Jimmy Maher (maher@filfre.net)

The Digital Antiquarian
Volume 4: 1982

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This eBook was converted on
December 20th, 2015

Design and conversion for eBooks by
Richard Lindner (rlindner81@gmail.com)

Contents

1. Time Zone

2. Time Zone: Tackling the Monster

3. Time Zone: Aftermath

4. Ludic Murder

5. Britain’s Occult Uncle

6. The Dennis Wheatley Crime Dossiers

7. Deadline

8. Playing Deadline, Part 1

9. Playing Deadline, Part 2

10. Playing Deadline, Part 3

11. Playing Deadline, Part 4

12. The Zork Users Group

13. Japan

14. Japanese Adventuring

15. Brøderbund

16. Choplifter

17. The Prisoner 2

18. SAGA

19. Zork III, Part 1

20. Zork III, Part 2

21. Starcross

22. The Magnificent Penguin

23. Transylvania

24. The Wizardry and Ultima Sequels

25. Playing Ultima II, Part 1

26. Playing Ultima II, Part 2

27. Level 9

28. The BBC Micro

29. Phoenix and Acornsoft

30. A Gallery of Unfortunate Events

31. The Speccy

32. The Hobbit

33. Summer Camp is Over

34. The Commodore 64

Time Zone
June 5, 2012

In January of 1981, as On-Line Systems were settling into their first office in Coarsegold, California, Roberta Williams already had three Hi-Res Adventures to her credit: Mystery House, The Wizard and the Princess, and the introductory adventure Mission: Asteroid. For her next game, she wanted to do something bold and big. Really big. She envisioned the ultimate treasure hunt, through time as well as space, in which the player would have to visit every continent at five different meticulously recreated historical moments, en route to a climax set on an alien planet in the far future that would by itself be larger than most standalone adventures.

When not working with Ken to get On-Line properly off the ground as a real business over the next six months, Roberta developed her idea, deciding exactly when and where should be included and sketching out maps and a puzzle structure as well as a simple framing story to justify it all. She had been so fascinated when first playing the original Adventure that she had “never wanted it to end.” Now, she seemed determined to get as close as possible to that ideal of infinite adventure. Time Zone just kept growing; by the time Roberta set the complete design document before Ken that summer, it had grown from an estimated five or six to twelve disk sides. This at a time when the biggest epics like Ultima and Wizardry were just spilling onto a second side for the first time.

Ken and Roberta had worked closely together on her first three games, with Roberta doing the writing and design and drawing the graphics and Ken coding it all on the computer. Now, however, Ken was busy running the full-fledged company that On-Line systems had become. Anyway, Time Zone was far too ambitious a project for just two people to tackle. So Ken assembled a team of about ten people for Time Zone, who would spend months working full-time or part-time on the game. The formation of what Ken dubbed “the Time Zone task force” marks a significant moment in the history of game development.

Previously games had been created by one or at most two or three people, each a jack-of-all-trades doing the art, design, and programming as needed. This was after all an era when much game design revolved around exploiting some technical quirk or capability of the hosting hardware, leaving precious little space between the abstracts of design and the details of implementation. Roberta Williams, who as a non-programmer as well as a female was very much the odd woman out in early 1980s game development, felt the need in a contemporary interview for Computer Gaming World to defend her contribution as a pure designer: “Sometimes I feel that people don’t think that I’m as much a part of the creative process as I claim, due to the fact that I don’t program. The designing of the game is the most important and creative part of the project (and also the most fun).” In explicitly separating programmers from artists from designers for the Time Zone project, Ken and Roberta began the march toward the modern model of big-studio development, in which the jack-of-all-trades mastermind has been superseded by teams of hundreds of specialists weaving ever more granular fragments of the whole tapestry. It seems safe to say that Time Zone‘s team was the largest ever assembled to that point to create a computer game — fittingly, as Time Zone was the closest game development got in 1981 to a modern AAA title.

Time Zone was of course to be a Hi-Res Adventure, meaning its appeal would be rooted in the pictures that would illustrate each of its locations. Arguably the most important person on the team after Roberta herself therefore became Terry Pierce, an 18-year old hired straight out of the local high school to draw 1400 pictures for the game in pencil on graph paper. Two others then laboriously traced the pictures on Apple’s Graphics Tablet, filled them in with color, and stored them on disk in a highly compressed format, all accomplished with the tools Ken had originally developed for The Wizard and the Princess. The other side of the operation was the “logistics team,” a few scripters who translated Roberta’s descriptions of geography and puzzles into Ken’s ADL (Adventure Design Language). They created each of Roberta’s “time zones” as a small, self-contained adventure game in its own right. In ostensible charge of the whole was Bob Davis, the personable fellow Ken had hired out of a local liquor store. Yes, in a career trajectory that could only have happened in 1981 and possibly only in the Oakhurst area, Davis had gone from liquor-store clerk to designer of his own game (Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, Hi-Res Adventure #4) to manager of the most ambitious game-development effort in computer history, all in a matter of months. In between finishing up his own game, he now tinkered with ADL for Time Zone and loosely supervised the other coders and artists.

As you might imagine, the whole project started to go off the rails pretty quickly. Davis was well liked by everyone — he was a guy with “a huge heart and a ton of enthusiasm” in John Williams’s words — but lacked the experience or temperament to be a project manager. And while he was adept enough with simple ADL scripting, he lacked the technical acumen needed to even come up with a plan for pulling together all of these little games his coders were creating into the monstrous whole that would be Time Zone. Meanwhile Ken, the one guy at On-Line with the technical know-how and organizational smarts to really manage the project, was kept so busy by other concerns that he could spare little attention. Still, he expected Davis and his team to deliver a completed Time Zone before Christmas — an impossible deadline even without all of the partying and other distractions that accompanied life at On-Line.

Then a savior of sorts walked through the door, in the form of one Jeff Stephenson. At 30 years old, Stephenson already had considerable experience in the computer industry, as well as the sort of rigorous understanding of the technology and the organizational skills that most of the self-taught hackers and kids around On-Line lacked. His last employer had been none other than Software Arts, developers of the most important microcomputer application in the world, VisiCalc. Upon moving from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the mountains of northern California, Stephenson decided to drop in on On-Line, the closest technology company, to see if they needed a programmer. From Hackers:

He put on cord jeans and a sport shirt for the interview; his wife suggested he dress up more. “This is the mountains,” Jeff reminded her, and drove down Deadwood Mountain to On-Line Systems. When he arrived, Ken told him, “I don’t know if you’re going to fit in here — you look kind of conservative.” He hired Jeff anyway, for $18,000 a year — $11,000 less than he’d been making at Software Arts.

Stephenson’s first assignment was to join Davis as co-head of the Time Zone project, to cut through the chaos and get the project back on track. His “conservatism” turned out to be exactly what Time Zone needed. He set everyone firmly and clearly about their appointed tasks, like would have been expected within the more businesslike confines of Software Arts. He himself made modifications to Ken’s Hi-Res Adventure engine to let them tie all of the regions in the game together, at least loosely, letting the player move her avatar from mini-adventure to mini-adventure via the time machine and to carry items with her. And he convinced another On-Line programmer, an action-game maestro named Warren Schwader, to dramatically speed up the rendering of the graphics as the player moved through this huge world. That made a game that would be, as we’ll see in my next post, very painful to play at least a modicum less painful.

By this point the focus for everyone had long ago shifted from Roberta’s original starry-eyed dream of an adventure game for (literally!) the ages to just getting the damn thing done in some reasonably acceptable form. Roberta would later say in the CGW interview, “Once we got into it and saw how big of a job it was, we were almost sorry we started it in the first place.” It’s probably safe to say that most of her team would have happily removed the “almost” from that statement. What with the time constraints, they created essentially a skeleton of Roberta’s vision, with the historical vignettes given little more atmosphere or detail than were needed to support the simple overarching puzzle structure.

Still, all those pictures remained to be drawn, bringing an unbelievable burden of work down on Terry Pierce’s thin shoulders. Almost as burdensome as the quantity of work was the sheer tedium of the subject matter: hundreds and hundreds of uninteresting “fields,” “forests,” and “city streets” to accompany the few locations with something to actually do or look at in each region. In what seems a case of bizarrely misplaced priorities today, the Hi-Res Adventure brand demanded that every single one of Time Zone‘s more than 1300 locations be given its own unique picture, even if the location itself consisted of only “You are in a forest.” Ken and Roberta knew perfectly well where their bread was buttered. Hi-Res Adventures didn’t sell so well because of deathless prose or intricate world-modeling; they advanced little beyond the Scott Adams games in these areas. No, they sold so well because of all those colorful pictures that made them some of the most visually arresting software you could run on an Apple II. And so Pierce worked furiously to crank the pictures out; John Williams remembers the poor kid “almost in tears” from the stress, but still frantically sketching away.

Even with such heroic efforts, there was no way Time Zone was going to be ready for Christmas. The project slipped into 1982, finally shipping (with a big sigh of relief from all concerned) about the beginning of March. Taking into account the sheer quantity of locations, On-Line decided the game was worth a premium price: in fact, a rather staggering list price of $99.95, about twice what anyone had dared to charge for even the most ambitious of computer games before. (Indeed, when accounting for inflation Time Zone is still quite possibly the most expensive videogame ever released.) For an advertisement, they created a mock movie poster, making the most explicit link yet between games and movies. It’s an interesting moment in this fraught relationship, a step on the way to the “interactive movies” On-Line and others would be touting a decade down the road.

Roberta also compared Time Zone to an “epic movie in the tradition of Cecile B. DeMille” in her CGW interview.

The introduction to the manual touts the size and scope of the project proudly, reminding one of the similar introduction to Wizardry‘s manual: “Time Zone has been over a year in the making”; “Roberta Williams spent over six months writing and designing the game before the first line of code for the game was actually written”; “it was the biggest project that On-Line Systems has ever embarked upon”; “it required a complete restructuring of our adventure programming procedures”; “Time Zone is by far the largest and most complex game ever written for any microcomputer.” An article in Softline stated, “This game took more than fourteen months to complete and it has been estimated that it will take people a year to solve due to its extreme complexity.” Predictably enough, an adventure fanatic named Roe Adams III finished it in just about a week, and promptly called On-Line to tell them about it. (I suspect Adams must have hacked — not because the amount of actual content in Time Zone really amounts to all that much but because of its handful of completely absurd puzzles. But I suppose a sufficiently methodical and patient man who went without sleep theoretically could solve the game in a week…)

None of the promotion helped very much. Time Zone became a notorious, high-profile flop, the first such that On-Line had ever released — and a fate it richly deserved. As John Williams wrote to me to open our discussion about the game, “It frankly wasn’t that good.” Indeed, Time Zone is something of a nadir in the annals of adventure-game design, the logical culmination of several ugly trends that I’ve been harping on about for quite some time now in this blog. It plays like a caricature of an old-school text adventure, with all of the annoyances of the form and too few of the delights, and with its rushed development peeking through from every crack and seam. More on that next time.

(Thanks for much in this post goes again to John Williams, whose memories are always invaluable to me.)

Time Zone: Tackling the Monster
June 7, 2012

As a kid, I absolutely loved time-travel stories. I devoured Quantum Leap and Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol, and later in adulthood was very enamored with Connie Willis’s more sophisticated takes on the tropes. As cool science-fictional concepts go, time travel is pretty hard to top. By comparison every other genre of story is limited, bound to whatever milieu the author has chosen or invented. But time travel lets you go hopscotching through the universe — or a multiplicity of them — within the bounds of a single volume.

It also makes a pretty damn appealing premise for an adventure game, maybe even more so than for traditional fiction, what with setting being the literary element adventures do best. And indeed, time travel forms its own lively adventure sub-genre which just happens to include some of my very favorites. Time Zone does not make that list, but it is the first major text adventure to really explore the genre. Considering what a natural fit it is for an adventure game, I’m only surprised that a game like Time Zone took this long to appear. (And yes, I know I’m opening myself up to long lists of obscure or amateur titles that did time travel before Time Zone. By all means, post ’em if you got ’em. But as a professional adventure with a full-fledged time-hopping premise, I’d say Time Zone is probably worthy of recognition as the first text adventure to really go all in for time-travel fiction of the sort I knew as a kid.)

Time-travel stories may be written out of fascination with the intrinsic coolness of time travel itself, but they do often need some sort of framing premise and conflict to motivate their heroes. Time Zone goes with a B-movie riff on 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is the “dawn of man,” echoes the Time Zone manual, and mankind is being observed with interest by an advanced alien race, the Neburites. Here, however, the aliens are evil, and get pissed off as the centuries go by and mankind’s essential badassitude asserts itself:

The year is 4081. The Earth is a fast-paced, highly technological society. The advancement of Earth in the last 2000 years is an amazement to Earth historians and a constant source of pride to Earth scientists. The Neburites, though, feel quite the opposite.

In the 2000 years since our last glimpse of the extraterrestrials they have advanced little, and their jealousy for the Earth’s advancement has grown to a mad fervor. The evil Neburite ruler Ramadu fears that the Earth will very soon become the superior race in the galaxy. This must not happen. His plan is to strike now, before the Earth is advanced enough to defend itself against an attack. So Ramadu has built an awesome ray gun, and aimed it directly at the distant Earth.

It seems that unless something is done, if Ramadu is not stopped and his weapons destroyed, Earth will never see the year 4082.

Stopping him is, of course, a job for you, an everyday Earthling living in 1982, given to you along with a time machine by “a terrestrial guardian or keeper.”

It’s never explained just why you were chosen rather than someone from, you know, the year 4081 who might consider the Earth’s pending destruction a more urgent problem, nor why this mission needs to involve all this time travel at all. You must visit dozens of times and places to collect the equipment you’ll need to confront Ramadu on his home planet in 4081 — exotic stuff like a hammer, a knife, a rope, and a damn rock(!). It would be a lot easier and faster to pop into your house — the time machine just appeared in your back yard, after all — or at worst down the street to the local hardware store to collect these trinkets and be on your way directly to Ramadu.

To some extent these absurdities are part and parcel of adventure gaming even today. (If you somehow lose the walking stick that is key to many puzzles in my own game The King of Shreds and Patches, why can’t you just go to a shop and buy another one?) Even today games often drag and contort their stories, not without split seams and shrieks of pain, into shape to accommodate their technical affordances. As a collection of smaller adventures bound together with bailing wire and duct tape, Time Zone has no notion of global state other than through the objects the player is carrying with her, which she obtained by solving various zones, just as Wizardry has no way of controlling for winning other than by looking to see whether the party is carrying the ribbon they could only obtain by taking out Werdna. The necessary suspension of disbelief just seems somehow more extreme in Time Zone, as, for example, when I park my time machine on a city street in the middle of downtown London without anyone seeming to notice or care.

But, yeah, you can say I’m just anachronistically poking holes in a game running on very limited technology — except that Infocom released a game at the same time that showed a reasonably consistent, believable premise and setting was very possible even with 1982 technology. (More on that in a future post.)

It’s not really surprising given the simplistic story and world model, but it is interesting to note the lack of many traditional time-travel tropes and concerns in Time Zone, the questions and paradoxes that do almost as much as the multiplicity of settings time travel offers to make it such a fun premise for a story (or a game). For instance, there’s no thought at all given to what happens if you change history. I suppose thought is not really needed, first of all because many zones have nothing interesting really going on anyway. For those that do, alteration of history is prevented by what Carl Muckenhoupt (whose own posts on Time Zone I highly recommend as companions to this one) calls “the poverty of the game engine.” The parser understands very little beyond what you have to do to solve the game, meaning that if you try to do something to mess with history — like, say, kill Christopher Columbus — you’re not going to be able to communicate your idea anyway.

The one place where Time Zone does nod toward traditional time-travel concerns is in not letting you carry objects back in time to a point before they were invented; if you try it, the anachronistic objects are destroyed. This of course provides Roberta Williams with a way of gating her puzzle design, preventing the player from using an obviously applicable item from solving this or that puzzle. It can also be very annoying, not only because it’s all too easy to be careless and lose track of what you’re carrying where, but also because it’s not always clear to the player — or, I strongly suspect given the countless historical gaffes in the game, to Roberta either — just when an item was invented, and thus just where the (time)line of demarcation really lies. In the small blessings department, the game does at least tell you when objects are destroyed this way. Given the era and the designer, one could easily imagine it keeping mum and letting you go quite a long way before figuring out you’ve made your game unwinnable.

But I should outline the general structure of the game before we go any further. From your home base that is literally your contemporary home, you can travel to each of the seven continents in any of five times — 50 BC, 1000 AD, 1400 AD, 1700 AD, 2082 AD — to collect what you need for the climax on Neburon in 4082 AD. (The manual says 4081, but it seems to have been written back when the game was still expected to ship in 1981 — thus the neat 2100-year gap.) Oh, and you can also visit 400 million BC, but only in one location. It’s explained as being thus limited because this was before the continents as we know them came into being. The same is also claimed to be true, bizarrely, of 10,000 BC (obviously there were no geologists around On-Line). Not all of the zones need to be visited; some serve only as red herrings. In what is, depending on your point of view, either a ripoff or the funniest joke in the game (or both), Antarctica in every single time consists of just a single location. You can only get out of your time machine, say, “Gee, it’s too cold here,” and climb back inside.

Some of the zones contain historical characters drawn straight from grade-school history books, giving the game (like so much of Roberta Williams’s work) a feel of children’s literature.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll note that Time Zone is not exactly rigorous about putting these characters precisely when they belong. It’s kind of tough to know to what extent Roberta messes with chronology just to be able to fit in all the cool stuff she wants to given just five time periods in which to put it all — Columbus certainly seems like a must-have, even if he is displaced by 92 years — and to what extent it’s all down to sloppy or nonexistent research. In her interview with Computer Gaming World to promote Time Zone, Roberta mentions an error she made, placing a rhea bird in Australia rather than South America. She explains the error away more disingenuously (or is this supposed to be funny?) in the manual:

To make a more interesting and challenging adventure, we have made some minor changes. For example, at one point in the game (I won’t say where) we have placed a rhea egg where you will never find a rhea bird. Anyone knowledgeable in ornithology knows that a rhea bird belong in South America (which is not where it is). This type of thing happens from time to time in Time Zone.

Worrying so much over such a minor point leaves one thinking that Time Zone‘s history must be rigorous indeed. Um, no. In addition to thinking that Pangaea still existed in 10,000 BC, the game also thinks that man invented fire in 10,000 BC. (In fact, it lets you be the one who invents fire, creating all sorts of timeline repercussions — if the game was more interested in such things, that is).

And it places brontosauruses (from the Jurassic period) and tyrannosauruses (from the Cretaceous) together in 400 million BC, hundreds of millennia too early for either. And then there’s Napoleon ruling in 1700 AD.

It’s hard for me to attribute this to the need to have cool stuff, because Louis XIV’s France was a pretty interesting historical moment in its own right. And your mission in this zone is to collect a comb and some perfume, which fits better with the Sun King’s effete court than with the more martial Napoleon. So, I must reluctantly conclude that Roberta doesn’t know her Louis XIV from her Napoleon. She also thinks that Saint Petersburg is in Asia, and that Peter the Great was the husband of Catherine the Great. “History books aren’t a lot of fun,” she asserts in the manual. Which kind of begs one to wonder why someone who doesn’t like history books is writing a game about history.

Time Zone has always had a reputation as a fearsomely unfair and difficult game. That’s true enough, but it’s not universally true when you look at in a granular way. Many — probably most — of the puzzles break down into a few repeated archetypes, such as trading one fairly obvious item for another item.

There’s even a limited but surprising amount of kindness (or “user friendliness,” as the manual says over and over; presumably that term had just come into vogue). In addition to the game’s being kind enough to tell you when you lose an item in the timestream, the inventory limit, while present, is a very generous 16 items or so. And there are technically no mazes, if we restrict the term to rooms that are not laid out so that going north after going south gets you back where you started.

There are, however, large, tedious-to-map grids of empty rooms in virtually every zone you visit, and the game never tells you which exits from a location are available, forcing you to rely on trial and error. (Thank God the Hi-Res engine doesn’t support diagonal exits.) Indeed, Time Zone may have the shabbiest ratio of rooms to things to actually do in them in adventure-game history. By my count there are 57 items in the game, about the same as each of the first two Zork games — but spread over more than 1300 rooms. If anything the ratio feels even worse than that, as you wander through endless “pastures,” “meadows,” “fields,” and “city streets.” Actually playing Time Zone feels not like a grand journey through history, but rather a long slog through a whole bunch of nothing. No wonder poor Terry Pierce was reduced to tears at having to draw this monotony.

To relieve the boredom, entering some of these otherwise meaningless locations leads to instant death. The only way to solve many of these “puzzles” is to learn from the deaths and not enter that location again.

Some of the pictures are pretty nice, up to the standard of the earlier Hi-Res Adventures. Others show the strain of drawing 1400 pictures in eight months; they look pretty bad.

Something that’s often overlooked about the Hi-Res Adventures today is that they are not simply text adventures with illustrations, after the style of, say, the Magnetic Scrolls games of the later 1980s. Right from Mystery House there was an element of interactivity to their graphics: drop an item in an area and you would see it there; open a door and you would see it open onscreen; etc. That’s quite impressive. However, occasionally, just occasionally, Roberta decides to put essential information into the picture rather than bothering to describe it in text. Because this happens relatively seldom, and because there’s so much else in those pictures that isn’t implemented in the game, these occasions are devilishly easy to miss entirely.

In the picture below, that little green thing at the bottom right that looks like an air vent is an essential oxygen mask — apparently for a person with a very weirdly shaped head, but that’s another issue — that’s going to get destroyed if we go back in time with it in the time machine with us.

Nothing in the picture below is implemented except one of the drawers, which contains a knife that you need.

Only the cabinet is implemented below, which… you know the drill.

And the tusks of the elephant skeleton are implemented as separate objects that can be pried out and taken, something I’d never suspect in a million years.

All of this is frustrating in the extreme, but none of it is really that different from the other Hi-Res Adventures. What makes Time Zone so untenable, and leads to its reputation for difficulty and cruelty, is the combinatorial-explosion factor. There’s a pretty fixed order in which you need to work your way through the zones, using items found in one to solve puzzles in the next. Yet the game gives no clue whatsoever what that order must be, leaving you hopelessly at sea about where to go next or what to work on. (And then of course if you miss something like one of the above…) By late in the game you’ll have a full inventory plus a whole collection of extra objects piled outside your time machine, and won’t even know what to take with you from zone to zone.

Throw in all of the other annoyances — the pointless sudden deaths; the huge empty maps; the items and entire zones that serve only as red herrings; the uncertainty about what you can and can’t interact with; the obstinate parser; and just a few howlingly bad puzzles to top it all off — and the result is just excruciating. Theoretically this game could be solved, but really, why would you want to? Anyone willing to put this amount of methodical, tedious work in for so little positive feedback might be better off doing something that benefits mankind, or at least earns her a paycheck.

Or maybe it can’t be solved. It wouldn’t be a Roberta Williams game without a couple of really terrible puzzles. One of those is found in Asia (should be Europe, but why quibble?) in 1700 AD, where you have to wait outside Catherine the Great’s castle for five turns for no apparent reason for her to emerge with hubby Peter the Great and drop a hat pin.

This is made especially annoying by the fact that the game doesn’t even have a WAIT verb; you have to fiddle around with endless LOOKs and the like to get the turns to pass. (If you construed from the lack of WAIT that there would be no puzzle mechanics involving time, the joke’s on you.)

The other crowning jewel is the mountainside in the Asia of 1000 AD where you must type a totally unmotivated OPEN SESAME.

Puzzles aside, Time Zone just feels a bit amateurish and sloppy most of the time. Like a piece of fiction from a beginning writer, one senses that no one is in control of its tone or message, which veer about wildly. Nowhere is this more painful than in its depictions of the non-white natives of the zones, which come off as hilariously racist — but, I’m sure, unintentionally so.

There are also weird occasions when the “children’s book” tone suddenly gives way to thoughtless violence.

So, no, Time Zone is not a very good game. The climax on Neburon, which takes two disk sides by itself, is actually the strongest part, full of sudden deaths and empty rooms but also possessed of a forward narrative drive and sense of tension that was still rare in this era, as you penetrate deeper and deeper into the alien base. If released on its own, it would have stood up as possibly the best of the Hi-Res line. As it is, though, it comes at the end of such an exhausting slog that it’s hard to really appreciate. By the time you see the victory screen — which, incidentally, makes no sense; why are the people in your home town of 1982 celebrating a victory you won in 4082? — you’re just glad it’s over, just like the team who made it were when they finally got it out the door.

Sometimes, as The Prisoner taught us, the best way to win is not to play. Time Zone is perhaps doubly disappointing because the premise has so much potential. But neither the technology nor the designer were really equipped to realize such an ambitious idea, and certainly not in the time allowed. Still, Time Zone is of undeniable historical significance, so I have the Apple II disk images and the manual for those of you who’d like to dive in.

Next time: a bit about the aftermath of Time Zone before we move on to something else.

Time Zone: Aftermath
June 9, 2012

Time Zone met a fairly cool reception upon its release. It wasn’t panned in the magazines; bad reviews were all but nonexistent in this era. Still, it received surprisingly little coverage for such a major release from such a major publisher. When it was discussed, the main preoccupation was its immense size, with little attention given to its other qualities. Most likely those assigned to write about it were as intimidated by it as everyone else, and didn’t know quite where else to begin.

Feedback from the everyday gaming public in the only form that ultimately matters to a publisher, sales, was also very disappointing. As they had for the other Hi-Res Adventures, On-Line had announced plans to port the game to the Atari 400 and 800 — where, thanks to the small disk capacity of those machines, it was projected to occupy an astounding 20 disk sides. In the wake of very poor sales, however, they quietly shelved those plans, judging it not worth the effort. Within a few months all active promotion had ceased, as On-Line wrote the game off as a failed, not-to-be-repeated experiment and moved on. Luckily they still had plenty of more successful software, enough so that the Time Zone project, while it certainly didn’t help the bottom line, didn’t by itself endanger the house that Ken and Roberta had built.

It’s temping to see in Time Zone‘s failure the adventuring public standing up for their rights at last, rejecting the absurdities of the genre to the strains of “We’re Not Gonna Take It” (hopefully the Who’s version rather than Twisted Sister’s). Alas, this probably wasn’t the case. Cruelty and unfairness were still largely what was expected of an adventure game at this stage. Of the games I’ve looked at so far for this blog, only (bizarrely enough) Softporn is not at least a little bit sadistic, and that hadn’t prevented many of them from becoming hits. Time Zone‘s sins were not so much unique as compounded by its size, affirmatively answering the question of whether a game could be simply too big.

The other question Time Zone answered was whether an adventure game could cost too much, and therein lies the more obvious reason for its failure. Prices had escalated rapidly since the days of 1978, when individual programmers had sold games in Ziploc baggies for $5 or $10. Publishers watched in delight as they raised their prices — to $20, $35, finally to $50 with the arrival of Wizardry — and people just kept on buying, even as the United States and the world plunged deeper into the worst recession prior to the recent one. Looked at from today’s perspective, the games business circa 1982 looks like the proverbial license to print money, as publishers could sell games created in a few months by one or two programmers for prices that were, when considered with inflation, equal to or greater than those of modern AAA titles developed by teams of hundreds. Yet there was a limit, and Wizardry and Time Zone by their respective success and failure pretty definitively found it. From then on publishers would not dare to venture much beyond $50 for even their most lavish productions. As the public’s expectations went up, resulting in games that needed bigger development teams and ever more time to make, profit margins correspondingly shrank. No wonder so many game-makers from those halcyon days can’t help but look back on the early 1980s with a certain wistfulness.

There were of course some people who bought Time Zone, and even some who claimed to enjoy it. It managed to place 20th in Softalk magazine’s readers’ poll for the best software of 1982, beating out the likes of Infocom’s Deadline. And Electronic Games magazine gave it a year-end “Certificate of Merit.”

The most prominent fan of all was Roe R. Adams III, the prolific adventure-game reviewer and columnist for several magazines who according to legend became the first in the world to solve the game, just one week after its release, and according to Steven Levy’s Hackers then “declared Roberta’s creation one of the greatest gaming feats in history.” Adams was active on a telecommunications service known as The Source, an important early online community that was the first of its kind barring only PLATO, and as such is probably worthy of a post or three in its own right. After watching his other, less adept adventuring friends flounder in the game, he convinced the powers that were on The Source to set up an area called the Vault of Ages, dedicated to plumbing the mysteries of Time Zone collaboratively. Users were greeted with the following upon going there:

Welcome to the Vault of Ages. Here we are coordinating the greatest group effort in adventure solving — the complete mapping of On-Line’s Time Zone.

I am the curator of the vault. You are the 85th intrepid time traveler to seek the knowledge of the vault. Herein we are gathering, verifying, and correlating information about each time zone. Feel free to visit here anytime, but remember that for the vault to fill, we need your contributions of information. Anytime you have new information about mapping, puzzle solutions, traps overcome, items found, s-mail this info to me. After verification, your contributed jigsaw puzzle piece will be added to the vault file, and your name will be entered upon the rolls as a master solver. Now step this way and I will introduce you to the Master Catalog.

Eventually with more than 1800 members, the Vault of Ages is a fascinating example of early crowd-sourcing, an ancestor of everything from Wikipedia to a thousand Lost message boards, and as such of perhaps more ultimate significance than Time Zone itself.

Within On-Line, Time Zone was notable in retrospect for being the first project of Jeff Stephenson. The great unsung hero of On-Line’s (soon to be Sierra’s) glory years, Stephenson would largely take over from Ken Williams as the company’s hacker-in-chief as the latter found business concerns monopolizing his time. Stephenson became the technical architect behind the next two generations of Sierra adventure games, designing the AGI and SCI engines and development tools that allowed Sierra’s games, like Infocom’s, to run on any platform for which the company wrote an interpreter. We’ll be getting much more familiar with Stephenson and his work in the years to come.

Still, most within On-Line were happy to forget about Time Zone as quickly as possible. That’s not all that surprising, given the chaotic development process, the unsatisfying final result, and the commercial failure of the project. Yet it went beyond even that. There was something ill-starred about Time Zone that seemed to affect many involved with it. Most of the youngsters who worked on the game left for university or other greener pastures upon its completion, happy not to have anything more to do with the games industry. Terry Pierce, the 18-year-old artist who had drawn all of those 1400 pictures virtually singlehandedly, burned out more dramatically. He was the best friend of Ken’s little brother John, who was only slightly older but already filling numerous high-profile roles at On-Line, including putting together the packaging for Time Zone. John describes a “kind of psychotic episode,” in which Terry was found “walking down the snowy highway at night in below freezing weather with no shoes or shirt on.” He also was gone shortly after that incident, severing all contact with his erstwhile best friend and everyone else at On-Line for over 20 years.

But the saddest tale of all was that of Bob Davis. Davis, you’ll remember, was the personable fellow who had gone from clerking at a liquor store to designing his own game to heading the Time Zone project in six months. He had a history of alcoholism and drug abuse, but had managed to get himself basically clean and sober by the time he started working for On-Line. But around the time that Time Zone was wrapping up, Davis, making more money than he ever had in his life, started to indulge in a big way again. He quit his job shortly after, deciding he could write games on his own and sell them to publishers. Davis was a bright guy when sober, but he hadn’t a prayer of authoring a game from scratch when bereft of tools like Ken’s ADL adventure-scripting language. He fumbled with learning assembly language for the Atari VCS, one of the most notoriously difficult programming platforms ever devised. But mostly he shot up drugs.

Soon the royalty checks started to get smaller as his game Ulysses and the Golden Fleece went from new hit to catalog status, and soon after the money was gone along with his wife. Davis began calling On-Line’s offices on an almost daily basis, asking for a job he obviously was no longer capable of doing — or, even better, just a straight handout. Knowing where the money would go if he just gave it to him, one kind-hearted old colleague offered to pay his mortgage directly; Davis angrily slammed down the phone in response. He started trying to pass bad checks all over town, becoming a pariah in this small community where everybody knew everybody. In a story that rings familiar to all too many of us, he “flamed out in a way that burned every bridge along the way,” in John William’s words, and by the end of the year was in jail in Fresno. I don’t know what happened to him after that, although I can say that he never rejoined the games industry to build on his unlikely early success. John believes he called On-Line just once after his release from jail, to an understandably “chilly reception.” But Bob Davis, first through all those increasingly desperate phone calls and then through the bad memories of his fall from grace, haunted On-Line for years afterward, casting a pall over everyone’s memories of Time Zone itself.

And that sad note is where we’ll have to leave it with Time Zone. As we’ll soon have several occasions to learn again, individuals and companies could fall as fast as they rose in the early PC industry.

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 Allen 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, it’s 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 Holme’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 Odeipus 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.

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 official literature. 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, a generic demon 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.

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, 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 telgrams, 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 this 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 much 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!)

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.

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, Marshal 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 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 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.

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 then half of the 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 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 are 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.

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.

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,” Blanks 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 Dubar’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 way 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…

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.

Japan
July 26, 2012

There were two possibilities that kept those who built the PC industry in the United States and Britain awake at night, both all the more terrifying in that they seemed all but inevitable. One was the arrival of the sleeping giant that was IBM. The pioneers could easily imagine Big Blue bludgeoning its way into the industry with billions of dollars behind them and a whole slate of “standards” of its own, destroying everything they had built. This was, after all, exactly what IBM had done years before to the big mainframe market which it now all but owned for itself. When Big Blue finally came to the PC, however, it showed unprecedented eagerness to partner with already extant PC firms like Microsoft. IBM’s entrance in the fall of 1981 did eventually result in one, near universal computing standard, but the process of sweeping out what the pioneers had built would end up taking more than ten years to come to completion — and, most shockingly, neither the hardware nor the software standard that resulted would remain under IBM’s control. This gave companies, at least those able to see which way the winds were blowing, plenty of time to adapt to the new computing order. (Or, in the case of Apple, to stake out their own territory as the anti-IBM.) Yet even as IBM’s entrance proved nowhere near as bad as it might have been, everyone still waited for the other shoe to drop: Japan.

Many people who know much more about such things than I have analyzed Japan’s postwar economic miracle. Suffice to say that the devastated remains of the country after World War II rose again, and more quickly than the most optimistic could have predicted. Already in 1968 Japan became the world’s second largest economy, its explosive growth initially fueled largely by exports of steel and textiles and other heavy industry. It was at about this point that a new form of Japanese expansionism made the country again a source of concern rather than pride for the United States: a new wave of Japanese consumer products began reaching American shores, most notably consumer electronics and cars. Today we remember mostly the latter. The products of Nissan, Toyota, and Honda devastated the U.S. auto industry, and for good reason. They were cheaper, better built, better engineered, safer, and, very important in the wake of the oil crisis, much more fuel efficient than American cars of the era. Yet the American auto industry did survive in a damaged state, and in time even learned to compete again. Huge swathes of the domestic electronics industry had no such luck. Japan didn’t just damage American consumer-electronics companies, they effectively destroyed them. Already by 1982 it was getting hard to find a television or stereo made in America, and a decade later it would be, a few high-end boutique brands aside, impossible. And even as they took over the old, Japan also pioneered new technologies, such as the iPod of the early 1980s, the Sony Walkman.

In one of those fun paradoxes of capitalism, Americans fueled this expansion by buying Japanese products even as they also lived in increasing fear of this new economic menace. Television advertisements from the Detroit auto manufacturers were filled with slurs against Japan that veered uncomfortably close to unabashed racism, while newspapers and magazines were filled with awed exposés of Japanese workplace culture, which came across a bit like the Borg of Star Trek fame. The average Japanese, people were told, placed loyalty to his employer over loyalty to his family or his country; forewent hobbies, friends, vacations, and family life in favor of work; began each 12-hour-plus working day by singing company songs and doing calisthetics with his coworkers; demanded only the most modest of salaries; considered an employment contract a lifetime through-good-or-ill commitment akin to a marriage vow. Add to this the complete, threatening otherness of Japanese society, with its insular artistic culture and its famously difficult language. The long and painful recession of the early 1980s only increased the sense of dread and paranoia. An earlier generation of Japanese had been willing to fly their planes deliberately into enemy ships in the service of an obviously lost cause, for God’s sake. How could American employees compete with that kind of commitment? What industry would the Japanese be coming for next time — and was there even any point in trying to stop them when they did?

The burgeoning Western PC industry seemed like it should be right in Japan’s wheelhouse. After all, this was a country that was cranking out well-trained electrical engineers at the rate of 40,000 per year by 1982, and that increasingly enjoyed global domination of most other types of electronics. To the paranoid and the conspiracy-minded, the PC industry seemed ripe to follow the pattern set in those other sectors. Japan would let Americans do the hard work of development and innovation, and then, when the technology was mature enough to be practical for the average home and business, sweep in with an avalanche of cheap PCs to make the industry their own. This vision of Japan is of course a confused one, especially in insisting on seeing the entire Japanese economy as a single, united front; in reality it was built, like the American economy, from many individual companies who competed with one another at least as hard as they competed with the West. Still, that’s how it looked to some on the outside, especially after the arrival of Space Invaders, followed by a steady deluge of other standup arcade games, showed that Japan was no slouch when it came to computer technology.

A couple of people in the PC industry worried about a Japanese-driven apocalypse even more than most, for the very good reason that it had already happened to them once: Jack Tramiel of Commodore and, in Britain, Clive Sinclair. Both had seen their companies driven to the brink of bankruptcy in the previous decade, when low-priced Japanese models drove them out of previously profitable gigs as calculator manufacturers in a matter of months while they could only stand around wondering what had just hit them. Now, both were determined to make sure it didn’t happen to them again in their new roles as PC purveyors.

Commodore caused increasing chaos in the American PC industry of the early 1980s by selling first the VIC-20 and then the Commodore 64 at ever lower prices. Most attributed this to Tramiel’s maniacal determination to dominate at any cost, as summed up by his famous motto, “Business is war.” Yet an at least equally important source of his price-cutting mania was his fear of the Japanese, his fear that they would come in and undercut everyone else if he didn’t do it first. As he said in another of those little aphorisms he was so good at coining, “We will become the Japanese.” His competitors who cursed him as the ruthless SOB he was likely also had him to thank that the doomsday scenario of a Japanese takeover never came to pass. Japan would certainly play its role as a source for chips and other components, and companies like Epson and Okidata became huge in the printer market, but the core of the American computer industry would remain largely American for many years. With Commodore already dominating the home market with its low-priced but reasonably solid and usable machines, Japanese firms didn’t have the opportunities to upstage and undercut the competition that they did in other industries.

In a turnabout play that he must have greatly enjoyed, Tramiel actually opened his war with Japan on the enemy’s home front. Six months before introducing the VIC-20 to North America and Europe in the spring of 1981, Commodore debuted it in Japan as the VIC-1001. It became a big success there, although its limitations ultimately ensured it was a fairly short-lived one, just like in North America and Europe. Commodore would try to bring its later machines to Japan as well, but never got the same traction that it had with the VIC. Instead, Japan’s PC market remained peculiarly, stubbornly insular throughout the 1980s. If Japanese computers never invaded the West the way so many had feared, Western manufacturers also never had much luck in Japan. They were partly kept at a distance, as had been so many Westerners before them, by the challenges of the Japanese language itself.

Japanese is generally acknowledged to have the most complicated system of writing in the world. It’s comprised of three different traditional scripts, often interleaved in modern times with the occasional foreign phrase written using Latin characters. One script is kanji, a script borrowed from Chinese with thousands of characters, each of represents a concept rather than a phonetic sound. In addition, there are two syllabaries that can be used to write the language phonetically: hiragana and katakana. Including about 50 characters each, they are simply different scripts for the same phonetic values, similar, but not quite equivalent, to upper-case and lower-case letters in Western languages. Normal Japanese text is written using all three intermixed: kanji is used for the stems of content words; hiragana for suffixes, prepositions and function words; and katakana for a variety of other tasks, most notably to write loan-words from other languages and to add emphasis to a certain point. To complete this confused picture, and as anyone who has browsed Japanese videogame boxes can attest, many Western proper names are simply written in their original form, using Latin characters.

All of this amounts to a nightmare for anyone trying to make a computer input and output Japanese. Computers have traditionally stored text using a neat arrangement of one byte per character, which gives the possibility of having up to 256 separate glyphs. That’s more than enough not only for every English character but also for the various accents, umlauts, ligatures, and the like found in many non-English Western European languages. For Japanese, however, it’s sadly inadequate. Then there’s the problem of designing a keyboard to input all those characters. And there’s an additional, more subtle problem: with so many characters, each Japanese glyph must be quite intricate in comparison to the simpler abstracts that are Latin letters, and the differences between glyphs are often quite small. The blocky displays of the early PC era were incapable of rendering such complexity in a readable way.

Faced with such challenges, which made localizing their existing designs for Japan all but impossible, most Western companies largely chose to leave the Japanese market to Japanese companies. Although the first PCs available for purchase in Japan came from Apple and Radio Shack, it didn’t take Japanese companies long to jump in and take over. Hitachi and NEC introduced the first pre-assembled PCs to be built in Japan in 1979. By 1982, Japanese manufacturers controlled 75 percent of the Japanese market, which was dominated by three machines: the NEC PC-8801, the Sharp X1, and the Fujitsu FM-7. None completely solved the fundamental problems of displaying Japanese. In addition to the standard English glyphs, each could display only katakana, chosen because its characters are square and easy to make out even on a low-resolution display, and perhaps a handful of kanji pictographs, for extremely common concepts like “date” and “time.” Katakana, on its own, is fine for short sentences or simple messages, but reading and writing longer passages in it alone is a difficult, wearisome task. The machines had to be commanded, meanwhile, in good old English-derived BASIC (usually sourced from Microsoft), a particular challenge in a country large and insular enough that a good knowledge of English, especially at this time, was a fairly rare trait.

In light of these tribulations, Japanese companies worked feverishly to develop hardware capable of storing and displaying proper Japanese writing. In 1982 NEC introduced the first machine that could do that reasonably painlessly in the form of the PC-9801, an advanced 16-bit computer built around the Intel 8086 processor. It soon ruled the Japanese business market despite being incompatible with the IBM PC that dominated business computing elsewhere. By the time it was finally discontinued in 1997, the PC-9801 line had sold well over 15 million units, virtually all within Japan. The need to display kanji characters and compete with NEC drove other manufacturers, with the happy byproduct that most Japanese computers soon had very advanced display capabilities in comparison to most Western machines.

The PC-9801 and its competitors clearly pointed the way forward for computing in Japan, but they were initially expensive machines targeted very much at business. Home users would remain stuck for at least another couple of years with their more primitive 8-bit machines built around the Zilog Z-80 or Motorola 6809. Just like in the United States, these early adapters built a distribution network for games written by amateurs and semi-amateurs, called “doujinsoft” in Japan. Again like in the United States, a common early means of distribution was through program listings printed in the enthusiast magazines. The first and most respected of these, sort of the Japanese Byte, began in 1977 and was called Monthly ASCII. In 1981 the magazine began to publish an annual supplement for April Fool’s Day, called Yearly Ah-SKI! It mostly consisted of fake articles and advertisements mocking the computer industry, but included one full, working program as well each year. The second Yearly Ah-SKI!, in 1982, hosted what was almost certainly the first text adventure, first adventure game, and first full-fledged digital ludic narrative to be published in Japan. We’ll look at that next time.

Japanese Adventuring
July 28, 2012

One of the computers installed at Monthly ASCII‘s offices was a DEC PDP-11 minicomputer. Amongst other programs, this machine housed many of the games popular with Western institutional hackers of the early 1980s, such as Adventure and Zork. Many staffers played these games obsessively before and after working hours — and occasionally during them — in spite of the challenges their English language presented. ASCII also owned some imported Western PCs, along with early adventure games from Scott Adams, On-Line, and Infocom. With such games still unknown on homegrown Japanese machines, some staffers naturally began thinking about remedying that by writing a text adventure of their own. By this time various Western magazines had examined the technology used to develop professional text adventures. In addition to the many type-in BASIC adventures, there were articles like the one that appeared in Practical Computing in August of 1980, describing a machine-language text-adventure engine similar to the one used by Scott Adams.

With all this information at hand, two ASCII employees, Hideki Akiyama and Suguho Takahashi, proposed that the magazine develop and publish a text adventure for the 1982 Yearly Ah-SKI! parody issue. With permission granted, Akiyama developed an adventuring engine, and Takahashi wrote the first scenario for the system: Omotesando Adventure, after the street in Tokyo where ASCII‘s offices were located. It was a difficult project, particularly as both men could only work on it during down-time from their regular jobs on the magazine’s editorial staff. Still, as the first adventure made in Japan, both were determined that it should not be “shoddily made.” Omotesando was, in the words of Takahashi, a “pretty outrageous idea” for one reason in particular: despite being published in a Japanese magazine for a Japanese audience and running on Japanese computers, it was actually written in English.

Amongst the languages of the world, English, with its simple verb-object imperative construction, is rather unusually well-suited to a parser-driven adventure game. Even a related language like German makes coding a parser more complex through its many two-part verbs and its fondness for reflexive pronouns. Japanese, meanwhile, is still vastly less amendable to traditional parsing algorithms. As my translation and research partner for this article, Oren Ronen, told me, “Japanese doesn’t lend itself easily to the verb-noun pattern without sounding completely broken.” I suppose that ASCII could have had Omotesando Adventure output text in Japanese and accept input in English, but that would have created huge problems of its own, as legions of imperfect English speakers tried to figure out how to reference this or that Japanese word in the text in English. So, pure English it was — and luckily so for those of us who don’t know a lick of Japanese, as it gives us a chance to peek inside this important artifact.

Omotesando was developed on a Japanese Oki IF-800 computer running the English operating system CP/M. This machine was chosen because it wasn’t a particularly popular one with the other staffers, and thus normally spent its time gathering dust in a corner of ASCII‘s offices. When development was complete, Akiyama needed only write some bridge code for the various other Japanese Z80-based PCs, such as the very popular PC-8001 and PC-8801. With a little help from some other staffers, he soon had Omotesando running on a substantial percentage of Japanese PCs.

ASCII introduced Omotesando excitedly as a whole new experience for Japanese computer users:

Among the various things we can use a personal computer for, games are the most constant and popular. Games are in high demand, and software houses are pushing them into the market continuously. This issue we are introducing the Adventure Game. It’s an entirely new genre, the like of which was never seen on a computer. We may even call it a “New Type” of computer games.

The premise has you an employee of an unnamed rival magazine to ASCII. You’ve been ordered to sneak into ASCII‘s offices and find some way to sabotage the operation. It’s a nice change of pace from the dragons and spaceships that still dominated American text adventures, and there’s a certain postmodern sort of cleverness to all of the self-referentiality, a precursor to the generations of amateur bedroom text-adventure implementers who would get their start by implementing, well, their own bedrooms and/or apartments.

As one might expect, Omotesando is proudly old school in its design sensibilities.

Let’s state this clearly: we don’t believe you, who are experiencing an adventure for the first time, will be able to easily achieve the game’s goals. For several dozen tries you probably won’t even manage to sneak into ASCII Publishing’s offices. You will be caught in traps and die frustrating deaths. By trying again and again dozens or hundreds of times, you’ll learn things like “if I do this here I can go through” or “before I do this I must not do that” by trial and error and will be able to proceed. Solving the riddle that is the entire game can take several months and try your endurance.

In any case, since this is a game of endurance, we added the ability to save your position to a cassette and reload the game to continue from the same point. We’re very kind.

That said, to stay in the spirit of the adventure game, you must look for the way to save the game in the course of playing it (we’re not always kind). Once you find the way, you will be able to solve the game’s puzzles much more quickly.

As the illustration above shows, the English of the game is far, far from perfect. The same quirky sense of humor that marks the Yearly Ah-SKI! editorial content is as present as the sharp limitations on text length will allow. There is also the unusual (and annoying) “feature” of having to LOOK every time you enter a new room to determine what is really there. Other than that, and of course its setting, there’s oddly little about Omotesando to separate it from its inspirations. Perhaps the most surprising thing about it is that it is quite technically and even artistically competent within its modest aspirations. If you’d like to experience it for yourself, I’ve prepared a little care package for you. It includes Omotesando packaged up with a Japanese PC-8001 emulator as a Windows executable, along with translations and originals of the magazine articles that accompanied it. Sorry to be so platform-specific this time. Given the trials and tribulations of Japanese, this was about the best I could do. I do believe it should also run fine under WINE.

Omotesando Adventure, then, marks the beginning of the text adventure’s brief, precarious existence in Japan. The following year’s Yearly Ah-SKI! brought another, more complex game, once again implemented in English. By that time a Japanese company called Starcraft had begun a project to translate some of the more popular American illustrated text adventures for the domestic market, including most of On-Line’s Hi-Res Adventure line (with the expected exception of the white elephant Time Zone). Still, the difficulty of parsing Japanese made these games an awkward fit for the country; some actually resorted to making the player type a Japanese verb, hit enter, and then input a noun as the least painful and grammatically ugly approach.

As an alternative to such kludges, amateurs and professionals alike soon began experimenting with menu-driven interfaces in place of parsers. Thus was born the tradition of the Japanese visual novel, which became extraordinarily popular in spite of or because of the fact that many were partly or entirely exercises in pornography. Whatever objections some might have to their subject matter, or frustrations with their limited scope for player choice, these games did at least depart definitively from text adventures’ obsessions with puzzles and low-level object interactions to focus on telling more complex stories at a less granular level than most of their peers in the West. In fact, visual novels and the related genre of dating simulations remain important to Japanese computing culture even today, decades after text adventures faded from store shelves in the West.

A much more successful Western genre in Japan in comparison to the text adventure was the CRPG. Wizardry and its sequels in particular were massively popular when translated into Japanese. Just as the Beatles and other British groups of the 1960s mirrored back to America the music that America had originally created, Japanese CRPGs eventually made their way back to the West, where their unique, heavily story-oriented sensibility made them more popular with many players than the more hardcore, stats-oriented Western games.

Indeed, I’m afraid this blog will necessarily have to view Japan mostly through the lens of the West, through the games that made it back to these shores in English translations. I don’t know any Japanese, you see, and, while Oren did amazing work to help me with this article, I can’t expect him to keep doing my research and translating huge chunks of material for me. So, take this article as primer only on what was going on inside a country that would soon become hugely important to Western gaming culture. But before I move on, I’ll leave you with one last historical curiosity from inside Japan that Oren dug up for us.

During the early 1990s, after parser-driven games were considered commercially dead not only in Japan but also in the West, four of Infocom’s classic titles were ported to Japanese computers, and translated into Japanese in the process. Let me just let Oren finish this story:

There were 4 translations: Zork 1 is the only one that’s mentioned anywhere on the western web, but that’s only because it got a strange console release on the PlayStation and Sega Saturn. Most references get the facts wrong by saying those were the only releases it got. In fact, there was also a PC release with a proper text-entry based parser. In addition, Enchanter, Planetfall and (of all things) Moonmist got translations. All were wrapped in a fancy, Zork Zero-like interface with a changing graphical background depending on your location, a clickable compass-rose, and menus for saving and loading the game. They were released in the early ’90s by a software company called SystemSoft that mostly did game localizations for the Japanese market. They all mention Activision in the documentation, so the deal was made after Infocom’s buyout. The translations themselves are pretty good, as far as my non-native literary appreciation skills can tell.

The most remarkable thing about them is that they are the best implementation I can find anywhere of an IF parser in Japanese. Because of the complexity of parsing Japanese text, adventure games moved to menu-based systems much faster than in the West, and the few parser-based games that were released either required input in English or did a no-frills two word Japanese parser that was completely ungrammatical. The Infocom games parse complete, grammatical Japanese sentences (which is, again, a much more difficult task than in English) and even do all the fancy Infocom tricks like “take all except the stone” and remembering context for pronouns. I’m quite amazed they went through all the effort several years after parser-based games were completely forgotten about in the country.

The translations even reproduced the feelies from the original American releases. Alas, it appears they were, unsurprisingly, not successful, and they mark the last gasp of the text adventure’s short and fitful life in Japan.

(My thanks again to Oren Ronen for all his help researching and translating for this article and the proceeding one, which included translating a short interview with the designers of Omotesando Adventure.)

Brøderbund
August 3, 2012

I’ve already introduced some hackers on this blog who defied pop-culture stereotypes of blinkered nerddom with a remarkable range of interests and activities outside of computers. Marc Blank, for example, managed to finish medical school while moonlighting with MIT’s Dynamic Modeling Group, where he learned enough to become the most important technical architect behind Infocom’s technology. Andrew Greenberg of Wizardry fame went on to become a lawyer, and now “hacks the law with glee.” In its essence the attraction of hacking is the joy of coming to understand a complex, dynamic, semi-autonomous system, and then bending it to your will. Plenty else in the modern world beyond computers offers some of the same experience, medicine and law perhaps not least among them. Not to mention, to choose an obvious parallel for this blog, games.

The fellow I want to introduce you to today, Doug Carlston, had a background at least as eclectic as anyone I’ve mentioned earlier. Born in 1947 as the son of a Harvard-educated theologian, Doug by the time he was 30 already had a dizzying resume to his name: a Bachelor’s in social psychology from Harvard, studies in international economics at Johns Hopkins, and a law degree from Harvard Law School. In addition to his studies, he had also run a business designing and building houses; spent a year teaching in Botswana; written an introductory textbook on Swahili; written other language guides for American Express. But by 1977 Doug, two years out of law school, was bored, stuck with an uninteresting job with a huge law firm on the 82nd floor of Chicago’s Sears Tower. As a junior lawyer, he got “the kind of work nobody else wants to do,” like conducting client surveys and doing wills and trusts. Feeling “fat and slow” in addition to bored, he packed up and moved to a small town in Maine with a view to getting back to nature. There he set up an independent law practice serving the locals. That proved to chiefly mean defending clients who ran afoul of the stiff local hunting ordinances. Trouble was, virtually all of his clients were clearly guilty, and many never bothered to pay him for his services, making the practice both uninteresting and not terribly lucrative. To help with the latter problem, Doug began to dabble once again in housebuilding in addition to the law. Helping with the former was the TRS-80 he’d bought, ostensibly to help with bookkeeping at the office. Now, however, he just couldn’t stop playing with it.

The TRS-80 was far from Doug’s first exposure to computing. In fact, computing was yet another of those myriad of interests and activities that had marked his life to that point. He had been introduced to computers as early as 1964, when he attended a sort of summer camp for gifted teenagers who might be interested in becoming engineers. There he first dabbled in FORTRAN programming, finding it fascinating. When he went off to Harvard, he found a job there as a “programming assistant,” basically a tutor to help other students bend the machines to their will. When the time came to lock up the computer lab for the day, Doug and his buddies would stuff chewing gum into the locks so that they could sneak back in in the middle of the night and hack. Still, by the time he bought his TRS-80 in 1978 those days were many years in the past.

The TRS-80 served to reignite the old passion. Doug did use it to code programs useful to his practice, but he also embarked on an ambitious game, which he called Galactic Empire. It’s a work of considerable historical importance in its own right, quite apart from its place in Doug’s career. It was, you see, the first recognizable example of a “4X” (“explore, expand, exploit, exterminate”) grand strategy game to appear on a PC, the ancestor of such seminal later titles as Civilization and Master of Orion. The player begins Galactic Empire with a single medium-sized planet and a fleet of 200 ships. From this starting point she is expected to conquer the 19 other worlds of the game’s galaxy. Along the way she must manage each conquered planet’s economy, juggling taxes and population, in order to build more ships for her fleet. As you would expect of a game written in BASIC on a 16 K TRS-80, Galactic Empire is absurdly stripped down and primitive in comparison to its successors. Yet the core attributes — and the vision — are there.

What happened next will be familiar to anyone who read my earlier articles about other pioneers of the early software industry. Doug came up with some packaging and began selling his game directly to local computer stores, as well as through outlets for semi-professional software like SoftSide magazine’s TRS-80 Software Exchange and a similar organ run by Creative Computing. When Scott Adams started Adventure International, he signed up there as well. (Occupying a weird ground somewhere between software publisher and catalog merchant, AI did not demand an exclusive license to the software they “published.”) Meanwhile he made a second game, Galactic Trader, which replaced military with economic conquest. By the end of 1979, the two games together were bringing in about $1000 per month.

That $1000 was very welcome, because otherwise the bottom was falling out for Doug financially. The second oil crisis precipitated by the Iranian Revolution had seriously damaged the economy, and Doug could no longer sell his houses. Meanwhile it was becoming increasingly clear that his country law practice was not sustainable on its own, at least not in this economy. Barely two years after coming to Maine, he decided to cut his losses and move on, yet again, to something else. With no clear plan as yet what that something would be, he piled into his old Chevy Impala along with his 220-pound mastiff (in the front seat) and his computer (in the back) to visit his little brother in Eugene, Oregon. The car started to die before he made it there, in the vicinity of Yellowstone National Park. Doug:

Something went out with the transmission. It started throwing out smoke. Fortunately, by the time I got into western Oregon it was mostly downhill to Eugene because I had the windows rolled down so we could breathe because the smoke was coming up through the transmission. I couldn’t go more than 15 miles an hour and the windshield wipers wouldn’t work and it was a blizzard outside. I was out there kind of working the wipers by hand going downhill. Finally, we got down into Pendleton, which was just a lot lower than Walla Walla, and we could see again. We made it to about five miles from Eugene when the car finally gave up and my brother came and got me.

Said brother, Gary Carlston, had also made an interesting life of it so far. Like Doug, Gary had gone to Harvard, where he had planned, largely on a whim, to major in Celtic Studies. However, that program was full. On the same floor were the offices for Scandinavian Studies. He knew that the Carlston family had originally come to the United States from Sweden, and like his brother he was fascinated by languages, so what the hell… six years later, he had a Master’s in Scandinavian Languages and Literature. In the midst of that, Gary decided to spend one summer holiday in, appropriately enough, Sweden. An accomplished basketball player and coach, he got into a pick-up game with some locals there. One thing led to another, and Gary found himself returning the following year for a gig that was, in Steven Levy’s words, “so desirable that grown men gasped when he mentioned it”: coaching a Swedish women’s basketball team. Gary himself would later say, “Most girls in Sweden don’t look like the tall model type you’d expect.” Pause… wait for it. “This team did, though.” Whatever its perks, he proved to be good at the fundamentals of his job, leading the team to three championships and two runners-up in five years.

With Harvard and basketball behind him, Gary was faced with making a living in the real world. He briefly taught Swedish in a summer program, but the language was hardly in huge demand in the United States. He worked for a year as a director of the March of Dimes charity in Eugene, but he hated it, and finally quit. That was in the summer of 1979. When brother Doug arrived for his visit, Gary had already spent six months fruitlessly looking for another permanent job while trying to bring in a little something selling reflectors to the parents of schoolchildren.

So, the two brothers, both completely broke, compared and contrasted their misfortune and wondered what the hell to do next. Then Doug, remembering the one thing that had been going pretty well for him lately, suggested that they start a real software publisher to sell his games instead of relying on the semi-professional distribution networks. The very non-computer-literate Gary allegedly replied, “What’s software?” He took some convincing, but, with no other prospects on the horizon, finally agreed. Brøderbund Software was officially founded on February 25, 1980, with $7000 the brothers were able to scrounge from their last savings and their family. As Doug later told Forbes magazine, the company was born at that place and moment only “because I was stuck without a car and didn’t have the money to buy a new one.”

The name “Brøderbund” itself is of course an odd one that would never pass muster with a corporate public-relations department today. It actually first appears in Doug’s very first game, Galactic Empire, where it’s the name of one of the warring factions. “Brøderbund” is a compound noun that is vaguely recognizable to speakers of a number of languages, but isn’t quite correct in any of them. In Danish and Norwegian, the word “brødre” is the plural of “bror,” which means “brother.” (The “ø” is a special vowel found only in Danish and Norwegian; it’s pronounced like the German “ö,” and, also like “ö,” is often used in plural forms of nouns.) It’s probably acceptable to change it to “brøder” in a compound word, to make pronunciation easier. However, the second part of the name, “bund,” is in no sense correct. The intended meaning is obviously the German “Bund,” meaning a bond or union. Yet in Danish or Norwegian the correct word would be “forbund”; “bund” alone means a ground or base, obviously not the intended meaning. So, what we have here is a mash-up of Danish and German — or an example of a sort of pidgin Danish, if you prefer.

Which is not to say that the Carlston brothers didn’t know exactly what they were doing in creating the name. Both were fascinated by languages, and enjoyed this sort of linguistic play. They chose to use the Danish and Norwegian word for “brother” in place of Gary’s more familiar Swedish because Swedish uses German-style umlauts; thus the word would have become “bröder.” The problem with “bröder” was that the “ö” would be impossible to represent on computer screens of the time. The “ø,” however, could be represented by simply typing a zero; then as (sometimes) now, computer displays used the slash to easily distinguish “0” from “o.” This also made the name a clever play on computer technology itself. Even in their professional copy, where the proper character would presumably have been available, the company would often write “Brøderbund” as “Br0derbund” to reinforce the computer connection. As for pronunciation… let’s not even get into that. Suffice to say that everyone just said the name as “Broderbund,” although that’s not correct if we insist on reading it as a Scandinavian word.

Linguistic issues aside, Brøderbund was not a stunning success in its early months. They did have three games to sell, in the form of Doug’s Galactic trilogy. (He had recently completed a third and final game in the series.) Yet, with Softsel yet to be founded, software distribution to retail was in a confused and uncertain state, and neither brother was naturally suited to cold-calling stores to try to sell them on their products. May of 1980 was the low point; it seems incredible, but Doug claims that sales for that entire month were exactly $0.00. Then two things happened that would begin to turn the company around.

At the very first trade show at which they exhibited, the West Coast Computer Faire of March 1980, the Carlstons had made the acquantence of the Japanese software company Starcraft. In June, they got a call from them. As I mentioned in a recent post, Starcraft would later make a big name for itself within Japan by porting and translating Western games for the domestic market. At this point, however, they were reaching out to the West with a view to moving software in the other direction. They had coded several solid action games for the Apple II. Now they were looking for an American partner to sell them for them. This was a huge break, not only because the flashier Starcraft titles diversified Brøderbund’s portfolio greatly when contrasted with Doug’s more cerebral text-oriented strategy games, but also because these games ran on the Apple II, already a much more vibrant and healthy software platform than the Radio Shack-strangled TRS-80. From this point forward, Brøderbund would also switch their emphasis to the Apple II, porting the Galactic trilogy over and developing most of their new software for that platform first.

Shortly after the Starcraft deal was made, Gary got a call from his beloved old basketball colleagues from Sweden, saying they were coming to San Francisco and wanted to meet him there. When he told them that he didn’t have the money to come, they said they could pay for half of the trip — for a one-way ticket from Eugene to San Francisco. The brothers hatched a plan: Gary would fill his suitcase with software, then visit every computer store he could find in the Bay area, attempting to sell the stuff to them personally and hopefully earn enough to get home again. It worked beautifully; he sold almost $2000 worth of software. In the absence of a proper distribution network, the way forward was now clear: they must visit stores personally to sell the owners on their games. At the end of July, Doug took off on a zigzagging road trip to Boston and back, and sold some $15,000 worth of games on the way.

Still, it was a fairly time-consuming and expensive way of moving product, and times remained tight. Doug:

We were going weeks where we only ate on three days; things were that tight. We had used up all my savings from being an attorney and were maxed out on my credit card. My parents didn’t have any money. [In] October my mother lent us $2000 that she had inherited and her sister also lent us $2000.

Then, near the end of the year, Starcraft gave them a goldmine in the form of Apple Galaxian, a perfect clone of a new hit arcade game from another Japanese company, Namco. Soon enough people would be getting sued over far less blatant copying, but it was, ironically given the company’s later reputation for integrity and innovation, this unabashed arcade ripoff that really established Brøderbund as a major player in the software industry. Doug claims today to have not even been aware at first that it was a facsimile of someone else’s game, as the game had just recently been introduced to North American arcades.

Critically, it was at just this point that Softsel, the first proper software distributor, arrived on the scene, making it much easier for Brøderbund and other companies to get their products into stores around the country without the necessity for personal meet-and-greets. Bob Leff of Softsel played a key, and very personal, role in Apple Galaxian‘s success. Doug:

When I sent him a copy of this new game, he said, “We love it, and I want 5000 copies right away.” And I told him, “I’d love to do it, but I don’t have 5000 disks, and I don’t have enough money to buy 5000 disks.” He said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll lend you the money. You buy the disks and I’ll lend you the money as long as you send them all to me.” I said okay. And he sold everything within a month.

Brøderbund’s sales went from $10,000 in November of 1980 to $55,000 in December, all on the strength of Apple Galaxian. In fact, their sales for December amounted to more than those for the entire rest of the year. Apple Galaxian topped the Softalk magazine chart as the bestselling Apple II program in the country for three months. (Yes, it even outsold VisiCalc during that period.) With both Namco and, oddly, Apple themselves beginning to make legal rumbles, Brøderbund changed the name to Alien Rain in the spring of 1981, and it continued a bestseller for quite some months under its new moniker.

On the back of Apple Galaxian/Alien Rain, the Carlstons could begin to hire some employees and make bigger, more ambitious deals with a growing stable of outside developers. They brought in their younger sister Cathy, who had been unhappy in her job as a retail buyer for Lord and Taylor, to take the role of office manager. And they branched out into productivity software, for which they would soon become more famous than they were for their games. Bank Street Writer, an innovative word processor, was a particular hit, as was the first really complete payroll package to be released for PCs. In the summer of 1981, they left Eugene, which they felt was just too isolated and small to be conducive to their business and which had a horrible problem with fog that sometimes shut down the airport for a week or more at a time, for San Rafael, California, a town in the vicinity of San Francisco that was most famous for being the home of George Lucas and his production company Lucasfilm. In typically unpretentious fashion, they effected the move by renting three U-Haul trucks, packing everything up, and driving the lot down themselves.

You’ll have a hard time finding anyone who knew or worked with the Carlstons with much bad to say about them. For years the siblings each took a regular shift on Brøderbund’s production line, by all indications not as a gimmick but out of a real, heartfelt desire to demonstrate “the dignity in all of the work” at the company, and to have a chance to bond and really talk with their employees. Indeed, they found themselves caring more for their employees than any business guide would recommend, sometimes giving them a second chance even after they were caught stealing. Doug: “It turns out that Gary was the only person who could fire people — which is a valuable skill. He didn’t like it but he was able to do it.” Doug also demonstrated what would seem a hopelessly naive attitude toward his direct competitors. He called them all the “brotherhood,” and even wrote a book in 1985 (the long out-of-print Software People) to sing their praises. Somehow he and his siblings got rich in the cutthroat world of capitalism in the most subversive way imaginable: by just being really nice and fair to everyone, and never losing their idealism about the software they produced. Or anyway, that was most of it. As a story I’m about to retell will illustrate, there was a certain competitive edge to be found under their more cuddly qualities.

Everyone liked the Carlstons, but Brøderbund forged a special bond with On-Line Systems. Although the religious Carlston clan did not share the Williams’ taste for partying, the two companies were otherwise remarkably similar. Both were founded at almost the same time; both focused their early efforts on the Apple II; both enjoyed a relaxed internal culture unconcerned with rank or title; both published a diverse array of software, mostly from outside programmers, rather than specializing like, say, Infocom; both were headed by erstwhile hackers who found less and less time to write code as their businesses grew; both shared the conviction that they were doing something that really mattered for the future; both would ultimately prove to be long-term survivors and winners in a brutal industry, outliving virtually all of their other peers. Especially after making the move to San Rafael, the Williams and the Carlstons saw quite a lot of one another, and shared more trade secrets than any MBA would recommend.

The Carlstons were naturally all invited on that On-Line-sponsered, era-defining whitewater-rafting trip in the summer of 1981. One evening on that trip Doug and Ken Williams seriously discussed merging their two companies, but ultimately decided that it wouldn’t make sense. Normally a company merges with another to get something it lacks, but their two companies were so similar that it was hard to see what that something could be, in the case of either — not to mention the stress of sorting out locations, products lines, management structures, etc. Most of all, it became pretty clear that neither Ken nor Doug was very interested in giving up any control of the company he had founded. Instead they would continue as unusually friendly competitors for more than 15 years.

Another incident from the trip shows why that may have been for the best. While drifting down the river, the group came to a spot where “the water was deep and smooth, and cliffs rose up above the river banks.” Ken shouted to stop the boats, so he and whoever else wanted to could climb up to the cliffs and dive off. Quite a large number, including Roberta and Doug and his sister Cathy, who had swum competitively, decided to join him. At the top, however, Ken got cold feet, even as others were taking the plunge. He begged Doug to go back down with him and Roberta, so they wouldn’t have to be the only chickens in the group. Doug said no, and, to encourage him, suggested that they all four hold hands and jump off together. Ken agreed, they joined hands and ran toward the edge — but Ken balked again. In the end he and Roberta climbed back down in shame, while Doug and Cathy made the leap. “I pushed myself a little further than I was ready to handle,” Ken said. They were all friends, Doug layer wrote, “but we all like to win, and if the other falters, we aren’t likely to wait too long for him to catch up.” In his own quiet way Doug was as driven to win as the blustery Ken — or, as demonstrated by that moment on the top of the cliff, perhaps more so.

Brøderbund may have been having more and more success with their productivity software, but they were hardly ready to abandon games. Indeed, their action games were amongst the most popular and highly regarded on the Apple II. We’ll look at a particularly important title in their stable, released just about a year after the rafting adventure, next time.

(The early history of Brøderbund has been very well documented. The most useful sources for this article were: Steven Levy’s Hackers; Doug Carlston’s own Software People (out of print); the lengthy interview Doug Carlston conducted with The Computer History Museum in 2004; and a profile of the company in the September 1984 Creative Computing.)

Choplifter
August 15, 2012

Dan Gorlin was 27 years old in early 1981, and already possessed of the sort of multifarious resume that’s typical of so many we’ve met on this blog. He was just coming off a three-year stint with Rand Corporation, doing artificial-intelligence research, but before that he’d studied piano at the California Institute of the Arts, and also studied and taught African dance, music, and culture. Now the Rand gig was over, and he suddenly found himself with time on his hands and no great urgency to find another job right away; his wife was earning very well as an oil-industry executive. While staying home to show prospective buyers the Los Angeles house he and his wife had put up for sale, Gorlin started tinkering for the first time with a microcomputer, an Apple II Plus that belonged to his grandfather. Said grandfather, a hopeless gadget freak, loved the idea of a PC, but in actuality hardly knew how to turn the Apple II on; he called floppy disks “sloppy disks” out of genuine confusion. So, Gorlin had no difficulty keeping the machine at his house for weeks or months at a stretch.

He wasn’t using the Apple II to play games. Indeed, as he has repeatedly stated in interviews, Gorlin has never been much of a gamer. He was rather intrigued by what he might do with the Apple II as a programmer, what he might create on it. He started learning the vagaries of the Apple II’s hi-res graphics, the bitmapped display mode that many computers in 1981 still lacked. Amongst his other passions, Gorlin was fascinated by helicopters, so he started developing a program that would let a player fly a little helicopter around the screen using the joystick. At first he attempted to implement a pilot’s-eye view, showing the view from the cockpit in three dimensions, Flight Simulator-style, but eventually gave up on this as too taxing, settling for a third-person view of his little helicopter. Still, he tried, to the extent possible on a 48 K 8-bit computer, to make his program an accurate simulation of the rather odd and counter-intuitive physics of helicopter flight. Eventually he had a very acceptable little helicopter simulator running, if also one that was very tricky to fly.

He may have had the physics of flight in place, but Gorlin, who couldn’t help but notice by this point that others were making serious money selling Apple II games, needed a hook, a reason for flying the helicopter that could turn his simulator project into a real game with challenges and a goal. He tried adding some enemy tanks and planes to shoot at and be shot at by in standard arcade fashion, but it somehow still didn’t feel right. Then one fateful afternoon a local kid whom Gorlin had hired to do some repairs on his car was playing around with the program. “You should have some men to pick up,” the kid said — like in one of his favorite arcade games, the mega-popular Defender. Gorlin, non-gamer that he was, knew nothing about Defender, so he walked over to the local laundromat to have a look.

Defender is in many ways a typical creation of its time, with the player tasked with shooting down wave after wave of enemy ships to increase her score and earn extra lives. It does, however, have one unique element, from whence derives its name. Little “astronauts” wander the planet’s surface at the bottom of the screen. In an unexpected injection of Close Encounters into Star Wars, certain enemy ships attempt to abduct these fellows. If they succeed in carrying one off, the player has one last chance to effect a rescue: she can shoot down the offending ship, scoop up the falling astronaut, and set him down safely back on the planet’s surface. If enough astronauts get abducted (or killed falling from their destroyed abductors), the planet explodes and an onslaught of particularly deadly enemies begins, until the player either dies (most likely) or manages to revert everything back to normal by killing them all.

Defender‘s astronauts function more as a mechanical gimmick to differentiate the game from its peers than an earnest attempt at ludic worldbuilding, but they were enough to get Gorlin thinking about a new and unique goal for his own game. What if, instead of making the goal to shoot down enemies for points, he instead made it to rescue unarmed hostages for, well, the sake of doing good? It was a scenario very much in step with the times. In April of 1980, President Jimmy Carter had authorized sending six helicopters to attempt to rescue the 52 Americans being held hostage in Tehran following the Iranian Revolution of the previous year. The mission turned into an infamous fiasco which cost eight Americans on the mission their lives without ever even making contact with a single hostage — or Iranian for that matter — and arguably cost Carter any hope he might have still held for reelection later that year. Oddly, Gorlin says that he never made the obvious connection between his developing idea and the recent event in Iran until he started showing his game in public and heard people talking about it. Still, it’s hard not to feel that the influence must have been at least subconsciously present from long before that point. It’s certainly safe to say that most of the people who eventually made Choplifter one of the biggest Apple II hits of 1982 saw it as a direct response to an humiliation that still smarted with patriotic souls two years later, a chance to re-stage the mission and this time get it right.

By late 1981 all of the basic concepts of Choplifter had been implemented. While the enemy tanks and planes remained, they were now mere hindrances to be destroyed or — often preferably, because it wasted less time — avoided. The real goal was to rescue as many of the 64 hostages wandering the surface below as possible. You did this by landing the chopper next to them — but not directly on them, lest you crush them — and letting them climb aboard before an enemy tank could kill them. Once you had a pretty good load of hostages (your helicopter could hold up to 16), you needed to drop them off safely back at your base. The only score was the number of hostages you could manage to rescue before you lost the last of your three lives, or ran out of living hostages to carry away. If a new player could end up with more living than dead she was doing pretty well, and rescuing all 64 remains to this day one of the truly herculean feats of gaming lore.

Convinced that he “could make some money” with the game, Gorlin sent his prototype to Brøderbund, who had followed Apple Galaxian/Alien Rain with a wave of other, thankfully mostly more original titles that had garnered them a reputation as a premier publisher of Apple II action games. They loved Choplifter from the moment they booted it, and immediately flew Gorlin out to their new San Rafael headquarters to help him to polish it and to talk contract. Like so many others, Gorlin expresses nothing but warmth for Brøderbund and the Carlston siblings: “So the way they did it was, they’d see something that was like, it’d have promise, and they’d sort of engulf you with family love. It was a very nurturing environment.”

Brøderbund’s enthusiasm proved to be justified. When they started showing Choplifter at AppleFest and other trade shows that spring, people lined up “around the block” to play it. And when released in May of 1982, the game sold 9000 copies in its first month on the market, excellent numbers in those times. But that was only the beginning. Over the months and years that followed Brøderbund funded ports to virtually every viable platform that came along. And, in a move that must have made people wonder whether the earth was about to start orbiting the moon, Sega even bought a license to make a standup-arcade incarnation in 1986, a reversal of the normal practice of bringing arcade games to home platforms.

Gorlin worked on and off in the games industry over the years that followed, but often with the lack of enthusiasm we might expect from such a defiant non-gamer. He never had another high-profile success to match Choplifter, and his most abiding passion remains African dance. Still, with Choplifter‘s huge sales and Brøderbund’s very generous royalty rates even for ports and translations with which he had no direct involvement, he did very well for many years off his one big moment of glory. Even today when his name is mentioned it tickles at the back of many a long-time gamer’s mind, where it’s been rattling around for years after appearing on all those Choplifter title screens and boxes.

But what was it that made Choplifter so compelling to so many people? And, you might be wondering as a corollary, why am I devoting time to it on a blog that’s usually all about games with strong narrative elements? One immediate answer, at least to the former question, is that Gorlin was fortunate enough to create something perfectly in step with the zeitgeist of the early 1980s, when helicopter-based rescue missions and hostages were so much on people’s minds. Indeed, Gorlin himself has always mentioned this good fortune as a key to the game’s success. But in addition, and more importantly for our purposes, Choplifter is not just another action game. It’s doing something different from most of its peers, something that makes it worth talking about here in the same sense that Castle Wolfenstein was. It marks a step toward story, or at least real, lived experience, in a game that is not an adventure or CRPG.

Mind you, you won’t find a compelling story in the conventional sense attached to Choplifter. The manual justifies the action by explaining that the Bungeling Empire, a group of generically evil baddies invented by the Carlston brothers who appear in many early Brøderbund games, have kidnapped the 64 delegates to the United Nations Conference on Peace and Child Rearing they were hosting. (What could be more evil than to use violence against that conference?) Luckily, the United States has for some reason been allowed to build a post office(!) within Bungeling territory, into which they’ve smuggled “an entire helicopter disguised as a mail sorting machine.” You can use the reassembled helicopter to rescue the hostages and return them to the post office. It’s a typically silly action-game premise, obviously not meant to be taken too seriously.

No, it’s other aspects of Choplifter that make it interesting for my purposes, that make it feel like it wants to be an experiential game in a way that its peers don’t. One immediately noticeable difference is the aforementioned rejection of a scoring mechanic or a leaderboard. Your success or failure are measured not by some abstract, extra-diegetic numbers, but rather by two figures that have heaps of meaning within the world of the game: how many hostages you rescued and how many you allowed to be killed. Further, there is a definite end-point to Choplifter that involves more than the three avatar lives you have at your disposal. In addition to (naturally) ending when these are exhausted, the game ends when the supply of hostages is exhausted — when all have been killed or rescued. Complete failures, disappointments, tragedies, mixed outcomes, relative successes — and, for the holy grail, the complete victory of rescuing all 64 innocents — are possible. Contrast that with the kamikaze run that was the standard arcade game of the time, where you simply played until you ran out of lives.

For the first run you make to rescue hostages, you don’t have to contend with any enemy aircraft, only some ground-bound tanks. Next time, the enemy jets start to show up. In one sense this is a standard arcade mechanic, of offering up tougher and tougher challenges as the player stays alive longer. In another, though, it’s a realistic simulation of the situation. The first time you fly out with your smuggled-in helicopter, you catch the Bungelings by surprise, and thus have a fairly easy time of it. Afterward, however, they know what you’re about, and are marshaling their forces to stop you. As you fly back again and again into ever-increasing danger, there’s a sense of a plot building to its climax.

The in-game presentation consistently enforces this sense of inhabiting a real storyworld. The graphics obviously cannot look too spectacular, given the limitations of their platform, but the behavior of the hostages in particular has a verisimilitude that can actually be kind of touching. When you first fly over a group, they stand and wave, desperately trying to attract your attention. When you fly closer, and it becomes clear that you’re trying to pick them up, they all rush frantically toward you. Should enemies get in the way, their behavior is almost as unpredictable as would be that of real civilians who suddenly find themselves on a battlefield. Some run away, figuring that remaining captive beats dying, while others dash madly toward the helicopter, and are often killed for their rashness. It takes those that do reach the helicopter a nail-biting moment to scramble inside. Hover just overhead and they jump frantically underneath you, trying to get aboard. Later, when you fly them back to the post office, they pile out of the helicopter and rush for the sanctuary of the building — but a few, just a few, pause for a moment to turn and wave back in thanks.

Other arcade games, like Donkey Kong, had brought a similar sense of characterization to their actors, but the emergent qualities and realistic strictures of Choplifter nevertheless make it feel real in a way that those games don’t. There’s the fact that you can, for example, only pack 16 hostages at a time into your helicopter. And of course there’s the already-mentioned gruesome possibility of crushing hostages if you land on top of them. Elements like this can make Choplifter feel off-putting at first if you approach as just another classic arcade game. We don’t expect real-world logic to mix with game logic in quite that way, even though it would make perfect sense not to, you know, land on people’s heads if we were actually in that situation.

Another critical element is the behavior of the helicopter itself. Gorlin had originally envisioned Choplifter as a realistic simulation of actual helicopter flight, but a helicopter is about the most notoriously difficult type of aircraft there is to fly. Brøderbund convinced him that hewing too stubbornly to real helicopter physics would limit the appeal of the game far too much. Gorlin:

They taught me about playability. They helped me with control of the joystick.

The first Choplifter I showed Brøderbund was too realistic, too much of a helicopter simulation. De-emphasizing the weight of the calculations that simulated the vertical force control of the rotors made the chopper more flyable to the average player. I hated to see the realism go, but it did improve the game. In a lot of ways, Brøderbund helped me fine-tune and polish the presentation.

It’s important to note, however, that Brøderbund did not have Gorlin remove all of the realism. They just had him scale it back to a manageable level. What they achieved was — and this is important enough that I’m almost temped to call it visionary — a sort of videogame hyper-realism. The helicopter’s motions are sloppy and unstable enough that you still feel like you’re really flying. It’s a very different experience from the clipped, precise controls of other arcade games, like Choplifter‘s partial inspiration Defender. Choplifter achieves the neat trick of making you feel like a real pilot without demanding that you acquire the skills of a real pilot first. That alone makes it an important step on the road to truly experiential action games. Choplifter consistently invites us to enter a storyworld, to play with our imaginations as well as our reflexes.

When a game of Choplifter is, one way or another, over, two simple, classic words appear on the screen: “The End,” reinforcing yet once more this sense of the game as a lived story. In a fascinating article in the July 1982 Softline, Jim Salmons heavily emphasized this and the other cinematic qualities of the game, marking it as an early case study in the long, fraught relationship between videogames and movies. Some of his conclusions do rather stretch the point, but the fact that Choplifter was inspiring people to see it in such a way is significant in itself. Salmons describes the game in a way that make it sound at home with the ludic rhetoric of modern “serious games,” or for that matter some of the contemporary Edu-Ware simulations. On the player’s power to choose to what extent she goes after the enemy tanks and planes in lieu of simply trying to rescue the hostages:

Your temperament and values determine whether aggressive behavior is warranted. Sometimes, you can’t avoid it. On other occasions, it’s righteous reflex, as in retaliation for an enemy tank having just obliterated a huddled mass of frightened hostages.

No matter what heroics were involved, when all hostages are accounted for or all choppers lost, a transformation occurs. The eyes of the hero turn into the eyes of a general reading the dead and rescued statistics. What is the measure of success? Were three helicopters lost worth the return of six hostages? Though sixty returned, did four have to die?

Is Salmons going too far in turning Choplifter into a soul-searching exercise about the wages of war? Perhaps, at least a bit. But isn’t it interesting that the game managed to encourage such flights of fancy?

With its focus on rescue rather than destruction and its do-gooder plot, Choplifter today feels like a perfect symbol for Brøderbund themselves, about the nicest bunch who ever got filthy rich in business. We’ll hear more from them later, but next, as always, it’s on to something else. If you’d like to try Choplifter for yourself in the meantime, here’s the Apple II disk image for you.

The Prisoner 2
August 23, 2012

The Prisoner was a big sales success, at least by the standards of a small software house like Edu-Ware. Enough people were eager to believe in a vision of games as Art to embrace it despite its almost aggressively off-putting personality — or, perhaps, they were just desperate enough for new adventures that they were ready to put up with artistic aspirations as long they also had puzzles to solve. Regardless, the game played a crucial role in the company’s idealistic core mission, to bring quality educational software to this new generation of personal computers. The steady flow of profits from The Prisoner gave Edu-Ware, supported by Apple’s own efforts to define the Apple II as “the education computer,” time and resources to build a customer base of schools and engaged parents for titles like their Compu-Math and Algebra series.

Yet times were changing fast in software, and particularly in entertainment software. Even by just eighteen months after its release The Prisoner — with its sluggish all-BASIC implementation, its blocky, monochrome text or low-resolution graphics displays, and its photocopy/Ziploc-bag-based packaging — was beginning to look sadly amateurish in comparison with the latest extravaganzas from the likes of On-Line and Brøderbund. Edu-Ware therefore decided to remake their cash cow in a more polished, slicker, faster edition, with color and more and better graphics. Confusingly, they decided to call the new game The Prisoner 2, even though it was very much a remake rather than a sequel. Marketing never was Edu-Ware’s strong suit.

The new project reflected changing models of development, not only within a growing Edu-Ware but also within a growing software industry. The original had been cranked out by David Mullich in a furious six weeks of hacking. There was no separate design process; he simply designed as he coded, adding in whatever seemed cool and appropriate as it struck his fancy. By the time of The Prisoner 2, however, Mullich had acquired the title of “development manager” at Edu-Ware, with a staff of several programmers working under him on the company’s various projects. Having gotten more adept at 6502 assembly language since the time of the first game, he himself programmed some speed-critical routines for graphics that were also used in other Edu-Ware titles, as well as a text parser. He also drew the game’s graphics on paper. But to translate those drawings onto the computer, and to code everything else, he employed one Mike St. Jean, who worked, once again in BASIC, from a detailed design document provided by Mullich. Mullich was, in other words, transitioning from the jack-of-all-trades hacker typical of the very early PC era to this new creature known as a “game designer.” Those aforementioned assembly-language routines would be, in Mullich’s own words, “among the last programs I actually coded myself” in a career in software that continues to this day.

The results of his efforts are, as is all too typical of remakes, mixed. While it may have had at least as much to do with lack of time, expertise, and resources as artistic intent, the original’s stark, Constructivist appearance did much to strengthen the atmosphere of oppression, coercion, and collectivist subjugation. The Prisoner 2, by contrast, looks at first glance like just another “hi-res adventure” of the sort that were flooding the market by 1982 in response to On-Line Systems’s success, and the maze section that opens the game bears a pronounced resemblance to, of all things, the Wizardry series.

Likewise, the variety of different interfaces found in the original game, which the player had to puzzle out on her own to succeed, is here replaced in almost all places by a two-word parser that is unusually balky even by the standards of the time. It’s tempting to read some of its obstinacy as another instance of the old Prisoner tactic of resisting consistent interface standards to keep the player always ill at ease. How else to read the fact that the parser sometimes demands that you navigate with “forward,” “back,” “right,” and “left,” and other times with traditional compass directions? Still, it just somehow doesn’t quite work as well as the first game’s interface smorgasbord.

The new, more professional presentation must inevitably also become more technically opaque, removing some of the possibility for winning through, um, other means like code-diving. This might be a good thing in any other game, but, as Steve Pederson wrote in response to my article on the original Prisoner, in this case “nothing could be more in the spirit of the game [than cheating].”

A comparison of the manuals also gives me conflicted feelings. The original shipped with only the most essential information on the game and some slightly pedantic “educational notes” penned by Edu-Ware founder Sherwin Steffin. For the sequel, this document was replaced with a slicker production which elaborates a mythology of sorts for The Island and even for the original Prisoner television series. The Island, we are told, was created in the 1960s in response to the agitations of the counterculture.

It was in this climate that The Island was created. Its purpose then was to silence dissenters and to perpetuate authoritarian rule. Leaders of various social movements and government operatives who learned too much of their employer’s plans both unwillingly found themselves a new home on The Island — until such time as they were absorbed back into the system or died. But, from the perspective of the rest of the world, they had vanished without a trace, presumably the victims of foreign or illegal organizations.

Towards the end of the decade came the first exposé of The Island. It was presented in the form of a television adventure series so that its producers could circumvent the problems of censorship. Its focus was as a psychological study and a political statement concerning the problem of keeping one’s individuality and personal freedom in a technological society. While it did gain a cult audience, its messages did not receive the recognition that they deserved.

So, the influence of The Island spread unchecked in the seventies. The “me” generation proved to be a perfect target not only for The Island’s sinister activities, but also for one of the most powerful weapons of mass enslavement ever created: the computer. Ever increasing meddling by computer networks, data bases, and information peddlers in our daily lives forced us close to the verge of becoming mere numbers within the memory banks of hundreds of machines across the country. More and more information about us became accessible to anyone who had a link into the proper data base. With the flip of a switch, instantly our reputations could be tarnished and our influence destroyed. Lives became statistics, and statistics could be altered.

In short, the computer was turning society into a vast collective prison.

In the debate that raged through the 1970s and 1980s (and to some extent still today) on whether the computer was a tool of liberation and creative possibility or a tool for dehumanization and subjugation, this narrative comes down on the latter side. Yet The Prisoner 2 is of course using a computer to make just the sort of creative, humanistic statement it says the computer will stamp out. As always where The Prisoner is involved, the contradictions bite deep.

Mullich has here totally abandoned the notion from the original game of merely being “inspired by” the television show. He is now explicitly playing in the same storyworld as the show — and doing it without any sort of licensing deal with The Prisoner‘s corporate parent ITC Entertainment, who were either unusually benevolent or very unobservant. Ironically, Mullich later in his career would join Disney, where he would spend some of his time stamping out just this sort of intellectual-property infringement.

Eternal debates over intellectual property aside, I’m still not sure sure how I feel about the sequel’s elaborate backstory. Part of me wants to say that Mullich and company say far, far too much here, that rooting The Island in such a specific historical and cultural context costs them much of the ominously enigmatic feel of both the original game and television series. On the other hand, this more detailed fictional context does enable the most notable new aspect of the sequel: a sharply satirical critique of the videogame craze that was just reaching its first-generational peak when The Prisoner 2 reached stores in mid-1982.

A more disturbing turn of events took place in the eighties, however. Instead of the public becoming cautious of computerization, they took the devices into their very homes. For hours at a time, people would sit blank-faced in front of television sets playing uninspired clones of Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man. An entire civilization was willing to waste their precious lives playing mindless games, relentlessly pursuing nursery-school melodies, high scores, and pointless goals.

In that spirit, the Rovers, the balloon-like guards who prevented escape from The Island in both the television series and the first game, are replaced in the sequel with… Pac-Man.

As good adventure gamers, we might be tempted to agree with Mullich’s criticism of these mindless arcade games, to assume that our more cerebral games are exempt from his criticisms. But then we come to a building he added just for the sequel: the Grail House. Inside is something that was already becoming a symbol of adventure games at their most banal by this time: an extended maze. The maze includes rooms which specifically reference Adventure, Mystery House, The Wizard and the Princess, and the Scott Adams games.

Whether these portrayals are fleshed-out enough to rise to the level of satire is perhaps debatable, but they don’t exactly feel like loving tributes either. The Mystery House room, which flags you as a murderer (presumably of Ken Williams himself) until you find “absolution” in the church, has a particularly abrasive edge to it. Indeed, and especially given the truly awful parser, one could almost read the entirety of The Prisoner 2 as a satire on the absurdities of contemporary adventure gaming. The ultimate goal of the game is after all to free yourself by “escaping” from pointless submission to this world inside your computer, as Edu-Ware’s Steve Pederson is doing in the striking box art.

Leaving aside both other adventure games and The Prisoner 2‘s more colorful but less effective appearance (prompted, ironically, by commercial considerations that required keeping up with those very same other adventure games), much of the subversive, anti-authoritarian message of the original game does remain in the sequel. In some places it is even strengthened. The Library in the original, for instance, contained a hopelessly inscrutable free-association scenario whose issue could be a vital clue or a book getting burned. The sequel tries to force you to actively burn books.

B.F. Skinner’s theories of education come in for even sharper criticism here than in the first game. Succeeding at a series of rote memory exercises leads to a diploma and a wicked pun. (And note the teacher’s apple shaped, once again, like Pac-Man…)

Sometimes the manipulations of truth and perceptions reach new heights of inspiration, such as in this genius re-purposing of a quote from Thomas Jefferson.

We’re tempted to want to add a “be” — or, better yet, a “be free” — to the end. For the record, however, here’s the full quote:

No government ought to be without censors, and where the press is free, no one ever will. If virtuous, it need not fear the fair operation of attack and defence. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting out the truth whether in religion, law or politics. I think it as honorable to the government neither to know nor notice its sycophants or censors, as it would be undignified and criminal to pamper the former and persecute the latter.

Jefferson is here using the word “censor” in an archaic way, as a term for a person who closely monitors and criticizes the actions of another, generally one in a position of power. (Some remnant of this usage persists in the adjective “censorious,” as in condemning an unnecessarily critical critic’s “censorious behavior.”) Thus, far from arguing for censorship in the modern sense, he is arguing for the very governmental openness and transparency that is anathema to the powers that be on The Island.

The Prisoner 2 continues to emphasize that it itself is your enemy. In addition to the established dirty tricks from its predecessor (that bogus error message that tries to trick you into entering your resignation code appears again), it has some new ways to be belligerent. At one point it even threatens to re-format the game disk.

No, it doesn’t go quite that far. If you lose this game of judicial hangman, the game tries to fake you out by grinding the disk just like it would during a format, but ultimately declines to actually do the deed.

Another amusing fake-out is the computerized “Free Information” booth.

Asking “why” in this section makes the computer go berserk, screen flashing gibberish and disk drives wildly blinking and grinding. In addition to several episodes of Star Trek, this sequence also evokes the climax to one of the classic episodes of The Prisoner television show, “The General.” It’s also, of course, the all-important question that B.F. Skinner’s theories of education don’t prepare students to answer.

So, yes, The Prisoner 2 does manage to get its lumps in. If it doesn’t feel quite as laser-focused in its presentation and rhetoric or, well, quite as necessary as its predecessor, it’s certainly not an embarrassment. Yet, and ironically given its more polished presentation, it was not the same sort of commercial success. Steve Pederson estimates that it only sold in the range of 3000 to 5000 units in total, pretty underwhelming figures in comparison to games I’ve covered recently like Choplifter (9000 copies in its first month) or Deadline (25,000 copies in its first eight months). This was in spite of being ported to the Atari 400 and 800 and the IBM PC in addition to the Apple II. The entertainment-software market was growing rapidly, but Edu-Ware’s share in it was not.

To begin to understand why that should be, we might look to tensions and contradictions within Edu-Ware itself. Edu-Ware’s president and founder, Sherwin Steffin, had no great investment in games. As his company’s name would imply, his passion, a product of his long and ongoing career in education, was educational software. The company’s two other important players, Mullich and Steve Pederson, were each a generation younger than Steffin, and much more interested in computers and games for own sakes. Steffin was happy to allow them to indulge their interest as long as everyone also strove to develop the high-quality educational software that he had founded the company to create — and luckily so, as the first Prisoner turned out to be a gold mine that helped get his own projects off the ground. Yet by 1982 those projects were able to fly on their own, with programs like Algebra 1 selling in the tens of thousands. As Pederson has said, “As time went on, it became harder and harder to justify game development.” Edu-Ware didn’t need games anymore, and with a hungry market for their educational software and a president rather disinterested in the field, the company had begun the gradual process of abandoning the games market even as The Prisoner 2 was being released. As a retread (however well done) of an older game and with an unengaged corporate parent, The Prisoner 2‘s lackluster sales performance is not so surprising. Edu-Ware’s last big game release, the final, less than compelling installment of its Empire trilogy of science-fiction RPGs, appeared early the following year. And that was pretty much that for the Interactive Fantasies line to which The Prisoner games had belonged.

In July of 1983, Edu-Ware was purchased by a much larger company that had heretofore focused on software for big institutional machines, Management Sciences America. There are a couple of ways to see this development. On the one hand, plucky little Edu-Ware looked to already be facing an uncertain future in the educational market it had pioneered, as new companies like Spinnaker with established corporate parents entered with slick new products for the growing numbers of Apple II-devoted educators and parents. Perhaps finding a deep-pocketed parent of its own was the only way for Edu-Ware to have a hope of survival in this new, more crowded world. On the other hand, Sherwin Steffin told me recently via email that “marketing was an area in which I had neither skill nor interest,” and that this purchase was exactly the “exit strategy that I had planned from the beginning.”

What happened next, though, Steffin had most certainly not planned. He, Mullich, and Pederson were allowed to work without disruption for only a short time before relations collapsed in a pile of accusations, ultimatums, and, eventually, lawsuits. The Edu-Ware brand was largely merged into MSA’s Peachtree line of productivity software in 1984, and the last traces of the old company were obliterated by early 1985. By this time Steffin, Mullich, and Pederson were all long gone. It was an inglorious, anticlimactic end for a pioneering publisher, but not, alas, an atypical one.

As usual, I’ve prepared a copy of The Prisoner 2 for those of you who’d like to try it for yourselves. This time that’s especially important. Like its predecessor, The Prisoner II writes to the game disk during play, meaning that most of the copies archived on the Internet contain someone else’s half-finished game. I’ve prepared a zip with a clean copy of the Apple II disk, along with the manual (courtesy of the amazing Museum of Computer Adventure Game History). You might also want to have a look at a fascinating document at the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities: David Mullich’s original design document for the game.

Be seeing ewe!

SAGA
August 28, 2012

I haven’t had much to say recently about Scott Adams, the man who first brought adventure games to PCs. But he was out there through all of the developments I’ve covered since the last time I wrote a post about him, continuing to run Adventure International and to slowly expand his stable of simple 16 K adventures. I called AI the Dollar General of the early software industry in that last post, and I don’t know how to express it any better today. It existed in a sort of hazy space between publisher and mail-order catalog retailer; many of its programs were also available in other ways thanks to non-exclusive publishing agreements, and most were available only via the catalogs or the company’s single Longwood, Florida storefront (“Just 40 minutes from DISNEY WORLD!”), never finding their way into shops. AI is perhaps best seen as a bridge between the very earliest days of microcomputer software, when semi-altruistic organizations like SoftSide magazine’s TRS-80 Software Exchange and Creative Computing‘s equivalent organ acted as mere middlemen to help programmers sell their creations, and the modern paradigm that had fallen pretty firmly into place by 1982, of software publishers that functioned like book or record publishers in demanding exclusive rights from the actual creators and aggressively marketing those creations under their own brand.

In the long run such a business model was going to be problematic for AI, as the new order asserted itself more and more. As of 1982, however, they were still doing well within their niche. Their catalogs remained the same ramshackle pile of junk, oddities, and the occasional gem, all priced much cheaper than the more polished products of the competition. Sometimes, when AI felt they had a particularly hot product on their hands, they would try to pierce their insularity and play with the On-Lines and Brøderbunds, yet without losing the same weirdly, um, casual approach to basic English diction that marked their catalogs and the adventures of their founder.

I don’t think “penultimate” means what you think it does, Mr. AI Copywriter. At moments like this there’s something almost lovable about AI’s happy slapdashery.

Space war games aside, AI’s flagship titles remained their adventure games. Despite being like Ken Williams and Doug Carlston in needing to spend more and more time running a company and less and less hacking, Scott Adams managed to author another of these in 1981, Savage Island Part 2, and also co-authored Golden Voyage with a university student named William Demas. This brought AI’s line of official Scott Adams games to the neat dozen that have passed into history as the original Scott Adams canon. By 1982 their OtherVentures line, a grab bag of games not authored by the master himself, consisted of an additional five titles of varying technical approaches and quality, among them yet another port of Crowther and Woods’s original Adventure and Lance Micklus’s landmark Dog Star Adventure. But now AI’s comfortable position was beginning to feel threatened by the innovations of other companies. To understand why, let’s step back for just a moment to survey the adventuring field as a whole.

There’s a simple narrative about the life and (commercial) death of the text adventure that most of you interested enough to read this blog probably know all too well already. In the beginning, it goes, adventure games were all text all the time. But then came Mystery House, and in the years that followed more and more makers began adding pictures to their games, which became more and more important, until finally they were all that was left. Throw in the requisite appreciation of Infocom and a few other holdouts who stayed with text until it was painfully obvious that that way lay madness, and that’s pretty much the story.

As simplified encapsulations go, the story is fine. Still, there are things that surprised me when I started to look closely at the actual timeline of releases. One of those was just how quickly games with graphics came to dominate the market in the wake of Mystery House and (especially) The Wizard and the Princess, at least on machines like the Apple II that had the ability to display reasonable pictures. A flood of other “hi-res adventures” followed On-Line’s into the market, so many that On-Line would eventually feel the need to start suing others for using what they saw as their own name for their own unique line of games. Already in its May 1982 issue Softline magazine wrote that “the demands of the market are weighted heavily toward hi-res graphics” in adventure games.

Put crudely, we might say that text-adventure makers sorted themselves into two groups: those who saw text as a necessary kludge only, and got away from it as quickly as possible (the vast majority); and those who defined themselves by a more literary sensibility of which the use of text was an essential part (largely only Infocom at this point, although a handful of others would spring up to follow their example). In other words, are you working with text because there’s no other choice given technological constraints, or out of an intrinsic fascination with the medium? Let’s call the former group Type 1; the latter Type 2. This dichotomy continues to persist today; those who continue to write and play textual interactive fiction out of a love of the form itself often confuse others who see text adventures only as an early, primitive form of gaming technology that was quickly and thankfully replaced with something better.

The big, obvious drawback of including graphics was that they used precious memory and disk space on machines that had little of either to spare. Still, most players were entranced enough by pictures that they were willing to accept the tradeoff of less or worse everything else: total text, total length, parser, world modeling, execution speed, etc. The Apple II commercial adventure market by 1982 was divided between the picture-sporting but otherwise very primitive “hi-res adventures” and, well, at this stage pretty much just Infocom, who offered no pictures but better and more of just about everything else. It would be another year or so before Infocom started aggressively marketing their lack of graphics as addition by subtraction, but already they were beginning to stand out from everyone else for their refusal to jump on the hi-res bandwagon.

The only company that didn’t fit comfortably into this bifurcation was Adventure International. The Scott Adams adventures were still built using the same technological blueprint Adams had developed way back in 1978, when his Adventureland became the first adventure game to reach microcomputers. They still had to fit, database and interpreter, into just 16 K of memory, meaning they combined the worst of both adventuring paradigms: the lack of pictures of Infocom and the primitive everything else of typical graphics games. Luckily, the games’ low system requirements made them ideal for a market virtually everyone else missed. In addition to comparatively powerful machines like the Apple II, Atari 400 and 800, and the new IBM PC, the computer industry of the early 1980s had a huge soft underbelly of cheap, low-powered machines like the TRS-80 Model 1 and 3, the TI-99/4A, and the king of this segment and bestselling computer in the world, the Commodore VIC-20. For these machines, the Scott Adams titles, with their need for only 16 K of memory and their ability to run off cassette or even (in the case of the VIC-20) cartridge, were literally the only adventure games in town. Adams had a captive market here, as uncontested as the general PC market had been back in 1978. For several years he fed very well upon it.

Yet it would be nice to compete on the bigger machines as well, wouldn’t it? To do that he would obviously need to improve his games, to bring them more in line with those of either On-Line or Infocom. Given the carelessness of the prose in his games, one might be tempted to immediately lump Adams in with On-Line as a Type 1 developer. Surprisingly, however, even in a 1984 interview he was still expressing ambivalence about the addition of graphics to adventure gaming: “I still do prefer text. The player is left to exercise his imagination and provide his own images, which is more exciting.” Still, it would be much easier to add graphics to his existing games, using the ample memory and disk space they left unused in a machine like the 48 K Apple II Plus, than to rewrite them from scratch with the better everything else of Infocom. And that was clearly the path of least commercial resistance. As he said in the same interview, “If we can provide graphics, and people want graphics, then we should let them have graphics.” The result was SAGA, the Scott Adams Graphic Adventures.

At the heart of each SAGA is the original non-graphic adventure’s data file. (Literally; even misspellings go uncorrected.) To this foundation AI’s long-term in-house artist, “Peppy,” added lots of bright, colorful illustrations, one for each location as well as the occasional bonus scene. Following On-Line’s lead, you can see the text “behind” a picture by hitting enter on an empty command line, and takeable objects show up in the pictures, lending them a certain degree of interactivity and functionality rather than serving strictly as decoration. However, there isn’t the persistent annoyance that dogs the On-Line games of always needing to wonder whether pieces of the illustrations not described in the text can nevertheless be interacted with. Because they are text adventures with hooks for graphics retrofitted after the fact, you can turn off the graphics entirely if you like without missing anything vital.

In preparation for writing this post, I played through the SAGA version of Pirate Adventure, Adams’s second game and the one, along with The Count and perhaps the original Adventureland, that is generally the most fondly remembered today. (In contrast to pretty much every other designer ever, Adams’s games tended to get less and less satisfying as his career progressed.) And indeed, Pirate Adventure, which was co-written by his wife of the time, Alexis Adams, shows Scott Adams with his best foot forward. This early in his career he did not yet feel the need to ratchet up the difficulty through increasingly absurd puzzles. Yes, there are still some parser frustrations as well as such Scott Adams-isms as UNLIGHT as the antonym of the verb LIGHT, but the central task of building a ship is fun, and there’s an enthusiastic, encouraging tone to the text (what there is of it) that makes the whole go down surprisingly easy even today, a remarkable feat for such an early, primitive effort. There’s even a smidge of the more dynamic storyworld that would appear in The Count, with a cracker-loving parrot and a rum-loving pirate who move about. The SAGA version, with lots of pictures that are perhaps not quite up with the best of On-Line but aren’t bad either, only adds to the charm — at least until the slowness of loading all those graphics from disk makes you opt for all-text mode again.

AI released SAGA versions of the first three of the Scott Adams dozen in 1982, followed by the next three the following year, while also continuing to market the text-only versions for low-end machines that couldn’t support the graphic versions. Some of the OtherVentures also got their graphical due. A changing market and changing priorities after that meant that the remaining titles never got converted.

In their time the SAGA games served their purpose of breathing new life into this stable of old, comparatively unsophisticated games. Sure, Adventure International continued to look a bit low rent in comparison to slicker publishers, but their games were relatively inexpensive and, at their best, fun. For plenty of eager adventurers who had exhausted the works of other publishers, or who lacked the machine or the money to access them, Scott Adams and his OtherVentures buddies still held plenty of appeal. They could even do one thing the competition couldn’t: they could talk. That is, when running on a computer with a Votrax Type ‘n Talk, the first hardware-based speech synthesizer to arrive for PCs. Sure, it was a gimmick, but it was a clever one, and one that probably sold some SAGAs on its own.

If you’d like to check out SAGA for yourself, here’s Pirate Adventure for the Apple II.

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 example 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 lost 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.

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 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.

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.

The Magnificent Penguin
September 28, 2012

I recently was privileged to have quite an extensive series of email conversations with Mark Pelczarski, a man who played a variety of significant roles in the early software industry. I’m going to relate his story at some length here. Not only it is important in its own right, but it might also help to illustrate just how unique and, for those in the right place with the right skills, empowering those times were. As we move toward the end of 1982 in the chronology of the the blog as a whole, we’re also moving into an inevitably more conventionally professional, even mercenary era. So, maybe this tale can also serve as a final goodbye to those halcyon earliest days of the American PC industry. As you’ll see, Mark’s career took in a huge swathe of history, and shows just how much could happen for a driven young man in an amazingly short span of time.

In 1970 a teenage Mark signed up for an introductory computer-programming course at his suburban Chicago high school, one of the few in the country to offer such a thing. The students programmed an IBM 1130 minicomputer housed in cabinets scattered around a special, air-conditioned room, from which mechanical clunks and chatters emitted whenever the computer was in operation. There was a cabinet for the punched-card reader, one for the printer, one for the memory (all of 16 K, mounted on a series of flat plates so that you could see each individual bit), one for the disk drives. In the center of it all was a control console that looked like something out of Star Trek, all flashing lights and switches. The students, however, rarely saw the beast they programmed. They designed and wrote out their FORTRAN programs on paper, then carefully pecked them out on a keypunch machine located in a room adjacent to the computer itself. Finally they delivered their cards to the computer operator, who fed them into the beast itself, and, hours later, delivered a printout showing what (if anything) had happened. That was the nature of the process in 1970 even for many professional programmers.

Still, young Mark was fascinated. He learned a lot during that year, thanks partly to a wonderful teacher, Paul Halac, who managed to cram more into this one-year high-school course than many computer-science majors get in their first year at university. Halac even made an arrangement with a local business to let a few of his exceptional students, Mark among them, visit one evening per week to experience a much more welcoming computing environment: our old friend HP Time-Shared BASIC. A big baseball fan, young Mark also spent some of his free time tinkering with a statistics-driven FORTRAN baseball simulation, which the powers-that-were graciously allowed him to try on the school’s computer. His program played the 1970 World Series again and again; he recalls today that “Baltimore won more frequently than Cincinnati,” just like in the real thing. The direction his life would take was pretty well set by this computer access, so rare for 1970.

University followed — specifically, the University of Illinois, where Mark managed to simultaneously earn a bachelor’s in mathematics and a master’s in education (with an emphasis on computer-aided instruction) in just four years. Here he was once again fortunate in his choice of educational institutions. The University of Illinois, you may remember, was the home base of PLATO, the pioneering and profoundly influential educational-computing network whose personalities, games, and culture would indelibly stamp the early PC era. Mark was hired by the computer-science department as a research assistant, which came with a wonderful perk: a key that gave him total access, day or night, to the building that housed the PLATO terminals. Next to that another bonus that would thrill most students, having his own office right there at the university, paled. He spent many hours hunched over a PLATO terminal, developing a new appreciation for computers as tools for entertainment, creativity, and socializing. In his role as research assistant, he also wrote papers on computer-aided instruction and programmed courseware in BASIC.

Soon after Mark left university, the trinity of 1977 appeared. Before the decade was over, he would have the chance to know all three intimately.

That year Mark was teaching math at another Illinois high school while also struggling to get a computer club started for his students in the face of decidedly limited resources. Early on, the club had no computer access at all; they could only write out their programs on paper and imagine them running on a real machine. (Incredibly, the class actually did very well in a programming contest hosted by a local college with their completely untested programs.) Eventually the school purchased a terminal and arranged with a local community college where Mark was teaching a night course on BASIC programming for dial-up access to their computer system. It was a long way from PLATO, but it was a start. Early in 1978, the school replaced the dumb terminal with a newer, cheaper option: a single TRS-80, which like the terminal had to be shared by all of the students in the computer club and Mark’s new course on “computer math.”

Soon after, Mark bought his first PC of his own — a Commodore PET. As we’ve had occasion to discuss before, the PET never quite attracted the same following in North America as did the TRS-80 and the Apple II, but a hungry if smaller market for games and other programs did exist. Mark wrote a simple football simulation and sold it to Cursor, a subscription service that distributed programs to PET owners on cassette. Soon after, however, he grew disillusioned with his purchase. The original PET’s BASIC was so riddled with bugs and oddities that you kind of have to wonder whether anyone at Commodore ever actually tried to use it at all before sending thousands of machines out the door. For example, the shift key’s function was inverted: you had to press shift to get lower case. (Since the PET was unique amongst the trinity in offering lower-case input at all, perhaps Commodore felt their customers should just shut up and live with this inconvenience.) Mark got fed up, and returned his PET to the store where he had bought it. His career as a software mogul would have to wait a while.

The next year, 1979, brought marriage and a new job teaching COBOL programming at Northern Illinois University. It also brought the Apple II Plus, which was, with its 48 K of memory and readily available floppy-disk drives, a much more refined and usable machine than any of the original trinity. Mark decided to take the microcomputer plunge again. He purchased the Apple, and, naturally, fell to tinkering again.

One aspect of the Apple II had made it unique right from its debut: its support for true bit-mapped graphics programmable on the pixel level, as opposed to the text and character graphics only of the TRS-80 and PET. Every single machine also shipped with a set of paddle controllers, like the aforementioned “hi-res graphics” mode a legacy of Steve Wozniak’s determination that every Apple II must be able to play a good game of Breakout. One fateful day a student of Mark’s who also owned an Apple II showed him a simplistic drawing program he had written in BASIC, which would let the user draw lines and shapes on the screen in hi-res mode using the paddles. Like that first exposure to computers nine years before, this moment would do much to determine the future direction of Mark’s life. The student, possibly with commercial intentions of his own, refused to tell Mark exactly how his program worked. But this demonstration of what was possible was enough. He went home and started hacking, learning as he went about this still relatively little used and little understood aspect of the machine.

Already that fall he had a program he thought he might be able to sell. Giving it the catchy name of “Drawing Program,” he put it on a disk along with a Space Invaders clone and a slot-machine simulation he had written, photocopied some instructions, and stuck it all in the Ziploc bag that was the standard packaging for software in this era. He started visiting local computer stores to demonstrate this new product of “MP Software,” and was happily surprised to discover that they were willing to trade him printers or RAM chips or sometimes even real money for his creation. It began to dawn on Mark that microcomputers could be more than a hobby. But if so, what next? Enter SoftSide.

Like so much else in this article, we’ve encountered SoftSide before in this blog. Founded by Roger Robitaille in 1978 and somewhat forgotten today, it is nevertheless of immense historical importance: as, in its original TRS-80-specific format, the first magazine to focus on a single consumer platform; as the original home of Lance Miklaus’s landmark Dog Star Adventure, the urtext of a thousand bedroom-coded BASIC text adventures; as a great booster of the potential of adventure games in general; and as an advertising and/or editorial outlet for the thoughts and work of important early software figures like Scott Adams, the aforementioned Lance Miklaus, Ken and Roberta Williams, Doug Carlston, and, soon enough, Mark Pelczarski. That said, the magazine’s importance almost pales next to that of its adjunct, the TRS-80 Software Exchange, which was a vital step on the path toward a real software industry. With its non-exclusive distribution agreements and other author-friendly terms, it enabled those listed above and many more to sell their software nationwide for the first time. In my recent discussions with Mark Pelczarski, he confirmed something I had long suspected, that the magazine was essentially viewed by Robitaille as a promotional tool for his real business of selling software. Indeed, he developed a neat sort of synergy between the two organs. Most readers bought SoftSide for its many BASIC listings for games and other programs — listings that looked appealing but were tedious to enter and prone to typos on the part of both the magazine’s staff and the poor soul trying to copy all of that spaghetti code into her computer. Therefore each SoftSide always included an offer to just buy the things on tape or disk and be done with it. Later SoftSide started offering a service to automatically receive all of each issue’s programs on cassette every month.

The TRS-80 had been the really hot microcomputer when SoftSide was born in late 1978, but by a year later the Apple II also was taking off in a big way in the wake of the II Plus model, about to eclipse the TRS-80 in the vibrancy of its user community and software support if not (immediately) sales. That market looked like a good place for SoftSide to be. And sure enough, one day when flipping through an issue at a newsstand, Mark came across an advertisement for an editor for a new Apple II edition of the magazine. At 25 years old, with exactly zero experience in publishing of any sort, he applied — and was hired as editor of the new magazine, to be called AppleSeed. Those were unusual times, in which just about everyone in the PC industry was an amateur faking it and/or learning as they went. The January 1980 edition was the only one to appear as AppleSeed; they were threatened by an already litigious Apple, and had to change their name to simply SoftSide Apple Edition for the February issue. Mark worked on the magazine from Illinois for the first months. After the spring 1980 semester was done, however, he honored an agreement he had made with Robitaille before taking the job. He quit his comfortable teaching job at Northern Illinois and trekked eastward with his wife Cheryl to Milford, New Hampshire, home of SoftSide‘s offices.

SoftSide in both its TRS-80 and Apple II incarnations was a digest-sized black-and-white publication printed on cheap paper, very similar to the pre-2005 TV Guide. Feeling that a different format was needed for the magazine to get noticed at newsstands and continue to grow, Mark and some of the other staff convinced Robitaille to remake it as a glossy, full-sized magazine. Robitaille decided at the same time to go with a single edition that catered to not just the Apple II and TRS-80 but also newer machines like the Atari 400 and 800. Robitaille asked Mark to oversee the Apple II-oriented sections of the new magazine and to write each issue’s editorial and plenty of additional content, along with many of the type-in program listings which were still the magazine’s main raison d’être.

But there was also still that drawing program, which Mark had continued to tweak and expand over the months. He believes that it was either Robitaille or, most likely, another SoftSide stalwart named George Blank who finally came up with a proper name for it: The Magic Paintbrush. Mark began selling it through what was now called simply The Software Exchange in the wake of Robitaille’s decision to begin dealing in software for most PCs. He labeled it a product of “MP Software,” which could conveniently stand for either “Mark Pelczarski” or “Magic Paintbrush.” The Magic Paintbrush became one of many programs to be accepted by the SoftSide operation during Mark’s tenure whose significance would become clear only in retrospect — programs like the Williams’ Mystery House and Doug Carlston’s Galactic trilogy, not to mention the one that in a very real way made the microcomputer industry, VisiCalc.

Still, times were changing, and the writing was on the wall for the Software Exchange’s brand of non-exclusive software publication. Already many, not least Personal Software of VisiCalc fame, were using the operation not so much as a publisher but as a mail-order storefront, packaging their own software under their own logo and simply advertising it through the Software Exchange. Just a month after the new incarnation of SoftSide appeared, the first issue of the legendary Apple II-specific magazine Softalk arrived. Still fondly remembered today, Softalk became something of a model for the new breed of slick, ordinary-consumer-friendly, often platform-specific computer magazines that would flourish throughout the 1980s. Softalk featured a wide variety of voices within its pages on a wide variety of topics, from program listings to technical explanations to the “soft,” human-interest stories on the personalities behind the Apple II industry that the magazine always did exceptionally well and is most beloved for today. Also present were lots of outside advertisements from, among others, the many publishers that were springing up to slowly obsolete the likes of the Software Exchange. Robitaille, meanwhile, continued to include articles from just a handful of regular contributors and continued to reject outside advertising. With its usefulness diluted by its need to address so many platforms and its editorial integrity compromised somewhat, at least in the eyes of many readers, by its function as a front for a software sales operation, SoftSide‘s popularity waned in comparison with that of Softalk amongst Apple II owners. This situation caused some angst for Mark, himself after all an Apple II loyalist. At the end of 1980, with he and his wife homesick on top of everything else, he resigned as editor, although he would continue to write programs and a column for SoftSide for some months more. The couple moved back to Chicago.

It was, once again, time to ponder next moves. Having been so involved with the Software Exchange, Mark fell to considering whether there might be a better model for selling software via mail order. Inspiration came from an unlikely source.

During the 1970s Mark had spent several summers staying with friends in Berkeley, California, where he had learned to be quite the outdoorsman. He had hiked Tijuana and British Columbia, Yosemite and Kings Canyon, Half Dome and the Grand Canyon. He’d bought most of his equipment for these adventures from REI (Recreational Equipment, Inc.), and been very impressed with the experience. A co-operative with members rather than customers, REI emphasized service and information, to the extent that actually selling merchandise often seemed rather a secondary goal of the whole operation. Mark told me of purchasing a tent whose fiberglass poles started to split after several years of use. When he asked REI whether he could buy replacements, they gave him a set of new, redesigned poles for nothing, which he still uses to this day. Mark and Cheryl decided to found a new venture called Micro Co-op on the REI model. They would stock only software that they considered truly worthwhile, and would sell it through a catalog that emphasized information and customer empowerment rather than the hard sell, with unbiased comparative reviews by Mark himself.

Meanwhile Mark continued to tinker with his drawing program. On-Line’s recent The Wizard and the Princess had revolutionized Apple II graphics in two ways: through its use of vector drawing routines to pack a heretofore inconceivable number of pictures on a single disk, which we’ll talk about again shortly; and through its use of dithering to make the Apple II’s meager six colors look like many more. Mark found that he could make about a hundred colors by mixing the basic six, as long as you stood far enough back from the monitor that the pixels blended. Cheryl got used to the shouts of excitement from his office: “I figured out a way to get four more!” He incorporated these revelations into a new drawing program to sell through Micro Co-op as a product of “Co-op Software”: The Complete Graphics System. The “complete” was perhaps overambitious, but it was at least more complete than anything else at the time. From its first advertisement in May of 1981, it became a hit — such a hit that it forced Mark to consider whether there was any point in continuing Micro Co-op in lieu of becoming a full-time developer and publisher. Within days CGS was bringing in more than the rest of the operation combined; the answer soon seemed obvious. But what to call this new venture that was about to swallow the old? Once again inspiration came from an unlikely source.

During the previous year, a reader of SoftSide had sent in a legitimate query about a program published in an earlier issue with an off-the-wall postscript: what, he asked, do the initials in MP Software stand for? Mark was apparently in a silly mood, because he replied, as printed in the October 1980 edition of the magazine, that they stood for neither “Mark Pelczarski” nor “Magic Paintbrush,” but rather “Magnificent Penguin,” accompanying the reply with a little doodle of the bird in question. Partly it was just inanity for inanity’s sake, partly an homage to the inanity of Monty Python (another coincidental MP). When the time came to release CGS, Mark incorporated a similar doodle into the Co-op Software logo on the box, again more just for the hell of it than due to any conscious reasoning. Shortly after, one David Lubar wrote about CGS in a comparison of graphics software for Creative Computing; the section dedicated to CGS he labeled “Penguin Graphics.” Co-op Software wasn’t the catchiest name for a software publisher, and “Penguin” did have a certain ring to it… and so Penguin Software was born.

David Lubar’s review did more than give Penguin its name. It also prompted the two men to talk and begin to exchange ideas. David was also a talented programmer who had been dabbling in graphics programming for some months, developing a variety of quite sophisticated transformations — flipping pictures side-to-side or upside-down, or creating color image “negatives” or mirror images. Together the two devised the concept of painting with custom “brushes” of different patterns, implementing many of the concepts that have remained with paint programs to this day. Given the pioneering work done in computer graphics at places like Xerox PARC, it’s arguable how much of this was truly new to the world, but it was devised by Mark and David, who lacked any experience in such environments, from essentially whole cloth. (That such pioneering work was left unpatented and thus free to be further developed is something to be thankful for in these days when Apple and Samsung war over who first thought of rounded corners.) The first fruit of their joint labor appeared in October of 1981 as Special Effects, an add-on to CGS which admittedly did rather give the lie to its name. (The two packages were eventually sold together as The Complete Graphics System II). Key to the appeal of these programs was the way that the documentation described how to use the images you created in your own program, whether it be an arcade game, a graphic adventure in the On-Line mold, or something else. Penguin could soon begin calling themselves, without hyperbole, “the leader in Apple II graphics.” But even better graphics software was still to come.

For some time now people had been inquiring just how On-Line managed to get so many pictures on a single disk in their High-Res Adventure line. (For example, in one of those discoveries that can make trolling through the old magazines so much fun, you’ll find a letter from a young Brian Fargo in the January 1982 Softline asking just that.) As I explained in a much earlier post, Ken Williams’s genius here was to store each picture on disk not as a grid of static pixels but as a series of instructions that the computer could use to “draw” the picture all over again. For their next release, The Graphics Magician, Mark and David implemented this technique into their own storage routines, with similarly huge space savings. At last developers had the ideal tool for crafting adventure-game graphics, as well as pictures for many other purposes. They could also now use The Graphics Magician to make animations, thanks to some input from a third programmer, Chris Jochumson, whom Mark bumped into one day in Doug Carlston’s living room.

The Graphics Magician was also unusually user friendly (a term much in vogue at the time) in ways that had nothing to do with the actual program on the disk.

First, Mark took the near-revolutionary step of releasing it with no copy protection whatsoever, a move that such luminaries as Al Tommervik, publisher of Softalk, pronounced tantamount to suicide. Developers could secure their investment by making all the backup copies they wanted. That may seem like an obvious “feature” for a serious application today, but in 1982 it was very unusual. Even VisiCalc, the most serious, business-oriented application there was, was designed to be uncopyable. When your disk failed, you simply had to put your business on hold while you waited for a replacement under VisiCorp’s warranty which was hardly a warranty at all; a new disk could cost you up to $40. Those for whom VisiCalc was a truly critical application soon took to simply buying two copies from the start. Penguin’s rejection of copy protection for The Graphics Magician thus made a real rhetorical statement about the rights of users in an industry heretofore obsessed only with those of creators to protect themselves from piracy. In its wake — and that of Penguin’s spectacular failure to go out of business as a result — other publishers slowly began to follow its example. Soon applications software was expected by everyone to be free from copy protection as a matter of course, although games, always the pirates’ favorite and a market with much thinner profit margins, would not follow suit.

Second, this quite inexpensive package, with a list price of just $60 and a street price of considerably less, could nevertheless be freely used to create commercial games with no further licensing. There was just one requirement, a stroke of near genius on Mark’s part: the work in question had to prominently credit the software that had been used to create it. Soon credits screens like this one (from the SAGA version of Scott Adams’s Pirate Adventure) were everywhere, giving Penguin an unbelievable amount of free advertising — and through their competitors’ products at that.

In the wake of The Graphics Magician, adventures with graphics got a whole lot easier to make. Soon they were everywhere, all but swamping pure text adventures on the Apple II. Well before the end of 1982 Penguin stopped calling themselves “the leader in Apple II graphics.” Now they were just “the graphics people,” virtually unchallenged within their niche.

Mark was also firmly ensconced in what Doug Carlston called the “Brotherhood” as the clock slowly ran down on this era of friendly sharing and not terribly competitive competition. He socialized with the Carlstons, the Williams, the Tommerviks; chatted with Mitch Kapor about the project that would become Lotus 1-2-3; discussed adventure games with Scott Adams and Marc Blank. He had long ago been shocked to realize that he was making more money each month with Penguin than he had in a year of teaching. Penguin was a big success, almost accidentally so, all on the strength of essentially that one program he had first begun to develop back in 1979. Masters of their niche, they could think about diversification. Indeed, they were suddenly attracting outsiders with programs — mostly games, usually created using their own graphics software — which they were eager to have Penguin consider. We’ll look at one of those next time.

Transylvania
October 3, 2012

One day in 1979 Antonio Antiochia visited Eastern Michigan University with his father, who taught classes there on statistics and computers. Dad had some meetings to take, so he left Antonio in an empty computer lab, one of the few at the university equipped with real video terminals in lieu of the more common teletypes. The terminals were cool, but this was otherwise not an unusual scenario. Antonio had been hanging out at his father’s workplace for the past five years now, tinkering with the various big computers there. Now 13 years old, he could already program fairly well in FORTRAN and operate a keypunch machine. Indeed, he was all too familiar with the traditional method of mainframe programming — deliver a stack of cards to a friendly computer operator, then wait for the printed results. He had even spent many months working on a game. Called Terroron, it was an homage to the Japanese monster movies he loved; the player got to control a monster rampaging through a city. (From the great-minds-think-alike department: this is also the theme of Crush, Crumble, and Chomp!, arguably the most inspired use of the Automated Simulations DunjonQuest engine, as well as the later, more refined The Movie Monster Game.)

So, Antonio knew pretty well what he was doing as he started poking at one of the terminals to see what was what. He didn’t have an account on this system, but found that as Guest he had access to games. Not bad! Inside he found mostly the usual suspects, from Tic Tac Toe to The Oregon Trail. But wait, here was something new… something called WANDER. He started the program, and was greeted with the text that launched a thousand careers and a million obsessions:

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.

Antonio didn’t know quite what he was supposed to do next; for some reason this build of the game was missing the usual offer of instructions at the beginning. He flailed at it for a while and gave up. But it continued to tickle at the back of his mind, and a month or so later he tried again. This time he managed to find his way underground, and from there he was hooked. Terroron was quickly forgotten.

But when he finished Adventure at last, he had no more adventure games to play. It was the only one of its type on the university’s computers, and his family had no computer at home as yet. And he lacked the skill to make one of his own; working with text in FORTRAN was notoriously difficult. So, he used his imagination:

I came up with dozens of adventure plots in my spare time (and a few other games), drawing their outlines, their maps, etc., based on a wide variety of themes (a bit heavy on the fantasy genre) — simply out of the joy of creativity and discovery. It was cool.

Antonio had a particular reason to want to retreat into fantasy at this stage of his life. His mother, with whom he had been very close, had just died of cancer, leaving him and his father alone. The world inside his imaginary adventure games often felt much more welcoming than the real one.

One day Antonio mentioned Adventure to a friend of his from school, who in turn delivered the shocking news that there were a number of such games available on microcomputers, written by a guy named Scott Adams. The same friend told him about the Ann Arbor Community High School Computer Club, which had a collection of PCs available for use by the public for a small fee. Antonio became a regular there, playing the Scott Adams games and, eventually, starting to work on a real one of his own at last, a fantasy game called The Land of Ghaja; his adventure-gaming friend did him the final service of helping him to figure out how to parse text in BASIC. When the club was closed, he fed his addiction by visiting local computer stores and using their machines for as long as they would let him.

Antonio had of course been pestering his father for a computer of his own for months, and at last Dad could resist no longer. He brought home a new Apple II Plus, with the condition that the two would share it. Antonio quickly finished Land of Ghaja. “It was a little bit primitive,” he admits today. Still, he passed the game around his local circle of friends and fellow computer-club members, to a pretty good reception.

With time and privacy for his projects at last thanks to his father’s purchase, he started on another game that would benefit from what he had learned from the first. It would not only be more technically advanced, but would have a more unique setting. He was a big fan of Halloween and of classic movie horror of the Boris Karloff / Bela Lugosi / Lon Chaney, Jr. era. His new game would be horror — but a fun, retro, slightly campy sort of horror, more The Wolfman than the horror sensation of the moment, The Shining. Like one of his favorite movies, Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Antonio threw it all in: a werewolf, a vampire, even an alien and his UFO. He eventually named the game Transylvania. Not that he had ever been there or knew much of anything about the real place. His Transylvania was the land of old horror movies and tales and, of course, imagination.

Antonio’s father helped out as editor and coach. An Italian immigrant who spoke English with a strong accent, he nevertheless had an excellent command of English grammar and style, and was a steadfast source of encouragement. Antonio honed the game over a period of several months. Satisfied at last, he passed it among his friends and made plans to start another; the thought of doing anything else with it had yet to enter his mind. His father, meanwhile, had started ordering computer supplies from Mark Pelczarski’s post-SoftSide, pre-Penguin venture Micro Co-op. One day while placing an order over the phone he mentioned that his son had written a really impressive adventure game. Mark said that he was starting a publishing company (“Co-op Software”) to go along with the mail-order business. “Send it to us. We’d like to see it.” From that chance exchange was born the eventual Penguin Software’s first adventure game.

Mark immediately liked the game, but he was also aware that it was getting harder to sell pure text adventures on the Apple II in the wake of On-Line’s Hi-Res Adventure line. And there was something a little bit off about “the leader in Apple II graphics” releasing a game with no graphics. Could Antonio add some pictures? To help him, he was willing to give him all of his latest graphics software, including programs that would eventually become a part of The Graphics Magician, but that hadn’t yet been released at this point (summer 1981). Antonio wasn’t an artist and had no experience with computer graphics, but he was a trooper. While Penguin Software established and consolidated their position as “the graphics people,” Antonio sat at home laboriously drawing picture after picture using the software Mark had provided and the standard pair of paddles that came with every Apple II. Doing so ended up taking much more time than actually writing the game had — some nine months. His patient labor yielded some of the best graphics of the “hi-res adventure” era. (I’ve added a blurring effect to the image below and all of those that follow to try to convey what they would have looked like on a contemporary monitor, where the dithering would have smeared the pixels together to create many more apparent colors than the Apple II’s standard six. Our pixel-perfect digital screens otherwise just can’t do them justice.)

With the graphics done at last, Mark and the others at Penguin stepped in to do the final polishing. They cleaned up the original BASIC code, adding in some assembly-language routines to handle the graphics. And they put the game through considerable playtesting, adding responses to various actions that Antonio hadn’t anticipated. They also had some fun. “Werewolves of London,” the one hit single of the great Warren Zevon, was in heavy rotation at the Penguin offices as they worked on the game. Soon more and more of the song was finding its way into the game. Zevon’s caustic wit would have made an interesting contrast with Antonio’s more innocent monster-movie fixations, but in the end most of the former was edited out again. Messages like “He ripped your lungs out, Jim” just prompted too much confusion (“Who the heck is Jim?”) from people who didn’t know the song. Only one fragment remains in the released version.

The game that finally emerged from Penguin that summer of 1982 is one of the most charming of its genre and era. Yes, its parser and world model are extremely primitive in comparison to the contemporary games of Infocom. Yet it plays within its formal limitations beautifully. In fact, it’s an almost uniquely playable example of its type, thanks both to a lots of addition by subtraction — no maze, no guess-the-verb puzzles — and, well, lots of addition by addition: a collection of simple object-based puzzles that are commonsensical and play smartly within the strict limits set by the game’s technical underpinnings. The design as a whole is unusually open, crafted in a way that usually gives you lots of puzzles to work on in whatever order you choose. As Mark Pelczarski wrote in an email to me:

With Transylvania you could wander from puzzle to puzzle and see much of the Transylvania universe without getting stuck. At most points in the game there were maybe 3-5 or more open puzzles to solve. Each lead you further into the game, but seldom was one single puzzle a sticking point or roadblock (until you solved all the others).

Given this level of non-linearity and the limited amount of text in the game, Transylvania is inevitably more of a pastiche of fragments taken from other fictions than a coherent narrative experience of its own. Early on we find a note which tells us in all of four words everything we need to know about the plot: that a Princess Sabrina is going to be killed at dawn (Ach! A time limit!) and that it’s up to us to rescue her.

A pastiche it may be, but Transylvania absolutely nails the half Gothic, half campy atmosphere of a classic Universal monster movie. And anyway, by the time they got to the 1940s and the likes of Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman or Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, the Universal films were themselves little more than mix-and-match pastiches.

Like those movies, Transylvania has its chills, especially in the wandering werewolf and vampire who can creep up on you at any time, but there’s something almost comfortingly innocent about it all. This is safe horror that never trangresses certain well-understood boundaries.

Still, and just to remind us that it was after all written some 30 years after its inspirations went out of fashion, Antonio also threw in a UFO right out of Steven Spielberg.

Antonio told me recently that he had quite a twist on the classic monster movie in mind: that the vampire had actually come on the UFO, was actually an alien. He was “quite proud of myself and thought this was original” in this era before vampires were absolutely everywhere in pop culture, although it’s not something that can really be gleaned from the finished game. He describes the game today as “unsophisticated” but with a “simple playfulness” that makes it “likable.” I couldn’t agree more. Transylvania charmed me in a way akin to Ultima, the issue of another bright, precocious kid who wanted to pack as much cool stuff into his game as possible in the hope that you would like it all as much as he did.

Some time after Transylvania‘s release, and as Antonio was going through the surreal experience of coming home from school to find royalty checks for thousands of dollars in his mailbox, Penguin received a rather unusual package that came from an entire grade-school class in Australia. Its ostensible purpose was to ask for a hint book, but each kid in the class also contributed a crayon drawing inspired by the game. Antonio has kept and cherished the package to this day: “When I go through sad or frustrating times, I will sometimes read through those old letters to cheer myself up.” Indeed, making a class of schoolchildren happy is about as worthy an achievement as there is in life. I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about the progress of the art of ludic narrative and all that, but adventure games are most of all supposed to be fun, and are supposed to make people happy. And Transylvania delivers.

If you want to have some fun of your own, here’s an Apple II disk image of Transylvania. Or those of you with iOS devices can buy a port.

(My sincere thanks to Antonio Antiochia and, once again, to Mark Pelczarski for lending their memories and perspectives to this article.)

The Wizardry and Ultima Sequels
October 11, 2012

By far the two biggest CRPGs of 1981 — bigger in fact than any that had come before by an order of magnitude or two — were Wizardry and Ultima. So, it was natural enough that the two biggest CRPGs of 1982 were a pair of sequels to those games. Some things never change.

Wizardry: Knight of Diamonds appeared in March of 1982, barely six months after its predecessor. It was more what we would today call an expansion than a full-fledged sequel, requiring that the player transfer in her characters — of 13th level or above — from the previous game. Still, in 1982 as today, putting out a solid expansion with new content for a bestselling game was a perfectly justifiable move, whether viewed as a fan wanting more to do or just in the cold light of economics. After all, Wizardry I was selling like crazy and causing a minor sensation in the computer press, and customers were clamoring for more.

Given the short time Robert Woodhead and Andrew Greenberg had to prepare Knight of Diamonds, major improvements to the game system could hardly be expected. Yet they did a very good job of leveraging the engine and the construction tools they had built for the first game, offering six more dungeon levels for high-level characters who had presumably already vanquished the evil wizard Werdna in Wizardry I. If it lacked the shock of the new that had accompanied that game, Knight is in many ways a better, tighter design. The player’s quest this time is to assemble the magical paraphernalia of a legendary knight in order to rescue the kingdom of Llylgamyn from something or other — the usual CRPG drill. The six pieces are each housed on a separate level of the dungeon. This gives a welcome motivation to thoroughly explore each level which is largely absent from Wizardry I, whose dungeon levels 5 through 9 literally contain nothing of interest other than monsters to fight to build up the party’s strength. Woodhead and Greenberg also slightly tweaked the game balance by making it impossible for a side that surprises another to use magic spells during that first, free attack round they get as a result. This has the welcome result of excising a scenario Wizardry I players had come to know all too well: getting surprised by a group of high-level magic users who proceed to take out the entire party with area-effect spells before anyone can do anything in response. It’s still possible to get into similar trouble in Knight of Diamonds when encountering monsters with non-magical special attacks, but the occurrence becomes blessedly much less common. Other oddities that almost smack of being bugs in the original, such as the strange ineffectiveness of some spells against all but the lowest level enemies, are also fixed, and of course there are also plenty of new, high-level monsters to learn about and develop counter-strategies against. For anyone who enjoyed the first game, Knight of Diamonds delivers plenty of the same sort of fun, with even more strategic depth and an even better sense of design.

Woodhead and Greenberg, then, did the safe, conservative thing with their sequel, leveraging their existing tools to give the gaming public more of what they had loved before, and very quickly and with minimal drama at that. It was a commercially astute move, one of the last that the pair and Sir-Tech would make for a franchise that they would soon mismanage to the brink of oblivion. The story of Ultima II, by contrast, is much longer and messier, spanning eighteen months rather than six and involving major technical changes, business failures, and some minor crises in the life of the young Richard Garriott. The game that finally emerged is also longer, messier, and much more problematic than Knight of Diamonds, but in its gonzo way more inspiring.

After finishing Ultima I, one thing was absolutely clear to Garriott: he had ridden BASIC as far as it would take him. As impressive as his game was technically, it was also painfully slow to play, even with the addition of a handful of assembly-language routines provided by a friend from his old job at Computerland, Ken Arnold. BASIC was also inherently less memory-efficient, an important factor to consider as Garriott’s design ideas got ever more grandiose. He therefore decided that, rather than get started immediately on Ultima II, he would learn assembly language first. He called his publisher, California Pacific, to see if they could help him out. They put him in touch with their star action-game programmer, Tom Luhrs, currently riding high on his game Apple-oids, an Asteroids clone that replaced asteroids with apples. In Garriott’s own words, Luhrs “held his hand” through an intense, self-imposed assembly-language boot camp that lasted about a month during his summer break from university. Without further ado, Garriott then started coding on the project that would become Ultima II.

He returned to Austin in the fall of 1981 to begin his junior year at the University of Texas, even as his studies there increasingly took a back seat to computer games and his deep involvement with his SCA friends. One particular course that semester would serve as a catalyst which made him choose once and for all between committing wholeheartedly to a career in games or getting a degree.

The story of Garriott’s class in 6809 assembly-language programming is one that he’s told many times over the years to various interviewers, who have nevertheless tended to report it slightly differently. The outline is clear enough. The Motorola 6809 was the successor to the older 6800. Like its predecessor, the 6809 never became a tremendously common choice of microcomputer manufacturers, perhaps due to its relatively high price. It did, however, find a home in Radio Shack’s Color Computer line. More important to our purposes is to recall the relationship of the earlier Motorola 6800 to the MOS 6502. Chuck Peddle had worked on the 6800 at Motorola, then left to join MOS, where he designed the 6502 as the cost-reduced version of the 6800 that Motorola had not been interested in building; the 6502 used a subset of the 6800’s instruction set. When Garriott started in his assembly-language class, he therefore found he could do all of the assignments by simply writing 6502 code, an instruction set with which he was by now very familiar. Problem was, students were graded not just on whether their programs worked, but also on whether they were properly written, taking maximum advantage of the more efficient instruction set of the 6809. Suddenly Garriott found himself failing the class, even though his programs all worked perfectly well.

That’s the story that’s always told, anyway, a story that conveniently casts the professor teaching the course as a sort of rigid, establishment ogre shaking his finger in the face of the original, freethinking Garriott and his practical hacker ethic. One version of the story, however, found in the book Dungeons and Dreamers, paints a less than flattering picture of Garriott as well:

He refused to learn what the new processor could do. Why should he? He completed his assignments, but he refused to include the latest features of the new processor in his work. He professor wasn’t amused and knocked points off Richard’s grade for each successive sign of intractability. With each dropped point, Richard’s motivation waned until he finally hit bottom: an F in the class, and a determination to get out. He just couldn’t take the demands of the professor seriously.

What seems pretty clear, at least from this version, is that young Richard by this stage could already be a difficult person to deal with, arrogant and uninterested in compromise. There’s no reason we should really blame him for that today. Barely 20 years old, he was already featuring in glossy magazines under his nom de plume Lord British, selling many thousands of games and making a lot of money. (Although, as we’ll see shortly, exactly how much is another of those details that are still somewhat in question.) How many young men wouldn’t become a bit arrogant under those circumstances, uninterested in sitting through boring classes offering knowledge they didn’t feel they needed? Suffice to say that it’s worth remembering that there was a prickly side to Garriott as we continue his story in this post and later ones.

With the decision made to drop not only the class but also university entirely, Richard was faced with the daunting prospect of telling his family about it. Said family was, in his own words, “painfully overeducated.” With an astronaut father, he had been raised in a culture of extreme achievement, in which graduate degrees were not so much an achievement as a baseline expectation; both of his parents and, eventually, all three of his siblings would have one or more. Now Richard had to tell his father, a man very skeptical of this whole games thing anyway, that he was going to drop out well short of his undergraduate degree to pursue them full time. “We were pretty sure he was going to kill Richard,” remembered his brother Robert. The conversation first ended in an uneasy compromise, in which Richard would come back to Houston to devote most of his time to his game, but would take part-time classes at the University of Houston. This he did, albeit in somewhat desultory fashion, for about a year, until his father finally accepted that the games industry offered more opportunity than university for Richard at this moment. “When this ends,” said his father, “you’ll go back to school and get a real job.” That day, of course, would never come.

In the midst of the crisis of the 6809 class, another was also unfolding in Garriott’s life. California Pacific, the publisher who had discovered Akalabeth and whose head Al Remmers had named Ultima, hit the financial skids. At first blush it’s hard to understand how CP could be in trouble; Akalabeth and Ultima had both been big hits. They had other bestsellers in their stable as well, such as the aforementioned Apple-oids, in an era when profit margins were absolutely astronomical in comparison to anything that would come later. Garriott has claimed from time to time that Remmers and the others at CP all had huge drug habits, that they literally smoked up all of their profits (and then some) and ran their company out of business. While this is suitably dramatic, it should be remembered that Garriott was in Texas while CP was based in California, and that they rarely met personally. I asked around a bit, but could find no smoking gun, no one who remembered drugs to be any more of a factor at CP than at many of the other California publishers, where they sometimes hovered around the edges of corporate social lives but rarely (the sad story of Bob Davis aside) took center stage. It seems at least as likely that CP, like so many other companies in this era run by ex-hobbyists and hackers, simply lacked anything in the way of practical business sense. To Richard, raised in the straitlaced bosom of the Johnson Space Center, a joint or two on the weekend might not have been readily distinguishable from hardcore drug addiction.

Regardless of the cause, CP went under in late 1981 owing Garriott a substantial amount of money. When we ask how substantial, however, the picture immediately becomes unclear again. In places Garriott has claimed that he literally received nothing from CP for Ultima, that they paid him only for Akalabeth. Yet Dungeons and Dreamers claims that by the time he enrolled in that 6809 course he had made “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” a figure that seems difficult to attribute to Akalabeth alone. In an interview with Warren Spector, he stated that he was making “many times more” than his astronaut father by that time, and that Ultima had been “five to ten times” as lucrative as Akalabeth. Further complicating all of this are the chronological errors that are rife in accounts of Garriott’s early career, which I’ve written about before. Some accounts, for instance, have Garriott quitting university in the aftermath of Ultima II, which is clearly incorrect, and perhaps reflects a conflation of his stay at the University of Texas with that at the University of Houston. So all we can confidently say is that CP went out of business owing Garriott something, and that he is still rather angry about it to this day, referring to CP as “dumb” and “bozos” in that Warren Spector interview. (All of which seems rather harsh language to employ against the folks that discovered him, named the franchise that made him famous, and largely created the whole legend of his alter ego Lord British, but so be it.) He briefly brought in his older brother Robert, who was pursuing an MBA at MIT, to try to collect from the failed company, but found that the old adage about blood and turnips definitely applied in this case.

Garriott may have suddenly been without a publisher, but he was also one of the most well-known personalities in adventure gaming. Other companies immediately started calling. Richard, as we already noted, was feeling his oats a bit by this time. He proved to be a very demanding signee, wanting a very high royalty rate. But the real sticking point was his demand that his game be packaged with an elaborate cloth map. That odd demand — remember, this was still before Infocom revolutionized computer-game packaging with Deadline — was yet another legacy of that busy fall of 1981, when he’d first seen a new movie called Time Bandits.

A production of George Harrison’s Handmade Films which involved many alumni of Monty Python, Time Bandits is the slightly manic story of a group of rogue dwarfs who go hopscotching through space and time with the aid of a map which charts gates or rips in the fabric of space-time that blink regularly in and out of existence. Garriott was of the perfect age and personality to fall for Monty Python’s brand of zany irreverence. What really fascinated him about the movie, though, and to an almost bizarre degree, was that map. He and his friends saw the movie again and again at the $1.00 matinee, trying to sketch as much of the map as they could from the brief glimpses of it they got during the movie. Richard, you see, thought that this mechanic would be perfect for his new game; he wanted to know how the map really worked. Eventually he came to the disillusioning realization that there was no logic to it, that it was a pretty prop and nothing more. Still, he wanted to put time gates in his game, and he wanted to include an ornate cloth map to chart them. As publishers soon learned to their chagrin, this was as un-negotiable as his royalty demands; Richard was willing to give up games and return to university for a “real” career if he couldn’t find someone willing to meet them. Luckily, in the end he did — and none other than On-Line Systems. Richard may have been difficult, but Ken Williams knew a software star when he saw one. By the time Ultima II was previewed in the March 1982 issue of Softline, the basics of its insanely ambitious design were all in place, including time travel to five different eras and space travel to all of the planets of the solar system. Also in place was the deal with On-Line.

Without the distractions of a full-time university course-load, Garriott could now work full-time on his new game. Yet progress proved slower than expected. He had jumped in at the deep end in attempting to code something as ambitious as this as literally his first assembly-language project, ever. Ken tried to be as patient and encouraging as possible, keeping his in-house programming staff available as a sort of technical-support hotline for Richard. When Richard truly looked to be foundering about mid-year, he invited him to stay in Oakhurst for a time in one of the flats he had bought up around town, to work in On-Line’s offices and enjoy the feedback and comaraderie of the group. It seems to be here that the relationship really began to deteriorate.

On-Line wasn’t exactly Animal House, but they did like to party and have their fun on occasion. Richard, who for all his early success and fame had nevertheless lived a very sheltered life, didn’t fit in at all. “I’m not sure they liked me,” he later said. I recently asked John Williams about Garriott’s time in Oakhurst. He stated that everyone did their best to welcome Richard. For his part, however, Richard showed no interest in attending parties or in any of the outdoor activities that just about everyone at On-Line enjoyed. Still, John stated:

On a personal level, I really liked Richard and I think most at Sierra did. He was scary smart, knew what he wanted and did what needed to be done to make it happen, and in general was just an impressive person. He was quite young then – but you could tell he was going places. I had no idea how far he would go then. Certainly I never would have guessed outer space – but if he had said he planned to go, I’d have believed him.

Perhaps the strains on Richard’s relationship with Ken arose from that very “impressiveness.” As John told me, “There are very few people as smart and driven as Ken — and Richard was one of them.” Both were accustomed to being the center of their social universes; after all, it’s not every kid who can convince his friends to spend hours in a movie theater watching the same film over and over, trying to copy an esoteric map onto paper from the most occasional onscreen glimpses. Ken could be gruff and even confrontational, particularly so with people he thought were really good but whom he also thought needed that extra push to reach their full potential. He may have thought Richard needed just this sort of pressure to finish a game On-Line had originally projected to release in April. Yet Richard, with two hit games under his belt and a big contract from Ken himself proving his worth, was unwilling to be treated as a junior partner in anything. Serious tension was the inevitable result.

At the end of it all Richard may have been heartily glad to return to the familiarity of suburban Houston, but his sojourn in California does seem to have accomplished Ken’s purpose of getting him onto some sort of track to just finish his game already. Ultima II finally appeared, complete with the cloth map and deluxe packaging Garriott had demanded, just in time for Christmas, and just as On-Line Systems changed their name to Sierra Online. (The original packaging uses the latter name, but the actual program still refers to the former.) For the game’s big debut on the all-important trade-show circuit, Garriott dutifully appeared in Sierra’s booth at that December’s San Francisco AppleFest as Lord British, dressed in his full SCA regalia.

The game he was promoting had taken a full eighteen months to create, an unprecedentedly long time even in comparison to previous monster efforts like Sierra’s own Time Zone. Like that game, Ultima II proved to be a deeply flawed design, whose internal messiness echoed much of the stress and confusion that had marked its maker’s life over the months of development. At the same time, however, it may have been a necessary step on the way to the later, more celebrated Ultimas. We’ll talk about both aspects next time.

Playing Ultima II, Part 1
October 15, 2012

I thought we’d take a trip together into Ultima II today. I’m not going to overdo the exercise, as that wouldn’t be much fun for you or me; there’s a lot of sameness and even a fair amount of outright tedium involved in winning the game. I will, however, try to hit most of the highlights and give you a fair picture of what sort of experience the game has on offer. As always, feel free to jump in and play for yourself if you like. Ultima II is available for sale at Good Old Games in combination with Ultima I and III. As we’ll see, it has plenty of issues, but there are certainly worse ways to spend six bucks.

When we first create our character and start Ultima II proper, we might wonder just what Richard Garriott spent eighteen months working on. Aside from some animation that has been added to the water, everything looks just as it did in the last game. All of the graphics tiles appear to be exactly the same as those used last time around. As soon as we start to interact with the game, however, we have reason to bless Garriott’s move to assembly-language programming; everything is much, much snappier.

The map over which we wander is also different: this time we’re adventuring on Earth rather than Garriott’s old Dungeons and Dragons world of Sosaria. Moving over such familiar continents brings out the really weird scaling of the Ultima maps in a way that the previous game never did. Here London is exactly nine steps away from the southern tip of Italy, Africa eighteen steps from north to south. Ultima I presumably represented similarly immense distances with each tile, but because it was a fantasy creation I never really thought about it that way. I suppose there’s nothing absolutely prohibiting each step of our journey over the world map from representing days of travel. Yet Ultima II just doesn’t feel like it’s playing out over such an immense time scale; if it is, then the process of winning the game must involve decades (or more) of game time. And even that doesn’t explain why it’s possible to construct a bridge between North America and Europe by lining up a handful of ships. It makes a constant reminder that this is a highly constructed, highly artificial computer landscape we’re wandering through. That fine, I suppose… weird at first, but fine.

Speaking of weird: Ultima II may just have the most nonsensical fictional context I’ve ever seen in a CRPG — and that, my friends is really saying something. Let me do my best to explain it. The screenshot below shows us passing one of the “time doors” that blink in and out of existence at various places on the landscape; charting them is the whole point of the ornate cloth map that was such a priority for Garriott. Through them we can journey to primordial history, when the Earth still contained just the single über-continent Pangea; to “B.C.,” a time “just before the dawn of civilization as history records it” where we begin the game; to 1990; or to the “Aftermath” of 2111, when the Earth is a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s also possible to go to the “Time of Legends,” a “time before time, peopled by creatures of myth and lore.” Along with the time doors themselves, Legends is the most obvious direct lift from Time Bandits in the game. The same place existed with the same name in the movie, and, there as here, was the scene of the final showdown between good and evil.

It seems that after we defeated the evil Mondain to win Ultima I, his protege Minax, “enchantress of evil,” took up his cause, albeit using a subtler approach:

For Minax is not content to spread evil among the good, causing misery and pain. She prefers to sow seeds of evil in the good and thus set the good against the good, leaving no person untouched. Destruction abounds — and those horrors known only to the once good, guilt and horror and self-hatred, taint the Earth.

The climax was the holocaust of 2111, Minax’s greatest triumph to date, in which ancient civilizations born of love of beauty and wisdom and thought turned upon one another and, in their vicious anger and hate, destroyed almost all of the very Earth that had nurtured them.

What makes no sense about all this is that Ultima I, you’ll remember, took place on Sosaria. Now we’re suddenly fighting the legacy of Mondain on Earth for reasons that, despite furious ret-coning by fans in later years, go completely unexplained in the game itself. Garriott said later that he chose to set Ultima II on Earth because “time travel needs context.” In other words, we need a familiar historical frame of reference on which to hang everything to get the contrast between, say, prehistoric times and contemporary society. Hopscotching through the timeline of a fictional world whose history means nothing to us just isn’t all that interesting. All of that makes perfect sense — except that the version of history depicted in the game has little to do with our Earth’s. Why are orcs wandering about contemporary Earth attacking people? Assuming Garriott didn’t have big plans for world domination in his immediate future, why does Lord British apparently rule the world of 1990 from his castle? Why can we buy phasers and power armor from merchants in prehistoric times? It feels like two (or more) games that smashed together, with everything that made sense about either spinning off into oblivion. Put less charitably, it all just seems really, really dumb, especially considering that Garriott could have had his time doors without at least the most obvious of the anachronisms just by setting his game on Sosaria. Better yet, he could have just made his time doors the moon gates of later Ultimas; there is absolutely no concept here of actions in one time affecting the others. Garriott gains nothing from time travel but a sop to his Time Bandits fixation and a whole lot of stupid.

Anyway, we make our way to “Towne Linda,” located on the southern tip of Italy in B.C. When we enter we see one of the most obvious demonstrations of the work Garriott has been doing on his game engine since Ultima I: towns are now portrayed using the same tile graphics as the wilderness areas, filling many screens. Every city and village is now a unique creation, with its own geography and personality and its own selection of shops and services. There aren’t a lot of towns, just a few per time period (another thing that seems weird in the context of wandering a map of the Earth), but they do much to highlight the primacy of exploration over combat that has always made the Ultima experience unique. In the same spirit, it’s now possible to talk with anyone and everyone in the towns. In fact, it’s necessary to do so to pick up vital clues and information.

As Garriott has noted many times, walking around in the early Ultima can be a bit like wandering through the psyche of the young Richard, meeting the people, places, and interests that filled his time. Towne Linda, for instance, is named after his little sister, with whom he was very close. In a way this is kind of a fascinating concept — the videogame as intellectual landscape. As I’ve said before, one can picture an Annotated Ultima of a (fictional?) future where videogames are accepted as a form of literature. In it some hyper-dedicated scholar has laboriously run down all of the references and shout-outs in the same way that some have written books about Ulysses‘s allusions that are longer than Ulysses. And anyway, who can fault a guy for adoring his little sister? The problem comes when Garriott decides to get witty on us.

Now, Garriott is many things, with adjectival superlatives like “brilliant” very possibly among them. However, he’s not really a funny guy, and when he tries to be one here the results can be painful. Perhaps most grating, just because we have to see them over and over, are the generic phrases spouted by those for whom Garriott hasn’t written anything specific to say: like the guards who say, “Pay your taxes!” (why would a guard say that?), or the wizards with their immortal “Hex-E-Poo-Hex-On-You!” But even those with something unique to say are equally tedious, a jumble of obvious pop-culture references that isn’t exactly Gilmore Girls in its sophistication along with plenty of pointless non sequiturs. It feels like a teenage boy trying to ape Monty Python, which is just about the surest route to the profoundly unfunny I know of. Pity poor Richard; most of us left the humor of our teenage years in the past, but Garriott made the mistake of gifting his to the world. Reading some of the worst of this stuff brings on a sort of contact embarrassment for the guy.

Time Bandits: you have a lot to answer for. I’m sure Garriott imagined Ultima II as a manic, eccentric thrill ride like the movie, but, as he definitively demonstrates here, that tone is harder than it looks to pull off. At worst, it comes off like one of those amateur IF Competition entries in which the (usually young) author, realizing he’s written a game that makes no sense, tries to compensate by making it into an extended meta-comedy about the absurdities of text adventures — an exercise that fools exactly no one.

Like in Ultima I, saving the world from the forces of Evil in Ultima II requires that we not get too hung up on being Good. If we try to buy all of our equipment, food, and hit points (Ultima II persists with the bizarre mechanic of its two predecessors of making hit points a purchasable commodity), we find ourselves in a Sisyphus-like cycle of being able to earn just enough from killing monsters to keep ourselves in food and hit points, but not enough to buy better equipment or for doing any of a number of necessary things, like giving bribes to certain townspeople. To get ahead we need to, at a minimum, steal our food. Further, getting into a number of special areas requires keys that we can acquire only by attacking and killing town guards in cold blood.

Getting from continent to continent requires a ship. In the screenshot at above right we’ve used some of our ill-gotten keys to steal one from the village of Port Boniface. Once we deal with this sea monster that apparently lives in the harbor, we’ll be home free. Since towns reset themselves every time you leave and bloody murder has no other consequences, you eventually start feeling sort of like the CRPG Addict did when he played:

As far as I can tell (and I admit I didn’t keep a careful log), the only recurring characters are Lord British, Iolo, and Gwenno. The latter two are encased in a grassy area in…I don’t know. One of the towns. Remembering how I killed Gwenno for her key in Ultima I and having by now fully internalized my role as a serial killer, I landed a bi-plane in the grassy area and hacked them both to death.

For my part, I found that — gameplay tip here! — I could earn gold fastest by attacking this one townsperson who is always right at the entrance of the town of Le Jester in prehistoric Africa. I must have killed him and run out of town before the guards could get to me 500 times. Yes, Ultima II makes serial killers of us all.

Next time we’ll penetrate all the way into Minax’s lair in the Time of Legends. The assortment of monsters that greet us when we step through a time door to go there is a pretty good sign that we’re in the right place…

Playing Ultima II, Part 2
October 17, 2012

Despite allegedly taking place mostly on our Earth and sometimes even in (basically) our time, very little about Ultima II has much in common with the world that we know. One of the more interesting exceptions is the town of New San Antonio, which is right where you’d expect to find it in 1990. Oh, there are still unanswered questions; it wouldn’t be Ultima II without them. For instance, why is it called New San Antonio? Still, the town hosts an airport where we can steal the second coolest vehicle in the game: an airplane, an obvious nod to the San Antonio of our own world, which hosts two major Air Force bases. Having grown up in Houston and attended university in Austin, Richard Garriott would have been very familiar with San Antonio’s personality. One of the bases, Lackland, houses a huge training center that has earned it, and by extension San Antonio, the nickname of “Gateway to the Air Force.” Wandering the River Walk and other tourist areas around the time of one of the various graduation ceremonies is like strolling through a Norman Rockwell painting — a sea of earnest, clean-cut young men and women in uniform accompanied by proud, doting parents and siblings.

I’ve spent a lot of time already pointing out the cognitive dissonance and design failures that dog Ultima II. Never fear, I’ll get back to doing more of that in a moment. But the airplane affords an opportunity to note what Ultima II, and the Ultima series in general, do so right. As nonsensical as its world is, it consistently entices us to explore it, to find out what lies behind this locked door or at the bottom of that dungeon. Most of the time — actually, always in the case of the dungeon — the answer is “nothing.” But we find something really neat just often enough that our sense of wonder never entirely deserts us. In this case we come upon an actual, functioning airplane. Nothing in the manual or anywhere else has prepared us for this, but here it is. We look to our reference chart of one-key commands to see what seems to fit best, experiment a bit, and we’re off into the wild blue yonder. The airplane is kind of hard to control, and we can only land on grass, but we can fly through time doors to range over any of the time zones in the game, even buzz the monsters that guard Minax’s lair in the heart of the Time of Legends. We made this crazy, undocumented discovery for ourselves, so we own the experience fully. When we take flight for the first time, it’s kind of magic.

That feeling can be hard for modern players, who have every detail about every aspect of the game at their fingertips thanks to a myriad of FAQs, Wikis, and walkthroughs, to capture. Yet it’s at the heart of what made the Ultima games so entrancing in their day. Games like Wizardry gave us a more rigorous strategic challenge, but Ultima gave us a world to explore. This likely goes a long way toward reconciling the rave reviews Ultima II received upon its release (not to mention the fond memories some of you have expressed in the comments) with the contemporary consensus of bloggers, reviewers, and FAQ-writers who revisit the game today, who generally hold it a boring, poorly designed misfire and by far the worst of the 1980s Ultimas. I don’t so much want to disagree with the latter sentiment as I want to also remember that even here in their worst incarnation there was just something special about the Ultima games. They speak to a different part of our nature than most CRPGs — I’m tempted to say a better part. The joy of exploration and discovery can make us overlook much of the weirdness of not only the world and the story but also of the core game systems, some of which (like the need to buy hit points as you would food) I’ve mentioned, but many others of which (like the fact that earning experience points and leveling up confer absolutely no benefits other than bragging rights, or that the gold and experience you earn from monsters has no relation to their strength) I haven’t.

What could be cooler than an airplane, you ask? The answer, of course, is a spaceship. We find a few in the one town in 2111, Pirate’s Harbor, located approximately where we might expect Moscow to be. (Apparently the Soviet Union won World War III.) We steal one and we’re off into space, in what must already be the hundredth videogame tribute to Star Wars‘s warp-drive sequences.

It’s possible to visit all nine planets of the solar system. (In 1982 Pluto was still considered a full-fledged planet.) As with Earth itself, however, Ultima II‘s version of the solar system doesn’t have much in common with reality as we know it. Here Mercury’s terrain consists of “water and swamp”; Jupiter of “water and grass”; Uranus of “forest and grass.” Owen Garriott, Richard’s scientist/astronaut father, must have been outraged. The rest of us can marvel instead that not one of these planets contains anything to make it worth visiting. Indeed, Ultima II can feel like a box of spinning gears that often don’t connect to anything else. In addition to the planets, there are the similarly pointless dungeons, which waste a new dungeon-delving engine that marks as big an advance over Ultima I‘s dungeons as Ultima II‘s town engine is over Ultima I‘s generic towns. For some reasons spells only work in the (pointless) dungeons, meaning that there’s absolutely no reason to make one’s character a cleric or wizard, unless one feels like playing a hugely underpowered fighter. In space again, it’s actually possible — albeit pointless — to dive and climb and turn our spaceship, implying that Garriott originally intended to include a space-combat section like that of Ultima I but never got around to it. Thus, while Ultima II is an impressive machine, it feels like a half-assembled one. A couple of those meta-textual dialogs that are everywhere perhaps offers a clue why: “Isn’t Ultima II finished yet?” asks Howie the Pest; “Tomorrow — for sure!” says Richard Garriott. The only possible riposte to this complaint is that a contemporary player wouldn’t know that planets, dungeons, and so much else were superfluous. She’d presumably explore them thoroughly and get much the same thrill she’d get if her explorations were actually, you know, necessary. I’ll let you decide whether that arguments works for you, or whether Ultima II plays a rather cheap game of bait and switch.

In addition to all the unconnected bits and bobs, there are also problems with pieces that are important. The most famous of the glitches is the ship-duplication bug. We can make a new ship by boarding an existing enemy ship and sailing one square away; we’re left with a ship under our control and the original enemy, which we can continue to board again and again to crank out an endless supply of ships. It can be so much fun to make bridges of ships between islands and continents that it’s almost tempting to label this error a feature, one more of those juicy moments of discovery that make the Ultima games so unique. Other bugs, though, such as certain squares on the map where we simply cannot land a blow against a monster, are more annoying. And there’s one bug that is truly unforgivable. Flying into space requires a certain strength score. There is only one place in the game where we can raise our statistics: the clerk at the Hotel California (don’t ask!) in New San Antonio will sometimes randomly raise one when bribed appropriately. In the original release of the game, however, he will never raise our strength, thus making the game unwinnable for anyone who didn’t choose a fighter as her character class and put a lot of extra points into strength. Sierra did release a patch that at least corrected this problem — one of the first patches ever released for a game.

But, you might be asking, why should not being able to go into space make the game unwinnable if there’s nothing there to find anyway? Well, there actually is one thing we need there, but not on any of the familiar planets. Sifting through all of the jokes and non-sequiturs spouted by characters in the towns has revealed hints that a tenth planet, “Planet X,” exists. There we can pick up a blessing from one Father Antos, which in turn will let us buy a ring from a fellow back in New San Antonio on Earth. All we actually need to beat the Ultima II endgame is: the blessing; the ring; a special sword (“Enilno” — “On-Line” backward; the meta-textual fun just never stops!) that we also can buy in New San Antonio; and of course a character with good enough equipment and statistics to survive the final battle with Minax. She’s tricky, constantly teleporting from one end of her lair to the other, but in the end we finish her.

Like so much else in the game, the final message doesn’t really make sense. The optimistic reviewer for Computer Gaming World took it to suggest that Sierra might release new scenario disks to utilize some of those uselessly spinning gears. But that was not to be. Instead Ultima II is seen in its best light as a sort of technology demonstration, or a preview of the possibilities held out by Garriott’s approach to the CRPG. A better tighter, finished design, combined with another slate of technology upgrades, would let him do the job right next time.

Level 9
October 22, 2012

Before the likes of the Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81 and the Acorn Atom which I discussed in a previous post on British computing, there were the solder-them-yourself kits which began to arrive in 1978. The most long-lived and successful of these were the products of a small company called Nascom. The obvious American counterpart to the Nascom was the original kit PC, the Altair. That said, the Nascom was actually a much more complete and capable machine once you got it put together (no easy feat). It came, for example, with a real keyboard in lieu of toggle switches, and with video output in lieu of blinking lights. Like the Altair, the Nascom was open and flexible and eminently hackable, a blank canvas just waiting to be painted upon. (How could it not be open when every would-be user had to literally build her machine for herself?) In the case of the Altair, those qualities led to the so-called S-100 bus standard that, in combination with the CP/M operating system, came to dominate business computing in the years prior to the arrival of the IBM PC. In case of the Nascom, they spawned the 80-Bus architecture that could eventually also run CP/M, thanks to the Nascom’s use of the Zilog Z-80 processor that was also found in most of the American CP/M machines. A hardcore of committed users would cling to their Nascoms and other 80-Bus machines well into the 1980s even in the face of slicker, friendlier mass-market machines that would soon be selling in the millions.

One of the Nascom buyers was a 25-year-old named Pete Austin. He had finished a psychology degree at Cambridge when, “looking for an excuse to stay there for an extra year” before facing the real world of work and responsibility, he signed up for a one-year course in computing. He discovered he was very, very good at it. After finishing the course, he began a career as a programmer, mostly coding applications in COBOL on big-iron machines for banks and other big institutions. He quickly found that he wasn’t as excited by the world of business computing as he had been by the more freewheeling blue-sky research at Cambridge. But while programming accounting packages and the like may not have been exciting, it did pay the bills nicely enough. At least he earned enough to buy a Nascom for some real hacking.

After buying and building the Nascom, he spent a lot of time tinkering on it with his younger brothers Mike and Nicolas, both of whom were if anything even more technically inclined than Pete himself. Together the brothers developed a number of programming tools, initially for their own use, like a set of extensions to the Nascom’s standard BASIC and an assembler for writing Z-80 machine language. In 1981 they decided to try selling some of these utilities in the nascent British software market. They took out advertisements in a magazine or two under the name Level 9 Computing, a generic but catchy name that could refer to anything from an academic qualification to the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno to a level in a videogame to a Dungeons and Dragon dungeon or character level. They were rewarded with a modest number of orders. Encouraged, they added some simple games to their lineup, mostly the usual clones of current arcade hits. More indicative of their future direction, however, was Fantasy, a sort of proto-text adventure written by Pete. Some earlier experiences had influenced its creation.

Already a dedicated wargamer, the young Pete had been introduced to Dungeons and Dragons while at Cambridge. He promptly became obsessed with D&D and another early tabletop RPG, Empire of the Petal Throne. He later said, “In the evening we either played D&D or went down to the pub… and played Petal Throne.” Still, it took him a surprisingly long time to connect his interest in computers to his interest in RPGs. Cambridge was the premiere computing university of Britain, the atmosphere within its computer science department perhaps not terribly far removed from that at MIT. As such, there were plenty of games to be had, including some early proto-CRPGs obviously inspired by tabletop D&D. Pete toyed with them, but found them too primitive, underwhelming in comparison to playing with friends. (Ironically, Pete left the university just before the rise of the Phoenix mainframe text adventure boom, about which more in a future article.) The spark that would guide his future career wasn’t kindled until he was working in business computing, and had left D&D behind along with his old gaming buddies in Cambridge. On one of his employers’ systems, he stumbled across an installation of Adventure. Yes, now follows the story I’ve told you so many times before: long story short, he was entranced. Fantasy was the first product of his fascination. But Pete wanted to do more than create a stripped-down shadow of Adventure on the Nascom. He wanted to port the whole thing.

This was an audacious proposition to say the least. When Scott Adams had been similarly inspired, he had been wise enough not to try to recreate Adventure itself on his 16 K TRS-80, but rather to write a smaller, simpler game of his own design. A year after Adams’s Adventureland, Gordon Letwin of Microsoft ported the full game onto a 32 K TRS-80. The Austins also had 32 K to work with, but they lacked one crucial advantage that Letwin had been able to employ: a disk drive to fetch text off of disk and into memory as it was needed during play. With only a cassette drive on their Nascom, they would have to pack the entire game — program, data, and text — into 32 K. It looked an impossible task.

Meanwhile the Austins were mulling another problem that will be familiar to readers of this blog. The burgeoning British PC industry was in a state of uncertain flux. In yet another piece of evidence that hackers don’t always make the best businessmen, Nascom the company had suddenly collapsed during 1981. They were rescued by Lucas Industries, famed manufacturers of the worst electronic systems ever to be installed into automobiles (“Lucas, the Prince of Darkness”; “If Lucas made guns, wars would not start”; “Why do the British drink warm beer? Because Lucas makes their refrigerators!”), but their future still looked mighty uncertain in the face of the newer, cheaper computers from Sinclair, Acorn, and Commodore that you didn’t have to solder together for yourself. Wouldn’t it be great if the Austins could devise a system to let them run their game on any computer that met some minimal specification like having 32 K of memory? And what if said system could be designed so that games written using it would actually consume less memory than they would if coded natively? We’ve already met the P-Machine and the Z-Machine. Now, it’s time to meet the A-Machine (“A” stands for Austin, naturally).

In some ways Level 9’s A-Code system is even more impressive than Infocom’s technology. Although Level 9’s development tools would never quite reach the same level of sophistication as Infocom’s with their minicomputer-based ZIL programming language, the A-Machine itself is a minor technical miracle. While Infocom also targeted 32 K machines with their earliest games, they always required a disk drive for storage. The Austins lacked this luxury, meaning they had to develop unbelievably efficient text-compression routines. They were understandably tight-lipped about this technology that as much as anything represented the key to their success during their heyday, but they did let some details slip out in an interview with Sinclair User in 1985:

Pete’s text compressor has been a feature of all Level 9’s mammoth adventures. It works by running through all the messages and searching for common strings.

For example, “ing” might occur frequently. The compressor replaces “ing” with a single code wherever it occurs. That done, it goes through again, and again, each time saving more space. “It doesn’t always pick up what you’d expect it to,” explains Pete. In the phrase “in the room” the compressor might decide that it was more efficient to use a code for “n th” and “e r” rather than pick out “in” and “the.” That is not something which occurs to the human mind.

The Austins used a similar technique in their actual A-Machine program code, condensing frequently used sequences of instructions into a single virtual-machine “opcode” that could be defined in one place and called again and again for minimal memory overhead.

Having started with a comparison to Infocom’s technology, I do want to remind you that the Austins developed the A-Code system without the same pool of experience and technology to draw upon that Infocom had — no DEC minicomputers for development work, no deep bench of computer-science graduate-degree-holders. The youngest brother, Michael, was not even yet of university age. Yet, incredibly, they pulled it off. After some months they had an accurate if not quite word-for-word rendering of the original Adventure running in A-Code on their faithful Nascom.

But now Pete realized they had a problem. Level 9 had taken out some advertisements for the game describing its “over 200 individually described locations.” It sounded pretty good as ad copy. Unfortunately, they had neglected to actually confirm that figure. When they sat down and counted at last, they came up with just 139. So, determined to be true to their word, they decided to start squeezing in more rooms. They replaced the original’s simple (if profoundly unfair) endgame in the adventuring repository with an extended 70-room sequence in which the player must escape a flood and rescue 300 Elvish prisoners. Just like that Level 9 had their 200-room game, and they continued to trumpet it happily, the first sign of a persistent obsession they would have with room counts in the years to come. (The obsession would reach comical heights in 1983 with the infamous 7000-room Snowball and its 6800 rooms of identical empty spaceship corridors.)

The Austins released Colossal Adventure on the Nascom in early 1982, selling it by mail order through magazine advertisements. They copied each order by hand onto a store-bought TDK cassette tape. Into the TDK case they shoved a tiny mimeographed square of paper telling how to load the game. Scott Adams’s original Ziploc-bag-and-baby-formula-liner packaging was sophisticated by comparison. But they sold several hundred games in the first few months. And, with the work of tools development behind them, they were able to follow up with two more equally lengthy, entirely original sequels — Adventure Quest and Dungeon Adventure — before the end of 1982.

Colossal Adventure in particular makes for an interesting experience today. Prior to the endgame, it’s mostly faithful to its inspiration, but there are just enough changes to keep you on your toes. To create a context for the endgame, Pete grafted a plot onto the original game. You are now exploring the caverns at the behest of an elvish warrior. The axe-throwing dwarfs that haunt the caverns are not just annoying, but Evil; it is they who are holding the elf’s people prisoner. Certain areas are re-purposed to fit the new plot. The Hall of the Mountain King, in the original a faithful reconstruction of a cavern Will Crowther knew from his journeys into Bedquilt Cave, becomes here a sinister monument to the dwarfs’ conquests; Spelunker Today becomes a dwarven propaganda rag.

Pete did tinker here and there with the structure of the game as well. The outdoors are fleshed out quite a bit, with additional locations and (naturally) an additional maze, and a few familiar items are found in different — usually less accessible — places. Whether out of a sense of mercy or because his game engine wouldn’t support it, he also eliminates the need to response “YES” to solve the dragon “puzzle.” Much less mercifully, he inexplicably reduces the inventory limit to just four objects, which makes everything much, much more difficult than it ought to be, and makes finishing the game without buying more batteries for the lantern (and thus getting the full score) well-nigh impossible. The inventory limit also makes mapping the several mazes even more painful.

For its part, the endgame is absurdly difficult, but it also has a sense of onrushing momentum that was still rare in this era. Literally onrushing, actually; you are trying to escape a massive flood that fills the complex room by room. It’s impressive both from a storytelling and a technical perspective. For all their old-school tendencies, Level 9 would always show a strong interest in making their games narrative experiences. Dungeon Adventure and, especially, Adventure Quest show a similar determination to present an actual plot. The latter takes place decades after the events of Colossal Adventure, but begins on the same patch of forest. It does a surprisingly good, almost moving job of showing the passage of time.

It soon evolves into a classic quest narrative that could be torn from Greek mythology, with the player needing to make her way through a series of relatively self-contained lands to arrive at “the Black Tower of the Demon Lord.”

Sprinkled increasingly liberally through the three games are references to Tolkien’s Middle Earth — Black Towers, balrogs, High Councils, Minas Tirith. Still, they never feel so much like an earnest attempt to play in Tolkien’s world as a grab bag of cool fantasy tropes. It almost feels like Pete kind of wandered into Middle Earth accidentally in his quest for Cool Stuff to put in his games. As he later said, “Middle Earth was a convenient fantasy setting. It was a way of telling people the type of world they were getting.” Where another milieu offers something equally cool, he uses that; Adventure Quest, for example, features a sandworm straight out of Dune. All of this was, of course, completely unauthorized. After not mentioning the Tolkien references in early promotion, Level 9 actually advertised the games for a while as the Middle Earth Trilogy. Then, presumably in response to some very unhappy Tolkien-estate lawyers, they went the other way, excising all of the references and renaming the games the Jewels of Darkness trilogy.

Before I leave you, I just want to emphasize again what an extraordinary achievement it was to get these games into 32 K. Not only are they large games by any standards, brimming with dozens of puzzles, but — unlike, say, the Scott Adams games — the text also reads grammatically, absent that strangled quality that marks an author trying to save every possible character. Better yet, Pete knows how to create a sense of atmosphere. His prose is blessedly competent.

That’s not, however, to say that I can really recommend them to players today. In addition to quality prose, they’re also loaded with old-school annoyances: a two-word parser (in their original incarnation; the parser at least was updated in later releases); mazes every time you turn around; endless rinse-and-repeat learning by death; and always that brutal four-item inventory limit. They were damn impressive games in their time, but they don’t quite manage to transcend it. Fortunately, there were lots more adventures still to come from Level 9.

In which spirit: by the end of 1982, Level 9 had, thanks to the magic of A-Code, leaped from the Nascom onto the Sinclair Spectrum and the BBC Micro, ready to ride a full-on adventuring craze that would sweep Britain over the next few years. We’ll start to talk about the new machines that would enable that — including the latter two in the list above — next time.

The BBC Micro
October 29, 2012

Continental Europe is notable for its almost complete absence during the early years of the PC revolution. Even Germany, by popular (or stereotypical) perception a land of engineers, played little role; when PCs started to enter West German homes in large numbers in the mid-1980s, they were almost entirely machines of American or British design. Yet in some ways European governments were quite forward-thinking in their employment of computer technology in comparison to that of the United States. As early as 1978 the French postal service began rolling out a computerized public network called Minitel, which not only let users look up phone numbers and addresses but also book travel, buy mail-order products, and send messages to one another. A similar service in West Germany, Bildschirmtext, began shortly after, and both services thrived until the spread of home Internet access over the course of the 1990s gradually made them obsolete.

The U.S. had no equivalent to these public services. Yes, there was the social marvel that was PLATO, but it was restricted to students and faculty fortunate enough to attend a university on the network; The Source, but you had to both pay a substantial fee for the service and be able to afford the pricy PC you needed to access it; the early Internet, but it was also restricted to a relative technical and scientific elite fortunate enough to be at a university or company that allowed them access. It’s tempting to draw an (overly?) broad comparison here between American and European cultural values: the Americans were all about individual, personal computers that one could own and enjoy privately, while the Europeans treated computing as a communal resource to be shared and developed as a social good. But I’ll let you head further down that fraught path for yourself, if you like.

In this area as in so many others, Britain seemed stuck somewhere in the middle of this cultural divide. Although the British PC industry lagged a steady three years behind the American during the early years, from 1978 on there were plenty of eager PC entrepreneurs in Britain. Notably, however, the British government was also much more willing than the American to involve itself in bringing computers to the people. Margaret Thatcher may have dreamed of dismantling the postwar welfare state entirely and remaking the British economy on the American model, but plenty of MPs even within her own Conservative party weren’t ready to go quite that far. Thus the British post developed a Minitel equivalent of its own, Prestel, even before the German system debuted. But for the young British PC industry the most important role would be played by the British government’s broadcasting service, the BBC — and not without, as is so typical when government mixes with private enterprise, a storm of controversy and accusation.

Computers first turned up on the BBC in early 1980, when the network ran a three-part documentary series called The Silicon Factor just as the first Sinclair ZX80s and Acorn Atoms were reaching customers. It largely dealt with computing as an economic and social force, and wasn’t above a little scare mongering — “Did you know the micro would cut out so-and-so many skilled jobs by 1984?” The following year brought two more specialized programs: Managing the Micro, a five-parter aimed at executives wanting to understand the potential role of computers in business; and the two-part Technology for Teachers, about computers as educational tools. But even as the latter two series were being developed and coming to the airwaves, one within the BBC was dreaming of something grander. Paul Kriwaczek, a producer who had worked on The Silicon Factor, asked the higher-ups a question: “Don’t we have a duty to put some of the power of computing into the public’s hands rather than just make programs about computing?” He envisioned a program that would not treat computing as a purely abstract social or business phenomenon. It would rather be a practical examination of what the average person could do with a PC, right now — or at least in the very near future.

The idea was very much of its time, spurred equally by fear and hope. With all of the early innovation having happened in America, the PC looked likely to be another innovation — and there sure seemed to have been a lot of them this century — with which Britain would have little to do. On the other hand, however, these were still early days, and there did already exist a network of British computing companies and the enthusiasts they served. Properly stoked, and today rather than later, perhaps they could form the heart of new, home-grown British computer industry that would, at a minimum, prevent the indignity of seeing Britons rely, as they already did in some many other sectors, on imported products. At best, the PC could become a new export industry. With the government forced to prop up much of the remaining British auto industry, with many other sectors seemingly on the verge of collapse, and with the economy in general in the crapper, the country could certainly use a dose of something new and innovative. By interesting ordinary Britons in computers and spurring them to buy British models today, this program could be a catalyst for the eager but uncertain British PC industry as well as the incubator of a new generation of computing professionals.

Much to Kriwaczek’s own surprise, his proposed program landed right in his lap. The BBC approved a new ten-part series to be called Hands-On Micros. Under the day-to-day control of Kriwaczek, it would air in the autumn of 1981 — in about one year’s time. His advocacy for the program aside, Kriwaczek was the obvious choice among the BBC’s line producers. He had grown interested in PCs some months earlier, when he had worked on The Silicon Factor and, perhaps more importantly, when he had stumbled upon a copy of the early British hobbyist magazine Practical Computing. Now he had a Nascom at home which he had built for himself. A jazz saxophonist and flautist by a former trade, he now spent hours in his office trying to get the machine to play music that could be recognized as such. (“My wife and family aren’t very keen on the micro,” he said in a contemporary remark that sounds like an understatement.) Working with another producer, David Allen, Kriwaczek drafted a plan for the project that would make it more substantial than just another one-off documentary miniseries. There would be an accompanying book, for one thing, which would go deeper into many of the topics presented and offer much more hands-on programming instruction. And, strangely and controversially, there would also be a whole new computer with the official BBC stamp of approval.

To understand what motivated this seemingly bizarre step, we should look at the British PC market of the time. It was a welter of radically divergent, thoroughly incompatible machines, in many ways no different from the contemporary American market, but in at least one way even more confused. In the U.S. most PC-makers sourced their BASIC from Microsoft, which remained relatively consistent from machine to machine, and thus offered at least some sort of route to program interchange. The British market, however, was not even this consistent. While Nascom did buy a Microsoft BASIC, both Acorn and Sinclair had chosen to develop their own, highly idiosyncratic versions of the language, and a survey of other makers revealed a similar jumble. Further, none of these incompatible machines was precisely satisfactory in the BBC’s eyes. As a kit you had to build yourself, the Nascom was an obvious nonstarter. The Acorn Atom came pre-assembled, but with a maximum of 12 K of memory it was a profoundly limited machine. The Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81 were similarly limited, and also beset by that certain endemic Sinclair brand of shoddiness that left users having to glue memory expansions into place to keep them from falling out of their sockets and half expecting the whole contraption to explode one day like the Black Watch of old. The Commodore PET was the favorite of British business, but it was very expensive and American to boot, which kind of defeated the program’s purpose of goosing British computing. So, the BBC decided to endorse a new PC built to their requirements of being a) British; b) of solid build quality; c) possessed of a relatively standard and complete dialect of BASIC; and d) powerful enough to perform reasonably complex, hopefully even useful tasks. The idea may seem a more reasonable one in this light to all but the most laissez-faire among you. The way they chose to pursue it, though, was quite problematic.

As you may remember from a previous post, Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry had worked together at Sinclair’s previous company, Sinclair Radionics, before going on to found Sinclair Research and Acorn Computers respectively. In the wake of the Black Watch fiasco, the National Enterprise Board of the British government had stepped in to take over Sinclair Radionics and prevent the company from failing. Sinclair, however, proved impossible to work with, and was soon let go. The NEB shuttered what was left of Sinclair Radionics. But they passed its one seemingly viable project, a computer called the NewBrain which Sinclair had conceived but then lost interest in, to another NEB-owned concern, Newbury Laboratories. As the BBC’s grand computer literacy project was being outlined, the NewBrain was still at Newbury and still inching slowly toward release. If Newbury could just get the thing finished, the NewBrain should meet all of the BBC’s requirements for their new computer. They decided it was the computer for them. To preserve some illusion of an open bidding process, they wrote up a set of requirements that coincidentally corresponded exactly with the proposed specifications of the NewBrain, then slipped out the call for bids as quietly as they possibly could. Nobody outside Newbury noticed it, and even if they had, it would have been impossible to develop a computer to those specifications in the tiny amount of time the BBC was offering. The plan had worked perfectly. It looked like they had their new BBC computer.

But why was the BBC so fixated on the NewBrain? It’s hard not to see bureaucratic back-scratching in the whole scheme. Another branch of the British bureaucracy, the National Enterprise Board, had pissed away a lot of taxpayer money in the failed Sinclair Radionics rescue bid. If they could turn the NewBrain into a big commercial success — something of which the official BBC endorsement would be a virtual guarantee — they could earn all of that money back through Newbury, a company which had been another questionable investment. Some damaged careers would certainly be repaired and even burnished in the process. That, at any rate, is how the rest of the British PC industry saw the situation when the whole process finally came to light, and it’s hard to come to any other conclusion today.

Just a few months later, the BBC looked to have hoisted themselves from their own petard. It had now become painfully clear that Newbury was understaffed and underfunded. They couldn’t finish developing the NewBrain in the time allotted, and couldn’t arrange to manufacture it in the massive quantities that would be required even if they did. It was just as this realization was dawning that they received two very angry letters, one from Clive Sinclair and one from Chris Curry at Acorn. Curry had come across an early report about the project in his morning paper, describing the plan for a BBC-branded computer and the “bidding process” and giving the specifications of the computer that had “won.” He called Sinclair, with whom he still maintained polite if strained relations. Sinclair hadn’t heard anything about the project either. Putting their heads together, they deduced that the machine in question must be the NewBrain, and why it must have been chosen. Thus the angry letters.

What happened next would prompt even more controversy. Curry, who had sent his letter more to vent than anything else, was stunned to receive a call from a rather sheepish John Radcliffe, an executive producer on the project, asking if the BBC could come to Acorn’s Cambridge offices for a meeting. Nothing was set in stone, Radcliffe carefully explained. If Curry had something he wanted to show the BBC, the BBC was willing to consider it. Sinclair, despite being known as Mr. Computer to the British public, received no such call. The reasons he didn’t aren’t so hard to deduce. Sinclair had screwed the National Enterprise Board badly in the Sinclair Radionics deal by being impossible to work with and finally apparently deliberately sabotaging the whole operation so that he could get away and begin a new company. It’s not surprising that his reputation within the British bureaucracy was none too good. On a less personal level, there were the persistent quality-control problems that had dogged just about everything Sinclair had ever made. The BBC simply couldn’t afford to release an exploding computer.

At the meeting, Curry first tried to sell Radcliffe on Acorn’s existing computer, the Atom, but even at this desperate juncture Radcliffe was having none of it. The Atom was just too limited. Could he propose anything else? “Well,” said Curry, “We are developing this new machine we call the Proton.” “Can you show it to me?” asked Radcliffe. “I’m afraid it’s not quite ready,” replied Curry. “When can we see a working prototype?” asked Radcliffe. It was already December 1980; time was precious. It was also a Monday. “Come back Friday,” said Curry.

The Acorn team worked frantically through the week to get the Proton, still an unfinished pile of wires, chips, and schematics, into some sort of working shape. A few hours before the BBC’s scheduled return they thought they had everything together properly, but the machine refused to boot. Hermann Hauser, the Austrian Cambridge researcher with whom Curry had started Acorn, made a suggestion: “It’s very simple — you are cross-linking the clock between the development system and the prototype. If you just cut the link it will work.” After a bit of grumbling the team agreed, and the machine sprang to life for the first time just in time for the BBC’s visit. Soon after Acorn officially had the contract, and along with it an injection of £60,000 to set up much larger manufacturing facilities. The Acorn Proton was now the BBC Micro; Acorn was playing on a whole new level.

Acorn and the BBC were fortunate in that the Proton design actually dovetailed fairly well with the BBC’s original specifications. In places where it did not, either the specification or the machine was quietly modified to make a fit. Most notably, the BASIC housed in ROM was substantially reworked to conform better to the BBC’s wish for a fairly standard implementation of the language in comparison to the very personalized dialects both Acorn and Sinclair had previously favored. After the realities of production costs sank in, the decision was made to produce two BBC Micros, the Model A with just 16 K of memory and the Model B with the full 32 K demanded by the original specification and some additional expansion capabilities. The Model B also came with an expanded suite of graphics modes, offering up to 16 colors at 160 X 256, a monochrome 640 X 256 mode, and 80-column text, all very impressive even by comparison with American computers of the era. It would turn out to be by far the more popular model. At the heart of both models was a 6502 CPU which was clocked at 2 MHz rather than the typical 1 MHz of most 6502-based computers. Combined with an innovative memory design that allowed the CPU to always run at full speed, with no waiting for memory access, this made the BBC Micro quite a potent little machine by the standards of the early 1980s. By way of comparison, the 3 to 4 MHz Z80s found in many competitors like the Sinclair machines were generally agreed to have about the same overall processing potential as a 1 MHz 6502, despite the dramatically faster clock speed, due to differences in the designs of the two chips.

By quite a number of metrics, the BBC Micro would be the best, most practical machine the domestic British industry had yet produced. Unfortunately, all that power and polish would come with a price. The BBC had originally dreamed of a sub-£200 machine, but that quickly proved unrealistic. The projected price steadily crept upward as 1981 wore on. When models started arriving in shops at last, the price was £300 for the Model A and £400 for the Model B, much more expensive than the original plans and much, much more than Sinclair’s machines. Considering that buying the peripherals needed to make a really useful system would nearly double the likely price, these figures to at least some extent put the lie to the grand dream of the BBC Micro as the computer for the everyday Briton — a fact that Clive Sinclair and others lost no time in pointing out. A roughly equivalent foreign-built system, like, say, a Commodore PET, would still cost you more, but not all that much more. The closest American comparison to the BBC Micro is probably the Apple II. Like that machine, the BBC Micro would become the relative Cadillac of 8-bit British computers: better built and somehow more solid-feeling than the competition, even as its raw processing and display capabilities grew less impressive in comparison — and, eventually, outright outdated — over time.

As the BBC Micro slowly came together, other aspects of the project also moved steadily forward. By the spring of 1981 three authors were hard at work writing the book, and Kriwaczek and Allen were traveling around the country collecting feedback from schools and focus groups on a 50-minute pilot version of the proposed documentary. With it becoming obvious that everyone needed a bit more time, the whole project was reluctantly pushed back three months. The first episode of the documentary, retitled The Computer Programme, was now scheduled to air on January 11, 1982, with the book and the computer also expected to be available by that date.

And now what had already been a crazily ambitious project suddenly found itself part of something even more ambitious. A Conservative MP named Kenneth Baker shepherded through Parliament a bill naming 1982 Information Technology Year. It would kick off with The Computer Programme in a plum time slot on the BBC, and end with a major government-sponsored conference at the Barbicon Arts Centre. In between would be a whole host of other initiatives, some of which, like the issuing of an official IT ’82 stamp by the post office, were probably of, shall we say, symbolic value at best. Yet there were also a surprising number of more practical initiatives, like the establishment of a network of Microsystem Centres to offer advice and training to businessmen and IT Centres to train unemployed young people in computer-related fields. There would also be a major push to get PCs into every school in Britain in numbers that would allow every student a reasonable amount of hands-on time. All of these programs — yes, even the stamp — reflected the desire of at least some in the government to make Britain the IT Nation of the 1980s, to remake the struggling British economy via the silicon chip.

When the first step in their master plan debuted at last on January 11, everything was not quite as they might have wished it. The BBC’s programming department reneged on their promises to give the program a plum time spot. Instead it aired on a Monday afternoon and was repeated the following Sunday morning, meaning ratings were not quite what Kriwaczek and his colleagues might have hoped for. And, although Acorn had been taking orders for several months, virtually no one other than a handful of lucky magazine reviewers had an actual BBC Micro to use to try out the snippets of BASIC code that the show presented. Even with the infusion of government cash, Acorn was struggling to sort out the logistics of producing machines in the quantities demanded by the BBC, while also battling teething problems in the design and some flawed third-party components. BBC Micros didn’t finally start flowing to customers until well into spring — ironically, just as the last episodes of the series were airing. Thus Kriwaczek’s original dream of an army of excited new computer owners watching his series from behind the keyboards of their new BBC Micros didn’t quite play out, at least in the program’s first run.

In the long run, however, the BBC Micro became a big success, if not quite the epoch-defining development the BBC had originally envisioned. Its relatively high price kept it out of many homes in favor of cheaper machines from Sinclair and Commodore, but, with the full force of the government’s patronage (and numerous government-sponsered discounting programs) behind it, it became the most popular machine by far in British schools. In this respect once again, the parallels with the Apple II are obvious. The BBC Micro remained a fixture in British schools throughout the 1980s, the first taste of computing for millions of schoolchildren. It was built like a tank and, soon enough, possessed of a huge selection of educational software that made it ideal for the task. By 1984 Acorn could announce that 85% of computers sold to British schools were BBC Micros. This penetration, combined with more limited uptake in homes and business, was enough to let Acorn sell more than 1.5 million of them over more than a decade in production.

As for the butterfly flapping its wings which got all of this started: The Computer Programme is surprisingly good, in spite of a certain amount of disappointment it engendered in the hardcore hobbyist community of the time for its failure to go really deeply into the ins and outs of programming in BASIC and the like (a task for which video strikes me as supremely ill-suited anyway). At its center is a well-known BBC presenter named Chris Serle. He plays the everyman, who’s guided (along with the audience, of course) through a tour of computer history and applications and a certain amount of practical nitty-gritty by the more experienced Ian McNaught-Davis. It’s a premise that could easily wind up feeling grating and contrived, but the two men are so pleasant and natural about it that it mostly works beautifully. Rounding out the show are a field reporter, Gill Neville, who delivers a human-interest story about practical uses of computers in each episode; and “author and journalist” Rex Malik, who concludes each episode with an Andy Rooney-esque “more objective” — read, more crotchety — view on all of the gee-whiz gadgetry and high hopes that were on display in the preceding 22 minutes.

There’s a moment in one of the episodes that kind of crystalizes for me what makes the program as a whole so unique. McNaught-Davis is demonstrating a simple BASIC program for Serle. One of the lines is an INPUT statement. McNaught-Davis explains that when the computer reaches this line it just sits there checking the keyboard over and over for input from the user. Serle asks whether programs always work like that. Well, no, not always, explains McNaught-Davis… there are these things called interrupts on more advanced systems which can allow the CPU to do other things, to be notified automatically when a key press or some other event needs its attention. He then draws a beautifully analogy: the BASIC program is like someone who has a broken doorbell and is expecting guests. He must manually check the door over and over. An interrupt-driven system is the same fellow after he’s gotten his doorbell fixed, able to read or do other things in his living room and wait for his guests to come to him. The fact that McNaught-Davis acknowledges the complexity instead of just saying, “Yes, sure, just one thing at a time…” to Serle says a lot about the program’s refusal to dumb down its subject matter. Its decision not to pursue this strange notion of interrupts too much further, meanwhile, says a lot about the accompanying concern that it not overwhelm its audience. The BBC has always been really, really good at walking that line; The Computer Programme is a shining example of that skill.

Indeed, The Computer Programme can be worthwhile viewing today even for reasons outside of historical interest or kitsch value. Anyone looking for a good general overview of computers and how they work and what they can and can’t do could do a lot worse. I meant to just dip in and sample it here and there, but ended up watching the whole series (not that historical interest and kitsch value didn’t also play a factor). If you’d like to have a look for yourself, the whole series is available on YouTube thanks to Jesús Zafra.

Phoenix and Acornsoft
November 7, 2012

Cambridge was the heart of the early British PC industry, home of both Sinclair and Acorn as well as many supporting and competing concerns. Indeed, Cambridge University can boast of some of the major achievements in computing history, to such an extent that easy characterizations of the university as “the MIT of Britain” or the town as “the Silicon Valley of the UK” seem slightly condescending. It was Cambridge that nurtured Alan Turing, the most important thinker in the history of computer science, and that supplied much of the talent (Turing among them) to the World War II code-breaking effort at Bletchley Park that laid the foundation for the modern computer. Most spectacularly of all, it was at Cambridge in 1949 that EDSAC-1 — the first stored-program fully electronic computer, meaning the first that could be programmed the way we understand that term today — first came online. (The earlier American ENIAC was programmable only by switching logic gates and rerouting cabling in an elaborate game of Mouse Trap that could consume weeks. At risk of wading into a debate that has swirled for years, there’s a real argument to be made that EDSAC-1 was the first real computer in the sense of being something that operated reasonably akin to what we mean when we use the term today.) In 1953 Cambridge became the first university to recognize computer science as a taught discipline.

For decades computing in and around Cambridge centered on whatever colossus was currently installed in the bowels of the Computing Laboratory. After EDSAC-1 came EDSAC-2 in 1958, which was in turned replaced by Titan in 1964. All of these had been essentially one-off, custom-built machines constructed by the university itself in cooperation with various British technology companies. It must therefore have seemed a dismaying sign of the changing times when the university elected to buy its next big mainframe off the shelf, as it were — and from an American company at that. Coming online in February of 1973, Phoenix — the name was meant to evoke a phoenix rising from the ashes of the newly decommissioned Titan — was a big IBM 370 mainframe of the sort found in major companies all over the world. However, just as the hackers at MIT had made their DEC machines their own by writing their own operating systems and tools from scratch, those at Cambridge replaced most of IBM’s standard software with new programs of their own. Thus Phoenix became, literally, a computing environment like no other.

For more than two decades Phoenix was a central fixture of life at Cambridge. (In hardware terms, there were actually three Phoenixes; newer IBM mainframes replaced older hardware in 1982 and 1989). It was used for the expected computer-science research, much of it groundbreaking. But it also, like the contemporary American PLATO, became a social gathering place. It provided email access to a whole generation of students along with lively public discussion boards. The administrators delighted in replacing the stodginess of IBM’s standard MVS operating system with their own quirky sensibility. Phoenix’s responses to various pleas for HELP are particularly remembered.

HELP SEX
Phoenix/MVS, being of essentially neuter gender, cannot help with emotional, personal or physical human problems

HELP GOD
Please appeal to deities directly, not via Phoenix/MVS

HELP PHEONIX
Pheonix is spelt Phoenix and pronounced Feenicks.

HELP CS
CS is a standard abbreviation for Computing Service; it is also a "gas" used for riot control.

Given this freewheeling atmosphere, you’d expect to find plenty of games on Phoenix as well. And you wouldn’t be disappointed. Phoenix had all the usual suspects, from card games to chess to an implementation of Scrabble with an impressively fiendish AI opponent to play against. And, beginning in the late 1970s, there were also adventures.

Both Crowther and Woods’s Adventure and Zork (in its Dungeon incarnation, as “liberated” from MIT by Bob Supnik and ported to FORTRAN) arrived at Cambridge as one of their first destinations outside the United States. Like hackers across the U.S. and, soon enough, the world, those at Cambridge went crazy over the games. And also like so many of their American counterparts, they had no sooner finished playing them than they started speculating about writing their own. In 1978 John Thackray and David Seal, two Cambridge graduate students, started working on a grand underground treasure hunt called Acheton. It’s often claimed that Acheton represents just the third adventure game ever created, after Adventure itself and Zork. That’s a very difficult claim to substantiate in light of the number of people who were tinkering with adventures in various places in the much less interconnected institutional computing world of the late 1970s. Amongst just the finished, documented games, Mystery Mansion and Stuga have at least as strong a claim to the title of third as Acheton. Still, Acheton was a very early effort, almost certainly the first of its kind in Britain. And it was also a first in another respect.

Looking at the problem of writing an adventure game, Thackray and Seal decided that the best approach would be to create a new, domain-specific programming language before writing Acheton proper. The result, which has been retroactively dubbed T/SAL (“Thackray/Seal Adventure Language”) today, but was simply known as “that language on Phoenix used to write adventures” during its heyday at Cambridge, represents the first ever specialized adventure programming language. (Even the PDP-10 Zork had been written in the already extant, if unusually text-adventure-suitable, MDL.) The T/SAL system is something of a hybrid between the database-driven design of Scott Adams and the more flexible fully programmable virtual machine of Infocom. Objects, rooms, and other elements are defined as static database elements, but the designer can also make use of “programs,” routines written in an interpreted, vaguely BASIC-like language that let her implement all sorts of custom behaviors. Thackery and Seal improved T/SAL steadily as dictated by the needs of their own game in progress, always leaving it available for anyone else who might want to give adventure writing a shot. Meanwhile they also continued to work on Acheton, soon with the aid of a third partner, a PhD candidate in mathematics named Jonathan Partington. It grew into a real monster: more than 400 rooms in the final form it reached by about 1980, thus dwarfing even Zork in size and still qualifying today, at least in terms of sheer geographical scope, as one of the largest text adventures ever created.

Yet the most important outcome of the Acheton project was T/SAL and the community it spawned. The system was used to create at least fourteen more games over a decade. Freed as they were by virtue of running on a big mainframe from the memory restrictions of contemporary PC adventures, designers could craft big, sometimes surprisingly intricate playgrounds for a brainy audience of budding mathematicians and scientists that reveled in the toughest of puzzles. For those on their wavelength, they became an indelible part of their student memories. Graham Nelson, easily the most important figure in interactive fiction of the post-Infocom era, was an undergraduate at Cambridge during the heyday of the Phoenix games. He writes in Proustian terms of his own memories of the games: “They [the Phoenix 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.” Nelson’s later puzzle-filled epics Curses and Jigsaw show the influence of these early experiences at Cambridge in their erudition and sprawl.

Yet we shouldn’t overestimate the popularity of the Phoenix games. Running under a custom operating system on an IBM design that was seldom open to fun and games at other installations, they had no chance to spread beyond Cambridge in their original incarnations. Even at the university, their sheer, unapologetic difficulty made them something of a niche interest. And authoring new games in the rather cryptic T/SAL required an especial dedication. Fifteen games in over ten years is not really a huge number, and most of those were front-loaded into the excitement that surrounded the arrival of Adventure and the novelty of Acheton. During most years of the mid- and late-1980s it was only Jonathan Partington, who in authoring or co-authoring no fewer than eight of the fifteen games was by far the most prolific and dedicated of the T/SAL authors, that continued to actively create new work with the system. It’s probably safe to say that most of the Phoenix games had (at best) hundreds rather than thousands of serious players. Still, they would have a larger impact on the British adventuring scene outside of Cambridge’s ivory tower in a different, commercialized form.

One of the first at Cambridge to pick up on the T/SAL system was an oceanography professor in his early thirties named Peter Killworth, who had been taught a healthy appreciation for the brave new world of possibility that Adventure represented by his seven- and three-year-old sons: “I was constrained by what I knew about computers, but they treated the terminal as a person. While I was trying to work out what an axe was doing in a computer program, they were chopping the nearest tree down.” Killworth was intrigued enough to start tinkering with T/SAL as soon as he noticed it. He wrote a simple physics problem using the language. Through it he got his introduction to the interconnected web of social problem-solving that made the experience of playing and writing early institutional adventures so different from those on PCs.

“I had a problem which revolved around using a pivot to get up a cliff. Put weight on one end, and the other goes up — but you have to be careful to get the weight right. I programmed it on the mainframe, and left it for a friend to have a look at. When I came back next morning, I was deluged with messages from people I’d never heard of, all telling me where I’d gone wrong in the program.”

Encouraged by all this interest, Killworth decided to make a full-fledged game to house the puzzle. The result, which he completed even before Acheton was done, he called Brand X. It was a treasure hunt fairly typical of the general Phoenix aesthetic in its cruel puzzles and relatively heady (by adventure-game standards) allusions to Descartes, Coleridge, and the Bible. Figuring that was that, Killworth then returned his full attention to oceanography — until the arrival of the BBC Micro and Acornsoft caused him to start thinking about his game again a couple of years later.

Of all the technology companies in and around Cambridge, Acorn worked hardest to foster ties with the university itself. Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser made the most of the connections Hauser had formed there during the years he spent as a Cambridge PhD candidate. With Acorn’s office located literally just around the corner from the Computing Laboratory, the two had ample opportunity to roam the corridors sniffing out the best and the brightest to bring in for their own projects. They considered Cambridge something of a secret weapon for Acorn, taking the university itself into their confidence and making it almost a business partner. Cambridge reciprocated by taking Acorn’s side almost en masse as the British computer wars of the 1980s heated up. The university grew to consider the BBC Micro to be the machine that they had built — and not without cause, given the number of Cambridge students and graduates on Acorn’s staff. Clive Sinclair, meanwhile, who like Chris Curry had not attended university, displayed only a grudging respect for the Cambridge talent, mingled with occasional expressions of contempt that rather smack of insecurity.

Acorn Computers had helped one David Johnson-Davis to set up a software publisher specializing in software for their first popular machine, the Acorn, in 1980. Now, as the BBC Micro neared launch, Acornsoft would prove to be a valuable tool to advance the goal of making as much software as possible, and hopefully of as high a quality as possible, available for the new machine. Just as their big brothers had in designing the BBC Micro’s hardware, Acornsoft turned to the university — where prototypes were floating around even before the machine’s official launch — for help finding quality software of all types. They offered prospective programmers a brand new BBC Micro of their own as a sort of signing bonus upon acceptance of a program. After a friend got a statistics package accepted, Peter Killworth started to ponder whether he had something to give them; naturally, his thoughts turned to Brand X. He rewrote the game in the relatively advanced BBC BASIC, using every technique he could devise to save memory and, when that failed, simply jettisoning much of the original. (Ironically, the physics problem that got the whole ball rolling was one of those that didn’t make the final cut.) He then presented it to Acornsoft, who agreed to publish it under the title of Philosopher’s Quest, a tribute to the game’s intellectual tone proposed by Johnson-Davis’s right-hand man Chris Jordan. It was published in mid-1982, the first game in the Acornsoft line. Killworth hoped it would sell at least 500 copies or so and earn him a little bit of extra pocket money; in the end it sold more than 20,000.

Even in its chopped-down microcomputer incarnation, Philosopher’s Quest provides a pretty good introduction to the Phoenix aesthetic as a whole. An unabashed treasure hunt with no pretensions toward narrative or mimesis, its geography simply serves as the intellectual landscape to house its puzzles. To understand the game’s level of commitment to physical reality, consider that, after swimming underwater for a while, you can still strike a match inside the whale that swallows you. (Don’t ask.) We’re a long way from Zork III and its realistic simulation of the effects of swimming in a lake on a battery-powered lantern.

Yet the writing is as solid as it can be within the constraints of 32 K, with occasional flashes of dry wit and an awareness of culture beyond Dungeons and Dragons and Star Wars that’s pretty rare amongst games of its era. The parser is the typical two-worder of the era, but the game doesn’t strain to push beyond its limits, so it only occasionally frustrates. While not huge, the game is amazingly large given the memory restrictions under which Killworth was operating and the fact that he was working in BASIC. He was already an experienced programmer of weather and ocean simulations thanks to his day job, and his expertise comes through here. He would later speak of an “unofficial competition” with the Austin brothers of Level 9, kings of text compression, over how much text they could cram into the miniscule amounts of memory they had to work with.

The puzzles are a mixed bag, sometimes brilliant but always heartless. The very beginning of the game tells you everything you need to know about what you’re in for. You start in a store from which you can only remove two out of four items. You can increase this number to three through a clever action, but there’s no way to know which one of the four you’re not going to need later in the game; trial and error and learning by death are the rules of the day here. Still, some of the puzzles border on the beautiful, including one of my favorite guess-the-verb puzzles of all time. (Yes, like much in the game this puzzle violates the Player’s Bill of Rights in depending on outside knowledge, but, atrocities like Zork II‘s baseball maze aside, this has always struck me as the least of adventure-game design sins, especially in this era of readily accessible information on virtually any subject. I rather like it when a game sends me scurrying to the Internet in search of outside knowledge to apply. And I feel really special when, as in this case, I already have the knowledge I need.)

Other puzzles, however, are cheap and unforgivable in that way all too typical of early text adventures. There’s a vital room exit that goes completely un-described and thus can be sussed out only by beating your head against every wall in every room when you’ve reached the point of total frustration. More than anything else, the game takes delight in killing you, a parade of gruesome if often clever deaths, most of which you’re going to experience at least once in the course of playing; these are not jumping-off-a-cliff-to-see-what-happens deaths, but rather innocently-entering-a-room-only-to-be-trampled-by-an-elephant deaths. The deaths are so numerous and so absurd that they almost come off as parody. More so even than many other old games, Philosopher’s Quest can be enjoyed today, but only if you can get yourself in tune with its old-school sensibilities. Unsurprisingly, it and the other Phoenix games are very polarizing these days. Graham Nelson among others remains a big fan, while still others find them an exercise in masochism; see this old newsgroup thread for a sample of typical reactions.

Peter Killworth continued to write adventures after Philosopher’s Quest, for Acornsoft and later Topologika (who also published quite a few of the other Phoenix games for PCs). Already by 1983 he was earning twice as much from his games as he did from his Cambridge professorship. He later dismissed Philosopher’s Quest and its sometimes arbitrary puzzles as something of a learning exercise, but he always retained his reputation as an author of difficult games. For Killworth’s follow-up to Philosopher’s Quest, Castle of Riddles, Johnson-Davis had an idea that would begin something of a tradition in the British adventure-gaming scene. Acornsoft and Your Computer magazine sponsored a contest with a prize of £1500 worth of Acorn hardware and a £700 silver ring to the first person to solve the game. It took winner Peter Voke, Britain’s equivalent of the American adventure-gaming machine Roe R. Adams III, a full eight hours to solve the game. (Runner-up Colin Bignell made a mad cross-country dash through the night to get his winning entry to Your Computer, but pulled up in his car in front of the magazine’s headquarters just 20 minutes behind Voke.) Killworth also authored one of the classics of the sub-genre of adventure-authoring guides that were popular in the early- and mid-1980s, the aptly titled How to Write Adventure Games. He died in 2008 of motor neuron disease. Even when he was earning more from his adventures than he was from his day job, games were just a sideline to a significant career in oceanographic research.

We’ll likely be revisiting some of the later works of Killworth and the other Phoenix authors at some point down the road a bit. For now, you can download Philosopher’s Quest and Castle of Riddles as BBC Micro disk images. (I recommend Dave Gilbert’s superb BeebEm emulator.) Most of the original incarnations of the Phoenix games, Brand X included, have been ported to Z-Code format, playable in my own Filfre and countless other interpreters, thanks to a preservation effort led by Graham Nelson, Adam Atkinson, and David Kinder following the final shutdown of Phoenix in 1995.

A Gallery of Unfortunate Events
November 9, 2012

A philosopher’s life is a dangerous one…

The Speccy
November 12, 2012

To put it mildly, Clive Sinclair was not pleased by the BBC’s decision to make the Acorn Proton the standard bearer of British computing. He had some legitimate complaints to levy. The process of selecting the machine, for one thing, could under no interpretation be considered fair and above-board. The BBC had simply handed the contract to the government-controlled Newbury, then when that fell through slipped it to Acorn as the most viable remaining manufacturer that was not run by Sinclair; his company and others never had a chance. The price of the Acorn machine also seemed at odds with the BBC’s original intentions for the program. The £400 BBC Micro Model B (the really practical and desirable model) was simply too expensive to become the fixture in everyday British homes that the BBC had imagined. And then there was the question of whether a government agency had any right or business to interfere with the workings of private industry in the first place. (Admittedly, this was a question that Sinclair, like so many businessmen, tended to answer differently depending on whether he was the one directly benefiting from the government’s largesse.)

In addition to practical complaints, however, Sinclair was personally wounded by the BBC’s choice. They had chosen Chris Curry, the erstwhile junior partner he had mentored, over him; anointed Curry’s company the Great Hope for British computing rather than his own. In response, he lashed out. His interviews from the period — and he did plenty of them — read like the reactions of a jealous lover, strewn with invective toward the BBC peppered with occasional expressions of dismay that they didn’t pick him. From the August 1981 Your Computer:

“When you have a company like ours, which is easily dominating the whole of Europe in personal computers, we believe we have done a very important job in popularizing computers. It is a real disappointment to have your own national broadcasting corporation completely ignore you.”

“What the BBC is doing, it is doing badly and it is damaging the whole progress of computers in this country. We have put a new version of BASIC into our machines. It has been highly praised in the UK and abroad, because of its editing facilities. We developed into it features such as single-keyword entry. None of that is in the BBC version.”

On the perceived slight of not being consulted in the government’s planning for IT Year ’82:

“The government has it so wrong. Frankly, they are so bad at it, it would be better if they left it alone. Fine, they should be doing things for the computer market, but this recent Department of Industry scheme is so peculiar. We were not even talked to.”

But Sinclair reserved his most strident scorn for the rival whom he perceived to have gone behind his back to make the deal with the BBC. All pretense of civility fell away from his relationship with Curry, whom the BBC “for some strange reasons allowed to stick [their] logo on his machines” which would otherwise not have a chance in the marketplace. No shrinking violets themselves, Curry and his partner Hermann Hauser responded in kind with shots at Sinclair’s “duct-tape” brand of engineering that made his machines an impossibility for a serious organization like the BBC. Even Paul Kriwaczek, the producer of The Computer Programme, got in on the act to defend the BBC’s choice, calling Sinclair’s machines “throwaway” products. It was quite a petty display all around, if also a very entertaining one.

Sinclair largely won this public-relations war. The British computer industry was full of other, smaller companies feeling equally spurned by the BBC deal, equally convinced that their own latest designs could have fit the bill much better than anything Acorn had to offer. Sharing a common enemy with Sinclair made them, at least in this sphere, his friend. With virtually the entire industry standing on one side and just Acorn and the BBC on the other, it was easy to conclude that the BBC Micro must be the bad idea and/or botched execution they said it was. On Sinclair’s side most of all, though, was his popular image as the benevolent “Uncle Clive,” largely the creation of his advertising agency, Primary Contact.

Sinclair certainly looked the part of the slightly eccentric but ultimately cuddly boffin, and Primary Contact played the image up for everything they were worth. As Ian Adamson and Richard Kennedy wrote in Sinclair and the “Sunrise” Technology, even long before the controversy over the BBC Micro, “Sinclair was marketed as the maverick doyen of hi-tech, the lone entrepreneur with the vision to take on the Americans and the Japanese. The implication was that by supporting Sinclair the consumer was advancing the cause of British innovation in the face of the brute strength of foreign marketing might.” Now the entrenched bureaucrats of the BBC could be added to the forces he defied. The Clive Sinclair of the popular imagination spent his time puttering away in a basement laboratory somewhere before emerging with designs that were both simpler and better than the competition thanks to his grounded British know-how. He then, unmaterialistic boffin that he was, sold them for a ridiculously low price and just blinked bemusedly when praised for it. Spreading the joy of computing and helping his country were their own rewards. His anger at the BBC was the righteous anger of the honest, practical man confounded by sycophants and politicians.

The reality was very different. Sinclair certainly had electrical know-how, but he was no computer engineer. His machines were designed by others to his specifications, which always began and ended with the price he intended to sell them for and the profit margin he needed to preserve even at that price. Except for these absolutes, all else — including not only features but fundamental quality controls — was negotiable. Characteristically, Sinclair got most involved with the actual engineering of his “creations” when hunting down which component parts he could source for the cheapest prices. Personally, he was domineering, uninterested in the opinions of others and possessed of a deadly combination of overweening arrogance and a deeply buried insecurity that occasionally flashed to the surface when his decisions were questioned. His contempt extended to his customers, whom he regarded as sheep waiting for the Man of Genius (i.e., him) to tell them what they wanted. Surprisingly, Sinclair didn’t even believe that that would necessarily be computers in the long term. He had come into this field largely to finance the quixotic further development of two absurd products he had been dreaming about for years: a miniature, portable television and an electric car. Computers were just a means to that end, a way to capitalize on a passing fancy of the fickle everyman.

Of course, as French philosophers have taught us, the perceptions engendered by mass media are often as real in practical terms as anything else. The British computer industry needed a company hell-bent on selling its machines so cheaply that almost anyone could afford one, even if that meant cutting some corners. And the British public needed an Uncle Clive persona to put a friendly, comfortably British face on all of this disruptive new technology and tell them they had nothing to fear from it. Sinclair was such a terrible businessman that this ride couldn’t possibly last very long. But it would be fun while it did; whatever else you can say about Clive Sinclair, he’s never been boring.

When not sniping at the BBC in the press, Sinclair spent late 1981 and early 1982 pushing hard on his own new computer that would show them how wrong they had been to choose Acorn over him. The successor to the ZX80 and ZX81, it would borrow much of its internal and external engineering from those earlier machines, remaining a tiny thing that looked more like a desk calculator than a computer. The big change, from which it derived its name — the ZX Spectrum — was the addition of color and graphics capabilities. It would deliver these in a package costing just £125 for 16 K or, in another coup, £175 for a full 48 K, well under half the price of the 32 K BBC Micro Model B.

In many ways the Spectrum was a typical Sinclair product, the result of brutal cost-cutting. The keys were made of squishy rubber, which further added to the calculator-like impression and were only marginally more comfortable than the membrane keyboards of the ZX80 and ZX81. Many choices seemed a product of the echo chamber inside Sinclair, owing little to any sort of practical real-world considerations. When designing the ZX80, the company had developed something they called “one-touch” BASIC programming, which matched each BASIC command word to a key on the keyboard. The idea was that the user need only type a single key for each command instead of the whole word, thus cutting back on typos and limiting the interacting she had to do with the ZX80’s atrocious keyboard. As they added more commands to their BASIC with each successive model, however, the idea became increasingly ridiculous. By the time the Spectrum emerged the user had to memorize arcane sequences for many commands that required holding down multiple shift and control keys and some octopus-like finger dexterity. The sequences were both more difficult to remember and more difficult to enter than just typing in the words would have been; some commands actually required as many or more key strokes than there were letters in the word. How this absurd system could have made it out the door is a mystery — or perhaps a tribute to the dominance of Clive Sinclair, who had decided that “one-key” entry was a key to his company’s success and wasn’t interested in hearing otherwise.

In other ways, though, the Spectrum was a Sinclair like no others. Sinclair wasn’t exactly a company one might have expected to deliver cutting-edge aesthetics, but they shocked here. The machine’s externals, by industrial designer Rick Dickinson, have been enshrined — and for good reason — as a design classic. The svelte ebony case with its flash of color stands out from all of the other computers models of its era, with their chunky, lumpy frames and acres of bland beige plastic.

In practical terms, the Spectrum finally answered a question that had been uncomfortably nagging at the backs of the minds of many people ever since this computer thing got rolling in the press. Everyone understood that computers were the wave of the future and all that. But, if you weren’t running a shop and needing to keep inventory or something, what could you really do with one? Sure, a small minority might spend hours every night tinkering with the vagaries of BASIC, but that was of little practical value and destined to remain a niche interest at best. For everyone else, most notably children and teenagers, the Spectrum finally provided a better answer: you could play games. Its graphics hardware could display fifteen colors at a resolution 256 X 192, with the very significant restriction that each 8 X 8 block of the screen could use only two of them. Still, combined with the 48 K of memory that allowed a decent scope for complexity in game designs, it was good enough. Its tiny size even meant that you could stuff it into a trench-coat pocket to cart to your mate’s house after school. For all of the caveats and limitations that came with it, the Spectrum was the right machine at the right time at the right price to launch computer games into the mainstream in Britain.

In retrospect one of the most bemusing things about the feud between Sinclair and Acorn is that, as Curry and Hauser at least remarked in their more lucid moments, the BBC Micro and Sinclair Spectrum were barely competitors at all. Sinclair largely created a new, home-computer market in Britain, just as Commodore did with the VIC-20 in the United States. (The VIC-20 was also sold in Britain, but didn’t have quite the same impact.) The BBC Micro, meanwhile, put Acorn in a position similar to that of Apple in the U.S., making more expensive, better supported machines for a more “professional” (or, at least, well-heeled) consumer.

The Spectrum was officially launched on April 23, 1982, but it’s pretty safe to say that no consumer received a machine before June. Sinclair, who often trumpeted in interviews that he “never made the same mistake twice,” was nevertheless “utterly astonished” by the demand for the new machine, as he had been for each model that preceded it. The company’s practice of advertising that consumers who ordered directly from them would receive their computers within 28 days prompted much ire as waiting periods stretched to three months and beyond. This in turn prompted a sternly worded warning from the Advertising Standards Authority, a ritual that played out with every Sinclair product launch. It was 1983 before Sinclair cleared its backlog, at which time the company started the whole shortage over again when they reduced prices by more than 25%. In the end none of the angst mattered that much. Where else, Sinclair asked, were customers going to find a 48 K micro with 15-color graphics capabilities for his prices? Most people would wait, he figured — and he was right.

So, IT Year was a success beyond architect Kenneth Baker’s wildest dreams. At its end there were three times as many computers in British homes as there had been at its beginning. One could certainly argue how much of this explosion was really due to the government’s efforts; one suspects that Clive Sinclair would have some strong opinions on that subject. But, however we apportion the credit, things would never be the same; computing in Britain went mainstream with the IT Year and, crucially, the Spectrum. A generation of British children went to school to learn about computers and BASIC and many other subjects on the sturdy BBC Micros. The same kids came home to hang out with friends and play games in front of their “Speccys.” Can you guess which machine is more fondly remembered by Britons today? The poor BBC doesn’t have a chance.

The Spectrum also spawned a huge games industry to feed this eager market. Speccy programmers came to love the machine, as much because of as in spite of its limitations. With its crazy BASIC entry system and dry error messages like “Nonsense in BASIC,” the Speccy felt like theirs — quirky, slightly off-kilter, and somehow distinctly British in its sensibility. Many of the games they produced had a sensibility to match, very different from that of their American cousins. It’s mostly the innovative action games like Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy that are remembered today, but the Speccy also had adventures. Oh, boy, did it have adventures — thousands of them. We’ll look at one of the earliest and most important of them next time.

The Hobbit
November 16, 2012

In 1977 Alfred Milgrom started Melbourne House, a book publisher, with “four and a half” employees and offices in London and his native Melbourne, Australia. Over the next several years they made a modest go of it. In addition to a stable of young Australian authors, they established something of a specialty as a publisher of mid-list American authors who lacked contracts with the larger British and Australian houses. They signed quite a variety of them: novelist Gerald Green, just coming off a career peak as the screenwriter of the high-profile American television miniseries Holocaust; nonfiction man’s man extraordinaire Robin Moore, most famous for his 1965 book The Green Berets which spawned one of the most unexpected hit songs ever as well as an infamously jingoistic John Wayne movie; Lin Farley, one of the first to write about sexual harassment in the workplace; and Raymond Andrews, author of a trilogy of novels about a black sharecropper family in the mid-century South.

And then came 1980, and with it the Sinclair ZX80. With a PhD in “chemistry, maths, and physics” from Melbourne University, Milgrom had some somewhat atypical interests for a publisher; he had “always been interested in computers.” He quickly bought a ZX80 of his own. That August, Melbourne House published the hastily put together 30 Programs for the Sinclair ZX80, an unadorned collection of short, simple BASIC listings that could fit within the unexpanded machine’s 1 K of memory, including even a very stripped-down Eliza clone. The programs were credited to an alias computer gamers would soon come to recognize almost as quickly as the name “Melbourne House” itself: Beam Software, a contraction of Milgrom’s initials and the last name of another at Melbourne House who worked with him on the book, Naomi Besen.

In barely a year’s time WH Smith would be selling Sinclairs out of their High Street shops, but at this time no one in the bookseller’s trade knew what to make of the book Milgrom was now trying to sell. So he started taking out advertisements in the enthusiast magazines instead for what was likely the first book ever published about a Sinclair computer. It turned into a “runaway success,” the company’s immediate bestseller. Milgrom followed it up with more hastily produced technical books, written both in-house and by others. Melbourne House would remain one of the most prolific of British computer-book publishers for much of the 1980s. With so much opportunity in this area, their interest in publishing other types of books gradually fell by the wayside.

What with their publishing so many program listings in book form, it seemed an obvious move to begin offering some of them on tape for those who didn’t feel like doing so much typing. Accordingly, their first program on cassette, yet another clone of Space Invaders, appeared in February of 1981, the beginning of a slow transformation in primary avocation from book to software publisher. In a sometimes confusing dichotomy, Melbourne House would remain the publishing arm of Milgrom’s organization, while the wholly owned subsidiary Beam Software served as their in-house development group. Melbourne House would also sometimes publish programs created by outside developers, but for all practical purposes Melbourne House and Beam Software were one and the same entity.

Milgrom had been aware of Adventure and its antecedents for years, some of the latter of which were just beginning by mid-1981 to sneak into the British software market in the form of early, primitive efforts by Artic Computing. Realizing that the form was soon likely to be huge in Britain, as it already was in the United States, he decided to commit Melbourne House to creating one bigger and better than anything currently available for British microcomputers. Knowing he lacked the time and the technical skills to implement such an ambitious project, he posted an advertisement back in Australia at his alma mater, the University of Melbourne, looking for computer-science students interested in working part time on a game-development project. (It being the beginning of August, the Australian spring semester was just beginning.) The first to respond was Veronika Megler, a student about to begin her final year as an undergraduate with a particular interest in database design. Milgrom gave her a very simple brief: “Make the best adventure game ever. Period.”

Luckily, Megler had plenty of ideas about how to approach that rather vague objective. She had played just one adventure game in her life — typically enough, the original Adventure by Crowther and Woods. Yet she already felt she knew enough about the form to say what she didn’t like about it, what she wanted her game to do differently. She hated the threadbare world and static nature of Adventure, the way that most of the possible interactions were pre-scripted so that certain verbs only worked in certain places and many perfectly sensible actions were completely unprovided for. Most of all, she hated the way the other characters in the world had nothing to do, no possibility of reacting to the player’s actions. In place of solitary, static puzzle-solving, she imagined a dynamic environment filled with other characters moving about the world and pursuing agendas of their own — something that might actually feel like living inside a real story. Both Megler and Milgrom also very much wanted to get beyond primitive two-word parsers, something only Infocom had so far managed.

Megler recruited a partner to work with her on the game, Philip Mitchell, a fellow senior with whom she had already worked on a number of group projects and whom she knew to be both easy to get on with and a skilled programmer. Milgrom himself added a third member to the team specifically to help them with the parser: Stuart Richie, who was doing a dual degree in English linguistics and computer science, with a special interest in combining the two fields.

At first, the game was planned as a generic fantasy adventure. However, none of the people involved had any experience as writers of fiction. At some point during the early stages of development, someone (it’s unclear exactly who) suggested that it might be possible to adapt J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Once named, it seemed the obvious candidate for a story. Bilbo Baggins’s quest to kill the dragon Smaug and return safely with his treasure, overcoming trials and tribulations along the way, was not just suitable for an adventure game but practically identical in the broad strokes to the structure of most of them. And The Hobbit was very popular — probably the most-read fantasy novel of all time, in fact — which would guarantee the game an eager audience. (I’m going to assume from here on that you’ve read the book, which I think is probably true of most everybody reading this blog. If you haven’t, you should. It’s a consistent delight, with none of the reactionary nostalgia for an older, class-bound Britain that sometimes bothers me about The Lord of the Rings.)

Unlike more naive characters like the Austin brothers, Milgrom knew that he needed to work something out with the Tolkien estate before releasing a commercial game based on the novel. About six months in, with some demonstrations ready to show them, he made contact. As Milgrom put it in later interviews, he had “contingency plans” if the Tolkien people should turn him down — presumably, filing the proverbial serial numbers off and releasing the game as a generic fantasy adventure after all. But luckily they were very receptive. They had only one request: that the game be released with a copy of the book included, to which Milgrom readily agreed: “That way you get clues on how to solve the adventure from the book. It also fills in many details we just didn’t have space for in the 48 K.” As I write this, we’re awash in hype over the imminent release of the first of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies. It’s amazing to consider that thirty years ago the Tolkien estate was willing to entrust the property to a tiny publisher like Melbourne House employing a few kids working part-time when not at university. Tolkien was then, as he is now, the premiere fantasy writer. It’s just that the position of fantasy fiction within popular culture has changed incalculably, in no small part due to trends whose roots I’ve been chronicling on this blog.

Even with the novel to provide a world and the outline of a plot, the team had an insanely ambitious brief, one that obviously was not going to fly on the current Sinclair machines. Nor had Sinclairs made their way into the Australian market in any great numbers anyway. The most popular PC there at the moment was a Hong Kong-built clone of the TRS-80 sold through the local Dick Smith chain of electronic stores: the dubiously legal Dick Smith System 80. These machines shipped with only 4 K or 16 K of memory, but with a bit of ingenuity could be expanded up to 48 K. They also used the Z80 processor found in many machines, including the Sinclairs. Milgrom and his team decided to make their game on their hacked 48 K System 80s, under the assumption that by the time it was finished other, more consumer-friendly machines with the necessary attributes would be available to which they could port it without too much hassle. This practice of targeting tomorrow’s hardware today is now common in AAA game development; The Hobbit was perhaps the first example of it.

Of course, with 48 K and no disk drive to work with for virtual memory (Australia, like Britain, was still firmly cassette-bound), they still had one hell of a task in front of them. Megler remained the linchpin of the project, developing a whole adventuring system that should be at least theoretically reusable in future games. She also went through the book to develop a plan for the game, mapped the major events and characters to locations in the world, and added them to the engine’s database. Mitchell worked on a full-sentence parser that would allow the player to talk to the other characters in the world and even order them about. He called his system “Inglish.” Together, the code for the engine and the parser was eventually squeezed down to about 17 K, leaving the rest of the memory for Megler’s database. Richie, who was employed by Melbourne House for only a few months, contributed no code, and his ideas ultimately had little influence on the system. Milgrom’s idea of hiring a linguistics expert to develop a parser is one of those that sounds better in theory than it works in reality. As countless other programmers have learned, developing a good adventure-game parser has more to do with common sense and careful diligence than elaborate theories about linguistics or natural-language processing.

The Hobbit‘s development had some similarities to a student project, a certain abstract naiveté that sometimes threatened to send the team wandering hopelessly off course. They were having great fun — perhaps sometimes too much fun — just playing in this world they were building. Thanks to all of its random dynamism, it constantly surprised even them. Megler sometimes played the system like an early version of a god game such as The Sims, injecting new NPCs just to see what would happen and what kind of chaos they would cause with their fellow actors and the player: “I’d written in an angry dwarf that kept trying to kill you, and if you did something (I don’t remember what) it became a randy dwarf, and kept following you around and propositioning you. But Fred and Phil decided that was a little too much, and made me take it out again.”

And then it was the summer of 1982, the semester was over, and — in a demonstration of just what a part-time, semi-amateur project this was — Megler, the primary architect of all this, was suddenly gone: “I was bored with full-time programming and debugging, and eager to get on with a ‘real career’ (which gaming wasn’t, back then).” Only Mitchell stayed behind, to be hired by Milgrom as a regular, full-time employee. By this time The Hobbit was in a relatively finished form, a bit rough around the edges but basically a playable game on the TRS-80/System 80. Now the ideal platform on which to actually release it had come around, just as they had hoped it would: the first Sinclair Spectrums were just reaching consumers back in Britain. What with Melbourne House’s distribution network in that country and the tiny size of the domestic Australian market, the Spectrum and Britain were the obvious target platform and market respectively for their game. Luckily, the Spectrum used the same Z80 chip as their development platform, and had the same 48 K of memory. Porting Megler’s engine to the Speccy should be relatively simple.

The Speccy did also have one important feature that their development machines had lacked: color, bitmapped graphics. Milgrom decided that illustrations could be the cherry on top of his next-generation adventure. He commissioned an artist, Kent Rees, to create — on paper, as was the norm at the time — pictures for about 30 of the game’s 80-odd locations. Mitchell then developed a system to trace these images and import them into the computer, using the vector-drawing techniques pioneered by Ken Williams for Mystery House. (You can see clear evidence of this in the finished game; the computer draws each line and fill one by one before your eyes, like an artist recreating the picture each time.) The illustrations are by no means stunning, but they were certainly novel in their time, and sometimes do manage to add a little something to the atmosphere.

Interestingly, Mitchell continued to do most of this work on the System 80, a much more pleasant machine to work with thanks to its real keyboard. He only moved the finished product to the Spectrum when it came time to test his handiwork. (To add to the irony, the TRS-80 would be one of the few platforms on which The Hobbit would never get an official release.) Thanks to some very efficient drawing algorithms as well as smart text-compression routines that rivaled those of Level 9, Mitchell was able to pack the entire game, with illustrations, into the 48 K Spectrum, a remarkable feat indeed when one considers that he had no recourse to external storage — 48 K was literally all he had to work with for code, text, data, and pictures.

As summer passed into fall, the game was settling into its final form. But now a persistent problem threatened to derail everything: a multitude of tiny glitches and bugs that cumulatively began to overwhelm the experience of every session the longer it continued. Rather than crafting interactions by hand, Megler had striven to make The Hobbit a dynamic simulation. Monsters and other characters move about and act differently in every session, guided by random chance as well as their disposition toward the player (attacking Gandalf, Elrond, or Thorin tends to get you on their bad side); every object has a weight, size, and strength that determine its interactions with every other; each character, CRPG-style, has a certain numerical defensive and offensive strength as well as a health level for determining the results of combat. This could all lead to fascinating examples of what we would now call emergent behavior or even emergent storytelling, but it could also lead to a welter of bugs and general weirdness. Tracking these down turned into a nightmare, as the randomization and dynamism of the world meant that many were impossible to reproduce consistently. This had presented a huge challenge even when Megler was still on the project:

The Hobbit was a tough game to test. Unlike the other games of the time, it was written in assembler, not BASIC, and we would find bugs in the assembly and linking programs. Also, it was not deterministic, and the game played differently every time you played it, as a result of Philip doing a lot of work to develop a “perfect” randomizing routine. Literally, the player had a turn, then each animal had a turn, and the animals just “played” the game themselves according to their character profile, which included interacting with each other. In essence, the animals would do to each other anything that they could do to or with you. So we would constantly have animals interacting in ways that had never been programmed or envisioned. The game would crash because of something that happened in another part of the game that you as the user (or person testing the game!) didn’t see, because the game only showed you what was happening in your location. For a while, we had terrible trouble with all the animals showing up in one location and then killing each other before you got there, before I got the character profiles better adjusted!

Melbourne House struggled with these problems for a time, but eventually, as development stretched toward the eighteen-month mark, seems to have just declared it good enough and pushed it out the door. A telling disclaimer in the manual indicates that they were aware that it wasn’t quite in the state it probably should have been: “Due to the immense size and complexity of this game it is impossible to guarantee that it will ever be completely error-free.” And indeed, the first release of the game in particular is riddled with inexplicabilities. Swords break on spider webs; Bilbo can carry the strapping warrior Brand about for hours; Gandalf and Thorin can walk through walls; garbled text and status messages obviously meant for the development team pop up from time to time. Melbourne House released a version 1.1 shortly thereafter, which fixed some of this but — oops! — also broke another critical interaction, rendering the game unwinnable. Version 1.2 soon followed, but throughout the game’s long published history Melbourne House seemed to remain stuck in the same perpetual game of whack-a-mole. Today it’s still remembered for its bugs almost as much as anything else.

The parser is beset by problems of its own. It does understand a lot, including, for the first time anywhere to my knowledge, adverbs. It’s possible, for instance, to “viciously attack the mean goblin,” although I’d be shocked to learn that it doesn’t just throw away the adverb as it does articles. Yet in other ways, especially in early releases, it’s very frustrating to work with. It’s possible to “climb into the boat,” but not to “enter” or “get in” it; possible to ask Thorin to “carry me,” but not to ask him to “take me” (talk of randy dwarfs aside, no double entendre intended); possible to “look across the river”, but not to “look over” it. When I recently played the game I had at least two occasions where I knew what to do but just could not express it to the game no matter how hard I tried, and finally had to get the answer from a walkthrough. Coming from someone who’s played as many text adventures as I have, that’s a condemnation indeed.

Playing The Hobbit can be, as stated in the perfect title of its one MobyGames review, “strange.” In spite of the grand ambitions, expecting even a shadow of the richness of Tolkien’s world (not to mention his prose) in a 48 K adventure game is expecting too much. There was no real possibility of presenting the temporal element that is so important to stories. Instead, the plot of the novel is mapped to the game’s geography: moving further eastward gets you further and further into the story, from the beginning in Bilbo’s hobbit hole to the climax at Smaug’s lair. (The Battle of the Five Armies, like all of the dwarfs except Thorin, is left out as just too complicated to deal with.) This has the disconcerting side effect that you can travel back in time whenever you wish: the trolls’ camp is just two moves east of Bilbo’s house, and one move west of Rivendell. Needless to say given such a compressed geography, the sense of embarking on a grand journey that the book conveys so well is largely absent. That it works as well as it does is a testament to the book’s almost uniquely adventure-game-suitable quest narrative. Few other temporal landscapes could be mapped even this neatly to the geographical.

The experience feels rather like wandering through a series of stage sets depicting the major scenes from the book — stage sets which are also being wandered by a bunch of other characters just smart enough to be profoundly, infuriatingly stupid. Your companions on the quest, Thorin and Gandalf, are both singularly useless (or worse) when left to their own devices. Never one to let circumstances get in the way of avarice, Thorin will “sit down to sing about gold” in the midst of a goblin, warg, or dragon attack. Gandalf, meanwhile, is also attracted to shiny objects; he constantly plucks random items off your person (“What’s this?”), then tosses them on the ground and wanders off when his one-turn attention span expires. A critical element of the game is the player’s ability — and occasional requirement — to give orders to other (friendly) characters, to have them do things beyond the abilities of a four-foot-tall hobbit. Sometimes they do what you ask, but sometimes they’re feeling petulant. Perhaps the seminal Hobbit moment comes when you scream at Brand to kill the dragon that’s about to engulf you both in flames, and he answers, “No.” After spending some time with this collection of half-wits, even the most patient player is guaranteed to start poking at them with her sword at some point.

And actually, therein sort of lies the secret to enjoying the game, and the root of its appeal in its time. It can be kind of fascinating to run around these stage sets with all of these other crazy characters just to see what can happen — and what you can make happen. Literally, no two games of The Hobbit are the same. I can see what Megler was striving toward: a truly living, dynamic story where anything can happen and where you have to deal with circumstances as they come, on the fly. It’s a staggeringly ambitious, visionary thing to be attempting. Infocom had already moved somewhat in that direction with Deadline, but (probably wisely) had hung the more dynamic elements from a scaffolding of pre-scripted set-piece events — and even at that it was easy in early releases in particular to break through the sense of realism of the simulation.

Needless to say, the idea doesn’t entirely or even mostly work in The Hobbit either. There are still enough traditional puzzles that it’s too easy to lock yourself out of victory and have your living fantasy become a Beckett tragicomedy. Then there’s the wonky physics, the way that entirely random developments can ruin your game, and of course all of those bugs that often leave you wondering whether some crazy thing you’re seeing is an expected part of the general surreality that surrounds you or just something gone haywire. (At a certain point, it kind of ceases to matter anymore; you just go with it.) To say that the game’s reach exceeds its grasp hardly begins to state the case; the thing the game is reaching for is somewhere in orbit above its firmly earthbound self, being an experience huge teams of developers still haven’t entirely succeeded in delivering today. But still, The Hobbit plays like no adventure before it. In my recent game, a warg somehow got into the wood elves’ compound long before I got there. I arrived to find him prancing atop the corpse of the one who should have captured me and thrown me in a cell. Suddenly my problem was not how to escape from the elves but how to get past the warg, a very tough customer — not exactly how it played out in the book, but an exciting experience nevertheless. Sometimes, when it works, The Hobbit can be kind of amazing. It stands today as the direction that was largely not taken in text adventures, and at its best it can make you wonder why.

Expensive American imports aside, The Hobbit marked a whole string of firsts for the British adventure scene: first full-sentence parser; first illustrated game; first title licensed from a book (this would have been a first in the American market as well); not to mention first crazy experiment in emergent text-adventure storytelling. And it arrived just as Spectrums were finally getting to consumers in big numbers, and as said consumers were eager for flashy new experiences to enjoy on their new machines. The Hobbit, in short, became huge. It was a hit out of the gate, and just kept selling and selling as months on the market turned into years. Melbourne House made ports for virtually all of the other viable computing platforms of the time, as well as enhanced versions for disk-drive-equipped machines that improved the graphics, added atmospheric music, and offered a little bit smarter companions, a little bit better parsing, and a little bit more to do. It was in this form that the game finally reached American shores in 1985, through an arrangement with Addison-Wesley. The game promptly became a big hit there as well.

Indeed, The Hobbit seemed adaptable to any market or promotional scheme. In its original British incarnation, it was minimally packaged in a rather garish box typical of the young scene there. In the United States, it was beautifully packaged in a classy fold-out box with a lovely, understated cover illustration drawn by Tolkien himself — one of the best of the golden age of computer-game packaging. Either way, it sold like crazy.

Exactly how many copies the game eventually sold is a matter for some speculation. In High Score!, Rusel DeMaria and Johnny L. Wilson state that it sold more than a million copies, but even given its undoubtedly phenomenal popularity I tend to be leery of such a figure given what I know of sales figures for other games of the era. An article in the British magazine Computer and Video Games dated March 1985 guesses that it may have sold up 200,000 copies by that point. With its entry into the American market (where it was a hit, but not the phenomenon it was in Britain) and continued popularity in Britain, it’s very possible that the game ended up selling half a million copies in total, but it’s hard for me to see my way to much more than that barring better evidence. Still, even the lower figure makes it an excellent candidate for the bestselling text adventure of all time, challenged, if at all, only by Infocom’s Zork I. (The most played text adventure, of course, is and will likely always remain the original Adventure.) The Hobbit made Melbourne House as a major software publisher. And it largely made the British adventure game as its own unique thing, ready to go its own way and try its own things rather than remain beholden to the American approach.

As I write about The Hobbit, “strange” is a word that comes up again and again; everything about it seems anomalous. It’s strange that the game that made the British adventure game should have come from half a world away. It’s strange that a game with such an atypical approach to the form should be the best candidate for the bestselling example of said form of all time. It’s strange that the first publisher to license a book should have been tiny Melbourne House, not one of the more established American publishers. It’s strange that what is, in all honesty, something of a bug-ridden mess should also have such a compelling quality to it. It’s strange that a game based on a novel should be all about emergence rather than attempting to recreate the story of the book. It’s strange that the woman who came up with this new vision of how an adventure game could work left Melbourne House and the burgeoning industry before The Hobbit was even complete, never to return. The Hobbit is most interesting because so much about it is so unlikely.

If you’d like to try it in its original form for yourself, here’s a copy of the Spectrum tape image and the manual. There are lots of Spectrum emulators out there; I use Fuse. Of course, you can also find heaps of other versions out there for heaps of platforms, including the enhanced, disk-based versions that feel more fleshed-out than the original. But never fear, all retain at least a light dusting of the bugs and oddities that are so critical to the Hobbit experience.

(Sources for this article include the web links in the post itself as well as interviews, articles, and profiles in Computer and Video Games #27, Computer and Video Games #41, Crash # 3, Popular Computing Weekly Vol. 1 No. 36, Popular Computing Weekly Vol. 2 No. 43, ZX Computing Vol. 1 No. 6, and Home Computing Weekly #5. And Veronika Megler herself was an invaluable source for this latest, revised version.)

Summer Camp is Over
December 12, 2012

It’s difficult to exaggerate just what a phenomenon Atari and their VCS console were in the United States of the very early 1980s. The raw figures are astounding; nothing else I’ve written about on this blog holds a candle to Atari’s mainstream cultural impact. By the beginning of 1982 the rest of the business of their parent company, the longstanding media conglomerate Warner Communications, looked almost trivial in comparison. Atari reaped six times as much profit as Warner’s entire music division; five times as much as the film division. By the middle of the year 17 percent of American households owned a videogame console, up from 9 percent at the same time of the previous year. Atari all but owned this exploding market, to the tune of an 80 percent share. The company’s very name had become synonymous for videogames, like Kleenex is for tissue. People didn’t ask whether you played videogames; they asked whether you played Atari. As the company ramped up for the big Christmas season with their home version of the huge arcade hit Pac-Man as well as a licensed adaptation of the blockbuster movie of the year, E.T., they confidently predicted sales increases of 50 percent over the previous Christmas. But then, on December 7, they shocked the business world by revising those estimates radically downward, to perhaps a 10 or 15 percent increase. Granted, plenty of businesses would still love to have growth like that, but the fact remained that Atari for the first time had underperformed. Change was in the air, and everyone could sense it.

Those who had been watching closely and thoughtfully could feel the winds of change already the previous summer, when Atari’s infamously substandard version of Pac-Man sold in massive numbers, but not quite as massive numbers as the company and their boosters had predicted; when sales on the Mattel Intellivision and the brand new ColecoVision soared, presumably at the expense of Atari’s aged VCS; when Commodore continued to aggressively market their low-cost home computers as a better alternative to a games console, and continued to be rewarded with huge sales. The big question became what form the post-VCS future of gaming would take, assuming it didn’t just fade away like the Hula Hoop fad to which videogames were so often compared. There were two broad schools of thought, who would each prove to be right and wrong in their own ways. Some thought that the so-called “second generation” consoles, like the ColecoVision, would pick up Atari’s slack and the console videogame industry would continue as strong as ever. Others, however, looked to the PC industry, which VisiCalc and the IBM PC had legitimized even as Commodore was proving that people would buy computers for the home in huge numbers if the price was right. The VIC-20 may have been only modestly more capable than the Atari VCS, but as a proof of concept of sorts it certainly got people’s attention. With prices dropping and new, much more capable machines on the horizon, many analysts cast their lot with the home computer as the real fruition of the craze that the Atari VCS had started. Full-fledged computers could offer so much better, richer experiences than the consoles thanks to their larger memories, their ability to display text, their keyboards, their disk-based storage. The newest computers had much better graphics and sound than their console counterparts to boot. And of course you could do more than play games with a computer, like write letters or help Junior learn BASIC as a leg-up for a Computer World soon to come.

An increasing appreciation of the potential of home computers and computer games by the likes of Wall Street meant big changes for the pioneers I’ve been writing about on this blog. Although most of the signs of these changes would not be readily visible to consumers until the following year, 1982 was the year that Big Capital started flowing into the computer-game (as opposed to the console-centric videogame) industry. Slick new companies like Electronic Arts were founded, and old-media corporations started commissioning software divisions. The old guard of pioneers would have to adapt to the new professionalism or die, a test many — like The Software Exchange, Adventure International, California Pacific, Muse, and Edu-Ware, among dozens of others — would fail. The minority that survived — like On-Line Systems (about to be rechristened Sierra On-Line), Brøderbund, Automated Simulations (about to be rechristened Epyx), Penguin, and Infocom — did so by giving their scruffy hacker bona fides a shave and a haircut, hiring accountants and MBAs and PR firms (thus the name changes), and generally starting to behave like real companies. Thanks to John Williams, who once again was generous enough to share his memories with me, I can write about how this process worked within On-Line Systems in some detail. The story of their transformative 1982, the year that summer camp ended, begins with a venture-capital firm.

TA Associates was founded in 1968 as one of the first of the new breed of VC firms. From the beginning, they were also one of the most savvy, often seeing huge returns on their investments while building a reputation for investing in emerging technologies like recombinant DNA and gene splicing at just the right moment. They were one of the first VC firms to develop an interest in the young PC industry, thanks largely to Jacqueline Morby, a hungry associate who came to TA (and to a career in business) only at age 40 in 1978, after raising her children. While many of her peers rushed to invest in hardware manufacturers like industry darling Apple, Morby stepped back and decided that software was where the action was really going to be. It’s perhaps difficult today to fully appreciate what a brave decision that was. Software was still an uncertain, vaguely (at best) understood idea among businesspeople at the time, as opposed to the concrete world of hardware. “Because it was something you couldn’t see, you couldn’t touch, you couldn’t hold,” she later said to InfoWorld, “it was a frightening thing to many investors.” For her first big software investment, in 1980, Morby backed what would ultimately prove to be the wrong horse: she invested in Digital Research, makers of CP/M, rather than Microsoft. Her record after that, however, would be much better, as she and TA maintained a reputation throughout the 1980s as one of (if not the) major players in software VC. She described her approach in a recent interview:

If you talk to enough entrepreneurs, you quickly figure out which of their ventures are the most promising. First, I would consider the year they were formed. If a company was three years old and employed 100 people, that meant something was going right. Then, after researching what their products did, I’d call them — cold. In those days, nobody called on the presidents of companies to say, “Hi, I’m an investor and I’m interested in you. Might I come out to visit and introduce myself?” But most of the companies said, “Come on out. There’s no harm in talking.” My calling companies led to many, many investments throughout the years.

When you look at the potential of a company, the most important questions to consider are, “How big is its market and how fast is it growing?” If the market is only $100 million, it’s not worth investing. The company can’t get very big. Many engineers never ask these questions. They just like the toys that they’re inventing. So you find lots of companies that are going to grow to $5 million or so in sales, but never more, because the market for their products is not big enough.

By 1982, Morby, now a partner with TA thanks to her earlier software success, had become interested in investing in an entertainment-software company. If computer games were indeed to succeed console games once people grew tired of the limitations of the Atari VCS and its peers, the potential market was going to be absolutely huge. After kicking tires around the industry, including at Brøderbund, she settled on On-Line Systems as just the company for her — unique enough to stand out with its scenic location and California attitude but eager to embrace the latest technologies, crank out hits, and generally take things to the next level.

When someone offers you millions of dollars virtually out of the blue, you’re likely to think that this is all too good to be true. And indeed, venture capital is always a two-edged sword, as many entrepreneurs have learned to their chagrin. TA’s money would come only with a host of strings attached: TA themselves would receive a 24 percent stake in On-Line Systems; Morby and some of her colleagues would sit on the board and have a significant say in the company’s strategic direction. Most of all, everyone would have to clean up their act and start acting like professionals, starting with the man at the top. Steven Levy described Ken Williams in his natural habitat in Hackers:

Ken’s new office was just about buried in junk. One new employee later reported that on first seeing the room, he assumed that someone had neglected to take out a huge, grungy pile of trash. Then he saw Ken at work, and understood. The twenty-eight-year-old executive, wearing his usual faded blue Apple Computer T-shirt and weather-beaten jeans with a hole in the knee, would sit behind the desk and carry on a conversation with employees or people on the phone while going through papers. The T-shirt would ride over Ken’s protruding belly, which was experiencing growth almost as dramatic as his company’s sales figures. Proceeding at lightning pace, he would glance at important contracts and casually throw them in the pile. Authors and suppliers would be on the phone constantly, wondering what had happened to their contracts. Major projects were in motion at On-Line for which contracts hadn’t been signed at all. No one seemed to know which programmer was doing what; in one case two programmers in different parts of the country were working on identical game conversions. Master disks, some without backups, some of them top secret IBM disks, were piled on the floor of Ken’s house, where one of his kids might pick it up or his dog piss on it. No, Ken Williams was not a detail person.

If Ken was not detail-oriented, he did possess a more valuable and unusual trait: the ability to see his own weaknesses. He therefore acceded wholeheartedly to TA’s demands that he hire a squad of polished young managers with suits, resumes, and business degrees. He even let TA field most of the candidates. He hired as president Dick Sunderland, a fellow he had worked for before the birth of On-Line, where he had been loathed by the hackers under him as too pedantic, too predictable, too controlling, too boring. To Ken (and TA) this sounded like just the sober medicine On-Line would need to compete in the changing industry.

Which is not to say that all of this new professionalism didn’t also come with its attendant dangers. John Williams states frankly today that “some of those new managers came in with the idea that they would run the business after they pushed Ken to the side or out.” (It wasn’t clear to the Williams whether they came up with that idea on their own or TA subtly conveyed it to them during the hiring process.) Ken also clashed constantly with his own hire Sunderland; the latter would be gone again within a year. He was walking a difficult line, trying to instill the structure his company needed to grow and compete and be generally taken seriously by the business community without entirely losing his original vision of a bunch of software artisans creating together in the woods. As org charts started getting stapled to walls, file cabinets started turning up locked, and executive secretaries started appearing as gatekeepers outside the Williams’ offices, many of the old guard saw that vision as already dying. Some of them left. Needless to say, Ken no longer looked for their replacements in the local liquor store.

Ken proved amazingly adept at taking the good advice his new managers had to offer while remaining firmly in charge. After a while, most accepted that he wasn’t going anywhere and rewarded him with a grudging respect. Much of their advice involved the face that On-Line presented to the outer world. For a long time now everyone had agreed that the name “On-Line Systems,” chosen by Ken back when he had envisioned a systems software company selling a version of FORTRAN for microcomputers, was pretty awful — “generic as could be and dull as dishwater” in John Williams’s words. They decided on the new name of “Sierra On-Line.” The former part conveyed the unique (and carefully cultivated) aura of backwoods artisans that still clung to the company even in these more businesslike days, while the latter served as a bridge to the past as well as providing an appropriate high-tech flourish (in those times “On-Line” still sounded high-tech). They had a snazzy logo featuring a scenic mountain backdrop drawn up, and revised and slicked-up their packaging. The old Hi-Res Adventure line was now SierraVenture; the action games SierraVision.

Sierra hired Barbara Hendra, a prominent New York PR person, to work further on their image. Surprisingly, the erstwhile retiring housewife Roberta was a big force behind this move; her success as a game designer had revealed an unexpected competitive streak and a flair for business of her own. Hendra nagged Roberta and especially Ken — he of the faded, paunch-revealing tee-shirt and the holy jeans — about their dress and mannerisms, teaching them how to interact with the movers and shakers in business and media. She arranged a string of phone interviews and in-person visits from inside and outside the trade press, including a major segment on the prime-time news program NBC Magazine. Ken was good with these junkets, but Roberta — pretty, chic, and charming — was the real star, Sierra’s PR ace in the hole, the antithesis of the nerds so many people still associated with computer games. When someone like Roberta said that computer games were going to be the mass-market entertainment of the future, it somehow sounded more believable than it did coming from a guy like Ken.

In the midst of all this, another windfall all but fell into Sierra’s lap. Christopher Cerf, a longtime associate of The Children’s Television Workshop of Sesame Street fame, approached them with some vague ideas about expanding CTW into software. From there discussions moved in the direction of a new movie being developed by another CTW stalwart: Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets. For Ken, who had been frantically reading up on entertainment and media in order to keep up with the changes happening around his company, the idea of working with Henson was nothing short of flabbergasting, and not just because the Muppets were near the apogee of their popularity on the heels of two hit movies, a long-running television series, and a classic Christmas special with John Denver. John Williams:

Ken developed a kind of worship for two men as he began to study up on entertainment. One was Walt Disney and the second was Jim Henson. Both were men who were enablers — not known as much for their own artistry so much as their ability to bring artists and business together to make really big things happen — and that was what Ken strived for. Walt was already gone of course, but Henson was still alive.

Ken Williams (right) hobnobbing with Jim Henson

The almost-completed movie was called The Dark Crystal. In the works on and off for five years, it marked a major departure for Henson and his associates. Although populated with the expected cast of puppets and costumed figures (and not a single recognizable human), there were no Muppets to be found in it. It was rather a serious — even dark — fantasy tale set in a richly organic landscape of the fantastic conceived by Henson’s creative partner on the project, designer and illustrator Brian Froud. In an early example of convergence culture, Henson and friends were eager to expand the world of the movie beyond the screen. They already planned a glossy hardcover book, a board and a card game, and a traveling art exhibit. Now an adventure game, to be designed by Roberta, sounded like a good idea. Such a major media partnership was a first for computer-game publisher, although Atari had been doing licensed games for some time now for the VCS. Anyone looking for a sign that computer games were hitting the big time needed look no farther.

For the Williams, the changes that the venture capitalists had brought were nothing compared to this. Suddenly they were swept into the Hollywood/Manhattan media maelstrom, moving in circles so rarified they’d barely realized they existed outside of their televisions. John Williams again:

I remember this time very well. Let me put it in a very personal perspective. I’m like 22 or 23. A guy who grew up in Wheaton, Illinois (which is just down the street from absolutely nowhere) and currently living in a town of like 5000 people 50 miles from the nearest traffic light. Now imagine this young wet-behind-the-ears punk walking through the subways and streets of Manhattan with Jim Henson, getting interviewed on WNBC talk radio while wearing his first real tailored suit. Eating at “21” with Chris Cerf, and taking limos to meet with publishing companies on Times Square. That was me – and I was just along for the ride. For Ken and Roberta, it was on a whole other level.

Much of the Williams’ vision for computerized entertainment, of games as the next great storytelling medium to compete with Hollywood, was forged during this period. If they had ever doubted their own vision for Sierra, hobnobbing with the media elite convinced them that this stuff was going to get huge. Years before the technology would become practical, they started toying with the idea of hiring voice actors and considering how Screen Actors Guild contracts would translate to computer games.

But for here and now there was still The Dark Crystal, in the form of both movie and game. Both end up a bit underwhelming as actual works when set against what they represent to Sierra and the computer-game industry.

The movie is in some ways an extraordinary achievement, a living alien world built from Styrofoam, animatronics, and puppets. It’s at its most compelling when the camera simply lingers over the landscape and its strange inhabitants. Unfortunately, having created this world, Henson and company don’t seem quite sure what to do with it. The story is an unengaging quest narrative which pits an impossibly, blandly good “chosen one,” the Gelfling Gen, against the impossibly evil race of the Skeksis. It’s all rather painfully derivative of The Lord of the Rings: two small protagonists carry an object of great power into danger, with even a Gollum stand-in to dog their steps. Nor do the endless melodramatic voiceovers or the hammy voice acting do the film any favors. It’s a mystery to whom this film, too dark and disturbing for children and too hokey and simplistic for adults and with none of the wit and joy that marked Henson’s Muppets, was meant to really appeal. There have been attempts in recent years to cast the movie, a relative commercial disappointment in its time, as a misunderstood masterpiece. I’m not buying it. The Dark Crystal is no Blade Runner.

The game is similarly difficult to recommend. Like The Hobbit, The Dark Crystal‘s quest narrative maps unusually well to an adventure game, but Roberta showed none of the technical ambition that Veronika Megler displayed in making a game of her source material. The Dark Crystal suffers from the same technical and design flaws that mark all of the Hi-Res Adventure line: absurd puzzles, bad parser, barely-there world model, you’ve heard the litany before from me. In the midst of the problems, however, there are more nods toward story than we’re used to seeing in our old-school adventure games, even if they sometimes smack more of the necessities born of doing a movie adaptation than a genuine striving to advance the medium. Early on we get by far the longest chunk of expository text to make it into any of the Hi-Res Adventure line.

Unusually, the game is played in the third person, with you guiding the actions of the movie’s hero Jen and, later, both Jen and his eventual sidekick/tentative love interest, Kira. The duality of this is just odd; you never quite know who will respond to your commands. The third-person perspective extends to the graphics, which show Jen and Kira as part of each scene.

As Carl Muckenhaupt mentions in his (highly recommended) posts about the game, it’s tempting to see the graphics as a transitional step between the first-person perspective of Roberta’s earlier Hi-Res Adventure games and the fully animated adventure games that she would make next — games that would have you guiding your onscreen avatar about an animated world in real-time. It’s also very possible that working with the fleshed-out story and world of someone else inspired Roberta to push her own future original works further in the direction of real storytelling. Notably, before The Dark Crystal none of her games bothered to define their protagonists or even give them names; after it, all of them did.

Whatever influence it had on Roberta’s design approach, the fact remains that she seemed less passionate about The Dark Crystal itself than she had been about her previous games. With the licensing deal having been finalized as the movie was all but ready for release, The Dark Crystal was what John Williams euphemistically calls a “compressed timeline” game. Roberta spent only a month or so on the design while dealing with all of the distractions of her new life in the spotlight, then turned the whole thing over to Sierra’s team of in-house programmers and artists. It all feels a bit rote. John:

The simple truth is that the whole of the Dark Crystal project was, in the end, a business decision and not really driven by our developers or our creative people. I think that’s really why this is one of the least cared about and least remembered products in the Sierra stable. Look back at that game and there’s really none of Roberta ‘s imagination in there – and the programmers, artists, etc., involved were basically mimicking someone else’s work and creating someone else’s vision. The lack of passion shows.

The player must not so much do what seems correct for the characters in any given situation as try to recreate the events of the film. If she succeeds, she’s rewarded with… exactly what she already saw in the movie.

Adapting a linear story to an interactive medium is much more difficult than it seems. This is certainly one of the least satisfying ways to approach it. The one nod toward the dynamism that marks The Hobbit are a couple of minions sent by the Skeksis to hunt you down: an intelligent bat and a Garthim, a giant, armored, crab-like creature with fearsome pincers. If you are spotted in the open by the bat, you have a limited amount of time to get under cover — trees, a cave, or the like — before a Garthim comes to do you in. That’s kind of impressive given the aging game engine, and it does help with the mimesis that so many of the game’s other elements actively work against. But alas, it’s just not enough.

Even with the rushed development schedule, the game didn’t arrive in stores until more than a month after the movie’s December 7, 1982, premiere. After, in other words, the big Christmas buying season. That, along with the movie’s lukewarm critical reception and somewhat disappointing performance at the box office, likely contributed to The Dark Crystal not becoming the hit that Sierra had expected. Its sales were disappointing enough to sour Sierra on similar licensing deals for years to come. Ken developed a new motto: “I don’t play hits, I make them.”

Of course, it also would have been unwise to blame The Dark Crystal‘s underperformance entirely on timing or on its being tied to the fate of the movie. The old Hi-Res Adventure engine, which had been so amazing in the heyday of The Wizard and the Princess, was getting creaky with age, and had long since gone past the point of diminishing commercial returns; not only The Dark Crystal but also its immediate predecessor, the epic Time Zone, had failed to meet sales expectations. This seventh Hi-Res Adventure would therefore be the last. Clearly it was time to try something new if Sierra intended to keep their hand in adventure games. That something would prove to be as revolutionary a step as had been Mystery House. The Dark Crystal, meanwhile, sneaked away into history largely unloved and unremembered, one of the first of a long industry tradition of underwhelming, uninspired movie cash-ins. The fact that computer games had reached a stage where such cash-ins could exist is ultimately the most important thing about it.

If you’d like to try The Dark Crystal for yourself despite my criticisms, here’s the Apple II disk images and the manual.

(As always, thanks to John Williams for his invaluable memories and insights on these days of yore. In addition to the links embedded in the text, Steven Levy’s Hackers and the old Atari history Zap! were also wonderful sources. Speaking of Atari histories: I look forward to diving into Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel’s new one.)

The Commodore 64
December 17, 2012

As I described in my last article, many people were beginning to feel that change was in the air as they observed the field of videogame consoles and the emerging market for home computers during the middle part of 1982. If a full-fledged computer was to take the place of the Atari VCS in the hearts of America’s youth, which of the plethora of available machines would it be? IBM had confidently expected theirs to become the one platform to rule them all, but the IBM PC was not gaining the same traction in the home that it was enjoying in business, thanks to an extremely high price and lackluster graphics. Apple was still the media darling, but the only logical contender they could offer for the segment, the Apple II Plus, was looking increasingly aged. Its graphics capabilities, so remarkable for existing at all back in 1977, had barely been upgraded since, and weren’t really up to the sort of colorful action games the kids demanded. Nor was its relatively high price doing it any favors. Another contender was the Atari 400/800 line. Although introduced back in late 1979, these machines still had amongst the best graphics and sound capabilities on the market. On the other hand, the 400 model, with its horrid membrane keyboard, was cost-reduced almost to the point of unusability, while the 800 was, once again, just a tad on the expensive side. And Atari itself, still riding the tidal wave that was the VCS, showed little obvious interest in improving or promoting this tiny chunk of its business. Then of course there was Radio Shack, but no one — including them — seemed to know just what they were trying to accomplish with a pile of incompatible machines of wildly different specifications and prices all labeled “TRS-80.” And there was the Commodore VIC-20 which had validated for many people the whole category of home computer in the first place. Its price was certainly right, but it was just too limited to have long legs.

The TI-99/4A. Note the prominent port for “Solid State Software” to the right of the keyboard.

The most obvious contender came from an unexpected quarter. Back in early 1980, the electronics giant Texas Instruments had released a microcomputer called the TI-99/4. Built around a CPU of TI’s own design, it was actually the first 16-bit machine to hit the market. It had a lot of potential, but also a lot of flaws and oddities to go with its expensive price, and went nowhere. Over a year later, in June of 1981, TI tried again with an updated version, the TI-99/4A. The new model had just 16 K of RAM, but TI claimed more was not necessary. Instead of using cassettes or floppy disks, they sold software on cartridges, a technique they called “Solid State Software.” Since the programs would reside in the ROM of the cartridge, they didn’t need to be loaded into RAM; that needed to be used only for the data the programs manipulated. The idea had some real advantages. Programs loaded instantly and reliably, something that couldn’t be said for many other storage techniques, and left the user to fiddle with fragile tapes or disks only to load and save her data files. This just felt more like the way a consumer-electronics device ought to work to many people — no typing arcane commands and then waiting and hoping, just pop a cartridge in and turn the thing on. The TI-99/4A also had spectacularly good graphics, featuring sprites, little objects that were independent of the rest of the screen and could be moved about with very little effort on the part of the computer or its programmer. They were ideal for implementing action games; in a game of Pac-Man, for instance, the title character and each of the ghosts would be implemented as a sprite. Of the other contenders, only the Atari 400 and 800 offered sprites — as well as, tellingly, all of the game consoles. Indeed, they were considered something of a necessity for a really first-rate gaming system. With these virtues plus a list price of just $525, the TI-99/4A was a major hit right out of the gate, selling in numbers to rival the even cheaper but much less capable VIC-20. It would peak at the end of 1982 with a rather extraordinary (if brief-lived) 35 percent market share, and would eventually sell in the neighborhood of 2.5 million units.

With the TI-99/4A so hot that summer of 1982, the one wildcard — the one obstacle to anointing it the king of home computers — was a new machine just about to ship from Commodore. It was called the Commodore 64, and it would change everything. Its story had begun the previous year with a pair of chips.

In January of 1981 some of the engineers at Commodore’s chipmaking subsidiary, MOS Technologies, found themselves without a whole lot to do. The PET line had no major advancements in the immediate offing, and the VIC-20’s design was complete (and already released in Japan, for that matter). Ideally they would have been working on a 16-bit replacement for the 6502, but Jack Tramiel was uninterested in funding such an expensive and complicated project, a choice that stands as amongst the stupidest of a veritable encyclopedia of stupidity written by Commodore management over the company’s chaotic life. With that idea a nonstarter, the engineers hit upon a more modest project: to design a new set of graphics and sound chips that would dramatically exceed the capabilities of the VIC-20 and (ideally) anything else on the market. Al Charpentier would make a graphics chips to be called the VIC-II, the successor to the VIC chip that gave the VIC-20 its name. Bob Yannes would make a sound synthesizer on a chip, the Sound Interface Device (SID). They took the idea to Tramiel, who gave them permission to go ahead, as long as they didn’t spend too much.

In deciding what the VIC-II should be, Charpentier looked at the graphics capabilities of all of the computers and game machines currently available, settling on three as the most impressive, and thus the ones critical to meet or exceed: the Atari 400 and 800, the Mattel Intellivision console, and the soon-to-be-released TI-99/4A. Like all of these machines, the VIC-II chip would have to have sprites. In fact, Charpentier spent the bulk of his time on them, coming up with a very impressive design that allowed up to eight onscreen sprites in multiple colors. (Actually, as with so many features of the VIC-II and the SID, this was only the beginning. Clever programmers would quickly come up with ways to reuse the same sprite objects, thus getting even more moving objects on the screen.) For the display behind the sprites, Charpentier created a variety of character-based and bitmapped modes, with palettes of up to 16 colors at resolutions of up to 320 X 200. On balance, the final design did indeed exceed or at least match the aggregate capabilities of anything else on the market. It offered fewer colors than the Atari’s 128, for example, but a much better sprite system; fewer total sprites (without trickery) than the TI-99/4A’s 32, but bigger and more colorful ones, and with about the same background display capabilities.

If the VIC-II was an evolutionary step for Commodore, the SID was a revolution in PC and videogame sound. Bob Yannes, just 24 years old, had been fascinated by electronic sound for much of his life, devouring early electronica records like those by Kraftwerk and building simple analog synthesizers from kits in his garage. Hired by MOS right out of university in 1978, he felt like he had been waiting all his employment for just this project. An amateur musician himself, he was appalled by the sound chips that other engineers thought exceptional, like that in the Atari 400 and 800. From a 1985 IEEE Spectrum article on the making of the Commodore 64:

The major differences between his chip and the typical videogame sound chips, Yannes explained, were its more precise frequency control and its independent envelope generators for shaping the intensity of a sound. “With most of the sound effects in games, there is either full volume or no volume at all. That really makes music impossible. There’s no way to simulate the sound of any instrument even vaguely with that kind of envelope, except maybe an organ.”

Although it is theoretically possible to use the volume controls on other sound chips to shape the envelope of a sound, very few programmers had ever tackled such a complex task. To make sound shaping easy, Yannes put the envelope controls in hardware: one register for each voice to determine how quickly a sound builds up; two to determine the level at which the note is sustained and how fast it reaches that level; and one to determine how fast the note dies away. “It took a long time for people to understand this,” he conceded.

But programmers would come to understand it in the end, and the result would be a whole new dimension to games and computer art. The SID was indeed nothing short of a full-fledged synthesizer on a chip. With three independent voices to hand, its capabilities in the hands of the skilled are amazing; the best SID compositions still sound great today. Games had beeped and exploded and occasionally even talked for years. Now, however, the emotional palette game designers had to paint on would expand dramatically. The SID would let them express deep emotions through sound and (especially) music, from stately glory to the pangs of romantic love, from joy to grief.

In November of 1981 the MOS engineers brought their two chips, completed at last, to Tramiel to find out what he’d like to do with them. He decided that they should put them into a successor to the VIC-20, to be tentatively titled the VIC-40. In the midst of this discussion, it emerged that the MOS engineers had one more trick up their sleeves: a new variant of the 6502 called the 6510 which offered an easy way to build an 8-bit computer with more than 48 K of RAM by using a technique called bank switching.

Let’s stop here for just a moment to consider why this should have been an issue at all. Both the Zilog Z80 and the MOS 6502 CPUs that predominated among early PCs are 8-bit chips with 16-bit address buses. The latter number is the one that concerns us right now; it means that the CPU is capable of addressing up to 64 K of memory. So why the 48 K restriction? you might be asking. Well, you have to remember that a computer does not only address RAM; there is also the need for ROM. In the 8-bit machines, the ROM usually contains a BASIC-based operating environment along with a few other essentials like the glyphs used to form characters on the screen. All of this usually consumes about 16 K, leaving 48 K of the CPU’s address space to be mapped to RAM. With the arrival of the 48 K Apple II Plus in 1979, the industry largely settled on this as both the practical limit for a Z80- or 6502-based machine and the configuration that marked a really serious, capable PC. There were some outliers, such as Apple’s Language Card that let a II Plus be expanded to 64 K of RAM by dumping BASIC entirely in lieu of a Pascal environment loaded from disk, but the 48 K limit was largely accepted as just a fact of life for most applications.

With the 6510, however, the MOS engineers added some circuitry to the 6502 to make it easy to swap pieces of the address space between two (or more) alternatives. Below is an illustration of the memory of the eventual Commodore 64.

Ignoring the I/O block as out of scope for this little exercise, let’s walk through this. First we have 1 K of RAM used as a working space to hold temporary values and the like (i.e., the program stack). Then 1 K is devoted to storing the current contents of the screen. Next comes the biggest chunk, 38 K for actual BASIC programs. Then 8 K of ROM, which stores the BASIC language itself. Then comes another 4 K of “high RAM” that’s gotten trapped behind the BASIC ROM; this is normally inaccessible to the BASIC programmer unless she knows some advanced techniques to get at it. Then 4 K of ROM to hold the glyphs for the standard onscreen character set. Finally, 8 K of kernel, storing routines for essential functions like reading the keyboard or interacting with cassette or disk drives. All of this would seem to add up to a 44 K RAM system, with only 40 K of it easily accessible. But notice that each piece of ROM has RAM “underneath” it. Thanks to the special circuity on the 6510, a programmer can swap RAM for ROM if she likes. Programming in assembly language rather than BASIC? Swap out the BASIC ROM, and get another 8 K of RAM, plus easy, contiguous access to that high block of another 4 K. Working with graphics instead of words, or would prefer to define your own font? Swap out the character ROM. Taking over the machine entirely, and thus not making so much use of the built-in kernel routines? Swap the kernel for another 8 K of RAM, and maybe just swap it back in from time to time when you want to actually use something there.

The above will hopefully answer the most common first question of a new Commodore 64 user, past or present: Why does my “64 K RAM system” say it has only 38 K free for BASIC? The rest of the memory is there, but only for those who know how to get at it and who are willing to forgo the conveniences of BASIC. I should emphasize here that the concept of bank switching was hardly an invention of the MOS engineers; it’s a fairly obvious approach, after all. Apple had already used the technique to pack a full 128 K of RAM into a 6502-based computer of their own, the failed Apple III (about which more in the very near future). The Apple III, however, was an expensive machine targeted at businesses and professionals. The Commodore 64 was the first to bring the technique to the ordinary consumer market. Soon it would be everywhere, giving the venerable 6502 and Z80 new leases on life.

Jack Tramiel wasn’t a terribly technical fellow, and likely didn’t entirely understand what an extra 16 K of memory would be good for in the first place. But he knew a marketing coup when he saw one. Thus the specifications of the new machine were set: a 64 K system built around MOS’s three recent innovations — the 6510, the VIC-II, and the SID. The result should be cheap enough to produce that Commodore could sell it for less than $600. Oh, and please have a prototype ready for the January 1982 Winter CES show, less than two months away.

With so little time and such harsh restrictions on production costs, Charpentier, Yannes, and the rest of their team put together the most minimalist design they could to bind those essential components together. They even managed to get enough of it done to have something to show at Winter CES, where the “VIC-40” was greeted with excitement on the show floor but polite skepticism in the press. Commodore, you see, had a well-earned reputation, dating from the days when the PET was the first of the trinity of 1977 to be announced and shown but the last to actually ship, for over-promising at events like these and delivering late or not at all. Yet when Commodore showed the machine again in June at the Summer CES — much more polished, renamed the Commodore 64 to emphasize what Tramiel and Commodore’s marketing department saw as its trump card, and still promised for less than $600 — they had to start paying major attention. Day later it started shipping. The new machine was virtually indistinguishable from the VIC-20 in external appearance because Commodore hadn’t been willing to spend the time or money to design a new case.

The Commodore 64

Inside it was one hell of a machine for the money, although not without its share of flaws that a little more time, money, and attention to detail during the design process could have easily corrected.

The BASIC housed in its ROM (“BASIC 2.0”) was painfully antiquated. It was actually the same BASIC that Tramiel had bought from Microsoft for the original PET back in 1977. Bill Gates, in a rare display of naivete, sold him the software outright for a flat fee of $10,000, figuring Commodore would have to come back soon for another, better version. He obviously didn’t know Jack Tramiel very well. Ironically, Commodore did have on hand a better BASIC 4.0 they had used in some of the later PET models, but Tramiel nixed using it in the Commodore 64 because it would require a more expensive 16 K rather than 8 K of ROM chips to house. People were already getting a lot for their money, he reasoned. Why should they expect a decent BASIC as well? The Commodore 64’s BASIC was not only primitive, but completely lacked commands to actually harness the machine’s groundbreaking audiovisual capabilities. If the memory restrictions on BASIC weren’t enough to convince would-be game programmers to learn assembly language, this certainly did. The Commodore 64’s horrendous BASIC likely accelerated an already ongoing flight from the language amongst commercial game developers. For the rest of the 1980s, game development and assembly language would go hand in hand.

Due to a whole combination of factors — including miscommunication among marketing, engineering, and manufacturing, an ultimately pointless desire to be hardware compatible with the VIC-20, component problems, cost-cutting, and the sheer rush of putting a product together in such a limited time frame — the Commodore 64 ended up saddled with a disk system that would become, even more than the primitive BASIC, the albatross around the platform’s neck. It’s easily the slowest floppy-disk system ever sold commercially, on the order of thirty times slower than Steve Wozniak’s masterpiece, the Apple II’s Disk II system. Interacting with disks from BASIC 2.0, which was written before disk drives existed on PCs, requires almost as much patience as does waiting for a program to load. For instance, you have to type “LOAD ‘$’, 8” followed by ‘LIST’ just to get a directory listing. As an added bonus, doing so wipes out any BASIC program you might have happened to have in memory.

The disk system’s flaws frustrate because they dissipate a lot of potential strengths. Commodore had had a unique approach to disk drives ever since producing their first for the PET line circa 1979. A Commodore disk drive is a smart device, containing its own 6502 CPU as well as ROM and 2 K of RAM. The DOS used on other computers like the Apple II to tell the computer how to control the drive, manage the filesystem, etc., is unnecessary on a Commodore machine. The drive can control itself very well, thank you very much; it already knows all about that stuff. This brings some notable advantages. No separate DOS has to be loaded into the computer’s RAM, eating precious memory. DOS 3.3., for example, the standard on the Apple II Plus at the time of the Commodore 64’s introduction, eats up more than 10 K of the machine’s precious 48 K of RAM. Thus the Commodore 64’s memory edge was in practical terms even more significant than it appeared on paper. Because it’s possible to write small programs for the drive’s CPU to process and load them into the drive’s RAM, the whole system was a delight for hackers. One favorite trick was to load a disk-copying program into a pair of drives, then physically disconnect them from the computer. They would continue happily copying disks on their own, as long as the user kept putting more disks in. More practically for average users, it was often possible for games to play music or display animated graphics while simultaneously loading from the drive. Other computers’ CPU were usually too busy controlling the drive to manage this. Of course, this was a very good feature for this particular computer, because Commodore 64 users would be spending a whole lot more time than users of other computers waiting for their disk drives to load their programs.

Quality-control issues plagued the entire Commodore 64 line, especially in the first couple of years. One early reviewer had to return two machines before Commodore shipped him one that worked; some early shipments to stores were allegedly 80 percent dead on arrival. To go with all of their other problems, the disk drives were particularly unreliable. In one early issue, Compute!’s Gazette magazine stated that four of the seven drives in their offices were currently dead. The poor BASIC and unfriendly operating environment, the atrocious disk system, and the quality-control issues, combined with no option for getting the 80-column display considered essential for word processing and much other business software, kept the Commodore 64 from being considered seriously by most businesses as an alternative to the Apple II or IBM PC. Third-party solutions did address many of the problems. Various improved BASICs were released as plug-in cartridges, and various companies rewrote the systems software to improve transfer speeds by a factor of six or more. But businesses wanted machines that just worked for them out of the box, which Apple and IBM largely gave them while Commodore did not.

None of that mattered much to Commodore, at least for now, because they were soon selling all of the Commodore 64s they could make for use in homes. No, it wasn’t a perfect machine, not even with its low price (and dropping virtually by the month), its luxurious 64 K of memory, its versatile graphics, and its marvelous SID chip. But, like the Sinclair Spectrum that was debuting almost simultaneously in Britain, it was the perfect machine for this historical moment. Also like the Spectrum, it heralded a new era in its home country, where people would play — and make — games in numbers that dwarfed what had come before. For a few brief years, the premiere mainstream gaming platform in the United States would be a full-fledged computer rather than a console — the only time, before or since, that that has happened. We’ll talk more about the process that led there next time.

(As you might expect, much of this article is drawn from Brian Bagnall’s essential history of Commodore. The IEEE Spectrum article referenced above was also a gold mine.)