombs again.

(The definitive resource on the history of the Nevada Test Site must be, now and likely forevermore, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas’s amazing Nevada Test Site Oral History Project. I could barely scratch the surface of the hundreds of lengthy interviews there when researching this article. And thanks to Duncan Stevens for his recommendation of Operation Crossroads by Jonathan M. Weisgall. I highly recommend the documentary The Atomic Cafe as a portrait of the era of atomic kitsch.)

Comments
24 Responses

- LoneCleric

January 23, 2015 at 9:04 pm

Their windows sued -> widows

(Either that, or radio-activity works in ways I’m not familiar with. :-) )

- Duncan Stevens

January 23, 2015 at 11:16 pm

Here in the U.S., even household fixtures are litigious.

- Jimmy Maher

January 24, 2015 at 7:20 am

:) Thanks!

- matt w

January 23, 2015 at 11:06 pm

Slotin’s death was not only the second of a Los Alamos physicist but the second caused by an accident with the very same core, I believe.

- jalapeno_dude

January 24, 2015 at 12:20 am

Yep–it was known as the “demon core”.

- Carl

January 24, 2015 at 1:11 am

I’ve always been amazed we didn’t have a nuclear war at some point in the last 70 years. For all its paradoxes, MAD seems to have worked. Given that axiom, even if the Nevada Test Site killed some children, it saved many millions of children, because MAD is predicated on an actual deterrent, which you cannot have without testing.

There is still a lot of activity at the Nevada Test Site these days. They still blow things up there under the auspices of the Stockpile Stewardship program, but everything is subcritical.

- Jimmy Maher

January 24, 2015 at 7:37 am

That’s of course the logic that held sway at the time, possibly even including a certain number of dead children into the brutal calculus, but I’m not sure it stands up to scrutiny. Richard Rhodes in particular has made a really compelling case that deterrence did not require matching the other superpower bomb for bomb, that just a small number of relatively modest bombs combined with a reasonably effective delivery system would have made more than deterrent enough. Would the Soviet Union really attack the United States if the consequence was even a couple of Hiroshima-sized bombs falling on Moscow? The Soviet Union was a crazy place, but I’m not sure it was that insane.

It may be that it was this perceived need for equivalence, on the part of both superpowers, that was the real tragedy and folly of the Cold War, leading as it did to the hydrogen bomb, to thousands of missiles, and, yes, quite possibly to dead children in Nevada and Utah.

- Carl Grace

January 25, 2015 at 5:47 pm

You make some interesting points…. food for thought. As crazy as the Soviet Union were at time, I think history clearly records that it was in fact the Americans who were more provocative on the whole. Sad, really.

- Juan Castro

January 28, 2015 at 6:06 pm

Not believing in an afterlife (or an omnipotent being that will join the battle of your side) helps. Can you imagine a theocracy voluntarily folding like the USSR did?

- Victor Gijsbers

January 24, 2015 at 10:53 am

Hi Jimmy, you write “there has been a verified total of 2119 nuclear explosions set off for testing purposes”. But Wikipedia speaks of 2119 nuclear tests involving a total of 2474 devices. I assume it is the devices rather than the tests that correspond to the explosions.

- Jimmy Maher

January 24, 2015 at 11:02 am

Thanks for parsing this more finely. Rather than try to sort out how many explosions that corresponds to in the case of the United States, I took the easy way out and reworded the line.

- Brian Bagnall

January 24, 2015 at 1:16 pm

A new addition to my bucket list is to visit Mercury, Nevada. I’ll be checking out the documentary you recommend.

Corrections:
“about today is” … “about today are”
“there has been” … “there have been”
“law onto” … “law unto”
“with with Russia”

- Jimmy Maher

January 24, 2015 at 1:40 pm

Thanks. I believe the first two are okay. The first is equating a singular with a plural, which I believe can be done either way in English. In the second, “total” is actually singular, so I believe that’s grammatically correct even if it might sound a little odd on a quick reading. Can’t argue with the other two, however…

Mercury is still a closed city, so it’s not someplace you can drop by casually. I believe they run fairly regular tours to the site, but I understand that they’re very popular and so have to be booked well in advance. Las Vegas does have a very good atomic testing museum: http://www.nationalatomictestingmuseum.org/.

- Iffy Bonzoolie

April 23, 2020 at 1:27 am

I was going to mention the Atomic Testing Museum, there. If you find yourself in Las Vegas, and are sick of its typical fare, a visit is well worth your time and money.

It’s astoundingly pro-testing, and my friend and I thoroughly enjoyed the vigor with which they present information.

- Jeremy Gans

January 25, 2015 at 2:42 am

“Jacques Heim called his the “atome,” or atom, “the world’s smallest bathing suit.”” I’m glad this one didn’t stick. After all, one thing events on Bikini Atoll (and elsewhere) demonstrate is that atoms aren’t the smallest piece of matter. If there is an analogy, it is between one-piece swimsuits and atoms, which were respectively ‘split’ by bikinis and atomic explosions….

- pressurizer

January 25, 2015 at 6:43 pm

One thing that always puzzled me is what they were actually testing. I can understand the early tests of a new device or the initial testing of a new subclass, like the hydrogen or neutron bombs. You’d think that most innovations – trigger assembly, safety measures, etc. – could well be tested without actually setting off an explosion. Was there really that much valuable data to be gathered that over a thousand live tests were necessary? I can’t shake a sneaking suspicion that a lot of these tests (by both sides) were conducted just to piss off or scare the enemy.

- Jimmy Maher

January 25, 2015 at 7:11 pm

Yeah, I tend to ask the same question. It’s a very difficult one to answer given that most details about most of the tests are still classified. When you read the Oral History Project interviews with scientists and engineers who worked at the site, there’s still tons of “Sorry, I’m not allowed to answer that.” And even at that we’re drowning in information on American tests in comparison with Soviet…

One thing that does come up is that many things that can be easily simulated now had to be tested live back in the day due to the state of computer technology. Queue a certain amount of grumbling from test-site old-timers about how these new-fangled simulations are no substitute for a real shot…

- iPadCary

January 26, 2015 at 3:25 pm

Exemplary work as per usual, Jimmy! m

Sorry to be off topic, but could you please explain quickly again why you won’t bring
“The King Of Shreds & Patches” to iPad? Thank you

- Jimmy Maher

January 26, 2015 at 3:37 pm

Because there aren’t enough hours in my day.

- iPadCary

January 26, 2015 at 11:20 pm

Alrighty, then.

- Nifft

January 29, 2015 at 6:18 pm

You can play it with “Frotz”.

- ZUrlocker

February 13, 2015 at 2:24 am

well, if you weren’t writing so much ;-)

(really just kidding)

- tedder

December 22, 2017 at 4:41 am

“become it’s own independent service branch” -> its

- Jimmy Maher

December 22, 2017 at 11:35 am

Thanks!

T Plus 3: Edward Teller and His Superbomb
January 30, 2015

Scaffold

Whoever threw this place together wasn't too worried about permanence. Tin walls rise on flimsy studs to a ceiling that sags under its own weight. It reminds you of a prefab tool shed, several stories high.

You're standing beside a monstrous conglomeration of pipes, compressors and pressure valves that fills most of the building.

A stairway leads downward.

>d
You descend the stairway.

Bottom of Scaffold

A maze of plumbing rises before you like the back of a giant refrigerator. Stairs lead up to a scaffold overlooking the equipment. Turning south, you see a closed set of sliding doors, with a small box and a loudspeaker mounted on the wall beside them.

>open box
You swing the box open.

A toggle switch and a red button are mounted inside.

>turn on toggle switch
You turn on the toggle switch.

The loudspeaker emits a burst of static, then a steady hiss.

"Zero minus two minutes."

>push red button
You push the red button.

With an electric whirr, the heavy doors slide open.

"Zero minus ninety seconds."

>s
South Beach

The waters of a peaceful lagoon reflect the tropical dawn like a fiery mirror. A few stars are still visible in the rosy sky.

The glorified tool shed dominates this little island, leaving room only for a narrow strip of sand that curves to the northeast and northwest. A red button is mounted on the wall beside the open sliding doors of the shed.

"Zero minus one minute."

>ne
You follow the curve of the shore.

East Beach

Palm trees far across the lagoon stand in dark relief against the eastern sky. The shore continues northwest and southwest, around the equipment shed.

"Zero minus thirty seconds."

>nw
You follow the curve of the shore.

North Beach

A square wooden extension juts out of the side of the building, stretching away across the lagoon as far as you can see.

The beach continues around the equipment shed to the southeast and southwest.

"Five. Four. Three. Two. One."

Your tropical vacation is cut short by a multimegaton thermonuclear detonation, centered in the nearby equipment shed.

The first Trinity test of an atomic bomb in 1945 yielded an explosion equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT. Barely seven years later, on November 1, 1952, the United States exploded the first thermonuclear bomb — known colloquially as the “hydrogen bomb” — on Enewetak Atoll, a member of the Marshall Islands group. That first hydrogen bomb yielded an explosion worthy of 10.4 megatons of TNT, 520 times the force of the Trinity blast. Moore’s Law’s got nothing on the early days of atomic-bomb development.

President Truman had likened the Trinity bomb to the wrath of the God of the Old Testament, comparing it to “the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.” What then to make of the hydrogen bomb? It was a destructive force beyond comprehension. That we got there so quickly was almost entirely down to the drive of one man who was there at the meeting that would lead to the Manhattan Project and the first atomic bomb and who would continue to be a major voice in both American politics and American weapons development through the entirety of the Cold War. Driven by scientific genius, patriotism, paranoia, and a titanic ego, he became the nation’s most long-serving Cold Warrior, perhaps the ultimate exemplar of the mentality that spawned and fueled that shadowy conflict and the lurking specter of nuclear apocalypse that accompanied it. His name was Edward Teller.

Born on January 15, 1908, in Budapest as the son of a prosperous Jewish attorney, Teller didn’t say a word until age three, leading his parents to believe he might be retarded. But then, when he did start to speak at last, he spoke in complete sentences. As a young boy his favorite author was Jules Verne: “His words carried me into an exciting world. The possibilities of man’s improvement seemed unlimited. The achievements of science were fantastic, and they were good.” But he wouldn’t be allowed much time for boyish dreams. During 1918 and 1919, amidst the end of the First World War, the breakup of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Russian Revolution that was taking place nearby, governments came and went quickly in Budapest. First there was the relatively benign if chaotic Hungarian Democratic Republic. Then came the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the second communist state in the world, built on Lenin’s model; it was less benign, and even more chaotic. And finally there was the proto-fascistic Kingdom of Hungary, accompanied by the White Terror, a series of bloody purges and brutal repressions aimed at scourging the country of communism and, it often seemed, the Jews who had disproportionately supported it. The institutionalized discrimination of the period may have been the source of the relentless competitive drive that would mark the rest of Teller’s life; his father told him that as a Jew “he would have to excel the average just to stay even.” His father also told him that he would have to emigrate if he wished to really make something of himself. Young Edward therefore worked like mad on his academics, and in 1926 he was accepted to study Chemical Engineering at Karlsruhe University in Germany.

As the political climate in Germany darkened, Teller completed his undergraduate studies at Karlsruhe, followed by a PhD in Physics at the University of Leipzig. He also lost most of his right foot in a streetcar accident in Munich; he would wear a prosthetic, and walk with a pronounced limp, for the rest of his life. He took up a research post at the University of Göttingen, where he published papers like mad. Setting a pattern that would hold throughout his career, he almost always worked with a coauthor, who would be responsible for sorting insights that sometimes came off more as feverish ravings than rigorous science into some manageable, organized form, and who would do the tedious but necessary work of calculating and verifying what seemed to come to Teller unbidden as intuitive truths. Teller was given to occasional fits of brooding, but at other times could be great fun, possessed of an easy, self-deprecating humor and a ready laugh. He was quite an accomplished classical pianist, but his approach to the art said much about an internal drive that he sometimes masked in casual contact with his peers: he played everything fortissimo, treating the composers whose works he played like personal challengers. On the whole, though, he was well-liked, and increasingly well-respected for his theoretical élan.

But soon it was, as Teller later put it, “a foregone conclusion I had to leave” Germany; Hitler had come to power, bringing with him an institutionalized antisemitism that would soon make his run-ins with bigotry in Hungary seem mild. Thankfully, in 1934 his burgeoning reputation won him an appointment to work with the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr at the University of Copenhagen, the very center of the universe of physics at that time. This was followed by a brief stay at University College London. The following year he accepted a professorship at George Washington University. In the company of his new wife, his childhood sweetheart Mici whom he had returned to Budapest one last time to marry, he booked passage to the United States, not at all sure about his decision to leave Europe. His worries were unfounded; he quickly fell in love with the New World with all the patriotic passion an immigrant often musters, and never again wanted to live anywhere else.

In early 1939 a wave of excitement swept an international physics community still struggling to retain its dedication to the open sharing of knowledge in the face of the war clouds gathering over Europe. Two German scientists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, had managed a feat most of their colleagues had heretofore considered impossible: they had split an atom of uranium. They had, in other words, achieved nuclear fission. This opened up a possibility that had been long discussed but also long dismissed by most physicists as a fantasy: to create a fission chain reaction capable of releasing almost inconceivable amounts of energy — energy with the potential to create an almost inconceivably powerful bomb. Teller’s fellow physicist and Hungarian émigré Leó Szilárd immediately began agitating for a top-secret crash program to build one of these “atomic bombs,” or failing that to prove definitively that it could not be done. Using logic that would become all too familiar over the decades of atomic history to come, he said that the democratic world had to have the bomb before Nazi Germany. And, having split the atom first, the Germans were obviously already ahead. (Szilárd apparently didn’t consider that the willingness of Hahn and Strassmann to publish their work in scientific journals probably meant that they weren’t, at least yet, thinking all that seriously about its potential as a weapon.) But other scientists, including Bohr, remained unwilling to sacrifice their traditional openness in the name of something which they thought was likely to be impossible anyway. The chief stumbling block was the need for comparatively huge quantities of uranium 235, which no one knew how to produce in any remotely efficient way. “It can never be done,” said Bohr, “unless you turn the United States into one huge factory.” Unconvinced, Szilárd kept insisting that everything had changed as soon as fission was proved to be possible, and that his colleagues denied it at their peril.

It’s at this point that Teller, heretofore a promising but hardly a major physicist, enters the history books for the first time — not as a great thinker in his own right but, as he himself would later dryly put it, as “Szilárd’s chauffeur.” Szilárd didn’t drive, and he needed to get out to Long Island for the second of two meetings with Albert Einstein, now also living in exile in the United States, that would change the course of history. Einstein was just about the only physicist American politicians were likely to be familiar with, the only one they were likely to listen to if he came to them with outlandish science-fictional hopes and fears of a futuristic “atomic bomb.” Thus, barely a month before Germany invaded Poland to touch off the Second World War, Szilárd, Teller, and Einstein sat in the latter’s comfortable sitting room — Einstein still in his slippers — sipping tea. Teller, having already served as chauffeur, now accepted the further indignity of being the secretary, writing down the letter to President Roosevelt that his two older colleagues dictated to him. Hand-delivered to Roosevelt by Alexander Sachs, a well-connected Jewish banker, the letter led to the formation of an “Advisory Committee on Uranium,” forefather of the Manhattan Project, in October of 1939. The Committee included both Szilárd and Teller amongst its members. It was in fact Teller himself who made the first request for funding: for $6000 to finance some early experiments to be conducted by the exiled Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. After considerable argument about the expense, the request was approved.

Still, progress was slow, the government’s support was halfhearted, and even Teller himself was uncertain that he wanted to abandon pure science for weapons research. Then came the German invasion of France and the Low Countries in May of 1940. Teller later claimed that the shocking success of the Wehrmacht convinced him that “Hitler would conquer the world unless a miracle happened.” A speech by Roosevelt galvanized him to action: “If the scientists in the free countries will not make weapons to defend the freedom of their countries, then freedom will be lost.” Teller’s duty as he saw it was clear: “My mind was made up, and it has not changed since.” Actually, records of Roosevelt’s speeches from the period reveal no such formulation as the one in Teller’s recollection. There’s merely an offering of absolution to scientists for having enabled so many technologies which Germany was now putting to such evil use, along with a paean to the search for knowledge, scientific and otherwise, which Germany was now so actively repressing. Nevertheless, Teller would soon believe the “miracle” the world so urgently needed to be within sight in the form of the atomic bomb. His insistence on seeing weapons of mass destruction in such quasi-religious terms would come to define the role he would play in many dramas to come.

In mid-1941, just a few months after he and Mici took the oath of American citizenship, Edward Teller moved to Columbia to work more closely with Fermi and Szilárd, to whose cause he was now a complete convert. Soon after, he was party to yet another conversation that would change the world, this time with he himself as the active agent of that change. When Teller and Fermi were walking back from lunch one day, the latter mused “out of the blue” whether it might be possible to use the as-yet nonexistent atomic bomb as a mere catalyst for a much bigger bomb, one that fused rather than split atoms. Specifically, hydrogen might be fused to helium, like the process that powered the Sun. Fermi estimated that a fusion bomb could be made to explode with three orders of magnitude more force than a simple fission device. He considered the idea a throwaway; the numbers would start to get so big that you kind of had to ask what the point would really be. Teller, however, took it as a challenge.

This was vintage Teller. Already in 1941 he considered the fission bomb essentially a solved problem in theoretical physics. Just as he needed patient collaborators to clean up and finish his research papers, he was more than happy to turn over the practical work on the fission bomb to others while he swam after the next big fish. Within a year he thought he knew “precisely how to do it.” He broke the news to his colleague and best friend, exiled German physicist Hans Bethe:

Teller told me that the fission bomb was all well and good and, essentially, was now a sure thing. In reality, the work had hardly begun. Teller likes to jump to conclusions. He said that what we really should think about was the possibility of igniting deuterium [an isotope of hydrogen, sometimes known as “heavy hydrogen”] by a fission weapon — the hydrogen bomb.

Teller’s idea was soon christened “the Super.” He estimated that it should be able to “devastate an area of more than 100 square miles.”

Teller followed Fermi to the University of Chicago in 1942, where Fermi took charge of the project to build what became known as Chicago Pile 1, the world’s first nuclear reactor. When activated in November of that year, it proved once and for all that an atomic chain reaction, and thus an atomic bomb, was possible. With that proof, the newly christened Manhattan Project now ramped up in earnest under the stewardship of Army Air Force General Leslie Groves, who was placed in charge of infrastructure and practical and military concerns, and American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the scientific research. Teller was one of the first scientists to arrive at Los Alamos, the little community Groves and Oppenheimer constructed to finish the work of making the atomic bomb way out in the splendid isolation of the New Mexico desert. Teller liked and admired Oppenheimer with an enthusiasm that could sometimes verge on hero worship. Oppenheimer was, he said, a “bricklayer,” capable of seeing the whole puzzle and fitting its pieces together, as opposed to the “brick makers” around him who could only see their own small piece.

By now the Manhattan Project was working to develop not one but two types of fission bomb. The first would be a relatively crude device that used uranium 235. Neils Bohr’s words about “turning the United States into one huge factory” were proving to be prophetic, as Groves oversaw a massive industrial effort to enrich enough uranium to power it; this part of the Manhattan Project alone would eventually employ tens of thousands of people. The other bomb was a more elegant and efficient but also much more uncertain design that used the newly synthesized element of plutonium instead of uranium. It would have to be triggered by precisely placed and shaped explosive charges, which would implode its plutonium core into a supercritical mass and start the chain reaction. Teller worked for some time on this implosion process, the trickiest technical problem of all those that the Manhattan Project had to overcome.

Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller hiking near Los Alamos, circa 1944.

Teller, however, soon became aggrieving and aggrieved, building the foundation of yet another lifelong reputation: that of someone who just doesn’t play well with others. As the little community of Los Alamos grew around him, Teller had expected to either be placed in charge of all theoretical physicists or of an entirely new project to work on the Super. He didn’t get either appointment. Instead, his old friend Hans Bethe took charge of the theoretical physicists, leaving Teller so resentful that it spoiled their friendship forever. The Super project, meanwhile, never got started at all; it was declared an idea maybe worth revisiting after the fission bombs were finished, but nothing to use resources on now. Teller began to neglect his assigned tasks in favor of working independently on the Super. Bethe, he recalls, “wanted me to work on calculational details at which I am not particularly good, while I wanted to continue not only on the hydrogen bomb, but on other novel subjects.” George Gamow, a Russian émigré physicist who had known Teller from his years in Germany, notes that “something changed” in Teller after he got to Los Alamos. Before, he had been “helpful, willing and able to work on other people’s ideas without insisting on everything having to be his own.” Now… well, not so much. “Since the theoretical division was very shorthanded,” says Bethe, “it was necessary to bring in new scientists to do the work that Teller declined to do.”

Teller took to prowling about distracting scientists from other, more immediately useful work with his ideas and proposals, driving Bethe crazy. At last in the spring of 1944 Bethe, with Oppenheimer’s approval, relieved Teller “of further responsibility for work on the wartime development of the atomic bomb.” (The man who replaced Teller on the implosion team, Rudolf Peierls, brought with him an assistant named Klaus Fuchs who would share many details of the atomic bomb’s design — most importantly the tricky implosion process itself — with the Soviet Union.) Oppenheimer personally convinced an irate Teller not to leave. After all, he said, this was just what he wanted; now he could work on the Super full-time. And so Teller’s work on those first atomic bombs was largely done.

After the war was ended by the dropping of two examples of Los Alamos’s handiwork — one of uranium, the other of plutonium — on Japan, the little desert community began to disperse. Many of the most important minds behind the bomb, including Bethe, Fermi, and Oppenheimer himself, were eager to put weapons development behind them and return to either pure research or, in Oppenheimer’s case, increasing political engagement with the handling of their creation. Teller was deeply disturbed at this loss of brainpower, and even more disturbed that he still couldn’t get approval of his Super project. He wrote an urgent letter trying to convince his colleagues of the necessity of further weapons development, particularly on the Super, which he said was realizable within five years if they all put their minds to it. Deploying the same paranoid logic that had led to the development of the fission bombs, he said that the Soviet Union might very well be able to make a hydrogen bomb without even bothering with a fission-only bomb; the shadowy threat was now the Soviet Union rather than Nazi Germany, but the formulation was otherwise the same. He pronounced colleagues like Oppenheimer who would prefer to reach diplomatic accommodation with the Soviet Union, accommodation which might even entail sharing the atomic bomb with them, guilty of “fallacy.” And, sounding another thoroughgoing theme of his career, he pronounced thermonuclear explosions to be potentially useful for many peaceful purposes; they would “allow us to extend our power over natural phenomena far beyond anything we can at present imagine.”

Some of his colleagues were able to secure time on the ENIAC, by some reckonings the world’s first real computer, to do calculations which seemed to prove the Super feasible. An official conference held at Los Alamos in April of 1946 produced more general agreement that it should be possible, although by no means did everyone agree with all of Teller’s most optimistic predictions for its timetable. For the time being, though, those remaining at Los Alamos were busy preparing for Operation Crossroads, as well as improving the safety and reliability of the existing arsenal. Thus the Super remained firmly on the back burner. Teller himself had already departed in frustration by the time of the Super conference; he joined Fermi at the University of Chicago in February of 1946.

But thirty months later Teller, proclaiming himself increasingly disturbed by the Chinese Civil War and the by now blatant takeover of all of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union, returned to Los Alamos. “I fully realize the menacing international situation,” he said, “and I believe that the United States must develop its military strength to the utmost if we are not to succumb to the danger of communism.” And, casting himself as a martyr to the cause, he proclaimed a sense of patriotic duty to be behind the move, “in spite of the fact that I cannot hope to work as happily and with as much immediate satisfaction in a field of applied science.” More quietly but perhaps more honestly, he admitted to a friend that it was “quite clear that I am needed in Los Alamos more than I am needed in Chicago,” and “being necessary is an extremely important thing for me.” For their part, many of his colleagues noted not so much a considered position behind his decision as a visceral hatred of the Soviet Union that could sometimes seem to verge on the ethnic. The Soviet Union had just completed its takeover of Hungary in June of 1948, when the Soviet-backed Hungarian Communist Party effectively outlawed the democratic opposition and cut Teller off from his remaining family in Budapest. His Hungarian friend and Los Alamos colleague John von Neumann notes that “Russia was traditionally the enemy” of Hungary, subject to “an emotional fear and dislike” among his countrypeople.

Teller’s return to Los Alamos coincided with increasingly urgent consideration of the Super in the halls of government, prompted by clear signs from intelligence sources that the Soviet Union was getting close to a fission bomb of its own. “It would be dreadful,” wrote a White House aide named William Golden, “if the Russians got it [the Super] first.” Teller was on holiday in England in September of 1949 when he got the news that the Soviet Union had just exploded its first atomic bomb, at least a year before the CIA’s most pessimistic predictions.

His advocacy now shifted into overdrive. Despite the fact that the Soviets were still very obviously playing catch-up, and largely using stolen American designs to do so (that first Soviet bomb was a virtual clone of the Trinity bomb), he announced that the United States was in “grave danger that we have lost or are losing the atomic armaments race.” “If the Russians demonstrate a Super before we possess one,” he declared, “our situation will be hopeless.” His logic was questionable at best, to the extent that Ashutosh Jogalekar in a recent article for Scientific American goes beyond accusing him of fuzzy thinking to accusing him of outright deception, calling his advocacy for the Super “his first real dishonest act.” Yet he had at last an eager audience looking for any source of comfort in the face of the Soviet test. Oppenheimer, now increasingly at odds with Teller personally as well as professionally, wrote despairingly of “this miserable thing” that “appears to have caught the imagination, both of the Congressional and of the military people, as the answer to the problem posed by the Russian advance.” Seeing it as “the way to save the country and the peace,” he wrote, “appears to me full of dangers.” Teller took very, very personally Oppenheimer’s advocacy for diplomacy with the Soviet Union and his persistent skepticism about both the moral wisdom and the technical feasibility of the Super.

Advocates of reasoned diplomacy seldom won over advocates of nuclear armaments during the Cold War. On January 31, 1950, President Truman announced to the world that the United States was going forward with work “on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or super-bomb.” Announcing the Super publicly in this way made a marked contrast to the top-secret Manhattan Project. The move, driven largely by domestic political calculations on the part of Truman’s staff, explicitly defined future nuclear research as a race to the Super between the Americans and the Soviets, a sort of perverted forefather to the Moon Race in which both sides would seek to be first to unleash the most terrible destructive force in the history of the humanity.

Some scientists declined to work on the project out of moral misgivings; others simply because they didn’t want to work with Teller. Future Nobel Laureate Emilio Segrè, for example, pronounced Teller “dominated by irresistible passions much stronger than even his powerful rational intellect,” and turned his job offer down. The core of the team that was finally assembled included, in addition to Teller, two less visible European veterans of the Manhattan Project, Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann. They didn’t make for a very happy family. Within weeks Ulam was complaining about “Edward’s obstinacy, his single-mindedness, and his overwhelming ambition.” As Ulam and Neumann worked through the sorts of tedious calculations that Teller always found beneath him, a painful reality slowly dawned on them: Teller’s plan for the Super, which he had first conceived even before the fission bomb was a reality, simply wouldn’t work. When they tried to demonstrate this to Teller, the latter, in the words of Stanislaw Ulam’s wife Françoise, “objected loudly and cajoled everyone around into disbelieving the results. What should have been the common examination of difficult problems became an unpleasant confrontation.” “Teller was not easily reconciled to our results,” says Stanislaw Ulam himself more laconically. “I learned that the bad news drove him once to tears of frustration, and he suffered great disappointment. I never saw him personally in that condition, but he certainly appeared glum in those days, and so were other enthusiasts of the H-bomb project.” Teller was soon engaging in conspiracy theorizing, believing that Ulam and von Neumann were deliberately biasing their findings to make him and his Super look bad. He demanded that virtually all of Los Alamos be placed at his disposal, but as 1950 ground on and his theories looked more and more flawed nobody, least of all Teller, seemed quite sure what they should actually be doing.

Then, one day in late January of 1951, Françoise Ulam found her husband staring vacantly into their back garden. “‘I found a way to make it work.’ ‘What work?’ I asked. ‘The Super,’ he replied. ‘It is a totally different scheme, and it will change the course of history.'” The technical details of Ulam’s new scheme, and of Teller’s original, we won’t go into here. Suffice to say that Teller immediately saw the new idea’s potential. “Edward is full of enthusiasm about these possibilities,” wrote Ulam to a colleague. In an indication of just how far their relationship had deteriorated, he then added a stinger: “This is perhaps an indication they will not work.”

There soon followed what Jogalekar labels Teller’s second dishonest act. Unwilling to share the stewardship of or credit for his Super, Teller aggressively shunted Ulam aside, all but forcing him out of the project altogether. Françoise Ulam:

From then on Teller pushed Stan aside and refused to deal with him any longer. He never met or talked meaningfully with Stan ever again. Stan was, I felt, more wounded than he knew by this unfriendly reception, although I never heard him express ill feelings toward Teller. (He rather pitied him instead.) Secure in his own mind that his input had been useful, he withdrew.

Teller would minimize Ulam’s contribution for the rest of his life. Ulam himself never seriously campaigned to be awarded his own proper share of the credit, perhaps because he was much more ambivalent about their accomplishment than Teller. He often compared the hydrogen bomb to the Jewish legend of the Golem, which, having been created as a means of protection, eventually gets out of its maker’s control and goes on a murderous rampage through Prague.

With the Super now looking feasible, the Korean War raging, and the knowledge that, thanks not least to Truman’s grand pronouncement, this was now a race with the Soviets, even the likes of Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Bethe now supported its development. Teller, however, still created chaos everywhere he went. He demanded to be placed in sole charge of the Super project, including not only the research but the logistics, the engineering, and the administration. Knowing that that way lay madness, Los Alamos director Norris Bradbury absolutely refused. On September 17, 1951, Teller quit in a huff. Many of his colleagues mumbled darkly about what seemed a developing pattern: Teller had quit on the fission-bomb project as well just when it needed him most. (Teller himself would likely have replied that, as a theoretical physicist through and through, he was neither terribly interested in nor terribly good at the engineering details of actually building either the fission bomb or the Super.) “Once Teller left Los Alamos,” Bethe remembers, “even though they were working on ‘his’ weapon, he found all sort of reasons why it wouldn’t work. He tried to criticize it wherever possible.”

Nevertheless, Los Alamos soldiered on to shock the world and escalate the nuclear standoff to a potentially planet-wrecking scale when they detonated the first hydrogen bomb on November 1, 1952, a scene evocatively portrayed by Trinity in the vignette whose extracts open this article. It stripped not only Enewetak but every nearby island of all animal life and vegetation, as if someone had taken a giant potato peeler to their surfaces. It blew 80 million tons of highly radioactive material high into the air; parts of the fallout would travel to every corner of the globe. It vaporized birds in midair. It cooked nearby fish as if they had been dropped into a hot frying pan. (Yes, that cute, friendly dolphin that was so helpful to you in Trinity wasn’t long for this world.) Teller’s dubious dream had come to its fruition.

The world’s first hydrogen bomb explodes on November 1, 1952.

He should have been pleased, but he had other things on his mind. While Los Alamos worked to finish the Super, he was organizing an entirely new nuclear-weapons laboratory that would not be bound by what he saw as the carping pessimism of Los Alamos. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was founded on the site of a mothballed naval air station in Livermore, California, that summer of 1952. Teller claimed to be too busy setting up Livermore to make the trip to Enewetak to witness the blast, but most of his old colleagues attributed his failure to appear to pique; they believed he had been secretly hoping to see them fail, so his new Laboratory could sweep in and save the day. This alleged disappointment did not, however, keep him from claiming his paternity. “It’s a boy!” he announced.

On August 12, 1953, when the Soviet Union exploded its own inevitable first hydrogen bomb, the die for 35 more years of mutually assured destruction was irretrievably cast. On October 30, 1961, almost exactly twenty years after the idle lunch-time conversation that had spawned it, Teller’s baby reached terrifying adulthood when the Soviets detonated over the remote archipelago of Novaya Zemlya the largest atomic bomb and the largest force of any sort ever triggered by humans, a 50-plus-megaton thermonuclear monster that was promptly dubbed the “Tsar Bomba.” It produced a mushroom cloud over seven times the height of Mount Everest; would have caused third-degree burns to someone standing 60 miles away; broke windows over 500 miles away. Even by the standards of the institutionalized insanity of the Cold War this was madness. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans ever tested or built another bomb of anywhere close to that size for the simple reason that no one could quite imagine what to actually do with such a giant. Their 5- and 10-megaton warheads were less expensive, easier to make, and had more than enough megatonnage among them to destroy all life on the planet.

By the time of the Tsar Bomba Teller had largely abandoned the nuts and bolts of nuclear physics in favor of a career as an administrator of the military-industrial complex and as an increasingly visible political advocate for nuclear weapons and the strongest possible anti-communist stance. Just as Los Alamos seemed to have inherited some of its founder Robert Oppenheimer’s personality, being relatively cautious and pragmatic about the terrible weapons it developed, Teller’s Lawrence Livermore developed a reputation for shooting from the hip and a damn-the-consequences drive for ever bigger and dirtier bombs. Teller characterized his transformation from physicist to advocate as a principled move that he made only sadly and reluctantly. He was, he claimed again, a martyr to his thankless cause: “I cannot just go back to physics because I believe that to prevent another war happens to be incomparably more important.” Others questioned whether Teller didn’t enjoy the limelight a lot more than he admitted. Robert Brownlee, a colleague who worked with him during the 1950s, makes this observation:

Edward was, in my experience, two entirely different people. When he was with scientists, just scientists, every idea was interesting and valuable and rational and so on. And the moment a certain kind of person would walk in the room, a person who was outside the family, and therefore might take tales back, a press person, Edward would become a wild man. He would be showing off for the press or for the visitor, would say things that would make you do this: This guy has absolutely lost it, he’s completely crazy. But it was an affectation which he put on when somebody came. So the press, whenever they interviewed him, carried away with them a strange view of Edward. When he was just with us kids, he was not that at all. So when you could talk with Edward with the people right there, it was entirely different than having a stranger in there, because the moment that stranger arrived, Edward became another person. And it had something to do with publicity—I don’t know a better word for it. There must be a better word for it. But I learned that despite what everybody else at the lab said, Edward’s value had to be determined independent of his personality. He was extremely valuable, but nobody liked him because he was, every so often, totally flaky.

It was apparently this “crazy” version of Teller that the American people at large came to know well by 1960. After Teller made headlines across the country through his strident opposition to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 that moved all nuclear testing underground, Stanley Kubrick was inspired to make his caricature the eponymous star of Dr. Strangelove. He became for decades the favorite scientist of the American Right largely by telling them exactly what they wanted to hear. For instance, he played a major role, as we’ve already seen, in Ronald Reagan’s foolish SDI initiative of the 1980s, claiming to be able to provide not only its technology but also providing its justification: “If we went into a nuclear war today,” he said in 1980, “there is practically no question that the Russians would win that war and the United States would not exist.” The similarity of this rhetoric to that he had used to justify the Super 30 years before is not, I trust, lost on you. Even as the technologies of warheads and delivery systems evolved, the arguments employed in their justification always had this weird fly-in-amber consistency about them, leaving one to wonder when, if ever, enough would finally be enough. If anything, Teller’s rhetoric grew more extreme over the years; he once claimed that the United States had fallen so far behind the Soviet Union that he fully expected to be in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp — if not dead — within five years. His unapologetic advocacy of nuclear weapons and nuclear power continued until his death at age 95 in 2003. After the Cold War ended, rather than being thrilled at having seemingly achieved the goal he had worked toward for so many years, he merely chose a new bogeyman to fear: Saddam Hussein.

Teller had by then been ostracized for decades from his old Manhattan Project colleagues, who, whilst Teller plunged into Cold War politics, had collected an impressive shelf of Nobel Prizes amongst themselves working with more peaceful applications of nuclear physics. He replaced those old relationships with new ones forged with a group of younger colleagues at Lawrence Livermore who, having had their educations largely funded by the military-industrial complex, saw themselves first and foremost not as scientists but as weapons designers. To them, Teller was a hero. To the old guard, he was nothing less than the traitor in their ranks. The source of their enduring enmity was not his questionable advocacy for the Super or even his slighting of Ulam, but rather another sequence of events involving a man he had once admired greatly: Robert Oppenheimer.

In May of 1952, the FBI questioned Teller on the subject of Oppenheimer, another in a seemingly endless string of pseudo-investigations born of Oppenheimer’s pre-war involvement with communist causes and his current less than gung-ho attitude toward the nation’s nuclear buildup. Teller, who believed Oppenheimer personally responsible for delaying his beloved Super program, laid into his old boss with a vengeance. The country, he claimed, could easily have had the hydrogen bomb a year ago if not for Oppenheimer’s obstructionism. While he stopped short of outright calling him a Soviet spy, he was careful not to exclude the possibility either. Otherwise, he conducted what amounted to a character assassination. Oppenheimer was motivated not by principle but by vanity and jealously in his opposition to Teller’s plans, as he didn’t want to see Teller better his own fission bomb with the Super. He had “great ambitions in science and realizes that he is not as great a physicist as he would like to be.” (Ironically, many of Teller’s colleagues would have happily accused him of this exact deep-seated sense of insecurity and its resulting personal failings.) It would be better for the country, Teller said, if Oppenheimer was “separated” from the corridors of power.

Not quite two years later, with Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt near its peak, Oppenheimer’s enemies pounced openly at last, initiating hearings to revoke all of Oppenheimer’s security clearances; doing so would end his time as a policy adviser since virtually all of the policy about which he advised involved classified weapons systems. In April of 1954, Robert Oppenheimer was effectively put on trial. A parade of hawks from inside the military, the FBI, and the Washington establishment testified against him; a parade of his old Manhattan Project colleagues testified strongly in his favor. Except for Edward Teller. Called to the stand on April 28, Teller was unwilling to support Oppenheimer but also seemingly too craven to repeat his accusations of two years before in the man’s presence. Asked point-blank if he believed Oppenheimer a security risk, he equivocated like mad:

In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer acting —  I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted — in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more. In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.

I believe, and that is merely a question of belief and there is no expertness, no real information behind it, that Dr. Oppenheimer’s character is such that he would not knowingly and willingly do anything that is designed to endanger the safety of this country. To the extent, therefore, that your question is directed toward intent, I would say I do not see any reason to deny clearance.

If it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would.

“I’m sorry,” said Teller to Oppenheimer as he left the courtroom. “After what you’ve just said, I don’t know what you mean,” replied Oppenheimer. On May 27, Oppenheimer’s security clearances were formally and permanently revoked. “I think it broke his spirit really,” says an old friend. “He was not the same person afterward,” says Bethe. He spent most of his remaining years sailing and puttering around his beach house in the Virgin Islands. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations made some efforts to rehabilitate his reputation, most notably awarding him the Enrico Fermi Award for his service in 1963, but his security clearances, and with them his political influence, were never restored. He died at age 62 in 1967.

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller share an uncomfortable handshake on the occasion of the former being awarded the Enrico Fermi Award, 1963.

After the trial was done and gone, the scientists who had once worked with and admired Teller were left with the same question that we are: what the hell happened to him? How did this brilliant young scientist turn into the paranoid war-monger Americans soon got used to seeing on their television screens, opposing in his thickly accented English every effort at arms control ever mooted during the Cold War? How could a nuclear physicist, raised on science, talk about winning nuclear wars and dismiss the dangers of radioactive fallout as trivial?

There have been thousands of theories deployed in thousands of attempts to figure out Teller. Some have pointed back to that Munich street-car accident in his youth, which they claim — a bit melodramatically in my view — left him “in constant pain” for the rest of his life. Some have noted his deep-seated personal insecurity, which seemed to have its origins even earlier, to when he as a sheltered child with a doting mother suffered constant abuse and harassment at school for the crimes of being smart and being Jewish. Some have traced his hatred of communism to the chaos it brought to the Hungary of his youth — or, as noted previously, traced it to a Hungarian’s ethnic antipathy for Russia and the Russians. Enrico Fermi’s observation is amongst the most telling as well as the most witty: Teller was the only monomaniac he knew, he said, who had several manias. Carl Sagan, Teller’s bitter opponent during the SDI debates of the 1980s, believed that Teller had become so obsessed with the Super he had “fathered” that he couldn’t think rationally about it anymore. Like any parent, he couldn’t bear the idea of his child being a force for evil or, indeed, its not being a force for good. Thus his proposals to use it for defense in the SDI program, or to use it to dig harbors and canals and clear troublesome mountains away (fallout be damned!), or even to lob it at the Sun and the Moon for “research” purposes.

Edward Teller (right) with Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan.

Whatever made Teller the man he became, it wasn’t as simplistic as any of the above, taken in isolation or even in combination. For all his legendary arrogance and his willingness to hold grudges, he was also frequently described as a “warm” man and a good, true friend. When his former colleagues all cut him after his testimony at Oppenheimer’s security hearing, sometimes even publicly refusing to shake his hand, Teller reportedly spent hours “weeping” at the spoiling of most of the most important relationships in his life. He even tried desperately to recant his testimony, only to learn it was too late. No, none of us humans are that easy to figure out.

Yet there does seem to be a larger pattern that holds true not only for Teller but for many other architects of the nuclear-arms race: the sheer seductive allure of the Bomb itself. As Trinity’s box copy proclaims, “The basic power of the universe has been unleashed.” To wield such unprecedented power is a heady drug indeed. The Bomb is the One Ring, the Dark Side of the Force. (Interesting that so many of the most enduring mythic fictions of the Cold War feature such powerful but corrupting temptations…) Some people, like Robert Oppenheimer, were Prosperos, unnerved by its power and eager to eliminate it from the world. Others, like Edward Teller, were Dr. Faustuses, ready to ride this unholy force right down to the depths of Hell. Dueling aphorisms coined by the two men sound like extracts from Paradise Lost. “Physicists have known sin,” says Oppenheimer, eyes downcast. Teller, his trademark bushy eyebrows twitching with passion, replies, “Physicists have known power!”

(For a good history of the relationship between Teller and Oppenheimer — and also Ernest Lawrence, a figure I didn’t have room for in this article — see Brotherhood of the Bomb by Gregg Herken. You can find Carl Sagan’s article on Teller in The Demon-Haunted World.)

Comments
35 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

January 30, 2015 at 3:02 pm

The Bomb is the One Ring
Tolkien has sworn up and down that LOTR was not intended as allegory, and while some choose not to believe him about Sauron:Hitler, much of Fellowship of the Ring was written in 1939 and 1940, long before the atomic bomb was general public knowledge. So I’d acquit him of this charge.

One notable fact about the Tsar Bomba: it was initially supposed to be 100 megatons. Its payload was reduced at the last minute, and the potential fallout was notably limited by those changes. Among other things, the plane and crew dropping the bomb could not have gotten out of the blast radius in time (as it was, the plane went into freefall for a considerable height before eventually leveling out).

- Jimmy Maher

January 31, 2015 at 9:08 am

The parenthetical was intended more as a musing aside than a serious claim that either Tolkien or Lucas had the nuclear bomb actually in mind. For the rest, I believe us critics are still allowed to draw parallels even where they weren’t explicitly intended by authors. ;)

- Duncan Stevens

February 1, 2015 at 3:29 am

I just wouldn’t include LOTR in the category of Cold War fiction; it was published then, but conceived and, in substantial part, written well before. (Wagner is the more obvious influence anyway.) You can do what you like with Lucas, and there are certainly other examples, intended or not.

- Jimmy Maher

February 1, 2015 at 9:44 am

I think there are two different ways that one can take the phrase “Cold War fiction.” One is, “a fiction that was written during/inspired by the Cold War.” The other is, “a fiction that was popular/resonant in the culture during the Cold War.” Obviously in most cases these two overlap, but not here. And you go for the former definition, while I go for the latter. You say potato, I say potahto.

- Michael Davis

February 9, 2015 at 6:37 pm

Duncan I think you’re misunderstanding that he meant the phrase purely as a metaphor. He said the bomb was the one ring, not that the one ring was the bomb.

- Derek

June 3, 2018 at 7:35 pm

Indeed. The characterization of the Ring was probably not influenced by nuclear weapons, given that the first-draft version of what became the first two LOTR books was written long before the Trinity test. But Tolkien’s foreword to LOTR first denies that the story was an allegory of World War Two and then lays out how the story had gone had it been an allegory of the war. The allied powers of the West would have used the Ring to destroy Sauron and turned evil in doing so, and Saruman would have discovered how to make a Ring of his own.

The Ring was not shaped by the Bomb, but Tolkien specifically endorsed the notion that the two could be compared with each other.

- Ricardo

January 30, 2015 at 5:27 pm

You, sir, is a gentleman and a scholar. Read this over at planet-if. Amazing how much you can extract and analyze from digital antiques research. :)

- Ken Rutsky

January 30, 2015 at 5:48 pm

Loving these articles. Thank you.

Also:

“..along with a peon to the search for knowledge…”

paean?

- Jimmy Maher

January 31, 2015 at 9:05 am

I was of course referring to Roosevelt’s offering up of a research assistant as a sacrifice to the gods of war… No? Okay, then. Thanks!

- ZUrlocker

January 31, 2015 at 5:30 pm

At this point, I feel like I’m lost in the details. I’d like to get back to the game…

- Brian Bagnall

February 1, 2015 at 1:07 pm

I’m having similar feels. Context can be helpful but this is starting to feel like a full credit course.

- Lisa H.

February 2, 2015 at 12:50 am

Yeah, I’m starting to feel the same way…

- Jimmy Maher

February 2, 2015 at 9:18 am

I had approached this series with a certain amount of trepidation, as I suspected it would bring some reactions such as yours. Nor are your reactions at all unreasonable; you come here to read about computer games, and these articles haven’t, at least on the surface, had a whole lot to do with computer games. On the other hand, this material is important in its own right, important to me personally, and — and I really believe this — important to understanding the final argument that I want to make for Trinity as an historical tragedy. I hope when the final article appears that where I’m going with all this will be more apparent — although whether you find my argument relevant or interesting in itself is, once again, in the eye of the beholder. At any rate, after thinking about it I find I’m not willing to compromise my vision for this series. We writerly types can be stubborn like that. ;)

But that of course doesn’t solve the problem for those of you who just aren’t all that interested in reading thousands of words more on Cold War history. Worse, some of you are *paying* for this material via Patreon. I would never, ever want you to feel that, after you generously offered your support, I suddenly pulled a bait and switch.

So, I think the best compromise is to just not charge Patreon subscribers for the remainder of this series — which, for the record, is now exactly half over (cue sighs of relief and/or groans of impatience). I hope some of you will find what I’m doing here interesting and/or relevant to appreciating Trinity (you can print some “I appreciate Trinity on a much deeper level than you!” tee-shirts!), especially when the whole picture is fully revealed, as it were. For the rest: feel free to treat this long digression as just a (temporary) psychosis-fueled exegesis a la Pale Fire. ;) In about one more month I’ll be back to writing about computer games and the computer industry of the 1980s — got some great topics coming up, like Microprose, the arrival of the Atari ST and Amiga, more early experiments with parser-less or parser-value-added graphical adventures, a return to the British scene, etc., etc. Rest assured that this blog will not permanently become the The Cold War Antiquarian.

So, if you want to check out now and check back in in a month, I totally understand. Thanks in advance for your patience!

- Jeremy Gans

February 3, 2015 at 3:13 am

This series of posts is what prompted me to back your Patreon. I love the writing and the details, and it’s making me realise that, despite my very fond memories of Trinity, I came nowhere near to appreciating the genius of that game.

- Andrew Hickey

February 3, 2015 at 4:09 pm

Just to say that as a Patreon backer myself, this is exactly the kind of thing I come to your blog for. I only have a slight interest in early gaming, but have a *huge* interest in well-written, passionate, well-sourced historical analysis of almost any subject.

- Peter Piers

December 30, 2015 at 5:09 pm

At the time when they were published, I wasn’t much interested in these articles. Now, reading up, I am fascinated. Make of that what you will.

And keep writing whatever you think is best.

- Adele

February 10, 2016 at 3:33 am

These details and asides are what I love about the Digital Antiquarian – I can get lost in the details and writing of a single post each night. Thank you for the time and research, Jimmy!

- David Boddie

February 2, 2015 at 1:09 pm

I’m finding this mini-series of articles quite thought-provoking, though I can understand if others are not quite so interested in this diversion from the timeline. Maybe it’s the result of growing up during the time of Protect and Survive, or the result of studying Physics at a time when the subject of professional ethics was being raised in general publications. I think it helps some of us to understand where we have come from.

- Duncan Stevens

February 2, 2015 at 3:28 pm

Another vote in favor. (The sequence of posts appears to be following the symbols around the Trinity sundial, delving into the history behind each blast, so next up, I expect, will be the Soviet testing, then Hiroshima/Nagasaki, then Trinity itself.)

- Dehumanizer

February 3, 2015 at 6:04 pm

Add one more vote in favor. I find all of this fascinating.

- Scott

February 3, 2015 at 1:27 am

Another reader chiming in to say I find this all fascinating. Australian history classes certainly don’t feature much on the Cold War (or at least didn’t back when I was studying) and the mania of the time can still be seen in some ways today.

Hopefully the Trinity game lives up to all this buildup :)

- iPadCary

February 3, 2015 at 4:37 pm

Excellent reading, Jimmy!
Anyone, after reading this, at all intrigued by the character
that is Eddie Teller, and he IS a “character”,
should absolutely look up his testimony to Congress on SDI’s
doability, done sometime in the 80s.

Talk about your quintessential “Mad Scientist”! lol
The way he shouts, gesticulates & deliciously rolls the letter “R”
when saying “X-Ray Laser” …. Molto fabbo!

And it’s as it should be: we ALWAYS have the cool people on our side.
The side of Light.
It was decided a looong time ago by some extremly smart guys
that America was to be “The New Atlantis”.
Completely different than anything that’d come before Her ….
The place the world would & could look to in a time of need ….
The Disneyland of Earth, if you will.

In the persuit of this noble endevour, if, on that rarest of occasions,
we had to contract out for a helping hand, well, then …. y’know?
Like Werner Von Braun in “The Right Stuff” says:
“Our [Hungarians] are better than thier [Hungarians].”
And he’s right.
LONG LIVE THE MEMORY OF EDDIE TELLER, patriot extraordináire.

- Bernie Paul

February 10, 2015 at 4:59 pm

Sure it is important ! Why do / did take all the time and spend / spent all the effort involved in this kind of software ? . And for those of you pondering my question in the present tense, context should be specially important. There is plenty of context-free or context-light casual gaming out there. Those who criticize Maher’s approach would perhaps spend their leisure time better on something from the “app-store” than on this blog or most of the software it deals with. Kudos to Jimmy ! keep it up !

- ZUrlocker

February 13, 2015 at 2:22 am

I respect the research and the writing here. And it’s great to set some context around the game. I also find this period to be quite fascinating and incorporate some cold war elements into my work-in-progress game. But this feels like the context is overwhelming the main attraction, so to speak. It’s your show though; I’m just giving feedback.

- Peter Piers

December 29, 2015 at 7:33 pm

I’m just partway through the article and already the descriptions of the H-bomb leave me cold, cold, cold. Not cold as in indifferent – rather, as though a cold hand were stroking my chest, my lungs, my heart, a hand that I knew could start squeezing at any time.

- DZ-Jay

March 9, 2017 at 10:30 am

The following sentence,

>> “… in the name of something which was they thought was likely to be impossible anyway.”

seems awkward. I think the first “was” does not belong there. (Doubled-up words seem to be your arch-enemy, Jimmy. :) I know these are the result of editing, when splicing clauses together.)

-dZ.

- Jimmy Maher

March 10, 2017 at 4:07 pm

Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

March 9, 2017 at 11:53 am

>> “The similarly of this rhetoric to that he had used to justify the Super…”

I believe that adverb should be the noun “similarity,” right?

- Jimmy Maher

March 10, 2017 at 4:06 pm

Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

March 9, 2017 at 11:55 am

>> “… at having seemingly achieved the goal he he had worked…”

Double “he” in there… ;)

- Jimmy Maher

March 10, 2017 at 4:05 pm

Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

March 9, 2017 at 11:58 am

The following sentence,

>> “Teller had by then been ostracized for decades from his old Manhattan Project colleagues, who whilst Teller plunged into Cold War politics had collected an impressive shelf of Nobel Prizes amongst themselves working with more peaceful applications of nuclear physics.”

Could be potentially more clear if the middle clause were surrounded by commas, like so:

>> “Teller had by then been ostracized for decades from his old Manhattan Project colleagues who, whilst Teller plunged into Cold War politics, had collected an impressive shelf of Nobel Prizes amongst themselves working with more peaceful applications of nuclear physics.”

(after “who” and after “politics.”)

This would follow the same grammatical pattern of the next sentence:

>> “He replaced those old relationships with new ones forged with a group of younger colleagues at Lawrence Livermore who, having had their educations largely funded by the military-industrial complex, saw themselves first and foremost not as scientists but as weapons designers.”

- Jimmy Maher

March 10, 2017 at 4:05 pm

Thanks!

- Cc

August 22, 2018 at 3:44 pm

Well written, informative, passion but not poison. Is this really part of the internet?
Great articles and a wonderful site.

- Eric Nyman

February 10, 2019 at 4:50 am

This is such as fascinating topic and you’ve done a fabulous job of researching it. I really appreciate all the time and effort you’ve put into this.

While Lord of the Rings was not an allegory for nuclear weapons, the concept that humanity can be seduced into believing that great power can be harnessed and used for good when in reality it corrupts and cannot be reliably controlled once unleashed is an age-old theme, going back to at least the Jewish legend of the Golem as you pointed out, the ancient Greek myth of Pandora’s Box, as well as countless other works (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein comes immediately to mind).

Another interesting aspect of Edward Teller is that he was one of, if not the, first scientist to identify the dangers of carbon emissions in creating future climate change via a greenhouse effect. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/01/on-its-hundredth-birthday-in-1959-edward-teller-warned-the-oil-industry-about-global-warming
He was already making speeches to the petroleum industry about this in the late 1950’s and was quite accurate in his description of the eventual effects and dangers. If only he had dedicated his passion and genius to this cause rather than advocacy for nuclear weapons…..

T Plus 2: The Bomb at the Crossroads
February 5, 2015

Platform

This narrow platform is attached to the north side of a huge steel enclosure, fifty feet high. All around you, a frozen wasteland stretches off to a horizon lined with gray mountains.

A loudspeaker barks, "Sorokpyat sekund."

>d
You descend the ladder.

Under Platform

A network of cables snakes down the side of the enclosure, then trails southwest across the tundra. Grim tracts of permafrost greet your eyes every way you turn.

A ladder leads up to a platform overhead.

A loudspeaker intones, "Treetsat sekund."

Something touches your sneaker.

You kick it away with a shout. A rodent sails through the air, lands unharmed and scrambles out of sight.

>ne
Tundra

A prehistoric river bed cuts a narrow pass through the mountains rising north and east. The enclosure is a gray sentinel on the southwest horizon.

The ground is covered with rodents! They're racing northeast, oblivious to you or anything else in their path.

"Pyatnatsat sekund."

>ne
You follow the stream of rodents.

Cliff Edge

The river bed ends here, on a cliff overlooking an Arctic sea. But where ancient waters once fell, there now pours a living stream of rodents. Driven by mindless instinct, too stupid or frightened to turn away, they plunge by the hundreds into the crashing waves below. You recognize the species now. Lemmings.

The ground underfoot is split by a narrow fissure, almost hidden by the scrambling lemmings.

"Pyat, chetirye, tree, dva, adeen," barks the loudspeaker.

A searing glare engulfs the mountaintops! You turn, and stare in horror at a seething mass of flame billowing above the tundra.

Seconds later, a gale of radioactive debris sweeps you over the edge of the cliff, where you founder for a while in the Arctic waters.

On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb at what would soon become known as the Semipalatinsk Test Site, in a remote area of the Kazakhstan steppe. Although the successful test was not immediately announced, the radiation it produced was detected by one of a cordon of spy planes that patrolled the edge of the Kamchatka Peninsula. President Truman rather than General Secretary Stalin thus became the first to tell the world on September 23: “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R.” The Soviet Union soon gloatingly confirmed the test, and the world shuddered. The era of mutually assured destruction had just begun.

Looking back on the event from today, we might be tempted to ask whether it had to be this way, whether there were things the West could have done during its brief era of nuclear monopoly to assure that the world didn’t get plunged into a seemingly irresolvable stand-off whose only realistic end point would seem to be nuclear war. Or, conversely, was the history we got a pretty lucky one considering some of the alternatives? Or is the whole debate moot because the course of history is driven by bigger forces than the individual actors strutting and fretting their hours on its stage — or simply because what will be will be, the course of history inevitable? Those are some profound questions, involving, depending on how you approach them, historiography, philosophy, psychology, even religion. They certainly aren’t questions I pretend to be able to answer for you here. Yet it might be important to ask them and to think about them, not least because I think it might help us to better understand Trinity’s own view of history.

The period immediately after the end of World War II in the United States wasn’t quite the undilutedly joyous homecoming that the more sentimental popular histories of that time might make you think. The economy went through a brief but wrenching dislocation as the United States transitioned back from what had amounted to socialism in the name of maximal military production during the war years to consumer-driven civilian capitalism. And many women who had found unprecedented opportunities and responsibilities outside the home during the war must have felt at least a bit wistful when the men all returned and they found themselves back in their proverbial kitchens. But most of all there was a deep sense of uncertainty about the world the war had wrought. How would the United States and the Soviet Union, suddenly staring into each other’s eyes from either side of a bifurcated Europe, get along? What did the atomic bomb mean for that relationship, for the future in general? Journalist Edward R. Murrow, the veritable voice of the Greatest Generation, sounded a note of worried confusion rather than triumph during his broadcasts from this period: “Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and survival is not assured.”

The end of a major war is always a fertile time for utopianists looking for a way to ensure that another one never starts. In the historical timeline we know, World War II begat the United Nations, an imperfect collective which, if it hasn’t quite ended war, has done what it could over the years and has at least managed to be markedly more successful and long-lived than the League of Nations that preceded it. Many at the time, however, had in mind much more than a meeting place for the diplomats of the world, as useful as that’s occasionally proved to be. A major movement was in fact afoot, prompted largely by the atomic bomb and its implications, for nothing less than a world government.

In 1946 a little 86-page collection of essays with a big title appeared on bookstore shelves: One World or None: A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb. Many of its essays advocated turning the United Nations into the legislative branch of a new government to have sovereignty over all the nations of the world. The contributors who wrote the essays were hardly the bunch of anti-establishment dreamers you might expect. They included some of the most prominent scientists on the planet, including many — among them Niels Bohr, Robert Oppenheimer,  and Leó Szilárd — who had worked as part of the Manhattan project to build the bomb in the first place. Also among the contributors were Hap Arnold, commander of the Army Air Force during the war, and Walter Lippman, a prominent journalist who would go on to coin the phrase “Cold War.” Other public supporters of the book and the world-government movement that had spawned it included the president of Standard Oil of Ohio and the chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers, along with Senators, Congressmen, Supreme Court Justices, even current Army Air Force commander Carl Spaatz. The book became a bestseller. A few months after its release, a poll found that an astonishing 54 percent of the American public wanted the United Nations to become a world government with sovereignty over the United States as well as everyone else.

As the title of its manifesto would imply, the one-world movement saw the atomic bomb in mythic terms, destined to be either humanity’s savoir or its downfall. This vision of a post-atomic utopia as the only alternative to extinction can be traced back to The World Set Free, a 1914 novel by H.G. Wells which posits not only nuclear weapons but a world government as the only rational response to their existence. This new government “had to see the round globe as one problem; it was impossible any longer to deal with it piece by piece. They had to secure it universally from any fresh outbreak of atomic destruction, and they had to ensure a permanent and universal pacification.” Science, Wells wrote, must provide “the basis of a new social order.” How appropriate, then, that the one-world movement included so many scientists in its ranks. While Wells provided it with its broad outlines, it was one of these scientists who first drilled down to grasp the full implications of the historical atomic bomb. In the process, he became the first to understand, or at least to articulate, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction that must follow from it. This scientist was Niels Bohr.

Born in 1885 in Copenhagen, Denmark, Bohr had become by the 1930s as important and brilliant a physicist in his way as Albert Einstein. His most obvious among countless contributions was the so-called “Bohr Model” of the atom: protons and neutrons clustered into a central nucleus, electrons orbiting in neatly predictable clusters (“energy levels”). But just as important as his own work was his founding of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen in 1920. It became during the inter-war years the foremost gathering point for physicists from all over Europe and the world. Coincidentally or not, this period was perhaps the most fertile in the history of the field, marked by a whole series of quantum leaps (sorry!) in our understanding of the basic structures of the universe. Bohr knew everyone and was respected and liked by just about everyone, not just for his scientific genius but for a certain fundamental humanity that he was about to demonstrate to the world.

He was aboard a ferry returning to Denmark from a lecture tour to Norway when Germany invaded both countries early on the morning of April 9, 1940. Denmark surrendered within a few hours. As such a prominent figure, and one whose scientific genius could very well make him valuable to the war effort, Bohr was soon contacted by British agents bearing an offer to sneak him away to exile. But Bohr, like the Danish King Christian X, declined, saying his place was here with his people.

Niels Bohr during the war years

Initially, the German occupation wasn’t that bad as such things go. In return for a promise to behave themselves reasonably well and to produce food sufficient to feed many millions of German soldiers and civilians from the fertile soil of Jutland, Denmark was granted a level of autonomy and freedom unique amongst the occupied countries — a situation born not only of Germany’s need for the food Denmark could supply but also the country’s decision to surrender without a fight and Nazi racial theories that placed the Danes, being a Germanic people, only one rung or so down the ladder from the Germans themselves. Bohr himself, again like Christian X, took a principled but pragmatic stance, never hesitating to denounce the occupation and refusing to participate in any conference or other activity which involved the occupiers, but not actively resisting either.

After having dismissed an atomic bomb as possible only if “you turned the United States into one huge factory,” Bohr learned that others were less sanguine through a very surprising source. In September of 1941, Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist who had touched off the whole debate with his discovery of nuclear fission, came to Copenhagen, where he had a long conversation with his old friend, mentor, and confidant Bohr. Heisenberg was now conducting experiments with chain reactions in heavy water aimed at synthesizing plutonium for a potential atomic bomb. Speaking in circumspect terms, mindful of the Nazi ears that could be anywhere, Heisenberg shared the gist of his current research. We’ll never know exactly why he decided to open the topic with Bohr, who, old friend though he may have been, made no secret of his opinion of Nazi Germany. Was he, as his wife Elisabeth would later claim, suffering a crisis of conscience and reaching out for moral wisdom from his erstwhile mentor? Was he trying to tell Bohr that a Nazi atomic-bomb program was underway, in the hope that Bohr might be able to pass that information along to Britain? Or was he hoping to learn what if any research was going on in the other camp? To further muddy these waters, Heisenberg actually gave to Bohr a diagram of one of his heavy-water reactors, an act which would have been punishable as treason — if, that is, it wasn’t a planned act of counterespionage. Regardless, both men came away from the meeting unsatisfied, Bohr disappointed and angry that a former protege would contemplate creating such a terrible weapon for such an evil regime, Heisenberg having comprehensively failed to get the understanding and information — whichever, or both — he sought. The only thing the meeting accomplished was to make Bohr very nervous about the prospect of an atomic bomb.

But soon Bohr had more immediate worries. As the Danish resistance movement, feeling increasingly emboldened in response to Germany’s strategic setbacks over the course of 1942 and 1943, got more active, Denmark’s cushy arrangement with its occupier grew more and more fractious. At last, on August 29, 1943, the occupiers dissolved the Danish government and instituted martial law. Bohr was informed soon after by Denmark’s ambassador from Sweden that he was slated to be arrested. Underground fighters hid him and his family in a shed near Copenhagen’s pier until a boat could be sneaked in under cover of night. Dodging minefields and German patrol boats on a windy, miserable night, they made it across the Øresund to neutral Sweden.

Bohr had made his own escape, but he was frantic with worry over another group. He had received word that Denmark’s modest population of about 8000 Jews were also slated to soon be rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps. Their only possible escape would be to follow in Bohr’s footsteps and come to Sweden. Unfortunately, the Swedish government, very nervous of angering the Germans and thus bringing their wrath down upon their own country, had refused them permission to enter. Almost through sheer force of will alone, Bohr won a personal meeting with the Swedish King Gustaf V, and persuaded him to put pressure on his Foreign Minister to accept Denmark’s Jews. Working in coordination, the Swedish Coast Guard, the Danish resistance, and countless ordinary Danes methodically spirited away the Jews with typical Scandinavian efficiency. When the Nazis came to round them up, virtually all of those Jews who weren’t already out of the country were well-hidden in preparation for the trip. More than 99 percent would survive the war. It makes for one of the most remarkable stories of the Holocaust, and one of the vanishingly small number that have a happy ending. The Danes are justifiably proud of what they were able to do to this day; it says a lot about them as a people. It also, of course, says a lot about what kind of man was Niels Bohr, without whose assistance it never could have happened.

With Denmark’s Jews now offered a safe harbor, Bohr was eager to get to Britain and learn what if anything had been going on in the field of atomic-bomb research. The British offered him passage aboard one of the fast two-man Mosquito fighter-bombers they were using to carry diplomatic messages to and from the isolated Swedish government. With no other space available, the crew stuffed Bohr into the Mosquito’s tiny bomb bay. If attacked, the pilot announced, he would have to drop Bohr into the North Sea to save weight for maneuvering. Bohr was given a parachute and signal flare, but was highly unlikely to live more than a few minutes in that frigid water. Although the Mosquito made it back to Britain unmolested, Bohr failed to put on his oxygen mask properly and fainted en route. Once back on land again, however, he was none the worse for wear. By the end of 1943 he had completed his odyssey, arriving safely in Los Alamos.

He found there some of the greatest scientific minds of the generation, many of them his former colleagues, students, and/or friends, all well about the practical business of making an atomic bomb. He could now share with them at last the diagram Heisenberg had passed to him more than two years before. The design it depicted was so inefficient, so far behind those the Manhattan Project had constructed, that many thought it must indeed be a counterespionage ploy. Otherwise, as Bohr himself later said, Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues “didn’t need my help in making the atom bomb.” He instead made an intellectual leap in another realm entirely, a leap as dazzling as the one that had led to the Bohr Model of the atom. While at Los Alamos, Bohr said something positive but also ambiguous to Oppenheimer. Nothing like the massive conflict still raging in Europe and the Pacific would, he said, “ever happen again.” Even the perceptive Oppenheimer initially missed the full impartation of this statement.

Bohr meant it literally. Total war between great powers as the world had come to know it over the centuries simply could not happen in a post-atomic world because no one would be able to win. This didn’t mean that war of another sort would be impossible; one nation could attack another, or two could attack one another. However, the result would not be an extended struggle ending with a victor standing proud, but merely a short orgy of unimaginable destruction ending with two smoking losers. The atomic bomb was far, far more than just a new weapon. It would be the ultimate leveling force amongst nations, capable of reducing all of them to identical smoking ruins, “a far deeper interference with the natural course of events than anything ever attempted.” The very survival of civilization therefore required that war itself must be not a universal but a historical phenomenon. If war was, as Claus von Clausewitz had once so famously said, “the continuation of politics by other means,” this means of politicking was about to go off the table. “We are in a completely new situation that cannot be resolved by war,” said Bohr. The choice was not now between peace and war but between peace and guaranteed self-destruction. The major powers were about to enter a stalemate from which victory would be impossible. They could continue to jockey pointlessly for advantage, risking mutual annihilation all the while, or they could… what? That was the question.

“It appeared to me,” Bohr writes, “that the very necessity of a concerted effort to forestall such ominous threats to civilization would offer quite unique opportunities to bridge international divergencies.” There must be “a universal agreement in true confidence” to ban the atomic bomb and to ban all future war. Any such agreement would bring with it an important corollary: because nations were hardly likely to simply trust one another on a matter as deadly as the atomic bomb, there must also be an end to state secrets. As Oppenheimer would later express it, “Everything that might be a threat to the security of the world would have to be open to the world.” “What it would mean,” said Bohr, “if the whole picture of social conditions in every country were open for judgment and comparison need hardly be enlarged upon.” Could characters like Hitler and Stalin commit their genocides in such conditions?

Bohr’s logic was essentially that the atomic bomb was about to change everything anyway, whether we liked it or not. By planning for the atomic future we could make of that change a positive historical development rather than the potential end of civilization. As the country about to become the first with access to the bomb, the United States had the opportunity and the duty to initiate the process that could lead to this better world order by talking openly about this new power, inviting the world to join in the dialog. The “secrets” of the atomic bomb that the United States believed it possessed were merely trade secrets, technical secrets; the fundamental physics that had made its creation possible were accessible to the world. Thus the American atomic monopoly was destined to be a very short one. But what the country did while it had that monopoly, Bohr claimed, could cast the die for the next hundred years or more — indeed, could determine whether civilization itself lived or died.

Bohr’s stature was sufficient to win him separate meetings with American President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to argue his case in 1944. The meeting with Roosevelt turned into little more than a noncommittal formality. The meeting with Churchill, on the other hand, was a disaster. The irascible Churchill, preoccupied with final preparations for the D-Day invasion, had little interest in being lectured to on the vagaries of geopolitics by a pedantic Danish physicist. The styles of the two men did not, to say the least, mesh. Bohr had a way of circling around and around his points that could infuriate even his admiring students and coauthors; he liked to say that accuracy and clarity were complementary — “and so, a short statement could never be precise.” Churchill failed to grasp anything that Bohr tried to tell him. “I cannot see what you are talking about,” he said. “After all this new bomb is just going to be bigger than our previous bombs. It involves no difference in the principles of war.” His main takeaway from the meeting seems to have been that Bohr wanted the Western Allies to immediately turn over the bomb to the Soviet Union as well as anyone else who wanted it, when in fact Bohr was just asking them to initiate an open preliminary discussion about the bomb and what it meant for the world. After half an hour — half the scheduled time — Churchill all but threw Bohr out on his ear. He soon after wrote a memo saying that Bohr should be closely watched, and consideration even given to “confining” him to make sure he didn’t commit “mortal crimes” — presumably in the form of an attempt to give the bomb to the Soviets of his own accord.

Churchill’s reaction certainly isn’t impossible to understand. He still had this war to fight, after all. And Bohr’s plan wasn’t necessarily the most practical. It does have that distinct whiff of the utopian about it, an odor that a practical politician like Churchill would have learned to detect and detest many years ago. Parts of the argument do rather sound like a scientist trying to impose a rigid frame of cause-and-effect logic on complicated, messy international affairs that just won’t admit one. Still, one wishes Bohr could at least have been able to get Churchill or Roosevelt to think about the implications of his greatest insight: the still-in-the-offing but unavoidable prospect of MAD. As it was, neither man seems to have remarked the concept at all, lost as it was in Bohr’s typical sea of verbiage. Almost as depressing is Churchill’s immediate leap from “advocate for reasoned diplomacy with the Soviet Union” to “traitor”; this exact fallacy would ruin many lives over the course of the Cold War to come. Bohr — a great, even heroic man, whatever the practical failings of some of his ideas — spent the rest of the war trying fruitlessly to get further meetings with either leader. He had saved Denmark’s Jews from the Holocaust, but he couldn’t save the world from the Cold War.

Or, better said, he couldn’t do it alone. Ideas, if repeated often enough, have a way of spreading themselves around. By 1945, Bohr’s ideas were, as nuclear historian Richard Rhodes puts it, “in the air” in both Washington and Los Alamos. Vannevar Bush and James Bryant Conant, Roosevelt’s two closest science advisers, expressed concern as the fateful day of the first test neared that it was dangerous to assume that the United States’s atomic monopoly could possibly last for very long. If Roosevelt’s government didn’t talk to the Soviets about it before using it, it could lead “to a very undesirable relationship indeed on the subject with Russia.” Showing some prescience of their own, they imagined that someday atomic bombs might be able to reach all the “cities of the world” from anywhere in the world via a “robot plane or guided missile.” They proposed that the United States initiate a dialog which could lead to the formation of an “international office” to share and regulate the secrets of the atom: “We recognize that there will be great resistance to this measure, but believe the hazards to the future of the world are sufficiently great to warrant this attempt.” Robert Oppenheimer also said that the time may be right to “open up this subject” with the Soviet Union “in a tentative fashion.”

After Roosevelt’s death in April of 1945, his and his successor Harry Truman’s war-hating Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who had personally overseen the Manhattan Project from its beginning, made a much more forceful statement, saying that as the inventor of the atomic bomb the United States would bear “a certain moral responsibility” for any “disaster to civilization which it would further.” Thus the country had a moral imperative to try to arrange a world order which could avert such a disaster, via a “world peace organization” which could eventually be entrusted to “share” the atomic bomb with everyone. No less a military mind than Army Chief of Staff George Marshall said it might be a good idea to invite a Soviet delegation to get an overview of what had been done at Los Alamos and to witness the upcoming Trinity test.

Stalin, Truman, and Churchill at Potsdam, 1945

It’s of course impossible to say how Roosevelt would have reacted to such advice from two of his oldest and wisest friends. Certainly it’s much harder to accuse them than Bohr of political naiveté. The new President Truman, however, was very much under the sway of his new Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes, who would become one of the early architects of the country’s Cold War posture, pushing for a hardline, take-no-prisoners approach to the Soviet Union. Told of the atomic bomb’s massive destructive potential, Byrnes was not disturbed but delighted, saying it would greatly improve the United States’s negotiating position with the Soviet Union, that a forceful “demonstration of the bomb” in action — in the form of its being unexpectedly dropped on Japan — “might impress” the un-forewarned Soviet Union. At the Potsdam Conference just eight days after the Trinity test, Truman mentioned almost offhandedly to Stalin that the United States had developed “a new weapon of unusual destructive force”; that was as far as all of the suggestions for a dialog with the Soviet Union would ever stretch. Stalin, who knew all about the Manhattan Project’s existence thanks to his espionage network and knew perfectly well that it was more than just “a new weapon,” almost smirked visibly at this confirmation of his supposed ally’s perfidy: “He said he was glad to hear it and he hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.'” Both men then dismissed the topic. With the last war not yet over, a new standoff was already beginning. Would it be an intractable one? That’s a question much of the world would soon be asking.

Truman may have squandered his first and best opportunity to really talk with the Soviets about the bomb, but well before Japan’s surrender was a year old the voices calling for international controls became too loud and popular for a seasoned politician like him to ignore. So, like any seasoned politician, he hedged his bets. Even as the Navy was assembling a fleet of ships to be blasted by atomic bombs at Bikini Atoll as a blunt demonstration of the United States’s new military might, he sent a patrician financier and longtime policy adviser named Bernard Baruch to the United Nations to explore the formation of a United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. “We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead,” Baruch announced to the assembled delegates. “We must elect world peace or world destruction.” He offered a plan that would place the United Nations in control of “all atomic-energy activities potentially dangerous to world security,” with the power to inspect all nuclear facilities and punish anyone found to be attempting to make weapons. The Soviets, not in a good humor after the Bikini tests, replied that the Americans should begin by destroying all of their own atomic bombs as a sign of good faith, and negotiations quickly reached an impasse from which they would never emerge. The Soviets’ undisguised mistrust of American intentions was part and parcel of an ever-widening gulf between the world’s two remaining superpowers that would soon make dreams of worldwide arms control and world government sound as quaint as… well, as quaint they sound to our ears today. Meanwhile the atomic bomb was becoming, almost in spite of itself, an increasingly vital part of the United States’s strategic picture.

The problem was one of conventional-force disparity. When the forces of the Western and Eastern Allies had met one another in the middle of Germany at the close of the war, they had been roughly equal. Now, though, the Americans and British were coming home by the millions, leaving behind their rifles and their uniforms and returning to lives as business executives, shopkeepers, and farmhands. Meanwhile the Soviet Union, a centralized economy driven largely by military spending which had no private jobs to which to return, wasn’t demobilizing to anywhere near the same degree. And Stalin was reneging on all of his promises to allow the countries of Eastern Europe free determination, bringing down an “Iron Curtain” — the term was popularized by Winston Churchill in a speech on March 5, 1946, ironically at almost the same moment as the publication of One World or None — across the middle of Europe. The stage was thus set for a stand-off that would last more than forty years, the democratic peoples of the West staring down the totalitarian nations of the East. The West had no hope of matching Soviet numbers in Europe unless it was willing to keep most of its young men in arms for terms of as much as eight or ten years each. This the civilian societies of the West, eager to rebuild and enjoy the fruits of the hard-fought peace, had no interest in doing. Thus by 1947 Soviet armies in Europe outnumbered Western by as much as ten to one. But there was a great equalizer: the atomic bomb.

Indeed, some believed the atomic bomb should be more than a mere equalizer, should be used to solve the problem in a more direct way. As relations worsened with the Soviet Union and the clock ticked down to the inevitable reality of a Soviet bomb, the pendulum of public sentiment swung wildly in a new direction. A public that just a year before had been dreaming of a peaceful world-government utopia now began to seriously mull the notion of a preemptive nuclear strike. It would be a painful undertaking, strike proponents said, but it had to be done now, before the Soviets had atomic bombs of their own. Some of the hawkish voices were those of respected military men, like General Leslie Groves, who had built the Manhattan Project from the ground up, and General Orvil Anderson, who thought nuclear war would be the most Christian thing to do at this juncture: “I think I could explain to Him that I saved civilization.” The dogged old warrior Churchill reminded everyone how well appeasement policies had worked against Hitler, and advocated an ultimatum: pull out of all of the countries you’ve occupied and give to them the right of self-determination you promised them or prepare to be nuked. Other voices advocating preemptive nuclear war were more surprising. The great British philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose pacifism had led to his imprisonment during the First World War, was among them, as was Hamilton Holt, just a year before the organizer of a major world-government conference. World government in his view should now entail that any nation that attempted to develop atomic bombs, as the Soviet Union obviously was, “should be wiped off the face of the earth” by the United Nations with a taste of its own medicine. (The role and fate of the United States, still the only nation actually in possession of atomic bombs, was unclear in this formulation.)

Thankfully, such voices didn’t get their way before August 29, 1949, made the point moot. There could be no preemptive strikes on a Soviet Union in possession of a bomb of its own. With the Soviet bomb ended this crazy few years when the direction of history seemed a veritable smorgasbord of divergent possibilities, some wonderful, some terrible. Now the world must settle in for the long, tense, grinding nuclear stalemate of the Cold War, and the United States must exchange dreams of world government for paranoid communist witch hunts.

Looking back at that crossroads of history of 1945 to 1949, we’re left to wonder whether it all could somehow have turned out differently. Could some great leader willing to really listen to what Bohr and all those who followed him were saying have harnessed the idealistic fervor of the world-government movement, and in so doing changed the course of history as we know it? If Roosevelt had lived longer, would he have been that leader, or would he have pretty much done what Truman did? Was there any real possibility for a peace not founded on threats in a world that contained the paranoid maniac Stalin, just possibly the most prolific mass murderer in the history of the world? These aren’t questions I can answer for you; you’ll have to ponder them on your own. Perhaps, given the situation at the end of World War II, the Cold War really was inevitable. Perhaps any more earnest attempt to prevent an arms race and/or institute international controls on nuclear weapons would have merely ceded the advantage to the Soviet Union and resulted in a Soviet first strike (Stalin, alone among the Soviet General Secretaries, strikes me as just possibly crazy and genocidal enough to do it if he thought he could get away with it).

For its part, Trinity takes the tragic view of history. Its attitude toward the Cold War and the societies it involved is summed up in the extract that opened this article: a horde of lemmings running pell-mell toward their destruction, “too stupid or frightened to turn away” — certainly not one of the game’s more subtle examples of symbolism but nevertheless one of its most striking and effective. Less impressive is Trinity’s recreation of the actual scene of that first test, which it gets thoroughly wrong; the actual test took place on the landlocked steppes of Kazakhstan, nowhere near the Arctic Ocean. One must assume that Brian Moriarty’s research simply failed him for this, the only scene in the game that shows the Soviet side of the Cold War. The larger point of the scene, however, stands. Trinity postulates that the inevitable end point for the lemmings of the world is an apocalyptic fall off of an unthinkable nuclear cliff. So far — fingers crossed! — that hasn’t happened. I admire Trinity greatly, but I hope that history continues to prove it less than prescient in this regard.

Comments
30 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

February 5, 2015 at 5:03 pm

Stalin, who knew all about the Manhattan Project’s existence thanks to his espionage network and knew perfectly well that it was more than just “a new weapon,” almost smirked visibly at this confirmation of his supposed ally’s perfidy

Not following this. What was perfidious about Truman’s potential use of the bomb?

- Duncan Stevens

February 5, 2015 at 5:03 pm

Sorry–thought I closed the tag.

- Jimmy Maher

February 5, 2015 at 5:18 pm

The United States and the Soviet Union were allies in war. One would assume that an ally would at least share the bare facts about a potentially devastating weapon like the atomic bomb. By keeping the atomic bomb from Stalin, Britain and the United States were making it very clear that they didn’t trust Stalin and didn’t really consider him “one of them.” They were also clearly thinking past the end of the war, wanting to keep the bomb for themselves to have leverage against Stalin (i.e., perfidy). A brief, vague, reluctant aside at a conference was hardly enough to make up for the information that Truman and his predecessor should, at least in Stalin’s view, have been sharing all along.

Obviously the other side of this is that Stalin was a bloodthirsty maniac that anyone would be a fool to trust in anything. But the bit in question was written from Stalin’s point of view, who doubtless felt himself very hard done by…

- Duncan Stevens

February 5, 2015 at 5:37 pm

Do internal documents actually indicate that Stalin felt that way? He may well have said it for public consumption.

Bear in mind that the Soviet Union’s war was over at that point. Truman was trying to get Stalin to enter the war against Japan; Stalin did not do so until after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Technically, there was no ongoing joint military operation at the time of the Trinity test. I guess you could argue that the fact of the conference suggests a continuing alliance, but I’m not sure your view of allies’ obligations to inform each other about weapons research was shared at the time.

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2015 at 8:46 am

As far as whether there was some legal treaty or contract “obligating” the Western Allies to share the details of the atomic bomb with the Soviet Union, probably not. Under the expectations one might have of a group of allies publicly telling the world they were united in a single cause — one for all, all for one — the decision could be judged perfidious. (It was under development for years while all of the allies *were* making common cause against a joint enemy, so we can’t really judge the decision not to share it strictly under the conditions of July 1945.) Obviously this alliance was first and foremost one of convenience, a classic example of “the enemy of my enemy…”, but it’s not as if Stalin needed much provocation to get pissed off in general.

I don’t believe we have any equivalent to Truman’s diary in the case of Stalin — certainly not in any language I can read. Whether Stalin’s rage was feigned or not is probably not a question we can answer definitively. Even something like Truman’s diary is very obviously written in the knowledge that it will be read by posterity, and thus hardly a direct pipeline to its maker’s soul. But in the terms of fairly broad narrative history under which this article was written, I feel comfortable enough with the characterization I’ve made.

The situation with the Soviet Union’s entry into the war is a bit more complicated than it’s sometimes made out to be. For a couple of months, from the German surrender until the Trinity test, the Truman administration was indeed pushing very hard to get the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan. The thought was that a Soviet invasion of Manchuria would provide a welcome distraction and tie down Japanese troops that would otherwise be used to defend the home islands, should an American invasion prove necessary. Essentially the Truman administration was acting as if it didn’t have the bomb and never would — simple best practices in any large-scale endeavor, so that they would be able to regard a successful test as a pleasant surprise rather than a fizzle as a devastating setback. As soon as the Trinity test was successful, however, a Soviet entry into the war became much less of a priority, very possibly even a bad thing if it let the Soviet Union grab China or a piece of it for itself or gave it a claim to other territories in the Pacific. If there was any doubt, Stalin would have been able to see by the way that Truman and Churchill suddenly stopped pressuring him daily to declare war on Japan that something very significant was up with this mysterious new weapon of theirs. A really good summary of this period is Prompt and Utter Destruction by J. Samuel Walker. It’s become my bible for the next article, which will deal with the decision to drop the bomb on Japan.

Just in case it’s gotten somehow lost in all this:

My major point here is that Potsdam was the perfect opportunity for Truman to sit down with Stalin and really try to open a dialog on the atomic bomb and what it might mean. This doesn’t mean giving him the bomb or helping him to make one of his own. It just means starting to *talk*. This was something that the leaders of the Cold War failed to do again and again, and it starts right here, before the previous war was even over. By electing not to trust Stalin at all, Truman set the pattern for the next several decades of fear and mistrust and general Failures to Communicate. As Henry Stimson (who very much wanted Truman to have that real talk with Stalin) said at the time, “Sometimes the way to make someone trustworthy is to trust him.” (And yes, I realize I’ve just directly contradicted the end of my previous comment, but we’ll let that go, in both cases, in the name of hyperbole.)

- Duncan Stevens

February 6, 2015 at 1:19 pm

Considering Stalin had his own atomic project during the war that he didn’t share with the West (as the Rhodes book describes), I’ll vote for “feigned.” I focused on disclosure in the post-Trinity period because that’s when the U.S. knew for sure that the thing worked. As you note, Truman was not 100% sure that it would, in fact, work.

I understand your point about the lost opportunity. There was a fairly significant constituency in the spring of 1945 that wanted to beat the Soviets to Berlin, an obvious provocation (and some, like Patton, that wanted to keep going right on to Moscow), so Truman may well have seen an approach that eschewed both direct confrontation and explicit overtures of postwar friendship as the moderate course.

- Lisa H.

February 5, 2015 at 8:37 pm

I always liked the running “It’ll never work!” gag in the comic.

he liked to say that accuracy and clarity were complimentary — “and so, a short statement could never be precise.”

If that is his meaning, you want “complementary,” that is, they are complements of one another. (Although perhaps they are also complimentary as in given for free!)

Now the world must settle in for the long, tense, grinding nuclear checkmate of the Cold War

Do you not mean “stalemate”?

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2015 at 9:23 am

I must sheepishly say that I never actually realized that “complimentary” and “complementary” were two different words, not just one with two possible meanings; shades of a similar revelation a year or two ago regarding “discreet” and “discrete.” You learn something every day!

I meant to write “checkmate” as a little nod back to the chess analogy I used describing Bohr’s vision of what the bomb would wreak. But now that I think about it a “checkmate” analogy doesn’t entirely make sense, does it? Whoops!

- Victor Gijsbers

February 6, 2015 at 11:14 am

And stalemate is also a chess term, isn’t it?

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2015 at 1:37 pm

It’s certainly *used* in chess, but I don’t know offhand if it *stems* from chess. At any rate, I decided the whole metaphor wasn’t as clever as it thought it was and excised it…

- Sniffnoy

February 6, 2015 at 8:40 pm

It does come from Chess (that’s why there’s a “mate” in it); the more general meaning is later.

- Duncan Stevens

February 5, 2015 at 10:01 pm

Nitpick: I’m not sure the Semipalatinsk Test Site would have been a “frozen wasteland” on August 29, 1949 (it’s in Kazakhstan, not that far north). The test depicted isn’t necessarily the first one.

- Duncan Stevens

February 5, 2015 at 10:07 pm

…and the description refers to the “Arctic waters,” but the Kazakhstan test site is a long way from the Arctic. Hmmm. Maybe the intent was to refer to the Novaya Zemlya site (which didn’t go into use until the mid-50s, well after the first H-bomb test)?

- David Boddie

February 6, 2015 at 8:52 am

That’s what I wondered. It seems a long way from the Arctic: http://radicalcartography.net/index.html?nuclear

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2015 at 9:08 am

Good catch! I’d missed that entirely.

The evidence of the comic book would certainly seem to suggest that this was meant to depict the first test: i.e., “The American monopoly on a-bombs is short-lived.” The following scene shows a man reading a newspaper announcing “Reds Explode A-Bomb,” and Edward Teller jumping in to push for the Super as a response.

I think this is just one of the few examples of Moriarty’s research failing him. In his defense, very little was known about many aspects of the Soviet side of the atomic standoff when he was writing Trinity. His sources and his narrative are all very American-centric — as has been, obviously, my own — with the exception only of this scene which he evidently got pretty comprehensively wrong. I’ll add a note to the article.

- Duncan Stevens

February 6, 2015 at 11:56 am

Hmmm. The radiation from the first test was detected by a U.S. spy plane (Truman announced that the Soviets had done a test before the Soviets did), so I think it was known roughly where it happened. I would call this more artistic license by Moriarty then a failure of research: there was no major body of water at Semipalatinsk into which a whole bunch of lemmings could be jumping, there was one at Novaya Zemlya, so the test got moved north. Maybe that’s too much license in a game that styles itself as a tour through nuclear history?

- Duncan Stevens

February 6, 2015 at 1:29 pm

…though, on further reflection, I’m not sure that the (general) location was public knowledge, even if the U.S. knew it. The U.S. didn’t want to broadcast its spy planes’ activities, after all, and the announcement caught Stalin off guard. I’m not sure what became public between 1949 and 1986.

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2015 at 1:39 pm

While Trinity certainly has its share of poetry about it, there aren’t any other places where poetic truth trumps historical accuracy to anywhere near such a degree. On the other hand, I certainly wouldn’t want to lose the lemmings, maybe the most potent single symbol in the game. Only Moriarty knew… and I suspect he’s forgotten.

- Michael Davis

February 11, 2015 at 5:51 am

“there was no major body of water at Semipalatinsk into which a whole bunch of lemmings could be jumping,”

Of course now we know there is no major body of water anywhere that lemmings would jump to their deaths into

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wilderness_%28film%29

- johannes_paulsen

September 6, 2015 at 11:36 pm

Too much license? If people are willing to forgive the game’s basic logical flaws (e.g., the question of why the ‘unsabotaged’ bombs don’t go off correctly later, the question of where the umbrella came from, etc.) it almost seems a little unfair to nitpick this one.

The fact that John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis doesn’t get a single mention in what is supposed to be a game about the tragedy of nuclear war is far more inexcusable than getting the trivia wrong about the first Soviet nuclear test.

- Derek

June 3, 2018 at 8:03 pm

But the Cuban Missile Crisis was a narrowly averted tragedy. The game is about escalation: one nuclear-armed nation becomes two nuclear-armed enemies, nuclear becomes thermonuclear, the technology is continuously refined through testing, and the movement of the arms race into space proves to be the final, fatal provocation. If the game is arguing that the pattern of escalation leading to annihilation was the inevitable result of the Trinity test, it’s irrelevant to that argument that Kennedy prevented annihilation in 1962. Some idiot somewhere down the line will press the button even if he didn’t.

- johannes_paulsen

February 4, 2019 at 7:45 pm

@Derek

(A little thread necromancy here, but…)

I meant more from the perspective that Kennedy almost blundered his way into a nuclear war, and a few die rolls going the other way would’ve meant the nuclear war would’ve happened 25 years earlier. It would have provided a natural bit of foreshadowing.

Better question: Why does Reagan get a shout-out in the Trinity comic book when Kennedy took us to the brink for…

…well, for what, exactly? Because he didn’t want to come to the bargaining table over the Jupiters in Turkey under duress? Was that really worth going to DEFCON 2?

So yes, I do maintain that failing to reference Cuba *at all* is a rather glaring omission on what’s supposed to be a tour through nuclear history.

- Duncan Stevens

February 6, 2015 at 1:42 pm

Also, I recommend Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen for a lively, imaginative take on the Bohr-Heisenberg meeting. Arguably, its speculation about Heisenberg’s motives is a bit on the charitable side, but as drama it’s pretty good.

- Matt W

February 19, 2015 at 9:35 am

It’s not only “pretty good”, IMHO, it’s really fantastic. If you’re lucky enough to catch it in the theater, it makes for a riveting evening.

The movie version (from the BBC, I think), is pretty “meh”, though.

- Michael Davis

February 11, 2015 at 7:59 pm

Well, I’ve finally caught up to the present articles. Reading this blog nightly has become so much a part of my evening routine that I feel like I’m going to have a free hour every night that I won’t know what to do with.

A while back I made a piece of Ultima V fan art (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151066274694504) that I was able to bring to Austin and have signed by Richard Garriott (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100524250954288) and Denis Loubet, two of my creative heroes. I had the Shay Addams book pretty much memorized as a kid. I found your blog because of the Ultima entries, and the fair and nuanced view of the history of Origin prompted me to open up your table of contents and start at the beginning.

I started out merely tangentially curious about the nitty-gritty history of computer games specifically. For the effort I am now measurably more educated about the world I live in. I feel like, without hyperbole, I am a wiser and more worldly person thanks to your editorial lens.

Thank you very, very much for this blog.

I’m in the habit of making fan art (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151902099239504, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151000603539504), and, this might be kind of weird, but I’ve made you something, as kind of a ‘thank you’ for these most recent articles:

https://vimeo.com/119372336

- Jimmy Maher

February 12, 2015 at 7:59 am

Wow! No one’s ever made a video for me before. That’s really cool. Thanks!

- Scott M. Bruner

May 13, 2016 at 5:20 am

I’m going through these “Trinity” posts (which are tremendous) for a paper I’m working on…I noticed that you mention how you hope that Trinity isn’t prescient in its remarkably dark conclusion about the inevitablity of the apocalypse.

I might argue that it was works like Trinity (and The Day After and Testament) and their grim conclusions which were part of a cultural movement, a canary in the coalmine aesthetic push, to characterize the absolute madness of what was happening and where we were headed…now, Trinity, of course, didn’t come near the impact of The Day After on the American consciousness…but I would say that it was a part (even in its small community) of an art/cultural movement that had a significant impact on the popular imagination by identifying the self-inflicted destruction we were plunging towards and helping to galvanize our fears into a desperate need for action, which is to say maybe Moriarty’s fatalism while not contrived, was the fatalism of the perspective of an alternate universe he had a significant hand in helping us avoid. Moriarty leaves us no ultimate choice or agency in Trinity itself but by doing so, within this fictional work and universe (where the laws of physic are bent so out of shape), he coerces us to peer into the abyss…

…perhaps in the hope that in our real world beyond the computer screen, we might then take advantage of ever/any opportunity to steer the #@$( clear of it. My point being, perhaps Moriarty’s prescience was in acknowledging how dark art needed to be to wake us up.

- DZ-Jay

March 10, 2017 at 12:03 pm

I have a sincere question. The closing paragraphs seem to suggest that the only alternatives available were a Pollyanna world-government enforced peace, absolute nuclear annihilation, or the resulting Cold War.

It does not seem to be open to the possibility of a potential first strike against the Soviet Union in order to possibly result in our status quo sans the Cold War itself.

Why is this? Putting aside your personal convictions against utilizing the weapon as a show of force, it did result in neutralizing and transforming Japan. Could it have done something similar to the USSR — at great costs perhaps, but with significant benefit to the greater world?

-dZ.

- Jimmy Maher

March 10, 2017 at 4:26 pm

Leaving aside the moral questions and lots of practical questions about getting together enough nuclear bombs to manage such a strike and delivering them successfully, it’s hard for me to imagine a scenario where such a monstrous act would be viable in terms of American domestic politics. Americans, whatever the reality on the ground, like to see themselves as the good guys, and a preemptive nuclear strike on a nation with which their country is at peace is about as far from that self-portrait as you can get. Had it been done, it would have left such a moral stain on the United States in the eyes of the world that the soft power which the country projected so successfully for the next 60 years or so — I’d say the jury is out on whether the United States can continue in that role in the wake of George W. Bush and now Donald Trump — would never exist in this alternate timeline. I think the world that followed would be very, very different, in more ways than just the absence of a Soviet Union, and by no means likely to be a better one that our own. A preemptive nuclear strike, carrying with it the justification that such a thing must in some circumstances be acceptable, would be a terrifying precedent to set. (The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which I feel were justifiable, were not preemptive first strikes, since the United States and Japan were already engaged in total war at the time.)

- DZ-Jay

March 10, 2017 at 6:00 pm

Hi, Jimmy,

That’s a very fair and persuasive point. Thank you for taking the time to respond.

For what it’s worth, my personal views on the justification of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki coincide rather closely with what you state on your next article. As a matter of fact, your conclusions on that article took me by surprise for after the build up in five previous articles, I was bracing myself for the absolute opposite case, and not such a compelling and reasoned argument. A bit unfair on my part, perhaps, which shows that we should never be quick to judge.

Thanks for the food for thought. :)

dZ.

T Plus 1: Bombing Japan
February 13, 2015

Playground

A set of children's swings moves slowly back and forth in the humid breeze. Behind them stands a long building, its windows hung with flowers and birds folded from colored paper.

Mounds of dirt are heaped around a dark opening to the east. It appears to be a shelter of some kind.

Several small children are happily chasing dragonflies north of the swing set. Turning south, you see a group of adults (schoolteachers, by the looks of them), wearily digging another shelter like the first.

A little girl races between the swings, hot on the trail of a dragonfly. She trips and sprawls across the sand, laughing with hysterical glee. Then she sees you.

At first, you're sure she's going to scream. Her eyes dart back and forth between you and the teachers; you can see a cry forming on her lips.

Suddenly, the umbrella in your hand catches her eye. You watch her expression soften from fear to curiosity.

>examine girl
The girl is a cute four or five years old.

The girl can't keep her eyes off the umbrella.

You've noticed a faint sound coming from somewhere overhead. The girl turns to stare at the sky.

>girl, hello
The girl blinks uncomprehendingly.

The sound overhead grows louder. There's no mistaking the drone of aircraft.

The girl looks at you expectantly and tries to pull you towards the shelter.

Muttering with exasperation, the teachers drop their spades and begin to trudge in the direction of the shelter.

One teacher, a young woman, sees you standing in the sandpile and shrieks something in Japanese. Her companions quickly surround you, shouting accusations and sneering at your vacation shorts. You respond by pointing desperately at the sky, shouting "Bomb! Big boom!" and struggling to escape into the shelter.

This awkward scene is cut short by a searing flash.

On August 6, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets dropped the second atomic bomb ever to be exploded in the history of the world — and the first to be exploded in anger — on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later another B-29, piloted this time by Major Charles Sweeney, dropped another — the second and, so far, the last ever to be exploded in anger — on Nagasaki; it’s this event that Trinity portrays in the excerpt above. On August 15, Japan broadcast its acceptance of Allied surrender terms.

The cultural debate that followed, condensed into four vignettes:

In the immediate aftermath of the event, the support of the American public for the bombings that have, according to conventional wisdom, ended the most terrible war in human history is so universal that almost no one bothers to even ask them about it. One of the few polls on the issue, taken by Gallup on August 26, finds that 85 percent support the decision versus just 10 percent opposed. Some weeks later another poll finds that 53.5 percent “unequivocally” support the country’s handling of its atomic arsenal during the war. Lest you think that that number represents a major drop-off, know that 22.7 percent of the total don’t equivocate for the reason you probably think: they feel that the United States should have found some way to drop “many more” atomic bombs on Japan between August 6 and August 15, just out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Newspapers and magazines are filled with fawning profiles of the “heroes” who flew the missions, especially of their de facto spokesman Tibbets, who comes complete with a wonderfully photogenic all-American family straight out of Norman Rockwell. He named his B-29 the Enola Gay after his mother, for God’s sake! Could it get any more perfect? Tibbets and the rest of the Enola Gay’s crew march as conquering heroes through Manhattan as part of the Army Day Parade on April 6, 1946. The Enola Gay becomes a hero in her own right, with the New York Times publishing an extended “Portrait of a B-29” to tell her story. When she’s assigned along with Tibbets himself to travel to Bikini Atoll to possibly drop the first Operations Crossroads bomb, the press treat it like Batman and his trusty Batmobile going back into action. (The Enola Gay is ultimately not used for the drop. Likewise, Tibbets supervises preparations, but doesn’t fly the actual mission.)

Fast-forward twenty years, to 1965. The American public still overwhelmingly supports the use of the atomic bomb, while the historians regard it as has having saved far more lives than it destroyed in ending the war when it did and obviating the need for an invasion of Japan. But now a young, Marxist-leaning economic historian named Gar Alperovitz reopens the issue in his first book: Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam. It argues that the atomic bomb wasn’t necessary to end World War II, and, indeed, that President Truman and his advisers knew this perfectly well. It was used, Alperovitz claims, to send a message to the Soviet Union about this fearsome new power now in the United States’s possession. The book, so much in keeping with the “question everything your parents told you” ethos of the burgeoning counterculture, becomes surprisingly popular amongst the youth, and at last opens up the question to serious historiographical debate in the universities.

Fast-forward thirty years, to the mid-1990s. The Smithsonian makes plans to unveil the newly restored Enola Gay, which has spent decades languishing in storage, as the centerpiece of a new exhibit: The Crossroads: The End of World II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Cold War. The exhibit, by most scholarly accounts a quite rigorously balanced take on its subject matter that strains to address thoughtfully both supporters and condemners of the atomic bombings, is met with a firestorm of controversy in conservative circles for giving a voice to critics of the bombing at all, as well as for allegedly paying too much attention to the suffering of the actual victims of the bombs. They object particularly to the charred relics from Hiroshima that are to be displayed under the shadow of the Enola Gay, and to the quotations from true-blue American heroes like Dwight Eisenhower voicing reservations about the use of the bomb. Newt Gingrich, the newly minted Republican Speaker of the House, condemns the Smithsonian and its director, Martin Harwit, as “cultural elites” telling Americans “they ought to be ashamed of their country.” Tibbets, still greeted as a hero in some circles but now condemned as an out-and-out war criminal in others, proclaims the proposed exhibit simply “a damn big insult” whilst reiterating that he feels not the slightest pang of conscience over what he did and sleeps just fine every night. In the end the grander ambitions for the exhibit are scuttled and Harwit harried right out of his job. Instead the Smithsonian sets up the Enola Gay as just another neat old airplane in its huge collection, accompanied by only the most perfunctory of historical context in the form of an atomic-bombing-justifying placard or two.

Fast-forward another ten years. On November 1, 2007, Paul Tibbets dies at the age of 92. The blizzard of remembrances and obituaries that follow almost all feel compelled to take an implicit or explicit editorial position on the atomic bombings, which are as controversial now as they’ve ever been. Conservative writers lay on the “American hero” rhetoric heavily. It’s the liberal ideologues, though, who become most disingenuously strident this time. Many resort to rather precious forms of psychoanalysis in trying to explain Tibbets’s lifelong refusal to express remorse for dropping the bomb, claiming that it means he had either been a sociopath or deeply troubled inside and holding himself together only through denial. They project, in other words, their own feelings toward the attack onto him whilst refusing him the basic human respect of accepting that maybe the position he had steadfastly maintained for sixty years was an honest, considered one rather than a product of psychosis.

If support for the atomic bombings of Japan equals mental illness there were an awful lot of lunatics loose in the bombings’ immediate aftermath. If we could go back and ask these lunatics, they’d likely be very surprised that people are still debating this issue at all today. Well before 1950 the history seemed largely to have been written, the debate already long settled in the form of the neat logical formulation destined to appear in high-school history texts for many decades, destined to be trotted out yet again for the bowdlerized version of the Enola Gay exhibit. Japan, despite being quite obviously and comprehensively beaten by that summer of 1945, still refused to surrender. But then, as the Smithsonian’s watered-down exhibit put it: “The use of the bomb led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. Such an invasion, especially if undertaken for both main islands, would have led to very heavy casualties among American, Allied, and Japanese armed forces, and Japanese civilians.” The bombings were terrible, but much less terrible than the alternative of an invasion of the Japanese home islands, which was estimated to likely cost as many as 1 million American casualties, and likely many times that Japanese.

For a sense of the sheer enormity of that figure of 1 million casualties, consider that it’s very similar to the total of American casualties in both Europe and the Pacific up to the summer of 1945. Thus we’re talking here about a potential doubling of the the United States’s total casualties in World War II, and very possibly the same for Japan’s already much more horrific toll. The only other possible non-nuclear alternative would have been a blockade of the Japanese home islands to try to starve them out of the war, a process that could have taken many months or even years and brought with it horrific civilian death and suffering in Japan itself as well as a slow but steady dribble of Allied casualties amongst the soldiers, sailors, and airmen maintaining the blockade. For a nation that just wanted to be done with the war already, this was no alternative at all.

Against the casualties projected for an invasion or even an extended blockade, the 200,000 or so killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki starts to almost seem minor. I’d be tempted to say that you can’t do this kind of math with human lives, except that we did and do it all the time; see the platitudes about the moderate, unfortunate, but ultimately acceptable “collateral damage” that has accompanied so many modern military adventures. So, assuming we can accept that, while every human life is infinitely precious, some infinities are apparently bigger than others (Georg Cantor would be proud!), the decision made by Truman and his advisers would seem, given the terrible logic of war, the only reasonable one to make… if only this whole version of the administration’s debate wasn’t a fabrication.

No, in truth Truman never had anything like the debate described above with his staffers — unsurprisingly, as the alleged facts on which it builds are either outright false or, at best, highly questionable. Far from being stubbornly determined to battle on to the death, Japan was sending clear feelers through various diplomatic channels that it was eager to discuss peace terms, with the one real stumbling block being the uncertain status under the Allies’ stated terms of “unconditional surrender” of the Emperor Hirohito. Any reasonably perceptive and informed American diplomat could have come to the conclusion that was in fact pretty much the case in reality: that many elements of this proud nation were still in the Denial phase of grief, clinging to desperate pipe dreams like a rescue by, of all people, a Soviet Union that suddenly joined Japan against the West — but, as those dreams were shattered one by one, Japan as a whole was slowly working its way toward Acceptance of its situation. Given these signs of wavering resolution, it seems highly unlikely that an invasion of Japan, should it have been necessary at all, would have racked up 1 million casualties on the Allied side alone. That neat round figure is literally pulled out of the air, from a despairing aside made by Truman’s aging, war-weary Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall engaged in a similar bit of dead reckoning, based on nothing but intuition, and came up with a figure of 500,000. Others reckoned more in the range of 250,000. The only remotely careful study, the only one based on statistical methods rather than gut feelings, was one conducted by the Army that estimated casualties of 132,500 — 25,000 of them fatalities — for an invasion of Kyushu, 87,500 casualties — 21,000 of them fatalities — if a follow-up invasion of Honshu also became necessary. Of course, nobody really knew. How could they? The only thing we do know is that 1 million was the highest of all the back-of-the-napkin estimations and over four times the military’s own best guess, meaning it’s better taken as an extreme outlier — or at least a worst-case scenario — than a baseline assumption.

The wellspring for the problematic traditional narrative about the use of the atomic bomb is an article which Henry Stimson wrote for the February 1947 issue of Harper’s Magazine. This article was itself written in response to the first mild stirrings of moral qualms that had begun the previous year in the media in response to the publication of John Hersey’s searing work of novelistic journalism Hiroshima. Stimson’s response sums up the entire debate and the ultimate decision to drop the bombs so eloquently, simply, and judiciously that it effectively ended the debate when it had barely begun. The two most salient planks of what’s become the traditionalist view of the bombing — Japan’s absolute refusal to surrender and that lovely, memorable round number of 1 million casualties — stand front and center. This neat version of events would later be enshrined in the memoirs of Truman and his associates.

Yet, as we’ve seen, Stimson’s version of the debate must be, at best, not quite the whole truth. I want to return to it momentarily to examine the biggest lie therein, which I consider to be profoundly important to really understanding the use of the bomb. But first, what of the stories told by those of later generations who would condemn the use of the bomb? They’ve staked various positions over the years, ranging from unsubstantiated claims of racism as the primary motivator to arguments derived from moral absolutism: “One cannot firmly be against any use of nuclear weapons yet make an exception in the case of Hiroshima,” writes longtime anti-nuclear journalist and advocate Greg Mitchell. Personally, I don’t find unnuanced tautologies of that stripe particularly helpful in any situation; there’s always context, always exceptions.

By far the strongest argument made against the use of the atomic bomb is the one that was first deployed by Gar Alperovitz to restart the debate in 1965: that external political concerns, particularly the desire to send a message to the Soviet Union, had as much or more to do with the use of the bomb than a simple desire to end the war as quickly and painlessly as possible. While the evidence isn’t quite as cut-and-dried as many condemners would have it, there’s nevertheless enough fire under this particular smokescreen to make any proponent of the atomic bombing as having merely been doing what was necessary to end the war with Japan at least a bit uncomfortable.

It was the evening of the first day of the Potsdam Conference involving Truman, Stalin, Winston Churchill, and their respective staffs when Truman first got word of the success of the Trinity test. Many attendees remarked the immediate change in his demeanor. After having appeared a bit hesitant and unsure of himself during the first day, he started to assert himself boldly, almost aggressively, against Stalin. Suddenly, noted a perplexed Churchill, “he told the Russians just where they got on and off and generally bossed the whole meeting.” Only when Churchill got word from his own people of the successful test did all become clear: “Now I know what happened to Truman yesterday…”

There follow Potsdam in the records of the administration’s internal discussions a disturbing number of expressions of hopes that the planned atomic bombings of Japan will serve as a forceful demonstration to Stalin that the United States should not be trifled with in the fast-approaching postwar world order. Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes in particular gloated repeatedly that the atomic bomb should make the Soviets “more manageable” in general; that it would “induce them to yield and agree to our positions”; that it had given the United States “great power.”

But we have to be careful here in constructing a chain of causality. While it’s certainly clear that Truman and many around him regarded the bomb as a very useful lever indeed against increasing Soviet intractability, this was always discussed as simply a side benefit, not a compelling reason to use the bomb in itself. There were, in other words, lots of musing asides, but no imperatives in the form of “drop the bomb so that we can scare the Russians.” Truman’s diary entry after learning of the Trinity test mentions the Soviets only as potential allies against Japan: “Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan explodes over their homeland.”

If we consider actions in addition to words the situation begins to look yet more ambiguous. Prior to Potsdam the United States had been pushing the Soviet Union with some urgency to enter the war against Japan, believing a Soviet invasion of Manchuria would tie down Japanese troops and resources should an American-led home-island invasion become necessary. The Truman administration also believed a Soviet declaration might, just might, provide the final shock that would bring Japan to its senses and cause it to surrender without an invasion. But in the wake of Trinity American diplomats abruptly ceased to pressure their Soviet counterparts. The Soviet Union would declare war at last anyway on August 8 (in between the two atomic bombings), but the United States, once it had the bomb, would seem to have judged that ending the war with the bomb would be preferable for its interests than having the war end thanks to the Soviet Union’s entry. The latter could very well give Stalin postwar justification for laying claim to Manchuria or other Japanese territories, claiming part of the spoils of a war in which the Soviet Union had participated only at the last instant. An additional implicit consideration may have been the conviction of Byrnes and others that it wouldn’t hurt postwar negotiations a bit to show Stalin just what a single American bomber could now do. The realpolitik here isn’t pretty — it seldom is — but what to make of the whole picture is far from clear. The words and actions of Truman and his advisers would seem ambiguous enough to be deployed in the service of any number of interpretations, from condemnations of them as war criminals to assertions that they were simply doing their duty in prosecuting to the relentless utmost of their abilities their war against an implacable enemy. Yes, interpretations abound, most using the confusing facts as the merest of scaffolds for arguments having more to do with ideology and emotion. I won’t presume to tell you what you should think. I would just caution you to tread carefully and not to judge too hastily.

In that spirit, it’s time now to come back to the biggest lie in Stimson’s article. Quite simply, the entire premise of the article is untrue. Actually, there was no debate at all over whether the atomic bomb should be used on Japan.

Really. Nowhere is there any record of any internal debate at all over whether the atomic bomb should be dropped on Japan. There were debates over when it should be used; on which cities it should be used; whether the Japanese should be warned beforehand; whether it should be demonstrated to the Japanese in open country or open ocean before starting to bomb their cities. But no one, no one inside the administration ever even raised the shadow of a suggestion that it should simply be declared too horrible for use and mothballed.  Not even among the scientists who built the bomb, many of whom would become advocates in the postwar years for atomic moderation or abolition, is there even a hint of such an idea. Even Niels Bohr, who was frantically begging anyone in Washington who would listen to think about what the bomb might mean to the future of civilization, simply assumed that it would be used as soon as it was ready to end this war; his concern was for the world and the wars that would follow. Interestingly, the only on-the-record questioners of the very idea of using the atomic bomb are a handful from the military who had no direct vote on the strategic conduct of the war in the Pacific, like — even more interestingly — Dwight Eisenhower. Those unnoticed voices aside, the whole debate over the use of the atomic bomb on Japan is largely anachronistic in that nobody making the big decisions at the time ever even thought to raise it as a question. The use of the bomb, now that it was here, was a fait accompli. I really believe that this is a profoundly important idea to grasp. If you insist on seeing this conspicuously missing debate as proof of the moral degradation of the Truman administration, fair enough, have at it. But I see it a little bit differently. I see it as a sign of the difference between peace and war.

The United States has visited war upon quite a number of nations in recent decades, but the vast majority of Americans have never known war — real war, total war, war as existential struggle — and the mentality it produces. I believe that this weirdly asymmetrical relationship with the subject has warped the way many Americans view war. We insist on trying to make war, the dirtiest business there is, into a sanitized, acceptable thing with our “targeted strikes” and our rhetoric about “liberating” rather than conquering, all whilst wringing our hands appropriately when we learn of “collateral damage” among civilians. Meanwhile we are shocked at the brutal lengths the populations of the countries we invade will go to to defend their homelands, see these lengths as proof of the American moral high ground (an Abu Ghraib here or there aside), while failing to understand that what is to us a far-off exercise in communist control or terrorist prevention is to them a struggle for national and cultural survival. Of course they’re willing to fight dirty, willing to do just about anything to kill us and get us out of their countries.

World War II, however, had no room for weasel words like “collateral damage.” It was that very existential struggle that the United States has thankfully not had to face since. This brought with it an honesty about what war actually is that always seems to be lacking in peacetime. If the conduct of the United States during the war in the Pacific was not quite as horrendous as that of Japan, plenty of things were nevertheless done that our modern eyes would view as atrocities. Throughout the war, American pilots routinely machine-gunned Japanese pilots who had bailed out of their stricken aircraft — trained pilots being far, far more precious a commodity to the Japanese than the planes they flew. And on the night of March 9, 1945, American B-29s loosed an incendiary barrage on Tokyo’s residential areas carefully planned to burn as much of the city as possible to the ground and to kill as many civilians as possible in the process; it managed to kill at least 100,000, considerably more than were killed in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and not far off the pace of Hiroshima. These scenes aren’t what we think of when we think of the Greatest Generation; we prefer a nostalgic Glen Miller soundtrack and lots of artfully billowing flags. Our conception of a World War II hero doesn’t usually allow for the machine-gunning of helpless men or the fire-bombing of civilians. But these things, and much more, were done.

World War II was the last honest war the United States has fought because it was the last to acknowledge, at least tacitly, the reality of what war is: state-sponsored killing. If you’re unlucky enough to lead a nation during wartime, your objective must be to prosecute that war with every means at your disposal, to kill more of your enemy every single day than he kills of your own people. Do this long enough and eventually he will give up. If you have an awesome new weapon to deploy in that task, one which your enemy doesn’t possess and thus cannot use to retaliate in kind, you don’t think twice. You use it. The atomic bomb, the most terrible weapon the world has ever known, was forged in the crucible of the most terrible war the world has ever known. Of course it got used. The atomic bombings of Japan and all of the other terrible deeds committed by American forces in both Europe and the Pacific are not an indictment of Truman or his predecessor Roosevelt or of the United States; they’re an indictment of war. Some wars, like World War II, are sadly necessary to fight. But why on earth would anyone who knows what war really means actually choose to begin one? The collective American denial of the reality of war has enabled a series of elective wars that have turned into ugly, bleeding sores with no clear winners or losers; somehow the United States is able to keep mustering the will to blunder into these things but unable to muster the will to do the ugly things necessary to actually win them.

The only antidote for the brand of insanity that leads us to freely choose war when any other option is on the table is to be forced to stop thinking about it in the abstract, to be confronted with some inkling of the souls we’re about to snuff out and the suffering we’re about to cause. This is one of the services that Trinity does for us. For me, the most moving moment in the entire game is the one sketched out at the beginning of this article, when you meet a sweet little girl who’s about to become a victim of the world’s second atomic-bomb attack. Later — or earlier; chronology is a tricky thing in Trinity — you’ll meet her again, as an old woman, in the Kensington Gardens.

>examine woman
Her face is wrong.

You look a little closer and shudder to yourself. The entire left side of her head is scarred with deep red lesions, twisting her oriental features into a hideous mask. She must have been in an accident or something.

A strong gust of wind snatches the umbrella out of the old woman's hands and sweeps it into the branches of the tree.

The woman circles the tree a few times, gazing helplessly upward. That umbrella obviously means a lot to her, for a wistful tear is running down her cheek. But nobody except you seems to notice her loss.

After a few moments, the old woman dries her eyes, gives the tree a vicious little kick and shuffles away down the Lancaster Walk.

That scene breaks my heart every time I read it, and I’m still not entirely sure why.

I like the fact that Trinity goes to Nagasaki rather than Hiroshima. The Hiroshima attack, the more destructive of the two bombings in human lives by a factor of at least two and of course the first, normally gets all of the attention in art and journalism alike. Indeed, it can seem almost impossible to avoid emphasizing Hiroshima over Nagasaki; I’ve done it repeatedly in this article, even though I started out vowing not to. “We are an asterisk,” says Nagasaki sociologist Shinji Takahashi with a certain bitter sense of irony. “The inferior a-bomb city.” Nagasaki wasn’t even done the honor of being selected as a target for an atomic bomb. The B-29 that bombed Nagasaki had been destined for Kokura, but settled on Nagasaki after cloud cover and drifting smoke from a conventional-bombing raid made a drop on Kokura too problematic. An accident of clouds and wind cost 50,000 or more citizens of Nagasaki their lives, and saved the lives of God only knows how many in Kokura. As the Japanese themselves would say, such is karma. And such is the stuff of tragedy.

Comments
33 Responses

- Jayle Enn

February 13, 2015 at 7:41 pm

Trinity was the first Infocom game I finished without a (hard to find) hint book. I’m not sure if it’s because the puzzles were fairly straightforward, or the writing was so compelling to a teenage me. I think the latter because, decades later, I’ll think unbidden, ‘Her face is wrong’ and relive the awful realization of who that little girl by the swingsets grew up to be.

- Jimmy Maher

February 14, 2015 at 11:01 am

I *love* the line “She must have been in an accident or something.” So perfect, so cluelessly contemporary American.

- Lisa H.

February 16, 2015 at 8:25 am

I feel dumb – who does the Nagasaki scene girl grow up to be?

- Lisa H.

February 16, 2015 at 8:35 am

Never mind; got it now. But I do still feel pretty stupid – especially given the number of times I’ve played through this game – that I never noticed that before.

- Ronixis

February 13, 2015 at 7:51 pm

From the survey result, is that actually 22.7% of the remainder (which would be 10.5% of the total respondents) or 22.7% of the total respondents?

- Jimmy Maher

February 14, 2015 at 8:48 am

I didn’t write that very well at all. I meant 22.7 percent of the total respondents. Fixed it. Thanks!

- Duncan Stevens

February 13, 2015 at 9:31 pm

Agree that there isn’t really a good answer to whether Truman should have dropped the bomb. Having read some of the literature, it does seem to me that the option of demonstrating its use to the Japanese (say, by dropping it on an uninhabited island) before using it on a city deserved more attention than it got. It appears that it was rejected by the committee Stimson chaired for fear that (1) the bomb might not work, emboldening the dead-enders, and (2) telling the Japanese that the bomb was coming might lead them to shift POW camps into the likely targets. I’ve never found either explanation very convincing: (1) while there was some question about whether the plutonium bomb (Fat Man) would work, it was pretty clear that the uranium bomb (Little Boy) would work, and (2) there had already been extensive bombing of Japanese cities, so if Japan was going to move POWs to the cities to deter strikes, it likely would have done so already.

On the other hand, Japan *didn’t* react to Hiroshima by surrendering immediately, so you could argue that the demonstration wouldn’t have accomplished anything. The Rhodes book suggests that three days wasn’t enough time for the relevant decisionmakers to make their choice, and there may be something in that, but I haven’t seen any evidence that unconditional surrender was imminent when the second bomb was dropped. (The book also notes that the regime stacked the deck by, for example, publishing the proposed surrender terms in the newspapers but heavily editing the terms so that they seemed more onerous.)

As for the diplomatic feelers…I’ve never been sure what to think. Mixed messages were being sent, and whether the U.S. should have viewed surrender on acceptable terms as inevitable without the bomb or an invasion isn’t, to my eye, as easy a question as you suggest. Had the Potsdam declaration clearly stated that “unconditional surrender” didn’t mean Hirohito had to go, would that have changed things? Maybe, maybe not. And even if it could be expected that Japan would have gotten there eventually, waiting for that wasn’t a cost-free strategy either; see the sinking of the Indianapolis on July 30.

One other note about the woman in London: consider that the premise of the game as it ultimately plays out is that she will (almost certainly) die in the London attack. I.e., she’ll survive the Nagasaki attack, severely scarred, and live her life only to die in another bombing. Thinking about it that way helps particularize what would, as you note, otherwise be abstract.

- Ken Rutsky

February 13, 2015 at 9:49 pm

“As for the diplomatic feelers…I’ve never been sure what to think.”

I seem to remember the diplomatic overtures were made behind the backs of the military command, who were really running the show? Or am I wrong…

- Jimmy Maher

February 14, 2015 at 9:21 am

There was definitely a war faction and a peace faction, but I’m not sure I’d characterize it as the latter “going behind the backs” of the former. I believe it was more just a heated internal debate, with resulting mixed signals sent to the outside world.

- Duncan Stevens

February 14, 2015 at 3:08 pm

I believe that the Japanese diplomats in question were in Switzerland; they said they had back-channel communications going on with the regime, but it wasn’t 100% clear whether the regime was on board with everything they were saying.

- Jeremy Gans

February 14, 2015 at 2:20 am

I read last year that there are a number of Japanese who were bombed in Hiroshima, then shipped off as survivors to Nagasaki (too) soon after. I think they are all dead now, but they were known (and venerated to a degree) in Japan as the ‘twice-bombed.” I remember thinking at the time that the girl in Trinity was also in that category.

(One other thing. It did strike me that she seemed to give up on that umbrella a little too easily, given what it must have meant to her.)

- Jimmy Maher

February 14, 2015 at 10:14 am

One other obvious argument against demonstrating the bomb was that, as I alluded to in another comment, the Americans actually only had two of them to hand, and didn’t expect more for several weeks. Thus if you use one as a demonstration and Japan doesn’t respond as you hope you’ve lost one of your two precious bullets.

Truman and Stimnson among others later did claim to have dropped leaflets on Japan warning of the impending attack, but the historical record is unclear a) whether this happened at all or b) whether if it did they were well-enough written and widely-enough distributed to make any realistic difference.

One thing that often goes unreported is that there actually were 23 American prisoners of war in Hiroshima…

A huge part of the “unconditional surrender” situation was dictated by domestic political calculations on Truman’s part. Far from being the “buck stops here” standup decision-maker of popular legend, Truman ran an administration that was in some ways the first of the modern ones, driven very much by polling. His Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes was a particularly political creature. “Unconditional surrender” was *hugely* popular with the American public, and Truman was very nervous about how it would be received if he suddenly modified that. And he was also concerned that he not appear weak to Stalin.

I would say Japan’s surrender, with or without the bomb, *was* inevitable; it obviously wasn’t going to *win* this war, and the United States obviously wasn’t going to accept anything less. This would have been as obvious to Truman as it is to us. The question, of course, is *when* that surrender would occur.

Truman’s duty as a wartime leader, as I see it, was not to kill Japanese just for the fun of it, but also not to trade even 100,000 Japanese lives for 1 American. That’s harsh, but that’s what war *is*. In waiting around after the first bomb was dropped or hoping that the Soviets’ entry could bring about Japan’s surrender, he would have been doing just that; the Kamikazes would have continued to fly into American ships and the Japanese submarines would have continued to torpedo them (as the fate of the Indianapolis made so clear). This is the reason that at the end of the day I reluctantly and sadly agree with the decision to use the bomb — or at least am unwilling to condemn Truman for it; this is a very, very difficult question for me. I’d a feel a little better about my answer if Truman had also continued to pressure Stalin to come in, and hadn’t gloated so much about the effect the use of the atomic bomb would have on relations with the Soviet Union…

- Duncan Stevens

February 14, 2015 at 3:27 pm

When the surrender would occur and on what terms was not clear. The regime pretty much blew off the Potsdam declaration, and while other channels may have been more receptive, there was a lot of uncertainty. As you note, Truman, at that point, wasn’t willing to sacrifice any more American lives in hopes of a less harsh outcome, and continuing to pound Japan with conventional weapons wasn’t going to be cost-free.

It’s not clear to me how big a difference, for Japan, Stalin entering the war earlier would have made, or whether Japan would have surrendered without the use of the bomb. The Soviet Union could roll through Manchuria, but it wasn’t going to be leading an invasion of the main islands. (Did the Soviets even have an amphibious force?)

- Jason Dyer

February 14, 2015 at 5:36 pm

I’m not so convinced at the case surrender was inevitable. Even after the two atomic bombs there was a near-coup to prevent a surrender.

http://warhistorian.org/grimsley-coup-what-if.pdf

- Ken

February 16, 2015 at 3:02 am

Also often overlooked (or ignored) is that a peace short of unconditional Japanese surrender – either on terms of status quo ante bellum (reset the map to December 5, 1941) or involving Japan giving up a fairly small portion of their prewar conquests in China – would have done nothing more than sow the seeds of the next war, as the fundamental cause of the war -Japan’s dominance by a militaristic government that sought to build a self-sufficient economic empire via fire and sword.

So long as the US owned or was allied with any territory between Asia and Midway Island, the US possessed the strategic position to strangle any Japanese Empire that could ever be, meaning that unless Japan forsook their dreams of such an empire, that empire would only exist as long as the United States allowed it to exist. This was an intolerable situation to the military figures that actually ruled there, so the only real option open was either unconditional Japanese surrender, or another war -just as bad, if not worse- ten or twenty years down the line, exactly as happened with the ill-conceived Versailles treaty that ended WWI.

As for the casualty debate for DOWNFALL, the military planners that formulated the lower figures were ignorant of the quantity of suicide units that Japan had ready for battle. In addition to the famous Kamikaze fighters and less famous “baka” manned cruise missiles, they had large numbers of manned torpedoes (used rather little in the war) ,suicide speedboats (never used operationally), and suicide midget submarines (also never used). Those units alone (which proved very difficult to stop and highly accurate) would have inflicted very heavy casualties among the troopships for the invasion.

Potentially even worse, cyanide pills were manufactured and distributed to civilians in mass numbers (I personally know a woman who still has the one she was given by her mother as a small girl and told to take if the Americans came), which had the potential for mass civilian deaths even without the inevitable collateral damage that would result from any serious fighting.

- Jimmy Maher

February 16, 2015 at 7:05 am

As a counterpoint, there were signs of what the military suspected to be weakening resolution that were taken into account. At Okinawa, 7400 soldiers from the garrison actually surrendered — still a small percentage, but a much, much higher number than surrendered in previous campaigns. See George Feifer’s Tennozan: The Battle for Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb for more on the military’s thinking.

While you describe a lot of very sensible reasons for making sure Japan capitulated completely, by 1945 none of that was at all in question within Truman’s administration for the very reasons you state. The only question was whether to accept as a condition the continuing reign of Hirohito as Emperor and to give him immunity to war-crimes charges — and this of course was accepted in the end.

- Ken Rutsky

February 13, 2015 at 9:46 pm

Great article, the best in this series so far, and one of the best overall I’ve read on this blog. I really appreciate the sections about the public’s changing view of prosecuting war. “[S]omehow the United States is able to keep mustering the will to blunder into these things but unable to muster the will to do the ugly things necessary to actually win them” is profound, well-put.

I’ve already said it, but thanks so much for these posts. I was a military history nut from a very young age (still am). Reading Hersey’s book in sixth grade (a flea market book seller recommended it to me; I think he found my enthusiasm for the subject a little unsettling) really opened my eyes to a lot of what got left out of all those old history books, glossy atlases and Ballantine paperbacks. Maybe your blog will do the same for someone else.

- Jimmy Maher

February 14, 2015 at 9:42 am

Thanks! Even though this is (I believe) the shortest of these articles, it’s the one I struggled with the most. I think I ended up excising almost as much text as I left in. I removed a lot of editorializing, as I think this is a question everyone should probably think about for herself. I have my own view, which probably still does creep through a bit in the article, but I really don’t want to tell you what to think. I suppose that’s kind of exception to my general rule for this blog. Enjoy it while it lasts… ;)

It sounds like we have similar histories. When I was maybe ten or so I discovered a treasure trove in our attic, a bunch of old Military Book Club books on World War II. For the next several years I was known as “the warmonger” within the family. I loved a four-volume series by Edward Jablonski called Airwar most of all. I was particularly fascinated with its vivid descriptions of the carrier battles in the Pacific; I relived them over and over in my imagination, even bought the absurdly complex Avalon Hill wargame Flattop (which I proceeded to get absolutely nowhere with).

At the time I was also a big Star Trek fan, and I kind of conflated the two in my mind. My favorite episodes were not the planetside stories but the ones where the Enterprise would do battle in space and Kirk would command from the bridge with photon torpedoes flying and damage reports coming in. Inevitably, the starship Enterprise led me to the storied World War II aircraft carrier Enterprise. I read The Big E by Edward Stafford several times front to back.

But I think it was another part of Airwar that first began to bring home to me the real meaning of war. Writing about the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, Jablonski described vividly how the American pilots machine-gunned Japanese troops on the decks of transports and, after those transports were sunk, as they struggled in the water. The carnage was so terrible that many of the pilots threw up in their cockpits, but they kept on pulling their triggers lest those troops make it Guadalcanal and reinforce the Japanese garrison there.

Definitely a needed corrective to my view of war as all glory and excitement and adventure. War is killing. These days I’m very aware of that, and always find myself saying when I open one of those old gung-ho books I used to love, “But you’re making light of killing people!” I don’t judge military-history buffs for the hobby, as I know how compelling it can be, but it’s just not for me anymore.

It sounds like Hiroshima may have been a corrective you could use, and a certain bookstore owner may have been very, very wise to recommend it…

- ZUrlocker

February 15, 2015 at 3:26 pm

Yes, enjoyed this post quite a bit. Definitely best of the series. And the comments are also very good reading.

- Jeremy Gans

February 14, 2015 at 2:17 am

A terrific post and one I’d been nervous about for personal reasons. I’m an Australian and attended a US summer school (in Paris) in 1994, which I think must have been during the debate about the Smithsonian display. I talked to some Americans about the issue and took what I thought would be a gentle route into the dilemma, saying (not quite truly) “I’m convinced that the US was right to bomb Hiroshima. But I’m not so sure about Nagasaki. Couldn’t they have at least waited a few more weeks to see if the Japanese would surrender?” I’m pretty sure that I was inspired to make that argument by Trinity, which I recall surprised me by taking me to Nagasaki, rather than Hiroshima as I was anticipating. Like you and others, that girl’s wrong face was a lasting image. However, to say the least, my plan for a gentle argument didn’t work. The folks I argued with were incensed by my suggestion and I was incensed that they were incensed. There was some shouting.

Anyway, one thing I am curious about, that you don’t cover here, is the debate the Americans DID have, about what to bomb in Japan, and when, and who. And, to reiterate my question from twenty years ago, what was the rationale (if there was one) for bombing Nagasaki/Kokuru just three days after Hiroshima?

- Jimmy Maher

February 14, 2015 at 9:03 am

There was never any proposal or conception that I’m aware of to bomb Japan just twice (or once) and then wait and see what it did in response. The plan was rather to conduct an atomic-bombing *campaign* until Japan surrendered. But the problem was that every bomb was essentially a handmade bespoke piece, quantities of uranium and plutonium were still limited, etc. So it was simple logistics problems that kept more bombs from dropping between August 9 and August 15. I believe the next bomb was actually still at least two weeks away from being ready to go at the time of Japan’s surrender.

The discussions about where to bomb make for a very complicated subject if you drill down into the minutiae. Tokyo was taken off the slate for early targeting right away, partly for humanitarian reasons — the population was *very* densely packed even by Japanese standards — partly out of concern for how it would look to the rest of the world, partly for practical reasons — you might not want to wipe out the seat of government and thus plunge the country into chaos when you hope the government is about to surrender. Otherwise, cities were wanted which had at least some semblance of being of military value — again, largely for political reasons — and, much more cold-bloodedly, that hadn’t been bombed too extensively before, so the damage the atomic bomb did could be better evaluated.

Kyoto actually fit all of these criteria and almost certainly would have been one of the first two targets had not Secretary of War Henry Stimson personally intervened and said, no, we can’t bomb “the Rome of Japan.” A very interesting guy was Stimson…

- Andrej Panjkov

February 22, 2015 at 5:01 am

I believe that the ground zero point for Kyoto was going to be the central railyard, which is now a locomotive museum. The prime exhibit there is the Emperor’s official locomotive engine.

- Scott Gage

February 16, 2015 at 3:59 am

Great article. Very thought-provoking stuff.

Bit of a typo though:

all whilst ringing our hands appropriately when we learn of “collateral damage” among civilians

That should be “wringing”, unless you have bells for hands :)

- Jimmy Maher

February 16, 2015 at 6:40 am

:) Thanks!

- Lisa H.

February 16, 2015 at 8:40 am

So aside from me being dense (and posting a comment before I’d even finished reading the article), I do want to say that I found the running motif in the comic of “It’s my patriotic duty” interesting, especially the line here with the hestitation in it, and “I hear an airplane” particularly chilling – so innocent.

- Kevin Colyer

March 5, 2015 at 9:27 pm

Very insightful and thoughtful post. I think your comments of the use of the bomb being obvious in the totality of war very interesting and the contrast with post-wwII wars having a strong ring of truth to them.

I have been reading your blog avidly, but this has been the best post (and series). Perhaps there is a history book or two in you?!!!

- Ruber Eaglenest

March 27, 2015 at 6:51 am

You said that “That scene breaks my heart every time I read it, and I’m still not entirely sure why.” Well I’m sure it breaks your hearth the second time you play the game, or further revisits to the game. Isn’t Trinity a wonderful game?

There are more emotives moment in the thread of time with that secene. You can save the girl inside in a way but dying in the process, but it is a sweet death.

- Martin

July 28, 2016 at 3:14 am

Sorry if this is ignoring the main meat of the article but this is bugging me.In the game sample, you say “girl, hello” and get a blank response because I assume, you are talking in English. So what happens if you try to talk to her in Japanese? Does the game have any options to actually communicating with her?

- Jimmy Maher

July 28, 2016 at 7:10 am

Don’t believe so, no.

- Gideon Marcus

February 5, 2017 at 2:53 am

Great article. I did not see mention that the casualty predictions were inflated to justify the dropping of the bomb (you say there was no debate at all over the bomb’s use); during my Japanese studies classes, which were largely useless, there was much discussion over that issue.

Speaking of wargames, my wife and I played Operation Olympic, the Avalon Hill simulation of the never-executed invasion of Kyuushuu. It was fascinating battling over cities we had just visited a few months before, including a little village where lives the charming Japanese family that adopted us over the last decade.

I’m glad it wasn’t real….

- Wolfeye M.

September 14, 2019 at 11:33 am

I once saw a picture of a woman who “survived” the bombing of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Her face was melted, almost like a smear, no eyes, nose, or mouth, nothing that made her recognizable as a human. That description in the game tones it down a lot. I’m not sure how long she lived after they took the picture of her, but part of me hopes it wasn’t very long. I wouldn’t even wish that on my worst enemy, and all she was guilty of was belonging to a country we were at war with. That image sometimes revisits me in my nightmares.

I personally think that dropping the bombs was justifiable, even a sad necessity to end the war as quickly as possible, but… I’ve heard people say it was a GOOD thing. Makes me want to look up that picture of that poor woman and send it to them, let them see the reality of what they’re talking about. But, that’d mean I’d have to see it again.
I just hope cooler heads continue to prevail, and dropping A-bombs in war happens only once in the history of the world.

- Lee C.

August 10, 2020 at 4:55 pm

Abu Grahib -> Abu Ghraib

- Jimmy Maher

August 12, 2020 at 9:53 am

Thanks!

T Plus 0: The Fulcrum of History
February 19, 2015

We’re interdimensional travelers of time and space, Wabewalkers on the go. We’re going to visit a nondescript spot way out in the New Mexico desert between Socorro and Alamogordo, approximately latitude 33 degrees north, longitude 106 degrees west, late in the evening of July 15, 1945.

If you were a novelist scripting a place to unleash an elemental force of nature, you hardly could have done better than the place we stand now. There’s something different about New Mexico; not for nothing do they call it the Land of Enchantment. It’s a quality of the air, of the light, of the harsh, otherworldly landscape itself which is in no way conventionally beautiful but beautiful all the same. New Mexico captures dreamers for reasons no one can fully articulate. Dreamers like Georgie O’Keeffe, who fled her circle of New York City sophisticates to roam the desert alone and obsessively paint, paint, paint not just the stuff around her but the light that baked her skin brown as a nut. Dreamers like D.H. Lawrence, who wandered to New Mexico as part of his “savage exile” from Britain and stayed long enough to write several books here; he declared New Mexico “the greatest experience I ever had,” one that “changed me forever.”

I know what he meant. When I was young and at loose ends, I took a solitary road trip around the state in my old 280Z, staying at hostels at night and roaming the dunes during the day. I still remember the dust and the sweat and the light, and how good a beer and a dive into a watering hole felt at the end of the day. New Mexico still calls to me. I’ve gone back several times with various companions since, and I suspect I’ll continue to look for excuses to do so for the rest of my life. Still, it’s never been quite the same as it was that first time. I think the desert is best experienced alone.

The part of the desert we’re visiting today was once part of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro — “The Royal Road of the Interior” — that ran all the way from Mexico City to San Juan Pueblo near the northern border of the present-day state of New Mexico. This stretch of the Camino Real was and is known as Jornada del Muerto — “Journey of the Dead.” It’s so-called because this basin, stretching 100 miles north to south, is bereft of food and water throughout its length. Only yucca and scattered scrub grows here. Native Americans knew from time immemorial to avoid it at all costs, while the Spaniards who died trying to make their way across it became the source of the ominous name it has held since before 1700. The Spaniards named the town they built at its northern tip Socorro — “succor” or “sustenance” — because that’s exactly what it represented to weary travelers from El Paso del Norte toward heading north toward Santa Fe. Various settlers over the centuries have tried to make a go of life in the Jornada del Muerto, digging wells and bringing in sheep and cattle; we’ll meet in a bit a part of what they left behind. But it’s always a hardscrabble existence, their numbers always few.

This particular night in the Jornada del Muerto is an unusual one for two reasons. First of all, it’s raining, something that happens very seldom here. In fact, it’s raining hard, a violent thunderstorm of the sort that visits the desert only once or so per year. The storm will dump four inches of rain in a few hours onto a region that normally only gets about eight per year. That the rain gods should choose this of all nights to have their frolic seems poetically portentous. Because, you see, perched incongruously in the middle of nothing is a 100-foot-tall tower, Ground Zero of a new era in human history.

Base of Tower

A steel tower rises overhead, black against the cloudy sky. Your eyes follow the tapered frame up the ladder, past dangling ropes and cables, to the platform at its summit.

Paved roads and instrument lines lead off into the surrounding desert.

Let’s travel up the tower’s length and peek inside the flimsy metal shed perched at its top (what barrier is height to an interdimensional traveler?). Inside we see the “gadget,” the world’s first atomic bomb, an ungainly contraption of steel and cabling. We’ve arrived at Trinity.

Shack

You're in a metal shack, barely twelve feet square. The oak floor is littered with discarded bits of rope, pulleys and other hardware. A dark light bulb hangs from the ceiling. You can see an exit in the west wall.

A five-foot sphere rests on a bracket in the middle of the floor. Its surface is studded with bolts and crossed with electrical cables, all converging in a boxlike enclosure nearby.

Sitting in the corner (luckily, we interdimensional travelers are also invisible) is a young man flipping nervously through a cheap paperback. His name is Donald Hornig, and he’s 25 years old. He’s a prodigious chemist who’s already earned his PhD, an expert on explosives who was plucked out of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute by James Conant, President of Harvard, to join the Manhattan Project. He did important work on the implosion process that will, if all goes well, start in a matter of a few hours a nuclear chain reaction in the gadget with which he now shares the shed. He will go on to a long career as a professor and administrator in some of the pinnacles of academia: Brown, Princeton, Harvard.

Right now, however, Hornig is just a glorified babysitter, perched up here because General Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer are paranoid about sabotage and don’t trust any ordinary guard to get too close to the gadget. He must know at some level that, brilliant as he is, he’s no Oppenheimer or Edward Teller; he’s up here at the top of a 100-foot tower babysitting a cobbled-together nuclear bomb in the middle of a violent thunderstorm because he’s expendable. That’s the way it always is; when the Oppenheimers and Groves of the world start their grand projects, there always have to be lots of Hornigs to see that they get done. He tries to forget his predicament, tries to read his book — The Desert Island Decameron, a collection of light essays and stories written by popular authors and sold cheap to keep the troops entertained — under the light of the single bare bulb dangling from the ceiling, trying to ignore the flashing lightning and howling wind. At last, at midnight, with the storm still raging, his telephone rings: “Come down!” Hornig climbs carefully down the side of the tower, then gets into a jeep and heads off to the canteen at the base camp for a cup of coffee. He will be the last person to see the gadget.

As the hours pass and the bomb sits alone up there in its shed, the temporary bunkers and camps that surround it are buzzing with activity. The plan was to explode the gadget at 4:00 this morning, but the weather causes a delay and much uncertainty. It’s considered urgently important to do the test this morning if at all possible, as President Truman is now in Potsdam and awaiting word of the Manhattan Project’s success — or failure — to know how he should conduct himself with Soviet General Secretary Stalin; as a whole raft of dignitaries and representatives have made the trip down to New Mexico to see the blast; as everyone is so damn tired — most of the people working onsite haven’t slept for two days — that they’d need a week or two just to rest and recuperate and prepare everything again for a rescheduled test.

Thankfully, the rain stops at dawn.

At 5:10, a physicist named Samuel King Allison begins intoning the final twenty-minute countdown over loudspeakers mounted all over the complex. His voice booms out for our ears only from the base of the tower itself. Countdowns sounding much like this one will later become familiar to everyone who watches the NASA space launches on television. This one, though, is like the gadget itself the first of its kind in the history of the world. A local radio station is broadcasting on a similar wavelength; Allison’s dulcet tones are occasionally overlaid with snatches of The Nutcracker Suite. Indeed, radio interference has been a constant problem at the Trinity site. The frequency chosen for short-wave communication among the scientists is the same as that used by a railway freight yard in San Antonio, Texas. Throughout the last weeks of frenzied preparation, the scientists could occasional hear the train dispatchers — and the train dispatchers could presumably occasionally hear the scientists. Even more alarmingly for security, Trinity also occasionally gets its bandwidth crossed with shortwave transmissions from the Voice of America. Hopefully their dialogs are esoteric enough that no one is likely to make sense of them.

At 5:25 we see a signal rocket flash into the sky, at 5:29 another; there was supposed to be one at 5:28 as well, but it was a dud. Let’s freeze time now (we interdimensional travelers do have many powers, don’t we?) and look around to see what else these men have wrought out here in the desert.

If we begin to streak outward from the tower in concentric circles — like, say, a hyperactive roadrunner — the first interesting thing we come to is an enormous metal non sequitur perched about half a mile west of the tower.

West of Tower

A tall framework of steel has been erected here, cousin to the larger tower visible not far to the east. Suspended within the frame is an enormous metal barrel, at least twenty feet long and ten wide, with rounded end caps. It looks like a king-sized cold capsule.

>examine barrel
Why would anyone hang a giant barrel in the middle of nowhere like this? There don't seem to be any openings, windows or markings of any kind; as far as you can tell, the thing is utterly useless.

The cold capsule, known colloquially as “Jumbo,” is a sign of the sheer urgency of the Manhattan Project and its associated willingness to expend resources lavishly on things that may actually prove pointless. (This is, you may remember, the same Manhattan Project that designed and built not one but two completely different atomic bombs, one using uranium and the other — the sort being tested this morning — using plutonium, in the hope that at least one of the things would turn out to work.) For a time plans for the Trinity test called for the gadget to be completely enclosed within Jumbo, which was designed to be strong enough that if the explosives mounted around the bomb’s plutonium core fired but failed to trigger the expected nuclear chain reaction its walls would not be breached. Thus it would be easy to collect and reuse the precious plutonium. Manufactured in Ohio, the heart of steel country, to exacting specifications, just getting its 214-ton bulk to the test site turned into a major effort of logistics. A railroad car had to be specially modified to carry this, the largest item ever shipped by rail. Because many sections of track simply couldn’t support something of this weight, the train had to take a circuitous route, from Barberton, Ohio, down to New Orleans, and then west across Texas. A special spur had to be constructed south of Socorro to unload it. Jumbo was then loaded onto a specially constructed 64-wheel trailer and pulled to the Trinity site by nine tractors along a 25-mile road that also had to be constructed from scratch.

And by the time it arrived here at last, two months ago, it was already superfluous. The scientists were feeling more and more confident that the test would be a success, plutonium was beginning to come out of the Manhattan Project’s complex of nuclear reactors in Hanford, Washington, in relatively good quantities, and it would make for a better, easier-to-monitor test if the bomb was exploded in the open air rather than inside a giant steel tube. And so after all that effort Jumbo has ended up here; the scientists lamely explain that they can use it to see what effect an atomic bomb has on… well, on a giant, pointless 214-ton metal tube sitting half a mile away from it. The answer will turn out to be, unsurprisingly, pretty much none at all, although the tower in which it’s mounted will be blown down. Jumbo will eventually end up sitting in the Trinity memorial parking lot for the benefit of the tourists who will be allowed to visit on one or two days out of every year, while scientists will later realize what a blessing it was that Jumbo wasn’t used: it would have been vaporized by the gadget, spewing 214 tons of radioactive particles into the atmosphere.

Continuing to circle outward, we come now to a strange artifact of another type not quite a mile southeast of the shot tower.

Shallow Crater

You're standing at the edge of a shallow depression in the desert floor, a few hundred feet across. The ground within is gray and pulverized, as if by a powerful explosion.

This is indeed the remnant of a powerful explosion, of a dress rehearsal of sorts for Trinity that was conducted two months ago. A rather staggering 110 tons of TNT were stacked atop a 20-foot tower, along with a sprinkling of radioactive plutonium for realism’s sake. Then the whole thing was blown up remotely from the control bunker destined to be used for the main test. The plutonium was scattered widely by the explosion, giving the scientists a way to check and calibrate their instruments.

Moving along brings us to something more interesting about two miles southeast of the shot tower: an everyday-looking if somewhat worse-for-wear house sitting alone in the desert.

>examine house
The ranch house is squat and ugly, with adobe walls and a cheap tin roof. A deck is attached to the front.

The ranch house was built in 1913 by Franz Schmidt, a German immigrant and homesteader who lived a lonely existence here with his family for about ten years, raising sheep and cattle on land which he leased from the New Mexico government; the state owns most of the Jornada del Muerto. The Schmidts eventually sold the house and their lease on the land to another family, the McDonalds. But in 1942 the McDonalds were forced off their land by the federal government, who needed a wide open space for the testing of artillery and bombs.

When this part of the Jornada del Muerto was selected for the Trinity test in 1944, the house was a convenient bonus. It became a headquarters of sorts for the scientists. The interior was largely stripped, workbenches, maps, and equipment moved in, generators set up just outside for electricity. The doors and windows were weather-stripped as part of an oft-futile battle against the gales of dust and sand that constantly blow over the desert plains. The walls were tar-papered and the roof painted with aluminum paint in a truly futile battle against the searing heat of summer. The scientists found a more effective remedy to be the reservoir out back, perfect for spirit-renewing afternoon dips when the work became exhausting and the heat unbearable.

Let’s peek inside the house, see what they were up to in there…

Assembly Room

Whoever used this room was paranoid about dirt. The floor is swept spotless, and the edges of both windows are carefully sealed with tape. A closed front door leads east, and there's an open closet door in the north wall. Other exits lead south and west.

A workbench covered with loose sheets of brown paper runs along the north wall. You see bits of wire and other debris scattered across the paper.

Just a few days ago, on the evening of July 12, the two halves of the gadget’s plutonium core arrived at the ranch house under the stewardship of a young Army sergeant named Herbert Lehr, having ridden down from Los Alamos in the backseat of a sedan. The next day Louis Slotin arrived at the house’s “clean room” — the doors and windows had been sealed with tape and plastic against the ever-present dust and sand — to assemble the core. He placed a beryllium/polonium neutron initiator inside one half of the plutonium core, then gently lowered the other half into place to produce an apparatus about the size of a tennis ball but about the weight of a bowling ball. The scientists call these operations “tickling the dragon’s tail,” as one slip can send the core supercritical, irradiating the surrounding area and anyone within it. In the future such things will be done by machines inside shielded real clean rooms, attended by radiation-suited operators. But in 1945 the scientists place all of their faith in Slotin’s steady hand and steely nerves, and in the jeeps waiting outside with their engines running — as if radiation could be outrun. Luckily, Slotin was an experienced hand at this. The assembly went off without a hitch, the assembled core delivered to the shot tower to be placed inside the gadget the next day. Slotin’s luck, however, won’t hold out forever. Less than a year from now, he’ll make a mistake when performing a similar operation, absorbing a huge dose of radiation and dying agonizingly a week later.

The ranch house, judged too close for safety to the shot tower and thus empty now, will weather the blast none the worse for wear, apart from some blown-out windows. The ravages of time and weather will not be so kind. It will sit, abandoned and ignored, for decades after the Trinity test while David McDonald, patriarch of the family that once owned it, burns with outrage. The McDonalds, David will later claim, had been promised that the lease and the land would be returned to them once the war was over and the need for such large-scale artillery testing disappeared. But after the war that need will be replaced by another: the artillery range will become the White Sands Proving Grounds, where captured V-2 rockets are tinkered with to inaugurate the United States’s missile program. And then the White Sands Proving Grounds will become the modern White Sands Missile Range. Meanwhile David McDonald will continue to insist that the land was “stolen” from his family. The story will take a bizarre turn in 1982 when David McDonald, now 81 years old, will take possession along with his niece Mary of what’s left of the house — by then it will be little more than a ruin — armed with two rifles and a pistol. They will post signs about the property: “Deeded Land — No Trespassing” and “Road Closed to U.S. Army.” Eventually, with the aid of one of New Mexico’s Senators and the district’s Congressmen, they will be talked into leaving the property peacefully.

Whether as a result of David McDonald’s actions or just coincidence, the military will at last decide at about that time to do something with the house. It will be restored to its 1945 condition by the National Park Service and, beginning in 1984, opened to tourists who come to the Trinity site.

Continuing our circles, we come at last to some people. Three bunkers are set up about six miles northwest, southwest, and south of the shot tower, each with a handful of inhabitants. Let’s stop at the largest and most interesting of these, the “Baker” bunker south of the tower, from which the explosion is to be actually controlled and monitored.

>examine shelter
The square shelter is built of heavy timber, covered with a thick layer of earth on the north side. Bright light spills across the desert from the open south entrance.

A thin man steps into view, standing just inside the shelter's entrance.

>examine man
The thin man near the shelter is drawn and haggard; it looks as if he hasn't slept in days.

Pushing back his porkpie hat, the thin man peers up at the overcast sky.

The thin man is Robert Oppenheimer. Others out of our sight inside the bunker include Enrico Fermi, the first man to institute a nuclear chain reaction; George Kistiakowsky, head of the group that designed the high-explosive lenses that will collapse the gadget’s plutonium core; Kenneth Bainbridge, who has supervised the practical details of this test on behalf of the Los Alamos scientists; meteorologist Jack Hubbard, who was for most of the previous night the most anxiously consulted man on the site; and Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, General Groves’s right-hand man. Groves himself tore off from the control bunker in a jeep twenty minutes ago, toward the base camp further south, in accordance with a rule that he and Farrell should never place themselves into danger at the same time. All of the people I’ve just mentioned are worthy of articles in their own right. But now, for today, what of Oppenheimer?

Yes, what of Robert Oppenheimer? That’s a question that family, friends, and colleagues have been asking and will continue to ask all his life. As enigmatic a man as you’re ever likely to meet, he seems almost uniquely capable of inspiring either the most fervent admiration or the most contemptuous dislike — and sometimes, as in the case of Edward Teller, both in the same person. Perhaps an old story might help me to begin to explain.

Shortly after a young Oppenheimer accepted a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley, he went on a date with a graduate student. They apparently didn’t hit it off very well, and she fell asleep in the car on what should have been a romantic drive up into the Berkeley hills. Oppenheimer simply parked the car and walked away, leaving the girl to wake up alone in a car to which she had no key several miles from home. To his admirers, this became another amusing story about the Oppie the great eccentric, doubtless walking home mulling some fundamental property of the universe, the dull girl long forgotten. To his detractors, it was just a story about a jerk who left a girl stranded in the middle of nowhere for the crime of failing to be his dream date. Far from being natural, they claimed, Oppenheimer’s whole eccentric-intellectual schtick was carefully calculated; he knew exactly the effect he was trying to create when he said, for instance, that he hadn’t been aware of the 1929 stock-market crash until six months after it happened.

Oppenheimer’s famous cultural omnivorism is similarly polarizing. He cooks exotic Indonesian cuisine, studies ethical philosophy, and speaks several languages fluently; when in the Netherlands many years before the war, he would give his physics lectures in Dutch. He collects Renoir, Picasso, Vuillard, Rembrandt, and van Gogh for his walls. He loves classical music, the thorny later works by Beethoven being a particular favorite. He once read the entirety of Das Kapital on a single cross-country train trip. He’s fascinated by Eastern spiritualism, particularly Hinduism, and has learned Sanskrit so as to read the Bhagavad Gita in the original. And yet, while his range of accomplishments is certainly impressive, even Oppenheimer’s friends can sometimes get exasperated with his insistence on working convoluted classical allusions into a discussion on where to eat lunch today. He is, some say, at bottom a poseur.

Yes, for every Oppenheimer admirer there’s a detractor who senses that all of his almost frantic erudition and epicurianism is mere artifice — or part of a striving to fill some basic emptiness at the center of his personality.  One of his Dutch colleagues spoke to this impression when Oppenheimer was still in his twenties: “Robert, the reason you know so much about ethics is that you have no character.” While still an undergraduate, Oppenheimer once expressed to some friends the unbearably adolescent sentiment that “the kind of person I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance.” One might say that Oppenheimer has spent the last twenty years trying to create just that persona from whole cloth, Byron and Darwin all rolled into one, with all the pretension that implies. The sense so many have that there’s something just not quite honest about Oppenheimer, and the almost visceral loathing this impression can create in them, perhaps does much to explain, if by no means to excuse, the persecution he will suffer in the years to come.

Oppenheimer’s life before the war was a rather shockingly bohemian one by the straitlaced standards of the American physics community, involving flashy cars, a flashy pad in the hills, and, prior to and even after his marriage in 1940, rumors of sexual dalliances. His wife is three-time divorcée Kitty Harrison, a well-known Berkeley radical and former Communist Party member who became pregnant with Oppenheimer’s child while still married to her previous husband.

What many of his supporters will later label mere “flirtations” with communism are in reality much more than that. While he apparently never officially joined the Communist Party himself, Oppenheimer met regularly with most of its prominent members in Berkeley, organized rallies with them for manifold causes, and in 1940 personally edited and wrote much of the content for two pamphlets that hewed very closely indeed to the Communist Party line about the war in Europe:

Europe is in the throes of a war . It is a common thought, and a likely one, that when the war is over Europe will be socialist, and the British Empire gone. We think that Roosevelt is assuming the role of preserving the old order in Europe and that he plans, if need be, to use the wealth and the lives of this country to carry it out. We think, that is, that Roosevelt is not only a “war-monger” but a counter-revolutionary war-monger. We think it is this that has turned him from something of a progressive to very much of a reactionary.

The FBI opened its first file on Oppenheimer in March of 1941.

Still, even many of those who will go on to condemn him would have to admit today that his handling of the Manhattan Project has been spectacular. Placed in charge of the most brilliant single collection of scientific minds of the twentieth century, Oppenheimer has found ways to bend virtually every one of them to his will, despite the fact that lots of them have international reputations that far exceed his own; tellingly, Oppenheimer was chosen by General Groves for his position precisely because he wasn’t already engaged in any other research that looked to be vital to the making of the atomic bomb or any other aspect of the war effort. This gifted scientist has risen to the occasion, proving, at least for these few years, to be an if anything even more gifted politician, leader, and administrator. His charges, even those who didn’t have much use for him a few years ago, have gradually come to love him for always making the sensible choice when a big decision comes to his desk and otherwise keeping the nonsense to a minimum. He gives them clear directives and all the resources they need and then trusts them to see their projects through with minimal interference.

But Oppenheimer has also done something else for the Manhattan Project: as the most notable aesthete amongst its ranks, he’s given it its aesthetic character. Oppenheimer first came to New Mexico as a sickly teenager, sent there by his wealthy New York City family to recover from colitis in the clean air of the high desert. Like so many others with artistic souls, he fell in love with the place. As an adult, he bought a little log cabin east of Santa Fe, and spent time there every summer, sometimes alone, sometimes with his closest friends. Many remarked how free and unaffected Oppenheimer became there. Physics and the desert, he remarked on one of these unguarded occasions, were his only real loves. Oppenheimer must have been thinking what a perfect match the Land of Enchantment made for the elemental power of the atomic bomb when he convinced Groves to buy the Los Alamos Ranch School, a boarding school for boys perched atop a 7200-foot mesa 175 miles north of the place where he now stands, to become the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The name for this test is also classic Oppenheimer. One’s first assumption upon seeing the name is that “Trinity” must be a Christian allusion, one that might seem vaguely disrespectful or even blasphemous except for the fact that it really doesn’t make any sense at all in that context. Another possibility that will be mooted by later scholars is that the name refers not to the Christian Trinity but to a Hindu concept that would be very appealing to a physicist like Oppenheimer. According to Hinduism, all of the universe is under the sway of three gods: Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu, the Preserver; and Shiva, the Destroyer. Nothing in the universe is ever created or destroyed; it merely changes form at the behest of one of this trinity of gods. It’s the First Law of Thermodynamics as religion.

The likely true story, however, is a much more personal one. Prior to his marriage, Oppenheimer had a passionate, turbulent romantic relationship with a young woman named Jean Tatlock. It was in fact Tatlock, an ardent member of the Communist Party, who introduced Oppenheimer to left-wing politics and to many of the associations he will come to bitterly regret after the war. She also introduced him to the great English metaphysical poet John Donne. One sonnet in particular may have become indelibly linked with Tatlock in Oppenheimer’s mind:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

The relationship apparently didn’t die even with Oppenheimer’s being “betroth’d unto” another. He met and spent the night with Tatlock on at least one occasion after assuming control of the Manhattan Project; we know this because a pair of government agents tailed them to her apartment and sat outside the entire night. Six months later, in January of 1944, Tatlock committed suicide. Oppenheimer broke down and wept upon hearing the news. It seems very likely that he named the first American test of an atomic bomb after this noted communist with whom he had conducted an extramarital affair. Yes, that’s a horrible, unfairly moralizing reduction of a woman’s life, of a relationship that clearly affected — scarred? — both parties deeply. But, sentiment aside, there’s a part of Robert Oppenheimer that would have slyly enjoyed putting one over on the military command, would have enjoyed hearing all the rampant speculation around him while he just sat enigmatically and cherished his knowledge of what Trinity really meant. This is the old Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer the polarizer.

Whatever else he is, Robert Oppenheimer is right now very near a nervous breakdown as the moment of Trinity, destined to be either the great achievement or the great fiasco of his life, draws near. Always of a nervous disposition, he’s now at the ragged edge. For the last couple of hours General Groves has been periodically leading him out of the bunker on walks to try to calm his nerves. Groves, Oppenheimer’s opposite in every way — rotund where Oppenheimer appears almost emaciated, a blunt personality as devoid of Oppenheimer’s melancholy as he is of his intellectualism — is nevertheless oddly sympatico with the man he hand-picked to lead the scientists. It’s a strange, unlikely bond, but a bond nevertheless. Groves greatly admires Oppenheimer, pronouncing him a “genius”: “Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly. I guess there are a few things he doesn’t know about. He doesn’t know anything about sports.” His betrayal will thus hurt Oppenheimer even more than that of Edward Teller when, almost nine years from now, he will state at Oppenheimer’s security hearing that he feels that Oppenheimer’s security clearances should be revoked.

In the here and now, Groves left Oppenheimer to manage as best he can about 20 minutes ago. Now he’s at the Trinity base camp, a makeshift little town for several hundred scientists, engineers, soldiers, and workers about 10 miles from the shot tower.

There are lots of other people around the site that we could talk about. There is, for instance, Klaus Fuchs, the quiet German exile who has been passing vital secrets of the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union for months now and will continue to do so for years to come. And look, there’s our old friend Edward Teller. He’s standing on Compañía Hill, a good observation point about twenty miles northwest of the shot tower, along with dozens of other scientists and dignitaries who have just arrived to view the test. Like others all around the site, they’ve been smearing themselves with suntan lotion for protection against the blast. Now most of them are lying, as they’ve been instructed, with their feet facing the blast and their eyes looking away from the direction of the shot tower. One or two, like physicist Richard Feynman, will ignore the instructions and suffer temporary blindness as a result.

Yes, we could say so much more about these people standing at the fulcrum of history, but it’s time to end Oppenheimer’s torment. Let’s return to the shot tower and restart time.

At 5:29:45, a spark leaps from the control bunker to the gadget, jumping across the 32 detonators attached to the 32 lensed explosive charges spaced about the inside of the sphere. The sphere implodes with tremendous force, crushing the plutonium core into a supercritical mass. Its atoms begin to fission, releasing energy and freeing neutrons. The free neutrons strike more atoms of plutonium, causing them to fission in turn; a nuclear chain reaction has begun. As the quantity of fissioning atoms increases exponentially, the superheated core expands outward, until the atoms are no longer close enough together to sustain the chain reaction. And just like that, it’s all over — except for the boom, as the radioactive material, hotter now than the surface of the sun, explodes outward with a force equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT.

At the Baker bunker, one person says, “My God, it’s beautiful.” “No,” replies another, “it’s terrible.” “Now we’re all sons of bitches,” says yet another.

Ed Lane, engineer of a passing train:

All at once it seemed as if the sun had suddenly appeared in the sky out of darkness. There was a tremendous white flash. This was followed by a great red glare and high in the sky there were three tremendous smoke rings. The highest was many hundreds of feet high. They swirled and twisted as if being agitated by a great force. The glare lasted about three minutes and then everything was dark again, with dawn breaking in the east.

H.E. Wieselman, passenger on another train:

Suddenly, the tops of high mountains by which we were passing were lighted up by a reddish, orange light. The surrounding countryside was illuminated like daylight for about three seconds. Then it was dark again. The experience scared me. It was just like the sun had come up and suddenly gone down again.

L. Don Leet, a seismologist monitoring the blast from 50 miles away:

When it let go, it lit up 180 degrees of the horizon, not like one but a dozen brilliant suns. It stayed lit up and made chills run up my back because I knew what might happen if it was not controlled. It was followed by a brilliant red wall of flame. Fifty miles away it was like an earthquake.

Physicist William Laurence, on Compañía Hill along with Teller and the others:

There rose from the bowels of the earth a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one. It was a sunrise such as the world had never seen, a great green super-sun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than 8,000 feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with a dazzling luminosity. Up it went, a great ball of fire about a mile in diameter, changing colors as it kept shooting upward, from deep purple to orange, expanding, growing bigger, rising as it was expanding, an elemental force freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years. For a fleeting instant the color was unearthly green, such as one sees only in the corona of the sun during a total eclipse. It was as though the earth had opened and the skies had split. One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the Birth of the World—to be present at the moment of Creation when the Lord said: “Let There Be Light.”

New Mexicans in the vicinity believe the state has just experienced an earthquake, or that a meteor has just come to earth. Many of a religious inclination believe this must be the end of the world. Others assume “the Japs” have unleashed some horrible new weapon.

The military will quickly claim that the explosion was the result of an accident at an ammunition dump, but those relatively close to the blast will have cause to be skeptical of that story. In the weeks to come, ranchers will notice that many of their cows have begun losing their hair. It will eventually grow back in, but when it does so it does so in white. After the atomic bombing of Japan, when everyone knows at last what really happened at the Trinity site, these “atomic cows” will become press favorites. Unpainted fences will also turn white, as will some of the ranchers’ beards and half of a black cat. Fallout, apparently borne in waterways, will turn the products of paper mills in Indiana and Iowa mildly radioactive, spoiling a whole production run of Kodak film which used the mills’ product for its packaging. Unusual atmospheric radioactivity will be detected as far away as Maryland, while traces of plutonium will be detected in plants and in cattle feces 100 miles from the shot tower. Ornithologists will notice signs of radiation sickness and, later, unusual deformities amongst the local bird populations. Plenty of ranchers living in the vicinity of the blast as well as personnel at the site itself will later die of cancer, but their numbers will not be vastly larger than one might expect from any random sample, nor will there be any smoking guns to definitively attribute their deaths to this event. As scientists study the situation, they will soon conclude that the Trinity test got very, very lucky. Had the rain started again soon after the blast, the fallout it would have brought back to earth with it could have been disastrous. Future Stateside testing will be moved to an even more remote area, in the Nevada desert.

And what (again) of Robert Oppenheimer? Well, he will later claim that a phrase from the Bhagavad Gita was the first to flash through his mind: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Be that as it may, when he opens his mouth to speak in the first instant after the explosion his erudition for once seems to fail him. Turning to Enrico Fermi, relief spreading over his countenance, he says just two words: “It worked.”

Comments
23 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

February 19, 2015 at 5:31 pm

Two of my favorite anecdotes: in response to Groves’s continued secrecy directives following the test, an aide said, “Can you give us an easy job, General, like hiding the Mississippi River?” And a local rancher later told site personnel, “You boys must have been up to something this morning. The sun came up in the west and went on down again.”

In the game, a Jeep is parked northwest of the tower (a key bit of info is there). In the Jeep is a wallet with a picture of a boy in it. It was never clear to me who the boy was supposed to be.

- Jimmy Maher

February 20, 2015 at 8:44 am

Yes, it seems like it must be a specific reference, but if so it’s hard to see to whom. Many of the figures involved had sons, but the jeep is located slightly northwest of the tower, while virtually all of the “name” figures were either at the Baker bunker or the base camp, both south of the tower, or at Compañia Hill, to the northwest but completely offsite; they never even visited the site that morning, just drove down from Los Alamos straight to Compañia Hill.

- Petter Sjölund

February 20, 2015 at 2:59 pm

Is there a connection between the boy in the picture and the one blowing soap bubbles in London and the Wabe? It was a long time ago I played this, but I seem to have a memory of him having a bubble wand in the picture or something.

- Jimmy Maher

February 20, 2015 at 3:11 pm

No, no bubble wand:

>examine snapshot
The black-and-white snapshot shows a boy staring at the camera.

- Petter Sjölund

February 22, 2015 at 4:33 pm

> examine boy
The boy in the snapshot seems familiar. Maybe it’s the wand he’s holding.

- Jimmy Maher

February 23, 2015 at 9:41 am

Ah… good catch!

- TsuDhoNimh

February 19, 2015 at 6:33 pm

Trinity was not the first countdown to a launch at least according to IMDB. IMDB claims that Fritz Lang used it in 1929 in his movie “Woman in the Moon”. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019901/trivia?item=tr0567734

- Jimmy Maher

February 20, 2015 at 8:45 am

Interesting. That does still leave the Trinity countdown as the first real-world countdown, for the time being.

- Duncan Stevens

February 19, 2015 at 7:14 pm

Also, I suspect you’re getting to this in a future piece, but Fermi started taking bets on whether the blast would ignite the atmosphere, and if so whether just New Mexico or the entire world would be destroyed.

- Lisa H.

February 19, 2015 at 7:47 pm

I think they put that in the comic, too.

- Duncan Stevens

February 20, 2015 at 3:14 am

I don’t think anyone really knows where the name came from. The Tatlock theory is as good as any. Oppenheimer said, in a 1962 letter to Groves, that he didn’t remember exactly why he chose the name, but he knew it came from two Donne poems, the one you quote and one with these lines:

As West and East
In all flatt Maps—and I am one—are one,
So death doth touch the Resurrection.

Nothing actually referencing the Trinity there, as Oppenheimer admits, but it hints at ideas of death and rebirth that could be linked to the bomb project without too much of a stretch. And you could certainly find relevant themes–violence as a paradoxical good–in the other one.

(Oppenheimer didn’t quote the other Donne poem to Groves, perhaps because “But am betroth’d unto your enemy,” from someone whose loyalties to the United States, had already been questioned, might have been taken as an admission.)

- Jimmy Maher

February 20, 2015 at 8:55 am

There’s also the “Trinity” section of A Litany: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/litany.php.

I do think that, regardless of the specific Donne poem in question, there’s fairly good circumstantial evidence for the Trinity name as a tribute to Tatlock. In the letter you mention, Oppenheimer says it was indeed a reference to Donne, and we know that Donne was the “special” poet in the relationship between Oppenheimer and Tatlock. Gregg Herken, who I think probably gets Oppenheimer and all his contradictions better than just about anyone, is confident enough to just baldly state that the name is a tribute to Tatlock in Brotherhood of the Bomb. Thus I opted to be only slightly more cautious here.

- Scott Gage

February 20, 2015 at 4:04 am

You hit one of my pet-peeve typos:

“Let’s peak inside the house, see what they were up to in there…”

Should be peek :)

- Jimmy Maher

February 20, 2015 at 7:26 am

Fixed. Thanks!

- Jubal

July 14, 2015 at 7:34 am

Just a minor nit-pick: you describe Donald Hornig as a “prodigal chemist”. Now that may be true for all I know, but as prodigal means “wastefully extravagant”, I suspect you may actually mean “prodigious” here…

- Jimmy Maher

July 14, 2015 at 9:23 am

I was going for the idea of “prodigy,” but it seems an adjectival form is indeed not possible there. Thanks!

- Peter Piers

December 31, 2015 at 5:07 pm

The game doesn’t name these people, then? Oppenheimer, Slotin… I mean, if I’m mostly unfamiliar with all of this, can I expect Trinity to throw me oblique references like “a thin man” and expect me to know who these people and these events are?

- Jimmy Maher

January 1, 2016 at 9:38 am

No, it doesn’t, but I’m not sure the game “expects you to know who these people are” for the purpose of solving it. It’s just that the references and added details are there if you look. Most of the vignettes that precede the climax also require a little thought and perhaps even research to fully understand as history. Just as War and Peace would be a poorer book if it laboriously explained all of the politics and logistics behind the historical events it depicts, I think Trinity is stronger for playing with the stuff of history rather than trying to explain everything. It’s a poetic meditation, not a textbook.

- DZ-Jay

March 11, 2017 at 1:28 am

Just a note on the phrase as used in this article, “Jornada del Muerta”: it should be “Muerto.” The preposition “del” is a contraction of “de el” (literally “of the”), where “el” is the article for a male proper noun. Therefore, “Muerto” (male dead subject) rather than “Muerta” (female dead subject).

A neutral alternative would be “de la Muerte,” which is the nominative for the concept of “death.” However, the name “Jornada del Muerto” suggests not the general concept of “death” but of dead people (akin to the difference between “of death” and “of the dead.”), thus the male gender in the article.

(And just to be sure it wasn’t a malapropriation used as the name of the road, I confirmed that it is indeed called “Jornada del Muerto,” meaning “Journey of the Dead.”)

Spanish is sort of strange in its application of gender. By the way, it is also my first language. :)

dZ.

- Jimmy Maher

March 11, 2017 at 7:57 am

Strange. Wonder how I did that. Anyway, fixed. Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

March 11, 2017 at 3:02 pm

>> “betroth’d uto”

Should be “unto.”

Also, if you’re going to use the tilde of the ñ, then may as well go all the Spanish way and accent the grave syllable of “Compañía Hill.” ;)

- Jimmy Maher

March 12, 2017 at 10:31 am

Thanks!

- Anonymous

February 6, 2021 at 8:13 pm

A. C. Gilbert created and sold a U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory for children in 1950

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_U-238_Atomic_Energy_Laboratory

T Plus 6: All Prams Lead to the Kensington Gardens
February 26, 2015

‘Twere better Charity
To leave me in the Atom’s Tomb –
Merry, and Nought, and gay, and numb –
Than this smart Misery.

— Emily Dickinson

And so, as another Infocom game once put it, it’s all come down to this. We have indeed come a long way, looked at a lot of history. But now it’s time to refocus on the game of Trinity. Fair warning, then: massive spoilers ahead.

Throughout its considerable length Trinity has constantly implicated the Wabewalker, and through him we who pull his strings, in the tragic history of the atomic age, refusing to allow us the comfort of abstraction. We’ve been forced to cold-bloodedly kill a couple of cute, innocent little would-be pets to show us that killing is ugly and heartbreaking, not a mere matter of shifting columns and figures around on a spreadsheet showing projected death counts. We’ve met the same woman in two different times, once as a happy little girl in Nagasaki just before the bomb dropped and again as an old woman still bearing the visible scars of her suffering there many years later. We’ve frolicked with a dolphin who’s about to be stupidly, senselessly cooked alive by a hydrogen bomb in the name of some ephemeral geopolitical advantage, bringing home to us what these terrible weapons do to the fragile ecosystems of our one and only home. We’ve made a bomb of our own and experienced some of the heady rush that comes with harnessing such elemental forces of nature — the same rush that captured and possibly consumed both Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, each in his own way. We’ve watched history being written down before our eyes into a permanent and remorseless Book of Hours. And we’ve located the fulcrum of history in that fateful moment on the morning of July 16, 1945, way out in the New Mexican desert.

It eventually becomes apparent that the overriding objective of Trinity the game is to sabotage Trinity the first test of an atomic bomb. All of our hopscotching through time has been to set us up for that goal. At last, we achieve it. We expect something triumphant. Surely this means that humanity has been steered away from this senseless course, that all this tragic history we’ve been experiencing has been averted.

Right?

Well, what we get is this:

You slide the blade of the steak knife under the striped wire and pull back on it as hard as you can. The thick insulation cracks under the strain, stretches, frays and splits...

Snap! A shower of sparks erupts from the enclosure. You lose your balance and fall backwards to the floor.

"X-unit just went out again," shouts a voice.

"Which line is it, Baker?"

"Kid's board says it's the informer. The others look okay. We're lettin' it go, Able. The sequencer's running."

The walkie-talkie hisses quietly.

"Congratulations."

You turn, but see no one.

"Zero minus fifteen seconds," crackles the walkie-talkie.

"You should be proud of yourself." Where is that voice coming from? "This gadget would've blown New Mexico right off the map if you hadn't stopped it. Imagine the embarrassment."

A burst of static. "Minus ten seconds."

The space around you articulates. It's not as scary the second time.

"Of course, there's the problem of causality," continues the voice. "If Harry doesn't get his A-bomb, the future that created you cannot occur. And you can't sabotage the test if you're never born, can you?"

The walkie-talkie is fading away. "Five seconds. Four."

The voice chuckles amiably. "Not to worry, though. Nature doesn't know the word 'paradox.' Gotta bleed off that quantum steam somehow. Why, I wouldn't be surprised to see a good-sized bang every time they shoot off one of these gizmos. Just enough fireworks to keep the historians happy."

And then we’re stuck right back where we started, in the Kensington Gardens on the eve of World War III, to do everything we’ve already done all over again… ad infinitum.

There are two levels on which to wrestle with this strange, bitter ending: on the physical, as realistic storyworld plot logic; and on the symbolic or poetic. Let’s start with the first.

While it’s hardly crystal clear, we can best surmise that Trinity portrays an alternate reality whose laws of physics dictate that that first atomic bomb — and presumably all the ones to follow, should anyone have been able to create them — should have blown up vastly bigger than the scientists who created it expected — and bigger also than the bombs we know from our own reality. Thus the gadget of this subtly different universe “would’ve blown New Mexico right off the map.” Like so much else in Trinity, it’s an idea with an historical basis, which is discussed at some length in The Day the Sun Rose Twice by Ferenc Morton Szasz. This book, published only shortly before Moriarty started working on Trinity, became his bible for the details of the Trinity test; Szasz himself became an informal personal adviser.

As early as 1922 Nobel Lauerate Francis William Aston warned against “tinkering with angry atoms,” voicing concerns that a physicist might accidentally start a chain reaction that would fuse hydrogen in the earth’s atmosphere into helium, the same process that powers the sun — and the hydrogen bomb. The question of whether a human-induced chain reaction taking place inside a bomb could start a runaway chain reaction in the atmosphere at large would continue to nag in the background for a long time, right up through the Trinity test and even well beyond it. In July of 1942, when the Manhattan Project was just getting started in earnest, Edward Teller of all people produced a series of calculations that seemed to show that a fission bomb could in fact create enough heat to ignite the atmosphere. All work came to a halt for several panicked days while the other scientists checked his numbers. It was decided that a probability of better than 1 in 3 million of such an apocalypse actually occurring would be enough to scuttle the Manhattan Project entirely. In the end some of Teller’s numbers were proved to be in error, the probability judged to be somewhat less than 1 in 3 million, and work resumed.

Yet even after they had checked and rechecked their calculations a certain nervousness persisted amongst the scientist preparing for the Trinity test. Enrico Fermi dealt with the question with his typical black humor, offering wagers on whether the bomb would cause a runaway chain reaction at all and, if so, whether it would take out just New Mexico or the whole world. (In either of the latter cases, the winner was likely to be sadly unable to collect…) When the bomb finally exploded, a number of scientists recall an instant of panic at its sheer scale, an instant of wondering if the runaway chain reaction they had all shoved into the backs of their minds was happening before their eyes. Their relief as it became clear that the explosion had reached its limit was perhaps even greater than their relief and sense of triumph that the Manhattan Project had succeeded in its mission.

So, that’s one important part of Trinity’s ending. But if we can feel ourselves on firm ground with a supersized version of the Trinity bomb absent the Wabewalker’s interference, the rest of what’s happened is rather less clear. Rather than causing the Trinity bomb to simply not work at all, our act of sabotage has merely reduced the scale of its explosion to the Trinity test we know from our own reality — i.e., to the scale the scientists were expecting all along. It seems very hard to believe that cutting a wire would really have allowed the Trinity bomb to blow up nevertheless, only not as big as it otherwise would. Still, we may have to accept the Wabewalker’s act as having had just that outcome. If we do, we must then assume that “bleeding off that quantum steam” entails that all future nuclear explosions will also be reduced in power to correspond with the one that’s just been sabotaged, as a result of some sort of heretofore undiscovered self-correcting quality of the universe. The Wabewalker, whom we might better name Sisyphus, must cycle again and again through time, (partially) sabotaging the Trinity bomb over and over to prevent that paradox that nature “doesn’t know” — the paradox that must be if he doesn’t perform the actions that give birth to the world he knew when he took his $599 London Getaway Package. We might consider him a hero, except that it’s not at all clear that his actions are a net positive. If “blowing New Mexico right off the map” would have led humanity to stop this madness and thus averted the nuclear apocalypse that comes in the Kensingtion Gardens, then according to the terrible logic of war in the nuclear age the lives of all those New Mexicans would better have been sacrificed in the name of saving billions more all over the world. Our victory in Trinity is the very definition of Pyrrhic.

This chain of conjecture is a sometimes flimsy one, some of its logic a bit wobbly. Yet one feels that trying to parse Trinity’s ending any more closely gets us into the fan-fiction territory of, say, hardcore Ultima fans trying to reconcile with itself Richard Garriott’s ever-changing world of Britannia, of frantic ret-conning to make sense of things that just, well, don’t make sense. As Andrew Plotkin once said of Trinity’s ending, “I’ve always been uncertain about how well it hangs together. But just uncertain enough that I think it might be cooler than I am capable of grasping.” It’s Trinity’s ability to evoke the doubt expressed in that second sentence that may just be its saving grace as a time-travel fiction.

But you know what? I’m not sure how much I care about the real-world logic behind Trinity’s ending, simply because it’s so powerful on a poetic and philosophical level. Taken as just the culmination of a time-travel puzzle, it’s very clever, yes, if not quite clever enough to feel entirely bulletproof. (Where did the umbrella actually come from? If, as would seem to be implied, that’s your corpse you meet in the magical land, how to reconcile that with the apparently eternal loop you’re stuck in?) It’s clever in a way that any science-fiction fan has seen many times before, clever in the way of that cool twist at the end of a great thriller. Taken more abstractly, however, it becomes much more than merely clever. And it’s on that more abstract level that I find I really want to discuss it.

Before I do that, though, I should take a moment to talk a bit more about why I’m so willing to forgive Trinity its faults as realistic fiction. It’s a question I’ve spent quite some time considering, using as a point of comparison Trinity’s perpetual point of comparison, Infocom’s other unabashed striving for the mantle of Literature A Mind Forever Voyaging. As many of you doubtless remember, I dinged that game pretty hard for its own various failings as realistic fiction. I therefore owe it to you to explain why I’m so blasé about this aspect of Trinity. One possibility is of course that I simply like Trinity better, and am thus more willing to excuse its failings. However, while the first part of that statement is certainly true, I’m not so sure about the second. Roger Ebert (every gamer’s favorite critic, right?) often used to say that every movie deserves to be reviewed on its own terms — i.e., on the terms of what it’s trying to be. If a movie wants to be a moody art-house character study, how much insight does it give into the proverbial human condition? If it’s a fast-paced action flick, how well does it get the adrenalin pumping? If it’s a porno… well, you get the idea. Unless I’ve misjudged its intent entirely, A Mind Forever Voyaging wants to be a compelling piece of hard science fiction, a realistic extrapolation of current trends in the spirit of the fictions it references on its back cover, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Trinity, though, wants to be something quite different, more poetic than realistic, more a philosophical meditation than a plot-driven story. Particularly when we’re in the magical land that serves as the hub of our historical explorations, we’re literally wandering through a landscape of symbolism, of ideas cast into physical reality. Trinity is a philosophical meditation given the superficial form of a story, like Gulliver’s Travels or Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

I think it’s fair to judge its ending in particular on those terms. I consider Trinity’s ending to be both the bleakest and the most profound in the Infocom catalog, much more so than that of Infidel in that Moriarty’s ending serves as the essential culmination of his game’s message, not as a mere experiment to see whether a tragic ending could “work” in an interactive medium. Indeed, one could use the word “experiment” to describe most of Infocom’s pre-Trinity nods toward Literature. The ending of Infidel, the friendship and sad fate of Floyd in Planetfall, arguably even the political message and puzzleless structure of A Mind Forever Voyaging were treated almost as technical challenges: “Can we use interactive fiction to do XXX?” Trinity alone feels like a mature, holistic statement rather than an experiment. It doesn’t even bother wasting time on the question: “Of course we can, and now here’s an historical tragedy for ya.”

I want to come back to the idea of Trinity as a tragedy, but first I want to look more closely at another phrase I’ve thrown out there from time to time in this series of articles: this idea of Trinity as a “meditation on history.” Ridiculously simplified, there are two ways of viewing history, of viewing time itself: as a ladder or as a wheel.

History as a ladder is an ongoing process of improvement and perfection. Wars and other terrible things sometimes happen that knock us a notch or two back down the ladder, but we always pick ourselves up and start to climb again. As long as we keep working at it, the lives of most of the people on earth will most of the time continue to get better. It’s an idea that by this point seems intertwined into the very DNA of most Western societies. You can find it in the Christianity — particularly Protestant Christianity — whose moral precepts are still at the root of our systems of laws: a Christian, born into a heritage of sin, spends her life striving to overcome that heritage and improve both herself and the world around her, after which she’s rewarded with the ultimate perfection of Heaven. You can find it in our economic systems: capitalism is based on the assumption that we can always make more money than we did the previous year (an assumption which, as Karl Marx among others have pointed out, may not be sustainable in the long term). The United States, amongst the most Christian and the most unabashedly capitalist of Western societies, hews to the idea particularly closely: what else is the American Dream but an idealized narrative of personal improvement and eventual perfection, a secular version of Christianity’s spiritual journey? In the euphoric aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, American historians started enthusiastically writing about “the end of history,” declaring the world to have reached the top of the ladder and attained perfection at last — in, naturally, the image of the United States. But I’m not here to condemn the notion of history as progress. Far from it. As an American myself, it’s largely the way I too see the world — and, I would even say, with good reason. Still, we should give due weight to the other point of view.

Circumstances come and go, says the circular view of history, but through it all there is the Eternal Now. As the Book of Ecclesiastes, one of the most beloved and most theologically problematic books of the Old Testament, says: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” It’s a view that’s actually even older than Ecclesiastes, stretching back to the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers whose works often survive only as fragments. Since then it’s tended to be most prevalent in non-Western societies. Certainly we can see it in Hinduism and Buddhism with their nearly perpetual reincarnation of the soul rather than the single life as a journey toward perfection (or damnation). It was resurrected in the West only in the last few hundred years by the school of European continental philosophy, whose tolerance for ambiguity and subjectivity tends to stand it in opposition to the analytic tradition that dominates in Britain and the United States, with its emphasis on rationalism and empiricism. Thus you can find it in Nietzsche’s idea of the Eternal Recurrence. You can find it in our old friend Robert Pinsky’s metaphor of the Figured Wheel. You can find it in its most nihilistic incarnation in many apocalyptic fictions of the Cold War, such as Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, which posits a humanity destined to pull itself out of the Dark Ages only to destroy its civilization as soon as nuclear weapons are (re)invented, over and over again in a futile cycle of stupidity spanning endless millennia. And of course you can find it in Trinity, which posits your grand adventure to be a perpetual loop — or, to choose another symbol from the game itself, a Klein bottle with no beginning, no end, and no measurable property of progress in between.

Trinity’s despairing nihilism is a result of Brian Moriarty’s own conviction as of 1986 that nuclear war was inevitable, that it was only a question of “when” and “how,” never “whether.” Any thoughtful person studying the history of atomic weapons and the Cold War as of 1986 could experience the same sense of predestination, the sense of the futility of the individual, that permeates Trinity. Time and time again the reasonable men had been battered down by the paranoid and the power-mad. Robert Oppenheimer’s case is just one example. Another, perhaps more immediate one for Moriarty would have been the story of President Carter, who entered office determined to reduce the United States’s nuclear arsenal to a “minimal deterrence” level of just 100 to 200 missiles and reach reasonable accommodations with the Soviet Union on a host of issues; he exited four years later amidst boycotts and spiking tensions, and having initiated the arms buildup that would go on to become the most extreme in the peacetime history of the country under Ronald Reagan. Against the forces of history, it seemed that even a good and powerful man like Carter was ultimately powerless.

Can I, the individual, alter the course of history? My answer must first depend on whether I believe in free will. Trinity would seem to tell us that we do have free will on an individual, granular level. The Book of Hours we discover in the magical land shows the Wabewalker’s actions in its pages only as he performs them, not before. Yet on the other hand, virtually everything else in the game is set up to make us feel, as Moriarty put it in an interview published immediately after Trinity, “the weight of all this history, crushing you.” There’s not a lot of individual agency allowed by that description, is there? The magical land of metaphor that serves as the spine of the game would certainly seem to represent a view of time that’s mechanistic and eternally recurring. The sun sweeps around and around its perimeter under the control of the mechanical sundial at its center — literally a wheel of time — its shadow falling again and again on the same set of historical events. “No new thing under the sun” indeed. This is the tragic view of history.

And now, having stumbled upon that word yet again, I think it’s time for us to really think about it. Like so many words, it has at least a couple of valid usages. In everyday speech we use it pretty much any time something really sad or really unjust happens to anyone. So, yes, the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Copenhagen were tragic. But they weren’t tragedies in the philosophical or literary sense that Trinity is a tragedy.

Most of us were inculcated as schoolchildren in another version of tragedy: it’s all about the “tragic flaw.” A noble, virtuous, and capable man is utterly undone by a single failing in his character: perhaps Lust, perhaps Greed, perhaps Ambition, perhaps Jealousy. The tragic hero must of course die for his failing, but in the process of doing so he will be redeemed and restored to at least a measure of his former greatness through self-discovery and acknowledgement of his sins. Originating with Aristotle in roughly 350 BC, it proved to be a conception very well-suited to later Christian societies, for the cycle forms a neat allegory of the central narrative of Christianity: the Creation, the Fall, and Redemption in the after-life. How appropriate then that the earliest great tragedy of the Elizabethan era, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, not only follows this outline perfectly but has its protagonist directly interacting with metaphysical specters of Christian good and evil.

Still, despite lots of hammering and prodding over the centuries, the tragic flaw actually sits rather uncomfortably upon lots of tragic heroes. What’s the tragic flaw of Oedipus? He quite sensibly did everything he reasonably could to derail the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, only to have the universe screw him over anyway. What’s the tragic flaw of Hamlet? Some critics have tried to say it’s indecisiveness, but one can’t help but feel that wishy-washyness lacks a certain moral grandeur. What’s next? Messiness as a tragic flaw? (If so, and as anyone who’s ever seen my office will attest, I’m screwed.)

Aristotle’s word that is generally translated as “tragic flaw” is “hamartia.” It’s a term with its origins in archery, where it’s used to refer to a “missing of the mark.” It was removed from this context by Aristotle, and extended to mean any general mistake or failing. Later, Christian translators may have anachronistically inserted the concept into their own worldview, giving it a moral, even spiritual dimension it does not generally possess in Greek tragedy. There is no grand Christian narrative of guilt, punishment, and redemption to be found here, but rather a sort of cosmic joke and an illustration of the powerlessness of even the mightiest in the face of a universe determined to have its way with us no matter what we do. This is the conception of tragedy hinted at in the works of the philosophers who lived during and before the time of Sophocles, well before the time of Aristotle. It’s the conception of tragedy that Nitszche would rescue and begin to expound in the nineteenth century after centuries of neglect. Trinity also connects itself to these classical currents, not least via another in its arsenal of symbols: the ferryman Charon. In Greek mythology, he carries souls from the land of the living to that of the dead. In Trinity, he carries the Wabewalker to the Trinity site, the beginning of the end.

The ancient Greeks called the elemental, irresistible force of the universe, the “what will be must be” of existence, “physis.” Some people prefer to call it God; some prefer to call it science — or, more specifically and interestingly, physics. Whatever you call it, it can be a bitch sometimes. The real key to Trinity the tragedy may lie in those lines from Hamlet quoted on the back of its box:

The time is out of joint;
O cursed spite, That ever I was
born to set it right!

Hamlet is arrogant enough to believe he’s some sort of Aristotlian tragic hero, destined to “set it right” through his redemptive, sacrificial heroism. What he fails to understand is that the universe is destined to kick his ass no matter what he does. The Wabewalker is arrogant enough to believe in his sweet, clueless American way that he can “fix” history and make everything better. He’s likewise about to get a swift kick in the ass to disabuse him of that notion. Oedipus the King, Hamlet, and Trinity all in fact share a protagonist who’s deluded enough to believe he can prevent or correct a monstrosity that should not be: a son married to his mother in Oedipus; a brother who has committed fratricide and married his sister-in-law in Hamlet; the atomic bomb in Trinity. The joke’s on them. The universe is, as Trinity’s climactic text implies and as a little game called Zork once stated outright, “self-contained and self-maintaining.”

So, are we left with nothing more than a sick cosmic joke? An essential component of the Aristotelian conception of tragedy is the hero who is redeemed at last through his suffering. Where is the Wabewalker’s redemption? Those of us who play Trinity today can of course take comfort in the fact that what Moriarty saw as inevitable did not come to pass. Instead a hero emerged named Mikhail Gorbachev who, it turned out, actually was capable of breaking the tragic cycle and just possibly saving the world in the way that Oppenheimer, Carter, the Wabewalker, and so many others were not. Because of him life did not imitate Trinity’s art.

But playing the Gorbachev card is kind of cheating, isn’t it? Is there redemption to be found within Trinity without recourse to external events? I’m not sure I know how to answer this question, how to describe or explain the way that Trinity makes me feel, but I’ll try.

The ancient Greeks talked about something called the “kairos moment,” the orgiastic instance when physis wells up and Great Change happens. Call it God time if you prefer; call it the ineffable transcendence. At that moment we’re at one with the universe, at one with time. The time is no longer out of joint; we’re living in time, oblivious to it. Those scientists in the New Mexico desert experienced a kairos moment when they saw their gadget explode — so awful and so awe-full. Somehow, in a way nobody has ever adequately described and that I certainly can’t begin to, we can also experience a vicarious kairos time at the culminating moment of tragedy, stare into the abyss and come away redeemed. It’s not about seeking redemption for Oedipus or Hamlet or the Wakewalker. It’s redemption for us.

When Nietzsche wrote of a wheel of time, of the Eternal Recurrence, it wasn’t an exercise in nihilism. Just the opposite. He was looking for a way to escape from the tyranny of linear chronology, from the eternal tragedy of the human condition, which is to live out of joint with time, always casting our mental gaze forward or backward, almost never living in the Eternal Now that is Life. If you’re like me, maybe you feel a bit wistful from time to time when you watch your pets play or eat or love, completely in the moment. They have something we can only touch occasionally, unpredictably. And yet it’s important to try. Because even if the world is headed to hell, even if the missiles are going to fly tomorrow, we have the Now. Because even if our individual Books of Hours are already completely written and we can’t do a damn thing about any of it, we still have the Now. Inside Trinity, we wind up after the supreme futility of the sabotage that wasn’t quite the sabotage we thought it was back in the Kensington Gardens. Okay, fair enough. Let’s take a stroll, feel the sun on our skin, enjoy the happy babble of life around us. Who cares if this is the last moment ever? It’s a moment, isn’t it? Pity to waste it. Anyway, last I checked there was a soccer ball and a perambulator and an umbrella to be gathered…

Comments
48 Responses

- Andrew Plotkin

February 26, 2015 at 5:40 pm

“It seems very hard to believe that cutting a wire would really have allowed the Trinity bomb to blow up nevertheless, only *not as big* as it otherwise would.”

The way I run this theory, the bomb failed completely; the “quantum steam” effect applies to *this* bomb as well as all future ones.

(To restate — you said most of this already: The force of paradox — history’s alteration — is exuded through every point in history where a nuclear bomb is supposed to go off. It causes a bomb-like effect; but, in this story-world, much smaller than a “real” nuclear explosion. Trinity becomes the first example.)

If we try to follow this logic, it runs into the weeds and ties itself around our ankles. (As I said in the forum thread you linked!) Why doesn’t the Nagasaki bomb, lacking a saboteur, annihilate half of Japan? Etc.

My fifteen-year-old self, outraged at the logic, sat himself down and wrote a letter of complaint to Infocom. I got a gracious reply — I believe it was in Moriarty’s own hand — essentially saying “This is the way we think the story had to go.” And you really can’t say much more than that, at a plot level.

(I think that letter is still in my father’s basement somewhere. I really have to dig it out and post a scan.)

Turning to the notion of tragedy… I can’t entirely dismiss the plot logic! James Nicoll once said (yes, he’s said more than one quotable line): “I don’t mind hidden depths but I insist that there be a surface.”

When I try to view Trinity as a tragedy of history, it’s of a history where *nuclear bombs don’t work the way we think.* The physicists were wrong; they’re *still* wrong today. And that has consequences! It says something about history, both about the past (the threat of MAD) and the future (our dreams of fusion power?) But it doesn’t sit well with the talk of redemption and the joints of time(*). It makes Trinity’s ending a fuddle, no matter how you try to approach it.

(* Hidden from our prudish view by the Trousers of Time, no doubt.)

- David Boddie

February 26, 2015 at 7:02 pm

I like the idea of a history where our understanding is incorrect, but just correct enough that we don’t notice. In a way, that’s how science works: you have a theory that predicts the outcomes of experiments until you run one that makes you go back and think again. Sometimes, it even makes you question how the theory could ever have been sufficient in the first place.

Maybe another way of explaining why changing the first test would also affect every later explosion would be to consider that the first one marks the divergence of two worlds: one in which the explosions ignite the atmosphere, and the one the protagonist inhabits. Sabotaging the test presumably just means that we choose the second of these. In the game, what happens if you don’t cut the wire?

In my English Literature classes at school, I remember thinking that we were often reading too much meaning into what some authors had written. With that in mind, it seems that games may not be art, but it seems they can be literature. ;)

- Duncan Stevens

February 26, 2015 at 7:54 pm

One other ambiguity that, depending on how you view it, makes the game either moderately or extremely pessimistic: when you first enter the out-of-time world, you get this description:

As your eyes sweep the landscape, you notice more of the giant toadstools. There must be hundreds of them. Some sprout in clusters, others grow in solitude among the trees. Their numbers increase dramatically as your gaze moves westward, until the forest is choked with pale domes.

Each of those toadstools represents a nuclear blast, and their number “increase[s] dramatically as your gaze moves westward”–but are you looking west at that point? Or is your gaze simply “moving westward” from the eastern horizon? If the latter, then you may be simply looking at the (extensive) past history of nuclear testing; if the former, it seems like you’re looking at a full-scale nuclear war that was just beginning as you left–and which you do not, in fact, avert. In that view, it’s not just London that you fail to save, it’s the entire world, or much of it, at least.

- David Auerbach

March 15, 2015 at 3:16 pm

I always read this as the scariest passage in the whole game, and didn’t see much ambiguity in it. The game starts with the opening of WW3, and in the context of the 1980s, the hundreds of toadstools immediately suggested the enormous nuclear stockpile (see the ending of the Trinity comic as well, the general standing in front of a gazillion missiles).

Looking back now, I’m almost convinced it’s the other way around. There had been about a thousand nuclear tests by the mid-80s, and the timeline doesn’t go east to west but in a counterclockwise circle.

On the other hand, it’s certainly the end anyway. On the sundial, Arizona is marked with alpha and London with omega, so whether due to the paradox loop cycle, global thermonuclear war, or narrative symmetry, the game certainly gives the impression that the London day you start at is THE END.

It reminds me of something Charles Hayward said about his band This Heat, working at the turn of the 80s: “The dread and fear thing was this whole (nuclear) mutually-assured-destruction thing that was happening at the time. We all thought that we were going to die in about two, three years. We really did.”

- Lisa H.

March 4, 2015 at 6:58 am

In the game, what happens if you don’t cut the wire?

Well, first the bomb explodes, naturally:

>z
Time passes.

“Zero minus ten seconds. Nine seconds. Eight. Seven. Six. Five seconds. Four. Three. Two.”

You hear a loud clunk at the word “One.”

All at once the sphere disappears in a flash of startling brilliance! You jam your hands over your eyes in the awful glare; never see the fireball closing in at many times the speed of sound; and never feel the stellar heat that annihilates much of the state of New Mexico.

Then you wind up at The River with Charon picking you up, and the game ends. There isn’t a denoument about what happens to the rest of the world, if that was what you were wondering.

- David Boddie

March 4, 2015 at 11:30 pm

Thanks, Lisa. So, the outcomes are consistent and the New Mexico thing is not just a throwaway remark in the other outcome. Interesting. It makes one wonder which of the two is the “winning” choice, though presumably only one earns you points.

- Duncan Stevens

March 5, 2015 at 4:38 am

Right. Other suboptimal endings (when you get caught) note that you’re incinerated shortly afterwards in a “multigigaton blast.” In the rgif thread Jimmy mentioned, one of Infocom’s playtesters said he didn’t recall when the alternative-history angle came along, and when I tracked down one of the beta versions, it didn’t have the “multigigaton” references or other indications that the blast was something other than the real-life version, except for the “winning” ending. So those were added late in the process, probably in response to some tester asking about the inconsistency.

- Jimmy Maher

March 5, 2015 at 6:48 am

A “multigigaton” blast, by the way, is almost inconceivably enormous. The largest atomic bomb ever exploded was the “Tsar Bomba” exploded by the Soviets in 1961: around 50 megatons. In addition to annihilating New Mexico (at least), one suspects it would have serious consequences for the planet as a whole.

- Jimmy Maher

February 27, 2015 at 8:04 am

When Duncan and I were discussing this over email, I wrote:

“I find it can be a little bit hard to get some readers, especially readers heavily into the sorts of genre literature that usually most interests computer gamers, to look for higher layers of meaning in a work beyond mere plot logic. And so you get all of the endless ret-conning that goes on to try to make Richard Garriott’s completely nonsensical Ultima world make sense, etc. Science fiction and fantasy readers in particular will accept elves and dragons and magic and “warp drives” and God knows what else, but give them, say, Gulliver’s Travels and they’ll spend hours complaining about how this Lilliputian land couldn’t really exist and is there some way they can ret-con it into the world as they know it, etc., all the while completely missing the real point of the story.”

Yes, that’s almost unbearably smug and condescending, and you of all people are certainly not deserving of my condescension. Problem is, I don’t quite how to frame this in a way that *doesn’t* make me sound like everybody’s worst caricature of the smug Literature professor (like, say, that guy from The Squid and the Whale). I really don’t want to make it sound like a personal failing if you don’t appreciate Trinity like I appreciate Trinity. As David Boddie slyly winked at, it’s very possible I’m reading way too much into all this anyway. On the other hand, the assumption of many students that the goal of literary criticism is to figure out “what the author meant to say” is flawed in itself and…

Oh, boy, I’m not helping my cause here, am I? Various people come to literature (and games) expecting various things, and that’s fine. Also, you’re awesome and I admire your work greatly. How’s that? :)

- David Boddie

February 27, 2015 at 3:37 pm

I wasn’t necessarily suggesting that you were reading too much into Trinity, Jimmy. :)

- Andrew Plotkin

February 28, 2015 at 8:55 pm

I’ve extended my comment here into a blog post, basically a “How would I have handled this ending?” retrospective from our privileged thirty-years-on vantage.

http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2015/02/trinity-design-ruminations/

- Duncan Stevens

February 26, 2015 at 5:55 pm

As far as the ending hanging together: a time-travel loop to restore the present is a known subgenre, but usually the time traveler has himself triggered some worse outcome that he/she then has to undo, both to avoid a paradox and prevent the nastier fate. Here, there’s nothing about Wabewalker going back in time that could logically have caused the Trinity test to ignite the atmosphere and blow up all of New Mexico. (The game is quite clear that, in the future that Wabewalker is coming from, these runaway chain reactions didn’t happen–“the future that created you cannot occur.”) So that’s one big objection to the logic here.

But I agree that insisting on precise logic is probably not the best way to look at Trinity. Had the ending simply been “and then there was no bomb, everything was great,” it’s hard to see how the player would be left feeling “the weight of all this history,” in Moriarty’s words. And “you failed to stop the test, you accomplished nothing” would be a pretty sour ending to the game. The alternative-history/looping resolution both works on the poetic/philosophical level and addresses the need to end the story in a way that wasn’t overly sunny but also didn’t leave the whole thing feeling like a waste of time. If logic was a casualty, well, you can’t have everything.

To my mind, Trinity works better than AMFV because it uses the traditional “game” aspects of IF to its advantage. The puzzle-solving drives the story and gives it pace, and the puzzles themselves, in most instances, reflect and reinforce the themes of the game. The gnomon puzzle mirrors the harnessing-elemental-forces theme; the skink and lemming puzzles force the player to deal out death in the name of avoiding greater disasters, just as the makers of the bomb believed they were doing (and introduce the idea of complicity for an IF protagonist); the corpse/Charon puzzle forces the player to confront his/her own mortality; the bubble puzzle reinforces the fragility of existence; the lemming puzzle reminds us of mankind’s self-destructive nature; the Nagasaki crane puzzle, perhaps, reminds us of the hope for peace, and the power of the peace movement. Some of the puzzles don’t reflect the themes (the emerald recipe puzzle, say, unless you want to view yourself as creating your own Manhattan Project, throwing ingredients together with limited knowledge about where it will all lead), but most do. And most of them aren’t set pieces; they serve the logic of the story to an extent unusual in IF circa 1986.

So viewed, the logical holes–the eternal umbrella, the strange encounter with one’s own corpse–become a little less nagging because they help reinforce the game’s themes. Moreover, the puzzles are, on the whole, hard enough that the player feels a sense of accomplishment, helping to offset the downbeat nature of the ending. (To be sure, in the middle section, the motivation for the puzzle/solving is a tad uneven. Why, exactly, am I so anxious to visit all these earlier blasts? Putting a vital (yet mundane) object/task behind each door is a rather artificial way to send the player on a tour through nuclear history. But once you accept the magpie/explorer role of an IF protagonist, the themes fall into place.)

I also think that Trinity benefits by not clearly inhabiting any particular genre, whereas AMFV, with its focus on gadgetry, was immediately recognizable as relatively “hard” SF. The magic-realism air of the middle section helps make some of the logical difficulties feel a bit more forgivable than the corresponding problems in AMFV (and those problems were much more central to the conceit of the game in AMFV than they are in Trinity). That Trinity is much more lyrically written than AMFV also helps.

- Duncan Stevens

February 26, 2015 at 6:07 pm

Meant to mention that one later game that carries off a similar “puzzles united by thematic elements” is So Far. Something tells me this might not be a total coincidence.

- Andrew Plotkin

February 27, 2015 at 3:29 am

Nope.

- Lisa H.

February 26, 2015 at 8:18 pm

It eventually becomes apparent that the overriding objective of Trinity the game is to sabotage Trinity the first test of an atomic bomb.

You probably wanted either “is to sabotage Trinity”, full stop, or “is to sabotage the first test of an atomic bomb”.

If, as would seem to be implied, that’s your corpse you meet in the magical land

Eh? This never occurred to me. Implied by the fact that you get the boots from it? (Wow, between this and never realizing the girl in Nagasaki was the woman in Kensington Gardens, I am starting to feel really stupid.)

- Lisa H.

February 26, 2015 at 8:19 pm

Additional: Oops, I get your phrasing now about Trinity-the-game vs. Trinity-the-test. Never mind.

- Keith Palmer

February 26, 2015 at 8:40 pm

After all the work you’ve put into looking at this game and the dark larger history it’s built upon, it does seem sort of ungrateful of me to admit that, when Internet access arrived in my home town and I found clues at last for Trinity (and A Mind Forever Voyaging) to get to the end of a game I’d made perhaps more of an effort to play through than with others (I almost gave up at the puzzle of how to cool the meteorite before hitting on the solution, but couldn’t figure out how to escape Nagasaki), my immediate reaction to the conclusion seemed similar to what you describe as Scorpia’s to Infidel (which I don’t think bothered me when I’d played to the end of that game with heavy reliance on the hintbook). It seemed to me sudden, arbitrary, at once smug and despairing; for years to follow whenever I saw Trinity praised (up to and including your own “Let’s Tell A Story Together”) I would just dwell on my negative reaction. If, as you’ve said, there are “Trinity people” and “AMFV people,” I suppose I was an “AMFV person” almost by default.

In realizing you would get around to the game here, though, I made a fresh effort to do some more thinking about it. I might have been a little conscious of how often I’m willing to try and be sympathetic towards certain other works criticized as if making a big deal of “obvious” reactions and inclined to think they just might not be viewed “deeply” enough (as much as I can imagine this opens me up to criticism in turn…) Other forecasts of nuclear war may hold their own doses of “despair,” but I’ve started wondering if they can at least be seen as trying to drive their audiences towards taking some form of action to stand against apocalypse. The “driven by your effort” nature of interactive fiction, however, might have made the sudden suggestion of “fate being fixed” seem that much more inescapable and oppressing. Beyond that, I suppose I’m now willing to see “the conclusion I’d been expecting” as a story in which “magic” pops up at the last second to save everyone, which would be a story with its own dangerous connotations. I do know that with Brian Moriarty’s statements on record attempts to seek “other ways out” might still be too much of a stretch, but in any case your own thoughts on the matter were interesting too.

- Jimmy Maher

February 27, 2015 at 7:43 am

I actually think the fact that Trinity doesn’t really try to exhort its players to “take a stand against apocalypse” is one of its key strengths. Most protest art is pretty terrible, at least when taken outside of its historical context. Trinity has a dignity about it that a more muckraking piece wouldn’t. (Such a piece would be historically interesting just for trying to say something about the world, which very few games were doing in the 1980s, but interesting in a very different and, in my opinion, shallower way.)

- Keith Palmer

February 27, 2015 at 5:31 pm

I can see now how a “Don’t want that to happen? Do this!” conclusion to any work can make it easier to dismiss. It just seems that when I got to the end of Trinity, I was convinced I was being “ordered” to accept that *all* effort was futile. I might yet try and butter that up a bit by wondering if “interactivity” provided greater impact than the familiar variant of time travel stories where any action to change the future only ends up bringing the original state to pass, but I do know it was a somehow extreme reaction.

- B1AF02B6DB5D

February 26, 2015 at 11:16 pm

Does anyone know of a way to play that game today, without doing something illegal and with a student’s budget (also, no old hardware)?

- Jimmy Maher

February 27, 2015 at 7:32 am

There is an iOS app which Activision sells through the Apple Store. The app is free, but each game after Zork I is an in-app purchase — but only a dollar or two, so hopefully manageable on a “student’s budget.” ;) The app, for what it’s worth, is really well done. I was kind of disappointed it didn’t get more attention when it came out.

Otherwise Infocom’s story files are not hard to find with a quick Google. Not strictly legal, mind you, but legality isn’t always morality. You’ll can decide where your own moral line is drawn…

- B1AF02B6DB5D

February 27, 2015 at 3:48 pm

Thanks very much for the answer! I would love to try out the app, but will not be able to, due to a lack of iDevices. So maybe I’ll look into the other option. Thanks again though!

- Steve

February 27, 2015 at 12:40 am

On the contradistinction between the linear and cyclical views of time, I found Thomas Cahill’s The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels an enlightening read.

The characterisation made of Protestant Christianity came across to me as nearly the opposite what Protestantism actually stands for. The principles of justification by faith alone, through God’s unmerited favour alone, are central to Protestantism and run all the way back to Christianity’s roots – see Paul’s letter to the churches in Rome.

How did you come to the conclusion that “capitalism is based on the assumption that we can always make more money than we did the previous year”? I don’t see why a capitalist would even need to accept this assumption, much less regard it as foundational?

I don’t find the case for Gorbachev as the hero of the cold war to be plausible. His hand was largely forced by circumstances beyond his control. It seems, frankly, like the kind of idea that comes from struggling just a little bit too hard to see Reagan as the villain.

- Jimmy Maher

February 27, 2015 at 7:25 am

Thanks for the recommendation!

Your last 3 points, in order:

1. Justification through faith versus justification through works is of course a longstanding debate in Christianity. But if, like most Protestants, you accept the former, I believe there is an assumption that, having accepted God, you have a duty to make yourself and the world around you better. Yes, you will fail sometimes, and God will forgive you if you ask Him, but the expectation is still there. Yes, you can never *overcome* your heritage of sin through good works alone — you need God for that — but you still have a duty to try to follow His moral code and to help your fellow humans. And yes, a mass murderer could theoretically repent and accept God on his deathbed, be forgiven, and enter the Kingdom of Heaven without doing anything to “deserve” it, but for most it doesn’t work like that.

I believe there’s actually been quite a lot written about the rise of Protestantism with its ethics of personal improvement and self-reliance and the associated rise of capitalism and our modern view of history. I’m certainly no scholar on such things, but the connection has always felt pretty solid to me.

2. This is a fairly basic philosophical assumption of capitalism, isn’t it? Our modern economies are driven by investment. You get nothing back from investment — other than dividends, and who invests for dividends these days? — unless the company in which you invest makes more money than it did the previous year. (See how the analysts react to a company that just treads water year after year. You can get away with it at the level of the small businessperson, but that’s not where most of the capital in our economies reside.) For the last couple of hundred years, this has been possible. But — so some people say — it may not be possible for too much longer, as we’re going to simply run out of resources. Maybe a market economy is possible absent the assumption — I kind of hope so — but it would have to be different mechanically and philosophically than the one we have today. It’s also of course possible that the people saying this are simply wrong; there were lots and lots of people saying the same thing at the time of the Great Depression, after all.

3. I don’t disagree that Gorbachev’s hand was “forced by circumstances beyond his control,” but I’m not really sure how that bears on his being a hero. *Most* heroes’ hands are “forced by circumstances beyond their control.” Those same circumstances could have led him to do any number of things, many of them damaging to the world, some of them just possibly entailing the destruction of the world. He chose the wise, humane course, against the tide of his country’s history and the Cold War’s history, the very same history that Trinity paints as an irresistible force. To me that makes him a hero.

As for Reagan: I see him as neither hero nor villain. Of all the personal descriptions I’ve read of him, the one that feels most correct to me, and seems best supported by the evidence of staffer interviews, etc., is the one in Way Out There in the Blue by Frances FitzGerald: that he was a genial fellow with a peculiar emptiness at the heart of his personality and a certain endemic intellectual laziness. Certainly flawed, but I wouldn’t use the word “villain.” Or, if we dispense with the psychoanalysis: he (or, perhaps better said, his administration) was a huge problem, until, coaxed by Gorbachev, he stopped being. Which was progress, but not quite heroic progress.

- Mike Taylor

April 16, 2018 at 8:04 pm

I don’t disagree that Gorbachev’s hand was “forced by circumstances beyond his control,” but I’m not really sure how that bears on his being a hero. *Most* heroes’ hands are “forced by circumstances beyond their control.”

Or, as Alan Dean Foster might have put it: “Gorbachev was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Naturally, he became a hero.”

- Andrew McCarthy

February 27, 2015 at 12:21 pm

So, are we left with nothing more than a sick cosmic joke? An essential component of the Aristotelian conception of tragedy is the hero who is redeemed at last through his suffering. Where is the Wabewalker’s redemption? Those of us who play Trinity today can of course take comfort in the fact that what Moriarty saw as inevitable did not come to pass. Instead a hero emerged named Mikhail Gorbachev who, it turned out, actually was capable of breaking the tragic cycle and just possibly saving the world in the way that Oppenheimer, Carter, the Wabewalker, and so many others were not. Because of him life did not imitate Trinity‘s art.

I suspect that this is perhaps the real point of Trinity, its ultimate raison d’être.

Simply by playing the game, people who were not previously disposed to worry overmuch about the consequences of nuclear warfare might recoil in horror… and, years later, those same people might be the ones making decisions at the highest levels of government.

In that respect it’d be a cautionary tale, rather like Dr. Seuss’ darkest children’s book, The Lorax.

And, as such, Trinity offers a way to break free of the cycle of eternal repetition… even as we appreciate the Eternal Now.

If, as you say, Moriarty was convinced at the time of the inevitability of nuclear war, he may not himself have appreciated this aspect of the game when he made it. But I’m pretty sure he’d find it fitting.

After all, Nicholas Meyer accomplished much the same thing, when Ronald Reagan happened to watch The Day After.

- Veronica Connor

February 28, 2015 at 4:57 pm

“You can find it in the Christianity — particularly Protestant Christianity — whose moral precepts are still at the root of our systems of laws…”

That’s a bridge too far, Jimmy. The moral (ethical, actually) precepts that form the basis of our laws predate Chrisitianity by thousands of years. You can go the Louvre and read the Code of Hammurabi right off the stone it was carved into, and it reads like a biblical prequel story. This is but one example of our current ethics and morals predating all theologies.

Chrisitianity is, like all theologies, built upon those that came before. No philosophy exists in a vacuum or was created from whole cloth, much as they all like to sound as though they were. They are human stories, building upon other human stories. It’s what we do.

In fact, the science increasingly shows that the fundamental aspects of ethical law that form our civilization are in fact innate- it has always been an envolutionary advantage not to hurt each other, which is why we mostly dislike doing so. The finer points of law have been built upon those basics as we’ve learned what is needed to live together in increasingly large groups.

Whether one believes in God or gods outside that framework is a separate and deeply personal choice. But to ascribe American laws to some roots in Christianity is a fool’s errand.

- Jimmy Maher

March 1, 2015 at 8:24 am

Thanks for the reply, but it doesn’t seem to be responding to what you actually quoted. ;) I made no claim that these moral precepts originated with Christianity nor that they are unique to it, just that the bedrock morality that the law upholds is essentially the same as Christian morality. I would further claim that these laws were *created* with sometimes implicit but often explicit reference to Christianity even in a country like the USA that ostensibly separates church from state. See for example the law’s upholding of marriage and punishment of adultery in divorce court and the prohibitions against the (arguably) victimless crime of prostitution. Or just the fact that witnesses still swear on a Bible unless they choose something else…

I do think that the civilizing effect Christianity had on many societies is sometimes too readily dismissed by those eager to condemn its manifold abuses. But as neither a committed atheist nor a Christian — I’m happily, wishy-washily agnostic — I don’t really have a dog in that fight.

- Nate Cull

March 2, 2015 at 4:21 am

@Andrew: The Lorax (1971) is indeed a powerful ecological fable – I remember watching the 1972 TV special in school in the 1980s. The gut-punch of that story has never left me. I wish more people had read and absorbed that book.

But! There’s an even better example in the current discussion. Seuss actually wrote a children’s book specifically about nuclear war and Mutually Assured Destruction. (Of course he did.) The Butter Battle Book, in 1984.

It’s every bit as terrifying as Trinity and only a slightly bit more hopeful in its ending: “Who’s going to drop it? Will you? or will he?”

And this wasn’t at all an outlier. There were actually so many happy friendly children’s books about the total and utterly inevitable annihilation of the world in the 1980s and oh my God I need to stop geeking out about this right now because I’m totally showing my age.

But you could write a dozen theses on 80s nuclear fatalism and a dozen more on how all this cultural art product just vanished into a pit of self-induced cultural amnesia in the 1990s when WWIII got unexpectedly, impossibly, cancelled. It’s been long enough, we really need to start remembering.

- Andrew McCarthy

March 2, 2015 at 10:26 am

@ Nate Cull

Fascinating! I think I read that book once, long ago.

But as a child, I read The Lorax first–and naturally was slightly traumatized. So of course it’s the “dark Dr. Seuss” book that comes foremost in my recollection.

- Andrew McCarthy

March 2, 2015 at 10:29 am

Also, as a child of the 1990s, I grew up without constant references to the Cold War dominating everyday life. So, while the message of The Lorax was evident to me even at that tender age, the subtext of The Butter Battle Book escaped me at the time.

- DZ-Jay

March 11, 2017 at 3:42 pm

>> “we’re literally literally wandering through…”

I think one of those is literally redundant. :)

- Jimmy Maher

March 12, 2017 at 10:27 am

Thanks!

- Steve

May 14, 2017 at 4:33 pm

You covered Trinity’s story and thematic elements, but unlike all the other games you’ve reviewed, you barely talked about the gameplay itself. Nothing to say about the little voice constantly and condescendingly “sniggering” in your ear, which more often than not feels like Moriarty’s attempt at a director’s commentary than a legitimate story element? The almost Disneyesque interactions with anthropomorphized animals (the ones you don’t kill, that is)? Anything at all about the puzzles?

I had at least hoped for a mention of the game’s ridiculously strict inventory limit, a return to a convention that adds nothing to the game and necessitates tedious “save/restore” trial-and-error gameplay every time you walk through a door, as you desperately hope you’ve brought the correct items with you (and ONLY the correct items, because chances are you won’t have room to carry any new ones once you’re on the other side)…

- Casey Nordell

January 11, 2018 at 11:17 pm

I would posit that Hamlet’s tragic flaw is “inaction” (rather than “indecisiveness”… This is a subtle but important difference). As time passes, continued inaction forces “indecisiveness” to become “choosing to take no action” (e.g. when he chooses not to kill the king while the king is praying). And does time ever pass (for five whole Acts!). A failure to take action in one’s life leads to a lack of agency which does indeed have a certain moral grandeur. In short, failing to live one’s own life is the greatest personal tragedy I can think of.

Long time reader, first time commenting. I love the blog; it is so well written! Thank you for writing all these great essays.

- Ben Bilgri

February 18, 2018 at 2:17 am

I’ve noticed that a good proportion of this blog’s readers seem to be members of the modern interactive fiction community. Forgive me if that’s an inaccurate assessment, but I wanted to provide a voice of appreciation from someone who’s coming from a decidedly different perspective:

The first computer game I ever played was Sierra’s Space Quest III, but a few years after that I departed in the direction of first-person 3D games and never looked back. For most of my life l was all about the immersive sims and first-person storyworlds. Give me the Deus Ex games, the first couple Bioshocks, the 2017 Prey, the Dishonoreds, Tacoma, and Soma.

I’ve always loved the history of the medium I love, but until I started reading your blog, I had almost completely overlooked interactive fiction. I remember buying Return to Zork in the 90s in an edition that included the Zork Anthology as a shrinkwrapped add-on in the same package, and expecting it to be graphic adventures with less-impressive graphics, like King’s Quest I would be if it were packaged with King’s Quest VI. When I opened it up and saw what it actually entailed, I didn’t get it then, but I do now.

I love the environmental storytelling you see in the modern immersive sims, the discovery of the small, everyday – sometimes even inconsequential – stories that populate the game world. I used to think that no one had accomplished that kind of worldbuilding before around 1994 and the first System Shock. But after reading through your articles, I realize that Infocom was building incredibly detailed worlds in text, before the technology was available to render them in 3D.

I still love story-heavy 3D games, but I just finished Trinity, my first text adventure. It was amazing. Thanks so much for broadening my horizons, and keep up the good work!

- Jimmy Maher

February 18, 2018 at 10:18 am

So I’ve made a convert. Ha, my plan to return the text adventure to world domination is working!

But seriously, and while I would never have recommended Trinity as anyone’s first text adventure, I’m glad you discovered something new that you enjoy. You have a veritable lifetime’s worth of further adventures in text to discover whenever you get around to them. Betwixt and between, feel free to continue enjoying your big 3D worlds, which certainly have an allure of their own. ;)

- Ben Bilgri

February 18, 2018 at 4:35 pm

Heh, yeah. It was an experience. I’m only up to 1983 in the blog, so I wanted to avoid getting a non-representative example with some of the illogical puzzles you’ve covered in earlier years. Plus I’m a fan of atomic history, I hadn’t gotten to those articles yet so it was completely unspoiled, and you’d already mentioned it as one of Infocom’s best. Ended up being the right one for me. :)

- Mike Taylor

April 16, 2018 at 8:12 pm

“An essential component of the Aristotelian conception of tragedy is the hero who is redeemed at last through his suffering.”

Is it?

What is Hamlet’s redemption? What is Macbeth’s? What is Romeo’s or Juliet’s?

I don’t see that at all.

- Jimmy Maher

April 17, 2018 at 5:43 am

A possible argument, speaking in the context of Shakespearean tragedy: at the end, when the bodies are strewn across the stage, there’s always a grace note of redemption. At the last moment, the hero acknowledges his sins and accepts them, thereby redeeming himself. (I trust that I don’t need to explicate the Christian influence here. In fact, it’s partially because of stuff like this that so many have speculated whether Shakespeare might have been secretly Catholic.)

But I don’t really believe that Aristotle’s conception of tragedy is the only or the necessarily correct one, nor do I think it’s the best way of reading the plays you mention. So, I share your skepticism. The last paragraphs of the article are largely devoted to explaining why. Hamlet in particular reaches back to a conception of tragedy that’s much older than Aristotle. Not for nothing did those critics who tried to read it through a Christian/Aristotelian worldview, such as C.S. Lewis, label it “the problem play.”

- Mike Taylor

April 17, 2018 at 12:25 pm

Well, this seems like a stretch to me. I can accept that there are shoots of hope at the end of Hamlet, but I don’t remember any at the end of Macbeth. I think that is just a plain tragedy. Which is why I objected to your notion that the final redemption through suffering is a “essential component” of tragedy.

It’s interesting, now I come to think of it, that while unambiguously tragic endings are vanishingly rare in film, they are or at least used to be very common in theatre. I’ve heard it said (maybe unfairly) that in the end the only distinction between “tragedy” and “comedy” in Shakespeare is whether there’s a happy ending or not. I find it interesting that by most counts he wrote about as many tragedies as comedies (e.g. 12 vs. 14 in this list).

- Jimmy Maher

April 17, 2018 at 1:01 pm

Careful — I said “the Aristotelian conception of tragedy,” not tragedy full stop. I’m literally just reiterating what Aristotle writes in Poetics. It’s not my notion at all. In fact, I spend the paragraphs that follow pushing back against that notion.

I do think you’re rather conflating two meanings of “tragedy”: the literary conception and the popular or historical conception (i.e., “September 11 was a great tragedy”). To talk of Othello as “just plain tragedy” without an element of redemption or, if you prefer, catharsis — whether in the protagonist, the society around the protagonist, or the audience — is to talk of it as not a tragedy at all. Tragedy in literary terms doesn’t mean just “a sad ending.” That’s something the Greeks before Aristotle, Aristotle himself, and the Shakespearean tragedians who came after him *could* all agree on.

To say that there’s no distinction between comedy and tragedy in Shakespeare other than the ending is not so much unfair as — sorry! — ignorant. The comedies really are consistently funny, at least once you fall into tune with the rhythms of Elizabethan English; they’re fun and frothy and light and bursting with the sheer joy of life. (Sadly, many people know nothing of them because they’re not often taught, out of the longstanding prejudice against happiness in art.) The tragedies often have elements of comic relief, but their overall tone is markedly different.

Late in his career, Shakespeare did start to muddle the two genres as he began to experiment more with form. Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, all hybrids or Others to one degree or another, are sometimes called “the romances,” largely for lack of knowing how else to classify them.

- Mike Taylor

April 17, 2018 at 10:10 pm

Careful — I said “the Aristotelian conception of tragedy,” not tragedy full stop.

Fair point — I was talking about Shakespearian tragedy, which I know a little about, and didn’t pick up on the very clear distinction you were making. Similarly, I deliberately did not mention Othello because I’m not familiar with it, so I have no idea how it fits or does not fit the Aristotelian model that you refer to.

The comedies really are consistently funny.

On this, I must defer to Rowan Atkinson: “If Shakespeare had meant it to be funny, he would have put a joke in it.” But maybe that’s just bitterness left over from having been made to study The Twelfth Night in school. Shudder.

That said, it’s clear that you know your Shakespeare much better than I do, so am I am going gracefully retire from this thread with us much dignity as I can retain. See you on the next comment thread!

(BTW., I’ve been commenting less recently because I’ve mostly been reading in bed on my Kindle Fire, which is awful for typing on. But still finding all these posts fascinating, especially the whole sequence on Trinity.)

- Johannes K. Paulsen

January 12, 2019 at 5:41 pm

In accord with Infidel, I prefer to return to London, then simply type “wait” until you see the text: “The east wind falls silent, and a new star flashes to life over the doomed city.”

Seems a poetic way to break the cycle and end the game.

Didn’t change my score though. Huh.

- Wolfeye M.

September 14, 2019 at 12:59 pm

Sounds like Trinity would be a good one to bring up in an “are games art?” debate.

It’s definitely written in such a way to make the player feel or think something, and the way it handles the subject matter is downright philosophical.

I wish you had spent more time on the actual game, rather than the history surrounding it. I enjoyed reading what you did write, but I still don’t know what the game is like, and I don’t particularly want to play it, after reading your articles about it. Charon is in it, and anthromic animals you kill at some point?

And…That ending, though. You didn’t go back and accidentally kill your grandfather, at least.

But, as I was saying before I went off on tangents, Trinity sounds like a game that it’d be very hard to say isn’t art.

- Derek

May 25, 2021 at 4:01 am

Which is funny, because Moriarty himself gave a lecture, 25 years after Trinity, that argued games can’t be art.

- Nathanael

March 6, 2021 at 10:45 am

It’s interesting that you said that most hardcore Infocom fan would name Trinity or AMFV as their favorites.

I’ve always been a hardcore Infocom fan, but I’ll take Wishbringer any day. And I have a soft spot for Spellbreaker.

While I resorted to hints for nearly all the Infocom games, Trinity is the only one I actually gave up on and didn’t bother to finish. This is clearly a minority viewpoint, but the gameplay is oppressively hostile and cryptic, violating most of the Player’s Bill of Rights, and much of it is unrewarding to boot. While AMFV had some similar problems, at least it was worth going through the story. The illogic of the puzzles in Trinity was substantially worse than anything in _Alice_ (which was, after all, written by a logician), they were nested worse than Zork II, the inventory limit was brutal, there were time limits everywhere, and eventually I tired of them. Going through the walkthrough didn’t even explain the logic of the early puzzles after they were “solved”, at which point I gave up.

It probably didn’t help that I already knew the history of the US and Russian nuclear programs, which meant the local color / scenery wasn’t interesting. I didn’t find the magic spell recipe, which is an annoying gimmick anyway, without hints. At least with AMFV I wanted to finish the story; I cared enough to read through the walkthrough; though it’s a very flawed game. With Trinity, I didn’t care.

But I feel like Wishbringer actually had more to say than either AMFV or Trinity… The contrast of *practically every single thing* with its “evil alternate” which *isn’t very different* really keeps sticking with me, something about the fine line between good and evil…

- Lisa H.

March 6, 2021 at 5:50 pm

Going through the walkthrough didn’t even explain the logic of the early puzzles after they were “solved”

Which ones are you referring to?

I like Trinity, but my actual favorite is probably Hitchhiker’s Guide followed maybe by Arthur (!). AMFV is atmospheric, but the fact that the bulk of the gameplay is passive wandering around and looking at things is kind of dull. I have never solved any Infocom game without hints (in fact my usual tack was to read the Invisiclues through first) so that doesn’t factor in for me.

Trinity Postscript: Selling Tragedy
February 26, 2015

Like A Mind Forever Voyaging, Trinity seemed destined to become a casualty of an industry that just wasn’t equipped to appreciate what it was trying to do. Traditional game-review metrics like “fun” or “value for money” only cheapened it, while reviewers lacked the vocabulary to even begin to really address its themes. Most were content to simply mention, in passing and often with an obvious unease, that those themes were present. In Computer Gaming World, for instance, Scorpia said that it was “not for the squeamish,” would require of the player “some unpleasant actions,” that it was “overall a serious game, not a light-hearted one,” and then on to the firmer ground of puzzle hints. And that was downright thoughtful in comparison to Shay Addams’s review for Questbusters, which tried in a weird and clunky way to be funny in all the ways that Trinity doesn’t: “It blowed up real good!” runs the review’s tagline, which goes on to ask if they’ll be eating “fission chips” in the Kensington Gardens after the missiles drop. (Okay, that one’s dumb enough to be worth a giggle…) But the review’s most important point is that Trinity is “mainly a game” again after the first Interactive Fiction Plus title, A Mind Forever Voyaging, so disappointed: “The puzzles are back!”

Even Infocom themselves weren’t entirely sure how to sell or even how to talk about Trinity. The company’s creative management had been unstintingly supportive of Brian Moriarty while he was making the game, but “marketing,” as he said later, “was a little more concerned/disturbed. They didn’t quite know what to make of it.” The matrix of genres didn’t have a slot for “Historical Tragedy.” In the end they slapped a “Fantasy” label on it, although it doesn’t take a long look at Trinity and the previous games to wear that label — the Zork and Enchanter series — to realize that one of these things is not quite like the others.

Moriarty admits to “a few tiffs” with marketing over Trinity, but he was a reasonable guy who also understood that Infocom needed to sell their games and that, while the occasional highbrow press from the likes of The New York Times Book Review had been nice and all, the traditional adventure-game market was the only place they had yet succeeded in consistently doing that. Thus in interviews and other promotions for Trinity he did an uncomfortable dance, trying to talk seriously about the game and the reasons he wrote it while also trying not to scare away people just looking for a fun text adventure. The triangulations can be a bit excruciating: “It isn’t a gloomy game, but it does have a dark undertone to it. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.” (Actually, it is.) Or: “It’s kind of a dark game, but it’s also, I like to think, kind of a fun game too.” (With a ringing endorsement like “I like to think it’s kind of a fun game,” how could anyone resist?)

Trinity’s commercial saving grace proved to be a stroke of serendipity having nothing to do with any of its literary qualities. The previous year Commodore had released what would prove to be their last 8-bit computer, the Commodore 128. Despite selling quite well, the machine had attracted very little software support. The cause, ironically, was also the reason it had done so well in comparison to the Plus/4, Commodore’s previous 8-bit machine. The 128, you see, came equipped with a “64 Mode” in which it was 99.9 percent compatible with the Commodore 64. Forced to choose between a modest if growing 128 user base and the massive 64 user base through which they could also rope in all those 128 users, almost all publishers, with too many incompatible machines to support already, made the obvious choice.

Infocom’s Interactive Fiction Plus system was, however, almost unique in the entertainment-software industry in running on the 128 in its seldom-used (at least for games) native mode. And all those new 128 owners were positively drooling for a game that actually took advantage of the capabilities of their shiny new machines. A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity arrived simultaneously on the Commodore 128 when the Interactive Fiction Plus interpreter was ported to that platform in mid-1986. But the puzzleless A Mind Forever Voyaging was a bit too outré for most gamers’ tastes. Plus it was older, and thus not getting the press or the shelf space that Trinity was. Trinity, on the other hand, fit the bill of “game I can use to show off my 128” just well enough, even for 128 users who might otherwise have had little interest in an all-text adventure game. Infocom’s sales were normally quite evenly distributed across the large range of machines they supported, but Trinity’s were decidedly lopsided in favor of the Commodore 128. Those users’ numbers were enough to push Trinity to the vicinity of 40,000 in sales, not a blockbuster — especially by the standards of Infocom’s glory years — but enough to handily outdo not just A Mind Forever Voyaging but even more traditional recent games like Spellbreaker. Like the Cold War Trinity chronicles, it could have been much, much worse.

Comments
11 Responses

- Brian Moriarty

February 27, 2015 at 5:28 am

“Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time.” (Lennon)

[Unused quote bomb]

- Lisa H.

February 27, 2015 at 7:49 am

Ah, LOL. I like.

- Nate Cull

March 2, 2015 at 8:54 pm

[Squeeee!]

Trinity’s quote bombs had a huge influence on a lot of ’90s IF, as I recall. Thank you for inventing those!

(Though AMFV also had section quotes, but not I think with that particular statusbar-abuse).

- pressurizer

March 1, 2015 at 11:35 am

Today, the notion of using a text-adventure of all things to show off the capabilities of your shiny new computer sounds pretty weird. You had to be a computer-buff to realize how impressive it was.
On a different note, I really admire what Trinity and its developers set out to do. I’m not a fan of text-adventures (and wasn’t back in the day), but your series of articles makes me itch to try it out.

- Dehumanizer

March 2, 2015 at 2:54 pm

Hello. About Trinity and the C128, you might want to add that it’s not just a question of the game (and the other IF Plus games, AMFV, Bureaucracy and Beyond Zork) supporting the C128 natively; it’s also that those games didn’t even have a C64 version (because IF Plus required 80 columns and 128 KB of RAM). So I guess it felt even “better” for C128 owners. :)

- Cliffy

October 23, 2017 at 8:28 pm

I wonder if Trinity would have sold even more units if it ran on a C64 (noting that this is an impossible wish – it wouldn’t have been the game that it was under those hardware constraints). I can assure you I stood many times in my local Waldensoft holding this box in my hands and wishing I could run it. (I have since purchased and played it multiple times in various Infocom collections.)

- tedder

December 24, 2017 at 1:56 am

“serendipity having nothing to do with any its literary qualities.”

Missing “of”.

- Jimmy Maher

December 24, 2017 at 7:55 am

Thanks!

- Allan Holland

April 26, 2020 at 2:07 am

At the end of all this incandescently beautiful writing, and compounded with the thoughtful articles on AMFV, I cant help but wonder how Jimmy’s perspective may have changed on both these seminal works of fiction, interactive or otherwise, given the current global dystopian currents buffeting us all. These articles were written before the nightmare American election of 2016. And way before the pandemic.

- Jimmy Maher

April 26, 2020 at 8:50 am

The Civilization articles included some of my thoughts on Trump and all the rest circa 2018. I don’t know that my opinions are all that altered in the broad strokes. Commenter Brian, responding to the fifth article in that series, wins the award for the most prescient comment ever made on this blog: “We may (hopefully) be entering a post-war era, but watch out for the next pandemic.”

I think the subject of the pandemic is, first and foremost, an almost inconceivably complicated one. No one has all of the right answers, or even perhaps all of the right questions. We’re all flying blind, conducting a massive worldwide experiment on how best to respond to such an event. When the dust has finally settled, we’ll be able to look at all of the different measures which different countries chose to implement and their efficacy, and then, if we’re wise, we’ll be able to do better next time.

Likewise, the jury is very much out on what it will all come to mean in the context of history. I’ve heard some smart people say that it will lead to more isolationism and nationalism in the face of such an insidious “foreign menace,” but I’ve heard equally smart people say that it will lead to a renewal of international cooperation by providing an indelible demonstration that all of us here on Spaceship Earth are ultimately in this thing together. I hope the latter, but we shall see. The optimist in me notes that the phenomenon of most of the globe voluntarily shutting down and jeopardizing its economic future just in order to save the most vulnerable among us would be unimaginable at any other point in history. It does give me hope that these times of ours are not as “dystopian” are they’re sometimes made out to be.

I’ll venture only one bold prediction: when the books about this period come to be written, Donald Trump will be deemed to have written his own political obituary in the spring of 2020. But I do worry what the next six months will bring, as he becomes simultaneously more terrified by that specific reality and more divorced from reality in general.

Bearing more directly on the subject of Trinity: more than ever, I see Russia as the greatest international tragedy of our time, with Gorbachev as its tragic hero. I don’t believe that all countries can or should have exactly the same form of government, but it is abundantly clear to me that Russia’s government continues to fail its people profoundly. Corruption is a cancer that, once it well and truly sets in and becomes a government’s accepted way of conducting itself, is horribly difficult to end. There’s a lesson there for the United States of 2020, which is flirting with just such a diagnosis in its own body politic.

- Allan Holland

May 5, 2020 at 9:39 pm

What a thoughtful and poignant response. Hope you and your family stay safe. Thank you for your insight.

Moonmist
March 12, 2015

THE IMPLEMENTOR’S CREED

I create fictional worlds. I create experiences.

I am exploring a new medium for telling stories.

My readers should become immersed in the story and forget where they are. They should forget about the keyboard and the screen, forget everything but the experience. My goal is to make the computer invisible.

I want as many people as possible to share these experiences. I want a broad range of fictional worlds, and a broad range of “reading levels.” I can categorize our past works and discover where the range needs filling in. I should also seek to expand the categories to reach every popular taste.

In each of my works, I share a vision with the reader. Only I know exactly what the vision is, so only I can make the final decisions about content and style. But I must seriously consider comments and suggestions from any source, in the hope that they will make the sharing better.

I know what an artist means by saying, “I hope I can finish this work before I ruin it.” Each work-in-progress reaches a point of diminishing returns, where any change is as likely to make it worse as to make it better. My goal is to nurture each work to that point. And to make my best estimate of when it will reach that point.

I can’t create quality work by myself. I rely on other implementors to help me both with technical wizardry and with overcoming the limitations of the medium. I rely on testers to tell me both how to communicate my vision better and where the rough edges of the work need polishing. I rely on marketeers and salespeople to help me share my vision with more readers. I rely on others to handle administrative details so I can concentrate on the vision.

None of my goals is easy. But all are worth hard work. Let no one doubt my dedication to my art.

Stu Galley wrote the words you see above in early September of 1985, a time when Infocom was reeling through layoff after torturous layoff and looked very likely to be out of business in a matter of months. It served as a powerful affirmation of what Infocom really stood for, just as the misplaced dreams of Al Vezza and his Business Products people — grandiose in their own way but also so much more depressingly conventional — threatened to halt the dream of a new interactive literature in its tracks. “The Implementor’s Creed” is one of the most remarkable — certainly the most idealistic — texts to come out of Infocom. It’s also vintage Stu Galley, the Imp who couldn’t care less about Zork but burned with passion for the idea of interactive fiction actually worthy of its name.

Galley’s passion and its associated perfectionism could sometimes make his life very difficult. In the final analysis perhaps a better critic of interactive fiction than a writer of it — his advice was frequently sought and always highly valued by all of the other Imps for their own projects — he would be plagued throughout his years at Infocom by self-doubt and an inability to come up with the sorts of original plots and puzzles that seemed to positively ooze from the likes of Steve Meretzky. Galley’s first completed game, The Witness, was developed from an outline provided by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling, while for his second, Seastalker, he collaborated with the prolific (if usually uncredited) children’s author Jim Lawrence. After finishing Seastalker, he had the idea to write a Cold War espionage thriller, tentatively called Checkpoint: “You, an innocent train traveler in a foreign country, get mixed up with spies and have to be as clever as they to survive.” He struggled for six months with Checkpoint, almost as long as it took some Imps to create a complete game, before voluntarily shelving it: “The problem there was that the storyline wasn’t sufficiently well developed to make it really interesting. I guess I had a vision of a certain kind of atmosphere in the writing that was rather hard to bring off.” Suffering from writer’s block as he was, it seemed a very good idea to everyone to pair him up again with Lawrence late in 1985.

Just as Seastalker had been a Tom Swift, Jr., story with the serial numbers not-so-subtly filed away, the new game, eventually to be called Moonmist, would be crafted in the image of an even more popular children’s book protagonist with whom Lawrence had heaps of experience: none other than the original girl detective, Nancy Drew. She was actually fresher in Lawrence’s mind than Tom: he had spent much of his time during the first half of the 1980s anonymously churning out at least seven Nancy Drew novels for the Stratemeyer Syndicate, creators and owners of both the Tom and Nancy lines. As in Seastalker, you provide Moonmist with a name and gender when the game begins. The game and its accompanying feelies, however, would really kind of prefer it if you could see your way to playing as a female. Preferably as a female named “Nancy Drew,” if it’s all the same to you.

The plot is classic Nancy, a mystery set in a romantic old house, with a hint of the supernatural for spice. You’ve received a letter from your friend Tamara, for whom a semester abroad in Britain has turned into an engagement to a Cornish lord. It seems she has need for a girl detective. She’s living with her Lord Jack now at his Tresyllian Castle — chastely, in her own bedroom, of course — and all is not well. Lord Jack’s father, Lionel, was a globetrotting adventurer who recently died of “some sort of fatal jungle disease” that he may or may not have accidentally contracted. Lord Jack’s last girlfriend, the beautiful Deirdre, became entangled with his best friend Ian as well, and then allegedly committed suicide by throwing herself off some nearby cliffs after Jack broke it off with her in retaliation. Now her ghost is frequently seen haunting the castle and, Tamara claims, trying to kill her with venomous spiders and snakes. Joining you, Lord Jack, Tamara, and Ian at the castle for a memorial dinner marking the first anniversary of Lord Lionel’s death are Vivien, a painter and sculptor and the local bohemian; Iris, a Mayfair debutante who may or may not have something going with Ian; Dr. Wendish, Lord Lionel’s old best mate; and a slick antique dealer named Montague Hyde who’s eager to buy up the castle’s contents and sell them to the highest bidder.

Labelled as an “Introductory” level game, Moonmist splits the difference between earlier Infocom games to bear its “Mystery” genre tag. It doesn’t use the innovative player-driven plot chronology of the most recent of those, Ballyhoo, opting like Deadline, The Witness, and Suspect for a more simulationist turn-by-turn clock that gives you just a single night to solve the mystery. However, you the player don’t have to engage in the complicated, perfectly timed story interventions demanded by those earlier mysteries. After the events of the dinner party that sets the plot in motion, Moonmist is actually quite static, leaving you to your own devices to search the castle for clues and assemble a case that will reveal exactly what happened to Deirdre and who is dressing up as her ghost every night. (You didn’t think the ghost was real, did you? If so, you haven’t had much exposure to Nancy Drew or the works she spawned — like, for instance, Scooby-Doo.) You’ll also need to find a mysterious treasure brought back to Cornwall by Lord Lionel after one of his expeditions abroad. Depending on which version of Moonmist’s mystery you’re playing, therein may also lie another nefarious plot.

But wait… which version? Yes. We’ve come to the most interesting innovation in Moonmist. The identity of the guilty one(s) and the nature of the treasure change in four variations of the plot, which you choose between in-character by telling the butler your “favorite color” at the beginning of the game: green, blue, red, or yellow. (I’ve listed them in general order of complexity and difficulty, and thus in the order you might want to try them if you play Moonmist for yourself.) Infocom had tried a branching plotline once before, in Cutthroats, but not handled it terribly well. There the plot suddenly branched randomly well over halfway through the game, leading you the intrepid diver to explore one of two completely different sunken shipwrecks. If the objective was to make an Infocom game last longer, the Cutthroats approach was nonsensical; it just resulted in two unusually short experiences that added up to a standard Infocom game, not a full-length experience that could somehow be experienced afresh multiple times. And randomly choosing the story branch was just annoying, forcing the player to figure out when the branch was about to happen, save, and then keep reloading until the story went in the direction she hadn’t yet seen. The worst-case scenario would have to be the player who never even realized that the branch was happening at all, who was just left thinking she’d paid a lot of money for a really short adventure game.

While it’s not without problems of its own, Moonmist’s approach makes a lot more sense. I do wish you were allowed to name your color a bit later; this would save you from having to play through a long sequence of identical introductions and preparations for the dinner party that kicks off the mystery in earnest. Still, Moonmist’s decision to reuse the same stage set, as it were — rooms, objects, and characters — in the service of four different plots is a clever one, especially in light of the limitations of the 128 K Z-Machine. It’s of course an approach to ludic mystery that already had a long history by the time of Moonmist, beginning with the board game Cluedo back in 1949 and including in the realm of computer games the randomized mysteries of Electronic Arts’s not-quite-successful Murder on the Zinderneuf and the hand-crafted plots of Accolade’s stellar Killed Until Dead amongst others.

Moonmist is, alas, less successful at crafting 4 mysteries out of the same cast and stage than Killed Until Dead is at making 21. Moonmist’s variations simply aren’t varied enough. Although the perpetrator, the treasure, and the incriminating evidence change, the process of finding them and assembling a case is the same from variation to variation. After you’ve solved one of the cases, and thus know the steps you need to follow, solving the others is fairly trivial. The process of finding Lord Lionel’s treasure is literally a scavenger hunt, a matter of following a trail of not-terribly-challenging clues in the form of written messages until you arrive at its conclusion. The guilty guest, meanwhile, is readily identifiable as the one person who leaves the dinner party and starts poking restlessly around the rest of the castle. And once the treasure is secured and the guilty one identified it’s mostly just a matter of searching that person’s room carefully to come up with the incriminating evidence you need and making an “arrest.” The changes from variation to variation amount to no more than a handful of objects placed in different rooms or swapped out and replaced with others, along with a bare few paragraphs of altered text. Although they’re not randomly generated, the cases feel unsatisfying enough that they almost just as well could have been; there’s a distinct “Colonel Mustard in the lounge with the candlestick” feel about the whole experience. Even the exact words that the guilty party says to you never change from variation to variation. Most damningly, Moonmist never even begins to succeed in giving you the feeling that you’re actually solving a mystery — the feeling that was so key to the appeal of Infocom’s original trilogy of mystery games. You’re just jumping through the hoops that will satisfy the game and cause it to spit out the full story in the form of the few bland sentences that follow your unmasking of the mastermind.

Some of these shortcomings can doubtless be laid at the feet of the aging 128 K Z-Machine, whose limitations were beginning to bite hard into Infocom’s own expectations of even a modest work like Moonmist by 1986. Even reusing most of the environment apparently didn’t give Galley and Lawrence enough room to craft four mysteries that truly felt unique. On the contrary, they were forced to save space by off-loading many of the room descriptions into a tourist’s guide to Tresyllian Castle included with the documentation. So-called “paragraph books” fleshing out stories (and providing copy protection) via text that couldn’t be packed into the game proper would soon become a staple of CRPGs of the latter half of the decade wishing to be a bit more ambitious in their storytelling than simple hack-and-slashers like Wizardry and The Bard’s Tale. But a CRPG is a very different sort of experience from a text adventure, and what’s tolerable or even kind of fun in the former doesn’t work at all in the latter. Having to constantly flip through a slick tourist brochure for room descriptions in Moonmist absolutely kills the atmosphere of a setting that should have fairly dripped with it. Tresyllian Castle is, after all, set on a spooky moor lifted straight out of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and comes complete with everything an American tourist thinks a British castle should, including a hedge maze (thankfully not implemented as an in-game maze), a dungeon, and a network of secret passages.

The text’s scarcity is doubly disappointing because the writing, when it’s there, is… well, I’m not sure I’d label it “great” or even “good,” but it is perfectly evocative of the sort of formulaically comforting children’s literature Jim Lawrence had so much experience crafting. How you react to it may very well depend on your own childhood experiences with Nancy Drew — or, perhaps more likely if you’re male like me, with her Stratemeyer Syndicate stablemates The Hardy Boys (yet another line for which Lawrence, inevitably, wrote a number of books). Just the idea of a white-haired old man raised in the swing era trying to write from the perspective of a 1980s teenager is weird; Nancy, born a teenager in 1930, is like Barbie and Bart Simpson eternally stuck at the same age both physically and mentally. Given that Nancy is, like Barbie, largely an aspirational fantasy for those who read her, Lawrence tries to make her life everything he thinks a contemporary twelve-year-old girl — the sweet spot of the Nancy Drew demographic — wishes her life could be in a few years. And given the artificial nature of the whole concept and its means of production, Nancy, and therefore Moonmist, inhabit a sort of cartoon reality where people routinely behave in ways that we never, ever see them behaving in real life. See, for example, your first meeting with Ian and Iris, nonsensically dancing together to pass the time before dinner “to the faint sound of rock music from a portable radio on a table nearby.” I mean, really, who the hell starts dancing just to pass the time, and who dances to the “faint sound of rock music?” Once or twice the writing veers into the creepy zone, as when Lawrence declares, “My, what a fine figure of a woman!” when you take off your clothes preparatory to taking a bath. But mostly it manages to be quaint and nostalgically charming with its mixture of Girl Power and romantic teenage giddiness.

"My fiance, Lord Jack Tresyllian," Tamara introduces him. "Jack, this is my friend from the States, Miss Nancy Drew."

"So you're that famous young sleuth whom the Yanks call Miss Sherlock!" says Lord Jack. "Tammy's told me about the mysteries you've solved -- but she never let on you looked so smashing! Welcome to Cornwall, Nancy luv!"

Before you know it, he sweeps you into his arms and kisses you warmly! Let's hope Tamara doesn't mind -- but for the moment all you can see are Lord Jack's dazzling sapphire-blue eyes.

Considered as an Infocom game rather than a Nancy Drew novel, however, Moonmist is afflicted with a terminal identity crisis. Infocom had been making a dangerous habit of conflating the idea of an introductory-level game for adults with that of a game for children for some time already by the time it appeared. Seastalker, the first game to explicitly identify itself as a kinder, gentler Infocom product, had originally been marketed upon its release in June of 1984 as a story for children, trailblazer for a whole line of “Interactive Fiction Junior” that would hopefully soon be selling madly to the same generation of kids that was snapping up Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks by the millions. Sadly, that never happened — doubtless not least because a Choose Your Own Adventure book cost $2 or so, Seastalker $30 or more. Upon the release exactly one year later of Brian Moriarty’s Wishbringer, an introductory-level game written using the same adult diction of most of Infocom’s other games, the “Junior” line was quietly dropped and Seastalker relabeled to join Wishbringer as an “Introductory” game, despite the fact that the two were quite clearly different beasts entirely. Then, in October of 1986, Moonmist was also released as simply an adult “Introductory” game — but, as just about the entire article that precedes this paragraph attests, Jim Lawrence and Stu Galley apparently didn’t get a memo somewhere along the line. Moonmist the digital artifact was, in opposition to Moonmist the marketing construct, plainly children’s literature. At best — particularly if she used to read Nancy Drew — the adult player was likely to find Moonmist nostalgically charming. At worst, it could read as condescending. Any computer game released into the cutthroat industry of 1986 was facing a serious problem if it didn’t know exactly what it was and whom could be expected to buy it. Moonmist, alas, wasn’t quite sure of either.

That said, Moonmist actually did somewhat better than one might have expected given this confusion. Its final sales would end up at around 33,000 copies, worse than those of Seastalker but not dramatically so. There’s good reason for its modern status as one of Infocom’s less-remembered and less-loved games: it’s definitely one of the slighter works in the canon. Certainly only hardcore fans are likely to summon the motivation to complete all four cases. Despite its shortcomings, though, others may find it worth sampling one or two cases, and historians may be interested in experiencing this early interactive take on Nancy Drew published many years before the long-running — indeed, still ongoing — series of graphic adventures that Her Interactive began releasing in the late 1990s.

Moonmist would mark the last time that Stu Galley or Jim Lawrence would be credited as the author of an Infocom game. Lawrence returned to print fiction, where he could make a lot more money a lot more quickly than he could writing text adventures. Galley remained at Infocom until the bitter end, working on technology and on one or two more game ideas that would frustratingly never come to fruition. Given just how in love he was with the potential of interactive fiction, it does seem a shame that he never quite managed to write a game that hit it out of the park. On the other hand, his quiet enthusiasm and wisdom probably contributed more than any of us realize to many of those Infocom games that did.

(In addition to the Get Lamp interviews, this article draws from some of the internal emails and other documents that were included on the Masterpieces of Infocom CD. An interview with Galley in the June 1986 issue of Zzap! was also useful.)

Comments
46 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

March 12, 2015 at 3:20 pm

I’m pretty sure the game says “My, what a fine figure of a man!” if you play as male. Whether anyone has used that phrasing ever in reference to a male is another question.

I didn’t remember the game telling you to read the tourist brochure for room descriptions. Were there instances of important information only appearing there?

- X

March 13, 2015 at 6:18 am

Let me Google that for you: fine figure of a man

- Jimmy Maher

March 13, 2015 at 6:58 am

I just know it as the first line of a great Elvis Costello song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwGdB4Gj7Js

- Jimmy Maher

March 13, 2015 at 6:35 am

Actually, if you’re playing as a man, you get this instead:

>remove outfit
Okay... You immediately wish for central heating!

And yes, there’s lots of absolutely essential information in the tourist brochure. For instance, the umbrella stand in the entryway, which is never mentioned at all by the game’s text, but critical to solving one of the cases.

- Duncan Stevens

March 13, 2015 at 7:44 pm

I don’t remember ever seeing that line at all (and I know I tried playing both as male and female because I noticed some of the other changes, like Jack smooching me). Different releases? It seems unlikely.

- Duncan Stevens

March 13, 2015 at 7:49 pm

This magazine article quotes the “what a fine figure of a man” line:

http://rupazero.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Volume-2-Issue-2-gender-and-sexuality.pdf

So maybe it really did change in different releases.

- Rob Childers

July 27, 2021 at 11:10 pm

The game gives you that line if you used a gender-neutral prefix (instead of Mr, Ms, or what-have-you) when giving your name and favorite color at the beginning.

- Lisa H.

July 28, 2021 at 6:28 pm

The game recognizes several gendered titles from a fixed list; if you give any other word at all in that position (including things that are not titles), it flags the player as “unknown gender”.

- Rob Childers

July 28, 2021 at 9:01 pm

And if you pick some color other than blue, red, yellow, or green, you’ll be assigned one of those colors, Bolitho telling you that the guest room is decorated in your chosen color plus one of the main colors. I don’t think the color assigned to you in these circumstances is entirely random; purple, for instance, always seems to get me yellow along with it.

- Lisa H.

July 28, 2021 at 11:02 pm

There actually used to be violet and orange variations, but they were taken out before release. https://github.com/the-infocom-files/moonmist/blob/develop/colors.zil has the routines that deals with the player’s name and color selection, GET-NAME and GET-COLOR. The list of titles it recognizes is readable in GET-NAME and I got the general idea of what it was doing with the GENDER-KNOWN flag, but I don’t know enough about the workings of ZIL to understand how it’s picking a color if you don’t enter one of the preset ones. I thought I’d read elsewhere that it was supposed to be random, but I’m not seeing PROB or RANDOM kinds of commands in the routine, so maybe not. As I said, though, I don’t really know what I’m looking at so I could be wrong.

- Duncan Stevens

March 12, 2015 at 3:42 pm

Also, the ghost is real in one version. (Which, as I recall, makes the gameplay more annoying, as you have to be in the right place to find the ghost when it shows up, not just ferret out the costume.)

- Jayle Enn

March 12, 2015 at 5:01 pm

That one stymied me until I typed ‘scream’ and the ghost responded like any other character in the game.

- Rob Childers

July 28, 2021 at 5:00 am

The version where you actually encounter the ghost is the only place you really have a use for the aerosol device Bolitho gives you after he shows you to your room (you spray it in the “ghost’s” eyes), and you don’t even really need it there. It’s in all four scenarios, and Bolitho makes a point of giving it to you, and you don’t even really need it for anything.

- Jimmy Maher

March 13, 2015 at 6:40 am

The ghost is never actually real. In one variation you do catch the ghost in the act rather than just finding the costume, but it’s nevertheless a costumed person. The ending text explains very clearly who and why.

- Peter Piers

January 5, 2016 at 8:24 pm

Funny, I seemed to remember the ghost being real in one variation… with nothing to back me up, though, I’ll put it down to memory playing tricks.

- Peter Ferrie

February 5, 2016 at 10:51 pm

I seem to remember that if you know the location of a particular entrance to the secret passages (by having played previously), you can just wait there until the “ghost” arrives, and solve that mystery immediately.

- Duncan Stevens

March 12, 2015 at 3:46 pm

On artificial behavior, the game has something like an “angry” flag that is triggered if you’re discovered searching a person’s room. If the flag is on, the person won’t talk to you (or allow you to keep searching the room). APOLOGIZE, and the person will happily start talking again and, I think, leave the room so you can continue to search. It’s the Radio Button Theory of Emotions.

- Jayle Enn

March 12, 2015 at 5:05 pm

I remember enjoying Moonmist, but I was young and a big fan of books like Nancy Drew and the Three Investigators, so definitely part of the target audience. I still look back on the Ghosts of Cornwall feelie booklet fondly.

- Nathanael

March 6, 2021 at 11:02 am

Likewise. I also enjoyed Moonmist enough to play all four variations (!!!) but I have a very long set of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books lurking in my closet…

The slightly cardboard/cliched nature of the characters helped a lot with the problem of having plausible NPCs in interactive fiction. You don’t expect them to have complex responses, they don’t in the Hardy Boys either!

- Keith Palmer

March 12, 2015 at 10:09 pm

Moonmist has stuck with me, but I’d say a big part of that could well have been, oddly enough, finding a thoroughly negative review of it in the May 1987 issue of 80 Micro in the early 1990s. That magazine hadn’t bothered to review any of the other Infocom games since Deadline and Starcross; even though it was then adding coverage of Tandy’s MS-DOS clones in an increasingly uneasy blend with coverage of the old Z-80 “TRSDOS” computers, it pretty much seemed pitched to a subscriber base of “Serious Self-Sufficient Programmers” at that point. (It had, however, run an equally negative review of the “Rambo: First Blood Part II” text adventure the year before, and in the very issue the Moonmist review was complaining about how similar the variants were and how “nowhere is there the least hint that your character is any danger,” the editor did muse about the good old days of low-resolution TRS-80 games…)

In any case, when we did get “The Lost Treasures of Infocom” I’d wound up with the impression it would be best to get to Moonmist quickly. I seem to recall playing it right after Zork I, and I have the impression I managed to finish it without resorting to the hint book, which I have to admit still means a good deal to me… although, while I figured out how to prompt the other three variants, I never bothered to play through them. In any case, it seems it was only while contemplating the upcoming discussion of the game here that I really started to think the game character was “supposed” to be female, what with being invited to visit a just-married female friend (the letter that set that up wasn’t included in “The Lost Treasures of Infocom” manual, although I’ve since managed to see it), although I then got to wondering if that was just letting “gender expectations” show. I also have the impression the game wasn’t completely unfavourably compared to a more recent text adventure with its own “variants” in a review, but when I went looking at “An Act of Murder” on IFDB I couldn’t turn it up, so now I have no idea of where I might have seen the comparison.

- Mark Ricard

April 10, 2015 at 3:30 am

Keith ,I also remmeber that review on IFDB. So you did not imagine it.

- Peter Piers

January 5, 2016 at 8:26 pm

I did a double-review of Moonmist and Act of Murder once. It’s not there anymore, by choice. You didn’t imagine it, folks. :)

- Lisa H.

March 12, 2015 at 10:43 pm

After finishing Seastalker, he had the idea to write a Cold War espionage thriller, tentatively called Checkpoint: “You, an innocent train traveler in a foreign country, get mixed up with spies and have to be as clever as they to survive.”

I take it Checkpoint eventually became Border Zone?

including a hedge maze (thankfully not implemented as an in-game maze)

If you’ll permit me a moment for some heartfealt swearing at Hollywood Hijinx…

- Lisa H.

March 13, 2015 at 12:31 am

*heartfelt. I can’t type.

- Jimmy Maher

March 13, 2015 at 6:56 am

Yes, the bare idea was obviously recycled to become Border Zone. I get the impression, however, that the text and code of that game was all pretty much original to Marc Blank. More when we get there and I’ve researched a bit more!

- Scott Gage

March 13, 2015 at 3:32 am

Typo time:

(You didn’t the ghost was real, did you? If so, you haven’t had much exposure to Nancy Drew or the works she spawned — like, for instance, Scooby-Doo.)

Need a think in there.

- Jimmy Maher

March 13, 2015 at 6:57 am

Thanks!

- Jason Scott

March 13, 2015 at 6:52 am

If a fairy came down and said “ok, you will have never made GET LAMP but Stu Galley becomes your dad” I would have jumped at it. What a great guy.

- Brian Moriarty

March 13, 2015 at 11:14 pm

A bit of Moonmist trivia.

Also: Border Zone is a completely different game from Checkpoint (which still exists, by the way).

- Jimmy Maher

March 14, 2015 at 8:29 am

I certainly noticed it, but didn’t want to say anything definite about it because it’s never definitely stated as such in the game’s text. I would have considered baldly claiming Deidre and Vivien to be a “lesbian couple,” as the article referenced in the Wikipedia link does, to be majorly overreaching on the evidence of the text alone. Isn’t it more a depiction of unrequited love than a relationship?

Part of the reason that I was reluctant get deeper into this aspect of the game may be because it would represent such a depressingly typical depiction of homosexuality for its era. A stereotypical dike is obsessed with a young, heterosexual virtuous girl, and it drives her to murder… Yuck. In retrospect, though, that’s important in its own right.

- Peter Piers

January 5, 2016 at 8:32 pm

“Checkpoint (which still exists, by the way).”

The collector in me has sprung to attention! Where would it exist, specifically?

- Lisa H.

March 14, 2015 at 5:05 am

Re: player gender, You can get some sorta-gender-neutral gameplay and a few amusing responses if you don’t follow the game’s prompting to use a gendered title like “Lady” or “Mr.” and instead type in something nonsensical.

- Jimmy Maher

March 14, 2015 at 8:38 am

Okay, mystery solved. I had entered by name as “Herr Helmut Kohl” just for grins. I’d assumed the game had recognized the “Herr,” which was impressive but not entirely unexpected, as the documentation mentions it understanding things like “Dame,” etc. It seems it really didn’t understand at all, and just went the sexually ambiguous route…

- Michael Davis

March 21, 2015 at 11:53 pm

So is that maybe why you didn’t get the “fine figure of a man” line?

- Oren Ronen

March 14, 2015 at 10:46 am

Reading this made me revisit the Japanese version of Moonmist, the oddest choice of the four Inform games localized into the language years after the originals had been published.

Much like the other games, this is an impressive effort, and I’d love to hear the story behind it and how it was implemented. The feelies are all represented: the letters are written in what seems to me like a proper young Japanese woman’s handwriting, and the rest, though pushed to the back of the instructions manual instead of being separate booklets, are reproduced in full. They even added a few pages of character descriptions complete with illustrated portraits.

The game opens with an elaborately animated reproduction of the Moonmist cover art for a title screen, and then, much like the other Japanese Infocom games, goes into a somewhat enhanced version of the Zork 0 interface. You get a graphical compass rose, an illustrated background behind the text that changes along with the location, customizable shortcuts for common verbs as well as a list of items available in the current location and a graphical inventory where each item gets its own little icon, Monkey Island style. The full Invisiclues hints are also included online, along with a system that prevents you to look at too many of them.

The game features a full-sentence Japanese parser accepting both kanji and input written just in kana (if you don’t know why this is impressive for an early ‘90s game, trust me that it is). The translation itself is excellent, though I was struck by a few oddities the very first minute of the game. The original game tried to deduct your sex from the title you choose when entering your name. This doesn’t work at all in Japanese, and so you choose your sex from a menu. Thing is, the menu has three options – the expected male and female, but also okama. Reading the comments above I can see why it’s there — the original game code had a path for uncertain gender which the translators had to deal with — but it’s a very odd term to come across on the game’s second move. Color is also chosen from a menu and unlike the original the game then asks for your age, though I have no idea whether it has any effect on the text later on or not.

Maybe I’ll play some more along with the English original and try to figure it out.

- Oren Ronen

March 14, 2015 at 10:48 am

Alas, the link in the comment above got broken — just remove the extra quotation mark from the end of the URL.

- Jimmy Maher

March 14, 2015 at 11:32 am

I edited the link for you. It works now. ;)

And thanks for this! It’s quite fascinating, especially the amount of effort that was put into the port. It’s doubly odd to do so much work for such a — if saying this is not too unkind — slight game.

And replacing the gender-neutral choice with an explicitly gay one? That’s *really* weird, especially as I was under the impression that Japanese culture of the 1980s and 1990s was even more conservative about that sort of thing than American.

- Mark Ricard

April 10, 2015 at 3:32 am

Was this like the format Legend used with it’s text adventures in the 90s?

- Andrew McCarthy

March 17, 2015 at 3:34 pm

Only four colors? But I expressly requested six!

“Play it again, Sam.”

Four colors? I thought we agreed to six.

- SHOlafsson

March 20, 2015 at 2:34 pm

Finally made it here after a reading binge much to the chagrin of my family. I must have been very much a middle of the road adventurer, since I never made it anywhere with either Seastalker or Moomist (much as I didn’t with the hard ones, Starcross, Suspended or Sorcerer). Gee now I need to dig up the list of completed text adventures from my youth :). I am thoroughly enjoying your work, it brings back so many memories plus all the things I was not aware of.
Your Amiga book is on my Amazon wishlist for purchase when I make it to the States. (A second passion we seem to have shared.) If I am ever in your neck of the woods I offer to buy beers, unfortunately my coming trip to Jylland probably does not allow a stop in Odense. All the best to you and your family, and may this blog continue for a long time to come!

- CJGeringer

January 13, 2016 at 7:20 pm

Could it be that the nfour variations of plots were nto so much to increase replay value, but to give diferent people slightly diferent experiences? similar to how the Little computer people had variations?

The colour question does not seem to indicate what it does, and someone replaying the game does not really have a reason to change this answer.

Maybe Infocom, just wanted it to foster interesting conversations that would help the game´s sale,s since infocom seem to have been unusually savvy in how to foster a kind of community among it´s fans?

- Jimmy Maher

January 13, 2016 at 7:34 pm

No, it was pretty prominently promoted on the basis of being replayable. From The Status Line newsletter, Summer 1986:

Moonmist has four different variations[…]. This gives Moonmist more replay value than any other Infocom story to date.

- Daniel

April 26, 2019 at 2:14 pm

Nitpicking (and a few years late), but I think it should be venomous instead of poisonous. Poisonous kills you if you ingest it, venomous is if it kills you when it bites you.

- Jimmy Maher

April 27, 2019 at 7:37 am

Fair enough. Thanks!

- Jake

August 26, 2021 at 1:19 pm

I noticed the Moonmist article is not included in the .epub Infocom Ebook. Is this an oversight?

- Jimmy Maher

August 26, 2021 at 3:05 pm

Yes, must have been. Sorry. I’ll look into it and report back…

Leather Goddesses of Phobos (or, Sex Comes to the Micros — Again)
March 5, 2015

For a brief moment there circa 1981, it looked like Softporn was going to spawn a whole new genre of sexy software. Following that game’s release and its massive-by-the-standards-of-1981 commercial success, others rushed to jump on the bandwagon, and the phrase “bedroom hacker” suddenly took on a whole new meaning. The titles conveyed the programs’ contents pretty well: Bedtime Stories, Dirty Old Man, Encounter, Zesty Zodiacs. Those wanting to get right down to business could presumably buy the straightforwardly named Sex Disk, while those more into foreplay could pick up Wanna Play Footsie?. My personal favorite, which makes me laugh every time for some reason, is Pornopoly. Some ambitious entrepreneurs even formed a program-of-the-month club for adult software, The Dirty Book. Their advertisements trumpeted the microcomputer “sexplosion,” promising “bedroom programs and games geared to creative, joyful living and loving,” the “opportunity to chart your own course to greater intimacy and satisfaction in the months to come.” Virtually all of this stuff was, whatever your opinion of its subject matter, pretty low-rent in execution, managing to make Softporn, hardly a marvel of writing or programming in its own right, look downright classy. But the quality of adult software never got a chance to improve in the way of other genres because suddenly, barely a year after the sexplosion began, it was all over. It was the would-be home-computer revolution that killed it.

A near-hysteria against videogames was sweeping certain sectors of the United States at that time. This was the era when entire towns were banning videogame arcades, when the Surgeon General was claiming they “addicted children, body and soul.” Makers of home computers were eager to not only avoid being tarred with the same brush, but to capitalize on the travails of the arcades and the videogame consoles by positioning a home computer like the Commodore VIC-20 as the better, healthier family alternative to an Atari VCS. A home computer, so the ad copy claimed, was first and foremost educational, a point always backed up with glossy photos of beaming children learning math or their ABCs in front of a glowing screen. A game like Pornopoly was, to say the least, not exactly compatible with that image. Indeed, American culture as a whole was changing when it came to matters of the flesh. The Christian Right was a major force to be reckoned with in American politics following Jerry Falwell’s founding of the Moral Majority in 1979 and the major role it played in getting Ronald Reagan elected President the following year. Now public attitudes toward sex were beginning to lurch back toward the wholesome 1950s, away from the revolutionary 1960s and the free-and-easy 1970s.

And so the sexplosion petered out prematurely. Even at Sierra the dying embers of California hippie decadence that had led to that famous Softporn hot-tub cover photo were fading out as the marketers and venture capitalists rushed in. Softporn itself was pulled off the market within a couple of years of its release, despite the fact that it was still selling very well, and Roberta Williams underwent a headspinning transformation from the topless swinger on the cover of Softporn to the wholesome Great Mom behind family-friendly titles like King’s Quest, Mickey’s Space Adventure, and Mixed-Up Mother Goose. Even Electronic Arts, who dearly wanted to see software as the next big trend for with-it hipsters, were careful to stay well away from any hint of sex in their games.

But of course sex never, ever really goes away. It just goes underground. With sexy software now too hot for “legitimate” distributors or shops to handle, the latest programs were traded about for free — often via the burgeoning network of pirate bulletin-board systems — or sold via advertisements in the backs of the sorts of less-than-discerning “alternative weeklies” of which every major city seemed to have at least one specimen. The character of the programs themselves changed as well. The first generation of sexy software had been relatively staid as such things go, more akin to one of the ubiquitous soft-core couple’s manuals found in such quantity on bookstore shelves then and now than hardcore pornography. This attitude extended to intent as well as content: most of these programs were quite clearly pitched to adults who would use them to enhance a relationship or social Sexy Times. The new generation of games and programs, however, was all too obviously created by the teenage boys who were beginning to dominate amongst computer users — teenage boys who had watched their share of porn but had little to no experience with actual sex. Their audience was likewise looking for something unabashedly designed to help them get off — solo.

Amongst the earliest and the most popular of all this lot was a little charmer of a text adventure called Farmer’s Daughter. It’s about exactly the teenage fantasy its name would imply: “She’s wearing tight denim shorts and a skimpy white halter top, her nipples just about poking right through. She looks about sixteen… and willing!!!” Originally created on a Commodore 64 by a couple of teenagers named R.W. Fisher and D.W.J. Sarhan and sold through advertisements in Playboy and National Lampoon amongst other places (Fisher claims they “sold a ton”), Farmer’s Daughter was hugely played, traded, and ported within the pirate underground, enough to make it one of the most popular text adventures of all time. This was one that every teenage hacker just had to have in his collection, and thanks to its subject matter one he was much more likely to earnestly try to play than just about any other. With a claim at least as great as that of Softporn to being the urtext of a whole genre of “adult interactive fiction” — Farmer’s Daughter is actually pornographic; Softporn, despite its name, isn’t — it’s still remembered by some with nostalgia even today. In 2001, one “Despoiler” even made a new version to run on modern interactive-fiction interpreters.

Farmer’s Daughter is actually one of the subtler specimens of its type, playing out largely like just another home-grown text adventure until you get to the big climax. A more typical example of one of these blue-balled fever dreams is Mad Party Fucker: “You have been invited to a party at a huge mansion. It is rumored that whores will be there. You come there nude and ready for action.” (You’re destined for the social faux pas of the century if those “rumors” turn out not to be true and this is just an ordinary old dinner party…) The hilarity of that tagline is unfortunately undercut by the ugliness of its other part: “The object of this game is to fuck as many women as you can without getting bufu’ed by fags (contracting AIDS).”

By no means did the horn-dogs confine themselves to text. In addition to endless variants of strip poker — many of them inevitably featuring the era’s most popular pinup girl, Samantha Fox — there were all sorts of rhythmic action games on offer, of varying degrees of grossness. Have a look at the website Girls of ’64 sometime and marvel and shudder at the sheer quantity and variety of the offerings. Disgusting as so much of this stuff is, there’s also something quaint about it. In just another decade or so the arrival of the Internet in homes would mean that never again would teenage boys have to satisfy their lust with pixelated, sometimes almost indecipherable 8-bit graphics and text adventures, for God’s sake.

The respectable magazines of the trade press, not to mention the shop shelves, gave no hint of this hyperactive pornographic underground. Through the brief home-computer boom and bust of 1982 to 1985 commercial software was almost universally G-rated. Sexual content began to creep back into the software overground only in about 1986. By this time the home-computer revolution had, as we’ve noted in plenty of earlier articles, largely come and gone in the eyes of the mainstream media, leaving behind a core of committed hobbyists to which it no longer paid all that much attention. One of the first publishers to sidle back through the door this partially reopened was Jim Levy’s Activision 2.0: both Alter Ego and Portal deal with sex with a bracing frankness. Notably, neither is a “sex game” in the way of those that were once featured in The Dirty Book. They’re rather games with something to say about real life; they include sex simply because sex is a part of life. As such, their sexual content could, and often did, go entirely unremarked by people who didn’t actually play them.

To everyone’s surprise, the first game of the post-bust era that did happily define itself as a “sex game” came from Infocom, heretofore regarded as amongst the most literary and mature of game makers. Leather Goddesses of Phobos put its sexy content front and center in its box copy and advertisements and, most of all, in its title.

Long before Leather Goddesses of Phobos became an actual game, it was a title and a joke — or, rather, a couple of jokes. Just after their move in 1982 into their first real corporate offices on Cambridge’s Wheeler Street, Joel Berez and Marc Blank organized a little housewarming party for Infocom’s handful of staffers and board of directors as well as other intimates — among them staffers at their new G/R Copy PR agency, employees of other local software companies and distributors, even owners of nearby computer shops. Berez and Blank were, claims Steve Meretzky, “extremely hyper” about making sure it came off as the perfect coming-out event for the growing company, despite the fact that just a few dozen outsiders were actually attending. In the offices’ central room was a big chalkboard listing all of Infocom’s modest catalog of just a few adventure games and the computers for which each was available. Always the jokester, Meretzky crept over to the chalkboard just before the party started and added an entry for Leather Goddesses of Phobos — “something that would be a little embarrassing but not awful.” Berez saw it minutes later and “erased it in a panic” before any of the outsiders could see it.  (Berez and Meretzky actually had something of a history of this sort of thing. Meretzky, in the words of Mike Dornbrook, “always made fun of Joel. Mercilessly. But in a very humorous way…”)

Anticlimactic as its ending was, the story, and most of all the name, nevertheless passed into Infocom lore. Leather Goddesses of Phobos became the default name of any project that hadn’t yet been given a name of its own: “For years thereafter, when anyone needed to plug the name of a nonexistent game into a sentence, it would be Leather Goddesses of Phobos.” The name even made its way into a couple of real games: it’s a videotape the protagonist of Starcross watches, much to his disappointment when he finds out it’s actually “something about the history of the Terran Union”; and it’s the name of the only functioning machine in the video arcade in Wishbringer.

The other joke was almost as old. Whenever discussions came around to what sorts of games Infocom should do, to what genres they should cover, someone would inevitably suggest a porn game. At first the joke was just a flippant response, but as the company plunged into its disastrous 1985 and overall sales began to clearly trend downward it began to take on a decidedly more blackish tinge. At that year’s end, with A Mind Forever Voyaging behind him, Meretzky decided to actually do it: to make a real Leather Goddesses of Phobos — and to put sex in it. He wasn’t, mind you, suggesting a porn game per se, but rather a “racy” spoof of/tribute to the science-fiction serials of the 1930s. It wasn’t a hugely original idea in itself — the Barbarella comics and film of the 1960s had already worked this ground to good effect by making the sex that was implied in the old serials explicit — but it was fairly original as games went, and that was the real point. Knowing that the old dictum of Sex Sells is about as timeless as marketing wisdom gets and that Infocom could really use a hit right about now, marketing manager Mike Dornbrook as well as the other Imps agreed enthusiastically that it was a great idea. Al Vezza, still clinging by his fingernails to a fantasy of Infocom as a force in business software and always terrified of anything that might damage the company’s image in that quarter, was less enthusiastic, but allowed Meretzky to proceed. As a sop to sensibilities like his, Mereztky did agree to allow the player to select from three levels of naughtiness: “tame,” “suggestive,” and “lewd.” (I’m not certain if anyone in the history of the world has ever actually played Leather Goddesses on anything but “lewd.” That’s kind of the point of the game, isn’t it?)

Sex aside, with Leather Goddesses we’re back in Meretzky’s comfortable wheelhouse of zany science-fiction comedy, complete with all the puzzles that were so conspicuously missing from A Mind Forever Voyaging. It’s thus easy enough to cast Leather Goddesses as an artistic retreat for a Meretzky who had pushed the envelope too far with his previous game. Doing so would not be entirely incorrect, but it’s not precisely the whole truth either. You see, we really can’t set the sex aside quite so easily as all that. Leather Goddesses may mark a formal retreat in many ways, but in his soul Mereztky still desperately wanted to rake some mucks, to make another political statement. And while, as a playthrough of A Mind Forever Voyaging will attest, Meretzky was genuinely passionate about and committed to his political views, he was also a young creative person who, like so many young creative persons, just wanted to cause some controversy — any controversy.

A Mind Forever Voyaging dealt with some politically sensitive topics, and I was hoping that it would stir up a lot of controversy. It didn’t. Not a single flaming froth-at-the-mouth letter. So I decided to write something with a little bit of sex in it, because nothing generates controversy like sex. I’m hoping to get the game banned from 7-Eleven stores. Finally, I get asked all the time, “When are you guys gonna do a graphic adventure?” Well, we won’t add pictures to our stories, so this was the only way to create a graphic adventure.

Leather Goddesses of Phobos begins with this:

Some material in this story may not be suitable for children, especially the parts involving sex, which no one should know anything about until reaching the age of eighteen (twenty-one in certain states). This story is also unsuitable for censors, members of the Moral Majority, and anyone else who thinks that sex is dirty rather than fun.

The attitudes expressed and language used in this story are representative only of the views of the author, and in no way represent the views of Infocom, Inc. or its employees, many of whom are children, censors, and members of the Moral Majority. (But very few of whom, based on last year's Christmas Party, think that sex is dirty.)

By now, all the folks who might be offended by LEATHER GODDESSES OF PHOBOS have whipped their disk out of their drive and, evidence in hand, are indignantly huffing toward their dealer, their lawyer, or their favorite repression-oriented politico. So... Hit the RETURN/ENTER key to begin!

Couched in humor as it is, this is also the most topical, baldly political statement ever to appear in an Infocom game. A Mind Forever Voyaging had at least spread a thin veneer of science-fiction worldbuilding over its political message. Not so here; Mereztky calls out the Moral Majority by name. It might perhaps be a bit hard for us today to appreciate the big stew of silliness that is Leather Goddesses of Phobos as a full-on political statement. Indeed, it can be hard not to get annoyed with the game’s intermittent tendency to pat itself on the back for an alleged edginess that strikes us today as about as transgressive as missionary sex in a private bedroom between a happily married heterosexual couple. See, for instance, this gag, obviously inspired by George Carlin’s famous “Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television” routine.

>z
Time passes...

[A warning for any Jerry Falwell groupies who are miraculously still playing: we'll be using the word "tits" in five turns or so. Please consult the manual for the proper way to stop playing.]

>z
Time passes...

[Only a few turns until the "tits" reference! Use QUIT now if you might be offended!]

>z
Time passes...

[Last warning! The word "tits" will appear in the very next turn! This is your absolutely last chance to avoid seeing "tits" used!!!]

>z
Time passes...

A hyperdimensional traveller suddenly appears out of thin air. "My sister has tremendous breasts," says the traveller and, without further explanation, vanishes, leaving only a vague trace of interdimensional ozone.

[Oh, regarding the use of "tits," we changed our mind at the last minute. Everyone agreed it was too risque.]

We owe it to the game to take a moment to try to understand just why Leather Goddesses is so inexplicably proud of itself. In 1986, the year that Leather Goddesses was released, the culture wars of the 1980s were at their peak. The previous year had given the country Senate hearings instigated by Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center and their “Filthy Fifteen” list of offending songs; the hearings would lead to a “Parental Advisory” label, the so-called “Tipper sticker,” appearing on many cassettes and CDs. Two months before Leather Goddesses’s publication Attorney General Edwin Meese’s Commission on Pornography published a report which claimed a direct link between violent crime and access to pornography amongst a host of other dubious assertions, and which argued for stepped-up enforcement of so-called “decency standards.” The following April the Federal Communications Commission would effectively change some of those same standards in a landmark ruling that levied stiff fines on shock jock Howard Stern’s radio show; from now on it would be possible to fine radio broadcasters not just for violating a list of proscribed words but for any “language or materials that depict or describe, in terms patently offensive to community standards or the broadcast media, sexual or excretory activities or sexual organs.” Taken in the context of these events and many others, Leather Goddesses’s self-satisfaction feels more understandable and even, in its modest way, more principled.

But what is there to say about Leather Goddesses apart from its politics? Well, Mike Dornbrook’s succinct description of the game for Infocom’s newsletter is a pretty accurate one: “Hitchhiker’s Guide with sex.” You play an ordinary citizen of Upper Sandusky, Ohio, in the year 1936 who gets abducted by the Leather Goddesses of Phobos. These same Leather Goddesses are also planning to invade Earth itself, to make of it their own “private pleasure world.” You’re to be an experiment to pave the way: “your unspeakably painful death will help our effort to enslave humanity” in some way that’s never elaborated, although you are told that it will involve “lots of lubricants, some plastic tubing, and a yak.” Luckily, you escape to hopscotch around a pulp-science-fiction version of the solar system with a sidekick you pick up along the way, trying to assemble the pieces of a “Super-Duper Anti-Leather Goddesses of Phobos Attack Machine!”

1. a common household blender
2. six feet of rubber hose
3. a pair of cotton balls
4. an eighty-two degree angle
5. a headlight from any 1933 Ford
6. a white mouse
7. any size photo of Jean Harlow
8. a copy of the Cleveland phone book

It is, to say the least, a pretty nonsensical plot, one that ultimately boils down in tried-and-true adventure-game fashion to a big treasure hunt — something the game, which spends lots of time gleefully embracing and then subverting adventure-games clichés, is well aware of.

All of those teenage boys who doubtless dived into Leather Goddesses hoping it would get them off were in for a disappointment. If we accept the common definition of pornography as any work designed primary to sexually arouse or titillate, over and above any other artistic purpose, Leather Goddesses resoundingly fails to qualify. Its few sex scenes are purposely full of schlocky romance-novel cliches, all “hot, naked bodies,” “warm and wild feelings springing from your loins, spreading like a fiery potion through your veins” and “lustful orgasms” (is there any other kind?). The detailed play-by-play and anatomical precision that teenage boys crave is, needless to say, not to be found here. In a nod toward gender equality that you certainly wouldn’t see from the pornographic-software underground, it’s actually possible to play Leather Goddesses as either a male or a female; you select your gender at the beginning of the game by going into either the men’s or women’s restroom. The sexes of various people you encounter during the game are adjusted accordingly. The very fact that Meretzky was able to do this so seamlessly within the brutal textual constraints of the 128 K Z-Machine says a lot about just how soft-focus the sex scenes actually are.

While Meretzky gets points for making the effort to include the 30 percent or so of Infocom’s loyal customers who were females, my old Gender Studies indoctrination from university does prompt me to note that even if you choose to play as a female you’re still playing a game largely built for the male gaze. Notably, the Leather Goddesses themselves don’t change gender, and remain equally interested in you whether you play as male or female. There are a couple of obvious causes for this. One is of course that changing the Leather Goddesses to Leather Gods would have been really hard given the constraints of the Z-Machine, not to mention problematic given the name of the game. And the other is that 1980s males who were appalled by male homosexuality were often more than accepting of a bit of female-on-female action.

I find the most jarring moment in Leather Goddesses to be not one of the sex scenes but rather the first time Meretzky swears at me. His first “let’s cut the bullshit” just a few turns in feels so aggressive, so at odds with Infocom’s usual house style that it always hits me like a slap. Moreover, it somehow doesn’t feel genuine either; it feels like Meretzky is swearing at me out of a sense of obligation to the “lewd” mode, and that he’s not entirely comfortable in doing so. More successful are all of the sly double entendres that litter the text, right from the moment you walk into a restroom at the beginning of the game and find a “stool” there. They’re all about as stupid as that, but sometimes gloriously so. My favorite bit might just be the response to the standard SCORE command.

>score
[with Joe]
Unfortunately, Joe doesn't seem interested, and it takes two to tango.

When he’s not cursing or referencing sex in some way, Meretzky is giving you pretty much the game you’d expect from the guy who wrote Planetfall and co-wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: lots of broad, goofy humor, the jokes coming fast and furious, often falling flat but occasionally hitting home. The situations you get yourself into are as gloriously stupid as the puns and double entendres, and perfectly redolent of the game’s inspirations: you go wandering through the jungles of Venus; go sailing the canals of Mars; and, best of all, get into a swordfight in space where you can inexplicably talk to your opponent and where Newtonian mechanics most resoundingly don’t apply. I’d probably be a bit more excited about the humor in this and Meretzky’s other games if it hadn’t led to so many less clever imitators who held fast to the “stupid” but forgot the “glorious.” See, for example, this description of a spaceship in Leather Goddesses, which is far more anatomically explicit than anything in any of the sex scenes: “Hanging from the base of the long, potent-looking battleship are two pendulous, brimming fuel tanks.” Then compare it with its distressingly literal adaptation to graphics in the blatant but more explicit Leather Goddesses clone Sex Vixens from Space of a couple of years later.

One thing that had changed about Meretzky’s work by the time of Leather Goddesses is pointed out by passages like the one just quoted: his writing has improved, subtly but significantly. Perhaps due to his enthusiasm and the sheer pace at which he turned out work, the Meretzky of Planetfall, Sorcerer, and even A Mind Forever Voyaging could be a bit slapdash, even a bit lazy in stringing his words together from time to time. Jon Palace, Infocom’s secret weapon in so many things, did much to keep that from happening in Leather Goddesses. Palace:

I would make an attempt to point out areas where the text could be a little richer. At one point Steve just gave me a big fat printout of all the words in the game. I went through it and tried to find opportunities for adjectives or verbs that could be a little more interesting.

Leather Goddesses’s text is indeed more interesting, with more of a “you are there” feeling, with more showing and less telling. Mereztky was grateful enough to give Palace a special public thank you for “sensualizing” his text.

Still, I remain most impressed by Meretzky as a game and puzzle designer rather than as a writer. Leather Goddesses excels here. Take all the sex and all the humor away, and it’s still just a damn fine example of adventure-game craft, the best Meretzky had yet come up with. One of its puzzles in particular, the “t-removing machine,” has rightly gone down in text-adventure lore as just possibly Meretzky’s cleverest and most memorable ever. It’s also one that could never, ever be done successfully in any other medium, and another example of an increasing interest in abstract wordplay that marked many of Infocom’s later titles. The game’s most elaborate set-piece puzzle is yet another example of an Infocom maze that isn’t really a maze in the traditional sense. That said, it might just leave you longing for the days of “twisty little passages, all alike.” What with a quickly expiring light source and the cycling series of perfectly timed actions required to stay alive, it’s certainly the most polarizing of the puzzles, infuriating to a certain sort of player who considers it just tedious busywork and delightful to another type ready to pull out a pencil and paper and settle down for a nice logistical challenge. (Personally, I’m in the latter camp.) Virtually all of the other puzzles are very entertaining in less polarizing ways, logical despite the illogic of the setting and solvable, but not trivially so. It all makes for a hell of a lot of fun, even if you do mostly have to have your clothes — well, your loincloth — on.

Leather Goddesses’s packaging became one of Infocom’s most memorable collections, arguably the last such before the company’s straitening economic circumstances began to really affect the contents of those beloved gray boxes. Meretzky always took an early and personal interest in this aspect of his games, and Leather Goddesses was no exception. He had barely begun working on the game when he had the idea of including a scratch-and-sniff card with various scents that the player would be asked to smell from time to time. Meretzky:

I got several dozen samples from the company that made the scents. Each was on its own card with the name of the scent. So one by one I had other Infocom employees come in, and I’d blindfold them and let them scratch each scent and try to identify it. That way, I was able to choose the seven most recognizable scents for the package. It was a lot of fun seeing what thoughts the various scents triggered in people, such as the person who was sniffing the mothballs and got a silly grin on his face and said, “My grandmother’s attic!”

Thus the game was designed to incorporate the seven “most recognizable” scents rather than the scents being chosen to fit the game, an unusual but not unique case of placing the feelie cart before the game horse (remember, for instance, the Wishbringer stone?). And, since you’re probably wondering: no, none of the scents were remotely sexual.

The package also included a 3-D comic complete with the requisite glasses for reading it, drawn by the same artist responsible for Trinity’s comic, Richard Howell. (Howell would go on to have a long career in comic books.) The box cover art itself would prompt a squabble between Meretzky and Mike Dornbrook’s marketing department almost as heated as the great Spellbreaker/Mage controversy of the year before. Meretzky wanted to develop for the cover the concept drawing you see below, featuring a collection of elements from the game itself. (Thanks to Jason Scott for making this image available online.)

Dornbrook’s people, however, thought the drawing was just too busy to work on store shelves. Dornbrook:

You can’t look at a cover in isolation. You’ve got to look at a cover when it’s with a hundred other covers. Does it work on a shelf that’s crowded with covers? If it blends in, doesn’t stand out, it’s a failure, no matter how great the art is. It’s got to work as a cover!

Marketing instead opted for the cleaner, simpler design you saw earlier in this article, which also had the advantage of highlighting the marvelous name around which the whole game had been designed in the first place. A very unhappy Meretzky satirically asked to include a disclaimer in the package apologizing for the lame cover art and explaining how much better it should have been.

Leather Goddesses was released in September of 1986. Obviously feeling they might just have a sorely needed commercial winner on their hands, marketing gave the game special priority. For instance, they printed tee-shirts to pass around and sell through the Infocom newsletter, featuring the Leather Goddesses logo on the front and the slogan “A dirty mind is a terrible thing to waste” on the back. About half of the considerable fan mail the game generated was indeed of the “froth at the mouth” stripe Meretzky had been missing in response to A Mind Forever Voyaging. (Most of the other half, meanwhile, seemed to consist of complaints that the game was too tame.) A woman in Orange County, California, wandered into her local software store only to see the tee-shirt on display on the wall and, even worse, on the backs of some of the staff. She pitched a fit about the game’s title with its “deviant sexual overtones and references to bondage and other unnatural acts.” Her complaints forced an official policy change for the chain’s sixty or so stores: Leather Goddesses must be placed only on the highest shelves at the very back of the store, and could not be included in sales promotions, special in-store displays, or advertisements in any form of media — and of course staffers wouldn’t be allow to wear their complimentary tee-shirts anymore. At least one of the big mail-order sellers, Protecto Enterprises of Illinois, declared that they were “founded on Christian principles and ethics and will not sell any product that goes against those principles”; Leather Goddesses by their lights did just that. Still, most of the most committed culture warriors in the country just weren’t paying enough attention to the relatively tiny entertainment-software market when there was so much more mainstream material in the form of music and television and films and books to rail against. Thus Meretzky would have to be satisfied with only the occasional outraged letter rather than the pitchfork-wielding mob of his dreams.

Any sales lost for reasons of outraged morality were more than made up for by the game’s sex appeal. Leather Goddesses proved to be by a factor of at least three Infocom’s biggest seller post-Activision acquisition, selling around 130,000 copies — Infocom’s last game to break six digits, their last to qualify as a genuine hit, and their first and last to prove that Sex Sells was as true in computer games as it was in any other media. It lands just below Wishbringer on Infocom’s all-time sales chart, their sixth best-selling game overall. At least one of the fans it attracted may have horrified Meretzky: Tom Clancy, technothriller author and noted friend of the Reagan administration. “I’d like to meet whoever wrote that,” he said in an interview. “I just don’t know what asylum to go to.”

The milestones in general start to get more melancholy now as we move into the latter stages of Infocom’s history. There’s one more we should mention in the case of Leather Goddesses, over and above “last 100,000 seller” and “last hit.” It marked also the last time that Infocom would have a significant part in, for lack of a better word, the conversation inside the computer-game industry at large. Other publishers took note of Leather Goddesses’s success. With the industry’s sexual taboo at least partially broken thanks to Infocom and (to a lesser extent) Activision, sex on the computer would begin to cautiously poke its head back up out of the underground again. We’ll see plenty of evidence of that in future articles.

Like Hitchhiker’s, Leather Goddesses advertises a sequel in its finale that the original Infocom would never deliver: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X. (A graphic adventure by that name would be designed by Meretzky and released by Activision under the Infocom label well after the original company was dissolved.) Too bad the series barely got started, because the already planned title of a third game might have really riled up some sensitive souls: Diesel Dikes of Deimos.

(As usual, Jason Scott’s Get Lamp interviews were invaluable to this article. Steve Meretzky is also interviewed at length in Game Design Theory and Practice by Richard Rouse III. Also useful: the October 1987 and July 1988 Computer Gaming World, and the Summer 1986 edition of Infocom’s Status Line newsletter. The Dirty Book advertisement is from the September 1982 Kilobaud.)

Comments
36 Responses

- Dehumanizer

March 5, 2015 at 3:45 pm

I actually finished this one for the first time on the iPad (with a bluetooth keyboard, of course), a couple of years ago.

Typo:
With the industry’s sexual taboo at least partially broken thanks to Infoocom

- Jimmy Maher

March 6, 2015 at 7:27 am

Thanks!

- Jonno Downes

March 5, 2015 at 8:20 pm

Actually infocom did develop ‘Gas Pump Girls…’
http://www.mobygames.com/game/leather-goddesses-of-phobos-2-gas-pump-girls-meet-the-pulsating-

- Lisa H.

March 5, 2015 at 8:31 pm

And so the sexplosion petered out prematurely.

Tee hee hee petered! *sniggers*

…ahem. Sorry. (I’m an adult, really.)

“The object of this game is to fuck as many women as you can without getting bufu’ed by fags (contracting AIDS).”

Yikes. Ugly, yes, though also rather telling about its time period.

(I’m not certain if anyone in the history of the world has ever actually played Leather Goddesses on anything but “lewd.” That’s kind of the point of the game, isn’t it?)

I have, mainly to see the differences in the game’s text and to provoke funny responses when you try to do things you’re not supposed to on lower levels (like using swear words or performing sexual acts). It’s also funny to give silly ages when entering lewd mode, like 5 or 200.

any work designed primary to sexually arose or titillate

arose -> arouse.

I find the maze extremely tedious and frustrating. Even knowing a perfect sequence of moves, I often screw up typing them in. Fortunately, they had mercy in the Solid Gold release and let you bypass it with a single command ($CATACOMB).

When I was a teenager I found this game a bit embarrassing to play (as either sex), the same peeking-through-my fingers feeling I got from playing Leisure Suit Larry. (Nowadays, I’m surprised my parents allowed me to when I was ~14. I wonder if they didn’t really know what the content of those games was.) Now I find Leather Goddesses just campy (not that that’s a bad thing). Even “lewd” mode is really rather tame, as you observe.

A favorite line from the hints:

HELP!!! How can I get out of Cleveland?
1. Millions ask this question daily.

- Jimmy Maher

March 6, 2015 at 7:30 am

Originally I was going to litter bad sexual puns and double entendres through the article in the way of Leather Goddesses itself. But then I decided it felt forced and wasn’t really all that funny. Still, one or two obviously survived. ;)

Thanks for the typo correction!

- Cliffy73

May 24, 2015 at 10:58 am

Yes, if you never play Leather Goddesses on Tame mode, you’ll never see the funniest parser error message in Infocom history:

>fuck Trent

[I don’t know the “f-word.”]

- Nathanael

March 6, 2021 at 10:52 am

Whenever I got to a bit which seemed like it might be different in the different modes, I would save and try it in all three modes. A few of them have different jokes in each version.

- Jayle Enn

March 5, 2015 at 8:50 pm

Sparks! Explosions! “Pockita-pockita-pockita FEEP!” the machine exclaims.

I still reference the T-remover sometimes when I’m doing something remotely hazardous and electronic.

I’ll agree: even when I was a kid, that ‘let’s cut the bullshit’ line felt really awkward. In retrospect, I wonder if that may have been as pointed as the jabs at the Moral Majority, a comment on forcing either extreme on human expression and… expressions in general.

I don’t think I did ever play all the way through in all three modes, though it was worth it to switch modes for the sex scenes. When explicit sex or crudity wasn’t allowed, they dove right back into Hitchhiker’s Guide style absurdities.

- Lisa H.

March 5, 2015 at 11:01 pm

Sometimes I just say “pockita-pockita-pockita-FEEP!” apropos of nothing, because it’s so fun to say.

The only specific funny responses I remember (besides the untangling cream) are for the rabbit (rabbi) and cotton balls (coon balls (!)). If I remember right, it felt like they missed an opportunity with the tray (ray) – or did they implement something for that one? Anyone remember any others?

- Jimmy Maher

March 6, 2015 at 7:33 am

The tray is accounted for:

>open compartment
Opening the odd machine reveals a ray.

>examine ray
It looks a little like Ray whatsisname from second grade.

- matt w

March 6, 2015 at 12:34 pm

Hmmm, “pockita-pockita-queep” is from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Does “feep” have some Phobosy connotations?

- Lisa H.

March 6, 2015 at 7:24 pm

It makes me think of the entries for feep/feeper in the Jargon File aka Hacker’s Dictionary. http://catb.org/jargon/html/F/feep.html – not that the entries are particularly interesting (it’s just one of several onomatopoeics like “beep” for that sort of sound), but it makes me wonder if that was in their consciousness, since there’s strong connections between Infocom and MIT hacker culture (obviously).

- matt w

March 6, 2015 at 12:37 pm

And the T-remover of course wound up inspiring Emily Short’s epic Counterfeit Monkey.

- Scott Gage

March 5, 2015 at 11:42 pm

Well, here we are. I never thought I’d find a reference to Mad Party Fucker in an online article.

That game was awful, by the way. Even when I played it as a kid you could tell it was pure garbage. However the title meant that anyone under the age of 15 at the time had to play it at least once.

- S. John Ross

March 6, 2015 at 5:27 am

The two games that hooked me on IF were this one (I still hold it as a kind of Gold Standard) and Plundered Hearts, which just happen to have been the two available to borrow from a friend in the early 90s. Given that one was “racy” in a for-the-male-gaze way and the other was “romantic” in a for-the-female-gaze way, I’ve always wondered if that wasn’t deliberate in some way on the part of Infocom, that one made the other more “okay” or if the two were seen as being two prongs of an experimental attempt at … something. Anyway, I still hold both in high regard, replay them each now and then, and will spend a lot of hobby time for the rest of my life kinda-sorta imitating both, since I played them both at the same time and formed my baby-bird bond with IF through them.

- S. John Ross

March 6, 2015 at 5:28 am

I’ve always felt the same sense of a jarring lack of sincerity in that “bullshit” line too, BTW.

- Rowan Lipkovits

March 6, 2015 at 5:59 am

Leather Goddesses advertises a sequel in its finale that Infocom would never deliver: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X

This line has been bugging me all day. A game by that title did see the light of day, written by Steve Meretzky and published (by Activision) with the Infocom name on the box. Do you mean that as a product of the zombie-Infocom, or as a non-text-adventure, it simply doesn’t count? (With Meretzky remaining at the helm, that’s about as much authenticity to the lineage as I think one can reasonably demand.)

- Jimmy Maher

March 6, 2015 at 7:39 am

Yeah, I really consider a different beast entirely for both of the reasons you cite. However, I added a little parenthetical about it to the text. Thanks!

- Duncan Stevens

March 6, 2015 at 8:07 pm

I never played this one, but it’s been described as really amazingly bad, e.g.:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/rec.games.int-fiction/082w2s_o7sU/yIldYpVBkwgJ

- Steffan Swaan

March 6, 2015 at 6:08 am

I just stumbled on your blog through MetaFilter and am having a great time reading the arcives. I played a port of this game some time ago on, of all things, a GameBoy emulator. Great fun.

- James

March 7, 2015 at 6:00 am

Metafilter: we see you

- Hanon Ondricek

March 6, 2015 at 3:12 pm

I was also going to comment that the T-remover had to be Emily Short’s Counterfeit Monkey inspiration. I loved this game because I was actually able to solve great parts of it as a youngster, such as setting a trap for the plant, and using the portable hole.

Also a lot of fun was taking a moment of solemn remembrance for your sidekick every time they died gruesomely and then having them show up nonchalantly several turns later only slightly worse for wear.

- Andrew Plotkin

March 6, 2015 at 4:42 pm

“…back toward the wholesome 1950s, away from the revolutionary 1960s and the free-and-easy 1970s.”

Not the “censorious 1950s” or the “repressed 1950s”? :)

Seriously, from my point of view it’s the 1970s that were wholesome. Not that I ever encountered that scene first-hand.

- Jimmy Maher

March 7, 2015 at 8:21 am

Hmm…

I recommend a viewing of Boogie Nights and a listen to the Rolling Stones album Some Girls to begin to build a foundation in vintage disco-era sleaze…

- Steve McCrea

March 8, 2015 at 6:22 pm

Are you sure the Trinity comic is by Richard Howell? I can’t find any reference to the artist, but it looks to me like an early Kyle Baker piece. The style is very different from the LGOP comic.

- Steve McCrea

March 8, 2015 at 6:33 pm

Oh, and I just noticed that the variant cover sketch for LGOP has the initials KB (I think it’s a K).

- Jimmy Maher

March 9, 2015 at 6:36 am

If you ask the bird woman at the beginning of Trinity about “trinity,” you’ll see a credits screen. Richard Howell is credited as “illustrator,” while others are credited for the map, crane, and sundial that came as feelies. It’s hard for me to imagine what else Howell could have “illustrated,” and since no other artist is credited…

- Steve McCrea

March 9, 2015 at 6:31 pm

Ah. According to Kyle Baker, he inked the comic, but he doesn’t remember the penciller. That explains it…

- Eddie in Miss

March 9, 2015 at 10:46 am

A typo,

Has rightly gone done in text adventure history

Should be down.

Thanks Jimmy for this blog and for Filfre!

- Jimmy Maher

March 9, 2015 at 11:04 am

Thank you!

- S. John Ross

April 2, 2015 at 4:34 am

Also, I feel compelled to pimp my “Lane Mastodon Alternates” PDF, available at the IF Archive, because it’s awesome and genuinely useful to those of us who are Ray Zone junkies =)

- Peter Piers

January 4, 2016 at 8:10 pm

” (I’m not certain if anyone in the history of the world has ever actually played Leather Goddesses on anything but “lewd.” That’s kind of the point of the game, isn’t it?)”

I’m not a prude, but for some reason I was wary of playing the game in a public place and possibly have the game throw something I wouldn’t like others to see. And I didn’t really feel like anything racy. I just didn’t.

Mind you, I have plenty of AIF in my collection. Maybe I got supremely tired of it and wanted to enjoy LGOP on its other merits.

I never got the Scratch-N-Sniff card, of course, but I’m sort of proud to have gotten the one on Leisure Suit Larry 7, another racy game. Hmmm, curious connection.

- Peter Piers

January 5, 2016 at 5:38 pm

I thought the riddle was a much bigger issue than the maze.

Mind you, I somehow stumbled onto the “cheat code” for skipping the maze. Bliss. I knew what it’d be like from the feelie comic, so I did it without a moment’s hesitation.

- Mark S. Fisher

January 10, 2016 at 4:24 pm

I would say the cover art was most likely a strong contributing factor to it’s sales numbers.

- Steve

May 15, 2017 at 9:18 am

An interesting tidbit about the IBM version of this game, from Wikipedia:

“Infocom’s adult-themed Leather Goddesses of Phobos had a boss key (control-B) which would hide the game and show a screen designed to look like a Cornerstone database view. Upon closer inspection, however, the screen was not exactly boss safe, being populated with order info on rather ridiculous adult items, including an “inflatable milkman.”

- Casey Nordell

January 11, 2018 at 11:33 pm

So do we have a consensus that the unused cover art was sketched by Kyle Baker (and signed “KB” at the bottom)?

I ask because I think it would be great to try to commission an artist to color in the drawing so we could see what it would have looked like if it have been used as the final box it. Is there a way to deduce who the colorist would have been if they had moved forward with using that image as the box art? Perhaps the likely person is still alive and we could commission that person to finish it?

Hollywood Dave’s Hijinx
August 21, 2015

Most happy offices, if they’re lucky, have one guy (or girl) who’s more important for the way he helps others enjoy coming to work than for the actual work he gets done personally when he’s there. He’s the guy who remembers birthdays and graduations; who organizes the softball team and the potlucks and the rotisserie baseball league and the NCAA basketball pools; who’s always willing to fetch lunch or (after working hours, hopefully!) a keg of beer; who’s always available for a meeting around the proverbial water cooler to laugh at a great new joke or commiserate with old disappointments. For Infocom, which for most of its lifetime was possessed of a very happy office indeed, that guy was “Hollywood” Dave Anderson.

A California boy through and through — one only had to hear his nickname or look at the loud beachwear he wore to work every day he could get away with it to divine that — Anderson had first come to Boston in late 1982 with his buddy Jeff O’Neill, executing a reverse Manifest Destiny to seek their promised land to the east. He was working in a sawmill a few months later when he saw an advertisement in the newspaper from a company he’d never heard of called Infocom, looking for game testers. He didn’t know much of anything about computer games, but getting paid to play them all day certainly sounded a lot better than life at the sawmill. He became one of Infocom’s first full-time testers, taking over from Steve Meretzky, who was already moving on up to write Planetfall. Soon O’Neill joined him in the same role. Hollywood was good at his job, thorough and insightful in everything from spotting typos to bigger questions of design and puzzle fairness. With the testing department growing rapidly around him in Infocom’s first bloom of major commercial success, within six months he was the grand old man of the group, officially given the title of Lead Playtester.

Something else that happened at nearly the same time does much to explain the even more important role that Anderson was already playing at Infocom. One day in November of 1983, he decided it was high time that somebody clean up the stagnant goldfish pond located outside Infocom’s Wheeler Street offices. He scooped out the three fish, moved them to a temporary holding tank, drained the pond and diligently scrubbed it clean, and put fresh water back in. Anyone who knows anything about fish — a group that apparently didn’t include Anderson or anyone else at Infocom whom he might have talked to about his scheme — can probably guess what happened when he put the fish back in the next day. They all promptly died, undone by a screwed-up pH balance or incorrect oxygen content or bad karma or whatever it is that makes domestic fish die if you so much as look at them wrong (one wonders how evolution ever spared this bunch). The others at Infocom decided to prosecute him for the fish’s murder, with Marc Blank acting as prosecutor, Steve Meretzky as his defense attorney, Mike Dornbrook as fishy expert witness, and nine upright Infocom employee/citizens as the jury. After a lengthy — okay, not really lengthy — trial, he was found not guilty, the victim of a frame job by the real murderer, a Micro Group programmer — and jury member to boot! — named Poh Lim. Lim was sentenced to life in the Graphics “Group,” a truly solitary confinement given the state of the company’s graphics technology at the time.

Hollywood’s trial passed into Infocom lore as one of the first grand comic absurdities of the sort that their staffers would raise to a high art. It also says much about his own role in daily life in the office, from the energetic helpfulness that led him to clean the pond so thoroughly in the first place to the gleeful way he jumped aboard to play his role in the whole (mis)carriage of justice. His name didn’t appear on the game boxes, but faithful readers of Infocom’s New Zork Times newsletter, if they were really paying attention, would have noticed that his name and sometimes picture crop up over and over in accounts of the cheerful insanity that was daily life at the company. He doesn’t hog the limelight — he wasn’t that kind of guy, not at all — but he’s always there, as a participant and as often as not an instigator.

Hollywood doffs his trademark loud shirt for once to act as host of a live-action What’s My Line? show.

Back in his preferred attire, Hollywood carves a pumpkin with a chainsaw (!) at Infocom’s Halloween party. I guess the time at the sawmill did prove to be good for something after all.

It was for example Hollywood who, after seeing the noble sport at a lounge in his namesake city in California, brought hermit-crab racing to Infocom. Teams were established, and a prize collection of crabs bought by Hollywood at a local pet store auctioned off to each to carry its standard at Drink’em Downs raceway, constructed in the ample space left over inside the CambridgePark Drive offices after Cornerstone had come and gone.

Drink’em Downs track announcer Hollywood calls the action, assisted by track timer Stu Galley. The latter had a difficult job: races could take a while, as the crabs had a tendency to say, “Screw this!” and shrink into their shells at the starting gate.

But Hollywood’s most legendary exploits took place on the softball field. He was instrumental in setting up Boston’s Software Softball League, which included along with Infocom the likes of Spinnaker and Lotus. Hollywood became the coach of Infocom’s team, making the official uniform, inevitably, a loud floral shirt. The games became a pivotal part of Infocom’s social calendar, a bonding experience notable even by the company’s usual close-knit standards. In trying to explain how it was at Infocom during the early days when everything they touched seemed to turn to gold, many old employees turn back to those sun-kissed summer days on the softball field when a ragtag bunch of them would show up with several coolers full of beer and little idea who was even playing what position to compete against companies often several times their size, companies that held actual practice sessions and even had actual uniforms — and, much more often than not, Infocom would win. That said, those chalking the wins purely up to Infocom’s charmed early life were doing something of a disservice to their best player. It seems safe to say that Hollywood all but won some games by himself, what with his eye-popping yearly batting averages of .800 or better and his habit of hitting home runs by the handful.

A motley crew but an effective one on the softball field. Of the guys wearing the ridiculous straw hats, Hollywood is the one to farthest left.

The story of Hollywood Anderson at Infocom is to everyone who was actually there and, indeed, to him as well largely the story of an all-around good mate, not of a game designer. This fact highlights a distinction that perhaps isn’t always appreciated enough, setting into stark relief just how differently Infocom was and is regarded by those who were inside the company in contrast to those who just loved the games. The company that people like me love to idealize as visionaries of interactive storytelling was for the people there first and foremost just a great social experience, for many or most the very best of their entire lives. To them Infocom was about computer games only secondarily. The Infocom that they knew is one that we cannot — and, what with them being so hopelessly close to the sausage-making that led to the games, the opposite is also true. When interviewed by Jason Scott for his Get Lamp documentary, Hollywood didn’t seem to want to talk about his one and only game Hollywood Hijinx so much as all the great memories he has of Infocom as a place, memories that often deal only tangentially with the actual nuts and bolts of making interactive fiction.

Even taken on these terms, however, the story of Hollywood’s transformation from tester and life of the Infocom party to Implementor is an unusual one in comparison to that of his peers. Unlike Steve Meretzky or Jeff O’Neill, talented writers and frustrated artists who worked hard to get out of the testing department, and still less like Brian Moriarty, who accepted a job in the Micro Group with the secret agenda of becoming an Imp by hook or by crook, designing his own game just seemed to kind of fall into Hollywood’s lap. He was good at his job and took it seriously, but his passion for the medium didn’t exactly burn with the heat of a thousand suns. He himself notes that the staff was divided between those who believed they were on the cusp of a new form of interactive literature and those who saw their products as “just games.” He, no tortured-artist type by temperament or circumstance, saw them pretty definitively as the latter — the more game-like the better, in fact. Hollywood was an old-school guy who still held Zork up as a sort of gold standard. He was a member of the small minority of even old-school players who love mazes; he loved nothing more than to hunker down with a blank piece of graph paper and a full inventory to drop’em and map’em.

Of course, one would have to be a deeply incurious person to test interactive fiction as a full-time job for literally years without developing some interest in what went into making it. One year Infocom hired a high-school boy named Tom Bok to help with testing over the summer. He got hold of the ZIL source code to the original Zork and started playing around with it, first just by substituting text of his own but later by experimenting with the actual instructions. Both Hollywood and his old buddy Jeff O’Neill got interested in his explorations, and the trio made a spoof they called Zok — a portmanteau of Zork and Bok — that was widely played by others in the office.

Still, while those experiments led O’Neill in fairly short order to pitch and get accepted his idea for Ballyhoo, Hollywood’s own route to Imphood would be more circuitous. When Activision bought Infocom in mid-1986, one of Jim Levy’s first requests was that they start making more games — many more in fact, to the tune of twice as many releases per year as had been their wont. To meet that demand, they would need more Imps, and hard experience had taught them that hiring people off the street and expecting them to learn this absolutely unique art form didn’t usually work, even if they had the money in the budget for it (which they really didn’t). But right there was Hollywood, who’d been testing games for three years now and thus knew the form about as intimately as anyone who hadn’t actually written a game before could. And this was Hollywood, whom everyone liked and appreciated. Wouldn’t it be nice for him to see his name on a box? Hadn’t he earned that through his years of many and varied services? If the door wasn’t quite held wide for him, it was certainly somewhat ajar. All he really had to do was saunter through with a half-decent idea.

In a telling foreshadowing of how his game would end up being developed, even the initial idea wasn’t his. It was Liz Cyr-Jones, another tester who would be promoted to Hollywood’s old role of Lead Playtester upon his departure (how’s that for motivation?), who proposed making his game an extended homage to his long-standing nickname, so ingrained by now that The New Zork Times had taken to writing his name as “Dave” Hollywood Anderson. Hollywood Hijinx would be a scavenger hunt taking place on the mansion of your recently deceased Uncle Buddy and Aunt Hildegarde Burbank, B-movie moguls par deluxe. According to the terms of their will, you need to find ten mementos from their movies in the course of a single night to inherit their fortune. It seemed a fun premise to Hollywood, perfectly suited to his own gaming predilections and experience — or, rather, his lack thereof. It was essentially a Zork set in the present day, the focus firmly on the puzzles that were to him the most interesting part of interactive fiction. The deserted, static grounds of the mansion would make the programming easier, while the played-for-laughs B-movie premise would let him liven them up with a bit of humor and atmosphere while being surreal enough that he didn’t need to worry too much about realism or plot or any of the rest of the stuff that Infocom’s preferred characterization of their games as “interactive fiction” normally implied. He pitched Jones’s idea, and, sure enough, it was accepted. Just like that, he was an Imp.

While it would bear Hollywood Anderson’s name on its cover and it would certainly be him who had final say on the project, Hollywood Hijinx is one of the two Infocom games since the days of the original Zork that is best described as a true group effort. (The other would be their very next game, subject of my next article. Its development would take that path, however, for very different reasons.) Just about everyone in the testing department pitched in with ideas for puzzles and gags, treating it as a welcome chance to make a game of their own for a change instead of only breaking the games of others. But Hollywood’s collaborators also extended far beyond the testing people. The only really big fan of B-movies at Infocom — Hollywood himself barely even knew who Roger Corman was — was, perhaps surprisingly, “Professor” Brian Moriarty, on the surface at least the most serious and “literary” of all the Imps. He pitched in with lots of ideas to lend humor and texture to the game, and took the time to write some of Tinsel World, the dishy showbiz magazine that became the centerpiece of the feelies. Infocom’s packaging people reveled in their freedom from overly stringent Imp guidance to come up with much of the rest from their own whole cloth. Hollywood did most of the programming himself, but admits to spending a lot of time “running around the office groveling” to Steve Meretzky or Dave Lebling to help him when it got beyond “the basics” of ZIL. None of this should be taken as a dismissal of Hollywood’s ability, and certainly not as an accusation of dishonesty. A social animal if ever there was one, this was just his natural way of working. And, good guy that he was, everyone was more than happy to help.

I wish I could tell you that the game that resulted from all of this is one of the Infocom greats, a tribute to Hollywood’s infinite good will and subtle leadership. Sadly, however, I can’t. There are worse games in the catalog than Hollywood Hijinx, but I’m not sure there are any that feel quite so inessential as this one. Indeed, it has to be the single least innovative Infocom game ever. Its most immediately striking feature, not least because you encounter it almost immediately, is the mansion’s defiantly old-school hedge maze, the single largest, gnarliest example of its type ever to appear in an Infocom game. (I did mention that Hollywood loved mazes, didn’t I?) Thankfully you can, after solving a number of other puzzles, put together an in-game map of the thing that will see you through in lieu of solving it yourself; one suspects that this must have been added by Hollywood under duress after hearing from outraged testers. Problem is, it’s all too easy to not realize that’s possible when you first encounter the maze, especially because the map is hidden behind some fairly tricky puzzles that you may not believe are solvable without discovering what’s in the maze’s center first. Remember this, would-be players, and don’t spend several hours mapping the thing — unless, like Hollywood, you enjoy that sort of thing — as I did when I first played!

Of course, innovation isn’t everything, and there’s certainly always room for a well-done Zork-like puzzlefest. Unfortunately, though, Hollywood Hijinx doesn’t quite hold up even on those terms. Most of the puzzles are fine, some (like one involving a certain delightful Godzilla-themed interactive diorama) more than fine. But there’s also one that’s notably terrible, arguably the worst single puzzle to appear in an Infocom game since the infamous baseball maze and bank in Zork II. Because I seem to have developed a regular sideline (or form of personal therapy) in complaining about puzzles, I’m going to describe (and spoil) it in the next paragraph. Sensitive readers may want to skip what follows.

So, you discover a water-filled channel through which you can swim to resurface in a cave complex. Being a cave, however, it has no light. You have a flashlight and also some matches that are theoretically capable of providing some, but the flashlight isn’t waterproof. The obvious thing would be to find a Ziploc bag or other waterproof container to put a light source into, but the mansion’s larder, alas, isn’t well-stocked with such practical necessities. The solution that you eventually discover — or, more likely, look up in the hint book or walkthrough — requires you to coat a match with wax from a burning candle, then scrape it off when you surface on the other end of the pool. That’s an iffy enough proposition in itself, but the game’s text for some reason decides to make it even harder to believe — and to solve. When you “put wax on match,” the response is that “the match head [emphasis mine] is now covered with a thin coating of candle wax.” We have here another of that thriving subspecies of text-adventure puzzles that just don’t make any practical sense whatsoever given the consensus version of reality we presumably share with the games we play. Even if the wax has miraculously kept the match head dry, and even if it’s possible to scrape off all of the glop and still have a strikeable head, all of the rest of the match — you know, the part that actually burns — is still all wet. That it couldn’t possibly burn seems so obvious that I spent a long time banging my head against other walls, sure this particular action couldn’t have anything to do with this particular puzzle. I even took the game’s choice of describing the wax as coating only the head as a deliberate kindness meant to steer me away from seeing it as a solution to the problem of a comprehensively wet match. Little did I know…

The writing in Hollywood Hijinx is mostly fine, enlivening its puzzles with fun props and memories hearkening back to the Burbanks’ glory days. As with so much in this game, it’s hard to say how many of the atmospheric touches were devised by Hollywood himself and how many were passed along to him by others, but then it’s not ultimately all that important anyway. For a guy who was more interested in puzzles than text, Hollywood, to his credit, managed to oversee an enjoyable reading as well as playing experience. The only really jarring moment comes when you screen a copy of Uncle Buddy’s lost film A Corpse Line, when the tone suddenly shifts from gentle satire to full-on zombie horror. I’m still not entirely sure if the disturbing scene you witness and the death you suffer immediately afterward are meant to be parodic and just come off wrong or if they really are meant to be horrific. Either way, they stand out from the rest of the game like, well, a dancing corpse in a top hat.

Much more problematic for anyone trying to solve Hollywood Hijinx are just a few places where the scene that Hollywood is evidently seeing in his mind’s eye isn’t quite captured in its entirety in the text, making, whether intentionally or unintentionally, some things harder than they would otherwise be. (The inside of the fireplace is the most notable offender; know that the “loose mortar” that the game so casually describes apparently isn’t so much loose as irregular, providing lots of convenient… well, I’m sure you can figure the rest out for yourself. The other possibility is that you’re an acrobat who’s capable of sticking one toe into a hole at waist height, stepping up, and balancing there on the face of an otherwise smooth — and loosely mortared to boot — wall.)

The little glitches that dog Hollywood Hijinx may have something to do with the unique collaborative process that was its making. If most of the testers are pitching in with ideas and puzzles, the obvious danger becomes that they get too close to the design, unable to see it anymore as an objective outsider would. In short, if the testers are writing the game, who’s testing it? (There may be an aphorism in there somewhere…) Yet it’s also true that this would hardly be the last time that cracks in Infocom’s usual smooth veneer of polish would be noticeable in their last great surge of text-only games of which Hollywood Hijinx is the first. I’ll take up the question of precisely why that should be at greater length in another article, but will just note for now that Infocom was suddenly being asked to become prolific on a scale which they had never approached before in their history. Between January 1987, the date of Hollywood Hijinx’s release, and January 1988, when they would release their last all-text adventure game, no fewer than nine titles would pour out of their offices, a rate of production nearly twice that of any other twelve-month period in their history. The number of personnel involved in making the games, meanwhile, did not increase. In fact, just the opposite: Infocom hired their last employee in 1985. As people left in the months and years that followed, they were never replaced. Even when Hollywood stepped up to become an Imp the testing vacancy he left behind remained unfilled in perpetuity, leaving the company with one less conscientious tester to cover a flood of new games that threatened to drown the whole department. Looked at in this light, the biggest surprise is that Infocom’s games of 1987 didn’t suffer still more, that Infocom managed in spite of it all to turn out a some final gems worthy of standing alongside anything from their less harried earlier years.

After Hollywood Hijinx hit the street and promptly became Infocom’s lowest seller to date, their first to fail to break even 20,000 copies, Hollywood Anderson evinced no particular burning desire to make another game. He rather parlayed his knowledge of Aldus PageMaker into his third and final role at Infocom. As their desktop-publishing expert, he helped to put together the newsletters that were still sent out every quarter to the remaining Infocom faithful. (Indeed, the newsletters seemed to grow in size and ambition almost in direct opposition to the dwindling sales of the actual games.) It was a perfect role for him. Even as the realities of life inside CambridgePark Drive grew ever more stressful, he continued to put a good face on it for the outside world, filling the newsletters with stories of the latest antics and coming up with delightfully goofy promotional ideas that could be used to drum up a little enthusiasm for very little of the money that Infocom increasingly didn’t have. The “take a picture of yourself holding an Infocom game on the Great Wall of China” contest, for example, became a particular favorite of fans and employees alike. Still, he remained as always most valuable not for what it said in his job description but for what he brought to daily life at the office. His peers during this last couple of years had more need than ever for his affable charm and unflappable sense of fun.

I’ve seen a few “where are they now?” pieces done on one-hit wonders of the music industry in which the subjects have noted how frustrating it can be to be perpetually framed with that negative label. After all, just getting one song played on the radio and bought in mass quantities by a fickle public — hell, just getting signed and getting a record out at all — is more than the vast majority of working musicians will ever achieve. Similarly, while his game is far from the best of the pack, Hollywood Dave Anderson is one of the vanishingly small number of people on the planet who can hold up an Infocom box with his name on the cover. That’s one hell of an achievement in itself. If the skids that got him there were just slightly greased in contrast to his peers, you’ll never meet a single one of them with a resentful word to say about it. Hollywood, because of who he was and what he brought to their lives every day, deserved his tiny little twirl in the limelight. As long as the Infocom catalog is remembered, there will be his game — his name — nestled in there among the others, a reminder of a great chum and a place that was for six or so great years a great place to be young and creative and happy. There are certainly worse legacies to have.

(As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Thanks again, Jason! Other sources include Infocom’s New Zork Times and Status Line newsletters of Spring 1984, Summer 1984, Summer 1985, Winter 1986, Fall 1986, Winter 1987, Summer 1987, Fall 1987, Winter 1987, Spring 1988, and Summer 1988, and Down From the Top of Its Game, an academic paper on the company’s history.

Hollywood Hijinx and most of the other Infocom games are available for purchase as part of an iOS app.)

Comments
29 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

August 21, 2015 at 2:07 pm

Curious: where is Anderson now? Did he land somewhere else in the software industry?

- Jimmy Maher

August 21, 2015 at 2:23 pm

Not sure actually. I know he worked with Marc Blank in Oregon for a while immediately after Infocom was dissolved, but I don’t know his history after that. He was never really a computer guy — he insists that he never even *really* learned ZIL — so it wouldn’t surprise me if he wound up in some other industry entirely. I’m sure Jason Scott probably knows (take that as a hint, Jason, if you’re reading).

- Jason Scott

August 21, 2015 at 9:24 pm

At the time that I interviewed Dave, he was living in Massachusetts. Your article mentions it lately, but he mentioned about he and some buddies went to a wedding in Massachusetts, went back to California, packed up, and moved out east. It was truly that impulsive. He also mentioned going out of his way to find an appropriate loud shirt from his closet to make sure that he was interviewed properly.

I have the impression that he is still living in Massachusetts. He certainly has a family and happiness. Like the others, he has no particular love of the management and focuses on the camaraderie more than anything else.

- Jimmy Maher

August 22, 2015 at 6:52 am

Thanks as always, Jason!

- Bob Reeves

August 21, 2015 at 3:39 pm

As someone who still plays Zork I several times a year, I thoroughly enjoyed this game for its old-school-wander-around-alone-&-solve-puzzles feel, though I found the B-movie stuff mildly annoying at best, & didn’t solve the maze in the archaic manner. It wasn’t till reading this post that I even considered there might’ve been a problem with the rest of the match being wet.

- Felix

August 21, 2015 at 6:03 pm

Oh my. This so much reminds me of my days at DIFFstudios. A rocky ride that ended in bad blood and disappointment, yet we stayed a team to the end — and after. Our boss from those days never ceases to be amazed that we’re not only still friends, but willing to work for him again whenever the opportunity arises. And it’s all because, for better or worse, for a few wonderful years we were the best of the best, the most innovative web agency in Bucharest, doing things others didn’t dream of.

Was that because of the team spirit, or the other way around? Let’s just call it a virtuous cycle. Either way, the human factor matters more than everything else combined, and people are neither interchangeable nor able to achieve much on their own, no matter how skilled they may be.

- whomever

August 21, 2015 at 6:09 pm

Typo: Hldegarde

- Jimmy Maher

August 22, 2015 at 6:27 am

Thanks!

- Duncan Stevens

August 21, 2015 at 6:22 pm

I played this one sometime in the late ’90s, I believe, and the Godzilla and gap-in-the-stairs puzzles are the only parts of it I remember, which supports your reading: nothing very memorable here. Maybe B-movie fans got more out of it.

Hollywood Hijnix is one of the two Infocom games since the days of the original Zork that is best described as a true group effort. The other would be their very next game, subject of my next article. Its development would take that path, however, for very different reasons.

Sounds like Bureaucracy. Looking forward to that one, though any Imps following along may be wincing in anticipation..

- Jimmy Maher

August 22, 2015 at 6:40 am

Warning, some spoilers:

The elevator puzzle is also really good. The moment that you realize that this little closet is actually an *elevator* is the best “a-ha!” moment in the game in my opinion.

At the same time, though, it’s odd that The Lurking Horror also had puzzles revolving around an elevator six months later, to the extent that they might even share much of the same code. I wonder if Dave Lebling was behind both…

- Lisa H.

August 21, 2015 at 8:49 pm

This is one I really didn’t get when I poked at it on the Lost Treasures CD that I got in the mid-90s; I was about 16 at the time. That might be a bit odd considering I was already a big MST3K fan, but there it is. I guess something about the setup left me cold. I enjoy it more now, though it still isn’t particularly interesting.

beachware

Beachwear. (Unless you mean he was wearing plastic plates and cutlery?)

PH

I think this is written with lowercase p, pH.

one wonders how evolution ever spared this bunch

It isn’t so much evolution as human keepers, though, innit? Like anything else domestic. (And FWIW when we used to keep fish when I was a kid, we never had much trouble keeping them alive. We even used to buy feeder goldfish because they were so cheap, which I think are the type usually used as prizes in carnival games and that everyone thinks of as fragile and likely to die within days, and just let them grow up in our 40-gallon tank.)

it would certainly be him who had final say on the project, Hollywood Hijnix is one of

Misspelled “Hijinx” there.

Tiinsel World

Having a problem with your keyboard’s I key, eh? (someone else pointed out a missing “i” in Hildegarde earlier on, I think.)

requires you to coat a match with wax from a burning candle, then scrape it off when you surface on the other end of the pool. That’s an iffy enough proposition in itself, but the game’s text for some reason decides to make it even harder to believe — and to solve. When you “put wax on match,” the response is that “the match head [emphasis mine] is now covered with a thin coating of candle wax.”… Even if the wax has miraculously kept the match head dry, and even if it’s possible to scrape off all of the glop and still have a strikeable head, all of the rest of the match — you know, the part that actually burns — is still all wet.

Coating a match head with wax is a standard method of waterproofing them, which I learned in Camp Fire and probably any Boy or Girl Scout did as well (though of course not everyone would have had that experience). You do not scrape the wax off when you intend to use it; you simply strike the match straight through the wax. If you coated the whole match and not just the head you would have molten wax on your fingers as it burned (ouch). The way it is in the game is how I would expect it to work. Although I suppose it’s true that in the real-life application it is not meant to protect them against total immersion in water, just against them getting damp from rain or similar in your backpack or whatever, so maybe there is that, though honestly that possibility (that in this case the match shaft would be too wet to burn even if the head lit) did not occur to me, because the whole wax-on-the-head thing seems normal to me to begin with.

- Jimmy Maher

August 22, 2015 at 6:51 am

Obviously Hildegarde’s “i” wanted its share of the spotlight and wandered over to join Tinsel World. But thanks!

The match puzzle just became a lot more interesting, based on your comment and those of one or two others. It seems this may actually resemble the Zork II baseball puzzle more than I knew, depending on a certain bit of cultural or practical knowledge that I lacked. I was never a Scout, and I think I’ve been camping maybe twice in my entire life. Obviously I’ve just discovered yet one more reason, alongside still not being able to throw a ball worth a damn and others, why I should have spent more time outside and less in front of my computer as a kid.

Anyway, the fact that many of you *didn’t* have any problems with it makes me wonder if I should propose a new addition to the Player’s Bill of Rights: “18. Not to need to have been a Scout.” Hey, it’s really no more weirdly specific than “Not to need to be an American.” This puzzle seemed absolutely absurd to me, so it’s surprising to say the least to learn that it does have a firm basis in reality, even as I continue to maintain that that match couldn’t possibly really burn.

- Ken Brubkaer

March 29, 2016 at 12:07 pm

Actually, waterproof matches are fairly common for camping/backpacking people. I remember having them when I was a kid in about ’75 and my family went canoeing for two weeks. They had some sort of green coating on the head and the stick was unprotected.

- DZ-Jay

March 19, 2017 at 12:54 am

I must concur with Lisa. As a Boy Scout, covering matches heads with wax was a typical preparation we did before camping. Even if you were not a Boy Scout, I would have expected you to at least acknowledge the physical possibility due to wax being a common waterproofing material in many products (consider cardboard containers for liquids, for example). Stating that it is “impossible” is rather bold and says more about you than the game’s expectations.

I must also say that I don’t find anything wrong with culturally-specific puzzles. It may not serve a more global audience, but the United States is rather large and includes an expansive market.

Besides, do we really want every puzzle in every game to be either some brainy, purely logical mathematical enigma, or one aiming at the lowest common denominator of generic and cultural knowledge?

dZ.

- sho

August 21, 2015 at 10:11 pm

For some reason my all time favourite, savouring this for the weekend ;)

- Keith Palmer

August 21, 2015 at 10:23 pm

I might remember Hollywood Hijinx a bit more fondly than some of the people here. The Lost Treasures of Infocom II didn’t have a hint book as the first volume did (as much as trying to look up “just one hint” from that thoroughly unprotected mass of text always seemed to spoil me as to everything else in the game, such that after a while I just shrugged and accepted that), and I only really played about half of the games in it. While I didn’t solve Hollywood Hijinx on my own, I was still left feeling I’d almost done that (merely amused when I sorted out the key to the hedge maze after mapping it all out on squared paper before even getting in the mansion, and sorting out the waterproof match problem too), and that seems to have counted for something… although when I first got online a few years later and looked up hints to finish A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity at last, some unexplained reason kept me from doing the same thing with that game.

However, when I was looking up those hints I was also looking at the games of the First Interactive Fiction Competition. “Mystery Science Theater 3000: Detective,” and some explanations of the original show in the game and a SPAG review, got me thinking it sounded kind of fun, and a few years later I got around to watching all of the show…

- ZUrlocker

August 22, 2015 at 8:55 pm

Great post Jimmy! Loved the backstory on Hollywood Dave. Even if the later Infocom stories were a bit rushed, in some ways they were more accessible or at least that’s how they felt to me. And they also went beyond the original fantasy genre. As others mentioned, while the matchstick puzzle is not obvious this was a pretty standard technique I learned as a Boy Scout in Canada. I may test it out but I’m pretty sure the wooden stick dries out very fast and will burn even if damp.

BTW I think it would be great if you collected some of these Infocom stories (and maybe later Inform classics)and turned it into a book for would-be IF authors as a guide to creating great IF works. The IF Theory book has a few decent essays but no one has written a great book that teaches story crafting in IF with real examples…

- Brian Bagnall

August 23, 2015 at 3:40 pm

Excellent article as usual. Shades of Douglas Adams’ writing style with the fish pond incident.

“he wore to work every day he could get away with it to divine that” – cross out “he could get away with it”?

“seem to be have” – cross out “be”

- Jimmy Maher

August 24, 2015 at 6:38 am

I’ll take the second suggestion, the first is as intended. ;) And thanks!

- Poddy

August 23, 2015 at 10:28 pm

I enjoy all the posts all the time, but the Infocom posts more than most. Ended up buying ‘Get Lamp’, finally, based solely on how often it shows up as a source here. Can I hope there’s some exploration of “Plundered Hearts” coming up? I’d love to see if my fond memories hold up to the light of day.

- Jimmy Maher

August 24, 2015 at 6:39 am

Oh, yeah, definitely. I *love* Plundered Hearts.

- Bernd

August 25, 2015 at 7:14 pm

I am really fond of Hollywood Hijinx. I must have been around 15 when I got it into my hands, and it was everything I enjoyed (and enjoy) most about text adventures: a limited rathern than sprawling map with lot’s and lot’s of puzzles. And puzzles that were, by and large, quite managable. The bit about only part of the match being coated never confused me, but that may have been one of the few cases in which not having English as mother language worked in my favor when playing text adventures.

For some of the puzzles I still remember today the thrill when I finally managed to solve them: the above-mentioned elevator (both discovering it and figuring out how to operate it while not being inside) is one of these puzzles.

I also hugly enjoyed the writing: at that time I was an avid reader of everything Douglas Adams, and here finally was a game with a similar tone that was not beyond me (as HGTTG and Leather Godesses had been). Some of the jokes, which may feel forced to an adult (e.g., the “Maltese Finch”) are of course just the thing for a 15-year-old … feeling proud that he actually gets them.

So maybe I got to play Hollywood Hijinx just at the right point of time. Be that as it may: “Dave” Hollywood Anderson’s only Infocom game is one of the Infocom games I cherish most.

- Jimmy Maher

August 26, 2015 at 5:37 am

Thanks for this! Our appreciation of a game is always *so* dependent on circumstance and context…

- sho

September 8, 2015 at 8:22 am

In the off chance you missed this during your research:

https://archive.org/stream/Computer_Video_Games_Issue_064_1987-02_EMAP_Publishing_GB/Computer__Video_Games_Issue_064_1987-02_EMAP_Publishing_GB#page/n85/mode/2up

- Jimmy Maher

September 9, 2015 at 6:06 pm

No, I hadn’t seen that one before. Those pictures are… interesting. Thanks!

- Peter Piers

February 5, 2016 at 8:57 pm

Although you make good points regarding the game being non-innovative and non-memorable and not having anything enw or even risky in terms of design… it’s still a game that generates fond memories and a pleasant gaming experience. Because what it does, it does so well – you can’t ever underestimate that. :) Yes, it is merely a treasure hunt, traditional as all get-out (I wrote a review of it once in which I called it “Zork Lite” – referring to the lighter atmosphere as well as the easier puzzles), but it’s a good, enjoyable traditional non-innovative treasure hunt. There’s a lot to be said for pedestrian-yet-lovable/functional!

- Rafael

February 22, 2017 at 3:19 pm

I just finished it for the first time and I have to say I really enjoyed it! Between a game with lots of story and non-challenging puzzles vs. no story with challenging puzzles, I still prefer the latter. Both together is obviously ideal, but very few examples exist, I guess. Anyway, about the match, it was the last thing I solved. By the time I had 9 treasures the only noticeable items I hadn’t used yet were the statues and the green match, so it was a quick “a-ha!” after that. Thanks for the article!

- Steve

June 4, 2017 at 7:39 am

After reading through the comments, I’m a bit surprised you didn’t soften your wording a bit about the match head, considering how many people let you know it indeed works as depicted. You can even Google “waterproofing matches” if you need more confirmation about the method.

There’s a little science denier in all of us, I guess! ;)

- Joe

July 11, 2020 at 4:57 am

I just finished this game myself and I found it to be in the top half of Infocom games overall. Not earth-shattering, but really a nice surprise after Moonmist.

I did map the full maze and it makes it fairly easy (if time-consuming) to do so since it is a straight grid and it tells you how many feet you walk in each step. A bit of graph paper and it’s a cinch… followed by disappointment as there is no clear center. You DO have to solve the other puzzle, less to know the layout of the maze and more to just locate the “X”. (And I wonder if the X can move between games? I should check the source. It seems like it could since there are a half-dozen dead ends that could have worked.)

The match puzzle is god-awful. I really did not get it at all and needed a hint.

Bureaucracy
August 27, 2015

“Writing a book is staring at a piece of paper until your forehead bleeds.”

— Douglas Adams

Shortly after the release of his second Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel, with the money now pouring in and showing no signs of stopping, Douglas Adams moved from his dingy little shared flat in Islington’s Highbury New Park to a sprawling place on Upper Street. Later to be described down almost to the last detail as Fenchurch’s flat in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the place had one floor that consisted of but a single huge L-shaped room that, coming complete as it did with a bar, was perfect for the grand parties he would soon be holding there.

There was just one problem: he couldn’t get his bank to acknowledge the fact that he had moved. For the rest of his life Adams swore up and down that he had done everything exactly as one was supposed to, had dutifully gone personally down to his local branch of Barclays Bank, filled out a change-of-address form, and handed it to a woman behind the counter. Barclays duly acknowledged the change — and sent said acknowledgement to his old address in Highbury New Park. Adams wrote them back, pointing out the mistake, which the bank promptly and contritely apologized for. Said apology was sent, once again, to Highbury New Park. This cycle continued, as Adams told the story anyway, for no less than two infuriating years. Toward the end of that period, having tried politeness, bluster, threats, and reason, he resorted to charm and outright bribery in a letter to one Miss Wilcox of Barclays, gifting her with a book and even holding out a tempting possibility of marriage to a hugely successful author — namely, him — if she would just change his damn address in her bank’s computers already.

My address is at the top of this letter. It is also at the top of my previous letter to you. I am not trying to hide anything from you. If you write to me at this address I will reply. If you write to me care of my accountant, he will reply, which would be better still. If you write to me at Highbury New Park, the chances are that I won’t reply because your letter will probably not reach me, because I don’t live there any more. I haven’t lived there for two years. I moved. Two years ago. I wrote to you about it, remember?

Dear Miss Wilcox, I am sure you are a very lovely person, and that if I were to meet you I would feel ashamed at having lost my temper with you in this way. I’m sure it’s not your fault personally and that if I had to do your job I would hate it. Let me take you away from all this. Come to London. Let me show you where I live, so that you can see it is indeed in Upper Street. I will even take you to Highbury New Park and introduce you to the man who has been living there for the past two years so that you can see for yourself that it isn’t me. I could take you out to dinner and slip you little change-of-address cards across the table. We could even get married and go and live in a villa in Spain, though how would we get anyone in your department to understand that we had moved? I enclose a copy of my new book which I hope will cheer you up. Happy Christmas.

History does not record whether this passionate missive was the one that finally did the trick.

Most writers collect interesting, humorous, and/or frustrating incidents as they go about their daily lives, jotting them down literally or metaphorically for future use, and Douglas Adams was certainly no exception. He tried to shoehorn this one into Life, the Universe, and Everything, his third Hitchhiker’s novel, via an extended riff about a change-of-address card that fouls up a planet’s central computer systems so badly that they initiate a nuclear Armageddon, but it just didn’t work somehow. The whole sequence ended up getting condensed down to a one-line gag in an extract from the in-book Hitchhiker’s Guide, listing “trying to get the Brantisvogan Civil Service to acknowledge a change-of-address card” as one of life’s great impossibilities. Still, he continued to believe the anecdote was worthy of more than that, worthy of more even than becoming just another of the arsenal of funny stories with which he amused journalists, fans, and party attendees alike.

It seems that it was the process of making the infuriating, subversive, brilliant Hitchhiker’s game with Infocom that first prompted Adams to think about making a game out of his travails with Barclays, along with the insane bureaucratic machinations of modern life in general. It was at any rate during Steve Meretzky’s visit to England to work on the Hitchhiker’s game with him that he first mentioned the idea. Meretzky, busy trying to get this game finished in the face of the immovable force that could be Adams’s talent for procrastination, presumably just nodded politely and tried to get his focus back to the business at hand.

Seven or eight months later, however, with the Hitchhiker’s game finished and selling like crazy, Adams stated definitively to Mike Dornbrook of Infocom that he’d really like to do a social satire of contemporary life called Bureaucracy before turning to the sequel. Asked by Electronic Games magazine at about this time whether he would “soon” be starting on the next Hitchhiker’s game, his answer was blunt: “No. I really feel the need to branch out into fresh areas and clear my head from Hitchhiker’s. I certainly have enjoyed working with Infocom and would very much like to do another adventure game, but on a different topic.”

The desire of this boundlessly original thinker to just be done with Hitchhiker’s, to do something else for God’s sake, certainly isn’t hard to understand. What had begun back in 1978 as a one-off six-episode radio serial, produced on a shoestring for the BBC, had seven years later ballooned into a second radio serial, four novels, a television show, a stage production, a pair of double albums, and now, so everyone assumed, a burgeoning series of computer games. Adams himself had a hand to a lesser or (usually) a greater extent in every single one of these productions, not to mention having spent quite some time drafting and fruitlessly hawking a Hitchhiker’s movie script to Hollywood. It had been all Hitchhiker’s all day every day for seven years.

Being the soul of comedy for millions of young science-fiction nerds had never been an entirely comfortable role for Adams. Sometimes the gulf between him and his most loyal fans could be hard to bridge, could leave him feeling downright estranged. Eugen Beers, his publicist, describes the most obsessive of his fans in terms that bring to mind a certain beloved old Saturday Night Live skit:

One of my abiding memories is how much he loathed book signings. It’s always a scary time for an author when you actually meet your fans, and Douglas had some of the ugliest and certainly some of the most boring people I’ve ever met in the whole of my life. They would come up to him to get their book signed and say, “I notice on page 45 you refer to…” and Douglas would say, “I haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about.”

Beers notes that Adams was “incredibly patient, in fact patient beyond anything I would have been.” Yet, and ungenerous as Beers’s description of the fans may be, the disconnect was real. Adams’s heroes growing up had been The Goon Show and later Monty Python, not Arthur C. Clarke or Robert A. Heinlein. He desperately wanted to prove himself as a humorist of general note, not just that wacky Hitchhiker’s guy that the nerds all like. Yes, Hitchhiker’s had made him rich, had paid for that wonderful Islington flat and all those lavish parties, but at some point enough had to be enough.

Infocom’s great misfortune was to have barely begun their own Hitchhiker’s odyssey just as Adams finally decided to bring his to an end. On the one hand, Adams’s desire to explore new territory must have sounded a sympathetic chord for many of the Imps; they had after all refused to continue the Zork series beyond three games out of a similar desire to not get stereotyped. But on the other hand they all had, and not without good reason, envisioned Hitchhiker’s as a cash cow that would last Infocom for the remainder of the decade, a new guaranteed bestseller appearing like clockwork every Christmas to buoy them over whatever financial trials the rest of the year might have brought. For Mike Dornbrook it must have felt like a nightmare repeating. First he had been deprived far too soon of the Zork series, the first of which still remained Infocom’s best-selling game; now it looked like something similar was happening even more quickly to the would-be Hitchhiker’s series, whose first game had become their second best-selling. In describing why he was “concerned” about making Bureaucracy Infocom’s Douglas Adams game for 1985 and pushing the next Hitchhiker’s game to 1986 at best, Dornbrook unconsciously echoes Adams’s own reasoning for wanting to move on: “The whole financial deal we had signed with him was based on a bestselling line of books that was very, very popular, very well-known. He hadn’t proved himself at anything else yet, for one thing. It was a little hard telling him that…”

It was a little hard to tell him, so Dornbrook and Infocom largely didn’t out of a desire to keep Adams happy. As his current contract with Infocom only covered Hitchhiker’s games, it was necessary to negotiate a new one for Bureaucracy. Dornbrook had some hopes of getting Adams at something of a discount, given that he’d be coming this time without the Hitchhiker’s name attached, but he was stymied even in this by Ed Victor, Adams’s tough negotiator of an agent. Infocom was left saddled with a game that they didn’t really want to do, which they would have to pay Adams for as if it was one that they wanted very badly indeed.

As Dornbrook and other staffers have occasionally noted over the years, there was nothing in Infocom’s Hitchhiker’s contract that technically prevented them from just going off and doing the next Hitchhiker’s game on their own, whether in tandem with or instead of Bureaucracy. The contract simply gave Infocom the right to make up to six Hitchhiker’s games for the cost of a certain percentage of the revenue generated thereby, full stop. They’ve stated that it was their respect for Adams as a writer and as a person that prevented them from ever seriously considering making Hitchhiker’s games without him. I don’t doubt their sincerity in saying this, but it’s also worth noting that to go down that route would be to play with some dangerous fire. While Adams may have been personally sick to death of Hitchhiker’s, he had shown again and again that he considered the franchise to be his and his alone, that if anything got done with it he wanted to do it — or at least to closely oversee it — himself. Not only would a unilateral Infocom Hitchhiker’s game almost certainly spoil their relationship with him for all time, but it risked becoming a public-relations disaster if Adams, never shy of stating his opinions to the press, decided to speak out against it. And could any of the Imps, even Steve Meretzky, really hope to capture Adams’s voice? An Adams-less Hitchhiker’s game risked coming off as a cheap knock-off, as everything that Infocom’s carefully crafted public image said their games weren’t.  Thus Bureaucracy — and, for now, Bureaucracy alone — it must be.

In light of its being rather forced upon them in the first place and especially of the exhausting travail that actually making it would become, it’s difficult for most old Infocom staffers to appreciate Bureaucracy’s intrinsic merits as a concept. Seen in the right light, however, it’s a fairly brilliant idea. Douglas Adams was of course hardly the first to want to satirize the vast, impersonal machines we create in an effort to make modern life manageable, machines that can not only run roughshod over the very individuals they’re meant to serve but that can also trample the often well-meaning people who are sentenced to work within them, even their very creators. What was the Holocaust but a triumph of institutional inertia over the fundamental humanity of the people responsible for its horrors? Years before those horrors Franz Kafka wrote The Trial, the definitive comedy about the banality of bureaucratic evil, a book as funny in its black way as anything Douglas Adams ever wrote. Just to make its black comedy complete, all three of Kafka’s sisters later perished in the Holocaust. Set against those events, Adams’s struggle with Barclays Bank to get his address changed seems like the triviality it truly was.

What, though, to make of this idea of a satire of the bureaucratic impulse as interactive fiction? I think there’s a germ of genius in there, a germ of something as brilliant and subversive as anything in the Hitchhiker’s game. Playing a text adventure — yes, even one of Infocom’s — is to often feel like you’re interacting with the world’s pettiest and most remorseless bureaucrat. We’re all only too familiar with sequences like this one, which as it happens is taken from the eventual finished version of Bureaucracy:

>put blank cartridge in computer
[This story isn't allowed to recognise the word "blank."]

[Your blood pressure just went up.]

>i
You're holding an unlabelled cartridge, an address book, a small piece of laminated card, an airline magazine, $57.50, an envelope containing a memo, a power saw, a Swiss army knife, a coupon booklet, a damaged painting of Ronald W. Reagan, a flyer, a Popular Paranoia magazine, your passport, your Boysenberry computer (containing an eclipse predicting cartridge), a small case and a hacksaw. You're wearing a digital wristwatch, and you have a deposit slip and a wallet in your pocket.

>put unlabelled cartridge in computer
You'd have to take out the eclipse predicting cartridge to do that.

>get eclipse cartridge
You're holding too much already.

>drop painting
You drop the damaged painting of Ronald W. Reagan.

You're beginning to feel normal again.

>put unlabelled cartridge in computer
You'd have to take out the eclipse predicting cartridge to do that.

>get eclipse cartridge
You take the eclipse predicting cartridge out of your Boysenberry computer.

>put unlabelled cartridge in computer
The unlabelled cartridge slips into your Boysenberry computer with a thrilling little click...

One of Adam’s initial ideas was to have a blood-pressure monitor that would increase every time you got into a tussle with the parser like the one above. This idea made it into the finished game. Yet there are signs, fleeting clues, that that should only have been a beginning, that he would have gone much further, that his idea was to create a game that would end up as, among other things, a self-referential commentary on the medium of interactive fiction itself, a further venturing down the road that the Hitchhiker’s game had already started on with its lying parser and its willingness to integrate your typos into its story. Tim Anderson of Infocom recalls a puzzle involving a pile of boxes, of which you needed to specify one that the parser would obstinately refuse to recognize. How fun such a game could have been is very much up for debate; it sounds likely to run afoul of all of the issues of playability and fairness that make Hitchhiker’s the last game in the world to be emulated by a budding designer of interactive fiction. Nevertheless, I would love to see that original vision of Bureaucracy. While some pieces of it survived into the finished game in the form of the blood-pressure monitor and the snooty, bureaucratic tone of the parser, for the most part it became a different game entirely — or, rather, several different games. Therein lies a tale — and most of the finished game’s problems.

Endeavoring as always to keep Adams happy, Infocom assigned as his partner on the new game no less august an Imp than Marc Blank, who along with Mike Berlyn had been one of the two possible collaborators Adams had specifically requested for the Hitchhiker’s game; he’d had to be convinced to accept Steve Meretzky in their stead. Alas, Blank turned out to be a terrible choice at this particular juncture. He was deeply dissatisfied with the current direction of the company and more interested in telling Al Vezza and the rest of the Board about it at every opportunity than he was in writing more interactive fiction. Bureaucracy thus immediately began to languish in neglect. This precedent would take a long, long time to break. The story at this point gets so surreal that it reads like something out of a Douglas Adams novel — or for that matter a Douglas Adams game. Infocom therefore included it in the finished version of Bureaucracy as an Easter egg entitled “The Strange and Terrible History of Bureaucracy.”

Once upon a time Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky collaborated on a game called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Everyone wanted a sequel, but Douglas thought it might be fun to do something different first. He called that something Bureaucracy, and wanted Marc Blank to work on it with him. Of course, Marc was busy, and Douglas was busy, and by the time they could both work on it, they were too busy to work on it. So, Jerry Wolper [a programmer who had collaborated with Mike Berlyn on Cutthroats] got a free trip to Las Vegas to talk to Douglas about it before it was decided to let it rest for a while instead. Jerry decided to go back to school, so Marc and Douglas spent some time on Nantucket looking at llamas, drinking Chateau d'Yquem, and arguing about puzzles. Nothing much happened for a while, except that Marc and Douglas got distracted again. Paul DiLascia [a senior member of the Cornerstone development team] decided to give it a try, but changed his mind and kept working on Cornerstone. Marc went to work for Simon and Schuster, and Paul went to work for Interleaf. Jeff O'Neill finished Ballyhoo, and, casting about for a new project, decided to take it on, about the time Jerry graduated. Jeff got a trip to London out of it. Douglas was enthusiastic, but busy with a movie. Progress was slow, and then Douglas was very busy with something named Dirk Gently. Jeff decided it was time to work on something else, and Brian Moriarty took it over. He visited England, and marvelled at Douglas's CD collection, but progress was slow. Eventually he decided it was time to work on something else. Paul made a cameo appearance, but decided to stay at Interleaf instead. So Chris Reeve and Tim Anderson took it over, and mucked around a lot. Finally, back in Las Vegas, Michael Bywater jumped (or was pushed) in and came to Boston for some serious script-doctoring, which made what was there into what is here. In addition, there were significant contributions from Liz Cyr-Jones, Suzanne Frank, Gary Brennan, Tomas Bok, Max Buxton, Jon Palace, Dave Lebling, Stu Galley, Linde Dynneson, and others too numerous to mention. Most of these people are not dead yet, and apologise for the inconvenience.

Trying to unravel in much more detail this Gordian knot that consumed more than twice as much time as any other Infocom game is fairly hopeless, not least because no one who was around it much wants to talk about it. The project, having been begun to some extent under duress, soon become a veritable albatross, a bad joke for which no one can manage to summon up much of a laugh even today. Jon Palace is typical:

There may be some fun things left in the game, but it left such a bad taste in my mouth. At some point it became, the less I can have to do with it the better. It wasn’t fun doing that game. Bureaucracy is the only game I can remember that was just downright not fun to do.

The natural question, then, is just what went so horribly awry for this game alone among all the others. Infocom’s official version of the tale neglects only to assign the blame where it rightfully belongs: solidly on the doorstep of Douglas Adams.

Adams was a member of a species that’s not as rare as one might expect: the brilliant writer who absolutely hates to write, who finds the process torturous, personally draining to a degree ironically difficult to capture in words. Even during the seven-year heyday of Hitchhiker’s, when he was to all external appearances quite industrious and prolific indeed, he was building a reputation for himself among publishers and agents as one of the most difficult personalities in their line of business, not because he was a jerk or a prima donna like many other authors but simply because he never — never — did the work he said he was going to do when he said he was going to do it. The stories of the lengths people had to go to to get work out of him remain enshrined in publishing legend to this day. Locking him into a small room with a word processor and a single taskmaster/minder and telling him he wasn’t allowed out until he was finished was about the only method that was remotely effective.

It wasn’t as if Infocom had never seen this side of Douglas Adams before. His procrastination had also threatened to scupper the Hitchhiker’s game for a while. They had, however, as they must now have been realizing more and more, gotten very lucky there. With Infocom’s star on the ascendant at that time, the publishing interests around Adams had clearly seen a Hitchhiker’s Infocom game as a winning proposition all the way around. They had thus mobilized to make it part of their 1984 full-court press on their embattled author that had also yielded So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the overdue fourth Hitchhiker’s novel. Infocom, meanwhile, had fortuitously paired Adams with Steve Meretzky, the most self-driven, efficient, and organized of all the Imps, who always got his projects done and done on time — as evidenced by his sheer prolificacy as an author of games, gamebooks, and lots and lots of fake memos. Even with Meretzky’s boundless creative energy on Infocom’s side, it had taken colluding with Adams’s handlers to isolate the two of them in a hotel in Devon to get Adams to follow his partner’s example and buckle down and work on the game.

With the industry now shifting under Infocom’s feet in ways that were hardly to their advantage, with Cornerstone threatening to sink the company even if they could find a way to keep selling lots of games, with the project in question a one-off that no one knew much about rather than another entry in the Hitchhiker’s line-up, Infocom lacked the leverage with Adams or his handlers to do anything similar for Bureaucracy. And Meretzky was staying far, far away, having apparently decided that he’d done his time in Purgatory with Douglas Adams and had earned the right to work on his own projects. Thus despite allegedly “working on” Bureaucracy personally for almost two years, despite all of the face-to-faces in Las Vegas, Nantucket, and London, Adams’s contributions at the end of that time amounted to little more than the rough idea he had brought to Infocom in the first place: the name, the blood-pressure monitor, and a few vague puzzles ideas like the boxes that sounded interesting but that no other than him quite understood and that he never deigned to properly explain. Meretzky:

Douglas’s procrastination seemed much worse than it was with Hitchhiker’s. That seems odd because he did the first game only grudgingly, since he had already done Hitchhiker’s for several different media, but Bureaucracy was what he most wanted to do. Perhaps the newness and excitement of working in interactive fiction had worn off; perhaps he had more distractions in his life at that point; perhaps it was that the succession of people who had my role in Bureaucracy didn’t stay with the project for more than a portion of its development cycle and therefore never became a well-integrated creative unit with Douglas; perhaps it was that, lacking the immovable Christmas deadline that Hitchhiker’s had, it was easier to let the game just keep slipping and slipping.

Brian Moriarty is less diplomatic: “Douglas Adams was a very funny man, very witty, a very good writer, and also very, very lazy. Anyone who knew Douglas will tell you that he really didn’t like to work very much.” Just to add insult to injury, when Adams did rouse himself to work on a game project it turned out to be for a competing developer. In January of 1986 he spent several days holed up in London with a sizable chunk of the staff of Lucasfilm Games, contributing ideas and puzzles to their Labyrinth adventure game. That may not sound like the worst betrayal in the world at first blush, but consider again: he devoted more time and energy to this ad-hoc design consultation than he ever had to what was allegedly his own game, the one Infocom had started making at his specific request.

The succession of Imps who were assigned to the project were forced to improvise with their own ideas in face of the black hole that was Adams’s contribution. Details of exactly who did what are, however, once again thin on the ground. The only Imp I’ve heard claim specific credit for any sequence that survived into the final game is Moriarty, who remembers doing a bit where you’re trying to order a simple hamburger in a fast-food joint, only to get buried under a bewildering barrage of questions about exactly how you’d like it. The inevitable punchline comes when a “standard, smells-like-a-dog’s-ear burger with nothing on it” is finally delivered, regardless of your choices.

By late 1986, as the Bureaucracy project was closing in fast on its two-year anniversary, it was not so much a single big game as a collection of individual little games connected together, if at all, by the most precarious of scaffolding, each reading not like a game by Douglas Adams but a game by whatever Imp happened to be responsible for that section. Not only had Adams’s ideas for leveraging the mechanics of program and parser in service of his theme been largely abandoned, but at some point a fairly elaborate satire of paranoid conspiracy theorists — sort of an interactive Illuminatus! trilogy — had gotten muddled up with the satire of impersonal bureaucratic institutions in general. As the recent revelations about the National Security Agency have demonstrated, the two all too often do go together. Still, those parts of Bureaucracy had wandered quite far afield from everyday frustrations like trying to get a bank to accept a change-of-address form. It had all become quite the mess, and nobody had much energy left to try to sort it out.

If you had polled Infocom’s staff at this point on whether they thought Bureaucracy would ever actually be finished, it’s unlikely that many would have shown much optimism. The project remained alive at all not due to any love anyone had for it but rather out of what was probably a forlorn hope anyway: that getting this game out and published would pave the way to the next Hitchhiker’s game, to another potential 300,000-plus seller. Having done their part in getting Bureaucracy done, with or without Adams, Infocom hoped he would do his by returning to Hitchhiker’s with them. Few who knew Adams well would have bet much on that particular quid pro quo, but hope does spring eternal.

And then, miraculously, more than a glimmer of real hope did appear from an unlikely quarter. Marc Blank was long gone from Infocom by then, but had continued to keep in touch with his old friends among the Imps. At the November 1986 COMDEX trade show in Las Vegas, he bumped into Michael Bywater, a good friend of Douglas Adams and a fellow writer — in fact, a practitioner of his own brand of arch British humor that, if you squinted just right, wasn’t too different from that of Adams himself. Knowing the fix his old friends were still in with the game he had been the first to work on so long ago, a light bulb went off in Blank’s head. He hastily brokered a deal among Infocom, Adams, and Bywater, and the last arrived in the Boston area within days to hole up in a hotel room for an intense three weeks or so of script-doctoring. Infocom’s Tim Anderson, the latest programmer assigned to the project, stayed close at hand to insert Bywater’s new text and to implement any new puzzles he happened to come up with.

Jumbling the chronology as we’re sometimes forced to around here in the interest of other forms of coherency, we’ve already met Bywater in the context of his personal and professional relationship with Anita Sinclair and Magnetic Scrolls, and the salvage job he would do on that company’s Jinxter nine months or so after performing the same service for Infocom. As arrogant and quick to anger as he can sometimes be (one need only read his comments in response to Andy Baio’s misguided and confused article on the would-be second Hitchhiker’s game to divine that), everyone at Infocom found him to be a delight, not least because here at last was a writer who was more than happy to actually write. In a few weeks he rewrote virtually every word in the game in his own style — a style that was more caustic than Adams’s, but that nevertheless checked the right “British humor” boxes. Just like that, Infocom had their game, which they needed only test and publish to finally be quit of the whole affair forever. Right?

Well, this being the Game That Just Wouldn’t Be Finished, not quite. Janice Eisen, a current reader and supporter of this blog and an outside playtester for Infocom back in the day, recalls being given a version of Bureaucracy for testing that was largely the same structurally as the released version and that seemed to sport Bywater’s text, but that nevertheless differed substantially in one respect. The ultimate villain in this version, the person responsible for all of the bureaucratic tortures you’ve been subjected to, was not, as in the final version, a bitter computer nerd seeking to exact vengeance on the world and (for some reason) on you for his inability to get a date, but rather none other than Britain’s Queen Mother. As a satirical theme it’s classic Bywater. He was and remains a self-described republican, seeing the monarchy as setting “an appalling example to the whole nation by making clear that there’s at least one thing — head of state — that you can’t achieve but can only be born to.”

Some weeks after testing this version of Bureaucracy at home as usual, Janice, who lived close to Infocom’s offices, got a call asking if she could come in to test what would turn out to be the final version on-site. She was also told she could bring a friend of hers, another Infocom fan but not a regular tester, to join in. They spent a Saturday playing through the game, with a minder on-hand to give them answers to puzzles if necessary to make sure they got all the way through the game. It’s not absolutely clear whether Bywater was involved in the further rewriting made necessary by the replacement of the Queen Mother with the nerd, but the lavishly insulting descriptions of the latter — “ghastly,” “sniveling,” “ratty,” and “ineffectual” number amongst the adjectives — sound nothing like any of the Imps’ styles and very much like Bywater’s. When she asked why Infocom had made the changes — she had enjoyed the Queen Mother much more than the nerd — Janice was told that Infocom had feared that they were going too far into the realm of politics, that they were afraid that the Queen Mother, 86 years old at the time, might die while the game was still a hot item, making them look “terrible.” (This fear would prove unfounded; she would live for another fifteen years.)

So, it was a tortured, cobbled, disjointed creation that finally reached store shelves against all odds in March of 1987, and apparently one that had been subject to the final violation of a last-minute Bowdlerization. For all that, though, it’s a lot better game than you might expect, a better game even than most of the Infocom staffers, having had it so thoroughly spoiled in their eyes by the hell of its creation, are often willing to acknowledge. I quite like it on the whole, even if I have to temper that opinion with a lot of caveats.

Bureaucracy shows clear evidence of the fragmented process of its creation in being divided into four vignettes that become, generally not to the game’s benefit, steadily more surreal and less grounded in the everyday as they proceed. The first, longest, and strongest section begins after you have just gotten a new job and moved to a new neighborhood. Your new employer Happitec is about to send you jetting off to Paris for an introductory seminar. You just need to “pick up your Happitec cheque, grab a bite of lunch, a cab to the airport, and you’ll be living high on the hog at Happitec’s expense.” Naturally, it won’t be quite that easy. It’s here that the game pays due homage to the episode that first inspired it: your mail had been misdelivered thanks to “a silly bit of bother with your bank about a change-of-address card.” Subsequent sections have you trying to board your flight at the airport; dealing with the annoyances of a transcontinental flight, which include in this case something about an in-flight emergency that will force you to bail out of the airplane; and finally penetrating the dastardly nerdy mastermind’s headquarters somewhere in the jungles of Africa.

Much of Bureaucracy’s personality is of course down to Bywater (about whom more in a moment), but I’m not sure that he comprises the whole of the story. I’d love to know who wrote my favorite bit, which is not found in the game proper but rather in one of the feelies. Your welcome letter from Happitec is such a perfect satire of Silicon Valley’s culture of empty plastic Utopianism that it belongs on the current television show of the same name. The letterhead’s resemblance to Apple’s then-current Macintosh iconography is certainly not accidental.

From the cult of personality around Happitec’s “founder and president” to the way it can’t even be bothered to address you by name to the veiled passive-aggressive threat with which it concludes, this letter is just so perfect. All it’s missing is a reference to “making the world a better place.”

Bywater, for his part, acquits himself more than well enough as the mirror-universe version of Douglas Adams, almost as witty and droll but more casually cruel. His relentless showiness makes him a writer whom I find fairly exhausting to try to read in big gulps, but he always leaves me with a perfect little bon mot or two to marvel over.

This is the living room of your new house, a pretty nice room, actually. At least, it will be when all your stuff has arrived as the removals company said they would have done yesterday and now say they will do while you're on vacation. At the moment, however, it's a bit dull. Plain white, no carpets, no curtains, no furniture. A room to go bughouse in, really. Another room is visible to the west, and a closed front door leads outside.

This deeply tacky wallet was sent to you free by the US Excess Credit Card Corporation to tell you how much a person like you needed a US Excess card, what with your busy thrusting lifestyle in today's fast-moving, computerised, jet-setting world. Needless to say, you already had a US Excess card which they were trying to take away from you for not paying your account, which, equally needless to say, you had paid weeks ago.

The stamp on the leaflet is worth 42 Zalagasan Wossnames (the Zalagasans were too idle to think of a name for their currency) and shows an extremely bad picture of an Ai-Ai. The Ai-Ai is of course a terribly, terribly rare sort of lemur which is a rare sort of monkey so altogether pretty rare, so rare that nobody has ever seen one, which is why the picture is such a blurred and rotten likeness. Actually, come to think of it, since nobody has ever seen the real thing, the picture might in fact be a really sharp, accurate likeness of a blurred and rotten animal.

The machine says: "Jones here. I'm the new tenant of your old house. There's a whole bunch of mail been arriving here for you. Urgent stuff from the Fillmore Fiduciary Trust. You know what I thought? I thought 'Do the right thing, Jones. Forward the guy's mail.' Then I found out about the termites. Then I found out about the nightly roach-dance. So I thought 'Rats.' I've returned your mail to your bank. Sort it out yourself."

So, when the scenario gives him something to work with Bywater can be pretty great. He’s much less effective when the game loses its focus on the frustrations of everyday existence, which it does with increasing frequency as it wears on and the situations get more and more surreal. He seems to feel obligated to continue to slather on heavy layers of snark, because after all he’s Michael Bywater and that’s what he does, but the point of it all begins rather to get lost. His description of your fellow passengers aboard an African airline as playing “ethnic nose flutes” is… well, let’s just say it’s not as funny as it wants to be and leave it at that. And his relentless picking away at the service workers you encounter — “The waiter squints at his pad with tiny simian eyes, breathing hard at the intellectual effort of it all.” — doesn’t really ring true for me, largely because I never seem to meet so many of these stupid and/or hateful people in my own life. Most of the people I meet seem pretty nice and reasonably competent on the whole. Even when I’m being gored on the bureaucratic horns of some institution or other, I find that the people I deal with are mostly just as conscious as I am of how ridiculous the whole thing is. As Kafka, who was himself an employee of an insurance company, was well aware, this is largely what makes bureaucracies so impersonal and vaguely, existentially horrifying. Ah, well, as someone who sees nothing cute about someone else’s baby — sorry, proud parents! — I can at least appreciate Bywater’s characterization of same as a “stupid, half-witted” thing emitting “hateful little bleats.”

The puzzles are perhaps the strangest mixture of easy and hard found anywhere in the Infocom catalog. The first two sections of the game are very manageable, with some puzzles that might almost be characterized as too easy and only a few that are a bit tricky; the best of these, and arguably the most difficult, is a delightful bit of illogical logic involving your bank and a negative check. When you actually board your flight and begin the third section, however, the difficulty takes a vertical leap. The linear run of puzzles that is the third and fourth sections of Bureaucracy is downright punishing, including at least three that I find much more difficult than anything in Spellbreaker, supposedly Infocom’s big challenge of a game for the hardcore of the hardcore. One is an intricate exercise in planning and pattern recognition taking place aboard the airplane (Bywater claims credit for having designed this one from scratch); one an intimidating exercise in code-breaking; one more a series of puzzles than a single puzzle really, an exercise in computer hacking that’s simulated in impressive detail. None of the three is unfair. (The puzzle that comes closest to that line is actually not among this group; it’s rather a game of “guess the right action or be killed” that you have to engage in whilst hanging outside the airliner in a parachute.) The clues are there, but they’re extremely subtle, requiring the closest reading and the most careful experimentation whilst being under, in the case of the first and the third of this group, time pressure that will have you restoring again and again. Bureaucracy raises the interesting question of whether a technically fair game can nevertheless simply be too hard for its own good. The gnarly puzzles that suddenly appear out of the blue don’t serve this particular game all that well in my opinion, managing only to further dilute its original focus and make it feel still more schizophrenic. I think I’d like them more in another, different game. At any rate, those looking for a challenge won’t be disappointed. If you can crack this one without hints, you’re quite the puzzler.

Although it’s Infocom’s third release in their Interactive Fiction Plus line of games that ran only on the “big” machines with at least 128 K of memory, Bureaucracy doesn’t feel epic in the way of A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity. A glance at the story file reveals that it doesn’t completely fill the extra space allowed by the newer Z-Machine, in contrast to the previous two games in the line that stuff the format to the gills. I would even say that quite a number of Infocom’s standard releases subjectively feel bigger. Bureaucracy became an Interactive Fiction Plus title more by accident than original intent, the extra space serving largely to give a chatty Michael Bywater more room to ramble and to allow stuff like that elaborate in-game computer simulation. And given the way the game was made, I’d be surprised if its code was particularly compact or tidy.

Despite all of the pain of its creation and the bad vibes that clung to it for reason of same, Infocom released Bureaucracy with relatively high hopes that the Douglas Adams name, still printed on the box despite his minimal involvement, would be enough to sell a substantial number of copies even absent the Hitchhiker’s name. Adams, showing at least a bit more enthusiasm for promoting Bureaucracy than he had for writing it, gave an interview about it to PBS’s Computer Chronicles television program, during which it becomes painfully apparent that he has only the vaguest notion of what actually happens in the game he supposedly authored. He also appeared on Joan Rivers’s late-night talk show; she declared it “the funniest computer game ever,” although I must admit that I find it hard to imagine that she had much basis for comparison. None of it helped all that much. As was beginning to happen a lot by 1987, Infocom was sharply disappointed by their latest hoped-for hit’s performance. Bureaucracy sold not quite 30,000 copies, a bit better than the Infocom average by this point but short of Hitchhiker’s numbers by a factor of more than ten.

The game’s a shaggy, disjointed beast for sure, but I still recommend that anyone with an appreciation of for the craft of interactive fiction give it a whirl at some point. If the hardcore puzzles at the end aren’t your bag, know that the first two sequences are by far its most coherent and focused parts. Feel free to just stop when you make it aboard the airplane; by that time you’ve seen about 75 percent of the content anyway. Whatever else it would or should have become, as Infocom’s only work of contemporary social satire Bureaucracy is a unique entry in their catalog, and in its stronger moments at least it acquits itself pretty well at the business. That alone is reason enough to treasure it. And as a lesson in the perils of staking your business on a single mercurial genius… well, let’s just say that the story behind Bureaucracy is perhaps worthwhile in its way as well.

(As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Reader Janice Eisen took the time to correspond with me about her memories of testing Bureaucracy, for which I owe her huge thanks. Other sources include the two Douglas Adams biographies, Hitchhiker by M.J. Simpson and Wish You Were Here by Nick Webb; the Family Computing of September 1987; the Electronic Games of April 1985; and the audio of Steve Meretzky and Michael Bywater’s joint conversation in London back in 2005.)

Comments
44 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

August 27, 2015 at 8:45 pm

I’m puzzled. How did Adams’s sharp agent let him sign such a dumb contract that allowed Infocom to make Hitchhiker’s games independently of him? Perhaps the agent figured that Infocom wouldn’t do that for the reasons you articulate, but it still seems boneheaded.

- Jimmy Maher

August 28, 2015 at 7:13 am

I certainly haven’t seen the contract myself, but this is a statement that comes up quite frequently in interviews of the Infocom staffers. Absent evidence to the contrary, I have to assume that they’re correct.

Adams’s agent Ed Victor certainly wasn’t naive or boneheaded in the least; he was quite a tough-minded character who was good at extracting the proverbial maximum value for his client. Just theorizing here: given Adams’s well-known talent for procrastination, perhaps it was seen as leverage to force him into working on the Infocom games, or as a potential way of getting the games done anyway if he just couldn’t be motivated. Such speculation does of course bring with it the question of why that means of pressure was never brought to bear. Maybe with the sudden collapse in Infocom’s fortunes in 1985 and the steady decline of the text-adventure market thereafter, they just figured the commercial rewards wouldn’t be worth the effort?

- Cliffy73

December 17, 2015 at 1:56 am

My guess is that Victor knew Infocom would fear Adams going on a tear in the press if they wrote one without him. This way he got his client the percentage whether Adams wrote them or not but also assuaged Infocom’s fear that IF-neophyte Adams would be somehow unsuitable. Seems like exactly the best deal under the circumstances.

- Michael Dornbrook

May 2, 2018 at 2:20 am

I still have a copy of the contract. And I can attest that Ed Victor was one of the very best at his job. As I recall, Douglas was still enthusiastic about Hitchhikers when we were negotiating the contract. This was before his difficulty getting So Long and Thanks for All the Fish written (which happened simultaneously with the game). By the time he finished that book and the Hitchhikers game (which honestly was mostly written by Steve Meretzky), he was sick of HHGG.

The thinking was that each of the 3 books completed at the time of the game contract had enough material to create 2 games, so a total of 6. Given the sheer amount of material to work with, and the relatively small size of interactive fiction games, I didn’t doubt that we could create 6 interesting games. I don’t think we felt that Douglas had to be heavily involved. Obviously we wanted his creative input, but a big factor was having his involvement in press tours to market the games. The process of getting Bureaucracy done had taken a toll on the relationship, so starting another game was going to require a cooling-off period.

I, for one, never gave up hope that we’d eventually do more Hitchhiker titles. Even in 1988 time frame, I think a second Hitchhikers game would have done pretty well (not as well as the original, but better than any other games we were putting out then). But with new owner Activision running out of money (it went bankrupt a couple of years later), a downward spiral had already begun.

My concern about Bureaucracy from day one was that games are a way to get away from the frustrations of the real world. Coming home from a typical frustrating job to play a game that throws you back into the hell you are trying to escape was not my idea of fun. Douglas was convinced that it would outsell HHGG, so I offered him a deal that would pay much higher royalties if he was right, and very little if the game sold at the level of one of Infocom’s more modest sellers. He and Ed refused to consider that.

P.S. Working with Douglas, and especially socializing with Douglas, was one of the high points of my career. He was brilliant, interesting, incredibly funny, well-informed, curious about everything, and the life of the party.

P.P.S. One of my favorite package feelies was in the Bureaucracy box – I’m surprised it wasn’t mentioned. The Better Beezer Card application (in triplicate) is quite funny.

- Richard S

September 12, 2018 at 4:37 am

I just dug out my Bureaucracy box after reading this and found the Beezer Card application I filled out way back when. I put 222 as my age in months (or was that number of tattoos?). It was a fun little reminder that I was indeed so young as 18 at one time. I might just have to try to complete Bureaucracy one of these days!

- Steve-O

August 27, 2015 at 10:40 pm

Only the worst sort of pedant (hello!) would notice this, but in “brokered a deal among Infocom, Adams, and Bywater, and the latter arrived in the Boston area”, “latter” should be “last”. “Latter” only applies when there are just two items in the list.

- matt w

August 28, 2015 at 12:09 am

I have a pedantic note too: I must object to “The puzzles are a mixed bag in a quite literal sense,” unless there’s a feelie you don’t describe. (I know that “literal” is often used in a way that doesn’t literally mean “literal,” but still.)

And since I’m nitipicking I also want to echo Howard below–I don’t exactly drop everything, but I immediately open the tab from Planet-IF and leave it there until I get the chance to read it. Not to mention that these posts are a substantial part of the reason I’m always checking Planet-IF.

- Jimmy Maher

August 28, 2015 at 6:19 am

Yeah, I wasn’t really happy with that sentence myself but never quite went back to change it. I have now. Thanks!

- Jimmy Maher

August 28, 2015 at 5:54 am

Thank God for pedants, then! Thanks!

- Howard Lewis Ship

August 27, 2015 at 11:12 pm

Something’s missing in the sentence “Bywater claims credit for having as well as written the text for this one”.

- Jimmy Maher

August 28, 2015 at 5:58 am

Fixed, thanks. And I’ll never complain about you folks helping me to fix up these articles — not that praise isn’t also appreciated. :)

- Howard Lewis Ship

August 27, 2015 at 11:15 pm

Also, since I keep posting just grammar problems and the like, I’d also like to share some positive feedback — when you post a new article I drop everything to read it immediately.

- matt w

August 27, 2015 at 11:57 pm

As the resident person who points this sort of thing out, have you spelled “Leo J. Zereb” backwards?

- Jimmy Maher

August 28, 2015 at 6:13 am

I have now. :)

- matt w

August 28, 2015 at 12:03 am

Also, another possible clue, “thrusting” is something of an Adamsism–“Mostly Harmless” contains phrases like “This is the most radical, dynamic and thrusting business venture in the entire multidimensional infinity of space/time/probability ever.” Though in light of the chronology maybe Adams borrowed it from Bywater.

- Monty

August 28, 2015 at 1:35 am

I have always been fond of Bureaucracy, because I was part of the team of three high school students that won the Bureaucracy Marathon of the Minds (the pre-release tournament that Infocom was staging for its games around this time). It took us 36 straight hours, at the end of which we were very tired.

- Jimmy Maher

August 28, 2015 at 6:21 am

Wow. Given the modest length of the game, you must have spent a lot of time staring at the same puzzles. Given how hard those puzzles at the end are, that’s understandable. Going to write a bit about the Marathons of the Mind in my next article, by the way.

- Dan

January 30, 2017 at 7:25 pm

Interesting. My team won the MotM in San Francisco, using Hollywood Hijinx. Not as difficult a game.

- whomever

August 28, 2015 at 7:46 pm

Fascinating reading. I actually really loved Bureaucracy when it came out (I was 14 IIRC). Didn’t ever get past the airport if I remember but I really enjoyed the writing and the atmosphere. I got in the habit of using “ochre and aubergine stripes” as my standard color (from the Llama farmhouse). And I will credit it this: I learned how to spell the word properly because of it.

- G Grobbelaar

August 29, 2015 at 11:43 am

This game frustrated me as well, at least now I know why! I was a DNA fanatic and read all his books, except Mostly Harmless (Due to Marvin…) I love that paranoid android! It just didn’t ring true to his style. My wife read some of the game’s text when I played it and IIRC wasn’t bothered and said it sounds like his writing. (But for the record,I still strange that most people don’t, or is unable to see the difference between certain video recordings media, hear when dialogue in a movie, tv show, etc., sound stupid or even when I read books the authors voice sounds off – good example is DNA’s Starship Titanic which might just be in the same line as Bureaucracy, written by Terry due to DNA’s habits! And I am basically tone-deaf haha!) As for the game I did like it, don’t get me wrong on that! One other reason this game makes me smile when I hear about it, is the fact that we moved in 2001 from Johannesburg to a small town (Welkom) after I was run over by a car and couldn’t do that security work, ironically I worked at First National Bank – Barclays left the SA in the 80’s – and became FNB, the wife and I change our ID’s (Identity Documents) and to this day the Powers that be has our address at the Jo’burg address, we gave up to change it after a dozen times!

- G Grobbelaar

August 29, 2015 at 11:49 am

That will be our postal address I meant to say! As we lived in a flat/apartment that went a bid down over the years as did the neighbourhood!

- Nate

August 29, 2015 at 7:08 pm

I’m so glad to be a supporter on Patreon. Your articles bring me a smile each weekend.

“hopes does spring eternal.” -> singular

- Jimmy Maher

August 29, 2015 at 9:50 pm

Thanks!

- Janice M. Eisen

August 29, 2015 at 9:54 pm

As usual, a terrific article that puts the game’s problems in their proper perspective. Glad I was able to help!

- Dan Fabulich

August 31, 2015 at 5:22 am

Wow, I missed Andy Baio’s “Milliways” article which you briefly linked to above when it was originally published. http://waxy.org/2008/04/milliways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/

That comment thread is a twenty-car traffic accident, with Bywater playing the role of a jackknifed big rig!

At various points Andy pipes up to say that he’s deleted some of the worst stuff! Considering what remains, I can’t even imagine what he must have deleted.

- Gnoman

August 31, 2015 at 6:38 pm

Now I have to wonder how much Adams had to do with Starship Titanic – the humor in that game felt extremely Adamsian (which is to say that I mostly found it dull and idiotically unfunny), but I find it hard to imagine he took that project any more seriously than this one.

- Jimmy Maher

September 1, 2015 at 7:17 pm

Bywater did help with Starship Titanic as well, but my impression is that it was more of a legitimate collaboration than was the case for Bureaucracy. (It also led to a major falling-out between the two old friends, as described in Nick Webb’s Wish You Were Here.)

- Charlie pye

September 1, 2015 at 4:51 am

Maybe part of the problem with this game is the incident itself that gave Adams the inspiration? To me, that doesn’t seem like an incident with bureaucracy at all. I mean sure, it’s a big bank so they have a big bureaucracy, but that wasn’t the problem for him. It was just a standard, human, screw up. A bureaucratic nightmare is when they follow their rules no matter how difficult or illogical they might be- in his case, they just didn’t follow their own rules. He filled out the form just like they wanted, but they lost it.

Obsidian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian_(video_game)) is a fun game I remember, that’s probably more like what he imagined.

- Jimmy Maher

September 1, 2015 at 7:21 pm

I understand what you’re saying, but I would just note that a very common frustration with large, rigid bureaucracies is that once a mistake is made it’s almost impossible to get corrected because the system is simply not designed to allow the individual agency that would be necessary to do so. So, in my opinion the story is an apt one — assuming of course that it’s entirely true. (Like many great storytellers, Douglas Adams was often willing to massage the truth a little in the service of a crowd-pleasing anecdote.)

- Peter Ferrie

February 12, 2016 at 12:52 am

At least in the Apple II version, there is a game-crashing bug if you order from the second server the salad with vinaigrette. That was my first experience with the game, and I avoided it for years afterwards as a result.

- DZ-Jay

March 19, 2017 at 11:59 am

>> “The project, having been begun to some extent under duress, soon become a veritable albatross…”

There’s a strange tortured use of verb tenses there. At the very least, it should be “became” or “becomes.” Probably the latter to coincide with the first clause.

- DZ-Jay

March 19, 2017 at 12:18 pm

>> … this letter just so perfect”

Perhaps missing a verb there?

- Jimmy Maher

March 20, 2017 at 8:36 am

Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

March 19, 2017 at 12:38 pm

By the way, this is yet another very interesting article and the history of the game is truly fascinating. Thank you so much for it.

As hellishly interesting as the story is, the game does not sound like much fun at all, at least not in the way you have depicted it. Yet you still recommend it, so I must ask, is it really a good game, or is it merely a historical curiosity which may be of passing interest to some? From all your descriptions, the feedback from the Imps, the posturing from one involved in it — and even from the origin story of the game itself — I would surmise the latter.

dZ.

- whomever

March 19, 2017 at 2:18 pm

Don’t want to speak for Jimmy, but to provide an answer to this: As one who played it at the time IMHO Bureaucracy was one of the more fun Infocom games, though I think the ending feels rushed. Certain of the puzzles are awesome. So, IMHO, yes, it’s lots of fun to play.

- Chad

August 10, 2017 at 4:35 pm

I’m amused at the name of Happitec’s founder. Leo J Zereb is a nice nod to Joel Berez.

- whomever

October 12, 2017 at 7:18 pm

The Atlantic just published an article that starts out with a description of this game! Surprised to see it referred in such a mainstream publication. (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/10/bureaucrat-welfare-zacka/542547/)

- Chris Devers

April 18, 2018 at 3:25 pm

So Rian Johnson, director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, likes your article :-)

https://twitter.com/rianjohnson/status/986492353794850817

- Pingback: Stay Forever | Amnesia (Folge 81)

- Prof. Pfeifenberg

September 20, 2018 at 2:12 pm

Late to the party….

But why FFS didn’t Douglas Adams just change his BANK? I know I would.

- Lisa H.

September 20, 2018 at 5:19 pm

Because it would be the same all over? Bureaucracy is bigger than just one institution.

- Sebastian Redl

January 25, 2019 at 3:26 pm

As one of those proud young parents, I found it interesting to note that the description of a baby immediately evoked an intense emotional reaction in me. I could really feel my hackles rise, ready to yell insults at the author for daring to characterize a baby as “hateful”.

The mind is a strange place.

- Sebastian Redl

January 25, 2019 at 3:27 pm

Is “evoke” even the right word here?

- Lisa H.

January 25, 2019 at 7:21 pm

Sure: “to call up or produce (memories, feelings, etc.); to elicit or draw forth, to call up; cause to appear; summon; to produce or suggest through artistry and imagination a vivid impression of reality”, although you might also have been thinking of provoke, which has some similar meanings in this sort of context.

…and Into the Fire
September 5, 2015

When Infocom’s loyal fans received their New Zork Times newsletter for the spring of 1986, they were surprised not only by the shocking acquisition by Activision that was announced therein but also by the issue’s letterhead. Replacing The New Zork Times was a simple “* * * *.” It seemed that a certain Gray Lady in New York City had belatedly — very belatedly, in light of the fact that she had published several articles about Infocom — gotten wind of the title of the newsletter and decided that it wasn’t kosher at all. “You are endangering vital Times Company assets,” she had written, without deigning to clarify in exactly what way. The bottom line, however, was clear enough: “I am asking our attorney to take the necessary steps.”

This obviously wasn’t a fight that Infocom was going to win. After apologizing to “the millions of people who had bought The New York Times hoping to receive ‘* * * *,'” they initiated a contest to seek out a new name, the ironic prize a subscription to The New York Times. Cliff Tuel of San Jose had the winning suggestion, The Status Line, although I must say that my personal favorites are The Gnu Yak Times (“All the gnus’ wee feet leave prints”), The Old Zork Times, and The New York Times (“Really give them something to complain about!”). Tuel declined his Times subscription, saying he lacked a bird cage that needed lining, and asked for a free Infocom game instead, thus enabling a delighted Infocom to write that “The New York Times can’t be given away!”

Amid all the turbulence that had led to the Activision acquisition, the need to retire the name that had been on Infocom’s newsletter since Mike Dornbrook had founded The Zork Users Group back in 1981 was a fairly minor problem, one to be dealt with with as much grace and good humor as possible — in the case of Infocom that always meant a considerable amount of both — and put behind them. Seen with the benefit of hindsight, though, it represents the beginning of the slow erosion of Infocom’s identity that would mark this final era of their existence, a process of bargaining with powers greater than themselves that slowly leached away more and more autonomy, more and more personality, from this proud little troupe that had always done things their own way. By the time that process came to its inevitable painful anticlimax three years later, some at Infocom would wonder if it mightn’t have been better to have just let the company go under in 1986.

Perhaps Infocom, desperate as they were to see Activision as an unmitigated savior, should indeed have been more conscious from the beginning of what the acquisition must really mean. Yet that was hard to do as a jovial Jim Levy joined in the usual Infocom insanity to take part in an impromptu “InfoWedding,” hastened to declare at every opportunity his love for their games, and always used the word “merger” — never “acquisition” — when describing the new “partnership.” It was almost enough to cause one to forget where all of the actual power resided. Brian Moriarty continues to refer to Levy even today almost dismissively, as “a fairly benign guy” (a turn of phrase that always brings to mind the old “mostly harmless” gag from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). Infocom hastened to declare in their newsletter that all would remain business as usual: “We’ll still be the Infocom you know and love.”

But the reality is that few companies buy other companies in order to just leave them alone and let them continue to go about their business, regardless of what they first say to the nervous employees of said companies. Levy did have quiet plans of his own for Infocom, plans that, if fully known, might have left the latter feeling less sanguine about their future. Alex Smith, a videogame historian who recently interviewed Levy at some length, describes his plans thus: “He never planned to isolate Infocom as a separate entity doing its own thing. He knew as well as anyone that interactive fiction was the past, not the future, but he did believe the Implementors could help lead us into that future hand in hand with Activision game designers.” Entering into such a partnership as the clear junior partner must be, at best, an uncomfortable adjustment for a company that wasn’t used to answering to anyone. Whatever else happened in the Activision/Infocom relationship — and plenty would — nothing was ever going to be quite the same again for the latter.

While Jim Levy’s bigger plans remained for the long term, to be put into practice perhaps after Infocom had had some time to adjust to their new reality, Activision had an immediate impact on Infocom’s day-to-day operations in at least one very important respect. Following a 1985 in which Infocom’s output dipped to just three new works of interactive fiction, plus Cornerstone and the graphical multiplayer game Fooblitzky, many fans had begun to speculate on the company’s overall health as well as its commitment to the genre which had made it what it was. With Infocom now firmly and unambiguously a specialist in adventure games again, Activision encouraged them to make something of a statement by releasing a lot of interactive fiction before 1986 was out. Eager to cooperate and just as eager as Activision was to tell the world that they were “back,” Joel Berez and his management team crafted an ambitious release schedule. In addition to a pair of Zork and Enchanter trilogy collector’s sets and the already released Ballyhoo and Trinity, they pushed the Imps to finish four more new games. All seemed like they had real commercial potential with one demographic or another. There was Leather Goddesses of Phobos, a game for which, in deference to Steve Meretzky’s proven comedic touch and most of all to the time-honored maxim that Sex Sells, they had very high hopes; Moonmist, a second collaboration between Stu Galley and seasoned children’s author Jim Lawrence that would be, after the Tom Swift-in-all-but-name Seastalker, Nancy Drew with the serial numbers filed away; Hollywood Hijinx, a product of first-time author “Hollywood” Dave Anderson and an old-school puzzlefest of the sort that a large percentage of Infocom’s hardcore fans still adored above any other sort of game; and Bureaucracy, a satirical comedy with a uniquely long and troubled development history already behind it which would nevertheless have the huge advantage of having Douglas Adams’s name on the box.

It was all too ambitious. Eager to please as they might have been, Infocom had never before pushed out four games in six months, and really wasn’t equipped to do it now without compromising quality in ways no one was willing to do. Management only compounded the problem by remaining in denial about this reality for far too long. Jon Palace became the unfortunate point man ordered to find a way to finish, package, and polish the two games that were least far along, Hollywood Hijinx and Bureaucracy, in record time. When he told his managers that this was impractical, and asked if he could just focus on getting one or the other out in time, his request was denied; management wanted both. In the end, both projects spilled into the following year, Hollywood Hijinx appearing in January and Bureaucracy not until March. Palace:

That was a hard lesson learned. We missed the Christmas season. As Steve Meretzky likes to say, games need a certain amount of time, and just putting more resources on them doesn’t make it happen faster. You can’t use nine women to have a baby in one month.

The episode precipitated some of the first cracks in the relationship between Activision and Infocom, began to engender a slowly hardening perception of the latter on the part of the former as an undisciplined gang of artistes who just wouldn’t knuckle down to the hard-headed business of selling games, who greeted every suggestion with a long explanation of why they, special little flowers that they were, just couldn’t manage it. As for Infocom’s perception of Activision… well, much more on that momentarily.

Whatever Activision’s perception, at this stage Infocom was still striving mightily to please both their customers by making quality games and their new masters by making lots more of them. Including the two titles that had slipped from 1986, Infocom released no fewer than eight games over the course of 1987, followed by another that slipped into January of 1988. It marked by far the most prolific outpouring in the company’s history.  While the expanded release schedule allowed room for one or two unabashed experiments, Infocom’s management was every bit as aware as Activision’s that they could really use a big hit or three among that group. As Infocom looked over their plans for the year on New Years Day 1987 they must have felt like they had as close to a can’t-miss lineup as they could possibly craft. It included games like Douglas Adams’s Bureaucracy, better late than never; Stationfall, the long-awaited sequel to one of their most beloved early titles, featuring copious amounts of Floyd the lovable robot; The Lurking Horror, a leap into horror fiction that seemed especially well-timed on the heels of ICOM’s dire but very successful Uninvited. For the coup de grâce, they planned to cap the year with Beyond Zork, their first use since 1982 of their strongest brand by a mile, a brand the Imps had previously rejected ever using again. They now proved far more willing than in earlier years to compromise their artistic ideals a bit for the sake of commercial concerns. Figuring that if you can’t beat ’em you might as well join ’em, Beyond Zork would combine traditional text-adventure mechanics with the randomized combat and character leveling of a CRPG, a genre whose popularity seemed to be growing in inverse proportion to the decline of Infocom’s brand of adventure game. Infocom was truly pulling out all the stops for this one, for which they were designing yet another new version of their venerable Z-Machine that would allow for an onscreen automap, a windowing system, mouse input, more sophisticated text formatting, and a character-based graphics system that, if not quite what most people thought of when they thought of graphics in an adventure game in 1987, was certainly as close as Infocom had ever come.

The verdict on whether what would turn out to be the last great outpouring of all-text Infocom games was ultimately a good or a bad thing remains mixed to this day. Some who were at Infocom believe it was all far, far too much, especially given that their employee rolls remained stuck at about 40 people who were now being expected to produce almost twice the product of earlier years. It’s hard to imagine how this increased workload couldn’t have had an effect on the end result. And indeed, some of the games of 1987 do show signs of stress in the form of puzzles that could have used a bit more thought or ideas that aren’t quite fully formed. Further, Mike Dornbrook for one believes that by 1987 there was simply a very finite number of diehards willing to buy all-text adventure games at all, and that even many of these people were unwilling to buy eight of them in a single year. Thus, he believes, Infocom’s 1987 games to a large extent ended up cannibalizing one another’s sales. (Dornbrook actually lobbied fruitlessly at the time that Infocom should be going in the opposite direction, should be pouring all of their resources into just one or two major epics per year, a very radical idea that would have entailed the upending of the one-author one-game model of creation that had been with the company almost since the beginning.) Set against these practical concerns, however, must be the fact that the expanded release schedule allowed some welcome new voices that I for one would certainly not want to be without. Amy Briggs’s absolutely delightful Plundered Hearts alone is more than argument enough for the policy in my eyes.

Infocom’s newfound prolificacy undoubtedly contributed to the decision to retire Mike Dornbrook’s old matrix of fiction genres and difficulties that had been instituted along with the gray-box era of standardized packaging back in 1984. Beginning with Hollywood Hijinx, these categories were replaced on the box covers with a simple “Interactive Fiction” label and an author credit. It’s hard to mourn their disappearance too much. The difficulty rankings in particular were arguably worse than useless, having far too often been motivated more by how difficult Infocom’s marketing department would like for a given game to be than by the reality. (Particular lowlights included the infamously hard yet “Standard” level Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the “Advanced” yet almost trivial Infidel.) Of late the genre tags had also been looking increasingly strained as the Imps continued to explore new fictional territory. (Was the mournful Cold War tragedy Trinity really what people were looking for when they set out to buy a “Fantasy” game? Was Leather Goddesses of Phobos science fiction or was it “pure” comedy?) Looking back, the loss of the matrix seems once again most impactful in the symbolic rather than the practical sense, as one more piece of Infocom’s old identity bargained away.

Bruce Davis

If the character of the earliest changes wrought by the Activision acquisition can be and were debated, both now and at the time, those that began to take hold after January of 1987 leave far less room for discussion. Everyone at Infocom at the time agrees that most of them were nothing less than devastating. The trouble all stemmed from the toppling of Jim Levy and the ascent of one Bruce Davis, the man destined to go down in Infocom lore as Al Vezza’s successor in the role of the great villain of the story. While some of the Imps can now find it in their hearts to forgive Vezza for the Cornerstone debacle and all of his other mistakes, none seem willing to extend the same courtesy to Davis. The wounds he inflicted still fester all these years later, and former Infocom staffers, so balanced and level-headed and even wise when discussing most topics, can sometimes begin to sound like shrill conspiracy theorists when the topic turns to Davis. Marc Blank:

My sense of Bruce Davis is that he thought that companies made money by suing people, not by making products. He didn’t like the fact that Infocom had been bought in the first place, and he arranged to make it fail and shut it down.

Mike Dornbrook:

He was a lawyer who had no games experience. I don’t know that he even had much business experience, other than as a legal consultant.

He thought like a lawyer, not an entrepreneur. He didn’t seem to care what the moral/ethical deal was, but what he could get away with in court.

As we’ll see, Davis did much to earn such vitriol. At the same time, though, these characterizations of him are hardly fair. Far from lacking any experience in business, Davis had cut his teeth in the games industry as the head of Imagic, a developer and publisher that had followed in the footsteps of Jim Levy and Activision to enjoy a couple of very successful years as a third-party purveyor of titles for the Atari VCS during that platform’s boom period. After the Great Videogame Crash of 1983 Davis had, ironically in light of the role he would later play as Infocom’s nemesis-in-chief, tried to jump onto the bookware bandwagon that had arisen largely as a reaction to Infocom’s success, creating a line of interactive fiction in partnership with Bantam Books called Living Literature. When that proved not to be a success, the remnants of Imagic wound up at Activision. (See Scott Stilphen’s comment below for more on this.) Among those remnants was Davis himself, who worked for Activision initially as a freelance consultant hired by a board that was growing more and more restive under Jim Levy’s leadership, concerned by his continual investing in quirky, high-concept titles like Alter Ego and Portal and by his complete dismissal of some of the most popular genres in gaming, such as the CRPG. (Levy had, for instance, rejected Interplay’s The Bard’s Tale as “nicheware for nerds,” leaving Electronic Arts to pick it up and turn it into a massive hit.)

In his role as consultant, Davis had pushed hard to convince Activision to purchase not Infocom but rather Sierra, whose animated graphical adventures he believed, correctly, to be the direction the industry at large must go in the years to come. Mike Dornbrook claims that Davis actually negotiated the purchase with Ken Williams, only to have Jim Levy and the board reject it “over a fairly small difference of opinion on price.” (“I suspect that he would have messed up Sierra, though,” notes Dornbrook.) Conversely, Davis adamantly opposed Levy’s purchase of Infocom, believing — again, it must be admitted, correctly — that text adventures were on their way out and that the price Activision was paying was far too high. He did have a point. Neither purchaser nor purchasee had made a single quarterly profit in years, and Infocom’s recent sales showed worrying evidence of a steady downward slide even absent the damage done by Cornerstone. Nevertheless, Jim Levy got his way one last time; he got his preferred adventure-game company. But he was on borrowed time. In mid-January 1987, following yet another underwhelming Christmas season, with the huge nest egg Activision had collected during the videogame boom now wiped out by more than three straight years of big losses, Davis orchestrated what Dornbrook calls an “underhanded coup” to oust Levy and take over his role of CEO. Life at Infocom got hugely more difficult from that moment forward.

That said, to imagine that Davis was deliberately conspiring to destroy Infocom strikes me as quite the stretch. He may very well have felt that Activision had gotten a raw deal on the purchase, but, having staked his reputation on his ability to turn Activision around, he was hardly in a position to exorcise a personal grudge that must impact their all-important bottom line. Looking at Infocom from his office on the other coast, he saw an under-performing subsidiary that needed to change the way it operated in order to become a good citizen of Activision’s corporate family. He took it upon himself to effect the necessary changes, without paying any undue heed to the complaints of this undisciplined bunch who, what with all of the absurd antics they called their “culture,” didn’t seem all that concerned about the fact that their games weren’t selling well and that they were continuing to lose money. This was a drastic misreading of Infocom — everyone cared very much indeed and desperately wanted to turn their fortunes around — but there it was.

The first indication the average Infocom fan received that the times they were a-changing came when Infocom’s third and fourth games of 1987, Stationfall and The Lurking Horror, were released simultaneously in June. Replacing the classic gray-box packaging was something that looked almost the same at first glance but was… well, there’s no kinder way to put it: it looked, and was, much cheaper. Replacing the old bound-in “browsie” was a conventional manual dropped into a depressingly conventional shrink-wrapped box. Feelies to set the stage could still be found therein, but they were dramatically reduced in quantity and quality. The era of classy Infocom packaging was over just like that, one more piece of their identity stolen away.

Unsurprisingly, the change was the result of a Bruce Davis initiative. In the name of streamlining the operations of the parent company and all of its subsidiaries and taking advantage of economies of scale, he demanded that everyone use the same size and style of box and that all products be manufactured in the same plant. For Infocom, who had always been intimately involved with every detail of the packaging of their games and who had worked with the same local assembly company for years, the resulting compromises and loss of oversight felt positively emasculating. Nor did it save them any money. Mike Dornbrook claims that they were billed twice as much for each of the new cheap, flimsy packages, and that Activision’s packager, unused to assembling boxes full of so many little goodies, kept screwing up to boot, leaving out instruction manuals or dropping in the wrong disks.

But the cheaper packaging was only one consequence of being expected to conform to Activision’s company-wide distribution model, and quite possibly one of the less damaging at that. Something else was going on behind the scenes, less immediately obvious to the casual buyer but devastating to Infocom’s business model. Mike Dornbrook:

When Bruce Davis took over Activision, he told the sales force that the strategy was to clear the shelves: this is a hits-driven business, products have a two- or three-month shelf life. Get them out there, then get them off the shelves to make room for new product.

When he announced that, I made a point of saying to him that that wasn’t at all the business model that worked for us. What we’d been doing was putting out four to five really strong games per year, with the hope that one of them would become a really strong back-catalog title that would sell for years and years to come. When he came in in 1987, Zork I and some of the other early games were still selling well at retail. About half of our total yearly sales came from the back catalog. And most of the profits came from the back catalog. We invested a ton of money in the new games in the hope that one of them would become a back-catalog [perennial].

He threw that out. He threw out half of our sales and completely changed our financial model. When we told that he’d just thrown out half our sales, his response was to do twice as many games, do eight games per year instead of four. But the whole industry was going in the direction of investing more in each title. Games were becoming more elaborate. We couldn’t halve the amount of work we put into a game and stay competitive, halve the budget. But that’s what we were ordered to do.

Infocom had previously charged retailers and distributors a stiff 15-percent restocking fee on product which was returned to them, causing them to think twice before placing large orders on new titles but also creating a strong incentive to keep catalog titles on their shelves. Under Davis, Activision adopted exactly the opposite stance, trying to create a buzz for new releases by encouraging distributors and retailers to order massive quantities, which they could return for no penalty if necessary to clear space for the next big hit. Dave Lebling:

Activision bought into the “sell huge, accept returns” theory. That did not help Infocom because it meant that there was an easy choice for a distributor or a retail store when new stuff came in and they were short on shelf space: “Here’s this Infocom stuff. It sells, but it sells slowly. And here’s this new game that might be a huge hit! Let’s send the Infocom stuff back. Activision is accepting returns now.” That essentially destroyed the Infocom back list in one stroke.

Activision was equally uninterested in another major Infocom revenue center: the InvisiClues line of hints books that, as much or more so than the games, sold steadily if unspectacularly as catalog items over periods of years. Moonmist, Infocom’s last game of 1986, also became their last to receive the full-fledged InvisiClues treatment. After that they experimented with combining somewhat stripped-down clues for two recent games in one hint booklet in the hope that, having purchased hints for the game they were having trouble with, buyers would be encouraged to buy the other game for which they already had hints to hand. It doesn’t appear to have worked out all that well, especially given that the combinations were essentially random, based strictly on what games came out at around the same times and possessing none of the thematic consistency that might make each pairing particularly appealing to players with certain interests. By the end of 1987 the InvisiClues line was being phased out entirely in favor of in-game hint systems. Thus was yet another piece of the iconic Infocom experience lost, along with one more important source of revenue.

Infocom was trapped in a strange and awkward position. Increasingly associated with where computer gaming had been rather than where it was going, they were controlled by a parent obsessed with the Now of ephemeral hit-making, a parent which seemed almost to be actively trying to erase the rich heritage that was perhaps their greatest remaining strength in the marketplace. Trying to find a way to make all that old stuff new again to accord with Activision’s business model, Infocom indulged in a flurry of repackaging: a pair of themed collections, one of “Classic Mysteries” and the other of “Classic Science Fiction”; “Solid Gold” editions of the big older hits Zork I, Hitchhiker’s, Leather Goddesses, Planetfall, and Wishbringer that included in-game hints to replace the InvisiClues that were no longer being made.

Included among the supplementary materials in Activision’s 1996 Masterpieces of Infocom collection is a document that’s fascinating in a very uncomfortable sort of way: the minutes of a meeting that took place at Infocom during this confused and confusing period. Specifically, the meeting occurred on April 29, 1987. It shows the company wrestling with what feels like a full-on identity crisis, a far cry from their confident, brash, even arrogant glory days.

There was a great deal of discussion about defining what it is we do. For example, do we just do I.F.?  Do we do anything that has an English parser in it?  Do we have to have puzzles?  Do we have to have stories? If you do a point-and-click interface (like Deja Vu) is it still “what we do”?

There was a lot of discussion of what the market is.  Do we think there is any realistic chance of doing “mass-market” stuff?  Reading and typing make us a minority taste immediately. What if you don’t have to read and/or type?  Can you do a good I.F. game with a point-and-click interface?  Deja Vu has one approach, Labyrinth another.

What makes our games enjoyable?  Lots of different things were mentioned: Puzzles, story, humor, exploration, etc.

They struggle with the trade press’s general disinterest in Infocom, which they believe to be born of that perpetual bane of the text adventure in general: the fact that a modern, sophisticated one looks pretty much the same at a glance as a creaky, simplistic one.

Some people in the market seem to believe that I.F. technology, particularly ours, hasn’t advanced in years.  They don’t notice the small improvements in the parser and substrate, probably because to a casual observer, our newest games look a lot like our first ones.

(Apparently, Personal Computing is doing a piece on new stuff, and said they weren’t including anything of ours (when asked) because it’s “old hat.”)

Some ideas for changing this opinion:

- Graphic title screens.

- “Illuminated” text adventures (as XZIP will permit).

- Sound.

- Friendlier parser (knows about common “first-time” mistakes).

- Better demos (a demo mode, or a demo with speech recognition and speech synthesis for output).

There was a fair amount of discussion about whether it is worth doing any kind of graphics unless it is “the best.”  Is it worthwhile merely equalling the level of graphics in The Pawn?  I think the consensus was that doing good graphics (such as an “illuminated” adventure with Pawn-quality graphics) was better than doing nothing.

A friendlier parser that might make it possible to learn how to play without reading the manual was proposed.  It was pointed out that we do this already (to some extent) in games such as Seastalker and Wishbringer.  Might be nice to do even better, though.

The consensus was that these things should not all be introduced at once (waiting until they’ve all been designed and implemented), but rather one thing at a time, whenever we have a game that wants to use them. Of course, given our manpower shortage, we can hardly do it any other way.

That last paragraph says much about how things would play out over the balance of 1987: it became, among other things, the Year of the Technological Gimmick at Infocom. The Z-Machine had remained clean, simple, and remarkably stable for years, changed only in very straightforward, commonsense ways to support the new Interactive Fiction Plus line of 256 K story files. Now, however, it was about to be extended — some might say “tortured” — in about a dozen different ways at once, making, as Graham Nelson puts it, “a mess of the system of opcodes (designed by committee).” Some of the torturing was necessary simply to bring Infocom’s games to parity with the latest innovations from Britain’s Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9, the other two companies in the English-speaking world still actively trying to push forward the art and technology of the text adventure. Thus Infocom added an undo command, command-line recall and editing, and programmable function keys among other unflashy but welcome conveniences to their games. Perhaps the most welcome of all of these was the simplest: beginning with Bureaucracy, “x” finally became a synonym for the verb “examine,” which was getting used ever more frequently as the games’ worlds and text grew ever richer. These final additions put the bow on the Infocom model for interactive fiction destined to be adopted as standard best practice by the hobbyist community that would arise after their demise.

Other innovations from this period proved less long-lived. There’s a whiff of desperation clinging to the cheesy sound effects that were shoehorned into The Lurking Horror and Sherlock: Riddle of the Crown Jewels — “We may still not know how to do graphics, but we can do sound!” — and the less said about the pointless real-time element that was added to Border Zone the better. And then there were the tangle of additions — colors, new typefaces, character graphics, windows, mouse support — that made Beyond Zork into what Infocom liked to call an “illuminated” text adventure. At some point, one senses, Infocom just started throwing everything at the wall in the hope that some of it would stick, would make the world forget that the one thing it kept actually asking Infocom for — beautiful bit-mapped illustrations like those found in the Magnetic Scrolls games — wasn’t being delivered. Graphics of that stripe remained impossible as long as Infocom remained tied to that big character-oriented DECSystem-20 that had been at the heart of their development process since the very beginning.

The gimmicks didn’t help very much. Infocom’s ambitious slate of games for 1987, conceived with such high hopes, turned into a cavalcade of disappointments as the year wore on; 1987 also became the Year of the 20,000-Seller. Some, like Bureaucracy, did a bit better than 20,000 while still falling short of expectations. Some, like Border Zone, Infocom’s single worst-selling all-text adventure ever, did considerably worse. But most hovered right there around 20,000 copies, a fraction of what even the least commercially imposing Infocom games had been selling during 1983 and 1984. Beyond Zork, their ace in the hole, their all but guaranteed blockbuster, proved in its way the biggest heartbreaker of all. Its sales topped 40,000 copies, a darn sight better than any other game of the year but still far below expectations; the big games of previous years had topped 100,000 in sales as a matter of course. Underwhelming as it was in relative terms, Beyond Zork was successful enough to nudge the slimmed-down Infocom into profitability one last time in the fourth quarter of 1987, the first time the company had managed such a feat since the same quarter of 1983. Yet what might have looked like a hopeful sign was really a mirage. Beyond Zork’s sales clearly weren’t going to buoy them for long, and they had nothing in the immediate pipeline that looked remotely as promising. Clearly something had to give. Infocom was simply not justifiable for Activision as an ongoing concern selling games in numbers like these, and Bruce Davis was fast running out of patience.

Given Davis’s unwillingness to listen to Infocom, his determination to, as Stu Galley puts it, “be rigorous” with what he saw as a “bad investment,” it was tempting to lay all of these problems at his feet and be done with it. Indeed, that’s a temptation from which many former Infocom staffers are far from immune even today. In their more thoughtful moments, however, they have to acknowledge that Infocom’s problems extended far beyond Davis. Dave Lebling:

Activision had managed to mess things up so badly from our point of view that the fact that the industry as a whole was having problems was something we didn’t begin to actually get until later. But we got it later. Sales were off, some of which we thought, I still think rightly, was due to Activision’s lousy policies. But some of it was just that there were a lot of games out there on a lot of subjects, and the influx of better and better graphics were having an impact.

Any argument that Bruce Davis was simply incompetent must reckon with the fact that, problem child Infocom’s travails notwithstanding, he accomplished everything he had promised for Activision as a whole and then some during 1987. In the fiscal year which ended on March 31, 1987, Activision had lost no less than $14.6 million (a sizable chunk of which was due to the Infocom acquisition). In the year ending March 31, 1988, they made $3.6 million, marking the company’s first profitable fiscal year since 1982-83. Davis accomplished this remarkable turnaround via a series of shrewd moves that showed him to be anything but incompetent. He leveraged Activision’s far-reaching and efficient distribution network, a legacy of their glory days when games like Pitfall! sold huge numbers through the mass merchandisers, to build a large network of smaller “affiliated publishers” who paid for access to it. These rolls included the likes of Lucasfilm Games, New World Computing, Access Software, Firebird and Rainbird, and in some markets Sierra. Within a year of Davis’s taking over, Computer Gaming World was fretting that Activision and Electronic Arts were effectively dividing the entire industry into two camps via their extensive, dueling networks of affiliates. Under Davis, Activision had gone from also-ran to a potential engulferer and devourer in an amazingly short time.

For their own games, Activision homed in on categories that were proven commercial winners and largely discarded the rest. The new focus paid off. The first year of Davis’s stewardship yielded several substantial hits, colorful fast-paced titles slow-pitched right down the center of the mainstream to hit the prototypical gamer of the era, the teenage boy, right in his sweet spot. Teenage boys loved karate; thus the slick action-adventure The Last Ninja and a beat-em-up called Chop ‘N Drop did very well. They also loved Arnold; thus the success of Predator. And of late they were returning to the standup arcades; thus a port of the arcade hit Rampage became a “mega-hit” for Activision in turn on home computers. The new management team preferred to see themselves as realistic, hardheaded businesspeople replacing Jim Levy’s artsy-fartsy dreamers, whose era they often referenced obliquely in interviews. “Now we’ve focused in on the products that have been most successful for us,” said product manager Mark Beaumont in one. “We’re channeling in on those areas that work best and not taking too many forays into the never-never land of ‘who knows what this product is.'” Director of corporate communications Loretta Stagnitto elaborated further in another:

Games like Web Dimension, Alter Ego, and Portal were truly innovative, but the consumer was more interested in action-oriented, strategy games, and/or fantasy/role-playing titles. In other words, the programs weren’t geared to the needs of the average user. Then the company spent a lot of money trying to convince everybody they wanted those types of programs, instead of publishing what the people really wanted. It was a very confusing time in Activision’s history.

Davis himself indulged in what verged on open gloating at his predecessor’s expense: “We’ve been making money and we plan to continue it forever, and if we don’t, you can talk to the next guy.” The idea was to get product out there quickly to capitalize on the latest trends in television, movies, the arcades.

It was only Infocom that stubbornly resisted the new approach. Jon Palace:

We had a summit at some rather dreary hotel in Cambridge. We were sitting around a big U-shaped table, and one of the heads of Activision said, “Our motto is, if you can’t be best be first.” All of the Activision people nodded their heads. And all of the Infocom people were looking at each other thinking, “That doesn’t sound good for us.”

Smug character that he may have been, cold fish with little passion for games as anything other than commodities that he may also have been, the inconvenient truth lurking at the root of the story of Infocom’s final years is that Bruce Davis was also largely right about the direction of the industry. It was becoming more and more driven by hits; licenses were getting ever more important; shelf lives were shrinking; the types of games being produced were becoming more homogenized; a handful of players were playing a bigger and bigger role, increasingly dictating the terms under which the industry as a whole operated. Whether Bruce Davis was more symptom or cause of these realities was almost irrelevant. These truths weren’t and never would be universal; there still was and would remain room for people doing interesting, bold, creative work. (Thankfully, or I wouldn’t have much more to talk about on this blog.) But the question at hand was whether Infocom, having sold their souls to a company now so determined to play in the mainstream, could find a sustainable niche whilst remaining recognizably themselves. If they could, the next question must be whether the commercially ambitious Davis would be content to let them remain there. And the answers weren’t looking very good.

Still, real life is messy and eras are never all one thing, and to paint too gloomy a picture of life at the latter-day Infocom would be a mistake. Amid all the stress and angst there remained plenty of space for all of the usual crazy antics, plus a few new ones to boot. For instance, the hermit-crab races, one of the all-time legendary Infocom absurdities, started up only at this late date. Likewise some of the best and most entertaining promotional ideas, like the “Marathon of the Minds” that brought together teams of high-school or university students to assault the latest game until one of them solved the thing or everyone dropped from sheer exhaustion. The Status Line that reported on it all was a New Zork Times by another name that still smelled as sweet to the loyal fans still buying the games; it actually expanded in size and production values during 1987. If the picture it painted of life inside CambridgePark Drive — a life of nonstop fun and creativity unbound — wasn’t exactly the whole story, it wasn’t exactly a lie or a PR snow job either. Infocom, whatever the era, was a pretty great place to be. One suspects that the dawning realization that the end may be near only made everyone that much more determined to enjoy it.

Most of all, there remained — and remain — that last run of games to attend to, tarnished a bit here and there by the rushed schedule and the other drawbacks of life under Bruce Davis, but still oozing design craft and consistently failing in interesting ways even when they do fail. Like players at the time of their release, we should be sure to enjoy them while they last. So, settle in. The end may be approaching, but we’ve still got a lot to talk about.

(Sources: As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Thanks again, Jason! Other sources include: personal correspondence with Mike Dornbrook, for which I also offer my heartfelt thanks; The New Zork Times/Status Line of Spring 1986 and Summer 1986; Computer Gaming World of March 1988 and April 1988; Compute! of November 1987 and August 1988; Commodore Magazine of July 1989; InfoWorld of June 25 1984 and October 3 1988; Down From the Top of Its Game, an academic paper on Infocom’s history; and the supplementary materials included with Activision’s 1996 Masterpieces of Infocom collection.)

Comments
30 Responses

- Lisa H.

September 5, 2015 at 9:32 pm

make something of a statement by released a lot of interactive fiction before 1986 was out

Releasing.

a genre whose popularity seemed to be growing in reverse proportion

Inverse?

Was the mournful Cold War tragedy Trinity really what people were looking for when they set out to buy a “Fantasy” game? Was Leather Goddesses of Phobos science fiction or was it “pure” comedy?

FWIW, on my own website I chose to classify Trinity as science fiction, I suppose largely because its central conceit is a time travel loop and you’re visiting various periods in history, though given that it could be said to straddle sci-fi and fantasy in a manner perhaps similar to Doctor Who; certainly both have a lot of fantastic elements and themes and neither is anywhere near “hard SF”.

Leather Goddesses I put in with the comedies; its setting is pulp sci-fi but it’s a bit of a send-up of that genre, and I feel that what the player is primarily intended to get out of it (besides possibly very slightly titillated) is a good larf more than a real sci-fi experience.

For the case of a box label, I wonder why not just label them with both genres if it was important to do so at all? Books usually have a few options for “shelve under” printed on them.

a modern, sophisticated one looks pretty much the same at a glance as a creeky, simplistic one.

I think you meant “creaky.”

cheesy sound effects that were shoehorned into The Lurking Horror and Sherlock: Riddle of the Crown Jewels

…there’s sound effects?!

the less said about the pointless real-time element that was added to Border Zone the better.

Ugh, no kidding.

Activision honed in on categories

Homed in on.

- Jimmy Maher

September 5, 2015 at 9:54 pm

Thanks as always for the corrections!

The problem with adding new genres like “Comedy” was that it started to screw up the neat matrix that Infocom used to try to create a balanced release schedule and, in the longer term, a balanced catalog among genres and difficulties. That worked, at least in theory, when there were just four neat genres. When they started adding to that number, though, the exercise quickly threatened to become meaningless.

And yeah, both Lurking Horror and Sherlock had digitized sound effects, but only in the Amiga and (maybe?) the Macintosh versions, those being the only machines at the time really capable of playing sampled sounds. The sound files and some information on how to get them working are available on the IF Archive: http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXmediaXsound.html.

- David Kinder

September 6, 2015 at 7:37 am

The Amiga version of Lurking Horror, and the Amiga and Mac versions of Sherlock had sound. As ever, see Paul Doherty’s exhaustive fact sheet: http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/info/fact-sheet.txt

- Rob

September 8, 2015 at 5:51 am

The IBM/compatible PC speaker was playing digitised sounds as early as 1987.

- Jimmy Maher

September 8, 2015 at 7:04 am

Sure, technically, via Access’s RealSound and other technologies — as also could the Commodore 64 and others for that matter. But practically, in the sense of sounds of any length and any fidelity pleasant to hear as anything other than a gimmick, not so much. That’s what I meant to imply with the adverb “really” in my original statement. (A more compelling case for an omission, for what it’s worth, could be made for the Atari ST or Apple IIGS.)

- Pedro Timóteo

September 6, 2015 at 9:45 am

I seem to be in the minority here, but I didn’t dislike the real time elements in Border Zone at all; I think they make some sense for that game. It’s not something that should become common for this genre, of course, but it being in a single game doesn’t offend me, or “ruin the game”, I think.

Besides, I was used to it from playing The Hobbit on the ZX Spectrum (where if you don’t touch the keyboard for a minute, you get the “You wait. Time passes.” message). :) Red Hawk and its sequel, also on the Spectrum, were real time text adventures as well, and didn’t suffer for it, I believe.

- Jimmy Maher

September 6, 2015 at 10:01 am

Thinking back — I actually haven’t replayed this one yet for the blog — I think the big problem is a mismatch between the type of gameplay it offers, which is basically “play several times to see how everything fits together and then play to win,” and the real-time element, which would fit much better in a scenario that allowed for a more emergent sort of play. As it is, the real-time element just becomes an irritation. It feels like a gimmick stuck in for the hell of it rather than an integral part of the design.

But we can continue this discussion when we get to the Border Zone article, when I’ll hopefully have a more considered opinion to offer… ;)

- Torbjörn Andersson

September 6, 2015 at 10:24 am

Well, at least you’re not alone. One of my fondest memories of Border Zone was hiding near the border in the second chapter, waiting for a chance to slip past the search lights while the pack of dogs (that I hadn’t yet figured out how to get away from) got closer. I don’t think that would have been nearly as tense if it hadn’t been for the real-time element.

Another interesting trick was how it tried to get away from the traditional concept of rooms by describing your movement between them, rather than the rooms themselves (unless you typed “look”). I don’t remember seeing that in any other Infocom game.

Even if I think the time limit in the final chapter was too strict, making it less fun to play, the game remains one of my favorites from that particular era. I look forward to reading the article about it.

- Jason Dyer

September 5, 2015 at 9:36 pm

I still think the first section of Border Zone is one of the best integrations of puzzle and story in all IFdom.

- matt w

September 5, 2015 at 9:54 pm

I think “exorcising a grudge” should be “exercising”–it’s more common.

- Jimmy Maher

September 5, 2015 at 10:05 pm

I actually prefer “exorcising” in this case…

- David Simon

September 6, 2015 at 2:28 pm

But “exorcise” means remove, which is just what he was doing (since he couldn’t keep nursing the grudge)

- Jimmy Maher

September 7, 2015 at 6:41 am

To my mind “exorcise” is more than just a synonym for “remove.” There’s an active, even violent aspect connected with its original religious usage. One could “exorcise” a grudge by taking revenge on its source. With the dish thus served (whether cold, hot, or lukewarm), one has indeed “exorcised” the grudge, and is no longer subject to its nagging. It’s *this* that Davis couldn’t allow himself to do (assuming any grudge really existed at all) due to bigger concerns about Activision’s need to return to profitability.

- DZ-Jay

March 22, 2017 at 10:01 am

That’s really a bit of tortured semantics, there. To “exorcise” is to “drive out,” with the strong implication that the intent is to rid a person or entity of some ill or evil. Even if exacting revenge results in calming passions and reducing grudging impulses, it would be tenuous to suggest that that was the original intent of the action.

Almost by definition, to hold a grudge implies an ill will towards a subject and a desire to act on it, not to assuage the passions.

Why not admit it was a typo? It’s OK, it happens. :)

dZ.

- Keith Palmer

September 5, 2015 at 10:51 pm

I was wondering a little bit just where the “Infocom as a whole in 1987” article would go; the change in packaging makes sense as a dividing point, although for me the “before” and “after” can seem set by the “Passport to the United Products of Infocom” catalogue my family had in our lone “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” box, which included Hollywood Hijinx but not Bureaucracy. That aside, I knew this part of the story was coming from “Down From the Top of Its Game,” which placed the spin you mention the Implementors providing on it, but I suppose I was wondering too if there can be a difference between “another sudden tragic twist” and “shades-of-grey history.”

- Alex Smith

September 5, 2015 at 11:07 pm

Bravo! This is by far the most nuanced examination of the Activision-Infocom merger I have seen. You have captured the contradictions of the period well and the difficulties inherent in merging two such different cultures. Bruce Davis still comes out as the villain — and rightfully so — but not the mustache twirling variety.

- S. John Ross

September 6, 2015 at 3:10 am

This is just a “me, too” post for Alex Smith’s comments, but … an _emphatic_ one.

- Jimmy Maher

September 6, 2015 at 8:23 am

Thanks!

By the way, I did try to contact you at the email address you use for your comments here to talk about this stuff a bit further, but I never got a response. Maybe an overprotective spam filter? Probably a moot point now anyway, as I’m pretty happy with how it came together — including the valuable input you’d already given, of course. Thanks for that as well!

- ZUrlocker

September 7, 2015 at 2:11 pm

Great post. I appreciate the balanced view on the need to get Activision back to profitability. The whole thing is a shame, but this feels like a very honest account of things.

BTW, I also greatly enjoyed the real-time element of “BorderZone”. Perhaps it’s just a genre I really like, but it created a sense of urgency that made my heart pound!

- johannes_paulsen

September 7, 2015 at 3:53 pm

You know, of all those ’87 games, from my adolescent perspective at the time, only Moonmist and Fooblitzsky were complete misses. I really enjoyed the atmosphere of Border Zone, if not the gimmicky realtime element. I even found Hijinx to be a quite refreshing game of pleasant puzzles, especially after spending too much time on the “one-wrong-move-and-the-game-is-now-unwinnable” Trinity. (I abandoned Trinity in frustration after getting to the test site and realized that I wasn’t free to explore the place at my own pace and instead would have to figure out what to do independently first, and then put it all together in one ‘pseudo-perfect’ run, an element of IF I absolutely detest, particularly for a game that supposed to be driven at least in part by narrative as Trinity.)

Also – was I the only one who didn’t like Beyond Zork because it promised to undo that rather poetic ending to Spellbreaker?

- Bob Reeves

September 7, 2015 at 4:22 pm

Fooblitzky was one of my favorite “board” games at the time. As for Beyond Zork, I was excited that the universe got to continue despite Spellbreaker … but then, I also loved Zork Zero & the three graphic Activision Zorks.

- Jimmy Maher

September 7, 2015 at 10:05 pm

Yeah, the ending did bother me as well. Spellbreaker’s ending is abstract and poetic enough that it can mean different things to different people, but for me it feels like a metaphor for growing up and, if not quite leaving childish things behind, putting them in perspective and in their place. I wasn’t thrilled to see that undone. But, again, more when we get there!

- Duncan Stevens

September 10, 2015 at 2:00 pm

Ordinarily, I agree about long sequences that have to be gradually perfected. I’m not sure how the dramatic tension at the end of Trinity could have been achieved without it here, though. Maybe that tension could have been sacrificed to avoid annoyingly repetitive gameplay, but I don’t think the tradeoff could have worked here. The whole premise of the game is that you’re sent to the site of various atomic explosions throughout history (in two cases, in the future), and if you dawdle too long at any of them you’re vaporized in the blast. Changing the last one so that you’re in no danger of being blown up would have been inconsistent with everything that came before. (And going to a series of nuclear blasts with no danger of being affected by them wouldn’t make for a very involving game.) I guess the game could have adopted an approach like that of Ballyhoo where events move forward only in response to certain triggers, but I still don’t think it would have worked.

- Bumvelcrow

September 9, 2015 at 7:09 pm

Bittersweet, but I’m really looking forward to your dissection of the 1987 games. I was late to the party so 86-87 is my era and Lurking Horror and particularly Stationfall are two of my favourite games ever.

- Scott S.

February 6, 2016 at 3:42 pm

“…the remnants of Imagic were purchased by Activision.”

I wouldn’t be so sure of that, unless you have some hard evidence to back it up. Despite popular belief, I don’t think Activision owns or has ever owned any of the Imagic properties, and if true, exactly how Activision can legally release any of Imagic’s games has never been explained. Former Imagic co-founder Bill Grubb stated in 2003 the rights have never been sold to Activision or anyone. According to a 2004 interview with Retrogaming Radio, Bruce Davis stated Imagic fell into bankruptcy in 1985 after selling off its fixed assets, and still exists as a California corporation, but in “bad standing” because its debts have never been paid off since then. If those were to be cleared, Imagic could be revived and would continue to hold all the rights it previously had. Near the end, Imagic was headquartered in office space sub-leased from Activision and was hoping Activision would buy them, but that never happened. Because there was no buyer, and because Davis had no successor as CEO of Imagic, the rights to Imagic’s games remain in limbo. So, it would appear Davis took advantage of that fact when he was at Activision.

Ken Love, who formerly worked at Activision and was involved in several of Activision compilation packages (Action Pack, Game Vault, Anthology, Hits), has claimed on several occasions that Activision outright owned all of Imagic’s games. This Atariage forum thread from October 2003 has a post from John Hardie questioning that claim.

>>
“It was in this topic on the 19th of March that you (Ken) stated Activision owned the Imagic 2600 games (http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/22812-)

But then on April 11th I became aware of an email from George Rose, Sr. VP and General Counsel at Activision, asking for help in proving that Activision bought the Imagic assets. This was almost a full month after you stated that fact to be true.

I would be willing to chalk it up to the red tape involved in getting information from one dept. to another within a big company like Activision, except that I spoke to Bill Grubb again today and he says that the rights were not purchased by Activision back then and that they’re not owned by Activision today.

Unless a deal has been worked out recently (which seems unlikely since Bill had no knowledge of this), I can only assume that either Activision is using the roms illegally or a deal was made without contacting Bill (who would definitely have to be involved in something like this).

Let us know what you find out as I’m only going on the little information I have in addition to my conversations with Bill.

Best Wishes,
John ”
>>

Ken never replied with any information to back up his claim, and as recently as June 2012 continues to say Activision owns Imagic’s games – http://atariage.com/forums/topic/199219-

Mike Dornbrook’s comments about Bruce Davis are rather interesting: “He thought like a lawyer, not an entrepreneur. He didn’t seem to care what the moral/ethical deal was, but what he could get away with in court.”

I think Bruce Davis took advantage of Imagic being in ‘financial limbo’, and after ousting Jim Levy and taking over Activision, simply annexed (i.e. stole) the Imagic library for himself and Activision, who has been milking those titles ever since.

- Jimmy Maher

February 7, 2016 at 8:23 am

Thanks for this. It’s a little outside my bailiwick, so I’m largely content to defer to people like you who have studied the cartridge videogame market more closely. I would only say that it does strike me as a little out of character for Davis to just scoop up and start using games he had no right to. Much as so many love to demonize the fellow, my sense of him is of a legal stickler with a pedantic streak and little intrinsic interest in games. That’s perhaps good ground for demonization right there, I suppose, but I sense he did have a rather rigid ethical code he stuck to. But that, of course, is just a sense.

Anyway, I changed the wording in the article, and added a note to look at your comment for more information.

- AguyinaRPG

May 7, 2016 at 8:14 pm

One thing I just came across, Activision did in fact resell Demon Attack at one time.

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1346&dat=19870411&id=KLcwAAAAIBAJ&sjid=j_sDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6956,5196411&hl=en

- Markus

July 18, 2016 at 11:49 am

Considering 1987 was the year of Maniac Mansion, I sometimes find myself contemplating what would have happend had Infocom been in a position to really take on that direction of doing adventures, maybe even in partnership with Lucas(film|Arts) instead of ownership by Activision. The technological ease, the interface and the graphical and sound output combined with Infocom’s and the Imps’ way and art of storytelling – that could have been quite something…

- Wolfeye M.

September 19, 2019 at 10:44 am

My nickname for Activision has been “Axe the Vision” for years, because they’ve always seemed to care more about money, than making genuinely good games. Like, for example, their endless amount of entries in the Call of Duty franchise, which for some reason people still buy, despite the games being always pretty much the same with a new coat of paint. And they’ve shut down a few game studios whose games I really liked. After reading about what they did to Infocom, well, turns out they’ve been “axing the vision” for the entire time I’ve been alive, since before I even started playing games. It’s a real shame Infocom went down like that.

- Nathanael

March 6, 2021 at 11:48 am

Bruce Davis really does seem thoughtless. Having had it politely pointed out that Infocom’s business was in keeping the backlist and selling hint books, the healthy response would have been to tell Infocom to focus on that, control the niche, and let them make one new game a year or something — like Mike Dornbrook advised! But Davis seems to have had a one-size-fits-all attitude towards computer games, which is probably why Activision has been known as a trash publishing house ever since.

Dornbrook was correct. I remember myself not being able to afford to buy everything that was coming out at the time. If they’d cut the production rate… I’d have Grey Box copies of all of ’em.

Stationfall
September 10, 2015

It’s all too easy to underestimate Steve Meretzky. Viewed from on high, his career is a long series of broad science-fiction or fantasy comedies — fun enough, sure, but not exactly the most challenging fare. Meretzky, it would seem, learned what worked for him in 1983 when he wrote his first game Planetfall and then just kept on doing it. The lukewarm commercial and critical response to his one great artistic experiment, 1985’s A Mind Forever Voyaging, only hardened the template that would hold true for the remainder of his career.

Such a dismissive summary, however, is unfair in at least a couple of ways. First of all, it fails to give due credit to Meretzky’s sheer design craft. By the time he entered the second half of the 1980s with a few games under his belt, he was second to no one on the planet in his ability to craft entertaining and fair puzzles, to weave them together into a seamless whole, and to describe it all concisely and understandably. Secondly, and more subtly, his games weren’t always quite as safe as they first appeared. Merezky often if not always found ways within his established templates to challenge his players’ expectations and give critics like me something to talk about all these years later: the endearing Floyd and his shocking death in Planetfall; the political statement in the era of Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority that sex could be fun rather than dirty — arguably more effective in its easy-going way than A Mind Forever Voyaging’s more hectoring tone — that’s embedded within Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Nowhere are Meretzkty’s talent for pure game design and his willingness to slyly subvert his wheelhouse genre more highlighted than in Stationfall, his game of 1987.

A sequel to Planetfall had been quite a long time coming. Floyd had offhandedly promised one at the end of that game, but any plans Meretzky may have had to turn it into a franchise were overwhelmed by Infocom’s need to get the next Enchanter trilogy game done, the need for a Douglas Adams collaborator, and soon enough by new ideas from Meretzky himself. After the Activision buyout, with Infocom in general becoming much more willing to mine their own past in search of that elusive, much-needed hit, he debated for some time whether to do a Planetfall sequel at last or a new Zork game. In the end Brian Moriarty took Zork, and thus the die was cast. Meretzky’s sixth and, as it would transpire, final all-text adventure game would be a sequel to his first.

Stationfall reunites you almost immediately with Floyd, the lovable robot companion who remains for most players the most memorable aspect of Planetfall. Your exploits in the first game led to a promotion from Ensign Seventh Class to Lieutenant First Class, but your actual duties aren’t much more interesting now than they were then. Instead of pushing a mop around, you now spend your days pushing paper around. Your assignment for today is to take a space truck from your ship to a nearby space station to pick up a set of “Request for Stellar Patrol Issue Regulation Black Form Binders Request Form Forms” — something of an Infocom in-joke, an extrapolation of Meretzky’s love for real-life “memo hacking”. You pick up a robot from the pool to help you on the trip, and, lo and behold, it turns out to be good old Floyd, whom you’ve seen “only occasionally since he opted for assignment in the Stellar Patrol those five long years ago.” When you and Floyd arrive at your destination, you find it deserted. Where has everyone gone? Much like in Planetfall, you will have to figure out what happened here and how to stop it from continuing to happen if you hope to escape alive.

Floyd is in as fine a form as ever. Some parts of his schtick are recycled from the first game, others parts adorably new.

>sit in pilot seat
You are now in the pilot seat. Floyd clambers into the copilot seat, his feet dangling a few centimeters short of the floor. "Let Floyd launch the spacetruck? Please? Floyd has not crashed a truck in over two weeks!"

>floyd, launch spacetruck
"Floyd changed his mind. Controls too scary-looking."

As in the first game, part of the genius of Floyd is that you never know quite what he really looks like. You hear at various times that he has legs, eyes, can cry oily tears and can smile, but you get no explicit description. This leaves each player to construct her own idealized image, whether based on kittens or puppies or children or whatever represents the ultimate Cute for her personally.

Floyd, of course, simply has to be in any game that dares to bill itself as a sequel to Planetfall. More notable is just how thoroughly Stationfall embraces the idea of being a sequel in other ways. The deserted planetside research complex has been replaced with a deserted space station, but otherwise the environments are remarkably similar. Like in Planetfall, you’re racing against a deadly disease that will kill you if you take too long. Other aspects of Stationfall are so faithful to the original as to feel downright anachronistic in an Infocom game of this late vintage. Hunger and sleep timers make their first appearance in years, and the environment is liberally sprinkled, although not quite so maddenly so as in Planetfall, with red herrings and rooms whose only purpose is to add verisimilitude. Among the latter, for example, are the ubiquitous “SanFacs,” included here just as they were in Planetfall as an answer for every kid who ever watched Star Trek and asked just where you pooped aboard the Enterprise. The returning elements are so numerous as to feel pointless to try to exhaustively catalog: the yucky but good-tasting goo that is the staple of your diet; the tape spools you use in combination with the library’s reader to ferret out clues; the magnetic key cards that are cruelly easy to corrupt and thereby lock yourself out of victory (one of my few quibbles with a mostly superb game design); the control-room monitors that helpfully break down the status of every subsystem into a simple green, yellow, or red. It’s all so similar that the differences, like the realization that your goal this time isn’t to actually repair the station, arrive as something of a shock.

Yet if Stationfall is by conscious choice a throwback, it’s also a testament to just how far Steve Meretzky had come as a designer in the four years since Planetfall. That first game he ever wrote can feel at times like it’s rambled out of its maker’s control, leaving its various bits and pieces to dangle unconnected in the breeze. Stationfall in contrast is air-tight; even its red herrings are placed with purpose. Meretzky knows exactly what he’s doing at every juncture, is in complete control of his craft; all of its bits and pieces fit together seamlessly. Particularly noticeable is just how much better of a writer Meretzky has become, the continuation of a trend that began to reach a certain fruition in 1986’s Leather Goddesses, the game for which Infocom’s unsung hero Jon Palace made a special effort to help him to “sensualize” his text. Almost entirely gone now are the off-hand, even lazy descriptions that creep into Meretzky’s early games, when he tended to tell too much and show too little in his hurry to get to the next really exciting part. I’m tempted to give you an example at this point, but, textual sensualizing or no, he still isn’t the kind of writer that dazzles you with his poetry. Stationfall’s text is rather impressive in the cumulative. After playing for a long while, you begin to realize that its simple, sturdy diction has quietly given you a pretty darn good sense of where you are and what you’re doing.

Lest it all start to feel too dry, the robots are a constant source of amusement. I say “robots” here because early on you find another friend to join you and Floyd, a gangly, chatty metal nerd named Plato — C-3PO to Floyd’s R2-D2 — who proves almost as lovable.

"I am quite surprised to discover you here," says the robot. "I have not seen a soul for a day now, perhaps more. But look, here I am forgetting my manners again. I am known as Plato to the humans on this station, and I am most gratified to make your acquaintance."

Plato reaches the last page of his book. "Heavens! It appears to be time for another jaunt to the library. Would you care to accompany me, my boisterous friend?"

"Oh boy yessiree!" says Floyd, bounding off after Plato. "I hope they have copies of my favorite comic, THE ADVENTURES OF LANE MASTODON!"

Floyd really ought to go into advertising as a product-placement expert…

The remainder of this article will spoil the plot and ending of Stationfall (and Planetfall as well), along with a couple of the final puzzle solutions. If you want to experience Stationfall unspoiled, by all means go do so and come back later. The experience of playing with no preconceptions is well worth having.

And then, perhaps at about the point when you’re really starting to appreciate just what a well-crafted and charming traditional adventure game you’re playing, Stationfall starts to get deeply, creepily weird.

Like so much else in Stationfall, its darker shadings don’t arise completely out of the blue. Some of the same atmosphere of dread and paranoia was lurking beneath the surface goofiness in Planetfall as well; the background to that game was after all a devastating pandemic that was slowly killing you as well as you messed about with Floyd and chowed down on colored goo. Stationfall, however, slowly becomes darker and more subversive than its predecessor ever dared. To understand the difference between the games, we might begin by noting how their plots unfold. In Planetfall you can revive virtually the entire population of the planet Resida after discovering the cure for the pandemic that has struck it, effectively turning back the clock and making everything right again — including, as it turns out, the supposedly “dead” Floyd. In Stationfall, dead is dead; the crew of the space station is gone and they’re not coming back. It feels like the work of an older, more world-weary writer. Yet even that description doesn’t quite get to the heart of the tonal shift that Stationfall undergoes over the course of your playing. It becomes a comedic text adventure filtered through the sensibility of David Lynch, unsettling and just somehow off in ways that are hard to fully describe.

But describe it I must — that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? — so maybe I should start by explaining what’s actually going on on this station. In yet one more homage to Planetfall, it has indeed been infected by a deadly virus. This, however, is a virus of another stripe, computerized rather than biological. It infects any machinery with which it comes into contact, causing the gadgets that make life possible in space to gradually “turn against their creators.” This, then, is the fate that’s been suffered by the people who used to crew the station. As you wander about the station and time passes, you begin to see more and more evidence of the process that’s underway. The automatic doors, for instance, no longer whisk efficiently open and shut for you, but open “barely wide enough for you to squeeze through. As you do so, the door tries to shut, almost jamming against you!” (This progression doesn’t quite make logical sense, as the station has already killed its entire crew, but it’s so effective in context that I’m happy not to nitpick unduly.)

Creepiest of all is what begins to happen to Plato and your old buddy Floyd. The messages describing their antics begin to change, subtly at first but then unmistakably.

Floyd produces a loud burp and fails to apologize.

Floyd stomps on your foot, for no apparent reason.

Floyd meanders in. "You doing anything fun?" he asks, and then answers his own question, "Nope. Same dumb boring things." You notice that Plato has also roamed into view behind Floyd, once again absorbed in his reading.

"Let us take a stroll, Floyd," says Plato, tucking his book under one arm. "Tagging along after this simpleton human is becoming tiresome." He breezes out. Floyd hesitates, then follows.

It’s Plato who tries to kill you first, whereupon Floyd comes to your rescue one last time. But his resistance to the virus won’t last much longer. When you try to hug him to thank him for his deed, “Floyd sniffs, ‘Please leave Floyd alone for a while.'” He shows up from time to time after that, growing ever more rude and petulant. And then he’s simply gone, who knows where, doing who knows what. By now any traces of goofy comedy are long gone. Many players of Planetfall have described how much they missed Floyd after his final sacrifice for their sake, how empty and lonely the complex suddenly felt. Yet that feeling of bereavement was as nothing compared to the creeping dread you’re now feeling, waiting for Floyd to show up again, quite possibly to kill you, as everything around you continues to feel ever more subtly, dangerously wrong.

And then, if you survive long enough, you make it to the climax and you do indeed meet Floyd again, in another deeply unsettling scene that juxtoposes the old, playful companion you used to know with whatever it is he’s become: “Floyd is standing between you and the pyramid, his face so contorted by hate as to be almost unrecognizable. You also wonder where he picked up that black eye patch.” You can picture the old Floyd coming across an eye patch like that and putting it on with one of his squeals of delight. Now, though… it’s all just so wrong.

To win Stationfall you have to kill Floyd. It’s the strangest, most disturbing ending to an Infocom game this side of Trinity — far more disturbing in my eyes than that of Infidel, Mike Berlyn’s stab at an interactive tragedy, in that that game held you always at an emotional remove from the doomed persona you played, who was never depicted as anything other than a selfish jerk anyway. This, though… this is Floyd, the most beloved character Infocom ever created.

>put foil on pyramid
As you approach the pyramid, Floyd levels his stun ray at you, so you quickly back off.

Floyd fires his stun ray nonchalantly in your direction, laughing, as though taunting you. You feel part of your leg go numb.

>shoot floyd with zapgun
The bolt hits Floyd squarely in the chest. He is blown backwards, against the pedestal, and slumps to the deck.

>put foil on pyramid
The foil settles over the pyramid like a blanket, reflecting the pyramid's evil emanations right back into itself. A reverberating whine, like an electronically amplified beehive, fills the room. The whine grows louder and louder, the pyramid and its pedestal begin vibrating, and the sharp smell of ozone assaults you.

The noise and the smell and the vibration overwhelm you. As your knees buckle and you drop to the deck, the pyramid explodes in a burst of intense white light. The explosion leaves you momentarily blinded, but you can hear a mechanized voice on the P.A. system, getting slower and deeper like a stereo disc that has lost its power: "Launch aborted -- launch -- abort --"

The replica pyramids fade to darkness, and a subtle change in background sound tells you that the space station's systems and machinery are returning to their normal functions.

Still dazed, you crawl over to Floyd, lying in a smoking heap near the blackened pedestal. Damaged beyond any conceivable repairs, he half-opens his eyes and looks up at you for the last time. "Floyd sorry for the way he acted. Floyd knows...you did what you...had to do." Wincing in pain, he slowly reaches over to touch your hand. "One last game of Hider-and-Seeker? You be It. Ollie ollie..." His voice is growing weaker. "...oxen..." His eyes close. "...free..." His hand slips away from yours, and he slumps backwards, lifeless. One of his compartments falls open, and Floyd's favorite paddleball set drops to the deck.

In the long silence that follows, something Plato said echoes through your mind. "...think instead about the joy-filled times when you and your friend were together." A noise makes you turn around, and you see Oliver, the little robot that stirred such brotherly feelings in Floyd. Toddling over to you on unsteady legs, he looks uncomprehendingly at Floyd's remains, but picks up the paddleball set. Oliver looks up at you, tugs on the leg of your Patrol uniform, and asks in a quavering voice, "Play game... Play game with Oliver?"

I complained at some length in my article on Planetfall about the ending to that game, how it undercut the pathos of Floyd’s noble sacrifice by bringing him back, all repaired and shined up and good as new again. The natural first question to ask here, then, is why he’s not similarly repairable this time.

Setting aside such practical questions in the name of dramatic effect, I’m not entirely sure how to feel about this scene. Even more so than that of Floyd’s first death (itself a bit of one-upsmanship inspired by Electronic Arts’s early “Can a Computer Make You Cry?” advertisements), it feels a little manufactured. It’s as if Meretzky, having failed to stick to his dramatic guns the first time around, has decided to make up for it with interest by not only killing Floyd for good this time but by making you put him down yourself. On the other hand, the scene’s very tonal discordance feels part and parcel of the increasingly surreal journey the game as a whole has become. The appearance of a new “baby” robot that’s apparently supposed to make everything all better feels for me like the strangest element of all. It’s common in tragic literature going back to Shakespeare and well before to end an orgy of death and destruction with a glimmer of hope in the form of new life, a reminder that a new spring always follows every winter and that life in all its comedy and tragedy and joy and pain does go on for the world at large. Yet if that’s the intent here it’s handled rather clumsily. It just feels like Floyd is being replaced, and only adds to the Lynchian oddity of the whole experience. I suspect the weirdness of this final scene is due more to the tone finally starting to get away from Meretzky — aided no doubt by the fact that he was pushing right up against the limits of the 128 K Z-Machine, and didn’t have space to write more — than authorial intent. Nevertheless, effectively weird it is, the perfect ending to what’s evolved (devolved?) into a perfect horror.

One final oddity about Stationfall is how little discussion the strange, creepy, off-putting experience it morphs into has prompted. Janet Murray, the MIT and Georgia Tech professor who’s largely responsible for Planetfall’s reputation in academia thanks to writing about it in her seminal book Hamlet on the Holodeck, appears not to even be aware of this second and final chapter to Floyd’s story. Most contemporary reviewers in the trade press likewise never hinted at the darkness that eventually envelops the game, probably because, pressed for time as always, they never got that far. Indeed, Stationfall must be the perfect test to see if reviewers have really played the game they write about. Only Computer Gaming World’s Scorpia, although most interested as usual in giving puzzle hints, noted in passing that “there is one aspect of the ending that may give some people trouble.”

A subversive nightmare slipped into the garb of a middling fan-servicing sequel, Stationfall is in its way one of the most fascinating games Infocom ever published, evidence of a determination to keep challenging players’ expectations even as the curtain began to lower. In forcing you to kill Floyd, that most beloved personification of Infocom’s art, is Steve Meretzky making a statement about what the world was doing to Infocom through its increasing disinterest? That’s perhaps a stretch. Is the final effect Stationfall has on the player planned or accidental? That’s also difficult to know. All I can say is that it creeps me the hell out while still managing to be a superbly crafted traditional text adventure. I for one find it far more unnerving than Infocom’s ostensible first horror offering, The Lurking Horror, which was ironically released simultaneously with this game. Who would have guessed that Steve Meretzky could do scary this well? Who would have guessed from reading the box of Stationfall — “Floyd is back in the boffoid sequel to Planetfall.”; “The puzzles will challenge your intellect, the humor will keep you laughing, and Floyd will win your heart.” — that you’d end up creeping around the deserted station feeling like this? Many a horror movie starts under similarly innocuous circumstances, but the effect is lessened by the fact that the audience knows what they’ve signed up for, knows they just bought tickets to a scary movie. The question for them isn’t whether things will go south, but when. Playing Stationfall unspoiled for the first time is like walking into a Ghostbusters film that turns halfway through into the The Exorcist. A bait and switch? Perhaps, but a brilliantly effective one. Like, come to think of, much of Steve Meretzky’s career.

(Stationfall and most of the other Infocom games are available for purchase as part of an iOS app.)

Comments
24 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

September 10, 2015 at 3:00 pm

is Steve Meretzky making a statement about what the world was doing to Infocom through its increasing disinterest? That’s perhaps a stretch.

Or what he thought Activision was doing to Infocom? Probably still a stretch, but maybe less of one.

- Jimmy Maher

September 11, 2015 at 5:56 am

That doesn’t quite fit with the timeline. Meretzky would have started this game in late 1986, when Jim Levy was still in control and relations were still fairly peachy. Even at the time of its release, it was just starting to become really clear to Infocom that life under Bruce Davis wasn’t going to be pleasant.

- Marshal Tenner Winter

September 10, 2015 at 4:19 pm

“arguably more effective in its easy-going way than A Mind Forever Voyaging‘s more hectoringt tone” You may want to take off that superfluous T on “hectoring”.

- David Welbourn

September 10, 2015 at 8:58 pm

There’s never a t-remover around when you need one.

- Lisa H.

September 12, 2015 at 4:25 am

*rimshot*

- Jimmy Maher

September 11, 2015 at 5:53 am

Thanks! And David — :).

- Bumvelcrow

September 10, 2015 at 7:56 pm

I’m glad it’s not just me who considers Stationfall one of the most atmospheric and disturbing games ever written! Reading this article brings back ancient memories of playing it and makes me want to shiver…

- johannes_paulsen

September 12, 2015 at 12:09 am

I actually didn’t think killing Floyd was the most disturbing part of the game. That made sense — Floyd was being influenced by the pyramids, and he wasn’t in control of his decisions anymore, and if there was a way to save him, great, but I wasn’t as broken up by his death as I was in Planetfall. (It was easier to drop him since he was fighting me by that point anyway.)

No, the spookiest part was the fact that the malevolent alien presence that was just beneath the surface. The weird alien written language that involved tasting…. And those spooky pyramids. The most chilling part? The note in the bio lab that explained that the pyramids were like a “bacterioph-” For some reason, that stayed with me. I think I had to step away from the game for a little bit after reading that note!

- Bob Reeves

September 13, 2015 at 1:39 pm

Since you’re the only human on the station at the end, there’s no one to repair Floyd. Plus, he’s probably suffered so much corruption from the virus that he’s past the point of no return–even if he could be repaired, he’d still be evil. I didn’t see Oliver as a replacement at all, just as an image of innocence that helps us remember Floyd as he was and can never be again. As to Meretzky being able to do scary, the 2081 sequence in AMFV gave me more nightmares than anything in Stationfall. Only the Vildroid chapter of The Space Bar is worse.

- Jimmy Maher

September 14, 2015 at 5:48 am

While I’m not hugely invested in splitting hairs on this topic, I will just note neither of those explanations for Floyd’s irreversible death do it for me. Why can’t I just put him in my space truck and take him back to my ship to be repaired? And, even overlooking the fact that the old Floyd returned just before his death, why should Floyd remain evil when all of the other systems on the station, who were actually exposed to the virus for much longer, go back to normal?

- Bob Reeves

September 14, 2015 at 1:09 pm

Oops. You’re right of course. I don’t think sometimes.

- TsuDhoNimh

September 14, 2015 at 1:45 am

I have to admit that I played this game entirely because it was recommended here, got to the explosive series of puzzles, and got so fed up with doing that puzzle that I gave up. I think I restarted almost from the beginning three times because the explosive evaporated while I was fiddling with the timers and detonators or I’d set it up correctly but hadn’t yet figured out that the detonator was bad, which could have been clued a bit better than it was.

Not to mention the truly evil return of the demagnetized ID card “puzzle”.

- Jimmy Maher

September 14, 2015 at 5:53 am

Hmm. I agree about the key card, which is an unnecessary cruel gotcha of the sort more typical of Sierra than late-era Infocom. The explosive, however, I thought to be a superb puzzle, if one that does indeed require some learning through failure. The tag on the explosive does tell you that it won’t last long in warmer temperatures — a way for Meretzky to say, “You might want to save here,” which is a kindness few other 1980s game designers would have bothered with.

- TsuDhoNimh

September 15, 2015 at 6:37 pm

I suppose that one of the problems of playing old games is that I lack the patience for them that I had when I was twelve years old and the game I was playing was the only game around to play. So instead of playing a game like Stationfall all the way through, I get stuck about halfway through, give up, read the walkthrough (or Digital Antiquarian article) and I’m done.

- Janice M. Eisen

September 14, 2015 at 11:11 am

I had thought that the sudden appearance of a younger-seeming robot named Oliver at the end was a reference to Cousin Oliver from The Brady Bunch, already a well-known cliche at the time. I guess only Meretzky would know for sure.

- Stopin

September 19, 2015 at 1:56 pm

Stationfall won a place in my heart as the first Infocom game I finished without hints. The only other thing I remember is the steaming cup of coffee that suddenly appears in the mess hall. The whole thing was genuinely eerie and I just left it there. If I remember right, the game keeps listing it in the location description, slowly getting colder and colder.

- Peter Piers

September 20, 2015 at 2:02 pm

I just picked up on something you said: “Meretzky’s sixth and, as it would transpire, final all-text adventure game”…

Are you not counting the Spellcasting 101 series on account of its graphics? Because, although they do add a lot to the experience, I think they’re more illustrative (think Scott Adams’ SAGA) than part of the actual game (think Sierra’s Illustrated Adventures). In fact, for most Legend Entertainment games (BTW, I’m really looking forward to you tackling LE!), I think you can turn off the graphics altogether.

- Jimmy Maher

September 20, 2015 at 2:20 pm

By all-text I mean just that. I normally called interactive fictions with pictures illustrated text adventures to distinguish them from point-and-clickers and animated graphic adventures of the Sierra AGI style. That said, Meretzky actually did one more game for Infocom before Legend, Zork Zero, which doesn’t use graphics for illustrations so much as to help visualize certain puzzles.

- Peter Piers

September 20, 2015 at 2:07 pm

(BTW, I always imagine Floyd as Bender from Futurama. *Always*. No, I have no idea why; I don’t see Bender as cute in any way, shape or form)

- Scott Hughes

January 21, 2021 at 12:44 pm

That’s really funny. I played both Planetfall and Stationfall around the time Stationfall came out in the 80s, way before Bender existed. But I distinctly remember thinking when I started watching Futurama that Bender was essentially a grown-up Floyd, who turned out to be kind of a jerk. I think part of is that Bender opens up his chest and takes out booze; that reminded me of finding things stored inside Floyd.

- Martin

August 23, 2016 at 1:23 am

Is it possible that you are over thinking the end of the game. Isn’t it just a rerun of Old Yeller. Maybe Floyd is undescribed but he’s (he?) really an electronic dog -as in mans best friend.

- Wolfeye M.

September 19, 2019 at 11:15 am

I would have been so pissed at the end of Stationfall if I had played the game, especially after the boxart hyped it up as another fun adventure with Floyd. I hate Old Yeller type of stories.

I wonder, did Infocom get any angry letters about the ending? That was the era before Twitter, when companies and developers were just a few clicks away on social media. If someone bothered to send snail mail, they were probably genuinely upset.

- Aaron

April 20, 2020 at 4:39 pm

I love these write-ups; thanks. BUT… please edit to add the spoiler alert earlier in the article before mentioning Floyd’s death!

- Jimmy Maher

April 22, 2020 at 8:49 am

While I’m not insensitive to such things, Floyd’s death is so well-known by this point that it’s bit like “revealing” that everybody dies at the end of Hamlet. (Floyd’s death is easily the most celebrated and discussed single moment in the entire Infocom canon.) In any event, it’s probably good policy not to read a review of a sequel to a game if one is super-sensitive to spoilers of its predecessor; setting up the sequel kind of requires revealing at least some of what came before.

The Campy Cosmic Horror of H.P. Lovecraft
September 18, 2015

If you look at the way critics describe Lovecraft … they often say he’s purple, overwritten, overblown, verbose, but it’s un-putdownable. There’s something about that kind of hallucinatorily intense purple prose which completely breaches all rules of “good writing”, but is somehow utterly compulsive and affecting. That pulp aesthetic of language is something very tenuous, which all too easily simply becomes shit, but is fascinating where it works.

– China Miéville

One of Lovecraft’s worst faults is his incessant effort to work up the expectations of the reader by sprinkling his stories with such adjectives as “horrible,” “terrible,” “frightful,” “awesome,” “eerie,” “weird,” “forbidden,” “unhallowed,” “unholy,” “blasphemous,” “hellish,” and “infernal.” Surely one of the primary rules for writing an effective tale of horror is never to use any of these words — especially if you are going, at the end, to produce an invisible whistling octopus.

— Edmund Wilson

So that was what these lekythoi contained; the monstrous fruit of unhallowed rites and deeds, presumably won or cowed to such submission as to help, when called up by some hellish incantation, in the defence of their blasphemous master or the questioning of those who were not so willing?

— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”

H.P. Lovecraft is what people like to call a “problematic” writer. For many, the quote just above is all they need to know about him: a jumble of wild adjectives seemingly thrown into the air and left where they fell, married to a convoluted tangle of dependent clauses, all ending in a non-sequitural question mark. Lovecraft’s more fervent admirers sometimes say that he is a “difficult” writer, whose diction must be carefully unpacked, not unlike that of many other literary greats. His detractors reply, not without considerable justification, that his works don’t earn such readerly devotion, that they remain a graceless tangle even after you’ve sussed out their meaning. And that’s without even beginning to address the real ugliness of Lovecraft, the xenophobia and racism that lie at the core of even his best-regarded works. Lovecraft, they say, is simply a bad writer. Full stop.

Well, they’re mostly right. Lovecraft is in most respects a pretty bad writer. He is, however, an otherwise bad writer who somehow tapped into something that many people find deeply resonant of the proverbial human condition, not only in his own time but perhaps even more so in our own. Despite his clumsy prose and his racism and plenty of other sins, his stature has only continued to grow over the decades since his death in poverty and obscurity in 1937 at age 46. This man who himself believed he died a failure, who saw his work published only in lurid pulp magazines with names like Weird Tales and never had the chance to walk into a bookstore and see a book of his own on the shelf, now has a volume in the prestigious Library of America series. His literary influence, at least within the realm of fantastical fiction, has been almost incalculable. Stephen King may have sold hundreds of millions more books, but it’s Lovecraft who’s most often cited to be the most influential single practitioner of horror fiction of the twentieth century. In popular culture too he’s everywhere, from 1979’s classic science-fiction thriller Alien to 2014’s critically acclaimed first season of True Detective. The alien monstrosity Cthulhu, his most famous creation, now adorns tee-shirts, coffee mugs, and key rings; you can even take him to bed with you at night in the form of a plush toy. For a lifelong atheist, Lovecraft has enjoyed one hell of an afterlife.

Perhaps most surprising of all is Lovecraft’s stature as one of the minor deities of ludic fictions, living on a plane only just below the Holy Trinity of Tolkien, Lucas, and Roddenberry. He was an avowed classicist who found the early twentieth century far too modern for his tastes, who believed that he’d been born 200 years too late. He disliked technology as much as he did most other aspects of modernity, wrote in an archaic diction that was quite deliberately centuries out of date even in his own day, and in general spent his entire life looking backward to an idealized version of the past. Yet there’s his mark stamped implicitly or explicitly all over gaming — gaming with its cult of the new, its fetishization of technology, its unquenchable thirst for more gigabytes, more gigahertz, more pixels. It’s a strange state of affairs — but, then again, one of the Holy Trinity itself was a musty old pipe-smoking Oxford professor of philology who was equally disdainful of modern life.

At any rate, we’re just getting to the point in this little history of gaming where Lovecraft starts to become a major factor. Therefore it seems appropriate to spend some time looking back on his life and times, to try to understand who he was and what it is about him that so many continue to find so compelling.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born his parents’ first and, as it would transpire, only child into comfortable circumstances in Providence, Rhode Island, on August 20, 1890. His father was a traveling sales representative for a local silversmith, his maternal grandfather an entrepreneur and industrialist of considerable wealth and influence. The specter of madness, destined to hang constantly over Lovecraft’s own life as it would that of so many of his fictional protagonists, first raised its head when he was three years old: his father had a complete nervous breakdown on a sales trip to Chicago, likely caused by syphilis. He never recovered his sanity, and young Howard never saw his father again after his breakdown; he died in an asylum within five years.

Lovecraft’s mother was also of what they used to call a “nervous disposition,” alternately encouraging, coddling, smothering, domineering, and belittling him. Still, life as a whole was pretty good for much of his childhood. Mother and son lived with his grandfather and two aunts in a rambling old house with a magnificent library and a cupola outfitted as his personal clubhouse, complete with model trains, armies of lead soldiers, and all the other toys a boy could want. While he showed little interest in children his own age and they in turn showed little in him, Lovecraft would come to remember his childhood as the best period of his life. The family treated him as a prodigy, indulging his interests in chemistry and astronomy and clapping heartily when he read to them his first stories and poems — and, it must be said, not without reason; one of his poems, a gloss on The Odyssey composed when he was just seven years old, consisted of 88 lines of meticulously correct iambic heptameter.

But then, on March 24, 1904, came the event that Lovecraft would always reckon the greatest tragedy of his life. His grandfather died on that date, leaving behind a financial situation that proved, thanks to a recent string of losses by his business interests, far worse than anyone in his family had anticipated. Lovecraft and his mother were forced to move from the spacious ease of the family homestead, which had come complete with a retinue of liveried servants, into a cramped little duplex, where they’d have to fend for themselves. The young Lovecraft, already extremely class-conscious, took the decline so badly that he considered suicide. He compensated by claiming ever more stridently, on the basis of little real evidence, to be the latest of a long line of “unmixed English gentry.” Given his already burgeoning obsession with racial and familial purity, that was a wealth far more important than mere money.

Despite his prodigious childhood, Lovecraft’s academic career petered out anticlimactically. For some years he had hoped to become an astronomer, but when the time came to think about university he elected not to even attempt the entrance exam, fearing that his math skills weren’t up to the test. Avoiding the stigma of failure by not even trying would continue to be the pattern of much of his life. Arrogant yet, as arrogant people so often are, extremely insecure at heart, he preferred to adopt the attitude of the wealthy gentry of old whom he so admired, waiting in his increasingly shabby ivory tower for opportunities to come to him.

His academic career was over before it had really begun, but Lovecraft considered workaday employment to be beneath him. He lived until age 28 under the thumb of his mother, subsisting on the slowly dwindling remains of his grandfather and father’s inheritances and the largess of other family members. His principal intellectual and social outlet became what was known at the time as “amateur journalism”: a community of writers who self-published newsletters and pamphlets, forerunners to the fanzines of later years (and, by extension, to the modern world of blogging). A diligent worker who was willing to correspond with and help just about anyone who approached him — a part of his affected attitude of noblesse oblige — Lovecraft also had lots of time and energy to devote to what must remain for most practitioners a hobby. His star thus rose quickly: he became vice president of the United Amateur Press Association, the second largest organization of its kind in the country, in 1915, and its president in 1917, whilst writing prolifically for the various newsletters. His output during this period was mostly articles on science and other “hard” topics, along with a smattering of stilted poetry written in the style of his favorite era, the eighteenth century. He also began the habit of copious and voluminous letter writing, largely to fellow UAPA members, that he would continue for the rest of his life. By the time of his death he may have written as many as 100,000 letters, many running into the tens of pages — a staggering pace of eight or nine often substantial letters per day in addition to all of his other literary output.

By the time he was serving as president of the UAPA, his mother, always high-strung, was behaving more and more erratically. She would run screaming through the house at night believing herself to be chased by creatures from her nightmares, and suddenly forget where she was and what she was doing at random times during the day. She was quite possibly suffering from the same syphilis that had killed her husband. At last, on March 13, 1919, her family committed her to the same mental hospital that had housed her husband; also like her husband, she would die there two years later after a botched gall-bladder surgery. Lovecraft was appropriately bereaved, but he was also free. Within reason, anyway: unable to cook or do even the most basic housekeeping chores and unwilling to learn, and having no independent source of income anyway, he wound up living with his aunts again.

Around the same time, he began to supplant his nonfiction articles and his poetry with tales of horror, drawing heavily on the style of his greatest literary idol, Edgar Allan Poe, as well as contemporary adventure fiction, his family’s history of madness, and the recurring nightmares that had haunted him since age six. While the quality of his output seesawed radically from story to story during this period, as indeed it would throughout his career, he wrote some of his most respected tales in fairly short order, such as “The Music of Erich Zann” and “The Rats in the Walls.”

That last story in particular evokes many of the themes and ideas that would later come to be described as quintessentially Lovecraftian. An aging American industrialist chooses to retire to his family’s ancestral home in England. He builds his new family seat on the ruins of the old, a place called Exham Priory which was abandoned during “the reign of James the First” when one of the sons murdered his parents and siblings and fled to Virginia to found the current branch of the family tree. Three months after these events, as local legend would have it, a flood of rats had poured forth from the derelict building, devouring livestock and a few of the villagers. Since then the site has been one of ill repute, never occupied or rebuilt and avoided conscientiously by the locals. Dismissing it all in classic horror-story fashion, our elderly hero rebuilds the place and moves in, only to be awakened night after night by the sound of thousands of rats scurrying behind the walls, rushing always downward toward an altar in the cellar, a relic from an ancient Druidic temple that apparently once existed on the site. Working with some associates, he finds the entrance to a secret underground labyrinth beneath the altar, where his ancestors practiced barbaric rites of human sacrifice and cannibalism; it was apparently his discovery of and/or attempted initiation into the familial cult that led that one brave son to murder his family and flee to the New World. Alas, our hero proves not so strong. The story ends, as so many Lovecraft stories do, in an insane babble of adjectives, as the protagonist goes crazy, kills, and eats one of his comrades. He is telling his story, we learn at the end, from the madhouse.

Many Lovecraft stories deal similarly in hereditary evil and madness, the sins of the father being visited upon the helpless son. That seems paradoxical given that he was an avowed atheist and materialist, but nevertheless is very much in keeping with his equally strong belief in the power and importance of bloodlines. There are obvious echoes of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” in “The Rats in the Walls” — so obvious that Lovecraft, admittedly not exactly the most self-aware of writers, could hardly fail to be aware of them. Yet I think a comparison of the two stories also does a great deal to point out the differences between the two writers. Poe focuses on inner, psychological horrors. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” it’s his protagonist’s guilt over a senseless murder he himself committed that leads him to hear the beating of his victim’s heart under the floorboards of his house, and that finally drives him mad. Whatever else you can say about his plight, it’s a plight he created for himself. But the evil in “The Rats in the Walls” is an external evil in the face of which psychology is meaningless, guilt or innocence irrelevant, and the narrator helpless. Lovecraft brings us to shudder not for his characters, who are so thin as to be impossible to really care about, but for humanity as a whole. Nihilism on this cosmic scale was something new to horror fiction; it’s the bedrock of his claim to literary importance.

Lovecraft’s big break, such as it was, came in 1923 when one of his young proteges told him of a new paying magazine called Weird Tales that was just starting up and was thus eager for submissions. Why, they asked, didn’t he submit some of his stories?

The letter that Lovecraft attached along with his initial submission of five stories finds him still affecting the persona of an English gentleman of leisure who likes to amuse himself with a bit of scribbling now and again, who doesn’t really care all that much whether Weird Tales is interested or not.

Having a habit of writing weird, macabre and fantastic stories for my own amusement, I have lately been simultaneously hounded by nearly a dozen well-meaning friends into deciding to submit a few of these Gothic horrors to your newly founded periodical … I have no idea that these things will be found suitable, for I pay no attention to the demands of commercial writing … the only reader I hold in mind is myself …

The magazine did accept all five of them for the handsome fee of 1.5 cents per word, beginning a steady if far from lucrative relationship that would last for the rest of Lovecraft’s life. Weird Tales would remain always far from the top of the pulps, selling a bare fraction of what the biggest magazines like Argosy All-Story Weekly and Black Mask sold. Yet even among its stable of second-tier authors Lovecraft was not particularly prominent or valued. In over a decade of writing for Weird Tales, he wasn’t once granted top billing in the form of a cover story. Indeed, many of his submissions, including some that are regarded today as among his best work, were summarily rejected.

The February 1928 issue of Weird Tales that included Lovecraft’s most famous story. As always, it didn’t make the cover.

It was shortly after his stories started appearing in Weird Tales that Lovecraft embarked on the one great adventure of his life. In March of 1924 this confirmed bachelor, who had never before expressed the slightest romantic interest in a woman, shocked family and acquaintances alike by abruptly moving to New York City to marry Sonia Greene, one of his UAPA correspondents. Just to make it all still more bizarre, she was a Jew, one of the groups of racial Others whom he hated most. But anyone who thought that his wife’s ethnicity might reflect a softening of his racism was soon proved wrong. He instructed Sonia that she should ensure that any gatherings she arranged be made up predominantly of “Aryans,” and persisted in excoriating her ethnicity, often right in front of her. The marriage soon ran into plenty of other problems. She was loving and affectionate; he, she would later claim, never once said the words “I love you” to her. She had a healthy interest in sex; he had none — indeed, found it repulsive. (He had an “Apollonian aesthetic,” she a “Dionysian,” he would later say in his pompous way.)

The couple separated within a year, Lovecraft renting a single large room for himself in Brooklyn Heights, a formerly wealthy area of New York now come down in the world, full of rooming houses catering to transients and immigrants. That last in particular always spelt trouble for Lovecraft. He poured his bile into “The Horror at Red Hook.” One of his uglier stories, it’s set in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn, a neighborhood with a similar history to that of Brooklyn Heights. It reads like a bigot’s vision of Paradise Lost.

Its houses are mostly of brick, dating from the first quarter to the middle of the nineteenth century, and some of the obscurer alleys and byways have that alluring antique flavour which conventional reading leads us to call “Dickensian”. The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles. Here long ago a brighter picture dwelt, with clear-eyed mariners on the lower streets and homes of taste and substance where the larger houses line the hill. One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there—a worn flight of steps, a battered doorway, a wormy pair of decorative columns or pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing.

From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares, occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when visitors pick their way through.

After describing his unhappiness in New York to his aunts with increasing stridency — he said he awoke every morning “screaming in sheer desperation and pounding the walls and floor” — Lovecraft got from them a railway ticket and an invitation to come back home at last in April of 1926. His two-year adventure in adulthood having ended in failure, he resumed what even his most admiring biographers acknowledge to be essentially a perpetual adolescence.

Back in Providence, Lovecraft wrote his most anthologized, most read, most archetypal, most influential, and arguably simply best story of all: “The Call of Cthulhu.” Its opening lines are the most famous he ever wrote, and for once relatively elegant and to the point, a mission statement for cosmic horror.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

The narrator of “The Call of Cthulhu” is an intellectual gentleman, apparently an anthropologist of some stripe or other, who stumbles upon a sinister cache of documents whilst serving as executor of his grand-uncle’s estate following the latter’s death under somewhat mysterious circumstances. An epistolary tale in spirit if not quite in technical form, the bulk of its length consists of our narrator explaining what he found in that initial cache as well as the further research to which it leads him. He gradually uncovers evidence of a sinister global cult, older than antiquity, which worships Cthulhu, an extraterrestrial entity of inconceivable power. Cthulhu sleeps entombed somewhere beneath the Pacific Ocean, waiting until “the stars are right,” when he will rise again to awaken his even more powerful comrades — the so-called “Great Old Ones” — and rule the world. Non-converts like our benighted narrator and his grand-uncle who learn of the cult’s existence tend not to live very long; it apparently has a very long reach. Importantly, however, it’s also strongly hinted that the cult may be in for a rude surprise of its own when Cthulhu does finally awaken. He and the Great Old Ones will likely crush all humans as thoughtlessly as humans do ants on that day when the stars are right again.

In only one respect is “The Call of Cthulhu” not archetypal Lovecraft: it has a relatively subdued climax in comparison to the norm, with our narrator neither dead nor (presumably) insane but rather peeking nervously around every corner, waiting for the cult’s inevitable assassin to arrive. This is doubtless one of the things that make it so effectively chilling. Otherwise all of the classic tropes, or at least those that didn’t already show up in “The Rats in the Walls,” are here: locales spanning the globe; forbidden texts; non-Euclidean alien geometries “loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.” There’s the affectedly archaic diction: “legends” becomes “legendry”; the past tense of “show” becomes “shew.” There’s lots of words that you’ll only find in Lovecraft, to such an extent that you know as soon as you see one of them that you’re reading either him or one of his imitators: “eldritch,” “Cyclopean,” “daemonic.” There’s the way, kind of hilarious and kind of endearing, that every single person or document talks in the exact same voice and diction. (This applies even to an extract from The Sydney Bulletin, which describes the crew of a ship as “a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes.”) And yes, this being Lovecraft, the usual racism and horror of miscegenation is also all over the place: the cult makes its outposts not with the upright Aryan races but with the “debased,” “mongrel” peoples of the earth. Almost as notable is what is conspicuously missing, here as well as elsewhere in the Lovecraft oeuvre: humor, women, romance, beauty that isn’t somehow “blasphemous” or “daemonic.” Come to think of it, about 95 percent of life’s rich pageant. Some writers like Shakespeare and Tolstoy enfold the whole world of human experience, while others focus obsessively on one tiny corner of it. Lovecraft is definitely among the latter group.

Many of Lovecraft’s later stories continued to explore what came to be known as the “Cthulhu Mythos,” sometimes in the form of novellas rather than short stories. Always generous with his friends and correspondents, he also happily allowed other writers to play with his creations. Thus the Mythos as we’ve come to know it today, as a shared universe boasting contributions from countless sources — many of them, it must be said, much better writers than Lovecraft himself — was already well into its gestation before his death. Whatever else you can say about Lovecraft, his complete willingness to let other share in his intellectual property is refreshing in our current Age of Litigation. It’s one of the principal reasons that the Mythos has proved to be so enduring.

When not writing his stories or his torrents of letters, Lovecraft spent much of the last decade of his life traveling the Eastern Seaboard: as far south as Florida, as far west as Louisiana, as far north as Quebec. Preferring by his own admission buildings to people, he would invariably seek out the oldest section of any place he visited and explore it at exhaustive length, preferably by moonlight. Broker than ever, he often stayed with members of his small army of correspondents, who also took it upon themselves to feed him. Otherwise he often simply went hungry, sometimes for days at a time. Paul Cook, one of his few local friends, was shocked at the state in which he returned to Providence from some of his rambles: “Folds of skin hanging from a skeleton. Eyes sunk in sockets like burnt holes in a blanket. Those delicate, sensitive artist’s hands and fingers nothing but claws.”

Those friends and correspondents of his, more numerous than ever, were an interesting lot. They now included among them quite a number of other writers of pulpy note, some of them far more popular with inter-war readers than he: Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian), Clark Ashton Smith (the outside writer who first and most frequently played in the Cthulhu Mythos during Lovecraft’s lifetime), Fritz Leiber (creator shortly after Lovecraft’s death of the classic fantasy team of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser), Robert Bloch (author many years later of Psycho). Those last two, as well as many or most of Lovecraft’s other regular correspondents, were notable for their youth. Many, like Bloch, were still in their teens. The picture below shows Lovecraft on a visit to the family of another of his young friends in Florida in 1935. Robert Barlow had just turned 17 at the time. It’s an endearing image in its way, but it’s also a little strange — even vaguely pathetic — when you stop to think about it. What should this 45-year-old man and this 17-year-old boy really have to share with one other?

H.P. Lovecraft, left, with the young Robert Barlow and family (and cat) in Florida, 1935.

Ironically, Lovecraft died just as his career seemed to be on the upswing. In 1936 he received $600, the most he’d ever been paid at once for his writing and a small fortune by his meager standards, for two novellas (At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time) that were published by the prestigious (by pulp standards) Astounding Science Fiction. This marked a major step up from the perpetually near-bankrupt Weird Tales. Best of all, both novellas made the cover, signaling what could have been the start of a steady relationship with a magazine that valued him much more than Weird Tales ever had, that may have finally allowed him to earn a real living from writing. But it wasn’t to be. On February 27, 1937, after weeks of excruciating stomach pain, he visited a doctor for the first time in years, who determined that cancer of the small intestine and acute kidney disease were in a race to see which could kill him first. He died on March 15.

The relative upswing in Lovecraft’s literary fortunes that began with his publication in Astounding proved oddly unaffected by his death. In 1939 August Derleth and Donald Wandrei formed Arkham House — named after the fictional New England city, a stand-in for Providence, where Lovecraft set many of his stories — to preserve his work in book form. A long, convoluted series of copyright disputes arose almost immediately, initially between Lovecraft’s young friend Robert Barlow, whom he had named as executor of his estate, and Darleth and Wandrei, who claimed to have been bequeathed the rights to his stories by his family. This tangle has never been entirely resolved, but most people today simply act as if Lovecraft’s stories are all in the public domain, and to the best of my knowledge no one has ever been sued for it.

Edmund Wilson’s infamous 1945 hatchet job for The New Yorker, from which I quoted to begin this article, is entertaining but not terribly insightful, and must have been disheartening on one level for fans of Lovecraft, especially as it set the tone for discussion of him in high-brow literary circles for decades to come. On the other hand, though, the very fact that Wilson, the country’s foremost literary critic at the time, felt the need to write about him at all is a measure of how far he had already come in the eight years since his death. Since then Lovecraft has continued to grow still more popular almost linearly, decade by decade. He long since became one of those essential authors that anyone seriously interested in the genres of fantasy, science fiction, or horror simply has to read, and if the recent success of True Detective is anything to go by he’s not doing too badly for himself in mainstream culture either. As I write this article today I see that not only “Lovecraft” but also “Cthulhu” are included in the Firefox web browser’s spelling dictionary. What more proof can one need of the mainstreaming of the Mythos?

But just what is it about this profoundly limited writer that makes his work so enduring? Well, I can come up with three reasons, one or more of which I believe probably apply to most people who’ve read him — those, that is, who haven’t run screaming from the horrid prose.

The first and most respectable of those reasons is that when he wrote “The Call of Cthulhu,” his one stroke of unassailable genius, Lovecraft tapped into the zeitgeist of his time and our own. We should think about the massive shift in our understanding of our place in the universe that was in process during Lovecraft’s time. In the view of the populace at large, science had heretofore been a quaint, nonthreatening realm of gentlemen scholars tinkering away in their laboratories to learn more about God’s magnificent creation. Beginning with Darwin, however, all that changed. Humans, Darwin asserted, were not created by a divine higher power but rather struggled up, gasping and clawing, from the primordial muck like one of Lovecraft’s slimy tentacled monsters. Soon after the paradigm shift of evolution came Einstein with his theories about space and time, which claimed that neither were anything like common sense would have them be, that space itself could bend and time could speed up and slow down; think of the “loathsome non-Euclidean geometry” of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones. And then came our first inklings of the quantum world, the realization that even the comforting regularity of Newtonian physics was a mere facade spread over the chaos of unpredictability that lay beneath. The world seemed to be shifting beneath humanity’s feet, bringing with it a dawning realization that’s at the heart of the embodiment of existential dread that is Cthulhu: that we’re just not that important to anyone or anything; indeed, that it’s difficult to even express how insignificant we are against the vast sweep of the unfeeling cosmos. I believe that our collective psyche still struggles with the ramifications of that realization today. Some cling ever tighter to traditional religion (it’s interesting to note that fundamentalism, in all its incarnations, is a phenomenon that postdates Darwin); some spend their lives trying to forget it via hedonism, career, social media, games (hey, I resemble that remark!); some, the lucky ones, make peace with their insignificance, whether through Nietzschian self-actualization, spirituality, or something else. But even for them, I believe, persists somewhere that dread and fear of our aloneness and insignificance, born of the knowledge that a rogue asteroid — or a band of inconceivably powerful and malevolent aliens — could wipe us all out tomorrow and no god would save us. It’s this dread and fear that Lovecraft channels.

That’s the philosophical argument for Lovecraft’s importance, and I do think it’s a good one. At the same time, though, it’s hardly a full explanation of why so many of us continue to enjoy — yes, enjoy — reading Lovecraft even after he’s beat his one great idea comprehensively into the ground over the course of dozens of tales. We also read Lovecraft, ungenerous and even voyeuristic as it may sound, because we’re fascinated by the so obviously troubled personality that created them. In short, we want to know just what the hell is up with Lovecraft, this man who fancied himself an independent, strong-minded gentleman scholar yet is actually terrified of just about every damn thing in the universe. Various people have advanced various theories as to what in fact was up with Lovecraft. Some, noting his inability to express any other emotion than terror and, most of all, disgust — which he admittedly does do very well — have said that he must have been on the autism spectrum. Others, noting his habit of surrounding himself with young male admirers and his occasional habit of describing their appearance in rather, shall we say, idealized terms, have questioned whether he was a closeted homosexual — quite possibly closeted even from himself. In the end, though, all such theories end up feeling unsatisfying and anachronistic.

What is clear is that the Lovecraft we meet in his fiction is a walking, talking bundle of neuroses and phobias, disgusted especially by the seething biological physis that is life itself. Most of all, he’s disgusted by that ultimate imperative of biology: sex. His work is so laden with Freudian imagery that it’s the veritable mother lode for any believer in displacement theory: “rigid” pillars; yawning abysses coated with slimy moisture; dilating doorways leading into dark, strong-smelling tunnels; thick round “Cyclopean” columns (did someone say something about a one-eyed trouser snake?). Read in the right spirit, passages like this one from “The Call of Cthluhu” become hilarious:

…everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there.

What makes all of this still more hilarious is that Lovecraft has no idea that he’s doing it. It’s almost enough all by itself to make one a believer in Freud — if one can stop laughing long enough.

And that in turn gets us to the real dirty little secret about Lovecraft, the reason so many of us continue to love this pretentious bigot like we do the racist but entertaining old uncle we see every Thanksgiving: he’s just so fun. He’s the best camp this side of Plan 9 From Outer Space. This is the real reason that people want to take Cthulhu to bed with them as a plush toy. In the countless works of Lovecraftian fiction that have been written by people other than H.P. Lovecraft, the line between parody and homage is always blurred, largely because he’s uniquely impervious to the typical mode of literary parody, that of exaggerating an author’s stylistic tics until they become ridiculous. The problem is that Lovecraft already parodies himself. Really, how could anyone write anything more ostentatiously overwrought than this?

The tramping drew nearer—heaven save me from the sound of those feet and paws and hooves and pads and talons as it commenced to acquire detail! Down limitless reaches of sunless pavement a spark of light flickered in the malodorous wind, and I drew behind the enormous circumference of a Cyclopic column that I might escape for a while the horror that was stalking million-footed toward me through gigantic hypostyles of inhuman dread and phobic antiquity. The flickers increased, and the tramping and dissonant rhythm grew sickeningly loud. In the quivering orange light there stood faintly forth a scene of such stony awe that I gasped from a sheer wonder that conquered even fear and repulsion. Bases of columns whose middles were higher than human sight . . . mere bases of things that must each dwarf the Eiffel Tower to insignificance . . . hieroglyphics carved by unthinkable hands in caverns where daylight can be only a remote legend. . . .

I would not look at the marching things. That I desperately resolved as I heard their creaking joints and nitrous wheezing above the dead music and the dead tramping. It was merciful that they did not speak . . . but God! their crazy torches began to cast shadows on the surface of those stupendous columns. Heaven take it away! Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry torches . . . men should not have the heads of crocodiles. . . .

To those last lines I can only reply… no shit, Sherlock. Long after the cosmic horror has had its moment and you’ve realized that obscure diction doesn’t a great writer make, the camp will always remain. While it may be borderline impossible to parody Lovecraft, it’s great fun for a writer to just go wild once in a while in his unhinged style, to ejaculate purple prose all over the page in an orgasm of terrible writing. (Having once written a Lovecraftian interactive fiction, I fancy I know of what I speak.) This, again, is extremely important to understand when reckoning with his tremendous ongoing popularity, and with the fact that so many excellent writers who really ought to know better — people like Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Jorge Luis Borges, and Joyce Carol Oates — can’t resist him.

If you haven’t yet read Lovecraft, I certainly recommend that you do so. Love him or hate him, he’s a significant writer with whom everyone — especially, as we’ll begin to see in my next article, those interested in ludic culture — should be at least a little bit familiar. And getting a handle on him isn’t a terribly time-consuming task. While his other works can certainly be rewarding to cosmic-horror aficionados and lovers of camp alike, you can come to understand much or most of what he does and how he does it merely by reading “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Call of Cthulhu.” In my opinion the best of his later works is At the Mountains of Madness, more a work of pulpy Antarctic adventure than horror and all the better for it; his prose here is a bit less purple than his norm. (That said, it does also contains one of the best instances of high Lovecraftian camp ever, when he shows himself perhaps the only person on the planet who can find penguins “grotesque.”) After you’ve read those three all of his writerly cards are pretty much on the table. His other works more amplify his modest collection of themes and approaches than extend them.

Next time we’ll take up another weird tale: how a young game designer turned these nihlistic stories whose protagonists always end up dead or insane into a game that would actually be fun — one that you might even be able to win once in a while.

(The definitive biography of H.P. Lovecraft is and will likely remain S.T. Joshi’s sprawling two-volume I Am Providence. A shorter and more accessible biography is Paul Roland’s The Curious Case of H.P. Lovecraft. Worthwhile online articles can be found at The Atlantic, Salon, The New York Review of Books, and Teeming Brain. The Arkham Archivist has put together The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft, a free-to-download ebook for Kindle and EPub readers. Finally, there’s BBC Radio’s excellent Weird Tales: The Strange Life of H.P. Lovecraft.)

Comments
96 Responses

- Victor Gijsbers

September 18, 2015 at 1:51 pm

O man. Once in a while I wonder whether I should give Lovecraft another god, and then I see a phrase like “gigantic hypostyles of inhuman dread and phobic antiquity” and I think: no. It’s not just that the prose is purple; it’s also just plainly incorrect. “Hypostyle” isn’t a noun, and “phobic” doesn’t mean what Lovecraft thinks it does. Aaargh!

Anyway, I did read the three stories you recommend, so I’ll assume that I already got everything out of Lovecraft that I’ll ever get out of him. ;-)

One typo: “in turned” -> “in turn”

- Victor Gijsbers

September 18, 2015 at 1:52 pm

I actually wonder whether I should give him “another go”, not “another god”, but I guess that’s one for Freudian catalog.

- Rowan Lipkovits

September 18, 2015 at 4:08 pm

Between the Great Old Ones and the Elder Gods, the one thing the Lovecraft Mythos distinctly does not need is yet another god.

- Jimmy Maher

September 18, 2015 at 2:17 pm

Apologists will tell you that Lovecraft was concerned as much with the *sound* of words as their meaning. But…yeah. Joyce he’s not.

Thanks for the correction!

- Jason Dyer

September 18, 2015 at 3:35 pm

Hypostyle is allowed to be a noun. (I just checked two different dictionaries.)

What does Lovecraft think phobic means? It’s certainly an odd, uncomfortable use of the word, but not exactly incorrect either; I would say that’s the point.

(I do think there are some terrible bits of prose you can pick out, just this particular excerpt seems fine to me.)

- Victor Gijsbers

September 19, 2015 at 8:49 am

It’s not a noun according to Mirriam-Webster, the Collaborative International Dictionary of English, and VanDale. But apparently other dictionaries have other opinions.

Lovecraft seems to think that “phobic” means “fearsome” — “phobic antiquity” presumably means “so old that its very oldness is fearsome”. But “phobic” means “plagued by fears,” and that just makes no sense here.

- hüth

September 19, 2015 at 8:43 pm

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/hypostyle

Oxford, of course, being the one that Lovecraft would’ve cared about.

- luxhibernia

October 11, 2015 at 3:17 pm

‘Phobic’ can also mean ‘of Phobos’ if you’re writing in the cosmic horror vein.

Many modern readers do not have the ear for romantic, gothic or mannerist prose because they have learned that less is more and that a writer must say exactly what they want to convey.

That’s not what Lovecraft is trying to do.

- Andrew Plotkin

September 18, 2015 at 2:38 pm

Whenever Lovecraft is discussed, I like to bring up my pet theory, which is that he attained immortality *because* he was such a terrible stylist. “Damn,” every writer thinks, “what if I could tap that vein of cosmic nihilism and existential terror *and also not suck?*” And thus the Lovecraftian exocanon grows.

(Like Lovecraft’s writing itself, this theory is not entirely convincing, but you have to admit it’s part of it.)

I’m going to be completely tedious and insist that True Detective does not contain references to Lovecraft, but to Robert W. Chambers, of the *previous* generation of American weird-tales writing. Lovecraft’s use of “Carcosa” and “Hastur” were his bid to keep *Chambers* current (along with his contemporary Ambrose Bierce, I see). True Detective continues that tradition.

If you want a 2014 example, try “The Litany of Earth”, a short story by Ruthanna Emrys. (http://www.tor.com/2014/05/14/the-litany-of-earth-ruthanna-emrys/). Recommended.

(Typo: “eldrich” should be “eldritch”. A word I first learned from _Wishbringer_, as it happens.) (And _Spellbreaker_ has some Cyclopean ruins, surely a passing bit of homage.)

- Jimmy Maher

September 18, 2015 at 5:10 pm

It’s a fine theory, I’d say. What does certainly seem clear is that Lovecraft in the original has always been more popular with *writers* than *readers*. It’s largely because of their eagerness to take up his mantle that the Mythos has endured. Lots of them take the mythology of the Mythos far more seriously than Lovecraft ever did.

The Mythos is also just about the newest storyworld that is largely free of copyright concerns, which has also allowed it to thrive in a way that many more recent properties can’t. I think I’ll be getting at least a bit more into that in my next article.

Leaving aside the rather disappointing big reveals in the last episode or two of True Detective, much of the nihilist philosophy spouted by… what’s his name, Matthew McConaughey’s character, did feel very Lovecraftian to me. And of course the entire show is very much an homage to the pulps, something most critics forgot until those last episodes made it very plain indeed. But I won’t quibble too much about a topic I have a feeling you know more about than I do. ;)

I’d missed or forgotten those bits of Wishbringer and Spellbreaker. It’s of course notable that the latter was written by Dave Lebling, later the author of The Lurking Horror and so obviously at least something of a Lovecraft fan. Perhaps also relevant: Lebling was often teased by the other Imps for the tendency of his prose to get a bit purpleish, but most of that was excised by the time his games hit the shelves, thanks to Infocom’s editorial process and, probably most of all, to the harsh space limitations of the Z-Machine. Would that Lovecraft had labored under similar restrictions…

And thanks for the correction and the recommendation. I’ll look it up!

- matt w

September 19, 2015 at 4:08 am

“much of the nihilist philosophy spouted by… what’s his name, Matthew McConaughey’s character, did feel very Lovecraftian to me”

I’ve read that it was specifically influenced by Thomas Ligotti.

- Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2015 at 8:25 am

Ligotti is a noted fan of Lovecraft, so there is that. A quote:

“Poe and Lovecraft – not to mention Bruno Schulz or Franz Kafka – were what the world at large would consider extremely disturbed individuals. And most people who are that disturbed are not able to create works of fiction. These are people who are just on the cusp of total psychological derangement. Sometimes they cross over and fall into the province of ‘outsider artists.’ That’s where the future development of horror fiction lies – in the next person who is almost too emotionally and psychologically damaged to live in the world but not too damaged to produce fiction.”

- Felix

September 18, 2015 at 3:35 pm

From Lovecraft’s work I’ve only read The Color Out of Space, and while the climax is amazing, with the party coming at the farm to find the dying family, I had to skim over most of the text to get there at all. And that was a Romanian translation, presumably better written than the original (as it would be difficult to do worse). At least the story features a well-designed monster for a change; nowadays, Cthulhu and shoggots are more commonly the stuff of parodies — the former at the very least is likelier to be depicted as a cute plushie or funny cartoon than anything resembling the spirit of the original. And for good reason: the world is largely composed of grown-ups, while Lovecraft, as you pointed out, stopped short of that stage in his life. To be honest, I find it remarkable that people can still write straight-up horror based on his ideas, let alone as masterfully as you did; after all, Lovecraft was ultimately little more than a child afraid of the dark. But then again, I suppose such primal fears remain buried deep in all of us, from where the right words can awaken them again and bring them to the surface, to spill over the facade of self-assurance we’ve built over the years.

Lovecraft was terrified by the universe’s mind-boggling scale, but all too often we find ourselves tiny and insignificant even compared to the world immediately around us. And that, ironically, makes him a visionary in retrospect.

- Jimmy Maher

September 18, 2015 at 5:17 pm

That’s actually interesting to think about. Just how would one go about *translating* Lovecraft? Trying to capture all of those anachronistic spellings and obsolete words and then trying to misuse so many of them and to tangle the grammar all to hell. The mind boggles. I’d probably just say, “Screw it!” and write the same story in my own vernacular — which, as you said, could hardly read much worse. Maybe there are a bunch of Germans or Frenchmen or Russians wandering around going, “You know, I don’t know why everyone complains, this Lovecraft fellow’s writing’s really not half bad.”

- Duncan Stevens

September 19, 2015 at 3:51 am

Somewhere in a box in my basement I have a book of Lovecraft stories, translated into French. I got through some of them, long ago, but I don’t remember what the translator did with his wacky diction.

At some point soon I’ll get those books out of those boxes onto shelves (need to get shelves installed)–when I do, I’ll set that book aside and take another look. If the results are amusing, I’ll send Jimmy some excerpts.

- Poddy

September 19, 2015 at 5:08 pm

http://www.noosfere.com/icarus/livres/niourf.asp?numlivre=2146580806

I distinctly remember this translator used ‘innommable’ a lot. Possibly every fourth word, in fact.

- Poddy

September 18, 2015 at 3:48 pm

I have always felt strongly that Lovecraft’s forte wasn’t horror, but fantasy, particularly Dunsanian pastiche. I discovered him in high school for his horror, same as anyone, but the only things of his I ever go back to are texts like “Celephais”, or “The Quest of Iranon”, or “The Cats of Ulthar”, or even “The Doom That Came to Sarnath”. “Celephais” is particularly interesting in what it reveals of Lovecraft’s self-perception.

As for “True Detective”, yeah, I don’t even think it did a good job of Chambers.

- TsuDhoNimh

September 18, 2015 at 4:10 pm

Because I can’t resist:
” I believe that our collective psyche sill struggles with the ramifications of that realization today”: typo: sill should be still.

I think you did a great job in this post capturing the spirit of what makes Lovecraft simultaneously so good and so bad (or is it so bad it’s good?).

- Jimmy Maher

September 18, 2015 at 5:22 pm

Thanks!

Some readers do occasionally get irate about the typo corrections, apparently seeing it as disrespectfully focusing on trivialities. I know their hearts are in the right place when they do so, so in a perverse way I appreciate it. But I *also* hugely appreciate the corrections. I take my writing seriously and want it to be correct. So, no need to resist!

- LAK

September 18, 2015 at 9:34 pm

Nice writing, as always!

“heredity evil and madness”: should this be “hereditary evil and madness”, or maybe “heredity, evil, and madness”? Either is certainly appropriate for HPL…

- Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2015 at 8:17 am

The former. If I start writing of “legendry” or things I was “shewn,” someone please give me a good shake. Thanks!

- DZ-Jay

March 23, 2017 at 11:22 am

I’m one of those who submits the occasional correction (well, OK, more than occasional). I do so for two primary reasons, and without any intent to appear superior, to condescend, or to belittle the author’s efforts.

The first reason is a matter of literary effect. I enjoy reading, and as others with the same affinity to the written word, reading evokes a personal connection between the mind of the author and mine in a deeply personal way. Thus, I immerse myself in the text, almost trance-like, following the narrative and furthering the connection to a tight bond with the author when his ideas take form as mine and — whether accepted or agreed upon, or not — at least are assimilated enough to be considered, though briefly, at a personal level.

It should then be understandable that a typo, a grammatical error, a sharp variance in style, or even a stilted or awkward clause construction can jar me abruptly from this trance — in much the same way that an incongruous element of scenery or dialog in a movie breaks irrevocably the suspension of disbelief. We can call this a break in the narrative immersion, and just like its film counterpart, it is distracting, disturbing, and steals away the enjoyment inherent in reading.

Thus, when I offer a correction or a suggestion to improve a sentence or a word, I do it at once to bring myself back into the fold, and to help the author avoid this for future readers (even more when that future reader may be myself at some later time).

The second reason is one of lesser importance: depending on the case to educate, correct the record, help polish the material, or otherwise assist the author in improving his craft in the same way that I wish others would assist me to better my own.

There is one third reason that perhaps applies more to this blog than to most others: the author’s claim to want to publish (and my own personal desire to see) this series in book form. From the beginning this motivated me to be especially critical of diction to ensure the material be well polished for its eventual literary debut. This is because, while in blog format we can always contribute and add comments to correct or enhance the stories; once published there is no such recourse, and such finality of the work demands a thorough screening prior to its publication.

What I hope comes from the above, and indeed what I deeply hope the author takes away from my own personal comments on his work, is that it is done out of a sincere admiration to the author’s work itself. That the articles are so interesting, so fascinating, and I enjoy them so much, that I wish to polish them to perfection not only for others to enjoy, but for myself to re-read in years to come and rekindle that enjoyment.

And if sometimes I fail to praise a particular piece is not for lack of interest or dislike, but because it sometimes feels that the work is so good on its own merits, that this should appear obvious to everyone, when in fact it may be only so inside my head.

Keep up the good work! (And sorry for the constant corrections, I hope they help.)

Sincerely,
-dZ.

- Duncan Stevens

September 18, 2015 at 4:35 pm

The question has occasionally been kicked around on the IF newsgroups: why do IF authors come back to Lovecraft so often (when writing horror games–i.e., why not other subgenres of horror)? I think there are a few reasons:

1. Lovecraftian horror lends itself well to puzzle-solving, i.e., “figure out what’s going on.” (That the answer is always some minor variant of “an evil cult is acting in service of some monstrous alien being” doesn’t seem to be a problem.) Other forms of horror that primarily involve running away from some menace don’t work as well in that respect.

Letting the story revolve around a mystery helps solve the pacing problems that otherwise tend to afflict IF. It’s not necessarily a problem if the player stops to inspect the scenery for 200 turns while investigating mysterious disappearances, but if the main source of dramatic tension is a guy chasing you with an axe, it’s probably not a good thing if everything pauses while the player searches some flowerbeds.

Lovecraftian plots lend themselves particularly well to mystery-style plots because the answer is always big and dramatic: it’s a plot that will *destroy the world* (or maybe just the town?). It makes for a more exciting resolution than “the murderer is Joe.”

2. Lovecraftian horror makes for writerly, uh, flourishes. Or encourages bad writerly behavior, depending on how you look at it. There’s more room for imagination in depicting how unedifying the monster and its minions are than in describing how mean the murderer looks or how sharp his axe is. That leads, of course, to all sorts of excesses, as you note. (There’s one semi-amusing moment in Michael Gentry’s Anchorhead where the game essentially says “It was so horrible than I just can’t describe it.” Haven’t read enough Lovecraft to know whether that’s an homage to something Lovecraft liked to do.)

3. IF authors have, by and large, read a lot of the same stuff, and even if they haven’t read Lovecraft, they’ve read folks heavily influenced by him. Their horror writing tends inevitably to gravitate back to his model. Boring, but probably true.

- Jimmy Maher

September 18, 2015 at 5:29 pm

I’ll be getting into your first point in particular in the next article. Many Lovecraft stories are structured as mysteries, which work really, really well as games — the story has already been written, you’re just trying to uncover how it played out. This avoids many of the more intractable problems normally associated with interactive storytelling.

I would add a possible fourth reason:

Most other forms of horror tend to have a religious dimension involving damned souls, etc. But religion, at least in the games themselves, has never been particularly popular with the IF community. Lovecraft removes the horror from that traditionalist paradigm to one more abstract and science-fictional. I think this feels more in keeping with the community’s sensibilities.

Oh, and if I ever draw up a Lovecraft drinking game I’m definitely going to include “Drink once every time Lovecraft calls something ‘indescribable’ and then proceeds to describe it at feverish length.”

- Duncan Stevens

September 18, 2015 at 7:19 pm

Oh, and if I ever draw up a Lovecraft drinking game I’m definitely going to include “Drink once every time Lovecraft calls something ‘indescribable’ and then proceeds to describe it at feverish length.”

Maybe the implication is “can’t be described in a coherent way, so here’s the incoherent version.”

- Christina Nordlander

September 18, 2015 at 9:31 pm

I have to admit, your fourth reason doesn’t seem very compelling to me. A lot of horror subgenres (such as slasher and other non-supernatural horrors) don’t have a religious dimension. Ghosts and vampires do of course have their origins in religious concepts (leaving zombies out of this for now, since I 1) know very little of Voodoo, and 2) realise that the modern popculture zombie is very different from the original belief), but in modern fiction about such creatures, those themes are so obscured as to be invisible unless the author goes out of their way to emphasise them.

I agree that Lovecraft was the originator, or at least a major force, of horror fiction that is largely unconnected to religious or moral themes, but in the 21st century, that’s not something unique to cosmic horror specifically.

Loving your blog, by the way. Keep it up!

- Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2015 at 7:48 am

Yeah, I could have been more coherent. But if we limit ourselves to *supernatural* horror I think there’s something to be said for it. I think the more recent fondness for zombies in IF may spring from much the same place. And of course all of this is by no means limited to the IF community, but probably also applies to the broader culture’s love for Lovecraft and zombies these days.

- Dave

September 18, 2015 at 6:16 pm

Duncan Stevens: >> (There’s one semi-amusing moment in Michael Gentry’s Anchorhead where the game essentially says “It was so horrible than I just can’t describe it.” Haven’t read enough Lovecraft to know whether that’s an homage to something Lovecraft liked to do.)

It is. The (very) short story “The Unnamable” is the classic case, and quite a mix of self-awareness and irony:

“Besides, he added, my constant talk about ‘unnamable’ and ‘unmentionable’ things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralyzed my heroes’ faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced.”

Back to the larger topic, I’d recommend The Silver Key story, almost an autobiography of fantastic errors:

“He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness. ”

And Jimmy, the King of Shreds and Patches remains the only IF game I have finished to date, and what got me interested in your blog in the first place… Keep writing!

- Baf

September 18, 2015 at 7:44 pm

Calling things “indescribable” is very much something Lovecraft liked to do.

- MrEntropy

September 18, 2015 at 5:48 pm

My favorite Lovecraft tale is “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath”

- Matthew W

September 18, 2015 at 8:50 pm

I don’t think Lovecraft is as bad a writer as he’s made out to be. I think he is a massively uneven writer, While lots of his sentences are terrible, some are pretty good, maybe even very good – the introduction to Call of Cthulhu that you quote for example.

(I think Tolkien’s unevenness also leads to underestimation of his – far superior – technical abilities).

For me one of the big attractions of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos is its sheer alienness. At their best his creations really are jarringly different and starnge.

- Matthew W

September 18, 2015 at 8:52 pm

ps Great article, great blog!

- Joachim

September 18, 2015 at 9:11 pm

I recently read The Horror of Red Hook and, like you, I thought the place was fictional. But apparently not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hook,_Brooklyn

- Joachim

September 18, 2015 at 9:23 pm

By the way, that was one of the Lovecraft-stories I found most disturbing. Mostly because I read it right around the time of the horrifying massacre of the yezidis in Iraq, and here this story was referring to that whole ethnic group as devil worshippers. Just felt very wrong.

- Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2015 at 7:45 am

Yeah, this is what makes the “just a man of his time” defense so hopeless when applied to Lovecraft’s racism: his racism is not incidental but fundamental to his stories. If you remove it you remove much of what he himself was consciously trying to say.

- hüth

September 19, 2015 at 8:52 pm

He’s also, very specifically, *not* a man of his time.

- Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2015 at 7:40 am

Woops! Thanks, fixed.

- Keith Palmer

September 18, 2015 at 10:20 pm

Knowing the narrative here would be getting to The Lurking Horror soon, I was wondering about bringing up how, while that game could be called “Lovecraftian,” works of interactive fiction from the following decade would push the resemblance much closer… Getting a full “prologue” like this one was an interesting surprise.

In any case, I’d heard a fair bit about “the importance of Lovecraft” by the time I found some S.T. Joshi-edited collections in a library just out of university (and, not that long afterwards, Penguin Books put out some collections, also with slightly prim introductions by Joshi…) I acknowledge how he tapped into “the terror of cosmic scale,” but seem better able at compartmentalizing the intimidation it packs in his stories, perhaps by taking in the more optimistic side of science fiction (although aware the “Lovecraftian” rebuttal would involve mentioning something about “denial”…) Perhaps I have a soft spot for the Lovecraft story “The Shunned House,” in which the evil force is a bit less overwhelming, and find some food for thought in at least some of the non-human beings of “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow Out Of Time” starting to seem less “incomprehensible” (As a small note of correction, though, I noticed you referring to “John W. Campbell’s Astounding”; he didn’t become editor of that magazine until the summer of 1937, just after Lovecraft’s death.)

- Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2015 at 8:20 am

There is a shift that happens after “The Call of Cthluhu,” the evils in Lovecraft’s stories going from being unexplained supernatural entities to alien visitors. That’s doubtless what you remarked.

And… correction made. Thanks!

- Petter Sjölund

September 19, 2015 at 1:15 am

I suppose it should be mentioned that Red Hook is a real district i Brooklyn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hook,_Brooklyn

- Petter Sjölund

September 19, 2015 at 4:02 pm

(Written when the other, nearly identical comment above was still in moderation. Feel free to delete this.)

- S. John Ross

September 19, 2015 at 6:47 am

This is my favorite piece on HPL ever. Thank you.

- S. John Ross

September 19, 2015 at 7:02 am

(A little surprised to see no mention of Dunsany, though!)

- Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2015 at 8:28 am

Yeah, that was one of the things that I elected not to go into in order to keep the article manageable. I usually try to keep these articles to no more than about 7000 words (although I don’t *always* succeed), and I wasn’t eager to split this one into a two-parter.

- Janice M. Eisen

September 19, 2015 at 7:55 am

I’ve often been embarrassed to admit that I find Lovecraft utterly unreadable, but after reading this, I feel better about it. I appreciated the look at his life, as well as the reasons for his outsize influence on the genre in both textual and ludic forms.

Since you request corrections, I must second Keith Palmer’s comment about Campbell not being editor of Astounding at the time; also, the magazine was still named Astounding Stories then, as you can see on the cover you reproduce.

There’s a lot of controversy in the fantasy/horror community right now over whether the World Fantasy Award, which is a bust that’s a caricature of Lovecraft designed by Gahan Wilson, should change its design. Some writers of color who have won the award are very much in favor of changing it, while Lovecraft partisans like Joshi insist that you can separate the man’s literary contributions from the less savory parts of his personality. I tend to think they should change it, especially if it is disturbing actual winners of the award, and having seen some of the worst racist stuff HPL wrote.

- Arkadiusz Dymek

September 19, 2015 at 10:02 am

A sidenote on Lovecraft mainstreaming:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu_Regio

- Bernie

September 19, 2015 at 1:13 pm

Aren’t we being a little too hard on Lovecraft ? Yes, he made up words and wasn,nt careful with his grammar. But, as your article shows, he never denied being an amateur and a non-professional. He was pretentious about being “old money” but was honest and humble about not being “a writer”.
And furthermore : I’m a fan of his stories not because of his artistic sensibilities. I read Shakespeare and Conrad when I want that. For me, Lovecraft is about settings, environments : the old, inbred, in-grown towns, the wretched country folk, the derelict mansions, the “mongrel” and “evil” peoples, ancient books : perhaps you should focus less on Cthulu and the Cyclopean and more on Arkham, Miskatonic University. You should have mentioned the “mad arab Abdul Alhazred” and his “Necronomicon”. In my opinion, it’s those details that draw us to Lovecraft, not his “arguments” and “logic”. No one can deny that’s indeed the case with his most conspicuous artistic heir Stepehen King. If you can think of Lovecraft as a professional writer without his trademark quirks, a commercial writer, King is what comes to mind. So, if you want know why we like Lovecraft, ask yourselves what made Stephen King a millionaire : what Lovecraft did as a hobby, King turned into a science.

- Jimmy Maher

September 20, 2015 at 7:24 am

You of course absolutely should make up your own mind about Lovecraft, as with everything I write about — that’s why I always try to point out where you can find stuff yourself to play or, in this case, read — but I do fear there are a couple of misunderstandings creeping in here.

The first and most significant is this idea of Lovecraft as an “amateur” writer. While I do think there’s a great thesis to be written on him as an “outsider” artist, like Daniel Johnston (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Johnston) and Henry Darger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger), Lovecraft himself would not have equated his “amateur” status with lack of ability or seriousness of intent or literary merit. Just the opposite, in fact. He adopted (or affected) the values of a member of the 18th-century landed gentry. An important part of these was the idea that commercial work was demeaning for a gentleman of quality like (he saw) himself, and demeaning for the literary work itself as well. It’s one of those constant ironies that mark his life, sometimes funny and sometimes kind of pathetic and often both, that he was publishing this work that aspired to echo Pope and Swift and Johnson and of course Poe in the pulps, just about the least respectable literary organs out there. And Weird Tales wasn’t even a particularly good or popular pulp at that! Read that initial submission letter and think about how strange it must have read to the people who received it. It seems safe to say that nobody had ever written them a letter like that before — and never would again, save for more correspondence from good old Howard.

The other thing I’d like to point out is that I don’t consider King a particularly Lovecraftian writer, and I don’t think many others do either. His relationship with Lovecraft has been complicated. He’s mentioned how fascinating he found him on first reading him as a boy and provided glowing blurbs for Lovecraft story collections, but he’s also dismissed him from time to time as essentially an adolescent’s idea of horror. King’s horror tends to be grounded in psychology and personality, something Lovecraft with his famously flat and homogenous characters never even attempted. Even when he’s writing a deliberate homage, as he did recently, I don’t think he gets all that close to the feel of the original.

Other writers do, of course, and often combine it with a much more accessible and elegant style of, you know, writing. Certainly no one could argue against Lovecraft’s influence.

Anyway, just some food for thought. Thanks for commenting, and feel free to continue to enjoy Lovecraft. ;)

- Cmdrfan

October 3, 2015 at 7:11 pm

I really have to thank you for the generous enlightment you give us, your readers, with each article and each response to the comments. I really appreciate it.

All these posts about Lovecraft’s work make me think that perhaps you should publish something on William Gibson, starting with his “Gernsback Continuum”. Although it isn’t a horror / fantasy story, I find it’s “anti-Camp” argument very relevant to our little debate here. And , what better example of “unconventional ” style than Gibson ?.

Thanks Again for a great blog !

- Jimmy Maher

October 4, 2015 at 9:10 am

You’re welcome! I do plan to write at some length on William Gibson before covering Interplay’s Neuromancer game. I absolutely love “The Gernsback Continuum,” maybe more than he anything else he ever wrote. Thanks for reminding me to talk about it!

- Brian Bagnall

September 19, 2015 at 4:38 pm

Thanks for giving Lovecraft a complete article in preparation for Lurking Horror. One of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had was Alone in the Dark, which is unabashedly lovecraftian. Not only the first real survival horror game (some say Project Firestart was), but it had the perfect music to set the tone. That game introduced me to this Lovecraft person, and to be honest, his stories were somewhat of a disappointment after such a stellar game.

Another great gaming experience was Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. This fairly humble game had such mystery and a great progression as things become gradually weirder and weirder. The slightly off townsfolk were quite memorable in that one, and led me to read its inspiration, The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

I guess people might also say Doom was a Lovecraft inspired game in many ways. Even with his fertile imagination, Lovecraft never could have predicted his books would inspire works in a media that didn’t even exist during his time.

As for his xenophobia, you can also add penguinphobia.

Typo: “finally awakening”

BTW Is it me, or does the cover of Astounding Stories resemble a couple of Ghostbusters running away from Slimer?

- Jimmy Maher

September 19, 2015 at 4:49 pm

Some levels of Doom were designed by Sandy Petersen, who also designed the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG. So, yes, definitely a big influence there as in so many other places.

And thanks for the correction!

- Brian Bagnall

October 23, 2015 at 6:45 pm

By the way, At the Mountains of Madness uses the phrase “lurking horror” a few times, so perhaps that’s what inspired the title of Dave Lebling’s game.

- Martin

August 23, 2016 at 2:50 am

More likely, a fragment that Lovecraft wrote that August Derleth wrote a story around – “The Lurker at the Threshold”.

- Martin

August 23, 2016 at 2:54 am

Or “The Lurking Fear”, of course.

- Pedro Timóteo

September 19, 2015 at 6:26 pm

Like a few others, I’m more generous to Lovecraft than you seem to be in your post (which I loved, don’t get me wrong). I see the faults in his writing, but to me they’re really part of the charm; without the purple prose, his stories wouldn’t be half the fun (or half the length, for that matter).

I actually prefer The Shadow over Innsmouth to The Call of Cthulhu. While the former’s only sin (other than the racism / fear of “race mixing” common to Lovecraft) is that it ends a bit too abruptly (but until then it has a fantastic atmosphere, more creepy than scary), I think Cthulhu, while still a great pulp story, suffers from the presence of a cult that kills people who find out too much about it. If the story had ended with the narrator afraid of Cthulhu’s eventual awakening, and doubting his sanity, I think it would have worked out better than “I probably won’t last long, the cult knows I know too much”. This is just my personal taste, though.

Also, I’m currently playing through your KoSaP game, and it’s been great so far, though I’m still near the beginning (too little free time, mostly — the game isn’t particularly hard, especially with the think command). It came as a surprise, when reading this post, that you don’t seem to actually like Lovecraft that much. :)

- Dave G.

September 21, 2015 at 4:57 am

“The Shadow over Innsmouth” borrows a lot from the hard core detective potboilers of its day. Lovecraft must have been influenced by his contemporaries who specialized in that genre. And because of that it’s a real page turner, unusual for Lovecraft.

- Lisa H.

September 20, 2015 at 4:58 am

There’s lots of words that you’ll only find in Lovecraft, to such an extent that you know as soon as you see one of them that you’re reading either him or one of his imitators: “eldritch,” “Cyclopean,” “daemonic.”

None of these are only found in Lovecraft, uncommon though they may be. “Eldritch” dates to the early 1500s (besides the use in Wishbringer that someone else noted, and also the same “eldritch vapor” appears in in Beyond Zork); “Cyclopean” to the mid-1600s (although maybe not in the sense something like “amazingly huge” that Lovecraft seems to use it; it’s hard to tell just from the quick dictionary check I made); “daemonic” may be an affected spelling, but relates to Latin daemon or Greek daimon.

he would invariably seek out the oldest section of any place he visited and explore it at exhaustive length, preferably by moonlight.

This sounds a bit like urban exploration aka building hacking or tunnel hacking, to me, which, now that I say it, seems similar to certain parts of The Lurking Horror.

he’s uniquely impervious to the typical mode of literary parity

…parody, I assume you mean? (although perhaps one cannot have literary parity with him either!)

the horror that was stalking million-footed toward me through gigantic hypostyles of inhuman dread

FWIW I seem to remember using “hypostyle” as a noun in art history class, although it might have been just a shorthand for terms like “hypostyle hall” and not exactly a noun in the proper sense.

- Jimmy Maher

September 20, 2015 at 7:35 am

Okay, when you find them in relatively *modern* works you know it’s Lovecraft or Lovecraftian. ;) I think the instances in Infocom are almost certainly deliberate homages.

Thanks for the correction!

- Lisa H.

September 20, 2015 at 8:05 pm

I didn’t mean that the words were necessarily archaic simply because they have older origins, although they may sound a bit pretentious, rather that they were not Lovecraft’s inventions. I don’t think I’ve encountered “Cyclopean” much but I have definitely read “eldritch” and “daemonic” in modern works both fiction and non-fiction that are not Lovecraftian in nature.

- Doug Orleans

September 21, 2015 at 3:58 am

In particular, Victor Frankenstein often calls his creation a daemon, in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel.

- Peter Piers

February 15, 2016 at 5:39 pm

FWIW, “eldtrich” appears somewhat frequently in Terry Pratchett – but it’s a running gag that no one really knows what it means, including the people who use the word. It was used in The Light Fantastic to describe the Luggage, by, I think, Cohen the Barbarian; since then, people tend to think eldtrich means wooden or, more often, oblong.

- ZUrlocker

September 20, 2015 at 2:25 pm

Love this post. For those who find HP Lovecraft hard to read, you might find the adaptations in radio and graphic novels more accessible.
HPLHS Radio adaptations:
http://cthulhulives.org/radio/DART/index.html
Graphic Novels on Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=hp+lovecraft+graphic+novels&tag=googhydr-20&index=stripbooks&hvadid=36275607760&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=2738299158829819199&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=b&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_1nk71wan6k_b

- Andrew

September 22, 2015 at 8:56 am

Excellent article, as always – we seem to be well past new pieces on 1980s UK computer games now, so it’s things like this (and the recent Douglas Adams one) that keep me reading this blog!

Anyway, much as I agree with most of the analysis of Lovecraft as a writer, I think there is a case for the defence, at least up to a point.

Yes, he buried his prose in an avalanche of adjectives and, no, literary greats do not write like that – anyone even half-decent would carefully select one or two adjectives or adverbs that say all they want them to and leave it there – but I think you can see what he was trying to do.

I mean, if you really did happen to bump into an ancient winged one in the street you would not be able to grasp what you’re seeing either, and so the overwrought style could be said to suit the sensory overload his characters experience.

Yes, more accomplished writers would certainly put that across more skilfully, but in the context of what Lovecraft was aiming for and the level he was writing at (did he ever claim to be the next Hemingway or Fitzgerald?) it does, in its own weird way, kind of work.

Oh, and I agree with an earlier poster’s implication that “daemon” didn’t fall out of use around 1300. The re-launched 1980s version of “Eagle” (a classic British comic) ran a haunted house story called “The House of Daemon” in 1983, which I especially remember because I used the word in a (shamelessly ripped-off, admittedly) story I wrote at school and got praise from my teacher for knowing that “demon” could also be spelt with the extra “a”!

- Jimmy Maher

September 23, 2015 at 5:51 am

I feel quite confident that Lovecraft had little to no idea who Hemingway or Fitzgerald were. He was, remember, an 18th-century gentleman out of time. ;) He’d more likely want to be the next Pope or Johnson, and he did aspire to that ideal — albeit quite badly — in his poetry. And of course his stories, especially the early ones, absolutely ooze Edgar Allan Poe, who other than his own pulp contemporaries was just about the most recent author Lovecraft read.

I must admit that I still always think of background-resident program in Unix when I hear the word “daemon.” In introducing millions of young nerds to the term, Unix probably played as big a role as Lovecraft in reclaiming it for the 20th (and 21st) centuries.

I do have quite a bit still to write on Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls, and a fellow named Peter Molyneux will arrive one the scene within the next couple of years as well. So, there will be more British coverage, although it may feel less like its own thing as the gaming industry increasingly internationalizes.

- DZ-Jay

March 23, 2017 at 10:53 am

In the case of Unix daemon, like much of nerdy computer lore, it was taken from Greek mythology (think kerberos, trojan horse, etc.) in which a daemon is an attendant spirit, a sort of servant to the gods that lurks in waiting until summoned for action. Thus very fitting to a background server process. Hardly “Lovecraftian.”

-dZ.

- Guillaume Leroy

September 22, 2015 at 8:58 pm

It may be something of a stretch to say that Borges could not resist Lovecraft – yes, he wrote a Lovecraftian pastiche (admitting, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, to be somewhat baffled by his need to do such a thing), There Are More Things, but if we believe Alberto Manguel, it seems he tried to read Lovecraft many times, but invariably abandoned, disheartened by the excessively bad prose.

But other great writers were interested – at least, up to a point. Julien Gracq, universally recognized as one of the masters of French prose, and who already was a devotee of Poe, showed, near the end of his life, some interest towards Lovecraft.

In one of his essays about German romanticism – one of his main influences – Gracq says something which I find rather illuminating, and which I think we can apply, mutatis mutandis, to Lovecraft. In effect, Gracq says something like “Well, German romantic works are generally flawed, they do not really live up to their purpose – but we feel this great purpose, we have a glimpse of the very real vision behind the works, and the power of this half-seen vision explains our fascination for them” (of course, he expresses that in unbelievably elegant French, which, sadly, I would never be able to translate).

Even if Lovecraft was certainly no Novalis – far from it – I think we have something of the same order with him. Behind the frequently preposterous prose, we perceive the cosmic vision which was its main impetus, and the very power of this vision largely explains the enduring appeal of the stories, deeply flawed as they are. I would suggest, in any case, that goes a long way to explain the enthusiasm of several great writers for Lovecraft (Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, Miéville, Gracq – or even Borges, with his reluctant, and finally disappointed interest – do not strike me as great lovers of camp, and I find rather hard to believe that the campy side could be a real motive for them).

- Jimmy Maher

September 23, 2015 at 5:37 am

Thanks for this! I do think the language itself of Lovecraft does hold at least some fascination for at least some of the aforementioned “great writers.” See, for instance, Miéville’s quote which opens this article. Whether their fascination is consciously or unconsciously campy is of course another question. Perhaps more important is just to recognize the fun factor in Lovecraft, something that too often gets lost with scholars like S.T. Joshi, who are so eager to make of him a major literary stylist, thinker, and even philosopher that they lose a big part of his pulpy appeal. (And see Andrew Plotkin’s comment for another reason why many great writers are attracted to him: because they think they can do what he does *better*.)

I have little else to add other than my gratitude for introducing me to several things new to me.

- Guillaume Leroy

September 23, 2015 at 11:20 pm

You’re welcome!

I entirely agree: reading Lovecraft can be great fun indeed. Joshi often goes to ridiculous lengths trying to lionize his idol (there *has* to be something wrong with someone who raises Lovecraft’s literary achievements to the pinnacle, while disparaging – in accordance with Lovecraft’s own prejudices – such a fine stylist as Robert Louis Stevenson). And about Lovecraft as a “thinker”, well… let’ say he happens to share Joshi’s convictions about the falsity of religion and the meaninglessness of the universe, and that’s that.

I think there is far more sense in your portrayal of HPL as an “outsider artist” along the lines of Daniel Johnston or Henry Darger. I had never thought of him this way myself, but I find this idea really illuminating.

By the way (re a previous comment): I would not entertain excessive hopes about the possibility of French translations improving Lovecraft. The early translations (with which I discovered him when I was about 12) were, frankly, mostly terrible. I’ve only browsed the recent ones, but though they seem decent to me, I would venture that the originals are still *way* superior (I know… a thought to make one cringe, maybe).

- Scott Gage

September 23, 2015 at 1:39 am

Just a note you link to the King of Shreds and Patches via king.filfre.net. Not sure if a redirect is failing but it gave me a 404 and the link on your own sidebar is http://maher.filfre.net/King/.

- Jimmy Maher

September 23, 2015 at 5:24 am

Woops! Thanks!

- Gabriel

September 23, 2015 at 10:58 pm

I found it a bit odd that you listed “xenophobia” as a problematic aspect of Lovecraft’s writing. Given that it literally means a fear/aversion of that which is alien, one could say it’s an apt description of his genre.

- Jimmy Maher

September 24, 2015 at 6:47 am

Lovecraft’s fear and, perhaps more importantly, his disgust with the alien extended far beyond the proverbial little green men from outer space. It included other cultures, other races, the other sex, other styles of writing that departed too far from his beloved 18th-century classicism, etc. This was a person who was unable to adapt to adult life because it was just too *different*, who wrote about New York, a couple of hundred miles from his family home in Providence, as if it was a dispatch from the other side of the world. I find all of that very problematic, in a person and a writer.

- Gabriel

September 24, 2015 at 11:04 pm

Yeah, given its proximity to racism, and the rest of the article, I understood your point and I agree with you. I just found the word choice kind of funny. I was almost expecting you to follow it with “not just against the Old Ones” or something like the reply you wrote.

From a historical perspective, it’s revealing to read things like this and realise that readers apparently had no objection. But when reading for pleasure in modern times, it’s cringeworthy in a way the author did not intend.

- Alex Freeman

September 24, 2015 at 6:36 am

“And then came our first inklings of the quantum world, the realization that even the comforting regularity of Newtonian physics was a mere facade spread over the chaos of unpredictability that lay beneath.”
Ah, but there are deterministic takes on quantum mechanics. Not being able to know the exact velocity and position of a particle is due to the imperfections in our ability to measure it. When something random seems to happen such as something in more than one place at a time being forced to decide which position it will remain in, our universe actually splits into multiple universes with each for each position the particle was in.

“The world seemed to be shifting beneath humanity’s feet, bringing with it a dawning realization that’s at the heart of the embodiment of existential dread that is Cthulhu: that we’re just not that important to anyone or anything; indeed, that it’s difficult to even express how insignificant we are against the vast sweep of the unfeeling cosmos… some, the lucky ones, make peace with their insignificance, whether through Nietzschian self-actualization, spirituality, or something else. But even for them, I believe, persists somewhere that dread and fear of our aloneness and insignificance, born of the knowledge that a rogue asteroid — or a band of inconceivably powerful and malevolent aliens — could wipe us all out tomorrow and no god would save us.”
Given all that, what keeps you from giving in to despair and ending it all?

- Jimmy Maher

September 24, 2015 at 6:58 am

My personal philosophy builds a little bit on Nietzsche, a little bit on existentialism, a little bit on the Buddhist tradition. I believe that it’s quite possible that there is no inherent meaning to our lives, but that we can make our own by living and creating in the moment (a strange thing for an historian to say, I know). Also, I’m not sure about the meaningless of it all. Although I don’t really believe in a God the Father floating around in the sky, I do think the universe is far grander and stranger than we’ve yet even begun to comprehend. Who knows, right?

And by disposition I’m not really prone to long stretches of melancholia. There’s always something more interesting to do. Maybe I’m just good at compartmentalizing.

Also, there’s music. And my wife. ;)

- S. John Ross

September 25, 2015 at 2:32 pm

I’m fascinated when people attach emotional _value_ to the meaninglessness of the universe. I find this useful for perspective: replace the word “meaning” with the name of any other awesome human invention. Lasagna, let’s say.

Of course the universe is lasagnaless unless we continue to make lasagna. That’s not sad or tragic or bleak or horrific. It’s not bad news at all. It’s just the way lasagna is. We invented it, and so we must continue to create it if we want it in our lives. And it’s AWESOME, and it’s even better if made with friends, so we’ll keep on making it, and possibly even consuming a bit too much of it but that’s okay because it’s rad.

And you clearly get this. I’m just riffing, not contradicting.

But it really is ODD because some people really do stare out into the void wondering if there’s inherent lasagna provided free of charge by the … dust and hydrogen and stuff, and getting all mopey if they don’t see it falling from space. As if that would even be good lasagna.

And some people, I guess terrified of making it themselves, or just too busy with other things, settle for prepackaged, frozen lasagna from some mysterious outside source, and I guess that’s religion.

Anyway, I find it puzzling (plus fascinating) when folks get mopey about the space-rocks not having any. The space-rocks wouldn’t even know how to appreciate it if they did.

- Jimmy Maher

September 25, 2015 at 7:58 pm

Well, I do think there’s a longing for transcendence that’s a bit more complicated than that. When we hear an amazing song at just the right moment, or walk out of a movie weak at the knees, or play with a kitten, or see our child for the first time, or (especially if we’re of a certain age) just have a pretty girl smile at us, or feel sunshine on our shoulders and it makes us happy… we feel that what we’re experiencing *must* be more than the result of biochemical processes inside our brains. This is a feeling I’m not quite willing to dismiss, much as I do enjoy a good lasagna. ;)

The problem with the traditional God theory for me is it doesn’t really solve the problem. If you tell me there’s a God who made everything, I just want to ask who made God? All you’ve done is kick the problem upstairs, so to speak. In Nietzsche’s later years he abandoned making traditional philosophical arguments in favor of parables like Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I also feel like I find my comfort and peace in a realm beyond what I can clarify using logical argument, although I think embracing and accepting the mystery of it all and learning to just *live* and be in all of those magical moments instead of stressing about why you’re feeling the way you do is a big part of it. Beyond that… I’m no guru. I think some peace of mind comes just from years and experience. They bring a certain acceptance and, if you’re open to it, perhaps even a sense of harmony with the cycles of life and time.

- S. John Ross

September 28, 2015 at 7:02 am

Oh, I’m not dismissing wonder. I live each day surrounded by it and frequently immersed in it and always, always grateful for it. I’m just dismissing the refusal to give credit where it’s due, and where it’s due is us. The human condition is actually about being human, and I’m dismayed at the habit of so many to, as you say, kick it upward (and in the process, conclude that the lack of sky-lasagna is some kind of horrific tragedy worth hand-wringing and mopey poetry and so on).

- Ahmet Elginoz

August 27, 2020 at 1:11 pm

I think this lasagna theory is one of the best theories for meaning of life. I am saving this in my notes :)

- Michael Davis

November 19, 2015 at 3:56 pm

“The human condition is actually about being human”

Since you speak so authoritatively, I’d love to hear the logical proof of this you obviously have.

- Bernie

September 25, 2015 at 4:19 am

Sorry for hogging space for a second post, but Brian’s comment gave me an idea to summarize Lovecraft’s influence and charm : use games as an example. I was thinking about Darkseed : they were inspired by H.R. Giger, another Lovecraft aficionado, and Lovecraft proper. That game turned out so Lovecraftian that it’s even plaged by design flaws much in the same vein as Lovecraft’s work is laden with writing flaws. But that game’s atmosphere and weirdness (especially the Giger-inspired dark world) are really it’s selling point, exactly as Lovecraft’s stories.

- Y.Whateley

September 25, 2015 at 6:09 pm

“Bad writing”? Hardly – it’s simply a particular kind of writing for a specific purpose. Lovecraft writes in the same spirit as a magician, and as a comedian:

With one writer’s hand, he’s screaming “LOOK! There’s nothing up my hellish, blasphemous, squamous, eldritch sleeve!” With the other, he says “Oh, and by the way – I just found THIS crawling in your ear.”

He’s standing there on stage, winding us up with a big, elaborate story while we’re following off in what seems like an obvious direction, and then quietly dropping a punchline on us at the end that yanks us right out of the expected and into the hidden, conflicting meaning of everything that led up to it.

And THAT is a large part of why we keep coming back to Lovecraft’s writing, even when it technically seems to break every rule of good taste for proper writing: Lovecraft was never there to politely chat with us as polite company. Rather, he was there to establish a surreal comfort zone as something seemingly normal, and then shock us out of it until every rule and law of the universe that we’ve ever taken for granted and familiar looks strange and alien, foreign and suspect, leaving us to question everything that once seemed certain and solid and predictable.

Lovecraft is fueled on shocks and surprises, and on the surreal and weird, the topsy-turvy. These happen to be some of the same qualities that we’ve come to value in video games as well – I would bet that almost every revolutionary, successful and frequently-imitated new video game since the 1970s has at least made a token nod to elements of the surreal, the shocking, and the surprising.

Great articles on Lovecraft and his influences on gaming – thank you very much for posting them!

- Michael Davis

November 19, 2015 at 3:49 pm

I think Lovecraft’s great genius was to ensconce some of the most literal and actual existential terrors of the Age of Information (try to imagine your human body standing immediately next to a star… or a stellar nursery!) into the seemingly innocuous wrapper of the purplest purple-coloured purple prose of maybe all time. It is, at least to my very limited empirical knowledge, one of the greatest magician’s tricks in modern literature.

While he’s pulling all these goofy rabbits out of goofier hats and your ocular muscles are getting sore from rolling your eyes at the camp, with his other metaphysical hand he’s stuffing your pockets with pockets with hissing cockroaches.

- Michael Davis

November 19, 2015 at 3:53 pm

Aaaand then I read the rest of the comments and I realize the comment directly above mine already says exactly what I just did. Derp

- C.J.Geringer

January 18, 2016 at 1:04 pm

I would like to suggest “The outsider” as a very good starting point to reading Lovecraft.

It is interesting and very short.

I also think that his stories dealing with dreams are underrated they have their own problems, but are very interesting.

- Kyle

August 28, 2016 at 6:07 pm

Probably the only disappointment I had about this article was the lack of historical context for Lovecraft’s rampant xenophobia. For as often as it’s brought up, I’m left with no notion of whether he was more or less racist than the people of his time. Whether he possessed especially racist views, and where he might have gotten them. Was he an outlier among his peers? What did his vast correspondence circle think of it, if they even noticed? Or was this just how people were then, and it’s worth point out because we’ve progressed from there, but doesn’t contribute to the conversation beyond that?

It just seems lazy to point out that people from the turn of the 20th century were racist. For as in depth as this blog frequently goes, and the nuance it’s shown in things being a product of their time, I was a little let down.

Aside from that, I’ve been catching up from the beginning, and am enormously impressed. Closing in on Current Year!

- Jimmy Maher

August 29, 2016 at 8:18 am

Lovecraft’s racism was unusually extreme even in the context of his times. The attitudes of the colonizing powers toward the native races whose lands they occupied often took on a paternalistic, condescending air during this period; think of Kipling’s notion of “The White Man’s Burden,” his duty to uplift and “civilize” his inferiors (while also exploiting their labor and the wealth of the lands that once belonged to them, of course). But there’s none of this in Lovecraft — just fear, disgust, and loathing. While I hesitate to go full Godwin on the poor fellow, about the only analogue I can think of in media I’ve experienced would be some of the ugliest Nazi propaganda, like the film The Eternal Jew, which compares Jews extensively with rats — a comparison also favored by Lovecraft.

There have been some attempts to rehabilitate Lovecraft’s hugely problematic racism by scholars like S.T. Joshi. The most common claim is that he was at least beginning to reject his old views by the time he died. The evidence for this assertion is, however, far from incontrovertible; certainly there’s no anti-racist equivalent to earlier charmers like “On the Creation of Niggers,” and definitely no explicit repudiation of his earlier racist views to be found anywhere in his voluminous correspondence. I tend to think the assertion is down as much to wishful thinking as reality myself.

- Kyle

August 30, 2016 at 1:12 pm

Well, there is a fairly limited pool of things you can compare and contrast with when the topic is “racial purity”.

But yeah, that about adds the context I was seeking, thank you for indulging me.

- Mike

October 28, 2018 at 11:06 am

Absolutely terrible post full of inaccuracies, blatant falsehoods, armchair psychoanalysis and reductionism. It’s clear the author has an axe to grind and can barely restrain himself with trying to paint Lovecraft as a second-rate writer who was also a virulent racist. I laughed a little when Maher presents writers who can’t hold a candle to Lovecraft (Neil Gaiman, China Miéville) as superiors!

Here is the gist of it: Lovecraft was without a doubt a genius, many decades if not centuries ahead of his time. Like Nietzsche, he managed to dive deep inside the human condition and lay bare the grim realities for everyone to see.

Jimmy Maher is certainly not a genius, but even worse, is obviously politicized and brainwashed by the prevailing ideology of the day and incapable of putting forth an amoral perspective. The part I found most amusing is that he feels his conjectures, half-assed assumptions and projections have something to add to the discussion around a thinker of such titanic magnitude as HPL.

My suggestion: Read the references that Maher lists (which in many cases go against his easily-digestible conclusions) and make up your own minds.

- Mike Taylor

October 29, 2018 at 8:52 pm

Just imagine being incapable of putting forth an amoral perspective! How awful!

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- Wolfeye M.

September 19, 2019 at 1:29 pm

Lovecraft’s xenophobia and racism, which is clear if you read his work, has always been something I consider ironic, considering his last name.

I’ve read everything he ever wrote, or at least, everything in The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft. I can’t say I have any particular favorites, because I binge read the entire book, and it all blended together. But, despite his …problematic… elements, there’s something about his work that just grabbed me, and didn’t let go until I was done. Took about a week to get through, what with life’s tendancy to get in the way of reading time. The nightmares I had afterwards were…fun.

- Walter Moczygemba

October 28, 2019 at 1:40 am

As a Lovecraft fan with a low tolerance for (what I consider) camp, I’m dismayed to see anyone define his work in those terms. Certainly some of his earlier writing is poor enough to qualify (as well as 90% of what he’s posthumously inspired), but I don’t see anything particularly wrong with the prose you cite here. Maybe I’m just too willing to take him on his own terms, and so impressed with the themes and imagery that they simply seem all of a piece with the style. That said, even I will admit that the best-written story ever published under Lovecraft’s name was the collaboration “The Night Ocean,” the great majority of which was actually by none other than little Robert Barlow!

And as much as a fanatic like myself would protest, Lovecraft himself might very well agree with your stylistic assessment. From what I’ve read of his correspondence, he aspired to high literary quality, but never felt like he got anywhere close. And he did consciously aim for camp at least once: “Sweet Ermengarde” amply demonstrates why he kept humor and romance out of his “serious” writing!

However we may disagree on his work, I am very impressed at such a thorough-going and well-researched article. I only see one minor error of fact: “shew” is just an old-fashioned spelling for “show,” present tense. (I’m also not sure I’d call his archaic diction “affected,” since he grew up reading 18th-century books and this was, as it were, his native tongue). Thank you for all the hard work and thought you put into this amazing blog!

- Leo Vellés

October 28, 2019 at 9:24 pm

“Lovecraft brings us to shudder not for his characters, who are so thin as be impossible to really care about, but for humanity as a whole”.
Is a “to” missing when you write “…who are so thin as be impossible to really care about…”(between “as” and “be”)?.
English Is not muy first language, so maybe i am wrong.
By the way, another great article. One of the things i love of your blog Is that you really made interesting articles that even didn’t mention a game, like the four or five posts previous to your take on Trinity. That’s evidence of a very good writer to me.

- Jimmy Maher

October 29, 2019 at 10:08 am

Indeed it is. Thanks!

The Lurking Horror
October 2, 2015

Given the demographics of many readers of H.P. Lovecraft, not to mention players of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, it was inevitable that the Cthulhu Mythos would make it to the computer. The only real surprise is that it took all the way until 1987 for the first full-fledged digital work of Lovecraftian horror to appear. That it should have been among all the Imps of Infocom Dave Lebling who wrote said work is, on the other hand, no surprise. The most voracious and omnivorous reader of all in an office full of them, Lebling was also the only Imp with deep roots in the world of tabletop RPGs; he had to have been aware of Sandy Petersen’s game even if he had never played it.

Running neck and neck as he was with Steve Meretzky for the title of most prolific and recognizable Imp, Lebling was pretty much given carte blanche to choose his projects. Thus his rather vague proposal, for a “kind of H.P. Lovecraft game set at a kind of MIT-ish place,” was all that was needed to set the ball rolling. Not that, even discounting Lebling’s track record, there was a lot of risk in the proposition: horror, while relatively uncommon in adventure games to date, was a fictional genre with obvious appeal for the typical player, and Lovecraft was as good a point of entry as any. Indeed, the graphical adventure Uninvited, which had thrown a bit of Lovecraft into its blender along with lots of other hoary old horror tropes, was doing quite well commercially at the very instant that Lebling was making his proposal. Horror was a perfect growth market for adventure authors and players tired of fantasy, science fiction, and cozy mysteries.

The Lurking Horror’s title inauspiciously harks back to “The Lurking Fear,” a story from Lovecraft’s Edgar Allan Poe-aping early years that’s not all that fondly regarded even by aficionados. “The tempo increases imperceptibly from sluggish to slow” over the course of the story, and “the awful crescendo of terror that we have been promised is more of an anticlimax,” writes Lovecraft biographer and critic Paul Roland. Ah, well… at least it has a great title, as well as a gloriously cheesy opening line that comes perilously close to “It was a dark and stormy night”: “There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the lurking fear.”

The game casts you as a freshman at “GUE Tech,” a stand-in for MIT. It’s the end of the term, and your twenty-page paper on “modern analogues of Xenophon’s ‘Anabasis'” is due tomorrow. Lebling cleverly updates the classic Lovecraftian setup of a scholar coming upon a strange and foreboding document in an archive somewhere for the computer age. As you try to work on the paper inside the computer center, alone but for one occasionally helpful but usually infuriating hacker, you find that a strange file has replaced your own, a combination of “incomprehensible gibberish, latinate pseudowords, debased Hebrew and Arabic scripts, and an occasional disquieting phrase in English.” Your directory has somehow gotten mixed up with that of the “Department of Alchemy,” says the hacker. You’ll have to go down there to see if they can help you out. If you first help him out with a little problem of his own, he’s even kind enough to provide you with a key that will open most of the doors down there. And so you set off into the bowels of the university, deserted thanks to the blizzard raging outside on this dark winter night, all the while trying not to think about all the students that have been disappearing lately. Down there in the basements and steam tunnels you’ll encounter the full monty: a zombified janitor; a blood-encrusted sacrificial altar; hordes of rats running who knows where; an insane scientist trying to summon creatures from the beyond; lots of slime and general grossness; and, at last, the tentacled beastie at the heart of it all, who seems to be worming his way into the campus’s computer network to do… well, we’re never quite sure, but chances are it’s not good.

This last is The Lurking Horror’s one really original contribution to Mythos lore, mixing it up with a bit of William Gibson-style cyberpunk; Neuromancer, another book Lebling had to have read, was the talk of science fiction at the time. The mash-up here anticipates a whole sub-genre (sub-sub-genre?) of stories, even if The Lurking Horror doesn’t do a whole lot with the premise beyond introducing it.

But then much the same thing could be said about the game’s relationship to Lovecraft in general. While most of the surface tropes are present and accounted for, most of the subtext of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror — humanity’s aloneness in a cold and unfeeling cosmos, the utter alienness of the Mythos that places it beyond our conceptions of good and evil, the sheer hopelessness of fighting powers so much greater than ourselves — is conspicuously absent. Likewise the actual creatures and gods of the Cthulhu Mythos; the only proper name from Lovecraft to be found here is that of the author himself, appearing as the name of a file on your computer by way of credit where it’s due. At the time that Lebling was writing the game, Arkham House was still emphatically claiming copyright to Lovecraft’s works, and companies like Chaosium who made use of the Mythos were paying licensing fees. Although Arkham’s claim would eventually prove dubious enough that Chaosium and others would drop the license and continue business as usual without it, it was likely copyright concerns that prompted Lebling not to name names. Unlike many computer games that would follow, The Lurking Horror also evinces no obvious debt to the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG beyond the bare fact that both are games that build on Lovecraft’s writings. It’s all enough to make me feel a little embarrassed about the two-article buildup I’ve given this game, afraid that this article might now come across like the mother of all anticlimaxes. I can only ask you to be patient, and to know that those last two articles will pay off in spades down the road, when we encounter games that dig much deeper into Mythos lore than this one does.

Even the language of The Lurking Horror doesn’t quite ever go all-in for Lovecraft in all his unhinged glory. While Lebling gets some credit for using “debased” in an extract I’ve already quoted, there’s not a single “blasphemous” or “eldritch” to be found. Part of the ironic problem here, if problem it be, is that Lebling is just too careful a writer — too good a writer? — to let his id run wild in a babble of feverish adjective in that indelible H.P. Lovecraft way. Consider for example this scene, which finds you peering down through a manhole into a pit of horror.

>look in plate
You peer through the hole, shining your light into the stygian darkness below. The commotion below is growing louder, and suddenly you catch a glimpse of things moving in the pit. Without consciously realizing you have done it, you slam the panel shut, reeling away from the source of such images. Now you know what has been done with the missing students...

Lovecraft would doubtless describe this scene as “indescribable,” and then go nuts describing it. Lebling throws in a Lovecraftian “stygian,” but otherwise much more elegantly describes it as indescribable without having to resort to the actual word, and then… doesn’t describe it. His final line is more subtly chilling than anything Lovecraft ever wrote, a fine illustration of the value of a little restraint. Lebling, it seems, subscribes to the school of horror writing promoted by Edmund Wilson in his famous takedown of Lovecraft, which claims the very avoidance of the overwrought adjectives that Lovecraft loved so much to be key to any effective tale.

Perhaps of more concern than Lebling’s failings as a 1980s reincarnation of Lovecraft is the fact that The Lurking Horror, despite some effectively creepy scenes like the one above, ultimately isn’t all that scary. As I noted in my review of the simultaneously released Stationfall, I find that game, ostensibly another of Steve Meretzky’s easygoing science-fiction comedies, far more unnerving in its latter half than this game ever becomes. The default house voice of Infocom is a sly tone of gentle humor, an unwillingness to take it all too seriously. Just that tone creeps into a number of their more straight-laced works, this one among them, and rather cuts against the grain of the fiction. And in this game in particular one senses a conflict in Lebling that’s far from unique among writers following in Lovecraft’s wake: he wants to pay due homage to the man, but he’s also never quite able to take him seriously. At times The Lurking Horror reads more like a Lovecraft parody than homage, a line that is admittedly thin with a writer as ridiculous in so many ways as Lovecraft. Even more broadly, it sometimes feels like a parody of horror in general. The disembodied hand whom you can befriend, for instance, not only doesn’t feel remotely Lovecraftian but is actually a well-worn trope from about a million schlocky B-movies, played here as it often is there essentially for laughs. After striking an appropriately ominous note at the very end of the game, when an egg of the creature you’ve finally destroyed apparently spawns and flies off to begin causing more havoc, Lebling just can’t leave it at that. Instead he closes The Lurking Horror with a bit of macabre slapstick that’s more Tales From the Crypt than Call of Cthulhu.

>get stone
You pick up the stone. It has a long jagged crack that almost breaks it in half. As you pick it up, you feel it bump to one side. Then, as you are holding it in your hand, something pushes its way out through the crack, breaking the stone into two pieces. Something small, pale, and damp blinks its watery eyes at you. It hisses, gaining strength, and spreads membranous wings. It takes to the air, at first clumsily, then with increased assurance, and disappears into the gloom. One eerie cry drifts back to where you stand.

Something rises out of the mud, slowly straightening. The hacker, mud-covered and weak, staggers to his feet. "Can I have my key back?" he asks.

But the most important reason that The Lurking Horror doesn’t stick to its Lovecraftian guns is down to the other, perhaps even more interesting thing it also wants to be: a tribute to MIT, the university where Infocom was born and where Dave Lebling himself spent more than a decade hacking code, eating Chinese food, and exploring roofs and tunnels.

In choosing to look back with more than a hint of nostalgia rather than to gaze resolutely forward, The Lurking Horror was part of a general trend at Infocom during these latter years of the company’s history, part and parcel of the same phenomenon that saw Steve Meretzky bringing back Floyd at last for Stationfall and, after five years without a Zork, the Imps suddenly pulling out that old name that had made them who they were twice in the space of less than a year. By 1987, with sales far from what they once were and their new corporate overlords at Activision understandably concerned about that reality, a sneaking suspicion that they may be nearing the end game must have been percolating through the ranks. Thus the desire to look back, to appreciate — and not without a little wistfulness — just where they’d been. Lebling himself, meanwhile, was fast closing in on forty, a time that brings a certain reflective state of mind if not a full-fledged crisis to many of us. Whatever else it is, The Lurking Horror is also a very personal game for Dave Lebling, by far the most personal he would ever write.

Since I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve found myself growing more and more skeptical of parser-based interactive fiction’s ability to handle elaborate plotting worthy of a novel or even a novella. The Infocom ideal that was printed on their boxes for all those years, of “waking up inside a story,” was, I’ve come to believe, always something of a lost cause. In compensation, however, I’ve come to be ever more impressed by how good the form is at evoking a sense of place. Despite the name we all chose to apply to our erstwhile text adventures long ago, which I’m certainly not going to try to change now, architecture or landscaping may provide better metaphors for what interactive “fiction” does best. (It’s for this reason, for the record, that I’ve long since backed away from trying to painstakingly define “ludic narrative,” and moved away from an exclusive focus on digital storytelling for this blog as a whole.)

Given all that, I’m particularly fascinated by games like this one that embrace that great — greatest? — strength of the medium by letting us explore a real place. For all of the interactive fiction that’s been made during Infocom’s heyday and after, that’s been done surprisingly little. Only three Infocom games, of which this is the second, attempt to recreate real or historical places. I find The Lurking Horror particularly interesting because the landscape of MIT that it chooses to show us is so personally meaningful to Lebling, turning it into a sort of architecture of memory as well as physical space. I really want to do this aspect of the game justice, and so I have something special planned for you for next week’s article: an in-game guided tour of GUE/MIT.

For now, though, I’ll just note that The Lurking Horror is a worthwhile game if also a somewhat schizophrenic one. The comedy cuts against the horror; the Lovecraft homage cuts against the MIT homage. There’s a lot that Lebling wants to do here, and the 128 K Z-Machine just isn’t quite enough to hold it all. It’s one of the few standard-sized Infocom games that I find myself wishing had been made for the roomier Interactive Fiction Plus format. Still, nothing that is here is really objectionable. The puzzles are uniformly well-done, even if, oddly given that this game came out so close on the heels of Hollywood Hijinx, some of them once again revolve around an elevator. (I suspect a bit of groupthink, not surprising given the collaborative nature of Hollywood Anderson’s game). And the writing is fine, even if it does feel slightly strangled at times by the space limitations. The Lurking Horror feels a little like a missed opportunity, but it wouldn’t feel that way if what’s here — especially its recreation of MIT student life — wasn’t compelling already.

Infocom had high hopes for both Stationfall and The Lurking Horror, these two simultaneously released games of seemingly high commercial appeal written by their two most prolific and recognizable authors. The pair inspired the last really audacious promotional event in Infocom’s history — indeed, their most expensive and ambitious since the grand Suspect murder-mystery party of two-and-a-half years before. For the 1987 Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago — yes, that era-capping CES again — they rented the Field Museum of Natural History for hundreds of guests, as they had each of the two previous years, and sprung for a local rock band to liven the place up. This time, however, they also hired the famed Second City comedy troupe, incubator of talents like Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, to come in and perform improvisational comedy (“InfoProvisation”) based largely on Infocom games. From The Status Line’s article on the event, complete with great 1980s pop-culture references:

Through a hilarious sequence of skits using very few props (a couple of chairs and a piano), the audience saw a computerized dating simulator, roared at a romance between a next-generation computer and a piece of has-been software, met Stationfall’s Floyd, visited GUE Tech, and even had the opportunity to affect the course of a scene or two.

In a tribute to the best-selling Leather Goddesses of Phobos, three vignettes, set in a singles bar and interspersed throughout the program, showed real-life versions of the three playing modes. Tame would have made Mother Teresa proud, but by the time they went from suggestive to lewd, it was enough to make Donna Rice blush.

Steve Meretzky (second from left) and Dave Lebling (second from right) ham it up with Second City.

Steve Meretzky and Dave Lebling even got to join the troupe onstage for a few of the skits. (This must have been a special thrill for Meretzky, who, judging by his love for Woody Allen and for performing in Infocom’s in-office productions, had a little of the frustrated comedian/actor in him, like his erstwhile writing partner Douglas Adams.)

But If the Second City gala harked back to the glory days of Infocom in some ways, the present was all too present in others. The new, cheap packaging was hard for fans to overlook, as was the fact that the principal feelie in The Lurking Horror, a packet of “rattlesnake eggs,” had nothing to do with the game. It looked like something that someone in marketing had just plucked off the discount rack at the local novelty shop — which was in fact largely what it was, as was proved when the final package came out with an equally inexplicable rubber centipede in place of the eggs; apparently it could be sourced even cheaper. The Second City event did get a write-up in newspapers all over the country thanks to being picked up by the Associated Press, but, alas, seems to have done little for actual sales of Stationfall and The Lurking Horror, neither of which reached 25,000 copies. For the regular CES attendees who, whether fans of Infocom’s games or not, had grown to love their parties, this final blowout and its underwhelming aftermath was just one more way that that Summer 1987 edition of the trade show marked the end of an era.

Infocom, however, still wasn’t quite done with The Lurking Horror. A few months after all of the Chicago hoopla, a new version of the game, released only for the Commodore Amiga, reached stores. This one sported digitized sound effects to accompany some of its most exciting moments, a first for Infocom and the first sign of an interest in technical experimentation — not to say gimmickry — that would increasingly mark their last couple of years as a going concern. In this case the innovation came directly from an Activision that was very motivated to find ways to spruce up Infocom’s product line. But, unlike so many of Activision’s suggestions, Infocom actually greeted this one with a fair amount of enthusiasm.

It all began with a creative and innovative programmer named Russel Lieblich, who had come to Activision after spending some time at Peter Langston’s idealistic original incarnation of Lucasfilm Games. During the Jim Levy era Lieblich had been allowed to indulge his artistic muse at Activision, resulting in the interesting if not terribly playable commercial flops Web Dimension and Master of the Lamps. That sort of thing wasn’t going to fly in the new Bruce Davis era, so Lieblich, a talented musician as well as programmer, retrenched to concentrate on the technical aspects of computer audio, a field where he would spend much of his long career in games still to come. Of most relevance to Infocom was the system he developed for playing back digitized sounds recorded from the real world. Infocom had a playtester play through The Lurking Horror again, making a list of everywhere where he could imagine a sound effect. Lebling and others then pruned the list to those places where they felt sound would be most effective, and sent the whole thing off to Lieblich to hack into the Amiga version of the Z-Machine interpreter. At least a few other machines were theoretically capable of playing short digitized sounds of reasonable fidelity as well — the Apple Macintosh and IIGS and the Atari ST would have made excellent candidates — but sound was only added to the Amiga version, an indication of just what an afterthought the whole project really was.

As afterthoughts go, it’s not bad, although the fidelity of the sounds isn’t particularly high even by the standards of other Amiga games of the day. I doubt you’d be able to recognize “the squeal of a rat,” “the creak of an opening hatch,” or “the distinctive ‘thunk’ of an axe biting into flesh” — that’s how The Status Line describes some of the sounds — for what they’re supposed to be if you didn’t have the game in front of you telling you what’s happening. Still, they are creepy in an abstract sort of way, and certainly startling when they play out of the blue. While hardly essential, they do add a little something if you’re willing to jump through a few hoops to get them working on a modern interpreter. Whether the addition of a handful of sound effects was enough to make Amiga owners, madly in love with their computers’ state-of-the-art audiovisual capabilities, consider buying an all-text game was of course another matter entirely.

Next week we’ll put Lovecraft to bed for a while (doubtless dreaming one of his terrible dreams of “night-gaunts”), but will take a deeper dive into the other part of The Lurking Horror’s split personality, its nostalgic tribute to MIT and student life therein. If you haven’t played The Lurking Horror yet, or if you have but it’s been a while, you may want to wait until then to join me on a guided tour that I think you’ll enjoy.

(Sources: As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Thanks again, Jason! Other sources include: the book Game Design Theory and Practice by Richard Rouse III; The Status Line of Summer 1987, Fall 1987, Winter 1987, and Winter/Spring 1988.)

Comments
48 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

October 2, 2015 at 4:42 pm

I guess I’d agree that it’s not *consistently* scary, partly because, as with any parser-based game from this era, there are long puzzle-solving stretches between any scary bits (and the atmospheric element, while effective the first few times you enter the relevant locations, loses its scariness after you’ve trooped around for a while in your puzzle-solving endeavors). But there were definitely parts that I found effectively creepy at the time–the iron plate, the little sequence with the creature in the weather station, the rat tunnel, and the alchemy lab puzzle are the main ones I remember right now. (The weather station was particularly unsettling for me at first; it became less so after I realized the creature wasn’t after me as such.) Agreed on the hand being more joky than scary.

The sequence early in the game when you find that your file is corrupted, and the dream/vision bit that follows, is another good example of Lebing’s restraint. At several points, the writing hints at something awful without quite spelling it out the way Lovecraft would have tried to do.

- Jimmy Maher

October 2, 2015 at 6:32 pm

The rat tunnel strikes me as more gross than scary, and the mad scientist is walking right on the line where horror becomes comedy for me. (Granted, I could say both of the same things about much in Lovecraft.) Agreed that the weather-tower creature is probably the most effective scare of them all. The ending, on the other hand, feels more like an action movie than a horror flick. I think a lot of this stuff would be more effective if Lebling had been able to flesh it out a bit more, both in terms of implementation and text. Thus my wish that this had been an Interactive Fiction Plus title.

- Duncan Stevens

October 2, 2015 at 7:22 pm

Right–I don’t recall finding the ending particularly scary.

I really liked the elevator puzzle. Most of the other puzzles were just OK (and some weren’t even OK, such as the urchin and the maze), but that one was excellent.

- Felix

October 2, 2015 at 5:04 pm

Now I know where Charles Stross got some of his ideas…

- Duncan Stevens

October 2, 2015 at 5:17 pm

Also, all these years later, I remember the login/password combo without having to look it up, so evidently this game left an impression.

- Victor Gijsbers

October 2, 2015 at 5:43 pm

I don’t know whether it is your typo or Infocom”s, but “Anabsis” should be “Anabasis.”

- Jimmy Maher

October 2, 2015 at 5:51 pm

Looks like it’s… mine. No surprise there, right? Thanks!

- Victor Gijsbers

October 2, 2015 at 5:58 pm

Does the game itself involve an analogue of having to escape from inside the Persian kingdom while the Persian army is at your heels trying to kill you? :-)

- Jimmy Maher

October 2, 2015 at 6:08 pm

No. It’s more an analogue of exploring the dungeons beneath the Persian kingdom and kicking the ass of the leader, who just happens to be a tentacled blasphemous nightmare. I think that’s the part covered in Anabasis II: Xenophon Strikes Back.

- Duncan Stevens

October 2, 2015 at 6:21 pm

The bit in Anabasis II involving an elevator was quite prescient.

- Jubal

October 3, 2015 at 8:02 am

I’m guessing Dave Lebling may have been a big fan of “The Warriors”, then…

- niklasl

October 5, 2015 at 3:05 am

One modern analogue of Anabasis that comes to mind is that of a brave troop of game developers being alone in the hostiale territory of a major video game corporation after the leader that brought them there had fallen.

- Steven Marsh

October 2, 2015 at 7:31 pm

Lurking Horror was the second Infocom game I recall where I really found myself fighting with the parser over simple things. (The first was figuring out how to get the black hemisphere and white hemisphere together in Beyond Zork.) It was especially jarring since Lurking Horror was set in the modern world, and I felt like I wasn’t a character but a horribly ineffectual meat puppet:

> SET MICROWAVE TO 5 MINUTES
> SET TIME TO 5 MINUTES
> SET MICROWAVE TO 60 SECONDS
> TURN ON MICROWAVE
> PROGRAM MICROWAVE

(etc. to countless solutions that don’t work)

The ultimate solution to that problem felt like slicing an action down to too many discrete molecules. In comparison, most other games allow for things like OPEN DOOR rather than TURN DOORKNOB. PUSH DOOR… (etc.)

Similarly, figuring out how to get a ladder to span two levels would be trivial in real life (or even in a graphic adventure), but the parser utterly failed me in Lurking Horror. DROP LADDER TO FLOOR BELOW, PUT LADDER ON FLOOR, etc.

I’m sure I must have faced these problems in other games, but this was the first one I really felt it . . . possibly because – since it was set in the real world – I was less willing to overlook its inability to parse my obvious actions as being a gulf between my perceptions and a fantasy or science-fiction world.

- Jimmy Maher

October 2, 2015 at 7:48 pm

I think there’s some truth to this. It’s trying to do just a bit too much for the 128 K Z-Machine, and it does suffer in places where we really could have used a little *more*, in terms of both text and code. The fact that Infocom was pushing out so many games during 1987 may also have taken its toll on the final polishing.

- Duncan Stevens

October 5, 2015 at 3:13 am

I don’t know whether this was ever contemplated, but this is one game where it would have been natural to have a PC that was more than a cipher, and Lebling seems to have passed up that opportunity. The encounter with the hacker could have brought out some personality in the PC; no dice. You could have had a dorm room that would have said something about you, but no. The idea couldn’t have been completely foreign to the folks who put out Plundered Hearts the same year, so my guess is that space limitations played a role.

- Keith Palmer

October 2, 2015 at 10:02 pm

All the discussion about The Lurking Horror being a little too crammed into “the 128K Z-Machine” left me convinced I’d once seen a comment from Lebling himself lamenting he had to leave out “a lot of lovely shivers”; I went looking and found it in the old Inform Designer’s Manual.

In any case, I’m convinced The Lurking Horror is the Infocom game made after the “Passport to the United Products of Infocom” catalog was made up I best remember; Stationfall probably comes second. (I’ll have to admit to not really delving into a number of the other ones from that period, though…) As you’ve said in this post, though, it may not feel absolutely “Lovecraftian” to me (the back of the box did mention Lovecraft, but also Stephen King), although I must also admit the text adventure I’d point to instead is “Anchorhead”…

- Jimmy Maher

October 3, 2015 at 6:41 am

Ah, I thought I’d read something about The Lurking Horror along those lines, but I couldn’t track it down. Good catch!

- ZUrlocker

October 3, 2015 at 7:04 pm

Jimmy, great post. I have bought Lurking Horror several times (e.g. Masterpieces, Lost Treasures on iOS, several on eBay) and I have a legit Z5 file. I’m no longer running any DOS machines. What do I do with the Blorb file to get sound on a mac? Is there a particular Mac interpreter I need to use? If anyone has already explained the process a link is much appreciated.

- Steven Marsh

October 4, 2015 at 2:33 am

Jimmy linked to the appropriate files to get a version of the Z5 file that supports sound (Version 221) — http://ifarchive.giga.or.at/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXmediaXsound.html

Once you have a Version 221 of the Z5 file and the blb support files, you need an interpreter that’ll support it. The only one I’ve found that worked for me on a Mac was Windows Frotz running in Crossover (download an interpreter from http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXinterpretersXfrotz.html … which, yes, is less than ideal.

Crossover is commercial software that makes it straightforward to run DOS games, using an interpreter called Wine: https://www.codeweavers.com/

I haven’t tried it, but Wine Bottler (which looks free) might work as well:
http://winebottler.kronenberg.org/

Hope this helps!

- Jimmy Maher

October 4, 2015 at 8:18 am

The problem is best approached in two stages: 1) get a story file that supports sound; 2) get sound working in your particular interpreter.

1. There are three versions of the story file released by Infocom. Serial number 203.870506 is the original, and doesn’t support sound. Serials numbers 219.870912 and 221.870918 are the Amiga re-releases with sound support. If you don’t have either of the later versions in your collection, you have two options: 1) patch one of your versions to support sound using tools in the IF Archive directory that we’ve already linked to; or 2) just download a story file of the right version from a ROM repository or somewhere else (hint: you might want to look into the blog of a fellow named Doug Bolden). The former process is going to be complicated, once again, by the fact that you’re on Mac; the only executable included is for DOS. If needs must, you could run this through DOSBox (even a 64-bit Windows won’t run it), or if you have a C compiler on your Mac just compile the single source file to make your own executable. However you get there, when you have a story file that understands the typed command “$sound”, replying with “Sound off,” you’ll know you’ve successfully jumped through Hoop #1. (Be sure to type “$sound” again to turn the sound back on!)

2. Pretty much what Steve says. I’ve messed around a little with Gargoyle, but didn’t have any luck at all getting it to play the sounds. It may work if you’re willing to package the story file and the sounds together using the Blorb tools, as Ben Cressey describes at http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=2263&start=0. (Based on my experimentation this morning, it looks like the problems with Gargoyle’s Infocom sound support that are described in that thread have never been corrected.) Otherwise WINE and Windows Frotz are your best, most straightforward bet. I would say that both of the links provided by Steve are probably overkill for running a simple app like Frotz. Just the simple WINE — https://www.winehq.org/ — should be fine. Just put the blorbed sound files I linked to into the same directory as your sound-enabled story file, and make sure the blorb file has the same name as your story file apart from the file extension. It all should Just Work. The first place where sounds should play is in the dream sequence that begins after logging into the computer and editing your paper. So you may want to save just before that starts. Then you can quickly get back to it for experimentation purposes.

And yes, all of this is far, far more complicated than it really ought to be.

- sho

October 4, 2015 at 8:51 am

How about just running an Amiga emulator (UAE) on the Mac and running the original Amiga disk image?

- Jimmy Maher

October 4, 2015 at 9:06 am

Definitely an option, but tricky in its own way, especially for someone who’s never used an Amiga. I don’t think the Amiga Infocom games autoboot, which means tracking down a Workbench disk. Throw in the need for Kickstart ROMs and all and it starts to every bit as gnarly as any other approach. Amiga Forever unfortunately doesn’t run on Macs.

- Pedro Timóteo

October 6, 2015 at 8:04 am

There are also utilities such as unadf (on Linux, I think it’s in most distributions’ repositories, and I’m sure it should be possible to find its equivalent on a Windows or Mac system) that can extract files from an Amiga .adf disk image. Then you just have to look around for the Amiga disk version of this game, extract the Z-code file, and you have the Amiga version of Lurking Horror. You still need to add the sound files in blorb format (just download the single file from the link Jimmy provided).

unadf was most useful to me in order to try out Amiga versions of Sierra and LucasArts adventures on ScummVM, by the way. :)

- ZUrlocker

October 4, 2015 at 1:21 pm

Ok thanks. I have a version 221 Z5 file, but so far no luck with any of the native Mac interpreters: Gargoyle, Spatterlight, Zoom. Getting a DOS emulator going seems like overkill. “Just follow this easy 17 step process….”

Oddly, I can’t even get any of the DOS SND or Amiga DAT sound files to play on a mac manually. If anyone has converted these to plain WAV files that would be good enough for me. I’m just more curious about the sounds than anything.

- Steven Marsh

October 5, 2015 at 1:19 pm

You can extract the files yourself (although — again — it’s nowhere near as easy as it could be on a Mac). Just follow this easy 17-step process!

1) Download the BLB file from here: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/media/sound/

2) Download the Python file that lets you manipulate BLB files: http://www.eblong.com/zarf/blorb/blorbtool.py

3) Make a directory and dump those two into the same directory.

4) Open a Terminal prompt (In /Applications/Utilities/ )

5) From the Terminal prompt, change your directory to the folder you dumped those files into. The easiest way is to type:

cd [DON’T HIT RETURN]

… then drag and drop that directory into the Terminal window. Depending on where you created the directory in Step 3, this should result in something like:

cd /Users/yourusername/Downloads/Blorb\ temp

[NOW HIT RETURN]

6) Now, in the Terminal, type:

ls

This should confirm you’re in the right directory, with the .blb and the .py script. If not, something went wrong somewhere around Step 3-5; try again.

7) Once it’s working, type the following commands (one at a time, hitting return after each one):

python ./blorbtool.py Lurking.blb export Snd 3 lurking3.aiff
python ./blorbtool.py Lurking.blb export Snd 4 lurking4.aiff
python ./blorbtool.py Lurking.blb export Snd 6 lurking6.aiff
python ./blorbtool.py Lurking.blb export Snd 7 lurking7.aiff
python ./blorbtool.py Lurking.blb export Snd 8 lurking8.aiff
python ./blorbtool.py Lurking.blb export Snd 9 lurking9.aiff
python ./blorbtool.py Lurking.blb export Snd 10 lurking10.aiff
python ./blorbtool.py Lurking.blb export Snd 11 lurking11.aiff
python ./blorbtool.py Lurking.blb export Snd 12 lurking12.aiff
python ./blorbtool.py Lurking.blb export Snd 13 lurking13.aiff
python ./blorbtool.py Lurking.blb export Snd 15 lurking15.aiff
python ./blorbtool.py Lurking.blb export Snd 16 lurking16.aiff
python ./blorbtool.py Lurking.blb export Snd 17 lurking17.aiff
python ./blorbtool.py Lurking.blb export Snd 18 lurking18.aiff

[There is no sound file associated with 1, 2, 5, or 14.]

~~~

If everything’s worked out, you should have 14 AIFF files in your directory. These are standard well-behaved AIFF files; they’ll play in Quicktime, iTunes, Audacity, etc.

- ZUrlocker

October 6, 2015 at 3:48 pm

Ok thanks for the details. Despite my bitching, I did manage to get WinFrotz running using Wine on my Mac and the chanting sounds at least were better than I expected and very effective. If you happen to have converted the SND files to AIFF and want to ZIP and post them somewhere that is much appreciated.

- Jesse Blue

October 4, 2015 at 8:30 am

About the Apple IIGS: Infocom never made a IIGS version of anything, except Beyond Zork. In 1993, the Big Red Computer club published the “Lost Treasures of Infocom”, including Lurking Horror. But unfortunately, that did not contain the sound effects. See also: http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/lost-treasures-of-infocom

- Ian Schmidt

October 5, 2015 at 3:56 am

The Atari ST actually couldn’t play sampled sounds natively like the Amiga/Mac/IIgs. It used the Yamaha YM2149, a slightly more musical version of the AY-3-8910 sound generator that powered the Mattel Intellivision console and dozens of classic-era arcade games. The same techniques used on the C64 to play samples in games like Skate or Die via the SID also work on the 2149, but were not obvious and had no official Atari support.

- Jimmy Maher

October 5, 2015 at 5:02 am

I’m certainly no expert on the ST’s technical capabilities, but in writing that I was thinking of the original ST Starglider, which played about 30 seconds of a theme song recorded in a studio by real musicians. This would seem to indicate that it was possible to do sampled sound on the ST with reasonable fidelity — at least better fidelity than the Commodore 64 or stuff like Access RealSound on the PC clones could manage. Whether Atari ST sampled sound could have been worked into a game with the ease of the Amiga sound support is of course another question. Even the later Sherlock, which also supported sound, made it only to the Mac and Amiga, which would indeed seem to indicate that it was at best a trickier proposition.

- Pedro Timóteo

October 6, 2015 at 8:09 am

As far as I remember, digitized sound on the Atari ST basically killed the CPU while playing them, so it was mostly used in intros, title / menu screens, and so on. This wasn’t a problem in the later STE machines, but only a handful of games supported their extra features.

Even a normal ST *could* have handled The Lurking Horror’s digitized sounds, of course (since not much else is happening when playing them), but I guess Infocom didn’t want to bother with it by then.

- Jimmy Maher

October 6, 2015 at 8:31 am

Mmm, not so sure about that last. Many of the sounds in the game are looped continuously as the player enters commands and continues to play. Depending on how much the sounds really “killed the CPU,” this could present a problem — at least in comparison to the multitasking Amiga.

- Gnoman

October 5, 2015 at 9:38 pm

Unless the ones you’re talking about are different from the paired magnets (intended to rattle against each other) that I’m familiar with, novelty “rattlesnake eggs” seem to be an unforgivably irresponsible pack-in with a floppy disk game.

- Jimmy Maher

October 5, 2015 at 9:53 pm

Hmm… maybe that was the problem? I’ve never seen them or even heard them described in detail. They were just mentioned by reviewers who got a pre-release copy of the game.

- Steven Marsh

October 5, 2015 at 11:38 pm

Gnoman, I suspect you’re thinking of these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY-z12qsPjU

My assumption is that it was a version of the old prank with a washer wound up with a rubber band strung between an unbent curved paper clip, so that – when you open the envelope – it gives a “rattle” effect as the rubber band/washer unwinds. There’s no magnets involved so I imagine it’s no more dangerous than anything else metal.

Here’s a YouTube video of how the prank works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGtIGM07d98

Here’s an Instructable about how to emulate the effect with stuff you have around the house:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Rattle-Snake-Eggs-Prank/

I don’t have any definitive knowledge that this IS the feelie referred to, but I can’t imagine anything else it would be; I recall encountering this prank in the early ’80s, but I only first saw the rattling magnet things within the past decade.

- Alex Freeman

October 5, 2015 at 10:44 pm

I guess I have some trouble understanding why games like The Lurking Horror were such a tight squeeze for 128k considering they were all text. Does text really take up that much space? Ultima 4 and Maniac Mansion were able to fit on 64k of memory, and they were lengthy adventures full of graphics.

- Jimmy Maher

October 6, 2015 at 7:31 am

Like The Lurking Horror, Ultima IV and Maniac Mansion both use far more than 64 K. They use a form of virtual memory to store what’s not currently needed on disk, as does the 128 K Z-Machine. (Remember, the 128 K Z-Machine can run on the likes of a Commodore 64.)

Otherwise, this is largely apples to oranges. My instinct is that Maniac Mansion isn’t really any larger than The Lurking Horror, although it’s hard to quantify these things and with the different character combinations and all it perhaps makes better use of its size. Ultima IV certainly is much larger, but like other old-school CRPGs it achieves this by reusing the same handful of minigames over and over. Indeed, almost everything in that game is built from reusable parts: wilderness and city tiles, monsters, dungeon layouts, shops, shrines, etc. (The symmetry of the design, with the 8 shrines, 8 mantras, 8 runes, etc., isn’t just an aesthetic choice.) Ultima IV is also able to neatly divide itself into three — wilderness, towns, dungeons — and give each part its own disk side. This is something that The Lurking Horror, which needs to present a single contiguous space, can’t do. And the short answer is that, yes, text was *incredibly* expensive. That’s why old-school CRPGs tried so hard to minimize it. (By the time of The Lurking Horror, some were beginning to ship with paragraph books that let them add a little more texture to their worlds without having to include all that text in the game itself.)

Except for the most trivial (picking up and dropping things, etc.), almost every interaction in The Lurking Horror is unique. There’s just one computer, just one refrigerator with Chinese food, just one microwave, etc. And all require their own text and code to implement. I think this emphasis on “quality over quantity,” if you will, is why Infocom games tend to hold up better today than 1980s CRPGs, of which even the better ones, like Ultima IV, can feel like endless slogs offering little reward for hours at a stretch. But that’s just my opinion; obviously others disagree.

There are doubtless things Infocom could have done a bit better. Their text compression, for instance, wasn’t really all that great, at best only about a 35 to 40 percent saving over simply storing the text in the clear as ASCII. (Level 9 in Britain, the masters of text-adventure compression, used to roundly mock them for this.) But in the end anything they might have done would likely have only allowed a few more rooms and/or a few thousand more words.

For a better understanding of how Infocom’s technology worked and what I really mean when I talk about “the 128 K Z-Machine,” you might find this article useful: http://www.filfre.net/2012/01/zil-and-the-z-machine/.

- Sam Garret

October 6, 2015 at 7:09 pm

>>>That’s why old-school CRPGs tried so hard to minimize it. (By the time of The Lurking Horror, some were beginning to ship with paragraph books that let them add a little more texture to their worlds without having to include all that text in the game itself.)

Not to quibble (much :-) but that kind of added flavour had been going on since at least 1979’s Temple of Apshai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunjonquest)

- Alex Freeman

October 6, 2015 at 11:33 pm

Wow! That and your link were really informative! Thanks! I think I get it now. I hadn’t really thought about the uniqueness in Infocom’s games or how much recycling was done in other games. I had thought about virtual memory before but didn’t realize that’s what it was called. The reason I thought about is because of Super Mario Bros. In that game, once you pass something, you can’t go back to it if it’s gone past the left edge of the screen. Furthermore, if something goes off the edge of the screen, it’s gone for good. That’s why koopa shells will never hit anything off screen. I figured all of that was due to some technique I now know is called virtual memory.

- G Grobbelaar

October 11, 2015 at 3:47 am

My little useless advice, couldn’t get any sound files to work in any winfrotz untill i found ttsfrotz thingy! Its basically winfrotz for the blind! And all sounds worked perfect. The 2002 version is available from ifarchive. I even went so far ads making other sounds with a utility on ifarchive and change Lurking sounds so that when a friend played it the sounds were funny!

- Jimmy Maher

October 12, 2015 at 8:44 am

Just because all this wasn’t already confusing enough, we also have to remember that WinFrotz and Windows Frotz are actually two separate programs. I believe the former can also play the sounds, but it wants them in the older, non-blorbed format.

- Brian Bagnall

October 23, 2015 at 6:38 pm

I can scratch one more thing off my bucket list: finishing an Infocom game. Two peeks at the online Universal Hint System were needed (one to get past the maintenance man, and one to figure out how to get out of the professor’s lab). Not a bad experience all in all. This is much different from playing any other computer game, namely you need to keep notes, map all rooms and items, and play a little bit each night then go away and think about things offline before trying a few ideas again the next day.
One curious thing about the game is how it is so non-character driven. None of the characters even have names, including the urchin, the hacker, the professor and the mysterious alchemy student who wrote a certain letter. Makes me wonder what the thinking was there.

- Jimmy Maher

October 24, 2015 at 9:14 am

Most likely just lack of space…

- Jerome

July 19, 2017 at 2:05 pm

Finally picket up this 30 years old classic (solving it on my own, I can proudly say). This one has been on my pile of shame for ages.

I have no complaints about the puzzles, but I really got at stuck one point, when I didn’t realize that after showing some documents to the professor I could easily walk to the south part of the lab.

The most scary part for me was that occasionally when you’re in the elevator shaft, the elevator suddenly starts moving upwards (or even downwards once, crushing me).
I tried to rush up the staircase to see who pressed the button, but never found anyone…

I love confronting adventure parsers with absurd commands and so I stumbled upon a funny bug. Sometimes (not always) you can throw away your self. Right at the start of the game, try:

>throw me at hacker
Thrown. The Hacker retreats. […]

After that, “yourself” is found in the room. You cannot pick it up again, and when you leave the room you cannot examine yourself anymore :)

>look
[…]
There is yourself here.

>south
[…]

>examine me
You can’t see any yourself here.

PS: In fact I still use uhlersoth as password for “unimportant” accounts … OMG why am I telling this?

- Lisa H.

July 19, 2017 at 6:35 pm

I would suspect the urchin of pressing the elevator button, possibly.

- The Grand Rascal

April 7, 2018 at 12:47 pm

Does anyone here know exactly who, or what, in the Cthulhu mythos, “Uhlersoth” is or was? Google is useless in this regard…

- Lisa H.

April 9, 2018 at 7:49 am

This doesn’t answer your question, but I never thought it was supposed to be anything specific, just a word that kind of sounded like it came from the same phonetic family.

- Andy

June 13, 2019 at 2:22 pm

Late to the party here, but I found the rubber centipede really disturbing, since it hadn’t been mentioned in the copy on the back of the box. You opened the package, and – gahhghhAAAH what IS THAT THING?

Then again, I was about 9 years old when we got that game, so your mileage may vary.

- Allan Holland

January 31, 2020 at 8:53 pm

What I’d like to know is whether it was Dave Lebling’s idea to implement the ability to microwave the reanimated hand (back) to death. “The hand scrabbles around frantically, then at last lies still.” Wowzers. One of those weird little Easter Eggs. Was it a tester’s Idea or vintage PDL? (Jon Palace, maybe?)

MIT and GUE (or, The Annotated Lurking Horror)
October 7, 2015

We have a fair number of games and events still to cover in the ongoing history of Infocom that’s been biting such a good-sized chunk out of this blog for so long, but the end is slowly heaving into sight. The same was also true, albeit in a less certain and more intuitive way, for those actually at Infocom at the time of The Lurking Horror’s release. The winds of the industry were quite clearly blowing against them, and even if they could manage to eke out another hit or two it wasn’t at all clear how they could remake themselves to conform to the new order in the longer term. Meanwhile some of the Imps were beginning to wonder what the point of surviving as a developer of interactive fiction might be anyway. They knew how to make rock-solid text adventures in their traditional style, but they didn’t quite know how to advance beyond that. Given that they were unlikely to ever make a better game in that traditional style than Trinity, and that their players had proved unreceptive to their one attempt to radically upend the formula with A Mind Forever Voyaging, that was a problem. Infocom wasn’t populated by the sort of people who are comfortable just reworking the status quo year after year.

All of these feelings must have fed into David Lebling’s decision to set his game for 1987 at a lovingly recreated MIT, known as GUE Tech in the game. With commercial pressures threatening to crush an Infocom that had long since lost control of their own destiny and artistic ennui threatening to crush the Imps’ souls as well, it was nice to think back to the simpler days at MIT where it had all begun as just another hacking exercise, where that original mainframe Zork had represented for Lebling and his earliest co-Implementors something so inspiring and genuinely new under the sun. By way of honoring those feelings, I thought we could also take one last lingering look back along with Lebling today. I’d like to take you on a guided tour through The Lurking Horror’s MIT… oops, GUE. If you haven’t played this one before, or if it’s been a while, feel free to play along with me. I won’t solve the puzzles for you — although a little nudge here and there may be in the cards — but I will tell you a bit more about what you’re seeing. For what follows I’m hugely indebted to Janice Eisen (MIT Class of 1985), a Patreon supporter who not only pays me for each of these articles but all but did my job for me when it came to this one by sharing her own experiences of life at MIT as it was then and presumably still is today. So, come along with Janice and me and let us tell you a little about the place where Infocom began.

Whether you’re playing along or not, the map found in the center of the GUE Tech brochure that accompanies The Lurking Horror is well worth referring to now and throughout this tour. It roughly corresponds to the heart of the real campus, albeit with some important differences that I’ll be explaining when we come to them. If you’re feeling particularly motivated, you may also want to pull up MIT’s official campus map for comparison purposes. To orient yourself, know that the Great Dome is found on Building 10 on that map.

We start our adventurous evening one dark and snowy winter night in GUE Tech’s so-called “Computer Center,” which corresponds to MIT’s Building 13 (an ominous start, no?).

Terminal Room
This is a large room crammed with computer terminals, small computers, and printers. An exit leads south. Banners, posters, and signs festoon the walls. Most of the tables are covered with waste paper, old pizza boxes, and empty Coke cans. There are usually a lot of people here, but tonight it's almost deserted.

A really whiz-bang pc is right inside the door.

Nearby is one of those ugly molded plastic chairs.

Sitting at a terminal is a hacker whom you recognize.

Know first of all that this is not the place where so many future Infocom staffers worked throughout the 1970s, and created Zork near the end of that decade. That work took place on the leased top floor of the nine-story Building 47. Standing some distance to the north of the campus core, Building 47 is described by Steven Levy in his seminal Hackers as “a building of mind-numbing dullness, with no protuberances and sill-less windows that looked painted onto its off-white surface.” It still looks about the same today, and houses MIT’s Center for Biomedical Engineering and Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies among other tenants. Building 13, meanwhile, is not and never has been earmarked as a computer center; it houses the Material Sciences and Engineering Center among others.

That said, the description of the place, unholy mess included, is very typical of the computer labs that were and are scattered all over the campus. The hacker who inhabits it alongside us is certainly worth a look.

>examine hacker
The hacker sits comfortably on an office chair facing a terminal table, or perhaps it's just a pile of old listings as tall as a terminal table. He is typing madly, using just two fingers, but achieves speeds that typists using all ten fingers only dream of. He is apparently debugging a large assembly language program, as the screen of his terminal looks like a spray of completely random characters. The hacker is dressed in blue jeans, an old work shirt, and what might once have been running shoes. Hanging from his belt is an enormous ring of keys. He is in need of a bath.

It’s instructive to compare this depiction of a prototypical hacker — i.e., practically Richard Stallman in the flesh — with Michael Bywater’s “horrible nerd” from Bureaucracy. Lebling, while certainly not blind to his character’s annoying eccentricities, also shows a knowing familiarity that borders on affection. Bywater… doesn’t. Particularly knowing on Lebling’s part is the hacker’s typing ability, or if you like the lack thereof. Hackers have always looked on proper ten-fingered typing as a sure sign that the person in question is not one of them.

Richard Stallman

I trust I’m not giving too much away if I mention that that “enormous ring of keys” will become a critical part of the game. Strange as it may sound, keys, the more exotic the better, are in fact a status symbol at MIT. Keys imply knowledge of and access to the labyrinthine tunnels and cubbyholes that riddle the campus. “Roof-and-tunnel hacking,” something we ourselves will be indulging in on this snowy night, has always been a popular pastime at MIT, tolerated if not officially condoned by the administration and campus police — tolerated not least thanks to the fact that, contrary to The Lurking Horror’s GUE Tech brochure, no known deaths can be attributed to the practice. Janice told me the story of joining a “very unofficial student-run tour of the roofs and tunnels” as a freshman. After making their way down a creepy old steam tunnel, they popped out through a grating in a sidewalk right in front of a campus policeman. “You’re not supposed to be in there! Go back the way you came!” he ordered, leaving them no choice but to scurry back down the tunnel. One can imagine a self-satisfied character like our hacker here leading just such a tour, flaunting his knowledge and his enormous ring of keys before the newbies.

The word “hack” itself originated at MIT, where it originally implied both campus explorations of the sort just described and the sort of clever and usually elaborate practical jokes in which MIT students, once again with the tacit acceptance of the campus police and administration, have always indulged. In time anything done in an original, clever, and/or cheeky way came to be called a “hack.” By the 1960s it was being applied to computing at MIT, to the burgeoning culture of unrepentant oddballs who spent their lives trying to make these strange new machines run better, faster, and smarter. As former MIT hackers got jobs in private business and accepted postings at other universities, the usage became universal.

But we do have an assignment to write, so let’s see what we’re up against.

>examine assignment
Laser printed on creamy bond paper, the assignment is due tomorrow. It's from your freshman course in "The Classics in the Modern Idiom," better known as "21.014." It reads, in part: "Twenty pages on modern analogues of Xenophon's 'Anabasis.'" You're not sure whether this refers to the movie "The Warriors" or "Alien," but this is the last assignment you need to complete in this course this term. You wonder, yet again, why a technical school requires you to endure this sort of stuff.

Many an MIT student over the years has doubtless wondered the same thing. Like all accredited American universities, MIT conforms to the “balanced person” ideal of education, which demands that each student take a smattering of humanities and other subjects outside her major during her first year or two at university. Derided as the requirement often is, I tend to feel we could use more balanced people in the world today. The collision between technology and the humanities at MIT in particular has yielded some fascinating results, such as Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck and Nick Montfort’s work in many areas of computational creativity.

Buildings at MIT are, with only a few exceptions, referred to only by their numbers, and the same holds true for courses; thus the “better known” in the passage above is literally accurate. The prefix of “21” does indeed correspond to the Department of Humanities at MIT.

Let’s turn to that “really whiz-bang pc” and see if we can get to work.

>examine pc
This is a beyond-state-of-the-art personal computer. It has a 1024 by 1024 pixel color monitor, a mouse, an attached hard disk, and a local area network connection. Fortunately, one of its features is a prominent HELP key. It is currently turned off.

It’s a bit odd that The Lurking Horror refers to this machine as a PC at all; it’s obviously a workstation-class machine, generally considered a different species entirely from the more humble PC during the 1980s. Not only is this computer far beyond what would have been available to Lebling during his time at MIT, it’s also far beyond what the average student even in 1987 could hope to have at her disposal. It appears to represent a 3M workstation, a term first coined by Carnegie Mellon University professor Raj Reddy in the early 1980s. More of an aspiration than a practicality at that time, a 3M machine demanded at least 1 MB of memory, a display consisting of at least 1 million pixels, and a CPU capable of processing at least 1 million instructions per second. While a few such machines were available by 1987 and others were in the offing — after leaving Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs founded NeXT with this very specification in mind — very few were likely to be at the disposal of ordinary students looking to write Classics papers. Back in Lebling’s day, almost all of the work at the Laboratory for Computer Science was being done on text-only terminals — no mouse, no hard disk, no color, and for that matter no pixels that didn’t form textual characters — attached to a central DEC PDP-10. Indeed, this was largely the way that an increasingly anachronistic Infocom was still working in 1987. Nowadays, of course, a Raspberry Pi blows right past most of the 3M specification and just keeps on going for orders of magnitude afterward.

Let’s log in, shall we?

>turn on pc
The computer powers up, goes through a remarkably fast self-check, and greets you, requesting "LOGIN PLEASE:". The only sound you hear is a very low hum.

>login [you'll have to figure this out for yourself]
The computer responds "PASSWORD PLEASE:"

>type [this too]
The computer responds "Good evening. You're here awfully late." It displays a list of pending tasks, one of which is in blinking red letters, with large arrows pointing to it. The task reads "Classics Paper," some particularly ominous words next to it say "DUE TOMORROW!" and more reassuringly, a menu box next to that reads "Edit Classics Paper."

>click menu box
The menu box is replaced by the YAK text editor and menu boxes listing the titles of your files. The one for your paper is highlighted in a rather urgent-looking shade of red.

The “YAK” text editor is an obvious reference to Richard Stallman’s GNU project, an attempt to create a completely free and open-source operating system that he began at MIT in 1983. One of the tools Stallman brought to the GNU project at its founding was his everything-but-the-kitchen-sink text editor Emacs, a great favorite with hackers to this day. After years of uncertain progress, the utilities developed by Stallman and others for GNU were merged with Linus Torvalds’s new Unix-like kernel in the early 1990s to create the operating system known as “Linux” today — or “GNU/Linux,” as Stallman would undoubtedly correct me. The first two letters in the name of The Lurking Horror’s YAK editor were and are very common in hacker acronyms, standing for “Yet Another.” As for yet another what in this instance… your guess is as good as mine.

Stallman was at MIT throughout the 1970s, but he worked for the other half of MIT computer research’s split personality, the AI Laboratory rather than the Laboratory for Computer Science. (The names were of little relevance, with the latter often conducting AI research and the former often wandering far afield from it.) His path doesn’t seem to have crossed those of the future Infocom crowd with any great frequency, especially given that the Laboratory for Computer Science always had the reputation of being the more pragmatic and commercially oriented of the two groups. He would have held Infocom in contempt for attempting to market their innovations. Never one to hold back his opinions, Stallman liberally bestowed epithets like “fascist” on those who defied his “free as in freedom” hacker ethics by, say, trying to install a reasonably secure password system onto the campus computer systems.

I’ll leave it to you to read the paper, which turns out to be something very different than expected, and to talk with the hacker about it; be sure to appreciate the “explosion in a teletype factory” line, one of the best Lebling ever wrote. Afterward let’s have a look in the kitchen.

Kitchen
This is a filthy kitchen. The exit is to the east. On the wall near a counter are a refrigerator and a microwave.

Sitting on the kitchen counter is a package of Funny Bones.

>open refrigerator
Opening the refrigerator reveals a two liter bottle of Classic Coke and a cardboard carton.

>x carton
This is a cardboard carton with an incomprehensible symbol scrawled on the top.

>open carton
Opening the cardboard carton reveals Chinese food.

A joke among MIT hackers had it that the four basic food groups were caffeine, sugar, salt, and grease. What with caffeine and sugar getting pride of place even on that list, the infamous switch to the New Coke formula in 1985 hit them particularly hard. When the Coca-Cola Company bowed to popular demand and reintroduced the old formula as “Coke Classic” just a few months later, many hackers latched onto the theory, since disproved, that it was all a big conspiracy to switch out real sugar for high-fructose corn syrup in their favorite drink.

The connection between hacking and Chinese food is just as longstanding. A Chinese menu is a system of flavor combinations that’s infinitely intriguing to a certain kind of mind, and thus MIT hackers have been haunting Boston Chinatown since the late 1950s. Many bought Chinese-English dictionaries in order to translate the Chinese menus that were normally only given to Chinese patrons; these were always much more interesting than the safe choices reserved for English speakers. Yes, sometimes the results of the hackers’ culinary experiments could be vile, but other times they could be magnificent. In a sense it didn’t really matter. It was all just so interesting, yet another fascinating system to hack.

A favorite of the future Infocom staffers, as it was of many MIT hackers, was a place called The House of Roy, presided over by the inimitable Roy himself, whose sense of humor was surprisingly in sync with that of his favorite non-Chinese patrons. I love this anecdote from a regular customer:

We asked for tea and Roy (we think this was the family name) told Suford she would be allowed to go into the kitchen and make it for us. When she returned she informed us that the kitchen was ruled over by a large tom cat. (“Did you pet him?” “No, he was on duty.”) When we queried the owner his response was that the cat kept down vermin and was safer than chemicals. We asked about the Health Inspector and were told “cat cleaner than Health Inspector.”

Roy had only recently died at the time that The Lurking Horror was written, his beloved restaurant closed. Lebling pays tribute to this lost and lamented MIT institution by including it as the only nonfictional “Favorite Hangout” in his GUE Tech brochure.

If we put the Chinese food in the microwave for far too long — don’t try this at home without saving first! — we get an interesting description when we look at it again.

>x chinese food
This is a carton of radioactive Szechuan shrimp. Lovely red peppers poke out of the sauce.

The association of microwaves with nuclear bombs, and particularly the now ubiquitous slang to “nuke” one’s food, would appear to be another MITism that has entered the larger culture. Janice remembers hearing the slang during her time there as an undergraduate in the early 1980s, yet online etymologies claim its first documented use dates from 1987, the very year of The Lurking Horror.

At this point I’ll leave you to do something for the hacker and get something from him in return. Once you’ve taken care of that, let’s head for the elevator to begin to explore the rest of the campus.

>s
Elevator
This is a battered, rather dirty elevator. The fake wood walls are scratched and marred with graffiti. The elevator doors are open. To the right of the doors is an area with floor buttons (B and 1 through 3), an open button, a close button, a stop switch, and an alarm button. Below these is an access panel which is closed.

>x graffiti
"'God is dead' --Nietzsche
'Nietzsche is dead' --God"

The elevator doors slide closed.

>g
"Tech is hell."

>g
"I.H.T.F.P."

The nickname of simply “Tech” in reference to MIT is like many traditions there in that it goes back one hell of a long way. Between its founding in Boston in 1861 and its move across the Charles River to Cambridge in 1916, MIT was more commonly referred to as “Boston Tech” than by its official name. In student parlance part of the nickname stuck around even after the move.

“I.H.T.F.P” is another phrase with which all too many students are casually familiar. Sometimes described as the university’s unofficial motto, it stands for “I hate this fucking place.” Much as so many come to cherish their time at the university, the graffiti highlights a fact that can often get lost amid descriptions of all of the assorted traditions and tomfoolery (often one and the same) that go on at MIT: the fact that it is indeed, as Infocom’s GUE Tech brochure says, “a high-pressure school.” In fact, it’s the most demanding STEM university in the world. For decades there have been dark jokes among the student population about suicide, along with suspicions that the actual suicide rate is not being accurately reported. How’s that for a spot of horror?

Let’s take the elevator down a floor — be sure to check out that access panel first! — and then head out to the street.

>n
You enter the freezing, biting cold of the blizzard.

Smith Street
Smith Street runs east and west along the north side of the main campus area. At the moment, it is an arctic wasteland of howling wind and drifting snow. On the other side of the street, barely visible, are the lidless eyes of streetlights. The street hasn't been plowed, or if it has been, it did no good.

Massachusetts winters can be every bit as brutal as the one described here; they’re as much a fixture of life at MIT as any other tradition. As for the streets themselves: MIT’s Vassar Street is slyly replaced here by Smith Street, Smith being another of the “Seven Sisters” of prestigious, historically female liberal-arts colleges. Just down Smith Street to the east is an innocuous-looking “temporary building” with one hell of a story to tell.

>s
You push your way into the comparative warmth of a laboratory.

It is pitch black.

>turn on flashlight
The flashlight clicks on.

Temporary Lab
This is a laboratory of some sort. It takes up most of the building on this level, all the interior walls having been knocked down. (One reason these temporary buildings are still here is their flexibility: no one cares if they get more or less destroyed.) A stairway leads down, and a door leads north.

There is a metal flask here.

>get flask
Taken.

>d
Temporary Basement
During the Second World War, some temporary buildings were built to house war-related research. Naturally, these buildings, though flimsy and ugly, are still around. This is the basement of one of them. The basement extends west, a stairway leads up, and a large passage is to the east.

This rattletrap of a structure corresponds to the real MIT’s now long-gone Building 20, one of the most storied places on the campus. It was built quickly and cheaply in 1943 to house vital wartime research into radar. The expectation was that it would be destroyed as soon as the war was over. But, with postwar attendance booming thanks to the G.I. Bill and research space at a premium, no one quite got around to it for more than fifty years. Building 20 was a famously ramshackle place, showing ample evidence of its cheap and rushed construction. Walls were made of exposed plywood; ceilings were hidden above a tangle of pipes and wiring; floors were treacherously uneven; the roof leaked; windows never really fit right, and had a disconcerting habit of falling off entirely; the whole structure creaked alarmingly in the winds that blew right through its interior. It was sweltering in the summer and freezing in the winter, and coated with a litigator’s wet dream worth of asbestos and lead-based paint. Yet the people who worked inside it loved the place, dubbing it their “plywood palace.”

Building 20 would be of great historical importance were it only for the World War II research that went on there. Research into radar was funded almost as lavishly as the Manhattan Project, and was even more important for actually winning the war; “Radar won the war, and the atom bomb ended it,” goes the old saying. Much of that war-winning effort was centered right here.

But that was only the beginning. In later years countless other groups moved in and out of Building 20, doing important research into physics (an early atomic accelerator was built here, as was the world’s first atomic clock); linguistics (Noam Chomsky worked here for many years); neurology (Jerome Lettvin’s pioneering experiments on the relationship between the eyes and brains of frogs took place here); acoustics (Amar Bose, founder of Bose Corporation, worked here). Researchers loved Building 20 precisely because it was such a dump. They could feel free to drill holes in walls for cables — or knock them down entirely for that matter — and do plenty of other things that would require reams of paperwork and several safety reviews and months of bureaucratic wrangling to do anywhere else.

Most fascinating of all for our purposes, Building 20 is also Ground Zero for hacker culture. During the late 1950s it was the home of the Tech Model Railroad Club, about half of which consisted of typical train enthusiasts and half of which were there for the intrinsic interest of the plumbing, so to speak: all those wires and switches and diodes found underneath the big tables that supported the track layout. Much of the vocabulary they developed remains with us to the present day: a bad design was “losing”; a broken piece was “munged” (“mashed until no good”); unnecessary extra pieces were “cruft”; and, yes, a “hack” was a particularly clever technical feat, and “hacking” was… you get the idea. This diction and, even more importantly, the way of thinking behind it was transferred into a new field when a former TMRC member and current MIT professor invited some members to have a go at a new toy: a home-built something called the TX-0, one of the first transistorized computers and one of the first designed to be programmed and operated interactively rather than functioning as essentially a huge static calculating and collating machine. Several of the men who had helped design it went on to form Digital Equipment Corporation, donating the very first complete prototype computer they ever made, of their debut PDP-1 model, to MIT for more TMRC alumni to swarm over. Thus cemented, the links among DEC, MIT, and hacker culture persisted through the heyday of the original PDP-10 Zork and on into the 1980s. Infocom’s own aging PDP-10, on which The Lurking Horror itself was written, was just one more testament to the durability of those links.

Building 20 was demolished at last in 1999 to make room for the Stata Center, a massive slab of postmodern architecture, sort of a 21st-century Sagrada Família, that was opened in 2004. In the tradition of its predecessor, the Stata Center has been plagued by leaks, plumbing problems, and structural failures since its opening. Perhaps a ghost or two lives on?

The Lurking Horror departs from reality in giving its version of Building 20 a basement and an underground connection to the central buildings of the campus. In the game’s defense, visitors to Building 20 often remarked that the ground floor was so dank and dark that it felt like a basement. For reasons that have been lost to history, MIT chose to label that ground floor, normally Floor 1 in the university’s nomenclature, as Floor 0, as if it was indeed a basement. Just after the building was demolished in 1999, a student hack stuck an elevator in the midst of the rubble leading to a “previously hidden” subbasement stretching five stories below ground-level, presumably home of some top-secret and quite possibly nefarious government research. Aliens, anyone? These days the joke is that Building 20 is actually still standing, but hidden behind an invisibility field — perhaps a gift of those same aliens?

At some point you’ll meet an urchin skulking about down here in the basement.

>x urchin
This is an urchin. He's a youngish teenager wearing a ski hat, running shoes, and a bulky, suspiciously bumpy, threadbare parka. He's jumpy, and looks suspiciously at you.

I’m going to spoil things just to the extent of telling you that what he’s carrying beneath his parka is a pair of bolt cutters. It appears that this fellow is a bicycle thief, a consistent plague on the MIT campus since time immemorial. Kids like this one who hang about, usually for shady purposes, are indeed known as “urchins” in student parlance. When their crimes get particularly blatant, “urchin alerts” are sent out to the affected areas to warn students and faculty to keep a close eye on their valuables.

At this point you’ll likely want to do something about those old pallets off to the east and then do a bit of exploring in that direction. When you’re ready, let’s go all the way west and down the stairs to the subbasement, and then squeeze northwest through the crack.

Tomb
This is a tiny, narrow, ill-fitting room. It appears to have been a left over space from the joining of two preexisting buildings. It is roughly coffin shaped. The walls are covered by decades of overlaid graffiti, but there is one which is painted in huge fluorescent letters that were apparently impossible for later artists to completely deface. On the floor is a rusty access hatch locked with a huge padlock.

>read graffiti
It reads "The Tomb of the Unknown Tool."

The Tomb of the Unknown Tool is a real place at MIT, and another semi-legendary one at that. Legend has it that long ago there was an MIT student who was trying to study — to “tool” in student parlance; similarly, the noun “tool” is a dismissive term for a good, conventionally diligent student — but couldn’t because of all the loud parties in his dorm. So he found a little cubbyhole far underground, filled with heating and air-conditioning pipes and ducts, and made it his home, eating there, sleeping there, and most of all tooling there in peace. The unknown tool himself was long gone even by the time Lebling first arrived at MIT in the late 1960s, but his legend lives on. Always an early destination of aspiring roof-and-tunnel hackers, the real Tomb is situated in roughly the same location as the one that’s found in the game. And its walls are indeed covered with graffiti left behind by the many who have visited.

The Lurking Horror is actually not the first game in which Lebling referred to the Tomb of the Unknown Tool. The original PDP-10 Zork includes a “Tomb of the Unknown Implementors,” with graffiti of its own that says to “Feel Free!”

In that spirit, feel free to go through the hatch here and explore even deeper. When you’re ready, let’s go southeast from the Tomb, up twice, south to the Infinite Corridor (which we’ll come back to in just a moment), and finally west into the great outdoors again.

Mass. Ave.
This is the main entrance to the campus buildings. Blinding snow obscures the stately Grecian columns and rounded dome to the east. You can barely make out the inscription on the pediment (which reads "George Vnderwood Edwards, Fovnder; P. David Lebling, Architect"). West across Massachusetts Avenue are other buildings, but you can't see them.

We’re now standing at the front door to MIT. The address of the imposing building that stands here, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, is the official address of the institution as a whole. Erected in 1939, the Rogers Building (Building 7) gets its name from that of MIT’s founder, William Barton Rogers. It also bears his name on its pediment, although no “Architect” is credited.

Massachusetts Avenue is the only MIT street name that remains unaltered in the game. That it shows up in abbreviated form as the location name is not accidental; it’s universally pronounced “Mass. Ave” by students.

But it’s cold out here, no? Let’s go back inside.

Infinite Corridor
The so-called infinite corridor runs from east to west in the main campus building. This is the west end. Side corridors lead north and south, and a set of doors leads west into the howling blizzard.

There is a plastic container here.

There is a largish machine being operated down the hall to the east.

The Infinite Corridor during MIThenge.

The Infinite Corridor is another source of much MIT lore. It’s the longest university corridor in the world, stretching east from the Rogers Building under the Great Dome and across the pre-World War II heart of the campus to Building 8 — a distance of 825 feet. One of the most celebrated events at MIT is the so-called “MIThenge,” when twice per year the sun shines just perfectly into the corridor to illuminate it down its entire length. If all that wasn’t enough to ensure the Infinite Corridor’s notoriety, many fondly remembered hacks have also taken place here. A popular theme for decades had been to deck out the Corridor like a highway of one sort or another, often complete with lane markings, road signs, and billboards.

>get container
Taken.

>x container
It's a plain plastic container with something written on it. The plastic container is closed.

>read container
"Frobozz Magic Floor Wax (and Dessert Topping)"

The joke above isn’t quite original, and for once it’s not an MIT-specific in-joke. It harks back to a classic skit from the very first season of Saturday Night Live, in which Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, and Chevy Chase bond over Shimmer, a floor wax and dessert topping. One can imagine Lebling laughing at this around the same time he was working on Maze War at MIT, the world’s first networked multiplayer first-person shooter which he helped create almost two decades before Doom.

Moving down the Infinite Corridor to the east, we come upon a maintenance man.

A maintenance man is here, riding a floor waxer.

The maintenance man’s presence is a very subtle shade of in-joke. MIT’s housekeeping and custodial staff tended to do their work in the middle of the night, when the campus was largely deserted. Hackers like Lebling and company, however, tended to keep exactly same sorts of odd hours, another tradition that stretched all the way back to the days of the TX-0; “legitimate” users always kept that machine booked during the day, leaving it available only during the nighttime for the likes of the Tech Model Railroad Club. Hackers were often the only students that the janitors and housekeepers ever actually encountered, and some surprising and kind of sweet friendships formed thanks to the forced proximity between these very different walks of life.

This particular maintenance man, however, definitely doesn’t want to be our friend. I recommend that you deal with him now, if you can. If you’ve been dutifully gathering up the stuff you come across, you should have everything you need. I’m going to go south from the center of the Infinite Corridor, but you don’t want to follow me to where I go next unless you save first because the door will lock behind us, and for once our master key won’t open it (a rather pointless bit of cruelty on the whole, although to his credit Lebling does warn us).

Great Court
In the spring and summer, this cheery green court is a haven from classwork. Right now, the majestic buildings of the main campus are almost invisible in the howling blizzard. A locked door bars your way to the north.

We’re standing now at the center of the original 1916 Cambridge campus, designed by architect William Welles Bosworth. This court was also known as the Great Court at the real MIT until 1974, when it was renamed Killian Court after former MIT president James Rhyne Killian. Despite the rechristening, the old name stuck around for a long time, especially among folks like Lebling who were here before the change. MIT architecture in general is noted for its complete disharmony, a riot of mismatched buildings that seems to include at least one example of every American architectural school of the last century along with plenty of bland beige buildings with no discernible style at all. This original part of the campus, however, is coolly neoclassical, the lushly manicured central court bordered by trees, the buildings on either side forming arms that seem to bid the world to enter, much like St. Peter’s Basilica. It’s here, the only really bucolic place on campus, that commencement ceremonies are held every year.

Back inside — and assuming you’ve dealt with the janitor — let’s go up, up, up, all the way to the very tiptop of the Great Dome. You’ll need to solve a puzzle or two to manage it, but I’m sure you’re up to it.

You scramble up icy surface of the dome, almost slipping a few times, but finally you make it to the top.

On the Great Dome
This is the very top of the Great Dome, a favorite place for Tech fraternities to install cows, Volkswagen Beetles, giant birthday candles, and other bizarre objects. The top is flat, round, and about five feet in diameter. It's very windy, which has kept the snow from accumulating here. The only way off is down.

In the exact center of the flat area is a bronze plug.

Bitter, bone-cracking cold assaults you continuously. The temperature and the blizzard conditions are both horrible.

Despite interlopers like the Stata Center, the Great Dome, referred to affectionately by students as “the center of the universe,” still stands as the most enduring architectural image of MIT. As the game has made evident, just getting up here at all is a major feat of roof-and-tunnel hacking. For the even more ambitious, it’s also the ultimate location for an MIT hack (in the practical-joking sense, that is). Over the years a police cruiser, an Apollo Lunar Module, a Doctor Who phone box, a self-propelled solar-powered subway car, and a living cow have all appeared up here. The Great Dome has been coated with tin foil and has been turned into R2-D2, Tolkien’s One Ring, a giant cupcake, and a Halloween pumpkin, while the lights that illuminate it at night seem to change color constantly to celebrate one occasion or another. One of the earliest and most legendary of the Great Dome hacks occurred in 1959, when a complete working Volkswagen was torn down, carted up to the Dome, and reassembled there in the course of one long night.

A fire engine perches on the Great Dome.

After you’ve investigated thoroughly up here, let’s get back to ground level and go east to the end of the Infinite Corridor. Going north, we pass through the Nutrition Department.

>n
Fruits and Nuts
This is the central corridor of the Nutrition Building. The main building is south, and a stairway leads down.

The MIT Nutrition Department is indeed referred to with a certain contempt as “Fruits and Nuts” by hackers. (Think back to those four basic food groups…)

Going down the stairs here and then southeast takes us to the basement of the Brown Building. Let’s go up to the lobby and outside again.

Brown Building
This is the lobby of the Brown Building, an eighteen-story skyscraper which houses the Meteorology Department and other outposts of the Earth Sciences. The elevator is out of order, but a long stairway leads up to the roof, and another leads down to the basement. A revolving door leads out into the night.

>exit
You enter the freezing, biting cold of the blizzard.

Small Courtyard
This courtyard is a triumph of modern architecture. It is spare, cold, angular, overwhelming in size, and bears a striking resemblance to a wind tunnel whenever the breeze picks up. Right now this is true of the whole campus, though. A huge mass lurks nearby, and an almost featureless skyscraper is to the north.

>x mass
You see nothing special about it.

Bitter, bone-cracking cold assaults you continuously. The temperature and the blizzard conditions are both horrible.

GUE’s Brown Building stands in for the real MIT’s Green Building, which is even taller, a full 21 stories and almost 300 feet. Built in 1964, it’s yet another architectural outlier in this campus full of outliers, not only the only structure of its kind at MIT but also the only one in Cambridge; no other building there comes close to its height. As such a blatant violation of MIT and Cambridge’s normal philosophy of “horizontal continuity,” its construction was greeted with considerable controversy, not to mention outrageous rumors about the methods used to circumvent Cambridge’s normal building laws. The first tenants found that its height and proximity to the rest of the campus created a sort of artificial wind tunnel, the breeze coming off the Charles River getting so amplified that on blustery days it was impossible to even open the doors. Luckily, there were also connecting tunnels (like the one we just came through) leading to other buildings, preventing a change in the weather from trapping people inside. The original doors were eventually replaced with revolving doors. These largely alleviated one problem, but, as the description from the game relates, the courtyard remains a remarkably unpleasant place, particularly in winter.

Not really one of MIT’s more beloved buildings for all of these reasons, the Green Building’s height and general prominence on campus have nevertheless made it a target for hacks to rival the popularity of the Great Dome. For almost as long as the Green Building has existed, it’s been a Halloween tradition to throw dozens or hundreds of pumpkins down from its roof. In 1974, a professor and some of his students launched a concerted effort to operate the world’s largest yo-yo from the roof of the building, but for once this ambitious hack never quite worked out. Since the advent of cheap LED lighting, the Green Building has taken on a new role as a massive billboard telling the world what MIT students are thinking about at any given time. In 2012, students made the national news by turning it into the world’s biggest game of Tetris, inviting passersby to have a go for all of Cambridge to see. (No pressure!)

The undefined “huge mass” that Lebling describes is a sly dig at another polarizing structure that sits before the Green Building, Alexander Calder’s monumental slab of modernist sculpture The Big Sail. When it was erected just a year after the Green Building itself, conventional wisdom had it that its primary purpose was to alleviate the wind-tunnel effect. But campus officials insisted that, no, this… whatever it is… exists only for aesthetic purposes. Oh, well… what better spot for a Big Sail than a wind tunnel? It does look a bit like one of Lovecraft’s horrid winged creatures might, at least if you squint just right, so I suppose it makes a good fit for the game.

The Green Building really does house, among other departments, many of MIT’s Meteorology and Earth Science facilities. In that respect its controversial height has been a blessing: the roof supports much meteorological and radio equipment used in various experiments. Let’s head inside and up there now.

Top Floor
This is the top of the stairway. A door leads out to the roof here, and you can hear the wind blowing beyond. There is a sign on the door.

>read sign
It says "NO ADMITTANCE!" In smaller, hand-written letters below, it says "This means you!" and below that in different handwriting, it says "Who, me?"

>unlock door with key
The door is now unlocked.

>open door
You push the door open, revealing a windswept, snow-covered roof. Frigid wind whips snow into your face.

When Dave Lebling was at MIT, he used to make his way out to the roof of the Green Building through a fire door that was much like this one. Its sign read, “Positively No Admittance, Opening Door Sounds Alarm.” The first student to trepidatiously push it open found that it did no such thing, and thus was yet another interesting space opened for exploration.

Let’s head onward, shall we?

>exit
You enter the freezing, biting cold of the blizzard.

Skyscraper Roof
A low parapet surrounds a small roof here. The air conditioning cooling tower and the small protrusion containing the stairs are dwarfed by a semitransparent dome which towers above you. The blowing snow obscures all detail of the city across the river to the south.

>x dome
The dome is large and semitransparent. It's made of some sort of milky-colored plastic. It dominates the roof. You can climb up to the entrance via a short ladder.

Bitter, bone-cracking cold assaults you continuously. The temperature and the blizzard conditions are both horrible.

>u
You push your way into the welcoming warmth inside.

Inside Dome
You are inside a large domed area. The dome contains equipment that makes it clear it is a weather observation station. For some reason, it also contains a small peach tree. Wind whistles outside, and snow blasts against the semitransparent material of the dome.

Something smashes against the glass of the dome! You turn and see a dark shape clinging to the outside of the structure.

As you can see from the picture of the real Green Building, its roof supports a large dome much like this one, full of meteorological equipment, albeit one that is opaque rather than transparent. Lebling insists, however, that there was once another dome that was semi-transparent like this one. Further, he insists that there really was a tree inside said dome, although he’s not sure that it was actually a peach tree. No one he asked seemed to have any idea who put it there or what its purpose was. Mysteries like this aren’t particularly unusual at MIT. Incomprehensible equipment from one esoteric research project or another positively litters the campus, often stashed in the very out-of-the-way corners that make roof-and-tunnel hacking so enticing.

Given that, why not a burgeoning temple to an eldritch god as well? Let’s head for the last stop on our tour, The Department of Alchemy — as soon as you’ve investigated the dome thoroughly and dealt with that inconvenient monster, that is. Afterward, you want to go back down to the basement, up into Building 8, and south from the eastern end of the Infinite Corridor.

Chemistry Building
This corridor is lined with closed, dark offices. At the south end of the corridor is a door with a light shining behind it. There is something written on the door.

>read door
Painted on the door, in calligraphy indistinguishable from any other door at Tech, is the phrase "Department of Alchemy." You always used to wonder what was behind that door.

As was the case with the Tomb of the Unknown Tool, you may be surprised to learn that the Department of Alchemy is a real place at MIT — or, at any rate, that this Department of Alchemy door is real. Like in the game, it’s inside the Department of Chemistry, an example of a hack dating back many decades that was just too good to ever unhack. And, again like in the game, the real door conceals a laboratory. But the people inside do not attempt to summon blasphemous creations from the Beyond, at least as far as anyone knows.

Inside the door you’ll find a tricky — and very dangerous! — sequence awaiting you. You definitely want to save before this one, as you’re probably about to get sacrificed a few times before you get it all sorted. When you do (get it all sorted, that is), you’ll have a class ring at your disposal.

>x hyrax
The G.U.E. Tech class ring is a gold ring depicting a hyrax eating a twig. Such rings are familiarly known as "brass hyraxes."

The actual MIT class ring shows, for some reason, an alleged beaver eating a twig. But it looks more like a rat, and is thus commonly referred to as a “brass rat.”

And at this point we’ve largely seen the sights in The Lurking Horror that relate back to MIT. But there’s still lots of puzzles to solve and a blasphemous evil to defeat, so I’ll leave you to it. Remember the four basic food groups — particularly the first — when you get tired, and remember that Hollywood Hijinx isn’t the only Infocom game that evinces a certain fascination with elevators. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little tour. If you have, I’m pretty sure there are a couple of virtual tip jars around here if your scroll to the top and look to the right. Good luck!

(If you’d like all of these annotations and more in a succinct form, feel free to download the gloss of the game that Janice Eisen so kindly prepared for me. This document was the basis for much of what I’ve written above. The Lurking Horror itself is available for purchase along with most of the other Infocom games as part of an iOS app.)

Comments
33 Responses

- Dan Schmidt

October 7, 2015 at 12:27 pm

MIT class of ’91 here! This is all generally quite accurate; nice work by you and Janice.

Just one cavil: the “one of you three will not graduate” story gets told about every top school and I suspect is false for all of them, including MIT. In fact, MIT’s undergraduate graduation rate is 93%.

- William Hern

October 7, 2015 at 6:58 pm

I agree with Dan. My wife was told the same thing when she started her Electrical Engineering degree at McGill.

- Jimmy Maher

October 8, 2015 at 8:14 am

Okay, excised that one in three bit. It came from Steven Levy’s Hackers, which is normally pretty trustworthy, but apparently not in this case.

- ZUrlocker

October 8, 2015 at 4:09 pm

I think the “one in three” notion is apocryphal. The underlying stats may show that this is not actually the case, but I believe it is communicated at many high-pressure schools, whether officially or unofficially.

- Jayle Enn

October 7, 2015 at 2:03 pm

I recall a much shorter, though similar, explanation of connections between GUE Tech and MIT published in an issue of The Status Line. Someone had claimed it was really Miskatonic U, and Lebling decided to set them straight. This was much more informative, all things considered, and the bits of transcript really brought me back. Thank you. :)

I still love this game to bits, even though someone had misplaced the copy protection for my first copy. There was just something about exploring real-world locations while dealing with spurts of nightmarish imagery that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.

- TsuDhoNimh

October 7, 2015 at 8:46 pm

The thrill of exploring real-world locations in a nightmare-world setting is also evoked really well by Fallout 3 with its post-apocalyptic Washington, DC.

I had this sensation in reverse when, about 25 years after I’d played the original Colossal Cave Adventure game, I visited the real cave in Kentucky and loved the feeling that I was inhabiting a landscape that used to only exist in words on the screen.

- Torbjörn Andersson

October 9, 2015 at 6:15 pm

> even though someone had misplaced the copy protection for my first copy

Something like that happened to me with Stationfall. Not only had the store I bought it from stamped their name discreetly on the back of the blueprints, the three forms (one of which has the list of course headings you need to even get to the space station) were missing. I’m guessing some employee “borrowed” them, but at this point Infocom were gone and this was their last copy, so they couldn’t give me a replacement. I decided to keep it.

Fortunately, the Stationfall copy protection was actually pretty easy to get around with brute force and some lucky guesses based on the picture of the forms on the back of the box.

- Lisa H.

October 7, 2015 at 10:22 pm

The description of the “beyond-state-of-the-art whiz-bang pc” has always amused me, since even by the first time I played this game in the 90s, my home computer had pretty much surpassed it (okay, a modem, not a LAN, but still). Technology Marches On, and all.

Much of the vocabulary they developed remains with us to the present day: a bad design was “losing”; a broken piece was “munged” (“mashed until no good”); unnecessary extra pieces were “cruft”; and, yes, a “hack” was a particularly clever technical feat, and “hacking” was… you get the idea.

A little surprised you didn’t mention the Jargon File here.

The actual MIT class ring shows, for some reason, an alleged beaver eating a twig.

As a symbol of industriousness, perhaps?

- William Hern

October 9, 2015 at 10:26 am

I’m not sure that I agree with Jimmy’s statement that the “really whiz-bang pc” would have been far in excess of what the average student could expect to use. I remember touring multiple computer science departments in the UK in late 1987 and both the universities of Edinburgh and Manchester had computing labs for their first year students full of Sun-3 workstations. These machines definitely fulfilled the 3M criteria.

True, the workstations were newly installed at the time, but I’m sure that some similar US education establishments would have had them as well. I bet MIT would have had some.

And yes, I’m puzzled too as to why the game referred to it as a pc rather than a workstation. I guess Infocom felt that the term “workstation” would be too obscure for most adventure players.

- Jimmy Maher

October 9, 2015 at 1:32 pm

The character you play in The Lurking Horror doesn’t seem to be a computer-science student or all that terribly knowledgeable about them. You don’t seem to know much about what the hacker’s doing, etc. I just found it a little questionable that a student would use such a “whiz-bang pc” for writing a classics paper. I’m sure they existed and were used for more demanding tasks.

- Yeechang Lee

October 20, 2019 at 8:05 am

MIT is the one place where such a computer would be used for humanities homework. Among Project Athena’s goals was to install 3M workstations around the MIT campus, and to encourage students of all disciplines to use them for everyday tasks. Eisen would have graduated just before their installation but Lebling, given his ties to the institute, would likely have been aware of their availability by the game’s 1987’s release.

- Janice Eisen

October 8, 2015 at 2:17 am

Great job, Jimmy! There’s a beaver on the Brass Rat because it’s MIT’s mascot; the official reason is that the beaver is nature’s engineer, and students like to point out additionally that it is nocturnal. In recent years the beaver mascot has been given the name Tim, but that’s after my time.

I would agree with Dan Schmidt’s comment about “one in three”; I never heard that story about MIT, which is proud of its graduation rate. The more common and appropriate description is that each year, MIT takes 1000 of the smartest kids in the world and throws them onto a bell curve.

Like this blog, The Lurking Horror was clearly a labor of love.

- Dom

October 9, 2015 at 2:40 am

> Let’s login, shall we?

Typo: should be “log in”.

> [Stallman] would have held Infocom in contempt for attempting to market their innovations.

Many hackers do have some disdain for marketing people, but was RMS ever really against the commerce? He’d be okay with it these days anyway, if they released source code so he could hack it.

In his early days, anyone in the lab (even someone dropping in off the street) could hack on anything. And then companies clamied ownership, admins added passwords, colleagues started working with “classified” data, …

> For reasons that have been lost to history, MIT chose to label that ground floor, normally the first floor in the American nomenclature, as Floor 0

This is a non-sequiter: having a number other than 1 doesn’t mean it’s not the first floor. I suggest “normally Floor 1”.

> The Tomb of the Unknown Tool is a real place at MIT, and another semi-legendary one at that.

I wonder if this was the inspiration for Hollyfeld’s home in the 1985 film “Real Genius”.

- Jimmy Maher

October 9, 2015 at 8:07 am

Typo: should be “log in”.

“Login” and “log in” are both acceptable verbs in this case in modern English.

Many hackers do have some disdain for marketing people, but was RMS ever really against the commerce? He’d be okay with it these days anyway, if they released source code so he could hack it.

For a sampling of Stallman’s attitudes toward commercialization at the time, see the war between Lisp Machines and Symbolics. Stallman did work on the former, but only because he thought the latter was a far greater evil. This story, as well as that of Stallman’s attitude toward passwords and complete transparency (or the lack thereof), is told quite well in Levy’s Hackers. Had Symbolics chosen to release its products under an open-source license, it is indeed likely his attitude would have been very different. But it’s important to remember that the open-source business model didn’t really exist at this time. Thus commercialization inevitably meant propriety code — for Symbolics and Infocom and lots of others. And to *that* Stallman was and remains absolutely opposed.

This is a non-sequiter: having a number other than 1 doesn’t mean it’s not the first floor. I suggest “normally Floor 1”.

That dependent clause was for the benefit of international readers, who may not realize that unlike the rest of the world Americans consider the ground floor the first floor. Having lived overseas a few years now, this is one of the (seemingly ever increasing number of) things that now strike me as strange whenever I go back home for a visit. That’s what I was trying to say anyway. While I’m having a little trouble reading it as a complete non sequitur, I definitely could have put it better. Thanks!

- Dom

October 10, 2015 at 12:30 am

I don’t agree “login” is a verb. Lots of people use it as such (it may well be traceable to MIT hackers, not renowned for their grammar); but the illusion falls apart on conjugation, which inevitably suggests “log” as the verb. There are all kinds of similar word pairs (“check out”, “work around”, “go to”, “throw up”, “look over”) that follow the same pattern: the verb form is two words, there are hyphenated noun and adjective forms, and often there’s a non-hyphenated compound noun (particularly for common pairs).

Re-reading “Hackers” isn’t a bad idea. I looked over https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html#. He does mention that investors will “take control” of a company, more an indictment of corporate form rather than commerce (and it’s not clear whether he’s just concerned about interference in technical matters, which for Free Software could be worked around by forking). He’s had 20 years of hindsight anyway; it’s not hard to imagine the initial reaction being less cogent. The history can be quite interesting—thanks for writing about it in this ludic context!

Regarding “non-sequiter”, you implied MIT labelled the ground floor as something other than the first floor. They didn’t: building owners almost always label with nominal numbers, leaving the public to determine the ordinal phrases to use. So MIT called it “0”, but it’s still the “first floor” in American terms (floor 1 being the second–certainly less convenient than the non-American/Canadian convention, which has a nice correlation here).

- Jimmy Maher

October 12, 2015 at 9:49 am

Okay, you sold me on “log in.” There’s also the fact that you can’t say you have “loginned.” Thanks!

- David Boddie

October 9, 2015 at 10:39 am

“Having lived overseas a few years now, this is one of the (seemingly ever increasing number of) things that now strike me as strange whenever I go back home for a visit.”

That is strange given that you seem to have lived in at least one other European country that uses the same floor numbering system!

- Jimmy Maher

October 9, 2015 at 1:29 pm

:) I was thinking more of the way people talk about these things in conversation. Here in Denmark, if you say you live or work on the first floor you mean what Americans would call the second floor. Floor numbering systems, on the other hand, do vary a lot from building to building.

- David Boddie

October 9, 2015 at 8:21 pm

Even the idiosyncrasies section of the appropriate Wikipedia page doesn’t really fully address the inconsistency of floor numbering systems. ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storey#Idiosyncrasies

- Bernie

October 10, 2015 at 4:39 pm

Once more, great article !

You really brought forward Lebling’s care in recreating the campus life “look and feel”, which is , and i think this is your main idea here, The Lurking Horror’s main selling point. From reading this and your previous post I have reached the conclusion that perhaps Infocom an Activision marketed this adventure in a very lazy way, just exploiting the horror aspect.

I say this from personal experienc as well : I didn’t attend college at MIT , and hence am not familiar with its “lore”. Nevertheless, I graduated from my country’s top technical university, which was modelled on MIT back in the 1970’s, and can most definitely “get” most of TLH’s ambiance (after your post i’m sure I’ll “get” it all in a fresh playtrhrough). I think this kind of environment is more “universal” than most people think, mainly because MIT’s alumni and influence have spread worldwide. When Lebling was writing about his own college memories, he also was, unwittingly ? , striking a nostalgic chord within many tech graduates outside the MIT-club. A bunch of us former students from Science-and-Tech-only can remember similar places and legends, regardless of geographic location or language.

Gee, this post even made me forget about the Lovecraft connection !

- Jimmy Maher

October 12, 2015 at 8:41 am

Thanks!

I’m not sure I feel inclined to hugely fault Infocom or Activision’s marketing for this game in particular (when speaking about the games in general, one can of course find plenty of fault). “The ghastly visions of H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King” has a lot more pop than “a nostalgic tribute to university life.” Yes, the latter reads as much more literary, much more niche, and given the values surrounding interactive fiction today that has a definite appeal. But neither Infocom nor Activision were trying to be niche — though by 1987 circumstances had pretty much put Infocom there anyway.

- Bernie

October 10, 2015 at 4:41 pm

sorry ! ” Science-and-Tech-only SCHOOLS ” . just a typo.

- jay

October 12, 2015 at 5:03 am

Much as I love this website– and your posts really are something that I look forward to every day– I feel that good taste behooves me to rain on this particular parade.

In a way, this cloying MIT insiderness is probably the most insidious aspect of our modern world (and certainly throughout the 20th century)– and should not go unexamined. I think there’s a very specific relationship between the rise of “geek media” and its explicit overtures towards worlds of whimsy and infantalization, particularly in how it was used at schools like MIT, with the general American distaste of admitting our own evils.

To wit: all of the in-jokes, all of the backslapping about the latest and greatest hack, all of the various efforts to profess emotional ownership over a corporate media that is slightly less accessible than other corporate media (I prefer Monthy Python to Mork and Mindy), all of this should be viewed as either a conscious or unconscious anesthetic applied to the minds and souls of people whose function in life is little more than serving the industrial military complex.

It should be of no surprise that school like MIT encourages a shroud being thrown over its actual purpose, which is to build technologies that will aid the military in reducing human bodies to lifeless char. This should not celebrated. It’s massively distasteful and an education at that institution is like four years in the vomitorium, with the rest of us as its slaves.

- Jimmy Maher

October 12, 2015 at 9:23 am

I don’t *entirely* disagree with you. I have plenty of problems of my own with nerd culture, and frequently take a critical stance toward it here on the blog. And I agree that it’s absurd to judge others by the types of media they enjoy or any other markers of inclusion and exclusion.

That said, I think you’ve to some extent misjudged the intent of this article. This piece isn’t intended to take a stance on whether all of this is good, bad, or indifferent, and certainly isn’t intended as a recruitment tool for MIT. It’s rather intended to highlight the culture of this institution that, love it or hate it, was ingrained in Infocom’s very DNA. To really understand Infocom, you have to understand MIT. After that, you can make your own judgments, and take it or leave it as you will. (For the record, I’m happy to do the latter. I find MIT a very interesting place to read and write about, but I have no regrets for my own education in the humanities in a somewhat, um, less hallowed institution.)

As far as the role of the military, it is true that MIT has always received substantial funding from the military, and that this funding can be a bit uncomfortable to contemplate even for many involved in the research it enables. It’s also true that this is a subject worth examining carefully — albeit that wasn’t the intent of *this* article. But plenty of research that goes on at MIT has nothing to do with the military, and plenty of good has come even out of projects that *were* largely funded by the military, not least much of the underpinning of the revolutionary communications medium we’re using right now. It’s a complicated, knotty subject, and should probably neither be shoehorned into a light piece like this article nor dismissed with the claim that MIT’s actual purpose is “to build technologies that will aid the military in reducing human bodies to lifeless char.” One of its purposes? Perhaps yes, perhaps unfortunately. Its “actual” purpose? Come now!

- David Boddie

October 12, 2015 at 10:32 am

And there was I thinking that the part about Building 20 was a subtle commentary on the influence of commercial and military interests on academia: at first overt out of necessity, then using access to resources as a way to bring in new recruits, before finally becoming part of the background – almost “invisible”, you might say. ;-)

The idea of looking at MIT from a different perspective does lead to interesting discussions about the way real life universities, or college culture, are represented in games. I’ve never played The Lurking Horror so I don’t know if it can be read as a commentary or critique of MIT, and maybe that would be reading too much into it, anyway.

- Jimmy Maher

October 12, 2015 at 11:20 am

There are certainly interesting discussions to be had on the subject, but I don’t really see any of that in The Lurking Horror itself. It’s a guy looking back fondly on a place where he had spent quite a number of good years — full stop. Lebling was and is a thoughtful person, so I’m sure he has opinions, but I don’t see him trying to advance them through this game.

- Cmdrfan

October 16, 2015 at 4:01 pm

Man ! feelin’ a little cranky and obnoxious, aren’t we ?

Insiderness ? Geek Media ? , I guess you must be trying to get at some kind of “nerd conspiracy” theory.

You shouldn’t take Jimmy’s article, or Lebling’s game for that matter, so “seriously”. You’re just missing the whole point, especially when you criticize Jimmy’s choice of this subject.

Lebling is not promoting any MIT-glorification or “insiderness” , he’s just one of many writers crafting a detailed setting from his own experience. If we follow your logic all the way through, we may conclude that Melville and Hemingway were promoting “fisherman culture” and promoting animal cruelty. We may also conclude Joseph Conrad was an “India Company Insider” promoting colonialism. Or that maybe J.K. Rowling is subtly washing our brains with “Boarding School Culture” and is an agent of the British Educational-Industrial Complex.

- Michael Russo

October 15, 2015 at 8:19 pm

One of my favorite Infocom games really, and though I never wound up going to MIT I kinda sorta always wanted to just because of the game. It might also be because I just like the idea of wandering around a complex of buildings late at night by discovering hidden tunnels and passageways with no one around and a huge blizzard going on…

- Adele

May 11, 2016 at 3:15 am

“We start our adventurous evening one dark and snowy winter night in GUE Tech’s so-called “Computer Center,” which corresponds to MIT’s Building 13 (an ominous start, no?).”

The joke at the end made me nearly choke on my coffee at the reference desk.

- Pingback: House of Roy | ginHill.com

- UpTooLate

May 26, 2018 at 10:12 pm

This sentence: “Over the years a police cruiser, an Apollo Lunar Module, a Doctor Who phone box, a self-propelled solar-powered subway car, and a living cow have all appeared up here.” Should probably read “Doctor Who police box” (as seen here: https://goo.gl/WMaAjR).

- Leo Vellés

November 1, 2019 at 12:47 pm

Just below Richard Stallman’s picture: “Janice told me the the story of joining a “very unofficial student-run tour of the roofs and tunnels” as a freshman. ”
One double “the”.

- Jimmy Maher

November 1, 2019 at 3:00 pm

Thanks!

Nord and Bert
October 16, 2015

Fair Warning: a handful of puzzle spoilers are sprinkled through this article.

For the most part, Infocom weathered Activision’s demand that they suddenly double their output of games almost unbelievably well. While I fancy I can see evidence of their sudden prolificacy in a parser that could have been a little bit smarter here or a puzzle that could have used just a little more thought there, I certainly can’t say that any of the games I’ve written about so far were spoiled by the new pressure. The one glaring exception to that rule, the only title that truly does seem like a tragic victim of its circumstances, is the one I’m writing about today, Jeff O’Neill’s Nord and Berd Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It. Its failure to become the game it might have been is only made more disheartening by the fact that it was the most boldly experimental game concept Infocom had dared since Steve Meretzky’s A Mind Forever Voyaging, the perfect antidote to the sense of been-there/done-that ennui that was beginning to afflict some of Infocom’s other designs along with the Imps themselves. What could have represented a badly needed new direction would prove, like A Mind Forever Voyaging, a detour to nowhere.

We can see the seed of Nord and Bert in another Meretzky game, Leather Goddesses of Phobos. That game’s most brilliant puzzle of all from a crowded field of contenders, still justly remembered and loved today, is a “T-removing machine” that can turn rabbits into rabbis and trays into “little Ray whatsisname from second grade.” This sort of interaction, all about the words themselves that carried all the freight in an all-text Infocom game, could never be entirely replicated in one of ICOM’s point-and-click adventures, in a Sierra animated adventure game, nor even in one of Magnetic Scroll’s text adventures with pretty pictures. For an Infocom that was feeling increasingly embattled by all of the above and more, that had a definite appeal: “Let’s see you try to do this with your fancy graphics!”

After writing Ballyhoo and duly putting in some time as Sisyphus pushing the rock that was the Bureaucracy project up that hill, Jeff O’Neill decided to take Meretzky’s idea to the next level, to make an entire game that was all about the words out of which it was formed. He approached his game of wordplay in what he calls a “backwards” fashion, beginning with the puzzles rather than any set fictional genre or concept, spending days with his nose buried in references books of clichés and homonym pairs and poring over a wide variety of word puzzles from the likes of Games Magazine. To keep things somewhat manageable for the player, he decided to make his new game a series of “short stories” rather than a single extended experience, a first for Infocom. This way each of the segments could focus on one type of wordplay. The fictions for each segment became whatever was most convenient for the type of puzzles O’Neill wanted to present there. Only quite late in the process did he come up with an overarching story to bind the segments together, of the “mixed-up Town of Punster” that’s beset with a confusion of wordplay. You must “cleanse the land of every wrongful, wordful deed” by completing the seven mini-games and a master game combining all of the types of puzzles from the earlier parts. This finale you can naturally only access after completing everything else.

While the master game’s existence does give a nod toward the traditional idea of the holistic, completeable adventure game, most of Nord and Bert departs radically from what people had long since come to expect of a text adventure. In addition to the unusual segmented structure, which led Infocom to dub the game “Interactive Short Stories” rather than “Interactive Fiction” on the box, many other tried-and-true attributes are missing in action. Mapping, for instance, is gone entirely. Infocom in general had been growing steadily less interested in this part of the text-adventure paradigm for years before Nord and Bert, first having excised the mazes and confusing nonreciprocal room connections that mark Zork, and of late having taken to including maps of one sort or another showing their games’ geographies right in the packages as often as not. Nord and Bert, however, takes it yet one step further, eliminating compass directions entirely in favor of a list of accessible rooms in the status line. Thanks to the segmented structure that holds each section to no more than a handful of rooms, you can simply “go to” the room of your choice. Actually, you usually don’t even have to do that much: just typing the name of a room, all by itself, is usually sufficient to send you there.

Indeed, Nord and Bert displays itself to best advantage when it barely feels like an imperative-driven text adventure at all, but rather an exercise in pure wordplay not quite like anything that had come to a computer before. Simply typing the name of an object will cause you to examine it — no “examine” or even “x” verb required — and many of the textual transformations that form the meat of its puzzles require simply typing the correct word or phrase rather than carrying out an in-world action per se. It all amounted to a very conscious bid to, as O’Neill puts it, “attract new fans as well as making the old ones happy. I tried to fulfill this goal by taking the tedium out of the game (mapping, etc.) and making the game more approachable for people.”

Like all Infocom games, Nord and Bert feels like a game for smart people, but it feels aimed toward a different sort of smart person than had been the norm heretofore, and not just because of the absence of dungeons and dragons or rockets and rayguns. A perfect world, at least by the lights of Infocom and Jeff O’Neill, would have seen it replacing the New York Times crossword puzzle on the breakfast tables of urbane sophisticates looking for something to toy with over their Sunday morning coffee. To keep it from becoming too frustrating for this more casual audience, O’Neill tried to build into the game both an extra layer of forgiveness and a tempting challenge to return to on the next Sunday by making it possible to “solve” most sections without actually figuring out all of the puzzles. Scoring is handled as a simple accounting of puzzles available and puzzles solved, and you can always jump back into a section you’ve completed to try to get those last pesky points. Likewise, you can always get out of one section to try another if you need a change of pace; the game remembers your progress in each section for you when you decide to jump back in. And if you absolutely can’t figure something out, Nord and Bert includes a built-in hint system that doles out clues bit by bit, InvisiClues-style, until finally giving the whole solution. This marks yet another first for Infocom in a game that’s fairly stuffed with them.

O’Neill’s prose feels as arch and playfully sophisticated — if sometimes just a bit too self-consciously so — as a classic New Yorker piece: “In this time when phraseology is practiced with mischief as the sole black art, when the currency is debased with the ceaseless random coinage of words, when verbicide is statistically the common household tragedy — now is the time when such a doer of good words is most welcome.” Looking for a visual counterpart to his style for the box art and the feelies, O’Neill happened upon a book of cartoons called The Day Gravity Was Turned Off in Topeka by one Kevin Pope, a journeyman commercial artist for greeting-card companies and the like who was trying to make it as a newspaper cartoonist via a syndicated panel called Inside Out. His work was perhaps just a little too redolent of Gary Larson’s The Far Side to stand out in its own right, but then The Far Side was also hugely popular among exactly the sorts of people at whom Nord and Bert was aimed — and a Kevin Pope didn’t carry the same price tag as a Gary Larson. A deal was quickly worked out, with Infocom pledging both royalties and a prominent plug for his newspaper cartoon and book in return for a dozen or so original cartoon panels to accompany the game. Each plays with words in one way or another, but otherwise they have little to do with the game they accompany. Nord and Bert is one of the few Infocom games that can be played perfectly happily without ever even glancing at the feelies, yet another nod in the direction of being a more casual sort of experience. Despite this, the best of the cartoons not only appears on the box cover but also gives the game its name — a name which, once again, has nothing to do with the contents of the disk.

Two more of the Kevin Pope cartoons that were included with Nord and Bert.

Nord and Bert must have sounded pretty great in principle, both a bold new gameplay concept for a company that was growing tired of making the same old same old and a game that seemed like it could have the potential to reach a whole new type of player if Infocom could — and this was admittedly the trickiest part — find a way to reach her. Even in practice, when we fire up the actual game, things start out fine. The first section, the “Shopping Bizarre,” is the strongest in the game, a fresh delight to play after lots of adventures revolving around keys, maps, and fiddly in-world interactions. Its puzzles are all about finding homonyms, words that sound alike but are spelled differently, like a chocolate moose and chocolate mousse. Nord and Bert continues to acquit itself quite well in the next few sections. The second, “Play Jacks,” is themed around words and phrases that include a “jack”: “jack of all trades,” “jackhammer,” “Jacuzzi,” etc. Next comes “Buy the Farm,” another very strong section that deals in folksy clichés. And then we have “Eat Your Words,” which is all about English idioms like its title. But after that, alas, everything starts to go wrong. Having managed despite a few wobbles to keep its balance in a death-defying highwire act worthy of O’Neill’s earlier Ballyhoo for about half its length, when Nord and Bert finally falls it falls hard.

To understand why and how that should happen, we first have to acknowledge what a dangerous tightrope Nord and Bert really is walking right from the beginning. If you characterized the entire game as little more than a series of guess the verbs, nouns, and phrases, I might be able to accuse you of being ungenerous but I really couldn’t say that you were wrong. As such, it cuts against almost everything that Infocom had been striving for years now to make their games be. The parser, which Infocom had envisioned becoming eventually so smart and flexible that it would fade into the background entirely, a seamless conduit between player and world, is the entire focus of the play here. And instead of spurning the need for outside knowledge, instead of including everything you need to know to solve it within itself and its feelies as other Infocom games strove to do, Nord and Bert’s success as a game is completely dependent on its player’s knowledge of clichés, turns of phrase, and quirks of American English. Certainly just about anyone who didn’t grow up with English as her first language will have a horrible time here. I tried to play Nord and Bert recently with my wife, who speaks excellent English but nevertheless has it as her third language. We gave up pretty quickly. Most of it was just baffling to her; it’s not much fun to watch your playing partner grin and giggle with each new intuitive flash as you wonder what the hell he’s on about. I would venture to guess that even some native speakers not from the United States could have some trouble with the folksy Americanisms in sections like “Buy the Farm.” When Nord and Bert does finally fall off that tightrope even for a wordplay-loving native-speaking American like me, it’s almost more surprising that we made it this far together than it is shocking that the game finally went too far.

Still, the section where the big fall happens, “Act the Part,” is a mess by any standard. It seems that already by this point O’Neill was beginning to run out of workable wordplay ideas. The connection of “Act the Part” to the ostensible premise of the game as a whole is, at best, tenuous. You find yourself on the set of a banal sitcom, needing to determine the best action to advance a script that’s unknown to you. It devolves into a literal guessing game of trying to figure out what arbitrary action the game wants next, and a well-nigh impossible one at that. I’d be surprised if anyone in the history of Nord and Bert has ever actually connected a knife and “a bottle in front of me” to arrive at giving your deadbeat brother-in-law Bob a lobotomy without recourse to the hints. This is just bad, horrifically unfair design no matter how much we strain to make concessions for the sheer originality of the game as a whole. Just to add insult to injury (to use a phrase of which Nord and Bert would be proud), you have to solve every single inscrutable puzzle in this section to receive credit for completing the section as a whole.

The next section, “The Manor of Speaking” is also all but insoluble, and also bound by no identifiable connecting tissue of a consistent type of wordplay to give you some traction in divining its mysteries. A sample howler: you’re expected to spook a portrait of Karl Marx, whom the game tell you in the hints — but, naturally, nowhere else — “fears insurgencies,” by sticking a ticking alarm clock in a box and dropping it in front of him. Adventure games just don’t get any more “guess what the author is thinking” than that. The penultimate section, called “Shake a Tower,” recovers somewhat from those lowlights by at least once again building its interactions around an identifiable wordy theme, in this case Spoonerisms, word pairs with transposed sounds: for example, “gritty pearl” and “pretty girl.” But, with no contextual clues to tell you what you’re aiming to accomplish or what the game might expect, the scope of possibility remains far too wide. In short, all of these latter puzzles are just too hard, and not in a good way — a problem that persists into a master-game finale that throws everything that has come before into one unholy blender.

When playing Nord and Bert, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that at some point Infocom just gave up on it in light of all the other games on their plate, that they just did what they could with it and shoved it out the door as it was. An ironic source of temptation to do just that was likely those built-in hints, always a dangerous two-edged sword from the standpoint of good design. Players could never actually get stuck on the worst puzzles, could never have all that much to complain about, since the solutions were always waiting right there in the game itself, right? Well, no. Players still want to solve games for themselves. It’s not much fun, and kind of emasculating to boot, to play a game from its hint menu.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Nord and Bert, it also represented something new for Infocom from a technical standpoint, a compromise between the venerable original 128 K Z-Machine, which ran on just about every computer under the sun but whose limitations now seemed to bite harder with every successive game, and the 256 K Interactive Fiction Plus Z-Machine, which offered a hell of a lot more breathing room along with more screen-formatting flexibility but could only run on computers with the magic combination of 128 K of memory and an 80-column screen, two requirements that excluded it from the slowly fading but still industry-dominating Commodore 64. Internally, Infocom referred to games for the 128 K Z-Machine as “ZIPs” (for “Z-Machine Interpreter Program,” not to be confused with the compression format) and those for the 256 K as “EZIPs” (“Extended ZIPs”). Nord and Bert debuted a new category, the “LZIP” (presumably “Large ZIP”) that slotted into a sweet spot right in between. While built around the revised Interactive Fiction Plus Z-Machine, the LZIP format could adapt itself to 40-column screens and, as long as its total size was restricted to under 180 K, could be shoehorned into a Commodore 64 on a double-sided disk. That extra 50 K or so of space may not sound like much today, but it was precious for Imps used to a hard limit of 128 K, enabling features like Nord and Bert’s built-in hints. [1]The formats are generally referred to today by the version numbering found in the story files themselves. Versions 1 and 2 were early versions of the 128 K Z-Machine used for the original releases of Zork I and II respectively. Version 3 is the finalized, stable version of the 128 K Z-Machine on which those early games were re-released, and which thereafter ran the bulk of Infocom’s games for most of the company’s existence. Version 4 is the first 256 K Z-Machine, used for the Interactive Fiction Plus (“EZIP”) games A Mind Forever Voyaging, Trinity, and Bureaucracy, and now for the line of “LZIP” games like Nord and Bert. Yes, this is all quite confusing. No, if you’re not deeply interested in Infocom’s technology as opposed to their art, it’s not ultimately all that important. And yes, it’s going to get still more complicated before we’re done with their story.The Lurking Horror’s sound support on the Amiga to a whole new major revision of the Z-Machine for Beyond Zork. Much as Infocom and Activision judged all this feverish innovation necessary to have any hope of remaining competitive, it certainly wasn’t making their testing process any easier, especially when taken in combination with the brutal release schedule.

All of this confused activity may have had something to do not only with Nord and Bert’s fundamental design failings but also with some fit-and-finish issues that are very unusual to see in an Infocom game. In one or two places, for instance, correct responses are met first with a “[That sentence isn’t one I recognize.],” followed immediately by some text telling you that you have in fact solved a puzzle. Yes, it’s all made slightly more understandable by the radical overhauling the standard parser had to undergo for this game, but, nevertheless, the absence of exactly these sorts of glitches and parserial non sequiturs was one of the things that usually distinguished Infocom from even worthy competitors like Magnetic Scrolls. It’s hard to imagine these sorts of problems sneaking into a released Infocom game of an earlier, less hectic year. But then again, the very fact that such a strange experiment as Nord and Bert got a release at all is likely down to the simple reality that Infocom suddenly had so many slots to fill. With Activision craving so much pasta, might as well throw some crazy-colored penne at the wall as well as the usual spaghetti to see if it stuck.

Predictably enough, it didn’t, at least not that well. It turned out that plenty of traditional text adventurers just wanted their spaghetti, had no interest in the alternative Nord and Bert offered them. After the game’s release, William Carte, a reviewer for the very traditionalist Questbusters magazine (they had already found the likes of A Mind Forever Voyaging and Alter Ego far too avant garde for their tastes), became one of many to speak for this constituency. He misses mapping, saying “half the fun” is “finding secret doors and locations.” As for the puzzles that are there:

If you have a great vocabulary (or enjoy reading Webster’s Dictionary) and like limericks and wordplay, you may enjoy Nord and Bert. (As someone else phrased it, this game is for “word nerds.”) True adventure gamers will probably be disappointed.

With people who enjoyed Nord and Bert thus duly put in their place as untrue adventure gamers in this review and others like it, the game was going to face even more of an uphill commercial climb than other Infocom games of this late era. And as for the dream of reaching a new sort of brainy yet more casual player… well, you can probably guess about how well that went. Thanks to some fairly gushing articles in places like The New York Times Book Review and The Boston Globe Magazine, Infocom had actually begun to make some modest inroads into the less stereotypically nerdy end of the smart-people demographic during their peak years of 1983 and 1984. Sadly, however, free exposure like that hadn’t been their lot in life for some time now. These days they lacked the resources to mount an outreach effort of the necessary scale to reach such folks — or of any scale at all, really — and Activision, having now pivoted so completely to the traditional videogame market of teenage boys, neither understood nor cared about O’Neill’s broader vision for the game. Pushed out with little fanfare in September of 1987 in tandem with Plundered Hearts — the two already represented Infocom’s fifth and sixth games of the year, with yet three more being prepped for release within the next few months —  Nord and Bert if anything did somewhat better than its esoteric style and all but nonexistent promotion might have prompted one to expect, managing to sell about 17,000 copies, slightly more than its release partner and about 5000 more than the title that still remained Infocom’s worst-selling ever, Hollywood Hijinx. Still, the folks making that New York Times crossword had little cause for concern.

Nord and Bert, Jeff O’Neill’s second game, would also prove to be his last. He left Infocom shortly after its release, part of a slow exodus that began as relations with Activision continued to worsen and the future looked more and more bleak. His career at Infocom stands as the most disappointing of all of the Imps, the story of a fine writer and boldly innovative if inexperienced designer who began two wonderfully promising games in Ballyhoo and Nord and Bert only to have them fall apart — and both largely due to pressures outside his control. Given O’Neill’s inexperience, both just needed that extra bit of tender loving care that Infocom wasn’t quite in a position to give them. It’s not surprising, then, that he remains by far the most embittered of all the former Imps, the only one who declined to be interviewed for the Get Lamp documentary and, indeed, the only one to have maintained a nearly complete silence since Infocom folded.

Understandable as his bitterness is, at least one thing ought to lessen its sting.  Both of his games, commercial disappoints though they may have been in their day, have like A Mind Forever Voyaging proved hugely influential on the art of interactive fiction in the longer term. Just as Ballyhoo pioneered a new, less frustrating form of plotting that tailors the story to the player’s progress rather than making the player conform to the game’s chronology, Nord and Bert introduced to the world the delicious possibilities for interactive wordplay, for text adventures that revel in the very textuality that sets them apart from their graphical cousins. A persistent sub-genre has been the result, one that includes gems like Nick Montfort’s Ad Verbum and Emily Short’s more recent and even more delightful Counterfeit Monkey. Thanks to more time in the gestation, many more years of collective design wisdom on which to draw, and an audience of players that’s much more accepting of alternate approaches to interactive fiction than were many of Infocom’s fans, these games and a handful of other contenders like them largely avoided Nord and Bert’s worst pratfalls to become acknowledged classics as well as some of my own all-time favorites. (Much as it may mark me as a less than true adventurer, I do love me some wordplay, so much so that it’s occasionally led me to be way too forgiving of even Nord and Bert’s shortcomings in the past.) But then, this is much of the reason that Infocom’s catalog as a whole remains so vital and interesting after all these years. Even their failures cast a long shadow over everything that would follow them.

(Sources: As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me, even though those archives sadly don’t include an interview with Jeff O’Neill himself. The one place I’ve found where O’Neill does talk at all about his work on Nord and Bert is some remarks included with Ross Ceccola’s review of the game in the March 1988 Commodore Magazine. William Carte’s review appears in the November 1987 Questbusters.

Nord and Bert sadly isn’t included in the Lost Treasures of Infocom iOS app, so you’ll have to track down a copy elsewhere if you want to play it; I’m sure most of you won’t have any trouble figuring out where to look. While its failings keep it out of my Hall of Fame, its first half is strong enough to be well worth playing for more than historical interest.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

The formats are generally referred to today by the version numbering found in the story files themselves. Versions 1 and 2 were early versions of the 128 K Z-Machine used for the original releases of Zork I and II respectively. Version 3 is the finalized, stable version of the 128 K Z-Machine on which those early games were re-released, and which thereafter ran the bulk of Infocom’s games for most of the company’s existence. Version 4 is the first 256 K Z-Machine, used for the Interactive Fiction Plus (“EZIP”) games A Mind Forever Voyaging, Trinity, and Bureaucracy, and now for the line of “LZIP” games like Nord and Bert. Yes, this is all quite confusing. No, if you’re not deeply interested in Infocom’s technology as opposed to their art, it’s not ultimately all that important. And yes, it’s going to get still more complicated before we’re done with their story.

Comments
33 Responses

- David Boddie

October 16, 2015 at 11:33 am

Some wordplay for you:

nonreciperal -> non-reciprocal
lesson -> lessen

Or were those intentional? ;-)

- Jimmy Maher

October 16, 2015 at 11:38 am

:) Thanks!

- David Simon

October 16, 2015 at 11:53 am

Seconding the props for Counterfeit Monkey; it has wordplay out the wazoo, and what’s more, even manages to build a compete culture and history around it, taking place in a nation that built all its military and economic power on “linguistic manipulation technology”, e.g. the fearsome depluralization cannon.

- Duncan Stevens

October 16, 2015 at 1:03 pm

Agreed on Counterfeit Monkey, though I feel compelled to note that it had a lot more resources at its disposal than Nord and Bert. But it made very, very good use of those resources, and introduced new forms of wordplay, in the context of a single overarching game, much more deftly.

- Michael Davis

November 18, 2015 at 3:38 pm

“though I feel compelled to note that it had a lot more resources at its disposal than Nord and Bert”

“Thanks to more time in the gestation, many more years of collective design wisdom on which to draw, and an audience of players that’s much more accepting of alternate approaches to interactive fiction than were many of Infocom’s fans”

- Duncan Stevens

October 16, 2015 at 12:54 pm

I always figured that I didn’t appreciate “Act the Part” because I hadn’t spent as much time as everyone else watching sitcoms. It didn’t occur to me at the time to view that as a failing in the game. I also struggled to some extent with “Eat Your Words” because I hadn’t encountered some of the idioms before (e.g., “gore the ox” and “read the riot act”). Ditto “Meet the Mayor” (“possession is nine tenths of the law”). I think it’s probably fair to say that parts of Nord and Bert assume an adult player (with knowledge of old sitcoms and old songs), and parts are more kid-friendly, and there’s really no way to tell which is which. (And, as you say, some parts assume that the player is American.)

“Shake a Tower” was one of my favorite segments because I was very fond of spoonerisms (I was 12 at the time), and I don’t recall finding it unfairly hard. I don’t remember whether I used the hints, but if so it was pretty minimal use. Also enjoyed “Shopping Bizarre” (and I seem to recall finding it very easy); was less fond of “Play Jacks.”

Agree that “Manor of Speaking” was a misfire, particularly the part (I think it was the “Doldrums”–Phantom Tollbooth shout-out?) where, if memory serves, you could simply bog down entirely and have the game respond to your every command “I’ve heard that before.” There wasn’t, as you say, a distinct wordplay aspect to “Manor of Speaking” at all, and the segment is made harder by the expectation that one will emerge.

In retrospect, though I was fond of it at the time (and blamed any lack of appreciation on myself rather than the game), I agree that Nord and Bert could have been much better. Getting rid of the half-baked segments like “Act the Part” and “Manor of Speaking,” which aren’t really about wordplay at all, and replacing them with real wordplay would have vastly improved things, especially when there were so many other forms of wordplay to try. Later games like the ones you mention, along with Roger Firth’s Letters from Home and…well, I guess naming it would be a spoiler, but there’s a very clever 2004 competition entry that turns out to be about wordplay, show what could have been done had Nord and Bert been given some more care.

- Jason Dyer

October 16, 2015 at 8:26 pm

Shake a Tower was by far my favorite. I found it quite fair.

Agreed on Manor of Speaking and Act the Part being rubbish, though.

- Jimmy Maher

October 17, 2015 at 9:38 am

Based on some of your comments here, it’s possible I didn’t give “Shake a Tower” an entirely fair shake (wordplay intended). By the time I got there this time I was so irritated and frustrated by the two previous sections, “Act the Part” and “Manor of Speaking,” that I was perhaps all too ready to believe that “Shake a Tower” would go the same way. My memories of Nord and Bert really were *so* better than the actual game I just played, leaving me feeling kind of like a jilted lover. It also didn’t help that I ran into a nasty and unnecessary dead end by climbing up to the giant without the hat.

- matt w

October 17, 2015 at 1:43 pm

For me, the dead-end you get by climbing up to the giant without the hat is exactly the sort of thing I expect from Infocom. And it seemed a lot more fair than many of the dead ends I’ve encountered in acclaimed 20th-century IF, if only because it doesn’t take long to replay the beginning of that sequence. The main issue was (as I said below) that after doing all that stuff and being pretty proud of myself, I realized that it hadn’t actually helped me in the main quest.

It may have helped that I was liberally hitting the walkthrough for the previous sections.

- matt w

October 17, 2015 at 3:10 am

I was never able to get anywhere in Letters from Home. Or rather, I was able to get somewhere with some of the wordplay bits, but I had no idea what my goals were, and when I eventually hit the walkthrough I found that I needed to do a push-this-thing-here-and-stand-on-it puzzle that had nothing to do with wordplay. I think by then I’d locked myself out of it.

…I think I know the 2004 entry you mean. The wordplay was great but again, I had to hit the walkthrough early on and I was like, “How was I supposed to know to do all that adventure game stuff?” As I said below, I think the reason that Nord and Bert was the only Infocom I didn’t bounce right off is that it starts you right off with lots of wordplay for its own sake and doesn’t lock it off behind inventory and map puzzles, though it can’t sustain that the whole time (looking at you again, Manor of Speaking).

Speaking of Manor of Speaking there’s a nice little game of that name by Hulk Handsome from a few IFComps back. It’s pun-based, as I remember. Puddles on the Path is another nice cliche-based game, definitely influenced by Nord and Bert I think.

- Jayle Enn

October 16, 2015 at 2:03 pm

I was a very young word nerd when I tried Nord and Bert, and beyond the first two or three areas I couldn’t make head or tails of it either.
It did teach me a lot about turns of phrase, the existence of lox, and really neat words like ‘umbrage’, and years later I was delighted to learn there was a connection between buying a pig in a poke, and letting the cat out of the bag, but… yeah. The beginning of the spoonerisms sequence, where the game has to come out and tell you that the girl ‘continues to “shine on the door”‘ still sticks in my mind as one of the most baffling things I’ve ever encountered in a game.

- Bob Reeves

October 16, 2015 at 3:03 pm

I seem to recall that if one recognizes the joke about the bottle in “Act the Part” and types the word “lobotomy,” the game says “Bob isn’t here!” or something that tips you off that you’re supposed to give him one. As for “Manor,” the solution to that part does involve a pun, though most of it is annoyingly destitute of wordplay. The expression in “Farm” that I’d never run across was “make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” and in general, some of the proverbs and cliches seem more appropriate for a pre-industrial age than for a game released toward the end of the 20th century.

- Sam Kabo Ashwell

October 16, 2015 at 4:01 pm

As a non-Yanqui Anglo… yes, Nord & Bert contains some definite show-stoppers. It was the first Infocom game I played to completion, but I only managed it because I was playing it together with my American girlfriend. (And, yes, I’ve had other reports from conversationally-fluent ESL speakers for whom it represents an immediate and total brick wall.)

The ‘full bottle in front of me / full frontal lobotomy’ spoonerism was actually one that I knew and recognised – but I still couldn’t solve it, because N&B’s exact wording was a little bit different from the one that I knew.

“like a chocolate mouse and chocolate mousse”

A moose, not a mouse.

- Stephen Norris

October 16, 2015 at 4:46 pm

On mouse = mousse, thanks for pointing that out. I was trying to work out what dialect of English they were homophones in!

- Jimmy Maher

October 16, 2015 at 6:45 pm

Hmm… I’d always thought you were American, living in Alaska and all (if you’re still there, that is). Anyway, thanks for the correction!

- Sam Kabo Ashwell

October 16, 2015 at 7:11 pm

British. Though I’ve lived just over a third of my life there. (I’m in Seattle now. Except that I’m about to move to Hawaii.)

- Johannes Paulsen

October 16, 2015 at 4:18 pm

Really, though, the complaints about the ‘guess what I meant here’ school of word puzzle design here could also be leveled at many puzzle designers today. (I’m looking at you, THE NATION.) Perhaps it’s more of a matter of puzzle design + being in the wrong medium for most word puzzlers at the time.

Regardless , I did get a good many hours out of Nord and Bert when it came out…. It’s a shame it’s not available for iOS. This sort of game would been perfect for mobile. (If it could be polished, that is.)

- Lisa H.

October 16, 2015 at 8:42 pm

I seem to remember trying to play this game in junior high school, so age 11 or 12, and being almost totally hopeless at it. I did make some headway in “Shopping Bizarre” because I understood the homonym thing, but “Buy the Farm” and especially “Eat Your Words” were beyond me because I didn’t have the necessary background knowledge of idioms, ditto “Act the Part” because of not knowing slapstick tropes. I still don’t understand what is actually going on, thematically, in “Manor of Speaking”.

I’d be surprised if anyone in the history of Nord and Bert has ever actually connected a knife and “a bottle in front of me” to arrive at giving your deadbeat brother-in-law Bob a lobotomy without recourse to the hints.

If I were to play the game fresh now, I might – but only because I know the song “I’d Rather Have A Bottle In Front Of Me (Than A Frontal Labotomy)” from the 30th Anniversary Dr. Demento collection. (Apparently the phrase “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy” is sometimes attributed to Dorothy Parker, which might go along with the whole clever-words tone of this game.)

- Lisa H.

October 16, 2015 at 8:47 pm

Oh, and on the subject of Dr. Demento, the phrase also appears in the song “Existential Blues” that’s on the 20th anniversary collection, as “I’d rather have this bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy”.

- Monty

October 16, 2015 at 9:20 pm

Existential Blues is the song where I learned the pun, which is how I got it right in the game.

However, I can never remember how you’re supposed to finish The Manor of Speaking. Go to the attic and type “Revolve House,” maybe, but I have a vague recollection of that not being the right verb.

- Lisa H.

December 26, 2020 at 11:08 pm

Revolve is the right verb. You need to “revolve the attic” (using the “revolution” object you get from the safe).

- GeoX

October 16, 2015 at 10:35 pm

I solved the “frontal lobotomy” puzzle all by my lonesome, having previously heard the phrase from, I believe, Tom Waits. To be honest, I didn’t find the “Act the Part” section that bad, although obviously it didn’t even pretend to follow the game’s putative theme. There’s no defending the “Manor of Speaking,” though, and for whatever reason, I always found the “Jacks” section kind of inscrutable, even knowing the basic concept. The one that REALLY annoyed me was in the last part, though, where you have to “deep six the skeleton in the closet”–what, all of a sudden, with no warning, I have to mash together two unrelated idioms in a completely unintuitive way? Bah.

- matt w

October 17, 2015 at 2:59 am

Nord and Bert is the only Infocom game I’ve finished, or even played much of. Part of it is that I love wordplay (you may have noticed that when I see a weird-looking name I compulsively spell it backwards), but also it didn’t have the conspicuous cruelty of so many other Infocom games where you could obviously lock yourself out of a winning ending by doing something wrong at the beginning, or by not executing the first moves fast enough, or something like that. (You can do that in Shake a Tower, and in Manor of Speaking, oy… but by then I’d already played through a few segments.) And also, unlike a lot of games which force you to wander around a map for a while before you can solve any puzzles–either because you can’t find them, or because it’s impossible to know whether you have the resources to solve them till you’ve looked everywhere–the first sections just present you with puzzles, and even sometimes let you work on another puzzle before you go back to one.

That isn’t to say that I didn’t have to look at the Club Floyd transcript for a lot of this, especially pretty much the whole of Manor of Speaking. Act the Part didn’t give me too much trouble IIRC, having heard the “bottle in front of me” joke before, and the unclarity of the goals in Shake a Tower didn’t bother me that much. I get that feel from a lot of other classic games that I try (late 20th-century as well as Infocom era), that there’s a point where they dump me into an open map and expect me to figure out what to do by blundering into stuff. In this case there aren’t that many spoonerisms so I could just try whatever’s available to see how to go forward–though after I worked out a satisfying elaborate tricky sequence, I discovered that it had been a sidequest and I wound up hitting the hints to make progress toward the end of the chapter. So maybe the problem is that the sidequest and main quest are switched.

Still, I’d rather hint my way through this than get anywhere near some of the elaborate timing puzzles I’ve seen.

For wordplay-based games, I’ve really enjoyed Andrew Schultz’s Shuffling Around–Andrew is very much in the Nord and Bert tradition, of throwing a bunch of virtuosic wordplay together without regard for whether it makes that much sense as worldbuilding or prose. Some day I’d like to put together a wordplay game myself–I have the puzzles designed. I had this really clever one about a gritty pearl! So yeah, I got beaten to the punch on that one.

- Jason Scott

October 18, 2015 at 12:42 pm

When I was first working on GET LAMP, I was told on several occasions that some people wouldn’t be sitting for an interview, that they never sat for interviews. Some of those suggested folks, like Mark Blank, were more than happy to sit for my camera (although Mark took pains to point out how distant the whole thing was to him). Others were, without names being given, difficult to find or to arrange interviews for – one took a year to make happen, mostly because the subject was transient and prone to taking long consulting jobs out of my reach. And in the case of Al Vezza, I was able to talk with him on the phone and he was more than happy to be told the thing was going on, but he had no interest in sitting for an interview at all – it’s quite obvious he had had enough of that Infocom thing years before and assumed he would just be painted as a bad guy (which he often is, sometimes just benevolently at sea regarding leadership).

Two people I was told I would never, ever get were Jeff O’Neill and Tim Anderson. And that was true. I wrote Tim Anderson but got no response – O’Neill was just simply impossible for me to find. So it goes!

- Jimmy Maher

October 18, 2015 at 12:59 pm

I actually did get Jeff O’Neill’s email address from another Imp, and he did write me back. He even considered talking with me about Infocom for a day or two, but then decided against it. Fair enough. Brian Moriarty mentioned shortly afterward that O’Neill had decided to talk for some project or other, but was quite vague about exactly *what* project. Maybe the book that Rick Thornquist has been working on? Regardless, I hope an interview with him will see the light of day at some point.

Oddly enough, I did also hear from Tim Anderson years ago, and via an unsolicited email at that. It’s been a long time, though.

- LoneCleric

October 19, 2015 at 10:53 pm

Glad to see you mention Ad Verbum. Back then, Nick asked me to beta-test because he was eager for some “non-English native” feedback, but I had so much fun trying to solve it (and break it) that I ended up acting as his main beta-tester.

- Nate

November 8, 2015 at 9:54 am

Nord and Bert has a special place in my heart because it was the first Infocom game I actually owned – a birthday gift, I think. It was a bit of a disappointment discovering that it wasn’t a traditional walk-around adventure, but since I absolutely LOVED wordplay I ended up enjoying it immensely. Also, the built in hints made it possible for me to complete it – every other Infocom game except Trinity I got stuck somewhere.

Agreed, ‘Act the Part’ and ‘Manor of Speaking’ were just weird and not fun. ‘Shake a Tower’ though, I think was my favourite. ‘Riddle while foam burns’ -> hilarity.

I was a very strange child I guess.

- G Grobbelaar

November 10, 2015 at 1:05 pm

This N&B game, IIRC, was one my wife stumbled upon when I started my ‘InfoCom’ phase and decided to play it with her, like we did HHGttG, which was more of doing to try to get her into the text game thing. So as she have ‘n short fuse when it comes to these games, like HHGttG, I printed a walkthrough, but after about 2 min she started to figure it out! Including the bottle- lobotomy! Think I but assist in 2 or 3 places AND those were ALL basically to get spelling and phrases correctly! She is a language nut (saying that in the nicest way)! So this game has that weirdness for me as well as being the only game that my wife played straight through in a couple of hours! With me still wondering how the heck it all fit together! Word wise because still today I can’t play it beyond the first few turns! But those few hours made me love her even more! If I can just get her away from sims, and into text games, but as they say, you win some you loose some!

- Michael Davis

November 18, 2015 at 2:48 pm

Oh, c’mon, EVERYbody knows Karl Marx was TERRIFIED of insurgencies.

- Peter Ferrie

February 15, 2016 at 9:14 pm

I came to it expecting something along the lines of Jabbertalky (1980 title on the Apple II featuring anagrams and other wordplay), but obviously got something quite other. As a non-American English speaker, I couldn’t finish it. Hints be damned.

- Leo Vellés

November 2, 2019 at 12:30 pm

“When Nord and Bert does finally fall off that tightrope even for a wordplay-loving native-speaking American like me, it’s almost more surprising that we made it this far together than it is shocking that that the game finally went too far”.
A double that at the end of the sentence?

- Jimmy Maher

November 2, 2019 at 4:23 pm

Thanks!

- Chris Lang

December 25, 2020 at 1:01 am

Ah, Nord and Bert. Some sections work within the context, some don’t.

Shopping Bizarre, with the homonyms, and Shake a Tower, with the spoonerisms, are for the most part brilliant, with only a few nitpicks. Buy the Farm and Eat Your Words make good use of cliches and idioms.

But then there is Play Jacks, where aside from calling the name of Jack Frost, it revolves not so much on wordplay as on finding how many different ‘jack’ items can be contained within the one device you find early on. Act the Part, aside from the ‘rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy’ joke and the recurring ‘knock knock’ joke bits that require you to respond “Who’s There”, doesn’t really revolve around words so much as it revolves around old slapstick cheap gags.

And then there’s Visit the Manor of Speaking, which seems like it belongs in some other game entirely. It seems like one of those experimental ‘gimmick’ IF you might see submitted to the IF Competition or one of the various mini-comps, and its gimmick (every room has its own personality, literally) isn’t really a wordplay-based gimmick at all. If you’re not careful, you might end up being unable to get the one thing you need from the ‘Doldrums’ location, as its personality won’t let you use the same word twice – I found that to be a case of annoying the player just for the sake of it.

The Karl Marx portrait puzzle is one likely to be stumbled on by accident. And it’s only the very last command (using the ‘revolution’ item to REVOLVE ATTIC) that has even the slightest bit of wordplay. So while the concept of Visit the Manor of Speaking might be interesting in itself, it doesn’t really work within the premise of Nord and Bert (that of a town plagued by wordplay shenanigans).

The scenario you unlock through the others, Meet the Mayor, has an awkward moment or two (how were we to guess that we needed to give the skeleton in the closet the deep six? And that we needed to do that before we do the ‘bathwater’ wordplay?), but it serves its purpose as the part where we use what we learned about wordplay before to wrap things up.

All in all, Nord and Bert is one of those games that I’m glad I’ve played, but it could have been a lot better.

Plundered Hearts
October 23, 2015

Amy Briggs first discovered text adventures during the early 1980s, when she was a student at Macalester University in her home state of Minnesota. Her boyfriend there worked at the local computer store, and introduced her to the joys of adventuring via Scott Adams’s Ghost Town. But she only became well and truly smitten — with text adventures, that is — when he first booted up a Zork for her. The pair were soon neglecting their studies to stay up all night playing on the computer.

After graduating with a degree in English and breaking up with the boyfriend, Briggs found herself somewhat at loose ends, asking that question so familiar to so many recent graduates: “What now?” Deciding that six months spent back at home with her parents was more than enough, she greeted 1985 by moving to Boston, which made for a convenient location for seeking a fortune of a type still undetermined since she had a sister already living there. Only half jokingly, she told her friends and family just before she left that if all else failed she could always go to work for Infocom.

Lo and behold, she opened the Boston Globe for the first time to find two want ads from that very company, one looking for someone to test games and the other for someone to do the same for some mysterious new business product. Briggs, naturally, wanted the games gig. Straining just a bit too hard to fit in with Infocom’s well-established sense of whimsy, she wrote a cover letter she would later “blush about,” most of all for her inexplicable claim that she had “a ridiculous sense of the sublime.” Despite or because of the cover letter, she got an interview one week later — she “stumbled out something incomprehensible” when asked about the aforementioned “ridiculous sense of the sublime” — and got a job as a game tester two weeks after that. As she herself admits, she “just walked into it,” the luckiest text-adventure fan on the planet who arrived at just about the last conceivable instant that would allow her to play a creative role in Infocom’s future.

She joined at the absolute zenith of Infocom’s success and ambition, with the whole company a beehive of activity in the wake of the recent launch of Cornerstone. On her first or second day, no less august a personage than Douglas Adams came through to talk about the huge success of his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game and to plan the next one. Her first assignment was to help pack up everything inside the dark warren that was Infocom’s Wheeler Street Offices and get it all shipped off to their sparkling new digs on CambridgePark Drive. Humble tester that she was, it felt like she had hit the big time, signed on with a company that was going to be the next big success story not just in games but in software in general.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way. Having enjoyed just a couple of months of the good times, Briggs would get to be present for most of the years of struggle that would follow. She kept her head down and kept testing games through all the chaos of 1985 and 1986 leading up to the Activision acquisition, managing to escape being laid off.

As a woman, and as a very young and not hugely assertive woman at that, Briggs was in a slightly uncomfortable spot at Infocom, one to which many of my female readers at least can probably relate. Infocom was not, I want to emphasize, an openly or even unconsciously misogynistic place. On the contrary, it was a very progressive place in most ways by the standards of the tech industry of the 1980s. But nevertheless, it was dominated by white males with big personalities, strong opinions, and impressive resumes. Very few who didn’t fit that profile would ever have much to say about the content of Infocom’s games. (Discounting outside testers, about the only significant female voice that comes to mind other than that of Briggs is Liz Cyr-Jones, who came up with the premise and title for Hollywood Hijinx and made contributions to many other games as one of Infocom’s most long-serving, valued, and listened-to in-house testers.) Briggs needed someone in her corner, “pushing me and showing me how to do everything from compiling ZIL to insisting that I be taken seriously.”

None other than Steve Meretzky stepped forward to fill that role.  He saw a special creative spark in Briggs quite early, when she helped test his labor of love A Mind Forever Voyaging and just got what he was trying to do in a way that many other testers, still stuck in the mindset of points for treasures, didn’t. He proved instrumental in what happened next for Briggs. When she told him that she’d like to become an Imp herself someday, he introduced her to ZIL. She started working on a little game of her own for two or three hours after work in the evenings and often all day on the weekends. Like the generations of hobbyist text-adventure authors who have set their first game in their apartments, Briggs elected to begin with what she knew, the story of a tester finding bugs and taking them back to the Imp in charge. But because it was after all adventure games that she wanted to write, she muddled up this everyday tale with Alice in Wonderland: the bugs in questions were literal, metamorphosed critters, and the Imp was a caterpillar smoking a hookah.

In the fall of 1986, a call that was destined to be the last of its type went through the Infocom ranks, for a new Imp to help maintain the ambitious release schedule being pushed by Activision in the wake of the acquisition. Meretzky, showing himself to be far less sanguine on Infocom’s future prospects than he let on in public interviews, told Briggs that she should do her best to get it because “after this hiring there’s not going to be another Imp hired until one of us dies.” Along with a quiet word or two from Meretzky, her testing experience and the sample game she had been tinkering with for the last year were enough to convince management to give her a shot. Before the year was out she was an Imp, given a generous nine months — thanks to her being new on the job and all — to write, polish, and release her first game. What said first game would be was, within reason, to be left up to her.

The plan she came up with was a humdinger. She wanted to write an interactive romance novel, much like the literary guilty pleasures she had been addicted to ever since she was a teenager. Marketing immediately liked the idea of having Infocom’s first game with an explicitly female protagonist be written by a woman, saw great possibilities for opening up a “whole new market” with a game that should have huge appeal to female players. Infocom had halfheartedly pursued a similar idea before, entering into talks with a mid-list romance-novel author about a possible collaboration, only to see them peter out in the wake of the chaos wrought by Cornerstone and an evolving feeling that such partnerships with non-interactive authors usually didn’t work out all that well anyway. Now, though, they were happy to revisit the idea via a game helmed by an author who, if admittedly unproven, had been steeped in interactive fiction as well as romance fiction for quite some time now.

Meretzky, for his part, was much less bullish on the idea. A romance game must revolve around character interaction in a way that he, experienced Imp that he was, knew would be incredibly hard to pull off. Indeed, in some ways it marked the most ambitious concept anyone at Infocom had mooted since his own A Mind Forever Voyaging. And being a new, unproven Imp, Briggs would not even be given the luxury of the Interactive Fiction Plus format; her game would have to fit into the standard, aged 128 K Z-Machine. Meretzky’s advice was to do something else first and then circle back to the idea, much as Brian Moriarty had agreed to write Wishbringer before tackling his dream project Trinity. Perhaps sensing already that there might not be enough time left for that, perhaps just feeling stubborn, Briggs for once rejected his advice and pressed ahead with her original plan. Her reason for doing so was about as good as they come: this would be the Infocom game that she had always wanted to play.

Amy Briggs

Steeped sufficiently in romance novels to have become something of a scholar of the genre, Briggs had long since divided the books she read into four categories: contemporary romances; Gothic romances in the tradition of Jane Eyre and Rebecca; historical romances, or “bodice rippers,” with “lurid sex-filled plots in historical settings”; and the more subdued Regency romances in the tradition of Jane Austen, as much comedies of manners as stories of love and lust. She decided that she wanted to make her game a cross between a Regency novel, her personal favorite category, and an historical romance, with “more action than a Regency but less sex than an historical.” Whatever else it was, her game would still be an adventure game, and thus the emphasis on action seemed necessary. As for the lack of explicit sex, Briggs wasn’t suited by temperament to writing lurid sex scenes any more than Infocom was interested in publishing them — not to mention the complications of trying to craft interactive sex in a medium that struggled to depict even the most basic conversation.

Looking for an historical milieu, Briggs settled on the age of Caribbean piracy. Like Sid Meier, who was working on a very different pirate-themed game of his own 400 miles away in Baltimore, she wasn’t so interested in the historical reality of piracy as much as she was in the rich tradition of swashbuckling fiction. Many of the references she studied were doubtless the same as those being perused at the exact same time by Meier. Her actual statements about her game’s relationship to real history also echo many of Meier’s.

I already had plenty of experience with romance novels, from my reading, and I have long been interested in fashions, so I only needed to brush up on those. Pirates, though, I had to research, and sailing ships. I watched a lot of movies — Captain Blood-type movies and romantic adventures like Romancing the Stone. Plundered Hearts is about as historically accurate as an Errol Flynn movie. I tried not to be anachronistic if I could help it, but if the heroine’s hairstyle is from the wrong century or if pirates really didn’t make people walk the plank, if stretching the truth adds a lot to the story, does it really matter?

As the extract above attests, she gave her game the pitch-perfect title of Plundered Hearts. You take the role of the young Lady Dimsford, whose ship is waylaid on the high seas by a pirate who is both less and more than he seems. Captain Jamison, the legendary pirate known as “the Falcon,” is actually there to rescue you from kidnapping by the captain of your own ship, who’s in the thrall of the evil Governor Jean Lafond; Lafond already holds your father captive. Cast in the beginning in the role of damsel in distress, to survive and thwart the sinister plot against your family you’ll soon have to take a more active part in events. Along the way, you’ll need to rescue your erstwhile rescuer Captain Jamison a few times, and of course you’ll have the chance to fall in love.

As Emily Short notes in her review of the game, at times Plundered Hearts layers on the romance-novel stylings a bit thick, and with a certain knowingness that skirts the border between homage and parody, as in the heroine’s daydream that represents the very first text we see.

>SHOOT THE PIRATE
Trembling, you fire the heavy arquebus. You hear its loud report over the roaring wind, yet the dark figure still approaches. The gun falls from your nerveless hands.

"You won't kill me," he says, stepping over the weapon. "Not when I am the only protection you have from Jean Lafond."

Chestnut hair, tousled by the wind, frames the tanned oval of his face. Lips curving, his eyes rake over your inadequately dressed body, the damp chemise clinging to your legs and heaving bosom, your gleaming hair. You are intensely aware of the strength of his hard seaworn body, of the deep sea blue of his eyes. And then his mouth is on yours, lips parted, demanding, and you arch into his kiss...

He presses you against him, head bent. "But who, my dear," he whispers into your hair, "will protect you from me?"

A number of Infocom’s other more unusual genre exercises similarly verge on parody, whether as a product of sheer commitment to the genre in question or the company’s default house voice of sly, slightly sarcastic drollery. One thing that redeems Plundered Hearts, as it also does, say, many a Lovecraftian pastiche, is the author’s obvious familiarity with and love for the genre in question. And another is that even its knowing slyness, to whatever extent it’s there, departs from the usual Infocom mold. There aren’t 69,105 of anything here, no “hello, sailor” jokes, no plethora of names that start with Zorkian syllables like “Frob,” no response to “xyzzy” — all of which (and so much more like it) was beginning to feel just a little tired by 1987. Like Jeff O’Neill, another recently minted Imp who brought a fresh perspective to the job, Amy Briggs just isn’t interested in plundering the lore of Zork. Unlike O’Neill, she gives us a game that’s eminently playable. Plundered Hearts is the polar opposite of the cavalcade of insider jokes and references that is The Lurking Horror. Yes, that game certainly has its charms… but still, new blood feels more than welcome here. Plundered Hearts really does feel like it wants to reach out to new players rather than just preach to the choir.

Yet at the same time that it’s so uninterested in so many typical Infocom tropes, Plundered Hearts might just be the best expression — ever — of the Infocom ideal of interactive fiction. The backs of their boxes had been telling people for years that interactive fiction was like “waking up inside a story.” Still, the majority of Infocom games stay far, far away from that ideal. Some, like Hollywood Hijinx and Nord and Bert, are little more than a big pile of puzzles built around a broad thematic premise. Others, ranging from Infidel to Spellbreaker, give you a dash of story in the beginning and a dab of story in the end, with a long, long middle filled with lots of static geography to explore and yet more puzzles to solve. Even Infocom’s two most forthrightly literary efforts, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity, aren’t quite like waking up inside a story in the novelistic sense: there’s very little conventional narrative of any sort in Trinity, while for most of its length A Mind Forever Voyaging makes its hero more an observer than the star of its unfolding plot. The mysteries do offer relatively stronger narratives and more complex characters, but they’re very much cast in the classic mystery tradition of figuring out other peoples’ stories rather than really making one of your own.

Plundered Hearts, however, feels qualitatively different from them and almost everything else that came before. (The closest comparison in the catalog is probably Seastalker, Infocom’s only game marketed explicitly to children.) There’s a plot thrust — a narrative urgency — that’s largely missing elsewhere in the Infocom canon, coupled with many more of the sorts of things the uninitiated might actually think of when they hear the term “interactive fiction.” As you play, the plot thickens, events unfold, relationships change, characters develop and deepen, romance blossoms. In short, real, plot-related things actually happen. I don’t mean to say that this is the only way to write a compelling text adventure. Nor do I mean to say that there’s a lot of plot here by the standards of a typical novel or even novella, nor that you can do a whole lot to influence it beyond either clearing the hurdles before you and making it to the end — the game does offer a few alternate endings via a final branch — or screwing up and dying or suffering a “fate worse than death” that usually implies rape, and often a lifetime of indentured sexual servitude. What I am saying is that Amy Briggs took interactive fiction as Infocom preferred to describe it and made her best good-faith effort to live up to that ideal.  And, against all the odds, it works way better than it has any right to. I recently called the Infocom ideal of interactive fiction “something of a lost cause.” Well, I should have remembered that Plundered Hearts was waiting in the wings to prove me wrong just this once. Briggs dispenses with the things she can’t easily implement, like character interaction, via quick text dumps and concentrates the interactivity on those she can. By keeping the plot constantly in motion, she distracts us from the myriad flaws in her world’s implementation.

While Plundered Hearts has plenty of puzzles, those puzzles feel more organic than in the typical Infocom game, arising directly out of the plot rather than existing for the sake of their own cleverness. They’re also a bit easier than the norm, which suits the game’s purposes fine; you don’t want to spend hours teasing out the solution to an intricate puzzle here, you want to keep the plot moving, to find out what happens next. Most of the puzzles require only straightforward, commonsense deductions based on the materials to hand and your own goals, which are always blessedly clear. Yes, were Plundered Hearts written today, there are a few things a wise author would probably do differently. The timing of the first act, when you need to keep a powder keg in the hold of your ship from exploding, is tight enough that you might need to replay it once or twice to get it right, and it’s quite easy in one or two places to leave vital objects behind (don’t forget to grab that piece of pork when you make it to St. Sinistra!). Still, this game is far friendlier as well as far more plotty than the Infocom norm, and as a result it feels surprisingly modern even today.

As with many Infocom games, particularly in the latter half of the company’s history, much of the process of developing Plundered Hearts came down to cutting out all those pieces that wouldn’t fit into the 128 K Z-Machine. Briggs says that she finished the game inside six months, and then spent the remaining three cutting, cutting, and painfully cutting some more. Impossible as it is to make any real judgments without seeing the game she started with, Plundered Hearts doesn’t feel so much like a victim of those cuts as does Dave Lebling’s nearly contemporaneous The Lurking Horror. In some ways the cutting may have improved it, made it more playable. Briggs notes that she just didn’t have the space to allow the player to go too far astray, meaning that a screw-up more often leads to immediate death — or one of those other nasty, rapey endings — rather than a walking-dead situation. There are, she admits, “a lot of deaths” in Plundered Hearts. A lot of rapes too, more than enough to make the game feel squiggy if it had been written by a man. (Yes, this is a double standard. And no, I don’t feel all that motivated to apologize for it in light of the history that gave rise to it. Your mileage may obviously vary.)

In an interview published in Infocom’s The Status Line newsletter, Briggs tried to head off accusations that the game offered a retrograde depiction of gender relations by noting that “feminism does not rule out romance, and romance does not necessarily have to make women weak in the cliché sense of romance novels.” She further pointed out, rightly, that the protagonist of Plundered Hearts must soon enough take responsibility for her own fate, must turn the tables to rescue her Captain Jamison (“several times!”) and certainly can’t afford to “act as an air-head.” Not having much — okay, any — experience with romance novels, I don’t know whether or how unusual that is for the form, and thus don’t know to what degree we can label Plundered Hearts a subversion of romance-novel tropes. I do think, however, that by the time near the end of the game that it’s you, the allegedly helpless female, who comes swinging down off a chandelier to effect a rescue, the game has quite thoroughly upended the gender roles of your typical Errol Flynn movie.

Plundered Hearts and Nord and Bert, released simultaneously in September of 1987, represented the two most obvious marketing experiments in a 1987 Infocom lineup that otherwise largely played to the adventure-gaming base. These were also the two titles about which marketing had been most excited at their inception, as chances to pry open whole new demographics. By that September, however, following a punishing nine months already full of commercial disappointments, such ideas seemed like the fantasies they had probably always been. Infocom’s marketing efforts on behalf of Plundered Hearts in particular were tentative to the point of confusion, playing up the romance-novel angle on the one hand while seeking on the other to reassure the traditional adventurers that Infocom could hardly afford to lose that, really now, this wasn’t all that big a departure from Zork. And so we got this testimonial from one Judith C.: “Infocom’s first romance does the genre proud. Playing Plundered Hearts was like opening a romance novel and walking inside.” But we also got this one from Ron T.: “I was a little afraid that I wouldn’t like the game at first, being male and playing it as a female, but once you got started it was NO PROBLEM! I enjoyed it!!!”

Neither marketing angle was sufficient to make Plundered Hearts a hit. The sales of it and its release partner Nord and Bert dropped off substantially from those of the pairing of Stationfall and The Lurking Horror of just a few months previous. The final numbers for Plundered Hearts reached only about 15,500. Briggs recalls no big thrill of accomplishment at seeing her name on an Infocom box for the first time, nor even a sense of creative fulfillment at having done something so different from the Infocom norm and done it so well, only a deep disappointment at what she and Infocom’s management viewed as just another failed experiment.

Briggs’s remaining time at Infocom proved equally frustrating. While certainly not the only Imp whose most recent game had failed to sell very well, she was in a precarious position as the newest and most inexperienced of the group, with no older, more successful titles to point to as proof of her artistic instincts. In contrast to Plundered Hearts, an idea which Infocom’s management had embraced from the get-go, her new ideas got rejected one after another by a company she characterizes as now “terrified,” desperate to find “the next Hitchhiker’s” that could save them all. Management wanted games with obvious “marketing tie-ins,” but her personal interests were “geekish.” At the same time, though, they gave her little real direction in what sorts of subjects might be more marketable: “Just write us a hit.” The most retrospectively promising of her ideas, one that would seem likely to have satisfied management’s own criteria if they’d given it a chance, was a game either heavily inspired by or outright licensing Anne Rice’s vampire novels. But it came perhaps just a little too early in the cultural conversation — Rice’s books hadn’t quite yet exploded into the mainstream to help ignite the still-ongoing craze for all things vampire in popular culture — and was ultimately rejected along with all her other ideas. About the time that management started pushing her to call up Garrison Keillor to try to get a game deal out of her very tangential relationship with him — she had worked as an usher on A Prairie Home Companion during her university days, and had attended occasional potlucks and the like with the rest of the cast and crew at Keillor’s house — she decided that enough was enough.

Briggs left Infocom in mid-1988 after completing her final work for them, the “Flathead Calendar” feelie that accompanied her old mentor Steve Meretzky’s Zork Zero. She said that she was leaving to go write the Great American Novel. But like many an aspiring novelist, Briggs found the reality of writing less enchanting than the idea; the novel never happened. She jokes today that her fellow Imps set expectations a bit too high at her farewell party when they gifted her with a tee-shirt emblazoned with the words “1989 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.” She wound up taking a PhD in Experimental and Behavioral Psychology instead, and has since enjoyed a rewarding career in academia and private industry. Her one published work of interactive fiction — for that matter, her one published creative work of any stripe — remains Plundered Hearts.

It may be a thin creative legacy, but it’s one hell of an impressive one. Other Infocom games like A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity may carry more thematic weight, but in terms of sheer entertainment I don’t think Infocom ever made a better game. The last game ever released for the original 128 K Z-Machine, it’s the interactive equivalent of a great beach read in all the best senses, grabbing hold quickly and just rollicking along through rapier duels, exploding powder kegs, daring waterborne escapes, secret passages, death-defying leaps, etc., all interspersed — this being an interactive romance novel, after all — with multiple costume changes, a little ballroom dancing, and a few sweaty seductive interludes sufficient to make the old bosom heave. Much as I usually shy away from the Internet’s obsession with ranking things, if I was to list my personal favorite Infocom games Plundered Hearts would have to be right there at number two, just behind Trinity. And this comes from someone who doesn’t know the first thing about romance novels.

Indeed, one of the thoroughgoing pleasures of Plundered Hearts, the gift that keeps on giving for years after you’ve played it, is watching players like me and our friend Ron T. above fall victim to its charms despite all their stoic manly skepticism. Even Questbusters’s redoubtable William E. Carte, who in just the previous issue had declared Nord and Bert unfit for “true adventurers,” succumbed to Plundered Hearts despite being “a traditionalist and quite conservative as well.”

I must admit it bothered me a bit at first — my character being hugged and kissed by a man. After the initial scenes, however, I quickly got lost in the plot, and soon my character’s sex honestly didn’t matter. One female QB reader wrote me that she enjoyed the game and gave it to a male friend who also liked it. He particularly liked changing clothes repeatedly.

Don’t you love the sound of prejudices collapsing? I complain from time to time, doubtless more than some of you would like, about the lack of diversity in so much ludic culture. Leaving aside politics and social engineering and even concerns about simple fairness, I think that Plundered Hearts serves as a wonderful example of why diversity is something to be sought and cherished. Amy Briggs’s unique perspective resulted in an Infocom game like no other, one that gives people like me a glimpse of what people like her see in all those trashy romance novels. In a world that could use more of that sort of understanding, that can only be a good thing. But we don’t even have to go that far. In a world that can always use better and more varied games, more and more diverse game designers is the obvious best way to achieve that.

Like a number of people I’ve written about on this blog who have long since gone on to lead other lives, Amy Briggs’s own relationship to the game she wrote all those years ago is in some ways more distant than the one some of its biggest fans enjoy with it. It crops up in her life on occasions scattered enough that they always surprise, like the time that a student knocked on her door at the university where she was teaching to ask in awed tones if she was “the Amy Briggs.” He had played Plundered Hearts ten years before with his sister — young male fans, Briggs notes bemusedly, are almost always careful to make that distinction — had loved it, just wanted to say thank you. Briggs’s own memories of her brief, unlikely career as a game designer remain a mishmash of nostalgia for “the best job I’ve ever had” with the still-lingering disappointment of Plundered Hearts’s commercial failure — a commercial failure that, at the time and even now, is all too easy for her conflate with its real or alleged artistic shortcomings. “There are actually people who think my game is really good,” she says with more than a tinge of disbelief in her voice. Yes, Amy, there are. We think your game is very good.

(As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Thanks again, Jason! Other sources include Infocom’s Status Line newsletters of Fall 1987 and Winter 1987, Questbusters of December 1987, and an XYZZY interview with Briggs.

Plundered Hearts and most of the other Infocom games are available for purchase as part of an iOS app.)

Comments
59 Responses

- Peter Piers

October 23, 2015 at 11:50 am

Yes, Amy, if you’re reading this. I played Plundered Hearts about a month ago, and it IS good. It is modern, it is playable, it is enjoyable. I’m a guy and I didn’t play it with my sister and I don’t like genre fiction of this sort and I still found it the most story-like, plot-full of the Infocom games, way ahead of its time (Jimmy forgot to mention the multiple endings).

It has atmosphere, it has spirit, it has puzzles that are just right – it is SO hard to balance puzzles so they’re neither too easy nor an obstacle to the plot, in a game that’s so obviously and clearly about the plot. It has as much style as those Errol Flyn movies you had researched.

Be proud of Plundered Hearts, Amy Briggs. Be very, very proud.

- Peter Piers

October 23, 2015 at 11:53 am

“(Jimmy forgot to mention the multiple endings).”

Gah, no he didn’t! I missed where he did. Sorry, Jimmy!

- Allan Holland

January 8, 2020 at 4:20 am

Heat hear. Plundered Hearts is a masterpiece adored by many.

- Jayle Enn

October 23, 2015 at 11:51 am

My first brush with Plundered Hearts was the Invisiclues book. They had two games splitting a book, I think the other might have been Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and I was intrigued by the reference to alternative endings near the back.

I remember enjoying it, when I played the game years later. I’m not sure how much of it I really ‘got’ at the time, with pastiches and side references being my only familiarity with the genre, so now I’m inclined to see if I can find and get my old copy running.

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2015 at 12:00 pm

The other game in that pairing was Beyond Zork, for what it’s worth. Infocom’s very last InvisiClues.

- Peter Piers

October 23, 2015 at 11:51 am

Hey, do any of the Imps get any revenue from the Lost Treasure of Infocom releases? Including the app? I’m guessing no, but hey, call me an optimist.

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2015 at 11:58 am

No, afraid not. Everything went to Activision with the sale, and the Imps never worked on a royalty basis anyway, only a flat salary.

- Duncan Stevens

October 23, 2015 at 12:29 pm

About the time that management started pushing her to call up Garrison Keillor to try to get a game deal out of her very tangential relationship with him

Ha! I’d never heard about that. I can’t decide whether this idea was hilariously terrible or secretly brilliant, but I’m going with the former. I mean, the whole point of Lake Wobegon is that nothing much of significance ever happens; the status quo is always there again next week. (The various sepia-toned non-happenings have *emotional* significance for the narrator and the characters, at least sometimes, but they’re generally, and I guess deliberately, highly ordinary events.) Spinning a game that anyone would care about out of that (especially given the show’s older audience) would have been essentially impossible, and I can hardly blame Briggs for quitting at that point.

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2015 at 1:01 pm

Waiting for Godot: The Adventure Game

- Lisa H.

October 23, 2015 at 6:06 pm

I think you could do that too, although it would probably wind up being one of those wry one-room joke games, or something.

- Rowan Lipkovits

October 24, 2015 at 5:43 am

That joke was implemented back in 1994! http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=20akruitzbk12lv4

- Lisa H.

October 24, 2015 at 8:10 pm

Well there you go!

- Lisa H.

October 23, 2015 at 6:05 pm

I dunno, I think in today’s IF environment you could make a Wobegon game, although it would probably be one of those more about crafting of the setting and exploration of the environment than it would be about hard puzzle-solving. But of course that’s a different beast than trying to sell it commercially in the 1980s.

- Duncan Stevens

October 25, 2015 at 7:05 pm

But the setting isn’t very interesting either! Ordinary place where nothing out of the ordinary happens, that’s the whole shtick.

- Duncan Stevens

October 23, 2015 at 12:43 pm

A lot of rapes too, more than enough to make the game feel squiggy if it had been written by a man.

Yeah, agree. The squickiest sequence in the game, to my mind, was the puzzle in which you had to fight off the villain’s attempts to rape you, as it was a pretty hard puzzle and hence involved a lot of failed get-raped-and-start-over attempts. (The puzzle was made harder because the tool you have that seems like the most likely way out does not, in fact, work, and the one that does is sort of buried in the scenery and requires a relatively uncommon verb to make work.) On one level, I don’t fault Briggs for including this scene; my guess is that squicking male and female players alike with an (effectively) repeated rape scene was a very deliberate way of forcing the player to confront the reality (well, romance-novel reality, but still) of rape. And it was effective, for me at least. But it wasn’t much fun.

- Peter Piers

October 23, 2015 at 1:01 pm

Ditto. The one sticking point in the game, for me. I had to resort to the InvisiClues for that one, didn’t get it until the very last clue (i.e., the outright solution). It did spoil the game somewhat for me; afterwards I was not as willing to experiment as I was before, due to all of my previous failed experimenting.

But that’s just me. Once I turn to the hints, either I’ll swear then off entirely or I’ll just keep coming back; often the latter. And when compared to the rest of the puzzles (I mean, the heavy hinting of your first serious objective – stop the ship blowing up – is amazing, and without it I wouldn’t have solved that one; with that little bit of hinting, I solved it and felt clever and resourceful) it’s unfair to focus on that particular one.

It fails to bring the whole game down around it. But, it *was* a sticking point and did affect the rest of my experience.

- Felix

October 23, 2015 at 2:11 pm

Tee-hee! Manly men discovering that love and adventure work the same at both ends of the gender spectrum, and that women aren’t in fact so mysterious after all. No offense, Jimmy.

But now I wonder if some male readers are similarly uncomfortable reading Interview With the Vampire, with its bisexual and overly emotional protagonist…

- Felix

October 23, 2015 at 4:19 pm

In all honesty, I had a similar hesitation before reading a friend’s debut novella, simply because it’s unabashedly pornographic, and that simply isn’t my thing. But I liked it a lot, and not just because he’s my friend; it’s actually good. So, it’s worth trying something out without preconceptions now and then. Nobody says you have to finish if your first instinct turns out to have been right…

- Andrew Plotkin

October 23, 2015 at 3:58 pm

I have to admit that this is one of the two core-Infocom titles that I skipped over, back in the day. (The other was Arthur.) I eventually played the LTOI edition, but of course playing games post-graduation isn’t the same as “back in the day”.

“…entering into talks with a mid-list romance-novel author about a possible collaboration…”

I don’t suppose the author’s name is accessible? If it was Elizabeth Lowell, I’m going to laugh and laugh…

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2015 at 4:17 pm

Dave Lebling mentioned this in his Get Lamp interview. Unfortunately, he couldn’t recall her name, only could remember her being “nice.”

- matt w

October 23, 2015 at 8:52 pm

What’s so funny about Elizabeth Lowell?

- Andrew Plotkin

October 24, 2015 at 4:48 am

Oh, she wrote some sci-fi novels (as Ann Maxwell) which came up in discussion recently (not here).

I’m just imagining an alternate history in which Infocom published a _Fire Dancer_ adaptation as IF in 1988. But it’s thin speculation when we can’t establish who the author was in the first place.

- Nathan

October 23, 2015 at 6:24 pm

You don’t actually have to take the pork; that particular puzzle has two solutions.

- Taras

October 23, 2015 at 9:58 pm

One probably meaningless, but cute tangential connection Amy Briggs has with gaming history–other than her own contributions–is that she used to babysit Ron Gilbert, who of course went on to make his own swashbuckling, ahistorical, plot-driven pirate game.

- Jimmy Maher

October 24, 2015 at 9:16 am

Wow. I didn’t know that. Small world.

- Steve

July 5, 2017 at 4:02 am

This is amazing, if true.

- Poddy

October 24, 2015 at 12:54 am

I remember the first scene very fondly, where you can wait until the pirate crashes in and the captain saves you OR NOT, take the coffer and whack the pirate over the head with it OR NOT…And the story continues, only with a slightly different understanding of your abilities and character every time such a scene unfolds. It’s possible to impress or puzzle Jamison with your resourcefulness at many spots, he’ll respond differently to what you’re wearing when you meet him, it’s just so infinitely delightful.

- Jimmy Maher

October 24, 2015 at 9:17 am

I’m learning from some of these comments that Plundered Hearts is even more impressive and flexible than I realized. I didn’t know it was possible to take matters into your own hands in that first scene, and I also didn’t know it was possible to complete the game even if you leave the pork behind.

- TsuDhoNimh

October 25, 2015 at 12:18 am

I played this all the way through the day after I read the article, and I agree that the game does a great job of putting you in the story and being fair to the player. I needed many hints, but I never felt that a puzzle solution was illogical or unfair. The tough puzzles mentioned in the article and in the comments were indeed tough, but at least they made sense.

The game is certainly not perfect. It drove me crazy when the game would not accept certain phrases and in the room descriptions that didn’t tell you where the exits are. I spent way too much time trying to figure out how to get past the cupboard. No amount of “push cupboard” or “squeeze through gap” or “squeeze around cupboard” would get you out. The library puzzle had me on a guess-the-exact-phrase wild goose chase as well, as did the endgame, which is impossible to get through unless you guess that you can go South out of the library, which is not in the room description at all.

- Jimmy Maher

October 25, 2015 at 8:19 am

I don’t recall ever really struggling with the parser, and I definitely solved this on my own, with no hints, at least on my most recent playthrough. But granted, I have been playing a lot of Infocom games the last few years, so I perhaps have an instinct about what the parser is likely to understand, and I’m pretty good at solving adventure games in general by now. (Too bad I can’t put that skill on my CV!)

I also don’t recall struggling at all with the geography. Some of this may be a mismatch of expectations. For example, it was still pretty much expected at the time of Plundered Hearts that the player would draw a map. I always do so, using the very handy Trizbort in a window next to the interpreter. Plundered Hearts’s geography isn’t intentionally confusing, but it may be easier to see how it all fits together with a visual aid.

None of this is to say that you were playing “wrong,” of course. Just an explanation, along with the space limitations of the 128 K Z-Machine, for why a modern player may struggle a bit with a game that most contemporary players viewed as quite straightforward and very player-friendly. I’ve played so many old games since starting this blog that I may receive games more like the latter than the former by now.

- Poddy

October 25, 2015 at 9:00 pm

I remember struggling with the geography as a kid, but not on later replays where habit was ingrained. The ship recognizes ‘fore’ and ‘aft’ as directions, but the game does not always use ‘enter’ intuitively. The paths around the mansion don’t strictly match up everywhere so that after going east you have to return northwest (or something quite like that) and it does requires rereading descriptions to get around.

Still, you sense a problem-solving person behind the game, who wants to play WITH you and laugh WITH you– not someone cackling at their own cleverness whenever you stumble.

- TsuDhoNimh

October 26, 2015 at 5:33 pm

Clearly I should use Trizbort, which I did not know about (thanks, Jimmy!), any time I venture back into interactive fiction. Mapping is something I loved to do as a kid, but hate to do as an adult.

- Steve

July 5, 2017 at 4:14 am

I completely agree about the cupboard. Navigating that area was a nightmare.

I’ve found Jimmy is quite forgiving (or just genuinely blind) if he likes a game enough. For instance, in his response to your complaint about the Library, he suggests drawing a map; except you first get to that location through a window, so the fact there is a southern doorway would never be known to you, unless explicitly stated in the description (which it wasn’t).

- Torbjörn Andersson

October 27, 2015 at 10:15 pm

Being able (but not forced) to defend yourself in that early scene was one of my favorite little touches in the game, too. I was just about to post about it, when I saw you had beaten me to it!

I liked how resourceful the game made me feel as I played it, without turning me into some kind of super-woman. You do spend some time as the helpless (or not-so-helpless) victim, but it doesn’t feel out of place or character when you also get to play the rescuer.

- Jake

October 24, 2015 at 10:16 pm

One of the strange things about Infocom’s canon (and, I suppose the canon of so many other influential creators) is the complete disconnect between the long-term historical assessment of a work and its contemporary reception. AMFV, Trinity, and Plundered Hearts were all frankly pretty listlessly received at the time, but nowadays I think all three garner much greater community respect than Infocom’s more well-eceived, and more conventional works. There are a lot of ways in which Plundered Hearts is straight-up good craft (the story/puzzle integration, the writing, most of the mechanics) and a few respects in which it was actively innovative (the genre experimentation, the highly characterized protagonist).

It’s a shame that Amy Briggs came so late to Infocom that it wasn’t the same sort of idyll it was for the long-timer Imps, but it’s good that those occasional props she gets from people who recognize her name make it clear that, even if she only got one shot at a game, it was a damn good shot.

- Jimmy Maher

October 25, 2015 at 8:09 am

I think it’s important to remember that Infocom for much of the company’s existence all but personified mainstream adventure gaming. I wrote at some point a long time ago that those who made text adventures during the 1980s can be divided into two categories: those using text only because graphics weren’t possible, and those who saw the text adventure as a worthwhile creative form unto itself — who, in other words, *willfully* chose it over other alternatives. Sierra is the classic example of the former category; Infocom, if not 100 percent an example of the latter — they would have started including graphics of some sort by the mid-1980s if resources and technology had allowed — certainly were enraptured with interactive fiction as a form unto itself in a way matched by only a few of their peers. It’s to their huge credit that they continued to experiment with more textured, literary works throughout their lifetime, when most of the gaming public would have been perfectly happy for them to just keep making Zorks and long after such experimentation had proved itself to be less than hugely rewarding commercially.

I think we can also largely divide players into the same two categories. Those who have stuck with the format past its commercial collapse are looking for something a bit different than were most of their peers during the 1980s. Thus the positive critical consensus toward games that were often dismissed back in the day.

- Janice M. Eisen

October 26, 2015 at 2:31 am

I had been, up to this point, one of those crazy loyal fans who bought every new Infocom game as soon as it came out — except for the ones I’d tested — hell, I even bought a copy of Quarterstaff. Yet, like Zarf, I skipped this one. I hated romance novels, so I had no interest, and was even kind of offended that they thought that was the way to market to women. After seeing what a high opinion you had of the game, I pulled it up in Lost Treasures and played through it.

I think I’d have been disappointed if I had bought it back in the day. For all that I kept trying to convince non-players of the literary merits of Trinity, I wanted my crossword puzzle as well. You’re right that it’s very playable — I only had to resort to the InvisiClues a couple of times — and highly polished, though I had a couple of guess-the-verb moments, but it’s also very easy. If there had been a marketing genius at the company, maybe they could have sold it to romance fans and hoped to get a few of them hooked, but I can’t imagine how, and it was, sadly, too late anyway.

I’m sorry Amy had such an unfortunate experience, since she was clearly talented. Like so much in the waning years of Infocom, what a waste!

- Duncan Stevens

October 26, 2015 at 7:12 pm

One other notable thing about Plundered Hearts: more than in any other Infocom game, the PC has a personality and isn’t just the player’s avatar. There are things she will and won’t do, her emotional reaction to specific events is thoroughly described (and not just the big ones–“You haven’t been to a ball in months!”), and others react to her as a person (well, okay, some of them) rather than just someone who triggers events. Some other Infocom games had given the PC a name, but that was about it–if there was any moment when Watson or Arthur acted as something more than a faceless avatar, I sure don’t remember it.

To be sure, this could have been more consistently done, or at least there are certain aspects of the story that your character could have reacted to a tad more strongly. Escaping crocodiles, fighting off rapists, etc. Later IF games would do more with this. But it was a start.

- Lisa H.

October 27, 2015 at 12:15 am

if there was any moment when Watson or Arthur acted as something more than a faceless avatar, I sure don’t remember it.

Which Activision then lampshaded in Zork: Grand Inquisitor by having the player actually be called “Ageless, Faceless, Gender-Neutral, Culturally Ambiguous Adventure Person”.

- Jimmy Maher

October 27, 2015 at 3:28 pm

I think there are other Infocom games that do some of this, although not as well or as consistently. There are some off-hand remarks in the early stages of Infidel that let you know the protagonist is kind of a jerk, and in the opening act of Planetfall Meretzky beats the loser-with-a-mop drum pretty hard. Both characterizations kind of peter out later, though. Even better examples are A Mind Forever Voyaging and especially Seastalker. The latter doesn’t tend to attract much critical attention, being usually dismissed as just Infocom’s kids game (which it of course was), but if you ask me it’s actually the game in the catalog that resembles Plundered Hearts most: heavily characterized protagonist, plot-heavy, a constant narrative momentum that keeps you always reacting to events rather than just exploring static geography at your leisure. Plundered Hearts, however, is longer, better implemented, better written, and, well, just generally *better*.

It is interesting that Infocom not only never built all that much on Seastalker but that if anything, Plundered Hearts aside, did less of this sort of heavy characterization in later games. Once again I do think this points to a difference in player expectations. As I described in my article on Infidel, lots of purists weren’t at all happy about the idea of playing a *role* in an IF game, were very much wedded to the idea that they were playing *themselves*. (As Scott Adams described his protagonists, “I am your puppet.”) Mike Berlyn is on record noting that the reaction to Infidel in particular was enough to prompt Infocom to pretty much say, “Okay, won’t be trying too much more of *that*.” Nowadays the idea of playing a character who isn’t you in an IF game is so ingrained that we don’t think twice about it — or even think at all about it for that matter.

It’s also interesting to note that graphic adventures didn’t need to go through the same process. Right from King’s Quest on they often featured strongly characterized protagonists, and to seemingly little resistance or even notice from players. I think this is down to the second-person descriptions of text adventures versus the third-person view common in most early graphic adventures (and plenty of later ones as well, of course). When Myst became popular later on and brought with it a whole slew of first-person games, the old nameless, genderless, generic adventurey person made a comeback — including, as Lisa notes, in Zork: Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor.

- Duncan Stevens

October 27, 2015 at 5:05 pm

Mike Berlyn is on record noting that the reaction to Infidel in particular was enough to prompt Infocom to pretty much say, “Okay, won’t be trying too much more of *that*.”

I pulled up the quote from your Infidel article; I assume you’re thinking of this:

People really don’t want to know who they are [in a game]. This was an interesting learning process for everyone at Infocom. We weren’t really writing interactive fiction — I don’t care what you call it, I don’t care what you market it as. It’s not fiction. They’re adventure games. You want to give the player the opportunity to put themselves in an environment as if they were really there.

I wonder whether Berlyn/Infocom learned the right lesson, and whether Berlyn was accurately conveying the reaction that Infocom got. Was it that players didn’t want to be put in the shoes of a protagonist at all? Or was it that they didn’t like being put in the shoes of a really unappealing protagonist and being punished for his sins (committed prior to the game beginning)? In all likelihood, no one articulated this distinction very precisely, but they’re not the same thing, to my mind.

As for Seastalker and AMFV…I don’t think I’d call Seastalker’s protagonist heavily characterized. You learn in the feelies that you’re a brilliant young inventor, and other people treat you as part of the team, but I don’t think the game ever gives you any kind of emotional reaction to anything, hints at a personality trait, or identifies something you can or can’t do because of who you are. And in AMFV, you don’t have a personality at all in the lab and your simulated character is largely undeveloped. You’re a little more than an avatar in both games, but only a little. PH, uneven as it was in this respect, was a pretty big jump.

- Jimmy Maher

October 28, 2015 at 9:58 am

Berlyn designed Infidel to provoke, and provoke it did. Players’ reactions were undoubtedly made more extreme by the fact that the protagonist was so unappealing. That said, a lot of the debate that followed — much of it described in that article — did really highlight a difference in player expectations and assumptions that feels very striking today. Infocom obviously didn’t totally reject the idea of more fleshed-out protagonists, but I do think it caused them to tread quite carefully.

In the case of Seastalker, I think that the protagonist’s personality is conveyed quite well through the tone of the writing itself. It feels like the character’s own internal monologue. Hitchhiker’s has a very distinct “parser personality” as well, but that feels not so much like Arthur’s personality as it does the *game’s*.

Much as I’m in the “brave but flawed experiment” rather than the “misunderstood masterpiece” camp when it comes to A Mind Forever Voyaging, I give it a little more credit than you do. The scenes with Perry’s wife in particular really highlighted his personality. Things like the statement (heavily paraphrased here) that she looks even more beautiful now than she did when you married her decades ago really brought Perry’s subjective impressions into play. It wasn’t done all that often, and sometimes not all that well — it was actually in the game after the supposedly “literary” AMFV, Leather Goddesses, that Meretzky’s writing started markedly improving — but it is there, and very much intentionally so. It’s unsurprising then that this was the game over which Meretzky and Briggs first bonded.

None of which is to say that Plundered Hearts didn’t significantly improve on all those earlier efforts. It is, as I wrote in the article, the game that most closely matches the ideal of interactive fiction that an uninitiated someone might expect from reading the back of an Infocom box, and its willingness to invest the protagonist with a real personality is a big part of that.

- Jubal

October 28, 2015 at 4:59 am

So, there was a swashbuckling romantic adventure released in September of 1987, packed with romance, ingenious problems, affectionate references to classic stories, old Errol Flynn movies, love and romance, dashing handsome pirates, and so on, and which made little impact on release but has gone on to be much loved and very highly regarded. All of which applies equally to Plundered Hearts and The Princess Bride. There must have been something in the water.

- Jimmy Maher

October 28, 2015 at 10:11 am

Plundered Hearts and The Princess Bride also apparently share a puzzle solution, according to Neil deMause in his XYZZY News interview with Amy Briggs. Briggs clarifies that she didn’t lift the puzzle from the movie but rather from a book called The Sherwood Ring by Elizabeth Marie Pope. I don’t know whether The Princess Bride lifted from the same source. In fact, I don’t even know what the puzzle in question *is*. Maybe someone more familiar with the movie — I haven’t seen it in 20 years at least — has an idea?

- Duncan Stevens

October 28, 2015 at 12:25 pm

I’m guessing Neil was thinking about the goblets, though it’s a stretch to call it a common puzzle solution. But there’s a link insofar as poisoning/drugging a particular goblet does not actually solve the problem in either case.

- Lisa H.

October 28, 2015 at 5:12 pm

I dunno about a common puzzle solution as such, but the “which goblet is poisoned” trope sort of feels like an old standard. Anyone else remember “The Court Jester”?

- Steve

July 5, 2017 at 4:46 am

To note, the Invisiclues for this game references The Court Jester when addressing this puzzle. “The flagon with the dragon has the brew that is true…”

- NPC

January 4, 2016 at 7:43 am

Artistic extincts

A fate worse than death for a game designer?

- Jimmy Maher

January 4, 2016 at 9:41 am

How did that go unnoticed for so long? Thanks!

- Ruber Eaglenest

January 25, 2016 at 4:20 pm

This article was just marvellous. Thanks a lot!

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- William Hern

April 2, 2017 at 5:17 pm

Another great article – congratulations on highlighting one of the hidden gems in the Infocom collection.

You mention at the end of the piece that Plundered Hearts is available as part of the iOS “Lost Treasures of Infocom” collection. This is a great set of adventures – I’ve spent many enjoyable hours replaying the classic games.

Unfortunately Activision has not updated the app in over five years and it is likely that it will not run in the next version of iOS.

I’ve started a discussion thread about this in the Activision support forums and it would be great if others could chime in. The more supporting posts that we get, the greater the chance that Activision may listen and recompile the app so that it runs in the 64-bit iOS environment.

You can find the thread here – https://community.activision.com/t5/Activision-Support/Lost-Treasures-of-Infocom-on-iOS-needs-64-bit-support/m-p/10212843

- William Hern

September 24, 2017 at 8:31 pm

Unfortunately Activision has not granted permission for the recompile of the “Lost Treasures of Infocom” and, as a result, the app will not run in iOS 11. Nor is it available in the new AppStore.

A petition has been started on change.org and I’d encourage everyone to sign it. The more signatures we get, the better the chances we have of getting someone at Activision to take notice.

https://www.change.org/p/activision-convince-activision-to-convert-their-ios-game-lost-treasures-of-infocom-to-64-bit

- Steve

July 5, 2017 at 4:55 am

…is watching players like me and our friend Ron T. above fall victim to its charms despite all their stoic manly skepticism.

Ha! This claim is a bit subverted for long time readers by your insistence on bringing 21st century gender politics into your articles about the ’80s every time you get the chance. Stoic manly skepticism? I mean, come on. There’s been no evidence of that in any of your writing so far… ;)

Not to say that’s a bad thing, but your claim to the otherwise just comes off as disingenuous here. (Not to mention how it clouds perceptions of your rapturous praise of the game; did you just like the game because it was written by a female with a female protagonist? Or was it actually a good game that happened to have a female PC?)

- P J Evans

April 20, 2019 at 7:41 pm

I tried to play it. But I could never get it to get past the first scene – there didn’t seem to be a way to get it to *do* anything. (It’s one of those where I want the !@#$%^&*(!!! source code.)

- Wolfeye M.

September 20, 2019 at 11:46 am

I don’t like romance, but a female protagonist, who isn’t a useless damsel in distress, sounds like a nice change of pace.

But, the rape in the game is a major turn off, so I won’t play it.

Frankly, it’s *worse* if a woman writes that kind of garbage, because women, more often than not, are the victims. Why would a woman want to put another woman, even a fictional one, through that experience? Even worse, take the player right along with her? Even if it’s the fade to black, screaming in agony off screen, kind of portrayal, it’s garbage. Kills all interest I’d ever have in the game.

A shame, a real shame, because otherwise I’d have wanted to play it.

- Nathanael

April 21, 2020 at 6:34 pm

Having played all the Infocom games (often using hint books and walkthroughs liberally — Wishbringer is the only one I cleared without a single hint), I have to agree. Plundered Hearts is really very good, and I would love to see more like it. I haven’t seen a modern “story oriented” game which I enjoyed as much.

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Beyond Zork
November 6, 2015

For a company that’s long since gone down into history as the foremost proponent of the all-text adventure game, Infocom sure spent a lot of years fretting over graphics. As early as 1982, well before starting their iconic text-only advertising campaign, they entered into discussions with Mark Pelczarski of Penguin Software about a possible partnership that would have seen Antonio Antiochia, writer and illustrator of Penguin’s hit adventure Transylvania, drawing pictures for Infocom games using Penguin’s The Graphics Magician. When that combination of Penguin’s graphics technology with Infocom’s text-only Z-Machine was judged impractical, the all-text advertising campaign went forward, but still Infocom refused to rule out graphics internally. On the contrary, they used some of the revenue from 1983, their first really big year, to start a graphics research group of their own under the stewardship of Mike Berlyn. But that attempt at a cross-platform graphics system, a sort of Z-Machine for graphical games, petered out almost as quietly as the Penguin deal, resulting only in Berlyn’s unique but ultimately underwhelming computerized board game Fooblitzky. Specifying a single set of graphics capabilities achievable by all of the diverse computers on the market meant that those graphics had to be very primitive, and, thanks to the fact that they were running through an interpreter, slow to boot. In the end Fooblitzky made it only to the Apple II, the Atari 8-bits, and the PC clones, and even that was a struggle. Certainly trying to combine this already problematic system with the sort of adventure game that was Infocom’s bread and butter seemed hopeless. Thus the graphics group was quietly dispersed amid all the other downsizing of 1985. Strike two.

After completing Trinity in 1986, Brian Moriarty decided to see if he could make the third time the charm. The fundamental problem which had dogged Infocom’s efforts to date had been the big DEC PDP-10 that remained at the heart of their development system — the same big mainframe that, once lauded as the key to Infocom’s success, was now beginning to seem more and more like a millstone around their necks. Bitmap graphics on the DEC, while possible through the likes of a VT-125 terminal, were slow, awkward, and very limited, as Fooblitzky had demonstrated all too well. Worse, mixing conventional scrolling text, of the sort needed by an Infocom adventure game, with those graphics on the same screen was all but impossible. Moriarty therefore decided to approach the question from the other side. What graphic or graphic-like things could they accomplish on the PDP-10 without losing the ability to easily display text as well?

That turned out to be, if far from the state of the art, nevertheless more than one might expect, and also much more than was possible at the time that they’d first installed their PDP-10. DEC’s very popular new VT-220 line of text-oriented terminals couldn’t display bitmap graphics, but they could change the color of the screen background and individual characters at will, selecting from a modest palette of a dozen or so possibilities. Even better, they could download up to 96 graphics primitives into an alternate character set, allowing the drawing of simple lines, boxes, and frames, in color if one wished. By duplicating these primitives in the microcomputer interpreters, Infocom could duplicate what they saw on their DEC-connected dumb terminals on the computer monitors of their customers. Like much of the game that would gradually evolve from Moriarty’s thought experiment, this approach marked as much a glance backward as a step forward. Character graphics had been a feature of microcomputers from the beginning — in fact, they had been the only way to get graphics out of two of the Trinity of 1977, the Radio Shack TRS-80 and the Commodore PET — but had long since become passé on the micros in light of ever-improving bitmap-graphic capabilities. Once, at the height of their success and the arrogance it engendered, Infocom had declared publicly that they wouldn’t do graphics until they were confident that they could do them better than anyone else. But maybe such thinking was misguided. Given the commercial pressure they were now under, maybe primitive graphics were better than no graphics at all.

Thus color and character graphics became the centerpieces of a new version of the Z-Machine that Dave Lebling, Chris Reeve, and Tim Anderson, Infocom’s chief technical architects, began putting together for Moriarty’s “experimental” project. This version 5 of the Z-Machine, the last to be designed for Infocom’s PDP-10-based development system, gradually came to also sport a host of other new features, including limited mouse support, real-time support, and the ability, previously hacked rather rudely into the old version 3 Z-Machine for The Lurking Horror, to play sampled sound files. The most welcome feature of all was one of the least flashy: an undo command that could take back your last turn, even after dying. Game size was still capped at the 256 K of the version 4 Z-Machine, a concession to two 8-bitters that still made up a big chunk of Infocom’s sales, the Commodore 128 and the Apple II. For the first time, however, this version of the Z-Machine was designed to query the hardware on which it ran about its capabilities, degrading as gracefully as possible on platforms that couldn’t manage to provide its more advanced features. The graphically primitive Apple II, for instance, didn’t offer color and replaced the unique character-graphic glyphs with rough approximations in simple ASCII text, while both 8-bitters lacked the undo feature. Mouse input and sound were similarly only made available on machines that were up to it. Infocom took to calling the version 5 games, of which Moriarty’s nascent project would be the first, “XZIPs,” the “X” standing for “experimental.” (Even after Moriarty’s game was released and the format was obviously no longer so experimental, the name would stick.)

Moriarty’s new interface running on an Amiga. Note the non-scrolling status window at top left that currently displays the room description, and the auto-map at top right. You can move around by clicking on the map as well as by typing the usual compass directions.

The same interface gracefully (?) degraded on the Apple II.

Of course, it was still up to Moriarty to decide how to use the new toolkit. He asked himself, “What can I do within the constraints of our technology to make the adventuring experience a little easier?” He considered trying to do away with the parser entirely, but decided that that still wasn’t practical. Instead he designed an interface for what he liked to call “an illuminated text adventure.” Once again, in looking forward he found himself to a surprising extent looking back.

In watching myself play, I found the command I typed most was “look.” So I said this is silly, why can’t the room description always be visible? After all, that’s what Scott Adams did in his original twelve adventures, with a split-screen showing the room description, exits, and your inventory at the top, while you type in the bottom. So I said, let’s take a giant step backward. The screen is split in half in most versions. On the left side of the top half is a programmable window. It can contain either the room description or your inventory. So as you walk from room to room, instead of the description coming in-line with your commands, as it does now in our games, this window is updated. If you say, “inventory,” the window changes to show your possessions.

Another thing I liked about the old Scott Adams games was the list of room exits at the top of the screen. That’s a part of writing room descriptions that has always bugged me: we have to have at least one sentence telling where the exits are. That takes up a lot of space, and there are only so many interesting ways to do that. So I said, let’s have a list of exits at the top. Now, that’s not such a revolutionary idea. I thought of putting in a compass rose and all this other stuff, but finally I came up with an onscreen map that draws a typical Infocom map — little boxes with lines and arrows connecting them. The right side of the upper screen has a little graphics map that draws itself and updates as you walk around. It shows rooms as boxes and lines as their connections. If you open a door, a line appears to the next room. Dark rooms have question marks in them. The one you’re in is highlighted, while the others are outlined.

This onscreen map won’t replace the one you draw yourself, but it does make it much easier to draw. It won’t show rooms you haven’t been to yet, but shows exits of your current room and all the exits of the adjoining rooms that you’ve visited.

There’s even more to this re-imagining of the text adventure. On machines equipped with mice, it’s possible to move about the world by simply clicking on the auto-map; function keys are now programmable to become command shortcuts; colors can be customized to your liking; even objects in the game can be renamed if you don’t like the name they came with. And, aware that plenty of customers had a strong traditionalist streak, Moriarty also made it possible to cut the whole thing off at the knees and go back to a bog-standard text-adventure interface at any time by typing “mode” — although, with exits now absent from room descriptions, it might be a bit more confusing than usual to play that way.

Remapping the function keys, just one of many useful bells and whistles.

But really, it’s hard to imagine any but the most hardcore Luddites choosing to do so. The new interface is smart and playable and hugely convenient, enough to make you miss it as soon as you return to a more typical text adventure, to wish that it had made it into more than the single Infocom game that would ultimately feature it, and to wonder why more designers haven’t elected to build on it in the many years since Infocom’s demise. Infocom wrote about the new interface in their Status Line newsletter that, “never a company to jump into the marketplace with gaudy or ill-conceived bells and whistles, we have always sought to develop an intelligently measured style, like any evolving author would.” It does indeed feel like a natural, elegant evolution, and one designed by an experienced player rather than a marketeer.

With the new interface design and the technology that enabled it now well underway, Moriarty still needed an actual game to use it all. Here he made another bold step of the sort that was rapidly turning his erstwhile thought experiment into the most ambitious game in Infocom’s history. It began with another open-ended question: “What kind of game would go well with this interface?” He settled on another first for Infocom: still a text adventure, but a text adventure “with very strong role-playing elements,” in which you would have to create a character and then build up her stats whilst collecting equipment and fighting monsters.

I spent a lot of time playing fantasy games like Ultima and Wizardry and, one that I particularly liked a lot, Xyphus for the Macintosh. And I realized it was fun to be able to name your character and have all these attributes instead of having just one number — a score — that says how well you’re doing. I thought it would be nice to adopt some of the conventions from this kind of game, so you don’t have one score, you have six or seven: endurance, strength, compassion, armor class, and so on. Your job in the game is, very much like in role-playing games, to raise these statistics. And your character grows as you progress through the puzzles, some of which cannot be solved unless you’ve achieved certain statistics. You can somewhat control the types of statistics you “grow” in order to control the type of character you have.

Viewing the state of your character.

In conflating the CRPG with the text adventure, Moriarty was, yet again, looking backward as much as forward. In the earliest days of the entertainment-software industry, no distinction was made between adventure games and CRPGs — small wonder, as text adventures in the beginning were almost as intimately connected with the budding tabletop RPG scene as were CRPGs themselves. Will Crowther, creator of the original Adventure, was inspired to do so as much by his experience of playing Dungeons and Dragons as he was that of spelunking in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave. Dave Lebling was a similarly avid Dungeons and Dragons player at the time that he, along with three partners, created the original mainframe Zork, the progenitor of everything that would follow for Infocom. It was Lebling who inserted Dungeons and Dragons-style randomized combat into that game, which survived as the battles with a certain troll and thief that served as many players’ introductions to the perils of life in the Great Underground Empire in Zork I on microcomputers. About the same time, Donald Brown was creating Eamon, the world’s first publicly available text-adventure creation system that also happened to be the first publicly available CRPG-creation system. When Byte magazine made the theme of its December 1980 issue “Adventure,” no editorial distinction was made between games where you wandered around solving puzzles and those where you wandered around killing monsters. Years before Infocom would adopt the term “interactive fiction” as their preferred name for their creations, Lebling described Zork for that issue as a “computerized fantasy simulation,” a term which today smacks much more of the CRPG than the text adventure. In the same issue Jon Freeman, creator of Temple of Apshai and many of its sequels, spent quite some pages laboriously describing his approach to adventuring, which offered “character variation” that “affects the game in many ways.” He struggles, with mixed results, to clarify how this is markedly different from the approach of Zork and Scott Adams. In retrospect, it’s obvious: he’s simply describing the difference between a CRPG and a text adventure. Over time this difference became clearer, even intuitive, but for years to come the two forms would remain linked in gamers’ minds as representing separate sub-genres more so than categories onto themselves. “Adventure-game columnists” like Computer Gaming World’s Scorpia, for instance, continued to cover both into the 1990s and beyond.

That’s by no means inexplicable. The two forms shared plenty in common, like a story, a love of fantasy settings, and the need to explore a computer-simulated world and (usually) to map it. The forms were also connected in being one-shot games, long experiences that you played through once and then put aside rather than shorter experiences that you might play again and again, as with most action and strategy games of the period. And then there was the simple fact that neither would likely have existed in anything like the form we know them if it hadn’t been for Dungeons and Dragons. Yet such similarities can blind us, as it did so many contemporary players, to some fairly glaring differences. We’ll soon be seeing some of the consequences of those differences play out in Moriarty’s hybrid.

By the time that Moriarty’s plans had reached this stage, it was the fall of 1986, and Infocom was busily lining up their biggest slate of new games ever for the following year. It had long since been decided that one of those games should bear the Zork name, the artistic fickleness that had led the Imps to reject Infocom’s most recognizable brand for years now seeming silly in the face of the company’s pressing need for hits. Steve Meretzky, who loved worldbuilding in general, also loved the lore of Zork to a degree not matched even by the series’s original creators. While working on Sorcerer, he had assembled a bible containing every scrap of information then “known” — more often than not in the form of off-hand asides delivered strictly for comedic effect — about the Flathead dynasty, the Great Underground Empire, and all the rest of it, attracting in the process a fair amount of ridicule from other Imps who thought he was taking it all far, far too seriously. (One shudders to think what they would say about The Zork Compendium.) Now Meretzky was more than eager to do the next Zork game. Whirling dervish of creativity that he was, he even had a plot outline to hand for a prequel, which would explain just how the Great Underground Empire got into the sorry state in which you first find it in Zork I. But there was a feeling among management that the long-awaited next Zork game ought to really pull out all the stops, ought to push Infocom’s technology just as far as it would go. That, of course, was exactly what Moriarty was already planning to do. His plan to add CRPG elements would make a fine fit with the fantasy milieu of Zork as well. Moriarty agreed to make his game a Zork, and Mereztky, always the good sport, gave Moriarty his bible and proceeded to take up Stationfall, another long-awaited sequel, instead.

It was decided to call the new Zork game Beyond Zork, a reference more to its new interface and many technical advancements than to the content of the game proper. Having agreed to make his game a Zork, Moriarty really made it a Zork, stuffing it with every piece of trivia he could find in Meretzky’s bible or anywhere else, whilst recreating many of the settings from the original Zork trilogy as well as the Enchanter trilogy. Beyond Zork thus proclaimed to the world something that had always been understood internally by Infocom: that the Enchanter trilogy in a different reality — a better reality according to marketing director Mike Dornbrook’s lights — could have just as easily shipped as Zork IV through VI. But Moriarty didn’t stop there. He also stuffed Beyond Zork with subtler callbacks to almost the entire Infocom catalog to date, like the platypus, horseshoe, and whistle from Wishbringer and the magical umbrella from Trinity. Mr. Prosser, Arthur Dent’s hapless nemesis from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, shows up as the name of a spell, and Buck Palace, the statuesque B-movie star from Hollywood Hijinx, is the default name for your character if you don’t give him another. There are so many references that upon the game’s release Infocom sponsored a contest to see who could spot the most of them. Especially in retrospect, knowing as we do that we are now coming close to the end of the line for Infocom, all of the backward glances can take on an elegiac quality, can make Beyond Zork feel like something of a victory lap for an entire era of adventure gaming.

I’m less pleased with the actual plot premise of Beyond Zork, which, as unplanned sequels so often tend to do, rather clumsily undermines the message of its predecessor. Moriarty’s game builds on Spellbreaker, which saw you destroying magic in the name of saving the world. The ending of Spellbreaker:

You find yourself back in Belwit Square, all the Guildmasters and even Belboz crowding around you. "A new age begins today," says Belboz after hearing your story. "The age of magic is ended, as it must, for as magic can confer absolute power, so it can also produce absolute evil. We may defeat this evil when it appears, but if wizardry builds it anew, we can never ultimately win. The new world will be strange, but in time it will serve us better."

Your score is 600 of a possible 600, in 835 moves. This puts you in the class of Scientist.

Strange as it may sound, I judge that jarring last sentence to be nothing less than Dave Lebling’s finest moment as a writer. It’s an ending that can be read to mean many things, from an allegory of growing up and leaving childish things behind to a narrative of human progress as a whole — the replacing of a “God of the gaps” with real knowledge, simultaneously empowering and depressing in the way it can leach the glorious mystery out of life.

But still more depressing is the way that Beyond Zork now comes along to muck it up. You play a novice enchanter (where have we heard that before?) who, even as the wise and powerful hero of Spellbreaker sets about destroying magic, is dispatched by the Guild to retrieve the “Coconut of Quendor” that can safeguard it for a return at some point in the future. Why couldn’t Moriarty just leave well enough alone, find some other premise for his game of generic fantasy adventure? About the best thing I can say about the plot is that you hardly know it’s there when you’re actually playing the game; until the last few turns Beyond Zork is largely a plot-free exercise in puzzles, self-improvement (in the form of easily quantifiable statistics and equipment), and monster bashing.

On those terms, Beyond Zork seems to acquit itself quite well in the early going. Brian Moriarty remains the most gifted prose stylist among the Imps, crafting elegant sentence that must make this game, if nothing else, among the best written generic fantasies ever. Zork always had a bipolar personality, sometimes indulging in unabashed comedy and at others evoking majestic, windy desolation. Perhaps surprisingly in that it comes from the author of the doom-laden Trinity, Beyond Zork leans more toward the former than the latter. But then anyone who’s played Wishbringer knows that Moriarty can do comedy — and the juxtaposition of comedy with darker elements — very well indeed. I particularly like the group of Implementors you meet; this sort of meta-comedy was rapidly becoming another Zork tradition, dating back to the appearance of the adventurer from the original trilogy in Enchanter or, depending on how you interpret the ending of Zork III, possibly even earlier. Moriarty lampoons the reputation the Imps had within Infocom, usually expressed jokingly but not always without an edgy undercurrent, of being the privileged kids who always got all the free lunches and other perks, not to mention the public recognition, while the rest of the company, who rightfully considered themselves also very important to Infocom’s success, toiled away neglected and anonymous.

Ethereal Plane Of Atrii, Above Fields
The thunderclouds are compressed into a flat optical plane, stretching away below your feet in every direction.

A group of Implementors is seated around a food-laden table, playing catch with a coconut.

One of the Implementors notices your arrival. "Company," he remarks with his mouth full.

A few of the others glance down at you.

>x coconut
It's hard to see what all the fuss is about.

A tall, bearded Implementor pitches the coconut across the table. "Isn't this the feeb who used the word 'child' a few moves ago?" he mutters, apparently referring to you. "Gimme another thunderbolt."

>get coconut
The Implementors won't let you near.

A cheerful-looking Implementor catches the coconut and glares down at you with silent contempt.

"Catch!" cries the cheerful-looking Implementor, lobbing the coconut high into the air.

"Got it." A loud-mouthed Implementor jumps out of his seat, steps backwards to grab the falling coconut... and plows directly into you.

Plop. The coconut skitters across the plane.

>get coconut
As you reach towards the coconut, a vortex of laughing darkness boils up from underfoot!

"More company," sighs the cheerful-looking Implementor.

You back away from the zone of darkness as it spreads across the Plane, reaching out with long black fingers, searching, searching...

Slurp! The coconut falls into the eye of the vortex and disappears, along with a stack of lunch meat and bits of cutlery from the Implementors' table. Then, with a final chortle, the vortex draws itself together, turns sideways and flickers out of existence.

"Ur-grue?" asks the only woman Implementor.

"Ur-grue," nods another.

>ask implementors about ur-grue
"I think I just heard something insignificant," remarks an Implementor.

"How dull," replies another, stifling a yawn.

"This is awkward," remarks a loudmouthed Implementor. "No telling what the ur-grue might do with the Coconut. He could crumble the foundations of reality. Plunge the world into a thousand years of darkness. We might even have to buy our own lunch!" The other Implementors gasp. "And it's all her fault," he adds, pointing at you with a drumstick.

"So," sighs another Implementor, toying with his sunglasses. "The Coconut is gone. Stolen. Any volunteers to get it back?"

One by one, the Implementors turn to look at you.

"I'd say it's unanimous," smiles the cheerful-looking Implementor.

A mild-mannered Implementor empties his goblet of nectar with a gulp. "Here," he says, holding it out for you. "Carry this. It'll keep the thunderbolts off your back."

>get goblet
The Implementor smiles kindly as you take the goblet. "And now you will excuse us. My fellow Implementors and I must prepare for something too awesome to reveal to one as insignificant as you."

At first, the CRPG elements seem to work better than one might expect. Randomized combat in particular has for many, many years had a checkered reputation among interactive-fiction fans. It’s very difficult to devise a model for combat in text adventures that makes the player feel involved and empowered rather than just being at the mercy of the game’s random-number generator. There weren’t many fans of the combat in Zork I even back in the day, prompting Infocom to abandon it in all of their future games; only the usually pointless “diagnose” command remained as a phantom limb to remind one of Zork’s heritage in Dungeons and Dragons. Even Eamon as time went by moved further and further away from its original incarnation as a sort of text-only simulation of Dungeons and Dragons, its scenarios beginning to focus more on story, setting, and puzzles than killing monsters.

Battling a rat-ant (say, is that a Starcross reference?) in Beyond Zork.

Beyond Zork doesn’t entirely solve any of the problems that led to those developments, but it does smartly make the process of preparing for the combats more compelling than the combats themselves can possibly be. As you explore the world and solve puzzles, you level up and improve your ability scores. Among other things, this lets you fight better. You can also sell treasure for money, a nice twist on the treasure-hunt model of old-school text adventuring, and use it to buy better weapons, armor, and magic items. As you improve yourself through these means and others, you find that you can challenge tougher monsters. Thus, while the combat is still not all that interesting in itself — it still comes down to the same old “monster hits you for X points of damage, you hit monster for Y points of damage,”  rinse and repeat until somebody is done for — the sudden ability to win a battle in which you previously didn’t have a chance can feel surprisingly rewarding. Many of the monsters take the place of locked doors in more conventional text adventures, keeping you out of places you aren’t yet ready for. It feels about as satisfying to defeat one of these as it does to finally come across the key for a particularly stubborn lock in another game. Indeed, I wish that Moriarty had placed the monsters more carefully in order to guide you through the game in the right order and keep you from locking yourself out of victory by doing the right things in the wrong order, as I’ll describe in more detail shortly.

It also helps that the combats are usually quite low-stakes. While undo is disabled in combat — how ironic that Infocom introduced undo in their first game ever with a good reason not to allow it! — it’s always obvious very quickly when you’re over-matched, and usually fairly trivial to back away and go explore somewhere else before you get killed. One other subtle touch, much appreciated by a big old softie like me who can even start to feel bad for the monsters he kills in Wizardry, is that you rarely actually kill anything in Beyond Zork. Monsters usually “retreat into the darkness” or something similar rather than expiring — or at least before expiring. While I suspect Moriarty did this more to avoid implementing dead monster bodies than to make a statement, I’ll take my instances of mercy wherever I can find them.

Beyond Zork blessedly doesn’t take itself all that seriously, whether as a CRPG or as anything else. Instead of the painfully earnest orcs and dragons that populate most CRPGs, Beyond Zork’s monsters are almost uniformly ridiculous: Christmas tree monsters singing dreadful carols (anyone who’s ever visited a shopping mall on Black Friday can probably relate), cruel puppets who attack by mocking you (they “recite your nightly personal habits in excruciating detail” among other attacks), dust bunnies (got any lemony-fresh Pledge handy?). In a sense Beyond Zork is just another genre exercise for Infocom, albeit in a ludic rather than a literary genre this time, and as usual for them it can sometimes feel as much parody as homage. There are alternate, puzzlely solutions that can be used to defeat many monsters in lieu of brute strength, and usually in more entertaining fashion at that. In fact, in many cases cleverness is the only way forward. Vital clues to the various monsters’ weaknesses are found in the game’s version of Dungeons and Dragons’s Monster Manual, the accompanying feelie “The Lore and Legends of Quendor”; if only other companies offered such entertaining and clever copy protection! And if fighting fair and square or puzzling your way around the monsters aren’t enough alternatives for you, you can just use your Wand of Annihilation or other magic. Not just monsters but also many other problems can similarly be defeated in various ways. Beyond Zork is surprisingly flexible.

But, sadly, it’s often dangerously flexible. Which brings us to the part of this article where I have to tell you why, despite its many innovations, despite Moriarty’s usual fine writing, and despite some fine puzzles, Beyond Zork in my opinion just doesn’t add up to all that great of a game.  I think I can best explain how things go wrong by dissecting one particularly dismaying sequence in some detail.

Fair warning: heavy spoilers begin here!

So, I come upon a mother and baby hungus — “part sheep, part hippopotamus,” as “The Legends and Lore of Quendor” helpfully tells us — caught in a bad situation.

Quicksand
A strip of dry path winds alongside a pool of quicksand. You see a baby hungus stuck into the wet, gritty surface.

A mother hungus is standing nearby, gazing anxiously at her baby.

Luckily, I happen to have found a Stave of Levitation. What I need to do seems pretty obvious.

>point stave at baby
The baby hungus bellows with surprise as he rises out of the quicksand! Sweat breaks out on your forehead as you guide the heavy burden over the mud and safely down to the ground.

[Your strength just went down.]

The ungainly creature nuzzles you with his muddy snout, and bats his eyelashes with joy and gratitude. Then he ambles away into the jungle to find his mother, pausing for a final bellow of farewell.

[Your compassion just went up.]

Heartwarming, isn’t it? But you know what’s less heartwarming? The fact that I’ve just locked myself out of victory, that’s what. I needed to do something else, which we’ll get to in a moment, before rescuing the little fellow. It will, needless to say, likely be a long, long time before I realize that, especially given that the game actually rewards me by increasing my Compassion score. (As for the Strength loss, never fear, I’ll recover that automatically in a few turns.) This is terrible design, of the sort I expect from early Sierra, not late Infocom. I wrote in an earlier article that “we should reserve a special layer of Hell for those designs whose dead ends feel not just like byproducts of their puzzles and other interactive possibilities but rather intentional traps.” See you down below, Beyond Zork.

Beyond Zork is absolutely riddled with these sorts of traps, forcing you to restart many, many times to get through it, wondering all the while whether you didn’t render this latest puzzle you’re wrestling with insoluble a long time ago by some innocent, apparently correct action like the one above. What makes this even more baffling is that in other ways Beyond Zork is presented as an emergent, replayable experience, the sort of game where you take your lumps and move on until you either win or lose rather than constantly restoring and/or restarting to optimize your play. Taking a cue from the roguelike genre, large chunks of Beyond Zork’s geography are randomly generated anew every time you play, as are the placement of most magic items and their descriptions; that Stave of Levitation I just used may be a Stave of Annihilation in another playthrough, forcing me to make sure I make good use of the various shops’ ability to identify stuff for me. As the manual tells you, “No two games of Beyond Zork are exactly alike!” But what’s the point of that approach when most of those divergent games leave you fruitlessly wandering about, blocked at every turn, wondering where you went wrong? Even an infamously difficult roguelike like NetHack at least puts you out of your misery when you screw up. By the time you do figure out how to tiptoe through this minefield of dead ends, you’ve internalized the whole game to such an extent that the randomness is just a huge annoyance.

The deterministic text adventure and the emergent CRPG end up rubbing each other raw almost every time they touch. When you discover a cool new magic wand or spell, you’re afraid to use it to vanquish that pesky monster you’ve been struggling with for fear that you’ll need to use it to solve some deterministic puzzle somewhere else. Yes, resource management was always a huge part of old-school dungeon crawls like Wizardry and The Bard’s Tale — arguably the hugest part, given that their actual combat engines were often little more sophisticated than that of Beyond Zork — but there was always a clear distinction between things you might need to solve puzzles and things for managing combat. The lack of same here is devastating; the CRPG aspects are really hard to enjoy when you’re constantly terrified to actually use any of the neat equipment you collect.

And just as the text adventure undermines the CRPG, the CRPG also undermines the text adventure. Near the hungi — never fear, we’ll return to that problem shortly! — I find this, yet another callback to Spellbreaker:

>w
Idol
A stone idol, carved in the likeness of a giant crocodile, stands in a clearing.

You see a tear-shaped jewel in its gaping maw.

You see a tear-shaped jewel on the idol's maw.

>x idol
This monstrous idol is approximately the size and shape of a subway train, not counting the limbs and tail. The maw hangs wide open, its lower jaw touching the ground to form an inclined walkway lined with rows of stone teeth. A tear-shaped jewel adorns the idol's face, just below one eye.

>enter idol
You climb up into the idol's maw.

The stone jaw lurches underfoot, and you struggle to keep your balance. It's like standing on a seesaw.

>get jewel
The idol's maw tilts dangerously as you reach upward!
Slowly, slowly, you draw your hand away from the tear-shaped jewel, and the jaw settles back to the ground.

>u
You edge a bit further into the open maw.

Creak! The bottom of the jaw tilts backward, pitching you helplessly forward...

This sequence begins a veritable perfect storm of problems, starting with the text itself, which contradicts itself and thus makes it hard to figure out what the situation really is. Is the jewel in the idol’s maw, on the idol’s maw (the weird doubled text is present in the original), or stuck to the idol’s face? Or are there two jewels, one stuck on his face and one in (on?) his maw? I’m still not sure. But let’s continue a bit further.

>turn on lantern
Click. The lantern emits a brilliant glow.

Inside Idol
This long, low chamber is shaped much like the gizzard of a crocodile. Trickles of fetid moisture feed the moss crusting the walls and ceiling.

>squeeze moss
The moss seems soft and pliant.

The moss is “Moss of Mareilon.” As described in “The Lore and Legends of Quendor,” squeezing it as I’ve just done will lead to a dexterity increase a few turns from now. And so we come to one of the most subtly nasty bits in Beyond Zork. To fully explain, I need to back up just a little.

Earlier in the game, in a cellar, I needed to climb a “stairlike spiral” of crates to get something on top of them. Alas, I wasn’t up to it thanks to a low dexterity: “You teeter uncertainly on the lowest crates, lose your balance, and sprawl to the ground. Not very coordinated, are you?” Luckily, some Moss of Mareilon was growing right nearby; I could squeeze it to raise my dexterity enough to get the job done.

So, when I come to the idol, and find more Moss of Mareilon growing conveniently just inside it, that combined with the description of my somewhat clumsy effort to grab the jewel lead to what still seems to me a very natural thought: that I need to squeeze the moss inside the idol to increase my dexterity enough to grab the jewel. I do so, then use a handy magic item to teleport out, then do indeed try again to grab the jewel. But it doesn’t work; I still can’t retrieve the jewel, still get pitched down the idol’s throat every time. After struggling fruitlessly with this poorly described and poorly implemented puzzle — more on that in a moment — I finally start thinking that maybe it can’t be solved because I didn’t give my character enough dexterity at the very beginning of the game. This can actually happen; Beyond Zork is quite possibly the only text adventure ever written in which you can lock yourself out of victory before you even enter your first command. (“The attributes of the ‘default’ [pre-created] characters are all sufficient to complete the story,” says the manual, which at least lets you know some of what you’re in for if you decide to create your own.) So, I create a brand new character with very good dexterity, and spend an hour or so, cursing all of the randomizations all the while, to get back to the idol puzzle. But I still can’t fetch the diamond, not even after squeezing the moss.

It does seem that the game has, once again, actively chosen to mislead me and generally screw me over here. But, intentionality aside, a more subtle but more fundamental problem is the constant confusion between player skill, the focus of a text adventure, and character skill, the focus of a CRPG. Let me explain.

A text adventure is a much more embodied experience than a CRPG. There’s a real sense that it’s you — or, increasingly in later games, a role that you are inhabiting — whom you are guiding through the simulated world. Despite the name, meanwhile, a CRPG is a more removed experience. You play a sort of life coach guiding the development of one or more others. Put another way, one genre emphasizes player skill, the other character skill. Think about what you spend the most time doing in these games. The most common activity in a text adventure is puzzle-solving, the most common in a CRPG combat. The former relies entirely on the wit of the player; the latter, if it’s done well, will involve plenty of player strategy, but it’s also heavily dependent on the abilities of the characters you guide. After all, no amount of strategy is going to let you win Wizardry or The Bard’s Tale with a level 1 party. CRPGs are process-intense simulations to a greater degree than text adventures, which rely heavily on hand-crafted content, often — usually in these early years — in the form of puzzles of one stripe or another. This led Jon Freeman in his Byte article to call text adventures, admittedly rather reductively, not simulations or even games at all but elaborate puzzle boxes built out of smaller puzzles: “It can be quite challenging to find the right key, the right moment, and the right command to insert it in the right lock; but once you do, the door will open — always.” In a CRPG, on the other hand, opening that lock might depend on a random number and some combination of a character’s lock-picking ability, the availability of a Knock spell, and/or the quality of the lock picks in her pack. More likely, the locked door won’t be there at all, replaced with some monster to fight. Sure things aren’t quite so common.

Of course, these distinctions are hardly absolute. CRPGs, for example, contained occasional player-skill-reliant puzzles to break up their combat almost from the very beginning. Muddying up the player-skill/character-skill dichotomy too much or too thoughtlessly can, however, be very dangerous, as Beyond Zork has just so amply demonstrated. While one hardly need demand an absolutely pure approach, one does need to know where the boundaries lie, which problems you can solve by solving a puzzle for yourself and to which you need to apply some character ability or other. Those boundaries are never entirely clear in Beyond Zork, and the results can be pretty ugly.

All that said, I still haven’t actually solved the idol puzzle. I guessed quite quickly that the description of standing on the idol’s maw as “like standing on a seesaw” was a vital clue. The solution, then, might be to place a counterweight at the front of the maw to keep it from pitching up and pitching me in. Yet the whole thing is so sketchily described and implemented that I remain unsure what’s actually happening. If I start piling things up inside the maw, they do fall down into the idol’s stomach along with me when I reach for the jewel — apparently, anyway; they’re not described as falling with me, but they do show up in the stomach with me once I get there. But if those things fall through, why not the jewel? If it’s sitting on the idol’s tongue, it’s hard to imagine why it wouldn’t. Or is it actually stuck to the idol’s face, and the stuff about it being in the maw is all a big mistake? Yes, we’re back to that question again. It’s worth nothing that the quicksand area and the hungi therein are similarly subtly bugged. If I rescue the baby before doing something with the mother, he’s described as “ambling away into the jungle to find his mother” even though she’s right there, and, since I’ve just hopelessly screwed up, will now remain there forevermore.

The solution to the idol puzzle is clued in “The Lore and Legends of Quendor.” A hungus, it says, “will instantly charge at anything that dares to threaten its kin.” I have to attack the baby hungus and make use of the mother’s rage before rescuing her son.

>attack baby
[with the battleaxe]
Your battleaxe misses the baby hungus. It's just beyond your reach.

A sound like a snorting bull turns your attention to the mother hungus. It looks as if she's about to attack!

The mother hungus charges you. Ooof!

[Your endurance just went down.]

The baby hungus bellows helplessly, and its mother responds.

>ne
The baby hungus bellows mournfully as you walk away.

Birdcries
The unnerving cries of exotic birds echo in the treetops.

>z
Time passes.

The mother hungus storms into view!

>s
Idol
A stone idol, carved in the likeness of a giant crocodile, stands in a clearing.

You see a tear-shaped jewel in its gaping maw.

You see a tear-shaped jewel on the idol's maw.

>z

Time passes.

The mother hungus storms into view!

[Your endurance is back to normal.]

>enter maw
You climb up into the idol's maw.

The stone jaw lurches underfoot, and you struggle to keep your balance. It's like standing on a seesaw.

The mother hungus clambers onto the bottom of the idol's maw, snorting with rage!

>get jewel
The idol's maw tilts dangerously as you reach upward, standing on tiptoe to grasp the sparkling treasure...

Got it! The jewel pops off the idol's face, slips from your grasp and rolls down to the mother hungus's feet, where she promptly eats it, turns and lumbers off the jaw.

Creak! The bottom of the jaw tilts backward, pitching you helplessly forward...

Getting the jewel out of the hungus is another puzzle, but a much better one, so I won’t spoil it here. (No, it doesn’t involve a laxative…)

Spoilers end.

The sequence I’ve just described is probably the ugliest in the game, but other parts suffer to a greater or lesser degree from many of the same problems. Many of the bugs and textual confusions can doubtless be laid at the feet of an overambitious release schedule, while some of the sketchy implementation is likely down to the space limitations of even the 256 K Z-Machine. In recent correspondence with another Infocom aficionado, we talked about how Trinity, another 256 K game, really doesn’t feel all that huge, how much of the extra space was used to offer depth in the form of a larger vocabulary, richer text, and more player possibility rather than breadth in the form of more rooms and puzzles. Beyond Zork, by contrast, does feel quite huge, marks the most overstuffed game that Infocom had yet released. Considering that it must also support a full-fledged, if simplistic, CRPG engine, depth was quite obviously sacrificed in places.

But Beyond Zork’s most fundamental failing is that of just not knowing what it wants to be. In an effort to make a game that would be all things to all people, the guaranteed hit that Infocom so desperately needed, Moriarty forgot that sometimes a game designer needs to say, no, let’s save that idea for the next project. Cognitive dissonance besets Beyond Zork from every angle. The deterministic, puzzle-oriented text adventure cuts against the dynamic, emergent CRPG. The cavalcade of in-jokes and references to earlier games, catnip for the Infocom hardcore, cuts against appealing to a newer, possibly slightly younger demographic who are fonder of CRPGs than traditional text adventures. The friendly, approachable interface cuts against a design that’s brutally cruel — sometimes apparently deliberately so, sometimes one senses (and this is in its way more damning to Brian Moriarty as a designer) accidentally so. Beyond Zork stands as an object lesson in the perils of mixing ludic genres willy-nilly without carefully analyzing the consequences. I want it to work, love many of the ideas it tries to implement. But sadly, it just doesn’t. It’s a bit of a mess really, not just difficult, which is fine, but difficult in all the wrong, unfun ways. Spellbreaker is a perfect example of how to do a nails-hard text adventure right. Beyond Zork, its parallel in the Zorkian chronology, shows how to do it all wrong. I expect more from Infocom, as, based on Wishbringer and Trinity, I do from Brian Moriarty as well.

Despite receiving plenty of favorable reviews on the basis of its considerable surface appeal, Beyond Zork didn’t turn into the hit that Infocom needed it to become. Released in October of 1987, it sold a little over 45,000 copies. Those numbers were far better than those of any of the other Infocom games of 1987, proof that the Zork name did indeed still have some commercial pull, but paled beside the best sellers of previous years, which had routinely topped 100,000 copies. Enough, combined with the uptick in sales of their other games for the Christmas season, to nudge Infocom into the black for the last quarter of 1987, Beyond Zork wasn’t enough to reverse the long-term trends that were slowly strangling them. Moriarty himself left Infocom soon after finishing Beyond Zork, tempted away by Lucasfilm Games, whose own adventure-gaming star was rising as Infocom’s fell, and where he would at last be able to fulfill his ambition to dump the parser entirely. We’ll be catching up with him again over there in due time.

(Sources: As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Other sources include the book Game Design Theory and Practice by Richard Rouse III; Byte of December 1980; Questbusters of August 1987 and January 1988; Commodore Magazine of March 1988.

Beyond Zork is available for purchase as part of The Zork Anthology on GOG.com.)

Comments
77 Responses

- Brian Moriarty

November 6, 2015 at 2:40 pm

Mia culpa.

However, if my aging memory can still be trusted, the default character name was not Buck Palace. It was Frank Black, named after the character (played so memorably by Dennis Hopper) in the David Lynch film BLACK VELVET, which was released early in production.

- Matthew Murray

November 6, 2015 at 3:09 pm

I just replayed this game (for the first time in like 20 years) a month ago. The default character name is Frank Booth.

- Bob Reeves

November 6, 2015 at 5:37 pm

Actually it’s Frank Booth, in the game and the movie. You’re thinking of the Pixies, maybe. Anyway, thanks for a great game despite Jimmy’s mostly just criticisms.

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2015 at 5:48 pm

Yes and no. :) If you take the default character his name is indeed Frank Booth. (Not, as Bob noted, Frank Black of the Pixies, although that would have been fun too.) However, if you make your own character and make him male the default name, which you can change if you like, is Buck Palace.

- Matthew Murray

November 6, 2015 at 9:22 pm

That’s just not correct in the version of the game I have. No matter what you to do to create a male character, it’s always Frank Booth. Never Buck Palace.

- Nathan

November 7, 2015 at 7:27 am

It’s Buck Palace in versions 47 and 49, Frank Booth in 51 and 57.

- Brian Moriarty

November 7, 2015 at 4:19 pm

Ahem. Make that BLUE VELVET.

- Hanon Ondricek

November 6, 2015 at 3:47 pm

I loved Beyond Zork for its replayability.

Quick typo:

About the best thing I can say about the plot is that you hardly knows it’s there when you’re actually playing the game

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2015 at 5:51 pm

Thanks!

- Torbjörn Andersson

November 10, 2015 at 3:55 pm

This sounds a bit odd to me:

“It does seems that the game has, once again, actively …”

I’m not a native English speaker, but should that be either “It does seem” or “It seems”?

- Jimmy Maher

November 10, 2015 at 6:07 pm

Yes, it should. Thanks!

- doug egan

November 6, 2015 at 4:34 pm

Jimmy,
Maybe you, or one of your readers, can answer a question that has dogged me for years. I played Infocom games on my C64 in the early to mid 80s. I had a piece of software at that time called “Disc Doctor” that allowed me to scan discs by block and sector. I swear I read every block and sector of the Zork I disk looking for ascii characters. The only ones I ever found were “saving” and “loading” type message

After failing to find any ascii, I starting thinking like a cryptographer and looking for patterns that might have represented coded text. Still nothing.

So how was the text encoded on the discs? Would it ever have been possible for me to read text directly from the disc, or was it coded in a way that would have made that effectively impossible?

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2015 at 5:54 pm

Infocom’s text was stored in a format they called ZSCII. It permitted them to store 3 characters for every 2 bytes of space, and had the additional virtue, as you discovered, of making the text impossible to read with a sector editor or hex editor. Everything you could possibly want to know about the format is here: http://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point1/sect03.html.

- Donnie

November 9, 2015 at 6:16 pm

I remember somehow figuring out how those characters were stored when I was in high school. I didn’t know the slightest thing about virtual machines, but I had some kind of suspicion of it. It was very exciting to finally see all that Infocomish text scrolling down the screen of my Commodore 64.

- Matt Reichert

November 6, 2015 at 4:51 pm

First of all let me say that Beyond Zork is my favorite Infocom text adventure hands down. The humor and writing style are right up my alley, I still have a homemade Christmas Tree Monster that I pull out around Christmas time and place next to the regular tree.

I thought the CRPG addition to the standard text adventure was a stroke of genius. It really adds a new dimension to the then aging plain text adventure. The fact that the game is never truly the same twice is a huge plus to me as I like to replay BZ at least once a year and even though I know the answers to all the puzzles it still seems a little fresh. In fact I still find new things in the game each time I play like that Tasting the nectar coating in the goblet increases your luck or wearing the cloak lets you always run away from enemies. It’s little things like this that make BZ one of my favorite games to this day. I still like to see how much I can max out my stats when I play. I wonder if anyone has made a list of all the things in the game that can affect your stats?

Actually that cloak caused a bit of a problem for me back in the day. I knew you had to lead the mother Hungus to the idol to get the jewel out (I cheated and looked up to solution as that puzzle was TOUGH), but she can’t follow you if you have the cloak on. I thought there was some sort of bug in the game and had to restart. I was able to solve the puzzle because I did it before getting my hands on the cloak, but I didn’t know that was the cause of the problem until years later.

BTW the default name is Frank Booth (not Black). I’ve never seen Black Velvet and never knew where that name came from until just now. Another mystery solved.

- Hanon Ondricek

November 6, 2015 at 7:50 pm

I must see this Blue/Black Velvet movie starring Frank/Buck Booth/Black/Palace that Brian Moriarty made!

- Hunter

May 26, 2016 at 10:07 pm

I’m also a huge Beyond Zork fan. I wish there were more text games like it.

- TsuDhoNimh

November 6, 2015 at 5:17 pm

Something that’s even more frustrating about the Idol Jewel puzzle is that, at least on the Apple IIgs version, it is not even necessary to win the game, if you’re willing to take advantage of a bug in the store.

(possible spoilers below)
For some reason, you could sell the butterfly at the store for a small amount, and then leave the store. The butterfly would fly back out to eat the nectar on the goblet. You could then go in and sell it again for double the price as before. Repeat this about five or six times, and you have enough money to buy everything you need in the store without having to get and then sell the jewel.

I was also frustrated that you couldn’t just blast the idol with the staff of Destruction to get the jewel or use the staff of Levitation to get it.

I enjoyed this game perhaps more than it deserved back in the day. At the time I was still a big fan of Eamon and was excited that Infocom had finally tried to make an RPG.

- Markus

November 6, 2015 at 5:25 pm

“Buck Palace” is the default name in the early version, later it’s “Frank Booth”. Do the bugs and idiosynchracies as mentioned appear in later versions as well? That said, the Beyond Zork interpreter evolves a bit as well, version A is slightly less sophisticated than, say, version J.

And hey, no mention of other Beyond Zork interpreter specifics, such as the MODE and STATUS commands, and MONITOR, and COLOR, NAME, PRIORITY, OOPS, REFRESH, and uh…

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2015 at 6:09 pm

As noted elsewhere, I don’t believe the default character names change between versions. I played the first released version, serial number 870917. Beyond Zork did get an unusual number of updates for a late-period Infocom game, three of them. One would certainly hope these fixed some of the minor glitches, but I’m sure the more fundamental problems — or what I consider to be fundamental problems, anyway :) — remained. (It’s also possible that some of these releases were not updates at all but just versions for different platforms. Infocom’s cross-platform ideal was starting to get a little more threadbare by this point, in spite of the attempts to built more flexibility into the version 5 Z-Machine.)

- Matt Reichert

November 6, 2015 at 6:14 pm

On the Apple II version (which was the one I had) it was always Frank Booth. Even when you made a character (which I always did) it said Frank Booth. I never saw Buck Palace as the name.

- Markus

November 6, 2015 at 11:41 pm

Checked it quickly, it seems to be “Buck” in in 47/870915 and 49/870917, and “Frank” in 51/870923 and 57/871221. Changing the interpreter and/or platform – in Frotz or for real – doesn’t seem to have an impact except for the obvious front-end aspects (colors and all). To figure out how this is coded in(to) the story file I’d have to undust my (already limited) skills in using Disinform, do I really want to do that? Hm…

There seems to be no female default name. If you, say, choose a preset character and opt for female, it still offers only Buck (or Frank).

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2015 at 11:43 pm

I guess that settles that then. Thanks for taking the time to check it out!

- Markus

November 6, 2015 at 5:31 pm

Sorry, you do mention MODE. Right. Not enough coffee.

- S. John Ross

November 6, 2015 at 7:17 pm

I don’t know if it’s obvious (it’s MEANT to be obvious, but I may have botched that aspect) but the game Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom is _about_ is Beyond Zork, both in terms of celebrating it and (in some small areas) building upwards from it. Beyond Zork is, despite its occasional difficulties, tied for favorite among the Infocom games (tied with LGoP), and I still return to it for comfort, inspiration, and renewal of purpose. Where Tolkien and Howard and others failed to make fantasy “click” for me, Beyond Zork succeeded (it’s also the tonal parent of Uresia: Grave of Heaven, and I even contacted the BZ cartographer to do graphic work for me; I just couldn’t afford him)!

- Matt Wigdahl

November 6, 2015 at 10:42 pm

In retrospect the many mechanical similarities and in-game homages should have been obvious, but I missed it at the time, being completely sucked in by your alternate-reality CogniKing/Encounter Critical meta-backstory.

If there are folks reading this that enjoyed Beyond Zork, you will almost certainly enjoy Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom.

- S. John Ross

November 7, 2015 at 12:24 am

Aw, thank you Mr. Wigdahl =)

And I get pretty sucked into the meta-backstory myself. The ratio of irony to sincerity in that game leans a lot more sincere than I should ever explicitly admit to …

- matt w

November 7, 2015 at 4:53 am

I haven’t played Beyond Zork, but as soon as I read Jimmy’s description of the monsters as gates, I thought “Ooh, just like S. John did in Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom!” So in its odd way it was obvious to me.

And yes, enthusiastic second for the Treasures of a Slaver’s Kingdom recommendation.

- S. John Ross

November 8, 2015 at 9:30 am

Sa-ho!

- Jimmy Maher

November 7, 2015 at 8:36 am

I never made that connection either, although I enjoyed Treasures a lot. If I remember correctly, it focuses much more on the combat and doesn’t try to offer puzzles of anywhere near the complexity of Beyond Zork. Perhaps for that reason I found it very playable and solvable. And, yes, hugely entertaining with the backstory that practically reeks of nerdy 1980s kids playing D&D for hours on end in their parents’ basement (not necessarily a smell you want to experience in real life, believe me). In short, count me as another enthusiastic thumbs-up!

- S. John Ross

November 8, 2015 at 9:30 am

Thank you, sir =) And yeah, Treasures isn’t really interested in Zork-level lateral thinking, partly because I’m personally bad at SOLVING such puzzles, and partly because it would clash with the tone of Encounter Critical and (I suspect) discourage the EC fans I built it for, who are, as a group, AWARE of text-adventures but with highly variable levels of investment in the form. I was sincerely shocked when Real Actual IF Enthusiasts also liked it.

- Duncan Stevens

November 6, 2015 at 7:47 pm

Much as I enjoyed Beyond Zork back in the day, I mostly agree with Jimmy’s criticisms now. But I would characterize BZ more as a fairly good text adventure with some less-successful CRPG elements here and there, and while there are some bad design aspects, they’re not usually the CRPG elements’ fault, as such; they’re just poor design choices. The hungus puzzle is probably the worst example; the other bad choices are more in the category “event that occurs only once, and there’s a good chance you won’t realize its significance the first time,” like the minx and pterodactyl. Put another way: the deterministic aspect you describe interferes with the CRPG play because the player is reluctant to use resources (and, in at least one instance, may be inclined to keep bashing away at monsters when there was a puzzle-style way of getting rid of them), but the character-skill-building aspects don’t interfere with the text-adventure play. At least, they didn’t for me; the idea that the moss was the solution to the jewel puzzle never occurred to me, and I can’t think of any other times when I thought a problem would be solved with more skill. (And it wasn’t that I just didn’t play CRPGs, so the idea didn’t occur to me. I had played all the Wizardry games that had come out to that point.) The finite-use items didn’t bother me in the puzzle-solving–for whatever reason, I felt pretty confident that I wasn’t overusing them (perhaps because when I did use them, they appeared to be one of several potential solutions, such as the unicorn-in-the-stall puzzle).

(Interestingly, the fellow behind the CRPG Addict blog, who has systematically been working through CRPGs and has now made it up to 1990 or so, played Beyond Zork a while back and enjoyed it, surprisingly to me. First of several posts. He did say in the first post that he enjoyed text adventures, but not as much as CRPGs; considering that BZ works much better as a text adventure than as a CRPG, I’d have expected him to be lukewarm at best.)

On the design, there was good and bad. The triggers worked for the Wizard-of-Oz-parody bit, where (as I recall) you wouldn’t be sent to get a vital object until you knew what you would be looking for. It quickly became apparent to me that most of the magic was redundant: you could solve things with magic a lot of different ways (see the unicorn again). I was less enamored of the Zeno’s-bridge puzzle, which wasn’t actually a puzzle that could be solved (and when I encountered a dispel staff, it seemed like it should have worked; it didn’t), and as funny as the idea of the cruel puppet was, I was expecting a Scroll of Indifference or some such thing that would defeat him in a similarly creative way, but no. I’d say there were some quite good, and generally fair, puzzles–helmet/hourglass, dorn, cliff riddle, volcano/caterpillar, mirrors/darkness–mixed in with some bad ones, of which the idol puzzle was undoubtedly the worst.

- Jimmy Maher

November 7, 2015 at 8:24 am

For me, the Zeno’s Bridge puzzle is an example of the expectations of the text adventure and the CRPG conflicting. You expect these magic items to work consistently everywhere, in harmony with the more emergent, simulation-oriented approach of a CRPG. But they just don’t, and it’s hard to figure out where the boundaries lie, hard to know what’s a set-piece, deterministic puzzle and what’s a more flexible piece of world model. There are puzzles — or maybe one should say “situations” — like the unicorn that are admirably flexible, but there are others like the idol that are specific and persnickety. Even taking the idol puzzle on its own terms, it would have been nice if it was possible for me to just pile enough stuff inside the mouth to offset my own weight. But this doesn’t work; the simulation doesn’t go far enough. Likewise, it would have been nice if a character with really high dexterity, regardless of how it was acquired, could leap to safety.

I don’t think Beyond Zork is an irredeemable design at all. If I was making the game today, I would include a manager to make sure you can’t lock yourself out of victory: drop another magic item into the land somewhere if you use up something vital, etc. The game could still be a challenge, since you’d still need to find that item and figure out how to use it, but it wouldn’t be so cruel as what we have now. And I would push the simulation much further: give every item a weight for handling the idol puzzle, more use of ability scores to make playing with different characters feel more unique, etc. In other words, I like much of what Beyond Zork is trying to do, I just wish it did it *more* and more consistently. But obviously Infocom was never going to be able to add this complexity to a game that was already pushing the limits of the Z-Machine’s resources. This may be a failure, to whatever extent it is one — as shown by the comments here, opinions vary on this score — caused more by overambition in the face of technical constraints than anything else. Definitely an idea I’d like to see revisited.

- S. John Ross

November 6, 2015 at 7:52 pm

On reflection, my only real complaint with this excellent article is: not a single word for Bruce Hutchison?

- Jimmy Maher

November 7, 2015 at 8:09 am

Just following Infocom’s lead: https://www.filfre.net/misc/bz.png

- S. John Ross

November 8, 2015 at 9:17 am

Fair, but … sigh =)

I know when you write about Infocom and graphics it’s about the _computer_ graphics, but Hutchison’s work on the feelies is a huge part of the beauty of BZ, I think, and I’d love to learn more about his involvement someday. I guess I could just pester him myself, but I’m happy letting you do all the journalism while I just sit back and read =)

- ZUrlocker

November 9, 2015 at 4:59 pm

Who is Bruce Hutchison?

- Jimmy Maher

November 10, 2015 at 7:59 am

Drew the decorative map included as a feelie.

- S. John Ross

November 11, 2015 at 8:45 pm

(And illustrated Lore & Legends of Quendor)

- S. John Ross

November 11, 2015 at 8:47 pm

You really ARE determined to follow Infocom’s lead, aren’t you? =)

- S. John Ross

November 11, 2015 at 8:52 pm

The real name of the scratchboard artist Infocom credited as “Bruce Hutchinson.” He illustrated Lore & Legends of Quendor, and drew the game’s poster-map.

- whomever

November 6, 2015 at 9:10 pm

A recent Dr Who Christmas Special had a killer christmas tree that totally made me think of the monsters (probably independently developed though).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGe4JDbAfEk

- Matt Wigdahl

November 6, 2015 at 10:39 pm

Count me as another fan of Beyond Zork from back in the misty past. Although I enjoyed several of Infocom’s other titles more than BZ, there was a lot here to like. In particular, the ability to name items was a great feature I lifted for _Aotearoa_.

I thought the combination of CRPG and text adventure just worked for this game, and worked better than I think any previous game had achieved.

I fondly remember many hours of playing this game with friends from high school and trying to finally crack some of the tougher puzzles.

- Monty

November 6, 2015 at 10:49 pm

My favorite reference in Beyond Zork is the Christmas Tree Monsters, which call back to the “How to Play” text in the original manual for (at least Starcross, possibly more):

> GIVE THE CATERPILLAR TO THE CHRISTMAS-TREE MONSTER.

THE CHRISTMAS-TREE MONSTER IS REVOLTED AT THE THOUGHT OF ADORNING ITS BRANCHES WITH A CATERPILLAR.

I remember being delighted when the canonical nature of Christmas Tree Monsters hating caterpillars was confirmed.

- Rowan Lipkovits

November 7, 2015 at 4:48 am

The deterministic text adventure and the emergent CRPG end up rubbing each other raw almost every time they touch

Really this just makes Quest for Glory look better and better when you consider the delicate job they later did engaging essentially the same undertaking two years later.

- Jimmy Maher

November 7, 2015 at 8:04 am

Yes, those are really well-designed games. Looking forward to writing about them, not least because I will get to play them again.

- Lisa H.

November 7, 2015 at 9:55 am

to wish that it had made it into more than the single Infocom game that would ultimately feature it

Er, Arthur? Zork Zero? Or are you speaking only of this specific combination of features?

Steve Meretzky, who loved worldbuilding in general, also loved the lore of Zork to a degree not matched even by the series’s original creators.

Can’t blame him, really. Especially with the extra flavor contributed by things like The Lore and Legends of Quendor, it’s really a fun playground, despite its sparseness.

like the platypus, horseshoe, and whistle from Wishbringer

And the Shoppes with their old women and curtains, like the Magick Shoppe?

But still more depressing is the way that Beyond Zork now comes along to muck it up. You play a novice enchanter (where have we heard that before?) who, even as the wise and powerful hero of Spellbreaker sets about destroying magic, is dispatched by the Guild to retrieve the “Coconut of Quendor” that can safeguard it for a return at some point in the future. Why couldn’t Moriarty just leave well enough alone, find some other premise for his game of generic fantasy adventure?

Pendulum swinging back and forth between Science and Magick?

Ethereal Plane Of Atrii, Above Fields
I like the Invisiclues question and first answer for the “vague outline”, which is something like: What on earth do I do with a vague outline? Nothing – on earth.

hippopatamus

Hippopotamus? (unless [sic] in the source, I guess.)

Taking a cue from the roguelike genre, large chunks of Beyond Zork‘s geography are randomly generated anew every time you play

I think it’s not completely random, though, rather that there are a few possible maps the game selects between?

I finally start thinking that maybe it can’t be solved because I didn’t give my character enough dexterity at the very beginning of the game. This can actually happen; Beyond Zork is quite possibly the only text adventure ever written in which you can lock yourself out of victory before you even enter your first command.

Just curious, have you actually encountered this with anything other than the compassion stat?

Moriarty himself left Infocom soon after finishing Beyond Zork, tempted away by Lucasfilm Games […] We’ll be catching up with him again over there in due time.

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM*koffkoff* er, don’t mind me…. I’ll see myself out.

- Jimmy Maher

November 7, 2015 at 3:42 pm

Er, Arthur? Zork Zero? Or are you speaking only of this specific combination of features?

Yes, the latter.

Hippopotamus? (unless [sic] in the source, I guess.)

Thanks. Never could spell that word. We should just call them riverhorses, like so many other languages.

I think it’s not completely random, though, rather that there are a few possible maps the game selects between?

No, I think it’s quite a bit more sophisticated than that. I’ve seen a lot of layouts, and don’t believe I’ve ever seen two exactly alike. The randomization only happens when you first enter one of the varying areas, so if you restore to a point before that you see something new and have to redo your map. In other words, yeah, I saw a *lot* of different maps.

Just curious, have you actually encountered this with anything other than the compassion stat?

Haven’t tested the other stats exhaustively, no. Might be interesting to see if you can get out of the cellar with no points at all put into dexterity at the beginning of the game…

- Lisa H.

November 14, 2015 at 5:42 am

I think it’s not completely random, though, rather that there are a few possible maps the game selects between?

No, I think it’s quite a bit more sophisticated than that. I’ve seen a lot of layouts, and don’t believe I’ve ever seen two exactly alike.

I just poked around with going down into the cellar near the start of the game, and I think you’re right, there’s something more sophisticated going on than just selecting between a handful of preset maps (considering only room connections, and not placement of magical objects). I saved just before going down to the cellar and on 7 entrances, got 6 different maps; one was a vertical mirror image of a previous one. So, I still think not 100% random, but neither is it just selecting from a small pre-set.

- Peter Piers

November 7, 2015 at 12:18 pm

I’ll be very happy to catch up with Moriarty later. And I obviously don’t mean Tully Bodine. Loom remains one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played – though nostalgia surely has a lot to answer for, in light of some stupendous games I’ve played since. Regardless, it made a deep impression on me as a child and I still find its brilliant blend of music, plot and gameplay (as well as the actual choice of music) to be unique.

- Pedro Timóteo

November 7, 2015 at 1:23 pm

Great as always. I haven’t played this one yet, but I will (watching out for all those dead ends). :)

I don’t think that Apple II screenshot looks that bad, the map with character graphics looks fine to me. Maybe it’s because I played a lot of Nethack in text mode back in the 90s…

Interestingly, Windows Frotz allows us to choose the system (Amiga, DOS, Mac, etc.) the interpreter tells the game it’s running on, and it’s nice to see the differences (no graphics in some versions, different default colors, etc.). If you choose DEC 20, the game asks whether you have a VT220 terminal or not (with graphics only if you answer yes).

As a curiosity, I believe this is the fourth (and last) Infocom game released for the Commodore 128 but not the C64 (with the others being AMFV, Trinity and Bureaucracy). Infocom was really about the only developer to ever support the C128, unfortunately.

- Jimmy Maher

November 7, 2015 at 3:50 pm

The industry’s lack of support for the Commodore 128 is one of those things that I still can’t completely explain. For two or three years it was one of the better-selling platforms on the market, with a user base positively slavering for just about *any* game that ran on the 128 in 128 mode. Yet… (almost) nothing.

In the early days there were several games announced. Sierra planned for a while to bring the AGI games like King’s Quest to the 128, and Telarium announced The Scoop, and I believe there were a number of others. But all fell through. There seems to have been a bit of groupthink going on: “If no one else is bothering with the 128, why should we?” If someone had been brave enough to bring out a reasonably impressive graphical 128-mode game, I think they could have cleaned up. That would likely have prompted others to do the same, and this little corner of computer history could have been very different.

- Brian Bagnall

November 12, 2015 at 2:56 am

That is a good mystery why there wasn’t more software and especially games produced for the C128. Wikipedia says there were 5.7 million C128’s sold (it says 4 million elsewhere in the article) vs 5-6 million in the entire Apple II series, yet the size of the Apple II library is way out of proportion. I don’t see references for the C128 sales figures, so possibly the total units is exaggerated. With Infocom pulling out of the C128 market after the 4 games in 1986, this might be as good an indication as any of a weak C128 software market. It also seems likely that Commodore didn’t do very much to promote software development for the C128. I’m going to try to interview an accountant from Commodore who might be able to provide some hard numbers.

Commodore probably thought that it could sell a lot of C128’s due to the pull of a huge C64 library, and then eventually when the installed base of the C128 was large enough, software for the 128 mode would appear. I gotta say, that sounds like a realistic strategy and I’m kind of puzzled why it didn’t happen if the numbers above are even close to accurate.

- Jimmy Maher

November 12, 2015 at 8:12 am

I don’t know where there those numbers came from either, but they strike me as absurd. There were shocked reports in the press of 1986 that the 128 was outselling the Amiga by “four to one.” Since the Amiga sold about 100,000 units that year, that would mean that the 128 sold about 400,000 units, which strikes me about right. And that was almost certainly its best year. All indications are that sales all but stopped in the wake of the Amiga 500’s release; the latter made a much better choice for someone looking to spend a little more and step up from a 64. In 1989 the 128 was already cancelled due to lack of interest from buyers. It was a success, but a very brief-lived one.

My own best guess would be, at best, around 1 million 128s sold — and I think even that’s quite a generous estimate. If the 128 really sold 4 million units (much less 5.7 million), it would had to have been handily outselling the 64, which moved a fairly steady 1 million units per year during the mid-1980s and a little beyond. There’s absolutely no indication in the press of the time or anywhere else that that was happening.

The 64’s sales figures were similarly inflated for years, until pagetable.com did an analysis of the serial numbers to arrive at a likely worldwide total of about 12.5 million (http://www.pagetable.com/?p=547). I wish that someone with the skills and connections would do something similar for the 128.

That said, Infocom’s 128 games did do fairly well for them. Brian Moriarty has often mentioned eager 128 buyers as the main reason that his dark, off-putting Trinity *wasn’t* a complete bomb, and they probably contributed considerably to Beyond Zork’s relatively impressive sales numbers for a late-period Infocom game as well — not to mention Bureaucracy, Infocom’s next best-selling game of 1987. I think a graphical game would have done still much better. The Infocom games, after all, were not only all-text but ran only in the 128’s 80-column mode — a mode that many, perhaps most, 128 buyers who hadn’t also bought an RGB monitor couldn’t access. In short, I think there was a huge hunger for a 128 game that publishers never fed. Whether continuing to make 128 games beyond the first that just about every owner would have rushed out to buy would have been worthwhile is, of course, another question…

- Markus

November 13, 2015 at 7:24 pm

In fairness, one should mention that besides the four C128-only games by Infocom, there are eight additional multiboot games featuring the 80-column C128 interpreter alongside the 40-column C64 one (Nord and Bert, Border Zone, Sherlock, and the five Solid Gold games). In total, indeed no one else released as many games fully supporting the C128 as Infocom (not counting private freeware games and the like, and also not counting the pretty large number of C64 games that had an autoboot block for the C128 to automatically switch it into C64 mode and load the game, like e.g. plenty of Electronic Arts titles did).

I’ve always been a bit skeptical of that serial number analysis (interpreting serial number systems only gets you so far). What’s more, production and sales figures for a machine like the C128 always should be taken with some grain of salt, since they can easily be misinterpreted or otherwise quoted out of context considering that (unlike with the C64), over the course of its lifetime, the C128 sold as three distinctly different machines (the stock C128, the C128D and the C128DCR) in surprisingly plenty of different localized versions (Italian, Swiss, Norwegian, German, French, Swedish, Finnish,… you name it, they probably built it). For a number as low as “1 million”, my gut feeling is they are far too easy to find on the market nowadays. But then, the true numbers are hidden in Commodore’s own documents, and god knows in what landfill those are nowadays…

- Jimmy Maher

November 15, 2015 at 3:30 pm

Doing some research for another article now, and came upon one clue. Interviewed in the May 1987 Commodore Magazine, Thomas Rattigan, CEO of Commodore at the time, states that they’ve sold 6 million 64s and 1 million 128s to date. This dovetails quite well with the aforementioned serial-number analysis of the 64; the platform’s biggest single years were behind it by then, but it would continue selling steadily for quite some years to come, especially in Europe. On the other hand, this obviously forces me to revise my 128 estimate upward. Maybe 1.5 or possibly even 2 million on the outside? I still can’t imagine it getting anywhere close to 4 million, however.

- Pedro Timóteo

December 2, 2015 at 12:03 pm

I think the C64 Wizardry games also supported the C128, apparently just for disk caching (Wizardry 2, 3 and 5 supported the RAM Expansion Unit (REU), too, either on a C64 or a C128, as did late Infocom games).

Ultima 5 had music (and a nice soundtrack it was) only in C128 mode. Stupidly, Ultima 6 — where you had to swap disks *twice* for talking to any NPC — didn’t use the C128 at all.

Uridium Plus and Heavy Metal Paradroid (not the original releases of either) ran 20% faster / smoother on a C128, even though it was in C64 mode, by switching the CPU to 2 Mhz temporarily when not drawing the screen (and back to 1 Mhz when doing so). I think a couple of other games did the same.

The Rocky Horror Show had a C128 version with real C64 graphics — the previous C64 version just ported the Spectrum version’s (monochrome) graphics. Both versions still ran played too slow to be enjoyable.

Kikstart and The Last V8 had C128 versions with more than twice as many levels, but otherwise were identical to the C64 versions.

And… that’s it, apparently.

- Veronica Connor

November 7, 2015 at 7:16 pm

Great post as always, Jimmy. One quibble I have is using Photoshop as a metaphor for Graphics Magician. I would call Graphics Magician the Flash of its time, because it’s a runtime procedural rendering system, rather than an asset production tool. That’s what made it so powerful- it was a vector based template for how to draw something, combined with the engine to draw it for you. It was effectively a massively efficient way to compress images.

- Jimmy Maher

November 8, 2015 at 8:21 am

I couldn’t bear to compare Graphics Magician to Flash. It never did anything to deserve that insult. :) But yeah, on reflection it was a little bit of a trite and careless analogy. Excised. Thanks!

- The Lunchster

November 11, 2015 at 11:18 pm

. You play a novice enchanter (where have we heard that before?) who, even as the wise and powerful hero of Spellbreaker sets about destroying magic, is dispatched by the Guild to retrieve the “Coconut of Quendor” that can safeguard it for a return at some point in the future.

Wait, what? I got the impression you were just a random peasant who decided to wander around fighting things and playing with magic until you bumbled into the Ethereal Plane of Atrii and got your coconut-mission from the Implementors.

- The Lunchster

November 11, 2015 at 11:36 pm

I mean, the opening text mentions Y’gael and the council needing a ‘champion’, but we never actually saw you be chosen.

- Jimmy Maher

November 12, 2015 at 8:26 am

It’s a little unclear whether you’re in on the plot or not from the beginning — perhaps Moriarty himself never quite made up his mind? The text can probably be read both ways really. But certainly the ones who apparently choose you for the quest at the beginning are the Guild of Enchanters, not the Implementors. And there are enough lines that would seem to indicate that you aren’t just a wandering innocent — like “It’s hard to see what all the fuss is about” when you first see the Coconut in the hands of the Implementors, as if you already knew of its importance — that I tend to lean that way.

- Duncan Stevens

November 12, 2015 at 11:06 pm

Zork always had a bipolar personality, sometimes indulging in unabashed comedy and at others evoking majestic, windy desolation. Perhaps surprisingly in that it comes from the author of the doom-laden Trinity, Beyond Zork leans more toward the former than the latter.

Hmmm. I found the sequence in the ruined city (whose atmosphere is very much “windy desolation”), and the perspective on the game provided by the time-travel sequence, rather poignant. So there’s definitely some of both, but quite a lot more of the joky stuff, as you say. (Also, quite aside from whether it undermines Spellbreaker, the prologue is overwritten to the point of parody.)

- Chris

November 24, 2015 at 10:46 pm

Why do you so often use feminine pronouns in place of the generic (and perfectly valid) “he” / “him”? You’re a male writer, after all.

It tends to throw the reader off; he returns to earlier sentences, looking for references to a woman who’s presumably flown unnoticed past his readin’ eyes. It frequently represents a rhetorical speed-bump in your otherwise excellent prose.

I mean, y’know…as long as you’re into pedantry and all. :)

- Jason Scott

November 27, 2015 at 4:39 am

He does it because it still throws you off.

- Michael Davis

November 27, 2015 at 8:23 pm

Why do you notice or care?

- Tom

February 21, 2017 at 11:46 am

Because using the male pronoun when the sex is unknown is grammatically correct. Doing otherwise smacks of virtue signaling.

- DZ-Jay

March 28, 2017 at 9:51 am

I agree with Chris. It’s not a sexist thing, it’s a distraction to me. I am used to the male pronouns being neutral, as per tradition and propriety in the English language. Therefore, when encountering a female pronoun, it imparts the sentence with additional context which isn’t there; resulting, like Chris suggested, in me either looking back or at least thinking about who is meant. Either way, it distracts.

The fact that it is used in order to “make a statement” in favour of some equality adds to this distraction, since it burdens the text with additional weight that is completely incidental and tangential to what it’s actually trying to say.

-dZ.

- Pingback: Miscellanea November 2015 | panglott

- Peter Piers

February 25, 2016 at 7:02 pm

FWIW, I always played BZ the same way I’ve always played RPGs: creating perfectly balanced characters, equally strong and dextrous and intelligent and the lot.

In Ultima IV I was always a bard. A pattern emerges.

(Heck, I’m even a singer in real life)

- Ron "AAlgar" Watt

June 10, 2016 at 12:36 am

I’ve been strangely obsessed with BZ since I got it in ’87. I’ve replayed it literally hundreds of times, often as a weird sort of zen exercise. Randomized maps notwithstanding, I pretty much solve it by muscle memory at this point.

I took a break for a few years, largely because setting up the emulation was a bit of a hassle, but I was delighted to recently discover a fully legal playable-in-browser version at archive.org.

Today, for the first time in almost 30 years, I ran into a unique snag I’d never seen before: if you transform the butterfly into a caterpillar and take it into the cellar with you, then use the restore scroll to revive your burned-out lantern, the caterpillar turns back into a butterfly. It’s easy enough to change him back again if you still have the necessary inventory to do so… but it really threw me for a loop.

There isn’t really a point to this post. I just found it odd.

Great write-up, incidentally.

- Nathan

July 21, 2017 at 10:03 pm

After stumbling across this article, I struck up a dialog with Mr. Watt. We have been going back and forth trying to beat it in fewest moves, or fewest moves while still attaining the highest rank (0- Novice).

For those who know it inside and out, or those who want to see if our scores can be beaten, give it a shot: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Beyond_Zork_-_The_Coconut_of_Quendor_1987

Post your scores here along with any other oddities you might know about the game, stuff like:
– Open the mailbox on the wine bottle
– Jump off the bridge with the minx and then examine it

- Lisa H.

July 30, 2017 at 8:46 am

– Open the mailbox on the wine bottle

This was my first introduction to the fact that the bottle had a label with a white house and a mailbox on it! I spent a long time thinking you intended me to somehow open the actual mailbox in Thriff with the wine bottle, and therefore wondering how to get the bottle to that location (since you need the caterpillar, and to get that you need the hurdy-gurdy, and to get that you need the sea chest, and to get that you need to defeat the dorn beast, which for me usually means having the onion and thus giving away the wine bottle; but in the end I accomplished it via the Wand of Annihilation). Then once I got it there, an odd disambiguation question from the game revealed the truth: I tried to “open mailbox with bottle” and it asked me, did I mean the mailbox or the wine bottle? (There’s a similar disambiguation problem if you’re trying to enter the crashed farm house while holding the wine bottle, since the label also has a house on it. The “house wine”, you might say…)

– Jump off the bridge with the minx and then examine it

I’m not sure what’s so odd about this? Seems like I killed the minx by jumping into freezing water.

- Nathan

September 14, 2017 at 4:02 pm

Sorry to lead you on that wild mailbox chase, Lisa! Seems like you spent some time trying to get that bottle to Thriff. Kudos for the effort.

The minx thing isn’t so much odd, as a bit jarring. I remember 10-year-old me reading “the minx is as still as death” and I felt just plain awful. I mean one minute he’s scampering around and the next he’s basically an inanimate object.

The bug lists you linked on your site are great reads. Seems like folks have really spent some time trying different things in different orders.

In trying to beat the game with the fewest moves, Ron pointed out that if you build your character manually and juice your intelligence, you don’t have to do the tear/ruins puzzle. Using this, I was able to beat it in 325 moves (not with highest rank). Lots of saving and luck here, but I wonder how much lower other folks have gotten.

- Lisa H.

September 14, 2017 at 5:58 pm

That reminds me, I have to get around to deleting the XyzzyNews links in those walkthroughs. (or maybe finding archive.org links.)

- Leo Vellés

November 3, 2019 at 3:26 am

“Even better, they could download up to 96 graphics primitives into an alternate character set, allowing the the drawing of simple lines, boxes, and frames, in color if one wished”.
I hope i’m not being annoying pointing out another double word, un this case, a double “the” in this sentence

- Jimmy Maher

November 3, 2019 at 9:20 am

Not at all. It’s much appreciated. Thanks!

Border Zone
November 13, 2015

Unlike many early peers such as Sierra, who began publishing at least as many third-party titles as titles they developed themselves in the wake of their first success, Infocom throughout their independent existence prided themselves on keeping everything in-house. Every game they released was written right there in their Cambridge offices by their own dedicated little band of Implementors. But Activision’s pressure to release many more games every year in the wake of their acquisition of Infocom finally changed that in late 1986. Infocom desperately needed more Imps to meet Activision’s craving, but weren’t in a position to pay for any more full-time employees. While they could continue to promote eager testers and programmers from other parts of the company, always their most fecund source of new blood for the Imp pool, there was an obvious point of diminishing returns at play there as well: every tester they promoted to Imp meant one less person to test all of those new games that were now coming down the pipe. After promoting Amy Briggs, who was destined to go down in history as the last person ever to become a full-time Imp at Infocom, it was time to beat some other bushes. Like so many companies before and since who couldn’t afford real employees, Infocom filled the labor gap with contractors willing to work remotely for an initial advance against royalties. After all, modems — even expensive, state-of-the-art ones like the two they now hung off their venerable old PDP-10 — were a lot cheaper than employees.

This change represented, I shouldn’t neglect to emphasize, an enormous attitudinal shift for Infocom. They had never before paid anyone whatsoever on a royalty basis; all of the Imps had always worked for a flat salary. In retrospect we can see this instant as marking the beginning of a sea change in what Infocom really was, from a true creative collective making games together to a mere label under which Activision released any game that was even vaguely adventure-like or story-oriented. It would take a few years for that change to reach its full fruition, but the process started here.

Having elected — or been forced — to make this change in their way of doing business, the natural next question for Infocom was who these new contractors should be. One signee was an enterprising Californian named Bob Bates, founder of a tiny would-be adventure developer he called Challenge, Inc.; I’ll be telling his story in a future article. For other contractors, Infocom turned to some old friends, former Imps who had left the fold. With time and resources at a premium, that made a lot of sense: they already knew ZIL, knew how the Infocom development process worked and what would be expected of them as writers and designers.

Infocom thus reached out to Mike Berlyn, who had left the company back in early 1985 to found a design studio of his own, Brainwave Creations, with his wife Muffy. Having already shipped their first adventure game, Interplay’s text/graphic hybrid Tass Times in Tonetown — and through Activision as publisher at that — they were now sniffing around for a home for the new dimension-bending comedic caper they had on the boil. Much as Berlyn’s mercurial nature could make him difficult to work with at times, everyone at Infocom had always liked him personally. If they must work with outside contractors, he certainly seemed like one of the least objectionable choices. They got as far as signing an initial development deal before things fell apart for reasons that to my knowledge have never been fully explained.

Infocom’s other attempt to get the old band back together again would prove more fruitful even as it could also seem, at least on the surface, a much more surprising move. Marc Blank, you see, hadn’t just quit Infocom a year before. After months of squabbling with Al Vezza’s board over Cornerstone and pretty much every other decision they were making, he had been summarily fired.

Blank moved on to, of all places, Infocom’s erstwhile suitors Simon & Schuster, where he became “Vice President of Computer Software Development,” his responsibilities to include “artificial intelligence, expert systems, sorting out new technologies like optical and disk storage.” The brash young Blank, however, soon found he didn’t fit all that well within the conservative old halls of Simon & Schuster. He left what he calls today a “terrible” job within a few months.

Blank’s next stop would prove more extended. He moved to California to work with a company called American Interactive Media, a new corporation with roots in the music industry who were now so closely associated with the Dutch consumer-electronics giant Philips as to blur the line between independent contractor and subsidiary. Philips had initiated a project to bring the brand new technology of CD-ROM to consumers via a set-top box for the living room, and American Interactive was to create games and other content to run on it. In the long run, this would prove another frustrating experience for Blank; Philips’s gadget wouldn’t finally be released until 1991, an astonishing seven years after the project had been started, and for all sorts of reasons would never take off commercially. For the time being, however, it felt fantastic. A guy who loved nothing better than to take a Big New Idea and give it practical form, Blank felt like he was taking interactivity to the logical next step after Infocom, working not with plain old text but with a whole rich universe of multimedia potential at his fingertips.

While he was about inventing the future for Philips, though, he wasn’t above doing some more work for his Infocom friends from the past. And Infocom was very eager to work with him again. The people he had pissed off enough to get himself fired were largely gone from the newly slimmed-down, games-only edition of the company. Truth be told, most of the people still there had agreed with every sullen argument and veiled jab he had ever delivered to Al Vezza and his cronies. They called, Blank said yes, and Border Zone was born.

It would prove a classic Marc Blank project. Never a gamer, he claims that to this day he’s never played a single Infocom game, other than those he wrote himself, to completion. Nor does he have much intrinsic interest in writing or game design as disciplines unto themselves. During his time with Infocom and even before, when working on the original MIT Zork, he preferred to see himself as the wizard behind the curtain, crafting the magic behind the magic, so to speak, that enabled people like Dave Lebling and Steve Meretzky to do their thing. It was Marc Blank who tinkered endlessly with the parser in that original Zork, taking it from a clone of Adventure’s primitive two-word jobber to one that wouldn’t be fully equaled by anyone else for well over a decade. It was Blank who came up with vehicles you could ride in and characters you could talk to. It was Blank who sat down with Joel Berez and figured out just how Zork could be chopped up and delivered onto microcomputers via a cross-platform virtual machine, an event that marks the beginning of the real story of Infocom as a maker of computer games. And for his pièce de résistance, it was Blank who radically upended people’s very ideas of what an adventure game could be with his interactive murder mystery Deadline, not in the name of art or literature but simply because he found doing so such a fascinating technical exercise.

When Blank wrote and designed a game, he did so essentially as a demonstration of the one or more Big New Ideas it contained, with the thinking that, new technology now to hand, better writers and designers than him could make something really cool with it. Selling his own skills in those departments short though he may have been, Blank manifested no innate need to create in the sense of crafting a single unified work and stamping his name on it as its author. He was perfectly happy to just help others with the interesting technical questions raised by their own would-be creations, as when he built the system for Mike Berlyn’s Suspended that let you play by issuing commands not to a single avatar but to six different robots, each with its own unique outlook and capabilities. Tellingly, Blank authored — or rather co-authored, with Dave Lebling — his last game during his tenure as an Infocom employee, Enchanter, more than two years before he left. (Its Big Idea was a magic system complete with multifarious spells that would — hopefully — affect the world believably no matter where, when, or on what they were cast.) Once other Imps were readily available to implement games, he was content to let them while he did other interesting things.

If Blank was suddenly eager now, three years after Enchanter had been published, to write a game again, it could only mean that he had another very compelling Big Idea which he wanted to put through its paces. This time it was real time.

On the surface, it was far from a new idea. As far back as 1982’s The Hobbit, games from other companies had incorporated a timer such that, if you sat too long at a command prompt without doing anything, the program would process a turn as if you had entered a “wait” command, presumably in the name of keeping you on your toes and adding a dollop of urgency to the experience. In addition to The Hobbit and its descendants, Synapse Software’s BTZ engine (“Better than Zork,” although it really wasn’t) had also used this mechanic — a somewhat odd choice for a line which otherwise strained to promote itself as even more cerebral and “literary” than Infocom, but there you go. On the whole it had proved little more than an annoyance, here and everywhere else it had turned up. The actual games it sat atop did nothing of real interest with it. They weren’t actually real-time games at all, rather turn-based games with a chess timer grafted on.

Blank’s idea, which he worked with Infocom’s systems programmers to build into the new version 5 Z-Machine, was to do something much more sophisticated and thoughtful with real time. He had always been deeply interested in creating more dynamic, realistic environments, in pushing back the boundaries of Infocom’s games as simulations. Consider what made him find Deadline so exciting back in 1982:

You’re in this world where all these things are going on. People are doing things. They stop here, talk to someone, go here. Some things would change depending on what you did, but you could sit in one place and watch people come and go. I loved that the world was alive. Instead of exploring a dead world, you’re in a dynamic world with other things going on that you can impact, and what people then do will change, and that will then resonate out, etc. I had no idea how to do that. I had to make it up as I went along. That to me was the fun part.

Now, in Border Zone, the world would live and change, often completely outside of your view, even as you read, thought, and typed your commands. Blank would remove the artificiality of the turn-based structure and create a truly living world behind the words that you read on the screen. You might be in a train compartment trying frantically to hide some key piece of evidence to avoid arrest. As you do so, a guard is following his own schedule, moving from compartment to compartment in the train, getting ever closer, all unbeknownst to you until he bursts into your cabin. If you do manage to get everything sorted in your  compartment before the guard turns up, you’re left to wait — literally to wait, sitting there watching the seconds tick by on the clock on your real-world wall, knowing some sort of security check must be coming, wondering if you hid everything well enough. Nothing quite like this had ever been done before. It absolutely teemed with complications, ran contrary to some of the most bedrock assumptions in Infocom’s development system. It would be a massive technical challenge to get working correctly. But then, massive technical challenges were what Blank lived for.

As usual for Blank, the fictional premise, plot, and puzzles were chosen after the Big Idea, in answer to the question of what sort of fiction would demonstrate said Idea to best effect. Thankfully, and again as usual for Blank, what he came up with proved far more compelling than one might expect from a designer so eager to declare himself so uninterested in game design. He settled on spy fiction. Stu Galley had actually already tried to craft a spy thriller for some six months between implementing Seastalker and Moonmist, but had finally given up on it as just too complex to bring off with Infocom’s technology at that time. Now, though, Blank thought he might have cracked the code. Spy fiction should make an excellent fit for a game of nail-biting real-time tension. And it certainly didn’t hurt that it was enjoying considerable commercial success at the time: countless readers of writers like John Le Carré, Robert Ludlum, and Fredrick Forsyth were enjoying a final spot of classic Cold War intriguing in a world that was soon to change in ways that absolutely no one could ever have predicted.

There’s a bit of the typical Infocom in-jokery, now getting more tired than not, in “Frobnia,” the name of the fictional Eastern Bloc country where much of the action of Border Zone takes place. The principal feelie, a tourist brochure and phrase book for Frobnia, also plays for laughs of the “in America you break law, in Soviet Russia law breaks you!” stripe, complete with poorly translated English, and that’s okay because it’s actually pretty sharp and funny stuff. But otherwise Blank plays it straight, and in the process does a good job evoking classic spy thrillers like Day of the Jackal. Border Zone is, like Nord and Bert, a segmented game, telling a single story in three parts from three points of view; breaking it up like this helped to keep the complexities of this real-time, player-responsive world from becoming overwhelming. While Blank didn’t lift much if any text or code directly from Galley’s previous stab at the spy genre, a game that was to be called Checkpoint, the plot of Border Zone’s opening sequence in particular bears a marked similarity to Galley’s outline: “You, an innocent train traveler in a foreign country, get mixed up with spies and have to be as clever as they are to survive.” In the first part, then, you play the role of an ordinary American businessman who’s entrusted with some vital documents by an American agent on a train that’s about to cross the border from Frobnia into the ostensibly neutral but Western-leaning (and equally fictional) nation of Litzenburg. In the second, you play the American agent himself, who, having palmed the documents on the businessman, must still escape his KGB pursuers. And in the third, you play a KGB agent with secrets of his own on the scene of the attempted assassination of the American ambassador to Litzenburg — an assassination pointed to by the documents. It all feels appropriately morally murky, and is about as intricately plotted as you can reasonably expect from a work with a fraction of the word count of the novels that inspired it.

Still, and as Blank would no doubt agree, the most interesting aspect of Border Zone is what it does technically and conceptually within its fictional premise. Going yet one step beyond those early mysteries, this is the most complex and responsive world simulation Infocom would ever manage, and, like Plundered Hearts, one of their relatively few games that comes close to delivering on their marketing’s promise of interactive fiction as being “like waking up inside a story.” Most interactive fiction, then and now, is fixated on things, on rooms and their contents, to a degree that can feel downright strange to the uninitiated. Border Zone steps away from that fixation to focus not on what things are in the world but on what’s happening there. The old rooms-and-connections model of geography is still there below the surface, but it’s radically de-emphasized. Many rooms have no set-piece descriptions at all to separate them from the story that’s happening to you and all around you, giving the text a sense of urgent flow. Consider, for example, this extract from the second part, from which you could remove the command prompts to end up with something that would read pretty well as an avant-garde second-person novel (a little Italo Calvino, anyone?).

You are standing at the back door of the hut, which can be circled to the northwest and the southwest. On all other sides lies the forest. A small window in the door gives a view into the house.

>n
You walk around to the north side of the hut.

Two men, presumably from the automobile parked at the end of the roadway south of the clearing, are in quiet conversation with a man, presumably the owner of the hut, who stands leaning against the closed front door. They seem to be lecturing him about something, for he speaks little and nods often.

You watch as the lone guard returns to the group. He appears relieved that he has nothing to report.

The dogs are no closer, but now they seem to be off to the south.

>n
A branch falls from a nearby tree, startling you briefly. You turn back and press on through the forest.

>n
You can hear a pack of dogs off to the south.

You continue through the forest, until you come to the edge of a wide clearing to the north - this is the border zone. From atop three guard towers standing in a line from east to west, searchlights play across the zone, brightly illuminating everything in their path. On either side of the towers are tall
fences, running parallel to the border, making a direct assault all but impossible.

>n
You run across the open field at a good clip, though you are hampered by slick- surfaced shoes. You're past the halfway point, but wait! The light from the rightmost tower is heading right at you! You freeze, and consider turning back, but it's too late. The searchlight is upon you now, and before you can react, the night is filled with the sound of wailing sirens.

****  You have been arrested  ****

It’s not that geography isn’t important, but the scale is shifted. As you duck from hiding place to hiding place trying to avoid a searchlight’s beam, the details of each piece of snowy tundra where you crouch aren’t so important, but where you are in the bigger picture — specifically, in relation to that questing beam — certainly is. Map-making is, as one would hope, completely deprecated. Where necessary, the feelies provide maps that are good enough to orient you to your environment, and the game itself also strains, within the limitations of its text-only presentation, to give a visual overview of the situation in the status line when you’re doing things like dodging guards and searchlight beams.

But what’s most important of all is the other people in the world, especially the ones with machine guns trying to hunt you down. The “puzzles” in this game aren’t really puzzles at all, but rather grounded, realistic situations that you need to come to understand and manipulate to your advantage. Suffice to say that there are no riddles or sliding blocks in this one, folks.

All that said, there’s an unavoidable irony about Border Zone: although this approach was inspired by the desire to make a scenario that would be a good match for the real-time component, just about everything it does could have been done just as easily — and, I would argue, just as successfully — using a conventional turn-based approach. In short, I’m not sure how much real time really adds to the experience. As with so many technically esoteric or ambitious touches in games, the real time in Border Zone feels ultimately more interesting for the programmer than it is for the player. Certainly there remain quite a number of unsolved problems. Border Zone’s visual presentation, for example, leaves a lot to be desired. For all the new capabilities of the version 5 Z-Machine, its display is still limited to two “windows”: a static top window, generally used for the status line and other persistent information like Beyond Zork’s room description and automap, and a scrolling bottom window for the main body of a game’s text. The ideal setup for Border Zone would have the command prompt in a static window of its own below the scrolling text — notably, this is the layout used by Synapse for their pseudo-real-time games — but this was apparently one step too far for Infocom’s programmers. Instead the command prompt is still in-lined with the rest of the text, meaning that when things happen around you outside of your direct prompting your command is rudely interrupted to tell you about it; then the partially completed command is printed again and you can finish what you were trying to do. It works, but it’s pretty ugly, not to mention disconcerting until you get used to it.

Border Zone doesn’t quite know how to make the command prompt work together with real time in an aesthetically pleasing way.

While that could be fixed easily enough with more advanced screen-layout capabilities, other problems with Border Zone feel more intractable. Given the careful reading that interactive fiction requires, you’re likely to be chronically short on time the first time through a scenario, then twiddling your thumbs waiting for things to happen on subsequent tries. And, believe me, you will be playing through each of these segments much more than once. Much like Beyond Zork, Border Zone promises one type of experience only to deliver another. The heavy emphasis on simulation and dynamism would seem to imply that this is an emergent experience, one where you can have a different experience every time out. Actually, though, that’s not the case, largely because, for all the world’s complexity, there’s no randomness to it at all. Everyone will follow the same patterns every time — complex patterns, yes, but patterns nevertheless — unless you interfere with them, which in turn will only set them on another deterministic course. This leads to a mode of play that isn’t as different from the interactive mysteries Blank earlier pioneered as many a player might wish.

In other words, this is another try-and-try-again game. Essentially you start playing by doing what seems the natural thing for a character in your circumstances, until you die or get captured or otherwise fail. Then you analyze the situation, come up with an idea as to how you might avoid the negative outcome, and try again. Rinse and repeat. Border Zone isn’t as punishing as the mysteries can be because each of its segments is so compressed, limited to no more than ten or fifteen minutes of real — i.e., wall-clock — time. It’s here, however, where the real time component can also become actively annoying. When you know the series of steps you need to follow to get to a certain point, you want to be able to “wait” in the game for each decision, not be forced to literally sit around waiting in real life. (It is possible to “wait for” a specific number of seconds, but that can be tough to plan out, not to mention deadly if you get it wrong.) And when you come to one of the junctures that require really precise timing, where you need to hit the enter key to submit your command at just the precisely right instant, it can be extremely frustrating when you, as another superspy would say, “miss it by that much” and have to start again.

Each sequence in Border Zone feels like a single bravura action sequence from a good James Bond flick, which is, one senses, exactly the effect intended. What with all the learning by death, playing can feel oddly like choreographing the delicate ballet that is such a sequence, trying again and again until you get all the drama and thrills just right. One notable side effect of the extreme time compression is that Border Zone, even with all three of its sections taken together, is one very short adventure game. Its rather expansive 175 K story file, which would seem to promise a much longer experience, is padded partially by an in-game InvisiClues-style hint system and partially by the complexities of the real-time system itself, but most of all by the overhead involved in implementing a world of depth rather than breadth. Everything was a trade-off in game development in Infocom’s day. In this case, Blank has dramatically increased your scope of possibility and the number of moving parts in the world around you at the expense of game length. Most of the things you might think to try in Border Zone work logically and have logical consequences in the context of the world and its other actors, even if most of them must inevitably be the wrong things, things that ultimately lead to failure. And yet, even duly accounting for the many replays that will be necessary to finish each sequence, it’s very difficult to spend more than three or four hours on Border Zone. That was a major problem for a commercial computer game selling for $30 or more. It’s not hard to understand why gamers would be put off by the entertainment-per-dollar ratio at play here, not hard to understand why publishers usually opted for longer if sketchier experiences over an intricately tooled Swiss watch of a game like this one.

How much its extreme brevity had to do with Border Zone’s poor sales reception is, given everything else that was going so wrong for Infocom at the time, hard to say. Certainly they tried hard to make it accessible to as many customers as possible. Despite running under the new version 5 rather than the version 4 Z-Machine of Nord and Bert, it became the second in Infocom’s “LZIP” line of larger-than-usual games that were nevertheless shoehorned into the Commodore 64. Still, sales were bad enough to give Border Zone the title of worst-selling all-text Infocom game in history: less than 12,000 units. Thus it wound down Infocom’s demoralizing 1987 just as it had begun, by setting a sales record of the wrong type. It doubtless didn’t help Border Zone’s cause that it was released in the immediate wake of the much higher profile and more enthusiastically promoted Beyond Zork.

One of Infocom’s least remarked and, one suspects, least played games today, Border Zone deserves better than that fate. I’m not sold on the case it makes for real-time interactive fiction, and little surprised that that avenue has gone all but completely unexplored through all of the years of non-commercial experimentation that has followed Infocom’s demise. But Border Zone is much more than just a failed technical experiment. Even if real time were taken out of the picture entirely, it would stand as an experience able to get the pulse pounding and the juices flowing, something that textual interactive fiction isn’t exactly known for. It’s also a very solvable game, and one where every challenge truly is part and parcel of the story you’re living. That, again, is something not a whole lot of interactive fiction, vintage or modern, can lay claim to. I highly recommend that you give it a play, and experience yet one more utterly unique Infocom game for yourself.

(Sources: As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Also useful was the April 1986 Questbusters.

Border Zone and most of the other Infocom games are available for purchase as part of an iOS app.)

Comments
34 Responses

- lmm

November 13, 2015 at 1:30 pm

The one place I’ve really seen real-time adventure work is the graphical The Last Express.

- Brian Bagnall

November 13, 2015 at 2:27 pm

I wonder if Marc went on to program Syphon Filter as a result of his experiences with this game. The AI in Syphon was also notable at the time, something Marc was clearly interested in. He was innovating a lot of new things which apparently resulted in development hell.

- Jayle Enn

November 13, 2015 at 2:50 pm

I’ve always liked the ‘I am Frobnia!’ tourist brochure feelie, with its ominous phrasebook where half of the example exchanges end in arrest.

I can’t remember if I’d learned to type before finally playing Borderzone, but I do remember that the real-time element made the last leg of the game incredibly frustrating to complete. It wasn’t just the regular matter of figuring out triggers and sequences, you had to type fairly complex commands on a tight schedule, and even a single typo could force a restart.

- Jimmy Maher

November 14, 2015 at 8:26 am

I actually found the timing trickiest at the end of the second part. You have to enter the last command at *exactly* the right instant, and you don’t have much time to get it typed either. I found the third sequence more forgiving in contrast.

- Matt Reichert

November 13, 2015 at 3:21 pm

I always wondered why Border Zone was never released for the Amiga even though the Amiga got just about everything else. I’m guessing poor sales on the other systems may have had something to do with it.

- Jimmy Maher

November 14, 2015 at 8:29 am

I would suspect it was because they would need to add the real-time support to the Amiga interpreter, and maybe could just never quite spare the personnel. Infocom made a radical technical change in direction just weeks after Border Zone’s release, as we’ll get to in a future article — sort of a last Hail Mary attempt to right their commercial fortunes. With a slow exodus of employees having already begun, that probably just never left time for relatively minor projects like an Amiga Border Zone.

- Alex Smith

November 13, 2015 at 4:52 pm

Interesting read as always. I just have one (overly?) nitpicky point of correction that may not even be worth the bother: Philips was not bringing CD-ROM to a set top box in the late 1980s. CD-ROM refers to a compact disc adhering to the yellow book standard, one of a series of “rainbow standards” codified by Sony and Philips to handle CD storage and playback in a variety of situations. CD-i, both the name of the set top box and the standard of its discs, refers to the green book standard. You cannot play a pure CD-ROM disc in a CD-i player and vice versa. In 1991, Philips and Sony created the CD-ROM XA extension that allowed for cross compatibility of the two formats, which was expanded into a new standard, white book, in 1993. Therefore, in practice, CD-ROM and CD-i players, including the Philips CD-i system that finally appeared in 1991, can generally read discs intended for both formats so long as the disc in question incorporates the CD-ROM XA extension.

Just as the term video game has emerged from its purely technical definition of a game making use of a video signal to encompass basically any electronic game played on a system constructed using logic circuits and featuring both a display and an element of interactivity, so to has CD-ROM become a generic term for any data CD. Therefore, it may be legitimate to keep it the way you have it. I just wanted to point out some of the murky technical differences in CD technology during the time period Blank would have been working with CD-i

- Jimmy Maher

November 14, 2015 at 8:33 am

Thanks. I will get into some of this detail when I write about CD-ROM proper, but at this point I think it’s better to stay out of the weeds. Everyone knows what CD-ROM is, and I’d rather not use a momentum-killing paragraph in this article to explain “this Philips project was like CD-ROM but wasn’t *actually* CD-ROM.”

- Markus

November 13, 2015 at 7:02 pm

Which interpreter did you use for that screenshot?

(At first glance I’d say Gargoyle with pretty much fully customized settings, but then, no idea which OS this is on…)

- Jimmy Maher

November 14, 2015 at 8:34 am

It’s just plain old Windows Frotz.

- Jason Dyer

November 14, 2015 at 4:10 am

I hold the first part is genius. It’s a perfect integration of plot and puzzle. There are so many permutations I felt completely unnerved trying to solve it, which is not something that would have ever worked without real time.

I’m not as wild about the other two parts, but I do felt there were some timing parts in the middle story that made stronger puzzles by actually waiting for the right moment and not just typing Z.Z.Z. etc.

- Nate

November 14, 2015 at 4:51 am

Aw man, Border Zone! This is one of my favourite Infocoms because of just how technically innovative it was, and how clever and well plotted the puzzly story was. And how committed it was to ‘you are inside a story’ rather than ‘let’s do yet another wacky comedy magic treasure hunt’.

But yeah, the *idea* of realtime spy fiction was much more interesting than its reality, sadly, for much the same reasons that the idea of Deadline was more fun than its actual metagame.

I still feel that for me, this late period of Infocom had some of its most creative ideas and it’s sad that these games never saw the commercial success they deserved.

Also it’s funny that both Beyond Zork and Border Zone come out as BZ.

- Rowan Lipkovits

November 14, 2015 at 5:21 am

Oh wow! I don’t think I’ve even seen the word “Frobnia” in print (well, you know what I mean) since making my 2012 Twine fangame — http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/files/frobniainstrumentidentify_0.html

- Lisa H.

November 14, 2015 at 6:28 am

I really liked the Frobnian phrasebook once I was old enough to understand it.

within the limitations of it text-only presentation

*its

single bravura action sequence from a good James Bond flick, which is, one sense,

“in” one sense, I think you meant.

It’s also a very solvable game

Ay well, I feel especially low IQ now, lol. Even walked through, I have a hard time understanding what’s even going on (and therefore how I’m supposed to know what to do) in chapter 3.

- Jimmy Maher

November 14, 2015 at 8:41 am

Thanks for the corrections!

The third part took quite a number of retries, but it wasn’t that hard for me to devise what needed to be done. I find that sometimes playing from a walkthrough can make a game seem more baffling than it really is, since you don’t get all the clues and context you get by poking around. And that goes double for a game like this one that relies so much on learning by death.

- Pedro Timóteo

November 14, 2015 at 5:22 pm

Another minor typo: “Philip’s gadget” should be “Philips’ gadjet”.

- Pedro Timóteo

November 14, 2015 at 5:59 pm

Argh. I myself made a typo the second type I typed “gadget”. :)

- Jimmy Maher

November 15, 2015 at 11:19 am

Happens every time, doesn’t it? Thanks!

- Bernie

November 14, 2015 at 1:46 pm

Great article, as always !

Your comments on the intrinsic difficulties of implementing real-time mechanics are right to the point.

I would like to get your opinion on a comparison between the real-time elements in Border Zone and those in Maniac Mansion, a contemporaneous game. My point being that, even though Maniac Mansion was a mostly-graphic adventure and not bound by the limits of “infocom’s technology” or organizational problems, bears some of the same problems expressed by players and reviewers of Border Zone : not enough time to act at real-time events and a lot of learn-by-dying.

My opinion is that Maniac Mansion deliberately introduced real-time only to some extent and in sections not vital to story advancement, thus leaving progress solely in the player’s hands (turn-based hands, that is). This lesson has been passed on through the last 3 decades.

Maybe Border Zone went too far into real-time territory for an adventure game, text or graphic, and Marc Blank can’t be blamed for trying since he didn’t have any previous references to turn to. He was a true innovator in adventure gaming.

- Jimmy Maher

November 14, 2015 at 2:55 pm

Just to be clear, I don’t think that Border Zone’s learning-by-dying is necessarily a design flaw, nor that it’s an inevitable outgrowth of the real-time approach. Indeed, and as I did try to clarify in the article, I’d say that it cuts against the real-time element, which brings with it the expectation that this will be a dynamic, emergent experience rather than a single set-piece meta-puzzle with just one ultimate solution. Both design approaches are perfectly acceptable. Border Zone’s problem is that it tries to have it both ways, and winds up in a bit of a muddle.

Although Maniac Mansion is real time, it doesn’t bother me in the same way. Part of the difference may just be the difference between mediums. I can think of only a few graphic adventures that were turn-based. Even the static ones, where time is essentially meaningless, are still running in real time. It’s just that nothing is happening around you, so it doesn’t matter. Many slightly later games, like Gabriel Knight, started to use player progress as triggers to advance the plot, an approach actually pioneered by Infocom in Ballyhoo. But even here the scenes are still playing in real time for the most part.

Another difference is that Maniac Mansion does have a lot more emergent possibility. Even if you take the same three characters as another player, there’s more variation in the routes you can take to victory than there is in Border Zone, a lot more time to experiment and investigate, and you can improvise your way out of some mistakes in ways you really can’t with Border Zone. Other mistakes, of course, not so much. Luckily, one trait Maniac Mansion and Border Zone do share is that it’s almost always clear really quickly when you’ve screwed up and need to restore or restart. It’s the games that let you screw up and don’t let you know you’ve screwed up until hours later when you simply can’t make any progress no matter what you do that really earn my ire.

- Pedro Timóteo

November 14, 2015 at 5:33 pm

I actually don’t think the “the game automatically waits a turn if you spend (e.g.) 30 seconds without entering a command” thing makes as much difference as the fact that things happen at specific times in specific places, whether you’re there or not, and missing some of them often means you’re dead ended (also seen in Deadline, Corruption, etc.).

One just forces you to type faster (or enter the “pause” command after every other command, while you’re reading or thinking about what to do next), the other forces you to learn by dying, spend entire play sessions waiting in each room making notes of what happens there at what times, etc. (so that you can later play a perfect, “clairvoyant” game), which I’m not a big fan of (mostly because it can become a bit repetitive), but it can still be fun.

- Nathan

November 14, 2015 at 4:46 pm

I really wanted to like the real-time feature of Border Zone, but I never really could.
Have any games since then (I mean IF, not Freefall) used the Z-Machine’s real-time input feature?

- Jimmy Maher

November 15, 2015 at 11:17 am

I remember seeing one or two games in older Comps that used it like The Hobbit and the Synapse games did: to add a sort of chess clock to the player’s turn-based input. But no, I can’t recall anything that tried to implement an actual real-time world behind the scenes. I suspect this is because a) doing so would be a huge challenge, since all of the Inform libraries have always been built on the assumption of a turn-based world, and b) based on the evidence of Border Zone the end results just aren’t all that compelling. That does make Border Zone an outlier, the only Infocom innovation that wasn’t taken up, elaborated on, and often refined by the hobbyist community that followed.

- ZUrlocker

November 14, 2015 at 8:05 pm

I still remember buying Border Zone at a Babbage’s mall store a few years after Infocom had bit the dust. I’d been away from IF for a while and I was excited to dive in again. To me the realtime component fit very well with the genre. It really did add a level of immersion to the game, especially to the first scene on the train. As mentioned, you have to die many times in this game to figure it out, but for me it still worked. That said, the three scenes and the realtime component do make the game feel fairly short. But as a fan of espionage fiction, it remains one of my favorite games.

Here’s a link to a PDF of the “I Am Frobnia” Fortunate Tourist Guide and Phrasebook. I thought it was brilliant.
http://mocagh.org/infocom/borderzone-phrasebook.pdf

- Jason Scott

November 15, 2015 at 6:05 am

In conversations I’ve had with Steve Meretzky, he heavily disputes that Mr. Blank “never played a game”, unless, as he roughly put it, testing a game by going through it entirely to the end isn’t playing it. Not sure which way reality goes.

- Pedro Timóteo

November 17, 2015 at 3:35 pm

Border Zone and most of the other Infocom games are available for purchase as part of an iOS app.)

As a curiosity, this is probably the last time we’ll see that exact message on this blog, unless you someday write about 1997’s Zork: The Undiscovered Underground. :)

- Jonathan

November 18, 2015 at 8:53 pm

Back in about 1981, Radio Shack published Raaka-Tu for the Model I/III (and later the Coco). While not a real time game, per se, there was a sequence at the very beginning where guards moved in a set pattern, and percise timing was required to get past them.

I am certainly no expert, but this is the earliest adventure game that I have seen/played where NPCs move of their own accord (rather than in direct response to the player’s actions).

- Jimmy Maher

November 18, 2015 at 9:17 pm

Very interesting. But Adventure and Zork did have the dwarfs and the thief respectively. A lot of the thief’s movements were random, but I’m not sure if they were entirely so. I think there was a certain amount of planning that caused him to to periodically return to his lair, etc.

- Chris

November 19, 2015 at 9:22 pm

Thank you for this series of great Infocom articles. In fact, thank you for the whole website. Unaccountably, I’ve just recently encountered it. I can’t stop reading. All of the work you’ve done is vastly appreciated. There’s no way I speak only for myself.

To communicate the credentials behind my new championing of your website (just calling this a “web log” disserves it vastly), I’ve written a few text adventures using Inform 7, not to mention several years’ worth of newsletter issues about old video games; I’ve published a book about old games as well. I’m loathe to include links, lest my intentions in commenting be misunderstood, so I’ll just leave it at: Thank you for all of your amazing work.

Chris

- Peter Ferrie

February 16, 2016 at 5:27 am

I seem to remember that there was a command to disable the timer, but I don’t have the manual handy to tell me what it was.

- Lisa H.

February 16, 2016 at 5:47 am

You can slow it down, but I dunno about disabling it entirely…

- Ibrahim Gucukoglu

March 6, 2017 at 10:58 pm

The realtime element of BZ was a real pane in the ass, especially when you were reliant upon a screen reader and external speech synthesizer as I was back in the days when I played this game. By the time you’d gotten half way through the somewhat lengthy passages of text, the timer had inexerabbly moved you forward a turn, so either you were arrested/killed before you could issue your command or the timing was so tight that you couldn’t complete the section due to lack of moves on the clock. I have to say though, that with all its shortcomings in the realtime element, BZ remains to this day one of my favourite IF titles in the Infocom cannon, especially the second section which must be one of the most tightly timed and demonising story lines one could ever experience. I never did manage to get my pen timer to explode under the guard’s car while the guards were in it, is that possible at all? That would certainly be one way of eliminating your enemy hahaha.

- DZ-Jay

March 28, 2017 at 11:10 am

>> “It was who Blank sat down with Joel Berez…”

I that’s a premature deployment of a pronoun: “It was Blank who…” :)

- Jimmy Maher

March 28, 2017 at 7:33 pm

Thanks!

Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels
April 15, 2016

Bob Bates, the last person in history to author an all-text Infocom adventure game, came to that achievement by as circuitous a path as anyone in a 1980s computer-game industry that was positively brimming with unlikely game designers.

Born in suburban Maryland in 1953, the fourth of the eventual eight children of James and Frances Bates, Bob entered Georgetown University on a partial scholarship in 1971 to pursue a dual major in Philosophy and Psychology. He was interested in people in the abstract, and this seemed the perfect combination of majors to pursue that interest. He imagined himself becoming a teacher. But as it turned out, the combination served equally well to prepare the unwitting Bob for a future in game design. At Georgetown, a Philosophy degree was a Bachelor of Arts, Psychology a Bachelor of Science, meaning he found himself taking a very unusual (and demanding) mixture of  liberal-arts and hard-science courses. What better preparation can there be for the art and science of game design?

Unlike the majority of Georgetown students, Bob didn’t have a great deal of familial wealth at his disposal; it was only thanks to the scholarship that he could attend at all. Thus he was forced to take odd jobs throughout his time there just to meet the many demands of daily life that the scholarship didn’t cover. Early on in his time at university, he got a job in Georgetown’s Sports Information Department that carried with it a wonderful perk: he could attend sporting events for free. When that job ended after about a year, Bob, a big sports fan, was left trying to scheme another way to get into the events. The solution he hit upon was working as a reporter for the sports department of the university newspaper. Access restored and problem solved.

The idea of becoming a writer had never resonated with Bob prior to coming to the newspaper, but he quickly found that he not only enjoyed it but was, at least by the accounts of the newspaper’s editors and readers, quite good at it. “That’s the point at which my aspiration switched,” says Bob, “from being a teacher to being a writer.” Soon he became sports editor, then the managing editor of the newspaper as a whole as well as the pseudonymous author of a humor column. His senior year found him editor-in-chief of the university’s yearbook.

Upon graduating from Georgetown in 1975, he still needed to earn money. On a job board — a literal job board in those days — he saw a posting for a tour guide for the Washington, D.C., area. The job entailed managing every aspect of group tours that were made up  of folks from various clubs and organizations, from schoolchildren to senior citizens. Bob would be responsible for their entire experience: meeting them at the airport, making sure all went well at the hotel, shepherding them from sight to sight, answering all of their questions and dealing with all of their individual problems. Just as his experience at the newspaper had taught him to love the act of writing, Bob found that working as a tour guide uncovered another heretofore unknown pleasure and talent that would mark his future career: “explaining places and history to people, explaining what happened and where it happened.” “These places were interesting to me, and therefore I tried to make them interesting for other people,” he told me — an explanation that applies equally to his later career as an adventure-game designer, crafting games that more often than not took place in existing settings drawn from the pages of history or fiction.

For Bob the aspiring writer, the working schedule of a tour guide seemed ideal. While he would have to remain constantly on the clock and on-hand for his clients during each tour of anywhere from three to seven days, he could then often take up to two weeks off before the next. The freedom of having so many days off could give him, or so he thought, the thing that every writer most craves: the freedom to write, undisturbed by other responsibilities.

Still, the call of the real world can be as hard for a writer as it can for anyone else to resist. Bob found himself getting more and more involved in the day-to-day business of the company; soon he was working in the office instead of in the field, striking up his own network of contacts with clients. At last, feeling overworked and under-compensated for his efforts, he founded a tour company of his own, one that he built in a very short period of time into the largest of its type in Washington, D.C.

By 1983, now married and with his thirtieth birthday fast approaching, Bob felt himself to be at something of a crossroads in life. Plenty of others — probably the vast majority — would have accepted the thriving tour company and the more than comfortable lifestyle that came with it, would have put away those old dreams of writing alongside other childish things. Bob, however, couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t all he wanted from life. He sold the company to one its employees when he was still a few weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday in order to write The Great American Novel — or, at any rate, an American novel.

The novel was to have been a work of contemporary fiction called One Nation Under God, an examination of the fraught topic, then and now, of prayer in American public schools, along with the more general mixing of politics and religion in American society — of which mixing Bob, then and now, is “extremely not in favor.” The story would involve a group of schoolchildren who came to Washington, D.C., on a tour — “that would be the write what you know part of the exercise,” notes Bob wryly — and got caught up in the issue.

But nearly two years into the writing, the novel still wasn’t even half done, and he still didn’t even have a contract to get it published. He reluctantly began to consider that, while he was certainly a writer, he might not be a novelist. “I need to find a different way to make money from this writing business,” he thought to himself. And then one day he booted up Zork, and the wheels started turning.

The edition of Zork in question ran on an old Radio Shack TRS-80 which Bob’s dad had given him to use as a replacement for the typewriter on which he’d been writing thus far. Bob had not heretofore had any experience with or interest in computers — he gave up his beloved old Selectric typewriter only very reluctantly — but he found Zork surprisingly intriguing. The more he played of it, the more he thought that this medium might give him an alternative way of becoming a writer, one with a much lower barrier to entry than trying to convince a New York literary agent to take a chance on a first-time novelist.

A lifelong fan and practitioner of barbershop harmony, Bob was singing at the time with a well-known group called the Alexandria Harmonizers. Another member, with whom Bob had been friends for some time, was a successful businessman named Dave Wilt, owner of a consulting firm. An odd remark that Dave had once made to him kept coming back to Bob now: “If you’re ever interested in starting a business, we should talk.” When Bob screwed up his courage and proposed to Dave that they start a company together to compete with Infocom, the latter’s response was both positive and immediate: “Yes! Let’s do that!”

While he had little personal interest in the field of computer gaming, Dave Wilt did have a better technical understanding of computers than Bob. Most importantly, he had access to systems and programmers, both through his own consulting firm and in the person of his brother Frederick, a professional programmer. A three-man team came together in some excess office space belonging to the Wilts: Dave Wilt as manager and all-around business guy, Frederick Wilt as programmer and all-around technical guy, and Bob as writer and designer.

They decided to call their little company Challenge, Inc. Ironically in light of Bob’s later reputation as a designer of painstakingly fair, relatively straightforward adventure games, the name was carefully chosen. “If you think an Infocom game is hard,” went their motto, “wait until you try a Challenge game!” A connoisseur of such hardcore puzzles as the cryptic crosswords popular in Britain, Bob wanted to make their text-adventure equivalent. In commercial terms, “it was exactly the wrong idea at the wrong time,” admits Bob. It was also an idea that could and very likely would have gone horribly, disastrously wrong in terms of game design. If there’s a better recipe for an unplayable, insoluble game than a first-time designer setting out to make a self-consciously difficult adventure, I certainly don’t know what it is. Thankfully, Infocom would start walking Bob back from his Challenging manifesto almost from the instant he began working with them.

The deal that brought Challenge, Infocom’s would-be competitor, into their arms came down to a combination of audacity and simple dumb luck. It was the Wilts who first suggested to Bob that, rather than trying to write their own adventuring engine from scratch, they should simply buy or license a good one from someone else. When Dave Wilt asked Bob who might have such a thing to offer, Bob replied that only one company could offer Challenge an engine good enough to compete with Infocom’s games: Infocom themselves. “Well, then, just call them up and tell them you want to license their engine,” said Dave. Bob thought it was a crazy idea. Why would Infocom license their engine to a direct competitor? “Just call them!” insisted Dave. So, Bob called them up.

He soon was on the phone with Joel Berez, recently re-installed as head of Infocom following Al Vezza’s unlamented departure. Berez’s first question had doubtless proved his last in many earlier such conversations: did Bob have access to a DEC minicomputer to run the development system? Thanks to the Wilts’ connections, however, Bob knew that they could arrange to rent time on exactly such a system. That hurdle cleared, Berez’s first offer was to license the engine in perpetuity for a one-time fee of $1 million, an obvious attempt, depending on how the cards fell, to either drive off an unserious negotiator or to raise some quick cash for a desperately cash-strapped Infocom. With nowhere near that kind of capital to hand, Bob countered with a proposal to license the engine on a pay-as-you-go basis for $100,000 per game. Berez said the proposal was “interesting,” said he’d be back in touch soon.

Shortly thereafter, Berez called to drop a bombshell: Infocom had just been bought by Activision, so any potential deal was no longer entirely in his hands. Jim Levy, president of Activision, would be passing through Dulles Airport next Friday. Could Bob meet with him personally there? “I can do that,” said Bob.

Levy came into the meeting in full-on tough-negotiator mode. “Why should we license our engine to you?” he asked. “You’ve never written a game. What makes you think you can do this?” But Bob had also come prepared. He pulled out a list of all of the games that Infocom had published. With no access to any inside information whatsoever, he had marked on the list the games he thought had sold the most and those he thought had sold the least, along with the reasons he believed that to be the case for each. Then he outlined a plan for Challenge’s games that he believed could place them among the bestsellers.

Bob’s plan set a strong precedent for his long career to come in game development, in which he would spend a lot of his time adapting existing literary properties to interactive mediums. Under the banner of Challenge, Inc., he wanted to make text-adventure adaptations of literary properties possessed of two critical criteria: a) that they feature iconic characters well-known to just about every person in the United States if not the world; and b) that they be out of copyright, thus eliminating the need to pay for licenses that Challenge was in no position to afford. He already had the subjects of his first three games picked out: Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur, and Robin Hood, in that order — all characters that Bob himself had grown up with and continued to find fascinating. All were, as Bob puts it, “interesting people in interesting places doing interesting things.” How could a budding game designer go wrong?

Levy was noncommittal throughout the meeting, but on Monday Bob got another call from Joel Berez: “Let’s forget this licensing deal. Why don’t you write games for Infocom?” Both Activision and Infocom loved Bob’s plan for making adventurous literary adaptations, even coming up with a brand name for a whole new subset of Infocom interactive fiction: “Immortal Legends.” The idea would only grow more appealing to the powers that were following Jim Levy’s ouster as head of Activision in January of 1987; his successor, Bruce Davis, brought with him a positive mania for licenses and adaptations.

We should take a moment here to make sure we fully appreciate the series of fortuitous circumstances that brought Bob Bates to write games for Infocom. Given their undisputed position of leadership in the realm of text adventures, Bob’s inquiry could hardly have been the first of its nature that Infocom had received. Yet Infocom had for years absolutely rejected the idea of working with outside developers. What made them suddenly more receptive was the desperate financial position they found themselves in following the Cornerstone debacle, a position that made it foolhardy to reject any possible life preserver, even one cast out by a rank unknown quantity like Bob Bates. Then there was the happenstance that gave Bob and the Wilts access to a DECsystem-20, a now aging piece of kit that had been cancelled by DEC a couple of years before and was becoming more and more uncommon. And finally there came the Activision purchase, and with it immediate pressure on Infocom from their new parent to produce many more games than they had ever produced before. All of these factors added up to a yes for Challenge after so many others had received only a resounding no.

In telling the many remarkable stories that I do on this blog, I’m often given cause to think about the humbling role that sheer luck, alongside talent and motivation and all the other things we more commonly celebrate, really does play in life. In light of his unique story, I couldn’t help but ask Bob about the same subject. I found his response enlightening.

In the course of my subsequent career, I ended up rubbing shoulders with lots of very, very well-known authors. Sitting with them informally at dinners and various events and listening to their stories, every single one of them would talk about “that stroke of luck” or “those strokes of luck” that plucked them from the pool of equally talented — or better talented — writers. Their manuscript landed on an editor’s desk at a certain day at a certain time. Or they bumped into somebody, or there was a chance encounter, etc. Every successful writer that I know will tell you that luck played a huge part in their success.

And I am no different. I have been extremely fortunate… but you know, that word “fortunate” doesn’t convey the same sense that “luck” does. I’ve been LUCKY.

With Infocom’s ZIL development system duly installed on the time-shared DEC to which Challenge had access — this marks the only instance of the ZIL system ever making it out of Massachusetts — Bob needed programmers to help him write his games, for Frederick Wilt just didn’t have enough time to do the job himself. Through the once timeless expedient of looking in the Yellow Pages, he found a little contract-programming company called Paragon Systems. They sent over a senior and a junior programmer, named respectively Mark Poesch and Duane Beck. Both would wind up programming in ZIL for Challenge effectively full-time.

Most of the expanded Challenge traveled up to Cambridge for an introduction to ZIL and the general Infocom way of game development. There they fell into the able hands of Stu Galley, the soft-spoken Imp so respected and so quietly relied upon by all of his colleagues. Stu, as Bob puts it, “took us under his wing,” a bemused Bob watching over his shoulder while he patiently walked the more technical types from Challenge through the ins and outs of ZIL.

Infocom continued to give Bob and his colleagues much support throughout the development of the game that would become known as Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels. It was for instance Infocom themselves who suggested that Sherlock become the second Infocom text adventure (after The Lurking Horror) to include sound effects, and who then arranged to have Russell Lieblich at Activision record and digitize them. Present only on the Amiga and Macintosh versions of the game, the sounds, ranging from Sherlock’s violin playing to the clip-clop of a hansom cab, are admittedly little more than inessential novelities even in comparison to those of The Lurking Horror.

More essential was the support Infocom gave Bob and company in the more traditional aspects of the art and science of crafting quality adventure games. As I’ve occasionally noted before, the triumph of Infocom was not so much the triumph of individual design genius, although there were certainly flashes of that from time to time, as it was a systemic triumph. Well before the arrival of Challenge, Infocom had developed a sort of text-adventure assembly line that came complete with quality control that was the envy of the industry. Important as it was to all the games, Infocom’s dedication to the process was especially invaluable to first-time Imps like Bob. The disembodied genius of the process guided them gently away from the typical amateur mistakes found in the games of virtually all of Infocom’s peers — such as Bob’s early fixation on making a game that was gleefully, cruelly hard — and gave them the feedback they needed at every step to craft solid adventures. Sherlock was certainly an unusual game in some respects for Infocom, being the first to be written by outsiders, but in the most important ways it was treated just the same as all the others — not least the many rounds of testing and player feedback it went through. Even today, when quality control is taken much more seriously by game makers in general than it was in Infocom’s day, Infocom’s committed, passionate network of inside and outside testers stands out. Bob:

There’s something that distinguished Infocom from most other game companies that I’ve worked with — and I’ve since worked with a lot. The idea of the role of the tester in today’s game-development world is that a tester is somebody who finds bugs. Testing is in fact often outsourced. What people are looking for are situations where the game doesn’t work.

But testing at Infocom was a far more collaborative process between tester and designer, in terms of things that should be in the game and perhaps weren’t: “I tried to do this and it should have worked”; “This way of phrasing an input should work, but it didn’t.” GET THE ROCK should work just as well as PICK UP THE ROCK or TAKE THE ROCK or ACQUIRE THE ROCK or whatever. That applied not just to syntax, but to things like “It seems like this should be possible” or “You know, if you’ve got the player in this situation, they may well try to do X or Y.” We would look at transcripts at Infocom from testers. And we’d solicit qualitative comments as well as mechanical comments. If the machine crashed somewhere or kicked out an error message, of course I’m interested in that, but the Infocom testers would also offer qualitative input about the design of the game. That was special, and is not often the case today. I think that’s something that contributed greatly to the quality of Infocom’s games.

Bob remembers the relationship with everyone at Infocom, which he visited frequently throughout the development of Sherlock and the Challenge game that would follow it, as “really good — we liked each other, we liked talking with each other, I enjoyed visiting their offices and wanted to feel like a part of their culture. They accepted me as one of their own.” The lessons in professionalism and craft that Bob learned from Infocom would follow him through the rest of an impressive and varied career in making games. Bob:

They had the same persnicketiness to get things right that I had. For example, in Sherlock there was a puzzle that involved the tides in the Thames; the Thames goes up quite a bit, like six or seven feet in its tidal variation. In the Times newspaper included with the game, for which they got permission from the London Times to include excerpts from that day, we put in tide tables, and I remember huge arguments over whether they should be the actual tide tables from that day or whether we could bend them to suit the player — to have it work out so the player could solve this puzzle at a time that was convenient for the player, as opposed to when it was convenient for nature. Right now I don’t recall the resolution to that. I don’t remember who won.

My own amateurish investigations would seem to indicate that the tide tables were altered by several hours, although I’m far from completely confident in my findings. But the really important thing, of course, is that such a “persnickety” debate happened at all — a measure of all parties’ willingness to think deeply about the game they were making.

Like many of Bob Bates’s games, Sherlock isn’t one that lends itself overmuch to high-flown analysis, and this can in turn lead some critics to underestimate it. As in a surprising number of ludic Sherlock Holmes adaptations, you the player are cast in the role of the faithful Dr. Watson rather than the great detective himself — perhaps a wise choice given that Sherlock is so often little more than a walking, talking deus ex machina in the original stories, his intellectual leaps more leaps of pure fancy on Arthur Conan Doyle’s part than identifiable leaps of deduction. Sherlock effectively reverses the roles of Watson and Sherlock, rendering the latter little more than a sidekick and occasional source of clues and nudges in the game that bears his name.

It seems that Professor Moriarty has struck again, stealing nothing less than the Crown Jewels of England this time. He’s hidden them somewhere in London, leaving his old nemesis Sherlock a series of clues as to their location in the form of verse. To complete this highly unlikely edifice of artificial plotting, Sherlock decides to turn the investigation over to you, Watson, because Moriarty “will have tried to anticipate the sequence of my actions, and I’m sure he has laid his trap accordingly. But if you were to guide the course of our investigations, he will certainly be thrown off the scent. Therefore, let us take surprise onto our side and rely on your instincts as the man of action I know you to be — despite your frequent modest assertions to the contrary.” The real purpose of it all, of course, is to send you off on a merry scavenger hunt through Victorian London. This is not a game that rewards thinking too much about its plot.

The more compelling aspect of Sherlock is its attention to the details of its setting. It marks the third and final Infocom game, after Trinity and The Lurking Horror, to base its geography on a real place. Bob worked hard to evoke what he calls “the wonderful Victorian era, with the gas lamps and the horse-drawn carriages and the fog,” and succeeded admirably. The newspaper included with the game is a particularly nice touch, both in its own right as one of the more impressive feelies to appear in a late-period Infocom game and as a nice little throwback/homage to the earlier tabletop classic Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective.

At the same time that it evokes the Victorian era, however, Sherlock gives a view of London that will be immediately recognizable to any tourist who has ever, as another Infocom game once put it, enjoyed a “$599 London Getaway Package” and “soaked up as much of that authentic English ambiance as you can.” There’s a certain “What I did on my London vacation” quality to Sherlock that’s actually a strength rather than a weakness. Appropriately for a former tour guide who was himself a semi-regular London tourist, Bob made sure to fill his version of Victorian London with the big sights his audience would recognize: Big Ben, Madame Tussaud’s, Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, all right where they ought to be on the map. (The game includes a taxi service to shuttle you around among the sights.) Bob lavished particular love on Westminster Abbey, taking pains to duplicate its layout as closely as space constraints allowed from a huge, glossy book he’d purchased in the Abbey’s gift shop on one of his own visits to London.

This map of the real Westminster Abbey matches up very well with…

…the one found in Sherlock.

The time limit in Sherlock — you have just 48 hours to recover the Jewels — may raise some eyebrows, but it’s quite generous as such things go, allowing you more than enough time to poke into everything and savor all of the sights. You’re much more likely to find yourself waiting around for certain things that happen at certain times than trying to optimize every move. If there is a design flaw in the game, then it must be, as Bob himself admits, the very beginning: you need to solve one of the most difficult puzzles in the game right off to get properly started. Because it isn’t initially clear where or what this puzzle is, you’re likely to spend quite some time wandering around at loose ends, unsure what the game expects from you. As soon as you cross that initial hurdle, however, Sherlock settles down into a nicely woven ribbon of clues, not too trivial but also not too horribly taxing, leading to an exciting climax that’s actually worthy of the word.

Sherlock was released in January of 1988, becoming the last of an unprecedented spurt of nine Infocom games in twelve months and, as I mentioned in introducing this article, the last all-text Infocom adventure game ever. It also marked Infocom’s last release for the Commodore 64, the third and last of the “LZIP” line of slightly larger-than-usual games (like its predecessors, Sherlock uses some of the extra space for an in-game hint system), and the end of the line for the original Z-Machine that had been conceived by Marc Blank and Joel Berez back in 1979; Infocom’s new version 6 graphical Z-Machine would retain the name and much of the design philosophy, but would for the first time be the result of a complete ground-up rewrite. Finally, Sherlock was the 31st and final Infocom adventure game to be developed on a DEC, even if the particular DEC in question this time didn’t happen to be Infocom’s own legendary “fleet of red refrigerators.”

Whatever the virtues of the built-in name recognition that came with releasing a Sherlock Holmes adventure, this Sherlock Holmes adventure didn’t do notably well, as will come as no surprise to anyone who’s been following my ongoing series of Infocom articles and with it the sales travails of this late period in their history. Released at a time of chaotic transition within Infocom, just after the company had made the decision to abandon the text-only games that had heretofore been their sole claim to fame, Sherlock became yet one more member of Infocom’s 20,000 Club, managing to sell a little over 21,000 copies in all. Bob and his colleagues at Challenge were not happy. They had spent far more time and money creating the game than anticipated, what with all the heavy lifting of getting ZIL up and running in their new environment and learning to use it properly, and the financial return was hardly commensurate. In the end, though, they decided to stay the course, to make the King Arthur game they had always planned to do next using the new development system that Infocom was creating, which would at long last add the ability to include pictures in the games. Surely that would boost sales. Wouldn’t it?

The melancholia that comes attached to Sherlock, the epoch-ending final all-text adventure game from Infocom, is, as is usual for epoch-ending events, easier to feel in retrospect than it was at the time. Bob, being somewhat removed from the Infocom core, didn’t even realize at the time that there were no more all-text games in the offing. Not that it would have mattered if he had; he preferred to think about the new engine with which Infocom was tempting him. With everyone so inclined to look forward rather than behind, the passing away of the commercial text-only adventure game into history was barely remarked.

Looked at today, however, Sherlock certainly wasn’t a bad note to go out on. Being built on the sturdy foundation of everything Infocom had learned about making text adventures to date, it’s not notably, obviously innovative, but, impressively given that it is a first-timer’s game, it evinces heaps of simple good craftsmanship. We may celebrate the occasional titles like A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity that aspire to the mantle of Literature, but the vast majority of Infocom’s works are, just like this one, sturdily constructed games first and foremost. Explore an interesting place, solve some satisfying puzzles — the core appeals of a good text adventure are eternal. And, hey, this one has the added bonus that it might just make you want to visit the real London. If you do, you’ll already have a notion where things are, thanks to Bob Bates, lifelong tour guide to worlds real and virtual.

(Sources: Most of the detail in this article is drawn from an interview with Bob Bates, who was kind enough to submit to more than two hours of my nit-picky questions.)

Comments
29 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

April 15, 2016 at 3:22 pm

Nitpick: you do find various gems scattered around London in your scavenger hunt, but I don’t believe it’s ever stated that they are part of the crown jewels. And then, at the end, you find “the crown jewels,” defined as a single object.

- Jimmy Maher

April 15, 2016 at 4:33 pm

That was the easiest correction ever. Just make “locations” into “location.” :) Thanks!

- Dave Gilbert

April 15, 2016 at 3:29 pm

I loved this game as a kid. I am ashamed to admit that the first thing I typed was “Shoot Sherlock.” I was surprised that the game let me do it. :o

- Lisa H.

April 15, 2016 at 7:31 pm

That’s thorough implementation for you…

- Jimmy Maher

April 16, 2016 at 8:25 am

One thing that Bob and I talked about is how many designers design adventures only as “IF THEN” constructions. “If the player does this (thus solving a puzzle), then do that.” But much of the fun is in the ELSE, the things that have no direct bearing on solving the puzzles but can make the world feel more alive, offer clues, and/or just amuse the player. SHOOT SHERLOCK is probably an instance of the first and the last of those at least.

- Brain Breaker

April 15, 2016 at 3:38 pm

Hi Jimmy,

First time commenter here, but I’ve enjoyed your blog for quite a while now.

I have a quick question for you, if you have the time. I recently stumbled upon what I think may be the real inspiration behind Roberta Williams’ Mystery House (it seemed crazy at first, but after careful consideration I’m convinced that it’s quite probably true). Your articles on the game and the origins of On-Line are probably the best out there, so I was going to post my weird little theory on one of those. But, they’re several years old now, so I wasn’t sure if they’d be seen. However, I don’t want to clutter up the comments of an unrelated article like this with off-topic chatter without asking you first. So, should I go ahead and post it here, or backtrack to the older, topic-specific articles instead?

Thanks!

- Jimmy Maher

April 15, 2016 at 4:35 pm

It’s probably better to attach it to the older articles. I see and read every comment that gets made anywhere, and I know that many of my more dedicated readers subscribe to the comments RSS feed so they can do the same. Plus it will be easier for future readers to find that way. Also easier for me to find, if and when I ever around to revising this whole mess to turn it into proper books. :)

- matt w

April 22, 2016 at 9:42 pm

But hopefully it won’t clutter up the comments too much to leave a link to it, for those of us who are reading this and curious with anticipation: in the comments to https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/ken-and-roberta/

- Steven Marsh

April 15, 2016 at 3:50 pm

It’s been a MANY years since I played it, but I recall being fairly disappointed when I played it originally. I think it’s because I was expecting something that felt more like a mystery – similar to Deadline or even Ballyhoo – rather than a conventional scavenger hunt; I don’t recall anything particularly mystery-like or deductive about the adventure. (If the Sherlock name hadn’t been attached, I probably wouldn’t have cared, but – for me – “Sherlock” = “mystery”.)

Conversely, I LOVED Arthur, and I’m looking forward to that review.

Oh, and Bob Bates is the author of my favorite text adventure of all time – Timequest – so I’m still kinda sad I didn’t enjoy Sherlock very much. But maybe I should revisit it; a couple of decades might let me revisit it with different expectations.

- Jimmy Maher

April 15, 2016 at 4:40 pm

I’m more the opposite. Arthur has all of the ingredients of a very good adventure, but there are a lot of needless annoyances and one or two unnecessarily obtuse puzzles of the sort that unfortunately are par for the course with Infocom’s final run of illustrated games. It’s probably the best of those games… but then that’s not saying a whole lot.

Timequest, though, does hold a special place in my heart as well. Looking forward to that one myself.

- Bob Reeves

April 17, 2016 at 1:04 pm

I know from this and previous comments you’re not one of them, Jimmy, but I’m still hoping there are one or two other players out there who were and are impressed with “Zork Zero.” I agree that “Arthur” was a high note to go out on.

- Torbjörn Andersson

April 17, 2016 at 10:26 pm

I haven’t played it in a long time either. I remember enjoying the game, but I also remember being slightly disappointed and thinking that the tone of it was all over the place.

- Doug Orleans

April 15, 2016 at 3:56 pm

I think you mean “commensurate”, not “commiserate”…

- Jimmy Maher

April 15, 2016 at 4:41 pm

Thanks!

- Michael F

April 15, 2016 at 4:48 pm

“commiserate” — I think you meant “commensurate”.

- Lisa H.

April 15, 2016 at 7:32 pm

He already had the subjects of his first three games picked out: Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur, and Robin Hood, in that order

Having played both Sherlock and Arthur, I have to wonder what the Robin Hood game would have been like if it had manifested.

I found Sherlock rather dull have only played through a minimum number of times to hack together a walkthrough (which itself lacks color and is evidence of my lack of emotional engagement with the game). Arthur certainly has some frustrating puzzles, but I like it enough to play through it every now and again. Then again, I am not as fascinated as some with the character of Sherlock Holmes in the first place, so maybe that has something to do with it.

It seems that Professor Moriarty has struck again, stealing nothing less than the Crown Jewels of England this time. He’s hidden them around London, leaving his old nemesis Sherlock a series of clues as to their location in the form of verse.

I don’t think changing “locations” to “location” fixes this – Moriarty still has not hidden “them”, i.e., the Crown Jewels themselves, “around London”.

- Jimmy Maher

April 15, 2016 at 8:02 pm

Okay. We replace “around” with “somewhere in” and that should do it…

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- Ben P. Stein

April 16, 2016 at 1:49 am

Thanks for another great column.

I had forgotten about “Sherlock,” in part because it’s not included in the excellent Lost Treasures of Infocom app.

Your column makes a convincing case for how external factors beyond one’s control or knowledge can make possible life-changing situations.

In that light, did Bob mention if his preparation made a significant difference in his meeting with Jim Levy? Did he mention how well he did in his guesses for the highest-selling and lowest-selling sales figures for Infocom titles?

Finally, I found what appears to be the tiniest of typos. There may be a missing word in this phrase:

…of which mixing Bob, then and now, is “extremely not in favor.”

Thanks again,
Ben

- Jimmy Maher

April 16, 2016 at 8:20 am

The construction of that sentence is a little non-standard, but it is grammatically correct and not a typo. Just keeping you all on your toes. ;)

I feel quite confident that Bob’s preparation did make a significant impact on Levy, and I believe that his guesses were largely correct. That said, it’s been a long, long time, and it wouldn’t really be fair to quiz either man too much on the subject now.

- Ben P. Stein

April 16, 2016 at 3:04 pm

Thanks so much! If that sentence was grammatically correct, my apologies! I’d only ever point out potential issues so that the quality of your archive could be the very best it can be. (And I realized I should have eliminated the words “sales figures for” in my initial post here–so I can make an actual error on behalf of both of us!)

Fair point about the meeting with Jim Levy. I’m thinking that the fact that he successfully landed a meeting with Levy played an important rule, so it’s a good mix of intention and chance events. Great piece as always!

- Ben P. Stein

April 16, 2016 at 3:30 pm

And my “rule” should be “role.” So I’ll stop there. Thanks again!

- Torbjörn Andersson

April 17, 2016 at 10:14 pm

“the sounds, ranging from Sherlock’s less-than-virtuoso violin playing to the clip-clop of a hansom cab”

Did you mean Watson’s violin playing? (Not that I’d call Holmes’s playing virtuoso either, but it sounded nice.)

- Jimmy Maher

April 18, 2016 at 7:33 am

I thought it was Sherlock who made the terrible screeching noise, which did strike me as odd because in the stories he was described as quite an accomplished player. So it was Watson, huh? That explains that…

- Torbjörn Andersson

April 20, 2016 at 9:55 am

The screeching noise is if you, i.e. Watson, play the violin. You can give the violin to Holmes and ask him to play it, and it will sound much nicer.

(Watson plays the first couple of notes from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. I don’t recognize what Holmes plays, and the game only calls it “a brief, haunting melody whose melancholy notes fill the air with beauty”.)

- iPadCary

May 9, 2016 at 7:19 pm

Love, love, LOVE this game!
Have it on iPad Pro with Frotz!

- DZ-Jay

April 17, 2017 at 11:21 am

I’m having trouble parsing the following sentence:

>> “Stu, as Bob puts it, “took us under his wing,” a bemused Bob watching over his shoulder while he patiently walked the more technical types from Challenge through the ins and outs of ZIL.”

How is the second clause related to the first? Should it be “… *said* a bemused Bob…” or should it had been “Stu, as Bob puts it, ‘took under his wing’ a bemused Bob…”?

-dZ.

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- Marco

May 21, 2020 at 9:24 pm

I played this game a long while back. What interests me particularly is that this plot of Moriarty stealing the Crown Jewels has nothing to do with the canon, but it’s appeared over and over again in derivative works. As if everyone somehow feels it’s the story Conan Doyle should have written.

I thought the focus on tourist attractions did successfully evoke Victorian London: the first guidebook to Westminster Abbey was indeed published in 1885. But the time limit was frustrating, as you’d just have worked out what to do, only to realise you weren’t going to have enough turns left to finish the game, and so have to restart from the beginning.

The Bruce Youth
April 22, 2016

On June 13, 1988, exactly two years to the day after Infocom officially became a subsidiary of Activision, a set of identical Federal Express packages appeared on the doorsteps of the old, independent Infocom’s former stockholders. This group, which included among its ranks such employees and contractors of the current Infocom as Joel Berez, Marc Blank, Dave Lebling, and Stu Galley, had been the direct beneficiaries of the $2.4 million in stock that Activision had paid along with the assumption of $6.8 million in debt to acquire the company. The bundles of legal documents the former stockholders now found inside the Federal Express envelopes were eye-opening to say the least: they said that the shareholders would have to pay Activision much of that money back.

As is standard practice in such deals, the shareholders had signed contracts agreeing to indemnify Activision if they were shown to have misrepresented the financial position of their company. In layperson’s terms, if they had cooked the books to get Activision to bite, they would be personally liable for the difference between fantasy and reality. Activision had two years to make such a claim, which makes the date of June 13, 1988 — literally the last possible instant to do so — very significant.

The exact reasoning behind Activision’s demand for recompense was vague at best, seemingly amounting to little more than an assertion that Infocom had turned out not to be worth as much as an ongoing subsidiary as both Activision and Infocom had thought it would back in 1986. The former shareholders viewed it as simply an attempt by Activision’s President Bruce Davis to extort money out of them, especially as the contract they had signed demanded that concrete data ground any indemnification claim. The deal to acquire Infocom had happened during the reign of Davis’s predecessor Jim Levy, allegedly over Davis’s strident objections. Now, the shareholders assumed, he meant to wring whatever money he could out of a money-losing subsidiary he had never wanted before he cast it aside. Incensed to be essentially accused of fraud and humiliated that the perceived value of their company, one of the leading lights in computer games just a few years before, had come down to this, the former shareholders vowed to fight Davis in court.

Shortly after igniting this powder keg, Davis made one of his infrequent visits to Infocom from Activision’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters. While there, he took marketing manager Mike Dornbrook out to dinner. Dornbrook shared with me his recollections of that evening.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[1]Note that “lawsuit” probably isn’t quite the correct terminology. Activision’s demand for recompense wasn’t technically a lawsuit; it would actually be the former shareholders who would first sue Activision for allegedly making a false indemnification claim. Still, I trust that the gist of Dornbrook’s sentiment is clear and accurate enough.

I told Bruce that I was intimately involved with the finances of Infocom in Spring 1986 and I was sure that Joel and the rest of the team were honest. They not only believed all the financial numbers, they felt that Activision was getting a very good deal. How did he expect them to react to this lawsuit?

His response was that he didn’t care if the numbers were actually accurate and believed at that time. In retrospect, it was clear to him that Activision had overpaid and he was convinced that a jury would agree and reward him some of the money back. He felt it was his duty to the Activision shareholders to get as much back as he could. He expected the Infocom indemnifying shareholders to simply negotiate a settlement. When I told him that they would rather fight than give in to such blackmail, he indicated that I was being naive to think this.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[2]Ironically, an unexpectedly popular Infocom shovelware package called The Lost Treasures of Infocom is widely credited with turning around the financial fortunes of the new Kotick-led Activision, while the first big new hit of same was something called Return to Zork. Kotick would thus still be trying to extract money from the old Infocom shareholders for allegedly overvaluing their company even as the fruits of the Infocom acquisition were saving his own.

In the context of 1988, Activision’s claim made for one hell of a situation. Some of the most important people at Infocom, including their President Joel Berez, were now engaged in an open legal battle with the same people they were expected to work with and report to. Yes, it was one hell of a situation. For that matter, it was shaping up to be one hell of a year.

The heart of Infocom’s travails, the wellspring from which the indemnification claim as well as every other problem burst, was a steady decline in sales. Worrisome signs of the gaming public’s slacking interest in their text-only interactive fiction could be discerned as early as 1985, and by 1987 that reality was fairly pounding them in the face every day. Between January 1987 and January 1988, Infocom flooded the adventure-game market with nine new titles to average sales of only about 20,000 units per game, a fraction of what their games used to sell. Clearly releasing more games wasn’t helping their cause. All signs indicated that the flood of new releases only prompted their all too finite remaining base of fans to pick and choose more carefully among the few titles each tended to purchase each year. Thus in working harder Infocom most definitely wasn’t working smarter, but rather managing to get even less bang than before for their development buck.

But if more games didn’t help, what would? Drowning as they were, they cast about desperately, giving serious consideration to ideas at which the younger, prouder Infocom would have scoffed. Some seriously mooted suggestions were described even by those who did the suggesting as “schlock,” such as partnerships with Judith Krantz, Sidney Sheldon, or the rather vague category of “Hollywood stars.” (The sad reality, of course, was that Infocom’s own star had now burned so low that they wouldn’t have had much chance of tempting even the lowest-wattage such fodder into working with them.) The most shocking and patently desperate suggestion of all was for a “serious XXX porn game,” although they wouldn’t put their own name on it. After all, one must have some dignity.

In this atmosphere of magic-bullet hunting, it was natural to turn back to the glory days, to the names that had once made Infocom one of the glories of their industry. Thus the Zork name, left unused since Zork III in 1982, was resurrected at last for Brian Moriarty’s Beyond Zork, begun in late 1986 and released a year later.

Yet there was another of their old games that Infocom looked back upon with if anything even more wistfulness than the original Zork trilogy. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was the very personification of Infocom’s glory days, selling well over 300,000 copies, attracting considerable mainstream-press coverage, and generally marking the high-water point of their commercial fortunes. The game itself hadn’t so much ended as stopped midstream, its final paragraphs explicitly promising a sequel. If only they could finally get that sequel made…

The problem with doing the Hitchhiker‘s sequel was it must entail trying to work yet again with the charmingly insufferable Douglas Adams, a black hole of procrastination who seemed to suck up the productivity of every Imp he came into contact with. Bureaucracy, first proposed by Adams as a sort of light palate cleanser between Hitchhiker’s and its sequel, had turned into the most tortured project in Infocom’s history, involving at one time or another most of the development staff and consuming fully two years in all (the average Infocom game required about six to nine months). Released at last in March of 1987 only thanks to a last-minute rescue mission mounted by Adams’s good friend and semi-regular ghostwriter Michael Bywater, the end result had left no one entirely happy.

Even as Bureaucracy was still lurching erratically toward completion, Stu Galley had taken a stab at outlining a possible plot for a Hitchhiker’s sequel, calling it Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Infocom hoped they could run Galley’s ideas by Adams to maybe, just maybe get his juices flowing and get him to want to get started properly. But little resulted other than a lot of internal discussion and a very sketchy beginning-of-a-demo that would be kicked around for a long time at Infocom and, later, around the modern Internet after it was leaked from an old backup by a blogger. Over on the other side of the Atlantic, Adams continued to say all the right things in the abstract and to deliver absolutely no usable concrete feedback.

With this evidence to hand that Douglas Adams continued to be Douglas Adams, enthusiastic about proposing projects but completely disinterested in actually working on them, no one wanted to even think about starting on the Bureaucracy merry-go-round all over again. Infocom was in a weird position: everyone wanted a Hitchhiker’s sequel in the abstract, but no one wanted to try to work with Adams on one. And so, just as had happened with Bureaucracy, the project got passed around to whomever didn’t manage to look busy enough before any given planning session. It became the most energy- and morale-draining hot potato ever.

In the immediate wake of Bureaucracy’s release, Infocom hoped they might be able to shepherd the Hitchhiker’s sequel to completion by once again turning the tasks that would normally be shouldered by Adams over to Michael Bywater. This time, however, his work didn’t go as smoothly. Whether stymied by the differences between writing a game from scratch and merely (re)writing all of the text for a game, as he had largely done for Bureaucracy and would later do for Magnetic Scroll’s Jinxter, or daunted by the prospect of playing with some of his old friend’s most beloved creations, he was slow to produce results, even when Infocom flew him to Cambridge and put him up in a nearby hotel so he could be closer to the action.

Despite little progress on a script having been made by year’s end, the project was foisted on Infocom’s Amy Briggs for implementation at the beginning of 1988. She felt herself to have been placed in an untenable position, caught between Infocom and a none-too-responsive British contingent consisting of Bywater and Adams — and, with Bywater currently dating Magnetic Scrolls’s head Anita Sinclair, an undefined role to quite possibly be played by that company as well. Unsure where her responsibilities on Restaurant began and ended and frustrated by management’s unwillingness to let her turn any of her own original ideas into a game, she announced that she would be leaving Infocom in June.

With Briggs bowing out, a new suggestion surfaced from Britain: just let Douglas and Michael and Anita do the whole thing over here, implementing it using Magnetic Scrolls’s in-house technology. Most at Infocom were left aghast by the idea. While they had been willing to publicly acknowledge Magnetic Scrolls as the worthiest of their direct competitors — conveniently leaving out the fact that they were, at least in North America, also largely their only remaining direct competitors — and while relations between the two companies were for the most part quite good, no one at Infocom truly regarded Magnetic Scrolls as their equals in craftsmanship. In this belief, it must be said, they were correct. Magnetic Scrolls’s engine did a few things better than Infocom’s, but it did a lot of other things worse, and their games in general remained well behind Infocom’s in terms of design and attention to detail. It had always been Magnetic Scrolls who were the disciples, who had filled their games with homages to Zork and Hitchhiker’s and gratefully accepted Infocom’s benevolent condescension. The idea of Magnetic Scrolls doing the next Hitchhiker’s — one of Infocom’s two biggest properties — was just too, too much, one more measure of how far they had fallen. It was hard not to take as a personal betrayal the fact that Adams was even proposing such a thing.

The Hitchhiker’s sequel finally died on the vine during the middle months of 1988, abandoned due to dwindling resources — Magnetic Scrolls’s business wasn’t exactly booming by that point either — and sheer exhaustion with the subject on both sides of the Atlantic. Just as a potential Restaurant at the End of the Universe was puffed up to almost mythic proportions as a business-saver in its own day, the sequel-that-never-was has loomed large in fan dialogues over the years since — especially after that aforementioned leak, whose source didn’t do a great job of contextualizing Stu Galley’s brief demo and instead proclaimed it to be “the unreleased sequel to Hitchhiker’s,” full stop. In truth, the idea that a Restaurant game could have measurably altered Infocom’s trajectory seems doubtful at best. Despite sporting Douglas Adams’s name so prominently, Bureaucracy had sold less than 30,000 copies, only a tad better than the typical Infocom game of its period. While the Hitchhiker’s name could be expected to add appreciably to that total, the hard fact remained that it just wasn’t 1984 anymore. A Restaurant at the End of the Universe that sold 100,000, even a miraculous 200,000 copies would have done little to cure the underlying diseases ailing Infocom. To survive, Infocom needed to improve the sales of all of their games dramatically.

Looked at soberly, it was obvious even at the time that a far more sustainable cure than any one-off hit game must be a new game engine that would finally give the market what it had seemingly been demanding for quite some time now: Infocom games with real graphics, real pictures. The big DEC machine on which Infocom continued to develop their games, so much the source of their strength during the early years, had long since become their albatross in this area. With Beyond Zork, their so-called “illuminated text adventure,” they had pushed its limited display capabilities as far as they could possibly go — and that still wasn’t anywhere near far enough.

Accordingly, on May 4, 1987, Infocom went through a significant restructuring. The old Micro Group, responsible for deploying the games onto the many microcomputers Infocom supported, was merged with the Systems Group, previously responsible for maintaining the DEC and its ZIL compiler, along with all of the other development tools the DEC hosted. The newly combined entity would write entirely new versions of ZIL and the Z-Machine from scratch, inspired by the architectures of the old systems but not necessarily beholden to them. The new ZIL compiler would for the first time itself run on microcomputers, on a set of shiny new top-of-the-line Apple Macintosh IIs that had just been delivered, while the new version 6 Z-Machine would at last support proper graphics, at the cost of running on just a small subset of the huge variety of machines Infocom had once supported: the Apple Macintosh, the Apple II, the Commodore Amiga, and MS-DOS became the only survivors from a group that had once numbered almost 25. Ah, well… the list of viable consumer-computing platforms had been whittled down almost as markedly as the list of producers of textual interactive fiction in recent years.

I’ll pick up the thread of the first (and last) graphical Z-Machine’s development in somewhat more detail in my next article. For now, though, I’ll just note that adapting Infocom’s core competencies to new technology and to the addition of graphics proved, as one might expect, a challenging undertaking. The gap between the release of the last text-only game in January of 1988 and the first illustrated game in October was a long, tense one, during which the old catalog titles continued to sell worse than ever without even the modest kick of excitement provided by new releases. Even after October, the first of the new illustrated games was for months available for the Macintosh only, not a big gaming machine.

It was during 1988 that Infocom first began to take on the stink of not just a troubled business but a dying one. For the first time, many who worked there began to judge the pain of these trying times to outweigh the legendary fun and camaraderie that always marked life inside the company. And many also seemed caught out by the natural cycles of life. Old timers still refer to this period as Infocom’s “baby boom.” It seemed just about every one of these heretofore happy-go-lucky singles was suddenly getting married and/or starting families. Those life changes made spending uncounted evenings and weekends working and playing with their Infocom family less appealing, and made the stability of a good job working for a bigger company with a more certain future that much more appealing. Even if the new games succeeded, the heyday of the old Infocom, once characterized by my fellow historian Graham Nelson as “a happy, one-time thing, like a summer romance,” seemed to be inexorably coming to an end.

In short, then, people started to leave. Some were the rank-and-file, the behind-the-scenes secretaries and accountants and middle managers whose names you don’t often hear in histories like this one, but who fill out softball teams, gossip around water coolers, and are as essential as anyone else to running a business. Others, however, were bigger names. Some were disturbingly big names.

The first of the Imps to go was Jeff O’Neill, very early in the new year. His departure was followed by Amy Briggs’s announcement that she would be leaving in June. And that news was in turn followed by the departure of one of the really big dogs: none other than Brian Moriarty, tempted away by an offer to design point-and-click graphical adventures for Lucasfilm Games.

As they jumped off the sinking ship, the departing tried their best to put a brave face on things for those they left behind. “I am still excited by the computer-entertainment industry,” wrote Amy Briggs in her farewell memo, “and I honestly think that Infocom has a good chance to be at the top of the heap, as long as you don’t give up long-term quality and innovation for short-term bucks.” Gayle Syska, a long-time product manager, wrote upon her departure that “I truly believe that Infocom has the potential to do very well this year and into the future. I’m probably leaving Infocom just before the big pay-off comes for all of our hard work. I think interactive fiction is still alive and is soon to be doing well again. Infocom interactive fiction will experience a resurgence just like videogames.” Such encouragements read as forced now as they must have back in 1988. If the future is so rosy, why are you leaving?

In the aftermath of Bruce Davis’s June 13 indemnification bombshell, the stream of departures threatened to turn into a flood. Two of the losses that immediately followed that event were perhaps the most irrevocable of all. One was that of Jon Palace, the quiet advocate for quality and professionalism who had made every single one of Infocom’s games better than it needed to be since his arrival more than four years before: convincing this Imp to try to make his prose just a little more evocative, convincing packaging to find a way to include that expensive but essential feelie. Palace’s steadying influence would be sorely missed in the Infocom games still to come. With his departure, the highly systemized Infocom process of making quality adventure games, something I’ve made much of on this blog for (I believe) very justifiable reasons, finally began to break down under the sheer pressure of external events. Each of their final few games has moments that leave one thinking, “Gee, if only Jon Palace had still been there this part might have been a little bit better…”

The other incalculable loss was that of President Joel Berez, who had led Infocom to their initial glory, dutifully stepped back to make way for Al Vezza and the misguided dream of Cornerstone, then returned to leading Infocom as a whole following the Activision acquisition. Through good times and bad, Berez had walked a fine diplomatic line, doing his best to negotiate for the resources his Imps needed without embarrassing or unduly agitating those above him in the hierarchy. Recently he had been working hard to put down rumors of a “rift” between Activision and Infocom that were for the first time starting to bubble into the trade press; as usual, Berez considered his words carefully and said all the diplomatically correct things. In the aftermath of the indemnification action, however, he felt he just couldn’t continue. After all, Berez was himself one of the former shareholders from whom Davis was demanding repayment. How could he launch a lawsuit against the guy to defend his reputation and continue at the same time to report to him, continue to interact with him on an almost daily basis and work with him to try to rebuild a reeling Infocom? He decided he couldn’t, and quit.

To replace Berez, Davis brought in his own man, newly poached from Electronic Arts: Joe Ybarra. Whatever else you could say about him, Ybarra wasn’t the soulless business lawyer that so many at Infocom would accuse Davis himself of being. As one of Electronic Arts’s first game producers, Ybarra had helped to invent on the fly the critical role that such folks play in game-making to this day. He loved games, and had a rich resume of classic titles to his credit — titles which he had not just managed but nurtured, advocated for, and contributed to creatively. Among them were such landmark designs as M.U.L.E., Seven Cities of Gold, The Bard’s Tale, Starflight, and most recently Wasteland. One thing Ybarra had yet to do in his career, however, was show any particular interest in or affinity for text adventures, making him on the surface at least an odd choice for this new role. The tightly knit group remaining at Infocom had never known life without Berez, and weren’t exactly open-minded about this new arrival from the hated corporate mothership. Ybarra was immediately pigeonholed as the company man sent by Davis to whip them into shape. It was an extremely uncomfortable situation for everyone.

But Infocom wasn’t the only part of Bruce Davis’s empire undergoing wrenching, vertigo-inducing change that year. Indeed, the hiring away of Ybarra from Electronic Arts was itself part and parcel of Davis’s increasingly aggressive approach to running Activision — a company which, just to add to the confusion, wasn’t actually called Activision anymore.

During the first eighteen months following the ouster of his predecessor Jim Levy, Davis had accomplished all he had promised Activision’s board back in January of 1987 and then some, returning an operation that had been losing money for years under Levy to solid profitability. He’d done so by re-focusing on safe, commercially proven game genres, avoiding the long shots and artistic flights of fancy that had characterized so many of Activision’s games under Levy. And, even more importantly, he’d done it by building a large stable of smaller “affiliated publishers” who paid for access to Activision’s extensive distribution network. Only Infocom, still losing hundreds of thousands almost every quarter, remained the stubborn outlier in Davis’s turnaround story. Now he felt emboldened to really put his stamp on Activision.

During that busy June of 1988, Davis announced to an incredulous world and an equally incredulous Infocom that Activision would henceforth be known as “Mediagenic.” The new name, he said, would be “more reflective of the total corporate personality”; the old “still causes potential investors to think of cartridge games.” The decision to abandon a storied name like Activision’s should never be taken lightly. Yet the decision to make this name change at this point in time is particularly inexplicable. Davis was choosing to actively dissociate his company with their heritage in cartridge games just as cartridge games were becoming red-hot again, thanks to the rise of Nintendo. And then the new name was just so patently terrible, sounding like something some marketer’s computer had spit out when asked to produce variations on the theme of “Activision.” Plenty would argue that it was indeed reflective of the new company’s emerging “total corporate personality” under Davis — more’s the pity. Jokes about the new name could be heard at every trade show and conference: “Mediagenic is a bio-engineering firm producing mutant couch potatoes”; “a mediagenic is a disease that infects television sets.” Within bare weeks, Davis was already backpedaling — one imagines one can almost hear him sobbing “What have I done?” between the lines of the press releases — saying that the cartridge-based titles that Mediagenic was now frantically trying to develop for the Nintendo would retain the old Activision name. Mediagenic would be the General Motors of videogames, dividing their product line into “brands” like Activision, Gamestar, Infocom, and a new productivity line with the even worse name of “TENpointO.” (“They must have gone through that many versions of a real name, then gave up,” went the joke.)

For Infocom, it marked one more step in a creeping transformation that had already been underway for quite some months. From a semi-independent development studio, they were being inexorably converted into a mere brand for any narrative-oriented games Mediagenic chose to publish, many of which might not involve the folks in Infocom’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, ostensible headquarters at all.

The first “Infocom” game that wasn’t quite an Infocom game had been something called Quarterstaff: The Tomb of Setmoth, a Macintosh CRPG originally self-published by a pair of programmers named Scott Schmitz and Ken Updike in 1987. After Activision (as they still were known at the time) picked up the rights to the game, they gave it to Infocom, their “Master Storytellers,” where it fit in relatively well with the new Macintosh-centric development direction. By all indications, the Infocom staffers found Quarterstaff genuinely intriguing, devoting quite some months to overhauling a somewhat rough-around-the-edges game filled with programmer text, programmer art, and an awkward programmer interface. Amy Briggs rewrote almost every word of the text in her own light-hearted style, and the testing department attacked the game with the same enthusiasm they showed toward any other. Released only for the Macintosh, the game’s sales were fairly minuscule, but Quarterstaff is certainly the outside creation of this period that feels most like the real Infocom put some real heart into it.

Far less well-liked — in fact, deeply, passionately loathed — were the so-called “Infocomics.” Back in 1986, Tom Snyder Productions, a name with a rich legacy in software for education and edutainment, had signed a contract with Jim Levy’s Activision to make a series of computerized comic books similar in conception to Accolade’s Comics, each selling for $12 or less. On the face of it, it wasn’t really a bad idea at all. While Accolade’s take on the idea proved charming enough to make my personal gaming Hall of Fame, however, things stubbornly refused to come together for the Tom Snyder versions: they were too slow, the graphics were too ugly, the player’s options for controlling the story too trivial, the whole experience too awkward. And, although development stretched on and on, they just never seemed to get much better. When Bruce Davis decided to dump responsibility for the creative side of the whole troubled project on Infocom, the Imps took it as a personal affront. Gritting their teeth all the while, Steve Meretzky and Amy Briggs cranked out the storyline and dialog for one Infocomic each, and another staffer named Elizabeth Langosy did two more.

It seems safe to say that nothing Bruce Davis imposed upon Infocom outside of the indemnification action enraged his subsidiary quite as much as Infocomics. Having always taken quality so seriously, to be associated with something so plainly substandard, so cheap in all definitions of the word, was anathema to Infocom. Upon the Infocomics’ release, their displeasure leaked out into the public sphere; Computer Gaming World came directly to Davis to demand he address “rumors” that “the Infocom division had become a dumping ground for unwanted Activision product.” “Nothing was shunted off on anybody,” Davis insisted. “Infocom is an A+ line, not a B line!” As far as the people inside Infocom were concerned, he wasn’t fooling anyone.

The final Infocom-game-in-name-only of this period, a licensed CRPG called BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception, is a militaristic game about giant fighting robots whose aesthetics feel a million miles away from Infocom’s classic textual interactive fiction. But this time the real Infocom wasn’t asked to do much of anything with it other than plug it in their newsletter, and by the time of its release in November of 1988 everyone was feeling too demoralized to muster much further outrage anyway.

As their situation grew to feel more and more hopeless, open defiance at Infocom turned increasingly into passive aggression and gallows humor. One anonymous employee created a theme song for the age, sung to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Allentown.”

Well, we’re working here at Infocom,
And they’re shutting the DEC 20s down,
Out in Menlo Park they write a report,
Fill out a form, see you in court.
Well, our founders didn’t see it at all,
Had an office down at Faneuil Hall,
Thought they’d get rich selling Cornerstone,
Ed Reuteman, Tommy Smaldone.
And we’re living here at Infocom,
But our recent games were all a bomb,
And it’s getting very hard to pay.

And we’re waiting here at Infocom,
For the public offering we never found,
For the promises Al Vezza made,
If we worked hard, if we behaved.
So the Golden Floppies hang on the wall,
But they never really helped us at all.
No, they never taught us what was neat,
Graphics and sound, sizzling heat.
And we’re waiting here at Infocom,
For the latest Apple download from Tom,
And they’re supposed to ship today.

Every tester had a pretty good shot,
To become an Imp and earn a lot,
But that was all before those Mountain View crooks,
Started writing off good will on our books.
Well, I’m living here at Infocom,
Even the rotisserie standings are glum,
So I won’t be logging in today,
And it’s getting very hard to pay.
And we’re living here at Infocom.

But perhaps the bitterest single expression of the anger and pain being felt inside Infocom was the “Bruce Youth Informant’s Report” that was briefly circulated. A response to the constant corporate-speak hectorings to just be positive and productive that were always coming down from Mediagenic in California and now from Joe Ybarra right inside Infocom’s own walls, the memo went full Godwin on their not-so-respected supreme leader.

Of course, we can’t depend on the honor system alone to pry some from their negative niches. So during this week, accompanying our “No Negs” week, we will also have a little self-help program for those of us who can’t stop the black humor. The program, known as “Bruce Youth,” is modeled after the highly successful Hitler Youth program in Germany several years ago. Although we won’t have executions or imprisonments for offenders, you will be able to turn in fellow employees who utter negative comments. Just fill out the form below.

At year’s end, Fred, Infocom’s faithful old DECsystem 20, was shut down for the last time and decommissioned. Relieved of its duties of hosting the ZIL compiler and serving as the hub of Infocom’s game-development efforts already months before, the old machine had soldiered on as host to Infocom’s internal email system and other such workaday applications. Now, however, it was to be replaced entirely by a shiny new Sun server. A piece of exotic high technology when it had arrived at Infocom six years before, described in reverent tones in countless fawning magazine articles during the glory years that followed, the DEC was now just an obsolete dinosaur of an old computer, destined for the scrapheap. As they watched the workers haul its bits and pieces outside and throw them roughly into the back of a truck, it must have been hard for Dave Lebling and Steve Meretzky, the last remnants of the once-thriving team of Imps who had created so many great games on the DEC, not to draw comparisons to their own work in interactive fiction. Once heralded in the New York Times and the Boston Globe as the dawning of a major new literary form, now nobody much seemed to care about Infocom or their games at all. It seemed that they too were obsolete, destined for the scrapheap of history.

It was, then, in this ever more despairing and poisonous atmosphere that Infocom’s last few adventure games were developed and released. To imagine that the circumstances of their creation could somehow not affect them would be very naive. And indeed, all are badly flawed works in their own ways, falling far short of the standards of earlier years. For that reason, I don’t expect my articles about these final games to be among the most pleasant I’ve ever written; this article certainly hasn’t been. But I’ve come this far, and I owe it to you and to this bigger history we’re in the midst of to complete Infocom’s story in the same detail with which I began it. So, next time we’ll turn our attention to the first of those final works, and see what we can see there.

(Sources: As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Much of is also drawn from Jason’s “Infocom Cabinet” of vintage documents. Magazine sources include Computer Gaming World of April 1988, July 1988, November 1988, and November 1991; Questbusters of September 1988 and February 1989; InfoWorld of November 28 1988; Amazing Computing of August 1988 and October 1988. Also Down From the Top of Its Game, a business study of Infocom. And, last but certainly not least, my thanks go to Mike Dornbrook and my fellow historian Alex Smith for their correspondence.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

Note that “lawsuit” probably isn’t quite the correct terminology. Activision’s demand for recompense wasn’t technically a lawsuit; it would actually be the former shareholders who would first sue Activision for allegedly making a false indemnification claim. Still, I trust that the gist of Dornbrook’s sentiment is clear and accurate enough.

↑2

Ironically, an unexpectedly popular Infocom shovelware package called The Lost Treasures of Infocom is widely credited with turning around the financial fortunes of the new Kotick-led Activision, while the first big new hit of same was something called Return to Zork. Kotick would thus still be trying to extract money from the old Infocom shareholders for allegedly overvaluing their company even as the fruits of the Infocom acquisition were saving his own.

Comments
38 Responses

- Jim Leonard

April 22, 2016 at 3:56 pm

Wonderful coverage as always, but I have to call unnecessary roughness on the Infocomics assessment. The 2-D graphics, of which there were many, were manipulated in full 3-D during intros and transitions (courtesy of David Kaemmer, who would later produce the Papyrus indycar racing games), which was above and beyond what was required. They were less interactive, yes, but they were meant to be a comic you could read from multiple character’s viewpoints, and they achieved that exactly.

I won’t claim that Infocomics were high art, but I feel they succeeded on the level they were going for.

- Jimmy Maher

April 22, 2016 at 5:06 pm

Fair enough. I would just note first of all that this article presents at least as much the view the folks at Infocom had of the Infocomics as my own point of view as a critic. Putting my critic’s hat firmly on now, I would say the biggest problem with the Infocomics is that they just look *ugly*, not colorful and fun like a proper comic book. (A comparison with Accolade’s Comics really is instructive.) I haven’t delved into their development history enough to know, but I suspect that they were developed for MS-DOS CGA first, then ported to more graphically capable platforms. Bad choice. Also note that they were still running in CGA on MS-DOS long after most games had come to support EGA — doubtless a consequence of their long, troubled development. At the time, it just made them look cheap.

- Duncan Stevens

April 22, 2016 at 4:31 pm

Two legal reactions.

His response was that he didn’t care if the numbers were actually accurate and believed at that time. In retrospect, it was clear to him that Activision had overpaid and he was convinced that a jury would agree and reward him some of the money back.

I really doubt that the contract allowed Activision to recover from Infocom if the deal looked bad “in retrospect,” and I hope Dornbrook ran straight to Infocom’s lawyers.

In the aftermath of the indemnification action, however, he felt he just couldn’t continue. After all, Berez was himself one of the former shareholders from whom Davis was demanding repayment. How could he launch a lawsuit against the guy to defend his reputation and continue at the same time to report to him, continue to interact with him on an almost daily basis and work with him to try to rebuild a reeling Infocom?

Berez wasn’t, to my understanding, “launching a lawsuit” against Davis or Activision; he was defending one (or, more specifically, a third-party indemnity claim). So I would tweak it to “engage in active litigation against Davis to defend his reputation and continue at the same time…”

- Jimmy Maher

April 22, 2016 at 4:59 pm

On your first point, we should remember that we’re getting one side of the story here. I hesitate to present that side as absolute fact, although I trust Dornbrook that’s he’s recalling as honestly as he can.

On your second:

The question, which maybe you can answer (or maybe you just have), is whether an indemnification claim is in fact a lawsuit. I’ve heard two versions of the story, one that Berez and company were defending a lawsuit, the other that the indemnification claim was an action with legal force but not a lawsuit — i.e., presumably if it wasn’t paid it could *lead to* a lawsuit. The stockholders then launched a lawsuit of their own to say they wouldn’t pay it (and quite possibly asking for recompense of their own for the damage done to their reputation). I know that without any documentation other than memories and one or two writeups by contemporary gaming journalists — not exactly a group known for their professionalism or scrupulous accuracy — it’s hard to say anything for sure, but any light you can shed would be appreciated as always.

- Duncan Stevens

April 22, 2016 at 5:38 pm

There are a lot of options here, and the legal documents don’t seem to be publicly available. (I wouldn’t rely on descriptions of litigation in the mainstream press, let alone in gaming publications. Even the mainstream press gets a lot of this stuff wrong.)

Activision’s shareholders sued Activision’s management; that much seems clear. The theory of the suit could have been that Activision inflated the value of the stock by making misrepresentations about the business, which would violate federal securities laws. Or it could have been that Activision’s management violated their duties to Activision itself by mismanaging the company, which might give rise to fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, and other claims. (This is ordinarily known as a derivative suit.)

A defendant in a lawsuit has the option of bringing in a third-party defendant on a variety of theories, among them indemnification, meaning “you promised that, if I was forced to pay party X under circumstances Y, you’d foot the bill.” It’s possible that there was an actual indemnity clause in the Infocom purchase agreement, though I doubt it stretched this far, there are third-party claims other than indemnity that I won’t go into here. A third-party claim is in fact a lawsuit, though it’s ancillary to a separate lawsuit, and it doesn’t have force independent of the main suit; if the Activision shareholders suddenly decided to drop their suit against Activision’s management, there would be nothing for Infocom’s various shareholders to indemnify Activision’s management for.

It’s possible that Infocom’s management filed their own lawsuit against Davis et al., asserting that they had no indemnification responsibility. That would usually be done as an action for declaratory judgment, and most often a likely defendant will do it preemptively (i.e., before it gets sued) in order to pick a forum (say, Massachusetts state court, with juries likely to be sympathetic to the local business, rather than California state or federal court). But your description makes it sound like the third-party claim from Activision’s management came as a surprise to Infocom; Infocom’s lawyers didn’t see it coming and make a preemptive strike. More to the point, this sort of choose-the-forum tactic wouldn’t work for a third-party claim anyway, since the third-party claim is inextricably attached to a larger suit (the Activision shareholder suit) that already exists; there’s no point in jockeying over where to litigate an offshoot of it. It has to be part of the same action. So I doubt this is what happened.

But it’s possible that Infocom’s shareholders had some independent claim against Davis et al. Maybe they were themselves Activision shareholders for some reason (perhaps some of the 1986 buyout compensation was in the form of stock options), and were either indirectly or directly involved in the shareholder litigation. Or maybe they had some contract claim against Davis for his hamhanded handling of Infocom, though I doubt it–a purchaser wouldn’t typically assume any obligations to the shareholders or employees of the purchased company. If they did have such a claim, it probably wouldn’t have been brought as part of the larger Activision dispute; it probably would have been an independent suit. So I can’t say it’s definitely wrong. It just seems very unlikely.

- Duncan Stevens

April 22, 2016 at 5:55 pm

I guess I should say: there is such a thing as a freestanding indemnity claim. Usually, this would be filed when you’ve already had to pay the money you think someone else (the indemnitor) should be paying for you, and you’re trying to force the indemnitor to pay up. If you *haven’t* had to pay the money already, there’s not generally a basis for an independent suit; the third-party claim says, in effect, “if I have to pay, you should pay for me.” Can’t swear that it’s never happened, but it would be unusual.

(Also, I suspect that what the shareholders got was a lawsuit, not just a demand, if the timing was so crucial. There could have been a two-year window under the purchase agreement under which indemnity demands had to be delivered in that time, but Activision’s lawyers probably wouldn’t have limited themselves that way, and I can’t see Infocom’s lawyers insisting. Among other things, that would have been something of a red flag. The two-year deadline probably arose from a state statute of limitations, and sending a demand letter does not extend a statute of limitations.)

- Jimmy Maher

April 22, 2016 at 5:55 pm

Okay. Trying to unpack this a little bit…

Why is it “clear” that *Activision’s* shareholders sued Activision’s management? Do you know something I don’t, or is there a misunderstanding here somewhere?

And a couple of things:

I feel pretty confident that the initial action was indeed an indemnification claim. This is what Dornbrook told me, and what the most thorough published account I’ve found of the episode, in the November 1991 Computer Gaming World, claims. (That account was by Johnny Wilson, who’s about as respectable as gaming journalists come.) My understanding was that an indemnification agreement was fairly standard boilerplate when one company acquires another in this way.

Activision definitely paid Infocom’s shareholders in stock rather than cash at the acquisition. Whether and which ones still owned said stock two years later I don’t know.

- Duncan Stevens

April 22, 2016 at 6:41 pm

Why is it “clear” that *Activision’s* shareholders sued Activision’s management?

I’m assuming this is so if Activision was seeking an indemnity from Infocom’s shareholders in the amount of Activision’s purchase of the Infocom stock (as your description above seems to suggest). An indemnity for what? Most likely, damage sustained to Activision as a result of misrepresentations in the runup to the purchase–i.e., misrepresentations that caused Activision to make a purchase it would not otherwise have made. I think Activision was more likely to be seeking recovery on this theory if its shareholders were already suing Activision. Among other things, it *invites* such a shareholder suit by suggesting that management didn’t do a good job in vetting Infocom.

(I pulled that CGW article. Here’s what it says:

Yet harmless jokes about Levy turned to
cynical anger at Levy’s successor, Bruce
Davis. Insiders claim Activision’s new CEO
had been against the Infocom buy-out from
the start and that he immediately raised the
ante on some anticipated losses that were
to have been indemnified by Infocom
shareholders from $300,000 to $900,000
with no accounting. The shareholders filed
a preemptive suit and managed to stave off
the “required” payment.

…which, to my mind, confuses things even more. So if you’d prefer to just stick with what you have, I won’t blame you.)

- Jimmy Maher

April 22, 2016 at 7:10 pm

Yes, okay. I think I will this leave alone as the best compromise I can manage between the various accounts. I tried to find some documentation on the case from third-party sources, but, as you say, nothing seems to be publicly available. At any rate, I feel confident in the broad strokes: Bruce Davis initiated actions to try to get some of Activision’s money back, the shareholders viewed it as horribly unfair, and the whole episode contributed materially to the collapse of Infocom. Thanks so much for your feedback! If I find anything more definite, I’ll run it by you.

- Michael Dornbrook

May 22, 2018 at 12:48 am

I can clarify a few issues here. The two-years was a contractual deadline, not a statute of limitations.

To be served with this claim on the two-year anniversary without any prior hint of a problem was shocking. The contract required that claims be very specific – exactly what was being claimed and for what reason. The claim that arrived on June 13, 1988, did not meet this requirement – it was vague. Over the following years it was fleshed out with some specifics that kept changing and growing – not at all what was allowed under the contract.

It was a bullying tactic intended to squeeze a settlement. Unfortunately this sort of abuse of the legal system is all too common (Harmonix shareholders went through a similar fight with acquirer Viacom – all the way to the Supreme Court of Delaware, where we eventually won, but at great expense).

- Lisa H.

April 22, 2016 at 6:59 pm

One anonymous employee created a theme song for the age, a variation on Billy Joel’s “Allentown.”

I’d call this a filk, myself.

But out recent games were all a bomb

Our.

Even the rotisserie standings are glum

“Rotisserie”? What’s this person referring to? (Presumably not actual roasted meat?)

That informant’s report is hilarious. Perhaps a bit ironically in the circumstances, it has the feel of a feelie (IMO).

- Jimmy Maher

April 22, 2016 at 7:17 pm

Thanks!

I actually had no idea what a “filk” was. Having looked it up… mm, seems a little too fannish for my tastes. I did change the wording of the original, though, which I agree didn’t quite sit right.

“Rotisserie” refers to Infocom’s Rotisserie baseball league: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_baseball.

The Bruce Youth report does feel quite… Meretzky, doesn’t it?

- Lisa H.

April 23, 2016 at 4:04 am

IMO Infocom as a topic is in the corral of “fannish” in the sense of being scifi-nerdy (one could certainly write a filk in the key of Infocom), but perhaps it’s splitting hairs.

- Nate

April 22, 2016 at 7:03 pm

Nice work as always.

“But out recent games” -> “But our”

- Michael Russo

April 22, 2016 at 7:22 pm

Please be kind to Zork Zero. I know it can seem a bit of a mess at times, but it’s a big, sprawling, entertaining mess of a classic puzzler, and when you get to the end you really do get the relieved feeling (like Arthur gets at the end of “Mostly Harmless”) that is all finally over.

- Jimmy Maher

April 22, 2016 at 7:24 pm

I can agree with the last part of this. ;)

- Michael Russo

April 22, 2016 at 7:43 pm

lol well you also have to agree that the thing is big and sprawling since the V6 Z-machine supports so many more locations and objects and much more room for text (if only they’d been able to give Lurking Horror more room for the text that DL had to cut out)… we wouldn’t see that kind of size to a text adventure again until Curses really. the “entertaining” part i’ll admit is subjective but there are others like me out there who enjoyed it. we also knew it was (or was going to be) the end.

- Keith Palmer

April 22, 2016 at 10:16 pm

I had to go back to “Down From the Top of Its Game” to confirm that it hadn’t mentioned the former Infocom shareholders being sent legal documents demanding money back; it would have added that much more punch to interpretations of Bruce Davis as the unrelieved villain of the sad end of the story. Now, I’m just looking at some of Graham Nelson’s briefer comments in “The Inform Designer’s Manual” and considering them as allusions to the dealings.

Having read the documents from “The Infocom Cabinet,” though, I was aware of Infocom moving to Macintosh IIs for its development system, and I can admit to being intrigued and even amused by that, although it does get me thinking of “the happiest/most outwardly successful/most self-satisfied” (depending on your point of view) era of “the Scully years” at Apple. I also took note of a page in the “1988 memos” where someone tries to put the best spin possible on the Infocomics; on the other hand, the memo is another farewell letter… (I do remember seeing an ad for the Infocomics in a “physical” comic book I was reading at the time, and maybe my anime fandom makes me think of “visual novels” and wonder if there might have been a “starting point” for something bigger if not for the lowest-common-denominator graphics…) I’m also wondering how the “Infocom novels” fit into these final days.

While I understand your touching lightly on “Battletech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception” and moving on, I have to admit that while “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” was the sole Infocom adventure I actually played when the company was still in business, I did have a chance to play that CRPG not that many years after it came out, at a sort of “computer games centre” in my home town. However, I might have been set up for that by having watched “Robotech” a few years before, then noticed Battletech RPG modules in hobby shops to wonder just who was ripping off who… (Years later, I would sort out at last things were a bit more complicated than that.) For some reason, I’m amused a marketing point was made of the computer game’s little thumbnails of “character art” being “in the Japanese style,” as I’ve seen comments from the original RPG designer that he had been struck by the general idea of “giant piloted robots” and the designs of “mecha anime,” but hadn’t cared for all the other foreign baggage attached.

- Jimmy Maher

April 22, 2016 at 10:29 pm

For what it’s worth, the CRPG Addict played Battletech and wasn’t impressed: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.dk/2012/03/battletech-final-rating.html. It seems typical of the quickie licensed fodder Activision/Mediagenic was churning out a lot of during the Bruce Davis era.

I do have an article on the Mac in the later 1980s on my calendar, by the way.

- Captain Rufus

April 23, 2016 at 10:39 pm

I’m a big Battletech fan. Even in its day it was a bit of a disappointment as so many early Westwood games were. The first hour or two of gameplay was fantastic. The next 10+ hours were mostly cut and paste padding with one of the worst end game sequences to any RPG ever. Colored door puzzles. Depending on if you had a map or not it was like 1-5 hours of colored door puzzles. I know when I think giant robots I think colored door keys.

- Alex Smith

April 22, 2016 at 11:34 pm

One minor correction: Joe Ybarra was not the very first EA producer; he was preceded by Dave Evans and Pat Mariott, who had both worked as project managers under Trip at Apple (Joe had also been at Apple too, but did not actually know Trip). Joe’s last job at EA was as the head of the “Interactive Stories” division, which is probably why he was hired to lead Infocom (that, and Activision harbored a fair number of ex-EA people by that point).

- Jimmy Maher

April 23, 2016 at 8:49 am

Thanks! Minor edit made.

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- Bernie

April 23, 2016 at 10:10 pm

Jimmy :

Congratulations on a very detailed yet delightfully readable piece that manages to both entertain and educate at the same time !

The bits about Infocom’s disappointing sales for their last batch of titles in 1987-1988, the mention of similar woes at Magnetic Scrolls and the bit in sidenote number 2. about Return to Zork, made me wonder if Activision’s management might not after all had been given Infocom good advice regarding the market’s future, but marred by bad policies and strategies.

I tried to find some information about sales of graphics-oriented adventure games released within this time frame (’87-’88) which could have been comparable to Infocom’s titles (i.e. not by Sierra). Maybe Lucasfilm’s Maniac Mansion, ICOM’s Shadowgate and Deja Vú II, Interplay’s Tass Times, etc… Even though these early graphics-centric offerings hadn’t yet reached Infocom levels of complexity or playability, I suspect they proved “good enough” to pull Interactive Fiction’s intended demographic.

I wonder if you could perhaps offer your perspective regarding this Infocom-vs-best-graphic-oriented-efforts comparison.

P.S. – Return To Zork (1993) , a purely “multimedia” offering, reportedly moved over 1 million units. Imagine if the original Infocom had embraced a visual design philosophy back in 1987.

- Jimmy Maher

April 24, 2016 at 8:07 am

While concrete sales numbers are hard to come by, all of the graphical lines you mention with the possible exception of Tass Times were definitely outselling Infocom’s text adventures healthily by 1987. I’m not sure Activision’s management was telling Infocom anything they didn’t already know. As far back as 1983, the year of “We put our graphics where the sun don’t shine,” Infocom had been mulling various schemes for inserting graphics into their games in one form of another. The problem was that Cornerstone sucked up all the resources that might have gone toward such a project, and after Cornerstone flopped, with sales of their text adventures also slowing, there simply was no money for it. Under Bruce Davis, Activision talked a good game about wanting Infocom to add graphics, but, again, didn’t give them any money to execute with. The final batch of illustrated games was created on a shoestring.

- Bernie

April 26, 2016 at 12:11 am

Thnaks a big lot for the clarification Jimmy !

I seem to have been under the impression they were STILL stubborn about adding graphics in 1987. But I failed to look at the budget situation (Cornerstone, and then Davis wanting “something for nothing”).

I’ve always wondered how great the original Infocom’s (had they stayed together) “MYST-killer” might have been. I don’t mean to discredit Cyan, but I’ve always considered Zork’s content far superior to Myst’s in terms of creativity. And let’s better not mention 7th Guest !

- Michael Dornbrook

May 22, 2018 at 12:21 am

One thing you need to keep in mind is that there was a huge technical development between 1987 and 1993 – the CD-ROM. With a capacity of 650 megabytes, it dwarfed the few hundred kilobyte limits we still faced on floppy disks in 1987.

- Bernie

April 23, 2016 at 10:11 pm

…” had been GIVING Infocom good advice” …..

Sorry for the typo !

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- Alexander Freeman

April 26, 2016 at 3:42 am

As I see it, this is what Activision and Infocom should have done:
After getting rid of Al Vezza and the whole Cornerstone thing, Infocom should have made a determined effort to fight the notion that it was antiquated. It should have started soon afterward making a 16-bit version of ZIL only for 16-bit computers such as the Mac, Amiga, Atari ST, Apple IIGS, and IBM-PC compatibles. The Apple II and Commodore 64 would have been out.

Freed from the constraints of 8-bit computers, the new ZIL would have enabled bigger games with a new interface that could include pictures, including, most importantly, perhaps, an auto-map. There could have been a window for the room description and another for the inventory. Pictures would have a black-and-white version to show on CGA, Hercules, and the Mac.

The release for The Lurking Horror and Plundered Hearts should have been delayed for a year so that they could take full advantage of the new language as they got rolled out for 1988.

They also should have decommissioned the DEC in 1986 or even 1985 and switched over to using Amigas (or perhaps IBM PC compatibles as those were the ones that ended up winning in the marketplace) for development.

Activision should have given the funding to make all this possible but also told Infocom to forget about finding a silver bullet and instead focus on doing what it did best– being innovative. It also should have finally encouraged the imps to branch out in terms of game design and try making games that weren’t text adventures so they’d be prepared the eventual commercial demise of text adventures.

- Alexander Freeman

April 26, 2016 at 3:43 am

“With this evidence to hand that Douglas Adams continued to be Douglas Adams, enthusiastic about proposing projects but completely disinterested in actually working on them…”

I think you mean “uninterested” as “disinterested” means “impartial” or “unbiased”.

- Jimmy Maher

April 26, 2016 at 5:20 am

Thanks, but it can mean both in modern usage.

“Disinterested and uninterested share a confused and confusing history. Disinterested was originally used to mean ‘not interested, indifferent’; uninterested in its earliest use meant ‘impartial.’ By various developmental twists, disinterested is now used in both senses. Uninterested is used mainly in the sense ‘not interested, indifferent.’ It is occasionally used to mean ‘not having a personal or property interest.’

Many object to the use of disinterested to mean ‘not interested, indifferent.’ They insist that disinterested can mean only ‘impartial’: A disinterested observer is the best judge of behavior. However, both senses are well established in all varieties of English, and the sense intended is almost always clear from the context. “

- Alexander Freeman

April 27, 2016 at 3:48 am

It seems you’re quoting Dictionary.com. Ah, well, I guess that’s another thing which I learned in English class but which turned out to be not entirely accurate. As a side note, why do comments on this blog now require approval first?

- Jimmy Maher

April 27, 2016 at 5:19 am

Comments only require approval if it’s the first time you’ve entered a particular email address or there are two or more links in your comment.

- DZ-Jay

April 19, 2017 at 11:17 am

>> “Gee, if only Jon Palace had still been there this part might have been been a little bit better…”

There is a redundant “been” in there which is redundant. :)

- Jimmy Maher

April 21, 2017 at 3:48 pm

Thanks!

- Michael Dornbrook

May 2, 2018 at 4:38 am

Bobbie Kotick wasn’t responsible for the continuance of the lawsuit after he bought out the Activision assets from the bankruptcy court (interesting aside, his backer in this was Steve Winn, of casino fame). As Activision/Mediagenic went bankrupt they owed their lawyers a lot of unpaid invoices. As part of the settlement with the lawyers, the law firm got to keep whatever they could collect from the Infocom shareholders. So, instead of the suit mercifully dying with the bankruptcy, the law firm continued to pursue it in their spare time.

I was told that as Mediagenic was winding down, Bruce Davis offered to sell the entire Infocom library to Ken Williams at Sierra for $25,000. Ken couldn’t afford it at the time. (I would have happily paid that!). I was also told that Kelly Zmak, who was one of the last few employees, was the one who suggested doing The Lost Treasures of Infocom rather than sell off the rights. Again, if I remember correctly, the newly-reconstituted-from-bankruptcy-Activision then sold 100,000 of them at a retail price of $99. (I believe Bobby and Steve paid less than $2 million for all of Activision’s assets.) Many more Infocom packs were produced in the 1990’s by Activision. I’m told that no game had sold fewer than 300,000 copies after this.

- Nathanael

March 6, 2021 at 1:14 pm

The huge sales of Lost Treasures are at least partly due to those of us who had not been able to afford all the original games on their very-frequent original releases and had had to settle for one every two years.

If Lost Treasures had been nicer releases (full color scans of the original documentation on CD, for example) they’d have sold even better.

Mr Dornbrook, it’s pretty obvious you were correct all along. If Infocom had put out one big game a year and focused on keeping up the quality of the back catalog releases, along with the Invisiclues, that was a surefire recipe for slow but steady profits.

It’s such a pity Bruce Davis was a malicious fool, and that the library never got bought by someone more responsible. Infocom would likely have faced the same fate as Sierra eventually, but the Sierra rereleases have always given their source material more respect.

You know, at this point it would probably be possible to crowdsource funding to get the rights from Kotick into the hands of someone who’d be willing to curate the games properly and produce collectors’ annotated rereleases.

Zork Zero
April 29, 2016

Zork Zero the idea was kicking around Infocom for quite a long time before Zork Zero the game was finally realized. Steve Meretzky first proposed making a prequel to the original Zork trilogy as far back as 1985, when he included it on a list of possible next games that he might write after finishing his personal passion project of A Mind Forever Voyaging. The Zork Zero he described at that time not only already had the name but the vast majority of the concept of the eventual finished game as well.

As the name implies, a prequel to the Zork trilogy. It would be set in the Great Underground Empire, and covering a long period of time, from the end of the reign of Dimwit Flathead in 789 through the fall of the GUE in 883, and possibly through 948 (the year of the Zork trilogy). It would almost certainly end “west of a white house.” There would be some story, probably about as much as Enchanter or Sorcerer. For the most part, though, it would be an intensely puzzle-oriented game with a huge geography.

The fact that Meretzky knew in what years Dimwit Flathead died, the Great Underground Empire fell, and Zork I began says much about his role as the unofficial keeper of Zorkian lore at Infocom. He had already filled a huge notebook with similarly nitpicky legends and lore. This endeavor was viewed by most of the other Imps, who thought of the likes of Dimwit Flathead as no more than spur-of-the-moment jokes, with bemused and gently mocking disinterest. Still, if Infocom was going to do a big, at least semi-earnest Zork game, his obsessiveness about the milieu made Meretzky the obvious candidate for the job.

But that big Zork game didn’t get made in 1985, partly because the other Imps remained very reluctant to sacrifice any real or perceived artistic credibility by trading on the old name and partly because the same list of possible next projects included a little something called Leather Goddesses of Phobos that everyone, from the Imps to the marketers to the businesspeople, absolutely loved. Brian Moriarty’s reaction was typical: “If you don’t do this, I will. But not as well as you could.”

After Meretzky completed Leather Goddesses the following year, Zork Zero turned up again on his next list of possible next projects. This time it was granted more serious consideration; Infocom’s clear and pressing need for hits by that point had done much to diminish the Imps’ artistic fickleness. At the same time, though, Brian Moriarty also was shopping a pretty good proposal for a Zork game, one that would include elements of the CRPGs that seemed to be replacing adventure games in some players’ hearts. Meanwhile Meretzky’s own list included something called Stationfall, the long-awaited sequel to one of the most beloved games in Infocom’s back catalog. While Moriarty seemed perfectly capable of pulling off a perfectly acceptable Zork, the universe of Planetfall, and particularly the lovable little robot Floyd, were obviously Meretzky’s babies and Meretzky’s alone. Given Infocom’s commercial plight, management’s choice between reviving two classic titles or just one was really no choice at all. Meretzky did Stationfall, and Moriarty did Beyond Zork — with, it should be noted, the invaluable assistance of Mereztky’s oft-mocked book of Zorkian lore.

And then it was 1987, Stationfall too was finished, and there was Zork Zero on yet another list of possible next projects. I’ll be honest in stating that plenty of the other project possibilities found on the 1987 list, some of which had been appearing on these lists as long as Zork Zero, sound much more interesting to this writer. There was, for instance, Superhero League of America, an idea for a comedic superhero game with “possible RPG elements” that would years later be dusted off by Meretzky to become the delightful Legend Entertainment release Superhero League of Hoboken. There was a serious historical epic taking place on the Titanic that begs to be described as Meretzky’s Trinity. And there was something with the working title of The Best of Stevo, a collection of interactive vignettes in the form if not the style of Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It.

Mind you, not all of the other projects were winners. A heavy-handed satire to be called The Interactive Bible, described by Meretzky as “part of my ongoing attempt to offend every person in the universe,” was eloquently and justifiably lacerated by Moriarty.

As you noted, this game is likely to offend many people, and not just frothing nutcakes either. A surprising number of reasonable people regard the Book with reverence. They are likely to regard your send-up as superficial and juvenile. They will wonder what qualifies you to poke fun at their (or anybody’s) faith. Why do you want to write this? Do you really think it will sell?

If Zork Zero wasn’t at the bottom of anyone’s list like The Interactive Bible, no one was exactly burning with passion to make it either. Few found the idea of going back to the well of Zork yet again all that interesting in creative terms, especially as Beyond Zork was itself still very much an ongoing project some weeks from release. The idea’s trump card, however, was the unique commercial appeal most still believed the Zork trademark to possess. Jon Palace’s faint praise was typical: “I’m sure this would sell very well. It’s certainly ‘safe.'” By 1987, the commercially safe route was increasingly being seen as the only viable route within Infocom, at least until they could manage to scare up a few hits. A final tally revealed that Zork Zero had scored an average of 7.2 among “next Meretzky project” voters on a scale of 1 to 10, edging out Superhero League of America by one tenth of a point, Titanic by two tenths, and The Best of Stevo by one full point; the last was very well-liked in the abstract, but its standing was damaged by the fact that, unusually for Meretzky, the exact form the vignettes would take wasn’t very well specified.

On August 7, 1987, it was decided provisionally to have Meretzky do Zork Zero next. In a demonstration of how tepid everyone’s enthusiasm remained for such a safe, unchallenging game, an addendum was included with the announcement: “I think it is fair to add that if Steve happens to have a flash of creativity in the next few days and thinks of some more ideas for his experimental story project (Best of Stevo), nearly everyone in this group would prefer that he do that product.” That flash apparently didn’t come; The Best of Stevo was never heard of again. Also forgotten in the rush to do Zork Zero was the idea, mooted in Beyond Zork, of Zork becoming a series of CRPG/text-adventure hybrids, with the player able to import the same character into each successive game. Zork Zero would instead be a simple standalone text adventure again.

While it’s doubtful whether many at Infocom ever warmed all that much to Zork Zero as a creative exercise, the cavalcade of commercial disappointments that was 1987 tempted many to see it as the latest and greatest of their Great White Hopes for a return to the bestseller charts. It was thus decided that it should become the first game to use Infocom’s new version 6 Z-Machine, usually called “YZIP” internally. Running on Macintosh II microcomputers rather than the faithful old DEC, the YZIP system would at last support proper bitmap illustrations and other graphics, along with support for mice, sound and music, far more flexible screen layouts, and yet bigger stories over even what the EZIP system (known publicly as Interactive Fiction Plus) had offered. With YZIP still in the early stages of development, Meretzky would first write Zork Zero the old way, on the DEC. Then, when YZIP was ready, the source code could be moved over and the new graphical bells and whistles added; the new version of ZIL was designed to be source-compatible with the old. In the meantime, Stu Galley was working on a ground-up rewrite of the parser, which was itself written in ZIL. At some magic moment, the three pieces would all come together, and just like that Infocom would be reborn with pictures and a friendlier parser and lots of other goodies, all attached to the legendary Zork name and written by Infocom’s most popular and recognizable author. That, anyway, was the theory.

Being at the confluence of so much that was new and different, Zork Zero became one of the more tortured projects in Infocom’s history, almost up there with the legendarily tortured Bureaucracy project. None of the problems, however, were down to Meretzky. Working quickly and efficiently as always, his progress on the core of the game proper far outstripped the technology enabling most of the ancillary bells and whistles. While Stu Galley’s new parser went in on November 1, 1987, it wasn’t until the following May 10 that a YZIP Zork Zero was compiled for the first time.

In sourcing graphics for Zork Zero, Infocom was on completely foreign territory. Following the lead of much of the computer-game industry, all of the graphics were to be created on Amigas, whose Deluxe Paint application was so much better than anything available on any other platform that plenty of artists simply refused to use anything else. Jon Palace found Jim Shook, the artist who would do most of the illustrations for Zork Zero, at a local Amiga users-group meeting. Reading some of the memos and meeting notes from this period, it’s hard to avoid the impression that — being painfully blunt here — nobody at Infocom entirely knew what they were doing when it came to graphics. As of February of 1988, they still hadn’t even figured out what resolution Shook should be working in. “We still don’t know whether images should be drawn in low-res, medium-res, interlace, or high-res mode on the Amiga in Deluxe Paint,” wrote Palace plaintively in one memo. “Joel claims Tim should know. Tim, do you know?”

Infocom wound up turning to Magnetic Scrolls, who had been putting pictures into their own text adventures for quite some time, for information on “graphics compression techniques,” a move that couldn’t have sat very well with such a proud group of programmers. The graphics would continue to be a constant time sink and headache for many months to come. Steve Meretzky told me that he remembers the development of Zork Zero primarily as “heinous endless futzing with the graphics, mostly on an Amiga, to make them work with all the different screen resolutions, number of colors, pixel aspect ratios, etc. In my memory, it feels like I spent way more time doing that than actually designing puzzles or writing ZIL code.”

Zork Zero uses graphics more often to present the look of an illuminated manuscript than for traditional illustrations.

And yet in comparison to games like those of Magnetic Scrolls, the finished Zork Zero really wouldn’t have a lot of graphics. Instead of an illustration for each room, the graphics take the form of decorative borders, an illuminated onscreen map, some graphical puzzles (solvable using a mouse), and only a few illustrations for illustrations’ sake. Infocom would advertise that they wanted to use graphics in “a new way” for Zork Zero — read, more thoughtfully, giving them some actual purpose rather than just using them for atmosphere. All of which is fair enough, but one suspects that money was a factor as well; memos from the period show Infocom nickel-and-diming the whole process, fretting over artist fees of a handful of thousand dollars that a healthier developer wouldn’t have thought twice about.

The financial squeeze also spelled the end of Infocom’s hopes for a full soundtrack, to have been composed by Russell Lieblich at Mediagenic, who had earlier done the sound effects for The Lurking Horror and Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels. But the music never happened; when Zork Zero finally shipped, it would be entirely silent apart from a warning beep here or an acknowledging bloop there.

Hemorrhaging personnel as they were by this point, Infocom found themselves in a mad scramble to get all the pieces that did wind up making it into Zork Zero together in time for Christmas 1988, months after they had originally hoped to ship the game. Bruce Davis grew ever more frustrated and irate at the delays; a contemporary memo calls him a “looming personality” and notes how he is forever “threatening a tantrum.” A desperate-sounding “Proclamation” went out to the rank-and-file around the same time: “The one who can fix the bugs of Zork Zero, and save the schedule from destruction, shall be rewarded with half the wealth of the Empire.” Signed: “Wurb Flathead, King of Quendor.”

Like a number of Zork Zero’s illustrations, this one actually conveys some important information about the state of the game rather than being only for show.

Time constraints, the fact that the beta builds ran only on the Macintosh, and Infocom’s determination to test Zork Zero primarily using new testers unfamiliar with interactive fiction meant that it didn’t receive anywhere near the quantity or quality of outside feedback that had long been customary for their games. Many of the new testers seemed bemused if not confused by the experience, and few came anywhere close to finishing the game. I fancy that one can feel the relative lack of external feedback in the end result, as one can the loss of key voices from within Infocom like longtime producer Jon Palace and senior tester Liz Cyr-Jones.

Despite the corner-cutting, Infocom largely missed even the revised target of Christmas 1988. Only the Macintosh version shipped in time for the holiday buying season, the huge job of porting the complicated new YZIP interpreter to other platforms having barely begun by that time. Zork Zero was quite well-received by the Macintosh magazines, but that platform was far from the commercial sweet spot in gaming.

A nice touch: the decorative borders change as you enter different regions.

A sort of cognitive dissonance was a thoroughgoing theme of the Zork Zero project from beginning to end. It’s right there in marketing’s core pitch: “Zork Zero is the beginning of something old (the Zork trilogy) and something new (new format with graphics).” Unable to decide whether commercial success lay in looking forward or looking back, Infocom tried to have it both ways. Zork Zero’s “target audience,” declared marketing, would be “primarily those who are not Infocom fans; either they have never tried interactive fiction or they have lost interest in Infocom.” The game would appeal to them thanks to “a mouse interface (enabling the player to move via compass rose), onscreen hints, a new parser (to help novices), and pretty pictures that will knock your socks off!”

Yet all the gilding around the edges couldn’t obscure the fact that Zork Zero was at heart the most old-school game Infocom had made since… well, since Zork I really. That, anyway, was the last game they had made that was so blatantly a treasure hunt and nothing more. Zork Zero’s dynamic dozen-turn introduction lays out the reasons behind the static treasure hunt that will absorb the next several thousand turns. To thwart a 94-year-old curse that threatens to bring ruin to the Great Underground Empire, you must assemble 24 heirlooms that once belonged to 12 members of the Flathead dynasty and drop them in a cauldron. Zork Zero is, it must be emphasized, a big game, far bigger than any other that Infocom ever released, its sprawling geography of more than 200 rooms — more than 2200 if you count a certain building of 400 (nearly) identical floors —  housing scores of individual puzzles. The obvious point of comparison is not so much Infocom’s Zork trilogy as the original original Zork, the one put together by a bunch of hackers at MIT in response to the original Adventure back in the late 1970s, long before Infocom was so much as a gleam in anyone’s eye.

A Tower of Hanoi puzzle, one of the hoariest of Zork Zero’s hoary old chestnuts.

The question — the answer to which must always to some extent be idiosyncratic to each player — is whether Zork Zero works for you on those terms. In my case, it doesn’t. The PDP-10 Zork is confusing and obscure and often deeply unfair, but it carries with it a certain joyous sense of possibility, of the discovery of a whole new creative medium, that we can enjoy vicariously with its creators. Zork Zero perhaps also echos the emotional circumstances of its creation: it just feels tired, and often cranky and mean-spirited to boot. Having agreed to make a huge game full of lots of puzzles, Meretzky dutifully provides, but the old magic is conspicuously absent.

Infocom always kept a library of puzzly resources around the office to inspire the Imps: books of paradoxes and mathematical conundrums, back issues of Games magazine, physical toys and puzzles of all descriptions. But for the first time with Zork Zero, Meretzky seems not so much inspired by these resources as simply cribbing from them. Lots of the puzzles in Zork Zero are slavish re-creations of the classics: riddles, a Tower of Hanoi puzzle, a peg game. Even the old chestnut about the river, the fox, the chicken, and the sack of grain makes an appearance. And even some of the better bits, like a pair of objects that let you teleport from the location of one to that of another, are derivative of older, better Infocom games like Starcross and Spellbreaker. One other, more hidden influence on Zork Zero’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to puzzle design — particularly on the occasional graphical puzzles — is likely Cliff Johnson’s puzzling classic The Fool’s Errand, which Meretzky was playing with some dedication at the very time he was designing his own latest game. The Fool’s Errand’s puzzles, however, are both more compelling and more original than Zork Zero’s. Meretzky’s later Hodj ‘n’ Podj would prove a far more worthy tribute.

Zork Zero is a difficult game, and too often difficult in ways that really aren’t that much fun. I’m a fan of big, complicated puzzlefests in the abstract, but Zork Zero’s approach to the form doesn’t thrill me. After the brief introductory sequence, the game exposes almost the whole of its immense geography to you almost immediately; there’s nothing for it but to start wandering and trying to solve puzzles. The combinatorial explosion is enormous. And even when you begin to solve some of the puzzles, the process can be made weirdly unsatisfying by the treasure-hunt structure. Too much of the time, making what at first feels like a significant step forward only yields another object to throw into the cauldron for some more points. You know intellectually that you’re making progress, but it doesn’t really feel like it.

I much prefer the approach of later huge puzzlefests like Curses! and The Mulldoon Legacy, which start you in a constrained space and gradually expand in scope as you solve puzzles. By limiting their initial scope, these games ease you into their worlds and limit the sense of hopeless aimlessness that Zork Zero inspires, while a new set of rooms to explore provides a far more tangible and satisfying reward for solving a puzzle sequence than does another object chunked in the cauldron and another few points. The later games feel holistically designed, Zork Zero like something that was just added to until the author ran out of space. Even The Fool’s Errand restricts you to a handful of puzzles at the beginning, unfolding its mysteries and its grand interconnections only gradually as you burrow ever deeper. That Infocom of all people — Steve Meretzky of all people, whose Leather Goddess of Phobos and Stationfall are some of the most airtight designs in Infocom’s catalog — is suddenly embracing the design aesthetic of the 1970s is downright weird for a game that was supposed to herald a bright new future of more playable and player-friendly interactive fiction.

The in-game Encyclopedia Frobozzica is a nice but rather underused feature. The encyclopedia could have provided more nudges for some more of the more obscure puzzles and maybe even some direction as to what to be working on next. Instead that work is all shuffled off to the hint menu, the use of which feels like giving up or even cheating.

The puzzles rely on the feelies more extensively than any other Infocom game, often requiring you to make connections with seemingly tossed-off anecdotes buried deep within “The Flathead Calendar.” I generally don’t mind this sort of thing overmuch, but, like so much else in Zork Zero, it feels overdone here. These puzzles feel like they have far more to do with copy protection than the player’s enjoyment — but then much of the time Zork Zero seems very little concerned with the player’s enjoyment.

I love the headline of the single review of Zork Zero that’s to be found as of this writing on The Interactive Fiction Database: “Enough is enough!” That’s my own feeling when trying to get through this exhausting slog of a game. As if the sheer scope and aimlessness of the thing don’t frustrate enough, Meretzky actively goes out of his way to annoy you. There is, for instance, a magic wand with barely enough charges in it; waste a few charges in experimentation, and, boom, you’re locked out of victory. There’s that aforementioned building of 400 floors, all but one of them empty, which the diligent player will nevertheless feel the need to explore floor by floor, just in case there’s something else there; this is, after all, just the type of game to hide something essential on,say, floor 383. And then there’s the most annoying character in an Infocom game this side of Zork I’s thief, a jester who teleports in every few dozen turns to do some random thing to you, like stick a clown nose over your own (you have to take it off within a certain number of turns or you’ll suffocate) or turn you into an alligator (you have to waste a few turns getting yourself turned back, then deal with picking up all of your possessions off the ground, putting those things you were wearing back on, etc.). Some of these gags are amusing the first time they happen, but they wear out their welcome quickly when they just keep wasting your time over a game that will already require thousands of moves to finish. The jester’s worst trick of all is to teleport you somewhere else in the game’s sprawling geography; you can be hopelessly trapped, locked out of victory through absolutely no fault of your own, if you’re unlucky and don’t have the right transportation handy. Hilariously, Infocom’s marketing people, looking always for an angle, hit upon selling the jester as Meretzky’s latest lovable sidekick, “every bit as enjoyable and memorable as Floyd of Planetfall fame.” Meretzky himself walked them back from that idea.

Some of the puzzles, probably even most of them, are fine enough in themselves, but there is a sprinkling of questionable ones, and all are made immeasurably more difficult by the fact that trying out a burst of inspiration can absorb 50 moves simply transiting from one side of the world to the other. Throw in a sharply limited inventory, which means you might need to make three or four round trips just to try out all the possible solutions you can think of, and things get even more fun. Graham Nelson among others has made much of the idea that the 128 K limitation of the original Z-Machine was actually a hidden benefit, forcing authors to hone their creations down to only what needed to be there and nothing that didn’t. I’ve generally been a little skeptical of that position; there are any number of good Infocom games that feel like they might have been still a little better with just a little more room to breathe. Zork Zero, however, makes as compelling a case as one can imagine for the idea that less is often more in interactive fiction, that constraints can lead to better designs.

The in-game mapping is handy from time to time, but, split into many different regions and viewable only by typing “MAP” from the main screen as it is, is not really ideal. A serious player is likely to be back to pencil and paper (or, these days, Trizbort) pretty quickly.

Which is actually not to say that Meretzky was operating totally unfettered by space constraints. While the YZIP format theoretically allowed a story size of up to 512 K not including graphics, the limitations of Infocom’s least-common-denominator platform, the Apple II, meant that the practical limit was around 340 K, a fairly modest expansion on the old 256 K EZIP and XZIP formats used for the Interactive Fiction Plus line. But still more restrictive was the limitation on the size of what Infocom called the “pre-load,” that part of the story data that could change as the player played, and that thus needed to always be in the host machine’s memory. The pre-load had to be held under about 55 K. Undoubtedly due in part to these restrictions, Zork Zero clearly sacrifices depth for breadth in comparison to many Infocom games that preceded it. The “examine” command suffers badly, some of the responses coming off like oxymorons: “totally ordinary looking writhing mass of snakes”; “totally ordinary looking herd of unicorns.” The sketchy implementation only adds to the throwback feel of the game as a whole.

The hints are certainly nice to have given the complexity and scope of the game, but they unfortunately aren’t context-sensitive. It’s all too easy to accidentally read the wrong one when trying to sort through this jumble.

Another subtle hidden enemy of Zork Zero as a design is the online hint system. Installed with the best of intentions in this as well as a few earlier Infocom games, it could easily lead to creeping laziness on the part of a game’s Implementor. “If the player really gets stuck, she can always turn to the hints,” ran the logic — thus no need to fret to quite the same extent over issues of solubility. The problem with that logic is that no one likes to turn to hints, whether found in the game itself, in a separate InvisiClues booklet, or in an online walkthrough. People play games like Zork Zero to solve them themselves, and the presence of a single bad puzzle remains ruinous to their experience as a whole even if they can look up the answer in the game itself. Infocom’s claim that “the onscreen hints help you through the rough spots without spoiling the story” doesn’t hold much water when one considers that Zork Zero doesn’t really have any story to speak of.

More puzzling is the impact — or rather lack thereof — of Stu Galley’s much-vaunted new parser. Despite being a ground-up rewrite using “an ATN algorithm with an LALR grammar and one-token look-ahead,” whatever that means, it doesn’t feel qualitatively different from those found in earlier Infocom games. The only obvious addition is the alleged ability to notice when you’re having trouble getting your commands across, and to start offering sample commands and other suggestions. A nice idea in theory, but the parser mostly seems to decide to become helpful and start pestering you with questions when you’re typing random possible answers to one of the game’s inane riddles. Like your racist uncle who decides to help you clean up after regaling you with his anecdotes over the Thanksgiving dinner table, even when Zork Zero tries to be helpful it’s annoying. Nowhere is the cognitive dissonance of Zork Zero more plainly highlighted than in the juxtaposition of this overly helpful, newbie-friendly parser with the old-school player hostility of the actual game design. “Zork hates its player,” wrote Robb Sherwin once of the game that made Infocom. After spending years evolving interactive fiction into something more positive and interesting than that old-school player hostility, Infocom incomprehensibly decided to circle back to how it all began with Zork Zero.

The most rewarding moment comes right at the end — and no, not because you’re finally done with the thing, although that’s certainly a factor too. In the end, you wind up right where it all began for Zork and for Infocom, before the famous white house, about to assume the role of the Dungeon Master, the antagonist of the original trilogy. There’s a melancholy resonance to the ending given the history not just of the Great Underground Empire but of Infocom in our own world. Released on July 14, 1989, the MS-DOS version of Zork Zero — the version that most of its few buyers would opt for — was one of the last two Infocom games to ship. So, the very end for Infocom circles back to the very beginning in many ways. Whether getting there is worth the trouble is of course another question.

As the belated date of the MS-DOS release will attest, versions of Zork Zero for the more important game-playing platforms were very slow in coming. The Amiga version didn’t ship until March of 1989, the Apple II version in June, followed finally by that MS-DOS version — the most important of all, oddly left for last. By that time Bruce Davis had lost patience, and Infocom had ceased to exist as anything other than a Mediagenic brand. The story of Zork Zero’s failure to save Infocom thus isn’t so much the story of its commercial failure — although, make no mistake, it was a commercial failure — as the story of Infocom’s failure to just get the thing finished in time to even give it a chance of making a difference. Already an orphaned afterthought by the time it appeared on the platform that mattered most, Zork Zero likely never managed to sell even 10,000 copies in total. So much for Infocom’s “new look, new challenge, new beginning.”

We have a few more such afterthoughts to discuss before we pull the curtain at last on the story of Infocom, that most detailed and extended of all the stories I’ve told so far on this blog. Now, however, it’s time to check in with Infocom’s counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic, with the other two of the three remaining companies in the English-speaking world still trying to make a living out of text adventures in 1988. As you have probably guessed, things weren’t working out all that much better for either of them than they were for Infocom. Yet amidst the same old commercial problems, there are still some interesting and worthy games to discuss. So, we’ll start to do just that next time.

(Sources: As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Much of it is also drawn from Jason’s “Infocom Cabinet” of vintage documents. Magazine sources include Questbusters of March 1989, The Games Machine of October 1989, and the Spring 1989 issue of Infocom’s The Status Line newsletter. Huge thanks also to Tim Anderson and Steve Meretzky for corresponding with me about some of the details of this period.

If you still want to play Zork Zero after the thrashing I’ve just given it — sorry, Steve and all Zork Zero fans! — you can purchase it from GOG.com as part of The Zork Anthology.)

Comments
40 Responses

- Steven Marsh

April 29, 2016 at 1:53 pm

Interesting read, as ever; thanks!

I’m a bit more sympathetic to this game than you are, although I admit I haven’t played it all the way through in many years.

One of the things I most appreciated about it – when I was 15 – is that it was so discrete; I could play for a few hours and feel fairly confident that I was 1) making progress, and 2) having some kind of satisfying game experience. Since there wasn’t a time limit (or food or other limited resource) and fairly hard to get locked out, I could feel confident that any puzzles I solved actually WERE solved.

That wasn’t the case with many (most?) Infocom games. Hitchhiker’s Guide kept feeling (correctly) like it was trying to punish you for the slightest misstep. The three classic mysteries all felt like I could play for hours and not be any closer to “really” solving it. Even – as I recall – Arthur (which I enjoyed more as a story) had a time limit that was a bit stressful.

I also didn’t mind the reuse of classic puzzles, because the game was so bleedin’ big that those felt like mental “breathers.” It’s like how a crossword puzzle with nothing but super-clever clues is pretty exhausting; you need the easy and common OREO and AJA answers to give you some easy mental “victories.” Plus – again – the game was so big that I never felt like those puzzles were crowding out other, more-interesting puzzles. Plus, if Infocom had continued, I felt like Zork Zero would have been a good line in the sand for nearly every classic type of puzzle: “We can never do a puzzle like [X] again, because we did that one in Zork Zero.”

Zork Zero (as I played it on the Apple IIgs) is, perhaps, one of the classic examples of that “physicality” of the play experience. Deciding (foolishly) to climb to the top of the Tower took well over an hour on my Apple, as every few levels resulted in another ka-CHUNK ka-CHUNK of the 3.5″ drive spinning to life. In contrast, I played this recently and – thanks to macros – got to the top in a couple of minutes. It’s really hard to describe how different that original experience is; it’s not just slower. There was always a moment’s deliberation of, “Do I want to go poking around on the west side of the kingdom again? That’ll take some time…”

This isn’t really an errata, but I’ll note that the “Apple II” version was actually for the IIe and IIc (or the IIgs in compatibility mode, as I played it); it also required two 5.25″ disk drives or one 3.5″ drive – both of which would have been rarer for the IIe. I mention it here because – although certainly necessary – that couldn’t have helped its sales. I imagine the primary audience for the game was IIc and IIgs owners, both of whom I imagine were smaller than the IIe userbase. (The IIgs was an ideal platform in the Apple realm, because it was zippier than the rest of the line.)

- Jimmy Maher

April 29, 2016 at 2:11 pm

Thanks for this. Your comment serves as an always welcome reminder of the role that changing times and expectations play. If I was a kid with a long summer stretching out in front of me and only one new game to play, I’d quite possibly want it to be this one rather than something compact and completable like Leather Goddesses or Stationfall. As I’ve discussed a bit in relation to the 1980s Ultimas — some other games I don’t have overly high opinions of in terms of basic design — many players back in the day weren’t so much looking for a game to play as a world to inhabit for weeks or months at a stretch. Actually solving the whole thing might almost be a disappointment.

I was also interested to learn that the Apple II version required either two disks or a 3.5″ drive. I’d wondered vaguely how Infocom fit a game of this size into the machine — getting the smaller A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity onto a single double-sided disk had been a huge challenge — but never got around to really looking into it. I do know that getting acceptable speed out of the YZIP interpreter on the Apple II sucked up a lot of time and effort.

- Duncan Stevens

April 30, 2016 at 1:21 am

Since there wasn’t a time limit

The message for SCORE after a certain number of moves was pretty funny. The game tells you how many turns you’ve taken, and adds, “The day really seems to be dragging, doesn’t it?”

(Or maybe the command was TIME. Either way, it made me laugh.)

- Steven Marsh

May 7, 2016 at 12:47 am

Not to reply to my own post, but I finally figured what modern games tap into that “physicality” I talked about. The Professor Layton games (and the Puzzle Agent games, which are pretty closely related) have this animation between when you submit an answer and when it tells you if that answer is correct. Obviously, with modern technology, these games could give a thumbs-up/thumbs-down immediately, but by making the player sweat for a moment, they heighten that thrill when the answer is correct (and, of course, amplify the stomach-sinking when it’s wrong). It’s not a perfect comparison, but there was an indescribable thrill when I would see the floppy disk drive lights flicker into action as it downloaded a new chunk of text because I did something correct (or noteworthy) on an Infocom game.

- Nathanael

March 6, 2021 at 1:25 pm

I liked Zork Zero for exactly the same reason. Lots of gameplay (extend that dollar!), very few “you’ve locked yourself out of winning” things and none where you can’t tell, and lots of exploration.

And the graphics are very relaxing.

In fact, when I can get a Z-machine which handled the graphics correctly (running Linux, most of them don’t — I find myself running WinFrotz under Wine :-( ) Zork Zero is generally my go-to-Infocom game when I just want to noodle around in a Zorky world.

- Jayle Enn

April 29, 2016 at 3:05 pm

I enjoyed Zork Zero, but I think I enjoyed it in spite of the puzzles. There was just a… mean spiritedness to some of them, where a wrong answer forces a RESTORE or UNDO, but the feelies and the Encyclopedia were fun reads, and I enjoyed exploring that absurdly sprawling world.

Jumping-peg puzzles should never be used as a roadblock in a game though. Good grief.

- Lisa H.

May 2, 2016 at 3:19 am

Jumping-peg puzzles should never be used as a roadblock in a game though. Good grief.

I heartily agree!

- TsuDhoNimh

April 29, 2016 at 3:47 pm

I remember Zork Zero (I also played the //gs version) mostly for how forgettable it was despite its length. Before I read the article, the only things I remembered about the game were the lazy reuse of old puzzles and (finally) getting to play Double Fanucci.

- Alexander Freeman

April 29, 2016 at 11:32 pm

So you remember something because of how forgettable it was. Hmmm…

- Bob Reeves

April 29, 2016 at 3:57 pm

You’re fair as always, and make good points, but I loved this game the first time I played it and have continued to play it at least once every couple of years. I don’t know whether I’d have felt gypped otherwise, but Zork Zero was the first place I encountered ANY of the “hoary old chestnut” puzzles. I was a fan of the Zorkian mythology and also had been longing for a treasure-hunt experience comparable to the original Zork. (Hollywood Hijinx made me very happy.) The interlocking nature of the main puzzles, especially the regions beyond the Oracle and the bottom/top of the world, was exciting enough to make me feel I was understanding the structure of a rich universe, not just finding one more item to toss in the cauldron. Anyway, I suspect the game has other serious fans, and I just wanted to speak up for us.

- Michael Russo

April 29, 2016 at 5:28 pm

Yep, I was quite young when I played it too, and hadn’t encountered these chestnuts either. The other items you mentioned, along with what Jimmy mentions above about enjoying a whole big world to explore to a long period of time, are really why I have fond memories of the game and why others enjoy it too despite the design mistakes.

- Pedro Timóteo

April 29, 2016 at 5:05 pm

Great as always! And I’ll really have to play this one someday (big queue before it, though).

with the other two of the three remaining companies in the English-speaking world still trying to make a living out of text adventures in 1988

Well, technically there was a fourth one, Zenobi Software, which would last for a lot longer than the other three. :) But, of course, I understand that it’s impossible for you to cover everything.

- Jimmy Maher

April 29, 2016 at 6:13 pm

I tried to cover myself. ;) I could be wrong, but I don’t have the impression that the Balrog ever actually made a living wage from Zenobi. There were a number of other small shareware and mail-order outfits, but, again, all moonlighting operations rather than companies with proper offices, employees, etc.

- Duncan Stevens

April 30, 2016 at 1:48 am

I didn’t dislike Zork Zero as much as you did. The wealth of funny responses to random actions helped overcome the annoyances, though I did roll my eyes at the borrowed puzzles. There were some pretty clever puzzles here and there, to be sure (my favorite involved the way you use the life-size chess pieces), but c’mon, measure-out-liquids-with-two-odd-size-containers, lady-or-the-tiger, Tower of Hanoi, Hi-Q…it was just too much.

I also agree about the aimlessness, and the loss of pacing that results when most of the territory is available from the beginning of the game. I went back and reread a review I wrote about 20 years ago, which said, among other things:

Given the amount of story underlying Zork Zero, it’s
strange how little of it comes out in the game (until the finale, anyway); it doesn’t seem that it would have been impossible to discover interesting things about the Flatheads or about Megaboz that shape your quest and draw the player into finding out more. As it is, until the last few moves, what you see is largely what you get.

…which I still think is a fair point. The game could have had some structure, and had it been written earlier, it might have had some. As you point out, Meretzky embraced the Flathead/GUE lore stuff, and it would have been easy enough to give the game some actual plot arising from it. I’m not saying it would have been a great game that way, but it would have been less of a slog.

Also agree that the improvements in the parser are mostly invisible, though there are a bunch of scaled objects (large fly, larger fly, largest fly) that might not have worked with the earlier version of the parser.

One other observation: there’s so much silliness in Zork Zero that it felt less like a Zork game than a pastiche. The general setting of the original trilogy was that of a decayed empire, with funny bits now and again to lighten the mood; Beyond Zork had a slightly different feel, but the melancholic element showed up here and there. It just doesn’t show up at all in Zork Zero, unless you count the very ending. The same is true, to some extent, of Sorcerer as compared to Enchanter and Spellbreaker, but it’s amplified here.

- Jimmy Maher

April 30, 2016 at 7:05 am

I actually had a paragraph or two at one point specifically about the writing, but I ended up cutting it because it didn’t feel all that relevant somehow but did feel like piling on with the criticism — and I felt that the article was getting a bit too long and shaggy anyway.

But yeah, I agree with you. Lebling, Blank, and Moriarty all mixed windy grandeur with (generally) more subtle humor, whereas Meretzky in both Sorcerer and Zork Zero pretty much wrote slapstick comedy. This is kind of odd when we consider that Meretzky was actually the one who took the Zork milieu most seriously as a coherent setting, but so be it.

At his best, Meretzky writes humor that first seems dumb but proves to be shot through with a lot of real cleverness and wit. As his worst… well, it just seems dumb. While not a disaster in the writing department, Zork Zero tends more toward the latter than the former for me. Like so much else in the game, the humor seems a little rote. But, again, there are so many more fundamental issues of design here that I decided not to keelhaul the game for that as well. More inspired writing wouldn’t have saved this one.

- Casey Muratori

April 30, 2016 at 5:29 am

Not so much a comment on the article as just a slight note in Zork Zero’s favor: it has what I felt was the best text adventure puzzle I ever came across in Infocom’s catalog (or anyone else’s for that matter) – namely, the hard hat puzzle.

– Casey

- S. John Ross

April 30, 2016 at 8:18 am

I went in hoping you’d make a hodj n podj comparison at some point. Glad to see it.

I’m so mixed about Zork Zero because, like Meretzky, I see the Zork universe as not just a fantasy setting, but kind of the best fantasy setting, along with Groo’s world and WYHTL (partly because I’ve never been able to choke down the self-serious stuff like Tolkien, but mostly because when Zork is warm, it’s very successfully warm while being clever to boot … of course, Zork Zero is almost never warm …)

I actually love the graphics a lot in ZZ … the shifts in borders give a real sense of tone, and the little square symbols (used on both the automap and as “illuminations” in the text) worked well for me.

But yeah. So much of it feels phoned in, even nasty … and playing it on the heels of Beyond Zork, which I found (and still find) pretty magical in most respects, it just felt like a kind of cruel trap. “Ha ha, we have your heart and now we’ll stomp on it a bit here’s a tower of effing Hanoi.” More recently, the Professor Layton series manages a much more charming approach to presenting a chestnut bucket as an adventure.

But … there are bits I love. I love the opening. I replay the opening regularly, and then just quit and imagine the rest keeps on feeling like that. I feel like a strong editorial hand could reach in and slap Zork Zero down into something much more compact, and the other hand could slap some warmth into it.

- Keith Palmer

April 30, 2016 at 12:26 pm

I can’t remember now if I saved Zork Zero until I was running low on games in “The Lost Treasures of Infocom” (by which point “colour Macs” weren’t quite so expensive and distinctively rare as I suppose they must have been in 1988) or just until I’d played through all the other Zork adventures. In any case, though, I suppose by that point I had lost most of my reluctance to resort to the hint books, and Zork Zero’s built-in hints would have been less overbearing than the unconcealed text in the “Lost Treasures” book…

I do remember seeing the “Infocom’s new graphics” ad in an issue of “Games” magazine at my school library, and having already picked up on the old “the imagination has better resolution than any computer screen” selling point from a previous “Games” article there was a bit of an odd feeling mixed in with some actual excitement… Still, I have impressions of the mood of the IF community being openly hostile to “graphic adventures” in the mid-1990s, and I was contrasting the general mood in this piece and its responses to thoughts some first reactions to this adventure “must” have had overtones similar to “Dylan going electric” (or, to be perhaps perilously more recent, to the way some fetishize movie special effects from the early 1980s).

- Jimmy Maher

April 30, 2016 at 6:58 pm

There’s always been a lot of talk about this subset of text-adventure fans who were supposedly ideologically opposed to the inclusion of graphics, but I must say I’ve never really met any of them in all my years of playing and studying text adventures. I think these folks were/are at least as much mythical as real. Certainly there weren’t any of them at Infocom; “we stick out graphics where the sun don’t shine” was never really more than a clever marketing angle for them. About the most extreme position I’ve ever noticed is more one of indifference to graphics than outright hostility — i.e., as long as the core game isn’t simplified or dumbed down in order to make room for them, they’re accepted and often appreciated. During the 8-bit era, the core game usually *did* suffer to one degree or another from the inclusion of graphics, as Infocom’s advertising so memorably highlighted. (The games of Magnetic Scrolls are arguably the only exception.) Machines like the Macintosh and Amiga, however, were barely idling when running a typical Infocom text-only game, and could easily support graphics as well without losing anything. I suspect that Infocom’s lingering fear of outraged text-only purists was a case of them believing their own marketing a bit too much.

- David Cornelson

April 30, 2016 at 6:12 pm

I barely remember buying and playing Zork Zero, but I do know I loved every second of it. I’ve never been one to relate Infocom puzzles to hoary old ones, so that would have never mattered to me.

I think if you just play the game and catch Meretzky’s humorous jabs often enough, it makes you feel at home, or in a small computer lab in a high school in Milwaukee playing DUNGEO (mainframe Zork) on a paper terminal with wide green bar paper.

It’s too bad they didn’t just focus on making great stories and resisted any attempt to be dragged into the graphical world. A few years later and they would have had the Internet and HTML to handle those things.

- Janice M. Eisen

May 1, 2016 at 12:53 am

I seem to have liked the game more than you did, but I literally remembered nothing about playing it except the triumph I felt when I solved the Double Fanucci puzzle. (Upon reading your review, I remembered the 400-story tower, but literally nothing else you mentioned rang a bell.) I even had to go look up the game on Wikipedia to make sure I wasn’t confusing it with Beyond Zork.
It’s sad that there are so many late Infocom games with great potential that never reached it because of the company’s troubles.

- Lee Jones

May 4, 2016 at 8:49 am

I’ve been following the story of Infocom pretty closely on this blog from the beginning.

I’m also a bit of a history buff, with a particular interest in the Titanic, so the mention of an unmade Titanic game has really piqued my interest.
Is there anymore information about it online? Does Steve Meretzky talk about his work? Is there a way to contact him?
I REALLY want to know more about this.

- Jimmy Maher

May 4, 2016 at 6:04 pm

It’s been a game Meretzky has tried to get made for many years. I know a fair amount of the plot as he’d developed it by the late 1990s. It’s a very interesting historical angle indeed. Not to be a tease, but I don’t really feel it’s my place to publicly describe the plot in detail, in case Meretzky does still harbor hopes of getting it made someday. My best advice is to write to him yourself: http://boffo.us/. I’ve always found him to be quite accessible and responsive — which doesn’t of course guarantee he’ll want to divulge his design in detail.

- Lee Jones

May 5, 2016 at 7:57 am

Thanks for the info. Sent him a message.

Considering my fandom for Infocom, I almost feel like I’m making contact with a rock star.

- Jeffrey

May 28, 2019 at 7:00 pm

I would recommend listening to the Eaten by a Grue podcast episode wherein they interview Steve – iirc he discusses the Titanic game. http://monsterfeet.com/grue/

- Andrew Schultz

May 8, 2016 at 5:17 am

My take on the “old chestnut” puzzles (as someone who likes puzzles) was

1. Neat! something I can solve right away!
2. Ooh, I knew this too.
3. Hm, this does seem a little forced, even though it is playing to my strength. Am I getting spoiled or something?
4. Help! I can’t do much else other than what’s in the hint-feelies!

I was 13 at the time. I remember still having trouble getting through the puzzles I didn’t know even with the hints.

I think to some extent it was impressive to see any of this implemented–but the fun didn’t last so well. And speaking as a puzzle fan my favorite bits were still knowing and remembering which Flathead had which item.

That said, I was able to sit back and enjoy it for what it was years later. It did feel a bit disjointed, though, and the thrill of maybe SCORING ONE THOUSAND POINTS wore off too soon.

Has anyone ever tried to reverse engineer Double Fanucci? I’d be curious about the rules. I still wonder now and then.

- Jonathan Badger

May 9, 2016 at 1:00 pm

I’m surprised that Moriarty was such a humorless prude about Meretzky’s proposed Biblical spoof. A *lot* of people find humor about the absurdities of religion extremely funny (Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”, the “Great Prophet Zarquon” from Hitchhikers’ etc.). Yes, I’m sure a few people would have been (or rather *claimed* to have been without actually playing it) offended, but at least in the West, such people are a thankfully tiny percentage of the population.

- Jimmy Maher

May 9, 2016 at 1:42 pm

Well, there’s good satire and bad satire. To me, Meretzky’s proposal just sounds hectoring, obvious, mean-spirited, and dull. But apart from that I suppose it would have been fine. ;)

- Spike

January 27, 2018 at 12:51 am

Moriarty’s line about “frothing nutcakes” jogged something in my memory. Sure enough, a little bit of Internet searching turned up this old article of Meretzky’s from The Status Line.

I wonder if “frothing nutcakes” was an in-house term at Infocom to refer to, as Meretzky calls them, “religious fringe types.”

(Reading Meretzky’s letter also reminds me of the Dungeons & Dragons moral panic of roughly the same era.)

- Melfina the Blue

July 22, 2016 at 7:04 pm

“The problem with that logic is that no one likes to turn to hints, whether found in the game itself, in a separate InvisiClues booklet, or in an online walkthrough. ”
Hi, I do! But I play games for exploration and stories, not puzzles, and the boost I get for figuring out a frustrating puzzle is far less than the frustration I suffered, so yay walkthroughs and hint guides! (Not in any way suggesting you change your entry, just wanted to say that there is at least one person out there who contradicts your statement)

Also, very much enjoying the history. I’ve always been a PC gamer, but much of the history you’ve covered so far was completely new to me (IBM family and I was a small to medium child in the 80s so…)

- Lisa H.

July 22, 2016 at 8:13 pm

FWIW, I’m like you – I turn to hints or walkthroughs very quickly, sometimes not even beginning a game without such a resource available, because I would rather see the sights then get frustrated with my inability to solve puzzles.

- K. Garlow

December 21, 2018 at 4:50 pm

Correction: I believe “nickle-and-dimeing” is spelled “nickel-and-diming”.

- Jimmy Maher

December 22, 2018 at 5:57 am

Thanks!

- Leo Vellés

December 11, 2019 at 7:28 pm

“After Meretzky completed Leather Goddesses the following year, Zork Zero turned up again on his next list of possible next projects. ”
The double “next” in this sentence is intended?

- Jimmy Maher

December 13, 2019 at 3:24 pm

Thanks, but yes, it was.

- Sebastian

May 11, 2020 at 6:48 pm

“a move that couldn’t have set very well”

Sat

- Jimmy Maher

May 12, 2020 at 9:06 am

Thanks!

- David Meyer-Lindenberg

January 9, 2021 at 6:41 pm

First off, thanks for writing this blog, Jimmy. My dad introduced me to Infocom when I was a child, sparking a love affair with the games and genre that’s lasted up to the present day. Reading your articles, thoughtful and detailed as they are, has been a very stimulating experience.

I agree that Zork Zero has more than its share of cliched puzzles. I also didn’t like how the game incents you to drop the artifacts you find in the cauldron, but doing so not-infrequently locks you out of victory unless you used them to solve a random puzzle first – especially annoying since many of the artifacts really are otherwise useless! But what I loved about Zero is the sense it gives you of dungeon-delving, exploring the forgotten nooks and crannies of a dying world. I remember feeling elated at solving the Oracle’s puzzle and penetrating into the Grey Mountains, or finding the dead lovers in a sealed-off coal mine, or rediscovering some long-lost artist’s overlook, hidden beside a cliff that even to reach took some ingenuity. It gave me a strong sense of place, which I appreciated all the more given how ungrounded in geography some of the other Infocom titles can feel.

The game also, I think, pays a fair bit of attention to catering to the player’s natural curiosity about things in the world. One thing I like is that it consistently allows you to apply mechanism x – which only in fact solves a puzzle if applied to thing a – to things b, c, and d as well, and rewards you by outputting interesting little bits of information. For example, there’s a frozen lake in the Grey Mountains that reveals the history and nature of a magic item if you hold it up to the ice. Well, you can do that for just about every magic item in the game, and the well-written mini-stories you get as a result make you feel all the more immersed in the world, even if you can’t use them to solve a puzzle. It’s kind of like the ZIFMIA/AIMFIZ spells from the Enchanter trilogy in that respect.

- Nathanael

March 6, 2021 at 1:30 pm

You have again nailed what I love about Zork Zero. The exploration. Discovering the top and bottom of the world, the artists’ outlook, etc….

Honestly I think the exploration is what I play adventure games for (and cRPGs), more than anything else.

Even the first time I got a new graphical border by moving into a different room was exciting.

And Zork Zero is really quite excellent for the joy of exploration, even if the herd of unicorns could have used more descriptive text.

- Roger Durrant

February 16, 2021 at 11:39 am

A very interesting road. The zeitgeist at Infocom in those last days seems to smack of nothing less than nostalgic self denial; like the Berlin bunker in April 1945 the chief protagonists seem to have preferred harking back to the good old days of proud conquest.

Shogun
July 7, 2016

One of the generation of male writers forged in the crucible of World War II, James Clavell had a much harder war of it than such peers as Norman Mailer, James Jones, Herman Wouk, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, and James Michener. As a young man of barely twenty years, he found himself facing the Japanese onslaught on the Malay Peninsula at the onset of hostilities in the Pacific Theater. Following the most humiliating British defeat of the entire war, he spent the next three and a half years in prisoner-of-war camps, watching as more than nine out of every ten of his fellow soldiers succumbed to malnutrition, disease, and random acts of violence. Somehow he survived it all and made it home.

In 1953, he emigrated from his native England to Hollywood in the hope of becoming a film director, despite knowing only as much about how movies were made as his actress wife had deigned to tell him. He never actually became a director, but he did gradually establish himself by dint of pluck and sheer stubbornness as a screenwriter. Clavell claimed he learned how to write stories with mass appeal in Hollywood, developing a style that would preclude more than the merest flirtations with the sort of literary respectability enjoyed by the list of names that opened this article. To hear him tell it, that was just fine with him: “The first time you write a novel you go into ecstasy with the purple prose — how the clouds look, what the sunset is like. All bullshit. What happens? Who does what to whom? That’s all you need.”

If one James Clavell novel was going to please serious students of the literary arts, it would have to be his first, a very personal book in comparison to the epic doorstops for which he would later become known. Holding true to the old adage that everyone’s first novel is autobiographical, King Rat was a novelized account of Clavell’s grim experience as a prisoner-of-war. Published in 1962, its success, combined with his difficulty finding sufficient screenwriting gigs, led him to gradually shift his focus from screenplays to novels. The next book he published, Tai-Pan (1966), was a much longer, more impersonal, wider-angle historical novel of the early years of Hong Kong. Four similar doorstops would follow at widely spaced intervals over the next thirty years or so, all chronicling the experiences of Westerners in the Asia of various historical epochs.

James Clavell’s fiction was in many ways no more thoughtful than the majority of the books clogging up the airport bestseller racks then and now. His were novels of adventure, excitement, and titillation, not introspection. Yet there is one aspect of his work that still stands out as surprising, even a little noble. Despite the three and a half years of torture and privation he had endured at the hands of his Japanese captors, he was genuinely fascinated by Asian and especially Japanese culture and history; one might even say he came to love it. And nowhere was that love more evident than in Clavell’s third novel, his most popular of all and the one that most of his fans agree stands as his best: 1975’s Shogun.

The star of Shogun is a typical Clavell hero, a Capable Man whose inner life doesn’t seem to run much deeper than loving queen and country and hating Papists. John Blackthorne is the English pilot — i.e., navigator — of the Erasmus, the first Dutch vessel to discover Japan, circa 1600. Unfortunately, the Spanish and Portuguese are already there when the Erasmus arrives, a situation from which will spring much of the drama of this very lengthy tale of 1100-plus pages. Blackthorne becomes Clavell’s reader surrogate, our window into the strangeness, wonder, mystery, and beauty of feudal Japan.

While Blackthorne’s adventures in Japan are (very) roughly based on those of an actual English adventurer named William Adams, Clavell plays up the violence and the sex for all its worth. Many a youthful reader went to bed at night dreaming fever dreams of inscrutable and lovely geishas and the boxes of toys they kept to hand: “The beads are carefully placed in the back passage and then, at the moment of the Clouds and the Rain, the beads are pulled out slowly, one by one.” (Did finding that sort of thing enticing mean you were — my God! — gay?) Read by adults, such passages… er, extracts are still riotously entertaining in the way that only truly committed Bad Writing can be. My wife Dorte and I used Shogun as our bedtime reading recently. While it didn’t do much to encourage conjugal sexy times, it certainly did make us laugh; Dorte still thinks “pillowing,” Shogun’s favorite Japanese euphemism for sex, is unaccountably hilarious, and is forever going on about pillowing this and pillowing that. (She also loves the notion of a “poop deck,” but I suppose I can’t blame Clavell for that.)

Unsubtle prose and dodgy euphemisms aside, the first 25 to 30 percent of Shogun is by far the most compelling. Long enough to form a novel of reasonable length in their own right, the early chapters detail the arrival of Blackthorne and his Dutch cohorts in Japan, upon whose shores they literally wash up, starving and demoralized after their long voyage across the Pacific. I’ve occasionally heard the beginning of Shogun described as one of the finest stories of first contact between two alien cultures ever written, worthy of careful study by any science-fiction author who proposes to tell of a meeting between even more far-flung cultures than those of Europe and Japan. To that suggestion I can only heartily concur. As Blackthorne and his cohorts pass from honored guests to condemned prisoners and back again, struggling all the while to figure out what these people want from them, what they want from each other, and how to communicate at all, the story is compulsively readable, the tension at times nearly unbearable. (One suspects that some of the most horrific scenes, like the ones after Blackthorne and the crew are cast into a tiny hole and left to languish there in sweltering heat and their own bodily filth, once again draw from Clavell’s own prisoner-of-war experiences.) While I admit to being far from intimately familiar with the whole of the James Clavell oeuvre, I’d be very surprised if he ever wrote anything better than this.

After Blackthorne, stalwart Capable Man that he is, manages to negotiate a reprieve for the crew and a place for himself as a trusted advisor to a powerful daimyo named Toranaga, the book takes on a different, to my mind less satisfying character. It ceases to focus so much on Blackthorne’s personal plight as a stranger in a strange land in favor of a struggle for control of the entire country, once again based loosely on actual history, that looms between Toranaga, very broadly speaking the good guy (or at least the one with whom our hero Blackthorne allies himself), and another daimyo named Ishido. At the same time, the Portuguese Jesuits are trying to stake out a place in the middle that will preserve their influence regardless of who wins, whilst also working righteously to find some way to do away with Blackthorne and the Dutch sailors, who if allowed to return to Europe with information on exactly where Japan lies represent an existential threat to everything they’ve built there. Plot piles on counter-plot on conspiracy on counter-conspiracy, interspersed with regular action-movie set-pieces, as all of the various factions maneuver toward the inevitable civil war that will decide the fate of all Japan for decades or centuries to come.

In the meantime, Blackthorne, apparently deciding his life isn’t already dangerous enough, is carrying on an illicit romance with the beautiful Mariko, wife of one of Toranaga’s most highly placed samurai. Their relationship was much discussed in Shogun’s first bloom of popularity as being the key to the book’s considerable attraction for female readers; very unusually for such a two-fisted tale of war, adventure, and history, Shogun supposedly enjoyed more female readers than male. True to Clavell’s roots, however, Blackthorne and Mariko’s is a depressingly conventional Hollywood romance. We’re expected to believe that these two characters are wildly, passionately in love with one another simply because Clavell tells us they are, according to the Hollywood logic that two attractive people of the opposite sex thrown into proximity with one another must automatically fall in love — and of course lots of sex must follow.

The plot continues to grow ever more byzantine as the remaining page-count continues to dwindle, and one goes from wondering how Clavell is possibly going to wrap all this up to checking Amazon to be sure there isn’t a direct sequel. And then it all just… stops, leaving more loose threads dangling than my most raggedy tee-shirt. I’ve read many books with unsatisfying endings, but I’ve never read an ending quite as half-assed as this one. It’s all finally come down to the war that’s been looming throughout the previous 1100-plus pages. We’re all ready for the bloody climax. Instead Clavell gives us a three-page summary of what might have happened next if he’d actually bothered to write it. It’s for all the world like Clavell, who admitted that he wrote his novels with no plan whatsoever, simply got tired of this one, decided 1100 pages was more than enough and just stopped in medias res. Shogun manages the feat, perhaps unique in the annals of anticlimax, of feeling massively bloated and half-finished at the same time. This is a Lord of the Rings that ends just as Frodo and Sam arrive in Mordor; a Tale of Two Cities that ends just as Carton is about to make his final sacrifice. I’ve never felt so duped by a book as this one.

But I must admit that I seem to be the exception here. Whether because of the masterfully taut beginning of the story, the torrid love affair, or the lurid portrayal of Japanese culture that pokes always through the tangled edifice of plot, few readers then or now seem to share my reservations. Shogun became an instant bestseller. In 1980, a television miniseries of the book was aired in five parts, filling more than nine hours sans commercials. It became the most-watched show ever aired on NBC and the second most popular in the history of American television, its numbers exceeded only by those of Roots, another miniseries event which had aired on ABC in 1977. When many people think of Blackthorne today, they still picture Richard Chamberlain, the dashing actor who played him on television. Together the book and the miniseries ignited a craze for Japanese culture in the West that, however distorted or exaggerated Shogun’s portrayal of same may have been, did serve as a useful counterbalance to lingering resentments over World War II and, increasingly, fears that Japan’s exploding technological and industrial base was about to usurp the United States’s place at the head of the world’s economy.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Shogun’s huge popularity on page and screen brings us in our roundabout way to Infocom — or, more accurately, to their corporate masters Mediagenic. [1]Mediagenic was known as Activision until mid-1988. To avoid confusion, I just stick with the name “Mediagenic” in this article.Shogun the game having little identity of its own apart from the novel on which it’s based, it’s hard to discuss it through any other framework.)

Shogun the game at least looks pretty good.

Mediagenic’s absolute mania for licensed games following the accession of Bruce Davis to the CEO’s chair has been well-established in other articles by now. Infocom was able to find some excuse to head off most of the ideas in that vein that Mediagenic proposed, but Shogun was an exception. When Mediagenic came to Infocom with a signed deal already in place in late 1987 to base a game on this literary property — from Bruce Davis’s perspective, the idea was right in Infocom’s wheelhouse — their problem child of a subsidiary just wasn’t in any position to say no. Dave Lebling, having recently finished The Lurking Horror and being without an active project, drew the short straw.

Shogun the game was a misbegotten, unloved project from the start, a project for which absolutely no one in the Infocom, Mediagenic, or Clavell camps had the slightest creative passion. The deal had been done entirely by Clavell’s agent; the author seemed barely aware of the project’s existence, and seemed to care about it still less. It was a weird choice even in the terms of dollars and cents upon which Bruce Davis was always so fixated. Yes, Shogun had been massively popular on page and screen years earlier, and still generated strong catalog sales every year. It was hard to imagine, however, that there was a huge crowd of computer gamers dying to relive the adventures of John Blackthorne interactively. Why this of all licenses? Why now?

Dave Lebling was duly dispatched to visit Clavell for a few days at his chalet in the Swiss Alps to discuss ideas for the adaptation; he got barely more than a few words of greeting out of the man. His written requests for guidance were answered with the blunt reply that Clavell had written the book more than a decade ago and didn’t remember that much about it; the subtext was that he couldn’t be bothered with any of it, that to him Lebling’s game represented just another check arranged by his agent. Lebling was left entirely on his own to adapt another author’s work, with no idea of where the boundaries to his own creative empowerment might lie. In the past, Infocom had always taken care to avoid just this sort of collaboration-in-name-only. Now they’d had it imposed upon them.

Lebling chose to structure his version of Shogun as a series of Reader’s Digest “scenes from” the novel, cutting and pasting unwieldy chunks of Clavell’s prose into the game and demanding that the player respond by doing exactly what Blackthorne did in the novel in order to advance to the next canned scene. The player who has read the novel will find little interest or challenge in pantomiming her way through a re-creation of same, while the player who hasn’t will have no idea whatsoever what’s expected of her at any given juncture. It’s peculiar to see such a threadbare design from a company as serious about the craft of interactive fiction as Infocom had always been. Everyone there, not least Lebling himself, understood all too well the problems inherent in this approach to adaptation; these very same problems were the main reason Infocom had so steadfastly avoided literary licenses that didn’t come with their authors attached in earlier years. One can only presume that Lebling, unsure of how far his creative license extended and bored to death with the whole project anyway, either couldn’t come up with anything better or just couldn’t be bothered to try.

Shogun includes one graphical puzzle reminiscent of those in Zork Zero, a maze representing the tangled alleys of Osaka.

Consider the game’s handling of an early scene from the novel: the first time Blackthorne meets Yabu and Omi, respectively the daimyo and his samurai henchman who have dominion over Anjiro, the small fishing village where the Erasmus has washed up. Also present as translator is a Portuguese priest, Blackthorne’s sworn enemy, who would like nothing better than to see him condemned and executed on the spot. In the book, Blackthorne’s observations of the priest’s interactions with the two samurai convince him that there is no love lost between him and them, that Yabu and Omi hate and mistrust the priest almost as much as Blackthorne does. Blackthorne wants to communicate that he shares their sentiment, but of course all of his words are being translated into Japanese by the priest himself — obviously a highly unreliable means of communication in this situation. Desperate to show his captors that he’s different from this other foreigner, he lunges at the priest, grabs his crucifix, and breaks it in two, a deadly sin for a Catholic but a good day’s work for a Protestant like him. Yabu and especially Omi are left curious and more than a little impressed; Blackthorne’s action quite possibly staves off his imminent execution.

In the book, this all hangs together well enough, based on what we know and what we soon learn of the personalities, histories, and cultures involved. But for the game to expect the player to come up with such a seemingly random action as lunging for the crucifix and breaking it is asking an awful lot of anyone unfamiliar with the novel. It’s not impossible to imagine the uninitiated player eventually coming up with it on her own, especially as Lebling is good enough to drop some subtle hints about the crucifix “on its long chain waving mockingly before your face,” but she’ll likely do so only by dying and restoring many times.

Shogun is the only Infocom game outside of Leather Goddesses of Phobos in which you have to “make love to” someone — or type another euphemism, if you like — in order to score points. (Unfortunately, you can’t use “pillow” as a verb. This Dorte finds deeply disappointing.) It’s also, needless to say, the only one with nudity. Too bad Blackthorne is covering up his legendary manly member, whose size is a constant point of discussion in the book.

And this is far from the worst of Lebling’s “read James Clavell’s mind” moments. In their announcement of the game in their newsletter, Infocom noted that “the key to success in the interactive Shogun is the ability to act as the British pilot-major Blackthorne would.” For the player who hasn’t read the book and thus doesn’t know Blackthorne, this is quite a confusing proposition. For the player who has, the game falls into a rote pattern. Remember (or look up) what Blackthorne did in the book, figure out how and when to phrase it to the parser, and you get some points and get to live a little longer. Do anything else, and you die or get a message saying “this scene is no longer winnable” and get to try again. In between, you do a lot of waiting and examining, and lots of reading of textual cut scenes — called “interludes” by the game — that grow steadily lengthier as the story progresses and Blackthorne’s part in it becomes more and more ancillary.

In a telling indication of how the times had changed for Infocom, by far the most impressive aspect of Shogun is its visual presentation. Promoted, like the earlier Zork Zero, as “graphical interactive fiction,” it and the simultaneously released Journey are the first Infocom games to unabashedly indulge in pictures for their own sake, abandoning Steve Mereztky’s insistence that his game’s graphics always serve a practical gameplay function. Shogun’s pictures, drawn in the style of classical Japanese woodcuts by Donald Langosy, are lovely to look at and perfectly suit the atmosphere of the novel. The game’s one truly innovative aspect is the same pictures’ presentation onscreen. Rather than being displayed in a static window, they’re scattered around and within the scrolling text in various positions, giving the game the look of an unfurling illustrated scroll. Infocom had had their share of trouble figuring out the graphics thing, but Shogun demonstrates that, clever bunch that they were, they were learning quickly. Already Infocom’s visual palette was far more sophisticated than that of competitors like Magnetic Scrolls and Level 9 who had been doing text adventures with pictures for years. Pity they wouldn’t have much more time to experiment.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[2]Al and Peg

But of course, as Infocom’s vintage advertisements loved to tell us, visuals alone do not a great game make. Shogun stands today as the most unloved and unlovable of all Infocom’s games, a soulless exercise in pure commerce that didn’t make a whole lot of sense even on that basis. Released in March of 1989, its sales were, like those of all of this final run of graphical games, minuscule. In my opinion and, I would venture, that of a substantial number of others, it represents the absolute nadir of Infocom’s 35-game catalog. It is, needless to say, the merest footnote to the bestselling catalog of James Clavell, who died in 1994. And, indeed, it’s little more worthy of discussion in the context of Infocom’s history; the words I’ve devoted to it already are far more than it deserves. I have two more Infocom games to discuss in future articles, each with problems of their own, but we can take consolation in one thing: it will never, ever get as bad as this again. This, my friends, is what the bottom of the barrel looks like.

(Sources: As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Some of it is also drawn from Jason’s “Infocom Cabinet” of vintage documents. And the very last issue of Infocom’s The Status Line newsletter, from Spring 1989.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

Mediagenic was known as Activision until mid-1988. To avoid confusion, I just stick with the name “Mediagenic” in this article.

↑2

Al and Peg

Comments
57 Responses

- Pedro Timóteo

July 7, 2016 at 4:57 pm

First, great as always. :)

Second, yes, the novel (which I have read several times, and also listened to the excellent audiobook)’s end is quite abrupt and disappointing, but I still love the book and would recommend it to anyone. The problem with writing about the war is that it would add more years to the story, and Blackthorne would be little more than an observer (which was already happening to a degree near the end of the book).

Third, a typo: “diamyo” should be “daimyo”. Look for it at least 3 times. :)

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 7:45 am

Thanks!

- djogo patrao

July 7, 2016 at 5:05 pm

Great article, as always! I actually liked the book and didn’t missed a “big ending” – although by hollywood standards it should have one. For me, the overall strategy of Toranaga is the most compelling aspect of the book.

Btw , I think “diamyo” should be “daimyo”.

Thanks!

- Duncan Stevens

July 7, 2016 at 5:26 pm

I read the book as a kid, a very long time ago, and I don’t recall the non-ending for some reason. (I do remember snickering at the euphemisms for sex and anatomy, though.)

I never played the game, and even if I were inclined to, it’s…rather hard to find now. (Indeed, I’m curious about how you managed to get a copy.) I hope you had fun laughing at it, even if that’s not the usual Infocom experience.

- Marcus Johnson

July 7, 2016 at 7:54 pm

You can play the DOS version in your browser at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/msdos_James_Clavells_Shogun_1988

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 7:49 am

Like a lot of the stuff I play and write about, my source was not, strictly speaking, legal. ;) It’s available on lots of the abandonware archives, including even archive.org. I did make the mistake of buying Shogun for my Amiga back in the day — one of a bare handful of thousands who did so — so I figure I’m ethically covered.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 8, 2016 at 9:27 am

Yes, I don’t think you can get Shogun legally these days, except perhaps buying it second-hand on eBay.

Personally, I have no qualms about “abandonwaring” a game that absolutely isn’t available for sale, but opinions may vary. :)

- Matthew Heiti

July 7, 2016 at 5:30 pm

Excellent article! I remember that book looming on the shelf at home. I never did read it and opted for the equally lenghty Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa.

Might be of interest to you that there was actually another computer game released based on this book in 1986 (link to the lemon page here – http://www.lemon64.com/games/details.php?ID=2300)

I owned this Mastertronic version for the C64 growing up. It was a lovely game; a little pocket universe of tactics, alliances, betrayal and negotiation.

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 7:52 am

Yeah, I did discover that and thought about trying to work it in, but it would have ruined the article’s flow and didn’t seem all that ultimately important to the Infocom game. Thanks for mentioning it here, though! I have no personal experience with it, but it sounds like it was more interesting than the Infocom game.

- Andrew Plotkin

July 7, 2016 at 5:38 pm

It’s worth talking about the availability issue, actually. HHGG and Shogun are the two Infocom parser games that completely vanished from Activision’s catalog after the LTOI era (1992). HHGG reappeared on Douglas Adams’ personal web site, and Shogun was just gone.

Because of this, we’ve always assumed that the copyrights of those games were handed over to the titular authors. (And that Adams was much happier with his game than Clavell, or Clavell’s estate, was about his.) But this has only ever been an assumption.

In your researches, have you come across anything to confirm or deny this?

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 7:55 am

I know that in the case of Douglas Adams the game reverted to him after a certain window of time, probably ten years. His estate, as you noted, later began to license it to the BBC, making it the easiest of all Infocom games for the casual player to access today. Circumstantial evidence would indicate that Shogun had the same deal, but, it being a bad game of no commercial value whatsoever, the Clavell estate may not even know they own it.

- Merman

July 7, 2016 at 5:40 pm

It is also worth mentioning the other Shogun game based on the novel, created by Virgin Games.

http://www.gb64.com/game.php?id=6777&d=18&h=0

This is an arcade adventure, with the player choosing a character type and then exploring stylised areas to gain allies, fight enemies and earn enough respect to be made Shogun.

James Clavell’s Tai-Pan also inspired an 8-bit game.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 8, 2016 at 9:24 am

James Clavell’s Tai-Pan also inspired an 8-bit game.

Yes. Interestingly, the closest thing to Sid Meier’s Pirates! on the Spectrum. Decent game (with great graphics and music for the time), but it had a big problem, IMO: when in town, instead of picking options from a menu, you had to walk through the maze-like streets, which mostly looked the same, and each town had a *different* map (generated from a seed, so it didn’t change from game to game). It quickly became *quite* boring, especially at the beginning of the game, where you had to walk around press-ganging drunken citizens until you filled your crew.

The mini-games were far more action-oriented than Pirates!’s (including one that was basically a Gauntlet clone), but also quite harder.

Pity the Spectrum (which I had back then) never got Pirates!. The Amstrad CPC did, but it was a very poor port of the C64 original, including automatically converted graphics, and playing much slower…

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 10:33 am

Another version of Tai-Pan was quite popular on the Apple II in the early days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taipan!/. Given the nature of the industry at the time, I would guess it to have been unlicensed. I’ve often suspected it to have been an influence on Elite and later Pirates!, but, given I’ve never found any hard evidence to back up my suspicion, never wrote that in the articles on those games.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 11, 2016 at 2:09 pm

I found out about that when, some >10 years ago, I was experimenting with an Apple II emulator and trying out its games (as, being Portuguese, I never even saw a physical Apple II in front of me, although my stepmother (a teacher) once mentioned her school having at least a single IIc). I tried out that game wondering if it was a port of the 1987 game, in fact. It wasn’t, of course.

By the way, apparently your WordPress removed the exclamation mark from the end of the URL in your comment above, so it’s now pointing to the wrong Wikipedia article.

- Jimmy Maher

July 11, 2016 at 2:27 pm

Thanks! Should be fixed now.

- Captain Rufus

July 7, 2016 at 7:14 pm

Oddly enough there is also a C64 action adventure game based on the book that came out roughly at the same time.

- Lisa H.

July 7, 2016 at 7:36 pm

Do anything else, and you die or get a message saying “this scene is no longer winnable”

Wow. Disheartening, eh? Although I suppose I should be glad they saw fit to tell you outright, rather than leaving you to flounder.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 7, 2016 at 9:16 pm

There’s a funny example in the last screenshot: don’t get in the bathtub with Mariko in time, the romance never begins… game over.

- Jayle Enn

July 7, 2016 at 9:27 pm

…while the player who hasn’t will have no idea whatsoever what’s expected of her at any given juncture.

Oh god, that was me. I got through the first scene by using the hint system as a walkthrough, then… I think I got peed on by the Daimyo. Somewhere in there I realized that I was playing high-stakes mad-libs with a transcript and gave up on it. :(

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 7:59 am

For what it’s worth, you’re *supposed* to get peed on. Fail to do so (or, maybe better said, fail to have it done to you) and it’s game over again. Why? Because that’s what happened in the book, of course!

- Kaitain

July 7, 2016 at 10:30 pm

Minor typo:

diamyo -> daimyo

I remember the Chamberlain series very well. It seemed very dark and violent for the time…no doubt would come across as being very tame stuff these days. Sean Connery was the producers’ first choice for the role of Blackthorne, but he wasn’t interested (or they didn’t offer enough).

- Keith Palmer

July 8, 2016 at 12:03 am

Knowing we’d get to this game in time, and fully aware of the old dismissals of it (it is sort of interesting to know just how it began at last; I might have supposed Infocom was “scraping on its own for something that might be successful by that point”), I found and read an old copy of the novel not that long ago. I did muse a bit about the ambiguous fate a certain number of “best-sellers” seem to reach sooner or later (I do seem to put Herman Wouk’s roughly contemporaneous The Winds of War in the same category and might even have been a bit surprised to see him in the opening list; I suppose The Caine Mutiny could be invoked to correct me). All the same, I still seemed to plug through the pages with dispatch. (The only problem there is how often I wonder these days if I’m stuck thinking that if I don’t sweat and struggle to get through prose fiction, it must be “not worth the attention anyway…”) I certainly did wonder whether the character interaction was something that would “work” in interactive fiction; the early part of the novel, with the language barriers in place, might have seemed more interesting that way.

So far as the ending goes anyway, I suppose I was simply surprised; not seeming to recognize the name “Toranaga,” I supposed the protagonists had to be on the losing side. It took finishing the novel to realise it was a “all the characters have slightly different names from their historical inspirations” deal.

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 8:10 am

By coincidence, I’m actually reading The Caine Mutiny right now and enjoying the hell out of it. Is Herman Wouk not in literary fashion anymore? I’d never read him before. The Winds of War and War and Remembrance aren’t the sort of thing I usually go for anymore — as a kid I remember looking at them hard, but, little warmonger that I was, I wanted lots of combat action, and they seemed full of too much family/relationship stuff — but I was thinking about giving them a go at some point based on how good The Caine Mutiny is.

Michener is the most interesting figure on that list in terms of literary respectability. Once considered on a par with writers like Vidal and Mailer when his first book won the Pulitzer Prize, he pissed all his literary respectability away to start writing all those workmanlike historical doorstops. In compensation, he did sell 75 to 100 million books in his lifetime, which I’m sure helped to ease some of the pain of the critics’ sneers.

- Duncan Stevens

July 8, 2016 at 4:29 pm

I haven’t read Caine Mutiny, but both Winds of War and War and Remembrance are…not bad, once you accept that members of a specific family just happen to be in so many key places over the course of the war. The prose occasionally veers toward the purple, as I recall, but only occasionally. (I read them quite a while ago, but I was old enough that I’d have put down badly-written stuff of that length.) One device I found particularly interesting in the second one is that the action is intercut with a (fictional) German general’s dissenting view on why the war played out as it did.

- Keith Palmer

July 8, 2016 at 4:47 pm

Maybe that’s a fair enough summary of Winds of War/War and Remembrance. I can’t say I “disliked” them (the General’s commentary was also an interesting part of them to me), but perhaps my feeling was that as a sort of “everything in World War II fit into one fictional narrative” work, it was somehow “less profound” than a more focused novel (like The Caine Mutiny). This, though, might be a matter of “trying to present a personal reaction as a definitive judgment…”

- Alexander Freeman

July 8, 2016 at 3:34 am

“James Clavell’s fiction was in many ways no more thoughtful than the majority of the books clogging up the airport bestseller racks then and now…

Read by adults, such passages… er, extracts are still riotously entertaining in the way that only truly committed Bad Writing can be.

And then it all just… stops, leaving more loose threads dangling than my most raggedy tee-shirt. I’ve read many books with unsatisfying endings, but I’ve never read an ending quite as half-assed as this one. It’s all finally come down to the war that’s been looming throughout the previous 1100-plus pages. We’re all ready for the bloody climax. Instead Clavell gives us a three-page summary of what might have happened next if he’d actually bothered to write it. It’s for all the world like Clavell, who admitted that he wrote his novels with no plan whatsoever, simply got tired of this one, decided 1100 pages was more than enough and just stopped in medias res…

His written requests for guidance were answered with the blunt reply that Clavell had written the book more than a decade ago and didn’t remember that much about it…”

Well, no wonder I’ve never heard anything about Clavell outside Shogun and Infocom! It sounds as though he was just some mediocre writer who didn’t take pride in his work.

“Shogun the game was a misbegotten, unloved project from the start, a project for which absolutely no one in the Infocom, Mediagenic, or Clavell camps had the slightest creative passion… It was hard to imagine, however, that there was a huge crowd of computer gamers dying to relive the adventures of John Blackthorne interactively. Why this of all licenses? Why now?”

That makes me wonder why Activision agreed to it.

“The game’s one truly innovative aspect is the same pictures’ presentation onscreen. Rather than being displayed in a static window, they’re scattered around and within the scrolling text in various positions, giving the game the look of an unfurling illustrated scroll.”

*Shrugs shoulders* Well, I dunno. I kind of like how a static window lets the picture remain on the screen. Maybe the “illustrated scroll” approach works better with the Japanese-style artwork here, but I don’t think it would work better with other illustrated games. The fact that Arthur took the static-window approach later makes me think Infocom thought the same way.

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 8:15 am

“Just some mediocre writer” is pretty harsh. There’s something in Clavell and especially Shogun to which a whole lot of people respond. I’m not one of those people — to me he *is* just a mediocre (at best) writer — but, hey, different strokes for different folks and all that.

- Poddy

July 8, 2016 at 4:26 am

I remember Shogun fondly as one of those doorstops I lugged from class to class as an unloved teenager, and it had struck me as a really interesting First Contact story at the time.

Real question, though, are those illustrations actually considered nice by many people? I keep scrolling up to go look at naked Mariko because I am sure, deadly sure, that women’s legs don’t attach that way.

- Lisa H.

July 8, 2016 at 5:40 am

*sings* “The left hip’s connected to the… right knee!”

Wait, that can’t be right…

- Jimmy Maher

July 8, 2016 at 8:17 am

I think the pictures are deliberately stylized to resemble classical Japanese woodcuts. But, knowing nothing about classical Japanese woodcuts, I could be wrong.

- Alexander Freeman

July 8, 2016 at 3:56 pm

There definitely supposed to look like that. In fact, this:
https://www.filfre.net/2016/07/shogun/james_clavells_shogun_r295_1988activision_001/
bears a passing resemblance to this:
http://blog.art.com/artwiki/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/hokusai-great-wave-at-kanagawa-japanese-artwork.png

- Cliffy

October 7, 2016 at 6:41 pm

A few years back I saw an exhibition of that woodcut series, most of them early pressings (when printing off the woodcuts, the process would eventually damage the carving, so prints made earlier in the run have much sharper lines). Those things are no joke. If you ever get a chance to see an original print of the Great Wave at Kanagawa, **go**.

- Duncan Stevens

July 8, 2016 at 4:12 pm

FYI, I’m no expert here, but a considerably better-written novel about the Dutch in Japan during the Edo period is David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

- matt w

July 9, 2016 at 12:32 pm

It certainly is much better written, but I had problems with the idea that there was all this meticulously researched stuff and then the plot hinged on a pnaavonyvfgvp onol-zheqrevat frk fynir vzzbegnyvgl phyg (rot13 for extreme spoilage of the first degree), which as far as I can tell has no basis in fact whatsoever. Which is a problem both because it doesn’t fit well with the meticulously researched stuff and also because it comes across as pretty racist. Imagine if a similar plot were part of a historical novel about medieval Jewish communities.

- Lisa H.

July 10, 2016 at 2:57 am

the plot hinged on a pnaavonyvfgvp onol-zheqrevat frk fynir vzzbegnyvgl phyg

Wow, what? Seriously?! Maybe I’m glad I haven’t played this game.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 10, 2016 at 2:12 pm

Either I misunderstood something, or that had nothing to do with this game (and there’s certainly nothing like it in the Shogun novel)…

- Jubal

July 11, 2016 at 12:55 am

The “frk fynir vzzbegnyvgl phyg” is in the David Mitchell novel mentioned in Duncan Stevens’ comment, not Shogun, which indeed features nothing of the sort.

- Lisa H.

July 11, 2016 at 2:29 am

Ah, sorry, I did misunderstand. I subscribe to the comments feed, so I often read them out of direct context.

- Duncan Stevens

July 11, 2016 at 2:04 pm

Imagine if a similar plot were part of a historical novel about medieval Jewish communities.

Then it would have set off a lot more alarms because it played to specific, tired anti-Semitic smears. The phyg in Thousand Autumns doesn’t reinforce any stereotype about Asian or Japanese people, at least not one I’d ever heard of. (And there are a lot of applicable stereotypes that the novel carefully avoids–the guy who looks like a white savior ends up not actually saving anyone, the apparently passive Asian female bails herself out of her exploitative situation, etc.) But I take your point about the strangeness of dropping a wholly invented idea into an otherwise carefully researched setting.

- matt w

July 12, 2016 at 3:15 am

Isn’t Sinister Oriental Cult a pernicious stereotype about Asians?

More to the point, Mitchell can only get away with this and retain his critical respectability because of the foreignness of Japan to his audience. If he tried to write a meticulously researched book about the history of Christianity whose plot hinged on that sort of thing, the congoscenti would laugh at it the way they laughed at The Da Vinci Code.

- Duncan Stevens

July 12, 2016 at 3:56 am

There are sinister cults the world over, many of them depicted in popular culture, so I’m going to go with “no.” Had Mitchell written a book about an evil exploitative cult in Texas, no one would have batted an eye.

I’m pretty sure people laugh at Dan Brown in large part because of his writing, and I think you may overstate the insistence on strict historical plausibility among literary critics. The Name of the Rose, for instance, has a fairly outlandish plot in a recognizable medieval Christian setting, but I don’t think critics scoff at it on that basis. (Yes, I know, it’s really all about semiotics, but still.)

- Petter Sjölund

July 9, 2016 at 2:09 am

It’s more than twenty years since I played it, but I actually remember the beginning of the game, while you’re still on your ship, as pretty good for its time. How does it hold up?

- Jimmy Maher

July 9, 2016 at 1:02 pm

The opening scene definitely is better than much of what follows. The game is more willing there to go after the spirit rather than the letter of the original story, using methods that work in an interactive context. Take, for instance, the Erasmus’s crew, whom Clavell in the novel establishes through lots of flashbacks, exposition, and dialog to be, one or two exceptions aside, a pretty craven, lazy, drunken, useless bunch. With far fewer words at his disposal, Lebling establishes the same thing by inserting a little mystery story of a puzzle involving Blackthorne’s last apple, which one of the crew has stolen. The way you wind up retrieving it does much to establish Blackthorne’s character as well as a two-fisted man of action, helping to set your expectations for what sort of actions the game is likely to consider appropriate for him. If there’d been more of that and less direct transcription of the novel’s events, Shogun would have been a much better game.

- Petter Sjölund

July 9, 2016 at 11:38 pm

Yeah, that’s about what I remembered. I my memory it also has this nice atmosphere of being trapped in this ship, starving and lost at sea, that has no counterpart in the rest of the game.
On another note, some of the things you criticize this game of, such as the player pantomiming her way through a re-creation of the book, might apply to the Hitchhiker’s Guide game as well. When you think about it, large parts of the latter game are about methodically clueing you towards doing some pretty illogical things. Perhaps the difference between a terrible game and a great one sometimes only is the amount of time and polish spent on it.

- Jimmy Maher

July 10, 2016 at 8:18 am

I don’t really see much comparison myself. While I suppose one could say that the first third to half of Hitchhiker’s does have you to some extent pantomiming your way through the book, that’s only in the broad strokes; it’s full of original puzzles and situations that work in the context of interactive fiction from the beginning. And then of course it diverges radically once you get to the Heart of Gold.

I wouldn’t even say that Shogun’s core problems have much to do with polish per se. Even at this late date and in this dispiriting atmosphere, Infocom’s text is still polished and copy-edited to a degree matched by no one else in the industry, and I never encountered anything that seemed like an outright bug. Shogun’s problems are down to something more fundamental than a lack of polishing.

- Petter Sjölund

July 10, 2016 at 10:49 am

Well, it’s some time since I played them both, but I think there are some similarities. Hitchhiker’s doesn’t follow the book very closely, but there is a similar pattern of short, loosely connected scenes that you “win” by finding the right outlandish command to type. Sebz rawbl cbrgel naq jenc gur gbjry nebhaq zl urnq gb gnfgr qnexarff naq gnxr ab grn. Of course this is only part of Hitchhiker’s, and it has some great puzzles and writing. But it might have been something like that Lebling was aiming at.

- matt w

July 11, 2016 at 10:37 am

I don’t think the last two you mentioned are even in the book, though.

- Bumvelcrow

July 9, 2016 at 6:21 am

Whilst I wouldn’t argue that it’s not a great game, I do have good memories of the early parts, perhaps due to the way the graphics enhance the already tension-filled atmosphere generated by the text. After that it drifted and I lost interest but it had enough of an impact that it left me with a permanent interest in Japanese culture and even tried to learn the language. I don’t think I can say that about any other game. Well, other than Trinity – I think that helped turn me into a Physicist!
I did read the book, after the game, but remember very little of it after the early culture shock. I do tend to keep a mental list of bad endings I can repeatedly complain about, and Shogun isn’t on it so it can’t have been that bad. Or perhaps I’d just tuned out by then and was glad when it was over.

- Brian Bagnall

July 10, 2016 at 4:42 pm

I have vague memories of seeing snippets of this miniseries when I was young and recall being horrified when a few crew-members were boiled alive. Then maybe 10 years ago in a fit of nostalgia revisiting miniseries like V and The Day After it got on my watch list. It was definitely good enough to hold my attention throughout the series, although Richard Chamberlain did seem a little miscast to me. Sean Connery certainly would have elevated this to new heights. I also ended up reading the book and being quite impressed with what he had created.

Game of Thrones seems to be hitting that same sweet spot for mass audiences that Shogun hit back then: a tapestry of characters spinning plots to rule the land, surprise deaths of established characters, lurid sex scenes and a world very alien from our own.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 14, 2016 at 8:31 am

One more, I think:

Mediagenic’s absolute mania for licensed games following the accession of Bruce Davis to the CEO’s chair

Shouldn’t this be “ascension”?

- Jimmy Maher

July 14, 2016 at 9:11 am

Either would work, but I like “accession” here. It’s usually used in relation to the coming of a king into his rightful power, and I think that kind of fits with the way Bruce Davis seemed to see himself and certainly the way that Infocom saw him. It’s a little cheeky, sure, but what the hell.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 14, 2016 at 3:54 pm

Fair enough. I didn’t know this usage of “accession”, thanks. :)

- Markus

July 18, 2016 at 11:08 am

Maybe tell Dorte that after reading this, I’m inspired to use “go pillow yourself” in conversation…

- Cliffy

October 7, 2016 at 7:24 pm

When I learned via my purchase of Lost Treasures v. 2 in ’94 or thereabouts that Infocom had done a Shōgun adaptation after I’d lost track of them in the late ’80’s (just like everyone else), I thought it made perfect sense. While Shōgun might not have been a literary masterwork, on the basis of the miniseries it had a pedigree alongside that of Roots and Thornbirds — perhaps this wasn’t the stuff that they were talking about in university English departments, but within the popular mainstream it had an air of erudition and sophistication that seemed to me exactly the attitude Infocom had cultivated during its mid-’80’s heyday.

Of course, had I read the book, perhaps I would have recognized that this was an illusion. But most of the potential audience hadn’t read it, either — they just knew that it had been considered an important work, and the subject of plenty of water-cooler conversation, not all that long ago.

It’s too bad the circumstances of the game’s creation were so confining. But I think the idea of it was one of the few things Davis got right with the handling of Infocom. (And the artwork is lovely.)

- Aula

January 15, 2018 at 4:11 pm

What do you get if you put a shotgun in a t-remover?

- Lisa H.

January 16, 2018 at 7:38 pm

*snerk* Not that there’s a shotgun in Leather Goddesses (right?), but funny.

Journey
July 15, 2016

The parser is and has always been both the text adventure’s ace in the hole and its Achilles heel. Devotees will tell you, correctly in my opinion, that it offers possibilities for interaction — even, one might say, possibilities for interactive wonder — allowed by no other interface. Detractors will tell you, also correctly, that it’s too persnickety, too difficult to use, that in its opacity and inscrutability it violates every rule of modern interface design. Devotees will reply, yet again in my opinion correctly, that if you take away the parser you take away the magic. What can compare with typing some crazy command and seeing it work? What, the detractors reply, can frustrate more than figuring out what to do, not being able to get the parser to acknowledge your efforts, turning to a walkthrough, and finding out you were simply using the wrong verb or the wrong phrasing? And so we go, round and round and round. This waltz of point and counterpoint says as much about the text adventure’s decidedly limited mass appeal as it does about why some of us love the form so darn much.

For most of the text adventure’s lifespan people have been devising various ways to try to break the cycle, to capture at least some of the magic without any of the pain. Even Infocom, whose parser was legendary in its day, had a go in their final days at doing away with the gnarly, troublesome thing altogether, via a game called Journey.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Journey can be dated to November 6, 1987, when a proposed “new project” emerged from an internal planning meeting. By that point, attitudes about Infocom’s future prospects had broken into two schools of thought. One view, still dominant inside Infocom’s own offices but viewed with increasing skepticism in the headquarters of their corporate masters Mediagenic, [1]Mediagenic was known as Activision until mid-1988. To avoid confusion, I just stick with the name “Mediagenic” in this article.

True to the dominant internal opinion, Infocom put the majority of their resources into one last kick at the can for their parser-based games, putting three new illustrated but still parser-driven text adventures into development. They hedged their bets just a little, however, by making sure the new version 6 Z-Machine they had in development to power those games could support purely mouse-based point-and-click interaction as well the traditional keyboard-driven approach. And then they started this “new project” of theirs to see what the possibilities for non-parser-based adventuring might really be.

The meeting notes read that said new project should be “true to [the] corporate philosophy”; that it should “embody the concept of ‘interactive storytelling'”; that it should “employ a simple, intuitive user interface unlike the one used in our traditional IF games”; and that, while initially “intended for use on existing home computers,” it should be “readily adaptable to other interactive media, such as CD-I, DVI, Nintendo, etc.” Finally, the plan called for “minimal (or optional) use of text.” This last would fall by the wayside in light of Infocom’s limited resources and complete lack of experience working in anything other than text; instead they would settle for lots of pictures to accompany the text. Otherwise, though, the game Marc Blank wrote in response to this plan would hew quite closely to it.

Ironically, it was Blank who had been the mastermind behind the magnificent parser, first implemented as part of the original Zork at MIT, that had been so key to Infocom’s ascendancy during the first half of the 1980s. Now he would be working on the interface that might just become its replacement if the conservative camp should prove mistaken in their faith in the old ways. But then, Blank wasn’t much of a sentimentalist. Assuming he thought of it at all, the idea of sounding the death knell of the traditional Infocom game didn’t bother him one bit. On the contrary, this new project was a perfect fit for Blank, exactly the sort of medium-advancing technical challenge he loved. He insists today that throughout his work with Infocom game design and story were always secondary in his mind to the technology that enabled them. Thus virtually every one of the games with which he was most intimately involved, whether as the officially recognized Implementor or the self-styled “wizard behind the curtain” enabling the creativity of another, pushed Infocom’s technology forward in one way or another. That would be more true than ever of Journey, which Blank created as he had Border Zone from the West Coast, working as an independent contractor rather than an Infocom employee. Blank:

Journey was an experiment to find out whether you could play an interactive story without having to type. It was all about whether you could still have people feel they had the ability to do a lot of different things, but not force them to guess words or use a keyboard. A lot of people just don’t like that; they aren’t good at it. It’s a turn-off. For me, the idea was to just experiment with another style of evolving the story — a different interface, just to see where it would go.

Even more so conceptually than technically, this new interface of his was going to be a tricky business. A bunch of hard-branching links in the form of a computerized Choose Your Own Adventure book was likely to appeal to no one. At the same time, though, to simply write a traditional text adventure in which the parser was a menu-based labyrinth of verbs and nouns would be both technically impractical — there wouldn’t be enough space on the screen for such a thing for one thing, and even the new version 6 Z-Machine didn’t support scrolling menus — and unplayable in its sheer complication. Blank would need to thread the needle, staking a middle ground between the extreme granularity of Zork and the huge irreversible plot swings that accompany almost every branch in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. To a rather remarkable degree really, he succeeded in doing just that.

Blank’s first brilliant stroke was to make Journey, if not quite a full-fledged CRPG, at least a CRPG-like experience. You the player identify most closely with a single character named Tag, who also serves as the author of the past-tense “chronicle” of the adventure that you’re helping him to create. You’re responsible for managing several of his companions in adventure as well, however, each with his own strengths, weaknesses, and special abilities. Most notably, the wizard Praxix can cast spells, each of which requires a certain combination of reagents which you’ll need to collect over the course of your Journey. Many problems can be solved in multiple ways, using different spells or combinations of spells, the special abilities of one character or another, and/or your own native cleverness. While the scope of possibility in Journey is undeniably limited in comparison to a traditional Infocom game, in practice it feels broader than you might expect.

To understand a little better how that might be, let’s have a closer look at the interface, as shown in the screenshot above. You’ll notice that the menu at the bottom of the screen is divided into five columns. The first contains possibilities that apply to the entire party — usually involving movement — along with access to the “Game” menu of utility commands. The second column, which isn’t actually clickable, lists each character in the party; the party can include up to five people, who can come and go according to choices and circumstances. The third, fourth, and fifth columns contain “verbs” applying only to the individual party member whose row they inhabit; these also come and go as circumstances change. Many verbs will lead to a further menu or menus of “nouns.” For example, asking Praxix the wizard to “cast” leads first to a direct-object list of available spells, and then on to an indirect-object list of possible spell targets, as shown in the screenshot below. Clicking on the name of Bergon to the far right on that screen would complete a command equivalent to typing “cast elevation on Bergon” in a traditional Infocom game. The whole system is elegant and well thought-through. Limited though it may be in contrast to a parser, it nevertheless presents a vastly larger possibility space than a Choose Your Own Adventure story, not least because it has a world model behind it that’s not all that far removed from the one found in any other Infocom game.

Journey is, as you’ve doubtless gathered by now, a high-fantasy story, a quality that, combined with the CRPG-like flavor, delighted a beleaguered marketing department still searching desperately for a counter to the huge popularity of the Ultima, Bard’s Tale, and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons series. Looking for a way to distinguish it from Infocom’s more traditional “graphical interactive fiction,” marketing dubbed it a “role-play chronicle” — not exactly a phrase that trips off the tongue. Blank:

I wanted to call it ‘role-playing fiction.’ They came back with role-play chronicle, and I said, “What does that mean?” They said, “Well, it’s like a chronicle,” and I said, “Yeah, it sort of is because it’s told in the past tense.” So they just sort of invented a phrase. It’s not my favorite, but it’s passable, and I don’t think Journey will stand or fall on what category you put it in. There are a lot of games that are called this type or that, but what really matters is what people think of them.

Awkward though marketing’s name may have been, there is indeed some truth behind it. One of the more interesting aspects of the game is its commitment to the idea of being a chronicle — or, if you like, a novel — that you, through Tag, are creating as you play. If you choose to make a transcript of your adventure, you can opt to have it not include your explicit command choices if you like, just the text that appears in response. The end result can read surprisingly well — a little disjointed at times, yes, but far better than would, say, Zork in this format.

There is, granted, no denying the story’s derivative nature; this is a game that absolutely oozes Tolkien, a fact that Infocom’s marketing department, far from concealing or denying, trumpeted. Journey, runs the game’s official announcement in Infocom’s The Status Line newsletter, is “a classic narrative in the exciting tradition of Tolkien” that “plunges you into an uncharted world of dwarves, elves, nymphs, and wizards.” True to its inspiration, Tag, ultimately the hero of the story, is seemingly the meekest and weakest of a group of disparate companions who form a fellowship and set out on a lonely quest to save their land from an encroaching evil that threatens their civilization’s very existence. Sound familiar? Name a proper noun in The Fellowship of the Ring, and chances are it has an analogue in Journey.

For instance, in place of Tolkien’s magic rings Journey has magic stones as the key to defeating the Dread Lord, its version of Sauron. In this extract, Gandalf… I mean, the great wizard Astrix tells the party of the true nature of their quest.

"I have been following your progress with great interest," the Wizard said, stroking his stringy gray beard. "You are a very resourceful group, that is certain!"

His voice then became dark. "The question is: Have you mettle enough to make siege on the Dread Lord himself?" And then, smiling, the darkness fell from his voice, and he answered his own question, "We shall see, I suppose; we shall see."

Leading us to his hearth, he sat us in a semi-circle around the blazing fire and spoke. "There is a story I must tell, a story of Seven Stones. Created in a time lost to living memory, these Stones contained the very strength and essence of our world. Of the Seven, Four were entrusted to the races of men who could use them best: Elves, Dwarves, Nymphs, and Wizards.

"These are the Four: the Elf Stone, green as the forests of old, and the Dwarf Stone, brown as the caverns of Forn a-klamen; the Nymph Stone, blue as the deep waters of M'nera, and the Wizard Stone, red as the dark fire of Serdi.

"The four races are now sundered, and the Four have long been kept apart, but now, with the Dread Lord rearing his misshapen head in our lands, we must bring them together again. For with them, we can hope to find the Two, and then, finally, the One with whose help we can destroy all Evil.

"For it is told that having the Four, it is possible to find the Two; so, also, do the Two give witness to their master, the One that in elder days was called the Anvil!"

Yet somehow Journey is far less cringe-worthy than it ought to be. For a designer who stubbornly, almost passive-aggressively insists today that the technology “was more important than the story” to him, Blank delivered some pretty fine writing at times for Infocom. Journey is full of sturdy, unpretentious prose evoking a world that, overwhelmingly derivative though it is, really does manage to feel epic and interesting in a way too few other gaming fictions have matched in my experience. I was always interested to explore the world’s various corners, always happy and genuinely curious when the opportunity arose for Tag to learn a little more about it from one of the other characters. Coming from me, someone who generally finds the real world much more interesting than fantastical ones, that’s high praise.

Indeed, when I first began to play Journey I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the whole experience. Not expecting to think much of this oddball effort released in Infocom’s dying days, I’d put off playing it for a long, long time; Journey was the very last of the 35 canonical Infocom games that I actually played. Yet when I finally did so I found it a unique and very pleasant experience. It felt very much like what I presumed it to be attempting to be: a more easygoing, relaxed take on the adventure game, where I could feel free to just take in the scenery and enjoy the story instead of stressing too much over puzzles or worrying overmuch about logistics. The game’s own rhetoric, obviously trying to wean players of conventional interactive fiction into this new way of doing things, encourages just such a relaxed approach. “Try to play as much as possible without overusing Save,” says the manual. “There are no ‘dead ends’ in Journey; feel free to experiment and take chances. Every action you take will cause the story to move forward.” This idea of a text adventure with no dead ends encourages comparisons with the contemporary works of Lucasfilm Games in the graphic-adventure realm, who were working toward the same goal in response to the notoriously player-hostile designs of Sierra. Marc Blank’s contemporary interview comments make the comparison feel even more apt:

We’ve learned a lot about interactive storytelling, but it’s been sort of clunky and not directed. I thought it would be interesting to design a story in which you really couldn’t get stuck. The choices you have to make are more tied into the story than into the minutia of manipulating objects. That really led to the whole style of telling the story and the interface. All that came out of the desire to try something like that.

So, yes, Journey and I had a great relationship for quite a while. And then it all went off the rails.

The first sneaking suspicion that something is rotten at the core of Journey may come when it hits you with some puzzles mid-way in that suddenly demand you type in phrases at a command line. Not only a betrayal of the “no-typing” premise that Infocom had hoped would make Journey amenable to game consoles and standalone CD-ROM players, these puzzles aren’t even particularly worthy in their own right, requiring intuitive leaps that feel borderline unfair, especially in contrast to the consummate ease with which the rest of the game is played. But, alas, they’re far from the worst of Journey’s sins.

For there inevitably comes a point when you realize that everything Infocom has been saying about their game and everything the game has been implying about itself is a lie. Far from being the more easy-going sort of text adventure that it’s purported to be, Journey is a minefield of the very dead ends it decries, a cruel betrayal of everything it supposedly stands for. It turns out that there is exactly one correct path through the dozens of significant choices you make in playing the game to completion. Make one wrong choice and it’s all over. Worse — far worse — more often than not you are given no clue about the irrecoverable blunder you’ve just made. You might play on for hours before being brought up short.

The worst offenders to all notions of fairness and fun cluster around the magic system and its reagents. Remember those puzzles I mentioned that can be solved in multiple ways? Well, that’s true enough in the short term, but in the long term failing to solve each one in the arbitrary right way — i.e., solving it by using a spell instead of your wits, or simply by using the wrong spell — leaves you high and dry later on, without the necessary reagents you need to get further. Playing Journey becomes an exercise in stepping again and again through the story you already know, clicking your way hurriedly through the same text you’ve already read ten times or more, making slight adjustments each time through so as to get past whatever dead end stymied you last time. This process is exactly as much fun as it sounds. In contrast to this exercise in aggravation, Shogun’s summary halting with a “this scene is no longer winnable” message when you fail to do what the novel’s version of Blackthorne did suddenly doesn’t seem so bad.

How incredible to think that Journey and Shogun stemmed from Marc Blank and Dave Lebling, designers of the original Zork and Infocom’s two most veteran Implementors of all. These two of all people ought to have known better. Both games’ failings feel part and parcel of the general malaise infecting everything Infocom did or tried to do after 1987. Absolutely nothing that anyone did seemed to come out right anymore.

Like those of Shogun, Journey’s 100-plus pictures are the work of artist Donald Langosy.

As bizarre as it is to see such frankly awful game design from a company like Infocom and an Implementor like Marc Blank, the disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality of Journey is still stranger. “Unlike other games you may have played, there are virtually no dead ends,” the manual promises. “Any action you take will advance the story toward one of its many endings.” I suppose there’s a germ of truthfulness here if you count a dead end only as being stranded in a walking-dead situation; the nature of Journey’s interface means that you will always get a clear message that the jig is up once you’ve run out of options to move forward, sometimes even accompanied by a helpful hint about where you might have messed up way back when. Still, the assertion seems disingenuous at best. When people talk about multiple endings and multiple paths through an interactive story, this isn’t quite what they mean. Ditto Blank’s contemporary claim that there are “dozens” of “alternative endings,” and “very few places where you get killed.” Really, what’s the practical difference between a losing ending that involves death and one that leaves Tag and his friends defeated in their quest? The Dread Lord wins either way.

Today, none of the people left at Infocom during this final unpleasant period of the company’s existence are particularly eager to talk about those painful end times or the final batch of underwhelming games they produced. Thus I’ve never seen anyone even begin to address the fraught question of just what the hell they were thinking in trying to sell this sow’s ear of a game as a silk purse. Part of the disconnect may have stemmed from the physical distance between Marc Blank and the people at Infocom who wrote the manual and did the marketing; this distance prevented Blank from being as intimately involved in every aspect of his game’s presentation as had long been the norm for the in-house team of Imps. And part of the problem may be that the rhetoric around the game was never modified after the original vision for Journey became the cut-down reality necessitated by time pressure and the space limitations of even the latest version 6 Z-Machine. (While Journey’s text feels quite expansive in comparison to the typical parser-based Infocom game, Blank was still limited to around 70,000 words in total; the perception of loquacity is doubtless aided by the fact that, Journey’s scope of player possibility being so much more limited, a much larger percentage of that text can be deployed in service of the main channel of the narrative rather than tributaries that many or most players will never see.) Regardless of the reasons, Journey stands as the most blatant and shameless instance of false advertising in Infocom’s history. It’s really, really hard to square marketing’s claim of “no dead ends” with a game that not only includes dead ends but will end up being defined by them in any player’s memory. Infocom was usually better than this — but then, that’s a statement one finds oneself making too often when looking at their final, troubled run of games.

True to the Tolkien model to the last, Infocom planned to make Journey the first of a trilogy of games, the latter entries of which would likely have been written by other authors. Blank proposed starting on an untitled sort of narrative war game as his own next project, “a variant of traditional FRP [fantasy-role-playing] games in which the predominant activity is combat on the battlefield level, as opposed to the hand-to-hand level.” It would use the menu-driven Journey interface to “make a complex game simple to use and learn” and to “provide a narrative force to the unfolding of the war.” But events that followed shortly after the concurrent release and complete commercial failure of Journey and Shogun in March of 1989 put the kibosh on any further use of Journey’s interface in any context.

And that’s a shame because its interface had huge potential to bridge the gap between the micromanagement entailed by a parser and the sweeping, unsatisfyingly arbitrary plot-branching of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. It’s only in the past decade or so that modern authors have returned to the middle ground first explored by Blank in Journey, constructing choice-based works that include a substantial degree of world modeling behind their text and a more sophisticated approach to interaction than a tangle of irrevocable hard branches. In the years since they began to do so, the quantity of choice-based works submitted to the annual Interactive Fiction Competition has come to rival or exceed those of more traditional parser-based games, and commercial developers like Inkle Studios have enjoyed some financial success with the model. While they provide a very different experience than a parser-based game, my own early engagement with Journey demonstrates how compelling games of this stripe can be on their own terms. And they’re certainly much more viable than traditional text adventures as popular propositions, being so much more accessible to the parser-loathing majority of players.

Unsatisfactory though it is as a game, Journey marks Infocom’s final mad flash of innovation — a flash of innovation so forward-thinking that it would take other developers working in the field of interactive narrative a good fifteen years to catch up to it. Perhaps, then, it’s not such a terrible final legacy after all for Marc Blank in his role as Infocom’s innovator-in-chief — a role he continued to play, as Journey so amply proves, right to the end.

(Sources: As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Some of it is also drawn from Jason’s “Infocom Cabinet” of vintage documents. Plus the May 1989 issue of Questbusters, and the very last issue of Infocom’s The Status Line newsletter, from Spring 1989.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

Mediagenic was known as Activision until mid-1988. To avoid confusion, I just stick with the name “Mediagenic” in this article.

Comments
56 Responses

- iPadCary

July 15, 2016 at 12:15 pm

Loooooove “Journey”!
Can’t wait for the “Quarterstaff” piece!

- Jayle Enn

July 15, 2016 at 2:41 pm

My strongest memory of Journey, besides the honestly quite pretty artwork, was finally resorting to a walkthrough in order to successfully complete it. Even then, I was still one or two reagents short at the last critical point and lost. I never tried again.

It’s frustrating, because it really was an intriguing little world, and because so much of the detail seems (in retrospect at least) to be hidden within the game’s meandering failure branches.

- Jimmy Maher

July 15, 2016 at 3:06 pm

I could be wrong, but I don’t think there’s really much detail hidden in the failure branches. I believe that wrong choices almost always cause you to *miss* things rather than heading off down the wrong path entirely. So, if you make all the right choices, you should end up with a very complete “chronicle” of the whole.

- Jayle Enn

July 17, 2016 at 5:30 am

It’s very possible that I’m misremembering, too! My memories of the game aren’t at all recent, and my perception of its flaws have probably grown worse from there.

On a less negative note, looking at the UI now makes me think of Japanese console RPGs, both in layout and the process of selecting characters and actions. Maniac Mansion too, come to really think about it.

- Alexander Freeman

July 15, 2016 at 6:26 pm

I’ve always found it odd how hard so many people seem to think the parser is. LOOK, GET BALL, and PUT BALL ON TABLE capture the three basic syntaxes that are expected the vast majority of the time (i.e. verb, verb direct object, and verb direct object preposition indirect object). Even as an eight-year-old, I could figure this out. Sure, some games have a lot of “guess the verb” moments, but those are usually poorly tested and not so well designed games anyway. Infocom showed sufficient testing can make those moments a rarity.

- Sniffnoy

July 15, 2016 at 11:53 pm

One common problem I’ve had with parser-based games is offering things for trade. I don’t think I’ve ever played one that recognized any variant of “Trade ball to Bill in exchange for dart”. Instead they seem to rely on you just giving the ball to Bill, and just saying, oh, Bill recognizes that you’re trying to trade it for the dart, he’s going to give you the dart now. But you can understand why I would be reluctant to enter such a command! And it’s really not explicit at all. Parsers should be able to handle that, IMO.

(Not that point-and-click adventure games are any better on that front. But you’d expect parsers to handle it better.)

- Alexander Freeman

July 16, 2016 at 4:11 am

Hmm… interesting. One possibility would be to allow TRADE BALL WITH BILL FOR DART or TRADE BALL FOR DART WITH BILL. It could also even be done with current parsers:
>TRADE BALL FOR DART
With whom?
>BILL
Or
>TRADE WITH BILL
What do you want to trade with him?
>BALL
What do you want to trade that for?
>DART

Still, it couldn’t hurt to have the parser transform IN EXCHANGE FOR into FOR.

I have thought about it accepting an additional indirect object that would be used with the preposition WITH as in SCREW SCREW IN THREAD WITH SCREWDRIVER or TIE CART TO HORSE WITH ROPE. However, I have wondered if that’s worth enhancing the parser for seeing as it can already be told to ask what with.

- Sniffnoy

July 16, 2016 at 10:59 pm

Wait, they *don’t* already let you do that? Can’t you already e.g. “kill dragon with sword”?

…or is the problem there that that’s only one prepositional complement, and the parser just thinks, “oh, this thing is the indirect object / prepositional complement”, rather than, y’know, distinguishing by preposition? So you can “throw ball with sling” or “throw ball to Bill” but not “throw ball to Bill with sling”?

I think this might be a problem I’ve run into before, actually. “Tie cart to horse with rope” is pretty natural; how is one supposed to use rope if one can’t tie X to Y with it? I think I have failed to use rope in that way before.

- matt w

July 17, 2016 at 3:07 am

It isn’t necessarily that the parser fails to distinguish by prepositional complement–current parsers, at least, would be perfectly capable of recognizing SET PHASER ON TABLE and SET PHASER TO STUN as different actions. In Inform 7 it’s as simple as writing:
Understand “set [something] to [something]” as putting it on.
Understand “set [something] to [text]” as setting it to.
and in fact the latter of those commands is built in to the standard library.

The problem (in Inform at least) is that the parser isn’t set up to handle three nouns at once. This is surmountable, though, with some hacking. The other problem is that the player isn’t going to know that you need to use that syntax–either they’re a parser aficionado, who knows that commands take two nouns max, or they’re a parser non-aficionado, who is probably going to be flailing around before they get in a position to “Tie cart to horse with rope.”

In games I’ve played where you need to do something like that, I think you either have to type “Tie cart to horse” and the game will use the rope if you have it and refuse the command if you don’t, or you need to type “Tie rope to cart” and then “tie rope to horse.”

- Sniffnoy

July 19, 2016 at 1:34 am

either they’re a parser aficionado, who knows that commands take two nouns max, or they’re a parser non-aficionado, who is probably going to be flailing around before they get in a position to “Tie cart to horse with rope.”

I don’t think that dichotomy is accurate at all? I’ve played several IF games and I honestly never realized before now that commands take at most two nouns, whether as objects, indirect objects, or prepositional complements. It’s not too hard to see someone else play and get the gist of it — you enter commands that you want your character to do, and these generally have to be unambiguous and granular in nature (and, y’know, understandable by a computer). But nothing about that rules out “tie cart to horse with rope”. That’s something that you could reasonably expect to be an atomic action, and it’s not even a complicated sentence. There’s no reason that this shouldn’t be handleable except for the limitations of the particular parsers that have actually been written; implementing it doesn’t require solving an AI problem or anything.

- matt w

July 17, 2016 at 2:55 am

The thing about this sort of thing is that the player has to know somehow that a command like TRADE BALL FOR DART or TRADE BALL TO BILL FOR DART will work. (Or type it without knowing–but if you’re relying on a player typing syntaxes that they won’t know then you’re going to wind up with players typing a lot of commands the parser won’t understand.) At least people who’ve been brought up on parser games are pretty well habituated to GET THIS and X THAT and PUT THIS IN THAT and UNLOCK THAT WITH THIS and some of the other things, but even with that kind of background you have to be pretty good at hinting the verb and syntax you want to use if you want the player to come up with TRADE THIS FOR THAT.

(Though I’m also wondering how this is supposed to work from a puzzle design standpoint–how do I know that trading Bill the ball for the dart is a good idea? If it’s that Bill has a dart I want and I can recognize that he needs the ball, I guess I expect GIVE BALL TO BILL to produce the result I need to move things along, on the general principle that if there’s something you can do in a game it’ll accomplish something…. taking on board Jimmy’s caveat about the Magnetic Scrolls games. If you have a game where the puzzles are that you really need to figure out which things to trade for what things according to some system, then the game should be explaining the verb you need to use.)

I have found that the parser really is a problem to people who aren’t used to the parser in some way (in my case I had to start getting used to it by going through a few games consulting walkthroughs very often). I made a fairly puzzleless game (if you go long enough without encountering anything it gives you a sharp nudge as to what to do next) which I’m pretty sure didn’t give any problems to the parser people who played it, and gave it to my non-IF writing group with some reasonably detailed instructions about the kind of commands that work. None of them could play it at all. One of them started out by typing “look out the window,” when all my testers knew not to try anything with the window because it wasn’t in the room description; then just typed “hint” until there wasn’t anything left to do. The one who was most committed to taking it seriously did some stuff but wound up typing “the kettle boils” when it was necessary to wait a little bit for the kettle to boil. Even if that had been an imperative mode command like “wait for the kettle to boil,” can you imagine what a nightmare it would be to implement that perfectly reasonable thing to want to do?

So yeah, in my experience even if you tell people what the syntaxes are you can’t just expect them to figure everything out. We’re depending on more familiarity with the parser than we may think.

As for the last point, I think if you’re making the player type a two-noun command and then quizzing them for a third noun (which, again, is something that you’d have to hint if you want anyone to divine that they need to do it), they could reasonably ask why you didn’t just implement the three-noun command instead of putting them to the extra trouble. “Because it’s hard to implement in the Inform parser” wouldn’t be a good answer.

- Alexander Freeman

July 17, 2016 at 3:37 am

“…or is the problem there that that’s only one prepositional complement”
Well, yes, that’s why I said an ADDITIONAL indirect object.

“The one who was most committed to taking it seriously did some stuff but wound up typing ‘the kettle boils’ when it was necessary to wait a little bit for the kettle to boil.”
Huh, that’s funny. Didn’t your game say to enter COMMANDS?

“Even if that had been an imperative mode command like ‘wait for the kettle to boil,’ can you imagine what a nightmare it would be to implement that perfectly reasonable thing to want to do?
“So yeah, in my experience even if you tell people what the syntaxes are you can’t just expect them to figure everything out. We’re depending on more familiarity with the parser than we may think.”
Well, if you say so. I suppose you’d know from that experience. I just don’t see how someone could that would fit any of the syntaxes I’ve just mentioned.

“As for the last point, I think if you’re making the player type a two-noun command and then quizzing them for a third noun… they could reasonably ask why you didn’t just implement the three-noun command instead of putting them to the extra trouble. ‘Because it’s hard to implement in the Inform parser’ wouldn’t be a good answer.”
Yeah, good point.

- Alexander Freeman

July 17, 2016 at 5:39 am

You know, thinking about this some more has given me an idea. Why not follow the example set by modern user interface design? Possibly have a few options for someone to choose from.

One would be having a bunch fields where the command line is. The first box would labeled VERB, the second DIRECT OBJECT, the third PREPOSITION, and the fourth INDIRECT OBJECT. Allow for both an adjective and a noun in each OBJECT box as needed.

Another would be to have something like Journey’s interface, but there’d be an “Other” option so that you can enter something not listed, making it less like a CYOA.

Finally, maybe below the command line, you could have some floating text saying VERB when it’s blank, ADJECTIVE or NOUN right below where the next word would be, and so on. It would serve as a real-time syntax checker.

- Jimmy Maher

July 17, 2016 at 8:13 am

I think that using a parser successfully requires a certain frame of mind that programmers have learned out of necessity but that can be a huge struggle for others. Those others aren’t stupid; they just quite literally haven’t learned to think the right way. Of course, the parser can be learned, and by most people within a few hours. But it can be a hugely frustrating experience in the beginning, and a completely foreign one at that. Most people today have no experience whatsoever with *typing* a command to the computer. The point-and-click paradigm attained absolute domination many years ago.

So, what we have is a uniquely foreign, opaque, and frustrating interface that causes most modern players to bounce off long before it clicks. I don’t have any solution to offer for this. As I wrote at the beginning of this article, I think it’s just the nature of the beast, meaning parser-based interactive fiction will always be a tiny niche hobby. Which is fine really.

- matt w

July 17, 2016 at 4:45 pm

“Most people today have no experience whatsoever with *typing* a command to the computer.”

I feel like this isn’t absolutely true. Most people probably have typed things into Google at some point, and in some ways IF parser commands are more like Google queries (especially ones like “What happens if Britain leaves the EU?”) than command-line things like cd C:\games\infocom\ or whatever. But Google has a lot going on under the hood to try to get meaningful results out of any old thing you type in, and can get away with keyword matching because it doesn’t afford you the kind of control that you need for a parser game to not be totally frustrating. (I don’t expect to type “show me that picture where Steve Nash and a bunch of other basketball players look totally goofy in the middle of the game” and get what I want. Though if anyone knows where I can find that picture please advise.) And also Google has a hunormous variety of possible responses, whereas a parser can only do what you’ve programmed in–the problem with “wait until the kettle boils” wouldn’t so much be parsing the command as programming in that behavior, and all the other similar behavior someone might expect.

And in its way the parser doesn’t really call on the habits of the programmer, IMO. The point is that if you’re able to get into the frame of mind where you’re able to interact with the parser then it relies on the extremely powerful language centers of your brain. It’s much more natural and quicker for me to type “put tea in teapot” than it would be to accomplish the same thing using a menu interface. But it’s only natural in that way because I’m not tempted to go outside the syntax I know the parser accepts.

(Alexander, that’s part of the reason that I didn’t include COMMANDS in my game, the other parts being that it was something I had written in a very short time and also that my testers, being people who played parser games, never needed a list of commands. The point of the game, whose source you can see here, is in large part that you’re supposed to be able to interact with it pretty naturally–you see a loaf of bread, you see a bread knife, you type “CUT THE BREAD WITH THE KNIFE.” And if you’re not getting things done the game will prompt you with something like “You’ll have to fill the kettle up with water.” whereupon “FILL THE KETTLE UP WITH WATER” works–though there’s some fussing with the bread box at the beginning where this doesn’t work as smoothly as I’d like. But giving an explicit list of commands felt like it would disrupt this smooth interaction, or at least an interaction that’s smooth for people who are a little used to it.)

So the frame of mind that you need for the parser is really that of someone who can use a restricted set of language in a precise way to obtain specific effects. Which means it’s like programming… if you’re programming in Inform 7.

- Jimmy Maher

July 18, 2016 at 2:27 pm

It’s a complicated topic, and it’s easy to get yourself into a hopeless tangle of likenesses and metaphors, but I would personally say that a command to a parser-driven text adventure is really more similar to an MS-DOS or Unix command than a Google query. You are, after all, issuing an imperative statement telling someone — the computer or your avatar — to do something. And, whereas a Google query that includes at least one or two recognizable words will always return *something*, a text-adventure parser can respond only to an extremely small, circumscribed subset of vocabulary and grammar. This, again, makes it much more similar to a command line or a programming language. But at the same time, a problem may very well be that, because the language of the parser superficially appears to be conventional English (or some other human language), there is an expectation created that the program will understand much more than it actually can. (Inform 7, brilliant as it is in so many respects, also suffers from the same syndrome.) And things like Google may also contribute to the notion that you can essentially type *anything* and expect a response.

I think programmers have an easier time with parsers because the text-adventure command line is really a language or language subset of its own that, like most programming languages, borrows from English (Inform 7 is only an extreme example of this phenomenon). But it’s heavily, rigidly structured to not only to make it easier for the computer to interpret but also — and this point is usually missed — to remove all possibility of ambiguity, which it accomplishes partly by forcing the player/programmer to think in a ridiculously granular way, something programmers are used to doing but many others are not. One could take this comparison even further by equating objects with which one can interact in a text adventure with variables, which must be declared beforehand in many programming languages. Again, programmers innately grasp that you can’t start messing about with the windows or the walls in a text adventure if they haven’t been “declared” via a mention in the text. This thought process can I think be more or less hard for many non-programmers encountering it for the first time to grasp.

I would say the closest thing to a parser used on an everyday basis would be something like Siri rather than a Google search. And I do think it’s perfectly possible to make a much, much smarter and more responsive parser. But it would require a research effort which makes sense for a global search engine or a widely used mobile-phone interface, but just doesn’t for a text adventure.

- Alexander Freeman

July 17, 2016 at 5:40 pm

I think you misunderstood what I meant, Matt. What I meant is that I thought your game made it perfectly clear that one is supposed to enter commands at the command prompt, not a COMMANDS verb that lists all the different verbs recognized.

Anyhow, I think I may be on to something here with using modern features to make the parser more user friendly. Once I have it working, I think you all will see what exactly I had in mind. Maybe I just didn’t do a good enough job of describing it in that comment.

- matt w

July 18, 2016 at 4:11 am

Ah, I did misunderstand about commands–I thought you meant to enter “COMMANDS” (which I have seen in some games). The game itself didn’t say to type commands at the prompt, but I did say that in the e-mail I sent out to the non-IF players with the game… but either it’s too hard to read the manual, or (somewhat my pet theory) it’s just hard to break the habit of typing what seems natural. Though in this case maybe the problem wasn’t even the syntax, as that the “kettle boils” person was frustrated at having to wait at that point and the person who examined the window just didn’t know what the conventions were for what was implemented… dunno.

Your ideas sound intriguing but the text field one would likely, for me, run into a problem were entering commands wouldn’t be like just typing my thoughts in the relevant way–typing PUT (tab) BREAD (tab) IN (tab) TOASTER (enter) just isn’t like typing PUT BREAD IN TOASTER. As for the real-time syntax checker, you might want to check out the Inform 7 extension Interactive Parsing by Jon Ingold (found here, only compatible with older versions of Inform I think, but you can get older versions from the Inform website). It tries to do something like that… didn’t catch on for whatever reason, and I’m not sure the demo Jon made of it is available. Jon went on to found Inkle, of 80 Days and Sorcery!, so he’s left the parser behind himself.

- Alexander Freeman

July 18, 2016 at 5:22 am

Yeah, I have thought about how to enter commands into the fields. one way would be to use tab, but it could also use space to achieve the same thing. I’ll have to look into what Jon Ingold did, though.

- Sniffnoy

July 19, 2016 at 1:49 am

The thing about this sort of thing is that the player has to know somehow that a command like TRADE BALL FOR DART or TRADE BALL TO BILL FOR DART will work. (Or type it without knowing–but if you’re relying on a player typing syntaxes that they won’t know then you’re going to wind up with players typing a lot of commands the parser won’t understand.) At least people who’ve been brought up on parser games are pretty well habituated to GET THIS and X THAT and PUT THIS IN THAT and UNLOCK THAT WITH THIS and some of the other things, but even with that kind of background you have to be pretty good at hinting the verb and syntax you want to use if you want the player to come up with TRADE THIS FOR THAT.

As I said in my post above, I don’t think your dichotomy here is correct. And I think it’s a mistake to say, well, everyone’s gotten used to how things work with these particular technical limitations, so we can’t improve things or it would be too confusing to existing players. Like… that seems like a fairly minor problem by comparison. Maybe just, y’know, put in big letters on your game, “This game has an improved parser that can handle more complex sentences, so you might want to try some!” Maybe more detail than that.

I don’t really understand why it would supposedly be so hard to come up with “trade this for that”. A number of adventure games involve trading things; if you want to trade for something, why would you not just say so? It’s basically the most direct way. I mean, above I used the phrase “in exchange for”, which is a more natural way IMO, but it’s possible you can program that to work too as a special case. Rather than having to hint the verb and syntax, maybe you can just allow permissive verbs and syntaxes. This is what games already do quite a bit of, though with simpler syntaxes, admittedly.

(Though I’m also wondering how this is supposed to work from a puzzle design standpoint–how do I know that trading Bill the ball for the dart is a good idea? If it’s that Bill has a dart I want and I can recognize that he needs the ball, I guess I expect GIVE BALL TO BILL to produce the result I need to move things along, on the general principle that if there’s something you can do in a game it’ll accomplish something…. taking on board Jimmy’s caveat about the Magnetic Scrolls games. If you have a game where the puzzles are that you really need to figure out which things to trade for what things according to some system, then the game should be explaining the verb you need to use.)

I agree there is a puzzle design challenge here — though I think it’s less a matter of actual puzzle design, and more a matter of “puzzle interface design”. But what you’re doing here is essentially metagaming, and I don’t think the player should have to rely on metagaming to such an extent. It’s easy to expect the Magnetic Scrolls result instead if you don’t! But I agree there’s a potential problem here; if you allow the player to explicitly trade the ball for the dart, then it makes less sense for Bill to refuse your gift (so that you’re not stuck) if you want to just give him the ball, or to decline your offer if you try to trade two balls for the dart, or whatever.

- Sniffnoy

July 19, 2016 at 8:25 pm

Actually, I guess in games with more separation between the player and the character, this is just handled by having the character refuse to do such a thing. This can get a little frustrating if there’s no obvious reason for the character to refuse, but it’s no worse than having the game refuse. Unfortunately this solution doesn’t work as well with the standard second-person style, though I’ve seen it used there; it just reads kind of weirdly.

- Jimmy Maher

July 16, 2016 at 9:49 am

The worst offenders here are the Magnetic Scrolls games, which in the name of simulation will let you give anything to anyone. If the action isn’t necessary to the plot or a puzzle, the character will just take the object, and you have no way to ever get it back.

Modern games do at least offer undo. If you aren’t sure exactly what the parser will do with a command, you can just try it and see, then undo if it goes wrong.

- Alexander Freeman

July 20, 2016 at 1:14 am

“I’ve played several IF games and I honestly never realized before now that commands take at most two nouns, whether as objects, indirect objects, or prepositional complements. It’s not too hard to see someone else play and get the gist of it…”

Yeah, my memory of my very first experiences with adventure games is a little fuzzy, but I think my very first adventure game ever was a little known game called Castle Adventure, but that only had a simple two-word parser. But I was able to pick it up quite easily. My next three adventure games were Hugo’s House of Horrors, Zork 1, and some obscure game called Enchanted Castle. I think it was in that order. I think I might have read sample commands and got the gist of it after entering various different commands. HHH had a keyword search. I think Enchanted Castle had a two-word parser like Castle Adventure.

But, yeah, my experience was getting the gist of it from examples and maybe seeing other people type in commands. (It was a long time ago.) I just thought everyone would pick it up too. I didn’t think about how many nouns a command would accept until I decided to make my own parser modeled after Infocom’s.

- Felix

July 17, 2016 at 6:56 am

The problem with the parser is that people have different cognitive abilities, and they can miss instructions even while earnestly reading the manual — every book is full of little “blink and you miss it” bits that can easily prove important down the road. Sure, that’s what beta-testing (and beta-reading) are for… but testers are human too.

Besides, when you have an UI that implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) encourages people to experiment beyond what the manual says, is it any surprise that some players will try wacky stuff? Doubly so if they’re not completely familiar with the genre conventions… something a lot of us are only because we also tried authoring.

Look, I grew up with line-number BASIC. I’m a long-time Linux user. I love command lines. But in interactive fiction, the parser is by and large a lie, and after decades of experiments it should be obvious that’s a fundamental trait.

- Alexander Freeman

July 17, 2016 at 5:48 pm

“Besides, when you have an UI that implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) encourages people to experiment beyond what the manual says, is it any surprise that some players will try wacky stuff? Doubly so if they’re not completely familiar with the genre conventions…”

Well, that’s not necessarily a bad thing as long as there are no penalties for experimenting. That’s how one learns. Besides, I still like trying wacky things after having played adventure games for more than 25 years! ^_^

Still, you bring up a good point about how different people learn differently. I think a short, thoroughly tested game with the features I’ve suggested might serve as a good tutorial for how the whole thing works.

- M. Sean Molley

July 15, 2016 at 6:26 pm

Is there an easy way to play this? “Journey” and “Quarterstaff” are the only two Infocom-published titles that I have never gotten to play (or if I did, I don’t remember anything about them!)

- Jimmy Maher

July 15, 2016 at 7:34 pm

I don’t like to give out direct links to such things here, but it’s not hard to find by searching for something like “abandonware Infocom Journey.” The story file is playable in any modern Z-Machine interpreter that supports the .z6 format. It will be the largest single file in an MS-DOS (or any other) version of the game. If you’re using Windows Frotz and possibly some other interpreters, you’ll also need the graphics in a format the interpreter supports. These you can download from http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXmediaXblorb.html. Make sure the .blb file has the same name as the story file and is in the same directory. Then just load the story file into your interpreter like any other Infocom (or Inform) game.

- Michael Davis

July 16, 2016 at 11:34 pm

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Journey_-_The_Quest_Begins_1988

- Michael Davis

July 16, 2016 at 11:36 pm

Err.. right after clicking ‘Post Comment’ I thought, erp, maybe I misinterpreted what you meant when you said “I don’t like to give out direct links to such things here”. I took that to mean sketchy abandonware or piracy sites, but maybe you just meant, like, any links at all, and if that’s the case, please delete my comment: I definitely didn’t mean to be mutinous or insubordinate!

- Jimmy Maher

July 17, 2016 at 8:04 am

archive.org is legitimate enough to be in order. I’m always forgetting that collection exists now…

- Michael Davis

July 24, 2016 at 6:13 pm

I have gotten a TON of mileage out of that collection. It was particularly helpful when gathering reference for ICBM :D

- Andrew Plotkin

July 15, 2016 at 6:31 pm

My memories of _Journey_ boil down to three things:

– Running out of a reagent. When I was planning _Hadean Lands_, I was thinking in equal measure of _Enchanter_ and _Journey_ — Infocom’s two models of resource-limitation puzzle. _Enchanter_ is a shining beacon of Doing It Right, and _Journey_, well, isn’t. But I was sure that _Journey_ had *something* worth exploring.

– The cod-Tolkien setting. I’m afraid I didn’t find it even as interesting as you did. It managed to feel more bland and boilerplate than the Zork milieu, which is a low bar to clear. (Quendor is literally nothing but cornball jokes and anachronisms held together with fantasy pastiche, but I remember wishing that _Journey_ had been set there.)

– And yet, one of those type-an-answer puzzles — the “Doors of Moria” puzzle — remains near the top of my favorite Infocom puzzles ever. Yes, it requires a leap of intuition. It’s a classic riddle; those require such leaps by definition. But it’s a *great* riddle, with an answer that is simple and obvious once you see it (or it’s explained), and it’s completely original to Infocom as far as I know.

(You could accuse me of liking that puzzle because I had the classic riddle-solving experience: I stared at it and sweated for hours, then gave up, went to take a shower, and the answer assembled itself in my head apparently by itself. This accusation would be accurate. You gotta treasure those moments when they happen.)

- Lisa H.

July 15, 2016 at 8:05 pm

I like the Quendor setting enough that I’ve sometimes wanted to ask for gift fanfic written there (though always gave it up as probably too obscure). At least you can say that it’s unusual and colorful; Journey’s is rather off-the-rack in comparison.

- S. John Ross

July 16, 2016 at 6:04 am

I love Quendor so much that there’s a faint squeaking noise in my head when I think of it.

- Lisa H.

July 16, 2016 at 3:37 am

It’s really, really hard to square marketing’s claim of “no dead ends” with a game that not only includes dead ends but will end up being defined by them in any player’s memory.

Ayup. It took me a long time to play through this enough to my satisfaction to put a walkthrough for it up on my website. One of the things that annoyed me the most about the limited reagents was not just that it was easy to run out of them, but that you began the game with only JUST enough of one, so that you would come up short of it not even through flailing around trying to solve puzzles, but by exploring all the menu options available to you at the start of the game! It seems excessively cruel to me that you should be punished plotwise for following a menu branch that otherwise just adds background color, especially since it might not become apparent until the absolute end.

- xxx

July 16, 2016 at 4:49 am

“It’s really, really hard to square marketing’s claim of “no dead ends” with a game that not only includes dead ends but will end up being defined by them in any player’s memory.”

Exactly! That’s the main thing which stands out to me about Journey in my memory: the constant fear that anything I did would lock me out of winning. I had so many damn saved games. Eventually gave up because that fear hanging over my every move and the constant repetition of the earlier parts of the game were about as fun as food poisoning, despite the interesting interface and pictures.

- S. John Ross

July 16, 2016 at 6:07 am

“…A bunch of hard-branching links in the form of a computerized Choose Your Own Adventure book was likely to appeal to no one….”

Speaking of: will you be writing about the Infocomics (or have you already and I missed it?)

- Jimmy Maher

July 16, 2016 at 9:45 am

I wrote about them in passing earlier, but no, no detailed reviews of the individual titles. You have to draw a line somewhere. ;)

- matt w

July 16, 2016 at 4:00 pm

The great wizard Asterix? Did you have to defeat the fearsome dragon Tintin?

- Jimmy Maher

July 16, 2016 at 4:45 pm

:) I had some snark to that effect in the article at one point, but wound up cutting it — mainly because Astrix isn’t quite the same as Asterix, and I could imagine a bunch of people correcting me for that, but trying to explain I knew that in the article would just make the whole thing too labored and unfunny.

- Alexander Freeman

July 16, 2016 at 5:41 pm

Is that from the Comic Asterix or the comic Tintin?

- matt w

July 17, 2016 at 3:14 am

Ah. In the article you do call him Asterix with the “e.” Also on the typo patrol, you mention “Dave Lebing” which I think should be “Lebling.”

(Alexander below–each character is from their respective comic–I went for a different comic for the dragon’s name because all the Asterix characters have names ending with -ix which would spoil the joke, unless I’m going for really obscure ones like Zebigbos or Tullius Detritus.)

- Jimmy Maher

July 17, 2016 at 8:03 am

Woop! Should have known I’d screw that up somehow.

- matt w

July 16, 2016 at 4:03 pm

From that passage one does suspect that there were originally Eight Stones, one of which was sundered. First one finds the Four, which leads one to the Two, and thence the One, and the One-Half, and the One-Quarter, and so on for infinite replay value.

OK, the capitalization of significant Nouns is a well-established enough trope that it can be Useful in setting the stage. I’ll stop snarking now.

- Bob Reeves

July 16, 2016 at 4:33 pm

Enjoyed it and solved it pretty quickly at the time, but I need a walkthrough now (and even following it faithfully, can still lack what I need to cast the last spell, I’ve discovered).

- Dave Gilbert

July 17, 2016 at 5:22 pm

Not only could you run out of reagent, but you could also get stuck if you didn’t write down what color residue appeared on Praxix’s fingers when he cast a spell. When Tag has to cast his own spell at the end of the game, he doesn’t know which reagent is which and has to guess based on their colors.

God this game is flawed for this reason alone. But also GOD did I love love love this game. I got lost in it. I replayed it several times to get to the proper ending, and I didn’t care.

Of course I was like 11 at the time. Perhaps I didn’t know better.

- Lisa H.

July 18, 2016 at 6:59 pm

Off topic: Jimmy, I’m a little confused how you were able to make this reply: https://www.filfre.net/2016/07/journey/#comment-248979 I don’t see any reply link on the comment of matt w’s you were replying to. I do see them on some other comments (is it a question of depth? max 5 levels?) and of course I’m able to leave an entirely new one, but… ?

- Jimmy Maher

July 19, 2016 at 8:12 am

Although WordPress supports comments nested up to 10 deep, my current settings limit them to nesting no more than 5 deep. Otherwise there just isn’t enough screen space, especially on mobile. The way WordPress accomplishes this restriction is simply by not offering a reply link after the 5th level. However, I reply to comments a little differently than you folks do. I normally receive an email, and if I wish to reply I click a link right there in the email which takes me to my administration panel to enter a reply.

So, in short, I can do it but you can’t. ;)

- Lisa H.

July 19, 2016 at 6:21 pm

Speaking of screen space, the central column seems awfully narrow on 1920×1080. Lots of plain brown background with the content filling les than half, maybe about half if I include the sidebar. I could be wrong but thought that was a fairly common monitor size these days? I don’t suppose WordPress supports dynamically serving different versions based on detecting the reader’s window size?

- Eric Lundquist

July 19, 2016 at 10:27 pm

On my screen, the web browser is 21″ wide, and the blog uses up 9.75″ of that, leaving the rest brown. The actual white text column is under 6.75″, or 1/3 of the field.

Thankfully, it uses the full screen on my phone.

- Jimmy Maher

July 20, 2016 at 7:28 am

You’re right that that’s a very common resolution, but most people find reading wide columns of text to be very uncomfortable. Thus most commercial sites and blogs, like this one, keep the text width limited to roughly that of a printed page even when browsing full-screen. Most of the sites I read regularly follow this practice; about the only exceptions, for what it’s worth, are Wikipedia and Planet IF.

I would venture to guess that most people running 1920×1080 on a desktop are like me in that they usually don’t browse with the browser window maximized. And those running that resolution on a laptop screen with much higher pixel density will usually employ a magnification factor to keep everything from being *really* small. Again, that’s my usage pattern anyway.

Not to say you’re doing it wrong, but… well, you may be doing it differently from many or most of us. ;)

- Ibrahim Gucukoglu

July 22, 2016 at 4:57 am

Hi Jim,.

Thanks as always for a concise and decisive look at this Infocom game, it brings me many happy memories as all your articles on Infocom do. I spent many happy hours trying to solve Journey, and it was the only game I didn’t end up using a walkthrough to get me past the final few hurdles. I agree with you re the unfair puzzle solving which forced you to look at your reagents pretty much every. Spell casting to make sure you hadn’t overused your allowances. You often had more of some reagents than you strictly needed while if I remember rightly, the water essence was one of the hardest to come by and for which you needed to solve the final puzzle where you need to cast a lightning spell yourself. Speaking of this puzzle, does the latest version of journey let you complete it as I could never do so. Whenever you mix the final bunch of reagents together, before you can cast them, the dread Lord always kills your dwarf and you end up with Ann in satisfying ending. Could you help me here are as I still have my last save game point somewhere on floppy disk. Thanks.

- Jimmy Maher

July 22, 2016 at 7:19 am

I’m afraid I gave up in frustration and sheer boredom myself before managing to see the winning screen, which makes Journey still the only Infocom game I’ve never actually won. But perhaps someone else can help.

- Aeron Pax

June 27, 2019 at 2:39 pm

Yes, Journey is winnable and I have completed it!

Personally, I loved Journey and stuck with it through thick and thin until I solved it.
I’m sorry your struggles were not met with accomplishment here Jimmy.

I think you punish it too hard in your review, but it is all subjective and this one eluded you. Too bad, but keep your spirits up!

Thanks for your digital antiquarian efforts.

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- Wolfeye M.

September 26, 2019 at 9:27 am

Figures. I’m not a big fan of games with puzzles, they’re just frustrating for me, not fun or relaxing. So most, if not all, of Infocom’s games aren’t something I’m particularly interested in playing, although I have enjoyed reading about them in your blog. Finally, a game that sounds interesting (to me), because it’s like a CRPG (a type of game I’ve got thousands of hours of play time in). And, it’s seemingly designed in “easy mode”, compared to the likes of Zork (the game that turned me off text adventures). But, they “went off the rails”, with dead ends, and all the things that frustrate my enjoyment of that sort of game. Oy vey.

Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur
July 22, 2016

And so at last, twelve years after a group of MIT hackers had started working on a game to best Crowther and Woods’s original Adventure, it all came down to Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur, Infocom’s 35th and final work of interactive fiction. Somewhat ironically, this era-ending game wasn’t written by one of Infocom’s own long-serving Imps, but rather by the relatively fresh and inexperienced Bob Bates and his company Challenge, Incorporated, for whom Arthur represented only their second game. On the other hand, though, Bates and Challenge did already have some experience with era-ending games. Their previous effort, Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels, had been the last text-only Infocom game to be published. As Bates’s buddy Steve Meretzky delights in saying, it’s lucky that Challenge would never get the chance to make a third game. What with them having already “single-handedly killed” the all-text Infocom game with Sherlock and then Infocom as a whole with Arthur, a third Challenge game “probably would have killed the entire computer-game industry.” We kid, Bob, we kid.

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.Arthur’s birth is the story of one of the few things to go according to plan through the chaos of Infocom’s final couple of years. When he’d first pitched the idea of Challenge becoming Infocom’s first outside developer back in 1986, Bates had sealed the deal with his plan for his first three games: a Sherlock Holmes game, a King Arthur game, and a Robin Hood game, in that order. Each was a universally recognizable character from fiction or myth who also had the advantage of being out of copyright. The games would amount to licensed works — always music to corporate parent Mediagenic’s [1]Mediagenic was known as Activision until mid-1988. To avoid confusion, I just stick with the name “Mediagenic” in this article.

He chose to make his game the superhero origin story, if you will, of the once and future king: his boyhood trials leading up to his pulling the sword Excalibur from the stone in which it’s been embedded, thereby proving himself the rightful king of England. That last act would, naturally, constitute the climax of the game. In confining himself to the very beginning of the story of King Arthur, Bates left open the possibility for sequels should the game be successful — another move calculated to warm hearts inside Mediagenic’s offices, whose emerging business model in the wake of the Bruce Davis takeover revolved largely around sequels and licenses.

From the perspective of Challenge, Arthur was created the same way as had been Sherlock, from their offices in suburban Virginia as an all-text game, using a cloned version of Infocom’s DEC-hosted development environment that ran on their own local DEC minicomputer. But after Challenge had delivered their game to Infocom this time around, it went through a lengthy post-production period in the latter’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, offices, during which it was moved to Infocom’s new Macintosh-hosted development environment, then married to graphics created by a team of artists. Due at least to some extent to the nature of its development process, Arthur can be seen as a less ambitious game than any of the three works of graphical interactive fiction that preceded it. Its pictures were used only as ultimately superfluous eye candy, static illustrations of each location without even the innovative scrolling page design of Shogun. A few niceties like an onscreen map and an in-game hint menu aside, this was graphical interactive fiction as companies like Level 9 and Magnetic Scrolls had been doing it for years, the graphics plainly secondary to the very traditional text adventure at the game’s core.

Created by a team of several outside contractors, Arthur’s pictures are perhaps best described as “workmanlike” in comparison to the lusher graphics of Shogun and especially Journey.

Far from faulting Arthur for its lack of ambition, many fans then as well as now saw the game’s traditionalism as something of a relief after the overambitious and/or commercially compromised games that had preceded it. Infocom knew very well how to make this sort of game, the very sort on which they’d built their reputation. Doubtless for that reason, Arthur acquits itself quite well in comparison to its immediate predecessors. It’s certainly far more playable than any of Infocom’s other muddled final efforts, lacking any of their various ruinous failings or, for that matter, any truly ruinous failings of its own.

That said, the critical verdict becomes less positive as soon as we widen the field of competition to include Infocom’s catalog as a whole. In comparison to many of the games Infocom had been making just a couple of years prior to Arthur, the latter has an awful lot of niggling failings, enough so that in the final judgment it qualifies at best only as one of their more middling efforts.

A certain cognitive dissonance is woven through every aspect of Arthur. In his detailed and thoughtful designer’s notes for the game, which are sadly hidden inside the hint menu where many conscientious players likely never realized they existed, Bates notes that “there is an inherent conflict built into writing a game about King Arthur. It is the conflict between history and legend — the way things were versus the way we wish they were.” Bates took the unusual course of “cleaving to the true Arthur,” the king of post-Roman Britain who may have reigned between 454 and 470, when the island was already sliding into the long Dark Ages. He modeled the town in which the game is set on the ancient Roman British settlement of Portchester, just northwest of Portsmouth, which by the time of the historical Arthur would likely have been a jumble of new dwellings made out of timber and thatch built in the shadow of the decaying stonework left behind by the Romans. A shabby environment fitting just this description, then, becomes the scene of the game. Bates invested considerable research into making the lovely Book of Hours included with the game as reflective of the real monastical divine office of the period as possible. And he even wrote some snippets of poetry in the Old English style, based on alliteration rather than rhyme. I must say that this approach strikes me as somewhat problematic on its face. It seems to me that very few people pick up an Arthurian adventure game dreaming of reenacting the life and times of a grubby Dark Ages warlord; they want crenelated castles and pomp and pageantry, jousts and chivalry and courtly love.

But far more problematically, having made his decision, Bates then failed to stick to it. For instance, he decided that jousting, first anachronistically imposed upon the real Arthur many centuries after his death, had to be in his own more historically conscientious version of the story “to make the game more enjoyable.” The central mechanic to much of the gameplay, that of being able to turn yourself into various animals, is lifted from a twentieth-century work, T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, as is the game’s characterization of Arthur as a put-upon boy. Other anachronisms have more to do with Monty Python than written literature, like the village idiot who sings about his “schizophrenia” and the kraken who says he “floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee.” I should say that I don’t object to such a pastiche on principle. Writers who play in the world of King Arthur have always, as Bates himself puts it, “projected then-current styles, fashions, and culture backwards across the centuries and fastened them to Arthur.” Far from being objectionable, this is the sign of a myth that truly lives, that has relevance down through the ages; it’s exactly what great writers from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Thomas Malory, T.H. White to Mary Stewart have always done. The myth of King Arthur will always be far more compelling than the historical reality, whatever it may be. What I object to is the way that Bates gums up the works by blending his psuedo-historical approach with the grander traditions of myth and fiction. The contrast between the Arthur of history and the Arthur of imagination makes the game feel like a community-theater production that spent all its money on a few good props — for instance, for the jousts — and can’t afford a proper stage. Far from feeling faithful to history, the shabby timber-and thatch environs of his would-be Portchester just feel low-rent.

A similar cognitive dissonance afflicts the game and puzzle design. In some ways, Arthur is very progressive, as feels appropriate for the very last Infocom text adventure, presumably the culmination of everything they’d learned. For the first time here, the hint menu is context-sensitive, opening up new categories of questions only after you encounter those puzzles for the first time. (It’s also integrated into the structure of the story in a very clever way, taking the form of Merlin’s future-scrying crystal ball.) The auto-map is useful if not quite as useful as Infocom’s marketing might have liked it to be, and for the first time here the new parser, rewritten from the ground up for this final run of graphical games, does sometimes evince a practical qualitative difference from the old. In these respects and others, Arthur represents the state of the art in text adventures as of 1989.

In other ways, however, Arthur is profoundly old-school, not to say regressive. There is, for instance, an unadulteratedly traditional maze in here, the first such seen in an Infocom game since Zork I’s “maze of twisty little passages, all alike.” There is a trick to figure out at the beginning of the one in Arthur — the old drop ‘n’ plot isn’t possible, necessitating the finding of another method for distinguishing one room from another — but after that moment of inspiration you can look forward to the tedious perspiration of plotting out ten rooms and the hundred separate connections that bind them. How odd to think that the only Infocom games to include traditional mazes were their very first and their very last. And while we’re on the subject of Zork I, I should mention that there’s a thief character of sorts in Arthur who’s every bit as annoying as his shifty progenitor. When you first wander innocently into his domain, he steals all your stuff with no warning. (Thankfully, undo is among the game’s modern conveniences.) But perhaps the best illustration of Arthur’s weird mixing of new- and old-school is the magic bag you find in Merlin’s cave. It can hold an infinite amount of stuff, thus relieving you of the object-juggling so endemic to so many early text adventures from Infocom and others. Unfortunately, though, the bag is stuck behind the domain of the aforementioned thief, who steals it as soon as you try to walk out with it. Thus this huge convenience is kept out of your hands for what may for many players — Arthur is quite nonlinear — amount to the bulk of the game. Progression and regression, all in one would-be handy bag of holding.

In marrying its puzzles to its plot, Arthur is once again best described as confused. Instead of a single score, Arthur has four separate tallies, measuring how “wise and chivalrous,” “strong and courageous” you’ve so far become. In common with a number of late Infocom games, there’s a slight CRPG element at play here: your scores actually affect your ability to perform certain actions. The goal, naturally, is to “gain the experience you need to claim the sword,” in the course of which you “must demonstrate them [your knightly virtues] for all to see.” So, when it comes down to the final climactic duel with King Lot, the villain of the game, what do you do? You distract him and sucker-punch him, that’s what. How’s that for chivalry?

Before wrapping up my litany of complaints, I do have to also mention a low-level bugginess that’s not awful by the standards of the industry at large but is quite surprising to find in an Infocom game. The bugs seem to largely fall into the category of glitches rather than showstoppers: if you immediately wear some armor you’ve just discovered instead of picking it up first and then wearing it, you don’t get the points you’re supposed to; another character who normally won’t follow you into a certain location will suddenly do so if you lead him in animal form, which allows you to bypass a puzzle; etc. Relatively minor as such glitches may appear on their face, Arthur’s CRPG-like qualities make them potentially deadly nevertheless. Because your success at certain necessary actions is dependent on your score, the points you fail to earn thanks to the bugs could make victory impossible.

Scorpia, Computer Gaming World’s influential adventure-game columnist, called Arthur nothing less than “Infocom’s most poorly produced game ever,” labeling the disk-swapping required by the Apple II version “simply outrageous”: “When you have to change disks because part of a paragraph is on one, and the rest on another, you know something is wrong with the design. This is also sometimes necessary within a single sentence.” These problems made the much-vaunted auto-map feature essentially unusable on the Apple II, requiring as that version did a disk swap almost every time you wanted to take a peek at the map. Granted, the Apple II was by this point the weak sister among the machines Infocom continued to support, the only remaining 8-bit in the stable — but still, it’s hard to imagine the Infocom of two or three years before allowing an experience as unpolished as this into the wild on any platform.

During Arthur’s lengthy post-production period, Bates already turned his mind to his next project. It was here that that surprisingly durable original plan of his finally fell victim to the chaos and uncertainty surrounding Infocom in these final months. Still searching desperately for that magic bullet that would yield a hit, Infocom and Mediagenic decided they didn’t feel all that confident after all that the Robin Hood game would provide it. Bates delivered a number of alternative proposals, including a sequel to Leather Goddesses of Phobos and a game based on The Wizard of Oz — yet another licensed game that wouldn’t actually require a license thanks to an expired copyright. Most intriguingly, or at least amusingly, he proposed a mash-up of the two ideas, a Wizard of Oz with “more suggestive language, racier insinuations, and a sub-stratum of sex running throughout. We could substitute a whip for the striped socks and dress Dorothy in leather.” History doesn’t record what Mediagenic’s executives said to that transgressive idea.

In the end, Bates had his next project chosen for him. In a development they trumpeted in inter-office memoranda as a major coup, Mediagenic had secured the rights to The Abyss, the upcoming summer blockbuster from James Cameron of Terminator and Aliens fame. This time Bates drew the short straw for this latest Mediagenic-imposed project that no one at Infocom particularly wanted to do. He was provided with a top-secret signed and numbered copy of the shooting script, and dispatched to Gaffney, South Carolina, where filming for the underwater action-epic was taking place inside the reactor-containment vessel of a nuclear power plant which had been abandoned midway through its construction. After meeting briefly there with Cameron himself, he returned to Virginia to purchase an expensive set of Macintosh IIs through which to clone Infocom’s latest development system. (With Infocom’s DEC system being decommissioned and sent to the scrapyard at the end of 1988, he now didn’t have any other choice but to adapt Challenge’s own technology to the changing times.) The beginning of the Abyss game he started on his new machines, a bare stub of a thing with no graphics and little gameplay, would later escape into the wild; it’s been passed around among fans for many years.

But events which I’ll document in my next article would ensure that the interactive Abyss would never become more than a stub and that the money spent on all that new equipment would be wasted. Bob Bates’s Infocom legacy would be limited to just two games, the first a very satisfying play, the second a little less so. Lest we be tempted to judge him too harshly for Arthur’s various infelicities, we should note again that the three most prolific Imps of all — Steve Meretzky, Dave Lebling, and Marc Blank — had all delivered designs that failed far more comprehensively in the months immediately preceding the release of Bates’s effort, Infocom as a whole’s last gasp, in June of 1989. By the time of its release, Arthur was already a lame duck; the Infocom we’ve come to know through the past four and a half years worth of articles on this blog was in the final stages of official dissolution. With its anticlimactic release having been more a product of institutional inertia than any real enthusiasm for the game on Mediagenic’s part, Arthur’s sales barely registered.

So, it remains for us only to tell how the final curtain (shroud?) came to be drawn over the short, happy, inspiring, infuriating life of Infocom. And, perhaps more importantly, we should also take one final glance back, to ask ourselves what we know, what we’ve recently learned, and what will always remain in the realm of speculation when it comes to this most beloved, influential, and unique of 1980s game-makers. We’ll endeavor to do all that next time, when we’ll visit Infocom for the last time.

(Sources: As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Some of it is also drawn from Jason’s “Infocom Cabinet” of vintage documents. Plus the September 1989 issue of Computer Gaming World, and the very last issue of Infocom’s The Status Line newsletter, from Spring 1989. And my huge thanks go out to Bob Bates, who granted me an extended interview about his work with Infocom.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

↑1

Mediagenic was known as Activision until mid-1988. To avoid confusion, I just stick with the name “Mediagenic” in this article.

Comments
46 Responses

- Andrew Plotkin

July 22, 2016 at 4:58 pm

I’m going to be a game-historical pedant and insist that Zork did *not* have a traditional maze. It added the surprise twist of the thief, who (statistically) foils your attempt to use the drop-and-plot approach — the “traditional” solution defined by Adventure.

(And Adventure had already set the tone by following its original maze with the surprise-twist “all different” maze.)

If Arthur’s maze had absolutely nothing outside the Adventure model — you imply that the thief doesn’t turn up in the maze — then yes, *that’s* “traditional*. And terribly lazy.

- Duncan Stevens

July 22, 2016 at 5:09 pm

The solution to the maze in Arthur is slightly different from drop-and-plot, though it amounts to the same thing. But yes, the thief character in Arthur is stationary and doesn’t venture into the maze.

- Duncan Stevens

July 22, 2016 at 5:18 pm

…actually, on reflection, there are two mazes. But one of them can’t be solved the traditional way at all, I believe.

- Jimmy Maher

July 22, 2016 at 7:25 pm

What I was going for was that you still have to solve Zork I’s maze by mapping it. The later “mazes” that showed up in Infocom games, excepting that in Arthur, all had some trick to figure out that allowed you to avoid mapping them.

- Peter Piers

September 6, 2016 at 2:23 pm

“Avoid mapping”? Surely, more like “mapping differently”, I’m thinking specifically of Spellbreaker. (you DID say “all”…)

- Peter Piers

September 7, 2016 at 3:13 pm

Not Spellbreaker, Sorcerer.

- Jason Dyer

July 23, 2016 at 3:16 pm

Adventure already had the pirate foiling object dropping in the all alike maze. On top of that, the all alike maze was too large for one’s inventory capacity.

The thief very much feels like a pirate knockoff (albeit better done).

The trick in the Arthur maze is actually very clever and satisfying to work out. Actually mapping the maze after was of course the usual dull.

- Rowan Lipkovits

July 22, 2016 at 5:14 pm

“take a peak at the map.” — unless the map is of a mountaintop, you probably meant “peek”.

- Jimmy Maher

July 22, 2016 at 7:22 pm

Thanks!

- Duncan Stevens

July 22, 2016 at 5:37 pm

As I recall, I found Arthur a mixed bag. There were some good puzzles, and some fairly bad ones–I’m thinking in particular of the hot/cold room puzzle in the cave, whose solution is sort of a random flight of whimsy, and the jousting puzzle, which isn’t really a puzzle at all.

As for the tone, I had read enough Arthurian literature, including the Mary Stewart series, to be unbothered by the grimy Dark Ages setting, and I actually found the Book of Hours, alliterative poetry, etc. sort of interesting; I had never encountered that style of verse before. I actually found Bates’s approach to Arthuriana *less* weird than T.H. White’s–the anachronisms aren’t nearly as wacky and flagrant–and I was certainly conditioned to expect a grab-bag approach to Arthur.

- Duncan Stevens

July 22, 2016 at 6:14 pm

Bates left open the possibility for sequels

Hmmm. One thing I did like about the game was the reference in the demon’s cave to the rest of the Arthur story, which was completely unnecessary to the game but served to complicate a plot that otherwise isn’t very interesting. In other words, it puts a different shade on your “winning” the game.

But maybe I should view it as a reference to planned-but-never-made sequels, though I’m hard-pressed to see how the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot triangle could have been made into IF.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 22, 2016 at 8:18 pm

though I’m hard-pressed to see how the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot triangle could have been made into IF.

Level 9 tried, as a matter of fact…

- Duncan Stevens

July 23, 2016 at 12:38 pm

Right, I’d forgotten that. Not a particularly successful attempt, it appears.

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2016 at 7:51 am

I wouldn’t say that Arthur had “planned but never made sequels.” Rather that the possibility of making them would be there if the game should prove a hit, which may seem a fine distinction but is I think an important one.

One other interesting bit of lore: the blank gravestone behind which you hide in the beginning of the game was intended to be Lancelot’s future grave, which according to legend he was shown when young.

- Duncan Stevens

July 23, 2016 at 12:37 pm

Fair enough. Not planned, exactly. But I still wonder (now) whether that part was included to give the game some perspective and weight, or just to hint at the possibility of sequels.

One design sin you don’t mention: hunger puzzles. Yes, a little more creative here because you have to satisfy your hunger when turned into an animal, but still, bleah. I’m trying to give Bates the benefit of the doubt by imagining that, in an actual Dark Ages setting, hunger might really be an issue for a boy wandering around on his own, but I’m not fully convincing myself.

- Lisa H.

July 22, 2016 at 9:33 pm

Bates invested invested considerable research

Is there an echo in here echo in here?

It seems to me that absolutely no one picks up an Arthurian adventure game dreaming of reenacting the life and times of a grubby Dark Ages warlord

A minority, quite possibly, but “absolutely no one” is a bit strong. There’s a lot of history nerds out there.

the game’s characterization of Arthur as a put-upon boy and Merlin as a befuddled, lovable old loon

I’m puzzled that you think Merlin comes off that way. He seemed more an aloof, mysterious mentor type to me. Certainly I don’t think he’s like in the Disney Sword in the Stone (though I haven’t actually read the book; I wouldn’t be surprised if Disney amped up the silliness).

The auto-map is useful if not quite as useful as Infocom’s marketing might have liked it to be

How do you mean? I tend to play with the map always up on the screen precisely because of its usefulness.

When you first wander innocently into his domain, he steals all your stuff, locking you out of victory through no fault of your own.

Does it? Stolen objects can turn up in the village idiot’s hands, where you can trade for them. Is it possible that the crucial object (the only one I can think of that if you were permanently deprived of it, you could not get the other object you need to actually solve the problem of this thief) never gets traded like that? (I’m not sure without looking at a map if not having other objects could prevent you from getting to the tower in the first place.)

Unfortunately, though, the bag is stuck behind the domain of the aforementioned thief, who steals it as soon as you try to walk out with it. Thus this huge convenience is kept out of your hands for what may for many players — Arthur is quite nonlinear — amount to the bulk of the game.

Hm, a fair amount of the game, I suppose, but if you apply yourself to solving the thief problem as soon as you can, you get more use out of the bag.

So, when it comes down to the final climactic duel with King Lot, the villain of the game, what do you do? You distract him and sucker-punch him, that’s what. How’s that for chivalry?

I think the idea there is to show mercy, not to kill if it’s not absolutely necessary.

a Wizard of Oz with “more suggestive language, racier insinuations, and a sub-stratum of sex running throughout. We could substitute a whip for the striped socks and dress Dorothy in leather.”

…wow. Just, wow.

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2016 at 8:08 am

Is there an echo in here echo in here?

Corrected. Thanks!

A minority, quite possibly, but “absolutely no one” is a bit strong. There’s a lot of history nerds out there.

Maybe you’re right. Softened that one a bit (and also fixed a grammar problem).

I’m puzzled that you think Merlin comes off that way. He seemed more an aloof, mysterious mentor type to me. Certainly I don’t think he’s like in the Disney Sword in the Stone (though I haven’t actually read the book; I wouldn’t be surprised if Disney amped up the silliness).

I’m in the opposite position, having never seen the movie. But I think you’re right. I was projecting. Will fix that momentarily.

How do you mean? I tend to play with the map always up on the screen precisely because of its usefulness.

I find it really hard to get a good overview of the geography as a whole using the auto-map because it’s divided into distinct regions, and you can’t move between them. That may be a personal problem, but it’s worth noting that the instant response of a modern interpreter does make the map far less frustrating than it would have been back in the day. Even on an Amiga, there would be a delay and usually disk access to draw the map each time. As for the Apple II… we’ve covered that one in the article. ;)

Does it? Stolen objects can turn up in the village idiot’s hands, where you can trade for them. Is it possible that the crucial object (the only one I can think of that if you were permanently deprived of it, you could not get the other object you need to actually solve the problem of this thief) never gets traded like that? (I’m not sure without looking at a map if not having other objects could prevent you from getting to the tower in the first place.)

But you can only trade one thing for another. Lose the wrong combination of things at the wrong time, and I’m pretty sure you’re screwed. Or, even if you’re not *literally* locked out of victory, the whole process becomes so excruciating that you might as well be. But I removed that statement nevertheless.

- Lisa H.

July 24, 2016 at 2:00 am

Re: Merlin, I suppose there is some goofiness in that the occasional joke lines at the bottom of the screen are meant to be his voice, like, in your head or something, aren’t they? I hadn’t remembered that when I wrote my comment, but I played through last night, and I noticed some doozies of silly jokes. Not out of character for Infocom itself, even in a game with overall serious tone, but if you imagine Merlin saying them… well.

I find it really hard to get a good overview of the geography as a whole using the auto-map because it’s divided into distinct regions, and you can’t move between them.

Ahh, yes. That annoys me as well – although at least this game’s geography is smaller than Zork Zero’s, where I found the lack of being able to get an overview to be rather a pain.

Lose the wrong combination of things at the wrong time, and I’m pretty sure you’re screwed. Or, even if you’re not *literally* locked out of victory, the whole process becomes so excruciating that you might as well be.

Fair enough.

- Nate

July 27, 2016 at 10:21 am

And that was how we got the ’90s computer gaming scene.

“Mediagenic presents an Activision production of an original Infocom game: American McGee’s Wizard of Oz: Madness Returns: Leather Goddesses of Phobos II”

- Jimmy Maher

July 27, 2016 at 10:54 am

Ah, I’d forgotten old American McGee. Never in the field of gaming history has one name been hyped so much for so little reason.

- Carl

July 22, 2016 at 10:37 pm

Typo alert: When you talk about the thematic pastiche, “principal” should be “principle”.

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2016 at 8:13 am

Thanks!

- Alexander Freeman

July 23, 2016 at 1:20 am

“Somewhat ironically, this era-ending game wasn’t written by one of Infocom’s own long-serving Imps, but rather by the relatively fresh and inexperienced Bob Bates…”
I’m not so sure if that qualifies as ironic. Aren’t eras supposed to end with someone passing the torch to the someone less experienced?

Anyhow, I can’t help noticing we’re in the year 1989. If you aren’t already going to do it, I think you should cover King’s Quest 4 before you do Quest for Glory because KQ4 was a major technological breakthrough, having been influenced by the cinematics and visuals of Japanese visual novels for Japanese PCs, and being the first game to use the MT-32 sound card.

- Jimmy Maher

July 23, 2016 at 8:18 am

I would say that eras begin that way, personally. There was no sense of a “passing of the torch” clinging to Infocom at the end. It was all just… over. We can perhaps view it that way if we choose today, but only with the benefit of our knowledge of Bates’s future career.

Yes, I do plan to write about King Quest IV’s technological significance before getting to Quest for Glory.

- Alexander Freeman

July 26, 2016 at 3:38 am

I’ve just thought of something. You might find this interesting:
https://archive.org/stream/Tenth_Anniversary_1990_Sierra-On_Line#page/n17/mode/2up

It gives some background on how Sierra was inspired to come up with its SCI engine. It was actually how I first found out about (having a physical copy of this catalog back in the day). Of course, you might already know everything mentioned in pages 34 to 37. ^_^

- Jimmy Maher

July 26, 2016 at 7:46 am

It seems my copy was missing those pages, which might very well have caused me to miss that anecdote altogether. So thanks for that!

- Alexander Freeman

July 26, 2016 at 11:40 pm

You’re welcome! YouTube also has lots of videos that contrast MT-32 with Sound Blaster and videos of the Japanese version of the Japanese games mentioned in those pages. You can also find videos for cinematic MSX games like Angelus and Jesus. I can see the resemblance to SCI.

- Pingback: Pixel Scroll 7/22/16 Rudyard Pixeling’s Just Scroll Stories | File 770

- Ben B.

July 23, 2016 at 4:32 am

At this moment of transition, gotta say thanks for illuminating the world of early computer gaming in general, and the history of IF in particular. My own experience in this era lay firmly in the realm of Sierra’s graphic adventures, so I had precisely zero experience with this whole facet of my favorite hobby’s early history until I ran into the Zork Anthology in the late 90s.

I’m interested in your opinion of the relative merits of the myriad of ways in which ludic narrative is presented to the modern gamer. Given your own work in the IF medium, it would make complete sense if your own preferences lay in that genre. But as someone who grew up with graphic adventures and then transitioned to FPSes and RPG hybrids like the System Shock, Bioshock, and Deus Ex franchises, I can’t wait to hear your assessment of the relative advantages/disadvantages that games like this have in comparison to the works you’ve looked at thus far. It’s been a fascinating read. Thanks again.

- Brian Bagnall

July 23, 2016 at 2:18 pm

In your wrap-up of Infocom, I’ll be curious to know what other directions the company considered. I never thought Infocom’s graphical adventure engine was radical or different enough to gain them much notice. One obvious direction was to follow other adventure game engines.

At the time, I would have been very interested to see Infocom’s take on SCUMM if they evolved it a few years. Especially if they revisited a few genres they had done in the past. Something like Suspect in SCUMM would make it easier to follow the suspects around (something that was always difficult with text) and the different party costumes and mansion locations would be fun in graphics. The Detective Game for the C64 was almost like Suspect done in SCUMM. As rote as this sounds, releasing SCUMM sequels or remakes of their most popular games would have opened up those adventures to an audience that was put off by the frustrations of a text only parser.

Zork’s style of adventuring seems suitable for engines like Dungeon Master or perhaps Alone in the Dark, though the latter is getting a bit advanced for the time. Anyway, I’m curious how far their discussions went near the end.

- Nate

July 23, 2016 at 8:53 pm

I think one of the main problems was they were too tied to their roots to truly build a graphical adventure. I remember “the best resolution is your imagination” ads at the time and didn’t find them convincing.

Lucasgames had no text adventure history to hold them back. I don’t think Infocom had the right team or abilities to make a break with their past and start over with the simplistic (but intuitive) model of graphical adventure.

It would have been fascinating if they did, though.

- Alexander Freeman

July 24, 2016 at 1:35 am

Perhaps, but then again maybe some of them wanted something more cerebral than typical graphical adventure game. I haven’t played much in the way of LucasArts games (liked Maniac Mansion, though), so maybe I’m being unfair, but they seem to suffer the same problem point-and-click adventure games in general suffer from: The interface limits the possibilities too much, thereby reducing the challenge too much.

Having said that, it seems that Infocom’s mystery games relied on a fairly small set of verbs all throughout, making them more amenable to something similar to the typical point-and-click interface. Unusual actions such as *SPOILER ALERT* svccjoh uif qfodjm po qbe pg qbqfs *END SPOILER* (change each letter to the previous letter in the alphabet to decrypt) could be done by some action that lets you manipulate items by rotating them so as to enable you to insert them into, rub them against, etc. something else. However, I’ve only played Deadline and The Witness. I don’t know if that’s true of Suspect.

It is finally worth pointing out that Brian Moriarty would eventually go on to work for LucasArts, however.

- Michael Davis

July 24, 2016 at 6:08 pm

Just in case anyone would like a tool to assist them in decoding that spoiler: http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/caesar.php

- iPadCary

July 25, 2016 at 6:43 pm

The masterpiece, in SO many ways, that is “Loom”
could have and SHOULD have been an Infocom game.

- Alexander Freeman

July 25, 2016 at 10:56 pm

Well, that IS one of the games Brian Moriarty wrote for LucasArts actually. Haven’t played it, though.

- Peter Piers

September 6, 2016 at 3:17 pm

I know Legend Entertainment is not Infocom, but it may be the best insight we have. The path from Eric The Unready to Mission Critical and Callahan’s Crosstime Salloon and The Blackstone Chronicles tells quite the story!

- Steve

July 20, 2017 at 10:54 pm

It is interesting to wonder how things would have turned out without the Cornerstone debacle…

Would they have been successful enough to avoid having to sell the company to Activision, which in turn would allow them to produce games at their own rate instead of flooding the market with games, which in turn would have perhaps allowed each game to do better on its own merits instead of cannibalizing profits from the others?

I like to think their text adventures would have still continued (albeit to a smaller but dedicated audience, as it is now), but their forays into graphics would have become more like the LucasArts games…at first menu-based, then ultimately context-based.

Or perhaps they would have developed an entirely new system for adventure gaming that we never ended up getting… *wipes away tear*

- ZUrlocker

July 23, 2016 at 9:13 pm

I know this is a minor point in the story but “callow executives” seems like a rather un-supported characterization. The Oz story pitch seems like a terrible idea at any rate.

- Jimmy Maher

July 24, 2016 at 9:55 am

I’d call it more a complete non sequitur than an unsupported characterization. But yeah, see your point. ;)

- David J

July 24, 2016 at 2:17 am

Quick correction: Cameron didn’t direct Rambo.

- Jimmy Maher

July 24, 2016 at 6:48 am

Okay, it seems he just helped write the screenplay. Thanks!

- iPadCary

July 24, 2016 at 2:34 pm

It’s this & “The Dion Crisis” that I’ve been waiting for
ever since I first started coming here. Well done, Jimmy!

- Matt Reichert

July 25, 2016 at 4:29 pm

That’s odd. I played the Apple II version back in the day and didn’t think there was excessive disk swapping. At least not any more than in Zork Zero, Journey, and Shogun. Then again I never used the auto map much so that may have been the main sticking point. I also had more patience for such things back in the day since I didn’t really know better.

One thing I’ll say for Arthur is that I felt the difficulty was extremely fair. I beat it as a 12 year old kid and only had to resort to hints twice, both in spots you mentioned (the maze and how to set up the ‘sucker punch’ at the end). Zork Zero and Journey were tougher but manageable, but I literally played Shogun from the built in hints because I never read the novel (still enjoyed it though).

- Jeffrey

March 15, 2019 at 4:28 pm

Who is the character who will follow you when in animal form? Finished the game and I don’t think I ever came across that.

- Lisa H.

March 21, 2019 at 6:25 pm

I’m not sure what Jimmy’s referring to there either. Possibly the prisoner you free under Lot’s castle?

- Peter Orvetti

June 21, 2020 at 6:05 pm

I found this blog about a year ago while googling some Infocom obscurity and have returned regularly. This weekend, I decided to read all of the Infocom posts. I believe I tried all 36 (yes, even “Fooblitzky”) at least once, though the only one I completed sans hints was “The Witness”. While I love these games, I’ve never been all that GOOD at them. (That said, I’m older now and am rather decent at escape rooms, so perhaps I should try again.)

One running theme throughout these posts is that some — perhaps most — of the Infocom games expect the player to die repeatedly to gain some knowledge needed to win. I think one reason Young Me failed so often is that I just did not anticipate this. Though I was no novice to the IF genre — I first played a Scott Adams game on a TI 99-4A at age seven — I still went in with the assumption that if I were to do everything perfectly right, and not run afoul of an external force like a badly timed Wizard visit — that I should be able to win. Relying on reincarnation seems to take the player out of the verisimilitude (as Graham Nelson would agree).

Through this site I’ve also discovered the current world of IF with some childlike glee. I’ve played a few recommended games and even downloaded Inform7, though I’ve not yet had time to really explore it. After getting my bearings in the current milieu, maybe I’ll give it a whack.

Moving to California
July 29, 2016

The work week of May 1, 1989, started off much like any other inside the beleaguered latter-day Infocom. In the cavernous 18,000 square feet of their office space at 125 CambridgePark Drive — its sheer size was an ever-present reminder of more optimistic times, when Infocom had thought themselves poised to become the next Lotus — the shrunken staff of just 26 souls puttered through another Monday, pausing now and again to chat about the weekend just passed. The old days when CambridgePark would buzz during off-hours with parties and socializing and passionate programmers and testers burning the midnight oil were now a memory of the past. Changing life circumstances — the majority of the remaining staff were now married, many with small children — had done as much as the generalized malaise now afflicting the place to put an end to all that. CambridgePark now felt much like any other office, albeit a peculiarly empty one, and one over which hung an almost palpable sense of impending doom. Still, when the axe finally fell it came as a shock. It always does.

A memo went out early that week asking everyone to attend a meeting on Thursday, May 4, “to discuss the next generation of internal products.” More ominously, the memo said that the 3:00 P.M. meeting would “go as late as necessary.” And evidently management expected that to mean quite late, for they would be “ordering out for dinner.”

Embedded Javascript removed for eBook.[1]Mediagenic was known as Activision until mid-1988. To avoid confusion, I just stick with the name “Mediagenic” in this article.

Bob Bates, working on his licensed Abyss game from suburban Maryland, had planned to fly up to Cambridge for one of his regular design meetings on Monday, May 8. But Infocom’s new Mediagenic-installed head Joe Ybarra called him early in the week of May 1, saying he really needed him to come up this same week if at all possible. When Bates arrived on Friday, May 5, to a curiously subdued CambridgePark, he was ushered immediately into Ybarra’s office. Infocom was moving to California without most of its current employees, Ybarra informed him, and his Abyss project was being cancelled. Nor would Infocom be requiring Bates’s services again; his development contract was officially terminated as of today. When a shell-shocked Bates returned home on the red eye that same rainy night, he found that his roof was leaking buckets. It had turned into that sort of week for everyone.

Steve Meretzky had been scheduled to attend the Computer Game Developers’ Conference that very weekend in Sunnyvale, California. He was still allowed to fly out on Infocom’s dime, but replaced the company’s name on his badge with “Make Me an Offer!” It was at this event that word of the fate of Infocom, which everyone knew had long been troubled but which still remained one of the most respected names in computer games, was first spread within the industry.

News of Infocom’s fate first reached the world at large via an announcement in the May 22, 1989, issue of the Boston Globe Magazine. The understated headline has become oddly iconic among fans: “Computer-Games Firm Moving to California.” A “new consumer preference for games with graphics and sound,” went the workmanlike report, was responsible for Infocom’s travails, along with Nintendo and “the aging of Infocom’s traditional audience, composed of early computer users who spent evenings and weekends hunched over a terminal drawing maps in text-only games that took 20 to 50 hours to solve.”

When word reached the trade press, Mediagenic held tightly to the story that this was simply a move, not a shutdown. Rob Sears made the counter-intuitive claim that Mediagenic was doing what they were “not so much to close Infocom down as to ensure it survives.” “The Great Underground Empire, curiously enough, has not been shut down,” insisted Joe Ybarra. “What’s happened is we’re in the process of relocating it to the West Coast.” At the same time, though, Ybarra did have to quietly admit that none of the Imps who had built the Great Underground Empire would remain a part of it. He could only offer some unconvincingly vague suggestions that some of the former Imps might “do projects” at some point as outside contractors. Certainly anyone wedded to the idea of Infocom as a maker first and foremost of text adventures was given little reason for hope.

You’ll probably see a shift in direction that’s commensurate with which way the market is headed. If you look at all the successful products, they’re graphics- and sound-intensive. Products as a whole are pushing more toward role-playing than toward our classic adventure game. I think we’ll be building more hybrids that share elements of all these different genres. In particular, one of the areas I find most exciting is getting into more interactive graphics, the idea of doing things that are object-oriented… a cross between Manhole and the HyperCard environment and our traditional object-oriented ZIL environment.

(In case Ybarra’s comments don’t make it clear, know that “object-oriented” was one of the sexiest buzzwords of the period, to be applied to anything and everything possible.)

The personnel inside CambridgePark continued to perform their duties in desultory fashion during those final weeks following the meeting that informed them of their fate. There was still plenty to do; Infocom had still not delivered finalized versions of their four most recent works of graphical interactive fiction for MS-DOS, the most important platform in the industry. Yet there was, understandably, little enthusiasm for doing it. Employees spent a lot of time picking out free games from the collection around the office, bidding on the office furniture and computers, and indulging their black humor via vehicles like a lunchtime “slideshow history of Infocom” entitled “Cornerstone through Tombstone.” And then the last day came, and the lights inside CambridgePark were extinguished forever — or at least until the next corporate tenant arrived.

By the point of that final closure, a considerable amount of back-channel sniping by the people of the former Infocom had begun toward Mediagenic. Not coincidentally, Mediagenic’s own take on recent events also became less sanguine. Sources from Infocom claimed that Mediagenic had pulled the plug just as the money spigots were about to open, just before the all-important MS-DOS versions of their graphical interactive fictions finally hit the market; as it was, these versions would all be released by Mediagenic as un-promoted afterthoughts within weeks of the closure. Mediagenic, for whom Infocom’s slow progress on their MS-DOS interpreter had been a huge frustration and a significant factor in their decision to finally wash their hands of CambridgePark altogether, replied that “the consolidation might not have become necessary if the IBM SKUs could have been released initially.” Likewise, Joe Ybarra’s characterization of the fundamental failings of Infocom’s games grew more pointed: “We cannot continue, in the marketplace, living off products that take eight hours to play well and up to 200 hours to complete.”

The view of the decision of May 4, 1989, that prevails universally today, as representative of a definitive ending rather than a move or consolidation, was already taking hold. Mediagenic stopped giving even lip service to Infocom as an ongoing operation of its own in the spring of 1990, when Rob Sears left and the remaining handful of personnel who had worked under him were either let go or absorbed into the parent company. From now on, Infocom would be a mere label under which Mediagenic would release some of their more narrative-oriented games.

In the long run, the people who had made up the old Infocom would all be just fine. After all, they were one hell of an impressive group, with credentials and talents that made them eminently employable. For those stalwarts in positions of business or creative leadership, who had been forced to bear up under the ever more crushing burden of Infocom’s troubled finances since 1985, the final, sharply definitive ending to it all felt like something of a relief as soon as the shock and pain of the initial announcement had faded.

The majority of the old Infocom staff exited the games industry at the same time that they exited Infocom, never to return. The limited or nonexistent applicability of the skills of some of Infocom’s most essential employees to the games being made by other companies — like, for instance, those of editor, producer, and all-around unsung hero Jon Palace — says much about just how unique Infocom really was. For others, though, the decision to get out of games had more to do with their fatigue with such an eternally tormented and tormenting industry than it did with job opportunities or a lack thereof inside it. Put simply, there are easier ways to make a living than by making computer games, and masterful programmers like Tim Anderson, Dave Lebling, and Stu Galley reckoned they were ready for more ordinary jobs. They and many others like them went on to live happy lives, building good, enjoyable careers that needn’t consume them. But there were also some gluttons for punishment who hadn’t yet burnt out on games. Marc Blank, Steve Meretzky, Mike Berlyn, Brian Moriarty, Mike Dornbrook, and Bob Bates would all be stubborn and passionate enough to remain in the industry. We’ll thus be meeting at least some of them again in future articles.

Seen purely as a business proposition, Infocom had been a colossal, unadulterated failure. Whether as independent company or Mediagenic subsidiary, Infocom never enjoyed a single profitable year after 1983, and its final ledger shows it to be millions in the red over the course of its relatively brief lifetime. But very few of those who had worked there thought of Infocom as a failure in the aftermath of its death — not even those former employees whose jobs had entailed fretting about the endless cavalcade of quarterly and yearly losses.

For some former employees, including many who might have had little to no interest in the company’s actual products, Infocom remains forever in their memories just a really fun office to work in — indeed, the best they could ever imagine. Plenty of these people would be shocked to learn of the aura of awed respect and love that still surrounds the very name of Infocom in the minds of fans today; they never realized they were creating timeless games. Others, of course, including virtually everyone who played a major creative role in making the games, did realize, at least after the fact, that they had done something very special indeed. Some former employees accept the bad decisions and missed opportunities that so frustrate fans peaceably, as karma, fate, or just plain old learning experiences. Others, thankfully a minority, still curse the names of either or both Al Vezza and Bruce Davis, the two great villains of the story, and are intermittently tormented by thoughts of what might have been.

What might have been… it’s a fraught question, isn’t it? Yet it’s a question that we as humans, confronted with something as special and noble as Infocom that seems so self-evidently to have died too soon, can hardly resist asking. The historian in me knows to be very leery of setting off down that road. Still, just this once, coming as we are to the end of the most detailed story I’ve ever told on this blog, maybe we can indulge in a little bit of counter-factualizing.

It seems to me that the first and perhaps most important thing we need to do to come to grips with the might-have-beens that surround Infocom is to separate the company itself from the medium of the text adventure. Such a separation can be weirdly difficult to actually accomplish. Infocom didn’t create the text adventure, nor did the company’s end mark the medium’s end — far from it, as years of articles that are hopefully still to come right here on this site will underline — but the name of Infocom would always remain all but synonymous with the form. Jason Scott has told how, when he was making his Get Lamp documentary about the life and times of the text adventure, he was constantly asked by friends how his “Infocom movie” was coming. At a certain point, he just gave up on correcting them.

Given this close connection, it can be jarring to consider that few to none of the people working at Infocom, even among those who weren’t on Team Cornerstone, thought of their company as an exclusive maker of text adventures. The story of how Infocom first came to make text adventures almost accidentally — that of needing a product to bootstrap their operation, and pulling good old MIT Zork down off the shelf as the fastest way to make one — has of course been well-documented, here and in plenty of other places. But even after they had become identified as makers of the world’s most sophisticated text adventures, they were very reluctant to settle for that niche. A research project into cross-platform graphics was begun already in 1983, at the same time that they were running all those iconic “anti-graphics” advertisements; said advertisements were merely clever promotions, not the expression of an absolute corporate philosophy. In 1984, Mike Berlyn and Marc Blank poured considerable time and effort into another innovative research project that came to naught in the end, a multi-player MUD-like environment to be hosted by the online service CompuServe. The following year brought the multi-player computerized board game Fooblitzky, Infocom’s first graphical product and one of the oddest they ever released. In short, Infocom always had ambitions beyond the text adventure, but those ambitions were consistently crippled by the lack of money for game development that plagued the company beginning as early as 1983, when Cornerstone first began to suck all the oxygen out of the room.

The counter-factual scenario most likely to yield an Infocom that survives beyond the 1980s is, as fan wisdom has long attested, one in which they never start down the Cornerstone wormhole. Yet the same best-case scenario is also possessed of a trait that fans may be less eager to acknowledge: in it, the money not spent on Cornerstone isn’t spent on making ever more elaborate text adventures, but rather on embracing new genres, new paradigms of play. Infocom could quite likely have survived if they’d avoided Cornerstone and made smart business decisions, and the world of gaming would doubtless have been a better place for their tradition of literacy, thoughtfulness, and innovation. But unfortunately, those same smart business decisions would likely have to entail branching out from the text adventure early, and eventually moving on completely. Dave Lebling:

I think in terms of continuing to produce the kind of thing we had been producing — i.e., text adventures with lots of cool technology to make them more realistic, lots of plot value, etc. — we could have gone on forever. I’m less sure whether the market would have continued to buy those. We had big arguments about this even before the Mediagenic/Activision acquisition. If you’ve spent several thousand dollars for a computer with a color screen and a video card and you want to display lots of pretty pictures, are you going to settle for a text adventure?

In my opinion, that was sort of a minority taste, just like reading is somewhat of a minority taste. People would much rather look at pictures than read as a rule. There’s a subculture of people who love to read, who are passionate about reading, passionate about books, but it’s not the majority of the public. The same thing is true in computers. There are people who like pictures and action and so forth, and there are people who like reading. And again, they are a minority.

So, I don’t think Infocom could have continued to go on from strength to strength the way we seemed to have been doing initially; we would have plateaued out. I think we eventually would have had to branch out into other kinds of games ourselves. The advantage would have been that we would have decided what to do, rather than some other company.

For proof of Lebling’s assertions, we need only look to what happened in the broader computer-game industry of our own timeline during the mid- to late-1980s. In 1984, at the height of the bookware frenzy, at least a dozen publishers in the United States alone could lay claim to major initiatives in the realm of text adventures, a medium that, being in most people’s mind the ultimate anti-action game, seemed the perfect fit for post-Great Videogame Crash electronic entertainment. Every single one of those initiatives, excepting only the games Infocom released that year, disappointed to one degree or another. To imagine that a counter-factual Infocom — even one with the resources to improve their technology, to offer even bigger and better games than the ones we know, to include pictures and interface conveniences years before the Infocom of our own timeline — could have continued to buck the trend for very long seems a stretch. And indeed, many of Infocom’s financial travails, which began already in 1985 when a subtle but worrisome sales slowdown on the part of many of their games first became evident alongside the obvious disaster that was Cornerstone, had far more to do with the wider market for text adventures than it did with Cornerstone. Put another way: if their games business had continued to explode as it had in 1983 and 1984, Infocom could have weathered the storm of Cornerstone’s failure bruised but solvent. It was a perfect storm, a combination of their slackening games business and the fiasco that was Cornerstone, that cast them into Mediagenic’s arms in 1986.

So, to understand the reasons for Infocom’s collapse we need to ask why it was that the bookware boom, during which they were the shining example to be emulated by all those other publishers, so comprehensively failed to meet expectations. I think there are two reasons really, involving two D-words I tend to dwell on a lot around here: Demographics and Design.

Simply put, the games industry of the mid- to late-1980s wasn’t populated by enough readers to sustain a vibrant culture of commercial text adventures. The overwhelming computer-game demographic by 1985 was teenage boys, who have never been known as a terribly thoughtful group. The dominance enjoyed by text adventures during the earlier years of the decade owed much to the fact that computer gaming was a much more exclusive hobby during that period, practiced only by those with a restless bent of mind and the financial resources to invest thousands of dollars in an object as ultimately useless as an early microcomputer for the home. Mike Dornbrook and others involved with Infocom near the beginning have often mentioned their wonder at the sheer number of doctors and lawyers on their mailing lists. The demographics of gaming began to change with the arrival of the inexpensive Commodore 64 as a major market force in 1983. Within the next year or two, it remade the entire industry in its image — and most definitely not to the text adventure’s benefit.

At the same time that this demographic shift was underway, Infocom and the various bookware bandwagon jumpers were allowing themselves to become confused about the reasons for the text adventure’s ascendancy even among the relatively cerebral home-computer constituency of the early 1980s. Companies making text adventures in those early days can be divided into two groups: those like Sierra who were working in text because nothing else was practical at the time, and those like Infocom who saw the text adventure as a worthy new ludic and/or literary form unto itself. Sierra got away from text adventures just as soon as they could, and went on to become one of the biggest and most important game publishers of the 1990s. Infocom stuck with the form, and we know what happened to them. There is I think a lesson to be found therein. Infocom craved a sort of player who didn’t exist in the numbers they believed them to even in the early years, and who came to make up a smaller and smaller percentage of the gaming public as time went by. By 1987, some of Infocom’s experiments were aimed at a computer-game customer who was all but nonexistent: like a fan of New Yorker-style verbal wit in the case of Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It, or a romance-novel fan in the case of Plundered Hearts.

A tantalizing question must be whether a healthier Infocom could have created a market for such games among non-gaming, possibly non-computer-owning lovers of books and puzzles. Clearly their games did have appeal to some well outside of the typical computer-game demographic. Infocom during their halcyon days had enjoyed glowing write-ups in such places as the Boston Globe, the New York Times Review of Books, Discovery magazine, and even Rolling Stone. Still, the fact remained that their games threw up tremendous barriers to entry, beginning with the sheer cost of the equipment needed to run them and ending with the learning curve for interacting with them. While it’s tempting to imagine a world of interactive fiction existing entirely outside the rest of the games industry with its bash-and-crash take on existence — a world where literary sophisticates pick up a copy of the latest Infocom release from a kiosk in a trendy bookstore — it’s hard to imagine even a healthy Infocom creating such a milieu from scratch. It’s also doubtful, for that matter, whether most of their precious remaining base of customers really wanted to see them moving in that direction. The Infocom games that are most notable for their literary ambition, like A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity, were never among their biggest sellers. A substantial percentage of their customer base, as various Imps have wryly noted over the years, would have been quite happy if Infocom had churned out nothing but endless iterations on the original Zork. It was at least as much the Imps’ own creative restlessness as it was the need to serve the market that led them to dabble in so many different literary genres.

But what of those customers who were perfectly content with new iterations of Zork? Where did they disappear to as the years went by? After all, Infocom continued to indulge them with plenty of traditional games right up until the end, and plenty of other companies were equally willing to serve them. I think that it may be when we come to the Zorkian traditionalists that we especially have to consider that other D-word.

If you ask gaming old-timers about text adventures today, most will recall them as creaky, virtually unplayable things riddled with guess-the-verb issues and incomprehensible puzzles. And here’s the thing: such conventional wisdom really isn’t wrong. When I first began to write the history that this blog has become, I hoped I would be able to unearth a lot of hidden text-adventure gems from publishers other than Infocom to share with you. I did find some games that fit that description, but I also found that even the good games from other publishers stand as deviations from the norm of terrible design, sometimes fostered by an unusually dedicated development team, sometimes by the stars just seeming to align in the right way. It seems impossible to imagine that the bad design that was so endemic to the medium throughout the 1980s didn’t play a major role in turning many players away permanently. Infocom’s games were vastly better than those of their competitors, a fact which played a huge role in fostering the company’s small but legendarily loyal group of hardcore fans. Yet even Infocom’s games were hardly guaranteed to be completely free of design issues. Indeed, as Infocom’s personnel pool shrank and the pressure from Mediagenic to release more games more quickly increased, design issues that they once seemed to have put behind them began to creep back into their games to a rather disconcerting degree. With almost all of the trade-magazine reviewers uninterested in really delving into issues of design, playability, and solubility, players had no real way of knowing which games they could trust and which they couldn’t. The graphic adventures that came to supersede text featured lots of terrible design choices in their own right, but they at least had the virtue of novelty, and that of serving as showcases for the graphics and sound of the latest home computers. (In the longer run, there’s a strong argument to be made that the graphic adventure would wind up shooting itself in the head via poor design by the end of the 1990s exactly as the text adventure had ten years before.)

But rather than unspooling further counter-factual speculations on how it all could have turned out differently, maybe we should ask ourselves another important question that’s less frequently discussed: that of whether an Infocom that survived and continued making text adventures of one sort or another would really have been the best thing for the still burgeoning art of interactive fiction. It’s hard not to remark the sense of creative exhaustion that imbues Infocom’s last gasp, their final four attempts at “graphical interactive fiction.” Much of that is doubtless down to the strain of their ever-worsening relationship with Bruce Davis and Mediagenic, and the long run of commercial disappointments that had prompted that strain. But is that all that was going on? Both Dave Lebling and Marc Blank have spoken of a sense of not really knowing what to do next with interactive fiction after having innovated so relentlessly for so long. Lebling:

I think the space of what can be done in text adventures has been well-explored by a variety of very creative people (by no means all of whom worked at Infocom). It would take, I fear, a qualitative leap in the development language or environment to expand that space. We never got very good at doing conversation, for example. There’s a long way to go before realistic conversations exist in games. We were okay but not spectacular at giving people more than one way to solve a problem. You need a more advanced input method to solve that one. People are just not that interested in typing to the game to simulate physical actions. A virtual-reality suit would solve that but they’re a long way off.

No one has yet solved the primary problem of adventure games, which is, what happens when the player doesn’t do what you expected? Once progress is made on that one, it might be fun to write an adventure game again.

And Blank:

To me, the problem was where it could go, whether we had reached some kind of practical limit in terms of writing a story that way. People used to always ask whether you could have a more powerful parser. Could you have a parser that understood different kinds of sentences? Questions, statements to other characters like “I’m hungry.” Better interaction than the very stilted kind of thing we did in the mysteries, or in Suspended where you could only say things like “go to this room” — where you’re basically just adding the name of a character and a comma at the beginning of a sentence, but everything else is the same.

The problem is that the more things you want to handle the more cases you have to handle, and it becomes very open-ended. You end up much more with the guess-the-word problem. If all of a sudden you can ask any question, but there are really only three questions that are important to the story, you’re either going to spend all this time coming up with answers that don’t mean anything or you’re going to have a lot of “I don’t know that,” which is frustrating. I always suspected it was a dead end. The nice thing about the command-oriented game is that you can come up with a pretty complete vocabulary and a pretty complete set of responses. As soon as it becomes more open-ended — if I can say, “I’m hungry” or “I like blue rubber balls” — how do you respond to that? It’s like Eliza. You get an answer, but it has nothing to do with what you asked, and at some point you realize it’s a fraud, that there’s no information there. What happens is that the worlds get bigger as you open up the vocabulary, but they get sparser. There’s less real information; it’s mostly noise just there to convince you of the world. I think that’s when it gets boring.

I worried about this a lot because people would always ask about the next step, the next thing we could do. It really wasn’t clear to me. Okay, you can make the writing better, and you can make puzzles that are more interesting. But as far as pushing toward a real interactive story — in a real story, you don’t just give everyone commands, right? — that was an issue. We worked on some of those issues for quite a while before we realized that we just weren’t getting anywhere. It was hard to know where to go with it, what was going to be the interesting part of it. Or were you turning it into a simulation, a world you can wander around in but not much happens? I always kind of hit a wall trying to move forward there.

So we said, okay, there are new [literary] genres. So then we had Amy doing Plundered Hearts, Jeff doing Nord and Bert, etc. We don’t know what the next step is technically, so instead we’re going to just kind of mess with the format. So we’ll do a satire and a pulp romance and a horror story. But there was a real issue of creative burnout. You’ve done all these things. Do you just keep doing them? Where does it go? Where does it lead? By the time Infocom closed down, I think it’s fair to say that it wasn’t obvious. I got the sense that some of the games were just an excuse to try something else: “I don’t know what to do, let’s try this.”

To some extent, Lebling and especially Blank fall victim here to their need, being technologists at heart, to always measure the progress of the medium of the text adventure in technological terms. No one declares the novel to be a dead form because the technology of printed text hasn’t advanced in hundreds of years. As many of my earlier articles attest, I see immense value in many of the literary experiments of Infocom’s later years that Blank is a bit too eager to dismiss.

I see evidence in Lebling and Blank’s comments of two creatively exhausted people rather than a creatively exhausted medium. I suspect that the group of people who made up Infocom, brilliant as they were, had taken the art of interactive fiction just about as far as they were personally able to by 1989. The innovations that would follow — and, contrary to both men’s statements above, they most definitely do exist — would largely come out of a very different culture, one free of the commercial pressures that had begun more and more to hamstring Infocom by the end. A work that is to be sold for $30 or more as a boxed computer game has to meet certain requirements, certain player expectations, that often worked at cross-purposes to the medium’s artistic evolution. Must a game require many hours to play? Must a game have puzzles? Can a game feel like a personal testament? Is an interactive-fiction game necessarily a game at all? To paraphrase that famous old Electronic Arts advertisement, can a work of interactive fiction make you cry? These were questions that Infocom — especially but not exclusively an Infocom under Mediagenic, laser-focused as the latter was on delivering conventional hit games — wasn’t in any position to further explore. The medium’s creative future would have to be left to the amateurs.

If we begin to see Infocom as, rather than a beautiful thing that was strangled far too soon, a beautiful thing that simply ran its course, we might just begin to upend the narrative of tragedy that surrounds the legendary company to this day. Among many fans of text adventures today, there’s still a marked tendency to look back on the heyday of Infocom and the commercial text adventure in general as the pivotal era in the medium’s history, a lost golden age that ended far too soon. That’s understandable on one level. This brief era marks the only period in history when it was realistically conceivable to make a living authoring text adventures, a career that plenty of hardcore fans would rate as their absolute first choice in careers out of all of them. We’ve thus seen the tragic version of the medium’s history repeated again and again for far longer than the alleged golden age actually lasted. Ironically, we tend to see it especially in those summations of interactive fiction and its history that try to reach beyond the insular community of present-day enthusiasts to serve as introductions for the uninitiated. Such articles almost always begin with Infocom, proceed to dwell at length on those glory days gone by, then mention the modern community — “but wait, interactive fiction isn’t dead!” — in a way that inevitably smacks of a lingering population of diehards. It seems rather a shabby way to frame the history of a living literary form, doesn’t it? Perhaps we can learn to do better.

In his 2007 PhD thesis on interactive fiction, Jeremy Douglass proposed recasting the commercial era as “an important anomaly, a brief big-business deviation from the otherwise constant association of the IF genre with individual authors each networked into a kind of literary salon culture.” This was what interactive fiction largely was before Infocom, and what it became again after them. Seeing the medium’s history in this way doesn’t mean minimizing the accomplishments of Infocom, whose 35-game canon deserves always to be regarded as the text adventure’s version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, the wellspring and constant source of inspiration for everything that followed. It does, however, mean recognizing that, in terms of great games that delight and amuse and tantalize and sometimes move their players, the text adventure was really just getting started even as Infocom died. Because this blog has long since begun to reach readers from well outside the interactive-fiction community from which it first sprang, I’m going to guess that some of you may have little experience with what came after Infocom. It’s for those readers among you especially that I plan to cover what came next with the same care I lavished on Infocom’s history. So, never fear. I plan to spend a lot more time praising the humble text adventure in the time to come, and I’m far from ready to bury it alongside Infocom.

(Sources: As usual with my Infocom articles, much of this one is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Some of it is also drawn from Jason’s “Infocom Cabinet” of vintage documents. Periodical sources include Computer Gaming World of September 1989; The Boston Globe Magazine of May 22 1989; Questbusters of July 1989; The Games Machine of October 1989, December 1989, and July 1990. See also Adventure Classic Gaming’s interview with Dave Lebling and Jeremy Douglass’s PhD thesis. And my huge thanks go out to Bob Bates, who granted me an extended interview about his work with Infocom.)

Footnotes

Footnotes

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Mediagenic was known as Activision until mid-1988. To avoid confusion, I just stick with the name “Mediagenic” in this article.

Comments
86 Responses

- Max Horn

July 29, 2016 at 4:45 pm

Typo: “would all would be”

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2016 at 10:08 pm

Thanks!

- Duncan Stevens

July 29, 2016 at 4:48 pm

35-game canon deserves always to be regarded as the text adventure’s version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

An interesting comparison! Certainly apt insofar as the set of works varies widely in quality and includes, along with some real masterpieces, several pieces that are generally acknowledged as not very good–and insofar as the *form* of the works in the canon has held sway, to a large extent, in later works.

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2016 at 9:35 pm

It’s a little interesting/amusing to note how close the works are in number as well: 39 plays generally believed to have been solely authored by Shakespeare versus 35 Infocom games. (Although perhaps we should regard the final four works of graphical interactive fiction the way we do the Fletcher collaborations — i.e., as compromised later works produced in the artist’s declining years.)

But one thing that really does repeatedly amaze me is how much of modern interactive fiction, right to the present day, echoes ideas first experimented with in one Infocom game or another. It really has proved an extraordinarily rich heritage.

- Mike Taylor

December 30, 2017 at 12:16 am

What amazes me even more is how much goes right back to ADVENT.

- Jason Scott

July 29, 2016 at 5:46 pm

Hooray! It has been a pleasure to watch the extra material from GET LAMP have a new life in these many articles.

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2016 at 9:38 pm

My sincere thanks, Jason, for all you’ve done — sharing so much with me, lending your name and reputation to this blog before I’d found many readers, etc. I’m in your debt.

- David Cornelson

July 29, 2016 at 6:11 pm

Are you going to explore the history of TADS and Inform?

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2016 at 9:39 pm

In due course, yes. But first we have a little something called AGT…

- Alexander Freeman

July 30, 2016 at 2:00 am

Just out of curiosity, do you plan on covering Space Aliens Laughed at My Cardigan and Paul Panks?

- Jimmy Maher

July 30, 2016 at 7:19 am

Hadn’t really thought about either. Possibly they will come up in the form of community lore. Paul Panks’s is a sad, uncomfortable story that seems difficult to tell in a forum like this one without being exploitative.

- Jubal

July 30, 2016 at 9:58 am

Perhaps something like the infamous Stiffy Makane might be a better example of “the worst of amateur IF” than the late Mr. Panks, not least for the long-lasting influence it has had on the community.

For what it’s worth, I miss the poor mad bastard. He had a drive and a love for the form that few have ever approached.

- Alexander Freeman

July 30, 2016 at 8:39 pm

Yeah, I remember someone comparing him to Ed Wood, and I think that’s an apt comparison. Both were bad at what they did, but they also had relentless drive and tons of passion and were very prolific. Unfortunately, it would be hard to discuss Paul Panks now that you mention it.

- ZUrlocker

July 30, 2016 at 9:20 pm

Great post to end the infocom era. Very thoughtful. Personally, I think some expository on Paul Panks and others would be very worthwhile. He was not always successful, but he sure was prolific.

- Jubal

July 31, 2016 at 12:52 am

The Ed Wood comparison seems pretty fair, actually.

Panks also has the dubious distinction of having written the only amateur-era IF game ever to be discussed on Cracked.com.

- Andrew

July 29, 2016 at 7:48 pm

Oddly appropriate that you quote the EA tagline about IF making you cry – I wouldn’t quite say this article has done that for me, but it is moving to read and the extended analysis and almost “obituary” of Infocom was clearly a labour of love on your part.

I can almost picture you sitting at your PC, trying to type “And so in May 1989 they pretty much all got sacked. The End”, before realising that you couldn’t possibly end it so abruptly and, even if took you sitting up 72 hours straight to do it properly and finishing in a caffeine-induced haze then, dammit, that’s what you were going to have to do.

Does your last piece on Infocom feel like the end of an era to you?

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2016 at 9:48 pm

It certainly marks a major turning point, and I’m very much aware of that. Not to disappoint, though, but your picture of how this article came to be is a little more dramatic than the reality. My working habits are more classical than romantic, I’m afraid. Marriage and middle age tend to do that to you. ;)

I do also think that I share some of the sentiment of the Infocom old guard in mostly just being sort of glad it’s all over. The final era is pretty dispiriting, and I don’t particularly enjoying raking game after game over the coals, although I strained mightily to find ways to do that interesting, readable ways. But still, it was more in the case of those last four reviews that I was tempted to just do something like you describe — just write, “And the last four games all sucked,” and then write this article. This article, on the other hand, had been brewing somewhere in the back of my mind for literally years.

And then of course I am genuinely excited to get to what came after Infocom, which is a great story in itself. So that certainly helped ease the pain. ;)

- AguyinaRPG

July 29, 2016 at 8:16 pm

Very nice examination, Jim. I didn’t read every Infocom article up until this point, but I definitely wanted to read this one.

I think your take on Infocom’s relevance and ability to persist is one that I can follow. These guys were not just restricted to these co-called “archaic” style of games or styles such as Zork (I’m looking to talk to Dornbrook about his work at Looking Glass for example). The interactive fiction medium has many important lessons to glean from it. Certainly games like Plundered Hearts prove that much for their diversity in theme and approach. The very best of the genre taps into styles of interaction which are seldom seen in video games, merely for not having enough prominent examples to draw from.

However, I do agree with Lebling and Blank on the failure state of interaction. Chris Crawford obviously echoes this (while touting his own work, of course) and I do see it as a roadblock. Not necessarily because you *need* to have a conversation in these games, but because the world is constructed as if you do. The world isn’t so intelligently designed as to let the player understand why actions don’t work. It’s a concession and always has been.

I do also believe that the literary types in games do have a certain arrogance, though I don’t mean that in a mean way. They are dedicated towards bringing a certain level of sophistication to games, fighting tooth and nail to preserve what they believe to be a good story against what’s best for the game. Both Infocom and Sierra demonstrate this well, I think. I don’t think you can excuse the former just because the latter is far more obvious. Still, I respect both camps, and I hope that discussion of Infocom will continue to help game creators realize the different paths they can utilize in the realm of interactive experiences.

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2016 at 9:52 pm

Can you give some examples of Infocom “fighting to preserve what they believe to be a good story against what’s best for the game?” I ask because, while I can perhaps think of just a few, they’re all among the 13 Infocom games I would broadly categorize as design failures rather than the 22 successes. I certainly don’t see it as a commonplace pattern in their designs. Most of their failures failed for very different reasons.

- Jollo

July 30, 2016 at 7:21 pm

I believe he’s talking about their later, more cerebral thought experiments.

- Brian Bagnall

August 3, 2016 at 2:48 pm

You wouldn’t happen to have a list of the 22 successes and 13 failures would you?

- Jimmy Maher

August 3, 2016 at 3:06 pm

See the 22 Infocom games listed in my Hall of Fame. ;)

- Carl Read

July 30, 2016 at 12:28 am

I remember reading someone from Infocom saying once that “we probably have more computing power here than some third-world countries”. Which was probably true, but it may have also explained their lack of commercial savvy. In a world when home computers were mostly without floppy drives, (except for those owned by doctors and lawyers), they were only making multi-disk games.

I played a lot of cassette-based adventures before I touched an Infocom game, but didn’t find Infocom’s any more enjoyable. This is probably me though, in that I enjoy looking around a world more than solving puzzles.

One thought you possibly haven’t had regarding the limited take up of text adventures in those days, is that a lot of users could hardly type and probably hated doing so. We take it as a given now that people can type, but a lot of those buying C64s for games probably hadn’t touched a keyboard before getting them. This, now, shouldn’t be a problem.

- Jimmy Maher

July 30, 2016 at 7:29 am

I wouldn’t say that Infocom lacked commercial savvy. Their iconic marketing campaigns from 1983 and 1984 in particular ought to be studied in every business school in the land. Even Cornerstone was quite well-presented. What brought them down was far more complicated.

- Carl Read

July 31, 2016 at 12:57 am

But the arrogance inherent in that ‘third-world’ comment perhaps explains why they didn’t bother to work out how to get their games working on cassette-based machines. No amount of marketing could get them into that market, which as you know, was huge in the UK.

- AguyinaRPG

July 31, 2016 at 2:11 am

But really, how much software actually was a success from the US to the UK in this period? Very few publishers really tried to make that gap. Activision did it early on, but I can’t recall any big hits they had with that.

- Jimmy Maher

July 31, 2016 at 6:34 am

Ghostbusters was a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

- Carl Read

July 31, 2016 at 7:24 am

I don’t know for sure – that’s a job for a historian! ;)

(Remembers an early mention of infocom games in MicroComputer Printout – scans and puts on Web here…

http://oi66.tinypic.com/2cg0me1.jpg
http://oi67.tinypic.com/2vihuvb.jpg

) That’s from January 1983 and was someone’s idea of what should be included in their desert island disks. The Zork disks were for sale in the mag at £29.95 each (albeit Atari ones). For comparison, the Spectrum was selling for £125 at that point, the Commodore Vic20 for £170, its cassette drive for £44.95 and its disk drive for £396!

It’s hardly any wonder the UK games market was cassette based then. The US games were available, but if disk only, it’s obvious not many would sell.

- Jimmy Maher

July 31, 2016 at 6:45 am

I don’t see it as arrogance. Their games were totally dependent on the Z-Machine’s virtual-memory scheme; one might even say that that was at the heart of everything that made them so special. There just wasn’t any way to move them onto cassette without gutting them so badly as to cut out the heart of what made an Infocom game an Infocom game.

To advance a medium (any medium), developers sometimes have to leave some hardware behind. Infocom showed a willingness to do this throughout the company’s existence. In the beginning, when Zork I was first released, the American market was also still fairly cassette-centric. Infocom thus made a conscious choice from the beginning to forgo a big chunk of their potential market in favor of offering the remainder a much *better* experience. Later, of course, they did it again with the Interactive Fiction Plus games. Neither A Mind Forever Voyaging nor Trinity, perhaps the two most respected Infocom games today, would have been possible without this willingness.

Infocom had terrible distribution in Britain anyway until the Mediagenic acquisition — making their games available at last in Europe for a (somewhat) reasonable price was one of the few good turns Mediagenic did Infocom. And by that time disk drives were starting to become a little more common. Yes, you could perhaps argue that Infocom should have aggressively pushed into Europe earlier, but they were doing very well in the United States already, and were still a small company with little muscle to establish distribution in foreign markets. And then there was the cassette/disk-drive dichotomy between the markets…

Infocom *can* be justly accused of arrogance in some areas. But it’s really hard for me to see this as being among them. The “Third World” comment was almost certainly delivered with a wink and a nudge. Infocom loved to talk up the power of their PDP-10, which was a completely plebeian piece of hardware in the world they came from, for the benefit of the wide-eyed gaming journalists who came to visit them. Arrogance or just a bit of sly fun? You be the judge…

- Carl Read

July 31, 2016 at 9:01 am

I’ve just read your ‘ZIL and the Z-Machine’, so now know how they approached storage. (Sorry for my random-access approach to reading the site…) And I’m still not convinced the games couldn’t have been done on both disk and cassette without gutting them.

The virtual memory approach obviously wouldn’t work on tape, but adventures are made up of locations which are usually linked to other locations near to them. Groups of near locations could be loaded in as needed from tape, with rewinds hopefully kept to a minimum for the player. (Ahh – the good old days…:)

My guess is they just couldn’t be arsed to solve the problem, if they even considered it.

- Jimmy Maher

July 31, 2016 at 11:14 am

If you really are willing to be convinced, I would suggest you look a little more carefully at the Z-Machine architecture and consider such questions as how you would create a contiguous environment — objects dropped in one location stay there; doors stay open or closed; the thief continues about his business on the other side of the map; machines and gadgets stay in the state you left them; etc — using a bunch of static loads and what kind of end-user experience having to constantly wait for tape access as you, say, roam to and fro over the landscape of Zork would result in. A good place to start might be the Z-Machine Standards Document: http://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point1/index.html.

If not, fair enough. “They just couldn’t be arsed” does have the virtue of pithy simplicity. ;)

- Carl Read

August 1, 2016 at 7:59 am

To quote you from here: https://www.filfre.net/2012/01/zil-and-the-z-machine/

“The dynamic data — memory the virtual machine will write to as well as read — is always stored in the host computer’s RAM. The static data, however, is loaded in and out of RAM by the interpreter as needed in 1 K blocks known as pages.”

In other words, it’s just the static data that’s loaded from disk as the game is played, unlike what you’re trying to claim below. With some thought, it could’ve been made to work fine on disk as well as be usable from tape.

Infocom’s parser and the games themselves should be their claim to fame. The use of virtual memory to achieve it is neither here nor there.

- Jimmy Maher

August 1, 2016 at 10:41 am

I’m afraid you’re confusing dynamic and static data with dynamic and static loading of that data. In a disk-based game the static data — i.e., data that will not change in the course of play and thus doesn’t need always to be memory-resident — can be loaded dynamically under the control of the interpreter, swapped in and out in discrete 1 K chunks as needed. This is because a floppy-disk drive is a (relatively) fast dynamic-access storage device. A tape drive is a slow sequential storage device, which means the only practical way to use it as a sort of virtual memory is to divide the game into chunks that each effectively functions as an independent little adventure of its own. This was how, for example, Level 9 did it with their later three-part adventures.

Maybe a real-world example of the challenges would be helpful. Let’s take Zork I, the smallest story file Infocom ever released and thus presumably the most amendable to being converted to tape. Here’s its vital statistics, courtesy of the “infodump” analysis utility. (Note that this is the later, more fleshed-out version of Zork I rather than the one that ran in the 32 K TRS-80 with disk drive. This later release, requiring also a more fleshed-out interpreter, is the version that sold by far the most units. Using it strikes me as in keeping with our stipulation that we’re not allowed to “gut” the games to fit them onto tape. If you like, however, feel free to substitute the numbers from my ZIL and the Z-Machine article. I don’t think the core problems will change all that much.)

Story file is zork1.dat

**** Story file header ****

Z-code version: 3
Interpreter flags: Display score/moves
Release number: 88
Size of resident memory: 4e37
Start PC: 4f05
Dictionary address: 3b21
Object table address: 02b0
Global variables address: 2271
Size of dynamic memory: 2e53
Game flags: None
Serial number: 840726
Abbreviations address: 01f0
File size: 14b8c
Checksum: a129

This tells us that the total size of the story file is about 84 K (1db8c in hex) and the size of the resident memory — i.e., dynamic memory, or things that can change during play, and thus have always to be present in the computer’s RAM — is about 20 K (4e37 in hex).

Now, let’s consider some numbers in the case of a 48 K tape-based Sinclair Spectrum, which is the platform I’m going to presume you propose Infocom should have been targeting. The interpreter generally required about 16 K on the 8-bit machines. Then we need to devote another 20 K to the dynamic memory, putting us at 36 K. The Z-Machine requires a stack of at least 2 K, putting us at 38 K. I’m not familiar enough with the Spectrum to know how much additional memory is required by the screen and other utility functions, so in the spirit of putting the best possible face on things we’ll ignore the significant additional memory we’d lose there.

That still leaves us with just 10 K to use for the remaining 64 K of story file. Infocom’s development system wasn’t designed to sort static memory into chunks based on geography, but, again, let’s hand-wave that away, assuming they did a major ground-up rewrite to somehow give it this capability. It still means that Zork I would require 7 or at best 6 separate tape loads for the player to entirely traverse its geography. And Zork I is an extremely nonlinear game, meaning the player is constantly trekking hither and yon. I’m going to guess that, in addition to the frustrations of constantly rewinding and fast-forwarding the tape, the player of such a game would spend far more time waiting on all these loads than actually playing.

And, again, this is a best-case scenario with countless problems hand-waved away. The non-changing details of the objects the player can carry, for instance, are not stored in dynamic memory in the standard Infocom system, but they would have to be in a tape-based scenario like this one if you didn’t want to have to go to tape every time you examined an object in your inventory. The result would be a requirement for still further memory-resident code, and still less space left over for the rest of the game to be swapped in as needed from tape.

Later Infocom story files — even the non-Interactive Fiction Plus games — grew steadily in size to pin themselves right up against the theoretical maximum story-file size of 128 K. For this reason, Infocom dropped support for 48 K machines even with disk drives by 1985 or so. There just wasn’t enough space. I’m going to have to bow out now, but I really would encourage you have a look at the Z-Machines Standards Document if you’re interested in exploring this topic further.

- Carl Read

August 1, 2016 at 8:00 am

Umm – above! :)

- Keith Palmer

August 1, 2016 at 10:12 pm

All this discussion of “putting an Infocom game on cassette” has me thinking of Mini-Zork, boiled down from Zork I (just as Zork I was a segment of the “mainframe Zork”…) There was even a map somewhere in the “Infocom Cabinet” files that left me wondering if a similar process of condensing was being contemplated for Zork II. Of course, just because it was possible to fit a complete adventure game and the necessary interpreter into the Commodore 64’s memory space doesn’t mean this would have been an appealing idea to those who would have had to count every character…

- Alexander Freeman

August 2, 2016 at 4:17 am

All this has made me wonder how text adventure game that did what Wasteland did would have been received. That is, one that did something like putting all the descriptions of objects and rooms and some read herrings into the manual so as to make it small enough to fit on something like a tape.

- Jimmy Maher

August 2, 2016 at 6:41 am

Infocom came closest to that in Moonmist, which effectively moved most of the room descriptions into a brochure accompanying the game. Hard to say whether it was more motivated by the need to save space or copy protection, though. (But then the same could be said of Wasteland.) Personally, I found it very annoying. You interact with the text much more consistently and intimately in a text adventure.

- flowmotion

August 8, 2016 at 4:38 am

Just to back up what Jimmy is saying here is some more gross figure, found here. (regarding Commodore’s cassette system):

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=690223

> Well, if the transfer rate is 300 baud (which really meant “bits per second” even though “baud” is supposed to mean “signal state changes per second”)… 10 bits are used per byte, so a 30 minute “side” of a cassette would hold 30minutes * 60secs/min * 300bits/sec / 10bits/byte = 54 Kbytes.

Per a previous article, Zork I was 77K (about half the size of an Apple disk). So even if a feasible swap system was somehow built, it would take ~43 minutes to load the data into the system, under optimal conditions. As a practical matter, you would constantly be loading the cassette as you moved around the map.

I only had the briefest experience with cassette PCs and getting 4kb of STARTREK.BAS to load was a flakey and interminable experience. So, even if it was theoretically possible to get these games loading from a cassette, the user experience would be so horrible really nobody would want to do it.

- Keith Palmer

July 30, 2016 at 11:33 am

I knew about “11 of the 26 were asked to move; 5 of the 11 actually moved” and had seen “From Cornerstone to Tombstone” in the “Infocom Cabinet,” but hearing Infocom had to finish the MS-DOS interpreter for their final games even after being told the bad news adds that extra bit of poignancy.

In any case, as much as I can remember a bit from Get Lamp that makes me wonder if a thing or two might yet be said about “The Lost Treasures of Infocom” (although I can absolutely suppose the bundles were something a handful of new people at most worked on), this was a solid wrap-up. Lebling and Blank’s gloomy “how can these games ever respond to unanticipated input?” comments did at least leave me wondering if there could be something to them, but perhaps that just leaves me anticipating what you’ve got to say about the “noncommercial scene.” (There, perhaps, I have to face how I could always play more current interactive fiction than the limited amount I actually do.) Your speculation about just what had happened to the people who had bought Infocom’s first releases seems reasonable enough, although I can think back to Get Lamp again and a comment in it that, for all the self-depreciating rhetoric in the IF community about “the eclipse of literacy,” “reading off a computer screen” may be more comfortable for people now (through improved resolution and simple practice) than it was in the 1980s. (I suppose there I can also reflect on a short-lived Apple II magazine from the mid-1980s that included a column from Softalk’s Margot Tommervik; in the hangover after the 8-bit home computer boom of the early 1980s went bust, she built one column around speculation the “computer market” had already saturated at the size of the “people who read for pleasure” market.)

As for me, in 1989 I was still wondering if I’d ever see a hint about just how to hold “tea” and “no tea” at the same time and finish The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; seeking out other Infocom games at that time didn’t occur to me at all… although maybe the awareness that developed that I’d “missed out” (at least until “The Lost Treasures of Infocom”) might have played its own part in making Infocom stick in my head.

- Jimmy Maher

July 30, 2016 at 1:12 pm

The release of Lost Treasures definitely marks a watershed moment of its own. Widely regarded among the general public as just a maker of oddball, outdated games by the time they closed, Infocom’s stock rose precipitously in the early 1990s following the huge-selling Lost Treasures compilations, the text adventure’s last belated commercial hurrah. You’re right that that must be an important part of any Infocom history in its own right; it’s really the starting point of the modern view of the company.

- Felix

July 30, 2016 at 2:03 pm

Ironic how a thing several people wrote about this spring (myself included) was already so clearly seen and said by Marc Blank, who knows how long ago: that any parser-based text adventure is doomed to be 90% fluff, that has to be painstakingly handcrafted even though it does nothing to advance the story; that picking the important bits out of all the fluff can be as tedious for the player as it is for the author, even outside of puzzles; last but not least, that making the parser and world model smarter would only increase the proportion of irrelevant fluff from 90% to 99.9%. If anything, the post-commercial era has taught us that more sophistication wasn’t the answer. And it still took us all a lot of pain to reach that conclusion.

Either way, Infocom didn’t deserve Cornerstone; saddling them with that terrible idea was a lot like throwing a millstone to a drowning person instead of a life raft. As my mother taught me, “if you can’t help someone, at least leave them alone”. Good things might have come out of Infocom dying of natural causes rather than bean-counter boneheadedness, things we can only guess at now. And I’m sick of seeing this story repeating again and again. Three times just in my own career alone is plenty enough.

- Michael Davis

August 1, 2016 at 7:53 pm

Is that irony?

- flowmotion

August 3, 2016 at 3:52 am

Excellent point.

Perhaps Infocom’s few big hits were not solely due to the “14 year old boy” appeal, but that IF works best in simplified universes where there are only treasures to steal, trolls to stab, and buttons to push, and so on.

ASK CHARACTER ABOUT HIS WIFE is something you might be eager to read, but not something you ever personally like to do. The tropes worked as tropes.the “literariness” was perhaps unwanted.

- Felix

August 7, 2016 at 2:49 pm

@flowmotion: Indeed. Note how in Stanley Parable, interaction is also limited to moving around and pushing buttons…

- Ben Kidwell

July 30, 2016 at 7:13 pm

Amazing article. Very emotional to finally read this after so many years of reading your retelling of the story of Infocom, which was also the story of my childhood. You combine impeccable research with personal experience and love for the works and an empathetic human understanding of the protagonists. This blog changed my life by providing me with tremendous inspiration for my own creative projects. I’m excited to see your telling of the story of the rise of independent IF.

- Colin Djukic

July 31, 2016 at 7:03 am

I want to second that comment. Your articles are always wonderful, but this is a high mark. Thank you for what you’re doing, and I’d like to take a bow to Jason Scott as well, keep it up.

- Steven Marsh

July 30, 2016 at 8:02 pm

A fascinating coda to a fascinating company. Thank you for your efforts.

As an aside, this article is showing as having posted on July 23; I suspect that’s not the case (and it actually posted July 29, based on the first comments). Not sure how much that matters to you, but I thought I’d mention it!

- Jimmy Maher

July 30, 2016 at 8:15 pm

I accidentally hit publish on a draft some days ago, then quickly unpublished it again. It must have retained the original date. Changed it manually. Thanks!

- Alexander Freeman

July 30, 2016 at 8:46 pm

I came to more or less the same conclusion you did about Infocom. I seem to recall you even comparing what happened there to a summer romance. I still think if they’d played their cards right, Lurking Horror and Plundered Hearts wouldn’t have been compromised as much, and they would have made some games that were better than Zork Zero, Beyond Zork, and Shogun. They could have done a better job branching out to other types of games before finally leaving text adventure games behind for good in, say, 1990.

- Pedro Timóteo

July 31, 2016 at 10:08 am

Great post as always; both informative and emotional.

Like others have done (both yourself, and commenters above), it’s fun to speculate, to ask “what if” (there had been no Cornerstone, Infocom had been slightly better at business, and so on. I think they *might* have extended the commercial IF era for a few years (not many), and later innovations such as Magnetic Scrolls’ “Magnetic Windows” and Legend’s engine might have come from Infocom instead, and possibly even a few years earlier.

I also wonder if Infocom might have lived on doing point and click adventures — possibly more “mature” and innovative than those from Sierra and Lucasfilm –, if they had an engine of their own at least as good as AGI/SCI and SCUMM. But would the Imps have been interested in doing those kinds of games? In the “real timeline”, only one of them was (Brian Moriarty, with Loom)…

Of course, by 2000 or so, even point and click adventures probably couldn’t go on making any real money…

- Pedro Timóteo

July 31, 2016 at 10:20 am

I also wonder if Infocom couldn’t have had a *lot* of success doing graphical remakes of their classic games (think Softporn -> Leisure Suit Larry), in the late 80s and early 90s. They would already have better stories, better puzzles and a better design than most of what Sierra did… Who’d want Space Quest when they could have AGI(ish) Planetfall?

Again, I don’t know if the Imps would have enjoyed that, though.

- Alexander Freeman

August 1, 2016 at 12:36 am

Interesting points. I think a graphical remake without a parser would have lost too much. However, the graphics for Sierra’s AGI and SCI0 games took up so much memory that there wasn’t enough left for a parser as good as Infocom’s. CDs could have taken care of that problem, but they didn’t take off until after parser games left the market. I’m not sure why even point-and-click adventure games died commercially around 2000, though. They seem as though they’d cost a lot less to make than plenty of modern-day games.

- Lisa H.

August 1, 2016 at 1:35 am

Who’d want Space Quest when they could have AGI(ish) Planetfall?

I’d play them both. Although that might be easy for me to say given that I wasn’t playing SQ contemporary with its releases; like Planetfall I only came to it rather later.

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- Bernie

July 31, 2016 at 4:12 pm

My Two Cents ….

Joe Ybarra had a part of the truth : Manhole + HyperCard … but was wrong about people not wanting games that took “20 to 50 hours”.

The Infocom gang were onto something with their discovery of a “Zork-leaning” demographic hungry for more puzzles … but wrong on their pessimistic views about computer games and reading. And specially wrong believing that the game world had to be “hyper-interactive” in order for adventure games to have a future.

What i’m saying is that all these guys could have anticipated the future and acted accordingly if they had worked better together.

Myst , a very “zorkian” world full of puzzles (ditto for Infocom’s demographic insights) from the people who created The Manhole (ditto for Ybarra’s comment) using an engine very similar to HyperCard that was created on Mac II’s (ditto for Ybarra and the Imps) , went on to become the best selling computer game in history since its introduction in 1994. And it included loads of reading ! Gee, the back story was even based on magical books and writing !

There’s also The 7th Guest : not very Zork-like, but entirely puzzle-based , and with a horror theme “lurking” behind the brain teasers. It also sold a lot of copies and spawned a sequel.

The “what-if” question brought to mind a story I read in an old issue of RetroGamer Magazine : Ultimate Play The Game (which I think you have mentioned in Antiquarian also), one of the premier ZX Spectrum developers during the system’s golden years (83-87). Although their creations were in very different genres from Infocom’s, they shared the same “cult” status among their audience and that “otherness” distinguishing them form the rest of their peers in the eyes of the press. What makes the story of Ultimate’s founders, in my opinion, a success in contrast to Infocom’s is that they were able to see the demise of their chosen technology platform (early-to-mid 80’s 8-bit home computers) very early (’85-’86), when the ZX, C64 and their peers were at their peak, and acted accordingly. They took their “essence” as designers and applied it to the up-and-coming console medium by re-forming as the legendary Rare Ltd., of “Donkey Kong Country” fame. They even managed to swith genres and still make it big with their “Goldeneye 007” 1st person shooter.

The collapse of Infocom’s whole concept was not Conerstone’s or Mediagenic’s fault in the end, it was the Imps’ ! …. they weren’t flexible enough towards new technology as designers, and neither entrepreneurial enough to sell their stake at the right moment and regroup under a new banner. This surely would have benefitted adventure gaming in general during the 90’s.

Sorry for the long post ! Perhaps Jimmy can help me a little and reprhrase this using his unique powers of synthesis and insight , like he did with the material on this wonderful post !

- Jimmy Maher

July 31, 2016 at 5:12 pm

You do want to be careful drawing too many conclusions from the huge success of Myst. It was the first game to really show off the capabilities of the new generation of so-called “multimedia PCs”: CD-ROM, SVGA graphics, Soundblaster sound cards. Most people who bought it bought it as a showpiece, not a game they were all that serious about playing and completing. It was also packaged with many “multimedia kits,” which made up a big chunk of its sales. It must be one of the least *played* games in proportion to its sales in history.

Of course, back in the day plenty of people bought Zork as a showpiece of its own. And just as (I would argue) many publishers took the wrong lesson from the success of Zork, the success of Myst resulted in a flood of clones, none of which managed more than a tiny fraction of its sales.

- Lisa H.

August 1, 2016 at 1:37 am

My mother bought Myst; I don’t know if she ever played it much, but my main picture of it is of the box sitting dusty on the little side table next to her computer. Personally, I still haven’t ever played it!

- Bernie

August 5, 2016 at 3:12 pm

Thank you very much jimmy !

Maybe my perspective is not wide enough, since I was one of those few you mention that actually played Myst and finished it. It even inspired me to take up Zork again after many years.

Your comment has led me to refine my view a little bit : Myst was a very honest effort to bring traditional, zork-style, adventure-gaming to wider audience by taking advantage of the emerging Multimedia-PC technology platform. But it turned out they only managed to promote the technology itself, and were only preaching to the converts as far as adventure gaming is concerned. But they tried, and were sucessful in some twisted way apart from financially. This could’ve been Infocom’s Imps, and perhaps the kind of money generated by Myst would’ve given them enough space to create something truly wonderful.

Your comment about developers learning the wrong lesson from Zork and Myst also gave a new perspective on another genre you’ve discussed here : RPG’s. US and European developers might also have learned the wrong lesson from the “Gold Box” and Richard Garriott’s “canonical” Ultimas (V, VI and specially VII) going on to craft bigger and bigger geographies, increasingly complex world models and legions of NPC’s with detailed lives and homes of their own. This brought good profits during the 90’s and early 2000’s, perhaps thanks to a novelty factor and improving 3D graphics. But there was also Final Fantasy V, VI, VII and the whole Japanese / console phenomenon, the guys who learned the “right” lessons from Garriott : emphasize the ‘Role’ and ‘Game’ aspects and simplify the ‘Play’ with almost-linear progression and an intuitive battle interface. And don’t waste graphics power on more “realistic” knights and orcs, make it all very stilyzed and fluid, manga-style. Then, the Diablo series brought that all-important element of real-time hack-n-slash action. If you look at any best-selling RPG of the last 10 years, you’ll immediately recognize Final Fantasy’s and Diablo’s influence, but in the same historical time frame the closest thing you’ll find to a “modern-day Ultima” are, paradoxically, re-makes of Ultima V and VI painstakingly created on modern engines that provide scripting capabilities.

- whomever

August 5, 2016 at 4:39 pm

I’m not sure I buy the “all recent successful RPG Isn’t like Ultima”. What about the Elder Scrolls? They have been super successful and feel like pretty direct descendents to me.

- Sam Garret

August 1, 2016 at 12:06 am

Tiny, tiny typo I almost hesitate to mention as it’s so small:

“gaming public as time went by”.

Lovely article as always, and the talk of Myst in the comments makes me eager to read your take on Return to Zork, Nemesis, and Grand Inquisitor, all of which were interesting, but also, in some ways, horrible. Something to look forward to, I guess.

- Sam Garret

August 1, 2016 at 12:20 am

(Note to self: don’t indicate typos with greater than and less than signs or the extraneous letters they contain will get stripped because HTML. D’oh!)

- Sniffnoy

August 1, 2016 at 3:07 pm

Note, you can include the less than sign (<) by typing &lt;, and you can include the greater-than sign (>) by typing &gt;. (Assuming I’ve done this right…)

- Jimmy Maher

August 1, 2016 at 6:25 am

Always appreciated, even (especially?) when tiny. Thanks!

- Michael Davis

August 1, 2016 at 7:55 pm

Man, what a ride, huh? Thank you so much for this blog. I can’t imagine how many man-hours you pour into this project, but it is very, very appreciated :D

- Joe

August 2, 2016 at 2:28 pm

I enjoyed the article!

I do think your comments about Blank and Lebling come across as a bit dismissive, suggesting that their technical interests blindered their view of interactive fiction’s prospects.

They were professional game devs working in a commercial environment, and I suspect the quotes you included were (implicitly) about the prospects of commercial IF. Homebrew, freeware hobbyist projects are a whole different thing. As much as you or I might enjoy them, they are, market-wise, completely irrelevant!

Presumably Blank and Lebling were talking about measures needed to return IF to (at least modest) popularity, which almost by definition means a legitimate commerical market. I would argue that the current demand even for *free* IF would not register on any legitimate measure of game popularity by genre, and the demand for *paid* IF, even of high quality, would absolutely not register. There would need to be some sort of radical, literally game-changing paradigm shift in how IF is designed and interacted with to generate enough fans to make it register… which is exactly what Blank and Lebling were saying in those quotes.

The reality is, the IF community *is*, to a large extent, a small group of die-hards. There is no shame in that whatsoever! But that doesn’t mean Blank and Lebling’s comments were anything but spot-on.

- flowmotion

August 3, 2016 at 4:13 am

> Infocom never enjoyed a single profitable year after 1983

I have to say the picture of late-stage Infocom you have been painting here for a while has been quite depressing.

They churn out game-after-game, they get some semi-positive response in obscure publications, and the game goes on to sell in completely minuscule numbers. Who knows if this is some hardcore fanbase, or people buying something by mistake because of the cover art. Even now, only their biggest fans could even remember half this stuff. They take some advantage of their creative freedom in this situation, but for the most part they just go through the motions and just keep churning out game after game after poor-selling game.

Once I worked in a “great environment” at a job that was completely dead-end due to corporate politics. Everyone put in their 20-30 hours, there was a lot of drinking and sleeping with coworkers, it was a fun place to work. Whenever I run into someone from that job, they talk about how great it was. But we all knew (or should have known) that we were doomed. I realized that kind of job attracts a certain “fun person” which makes it a “fun job”. But success-oriented people don’t hang around and wait for the noose to be put around their neck.

If you told me in 1989 that Infocom was still around, I “would have been like no way”. I imagine a lot of these people felt the exact same way about their job.

- Oscillations

August 5, 2016 at 4:40 am

Post-Infocom IF just isn’t interesting and never will be. Even the Infocom story is way more interesting at this point than playing any of their games.

- NorkaBoid

August 16, 2016 at 4:00 pm

Oh, I don’t know. Certainly the Infocom story, as unfolded for us by Jimmy here, has been a great deal more fascinating than I, for one, had ever imagined. And it may seem impossible to top at this point.
But … when you consider that “post-Infocom” IF consists of a much more diverse body of works (dare I call them “games” collectively?) created by a much more diverse bunch of people over a much longer — and still expanding — period of time, why should we not expect the story of post-Infocom interactive fiction to be a couple orders of magnitude more interesting?
If the Lane Barrow interview is any indication of what’s still to come, we’re in for quite a ride!

- metzomagic

August 10, 2016 at 3:41 pm

Wow. I thought I knew the history of Infocom quite well, but it turns out that was only in the context of playing some of their more popular efforts, and from ‘randomly accessing’ some of your other articles about them. I had assumed that their demise was largely due to the popularity of IF waning because of the advent of graphics and sound.

So when I saw a reference to ‘Cornerstone’ in this article, I had not the slightest inkling of what you were talking about. Only when I did a site search for the term did I find your ‘Down From the Top’ article dated 3 April, 2014. And then I read it; and then I wept :-( They really, really, needed a separate business division for Cornerstone. End of story.

- Lee Jones

August 12, 2016 at 6:34 pm

This was quite a bittersweet read. Sad, at times, but somewhat hopeful.

I’ve been studying the world consumer electronics from the late 1970s through the 1980s, and I’ve noticed, on the whole… It seems like there was an over-abundant optimism, pervading the entire industry, that just all sort of… Crashed, for a variety of reasons, and left us with the closed, lifeless coporate environment we have today.

For some reason, Infocom reminds me greatly of Atari. Both companies experienced a rather similar rise and fall, and both had these grandiose ideals of changing the industry. Atari certainly started as simply a videogame company, but their ambitions grew exponentially to include a grand computer revolution, that never came to be.

The videogame/computer industry seems to be rife with grand ideals of changing the world, that are too ambitious, and run their course, before puttering out with a whimper.

- Michael Dornbrook

May 2, 2018 at 3:57 am

But sometimes those grand ideals become a Nintendo, or an Apple, or a Facebook. You don’t create something that changes the world without that sort of grand ideal and ambition.

- Nate

August 13, 2016 at 11:24 am

“I’ve been studying the world consumer electronics from the late 1970s through the 1980s, and I’ve noticed, on the whole… It seems like there was an over-abundant optimism, pervading the entire industry, that just all sort of… Crashed, for a variety of reasons, and left us with the closed, lifeless coporate environment we have today.”

As someone who was a kid in the 1980s, I agree. There was a strong strain of utopianism in the early microcomputer world. Read the early 1970s-80s magazines – Creative Computing and Byte particularly – and you can see there were very high expectations that ‘putting computers in the hands of the people’ would transform society, expand consciousness, and shift power back from governments and corporations. The Venn diagram of the early microcomputer people and the ‘West Coast technological hippie’ scene was nearly a circle. Stewart Brand and Timothy Leary. Steve Wozniak (Jobs not nearly as much, but Apple still gets a lot of mileage out of their ‘hippie cred’ despite being the most corporate of corporates).

The utopianism mostly died out by the mid 1980s, then kicked in again – briefly – in the 1990s with the Internet and ‘cyberculture’ and the whole mom-and-pop ISP era and Open Source. But Facebook and iPhones have now killed it again. Data transfer even for non-Americans is centralised in Seattle and San Francisco in hundred-billion-dollar tech unicorns, and we’ve all shrugged and accepted that GCHQ/NSA are reading everything. Our devices are increasingly less general-purpose, more locked down, requiring signing keys to publish software.

This new era of centralisation would have been unthinkable even in the 1990s – but was very much the expectation in the 1970s, the era of IBM mainframes and the Bell telephone monopoly, before the microcomputers.

It’s starting to feel like the 1980s-90s were a brief, weird optimistic anomaly. I hope maybe we can get another chance. But I think we’ll have to first have a popular sensibility that demands it. Another 1960s, or something like it.

- Lee Jones

August 24, 2016 at 1:51 am

Another question here to the OP, but since we’ve reached the end of Infocom’s tale, I’m somewhat curious why not a post about “Battletech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception” from 1988?

- Jimmy Maher

August 24, 2016 at 3:42 am

It was an Infocom game in name only, curated entirely by Mediagenic. The Cambridge team had nothing to do with it.

- Michael Dornbrook

May 2, 2018 at 3:54 am

It was developed outside (one of Westwood Studio’s first projects, as I recall), but produced from Infocom (by Rob Sears). We did the package and the marketing for it.

- Nigel Tao

April 14, 2017 at 4:59 am

Typo in “Yabarra”.

- Jimmy Maher

April 14, 2017 at 7:09 am

Thanks!

- Michael Dornbrook

May 2, 2018 at 3:52 am

I just ran across this for the first time. Lots of very interesting observations here. Having been at Infocom from 1979 (first to be paid) to turning the lights out in 1989, with the exception of business school in Chicago 1981-1983, when I also tested Zorks II, III, Deadline and Starcross, started the Zork Users Group and the New Zork Times, and created and wrote the InvisiClues hint books, I know this story pretty well.

There are numerous things both in the post and the comments that I’d love to respond to, but I’ll try to keep it short.

While Infocom as a whole was losing money, the games division was highly profitable in 1983, 1984, and less so in 1985. (While most game companies were privately held and their finances were confidential, I believe we were likely the most profitable of them all.) Those profits were poured into Cornerstone. The year of near-bankruptcy as we shut down Cornerstone in fall of 1985 and sold the company to Activision in 1986 (Friday, the thirteenth of June, a day I’ll never forget), brutalized the company. Given how successful we had been (e.g. even i 1985 we had the best-selling game, Hitchhiker’s), we had every reason to believe we could recover the magic once we put our financial troubles behind us.

One element of Infocom’s success that tends to be overlooked is our machine independence. By creating a game engine that was then interpreted on the individual machines, we could get our entire library of games running on a new computer very quickly. Take a look at the grid of games we were selling in the mid-1980’s. We were running on 24 separate computer systems. In the early 80’s new computers were constantly being introduced. Sometimes the manufacturers would get us an early version of their new machine so that they’d have a bunch of top-quality games available when it came to market. Even when companies weren’t supportive (Steve Jobs at Apple looked down on games and didn’t help at all), we could quickly purchase a new machine such as the Macintosh the day it went on sale (January 24, 1984), write an interpreter, and get all of our games out quickly. In June 1984 all 12 of our games were available in stores for the Mac. As I recall, there were only 5 other products, other than those that Apple released, available. So for many months we had virtually no competition on the platform.

One hole in our thinking was that this trend would continue. We felt any graphics we did should also be machine-independent. This was a huge challenge for Foobllitzky and ended up meaning our graphics were “least-common-denominator.” By the late ’80’s, the market was consolidating more and fewer major new computer operating systems were being launched.

Many on the games side of the company have blamed Cornerstone for our demise. I actually think it was an excellent product (with a great product roadmap for subsequent products) by a stupendous team, but should never have been glommed on to the games business. In early 1984, shortly after Al Vezza came in as CEO, I begged him to consider separating the businesses and using a different company name for the Cornerstone business. I pointed out that Infocom had become synonymous with games, and that that wouldn’t help sell Cornerstone. Conversely, launching a business product would potentially weaken the Infocom brand among gamers. I also pointed out that the sort of investor who would take a flyer on Cornerstone would probably not value the games business, and the sort who would love to invest in a growing, highly-respected and profitable games business would likely not value Cornerstone. His response was a highly dismissive “you don’t understand finance.” (He was a university administrator, I had an MBA from the top finance school. Go figure.) As he later learned, that was exactly the problem he ran into in raising money.

- Derek

July 30, 2018 at 3:28 am

“Indeed, as Infocom’s personnel pool shrunk…” should be “shrank”. That said, this is such a widespread error nowadays that I fear the simple past-tense form of such verbs (“sink/sank/sunk” and so forth) may be dying out. Maybe you shouldn’t correct it, so the Digital Antiquarian will seem slightly less musty to the English speakers of the 22nd century.

- Jimmy Maher

July 30, 2018 at 5:32 am

That’s an error I find myself wanting to make whenever I use this particular verb. Normally I manage to catch myself. Thanks!

- David C

September 25, 2018 at 5:57 pm

” No one declares the novel to be a dead form because the technology of printed text hasn’t advanced in hundreds of years.”

Not a great analogy. A better one might be film – in which case Infocom were the kings of the silent black and white era. A company that, indeed, kept on making silent black and white films into the colour and talkie age.

- dsparil

September 6, 2019 at 4:29 pm

Thanks for writing this years long series on Infocom. I’ve been a reader for several years, but suddenly found myself compelled to read all the Infocom articles. It really cleared up some of the misconceptions I had about the company mainly about how Cornerstone was more than some dalliance that ended up causing huge issues. A big problem with all the “don’t do Cornerstone” scenarios is that creating a product like it was always the plan so not doing it is essentially changing the company’s whole reason for existing.

An interesting “case study” is future Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii’s The Portopia Serial Murder Case which was originally made for the PC-6001 computer in 1983. It was directly inspired by text adventures which were largely not available in Japan at the time and combined a parser with a large visual illustration on quite modest and low resolution hardware. My point though is that it found it’s greatest success on the Famicom (Japanese name of the NES) selling hundreds of thousands of copies using a streamlined menu-based interface.

I wonder if Infocom could have had some success if they had embraced the NES when it launched in the US since Infocom certainly had the 6502 knowing programmers to work on it. The timing probably doesn’t quite work out in reality as the NES had a soft US launch in fall ’85 precisely during the Cornerstone caused low resource years, but it’s an interesting possibility. ROM size would have been an issue at first, but perhaps the lack of needing to run in a VM could remedy that a bit.

Journey in particular seems like a good candidate due to the timing of its release and being generally menu-based. Perhaps the limitations of the platform could have cut down down on the dead ends in that game due to lack of space. A slimmed down Zork I would have also worked for the name recognition and obvious follow ups.

It’s just odd to me that this type of scenario doesn’t really get brought up especially because Activision published Falcom’s adventure/RPG Asteka II in the US as Tombs & Treasure under the Infocom brand! That was quite a few years later in ’91, but the pieces did seem to fall together eventually.

- Jimmy Maher

September 7, 2019 at 7:03 am

I think that a heavily text-oriented game, even with graphics on the side, would be a hard sell on the Nintendo. I don’t think it was possible to put a great deal of text on the screen at once — 40 columns at best — and reading it off an analog television probably wouldn’t be terribly pleasant. And really, I just can’t imagine that there were many players clamoring for such a thing. The NES made its name on simple, cheerful, action-oriented games beloved mostly by a fairly young demographic, and the parent company carefully nurtured that ecosystem. I’m not sure they would even have allowed something as radically different as Journey — even assuming it was redesigned to be a more enjoyable experience — to be released.

- dsparil

September 10, 2019 at 11:55 am

Removing most of the text would have been part of the shift mainly in the room descriptions. Portopia dedicates about half of screen on the bottom to text primarily to dialogue with commands on the right and an image on the left. Tombs & Treasure has a mirrored layout but with less room for text. You move a cursor around the scene in T&T when looking or using an item although Portopia uses this much less.

This type of game was quite popular in Japan. Kemco’s ’87 NES port of ICOM’s Shadowgate was popular in the US too, and led to several ICOM games getting ports over the years. Nintendo definitely would have approved this type of game even if the NES in particular didn’t build its reputation on them.

What got me thinking about this in the first place was that Nintendo announced a remake of their Famicom Detective Club for Switch last week. With the cachet of the Infocom name, I do think they could have had some success. T&T was originally released in Japan in ’88 and almost seems like an exact attempt at converting a text adventure to a primarily graphical presentation though one with heavier RPG mechanics. I just suggested Journey do to timing, but even a new project could have hypothetically done well.

- Wolfeye M.

September 26, 2019 at 11:40 am

I had Zork 1 on my Apple 2 e. I didn’t get very far, and I’m pretty sure it’s the first game I rage quit. I definitely wasn’t having fun, and I had a lot of other games to play. When my Apple 2 e finally gave up the ghost, I kept a few of the games. Mostly because of the associated memories, but also in case I gave into the temptation to buy a used 2e off eBay. Zork was not one of the games I kept. Now, I almost regret that.

Zork was the game that turned me off text adventures, and games with puzzles. Every time I encountered either type of game, I’d think, “Oh, it’s like Zork,” and not play it.” Infocom didn’t even register in my memory as the company that made Zork, and after reading your blog, I’m sure I never played any of their other works. So, needless to say I don’t have any fond memories of playing their games.

With that said, it’s sad what happened to Infocom. I may not like puzzley text adventures, but clearly plenty of people did, and still do. And, have fond memories of playing their games, even Zork 1. Reading about their rise and fall on your blog was both interesting, and sad. Which, I think, says something about your writing, turning a subject I’m not even the least bit a fan of, Zork and the like, into something I enjoyed reading about. I even downloaded a text adventure app on my phone, and installed Zork… only to be reminded why I don’t play those games. Oy vey. Still a enjoyable, if bittersweet, series of articles to read.

- Iffy Bonzoolie

May 23, 2020 at 5:09 am

Thanks, Jimmy, for so much thoughtful coverage of Infocom. I’m slowly making my way through your blog from here in the future, and just got here. Hello, from COVID-19 isolation!

As you say — and have said — it’s probably not overly productive to play what if scenarios. And yet… I think there was still a lot of valuable raw material there at Infocom at the end.

I thought some of the graphics integration with Shogun and Arthur were beautiful and engaging, they just weren’t subjects I was interested in AT ALL.

But I think if we took those engine improvements, and those from Zork Zero, pulled in those key principles from Ron Gilbert’s school of adventure game design (or a similar Player’s Bill of Rights) and mixed that with a slightly more simulational CRPG and pulled it together for a Beyonder Zork, you’d have a pretty amazing game. Even now.

I know that the artists want room to create, and freedom to breathe… You are suffocating meee! But, Zork should have been their Cornerstone. The cash cow that provides artistic freedom in our capitalist society. Bethesda is a huge company based on one game world (well, two since they acquired Fallout [OK, three after acquiring Id]). Zork captures the imagination immediately, just with the name. And you add the mystery box of just what is the GUE, and how did it come to be? There’s a LOT more to be told there, and I don’t even think it would be selling out.

I know you weren’t enamored with the CRPG hybrid aspect of BEYONDZO, but I was… and still am. Sprinkling RPG on most things makes them better. Kind of like cinnamon. So I think they could have had two lines running, an RPG line and an Adventure line, both in the canonical Zork timeline. Keep them both parser based — What, are we savages? — but with bells and whistles enough to have good screenshots for the kiddies.

This comment is long enough, but the demographics question is also interesting. There were two groups that Infocom couldn’t reach. Not only the teenage boys who grew to dominate the market… but also all the older, more cerebral folks who didn’t have computers, or just didn’t play games on them. I don’t think the problem was that many people actively stopped wanting Infocom games, the problem was that the market was growing quadratically with new people who didn’t want those games. With that growth, the criteria for success changed. Also, lots of misfires (Border Zone, Shogun, Sherlock, Arthur) that split the dollar vote, and just didn’t speak to all those people that bought Leather Goddesses. I know the sales numbers don’t quite bear that out for, say Stationfall, which should have had such appeal, but there’s still something there.

And now, many years later, all those bookish nerds that aren’t computer nerds now carry a computer with them everywhere they go, at all times… But there’s no herald to introduce Interactive Fiction to them. Nor has a form yet been created that ties together modern technology with all the things that define IF.

New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 1: Digging the Trenches
October 18, 2019

One of the most oddly inspiring stories I know of in all computing history is that of the resurrection and re-purposing of the Z-Machine, Infocom’s virtual machine of the 1980s, to serve a whole new community of interactive-fiction enthusiasts in the 1990s and well beyond. Even as the simple 8-bit computers for which it had originally been designed became obsolete, and then became veritable antiques, the Z-Machine just kept soldiering on, continuing to act as the delivery system for hundreds of brand new games that post-dated the company that had created it by years and eventually decades. The community of hobbyist practitioners who spawned the Interactive Fiction Renaissance of the mid-1990s made the Z-Machine one of their technological bedrocks for reasons more sentimental than practical: most of them worshiped Infocom, and loved the way that distributing their games via Infocom’s venerable virtual machine made them feel like the anointed heirs to that legacy. The Z-Machine was reborn, in other words, largely out of nostalgia. Very soon, though, the hobbyists’ restless creativity pushed and twisted the Z-Machine, and the genre of games it hosted, in all sorts of ways of which even Infocom at their most experimental could never have dreamed. Thus a regressive became a progressive impulse.

In the end, then, a design which Joel Berez and Marc Blank first sketched out hurriedly at their kitchen tables in 1979, in response to the urgently immediate problem of how to move their DEC PDP-10 game of Zork out of the MIT computer lab and onto microcomputers, didn’t fall out of general use as a delivery medium for new games until after 2010. And even today it still remains in active use as a legacy technology, the delivery medium for half or more of the best text adventures in the historical canon. In terms of the sheer number of platforms on which it runs, it must have a strong claim to being the most successful virtual machine in history; it runs on everything from e-readers to game consoles, from mobile phones to mainframes, from personal computers to electronic personal assistants. (To paraphrase an old joke, it really wouldn’t surprise me to learn that someone is running it on her toaster…) Its longevity is both a tribute to the fundamental soundness of its original design and to the enduring hold which Infocom’s pioneering interactive fiction of the 1980s has had upon more recent practitioners of the form. Like so many technology stories, in other words, the story of the Z-Machine is really about people.

One of the more ironic aspects of the Z-Machine story is the fact that it was never designed to be promulgated in this way. It was never intended to be a community software project; it was no Linux, no Mozilla, no Java. The ideological framework that would lead to such projects didn’t even exist apart from a handful of closeted university campuses at the time Berez and Blank were drawing it up. The Z-Machine was a closed, proprietary technology, closely guarded by Infocom during their heyday as one of their greatest competitive advantages over their rivals.

The first order of business for anyone outside of Infocom who wished to do anything with it, then, was to figure it out — because Infocom certainly wasn’t telling. This first article in a series of three is the story of those first intrepid Z-Machine archaeologists, who came to it knowing nothing and began, bit by bit, to puzzle it out. Little did they know that they were laying the foundation of an artistic movement. Graham Nelson, the most important single technical and creative architect of the Interactive Fiction Renaissance of the 1990s (and thus the eventual subject of my second and third articles), said it most cogently: “If I have hacked deeper than them, it is because I stand in their trenches.”

Although the Z-Machine was decidedly not intended as a community project, Infocom in their heyday made no particular attempt to hide the abstract fact that they were the proud possessors of some unusual technology. The early- and mid-1980s, Infocom’s commercial peak, was still the Wild West era of personal computing in the United States, with dozens of incompatible models jockeying for space on store shelves. Almost every published profile of Infocom — and there were many of them — made mention of the unique technology which somehow allowed them to write a game on a big DEC PDP-10 of the sort usually found only in universities and research laboratories, then move it onto as many as 25 normally incompatible microcomputers all at once. This was, perhaps even more so than their superb parser and general commitment to good writing and design, their secret weapon, allowing them to make games for the whole of the market, including parts of it that were served by virtually no other publishers.

So, even if highfalutin phrases like “virtual machine” weren’t yet tripping off the tongue of the average bedroom hacker, it wasn’t hard to divine what Infocom must be doing in the broad strokes. The specifics, however, were another matter. For, while Infocom didn’t hide the existence of a Z-Machine in the abstract, they had no vested interest in advertising how it worked.

The very first outsiders to begin to explore the vagaries of the Z-Machine actually had no real awareness of doing so. They were simply trying to devise ways of copying Infocom’s games — most charitably, so that they could make personal backups of them; most likely, so that they could trade them with their friends. They published their findings in organs like The Computist, an underground magazine for Apple II owners which focused mainly on defeating copy protection, hacking games, and otherwise doing things that the software publishers would prefer you didn’t. By 1984, you could learn how Infocom’s (unimpressive) copy-protection scheme worked from the magazine; by 1986, you could type in a program listing from it that would dump most of the text in a game for cheating purposes.

But plumbing the depths of a virtual machine whose very existence was only implicit was hard work, especially when one was forced to carry it out on such a basic computer as the Apple II. People tended to really dive in only when they had some compelling, practical reason. Thus users of the Apple II and other popular, well-supported platforms mostly contented themselves with fairly shallow explorations such as those just described. Users of some other platforms, however, weren’t fortunate enough to enjoy the ongoing support of the company that had made their computer and a large quantity of software on the shelves at their local computer store; they had a stronger motivation for going deeper.

Over the course of the 1980s, the American computing scene became steadily more monolithic, as an industry that had once boasted dozens of incompatible systems collapsed toward the uniformity that would mark most of the 1990s, when MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, and (to rather a lesser extent) the Apple Macintosh would be the only viable options for anyone wishing to run the latest shrink-wrapped commercial software. This gradual change was reflected in Infocom’s product catalog. After peaking at 25 or so machines in 1984, they released their final few games in 1988 and 1989 on just four of them. The realities of the market by then were such that it just didn’t make sense to support more platforms than that.

But technical transitions like these always come with their fair share of friction. In this case, plenty of people who had been unlucky or unwise enough to purchase one of the orphaned machines were left to consider their options. Some of them gave up on computing altogether, while others sucked it up and bought another model. But some of these folks either couldn’t afford to buy something else, or had fallen hopelessly in love with their first computer, or were just too stubborn to give it up. This state of affairs led directly to the world’s first full-fledged Z-Machine interpreter to be born outside of Infocom.

The orphaned machine at the heart of this story is the Texas Instruments 99/4A, a sturdy, thoughtfully designed little computer in many respects which enjoyed a spectacular Christmas of 1982, only to be buried by Jack Tramiel under an avalanche of Commodore VIC/20s and 64s the following year. On October 28, 1983, Texas Instruments announced they were pulling out of the home-computer market entirely, thus marking the end of one of the more frantic boom-and-bust cycles in computing history. It left in its wake hundreds of thousands of people with 99/4As on their desks or in their closets — both those who had bought the machine when it was still a going proposition and many more who snatched up some of the unsold inventory which Texas Instruments dumped onto the market afterward, at street prices of $50 or less. The number of active 99/4A users would inevitably decrease sharply as time went on, but some clung to their machines like the first loves they often were, for all of the reasons cited above.

This little 99/4A fraternity would prove sufficiently loyal to the platform to support an under-the-radar commercial- software ecosystem of their own into the 1990s. For many users, the platform was appealing not least in that it never lost the homegrown charm of the very earliest days of personal computing, when every user was a programmer to one degree or another, when the magazines were full of do-it-yourself hardware projects and type-in program listings, and when one kid working from his bedroom could change the accepted best practices of everyone else almost overnight. The Z-Machine interpreter that interests us today was a reflection of this can-do spirit.

Infocom’s first taste of major success had corresponded with the 99/4A’s one great Christmas. Naturally, they had made sure their games were available on one of the hottest computers in the country. Even after Texas Instruments officially abandoned the 99/4A, there was no immediate reason to ignore its many owners. Thus Infocom continued to make versions of their games for the machine through The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in September of 1984. In all, they released fourteen 99/4A games.

But continuing to support any given machine eventually tended to become a more complicated proposition than simply continuing to use an already-extant interpreter. The Z-Machine in reality was more of a moving target than the abstract idea behind it might suggest. Infocom’s games got steadily bigger and richer as time went on, with more text, better parsers, and more ambitious world models. The original Z-Machine, as designed in 1979, had a theoretical maximum story-file size of 128 K, but the practical limitations of the machines running the interpreters kept the early games from reaching anything close to this size. (The original Zork, for example, Infocom’s very first game, was just 77 K.) As story files pushed ever closer to their theoretical maximum size in the years that followed, they began to exceed the practical limitations of some existing interpreters. When that happened, Infocom had to decide whether reworking the interpreter to support a larger story file was possible at all, and, if so, whether it was worth the effort in light of a platform’s sales figures. Following Hitchhiker’s (story-file size: 110 K), their fourteenth game, but before Suspect (story-file size: 120 K), their fifteenth, Infocom judged the answer to one or both of those questions to be no in the case of the 99/4A.

Barry Boone, the first person outside of Infocom to create a full-fledged Z-Machine interpreter.

As one might expect, this decision left a number of 99/4A users sorely disappointed. Among them was Barry Boone, a clever young man just out of high school who was already one of the leading lights of 99/4A hackery. Having read enough about Infocom to understand that their game format must be in some sense portable, he started doggedly digging into the details of its implementation. Soon he was able to make a clear delineation between the interpreter running natively on his machine and the story file it executed — a delineation the Apple II crowd writing for The Computist had yet to manage. And then he uncovered the big secret: that the interpreter packaged with one game could actually run the story file from another — even if said story file originated on a platform other than the 99/4A! Boone:

Having worked out the file format, I wrote a program to crunch the non-TI files and build the TI files. The resulting files appeared to work, but I quickly discovered [a] problem. If I converted an older game that already existed in TI format, everything worked perfectly. But with the newer games, there was a big problem.

The problem was that the interpreter software written for the TI had a number of bugs, many of which did not show up with the original set of games, but became all too apparent with the newer ones and made them unplayable. So I began a process of reverse-engineering the Z-Code interpreter for the TI. Once I reached a point of having recreated the source code, I began working on making the code more efficient, and fixing numerous bugs in the implementation. The largest bug I encountered was a vocabulary-table bug. Basically, the original TI interpreter would hit an overflow bug if the vocabulary table was too large, and the binary-search algorithm would start searching the wrong area of memory to look up words. This had the effect of making the last portion of the vocabulary inaccessible, and made the game impossible to play.

I also added a number of enhancements that allowed the games to load about twenty times faster, and modifications to play the games on TI systems equipped with 80-column displays. Finally, I had to make a second variation of the interpreter so that persons who had an extra 8 K of RAM (known as a Super Cart, or Super Space module) could play some of the games that required a larger memory footprint than 24 K of memory buffer. These games included Leather Goddesses.

Boone estimates that he finished his interpreter around 1986, whereupon he promptly began sharing it with his network of friends and fellow 99/4A enthusiasts, who used it to play many of the newer Infocom story files, transferring them from disks for other platforms. Boone was stymied only by the games from Infocom’s Interactive Fiction Plus line, such as A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity. Those games used an expanded version of the Z-Machine, known internally as version 4 — the mature version of the original virtual machine was version 3 — which expanded the available memory space to 256 K, far beyond what the 99/4A could possibly manage. Even without them, however, Boone gave himself and his mates ten new Infocom games to play — i.e., all of those released for the 128 K Z-Machine between October of 1984 and July of 1987, when this original incarnation of the virtual machine made its last bow in Infocom packaging.

But even that wasn’t quite the end of the story. An obscure footnote to Infocom’s history took shape in late 1988 or early 1989, when Chris Bobbitt, founder of a company called Asgard, the 99/4A software publisher that most resembled a real business as opposed to a hobbyist project, had the idea of contacting Infocom themselves to ask permission to market the newer games, running under Boone’s interpreter, as legitimate commercial products. Although Bobbitt doubtless didn’t realize it at the time, Infocom was by then on the verge of being shut down, and Mediagenic, their less-than-doting parent company, were also beginning to feel the financial stresses that would force them into bankruptcy in 1990. They saw Bobbitt’s proposal as a handy way to clear their warehouse of old stock and make some desperately needed cash. Jim Fetzner, who worked with Asgard at the time, remembers how the deal went down:

[Bobbitt] contacted Infocom to ask for permission to release the later Infocom releases, and was given permission to do so on one condition: that the packaging and disks had to be originals for other systems, relabeled (the packaging) and reformatted (the disks) for use with the TI. Infocom scoured their warehouse and sent Chris two very large boxes of the titles he was asking to reproduce—and noted on the invoice that these boxes included every single copy of the relevant titles that Infocom still had in their possession. Some of the titles were relatively plentiful, but others were included in much lower numbers. The boxes only contained four copies of Leather Goddesses of Phobos, for example. All other titles had at least ten copies each, and some had a lot more. He was permitted to buy more copies from remainders in the retail channels, though, so it is possible there are more properly badged Asgard copies of the titles that were harder to find. All of the stock he received from Infocom was gone in a matter of months.

These games, which Bobbitt bought for $5 apiece and sold on for several times that, thereby became the last new Infocom games ever sold in their original packaging — out-of-print games from a dead company sold to owners of an orphaned computer.

Asgard prepared their own platform-specific reference card after the Infocom example and inserted it into the box.

Well before Asgard entered the scene, however, another, more structured and sustainable project had led to a Z-Machine interpreter much more amenable to being ported and built upon than Boone’s incarnation of same for an idiosyncratic, bare-bones, orphaned platform. Not long after Boone first started sharing his 99/4A interpreter with friends, a few students at the University of Sydney in far-off Australia started disassembling another of Infocom’s own interpreters — in this case one for Zilog Z80-based computers running the operating system CP/M. The group included in their ranks David Beazley, George Janczuk, Peter Lisle, Russell Hoare, and Chris Tham. They gave themselves the rather grandiose name of the InfoTaskforce, but they initially regarded the project, said Janczuk to me recently, strictly as “a form of mental calisthenics”: “This was never meant to be a public exercise.”

Still, the group had several advantages which Boone had lacked — in addition, that is, to the advantage of sheer numbers. Boone had been a bedroom hacker working on fairly primitive hardware, where cryptic assembly language, highly specific to the computer on which it was running, was the only viable option. The InfoTaskforce, on the other hand, had more advanced hardware at their disposal, and were steeped in the culture of institutional hacking, where portable C was the most popular programming language and software was typically distributed as source code, ready to be analyzed, ported, and expanded upon by people other than its creators, quite possibly working on platforms of which said creators had never dreamed. And then, thanks to their university, the InfoTaskforce was connected to the Internet, long before most people had even heard of such a thing; this gave them a way to share their work quickly with others across a wide, international swath of computing. The contrast with the segregated ghetto that was the world of the 99/4A is telling.

David Beazley, who did almost all of the actual coding for the InfoTaskforce interpreter — the others had their hands full enough with reverse-engineering the Z-Machine architecture — did so in C on a first-generation Apple Macintosh. On May 25, 1987, he used this machine to compile the first truly portable Z-Machine interpreter in history. Within a week, he and his mates had also gotten it compiled and running on an MS-DOS machine and a big DEC VAX. (Ironically, the latter was the successor to the PDP-10 line so famously employed by Infocom themselves; thus one might say that the Z-Machine had already come full-circle.)

As Janczuk remembers it, the first version of the interpreter to reach the Internet actually did so accidentally. He gave it to a friend of his at university, who, as so many friends have done over the years, uploaded it without permission on June 2, 1987. There followed an immediate outpouring of interest from all over the world, which greatly surprised the interpreter’s own creators. It prompted them to release an official version 1.0, capable of playing any story file for the standard — i.e., 128 K — Z-Machine on August 1, 1987. Already by this time, the Commodore Amiga personal computer and several more big machines had been added to the list of confirmed-compatible host platforms. It was a milestone day in the history of interactive fiction; Infocom’s games had been freed from the tyranny of the hardware for which they’d originally shipped. And they could remain free of the vicissitudes and fashions of hardware forevermore, as long as there was an enterprising hacker ready to tweak an existing interpreter’s source code to suit the latest gadget to come down the pipe. (So far, there has been no shortage of such hackers…)

With their university days coming to an end, the InfoTaskforce boys worked on their interpreter only in fits and starts over the years that followed. Not until 1990 did they finish adding support for the Interactive Fiction Plus line; not until 1992, in a final burst of activity, did they add support for Infocom’s last few text-only games, which ran under what was known internally as the version 5 Z-Machine. This last release of the InfoTaskforce interpreter actually attracted a bit of scoffing for its inefficiency, and for generally lagging behind what other hackers had done by that point in other interpreters.

In reality, information and inspiration rather than the software itself were the most important legacies of the InfoTaskForce interpreter. Beazley’s C source told you almost all of what you really needed to know about the Z-Machine, so long as you were sufficiently motivated to dig out the information you needed; doing so was certainly a fair sight more pleasant than poring over eye-watering printouts of cryptic disassembled Z80 machine language, as Beazley and his pals had been forced to do before coming up with it. The InfoTaskforce interpreter thus became the gateway through which the Z-Machine burst into the public domain, even as Infocom was soon to collapse and abandon their virtual machine. This was a role which Boone’s interpreter, for all its naïve brilliance, just wasn’t equipped to play, for all of the reasons we’ve already explored.

An enterprising American hacker named Mark Howell did perhaps the most to build upon the foundation of the InfoTaskforce interpreter during the half-decade after its initial appearance. His own interpreter bore the name of ZIP (for “Z-Machine Implementation Program”), a name it shared with the popular compression format, to enormous confusion all the way around — although, to be fair, this was also the name by which Infocom knew their own interpreters. ZIP was faster and less buggy than the InfoTaskforce interpreter, and for this reason it soon surpassed its older sibling in popularity. But Howell also delved further into the architecture of the Z-Machine than anyone before him, analyzing its design like a computer scientist might rather than as a hacker simply trying to write a quick-and-dirty clone of Infocom’s existing interpreters. When he came up for air, he uploaded his set of “ZTools” — programs for probing story files in all sorts of ways, including a disassembler for the actual code they contained. These tools did much to set the stage for the next phase of the Z-Machine’s resurrection and liberation.

In 1992, another building block fell into place when Activision shipped their Lost Treasures of Infocom collection to unexpected success. It and its sequel collected all of the Infocom games together in one place at a reasonable price, stored as neatly discrete story files ready to be fed into either the original Infocom interpreters included on the disks or an alternative of one’s choice. Lost Treasures shipped only in versions for MS-DOS, the Apple Macintosh, and the Commodore Amiga — the last three commercially viable personal-computing platforms left in North America by that time (and the Amiga wouldn’t enjoy that status much longer). But users of orphaned and non-North American platforms were soon passing around the tip that, if you could just get the story files off of the original Lost Treasures disks, they could be run on their own platforms as well with one of the interpreters that had by now spread far and wide. For example, our old friends at The Computist, still carrying the 8-bit torch in these twilight days of the Apple II, published instructions on how to do just that — a fitting end point to their earliest explorations of the Infocom format.

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the magazine Acorn User published a similar article for users of the Acorn Archimedes, a machine that was virtually unknown outside of Britain, a few parts of mainland Europe, and Australasia. (“It’s hard to conceive of videogame nostalgia,” they wrote of the Lost Treasures collections, “but this is as close as it gets.” Little did they know…) It so happened that an Oxford doctoral candidate in mathematics named Graham Nelson was a stalwart Acorn loyalist and a regular reader of that magazine. By the time the article in question appeared, the window opened by the InfoTaskforce interpreter and all the software that had followed it, combined with the Lost Treasures collections, had already led him to begin sliding the next couple of building blocks of the Interactive Fiction Renaissance into place.

Infocom’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy running on an Acorn Archimedes — a platform for which it was never officially released — under a third-party Z-Machine interpreter by Edouard Poor.

(Sources: The Computist 5, 7, 34, 41, 47, 57, 58, 63, and 86; Acorn User of July 1993; Asgard Software’s newsletters from 1989 and 1990. Online sources include Barry Boone’s memories of writing his Z-Machine interpreter at The Museum of Computer Adventure Game History and his bio for the TI99ers Hall of Fame. The original source for the InfoTaskforce interpreter can be found in various file archives. My huge thanks go to Barry Boone, Jim Fetzner, and George Janczuk for talking to me about their pioneering early work in Z-Machine archaeology.)

Comments
40 Responses

- Pedro Timóteo

October 18, 2019 at 4:51 pm

Can’t wait to read the next two parts. :)

A small (possible) correction: according to both Wikipedia and MobyGames, Lost Treasures was also released for the Apple IIGS. In fact, I think I’ve read somewhere that it was the only way some of the games were (officially, at least) playable on a IIGS, since many of them weren’t individually released for it.

- William Hern

October 18, 2019 at 5:52 pm

Seconded! Another great article by Jimmy.

Yes, I vaguely remember the Apple IIGS version of Lost Treasures – I think that it was released by Big Red Computer Club, rather than Infocom itself.

- Jimmy Maher

October 18, 2019 at 6:56 pm

While I have had a bad tendency to forget the Apple IIGS in the past, I’d say this is at the least a borderline case. I don’t think it came out until a couple of years after the original Lost Treasures, and then in a re-release by a third party. Ironically, the most apt comparison is one from this very article: Asgard’s Infocom re-releases.

- Jeremy Hetzler

October 18, 2019 at 6:19 pm

Fantastic! Cannot wait for the rest of the series. (Is it really only three parts? :))

One suggested edit:
“wasn’t hard to devise” -> “wasn’t hard to surmise”

- Jimmy Maher

October 18, 2019 at 6:51 pm

“Divine” was actually the word I was looking for. ;)

- Keith Palmer

October 18, 2019 at 9:56 pm

I’d been wondering when this piece would show up, but it does seem the time spent researching it has paid off. While waiting I’ll admit to contemplating the obvious differences between ZIL and Inform (1-6), and wondering about “the continuation of the Z-Machine” being a “nostalgic affectation” as opposed to what might have been produced starting afresh (as I have a vague impression TADS was), but setting out a path of history that begins with “getting later Infocom games to run on computers the company had given up on” makes it more a matter of small, reasonable steps. (While the TI 994/A people did it first, and learning what they did does impress me with how long they kept their machines running, I have come across a newsletter for “the last TRS-80 users” that described in 1989 how to combine “driver programs” and “data files.”)

In talking about the Z-Machine, I do wonder a bit about the creation of “parsers as good as Infocom’s” being a separate but just as necessary development. However, I don’t know a lot about how difficult that actually was; my knowledge on the matter stalls somewhere around primitive two-word parsers in BASIC…

- Jimmy Maher

October 19, 2019 at 8:17 am

While the Z-Machine certainly couldn’t parse anything on its own, it came with a lot of opcodes that made parsing and other sorts of lexical manipulations easier than they would be on a (virtual or non-virtual) computer not heavily optimized for the one task of running text adventures. Both ZIL, Infocom’s in-house language, and Inform, Graham Nelson’s, are unusually close to the hardware in the way they leverage these unique affordances of the Z-Machine. This even though their actual syntaxes are radically different, one being based on LISP, the other on C. Thus Inform wasn’t quite starting from scratch on the parser, the way a BASIC programmer would have to. More on some of this in the third article…

- Andrew Plotkin

October 19, 2019 at 3:11 pm

To add a detail (which I’m sure you’ll get into in future articles): The reverse-engineering work of the ITF documented not just the Z-machine “hardware” specification, but the dictionary and grammar tables used by the Infocom parser. These were data tables in Z-machine memory that listed the verb forms used by the parser: “GET [noun]”, “GET IN [noun]”, “PUT [noun] IN [container]”, etc.

With this understanding, replicating the basic algorithm of the Infocom parser was fairly easy. Graham Nelson’s parser uses a different table structure but encodes the same sort of information.

- Peter Ferrie

October 18, 2019 at 10:38 pm

And back to the Apple II, with the 2018 release of Pitch Dark
We collected all known versions of all of the Infocom Z1-Z5 titles, and made them available from a single hard-disk archive, instead of individual floppy disks, with a front-end that has descriptions, hints, and save-game management.

There’s also a sequel Pitch Darker which includes a collection of fan-made Z5 games.

Support for Z6 files is still in development, but we haven’t given up yet!

- Ehren

October 18, 2019 at 10:41 pm

Very interesting history. What did the folks at Infocom think of these alternative interpreters (if they thought of them at all)?

One typo I noticed:
under-the-radar commercia- software ecosystem

- Jimmy Maher

October 19, 2019 at 8:25 am

Thanks!

During the last couple of years of Infocom as a going concern, I don’t think anyone was really aware of the InfoTaskforce interpreter. I suppose they must have understood at some level that someone had made a new 99/4A interpreter, but they had bigger concerns.

- Alex Freeman

October 19, 2019 at 1:15 am

This was, perhaps even more so than their superb parser and general commitment to good writing and design, their secret weapon, allowing them to makes games for the whole of the market, including parts of it that were served by virtually no other publishers.

DEFINITELY more than their parser however superb it was. I actually wonder if Infocom’s parser was TOO superb for its own good. The reason I say that is because, over the years, I’ve learned about how most people struggle with text parser. It seems it’s generally because they type out all kinds of crazy commands like OFFER TO HELP THE MAN WITH HIS FINANCIAL SITUATION. I think it would actually be easier to get people on board with text parsers if they allowed only 3 words at a time. So, for instance, instead of allowing LOOK UP MAGIC IN THE BROWN DICTIONARY, it would work like this:
>LOOK UP MAGIC IN THE BROWN DICTIONARY
One to three words only!
>LOOK UP MAGIC
Where?
>IN DICTIONARY
Which one?
>BROWN

That may seem like a nuisance, but I think most people could figure out a parser like that, one that wasn’t quite as free-form as Infocom’s.

- Jimmy Maher

October 19, 2019 at 8:45 am

This has been a subject of enormous debate for many years now, with some people saying we made a mistake as soon as we departed from the two-word Scott Adams model, others straining toward ever more elaborate forms of natural-language processing. Personally, I confess that I’ve always been slightly baffled that people have so much trouble at all. I suspect that interacting with a parser easily and naturally may require some combination of writerly and programming skills — i.e., the ability to express your desired action simply and precisely in grammatical English (or whatever language you’re playing in). Since I can count those two skills among my shabby collection of same, I struggle to understand why some people find a parser so daunting. Even so, however, I don’t think it’s any harder to interact with a text adventure in the abstract than it is with any number of modern shooters or strategy games, whose interface complexities I do find truly baffling. Much of it is doubtless a question of motivation, and of what you grew up with during that brief window in life when learning things like these is easy.

For what it’s worth, I think the Infocom parser got the complexity just about perfect. A more basic parser just doesn’t let you express enough complication in your actions to enable the full range of puzzle (and general interactive) possibilities, while one that operated like you suggest would quickly drive the player fairly crazy in my opinion. A more complex one leads to all sorts of guesswork, as human language tends to get less precise and direct as it gets more complex. (Witness, for example, the enormous tapestry of indirection and circumlocution that we engage in in the name of politeness: “Could you be so kind as to pass the salt?” instead of just “Give salt to me!” This is the reason that many people speaking a second language tend to come off as slightly brusque or impolite — because those everyday circumlocutions are actually quite grammatically difficult.) When you wander into this area, the computer has to start guessing what you really mean. Inevitably, it guesses wrong a fair amount of the time, and chaos ensues…

Another oft-overlooked area of parser design is error messages. The Infocom parser, and the Inform one after that, tells you precisely what part of your command it didn’t understand and why. This is *so* much better than a simple, “I don’t understand.” It becomes a gentle form of training. In the same spirit, I tend to believe that the best course of action isn’t to attempt to radically expand (or contract) what the parser can understand, but rather to find ways to help people train their minds to interact with the tried-and-true.

- bickerdyke

October 19, 2019 at 12:26 pm

I spent a few weeks this year to bring a z-Machine story I wrote like 25 years ago to the Google Assistant. (to be honest, it started as C64 basic and got it’s Inform6 port like 10 years ago…) and with that experience, if I would write another story, I would let a machine learning speech recognition do the parsing.

While my setup mostly passes the verbatim words spoken to the voice assistant on to the z-machine, I already used it to extend the game based on common utterances during ongoing training. The words don’t need to be exact but you will get an input in the form of intent – object – another object. (And it really feels like bad form translating that back internally into 2 word inform commands….)

- Jimmy Maher

October 19, 2019 at 2:28 pm

I had a fairly long talk with Bob Bates about such a setup fairly recently. He believes that an all-audio form of interactive fiction — voice input and output — is the only long approach likely to have a measure of mass appeal again. I can see what he means, but also think games designed for that medium will almost inevitably have to be different than the Infocom style — less puzzlely, more branching-story-oriented. Solving complex puzzles usually requires scanning through the text over and over. I can’t imagine being able to hold enough of the picture, as it were, in one’s head, nor would it be fun to make the computer read you the same things over and over.

Anyway, voice recognition and voice synthesis have just about gotten good enough that the approach starts to become feasible. Definitely an area ripe for experimentation.

- bifo

November 3, 2019 at 1:24 am

I don’t think that would work without a lot of creativity, imagine going back to the same rooms and endlessly hearing the same descriptions of the same thing. Text is benign enough that you can ask for the same description and it doesn’t get grating, but hearing someone read the exact same description would grate, to the point that people would become abusive to the parser in the same way that they abuse things like Siri.

Frankly, the idea of an audio-based interactive fiction reminds me of the british TV show Taskmaster, where a bunch of comedians compete in solving a series of silly puzzles and their frustration and annoyance is played for laughs. It’s funny to watch, but deeply irritating to participate in.

- Jimmy Maher

November 3, 2019 at 9:19 am

Yes, this is why the nature of the experience would have to change, taking on more of the characteristics of a hypertext narrative rather than a text adventure.

- Alex Freeman

October 21, 2019 at 11:35 pm

That sounds fascinating, bickerdyke! So does the ongoing training consist of having a bunch of text-adventure newbies issue commands to Google Assistant?

- Andy Baio

October 19, 2019 at 2:01 am

Great article. I bought a copy of Hollywood Hi-Jinx off eBay last year, which is in flawless condition and shipped complete with all the feelies—but didn’t come with disks, a UPC code on the back of the page, or sticker identifying which platform it was for. I’m guessing it was one of the unsold inventory that didn’t end up repackaged for the TI…?

- Jimmy Maher

October 19, 2019 at 9:00 am

It’s impossible to say. Sadly, the most likely scenario may be that someone re-shrinkwrapped it to get a better price. It’s actually amazing how much cheating and general skulduggery goes on in the tiny realm of vintage-game collectors. Someone, for example, apparently forged a whole run of the Asgard Software Infocom releases, using photocopied packaging, knowing these are something of a Holy Grail among hardcore Infocom collectors. It’s enough to make me glad I was born without the collector instinct…

- Chris Klimas

October 19, 2019 at 4:39 pm

Small correction: Lost Treasures also shipped for the Apple IIGS, which is where I encountered it.

- Lisa H.

October 19, 2019 at 6:04 pm

I don’t know about running the Z-machine on a toaster, but I’ve seen a refrigerator with a touch screen that was probably smart enough to do it.

- M. Casey

October 19, 2019 at 7:15 pm

Wow, great article Jimmy.

Was this the first time the TI-99/4A made a major appearance in your work? It was totally a footnote in computer history, but it was my first computer–purchased by my dad in the inventory blowout you mention–so there’s a nostalgic appeal to it.

There were some unfortunate choices there that really held the machine back; the days of cassette deck storage were winding down, happily, but had Texas Instruments gone with floppies instead of cartridges as their default I think the TI would’ve been longer-lived.

Back in those days I remember wishing I could afford Hitchhiker’s. Instead it was mostly a diet of Parsec, Munchman, and whatever I could borrow or program myself at that young age.

- Jimmy Maher

October 19, 2019 at 7:23 pm

It’s showed up a bit here and there, such as in the “Business is War” article. Certainly not extensively, though.

- Steve Cook

October 20, 2019 at 1:04 am

Is the InfoTaskforce’s David Beazley the notable Python developer?

- Jimmy Maher

October 20, 2019 at 8:55 am

No. I made the same mistake, to the point of sending him an email to ask about it. He wrote a very friendly note back to say that, while he had fond memories of playing Infocom games, he’d never written an interpreter for them.

- Ben

October 20, 2019 at 1:09 am

“allowing them to makes games for the whole of the market”

Makes should be make?

- Jimmy Maher

October 20, 2019 at 8:53 am

Thanks!

- Jim Fetzner

October 20, 2019 at 1:21 am

Actually, I am pretty sure you may have confused me with Jim Reiss, as I remember writing the Infocom message to you relating to the Asgard production of these titles when you were starting to work on this project. . .I am named Jim, but the last name is Fetzner. I helped Chris Bobbitt sort them out during a visit to Northern Virginia right after he received the two massive boxes of Infocom titles (and purchased one of each title for my personal collection). Jim Reiss was definitely a prolific Asgard programmer though, so he probably gave you a lot of information too!

- Jimmy Maher

October 20, 2019 at 8:53 am

Woops! So sorry about that. Too many Jims in this story…

- Adam Thornton

October 20, 2019 at 2:21 am

An FYI: to bring the story closer to full circle, I’ve ported the Frotz interpreter to TOPS-20 on the PDP-10.

https://github.com/athornton/tops20-frotz

The magic to transform Frotz source into something the TOPS-20 compiler will consume is:

https://github.com/athornton/tops20-frotz

It won’t be _all the way_ back home until ported to ITS–which does not have nearly as modern a C compiler as TOPS-20–but, still, it was pretty thrilling to see _Jigsaw_ run on TOPS-20.

- Carl Grace

October 20, 2019 at 3:41 am

Jimmy, is there a reason you call the TI Computer the 99/4A and not the TI-99? When it was (briefly) popular I only ever recall hearing it called the TI-99 not the 99.

It’s not a big deal to be sure, but even the magazines called it the TI-99 (similar to the C64) as far as I remember although to be fair it was a long time ago.

- Jimmy Maher

October 20, 2019 at 9:02 am

Just an aesthetic preference. I don’t use the C64 abbreviation either, for what it’s worth. Just don’t like the way it looks on the page…

- John

October 21, 2019 at 5:53 am

It’s interesting to think about the different fate of the graphical adventures: roughly the same type of portability has been achieved through ScummVM, but to my knowledge there’s nothing in that world even close to approaching the interactive fiction scene of new creations running on the old systems.

There’s all sorts of perfectly good reasons: maybe the most obvious being the much higher barrier to entry for creators once art enters the picture.

- Jimmy Maher

October 21, 2019 at 9:41 am

Another reason the Z-Machine stuck around so long was that it really did do everything an interactive-fiction virtual machine needed to do, whether in the 1980s, the 1990s, or the 2000s; because of its minimalist nature, it was easy enough to retrofit better typefaces, scrollback buffers, etc., at the interpreter level. Thus playing a TADS game on a TADS interpreter really wasn’t that much different an experience from playing on Infocom’s aged virtual machine with a modern interpreter. We’d probably still be releasing heaps of new games for the Z-Machine if it weren’t for its limitations on size, which really began to bite after the introduction of Inform 7. (The post-Infocom version 8 standard did push allowable story-file size up to 512 K, but it really wasn’t possible to go beyond that without becoming very inefficient.)

But graphics change the picture (ha!) dramatically. Nobody particularly wants to play a new graphic adventure with Sierra graphics from the 1980s, except for nostalgics and lovers of retro kitsch — and catering that slavishly to the nostalgia instinct tends to keep you from doing much that’s new and interesting.

- Scott

October 21, 2019 at 5:16 pm

Fantastic ! Jimmy . Thanks

- Watts Martin

October 22, 2019 at 8:48 pm

As someone who clung tenaciously to the TRS-80 Model 1/3/4 line, I remember that someone managed to produce — actually, I suspect “extract” is the correct word — a version 3 compatible interpreter for the platform. If you put the interpreter and a game file on the same disk with the same name except for the extension — i.e., ZORK3/CMD and ZORK3/DAT — the interpreter would find the correct data file and load it. I’m 99% sure there were several Infocom adventures that were never officially released for the TRS-80 that came out that way.

I was on some pre-internet service, either GEnie or Delphi, that had an official Infocom forum on it, and I proposed in a thread that Infocom see if they could compile a v5 interpreter for the TRS-80 Model 4 with minimal effort: Model 4 computers could have 128K of RAM, (barely) enough to support the format, and there was a C compiler available for them. One of the Infocom engineers actually responded to me and said something along the lines of, “That’s maybe something I could bring up at the next monthly planning meeting.” As it turned out, I’m pretty sure there was no next monthly planning meeting — that was around April or May of 1989.

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2019 at 4:53 am

I did find some TRS-80 files floating around some odds-and-ends disk images, called “The Infocom Executor” or something like that, dating from 1986. At first, I thought I might have stumbled upon yet another early third-party Z-Machine interpreter, but eventually concluded that it was just what you describe. I also found what appeared to be a commented disassembly of Infocom’s interpreter. I don’t know whether this was the one used by the InfoTaskforce in their work.

As you may know, the TRS-80 architecture was actually very popular in Australia, largely in the form of a clone manufactured and sold by an electronics chain called Dick Smith’s. George Janczuk at least was active on this scene; I found several pre-InfoTaskforce tools written by him for the TRS-80, such as a story-file vocabulary lister and a text dumper.

- Wolfeye M.

October 28, 2019 at 8:46 am

Looks like I’ve caught up with your blog. It’s been a good read, so far. Looking forward to the next one.

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New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 2: Hacking Deeper (or, Follies of Graham Nelson’s Youth)
November 8, 2019

Earlier this year, I reached out to Graham Nelson, the most important single technical architect of interactive fiction’s last three decades, to open a dialog about his early life and work. I was rewarded with a rich and enjoyable correspondence. But when the time came to write this article based on it, I found myself on the horns of a dilemma. The problem was not, as it too often is, that I lacked for material to flesh out his personal story. It was rather that Graham had told his own story so well that I didn’t know what I could possibly add to it. I saw little point in paraphrasing what Graham wrote in my own words, trampling all over his spry English irony with my clumsy Americanisms. In the end, I decided not to try.

So, today I present to you Graham Nelson’s story, told as only he can tell it. It’s a rare treat given that Graham is, like so many people of real accomplishment, usually reluctant to speak at any length about himself. I’ll just offer a couple of contextual notes before he begins. The “Inform” to which Graham eventually refers is a specialized text-adventure programming language by that name targeting the Z-Machine (and much later a newer virtual machine known as Glulx which has finally come to supersede Infocom’s venerable creation); Inform has been the most popular tool of its type through the last quarter-century. And Curses is the first full-fledged game ever written with Inform, a puzzly yet eminently literary time-traveling epic which took the huddled, beleaguered text-adventure diehards by storm upon its release in 1993, giving them new hope for their beloved form’s future and inspiring many of them to think of making their own games — using Inform more often than not. In the third and final article of this series on the roots of the Interactive Fiction Renaissance, I’ll examine both of these seminal artifacts in depth with the detachment of a third party, trying to place them in their proper historical context for you. For today, though, I give you Graham Nelson unfiltered to tell you his story of how they — and he — came to be…

Great Baddow, the quiet Essex village where Graham Nelson grew up.

I was born in 1968, so I’m coeval with The White Album and Apollo 8. I was born in Chelmsford, in Essex, and grew up mainly in Great Baddow, a quiet suburban village. There were arable farms on one side, where in those days the stubble of the wheat would still be burned off once a year. (In fact, I see that the Wikipedia page for “stubble burning” features a photo from the flat countryside of Essex, taken in 1986. The practice is banned now.) My street, Hollywood Close, had been built in the early 1960s on what used to be Rothman’s Farm. The last trees were still being cut down when I was young, though that was mainly because of Dutch Elm Disease. The houses having been sold all at once, to young families of a similar age, my street was full of seven-year olds when I was seven, and full of fifteen-year olds when I was fifteen. I went to local schools, never more than walking distance away. My primary school, Rothman’s Junior, was built on another field of the same farm, in fact.

My father Peter was an electronics engineer at English Electric Valve. My mother Christine — always “Chris” — was a clerical civil servant before she had me, at the National Assistance Board, which we would call social security today. In those days, women left work when they had a child, which is exactly what she did when she had me and my brother. But later on she trained as a personal assistant, learning Pitman shorthand, which I never picked up, and also typing, which I sort of did: I am a two-fingered typist to this day, but unusually fast at it. I did try the proper technique, but on our home typewriter, my little finger just wasn’t strong enough to strike an “A”. Or perhaps I saw no reason to learn how other people did things.

My parents had met in school in Gosport, a naval village opposite Portsmouth, on the south coast of England. As a result, both sides of my family were in the same town; indeed, we were the eccentric ones, having moved away to Essex. My many aunts, uncles, second cousins, and so on were almost all still in Portsmouth, and we would stay there for every holiday or school break. In effect, it was a second home. Though I didn’t know him for long, a formative influence was my mother’s father Albert, a navy regular who became a postman in civilian life. He was ship’s cook on HMS Belfast during the Second World War; my one successful poem (in the sense of being reprinted, which is the acid test for poems) is in his memory.

None of these people had any higher education at all. I would be the first to go to a university, though my father did the correspondence-course Open University degree in the 1970s, and my mother went to any number of evening classes. (She ended up with a ridiculous number of O-levels, rather the way that some Scouts go on collecting badges until their arms are completely covered.) They both came from genuinely poor backgrounds, where you grew a lot of your own food, and had to make and mend. You didn’t buy books, you borrowed them from the library — though my grandmother did have the Pears Cyclopaedia for 1938 and a dictionary for crosswords. But I didn’t grow up in any way that could be called deprived. My father made a solid middle-class income at a time when that could keep a family of four in a house of their own and run a car. He wasn’t a top-bracket professional, able to sign passport applications as a character reference, like a doctor or a lawyer, but he was definitely white-collar staff, not blue-collar. Yes, he worked in a factory, but in the R&D lab at one end. This is not a Bruce Springsteen song. He would not have known what to do with a six pack of beer.

My brother Toby, who later became a professional computer programmer working at Electronic Arts and other places, was two years younger than me, which meant he passed through school with teachers expecting him to be like me, which he both is and isn’t. He’s my only sibling, though I now also have a brother-in-law and sister-in-law. “Graham” and “Toby” are both definitely unusual names in England in our generation, which is the sort of thing that annoys you as a child, but is then usefully distinctive in later life. At least “Graham” is unabbreviable, for which I have always been grateful.

The local education authority would have expected me to pass the eleven-plus exam, and move up the social ladder to King Edward VI Grammar School, the best in the area by far. But my parents, who believed in universal education, chose not to enter me. So at eleven and a half, I began at Great Baddow Comprehensive School. I didn’t regret this then, and don’t now. I had some fine teachers, and though I was an oddity there, I would have been an oddity anywhere. Besides, I had plenty of friends; it wasn’t the social snake-pit which American high schools always seem to be on television.

Until around 1980, there were no commercial home computers in the UK, which was consistently a couple of years behind the United States in that respect. But my father Peter was also an electronics hobbyist. Practical Electronics magazine tended to be around the house, and even American magazines like Byte, on occasion; I had a copy of the legendary Smalltalk number of Byte, with its famous hot-air-balloon cover. But the gap between these magazines — and the book in my school library about Unix — and reality was enormous. All we had in the house was a breadboard and some TTL chips. Remarkably, my father nevertheless built a computer the size of a typewriter. It had no persistent storage; you had to key in opcodes in hex with a numeric keypad. But it worked. It was a mechanism with no moving parts. It’s hard to explain now how almost alchemical that seemed. He would give a little my-team-has-won-again cheer from his armchair whenever the BBC show Tomorrow’s World used the words “integrated circuits”. (I think this was a little before the term “microchips” came into common usage, or possibly the BBC simply thought it a vulgar colloquialism. They were more old-school back then.)

Until I was twelve years old, then, computing was something done on mainframes – or at any rate “minis” like the DEC VAX, running payroll for medium-sized companies. Schools never had these, or anything else for that matter. In the ordinary way of things, I would never have seen or touched a real computer. But I did, on just a few tantalising occasions.

Great Baddow was not really a tech town, but it was where Marconi had set up, and so there were avionics businesses, such as the one my father worked for, English Electric Valve. Because of that, a rising industry figure named Ian Young lived in our street. His two boys were just about the same age as me and my brother, and he and his wife Gill were good friends of my parents — I caught up with them at my parents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary only a few weeks ago. Ian soon relocated to Reading as an executive climbing the ranks of Digital Equipment Corporation, then the world’s number two computer company after IBM, but our families kept in touch. A couple of times each year my brother and I would go off to spend a week with the Youngs during the school holidays. This is beginning to sound like a Narnia book, and in a way it was a little like that. Ian would sportingly take us four boys to DEC’s headquarters — in particular, to the darkened rooms where the programmers worked, in an industrial space shared with a biscuit factory. (Another fun thing about the Youngs was that they always had plenty of chocolate-coated Club biscuits from factory surplus.) We would sit at a VT-220 terminal with a fluorescent green screen and play the DECUS user group’s collection of games for the VAX. These were entirely textual, though a few, like chess or Star Trek, rendered a board using ASCII art. Most of these games were flimsy nothings: a boxing simulator, I remember, a Towers of Hanoi demo, and so on. But the exception was Crowther and Woods’s Adventure, which I played less than a year after Don Woods’s canonical first version was circulated by DECUS. Adventure was like nothing else, and had a depth and an ability to entrance which is hard to overstate. There was no such thing as saving the game — or if there was, we didn’t know about it. We simply remembered that you had to unlock the grating, and that the rusty iron rod would… and so on. Our sessions almost invariably ended in one of the two unforgiving mazes. But that was somehow not an unsatisfying thing. It seemed like something you were exploring, not something you were trying to win.

It was, of course, maddening to be hooked on a game you could play perhaps once every six months. I got my first actual computer in 1980, for my twelfth birthday: an Acorn Atom. I had the circuit diagram on my wall; it was the first and last computer I’ve ever owned which I understood the physical workings of. My father assembled it from the kit form. This was £50 cheaper — not a trivial sum in those days — and was also rather satisfying for him, both because it was a lovely bit of craftsmanship to put together (involving two weekends of non-stop soldering), and also because he was never such a hero to his son as when we finally plugged it in and it worked flawlessly. Curious how much of this story appears to be about fathers and sons…

At any rate, I began thinking about implementing “adventures” very early on. This was close to impossible on a computer with 12 K of RAM (and even that only after I slowly expanded it, buying 0.5 K memory chips one at a time from a local hardware store). And yet… I can still remember the epiphany when I realised that you could model the location of an object by storing this in a byte which was either a room number or a special value to mean “being carried”. I think the most feasible creation I came up with was a procedurally-generated game on a squared grid, ten rooms wide by infinity rooms long, where certain rooms were overridden with names and puzzles. It had no title, but was known in my family as “the adventure of Igneous the Dwarf”, after its only real character. My first published game was an imitation of the arcade game Frogger for the Acorn Atom. I made something like £70 in royalties from it, but it really had no interactive-fiction content of any kind.

My first experience of commercial interactive fiction came for the BBC Micro, the big brother of the Acorn Atom; my father being my big brother in this instance, since he bought one in 1981. The Scott Adams line made it onto the BBC Micro, and so did ports of the Cambridge mainframe games, marketed first by Acornsoft and then by Topologika. I thus played some of the canonical Cambridge games quite a while before going to Cambridge. (Cambridge was then the lodestone of the UK computing industry; things like the BBC Micro and the ARM chip are easily overlooked in Cambridge’s history, given the university’s work with gravity, evolution, the electron, etc., but this was not a small deal at the time.) In particular, the most ambitious of the Cambridge games, Acheton, came out from Acornsoft on a disk release, and I played it. This was an extraordinary thing; in the United Kingdom, few computer owners had disk drives, and no more than a handful of BBC Micro games were ever released in that format.

I made something fractionally like a graphical adventure, called Crystal Castle, for the BBC Micro. (In 2000, Toby helpfully, if that’s the word, found the last existing cassette tape of this, digitised it to a WAV file, signal-processed the result, and ended up with about 22 K of program and data. To our astonishment, it ran.) It was written in binary machine code, which thus had no source code. Crystal Castle was nearly published, but the deal ultimately fell through. Superior Software, then the best marque for BBC Micro stuff, exchanged friendly letters with me, and for a while it really did look like it would happen. But I really needed an artist, and a bit more design skill. So, they passed. I imagine they had quite a large slush pile of games on cassette sent in by aspiring coders back then. You should not think of me as a teenage entrepreneur; I was mostly unsuccessful.

I did get two BBC Micro games published in 1984 by a cottage-industry sort of software house somewhere in Essex, run by a local teacher. Anybody who could arrange to duplicate cassette tapes and print inlay cards could be a “software house” in those days, and quite a lot of firms with improvised names (“Aardvark Software”, etc.) were actually people running a mail-order business out of their front rooms. They sold my two games as one, in that they were side A and side B of the same cassette. The games had the somewhat Asimovian names Galaxy’s Edge and Escape from Solaris. I honestly remember little about them, except that Escape from Solaris was a two-handed game. To play, you had to connect two BBC Micros back-to-back with an RS-423 cable, and then you had to type alternate commands. One program would stall while the other was active, but the thing worked. I cannot imagine that these games were any good, but the milieu was that of alien science being indistinguishable from magic. The role-playing game Traveller may have been an influence, I suppose, but my local library had also stocked a great deal of golden-age science fiction, and I had read every last dreg of it. (I hadn’t, at that time, played Starcross, though I’d probably seen Level 9’s Snowball.) I do not still have copies, and I am therefore spared the moral dilemma of whether I should make them publicly available. I did get a piece of fan mail, I remember, by someone who asked if I was a chemist. From this memory, I infer that there were some science-based puzzles.

The Quill-written games weren’t any influence on me, nor really the Magnetic Scrolls ones. The Quill was a ZX Spectrum phenomenon — and the Spectrum came from Acorn’s arch-enemy Sinclair. I think my father regarded it as unsound. It certainly did not have a keyboard designed to the requirement that it survive having a cup of coffee poured through it, as the BBC Micro did. But it did have an enormous amount of RAM — or rather, it didn’t consume all of that precious RAM on screen memory. The way that it avoided this was a distasteful hack, but also a stroke of genius, making the Spectrum a perfect games machine. As a result, those of my friends whose fathers knew anything about computers had BBC Micros, and the rest had Spectrums. It is somehow very English of us to have invented a new class distinction in the 1980s, but I rather think we did. Magnetic Scrolls were a different case, since they were adopting an Infocom-like strategy of releasing for multiple platforms, but they came along later, and always seemed to me to be more style than substance. The Pawn was heavily promoted, but I didn’t care for it.

I really must mention Level 9, though. They wrote 200-room cave adventures – albeit sometimes the cave was a starship – and by dint of some ingenious compression were able to get them out on tape. In particular, I played through to completion all three of the original Level 9 fantasy trilogy: the first being an extended version of the Crowther and Woods Adventure, the second and third being new but in the same style. I still think these good, in some relative sense. Level 9’s version of the Crowther and Woods Adventure, Colossal Adventure, was the first version which I fully explored, so that it still half seems to me like the definitive version. Ironically, none of Level 9’s games had levels in the normal gaming sense.

I didn’t play any of Infocom’s games until, I think, 1987. I bought a handful, one at a time, from Harrod’s in Knightsbridge — a department store for the rich and, it would like to imagine, the socially elite. I was neither of those things, but I knew what I wanted. Infocom’s wares were luxury goods, and luxury goods tend to stay on the shelves until they sell. Harrod’s had a modest stock, which almost nobody else in the UK did, though you could find a handful of early Infocom titles such as Suspended for the Commodore 64 if you trawled the more plebeian electronics shops of Tottenham Court Road. The ones I bought were CP/M editions of some of the classic titles of 1983 to 1985: Enchanter, I remember, being the first. These we were able to run on my brother’s computer, which was an Amstrad, a British machine built for word processing, but which — thanks to the cheapness of Alan Sugar, Amstrad’s proprietor, a sort of British version of Commodore’s Jack Tramiel — ran CP/M rather than MS-DOS.

That was just after I had begun as an undergraduate at Cambridge and joined the mainframe there, Phoenix, as a user. Each user had an allocation of “shares”, which governed how much computing time you could have. As the newest kid to arrive, I had ten shares. There were legends of a man in computational chemistry, modelling the Schrödinger equation for polythene, who had something like 10,000. At any rate, ten shares was only just enough to read your email in daytime. To run anything like Dungeon, the IBM port of Zork, you had to sit up at night — which we did, a little. I think Dungeon was the only externally-written game playable on Phoenix; the others were all homegrown, using TSAL, the game assembler written by David Seal and Jonathan Thackray. As I wrote long ago, to me and others who played them them those games “are as redolent of late nights in the User Area as the soapy taste of Nestlé’s vending-machine chocolate or floppy, rapidly-yellowing line printer paper.” As I noted earlier, most of them ultimately migrated to Acornsoft and Topologika releases.

But there were other social aspects to Phoenix as well. There was a rudimentary bulletin board called GROGGS (the “General Reverse-Ordered Gossip-Gathering System”) and it was tacitly encouraged by the Phoenix administrators because it stopped people abusing the Suggest program as a noticeboard. (We did not then have access to Usenet.) GROGGS was unusually egalitarian — students and faculty somewhat mingled, which was not typical of Cambridge then. Its undoubted king was Jonathan Partington (JRP1), a young professor who had a generous, playful wit. The Phoenix administrators dreaded his parodies of their official announcements. In his presence, GROGGS was a little like the salon in which the hangers-on of Oscar Wilde would attempt to keep up. Numerous people had a schtick; mine was to mutate my user-name to some version of the Prufrockian “I am not Prince Hamlet”. Commenting on the new Dire Straits album, I would post as “I am not Mark Knopfler”. That sort of thing. Jonathan wrote some of the Cambridge mainframe games. He taught me for a few second-year options.

There was also a form of direct messaging, the “notify” command, and you had the ability to link your filespace to somebody else’s, in effect giving them shared access. At some point Mark Owen and Matthew Richards, inseparable friends at Trinity College, observed that these links turned the users of Phoenix into a directed graph — what we would now call a social network. Mark and Matthew converted the whole mainframe into a sort of adventure game on this basis, in which user filespaces were the rooms, and links were map connections between them. You could store a little text file in your filespace as your own room description. Mark and Matthew’s system was called MEGA, a name chosen as an anagram of GAME. Mark went on to take a PhD in neural networks, back in the days when they didn’t work and were considered a dead end; he eventually wrote a book on signal processing. Matthew, a gifted algebraist and one of the nicest people I have ever known, died of Hodgkin’s disease only a couple of years into his own PhD — the first shock of death close up that most of us had known. The doctors tried everything to keep him alive. There’s no length they won’t go to with a young, strong patient, however cruel.

At any rate, back in the days of MEGA, it occurred to me that more could be done. Rather than storing just a single room description, each user could store a larger blob of content, and we would then have a form of MUD. This system, jointly coded by myself and a CS student called John Croft, was called TERA (I forget why we didn’t go up from MEGA to GIGA — perhaps there already was one?) and its compiler was “teraform”. This is the origin of the “-form” suffix in Inform’s name.

Cambridge mathematics degrees were in four parts: IA, IB, II, and III. Part III was an optional fourth year, which now earns you a master’s, but which for arcane funding reasons didn’t in my day. The Part III people were the aspiring professionals, hoping for a PhD grant at the end of it. Only seven or eight were available, which lent a competitive edge to a social group which was all too competitive already. I was thoroughly settled in Cambridge, living in an old Victorian house off Trumpington Street with four close friends, down by the river meadows. It was a very happy time in my life, and I had absolutely no intention of giving it up. As a geometer, I was hoping to be a research student of Frank Adams, a legendary topologist but a man with an awkward, stand-offish character. I’m now rather glad that this didn’t happen, though I’m sorry about the reason, which was that he died in a car crash. The only possible alternative, the affable Ray Lickorish, was just going on sabbatical. And so I found myself obliged to apply to Oxford instead. I was very fortunate to become the student of Simon Donaldson, only the fifth British mathematician to win the Fields Medal. (He is warmly remembered at St Anne’s College, where I now am, not for the Fields, or the Crafoord Prize, or for being knighted, or winning a $3 million award — not for any of that, but for having been a good Nursery Fellow, looking after the college crèche.) Having opened up a new and, almost at once, a rapidly-moving field of study, Simon was over-extended with collaborators, and I wasn’t often a good use of his time. Picture me as one of those plodding Viennese students Beethoven was obliged to give piano lessons to. But it was a privilege even to be present at an important moment in the history of modern geometry, and in his quietly kind way, Simon was an inspirational leader.

So, although I did find myself a doctoral perch, I had time on my hands — not work time, as I had plenty to do on that front, but social time, since everyone I knew was back in Cambridge. I read a great many books, buying up remaindered Faber literary paperbacks from the Henry Pordes bookshop in Charing Cross Road, London, whenever I was passing through. The plays of Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett, David Hare; the poems of Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, Auden, Eliot, and so forth. I wrote a novel, which had to do with two people who worked in a research lab doing unethical things attempting to control chimpanzees. He took the work at face value, she didn’t, or perhaps it was the other way around. By the time I finished, I knew enough to know that it wasn’t any good, but in so far as you become a writer simply by writing, I had become a writer. I then wrote four short stories, and a one-act play called A Church by Daylight (a title which is a tag borrowed from Much Ado About Nothing). This play was thin on plot but had to do with loss. I wasn’t much good at dialogue, and in some way I boiled the play down to its essence, which was eventually published as a twelve-line poem called “Requiem”.

It was during my second year as a DPhil student that The Lost Treasures of Infocom came out. At this time my computer was an Acorn Archimedes with a 20 MB hard drive. I bought the MS-DOS box because I could read the story files from the MS-DOS disks, even if I couldn’t run the MS-DOS interpreter. I had no modem or network access from my house, and could only get files on or off by taking a floppy disk to the computing-service building right across town. I used the InfoTaskforce interpreter to actually play the games on my Archimedes.

So, I would say that the existence of a community-written interpreter was an essential precondition for Inform. In the period from 1990 to 1992, there were two significant Infocom-archaeology projects going on independently, though they were certainly aware of each other: the InfoTaskforce interpreter, and a disassembler called “txd” by Mark Howell. The InfoTaskforce people were based in Australia, and I had no contact with them, but I saw their code. Mark, however, I did exchange emails with. I remember emailing him to ask if anyone had written an assembler to make new games for the Z-Machine, and he replied with some wording close to: “Many people have had many dreams”. I set myself the task of faking a story file just well enough to allow it to execute on the InfoTaskforce interpreter.

I recall that my first self-made story file computed a prime factorisation and then printed the result. Except that it didn’t. I would double-click on the story file, and nothing would happen. I would assume that this was because there was some further table in the story file which I needed to fake: that the interpreter was refusing my file because it lacked this table, let’s say. As a result, I got into a cycle of making more and more elaborate fakes, always with negative results. Eventually I found that these faux story files had been correct all along; it was just that the user interface for the Acorn Archimedes port of the InfoTaskforce interpreter displayed nothing onscreen until the first moment when a game’s output hit the bottom of its virtual display and caused a scroll event. My story files, uniquely in the history of the Z-Machine, simply printed a few lines and then quit. They didn’t produce enough output to scroll, so nothing ever showed up onscreen. (This is why, for several years, the first thing that an Inform-written game did was to print a run of newlines.) So, when I finally managed to make a story file which factorised the numbers 2 to 100, and found that it worked correctly, I had a fairly elaborate assembler. This was called “zass”, and eventually became Inform 1.

The project might have gone no further except for the arrival of Usenet and the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup. Suddenly my email address was one which people could contact, and my posts were replied to. I was no longer on GROGGS, talking to a handful of people I knew in real life; I was on Usenet, talking to those I would likely never meet. People didn’t really use Inform much until around Inform 3, but still, there was feedback. An appetite seemed to exist.

A curious echo of the fascination the Z-machine held is that a couple of tiny story files produced by me in the course of these experiments — I remember one with two rooms in it and a few sample objects, one of them a football — themselves started to be collected by people. Of course there were soon to be lots of story files, an unending supply of them. But for just a brief period, even the output of Inform had a sort of second-hand glory reflected onto it.

Inform 1 was the result of my experiments to synthesise a story file, so it preceded Curses; it’s not that I set out to create both. Still, I did once write that Inform and Curses were Siamese twins, though the expression makes me flinch now. It’s not a comedic thing to be born conjoined. That aside, was it true, or did it simply sound clever? It’s true in part. I steadily improved Inform as I was building up Curses in size, and Curses undeniably played a role as a proof of concept. Numerous half-finished interactive-fiction systems had been abandoned with no notable games to their credit, but TADS, especially, shone by having been used for full-scale works. Yet this linkage is only part of the story.

In retrospect, the decision to write Curses fits with the pattern of imitation which you tend to find in the juvenilia of writers. I had read some novels, I wrote a novel; I had read some plays, I wrote a play; and so on. Lost Treasures may have played the same role for me, in computer-game terms, that those 1980s Faber & Faber paperbacks played in literary terms. But I also wrote Curses as an entertainment for my friends back in Cambridge, who attacked it without mercy. A very early version caused hilarity not so much for its intrinsic qualities as because the command “unlock fish” crashed it right out.

The title alludes to the recurring ancestral curses of the Meldrew family, each generation doomed never quite to achieve anything. (Read into that what you will, but it caused my father to raise an amused eyebrow.) The name was actually a hindrance for a while. In the days of Archie and Veronica and other pre-Web systems for searching FTP sites, “curses” was a name already taken by the software library for text windows on Unix.

What is Curses about? A few years ago Emily Short and I were interviewed, one after another, at the Seattle Museum of Pop Culture. Emily described Curses as being about the richness of culture and the excitement of discovering it. This may be an overly generous verdict, but I see what she means. Curses has a kind of exuberance to it. The ferment of what I was reading infuses the game, and although most people saw it as a faithful homage to Infocom, it was also a work of Modernism, assembled from the juxtaposed fragments of other texts. At Meldrew Hall, I could connect everything with everything.

There were four main strands here. Most apparent is the many-volume Oxford History of England, an old-school reference work, which lined up on my shelf in pale blue dust jackets. I had collected them by scouring second-hand book shops with the same assiduity as a kid completing an album of football stickers. Something of each went into Curses, from Roman England (Vol. I) through to society paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and so on. The second strand was Eliot and The Waste Land, not solely for its content but also for its permissive style, as if it had authorised me to throw everything together. The third strand was classics: I was reading a lot of those “Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Philosophy” type of books, and I liked to grab the picturesque parts. Lastly, of course, the fourth strand is Infocom. Some of the puzzle design is lovingly imitative of Lebling, especially. The hieroglyphics from Infidel make a direct appearance. I also took affectionate swipes at the conventions, as with the infamous “You have missed the point entirely” death incurred simply by going down from the opening room, or the part where the narrator awards some points and then, a few turns later, takes them back again. Or the devil, who gives hints, all of which are lies. People actually filed bug reports over that. But really, I don’t think I did anything so transgressive that Infocom might not have done the same itself.

Those four strands are the main ingredients, but I should also acknowledge the indirect influence of the 1980s turn towards magical realism in fantasy novels, where it became possible to marry the fantastical with the merely historical. I had certainly read John Crowley’s Little, Big, for example. You could, at a stretch, say that Curses lies in the same genre.

The art of the Modernist collage is to somehow provide some cement which will hold the whole thing together. In the case of Curses, that cement is provided by the continuity of the Meldrew family and of the house – to which, and this is crucial, the player is always returning, and which ramifies with endless secret rooms. Moreover, you always experience the house through its behind-the-scenes places, joined in a skeletal way around the public areas which you never get to visit. The game is at its best when this cement is strongest, with the puzzles directly related to family members or to the house’s nooks and crannies. It loses coherence when it goes further afield, and this is why a final proposed addition, to do with the subway systems of various world cities all being joined up, was dropped. It didn’t feel like Curses any more. The weakest parts of Curses are the last parts added, and I suspect that the penultimate release is probably a better experience than the final one.

I am sometimes asked if Curses was autobiographical. As the above makes clear, in one sense yes, in that it’s a logbook of my reading. And in another obvious sense, no: I never actually teleported to ancient Alexandria. Nor have I ever lived in a grand house. My family home was built around 1960. It had seven rooms, none of them secret, and its map was an acyclic graph. There were early players who imagined that I might really be from some cadet branch of the landed gentry, with spacious grounds out of my window. This was not the case. Our estate consisted of one apple tree and two gooseberry bushes. All the same, England is not like America in this respect. Because of the Second World War, and because of inheritance tax, the great stately homes of England had essentially all become public places by the time I was a child. A routine way to entertain visiting grandparents was to take them around, say, the Jacobean manor house at Hatfield, where the Cecils had lived since the reign of James I. You didn’t have to be at all rich to do this.

The Attic area of Curses, where the game begins, does also contain just a little of my real family. The most intriguing place in my childhood home was, for sure, the attic, because it was so seldom accessible to me: a windowless but large space, properly floored, but never converted into a living area. My father would develop photographs up there, pouring chemicals into a tray, under a red lamp with a pull-cord switch. He would allow me to pull this cord. The house also had an airing cupboard — that is, a space around the hot-water boiler where towels could be dried. In this cupboard, my mother at one time made home-brew wine, in a sort of slow chemistry experiment with evil-looking demijohns. My brother doesn’t really make an appearance in Curses, which I’m sad about now, but it’s essential that the protagonist has ancestors rather than contemporaries. Though the protagonist has a spouse and children, mentioned right up front, they never appear, which I think is worth noting in a game where almost everything else that is foreshadowed eventually comes to pass.

Curses is by any reasonable standard too hard. In its first releases, I would update it with new material each time I made bug fixes, so that the game evolved and grew. Some players would play each version as it came out, and this enabled them to get further in, because they had prior experience from earlier builds. A dedicated fan base sent in bug reports, my favourite being that the brass key could not be picked up by the robot mouse, because brass is non-magnetic. The reward for any bug reported was that the reporter could nominate a new song to be added to the radio’s playlist, provided that it was both catchy and objectively dreadful. It would be interesting to extract that playlist now and put it on Spotify.

Feedback from players gave Curses a certain polish, but it wasn’t the only thing. I think it’s noteworthy that, just as Infocom had an editor as well as play-testers, so too I had an editor for at least part of the process: Gareth Rees, a Cambridge friend, author of the very wonderful Christminster. Richard Tucker also weighed in. I have the impression that before 1992 works of interactive fiction didn’t have much quality control, not so much because people didn’t want it, but because networking conditions didn’t allow for it.

To my great regret, the source code for Curses is now lost. It was for a while on a disk promisingly labelled “Curses source code”, but that disk is unreadable, and not for want of trying. Somewhere in my many changes of address and computer, I lost the necessary tech, or damaged it. (And Jigsaw too, alas.) It wouldn’t be hard to resurrect something, by working from a disassembly of the story file: there’s actually a tool to turn story files into Inform 6 out there somewhere. I occasionally think of asking if anyone would like to do that, and perhaps produce a faithful Inform 7 implementation.

Today, people play Curses with a walkthrough by their sides. But the game never quite goes away. Mike Spivey told me recently that he introduced himself to modern interactive fiction – “modern” interactive fiction – by playing Curses in 2017. A few people, at least, still tread Meldrew Hall. I remain fond of the place, as you can probably gather from the length of this reminiscence. Once in a blue moon I am tempted to write a sequel, Curses Foiled. But no. Sometimes you really can’t go back.

Comments
31 Responses

- Doug Egan

November 8, 2019 at 8:46 pm

Thanks so much for publishing this correspondance with Graham Nelson. I have always wondered how Inform came to be, and revere “Curses” as one of my introductions to modern interactive fiction.

- Andrew Plotkin

November 8, 2019 at 9:43 pm

Thanks for getting this story out of Graham. :)

> (and much later a newer virtual machine known as Glulx which has finally come to supersede Infocom’s venerable creation)

It felt like “much later”, but really less than seven years later! Inform’s birthday is mid-1993; my first draft of Inform-with-Glulx was late 1999.

A short time by the standards of us senior IF citizens looking back. Or, I suppose, the same interval as Infocom’s entire lifespan as an independent company.

- Ross

November 9, 2019 at 12:26 am

It seemed like a lot longer because we were all a lot younger back then.

- Jimmy Maher

November 9, 2019 at 8:34 am

I think in this context the “much” makes sense. Certainly at the pace this history has been moving. ;) And then there’s the fact that the Z-Machine wasn’t really superseded by Glulx until circa 2010. Before that, Glulx was used only by those who wanted to include multimedia elements, or on those occasions — vanishingly rare prior to Inform 7 — when a game exceeded the size limits of even the version 8 Z-Machine. I remember in the Comps of the aughts there would generally be twenty or thirty Z-Machine games, one or two Glulx.

- Peter Olausson

November 8, 2019 at 11:57 pm

With virtually no interest whatsoever in the IF renaissance etc I expected this post to be a dud, something to read while waiting for the next interesting one. How utterly wrong I was! This is a wonderful gem I will certainly return to many times. Thanks, Graham!

- Captain Kal

November 10, 2019 at 2:10 pm

Same here. It took me back, in my own childhood, quite different is many aspects, the same in others!! Great work!!!

- David Boddie

November 9, 2019 at 1:22 am

“Somewhere in my many changes of address and computer, I lost the necessary tech, or damaged it.”

If it’s not a completely hopeless case, there are people who might have the equipment to help rescue the data. Assuming that we’re talking about old Acorn systems, it’s worth mentioning that there’s an active Acorn retro-scene that tries to repair and preserve as much as possible.

- Jimmy Maher

November 9, 2019 at 8:36 am

I’ll mention it to Graham, in case he doesn’t see your comment. Thanks!

- Rafael

November 9, 2019 at 3:22 pm

Independently of filesystem or media, I am sure there are people very interested in preserving it. Kryoflux dumps (with many revolutions) or similar, could be used to recover as much as possible using modern dsp algorithms and so.

- Martin

November 9, 2019 at 1:31 am

“If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our club”.

Sorry most of you will be scratching your heads about this comment.

- Mike Russo

November 10, 2019 at 12:07 am

Whatever its perceived failings, Curses gets away with it all because it’s just so much FUN to play! Thanks for this great article.

- Lee Newsome

November 10, 2019 at 1:45 am

Graham may be interested to know that his early BBC micro adventure games, “The Discovery” and “Escape from Solaris” were recently found and made playable online.
http://bbcmicro.co.uk/index.php?rt_R=&rt_B=&rt_M=&rt_P=&rt_U=&rt_W=&rt_L=&search=Graham+Nelson&sort=u

- Jimmy Maher

November 11, 2019 at 12:47 pm

Cool! Added that link to the article. Thanks!

- Kerry Guerrero

November 10, 2019 at 11:23 pm

Yet another fantastic article! Excellent work.

Some time ago I worked out the song titles played by the radio in _Curses_. I’ll list them below for future reference. Turning the list into a Spotify playlist, is left as an exercise for the reader. Enjoy.

————-

The radio valves glow, and execrable so-called easy listening music fills the air…

The radio plays

* a synthesized
* a light orchestra
* a choral
* a snare drum and strings
* a country-and-western
* a one-finger piano
* a Welsh coal-miners’ Eisteddfod choir
* a Hammond organ
* an easy-listening
* a “lite-n-mellow”
* a jazz trio
* a Big Band

[version | rendition | travesty | arrangement | transcription] of

* a splendid concert of the Sibelius Violin Concerto by the Minot Symphony Orchestra of North Dakota
* Queen’s “I Want To Break Free”
* Bach’s “Air on a G-string”
* Mozart’s “Musical Joke”
* Stockhausen’s “Piano Pieces I-IX”
* Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”
* Summer from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”
* the especially slow movement of Gorecki’s “Symphony no. 3”
* Spandau Ballet’s “Gold”
* Duran Duran’s “Is There Something I Should Know?”
* Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla”
* Don McLean’s “American Pie”
* Chopin’s “Nocturne no. 1”
* Oxygene by Jean-Michel Jarre
* the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine”
* the Beatles’ “She Loves You”
* the Beatles’ “Hey Jude”
* the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
* Queen’s – “Bohemian Rhapsody”
* the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour”
* the Beatles’ “I Am The Walrus”
* Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”
* the old Elvis Presley number “Jailhouse Rock”
* the old Elvis Presley number “Blue Suede Shoes”
* ELO’s “Mr Blue Sky”
* Bach’s Toccata in D minor for organ
* ABC’s “The Look of Love”
* the Beach Boys’ “California Girls”
* the Stranglers’ “Golden Brown”
* Genesis’ “That’s All”
* Grieg’s piano concerto
* Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”
* Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5
* Beethoven’s “Emperor” piano concerto
* Mozart’s “Elvira Madigan” concerto
* Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 5
* Deep Purple’s “Smoke On The Water”
* Faure’s Requiem
* Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture”
* the Swan from Saint-Saëns’ “Carnival of the Animals”
* the “O Fortuna” from Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana”
* Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”
* the Bugs Bunny theme tune
* Strauss’ “Blue Danube” waltz
* the Star Wars theme tune
* the Star Trek theme tune
* the Dallas theme tune
* Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” overture
* Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing”
* Dire Straits’ “Brothers In Arms”
* Dire Straits’ “Tunnel Of Love”
* Wham’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”
* something abysmal by Leo Sayer
* Lionel Richie’s “Hello”
* Hot Chocolate’s “Happy Birthday”
* Abba’s “Mama Mia”
* Abba’s “Knowing Me, Knowing You”
* Barry Manilow’s “I Write The Songs”
* Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick”
* Ravel’s “Bolero”
* “Nessun Dorma”, as sung simultaneously by Pavarotti, Carreras and Dolly Parton
* Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”
* Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean”
* Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”
* Kylie Minogue’s “I Should Be So Lucky”
* the Eurovision Song Contest’s finest five minutes, “Diggy-Loo Diggy-Lay (Life Is Going My Way)”
* Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Come on Eileen”
* Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild”
* Toto’s “The Eye of the Tiger”
* Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”
* the traditional air “Greensleeves”
* Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark”
* Noel Coward’s “Don’t Put Your Daughter On The Stage”
* Chas and Dave’s “Rabbit Song”
* Paul McCartney’s “Mull of Kintyre”
* John Lennon’s “Imagine”
* that grisly carol, “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”
* that hoary old favourite, “Oh Come All Ye Faithful”
* “My Way” crooned over by Frank Sinatra

- Jimmy Maher

November 11, 2019 at 8:47 am

Does it really say “Eye of the Tiger” is by Toto? It’s actually by Survivor. (And yes, I’m appropriately ashamed to know this…)

- Kerry Guerrero

November 11, 2019 at 6:12 pm

I rechecked on a fresh disassembly and does say “Eye of the Tiger” is by Toto. Obviously a mistake. Good catch! (And no shame, it’s a great tune…)

- Lisa H.

November 11, 2019 at 6:38 pm

That would be some mashup!

- Chris Charabaruk

December 23, 2019 at 7:35 pm

I can’t wait for Survivor’s cover of “Africa”.

- Lisa H.

November 11, 2019 at 6:00 pm

Sounds like a rather difficult exercise for the reader (is there any other kind?). The Beatles songs especially pop out as ones that have their copyrights very jealously guarded and license fees held at high ransom. Michael Jackson might possibly be the same way.

- Zack Urlocker

November 11, 2019 at 12:16 am

Jimmy, this is a great story. But I would have loved to have more details on the language design, key insights into the implementation of Inform, a discussion of how he came up with some of the concepts in the language and tools, etc. I hope we’ll see some of that in part 3 or maybe in a part 4, 5 or 6. This is a topic worth digging into!

- Mike Taylor

November 12, 2019 at 7:18 am

STRONGLY agree!

- Andrew Plotkin

November 12, 2019 at 9:38 pm

Graham wrote up a great deal of that material in the Inform Tech Manual document: http://inform-fiction.org/source/tm/index.html

I believe that was written in parallel with the launch of Inform 6 (1996), so it’s pretty close to the action.

- Ant

November 12, 2019 at 12:07 pm

This is the quibbliest of quibbles but it’s actually an RS-423 cable that you need if you want to connect two Beebs together to play Escape From Solaris (and not an RS-232 as Graham wrote above).

- Jimmy Maher

November 12, 2019 at 1:41 pm

Fair enough. Thanks!

- Aula

November 16, 2019 at 9:09 am

“Interactive Fiction Rennaissance”
should be “Renaissance”

BTW, it’s interesting timing that between this article and the next, the Adventures of Perseus appeared on the Analog Antiquarian, the connection being that Andromeda appears briefly in Curses and less briefly in the story of her husband. Was that just a coincidence, or did you actually plan things that way?

- Jimmy Maher

November 16, 2019 at 9:30 am

Thanks!

And, while I’d love to take credit for the concordance, it was just a coincidence, I’m afraid. ;)

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- M. Casey

November 22, 2019 at 5:38 am

Great job Jimmy. It takes some humility for a writer to just get out of the way when his subject speaks so well on his own, and it paid off in spades here.

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- moving sound

December 24, 2019 at 5:31 pm

For some reason, I imagine a Curses Foiled game being to Curses what Cragne Manor was to Anchorhead.

- Ibrahim Gucukoglu

December 31, 2019 at 1:34 pm

I always wanted to learn more about the enigmatic, elusive Graham so thanks for bringing this article to print.

New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 3: A Renaissance is Nigh
November 22, 2019

In 1397, a Byzantine scholar named Manuel Chrysoloras arrived in Florence, Italy. He brought with him knowledge of Greek, along with many ancient manuscripts in Greek and Latin that had been lost to the West in the chaos following the collapse of the Roman Empire. This event is considered by many historians to mark the first stirrings of the Italian Renaissance, and with them the beginning of the epoch of scientific, material, and social Progress which has persisted right up to the present day.

In 1993, an Oxford graduate student named Graham Nelson released a text adventure called Curses that, among other things, functioned as an advertisement for a programming language he called Inform, which targeted Infocom’s old Z-Machine. This event is considered by most of us who have seriously thought about the history of text adventures in the post-Infocom era to mark the first stirrings of the Interactive Fiction Renaissance, and with them the beginning of an interactive-fiction community that remains as artistically vibrant as ever today.

Yes, I can see you rolling your eyes at the foregoing. On one level, it is indeed an unbearably pretentious formulation, this comparing of one of the most earthshaking events in human culture writ large with the activities of a small community of niche enthusiasts. Yet, if we can agree to set aside the differences in scale and importance for the moment, the analogy really is a surprisingly apt one. Like the greater Renaissance in Europe, the Interactive Fiction Renaissance prepared a group of people to begin moving forward again by resurfacing old things that had been presumed lost forever. Taking pride of place among those things, being inextricably bound up with everything that followed, was the Z-Machine, functioning first as a means of running Infocom’s classic games, as we saw in the first article in this series; and then as a means of running new games, as we began to see in the second article and will examine in still more detail today.

As Graham Nelson began to pursue the dream of writing new software to run on Infocom’s old virtual machine, he had no access to the refined tools Infocom had used for that task. Thus he was forced to start from nothing — from what amounted to a bare chunk of (virtual) computing hardware, with no compilers or any other software helpers to aid his efforts. He had to start, in other words, at the bare metal, working in assembly language.

Assembly language is the lowest level at which any computer, whether real or virtual, can be (semi-)practically programmed. Its statements correspond to the individual opcodes of the processor itself, which normally encompass only the most granular of commands: add, subtract, multiply, or divide these numbers together; grab the number from this local register and put it into that memory location; etc. Assembly language is the primordial language which underpins everything, the one which must be utilized first to write the compilers that allow programmers to develop software in less granular, more structured, more human-friendly languages such as C, Pascal, and BASIC.

Already at this level, however, the Z-Machine separates itself from an ordinary computer. Alongside the rudimentary, granular opcodes that are common to any Turing-complete computer, it implements other opcodes that are absurdly baroque. The “read” opcode, for example, does all of the work of accepting a full line of text from the keyboard, then separating out its individual words and “tokenizing” them: i.e., looking them up in a dictionary table stored at a defined location in the virtual machine’s memory and converting them into the codes listed there. Another opcode, “save,” simply orders the interpreter to save the current state of the machine to disk, however it prefers to go about it; ditto the “restore” opcode. These complex and highly specialized opcodes exist because the Z-Machine, while it is indeed a Turing-complete, fully programmable anything machine in the abstract, is nevertheless heavily optimized toward the practical needs of text adventures. Thus an object table meant to represent rooms and things in the world of a game is hard-coded right into its memory map, and there are other single opcodes which encapsulate relatively complex tasks like looking up or changing the properties of an object in the world, or moving one object into another object.

Strictly speaking, none of this is really necessary; the Z-Machine is far more complicated than it needs to be in abstract terms. Infocom could have created a robust virtual machine which implemented only traditional low-level opcodes, building everything else out in the form of software libraries running on said virtual machine. But they had a strong motivation for hard-coding so many of the needs of a text adventure right into the virtual hardware: efficiency. A baroque opcode like “read” meant that all of the many steps and stages which went into accepting the player’s command could take place at the interpreter level, running natively on the host computer. Implementing a virtual machine of any sort was a serious challenge on a 1 MHz 8-bit computer like an Apple II or Commodore 64; Infocom needed every advantage they could get.

By the time of Graham Nelson’s experimentation with the Z-Machine, most of the concerns that had led Infocom to design it in this way had already fallen by the wayside. The average computer of the early 1990s would have been perfectly capable of running text adventures through a simpler and more generic virtual machine where the vagaries of the specific application were implemented in software. Nevertheless, the Z-Machine was the technology Graham had inherited and the one he was determined to utilize. When he began to work on Inform, he tailored it to the assumptions and affordances of the Z-Machine. The result was a high-level programming language with an unusual degree of correspondence to its underlying (virtual) hardware. Most obviously, the earliest versions of Inform couldn’t make games whose total compiled size exceeded 128 K, the limit for the version 3 Z-Machine they targeted. (This figure would be raised to 256 K once Inform began to target the version 4 and 5 Z-Machine.)

Yet this limitation was only the tip of the iceberg. Each function in Inform was limited to a maximum of 15 local variables because that was all that the stack mechanism built into the Z-Machine allowed. Meanwhile only 240 global variables could exist because that was the maximum length of the table of same hard-coded into the Z-Machine’s memory map. Much of Inform came to revolve around the Z-Machine’s similarly hard-coded object table, which was limited to just 255 objects in version 3 of the virtual machine. (This limitation was raised to 65,535 objects in the version 4 and 5 Z-Machine, thereby becoming in practice a non-issue.) Further, each object could have just 32 attributes, or states of being — its weight, its open or closed status, its lit or unlit status, etc. — because that was all that was allowed by the Z-Machine’s standard object table. (Starting with version 4 of the Z-Machine, objects could have up to 48 attributes.) All of the dynamic data in a game — i.e., data that could change during play, as opposed to static data like code and text strings — had to fit into the first 64 K of the story file, an artifact of the Z-Machine’s implementation of virtual memory, which had allowed it to pack 128 K or more of game into computers with far less physical memory than that. This limitation too was inherited by Inform despite the fact that by the early 1990s the virtual-memory system had become superfluous, a mere phantom limb which Inform nevertheless had to accept as part of the bargain with the past which it had struck.

Indeed, having been confronted with so many undeniable disadvantages arising from the use of the Z-Machine, it’s natural for us to ask what actual advantages accrued from the use of a fifteen-year-old virtual machine designed around the restrictions of long-obsolete computers, as opposed to taking the TADS route of designing a brand new virtual machine better suited to the modern world. One obvious answer is portability. By the early 1990s, several different open-source Z-Machine interpreters already existed, which between them had already been ported to virtually every computing platform in the world with any active user base at all. Any Inform game that Graham Nelson or anyone else chose to write would become instantly playable on all of these computers, whose combined numbers far exceeded those to which Mike Roberts, working virtually alone on TADS, had so far managed to port his interpreter. (The only really robust platform for running TADS games at the time was MS-DOS; even the Macintosh interpreters were dogged by bugs and infelicities. And as for Graham’s favored platform, the British-to-the-core Acorn Archimedes… forget about it.)

In reality, though, Inform’s use of the Z-Machine appealed at least as much to the emotions as to technical or practical considerations. The idea of writing new games to run on Infocom’s old virtual machine had a romantic and symbolic allure that many found all but irresistible. What better place to build a Renaissance than on the very foundations left behind by the storied ancients? Many or most of the people who came to use Inform did so because they wanted to feel like the heirs to Infocom’s legacy. Poor TADS never had a chance against that appeal to naked sentimentality.

Even as Inform was first gaining traction, it was widely known that Infocom had had a programming language of their own for the Z-Machine, which they had called ZIL: the “Zork Implementation Language.” Yet no one outside of Infocom had ever seen any actual ZIL code. How closely did Inform, a language that, like ZIL, was designed around the affordances and constraints of the Z-Machine, resemble its older sibling? It wasn’t until some years after Inform had kick-started the Interactive Fiction Renaissance that enough ZIL code was recovered to give a reasonable basis for comparison. The answer, we now know, is that Inform resembles ZIL not at all in terms of syntax. Indeed, the two make for a fascinating case study in how different minds, working on the same problem and equipped with pretty much the same set of tools for doing so, can arrive at radically different solutions.

As I described in an article long ago, ZIL was essentially a subset of the general-purpose programming language MDL, which was used heavily during the 1970s by the Dynamic Modeling Group at MIT, the cradle from which Infocom sprang. (MDL was itself a variant of LISP, for many years the language of choice among artificial-intelligence researchers.) A bare-bones implementation of the famous brass lantern in Zork I looked like this in ZIL:

<OBJECT LANTERN
(LOC LIVING-ROOM)
(SYNONYM LAMP LANTERN LIGHT)
(ADJECTIVE BRASS)
(DESC "brass lantern")
(FLAGS TAKEBIT LIGHTBIT)
(ACTION LANTERN-F)
(FDESC "A battery-powered lantern is on the trophy
case.")
(LDESC "There is a brass lantern (battery-powered)
here.")
(SIZE 15)>

Inform has a fairly idiosyncratic syntax, but most resembles C, a language which was initially most popular among Unix systems programmers, but which was becoming by the early 1990s the language of choice for serious software of many stripes running under many different operating systems. The same lantern would look something like this in a bare-bones Inform implementation:

Object -> lantern "brass lantern"
with name 'lamp' 'lantern' 'light' 'brass',
initial
"A battery-powered lantern is on the trophy case.",
description
"There is a brass lantern (battery-powered) here.",
after [;
SwitchOn:
give self light;
StartDaemon(self);
SwitchOff:
give self ~light;
],
size 15,
has switchable;

After enough information about ZIL finally emerged to allow comparisons like the above, many Infocom zealots couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed about how poorly Infocom’s language actually fared in contrast to Graham Nelson’s. Having been designed when the gospel of object-oriented programming was still in its infancy, ZIL, while remarkable for embracing object-oriented principles to the extent it does, utilizes them in a slightly sketchy way, via pointers to functions which have to be defined elsewhere in the code. (This is the purpose of the “ACTION LANTERN-F” statement in the ZIL code above — to serve as a pointer to the routine that should run when the player tries to light the lantern.) Inform, on the other hand, allows all of the code and data associated with an object such as the brass lantern to be neatly encapsulated into its description. (The “SwitchOn” and “SwitchOff” statements in the Inform excerpt above explain what should happen when the player tries to light or extinguish the lantern.) A complete implementation of the Zork I lantern in Inform would probably fill a dozen or more lines than what we see above, monitoring the charge of the battery, allowing the player to swap in a new battery, etc. — all neatly organized in one chunk of code. In ZIL, it would be scattered all over the place, wired together via a confusing network of pointers. In terms of readability alone, then, Inform excels in comparison to ZIL.

Most shockingly of all given the Infocom principals’ strong grounding in computer science, they never developed a standard library for ZIL — i.e., a standardized body of code to take care of the details that most text adventures have in common, such as rooms and compass directions, inventory and light sources, as well as the vagaries of parsing the player’s commands and keeping score. Instead the author of each new game began by cannibalizing some of the code to do these things from whatever previous game was deemed to be most like this latest one. From there, the author simply improvised. The Inform standard library, by contrast, was full-featured, rigorous, and exacting by the time the language reached maturity — in many ways a more impressive achievement than the actual programming language which undergirded it.

Because it was coded so much more efficiently than Infocom’s ad-hoc efforts, this standard library allowed an Inform game to pack notably more content into a given number of kilobytes. The early versions of Curses, for example, were already sprawling games by most standards, yet fit inside the 128 K Z-Machine. Later versions did move to, and eventually all but fill, the version 5 Z-Machine with its 256 K memory map. Still, the final Curses offers vastly more content than anything Infocom ever released, with the possible exception only of Zork Zero (a game which was itself designed for a version 6 Z-Machine that took the ceiling to 512 K). Certainly any comparison of A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity — both famously big games with a story-file size pegged to the version 4 and 5 limit of 256 K — to the final version of Curses — story-file size: 253 K — must reveal the last to be an even more complex, even more expansive experience.

So, the Inform development system could hold its head up proudly next to ZIL; in fact, it was so well-thought-through that ZIL would thoroughly disappoint by comparison once hobbyists finally learned more about it. But what of Curses itself, the game with which Inform was so indelibly linked during the first few years of its existence? Was it also up to the Infocom standard?

Before delving into that question in earnest, I should perhaps elaborate a bit on Graham Nelson’s own description of Curses from the previous article.

In the game, then, you play the role of a rather hapless scion of a faded aristocratic family. Aristocratic life not being what it once was, you’ve long since been forced to register the familial mansion with the National Trust and open it up to visitors on the weekends in order to pay the bills. As the game proper begins, your family is about to take a jaunt to Paris, and you’ve come up to the attic — a place in as shabby a state as the rest of the house — to look for a tourist map you just know is lying around up here somewhere.

It's become a matter of pride now not to give up. That tourist map of Paris must be up here somewhere in all this clutter, even if it has been five years since your last trip. And it's your own fault. It looks as if your great-grandfather was the last person to tidy up these lofts...

Attic
The attics, full of low beams and awkward angles, begin here in a relatively tidy area which extends north, south and east. The wooden floorboards seem fairly sound, just as well considering how heavy all these teachests are. But the old wiring went years ago, and there's no electric light.

A hinged trapdoor in the floor stands open, and light streams in from below.

In the best tradition of shaggy-dog stories, your search for the map turns into an extended adventure through space and time. You just keep finding more and more secret areas and secret things in the attics and the grounds surrounding the house, including a disconcerting number of portals to other times and places. The whole thing eventually comes to revolve around an ancient familial curse reaching back to the time of Stonehenge. If you manage to get to the end of the game — no small feat, believe me! — you can finally lift the curse. And, yes, you can finally find the bloody Paris tourist map.

It’s hard to know where to start or end any discussion of Curses. It’s one of those works that sends one off on many tangents: its technology, its historical importance, its literary worth as a writing exercise or its ludic worth as an exercise in design. Faced with this confusion, we might as well start with what Curses has meant to me.

For Curses is indeed a game which carries a lot of personal importance for me. I first discovered it about four or five years after its original release, when I was working a painfully dull job as a night-shift system administrator — a job which paid not so much for what I did each night as for my just being there if something should go wrong. I had, in other words, copious amounts of free time on my hands. I used some of it playing a bunch of post-Infocom text adventures which I hadn’t previously realized existed. Because they looked — or could be made to look — like just another scrolling terminal window, they suited my purposes perfectly. Thus my memory of many a 1990s classic is bound up with those nights in a deserted data center — with the strange rhythm of being awake when everyone else is asleep, and vice versa.

Of all the games I played during that time, Curses made one of the greatest impressions on me. I was still young enough then to be profoundly impressionable in general, and I found its casual erudition, its willingness to blend science with poetry, mathematics with history, to be absolutely entrancing. Having been a hopeless Anglophile ever since I first heard a Beatles record at circa six years old, I was well-primed to fall in love with Graham Nelson’s dryly ironic and oh-so-English diction. In fact, as I began to write more seriously and extensively myself in the years that followed, I shamelessly co-opted some of his style as my own. I like to think that I’ve become my own writer in the time since that formative period, but some piece of Graham is undoubtedly still hiding out down there somewhere in the mishmash of little ticks and techniques that constitute my writer’s voice.

For all that Curses entranced me, however, I never came close to completing it. At some point I’d get bogged down by its combinatorial explosion of puzzles and places, by its long chains of dependencies where a single missed or misplaced link would lock me out of victory without my realizing it, and I’d drift away to something else. Eventually, I just stopped coming back altogether.

I was therefore curious and maybe even slightly trepiditious to revisit Curses for this article some two decades after I last attempted to play it. How would it hold up? The answer is, better than I feared but somewhat worse than I might have hoped.

The design certainly shows its age. I have less patience than ever today for walking-dead scenarios that are as easy to stumble into as they are here. I wholeheartedly agree with Graham’s own statement that “Curses is by any reasonable standard too hard.”

So far, so expected. But I was somewhat more surprised by my crotchety middle-aged take on the writing. Mind you, some aspects of it still bring a smile to my face; I still can’t resist saying, “It’s a wrench, but I’ll take it,” every time I pick up a wrench in real life, much to my wife’s disgust. (Luckily, as she’d be the first to point out, I’m not much of a handyman, so I don’t tend to pick up too many of them.) In other places, though, what used to strike me as delightful now seems just a little bit too precious for its own good. I can still recognize the influence it had over me and my own writing, but it does feel at times like an influence I’ve ever so slightly outgrown. Today, things like the game’s quotation of the lovely Dorothy Parker poem “Inventory” — “Four be the things I’d been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.” — when you first type the command of the same name can feel just a little bit facile. Curses is constantly making cultural cross-connections like these, but they’re ultimately more clever than they are profound. It’s a game packed with a lot of cultural stuff, but not one with much to really say about any of it. It instead treats its cultural name-dropping as an end unto itself.

Curses strikes me as a young man’s game, in spite of its showy erudition — or perhaps because of it. It was written by a prodigious young man in that wonderful time of life when the whole world of the intellect — all of it — is fresh and new and exciting, when unexpected pathways of intellectual discovery seem to be opening up everywhere one looks. In this light, Emily Short’s description of it as a game about the sheer joy of cultural discovery rings decidedly true. Graham himself recognizes that he could never hope to write a game like it today; thus his wise decision not to return to the well for a sequel.

But to fairly evaluate Curses, we need to understand its place in the timeline of interactive fiction as well as in the life of the man who created it. It’s often billed — not least by myself, in this very article’s introduction — as the game which kicked off the Interactive Fiction Renaissance, the first of a new breed which didn’t have to settle for being the next best thing to more Infocom games. It was the first hobbyist game which could stand proudly shoulder to shoulder with the best works of Infocom in terms of both technical and literary quality.

On the face of it, this is a fair evaluation — which is, after all, the reason I’ve deployed it. Yet the fact remains that Curses’s mode of production and overall design aesthetic mark it as a distinctly different beast from the best later works of the Renaissance it heralded. While the games of Infocom certainly were an influence on it, they weren’t the only influence. Indeed, their influence was perhaps less marked in reality than one might imagine from the game’s intimate connection to the Z-Machine, or from its borrowing of some fairly superficial aesthetic elements from Infocom, such as the letterboxed literary quotations which were first employed to such good effect by Trinity. While Curses’s technology and its prose were unquestionably up to the Infocom standard, in spirit it verged on something else entirely.

In the beginning — the very beginning — text adventures were written on big institutional computers by unabashed eggheads for a very small audience of other eggheads. Games of this type were expected to be hard; questions of fairness rarely even entered the conversation. For these games weren’t just designed for single eggheads to play and conquer — they were rather designed for entire teams of same; adventure gaming in these early days was regarded as a group activity. These games were made publicly available while still works-in-progress; their mode of production bore an ironic resemblance to modern attitudes about “software as a service,” as manifested in modern gaming in things like the Steam Early Access program. In fact, these text-adventures-as-a-service tended not to ever really get finished by their designers; they simply stopped growing one day when their designers left the institution where they lived or simply got bored with them. Graham Nelson was exposed to this tradition early on, via his first encounters with the Crowther and Woods Adventure. (Remember his telling reminiscence: “It seemed like something you were exploring, not something you were trying to win.”) When he came to Cambridge in 1987, he was immersed in a sustained late flowering of this design aesthetic, in the form of the text adventures made for the Phoenix mainframe there.

This attitude cut against the one which Infocom had long since come to embrace by the time Graham arrived at Cambridge: the notion that text adventures should be interactive fictions, soluble by any single player of reasonable intelligence in a reasonable amount of time. As the name “interactive fiction” would imply, Infocom adopted a fundamentally literary mode of production: a game was written, went through lots of internal testing to arrive at some consciously complete state, and then and only then was sent out into the world as the final, definitive work. Infocom might release subsequent versions to fix bugs and incongruities that had slipped through testing, just as the text of a book might receive some additional correcting and polishing between print runs, but Infocom’s games were never dramatically expanded or overhauled after their release. Post-Curses, the hobbyist interactive-fiction community would embrace this Infocom model of production almost exclusively. In fact, a game released “before its time,” still riddled with bugs and sketchily written and implemented, would attract the most scathing of rebukes, and could damage the reputation of its author to the point that she would have a hard time getting anyone to even look at a subsequent game.

Yet Curses was anything but an exemplar of this allegedly enlightened interactive-fiction production function. Graham Nelson’s game grew up in public like the institutional games of yore, being expanded and improved in six major stages, with more than two years elapsing from its first release to its last. Betwixt and between them, Graham shared yet more versions on a more private basis, both among his local peer group and among the burgeoning community of Curses superfans on the Internet. As each new version appeared, these armies of players would jump into it to find the new puzzles and give their feedback on what else might be added to or improved, just as an army of MIT students once did every time the people who would eventually found Infocom put up a new build of the PDP-10 Zork. There are, for example, seven separate ways to solve an early puzzle involving the opening of a stubborn medicine bottle in the final version of Curses, most of them the result of player suggestions.

So, Curses should be understood as an ongoing creative effort — almost, one might say, a collaboration between Graham Nelson and his players — that grew as big as it could and then stopped. A scrupulous commitment to fairness just wasn’t ever in the cards, any more than a rigorously pre-planned plot line. In a telling anecdote, Graham once let slip that he was surprised how many people had finished Curses at all over the years. It was designed, like his beloved Crowther and Woods Adventure, to be a place which you came back to again and again, exploring new nooks and crannies as the fancy took you. If you actually wanted to solve the thing… well, you’d probably need to get yourself a group for that. Even the hint system, grudgingly added in one of the later versions, is oblique; many of the hints come from a devil who tells you the exact opposite of what you ought to be doing. And all of the hints are obscure, and you’re only allowed three of them in any given session.

All of which is to say that, even as it heralded a new era in interactive fiction which would prove every bit as exciting as what had come before, Curses became the last great public world implemented as a single-player text adventure. It’s an archetypal Renaissance work, perched happily on the crossroads between past and future. Its shared debt to the institutional tradition that had stamped so much of interactive fiction’s past and to the Infocom approach that would dictate its future is made most explicit in the name of the language which Graham developed alongside the game. As he told us in the previous article in this series, the first syllable of “Inform” does indeed refer to Infocom, but the second syllable reflects the habit among users of the Cambridge Phoenix mainframe of appending the suffix “-form” to the name of any compiler.

Speaking of Inform: Curses also needs to be understood in light of its most obvious practical purpose at the time of its creation. Most new text-adventure creation systems, reaching all the way back to the time of Scott Adams, have been developed alongside the first game to be written using them. As we’ve seen at some length now in this article and the previous one, Inform was no exception. As Graham would add new features to his language, he would finds ways to utilize them in Curses in order to test them out for himself and demonstrate them to the public. So, just as Inform reflects the Z-Machine’s core capabilities, Curses reflects Inform’s — all of them. And because Inform was designed to be a powerful, complete system capable of producing games equal in technical quality to those of Infocom or anyone else, the puzzles which found their way into Curses became dizzying in their sheer multifariousness. Anything ZIL could do, Graham was not so subtly implying, Inform could do as well or better.

Here, then, the Infocom influence on Curses is much more pronounced. You can almost go through the Infocom catalog game by game, looking at the unique new interactive possibilities each release implemented and then finding a demonstration somewhere in Curses of Inform’s ability to do the same thing. Zork II introduced a robot to which the player’s avatar could issue verbal commands, so Curses does the same thing with a robot mouse; Enchanter had an underground maze whose interconnections the player could alter dynamically, so Curses has a hedge maze which let its player do the same thing; Infidel drew hieroglyphic symbols on the screen using groups of ASCII characters, so Curses has to demonstrate the same capability; etc., etc. (One of the few Infocom affordances that doesn’t show up anywhere in Curses is a detailed spell-casting system, the linchpin of the beloved Enchanter trilogy — but never fear, Graham wrote an entirely separate game just to demonstrate Inform’s capabilities in that area.) If all this doesn’t always do much for the game’s internal coherence, so be it: there were other motivations at work.

Graham Nelson’s own story of the first release of Curses is stamped with the unassuming personality of the man. On May 9, 1993, he uploaded it to an FTP site connected with the Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung — a research institute in Bonn, Germany, where a friendly system administrator named Volker Blasius had started an archive for all things interactive fiction. He then wrote up a modest announcement, and posted it to the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction — a group originally set up by stuffy academic hypertext enthusiasts of the Eastgate stripe, which had since been rudely invaded and repurposed by unwashed masses of text-adventure enthusiasts. After doing these things, Graham heard…nothing. Feeling a little disappointed, but realizing that he had after all written a game in a genre whose best days seemed to be behind it, he went about his business — only to discover some days later that his incoming Usenet feed was bollixed. When he got it fixed, he found that his little game had in fact prompted a deluge of excitement. No one had ever seen anything like it. Just where had this mysterious new game that somehow ran on Infocom’s own Z-Machine come from? And where on earth had its equally mysterious author gone to after releasing it?

It really is hard to overstate the impact which Curses, and shortly after it Inform, had on the interactive-fiction community of 1993. Text adventures at that time were largely an exercise in nostalgia; even all of the work that had been done to understand the Z-Machine and make new interpreters for it, which had been such a necessary prerequisite for Graham’s own work, had been done strictly to let people play the old games. While some people were still making new games, none of them could comprehensively stand up next to Infocom at their best. Yes, some of them evinced considerable creativity, even a degree of real literary ambition, but these were held back by the limitations of AGT, the most popular text-adventure development system at the time. Meanwhile Adventions, the makers of the most polished games of this period, who were wise enough to use the technically excellent TADS rather than the more ramshackle AGT, were more competent than inspired in churning out slavish homages to Zork. All of the absolute best text adventures, the ones which combined literary excellence and technical quality, were still those of Infocom, and were all more than half a decade old.

And then along came Curses as a bolt out of the blue. Even if we wish to argue that some aspects of it haven’t aged terribly well, we cannot deny how amazing it was in 1993, with its robust determination to do everything Infocom had done and more, with its distinct and confident literary sensibility, and not least — the appeal this held really cannot be emphasized enough — the fact that it ran on Infocom’s own virtual machine. It dominated all online discussion of text adventures throughout the two years Graham spent continuing to improve and expand it in public. The gravitational pull of Curses was such that when Mike Roberts, the creator of TADS, released an epic of his own later in 1993, it went oddly unremarked — this despite the fact that Perdition’s Flames was progressive in many ways that Curses distinctly wasn’t, making it impossible to lock yourself out of victory, prioritizing fairness above all other considerations. It stands today as the better game in mechanical terms at least, recommendable without the caveats that must accompany Graham’s effort. Yet it never stood a chance in 1993 against the allure of Curses.

And so it was that the quiet, thoughtful Englishman Graham Nelson — hardly the most likely leader of a cultural movement — used Curses and Inform to sculpt a new community of creation in his own image.

Graham’s technological choices became the community’s standards to a well-nigh shocking extent. The version 5 Z-Machine, the last and most advanced of its text-only iterations to come out of Infocom, had only been used by a few late Infocom games, none of them hugely beloved. Thus its implementation had tended to be a somewhat low priority among interpreter writers. But when Curses outgrew the 128 K memory space of the version 3 Z-Machine fairly early in its release cycle, and Graham stepped up to the 256 K version 5 Z-Machine, that decision drove interpreter writers to add support for it; after all, any Z-Machine interpreter worth its salt simply had to be able to play Curses, the sensation of the text-adventure world. Thus the version 5 Z-Machine became the new standard for the hobbyist games that followed, thanks not only to its expanded memory space but also to its more advanced typography and presentation options. (Graham would later define two new versions of the Z-Machine for really big games: an experimental and seldom-used version 7 and a version 8 which did come into common use. Both would allow story files of up to 512 K, just like Infocom’s graphical version 6 Z-Machine.)

Graham was utterly disinterested in making money from his projects. He made Inform entirely free, destroying the shareware model of AGT and TADS. David Malmberg, the longtime steward of AGT, stepped down from that role and released that system as well as freeware in 1994, signalling the end of its active development. Mike Roberts did continue to maintain and improve TADS, but soon bowed to the new world order ushered in by Inform and made it free as well. Not coincidentally, the end of the era of shareware text adventures as well as shareware text-adventure development systems coincided with Graham’s arrival on the scene; from now on, people would almost universally release their games for free. It’s also of more than symbolic significance that, unlike earlier hotbeds of text-adventure fandom which had coalesced around private commercial online services such as CompuServe and GEnie, this latest and most enduring community found its home on the free-and-open Internet.

It’s important to note that Graham’s disinterest in making money in no way implied a lack of seriousness. He approached everything he did in interactive fiction with the attitude that it was worth doing, and worth doing well. In the long run, his careful attention to detail and belief in the medium as something worthy of serious effort and serious study left as pronounced a stamp on the culture of interactive fiction as Inform or Curses themselves.

In 1995, he produced “The Z-Machine Standards Document,” which replaced years of speculation, experimentation, and received hacker wisdom with a codified specification for all extant versions of the Z-Machine. At the same time that he worked on that project, he embarked on The Inform Designer’s Manual, which not only explained the nuts and bolts of coding in the language but also delved deep into questions of design. “The Craft of Adventure,” its included essay on the subject, remains to this day the classic work of its type. Working with what was by now an enthusiastic hobbyist community which tempered its nostalgia for the medium’s commercial past with a belief in its possibilities for the present and future, Graham even saw The Inform Designer’s Manual — all 500-plus pages of it — printed as a physical book, at a time when self-publishing was a much more fraught endeavor than it is today.

But the most amusing tribute to the man’s sheer, well-earned ubiquity may be the way that his personality kept peeking through the cracks of every game made with Inform, unless its author went to truly heroic lengths to prevent it. His wryly ironic standard responses to various commands, as coded into the Inform standard library — “As good-looking as ever” when you examined yourself; “Violence isn’t the answer to this one” when you gave in to frustration and started trying to beat on something; “You are always self-possessed” when you attempted to take yourself — proved damnably difficult to comprehensively stamp out. Thus you’d see such distinctly non-Nelsonian efforts as zombie apocalypses or hardcore erotica suddenly lapsing from time to time into the persona of the bemused Oxford don wandering about behind the scenes, wondering what the heck he’d gotten himself into this time.

Seen with the hindsight of the historian, the necessary prerequisites to an Interactive Fiction Renaissance aren’t hard to identify. The Internet gave text-adventure fans a place to gather and discuss the games of the past, as well as to distribute new ones, all unbeholden to any commercial entity. Free Z-Machine interpreters made it easy to play Infocom’s games, widely recognized as the best of their type ever made, in convenient ways on virtually every computer in existence. Activision’s two Lost Treasures of Infocom collections made the complete Infocom canon easy to acquire, placing all text-adventure fans on an even footing in the course of providing them with their equivalent of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. And then Graham Nelson came along and gave so much: a superb programming language in Inform, a superb demonstration of where interactive fiction could go in the post-Infocom era in Curses, documentation that exceeded the standard of most professional efforts, and, perhaps most of all, a living example of how interactive fiction was worth taking seriously in all its aspects, worth doing completely and well — and forget worrying about making money out of it. So, my next statement is as cringe-worthy as it is inevitable: Graham Nelson became interactive fiction’s Renaissance Man.

Now, it was just a matter of time before all of these forces forged something rather extraordinary. The year after Graham arrived on the scene in such exciting fashion was actually one of the quietest in the history of text adventures in terms of new releases; AGT was dying, while Inform was just beginning to pick up steam as an entity separate from Curses. But the following year, 1995, would see an embarrassment of worthy releases, large and small, trying all sorts of things, even as the cultural capstone to the new edifice of post-Infocom interactive fiction — an annual Interactive Fiction Competition — arrived to complete the construction process. The events of 1993 had been the harbinger; 1995 would become the true Year One of the Interactive Fiction Renaissance.

(Sources: the book The Inform Designer’s Manual by Graham Nelson; Stephen Granade’s timeline of interactive fiction on Brass Lantern; archives of rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction, available on the IF Archive. My warmest thanks go once again to Graham Nelson for sharing so much of his story for these articles.

Curses remains available for free. It can of course be played on any Z-Machine interpreter.)

Comments
42 Responses

- Jason Scott

November 22, 2019 at 5:55 pm

I am delighted that after not even doing me the favor of even responding to an interview for GET LAMP, Graham Nelson finally has put together (with Jimmy’s help) the important backstory of Inform and the part it played in the Z-Machine story.

- Allan Holland

November 24, 2019 at 9:09 pm

Between you and Jimmy, I owe a huge debt of gratitude as a lifelong infocom and IF fan. Get Lamp is info nirvana for me. Thank you both times infinity.

- Jason Scott

November 29, 2019 at 1:20 am

Jimmy took a fun movie and turned its droppings into a compelling, epic narrative, for which I will always be grateful.

- Torbjörn Andersson

November 22, 2019 at 7:16 pm

“Further, each object could have just 32 properties, or states of being — its weight, its open or closed status, its lit or unlit status, etc. — because that was all that was allowed by the Z-Machine’s standard object table.”

The open/closed and lit/unlit statuses would probably be attributes (or flags, depending on which specification you’re looking at), rather than properties. For instance “TAKEBIT” AND “LIGHTBIT” in your ZIL example, and “light” and “switchable” in your Inform example.

The Inform 6 Technical Manual notes that later versions worked around the property limitation by adding “a major data structure not present in the Z-machine architecture: the concept of “individual property”, a mechanism to allow games to have more or less unlimited numbers of properties which don’t need to be declared before use.”

- Jimmy Maher

November 22, 2019 at 8:00 pm

Yes, you’re right, of course. Thanks!

At some point, Inform began to bypass the hard-coded object table entirely — implementing its own data structures in software, as if the Z-Machine was the more bare-bones virtual machine I described it in the article as *not* being. This was possible, of course, because performance was no longer an issue. However, I’m not exactly sure offhand when this happened, other than sometime between the first release of Inform 6 and the first release of Inform 7. I’m not sure if what you’re referring to is the same thing or an interim step.

- Andrew Plotkin

November 22, 2019 at 8:23 pm

Individual properties came in with the first release of Inform 6. I6 also added a class inheritance model, giving the language a more explicitly OO slant.

Those were the last major extension that Inform provided (over Infocom limitations) until the invention of Z-code versions 7 and 8.

- Aula

November 24, 2019 at 3:39 pm

“However, I’m not exactly sure offhand when this happened”

IIRC it was at the same time that Inform started to support Glulx as an alternative target VM. Since Glulx has no opcodes to handle an object tree, Inform needed to be changed so that it wouldn’t try to generate them, which had the side effect of not using them on the Z-Machine either.

- Jimmy Maher

November 24, 2019 at 4:55 pm

Ah, yes, that makes a lot of sense…

- Andrew Plotkin

November 25, 2019 at 4:15 pm

Whoops, no, that’s not correct.

When the Glulx back-end went into I6, I deliberately avoided changing the Z-machine generation code. I might have added some minor optimization to the code generator, but that’s all. My concern was to add new functionality as cleanly as possible while not breaking anything that was already there.

The fact is, I6’s Z-machine code still uses the native Z-code object tables. They are *not* bypassed, and I’m not sure where you’re getting the claim that they are.

As I said above, I6 adds a new individual property table, and it adds a class hierarchy. (Object classes are represented as special Z-code objects outside the world.) There’s also “strict mode”, which adds *wrappers* around the native Z-code opcodes to check for various errors. But the Z-code opcodes are still there at the bottom.

- Jason Dyer

November 22, 2019 at 7:38 pm

I may be in error on this, but I believe the final version of the medicine bottle had more than 7 methods — 11 I think? I unfortunately no longer have a save file at the end of the game where I could easily check (it’s in the end notes part, I know).

- Jimmy Maher

November 22, 2019 at 8:17 pm

Just checked using TXD because I don’t have an end-of-game save handy either. Oddly, the story file seems to list only six — and I believe that one of these, giving it to Aunt Jemima, actually hoses you because she eats the pill inside. But seven is stated in several places online, and that’s Graham’s recollection.

- Andrew Plotkin

November 22, 2019 at 8:10 pm

“Instead the author of each new game began by cannibalizing some of the code to do these things from whatever previous game was deemed to be most like this latest one.”

When the Infocom source code came out this year (thanks Jason!), it turned out to include a source directory marked “generic”. This was a game with a parser, a couple of blank rooms, and a couple of blank objects — clearly intended as a base for copying.

The compiled files in that directory are dated 1985 and 1987, so it’s not clear how many Infocom games were started by forking the generic template, as opposed to cloning an earlier full game. But it’s an apparent attempt to standardize the original parser code. (Distinct from the “New Parser” of the final V6 games.)

- Jimmy Maher

November 22, 2019 at 8:23 pm

Interesting. In some of the interviews for Get Lamp, Imps described their habit of taking a previous game and stripping it down to only the needful, so this likely was a fairly late practice. The sadly departed Stu Galley, for example, definitely said that The Witness was built on the foundation of Deadline.

- Jason Scott

November 22, 2019 at 11:32 pm

I suspect that each of the imps had their own approach to this situation, and in the interviews there’s definitely a “lineage” between them, with a lot eminating from Marc Blank. (For example, Marc Blank to Stu Galley, Marc to Steve Meretzky, and so on.)

I’m surprised the ZIL community hasn’t tried a “overlapping code” test to see how much of each game’s DNA is like the others from the source code, but when they do, I bet it’ll be informative.

At various points in the history, like Zarf has hinted, there are attempts to “clean up” the Infocom structure, to various degrees of success. Remember, for example, that both Blank and Berlyn essentially separated from Infocom and worked as remote contractors for various reasons, so their day to day was different. And Bates, I’m sure, caused a lot of cleaning up because he was trying to duplicate the environment and understand it, which meant all the dusty corners got a look.

I’m just encouraging us to not think of the place as a monolithic “and then they did this” because it’s very obvious that was not the case.

- Quinn Dunki

November 24, 2019 at 5:06 pm

Both are probably true. The generic source folder would provide many basics, but it would still have made sense to also start with a similar game to avoid rewriting some of the more subtle things.

As for Infocom not having a standard library, that makes sense from a technical standpoint. Libraries are a trade off of reduced development time versus code size. If the library is implemented as source, more generic or abstracted services create longer code and larger data structures. If the library is implemented as binary, you have overhead introduced by linkers and potentially code relocation, symbol tables, etc.

Writing each game from first principles may not be the fastest way, but it likely did result in smallest possible code, the paramount concern. I haven’t seen the “generic” source folder referenced above, but my guess it is provides some very basics- the stuff you CAN share without incurring increased code size from abstraction.

- Jimmy Maher

November 25, 2019 at 11:35 am

Although your logic would be completely correct under most scenarios, I’m not certain about this one. A text adventure is a fairly specialized piece of software, and a standard library designed just for that purpose may not suffer so horribly from the inefficiencies you describe, as long as its designers struck the right balance between complexity and commonality. While I’ve by no means extensively analyzed the Infocom source code that was released with such fanfare a while back, my strong impression is that in general it’s not particularly good or efficient code in an abstract sense. There’s a lot of unnecessary elaboration and particularly a lot of local repetition of things that could be better encapsulated into global functions. (This makes a degree of sense, given that a number of the Imps didn’t come to Infocom with a deep background in programming in the abstract, essentially learning ZIL as their first and only language on the fly.)

And in the end, as they say, the proof is in the pudding: Curses, using the rigorously engineered Inform library, packs a heck of a lot more game into the 256 K Z-Machine than either A Mind Forever Voyaging or Trinity.

- Dave Lebling

December 7, 2019 at 12:28 am

…and Suspect was built on Deadline as well. I haven’t polled the other imps on this, but I believe no actual game was based on the “generic” core game.

Fundamentally it was the space limitations that led us away from having a generic library. With the later, larger size limits, this was potentially something we could have ignored (also ignoring for the moment the limitations of floppy disk capacity), but other issues sucked up a lot of the air that such an effort would have taken.

Hard as it is to believe, the period in which Zork was written was also early days for the whole object-orientation, inheritance, classes, strong-typing philosophy. In fact, we were right down the hall from Barbara Liskov, who was defining them and promoting them at the same time we were writing Zork. The language she and her team invented (CLU) was in fact originally implemented in Muddle. (It was also very slow in Muddle, so they moved off of it as soon as they could.)

Jason Scott’s suggestion of DNA testing to determine the parentage of each line or ZIL function is a good one. I suggest someone with a lot of time and energy take it on!

- matt w

November 22, 2019 at 8:14 pm

About the default messages for Curses peeking through in later games–I’m pretty sure I’m not the only Cragne Manor author who went through replacing all the default messages except the one for WAKE (“The dreadful truth is, this is not a dream.”) [FWIW, someone did try to smell the welcome mat, so my effort was not wasted.]

- Jimmy Maher

November 24, 2019 at 4:58 pm

That’s actually an amusing example of a message stemming directly from Curses that has remained a part of Inform’s standard library right up until today. It exists in Curses because you enter one of its parallel dimensions by lying down and sleeping. But, as the text says…

- S. John Ross

November 22, 2019 at 8:52 pm

I’m going to get awfully emotional when you get to the parts about I7, when non-programmers like me were invited to play. But it’s certainly also moving reading about these foundations; it really highlights the level of effort Graham put into it all.

- Keith Palmer

November 22, 2019 at 9:46 pm

I recall first encountering Curses as a self-contained Macintosh application in the shareware folder of a monthly “CD-ROM magazine”; unfortunately, I don’t know where those old disks have got to to confirm that memory. However, where some time before (as I commented on “The Last Works Before the Renaissance“) I’d happened on a TADS adventure and merely been amused someone had managed something so nostalgic without really wondering how they’d done it, the “about menu” in Curses described Inform and gave me a sense of potential just over the horizon.

With that said, though, I didn’t play very far into the game then; having struggled with “The Lost Treasures of Infocom” might have left me intimidated. A while after that I first got connected to the Internet, and one of the first things I went looking for via the just-established Yahoo and its ilk was “text adventure information,” if as much to finally finish A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity as anything. The First Interactive Fiction Competition did happen later that year, however, and I did eventually resort to a Curses walkthrough…

- S. John Ross

November 22, 2019 at 10:42 pm

If the monthly CD-ROM magazine was Interactive Entertainment, I used to be a department editor there =) You can snag copies of the CDs here: https://archive.org/details/interactive_entertainment

- Keith Palmer

November 23, 2019 at 2:05 am

I have the impression the CD-ROM we subscribed to was “Nautilus,” but thanks for the link anyway. One other thing that caught my attention about this piece but which I didn’t put into my first comment was mentioning “adventures meant to be played by a team”; Renga in Blue’s recent ascent of the mountain named “Warp” brought that idea to my mind just before seeing it here.

- Ross

November 22, 2019 at 10:55 pm

I always hoped the number of times I am referenced in footnotes in the Inform Designer’s Manual might someday help me professionally. So far, it has not.

- Michael

November 23, 2019 at 12:55 am

“At the same that that he worked on that project…”
–>same time?

- Jimmy Maher

November 23, 2019 at 9:46 am

Thanks!

- Eddie

November 23, 2019 at 6:40 am

Thank you Jimmy for the wonderful article, and thank you Graham for Inform and Curses.

It is so amazing to play zcode games on an old Palm IIIx.

I wish someone would make Frotz for Chromebooks!

- mathew

November 25, 2019 at 8:02 pm

DOS Frotz should work in DOSBox for Chromebook.

Or the Parchment Z-code interpreter should work, in which case you can play Curses right now by going to https://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=plvzam05bmz3enh8 and clicking the Play on-line button.

- flowmotion

November 23, 2019 at 6:57 am

The Inform example here doesn’t appear to be “{C;}-like” at all to my eyes. More like a DSL implemented in Ruby or something from the natural language school like HyperTalk/AppleScript. Or maybe even pascal.

- Ross

November 23, 2019 at 7:19 am

Object declarations are the least C-like thing in Inform. The actual procedural code is just exactly straight-up C with like 4 syntactic oddities (The use of colons as separators in the for-loop, square brackets rather than braces for function declarations, the use of the arrow operator for array indexing, and the idiosyncratic escape sequences in strings)

- Aula

November 24, 2019 at 3:29 pm

“given the the Infocom principals’ strong grounding”

“Graham even saw the The Inform Designer’s Manual”

both of these have a duplicate “the”

- Jimmy Maher

November 24, 2019 at 4:55 pm

Thanks!

- Ken Brubaker

November 24, 2019 at 8:44 pm

Actually, the second one is grammatically correct since the first ‘the’ is referring to a title which starts with ‘The’. But it does sound a bit weird.

- Carl

November 25, 2019 at 4:47 am

Not a huge deal of course but assembly language is not the lowest level you can use to program a machine. While you’re right that each mnemonic usually corresponds to an opcode, in assembly language you also have variable declarations, macros, and some assembly languages have subroutines and facilities for memory allocation.
The lowest level is pure machine code,

- Mike Taylor

November 25, 2019 at 8:23 am

True — and inherent in the very name “assembly”, which indicates that the real code is being assembled from some more symbolic representation. Back when I was learning to program on a Commodore Pet 2001, I did write actual 6502 machine language by hand (a little, and very poorly), so I still have some opcodes stuck in my head decades later: hex A9 for Load Direct, AA for Transfer A to X, AD for Load Indirect, 00 for Break, etc. I would poke those numbers directly into their locations.

- Jimmy Maher

November 25, 2019 at 11:39 am

I take your point, but I’m going to take refuge in “(semi-)practically.” While I’ve heard a number of stories of people able to write binary code on the fly — I certainly have never had the mind for such a thing, even when I was younger — few would do so unless there just wasn’t any other alternative.

- Lisa H.

November 25, 2019 at 5:15 am

The several references in the comments to Get Lamp make me wonder how many other readers out there have one of the challenge coins. (I had forgotten, or not known, that they were numbered until I looked them up before making this comment and found 1. a cancelled Kickstarter that offered coins made by the same company as a perk, but “they won’t be individually numbered”; and 2. one on eBay for $125 (!!).

- Peter Olausson

November 25, 2019 at 6:49 pm

I must be even more ignorant of modern IF than I thought, since I fail to see how eg “just” 255 objects with “just” 32 attributes each matter to anyone but the most ambitious authors, and indeed are “undeniable disadvantages”.

- Jimmy Maher

November 25, 2019 at 7:02 pm

They fill up fast. Every room is an object, as is the player character, every other character or creature, and every, well, *object* in the world (including all the ones you can’t pick up and carry, like tables and carpets and rivers). As are lots of seemingly more abstract things — like every possible direction for movement (that’s twelve objects right there), possible conversation topics, etc. If you can reference it as a direct or indirect object in a command, it’s probably an object in the programmatic sense. Even Infocom struggled mightily with the 255-object limitation, which often bit harder than the 128 K limitation. Today, when players expect a much more richly implemented world as a matter of course, it would be hopeless.

Attribute inflation is similarly deceptive. Object taxonomy functions via a series of true-false questions, implemented as attribute flags. Am I a room? Am I a door? Am I a compass direction? Am I a living creature? Can I be taken? Can I be opened? AM I currently open? Can I be lit? Can I be turned on and off? AM I turned on? Etc., etc.

- Ross

November 26, 2019 at 2:33 am

It has been a heck of a long time, but the most implacable limit you ran up against in the Z-machine was the 64k ram limit. The limits on global properties and attributes mostly impact the design of the library – why some things are lookup tables and others are subroutines, and you can muddle your way around the object limit by recycling objects (There’s a bit of black magic I hammered out years ago – rewriting the object table at runtime in software), but you still ran into the wall that only the first 64k of memory was dynamic and byte-addressable.

- Peter Olausson

November 27, 2019 at 10:23 am

Ahh, or should it be ooh — *those* kinds of objects! Then I get it. Completely different.

- Fuck David Cage

November 27, 2019 at 8:02 pm

I think a great game series that shows how much can be programmed, and pushes the limits well
beyond most games–a series I put on a list of suggestions in the comments for the hall of fame–is Metal Gear Solid. I respect Hideo Kojima for many reasons, such as his complex stories, challenging and fun gameplay and appreciation for the player’s intelligence, and his detailed programming tricks are perfect examples. He managed to program ice melting, enemies who could hear the characters sneeze, commanders who respond to almost everything the player does–even deeply embedded actions, like eating a vulture that has eaten a man and being accused of cannibalism by proxy.

I wonder how often a programmer got confused by the references to an object as “self,” and forgot whether he was working on an object or the main character? How did the Inform interpreter refer to the main character? This could explain a lot of the bugs on Nathan Simpson and Graham Cree’s lists. *Tangential note: I think fans of those lists would also enjoy David Wonn’s list and Zany Video Game Quotes*