Jimmy Maher (maher@filfre.net)

The Digital Antiquarian
Volume 6: 1984
Comments Edition

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Contents

1. Popcorn and Peanuts

1. Comments

2. The Unmaking and Remaking of Sierra On-Line

1. Comments

3. A Computer for Every Home?

1. Comments

4. From Automated Simulations to Epyx

1. Comments

5. How Things Work: Commodore 64 and Summer Games Edition

1. Comments

6. Seven Cities of Gold

1. Comments

7. Sorcerer

1. Comments

8. Seastalker

1. Comments

9. Bookware

1. Comments

10. Rendezvous with Rama

1. Comments

11. Fahrenheit 451: The Book

1. Comments

12. Fahrenheit 451: The Game

1. Comments

13. Dragonworld

1. Comments

14. Michael Crichton

1. Comments

15. From Congo to Amazon

1. Comments

16. Amazon in Pictures

1. Comments

17. Shadowkeep

1. Comments

18. Masters of the Game

1. Comments

19. Cutthroats

1. Comments

20. Douglas Adams

1. Comments

21. The Computerized Hitchhiker’s

1. Comments

22. Hitchhiking the Galaxy Infocom-Style

1. Comments

23. Suspect

1. Comments

24. Sherlock

1. Comments

25. This Tormented Business, Part 1

1. Comments

26. Elite (or, The Universe on 32 K Per Day)

1. Comments

27. Mike Singleton and The Lords of Midnight

1. Comments

28. The Legend of Ultimate Play the Game

1. Comments

29. The Merry Pranksters of Automata

1. Comments

Popcorn and Peanuts
July 12, 2013

By the time the IBM PC was a year old in late 1982, it was clear that the machine was a huge success. IBM had sold some 150,000 PCs during that first year, and demand continued to increase almost exponentially. As the PC blew right through sales forecast after sales forecast, IBM scrambled desperately just to meet demand. An interview with Don Estridge, head of IBM’s Entry Systems Division that was responsible for the PC, in the November 1983 Byte describes the chaos of those heady first couple of years:

Each quarter, IBM asks everyone who is selling the PC for a projection of purchases for two periods: the next quarter and the three quarters following it. In October 1982, for example, the division asked customers how many systems they expected to buy for the period from January through March 1983. Then IBM asked these customers what they expected to buy for April through December 1983.

When customers returned in January of this year [1983], ostensibly to talk about their system needs for April 1983 and beyond, they wanted to talk about January through March all over again. They doubled their orders for that first quarter.

“Then the same darn thing happened again in March, when we were talking about July through September. We can only handle so many factors of two,” Estridge says. “We’ve upped our production rate three times this year; production is very high. We’re extremely pleased that we can build a quality product at that rate, but it’s not enough. If the demand keeps on going at these rates,” Estridge warns, “at some point there won’t be any more parts.”

The IBM PC wasn’t just a commercial success; it was a transformative landmark for the PC industry as a whole. The vast majority were purchased not by the hackers, hobbyists, and early adopters who had heretofore driven the PC industry, but rather by the mainstream of corporate America, conservative businesses who were as nonplussed by its relatively high price as they were soothed by the legitimizing imprimatur of IBM. Both were taken as signs that the IBM PC was a serious machine, qualitatively different from the scruffy likes of Commodore, Atari, Radio Shack, and even Apple. Big Business placed huge orders that could reach into the multi-millions at a single pop. Merrill Lynch, for instance, went overnight from being dismissive of computerized trading to ordering a machine for the desk of every single broker in the company — 12,000 computers. Such was the power and mystique of IBM, the number-one company in the world in after-tax profits, a company whose gross sales exceeded the budget of the state of California.

And all of that was starting to happen even before the IBM PC got its killer app, the second such to hit the PC industry as a whole: Lotus 1-2-3. Introduced in January of 1983, 1-2-3 was, like the first killer app VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program. But 1-2-3 was clearly better in just about every possible way, to the extent that it made VisiCalc a has-been virtually overnight. Mitch Kapor, head of Lotus, had made the decision to throw in his lot entirely with relative newcomer IBM, not bothering to make a version of 1-2-3 for the Apple II or the CP/M machines or anything other than the IBM PC running Microsoft’s MS-DOS. Just as the Apple II had gotten a huge boost from being the first machine to run VisiCalc, that first clearly useful piece of PC software for the everyday businessperson, the IBM PC soared on the back of Lotus 1-2-3. For CP/M and the vendors still supporting it with hardware and software, meanwhile, Kapor’s decision marked the definitive beginning of the end. By 1985 CP/M would effectively be a dead operating system. Businesspeople simply had no use for a computer that couldn’t run 1-2-3.

An interesting and too little remarked aspect of the transformation wrought by the IBM PC is that IBM themselves never planned it or saw it coming. They themselves, in what amounted to a rare display of corporate humility, underestimated the impact that the IBM name would have on the industry. Instead of arrogantly going their own way and defining their own standards, which had always been their wont with their bigger computer systems, with the PC they made an apparently sincere effort to fit into the existing ecosystem. They even dutifully tried to license and adopt CP/M as their standard operating system until losing faith in Gary Kildall and Digital Research and going with Microsoft’s CP/M lookalike MS-DOS. A quick glance at a sales brochure for the original IBM PC reveals a plethora of features that had little relevance to the workaday world of business computing: an optional color graphics card (not a great one, but notable for existing at all); sound (ditto); a joystick interface card; a BASIC environment built into ROM, which would could be used in lieu of a disk-based operating system; a cassette-drive port; the possibility of connecting the machine to an ordinary television in lieu of a monitor; and the possibility of buying it configured with as little as 16 K of memory. Far from being a honed weapon for business-computing domination, the IBM PC was designed to be generalized and flexible, adaptable to many different roles in the same way as, say, the Apple II. When Big Business jumped all over it, it seems to have surprised IBM as much as anyone.

Which is of course not to say that they were complaining about it when it happened. As it became clear how the IBM PC was perceived and where it fit, IBM initiated development of a next model that excised many of the aforementioned phantom limbs while giving business users more of what they had liked about the original. The PC/XT, introduced in March of 1983, came with a still slightly exotic (and expensive) 10 MB hard drive as standard equipment, and was an all-around bigger, beefier contraption with eight expansion slots rather than five, more standard memory, and a larger power supply to fuel it all. Another model in development, code-named “Popcorn” and due to be introduced early in 1984, was a portable — today we would say (at best) “luggable” — version for the businessperson on the road. Having served Big Business’s computing needs for years with their larger machines, IBM was in their element here as well, at least once they figured out what was happening and where their machines fit.

And yet, despite all of this success, the failure of the PC to really make a dent in other areas did rankle a bit. While the IBM PC had created a whole new market category for microcomputers, said category wasn’t the only new one. Shortly before the PC arrived, Commodore had introduced the VIC-20, an inexpensive machine pushed not as a tool for hackers or hobbyists but as a friendly machine to be used in the home by casual users for education, light productivity applications, and of course entertainment. The VIC-20 was a huge success, redefining Commodore’s corporate image forever (both for better and for worse in the long run), and opening the category of the “home computer” as a mass-market phenomenon. This in turn brought the venture capitalists and the would-be computer-entertainment moguls, not to mention a torrent of competitors and the Home Computer Wars of 1983. Suddenly the base of hackers and early adopters who had both built and been the customers of the microcomputer industry prior to 1982 or so were a minor factor, almost irrelevant, as everyone raced either upward to the business PC (where the big winner was of course IBM) or downward to the home computer (where the big winner was Commodore). Only Apple was left perched, not entirely comfortably, somewhere in the middle; the Apple II intersected the high end of the home-computer sector along with the low end of the business market, while also remaining the computer of choice in schools and a great favorite of the hackers who had built the industry.

The home-computer market was both much more price sensitive and much more crowded than the business market, and thus couldn’t hope to match the business market in sheer moneymaking potential. Commodore sold many more machines than even IBM in 1983, but didn’t make more than a fraction as much from the effort despite edging out Apple in total earnings for what would turn out to be the last time in their history. (This disparity in earning potential explains why Apple was so desperate to find a way to fully penetrate the business market with the Apple III, the Lisa, and finally the Macintosh.) Given this reality, it may seem odd that IBM concerned themselves with home computers at all. I believe we can point to a couple of factors here. First of all, home computers were simply an opportunity — perhaps not as big or juicy an opportunity as business computers, but who said a huge company like IBM couldn’t own both markets? All of the pundits were predicting that the home-computer market was only going to continue to grow, that in just a few years a computer would be as much a fixture in every home as a television and a stereo. That led directly to what we might call the public-relations motivation. If at all possible, all of those kids who would be growing up with computers in their homes should grow up with IBM computers. That way they would be inculcated into “the IBM way,” would be comfortable with IBM technology when they grew up and entered the business world, would seek it out when they got still older and were placed in charge of purchasing at their companies. One hand, as they say, would wash the other, realizing the goal of making IBM as synonymous with little computers as they were with the big ones.

This, then, was the reasoning that led to the machine code-named “Peanut,” IBM’s dedicated home computer. Development was well underway by the time of the PC/XT’s launch, and the project’s existence was, intentionally or unintentionally, something of an open secret with the press throughout 1983. The specter of IBM’s eventual arrival loomed over the chaos of the Home Computer Wars, over annual reports and long-term planning throughout the industry. Why shouldn’t the Peanut come to dominate the low end, said the conventional wisdom, just as its bigger siblings did the high end? Apple and Commodore and everyone else breathed a sigh of relief when the rumor mill revealed that Peanut, originally scheduled to appear just in time for Christmas, had been pushed back to early in the following year. At least they would get one more Christmas sales season — one which would actually turn out to be the biggest of all for some time to come, although they certainly didn’t know that — free of the IBM juggernaut. Then, in November of 1983, the Peanut was officially announced at last and prototypes shown to the press, in the hopes, some suspected, of making some of those would-be Christmas buyers hold off until they could have an IBM the following year. Journalists weren’t quite sure what to write about the machine they flocked to see at a special reception inside IBM’s Manhattan headquarters.

Much about the Peanut, now officially named the PCjr, was about what everyone had expected (feared?). While definitely, as its name would imply, a scaled-back version of IBM’s business machines, its available configurations of 64 K or 128 K of memory and 16-bit processor made it more than competitive with the Commodore 64 or Apple II in terms of sheer horsepower. It could boot to BASIC or, if you bought the optional floppy drive, MS-DOS, in which mode it could run a subset of IBM PC software that wasn’t too memory hungry. It offered 16-color graphics that were comparable to the Commodore 64 in some ways, although it lacked that machine’s sprites. It also had a pretty good three-voice sound chip, although, once again, not quite the equal of the Commodore 64’s SID. On the flip side, it could, like the newer Apple II models, display 80 columns of text compared to the 64’s 40, a feature that made it much more suitable than the 64 for word processing and other productive tasks. And it had one feature that really was ahead of its time: a wireless keyboard that let you kick back or sit wherever you wanted when you played the games that IBM hoped would soon be flooding the market. All in all, it all looked like a pretty reasonable effort, with the fit and finish and utility of the Apple II and most if not all of the audiovisual panache of the Commodore 64. It even had two — two! — cartridge ports for easy gaming. Coupled with the reputation and marketing resources of IBM, it looked like a very dangerous machine. And then you tried to actually type on the thing.

The PCjr’s infamous original “Chiclet” keyboard

IBM, you see, had gone with a rubber “Chiclet” keyboard, like that of a cheap calculator — or the sub-$200 Radio Shack Color Computer. Its presence was all but incomprehensible. Contrary to what Apple zealots then and now might prefer to believe, IBM was not normally oblivious to ergonomics or aesthetics. While their machines were not sexy, they were generally functional and comfortable over many hours of use, and always had that reassuring feeling of “IBM quality.” IBM put considerable thought and research into what they called “human factors” when putting together the original PC. Indeed, they maintained in Boca Raton an entire laboratory devoted to ergonomics.

He [Estridge] points out that various human-factors considerations are reflected in the overall PC design that he says make the machine comfortable to use. The keyboard can be tilted, for example, to assume a flat-surface angle or a tilted-up angle. Estridge says both are standard angles that make users feel comfortable.

He also cites studies of eye-pupil dilation that influenced the PC’s design. He says these studies have shown that there’s a direct relationship between pupil dilation and fatigue; the more a user’s pupil dilates, the more fatigued he may become.

“If you can cut down on contrast changes as people use the equipment, you reduce the likelihood of frequent pupil dilation.”

How has this principle been applied to the IBM PC? Estridge explains it this way: “Imagine that the center of the machine is a high-contrast area and the outside of the machine — the background — is a low-contrast area. The machine has grades of contrast as you move from the screen outward. Its highest contrast is on the display tube. Immediately around the tube is a lower-contrast border, and then the cabinet curls round to form an even lower-contrast frame.

“The eye then progresses from seeing dark gray to light gray to medium white, and, beyond that, essentially a noise background. As the eye moves across those boundaries, it doesn’t experience much contrast change, and the viewer doesn’t get tired.”

Much about the PCjr has that same sense of attention to detail and quality. The cartridges, for example, have a foam lining that lets them slide gently but snugly into place with a feel that is, as one YouTube commentator puts it, “awesome.” IBM also added special tabs to the keyboard to lock an overlay into place. Their idea was that many — most? — PCjr programs would ship with one of these little cardboard cheat sheets that explained the purpose of every key on the keyboard, right above the key itself.

And yet, inexplicably, there were those dead rubber keys that seemed to invalidate all positive impressions and make the PCjr feel like a toy. Typing on the machine was, as one journalist put it, “a hateful experience.”

The other obvious concern was the price. The 64 K model with cassette drive would cost you almost $700; the far more useful and desirable 128 K model with floppy-disk drive $1250. Everyone agreed that IBM could likely get a surcharge for their name, but would their reputation stretch that far considering that a Commodore 64 with disk drive would set you back less than $500 with a bit of shopping around?

Even as they questioned the keyboard, the press’s answer to this question was an almost universal “yes.” Such was the mystique of the IBM name that they seemed to have a hard time even conceiving of the PCjr as anything but a spectacular success. Compute!, the biggest, fastest growing, and arguably most influential magazine catering to the home-computer market, was so confident that they prepared the first three issues of their second platform-specific spin-off magazine (after one for the Commodore VIC-20 and 64) before the PCjr itself was even available for purchase. Two other new magazines were also in the offing; Spinnaker, reigning kings of educational software, had a warehouse full of cartridges; Sierra On-Line had games and productivity software of their own ready to go; publishers scrambled to sign authors to write shelves full of PCjr books. When IBM kicked off the PCjr’s advertising campaign with another of their award-winning “Charlie Chaplin” television spots during Super Bowl XVIII, it attracted at least as much attention amongst the low-end crowd as Apple’s now famous 1984 advertisement for the new Macintosh which aired a few commercial breaks later. The conventional wisdom held that the PCjr couldn’t help but succeed, and few had the fortitude to buck it. Only the sober-minded Byte sounded an ominous note of caution: “Should the PCjr fail to attract a market, a lot of folks will be crushed by the resulting fall.”

A couple of months after the Super Bowl, PCjrs started shipping at last. And then… crickets. Stores that had pre-ordered dozens of units in anticipation of mad rushes and shortages watched them languish on the shelves. IBM couldn’t seem to escape their reputation as the makers of tools for big business. It turned out that many of the most interested customers were not computer neophytes looking to take the plunge for the first time, but rather businesspeople looking for something compatible with the machine on their desk at work, only smaller and cheaper, something they could use to get a bit of work done at home. They kicked the tires, but once they touched the horrid keyboard and learned that much business software — including, critically, Lotus 1-2-3 — wouldn’t run on this cut-down edition of the PC, their interest quickly faded. As for everyone else… well, they seemed perfectly happy to buy Apples and Commodores, both of which ran a hell of a lot more and better games. Compute!‘s new PCjr magazine was gone after just half a dozen issues.

Never known for giving up easily on a product, IBM bowed to the criticisms at last in the summer of 1984 and replaced the Chiclet keyboard with a proper model. In one of those moves that made IBM IBM, they offered one of the new keyboards to every single person who had already bought a PCjr. (Skeptics couldn’t help but note that, while generous, this policy wasn’t really all that expensive, since IBM had sold so few of the things in the first place.) They offered a new memory expansion that could take the machine to 256 K and, combined with the new keyboard, make it a practical possibility for the businessperson looking for a cheaper, simpler home version of her office PC. They even convinced Lotus to make a version of 1-2-3 that could run in 128 K on the PCjr. It seemed that IBM was now listening to what their potential customers said they wanted from the PCjr rather than dictating who was allowed to buy the machine and how they were allowed to use it.

Best of all, IBM started slashing the price. By the 1984 Christmas season you could buy the 128 K PCjr with floppy drive and monitor for $750. It was now very competitive with its most obvious point of comparison, the Apple II line; Consumer Reports pronounced it a “slightly better” buy than the new Apple IIc in their November issue. And — and this is the part of the PCjr story that always seems to go forgotten in articles that pronounce it “one of the biggest flops in the history of computing” or “the Edsel of the computer industry” — it actually started to sell pretty well, and had a pretty good Christmas. As the new year dawned the PCjr seemed to be gaining momentum and carving a niche for itself, even if it wasn’t quite the niche that IBM had anticipated.

It was therefore doubly surprising when IBM suddenly pulled the plug in March, cancelling the whole line with no ceremony or concrete explanation other than saying their expectations had been “overly optimistic.” It was a very un-IBM-like move from a company normally known and feared for their steady, Borg-like inexorability, their willingness to methodically iterate through failure after failure until they got a thing right — a luxury allowed them by their enormous corporate resources but denied to most of their competitors. With the Christmas sales over and the PCjr now pushing past $1000 again for a basic system, sales had once again begun to flatline. IBM apparently realized that they couldn’t make a profit on the PCjr by selling it at the only prices the market would bear. They decided the home-computer market wasn’t worth the trouble after all, not when their new $5000-plus PC/AT was again selling beyond expectations to their bread-and-butter customers in Big Business.

In an important sense, however, the PCjr didn’t die with IBM’s cancellation announcement. Radio Shack, uncertain as ever exactly what to do with their fading line of TRS-80 computers, decided in 1984 that the thing to do was to effectively give up on the Trash 80 and hitch their wagon to the IBM train. In November they released the Tandy 1000, a rather nice, robust reimagining — saying simply “clone” may be too unkind — of the PCjr that had the same graphics and sound capabilities. It became popular enough that the Tandy 1000, together with the not inconsiderable installed base of “real” PCjrs, prompted some publishers to build improved graphics and sounds into their games for these computers, thus offering some relief to an MS-DOS world that would otherwise remain a depressingly ugly place to play games for several more years.

The PCjr, then, while certainly a failure in any big-picture reckoning, wasn’t quite the hopeless case it’s so often portrayed to be. This is borne out by the sales figures, which ended up in the vicinity of 325,000 units between March 1984 and March 1985, with another 100,000 or so likely being sold during the post-cancellation fire sale. (To put those figures in perspective, consider that the admittedly much more expensive Apple Macintosh sold 275,000 units during its first year.) That said, the PCjr is significant as the first moment that IBM, who had looked infallible and inexorable from the moment they first deigned to enter the microcomputer game, got their nose bloodied. True, their ego suffered more than their bottom line; the huge profits they were continuing to rake in from their business machines dwarfed what they might have made from the PCjr even had it been a raging success. If they were going to fail somewhere, this was the place to do it. Still, this failure was a warning, or, if you like, a sign that things wouldn’t always be as easy as they had been thus far.

I’m no MBA, but the business lessons we can take away from the PCjr story seem fairly obvious. IBM ignored reasonable concerns raised when their product was still at the prototype stage, then tried to dictate to their customers rather than listen to their needs once the PCjr was on the market. They also arrogantly assumed that they could ignore their competition, that their name and reputation alone would ensure success — in other words, they took exactly the opposite approach to the one they had taken with the original IBM PC. They did, to their credit, change course eventually, but by then it was, at least in the apparent view of some powerful people in management, not worth the trouble to see the turnaround through.

Yet there is also one more element that shouldn’t go unremarked here: that of timing. Had the PCjr been introduced early in 1983 rather than 1984 its story may have been very different. While 1983 was a year of unrestrained growth and unrestrained optimism for the potential of the new home-computer industry, 1984 was a much more uncertain year, a year of failures and half-successes and uncertainty and no small amount of blowback after the ebullient promises made the previous year. The PCjr was only one part of the story of that important year. I’ll get to the rest soon. But first we have to talk about one last enduring legacy of the PCjr. We’ll do next time.

(Byte dedicated its November 1983 issue to IBM and the PC line, and explored the PCjr in depth in the March 1984 issue. Computer Entertainment published a great postmortem of the PCjr in the July 1985 issue. Also very useful were the books Hard Drive, West of Eden, and Apple Confidential. The great pictures I’ve used here are from that July 1985 Computer Entertainment.)

Comments
13 Responses

- Giuseppe

July 12, 2013 at 9:02 pm

But first we have to talk about one last enduring legacy of the PCjr.

King’s Quest and its Adventure Game Interpreter?

- Jimmy Maher

July 12, 2013 at 9:12 pm

You guys always spoil all my surprises. :)

- anonymous

July 12, 2013 at 10:36 pm

Regarding the battle between the PCjr and the Apple IIc, you might enjoy reading this anecdote from Charles Eicher, who was selling them at the time:

http://weblog.ceicher.com/archives/2002/12/christmas_1984_the_great_apple.html

- Jimmy Maher

July 13, 2013 at 6:58 am

That’s a great anecdote. Thanks!

- Bill Loguidice

July 13, 2013 at 2:21 am

There are a few mistakes in your article. The PCjr really wasn’t internally expandable. It used sidecars, which snapped onto the side of the unit, like a sleeker version of the way you would expand the TI-99/4 and 4a before the PEB. It wasn’t substantial feeling, either. It was basically plastic, not metal like the original PC, and considerably smaller. Lotus 1-2-3 was only able to run, i.e., get around the memory limitation, through use of the second cartridge port. The Tandy 1000 basically removed the cartridge ports and was the one with PC-like internal expandability through slots, and overall greater compatibility with the PC. Obviously, it was a bit larger as a result. In any case, the Tandy 1000 series ended up doing what the PCjr never could, and that’s create a sustainable audio-video standard for a time that quite a few PC games supported until VGA and AdLib/SoundBlaster became standards.

- Jimmy Maher

July 13, 2013 at 6:49 am

Technically the PCjr did have three internal slots: one used for the 64 K memory expansion, one for the floppy drive, and one for a modem. But yeah, comparing it to the Apple II with its eight more generalized slots was probably a stretch. :) Minor edit made.

On the question of substantiality/quality, this is inevitably subjective. The unit I played with last year (always have to thinking ahead for this blog…) did feel well-built and professionally put together, and, indeed, had held up incredibly well through almost thirty years. It perhaps didn’t feel like it was designed to weather a nuclear war, like the original PC, but I’d put its build quality a solid notch above that of the Commodore 64 and other ~$200-300 machines, about on the level of the Apple II. Many journalists at the time remarked how badly the chinzy Chiclet keyboard jarred with the rest of the machine.

That said, “substantial” was maybe not quite the adjective to use to describe the PCjr. Again, edits made. Thanks!

- Subby

July 17, 2013 at 2:44 am

I played with a Jr at a Computerland when they first came out. I couldn’t get over how bad the keyboard felt, and how expensive it was.
I think you pretty hit it on the head, IBM’s arrogance did them in.

- Felix

July 13, 2013 at 3:18 am

That’s fascinating. I remember playing with a Junior 86 for the first time, which despite the name was a PC/XT clone with 640K of RAM and two 5.25″ floppies in the standard configuration, plus CGA graphics on a tiny green screen. It could run a surprising amount of classic games, actually. But for the most part I used it to code in Turbo Pascal 5.5 (just the compiler, editing with Volkov Commander).

Interestingly, all the Pascal programming books taught how to write “serious” applications, unlike the Basic ones. But I ended up coding my own Minesweeper. In text mode. With a tiny bit of machine code to enable and read the mouse.

I think it was all a matter of marketing and public perception in the end. Well, apart from the little green screen. But then again, I never owned a Spectrum and a color TV at the same time, and that wasn’t much of a problem for me, either.

- David Cornelson

July 13, 2013 at 5:37 am

My sister worked at IBM and she bought a junior for herself and for my younger brother Rob (probably when they had the fire sale). I probably played the bulk of the Infocom games on one of these two PC’s. I know I played the Enchanter Series on hers for sure. My friend Jack had one at college too and the one cool feature was you could sit back from the TV with the keyboard.

- JohnnyPanic

July 15, 2013 at 1:01 am

Awesome, we’re finally about to make it to King’s Quest!

- Brandon Campbell

November 19, 2014 at 8:59 pm

I had one of those little thermal printers! After the PCjr was cancelled, a mail-order company called Protecto Enterprizes bought up a bunch of those PCjr printers and sold them with interfaces to use with other computers, including my Commodore 64. It wasn’t much, but it could print graphics, which our previous daisy-wheel printer couldn’t, so I was glad to have it.

- Bob Z.

June 24, 2015 at 5:52 pm

Great article! I have been slowly working my way through these articles, which are uniformly fantastic. For this child of the 80’s, they are equal parts history lesson and walk-down-memory-lane.

[As an aside, “nonplussed” means confused or exasperated, which is pretty much the opposite of the meaning you seem to be going for (“unfazed” might be better). A common mistake, but one of my pet peeves.]

- Jimmy Maher

June 25, 2015 at 5:42 am

Thanks!

I do try to be careful and precise with the words I use, which I like to think is one of the things that separate me a bit from most of the writing out there about videogames. My own personal pet peeves are the way every famous game is for some reason “infamous,” and the way every old game any writer happens to remember fondly is “iconic.”

However, I think that “nonplussed” is a more questionable case. Strictures about use and misuse are one thing, but languages are of course living things that morph over time, much as it sometimes drives the grammarians crazy. Mark Lieberman reports (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=453) that as of 2008 a sample of 20 uses of the word revealed 10 that clearly used it “incorrectly,” to mean “unimpressed,” and just 7 that clearly used it “correctly.” I think its meaning is pretty clearly shifting, or at least admitting both usages. The big problem would come if the context didn’t make it clear which usage is intended, as in the remaining 3 of those 20 cases. In this case, I don’t think there’s likely to be any confusion. So, I think I’m going to leave it alone.

If it’s any consolation, I don’t think this is a word that I use in general all that often. I probably lean more on “underwhelmed,” another evolving word that has just begun to appear in dictionaries and spell checks in the last five to ten years. :)

The Unmaking and Remaking of Sierra On-Line
July 18, 2013

What happened for Ken and Roberta Williams in less than three years would have gone to anyone’s head. As the 1980s dawned, their lives were utterly ordinary. Ken was a business programmer putting in long hours every day in Los Angeles, Roberta his pretty, quiet, vaguely dissatisfied stay-at-home wife. Six months later she was a published game designer (to the extent that description meant anything in 1980), and the couple was sitting at their kitchen table opening the mail in disbelief as orders poured in for their little homemade adventure game. A year later, Ken was head of a burgeoning software house in their dream setting, nestled in the heart of the California Redwoods, and Roberta was his star designer. A year after that, they and the company they had built were software superstars. Glossy magazines and television shows begged for access and interviews; entertainment moguls flew them to New York to wine and dine them at 21 Club; venture capitalists lined up to offer money and advice, telling them they were at the forefront of the next big thing in media; big corporations offered to buy their whole operation, with starting offers of $20 million or more. Big franchises approached to talk about licensing deals: Jim Henson Associates, Disney, the Family Circus comic strip. For Ken, two of whose greatest heroes were Jim Henson and Walt Disney, such offers were flabbergasting. Late in 1982 IBM, by at least some measures the biggest, most powerful company in the world, humbly came knocking at the Williams’ door to ask if they’d be willing to work with them to develop software for their new home computer.

Yes, it would have gone to anyone’s head. Ken said yes to just about everyone, with the exception only of the outright buyout offers; he was having far too much fun to entertain them. The pundits, advisers, and investors that surrounded Ken were all telling him that the new low-cost home computers were the wave of the future, destined to replace the old Atari VCS game console and its competitors in the hearts and minds of consumers. This was the new gravy train, and the key to riding it was to get lots and lots of product out there to feed customers hungry for games for their new Commodore VIC-20s, Texas Instruments 99/4As, and Coleco Adams. Don’t stress too much about any given title, they said; just get lots of them out there. Simpler games were actually better, because then you could port them more quickly from platform to platform and pack them onto cartridges for all those ultra-low-end users without even a cassette drive. Ken, with these words ringing in his ears, dutifully made plans to push out 100 separate products in 1983 alone. He amassed a fleet of programmers to churn out action games which could be easily ported from platform to platform. Sierra spelled out this new approach in their “strategy outline” for 1983:

We believe the home-computer market to be so explosive that “title saturation” is impossible. The number of new machines competing for the Apple/Atari segment in 1983 will create a perpetually new market hungry for winning 1982 titles. We will exploit this opportunity.

Housing his growing fleet of salaried, workaday programmers — Ken had decided that dealing with artistically-tempered programmers like John Harris of Jawbreaker fame just wasn’t worth the trouble, that programming really shouldn’t be considered a creative endeavor at all — was soon becoming a problem. Growing technical, clerical, marketing, and warehouse staffs were also pushing the company’s total head count rapidly toward 100. Thus when the developer who owned Sierra’s office facilities offered to build a brand new building to house the company, a lovely place which perfectly suited the company’s image (if not, increasingly, its reality) as a clan of computer artisans living in the woods, Ken happily acquiesced, accepting rent in the vicinity of $25,000 per month.

The Sierra “redwood” building, custom-built for them in 1982

The new offices weren’t the only building contract Ken signed around this time. Figuring that if they were going to be entertainment moguls they needed to live the part, Ken and Roberta hired an architect to design a sprawling 10,000 square-foot, $800,000 house — huge money in this rural area — on the Fresno River, complete with racquetball and volleyball courts, full-length wet bar, and a mini-arcade with all the latest games.

But by the time Ken and Roberta moved on Labor Day weekend, 1983, the fantasy of their lavish housewarming party, which included a professional comedy troupe brought in from San Francisco for the occasion, was undercut by some slowly dawning realities. Sierra’s first big partnership with Big Media, on the Dark Crystal game, had been a major artistic and commercial disappointment, done in by the tired old Hi Res Adventure engine that powered it and a rote design by a Roberta Williams who seemed determined not to grow past what she had done for Mystery House. Their one real hit of the year, meanwhile, had not been any of the titles from Ken’s new programmers, but rather John Harris’s loving, officially licensed port of the arcade game Frogger, a port done so well that some said it surpassed its inspiration. Alas, Frogger was the last game Harris did for Sierra; he had left some time before, having signed on with Synapse Software, whom he considered more quality-oriented. It was already beginning to dawn at that party that they might actually make less this year than they had the last even as the new building and growing staff had increased their expenses enormously. Soon after, things really started to go south.

Much of the software that Sierra was now producing was on cartridges, which were both more expensive to produce than disks or tapes and took much longer to duplicate. With much of the industry following Sierra’s plan of churning out new games practically by the dozen, production capacity at the relatively limited number of facilities capable of making cartridges was at a premium. Sierra was forced to place huge orders in June or July for the games they hoped to be selling huge numbers of come Christmas. But a funny thing happened during the six months in between: the market for the VIC-20, the TI 99/4A, and the Coleco Adam, the machines for which most of these cartridges were produced, collapsed. Jack Tramiel, you see, had won the Home Computer Wars of 1983 by then, driving TI right out of the market. In the process, he had just about killed his own VIC-20 as well; the price of the vastly more desirable and capable Commodore 64 had dropped so low that there was little point in buying a VIC-20 instead. As for the Adam… well, it never had a chance; by the time it arrived the war was largely over and the victor already determined. The Commodore 64 rocketed out of that Christmas the new center of the gaming universe, a position it would hold for the next several years. Yet all Sierra had to sell Commodore 64 owners were a few simple games ported from the VIC-20. And they had tens of thousands of cartridges, millions of dollars of inventory which they couldn’t move for ten cents on the dollar, sitting in warehouses. Meanwhile their shiny licensing deals were also turning out to be of little benefit to the bottom line. Sierra felt that they were doing all the work on these and all the profits — what little there sometimes were — were going to the licensees. As 1984 ground on, it became clear that the company was in the most dire of straits, unable to even make their mortgage payments on their fancy new office building.

The only thing to do was to start cutting. In a matter of days the company shed the extra skin it had built up, going from 100 employees to an absolutely essential core of about 20. A desperate Ken went to Sierra’s landlord and offered him a 10% share in the company if he would just forgive them the rent for a few months, while they got back on their feet. Figuring that 10% of a dead company was worth less than the rent he might be able to get out of them now, he said no thanks. In the end Ken was able to negotiate only to give back some of the building for other tenants. He and Roberta and their closest associates paid some of the remaining rent for a while using second mortgages and personal credit cards. It looked like this dream they had been living was about to end less than four years after it had begun, that soon they might end up right back where they had started in the suburbs of Los Angeles. They might have packed it in but for one remaining hope: that contract they had signed with IBM back in the halcyon days.

Sierra’s relationship with IBM actually went back even further than that contract. IBM first partnered with Sierra during the run-up to the original IBM PC’s launch in 1981, when they hired them to port The Wizard and the Princess, one of the biggest Apple II titles of that year, to their new machine. Sierra first experienced the legendary IBM secrecy then. Prototypes would arrive in X-ray-resistant lead chests sealed with solder, and were expected to be stored and used in windowless rooms that were to be kept locked at all times. Despite being a relatively minor part of the PC’s launch, Sierra, and Ken in particular, got on well with IBM. For all the party-hearty persona Ken could put on (as well described in Hackers and elsewhere on this blog), he had spent his previous life working for big technology companies like IBM. He understood how they worked, knew what it meant to shake down a new computer system and find the bugs and flaws while also obeying the rules of corporate hierarchy. IBM likely found him a refreshing change from both the un-technical MBAs and the technically masterful but socially unsophisticated hackers that were most of his peers. At any rate, they came back to Sierra soon after initiating the PCjr project.

IBM flew Ken and Jeff Stephenson, the man who was quickly assuming Ken’s role as hacker in chief at Sierra as Ken got more and more absorbed with the business side, out to their offices in Boca Raton, Florida. After the NDAs and other legal niceties that were part and parcel of dealing with IBM, they explained what the PCjr was to be and asked them to pitch some software that might make a good fit. Ken and Jeff made a number of proposals that were accepted, including HomeWord, an easy-to-use, casual word processor with an early graphical user interface of sorts which Ken and Jeff were already working on; it would wind up IBM’s official word processor for the PCjr. But the most important proposal, the biggest in the history of Sierra On-Line and one which would change adventure gaming forever, was made up on the fly, drawn up on the back of a napkin during a pause in the proceedings.

Sierra was still known most of all for their Hi Res Adventure line of illustrated adventure games. Unsurprisingly, IBM very much wanted something along those lines for the PCjr. But they had some specific requests for changes from Sierra’s traditional approach, which if nothing else proved that not everyone at IBM was as blissfully ignorant of gaming as legend would have it. They asked for a game that could be replayable, that would be more dynamic and complex in its world modeling, sort of like Ultima and Wizardry (adventures and CRPGs were not yet clearly defined separate genres at this point). They specifically asked that puzzles have multiple solutions, that there be many different possible paths through the game.

Ken and Jeff sensed that they really wanted Sierra to push themselves, to get beyond the tried-and-true Hi Res Adventure model. And with good reason: as the sales for The Dark Crystal were about to show, Sierra desperately needed to raise their game if they wanted to keep their hand in adventures at all. Next to the games that Infocom was putting out, the Hi-Res Adventure games were painfully primitive. Yet how should they try to compete? Most other publishers, witnessing Infocom’s success with pure text, were beginning to shift their emphasis back to the parsers and the writing, de-emphasizing their pictures or removing them entirely. Infocom, in others words, was replacing Sierra as the model to be emulated. Ken instinctively sensed that this was not the right bandwagon for Sierra to leap aboard, much as they respected the technical accomplishment in Infocom’s games. They were movie people rather than book people; as Ken later said, Sierra had a “mass-market” sensibility which contrasted with Infocom’s “cerebral” approach. Rather than try to ape Infocom like other publishers, why not zig while everyone else zagged, double down on graphics while de-emphasizing text? Besides, one of the main selling features of the PCjr was to be its bright 16-color graphics. Shouldn’t its showcase adventure take advantage of them?

When IBM joined them again in the conference room, Ken and Jeff made their pitch for a new type of adventure game. Most of the screen would be given over to the graphics, like in the Hi Res Adventures, but the interactivity would now also extend to this part of the display. The player’s avatar would be visible onscreen, with the player able to move him around within each room using a joystick or the arrow keys. The player would still have to type non-movement commands, but now positioning within each room would play an important role: you would have to move right up next to that old tree stump to peer inside, walk up to the kindly forest elf to talk to him, etc. Some text would still have to remain to explain some of what happened, but much of the experience would be entirely visual, more movie than book. Action sequences requiring precise timing and coordination could be introduced. The system also promised to introduce the kind of dynamism that IBM desired in other ways. Other characters and creatures could wander the world, to be dodged, fought, or befriended. What we would today call emergent behavior might arise: the player might hide behind a handy tree when the wicked witch suddenly popped onto the scene. It would be a showstopper, conforming to Ken’s ten-foot rule for software marketing while also introducing whole new tactical layers that had never been seen in adventure games before. IBM signed on happily.

The reaction in Oakhurst was not quite so enthusiastic. Some felt that Ken and Jeff had promised IBM the moon, that this was simply a leap too far. Perhaps remembering Sierra’s last two adventure games, both of which had gone through long, painful development cycles for little commercial reward, they pointedly suggested that Ken go back to IBM and explain that Sierra had bitten off more than they could chew, cut the proposal down dramatically to something more realistically achievable, and try to get IBM to accept it. Ken, realizing that any such action would destroy his credibility with IBM forever, absolutely refused. He pointed out that they had 128 K of memory to work with for this project, a huge figure in comparison to the 48 K they’d had for the Hi Res Adventure games. He found a critical ally in Roberta, the person who would have to actually design for the system. She simply asked questions until she felt she understood the system and what it would and would not be capable of, digested IBM’s desires for a more dynamic game than was her previous wont, then went to work. Eventually the grumbling mostly ceased and the rest of the staff followed her example.

What with Ken having a company to run, the heavy lifting of turning the proposal into a game engine largely fell to Jeff Stephenson. Just like the Hi-Res Adventure engine, this one was designed to be reusable and extendible from the start. It was initially known as the Game Adaptation Language, or GAL. Ken, however, loathed the cutsiness of that acronym, and it was eventually renamed to the Adventure Game Interpreter, or AGI. (I’ll refer to the system as AGI from here on for the sake of consistency.) Soon the trucks bearing the familiar lead-lined crates began arriving in Oakhurst again, and development began in earnest on both the engine and the game it would run. The team chosen for the task consisted of Roberta and about half a dozen programmers and artists. The PCjr projects as a whole, which included the adventure game, HomeWord, and several others pieces of software, were given a top-secret code-name: Project Siesta. Still, it’s hard to keep anything a secret in a small town like Oakhurst. Word quickly spread around town: “The big fucking company is in town again.”

Some of the process of developing the first AGI game, eventually to be named King’s Quest, was not that far removed from the days of Hi Res Adventure. The artists still drew each scene on paper using colored pencils. These drawings were then traced using a graphics tablet connected to a computer, where they were stored using the vector-graphics techniques Ken had developed back in the days of Mystery House and The Wizard and the Princess. (When playing King’s Quest on older, slower hardware you can see each new room being drawn in line by line. Fascinatingly, what you are actually seeing there are the motions of the stylus being guided by the person who first traced the image all those years ago. Early King’s Quest versions let you see the process more clearly via an undocumented “slow draw” mode that can be activated by pressing Control-V.) Thanks to this evergreen technique, the image of each room occupies only .5 to 2.5 K. The same data also tells the interpreter where Sir Grahame, the game’s protagonist, can and cannot walk. Boundaries, such as the castle walls you see in the screenshot above, were traced with a special flag activated and incorporated right into the image itself.

Perhaps the trickiest problem that Jeff Stephenson had to wrestle with stems from the fact that we view each room in the game from a parallel perspective. Thus the game needs to account for the z-axis in addition to the x- and y-axes to maintain the illusion of depth. Each object in each room is therefore given something Jeff called its “priority,” essentially its position on the Z-axis. An object’s priority can range from 1 to 15, and increases as it gets closer to the “back” of the room. In drawing a scene, the interpreter draws objects of lower priority after those of higher priority. Say that a tree is positioned on the screen at priority 9. If Graham moves vertically, “deeper” into the screen, to, say, priority 11, then moves horizontally “behind” the tree, the tree will conceal him as expected. Up to four moving characters can be in a single room, the interpreter constantly adjusting the onscreen image to account for their movements.

The game logic is described using a simple scripting language which is once again descended from the system Ken had developed for the Hi Res Adventure line. Let’s take a look one small piece of the scene shown above. In addition to our alter ego Grahame, it shows a goat — “object” number 14 — who wanders back and forth in his corral, which in turn spans two rooms, numbers 10 and 11; the room shown above, the leftmost, is room 10. The goat continues to wander unless and until he is tempted to join Grahame by a scrumptious-looking carrot. Here’s how the goat’s logic in room 10 is described in AGI:

IF HAS-GOAT 0 AND OBJHIT-EDGE 14 AND EDGE-OBJ-HIT 1 AND GOAT-GONE 0 AND SHOW-CARROT 0 THEN ASSIGN GOAT-ROOM 11, ERASE 14

So, and without getting too lost in the weeds here, if we do not “have” the goat and are not showing him the carrot, and the goat has hit the edge of the screen in his wanderings, remove (“erase”) him from room 10 and put him in room 11. Room 10 alone has 180 such lines of script to describe all of its interactive possibilities. Like most software, an AGI game is more complex than it looks. This is true from the standpoint of both the engine programmers and the scripters. In the context of its time, AGI is nothing less than a stunning technological tour de force — one which, like all the best software, looks easy.

The technical virtuosity on display here made it rather easy for reviewers of the time to lose sight of the actual game it enabled, a painfully common phenomenon in the field of videogames. Indeed, I was anticipating reviewing King’s Quest more as a piece of technology than an adventure game, particularly given that I frankly don’t think very highly of Roberta’s work on the Hi Res Adventure line. I was, however, pleasantly surprised by her work here. King’s Quest‘s plot is almost as basic as that of the original Adventure: the kingdom of Daventry is in some sort of vaguely defined trouble, and the aging King Edward needs you, the brave knight Sir Grahame, to find three magic items that can save it. Since he conveniently has no heirs, do that and “the throne will be yours.” King’s Quest is another treasure hunt, nothing more or less.

Still, and making allowances for the newness of the technology, Roberta does a pretty good job with it. Many of the characters and situations you encounter as you roam Daventry are drawn, and not without a certain charm, from classic fairy tales: Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rumpelstiltskin. The latter is at the core of the one howlingly awful puzzle in the game, which starts out dodgy and just keeps layering on the complications until it’s well-nigh impossible.

(For the record: you meet an old gnome-looking sort of fellow who gives you three chances to guess his name. If you’re familiar with your Brothers Grimm, you might divine that he’s Rumpelstiltskin given the fairy-tale characters everywhere else in the game. But, no, “That is very close but not quite right.” Okay, you do have a note you found elsewhere which says, “Sometimes it is wise to think backwards.” So, “nikstlitslepmur.” No — “You have the right idea, but your thinking is just a little bit off.” It turns out you have to write the name using a backwards alphabet.)

But even here the IBM design brief saves Roberta from her worst instincts. There is, thank God, an alternate way to proceed without solving this puzzle, even if it does cost you some points. And most of the other puzzles are… not that bad, actually. Some are even pretty clever. That may sound like damning with faint praise, but given some of the absurdities of Time Zone it’s nevertheless praise indeed. There are a huge number of ways to go through King’s Quest, what with all of the alternate solutions on offer, and the game feels consciously designed in a holistic sense in a way that no previous Roberta Williams game did.

King’s Quest also makes use of most of the new possibilities afforded by the AGI system. There are enemies to be dodged and eventually dispatched — the witch out of Hansel and Gretel is particularly harrowing — and tricky action sequences to be navigated. King’s Quest is mostly a competent, enjoyable game even when divorced from its place in history as the first use of the revolutionary technology that powers it. It’s also reasonably solvable, at least if you aren’t too fixated on getting the maximum possible points. Realistically, it needed to be no more than a technological proof of concept to be a bestseller, but it manages to be considerably more than that. It acquits itself very well overall as the herald of a new paradigm for adventure gaming.

As development continued and Sierra’s financial position began to look more precarious, stress began to mount. Ken’s wish to just find average and uncreative but reliable programmers was perhaps amplified more than ever by some of the characters he ended up having to assign to the King’s Quest project. Whether because of its location near the old hippie meccas of northern California or just something in the water, Sierra always seemed to be filled with eccentrics despite Ken’s best efforts to run a more buttoned-down operation. One fellow was particularly noted for his acid consumption and his fascination with Fozzy Bear, and looked freakish enough that (in John Williams’s words) “when he went into a restaurant, everyone looked at him.” Another, similarly “off” programmer acted like a cross between a mad scientist and Zaphod Beeblebrox of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame. Near the end of the project one developer, angry at the long hours he had been working, held a critical piece of code ransom until Sierra paid him for dozens of hours of overtime to which he felt entitled. They agreed to pay, got the code, and promptly reneged, citing a clause in American contract law which says that a contract is null and void if one of the parties signs under duress.

When IBM officially unveiled the PCjr and its horrid Chiclet keyboard in November of 1983, Sierra was as surprised as anyone. For all their involvement in the machine’s development, they never had access to a real production model. Ken had to go down to ComputerLand and buy his own, just like everyone else, when the PCjr shipped at last in March of 1984. His first machine didn’t remain in his possession for very long. He went to the movies on his way home, leaving it in his car, only to find it stolen when he returned. That must have seemed like a bad omen coming to fruition as it became more and more clear that the PCjr, seemingly Sierra’s last hope, was flopping in the marketplace.

And that must have seemed a double shame because — and I know I may seem to be belaboring the point, but I can hardly emphasize this enough — King’s Quest was amazing in its time. Even magazines devoted to other platforms felt compelled to talk about it; it was just that revolutionary. King’s Quest, marketed under IBM’s official imprint with cover art apparently drawn by someone who had never seen the game, did sell pretty well by the standards of IBM PCjr software, but there just weren’t enough PCjrs being sold to save Sierra. Similarly, a version for the PCjr’s bigger brother, the IBM PC, sold well by the standards of games for that platform, but the entertainment market for such a business-computing stalwart wasn’t up to much. Although the AGI system had been designed to be portable, it had also been designed to run in 128 K of memory. This locked it out of the typical unexpanded Apple IIe (64 K) and the biggest gaming platform in the country, the Commodore 64. Sierra had exactly the right game on exactly the wrong platform. It seemed Ken had backed the wrong horse, a final bad decision that looked to have doomed his company. The situation just got more and more desperate. John Williams, Sierra’s marketing director, recalls placing media buys around this time with no idea how he was going to pay for them when the invoices came due: “This is either going to help, in which case we can deal with the cost of these and maybe negotiate payment on it — or it won’t work and we’ll be gone” anyway.

Two new machines played a big role in saving Sierra. Just a month after the PCjr finally shipped to stores, Apple announced and shipped the fourth incarnation of the Apple II, the IIc. We’ll talk a bit more about it in a future article, but for now suffice to say that the IIc was designed to be a semi-portable, closed appliance computer, in contrast to the hacker’s laboratories that had been previous Apple II models. Most critically for our purposes today, the IIc shipped with 128 K of memory. Its commercial performance would ultimately be rather lukewarm, but it did prompt many users of the older IIe model to upgrade to (at least) 128 K to match its capabilities. In time there were enough 128 K Apple IIs to justify porting the AGI interpreter to the platform.

But it was the Tandy 1000 that really saved Sierra in the most immediate sense, that gave that critical mass of 128 K Apple II users time to amass. It was introduced just as 1984, the most difficult year in Sierra’s history, was winding down. In many ways it was what the PCjr should have been, with the same graphics and sound capabilities and IBM PC compatibility in a smarter, more usable and expandable package. And it was sold in Radio Shack stores all over the country. In some areas the local Radio Shack was the only place within 200 miles to buy a computer. Sierra smartly developed a strong relationship with Radio Shack in the wake of the Tandy 1000’s announcement. Few other software publishers bothered, meaning that King’s Quest and other Sierra games stood almost alone on the shelves in many of these captive markets. The Tandy 1000, combined with the slowly increasing user base of expanded Apple IIs, gave King’s Quest the opportunity to slowly pull Sierra back from the edge of the abyss, particularly since much of the game’s $850,000 development cost had been funded by IBM. It would take time, but by the end of 1985, with King’s Quest II now already out and doing very well, the company was paying off debts and beginning to grow again.

Ken, Roberta, John, Jeff, and their closest associates had, much to their credit, stuck to their guns and not made the perfectly reasonable decision to pack it in. But they had also, as Ken well realized, gotten very, very lucky. Without the Tandy 1000 and few other lucky breaks, Sierra could easily have gone the way of Adventure International, Muse, and other big software houses who were flying high in 1982 and dead in 1985. As he recently said, it had all been “fun and games” for the first few years. Now he understood how quickly things could go bad with a few wrong decisions, understood what a fragile entity Sierra really was. Most of all, he never wanted to go through another year like 1984 again. The Ken Williams that emerged from that period was, like his company, changed. From now on he would do a remarkable job of balancing ambition with caution. This capacity to change and learn from his mistakes, much rarer than it seems it ought to be, was perhaps ultimately the most important quality he brought to Sierra. He reoriented his company to stop chasing fast bucks and to focus on a smaller number of quality titles for a modest number of proven platforms, and accumulated a stable of designers, programmers, and artists whom he treated with respect. They in turn did good, occasionally great work for him. Sierra Mark II, leaner, humbler, and wiser, was off and running.

(My huge thanks once again go to John Williams for contributing so many of his memories to this article. Hackers by Steven Levy was also invaluable for what I believe will be the last time at last, as we’ve now moved beyond the period it covers. An article in the February 1985 Compute! breaks down the AGI system in unusual detail for a contemporary source. If you want to know more about its technical side, it’s been documented in exhaustive detail since. If you just would like to play King’s Quest, it’s available in a pack with King’s Quest II and III at Good Old Games.)

Comments
13 Responses

- Felix

July 18, 2013 at 7:29 pm

Wow. This story has painful similarities to that of Ion Storm, except there’s a happy ending. It’s a lesson people never seem to learn: you don’t have something until you can touch it. Oh, and another one: don’t take consumers for idiots.

Common sense: so rare it’s a superpower…

- Keith Palmer

July 18, 2013 at 9:37 pm

This was another thoroughly interesting story, for me in part because, as you said, it goes beyond the narrative in Steven Levy’s “Hackers.” The suggestion of Sierra’s survival being a close-run thing and the comment about Infocom seeming to change the direction of the industry did have me pondering “counterfactuals” about what might have happened to adventure games otherwise, although as you said King’s Quest turned heads from the moment it launched.

The comment about the Tandy 1000 and Radio Shack pulling Sierra through did remind me of how King’s Quest III was ported to the Tandy Color Computer 3, which had graphics more or less comparable (although, as some never miss a chance to point out, not as good sound), a few years later. They didn’t get around to porting the two previous King’s Quest games or any of the other “AGI” adventures (save for Leisure Suit Larry, a game unsuitable for our house), though; I seem to recall a letter blaming high piracy among Color Computer users.

- Bill Loguidice

July 19, 2013 at 7:31 pm

While the Color Computer 3 was a solid computer, it did have poor sound, though, never advancing beyond what was available on the first Color Computer back in 1980. While it’s not appropriate to go into too much detail here, I honestly think no more AGI games appearing on the CoCo 3 was the result of nothing more than the games on the platform requiring 512K to run, a configuration option that split an already small user base. Luckily, as a modular engine, several of the other AGI games were ported not too long ago by dedicated enthusiasts, so a modern CoCo 3 user with an expanded system can easily enjoy them.

- Keith Palmer

July 19, 2013 at 9:47 pm

I should admit now to having not that long ago (if well before the Digital Antiquarian got to it) played the first King’s Quest on my “period hardware” using one of those unofficial uses of the modular interpreter (and a walkthrough); the “unofficial” aspect made me reluctant to bring it up. This is all veering further off topic, of course, but I do want to add I am looking forward to the Color Computer book you’ve been working on…

- S. John Ross

July 19, 2013 at 1:59 am

Another thoroughly readable and engaging piece of work. Assorted praises, etc.

- Jerry

July 19, 2013 at 4:16 am

Great article, Jimmy! I think I’ve read clear through your entire site, and I’m always looking forward to the next one.

It’s refreshing to read well-written accounts of this corner of our history. Thanks!

- spiralofhope

July 20, 2013 at 8:26 am

“Good Old Games” is gone. It’s just “GOG.com” now.

- matt w

July 20, 2013 at 2:10 pm

The link on the phrase “ten-foot rule” seems to be broken in a somewhat mysterious way. The link goes to your “making wizardry” post, the second half of the URL is an URL for a profile of Ken Williams at sierragamers.com which is what I think you wanted to link, but the phrase “ten-foot rule” isn’t there — it’s from the legal kerfuffle over Jawbreakers that you discuss in you “This Game Is Over” post.

- matt w

July 20, 2013 at 2:12 pm

OK, I see where the “ten foot rule” is in the sierragamers page:

“My brother John, who ran marketing for many years at Sierra, used to say that ‘it’s all about WOW value’ – if someone says WOW when they see the screen from 10 feet away, you have them sold.”

- Lisa

July 30, 2013 at 6:57 am

On the topic of the hideous gnome-name puzzle, the 1990 SCI version mercifully accepts “Nikstlitselpmur”.

- fan and ghost editor

August 5, 2013 at 5:22 pm

>> come Christmas. But a funny happened during the six months in between:

“A funny happened”? :) Syntactically it makes sense but it feels much too casual to be intentional…

[quietly disappears]

- Corpus

March 13, 2014 at 12:43 am

A funny happened and a funny thing happened means the same exact thing.

Your personal preference as a commenter is very interesting!

- Omer Mor

July 18, 2015 at 10:35 am

Here’s a link to the February 1985 Compute! article mentioned in the post:

A Computer for Every Home?
July 28, 2013

On January 13, 1984, Commodore held their first board of directors meeting of the year. It should have been a relaxed, happy occasion, a time to make plans for the new year but also one last chance to reflect on a stellar 1983, a year in which they had sold more computers than any two of their rivals combined and truly joined the big boys of corporate America by reaching a billion dollars in gross sales. During the last quarter of 1983 alone they had ridden a spectacular Christmas buying season to more than $50 million in profits. Commodore had won the Home Computer Wars convincingly, driving rival Texas Instruments to unconditional surrender. To make the triumph even sweeter, rival Apple had publicly announced the goal of selling a billion dollars worth of their own computers that year, only to fall just short thanks to the failure of the Lisa. Atari, meanwhile, had imploded in the wake of the videogame crash, losing more than $500 million and laying off more than 2000 workers. Commodore had just the previous summer moved into a sprawling new 585,000 square-foot, two story headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania that befitted their new stature; some of the manufacturing spaces and warehouses in the place were so large that Commodore veterans insist today that they had their own weather. Yes, it should have been a happy time at Commodore. But instead there was doubt and trepidation in the air as executives filed into the boardroom on that Friday the 13th.

A day or two before, Jack Tramiel had had a heated argument with Irving Gould, Commodore’s largest shareholder and the man who controlled his purse strings, in the company’s private suite above their exhibit at the 1984 Winter Consumer Electronics Show. That in itself wasn’t unusual; these two corrupt old bulldogs had had an adversarial relationship for almost two decades now. This time, however, observers remarked that Gould was shouting as much as Tramiel. That was unusual; Gould normally sat impassively until Tramiel exhausted himself, then quietly told him which demands he was and wasn’t willing to meet. When Tramiel stormed red-faced out of the meeting and sped away in the new sports car he’d just gotten for his 55th birthday, it was clear that this was not just the usual squabbling. Now observers outside the board-of-directors meeting, which was being chaired as usual by Gould, saw him depart halfway through in a similar huff. He would never darken Commodore’s doors again.

No one who was inside that boardroom has ever revealed exactly what transpired there. With Gould and Tramiel both now dead and the other former board members either dead or aged, it’s unlikely that anyone ever will. On the face of it, it seems hard to imagine. What could cause these two men who had managed to stay together through the toughest of times, during which Commodore had more than once teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, to irrevocably split now, when their company had just enjoyed the best year in its history? We can only speculate.

Commodore had ceased truly being Tramiel’s company in 1966, when Gould swooped in to bail him out from the Financial Acceptance Scandal of the previous year. Tramiel, however, never quite got the memo. He continued to run the company like a sole proprietor to whatever extent that Gould would let him. Tramiel micro-managed to an astonishing degree. He did not, for instance, believe in budgets, considering them a “license to steal,” a guarantee that the responsible manager, knowing he had X million available, would always spend at least X million. Instead he demanded that every expenditure of greater than $1000 be approved personally by him, with the result that much of the company ground to a halt any time he took a holiday. Even as Tramiel enjoyed his best year ever in business, Gould and others in the financial community were beginning to ask the very reasonable question of whether this was really a sustainable way to run a billion-dollar company.

Still, the specific cause of Tramiel’s departure seems likely to have involved his sons. Tramiel valued family above all else, and, like a typical small businessman, dreamed of leaving “his” company to his three sons. Whether by coincidence or something else, it even worked out that each son had an area of expertise that would be critical to running a company like Commodore. Sam, the eldest, had trained in business management at York University, while Gary, the youngest, was a financial analyst with a degree from Manlow Park College and experience as a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch. Leonard, the middle child, was the intellectual and the gearhead; he was finishing a PhD in astrophysics at Columbia, and was by all accounts quite an accomplished hardware and software hacker. Sam and Gary already worked for Commodore, while Leonard planned to start as soon as he finished his PhD in a few more months. Various witnesses have claimed that Tramiel the elder now wished to begin more actively grooming this three-headed monster to take more and more of his responsibilities, and someday to take his place. Feeling nothing good could come out of such blatant nepotism inside a publicly traded corporation that was trying to put its somewhat seedy history behind it, Gould refused absolutely to countenance such a plan. Given Tramiel’s devotion to his family and his attitude toward Commodore as his personal fiefdom, it does make a degree of sense that this particular rejection might have been more than he could stomach.

In any case, Tramiel was gone, and Gould, who had made his fortune in the unglamorous world of warehousing and shipping and was reportedly both a bit jealous of Tramiel’s high profile in an exciting, emerging industry and a bit embarrassed by his gruff, untutored ways, didn’t seem particularly distraught about it. The man he brought in to replace him could hardly have been more different. Marshall F. Smith was a blandly feckless veteran of boardrooms and country clubs who had spent his career in the steel industry. It’s hard to grasp just why Gould latched onto Smith of all people. Perhaps he was following the lead of Apple, who the previous year had brought in their own leader from outside the computer industry, John Sculley. Sculley, however, understood consumer marketing, having cut his teeth at Pepsi, where he was the mastermind behind the Pepsi Challenge, still one of the most iconic and effective advertising campaigns in the long history of the Cola Wars. The anonymous world of Big Steel offered no comparable experience. Smith’s appointment was the first of a long string of well-nigh incomprehensible mistakes Gould would make over the next decade. Engineers that were initially thrilled to have proper funding and actual budgets at last were soon watching with growing concern as Smith puttered about with a growing management bureaucracy and let the company drift without direction. Many were soon muttering that it’s often better to make a decision — even the wrong decision — than to just let things hang. Whatever else you could say about Jack Tramiel, he never lacked the courage of his convictions.

Commodore’s first significant new models, which reached stores at last in October of 1984, more than two years after the Commodore 64, hardly did much to inspire confidence in the new regime. Nothing about the Commodore 16 and the Plus/4 made any sense at all. The 16 was an ultra-low-end model with just 16 K of memory, long after the time for such a beast had passed. The trend in even inexpensive 8-bit computers was onward, toward the next magic number of 128 K, not backward to the late 1970s.

The Commodore Plus/4

As for the Plus/4, which like the 64 was built around a variant of the 6502 CPU and had the same 64 K of memory but was nevertheless incompatible… well, it was the proverbial riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. It was billed as a more “serious” machine than the 64, a computer for “home and business applications” rather than gaming, and priced to match at about $300, more than $100 more than the 64. It featured four applications built right into its ROM (thus the machine’s name): a file manager, a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a graphing program. All were pathetically sub-rate even by the standards of Commodore 64 applications, hardly the gold standard in business computing. The Plus/4 lacked the 64’s sprites and SID sound chip, which made a degree of sense; for a dismaying number of years yet a lack of audiovisual capability would be taken as a signifier of serious intent in computing. But why did it offer more colors, 128 as opposed to the 64’s 16? And as an allegedly more serious computer, why didn’t it offer the 80-column display absolutely essential for comfortable word processing and other typical productive tasks? And as a more serious (and expensive) computer, why did it have a rubbery keyboard almost as awful to type on as the IBM PCjr’s Chiclet model? And would all those serious, more productive buyers really be doing a lot of BASIC programming? If not, why was one of the main selling points a much better BASIC than the bare-bones edition found in the 64? Info, a magazine that would soon built a reputation for saying the things about Commodore’s bizarre decisions that nobody else would, gave the Plus/4 a withering review:

The biggest problem with the Plus/4 is the fundamental concept: an 8-bit, 64 K, 40-column desktop personal computer. Commodore already makes the best 8-bit, 64 K, 40-column desktop personal computer you can buy, with literally thousands of products supporting it! Why should consumers want a “new” machine with no significant advances, several new limitations, and virtually no third-party product support? And why would a company with no competition in the under-$500 category bring out an incompatible [machine] that can’t compete with anybody’s machine except their own? It just doesn’t compute!

Info ran a wonderfully snarky contest in the same issue, giving away the Plus/4 they’d just reviewed. After all, it was “sure to become a collector’s item!” Even the more staid Compute!’s Gazette managed to flummox a poor Commodore representative with a single question: “Why buy a 264 [a pre-release name for the Plus/4] instead of a 64 that has a word processor and, say, a Simon’s BASIC? It would be the equivalent of the 264 for less money.” Commodore happily claimed that the Plus/4 had enough utility built right in for the “average small business” (maybe they meant one of the vast majority that fail within a year or two anyway), but in reality it seemed like it had been cobbled together from spare parts that Commodore happened to have lying around. In fact, that’s not far from what happened — and Tramiel actually bears as much responsibility for the whole fiasco as the clueless Marshall Smith.

Tramiel, you’ll remember, had driven away the heart of his engineering team in his usual hail of recriminations and lawsuits shortly after they had created the 64 for him. He did eventually find more talented young engineers, notably Bil Herd and Dave Haynie. (Commodore always preferred their engineers young and inexperienced because that way they didn’t have to pay them much — a strategy that sometimes backfired but was sometimes perversely successful, netting them brilliant, unconventional minds who would have been overlooked by other companies.) When Herd arrived at Commodore in early 1983, engineers had been tinkering for some time with a new video and audio chip, the TED (short for Text Display). With engineering straitened as ever by Tramiel’s aversion to spending money, the 23-year-old Herd soon found himself leading a project to make the TED the heart of a new computer, despite the fact that it was in some ways a step back, lacking the sprites of the 64’s VIC chip and the marvelous sound capabilities of its SID chip. Marketing came up with the dubious idea of including applications in ROM, which by all accounts delighted Tramiel.

Tramiel, who at some fundamental level still thought of the computers he now sold like the calculators he once had, failed to grasp that the whole value of a computer is the ability to do lots of different things with it, to have lots and lots of options its designers may never have anticipated, all through the magic of software. Locking applications into ROM, making them impossible to replace or update, was kind of missing the point of building a computer in the first place. Failing to understand that a computer is only as good to consumers as the quality and variety of its available software, Tramiel also saw no problem with making the new machine incompatible with the 64. It seems to have come as a complete surprise to him when the machine was announced at that fateful Winter CES and everyone’s first question was whether they could use it to run the Commodore 64 software they already had.

After Tramiel’s abrupt departure, Commodore pushed ahead with the 16 and Plus/4 in the muddled way that would be their wont for the rest of the company’s life, despite a skeptical press and utterly indifferent consumers. It all made so little sense that some have darkly hinted of a conspiracy hatched by Tramiel amongst his remaining loyalists at Commodore to get the company to waste resources, time, and credibility on these obvious losers. (Tramiel recruited a substantial number of said loyalists to join him after he purchased Atari and got back in the home-computer game — exactly the sort of thing for which he so often sued others. But that’s a story for a later article.) Incredibly given the cobbled nature of the machine, it took nine more months after that CES to finally get the 16 and Plus/4 into production and watch them duly flop. Again, such a glacial pace would prove to be a consistent trait of the post-Tramiel Commodore.

By the time they did appear at last, the poor, benighted 16 and Plus/4 had more working against them than just their own failings, considerable as those may have been. The year as a whole was marked by failures in the home-computer segment of the market. Atari was reeling. Coleco was taking massive losses on their tardy entry into the home-computing field, the Adam. And of course I’ve already told you about the IBM PCjr.

Even Apple, who had enjoyed a splashy, successful launch of their new higher-end Macintosh (another story for a later date), had a somewhat disappointing new model amongst their bread-and-butter Apple II line. The “c” in the the Apple IIc’s name stood for “compact,” and it was indeed a much smaller version of Steve Wozniak’s old evergreen design. Like the Macintosh, it was a closed system designed for the end user who just wanted to get work (or play) done, not for the hackers who had adored the earlier editions of the II with their big cases and heaps of inviting expansion slots. The idea was that you would get everything you, the ordinary user, really needed built right in: all of the fundamental interface cards, a disk drive, a full 128 K of memory (as much as the Macintosh), etc. All you would really need to add to have a nice home-office setup was a monitor and a printer.

The Apple IIc

But the IIc was not envisioned just as a more practical machine: as the only II model after the first with which Steve Jobs played an important role, it evinced all of his famous obsession with design. Indeed, much of the external look and sensibility that we associate with Apple today begins as much here as with the just slightly older — and, truth be told, just slightly clunkier-looking — first Macintosh model. The Apple IIc was the first product of what would turn into a longstanding partnership with the German firm Frog Design. It marks the debut of what Apple referred to as the “Snow White” design language — slim, modern, sleek, and, yes, white. Everything about the IIc, including the packaging and the glossy manuals inside, oozed the same chic elegance.

Apple introduced the IIc at a lavish party and exhibition in San Francisco’s Moscone Center in April of 1984, just three months after a similar shindig to launch the Macintosh. The name was chosen to mollify restless Apple II owners who feared — rightly so, as it would turn out; even at “Apple II Forever” Jobs made time for a presentation on “The First 100 Days of Macintosh” — that Sculley, Jobs, and their associates had little further interest in them. Geniuses that they have always been for burnishing their own myths, Apple built a museum right there in the conference center, its centerpiece a replica of the garage where it had all begun. The IIc unveiling itself was an audiovisual extravaganza featuring three huge projection screens for the music video Apple had commissioned for the occasion. The most dramatic and theatrical moment came when Sculley held the tiny machine above him onstage for the first time. As the crowd strained to see, he asked if they’d like a closer look. Then the house lights suddenly came up and every fifth person in the audience stood up with an Apple IIc of her own to show and pass around.

Apple confidently predicted that they would soon be selling 100,000 IIcs every month on the strength of the launch buzz and a $15 million advertising campaign. In actuality the machine averaged just 100,000 sales per year over its four years in Apple’s product catalogs. The old, ugly IIe outsold its fairer sibling handily. This left Apple in a huge bind for a while, for they had all but stopped production of the IIe in anticipation of the IIc’s success while wildly overproducing IIcs for a rush that never materialized. Thus for some time stores were glutted with the IIcs that consumers didn’t want and couldn’t get their hands on the IIes that they did. (It’s interesting to consider that the PCjr almost certainly sold more units than the IIc, which has never been tarred with the label of outright flop, during each machine’s first year on the market. Narratives can be funny things.)

It remains even today somewhat unclear why the world never embraced the IIc as it had the three Apple II models that preceded it. There’s some evidence to suggest that consumers, not yet conditioned to expect each new generation of computing technology to be both smaller and more powerful than the previous, took the IIc’s small size to be a sign that it was not as serious or powerful as the IIe. Apple was actually aware of this danger before the IIc debuted. Thus the advertising campaign worked hard to explain that the IIc was more powerful than its size would imply, with the tagline, “Announcing a technological breakthrough of incredible proportions.” Yet it’s doubtful whether this message really got through. In addition, the IIc was, like the PCjr, an expensive proposition for the home-computer buyer: almost $1300, $300 more than a basic IIe. For that price you got twice the memory of the IIe as well as various other IIe add-on options built right in, but the value of all this may have been difficult for the novice buyer, the IIc’s main target, to grasp. She may just have seen that she was being asked to pay more for a smaller and thus presumably less capable machine, and gone with the bigger, more serious-looking IIe (if anything from Apple).

Then again, maybe the IIc was just born under a bad sign. As I’ve already noted, nobody was having much luck with their new home computers in 1984, almost regardless of their individual strengths and weaknesses.

But why was this trend so universal? That’s what people inside the industry and computer evangelists outside it were asking themselves with increasing urgency as the year wore on. As 1984 drew toward a close, the inertia began to affect even the most established warhorses, the Commodore 64 and the Apple IIe. Both Commodore and Apple posted disappointing Christmas numbers, down at least 20% from the year before, and poor Commodore, now effectively a one-product company completely reliant on continuing sales of the 64, sank back well below that magic billion-dollar threshold again. In the grand scheme of things the Commodore 64 was still a ridiculously successful machine, by far the bestselling computer in the world and the preeminent gaming platform of its era. Yet there increasingly seemed to be something wrong with the home-computer revolution as a whole.

The fact was that a backlash had been steadily building almost from the moment that the spectacular Christmas 1983 buying season had ended. Consumers had begun to say, and not without considerable justification, that home computers promised far more than they delivered. Watching all those bright, happy faces in television and print advertising, people had bought computers expecting them to do the things that the computers there were doing. As Commodore’s advertising put it, “If you’re not pleased with what’s on your TV set tonight, simply turn on your Commodore 64.” Yet what did you get when you turned on your 64 — after you figured out how to connect it to your TV in the first place, that is? No bright fun, just something about 38,911 somethings, a READY prompt, and a cryptically blinking cursor. Everything about television was easy; everything about computers was hard. Computers had been sold to consumers like any other piece of consumer electronics, but they were not like any other piece of consumer electronics. For the vast majority of people — those who had no intrinsic fascination with the technology itself, who merely wanted to do the sorts of things those families on TV were doing — they were stubborn, frustrating, well-nigh intractable things. Ordinary consumer were dutifully buying computers, but computers were at some fundamental level not yet ready for ordinary consumers.

The computer industry was still unable to really answer the question which had dogged and thwarted it ever since Radio Shack had run the first ads showing a happy housewife sorting her recipes on a TRS-80 perched on the kitchen table: why do I, the ordinary man or woman with children to feed and a job to keep, need one? Commodore had cemented the industry’s go-to rhetoric with the help of William Shatner in their VIC-20 advertising campaign that first carved out a real market segment for home computers. You needed a computer for productivity tasks and for your children’s future, “Johnny can’t read BASIC” having replaced “Johnny can’t read” as the marker of a neglectful parent. Entertainment was relegated to an asterisk at the end: “Plays great games too!”

Yet, honestly, how productive could you really be with even the Commodore 64, much less the 5 K VIC-20? Some people did manage to do productive things with their 64s, but most of those who did forgot or decided not to ask themselves a simple question: is doing this on the computer really easier than the alternative? The answer was almost always no. Hobbyists chose to do things on the computer because it was cool, not because it was practical. Never mind if it took far more effort to keep one’s address book on the Commodore 64, what with its slow disk drive and quirky, unrefined software, than it would have to just have a paper card file. Never mind if it was much riskier as well, prone to deletion by an errant key swipe or a misbehaving disk drive. It was cooler, and that was all that mattered — to a technology buff. Most other people found it easier to address their Christmas cards by hand than to try to feed envelopes through a tractor-fed dot-matrix printer that made enough noise to wake the neighbors.

Perhaps the one possible compelling productive use of a machine like the Commodore 64 in the home was as a word processor. Kids today can’t imagine how students once despaired when their teachers told them that a report had to be typed back in the era of typewriters, can’t conceive how difficult it was to get anything on paper in typewritten form when every mistake made by untutored fingers meant trying to decide between pulling out the Liquid Paper or just starting all over again. But even word processing on the 64 was made so painful by the 40-column screen and manifold other compromises that there was room to debate whether the cure was worse than the disease. Specialized hardware-based word processors became hugely popular during this era for just this reason. These single-function, all-in-one devices were much more pleasant to use than a Commodore 64 equipped with a $30 program, and cheaper than buying a whole computer system, especially if you went with a higher priced and thus more productively useful model like the Apple II.

The idea that every child in America needed to learn to program, lest she be left behind to flip burgers while her friends had brilliant careers, was also absurd on the face of it. It was akin to declaring during the days of the Model T that every citizen needed to learn to strip down and rebuild one of these newfangled automobiles. Basic computer literacy was important (and remains so today); BASIC literacy was not. What a child really needed to know could largely be taught in school. Parents needn’t have fretted if Junior preferred reading, listening to music, playing sports, or practicing origami to learning the vagaries of PEEKs and POKEs in BASIC 2.0. There would be time enough for computing when computing and Junior had both grown up a bit.

So, everything had changed yet nothing had changed since the halcyon days of the trinity of 1977. Computers were transforming the face and in some cases the very nature of business, yet there remained just two compelling reasons to have one in the home: 1) for the sheer joy of hacking or 2) for playing games. Lots more computers were now being used for the latter than the former, thanks to the vastly more and vastly better games that were now available. But for many folks games just weren’t a compelling enough reason to own one. The Puritan ethic that makes people feel guilty of their pleasures was as strong in America then as it remains today. It certainly didn’t help that the media had been filled for several years now with hand-wringing about the effect videogames were having on the psyches of youngsters. (This prompted many computer publishers of this period to work hard, albeit likely with limited success, to label their computer games as something different, something more cerebral and rewarding and even, dare we say it, educational than their simplistic videogame cousins.)

But, perhaps most of all, computers still remained quite expensive when you really dug into everything you needed for a workable system. Yes, you could get a Commodore 64 for less than $200 by the Christmas of 1983. But then you needed a disk drive ($220) if you wanted to do, well, much of anything with it; a monitor ($220) if you wanted a nice picture and didn’t want to tie up the family television all the time; a printer ($290) for word processing, if you wanted to take that fraught plunge; a modem ($60) to go online. It didn’t take long until you were approaching four digits, and that’s without even entering into a discussion of software. There was thus a certain note of false advertising in that sub-$200 Commodore 64. And because these machines were being sold through mass merchandisers rather than dealers, there was no one who really knew better, who could help buyers to put a proper system together at the point of sale. Consumers, conditioned by pretty much everything else that was sold to them not to expect the 64 on its own to be pretty much useless, were often baffled and frustrated when they realized they had bought an expensive doorstop. Many of the computers sold during that Christmas of 1983 were turned on a few times only, then consigned to the back of the closet or attic to gather dust. The bad taste they put in many people’s mouths would take years to go away. Meanwhile the more complete, useful machines, like the Apple IIc and the PCjr, were still more expensive than a complete Commodore 64 system — and the games on them weren’t as good to boot. Hackers and passionate gamers (or, perhaps more commonly, their generous parents) were willing to pay the price. Curious novices largely were not. Faced with no really good all-purpose options, many — most, actually — soon decided home computers just weren’t worth it. The real home-computer revolution, as it turned out, was still almost ten years away. About 15% of American homes had computers — at least ostensibly; many of them were, as just mentioned, buried in closets — by January 1, 1985, but that figure would rise with agonizing slowness for the rest of the decade. People could still live perfectly happy lives fully plugged into the cultural discourse around them and raise healthy, productive children in the process without owning a computer. Only much later, with the arrival of the World Wide Web and computers equipped with more intuitive graphical user interfaces for accessing it, would that change.

Which is not to say that the software and information industries that had exploded in and around the home-computer revolution during 1982 and 1983 died just like that. Many of its prominent members, however, did, as the financial gambles they had taken in anticipation of the home-computer revolution came back to haunt them. We’ve just seen how Sierra nearly went under during this period. Muse Software and Scott Adams’s Adventure International, to name two other old friends from this blog, weren’t so lucky; both folded in 1985. Electronic Arts survived, but steered their rhetoric and choice of titles somewhat away from Trip Hawkins’s original vision of “consumer software” toward titles tilted more toward the hardcore, in proven hardcore genres like the CRPG and the adventure game.

Magazines were even harder hit. By early 1984 there were more than 300 professionally published computing periodicals of one sort or another, many of them just founded during the boom of the previous year. Well over half of these died during 1984 and 1985. Mixed in with the dead Johnny-come-latelys were some cherished veteran voices, among them pioneers Creative Computing (1974), SoftSide (1978), and Softalk (1980). The latter’s demise, after exactly four years and 48 issues of sometimes superb people-focused journalism, came as a particular blow to the Apple II community; Apple historian Steven Weyhrich names this moment as nothing less than the end of the “golden age” of the Apple II. Those magazines that survived often did so in dramatically shrunken form. Compute!, for instance, went from 392 pages in December of 1983 to 160 ten months later.

Yet it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Paradoxically, some software publishers still did quite well. Infocom, for example, had the best single year in their history in 1984 in terms of unit sales, selling almost 750,000 games. It seemed that, with more options than ever before, software buyers were becoming much more discerning. Those publishers like Infocom who could offer them fresh, quality products showing a distinctive sensibility could do very well. Those who could not, like Adventure International with their tired old two-word parsers and simplistic engines, suffered the consequences. That real or implied asterisk (“Plays great games too!”) at the end of the advertising copy remained the great guilty secret of the remaining home-computer industry, the real reason computers were in homes at all. Thankfully, the best games were getting ever more complex and compelling; otherwise the industry may have been in even more trouble than it actually was.

Indeed, with a staggering number of machines already out there and heaps still to be sold for years to come, the golden age for Commodore 64 users was just beginning. This year of chaos and uncertainty was the year that the 64 really came into its own as a games machine, as programmers came to understand how to make it sing. Companies who found these keyboard maestros would be able to make millions from them. The home-computer revolution may not have quite panned out as anticipated and the parent company may have looked increasingly clueless, but for gamers the Commodore 64 stood alone with its combination of audiovisual capability, its large and ever growing catalog of games, and its low price. What with game consoles effectively dead in the wake of Atari’s crash and burn, all the action was right here.

In that spirit, we’ll look next time at the strange transformation that led one of our stodgiest old friends from earlier articles to become the hip purveyor of some of the slickest games that would ever grace the 64.

(The indispensable resources on Commodore’s history remains Brian Bagnall’s On the Edge and its revised edition, Commodore: A Company on the Edge. Frank Rose’s West of Eden is the best chronicle I know of this period of Apple’s history. The editorial pages and columnists in Compute! and Compute!’s Gazette provided a great unfolding account of a chaotic year in home computing as it happened. Particular props must go to Fred D’Ignazio for pointing out all of the problems with the standard rhetoric of the home-computer revolution in Compute!‘s May 1984 issue — but he does lose points for naming the PCjr as the answer to all these woes in the next issue.)

Comments
13 Responses

- Felix

July 28, 2013 at 3:54 pm

I say even 8-bit computers can be useful. Consider the obvious example of Visicalc. But you have to treat them like the tools they are, and most people even today expect computers to be lamp genies — intelligent slaves you just have to point at a problem and they’ll make all the hard decisions for you. All the thinking, all the paying attention, all the work in your place.

Two personal examples spring to mind: a couple of weeks ago, I was trying to help mom comprehend a math problem. It would have been SO easy if I had a line-number BASIC with graphical capabilities at hand. And she could have used Visicalc back when she was adding columns of numbers for hours on end with only a desk calculator to help her… when it was working.

Admittedly, the public’s attitude towards computers was shaped by decades of clueless journalists calling them “electronic brains”, stories about AI breakthroughs and not a little shameless marketing. But you’d think we’ve outgrown that by now.

Last but not least, interesting point about the protestant ethic influencing the general public’s attitude towards computer games. Especially as that’s very much still with us.

Good work as usual, thanks!

- hitfan

July 29, 2013 at 12:40 pm

This is what I like most about those old 8-bit machines: with BASIC being the de-facto operating system for these, you could run a small function, a loop, without a line number in direct mode and see the results instantly. BASIC’s direct mode is very powerful that way, and it’s something that’s missing in this age of compilers and dev studios.

“Last but not least, interesting point about the protestant ethic influencing the general public’s attitude towards computer games. Especially as that’s very much still with us.”

I don’t say this as a moral judgment, but more as an observation: America not only has the history of puritanism (work hard, so that you can work even harder!) but also the legacy of slavery. It’s kind of a double-whammy and it explains why the US doesn’t have 6 week paid vacations like many European countries do.

- Carl

August 1, 2013 at 9:16 pm

“This is what I like most about those old 8-bit machines: with BASIC being the de-facto operating system for these, you could run a small function, a loop, without a line number in direct mode and see the results instantly. BASIC’s direct mode is very powerful that way, and it’s something that’s missing in this age of compilers and dev studios.”

I think this is part of the allure of scripting languages and in particular Python. It is quite easy to run small functions directly in the interpreter, just as we used to do with the C64. However, as a modern language, it avoids a lot of the brain damage that went along with using C64 BASIC. We have come a long way.

- Felix

August 2, 2013 at 5:56 am

Yes, Python has some of the same allure while being infinitely more powerful and intuitive than Basic. In fact, I remember feeling the same about Logo on the Speccy. But line-number Basic had a unique style of interactivity that’s qualitatively different from that of any other language. The way you can see the program taking shape on the screen line by line… the ease of inserting/deleting/changing instructions one by one… Not to mention how much it teaches you about the way computers execute machine code.

We’ve gained a lot by developing more powerful languages. But we also lost something.

- ZORK FREE ARTS LAB

July 29, 2013 at 8:14 pm

This is, once again, a wonderful article, quite possible one of the best and most interesting I read on your stellar blog. As always, can’t wait for the next one!

- iPadCary

July 30, 2013 at 7:42 pm

A computer in every home ….?
Why not a chicken in every pot, too!
Huzzah.

Can’t wait until the boxmac stuff.
Be sure to do a story on the world’s FIRST Golden Age [you know — the 16-bit era?] game: “Alice” for Macintosh.

- Lori Emerson

July 31, 2013 at 9:49 pm

really impressive history you’ve written up for us here – thank you!

- Felix

August 2, 2013 at 5:43 am

The folks over at World of Spectrum just started a thread about serious uses for 8-bit machines. Some of the answers are impressive.

- iPadCary

August 4, 2013 at 2:01 pm

Jimmy,
I’m gonna get the new Kindle Paperwhite 2 when it comes out next month.
Will your IF app work on the new model as is, or will it have to be reworked?
Thanks!

- Jimmy Maher

August 4, 2013 at 3:00 pm

To be honest, this is the first I’ve heard of a new Kindle, so I don’t really know. :) The existing app should just work if the APIs haven’t changed, as it’s designed to adapt itself to differing screen resolutions, etc. But Amazon officially shut down the Kindle Active Content program a few months ago; legacy products remain in the store, but they’re not accepting new submissions or doing further development of the KDK. So, I really can’t say if they’ll bother to include KDK support in future Kindle models.

If Amazon should give me the opportunity to make needed updates, I certainly will. But somehow I suspect that’s unlikely…

- James

January 15, 2015 at 5:13 pm

“She may just have seen that she was being asked to pay more for a smaller and thus presumably less capable machine, and gone with the bigger, more serious-looking IIe (if anything from Apple). ”

I don’t understand where you were going with the ( ) there.

- Pingback: Episódio 54 – Dossiê Atari ST – Parte A | Retrocomputaria

- kovacm

August 13, 2015 at 9:30 pm

“No one who was inside that boardroom has ever revealed exactly what transpired there. With Gould and Tramiel both now dead and the other former board members either dead or aged, it’s unlikely that anyone ever will. On the face of it, it seems hard to imagine. What could cause these two men who had managed to stay together through the toughest of times, during which Commodore had more than once teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, to irrevocably split now, when their company had just enjoyed the best year in its history? We can only speculate.”

*** Leonard Tramiel reveal what was the reason of split:

“Then Bil Herd and Leonard Tramiel answered all of our retro questions. We learned that Commodore founder Jack Tramiel actually walked away from Commodore during CES in 1984, not a few months later as was always believed. The disagreement with main Commodore investor Irving Gould that caused his exit was also revealed. Leonard Tramiel explained that his father was angry that Gould was using Commodore funds as his personal piggy bank.”

http://dudeslife.com/index.php/2015/07/19/commvex-2015/

From Automated Simulations to Epyx
August 4, 2013

When Robert Botch joined Automated Simulations as director of marketing just as 1982 expired, it wasn’t exactly the sexiest company in the industry. They were still flogging their Dunjonquest line, which now consisted of no less than eleven sequels, spinoffs, and expansions to Temple of Apshai. More than a year after co-founder Jon Freeman had left in frustration over partner Jim Connelley’s refusal to update Automated’s technology, the entire line was still derived from the same BASIC-based engine that had first been designed to run on a 16 K TRS-80 back in 1979. It was hard for anyone to articulate why someone would choose to play a Dunjonquest game in a world that contained Ultima and Wizardry. And, indeed, Automated’s sales numbers were not looking very good, and the company had stopped making money almost from the moment that the Ultima and Wizardry series debuted. Still, that hadn’t prevented them from benefiting from the torrents of venture capital that entered the young industry in 1982, courtesy of the pundits who were billing home computers as the next big thing to succeed the game consoles. But now the investors were getting worried, wondering if this stodgy company and their somewhat pedantic approach to gaming had really been such a good risk after all. Thus Botch, whom Connelley hired under pressure to remake Automated’s image.

Botch’s first assignment was to visit the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that January, with Dunjonquest titles in tow to display to the crowd on a big-screen television rented for the occasion. Botch, who knew nothing about computers or computer games, didn’t much understand the Dunjonquest concept. He could hardly be blamed, for just trying to figure out which one you could play was confusing as hell: you needed to already have Temple of Apshai to play these additional games, but needed Hellfire Warrior to play those, etc. He was therefore relieved when another employee handed him a disk containing a straightforward, standalone action/puzzle game for the Atari home-computer line called Jumpman, a sort of massively expanded version of the arcade classic Donkey Kong with thirty levels to explore. Unusually for Automated, who usually developed games in-house, its presence was the result of an unsolicited third-party submission from a hacker named Randy Glover.

Randy Glover, developer of Jumpman

Botch was such a computer novice that he couldn’t figure out how to boot the game; his colleague had to tell him to “put it in that little slot over by the computer.” But when he finally got it working he fell in love. The rest of the show turned into an extended battle of wills between Botch and Connelley. The latter, who was determined to showcase the Dunjonquest games, would “come over, yell a lot, and tell me to take the disk out. Whenever he left the room, I’d load the program in again.” The crowd seemed to agree with Botch: he left CES with a notebook full of orders for the as yet unreleased Jumpman, convinced that in it he had seen the only viable future for his new employers.

The embattled Connelley saw his power further eroded the following month, when the investors brought in Michael Katz, an unsentimental, hard-driving businessmen with an eye for mainstream appeal. He had spent the past four years at Coleco, where he had masterminded the launch of some very successful handheld electronic games as well as the ColecoVision console, which had just sold more than 500,000 units in its first Christmas on the market. It was first agreed that Connelley and Katz would co-lead the company, but this was obviously impractical and untenable. In a scenario that could have easily happened to Ken Williams at Sierra if he had been less strong-willed and business-savvy, Connelley was being eased out of his own company by the monied interests he had welcomed with open arms. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, he left within months, taking a number of his loyalists with him to form a development studio he named The Connelley Group, which would release a couple of games through Automated before becoming free agents and eventually fading away quietly.

Katz, Botch, and the other newcomers were thus left alone to literally transform Automated Simulations into a new company. Automated had for some time now been branding many of their games with the label of “Epyx,” arrived at because their first choice, “Epic,” was already taken by a record label. No matter; “Epyx” was a better name anyway, proof that even a blind-to-PR squirrel like Connelley could find a nut every now and again. Katz and Botch now made it the official name of the reborn company, excising all trace of the stodgy old “Automated Simulations” name. Gone also would be the nerdy old Dunjonquest line which positively reeked of Dungeons and Dragons sessions in parents’ basements. They would instead strive to make Epyx synonymous with colorful, accessible games like Jumpman, aimed straight at the heart of the mass market. The old slogan of “Computer Games Thinkers Play” now became “Strategy Games for the Action-Game Player,” and they hired Chiat Day, Apple’s PR firm and the hottest such in Silicon Valley, to remake Epyx’s image entirely.

Jumpman itself made a good start toward that goal. It was a huge hit, especially once ported to the Commodore 64. One of first games to really take proper advantage of the 64’s audiovisual capabilities, it hit that platform like a nova at mid-year, topping the sales charts for months and probably becoming the bestselling single Commodore 64 game of 1983. It alone was enough to return Epyx to profitability. Unsurprisingly given commercial returns like that, from now on Epyx would develop first and most for the 64. They also hired Glover to work in-house. Before the end of the year he had already delivered a cartridge-based pseudo-sequel, Jumpman Junior, to reach ultra-low-end systems without a disk drive.

But now Katz had a problem. Other than Glover, he lacked the technical staff to make the Jumpmans of the future. Most of them had left with Connelley — and anyway games like their old Dunjonquests were exactly what the new Epyx didn’t want to be making. Then Starpath caught Katz’s eye.

Back in 1981, two former Atari engineers, Bob Brown and Craig Nelson, had founded Arcadia, Inc., eventually to be renamed Starpath after the release of the Arcadia 2001, an ill-conceived and short-lived games console from Emerson Radio Corporation. Drawing from friends, family, and former colleagues, Brown and Nelson put together a crack team of hardware and software hackers to make their mark in the Atari VCS market. Their flagship product was the marvelously Rube Goldberg-esque Supercharger, which plugged into the VCS’s cartridge port and added 6 K of memory (which may not sound like much until you remember that the VCS shipped with all of 128 bytes), new graphics routines in ROM, and a cable to connect the console to a cassette player. Starpath developed and released half a dozen games on cassette for use with the Supercharger, most of them apparently quite impressive indeed. But problems dogged Starpath. The company lived in constant fear of legal action by Atari, whom Brown and Nelson had not left on particularly good terms, in response to their unauthorized expansion. It did eventually become clear that Starpath had little to fear from Atari, but for the worst possible reason: the videogame market was collapsing, and Atari had far bigger problems than little Starpath. By late 1983 Starpath was floundering. Katz swooped, buying the entire company for a song and moving them lock, stock, and barrel from Santa Clara, California, into Epyx’s headquarters in nearby Sunnyvale.

Katz had no interest in any of Starpath’s extant products for a dead Atari VCS market. No, he wanted the programming talent and creative flair that had led to the Supercharger and its games in the first place. If they could do work like that on the Atari VCS, imagine what they could do with a Commodore 64. The Starpath folks would prove to be the final, most essential piece in his remaking of Epyx.

One of Starpath’s programmers, Dennis Caswell, had been playing around with ideas for a platforming action-adventure game before the acquisition. Indeed, he was already at work trying to animate the running man who would be the star. It was decided to let Caswell, who had three Supercharger games under his belt, run with his idea on the Commodore 64. He says his elation at the platform change was so great that “I unplugged my [Atari] 2600 and threw it out of my office and into the hall.” Working essentially alone, Caswell crafted one of the iconic Commodore 64 games and one of the bestselling in the history of Epyx: Impossible Mission.

Starpath had also been working on a decathlon simulation. In fact, it was far enough long to be basically playable. They discussed porting it to the 64, but the capabilities of that machine quickly led them to think about something more than just a simulation of track and field. Why not use the luxury of 64 K of memory and disk-based storage to simulate a broader cross-section of Summer Olympic events? With the 1984 Summer Olympics coming to Los Angeles, it seemed the perfect game for the zeitgeist, with exactly the sort of mass-market appeal Katz wanted from his new titles. He thought it a brilliant idea, and even went so far as to approach the Olympic Committee about making it an officially licensed product. He found, however, that Atari had long before sewn up the rights, back when they had been the fastest growing company in America. Epyx therefore decided to do everything possible to associate the game with the Olympics without outright declaring it to be an official Olympics simulation. They pushed the envelope pretty far: the game would be called Summer Games, would begin with an opening ceremony and a runner lighting a flame to the strains of “Bugler’s Dream,” would offer medals, would (as its advertising copy proclaimed) let you “go for the gold!” representing the country of your choice. Such legal boundary-pushing became something of a habit; witness Impossible Mission, which plainly hoped to benefit from an association with Mission: Impossible. (This in spite of the fact that Scott Adams had already been forced by the lawyers to change the name of his third adventure from Mission Impossible to Secret Mission.) In the case of Summer Games, Epyx likely got away with it because Atari was in no financial shape to press the issue and the Olympic Committee, never the most progressive institution, was barely aware of home-computer games’ existence. To this day many people are shocked to realize that Summer Games is not actually an official Olympics game. It all speaks to Katz’s determination to create games that felt up-to-date and relevant to the times. Yes, sometimes that could backfire, leading to trying-way-too-hard titles like Break Dance. Much of the time, however, it was commercial gold.

The original design brief for Summer Games called for ten events. The team also very much wished to include head-to-head, real-time competition wherever the nature of the sport being simulated allowed it. Beyond that, they would pretty much make it up on the fly; even the events themselves were largely chosen in the moment. The Starpath programmers’ talents were augmented by Randy Glover of Jumpman fame and Epyx’s first full-time artist, Erin Murphy. They were all under the gun from the start, for Katz wanted them to have something ready to show at the 1984 Winter CES, barely six weeks away when the project was officially green-lit. They worked through the holidays to deliver. Epyx arrived at CES with a very impressive albeit non-interactive opening-ceremonies sequence, fairly playable 4 X 400-meter relay and 100-meter dash races (both partially adapted from Starpath’s old decathlon project), and a diving event. At the show they learned that they had more competition in the (pseudo-)Olympics genre beyond Atari. HESWare, an aggressive up-and-comer not that dissimilar to Epyx who were about to sign Leonard Nimoy as their spokesman, showed HES Games. The prospect pushed Epyx to make sure Summer Games both met its planned pre-Summer Olympics release date and was as good as they could make it. To help with the former, the original plan for ten events was reduced to eight, principally via the sacrifice of weight lifting (fans of which sport would have to wait until 1986’s World Games to get their due). To help with the latter, more resources and personnel were poured into the project.

Even as this happened, attrition, a constant at Epyx, also became a concern. Katz’s new Epyx could be a rewarding place, but also an unrelentingly intense and competitive one, full of mathematical athletes convinced they were the smartest people in the room and all too happy to demonstrate it at their rivals’ expense. The spirit of competition extended beyond working hours; hundreds of dollars changed hands weekly in epic games of poker. Even some of Epyx’s brightest stars eventually found the company’s testoserone-and brainpower-fueled culture too much to take. Thus Starpath co-founder Bob Brown, finding Starpath’s new masters not to his liking, left quite soon after the acquisition, and Randy Glover, who had been assigned to the swimming events, abruptly left not long after CES. The swimming events were taken up by Stephen Landrum, the biggest single contributor to the project as a whole, who also did the opening ceremonies and the diving and pole-vaulting events.

It had been decided early on that Summer Games would let you compete as the representative of any of a variety of nations, complete with flags and national anthems to play during the medal ceremonies. Since it obviously would not be possible to include all of the 140 countries who would participate in the real Olympics, Epyx was left with the question of which ones should make the cut. Beyond the big, obvious powerhouses of the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, commercial considerations once again reigned supreme here. Katz had begun signing deals with foreign distributors, pushing hard to get Epyx’s games into the vibrant British and steadily emerging Western European software markets. Epyx reasoned that players in these countries would want the opportunity to represent their own nation. Thus relative Summer-Olympic non-factors like Norway and Denmark were included in the game, while potent teams from parts of the world that didn’t buy computer games, like East Germany, Romania, and Yugoslavia, were omitted. Most of the countries included had never been visited by anyone at Epyx. They sourced the flag designs from a world atlas, and called consulates and sales connections in Europe to drum up sheet music for the various anthems. Many of those anthems had never been heard by anyone working on the game; if some sound a bit “off” in tone or tempo, perhaps that’s the reason. For the coup de grâce, Epyx couldn’t resist including their own company as one of the “nations,” complete with a national anthem that was actually the Jumpman theme.

Summer Games was nearing the final crunch time on May, 8, 1984, when the Soviet Union initiated a boycott of the Los Angeles Games in a rather petty quid pro quo for the West’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games. (The people who were really hurt by both gestures were not the governments of the boycotees but a generation of athletes on both sides of the political divide, who lost what was for many literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to compete against the true best of their peers on the biggest stage their sports could offer them.) Epyx quickly decided to leave the Soviet Union in their version of the Olympics. After the game’s release, they reached out a bit cheekily to the Soviets in real life. Blotch:

We sent the Russian [read: Soviet] embassy (in Washington, D.C.) several copies of Summer Games for the Commodore 64. An enclosed letter stated since they would not be competing in the regular Olympics, at least they could participate in our version of the Games. This package was eventually returned to us with a thank-you note, because they only had access to Atari home computers. Our marketing people quickly replaced the Commodore software with Atari material and sent it back. I always wondered if they enjoyed the game, because we never heard from them again.

Epyx’s bigger concern was the same as that of everyone involved with the Los Angeles Games, whether directly or tangentially: what commercial impact would the boycott have? It seemed it must inevitably tarnish the Games’ luster somewhat. In the case of both Summer Games and the Olympic Games themselves, the impact would turn out to be less than expected. The latter has gone down in history as the most financially successful Olympics of modern times, while Summer Games would become — and this probably comes as anything but a spoiler to most of you — one of the bestselling computer games of the year, and the first entry of the bestselling series in the history of the Commodore 64.

Katz was determined to get Summer Games out in June, to beat HES Games to the market and to derive maximum advantage from the pre-Olympics media buildup. The team worked frantically to finish the final two events (gymnastics and skeet shooting) and swat bugs. They worked all but straight through the final 72 hours. Disks went into production right on schedule, the morning after the code they contained had been finalized.

Summer Games went on to sell in the hundreds of thousands across North America and Europe, thoroughly overshadowing the less impressive Olympian efforts of HESWare and Atari, the latter of whose games were at any rate only available on their own faltering lines of game consoles and home computers. It would be ported to a variety of platforms, although it would always remain at its best on the Commodore 64. Together with Impossible Mission and a racing game developed by the indefatigable Landrum and Caswell called Pitstop II, both also huge worldwide smashes, Summer Games completed the remaking of Epyx’s image and made of them a worldwide commercial powerhouse. Being for the most part conceptually simple games without much dependence on text, most of Epyx’s games were ideally suited to do well in non-English-speaking countries. Combined with Katz’s aggressive distributional push, this was key to making Epyx one of the first big entertainment-software publishers that could be said to be truly international. With so many potential customers to serve in emerging new markets and several new hits in addition to the still popular Jumpman, sales in 1984 soared as Epyx enjoyed almost exponential growth in earnings as the months passed.

We’ll continue the story of Epyx later, but for now I’m not quite done with Summer Games. Next time I’d like to do something I haven’t done in a while: dig into the technology a bit and explain how some of the magic that wowed so many back in 1984 actually works. It was also give us a chance to get to know the Commodore 64, a computer whose importance to gaming during the middle years of the 1980s can hardly be overstated, just a little bit better.

(The bulk of this article is drawn from two lengthy retrospectives published in the July 1988 and August 1989 issues of Commodore Magazine. The pictures of Randy Glover comes from the April 1984 K-Power.)

Comments
15 Responses

- sean barrett

August 4, 2013 at 3:01 pm

There’s extra characters at the end of the link to the archon page that breaks it (at least in Firefox).

- Jimmy Maher

August 4, 2013 at 4:02 pm

Weird. Upgrading to WordPress 3.6 seems to have broken links all through the database by inserting garbage characters after the final “/”. I think I fixed it with an SQL search and replace.

Thanks!

- fan and ghost editor

August 4, 2013 at 6:02 pm

pundents? pundits?

- ZUrlocker

August 4, 2013 at 10:18 pm

I think you mean “pundit” rather than “pundent” in para 1. Otherwise, a good post on the origins of Epyx.
–Z

- Jimmy Maher

August 5, 2013 at 5:26 am

Thanks!

- Tale

August 5, 2013 at 9:18 am

Aw, I was hoping for the nifty playable game versions of Summer Games and Jumpman, like in earlier articles.

Apart from that, well done! (As always).

- Jimmy Maher

August 5, 2013 at 9:25 am

There’s still one post to go on Summer Games, so don’t despair. ;)

- Mike Whalen

August 5, 2013 at 7:57 pm

Outstanding work as always, Jimmy, and I am very much looking forward to the next post!!

- Rob

August 6, 2013 at 4:49 am

On the subject of national anthems sounding a bit “off”, the Australian national anthem featured in the Epyx Games series was actually “Waltzing Matilda”, an Australian folk song. To be fair it is often seen as our unofficial anthem, but sounds nothing like the official “Advance Australia Fair”.

- Gilles Duchesne

August 8, 2013 at 5:18 am

Aw, and up to this very day I thought that the Australian anthem was also the theme from that “Secret Valley” TV show… :-(

- Pierre

August 7, 2013 at 2:50 pm

Superb! About a month ago I came across an old Atari joystick that I played Jumpman with. Then a few days latter I found a Pitstop II cart for the C64 along with an Epyx branded joystick (500XJ). That’s when I thought, “what ever happened to Epyx?” I did a little search but the results weren’t satisfying.

Jimmy, thanks for filling a blank in my mind. Looking forward to the next few posts.

Oh and I loved your Amiga book. The best in the series by far.

- Scott

August 15, 2013 at 12:54 am

Love the blog Jimmy, just one note on this one – while technically correct I think “metals” in paragraph 10 should be “medals” :)

- Jimmy Maher

August 15, 2013 at 7:11 am

Thanks!

- Kent Purrington

October 1, 2014 at 5:27 am

I was one of the playtesters at Epyx during this time. I would love to touch base with any of the programers of the time from Starpath or Mr. Botch, to say thanks for some fun years with a computer. Thanks for filling in some holes in my knowledge of Epyx.

- Jeffvv53

September 16, 2015 at 12:54 am

You can’t beat the old games. I remember shelling out $60 for Ultima 3 for the C64. Having a $300 phone bill because I played Zork over the phone

How Things Work: Commodore 64 and Summer Games Edition
August 9, 2013

I’m always trying to convey a sense of the audacity and creativity of hackers of the early PC era, who made so much out of so little. I include amongst this group both the hardware hackers who created the machines themselves and the software hackers who took them to place even their creators never imagined. In that spirit, I thought today we’d look at how the Commodore 64’s hardware team managed to make it do some of what it could given the technical constraints under which they labored, and how the software team who created Summer Games at Epyx found ways to make it do even more than they had fully considered. So, much of this article is for the gearheads among you, or at least those of you who’d like to understand a bit more of what the gearheads are on about. If you’re a less technical sort, perhaps you’ll be consoled by learning about some of the softer factors that went into the Summer Games design as well. And if that’s not interesting, hey, you can still watch my wife and I (mostly I) fail horribly at various Summer Games events via the movie clips.

This is, by the way, my first attempt to make use of WordPress 3.6’s integrated video capabilities. You’ll need an up-to-date browser with good HTML 5 support to see the clips. Hopefully my site won’t choke on the bandwidth demands. We’ll see how we go.

While you’re waiting (hopefully not too long) for the videos to load, let’s consider the basic visual capabilities of the Commodore 64: a palette of 16 colors at a resolution of 320 X 200. Those capabilities are, to say the least, modest by modern standards, but they actually present a huge problem when paired with another key specification: the 64 has just 64 K of RAM memory. This is all there is to work with; there is no separate bank of video memory, as on a modern computer. Everything — programs, data, the contents of the screen, and miscellaneous other things like buffers for the disk drive — must draw from this pool.

Now, a modern programmer wishing to represent a 320 X 200 screen with 16 colors in memory would probably just store it as a series of pixels, with one byte devoted to each pixel and storing a value of between 0 and 15 to represent that pixel’s color. This approach, known as bitmap graphics, is straightforward and eminently flexible, but there’s a problem. Consider: a 320 X 200 screen has exactly 64,000 pixels. In other words, by devoting one byte to each pixel we’ve just filled our entire 64 K of memory with a single screen.

Let’s consider then. Even a modern programmer, if she’s a more efficient sort, might note that we only actually need four bits to store a number between 0 and 15, and could therefore, at the cost of a bit more confusing layout, pack two pixels into every byte. That reduces consumption to a little under 32 K — better, but it’s still untenable to devote half of our precious memory to the screen.

It’s because bitmap graphics are so demanding that only high-end machines like the Apple Lisa and Macintosh used them by default at the time of Summer Games‘s release. And, notably, even those 68000-powered machines only displayed black and white, which reduced the requirement from four bits per pixel to one — a simple on-off, black-or-white toggle. Let’s consider the alternative that the 64’s designers, as well as those of many other machines, employed in various ways: character graphics.

In its default mode, the 64 subdivides its screen into a grid of character cells, each 8 X 8 pixels. Thus there are 40 of them across and 25 down, corresponding to the machine’s standard text display. Elsewhere in memory are a set of up to 256 tiles that can be copied into these cells. A default set, containing the glyph for each letter, number, and mark of punctuation in addition to symbols and simple line-drawing figures, lives in ROM. The programmer can, however, swap this set out for her own set of tiles. This system is conceptually the same as the tile-graphics system which Richard Garriott used in the Ultima games, but these tiles are smaller (only the size of a single character) and monochrome, just a set of bits in which 1 represents a pixel in the foreground color, 0 a pixel in the background color. The latter color is set globally, for the whole screen. The former is specified individually for each cell, via a table stored elsewhere in memory.

So, let’s look at what all this means in terms of memory. Each cell on the screen consumes one byte, representing the number (0 to 255) of the tile that is placed there. There are 1000 character cells on a 40 X 25 display, so that’s about 1 K consumed. We need 8 bytes to store each tile as an 8 X 8 grid of on-off pixels. If we use all 256, that’s 2 K. Finally, the color table with the foreground color for each cell fills another 1 K. We’ve just reduced 32 K to 4 K, or just 2 K if we use the default set of character glyphs in ROM. Not bad. Of course, we’ve also introduced a lot of limitations. We now have to build our display, jigsaw-puzzle style, from our collection of tiles. And each cell can only use two of our total of 16 colors, one of which can be unique to that cell but the other of which must be the same for the entire screen. For someone wishing to make a colorful game, this last restriction in particular may just be too much to accept.

Enter multicolor character mode. Here, we tell the 64 that we want each tile to be not monochrome but drawn in four colors. Rather than using one bit per pixel within the tile, we now use two, which allows us to represent any number from 0 to 3. One of these colors is still set individually for each cell; the other three are set globally, for the screen as a whole. And there’s another, bigger catch: because we still only devote eight bytes to each tile, we must correspondingly reduce its resolution, and that of the screen as a whole. Each tile is now 4 X 8 (horizontally elongated) pixels, the screen as a whole 160 X 200. Even so, this is easily the most widely used mode in Commodore 64 games. It’s also the mode that Scott Nelson (little brother of Starpath co-founder Craig Nelson) chose for Summer Games‘s flag selection screen.

But… wait, you might be saying. Surely the colorful screen shown above doesn’t always use the same three of the four colors within each tile. In fact, it doesn’t, and this introduces us to one of the keys to getting the most out of the Commodore 64: raster interrupts.

The picture on a cathode-ray-tube television or monitor is generated by an electron gun which moves across and down behind the screen, firing charged electrons at phosphors that coat the back of the screen glass. This causes them to briefly glow — so briefly, in fact, that the gun must paint the screen 60 times per second for televisions using the North American NTSC standard, or 50 times for the European PAL standard, in order to display a stable image without flicker. After painting each line of the screen from left to right, the gun must move back to the left to paint the next. This split second’s delay can be exploited by the Commodore 64 programmer. She can ask the machine to generate what’s known as a raster interrupt when the gun finishes painting a given line. She then has a few microseconds to make changes to the display configuration before the gun starts painting the next line. She can, for example, change one or more of the three supposedly fixed colors, as Scott Nelson does to generate the screen shown above.

But let’s say we don’t want to deal with trying to create a picture using tiles. The Commodore 64 actually does also offer a bitmap mode of sorts, albeit one with restrictions of its own that allow it to reduce the memory footprint from an untenable 32 K to a more reasonable if still painful 9 K. Here an 8 K chunk of memory is allocated to the bitmap, with each bit representing the status (on or off) of a single pixel. The foreground color represented by an “on” pixel is once again determined by a 1 K color table, with the colors still sorted into 8 X 8 pixel blocks. This leads to the most obvious oddity of the 64’s bitmap mode: the bitmap does not run all the way across the screen and then down, but rather across and down through each 8 X 8 cell that is assigned a given foreground color.

For those willing to trade resolution for colors, there is also a multicolor bitmap mode, which, like the multicolor character mode, treats each two bits as representing a single pixel of one of four possible colors. Horizontal resolution is accordingly reduced to 160 pixels. This mode is, however, more flexible than multicolor character mode in its choice of colors. Another area of memory, of 1 K, is allocated to a collection of color pairs for each cell, each pair packed into a single byte. Thus we can freely choose three of the four colors found within each cell without resorting to raster interrupts or other tricks. Total memory devoted to the display in multicolor bitmap mode amounts to 10 K.

That may not look like much at first glance, but for a programmer trying to shoehorn a complex game into 64 K it’s quite a sacrifice indeed. For this reason, and because its other restrictions could make it almost as challenging to work with as character mode, bitmap mode is not used as often as you might expect in Commodore 64 games. Summer Games is, however, a partial exception, employing bitmap mode in quite a number of places. For instance, Stephen Landrum’s opening-ceremonies sequence uses a multicolor bitmap. This sequence also demonstrates another critical part of the 64’s display hardware: sprites.

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/opening.mp4

Doing animation by changing the contents of screen memory is very taxing on a little 8-bit CPU like the 64’s 6502, not to mention tricky to time so that changes are not made in the middle of screen paints, which would result in ugly jerking and tearing effects. Sprites come to the rescue. Indeed, their presence or absence is a good indication of whether a given machine from this era is pretty good at playing graphically intense games (the 64, the Atari 8-bit lines) or not (the Apple II, the IBM PC). A sprite is a relatively small graphical element which is overlaid onto the physical screen, but independent of the bitmap or tile map stored in memory. It can be moved about quickly at minimal cost, just by changing a couple of registers. The display circuitry does the rest.

The 64 offers eight sprites to the programmer, each exactly 24 pixels wide by 21 tall. The image for each is stored in memory as the usual grid of on/off bits, for the modest total of 64 bytes used per sprite. An on bit represents the sprite’s color, of which each has exactly one; an off bit represents transparency, so that whatever is on the screen behind shows through. This means that the 24 X 21 pixel pixel size is not so arbitrary as it may first appear; a smaller sprite can be displayed simply by turning off the unneeded pixels.

There is also the inevitable multicolor sprite, which gives us three foreground colors to work with at the expense of half of our horizontal resolution. In this mode, the sprite is effectively just 12 X 21 pixels, but each pixel is now twice as wide as before, resulting in the same physical width on the screen. As in multicolor character mode, the second and third colors are fixed across all sprites in this mode.

A sprite can be pointed to different addresses in memory for its image between screen paints, creating the possibility of making animated sprites which cycle through a sequence of frames, page-flip style. Likewise, single- and multicolor sprites can be placed together and moved in lockstep to create larger or more complex onscreen figures. In the sequence above, the runner is made from three single-color sprites, each of which cycles through 14 frames of animation. (If you’ve played Impossible Mission, he may look familiar to you: he is in fact the same sprite as your avatar in that game, which Dennis Caswell happily shared with his colleagues.) The flames are four multicolor sprites, each with four frames of animation. And each of the eight doves is a single single-color sprite of eight animation frames.

But… again, wait. That’s far more than eight sprites in total, isn’t it? As you may have guessed, Landrum uses raster interrupts to reconfigure and thus reuse sprites as each screen paint proceeds. With the addition of such tricks the 64’s effective limit becomes not eight sprites in total but no more than eight sprites horizontally parallel with one another.

Let’s take another example, this time one showing an actual, interactive event in action: Stephen Landrum’s pole vault. I have my usual mediocre performance in the clip that follows, but my wife Dorte kicks some ass and actually demolishes our old world record.

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/misc/pole.mp4

The screen you see here is another multicolor bitmap. The vaulter is made up of three single-color sprites, which cycle through seven frames of animation as he runs and are then changed appropriately to reflect his state after he goes airborne. The pole is three single-colored sprites and the crossbar is a single multicolored sprite, as is, surprisingly and cleverly, the stationary top of the nearer (right-hand) upright. To understand this last, we have to understand the 64’s concept of sprite priority. Sprites are numbered from 0 to 7. If two sprites overlap one another, the sprite with the lower number is drawn on top of the one with the higher number. Landrum uses this property to easily create the illusion of the jumper passing behind the nearer upright as he soars through the air.

You might have noticed that the pole, the crossbar, and the upright are all quite large. This is down to yet another feature of the 64’s sprite system. It’s possible to expand a sprite vertically or horizontally or both, doubling its size (but not its resolution).

The pole vault is not quite as polished as most of the events, which may be a sign that, as one of the later events completed, it was a bit rushed. There’s some odd artifacting in the pole, for instance. And there’s a wonderful bug that lets you vault under the crossbar on its highest setting, creating a world record for the ages.

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/pole_bug.mp4

The two swimming events, which were started by Randy Glover but finished by Landrum following the former’s abrupt resignation, are the most complex in Summer Games. They’re largely an exercise in rhythm; you have to press the joystick button as your swimmer’s arms enters the water, then releases it when they emerge. I’m awful at it, but Dorte is pretty good.

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/swimming.mp4

The clock at top right is formed from six single-color sprites, each swimmer from four. The rest of what you see here may begin to illustrate how crazy you can get with raster interrupts. Each paint begins with the 64 in single-color bitmap mode. This allows the text (“Ready… Set… Go!”), which is drawn and erased directly into the bitmap, to be rendered in the higher resolution. But then, just as the electron gun reaches the top of the stands, the screen is changed to a multicolor bitmap.

Glover and Landrum use a technique known as double buffering to make the scrolling as smooth as possible. There are actually two bitmaps in memory, one of which is always being displayed and the other of which is being updated by the CPU for the next step in the scroll. When the time comes, the two are swapped, as the 64’s VIC-II graphics chip is pointed to the other in the pair. Well, it’s almost that simple. Complications arise because the poor 6502 just doesn’t have time to completely redraw a screen in memory for every pixel of scroll. Luckily, it doesn’t have to. The VIC-II also has what are known as horizontal and vertical fine-scrolling registers. They allow the programmer to shift the bitmap that appears onscreen by from 1 to 7 bits to the right (as in the swimming events) or down. Since this will create an ugly empty zone at the edges of the display for which the computer has no pixel data to display, another register lets the programmer expand the size of the border slightly to cover these cells — the width of the screen is reduced from 40 to 38 columns, or the height from 24 to 23 lines. Now it’s possible for Glover and Landrum to scroll the screen eight pixels before having to swap to the alternate bitmap, giving the CPU time to make said bitmap. Double buffering is rather unusual to find on the 64, as it’s horrendously expensive in memory. And indeed, the swimming events use virtually every last byte.

But that’s probably enough tech talk for today. Just for fun — and because if you got through all that you’ve earned it — let’s look at the other events in somewhat less exhaustive (exhausting?) detail.

The two running events have their origin in Starpath’s old Supercharger decathlon project, but were brought to the 64 and completed by Brian McGhie. Like virtually everyone at Epyx, he had no particular knowledge of or burning interest in Olympic sports. He therefore relied on a stack of old Sports Illustrateds to try to get the look of his runners and the stadium right. The events are very similar in appearance, but unlike the swimming events very different in execution. The 100 meter dash is a notorious joystick killer. You have to move the stick back and forth as quickly as possible — nothing more, nothing less. The 4 X 400 meter relay, by contrast, is the most cerebral of the events, a game of energy conservation and chicken. I’m unaccountably good at both, much to Dorte’s frustration.

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/relay.mp4

Interestingly, the scrolling in these events is implemented in an entirely different way from that in the swimming, illustrating how very much Summer Games is really a collection of individual efforts brought together under one banner. McGhie uses a multicolor character screen, and rather than using double buffering updates the hidden border areas on the fly to… but I promised to stop with the tech talk, didn’t I?

The diving event is yet another of Landrum’s. The diver here rather disconcertingly never surfaces after entering the water, simply because Landrum ran out of time.

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/diving.mp4

Skeet shooting was a joint project of John Leupp, Steve Mudry, and Randy Glover prior to his departure. They originally planned to show the shooter on the screen, as in all of the other events, but found it difficult to work out a practical way of implementing the event from that perspective. So skeet shooting received the only first-person perspective in Summer Games, and the poor shooter was left out entirely.

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/skeet.mp4

Finally, there’s the gymnastics event — really just a vault — by Mudry. In an example of the, shall we say, casual approach to box art that was so rife in this era, the Summer Games box shows someone doing a handstand.

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/gymnastics.mp4

If nothing else, this article has hopefully conveyed what a tricksy machine the Commodore 64 is, full of hidden capabilities and exploitable quirks. Learning to make it dance for you requires considerable time even if you have examples to follow. If you don’t… well, small wonder that its games were just beginning to come into their own in 1984, the year it had its second birthday. And Epyx and companies like it were barely scratching the surface. In a couple of years Summer Games would look downright quaint.

You can download the original Commodore 64 Summer Games and its manual from here if you like, for use in the emulator of your choice (I recommend VICE). Unlike most of the disk images floating around the Internet, this one is pristine, with the original set of world records, so you and your friends and/or family can make your own records — which is about 20% of the fun of playing Summer Games — rather than be shamed by the performances of obsessed teenagers from two or three decades ago.

We’ll continue to observe the Commodore 64 scene with interest in future articles. But next we’ll check in with a group of Atari 8-bit loyalists: the backwoods savants of Ozark Softscape.

(This article draws again from the Epyx retrospectives in the July 1988 and August 1989 issues of Commodore Magazine. Technical details of Summer Games were drawn from the Commodore 64 design case study which appeared in the March 1985 IEEE Spectrum. I also lifted the diagram showing the 64’s unusual bitmap mode from there. For what it’s worth, my favorite 64 technical reference is Mapping the Commodore 64 by Sheldon Leemon. And if I may be forgiven a blatant plug, do check out my book on the Amiga if you’re interested in the sort of technical details I’ve delved into in this post. Some of what I go into in the book actually apply equally to the 64, and I explain basic concepts, starting with what a bit and byte actually are, much more fully there.)

Comments
22 Responses

- Carl Grace

August 9, 2013 at 7:01 pm

One of my favorite of your posts yet! I grew up with the C-64 and I really enjoyed the technical details in this post, as my sorry BASIC programming on it didn’t require such depth.

Loved your Amiga book as well (bought it at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, which I thought was appropriate). I think the technical level you settled out it just about perfect to enable the reader to appreciate the accomplishments of the engineers and programmers associated with these older computers.

Your book was my fave of the Platform Studies series, although I also quite liked Racing the Beam.

- Giuseppe

August 9, 2013 at 7:32 pm

Great article, I’d actually like to read more techie stuff like this.

Btw, the videos worked fine on the latest version of Firefox.

- Jason Lautzenheiser

August 9, 2013 at 11:07 pm

Great article. I grew up with the 64 and learned how to program on one (and the Vic-20). At one time I knew all the scary details you’ve mentioned and dabbled with the raster interrupts, double-buffering and sprite manipulation, writing in a mix of assembler and basic. Great fun it was back then and I learned a lot. Thanks for the flash-back!

- Victor Gijsbers

August 10, 2013 at 7:19 am

What I don’t really get a sense of is: is this game any good? Much of it looks like simple and repetitive button-pushing tasks, but that might not be true.

- Jimmy Maher

August 10, 2013 at 8:05 am

Yes, I guess maybe I neglected that amidst all the tech stuff, huh? :)

But yeah, it’s really good. Most of the events are simple to play but difficult to master. In diving, for instance, you have a choice of three different moves you can perform, in any order you prefer. The more you pack in, the higher your difficulty score. This is then multiplied by your performance score — basically a measure of how vertically you enter the water — to determine your final score. All of which creates an element of strategy when playing with one or more others. Do I play it safe and get an almost guaranteed mediocre score, or take a risk?

Pole vaulting, as the video shows, lets you choose between various grips, all of which have an effect on how the controls react. Gymnastics, similar to diving, lets you challenge yourself or play it safe. And skeet shooting, as is easy to say from the video, is just pure anticipation and reflexes, and great fun. Etc., etc., etc.

That said, it’s not much of a single-player game. This one demands a group of people gathered around the television, the more the better (up to eight can play). Played that way, it’s a wonderful way to lose an afternoon/evening.

- Andrew

August 10, 2013 at 7:10 pm

Interesting post. I had a 64 so I love all your c64 stuff. I think I had Winter Games and never played this one. I assume it loaded each sport separately?

- Jimmy Maher

August 11, 2013 at 8:21 am

Yes, Summer Games is essentially eight different game programs bound together with a menu/scoring-tracking system. Or rather seven: the two swimming events are actually the same program.

- Giuseppe

August 12, 2013 at 12:05 am

I was wondering… will there be any talk of the Amstrad CPC on your blog? I’m no expert, but from what I know, despite being a bit of a Johnny-come-lately on the British PC scene, it was still pretty popular in Western Europe, selling a few million units. And it came out in 1984 – the year you’ve reached with the blog :)

- Jimmy Maher

August 12, 2013 at 7:59 am

At some point I’ll do an article on the second wave of British PCs: the Acorn Electron, the BBC Master, the Sinclair QL, the entry of Amstrad and the purchase by Amstrad of Sinclair, etc. The CPC will get some attention there, although it’s unlikely to become the subject of any in-depth articles like this one. :)

- Sig

August 12, 2013 at 5:36 am

This was one of the first games I ever played on our C64 (along with M.U.L.E.). We spent MANY hours in front of this as a family.

- Dehumanizer

August 13, 2013 at 9:56 am

Fantastic post. I had no idea that the C64 was so complex in terms of graphics. The ZX Spectrum I grew up with only had a single one…

- Dehumanizer

August 13, 2013 at 9:58 am

A single graphics mode, that is. Sorry.

- Pingback: Links for August 13, 2013 | Andrzej's Links

- Adam Sampson

August 13, 2013 at 7:37 pm

Those who liked the tech stuff here might also enjoy Michael Steil’s Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk, which goes into quite a bit more detail (in 64 minutes).

- Pingback: Four short links: 13 August 2013 - O'Reilly Radar

- Marc Gallo

August 15, 2013 at 7:10 pm

Great article!

I was a game designer and programmer on the C64 from ’84 through ’89…lived through this stuff…great to see some interest in the details of the VIC II modes, and accurate account as well…nice job!

amazing computer for its time…

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- David Boddie

August 24, 2013 at 3:21 pm

“It’s because bitmap graphics are so demanding that only high-end machines like the Apple Lisa and Macintosh used them by default at the time of Summer Games‘s release.”

The BBC Micro and related machines used bitmap graphics, except for the 1K teletext mode. This meant that they were always a little low on available RAM if you wanted nice graphics but at least they compensated for this with 80 column text modes.

- Brandon Campbell

November 19, 2014 at 7:14 am

Loved Summer Games! It was one of the few games I could get my sister (and her friends when they slept over) to play with me. The platform diving was my favorite, but I never understood how the swimming was supposed to work and found it boring.

- MagerValp

June 16, 2015 at 7:30 am

Reading this article a little late, but I had to comment on the pole vault glitch.

To make expanded sprites appear from under the left border you have to place them to the extreme right so that they wrap around. On PAL machines the wrapping is offset 8 pixels compared to NTSC, so if you play pole vault on an NTSC C64 there is no glitch. Presumably they didn’t have access to PAL machines during development and never noticed.

PAL/NTSC timing differences are also why some of the raster interrupts flicker a bit.

- Jimmy Maher

June 16, 2015 at 10:57 am

Hmm… I would think I would have set the emulator to NTSC since this is an American game, but maybe I neglected to. Been a long time since I made these videos…

- Hydro

July 26, 2015 at 5:40 pm

Great blog post!
Loved reading all the “tech” and truly appreciate the videos!
Yes, Dorte kicks your a$$ in swimming :)

Seven Cities of Gold
August 13, 2013

Shortly after completing M.U.L.E., Ozark Softscape held a week-long brainstorming retreat with their producer from Electronic Arts, Joe Ybarra, inside the Little Rock house that served as their offices. Dan Bunten arrived with a pretty good idea of the game he wanted to make next already in hand. He had recently become fascinated with a monster board game released by those famed purveyors of monster board games, Avalon Hill. Civilization places each player in charge of a single tribe at the dawn of history, about 8000 BCE, and lets her guide it down through the millennia as far as the time of the dawning of the glory that was Rome, about 230 BCE. Warfare plays a role, but Civilization isn’t really a traditional war game; equally important are exploration, culture, economics, and technological advancement. (Of course, all of these factors are inevitably interlinked.) With a scope like that, Civilization is just about as complicated and time consuming as board gaming gets. A full game generally consumes about eight hours even once you’ve learned how to play.

Dan’s colleagues dutifully set aside a day to play the game with him, to see what he was on about. They emerged blinking and befuddled, and not at all sure about the idea of a computerized version. How, after all, were they going to pack all of that complexity and grandeur into their little 48 K Atari 800s? Ybarra was likely motivated by another practical consideration: Civilization belonged to Avalon Hill, who were trying (with somewhat mixed results) to make a go of it in computer games, the place to which a dismaying quantity of their old customers were migrating. They weren’t likely to make it easy or cheap for a competitor to release a computer version of one of their big board-game titles. Better, Dan’s colleagues all argued, to make a more modest original game with some of the spirit of Civilization. This sort of conversation wasn’t that new to Ozark. Dan’s three partners, as well as Ybarra, freely acknowledged him to be a creative genius far beyond their own lights. Geniuses, however, occasionally need to be gently steered down practical roads, lest their Big Ideas overwhelm their sense of proportion; this they saw as part of their own modest contributions to Ozark.

Also in Ozark’s collection of board games was another Avalon Hill effort called Conquistador, a game of “The Age of Exploration: 1495-1600.” In it each player takes control of one of the great European powers as they explore, conquer, and eventually colonize the New World. Late in the game, wars among the players can develop as virgin territory gets harder to come by. It’s only slightly less daunting than Civilization; a complete game usually lasts five hours or so. Still, it felt like a concept that could be more readily pared down to something manageable on the Atari 800, and like one that could inspire a computer game original enough — particularly with a designer of Dan’s creativity on the project — that licensing wouldn’t become an issue. It also dealt with a subject that Dan and his brother Bill had found genuinely fascinating from an early age, when an uncle had given them their first book about the Conquistadors. And so Ozark’s next project was decided by the time the week was out.

Dan, still pining for Civilization, was initially not hugely enthusiastic. After he and Bill collected a tall stack of history books and dove in, however, he started to come around. Once again the Big Ideas started to come thick and fast. He envisioned a game played in three stages, like Conquistador. In the first, you would be exploring and dealing with the natives you encountered, which basically meant either trading and trying to establish peaceful alliances or doing a full-on Cortés and charging through their villages with swords swinging. The second stage would have you founding colonies, establishing permanent settlements and institutions in the New World rather than rushing back to Europe with each new shipful of gold. Finally, these emerging and expanding nations would have to deal with one another. Diplomacy and the results of its breakdown, wars, would ensue. Diplomacy being pretty difficult terrain for a computer opponent to navigate, Dan envisioned a game that, like M.U.L.E., would emphasize multiplayer play while offering computerized opponents merely as practice and fillers for empty human seats around the virtual table.

It was all very ambitious. Inevitably, the heartless hand of practicality — largely in the usual form of his partners — started to pare away at it pretty quickly. Stages two and three were excised entirely; this would be a game of exploration and conquest only, not politics or consolidation. You would also be restricted to playing as a representative of Spain and to exploring the lands of South and Central America that were historically conquered by Spain. The name Seven Cities of Gold was chosen as a reflection of this new emphasis on Conquistadors seeking after the wealth of exotic legends to bring home to Spain. Most painfully, it was decided to make the game single-player only, as it was ambitious enough as it was and no one knew quite how to make multiplayer work anyway. Besides, as Ybarra and everyone else at EA — not to mention the failure of M.U.L.E. — were able to attest, for whatever reason there just wasn’t a big market for multiplayer-focused strategy games. With EA and Ybarra sticking so loyally with Ozark despite M.U.L.E.‘s fate, there was perhaps a sense that Ozark owed them the best stab they could make at giving them a hit. At any rate, they owed it to themselves if they wanted to stay in this business; it was doubtful that even EA would continue to fund them if they delivered another under-performer like M.U.L.E. And so Seven Cities of Gold became the first single-player-only game Dan had ever made.

If that was a hard compromise to accept, there were consolations. The overarching Big Idea of Seven Cities, to be emphasized if necessary at the expense of everything else, would be Discovery. Dan had quickly realized when he first played Conquistador that it could not be a true recreation of the experience of exploring an uncharted continent for one very simple reason: the player came into it with a knowledge of the geography of the Americas, and with a bit of cursory outside research could know even the location of the capital of the Inca Empire. To remedy this, he proposed making a random map available in addition to the historical one. The historical map would be there out of obligation and for learning purposes; the real game would have you exploring New Worlds that were truly new to you.

The map generator turned into the most technically challenging element of the entire project. To be worthwhile, the random maps had to be as believable and logical as the historical. They couldn’t, in other words, just scatter landscape and natives about willy-nilly. From the manual:

There is a plate-tectonics model consulted for each creation. Mountain ranges are generated where the plates bump into each other. And secondary ranges (like the Allegheny Mountains on the historical map) may be created as well.

The program also consults a cultural dissemination model for its work. The influences of major civilizations are presumed to spread outward. Consequently, pueblo dwellers generally will be found between city-states and primitive agriculturalists. The model will allow for varying levels of this influence and can thus produce occasional continent arrangements which have no Incan-level civilizations. Alternately, it can make very rich and powerful arrangements, one which, like 16th-century Japan, are highly civilized from coast to coast.

The random-map generator was assigned to Jim Rushing, the purest coding mind at Ozark, who spent some four months struggling with it. It was quite a task for the little Atari; each map took a solid ten minutes of processing to generate. Frustratingly, the end result from early versions was always the same, a continent shaped like a giant peanut. Finally, Rushing found a bug in his random-number generator. Ybarra still recalls vividly the day that Dan called him to tell him that they had generated a believable alternate New World: “The energy and excitement was terrific. Dan was both elated and burnt out, but you could ‘hear’ him grinning on the other side of the phone.” Ybarra now firmly believed they were “creating another masterpiece.”

Indeed, the game is nothing if not elegant. Like in M.U.L.E., you are always embodied in the game by an onscreen avatar who visits shipyards, the pub, and the royal palace, and of course wanders through the New World as your surrogate. This can make it feel as much adventure game as strategy game; Seven Cities is anything but dry or abstract. The overland exploration which forms the heart of the game was inspired as much by Dan’s own experiences hiking the backwoods of Arkansas as his readings in history. He had particularly vivid memories of getting himself lost on occasion, and the relief engendered by coming upon a road or other familiar landmark. Seven Cities can prompt similar feelings as you press ever deep into this vast, unknown continent. The feeling of relief at finding your trusty ship sitting right there where you left it as you stumble out of the jungle with food supplies dwindling is almost indescribable.

But maybe the supreme achievement in verisimilitude is your interaction with the native tribes, as brilliant an abstraction of real-world experience into interface as the auctions of M.U.L.E. When you enter a new village, the inhabitants gather around you, surround you disconcertingly. You can give them gifts or try to “amaze” them by acting the part of one of their gods, but it’s always an uncertain, tentative communication that could erupt into violence at any time. Many times you will find yourself all but forced into massacring a village — or being massacred by them — by an inadvertent push of the joystick or a single panicked shot by a member of your own army who goes out of your control. It’s a superb simulation of how these encounters between two utterly alien cultures without a single word in common between them must have actually felt to the participants, and a lesson in just why they so often ended in violence even when both parties entered them with the best of intentions. Incredibly for a game of this vintage, the natives remember and communicate with one another. Attack one tribe in a region and the others will be much more suspicious. Try to “amaze” a group of natives too many times and it starts to become old hat — and they start to become suspicious.

For the desperately idealistic Dan, who was always eager to instil “a meaningful message,” the moral dimension of these encounters and the impact they would make on the player’s psyche were key not only to his game but to his very sense of his own worthiness as a person:

“The people I admire are the people who went to jail instead of Vietnam, or who go to India to do some good, or who are really committed to the environment. Those are the people who are really admirable. What I’m doing seems less important. I want to make a significant impact in a person’s life.”

Yet Seven Cities doesn’t preach; it leaves you to your conscience. Unquestionably, violence in Seven Cities often does pay, just as in real history, and the problematic nature of this was not lost on Dan:

“Many of the Conquistadors treated the natives horribly. Theirs was an arrogant and prideful approach to a society that had its own history and roots. But to be historically accurate required that we had to include violence. I don’t like the idea of players hurting other things, but there’s no alternative or you’re forcing your own moral decisions on an audience that ought to have a choice themselves.

“Bill and I were real Indian sympathizers when we were growing up. We always sided with the Indians instead of the cowboys. It just seems like such a neat, romantic culture to us, so in tune with the earth. Then to write a game where at least part of the game is wiping out Indians — that’s problematic.”

Seven Cities comments on your behavior toward the natives in only one way: if you get truly savage, the king will eventually tell you to please stop killing so many of them. But these words are never backed by any action, and the priority always remains to keep the gold flowing. The crown refuses to acknowledge that the gold and the killing that produces it are often inseparable. Such halfhearted carping is, as Dan noted, lifted straight from history, where it provided a way for those back in Spain to feel morally absolved while still benefiting from the killing and plundering of their countrymen.

Brilliant as its individual elements are, I do tend to have a problem appreciating Seven Cities of Gold as a holistic game. There is no competitor to play against, unless you count the natives you encounter — and the power imbalance between you and them is ultimately so great that, even if you choose the warlike approach, it’s hard to think of them in that role. Nor is there any in-game way to really lose or win. There isn’t even a definite end-point; you begin in 1495 and receive a rank based on your performance in 1540, but can continue to play on after that as long as you like. After a while the thrill of filling in the map and adding to my counts of missions and ships and rivers and other landmarks discovered starts to fade, and I start wishing for some goals, some sort of more specific direction. Dan himself delivered the following answer to the question, “How do I win?”

However you want. Seven Cities is a process-type game. You go along like real life. Life doesn’t have ends and wins and things like that. It has processes that you go through, and at times you stand back and say, “Hey, I’ve done pretty good so far.” Set your own goals really high and say, “That’s how I win.” Then go for it.

All of which is fine on the face of it, but Seven Cities just doesn’t feel to me like an intentional sandbox game in the mold of the (much later) SimCity. It rather feels like a design which is missing something it was originally intended to have, a possible legacy of the process of paring it down to a manageable project. On the other hand, I’m also willing to accept that this may just be down to a failure of imagination on my part, as the game received stellar reviews in its day and is still loved by many today.

Be that as it may, it seems to me that Seven Cities of Gold is still not so significant as a game in itself as for the frontiers it opened and the new things it dared to try. Its custom worlds, randomly generated at heart but meticulously terra-formed to be as believable as our own, became a staple of grand strategy games to come. Its consistent prioritizing of friendliness and elegant playability — the entire game is controlled, simply and intuitively, with a single joystick, and its manual consumes a scant 8 pages that spend as much time on historical background as game mechanics — served as an object lesson to games that used every key on the keyboard. The random maps, the native-encounter sequences, and the way that the whole game is played in “real time” rather than discrete turns also demonstrated how to take advantage of the unique abilities of the computer, rather than just encoding the rules of what could otherwise be a board game. And of course the moral ambiguity of this whole exercise, in which even peaceful alliances are ultimately made for the purpose of conquer and plunder, is never swept under the rug. Seven Cities has something to teach us about politics and history and perhaps even human nature. It goes well beyond the equipment lists and purely tactical concerns of a typical war game of the sort being pumped out by companies like SSI by the handful by 1984. Trip Hawkins declared that Ozark had pioneered a whole new genre of computer software: “edutainment.”

M.U.L.E. offered many of the same design lessons, but few others were thinking on this level at the time of Seven Cities‘s mid-1984 release. Troy Goodfellow goes so far as to call it “the most influential strategy game ever made.” That’s a bold statement even if we assume he’s implicitly restricting the field to computerized strategy games, but just the fact that Seven Cities is in the running in a world that contains games like Civilization (the computer version) says volumes.

Speaking of Civilization: one of those entranced by Seven Cities‘s innovations was a 30-year-old programmer and designer named Sid Meier, co-owner of a small publisher called MicroProse. Seven Cities and its determination to make strategy and history attractive and approachable became the inspiration for his breakthrough title, 1987’s Pirates!. The embodied interface of that game, which blurred the lines between strategy, adventure, and RPG while always making you feel that you are there, is lifted straight from Seven Cities; even the fonts and whole visual looks of the two games are similar. If Pirates!, generally acknowledged as one of the best computer games ever created, is even better than Seven Cities of Gold, it’s also true that it never could have existed without it, as Meier himself would happily admit. Later still, of course, Meier would manage what Dan never quite could, bringing all the complexity and grandeur — and then some — of the board game Civilization to the computer in an amazingly accessible way. Again, the road to Sid Meier’s Civilization could only have passed through Seven Cities of Gold.

While it may be most notable for the games it influenced, it’s also possible to say something about Seven Cities of Gold that is all too unusual in Dan Bunten’s career: the game was a hit in its own right. EA’s faith in their backwoods savants paid off at last, as Seven Cities sold at least 150,000 copies, five times the numbers done by M.U.L.E. and enough to make it EA’s biggest new game of 1984, in versions for the Atari 8-bit (the original and always the one that Dan himself saw as definitive), Commodore 64, Apple II, IBM PC, and eventually the Macintosh and the Amiga. Most of these ports were done by Ozark themselves or people within their circle. The Apple II version, for instance, came courtesy of a young University of Arkansas student named Mark Botner who spent the summer of 1984 working with them. He makes those days in the big house by the lake sound like an idyllic summer romance:

“What fun we had that summer. We would take a walk every day around Broadmoore Lake while our programs assembled for 15 minutes or so. We flew model airplanes, floated model boats in the lake, and played many different games. And, we actually got Seven Cities Of Gold ported to the Apple II!”

They were good times indeed. Suddenly the world was onto Dan Bunten and Ozark Softscape, as they (and particularly he) found themselves in constant demand for interviews, mentioned among the elites of the game industry.

While we leave our friends to enjoy a welcome taste of fame and fortune, you might want to try Seven Cities of Gold for yourself. If so, feel free to download the definitive Atari 800 version for use in the emulator of your choice.

(Dan Bunten began living as the woman Danielle Bunten Berry in the early 1990s, and had sexual reassignment surgery in November of 1992. She died five years later.

In preparing this article, I of course reviewed what I had already written about Dani. I confess it made me cringe a bit. I have long been annoyed by the habit of people who know nothing of her games of using Dani as some generic representative of her sexuality, and wanted to move the focus firmly to her work as a game designer, to leave the politics of gender identity alone and focus on why she was a such a giant in her chosen field. I now realize that in doing so I seemed to dismiss and disrespect the other parts of her story, although I genuinely didn’t intend to do so. A couple of angry commenters who, it seemed to me, wanted to force me into the very narrative template I had been trying to avoid only hardened my position. I continue to want to avoid the standard structure of the genre of “Dani Bunten Berry stories” — but I also realize that they had some points as well. I particularly regret that I never referred to Dani by her female name even in my note at the end of the article. I literally never realized I had done this until my recent rereading, and now understand some objections about how I considered her unworthy of referring to by her name and the like a bit better. I won’t edit the article, as doing so could only make those who commented look unreasonable in ways they really weren’t. Anyway, it perhaps serves as a better lesson just as it is. Know, however, that if I was writing it today I would handle the issue somewhat differently.

That said, you’ve surely noticed that I continue to refer to Dani as “Dan” and “he” in the article above. I understand the logic of those who would say that Dani was always a woman, merely one who was by an accident of birth born into a man’s body. Certainly this is the argument most advocates for transsexual rights would make. For myself, I am all for transsexual rights, but also believe that gender and sexual identity may be more fluid than much transsexual rhetoric would have it. In the end, I have continued to opt for clarity and reality as all of Dani’s friends and colleagues knew it in the 1980s: of her being the man Dan Bunten. Referring to “Dani” and “she” in these articles would be confusing to the reader and at least at some level anachronistic, opposed to the consensus reality shared by everyone around her. I understand that this decision may not seem ideal to everyone, and even that it runs counter to some journalistic style guidelines. If you disagree with it, I can only ask you to believe me when I say it was made in good faith, with no intention to slight. For what it’s worth, reports are that post-op Dani was never offended in the least about being referred to as a man when conversations came around to her years of living as Dan.

Finally, sources, which are largely the same as that last article: Dan wrote a column for Computer Gaming World from the July/August 1982 issue through the September/October 1985 issue. Those are a gold mine for anyone interested in understanding his design process. Particularly wonderful is his detailed history of Seven Cities of Gold‘s development in the August 1984 issue. Other interesting articles and interviews were in the June 1984 Compute!’s Gazette, the November 1984 Electronic Games, and the January 1985 Antic. Online, you’ll find a ton of historical information on World of M.U.L.E. Salon also published a good article about Dani ten years ago. The sadly now defunct Dani Bunten Berry Memorial Site is full of anecdotes and tributes, including the quote from Mark Botner which I used above. And see the site of the (apparently stalled) remake Alpha Colony for some nice — albeit somewhat buried — historical tidbits.)

Comments
17 Responses

- Felix

August 13, 2013 at 5:50 pm

In your defense, transgender issues are poorly understood even by people who should know better. But I’d say the issues aren’t so much complicated as very personal, and therefore diverse and unique. If some people get inflamed easily over it, that’s because they’ve been faced with ignorance, thoughtlessness and intolerance way too often. But your arguments are sound, and I think you’re being as fair as humanly possible.

- Mike Whalen

August 13, 2013 at 7:50 pm

I suspect, Jimmy, that — like so many other topics — you will be praised, damned, and treated with indifference depending upon the person reading.

- Tale

August 13, 2013 at 8:46 pm

I never knew Pirates! (Which we played for hours and hours on the NES, pronouncing it as If it were a German Word) had a predecessor. I Need to Check this out, Thanks.

- S. John Ross

August 14, 2013 at 4:47 am

It’s tangential, but it might be worth noting that Civilization was a British boardgame, and Avalon Hill (or, as we were always required to refer to it: The Avalon Hill Game Company) were just importing it to this side of the pond.

- Jimmy Maher

August 14, 2013 at 6:48 am

It’s worth the footnote that you’ve helpfully provided with this comment, but I’m not sure it needs to be incorporated into the main article. The Civilization that Bunten (and Meier) knew was in fact another of those monster Avalon Hill games…

- S. John Ross

August 14, 2013 at 7:49 am

Understood. I only pointed it out because the article text could be read to imply that Avalon Hill created it (though “released” is a suitably vague term as it stands).

- Wade

August 14, 2013 at 9:43 am

I copied this game to play on the Apple II+ in the day. I understood it was about olde exploration, but I was pretty young and any knowledge I had of the real history behind it was informed by the cartoon ‘The Mysterious Cities of Gold’ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcH_ZTF6smY)

On the topic of the massacres, though, I found that aspect of the game really funny. That sounds insensitive, but hear me out. As a 10 year old, I found it bizarre that you’d start walking around the screen and every native who attacked you would immediately die (though at cost to your party). There was something appalling and ridiculous about it that made me laugh. I guess at some level I did understand what was wrong with it – that was my reaction.

- Jimmy Maher

August 14, 2013 at 12:35 pm

No worries, my wife Dorte does the same. It took her about 20 seconds to decide that diplomatic options had been sufficiently explored. I was trying to get some work done Sunday while she played in the other room, and all I heard was the plink-plink of natives dying. I told her it must be her German heritage. :) (Just kidding, Marius! I love Germany and Germans — one in particular.)

- Alan

August 14, 2013 at 5:16 pm

When I played this game at 11, the parts I remembered most were really digging into the wilderness and going deep into the continent: once the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru had been established, taking long treks into North America where the resources weren’t as great and there were indeed diminishing returns: but I believe that there was a percentage tracking how much of the New World you had explored? I might be misremembering that. Anyway, that was the meta-game goal for me. Oh and sailing off the edge of the map ;)

- Jimmy Maher

August 14, 2013 at 5:55 pm

Yes, you can see what percentage of the map has been explored when back in Spain. Getting this to 100% is a perfectly reasonable goal to set for yourself, in line with Bunten’s comments in the article. My problem is that after allying with/conquering the Incas there isn’t so much ELSE to be done other than just filling in more of the map with terrain that starts to get very samey. Not that Seven Cities is the only strategy game to have a problem with anticlimax…

- Tale

August 14, 2013 at 5:44 pm

None Taken,you godless Yankee! :)

- Jason Dyer

August 17, 2013 at 2:15 pm

Trying to get Admiral without killing anyone (which is how I played) is really hard and I never managed it (at least it was hard when I was a kid — maybe I’d find it easy now, dunno).

- Kroc Camen

August 25, 2013 at 12:43 pm

I could swear that this game was ported to BBC Micro, as I vaguely recall playing something awfully close to this. I’ve been trying to find out what it was called. I remember it was turn-based, you had a map and a fog-of-war style system where you had to reveal all the tiles on the map. I remember docking the ship and heading in land.

But it’s not Pirates! I’ve tried that recently and it just doesn’t seem to fit. It doesn’t have the right “educational” ring to it that would have made it present in schools (I think we must have been studying either Columbus or the conquistadors).

It’s driving me quite to distraction not being able to pin it down.

- Walt

April 23, 2015 at 1:46 pm

I always thought Sid Meier’s breakout game was “F-15 Strike Eagle.” He was, at least, well known in my circle of friends, but then we also knew about “Floyd of the Jungle.”

I remember the Avalon Hill games (the computer ones) mostly because the cassettes used to have versions for just about everything available at the time (PET, TRS-80, Apple ][, Atari, etc.). I think I was always lucky in that the Atari versions started somewhere near the beginning of the tape; I can’t imagine trying to queue the cassette up to the middle to try and load up a game.

I don’t remember too much of their games, other than that they weren’t always very good. The text adventure “Empire of the Over-mind” confused me, for some reason. I remember seeing the boxes for “Jupiter Mission: 1999” and “Quest of the Space Beagle” but I have no idea what they’re about (possibly a novel tie-in with ‘Voyage of the Space Beagle’?). And, of course, the CRPG “Telengard” by Daniel Lawrence. I played the hell out of that game, snarfing up all the gold I could.

Kind of surprised of the no mention so far of the Alternate Reality games.

- Jimmy Maher

April 24, 2015 at 5:35 am

I think your perspective on some of this might be slightly skewed by your having (apparently) been an Atari 8-bit user. :)

F-15 Strike Eagle was indeed massive, Microprose’s biggest game of the 1980s by far. But, even though Meier designed and programmed it, it was much more identified with Wild Bill Stealey in the mind of the gaming public. It was Stealey’s face that was inside the manual’s front cover, complete with quotes on what inspired “him” to make the game, etc.

Pirates!, on the other hand, was the first game to bear the now-obligatory “Sid Meier’s…” prefix, a bit of promotional genius indulged in by Stealey, who consciously built Meier up to be Microprose’s star designer. It was also the first game — well, first game not counting Floyd of the Jungle :) — where Meier really broke free from the standard Microprose brief of military simulations and military strategy games. So it constitutes in my eyes both a breakthrough to public fame and an artistic breakthrough.

I’m afraid that Alternate Reality won’t get coverage here. Sorry! Just too many games, too little time, and CRPGs tend to be especially time-consuming. I’d assume that the CRPG Addict (http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com) will get to it at some point if he hasn’t already.

- Walt

April 24, 2015 at 11:19 am

It would not surprise me in the least if I were ‘post-dating’ credit, although I was aware of Sid Meier at the time and looked forward to any game he was involved with.

I don’t know if other people have this issue, and it’s why sites like yours are so important to me, but in my memory everything that happened in the 1980s feels like it took years when, in reality, it was months. Maybe one year at best. Perhaps it’s just part of getting old(er).

Say what you will about the Atari 400 keyboard; it was crappy to type on, but it was waterproof. It also survived having a school chair leg put through it. I had to open up the computer and push the corner of the keyboard back in place, but it still worked after that. It was unloved, but it was a trooper.

- Jimmy Maher

April 24, 2015 at 11:37 am

Yes, I’m well aware of that time-compression quality. The history of computers and especially computer games in the 1980s is to me a bit like the brief recording career of the Beatles: it’s almost hard to believe that so much could have happened in such a short time. And of course this impression is only added to by the fact that so many of us were kids then, when a single weekend seemed full of infinite possibility and a single summer seemed a veritable eternity.

Sorcerer
August 26, 2013

Steve Meretzky was a boundless fount of creative energy which couldn’t be contained by even his official projects for Infocom, many and varied as they were, and spilled over into daily life around the office in the form of elaborate themed parties, games that ranged from a multiplayer networked version of Boggle played over the DEC minicomputer to intense Diplomacy campaigns, and endless practical jokes. (“Memo hacking” became a particular favorite as Business Products ramped up and more and more buttoned-down business types started to appear in the office.) The lore and legends of daily life at Infocom, eagerly devoured by the faithful via the New Zork Times newsletter, is largely the lore and legends of Steve Meretzky, instigator and ringleader behind so much of the inspired lunacy.

Yet there was also another, oddly left-brained side to Meretzky. He was a compulsive organizer and even a bit of a neat freak; his meticulous and breathtakingly thorough archives informed much of Jason Scott’s Get Lamp project and, by extension, much of the Infocom history on this site. Mike Dornbrook, Infocom’s marketing director, calls Meretzky the most productive creative person he has ever met, one who evinced not a trace of the existential angst that normally accompanies the artistic temperament. Writer’s block was absolutely unknown to him; he could just “turn it on” and pour out work, regardless of what was happening around him or how things stood in his personal life.

But there was still another trait that made Meretzky the dream employee of any manager of creative types: he was literally just happy to be at Infocom, thrilled to be out of a career in construction management and happy to work on whatever project needed him. And so when Dave Lebling decided he’d like to write a mystery game and Marc Blank wanted to work on technology development, leaving the critical second game in the Enchanter trilogy without an author, Meretzky cheerfully agreed to take it on. When a certain famous but mercurial and intimidating author of science-fiction comedies came calling and everyone else shied away from collaborating with him, Meretzky said sure, sounds like fun. And when Tor Books offered Infocom the chance to make a series of Zork books in the mold of the absurdly successful Choose Your Own Adventure line, and everyone on the creative staff turned up their noses at such a lowbrow project even as management rubbed their hands in glee at the dollar figures involved, Meretzky took the whole series on as his moonlighting gig, cranking out four books that were hardly great literature but were better than they needed to be. Most gratifyingly of all, Meretzky ripped through all of these projects in a bare fifteen months whilst offering advice and ideas for other projects and, yes, getting up to all that craziness that New Zork Times readers came to know and cherish. Meretzky was truly a dream employee — and a dream colleague. One senses that if management had asked him to go back to testing after finishing Planetfall he would have just smiled and kicked ass at it.

Sorcerer, his sequel to Enchanter and Infocom’s first game of 1984, was, like so much of Meretzky’s work in this period, a bit of a thankless task. He neither got to devise the overarching plot and mechanics for the trilogy nor to bring things to a real conclusion, merely to write the bridge between fresh beginning and grand climax. Middle works in trilogies have always tended to be problematic for this very reason, and, indeed, Sorcerer is generally the most lightly regarded of the Enchanter games. I won’t really argue with that opinion, but I will say that Sorcerer is a very solid, entertaining work in its own right. It’s just that it gets a bit overshadowed by its towering companions, together arguably the best purely traditional adventure games ever to come out of Infocom, while also lacking the literary and thematic innovations that make games like Planetfall and Infidel — to neither of which it’s actually markedly inferior in overall quality — so interesting for people like me to write about.

Sorcerer casts you as the same budding enchanter you played in the game of that name. Having vanquished Krill, however, your star has risen considerably; you are now a member of magic’s innermost circle, the Circle of Enchanters, and protege of the Leader of the Circle, Belboz. Sorcerer opens with one of its most indeliably Meretzkian sequences. You are snug in your bed inside the Guild of Enchanters — but you don’t actually realize that for a few turns.

You are in a strange location, but you cannot remember how you got here. Everything is hazy, as though viewed through a gauze...

Twisted Forest
You are on a path through a blighted forest. The trees are sickly, and there is no undergrowth at all. One tree here looks climbable. The path, which ends here, continues to the northeast.
A hellhound is racing straight toward you, its open jaws displaying rows of razor-sharp teeth.

>climb tree
Tree Branch
You are on a large gnarled branch of an old and twisted tree.
A giant boa constrictor is slithering along the branch toward you!
The hellhound leaps madly about the base of the tree, gnashing its jaws.

>i
You are empty-handed.
The snake begins wrapping itself around your torso, squeezing the life out of you...

...and a moment later you wake up in a cold sweat and realize you've been dreaming.

SORCERER: INTERLOGIC Fantasy
Copyright (c) 1984 by Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
SORCERER and INTERLOGIC are trademarks of Infocom, Inc.
Release 4 / Serial number 840131

Your frotz spell seems to have worn off during the night, and it is now pitch black.

Like the similarly dynamic openings of Starcross and Planetfall, albeit on a more modest scale, Sorcerer‘s dream sequence can be a bit of a misnomer. The rest of the game is much more open-ended and much less plot-driven than this sequence might imply. As you explore the conveniently deserted Guild — everyone except you and Belboz have gone into town to shop for the Guild picnic — you soon realize that Belboz has mysteriously disappeared. And so the game is on, fueled by the same sort of magic-based puzzles that served Enchanter so well. Indeed, Meretzky copied the code for the Enchanter magic system wholesale into Sorcerer, along with some of the same spells, which had to be a great help for someone working on as tight a timetable as he was. Sorcerer‘s one big magical innovation is a set of potions to accompany its spell scrolls, something notably absent not only from Enchanter but also from Lebling’s Spellbreaker, the final game of the trilogy.

Like all of the Enchanter trilogy a very traditional game, Sorcerer is divided into two open-ended areas of exploration, the Guild of Enchanters and a sprawling wilderness and underground map which ultimately proves to house Belboz’s abductor, the demon Jeearr (another thoroughly Meretzkian name, and a character who also turns up in the last of the Zork gamebooks he was writing at the same time). The overall feel is looser than Enchanter, with the first game’s understated humor replaced with a more gonzo sensibility that can rub some players the wrong way. This player, who felt that Planetfall often seemed to be trying just a bit too hard, doesn’t exactly find Sorcerer hilarious but never really found it irritating in the way that Meretzky’s earlier game could occasionally be either. Perhaps the fact that Sorcerer wasn’t explicitly billed as a comedy left Meretzky feeling freer not to force the issue at every possible juncture.

Another Planetfall trait, that of lots of Easter eggs and red herrings, is also notable in Sorcerer, but again to a lesser extent. The useless bits, such as a functioning log flume and roller coaster inside the amusement park inexplicably located almost next door to Jeearr’s infernal lair, are mostly good fun. The sadomasochistic “potion of exquisite torture” is a standout that is just a bit risque for the prudish world of adventure gaming:

>drink indigo potion
The potion tastes like a combination of anchovies, prune juice, and garlic powder. As you finish swallowing the potion, a well-muscled troll saunters in. He whacks your head with a wooden two-by-four, grunting "You are playing Sorcerer. It was written by S. Eric Meretzky. You will have fun and enjoy yourself." He repeats this action 999 more times, then vanishes without a trace.

Another great bit comes if you use the aimfiz spell — “transport caster to someone else’s location” — to try to find Meretzky himself:

>cast aimfiz on meretzky
As you cast the spell, the moldy scroll vanishes!
You appear on a road in a far-off province called Cambridge. As you begin choking on the polluted air, a mugger stabs you in the back with a knife. A moment later, a wild-eyed motorist plows over you.

**** You have died ****

Like any old-school adventure game, Sorcerer is full of goofy and often random ways to die, from wandering into a room that’s missing a floor to getting buried under coins by an overenthusiastic slot machine. Still, Meretzky manages to skirt the letter if not quite the spirit of Andrew Plotkin’s Cruelty Scale through the gaspar spell: “provide for your own resurrection.” Gaspar returns you upon your death alive and well to the place where you last cast it, a handy substitute for the technological rather than arcane solution of restoring a saved game. If nothing else, its presence proves that Infocom was thinking about the arbitrary cruelty of most adventure games and wondering if a friendlier approach might be possible. (Space limitations would, however, always limit how far they could travel down this path. It would always be easier to simply kill the player than try to implement the full consequences of a bad — or simply unplanned for — decision.) Another sign of evolving thought on design comes in the form of the berzio potion (“obviate need for food or drink”), which slyly lets you bid adieu to the hunger and thirst timers of Enchanter and Planetfall. A year later, Spellbreaker would not even bother you with the whole tedious concept at all.

As the presence of amusement parks and casinos next to abducted enchanters and demons would imply, Sorcerer doesn’t concern itself at all with the fictional consistency that marked Planetfall or even, for that matter, Enchanter. Plot also takes a back seat for most of the game. You simply explore and solve puzzles until you suddenly bump into Jeearr and remember why you’re here. Likewise, some of the writing is a bit perfunctory if we insist on viewing Sorcerer as a literary experience. That, however, is not its real strength.

I find Meretzky slightly overrated as a writer but considerably underrated as a master of interlocking puzzle design. Sorcerer is full of clever puzzles, one of which, a relatively small part of the brilliant time-travel sequence in the coal mine, represents the last little bit of content which Infocom salvaged from the remaining scraps of the original MIT Zork. Yet it isn’t even one of the most memorable puzzles in Sorcerer; those are all Meretzky originals. In addition to that superb time-travel puzzle, there’s a fascinating thing that seems to be a maze but isn’t — quite. Both time-travel puzzles and pseudo-mazes were part of an already burgeoning traditions at Infocom; both would remain obsessions of the Imps for years to come. Meretzky does both traditions proud here. I won’t say too much more about Sorcerer‘s puzzles simply because you really should enjoy them for yourself if you haven’t already. They’re always entertaining, clever, and (sudden deaths and one tricky sequence involving a timed mail delivery early in the game aside) fair, and don’t deserve to be spoiled by the likes of me.

Sorcerer shipped in March of 1984 in a box that was fairly plebian for this era of Infocom. The crown jewel was contained inside the box this time, in the form of the infotater, an elaborately illustrated code wheel that was both one of Infocom’s most blatant uses yet of a feely as unabashed copy protection and so cool that it didn’t really matter. The infotater is today among the rarer pieces of Infocom ephemera. It remained in production for just a few months before Infocom switched to a standardized box format that was too small to accommodate it, and were thus forced to replace it with a less interesting table of information on plain paper.

Sorcerer sold decently, although not quite as well as Enchanter or the Zork games. (The steady downward trend in sales of Infocom’s flagship line of fantasy games would soon become a matter of increasing concern — but more on that in future articles.) Lifetime sales would end up in the vicinity of 45,000, with more than two thirds of those coming in 1984 alone. It’s not one of the more ambitious games of Infocom nor, truth be told, one of the absolute best, but it is a solid, occasionally charming, playable game. If you find yourself in the mood for an enjoyable traditional text adventure that plays relatively fair with you, you could certainly do a lot worse.

(As always, thanks to Jason Scott for sharing his materials from the Get Lamp project.)

Comments
9 Responses

- Steve Meretzky

August 26, 2013 at 8:52 pm

Well, gosh.

- Lisa

August 27, 2013 at 6:57 am

You still have to sleep in Sorcerer, though, which can lead to some amusing results in certain locations or when you’re flying.

- Duncan Stevens

August 27, 2013 at 6:20 pm

I seem to recall the infotater (in the standard gray box) coming in the form of a little booklet, not as fun as the code wheel but better than plain paper.

My favorite funny response from Sorcerer:

>WEAR FLAG
Who do you think you are, Abbie Hoffman?

- Torbjörn Andersson

September 10, 2013 at 7:21 pm

My favorite funny response from Sorcerer:

>WEAR FLAG
Who do you think you are, Abbie Hoffman?

My favorite was probably this one:

>FROTZ GRUE
There’s a flash of light nearby, and you glimpse a horrible, multi-fanged creature, a look of sheer terror on its face. It charges away, gurgling in agony, tearing at its glowing fur.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to find that immensely satisfying.

- Sam Garret

August 30, 2013 at 5:06 am

I find it interesting to note that you place it as the lightest of the trilogy. De Gustibus and all that, but it was definitely my favourite. The complexity of the puzzles was sufficient that you really felt you had accomplished something when you worked it out (Spellbreaker seemed just arbitrarily cruel with puzzles divorced from a narrative arc, though it’s been a while so I may be misremembering from young teenage-hood), and if the ending happened a little abruptly, that was at least in part because I’d just been enjoying myself the whole way and didn’t want it to end.

- Dave Thompsen

August 31, 2013 at 2:59 am

Sorcerer is still one of my all time favorite Infocom games, though I came at it in a bit of a round-about way.
The summer of 1984, I was twelve years old, I’d been saving my allowance, there was a computer store down the street, and so by gum, I walked down to buy the latest Infocom game myself, with my hard-earned moolah, after seeing it advertised in the latest New Zork Times.
So one afternoon I arrived home with my brand spanking new C64 copy of ‘Seastalker.’

Which I finished — that same night. Horribly disappointed, but having been raised on the torture of the Great Underground Empire, Seastalker was no challenge at all, and I felt somewhat cheated, not having really gotten the fact that it was an introductory adventure before plopping down my 45 bucks.
So the next day, amazingly, I managed to convince the guys at the computer store to let me return Seastalker, which probably makes me one of the few who actually managed to return an Infocom title.
To be fair, I didn’t get a refund. I got Sorcerer, the previously released title, instead.
This game I did not finish in one night. Probably took a couple of months.
I love it for so many reasons. First one I beat, myself. First game (and last, until many years later and the invention of eBay) that I had in the folio packaging, which I still have today, though the infotater’s a teeny bit worse for the wear. And the puzzles are brilliant — the completely fair and original maze, the sneaky old gnome, the potions – I loved them all. And the time travel puzzle is still, in my opinion, one of the most well-crafted examples ever seen in interactive fiction.

Thanks, Steve. Hitchhiker’s may have made me pull out more hair, A Mind Forever Voyaging made me think more, but Sorcerer? It set the hook and made me a fan for life.

- Lisa

September 1, 2013 at 12:12 am

You solved Sorcerer by yourself at age 12? …wow. Props. I have never, never solved an Infocom game without help, although I think I did better than average on toughies like Hitchhiker’s Guide because I was familiar with the source material – though OTOH when I first tried Zork I, I was 6 years old and stymied by vocabulary problems like not understanding “ajar” (re: the window on the house). Still though. I was hopeless attempting these games even in my 20s.

(In fact I’m not sure there’s any IF or even graphic adventure game that I have solved without help, outside of the very simple games intended as parodies; despite my love of the genre I am, it seems, just really really bad at puzzle-solving.)

- Dave Thompsen

September 1, 2013 at 1:32 am

To be fair, I’d started on the Scott Adams adventures on the VIC-20 when I was around 9 or 10, the the three Zorks for the Commodore a bit later, so I had a bit of practice.

Still, it took me a long time for Sorcerer. Spellbreaker, on the other hand — yeah, I needed a bit of a nudge on the 12 cube monstrosity, of which I expect Jimmy to get to in a couple of years.

- John G.

November 21, 2013 at 9:04 am

Great articles, but Steve M. overrated as a writer? Come on, Steve Meretzky’s Rockvil is like Fernando Pessoa’s Lisbon.

Seastalker
September 3, 2013

When a starry-eyed youngster heads off to Hollywood to chase her dreams, one of two fates awaits her: she might become one of the small minority that makes it and becomes a star, or she might end up lumped in with the vast majority that struggle and wait tables (seemingly every waiter in Los Angeles is an aspiring actor) for years to no avail. It’s either “Hooray for Hollywood” or “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” writ large. That’s the conventional wisdom anyway. But there’s actually a third possibility: the life of the working character actor, who picks up work where she can find it in the form of whatever small roles are available that don’t need a star to fill them. Just as every kid who picks up a guitar dreams of playing to stadiums full of screaming fans (and don’t let any indie-rock snob tell you different), it’s probably safe to say that no actor sets out to be such an anonymous cog in the Hollywood system. Yet it’s not a bad way to earn a living in the craft you love if stardom eludes you. I’ve long been fascinated by these folks whose names usually appear in the credits only as the audience is filing out of the theater, these working professionals who earn a solid living under the radar of the Dream Factory by learning their lines, showing up on time, and doing whatever’s asked of them and doing it well. This other side of the acting life is the subject of The Dangerous Animals Club, written by one of these bit players, Stephen Tobolowsky. It makes for a great read.

Other forms of media have their own equivalents to Tobolowsky. The publishing industry, for example, has always had people like Jim Lawrence.

Born in 1918, Lawrence began his writing career in 1941 when he was hired by the Jam Handy Organization as a scriptwriter for military training films. From then until the end of his life in 1994 he wrote for seemingly anyone who would pay him. Lawrence himself would be the last person to claim to be a great writer, but he always churned out copy that was, within the scope of the genres within which he worked, solidly crafted and eminently professional. When the project allowed, he even showed a considerable flair for imagination.

Lawrence wrote a staggering variety of stuff over his more than five decades as a working writer, but his specialty and greatest love was always fast-paced action-adventure stories for the young. In that genre, he wrote for old-time radio dramas like The Green Hornet; wrote Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries; wrote a James Bond comic strip for the newspapers; wrote a variety of Marvel comics. His oeuvre includes more than 60 novels alone, virtually none of which bore his own name anywhere in its pages. His most bizarre and disreputable assignment was a series of books about Peter Lance, an alien from the planet Tharb who has come to Earth to study this curious human phenomenon of sex — which he does enthusiastically and at considerable length, thanks to his superhuman stamina and a staggering variety of nubile young women eager to assist him in his research. But the place where Lawrence left his most obvious mark was a series of books about a young scientist/inventor/adventurer named Tom Swift, Jr.

The original Tom Swift was created by publishing pioneer Edward Stratemeyer, founder in the very early twentieth century of the so-called Stratemeyer Syndicate and its accompanying model of children’s book publication — a model that still persists to this day, and one whose echoes we can see in other media from superhero comics to Scooby Doo cartoons. His influence on publishing for adults and young adults was also profound; all those shelves full of Star Trek and Star Wars novels as well as Harelquin romances are, for better or for worse, thoroughly in the tradition of Edward Stratemeyer. His principal innovation was to deemphasize — indeed, to effectively do away with — the importance of the author in favor of the franchise. He published no standalone books, only series based around the recurring adventures of one or more juvenile heroes. All books in a series were allegedly written by the same author, whose name was carefully chosen by Stratemeyer to suit the tone of the series. In actuality, the books were written by teams of publishing B-listers like Jim Lawrence, who must at first usually work from plot outlines provided by Stratemeyer himself. Later, once they had proven themselves a bit, they were often trusted to create their own original stories, as long as they kept well within a detailed set of rules for what the books should and should not include. The best remembered series from Stratemeyer’s heyday today are The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, but many others sold in huge quantities during the first half of the twentieth century.

Among them were the original Tom Swift stories, which reached 40 books and sold over 30 million copies. Swift was the aspirational product of his era, a time when people like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Henry Ford were amongst the most admired in the country. Thus Swift was a teenage genius inventor who solved crimes and stymied his jealous rivals repeatedly using his various gadgets and vehicles. For all their pulpiness, the books included a surprising amount of real science and engineering. Amongst the technologies predicted in their pages were television, fax machines, and handheld movie cameras. Just as many flip-open mobile phones bear a suspicious resemblance to the old communicators from Star Trek, Tom Swift also wound up inspiring some technologies instead of just predicting them. Most famously, tasers were inspired by a Tom Swift story; the name is actually an acronym for “Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle.”

The series petered to a close in 1941, by which time Swift had grown up and gotten married. The resulting drop-off in popularity prompted a couple of new rules for the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s other series: heroes should not age and should be kept free of romantic entanglements. The Tom Swift, Jr. stories, which began in 1954, were an attempt to right that mistake and turn back the clock by moving the focus to Tom Swift’s son, the spitting image of his father as a boy. The new series ran for 33 books between 1954 and 1971. The inventions got a bit more outlandish, reflecting the era’s obsession with rocketry and space exploration; the second series’s record of prediction is nowhere near as good as that of the first. The new series also never quite matched the first’s popularity or cultural ubiquity during its heyday. Still, it had its famous fans; Steve Wozniak in particular has mentioned the Tom Swift, Jr. books as inspiring him to become an inventor and engineer. Tom Swift Jr. was allegedly written by one Victor Appleton II, presumed son of the Victor Appleton who wrote the first series. However, most of them were actually written by Jim Lawrence.

Lawrence had long since moved on to other series when one day during his morning coffee he read the first significant article about Infocom to appear in the mainstream media: Edward Rothstein’s piece on Deadline and other “participatory novels” which appeared in the New York Times Book Review of May 8, 1983. Although he had never written for the series, he had followed the birth of the Choose Your Own Adventure line of children’s fiction with more than professional curiosity. But now what Infocom was apparently doing just sounded so much better. Lawrence, whose previous career proved if nothing else that he’d try just about anything once, was intrigued by the possibilities despite knowing nothing of computers or computer games. He called Infocom’s offices and arranged to drive up to Cambridge for a visit from his home in New Jersey.

The 65-year-old Lawrence looked in Stu Galley’s words “like Santa Claus,” and had the same enthusiastic twinkle in his eye when he talked about storytelling. This wise old veteran was certainly a different sort of presence in an office filled with ambitious go-getters in their twenties and early thirties, many of whom had grown up reading the various series to which he had contributed. Infocom, who counted it as a corporate goal to get “real” writers involved with their stories (thus the presence of Mike Berlyn, already working on his second game at the time), were thrilled to sign him to a contract.

Infocom was also, of course, eager to branch out into new genres, and here Lawrence’s particular expertise again seemed perfect. They concocted the idea of a new line of “junior” adventures aimed at a new generation of the same children’s readership that had once devoured the Tom Swift books — and who were currently being introduced to the idea of ludic narrative through the Choose Your Own Adventure books and the many other titles being churned out by the booming gamebook industry. If kids thought Choose Your Own Adventure was cool, wait until they saw an Infocom game! The new line could presumably also serve as a gentle introduction to Infocom for adults, an alternative to being thrown in at the deep end via the likes of Zork. Infocom made their first attempt ever to license an existing property, approaching the Stratemeyer Syndicate about licensing Tom Swift or his son for a series of interactive books for a new generation. The Syndicate was happy to do so — for far more money than Infocom was willing or able to pay.

Thus the decision was made to make the game that would become known as Seastalker a Tom Swift adventure in everything but name. In place of Tom, it asks you the player for your first and last name at the beginning. The full name which then appears on the screen becomes (for example) Seastalker: Jimmy Maher and the Ultramarine Bioceptor, a deliberate echo of the old Tom Swift books, which were invariably named Tom Swift and His (Flying Lab, Jetmarine, Rocket Ship, etc.) — only with you inserted, Chose Your Own Adventure-style, as the hero. The game closely echos Tom Swift in many other ways beyond the bare fact of your being a genius boy inventor. Tom Swift’s hometown of Shopton, for example, becomes Frobton (one of very few overt references to Zorkian lore), and sidekick Bud is replaced with a doppelganger named Tip.

For all of his flair for storytelling, there was no way that the thoroughly un-technical Lawrence was going to be able to learn to program in ZIL. Infocom thus decided to assign him Stu Galley as a partner. Lawrence would craft the story and write most of the text, while Galley would program it and finds ways to make it work as an interactive experience. It seemed a perfect assignment for Galley, one of the best pure programmers in a company full of brilliant technical minds but one who tended to have a bit of trouble coming up with original story ideas. (His first game The Witness, you may remember, had been created from an outline provided him by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling.) This use of development pairs was somewhat uncharted territory for Infocom as Seastalker was begun, but a model they would find themselves using for no fewer than three of the five games they would release in 1984.

Work on Seastalker commenced with a lengthy meeting between Lawrence and Galley at Infocom’s offices, during which they hashed out the basic plot: a genetically engineered sea monster is attacking your friends at the Aquadome undersea research station. Only you and sidekick Tip can save them, using the Scimitar, the experimental two-man research submarine you’ve just designed and built. Lawrence then went back home to New Jersey, and development progressed largely through paper mail and telephone calls, with just a few more in-person meetings to mark milestones. Working this way inevitably slowed the process — at more than nine months, Seastalker would have the longest active gestation of any Infocom game to date — but Galley generally found the project to be, like his gently unflappable collaborator, a delight.

There was a time when we got to the last act of the story, where you, the brilliant young inventor, know what the threat is, know what you have to work with (your own inventions and whatever else is available), know the other characters. How do we devise a game strategy that’s interesting but not too difficult to get you to the end? Jim and I worked on this a whole day in Cambridge. I told him, “I feel like we have a big job in front of us because we’ve set up all this elaborate storyline without really knowing how it’s going to end.” Jim said, “Don’t worry, Stu, I’ve gotten heroes out of much tougher situations than this.”

Unlike many established traditional authors who tried to make the leap to interactivity, Lawrence didn’t struggle hugely with his loss of control over every aspect of plotting and timing. Galley theorizes that he may have been aided by his experience writing for comic strips and comic books, for which he had to start putting stories down on paper long before he could foresee what their endings might be or even which writers for hire might end up writing them.

As one might expect given its pedigree, Seastalker absolutely nails the tone of its inspiration. Its is a gee-whiz world full of adventure and excitement in which no problem cannot be solved with a bit of science and a dollop of all-American bravery and ingenuity. It’s never afraid of going over the top; the package includes a letter from the President congratulating you on your latest invention. As fiction, Seastalker makes for a nice, nostalgic place to return to for some of us dealing with the vagaries of adult life. Yet as a system it’s also amongst the most complex things Infocom had yet attempted. Playing Seastalker really does feel, for the first time in an Infocom game and arguably in an adventure game, like taking the leading role in an adventure novel. Events tumble down around you one after another as the plot comes thick and fast, leaving you constantly scrambling to keep up, to save these people who make it clear they’re depending on you. Seastalker is all about its plot that just keeps pushing you along like a bulldozer. There’s little here that feels like a traditional adventure-game puzzle, little time for such cerebral exercises. Even that staple of adventure gaming, mapping, goes out the window thanks to the blueprints of the Scimitar and the maps of both undersea complexes you’ll be visiting included in the package, a first for Infocom. While Deadline and The Witness have a dynamism of their own, their characters go about their business oddly oblivious to you; your job is essentially to observe their behavior, to come to an understanding of their patterns, and then to force yourself into the plot to redirect it at crucial junctures. No forcing is required in Seastalker; you truly are the hero, the cog around which everything and everybody revolves.

The Commodore 64 version of Seastalker showing the split-screen sonar view

One of the most impressive parts of Seastalker is its implementation of the Scimitar. You have to guide it around Frobton Bay yourself, using your sonar display and a depth map included in the package. Later, the climax of the story is an underwater battle involving the Scimitar, the sea monster, and the jealous rival behind all the chaos that is a genuine tactical struggle rather than an exercise in set-piece puzzle solving. For these sequences Infocom devised the first significant extension to the Z-Machine since its inception more than four years before: the ability to split the screen on certain computers, which Seastalker uses to display a non-scrolling upper window that shows your sonar screen as a simple textual rendering. (The member of the Micro Group responsible for moving this enhancement into the interpreters was the newly hired Brian Moriarty, a name we’ll soon be hearing a lot more of.)

Seastalker‘s feelies are, as you might have gathered given the wealth of maps and blueprints I’ve already described, unusually many and varied even for Infocom. There’s a clever set of “InfoCards” with hints printed in a special ink that can only be seen with the aid of an included InfoCard reader — just the sort of little gadget young Tom Swifts are likely to love. But Seastalker‘s packaging is most interesting today in that it serves as a sort of test run for much of what would follow just a month or two later, when Infocom converted their entire existing line of games into a new standardized packaging format, the classic and beloved “grey box.” For the first time we see in Seastalker a sample transcript showing how to interact with the game, an invaluable bit of teaching by example that would be included in every grey box to come. And the front of the box calls the game “Junior Interactive Fiction from Infocom.”

Infocom, despite a generally finely honed promotional instinct, had struggled for years to find a good label for what their games really were, wallowing around in unsatisfying pseudo-compounds like “InterLogic” and plebian descriptives like “prose games.” Some of the Imps had at last begun to casually refer to their games as “interactive fiction” in interviews during the latter half of 1983, notably in a feature article in the September/October 1983 Softline which dwelt at length on Floyd’s death scene from Planetfall. Seastalker, however, marks its first deployment as part of Infocom’s official rhetoric — appropriately enough, given that Seastalker is more worthy of the label than anything that came before. Infocom wasn’t the first to use the term “interactive fiction” in a computerized context; that honor belongs to Robert Lafore, who created a set of simple branching stories to which he gave that label back in 1979. Yet it was perfect for Infocom’s games, the last piece of the rhetorical puzzle they had been assembling with the able assistance of their mates at G/R Copy for a few years now. With the arrival of the grey boxes, all of Infocom’s games would officially be interactive fiction, the name the whole field of literary games in the Infocom tradition continues to go by to this day.

Released in June of 1984, Seastalker initially sold very well: more than 30,000 units in its first six months. But sales tailed off rather quickly after that; its lifetime figure is in the vicinity of 40,000. It may very well have been a victim of Infocom marketing’s conflation of a game for kids with an introductory game for adults. Certainly Seastalker is very short. Any adult at all experienced with adventure games can easily finish it in an evening, any adult totally inexperienced at least within two. One suspects that the arrival in 1985 of Wishbringer, a much better introductory game for adults, ate into Seastalker‘s sales in a big way.

But then Seastalker wasn’t really designed for adults. Children, who read more slowly and have the patience to relive something over and over (and over…) will likely get considerably more out of it, especially since there are a fair number of alternate paths to follow and even the possibility to finish without the full score; if you screw the pooch, one of your heretofore helpless friends will often stop hand-wringing long enough to jump in at the last minute and save the day for you. Still, it’s debatable how many parents would have been willing to spend $30 or $40 on the game when they could pick up a Choose Your Own Adventure book for $2.

All of which leaves Seastalker feeling like a bit of a missed opportunity in spite of its perfectly reasonable commercial performance. Stu Galley recalls that Infocom demonstrated Seastalker for a group of schoolteachers at the 1984 Summer CES show to the rapturous response that this sort of thing was “just what they needed” to get their kids reading more. One wishes that Infocom could have found some way to reduce the price and/or work aggressively with schools to get the game into more children’s hands. As it was, they dropped the idea of “Interactive Fiction Junior” and of trying to compete with the Choose Your Own Adventure juggernaut within a year, relabeling Seastalker rather incongruously as an introductory-level game for adults like the aforementioned Wishbringer. Even Lawrence and Galley’s second collaboration, Moonmist, was largely marketed as just another adult mystery game despite being at heart a Nancy Drew story in the same way that Seastalker was a Tom Swift.

If you have a child in that sweet spot of about eight to ten years in your life, you can begin to remedy that missed opportunity by giving her Seastalker and seeing what she makes of it. Like so much of Infocom’s work, it’s aged very little. For the rest of us, it’s a great piece of innocently cheesy fun that’s also quite technically and even formally impressive in its way. Infocom never made another game quite like it, which is alone more than reason enough to play it.

(As always, thanks to Jason Scott for sharing his materials from the Get Lamp project.)

Comments
6 Responses

- ZUrlocker

September 3, 2013 at 4:35 pm

Great story! I had no idea Jim Lawrence had written so much serial fiction.

- matt w

September 3, 2013 at 6:23 pm

Wow, this sounds great! And even for us grownups whose children aren’t old enough yet, lots of those flaws aren’t flaws anymore; now that it’s not $20-30 a game anymore, being able to finish in a day or two seems like a good thing.

- Gilles Duchesne

September 3, 2013 at 9:05 pm

“His ouevre”

That’s spelled “oeuvre”.

- Jimmy Maher

September 4, 2013 at 6:07 am

Thanks!

- Keith Palmer

September 5, 2013 at 1:25 am

I was just the age you suggest for “the sweet spot” when Seastalker was first released, and I was playing adventure games then (if hardly ever managing to win them)… except that I didn’t get to play the game until The Lost Treasures of Infocom 2 came out, at which point it might not have made that much of an impact on me beyond the sonar display, perhaps. Still, the “introductory” adventures Moonmist, Seastalker, and Wishbringer are the only Infocom games I have an impression of finishing without turning to hints. Your description does make me think I could well enjoy it more now; for some reason, it’s pleasant to hear one of its authors really had written the old juvenile series fiction I’d only thought it was “modelled on” (as much as that sort of thought seems to tempt people into too-quick dismissals…)

- Scott M. Bruner

September 19, 2013 at 2:45 am

I remember vividly playing Seastalker when we moved from California to Nebraska when I was…11 or 12? The house was empty as we waited for the movers to catch up and we didn’t even have a desk for the Apple //c, but it sat on my lap as I worked my way through it.

In my memory, it took about 5 days to complete, and I was pretty proud of myself – the other Infocom games, notable Suspect, always seemed a little difficult to fully grasp.

Bookware
September 10, 2013

Suppose that in some alternate universe you are William Shakespeare. Strolling about London one day in the late sixteenth century, mulling over plans for your next novel, you come upon some workmen erecting a large wooden structure of peculiar shape. The design of the building strikes you as inappropriate for either a dwelling or a place of business.

A few questions gain you some information about a recent invention (this is an alternate universe, remember) called the “play.” Live people, sometimes costumed and in makeup, are getting up on a flat surface called a “stage” and acting out stories!

The clever people who have designed and built the first stages, as well as the inventors of acting, are right in there writing and directing the best plays they can come up with. (At least the best they can come up with in their spare time — each of these people necessarily has one or two active careers already going.)

In one of the earliest successful plays, dummies representing invading aliens (Frenchmen, perhaps, or Spaniards, from across the Channel) were lowered on ropes from concealed positions above the stage, while the actor (this play needed only one) ran back and forth, following shouted directions from the audience, trying to shoot all the dummies before they touched the floor. The audience liked this play a lot and cheered it enthusiastically.

In a somewhat more recent show, also very popular, the lead actor climbs about on a crazy scaffolding of planks and ladders, trying to accomplish some rather simple-minded tasks, while others costumed as fantastic creatures try to knock him off by throwing barrels. It’s good slapstick fun, and the audiences love it.

“Wait a minute,” you say to these eager people who have been proudly explaining how plays work. “Wait a minute. That all sounds amusing, yes. But l really think you’re on to something bigger. Let me go home and think about this for a while… How many people can you get onstage at once? How many lines can an actor memorize? Can you have it dark on one half of the stage and light on the other half?”

They look at each other. “We’re not really sure,” one replies at last. “Our stages are still pretty primitive. Our actors are all new at the job. Everybody is. Next year we’ll be able to do more. But what should we try to do?”

You don’t have any instant answers for them. A lot of vague ideas suddenly churning. Possibilities. …

“I hope you will go home and think about it, Will,” says one of the stage managers. “You’re good with words. Maybe we could have the man on the ladder say something more than ‘Ouch!’ and ‘Wow!'”

“Yes, something more,” you agree thoughtfully, turning away. The other stage people call good wishes after you. But you scarcely hear them. Your mind is involved with new ideas.

To work with — depend on — carpenters, actors, experts in stage machinery and lighting? Whatever story emerged would no longer be purely your own. But already you can see that the stage those others have created can capture the imagination and enthrall an audience, even with no more than a few clowns and ladders.

You head for home, for a place where you can sit down and think, and write. Your thoughts are on a story that you had planned to make into a book. The one to be called Hamlet…

The words above were written by science-fiction author and would-be gaming entrepreneur Fred Saberhagen in a feature article about the possibilities for interactive fiction (“Call Yourself Ishmael: Micros Get the Literary Itch”) in the September/October 1983 issue of Softline — the same article in fact that contained the first published discussion of Floyd’s death in Planetfall and what it portended. Saberhagen, whose own flirtations with interactivity would be considerable but commercially frustrating, was at the vanguard of an emerging conventional wisdom about the intersection of computers, games, and books. He and his fellow pundits that started to emerge during 1983 weren’t the first to begin to think along these lines. The editors of SoftSide magazine had first started writing about the literary potential of “compunovels” back in 1979, truly a leap of faith in light of the strangled prose and plots of the Scott Adams games and the other 16 K adventures that were pretty much the only ones available to PC owners at the time. But it took the efforts of not only Saberhagen but also, and probably more significantly, respectable folks writing for respectable mainstream publications like The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine, and Scientific American to make of it a full-fledged meme. The boldest pundits declared that we were on the cusp of nothing less than a whole new form of literature that could be as rich, meaningful, and aesthetically brilliant as anything put down by Shakespeare or Melville. Suddenly what had once been dismissed as mere “adventure games” were worth taking seriously.

All of the articles just mentioned focused primarily or entirely on Infocom, the only company in the field whose games could realistically stand up to any scrutiny at all as literary works. Seeing this, and seeing Infocom growing less and less afraid to lay claim to the mantle of literary artists under such persistent stroking, lots of other companies started asking how they could steal some of Infocom’s cultural thunder and get a piece of what the pundits said would be the literature of the future. The players who now started entering the field were a surprisingly motley lot. There were the expected startups as well as old dogs in the software game looking to learn some new tricks. Epyx, Brøderbund, and Electronic Arts amongst others all discovered a latent passion for text, as did of all people console developer Imagic, whose action games for first-generation consoles like the Atari VCS had been enormously successful but who were now floundering like everyone else in that industry in the wake of the Great Videogame Crash. But technologists were not the only opportunists looking to jump on the bandwagon Infocom was driving. The huge publishing houses of Simon and Schuster, Addison-Wesley, and Random House also started software arms, as did smaller publishers like science-fiction paperback specialist Baen Books. On the other end of the distributional pipeline, the two biggest American bookstore chains, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, both set aside areas in their stores for entertainment software, as did the ubiquitous W.H. Smith in Britain. To complete the strange mixture and hedge the bets of their own software arm, Addison Wesley signed a deal with Infocom in early 1984 to distribute their games to the bookselling trade, an important contract that got Infocom into thousands of bookstores populated with just the sort of literate customers they were trying to reach.

All of this forthright investment in the idea of interactive fiction as a serious literary force by such pillars of mainstream American business feels a bit unbelievable today. Nor is it without a certain note of tragic resonance as the great What Might Have Been for people like me who still unabashedly love the idea. We see here the culture and, at least as importantly, the culture’s business interests trying to work out just what computer games were, what they could be, and perhaps what they should be. It’s a fascinating process to watch, if also — again, for people with my sympathies — one with kind of a heartbreaking ending. Were computer games actually games in the way that, say, Monopoly was? Or were they more like books? Or movies? Or were they — and this was the most messy and complicated and also the most likely answer of all — like any or all or none of the above, depending on the particular title in question and its genre and target audience? The answer to these questions was essential to answer another, more practical one: how, where, and to whom should computer games be sold? The folks we’re concerned with today are those who decided to bet on computer games, or at least a segment of them, as the next iteration in the long history of the book. Even on the business side of the development equation their efforts mix the expected desire to shift a lot of units and make a lot of money with a genuine idealism about the artistic potential of the form in which they were working. It was, as should be more than clear by now, an odd time in media.

If computer games were or could be literature, and if they wanted to be taken seriously as such, said many people, the smartest thing to do was to get people who already knew how to write literature — or at least readable popular fiction — involved in their creation. Or, failing that, the next best thing must be to play in the rich fictional worlds they had created. Lots of people in lots of companies followed this chain of reasoning simultaneously. Thus began the era of what the British press pithily came to call “bookware,” the splicing of the new frontier of computer games with the old of books and their authors, who were sometimes (but not all that often) actively involved, sometimes disinterested but happy to be getting another royalty check, and sometimes dead and thus blissfully unaware of the whole exercise. A trend that had been presaged in 1982 by The Hobbit reached manic full flower in 1984.

The list of bookware that flooded the market in both the United States and Britain between 1984 and 1986 is long, and includes some of the biggest names in genre fiction of the era as well as some surprisingly high-brow figures. An incomplete list might include: The Robots of Dawn (Isaac Asimov); The Mist (Stephen King); Amnesia (Thomas M. Disch); Mindwheel (future American poet laureate Robert Pinsky); High Stakes and Twice Shy (Dick Francis); Wings Out of Shadow (Fred Saberhagen); The Fourth Protocol (Frederick Forsyth); The Dragonriders of Pern (Anne McCaffrey); The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World (Harry Harrison); The Pen and the Dark (Colin Kapp); The Saga of Erik the Viking (Terry Jones); The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 (Sue Townsend); The Width of the World (Ian Watson); The Colour of Magic (Terry Pratchett); and Infocom’s own The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams). Those whose tastes ran more to the classics could choose from Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen); The Time Machine (H.G. Wells); Sherlock (Arthur Conan Doyle); Macbeth (William Shakespeare); The Snow Queen (Hans Christian Andersen); Dante’s Inferno; and Dracula (Bram Stoker). The list of games for which contracts were signed but which went unreleased due to the bookware bubble’s bursting includes Glory Road (Robert Heinlein); another Inferno (this one by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle); Animal Lover (Stephen R. Donaldson); 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne); Special Deliverance (Clifford D. Simak); Soldier, Ask Not (Gordon R. Dickson); and The World Thinker (Jack Vance). The publishers involved with all these efforts largely abandoned the old labels of “adventure game” and “text adventure” in favor of ones that reflected their literary aspirations. Some shamelessly appropriated “interactive fiction” from Infocom (who had themselves, of course, shamelessly appropriated it from Robert Lafore). Others made “interactive novels” or “computer novels.” Bantam Software came up with a particularly catchy label: “living literature.” Mosaic in Britain just bowed to the inevitable and stuck “bookware” on their boxes.

But it was none of the companies or games already mentioned who made the biggest bet on bookware. That was in fact a rapidly growing publisher located ten minutes from Infocom in Cambridge which had heretofore specialized in educational software: Spinnaker. Spinnaker debuted not one but two new imprints for bookware in 1984: Trillium (later Telarium, for reasons we’ll get to shortly), for book adaptations aimed at adults and teenagers; and Windham Classics, aimed at a somewhat younger set. They released no fewer than seven games between the two lines in 1984 alone (two more than Infocom’s total output for the year), followed by another five in 1985 and a final straggler in 1986, the twilight of the brief bookware era.

The story of Trillium and Windham Classics begins with a remarkable young publishing mogul named Byron Preiss. Born in 1953 in New York City, Preiss was one of those characters like Steve Jobs who could seemingly talk anybody into anything, one who as a callow youth not yet out of his teens was already able to convince older and supposedly wiser businesspeople to back his many and varied schemes. Throughout his career, Preiss mixed business with an idealism that seems to have been anything but affected. He first made a mark at seventeen, when he wrote and distributed The Block, an anti-drug comic book written for a near-illiterate reading level and aimed at grade-school children growing up in inner cities. He traveled around the country relentlessly to promote it, and eventually won the official endorsement of the Children’s Television Workshop of Sesame Street fame, as well as the lifelong friendship of one of the most important figures there, Chris Cerf. That’s just the way it was with Preiss throughout his life. He seemed genuinely unaware of the barriers between him and the people of power who could realize his dreams, and in consequence they seemed to just melt away. His gifts for gab and inspiration were legendary, as recalled by Leigh Ronald Grossman, one of a stable of young writers he came to nurture:

He had to be the most passionate person I’ve ever known, able to visualize what was special and exciting about EVERYTHING. I remember going to lunch with Byron and another publisher, in which the discussion hinged on a tired project that the whole staff was sick of dealing with after years of development. By the end of the lunch I was thrilled to be working on such a visionary project… and I’m still not quite sure how he did it.

He founded his own publishing company, Byron Preiss Visual Publications, in 1974 while enrolled in the film program at Stanford University. Through it he designed and/or published a variety of interesting, often groundbreaking work: a line of paperbacks that tried to revive the pulp adventures of the 1930s more than five years before Raiders of the Lost Ark; adult comics that didn’t involve superheroes and were forerunners of what have come to be called “graphic novels” today; Dragonworld, a beautifully illustrated epic fantasy novel which he himself coauthored; The Illustrated Harlan Ellison, whose pictures were in 3D and could be viewed through a pair of 3D glasses bound into the volume; various profusely illustrated nonfiction volumes for children and adults, on subjects ranging from the Beach Boys to dinosaurs. Throughout he assiduously cultivated relationships. By the time he turned thirty, Preiss’s Christmas-card list included people like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, the aforementioned Harlan Ellison, and Ray Bradbury in addition to many of the biggest names in the business of publishing and, yes, the members of the Beach Boys as well. C. David Seuss (a man whose role in this story will become clear shortly) believes that his sheer likability was perhaps his biggest asset of all; “people just wanted to go along with his ideas because he was just so nice.”

Throughout his career Preiss pushed the boundaries of what a book could be — physically, formally, and aesthetically. It’s thus little surprise that he got involved when the idea of the interactive book began to emerge in earnest in the early 1980s. His first project was a unique series in the crowded field of Choose Your Own Adventure books and copycats that dominated the children’s sections of bookstores at the time. The Be an Interplanetary Spy series mostly replaces simple choices of the “what do you want to do next?” variety with visual and logic puzzles that have to be solved to advance the narrative. In keeping with the through-going theme of Preiss’s career, the books are also lavishly illustrated, to the point that they are more interactive comic book than conventional text; the illustrations are often more important than the words. He would later create two more traditional but also fondly remembered gamebook series, Time Machine and Explorer.

Preiss had been well aware of computers and computer games since the mid-1970s, when like so many other Stanford students he paid a visit to nearby Xerox PARC. By mid-1983, with home computers booming, he felt the time had come to get involved with them as yet another facet of what a book could be. Indeed, the Be an Interplanetary Spy books, which started to appear at just this time, show more than a hint of influence from games like those of Infocom in their many puzzles and their replacing the occasional choices of Choose Your Own Adventure with almost constant interaction. By packing three or four puzzles and narrative branches onto almost every page he was able to make the books feel less granular, more like a parser-based adventure game than a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Still, Preiss wanted to go further. He started shopping around an idea for a series of computer games based on works by established authors, many of whom he just happened to have personal relationships with and whose participation — or at least willingness to sign a licensing contract — he could thus all but assure. He found himself a dance partner in the aggressive young Spinnaker Software.

Founded in April of 1982 by two friends from Harvard Business School and the Boston Consulting Group, Bill Bowman and C. David Seuss, Spinnaker was, like Electronic Arts, one of the new guard of slicker, more conventionally professional software publishers that began popping up during 1982 and 1983. Neither Bowman nor Seuss had a hackerish bone in his body. For proof, one need look no further than the ties they insisted on wearing to work every day at Spinnaker, or Bowman’s habit of getting up at 5:30 every morning to attend mass, or his seven children that were often hovering around Spinnaker’s offices after school hours (a marked contrast to life at Infocom, populated mostly by childless twenty- and thirty-somethings). They were savvy businessmen who saw an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an emerging market after the arrival of the IBM PC (Bowman believes he has one of the first hundred ever built) and the wave of purpose-built home computers that was set off by the Commodore VIC-20. The legendary venture capitalist Jacqueline Morby funded a nationwide jaunt to talk to retailers and look for obvious holes in the market, which revealed an exploding demand for educational software that could not be met by under-capitalized semi-amateurs like Edu-Ware. They jumped at it, with the aid of millions in venture capital arranged by Morby and her company TA Associates. (Morby would also take a place on Spinnaker’s board, along with that of Sierra On-Line and several others, making her one of the most powerful hidden shapers of the software industry of the 1980s.)

Spinnaker released their first products just in time for the Christmas of 1982. Some were done in-house, some by outside developers like educational pioneer Tom Synder Productions. Quality inevitably varied, but some, like Snyder’s In Search of the Most Amazing Thing, have become children’s classics. Still, Spinnaker was emblematic of the changes that swept the software industry with the the home-computer boom and the arrival of traditional big-business interests — and big-business money — looking to capitalize on it, yet another sign that the era Doug Carlston referred to as the software “Brotherhood” was well and truly ended. Their agenda plainly included driving older rivals like Edu-Ware out of the market entirely, a goal they soon accomplished. They placed all but unprecedented emphasis on licensing, branding, and advertising, a result of what Seuss calls his “First Law”: “Apply money at the point of resistance.” Spinnaker poured some 15% of their total earnings for 1983 back into huge advertising buys, much of it outside the trade press in places like Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, and Newsweek. They soon hit upon the scheme of releasing their software under a number of sub-brands, each of which would be as often as possible a licensed take on an already well-known consumer entity. By the end of 1983 their stable already included Fisher-Price (educational software for the very young; name licensed from the huge toy company), Nova (science education; name licensed from the long-running PBS television series), and Better Living (personal productivity software), as well as the flagship Spinnaker brand. Whatever its other merits, the approach was a clever sleight of hand for a company that aimed to do nothing less than own educational software, and in time and with luck to extend that dominance to home-computing software as a whole. Bowman:

“Shelf space is all that matters in this business. If everything is under the Spinnaker brand, the consumer feels he’s not getting much of a choice, but here he can choose any of six brands.”

Feel free to put your own scare quotes around “choose” there. Spinnaker drew analogies between themselves and General Motors, who had their Buick, Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, etc. — if nothing else an indication that Bowman and Seuss weren’t afraid to dream big. When Byron Preiss came along with his idea for a new line of bookware, it was both an opportunity to add yet more brands to the stable and to begin to make inroads into entertainment software (something that had been on their long-term agenda from the start), just as the Better Living brand represented their first explorations of the productivity market. Their internal industry studies showed adventure games to be a very good place to start. While they currently sold in less than one-third the numbers of action games, the segment was growing rapidly, while action games were doing just the opposite.

Shortly after Preiss came on the scene, one of Spinnaker’s best outside developers, Dale Disharoon, came to them with a bookware idea of his own: to make edutainment based on classic and contemporary children’s books. Disharoon’s educational titles sold in huge numbers for Spinnaker, so when he talked they tended to listen. Thus was born the Windham Classics line, brand number six for Spinnaker, as a companion to Trillium.

Preiss was most closely involved with the latter, and that’s also where we’ll be spending most of our time. As should be clear by now, Trillium owed its existence to a mixture of artistic idealism and commercial pragmatism — not that such strange bedfellows aren’t pretty much business as usual in any media industry. For Preiss, Trillium represented nothing less than the future — or a possible future — of fiction. For Spinnaker, it represented a bit of the same but also yet another branding opportunity, the chance to stamp the names of popular authors onto boxes and get in one the hot new trend in entertainment software. They placed a young marketing whizkid named Seth Godin in charge of Trillium’s image. (Godin has since become a darling of the business self-help industry; he currently runs “the most popular marketing blog in the world.”) Now it was time to start rounding up authors.

Here Preiss proved the value of all those connections to the world of written science fiction. He pulled out his thick phone list and started calling some of the name authors with whom he’d carefully built relationships over the last decade. He soon had Arthur C. Clarke signed for an adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama and Ray Bradbury for Fahrenheit 451. He also reached a tentative agreement with Robert Heinlein to adapt his juvenile classic Starman Jones, and initiated talks with Roger Zelazny, Philip Jose Farmer, Harry Harrison, and Alfred Bester. As with most of the products of the era of bookware, the question of how involved these authors were actually willing to be was always a delicate one. Mostly they wound up doing little more than politely sitting through presentations of the latest versions, with their creative role amounting to little more than a never- or almost never-exercised veto power. And that was about it, beyond signing their name to an appropriately glowing endorsement for the back of the box. Only Ray Bradbury was willing to get somewhat more involved, actively drawing up plot ideas for and by reports even contributing some prose to the Fahrenheit 451 game.

Thus when Spinnaker approached Michael Crichton about adapting one his books, they must have been thrilled to learn that Crichton had already been working on an original game with some associates for eighteen months, and was in fact looking for a publisher. More problematic was a game called Shadowkeep, a text-adventure/CRPG hybrid offered to Spinnaker by a small developer called Ultrasoft. A book or an author was nowhere in sight, but it was just too impressive a game to pass up, so Spinnaker simply flipped the process on its head by hiring Alan Dean Foster, the reigning king of media tie-in novels (he had made his name in the industry by ghost writing the novelization of the original Star Wars for George Lucas), to write a book based on the game. He would thus have his name displayed in huge letters on the box of a game he had had absolutely nothing to do with. For the Windham Classics line, Spinnaker took advantage of some blessedly out-of-copyright children’s classics like The Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz, but did sign a license for the recent Green Sky Trilogy, whose author, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, did heavily involve herself in the design of the resulting game. That game, Below the Root, is not a text adventure at all but is a lovely, lyrical classic in its own right.

Indeed, the games of Trillium and Windham Classics take a surprising variety of approaches, mixing illustrated text adventure with action and CRPG elements, sometimes in the same game. But the fundamental goal, particularly for the Trillium games, was to outdo Infocom at their own game. Largely at Seth Godin’s behest, Spinnaker put the Trillium games inside mouth-wateringly beautiful gatefold boxes that on aesthetic grounds might just outdo — dare I say it? — Infocom. They also started a newsletter in an effort to build a community of loyal customers in the same way Infocom had, although they were a bit stumped as to what to put in it beyond plugs and order forms for the games; Spinnaker’s offices weren’t filled with the same sort of inspired madness that made The New Zork Times such a constant delight. Infocom couldn’t help but feel the target Spinnaker had plainly painted on their back, couldn’t help but feel a bit unnerved by this big company — already much larger than them — with their big-name authors and their illustrations and other additional gimmicks that was determined to wrest away from them their comfortable niche in the industry. Spinnaker even negotiated a deal to get the Telarium games into every Waldenbooks in the country to sit side by side with the Infocom games that had also just arrived there thanks to Infocom’s deal with Addison Wesley. Various Infocom folks have quietly acknowledged that Spinnaker was the only competitor who ever really made them nervous in 1984, the year they sold more games than in any other.

They thus must have been quite pleased when the Trillium line hit a major snafu within weeks of launching in the fall of that year. It seemed there already existed a tiny publisher of educational books using the name of “Trillium.” Now the original Trillium’s lawyers came calling. Seuss feels they could have fought the suit and likely prevailed (the original Trillium had never actually registered their name as a trademark), but it would have been time consuming, disruptive, and expensive. Spinnaker chose instead to start the embarrassing process of re-branding the entire line with a new name. They chose “Telarium,” a name that, for what it’s worth, I like a lot better anyway. (To avoid confusion as we crisscross the Trillium/Telarium split in this and future articles, I’m just going to refer to the brand as “Telarium” from now on.)

The whole debacle was anathema to a company that was so focused on branding. And it was almost as frustrating when negotiations with the Heinlein people to release Starman Jones, previously considered a done deal to the extent that a huge amount of work had already been done on the game, reached an impasse from which they would never emerge despite months and months of Telarium’s optimistically announcing the nearly completed Starman Jones as “coming soon.”

The arrival of Telarium was greeted with hostility and even a certain amount of contempt, not only at Infocom but amongst their other peers as well. Jon Freeman, never one to pull his punches, delivered a withering takedown via his column in Computer Gaming World:

In the first place, the economics of the situation almost guaranteed that the programmers involved, despite the hype, would not be first-class. Big Name Authors and Best-Selling Books don’t come cheap. Although the draw of author and book is clearly a marketing advantage — and should therefore be paid out of the marketing/advertising budget — the cost is normally borne by R&D. A big chunk of the royalties that would otherwise go to the developers of the game is paid, instead, to the author of the book. What top-flight game designer or programmer would take that kind of a pay cut? Regardless of their deficiencies as game designers, most good programmers are still at work on their own ideas. Those who can’t come up with original subjects for games are busy making a lucrative living converting popular games to new computers. Therefore, the majority of programmers available for these book projects are either inexperienced or inadequate or both.

The worst part is that the SF people involved don’t know how little they know about the subject. Few of the authors involved in all these projects play games: most lack the time; many lack the inclination. Technophobes like Ray Bradbury, who admits that he cannot use the computer he owns, believe the apex of computer usage is to enter the text of a book and read it on the CRT. Would he know a good computer game if he fell over one?

Yes, Freeman’s logic is questionable at best. Still, many of the people who had been in the industry for years saw Telarium as calculated and soulless, and not without cause. There was an air of contrivance, even perhaps a note of disingenuousness about the whole enterprise. Seth Godin claimed, “We wanted to go to the people who could write [the games] the best. And that’s not programmers — it’s authors.” Which would be fine if only the authors in question were actually deeply involved; witness the particular absurdity of Shadowkeep as an “Alan Dean Foster” game. Meanwhile Telarium’s addition of graphics and music and even action sequences to the Infocom template just screamed of bullet points on some marketer’s demands for more, more, more than the competition. When the line ultimately proved commercially disappointing, few felt much sympathy. In fact, they cheered the failure as an object lesson that you can’t buy your way to success with big licenses and an overstuffed marketing budget. (A lesson subsequent gaming history has not, alas, always borne out.)

Yet there was also, as I’ve already noted, that idealistic side to Telarium that hasn’t been discussed enough. Yes, it may have been articulated by the terminally slick Seth Godin, but there was a genuine vision driving Telarium, a vision for games as coherent lived fictional experiences.

“We’re trying to make a game that is based on plot and characterization, not puzzles — the way a book is. If you read Fahrenheit 451, you don’t get stuck on page 50. And if you play the game, you don’t get stuck on frame 50, because the whole idea is that you’re interested in the game because of the characters and the plot and what’s happening. You care about what’s going on.”

Or, as he put it another way: “When you’re reading a good book, say a Ludlum thriller, you’re really sweating because you believe you’re part of the story. Adventure games weren’t doing that because the puzzles kept bringing you back to reality.” People in and around Telarium expressed over and over this determination to get beyond arbitrary, often frustrating set-piece puzzle solving to something worthy of Infocom’s chosen label of interactive fiction. To what extent they succeeded is debatable; certainly the games have plenty of rough edges. Still, they’re also more than worthy of the sort of careful second look that too few of the non-Infocom works of the bookware era have heretofore received. We’ll begin the process of remedying that next time.

(Many thanks to C. David Seuss for answering questions and sharing his memories with me. A Harvard Business School case study on Spinnaker was also invaluable. Particularly good contemporary articles on Telarium and the bookware phenomenon are in: the September/October 1983 Softline; the December 1984 Compute!’s Gazette; the June/July 1985 Commodore Power Play; the February 1985 Compute!; the April 1985 Electronic Games; the June 18, 1984 InfoWorld; the July 30, 1984 InfoWorld; the August 13, 1984 InfoWorld; the August 1984 Computer Gaming World; the February 1985 Micro-Adventurer; and the May 1985 Commodore Microcomputers. All were used for this article and the ones on individual Telarium games that will follow, as were Jason Scott’s Get Lamp archives which he kindly shared with me. The great illustration that begins this article was taken from the April 1985 Electronic Games.)

Comments
8 Responses

- Olivier Guinart

September 10, 2013 at 6:21 pm

You mention one of my favorite authors, Roger Zelazny :):
Nine Princes in Amber

Spot on with Trillium/Telarium Telarium and “Rendez-vous with Rama” or “Fahrenheit 451” (and others too)

Feedback on Trillium/Telarium.

- hitfan

September 11, 2013 at 12:46 pm

I remember seeing ads for these games in COMPUTE!, but I only glanced at them. But I did read this article.

Since I’ve never played any of these games, how did they work? Because they’re based on real-life books, I presume that the text adventure lifted much of the words from the source material.

But what would happen if the player diverged from the narrative of the original book? Would there be new text written in the spirit of the style of the original author?

I actually recently considered doing something similar to this not too long ago, without being really aware (until now after reading this article) that this concept was actually done previously. It was to be a text adventure (with some graphical elements) that takes place in the Edgar Allan Poe universe where the player would traverse through many of his short stories. The first part of the game took place in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and once the player killed the old man because of his evil eye and confessed to the crime (kind of gruesome for a protagonist to do this, but this is Poe) then he’d be teleported (the premise being that the player is inside a “Dream Within a Dream”) to the Gothic mansion in House of Usher and solve that segment, and so on.

I did create a spreadsheet that lifted most of the words from the Poe stories (for room descriptions and events), and organized them as a maze with room descriptions connected to each other, and so on. I also got as far as creating a font for this 8-bit retro game, but then quietly abandoned the project. I’m now using the font for a CRPG retro instead.

- Jimmy Maher

September 11, 2013 at 3:56 pm

You’ve hit on some of the most problematic aspects of adapting a book to a game. Various games tried to overcome the question of what happens when the player deviates from the plot in various ways. A related question is how to make a game challenging and interesting if the player has already read the book. The next several articles will deal with these and others in the context of the Telarium games…

Your idea sounds more than a little like The Dark Eye: http://www.mobygames.com/game/dark-eye. Well worth tracking down if you haven’t played it…

- hitfan

September 13, 2013 at 12:11 pm

Thank you for pointing towards this game. I looked it up and found this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKLCXbk9nbI

I had never heard of it before. Being a fan of Gothic horror and Poe, I figure that I fall into the target market for this game. One of the Poe stories that the game depicts is “Berenice” which is quite vivid and shocking as you read it.

I’ve always wanted to play a video game which felt like those 1960s horror movies that starred Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Do you know of any other games like those?

- Jimmy Maher

September 14, 2013 at 8:30 am

The only things that immediately come to mind are The Count and Transylvania, both of which I wrote about in depth earlier on this blog. They’re both very good games (The Count might just be Scott Adams’s finest hour), but also quite primitive technically, and so may not be to everyone’s taste.

Otherwise… I know there have been a number of graphic adventures based on Dracula, but I can’t speak to their quality. I’m sure there are lots of others in the Gothic horror genre as well. Gaming history is getting surprisingly long by now. :)

- Duncan Stevens

September 11, 2013 at 5:26 pm

Interesting! I read the Green-Sky books as a kid (and reread them a while back), but I had no idea there was a game based on them.

- Jimmy Maher

September 12, 2013 at 7:00 am

I last played it on the Trans-Siberian railroad traveling from Vladivostok to Moscow back in 2002. A very surreal environment, which may have colored my memories of the game (not to mention the bad vodka my cabinmates kept giving me). Still, I feel confident in saying it’s a really, really wonderful little game. Well worth your time.

- Jake Wildstrom

September 27, 2013 at 1:48 am

One thing that mpresses me about it looking back is that it has quite open gameplay. There’s a specific long-term goal (find Raamo), and only one real challenging prerequisite to doing so (develop the necessary spirit skills). But there are many things you can do to make the search easier, and how you achieve the goals is really up to you, and you can choose which subquests you want to tackle, in what order, and even how you complete them (they all have a fairly limited number of different approaches, but, still, it feels like the game would let you do whatever you wanted to within its rules).

AFAIK, there is only one encounter in the game which is actually mandatory. And even that one you might be able to forego if you’re good at guessing where hidden doors are.

Rendezvous with Rama
September 15, 2013

In the novel version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke discusses the music choices of astronaut David Bowman in the latter stages of his voyage to Saturn aboard the Discovery, after the malfunctioning supercomputer HAL has killed all of his crew mates and left him as alone as any human has ever been, millions of miles from the nearest fellow member of his species. He begins with opera, but soon finds that he can’t bear to hear human voices. So he moves on to the instrumental music of the Romantic composers, but soon finds their emotionalism “oppressive.” At last he finds peace in the cool abstractions of Bach’s architectures in sound.

It’s a passage that always makes me think of Clarke’s own qualities as a writer. You won’t find rich characters in his works, nor any insight whatsoever into that elusive thing known as the Human Condition. When he tries to do that sort of thing, the results are always odd, like something written from the standpoint of an alien who doesn’t quite get the chaotic emotions of humanity. And sometimes it’s kind of creepy. Take our subject for today, Rendezvous with Rama, which postulates a society of the future in which plural marriage is the norm and the crew aboard a spaceship can engage in spirited orgies without it breeding jealousies or having any effect on their group cohesion. Like when reading Heinlein’s libertarian free-love fantasies, this stuff leaves me screaming at the pages that people just aren’t made that way — not to mention that it leaves out virtually everything that’s actually interesting to read about love and sex. Sex to Clarke is all clunky mechanical and chemical interactions. It’s little surprise that he waxes poetic on the “sexual overtones” of spaceship docking in 2010. (“The rugged, compact Russian ship did look positively male when compared with the delicate, slender American one.”)

So, no, you don’t read Clarke for his insights into the psyche. What you do read him for are his Big Ideas, and for a glimpse at the ineffable majesty of the universe in all its unfathomable immensity and improbable orderliness. Published in 1973 when Clarke was at the peak of his powers and popularity in the wake of the 2001 film and novel, Rendezvous with Rama shines despite the aforementioned embarrassing attempts at personalizing its rather abstract story. It shines so brightly, in fact, that’s it’s arguably the archetypical Clarke novel, the one to read if you want to appreciate who he was and why he is important through a single book.

Rama tells the story of an object which enters the solar system from interstellar space in the year 2131. At first observers assume the object, which they christen Rama, to be just another asteroid — albeit a large one, with a diameter of some 40 kilometers. When a probe is launched to take pictures, however, the truth is immediately obvious: Rama was made rather than formed. It’s a spaceship of some sort, humankind’s first visitor from the stars. It’s hastily determined that exactly one spacecraft, the Endeavor, can make rendezvous before Rama slingshots around the Sun and back out into the depths of interstellar space. The bulk of the novel tells of the Endeavor‘s crew’s methodical exploration of Rama’s interior. There are a few emergencies to spice things up, but mostly Clarke is content to revel in the sense of wonder of the occasion and the unknowable mystery that is Rama itself, which operates with all the austere and remorseless precision of a Bach fugue. The Endeavor is forced to leave to avoid being burned up as Rama nears perihelion with the Sun. As Rama does so it siphons energy from the Sun itself by a mysterious process. And then it’s gone, leaving behind more questions than it answered. Rama, it seems, never had any interest in Earth or its inhabitants; our solar system was merely a handy gas station on the road to who knows where.

Clarke’s refusal to do more than nick the outer layer of the onion of mysteries that is Rama is, as a thousand reviewers before me have already commented, kind of infuriating. Yet it’s also crucial to the veneer of believability that makes Rama’s wonders all the more wondrous for us the readers. Why should we expect to understand an alien culture advanced enough to build something like Rama after a few weeks of poking around inside a single artifact? The unsolved mysteries are actually key to a sense of awe that can only be diminished by reading the series of ill-advised sequels which Clarke farmed out to Gentry Lee in his latter years, which give us the answers we thought we wanted and in the process turn the story into just another mediocre space opera.

In addition to a sense of awe, Rendezvous with Rama also leaves us with with one humdinger of a setup for an adventure game. Rama‘s plot, such as it is, of exploring a conveniently deserted spaceship and trying to puzzle out how things work reads like it was written with the medium in mind. It thus served as ready inspiration for such early adventure games as Infocom’s Starcross. And thus when Byron Preiss started looking for books to adapt to interactive fiction Rendezvous with Rama was about the most obvious candidate imaginable, especially because Preiss already had an established professional and personal relationship with Clarke; Preiss had recently produced The Sentinel, a collection of nine vintage Clarke short stories, for Berkley Book’s Masterworks of Science Fiction and Fantasy series, and was currently helping him with an autobiography that would never actually emerge. The contract was quickly signed.

Like Fahrenheit 451 and Dragonworld, the other two of the initial group of Telarium games that originated with the imprint, Rendezvous with Rama was created by a new shell company Preiss and Spinnaker founded just for the purpose: Byron Preiss Video Productions. Spinnaker’s Chief Technology Officer, Dick Bratt, masterminded an ambitious and expensive cross-platform adventure-game engine called SAS, the Spinnaker Adventure System. His job was made more challenging by the fact that he needed to support not just text but also graphics, sounds, even embedded action games. Given Preiss’s history as a publisher of graphic novels and lavishly illustrated coffee-table books, this all-plus-the-kitchen-sink approach to computerized storytelling was a virtual inevitability. Bill Bowman, one of Spinnaker’s founding partners, described SAS in some detail in a Harvard Business School case study:

It has been an important investment, and gives us a competitive advantage nobody else has. It cost well over $1 million, but it enables us to take a script from an author, add some art work, and a secretary can translate it into SAL (Spinnaker Adventure Language) that we created here. It is a very complex computer program and a sophisticated graphics tool. The result is that we put the new game on the machine once, and automatically get versions for each of the different microcomputers we support. This cuts the development costs dramatically, because normally you have to rewrite the program for each version for a different computer. Another important advantage is that we have all versions ready for sale at the same time, and we can profit from advertising, and not lose sales. SAL is a part of SAS (Spinnaker Adventure System). The second part of SAS is a graphics tool, that takes a normal picture on paper and prepares programs for all the different computers that display it. We have something similar for music: our musician plays some music in a special organlike machine, and in less than an hour we have the computer code that will play that music, optimized for each microcomputer. Another very important saying is that we have to “play test” the programs only once. Testing is a very important cost; it can take between 200 and 400 hours to test all the options that one of these programs offers. We would have to do it for each version of the same program if they were programmed independently, as almost everybody else in the industry does. Thanks to the system, our production costs are now about a third of what they were one year ago. It is an enormous asset for us. Two or three companies, at most, have something similar for text, but nobody has anything like it for graphics and music in the whole industry, and these features are becoming more and more important.

Having spent some time dissecting the Telarium games, I feel pretty confident in saying how SAL works. All of the basic logic for the game is compiled to native code for the target platform, of which there were only an eventual four: the Commodore 64, Apple II, IBM PC, and Atari ST. This kernel of perhaps 30 to 35 K remains in memory all the time. All of the assets it needs, including the actual text that is displayed as well as pictures and music, are stored on the games’ multiple disk sides, to be swapped into memory as needed. (If the assets needed are not on the disk currently in the drive, the kernel simply puts up a prompt to ask for the one it needs.) Action games can be swapped in in place of the usual adventure kernel, which they simply reload when done. All of this could add up to quite a lot of data by the standards of the time. Telarium games spill across four or five disk sides on the Apple II and Commodore 64, a fact Spinnaker happily trumpeted in their advertising.

Ron Martinez

Arthur C. Clarke with Byron Preiss and David M. Harris, Telarium’s editor

The team that worked on Rendezvous with Rama included programmer Michael P. Meyer and illustrator Robert Strong, along with writer and designer Ronald Martinez, one of Preiss’s regular stable of writers who had cut his teeth on interactivity via a couple of volumes in the Be an Interplanetary Spy series of interactive children’s books. Arthur C. Clarke’s own participation was, at best, limited. He lived, as he had already for almost thirty years, in Sri Lanka, and traveled so reluctantly that when he agreed to host a British television series on unusual science phenomena he required that the film crew come to him. The Telarium folks met him in person just twice during their work on the game, when he set aside afternoons during his occasional trips Stateside for consultations on the upcoming film version of 2010 to chat with them and — one senses most importantly — pose for some press photos with them. (Had it not been for 2010, it’s questionable whether they would have met at all.) The rest of the time they communicated with him via telephone and, most commonly, email, thanks to a satellite linkup Clarke (who famously first proposed the idea of the geosynchronous communications satellite in 1945) had installed in his home in Sri Lanka. Martinez says they would “run things by him,” but admits that it was “never really clear how much he was understanding or how much he was really digging into it.” Clarke’s biggest role was to pose for those publicity photos and to furnish a suitable quote written (or ghost-written) just for the back of the box.

So, Martinez and team were largely left alone to do with Rendezvous with Rama what they would. What that should be was by no means entirely clear. The notion of bookware sounded great when first broached, but as soon as one started to really think about it some problematic aspects started to surface. Trying to slavishly recreate the plot of a book as a game was a technical impossibility. Interactive-fiction systems simply couldn’t handle the complexity of even the most simplistic of novels. Even Infocom’s games, the class of the industry, could manage only the sketchiest of plots to motivate their exploration and puzzle solving; suffice to say that none of their games would have made good books. No one had a good solution for the combinatorial explosion of possibilities that would be touched off as soon as the player deviated from the plot, yet neither was there much point in just forcing the player to recreate the events of the novel. And how to make the game interesting and challenging to players, many of whom were presumably there because they had already read the book on which the game was based and thus knew everything that happened in it? Other Telarium games tried to work around these questions in a variety of ways. Rendezvous with Rama, however, didn’t really bother; it’s the only of the first batch of games to settle for just retelling the same essential story in radically simplified fashion, with the obligatory excising of all reference to the Endeavor‘s crew’s sex lives and other modest content changes apparently more motivated by the need to not offend than anything else. (The most appreciated of these involves the simps, creepy genetically modified monkeys that the crew of the Endeavor use essentially as slaves for all menial tasks in the book. In the game, the simps thankfully become androids.)

In Telarium’s defense, the novel is, as already noted, almost absurdly amenable to adaptation as an adventure game. Still, it’s difficult indeed to excuse the lukewarm nature of the whole enterprise. Rama the novel is far from intricately plotted, but there is a dynamism to its version of Rama the spacecraft, which slowly comes to life as it draws nearer to the Sun: lights come on, strange mechanisms begin to hum with energy, the atmosphere warms, and, most fabulous of all, semi-organic automatons start to scuttle about for reasons that can only be surmised. None of these surprises unfold in the game. Rama is simply another static environment to be explored, of the sort we’d already seen in a thousand adventure games before. The limitations of the SAL engine may explain such failings, but it doesn’t excuse them. Infocom had been creating virtual worlds that evolved on large scales during play for years by the time of this game’s release.

Nor does Martinez seem all that enthused to tell us about said static world. Clarke is no poet, but his descriptions of Rama’s interior are suitably awe inspiring. Here’s how Captain Norton of the Endeavor glimpses the panorama for the first time:

With all his strength, he threw the little cylinder straight upward — or outward — and started to count seconds as it dwindled along the beam. Before he had reached the quarter minute, it was out of sight; when he had got to a hundred, he shielded his eyes and aimed the camera. He had always been good at estimating time; he was only two seconds off when the world exploded with light. And this time there was no cause for disappointment. Even the millions of candle power of the flare could not light up the whole of this enormous cavity, but he could see enough to grasp its plan and appreciate its titanic scale. He was at one end of a hollow cylinder at least ten kilometers wide, and of indefinite length. From his viewpoint at the central axis, he could see such a mass of detail on the curving walls surrounding him that his mind could not absorb more than a minute fraction of it. He was looking at the landscape of an entire world by a single flash of lightning, and he tried by a deliberate effort of will to freeze the image in his mind.

All around him, the terraced slopes of crater rose up until they merged into the solid wall that rimmed the sky. No— that impression was false; he must discard the instincts both of Earth and of space, and reorientate himself to a new system of co-ordinates.

The description then continues for several more paragraphs.

When we step inside the vast cylindrical cavity of Rama for the first time in the game, Martinez gives us this:

You are at RAMA’s somewhat flattened, northern hub. The floor around the hub curves up gradually to become RAMA’s inner walls. Radiating from the hub, 120 degrees apart, are three stairway-like structures. Each appears to be several kilometers long. Due to its configuration, it seems as though you are standing upright on the hub, with the passageway from the long corridor going down in relation to your current position.

There’s no sense of the momentousness of the occasion; Martinez manages to make the most wondrous archaeological expedition in human history seem boring. Yes, technical limitations made it impossible to indulge in the sort of long passages that Clarke could employ, but Dave Lebling did a better job in Starcross in the face of similar restrictions, and Pete Austen did a still better job in Snowball. And the pictures, which are largely all done in the same palette and all but indistinguishable from one another, show no more enthusiasm for their subjects.

All of this is particularly baffling in light of Telarium’s expressed plans to get beyond adventure games as static puzzle boxes. Yet that’s all that Rendezvous with Rama is. If I may speak anachronistically, it’s downright Myst-like, just a static, empty landscape with strange machines to manipulate and puzzle out. Character interaction is limited to the occasional message over your helmet speaker from one of your crewmates, and the ability to occasionally use them as a hint system by asking them to ADVISE.

Worse, it’s not a particularly good puzzle box, a huge disappointment considering that the scenario is positively teeming with puzzle possibilities (as a later Myst-like graphic game, Rama, would amply demonstrate). The vast interior of Rama is implemented as hundreds of individual, mostly empty rooms to be tediously trod through and mapped in the hopes of finding something, anything that you can actually do. When you find them, the puzzles themselves are sometimes interesting, but too often push the limits of the world model past the breaking point. That’s apparently not that hard to do; even some of the “puzzles” described in the novel that were seemingly lifted right out of an adventure game had to be simplified to make them work in this adventure game. Often you have to read Martinez’s mind along with his text to see exactly what he is seeing, as the text fails to clearly set the scene (usually a sign of a lack of testing). Take this description of the wall of a structure:

The rectangular building is about 20 meters tall and 10 wide. Its surface is like polished enamel. A single post rises from the roof, and there are small indentations in the wall you are facing.

I spent quite some fiddling with the indentations, sure they must be some mechanism for opening a door. But actually they’re handholds, for climbing. The text fails to convey that they go all the way up the wall. It’s a clever puzzle, as far as it goes. (It’s not as trivial as just climbing the wall; the handholds are too small — for you). But it’s ruined by the failure to, you know, clearly tell me what I’m actually seeing. The parser, which in general is not horrible but definitely more limited than Infocom’s, also makes puzzle solving harder by its lack of feedback. Virtually any invalid input is greeted with the blasé non sequitur “You reconsider your words.” And absolutely no attention is given to partially correct actions that could serve as hints, not to mention the Easter eggs that make Infocom games like Sorcerer such a delight. Nope, just “You reconsider your words” over and over again.

A purposelessness infects all of your wanderings. It’s clear in the abstract what your mission should be — to explore this huge spaceship — but it’s not clear what the game expects from you in that context. There is no scoring system or other way of measuring your progress. There is a timer which does represent one of the game’s few innovations. It counts down in real time, forerunner of quite a number of (mostly underwhelming) experiments with real-time elements that interactive-fiction makers would indulge in over the next several years. Still, even this innovation is undermined by the fact that you’re never told exactly how much time you have. In fact, you have so much time that it’s hard to imagine it ever becoming a real problem. Rama‘s other notable innovation, a couple of shoehorned action games, is problematic in conception and horrid in execution. Both are so bad that Telarium ripped them out of later versions of Rama out of sheer embarrassment.

It eventually emerges that you don’t have enough fuel to escape; you must find a source on Rama itself. This additional source of drama was not in the book, and is kind of absurd from a fictional standpoint, as it means that you’ve effectively been sent on a suicide mission. (Who would have imagined that fuel would conveniently be available on Rama?) But, hey, at least it’s motivation of a sort. If you jump through a truly improbable series of puzzly hoops you can eventually reach a much vaunted “new ending” to the story, in which you learn that — oh, no, not this trope again! — Rama is actually an elaborate intelligence test constructed by distant aliens to measure humanity’s worthiness for future contact. Not only does this idea rip off Starcross (where it was equally unsatisfying), but it also cuts off at the knees the central theme of Clarke’s novel that we humans just aren’t that important in the grand scheme of things. For a game that was supposed to be the herald of a new era of interactive fiction of serious literary merit, Rama‘s shabby, ham-handed take on the novel that inspired it is appalling.

So, no, Rendezvous with Rama is not a very good game. Even the supremely uncritical computer press of 1984 couldn’t bear to give it more than neutral reviews; “nothing special” wrote adventure superfan Shay Addams in Commodore Power Play in a typical example. Those who had been hostile to the entire idea of Telarium from the beginning must have been nodding along happily, having had all of their prejudices and low expectations justified. Luckily for us if somewhat more disconcertingly for them, most of Telarium’s other games would have a bit more to recommend them.

Perhaps the oddest outcome of Telarium’s Rendezvous with Rama was the subsequent career of the man responsible for all that dull text, Ronald Martinez. Whatever his failings on this project, Martinez became fascinated with the idea of interactive fiction, and determined to do it better than he had in this game. He learned how to program so as to work on a new suite of interactive-fiction technology, and eventually founded Trans Fiction Systems, an interactive-fiction development studio of his own whose parser was one of the few that could legitimately rival Infocom’s. We may just be running into him and his works again on this blog. When and if we do, I should have more positive things to say about both.

The Telarium story should also get more inspiring from here. In the meantime, the masochists and historians among you may want to download the Commodore 64 version of Rendezvous with Rama for yourselves.

(The same references I used for my introduction to Telarium and bookware mostly apply here. Jason Scott’s interview with Ron Martinez for Get Lamp was particularly useful for this article. The photos were taken from an article in the December 1984 Compute!’s Gazette.)

Comments
18 Responses

- fan and ghost editor

September 15, 2013 at 1:40 pm

>> after the malfunctioning supercomputer HAL as killed all of his crew mates

_has_killed?

- Jimmy Maher

September 15, 2013 at 1:43 pm

Thanks!

- Sig

September 15, 2013 at 2:30 pm

Weirdly, I don’t remember the sex lives of the crew at ALL in this book. Considering I first read it when I was perhaps 12, you’d think that would be something I would remember.

Rama II wasn’t entirely awful. I eventually read two more. You shouldn’t do that. Best, actually, to stick with the original.

- Keith Palmer

September 15, 2013 at 5:36 pm

I had exactly that “I don’t remember that” reaction to the future sex lives of the book being mentioned. Maybe I’m willing to excuse the thought of it, anyway, with the impression of science fiction authors seeing that general literature was now more free to deal with the general topic and thinking “we have to extrapolate!”

Given the list of platforms the Telarium games were available on (I was intrigued to see the Atari ST as the last addition, but I suppose it’ll be a while before we get to that computer) I was a little interested that the picture of Arthur C. Clarke had him sitting in front of what looks to me to be an Atari 800.

- Jimmy Maher

September 16, 2013 at 6:33 am

This stuff is definitely in the background, but it’s there. At the end of the novel, Norton gets it on with his on-again/off-again shipboard partner, Dr. Laura Ernst.

“This situation, he knew, was doubtless being repeated throughout the ship. Even though they were weeks from home, the end-of-mission orbital orgy would be in full swing.”

Elsewhere it’s mentioned that sexual mores aboard ship are anything goes “as long as you don’t scare the simps.” It’s certainly implied that partners left back home are perfectly okay with this, and presumably themselves marking time with others while they wait.

I do kind of feel that Clarke added this out of a sense of obligation. Post-New Wave and post-Dangerous Visions, science fiction was expected to engage with social concerns, including sex. The impression I get is of a somewhat doughty Golden Age-er just trying to keep up. His discomfort with it almost radiates off the page for me. (This in marked contrast to Heinlein, for whom these themes were really, profoundly important.) To say that it’s not exactly in his wheelhouse as a writer hardly begins to state the case…

An argument might be made that societies and their mores do indeed involve, if only these weren’t so obviously 20th-century people transported into the future. Witness how all of them seem to be obsessed with some aspect of 20th-century or earlier culture, so that Clarke can shoehorn in lots of understandable references to films, books, and history we all know.

Another thing that always amuses me: reference is made to the Endeavor’s crew’s active sex lives aboard ship, but the only actual female crewmember we ever meet or hear mentioned is Dr. Laura. Sexual mores must have REALLY changed. :)

- John Elliott

September 16, 2013 at 7:49 pm

I’ve just checked my copy (Orbit 1991 edition), and the particular sentence about the ‘orbital orgy’ isn’t present. It just goes straight from “Anyway, you’re off duty now.” to “Now what are you thinking?”, with only a section break in between. My recollection is that it’s like that in all the editions I’ve read. This may account for some of the differing recollections in this thread.

- Jimmy Maher

September 17, 2013 at 6:19 am

Strange. I’ve never heard anything about a new edition of Rama. I pulled that passage from the current Kindle edition…

- John Elliott

September 15, 2013 at 8:57 pm

I don’t remember any mention of spirited orgies either. There is multiple marriage, though: Commander Norton has two wives (on different planets), and two other crewmen are not only in a stable relationship with each other, but are also both married to the same woman. From Norton’s thoughts, that sort of fully triangular relationship doesn’t seem to be particularly common.

- Jon Werner

September 18, 2013 at 10:46 pm

This is very timely since I actually just finished reading Rendezvous with Rama two weeks ago. Anyway, the text Jimmy quotes was in my e-book edition, and as you can see from the Google Books preview, can also be found on page 242 of the December 1990 Bantam mass paperback edition.

- iPadCary

September 16, 2013 at 12:11 am

Usual exemplary job, Jimmy!
2 things ….

1] Is RWR available for Frotz?
2] If anyone’s interested in the “Compute! Gazette” issue used for this article, it’s here:
http://archive.org/details/1984-12-computegazette

- Jimmy Maher

September 16, 2013 at 6:36 am

No, the Telarium games were written using a completely different development system from Infocom’s. The only way to play them today is via an emulator of one of their original platforms.

- Olivier Guinart

September 16, 2013 at 10:09 pm

+1 on not remembering any of the frisky lives of the crew. I was a kid at that time so it might have gone over my head.

No frustration on my end about the story, or the end, nor anything: Clarke has done a great job with the ship size description and it was like if I was there, in awe. And how the ship “awakes” was also captivating. I liked the book a lot and just wanted to move to its sequel.

About the game itself, thank you for your review. From the above experience with the book, I was always curious of the game adaptation, but not so much anymore now.

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- iPadCary

September 21, 2013 at 8:42 pm

Kind of off-topic, Jimmy, but have you seen this yet?
“JAWS: The Text Adventure”
http://toys.usvsth3m.com/jaws/

- Jimmy Maher

September 22, 2013 at 8:36 am

Cute. :)

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- Brian Quigley

December 20, 2013 at 8:29 pm

I just finished re-reading Rendezvous with Rama. I read it back in the 70’s or early 80’s and remembered how powerfully it drew me into the story. In the re-read, the draw was equally as compelling and I read it in two evenings. I had forgotten anything to do with the crew and I had even forgotten how it had ended. So I was somewhat startled at Clarke’s portrayal of the sexual lives of the crew, as I would have thought that I would have remembered those orgies, three-way marriages, etc., but I didn’t recall them at all. The other thing that I noticed was the religious cult of Jesus as an alien and that cult’s thought that Rama was an ark for those in the Solar System that would be judged as worthy to be saved. Implying that all others would perish. That is why the one crewman was willing to risk his life to deactivate the nuke from Mercury.
Any story ever written has points that we could pick at, however few authors have ever been able to keep me as engrossed in his story as this one.

- Peter Piers

September 28, 2015 at 7:23 pm

“(usually a sign of a lack of testing). ”

You can see it coming, though. They were so proud of “cutting down on testing” on their “maniphest”, where they explain how it all works.

Reading that thing was like watching an accident about to happen.

Fahrenheit 451: The Book
September 23, 2013

(For those of you reading in real-time: I recently was fortunate enough to exchange some emails with C. David Seuss, Spinnaker’s co-founder and president. He filled in some gaps for me, and also pointed me to a Harvard Business School case study that filled in some more. If you’re deeply interested in our current theme, you might want to look back over the previous two articles. There’s nothing new that is really earth-shattering, but I was able to fix a minor error or two and add a few more details on Spinnaker’s history and particularly the SAS development system used for most of the Telarium games.)

Ray Bradbury enjoys by far the best literary reputation amongst science-fiction writers of the Golden Age. Certainly he’s the only one you’re likely to find on a high-school English syllabus. If you’re feeling cynical, you can attribute much of his reputation to a chance meeting with Christopher Isherwood in a bookstore in 1950. When Bradbury showed considerable chutzpah in pushing a signed copy of his book The Martian Chronicles upon him, Isherwood for some reason actually read it and wrote a glowing reviewing heralding this “very great and unusual talent.” “I doubt if he could pilot a rocket ship, much less design one,” wrote Isherwood, thereby granting Bradbury his bona fides as a suitably scientifically inept literary writer, and making him the only science-fiction writer it was acceptable for the intelligentsia to read despite a bibliography that consisted mostly of the likes of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Weird Tales.

But of course attributing Bradbury’s reputation entirely to one English intellectual’s approbation would be unfair. He was — or eventually flowered into — just about the only one of his peers aware of a deeper, richer literary tradition than the one that began with the first issue of Amazing Stories in 1926, the only one who tried to craft beautiful — as opposed to merely functional — prose. He has some entertainingly pulpy adventure stories to his credit and some more labored but lyrical stories, as well as one novel of childhood, Dandelion Wine, that isn’t science fiction at all. Still, his bibliography of truly canonical works is fairly thin for an important writer who claimed to have written every single day for more than seventy years. For all his continuing literary reputation, most of his work after 1962’s Something Wicked This Way Comes was politely received and just as quickly forgotten amongst both genre and literary fans.

Bradbury’s most famous work, Fahrenheit 451, dates to 1953. It’s a book which kind of fascinates me but also frustrates the living hell out of me. If you somehow escaped it in English class, know that Fahrenheit 451 is the story of a fireman named Guy Montag who lives in a future where that profession doesn’t mean what you think it does: firemen now start fires rather than put them out. Specifically, their mission is to burn books, which never caused anyone anything but trouble anyway and have now been replaced by television and other more easy-going entertainments. This mission is considered so essential that houses are built from a special flame-proof material, not out of concern about conventional fire safety but because it makes it easier for the firemen to come and burn any stray books with a minimum of fuss. Because every dystopian novel needs a doomed rebel against the system, Montag grows disillusioned with his profession, and eventually joins the literary underground struggling to keep the flame of knowledge alive. His means of disillusionment is — in another fine dystopian tradition — a girl, a teenage neighbor named Clarisse. And this is where I first start to get really annoyed. Bradbury has been credited, with some truth, with foreshadowing or even inspiring everything from 24-hour news as entertainment to the Sony Walkman in Fahrenheit 451. I’ve never, however, seen him properly credited for his most insidious creation: the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl was first labelled as such by Nathan Rabin in a review of the movie Elizabethtown for the Onion’s AV Club. She has no real existence of her own; we never learn her hopes or fears or anything of her inner life. Her whole purpose rather revolves around the brooding male she has apparently been sent from Manic Pixie Heaven to save through the sheer force of her quirky charm. “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” Rabin writes, “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” We can add “sensitive young science-fiction writers” to that sentence.

The rain was thinning away and the girl was walking in the center of the sidewalk with her head up and the few drops falling on her face. She smiled when she saw Montag.

“Hello!”

He said hello and then said, “What are you up to now?”

“I’m still crazy. The rain feels good. I love to walk in it.”

“I don’t think I’d like that,” he said.

“You might if you tried.”

“I never have.”

She licked her lips. “Rain even tastes good.”

“What do you do, go around trying everything once?” he asked.

“Sometimes twice.” She looked at something in her hand.

“What’ve you got there?” he said.

“I guess it’s the last of the dandelions this year. I didn’t think I’d find one on the lawn this late. Have you ever heard of rubbing it under your chin? Look.” She touched her chin with the flower, laughing.

“Why?”

“If it rubs off, it means I’m in love. Has it?”

He could hardly do anything else but look.

“Well?” she said.

“You’re yellow under there.”

“Fine! Let’s try you now.”

“It won’t work for me.”

“Here.” Before he could move she had put the dandelion under his chin. He drew back and she laughed. “Hold still!”

She peered under his chin and frowned.

“Well?” he said.

“What a shame,” she said. “You’re not in love with anyone.”

I’m sure that for certain people — probably mostly romantic boys of about the age when Fahrenheit 451 is most often assigned in school — Clarisse reads as delightful. As for me, I find it hard to believe that a married 33-year-old man wrote this tripe that sounds like something I might have written for my high-school creative-writing class. Even making due allowance for different times, passages like this make it hard for me to see Bradbury as the serious writer Isherwood and others would have me believe him to be.

But if we don’t want to place Bradbury alongside Joyce and Orwell as one of the twentieth century’s greatest, what do we want to do with him? I tend to go down the same road as Bryan Curtis, who claimed that Bradbury was not so much a great writer full stop as a great pulp writer. Fahrenheit 451 is… well, it’s a silly book really. This is a world where Benjamin Franklin is honored as the supposed first book burner; where a bunch of maintenance workers who if they lived in our world would be changing the oil in your car come out to do a quick blood exchange on someone who’s taken a few too many pills; where teenage joy-riders run over pedestrians just for fun with no consequences; where semi-robotic, semi-organic Mechanical Hounds chase fugitives through the streets. All of this is described in luridly purple prose that wouldn’t be out of place in a Roger Corman script — or a computer-game instruction manual. A Mechanical Hound, resting after a hard day on the job: “It was like a great bee come home from some field where the honey is full of poison wildness, of insanity and nightmare, its body crammed with that over-rich nectar and now it was sleeping the evil out of itself.” You’re trying way too hard, Ray…

It’s all so over the top that it makes Fahrenheit 451 kind of fun to read, despite the fact that there’s not a hint of conscious humor in the book. Compared to the masterpiece of dystopian literature, Nineteen Eight-Four, it’s just not even operating on the same level. Orwell’s world is horrifying because it is believable; Bradbury’s is anything but. Every sentence Orwell writes is taut, considered; Bradbury just sort of gushes everywhere, piling on the adjectives until sentences threaten to buckle under their weight. The same goes for his other building blocks: he piles on a nuclear war from out of nowhere at the end of the book because, hey, why not add to the dystopian litany? I’m not sure I’m prepared to accept that Bradbury was a better writer than Clarke, Asimov, or Heinlein. I just think he was trying harder to be a good writer (in the sense that would lead to acceptance by Isherwood and his peers) than they were. Bradbury post-Isherwood dearly wanted to leave the pulps behind; he allegedly begged his publisher to remove the words “science fiction” from his books entirely. Yet the pulps remained at the core of who he was as a writer, at least when he was at his best. The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951) are my favorite books by him because their style is still easy, relatively unaffected by the call to Literature. Fahrenheit 451, unfortunately, often all but buries its pulpy fun elements underneath all that bloated verbiage.

Still, it’s possible to read Fahrenheit 451 as neither an endeavor in serious world-building nor pulpy adventure, but as an allegory about the threat posed to books and, well, thoughtfulness in general by mass media and the technology that enables it — as, in other words, Bradbury’s version of Animal Farm rather than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Certainly this is the most sympathetic way to approach it today if we’re determined to label it Great Literature, even as we remain in doubt whether that was really Bradbury’s intention.

Bradbury was always more than a bit of a Luddite. In later years he railed against the Internet and computers as only a reactionary old man can, displaying breathtaking ignorance in saying a computer was nothing but a glorified typewriter, and he already had two of them. Similarly, his target in the 1950s was television. Yes, there are ways in which Fahrenheit 451 feels shockingly prescient: the clamshell earphones people use to isolate themselves from the world even when out and about in public; the elaborate home-theater setups in every house; the ATM machines. And the questions Bradbury raises are profoundly worth asking still — in fact, more than ever — today, when everyone seems more and more wedded to their Facebook and Twitter accounts and less and less able to just enjoy the proverbial breeze on their cheeks, able to simply be in the non-electronic world of people and physical sensation. It’s also important to note that the dystopia of Fahrenheit 451, unlike that of Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a populist dystopia. The people have brought this world upon themselves, and fundamentally want things to be this way.

But of course for every point on this chain of thought there’s a counterpoint. If Twitter is a network of narcissistic celebrities and would-be celebrities tweeting about what they had for lunch, it’s also a way for activists in totalitarian countries to communicate outside the reach of the government. If email and the Internet isolate us from our neighbors, they have also opened up a new era of international communication and understanding, not just among the elites and heads of state but amongst ordinary kids in high schools and universities around the world. Perhaps the kindest thing I can say about Fahrenheit 451 in what I know has hardly been a glowing review is that it can lead us to think about these issues seriously. That Bradbury saw so much of the future in which we now live in 1953 is indeed remarkable. I just wish all of his arguments about it weren’t so muddled.

I’m a huge lover of books, so I ought to be very sympathetic toward Fahrenheit 451‘s defense of literature. Actually, however, I find it rather wrong-headed in that it misses everything that is personally important to me about literature. The rebellion that Montag finally joins at the end of the novel is made up of aging professors and other erudite types who have each memorized a classic work of literature, to be passed on to future generations of rebels and preserved until humanity decides it is ready for it again. Beyond representing a wonderfully interesting game of Chinese whispers, this scheme bothers me because it treats books as objects to be mothballed away, a static canon of Great Works held sacrosanct. It’s another sign of the conservative, even reactionary viewpoint from which Bradbury writes — a viewpoint I just don’t share and don’t ever want to. I’m for a living literature of creativity and reinvention; I’d rather watch a bunch of Italian prisoners put on an earthy performance of Julius Caesar that really matters to their own lives than watch a meticulously researched reproduction of the Elizabethan theater experience put on by a bunch of fussy scholars — to say nothing of those bores who pride themselves on pulling out an out-of-context Shakespeare quote for every occasion. Bradbury’s rebels should be spending at least as much time creating new books as preserving those that have gone before. The health of a culture is measured not by the size of its museums but by the creative life out there on its streets. And no, the irony of someone who calls himself the Digital Antiquarian writing this is not entirely lost on me. Suffice to say that museums and preservation are important too, but will never be as beautiful as a kid who picks up pen, paintbrush, instrument, or computer for the first time.

Bradbury continually confuses books as physical objects with the idea of books or, if you like, ideas. Frustratingly, at times he does seem to get the distinction:

Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

In another place he rails against what a later generation would come to call political correctness:

Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.

Yet, as he himself noted in the more lucid passage that precedes this one, all of these ideas can be conveyed by other means than paper and print. Nor are all books by some inherent property of the form challenging or enlightening. The bestseller rolls and airport newsstands are filled with volumes that are neither. And what of challenging films, television, even, yes, computer games? How are these things controlled when the firemen are obsessed only with paper books, any and all of them? With all due respect to Marshall McLuhan, the medium is not always the message.

Fahrenheit 451 is a stew of conflated ideas about censorship, the decline of reading, technology, media, government, nuclear apocalypse, even automobiles. Heady, worthwhile topics all, but it’s hard to pull one thing apart from another, hard to extract a cogent point of view on anything. Perhaps the book’s secret weapon is that it’s hard to find anything solid enough in this amorphous mass to really kick against. Bradbury himself became an expert at weaving and dodging through criticisms of the book as times and interlocutors changed. One year he was writing an afterword that was all about censorship in current times; a few years later Fahrenheit 451 wasn’t about censorship at all. The only ideas we can fully get our hands around are thoroughly banal: books are good, burning them is bad; everything’s going to hell with the younger generation.

The latter has been key to the book’s popularity with disgruntled authority figures everywhere, just as the pulpy fun and melodrama makes it appealing to teenagers. If it’s not ultimately a great book, it’s certainly one with something to appeal to a lot of different people, which made it a pretty good target for adaptation into a commercial computer game. We’ll see how that fared next time.

Comments
18 Responses

- Felix

September 23, 2013 at 1:20 pm

What, no link to TVTropes? Here goes: Manic Pixie Dream Girl. (Warning: deep rabbit hole. Proceed with caution.)

Anyway, I’d say that Fahrenheit 451 is a catchy book in retrospect; you don’t really have time to stop and ponder the absurdities while you’re reading. (I have to give it to Bradbury, he wasn’t prone to writing reams of pointless prose. Purple prose, yes, but that’s what critics like; except they call it literary fiction.) Well, except for that bit about the “book people” — I kept wondering why they weren’t simply working to preserve the book themselves, and duplicate them by any means possible. And I was pretty shocked to learn that the book was ranting against TV and not conformity — the medium, and not what people do with it. Some people are just born old I guess.

Speaking of that, there’s a prediction you missed: remember those improv sessions Montag’s wife plays with her friends over video? Nowadays we’d call it LARP. I wonder what Bradbury thought about that one coming through, assuming he ever knew…

- Jimmy Maher

September 24, 2013 at 11:15 am

I suggested that the Underground simply archive books onto film in a draft of this article, since the medium is apparently more important than the message to the firemen. But I decided that was a bit TOO snarky… :)

- Felix

September 25, 2013 at 5:19 am

Ah, but that’s already very high-tech. Mom used to simply transcribe by hand her favorite passages from borrowed books that she had to return. Which, incidentally, also helps a lot with memorization. You’d think the method would occur to a writer…

As for how effective that would be, one word: Samizdat. But maybe that was unheard of in the West back then…

- David Boddie

September 23, 2013 at 2:45 pm

Two minor corrections in the penultimate paragraph : “proceeds” -> “precedes” and “afterward” -> “afterword”.

A thought-provoking article. Thanks for writing it!

- Jimmy Maher

September 23, 2013 at 3:00 pm

Thanks! Just need a spell checker that knows what I mean…

- Scott M. Bruner

September 23, 2013 at 9:04 pm

“Suffice to say that museums and preservation are important too, but will never be as beautiful as a kid who picks up pen, paintbrush, instrument, or computer for the first time.”

I’d say they’re the same – the kid (or whoever) isn’t likely to pick up pen, paintbrush, or keyboard & mouse in a world which doesn’t value art and literature. Or hasn’t become inspired by it. Bradbury became a writer – not through a college education – but by going to the library every day and become absolutely enraptured with the worlds he found there on the shelves.

The Society in 451 no longer puts any merit on the histories of literary tradition, instead opting for a celebration of a materialistic, disposable culture.

There’s plenty of kids picking up pens and paint in 451, but they’re creating the hollow dioramas on the super sized screens, because they’ve missed out on the breadth, context, and wealth of our literary history.

Bradbury was a strong proponent of creating, as he was, of the those bound instruments that had brought him personally so much joy.

Bradbury was an unrepentant sentimentalist, and you can’t read any of these books without knowing that – to some, like me who shares that feature, his uncompromised celebration of books and classic literature is beautiful. I get, to others, it’s a curmudgeonly, stubborn exercise in futility, perhaps – but I can’t stop loving him railing with his fist at the sky to “get off the Internet lawn.”

Despite 1984’s intellectual superiority – and better examination of class/structure/totalitarianism, 451 always has and will be the better book – because I feel so much closer to the characters, and I’ve always felt 451 (look at how much has come true, from the size of our sets to the disposable culture to the American resentment of the intellect) was much closer to reality.

Confession: Ray’s my favorite writer.

- Scott M. Bruner

September 23, 2013 at 11:56 pm

I meant to say, *I feel* like 451 always will and will be the better novel.

- Jimmy Maher

September 24, 2013 at 6:38 am

Thanks for providing such an eloquent (and probably needed) counterpoint. Bradbury is obviously far from my own favorite writer, although I can still read his early stories with pleasure. (“There Will Come Soft Rains” is a masterpiece.)

- Felix

September 25, 2013 at 5:32 am

Luckily, reality turned out to be the other way around. People — especially young people — are reading more than ever before. And writing more than ever before. And books — printed books, no less — remain a powerful, universally recognizable cultural symbol even as various electronic media are already going the way of the dodo.

On the other hand, here we are under total surveillance, all of us, all the time. Funny how that happened.

- Odkin

September 24, 2013 at 6:30 am

Boy, you’re really off the mark on this one. I guess that mawkish sentimentality and charming old-fashioned romantic notions are unbearably…. gauche… to a Gen-X ex-pat Euro-sophisticate who affects a “take that, patriarchy!” “she” for every pronoun.

I find most paranoid screeds about censorship to be annoying, but 451 isn’t so much about the evil power of some bogeyman, but about the sadness of loss and forgetting all the memories that used to only exist in books.

And at 52 with 30 years of marriage to one, I still think that Manic Pixie Dream Girls are the best :-)

- L

September 27, 2013 at 5:06 pm

A manic pixie dream girl, as the term is widely defined, does not exist outside of her role in inspiring the menfolk around her. She does not have aspirations of her own, or character traits beyond a sort of vague feyness or whatever her menfolk happen to find attractive at this moment. She probably does not poop or menstruate, for example, or read anything that isn’t (coincidentally!) by her man’s favorite author.

Do you really think of your wife this way? Do you think she’d agree?

(I’m not even going to touch that pronoun comment.)

- Duncan Stevens

September 24, 2013 at 8:12 pm

I read Fahrenheit 451 as a teenager and enjoyed it; I don’t recall being put off by purple prose. But I also picked up Something Wicked This Way Comes a while back, and the writing was turgid enough that I couldn’t get very far into it. Not sure if Bradbury’s prose had gotten worse by then. (And I also reread Martian Chronicles as an adult, as well as one of his books of short stories, and both held up fine.)

- ZUrlocker

September 27, 2013 at 3:14 am

I also read Fahrenhit 451 when I was in high school and I quite enjoyed it. Certainly the text you quoted is quite silly but I don’t think it put me off. I read 1984 a few years later and found that to be more sophisticated, but still accessible to a teenager. And some years later I read The Martian Chronicles and found that to be quite enjoyable. I can’t say I ever thought of Bradbury as literature, but then, that’s not really been my taste anyways.

I thought your take on it was interesting, but it seemed like a bit of a strawman to argue against the literary quality of an SF writer. You could make the same arguments against much of Kurt Vonnegut’s works, but I still enjoyed them immensely in my 20s.
–Zack

- Howard Lewis Ship

September 25, 2013 at 4:54 pm

Wow! I get to take the low, low, low, road:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1IxOS4VzKM

- Victor Gijsbers

September 27, 2013 at 11:46 pm

Do you really consider Orwell to be one of the greatest writers of the century? 1984 is an important and interesting book; but I’d hesitate to call it great literature. For instance: Bradbury’s might be worse, but Orwell’s romance subplot and characterisation of the romantic interest isn’t a high point either.

- Jimmy Maher

September 28, 2013 at 7:48 am

Okay, “greatest” is maybe too strong a term, particularly because there was so much written in the twentieth century and I’m woefully unfamiliar with most of the stuff widely considered good. If “one of my personal favorites” is judged irrelevant, “most important” I think I could still make a pretty substantial argument for. Not just in 1984 but also in Animal Farm and lesser known works like Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell (fore)saw the world in ways few others could, and then proceeded to describe his observations in compelling ways that really did make the political personal. And he’s able to point out the real horrors without getting hung up on stuff he simply doesn’t personally like (like television) or retreating into cranky roll-back-the-clock conservatism.

I don’t see much of an analogue between Clarisse and Julia. While Clarisse apparently dances on four-leaf clovers and bathes in buttermilk, Julia is an earthy, real human being. To borrow from another commenter, she most definitely poops and menstruates. No, she’s no intellectual, and no, she’s not really a romantic or even terribly likable figure, but that’s kind of the point. Sex is her way of rebelling, the only concrete thing she can do. Orwell shows through her how a totalitarian system strips people down to the most desperate essence — even (or perhaps most) those fighting against it — and how the personal really does become the political.

And I wouldn’t call Winston and Julia’s relationship a “romantic subplot.” It’s not romantic, being unabashedly sexual; there’s little reason to think these people would be together in a different, better world. And it’s not a subplot; it’s the core driver of events in the book, at least until they are captured. (That “You are the dead” bit, by the way, is still the most chilling thing I’ve ever read. I’ll never forget how I jumped the first time I read the book.)

- Petter Sjölund

September 29, 2013 at 2:20 pm

When I read Fahrenhit 451 as a child one remark by Clarisse really made me flinch. I don’t have the exact quote, but she speaks approvingly of having been spanked by her parents when she was naughty. This seemed to be the explanation to why she became such a great person.

Otherwise I remember quite liking the book, and I loved many of Ray Bradbury’s short stories, especially those in The October Country.

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Fahrenheit 451: The Game
September 27, 2013

At the beginning of Fahrenheit 451 the game you learn that the nuclear apocalypse that ended the book turned out to not be so apocalyptic after all. It seems the country just got knocked around a bit. Now you’re in New York City looking to continue your rebellion against the book burners in charge of things and hopefully in the process rescue Clarisse, whom your sources tell you is still alive and being held prisoner somewhere in the city; it seems she’s gone from Manic Pixie Dream Girl to hardened resistance fighter.

Going west or north from the starting location gets you instantly killed by some of the fauna that now inhabits Central Park. Obviously that pile of leaves must be the ticket. Or is it?

>move leaves
Can't understand that.

>look under leaves
This is the southeast corner of Central Park. There is a clearing, with a pond to the west and a path leading north along the shore of the pond.

>push leaves
Can't understand that.

>get leaves
Nothing happens.

After ten more minutes of this sort of thing, you might find the magic verb at last…

>kick leaves
Under the leaves you see an old, rusted grating set into a patch of broken concrete.

To call this beginning of Instadeath combined with Parser Fun inauspicious hardly begins to state the case. What a surprise, then, when the game that follows turns into a worthy design with exactly the spark of passion and innovation that is so conspicuously missing in Rendezvous with Rama. If only the parser didn’t continue to undermine it at every turn…

Byron Preiss and Ray Bradbury first worked together on a book called Dinosaur Tales, which combined a number of old and new Bradbury stories on one of his favorite subjects with Preiss’s signature approach to books as lavishly illustrated objects d’art. When the Telarium project began, Preiss was able not only to convince him to sign a contract for the adaptation of his most famous book but also to involve himself in the project a bit more than Arthur C. Clarke would in Rendezvous with Rama: he wrote a summary of the book to be printed inside the game box, and did some interviews just to promote it. Telarium claimed that he also contributed “ideas” to the project, although that phrase is vague enough to mean almost anything; he did frankly state in one interview that he “wasn’t interested in doing the work himself,” would “trust his longtime friend Preiss to render the work faithfully.”

So, Fahrenheit 451 the game fell to Byron Preiss Video Productions, the shell company he and Spinnaker had set up that also created Rendezvous with Rama and Dragonworld from scratch. Preiss installed another veteran of his Be an Interplanetary Spy book series, Len Neufeld, as designer and writer. Being built with the same technology and employing many of the same programmers, artists, and composers as Rendezvous with Rama, Fahrenheit 451 is inevitably superficially similar in flavor to that game. Certainly the two games have plenty of disadvantages in common, including a stubborn and uninformative parser (the slightly less infuriating “Can’t understand that” replacing “You reconsider your words” as Fahrenheit 451‘s error message of choice) and pictures that sometimes look like little more than a smear of discolored pixels (with an ugly brown replacing an ugly blue as Fahrenheit 451‘s hue of choice). Fahrenheit 451 at least lacks Rendezvous with Rama‘s horrid action games. More importantly, it acquits itself far better by engaging with the themes and ideas of its source material rather than just the window dressing of stage set and plot outline. As blogger Dale Dobson noted in his post on the game, it “takes itself, and its inspiration, seriously, and that is to be commended.”

By making the game a sequel to the novel rather than a recreation, Neufeld is freed to create a design that plays in Bradbury’s world with many of Bradbury’s themes but that also works as an adventure game. You have the run of about twenty blocks of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, an area the team knew well; New York City was the home of Neufeld, Preiss, and, most of Preiss’s people. By setting the game in his home town and including famous landmarks like the Plaza Hotel and Tiffany’s, Neufeld manages to make the setting of Fahrenheit 451 feel like a real place, an impression aided by just enough elements of simulation: time passes and day cycles to night, Mechanical Hounds patrol up and down the street on a regular schedule, stores open and close and people come and go from their apartments. You must also eat occasionally and manage your money (which you’ll also need to find more of to complete the game).

The writing is more than solid; it’s sometimes downright lyrical. It’s not afraid to stretch to several paragraphs when the situation calls for it and never feels written down to a computer-game audience. Exploring the world, always one of if not the core pleasure of adventure gaming, is especially pleasurable here, as is solving a collection of interesting puzzles that are always logical and fair. Your ultimate goal is to penetrate the New York Public Library. Your immediate reason for doing so is to rescue Clarisse, who is being held prisoner there, but the goal also has symbolic significance in a game all about the pleasures and importance of books. No, there’s not much of a real story to speak of beyond that goal. And yes, there are a hundred problems I could poke at if we insist on judging the game as a coherent work of fiction, like the way that just about everyone in the whole city seems to be in the Underground, or how Clarisse now seems to be an entirely different person from the one we knew in the book. But this isn’t a book. It’s an adventure game, whose pleasures are anchored in exploring a landscape both physical and mental rather than plot. And the mood of the book is always very present. At the end, you must choose between abandoning the cause and enjoying life with Clarisse or sacrificing yourself on the altar of Literature, a perfect echo of the book’s contrasting of the comfort and superficial happiness of (Bradbury’s perception of) television with the dangerous ideas of the great books.

Many of the puzzles are of the conventional object-oriented stripe — you need this to do that, but to get it you need to find a way to do this, etc. — but the central spine of the design once again finds a way to connect with the themes of the book. You need the assistance of the various members of the Underground who are scattered around the city, but talking with them usually requires a password in the form of a literary quotation. So you spend a lot of your time hunting down and deploying these quotations, which run the gamut from the Song of Solomon to Moby Dick to the inevitable four from Shakespeare. In purely mechanical terms, it’s just another system of magic words, no more complicated or interesting than Adventure‘s PLUGH and XYZZY. Thematically, however, it’s brilliant, especially because the quotes always have something to connect them to the situation or person on which they must be used — even if that something is sometimes only obvious in retrospect. Many were supposedly chosen by Bradbury himself. Indeed, whatever his actual involvement with the development of Fahrenheit 451 the game, Bradbury the author is thoroughly present in it.

Ray Bradbury with his toys

I actually mean that literally as well as metaphorically. Amidst lots to do and discover, you can find “Ray’s” phone number and call him up. He helps with a puzzle or two directly, but also shares his thoughts on any of the literary quotes you care to ask him about, and will shoot the breeze in the form of a random anecdote if you just TALK TO him. I generally don’t have a lot of patience with the man-child persona Bradbury had by this time well established for his many interviewers. I find it affected and, well, childish, and his art, also long since established by 1984, of sounding profound without actually saying anything drives me nuts. There’s some of that here, but Neufeld and company curate him pretty well; he’s actually fun and interesting to listen to. Most of his responses are phrased as if he’s answering a question you just posed — a neat, verisimilitudes trick that requires a mere modicum of suspension of disbelief.

We’re all terminally ill. Sickness is merely a factor, like money.

Japanese, Italian, French, Chinese, and other East Asian (Thai, Korean, Philippine, etc.), Middle Eastern — when you`re hungry, everything`s good.

Favorite films? King Kong, Fantasia, Citizen Kane.

I told you — my favorite play is St. Joan.

Moby Dick, Tarzan, and Grapes of Wrath are my favorite books. I also love the stories of Hemingway and Poe.

Many of my early stories were published in the magazine Weird Tales in the early thirties and forties.

My love affair with dinosaurs has lasted as long as my affair with Mars.

Such little extras abound. You can REMEMBER snippets of prose from the original novel; in addition to Ray, you can also call many other people from the handy phone booths, most of whom aren’t strictly needed but all of whom add a touch of atmosphere or something to think about; there are alternate solutions to puzzles and many paths to victory.

I wish I could wrap up this article right here, with the final note that, while I find Fahrenheit 451 the novel rather overrated, this game is not only great fun to play but also left me feeling a bit more kindly disposed toward its inspiration and even its inspiration’s author. Alas, I can’t do that, for reasons I first broached at the beginning of this article.

The parser, you see, ruins everything. Telarium wants and claims it to be a full-sentence jobber to rival Infocom’s, but it barely seems to parse at all, just to match arbitrary sequences of words. (Yes, I have to take back what I said in an earlier article about Telarium’s parser being “adequate.”) The fact that it will accept more than two words just compounds the problem, adding a nice dose of combinatorial explosion when you’re trying to figure out what to type at the thing. Worst of all, it’s not consistent in its whims. Sometimes you must TALK <character>; sometimes you must TALK TO <character>; sometimes you must ASK <character>. Synonyms are virtually nonexistent. There’s a character named Emile Ungar whom you can only refer to as “Ungar” — not “Emile,” not “Emile Ungar.” Similar situations are absolutely everywhere. I was having a great experience with the game until I got stuck and turned to the walkthrough, whereupon I found that I had actually solved every single puzzle I’d found so far. I just hadn’t typed the exact phrasing that the parser wanted.

I can hardly express how disheartening this is to me. At one point I was ready to call Fahrenheit 451 the best non-Infocom adventure game I’d yet played for this blog. Now I can’t even really recommend it at all. What’s doubly frustrating is that the game doesn’t absolutely need a better parser per se; none of these puzzles require complicated parser interactions. Telarium just needed to put the game before testers for a week or so, to note what they tried to type and add those phrasings to the pattern matcher. As it is, it feels like a game that only its creators, who had the magic phrases wired into their subconscious, actually played. For a clue to how that could have happened, we might turn to a Harvard Business School study that describes the frantic push at Spinnaker to get the new line out in time for Christmas 1984. In the words of their chairman Bill Bowman:

We had people working 24 hours a day for a month. We converted the board room into a dormitory, with sleeping bags and pillows. People would work until they couldn’t go on anymore, and then they would go upstairs, sleep for a few hours, come down and start working again. We had a caterer bringing in meals for a month, weekdays, Saturdays and Sundays. It was… ridiculous, that’s what it was. But, we had to have the product in a month. We did meet the deadline, but we won’t do it again. It was extremely painful, although when it was finished, the camaraderie that existed in the team was fantastic. This involved some 30% of the people in the company. I think this is going to be our biggest line next year.

It’s hard to imagine this situation allowing for much testing. This leads to an important point: Infocom is justly celebrated for their ambitious, imaginative writers and designers. Yet it’s also true that they were far from the only such talented folks working in text in the 1980s. Infocom’s triumph was, as much as anything else, a triumph of process, of a commitment to quality and doing things right even if that meant taking the slow, plodding route of releasing a game every few months rather than vomiting out half a dozen on the eve of Christmas. Infocom’s games didn’t suffer from the problems of Fahrenheit 451 because Infocom never allowed themselves to get into a situation like the one described above — a situation which, whatever its value in adrenaline and company camaraderie, doesn’t often lead to the best games.

Still, Fahrenheit 451 does do enough things right, and has enough interesting innovations, that you may want to spend some time on Fifth Street. As an expression of the joys of literature it works for me better than the book. By all means feel free to download the Commodore 64 version and give it a shot if it looks tempting.

(The same references I used for my introduction to Telarium and bookware mostly apply here. The photo of Bradbury was part of an interview to promote Fahrenheit 451 the game in the June 18, 1984, issue of InfoWorld.)

Comments
6 Responses

- Felix

September 27, 2013 at 1:42 pm

That just makes me wonder. Did people not really understand text adventure design back then? I know from personal experience that a two- or three-word parser with clear error messages and enough synonyms doesn’t feel limited at all and can even help you by restricting the search space of possible phrasings. And as a plus, it’s trivial to code, unless you’re working in BASIC. :P

That said, I’m happy to hear that the rest of the game worked out that well, especially from a team that managed to botch Rama. I guess they had learned better in the mean time?

- Jimmy Maher

September 27, 2013 at 2:23 pm

Rendezvous with Rama, Fahrenheit 451, and Dragonworld were all actually developed simultaneously by Byron Preiss Video Productions, although different people were obviously assigned to different projects as primary responsibility. Fahrenheit 451 just seems to have drawn a designer with more passion for the source material and/or the medium.

These games were developed by a group of people new to text-adventure design working under huge time pressures with an unproven new game engine. That explains their flaws — although it doesn’t excuse them. It’s a pity, because there are lots of good, original ideas happening in the Telarium games. If they didn’t have that going for them, I wouldn’t bother writing about them.

- ZUrlocker

September 29, 2013 at 12:46 am

Sounds like it could have been a great game if it weren’t for the parser limitations.

- Adam Sampson

October 4, 2013 at 8:26 pm

Perhaps this’d be a good candidate for porting to a modern IF system, with a decent parser?

- Jimmy Maher

October 5, 2013 at 1:58 pm

It would be…

…except that, while I doubt anyone cares about the Telarium IP, I suspect the Bradbury estate most definitely does care about his most famous novel.

- Brandon Campbell

November 17, 2014 at 11:53 am

Interplanetary Spy, I had one of those books! Glad someone else remembers them.

Dragonworld
October 1, 2013

In 1976 Byron Preiss Visual Publications initiated a series of what we would call today graphic novels that have gone down as a landmark in comics circles. Each volume in the Fiction Illustrated line was a standalone story that replaced superheroes or anthropomorphic animals with hard-bitten detectives or space explorers “in the Star Trek tradition.” Preiss himself coauthored three of the first four books, and planned to work with another young writer named Michael Reaves on the fifth, an epic fantasy to be called Dragonworld. But the Fiction Illustrated line did indeed prove to be ahead of its time. Sales were disappointing, and his publishers weren’t interested in continuing the line. Undaunted, Preiss and Reaves turned Dragonworld into a more conventional fantasy novel, albeit one complemented by some fifty delicate pencil illustrations courtesy of Joe Zucker which Preiss and Reaves considered so integral to the project that they billed Zucker as essentially an equal partner. They all ended up living together in the same apartment for a time so as to work more efficiently on a novel that at more than 500 pages became an epic indeed.

Published in 1979, Dragonworld is the story of two lands, Fandora and Simbala, who are duped by festering resentments and disastrous misunderstandings into declaring war on one another. It’s left to a mismatched pair of adventurers — Amsel of Fandora, a retiring naturalist, and Hawkwind of Simbala, a warrior and leader — to join forces and find the truth: that the mythical colddrakes have in fact invaded both lands since the Last Dragon, normally the master who controls them, has been imprisoned. Dragonworld is in some ways an odd book in that it doesn’t quite fit comfortably into a category. The name, the look, and often the tone suggest a young-adult novel, an impression reinforced by the idealistic core message of “if we would all just take the time to talk and understand each other…” (Certainly it’s no great leap to see Fandora and Simbala as the United States and the Soviet Union.) But prior to Harry Potter kids’ books didn’t routinely stretch beyond 500 pages. And the story can also be grimmer than was the norm for a young-adult book circa 1979. In the first chapter we meet the perky young Johan and follow him on his grand first flight with a Flying Wing. We assume he’ll be our Bilbo surrogate — until Preiss and Reaves kill him violently to close the chapter.

Honestly, however, that may be the most interesting thing I can say about the book. It’s competently written and carefully plotted and the pictures are lovely, but at root it’s just another Tolkien derivative to me, not the sort of thing I can get all that chuffed about either way. So, I’ll leave it to those who are more invested in its genre to sing its praises or lament its flaws and move on.

The book was by all indications a moderate success, but hardly a genre landmark like Rendezvous with Rama or Fahrenheit 451. Still, securing the rights certainly wouldn’t be a problem, and would give Preiss the chance to write the sequel which the ending of the novel vaguely hints at. He even convinced Michael Reaves to join him again.

Dragonworld seems the most traditional of the Telarium games, what with being a quest narrative set in a fantasy world. Its story is a sequel to that of the novel in about the most unimaginative way it can be. It seems the Last Dragon had managed to get himself captured yet again, a fact he communicates to you, Amsel, via the Dragonpearl he gave you in the novel. And so you’re off again to fetch Hawkwind and journey with him down the length of Simbala to the Last Dragon’s place of captivity.

Traditional as it is, Dragonworld is also the best Telarium game I’ve yet written about. It’s not that it’s radically different, mind you. The parser still leaves much to be desired; “Try rephrasing this” is the error message you’ll come to hate this time. And the game is painfully slow to respond even when it does understand what you’re trying to say to it, especially on the Commodore 64 with its famously slow disk drive (the platform which otherwise, thanks to its graphics and sound capabilities, gives by far the best experience). The nadir comes in the form of three almost inconceivably awful action games, none of which would be likely to pass muster as a BASIC type-in magazine listing and one of which just might be the worst program I’ve ever actually seen somebody ask money for. How bad is this thing, you ask? Well, it’s so bad I was at first sure I must have a corrupted disk. It’s so bad that all of the action slows down to half speed every time you push the joystick, which is an especial problem because the whole game is already running in unbelievably slow motion. It would at least be simple to beat — if only the collision detection wasn’t often off by a whole sprite’s length or so.

The only saving grace is that this game and one of the others are completely irrelevant, unnecessary to play at all to complete Dragonworld. They simply appear like the worst non sequitur in history when you innocently wander into certain locations. Then, when you win or die — it makes no difference which — you’re dropped back into the text adventure, with no acknowledgment whatsoever of… whatever that was… that just happened to you. One of these horrors, however, is used to earn needed money in a casino, and can’t be avoided — theoretically. I got so annoyed with it that I used a hex editor on a save file to give myself the gold I needed, an exercise in tedious trial and error that was nevertheless far more fun than playing the gambling game would have been. As with Rendezvous with Rama, Telarium ripped all of these games out of later releases of Dragonworld, the best single decision they ever made to counteract their worst of putting them in in the first place.

It’s thus high praise indeed for me to say of the rest of the game that it managed to overcome all that and leave me with a good feeling toward it in spite of itself. There’s a charm to Dragonworld that’s missing from Rendezvous with Rama entirely and that’s undone by a fatal flaw or two in the otherwise worthy Fahrenheit 451. While the genre and plot structure may be superficially the most traditional of the Telarium games, Telarium’s promise to make games that were more about the fiction than the puzzles is not just lip service here. You pick up Hawkwind very early in your quest, and so have a companion from then on. If you try to do something for which the brawnier Hawkwind is better suited, like, say, attacking a monster, the action automatically passes to him. This is a bit weird conceptually in the same way it was in Sierra’s The Dark Crystal, but given the parser limitations it works fine really. Combine Hawkwind’s presence with the creatures and people you meet everywhere and the fact that you can even get a third companion to accompany you and Hawkwind for much of the game, and adventuring in Dragonworld is a far less lonely experience than the norm.

Dragonworld is made up of a long linear series of obstacles, until you arrive at the town of Kandesh, where you can roam freely to prepare yourself for the (once again linear) climactic scenes. The puzzles are always realistic problems grounded in the story and the environment, and can usually be solved in straightforward, realistic ways. If you’re one of those people like me who often wonders why you can’t just bash that troll in the chest instead of paying him his coin and then waiting for him to go to sleep and then casting some magic spell on him to get the coin back and ad infinitum, this is a good game for you. Indeed, Dragonworld‘s puzzles are fairly trivial to solve in the early going in particular. By the time you’re approaching the Last Dragon’s prison they’ve gotten more difficult — two or three are genuinely tricky — but overall Dragonworld is by far the easiest of the first batch of Telarium games. It takes almost a willful effort to lock yourself out of victory. Even during the climax you can backtrack almost to the starting location if you find you’ve left anything undone. This may not do much for dramatic tension (imagine Frodo at the Crack of Doom: “Sorry, Sam, it seems I’ve left something behind. Let’s just nip quickly back to the Shire, then come back and try this again.”), but it certainly makes for a less frustrating game. Likewise the primitive parser, while still prone to non sequiturs and fits of stubbornness, is used more wisely and made more generous in its interpretations this time. It’s seldom more than a momentary frustration.

Most of all, Dragonworld is just a fun world to inhabit for a while. The sound and especially the graphics actually justify their inclusion for the first time in a Telarium game. The latter were drawn by a relatively well-known artist, John Pierard. His work is bright, welcoming, and attractive even given the limits of the computers on which Dragonworld had to run. They add much to the experience, making the game feel like the grand fantasy romp it wants to be.

Overall, then, Dragonworld just comes together in a way that the previous two Telarium games I’ve written about do not. It’s hard to say exactly why this happened. Having the authors of the novel actually working on the game as committed, engaged writers and designers certainly couldn’t have hurt. And maybe, since it was Preiss’s company after all, his game got just that little bit extra: the best artist and composer, a little more testing, etc. Who knows? The important thing is that Telarium finally began to deliver on some of their promises here.

That said, I won’t lie to you: it’s still a much more unrefined experience than an Infocom game of similar vintage. But if you’re willing to work a little bit harder for your fun, there’s still much to be had here. Some annoyances can even be somewhat alleviated in modern times. Set your emulator to (at least) 200% speed, for example, to make the long parsing delays a bit more tolerable. As usual, you can download Dragonworld from right here.

Comments
5 Responses

- Alan

October 1, 2013 at 3:34 pm

Love these posts. BTW, are you going to be writing about Crichton’s Amazon? I’m reaaaally interested in how this Preiss/famous author dynamic worked with him.

- Jimmy Maher

October 1, 2013 at 3:36 pm

Yep. That one’s next in the hopper, in fact…

- Gilles Duchesne

October 1, 2013 at 4:24 pm

Ah, Dragonworld! I concur it was easy since I managed to play through it. ;-)

One nice thing I remember from that game was (I’ll be purposely vague to reduce spoilage) an item which seems like it’s going to be helpful, but in fact can get you killed in more than one occasion. A classic.

- Marshal Tenner Winter

October 1, 2013 at 6:00 pm

Man, this is the game I was trying to remember the name of just a few weeks ago! Thanks for the blast from my past!

- iPadCary

October 6, 2013 at 1:58 pm

BAH!
*Another* text adventure that doesn’t work in Frotz ….

Michael Crichton
October 8, 2013

It’s easy to dismiss Michael Crichton. Following his shocking 2008 death from throat cancer at age 66 (few had even been aware he was ill), virtually all of the obituaries and memorials took a tack similar to that of Charles McGrath in The New York Times: “No one — except possibly Mr. Crichton himself — ever confused them [his novels] with great literature, but very few readers who started a Crichton novel ever put it down.” One somehow feels the need to qualify that, yes, one understands he’s not great literature or anything before one admits to enjoying a Michael Crichton book. That’s kind of odd when you think about it. Readers of J.K. Rowling or Stephen King don’t seem to wax defensive quite so quickly or in quite such quantities.

If we take the relatively accepted and non-controversial definition of hard science fiction as a story that begins with the words “What if…” and then proceeds to try to rationally work through the consequences of that opening proposition, many of Crichton’s stories are virtual textbook examples of the genre. His breakout novel, The Andromeda Strain, asked what if a satellite returned to earth bearing a deadly extraterrestrial microbe; his most successful of all, Jurassic Park, asked what if dinosaur DNA could be recovered and cloned. Yet he was never really embraced by hardcore science-fiction readers. Something about Crichton was just too slick, too commercially calculated, too damn ubiquitous to be embraced by scruffy fan communities. He just wasn’t one of them. Instead he became the king of that genre unto itself of airport fiction, his latest bestseller — everything he released after The Andromeda Strain was a bestseller — to be found clutched under the arms of business travelers, as much a part of that strange artificial environment as X-ray machines, processed air, and canned announcements saying something about baggage left unattended. These folks wanted something to read that was neither embarrassing nor aggressively stupid but also not too taxing while they hurried up and waited. Crichton knew exactly where that perfect median lay, and he delivered every time.

All of which can make it a little bit hard to get really excited about Michael Crichton. I have a theory that, for all his ubiquity, relatively few people would claim him as their favorite writer — and those who do probably in all honesty don’t read a whole lot of books. Still, his achievements are kind of amazing. Educated as a doctor but never actually licensed to practice medicine, he was seemingly interested in everything and pretty good at a fair number of those things. And, like Steve Jobs and Byron Preiss, Crichton had looks and charm on his side as well. (People magazine named him one of their “50 Most Beautiful People” in the world in 1992, a rare honor indeed for a writer and general behind-the-camera type.) In 1970, in the aftermath of The Andromeda Strain‘s success, he abandoned his medical fellowship and set out to conquer the world of film. Despite having no background whatsoever in filmmaking, he convinced MGM to let him direct his own screenplay of Westworld in 1973. From there Crichton maintained parallel careers in the worlds of letters and film. It’s difficult to say which was more successful, especially since the latter so obviously fed off the former; every one of his first ten novels became a film, often with Crichton himself screenwriting, directing, and/or producing. And then, from the realm of Things Completely Different, let’s not forget that Crichton also created one of the most long-running and popular television dramas in history, E.R.

Clearly Crichton’s commercial instincts were well-honed. He always seemed to have the right book for the times, jumping on the newest trends and fears in popular science and the zeitgeist in general: the Hong Kong Flu (The Andromeda Strain, 1969); the first widespread discussion of cloning and its implications (Jurassic Park, 1990); workplace sexual harassment in the wake of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings (Disclosure, 1994); the global-warming debate (State of Fear, 2004). If he was still with us, I’m sure Crichton would have a book for the latest pop-science fad for all things neuroscience.

So, yes, there was a certain amount of calculation to Michael Crichton — but that’s not all there was. Yes, sometimes he oversimplified, and sometimes he got things just plain wrong, but most of Crichton’s books evidence more research than their sensational thriller plots — not to mention the feckless Hollywood blockbusters based on them — might suggest. Crichton was genuinely curious about the world around him, and genuinely worked to inform as well as entertain. Or, perhaps better stated, to entertain by informing, because the subjects he tackled are often genuinely fascinating. His peculiar genius was really composed of three parts: a deep sense of the current zeitgeist in science, technology, politics; a flair for explaining complicated ideas in an understandable, readable way (he could have been one hell of a “pure” pop-science writer if he’d wanted to); and the ability to tie the aforementioned talents to breakneck plots guaranteed to keep you turning the pages. We can see all of these elements at work in 1980’s Congo, generally regarded as one of his better books if also one that demonstrates some of his failings.

In typical Crichton fashion, Congo begins with an attack: an expedition encamped next to a heretofore undiscovered ancient city deep in the Congo Rainforest is ambushed and massacred by gorillas, or at least some somethings that are distinctly gorilla-like. The expedition had come there not for the sake of archaeology but to search for diamonds — special diamonds, meant to serve not as ornamentation but as the heart of a new generation of computers to be built using optical circuits instead of electric, made out of diamonds instead of silicon. Current computers, Crichton eventually explains, have gotten just as small and fast as they can with silicon chips. Like many specific predictions and extrapolations in Crichton novels, this is spectacularly wrong, as a quick comparison between, say, an Apple II and an iPad, both based on good old silicon, will demonstrate. But hey, where would a thriller writer (or pop-science writer, for that matter) be without a bit of hyperbole?

More prescient and interesting is the nature of the company that sent the unfortunate team into the field. Earth Resources Technology Services is like the Google of geology, scouring the planet on behalf of their clients to find mineral deposits of all stripes and stake claim to them. They are, to use a modern term, a data-driven organization, at least by the standards of 1980; ERTS stores “two million images” on their central computer, with new ones coming in at the staggering rate of “thirty images an hour.” They must inevitably send teams of people out to investigate promising sites in person, but the teams do their best to maintain satellite connections with ERTS headquarters in Houston. It’s thanks to this that ERTS gets to watch their team get killed in real-time. Not being idealistic sorts, they judge that this site is just too juicy to let a few killer apes and dead employees stand in their way. They mount a new expedition, which becomes the subject of the book. It’s led by one Karen Ross, who looks “the very flower of virile Texas womanhood” but entered MIT at age 13. For reasons that are rather tenuous at best, she decides to bring along a sign-language-using gorilla named Amy and her trainer, the diffident scientist Peter Elliot. The cast is rounded out by a grizzled ex-mercenary with a shady past named Munro and a jolly but mysterious group of native porters whom you just know are going to be the first to die. With our adventure-novel archetypes all in place, we’re off.

The structure of what follows is lumpy and kind of odd, but very typical of Crichton. About half of the text is devoted to a thrill-a-minute adventure story as the team penetrates deeper and deeper into the heart of the Dark Continent and into ever greater peril. Crichton meant it to be, besides being a crackerjack thriller in its own right, an homage to classic adventure fiction like The Lost World and King Solomon’s Mines; Crichton’s Lost City of Zinj and its diamond mines are in fact sourced from the same legends as the latter book. But Crichton, to his credit, doesn’t just try to ape adventure fiction of earlier generations. His heroes are thoroughly up to date, with all the latest gadgets. Thus they may be wandering through the jungle dodging cannibals, rampaging army troops, and strange hostile gorillas, but they’re also using their portable computer to link up with ERTS for all manner of assistance as they try to beat a rival high-tech consortium to the prize. (Admittedly, this assistance can sometimes be a bit too helpful, leaving Crichton with something of the classic Star Trek transporter dilemma: i.e., how can we have real drama when Captain Kirk can just shout “Beam me up, Scotty!” into his communicator as soon as things start to get hairy? Like the Star Trek writers, Crichton must often contrive circumstances — a freak solar flare, etc. — to cut off his heroes from their lifeline.)

Crichton, as even his worst detractors will admit, is good at constructing the skeleton of compelling suspense fiction. He knows how to build a roller coaster of a plot and let it run, knows how to keep you turning the pages to find out how they’re gonna get out of this one — even if he does wrap things up in this case via a classic deux machina of a volcano that’s been dormant for thousands of years suddenly deciding to erupt the very week our heroes visit.

But intertwined with the thriller is the pop-science book. Crichton loves his research, and loves to share what he’s learned with us. So we get often pages-long digressions on all sorts of things: the state of computing circa 1980 (lots of this, delving into lots of sub-topics); primates’ capacities for language learning (ditto); satellite-imaging technology; volcanoes; the strange customs of African cannibal tribes; the race among China, the Soviet Union, and the United States to exploit Africa’s vast mineral wealth; the hippopotamus in nature and in human culture; the vanishing rain forests; etc, etc. The pattern is always the same: during the story part of the novel some character, or Crichton the narrator himself, will make reference to some scientist, some event, some technology. Then it’s time to put the story on hold and start with the infodump.

By all rights this structure ought to be infuriating — but somehow Crichton makes it work. Perhaps it’s partly because most of the topics he writes about are genuinely interesting. Certainly it’s largely down to the fact that Crichton is a good writer within his sphere, able to make his factual material as engaging as his fiction. But maybe it’s also caught up with something else about Crichton, something I don’t even know whether I should label a flaw precisely because I think it’s actually a big part of his appeal as an author of airport fiction: the peculiar sense of distance about the whole exercise.

By the final chapters of Congo the situation is truly desperate. Our hardy band of heroes camped on the outskirts of Zinj are enduring nightly attacks by hundreds of remorseless killer gorillas. Already almost half their party — all native porters naturally; can’t start killing the heroes too soon — have been killed. Supplies are dwindling, ammunition almost exhausted. Worst of all, they can’t even try to escape back out into the jungle and take their chances with the roving bands of cannibals; the gorillas wait in ambush at the choke point which is the only way out of the valley in which they’ve encamped. And now, to top it all off, the volcano just above them is rumbling ominously. The horror of the situation should be palpable. Yet Crichton continues merrily along in the mode he established from the beginning, ticking off events as they occur and infodumping in between about gorilla behavior, gorilla populations, the cause and frequency of solar flares, the nature of language. He doesn’t do our imaginations any favors; any palpable fear or sense of real identification with the party will have to come from ourselves alone. Even his heroes seem oddly oblivious to their situation. No one seems to care all that much when the porters start getting killed. They’re much more concerned about their satellite connection and where those diamonds might be buried.

This strangely disembodied quality infects the whole book. Instead of giving us a tactile sense of the still primordial continent of Africa, inspiration for so many truly great books (Heart of Darkness; Out of Africa; The Green Hills of Africa), he infodumps statistics at us: that each tree has a trunk 40 feet in diameter and rises 200 feet, that there are four times as many species of animal life here as in a typical forest ecosystem. Add in Crichton’s less than engaging characters, who are if anything even more wooden than Arthur C. Clarke’s, and we’re left feeling, shall we say, somewhat removed from the action. We’re interested to find out what’s going to happen, but almost as an intellectual exercise rather than out of any sense of empathy. Nobody’s going to lose a lot of sleep if such refugees from Hollywood central casting as Karen Ross the Frigid Beauty or Munro the Shady Former Mercenary should buy it. By far the most memorable and endearing character in the book is Amy the signing gorilla.

Despite all of his research, there’s a certain facile quality to Crichton’s writing even when he sticks to facts. He is indeed shockingly prescient in imagining a company like ERTS, who deal only in hard data and seek to quantify absolutely everything, including the percentage chance their team has for finding diamonds and for getting themselves killed, which they coldly use to balance corporate risk and reward; diamonds are obviously worth some lives and the associated bad press and insurance payments. Yet he’s content to present ERTS’s corporate philosophy as just a neat new thing and move on. He never asks whether ERTS’s calculations and probabilities can replace more innate forms of human wisdom, or what it means that ERTS seem to think they can. Similarly, he mentions that Peter Elliot, trainer of Amy the gorilla, is being targeted by animal-rights groups, but he’s content to use this situation largely as a plot device to get Peter and Amy to Africa. Once that’s accomplished, it’s never mentioned again; he never addresses the legitimate ethical questions raised by inculcating an intelligent, empathetic animal into a human society in which it can never truly have a place beyond age seven or eight (the age at which a gorilla becomes too large, strong, and dangerous to safely interact with one-on-one). No, Crichton is happy to just label Elliot’s oppressors kooks and move on.

Like the wonks at ERTS, Crichton throws lots of facts at us and even comes to lots of conclusions, but never digs all that far beneath the surface. I think it’s this very facileness, this unwillingness to ever really make his reader — or, perhaps more importantly, himself — uncomfortable, that many people are subconsciously connecting with when they rush to make the disclamer that Crichton certainly isn’t great literature or anything. Yet it also may be just what made him so popular. When all is said and done, and despite all the chaos and death and violence and potentially world-ending threats his books contain, he’s a comfort read. You’ll emerge from reading one of his books feeling pleasantly distracted and even a bit more educated about various esoteric subjects, but with worldview intact and bedrock assumptions unchallenged (assuming, of course, that said worldview and assumptions are comfortably Middle American like Crichton’s in the first place).

All of which probably reads more harshly than I really intend it. After I reread Congo for this blog for the first time in many years, my reaction may have been typical: “I enjoyed that… but I don’t need to read anything else by this author again.” On the other hand, if I was trapped alone in an airport somewhere with time on my hands, and Jurassic Park or Sphere or The Andromeda Strain was in the display window of the bookstore… well, I might just take the plunge. What else can I say? Crichton knew exactly what he was doing and did it well. If that makes him a craftsman rather than an artist, well, many other bestselling authors are neither.

Amongst his other accomplishments, Crichton was also the most famous name ever to actively work in the medium of interactive fiction. (His only rival would be Stephen King — but while King’s story The Mist was adapted to interactive fiction, it was purely an exercise in licensing; thus the “actively.”) We’ll talk about how that happened and the game that resulted next time.

(The photo was taken from the February 1985 issue of Compute!.)

Comments
10 Responses

- Sam Kabo Ashwell

October 8, 2013 at 4:29 pm

It’s easy to dismiss Michael Crichton.

This felt, to me, to be an opening line a little akin to “IS YOUR MARRIAGE AS STRONG AS YOU THINK?” or “ARE THE REPUBLICANS REALLY TO BLAME?” My immediate instinct is “Yyyyyyup. Next tab!”

- Andrew Plotkin

October 8, 2013 at 5:25 pm

Speaking for the scruffy fan community, my thumbnail of Crichton was always “technophobic weinerhead”. Which is to say, _Jurassic Park_ convinced me that his interest in (pop) science was *always* in finding new and shinier boogiemen, and never in *actually* thinking about the consequences.

(I’m pretty sure that the movie version of JP put a gravestone on the use of “chaos theory” in science fiction. Even though it’s a legitimate mathematical concept, no serious SF writer wanted to sound that ignorant, ever again.)

I limited myself to reading the back covers of Crichton’s books after that, so I don’t have a basis for criticizing his entire, um, oeuvre. Nor have I played _Congo_ the game. But if you wanna know how he was perceived in the SF world, that’s it.

(But one must also note: the lead character John Crichton in _Farscape_ is well-known to have been named after Crichton the author. And _Farscape_ was of course the best show on television. So, I guess, not everybody agrees.)

- Jimmy Maher

October 9, 2013 at 6:47 am

I wouldn’t actually label Crichton a technophobe, although it’s certainly easy to get that impression from the plot summaries of his books. As will become a bit more clear in my next article, he was fascinated by technology, which made him amongst other things an early adapter and booster of PCs. I rather see Crichton as basing his thriller plots on what he knew and enjoyed, which happened to be science and technology. But then it’s an airport thriller, so something’s got to run amok…

The other part of your critique, that he often thought about these things shallowly, I can’t quibble with other than to say that I think this became more and more of a prominent trait as his career went on.

- S. John Ross

October 8, 2013 at 11:44 pm

I’ve never read Crichton. In fact, I’ve never read any of the “airport” authors past a page or three each (I always personally think of them as “supermarket checkout line” authors), but thanks to this article I now admire him :)

- Dannii

October 9, 2013 at 1:39 am

I’ve read a few of his books. I finished reading Next feeling the opposite of comforted, but I don’t know if there’s anything to generalise there.

- Wade

October 9, 2013 at 8:03 am

I think few people are aware of the films Crichton directed himself, the handful of sci-fi ones in particular, but he was a killer director in the genre he favoured. I’m talking about Westworld, Runaway and Coma especially. Films like Runaway and Looker look dated to the average filmgoer eye now, probably because they try to depict what the near future (from the 1980s) may look like, which is always tougher for films than for books. A book in the 50s may describe an iphone like thing and we can fill the blanks, but a film of the 50s has to show it using the tech of the 50s.

Crichton created Runaway and Looker from scratch. He wrote the stories and screenplays and then directed the films. People who can both write longform prose and direct films well are very rare, and I’ve always admired Crichton for the breadth of his creative abilities.

- iPadCary

October 10, 2013 at 2:29 am

OK, this is one article I simply feel compelled to chime in on.
I was an MC fan since “Sphere”.
He has a brilliant, brilliant mind & a snazzy directorial eye, as well.
I miss him terribly.

- Zurlocker

October 10, 2013 at 1:34 pm

I have not read Congo but I have read several of his books (Rising Sun, Disclosure, Jurassic Park etc) and I thought he did a good job: entertaining, good story telling, interesting ideas, good pacing.)

Seems like you started with an odd disposition of wanting to prove that his writing was not literature but in fact was complete crap. I don’t have much interest in high falutin literature but it seems you are too easy to dismiss Crichton’s merits as a storyteller.

- matt w

October 12, 2013 at 12:18 am

Hm, as someone who isn’t well disposed to Crichton, I thought Jimmy was starting from a disposition of trying to prove that his writing was not complete crap. If he’s a great storyteller and not a practitioner of high-falutin literature (which can be pretty good stuff), where’s the disagreement? Why so defensive?

- Ruber Eaglenest

October 10, 2013 at 3:26 pm

Man, I love Eaters of the Dead. That little book change my perspective from Crichton.

From Congo to Amazon
October 11, 2013

There are new ways of presenting information other than the traditional ways in which the reader or viewer is required to be passive. A few years ago, I realized that I didn’t know about these things, and that I’d better find out about them. The only way I could learn was to actually go and do one. So I said, “Well, I’ll just make a game and then I’ll learn.” And I certainly did.

— Michael Crichton, 1984

Anyone who had been reading Michael Crichton’s novels prior to the founding of the Telarium brand had to know of his interest in computers. The plot of 1972’s The Terminal Man, of a man who has a computer implanted in his brain, is the sort of thing that would become commonplace in science fiction only with the rise of cyberpunk more than a decade later. And of course computers are also all over 1980’s Congo; indeed, they’re the only reason the heroes are out there in the jungle in the first place. Crichton’s personal history with computers also stretches back surprisingly far. Always an inveterate gadget freak, he bought his first computer-like machine in the form of an Olivetti word processor almost as soon as his earnings from his first hit novel, The Andromeda Strain, made it possible. He wrote his books for years on the Olivetti. When the trinity of 1977 arrived, he quickly jumped aboard the PC revolution with an Apple II, first of a stable that within a few years would also include Commodores, Radio Shacks, and IBMs.

Never shy about sharing his interests in print, Crichton became a semi-regular contributor to Creative Computing magazine, who were thrilled to have a byline of his prominence under any terms. Thus they gave him free rein to opine in the abstract:

I would argue that it [computer technology] is a force of human evolution, opening new possibilities for our minds, simultaneously freeing us from drudgery while presenting us with a parody of our own rational sides. Computers actually show us both the benefits and the limits of rationality with wonderful precision. What could be more rational than that pedantic little box that keeps saying SYNTAX ERROR over and over? And what does our frustration suggest to us, in terms of other things to do and other ways to be?

But Crichton was more than the mere dabbler that poeticisms like the above might suggest. He took the time to learn how to program his toys, publishing fairly intricate program listings in BASIC for applications such as casting the I Ching (a byproduct of his seldom remarked interest in mysticism; see his nonfiction memoir Travels, which might just be the most interesting thing he ever wrote); identifying users based on their typing characteristics (inspired by his recent short story “Mousetrap”); and creating onscreen art mirroring that of abstract painter Josef Albers (Crichton’s interest in and patronship of the visual arts also tends to go unremarked). In 1983 he published the book Electronic Life: How to Think About Computers, a breezy introduction for the layman which nevertheless shared some real wisdom on topics such as the absurdity of the drive for “computer literacy” which insisted that every schoolchild in the country needed to know how to program in BASIC to have a prayer of success in later life. It also offered a spirited defense of computer as tools for entertainment and creativity as well as business and other practical matters.

Which isn’t to say that he didn’t find plenty of such practical applications for his computers. During this part of his life Crichton was immersed in planning for a movie called Runaway, which was to star Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons of Magnum P.I. and Kiss fame respectively. He hoped it would be one of the major blockbusters of 1984, although it would ultimately be overshadowed by a glut of other high-profile science-fiction films that year (The Terminator, Star Trek III, 2010). He hired a team to create a financial-modeling packaging which he claimed would allow a prospective filmmaker to input a bunch of parameters and have a shooting budget for any movie in “about a minute.” It was soon circulating amongst his peers in Hollywood.

Thus when the folks at Telarium started thinking about authors who might be interested in licensing their books and maybe even working with them on the resulting adaptations, Crichton was a natural. Seth Godin approached him in late 1983. He returned with extraordinary news: not only was Crichton interested, but he already had a largely completed game for them, based on his most recent novel, Congo.

Crichton had first started thinking he might like to write a game as long as two years before Godin’s inquiry. He’d grown frustrated with the limitations of the adventure games he’d played, limitations which seemed to spring not just from the technology but also from the lack of dramatic chops of their programmers.

I simply didn’t understand the mentality that informed them. It was not until I began programming myself that I realized it was a debugger’s mentality. They could make you sit outside a door until you said exactly the right words. Sometimes you had to say, “I quit,” and then it would let you through.

Well, that’s life in the programming world. It’s not life in any other world. It’s not an accepted dramatic convention in any other arena of entertainment. It’s something you learn to do when you’re trying to make the computer work.

Here’s what I found out early on: you can’t have extremely varied choices that don’t seem to matter. I can go north, south, east, or west, and who cares? You can only do that for a while, and then if you don’t start to have an expectation of what will happen, you’ll stop playing the game. You’d better get right going and you’d better start to have something happen.

If I play a game for a half-hour and it doesn’t make any sense to me, I’ll just quit and never go back. Say I’m locked in this house and I don’t know what the point of the house is and why I can’t get out and there’s no sort of hint to me about the mentality that would assist me in getting out — I don’t know. I could say “Shazam!” or I could burn the house down or — give me a break. I just stop.

Crichton started to sketch out his own adventure game based on Congo, whose simple quest plot structure made it a relatively good choice for conversion to the new format. Realizing that his programming skills weren’t up to the task of implementing his ideas, he hired programmer Stephen Warady to write the game in Apple II assembly language. The little team was eventually completed by David Durand, an artist who normally worked in film graphics. The game as it evolved was as much a mixed-media experience as text adventure, incorporating illustrations, simple action games, and other occasional graphical interludes that almost qualify as cut scenes, perfectly befitting this most cinematic of writers (and, not incidentally, making the game a perfect match with Telarium’s other games once they finally came calling). Crichton would sometimes program these sequences himself in BASIC, then turn them over to Warady to redo in much faster assembly language. Given Crichton’s other commitments, work on Congo the game proceeded in fits and starts for some eighteen months. They were just getting to the point of thinking about a publisher when Godin arrived to relieve them of that stress.

When Spinnaker started their due diligence on the deal, however, a huge problem quickly presented itself: Crichton, as was typical for him by this time, had already sold the media rights to Congo to Hollywood. (After they languished there for many years, the success of the Jurassic Park film would finally prompt Paramount Pictures to pick them up and make a Congo movie at last in 1995. Opinions are divided over whether that movie was just bad or so cosmically bad that it became good again.) Those rights unfortunately included all adaptations, including computer games, something the usually business-savvy Crichton had totally failed to realize. Spinnaker may have been a big wheel in home computers, but they didn’t have much clout in Hollywood. So, they came up with another solution: they excised the specifics of the novel from the game, leaving just the plot framework. The Congo became the Amazon; Amy the signing gorilla became Paco the talking parrot; Earth Resources Technology Services became National Satellite Resources Technology; a diamond mine became an emerald mine; African cannibals and roving, massacring army troops became South American cannibals and roving, massacring army troops. It may not have said much for Crichton and Spinnaker’s appreciation for cultural diversity, but it solved their legal problems.

Amazon was written for the Apple II in native assembly language. Spinnaker, however, took advantage of the rare luxury of time — the game was in an almost completed state when Crichton signed in late 1983, fully one year before the Telarium line’s launch — to turn it over to Byron Preiss Video Productions to make a version in SAL for the all-important Commodore 64 platform. The result wasn’t quite as nice an experience as the original, but it was acceptable. And it was certainly a wise move: Amazon became by all indications the most successful of all the Telarium games. Some reports have it selling as many as 100,000 copies, very good numbers for a member of a line whose overall commercial performance was quite disappointing. The majority of those were most likely the Commodore 64 version, if sales patterns for Amazon matched those for the industry as a whole.

I do want to talk about Amazon in more detail; it’s an historically important game thanks if nothing else to Crichton’s involvement and also a very interesting one, with some genuinely new approaches. But we’ll save that discussion for next time. In the meantime, feel free to download the Apple II version from here if you’d like to get a head start. Note that disk 3 is the boot disk.

(All of the references I listed in my first article on bookware still apply. Useful interviews with Crichton appeared in the February 1985 Creative Computing and February 1985 Compute!. Other articles and programs by Crichton appeared in Creative Computing‘s March 1983, June 1984, and November 1984 issues.)

Comments
4 Responses

- Felix

October 11, 2013 at 6:20 pm

Wow. Reading his books, I always felt that Crichton knew more about computers than the Hollywood Computing scenes in his books appeared to suggest, but I had no idea he was so involved with them. Awesome!

- Peter Pears

October 12, 2013 at 10:10 am

Little heads up, from my experience there’s a bug when playing Amazon in the beginning, in the “scroll with arrow keys in the “static” screen”. It’s not unlike the bug in Leisure Suit Larry 3, the workout section, where because of faster computers of today you have to do each exercise about 300 times.

Generally speaking, tapping the arrow key always in one direction (left seems best), not too quickly, does the trick. It’ll take a while, and may look as if nothing’s happening.

Just FYI. Could be, of course, that my copy of the game is damaged somehow and the problem doesn’t occur with the version you supply, or with any other interpreter.

Here’s info I found on my folder, actually:

The satellite communications portion of the game utilizes a routine at
$0B7C which does a lot of page flipping. This may bog down your emulator.
To fix this problem under AppleWin, hit F7 as the landsat screen loads,
enter ME B84 EA EA EA, and press F7 to resume execution. You won’t get
the “TV static” effect, but you will have enough time to press the left
and right arrows to tune in the picture. Hackers can find the disk
volume number comparrison code at $BC20.

- Jimmy Maher

October 13, 2013 at 8:17 am

I didn’t have a problem with that section, although it was hard to really know what I was doing. I just pounded on the arrow keys until the picture came into focus. It crossed my mind that it might be ignoring inputs entirely, that the instructions were just there in the name of atmosphere.

- Peter Pears

October 13, 2013 at 9:47 am

Funnily enough, the commodore/DOS versions were a tad more responsive in that section.

Amazon in Pictures
October 14, 2013

I thought we’d look at Amazon a little differently from the other Telarium games because it is, even more so than the others, very much a visual as well as textual experience. I therefore thought I could best convey the experience of playing it with lots and lots of pictures. It also marks one of the last of the classic Apple II “hi-res adventures,” which whatever their other failings had a unique aesthetic of their own. With the Commodore 64 so eclipsing other gaming platforms by 1984 — remember, Amazon with its long gestation period is in a sense much older than its eventual publication date of late that year — we won’t be seeing a whole more of this look. So, let this be our goodbye to one era even as it also represents a prime example of the newer, more sophisticated era of bookware. And anyway things have been kind of dry around here visually for a while now. This blog could use some pictures!

Uniquely for the Telarium line, Amazon lets you choose one of three difficulty levels. I’m playing on the highest difficulty of “Expedition Leader” here, which gives the most to see but is also pretty brutal; death lurks literally everywhere, and comes often (usually?) with no warning whatsoever.

Shay Addams referred to Amazon as an “interactive movie” in his Questbusters review, one of the earlier applications of that term to a computer game. And indeed, the opening sequence is very cinematic, and suitably dramatic. After tuning a receiver to catch the satellite transmission, we watch as the camera pans around the smoking, demolished remnants of the previous Amazon expedition’s campground. It ends with a shot of a member of the cannibal tribe that replaces the killer gorillas of the novel as the architects of all this destruction.

Replacing Amy the signing gorilla is Paco the talking parrot, shown here in this lovely illustration by David Durand. I find him kind of hilarious, but I’m not entirely sure if he was written that way intentionally or not; Crichton, whatever his other strengths, isn’t normally what you’d call a funny writer. Paco at first appears to be a classic adventure-game sidekick/hint system, giving advice constantly throughout the game. In a departure from the norm, however, his advice is, at least on Expedition Leader level, disastrously misguided at least 50% of the time, getting you killed or stranded in all sorts of creative ways. Crichton often stated that he wanted to make a more believable, realistic adventure game. In that spirit, I suppose taking everything said by a talking parrot as gospel might not get you very far in the real world. But then if we’re debating realism we have to also recognize that Paco is basically a cartoon character, even more so than Amy the ridiculously intelligent, loyal, and empathetic gorilla of the novel. Foghorn Leghorn’s got nothing on this guy.

Like in the book, we can use our field computer to link up with NSRT headquarters for regular updates. The above shows the situation just after we’ve parachuted with Paco into the Amazon rain forest. Looks like other than the cannibals and the rampaging government troops and that volcano that’s about to erupt there’s nothing to worry about.

Have I mentioned that it’s easy to die at Expedition Leader level? One wrong move leads to one of a rogue’s gallery of gleefully described death scenes to rival one of the Phoenix games.

Crichton’s opinion of Peru’s military seems to be no higher than was his opinion of Zaire’s in the novel.

In another strikingly cinematic scene, we use our handy night-vision goggles and an assist from Paco to sneak away from the troops who captured us.

With the “corrupt government troops” behind us, we now get to deal with the Kemani tribesman. Luckily, they like cigarettes and we happen to have a pack.

We climb the volcanic Mount Macuma, which separates us from our objective and will soon give us problems in another way.

NSRT airlifts some desperately needed supplies to us. (Why do I want to hear Paco saying “De plane! De plane!” when I see this screenshot?)

Crichton may have been trying to make a new type of adventure game, but he couldn’t resist including a very old-school maze which we have to navigate to reach the airdropped supplies. This is actually the only part of the game which requires mapping. Normally it’s much more interested in forward plot momentum than the details of geography.

Getting across the river is even more difficult than was getting over the mountain. Once again our night-vision goggles come in handy.

Next morning we find that mischivious monkeys have stolen our supplies. A merry chase follows, implemented as one of Amazon‘s two action games. These were not likely to make arcade owners nervous, but at least they aren’t embarrassingly bad like the action games in Telarium’s other titles. They’re actually kind of engaging in their way; a nice change of pace. Indeed, Amazon‘s way of constantly throwing different stuff at you is one of the most impressive things about it. The screen is constantly changing. “Whatever works for this part of the story” seems to have been Crichton’s philosophy.

One more obstacle to cross, and we come to the outskirts of the lost city of Chak. It doesn’t exactly look welcoming.

The cannibals attack that night and, in increasing numbers, every night we remain in Chak. The attack is presented as another action game, this time a Space Invaders-like affair which, while not as original or entertaining as the monkey chase, is at least competently executed.

We have about five days in Chak before the volcano erupts. If that sounds generous, know that it’s really not; time passes devilishly quickly. Our main objective is to find the secret staircase that will take us to the endgame.

The endgame requires us to open a series of doors in the correct order using clues found onscreen — one of the few classically adventure-gamey puzzles you’ll find in Amazon. The correct sequence for the above, for example, is 1-3-2. I assume this is because there are 9 marks on the first door, 13 on the second, and 11 on the third. At any rate my first instinct was to arrange them in numerical sequence, and it worked.

The final sequence is, to say the least, a bit more tricky. Now we have nine doors to contend with. This puzzle, which appears only at Expedition Leader level, stumped me entirely and forced me to a walkthrough. If you can solve it, or even just give the methodology for solving it given the correct answer, I’d love to hear about it. To see the answer, highlight the empty space that follows: 3-4-8-1-5-9-2-6-7.

Get past the last of the doors and we come to enough emeralds to warm any greedy adventurer’s heart. And after that, to quote Neal Stephenson, “It’s just a chase scene,” as we rush to get away from the erupting volcano.

Crichton wouldn’t return to computer games until some fifteen years after Amazon. It’s not hard to understand why. Even if Amazon sold 100,000 copies, his earning from it would have been a drop in the bucket compared to what he earned from his books and movie licenses. Yet Amazon is good enough that it makes me wish he had done more work in interactive mediums.

Which is not to say that it doesn’t have its problems. The parser is no better than you might expect from such a one-off effort; on at least one or two occasions I knew exactly what to do but had to turn to the walkthrough to figure out how to say it to the game. And the story logic often has little to do with real-world logic. If you don’t do everything just right in the opening stages of the game, for instance, your flight to Peru will get hijacked and you’ll end up dead after the game toys with you a bit — this despite there being no logical reason why your previous failings should have led to your flight getting hijacked.

Still, Amazon is a unique experience, as I hope the pictures above convey. Especially if played on one of the less masochistic levels, it’s a fast-moving rush of a game that’s constantly throwing something new and interesting at you. And it really is relentlessly cinematic, replete with stylish little touches. Even when it’s working with just text, words often stutter onto the screen in clumps to mimic conversation, or are pecked out character by character when they’re coming through your satellite computer hookup. There’s a sense that things could go in any direction, that anything could be asked of you next, rules of computer-game genres be damned. If that sounds appealing, by all means download it, fire up your Apple II emulator, and give it a go.

Comments
14 Responses

- Giuseppe

October 14, 2013 at 2:36 pm

I have to say the quality of the pixel art is quite impressive in at least some of the scenes, especially given the hardware limitations.

- Olaf Kröger

October 14, 2013 at 2:37 pm

The nine-door-puzzle stumped me, but here’s my shot at a post-hoc-methodology:

The right part of the picture tells us a) that the door pattern repeats itself horizontically, (so the top line for instance, reads 123123123…) and b) stresses diagonals from top left to bottom right. From this we are supposed to deduce that we should hit the doors along the three possible diagonals 1-5-9, 2-6-7, 3-4-8. The dots on the doors tell us the sequence of the diagonals: first the one with one dot in it, then the one with two, then the one with three.

“Best” puzzle since Rumplestiltskin in King’s Quest 1, no doubt…

- Andrew McCarthy

October 14, 2013 at 6:44 pm

If you read the right-hand graphic not as a whole, but as three interlocking renderings of the nine-door layout, arranged from left to right, then the three solid black spaces in each grouping indicate the doors you should select, three at a time.

As Olaf noted, the first sequence of three doors includes the door with one dot on it; likewise the second and third sequences include the doors with the matching number of dots.

- Jimmy Maher

October 15, 2013 at 12:24 pm

Okay, thanks. Still not quite sure I’m seeing it correctly, but these sorts of spatial puzzles are far from my forte. I’m hopeless at Blokus…

- stef

October 14, 2013 at 5:10 pm

Great review.
I hope, one day, you will talk about the famous “ShadowKeep”.

Anyway Thanks again !!

- Jimmy Maher

October 15, 2013 at 12:19 pm

That one’s coming soon. Fair warning, though, I don’t have a whole lot positive to say about it…

- stef

October 16, 2013 at 9:14 am

No matter, can’t wait :)
If I remember, the soft was written mixing applesoft basic and asm no ?
(because it was soooo slow on a real Apple //c)

- Sam Kabo Ashwell

October 14, 2013 at 5:25 pm

Ah, yes, the fabled South American hippo.

- Giuseppe

October 14, 2013 at 6:48 pm

Perhaps Mr. Crichton anticipated Pablo Escobar’s hippos. :))

- Jimmy Maher

October 15, 2013 at 12:19 pm

Ha, I totally overlooked that howler. :)

- James

January 16, 2015 at 6:57 pm

It is really minor, especially for box art of the era, but Paco is holding a diamond or sapphire or topaz that is distinctly not an emerald…

- Gilles Duchesne

October 16, 2013 at 9:14 pm

Ah, Amazon! Back then, I knew _of_ adventure games, but I didn’t have any. Even the, hrm, not-quite-legal sources were short on them back where I lived.

So when I noticed Amazon at the local Compucentre, I convinced my folks to get it.

Still have that game in my home office.

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Shadowkeep
October 18, 2013

The story of Shadowkeep, even more so than Amazon the odd duck in the Telarium lineup, begins with Sigma Distributing, one of the first big microcomputer hardware distributors in the Seattle area. In 1981 Christopher Anson, a Sigma vice president, sought and received permission to start a new subsidiary to develop original games to serve the growing demand for software for the computers Sigma was selling. Anson’s first two acts were to name the company Ultrasoft and hire a programmer named Alan Clark away from Boeing. Clark became the technical architect of the set of tools and approaches that would define Ultrasoft during their brief existence.

Anson had decided that the best place for Ultrasoft to make a splash was in the field of illustrated adventure games, a nexus of excitement in the wake of Mystery House and The Wizard and the Princess. Like Scott Adams, Ken Williams, and Marc Blank before him, Clark realized that it would be more efficient in the long run to write an adventure-game engine and language that could give designers a bit of distance from the technical details of implementation as well as let Ultrasoft deploy their games to multiple platforms relatively painlessly. Deciding that a little corporate branding is always in order, they named their adventure programming language simply Ultra; the interpreter for each targeted platform UltraCode; their graphics system UltraVision. From the standpoint of the end user, Ultrasoft’s most obvious innovation — or, if you like, gimmick — involved this last. UltraVision could display not just static pictures but also brief animations, which could be used to, say, show the player’s avatar actually walking from room to room. Less obvious but no less significant, however, was the parser, one of the first developed outside of Infocom that allowed more than two words — although, it should be said, it was nowhere near as impressive a creation overall (more on that shortly).

Ultrasoft developed two adventures using the system, The Mask of the Sun (1982) and Serpent’s Star (1983). Both are interesting in their way, more carefully crafted, atmospheric, and thoughtful than was the norm of the time. Serpent’s Star in particular does a surprisingly good job of matching its puzzles to its theme of Buddhist philosophy. But both — and particularly Mask of the Sun — are also riddled with the sorts of unfair elements that were all too typical of their era. And both are fairly excruciating to play under any conditions. Whatever its other merits, you see, the Ultra system is slow. A quick look at the games’ technical underpinnings gives a clue as to why: the Ultra program logic doesn’t appear to be compiled at all, merely interpreted in place. The only blessing of that approach was that it enabled some frustrated adventurers to find the solutions to the more incomprehensible puzzles by code diving.

Ultrasoft first tried to market and distribute Mask of the Sun and Serpent’s Star on their own, but found it tough sledding for a tiny company with mainly regional connections in the professionalizing software industry of 1983. They soon accepted the role of developer only, licensing both games to Brøderbund for publication. After spending most of 1983 working on an ambitious new game, an adventure-game/CRPG hybrid called Shadowkeep written in a new version of their system which they dubbed Ultra II, they found a publisher for it in Spinnaker, who took the largely completed game as a future member of their planned Telarium line.

Looking to find some way to make the game fit with the bookware theme of the line as a whole, Spinnaker came up with the idea of reversing the usual process, of hiring a name writer to adapt the game into a book rather than the opposite. Luckily, they had substantial time to get the novelization done; they signed the contract with Ultrasoft in late 1983, a year before they planned to launch the Telarium line. Spinnaker approached Warner Books, who hooked them up with the reigning king of media tie-in novels, Alan Dean Foster. After making his reputation within the industry ghost-writing the Star Wars novelization for George Lucas, Foster had gone on to do The Black Hole, Clash of the Titans, The Last Starfighter, and Alien among many others. Virtually any big science-fiction or fantasy movie released seemed to arrive with an accompanying Alan Dean Foster novelization. (That’s still true today; his most recent novelization as of this writing is of Star Trek into Darkness.)

Spinnaker furnished Foster with design documents and a copy of the Shadowkeep source code and let him have at it. Those were all he had to go on; he doesn’t recall ever meeting or speaking with anyone from the design team, nor ever actually playing the game. He does, however, recall it as a very challenging project indeed. Being a party-based CRPG in the mold of Wizardry, Shadowkeep has no actual protagonist to speak of — no characters at all, really, outside of the fellow who sells you equipment and the evil demon Dal’Brad who shows up for the final showdown on the last of the dungeon levels. He was thus forced to invent the vast majority of the novel himself, whilst struggling to strike a balance between writing some recognizable analogue to the experience of the game and giving away all of its challenges. He did his usual workmanlike job, handing in a readable little genre exercise for simultaneous release with the game. Tellingly, it’s not until halfway through the book that the heroes enter the Shadowkeep — i.e., reach the beginning of the game.

Said game is… well, it’s really strange. Imagine Wizardry played with a text parser, and you’ve pretty well summed up Shadowkeep. You make a party of up to nine(!) characters. Most of the usual is here: attribute scores, classes and races to choose from, ever better equipment and spells to collect. Oddly missing, however, are character levels and any concept of experience; getting more powerful in this game is strictly a matter of finding or buying better stuff. The dungeon levels are the usual 16 X 16 grids full of traps, monsters, and assorted cartographic challenges. There are some original ideas here. For instance, the positions of the monsters that attack you and those of the members of your party are taken account of to a degree not found in Wizardry, adding some strategic depth to the experience. You likewise have more combat options than in Wizardry; in each round you can choose to forget defense and attack twice, or to just parry, or to attack once while not totally neglecting defense. And certainly the full-color graphics, which feature occasional examples of Ultrasoft’s trademark animations, are much better than Wizardry‘s wire frames.

Still, Shadowkeep mostly just makes you appreciate all the more how well Wizardry does the dungeon crawl. The game replaces Wizardry‘s hot-key interface with, yes, a text-adventure parser. You literally just type what you want to do: “OPEN DOOR,” “GET THE TORCH,” “CAST THE LUMINANCE SPELL,” “LIGHT THE TORCH AND PREPARE THE SWORD,” “PUT THE WAND OF TRAVEL IN THE CHEST.” Sounds fine, right? Well, what sounds fine in the abstract doesn’t work so well in practice. You must now type “F <RETURN>” (for “FORWARD”) instead of just “F” every time you want to walk forward a square in the dungeon. This may seem a minor thing, but consider that you’ll be entering this command thousands and thousands of times in the course of playing the game. That extra keystroke thus means thousands and thousands of extra keystrokes. And that’s the tip of the iceberg; this game is death by a hundred such small cuts. Commands by default are carried out by the leader of your party, who is not even a character you select but merely the one with the highest Leadership attribute score. Having someone else do something requires that you prepend her name to the command (“NAOMI GET THE TORCH AND GIVE IT TO REB”) — yet more tedious typing.

And the parser, that focal point of the whole interface, is at least as exasperating as the mainline Telarium parser. Like Byron Preiss Video Productions and many others at this time, Ultrasoft chose to take a profoundly misguided approach to this most critical piece of their engine. As described in an article in Softline magazine:

Ultrasoft’s parser is based on concepts in artificial intelligence. In any given message, it eliminates words that don’t make sense and attempts to make sense out of words that are relevant to the situation. This method frees the player from the verb-noun format of the typical adventure’s input.

In other words, the parser pretends to be smarter than it is by simply throwing out anything it doesn’t understand and doing what it can with the rest. This approach may “free the player from the verb-noun format,” but it also guarantees that complex (and often not so complex) inputs will be not just rejected — which combined with a proper error message is at least a form of useful feedback — but misunderstood. Far from making the parser seem smarter, this just makes it seem that much dumber and that much more infuriating. It leads to situations like that in the Byron Preiss games where any input containing the word “LOOK” anywhere within it causes the parser to dump everything else and print a room description. In Shadowkeep, typing “NAOMI CAST CURE SPELL ON REB” leads her to cast it away into the ether — that “ON REB” was a bridge too far, and thus ignored. Such a system fails to recognize that at least 95% of the time those extra words are not just stuff the player tacked on for the hell of it (who wants to type more than necessary under any circumstances?) but essential information about what she really wants to do.

To play Shadowkeep is to constantly wrestle with the interface. After playing several hours there are basic tasks I still haven’t figured out how to do — like how to cast a cure spell on someone outside of combat, or how to just get a list of the spells a certain character knows. And, like Ultrasoft’s earlier games, Shadowkeep is slow. Every step in the dungeon seems to take an eternity, and as for more complex action… forget about it. Playing is like wading through molasses with shackled feet.

The rewards for all the parsing pain are relatively slight: a handful of logic- or object-oriented puzzles on each level that can perhaps be a bit more complex than they could be under the Wizardry engine. Needless to say, they aren’t worth the rest of the trouble, making Shadowkeep something of a lowlight in the long, chequered history of adventure/CRPG hybrids. Which is a shame, because Shadowkeep‘s dungeon levels do show evidence of some careful craftsmanship and, as noted above, there are some good, original ideas on display here. Shadowkeep is a perfect example of a potentially worthy game destroyed by horrid interface choices. And I mean that literally: if the game isn’t outright unplayable (some patient souls have apparently played and even enjoyed it), it’s closer than I ever need to come to that adjective.

Ultrasoft was already in the process of fading quietly away by the time of Shadowkeep‘s late 1984 release. They never managed to port the Ultra II engine beyond the Apple II, leaving Shadowkeep without that all-critical Commodore 64 version. Spinnaker toyed with doing the port themselves, even announcing it as coming soon on various occasions, but I see no reason to believe that ever happened. (A Commodore 64 version has been a semi-mythical White Whale in collecting circles for many years now, but, despite some anecdotal claims and remembrances, no one has ever produced an actual working version to my knowledge.) The lack of a Commodore 64 version and the underwhelming nature of the game itself combined to make Shadowkeep the least successful — and, today, rarest — of all the Telarium games. Alan Dean Foster’s book, while no bestseller itself, appears to have sold far more copies on the author’s name recognition and its $3 (as opposed to $35) price tag.

Shadowkeep consists, like most of the Telarium games, of four disk sides. In this case, however, all four sides are written to during play to preserve the current state of the dungeon levels; the player is expected to copy her originals before beginning. Most of the copies floating around the Internet contain the residue of the previous players in their dungeons. Thankfully, however, reader Peter Ferrie has provided me (and thus you) with a completely pristine set just waiting for you and only you to leave your marks upon them. If whilst playing Wizardry or Bard’s Tale you thought to yourself that this game would be even better if it played a lot slower and had a parser, you’ve just found your dream CRPG. All others should consider this one a subject for historical research only.

And on that less than stellar note we’ll be moving on from Telarium for a while. My final reckoning of their first five releases is: two worthy efforts (Dragonworld and Amazon); one could-have-been-a-contender (Fahrenheit 451); and two total misfires (Rendezvous with Rama and Shadowkeep). Not a horrible track record on the whole. We’ll see if they learned any lessons in time for their last few games down the road a ways. But next it’s time to get back to the big boys in the field, and tell the rest of the story of Infocom’s very eventful 1984.

(In addition to the sources listed in my first article on bookware and Telarium, I also referenced for this article a feature on Ultrasoft in the May/June 1983 Softline. And thanks to Alan Dean Foster for taking the time to share his memories of the Shadowkeep project with me.)

Comments
15 Responses

- stef

October 18, 2013 at 12:58 pm

Very cool article once again… It is a gold mine

And I agree, you must be patient when playing Shadowkeep.

Don’t forget to turn the fast mode on of your Apple // emulator :)

- Felix

October 18, 2013 at 6:10 pm

Indeed, writing the novelization of a game is no easy task. Shamus Young’s account of writing Free Radical based on System Shock is worth a read. (And so’s the book, but that’s besides the point.)

As for the game itself, it sounds like yet another case of overextending, ignoring hardware limitations and not prototyping first. At least they have the excuse of having done it in 1984…

- Gilles Duchesne

October 21, 2013 at 5:03 pm

“some frustrated adventures” –> adventureRs?

- Jimmy Maher

October 22, 2013 at 6:04 am

Thanks!

- Robb Sherwin

October 21, 2013 at 5:41 pm

Ha, reading about what this game tried has been a kick.

For the last year I have been making a CRPG in Hugo. I’ve implemented all the non-text adventure stuff a CRPG needs, like making and saving characters, combat, graphics and a world model where there are six characters instead of one. I was describing this work in progress as being like “Bard’s Tale using Hugo.”

So you can imagine my surprise to learn about a CRPG from the 80s that tried to use a text parser in a role-playing game, haha!

Thanks for writing this up. I feel I can learn a lot from mistakes that Shadowkeep made. Some of this stuff I’ve learned on my own — for example, the bit where you have to hit return after moving. Jon Blask wrote some code to implement a “travel mode” in my game, so you can just move with the arrow keys.

(I also realized, thanks to this article, that I don’t have a way in my WIP to heal characters outside of combat. Slowly sneaking away to implement that right now….)

Thanks for exploring these games with less “fame” than the Infocom lineup, Jimmy. They are fascinating and it’s becoming very clear that there’s a lot to learn about them that’s directly applicable for games made today! =)

- Jimmy Maher

October 22, 2013 at 6:13 am

You’re welcome! Virtually all IF created over the last two decades has been very much modeled after the Infocom approach. For good reason mostly; I’ve certainly not found anyone in researching this blog whose games were so polished and smartly put together as Infocom’s, and I don’t really expect to. Still, these other traditions are worth exploring and maybe learning from.

Many of Shadowkeep’s failings come down to hardware limitations and a lack of usability testing. Conceptually, I find what it’s trying to do really interesting. So good luck! I’ll be interested to see the end result. At least Shadowkeep can serve up pretty good examples of most of the pitfalls you can fall into. :)

- Josh Lawrence

October 22, 2013 at 8:09 pm

Jimmy and Robb,

There’s one other 8-bit game I know of that tried this RPG/text-parser hybrid, Realms of Darkness for the Apple II, published by SSI in 1986. I own it and messed around with it while back – the graphics aren’t super-slow, thanks to it using the Graphics Magician technique seen in many graphic adventure games of the time, but I can’t remember how good/bad the interface is (I didn’t explore it that much). Might be worth looking into as another attempt at this hybrid.

- Jimmy Maher

October 23, 2013 at 8:31 am

Hmm, quite interesting. I wasn’t aware of that game at all. I may indeed have to look harder when the time comes…

- Keith Palmer

October 23, 2013 at 10:19 pm

This does sort of feel like it’s getting a little late to reply (and also runs the risk of “shoehorning something only tangentially related in just because it’s something I can actually talk about), but the whole “press ENTER” aspect to this game did make me think of Dungeons of Daggorath, one of the TRS-80 Color Computer games that gets talked up today, and one where you had to type in two or three-word commands (although they could be abbreviated) and then press ENTER, with the clock ticking all the while… It could be a stretch to compare it to the numbers-quoting RPGs that have been described here, though.

- Jimmy Maher

October 24, 2013 at 5:31 am

I actually played Dungeons of Daggorath maybe ten years ago. It’s quite an achievement — but I don’t really consider it parser-driven, since the commands are all listed in the manual rather than “just type what you want to do.”

And no need to worry about commenting on older posts. I regularly get comments on things stretching all the way back to the beginning of this blog. I always get notified, and always read them with interest, as I’m sure do new readers just discovering those posts and old ones dedicated enough to sign up for the comments RSS feed. :)

- Nori

October 22, 2013 at 8:00 am

Thank you for another exellent entry. When I saw the word “Ultrasoft,” my heart jumped for joy! (Actually, Ultrasoft was mentioned on the “Bookware” entry last month but it was so brief, just being a developer of Shadowkeep, and I expected more.) I’ve been interested in the company but no information available. Also I didn’t know why they stopped publishing their own titles themselves, and broderbund got to publish them instead. Now I got the answer.

And I’ve been reading your entries on telarium with much interest as well, especially Shadowkeep. The game was so tempting when I was informed of it for the first time (via some magazine advertisement, probably), but I cannot get to play it. Sorry to hear it’s so rare now. Thanks again.

Nori from Tokyo

- Karl Dick

August 24, 2014 at 10:53 pm

Greetings from your “neighbour country” Germany. I was very positively surprised when I found your detailed articles about many of the Telarium games with so much background info, this was tremendous fun to read. I have been collecting Telarium games for some time now, and I also managed to snatch a copy of Shadowkeep as well. I had always wondered why this particular game had not been released for the more promising platform of that time, the C64. I knew their lead platforms were the Apple II and the C64, the IBM PC and Atari ST came later. I knew there were people out there looking for a PC version of the game, but since the C64 version was already “missing in action” the chances of a PC version were next to zero. I think I also found a scan of an old product flyer with an offer for demo disks of Telarium programs, and Shadowkeep was listed as the only one that was Apple II exclusive. That confirmed everything. Because of your article now at last I know it was not just due to poor sales of the title, but due to the inability of porting the game to the C64.
I agree with you about the Telarium games in general: they had some of the most beautiful packagings ever with their gatefold design and colourful illustrations, definitely worth collecting.
I suppose the rather poor sales forced the company to sub-license the Telarium games to british company Audiogenic later on for a release in the UK. Would you perhaps know, if there are any MSX ports/versions out there, according to the Mobygames database a company named IdeaLogic might have released a port for the MSX in Spain?
That part with the sub-licensing still is not completely clear to me. Again thanks for the detailed insight into the history of the Telarium games, especially into this rare one.

- Jimmy Maher

August 25, 2014 at 5:17 am

Hi, Karl…

I don’t have any specific details about the MSX Spanish translations other than the fact that they do indeed exist for at least some of the Telarium titles. Most American software publishers at this time weren’t terribly involved with translations for other markets, although they were happy to accept the money of companies in those markets who thought they saw potential and were willing to invest the time and money into making and marketing the port. A company called Starcraft became quite huge in Japan for a while porting American games to Japanese systems and occasionally cloning Japanese games for the American market. Various continental European companies had similar models. U.S. Gold published American games all over Europe. Sometimes they would translate the language for larger markets like Germany, sometimes just release it in English and hope for the best.

- Karl Dick

August 25, 2014 at 3:20 pm

Hi Jimmy,
thank you for quick reply. Yes, I do remember US Gold released several games under their “All American Games” label, for instance Ultima III or Masquerade (the old Phoenix/American Eagle) adventure and several SierraVenture titles. They also published the Beach Head Games and Raid over Moscow from Access Software and several Epyx titles. I just never knew why Audiogenic was chosen for publishing the Telarium games in the UK. It was probably one last effort to make some money from those Telarium titles.
Thank your for your help.

- Jimmy Maher

August 25, 2014 at 4:18 pm

For what it’s worth, my impression is that these arrangements were much more likely to be initiated by the company doing the “localized” version than the American publisher. So Audiogenic most likely came to Spinnaker. Why? It’s hard to say exactly. Maybe Perry Mason was particularly popular in Spain, in the same way that Germans went nuts for Dallas and Hogan’s Heroes. ;) Certainly text adventures in general were very popular there. Some years ago, when I was editing the old SPAG newsletter, I helped put together a history of Spanish interactive fiction. You may find that interesting: http://www.spagmag.org/archives/backissues/spag49.html.

Masters of the Game
October 23, 2013

Jon Palace helping to feed the Christmas demand for Zork II, 1984

I started my article on Infocom’s 1983 with an unsung hero, Dan Horn of the Micro Group. Let’s continue that tradition now that we’ve come to 1984 with another: Jon Palace.

As 1984 dawned, Palace was working as a textbook editor for McGraw-Hill Higher Education in New York City. Wanting to live pretty much anywhere else, he scoured the want ads for jobs as far away as Madison, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois. Then he stumbled across an advertisement in the Boston Globe Magazine from a company he had never heard of: Infocom. Palace had no real idea what Infocom did or what an adventure game was or what exactly they might expect him to do, but he duly applied and was granted an interview. He drove up to Boston one snowy day to sit down with Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn. He knew this was a different sort of operation than the staid, corporate McGraw-Hill when Blank asked him how old he was. “You can’t ask me that in an interview!” Palace replied, shocked, “… but I’m 27.” Blank seemed to like that answer; that was about the average age at Infocom, he noted.

Technology companies in those days still had a bit of a reputation. Palace remembered (almost certainly hyperbolic) accounts he’d read of life at Apple in the early days, where the board of directors would supposedly all share a joint or two before meetings. Thus when Stu Galley started to roll a cigarette in front of him that first day he thought the worst — but no, it was just tobacco. Palace went from the interview to the home of a friend of his in Brooklyn who had a computer and some of Infocom’s games to try to figure out what this company who might be about to hire him was actually all about.

If Palace didn’t quite know what Infocom wanted from him, Infocom didn’t really know either. They felt they needed someone who could serve as a sort of professional liaison for each game, to stand at the hub of the wheel and coordinate among the Imps that wrote the games, the Micro Group that deployed them onto the target platforms, G/R Copy and internal marketing who packaged and advertised them, and the logistics folks who scheduled them for release and got them to the customers. What they were really looking for was a producer, but they didn’t know that; in these early days of the games industry that role had yet to be defined. Then Mike Berlyn piped up to say that the sorts of things they were talking about sort of seemed like the stuff his editor used to do for him back when he was writing novels instead of games. And so Infocom was suddenly advertising for what had to be the strangest “editor’s” job that was ever offered. And Palace, who didn’t even own a computer, just stumbled into it. Infocom hired him to start that April.

Realizing he had lots of catching up to do if he even wanted to understand most of the conversations taking place around him, Palace took to returning to the office in the evening with his wife and some Chinese food to catch up on the Infocom back catalog. Soon he bought a used Apple IIe from Mike Berlyn so they could play at home. When his parents had trouble grasping just what it was he was now doing for a living, he pulled out The Witness to show them, Infocom-style — interactively. They then spent a fun evening trying to figure out who killed Freeman Linder.

Like Stu Galley, who also initially had no big interest in this whole adventure-game thing, Palace became one of the most idealistic about the potential and the worth of the work Infocom was doing. That idealism, combined with his background in writing and publishing, proved to be invaluable. One might even say that Palace became the final piece of the Infocom puzzle. He filled his producer’s role admirably, but, perhaps even more importantly, he pushed everyone to take their craft that much more seriously. Palace served as a buffer between those ever-opposed forces of Creative and Business, making sure no game was released before its time. Indeed, he gently prodded the Imps to spend that little bit of extra time and effort making their worlds believable, making sure their stories made sense, and, most of all, polishing their prose. Steve Meretzky gave Palace one of his few public acknowledgements in the Leather Goddesses of Phobos hint book, using words which speak not just to the roles he played but to the way he was valued — even beloved — by the Imps for the way he went about it: “Thanks to Jon Palace for a host of things, but especially for his help in ‘sensualizing’ the text, and for being a front-line defense against scheming marketeers.” When Jason Scott began planning interviews for his Get Lamp film almost twenty years after Infocom’s demise, the former Imps were almost unanimous in naming Palace as the greatest of all the unknown contributors to Infocom’s success. In his own low-key way he was as important to all of the great work that came out of the company between 1984 and 1989 as anyone whose name actually appeared on the boxes. He’s a key reason that the Imps refused to abandon their sense of craft and artistic integrity even as the circumstances around them, as I shall soon have to recount in all too much detail, made that more and more difficult.

But we don’t have to talk about that just yet. We’re just in 1984, after all, a very successful sales year for Infocom — in fact, the biggest such they would ever enjoy, the very apex of the bell curve that is their commercial history. It was also a year of consolidation and systemization; it was the year of the gray box.

Infocom’s trademark lavish packaging had been something of a sore point with retailers for some time now. Everyone loved creations like the Starcross saucer and the Suspended mask when the games were new; many owners hung the former from the ceiling all around their stores. The problem came after the initial hype had died down, when the games became catalog items to be stocked in quantities of just one or two and shelved toward the back of the store. Here the Starcross saucer tended to roll onto the floor, if it would fit on the rack at all, while the Suspended mask ran the risk of getting squashed flat between the other games on the rack. Moreover, such oddball injection-molded packages were expensive to make, particularly after they became catalog items and the quantities being made in each batch dropped dramatically. Infocom had thus already begun to scale things back; after Suspended all of the games were released in relatively more modest, conventional boxes. But even those were all essentially one-offs. By 1984 Infocom’s games ranged from the minimalist blister packs of the Zork games to the absurd flamboyance of Starcross and Suspended, with everything else somewhere in between. Any given game may have been beautifully packaged, but together on a shelf they kind of looked like a jumbled mess. You’d be hard pressed to realize they were all products of the same company. And, as dealers never ceased to tell them, this jumble was wasting space on the shelves that could be given over to stocking more Infocom games. Something needed to be done.

Infocom therefore did something they rarely did (and arguably could have done more often): they looked at what the competition was doing. The model for packaging in the industry at this time was the folio-style package used by Electronic Arts. It was a consistent look that immediately marked a game as a product of EA. Being deliberately evocative of a record sleeve, it also conjured exactly the image that EA, that would-be purveyor of hip, sophisticated entertainment crafted by a new generation of “electronic artists,” wanted to present to the world. Retailers absolutely loved it: it was slim and compact but still attractive, as easy to shelve onto racks spine-outward by the dozen as it was to open up, unfold, and stick in a display window. Infocom, driven particularly by head of marketing Mike Dornbrook, decided they needed something like that. What they came up with in association with the ever-essential G/R Copy was a veritable masterstroke.

The box is, not coincidentally, of about the dimensions and thickness of a typical hardcover novel. With the era of bookware in full bloom and Infocom’s games now showing up on more and more bookstore racks thanks to a distribution deal with Addison Wesley, the packaging and all of its associated rhetoric emphasizes the game’s literary qualities. Said emphasis extends right down to the contents of the disk; you type, for instance, “LOAD ‘STORY’,8” to start a game on the Commodore 64. The cover, meanwhile, prominently displays Infocom’s official new name for their works: not “adventure game,” not “text adventure,” but “interactive fiction.” It also shows where the game fits in a matrix of genres (consisting in the beginning of “Fantasy,” “Science Fiction,” “Tales of Adventure,” and “Mystery”) and difficulties (“Interactive Fiction Junior,” “Standard,” “Advanced,” and “Expert”).

The cover of the box flips open like a book for easy in-store browsing; it isn’t shrink-wrapped. Inside the left cover is a set of testimonials from happy customers. Most are the sort of thing you would expect, but, Infocom being Infocom, one or two bizarre remarks or complete non sequiturs were usually included in every game.

A bound-in booklet — called in-house the “browsie” because it was aimed as much at potential customers browsing in the store as at those same customers after they had brought the game home — begins with something to set the fictional stage: an issue of National Detective Gazette, a Stellar Patrol brochure, “The Great Underground Empire: A History.” The second half of the browsie is given over to a conventional instruction manual that incorporates everything Infocom had learned over the previous several years about teaching people how to play their games as quickly and painlessly as possible. The “Sample Transcript and Map,” an innovation which first appeared in Seastalker, the final pre-gray-box release, is a particular stroke of genius. It shows by example how to play and how to make a map via a fictional game made up just for the occasion by Infocom. Each title got its own sample transcript which takes place in a similar environment to the one found on the disk and demonstrates that title’s general style of play.

The new scheme was welcome not least in that it let Infocom separate each game’s fictional context from technical instructions on how to work it. Previously they had blended everything together, a conceit that must have seemed clever when they first did it for Deadline but that had grown very strained by 1984. (The original version of The Witness is a typical example. Its National Detective Gazette includes an article titled “Investigative Machines of the Future!” explaining this “Computer” that in the “early part of the next millennium” will be “the most important tool of the detective’s trade.”)

After the browsie comes the portion of the package that is sealed, containing the various physical feelies as well the game disk itself, all peeking enticingly through a clear plastic cover for the benefit of in-store browsers.

And finally there’s the back side of the box, which has the expected flavor text for the game as well as a shot of all the feelies on display. Then comes some standard text, a sort of mission statement for Infocom interactive fiction (“It’s like waking up inside a story!”; “You’re more than a passive reader!”), along with an explanation of the difficulty levels.

Converting the entire catalog to the new format was a huge task which consumed lots of resources during the first half of 1984. While much of the material that would go into the gray boxes already existed, it had to undergo considerable reworking in virtually every case to fit into the new format. Just untangling the fictional context from the technical instructions was a time-consuming, delicate task. And much had to be written from scratch, such as a suitably clever sample transcript for every single game. The three Zork games, which had previously shipped in blister packs containing only a disk and a slim manual telling how to play, demanded the most effort of all; a browsie and set of feelies that would be evocative enough to stand alongside those in the other games had to be designed for each from scratch.

Brilliant as the new packaging was, there was some inevitable sadness at Infocom over the loss of the likes of the Starcross saucer and the Suspended mask and a certain individual personality for each title that the old “anything goes” approach to packaging had represented. Certainly compromises — sometimes painful ones — had to be made. Steve Meretzky was particularly broken up about the loss of the infotater from the Sorcerer package; it was just too big to fit into the gray-box feelie tray, and so had to be replaced with a simple booklet.

The matrix of genres and difficulties was as useful to Infocom internally as it was to their customers. A diagram showing its current state — i.e., what current and upcoming games slotted in where — could generally be found on a whiteboard in the marketing department. This allowed them, as Jon Palace puts it, to “figure out where the holes were” in the current product line and not “put too many in one place.” In deciding what games to approve for development, big emphasis would be given to keeping the matrix balanced, making sure there were games for all fictional interests and all experience levels. After the beginning of the gray-box era you wouldn’t see unbalanced stretches like the one in late 1982 and early 1983 when three of five titles were science fiction — or for that matter Seastalker and Cutthroats, two titles released back to back just as the matrix was coming into force that were both nautical “Tales of Adventure” set in contemporary times.

The genres on the matrix were always much more defensible than the difficulty levels, which often seemed like little more than wishful thinking driven by the slot marketing would like for any given game to occupy. Zork I, while not quite so objectionable as Zork II, was a huge game with some very questionable puzzles that never would have made it into a later Infocom game. Just mapping its huge geography full of willfully inconsistent room connections could require hours of patient, dogged work with graph paper, pencil, and eraser. Yet Zork I also remained Infocom’s biggest seller by a country mile, selling more copies every year it remained on the market; it sold more than 150,000 copies in 1984 alone, an absolutely huge figure for the era and enough to account for more then 20% of Infocom’s total sales for the year. Many computer dealers still seemed to regard Zork I as an essential accessory to be taken home by the customer along with printer paper and some blank disks every they sold a new computer system. Infocom simply couldn’t drive such customers away with an “Advanced” or “Expert” label on this evergreen. So, Zork I became a “Standard”-level game. Similar concerns would soon lead to Infocom’s adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the cruelest game they had released since the days of Zork, Deadline, and Suspended but also one with a potential mass appeal like nothing they had done before, also being given the “Standard” label.

Stranger, because less explicable, were the difficulty levels bestowed on other games. Starcross, by no means a trivial challenge but one full of logical puzzles in a relatively consistent environment, was nevertheless an “Expert” game, while Infidel, the most straightforward game Infocom had yet produced outside of the deliberately easy Seastalker, became an “Advanced” game. One can only presume that, with the “Standard”-level Cutthroats about to be released and Seastalker in the “Junior” slot, Infidel fit the matrix better as an “Advanced”-level “Tale of Adventure.” Ditto for Starcross with Planetfall and the forthcoming Hitchhiker’s, both of which were already crowded into the “Standard” science-fiction slot. In the end marketing likely did themselves few favors with this sort of wishful thinking. Any new player who bought Zork I or Hitchhiker’s and was completely baffled, then looked at the box to see this was only “Standard”-level interactive fiction, “a good introductory level for adults”… well, she probably wasn’t likely to buy another. No one likes to feel stupid. If Infocom couldn’t make the difficulty levels accurate (and, as noted, there were indeed legitimate commercial concerns that made this problematic), they would have been better served to leave them off entirely.

Be that as it may, times in general were good. Infocom was the main reason for the bookware craze that was the hot new trend in entertainment software in 1984, even though, ironically, their own first book adaptation would only appear at the end of the year in the form of Hitchhiker’s. And their reputation extended far beyond the software industry. They were in Mike Berlyn’s words “intellectual rock stars”; it seemed everyone wanted a piece of them. Christopher Cerf, a big wheel with the Children’s Television Workshop, took a few of them out to meet with Jim Henson to discuss creative opportunities. George Romero of horror-movie fame asked them about movie rights to Zork. Timothy Leary wrote Berlyn a gushing letter about Suspended, saying it had “changed his life” and revealed to him the potential of computers with its portrayal of split consciousness. He later visited Infocom in person to discuss a collaboration. He envisioned a “personality” that would live in the computer, observe what you did and how you liked to do it, and adjust the experience of using the computer accordingly. None of these talks ultimately came to anything, but for this bunch of hackers and refugees from academia, who had mostly been kids or teens when Night of the Living Dead was provoking shock and outrage at the Saturday matinees and the Moody Blues were serenading Leary on the radio, it was heady stuff indeed. (Leary did eventually find a willing collaborator in Electronic Arts. Timothy Leary’s Mind Mirror — “Tune in, turn on, boot up” — became one of the strangest products that company would ever release, one that would never have seen the light of day outside of the experimental mid-1980s.)

And then, to cap off a crazy year, Simon & Schuster came calling waving tens of millions in their faces.

The story of the Simon & Schuster negotiation, only recently fully known thanks to the Get Lamp project, begins with one of the most important and controversial figures in publishing of the late twentieth century: Richard E. Snyder. Snyder started at Simon & Schuster in 1960, and had risen to vice president by the time the massive conglomerate Gulf and Western (or, as Mel Brooks dubbed them in Silent Movie, Engulf and Devour) acquired the company in 1975; his biggest claim to fame during these early years was perhaps giving Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward the title for All the President’s Men. After years of chafing against the hidebound practices of Simon & Schuster’s original management, he at last got the chance he had been dreaming of from Gulf and Western, who made him president in 1975 and CEO in 1978. Determined to wrench the company out of the past and into the modern world of media and entertainment, Snyder unabashedly pursued celebrities and big, commercial projects whilst building a reputation as the meanest man in his field, the barbarian at the gate of the tweedy, traditional world of publishing. He took a special delight in firing people, setting aside a room for the purpose that came to be called the “executive departure lounge.” His reputation spread far and wide; he made Fortune magazine’s list of “American’s Toughest Bosses” in 1984 in an article which compared him to the Ayatollah Khomeini — only Snyder had more hostages, Fortune wrote, in the form of an entire company which supposedly quaked in fear of him. He also became known for, in the words of Washington Post columnist Jonathan Yardley, “his assiduous accumulation of executive perquisites unmatched since the heyday of William Randolph Hearst, if not Croesus.” But he got results: in fifteen years he took Simon & Schuster from a $40-million business to a $2-billion business, from a modest trade publisher to the biggest, most diversified publisher in the world.

Much of that growth was fueled by aggressive acquisitions that let Simon & Schuster capitalize on any hot trend that came down the pop-culture pipe. Thus they were only being true to form when they began nosing around Infocom, kicking the tires as it were, as early as late 1983. They were eager to point out (in Mike Dornbrook’s words) “all the wonderful things they could do” for Infocom, which included among other things the chance to make games in the Star Trek universe; Paramount Pictures was also a subsidiary of Gulf and Western, and Simon & Schuster already published the Star Trek line of novels on their Pocket Books imprint. Snyder got personally involved in the latter half of 1984. Like any good publisher, he talked often to people in the bookstore trade. Waldenbooks, the biggest chain in the United States at the time, continued to mention often how well they were doing with this company called Infocom and this thing they made called interactive fiction.

And so Snyder, who could be charming as hell when he wanted to be, decided to try to make a deal personally. He invited Marc Blank and Mike Dornbrook to visit him in his executive suite near the top of a skyscraper in Rockefeller Center. It made, to say the least, quite the contrast to Infocom’s comfortable little home on Wheeler Street back in Cambridge. Dornbrook recalls marveling at the restroom, which “used gold in ways I had never thought of using gold.” The three had lunch in Snyder’s executive dining room at a table big enough to seat thirty — Dover sole, prepared by Snyder’s personal chef and served by three liveried attendants. Snyder stroked them like a master. Dornbrook:

Marc said, “Mike, why don’t you tell Mr. Snyder a little bit about InvisiClues?”

So I described what I’d done. I mentioned the selling price and how many had sold. By that point, late 1984, we’d sold over half a million — the Zork I InvisiClues book alone had sold something like 200,000 copies.

Synder said, “You’ve sold 200,000 copies at $9.95? That’s trade-paperback prices! Do you realize you’re one of the bestselling authors on the planet?”

I said, “What?”

Snyder said, “In terms of dollars you’re at Stephen King level!”

I was totally blown away.

Shortly after, Snyder sent a Gulf and Western acquisitions negotiator and the Simon & Schuster manager he proposed to have oversee Infocom to visit them in Cambridge. They arrived in a limousine to take Blank, Stu Galley, and Al Vezza (who had replaced Joel Berez as planned as Infocom’s CEO in January of 1984) to another opulent lunch. When they got down to specifics at last and made their offer, it was extraordinary: $28 million. To put this in context, understand that Infocom’s board had recently estimated the company’s value at perhaps $10 million, $12 million at the outside.

Yet feelings were mixed on Infocom’s side. While Blank and Joel Berez were reportedly very interested, Galley had taken an immediate dislike to the would-be overseer, feeling certain within minutes that he “didn’t understand” Infocom and never would. And Vezza couldn’t help but feel that if a corporate titan like Snyder, who, say what you would about him, didn’t get where he was by being stupid, was offering that kind of money then in the big picture Infocom must be worth much more. The negotiator’s response to his hemming and hawing only reinforced the impression. In Dornbrook’s recollection, he said, “Look, if it’s just a matter of a few million dollars, I don’t care, I’ll pay you more. But are you or are you not interested in selling?” Still unable to elicit a clear answer to that question, he decided that Vezza was not. Simon & Schuster ended up starting a brief-lived interactive division of their own in lieu of Infocom. Their most high-profile releases became, yes, a few Star Trek adventures.

In light of the course Infocom’s fortunes would soon take, both the people who were there at the time and mere interested parties like you and me will inevitably continue to second-guess the decision — or, perhaps better said, non-decision — for years to come. Jon Palace notes, probably correctly, that there was a certain amount of hubris in Infocom’s rejection of Snyder’s millions, that they couldn’t help but let some of the glowing press go to their heads and really did suspect that Simon & Schuster might just be getting them too cheap at a mere three times their valuation by the company accountants. And certainly interactive-fiction fans who feel the genre died (commercially) far too young are always looking for viable counter-factuals that keep Infocom alive and thriving into the 1990s and hopefully beyond.

Still, it’s hard for me to see this deal turning out all that well for Infocom in the end. Friction almost always results when a small, creative company is bought by, as Dave Lebling describes Simon & Schuster, “a giant soulless corporation.” When the bookware craze died down, as it seems it must whether Infocom was acquired or not, Infocom would have been just an artifact of a trend, one of many that hadn’t taken off quite like Simon & Schuster hoped. You win some and you lose some in business, after all. Nor was Snyder, as famous in the business community as he was hated by Simon & Schuster’s management class for his micromanaging instinct, exactly known as a patient man. A Simon & Schuster Infocom may very well have given us fewer works than did the eventual Activision Infocom; certainly the much larger Simon & Schuster was much more likely to write off an acquisition quickly as a failed bet and move on than was Activision. Even the former Imps, most of whom would have done very well financially by the acquisition, will mostly wryly admit that they look on the Simon & Schuster negotiation wistfully not so much as the potential enabler of many more years of fruitful creativity as an opportunity to cash out on all their hard work, to walk away from Infocom in the end with something more than the salary they’d earned over the years to show for their entrepreneurial efforts. That’s not a feeling we should begrudge them; I’m sure every one of us with mortgages and car payments would look back the same way. But it’s also a long way from the more idealistic what-might-have-beens that tempt us.

And there was always an elephant in the room as the board discussed the merits of Simon & Schuster’s offer: the Business Products division and the Cornerstone database. What had started as a two-man research project in October of 1982 and been officially approved as a viable endeavor ten months later had, since Al Vezza’s arrival as CEO in January of 1984, become Infocom’s strategic priority, consuming all the money the games generated and millions more that they had to acquire through bank loans. Simon & Schuster had no interest in business software, and would have been more than happy just to take the games division for their $30 million. Problem was, Infocom needed the ongoing revenue from the games division to keep Business Products going. Somehow funneling some or all of Simon & Schuster’s millions back into a remade Infocom-as-business-developer would involve tricky, time-consuming accounting shenanigans for which Vezza just didn’t feel he had time; Cornerstone was now entering the final, expensive crunch time, with a planned release in January of 1985. And Cornerstone was the dream of Vezza and at least a few of the other old timers, the reason they had founded Infocom in the first place. If becoming a success in business software is a more prosaic dream than that of inventing a new way of sharing stories, well, hey, it takes the prosaic as well as the poetic to make a world. Who are we to judge?

But the full story of Cornerstone is a story for another article. For now let’s just note that, despite tensions and conflicts that inevitably arose from packing a bunch of game and business developers together in the same increasingly cramped office, things in the big picture were still looking pretty great to just about everyone as they celebrated Christmas 1984. They had sold about 725,000 games that year worth $10 million, up from 450,000 and $6 million the previous year. They were so successful in their field that a whole genre of bookware had sprung up to try to capture some of their success, that their company name risked becoming synonomous, Kleenex-style, with the adventure game — or okay, if you like, “interactive fiction” — itself. And they had some of the more interesting people on the planet coming to them to propose collaborations. Speaking of which: their collaboration with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker’s game had sold some 60,000 copies in its first six weeks or so, a pace out of the gate that none of their earlier releases had even approached. If anything had frustrated Infocom over the last couple of years, it had been their inability to field a title that would break beyond the label of just “very successful” to become a phenomenon like Zork I, which at four years old still outsold any of their other games by a factor of two and had in fact just had its biggest sales year ever. Now it looked at last like they had another Zork. With the next Hitchhiker’s game expected by next Christmas, 1985’s game sales were estimated — very conservatively, they thought — as likely to reach at least $13 million. Add to that the at least $5 million or so they expected from the first year of Cornerstone sales, and it looked likely to be one hell of a year.

Granted, a sober-minded accountant or financial analyst might have looked at things less optimistically. She might have noted that Infocom had managed to maintain their upward sales trajectory even as the home-computer industry in general suffered a disappointing year of slowing hardware and software sales, failed platform introductions, shrinking or disappearing magazines, and a mainstream media that was suddenly as cynical about home computers as they had been ecstatic about them a year before. It was of course great that Infocom was so far bucking the trends — but would it continue? She also might have wondered why this company that was so ridiculously good and successful at this one thing was so determined to branch out into this other thing. After all, every business student learned that a small company should do one thing and do it well, that trying to do too much too soon was usually a fatal mistake. And, most worrisome of all, she might have noted that Infocom’s board had, wittingly or unwittingly, effectively bet the company on this new thing by going millions into debt to finance it. There was no Plan B if Infocom didn’t become successful in business products like they were in games. Indeed, one fact must have glared out at her as soon as she peeked at the books: thanks to Business Products, Infocom had managed to lose $2.4 million in 1984 despite sales increases of some 67%.

But, Vezza and the board would have replied, that was just temporary, just the money Infocom had to spend to make even more money in an industry that dwarfed the one they currently all but dominated. Cornerstone was shaping up to be a great product. It couldn’t fail.

Could it?

(As usual for my Infocom pieces, my secret weapons for this article were Jason Scott’s Get Lamp project materials. Thanks again for sharing, Jason!)

Comments
18 Responses

- Keith Palmer

October 23, 2013 at 10:13 pm

I was sort of waiting for the transition to the “grey boxes”; they were how I first thought of Infocom, given their lone adventure my family had (which I’m expecting we’ll get to in this cycle) came in a grey box. More than that, the catalog in that box (“Passport to the United Products of Infocom”) showed all the games in grey boxes. When we got “The Lost Treasures of Infocom” years later for our nearly-new Macintosh LC II and I decided the games needed individual icons, I clicked out 30-by-32 thumbnails in a paint program and made the later games look like they were in grey boxes, too. However, in the anticipation I did think of something you’ve sort of touched on in this post, that the change away from the folios marked an end in itself… (Having managed not that long ago to see some of those folio manuals with their lack of expected demarcation between “scene setting” and “instructions,” I suppose I was amused by the blend, although I do understand how there could be reasons for getting away from that.)

- Ben

October 27, 2013 at 4:05 am

Infocom being Infoocm

- Jimmy Maher

October 27, 2013 at 1:57 pm

Thanks!

- iPadCary

October 27, 2013 at 10:14 pm

Hey, Jimmy!
I can’t wait until the Kindle Paperwhite 2 comes out in a week so I can dive right into “The Kings Of Shreds & Patches”!

Any new, your own or 3rd parties, Textfyre titles on the horizon?
And how about Textfyre games in the App Store?

- Jimmy Maher

October 28, 2013 at 1:08 am

You’d have to check with David Cornelson over at http://textfyre.com to see what he’s got planned. I may convert some more titles to run on Android, but there won’t be any more Kindle e-ink titles; Amazon’s unfortunately discontinued new development of Kindle Active Content.

- iPadCary

October 28, 2013 at 3:27 pm

Hey, Jimmy!
Thanks for answering.

In the Kindle Store, not for the Kindle Fire, but for the Kindle eReader, there are a ton of games
that are fitted to perform in the Kindle Paperwhite’s [KP] eInk display.

Developing “King Of Shreds”, you know what I mean.
Games like “Scrabble”, “BlackJack”, “UNO”, etc.
I’m guessing that’s what you mean by “Kindle Active Content” [KAC], right?

OK, so just to be clear, are you saying Amazon doesn’t allow KAC apps to be made anymore?

If so, can you give me an approximate date, please, when this happened so I can start a topic on the Amazon Kindle Forum & ask why this has happened?

I ask because I always thought it kinda, for lack of a better word, “sexy” that devs looked beyond just processing text for a Kindle Paperwhite & worked within the framework an eInk’s display constraints to bring about that most wonderful of hacker things.
Something you’ve noted many a time regarding the Commodore64: expanding the function, utility, and capability of a KP and make it do what it’s creators never expected/meant/intended it to do, and that is deliver a satisfactorily substantive gaming experience.

Thanks!

- Jimmy Maher

October 29, 2013 at 6:29 am

Yes, that’s correct. I believe the program was discontinued last spring. Existing apps do remain in the store for the time being, but they’re not accepting new ones.

- iPadCary

October 29, 2013 at 3:18 pm

Thanks for the info, Jimmy!
Man, I wonder why Amazon did such a stupid thing ….?
I had some ideas of my own for some cool KAC.
OK, I’ll go start that Amazon Kindle Forum topic now.

- iPadCary

October 30, 2013 at 5:31 am

Just in case you’d like to take a quick peek, here’s the Amazon Kindle Forum topic: http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle/ref=cm_cd_et_up_redir?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdPage=1&cdThread=TxPIJ46C93S2NH&newContentID=Mx2YT6HU1V13QN3#Mx2YT6HU1V13QN3

- iPadCary

October 30, 2013 at 3:10 pm

I started the topic at the Amazon Kindle Forum
& boy did I get FAST feedback! lol
I think you’d find a lot of kindred spirits there as they
are vehemently anti-Apple devices.

Anyhoo, I was directed to 2 articles:
1] http://www.geekwire.com/2013/amazon-winding-app-developer-program-kindle-eink-readers/
HIGHLIGHT
Responding to GeekWire’s initial inquiry on the topic,
an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement,
“We continue to support the (Kindle Development Kit) and active content for Kindle e-readers.”
After the initial post, the spokesperson responded to the specific statement
that Amazon would no longer approve new Active Content app submissions:
“This is not the case. We continue to approve titles from developers.”

2] http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2013/04/16/amazon-shutting-down-app-developer-program-for-kindle-ereaders/#.UnEPfvmshcY

HIGHLIGHT
I have heard complaints that Amazon’s approval process for Kindle Active Content is so capricious
they make Apple look sane and reasonable.
Amazon has rejected apps for what the developers describe as ridiculous reasons,
blocked app updates with no explanation,
and generally made life difficult for the developers.
I’ve also been told off the record that Amazon plays favorites with developers.
Amazon has reportedly neglected to approve an app from a developer
so a similar app from a preferred developer can be released first.
In any case, now that a developer has called this story into question all I can say is that this situation is far from clear.

It looks like Amazon plays hardball with some devs, so in a
fit of pique & sour grapes, they’re spreading FUD about KAC.

Comment?

- Jimmy Maher

October 30, 2013 at 3:29 pm

I’m sorry, but I’m just not terribly exercised over this topic. Amazon was always super professional and helpful with me. It’s very true that they were very serious about quality control, but in the end that’s hard to really criticize. My app was the better for it. They took a genuine interest in the app, saying it was the most complex and ambitious thing ever done with the KDK, which made me feel quite good. They even sent a few bug reports from deep in the game, and said a number of them around the office were playing it for pleasure.

When it came time to shut down, they were nice enough to call me and explain that they’d still be selling the KDK apps for the foreseeable future, but were effectively mothballing new development — only critical bug fixes would be pushed to the store. If that was all a ruse, so be it.

I can understand their reasoning for discontinuing the program, and I can’t say I miss programming for the KDK. It was one of the less pleasant platforms I’ve ever had to work on. Maybe it’s better to just let the e-ink Kindles do what they do best… On the other hand, I’d be thrilled to work with the folks I dealt with at Amazon again.

I’d have liked to have sold a few more copies of my app, but, hey, a parser-driven game is a hard sell in the 2010s. I had a few reasonably good months, and it still brings in enough to buy my wife and I a nice dinner each month. And it was great experience, and led to a lot of work I’ve done since with mobile devices — work which thankfully pays a bit better. :)

- iPadCary

October 30, 2013 at 3:58 pm

OK, thanks for straightening all of that out, Jimmy.
Sorry to’ve taken up all of your time with it.

I’ve since submitted my own Amazon KAC dev request.
Let’s see what happens ….

- Olivier Guinart

October 28, 2013 at 4:08 pm

Love your stories, would buy your book if there was one out there. I need to get the GetLamp documentary too…

Small thing: “[…] some blank disks every they sold a new computer system.”. **Every** time?

- Jimmy Maher

October 29, 2013 at 6:34 am

You have to allow me a little bit of hyperbole now and then. :)

- Jonathan Blask

March 29, 2014 at 3:58 am

Might the S&S Star Trek game, the Promethean Prophecy, get its own post one day? I’d be interested in one.

- Jimmy Maher

March 29, 2014 at 8:05 am

Yes, I do plan to write about that one. It’s a 1986 game, so probably in the latter half of this year…

- Geoff Bailey

July 19, 2014 at 4:50 am

Sorry to chime in late about spelling errors, but “non sequiter” should be “non sequitur”. (This has been misspelled in a couple of other posts, also; here’s a Google search link for your convenience ( https://www.google.com.au/?gws_rd=ssl#q=sequiter+site:www.filfre.net ).

I just discovered this site a couple of weeks ago, and hope to be caught up soon. Keep up the good work!

- Jimmy Maher

July 19, 2014 at 6:15 am

Not at all. Thanks so much!

Cutthroats
November 1, 2013

Opinions amongst the former Imps vary wildly as to just how easy or difficult it was to work with ZIL, Infocom’s in-house adventure language. Stu Galley calls it “fairly easy”; Steve Meretzky calls it “quite intuitive” and “much easier to pick up” than any other programming language he had attempted before becoming an Imp; Bob Bates calls it “not that complicated,” at least for most tasks. Brian Moriarty, on the other hand, considers it “not particularly intuitive,” something that he learned only through sheer doggedness even as an accomplished assembly-language programmer (the skill which got him a job at Infocom in the first place). Some of those with less technical backgrounds found ZIL even more daunting. In early 1984 Infocom hired a prominent pop-science writer, who shall remain nameless, to become an Imp. Several other former Imps claim that, after he had struggled some six months with ZIL, they literally found him huddled beneath his desk, victim of a complete breakdown of sorts. That, needless to say, was that for him.

ZIL very nearly drove Mike Berlyn to the same state; he still considers actually becoming proficient with the language the biggest single accomplishment of his three years with Infocom. When he first came to the company, he regarded ZIL almost as a betrayal, the antithesis of what Marc Blank had promised him that working with their technology would be:

It was presented to me as, “We have this development system. Anybody can use it, and it’s just crying out for a writer. Why don’t you have a whack at it?”

That was not the case; it was not the truth. It wasn’t anywhere near reality. What they had was a high-level object-oriented language and a series of compilers, run-time interpreters, and virtual machines that were infinitely complex, and very little of it was hidden from the Implementer.

I was a self-taught programmer. I knew BASIC and some 6502 assembler. They sat me down in front of a terminal and said, “Here’s Emacs” — an editor I’d never used. I had no idea. To open a file took like fifteen keystrokes; I developed this claw from trying to press five keys at once. There was no language manual which I could sit down and go through, no tutorials or anything. And this was for any writer off the street? “Here you go, sit down at the terminal and write yourself a game!”

Even after becoming proficient at last, an endeavor he estimates to have required about six months, Berlyn continued to hate programming in the language. That loathing may be key to understanding something that must have driven his colleagues at least a little bit crazy about Mike Berlyn: hired on the basis of his novelist’s pedigree to be Infocom’s first “real writer” of interactive fiction, he always wanted to do anything but write interactive fiction. Of the three adventure games he wrote for Infocom, the only one he could be said to have tackled voluntarily and enthusiastically was the first, Suspended, a game which was arguably the least novel-like work Infocom would ever brand “interactive fiction,” being almost more a strategy game in text or a computerized board game. He had to be cajoled into doing Infidel, with his dissatisfaction showing up in the rather sour atmosphere of the final product. By 1984 he’d gotten involved with the research-and-development side of the company, working on a cross-platform graphics system and brainstorming with Marc Blank new-and-improved versions of Infocom’s core technologies of ZIL and the Z-Machine. He had also begun to design what would become the company’s first non-adventure game and first to use graphics, a multi-player computerized board game called Fooblitzky which would appear in 1985. (In light of Suspended and Fooblitzky, perhaps Berlyn was really a frustrated board-game designer slumming it as a writer?)

When a certain bestselling author by the name of Douglas Adams came to Infocom to propose a collaboration, he asked to work with Mike Berlyn by name. Berlyn turned the proposal down flat, saying he wasn’t interested in sharing power with another designer. With the highest-profile project Infocom would ever have hanging in the balance, Mike Dornbrook was left scrambling to enlist the ever-reliable Steve Meretzky for the project and to convince Adams that he could do just as good a job as the guy who wrote Adams’s favorite Suspended. I want to emphasize here that everyone liked Mike Berlyn, what with his big booming laugh and his knack for taking the piss out of everything in a good-natured way that kept everyone grounded: Suspended became Suspenders; Cornerstone became, prophetically as it would turn out, Tombstone; Choose Your Own Adventure books became What the Fuck Do I Do Now? books. But man, could it be hard to get and keep him on any given task.

Getting Berlyn to do another adventure game for 1984, even sans-Adams, was a challenge. A compromise was eventually reached: he would design the game and write the text, but would not be forced to program it. That should give him enough time to also continue with his other projects. For the actual programming, Infocom turned to one Jerry Wolper, an MIT computer-science graduate who had been doing various jobs for the company since 1982. This sort of development partnership was something that Infocom was grudgingly coming to accept as the only viable way of using writers-turned-Imps, as opposed to programmers-turned-Imps, to create interactive fiction; the science-writer fiasco would mark the last time they would just plant an outside writer in front of a terminal and hope for the best. Partnerships were in fact responsible for three of their five games of 1984, Berlyn’s among them.

The game in question is called Cutthroats. In an odd coincidence that probably wouldn’t have happened if the matrix had come into force a few months earlier, it was not only Infocom’s second “Tale of Adventure” in a row but also has a nautical theme superficially similar to that of the preceding game, Seastalker. You play a down-on-the-luck treasure diver living on Hardscrabble Island. It’s a place of indeterminate actual location — the latitude and longitude shown on a sea chart that is one of the game’s feelies would seem to place it smack in the middle of Africa — but pretty plainly modeled on Florida’s Treasure Coast. Things are kicked off via the lengthiest in-game introduction yet seen from Infocom:

Nights on Hardscrabble Island are lonely and cold when the lighthouse barely pierces the gloom. You sit on your bed, thinking of better times and far-off places. A knock on your door stirs you, and Hevlin, a shipmate you haven't seen for years, staggers in.

"I'm in trouble," he says. "I had a few too many at The Shanty. I was looking for Red, but he wasn't around, and I started talking about ... here," he says, handing you a slim volume that you recognize as a shipwreck book written years ago by the Historical Society.

You smile. Every diver on the island has looked for those wrecks, without even an old boot to show for it. You open the door, hoping the drunken fool will leave. "I know what you're thinkin'," Hevlin scowls, "but look!" He points to the familiar map, and you see new locations marked for two of the wrecks.

"Keep it for me," he says. "Just for tonight. It'll be safe here with you. Don't let -- " He stops and broods for a moment. "I've got to go find Red!" And with that, Hevlin leaves.

You put the book in your dresser and think about following Hevlin. Then you hear a scuffle outside. You look through your window and see two men struggling. One falls to the ground in a heap. The other man bends down beside him, then turns as if startled and runs away. Another man then approaches the wounded figure. He kneels beside him for a long moment, then takes off after the other man.

It isn't long before the police arrive to tell you that Hevlin's been murdered. You don't mention the book, and hours later, as you lie awake in your bed, you wonder if the book could really be what it seems.

You soon fall in with a group of three other treasure hunters. You must assemble supplies and otherwise prepare an expedition to a heretofore undiscovered shipwreck, whilst dodging and thwarting the other ruthless treasure seekers who have already done in your old buddy Hevlin. At last you put out to sea for the actual dive, which, if a certain betrayer amongst your crew doesn’t kill you, could make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.

Cutthroats is perhaps of greatest interest as Infocom’s first experiment with formal structure outside of the radical departure that was Suspended. There are two possible wrecks which might be the target of your treasure hunt: the São Vera, a Portuguese cargo ship loaded with gold that sunk in 1698, or the Leviathan, a sort of fictional hybrid of the Titanic and Lusitania which was sunk by a U-boat in 1916. The game randomly chooses at the appropriate point which one you get.

Like some later Infocom formal experiments, the results here are mixed at best. You can exercise control over which shipwreck you receive only by saving the game shortly before the point where the game announces its decision, then restoring until you get the one you want. Luckily, the dice are thrown, so to speak, only just before the announcement instead of the very beginning of the game, making this process — what with there being only two possibilities — clumsy but not horribly annoying. More problematic is that there is still a whole lot of game to play between the point where you learn which shipwreck you’ve gotten and the beginning of the actual dive. This section plays almost exactly the same for both shipwrecks, making it a somewhat tedious exercise the second time around. It’s hard to determine what purpose Berlyn thought he was serving with this branching structure, other than to experiment just for the sake of it. There are signs that the original plan may have called for four possible shipwrecks; the feelies chart and describe four shipwrecks, and the manual says you will “try to salvage a sunken treasure from one of four shipwrecks.” It’s even possible to visit the other two shipwrecks in the game, although you can’t get inside them. The number may very well have been cut in half due to space and/or time restrictions. In some ways four shipwrecks would of course have been even more problematic — you’d now need to replay a big chunk of the game not once but three times to see it all — but would perhaps have been more justifiable as an experiment in branching narrative.

Like Seastalker, Cutthroats evidences Infocom’s new emphasis on creating interactive fictions as opposed to traditional text adventures. There’s a constant forward plot momentum right from the beginning of the game, when a character knocks on your door to invite you to a meeting of would-be treasure hunters, to the climax, the dive on the shipwreck itself. Characters move about the island and, later, the boat on their own schedules, and you must keep to a timetable and be where you’re expected to be to keep the plot moving forward. It gives a feel very different from the static environs of Zork or even the deserted complex of Planetfall.

Less defensibly, especially to modern sensibilities, Cutthroats is not so forgiving in its dynamism as Seastalker. In fact, it’s similar to the mysteries that preceded it in that solving the game requires a certain amount of learning by death, of plotting out the workings of the story through replays, figuring out what you need to do to avert each new disaster only after you’ve seen it once or twice. That said, it’s a much more forgiving exercise than even The Witness on the whole; you usually only need to go back a handful of turns at the most. There’s only one really tricky element that’s likely to send you back almost to square one, a crucial piece of evidence you need to collect on Hardscrabble Island to prevent disaster once you get out to sea. Even with that, Cutthroats is a very playable, solvable game.

Still, I’m not sure I can call all that satisfying of a game. The other characters remain the crudest sort of archetypes, as you might guess from reading the names of your fellow treasure hunters: Johnny Red, the Weasel, Pete the Rat. (Guess which one sold you out to your rivals…) A winning ending does indeed make you rich, but does nothing to bring the killer of Hevlin to justice:

Johnny slaps you on the back. "Good job, matey!" As you return to the island over the calm, dazzling blue sea, you contemplate your wealth with a touch of sadness. You think of Hevlin and hope his soul is resting a little easier now.

One would presume that Hevlin would really “rest easier” not if you became rich but if you, you know, made some effort to catch the guy that knifed him. Berlyn has apparently learned his lesson from the furor provoked by the comeuppance he delivered to the greedy treasure hunter in Infidel. Rather than challenge our expectations again, he’s back to the adventure-game norm of Greed Is Good. Your character comes across much like the protagonist of Infidel — he’s all about the gold, baby — albeit without that game’s element of subversion and self-awareness.

The best adjective I can think of to describe Cutthroats is “workmanlike.” It’s a thoroughly professional effort — Infocom wasn’t likely to produce anything else by this stage in their evolution — but it’s missing a certain spark, a certain passion. That’s a shame not least because the setting has such potential. You should be able to smell the salt air blowing through this faded community of which not much is left but the old-timers who spend their days drinking at The Shanty, but the text never gets much more evocative than the magnificent name “Hardscrabble Island” itself. Similarly, the shipwrecks are described precisely and grammatically, but little effort is made to convey the atmosphere, which I can only imagine must be mystical and kind of terrifying, of penetrating these watery graves. Much as I appreciate the audacity of Suspended and the Infidel ending, I’m left feeling rather happy that Mike Berlyn would soon step out of the way and let other, more passionate Imps have a crack at things.

As I’ve researched and written these articles I’ve been constantly surprised by how out of line the sales of many Infocom games were with the reputations they hold today. That’s especially true of Cutthroats. Widely regarded as a middling, rather forgettable game today, Cutthroats was quite a big seller in its day: over 50,000 copies in the last few months of 1984 alone, enough to make it the second most successful of Infocom’s five games of that year, behind only the juggernaut The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s hard to know to just what to attribute the success, unless it be an alternative choice for customers who’d have preferred to get their hands on Hitchhiker’s, the hottest game in the industry that Christmas. The attention-grabbing cover art, one of the few photographs standing out in a sea of painted dragons and spaceships on store shelves, also may have played its part. (The packaging in general, with some great feelies that are integrated into the game even more than usual and a True Tales of Adventure magazine full of in-jokes for players of Infidel, is a superb first born-in-a-gray-box effort from Infocom and G/R Copy.) Lifetimes sales approached 80,000, placing it amongst the more successful of Infocom’s corpus as a whole. Mediocrity, it seems, does have its rewards.

Comments
14 Responses

- Robb Sherwin

November 1, 2013 at 6:14 pm

Totally anecdotal, but regarding the sales of Cutthroats!…

A few years ago I was into bidding on shrink-wrapped Infocom games via eBay. The two games that seemed to be in largest supply as unopened, wrapped games were HHGG and Cutthroats!. They made, what, a quarter-million of HHGG so the supply there is understandable. I wonder, though, if something was going on with sales of Cutthroats! versus copies that actually made it into the disk drives of players.

- Jimmy Maher

November 2, 2013 at 8:48 am

In the Infocom sales chart (http://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/2419969220/lightbox/), there’s quite a number of games listed under 1984 and 1985 with a footnote of “x Commodore PLUS/4 included.” I don’t know quite what that might indicate. Maybe Commodore asked Infocom to make a bunch of games and bought them outright themselves to distribute and try to juice a software market for the PLUS/4? If so, and given the fate of that platform, the vast majority would have likely gone unsold. This would account for almost 20,000 of Cutthroats’s almost 80,000 in sales.

Of course, if most of those shrinkwrapped copies you were seeing were for the PLUS/4, that would lend credence to this theory… :)

- Dave Thompsen

November 7, 2013 at 3:42 am

Shrink-wrapped copies of both Cutthroats and Suspect are still somewhat common on eBay to this day, usually the C64/Plus-4 versions.

- Jonathan Blask

November 1, 2013 at 8:30 pm

Of course, it doesn’t negate the fact that Berlyn had a hard time learning ZIL, but in the late 90s, when he ported Dr. Dumont’s Wild P.A.R.T.I. to Inform 6, he was very vocal on the ifMUD about how he’d rather be coding in ZIL. Of course, one will often prefer the thing they are already familiar with.

Still, now that things like the “ZIL manual” are out on the web ( http://xlisp.org/zil.pdf ), it is cool to look at the code that the Imps dealt with.

Plus, of course, there’s Jesse McGrew’s (and others’) work to create a modern ZIL compiler, ZILF ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/zilf/ ).

ZILF (and the current ZIL “library”) are not yet feature-complete, but I had a lot of fun the other month digging into ZIL code just the same. I somewhat chronicled my journey in this thread at joltcountry.com: http://www.joltcountry.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=8860

Overall, I thought ZIL is quite elegant in its handling of some things. I think it would have been very interesting if the ZIL manual had been available throughout the 90s. Inform might have developed a bit differently.

Anyhow, I’m pretty sure I mentioned much of this in a comment to another post, but I feel it’s worth mentioning every time there’s a post about ZIL’s steep learning curve.

- Jimmy Maher

November 2, 2013 at 8:50 am

I suspect that Berlyn may be something of a “grass is always greener” kind of fellow. If he now had to go back to ZIL, he might start complaining and wishing he could use Inform. ;)

- Andrew

November 2, 2013 at 3:44 pm

Great stuff, as always. Just one quibble – I don’t know if one is betrayed by the Weasel or the Rat!

- Jimmy Maher

November 3, 2013 at 8:58 am

Yeah, that was kind of the joke. ;)

- Andrew

November 3, 2013 at 10:24 pm

Ah! I read it like ‘it’s obvious which one sells you out’.

- iPadCary

November 6, 2013 at 2:21 am

Well, my new Kindle Paperwhite 2 [KPW2] arrived via UPS today.
Nice little birthday present to myself!
The first KAC I downloaded onto it was, of course, “King Of Shreds”.
Loving every minute of it!
But I notice “The Shadow On The Cathedral” wasn’t available
as it “isn’t playable” on a KPW2.
Do you know the story on this?

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2013 at 8:39 am

You’ll have to check with David Cornelson of Textfyre on that. I was just the hired help there.

- iPadCary

November 9, 2013 at 2:50 pm

Jimmy, I see blogs are available on KPW2.
Is “Digital Antiquarian”?

- Jimmy Maher

November 10, 2013 at 9:15 am

Sorry, afraid not.

While I certainly am gratified by your interest in my various nerdly endeavors, it might be best if you could contact me privately with this sort of inquiry. That way we could keep the individual article comments from getting cluttered with a lot of stuff having nothing to do with their topics.

- iPadCary

November 11, 2013 at 2:12 pm

You’re right, of course.
I’m glad I read this last response as I was just about to do it again! lol
But I see your email address now, so I’ll use that.
Won’t happen again, I promise.

- Rafael Oliveira

April 6, 2015 at 1:51 pm

I just discovered this blog and I’m completely thrilled and surprised on the backstory of some of my favorite games.

Cutthroats was the first Infocom game I bought, at thirteen or fourteen, and being Brazilian in the eighties, just a barely passable knowledge of english.

I still have my original (opened, very non-mint) gray box for the TRS-80, but the disk is long gone.

On Cutthroats, I got the game based on my two (then) new passions, diving and adventure games, as interactive fiction was an alien concept for someone used to Scott Adams works. I had a hell of a time translating whatever I could, but in the end I felt the game had very little to do with diving, so it was a big disappointment.

Douglas Adams
November 11, 2013

Hardcore fans of Douglas Adams can make the worst of ambassadors for his work. They go too often for the lowest-hanging fruit — like towels, “Don’t Panic!”, or the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a “trilogy” of five novels (a “joke” so thuddingly unfunny that I choose to believe it originated with some harried paperback copywriter rather than Adams himself). Or, God help us, “42.” All of these tropes had already had every last drop of novelty wrung from them thirty years ago. I can’t help but think about those awful teenagers — I should know; I used to be one — who march around repeating every line from their favorite Monty Python sketches verbatim in awful teenage faux-British accents in the belief that repetition is the soul of wit.

For me the real pleasures of Douglas Adams are subtler. He was a genuinely good crafter of sentences who cared about the way he put words onto the page, which is a quality rarer than it ought to be amongst popular writers. Even more unusually, he had a style all his own, crafting strange juxtapositions of words that shouldn’t work but somehow do. Some of the sentences in his books could have come from no one else’s pen. (Who else could have written, “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t”?) His wordplay has drawn occasional comparison with Lewis Carrol:

“You’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”

“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”

“You ask a glass of water.”

Hitchhiker’s as a whole is much more than a collection of intermittently amusing gags and goofy aliens. It’s no more really about outer space than Gulliver’s Travels is about Lilliput and Brobdingnag. At the same time, however, Adams wasn’t sending up or satirizing science fiction itself in the manner of something like, say, Space Balls. No, he was using his far-out settings and characters to comment on the real world around him: “I am writing about precisely here and now and putting it on an extreme epic cosmic scale to make fun of it.” Most of the best bits in Hitchhiker’s have recognizable analogues in human culture. It’s our sense of recognition, even if it’s subconscious, that makes them so funny. The Vogon captain is a stand-in for Adolf Eichmann and every other officiously bureaucratic little butcher in history. Through the band Disaster Area, “the loudest noise of any kind at all in the galaxy,” Adams mocked the pomposity of arena rock four years before This is Spinal Tap. Or take the resolutely non-sporting Adams’s description of Brockian Ultra Cricket as “a curious game which involved suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason and then running away,” a description that could be applied to most of the team sports we humans play.

Like Jonathan Swift, Adams isn’t interested in peddling what he regards to be false comforts. There’s an unsettlingly nihilistic core to at least the first three and the fifth Hitchhiker’s books. Adams’s universe may be charmingly wacky, but it’s also meaningless and utterly uncaring, even if Adams still professed himself to be an agnostic rather than an atheist through the writing of most of the series. (That changed only in the lengthy gap between the fourth and fifth books, when he met and became hugely enamored of Richard Dawkins. He spent the remainder of his life as an outspoken atheist and anti-theist to rival Dawkins himself.) This is after all a series that begins with the destruction of the Earth and all its billions of inhabitants because a bunch of aliens randomly decide to build a “hyperspace bypass” through its orbit. He is cruel enough to offer a Nietzschian solution of finding meaning in self-actualization through the mouth of the old planet designer Slartibartfast, only to jerk it away as just as deluded as any other route to inner peace.

“Perhaps I’m old and tired,” he continued, “but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. Look at me: I design coastlines. I got an award for Norway.

“Where’s the sense in that? None that I’ve been able to make out. I’ve been doing fjords all my life. For a fleeting moment they become fashionable and I get a major award.

“In this replacement Earth we’re building they’ve given me Africa to do and of course I’m doing it with all fjords again because I happen to like them, and I’m old-fashioned enough to think that they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent. And they tell me it’s not equatorial enough. Equatorial!” He gave a hollow laugh. “What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”

“And are you?”

“No. That’s where it all falls down, of course.”

It can all become a bit exhausting eventually, especially if you’re silly enough to try to devour the whole series in one gulp. Small wonder that Adams himself was prone to bouts of existential angst and depression throughout his life, during which times he admitted he could become embarrassingly like his terminally depressed robotic creation Marvin the Paranoid Android.

The emptiness at the heart of the other Hitchhiker’s books might explain why I like the fourth book, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, so much more than so many people, including on occasion Adams himself, tell me I ought to. The first time Adams tried to write a novel in the conventional way, from scratch (the first three books were all adapted from script treatments), it brings Adams’s hapless human victim-of-circumstances Arthur Dent back home to a resurrected Earth. (Don’t ask how; I’m not sure I even remember. No one reads Hitchhiker’s for the plot anyway.) There Adams lets him fall him love. More shockingly, it’s a disarmingly sweet little love story that, while funny, is funny in a completely different way from what we’ve come to expect. It shows the other side of Adams — the romantic — in passages that demand a noisily joyous soundtrack like, say, a little Raspberries. Or at least anything but Arthur’s album of bagpipe music.

That night, at home, as he was prancing round the house pretending to be tripping through cornfields in slow motion and continually exploding with sudden laughter, Arthur thought he could even bear to listen to the album of bagpipe music he had won. It was eight o’clock and he decided he would make himself, force himself, to listen to the whole record before he phoned her. Maybe he should even leave it till tomorrow. That would be the cool thing to do. Or next week sometime.

No. No games. He wanted her and didn’t care who knew it. He definitely and absolutely wanted her, adored her, longed for her, wanted to do more things than there were names for with her.

He actually caught himself saying things like “Yippee,” as he pranced ridiculously round the house. Her eyes, her hair, her voice, everything …

He stopped.

He would put on the record of bagpipe music. Then he would call her.

Would he, perhaps, call her first?

No. What he would do was this. He would put on the record of bagpipe music. He would listen to it, every last banshee wail of it. Then he would call her. That was the correct order. That was what he would do.

In moving his satirical eye to our own planet, So Long demonstrates how perceptive Adams really is about the world around him. The arguable highlight of the entire book is the biscuit story that Arthur shares with his new love Fenchurch. Unfortunately, it’s just too long to quote here. Instead I’ll share the alleged real-life origin of the story, which Adams later recounted in a speech collected posthumously in The Salmon of Doubt. (He helpfully translates “biscuit” into “cookie” here for the benefit of his American audience.)

This actually did happen to a real person, and the real person is me. I had gone to catch a train. This was April 1976, in Cambridge, U.K. I was a bit early for the train. I’d gotten the time of the train wrong. I went to get myself a newspaper to do the crossword, and a cup of coffee and a packet of cookies. I went and sat at a table. I want you to picture the scene. It’s very important that you get this very clear in your mind. Here’s the table, newspaper, cup of coffee, packet of cookies. There’s a guy sitting opposite me, perfectly ordinary-looking guy wearing a business suit, carrying a briefcase. It didn’t look like he was going to do anything weird. What he did was this: he suddenly leaned across, picked up the packet of cookies, tore it open, took one out, and ate it.
Now this, I have to say, is the sort of thing the British are very bad at dealing with. There’s nothing in our background, upbringing, or education that teaches you how to deal with someone who in broad daylight has just stolen your cookies. You know what would happen if this had been South Central Los Angeles. There would have very quickly been gunfire, helicopters coming in, CNN, you know… But in the end, I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do: I ignored it. And I stared at the newspaper, took a sip of coffee, tried to do a clue in the newspaper, couldn’t do anything, and thought, what am I going to do?

In the end I thought nothing for it, I’ll just have to go for it, and I tried very hard not to notice the fact that the packet was already mysteriously opened. I took out a cookie for myself. I thought, that settled him. But it hadn’t because a moment or two later he did it again. He took another cookie. Having not mentioned it the first time, it was somehow even harder to raise the subject the second time around. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice…” I mean, it doesn’t really work.

We went through the whole packet like this. When I say the whole packet, I mean there were only about eight cookies, but it felt like a lifetime. He took one, I took one, he took one, I took one. Finally, when we got to the end, he stood up and walked away. Well, we exchanged meaningful looks, then he walked away, and I breathed a sigh of relief and sat back.

A moment or two later the train was coming in, so I tossed back the rest of my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper were my cookies. The thing I like particularly about this story is the sensation that somewhere in England there has been wandering around for the last quarter-century a perfectly ordinary guy who’s had the same exact story, only he doesn’t have the punch line.

Whether in this or the more extended (and, truth be told, funnier) version in So Long, it’s a story that communicates worlds about Britishness. There’s been some doubt cast as to whether the story really happened at all; similar stories have apparently been passed around as urban legends since long before 1976. But then the story’s veracity or lack thereof isn’t actually the point, is it?

The series’s new tone didn’t last very long. When Adams returned to Hitchhiker’s under pressure from his publisher after a long hiatus, it was to write Mostly Harmless, a misanthropic little book that delights in blowing up the Earth and tormenting poor Arthur yet again and doesn’t even have the virtue of being all that funny. Big softie that I am, I prefer to pretend that it all ended with the perfectly tidy conclusion of So Long, with the Earth still intact, Arthur happily hitchhiking the galaxy again with Fenchurch, and Marvin dying — happy(!).

Amongst other things, Mostly Harmless was written as a sort of “Up Yours!” to Adams’s traditional fans, who hadn’t responded all that well to either the shift the Hitchhiker’s series had made in So Long or his Dirk Gently books, a pair of similarly earthbound philosophical detective novels he wrote between the fourth and fifth Hitchhiker’s books. (Some will tell you, and not without justification, that the Dirk Gently books were actually the best things Adams ever wrote.) It was a problem that frustrated Adams throughout his career: he wasn’t quite coming from the same place as most of the people who read what he wrote. While his fan base was rooted in science fiction, Adams never thought of himself as a science-fiction writer, in spite of some accidentally prescient things that sneaked into Hitchhiker’s — the most notable of which was the eponymous electronic guidebook itself, which is essentially Wikipedia running on a tablet, right down to the somewhat questionable veracity of much of what it offers and its editors’ somewhat, shall we say, idiosyncratic priorities.

Here’s what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.

It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

The Guide also tells you on which planets the best Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters are mixed, how much you can expect to pay for one and what voluntary organizations exist to help you rehabilitate afterward. The Guide even tells you how you can mix one yourself…

Cue up the recipes, etc., etc. Earth, meanwhile, is dismissed in another of those jokes we never need to hear again as “mostly harmless.” Similarly, and as described in a recent MIT Technology Review article, Wikipedia lavishes more care on its “List of Pornographic Actresses by Decade” than on some entire countries.

Still, Adams himself noted that “saying I write science fiction is like saying the Pythons make historical movies.” He always thought of himself as a comedy writer who happened to play in a science-fictional setting rather than a science-fiction writer whose work happened to be funny. Being a voracious reader in general, he had read his share of science fiction before creating Hitchhiker’s, but he wasn’t particularly obsessed with the stuff. Certainly his opinions of some of the icons of the field were hardly glowing. He said he “wouldn’t employ Isaac Asimov to write junk mail.” Arthur C. Clarke fared only a little better: he was “a little dull perhaps.” The only two science-fiction authors he spoke of in consistently glowing terms were Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Sheckley. These are also two are of the relatively small stable of science-fiction writers who are genuinely, consistently funny, which perhaps shows where Adams’s priorities really lay. When Adams’s agent started booking him for science-fiction conventions in the first blush of Hitchhiker’s success, he was discomfited by the places, and soon asked to stick with traditional bookstore signings. His favorite writer was someone that most of the people who attended those conventions had probably never heard of: the great British wit, satirist, and societal deconstructor par excellence P.G. Wodehouse.

When others — and there have been tons of them, including heaps and heaps writing not books but games — try to write in the “comedy science fiction” genre Adams virtually invented, they tend to get the surface trappings but miss the Wodehousian wit and wisdom that underlie them. Thus you end up with, well, a collection of intermittently amusing gags and goofy aliens. You end up, in other words, with Space Quest. Infocom, however, had the luxury of working with Adams himself on their adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which led to something rather more interesting than most of the ludic works in this genre. Having bored and possibly inflamed you with my opinions, next time I’ll come down more on the side of facts as we look at how that most storied of Infocom collaborations came to be.

(Of the three extant Douglas Adams biographies, Neil Gaiman’s Don’t Panic is the most readable and M.J. Simpson’s Hitchhiker the most factually rigorous. The official biography can’t really be recommended on either count.

In addition to the biographies, I drew information for this article and those that follow from the April 1985 Compute!’s Gazette, the April/May 1985 Commodore Power Play, the April 1985 Electronic Games, and, most valuable of all, an interview a pre-Infocom Adams gave to the October 1982 issue of Your Computer. The image that begins this article was taken from the April 1985 Electronic Games.)

Comments
22 Responses

- David Boddie

November 11, 2013 at 8:54 pm

It looks like someone has helpfully uploaded his Hyperland documentary to YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOsPKjbMvxY&list=PL4D736D136E07009A

- Ian Schmidt

November 12, 2013 at 4:59 am

As one of probably many people who hated the Python movies because I’d heard every remotely good line about 5 billion times before I had a chance to see them, I’m just glad I read most of Adams’ books as they came out, before they fell into the same sort of black hole.

And yeah, strong arguments can be made for Dirk Gently being his best, or at least most coherent, work.

- Felix

November 12, 2013 at 6:58 am

I think you’re being too harsh about what fans took from Douglas Adams’ work. “42” for example is an important concept, basically the modern version of Zen’s “mu” — “the question is wrong”. In fact, Douglas Adams himself was too dismissive of fans finding hidden meaning in his work. His famous line, “I may be a sad person, but I don’t make jokes in base 13”, is telling. We all find hidden meaning in books all the time that the author didn’t intend — that’s because we attach meaning to the Universe in general; it doesn’t have any by itself. (That, incidentally, is why authors shouldn’t try to intentionally put hidden meaning in their books; it doesn’t work that way and it’s pointless in the first place since readers will miss it and find their own instead.)

Remember, tropes are not cliches, and not a bad thing in and of themselves. ;)

- Jimmy Maher

November 12, 2013 at 7:29 am

Oh, I don’t disagree at all that the whole story of Deep Thought and the Ultimate Question is possibly one of the smartest, wisest bits in all of Hitchhiker’s.

The problem I have is that 99% of the people who deploy “42” aren’t engaging with any of that at all. They’re just plastering “42” everywhere as some marker of nerdy inclusion. That’s not witty or droll and certainly not original in the least. It’s just kind of tedious. If you have something to SAY about the Ultimate Question or its Answer, by all means go ahead. But otherwise… just stop. Please.

Adams was always uncomfortable with his most rabid fans, partly because, as related in the article, he was kind of coming from a different place than most of them. But also because having someone worship the ground you walk on is just kind of weird in general. (I’ve had one or two come along like that since I started this blog, and I never quite know how to tell them that, hey, I’m just this guy, you know? I can only imagine how it must have been for Adams.) Also, so many of these fans just wanted more Hitchhiker’s and more 42 jokes when he really wanted to try something else. I think it’s to his credit that he was unfailingly polite to them in his public appearances, if not always bubbling over with warmth.

- Helm

November 13, 2013 at 2:13 am

What is a trope but a cliche once it’s identified as a trope and surfaced in an ‘archive of tropes’?

No other disagreements with your post, just this question that doesn’t need an answer.

- @redpola

November 12, 2013 at 12:27 pm

“He was a genuinely good crafter of sentences” made me laugh out loud. Very clever. I hope it was an intentionally-terrible sentence! :)

- Jimmy Maher

November 12, 2013 at 12:51 pm

Unintentionally terrible I’m afraid… and now that you’ve publicly called me out for it I can’t even fix it. :( This whole article is pretty bad, actually. Maybe I should have followed my first instinct and just thrown it in the bin.

- Michael Davis

January 19, 2015 at 4:56 am

It feels awfully silly commenting on this over a year later, but for whatever it’s worth, I genuinely can’t tell what is terrible about the sentence. When taken literally, I can’t personally think of a way to say it better.

- Duncan Stevens

November 12, 2013 at 1:49 pm

My first thought about Adams’s take on other SF authors was to wonder what he thought of Terry Pratchett, whose style is similar in a lot of ways, but as of 2000, at least, he hadn’t read anything by Pratchett.

http://slashdot.org/story/00/06/21/1217242/douglas-adams-answers-finally

- Jimmy Maher

November 12, 2013 at 2:38 pm

From what I know of Pratchett, which is much less than I probably should, I’d say his books aren’t so much about his fantasy world of Discworld, in the way that, say, George R.R. Martin writes about whatever his world’s called, as they are about us. In other words, maybe he’s another humorist and social commentator who just happens to use the trappings of fantasy and science fiction.

- matt w

November 12, 2013 at 5:20 pm

I sort of think Douglas Adams:Terry Pratchett::Raymond Chandler:Ross Macdonald. Both pairs are up to a lot of the same stuff, but where Adams and Chandler are more iconic Pratchett and Macdonald were more productive and, if more workmanlike, developed their worlds more. Discworld is a much more built-up world than Adams’s universe, and I think the same thing is true of Macdonald’s milieu as compared to Chandler’s (but I might not be able to defend that).

Anyway I’d definitely say that from the Pratchett I’ve read you’re right that he’s writing about our world. There’s a Discworld novel parodying Australia, another about the postal service, and the first part of the very first Discworld book is about the destructive force of introducing insurance policies and economics to a fantasy world, not to mention tourism.

- Keith Palmer

November 12, 2013 at 9:43 pm

So far as comparisons to Adams’s work go, I’ve long held in my mind a comment made by Graham Nelson in the Inform Designer’s Manual, “the radio series and novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the Three Men in a Boat of the 1970s”. In the context of the quote, though, I’d be just as willing to agree it’s comparing “cultural impact.”

- Jimmy Maher

November 12, 2013 at 10:52 pm

Clever, but not sure I can entirely agree if we are indeed not talking “cultural impact.” Three Men is just silly fun. Hitchhiker’s is silly, but does have some pretty profound things to say — or at least some wise/cogent observations to make. At risk of getting too grandiose, I’d actually be tempted to plump for Gulliver’s Travels myself.

- Duncan Stevens

November 13, 2013 at 3:34 pm

There’s definitely plenty of social commentary in Pratchett’s novels, though Pratchett also spends a fair amount of time parodying fantasy itself; I wouldn’t call Adams a parodist. (Maybe a satirist? It’s pretty scattershot satire.)

Martin’s books aren’t parody, nor are they social commentary except in a very indirect sense, I believe he’s said that one thing he intended to do with his novels–which are very loosely based on the Wars of the Roses–was to show how horrible medieval warfare was for pretty much everyone involved, and for women in particular. You could take them as a critique of medieval-ish fantasy stories that tend to gloss over the seamier aspects of medieval life; man, does Martin dwell on the seamy.

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- Nick

November 14, 2013 at 1:15 am

Way to suck the life out of some comedic works. Thankfully, regardless of Adam’s message(s), he was and still is far more amusing and pertinent than this pontification.

- Jimmy Maher

November 14, 2013 at 9:25 am

It’s not a very good article, is it?

Although on rereading it I must say that it is kind of impressive of me to manage to shoehorn every one of my worst traits as a writer into a single article…

- Anthony

November 16, 2013 at 7:44 pm

You’re too hard on yourself. I suspect it was difficult to summon the verve to write enthusiastic preliminary remarks about something that’s been flogged to death like Hitchhiker’s has — even though it’s something seminal and something you love. Tricky.

- Peter Smith

August 21, 2014 at 6:26 pm

I actually think this article is quite sharply written and perceptive, for what it’s worth.

- Peter Piers

October 14, 2015 at 6:17 pm

Same here. Don’t knock yourself too hard. I quite enjoyed the article.

- ZUrlocker

November 14, 2013 at 7:20 am

I read HHGG and the follow-ons when I was in college just a few years after they were first issued in paperback. Adams’ had a comic style that was powerfully funny but also unique in its social commentary.

“This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

However, as once was said, dissecting humor is like dissecting a frog –few people are interested in it and the frog dies. Still you can’t blame Adams for his rabid fans or the myriad of derivative works.

- DJ Hastings

November 19, 2013 at 8:42 pm

When I started read your comments on Adams’ unique style, I immediately thought of the “much the same way that bricks don’t” line. That one really stood out to me when I first read the books. (Sadly, being a teenager at the time, I then went around repeating the line to everyone who would listen.)

The Computerized Hitchhiker’s
November 14, 2013

Born in Cambridge, England, in 1952, Douglas Adams received a good public boarding-school education at Brentwood School before entering Cambridge University to read English in 1971. His dream, however, was not to become a scholar but to write and — and this is often overlooked — perform comedy like his hero, another ludicriously tall and ungangly-looking British comic named John Cleese. Thus Cambridge was attractive not so much because it was one of the two most storied universities in Britain but because it was the home of the almost equally legendary Footlights theatrical troupe, incubator of Cleese and the rest of his mates in Monty Python and, indeed, a whole generation of British comedy. Adams was eventually accepted by the Footlights, but came gradually over the course of several years to the disheartening realization that he was no John Cleese. He just wasn’t much good as a performer. His stage presence was awkward when not nonexistent, and he could never seem to surpress his big, goofy, good-natured laugh, which was literally infectious; it would suddenly ring out in the middle of a sketch, then quickly spread to his fellow players and derail the entire performance. His career in comedy, if he was to have one, would have to be made off the stage.

Adams, whose social gifts are legendary, managed to make the acquaintance of most of the members of Monty Python while still a starving student. After graduating in 1974, he did some writing for the truncated final season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and also had a couple of onscreen cameos that mark his swansong as a performer. Otherwise, however, his mid-1970s were largely a period of disappointment: an aborted television special that was to feature Ringo Starr (meeting whom must at least have been a huge thrill for Adams the rabid Beatles fan); various other failed or stillborn television specials and pilots; various disappointing stage revues. He was about ready to give it up, move to Hong Kong, and become, of all things, a ship broker, when BBC radio bit on his proposal for a science-fiction comedy serial called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The first of its six half-hour episodes, named by Adams “Fits” in homage to Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark,” premiered on March 8, 1978, with no promotion and in a truly horrid time slot: 10:30 PM on a Wednesday night.

Predictably enough, it pulled a 0.0 in audience share, which would seem to indicate that absolutely no one heard it and that it was destined for the same fate as all of Adams’s previous projects. But the rounding error in that figure was apparently a very vocal lot. Entirely due to word of mouth, ratings increased steadily with each additional episode, prompting the BBC to rerun the entire thing to yet better ratings just two weeks after “Fit the Sixth” concluded the serial. Hitchhiker’s was on its way to becoming a full-fledged phenomenon. Ironically, it happened just as Adams also sold a television script to Doctor Who (“The Pirate Planet”) and took the position of script editor for the series. Suddenly he went from knocking on doors to the heart of the BBC machine, with more work than he could handle; he lasted just a year with Doctor Who before it became clear that the smart move was to ride this Hitchhiker’s thing as far as it could take him.

And that, of course, turned out to be very far indeed. Although conceived before the film’s debut, Hitchhiker’s had the good fortune to premiere just after Star Wars made Britain, like the rest of the Western world, wild for anything science fiction. Adams soon found himself sitting at the nexus of an entire cottage industry, as Hitchhiker’s was adapted into seemingly every medium imaginable: novels (three of them in the initial rush); another six-episode radio serial; another audio version released as two double albums; a six-episode television serial; even theatrical performances. Adams was intimately involved with all of these variations and re-packagings, with the exception only of the plays.

It was, to say the least, a heady time in the life of the still very young Douglas Adams. His first Hitchhiker’s novel was published in October of 1979 and within a few weeks was the bestselling paperback in Britain. Suddenly he was a wealthy and even modestly famous man. He later colorfully described this period as “like having an orgasm with no foreplay.” It was even stranger because the role in which he would enjoy his biggest success, that of novelist, had never been anywhere on his career agenda, a fact which perhaps does a great deal to explain why he would struggle so mightily to actually, you know, write books in the year to follow. Initially a strictly British phenomenon, Hitchhiker’s spread to the United States as well within a year or two, when the books were picked up by Simon and Schuster’s Pocket imprint and PBS broadcasted the television version. By 1982, when the third book debuted a bestseller, Hitchhiker’s was firmly ensconced as an institution in nerd culture on both sides of the Atlantic, a place it still occupies to this day. And it looked to have the potential of spreading well beyond the nerds: immediately after finishing the third book, Adams moved to Hollywood to begin working on the script for a Hitchhiker’s feature film to be produced by Ivan Reitman of Animal House fame.

Hitchhiker’s wasn’t the only novelty in nerd culture of the early 1980s. There was also the computer, and computer games. These two things inevitably came together quite early. In 1981, a British civil servant named Bob Chappell decided he’d like to write a text adventure based on Hitchhiker’s for his Commodore PET. He wrote to Adams’s British publisher, Pan Books, to ask permission. With little idea just what he was really on about, they said sure, as long as Pan and Adams himself were properly acknowledged. Chappell made his game, a simple treasure hunt which demanded you return five items to the “Five Artefacts Inn” to win; the parser which did the demanding was “Eddie, your faithful computer” from the novels. Chappell sold the game to software publisher Supersoft for “£500 worth of microchips and assorted programs.” However, the British software market was still in its infancy and the market for PET games — the PET being a fairly expensive machine used primarily for business — was a pretty small part of even that. Thus this original version of Hitchhiker’s made little impression, and seems never to have even been noticed by Adams himself or any of his immediate associates.

“Hitchhiker’s” on the BBC Micro

“Hitchhiker’s” on the Spectrum

Eighteen months later, the situation had changed dramatically. Not only was Hitchhiker’s more of a phenomenon than ever, but computer use was also exploding in Britain, with Clive Sinclair the toast of the nation. Supersoft decided to give the game another belated push, in new versions for the Commodore 64, Commodore VIC-20, and Dragon 32. Meanwhile, thanks to the original having been written in easy-to-modify BASIC, clones and variations were starting to pop up on other platforms. At least two companies attempted to sell their own versions: Computer Concepts made one for the BBC Micro, while Estuary Software Products made one for the Speccy and the Apple II.

Those completely unauthorized knockoffs, infringing as they did both on the intellectual property of Supersoft and that of Adams, were easy enough to head off. But the situation with the Supersoft version, thanks to that damned letter from Pan Books, was more complicated. It was pretty obvious to everyone in Adams’s camp that a computer game based on Hitchhiker’s was a natural, what with the demographic intersections at play between computer gamers and Hitchhiker’s fans, but the decision had been made to make any such project a tie-in to the big movie version of the story, for which Reitman and Columbia Pictures had just paid £200,000 and which everyone hoped might be released as early as 1984. “A legal storm is brewing,” announced the British weekly Popular Computing with gleeful anticipation in their April 21, 1983, issue. Sonny Mehta of Pan Books, the people who had created this mess in the first place, said they were “very concerned” about the game. Peter Calver of Supersoft insisted that they had all the permission they needed in that two-year-old letter.

As these things so often do, it all blew over rather anticlimactically. Within two weeks of pronouncing their defiance, Supersoft, apparently deciding it was best not to tangle legally with several companies hundreds or thousands of times bigger than they were, settled out of court, and agreed to remove all Hitchhiker’s references from the game. The game was renamed Cosmic Capers. “Millways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe” became “Colonel McWimpays, the Fastest Restaurant in the Galaxy”; “Vogons” became “Verrucans”; the “Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal” became the “Barbaric Binge Beast of Bongo”; the “Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster” became the “Burgunzian Shazam Shandy”; etc., etc. It wasn’t a particularly good game with or without the Hitchhiker’s license, and sank at last without leaving much of a trace. But still the game of Whack-a-Mole continued. Fantasy Software soon released a very thinly veiled Hitchhiker’s knock-off for the Spectrum called The Backpacker’s Guide to the Universe which at least had the virtue of being an original piece of code. Once again Adams’s lawyers sprung into action, and Fantasy was forced to re-release it as simply Backpacker and take out a series of advertisements in magazines saying that “Backpacker is in no way connected with the works of Douglas Adams.”

Douglas Adams was paying much more attention as all of this went down for the very good reason that he had himself become an avid computer user in the time since Pan had sent Chappell that troublesome letter. He had been a bit of a gadget freak since his photography classes back at Brentwood, where he found himself fascinated not so much with the art of photography as with the technology — the cameras themselves. Now that he could afford it, he filled his home with cameras, guitars (Adams was something of a frustrated would-be rock star who delighted in palling around with Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, and Paul McCartney’s band), and, of course, cars (he bought his first Porsche with the advance for the first Hitchhiker’s novel and just kept going from there). Computers, when he discovered them, were a natural progression. As with Michael Crichton, another author turned computer enthusiast, his first tentative steps came in the form of a standalone word processor. He’d soon replaced it with a real computer, a DEC Rainbow. Many, many more would follow. More so than even Crichton, for whom hacking was apparently something of a passing phase, Adams would remain a noted computer enthusiast and popularizer for the rest of his life.

Which brings us to Infocom. The story of how Douglas Adams ended up working with them is still somewhat murky. What follows is my best reconstruction of events from the many and occasionally contradictory available sources.

Adams discovered Infocom very soon after he discovered computers. He ended up buying several of their games, developing a particular fascination with Mike Berlyn’s Suspended. He found them a great aid to “not writing” during days in his study; not, as Infocom would soon learn, that he needed much help in that area. One day on a press junket of some sort or another he started discussing computer games with an executive from his American publisher, Simon & Schuster. He said he was rather nonplussed as a whole with what he’d seen, with the exception of this one company, Infocom. Without saying anything more about it to Adams himself, the executive interpreted Adams’s admiration to indicate that he would likely be willing to make a computer version of Hitchhiker’s in partnership with them.

Soon after, Simon & Schuster began to reach out to Infocom with an eye to possibly acquiring them. Whether there is, to borrow from the eventual Infocom Hitchhiker’s game, any causal relationship between these two events is not clear to me; Infocom may already have been on Simon & Schuster’s agenda. What is clear, however, is that Simon & Schuster took Adams’s alleged interest to Infocom when they did reach out, adding the Hitchhiker’s franchise to Star Trek on the list of things they could do for them. It was a tempting proposition indeed. In Mike Dornbrook’s words: “We were interested in both of these things, and we actually had a fairly intense internal debate because we didn’t think we could do both at once.” Then word reached Adams through the grapevine that Simon & Schuster was “dangling him like a carrot” before Infocom. A very unhappy Adams let Simon & Schuster know in no uncertain terms that there was a big gap between an expression of admiration for someone and a proposal of marriage. Adams being the cash cow he was, Simon & Schuster had to keep him happy. They thus had no choice but to go back to Infocom and sheepishly say that, well, the Hitchhiker’s thing might not be such a done deal after all. But hey, there was still Star Trek! The dance between the two companies then continued for many more months.

But Adams was actually not hostile at all to the idea of working with Infocom. He just didn’t like the way that Simon & Schuster had handled it. In fact, there was no legal reason that Simon & Schuster need be involved at all. Yes, they were Adams’s American publisher, but the franchise itself belonged to him, as evidenced by the fact that he had been able to sell the movie rights to Columbia rather than Paramount, who shared with Simon & Schuster the parent company of Gulf and Western. Speaking of that movie: it was starting to look like it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Douglas Adams the scriptwriter had proven underwhelming to Reitman and his colleagues. They said his script was too long, and wasn’t structured the way a three-act commercial blockbuster needed to be. Adams was digging in his heels on the requested changes, and, worst of all, Reitman and Adams mixed like oil and water — or a commercially-oriented Hollywood producer and a quirky British humorist. About the only qualities the two men seemed to share when together in a conference room were stubbornness and arrogance. And then there was Adams’s legendary gift for procrastination. As 1983 ground on and the script failed to progress, Reitman grew more and infatuated with another far-out comedy that had crossed his desk, a little thing called Ghostbusters which was written by Dan Aykroyd, a Hollywood pro he knew how to deal with. By that autumn he had put Hitchhiker’s on the shelf, where it would linger for many years, much to Adams’s chagrin, to proceed full speed ahead with Ghostbusters. Adams returned to Britain a frustrated man, having just experienced his first real failure since selling that first Hitchhiker’s radio serial. With no need to wait for the movie to make a computer-game version, perhaps an Infocom Hitchhiker’s could serve as something of a consolation prize. After all, apart from film computers games represented about the only medium the franchise had not yet conquered (unauthorized or semi-authorized knockoffs excepted, of course).

Ed Victor, Adams’s agent, therefore contacted Infocom’s Mike Dornbrook through a mutual acquaintance, Christopher Cerf of the Children’s Television Workshop, a fellow who was clearly very interested in interactivity and shows it by continuing to show up as a supporting player to so many of the little dramas I write about in this blog. Dornbrook and Victor hammered out an agreement over the course of several meetings, with only limited input from Adams, who in the words of Dornbrook “would often be at the meetings, but would certainly defer to Ed on any business-related decisions.” Still, a creative problem soon surfaced that, much to Dornbrook’s chagrin, threatened to derail negotiations.

Douglas wanted to work with Marc [Blank] or Mike [Berlyn]. He was dead set on them, because they had written the games that he liked. He really liked Suspended, really wanted to work with Mike Berlyn. Mike Berlyn wanted nothing to do with a collaboration. I was saying, “Oh, my God! We’ve got Douglas Adams desperately wanting to write a game with us! He wants to do Hitchhiker’s with us! There’s no question whether this will be a success!” Who wouldn’t want to work with this incredibly creative guy? But no one wanted to do it.

Just glancing at their relative sales and statures as writers, it does indeed seem incredible that Berlyn would turn down such a career-making opportunity. But these were heady times at Infocom, which prompted many of the still young men who worked there to have a somewhat, shall we say, exaggerated sense of themselves. With the lukewarm, sour-atmosphered Infidel as evidence of the work Mike Berlyn did when pushed into a project he wasn’t enthusiastic about, Dornbrook knew he needed to a) find a new partner for Adams (which was more difficult than it ought to be; Berlyn’s wasn’t the only big ego in the place); and b) sell Adams on whichever Imp he could convince (also no trivial task, given that Adams was another guy flush with commercial success and critical praise who liked things his own way).

At the time, Steve Meretzky was just finishing up Sorcerer. For a next project, Infocom had planned to partner him with science-fiction writer Joe Haldemann on an adaptation of the latter’s 1977 novel All My Sins Remembered. With Haldemann spending a year as a visiting professor at nearby MIT, it seemed the perfect window of opportunity for what would have been Infocom’s first full-on foray into bookware. But Haldemann didn’t seem as enthusiastic as his agent had been, and the project stalled after one or two phone conversations between the two. With Meretzky thus left without an obvious next project, and with the Haldemann project as evidence that he — steady, reliable fellow that he was — would be willing to work as inevitable second fiddle to a name author where the other Imps weren’t, he was the obvious choice. And of course his first game, Planetfall, had been more than a little similar to Hitchhiker’s.

Indeed, Planetfall is so similar to Hitchhiker’s in tone as well as subject matter that most still assume it to have been an homage to Adams’s work from the start. In fact, however, Meretzky had not been aware of Hitchhiker’s at all when writing the game. It was the testers who first told him that, you know, this really feels like something by this guy named Douglas Adams. This prompted him to borrow cassettes of the original series from a friend. He loved them — loved them so much that he added a little tribute in the game, in the form of a towel with “Escape Pod #42” and “Don’t Panic!” stenciled on. That was perhaps a bad move in the long run, because it left many people with the impression that Meretzky had been aping Adams from the start, when it really was just a matter of the proverbial great minds thinking alike. At any rate, as Infocom’s resident comedy-science-fiction Imp Meretzky would seem to have been the natural choice for a partner for Adams from the start. Yet it actually took all of Dornbrook’s charm to sell him on the idea; Adams was apparently entirely unaware of Planetfall, or had dismissed it as yet another cheap knock-off of his work.

Once Adams agreed to Mereztky, the contract was quickly signed. It was quite an ambitious one. Adams and Infocom agreed to do not just one Hitchhiker’s game but six. Given the technical limitations under which Infocom labored, which limited every game to no more than a novella’s worth of total text, each game would cover half of one of the then-extant three Hitchhiker’s books. The deal was signed just as 1983 turned into 1984. The first game should be out in time for Christmas 1984, with another presumably following every year.

Technophile that he was, Adams was hugely excited by the project — probably more excited, in fact, than he was about writing a fourth Hitchhiker’s book, the contract for which he signed at about the same time. He was even briefly taken with the notion of learning ZIL and actually helping to program the game; Meretzky remembers Adams proudly pulling out a simple “3D Tic Tac Toe” game he had written in BASIC to show off his burgeoning programming chops at one of their first meetings. But given Adams’s schedule for the year — which included writing the aforementioned book as well as the game, while also needing to leave time for his many and varied social and recreational pursuits — cooler heads prevailed. In Meretzky’s words: “We’d do the design together, Douglas would write the most important text passages and I’d fill in around them, and I’d do the implementation, meaning the high-level programming using Infocom’s development system.” They would do most of the collaborating electronically using Dialcom, the world’s first commercial email provider, after they spent a week together in Cambridge to get things rolling.

Adams accordingly came to Infocom’s offices in February of 1984 to spend a week hammering out the basic structure of the game with Meretzky. He arrived with no fanfare whatsoever. Stu Galley:

I happened to be walking by the front door when he came in — unescorted, with no one there to welcome him. I had to ask who he was. When he told me, I said, “You probably want to go talk to Joel [Berez] or Marc.”

Looking beyond the obvious commercial attractions, Hitchhiker’s made a pretty great setting for a game. The Achilles heel of any novel-to-game adaptation is generally the plot, specifically the question of what to do when the player deviates from it. But, as Meretzky notes, Hitchhiker’s was more like a grab bag of “characters, locations, technologies, etc., while the story line wasn’t all that important.” Or even more flexibly, as Adams put it in a contemporary interview, “a set of approaches and attitudes, with a few rough ideas about characters.” At first, Meretzky admits that he was “awed” by Adams, while Adams was uncertain about interactivity and how to use it. Meretzky sees this as the explanation for the beginning of the game, which is very linear and quite slavishly follows the opening of the book. Later, however, after the player (as Arthur Dent) and Ford Prefect escape the Earth just as it is destroyed by the Vogons, the game blossoms into its own original, wildly nonlinear design, a reflection of Adams’s growing comfort with the medium and both men’s growing comfort with one another.

Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky, February 1984, with the first Mac Adams ever saw

It was also at Infocom that February that Adams began a love affair that would continue for the rest of his life. As part of his tour around their offices, the Imps took him to the loft above the main floor where the Micro Group kept dozens and dozens of different computers, practically a showroom of all of the significant — and most of the insignificant — microcomputers that were now being or in the recent past had been manufactured. The crown jewel of the collection was a pre-release version of the Apple Macintosh, sent by Apple so that Infocom could have their games on the new machine as quickly as possible. Adams was immediately entranced. He promptly went out to buy one for himself, to take back to Britain with him. He claimed until the end of his life, quite possibly rightly, that this machine was the first Macintosh ever to make it to British soil. By 1985, when he was profiled in MacWorld magazine and thus first began to become known as a zealot for this platform so known for zealotry, he owned three; by 1987, six. The passion never faded. Right up until his death in 2001 he could be found waxing lyrical on the Internet about his collection. By then he required an entire room just to store all his obsolete models. As for the latest models: he “just wanted to hug” them every time he turned them on, just like in the old days. Macs do strange things to some people. Having never caught the bug myself, I’ll say no more, but just get back to 1984.

As everyone at Infocom would learn all too well before the company wound up, counting on Adams to deliver anything on time — or at all, for that matter — was usually a fool’s game. It was typical of him to start a project with huge enthusiasm; thus things went pretty swimmingly over that first week in Cambridge. But once Adams returned to Britain Meretzky found it harder and harder to get any work out of him. He wasn’t the only one: Adams was supposed to be working on that fourth Hitchhiker’s book, also to be in stores in time for Christmas, and had yet to even begin. His various handlers encouraged him to get away from the distractions of a London chock full of far too many shiny objects. So he packed his Saab with books, files, and computers and checked into Huntsham Court, a tiny hotel in Devon. It didn’t help much. In ten weeks there he wrote not a page of the would-be book, although he did develop a new hobby of comparative champagne-shopping and generally enjoyed himself immensely.

In many ways the game was looking quite promising, but there were still huge gaps in the design to be filled. Infocom finally decided to get more confrontational — usually the only way to get any work at all out of Adams after his first blush of enthusiasm for any given thing had faded. In May, shortly after Adams had ensconced himself in his remarkably unproductive writer’s retreat, they sent Meretzky over to join him there for four days, under orders to finish the design at all costs. With the game needing to ship by October to join the Christmas rush and heaps of coding and testing needed before that could happen, it was either that, let Meretzky finish it alone (a bad move politically, especially considering that Infocom hoped to get five more games out of Adams after this one), or postpone it — which would likely mean cancellation in the long run, as it was unlikely that Adams would get any more interested in the future.

Douglas Adams on the beach at Exmoor National Park in May 1984, where he and Steve Meretzky finished the Hitchhiker’s design

Meretzky in person proved to have just the right touch; he managed to keep Adams “pretty focused” on the game despite also allowing time for some sightseeing and for enjoying the “opulent cuisine” of Huntsham Court. The two came up with the final puzzle on the last day of the visit on the beach at Exmoor National Park. Then Adams returned to not writing his book, while Meretzky jetted back to the United States for three more weeks of feverish implementing. By July the game was in the hands of the first testers in roughly complete form. In September Adams dropped by Infocom’s offices to work out answers to some final questions raised by the testing process, and that was that.

Until now we’ve been seeing Adams at his most exasperating. Certainly it’s true that he didn’t have to work that terribly hard to earn his co-authorship credit alongside Meretzky; at least 90% of the actual work that went into the game was the latter’s. Meretzky not only did all the programming but also wrote at least as much of the text as Adams. The latter mostly provided just the text for the direct path through the game, leaving Meretzky to deal with all of the side trips and the incorrect and crazy things the player might try as well as any of the boring bridging passages that Adams couldn’t be bothered about. For all the superficial similarities in their humor, the two men’s working habits could hardly have been more different. Meretzky was disciplined, organized, methodical, seemingly immune to writer’s block and artistic angst, a dream employee for any manager of creative types. Adams was… well, Adams was Adams. Suffice to say that the spaceship captain in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe who just can’t seem to will himself out of his bathtub for years at a stretch was based on Adams himself. Although he is unfailingly diplomatic when describing the experience today, Meretzky must have suffered greatly at being saddled to such a temperament. Yet it’s also true, as Meretzky freely admits, that that unique Douglas Adams sensibility was essential to making the game the off-kilter, vaguely subversive creation it became. Who else on the planet would have thought to make “no tea” and “a splitting headache” an inventory object? Who would have thought to make the game lie to you? Who would have thought to make the player’s random typo from dozens of moves ago an integral part of the story? Adams pushed Meretzky to, as Mike Dornbrook puts it, “break the rules” that he’d thought were inviolate.

If Infocom thought they’d had it bad working with Adams, they could rest assured that the book had proven to be an even more nerve-wracking project. Upon Adams’s return to London late that summer with exactly no progress to show for his ten-week writer’s retreat, a desperate Sonny Mehta of Pan Books moved into a hotel suite with him for two weeks, during which he literally stood over him and forced him to write the book. Thanks to a subsequent mad scramble by both his British and American publishers it arrived in stores slightly ahead of the game. Unsurprisingly given its gestation, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is both shorter than and in most people’s opinion worse than its three predecessors. But as for myself: as I wrote in my previous article, I find the book a refreshing change from its predecessors. Go figure.

Having seen Adams at his worse, if not quite his truly infuriating worst, Infocom would now get the opportunity to see him at his best, to learn why so many people adored the guy even as he continually made their lives hell by not doing what he promised to do. Shortly after Adams’s last visit to Infocom that September, Marc Blank and Mike Dornbrook flew to London to plan the game’s promotional strategy. They had over a week there, which they expected to be largely filled with waiting for a few productive meetings with Adams and his people. They didn’t know Adams that well. He loved nothing better than to play the host and entertainer, and with book and game now both complete he could do so without guilt. He and his girlfriend (later wife) Jane Belson filled “almost every waking hour” the pair spent in London, and charmed the hell out of them in the process. Dornbrook:

We’d drive past a building and he would start telling a story. Now, he knew a lot about English history — but the thing was, Jane knew a lot more! Douglas tended to know the commonly accepted story, but she would know what the latest interpretation of that was. Just driving around the city and hearing all this history, and in a very classy, intellectual way, arguing over the history — it was just amazing.

But most amazing of all were the evenings. On his own Adams was already “probably the most interesting dinner companion you could have,” one of the great raconteurs of his time. Despite his reputation as a funneyman, he wasn’t a joke-a-minute kind of guy at all. What he was was deeply interested in and knowledgeable about all sorts of topics, from the universal to the esoteric, with lots of interesting thoughts of his own but also with a willingness to truly listen to and consider those of others. And then there was his guest list. Adams had taken advantage of the fame and fortune Hitchhiker’s had brought him to make the acquaintance of a dizzying cross-section of cultural, technical, and scientific movers and shakers: names like Alan Kay, Salman Rushdie, Bill Gates, David Gilmour. Evenings in Adams’s drawing room were like evenings spent in a classic Paris salon, or, as Mike Dornbrook put it, a visit to a Hollywood movie of the 1930s: “sparkling conversation by very interesting people talking about interesting subjects,” with wine to die for.

One evening Blank and Dornbrook found themselves breaking bread with Alan Coren (editor of Punch magazine), Terry Jones (of Monty Python), and Clive Sinclair in addition to Douglas and Jane. That dinner party, still remembered by Dornbrook as one of the most amazing evenings of his life, would also make its way into the British tabloid press. Adams had just that day received from Pan Books the very first copy of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. The press, for whom Sinclair could still pretty much do no wrong at this stage, would later report that Uncle Clive had insisted that he be allowed to buy it for a huge donation to charity. That account wasn’t precisely wrong, but the details were perhaps a bit more grubby than it might imply.

Adams was proudly showing the book to his guests when Sinclair, who was possessed of loads of imperiousness but very little social empathy, announced that he would like to have the book, to give to his son for his birthday. Adams, rather taken aback, said that he’d be happy to get another copy to him tomorrow, but this one was quite special to him, etc. Whereupon Sinclair offered “£1000 to the charity of your choice!” On the spot and very aware, as always, of his duties as host, Adams cheekily said fine, his choice would be Greenpeace — just about the last charity in the world to which Sinclair, arch-Tory and bosom buddy of Margaret Thatcher, would happily give money. But Sinclair agreed, and poor Adams saw his precious heirloom vanish into Sir Clive’s satchel.

Later in the evening Sinclair tangled with the less accommodating Marc Blank on one of those topics guaranteed to ruffle feathers in any mixed company: evolution. When Sinclair declared that natural selection was not sufficient to explain everything, Blank told him, at first politely but then increasingly less so, that he didn’t understand what he was talking about, and that he, Blank, with a degree in biology and training as a medical doctor, was better qualified to judge. The argument raged for the rest of the evening, while Douglas and Jane fruitlessly tried to change the subject. Later, Blank and Sinclair shared a cab ride home, with poor Dornbrook sitting uncomfortably between them in the “stony silence.” The two would never meet or speak again.

It’s possible that this argument may have had far-reaching consequences for Adams himself. He may have played the tolerant host at that dinner party, but he listened to the conversation keenly. Later in his life, after he became friends with Richard Dawkins, he himself became a noted (not to say strident) advocate for evolution. His biographer M.J. Simpon speculates that his interest in the topic may date from this evening. If so, two of the defining obsessions of Adams’s later life — his advocacy for evolution and his advocacy for the Macintosh — stem from his relatively few direct interactions with Infocom. (Which is not, of course, to say that he wouldn’t have discovered his interest in either by some other medium had he never come into contact with the Imps at all.)

Steve Mereztky introduces the Infocom Hitchhiker’s to a packed room inside Rockefeller Center

Poor Steve Meretzky, the one who done most of the actual work on the Hitchhiker’s game, didn’t get to experience the Douglas Adams Salon. He was back in Cambridge at the time, swatting the final bugs and prepping the game for release. At least he got a pretty nice consolation prize. Late in October, Adams came over to begin a publicity junket to promote his new book and game. It kicked off with a joint press conference with Meretzky and Infocom at Rockefeller Center, done just like the big boys in entertainment did it. The usual computer-trade-press suspects were almost lost amidst all of the mainstream-media reporters from places like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and even Playboy. Meretzky, barely two years removed from a career as a construction manager, got to stand at the podium in suit and “Don’t Panic!” button and trade jokes and repartee with Douglas Adams while the flash bulbs went off around them. (“I want you to know that I really enjoyed working on this game,” said Adams, “and I’m not just saying that because I’m trying to sell it. That’s only 90% of the reason.”) They were a good match physically as well as creatively; at 6’4″, Meretzky was about the only person from Infocom who could stand next to the 6’5″ Adams without looking like a dwarf. After the press conference the two jetted off to charm press and customers at the Las Vegas Comdex show and in Silicon Valley. Meretzky found it all very exciting, but found Adams’s now long-established press-conference schtick rather exhausting in time; he told the biscuit story from So Long using the exact same words at virtually every stop. He even told it during his somewhat awkward appearance on Late Night with David Letterman; Dave clearly had no real idea what Hitchhiker’s was, and a clearly nervous Adams rather flubbed the punch line. On the bright side, Infocom did at least get the most cursory of plugs on national television, when Letterman, rattling off the standard canned spiel about extant Hitchhiker’s incarnations, mentioned that it was now “even computer software.”

For Infocom, whose corporate rise had been almost as meteoric as Meretzky’s personal rise, this was truly the top of the mountain. Even as Hitchhiker’s soared to the top of the bestseller charts they were being wined and dined by Richard E. Snyder of Simon & Schuster in his private boardroom. Just a week after the Hitchhiker’s shindig in Rockefeller Center they hosted their second (and, as it would turn out, final) big press conference there, to announce their forthcoming database manager Cornerstone. Their booth at that Comdex, where they passed out thousands of free “Don’t Panic!” buttons to all and sundry, was amongst the most frequented and discussed at the show. They got their name onto National Public Radio stations around the country when they sponsored the first Stateside airing in years of the original Hitchhiker’s radio serials. They had truly arrived, and on multiple fronts at that.

Mike Berlyn clowning around on the Infocom assembly line, November 1984

The Hitchhiker’s game itself was the biggest hit Infocom had ever had, just as Dornbrook had known it would be. They literally couldn’t make them fast enough to meet demand that Christmas. As Meretzky himself recounted in an article for The New Zork Times, Infocom had to take desperate measures. They leased some more warehouse space just to have someplace to put the avalanche of feelies, boxes, manuals, and diskettes coming in for assembly. Ernie Brogmus, Infocom’s production manager, came to Meretzky to ask if he could organize some help from his white-collar colleagues inside the Wheeler Street offices. That evening Meretzky put a sign-up form on the office billboard for twenty volunteers to come to the assembly plant for a seven-hour shift that Sunday. When he arrived the office next morning at 9:30 there were thirty-five names on it. Forty people actually showed up. Soon Infocom organized a Saturday shift as well as evening shifts: “They were turning up with husbands and wives and mothers and sisters and brothers and friends.” Thanks to such dedication and camaraderie, Infocom in November of 1984 shipped more product than in any month before or after: 62,000 games, 6000 promotional “Sampler Packs,” and 21,000 InvisiClues hint books.

Hithchhiker’s went on to sell almost 300,000 units, over 200,000 of them in its first year, to become Infocom’s all-time second biggest seller, behind only Zork I, the game that had gotten it all started. Reviews were uniformly stellar. About the only grumbling came from some of Adams’s original British fans, who complained at his decision to work with an American company and at the fact that the game was never made available for the biggest home computer in Britain, the Sinclair Spectrum. “He’s putting the boot into his own fans, the British computer industry, and for all he cares the country itself,” wrote one particularly exercised ex-fan in Popular Computing. In Adams and Infocom’s defense, Sinclair’s decision not to produce a disk drive for the Spectrum made it impractical to port Infocom games to the platform. Publishers like Level 9 serving the thriving British adventure market were also a bit stung by the rejection, but to their credit largely seem to have taken it as motivation to improve rather than grounds for sulking.

Hitchhiker’s is not only of huge commercial and historical importance to Infocom and the adventure game; it’s also of huge artistic interest, with sections that almost feel like a deconstruction of the traditional text adventure. Accordingly, and having now given you the historic and commercial context, I think we should look at the game itself in some detail. Besides, it’s a fun one to write about, full of bits just screaming out for annotation. So, we’ll make that the next item on the agenda.

(The most detailed history of Adams’s relationship with Infocom from his standpoint is found in M.J. Simpson’s biography Hitchhiker. For the perspective from within Infocom, Jason Scott’s Get Lamp materials were, as usual, key. Also very useful were the April 1985 Compute!’s Gazette, the April/May 1985 Commodore Power Play, the April 1985 Electronic Games, the October 1982 Your Computer, and issues of Popular Computing from April 21, 1983; May 12, 1983; January 17, 1985; and March 28, 1985. And of course Infocom’s own New Zork Times newsletters from around the period. Oh, and thanks to Steve Meretzky for clearing up a question or two via email.)

Comments
16 Responses

- Anonymous

November 14, 2013 at 3:43 pm

“Five Artefacts [sic] Inn”
As far as I’m aware, “artefact” is a legitimate alternative spelling. I think it’s more common in Britain than America.

Great article, as usual. Thanks for writing.

- iPadCary

November 14, 2013 at 3:55 pm

Yeah, and those dummies spell color with a “u”.
They invented the darn language & they can’t even talk it right!

- Jimmy Maher

November 15, 2013 at 6:00 am

Dictionary.com agrees with you that “artefact” is a valid spelling, which is good enough for me. Thanks!

- iPadCary

November 14, 2013 at 3:53 pm

To see these pics of Meretzky & DNA, and knowing the first
Macintosh this legend ever set eyes on is a boxmac —
a MacPlus, I’ll wager — shown to him by no less a legend himself!

I swear I’d give a vital organ to return to those heady days of the Golden Age of Infocom, when the world trembled at the sound of our rock- ….
Sorry.

- Keith Palmer

November 14, 2013 at 11:05 pm

In 1984 I’d suppose the computer to be one of the original suffix-less Macintoshes, with its infamous 128 K of memory. (Adams is quoted in Steven Levy’s Insanely Great as to the difficulties of the early adopters, in love not with the computer itself “but a romantic idea of the machine.”) Having been pedantic, I should also admit to having “the bug” myself, acquiring not that many years ago a Plus with most of the original packaging and manuals of the 512K it had started as.

I suppose I’m more amused by the thought of that minimally authorized “early Hitchhiker’s,” which I’d known about before now, than I perhaps should be. I’d also known of the plans of a sequel to the Infocom game, but not just how many the contract was for. As much as I’m anticipating the discussion of the game itself, the story of its making is interesting and impressive in detail in its own right.

- Felix

November 14, 2013 at 5:14 pm

You know, I’ve had writer’s block (and programmer’s block), people I couldn’t work with — creatively or otherwise — and I’m overly infatuated with my work on top of that. Reading this story, however, I can’t help but wonder how people like Mike Berlyn or Douglas Adams ever got anything done at all.

Your beautiful wife once told me that I’m unusually easy-going. To me, it just seems that most other people are unusually picky… :)

- Lisa

November 14, 2013 at 9:32 pm

“He’s putting the boot into his own fans, the British computer industry, and for all he cares the country itself,” wrote one particularly exercised ex-fan in Popular Computing.

Did you maybe mean “incensed”?

- Jimmy Maher

November 15, 2013 at 5:57 am

While “incensed” would work, I believe that “exercised” also works here. It’s not a super common usage, but means excited, interested, engaged, etc.

- Victor Gijsbers

November 14, 2013 at 10:57 pm

Rushdie’s first name is Salman, not Salmon. :-)

- Jimmy Maher

November 15, 2013 at 5:55 am

Thanks! Must have had dinner on my mind. :)

- matt w

November 17, 2013 at 12:14 am

Or the Salmon of Doubt, perhaps?

- Andrew

November 15, 2013 at 12:09 pm

Fascinating stuff. Also, props for the Table of Contents feature. Handy!

- Dusty

November 15, 2013 at 5:59 pm

Yes, thanks for the Table of Contents. I’ve wanted a way to read through the blog in order and look up particular articles easily for a long time. I’ve read through twice already, as I’ve said before, since my late father was a computer scientist (so we had an Apple ][e in the house from 1983 and I was always one of the few kids in my class to have a computer of some kind until high school) and as a young boy growing in the 80s, I remember some of this (like Wizard and the Princess), and enjoy seeing the insight into the culture my father lived in when he was young and that I saw in his computer science department at the local university.

- Howard Lewis Ship

November 16, 2013 at 6:16 pm

I think you meant “treasure hunt” not “treasure hint”.

- Jimmy Maher

November 16, 2013 at 6:29 pm

Thanks!

- John G

November 22, 2013 at 4:15 am

Speaking as someone who unsuccessfully tried to get a book agent interested in a history of computer games (“too niche,” he told me)…the work you’re doing here is so great.

Oh the lost romance of Infocom! Reading this, I’d rather go back in time to be on the scene with the Dornbeast and Adams at the Rockefeller Center in 1985 than with Bogart and Bacall in ’45.

Hitchhiking the Galaxy Infocom-Style
November 19, 2013

Given that Hitchhiker’s is both one of the most commercially successful text adventures ever released and one that oozes with interesting things to talk about, I thought I would look at the experience in more detail than I have any Infocom game in quite some time. As we’ll see, Hitchhiker’s is not least interesting in that it manages to represent both a step forward and a step back for Infocom and the art of interactive fiction. What follows is a sort of guided tour of the game.

As with any Infocom game, the experience of Hitchhiker’s for any original player began long before she put the disk in the drive. It began with the box and its contents. The Hitchhiker’s package is one of the most storied of all from this company that became so famous for their rich packages. It’s bursting with stuff, most of it irrelevant to the actual contents of the disk but all of it fun: an advertising brochure for the titular guidebook;[1] a microscopic space fleet;[2] a set of “peril-sensitive sunglasses”;[3] a piece of pocket fluff; a set of destruct orders for Arthur Dent’s house and the Earth; the obligatory “Don’t Panic!” button.[4]

Impressive as the packaging is, not all of it was to Douglas Adams’s taste. He hated the gibbering green planet,[5] which had been designed and pressed into service by Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books imprint without any input from him when they first began to publish the books in North America. He briefly kicked up a fuss when he saw it leering at him from the Infocom box as well, but Infocom’s contacts at Simon & Schuster, whom Infocom was considering allowing to buy them at just this time and thus preferred to remain on good terms with, had asked with some urgency that it be there. By the time Adams saw the box there wasn’t really time to change it anyway. And so the planet — and I have to agree with him that it’s pretty hideous — remained.

The game proper begins just where the books and the smorgasbord of other variations of Hitchhiker’s did: with you as Arthur Dent waking up hungover in bed on what is going to be “the worst day of your life.” You immediately get a couple of clues that this is not going to be your typical Infocom game. The first command you must enter is “TURN ON LIGHT,” a typical enough action to take upon waking up in a dark bedroom, perhaps, but one that could momentarily stump a seasoned adventurer, so accustomed to living in an object-oriented world where she can only interact with what the game tells her exists around her; the game, you see, never mentions the presence of a light switch or a light. Hitchhiker’s will continue to occasionally accept or demand inputs that you, the Seasoned Adventurer, just don’t expect to work. And then when you dutifully check your starting inventory, you learn that you have “no tea” and “a splitting headache.” Such mixing of the physical and the metaphysical amongst your possessions will also remain an ongoing theme.

Especially if you’re at all familiar with any of the other Hitchhiker’s manifestations, you probably won’t have too many problems getting out of the house and lying in front of Mr. Prosser’s bulldozer to stop (for the moment) the destruction of your house to make room for a new bypass. If you do misjudge things and get yourself killed, you get an early introduction to another of the game’s throughgoing traits: the narrator, or the computerized “game master” if you will, has a voice and personality all his own. Playing Hitchhiker’s is like having a conversation — often an infuriating one — with him.

>stand
The bulldozer driver gives a quick chew of his gum and slams in the clutch. The bulldozer piles into the side of your home.

Your home collapses in a cloud of dust, and a stray flying brick hits you squarely on the back of the head. You try to think of some suitable last words, but what with the confusion of the moment and the spinning of your head, you are unable to compose anything pithy and expire in silence.

>s
You keep out of this, you're dead. An ambulance arrives.

>don't panic
You keep out of this, you're dead and should be concentrating on developing a good firm rigor mortis. You are put in the ambulance, which drives away.

>pray
For a dead person you are talking too much. As the ambulance reaches the mortuary a fleet of Vogon Constructor ships unexpectedly arrives and demolishes the Earth to make way for a new hyperspace bypass.

We are about to give you your score. Put on your peril-sensitive sunglasses now. (Hit RETURN or ENTER when ready.) >

The narrator doesn’t just tell you what’s happening. He chats with you, messes with you, has fun at your expense, occasionally lies to you. This isn’t precisely new ground for Infocom; their games going back to Zork I had occasionally broken from being the neutral voice of the simulation to offer quips and funny responses. But it’s much, much more pronounced here, an integral part of the experience instead of just the odd response to the occasional misguided or intentionally bizarre input. A similar smart-alecky narrative voice was par for the course with other versions of Hitchhiker’s and, indeed, kind of Adams’s default persona as a writer. Certainly anyone who’s ever read a Dickens novel knows that a second- or third-person voice doesn’t mean the narrator isn’t a character in the work. But seeing it here… well, that feels significant for anyone who’d like to see interactive fiction as a defensible literary form. Chalk that up as a big step forward.

So, Ford Prefect arrives just as expected to return your towel preparatory to getting off this rock before the Vogons blow it up to make way for a hyperspace bypass. If you haven’t experienced it already, here you are also introduced to another dominant trait: the game’s often arbitrary cruelty. If you simply take the towel Ford offers, he marches away, the Vogons arrive, and it’s game over. No, you have to refuse the towel to force Ford to actually notice your situation and come to the snap decision to take you with him.[6]

Ford convinces Prosser to take your place in front of the bulldozer, just like in the other Hitchhiker’s manifestations. You head for the pub, where you consume beer and peanuts to fortify yourselves for the matter transference beam. Then Prosser wises up and knocks down your house after all, prompting you, reenacting the role of the Arthur you remember from the book, to run screaming out of the pub. On the way you meet a hungry dog, who is key to one of the most legendarily cruel puzzles in the game. You need to feed him. As for why… well, that you won’t learn until much later. Then the Vogons show up with appropriate pomp and circumstance, and you and Ford have a bare instant to make your escape.

You wake up in darkness. The puzzle that follows can almost be read as an homage to the original Adventure, which had a maze for which close reading was similarly key. It’s early evidence of another trait of Hitchhiker’s: a tendency to evoke and occasionally subvert the adventuring heritage that preceded it. For instance, it will later hit you with a blessedly fake maze. As David Lebling recently put it, the form by 1984 was old and established enough that it could be parodied.

>z
You can hear nothing, smell nothing, taste nothing, see nothing, feel nothing, and are not even certain who you are.

>z
There's nothing you can taste, nothing you can see, nothing you can hear, nothing you can feel, nothing you can smell, you do not even know who you are.

>z
There's nothing you can taste, nothing you can see, nothing you can hear, nothing you can feel, nothing you can smell, you do not even know who you are.

>z
You can see nothing, feel nothing, hear nothing, taste nothing, and are not entirely certain who you are.

>smell
(darkness)
It does smell a bit. There's something pungent being waved under your nose. Your head begins to clear. You can make out a shadow moving in the dark.

>examine shadow
The shadow is vaguely Ford Prefect-shaped.

Vogon Hold
This is a squalid room filled with grubby mattresses, unwashed cups, and unidentifiable bits of smelly alien underwear. A door lies to port, and an airlock lies to starboard.
In the corner is a glass case with a switch and a keyboard.
It looks like the glass case contains:
an atomic vector plotter
Along one wall is a tall dispensing machine.

Ford removes the bottle of Santraginean Mineral Water which he's been waving under your nose. He tells you that you are aboard a Vogon spaceship, and gives you some peanuts.

That “tall dispensing machine” marks the most famous puzzle ever to appear in an Infocom game, or in any text adventure by anyone for that matter. A whole mythology sprung up around it. Infocom did a booming business for a while in “I got the babel fish!” tee-shirts, while it’s still mentioned from time to time today — sometimes, one suspects, by folks who actually know it only as a trope — as the ultimate in cruel puzzles. Yet I’ve always been a bit nonplussed by its reputation. Oh, getting the babel fish from dispenser to auditory canal is a difficult, convoluted game of Mouse Trap which is made yet more difficult by the facts that the dispenser has only a limited number of fish and you have only a limited number of turns in which to work before you’re hauled off to the Vogon captain’s poetry reading. Still, solving this puzzle is far from an insurmountable task. You’re given good feedback upon each failure as to exactly what happened to intercept the babel fish on its journey, while your scope of possibility is somewhat limited by the fact that this is still quite early in the game, when there aren’t yet that many objects to juggle. I feel like its reputation probably stems from this fact that it’s met so early in the game. Thus even most casual players did encounter it — and, it being the first really difficult puzzle, and one of the first for which prior knowledge of the other Hitchhiker’s manifestations was of no use, many or most of those players likely never got any further. The Imps have often noted that most people never finished most of the Infocom games they bought. What with its mass appeal to people who knew nothing of Infocom or adventure games thanks to the license as well as its extreme difficulty, one would presume that Hitchhiker’s had an even more abysmal rate of completion than the norm.

Since solving the babel-fish puzzle[7] is something of a rite of passage for all adventurers, I won’t totally spoil it here. I will note, however, that the very last step, arguably the most difficult of all, was originally even more difficult.

A small upper-half-of-the-room cleaning robot flies into the room, catches the babel fish (which is all the flying junk it can find), and exits.

The original version didn’t have that crucial parenthesis; it was wisely added at the insistence of Mike Dornbrook, who felt the player deserved just a little nudge.

The babel fish, of course, lets you understand the Vogon language, which is in turn key to getting that atomic vector plotter that is for some reason on display under glass amidst the “smelly bits of alien underwear.” Also key to that endeavor is the Vogon poetry reading to which you’re soon subjected.[8] What you’re confronted with here is a puzzle far more cruel in my eyes than the babel-fish puzzle. It’s crucial that you get the Vogon captain to extend his reading to two verses; let’s not get into why. Unfortunately, at the end of the first verse he remarks that “you didn’t seem to enjoy my poetry at all” and has you tossed out the airlock. The solution to this conundrum is a bit of lateral thinking that will likely give logical, object-focused players fits: you just have to “ENJOY POETRY.”

>enjoy poetry
You realise that, although the Vogon poetry is indeed astoundingly bad, worse things happen at sea, and in fact, at school. With an effort for which Hercules himself would have patted you on the back, you grit your teeth and enjoy the stuff.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. It’s undeniably clever, and almost worth any pain for the great line “worse things happen at sea, and in fact, at school.” But at heart it’s guess-the-verb, or at least guess-the-phrase, a rather shocking thing to find in an Infocom game of 1984. Now maybe my description of Hitchhiker’s as both progressive and regressive starts to become clearer, as does Dornbrook’s assertion that Adams pushed Meretzky to “break the rules.” A comparison with the babel-fish puzzle shows Hitchhiker’s two puzzling personalities at their extremes. For all its legendary difficulty, the babel-fish puzzle feels to me like a vintage Meretzky puzzle: intricate but logical, responsive to careful reading and experimentation. “ENJOY POETRY,” on the other hand, is all Adams. You either make the necessary intuitive leap or you don’t. If you do, it’s trivial; if you don’t, it’s impossible.

In the session I played before writing this article, something else happened in the midst of the poetry-as-torture-device. Suddenly this long piece of text appeared, apropos of nothing going on at the time:

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated. For instance, at the exact moment you said "look up vogon in guide" a freak wormhole opened in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried your words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time. A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'Hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvunt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green, sweet-smelling steam. As a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, the Vl'Hurg challenged his vile enemy to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in its sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words "look up vogon in guide" drifted across the conference table. Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries. Eventually the error was detected, but over two hundred and fifty thousand worlds, their peoples and cultures perished in the holocaust.

You have destroyed most of a small galaxy. Please pick your words with greater care.

It incorporates an invalid input I had tried earlier, an attempt to look something up in the in-game version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide using syntax the game didn’t much like.[9] The little story is funny, especially if you haven’t recently read the novel version of Hitchhiker’s; it’s lifted verbatim from a passing riff near the end of the book, with only your invalid input replacing the novel’s version of Arthur’s comment that “I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle.”[10] More interesting to me, however, is what it represents conceptually. In incorporating a spurious input into the story in this way, it represents a sort of breaking of the fourth wall — a fascinating development in light of the fact that Infocom had spent a great deal of effort building said wall in the first place. By the time of Hitchhiker’s they scrupulously distinguished between what I’ll refer to as diegetic commands (things that cause things to happen in the storyworld) and non-diegetic — or, if you like, utility — commands (things like “SAVE” or “RESTORE” or, indeed, invalid inputs that don’t affect the storyworld). For instance, time passes in the story and the turn counter advances only in the case of the former. Infocom’s goal had long ago become to separate the undesirable challenge of interacting with the parser from the desirable one of interacting with the storyworld. Now along comes Adams to muddy it all up again. The difference, of course, is that early text adventures confused the layers of interface and simulation because they didn’t entirely know what they were doing. Adams and Mereztky break the formal rules the way artists do — consciously.

That’s not the end of the fellow in the jeweled battle shorts and his buddy; you’ll be meeting them again soon. But in the meantime you’re thrown out of the Vogon airlock[11] and picked up at the last possible second by the Heart of Gold, thanks to the magic of Infinite Improbability Physics. You end up in Darkness again, a motif that will continue to recur. You come out of it via another of the game’s most storied bits, the first of two incidents of it flat-out lying to you:

>listen
(to darkness)
You hear the deep and distant hum of a star drive coming from far above. There is an exit to port.

>w
You can't go that way.

>n
You can't go that way.

>s
(We were lying about the exit to port.) You emerge from a small doorway...

Entry Bay Number Two
This is an entry bay for the Heart of Gold. A corridor lies aft of here.
There is a sales brochure here.

"This looks like that incredible new Infinite Improbability Drive spaceship, the Heart of Gold!" says Ford, with growing excitement.

"Announcement, announcement. This is Eddie (the shipboard computer). We have just picked up two hitchhikers at an improbability factor of 2 to the 21,914 power to 1 against."

Just as you’d expect from the novel, you soon meet the masters of the Heart of Gold, two-headed party fiend Zaphod Beeblebrox and his Earthling girlfriend Trillian, née Tricia McMillan, whom you (Arthur) once tried to pick up at a party in London only to watch her leave with Zaphod.[12] But from here things suddenly diverge from the novel. Your companions all bugger off to the sauna, conveniently removing themselves from the implementation equation and leaving you to explore the Heart of Gold and, eventually, a number of other realities to obtain a collection of tools,[13] a collection of fluff,[14] and, stereotypical Englishman that you are, a good cup of tea. Ford helpfully leaves his copy of the Guide with you; you can “CONSULT” it about an impressive number of things. Some of these entries are just meant for fun, although they are once again often just recycled bits from the book. At least a few, however, are essential reading.

The Heart of Gold also contains the second instance of the game lying to you, this one much more extended.

>u
Corridor, Aft End
This is one end of a short corridor that continues fore along the main deck of the Heart of Gold. Doorways lead to aft and port. In addition, a gangway leads downward.

>s
That entrance leads to the Infinite Improbability Drive chamber. It's supposed to be a terribly dangerous area of the ship. Are you sure you want to go in there?

>yes
Absolutely sure?

>yes
I can tell you don't want to really. You stride away with a spring in your step, wisely leaving the Drive Chamber safely behind you. Telegrams arrive from well-wishers in all corners of the Galaxy congratulating you on your prudence and wisdom, cheering you up immensely.

>s
What? You're joking, of course. Can I ask you to reconsider?

>no
Engine Room
You're in the Infinite Improbability Drive chamber. Nothing happens; there is nothing to see.

>l
Engine Room
I mean it! There's nothing to see here!

>l
Engine Room
Okay, okay, there are a FEW things to see here. This is the room that houses the powerful Infinite Improbability Generator that drives the Heart of Gold. An exit lies fore of here.
Sitting in the corner is a spare, portable Improbability Generator.
There is an ionic diffusion rasp here.
There is a pair of hypersonic pliers here.

(Footnote 10)

>footnote 10
I guess it isn't all that dangerous a place after all.

Those footnotes which pop up from time to time are another of the game’s blizzard of new ideas — rather pointless really, but good fun.[15]

If you experiment and use the Guide wisely, you’ll eventually find a way to transport yourself into about half a dozen little vignettes, sometimes still in the person of Arthur, sometimes in that of one of your three companions currently slumming it in the sauna. I won’t belabor most of these; this article has to end at some point, after all, and if you do play for yourself you deserve to discover something for yourself. But I do want to talk just a bit about one, or rather two that are closely interrelated, because they involve a puzzle often cited as an example of Hitchhiker’s extreme, downright un-Infocom-like cruelty.

One of the vignettes features our friend of the jeweled battle shorts. It seems that he and his erstwhile enemy have worked out the source of the misunderstanding that led to all those centuries of terrible war: a creature from Earth.[16] You’re transported onto the bridge of his flagship as he and his erstwhile enemy hurtle toward your planet, not yet destroyed by the Vogons in this vignette,[17] with malice in their hearts.

War Chamber
Spread before you, astonishingly enough, is the War Chamber of a star battle cruiser. Through the domed canopy of the ship you can see a vast battle fleet flying in formation behind you through the black, glittering emptiness of space. Ahead is a star system towards which you are hurtling at a terrifying speed.
There is an ultra-plasmic vacuum awl here.

Standing near you are two creatures who are gazing at the star system with terrible hatred in their eyes. One is wearing black jewelled battle shorts, and the other is wreathed in a cloud of green, sweet-smelling steam. They are engaged in conversation.

The fleet continues to hurtle sunwards.

If you’re like, oh, about 95% of players, your journey will end abruptly when the battle fleet, which in a fatal oversight on the part of our militant alien friends turns out to be microscopic by the scale of the Earth, is swallowed by a small dog. To prevent this, you needed to have taken the unmotivated (at the time) step of feeding something to the aforementioned dog way back on Earth in the first act of the game, before the Vogons arrived. Horribly cruel, no? Well, yes and no. Another of the vignettes — they appear in random order, thus justifying Meretzky’s assertion that Hitchhiker’s ends up representing one of the “most ruthlessly nonlinear designs we [Infocom] ever did” — has you replaying the opening sequence of the game again, albeit from the perspective of Ford Prefect. You can also feed the dog there. If you fail at a vignette, meanwhile — and that’s very easy to do — you usually “die,” but that’s not as bad as you might expect. You’re merely returned to the Heart of Gold, and can have another go at it later. This mechanism saves Hitchhiker’s repeatedly, and not least in the case of this puzzle, from accusations of relying on extensive learning by death.

Still, there should be no mistake: Hitchhiker’s is punishingly difficult for even the most experienced of adventurers, the most challenging Infocom release since Suspended and the one with the most elements of, shall we say, questionable fairness since the days of Zork II and Deadline. While it is possible to repeat the vignettes until you solve each overarching challenge, it’s painfully easy to leave small things undone. Having “solved” the vignette in the sense of completing its overarching goal, you’re then locked out of experiencing it again, and thus locked out of victory for reasons that are obscure indeed.[18] One or two puzzles give no immediate feedback after you solve them, which can lead you to think you’re on the wrong track.[19] For virtually the entire game after arriving on the Heart of Gold you labor away with no clear idea what it is you’re really supposed to be accomplishing. Sometimes vital properties of things go undescribed just for the hell of it.[20] And then many of these puzzles are… well, they’re just hard, and at least as often hard in the way of “ENJOY POETRY” as in the way of the babel fish. The “Standard” difficulty label on the box, which was placed there purely due to marketing needs, is the cruelest touch of all.

So, we must ask just how Hitchhiker’s became such an aberration in the general trend of Infocom games to become ever fairer and, yes, easier. Meretzky noted that trend in his interview for Get Lamp and was not, either back in the day or at the time of his interview, entirely happy about it. He felt that wrestling with a game for weeks or months until you had that “Eureka!” moment in the bathtub or the middle of a working day was a huge part of the appeal of the original Zork — an appeal that Infocom was gradually diluting. Thus Meretzky and Adams explicitly discussed his opinion that “adventure games were becoming a little too easy,” and that Hitchhiker’s could be a corrective to that. Normally puzzles that were exceptionally difficult had their edges rounded during Infocom’s extensive testing process. But that didn’t happen for Hitchhiker’s to the extent that it normally did, for a couple of reasons. First, many of these puzzles had been written not by any ordinary Imp but by Douglas Adams; for obvious reasons, Infocom was reluctant to step on his toes. Additionally, the testers didn’t have nearly as much time with Hitchhiker’s as with an ordinary Infocom game, thanks to Adams’s procrastination and the resultant delays and Infocom’s determination to get the game out in time for Christmas. The testers did a pretty good job with the purely technical side; even the first release of Hitchhiker’s is not notably buggy. But there wasn’t time for the usual revisions to the design as a whole even had there been a strong motivation to do them from Infocom’s side. Any lack of such motivation was not down to lack of complaining from the testers: Meretzky admits that they “strongly urged that the game be made easier.”

The decision to go ahead with such a cruel design has been second-guessed by folks within Infocom in the years since, especially in light of the declining commercial fortunes of the company’s post-Hitchhiker’s era. Jon Palace presented a pretty good summary of the too-difficult camp’s arguments in his own Get Lamp interview:

Some have argued that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was one of the biggest mistakes we made because it introduced a huge audience to a relatively difficult game. The difficulty of the game and its design flaws[21] may have turned off the largest new audience we could have had. Perhaps we should have made that game a lot easier. It’s very funny, and it’s got some terrific puzzles. But my point is that if it was the first time people were experiencing an Infocom game, because of the names “Hitchhiker’s Guide” and “Douglas Adams,” there was only so much Douglas Adams they could get out of it without working harder than they wanted to.

Steve Meretzky, on the other hand, remains unrepetant, as do Mike Dornbrook and others. Dornbrook’s argument, which strikes me as flawed, is essentially that most people didn’t finish most Infocom games anyway — even the easier ones — so Hitchhiker’s difficulty or hypothetical lack thereof didn’t make much difference. I suppose your attitude toward these issues says much about what you want Infocom’s games to be: accessible interactive stories with a literary bent or intricate puzzle boxes. It’s Graham Nelson’s memorable description of interactive fiction as a narrative at war with a crossword writ large yet again. For my part, I think interactive fiction can be either, an opinion apparently shared by Meretzky himself, the man who went on to write both the forthrightly literary A Mind Forever Voyaging and the unabashed puzzle box that is Zork Zero. Yet I do demand that my puzzle boxes play fair, and find that Hitchhiker’s sometimes fails me here. And while I have no objection to the concept of a tougher Infocom game for the hardcore who cut their teeth on Zork,[22] I’m not sure that Hitchhiker’s should have been that game, for the obvious commercial considerations Palace has just outlined for us.

And yet, and yet… it’s hard to see how some of the more problematic aspects of Hitchhiker’s could be divorced from its more brilliant parts. As a final example of that, I want to talk about — and, yes, spoil — one last puzzle, one of the last in the game in fact. By now you’ve collected all of the various bits and pieces from the vignettes and the narrative of the game has rejoined that of the book; the Heart of Gold has landed on the legendary lost planet of Magrathea. You’ve also managed to brew yourself a nice hot cup of tea. Now you need to get inside the room of Marvin the Paranoid Android to convince him to open the ship’s hatch to let you go exploring.

>s
Corridor, Aft End
This is one end of a short corridor that continues fore along the main deck of the Heart of Gold. Doorways lead to aft and port. In addition, a gangway leads downward.

>w
The screening door is closed.

>open door
The door explains, in a haughty tone, that the room is occupied by a super-intelligent robot and that lesser beings (by which it means you) are not to be admitted. "Show me some tiny example of your intelligence," it says, "and maybe, just maybe, I might reconsider."

>consult guide about intelligence
The Guide checks through its Sub-Etha-Net database and eventually comes up with the following entry:

Thirty million generations of philosophers have debated the definition of intelligence. The most popular definition appears in the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation android manuals: "Intelligence is the ability to reconcile totally contradictory situations without going completely bonkers -- for example, having a stomach ache and not having a stomach ache at the same time, holding a hole without the doughnut, having good luck and bad luck simultaneously, or seeing a real estate agent waive his fee."

>get no tea
no tea: Taken.

>i
You have:
no tea
tea
a flowerpot
The Hitchhiker's Guide
a towel
a thing your aunt gave you which you don't know what it is
a babel fish (in your ear)
your gown (being worn)

>open door
The door is almost speechless with admiration. "Wow. Simultaneous tea and no tea. My apologies. You are clearly a heavy-duty philosopher." It opens respectfully.

I’m not quite sure how you make that intuitive leap precisely fair, but I am pretty sure I wouldn’t want to live without it. Maybe Hitchhiker’s is fine just the way it is. Soon after, you drink that glorious cup of tea, a feat which, in possibly the most trenchant and certainly the funniest piece of social commentary on the nature of Britishness in the entire game, scores you a full 100 of the game’s total of 400 points. Soon after that you step onto the surface of Magrathea, where “almost instantly the most incredible adventure starts which you’ll have to buy the next game to find out about.” That game, of course, would never materialize. The ludic version of Arthur Dent has remained frozen in amber just outside the Heart of Gold for almost thirty years now, giving Hitchhiker’s claim to one final dubious title: that of the only game in the Infocom canon that doesn’t have an ending.

Crazy and vaguely subversive as it is, Hitchhiker’s would have a massive influence on later works of interactive fiction. Contemporaneous Infocom games are filled with what feels to modern sensibilities like an awful lot of empty rooms that exist only to be mapped and trekked across. Hitchhiker’s, on the other hand, is implemented deeply rather than widely. There are just 31 rooms in the entire game, but virtually every one of them has interesting things to see and do within it. Further, these 31 rooms come not in a single contiguous and unchanging block, but a series of linked dramatic scenes. The Heart of Gold, which contains all of nine rooms, is by far the biggest contiguous area in the game. Hitchhiker’s can thus lay pretty good claim to being the first text adventure to completely abandon the old obsession with geography that defined the likes of Adventure and Zork. Certainly it’s the first Infocom game in which map-making is, even for the most cartographically challenged amongst us, utterly superfluous. This focus on fewer rooms with more to do in them feels rather shockingly modern for a game written in 1984. Ditto the dynamism of most of the scenes, with things always happening around you that demand a reaction. The only place where you can just explore at your leisure is the Heart of Gold.

Many a later game, including such 1990s classics as Curses, Jigsaw, and The Muldoon Legacy, have used linked vignettes like those in Hitchhiker’s to send the player hopscotching through time and space. More have followed its lead in including books and other materials to be “CONSULT”ed. Even a fair number[23] have latched onto the pointless but somehow amusing inclusion of footnotes. Less positively, quite a number of games both inside the interactive-fiction genre and outside of it have tried very hard to mimic Adams’s idiosyncratic brand of humor, generally to less than stellar effect.[24]

Hitchhiker’s is an original, with a tone and feel unique in the annals of interactive fiction. It breaks the rules and gets away with it. I’m not sure prospective designers should try to copy it in that, but they certainly should play it, as should everyone interested in interactive fiction. It’s easily one of the dozen or so absolutely seminal works in the medium. Fortunately, it’s also the most effortless of all Infocom games to play today, as the BBC has for some years now hosted an online version of it. Yes, there’s lots of graphical gilding around the lily, but at heart it’s still the original text adventure. If you’re interest enough in interactive fiction to make it this far in this article and you still haven’t played it, by all means remedy that right away.

(In addition to the various Get Lamp interviews, Steve Meretzky’s interview in the book Game Design Theory and Practice was very valuable in writing this article.)

1. “As seen on Tri-D!” ↩

2. Easily mistaken for an plastic empty baggie. ↩

3. They turn opaque when danger is at hand to avoid upsetting your delicate sensibilities. The ones in the game package are, naturally, made of black construction paper. ↩

4. These were manufactured in huge quantities and given away for some time at trade shows and the like as well as being inserted into game boxes. ↩

5. Or whatever it’s supposed to be. ↩

6. Ford Prefect’s name, by the way, is one of the subtler jokes in Hitchhiker’s, and one that was entirely lost on American readers. The Ford Prefect, you see, was once a model of automobile in Britain. When the Betelgeusian Ford Prefect chose the name as “nicely inconspicuous,” he did so because he had, as Adams himself later clarified, “mistaken the dominant life form” on the planet. ↩

7. Or not. ↩

8. The original Hitchhiker’s radio serial mentions Vogon poetry as the third worst in the universe. The second is that of the Azgoths of Kria, while the first is that of Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Earth. Rather astoundingly, Johnstone is actually a real person, a bunk mate of Adams’s back at Brentwood School who would keep him awake nights “scratching this awful poetry about swans and stuff.” Now, it was kind of horrible of Adams to call him out like that (and probably kind of horrible for me to tell this story now), but it just keeps getting better. Poor Johnstone, who was apparently an earnest poet into adult life but not endowed with much humor not of the unintentional stripe, wrote a letter to Time Out magazine that’s as funny as just about anything in Hitchhiker’s:

“Unfortunate that Douglas Adams should choose to reopen a minor incident; that it remains of such consequence to him indicates a certain envy, if not paranoia. Manifest that Adams is being base-minded and mean-spirited, but it is surely unnecessary for Steve Grant [a journalist to whom Adams had told the story] to act as a servile conduit for this pettiness.”

With Johnstone’s lawyers beginning to circle, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone became Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings in the book and later adaptations. ↩

9. It’s fairly persnickety here; you can only “CONSULT GUIDE ABOUT” things. ↩

10. Indeed, it seems to go relatively unremarked just how much text in the game is lifted directly from the novel, another artifact perhaps of the sheer difficulty of getting original prose out of Adams. ↩

11. Although hopefully not before collecting the essential atomic vector plotter ↩

12. I’ve always found Zaphod a hilarious character because he was such a walking, talking anachronism even in the early 1980s. He’s just so obviously a creature of the 1970s, from his hippy-dippy diction to his easygoing, lackadaisically stoned take on existence. He’d fit right in in Dazed and Confused. ↩

13. Don’t ask. ↩

14. Really don’t ask. ↩

15. Like (hopefully) the ones I’ve included in this article in homage. Or maybe this is my bid for literary greatness via my own version of Pale Fire. ↩

16. This would seem to belie the Guide‘s description of Earth as “harmless,” and even the revised description of it as “mostly harmless.” ↩

17. There’s a joke, or maybe an aphorism, in there somewhere. “Between a Vl’Hurg and a Vogon,” maybe? ↩

18. Zaphod’s sequence is particularly prone to this, to the extent that I’ll offer a hint: look under the seat! ↩

19. I’m thinking particularly of growing the plant here. ↩

20. I’m speaking particularly of the brilliantly Adamsian “thing your aunt gave you that you don’t know what it is,” of which it’s vital to know — take this as another tip — that you can put things inside it, even though that’s never noted or implied by its description. ↩

21. Palace was no fan of the dog-feeding puzzle in particular. ↩

22. See 1985’s Spellbreaker, which unlike Hitchhiker’s was explicitly billed as exactly that and does a superb job at it. ↩

23. Not to mention this post. ↩

24. Tolkien is about the only other generally good author I can think of who has sparked as much bad writing as Adams. ↩

Comments
40 Responses

- Victor Gijsbers

November 19, 2013 at 12:36 pm

Another interesting article!

“Soon after you drink that glorious cup of tea […]”

This sentence would read easier if you add a comma between “after” and “you” (to make clear that “you drink that glorious cup of tea” is not a dependent clause for something that is yet to follow).

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2013 at 12:43 pm

Thanks!

- Anthony

November 19, 2013 at 2:19 pm

Excellent guide to the Guide. You’ve given us the flavour of the game and left enough on the plate for us to ENJOY at our leisure. A fitting tribute to an inspiring work of IF.

(Btw, I think the standard spelling is diEgetic.)

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2013 at 2:28 pm

What would I do without you guys to copy-edit for me? Thanks!

- matt w

November 19, 2013 at 2:55 pm

Thanks for the great article! I read with some trepidation about spoilers, because I really ought to give this a good try some day, but I’m pleased to see that the last and biggest spoiler is one that one of my friends already spoiled for me back in the day. Getting told about that puzzle may be my most substantial exposure to interactive fiction pre-2006.

Anyway, a typo and a couple comments: You have “Dazed and Confusion” which should be “Dazed and Confused.” And for footnotes in literature, I recommend The Makepeace Experiment by the dissident Soviet writer Abram Tertz, where the narrator gets into an argument with the footnotes and… I’ve said too much!

More on-topic, it seems to me that the game’s cruelty is probably somewhat necessary for its effect. The HHGtG universe is uncaring and unfair, where horrible things are constantly happening to people for no reason. So why should the player be spared? At least he can try again, maybe even having learned something from the experience. The Vl’hurg puzzle seems like a particularly brilliant example of that; it lets you know that something horrible has happened for no reason based on something you couldn’t have possibly foreseen (and if you’ve read the book you know what happens to the fleet, which perhaps makes the puzzle a bit easier to deal with when you start from the beginning).

Also, the text lifted straight from the books may have been a feature rather than a bug; rabid Hitchhiker fans probably enjoyed seeing our old favorites in the new setting. We certainly didn’t mind repetition of it, judging by the love a, um, friend of mine had of reciting passages off by heart.

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2013 at 3:13 pm

Thanks!

You make more explicit here a point I kind of danced around without ever properly settling down upon in the article itself: that what makes literary sense and what is good, fair game design are not always one and the same. (The narrative and the crossword rear their warring heads again.) It is hard to shake the feeling that Hitchhiker’s would lose much of its personality if all of its crazy, arbitrary bits were thrown away or somehow made more forgiving.

- Lisa

November 19, 2013 at 8:09 pm

Also, the text lifted straight from the books may have been a feature rather than a bug; rabid Hitchhiker fans probably enjoyed seeing our old favorites in the new setting.

That was the case for me. It was both very amusing (I felt like I was in on an inside joke) and somewhat helpful to have already read the books.

- David Cornelson

November 19, 2013 at 3:36 pm

I’m not sure if you’re missing a funny bone or what, but I distinctly remember each step of the Babelfish puzzle and being incapable of breathing I was laughing so hard. The very same experience from parts of the books (getting hit in the small of the back with a house party). This puzzle was brilliant, cruel, and hilarious.

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2013 at 3:43 pm

Um… did I ever say it wasn’t funny?

- David Cornelson

November 19, 2013 at 5:20 pm

My reading is that you note the puzzle’s fame, but you don’t entirely understand the fame. I’m not sure how you style your writing sometimes (factual only?) but mentioning that the puzzle is one of the funniest ever is important. My take is that you didn’t like it.

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2013 at 5:49 pm

No, I like the puzzle fine actually. I’m not sure I’d term it “hilarious,” but it’s more than amusing enough, difficult but fundamentally fair, and very satisfying to solve.

- Anthony

November 19, 2013 at 8:28 pm

I’d respectfully suggest that if you thought the babel fish puzzle was “hilarious” then you’re probably in the minority.

Sure, it was delightful, ingenious, infuriating, creative, amusing, and possibly even comic. But if it actually made you LOL… Are you sure you don’t have one funny bone too many? ;-)

- iPadCary

November 19, 2013 at 6:11 pm

When this came out, my friend Jay said: “If you didn’t read the book, don’t get this, It’s too hard.”
I thought that was rediculous as Infocom would never
sell a game where you had to do something else entirely
outside of the game before you were able to play.
It just made no sense.
So I got the game & go to it’s first puzzle.
Jay was right! lol
And I miss seeing the ads for it in OMNI magazine.
*sigh* ….

- Monty Ashley

November 19, 2013 at 6:33 pm

I’m sure you’ve seen this, but just in case…

You know about the files relating to the Hitchhiker’s sequel, right?

- Jimmy Maher

November 19, 2013 at 8:19 pm

Yes. There are serious… ethical concerns with the way much of that material was made public, however, and there are still lots of raw nerves among the Imps and others as a result. But we won’t be addressing Bureaucracy and the aborted Restaurant project for a while yet, so I have some time to talk with some people and decide what’s appropriate.

- Lisa

November 19, 2013 at 8:34 pm

I like the footnotes; nice touch. I was playing Stationfall last night and was amused to see that one of the footnotes in that game is about whether the idea was ripped off from Hitchhiker’s, and that “the author” (i.e. Steve Meretzky, I assume) reserved the right to rip off his own ideas!

- Keith Palmer

November 19, 2013 at 10:10 pm

This is it: the single Infocom text adventure I played in the 1980s, the one I experienced the famous “pause to process input, disk access, glorious advancement or casual rebuff” on the Radio Shack Color Computer’s all-caps 32 by 16 screen. (Then, I figured out the transcript would print out in mixed case, and used up a lot of paper immortalizing various sequences…)

Perhaps given in part that I was about ten when I started playing the game, I suppose that after a very brief while I wasn’t so much trying to think through its puzzles as just searching the hints and tips column of the Color Computer magazine “The Rainbow” for pointers. (By my unscientific estimation, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” had the most pointers offered there of any of the comparative handful of Infocom games offered for the Color Computer.) It never quite got around to explaining how to hold “tea” and “no tea” at once (just that you had to), though, and I was in high school in the early 1990s before I happened to hear a friend still had the hint book, and after much effort deciphering the faded remnants of the developed clues realised how I’d never made the mental leap of first recognising one bit of description was an object to be taken and then realising I could “buy” it even at that narrow stage in the game I’d thought Ford Prefect was sort of taking care of me. At long last, I got to the maximum-score ending with a wry sort of “well, that’s it” feeling.

The comments about the game’s difficulty do sort of tie in to my wondering now if things could have been different had I finished the game sooner, if my uncle would have sent my father more Infocom games instead of my just (eventually?) reading the catalog pamphlet and daydreaming about how great it would be to play more of them. Games in any case seemed back then to be more something that just sort of appeared without asking for them (in this case, at least, we got the box, if not the fluff or “Microscopic Space Fleet”). Still, I did eventually get to the point where on seeing “The Lost Treasures of Infocom,” right around when we finally retired our Color Computer 3 and got a Macintosh LC II, I at once sort of strongly implied that would be a very nice game package to have…

- Jimmy Maher

November 20, 2013 at 7:33 am

This was also the first Infocom game I ever played. My parents bought it for me Christmas 1984 to go along with my shiny new Commodore 1541 disk drive. It was hopeless, of course. I’d never played a text adventure before, and I’m not even sure I’d read the books yet. I may not have even got to the Vogon ship before I bought the hint book with my paper-route money a week or two after Christmas, then proceeded to do exactly what the hint book said not to and reveal almost every answer. What with all the subverting and even arguably satirizing of adventure-game conventions here, playing Hitchhiker’s as your first work of interactive fiction is a bit like picking up Ulysses as the first novel you ever try to read. And being that Hitchhiker’s was such a huge hit, I’m sure my situation was hardly unique.

But something must have stuck, because I bought more Infocom games and did a lot better with them, and, well, here we are in 2013. :)

- Scott

November 20, 2013 at 12:34 am

Wow, I never realised there were slated to be so many sequels – that explains the dreadful ending a lot better.

I remember playing this on my C64 with a list of commands my brother had figured out, but that only got me up to the Heart of Gold – from there I was quite lost until I finished the game with a guide years later. I thought it was genuinely funny in parts, especially the narrator.

The embarrassing part, though? I never realised the footnotes could actually be read – I think I tried consulting the guide about them rather than ever just typing “footnote 10”. Now I’ll have to have another go just to read them!

- Andrew Plotkin

November 20, 2013 at 2:11 am

H. P. Lovecraft is the generally bad author who has sparked as much good writing as Adams and Tolkien have sparked bad writing.

(But bad writing too.)

- Sam Garret

November 20, 2013 at 2:58 am

The Final Puzzle had my young teenage self stumped for a good six months until some kind soul put me out of my misery and I was finally able to finish the game. Starcross I knocked off in a week, but this one just escaped me – a form of tunnel vision disabling sufficient lateral thinking, I suppose, and I was a tad embarrassed by the fact I needed help. Prideful little things, teenagers.

Today, of course, the answer is a google search away. I wonder if I would still remember the puzzle so well if the answer had been so readily available.

On a side note – does the Zaphod section really lock you out? I have a vague recollection that you can still go to some shortened version of it involving only the jetski once you’ve finished the main arc, but I haven’t actually double checked.

- Jimmy Maher

November 20, 2013 at 7:37 am

In the original version at least, yes. When you get back into it after “solving” it, you just immediately slam into the cliff in the boat and are thrown back to Darkness. I know because I actually made this mistake on the play I just did for this article.

- Duncan Stevens

November 20, 2013 at 3:02 pm

They all lock you out, in one way or another, so if you don’t get key (apparently stray) objects when you solve them, you can’t finish the game. Most of them just “kill” you and kick you back into Darkness; the Vl’Hurg/brain section actually kills you (in memorably nasty fashion).

- Jason Dyer

November 21, 2013 at 7:28 pm

My first (and only) time playing was with the gold box version with hints, so I didn’t even need Google to help. Those got abused … heavily.

- Andrew Schultz

November 26, 2013 at 4:27 pm

It’s good to read a breakdown of why the game could be unfair. I remember my mother buying my sister and me the invisiclues early on (we were stuck in the dark! Explaining this would be a spoiler) and my feeling was that adults must’ve known a lot of stuff I didn’t to be able to solve these puzzles without a hint book (I was sure they did) and I was looking forward to growing up and understanding all this. Especially how I’d know about the ways you can be locked out of certain puzzles and how the game is mean about that.

The game got me reading the book before my mom bought the invisiclues, and I figured a wild crazy genius like Douglas Adams had a really good reason for doing things that way! I figured understanding all the whys was forbidden territory like jokes adults didn’t let me hear. I’d learn when I was 18, or something. Or not.

Your essay and others have provided a different understanding, but I think the note that the game would lose personality if it lost some of its outright flaws is a great one. Objectively, parts could be cut–but it’s no fun.

- Nicholas Joll

November 28, 2013 at 11:13 pm

Some great stuff in here. I had forgotten about the conjunction of tea and no tea. Thanks!

- Mark Ricard

December 27, 2013 at 5:45 am

A very well written article. Adams style does not really fit in with fair puzzle solving. It is too absurdist so it ends up being read the author’s mind. Maybe having read the book would have helped.

When I played it for the first time about two years ago,I got stuck at the point right before the end. You need to eat the plant to guess the right tool to bring. For some reason I wasn’t able to grow the plant.

- Soh Kam Yung

March 10, 2014 at 3:31 am

The BBC has updated the game for its 30th anniversary.

It is playable in your browser (works in Google Chrome but doesn’t seem to work for Firefox) at this BBC 4 website.

- Pingback: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy workout | Nerdy Jock

- Brandon Campbell

November 13, 2014 at 9:33 pm

Andrew Schultz, I know the feeling exactly, about thinking you’ll know everything when you’re an adult! And now I’m 38 and still feel almost as clueless as I did back then…

- Grunion Guy

November 17, 2014 at 1:54 am

I “beat” the game in the sense that I made it onto Magrathea back when the game first came out. I never did figure out the fluff puzzle but through pure stubbornness, and a constantly restored saved game, I eventually left with the right tool to let me out of the ship. It was years before I ever even learned that the pieces of fluff were important.

- Jimmy Maher

November 17, 2014 at 12:35 pm

Interesting. I had thought it was impossible to brute-force that puzzle, as Marvin would always ask for a tool you *didn’t* have if you hadn’t used the fluff and the rest of that contraption to see into the future.

- Grunion Guy

November 26, 2014 at 6:01 am

I remember trying every tool thinking that one would work. Of course, it didn’t. I thought maybe one last try. If the game randomly chose a new tool every time it was reloaded, I would just keep walking out with the awl until it worked. It eventually worked.

- Lisa H.

November 26, 2014 at 6:30 am

Strange. Like Jimmy, I thought it was impossible to brute-force; I think the hints themselves describe how Marvin is supposed to ask for something you don’t have if you haven’t properly solved it. Maybe Infocom intended that but the code didn’t actually turn out to work that way?

- Grunion Guy

November 26, 2014 at 9:29 am

The version I played was on the Apple IIe. I wish I’d made a transcript of the game as I was sometimes wont to do back then. Although it would have been the most boring read with dozens of pages of reloading before the somewhat less than triumphant win.

- Grunion Guy

November 26, 2014 at 9:36 am

Checking on Wikipedia, it mentions that if you failed to collect all ten tools, Marvin would ask for the one you failed to find. But having found all ten, perhaps then he just asked for a random tool? That does seem odd to give the player a one in ten shot to brute force it. Or would that be one in one hundred? That would make sense seeing as how I remember trying longer than I should have to force it, even when I just kept picking the awl.

- Lisa H.

December 6, 2014 at 3:06 am

Because I am an incredibly pedantic Virgo nerd, I decided to go looking in the hints for the version of HHG I have (Release 31 / Serial number 871119). MAJOR PUZZLE SPOILER AHEAD, for innocent readers…

How can I open the hatch?
25 hints left -> Have you tried OPEN THE HATCH?
24 hints left -> If sirens and lights went off when you tried to open the hatch, then the ship is still in space. Wait until the ship has landed.
23 hints left -> Do you remember an announcement when the Heart of Gold landed on Magrathea?
22 hints left -> Eddie (the shipboard computer) jammed the hatch to prevent anyone from leaving the ship until he’s checked to make sure the environment is safe.
21 hints left -> If you wait the 14.9 years such a check will take, you’ll probably die of boredom.
20 hints left -> You’ll have to figure out how to override Eddie’s wishes by fixing the hatchway mechanism in the Access Space.
19 hints left -> You don’t have the necessary intelligence for the task.
18 hints left -> Someone else does.
17 hints left -> Marvin. See the question about Marvin to figure out how to get him to open the hatch.
16 hints left -> Once Marvin has agreed to open the hatch, he tells you to meet him in the Access Space in twelve turns. Make sure you’re on hand for that meeting. (Hell hath no depression like a paranoid android scorned.)
15 hints left -> Marvin will ask you for the tool he needs to fix the mechanism.
14 hints left -> You must give him the proper tool or you’ve blown your one chance to get the hatchway open.
13 hints left -> There are a total of ten tools scattered throughout the game. For a complete list of them, see the quesion about the tools in the General Questions section.
12 hints left -> Even if you’ve collected all ten tools, you can only carry one at a time into the Access Space…
11 hints left -> …and you don’t have time to go out and get a different one before Marvin gives up and leaves…
10 hints left -> …and Marvin will NEVER ask for the tool you happen to be holding.
9 hints left -> There’s a way to figure out in advance what tool Marvin will ask you for.
8 hints left -> See the question about the fluff.
7 hints left -> Don’t go on until you’ve seen the fruit.
6 hints left -> Eat the fruit.
5 hints left -> The glimpse of the future provided by the fruit tells you what tool to bring into the Access Space.
4 hints left -> If you meet Marvin there and give him that tool when he asks for it, he will fix the mechanism and open the hatch.
3 hints left -> You’re now awesomely close to the end of the game.
2 hints left -> Go down through the hatch.
1 hint left -> Start waiting for the next exciting Hitchhiker’s game.
[That’s all.]

Soo… it sounds to me like they intended it to not be brute-force/luck-able: “Marvin will never ask for the tool you’re holding” – but of course he does literally do just that if you solved the puzzle and got the foresight. So that says to me that the game checks for whether you’ve eaten the fruit, and if you haven’t, always picks a different tool. As I said in another comment, though, maybe it was intended to work that way but actually doesn’t for some reason?

- Cliffy73

May 23, 2015 at 3:14 pm

One quibble about the difficulty of the “enjoy poetry” problem — “enjoy” is in the list of recognized verbs in the game manual. Taking a look at this list of verbs and noticing the unique ones is one of the first things I do when I’m stumped on an Infocom game. This is a lesson I learned after spending countless hours and a hundred moves stuck in the first “Dark” before I happened to glance at the list by chance and the scales fell from my eyes. Or nose, as the case may be.

The really embarrassing part is that after a long enough time flailing around in the Dark, the game starts giving you prompts. The one I still remember is “Four out of five sensitive people get this one right away.” At the time I thought the game was just making fun of me — which of course it was — but that’s not all it was doing.

- Gerhardus Grobbelaar

August 8, 2015 at 10:19 pm

This was the ONLY text game the wife was willing to go all the way with me as she loves the books, the tv series (which we only saw later) and of course the movie, which IMHO only got Marvin to the T, but rest I can listen to without getting bored, but won’t watch! (Of the topic, never read Mostly Harmless due to Marvin’s ‘state’ at the end of the previous book!) Marvin IS HHGTtG! Any case, we did ‘play’ the game, but with a walktrough that had everything ‘mapped’ out, thus lots of the fun stuff like the narrator speaking to you after you died, consulting the guide for various things, etc., got passed me, but I did later read some transcripts someone made of all the guides entries, footnotes, ‘have you tried this for fun’, stuff, and those! Will be playing it in the near future when I can get that android app to work on my tablet! It does give Paranoid Android a new twist when speaking in terms of tablets!
Thanx yet again for a thoroughly enjoyable article!

- Peter Piers

October 16, 2015 at 6:54 pm

It might interest you to know that Marvin makes a comeback in MH, IIRC. :)

Suspect
November 22, 2013

(This article includes some spoilers. I’ve hidden them in the text, but this will probably only work if you’re reading on the actual site. If you’re somewhere else, such as Planet-IF or an RSS Reader, you may want to click through to the site and read there — assuming you care about spoilers, of course.)

And finally there was Suspect. Dribbled out into Hitchhiker’s huge wake just as 1984 expired, David Lebling’s first exercise in ludic mystery and Infocom’s fifth title of 1984 still carries with it a certain inevitable air of the anticlimactic. But we always try to give every Infocom game its due around here, and Suspect will be no exception.

If you’ve played Deadline or The Witness, or even just read about them, you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from Suspect. Once again this is a game that you must not so much explore as dissect; must not work your way through linearly from introduction to climax but rather assault from every angle. You can expect to finish it successfully only after dozens of restarts, each of them a little fact-finding mission all its own. Then, when you’ve seen all the pieces, you can fit them together and plan your final mission, at the end of which you will hopefully walk away with a guilty verdict (on someone other than yourself, that is). That’s the ideal, anyway; more likely the first few times you try you’ll find you still don’t quite have enough evidence, and thus it’s back to restarting and looking for more.

Suspect completes a neat trilogy of mystery roles. In Deadline you played the detective investigating a murder; in The Witness a witness to a murder; and in Suspect, yes, the prime suspect in a murder. You play a newspaper reporter who’s invited by Veronica Ashcroft, a Maryland blue blood and old friend from university, to her annual Halloween bash. Soon after your arrival Veronica is found murdered in her office — offices are dangerous places in Infocom mysteries; that’s where the crime in all three of them takes place — with the lariat that goes with your cowboy costume wrapped around her neck. You have to find the real murderer before the detective that comes to investigate and his associate, your old friend Sergeant Duffy, arrest you for the crime.

While Suspect, like The Witness, hews very firmly to the sturdy template laid out by Deadline, it does reflect Infocom’s ever-growing sophistication. There are far more characters to interact with than in the earlier games, and far more to see and do. Indeed, the world of Suspect is in many ways the most complex Infocom had yet created. Every character in the game is constantly moving about the rather expansive grounds of Veronica’s estate, and they mostly react believably to events around them, whether said events are set off by you or someone else. Granted, it is kind of odd that no one seems to care all that much when they learn that Veronica’s just been murdered, to the extent that they just continue enjoying Veronica’s own party despite her unfortunate absence. Then again, exactly this sort of behavior is par for the course in many an Agatha Christie novel, so I suppose we can take it as in the spirit of the genre.

Dave Lebling is generally a deft, elegant writer. He doesn’t entirely let us down here, but he is somewhat hampered by the need to describe so many comings and goings. It can all begin to have something of a mechanistic feel, as if all these characters were models moving about the house on tracks.

>s
Long Hall South
This is almost the southern end of the long north-south hall. A large doorway opens into the southern end of the ballroom. Another door on the west is to a small closet.
Ostmann is off to the east.
Alicia heads off to the east.
Smythe heads off to the north.

>s
Long Hall Begins
Here the front hall and a long north-south hall fronting the ballroom intersect. Another hall starts south of here and goes east.
The Werewolf is to the west, heading toward the east.
Linda is to the west, heading toward the east.
Smythe is to the north, heading toward the south.

In his defense, Suspect is hardly alone among Infocom’s mysteries in having this wind-up-toy feel about it. The very depth of the simulation tends to cut against their literary sensibilities.

Still, Suspect also has room for whimsy. Lebling gifts us with more Easter eggs and in-jokes than any game this side of Sorcerer. Shout-outs for hardcore fans are everywhere. One of the party-goers is dressed as a “short, cuddly-looking robot”; another is a grue; moving a rug aside gets you “Under the rug you see a wooden trap door… No, sorry! That’s another story.” Indeed, the more superficial elements are some of the most entertaining. The game is a little time capsule of yuppie life in the early 1980s, from the BMW 320i in the garage to “Karma Chameleon” playing in the ballroom.

The charm extends to the feelies, the main exhibit of which is a little Miss Manners-style guidebook called Murder and Modern Manners. The humor therein bites a bit more sharply than was the norm for Infocom, with at least one paragraph that qualifies as genuine satire, on the subject of “Prison Projects”:

Poetry can be a wonderfully sensitive medium for expressing your remorse and anguish. The study of law will help you improve your oratory skills, a clear benefit when you make vehement pleas to the prison parole board. Writing books can also be quite rewarding: the first eight editions of this book were all highly successful and sold particularly well among guilt-ridden liberals. But perhaps the wisest choice is painting. Prisoners are perceived as having great depths of repressed artistic genius. There are literally thousands of deep-pocketed dilettantes who are willing to pay a fortune for prison art. Especially if the work is being done by prisoners with a background of violent crime.

Infocom and G/R Copy were able to enlist a name artist with a long history in high and commercial art, Alan E. Cober, to illustrate the box and the booklet in his distinctively spare, modern style. The economic woes that would beset the company very soon after Suspect would make such prestigious collaborators a thing of the past.

(Spoiler: I “EXAMINE”d Veronica’s party mask, but never “SEARCH”ed it. If this strikes you as rather a cheap move on the game’s part, I can’t say I disagree.)Suspect is in fact the second very tough Infocom game in a row, following seven very solvable titles between Suspended and Hitchhiker’s. (Hitchhiker’s and Suspect together are almost enough to make me revise my premise that Infocom games trended generally easier as the company grew older.) When you put together the clues which are laced very subtly through the text and the storyworld to divine who’s responsible and how he, she, or they committed the crime, it’s a wonderful moment. Unfortunately, that’s just the first step. Actually proving what you know to the detective’s satisfaction is something else, a task made even more difficult by a lack of feedback; you never really know how close you actually are or which bits and pieces you’ve presented to the detective are actually important. It’s particularly difficult to figure out that you need to monitor one absolutely vital thing, almost managed to solve the murder in my recent playthrough, aided no doubt by vague memories from years ago. I just neglected to do one key thing and therefore was short one key clue.

(Spoiler: I kept trying to find a good reason for Alicia to help Michael murder his wife; as the game itself says if you attempt to arrest her alone, she didn’t have any motive. I naturally suspected an affair between Michael and Alicia, but could find no evidence of this beyond seeing them dancing together briefly in the ballroom. Just as happened with both )Suspect oddly shares with both of the mysteries that preceded it.

Suspect would turn out to mark the end of the line for Infocom’s original, hardcore take on the interactive mystery novel. While they would continue to dabble in mystery, the later games would play more like conventional adventure games. It’s hard to say why a form that caused such excitement back when Deadline first appeared should peter out so relatively quietly. Certainly it’s clear that a significant number of Infocom fans, both then and now, dislike the form of play of the early mysteries intensely, even if enough enjoyed the format — or just let brand loyalty overcome their misgivings — to generate for Suspect fairly typical sales numbers for its period, just shy of 50,000 copies. But there was also perhaps something else: a feeling that, having invented the format with Deadline, Infocom didn’t quite know how to advance it. For all its additional polish, there’s nothing really new that Suspect brings to the table. It would be unfair to say it feels stale precisely, but it shares enough with its predecessors that it can feel a bit anonymous in their company. Suspect is certainly the least loved and least remembered of the three today. Of course, Infocom might have tried to shake up the approach with a hypothetical next game instead of abandoning it; just having the victim not be a blue blood and not die in her office would make a good start. But being as they never did, we’re left with a trilogy of games almost unique in adventuring history, and one which even comes with an overarching thematic progression. The only other role left for the player to enact was that of victim — and I’m not sure how Infocom could have managed that. Maybe by putting the whole format out of its misery, as they did.

An inevitable footnote to any discussion of Suspect must be the gala that Infocom held to promote it at the January 1985 CES. It was by far the largest party the company ever gave, yet another marker of the high-water point this period represents. They invited some 5000 people to the Hartland Mansion in Las Vegas, formerly one of Elvis Presley’s homes, for what must be the largest game of How to Host a Murder ever played. Customized letter openers, previously mailed to invitees, served for tickets as well as party favors; these are today one of the most cherished of all pieces of Infocom memorabilia. One of these also became the murder weapon, in a crime staged by an acting troupe in front of the crowds gathered in the mansion’s ballroom around a huge indoor pool. The next day’s Las Vegas Sun bore the headline “Murder Rocks CES!,” with the important detail that it was all just pretend hidden below the fold. It seemed like great publicity — until it prompted authorities to investigate, whereupon they determined that the house had not been zoned for hosting a public event of such a magnitude. Infocom was forced to return to Las Vegas to testify in court, but thankfully the owners of the house bore the brunt of the pain. Not as sexy as murder, perhaps, but such is life in the real world.

(As usual at this time of year, The Digital Antiquarian will be taking a little hiatus while my wife and I travel back to the good old U.S.A. for Thanksgiving with my friends and family. Will be back at it in two to three weeks, at which time we’ll shift back over to Britain to look at 1984 there. I’ll see you guys then.)

Comments
23 Responses

- David Boddie

November 22, 2013 at 8:51 pm

I’m sure I’ve already mentioned a game with a similar mechanic to this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_%28interactive_fiction%29

And it seems that the final role (protagonist as victim) was done five years later by Level 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapeghost

- Jimmy Maher

November 23, 2013 at 8:02 am

I played Corruption years ago. I remember it as being all but impossibly hard to solve. Will revisit it again of course when we get there. And I’m very much looking forward to Scapeghost, which I’ve never played.

- Robb Sherwin

November 22, 2013 at 8:56 pm

The only other role left for the player to enact was that of victim — and I’m not sure how Infocom could have managed that.

Level 9 did with Scapeghost. :)

Great article, as always. Suspect’s manual is my absolute favorite of any game, ever. I had always wished that Infocom did a game about Dr. Charles Edwards, Emergency Room Surgeon / Murderer.

- matt w

November 23, 2013 at 12:30 am

There’s also the old “Someone has slipped you poison and you have 24 hours to solve the mystery and maybe get the antidote” wheeze. (Looks like this is in the 1950 movie D.O.A., probably among others.) Goes nicely with a turn limit.

- Anon

November 23, 2013 at 4:54 am

Or alternatively, the player could have been the murderer, who now has to destroy, conceal, and alter evidence, and eliminate, turn, or trick witnesses, so as to not be discovered by the investigator.

- Jimmy Maher

November 23, 2013 at 8:05 am

I think I might recall a recent game that worked something like that… :)

- Mark Ricard

January 14, 2014 at 4:04 am

I even remember somebody review of that game in SPAG Magazine issue 61.

- Mark Ricard

January 14, 2014 at 6:12 pm

*someones review.

- Peter Piers

October 16, 2015 at 7:21 pm

Erm… any chance the comment above could be deleted or edited? I’m sorry, but it’s a huge, unprompted spoiler. I happened to play that game, and the realization that we’re talking about here was *crucial* for my enjoyment.

(I then proceeded not continue, because that level of complexity does not suit my tastes at all. But ah well)

- Jimmy Maher

October 17, 2015 at 9:30 am

Edited the comment so you’ll have to go looking for it to find out what game it is.

- Marshal Tenner Winter

November 22, 2013 at 9:34 pm

Hi! You stated ” I “EXAMINE”d Veronica’s party mask, but never “SEARCH”ed it. If this strikes you as rather a cheap move on the game’s part, I can’t say I disagree.”

My 2 cents on this is that you “examine” with your eyes only and “search” with your eyes and hands. This is how I implement it in my games, but I’ve been told to warn my players about it.

- Jimmy Maher

November 23, 2013 at 8:04 am

That’s not how Lebling sees it. :) I think that SEARCH and LOOK IN are pretty much equivalent in most of the Infocom games, this one included. And indeed, the clue is found on the inside of the mask. Still strikes me as needlessly cruel, verging on guess the verb.

- Mark Ricard

January 6, 2014 at 9:10 pm

Jim,I had the same problem about a year and half ago when I first played Dual Transform by Andrew Plotkin. At one point you can only find the object with search instead of examine. It is too bad because that was the only time I needed look at the walkthrough in the entire game. He claims it was a mistake on his part.

- Zurlocker

November 23, 2013 at 7:22 am

Good write up. Personally, I thought the artwork for Suspect was among the ugliest they ever used. But glad to know that it was “art”. :-)

- Giuseppe

November 26, 2013 at 3:05 pm

Yeah, I’m glad to know that it’s ‘art’ too, seeing how I think it’s hideous.

- Torbjörn Andersson

December 1, 2013 at 10:17 pm

There was a different cover illustration for Suspect in one of the Infocom product catalogs. You can see a scan of it at http://gallery.guetech.org/incomplete/incomplete-4.jpg though it’s a bit fuzzy since even the original image was pretty small.

- Felix

November 23, 2013 at 11:33 am

Amazing how much Karma Chameleon has been used as a symbol for 1983-1984. I remember an issue of the New Teen Titans where the eponymous protagonists are walking down the street and the same song is blaring from somebody’s boombox. I can’t think of any cultural product that would define 2013 to the same extent AND be remembered three decades from now. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be…

- Rick Reynolds

January 9, 2014 at 1:09 am

I’m sorry to post so late, but I was going through my Infocom collection of stuff and found a Quitclaim deed that I believe matches info from this game.

It isn’t listed anywhere on the Infocom fact sheet. Was it an extra feelie distributed with the Invisiclue booklet for this game?

- Jimmy Maher

January 9, 2014 at 10:19 am

It doesn’t ring any bells with me. If you were to scan it and post it somewhere, maybe somebody might be able to help.

- Dave Thompsen

March 5, 2014 at 4:18 pm

The “Quitclaim Deed” is the map packaged with the Suspect Invisiclues sold separately from the game.

http://gallery.guetech.org/suspect_invisiclues/suspect_invisiclues.html

- Peter Piers

October 16, 2015 at 7:33 pm

How bizarre – it looks exactly like the sort of feelie Infocom would have been glad to add in the box! I wonder why they “relegated” it to the InvisiClues packaging… Did InvisiClues often have that much extra stuff?

- Jimmy Maher

October 17, 2015 at 9:33 am

Not usually, no. Normally just the hints and a standard boxes-and-lines map of the game. It’s very possible that map was originally made for the game, but then it was decided it was too expensive to include and/or made the game too easy, so it was relegated to the hint booklet. That would be my best guess anyway.

- Peter Ferrie

December 8, 2015 at 12:20 am

And no mention of the bug with the magically appearing body? If you take the shortcut between the halls, you can reach the office one move before the body is placed.

Sherlock
December 12, 2013

The most anticipated British adventure release of 1984 was Melbourne House’s followup to The Hobbit, that perennial bestseller that remained one of the top two games in the country for much of the first two years after its release. Indeed, Melbourne House, who opened a splashy new office in Richmond, England, early in 1984 and was now established as one of the most important publishers in the British market, could be described without hyperbole as the house that The Hobbit had built. Everyone was dying to see their next big adventure.

The most logical candidate for a Hobbit followup must be the sequel to the source material of that work: The Lord of the Rings. When Alfred Milgrom of Melbourne House approached the Tolkien estate, however, he learned that it was not available. All media rights had been leased in the 1970s, before anyone knew what computer games were, to Fantasy Films, who had produced an animated film version of the first half of the story in 1978. That had been a flop (how times do change…), with the result that funding was never secured to complete the story. Still, Fantasy’s lease had yet to expire even though they were doing absolutely nothing with it. Milgrom, who believed — probably correctly — that being based on such an iconic property had been a major contributor to The Hobbit‘s success, looked around for something similarly iconic to adopt. He found it in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, which had the added virtue of being out of copyright. Melbourne House’s Hobbit “sequel” would be a new case for the timeless sleuth and his partner Watson.

Thus early in 1983 Philip Mitchell, now elevated to Melbourne House’s lead adventure developer in the wake of Veronika Megler’s departure, started work on Sherlock, building upon the adventure engine he and Megler had developed for The Hobbit. The core idea remained the same: to create a living world populated by other characters going about their business and pursuing their own goals, full of dynamism and emergent elements. Throw in the complications of an intricate mystery plot rather than a simple quest narrative, and it became one hell of a tall order. Throw in the need to have it all reside, with graphics, in 48 K of memory, and it started to look impossible. Confidently expected at first in a matter of a handful of months, the release date was pushed back to February of 1984, then to perhaps May or June, finally to September, while Mitchell wrestled with the challenge in two-steps-forward-one-step-back fashion (or sometimes vice versa). The game finally appeared after some eighteen months of development, a crazily long amount of time to work full time on an adventure game by the standards of the early 1980s; Level 9’s Pete Austin, by way of comparison, cranked out four big adventures in the same period while also helping to run a company. Sherlock‘s belated arrival was greeted as a major event. It simply had to be something special.

And that it certainly was — albeit perhaps not quite in the way anticipated. Sherlock starts with all the weirdness of The Hobbit and then multiplies it by ten. The game seems to have a life of its own, to have gotten away not only from you but also from Mitchell. To play is to step into a bizarrely addled world where nothing quite works the way it ought to. It starts with the opening text, which reads like it was written by a Victorian difference engine with a poor grasp of English grammar.

Melbourne House described Sherlock thus:

In Sherlock, you take on the role of Holmes. With the ever-faithful Watson you will roam freely through the gaslit streets of London and explore Victorian England in your quest to disentangle seemingly inexplicable and unresolvable mysteries. You will follow up clues and confront sinister and elusive characters during your adventure.

In reality, the game has nary a shred of the verisimilitude that description would suggest, although the adjectives “inexplicable” and “unresolvable” can certainly be applied in other ways. Once again the characters are just intelligent enough to seem unbelievably stupid. Sherlock‘s most loathed character, its equivalent of The Hobbit‘s Thorin, became Watson, whom you can never quite get to do what you want him to. Watson’s infuriating equivalent of Thorin’s singing about gold is to tell you over and over, apropos of nothing, what brilliant deductions you’re making.

And then there are the outright bugs. Oh, boy, what bugs. These are bugs for the ages. The strange behaviors that emerge from them can be counter-intuitively inspiring. The magazines soon latched onto “SherlockBugs” as a compound name for an entire genre of letters and articles to go along with the earlier “HobbitBugs”; many players found them the most interesting part of the game. In Sherlock, unconscious characters can talk.

You can see an unconscious policeman. An unconscious policeman says " I'm sorry, sir, I have my orders, but no one is to get by. "

SherlockBugs were soon being divided into subgenres to cope with their sheer quantity. One of the most populated of these involved all the strange interactions that swirl around the cab that you and the other characters use to travel around London. A letter writer to Personal Computing Weekly was amongst the first to note that all was not quite right with the cab.

I had been searching for some time for Major Percival Foulkes when, on returning to Baker Street, I found him in a hansom cab in my hall! I have since tried to remove him and the cab from the hall without success.

Now the game was afoot to see just how weird things could get.

Take the cab to Kings Cross Road, get out, and tell the cabbie to follow you. Go to the nearest train and tell the cabbie to climb into it. Then return to the cab, climb in, and type “LOOK.”

After trying this out, my inventory read: “You are carrying your alibi, herself, innocent, the Old Mill Road, guilty, and an idiot!”

Some players learned how to make the bugs work for them. A big problem for many was Inspector Lestrade, who takes off on the wrong track entirely as usual and will close the case by arresting the wrong person when the game has barely begun unless you can find some way to convince him otherwise — which is not terribly easy to do. One Ian Eaton of Hednesford found an alternative approach: to stash him in a cab.

When returning from Leatherhead on Monday night, follow Lestrade from the train and onto Kings Cross Road. Now as soon he hails a cab input “SAY TO CABBIE, GO TO ALDERGATE STREET.” You then realize that Lestrade has climbed into the cab and has been whisked off before he can give the cabbie his destination. I’ve found if you catch a cab yourself to Aldergate Street you find Lestrade sitting in the first cab, waiting patiently out of the way.

This enables the novice to explore London in peace, unhindered, and collect clues.

Other bugs were less useful. Players eventually figured out that replying to Watson’s “Good morning” at the beginning of the game with an innocent “Hello” would cause the game to crash many turns later — as would, incredibly, just talking too much in general to him. Melbourne House themselves, who resolutely spun all bugs as features resulting from the game’s “sophistication,” had this to say about that situation:

Watson is the one character who learns during the game and because his character consumes so much memory, you should be aware of not talking to him too much, or his knowledge could completely fill all available space and give you an “out of memory” statement.

Yes, the poor fellow can become just too smart for his own good — or yours.

Even when it’s working correctly the game is problematic. Much of the problem is the parser, which, for all that Melbourne House loved to hype its “Inglish” grammar, leaves much to be desired. It accepts one and only one idiosyncratic phrasing for most actions. (You can’t “ENTER,” “GET IN,” “GET INTO,” or “CLIMB IN” a vehicle, only “CLIMB INTO” it.) Glossy magazine reviewers generally gave the game the expected stellar grade, but even they couldn’t hold back from chiming in with some complaints. Crash magazine called the parser “clinical” and the game “too big for its boots.” Computer and Video Games called the parser “torturous” and summarized the game as “an intriguing and absorbing game written for the wrong machine by someone who doesn’t speak the vernacular.”

Between the bugs, the parser frustrations, and the need to be in the right place at the right time and manipulate all of the other characters just so, Sherlock is a well-nigh impossible game to actually solve. Melbourne House encouraged early players to contact them after solving the game, not through a formal contest of the sort favored by many British publishers but nevertheless with a certain unspoken promise of reward and recognition for the first to successfully manage the feat. It took the nation more than four months to produce a winning team. That was David and Paul Cunningham, a pair of teenage brothers from the village of Morpeth in Northumberland. Paula Byrne, Melbourne House’s British publicity manager, took the boys to lunch at The Sherlock Holmes Restaurant, where they got to explore Sherlock’s normally glassed-off study and also got the expected bag of Melbourne House swag. Incredibly, the brothers claimed to have played only on the weekends: “We weren’t allowed to play it during the week because of our homework!”

The Cunningham brothers sit with Sherlock himself in his study

Sherlock is by no stretch a good game, but all its craziness certainly makes it one of the most entertaining bad games I’ve ever played. It’s so out of control, so completely off the rails, that you half expect it to find a way to climb right out of your computer and start taking over the world. It’s kind of a fascinating experience, even today. (If you’d like to see for yourself, feel free to download its Spectrum incarnation.) In its day, the game was a hit beyond even Melbourne House’s expectations, selling out its first production run in three days and leaving the company scrambling to make more to feed Christmas demand. While it wouldn’t ultimately have the legs that The Hobbit did, it did more than well enough to encourage Melbourne House to keep at their anarchic and oddly compelling take on the adventure game.

Shortly before Sherlock‘s release, Fantasy Films’s lease on The Lord of the Rings expired at last, and Milgrom was able to scoop up the gaming rights. Mitchell proceeded to lead development over the rest of the decade of three more adventures based on the trilogy. All emerged with the same collection of bugs and unanticipated emergent behaviors that had become Melbourne House’s trademark. By now, however, gamers were becoming more discerning and the oddities somehow less charming. People at last started asking why Melbourne House couldn’t seem to hire a QA team, and why they were paying good money for sub-alpha-quality software. Each new game sold fewer copies than the last, and when The Crack of Doom appeared to end Melbourne House and Philip Mitchell’s career in text adventures it attracted barely a whisper of attention. Thus died quietly a unique — if also uniquely problematic — approach to interactive fiction.

(Quite a lot of minor sources this time for such a short article. I’ll run through them quickly: Popular Computing Weekly of October 6 1983, October 27 1983, July 5 1984, November 8 1984, and January 17 1985; Micro Adventurer of November 1983 and November 1984; Personal Computer Games of February 1984, November 1984, and December 1984; Crash of April 1984, June 1984, October 1984, December 1984, and September 1985; Home Computing Weekly of September 25 1984 and March 5 1985; Computer and Video Games of November 1984, April 1985, and September 1985. The photo of the Cunningham brothers was taken from the April 1985 Computer and Video Games.)

Comments
24 Responses

- iPadCary

December 12, 2013 at 6:00 pm

Is this playable in iFROTZ?

- David Boddie

December 12, 2013 at 6:16 pm

You’ll need a Spectrum emulator to play it. It seems that the game is available in JSMESS but I don’t know how well it works.

- iPadCary

December 12, 2013 at 7:59 pm

JSMESS is, as yet, undoable iSafari.
As such, to me, it doesn’t exist.
Shortsighted?
I prefer “forward thinking”, myself.

- Jason Scott

December 13, 2013 at 1:11 am

Oh no – if only there were other freely available and open source browsers to use JSMESS with.

- iPadCary

December 13, 2013 at 5:34 pm

If you can name a iPad browser that works with JSMESS,
because I’ve tried Safari, Chrome & Dolphin and
NONE of them do the job, I’m all ears.

- David Boddie

December 12, 2013 at 6:11 pm

Another fascinating article!

One typo: “ultimate” -> “ultimately”

- Jimmy Maher

December 13, 2013 at 7:11 am

Thanks!

- Steve McCrea

December 12, 2013 at 6:51 pm

There’s a fascinating tool called “Foggy London”, released just a few days ago, that runs the game in an emulator and exposes the game state (items, characters, etc).
http://members.aon.at/~ehesch1/fl/fl.htm
The author also wrote a similar tool for the Hobbit, available from his site.

- Olivier Guinart

December 12, 2013 at 7:37 pm

They really had that typo in the game: “[…] an unconscious policeman. An conscious policeman […]”?

I remember going to the movies for that Hobbit animated movie, and waiting and waiting for a sequel indeed (amazing what the Internet can answer today that you wouldn’t be able to find out easily in 1978).

- Jimmy Maher

December 13, 2013 at 7:10 am

Sadly, that one was mine… although it would make the story even better.

- John Elliott

December 12, 2013 at 10:03 pm

A curious coincidence; ‘Foggy London‘, an application that lets you watch the internals of the Sherlock game engine while you play it, was released this week.

(The author had previously written ‘Wilderland’, an equivalent program for The Hobbit).

And thinking back to the mention of satirical games in the Quill article, I hope Robin of Sherlock hasn’t been overlooked…

- Petter Sjölund

December 13, 2013 at 9:54 am

I may have its share of problems, but I enjoyed this a lot and solved it using a couple of hints from computer magazines. But I was eleven and hadn’t played any Infocom games.

- Mark Ricard

December 21, 2013 at 10:50 pm

Hi. This is a good review of the game. Your article talked about the bugs but you should have mentioned more about the plot itself. Like you said,it requires some exact timing. The scene with the opium den is good example. Also one of the mysteries you solve is a rip off of a Sherlock Holmes story. You should do another article covering the problems in this game.

- Mark Ricard

January 6, 2014 at 12:45 am

Did not notice this before but it is worth mentioning. The opium den scene that I mentioned is also a rip off another story Holmes story called “The Man with the Twisted Lip”. That makes two different story threads that are rip offs of Conan Doyle’s work.

- Mark Ricard

December 21, 2013 at 10:53 pm

Jim,isn’t this the first text adventure about Sherlock Holmes ever commercially made? If it was,the great detective certainly deserved a better computer debut.

- Jimmy Maher

December 22, 2013 at 7:34 am

Yes, it was.

- Mark Ricard

December 22, 2013 at 11:56 pm

Just reread my first comment. That was not how it was meant to sound. I enjoyed reading your review of Sherlock. Would you consider doing on another post on some of the other problems with this game?

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2013 at 6:37 am

No worries at all. It’s a valid enough criticism. I’ve gotten worse, believe me. :)

That said, I think I’m done with Sherlock personally. I tend to write about the aspects of a game I find really interesting, which in this case were the dynamic aspects leading to unexpected emergent behaviors and the bugs (these two things can be hard to distinguish from one another).

But criticism is a dialog. If you have opinions about the plot and/or other aspects of Sherlock you’d like to share, think about writing an IFDB review. And of course give us the link here. :) I’m sure others would be interested…

- Mark Ricard

January 6, 2014 at 8:44 pm

Was not criticizing your review. In fact I am very impressed by the amount of knowledge your posts contain. Where do you find most of your information? Your knowledge about the industry is deep.

- Jimmy Maher

January 7, 2014 at 8:48 am

I list sources at the bottom of most articles these days. Short answer: lots and lots of places, although contemporary magazine are a constant treasure trove for which I owe huge thanks to the many people who have taken on the thankless task of scanning them and archiving (https://archive.org/details/computermagazines) them.

- Mark Ricard

January 6, 2014 at 8:42 pm

Is there a version of the Foggy London program that runs on the Mac OS X? The version I found does seems to be PC only.

- Jimmy Maher

January 7, 2014 at 8:45 am

Looks like it would probably be compilable on a non-Windows system based on a quick glance at its dependencies, but that would take some tinkering. Easiest thing to do if you’re really interested is probably to install WINE (http://www.winehq.org/). Being a fairly simple app, I’d suspect that Foggy London would work perfectly well that way.

- Mark Ricard

January 7, 2014 at 9:40 pm

I tried to install wine but every time there is this weird installation error. Just decided to forget it. Unless you know why there would be problems with installing it on a max os
X.

- CfromAT

January 8, 2014 at 1:51 pm

Hi Mark, maybe you can find someone who compiles the provided sources for you on a Mac? A guy on the WoS forum has done so for Raspbian (http://www.worldofspectrum.org/forums/showthread.php?t=45756), so the program should work under different operating systems. – Sorry I can’t halp you more, but I am neither a professional programmer nor do I know anything about Macs!
Kind regards,
CfromAT (author of ‘Foggy London’)
PS: if you succeed, could you provide the executable Apple file for me to publish?

This Tormented Business, Part 1
December 17, 2013

As 1983 transitioned into 1984, the British games industry’s fortunes were soaring alongside those of its star platform, the Sinclair Spectrum. Mainstream press coverage soared right along with sales. Having not experienced the arcade- and console-videogame boom and crash to the extent of the United States, the press in Britain lacked a certain ennui that infected coverage of computer entertainment in that country. Thus picking up a tabloid newspaper really could make you think that games and their makers had arrived as mainstream entertainment, while several specialized weekly newsletters devoted to casual computing could be found at any newsstand, full of all the latest gossip. Trip Hawkins and Electronic Arts, who were earnestly trying to manufacture just this kind of mass-market buzz around their games and their “electronic artists” in the U.S. and largely failing, must have been green with envy. Of course, Britain’s homegrown electronic artists were also garnering a whole lot of money as well as a whole lot of press attention, giving Britons their first real exposure to the software superstar, generally in the form of a skinny, socially awkward young man rather incongruously sporting a Ferrari and a designer suit.

Imagine Software was the very personification of all this hype and excess. Founded by a few bright young sparks in Liverpool in 1982, Imagine burst to prominence and crazy profitability on the back of a slick action game called Arcadia, one of the early Speccy showcases which first made that machine the most popular gaming platform in country. Thus when Imagine suddenly collapsed in about the most dramatic fashion imaginable in June of 1984 — employees returned from lunch to find the doors barred and their offices occupied by bailiffs working on behalf of Imagine’s creditors, with the whole thing being filmed for national television — it was tempting indeed to conflate their fate with the prospects of the industry as a whole. In truth, Imagine had worked hard to deserve their fate by being richly, conspicuously stupid. They invested in vanity projects like a misbegotten would-be advertising agency called Studio Sing; they refused to hire a single proper, professional accountant (perhaps because they didn’t want to hear what she might say); they twice moved into bigger, flashier offices before the lease on the previous had expired, thus paying double or triple rents for months at a stretch when they couldn’t begin to fill even one of their properties; they threw huge piles of cash into a never-released “mega-game” to be called Bandersnatch which they planned to sell for £40 (the typical going rate for a game at the time was about £5 or £6) and about which nobody was quite sure what it was supposed to be; they allowed their staff of artists and programmers complete “creative freedom,” which translated into many of them not really doing much of anything at all. Against all this, the Ferraris and racing motorcycles everyone at the company seemed to own represented a fairly modest problem.

It was also true, however, that the British software industry as a whole was bound for a stern reckoning with reality, just as was the American. Unlike the American, the British industry was also forced to contend with what they claimed was a booming trade in not just pirating (that was something the Americans knew all too much about) but commercial counterfeiting, a byproduct of the fact that most software was still distributed on cassettes in Britain. These were easy and cheap to duplicate in large quantities, and the simplistic packaging still common in the industry was also quite easy to copy well enough to get the job done. Counterfeiters, industry insiders claimed, could be found selling their wares at every flea market and village festival in Britain. Some even started their own little mail-order operations, selling through advertisements in newspapers. The industry claimed counterfeiters and pirates were costing them at least £100 million every year.

It’s difficult to assess the veracity of such claims. Certainly the games industry in Britain as well as elsewhere has a long history of overheated, overly alarmist rhetoric on the subject, which can perhaps make one more dismissive than one should be of legitimate concerns. What is clear is that, whatever the cause, the software industry didn’t grow in 1984 like it had in 1983. There were now simply too many publishers competing for the same customers. The prudent professionals like Alfred Milgrom of Melbourne House and David Ward of Ocean survived; the muddle-minded amateurs like the boys at Imagine were left with only their memories of one hell of a ride. The shakeout was inevitably wrenching, enough so that the more heatedly apocalyptic predictions for, as it was dubbed in a trade paper, “this tormented industry of ours” can be forgiven. Roger Kean offered a more balanced take in an editorial in Crash magazine:

There is nothing new in this; it seems inevitable that all “new” industries must start in back bedrooms and move to the conglomerate boardroom. If an industry is worth it, big money will move in. Competition increases, tougher marketing emerges, and the under-capitalized pioneer suffers. The benefits of programmers marketing their games through the larger software houses shouldn’t be overlooked though. The programmer is free to concentrate on what he does best while being linked to sufficient finance to market the game well, and at the same time is freed from the real headache of all companies — financial controls.

Melbourne House aside, most of the biggest of the big boys weren’t heavily invested in adventure games. Britain would never have another adventure phenomenon quite like The Hobbit. What it got instead was something that is in its way more inspiring. To program a sellable arcade game on even a simple machine like the Spectrum required quite a depth of knowledge in assembly language and the quirks of the Speccy itself. However, an adventure game was a less daunting prospect, especially with the aid of a tool like The Quill. Accordingly, new adventure games appeared by the handful virtually every week, sometimes from established publishers but also from plenty of teenagers possessed of an entrepreneurial bent, blank cassettes, and Ziploc baggies. This output dwarfed that of the U.S. in quantity if not in quality; World of Spectrum currently has archived 2217 commercial text adventures for the Speccy alone, and I’d venture to guess that at least that many more have been lost to history. Few of them would ever threaten to crack the software top ten, but they nevertheless fueled a thriving cult of eager players.

To sort through this flood in any rigorous way would require more time and dedication than I can muster. Having already looked at Sherlock, the biggest adventure of the year, we’ll just dip in another toe or two before moving on, checking in on a couple of other friends we already met in earlier articles. Being part of the less roller-coastery adventure scene, both Peter Killworth and the Austin family who ran Level 9 weathered the year’s storms quite comfortably.

The connection between Cambridge University’s Phoenix mainframe culture and Acornsoft continued to hold strong in 1984, with Peter Killworth continuing to serve as the conduit. Having ported the Phoenix game Hamil to the BBC Micro the previous year, Killworth did two more direct ports this year. One, of Rod Underwood’s 1980 game Quondam, is of particular value for Phoenix historians: the original, you see, is one of at least two Phoenix games to have been lost entirely in their original incarnations, and thus Killworth’s version represents our only way to play it today. (Sadly, the other — Xerb by Andrew Lipson — would seem to truly be lost forever.) Killworth’s other port was a technical tour de force that consumed most of a year: he managed to cram all of the monumental Acheton onto two BBC Micro disks, using one as a database to fetch text into memory as needed. That dependence on disk storage cut into sales severely; disk drives were still a relative rarity on British home computers, even on the fairly expensive BBC Micro line. But if nothing else Killworth and Acornsoft had bragging rights as purveyors of easily the biggest adventure game yet to appear on a microcomputer, on either side of the Atlantic. Acheton and Quondam otherwise remain the same sort of exercise in mathematics and masochism as the Phoenix/Acornsoft titles I’ve already discussed, so I won’t belabor them any more here. By now we know what we’re getting into with these games.

Level 9 celebrated the New Year with a new game — literally; they started selling it to mail-order customers on January 1. Lords of Time is unusual in being one of very few Level 9 games not solely designed by Pete Austin. Its germ was a proposal sent to the company by a fan named Sue Gazzard, “mother of two boys and reluctant housewife.” The Austins liked her idea for a time-traveling adventure inspired by a certain long-running British science-fiction series so much that they asked her to design it for them, with Pete in the role of programmer and occasional co-designer. Before release Gazzard’s original title of Time Lords became Lords of Time and the more overt Doctor Who references were smoothed away. Yes, the days when Level 9 could innocently release a trio of games that amounted to Lord of the Rings fan fiction were behind them; they would soon be scrubbing those games similarly clean of their inspiration, yet another sign of a maturing industry.

Lords of Time marked the end of an era in another sense: it was the last Level 9 game without pictures. In the eyes of Level 9, the success of The Hobbit had made them a veritable commercial necessity. Most other publishers seemed to agree. Absent an Infocom to fly the pure-text standard proudly, almost every high-profile British adventure game from here on would have to have pictures, despite the resource drain they represented on little computers already being pushed to their limit. (The Acornsoft adventures were among the few exceptions — but they were already becoming something of a specialized taste anyway.)

Having decided to take the plunge, the Austin brothers managed using their usual technical wizardry to pack an absurd number of pictures into a tiny amount of memory. Pete claimed that they could fit 300 pictures into 6 or 7 K of memory using an ultra-compressed version of the vector-graphics techniques Ken Williams had first employed for Mystery House and The Wizard and the Princess in the U.S. The end result was not aesthetically masterful, but there was something to be said for giving the people what they wanted. The first Level 9 game to include graphics was Return to Eden, second in the Silicon Dreams trilogy they had begun with Snowball.

They rounded out the year with a third game, which appeared under the imprint of Mosaic Publishing rather than their own. The British equivalent to the American Telarium, Mosaic was busy pushing out an ambitious lineup of bookware, including titles based on books by Harry Harrison, Dick Francis, and Michael Moorcock. Level 9’s contribution was The Saga of Erik the Viking, a ludic sequel to the very popular 1983 children’s book by the improbably versatile Terry Jones of Monty Python fame.

Before I started writing this blog, I didn’t know nearly as much about Level 9’s games as a person who already years ago presumed to write a history of interactive fiction probably should have. Given their popular reputation as “the British Infocom” (admittedly, a title also sometimes ascribed to their later rivals Magnetic Scrolls), I dearly wanted to enjoy their games in the course of remedying that. But I must confess I’m finding that easier said than done. Snowball gave me hope that Level 9 was maturing, both with its more coherent fictional context and its fairer — albeit by no means entirely fair — puzzles, but this trio of games represents if anything a step backward. While I can overlook a lot of parser limitations and some strangled prose in light of the games needing to run on a 48 K machine with no recourse to disk-based virtual memory and now the added requirement of pictures, the unsolvable puzzles and the unnecessary cruelties are harder to forgive. There’s a locked door in Lords of Time that can be opened only by typing the magic word “EUREKA.” The only hint given for this is the fact that the door happens to be in an inventor’s laboratory. Otherwise, zilch — not even a nudge that you’re expected to use a secret word at all as opposed to opening the door by some more physical means. No wonder that programs to list the parsing vocabulary of Level 9 games were such a hot item in the magazines of this period. This sort of puzzle always frustrates me because it’s so… well, somehow dishonest. It’s easy and cheap to make a puzzle, or a game, that’s impossible to solve. The art and the craft come in making one that’s interesting, challenging, and solvable.

Return to Eden and Erik the Viking don’t feature any one puzzle quite so absurd, but in the aggregate are just about as impossible to solve and equally rife with annoyances and boring things required just for the hell of it. Eden, for instance, features a helicopter which constantly patrols overhead looking for you. You must “HIDE” every time it appears, which sometimes seems like every other turn. This goes on for literally most of the game; miss an appearance and it’s instant death. In no universe is this sort of thing remotely fun. Meanwhile the carefully worked-out setting of Eden‘s predecessor has been largely replaced with one more typical of adventure games — i.e., one a bit more on the absurd side.

That said, Level 9’s stellar contemporary reputation isn’t hard to understand. Thanks to their compression wizardry, they offered far more to do in every game than virtually anyone else, while their prose was generally a cut or two above the average and even their parser, while limited, was less limited than most. But I’m afraid their games — or at least those of this era — haven’t aged as well as one might wish. In the defense of Level 9 and others working the British market, I should note again that they were contending with horribly restrictive hardware in comparison to their American counterparts. The fact that they got as much game and as much text and graphics as they did into 48 K or (absent the graphics) even as little as 32 K of memory is remarkable in itself.

Still, the most remarkable and inspiring of all aspects of the British scene were all those amateur and semi-amateur creators making games for themselves with The Quill and other tools. They would become — and far sooner than the bigger publishers dreamed — the eventual face of interactive fiction. I probably haven’t quite given them their due, and probably won’t in the future, but I want to at least give them one more round of resounding lip service here.

Yet text adventures were not the most important games to come out of Britain in 1984. Indeed, for all its commercial uncertainty 1984 was an artistic year for the ages, one full of iconic titles and stone-cold classics, arguably the gaming year of the decade in Britain. I’d be truly remiss to not look at this creative explosion in other genres for which the British computers were, truth be told, probably better suited than displaying streams of hand-crafted text. So, next time we’ll jump into the first of a few of the most important and interesting titles from one hell of a crowded field.

(Paul Anderson and Bruce Everiss, respectively the maker and one of the stars of the BBC’s 1984 documentary on the British games industry that captured Imagine’s downfall, were reunited in 2011 at BAFTA for an interesting discussion. Other useful sources for this article: the Your Computer of November 1984; Crash of July 1985; Computer and Video Games of May 1984; and Micro Adventurer of July 1984. Oh, and feel free to download Peter Killworth’s two games of 1984 as well as Level 9’s three in versions for, depending on the game, the BBC Micro or Commodore 64.)

Comments
18 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

December 17, 2013 at 7:04 pm

Hezarin is in the IF Archive.

http://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXphoenixXgamesXpc.html

- Jimmy Maher

December 18, 2013 at 6:34 am

Thanks. I edited a SPAG issue largely devoted to the Phoenix games a few years ago. Hezarin was still missing at that time, but Adam Atkinson said it might be possible to recover a paper listing and type it in again. Don’t know if that’s what happened or something else, but good to know it’s been preserved.

- Duncan Stevens

December 18, 2013 at 2:20 pm

This confused me because Adam was responsible (in part) for the ports that made it into the IF Archive–quite a while back; the ports, including Hezarin, all seem to be dated 1999. Source code appears for the others, but not for Hezarin. I’m not sure how Hezarin could have been ported without source code; I guess it’s possible to create a port from compiled game output, but it would be an enormous pain. So I have no idea what the deal is here.

- Jimmy Maher

December 18, 2013 at 2:37 pm

When I was in touch with him, Adam said Hezarin was missing but that the author believed he might have the source code on paper. Adam said he would be willing to type it in if the author could find it. I certainly had the impression that Hezarin was otherwise missing entirely, but obviously that’s not right. Otherwise, yeah, no idea what the story is here. Could always check with Adam.

- Healy

December 17, 2013 at 11:27 pm

Are you ever going to pick up a Quill game on here? I think it would be a rather interesting look at the state of amateur IF at the time (sort of a proto-IFDB Spelinking), but I can understand not wanting to spend a whole lot of time on something that could very well be pretty awful.

- Jimmy Maher

December 18, 2013 at 6:38 am

Yeah, that’s a tough one. I’ve been trying to maintain a general ratio of one “real” year = 6 months blog time. The decisions I have to make to maintain that pace, however, get ever more painful. And as you say, most Quilled efforts, like most amateur efforts in the archive, are inevitably going to be pretty dire. But I suppose I might pluck just one at complete random sometime…

- Dehumanizer

December 18, 2013 at 10:30 am

Quill games weren’t necessarily indie; in fact, I’d say half of commercial Spectrum adventures were created with it (and later PAW). One of my favorites is CRL’s “Dracula”, by Rod Pike (although I have to say that the C64 version, also done with The Quill, “feels” a lot better than the Speccy one — bigger screen, a readable font, better graphics, and even music at some places).

- Dehumanizer

December 18, 2013 at 10:31 am

Ah, but the question was about *1984* Quill games, which would necessarily be indie, right? Sorry, then. :)

- Jimmy Maher

December 18, 2013 at 10:40 am

Not necessarily. Just to give one example that springs to mind, Melbourne House released Hampstead in 1984, which was a Quill game. It wasn’t very well received even at the time, however.

- Anthony

December 18, 2013 at 12:48 am

There’s a YouTube playthrough of Quondam here:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=5lVXwNPtWDM

- John Elliott

December 18, 2013 at 12:50 am

I didn’t remember the Eureka puzzle in Lords of Time as being particularly unfair, but when I checked I found that was because I had a later version which came on disk, and so wasn’t as constrained for resources. In the original, the room description is

You are in the invention room. You find odd scribblings on the walls and find half-finished tools on the floor.

but in the disk version it reads

You are in the invention room. You find a cartoon of a man in a bath on one wall, and find the cryptic hint “backwardness can make rueful”.

- Jimmy Maher

December 18, 2013 at 6:44 am

Yes, Lords of Time was rereleased as the first part of the “Time and Magick” trilogy in 1988. That version is MUCH better. It fleshes out the descriptions to offer more atmosphere and adds contextual nudges to make solving most of the more ridiculous puzzles — not least this one — easier. It makes Lords of Time into quite an enjoyable game, although a few puzzles, like getting the icicle, still go under-hinted.

- Scott

December 18, 2013 at 11:58 pm

Hey Jimmy, just a typo I noticed (Paragraph 3):

the British industry was also forced to content with

Shouldn’t that be “contend with”?

- Jimmy Maher

December 19, 2013 at 6:28 am

And I thought I might have made it through a whole post without one of these… thanks!

- Odkin

December 22, 2013 at 12:19 am

I think you mean “schadenfreude” and not “ennui”, when referring to the British press’ mood in the beginning.

- Jimmy Maher

December 22, 2013 at 7:35 am

No, I mean “ennui.” :)

- TerokNor

December 26, 2013 at 11:27 pm

What was Mosaic’s Moorcock game? A quick search didn’t turn up anything.

- Jimmy Maher

December 27, 2013 at 6:28 am

The Nomad of Time, based on on his Oswald Bastable series: http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=5291&d=18&h=0.

Elite (or, The Universe on 32 K Per Day)
December 26, 2013

Sometimes great works go unappreciated during their time. Other times their time knows exactly what they’re on about. The latter was the good fortune of Elite, Ian Bell and David Braben’s epic game of space combat, trading, and exploration. Arriving at a confused and confusing time in the British games industry, Elite caused a rush of excitement the likes of which had never been seen before even in an industry that seemed to live and die on hype, becoming a bestseller several times over despite being initially released on a platform, the BBC Micro, that was not generally considered much of a gaming machine. Bell and Braben became recognizable stars, their names tripping off the tongues of a generation of British gamers the way that those of Lennon and McCartney had their parents’. It was about as close as the industry would ever get to Trip Hawkins’s dream of game designers as the rock stars of the 1980s. As for the game they created… well, that’s gone down into history as just possibly the most remembered and respected single computer game of the 1980s. But we’re beginning with the ending, which isn’t our usual way around here. Let’s go back to the beginning and see how it all began.

Bell and Braben first met one another during the autumn of 1982, when both arrived at Cambridge University as first-year undergraduates. Bell was to read math, Braben physics. More importantly, both were avid hackers. Bell brought a BBC Micro to university with him, Braben an example of that machine’s predecessor, the Atom, which he had expanded and soldered on and generally hacked at enough to make Dr. Frankenstein proud. Bell had real professional programming experience, at least of a sort: he’d gotten his version of Reversi published by a tiny company called Program Power, and would soon see an original action game, Freefall, published by Acornsoft, software arm of the company that made the computers on his and Braben’s desks. Braben had just passion and aptitude. The two bonded quickly.

Not that they became precisely bosom buddies. As their later story would demonstrate to anyone’s satisfaction, they were very different personalities. If I may strain an analogy just one more time, Bell was the John Lennon of the pair, pessimistic, introverted, and perhaps just a little bit tortured, while Braben was the Paul McCartney, an optimistic charmer with one eye on the market to go with one eye on his art. If not for their passion for Acorn computers, they would have likely had little to say to one another. Both, however, had programming talent to burn, along with a less obvious but at least as important instinct for visionary game design.

But then in the era of Elite even more so than today technological innovation and design innovation were often inextricably linked, with the latter most often flowing from the former. Thus the design that would become Elite stemmed directly from a routine Braben wrote in June of 1983 which could draw four different static 3D spaceships using wire-frame graphics. To understand what made those spaceships so different, and so fraught with potential, we should look to the state of game graphics in general circa 1983.

Almost all action games of 1983 or earlier show their world from either directly overhead or sideways (like Defender in the picture to the left) or some odd hybrid of the two that doesn’t quite make sense in the real world (like Pac-Man in the picture to the right). They employ a third-person perspective; you see and control an onscreen avatar from a distance, rather than viewing the world through her eyes. She, her enemies, and perhaps some other elements like laser fire move over a relatively static background image. This approach makes life much easier for programmers in at least a couple of ways. Updating big chunks of screen is very expensive in terms of the computing power available to early PCs and stand-up arcade games. Therefore many of them implemented hardware sprites, little movable chunks of graphics that exist separately from the rest of the screen inside the computer, to be overlaid onto it by the video hardware at no cost to the CPU only on the physical monitor screen. A game like Defender or Pac-Man is an ideal fit for such technology; I trust it won’t be difficult to figure out which parts of the screens above are implemented as sprites and which as background graphics. (In the early days all of the work could be left to sprites: a few early games, such as Boot Hill, consist of only sprites which are sometimes projected over a painted background image.)

There’s also another, more subtle advantage to the traditional arcade-game perspective. If you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize that the worlds shown on the screens above don’t correspond to any recognizable version of our reality even postulating that it could contain invading aliens or munching heads being pursued through a maze of food pellets by ghosts. These worlds are strictly 2D; they lack any notion of depth. Pac-Man and his friends are living in a computerized version of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland; if we were to see this world through his perspective, it would be a very strange one indeed. Similarly, your spaceship in Defender can go up and down and left and right, but not in and out. This is very convenient for the programmer because the computer screen also happens to be flat, possessed of an X- and a Y-dimension but no Z-dimension. Thus the coordinates of any object in this flat world being simulated correspond nicely to its coordinates on the physical screen.

But what if you aren’t satisfied with a Flatland-esque world shown from a locked vertical or horizontal perspective? What if you want to immerse your player in your world good and proper, and to make it one that corresponds to our own of three dimensions while you’re at it? Well, now your job just got a whole lot more difficult. As it happened, however, that was exactly what Bell and Braben were soon trying to do. The crux of the problem, the crux of a huge body of 3D graphics theory as well as lots and lots of specialized hardware that is probably a part of the computer you’re using to read this and for which if you’re a hardcore gamer you may have paid hundreds of dollars, is disarmingly simple: how to translate the X, Y, and Z of a world that lives inside the computer to the X and Y of the computer screen. The starting point must be the rules of visual perspective, well understood by artists since at least the Renaissance. But that well-trodden path opens into a thicket of complications when applied to the computer. Lacking as it does an artist’s intuitive understanding of the real world, a computer has to be laboriously instructed on how not to draw objects that are behind other objects on top of them, how to figure out which surfaces of an object are visible and which are not, etc. Just to make the challenges even greater, sprites aren’t of any real use for 3D graphics: the entire screen is necessarily changing all the time when moving a first-person perspective through a 3D world.

Bell and Braben were hardly the first to enter into this territory. Indeed, the field of 3D graphics isn’t all that much older than the field of computer graphics itself. Academic researchers during the 1960s and especially the 1970s laid down much of the work that still grounds the field today. One minor contributor to this growing body of work was a graphics researcher and aviation enthusiast named Bruce Artwick, who finished a Master’s degree at the University of Illinois (home of PLATO) in 1976. For his thesis project, he combined his two interests. “A Versatile Computer-Generated Dynamic Flight Display” described a flight simulator featuring a first-person, out-the-cockpit view of a 3D world. In 1980, Artwick with his new company SubLogic brought to market the aptly titled Flight Simulator for the Apple II and TRS-80. Running in as little as 16 K of memory, it marked microcomputer gamers’ first encounter with the format that now dominates the industry: interactive, animated 3D graphics. The Flight Simulator line, whether sold under the imprint of SubLogic or Microsoft, went on to become a computing institution spanning some three decades.

Groundbreaking as they were, however, the early versions of Flight Simulator were also, as their name would imply, much more simulator than game. They provided no story, no goals, no sense of progression — just an empty world to fly through. Yes, they did include a mode called “British Ace 30 Aerial Battle,” which transformed your little Cessna into a World War I biplane and let you fly around trying to shoot other planes out of the sky, but, well, let’s just say that it was always clear when playing it that Artwick’s real priorities lay elsewhere. Mostly you were expected to make your own fun refining your piloting technique and, of course, marveling that this 3D world could exist at all on a 16 K 8-bit microcomputer.

A more traditionally gamelike application of 3D came to arcades that same year in the form of Atari’s Battlezone. In it you control a tank in battle against other tanks. You view the action from a first-person perspective, through a screen made to resemble the periscope of a real tank. Battlezone eventually made it to home computers and consoles as well, albeit not until 1983. While their awareness of Flight Simulator is questionable (it was an American product made for American platforms in a very bifurcated computing world), Bell and Braben were aware of and had played Battlezone in the arcades. It was the impetus for Braben’s rotating 3D spaceships and for the combat game Bell and Braben would soon be designing around them.

They were determined to bring 3D to a 2 MHz 8-bit computer with 32 K of memory, and to do it in the context of a real game with real things to do. At least they didn’t have to bemoan the uselessness of sprites to this new paradigm: having been created with educational and “practical” uses in mind rather than gaming, the BBC Micro didn’t have any anyway. Programming, like politics, being the art of the possible, compromises would be needed if they were to have a prayer. Braben had already made the wise choice to set his 3D demo in space. Space is full of, well, space. It’s almost entirely empty, thus dramatically reducing the amount of stuff their game would have to draw. One other obvious decision was to perform only the first part of the full two-part rendering process, drawing in the outlines of objects in their 3D world but not going back and filling in their surfaces, an even more complicated and expensive process. (As the screens above illustrate, Artwick and Atari had already made the same compromise in their own initial implementations of 3D.)

BBC Micro Elite. Note that the rendering is far from perfect, with lots of line breakage. Luckily, this isn’t so obvious when the ships are in motion.

Thus Braben made his first spaceships as simple as possible, with just enough lines and points to make of each a recognizable shape. This turned out to be wise for another reason: complex designs shown in wireframe tend to turn into a confusing mishmash of lines. To simplify rendering, all objects were also made convex, meaning that any given line will only pass in and out of the object once; as Braben himself put it in a talk at a recent Game Designers Conference, a block of cheddar cheese is convex but a block of Swiss is not. Later in the game’s development, when Bell and Braben has managed to considerably accelerate the original rendering code, more complex ships, like Bell’s Transporter, were added.

Another area of concern must be your control of your own spaceship, the one through whose cockpit you would be viewing this 3D universe. A spaceship, like an airplane, can change its orientation in six ways, being able to yaw, pitch, or roll in either direction. Yet a joystick can be moved in only four cardinal directions — perfect for a 2D world but problematic for their 3D world. Bell and Braben soon realized, however, that being in space saved them. With no ground, and thus no real notion of up and down with which to contend, turns could be accomplished by simply rolling to the desired orientation and pitching up or down; no need for a yaw control at all. While they took full advantage of the good parts of being in space, they also wisely decided not to try to make the game a remotely realistic simulation of spaceflight. Like Star Wars, their game would be one of dogfights in space, with ships inexplicably subject to a law of inertia that should have been left planetside. Anything else would just feel too disorienting, they judged. Most people would prefer to be Luke Skywalker rather than David Bowman anyway.

So, yes, this would be a game of space combat. That was always a given. But what should it be beyond that? How should that combat be structured, framed? With a workable 3D engine running at last after some months of concerted effort, it was time to ask these questions seriously. One alternative would be to make a traditional arcade-style game, complete with three lives, a score, and ever-escalating waves of enemy ships to gun down. To make, in other words, Battlezone with spaceships. Certainly what they already had was more than impressive enough to sell lots of copies.

Instead, Bell and Braben made their next visionary decision, to make their game something much more than just an arcade-style shooter. They would embed the shooting within a long-form experience that would give it a context, a purpose beyond high-score bragging rights. This was not, as effervescent popular histories of Elite‘s birth have often implied, completely unprecedented. Long-form experiences were not hard to find in computer games years before Bell and Braben — in adventures, in CRPGs, in strategy and war games. It was, however, rather more unusual to see this approach combined with action elements. Taken on their own, the action elements of Bell and Braben’s game were groundbreaking enough to go down as an important moment in gaming history. By refusing to stop there, they would ensure that their game would break ground in multiple directions, and go down as not just important but one of the most important ever.

The inspiration came from tabletop RPGs, a pastime both Bell and Braben indulged in from time to time, although, perhaps tellingly, usually not together. They liked the way an RPG campaign could span many, many sessions, could turn into an ongoing long-form narrative. And they liked the process of building up a character from a low-level nothing to a veritable god over weeks, months, or years. Of course, your “character” in their game was really your spaceship. Fair enough; your goal would be to upgrade that with ever better weapons and defenses that not coincidentally bore a strong resemblance to those in Bell’s favorite RPG: Traveller, the first popular tabletop RPG to replace swords and sorcery with rockets and rayguns. From here the rest of the design seemed to unspool almost of its own accord.

They needed a mechanism for upgrading the ship, something more interesting than just adding the next piece to the ship automatically every time a certain score threshold was reached. The natural choice was money; every option would have a cost, letting players prioritize and truly make their spaceships their own.

Okay, but how to earn money? Drawing again from Traveller (a game whose imprint would be all over the finished Elite not just in mechanics but in its overall feel), you could be a trader plying the spaceways, buying low in one system in the hopes of selling high in another — a whole new strategic dimension.

But then how would that involve combat? Well, the ships attacking you could be pirates. This would also go a long way to explain why they were so chaotic and kind of random in their behavior, an inevitable result of limited memory and horsepower to devote to their artificial intelligence. Pirates, after all, were chaotic and kind of random by their very nature.

But actually landing on all those trading planets obviously wasn’t going to be workable; avoiding those complications was the reason for setting the game in space in the first place. No problem; you could just dock at space stations in orbit around them. Bell and Braben came up with a new challenge to make this more interesting: in a bit inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, you would have to carefully guide your spaceship into the rotating station’s docking bay at the end of every voyage. Of course, over time this could get tedious as well as frustrating (a botched approach generally means instant death). No problem; for a mere 1000 credits, you could buy a docking computer to do it for you. Other non-combat-oriented ship upgrades were also added to the catalog, like a fuel scoop to gather fuel by skimming the surface of a sun instead of buying it at a station.

If those spaceships attacking you really were pirates, thought Bell and Braben, the authorities would probably be quite pleased with you for shooting them down. Why not put bounties on them, so you could make your living as a bounty hunter if you got bored with trading? Now the possibilities really started rolling. If you could shoot pirates for money, you could also attack peaceful traders — become a pirate yourself, in other words, if you felt you could outduel the police Vipers that would attack you from time to time once your reputation became known. They came up with an alternative use for the fuel scoop: use it to scoop up the cargo of ships you’d destroyed to sell on the stations. The fuel scoop also became key to yet another way of making money: buy a special mining laser, break up asteroids with it, and scoop up the alloys they contained to sell stationside. If only they’d had more than 32 K of memory, they could have gone on like this forever.

But 32 K was all they had, and that was a constant challenge to their growing ambitions. For this grand game of trading to work, there had to be a big, varied galaxy to explore. There should be planets with a variety of economies and governments, from safe, established democracies for the conservative, peaceful trader to visit to anarchies home to hordes of pirates for the brave or foolhardy looking to make a big score. They came up with a scheme to let them pack all of the vital information about a star system with a single inhabited planet — its location, its economy, its type of government, its technology level, its population, its dominant species, its GDP, its size, even its name and a bit of flavor text — into just six bytes. Even so, a modest galaxy of 100 star systems would still require 600 bytes that they just couldn’t seem to find. Now came their most storied stroke of inspiration.

In 1202 an Italian mathematician named Fibonacci described a simple construct that became known as the Fibonacci sequence. In its classic form, you begin with two numbers, either 1 and 1 or 0 and 1. To get the third number in the sequence, you add the first two together. You then add the second and third number together to get the fourth. Etc., etc. A common and very useful variation is to drop all but the least significant digit of each number that is generated. It’s also common to begin the sequence not with 1 and 1 or 0 and 1 but some other, arbitrary pair. So, a sequence that begins with 2 and 7 would look like this:

2 7 9 6 5 1 6 7 3 0 3 3 6 9 5 4 9 3 …

The sequence appears random, but is actually entirely predictable for any given starting pair. This variation, however, is only a starting point. You can apply any rules you care to specify to a sequence of numbers with entirely predictable results, as long as you are consistent about it. Bell and Braben realized that they could seed their galaxy with any sequence they wished of six hexadecimal numbers to represent the starting system. Then they could manipulate those numbers in a predetermined way to generate the next; manipulate those to generate the next; etc. They decided that 256 systems was a good size for their galaxy. They needed just those initial six bytes to “store” all 256 planets. In addition to the memory savings, this method of generating their galaxy also saved Bell and Braben many hours spent designing it from scratch. Indeed, growing new galaxies from different starting seeds soon became a game of its own for them. They went through many iterations before finding the one that made it into the final game. Some they had to throw out right away for obvious reasons, such as the one with a system called “Arse” and the ones that had unreachable systems, outside of the player’s ship’s seven-light-year range from any other stars. Others just didn’t feel right.

After a few months of steady work, the basics of what would become Elite were all in place in their heads if not entirely in their code. They decided it was time to see if anyone would be interested in publishing it. Braben believed they should try to find the biggest publisher possible, one with the reach to properly support and promote this game like no other. He accordingly secured them an appointment at the London offices of Thorn EMI, the recently instantiated software division of one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. Very much a sign of this heady period in British computing, Thorn EMI had been founded in the expectation that computer games were destined to be the next big thing in media. Like their colleagues over in EMI’s music division looking for the next big hit single, they weren’t looking for deathless art or niche audiences; they were looking for big, mainstream hits. They had developed a checklist of sorts, a list of what they thought would appeal to the general public that wasn’t all that far removed from Trip Hawkins’s guidelines for American “consumer software.” Their games should be simple, intuitive, colorful, and not too demanding. Bell and Braben’s complicated game — while it was a technical wonder; anyone could see that — was none of these things. They said it was nothing for them, although Bell and Braben were welcome to come back any time to show a reworked — i.e., simplified — version. (In the end, Thorn EMI would find that technology wasn’t ready for casual consumer software, and wouldn’t be for years. The hardcore was all they had to sell to. Unwilling or unable to adopt to this reality as Hawkins’s Electronic Arts eventually did, they faded away quietly without ever managing to find the breakout mainstream hit they sought.)

Bell suggested they try Acornsoft, who had already published his game Freefall. In many ways Acornsoft should have been the logical choice from the start. Bell already had connections there, they knew the BBC Micro better than anyone, and they were located right there in Cambridge practically next door to the university proper, an institution with which they had deep and abiding links. (Regular readers will remember that it was Acornsoft and Cambridge oceanography professor Peter Killworth who provided a commercial outlet for the adventure games created on Cambridge’s Phoenix mainframe.) Yet Braben was reluctant. Always the more commercially minded of the pair, he knew that Acornsoft was hardly at the forefront of the British games industry. Their modest lineup of adventure games, educational software, and utilities had some very worthy members, yet the operation as a whole, like most software adjuncts to hardware companies, always felt like a bit of an afterthought. With their limited advertising and doughtily minimalist packaging, no Acornsoft title had ever sold more than a few tens of thousands of copies, and most never cracked 5000 — a far cry from the numbers Braben fondly imagined for their game. Acornsoft’s association with Acorn also concerned him in that it would necessarily limit the game to only Acorn computers. He and Bell weren’t hugely fond of the Commodore 64 or especially the Sinclair Spectrum, but he knew that their game would have to be ported to those more prominent gaming platforms at some point if it was to realize its commercial potential. In short, Acornsoft was… provincial.

Still, he agreed to accompany Bell to Acornsoft’s offices. It was, to say the least, a place very different from Thorn EMI’s posh digs in central London. From Francis Spufford’s Backroom Boys:

[Acornsoft] operated from one room of a warren of offices above the marketplace. You got there by sidling around the dustbins next to the Eastern Electricity showroom. Past the window display of cookers and fridge-freezers, up a steep little staircase, and into a cramped maze that would remind one employee, looking back, of a level from Doom. “Very back bedroom,” remembered David Braben, approvingly. In Acornsoft’s office they found a rat’s nest of desks and cables, and four people not much older than themselves.

Two of those four people, managing directory David Johnson-Davies and chief editor Chris Jordan, would become the unsung heroes of Elite. Both got the game immediately, grasping not just its technical wizardry but also Bell and Braben’s larger vision for the whole experience. They both realized that this thing had the potential to be huge, bigger by an order of magnitude than anything Acornsoft had done before. Of course, it also represented a risk. Bell and Braben looked and acted like the couple of headstrong kids they still were. What if they flaked out? Nor was Acornsoft accustomed to issuing contracts and advances on unfinished software. Acornsoft had been conceived as an outlet for moonlighters and hobbyists, who sold them their homegrown software only once it was finished. Their normal policy was to not even look at programs that weren’t done; Bell and Braben were there at all only as a favor to Bell, a fellow with whom Acornsoft had a history and whom they liked personally. Still, Acorn as a whole was doing well; there was enough money to try something new, and this was too big a chance to pass up. They offered Bell and Braben a contract and an advance.

Now Braben made a move that would be as critical to Elite‘s success as anything in the game itself. Still concerned about Acornsoft’s provinciality, he negotiated a non-exclusive license which would allow them to develop and market versions for other machines after the versions for the Acorn machines were finished. Not quite sure what he was on about, Johnson-Davies agreed. With his share of the advance, Braben bought his own BBC Micro, retiring his hacked and abused old Atom at last.

As Bell and Braben worked to finish their game, Acornsoft provided essential playtesting while Johnson-Davies and Jordan served as an invaluable source of guidance and a certain adult wisdom. Sometimes the latter was needed to keep their ambitions in check, as when Bell and Braben burst into the Acornsoft office one day having had an epiphany. They had realized that, if all they needed to grow a galaxy was a starting seed of six numbers, they could have an infinite number of them — well, okay, about 282 trillion of them — in the game. They could let the player buy a “galactic hyperdrive” to jump between them, whereupon they would just generate a new random seed and let it rip. Johnson-Davis now showed a sharp design instinct of his own in walking them back a bit. Having more galaxies sounds like a great idea, he said, but having so many will actually spoil the illusion of a real persistent universe you’ve worked so hard to create. It will all just start to feel like what it really is: random. Nor will many of these new galaxies be pleasing places to explore, since you won’t be able to look at them and reject the ones with unreachable systems and the like. Bell and Braben agreed to settle for just eight galaxies, with a total of 2048 star systems to visit. That should be more than enough for anyone. Perhaps too many for Bell and Braben and Acornsoft’s testers: a planet Arse sneaked into one of these later galaxies and made it into the released version of the game.

Even as they gently squashed some of Bell and Braben’s more outlandish ideas, Johnson-Davies and Jordon still felt like something was missing. For all its technical and formal innovations, for all its scope of possibility, the game lacked any sort of real goal. Now, to some extent that was just the nature of the beast Bell and Braben had created. They would have dearly loved to have a real story to give context, had even planned on it at some stage (Braben says that “trading was originally going to be a very minor aspect”), but they now had to accept the fact that they weren’t going to be able to wedge some elaborate plot along with everything else into 32 K. Still, suggested Johnson-Davies and Jordan, maybe they could add something simple, something to mark progress and give bragging rights. Thus was born the system of ranks, based on the number of kills you’ve achieved. You start Harmless. After notching eight kills you become Mostly Harmless (a nod to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). Each rank thereafter is exponentially more difficult to achieve, until, after some 6400 kills, you become Elite. There was the goal, one that should keep players playing a good long time.

It was also in a backhanded sort of way a political statement. Cambridge University was awash with indignation over the policies of Margaret Thatcher; a major coal-miner’s strike which would become the battlefield for Thatcher’s final vanquishing of organized labor had the university’s liberal-arts wings all in a tumult from March of 1984. Bell and Braben bucked the university conventional wisdom to side with Thatcher. The player’s goal of becoming Elite was meant as a subtle nod toward the libertarian ideal of the self-made man, and a little poke in the eye of their leftist acquaintances. It also emphasized their view of their game as fundamentally about space combat, not trading. It gave players a compelling motivation to engage with what Bell and Braben still regarded as the most compelling part of the experience. You can make a lot of money as a peaceful, law-abiding trader who prudently runs from pirates when they show up, but you’ll never make Elite that way.

In finding an overarching goal they also found the title they’d been searching for for some time. They first planned to call the game The Elite, a name to celebrate the group that much of Cambridge was railing against. But the filenames used for the game just said “Elite.” In time, they dropped the article from the official title as well. Elite it became — shorter, punchier, and with fewer political ramifications for Acornsoft to deal with.

Similarly subtle swipes at Cambridge’s liberal-arts students, whom in the long tradition of hard-science students Bell and Braben regarded as mushy-minded prima donnas, made it into the text tables that Bell developed to describe the planets in the game. After the Fibonacci sequence had done its work, some were populated by “edible poets”; others by “carnivorous arts graduates.” Ah, youth.

Bell and Braben had disk drives on their BBC Micros. After compressing their code as much as they possibly could, they finally began to make use of their capabilities within the game. They split the game into two parts: the trading program, loaded in when you docked at a station, and the program handling travel and combat, loaded as soon as you left one. This concerned Acornsoft greatly because most BBC Micro owners still had only cassette drives, which didn’t allow such loading on the fly. What good was the game of the decade if most people couldn’t play it? So they convinced the two to fork the game three ways. One version, the definitive one with all the goodies, would indeed require a BBC Micro with a disk drive. Another, for a tape-equipped BBC Micro, would be similar but would offer a smaller variety of ships to encounter along with simplified trading and a bit less detail to planets you visited and to the overall experience. Finally, Acorn convinced them to create a third version, stripped down even more, for the BBC Micro’s little brother, the Acorn Electron, an attempt to compete with the cheap Sinclair Spectrum that Acorn had introduced the previous year.

Bell and Braben were naturally most excited about the disk-based version, particularly when they realized they had enough space still to add a little something extra. They made a couple of hand-crafted “missions” that pop up when you’ve been playing for a while: one to hunt down and destroy a stolen prototype of a new warship, another to courier some secret documents from one end of the galaxy to the other. These gave at least a taste of the more prominent story elements they wished they had space for.

While Bell and Braben finished up the coding, Johnson-Davies and Jordan worked to give the game the packaging and the launch it deserved. Acornsoft figured they needed to do all they could to justify the price they’d chosen to charge for the thing: from £12.95 to £17.65 depending on version, well over twice the typical going rate for a hot new game. They prepared a box of goodies the likes of which had never been seen before, not just from bland little Acornsoft but from anyone in the British games industry. Only some of the more lavish American packages, like those for the Ultimas and various Infocom games, could even begin to compare, and even by their standards Elite was grandiose. To a 63-page instruction manual Johnson-Davies and Jordan added The Dark Wheel, a separate scene-setting novella they commissioned from Robert Holdstock, an author just about to come into his own with the publication of his novel Mythago Wood. And they still weren’t done. They also added a ship-identification poster, a quick-reference guide, a keyboard overlay, some stickers, and a postcard to send to Acornsoft to tell them about it and get your certificate of achievement when you achieved the rank of Competent (an onscreen code revealed at that point would serve as proof).

Acornsoft stepped in and froze further development during the summer of 1984. The packaging was just about ready, and work on the game, while it would never be truly finished in the eyes of Bell and Braben, struck Acornsoft as about to reach a point of diminishing returns. And everyone was a little bit paranoid that something similar to Elite, even if it was nowhere near as good, might come out and steal their thunder. Bell and Braben grudgingly agreed that the time for release had come. But then, just as Acornsoft was about to send the master disk for duplication, Braben called Chris Jordan in a frenzy. They’d solved a niggling problem that had been bothering everyone for months, that of a “radar” scope to show where enemy ships are in relation to your own. The problem was, again, that of trying to map three dimensions onto two. Bell and Braben had done the best they could by providing two complimentary scanners that had to be read in conjunction to get the full picture, but it always felt, in contrast to just about everything else about the game, kind of clunky and un-ideal. Now they had come up with a way to pack everything onto a single screen. It was beautiful. Showing a commitment few publishers then or now could match, Acornsoft agreed to take the new version of the game, which brought with it the painful task of having the manual edited and re-typeset to describe the new radar scope. Now, two years after Braben had first started playing with 3D spaceship models, they were done.

Buzz about Acornsoft’s secret “Project Bell” had been high for months. Acornsoft rented for launch day Thorpe Park, a small amusement park (nowadays a much bigger one) near London. In a darkened room, with suitably portentous music playing, the world got its first glimpse of Elite — and of its two creators, who for the next few years would be the face of the young British games industry. In their picture from the launch party they look much as the British public would come to know them: Braben in the foreground, glib and personable; Bell a bit more uncertain and stereotypically nerdy and, much to Acornsoft’s occasional chagrin, more liable to go off-script.

Elite itself, needless to say, became a hit. Acorn and Acornsoft were making a big play for the home-computer market that Christmas, trying to challenge Sinclair and Commodore on their own turf, and Elite became a big part of that push. Advertising was shockingly frequent and grandiose for anyone who remembered the Acornsoft of old. The £50,000 campaign even included some television spots. Acornsoft Elite eventually sold almost 150,000 units between the BBC Micro and the Electron, a huge number for an absurdly expensive game on platforms not particularly popular with gamers. And most of those customers seemed to play Elite with an enthusiasm bordering on the obsessive. The first person known to become Elite was one Hal Bertram, on November 3, 1984, about five weeks after the game’s release. By the end of the year he had many companions in glory, while Acornsoft was positively flooded with postcards sent in by those attaining at least Competent status; they could barely make the badges they sent back to these folks fast enough. Many were doubtless aided by a bug in the ship-equipping code that had slipped through testing and was soon making the rounds amongst players: you could make infinite cash by trying to buy a laser you already had, whereupon the game would reward you with a generous cash credit in addition to the expected refusal. Undeterred, Acornsoft fixed the bug and sponsored a series of live monthly contests culminating in a grand showdown at the Acorn Users Show.

Still, it was clear to Braben that the really big numbers would come only when Elite came to the Speccy and the Commodore 64. The game was the talk of the industry, with owners of those more popular platforms, who had not even been aware of Acornsoft’s existence a few months ago, clambering to play it after it — along with its creators — began appearing in places like Channel 4 News.

And now we see the significance of that non-exclusive license Braben had negotiated. He heard through the grapevine about a former literary agent named Jacquie Lyons, who had recently become the first agent representing game developers in Britain. Lyons:

A friend rang up and told me about Ian Bell and David Braben. Elite had just happened and Ian and David had retained all rights other than for the BBC, which was extremely bright of them. They wanted me to represent the rest of those rights.

With virtually every publisher in Britain dying to publish Elite for the other, more popular gaming platforms, Lyons decided that there was one foolproof way to find out who really wanted it, and to make sure her new clients got served as well as possible in the process — i.e., paid as well as possible. At the beginning of December she held an auction, which, in her own words, “caused a lot of trouble in the industry — I was told this was an appalling way to go about it.” Lyons responded that such an approach was common in the publishing world from which she hailed. And what better way to ensure that your publisher would put everything they had into a game than to make them pay as dearly as possible for it? The deep pockets of British Telecom won the day amidst a flurry of media interest. Having just entered the software market with a new imprint called Firebird and eager to make a big splash with the highest-profile game in the industry, BT paid an undisclosed but “substantial” sum — Bell and Braben each got six figures up-front — for publishing rights to Elite on all platforms other than the Acorn machines. Suddenly Bell and Braben, who had yet to receive their first royalty checks from Acornsoft, were very wealthy young men.

For their part, Acornsoft allowed Bell and Braben to move on without fighting at all to retain Elite as a desperately needed platform exclusive. Indeed, they handled Bell and Braben’s departure with almost incomprehensibly good grace, even working out agreements to allow Firebird to reuse most of the wonderful supplemental materials they had stuffed into that bursting box. Perhaps they just had bigger fish to fry. Elite, you see, was the sole bright spot in a disastrous Christmas for Acorn as a whole, one rife with miscalculations which effectively wrecked the company. A desperate Acorn was purchased by the Italian firm Olivetti in 1985, and became thereafter a very different sort of place. The Acornsoft label was retired barely a year after the Elite launch, with Johnson-Davies and Jordan and all of their colleagues going on to other things.

But the game they had introduced to the world was just getting started. Bell and Braben themselves ported it to the Commodore 64. That version is not quite as fast and smooth as the BBC version — the 64’s 6502 is clocked at just 1 MHz instead of the BBC’s 2 MHz — but took advantage of the 64’s better graphics and its positively cavernous 64 K of memory to add in compensation more color and a welcome touch of whimsy to undercut its otherwise uncompromisingly dog-eat-dog world. There’s a third special mission, this one a bit of silliness drawn from the beloved Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles.” When the tribble — excuse me, “trumble” — population aboard your ship has mushroomed to the point that the little buggers start crawling around the screen in front of you, it’s laugh-out-loud funny, even if it is just about impossible to figure out how to get rid of them absent spoilers. But best of all is the new music which plays during the automated docking sequence: Johann Strauss’s “The Blue Danube,” a tribute to everyone’s favorite part of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It comes as a complete surprise (if you haven’t read an article like this, that is…) when you first flip the switch to try out your hard-won docking computer and are greeted with this unexpected note of easy beauty. Soon your travels assume an addictive rhythm: the calculus of buying and selling, followed by the tension and occasional excitement of the voyage itself, followed by the grace notes of “The Blue Danube,” when you know you’ve survived another voyage and can sit back and enjoy a few minutes of peace before starting the process over again. Life in a microcosm?

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/docking.mp4

The Commodore 64 Elite established a tradition of each port being largely hand-coded all over again; this gives each its own feel. Scottish developers Torus took on the challenging task of converting Elite to the Spectrum, which is built around a Z80 rather than the 6502 microprocessor at the heart of the BBC Micro and Commodore 64. Speccy Elite arrived several months after the Commodore 64 version and about a year after the original, touching off another huge wave of sales. Amidst the usual slate of added and lost features, it added yet more special missions, for a total of five. Missions became the most obvious way for the many individual developers who worked on Elite over the years to put their own creative stamp on the game, a trend actively encouraged by Bell and Braben; “just have your own fun” with the missions was always their response to requested advice. About the same time as the Spectrum Elite arrived in Britain, Firebird brought the Commodore 64 Elite to the United States, where it — stop me if you’ve heard this before — became a huge hit, one of relatively few games of the 1980s to make a major impact in both the European and North American markets. It served to establish Firebird as an important publisher in the U.S., the first such to be based in Britain and one which would give many other British games deserved exposure in that bigger market.

The ball was now well and truly rolling. For almost a decade the existing versions just kept on selling and the ports just kept on coming: to big players of the era like the IBM PC, the Apple II, the Atari ST, the Commodore Amiga, and the Amstrad CPC as well as occasional also-rans like the Tatung Einstein. Even the Nintendo Entertainment System got a surprisingly faithful and enjoyable version in 1991. In the end Elite made it to 17 separate platforms. Ian Bell has guessed in one place that it sold about 600,000 copies. David Braben claims that Elite surpassed 1 million copies worldwide, but this claim is much more dubious. Regardless of the final tally, Elite was certainly amongst the most commercially successful born-on-a-PC games of the 1980s.

Bell and Braben’s mainstream fame proved to be almost as enduring — in September of 1991 The One magazine could still write about the latter as “the most famous developer in Britain” — but their partnership less so. The two tried for some time to make Elite II for the BBC Micro and the Commodore 64, but never got close to completing it for reasons which vary with the teller. In Bell’s version, the game was just too ambitious for the hardware; in Braben’s, Bell was more interested in enjoying his new wealth and practicing his new hobby of martial arts than buckling down to work. Braben alone finally made and released Frontier: Elite II, a hugely polarizing sequel, in 1993. The erstwhile partners then spent the rest of the decade in ugly squabbles and petty lawsuits. To the best of my knowledge, the two still refuse to speak to one another. While both agreed to give talks upon the game’s 25th anniversary at the GameCity Festival in Nottingham in 2009, they agreed to do so only if they didn’t have to share a stage together. Like most people who have studied their history, I have my opinions about who is the more difficult partner and who is more at fault. In truth, though, neither one comes out looking very good.

Bell retired quietly to the country many years ago to tinker with mathematics, martial arts, and mysticism. He hasn’t released a game since the original Elite. Braben, in contrast, has built himself a prominent career as a designer and executive in the modern games industry. If he’s no longer quite the most famous developer in Britain, he’s certainly not all that far out of the running. He recently Kickstarted a new iteration of the Elite concept called Elite: Dangerous to the tune of more than £1.5 million, proof of the game’s enduring place in even the contemporary gaming zeitgeist and its enduring appeal as well as the cachet Braben’s name still carries.

And what is the source of that appeal? As with any great game for which it all just seemed to come together somehow, that can be a difficult question to fully answer. I could talk about how it was one of the first games to show the immersive potential of even the most primitive of 3D graphics, prefiguring the direction the entire industry would go a decade later. I could talk about how it was one of the first to graft a larger context to its core action-based gameplay, giving players a reason to care beyond wanting to run up a high score. I could talk about how perfectly realized its universe is, how it absolutely nails atmosphere; its cold beauty is just that, beautiful. Those minimalist wireframe spaceships are key here. I never quite felt that later iterations for more advanced platforms, which fill in the spaceships with color, felt quite like Elite. But then I suspect that for most folks the definitive version of Elite is the one they played first…

Maybe the most impressive thing that Elite evokes is a sense of possibility. You really do feel when you start playing, even today, even when you’ve read articles like this one and know most of its tricks, that you can go anywhere (as, given time and patience, you can), and that anything might happen there (okay, not so much). Yes, over time, especially over these jaded times, that sense fades, this Fibonacci universe starts to lose some of its verisimilitude, and it all starts to feel kind of samey. I must confess that when I played again recently for this article that point came for me long before I got anywhere close to becoming Elite. I think for the game to last longer for me I’d need some more of those story elements Bell and Braben originally hoped to include. But just the fact that that feeling is there, even for a little while, is amazing, the sort of amazing that makes Elite one of the most important computer games ever released. In addition to being a great play in its own right, it represents a fundamental building block of the virtual worlds of today and those still to come.

(In addition to being such a huge hit and such a seminal game historically, Elite comes equipped with a very compelling origin story. Together these factors have caused it to be written and talked about to a degree to which almost no other game of its era compares. Thus my challenge with this article was not so much finding information as sorting through it all and trying to decide which of various versions of events were most likely to be correct.

The lengthiest and most detailed print chronicle of all is that in the book Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford. More cursory histories have been published by Edge Online and IGN. Vintage sources used for this article include: Your Computer of December 1984; The One of January 1991 and September 1991; Micro Adventurer of January 1985; Home Computing Weekly of December 11, 1984; Personal Computing Weekly of August 23, 1984. David Braben’s talk at the 2011 Game Developers Conference was a goldmine, while Ian Bell’s home page has a lot of information in its archives. Other useful fan pages included FrontierAstro and The Acorn Elite Pages. And when you get bored with serious research, check out the Elite episode of Brits Who Made the Modern World, which in its first ten seconds credits the game with starting the British games industry and goes on to indulge in several other howlers before it’s a minute old. It makes a great example of the hilariously hyperbolic press coverage that always clings to Elite.

Finally, rather than provide a playable version of Elite here I’ll just point you once again to Ian Bell’s pages, where you’ll find versions for many, many platforms.

Updated June 14, 2014 and July 14, 2014: I heard from Chris Jordan, who set me straight on more than a few facts and figures found in the original version of this article. Edits made.)

Comments
32 Responses

- iPadCary

December 26, 2013 at 3:02 pm

Wowie, Jimmy: you really outdid yourself with this one!
As we slowly esconse into The Golden Age of the 16-bit era,
I cannot wait to see what you have in store for “Alice: Through The Looking Glass”,
Incentive Software, David Smith and “The Colony”,
the Macintosh, the AMIGA, etc., etc.

As I sit here after Christmas with a full belly,
listening to the “Opie and Anthony Christmas Spectacular”, I like being sated intellectually by your blog.

And I hope you and yours have a lovely holiday season.
I can only imagine how lovely a Christmas must be in Denmark.
Did you guys hold hands a move around the tree singing?
I saw that in a documentary once.

- Jimmy Maher

December 26, 2013 at 3:16 pm

Children do indeed traditionally hold hands and dance around the Christmas tree here singing. But we lack both children and the requisite knowledge of the song. :)

But yes, Christmas in general is lovely here. Happy holidays to you as well, and of course to all readers.

- Andy

December 26, 2013 at 3:50 pm

Edwin Abbott, not Edward Albee. (Though the idea of Edward Albee’s version of Flatland is pretty intriguing.)

- Jimmy Maher

December 27, 2013 at 6:19 am

Who’s Afraid of Flatland? Weird dude I am sometimes…

Thanks!

- Steve McCrea

December 27, 2013 at 8:34 pm

Another fascinating article. Thanks!
A few corrections:
“you’re job” (your)
“fuel scope” (scoop)
“Acornsoft has been conceived” (had)
“when only Elite came” (only when Elite came)
(I don’t mind if you just silently correct these and edit this out of the post :))

Also, a Fibonacci sequence doesn’t drop everything but the last digit. That’s just a way to get random digits out of it.

Steve

- Jimmy Maher

December 28, 2013 at 6:51 am

Edits made. Thanks!

- Felix

December 26, 2013 at 4:53 pm

It may be worth mentioning that the space trading half of the game wasn’t exactly new. I’m pretty sure a simplistic game based on the same mechanic was available for the very earliest 8-bit micros. Ian Bell’s innovation was the pseudo-random world generation technique, which was successfully used in countless games since. A look at the C source code available on his site is enlightening.

That said, I loved both sides of the game, they’re both exquisitely balanced and provide a nice contrast. The only part I hated was manual docking; luckily, the Speccy edition has a cheat whereas you can skip flying through space completely until you’ve earned enough to buy a docking computer. A far cry from Frontier Elite 2, where finding any spaceport at all on Mars is impossible, and landing on Earth at all is a tedious exercise with nearly 100% failure rate…

It’s also worth mentioning that the game’s formula has shown its endurance not just through the various ports and sequels, but also by the fact that it has spawned an entire genre. Vega Strike, the X series and EVE Online are just the few famous imitators I can remember offhand.

Oh, and I never made it past Dangerous… even that required more playtime that I care to admit.

- Jimmy Maher

December 27, 2013 at 6:21 am

Yes, there are quite a few precedents for the trading aspect. Perhaps most obviously Taipan, a 1982 game for the Apple II.

I didn’t get into these because a) 8600 words was probably enough and b) I’m not sure to what extent Bell and Braben were actually aware of them.

- Wade

December 27, 2013 at 6:01 am

Thanks for something good to read over Xmas.
I encountered Elite via a copy of the apple Ii port in the mid 80s I got from a school friend. Unheralded to me in any way, this was one of only a handful of copied games (amongst hundreds over a decade) I could not work out. I loved watching the dodecahedron swirl towards me, but in spite of my aim seing to be good, I don’t recall ever surviving docking. Perhaps I had to press another key? At the moment of impact, the apple made one of its less impressive ‘Brrrztr’ noises, then the game cut back immediately to the title page, which I took to mean I was dead or had failed.
I generally prided myself on sussing out the mechanics and keys for any game I copied in those days when doing so was often quite challenging, but yeah, I failed on Elite and missed out on it.
-Wade

- Felix

December 27, 2013 at 9:58 am

You also had to rotate so as to align yourself with the broad side of the station entrance, in addition to following the station’s rotation axis as closely as possible. The Speccy edition was fairly lenient in this regard; other editions may have been more demanding. (It doesn’t really count, but Oolite, a modern remake, is very demanding for example, to the degree that I could only play with a hack to give me a starting docking computer.)

- Jimmy Maher

December 27, 2013 at 10:14 am

I’ve found it’s easier if you go in fast, at full speed or almost full speed, rather than try to creep in and methodically line everything up. Don’t know if the speed confuses the collision detection or what, but I can manage about a 50% success rate that way (thank God for modern emulators and save states). Dorte, unaccountably, can do it nearly every time. We still bought a docking computer as our first purchase after the larger cargo bay because getting your ship in position for the docking run gets tedious quickly. (Talking about the original here, not the remake.)

- Kroc Camen

December 27, 2013 at 10:52 pm

The advice I always followed for docking was to fly at the planet and get as near as possible (watching the ALT meter), then turn around to face the station. This assures that you are not askew and only need to account for rotation, which I handle in the fashion you described — accelerate and spin. Doing this has always given me an 80%+ success rate, even in OOlite.

- Ian Holmes

December 27, 2013 at 8:27 pm

Thanks for this excellent, detailed piece. I used to hang around with the Cambridge/Acornsoft programmer scene in the mid to late 80’s, I’ve also had sporadic contact with both Braben & Bell over the years and I chuckled at your observation that most people who meet them both form their own opinions about who was more to blame for the rift. Danny O’Brien’s descriptions of them in NTK.net still raises a smile as well: “BELL (Anarchist, some trade in medicinal plants) and BRABEN (Feudal Capitalist, major export: buggy releases of Elite sequels)”

I wondered if you could be tempted to write a similar history of Exile, the other “great unknown” BBC micro game which Braben described as “The best game I’ve ever played on any computer, including Elite” and to which Edge magazine awarded a retroactive 10/10 (the only other games meriting that distinction were Elite and Super Mario Bros). I knew Peter Irvin and Jeremy Smith pretty well, as we promoted our game “Pipeline” at the same time as “Exile”. They were also clients of Jacquie Lyons (it puzzles me that more indie devs don’t use agents these days – it seems not to be standard). I’m still in touch with Peter; Jeremy (who also wrote Thrust) tragically died shortly after Exile was released. It is a groundbreaking game in many ways (deep plot, massive procedural cave system, Newtonian physics, sampled sound, AI, ecosystem, etc etc) and has inspired a number of indie projects I know about, but is generally much less well-known than Elite, especially outside the UK. Since your piece is one of the best I’ve ever read on Elite, I thought you might be persuadable… it’s a piece of history that deserves to be commemorated.

Anyway, thanks again for the Elite piece – very cool stuff.

- Ian Holmes

December 27, 2013 at 8:35 pm

I knew Peter Irvin and Jeremy Smith pretty well

actually that’s a shameless exaggeration. I met them a few times and they were very nice

- Jimmy Maher

December 28, 2013 at 6:54 am

I’m very aware of Exile, and do plan to write about it as perhaps the most remarkable of all the great open-world British action-adventures (a genre that became something of a specialty of the Brits; virtually no one in the U.S. was working this ground). That’s the good news. Bad news is, I’m working through this history in roughly chronological order, and I’ve only made it to 1984. So, it may be two or even three years before I get there. ;)

- David Boddie

January 8, 2014 at 11:54 am

This well-timed essay just appeared on my radar:

http://gamestudies.org/1302/articles/agazzard

- Scott M. Bruner

January 8, 2014 at 7:47 pm

Fantastic piece.

I felt the same way I did when I first started playing Elite on my Apple //c (I even remember the map) that I do when I find the rare times to play open-world games like a Skyrim do these days. The feeling of possibility was so welcome.

Until, of course, the docking. It was such a colossal PITA. So, like everyone I worked as hard as I could to get a docking computer. Then, while I was coming into a new station, I set the computer on, and the computer then lined me up to dock, with the correct rotation (this is how I remember it) and smashed me into the opposite side of the station where the entry port was.

That was when I quit Elite. I had forgotten how angry I was at the docking computer that day, and somewhere back in my mind am evidently still upset about it.

- Jimmy Maher

January 8, 2014 at 7:56 pm

Ouch. The docking computer on the 64 version (the one I’ve played the most) sometimes gets kind of discombobulated and spends forever twisting about it in place before it finally docks you, but I’ve never had it actually wreck me.

- David Boddie

January 9, 2014 at 12:15 pm

If I remember correctly, one of the unexpected advantages of the cut-down Electron version was that activating the docking computer instantaneously took you to the space station, if it was in range.

Another piece of folklore is that Braben and Bell were said to have signed the inside of the Electron they used when porting the game to that machine. I think that was mentioned in a magazine article, but I’d be hard pressed to find it now.

- M

January 9, 2014 at 11:13 pm

Elite: Dangerous just sounds like the space stage of Spore, but without the terraforming or the unique aliens. (aka my favourite parts)

- Olivier Guinart

January 14, 2014 at 6:28 pm

I’m awestruck! What a read, thank you!

About “Bell and Braben realized that they could seed their galaxy with any sequence they wished of six hexadecimal numbers to represent the starting system. Then they could manipulate those numbers in a predetermined way to generate the next; manipulate those to generate the next; etc. They decided that 256 systems was a good size for their galaxy. They needed just those initial six bytes to “store” all 256 planets.”, do we have specifics about this design? E.g., how many parameters did they need to define a galaxy? Why 6 hex numbers, and not only 2? Is it because the numbers repeat after a while, generating identical galaxies? Do we know the values of these 6 numbers? If not, I have the Apple II original game, but I’d avoid “reinventing the wheel” if this research has already been done…

- Jimmy Maher

January 15, 2014 at 6:55 am

Thanks!

Remember that everything about a system is encoded into those six bytes (sometimes with the aid of look-up tables stores elsewhere): type of government, population, flavor text, size, trade prices (to which a random adjustment is applied each time the system is visited), location, etc., etc. There are six bytes rather than two because, well, even with very smart compression six bytes were needed.

I don’t know a whole lot more about the internal workings of Elite, but I know there are people who do. Ian Bell posted the original BBC assembler source on his website many years ago, and this was used as the basis for at least two remakes: Elite: The New Kind and Oolite. (The former is unfortunately no longer available due to a legal action brought by Braben.) I’d check with their authors or in the code for Oolite if you’re not up for diving through the (very gnarly) BBC source.

- Olivier Guinart

January 16, 2014 at 6:15 pm

Thanks for the pointers Jimmy, interesting stories there too (e.g. the feud between Braben and Bell).

Following your advice and looking at the OOlite sources yesterday evening, the following came out (AFAICT).
– The seed: {0x4a, 0x5a, 0x48, 0x02, 0x53, 0xb7}
– It might be Fibonacci in the end, but the OOlite code shows lots of functions to manipulate seeds, e.g. functions that would rotate left once, OR’ed with 7 right rotations, all this being AND’ed with 255
– All these functions generating data for galaxy/planet, such as government, economy, techlevel, population, productivity (productivity = ((economy ^ 7) + 3) * (government + 4) * population * 8), radius, etc…

- David Boddie

January 17, 2014 at 4:16 pm

I don’t think Oolite is based on either the original Elite sources or a disassembly of the original published code, but I’m willing to be corrected by someone who knows better.

Another interesting remix of the original game is Elite-A, which adds/subtracts some features to balance out the gameplay.

- Jimmy Maher

January 18, 2014 at 8:40 am

Ah, okay. I’m sure you’re probably right then. I was just assuming again. I don’t know if Oolite has the same starting galaxy as Elite. If it does, you could always search through a disk image of the original for that hex sequence.

Ian Bell does have a C reimplementation of the original Elite trading engine on his site. I would assume (danger!) that this would have the starting seed and the correct Fibonacci algorithm.

- David Boddie

January 19, 2014 at 6:25 pm

As Olivier mentions, the starting seed can be found in Oolite. It’s also present in the ELITEB.TXT file from the BBC Cassette Elite sources archive (from http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/bbc/index.htm). It would be interesting to modify the seed to see what other galaxies are out there…

- Mark Ricard

January 16, 2014 at 10:54 pm

Wow.

You have a impressive depth of knowledge. The ways these guys were able to condense code was clever.
Here is a question. Was the sequence just a mnemonic device was it actually part of the code? What I’m asking is did the computer somehow “know” the relationship between the numbers itself?

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2014 at 6:28 am

Not entirely sure I understand the question. The program did “know” the relationship between the numbers in the sense that it applied the algorithm to each number to “generate” each new world the player visits. That was the whole point — to pack a galaxy into 6 bytes rather than 1536.

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- Alite

August 7, 2015 at 11:30 am

A fan port of Elite for Android can be found here:
http://alite.mobi

- Pingback: Quora

- Pingback: Représentation du cosmos dans le jeu-vidéo : réalisme ou fantaisie ? | Dans la Lune

Mike Singleton and The Lords of Midnight
January 7, 2014

If Ian Bell and David Braben, brashly young and brashly nerdy in that traditional math-and-science sort of way, became the baseline expectation for British game developers, Mike Singleton, creator of the beloved adventure/strategy hybrid The Lords of Midnight, was the outlier. He was older for one thing, already in his mid-thirties at the peak of his fame in the mid-1980s. And his background was also different. After a failed stab at becoming a theoretical physicist, Singleton had graduated university with of all things a degree in English, and spent a decade teaching the subject before computers arrived to provide an outlet for his latent talents for game design and programming. As Singleton himself put it, this background gave him an advantage over many of his peers in that “I am able to spell correctly, thank goodness.” More significantly, there’s a certain sense of nuance, even of grandeur, to The Lords of Midnight and some of his other games that distinguishes them from the more typical teenage-Dungeon-Master virtual worlds that crowded them for space on store shelves. His road from English teacher to one of the most famous developers in Britain not named Bell or Braben began in the late 1970s with, of all things, a betting shop.

The shop in question was owned by a friend in his home town of Liverpool. Said proprietor was always complaining about the math involved in some of the more elaborate bets favored by his patrons, such as the “around the clock,” which consisted of thirteen individual wagers placed on three different horses. Singleton offered to help out by writing some routines on the Sinclair programmable calculator he’d just received as a birthday gift. When that looked promising, they spent £100 on a Texas Instruments TI-59 calculator to take things to the next level. When that also went well, they upgraded yet again, this time to a Commodore PET with the idea of creating a complete PET-based software suite for managing all of the functions of a betting shop — a package which they could sell. But it didn’t work out. They just couldn’t figure a way to get the software to run fast enough to keep up with the fingers of an experienced bookmaker with a line of eager punters to service.

Looking around for some alternative use for their hardware investment, Singleton and his partner came up with an idea that was, in its way, visionary. What if they let customers play and bet on the computer whilst hanging about the shop waiting for race results? Singleton’s first game (of a sort, anyway), Computer Race, was born for this mercenary purpose. Customers who fed it money were rewarded with an onscreen, animated horse race. Singleton based his horses’ movements on a picture to be found on the wall of half the betting shops in Britain, Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion.”

The outcome of each race was determined randomly, with the customary small edge for the house. Again, Singleton and partner envisioned selling the game to betting shops all over the country. But again, their hopes came to little. This time they were undone by a legal rather than a technical problem. They ran afoul of British laws designed to keep betting shops as unwelcoming as possible. Singleton: “Having chairs is a little bit dicey, you might be contravening the laws — you’re encouraging people to go in a betting shop.” After narrowly losing a test prosecution, they decided the plan was too risky to go ahead with. It seemed the era of virtual racing must still be some years away. They sold exactly one Computer Race setup, to a betting shop in Ireland not subject to British law, where it played merrily for some years.

Having failed to become a gambling mogul, Singleton “took the computer and ran” to see if he could find another way to earn back its purchase price. Already a pretty good assembly-language programmer thanks to his experience with the betting shop, he wrote an action game he named Space Ace and sold it to PETSoft, one of the first software publishers to spring up in Britain. It sold 200 to 300 copies — not bad given the size of the British computer market at the time. But Singleton sensed a bigger opportunity in the offing. Despite their name, PETSoft had entered negotiations with Sinclair Research to market a line of programs for that company’s first microcomputer, the ZX80. Unfortunately, the deal fell through. Fortunately, Singleton was a persistent sort. He called Clive Sinclair directly to offer his services as an experienced programmer with a published game to his credit. Uncle Clive took a shine to him, and invited him up to Cambridge to pick up a prototype of and sign a contract to develop some games for Sinclair’s second machine, the ZX81.

To say the scope of possibility was limited on the ZX81 hardly begins to state the case; the machine had all of 1 K of memory. Over his two-week break from teaching that Christmas of 1980, Singleton knocked out half a dozen simple BASIC games and shipped them back to Sinclair to become Games Pack I. Now he began to reap some real financial rewards from his efforts at last: Games Pack I, that product of two weeks’ effort, earned him an astonishing £6000 during the following year. By way of perspective, know that £6000 was the average Briton’s yearly salary in 1980. “It was the best rate of pay I’ve ever had or am ever likely to have!” noted Singleton wryly.

If he’d been chasing the money until this point, that didn’t mean that Singleton didn’t genuinely love games. He was an avid board gamer and would-be game designer from childhood; he designed his first “James Bond-style” board game at 13, and retained an enduring fascination with Go throughout his life. In 1977 he discovered his first computer game (again, of a sort). Starweb was a play-by-mail game from the pioneer of the format, the American company Flying Buffalo. A harbinger of countless space-based grand-strategy games to come, Starweb required that players communicate each move on paper via post, writing their commands out using an arcane language to be entered into the game’s host, an exotic Raytheon 704 minicomputer. Once all of the players’ moves were entered, the Raythoen spit out the results in another arcane format that was, just for extra fun, completely different from the command-entry format. These reports were sent to players by return post. When two players met in the game, each was provided with her counterpart’s address, so they could talk amongst themselves and plot alliances and wars. And so it went, at a cost of $1.75 per move. Despite the extra postage cost and time delay entailed by his living in far-off England, Singleton was entranced. His first game lasted two years, ending in his victory over about fifteen others. He continued to play avidly thereafter. (Starweb, now approaching its 40th anniversary, is still an ongoing concern. The only obvious change from the game Singleton knew is that the communication can now be done via email.)

With that £6000 burning a hole in his pocket, Singleton now decided to press his faithful PET into service yet again to be the host of Starlord, a, shall we say, tribute to Starweb more accessible to British and European gamers. The PET got some pricey exotic technology which ate up a good chunk of the £6000: a hard disk and a color ink-jet printer. The latter allowed him to send players full-color maps of the galaxy and their position in it. Indeed, he made the entire game more colorful and friendly than its inspiration: “order forms” were now used to communicate your moves and their results were sent back in plain, readable English along with the map and copious status reports. All for the modest fee of £1.25 per turn. It was a lot of fiddly work for Singleton, but with players soon numbering in the hundreds (the game would peak around early 1984 with over 700), it was also quite profitable. When he realized he was earning more from Starlord than he was from teaching, he quit his day job.

He supplemented his Starlord income with more action games for the low-cost microcomputers that were now starting to flood Britain. First came Shadowfax, an unauthorized Lord of the Rings knockoff of the sort the rising profile of the computer-games industry wouldn’t allow for much longer. It had you playing Gandalf riding against the Black Riders; he reused the horse animations from Computer Race. It was also the first sign of a Tolkien fixation that would flower more elaborately in The Lords of Midnight. Shadowfax was followed by Siege and then Snake Pit (Singleton’s personal favorite from this early stage of his career). All were released for the Commodore VIC-20 and later the Sinclair Spectrum on the Postern label, and all did quite well.

He went through a phase of being fascinated with the possibilities for 3D displays — meaning 3D in the sense of those funny glasses you wear at the movies, not 3D rendering as in Elite. 3 Deep Space, released initially for the BBC Micro — Singleton apparently never met a machine he didn’t want to program — would be, Computer and Video Games magazine confidently predicted, “the first of a flood of stereoscopic games to hit the micro shops.” Or not, although Singleton gave it a hell of a try, porting 3 Deep Space to the Commodore VIC-20 and 64 as well as the Spectrum and publishing a bunch of 3D type-in listings along with the bound-in glasses to view them in the same issue of Computer and Video Games that made the aforementioned prediction (funny how that worked out). 3 Deep Space became the first flop of Singleton’s career.

His close relationship with Computer and Video Games was thanks to his friendship with that innovative magazine’s founder and editor, Terry Pratt. He even once ran a special simplified version of Starlord (called The Seventh Empire) just for the magazine’s readers. Pratt left Computer and Video Games in 1983 to take charge of a new publisher being set up by the media conglomerate EMAP, to be called Beyond Software. He immediately started urging Singleton to leave Postern and come write games for him. In September of 1983 Singleton invited him to his home in Chester, where they discussed three different ideas that might be turned into games. By the time of a 2004 interview for Retro Gamer magazine Singleton had forgotten what two of them were, but the third had been indelibly stamped not only in his head but in that of many thousands of gamers. It was a new graphics technique he called “landscaping” which he believed could be made to work on the Speccy. Given a grid-based map containing forests, plains, mountains, lakes, etc., landscaping would let him programmatically generate and draw a first-person view from any square on the grid, facing in any of the eight compass directions. He thought he might use it in a game far more ambitious than his previous simple action titles: something like the current bestseller The Hobbit, only much, much better. He believed he could pack a 64 X 64-square “game board” into his Spectrum’s 48 K of memory. This added up to 4096 individual locations to visit, each with eight possible views: over 32,000 individual pictures to see. The ad copy would practically write itself. Pratt told him to go for it: “I would first implement the technique and then, providing it worked, we’d go ahead with the full game.”

As would be the case with David Braben’s first rotating 3D spaceships, from this technical germ would be born a spectacularly innovative game design. Singleton envisioned a strategic war game that would play like an adventure game. Instead of viewing the conflict from on-high, you would see it through the eyes of those whose actions you controlled, whom you would be able to switch among and order about individually. The experiential aspect of war games, the role of the imagination in evoking their unfolding narratives of conflict in the mind’s eye, had always been an important part of the form’s appeal, much as stuffy grognards muttering about analyzing history and scoffing at games of mere make-believe might have sometimes been loath to admit it. Now Singleton could really bring that aspect to the fore, really let you live the experience through your generals’ eyes in a way that felt more like an adventure game. Yet there would be no parser, and text would be kept to a minimum to save memory for code. Singleton, who like many hardcore strategy gamers had little use for traditional adventures with their static worlds and static puzzles, was determined that his game be an unpredictable, dynamic, replayable experience like the cardboard war games he loved: “Routes aren’t dictated by the programmer in advance. You are in control of the main characters and their ultimate destiny.”

Of course, he would need a fictional context for the game. He thought of adopting the setting of a new play-by-mail design he’d been working on called The Lords of Atlantis, but Pratt wasn’t excited about that. Anyway, an underwater setting probably wasn’t worth the trouble. A medieval fantasy setting, he decided, would yield the best combination of popular appeal and ease of implementation, and be a natural fit for the sensibility of a Tolkien fan like himself. He decided to make his land a cold, icebound place simply because he “liked the combination” of the Spectrum’s shades of white and blue. He conceived of a land in which seasons last eons. His story would take place on the winter solstice, the darkest, coldest point just before a hoped-for new dawn and gradual thaw. The Lords of Atlantis became The Lords of Midnight. Now he started in earnest to build a world:

I drew a large map, which I still have, in nice felt-tip colours. It isn’t quite as difficult as it sounds and really I bet Tolkien did the same — you start off with a few word endings and tack different syllables on the front until you come up with something that sounds good, so you sit there going “Ushgarak, Ashgarak, Ighrem” to yourself until you get something that sounds nice or horrible according to what you want. [In reality the linguist Tolkien, who started with rigorously worked-out made-up languages and wrote The Lord of the Rings and the rest of the lore of Middle Earth largely to learn about the people speaking them, would have been aghast.] And once I got the map, then I started doing the story before I got on with any programming, and it was really the story that built up the atmosphere. I managed to get through the story quite quickly, in about three weeks. And that clarified all the major characters.

The story Singleton wrote, the preamble to the War of the Solstice, would eventually be included with the game as a novella. Taken on one level it’s just another Tolkien knockoff, if reasonably well written as such things go. We’ve got the usual stand-ins for Sauron (Lord Doomdark), Aragorn (Luxor), Frodo (Morkin), Elrond (Corleth), Gandalf (Rorthron), Gollum (Fawkrin). The game itself flies its Tolkien flag with equal pride. There are two ways to win which neatly parallel the two stories told in The Two Towers and The Return of the King: use Luxor (Aragorn) and as many of the thirty other Lords of the Free as he can rally to his banner to defeat Doomdark (Sauron) militarily, or sneak Morkin (Frodo) deep into Doomdark’s realm to destroy the Ice Crown (One Ring), source of Doomdark’s power.

Yet there’s a sense of the timeless to The Lords of Midnight which is seldom seen in other games then or now. Singleton does not just appropriate the surface tropes of The Lord of the Rings but also manages to capture some of its epic grandeur. In their advertising copy, Beyond would ceaselessly pound on that word “epic”: “The Lords of Midnight is not simply an adventure game nor simply a war game. It is really a new type that we have chosen to call an epic game, for as you play The Lords of Midnight you will be writing a new chapter in the history of the peoples of the Free.”

“Epic” is a word, like “tragedy” or “hero,” that’s been overused by our Hollywoodized culture to the point of meaninglessness; these days movies based on toy robots are epic sagas, and that party your friendly local teenager went to last weekend was epic, dude. The Lords of Midnight, however, reaches back to the word as it applies to The Iliad, The Odyssey, Paradise Lost, and, yes, Tolkien’s modern epic The Lord of the Rings. Not that I’m making direct artistic comparisons here, mind you. It’s just that there’s a similar if more modest windy majesty blowing through Mike Singleton’s land of Midnight, something I can’t quite put my finger on that makes it more than your typical fantasy pastiche. One need only read a few comments from the many players who remember the game well to realize that I’m not the only one to feel it. More so than strategic depth (which it has to a surprising degree; folks continue to discuss and refine their strategies to this day) or anything else, that feeling seems to be the defining trait of The Lords of Midnight for most players. It manages to be epic in the classical sense when other games settle for adjectives like “exciting” or “interesting” or “immersive.” It’s in the graphics; it’s in the simple elegance of the mechanics (there are only a few actions each character can perform); it’s even in the text, which is stately, literate, and dignified while necessarily remaining very succinct. Even when you lose — and you will lose, early and often, before you work out how everything works and develop a serviceable battle plan — you feel like the destruction of the People of the Free also has an epic resonance of its own; the story of Hector can be as compelling as that of Odysseus, after all.

Although they are very different games with very different personalities, The Lords of Midnight and Elite have a similar sense of scope about them. Both are incredibly complex systems in light of the hardware on which they run. More importantly, however, both are masterful examples of the Eliza effect writ large: they make you want to believe — make you actively imagine — that there is more to their universes than there actually is. Paradoxically, their very verisimilitude can be linked back to their hardware limitations. With scant memory and no disk storage to fall back upon, their creators were forced to generate most of their content procedurally rather than constantly slurping up static assets — whether in the form of graphics, sounds, data, or just text — from disk. The result feels unpredictable, flexible, and responsive to you in a way that most contemporary “epic” American adventure and CRPG games, which by The Lords of Midnight‘s time routinely spanned multiple disk sides, never manage with all their reams of static data. Taken purely in terms of the feeling of scope and possibility that they evoke, The Lords of Midnight and Elite are still some of the most awe-inspiring virtual worlds ever made.

Whatever other qualities The Lords of Midnight shares with Elite, it had nothing like that game’s extended gestation time. Having spent the last three months of 1983 developing the landscaping technique and designing the game and its world and of course writing the novella, Singleton didn’t start actually coding the game until January. He finished in a bare three more months of twelve-hour days, turning the whole thing in to Pratt that April. The whole project consumed less than seven months from start to finish. Within weeks, the game was on shelves. The final product was, in defiance of Beyond’s less than rigorous testing regime and the hard-won wisdom of anyone who’s ever programmed seriously, very nearly bug free. It’s a remarkable achievement indeed, one of the last of the great lone-wolf games. Singleton had done everything: design, graphics, coding, even writing most of the manual in the form of that novella. Technology and ever-greater player expectations would soon make such an approach, even for an apparent near savant like Singleton, untenable.

Mike Singleton shows off The The Lords of Midnight, 1984

Beyond, who had failed to make much of a splash with their first few titles, knew they had something special in The Lords of Midnight. They began previewing the game even before Singleton was completely done with it, creating a buzz of interest. By now it had become standard practice in Britain for publishers of hot new games to tell players to contact them as soon as they won for booty and ten minutes of fame that was either explicitly or implicitly up for grabs to the quickest and the cleverest. Recognizing the game’s literary texture, Beyond came up with one of the craziest such contests ever staged. Prospective winners, they said, should laboriously print every single screen of their experience, using a command Singleton had helpfully added for that purpose, to create “an illustrated history of the War of the Solstice.” The first person to send in a complete history of a winning game would become “the coauthor of a fantasy novel based around your adventures in Midnight,” which Beyond would “arrange for a fantasy writer to turn into a book to be published by one of the UK’s top fantasy publishers.” An audacious idea indeed, but one that turned into a fiasco. Whatever agreements Beyond had or thought they had, they ultimately couldn’t find any name author to write such a book nor anyone to publish it. The winning player, who had sent in his thick sheaf of papers just two weeks after the game was released, was quietly pacified with some alternate prizes and the whole episode flushed down the memory hole as quietly as Beyond could manage.

That hiccup aside, everything went smashingly. The Lords of Midnight sold 10,000 copies in its first two weeks at the unusually expensive price of £10. It turned into a solid success, albeit one that hovered around the tenth position on the sales charts for months on end rather than a chart-topper. No worries; that felt somehow appropriate, given the sort of slow-building but ultimately entrancing experience it is to play. Almost every Speccy-focused or platform-agnostic games magazine in existence published tips, maps, and often complete strategic solutions for both the quest victory and the military victory over the next year. There’s no better illustration of the esteem in which it came to be held by at least the more cerebral wing of Speccy gamers than Crash magazine’s big 1984 year-end poll. The Lords of Midnight was voted “Best Text/Graphical Adventure” by no less than 51% of voters; its closest competition came in the form of Sherlock with all of 10% of the vote. The game’s reputation only continued to build as the years passed and magazines like Crash turned more and more to dwell on past glories in light of the slowly dwindling supply of new Speccy games. In 1991 they dubbed it and its sequel “probably the two most exciting computer games ever written.” Its position in Spectrum lore remains inviolate today. (Beyond also funded ports to the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC, but those, while very positively reviewed and successful enough, never quite attracted the worship that Speccy lovers continue to bestow on the original.)

That aforementioned sequel, Doomdark’s Revenge, appeared, following another frenzy of design and programming on Singleton’s part, just in time for Christmas 1984. It was largely what one might expect: an even larger map, a few new commands to try, “few major surprises” (as Crash admitted in an otherwise glowing review). It was undoubtedly (as another reviewer noted) “more sophisticated and more difficult,” and became another big success for Beyond, but most today feel it failed to improve on its predecessor as either game or fiction. While it’s not a bad game by any stretch, even Singleton himself eventually came to recognize the original as superior. Ironically, some of its flaws were down to its increased “sophistication,” particularly its elaborations on the rather simplistic AI of the original. Singleton:

With 20/20 hindsight, the way the characters in Doomdark’s Revenge made and broke alliances of their own accord and moved about the map on their own quests made things too unpredictable for the sort of strategic planning a player could do in Lords. Perhaps some other feedback — in the form of news or intelligence information — to the player on what was actually going on in the (largely unseen) background between the other characters would have made this feature really work.

That said, I should also note that there is a substantial minority of players who prefer the larger map and more unpredictable play of Doomdark’s Revenge. Whatever else we say about it, the fact that a program running on a 48 K Spectrum is making and breaking alliances amongst non-player characters is pretty amazing in the same way as are the dynamic characters of The Hobbit and Sherlock — and, perhaps, similarly problematic from the standpoint of playability, falling into an uncanny valley of the AI which lessens rather than furthers the Eliza effect.

Singleton posing for Crash magazine at the peak of his fame

The scope of The Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge as well as innovative techniques like landscaping were so inspiring that Singleton couldn’t help but become a hacking hero even amongst Spectrum owners who lacked the patience to sit down and properly play the games. While he would never challenge Bell and Braben in the mainstream-fame sweepstakes, he was a big, big man in British computing for several years, with the magazines all jostling to interview him about not only coding and design but also such pressing concerns as his favorite food (steak and chips) and favorite pop groups (Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, and Led Zeppelin; 1970s hard rock was quite the staple amongst 1980s hackers).

But the interviewers’ favorite question was always about the status of The Eye of the Moon, the final game in what had been promised from the first would be a trilogy (how could such an unabashed Tolkien pastiche be anything else?). Singleton delivered tidbits about what the last game would entail, including a yet larger map and a different structure that would break the game (and the map) into a number of smaller quests, each building upon the previous and increasing in difficulty, to keep it from getting overwhelming in the way on which Doomdark’s Revenge was already arguably verging. But first he wanted to write a new, different sort of game for the Commodore 64, his first with a collaborator — thus marking the end of this lonest of lone-wolf coders, a sign of changing times if ever there was one — called Quake Minus One. Then Beyond, after barely two years as an independent entity, got bought by the giant British Telecomsoft, who were throwing their weight and money around the British games industry like crazy during the mid-1980s. BT had already, you may remember, outbid everyone else for the biggest game in the industry, Elite. They had also bought a Star Trek license from Paramount, and Singleton was drafted to work on that game for a while while The Eye of the Moon continued to languish. The Star Trek project didn’t go well at all, and he left to form his own small development house, Maelstrom Games. In the end, The Eye of the Moon never appeared, doomed by some combination of other pressing priorities, over-ambition, and legal uncertainty about who really owned what; Singleton and Pratt, you see, hadn’t bothered with contracts, only “gentleman’s agreements,” which was fine until a big, fussy company like BT came into the picture. Maelstrom did finally make and release an alternative concept as a third game, Lords of Midnight 3: The Citadel, in 1995 on the Domark label, but probably shouldn’t have bothered; few have much good to say about that effort.

Singleton’s career after his glory years of the mid-1980s is a motley mix of worthy and similarly underwhelming games, with one more unimpeachable classic, 1989’s Midwinter, thrown in for good measure. Lords of Midnight 3 marked his last project in the role of designer. He remained in the industry until his untimely death in 2012, but was forced to content himself with lower-profile, mostly purely technical roles on big teams, working on game whose titles sometimes sound like something from an Onion parody of manic videogame culture: HSX: Hypersonic Extreme, Wrath Unleashed. A long, long way from the stately dignity of The Lords of Midnight…

Having praised that game so effusively here, I should note before concluding that it isn’t as playable as, say, Elite. Formulating a strategy and keeping track of up to 32 individual leaders of the Free, not to mention Doomdark’s hordes, all but requires extensive notes and visual aids. The map views and more usable status screens that a modern strategy game of this ilk would have are painfully missing, leaving your own elbow grease as the only viable alternative. Perhaps the most practical approach is to print out one of the detailed maps published by one of the magazines on the biggest sheet of paper you can find, then to borrow some counters to use on it from the nearest handy board game. I’ve included a pretty good map, from Crash‘s July 1991 issue, along with the Spectrum tape image and the manual in a zip file which you’re welcome to download.

If all that sounds like too much effort, I highly recommend that you check out Chris Wild’s loving remake for iOS, Android, OS X, and Windows. It adds exactly those conveniences that can feel so painfully missing to modern sensibilities while still preserving the atmosphere and wonder of the original. Either way, by all means play it if you haven’t already. It’s one of the greats — and, particularly when taken in tandem with Midwinter, more than legacy enough for anyone.

(Sources: Crash of June 1984, January 1985, February 1985, March 1985, June 1987, April 1989, September 1991; Micro Adventurer of August 1984, November 1984; Personal Computer Games of August 1984; Your Computer of April 1986, December 1987; Big K of July 1984; Computer and Video Games 1985 Yearbook and of May 1982, January 1983, October 1983; Popular Computing Weekly of November 29 1984, March 13 1986; Retro Gamer #4. The painted flavor illustrations were taken from the August 1984 issue of Personal Computer Games.)

Comments
18 Responses

- Dehumanizer

January 7, 2014 at 10:53 am

Amazing post about one of my favorite games ever. :)

A couple of typos (Aragorn is spelled as “Aragon” a couple of times). Also, are you certain Singleton himself converted this game to the C64 and Amstrad? I seem to remember he didn’t. On Lemon64, he’s just listed as “Designer” for LoM, and Doomdark’s Revenge actually credits someone else for the conversion, so I wonder about LoM as well.

Hmm, on Lemon64 you can see a scan of the original C64 LoM cover, and it says “conversion by TAG & The KID (Incentive)”, so I guess that answers it. Don’t know about the Amstrad versions…

- Jimmy Maher

January 7, 2014 at 11:14 am

Thanks for these. Corrections made. Singleton had been in the habit of porting his own games before Midnight, and I just assumed… and you know what that makes me. :) Does perhaps explain why the 64 version, while otherwise very faithful, is so much slower than the Speccy.

- Anthony

January 7, 2014 at 3:08 pm

Jimmy, another fascinating writeup. I’ve lately been going through the run of the 1980s magazine Micro Adventurer on the Internet Archive, and Lords of Midnight crops up again and again, in features, in adverts, and especially in readers’ letters.

I was a bit nonplussed by all the excitement because back in the day I was a BBC Micro owner (pity me) and didn’t ever see LoM.

But your blogpost has now given me an inkling of what the fuss was all about. Many thanks.

(Obviously I’m loath to end without being infuriatingly pedantic. One typo: the adjective is spelt “loath”. Sorry.)

- Jimmy Maher

January 7, 2014 at 3:19 pm

No need to apologize. You folks will ease the burden of some poor copy-editor when and if all this material becomes a book.

- Felix

January 7, 2014 at 4:50 pm

Another of my all-time favorites, and one that, unlike Elite, has remained unique to this day (apart from the one sequel). Which is too bad, because the graphics engine that was revolutionary in 1984 is nowadays a few hundred lines of straightforward Javascript. Then again, Singleton’s own attempts to recreate his amazing success failed. The formula must be more difficult to get right than it appears. Oh well.

As for the game being a Tolkien pastiche, my own pastiche of Star Wars is just as blatant, yet none of my readers ever seemed to notice. As always, it’s how you tell the story, and not what story you tell…

- Mark Ricard

January 16, 2014 at 2:53 am

What games have you written?

- Gilles Duchesne

January 7, 2014 at 6:06 pm

hiccop -> hiccup

Otherwise, nice read as always.

- Jimmy Maher

January 8, 2014 at 7:52 am

Thanks!

- Jean-Yves

January 10, 2014 at 9:35 am

Superb article, thank you! There was quite a bit in there that was new to me and I’ve been a steadfast LOM fan since day 1.

A couple of points: Chris Wild’s epic (sorry, couldn’t resist) remakes are also available on BlackBerry 10 phones and even the PlayBook. Also, there are various other unofficial remakes out there, for Windows, Java and Web based. The latter, Midnight/MU, is the one I’m involved with and allows you to play LOM, DDR and other scenarios against other players online. All Midnight fans are welcome to pop by :)

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- Mark Ricard

January 16, 2014 at 2:55 am

Excellent article. How tough is the original to play? Is that the difficulty,i.e. dying randomly that makes it unfriendly to modern players or is it other aspects?

- Jimmy Maher

January 16, 2014 at 11:12 am

No random deaths or anything like that. It’s just that the interface is somewhat limited by the hardware, as I tried to explain.

- Jonathan Blask

January 25, 2014 at 6:54 pm

This is a bit of a tangent, but the stuff about horse racing programs made me think of Dick Francis’s Twice Shy, which dealt with people being murdered over a racing odds program written in BASIC. I personally was quite tickled with the book for that particular reason; it is sort of funny that it’s the only Francis book I’ve read and I picked that one completely by chance.

- Jimmy Maher

January 26, 2014 at 10:07 am

Another of Francis’s books was translated into a game during the heyday of bookware: http://www.mobygames.com/game/high-take.

- Olivier Guinart

February 5, 2014 at 10:59 pm

I’d like to stop writing “Very good article” for everything you post, but I can’t yet! ;)

I know it’s the season, but did you mean “technical gem” (instead of “technical germ”)?

- Jimmy Maher

February 5, 2014 at 11:11 pm

Don’t worry, I can never get enough of such comments. :)

In this case, I actually wrote what I intended (it does happen sometimes). I meant the older meaning of “germ”: “spark, root, bud, rudiment, seed.”

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The Legend of Ultimate Play the Game
January 14, 2014

Although the sorts of games they created are a little outside of my usual beat, I couldn’t possibly write an overview of 1984 in British gaming without including the little company with the big, unwieldy name of Ultimate Play the Game. During their glory years, which numbered no more than two, Ultimate was unabashedly worshiped amongst Spectrum owners. They took the place that the screw-ups at Imagine Software had thought was reserved for them: that of the most talented, innovative, cool, and fabulously successful developer in the country. No other Speccy developer, before or after, would ever come close to equaling Ultimate’s reputation. Amongst British gamers of a certain age or just a certain historical bent, the name “Ultimate Play the Game” is still spoken in positively reverent tones. No one, but no one, carries the mystique of Ultimate. Far from being a disadvantage, their short life only adds to their aura. They’re British gaming’s Joy Division.

Much of Ultimate’s mystique is down to their elusiveness. When they debuted their first games in 1983, the four founders of Ashby Computer and Graphics (trading name Ultimate Play the Game) — brothers Chris and Tim Stamper along with Tim’s girlfriend (later wife) Carole Ward and John Lathbury — did the usual dance, inviting the press out to their modest office in the Midlands town of Ashby-De-la-Zouch for interviews. Little did anyone realize that those first two interviews given that summer to Home Computing Weekly and Popular Computing Weekly would also be the last. At first, so the partners claimed, they were simply too busy writing and selling games to deal with the press. But it couldn’t have taken them long to realize that their silence only intensified gamers’ fascination. It was the best kind of promotion — the kind which costs nothing and for which you have to do nothing. The veil of secrecy has never really lifted; you don’t need two hands to count the total number of sit-down interviews given by the Stampers in the last thirty years. That can make things complicated for a fellow like me, but we shall do the best we can to ferret out some facts.

Born in 1958, Chris Stamper discovered computers while studying physics and electronics at Loughborough University. He was soon making one of his own, built around an RCA 1802 microprocessor, and learning to program it; this comfort with hardware as well as software would be key to his career. By 1979 he’d finagled a job at Associated Leisure, a new British firm set up to not only import Japanese and American arcade machines into the country but to continue to support the needs of the arcade owners who purchased them once they arrived. In that spirit, Chris spent much of his time working up conversion kits which would allow an owner to, say, convert a Space Invaders machine to a Galaxian when the former started getting long in the tooth. He also found a job for his less technical little brother Tim in graphics and design, and became firm friends with John Lathbury, another coder and hardware engineer.

Tim, Carole, and Chris Stamper

Their manager at Associated was a fellow named Norman Parker. Realizing the talent he had working under him, he convinced them all to leave Associated with him for a new venture: a company called Zilec, which would become one of just two British companies to manufacture and sell original arcade games. They became his secret weapons, engineering and programming a dozen games that were sold in Britain under the Zilec name or licensed to big Japanese companies like Konami and Sega.

The Stampers made a big deal of their time in the arcade industry in those first interviews as Ultimate, and with good reason. The experience they gained was invaluable. For one thing, the games they made were all built around the ubiquitous Zilog Z80, the chip also at the heart of the Sinclair Spectrum; Chris and John had every opcode and register permanently etched into their brains long before they saw their first Speccy. But just as important were the personal contacts they made. Barely out of their teens, they got to travel the world. Parker: “They saw all the best products from around the world. They learned their trade well.” They learned the delicate feint and parry of Japanese business decorum, and forged a bond with a Floridian named Joel Hochberg who had been in coin-operated entertainment since the days when that meant pinball machines; he had helped the young Nolan Bushnell launch the original Pong. Parker and Hochberg inculcated them with their own unsentimental view of electronic entertainment as first and foremost a business that should make them money. Parker:

They are completely down to earth about games. They know what a game has to do to make money. In the arcades a game has to make money immediately or it will almost literally be scrapped. They learned this important lesson from the arcade business.

Developing using Ultimate’s workstation

With the arcade industry beginning to go soft and British microcomputers sweeping the country, the Stamper brothers and Lathbury decided to bail on Zilec and start their own company to cater to that new market. Carole Ward came in as well as another graphic designer and “company secretary.” From the beginning, Ultimate developed games in a way very different from the typical Speccy bedroom coder. As with so much else about Ultimate, details of their development system are not entirely clear, but those early interviews do describe it as a 32-bit multi-user system on which they could write and compile their code and ship it over to an attached Spectrum for execution. (A best guess would be a 68000-based Unix workstation.) The methodology obviously borrowed heavily from that used by Zilec and their competitors for writing arcade firmware, and cost “several thousands pounds.” They chose the Spectrum, its low-end model with just 16 K of memory, as their target platform for reasons “purely economic — to finance the costs of the development system and to provide revenue quickly they needed a big-selling computer, and the 16 K Spectrum fit the bill.”

Ultimate made their public debut in mid-1983 with Jetpac, followed by a spurt of three more games in two months and no shortage of self-confidence. Tim:

There is now an awful lot of software out for the Spectrum, but ours will always sell because it’s better. We have worried a lot of our competitors. Suddenly Jetpac came out from nowhere, but in fact we have more experience than all of them. I think we have raised the user expectation of what the Spectrum can do and software houses have been forced to raise their standards in line with us.

Jetpac

The games justified the hubris. Those early titles are fast-paced, colorful, and smartly designed, and pack a staggering amount of content into 16 K. They really did seem to transform the Speccy into a whole new machine which no one had ever suspected it had within it and which no one but Ultimate knew how to access. While gameplay remains firmly in the three-lives, ever-more-difficult-levels mold of the arcade, the concepts are not only original but, gratifyingly, have you building things rather than just blowing them up. In Pssst you’re a gardener trying to grow a flower and protect it from rampaging insects; in Cookie you’re a baker trying to make a cake, Swedish Chef-style, with animate ingredients that don’t want to be baked. Gamers responded. Ultimate was soon rewarded with the biggest overall sales in the industry and the beginnings of the incomparable reputation they still enjoy today. By year’s end their games sat at #1, #3, and #4 on Computer and Video Games‘s Spectrum sales top ten — and they had retreated into their offices, protected by thick perspex windows, an entry phone to ward off casual knockers, and “Private: Keep Out” signs on the garage at the rear that would soon hold a Lamborghini or two.

Ultimate’s sealed offices

But the games that would really make Ultimate legendary would come with the next batch, for which they stepped up to the 48 K Spectrum, the one almost everyone was actually buying by now.

Atic Atac

The first of these bigger games was Lunar Jetman, a sequel to their very first game Jetpac with more complex play and a vastly larger area but still with the standard arcade structure of level after level, each more difficult than the previous, unfolding until you die. Then, between that game and the next, Ultimate’s design approach underwent a quiet revolution, from bringing games that could have been arcade hits to the Spectrum to longer-form experiences that could only have been born and bred for the home. The next game, Atic Atac, is another real-time action game with Ultimate’s by-now-expected superb graphics, but it drops you into a haunted castle full of rooms to explore, connections to map, monsters to defeat or avoid, objects to pick up, little puzzles to solve, all while contending with a time limit. There’s a score, but it’s not the real point of the endeavor — that’s to collect the three keys which will let you escape the castle. If you do so, you’ve actually won and the game is over. Remind you of anything? Crash magazine’s reviewer grappled with what kind of game Atic Atac really was: “Atic Atac is no way a true adventure, but neither is it a shoot-the-baddies game.” In those days, a “true” adventure meant a text adventure (possibly with illustrations for flavor) because that’s all there was. The genre that Atic Atac pioneered would within a year be named the “action-adventure.”

Which is not to say that Ultimate was the absolute first to tread this ground. The canonical first example of the form is Warren Robinett’s game Adventure, which he coded for the Atari VCS in the United States in 1979. Robinett had seen and been fascinated by the original Crowther and Woods Adventure on a visit to Stanford University. His game for Atari was an explicit attempt to translate the elements that had intrigued him on Stanford’s big PDP-10 to a form playable on the very different hardware of the VCS — so explicit an attempt that he even appropriated the name. Robinett:

I think you could describe what I did as translating the adventure-game idea from one medium to another. You can call text-adventure games a “medium”: the output to the player is text descriptions, the player types text commands to the game. That’s all there is: no graphics, no sound, no animation. The medium I was translating to was the videogame, where you have a joystick — one button and the four directions (or eight if you want to think of it that way) — and it has graphics, has color, has animation, has sound. So it had to change to work in that medium.

Robinett’s game was primitive even by the standards of Spectrum software of just a few years later; it had to be to run in 4 K of cartridge-based ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. But it threw down a gauntlet — albeit one which few American software houses, working the fertile ground of Zork-style text adventures and Ultima- and Wizardry-style CRPGs, took up. The folks from Ultimate, who had traveled far and seen much of the international videogame business while at Zilec and thus had to have seen Robinett’s Adventure, now picked it up for Britain instead. Atic Atac and the Ultimate action-adventures which followed — Sabre Wulf, Underwurlde, Knight Lore, Alien 8, Nightshade, Gunfright, and Pentagram — touched off a a veritable gaming subculture of copycats and, eventually, games which took the concept even further. The big open-world action-adventure would remain a cottage industry in British software through the end of the decade and beyond, with a string of iconic titles: Mercenary, Fairlight, Spindizzy, Head Over Heels, Exile, the Dizzy series, just for starters.

Ultimate reached their pinnacle of success at the end of 1984, when they released Underwurlde and Knight Lore simultaneously just in time for Christmas. The former was a continuation of what they had already wrought in Atic Atac and Sabre Wulf, but the latter marked the last big innovation they would gift to their eager public: the first isometric action-adventure.

Knight Lore

Ulimate’s worlds prior to Knight Lore, like those of virtually everyone else, were worlds of just two dimensions. (See my article on Elite for the reasons behind that and its ramifications.) They were viewed from directly above, from a strangely depthless sideways, or from even stranger, Pac-Man-like perspectives that conform to no obvious reality. Game developers had been frustrated by the limitations of 2D for years, but true 3D graphics, while David Braben and Ian Bell among others proved them not to be impossible, were very, very difficult on a simple 8-bit computer, and usually limited to wireframes if you wanted to get any performance at all out of them. Isometric perspective would turn out to offer a compromise, a way to get many of the benefits of 3D without most of the costs.

Engineers and architects had grown frustrated with the limitations of their 2D blueprints many years before videogames existed. They had realized that drawing a rectangular object like, say, a building from a sweet spot above and canted 45 degrees horizontally gave an excellent view of it in all its 3D glory without being very taxing on the drawer: it’s essentially just a matter of leaving vertical lines alone, rotating horizontal lines by -30 degrees, and rotating depth lines by +30 degrees. Best of all, a quirk in the rules of perspective means that objects deeper in the picture remain exactly the same size as those closer to the viewer — again, a huge burden lifted from the drawer. Or from the programmer and her computer. The transformations required to display an isometric view on a computer are fairly trivial compared to full 3D rendering. There are inevitable limitations — the real world isn’t generally so neatly rectangular — but, still, isometric graphics offered a magic bullet, a way to get something for, if not quite nothing, a very reduced cost.

Given that, it’s if anything surprising how slow game programmers were to catch on to their wonders. The first prominent games to use isometric graphics were a couple of arcade releases of 1982, Sega’s Zaxxon and Gottlieb’s Q*bert. Isometric graphics first came to the Spectrum in late 1983 in the form of Ant Attack, written by a young sculptor named Sandy White who applied his knowledge of real-world 3D construction to the construction of a virtual world inside his Speccy. But all of these titles were games in the traditional arcade mold. Ultimate applied the isometric perspective to a more ambitious, expansive action-adventure for the first time with Knight Lore. It was a match made in heaven; within a year virtually everyone else would make the switch as well. (One wag writing to Crash magazine labelled Knight Lore the “second most cloned piece of software after Wordstar.”) Not only did the isometric view bring a whole new depth (sorry!) of play, but it was stunning eye candy, becoming for most the ultimate (sorry again!) demonstration of Ultimate’s graphics prowess. One reviewer on the World of Spectrum site: “I think that setting eyes on Knight Lore for the first time must have been like seeing King Kong on the screen back in the 1930s when the film was released. It (Knight Lore) was the single most staggering thing I’d ever seen on a Spectrum.” Another: “I was there in the computer shop on the day Knight Lore was first loaded into the demonstration Speccy. Within thirty seconds there was a crowd about seven deep, everyone clambering over each other to get a better look.” It really was that amazing. As with Ultimate itself, a gauzy patina of awe still surrounds Knight Lore today amongst British gamers. A 1994 article in Edge magazine pronounced it nothing less than “the greatest single advance in the history of computer games.” That’s an assertion that reveals a certain loss of perspective (done now, I promise!) in my opinion, but it’s nevertheless a very, very important moment whose reverberations would echo for years through British gaming and well beyond.

Knight Lore is also enshrined in Ultimate lore for another reason. In an interview given to The Games Machine magazine in December of 1987 (the first they had agreed to since those early pieces back in 1983), the Stamper brothers dropped a bombshell:

Knight Lore was finished before Sabre Wulf. But we decided then that the market wasn’t ready for it. Because if we released Knight Lore and Alien 8 — which was already half-finished — we wouldn’t have sold Sabre Wulf. So we released Sabre Wulf, which was a colossal success, and then released the other two.

This little anecdote has had huge resonance in the years since because it so confirms the legend of Ultimate as both technical and artistic geniuses (they were doing isometric action-adventures even earlier than we thought!) and iconoclastic masters of PR and marketing (who else was thinking in terms of what the market was “ready for” in the wild and wooly days of the early British software industry?). And indeed, and assuming that it’s completely true, it does show uncanny foresight of a sort which many other publishers could have used. (Just to give one example: it strikes me that Beyond and Mike Singleton would have done better to wait another few months at least before releasing Doomdark’s Revenge, to let the buzz from The Lords of Midnight run its course and fully prime the pump for the sequel.)

Ultimate’s star dimmed somewhat during 1985, beginning as early as the next game, Alien 8, which prompted a few grumbles amidst the usual superlative reviews that it was really just Knight Lore in Space. By the time of Nightshade and Gunfright a developing critical consensus had it that Ultimate was not only failing to advance their action-adventure formula but actually beginning to regress, offering less interesting puzzles, less control, and less to do. A handful of underwhelming Commodore 64 games done by outside contractors — this after Ultimate had sworn they would always do all of their games in-house — damaged their reputation even more. In truth, the divide in quality pre- and post-Knight Lore was probably exaggerated; the British gaming press had more than a whiff of the tabloid about it, and generally delighted in tearing down heroes even more than it enjoyed building them up. (One magazine was so cruel as to gleefully follow Mark Butler around from developer to developer as he desperately searched for a job following the Imagine Software debacle. With that example of how the press treated previous golden boys, the folks at Ultimate could probably count themselves lucky that their own fall from favor was confined to some harsh reviews.) Then, just as 1986 began, Ultimate did something else they’d said they’d never do: sold out to the big, well-funded house U.S. Gold, who had become a huge player by licensing, repackaging, and distributing American software for the British market. Some more underwhelming games followed, and then the Ultimate imprint disappeared entirely, making its final appearance on a Collected Works anthology that packaged together their first eleven Spectrum games — all of the ones which the founders had actually programmed. Lathbury and the Stampers disappeared entirely for a couple of years. Speculation about just where the hell these most legendary Speccy developers of all had gotten to ran rampant.

What had happened, it eventually emerged, was one of the strangest transformations in the history of gaming. The Stampers claim that as early as late 1983, even before the run of action-adventures which would form the cream of Ultimate’s legacy, they brought the first Nintendo Family Computers (Famicoms) into the office. These strange little toylike game consoles, completely unknown in Europe or North America, were the hottest thing going in Japan, as Ultimate knew well from their ongoing international contacts. As home consoles crashed everywhere else in the world, as the received wisdom from all the British and American pundits said that consoles were dead and home computers were the future, the Famicom was motoring past the half-million unit marker after a matter of months on the market. Tim Stamper:

The machine, for the price it was available in Japan then [about $100 US], had colossal potential — we looked at this and we looked at the Spectrum — and then the Spectrum was hot stuff, but this was incredible. So we spent possibly eight months finding everything out about this system — its custom chips, and it takes a fair bit of work — we managed to do that and then started to write on the machine.

It was at this time, around the point when Knight Lore was about to hit store shelves, that the Stamper brothers set into motion a master plan to gradually divest themselves from the Speccy. The Speccy was huge in its home country, but it was in some sense provincial; it would never penetrate far beyond Britain and a few other European markets despite hopeful arrangements with Timex and others that tried to introduce it to North America and other such tempting places. (Eastern-bloc countries cloned the hell out of it, but that of course didn’t lead to more software markets for the Western likes of Ultimate.) Yes, you might make the same argument about the Famicom, but Nintendo was a smarter company than Sinclair with far more resources at their disposal and long-term plans in the offing for worldwide domination, as the Stampers knew well from their Japanese contacts. Ultimate was doing brilliant, unprecedented things with the Speccy graphically, but the Nintendo was more obviously capable in that area right out of the box; just imagine how far they might push it. And the Famicom had one other hugely appealing quality: its programs were sold on cartridges rather than tapes or disks. This made it a much more appealing system for children, novices, and the computerphobic: playing a game was a simple manner of shoving a cartridge in and turning on the machine; no entering arcane commands, no waiting twenty minutes with fingers crossed. Best of all, cartridges made casual piracy impossible — piracy which many Speccy publishers claimed was costing them half or more of their revenue.

So, for most of the same reasons that other publishers would also cite but far, far earlier, Ultimate decided to jump on the console bandwagon. Working without manuals or Nintendo’s development kits, they figured out how the Famicom worked and developed ways to program it. Nintendo, however, ruled the Famicom ecosystem with an iron fist. The only way to publish for the machine was through them, and they weren’t in the habit of granting licenses to companies outside of Japan. Enter their old American friend Joel Hochberg, who had longstanding relationships with Nintendo. He approached Nintendo executive Minoru Arakawa and finagled a meeting for the Stampers. Nintendo was impressed enough with the demos they showed that they signed them. Hochberg and the Stampers — Lathbury quietly dropped out of the picture around this point for reasons that have never been explained — formed a new company, Rare, to develop for the Nintendo, using the money still coming in from Ultimate and, eventually, Ultimate’s sale to U.S. Gold to fund this new entity. Rare went on to become one of if not the most valued software partner of Nintendo and one of if not the most prolific and successful maker of Nintendo games outside Nintendo themselves, while the odd little Famicom went on to change everything everywhere as the Nintendo Entertainment System.

That, anyway, is the story as the Stampers have told it and the one that has gone down in gamer legend. I don’t have any evidence to refute it, although I do have a sneaking suspicion that there’s a bit of PR and self-mythologizing going on here, that it wasn’t all that meticulously plotted from the beginning. Certainly one must admit that it smacks just a bit of, say, a really convoluted Homeland plot which depends on every person reacting just so and every link on the chain connecting flawlessly. Ah, well… I suppose gamers need their legends too. Whatever the dirty details, the Stampers have proved themselves to be very adroit businessmen under anybody’s terms. And we’ll leave it at that.

Technically superlative and meticulously crafted as they are, I’m not a huge fan of Ultimate or Rare’s games in general. They’re just so commercially calculated, so plainly aimed with pinpoint precision at the center of a market demographic that I can’t feel much, for lack of a better word, soul in them. I’ll cast my lot with the dreamers and crazed would-be electronic artists instead, even if their games aren’t quite so air-tight technically. I’d perhaps feel better about the Stamper legacy if there was any mention of joy or fun in the few interviews we have with them to balance all the talk of competencies and markets and competition and games as “products.” (Tim: “We actually act, I suppose, as Nintendo’s development team. If they feel they are lacking a product on a machine, they tell us, we develop it, and so we are sure of licensing product to them.”) But I must also acknowledge that I wasn’t there when Knight Lore and the others first wowed players, and my view of them might be different if I had been. Certainly the legend of Ultimate Play the Game will live on, and perhaps that’s as it should be. Yes, gamers do need their legends.

(Magazine sources: Your Computer of June 1983; Home Computing Weekly of August 9 1983; Popular Computing Weekly of August 18 1983, November 10 1983; Personal Computer Games of Summer 1983, January 1985; Computer and Video Games of March 1986; The Games Machine of March 1988; Retro Gamer #20; Edge of September 1994; Commodore User of July 1985; Next Generation of November 1995. Warren Robinett and Atari Adventure material drawn from Racing the Beam by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost and Jason Scott’s Get Lamp interview with Robinett. Nintendo material drawn from Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World by David Sheff.

Rare has consistently refused to grant permission to distribute the old Ultimate catalog and been quite aggressive with those who do so without approval. Since their lawyers are doubtless bigger than mine, no downloads this time. Sorry!)

Comments
39 Responses

- matt w

January 14, 2014 at 12:58 pm

Copy edit patrol: In the paragraph beginning “Born in 1958,” I think you’ve switched Tim’s and Chris’s names once.

- Jimmy Maher

January 14, 2014 at 1:09 pm

Thanks!

- Jaime Cifuentes Olivares

January 14, 2014 at 3:16 pm

Hello,

These games were the reason I decided to become a game programmer when I was 9 years old.

I think they deserve the credit of having created a whole generation of game developers that wanted to create games like the ones they did.

JetPac was the first game I played on my Spectrum, I remember that day like it was yesterday.

And in my opinion, Knight Lore was what made the revolution in the industry at that time. It was years light beyond of anything else.

Thank you for creating these games

And thank you for the article

- Andrew Plotkin

January 14, 2014 at 5:33 pm

Geometric nitpicking:

Isometric projections all have the property that distant objects are the same size as near ones. That’s the definition of “isometric”. (Put differently: in isometric, parallel lines stay parallel. In perspective projections, parallel lines converge to a vanishing point.)

The “sweet spot” is about making the grid line up. If you pick the right viewing angle, then a unit of depth is drawn as 1/2 unit up and 1 unit left. So tiles of every altitude fit onto the same 2D screen grid. (Imagine drawing a grid of diamonds on the Knight Lore screenshot.)

You can imagine differently-skewed isometric projections, but this one allowed programmers to work without weird fractional tile-offsets.

- Jimmy Maher

January 15, 2014 at 6:38 am

Thanks for this. I tend to be on shaky ground when it comes to matters 3D. Made a slight edit to make this passage less misleading.

- Ice Cream Jonsey

January 14, 2014 at 7:19 pm

Hi Jimmy, just a small correction – Q*bert was produced by Gottlieb, not Atari.

- Jimmy Maher

January 15, 2014 at 6:38 am

Thanks!

- Steve-O

July 24, 2014 at 1:19 am

And while we’re on the subject, Zaxxon was a Sega game. I don’t think Taito were involved.

- Jimmy Maher

July 24, 2014 at 5:53 am

0 for 2, eh? Thanks!

- Mark Ricard

January 15, 2014 at 5:21 am

It is very interesting that the big pioneers of action-adventure hybrid games came to Nintendo. Did they have anything to do with Legend of Zelda? That certainly fits their style. It was also one of my favorite games as a kid.

- Jimmy Maher

January 15, 2014 at 6:41 am

No, Zelda was written in-house by Nintendo. It slightly predates Rare/Ultimate’s involvement with the company.

- Kate Willaert

June 29, 2014 at 7:39 pm

From the sequence of events you give, it sounds like they were signed by Nintendo before selling Ultimate and starting Rare? Legend Of Zelda was released in Japan in early 1986. If they were talking with Nintendo in 1985 (or earlier?), might it be possible that one of the demos they showed Nintendo was Atic Atac or a game like it, and maybe Miyamoto was inspired to do something similar?

Though one thing I wonder: after Zelda became popular, why did Rare not revive Atic Atac on Nintendo? Did U.S. Gold own the license to those games, and Rare didn’t get them back until much later?

And even if that was the case, they easily could’ve created a brand new top-down action-adventure IP. It’s kind of strange they didn’t take advantage of that. But looking at a list of their NES output, maybe they were too busy cranking out licensed games.

- Jimmy Maher

June 30, 2014 at 7:31 am

Any answers I might give would just be speculation, and I’m not even among those most qualified to speculate, since I don’t know much about gaming in Japan. For what’s it worth, I’m inclined to think it’s most likely just a case of parallel evolution. People can and often do make similar breakthroughs simultaneously…

- Mark Ricard

January 15, 2014 at 5:23 am

Zelda, is of course goes without saying is one of the most successful examples of the action/adventure hybrid made for gaming consoles. But maybe nostalgia is clouding my views.

- Tale

January 15, 2014 at 9:49 am

Don’t you mean *thick* glass? Though I’d like me some think glass!

Otherwise, as always very illuminating for someone who has little to no knowledge of this era in videogaming.

- Jimmy Maher

January 15, 2014 at 9:59 am

Thanks!

- Eli

January 15, 2014 at 11:03 am

That is one deep article (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Knight Lore really makes me think of Diablo 1. The more I learn about the history of gaming, the more it diminishes my amazement of some of the later entrants. It looks like quite a few great games were “inspired” by others that came before them.

Still, love this website and everything on it. Thanks for doing this, Jimmy.

- namekuseijin

January 28, 2014 at 9:09 pm

@Eli, yeah

as I grow older, I feel like I have more fun learning of older games than playing modern rehashes of the same old Spacewar! shoot-and-dodge repetitive gameplay…

- Pierre

January 15, 2014 at 8:20 pm

I love it when I learn something new. One more peace of the history of video games and the British involvement clicked into place. Thanks for that.

- Mark Ricard

January 16, 2014 at 11:16 pm

Jim. I have two off topic questions for you.1. You are mentioned as one of the co-authors of Art of The Fugue. What was your role in programming that game. 2. Have you thought updating your IF game recommendation list. It only up to 2005. Maybe you do it as a a independent list. The best of recent times or something like that.

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2014 at 6:33 am

1. It’s been a while, but as I recall my wife and I devised and programmed at least one of the puzzles.

2. I haven’t played IF of the last few years extensively enough to be a good choice for such a project. Just the best-reviewed games, which means my list would just be a regurgitation of the critical consensus, and what fun is that?

- Mark Ricard

January 17, 2014 at 4:22 pm

I got up to the seventh game and tried the eighth. Too bad it kept crashing. So there are two more to finish. Which puzzle did you do? Victor Gberes said he might post high scores for some of the puzzles but has he done that yet?

- Jimmy Maher

January 18, 2014 at 8:43 am

1. Sorry, just don’t remember. One or two of the middle puzzles I think. I’m sure it must be in the credits somewhere.

2. Again, no idea. You’ll have to check with Victor.

In the future, it might be best if you could just email me with off-topic inquiries like this. That way we don’t clutter up the comments to individual posts. ;)

- MCP

January 18, 2014 at 12:27 am

Good article indeed, Jimmy.

As for the effectiveness of Ultimate team vision and planning ahead – aka “future world domination project”: it is curious to note that Rare achieved real superstardom only in the middle/late SuperNES era, with Donkey Kong Country (1994), Killer Instinct (1995) and their impressive silicon-graphics-based visual approach.

That’s to say: more than ten years after first experimenting with Nintendo hardware, which in gaming world is a very long time. Looking at their proper NES/Famicom output, I see it was huge in numbers, with some of the titles (Battletoads, Captain Skyhawk) being also critically acclaimed and technically great. But it’s difficult to say they enjoyed the same level of success as in Spectrum days – even though Japanese and worlwide market sales were probably good enough, the games did not leave a big mark in gamers’ memories as Speccy and then SNES titles did.

- namekuseijin

January 28, 2014 at 9:16 pm

I truly enjoyed their 2 efforts in the SNES: Battlemaniacs and DKC series. But they really peaked with a James Bond license for the N64: Goldeneye, a real joy and gem. They were all alone in the market as a second party for Nintendo for that ill-fated platform, but their output was sheer genius: Blast Corps, Banjo & Kazooie, Perfect Dark… I’m a console/arcade gamer by heart. IF and a few select puzzle games for smartphones are my only ventures outside console heaven…

- Pingback: Links for January 22, 2014 | Andrzej's Links

- Iggy Drougge

January 23, 2014 at 6:31 am

There was in fact another British coin-op developer: Century Electronics, not to be confused with the American coin-op manufacturer, Centuri.

- Jimmy Maher

January 23, 2014 at 8:52 am

I knew one of you would come through. :) Thanks, minor edit made.

- Gavin

January 29, 2014 at 9:33 pm

The UPtG story doesn’t quite end there!
http://www.livewiredesign.co.uk/#sthash.wJegjO2w.dpbs

- Asterisk

May 16, 2014 at 5:00 pm

Are you sure that Zilec was involved in the development of Gyruss? The list of Zilec games that you linked to doesn’t mention Gyruss, and all of the other online resources seem to indicate that it was designed in-house at Konami by Yoshiki Okamoto.

- Jimmy Maher

May 16, 2014 at 5:16 pm

This is asserted in an article in the July 1985 Commodore User by Norman Parker, founder of Zilec. It obviously could be false, but seems an odd claim to make if it wasn’t true. In the absence of any primary-source smoking gun to the contrary and the secretiveness of Japanese companies like Konami about who really wrote their games, I’m inclined to credit it as a quiet contract job fairly typical of the industry at that time.

- Marky Potatoes

March 26, 2015 at 1:19 pm

I guarantee that stuff about Gyruss (and likely Frogger) is false. Gyruss has the credits of the game inside the ROM, and they’re Yoshiki Okamoto’s Time Pilot team. Yoshiki Okamoto even claims his inspiration for Gyruss came from his love of Galaga. Plus, Gyruss has a very fluid and detailed game and enemy pattern design that Zilec’s games from the same period (i.e. Saturn) never had. The look and feel of Gyruss is totally different from Zilec games.

- Jimmy Maher

March 29, 2015 at 12:11 pm

Okay, you folks have convinced me. The Gyruss line that has prompted so much discussion is now gone. (Ironically, I wouldn’t know a Gyruss game if it walked up to me and asked itself to dinner.) Why Norman made that claim I have no idea — or maybe a copy-editor mistranscribed something else. Game magazines of the 1980s, like game magazines of today, weren’t really known for their high journalistic standards.

Anyway, thanks!

- sho

October 18, 2015 at 10:00 am

I am not saying this proves anything, but it might just be the grounds for some of the confusion.
This unusually outspoken Ultimate Aug. 1983 interview has a picture of a storyboard that bears an uncanny resemblance to 1983’s Gyruss. (the graphics however suggest a clone rather than the original)

https://archive.org/stream/home-computing-weekly-023/Home_Computing_Weekly_023#page/n32/mode/1up

- Glenn

November 9, 2014 at 7:51 am

What a great article. I remember the Ultimate games coming out when I was a kid. Playing hours and hours on them – great times. And considering the limitations of the Specy’s graphics (the pixel resolution was OK, but the colour resolution was way less, so you couldn’t colour each pixel but only blocks of pixels [one colour foreground, and one back, from memory] what they did was amazing. Ultimate were probably the best at dealing with this by clever placement of their graphics and other things. Let alone the 3D marvel of their later stuff (which was monochrome due to this colour resolution problem but still amazing nonetheless). And all this in less than 48K. Thats the bit that really gets me – how they got graphics and code, enough to do so much, into such little space. Anyway, cool article.

- Jeff

January 8, 2015 at 8:57 pm

Hey, any chance you remember were you sourced this “There is now an awful lot of software out for the Spectrum, but ours will always sell because it’s better. We have worried a lot of our competitors. Suddenly Jetpac came out from nowhere, but in fact we have more experience than all of them. I think we have raised the user expectation of what the Spectrum can do and software houses have been forced to raise their standards in line with us.” from, thanks!

- Jimmy Maher

January 9, 2015 at 6:59 am

Popular Computing Weekly, August 18 1983

- Luca Bordoni

May 19, 2015 at 10:16 am

Hi all, I’m the author of “Land of MIRE MARE”, released about a year ago.
For those who never heard about it, the game is a homebrew tribute to ULTIMATE made with Arcade Game Designer, a tool by Jonathan Cauldwell. Due to AGD memory limits, the adventure cannot be compared to the official Sabreman releases, also considering that my efforts were focused to fit the game in 48K.
The inspiration came from some graphic mockups made by 8bit graphic artist Jarrod Bentley, for a RETRO GAMER article entitled “THE TRAIL OF MIRE MARE”.
The Retro Gamer magazine published a review of Land of Mire Mare (issue #127, homebrew section), giving an 85% score.
Recently, a special edition of the game has been published on some physical boxed cassettes, as a perk for Chris Wilkins’ “The Story of ZX Spectrum Vol.2” through Kickstarter.
In conclusion, on the one hand, Land of Mire Mare is a modest ZX Spectrum program. On the other hand, it’s a little gem to include in any ZX Spectrum collection.

- Chris

October 23, 2015 at 11:56 am

For those who have an Xbox One, Ultimate’s back catalogue is available in the Rare Replay compilation – http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/rare-replay

I can tell I’m a child of the eighties – I can still play these early games competently, but totally suck as soon as the games’ vintage creeps through the nineties :-)

The Merry Pranksters of Automata
January 21, 2014

I closed my last article by noting that Ultimate Play the Game’s works can feel just a bit soulless to me with their slickness and unrelenting commercial focus — an opinion I’m sure many of you don’t share. Well, rest assured that I can’t attach any such complaint to my subject for today.

Automata UK was the creation of a pair of agitators named Mel Croucher and Christian Penfold who became the Merry Pranksters of the early British software industry, mixing absurdist humor with the DIY ethos of punk rock and more than a hint of an agitprop sensibility. Whatever else you care to say about them, you certainly can’t call them slick or commercial. Their works and their rhetoric harkened back to older utopian dreams for personal computing as a means to universal empowerment for all — dreams immersed in the ideals of the counterculture and promoted in the likes of the People’s Computer Company newsletter and the early issues of Creative Computing. With home computing taking off in Britain and the traditional forces of business and culture getting involved in a big way, those dreams were already beginning to sound quaint and anachronistic by the time Automata peaked in 1983 and 1984. Possessed as they were of about the level of business acumen you might expect from a pair of self-described “old hippies,” they were doomed from the start. Still, they had one hell of a lot of fun while they lasted.

Croucher was a disillusioned architect coming off a stint working under Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum to construct the modern Dubai. He’d also worked as a cartographer, played bass in rock bands, and briefly entertained the idea of becoming a painter. If Croucher was the would-be artist and visionary, Penfold was, relatively speaking, the more grounded; he’d sold everything from cars to plants to advertising space amidst various other jobs. Like many fruitful partnerships, they weren’t always sympatico with one another. Croucher declared that he was “to the left of Tony Benn” while Penfold was “to the right of Enoch Powell“: “That’s why it works — otherwise we’d come in in the morning and agree!”

Automata was founded circa 1977 on Croucher’s Dubai windfall. Like Melbourne House, it wasn’t initially conceived as a game or software developer, as is betrayed by the original full name: “Automata Cartography.” Capitalizing on Croucher’s background in cartography, they made tourist-friendly informational brochures and maps for the likes of the Sealink ferry service and British Airways. Those soon morphed into audio travel guides and promotions for foreign hotels as well as radio spots. Their guide to their home base of Portsmouth, narrated in the persona of of all people Charles Dickens, was heard by every tourist who booked a pleasure cruise around the harbor. They even produced some feature radio programming, such as a quiz program for Radio Victory that Penfold described as “rather like University Challenge without the brains.”

Mel Croucher and Christian Penfold, 1983

They were aboard a ferry on the English Channel, returning from working on a production for Sealink in the Channel Islands, when Croucher told Penfold about the Sinclair ZX81 computer he had just purchased, his first exposure to computing since the 1960s, when he’d struggled to teach the big machine at his university how to play “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and flash its lights in rhythm. He’d seen advertisements for computer games in magazines for £4 or £5, a princely sum compared to what he and Penfold were used to getting paid for their work. And he recognized that the world stood on an artistic precipice.

I knew that computers were not for performing business functions at all, but would transform everything I was involved in. I was absolutely convinced that computers would facilitate the convergence of film, book, theatre and music, with the added miracle of interactivity.

Having learned from his struggles with ALGOL in earlier decades that he wasn’t much of a programmer, he asked Penfold if he’d like to take up the task, to implement his (Croucher’s) many ideas; Penfold seemed like he would have a better mind for the task. Penfold, as Croucher has delighted in telling interviewers ever since, promptly threw up — not in reaction to the idea, but because the crossing was rough and he was prone to seasickness. On that auspicious note, the new venture was born.

Options were of course decidedly limited on the ZX81 with its 1 K of memory. So Croucher and Penfold would put ten mini-games onto a cassette, each necessarily trivial in itself but building as a collection to address some overarching theme. Both reacted viscerally to violence in games even in this era when that meant no more than onscreen blobs knocking off other onscreen blobs. “If there is such a thing as an alien, it doesn’t want to come down to earth and get killed,” noted Croucher. “I have yet to find an arcade game where there is a full trial at the start,” rejoined Penfold. Croucher later put it even more strongly: “I think people who create violent games are lazy, ignorant, and have poodle shit for brains.” Thus Automata’s games from first to last would be resolutely nonviolent.

Yet that didn’t keep them from offending in other ways, as evidenced by their aptly named first tape, Can of Worms, with its “piss takes” (Croucher’s words) involving acne, vasectomies, Hitler, and Reagan, and featuring a Space Invaders satire along with Royal Flush, an anti-monarchy screed which, yes, does involve a toilet. It all seemed to Croucher the appropriate response to those combative early years of Thatcher’s reign, times of “repression, depression, recession, and political mayhem.” Some reviewers were predictably outraged, accusing Automata of “peddling pornography to kids” (exactly the sort of reaction, one senses, that Croucher and Penfold were hoping for). Others took it all more casually; Eric Deeson noted bemusedly in Your Computer that Can of Worms “must suffice for readers with bad taste until something more revolting appears.” Croucher and Penfold obligingly tried to up the ante with Love and Death, a progression from fertilization to death (a theme to which they would eventually return for their most famous work) and The Bible, always a subject guaranteed to enrage. All were storyboarded by Croucher and then programmed by Penfold in crude BASIC, which he bragged was like his poetry — “unstructured.”

When the Spectrum appeared and sold like crazy, Automata, like most software houses, quickly made the switch to the new machine with its color graphics and luxurious 48 K of memory. They came into their own with their first game for the Speccy, the most commercially successful they would ever release. Pimania is an illustrated text adventure involving the Piman, a pink fellow with a grotesquely huge nose whose relationship to the player lives on some uncertain ground between ally and antagonist. Croucher had based him on a neighbor, “a deadpan poet with a great Scottish accent and peculiar vocal delivery.” He quickly became Automata’s mascot. Children took to calling the office wanting to speak to him; Croucher or Penfold obligingly played the part. He starred in a comic strip drawn by Robin Evans which ran on the back cover of every issue of Popular Computing Weekly. And he became a beloved presence at shows and other events, with Penfold usually inside the costume. Penfold:

He is an escape — an extension of our own personalities — all the nice and nasty bits rolled into one. But now he no longer just exists in our minds. He is real. He has his own character.

As for the game itself, the first puzzle tells you just about everything you need to know about what you’re in for. The opening screen simply says, “A key turns the lock,” then refuses to do anything else until you figure out that it wants you to press the Spectrum’s PI key. After that you get to work out that navigation is based not on the usual compass directions but the hands of a clock. And then things start to get difficult. Depending on how you look at it and how charitable you’re feeling, Pimania is either a surrealistic but tough-as-nails old-school adventure game, a confused and confusing and essentially unsolvable effort all too typical of beginning designers and programmers writing their first adventure, or a piece of sadistic satire sending up the absurdities of early adventure games.

Whatever its virtues or flaws, Pimania sold quite well, largely on the back of the Piman’s inexplicable popularity and a brilliant promotional idea. This was inspired by Kit Williams’s 1979 children’s book Masquerade, which encoded within it the location of a hare made out of gold and jewels and buried in a secret location somewhere in England. Thousands scoured the book for clues to the golden hare’s whereabouts until an intrepid seeker finally recovered it almost three years after publication. The book itself became a bestseller.

The Golden Sundial of Pi

Croucher and Penfold commissioned De Beers Diamond International Award winner Barbara Tipple to make a Golden Sundial of Pi out of gold, lapis lazuli, obsidian, and diamond, at a claimed price of an extraordinary £6000. Winning Pimania would provide the clues as to where and, crucially, when to show up to claim the prize; only one day of the year would suffice.

Contests were quickly becoming de rigueur for almost every major adventure-game release in Britain, but few attracted the attention and passion of this one. And yet the Pinmania mystery went unsolved, even though Penfold’s BASIC was an accessible target for would-be code divers. As months stretched into years, some began darkly hinting that maybe there wasn’t actually a Golden Sundial at all, that the whole thing was an elaborate practical joke being played on the gaming public — which admittedly would fit right into Automata’s public persona, but would also be unspeakably cruel. One poor fellow, convinced he’d cracked the code, even made plans to jet off to Bethlehem for Christmas. When Penfold and Croucher got wind of that, they were kind enough to tell him through the press that he was on the wrong track; I don’t know whether he believed them or went off anyway. The rather more accessible Stonehenge was a favorite target of many others, while yet more, having worked out a connection to Pegasus, visited seemingly everything everywhere having anything to do with horses. All for naught.

Uncle Grouch (Croucher) and the Piman (Penfold)

Even as the Pimania mystery remained unsolved, Automata launched a new contest to go with their next adventure, which bore the intimidating title of My Name is Uncle Groucho… You Win a Fat Cigar. As trippy as its predecessor, it had players chasing Groucho Marx — who now became Croucher’s alter ego to join Penfold in his Piman suit — around the United States. It was all surreal enough that it led interviewer Tristan Donovan recently to ask Croucher whether “drugs were a factor.” Croucher insists that he and Penfold were running on nothing stronger than beer and cigarettes.

This time the contest at least was a bit more conventional. The first player to identify a celebrity from clues provided in the game would win a trip to Hollywood on the Concorde and passage back home on the QE2. This one had an actual winner in relatively short order, one Phil Daley of Stoke-on-Tent. The celebrity in question, it turned out, was Mickey Mouse.

In addition to their own games, Croucher and Penfold also published quite a number of titles which they received from outside programmers. Each would be retrofitted into Automata’s ever-growing lore, which soon included a cast of characters largely drawn from the comic strip, with names like Ooncle Arthur, Swettibitz, and (my favorite) Lady Clair Sinclive. Each outside submission got an appropriately Automatatized new name, usually an awful pun: Pi-Balled, Pi-Eyed, Pi in the Sky. And each also got a theme song on the other side of the cassette, recorded on a little studio setup in Croucher’s front room. On these Croucher, who was something of a frustrated rock star, could run wild. The results are some weird amalgamation of musique concrète, New Wave synth-pop, a Monty Python sketch, and Croucher’s personal hero Frank Zappa. Or, for another set of comparisons: Your Computer called the track below (included with the Groucho game) “a curious fusion of a Mark Knopfler vocal and Depeche Mode backing, with a Bonzo Dog Band playout.”

And then came 1984 and Croucher’s magnum opus, Deus Ex Machina. He largely retired from Merry Prankstering for some six months to pour his heart and soul into it. He described it not as an Automata project proper but a “personal indulgence.” He believed he was creating Art, as well as the future of computerized entertainment:

I thought that by the mid-1980s ALL cutting-edge computer games would be like interactive movies, with proper structures, real characters, half-decent original stories, an acceptable soundtrack, a variety of user-defined narratives and variable outcomes. So I thought I’d better get in first, and produce the computer-game equivalent to Metropolis and Citizen Kane before the bastards started churning out dross. I wanted individuals to become totally immersed in the piece.

Penfold recognized Deus Ex Machina as “the crescendo of an idea” for Croucher, “an emotional achievement.”

Croucher had the idea of synchronizing a soundtrack to a computer game, to create an integrated, multimedia experience well before that word was in common usage. Because the Spectrum’s sound capabilities were rudimentary at best, the soundtrack would come on a separate cassette which the player must play at the same time as the game. The theme would be worthy of a prog-rock concept album: the journey of an individual through Shakespeare’s Seven Stages of Man in a vaguely dystopian postmodern world of mechanization, media saturation, and “Defect Police.”. Perhaps it didn’t make a whole lot of literal sense — you’re somehow born from a dropping left behind by the last mouse on earth “as the nerve gas eased its sphincter” — but that hadn’t stopped Tommy or The Wall, had it?

The soundtrack, some 45 minutes in length, was mostly recorded by Croucher at home; he would have loved to have put a “half-decent band” together, but finances wouldn’t allow. He was, however, determined to get some well-known voices to feature on it, and to record them properly. He therefore booked precious time in a big London studio.

He recruited Frankie Howerd, an old-school showman and perennial on the British comedic circuit known if not always loved by everyone in Britain in the same way as a Rodney Dangerfield or Gallagher in the United States, to play the role of the head of the Defect Police, a “terrifying idiot.” (“It turned out that the real thing would eventually appear in the form of George W. Bush, but let’s not get into that.”) Howerd showed little understanding or interest in the project. He did his job — no more, no less.

More enthusiastic was former Doctor Who Jon Pertwee as the master of ceremonies. He angered everyone by arriving two hours late for his session, but explained that he’d fallen off his motorcycle on the way over and literally limped in as quickly as he could, bruised and still in leathers. All was forgiven, especially when he did a brilliant job. He and Croucher became fast friends, so much so that they later wrote a book together full of absurdist ramblings.

Croucher first wanted Patrick Moore, an eccentric popularizer of astronomy who was sort of the British Carl Sagan, complete with unforgettable ticks that made him a television natural, to play the part of a sperm — “that would have been utterly surreal.” But when that fell through, he lucked into pub rocker Ian Dury of “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” fame. Dury “hated what mainstream games were offering kids,” and was excited to work on an alternative.

For the female voice of the machine, Dury recommended Marianne Faithfull, but she “was buried in drugs and we couldn’t get a meeting together.” After a bid for pop diva Hazel O’Connor also fell through, Croucher settled on a local singer named Donna Bailey, who wound up contributing the best singing on the soundtrack by far. The choir from nearby Warblington School also popped in to provide some “Another Brick in the Wall”-style vocals.

The game that accompanied all this was programmed to Croucher’s specifications by Andrew Stagg, a “boy genius” assembly coder he had discovered. It consists of a series of simple action games synchronized to the soundtrack. Your goal, such as it is, is to keep your “degree of ideal entity” as high as possible; each mistake in the games costs you percentage points. However, play continues inexorably onward no matter how badly you screw up, an obvious limitation of syncing a non-interactive soundtrack to an allegedly interactive experience. Then again, maybe that’s for the best: the games are not only of rather limited interest but also brutally difficult. I’ve never seen anyone get to the end with anything other than the worst possible score of 0%. For Croucher, the score wasn’t the point anyway:

The metaphor of the score is incidental, and I hoped people would interpret it to suit themselves. Do nothing — you’ll never win. Do everything right — you’ll feel good for a while, you’ll be regarded well according to society’s rules, but you’ll still never win. However, as the man [on the soundtrack] says — Imagine if this was nothing more than a computer game and we could start our lives all over again, and do it better. That was the only meaning really.

I have some problems with Deus Ex Machina and the rhetoric deployed around it, which we’ll get to momentarily, but when it works it can approach the total immersion Croucher was striving for, gameplay and music blending into a seamless whole. “The Lover” is a particular favorite, a gentle ballad, well sung by Bailey, that morphs into something more disturbing along with the game on the screen.

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/deus.mp4

Despite good reviews by writers who admittedly weren’t entirely sure what to make of a piece of unabashed multimedia art sandwiched into their usual diet of Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner, despite being released just in time for the big Christmas buying season, sales were about as close to nonexistent as they could conceivably be. By February, some five months on from release, just 700 copies had been sold on the Spectrum; a more recent port to the Commodore 64 had sold all of twelve. Still, Deus Ex Machina won “Program of the Year” from the Computer Trade Association that February. But it was now, as a profile in Sinclair User from this period put it, “an angry, bitter world” for Automata, the easygoing insanity of Groucho and the Piman replaced by uglier sentiments. Penfold dropped all of the jokey pretensions at his acceptance speech to voice his opinion of the state of a changed industry in no uncertain terms.

He and Croucher blamed Deus Ex Machina‘s failure entirely on new systems of software distribution. When they had gotten into the business back in 1981, software was sold mostly via mail-order advertisements in the hobbyist magazines, with the remainder being sold directly to the handful of computer shops scattered around the country. This approach became untenable, however, when computers came to the High Street and the big vanilla chains like Boots and W.H. Smith got into the game. As in virtually every other retail industry, distributors stepped in to act as the middle men between the publishers and the final points of sale. With far more software being produced by 1984 than they could possibly handle, these could afford to be selective; indeed, they would say their survival depended upon it. They carefully evaluated each game sent to them to establish not only whether it was a reasonably professional, bug-free effort but also whether it had enough mass appeal to be worthy of precious shelf space. There was an inevitable power imbalance at play: small publishers, desperate to get their games onto shelves in what was turning into a very uncertain year, needed distributors more than distributors needed them. Thus the distributors could afford to drive hard bargains, demanding a 40 to 60 percent discount off retail price and a grace period of up to two months after delivery to pay the bill. They also wanted games to fit into one of three price points: £2 for older “classics” and newer discount titles; £6 for typical new games; £10 for big prestige releases like The Lords of Midnight or anything from the demigods over at Ultimate Play the Game.

Automata bucked every one of these demands. Not only did they continue to demand high margins and cash on delivery, but they insisted that Deus Ex Machina retail at a grandiose £15. They weren’t entirely alone; others fought the new world order and sometimes, at least temporarily, won. The most famous among them is Acornsoft, who insisted on a similarly high price point for Elite. When a number of distributors refused to carry the game, Acornsoft simply shrugged and sold to those who would, until Elite became a transformative hit and the recalcitrant distributors came back begging for Acornsoft’s business. The artsy, avant-garde Deus Ex Machina, however, obviously lacked the mass appeal of an Elite. This time it was mostly the distributors who shrugged and moved on, with a predictable impact on the game’s commercial fortunes.

Given these circumstances, Croucher was and is eager to attribute Deus Ex Machina‘s fate to the age-old struggle between art and commerce:

The corporates had taken over as they always will when they spot a new lucrative market. They wanted standard product. Deus was designed as non-standard and I got the market completely wrong.

I suppose that’s fair enough as far as it goes, even given the odd fact that Automata was in a death struggle to charge their customers more than the going rate. The thing is, though, the suits were kind of right in this instance. Taken as a one- or two-time experience, Deus Ex Machina is intriguing, even inspiring. As a game, however, it’s not up to much at all. It took a retrospective review in ACE magazine to finally acknowledge the obvious: “the actual gameplay was strictly humdrum.” Now, Croucher and others might respond, and not without justification, that to evaluate it the same way one evaluates a more traditional game is rather missing the point; Deus Ex Machina is more multimedia experience than game. Fair enough. Except that it’s hard to overlook the fact that players were being asked to pay £15 for the privilege, one hell of a lot of money in 1984 Britain. For that price — or, for that matter, for £10 or £6 or even £2 — they deserved more than an hour or two of entertainment. Deus Ex Machina‘s failure to find a market was indeed a failure of distribution. Yet it’s not one that can really be blamed on the distributors; again, that’s just the way that the retail business works, whether you’re selling shoes, books, or computer software. It wasn’t their fault that there was no practical way to get shorter-form works to the public for a price that wouldn’t leave them feeling ripped off. The distributors just recognized, probably rightly, that there was no practical place for Deus Ex Machina in the software industry of 1984. Such is the curse of the visionary.

Automata never recovered commercially or psychologically from the failure of Deus Ex Machina. The old spirit of anarchic fun became one of passive-aggressive petulance. “Automata’s next product will be something truly wonderful, but we’re just not going to release it until everybody pulls their socks up,” Penfold declared. “Automata are too good for this industry.”

Croucher walked away in mid-1985. Penfold at first did the expected, declaring his intention to struggle on, but Croucher’s departure marked the effective end to Automata as a going concern. Penfold dropped out of sight, while Croucher continued his career as (in Jaroslav Švelch’s words) a “perpetually failed visionary.” He designed another avant-garde game or two for other publishers; tried and failed to launch a multimedia game console that would combine laser-disc video with traditional computer graphics; wrote a linked series of comic fantasy adventures of one Tamara Knight for Crash magazine; wrote a column for Computer Shopper; designed a game and a viral-marketing campaign for Duracell; did God knows what all inside and outside the computer industry. He recently launched a new edition of Automata and secured Kickstarter funding for a Deus Ex Machina 2 which has not yet emerged.

The original Deus Ex Machina has become a minor cause célèbre of academics and advocates for games as art, who tend to overrate it somewhat; it’s certainly interesting, certainly visionary, but hardly a deathless masterpiece. It’s simply the best that could be done by these people with these resources at this time — and there’s no shame in that. Much the same could be said about the rest of Automata’s works. They’re great to talk about, but too crude to be all that engaging to play today. Automata embraced a punk-rock ethos of production, but failed to recognize that games have in some senses a higher bar to clear. A bit of hiss on a record may be discountable, even charming, but a game with similar technical flaws is simply excruciating to play; it’s right here that comparisons between independent games and independent music break down horribly. Appropriately enough for what often seemed more an exercise in performance art than a real software company, Automata’s crazy catalog of subversive games is most fascinating simply because it existed at all.

Mel Croucher, Sue Cooper, Christian Penfold (as the Piman), and Lizi Newman

But before Automata leaves the stage and I end this article, there’s one more piece of the story to tell. On July 22, 1985, Sue Cooper and Lizi Newman, a schoolteacher and music-shop proprietor respectively from Yorkshire, arrived at an odd local landmark on the Sussex Downs: a gigantic horse cut into a chalk hill. They stood at the horse’s mouth in a driving rain, looking around nervously. Then the Piman clambered out from behind a clump of bushes. He presented the ladies with their prize while Croucher played his theme song one last time. Automata had played fair after all; the Golden Sundial of Pi was real. Perhaps due to the fact that Automata was winding down and they were tired of spending their July 22s crouching in the Sussex mud, they had even shown the women a bit of mercy: they really should have been standing at the horse’s arse.

(If you’d like to experience Deus Ex Machina for yourself — and despite my reservations it’s well worth the effort — I’ve prepared a care package with the Spectrum tape image, the soundtrack as MP3 files, and the manual. Both sides of the tape are in the same tape image. The emulator should automatically load in the second side when the time comes, leaving you only to start the second soundtrack. That how it works under Fuse, anyway.

Information and art for this article were drawn from the following magazines: Your Spectrum of December 1984; Popular Computing Weekly of June 30 1983, January 12 1984, April 4 1985, November 28 1985; Home Computing Weekly of July 19 1983, December 13 1983, February 26 1985; Computer and Video Games of November 1982, December 1982, January 1984, October 1985, September 1986; Crash of February 1984, May 1985, April 1986; Big K of December 1984; Sinclair User of September 1984, February 1985, April 1985; Your Computer of February 1982, December 1983; ACE of May 1988; Computer Choice of January 1984. Also invaluable were ZX Golden Years, the new Automata website, the Deus Ex Machina 2 website, and the Piman Files. The latter includes all of the Automata songs as MP3 files, including the one I’ve sampled here.)

Comments
16 Responses

- Felix

January 21, 2014 at 6:24 pm

Appropriately enough, the song you embedded makes for a nice background while reading the article. What a strange story, but at least it has a happy ending of sorts. Fun!

- X

January 21, 2014 at 6:52 pm

You mean “sympatico” not “in sympicato”?

Re the puzzle: Approximate Pi Day, I get; but what was the reason for this particular horse? Did the ladies figure it out or were they using the random-horse-location shotgun approach?

- Jimmy Maher

January 21, 2014 at 7:03 pm

It seems I do. :) Thanks!

From the article in Computer and Video Games magazine:

The horse clue comes from the Pimania map, in the shape of Pegasus, the horse. So Sue and Lizi visited public libraries, and consulted books such as Collins Field Guide and Hill Figures, to try to decide on the correct ‘horse’ location. They visited quite a few, including one at Westbury, and this was their second attempt at a claim, the first being at Uffington.

The clue that pointed them to the correct geographical location was the fact that Pegasus is near the Seven Sisters of the Plough. Their search, after a misleading pointer to Cambridgeshire in the Field Guide, finally put them on to the Seven Sisters Cliffs between Seaford Head and Over.

However, they were not convinced that they had the right spot until they made a pre-visit the day before. They saw the large compass mounted on a pillar, close to the car park entrance at this beauty spot. They also noticed the inscription of Psalm 33 on a metal plate set in stone (and adjacent to Psalm 34 in the game) nearby. But it wasn’t until they saw the view down into the Cuckmere Valley, where the river meanders to its outlet at Cuckmere Heaven, that they became convinced that this was indeed the view shown in the Pimania graphic when looking through the telescope.

- X

January 21, 2014 at 7:15 pm

Wow, I looked up the rest of the story, and it’s amazing anybody figured this out without the Internet. Now I wonder… whatever happend to the sundial. Surely it’s worth more than 6000£ today, just as a collectors’ item.

Also, it strikes me how uniquely British the puzzle is (gee-gee? really?). An American would doubtless wind up standing forlornly in the rain on March 14.

- Jimmy Maher

January 21, 2014 at 7:40 pm

Good question. I do kind of wonder whether it REALLY cost £6000. It doesn’t look like much in the picture, and Croucher and Penfold didn’t strike as flush enough to have £6000 just lying around. But who knows? They did come through on the trip to America, and Concorde plus QE2 fare plus accommodations in Hollywood couldn’t have been cheap.

Only thing to do would be to track down one of the women — a treasure hunt in itself, especially considering neither’s name is terribly uncommon.

- David Boddie

January 21, 2014 at 9:51 pm

The use of music to augment a computer game reminded me of something vaguely similar that came up on the stardot forums. A new member mentioned a record with a program track that contained a music video for another track. One of the other members did the hard work of putting the two together to complete the experience.

It’s not a game, but it seems like the time was right for experimentation with computers and music.

- Jimmy Maher

January 22, 2014 at 10:19 am

There was actually a fair amount of that sort of thing going on in the early 1980s, albeit most were for the Speccy because that was the most common platform. I believe Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks fame had one like it among others. And once Thorn EMI got involved with software it became a natural cross-promotional strategy.

- David Boddie

January 22, 2014 at 11:02 am

I wonder how much of this stuff has survived. Promotional items are often throwaway items: cover disks, tapes, records…

- Jimmy Maher

January 22, 2014 at 11:36 am

Many were B-sides of singles and the like. I’m sure any done by “name” artists like Shelley at least are still around somewhere, albeit probably more likely to be found in music collections than software collections…

- Jimmy Maher

January 24, 2014 at 2:50 pm

Stumbled across the Pete Shelley thing in the course of other research today. It was actually his album XL-1 which had a special track with a program to display the lyrics to the songs on a Spectrum.

- Anthony

January 30, 2014 at 2:30 pm

Jimmy, another brilliant read. I’m delighted to see that you’re covering the UK scene in such detail. There’s so much I missed out on at the time (through a combination of youth and stupidity).

Although your forthcoming book will do much to redress the balance, I still think there really ought to be more interest in these 8-bit tales in the mainstream media too. For example, the BBC eventually made a documentary about Kit Williams and the Masquerade treasure hunt, which inspired Pimania, but seems to have generally ignored Pimania itself, even though, as you’ve ably demonstrated here, it’s a story that sheds light on society, the economy, and the politics of the 1980s in a unique and fascinating way.

Btw, there was an 8-bit connection to Masquerade too. The controversial (and probably cheating) “winner” of the golden hare prize exploited the publicity of Masquerade to set up Haresoft, which made and sold the hare-based Hareraiser puzzle games for 8-bit machines, with a reported prize of £30,000 for the first correct solution! The prize was never claimed and Haresoft went bust. The golden hare was auctioned off by creditors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hareraiser

- Jimmy Maher

January 31, 2014 at 7:28 am

I wasn’t aware at all of Masquerade’s other connections to computer gaming. Thanks for this!

For the benefit of others: the BBC documentary Anthony mentions is currently available on YouTube, albeit in chopped-up form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEIFm0UHtoo&list=PLUK8IjafilJCxYzkorZcnAIIHCpkZ2ZiH.

- Anthony

February 2, 2014 at 8:49 pm

You’re welcome, Jimmy. I didn’t know any of this stuff about Haresoft either — your Pimania post inspired me to start looking into the matter, and I quickly found myself disappearing down a rabbit-hole* of fact, myth, and rumour.

Several days later, I emerged, bleary-eyed and confused, with a mere handful of links.

Still, here they are.

News (to be taken with a pinch of salt) about Haresoft and the golden hare, plus reviews of Hareraiser, from The Micro User magazine, 1984-5: http://plus.google.com/101965021336994942962/posts/g7cqd8Z9zCS

Screenshots of the Hareraiser games: http://www.acornelectron.co.uk/profs/electron/cats/haresoft.html

N.B. The first part of that documentary you linked to seems to have had its audio removed.

* “Hare-hole” sounded a bit dodgy.

- Piers Sutton

September 24, 2014 at 11:00 pm

Loving the coverage of the UK, and this article in particular is a fascinating read. Apparently that gentleman did go to Israel, and there were a few other strange treasure seekers involved; including a man who tried to book passage on the Space Shuttle (or so the article says). Though you reference the root site I didn’t see the path into this page, so here it is anyway.

http://worldofspectrum.org/hardware/answer.htm

- Dehumanizer

January 18, 2015 at 11:00 am

I know this is a relatively old post, but…

“which bore the intimidating title of My Name is Uncle Groucho… You Win a Big Fat Cigar” – according to World of Spectrum, it’s just “a Fat Cigar”, without the “Big”

“Despite good reviewers by writers” – should be “reviews”

- Jimmy Maher

January 18, 2015 at 11:11 am

Thanks!