Jimmy Maher (maher@filfre.net)

The Digital Antiquarian
Volume 7: 1985
Comments Edition

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Contents

1. This Tormented Business, Part 2

1. Comments

2. QL Pawn

1. Comments

3. Macintosh

1. Comments

4. Macware

1. Comments

5. Mindwheel (or, The Poet and the Hackers)

1. Comments

6. Essex and Brimstone

1. Comments

7. This Tormented Business, Part 3

1. Comments

8. Down From the Top

1. Comments

9. Wishbringer

1. Comments

10. Fooblitzky

1. Comments

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

1. Comments

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

1. Comments

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

1. Comments

14. Spellbreaker

1. Comments

15. Perry Mason: The Case of the Mandarin Murder

1. Comments

16. Nine Princes in Amber

1. Comments

17. An Alternate Chronicle of Amber

18. Comprehend

1. Comments

19. Of Wizards and Bards

1. Comments

20. The Road to IV

1. Comments

21. Ultima IV

1. Comments

22. Human Engineered Software (or, The Software Icarus)

1. Comments

23. Project: Space Station, Part 1: The Reality

1. Comments

24. Project: Space Station, Part 2: The Dream

1. Comments

25. Project: Space Station, Part 3: The Game

1. Comments

26. Apple, Carmen Sandiego, and the Rise of Edutainment

1. Comments

This Tormented Business, Part 2
February 4, 2014

In December of 1984 Sir Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry, heads of those leading lights of the British PC revolution Sinclair Research and Acorn Computers respectively, gave a Daily Mirror columnist named Michael Jeacock a Christmas gift for the ages. Like Jeacock, Sinclair and Curry were having a drink — separately — with colleagues in the Baron of Beef pub, a popular watering hole for the hackers and engineers employed in Cambridge’s “Silicon Fen.” Spotting his rival across the room, Sinclair marched up to him and started to give him a piece of his mind. It seemed he was very unhappy about a recent series of Acorn advertisements which accused Sinclair computers of shoddy workmanship and poor reliability. To make sure Curry fully understood his position, he emphasized his words with repeated whacks about the head and shoulders with a rolled-up newspaper. Curry took understandable exception, and a certain amount of pushing and shoving ensued, although no actual punches were thrown. The conflict apparently broke out again later that evening at Shades, a quieter wine bar to which the two had adjourned to patch up their differences — unsuccessfully by all indications.

If you know anything about Fleet Street, you know how they reacted to a goldmine like this. Jeacock’s relatively staid account which greeted readers who opened the Christmas Eve edition of the Daily Mirror was only the beginning. Soon the tabloids were buzzing gleefully over what quickly became a full-blown “punch-up.” Some wrote in a fever of indignation over such undignified antics; Sinclair had just been knighted, for God’s sake. Others wrote in a different sort of fever: another Daily Mirror columnist, Jean Rook, wrote that she found Sinclair’s aggression sexually exciting.

It would be a few more months before the British public would begin to understand the real reason these middle-aged boffins had acted such fools. Still heralded publicly as the standard bearers of the new British economy, they were coming to the private realization that things had all gone inexplicably, horribly wrong for their companies. Both were staring down a veritable abyss, with no idea how to pull up or leap over. They were getting desperate — and desperation makes people behave in undignified and, well, desperate ways. They couldn’t even blame their situations on fate and misfortune, even if 1984 had been a year of inevitable changes and shakeouts which had left the software industry confused by its contradictory signs and portents and seen the end or the beginning of the end of weak sisters on the hardware side like Dragon, Camputers, and Oric. No, their situations were directly attributable to decisions they had personally made over the last eighteen months. Each made many of these decisions against his better judgment in the hope of one-upping his rival. Indeed, the corporate rivalry that led them to a public bar fight — and the far worse indignities still to come — has a Shakespearian dimension, being bound up in the relationship between these two once and future friends, each rampantly egotistical and deeply insecure in equal measure and each coveting what the other had. Rarely does business get so personal.

Acorn’s flagship computer, the BBC Micro, is amusingly described by Francis Spufford in Backroom Boys as the Volvo of early British computers: safe, absurdly well-engineered and well-built, expensive, and just a little bit boring. Acorn had taken full advantage of the BBC’s institutional blessing to sell the machine in huge quantities to another set of institutions, the British school system; by the mid-1980s some 90% of British schools had BBC Micros on the premises. Those sales, combined with others to small businesses and to well-heeled families looking for a stolid, professional-quality machine for the back office — i.e., the sorts of families likely to have a Volvo in the driveway as well — were more than enough to make a booming business of Acorn.

Yet when the person on the street thought about computers, it wasn’t Curry’s name or even Acorn’s that popped first to mind. No, it was the avuncular boffin Uncle Clive and his cheap and cheerful Spectrum. It was Sinclair who was knighted for his “service to British industry”; Sinclair who was sought out for endless radio, television, and print interviews to pontificate on the state of the nation. Even more cuttingly, it was the Spectrum that a generation of young Britons came to love — a generation that dutifully pecked out their assignments on the BBC Micros at their schools and then rushed home to gather around their Speccys and have some fun. Chris Curry wanted some of their love as well.

Enter in 1983 the Acorn Electron, a radically cost-reduced version of the BBC Micro designed to take on the Spectrum on its own turf. Enthusiasm for the Electron amongst the rank and file at Acorn was questionable at best. Most were not afflicted with Curry’s need to show up his old boss, but rather manifested a strain of stuffy Cambridge elitism that would cling to Acorn throughout its history. They held Sinclair’s cheap machines and the games they played in a certain contempt. They were happy to cede that segment to him, would rather be working on innovative new technology — Acorn had already initiated a 32-bit RISC processor project that would eventually result in the ubiquitous ARM architecture that dominates smartphones and tablets today — than repackaging old for mewling schoolchildren. Curry had to struggle mightily to push the Electron project through in the face of such indifference.

A price of £200, about half that of the BBC Micro, would get buyers the same 32 K of memory and the same excellent BASIC, albeit in a smaller, less professional case. However, the Electron’s overall performance was sharply curtailed by an inefficient (but cheaper) new memory configuration. The Electron’s sound capabilities also suffered greatly by comparison with its big brother, and the BBC Micro’s Mode 7, a text-only display mode that programmers loved because it greatly reduced the amount of precious memory that needed to be allocated to the display, was eliminated entirely. And, much cheaper than the BBC Micro though it may have been, it was still more expensive than the Spectrum. On paper it would seem quite a dubious proposition. Still, a considerable number of punters went for it that Christmas of 1983, the very peak of the British micro boom. Many were perhaps made willing to part with a bit more cash by the Electron’s solidity and obviously superior build quality in comparison to the Speccy.

But now Curry found himself in a truly heartbreaking position for any captain of industry: he couldn’t meet the demand. Now that it was done, many months behind schedule, problems with suppliers and processes which no one had bothered to address during development meant that Electrons trickled rather than poured into stores. “We’re having to disappoint customers,” announced a spokeswoman for W.H. Smith. “We are not able to supply demand. What we have has sold out, and while we are expecting more deliveries the amount will still be well below demand.” By some estimates, Acorn missed out on as many as 100,000 Electron sales that Christmas. Worse, most of those in W.H. Smith and other shops who found the Electrons sold out presumably shrugged and walked away with a Spectrum or a Commodore 64 instead — mustn’t disappoint the children who expected to find a shiny new computer under the tree.

Never again was the lesson that Curry took away from the episode. Whatever else happened, he was damn sure going to have enough Electrons to feed demand next Christmas. Already in June of 1984 Curry had Acorn start placing huge orders with suppliers and subcontractors. He filled his warehouses with the things, then waited for the big Christmas orders to start. This time he was going to make a killing and give old Clive a run for his money.

The orders never came. The home-computer market had indeed peaked the previous Christmas. While lots of Spectrums were sold that Christmas of 1984 in absolute numbers, it wasn’t a patch on the year before. And with the Spectrum more entrenched than ever as the biggest gaming platform in Britain, and the Commodore 64 as the second biggest, people just weren’t much interested in the Electron anymore. Six months into the following year Acorn’s warehouses still contained at least 70,000 completed Electrons along with components for many more. “The popular games-playing market has become a very uncomfortable place to be. Price competition will be horrific. It is not a market we want to be in for very long,” said Curry. The problem was, he was in it, up to his eyebrows, and he had no idea how to get out.

Taking perhaps too much to heart Margaret Thatcher’s rhetoric about her country’s young microcomputer industry as a path to a new Pax Britannia, Curry had also recently made another awful strategic decision: to push the BBC Micro into the United States. Acorn spent hugely to set up a North American subsidiary and fund an advertising blitz. They succeeded only in learning that there was no place for them in America. The Apple II had long since owned American schools, the Commodore 64 dominated gaming, and IBM PCs and compatibles ruled the world of business computing. And the boom days of home computing were already over in North America just as in Britain; the industry there was undergoing a dramatic slowdown and shakeout of its own. What could an odd British import with poor hardware distribution and poorer software distribution do in the face of all that? The answer was of course absolutely nothing. Acorn walked away humbled and with £10 to £12 million in losses to show for their American adventure.

To add to the misery, domestic sales of the BBC Micro, Acorn’s bread and butter, also began to collapse as 1984 turned into 1985. Preoccupied with long-term projects like the RISC chip as well as short-term stopgaps like the Electron, Acorn had neglected the BBC Micro for far too long. Incredibly, the machine still shipped with just 32 K of memory three years after a much cheaper Spectrum model had debuted with 48 K. This was disastrous from a marketing standpoint. Salespeople on the high streets had long since realized that memory size was the one specification that virtually every customer could understand, that they used this figure along with price as their main points of comparison. (It was no accident that Commodore’s early advertising campaign for the 64 in the United States pounded relentlessly and apparently effectively on “64 K” and “$600” to the exclusion of everything else.) The BBC Micro didn’t fare very well by either metric. Meanwhile the institutional education market had just about reached complete saturation. When you already own 90% of a market, there’s not much more to be done there unless you come up with something new to sell them — something Acorn didn’t have.

How was Acorn to survive? The City couldn’t answer that question, and the share price therefore plunged from a high of 193p to as low as 23p before the Stock Exchange mercifully suspended trading. A savior appeared just in time in the form of the Turin, Italy-based firm Olivetti, a long-established maker of typewriters, calculators, and other business equipment, including recently PCs. Olivetti initially purchased a 49 percent stake in Acorn. When that plus the release of a stopgap 64 K version of the BBC Micro failed to stop the bleeding — shares cratered to as low as 9p and trading had to be suspended again — Olivetti stepped in again to up their stake to 80 percent and take the company fully under their wing. Acorn would survive in the form of an Olivetti subsidiary to eventually change the world with the ARM architecture, but the old dream for Acorn as a proudly and independently British exporter and popularizer of computing was dead, smothered by, as wags were soon putting it, “the Shroud of Turin.”

If Chris Curry wanted the popular love that Clive Sinclair enjoyed, Sir Clive coveted something that belonged to Curry: respectability. The image of his machines as essentially toys, good for games and perhaps a bit of BASIC-learning but not much else, rankled him deeply. He therefore decided that his company’s next computer would not be a direct successor to the Spectrum but rather a “Quantum Leap” into the small-business and educational markets where Acorn had been enjoying so much success.

He shouldn’t have bothered. While the Electron was a competent if somewhat underwhelming little creation, the Sinclair QL was simply botched every which way from Tuesday right from start to finish. Apparently for marketing reasons as much as anything else, Sir Clive decided on a chip from the new Motorola 68000 line that had everyone talking. Yet to save a few pounds he insisted that his engineers use the 68008 rather than the 68000 proper, the former being a crippled version of the latter with an 8-bit rather than 16-bit data bus and, as a result, about half the overall processing potential. He also continued his bizarre aversion to disk drives, insisting that the QL come equipped with two of his Microdrives instead — a classically Sinclairian bit of tortured technology that looked much like one of those old lost and unlamented 8-track audio tapes and managed to be far slower than a floppy disk and far less reliable than a cassette tape (previously the most unreliable form of computer storage known to man). The only possible justification for the contraption was sheer bloody-mindedness — or anticipation of the money Sinclair stood to make as the sole sellers of Microdrive media if they could ever just get the punters to start buying the things. These questionable decisions alone would have been enough to torpedo the QL. They were, however, just the tip of an iceberg. Oh, what an iceberg…

The QL today feels like an artifact from an alternate timeline of computing in which the arrival of new chips and new technologies didn’t lead to the paradigm shifts of our own timeline. No, in this timeline things just pretty much stayed as they had been, with computers booting up to a BASIC environment housed in ROM and directed via arcane textual commands. The QL must be one of the most profoundly un-visionary computers ever released. The 68000 line wasn’t important just because it ran faster than the old 8-bit Z80s and 6502s; Intel’s 16-bit 8086 line had been doing that for years. It was important because, among other things, its seven levels of external interrupts made it a natural choice for the new paradigm of the graphical user interface and the new paradigm of programming required to write for a GUI: event-driven (as opposed to procedural) programming. This is the reason Apple chose it for their revolutionary Lisa and Macintosh. Sinclair, however, simply used a 68008 like a souped-up Z80, leaving one feeling like they’ve rather missed a pretty significant point. It’s an indictment that’s doubly damning in light of Sir Clive’s alleged role at Sinclair as a sort of visionary-in-chief — or, to choose a particularly hyperbolic contemporary description from The Sun, as “the most prodigious inventor since Leonardo.” But then, as we shall see, computers didn’t ultimately have a lot to do with Sir Clive’s visions.

The big unveiling of the QL on January 12, 1984, was a landmark of smoke and mirrors even by Sinclair’s usual standards. Sir Clive declared there that the QL would begin shipping within 28 days to anyone who cared to order one at the low price of £400, despite the fact that no functioning QL actually existed. I don’t mean, mind you, that the prototypes had yet to go into production. I mean rather that no one at Sinclair had yet managed to cobble together a single working machine. Press in attendance were shown non-interactive demonstrations played back on monitors from videotape, while the alleged prototype was kept well away from them. Reporters were told that they could book a review machine, to be sent to them “soon.”

The question of just why Sinclair was in such a godawful hurry to debut the QL is once that’s never been satisfactorily answered. Some have claimed that Sir Clive was eager to preempt Apple’s unveiling of the Macintosh, scheduled for less than two weeks later, but I tend to see this view as implying an awareness of the international computer industry and trends therein that I’m not sure Sir Clive possessed. One thing, however, is clear: the oft-repeated claim that the QL represents the first mass-market 68000-based computer doesn’t hold water. Steve Jobs debuted a working Macintosh on January 24, 1984, and Apple started shipping the Macintosh months before Sinclair did the QL.

As those 28 days stretched into months, events went through the same cycle that had greeted previous Sinclair launches: excitement and anticipation fading into anger and accusations of bad faith and, soon enough, yet another round of investigations and threats by the Advertising Standards Authority. Desperate to show that the QL existed in some form and avoid legal action on behalf of the punters whose money they’d been holding for weeks or months, Sinclair hand-delivered a few dozen machines to journalists and customers in April. These sported an odd accessory: a square appendage hanging off the back of the otherwise sleek case. It seems Sinclair’s engineers had realized at some late date that they couldn’t actually fit everything they were supposed to inside the case. By the time QLs finally started shipping in quantity that summer the unwanted accessory had been removed and its contents somehow stuffed inside the case proper, but that turned out to have been the least of the machine’s problems.

Amongst the more troubling of these was a horrid keyboard, something of another Sinclair tradition by now. Sinclair did deign to give the new machine actual plastic keys in lieu of the famous “dead flesh” rubber keys of the Spectrum, but the keys still rested upon a cheap membrane rather than having the mechanical action of such high-flying competitors as the Commodore VIC-20. The keyboard was awful to type on, a virtual kiss of death all by itself for a supposed business computer. And it soon emerged that the keyboard, like everything else on the QL, didn’t work properly on even its own limited terms. Individual keys either stuck or didn’t register, or did both as the mood struck them. Reports later emerged that Sinclair had actually solicited bids for a mechanical keyboard from a Japanese manufacturer and found it would cost very little if anything more than the membrane job, but elected to stick with the membrane because it was such a “Sinclair trademark.” The mind boggles.

And then there were the performance problems brought on by a perfect storm of a crippled CPU, the Microdrives, and the poorly written business software that came with the machine. Your Computer magazine published the following astonishing account of what it took to save a 750-word document in the word processor:

1. Press F3 key followed by 6. A period of 35 seconds elapses by which time the computer has found the save section of Quill and then asks if I wish to save the default file, i.e. the file I am working on.

2. Press ENTER. After a further 10 seconds the computer finds that the file already exists and asks if I wish to overwrite it.

3. Press Y. A period of 100 seconds elapses while the old file is erased and the new one saved and verified in its place. The user is then asked if he wishes to carry on with the same document.

4. Press ENTER. Why a further 25 seconds is required here is beyond me as the file must be in memory as we have just saved it. Unfortunately, the file is now at the start, so to get back to where I was:

5. Press F3 key then G followed by B. The Goto procedure to get to the bottom of the file, a further 28 seconds.

For those keeping score, that’s 3 minutes and 18 seconds to save a 750-word document. For a 3000-word document, that time jumped to a full five minutes.

Your Computer concluded their review of the QL with a prime demonstration of the crazily mixed messaging that marked all coverage of the machine. It was “slightly tacky,” “the time for foisting unproven products on the marketplace has gone,” and “it would be a brave business which would entrust essential data to Microdrives.” Yet it was also a “fascinating package” and “certain to be a commercial success.” It arguably was “fascinating” in its own peculiar way. “Commercial success,” however, wasn’t in the cards. Sinclair did keep plugging away at the QL for months after its release, and did manage to make it moderately more usable. But the damage was long since done. Even the generally forgiving British public couldn’t accept the eccentricities of this particular Sinclair creation. Sales were atrocious. Still, Sir Clive, never one to give up easily, continued to sell and promote it for almost two years.

There’s a dirty secret about Sir Clive Sinclair the computer visionary that most people never quite caught on to: he really didn’t know that much about computers, nor did he care all that much about them. Far from being the “most prodigious inventor since Leonardo,” Sir Clive remained fixated for decades on exactly two ideas: his miniature television and his electric car. The original Sinclair ZX80 had been floated largely to get Sinclair Research off the ground so that he could pursue those twin white whales. Computers had been a solution to a cashflow problem, a means to an end. His success meant that by 1983 he had the money he needed to go after the television and the car, the areas where he would really make his mark, full on. Both being absolutely atrocious ideas, this was bad, bad news for anyone with a vested interest in Sinclair Research.

The TV80 was a fairly bland failure by Sinclair standards: he came, he spent millions manufacturing thousands of devices that mostly didn’t work properly and that nobody would have wanted even if they had, and he exited again full of plans for the next Microvision iteration, the one that would get it right and convince the public at last of the virtues of a 2-inch television screen. But the electric car… ah, that one was one for the ages, one worthy of an honored place beside the exploding watches of yore. Sir Clive’s C5 electric tricycle was such an awful idea that even his normally pliable colleagues resisted letting Sinclair Research get sucked up in it. He therefore took £8.6 million out to found a new company, Sinclair Vehicles.

The biggest problem in making an electric car, then and now, is developing batteries light enough, powerful enough, and long-lasting enough to rival gasoline or diesel. Researchers were a long way away still in 1984. A kilogram of gasoline has an energy potential of 13,000 watt-hours; a state-of-the-art lead-acid battery circa 1984 had an energy potential of 50 watt-hours. That’s the crux of the problem; all else is relative trivialities. Having no engineering solution to offer for the hard part of the problem, Sinclair solved it through a logical leap that rivals any of Douglas Adams’s comedic syllogisms: he would simply pretend the hard problem didn’t exist and just do the easy stuff. From his adoring biography The Sinclair Story:

Part of the ground-up approach was not to spend enormous amounts trying to develop a more efficient battery, but to make use of the models available. Sinclair’s very sound reasoning was that a successful electric vehicle would provide the necessary push to battery manufacturers to pursue their own developments in the fullness of time; for him to sponsor this work would be a misplacement of funds.

There’s of course a certain chicken-or-egg problem inherent in this “sound reasoning,” in that the reason a “successful electric vehicle” didn’t yet exist was precisely because a successful electric vehicle required improved battery technology to power it. Or, put another way: if you could make a successful electric vehicle without improved batteries, why would its existence provide a “push to battery manufacturers?” Rather than a successful electric vehicle, Sir Clive made the QL and Black Watch of electric vehicles all rolled into one, an absurd little tricycle that was simultaneously underwhelming (to observe) and terrifying (to actually drive in traffic).

He unveiled the C5 on January 10, 1985, almost exactly one year after the QL dog-and-pony show and for the same price of £400. The press assembled at Alexandria Palace couldn’t help but question the wisdom of unveiling an open tricycle on a cold January day. But, once again, logistics were the least of the C5’s problems. A sizable percentage of the demonstration models simply didn’t work at all. The journalists dutifully tottered off on those that did, only to find that the advertised top speed of 15 mph was actually more like 5 mph — a brisk walking speed — on level ground. The batteries in many of the tricycles went dead or overheated — it was hard to tell which — with a plaintive little “Peep! Peep!” well before their advertised service range of 20 miles. Those journalists whose batteries did hold out found that they didn’t have enough horsepower to get up the modest hill leading back to the exhibition area. It was a disgruntled and disheveled group of cyclists who straggled back to Sir Clive, pedaling or lugging the 30-kilogram gadgets alongside. They could take comfort only in the savaging they were about to give him. When the press found out that the C5 was manufactured in a Hoover vacuum-cleaner plant and its motor was a variation on one developed for washing machines, the good times only got that much better. If there’s a single moment when Sir Clive turned the corner from visionary to laughingstock, this is it.

Sinclair Research wasn’t doing a whole lot better than its founder as 1984 turned into 1985. In addition to the huge losses sustained on the QL and TV80 fiascoes, Sinclair had, like Acorn, lost a bundle in the United States. Back in 1982, they had cut a deal with the American company Timex, who were already manufacturing all of their computers for them from a factory in Dundee, Scotland, to export the ZX81 to America as the Timex Sinclair 1000. It arrived in July of 1982, just as the American home-computing boom was taking off. Priced at $99 and extravagantly advertised as “the first computer under $100,” the TS 1000 sold like gangbusters for a short while; for a few months it was by far the bestselling computer in the country. But it was, with its 2 K of memory, its calculator keyboard, and its blurry text-only black-and-white display, a computer in only the most nominal sense. When Jack Tramiel started in earnest his assault on the low-end later in the year with the — relatively speaking — more useful and usable Commodore VIC-20, the TS 1000 was squashed flat.

Undeterred, Timex and Sinclair tried again with an Americanized version of the Spectrum, the TS 2068. With the best of intentions, they elected to improve the Speccy modestly to make it more competitive in America, adding an improved sound chip, a couple of built-in joystick ports (British Speccy owners had to buy a separate interface), a couple of new graphics modes, a cartridge port, even a somewhat less awful version of Sinclair’s trademark awful keyboards. The consequence of those improvements, however, was that most existing Spectrum software became incompatible. This weird little British machine with no software support was priced only slightly less than the Commodore 64 with its rich and growing library of great games. It never had a chance. Timex, like other big players such as Texas Instruments and Coleco, were soon sheepishly announcing their withdrawal from the home-computer market, vanquished like the others by Commodore.

Back in Britain, meanwhile, it was becoming clear that, as if Sinclair hadn’t already had enough problems, domestic sales of the Spectrum were beginning to slow. Sinclair was still in a dominant position, owning some 40 percent of the British market. However, conventional wisdom had it that that market was becoming saturated; by late 1984 most of the people in Britain who were likely to buy a computer had already done so, to the tune of far more sales per capita than any other country on the planet. Sinclair’s only chance to maintain sales would seem to be to sell new machines to those who already owned older models. Yet they had pissed away the time and resources needed to create a next-generation Speccy on the QL. In desperation they rushed out something called the Spectrum Plus for Christmas 1984: a slightly more substantial-looking Spectrum with a better keyboard like that of the QL (still not a genuinely good one, of course; “Sinclair trademark” and all that). With no changes to its actual computing capabilities, this wasn’t exactly a compelling upgrade package for current Spectrum owners. And, Sinclair still being Sinclair, the same old problems continued; most Spectrum Pluses arrived with several of the vaunted new plastic keys floating around loose in the box.

By mid-1985, Sinclair’s position wasn’t a whole lot better than that of Acorn. They were drowning in unsold inventories of Spectrums and QLs dating back to the previous Christmas season and even before, mired in debt, and without the resources to develop the Spectrum successor they desperately needed.

Then it seemed that their own Olivetti-equivalent had arrived. In a “World Exclusive!” article in the June 17, 1985, edition, the Daily Mirror announced that “Maxwell Saves Sinclair.” The Maxwell in question was the famous British tycoon and financier Robert Maxwell, who would inject some £12 million into the company. In return, Sir Clive would have to accept some adult supervision: he would become a “life president” and consultant, with Maxwell installing a management team of his own choosing. Everyone was relieved, even Margaret Thatcher. “The government has been aware that these talks have been going on and welcomes any move to put the Sinclair business on a firm footing,” said a spokesman.

Then, not quite two months after the carefully calibrated leak to the Daily Mirror, Maxwell suddenly scuttled the deal. We’re not quite sure why. Some have said that, after a thorough review of Sinclair’s books, Maxwell concluded the company was simply irredeemable; some that Sir Clive refused to quietly accept his “life president” post and go away the way Maxwell expected him to; some that Sir Clive planned to go away all too soon, taking with him a promising wafer-scale chip integration process a few researchers had been working on to serve as his lifeboat and bridge to yet another incarnation of an independent Sinclair, as the ZX80 had served as a bridge between the Sinclair Radionics of the 1970s and the Sinclair Research of the 1980s. Still others say that Sir Clive was never serious about the deal, that the whole process was a Machiavellian plot on his part to keep his creditors at bay until the Christmas buying season began to loom, after which they would continue to wait and see in the hope that Sinclair could sell off at least some of all that inventory before the doors were shut. This last, at least, I tend to doubt; like the idea that he staged the QL unveiling to upstage the Macintosh, it ascribes a level of guile and business acumen to Sir Clive that I’m not sure he possessed.

At any rate, Sinclair Research staggered into 1986 alive and still independent but by all appearances mortally wounded. A sign of just how far they had fallen came when they had to beg the next Spectrum iteration from some of the people they were supposed to be supplying it to: Spain’s Investrónica, signatories to the only really viable foreign distribution deal they had managed to set up. The Spectrum 128 was a manifestation of Investrónica’s impatience and frustration with their partner. After waiting years for a properly updated Spectrum, they had decided to just make their own. Created as it was quickly by a technology distributor rather than technology developer, the Spectrum 128 was a bit of a hack-and-splice job, grafting an extra 80 K of memory, an improved sound chip, and some other bits and piece onto the venerable Speccy framework. Nevertheless, it was better than nothing, and it was compatible with older Speccy games. Sinclair Research scooped it up and started selling it in Britain as well.

The state of Acorn and Sinclair as 1986 began was enough to trigger a crisis of faith in Britain. The postwar era, and particularly the 1970s, had felt for many people like the long, slow unraveling of an economy that once been the envy of the world. It wasn’t only Thatcher’s Conservatives who had seen Sir Clive and Acorn as standard bearers leading the way to a new Britain built on innovation and silicon. If many other areas of the economy were finally, belatedly improving after years and years of doldrums, the sudden collapse of Sinclair and Acorn nevertheless felt like a bucket of cold water to the dreamer’s face. All of the old insecurities, the old questions about whether Britain could truly compete on the world economic stage came to the fore again to a degree thoroughly out of line with what the actual economic impact of a defunct Acorn and Sinclair would have been. Now those who still clung to dreams of a silicon Britain found themselves chanting an unexpected mantra: thank God for Alan Sugar.

Sugar, the business titan with the R&B loverman’s name, had ended his formal schooling at age 16. A born salesman and wheeler and dealer, he learned his trade as an importer and wholesaler on London’s bustling Tottenham Court Road, then as now one of the densest collections of electronics shops in Europe. He founded his business, Amstrad, literally out of the back of a van there in 1968. By the late 1970s he had built Amstrad into a force to be reckoned with as purveyors of discount stereo equipment, loved by his declared target demographic of “the truck driver and his wife” as much as it was loathed by audiophiles.

He understood his target market so well because he was his target market. An unrepentant Eastender, he never tried to refine his working-class tastes, never tried to smooth away his Cockney diction despite living in a country where accent was still equated by many with destiny. The name of his company was itself a typical Cockneyism, a contraction of its original name of A.M.S. Trading Company (“A.M.S.” being Sugar’s initials). Sugar:

There was the snooty area of the public that would never buy an Amstrad hi-fi and they went out and bought Pioneer or whatever, and they’re 5 percent of the market. The other 95 percent of the market wants something that makes a noise and looks good. And they bought our stuff.

An Amstrad stereo might not be the best choice for picking out the subtle shadings of the second violin section, but it was just fine for cranking out the latest Led Zeppelin record good and loud. Sugar’s understanding of what constituted “good enough” captured fully one-third of the British stereo market for Amstrad by 1982, far more than any other single company.

In 1983, Sugar suddenly decided that Amstrad should build a home computer to compete with Sinclair, Acorn, and Commodore. Conventional wisdom would hold that this was absolutely terrible timing. Amstrad was about to jump into the market just in time for it to enter a decline. Still, if Sugar could hardly have been aware of what 1984 and 1985 would bring, he did see some fairly obvious problems with the approach of his would-be competitors which he believed Amstrad could correct. In a sense, he’d been here before.

Stereos had traditionally been sold the way that computer systems were in 1983: as mix-and-match components — an amplifier here, a tape deck and record player there, speakers in that corner — which the buyer had to purchase separately and assemble herself. One of Sugar’s greatest coups had come when he had realized circa 1978 that his truck drivers hated this approach at least as much as the audiophiles reveled in it. They hated comparing a bunch of gadgets with specifications they didn’t understand anyway; hated opening a whole pile of boxes and trying to wire everything together; hated needing four or five sockets just to power one stereo. Amstrad therefore introduced the Tower System: one box, one price, one socket — plug it in and go. It became by far their biggest seller, and changed the industry in the process.

Amstrad’s computer would follow the same philosophy, with the computer, a tape drive, and a monitor all sold as one unit. The included monitor in particular would become a marketing boon. Monitors being quite unusual in Britain, many a family was wracked with conflict every evening over whether the television was going to be used for watching TV or playing on the Speccy. The new Amstrad would, as the advertisements loudly proclaimed, make all that a thing of the past.

The CPC-464 computer which began shipping in June of 1984 was in many other ways a typical Amstrad creation. Sugar, who considered “boffin” a term of derision, was utterly uninterested in technological innovation for its own sake. Indeed, Sugar made it clear from the beginning that, should the CPC-464 disappoint, he would simply cut his losses and drop the product, as he had at various times televisions, CB radios, and car stereos before it. He was interested in profits, not the products which generated them. So, other than in its integrated design the CPC-464 innovated nowhere. It instead was just a solid, conservative computer that was at least in the same ballpark as the competition in every particular and matched or exceeded it in most: 64 K of memory, impressive color graphics, a decent sound chip, a more than decent BASIC. Build quality and customer service were, if not quite up to Acorn’s standards, more than a notch or two above Sinclair’s and more than adequate for a computer costing about £350 with tape drive and color monitor. Amstrad also did some very smart things to ease the machine’s path to consumer adoption: they paid several dozen programmers to have a modest library of games and other software available right from launch, and started Amstrad Computer User magazine to begin to build a community of users. These strategies, along with the commonsense value-for-your-pound approach of the machine itself, let the CPC-464 and succeeding machines do something almost inconceivable to the competitors collapsing around them: post strong sales that continued to grow by the month, making stereos a relatively minor part of Amstrad’s booming business within just a couple of years.

Amstrad’s results were so anomalous to those of the industry at a whole that for a considerable length of time the City simply refused to believe them. Their share price continued to drop through mid-1985 in direct defiance of rosy sales figures. It wasn’t until Amstrad’s fiscal year ended in June and the annual report appeared showing sales of £136.1 million and an increase in profits of 121 percent that the City finally began to accept that Amstrad computers were for real. Alan Sugar describes in his own inimitable way the triumphalism of this period of Amstrad’s history:

The usual array of predators, such as Dixons, W. H. Smith, and Boots, were hovering around like the praying mantis, saying, “Ha, ha, you’ve got too many computers, haven’t you? We’re going to jump on you and steal them off you and rape you when you need money badly, just like Uncle Clive.” And we said, “We haven’t got any.” They didn’t believe us, until such time as they had purged their stocks and finished raping Clive Sinclair and Acorn, and realized they had nothing left to sell. So they turned to us again in November of 1985 and said, “What about a few of your computers at cheaper prices?” We stuck the proverbial two fingers in the air, and that’s how we got price stability back into the market. They thought we were sitting on stockpiles and they were doing us a big favour. But we had no inventory. It had gone to France and Spain.

Continental Europe was indeed a huge key to Amstrad’s success. When Acorn and Sinclair had looked to expand internationally, they had looked to the hyper-competitive and already troubled home-computer market in the United States, an all too typical example of British Anglocentrism. (As Bill Bryson once wrote, a traveler visiting Britain with no knowledge of geography would likely conclude from the media and the conversations around her that Britain lay a few miles off the coast of the United States, perhaps about where Cuba is in our world, and it was the rest of Europe that was thousands of miles of ocean away.) Meanwhile they had all but ignored all that virgin territory that started just a ferry ride away. Alan Sugar had no such prejudices. He let America alone, instead pushing his computers into Spain, France, and the German-speaking countries (where they were initially sold under the Schneider imprint — ironically, another company that had gotten its start selling low-priced stereo equipment). Amstrad’s arrival, along with an increasingly aggressive push from Commodore’s West German subsidiary, marks the moment when home computers at last began to spread in earnest through Western Europe, to be greeted there by kids and hackers with just as much enthusiasm and talent as their British, American, and Japanese counterparts.

One day in early 1986, Alan Sugar received an unexpected call from Mark Souhami, manager of the Dixons chain of consumer-electronics stores. Souhami dropped a bombshell: it seemed that Sir Clive was interested in selling his computer operation to Amstrad, the only company left in the market with the resources for such an acquisition. Dixons, who still sold considerable numbers of Spectrums and thus had a vested interest in keeping the supply flowing, had been recruited to act as intermediaries. Sir Clive and Sugar soon met personally for a quiet lunch in Liverpool Street Station. Sir Clive later reported that he found Sugar “delightful” — “very pleasant company, a witty man.” Sugar was less gracious, ruthlessly mocking in private Sir Clive’s carefully cultivated “Etonian accent” and his intellectual pretensions.

At 3:00 AM on April 2, 1986, after several weeks of often strained negotiations, Amstrad agreed to buy all of the intellectual property for and existing stocks of Sinclair’s computers for £16 million. The sum would allow Sir Clive to pay off his creditors and make a clean break from the computer market to pursue his real passions. Tellingly, Sinclair Research itself along with the TV80 and the C5 were explicitly excluded from the transfer — not that Sugar had any interest in such financial losers anyway. With a stroke of the pen, Alan Sugar and Amstrad now owned 60 percent of the British home-computer market along with a big chunk of the exploding continental European. All less than two years after the CPC-464 had debuted under a cloud of doubt.

When Sugar and Sir Clive officially announced their deal at a press conference on April 7, the press rightly marked it as the end of an era. The famous photograph of their uncomfortable handshake before the assembled flash bulbs stands as one of the more indelible in the history of British computing, a passing of the mantle from Sir Clive the eccentric boffin to Sugar the gruff, rough, and ruthless man of the bottom line. British computing had lost its innocence, and things would never quite be the same again. Thatcher had backed the wrong horse in choosing Sir Clive as her personification of the new British capitalist spirit. (Sugar would get a belated knighthood of his own in 2000.) On the plus side, British computing was still alive as an independent entity, a state of affairs that had looked very doubtful just the year before. Indeed, it was poised to make a huge impact yet through Amstrad.

Those who fretted that Sugar might have bought the Spectrum just to kill it needn’t have; he was far too smart and unsentimental for that. If people still wanted Spectrums, he would give them Spectrums. Amstrad thus remade the Speccy with an integrated tape drive in the CPC line’s image and continued to sell it as the low end of their lineup into the 1990s, until even the diehards had moved on. Quality and reliability improved markedly, and the thing even got a proper keyboard at long last. The QL, however, got no such treatment; Sugar put it out of its misery without a second thought.

I’ll doubtless have more to say about a triumphant Amstrad and a humbled but still technically formidable Acorn in future articles. Sir Clive, however, will now ride off into the sunset — presumably on a C5 — to tinker with his electric cars and surface occasionally to delight the press with a crazy anecdote. He exited the computer market with dreams as grandiose as ever, but no one would ever quite take him seriously again. For a fellow who takes himself so manifestly seriously, that has to be a difficult thing to bear. Sinclair Research exists as a nominal corporation to this day, but for most of the past three decades its only actual employee appears to have been Sir Clive himself, still plugging away at his electric car (miniaturized televisions have not been in further evidence). I know I’ve been awfully hard on Sir Clive, but in truth I rather like him. He possessed arrogance, stubbornness, and shortsightedness in abundance, but no guile and very little greed. Amongst the rogue’s gallery of executives who built the international PC industry that practically qualifies him for sainthood. He was certainly the most entertaining computer mogul of all time, and he did manage almost in spite of himself to change Britain forever. The British public still has a heartfelt affection for the odd little fellow — as well they should. Eccentrics like him don’t come around every day.

(Much of this article was drawn from following the news items and articles in my favorite of the early British micro magazines, Your Computer, between January 1984 and May 1986. Other useful magazines: Popular Computing Weekly of November 10 1983 and January 12 1984; Sinclair User of November 1984, February 1985, and March 1985. Two business biographies of Sir Clive are recommended, one admiring and one critical: The Sinclair Story by Rodney Dale and Sinclair and the “Sunrise” Technology by Ian Adamson and Richard Kennedy respectively. The best account I’ve found of Amstrad’s early history is in Alan Sugar: The Amstrad Story by David Thomas. Good online articles: The Register’s features on the Sinclair Microdrives, the QL, and the Acorn Electron; Stairway to Hell’s reprinting of a series of articles on Acorn’s history from Acorn User magazine. Finally, by all means check out the delightful BBC docudrama Micro Men if you haven’t already and marvel that the events and personalities depicted therein are only slightly exaggerated. That film is also the source of the last picture in this article; it was just too perfect an image to resist.)

Comments
21 Responses

- Dehumanizer

February 4, 2014 at 6:19 pm

a classically Sinclairian bit of tortured technology that much like one of those old lost and unlamented 8-track audio tapes

Missing word there. :) Other than that, great stuff, as usual.

- Dehumanizer

February 4, 2014 at 9:53 pm

Interesting that Ultimate did almost everything right and you don’t like them very much, while Clive Sinclair did almost everything wrong and you can’t help but like the guy. :)

- Jimmy Maher

February 5, 2014 at 9:35 am

Guess I’m just a romantic with a soft spot for the dreamers and the beautiful losers. :) And thanks for the correction!

- Keith Palmer

February 4, 2014 at 10:57 pm

A lengthy but satisfying article (even as we get further into the era where the history of computing seems to become a litany of the glaring mistakes made by almost everyone), and worth the wait. I took slight note of your covering Acorn’s attempt to expand into the US, having seen some evidence of that in old issues of Creative Computing. (That magazine, though, did run a review of the Sinclair QL in December 1984 that seemed to be trying to be positive.)

I was also sort of interested in your description of the QL as “an artifact from an alternate timeline of computing in which the arrival of new chips and new technologies didn’t lead to the paradigm shifts of our own timeline”, although I know about some other computers that seemed to use the 68000 as “just a faster CPU,” such as the TRS-80 Model 16 (even if bringing that up makes me feel again like someone isolated from the grand current of computer gaming, tossing in bits of trivia irrelevant to it…)

- Jimmy Maher

February 5, 2014 at 9:44 am

For what it’s worth, I’m not sure that argument applies to the Model 16 judging by the link you provided. The 68000’s first niche, before it came down enough in price to be practical for mainstream computers, was in Unix-based workstations capable of supporting multiple users and multitasking, essentially like the Model 16. Here again its interrupt system made it a great choice. Then it went into mainstream computers and finally ended up in our microwaves and washing machines… which says something kind of profound about computer technology.

And hey, I always enjoy your “trivia” because it fills in one of my blind spots nicely.

- X

February 4, 2014 at 11:57 pm

Oddly enough, “souped-up” has the ‘o’ in it. Soup was on everybody’s minds in the 1920s when it was coined, I guess.

- Jimmy Maher

February 5, 2014 at 9:36 am

Funny. I always thought of that term as referencing “super,” which makes a lot more sense than “soup.”

- ZUrlocker

February 5, 2014 at 12:23 am

Great write-up. Glad you mentioned the “Micro Men” show on BBC.

- John Elliott

February 5, 2014 at 12:58 am

Now those who still clung to dreams of a silicon Britain found themselves chanting an expected mantra: thank God for Alan Sugar.

Expected or unexpected?

- Jimmy Maher

February 5, 2014 at 9:36 am

“Unexpected” it should indeed have been. Thanks!

- iPadCary

February 5, 2014 at 9:06 pm

I think this is one of, if not outright •the• longest article written here at DA.
And Jimmy won’t say it because he’s too nice of a guy,
but as I am under no such compunction, allow me to
step in here for just a moment ….
•AHEM•
All of the obsessive-compulsive, basement dwelling losers out there who have the unmitigated GALL to point out
a MINOR •spelling•, as opposed to •factual•, error in an article of this length & breadth, I say this to you:
GET A LIFE.
Thank you.

- Jimmy Maher

February 5, 2014 at 9:13 pm

I know you intended this as a defense of me, and for that I appreciate it. However, I think you’ve badly misjudged a whole lot of people who are only taking the time to be helpful.

As someone who does try to take his writing seriously, I *hugely* appreciate my little army of copy editors. So, please, by all means keep it up! As I’ve said before, when I eventually put all this material into a book or other more permanent archive that will hopefully outlive me, your help now will make the work of me and/or some poor copy editor much easier.

- Dehumanizer

February 5, 2014 at 10:29 pm

I’ve always felt (since I was a kid, and that was a long time ago) that someone who corrected me was helping me (instead of “showing off” or something like that); glad to see I’m not the only one. :) And believe me, I love your articles for the *content*; most of it is about stuff I remember from my childhood, and yet I learn something new every time.

- Pierre

February 6, 2014 at 6:21 pm

Excellent article as always. You’ve done such a fine job of describing computing in Britain I’m hoping you also write about what was going on in Europe in the early-mid 80s. My impression at the moment is that Europeans were exposed to a greater array of computers from the US based Apple, Atari and Commodore, Japan’s MSX machines, and the British machines. That seems like a interesting story because the variety must have lead to interesting dynamics in the marketplace. I can also imagine a lot of regional differences.

I also wonder if personal computing developed at the same pace everywhere. My impression, from a Canadian perspective, is that 8-bit computers really got going in 1979 and transitioned to 16-bit computers by 1985-86. The PC clones started to gain traction in the home just after that. To me it seems the time lines are either more compressed elsewhere in the world or are offset a bit. It seems to me that by the early-mid 90’s the computing landscape was pretty uniform across all the developed nations. I wish I new for sure if all this is true.

All the best!

- Dehumanizer

February 6, 2014 at 7:21 pm

Interesting idea. Here in Portugal, the Spectrum ruled (for games) until about 1987, when most people moved to the Amiga, and by 1990-1991 people moved to PC compatibles (when VGA / Soundblaster because standard on new PCs).

Competitors such as the BBC Micro, Oric, Dragon, Apple II, C64, Amstrad CPC, 8-bit Ataris and the ST were *very* rare (in fact, I only ever touched three of the above in my life)… one thing I never liked (and still don’t) very much about my countrymen is that we tend to pick winners early and close our minds completely to other options; even today, for instance, the Playstations dominate the market to an absurd degree. But I digress.

In terms of business, I wasn’t interested in that in the early 80s, but as far as I can remember it was PC, PC, PC.. From memory, Spectrums, Amigas and so on were never really used for serious stuff here.

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2014 at 8:23 pm

I do want to cover European computing, allowing always for my desire to stay on a certain schedule and also for the language barriers. I can easily read German, Danish, and Norwegian, and Swedish with a bit more effort, but that’s the extent of my language skills — so France, Spain, Italy, etc., are to some extent closed books to me. Will do my best though!

I think your timeline is basically correct. To some extent the U.S. never had a proper 16-bit era, if what you mean by that is the Amiga and the ST, as most people in Europe do when they talk about 16-bit computing. The Commodore 64 remained huge in the U.S. through about 1990, the Nintendo NES much, much huger by 1987 or so. The Amiga and ST, while they were certainly available and had their hundreds of thousands of owners, never penetrated the mainstream like the 8-bitters before them. That scene was finally superseded only by the “multimedia PC” era that began about 1990 with the perfect storm of VGA, Soundblaster, and CD-ROM on the Intel platform. Nothing else had a chance on the PC side (meaning non-console) after that.

Otherwise, yeah, I think you’ve summarized things pretty well, with the caveat that many remnants of the old European scene persisted for a surprisingly long time. The final issue of the most beloved of the Spectrum magazines, Crash, didn’t appear until 1992, by which time most Americans were playing on multimedia systems sporting 386s or 486s literally hundreds of times faster than the Speccy’s old Z80. Even more incredibly, the last of the big glossy Amiga magazines in Britain didn’t shut down until after the September 11 attacks — something that always blows American minds (those of them that are aware of the Amiga at all that is) to contemplate. In America the Amiga was already beginning to fade by 1991, and was pretty much dead by the time of Commodore’s 1994 bankruptcy…

- Andrew

February 7, 2014 at 2:37 pm

Thanks for the tip about Micro Men – I downloaded and watched it. Very interesting! Love the scene with the three women…

- Jecel Assumpcao Jr

February 12, 2014 at 8:56 pm

Great article! I have to wonder about the phrase “He exited the computer market with dreams as grandiose as ever, but no one would ever quite take him seriously again” in a story that ends before the Z88.

- Jimmy Maher

February 13, 2014 at 6:59 am

Point taken — but but the Z88 was very much a cult computer even in its day, with Sinclair’s less than stellar reputation prompting most to view it with caution at best.

- Olivier Guinart

April 30, 2014 at 10:22 pm

Catching up now…

I’ve very much enjoyed this story. I like them all, but the point you make about how personal this one was (for Sinclair, Acorn and Amstrad) was like reading comedy and drama at the same time, very nice!

If I were to publish a book someday, I’d LOVE to have a small army of copy editors (hint hint on a need for your book ;).

Continental/European market was indeed bubbling along the same at this time too, e.g.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/TO7
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMT_Goupil
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXL_100
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micral

- dk

December 4, 2014 at 3:50 pm

Well, as you may have already noticed: Sir Clive is back with a vengeance! The Spectrum Vega has collected 112+ GBP on indiegogo so far, just three days into the campaign. :-)

QL Pawn
February 11, 2014

Clive Sinclair and Anita Sinclair

Flop though it was in the big picture, the Sinclair QL still managed to attract some tens of thousands of loyal users during its brief commercial lifespan, some of whom still persist with the flawed but oddly endearing little machine to this day. The user base was big enough to support a small commercial software market which included some games on offer. Because the supposedly business-focused QL wasn’t up to all that much graphically, a good proportion of the games were text adventures. Among this group was by far the most remembered piece of software born on the QL — indeed, for a certain group of enthusiasts the only reason the QL is remembered at all. I’m referring of course to The Pawn, the first game from the last of the great 1980s text-adventure houses to emerge, Magnetic Scrolls. Like so many other stories I’ve already told, theirs begins with a few young friends with a shared love of computers and Dungeons and Dragons.

Ken Gordon, Hugh Steers, and Rob Steggles all grew up together in the London suburb of Woolwich. Gordon and Steers were both dedicated hackers. Steggles was less technical, the “tag-along” member of the trio. He did, however, possess another talent which made Gordon and Steers value his company: he had a knack for devising clever scenarios for D&D, which he employed to good effect as Dungeon Master of their little role-playing group. All three were also avid players of adventure games on the computer. They played all the usual suspects in the Britain of the early 1980s, but, crucially, also had exposure to the works of Infocom thanks to the exotic and expensive Apple II the Gordon family owned in preference to the more typical Speccy or BBC Micro. The lives and works of these young men would be shadowed and to some extent guided by the work of that other great adventure-game house across the ocean for years to come. Gordon and Steers spent much time analyzing the Infocom games and tinkering with adventure-game engines and parsers, dreaming of their own games that could live up to the standards of Infocom.

Their hobby would almost certainly have come to nothing more had Gordon not had another friend just a couple of years older, an ambitious and driven young woman named Anita Sinclair who possessed technical talents of her own to go with charm and a flair for business and marketing. Although she was of no relation to Sir Clive, she nevertheless had the perfect name to work at his company. That’s exactly what she did for a time, becoming Sir Clive’s personal aide and one of his firm favorites in the process; their friendship would persist for years, outliving the heydays of both Sinclair Research and Magnetic Scrolls.

Ken, Hugh, and Anita all met in her flat on the evening before Ken and Hugh were to take their A-Levels. There they talked code and business and Hugh demonstrated a parser he had written. The three decided to go into business together writing games for a new platform from which Anita’s keenly honed nose detected the smell of opportunity: the Sinclair QL.

The QL may have been conceived as Sinclair Research’s “professional” machine, but even businesspeople would presumably want to have fun sometimes. Anita initially wanted to make arcade games; they could be finished and released relatively cheaply and quickly. Ken and Hugh, however, had grander ambitions: to form a company and develop the technology to make adventure games that could compete head to head with Infocom. Hugely popular though they were, British adventure games had so far been limited by the more limited British hardware: 48 K or even as little as 32 K of memory rather than the more customary 64 K of North America, and no disk drive to use for virtual memory. Companies like Level 9 had pushed that hardware to incredible places, but there were inevitable limits. The QL, though, came with a full 128 K, a figure which coincidentally was also the maximum size of a game written using Infocom’s Z-Machine virtual machine. Thus the trio could to be the first developers in Britain to meet Infocom on a level playing field.

In time Ken and Hugh infected Anita with their bug as well. She thus proposed to Sir Clive that she and her friends deliver a platform-exclusive next-generation adventure game for the QL, to be published by Sinclair themselves to give the game an official blessing of sorts. He agreed. Financing the venture largely through a certain amount of familial wealth that Anita had at her disposal, the trio of friends started Magnetic Scrolls — wonderful name, isn’t it? — in a tiny office in the district of Eltham, southeastern London, in the spring of 1984.

In their technical approach to game-writing as in so much else, they were determined to follow Infocom’s lead as much as possible. In lieu of Infocom’s famous DEC minicomputer, they built a network of four Apple IIs linked to a central hard drive. They used this to write in a subset of 68000 assembly language, which they named ELTHAM: “Extra Low-Tech Highly Ambiguous Metacode,” thus showing if nothing else that they had a sense of humor about the whole endeavor. A cross-compiler translated the ELTHAM code into a form suitable for running on the QL. Over long hours in the cramped office they applied all of the lessons they had learned as hobbyists and Infocom fanatics to an adventure-game engine with a complicated world model and a full-sentence parser the likes of which had never yet been seen from a British developer.

Still, a great adventure is not the result of its technical underpinnings alone. They also needed a game to put in there. Gordon and Steers thought of their old Dungeon Master Rob Steggles, who had just come back home for his first summer break from university (non-technical to the end, he was studying philosophy). Steggles:

They called me up and asked me to write a scenario to run on the system before I went off to university in the autumn. The scenario was The Pawn. What we did with The Pawn was get together as a group and talk for hours until we came up with a whole bunch of disparate, bizarre ideas. We wrote them all on several A1 sheets, put them on the wall, and looked at them for a while. Then I sat down and wrote a story around them.

Steggles then returned to university, where he “thought no more about it.” The others, however, went to work translating his notes into a game. What they had originally conceived as a six-month project turned into a long, hard slog for this group of clever but largely self-taught hackers venturing far into unfamiliar territory without the benefit of Infocom’s grounding in computer science from MIT. They continued to spend at least as much time on their recalcitrant toolchain as the actual game. Anita Sinclair (translated from the German original in Happy Computer magazine by me):

When The Pawn was more or less finished, we began debugging — looking for problems. To help us with that we had another program, a debugger, which worked similarly to a machine-language monitor. Our debugger told us that we had a failure in such and such a place. But no matter how much we pored over the code we couldn’t find the mistake. At last somebody figured out that the debugger itself had a bug.

It took more than a year after Steggles’s involvement ended for the final game to appear under Sinclair’s trademark gray livery in late 1985.

The Pawn on the QL

The Pawn is sadly not a game that stands up terribly well almost thirty years later, nor one for which I can muster much affection even after applying the requisite gauzy haze of nostalgia. It received its name late in development from a friend who played it named Tony Lambert, who noted that the player is kept in a constant state of bewilderment and is constantly being used and manipulated by those around him, like a high-fantasy version of The Band’s “The Weight.” And, indeed, The Pawn is a nasty, nihilistic little game with a mean streak unusually wide even for its era. This is a game which delights in breaking certain objects — like, inexplicably, a wooden bowl — when you DROP them without bothering to tell you about it until you try to use them dozens or hundreds of moves later; a game which expects you to commit cold-blooded murder at one point; a game which can’t even be bothered to render up a proper victory screen at the end, but instead lets you spend eternity wandering its landscape as a helplessly homeless ghost. It also has literally some of the worst puzzles I’ve ever seen — and, as you’ve probably gathered by now, I’ve seen a lot of puzzles.

A classic face-palm, almost so bad it’s good, comes in a secret room you discover inside a tree.

>enter door
Tree Trunk Room
You are in a small, cramped room inside the tree trunk. The floor is covered with varnished wooden planks and light filters through the various knots and holes further up the trunk.

There are some boards here. One of the floorboards seems quite loose.

>examine floorboards
The boards are large and very solid.

>examine loose floorboard
I don't understand loose

>lift floorboard
The boards are too heavy to lift.

>get floorboards
The boards are too heavy to lift.

>pull floorboard
You cannot get a grip on the boards

>touch floorboard
The boards are slippery

>slide floorboard
The boards are too heavy to lift.

>pry floorboard with hoe
I don't understand pry

>lever floorboard with hoe
Nothing happens.

>pull floorboard with hoe
You cannot get a grip on the boards

>examine door
The door is heavily camouflaged to make it look like part of the tree.

It is open

>look under door
You find nothing of interest

>close door
The door is now closed.

>lift floorboard
A dark forbidding opening is revealed leading down...

This sequence could almost stand in for the rest of this review, as it so nicely illustrates everything that’s wrong with The Pawn: the parser that’s superficially smart but doesn’t understand basic synonyms like “PRY” (or the more British “PRISE”) for “LEVER”; the world model that doesn’t distinguish between the loose floorboard and the rest of them; the refusal to just tell you what the hell you’re seeing so you can apply some sort of human logic to solving the puzzles. What’s apparently really going on above, if you haven’t gathered it already (and no shame in that), is that the open door was covering the loose board, preventing you from raising it. I must say “apparently,” of course, because the game refuses to tell you a word about something that would be completely obvious to you if you were actually standing there — this even though I’m desperately trying to give it the benefit of the doubt, looking hard at the door for some obscure message. This and some of The Pawn‘s other puzzles deserve to join the worst of Roberta Williams deep, deep down in adventuring hell.

I do want to say a little bit more about the parser because in its own way it’s as wrong-headed as many of the puzzles. Magnetic Scrolls loved to trumpet its ability to handle thorny constructions like “USE THE TROWEL TO PLANT THE POT PLANT IN THE PLANT POT”; in fact, I suspect that the very reason those items exist in the game is to show off the parser. And it worked — reviewers would dutifully type in such sequences when prompted by their press materials and write the requisite amazed copy. The Pawn‘s parser is, however, an absurdly brittle creation. If you know the exact formulations it expects, you can indeed use it in impressive ways. You can, for instance, “TIE THE HOE AND THE RAKE TOGETHER WITH THE TEE-SHIRT.” (This is another puzzle solution that makes no sense to anyone who’s ever seen the real-world analogues of The Pawn‘s hoe, rake, and tee-shirt, but never mind, I’m complaining about something else now.) But what if you try to “TIE SHIRT TO HOE AND RAKE”? Not only does the parser not understand — it misunderstands, leaving you with the shirt tied to the hoe and the last of the command blissfully ignored. Players don’t need a parser that gets all dressed up in its little sailor suit to do fancy tricks for the journalists, then collapses into a tantrum when asked to do a practical job. No, they need one that understands a wide variety of simple, commonsense constructions, and one that when it doesn’t understand doesn’t pretend it does but rather — and this is critical — gives good feedback on exactly what confused it so you can try again forewarned and forearmed. For all its fun with potted plants, The Pawn‘s parser still has a long way to go to match Infocom’s. It can at times be even more challenging to get sense out of than a two-word job because of the combinatorial explosion inherit in finding the exact, idiosyncratic phraseology it expects.

Formally, The Pawn is much more in the mold of Zork than any of Infocom’s later titles: a diverse, nonlinear grab-bag of disparate gags and puzzles and geography held together by little in the way of plot coherence. Some of the humor is kind of dumb but amusing; you play a stoner with a “green design of a plant that has seven jagged-edged leaves” on your tee-shirt, and further references to your love for pot abound (see the “pot plant”) without the game ever just coming out and saying it. (In retrospect I’m surprised that the guardians of adolescent virtue never caught onto this and condemned the game. Perhaps — incredibly! — it was too subtle…) Much of it, though, is just dumb full stop, such as the horse you meet who talks like Mister Ed. (“Get on up. Heyyy, you’re good. D’you ever star in a cowboy movie?”) And the less said about the cameo by Jerry Lee Lewis of all people the better…

As far as I can make out the game wants to be a cutting satire of adventure-game clichés, but its most amusing riffs are themselves lifted from other, smarter commentaries, such as the adventurer from Enchanter (“A tall, handsome man dressed in gleaming armour. He occasionally says things like ‘go north’, ‘get sword,’ and ‘unlight lamp.'”) and the meta-revelations sprinkled throughout the game that it really does all take place inside a computer, a trope that dates back at least to Microsoft’s 1979 version of the Crowther and Woods Adventure. The more original stabs at satire, such as the useless and inescapable maze with a sign outside labeling it “totally irrelevant to the adventure,” cut like a butter knife.

Maybe the kindest thing I can say about The Pawn is that it gave Magnetic Scrolls a suitably low baseline upon which to improve markedly and rapidly in games to come. That they had the opportunity to make more games is largely down to the talent shown by the core trio, particularly Anita Sinclair, for sensing which way the winds were blowing and planning accordingly. As work on the QL version of The Pawn proceeded, it was becoming more and more obvious that that platform was not likely to recover from its disastrous launch sufficient to support a dedicated adventure-game developer. Luckily, new 68000-based machines were appearing in the form of the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga; both offered more memory, spectacular graphics capabilities, and much better prospects for commercial success. By the time The Pawn appeared on the QL to predictably underwhelming sales, Anita and company had already initiated the process of porting the game to other machines, a task greatly eased by the development system they had spent so much time building. Soon gamers would look at the company’s early days as a QL-exclusive developer as little more than prehistory, a footnote to the real story.

That’s a story that I’ll be continuing in the course of time. But now it’s time to leave British shores and return Stateside, where an elephant in the room in the form of a certain paradigm-shifting platform introduction has been awaiting his due patiently for a long time now.

(The definitive source for information about Magnetic Scrolls on the Web is the Magnetic Scrolls Memorial, full of contemporary articles and even some memories from Rob Steggles. You can also find the game files themselves and interpreters to run them there. Francesco Cordella’s L’avventura è l’avventura hosts an excellent interview with Steggles. Useful magazine sources: Commodore User of December 1986; Happy Computer of January 1987; ZX Computing of August 1986; Popular Computing Weekly of October 10 1985; Computer and Video Games of October 1987; Home Computing Weekly of May 3 1983; Your Computer of January 1988. The picture at the beginning of this article is from the August 1986 ZX Computing.)

Comments
14 Responses

- David Kinder

February 11, 2014 at 10:05 am

From work on the Magnetic interpreter a while back, I think we decided that the ELTHAM thing was some sort of in-joke: the MS games look to have been written in m68k machine code, and then ported to other systems by building a cut-down m68k emulator for each platform.

Digging through old emails, I have this from Paul Findley:

“Yeah, well I guess after all these years, the game is finally up. I confess. ELTHAM *was* 68K with our own extensions. We wrote 68K emulators for VAX, 6502 and 8086 and essentially dumped the 68K binaries into ELTHAM datafiles. Sometimes the datafiles were reversed for speed reasons (which made it harder to spot too!), but it was basically 68K. Of course, this also meant we could run native on 68K platforms, hence your friend’s observations re Amiga and it also explains the embedded 68K on the C64. It was a great idea which we kept secret for a long time.”

- Jimmy Maher

February 11, 2014 at 10:24 am

Thanks for this! I had known that the game files themselves were essentially 68000 machine code, but thought they were compiled down from a more elaborate adventure-specific language, as indeed Anita Sinclair stated in several interviews.

Made a few edits to the article body…

- Wade

February 11, 2014 at 12:40 pm

I never knew til I read this that The Pawn started off without graphics. That’s huge to me for lots of reasons.

My first encounter with the game was a contemporary review of it in Australian Personal Computer Magazine, when I was an adolescent. I don’t remember if the review mentioned the Sinclair at all because that platform was no concern here.

The screenshots from this Atari ST or Amiga game were unbelievable to me. I had the same reaction to screenshots from Jinxter, Guild of Thieves when they were reviewed later. Probably more than to any other screenshots I’ve seen.

Anyway, those games just lived like that for me in my mind until maybe the 2000s when I used an interpreter to play The Pawn for the first time. My reaction was – the game sucked, and the graphics were a disappointment in a tiny window. They weren’t inherently disappointing just because of the march of time – the screenshots had had pictures filling the whole screen with a dark bar of text underneath. The scale of it was a big part of it that this emulator had failed to pull off. But yeah, I was really disappointed. Those old reviews and screenshots in APC still do it for me though!

-Wade

- Andrew

February 12, 2014 at 9:01 am

a flare for business -> flair

“the debugger itself had a bug” – genius

Gah! Those hooks you leave at the end drive me crazy – I’m sure I’m the only reading this who can’t guess what the new paradigm is… Macintosh? Argh.

- Dehumanizer

February 12, 2014 at 9:07 am

I thought about the NES (which came from Japan but made gaming “work” again in the States), but, yes, the Macintosh is more likely.

- Victor Gijsbers

February 12, 2014 at 1:20 pm

Has Jimmy already talked about the rise of the IMB PC with MS-DOS?

- Ian

February 13, 2014 at 5:49 pm

I’m assuming given Jimmy’s background that the paradigm shift is the Amiga, although there’s an argument to be made that the paradigm didn’t actually shift until the arrival of the “multimedia PC” (VGA+CD-ROM+SoundBlaster). Cinemaware notably went out of business betting on that paradigm shift before PCs were ready.

Similarly, the Macintosh didn’t shift the mass-market UI paradigm until Windows 3.0 started to gain traction 6 years later.

- Dehumanizer

February 14, 2014 at 10:58 am

But it’s still too early for the Amiga, we “are” currently in 1984. The first Amiga came out in ’85, and the first really successful one (the 500) was released in ’87, according to Wikipedia.

- Keith Palmer

February 14, 2014 at 11:53 pm

Now that I think about it, Amiga hardware prototypes were being demonstrated (with the “Boing” demo) at CES in 1984, so maybe my assumptions were wrong too. (I say that knowing there are plenty of ways to make a post on “Macintosh 1984” be a “be careful what you wish for” sort of thing…) Anyway, I note now the “paradigms don’t shift until the majority platform has them” superciliousness has already been applied to the Amiga as well.

- Jimmy Maher

February 13, 2014 at 7:13 am

I guess you wouldn’t believe me if I said I meant she was actually waving around a flare for business, would you? Ah, well… thanks!

- IPadCary

February 24, 2014 at 9:55 pm

It’s cliché, but it’s true: Magnetic Scrolls is the British Infocom AND Infocom’s ONLY equal.
And Anita’s a right bloody genius!

- Michael Davis

June 23, 2015 at 4:46 am

“has been awaiting his due patiently”

A male pronoun! Maybe your only one in the entire blog :)

- Peter Piers

November 2, 2015 at 6:45 pm

Technically maybe it should be “it”, as it refers to the elephant in the room.

Anyway, Jimmy’s not against male pronouns in general and nas no agenda in using female pronouns as his default. Best to leave this deceased equine unflogged.

- anthony lambert

August 14, 2015 at 3:42 pm

For the record I was actually one of the original founders of what became Magnetic Scrolls I introduced Ken and Hugh to Anita. Our first product for the QL was a 68k disassembler sold by KAT software (Ken,Anita and Tony). I arranged their original office in Eltham(!) SE London and came up with the name for the “Pawn”. I also wrote their original adventure text entry tool and compression software and the wrote the Macintosh game engine. I left very early to start my own venture Mindware. Fun Times!

Macintosh
February 20, 2014

See //www.youtube.com/embed/2B-XwPjn9YY

The Apple Macintosh had one hell of a long and winding road to join Steve Jobs onstage in front of a cheering throng at De Anza College’s Flint Auditorium on January 24, 1984. It was never even a particular priority of its parent company until, all other options being exhausted, it suddenly had to be. But once it finally was let out of its bag it became, just as its father predicted, the computer that changed everything.

Jobs wasn’t even the first father the Mac knew. It had originally been conceived almost five years earlier by another dreamer, digital utopianist, and early Apple employee named Jef Raskin who believed he could save the world — or at least make it a better place — if he could just build the Dynabook.

The brain child of still another dreamer and visionary named Alan Kay, who first began to write and speak of it in the very early days of Xerox PARC, the Dynabook was more thought experiment than realistic proposal — a conception, an aspirational vision of what could one day be. Kay called it “a dynamic media for creative thought”:

Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.

The Dynabook was a tall order in light of the realities of 1970s computer technology. Indeed, nothing that came remotely close would actually appear for another two decades at least. As Kay himself once put it, thinkers generally fall into two categories: the da Vincis who sketch away like mad and spin out a dozen impractical ideas before breakfast upon which later generations can build careers and obsessions; and the Michelangelos who tackle huge but ultimately practical projects and get them done. Kay was a da Vinci to the bone. The PARC researchers dubbed the less fanciful workstation they built to be their primary engine of innovation for the time being, the Alto, the “interim Dynabook.”

Michael Scott, Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin, Chris Espinosa, and Steve Wozniak circa 1977

Much later in the decade, Raskin thought he might advance the cause a bit more with an interim Dynabook of his own. He thought even the much-loved Apple II was too complicated, too difficult and fiddly, too aesthetically unpleasant, too big to ever play an important role in anyone’s life who was more interested in what she could do with a computer than the computer as an end in itself. He therefore pitched to the executives at Apple his idea for a relatively cheap (about $1000) and portable computer that, far from being the hardware hacker’s playground that was the Apple II, would be a sealed, finished piece — the only one you had to buy to start expressing yourself digitally. Even all the software you’d need would come built right in. Believing that the standard industry practice of naming prototypes after women (as often as not the prettiest secretary in the office) was sexist, he decided to call his idea Macintosh, after his favorite type of (edible) apples, the McIntosh.

In many ways Raskin’s idea cut directly against the grain of Apple’s corporate strategy, which was to further penetrate the business market, in the short term via the Apple III and in the long via the Lisa; both projects were already underway, although the latter was in nothing like the form it would eventually assume. While Apple was trying to trade in their bellbottoms for three-piece suits, Raskin was still living the hippie dream of bringing power to the people. “If I wanted to work for a business company, I’d join IBM,” he told Apple’s president Mike Scott. Still, the company was booming and an IPO was already visible on the horizon. There was enough money and enough hippie utopianism still hanging about the place to let Raskin and a few others tinker with his project.

The Macintosh project during its first eighteen months rarely had a staff of more than four, and often less than that; Raskin had to fight for scraps. Sometimes that worked out just as well; a key acquisition was Burrell Smith, a talented hardware engineer he rescued from a job as a lowly service technician, testing and repairing Apple IIs that had come back to the company under warranty. Smith became the Mac’s hardware guru, a position he would continue to hold right up through the launch and some time beyond, giving him by far the longest tenure of any member of the original team. Given his price window, Smith couldn’t afford to design anything that would be much more powerful than the Apple II; the first prototype was built around an 8-bit Motorola 6809 no more powerful than the Apple II’s 6502, and had just 64 K of memory. It did, however, use a relatively high-resolution bitmapped display in lieu of the Apple II’s text. Although he was oddly unenamored with mice and windows, this part at least of the Xerox PARC gospel had reached Raskin loud and clear.

With Raskin himself often not seeming sure what he wanted and what was doable and many of his staff not seeming overly interested in buckling down to work on his schemes, the project languished through most of 1980. On one or two occasions it was actually cancelled, only to be revived in response to Raskin’s impassioned pleas. Yet practical progress was hard to see. Raskin mostly busied himself with The Book of Macintosh, a sort of aspirational bible hardly more practical than Kay’s original dream of the Dynabook. Then Steve Jobs read The Book of Macintosh and promptly came in and took his computer away from him.

Jobs was a huge headache for Michael Scott, Mike Markkula, and the rest of Apple’s senior leadership, who received memos almost daily complaining about his temper, his dismissive attitude toward the Apple II platform that was the only thing supporting the company, and his refusal to listen to reason when one of his sacred precepts was threatened. Jobs’s headstrong authoritarianism had been a big contributor to the debacle that was the Apple III launch. (Traditional wisdom, as well as an earlier version of this article, would have it that Jobs’s insistence that the Apple III ship without a cooling fan led directly to the hardware problems that left Apple IIIs dying on buyers’ desks by the thousands. It does, however, appear that this version of events is at least questionable; see the comments section for more about that. Be that as it may, everyone involved would agree that Jobs did an already muddled project no favors.) The Apple III never recovered, and would pass into history as Apple’s first flop. Now he was sowing the same chaos within the Lisa project, a computer the company simply couldn’t afford to let go the same way as the Apple III. Scott and Markkula forcibly removed him from Lisa in late 1980. They would have liked for him to just content himself with enjoying his post-IPO millions and accepting the occasional medal at the White House as a symbol of the American entrepreneurial spirit while they got on with actually running his company for him. They would have liked, in other words, for Jobs to be like Wozniak, who dipped in and out of the occasional engineering project but mostly was happy to spend his time organizing rock festivals and finishing his education and learning to fly an airplane and generally having all the good times he’d missed during a youth spent with his head buried in circuit boards. Jobs, alas, was not so pliable. He wanted an active role at what was after all still in some moral sense his company. Trouble was, every time he took an active role in anything at all anger and failure followed. Thus his forcible eviction from Lisa while it still looked salvageable. But at the same time Apple certainly couldn’t afford an ugly break with their founder and entrepreneurial golden boy. When a hurt Jobs started to lick his wounds from Lisa not through ugly public recriminations but by interesting himself in Raskin’s strictly small-time Macintosh project, the executives therefore took it as very good news. Let him tinker and meddle to his heart’s content with that little vanity project.

But Jobs’s interest was very bad news for one Jef Raskin. Never really technical himself, Jobs nevertheless knew very well how technical people thought. He innocently suggested to Burrell Smith that he might dump the plebian old Motorola 6809 in favor of the sexy new 68000 that the Lisa people were using, and double the Mac’s memory to 128 K while he was it. That was an offer no hardware hacker could resist. With Smith successfully subverted, it was just a matter of time. Raskin wrote furious memos to upper management about Jobs’s unauthorized takeover of his project, but they fell on predictably deaf ears. Instead, in early 1981 the takeover was made official. Jobs condescendingly offered Raskin the opportunity to stay with the Macintosh in the role of technical writer. Raskin, who by all indications had an ego almost as big as Jobs’s own, refused indignantly and walked out. He never forgave Jobs for co-opting his vision and stealing his project, remaining convinced until his death in 2005 that his Macintosh would have been better for Apple and better for the world than Jobs’s.

For all that the project had been in existence for over eighteen months already, there was very little really to Macintosh at the time of the takeover — just Raskin’s voluminous writings and some crude hardware based on an obsolete chip that resoundingly failed to live up to the visions expressed in The Book of Macintosh. Thus one could say that the real story of the Macintosh, the story of the machine that Jobs would finally unveil in January of 1984, begins here. Which is not to say that Jobs discarded Raskin’s vision entirely; he had after all been originally drawn to the project by the ideas inside The Book of Macintosh. Although the $1000 goal would be quietly dropped in fairly short order, the new machine should nevertheless be inexpensive at least in comparison to the Lisa, should stress elegance and simplicity and the needs of everyday non-computer people above all else. Jobs, however, shared none of Raskin’s skepticism about mice and menus. He had bought the GUI religion hook, line, and sinker, and intended the graphical user interface to be every bit as integral to the Macintosh as it was to the Lisa. Hell, if he could find a way to make it more so he’d do that too.

Much of the original Mac team: Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Chris Espinosa, George Crow, Joanna Hoffman, Burrell Smith, and Jerry Manock. Taking a leaf from Electronic Arts’s playbook, Apple photographed them often in artful poses like this one during the Mac’s initial promotional push.

Still with pull within Apple the likes of which Raskin could only dream of, Jobs began assembling a group of stars to start over and make his version of Macintosh. Joining Smith the hardware guru were additional hardware engineer George Crow; programmers Andy Hertzfeld, Larry Kenyon, Chris Espinosa, Bruce Horn, Steve Capps, Bud Tribble, and Bill Atkinson; industrial designer Jerry Manock to shape the external look and feel of the machine; Susan Kare to shape the internal look and feel as designer of graphics, icons, and fonts; and Joanna Hoffman as writer, marketer, and the team’s face to the outside world, the first “Mac evangelist.” Jobs even briefly recruited Wozniak, but the latter found it hard to stay focused on the Mac, as he would just about every other project after his Apple II masterpieces, and soon wandered off again. Others would come and go, but the names listed above were the core of the team that would, just as Jobs so often promised them was inevitable, change the world.

Jobs deliberately fostered an “us against the world” mentality, with the world in this case apparently including the rest of Apple — particularly the much larger and more bureaucratic Lisa team. His dictum that “It’s better to be pirates than to join the Navy” shaped the Mac team’s conception of itself as a brilliant little band of rebels out to make a better world for everyone. They even took to flying a skull-and-crossbones flag outside their offices on the Apple campus. They were united by a sincere belief that the work they were doing mattered. “We all felt as though we had missed the civil-rights movement,” said one later. “We had missed Vietnam. What we had was Macintosh.” Their pranks and adventures have become computer-industry folklore (literally; Andy Hertzfeld’s longstanding website Folklore.org is full of them, and makes great reading).

Of course, one person’s genius at work is another’s self-entitled jerk. A joke was soon making the rounds at Apple:

How many Macintosh Division employees do you need to change a light bulb?

One. He holds the bulb up and lets the universe revolve around him.

Perhaps the people with the most justification for feeling aggrieved were those poor plodding pedants — in Jobs’s view, anyway — of the Lisa team. As Steve Capps would later put it, “A lot of people think we ripped off Xerox. But really we ripped off Lisa.”

To say that the Mac could not have existed without Lisa is no way an overstatement. Mac was quite literally built on Lisa; for a long time the only way to program it was via one of the prototype Lisas installed in the team’s office. The Mac people watched everything the Lisa people did carefully, then reaped the fruit of whatever labor seemed useful to them. They happily digested the conclusions of the Lisa team’s exhaustive user testing of various designs and interfaces and built them into Mac. They took Bill Atkinson’s QuickDraw, the core rendering layer at the base of the Lisa’s bitmapped display, for the Mac. Later, Jobs managed to take its programmer as well; in addition to QuickDraw, Atkinson became the author of the MacPaint application. Yes, Jobs proved surprisingly willing to borrow from the work of a team he dismissed as unimaginative plodders. The brilliance of the people involved is one answer to the question of how Macintosh was created by so few. Lisa, however, is another.

The Mac people regarded their leader with a combination of awe and bemused tolerance. It was team member Bud Tribble who coined perhaps the most famous of all descriptions for Jobs’s unique charisma, that of the “reality distortion field.” “In his presence,” noted Tribble, “reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything.” Tribble elaborated further on Jobs’s unique style:

Just because he tells you that something is awful or great, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll feel that way tomorrow. You have to low-pass filter his input. And then, he’s really funny about ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he’ll usually tell you that he thinks it’s stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later he’ll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it.

The aforementioned reality distortion field kept this sort of behavior from seeming as obnoxious as it would have from just about anyone else. Anyway, everyone was well aware that it was only because of Jobs’s patronage that the Mac project was tolerated at all at Apple. This little group of pirates, convinced that what they were doing was indeed (to choose another of Jobs’s catchphrases) “insanely great,” something that would change the world, knew that they owed the vision and the opportunity for Macintosh to Jobs. Atkinson later noted that “You only get one chance to change the world. Nothing else matters as much — you’ll have another chance to have vacations, have kids.” Most people, of course, don’t ever even get one chance. He and the rest of them owed theirs to Jobs.

Thankful as they were, they were hardly mindless disciples. They did their best to redirect his course when he got details as wrong as he got the big-picture vision right. When their reasoning failed, as it usually did with the imperious Jobs, they did their best to subvert him and/or to minimize the damage.

The list of bad decisions Jobs made about Macintosh is long, easily long enough to torpedo virtually any other computer. He insisted that the Mac use the same horrifically unreliable in-house-designed “Twiggy” disk drives as the Lisa, an example of borrowing a bit too much from Mac’s older sister. He rejected categorically pleas that the Mac at least have the option of memory expansion beyond 128 K, insisting that doing so would just encourage programming inefficiency and turn the Macintosh into a bloated monster like Lisa; his team’s arguments that a bitmapped, GUI-driven operating system running under a 16-bit processor required by its very nature vastly more memory than something like the Apple II got them nowhere. He rejected an internal hard drive because it would require that most hated of all pieces of technology, a noisy fan. He rejected a second internal floppy drive because there wouldn’t be room in Jerry Manock’s sleekly elegant case, plus bloat and all that. He tried to kill the Apple LaserWriter, a product that would prove almost as significant for the company as the Mac itself and without which the Mac may very well have not survived beyond its first couple of years. He cut short all discussion of networking by pulling out a floppy disk and pronouncing, “Here’s your network!” (The laser printer and Ethernet, those two other parts of the PARC gospel, had most resoundingly not reached Jobs during his famous visit.) He even refused to permit cursor keys on the keyboard, saying that the mouse was the only proper way to move the cursor in this new paradigm of computing.

The original Mac keyboard, complete with no cursor keys

People did what they could in the face of this litany. Burrell Smith made sure the Mac was capable of accommodating 3.5-inch floppy drives, the emerging industry standard soon to replace the older 5.25-inch floppies, as well as the Twiggy. When Lisa debuted a year ahead of the Mac and the Twiggy drives proved a disaster, the Mac manufacturing team was able to easily slot the 3.5-inch drives in in their place. (Taking the fall for Twiggy was another great service Lisa did Macintosh.) Everyone also made sure that the Mac was ready to accommodate more memory on both the hardware and software side, for when the realization finally dawned that 128 K just wasn’t going to cut it. (That realization began to dawn quite early even for Jobs; the machine he unveiled to press and public on January 24, 1984, had in fact been hacked to have 512 K. Otherwise the presentation would have been a less impressive one altogether, with a lot more time spent waiting for the Mac to deign to do something and none of the cool synthesized speech.) For most of the rest, there wasn’t much for it but to hope the machine did well enough with the early adopters that they could go back and fix the problems later. Cooler heads in management did at least prevail to save the LaserWriter.

On the hardware side, the Macintosh was smartly but minimalistly designed by Burrell Smith, a huge admirer of Steve Wozniak who strained to craft the same sort of elegant circuitry for the Mac that Woz had for the Apple II. For all that it was clean and compact, however, the Mac wasn’t terribly interesting or impressive as a piece of hardware. Jobs, from a contemporary interview in Byte magazine:

By paying a little more for the microprocessor, not only were we able to give the customer an infinitely more powerful chip than, say, an 8-bit chip or one of Intel’s baby micros, but we were able to pick up this amazing software [referring here to Bill Atkinson’s QuickDraw layer sourced from the Lisa project], and that allowed us to throw tons of chips out of this thing. We didn’t have to get special custom text or graphics chips. We just simplified the system down to where it’s just a bitmap on the screen, just Bill’s amazing software and Burrell’s amazing hardware, then in between that the other amazing software that we have. We tried to do this in every single way, with the disk and with the I/O…

The Macintosh, in other words, asks a hell of a lot of its 68000 CPU, something it could get away with because, well, it was a 68000, the most powerful reasonably priced chip in the industry of the time. A person reading that Byte interview might have asked what the 68000 could do with a bit more support in the hardware around it. That question would be answered in fairly resounding form by later 68000-based machines, most notably the Amiga, which could run rings around the Mac.

But of course that line of argument is a touch unfair; not only was the Mac first to the 68000 architecture, but it was also the first PC in the world to be principally defined not by its hardware but by its software. And the newly minted MacOS was indeed a brilliant creation, one that went in many ways far beyond what its legendary predecessors at Xerox PARC had managed. Incredible as the Xerox Alto was, there’s a hell of a lot that’s become a standard part of GUIs everywhere that dates not from the Xerox of the 1970s but from the Apple of the early 1980s. Amongst these are such basic building blocks as pull-down menus and even the idea of windows as draggable entities that can overlap and be stacked atop one another; on the Alto they were non-overlapping tiles fixed in place (as they also were, incidentally, in the earliest versions of Microsoft Windows). One of Jobs’s favorite aphorisms during the final frantic year of Mac development was “Real Artists Ship!” This was something the tinkerers and theorists at PARC never quite managed to do. As anyone who’s ever finished a big creative project knows, the work of polishing and perfecting usually absorbs far more time and effort — and tedious, difficult effort at that — than hammering out the rough concept ever does. Apple did this heavy lifting, thus enshrining Xerox PARC as well as the Mac itself forever in computing legend. And they did it well — phenomenally well. I have my problems with Apple then and now, but this should never be forgotten.

As the Mac began to assume concrete form at the beginning of 1983, Jobs’s star at Apple was again in the ascendent. After years of muddled leadership from Michael Scott and Mike Markkula, the company had finally decided that a more dynamic leader was needed. Scott and Markkula had been Silicon Valley insiders steeped in engineering detail; Markkula had personally contributed code, testing, and documentation to the company’s early projects. To bring to fruition Jobs’s vision for Apple as a great mainstream company, known and loved by the masses, a very different sort of leader would be needed. Ideally, of course, that leader would be him, but Apple’s board wasn’t that crazy. As a second-best alternative, Jobs became enamored with a very unconventional choice indeed: a marketing expert and polished East Coast blue blood who was currently running the Pepsi brand. His name was John Sculley, and it was doubtful whether he even would know how to turn on one of Apple’s computers.

Steve Jobs and John Sculley at the Mac’s public introduction on January 24, 1984.

Even had he never hooked up with Apple, Sculley’s name would be enshrined in business lore and MBA syllabi. Not yet 45 when Jobs’s courtship began, Sculley was already a decorated general of the Cola Wars. He had been one of the pioneers of what would come to be called “lifestyle advertising.” You know the sort of thing: all those advertisements that show cool, pretty people doing interesting things whilst listening to the hippest music and, oh, yes, just happening to enjoy a Pepsi while they’re about it. (“Come alive — you’re in the Pepsi Generation!”) “Boy,” thinks the consumer, “I’d like to be like those people.” And next time she’s at the grocery store, she picks up a six-pack of Pepsi. It sounds absurd, but, as one look at your television screen will tell you, it’s very, very effective. Very few of us are immune; I must sheepishly admit that I once bought a Volkswagen thanks largely to a certain advertisement featuring a certain Nick Drake song. As Mad Men has since taught all of us and Sculley grasped decades ago, the cleverest advertising doesn’t sell us a product; it sells us possibility. The best examples of the lifestyle form, like that Volkswagen spot, can be compelling and inspired and even beautiful.

If that wasn’t enough, Sculley was later instrumental to the most legendary Cola Wars campaign of all time, the Pepsi Challenge, which cleverly combined the lifestyle approach with the more conventional hard sell. The advertisements showed that it just happened to be the cool, attractive people — many of them hip young celebrities and athletes — who preferred the taste of Pepsi to that of Coke. The ads were everywhere, an inescapable part of the cultural landscape of the late 1970s and early 1980s. And, judging by the relative sales trends of Coke and Pepsi, they were very, very effective; for the root cause of the “New Coke” fiasco of the mid-1980s, look no further.

Now Jobs wanted Sculley to do the same thing for Apple, to craft for the company an identity that transcended the specifications sheets and price comparisons that sullied their competitors. To some extent Apple already enjoyed a special status; their compelling origin story and the charisma of their two young founders along with the engaging personality of their signature creation the Apple II gave them a cachet of which drabber, more conventional companies, executives, and computers could only dream. Now Jobs believed he and Sculley together could leverage that image to make an Apple computer the hippest lifestyle accessory of the 1980s. There was more than a little bit of utopian fervor to Jobs’s vision, part and parcel of that strange intermingling of hardheaded business ambition and counterculture idealism that has always seen Jobs and the company he founded selling a better world for a rather steep price. Jobs’s deal-closing pitch to Sculley, which may never have actually passed his lips in such pithy form, has nevertheless gone down into Apple lore: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” How could anyone refuse?

It became increasingly clear as 1983 wore on and Sculley settled into his new West Coast digs that the specific Apple computer that would be doing the world-changing must be the Macintosh. The Lisa was a flop, done in by intrinsic failings, like the unreliable Twiggy drives and its beautiful but molasses-slow GUI, and some extrinsic ones, like its high price and the uncertainty of big business — the only people who could realistically buy the thing — over what it really was good for. Nor did Jobs’s persistent whispers to reporters to just wait, that something cheaper and even better was coming soon, do the Lisa any favors.

Still, by many measures the Mac was not only cheaper but better than Lisa. Its 68000 architecture may have been unexceptional, but so was the Lisa’s — and the Mac’s 68000 was clocked at 8 MHz, a full 3 MHz faster than the Lisa’s. The Mac’s operating system was slim and lightweight, written in pure 68000 assembly language, as opposed to the Lisa’s bigger and more ambitious (overambitious?) operating system which was mostly written in Pascal. There was a price to be paid for the Mac’s slim efficiency; in some areas like multitasking and memory protection MacOS wouldn’t fully equal LisaOS until the arrival of OS X in 2001. But an average user just trying to get stuff done will make lots of compromises to have a snappy, usable interface — something which, at least in contrast to the Lisa, the Mac had in spades.

Condemned as a backwater project with little relevance to Apple’s business-centric corporate direction for years, as Macintosh geared up for the big launch Jobs and his band of pirates now found themselves taking center stage. Macintosh was now the future of Apple; Macintosh simply had to succeed. The last five years at Apple had been marked by the ever-greater success of the Apple II almost in spite of its parent company and two colossal and expensive failures to develop a viable successor to that beloved platform. Apple was still a major force in the PC industry, with yearly revenues approach $1 billion. Yet they were also in a desperately precarious position, dependent as they still were on the archaic Apple II technology and their absurdly high profit margins on same. At some point people had to stop buying the Apple II, which was now thoroughly outclassed in some areas (notably graphics and sound) by competition like the Commodore 64 that cost a fraction of the price. With the Apple III and the Lisa lost causes, the Macintosh by default represented Apple’s last chance to field a viable bridge to the Apple II-less future that had to come one of these days. Given the age of the Apple II, it was highly doubtful whether they would have time to go back to the drawing board and create yet another new machine for yet another kick at the can. The Mac represented their third strike; it was Mac or bust. Steve Jobs and his team reveled in it and prepared to change the world.

The Macintosh was announced to the world on January 22, 1984. Early in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII and not long after one of IBM’s Charlie Chaplin spots for the ill-fated PCjr, an audience bloated with chips and beer and bored with a rather lackluster football game saw this, the most famous Super Bowl advertisement of all time.

See //www.youtube.com/embed/R706isyDrqI

Most people had no idea whatsoever what Apple was on about, had no idea that Big Brother represented the hated IBM who had taken the lead in business computing that Apple felt was rightfully theirs. The commercial was the talk of the media for the next few days, as everyone speculated about just what this “Macintosh” thing was and what it had to do with hammer-hurdling freedom fighters. The advertisement, which it soon emerged had been directed by none other than that master of dystopia Ridley Scott of Alien and Blade Runner fame, would never darken a television screen again. No need; it had done its job, and would go down into history alongside Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy” ad as one of the two most famous one-and-done commercials of all time.

The “1984” spot was an overheated, rather adolescent piece of rhetoric, coming off almost like a caricature of Apple’s exaggerated self-importance. It was by no means beloved by everyone even within Apple. The Mac’s moving up to become the company’s biggest priority hadn’t change the determination of most of their executive wing to make it not as a maker of home and hobbyist computers, a competitor to Commodore and Atari and Radio Shack, but as a player in the much more lucrative field of business computing, where IBM (and, increasingly, IBM clones, a story for another time) ruled. Meanwhile Jobs still saw the Macintosh as he always had, as a way of changing not just the business world but the world full stop — which didn’t quite mean that he wanted to get down in the trenches with the likes of Commodore either, mind you, but also funneled his ambitions for the platform in a very different direction. Caught somewhere in the middle was John Sculley, a man who had been brought in thanks to his prowess as a consumer marketer but was nevertheless beholden to both factions. The constant push and pull between them, and the mixed messaging that resulted, would very nearly sink the Mac. Just before the Mac’s introduction, the business faction pushed through a rise in the list price from $2000 to a more businesslike $2500. But then came the “1984” commercial, whose lurid tone was all but guaranteed to repulse exactly the corporate leaders the business interests wanted to attract; these folks identified more with Big Brother than with the hammer-wielding freedom fighter. It would go on like that for a long time.

At the official launch on January 24, Jobs publicly committed Apple to the goal of selling 50,000 Macs in the first hundred days. It was dangerously ambitious; to miss the goal would be embarrassing and momentum-killing. In the end they managed it and then some; sales reached some 70,000, and they might have sold even more if not for teething problems at the factory typical of a new computer. Virtually all of the machines they sold, however, went not to corporations but to forward-thinking individuals of a certain technological bent and disposable income who rightly recognized in the Mac a new future paradigm. Douglas Adams, who saw his first Mac in Infocom’s offices and promptly fell in love, was archetypical of the demographic.

All of which was fine as far as it went — Apple was happy to sell to individuals too if they had the money to buy — but didn’t do a lot to further the dream of the Mac as a rival to the IBM PC on the desks of corporate America. Equally frustrating was much of the software that appeared that first year, which often tended toward games and other frivolous stuff frowned upon by corporations. By year’s end the early adopters with disposable income were already looking exhausted and corporations still weren’t buying. The result was tens of thousands of Macs piling up in warehouses and cancelled production orders. At year end total sales amounted to 250,000, about half of Jobs’s projections at launch time. And sales were getting worse every month, not better. It was beginning to look disconcertingly like Strike 3 — Apple III and Lisa all over again. The only thing keeping the company in the black was still the inexplicably evergreen Apple II, which in 1984, that supposed Year of the Macintosh, enjoyed its best sales yet. Revenue from the Apple II amounted to 2.5 times that from the Mac. Apple II loyalists, who despite Apple’s official claims of “Apple II Forever!” could see where the company’s real priorities lay, took no small delight in this reality.

Joanna Hoffman, the marketer who was with the Mac project almost from the beginning, frankly admitted later that the sales results were, at least in retrospect, unsurprising.

It’s a miracle that it sold anything at all. This was a computer with a single disk drive, no memory capacity, and almost no applications. People who bought it did so on seduction. It was not a rational buy. It was astonishing that Macintosh sold as many as it did.

Or, as Douglas Adams put it:

What I (and I think everybody else who bought the machine in the early days) fell in love with was not the machine itself, which was ridiculously slow and underpowered, but a romantic idea of the machine. And that romantic idea had to sustain me through the realities of actually working on the 128 K Mac€.

Those realities could be hellish. The single floppy drive combined with the inadequate memory could make the original Mac as excruciating to actually use as it was fun to wax poetic about, with the process of just copying a single disk requiring more than fifty disk swaps and twenty minutes. MacWrite, the Mac’s flagship version of that bedrock of business applications the word processor, was so starved for memory that you could only create a document of about eight pages. Determined Mac zealots swapped tips on how to chain files together to craft their Great American Novels, while the business world just shrugged and turned back to their ugly but functional WordStar screens. The Mac was a toy, at best an interesting curiosity; IBM was still the choice for real work.

Sculley did his best to apply his Pepsi marketing genius to the Mac, but found it tough sledding. That Christmas Apple began the “Test Drive a Macintosh” campaign, which — shades of the Pepsi Challenge — let prospective buyers take a machine home for free to play with for 24 hours. Some 200,000 did so, but very few actually bought afterward, leaving stores with nothing but a bunch of used Macs to show for their trouble. For the 1985 Super Bowl, Apple attempted to recapture some of the Mac’s launch buzz with another high-concept commercial, this one depicting IBM users as mindless lemmings trudging off the side of a cliff. Ridley Scott’s brother Tony did the directing honors this time between pre-production work on Top Gun. But by now it all just felt kind of trite and childish, not to mention insulting to the very businesspeople Apple was trying to win over. Reaction from corporate America was so negative that Apple briefly considered taking out a full-page apology in the Wall Street Journal.

Apple’s summer of discontent, the rock-bottom point for the Mac, came in 1985. Not only were Mac sales still moribund, but by then another terrifying reality was becoming clear: Apple II sales were also slowing. The previous year had at last been the top of the bell curve. The day they had dreaded loomed, the day when they would have no viable next-generation machine and no faithful Apple II to fall back on. Apple closed three of their six factories and laid off 20 percent of their workforce, some 1450 people, that bleak summer.

Shortly after, Steve Jobs finally walked away from Apple following an acrimonious split with his erstwhile best mate John Sculley and a clumsy failed coup in the Apple boardroom. Jobs had proved psychologically incapable of accepting or addressing the Mac’s failings as both a piece of computer hardware and as a marketplace proposition. Jay Elliott, Apple’s head of human resources, summed up his situation beautifully:

[Jobs] could see that horizon out there, a thousand miles out. But he could never see the details of each little mile that had to be covered to get there. That was his genius and his downfall.

The Macintosh, like Apple itself, needed a practical repairman in 1985, not a bold visionary. This was a role Jobs was, at least at this phase of his life, eminently unqualified to play. And so he had made life intolerable for everyone, until the ugly public split that several generations of previous Apple management had only just found ways to avoid had come at last. The famed Apple mojo seemed all but gone, lost along with their charismatic founder.

But, as happens often (if not quite often enough) in business as in life, that summer proved to be the darkness before the dawn. Apple’s engineers had not been idle while the Mac struggled through its difficult first year, but had rather set doggedly to work to correct the worst of its failings. An external floppy drive became available a few months after launch, greatly alleviating the hell of disk swapping. The so-called “Fat Mac” with 512 K of memory, the amount most of the development team not named Jobs had agreed was appropriate from the start, appeared late in 1984. A hard disk and even cursor keys — their lack had been one of the more loathed aspects of the original machine if also a boon for makers of add-on keypads — were in the offing, as was, slowly and painfully, a workable networking system. The loss of Jobs only made such alleged dilutions of his vision easier to accomplish. The buggy original systems software was slowly tweaked and upgraded, while a third-party software ecosystem steadily grew on the backs of enthusiastic early adopters with money to spend. It didn’t come as quickly as Apple would have liked, and much of it wasn’t initially as businesslike as they might have liked, but the software — and with it a burgeoning community of famously loyal users — did come. Indeed, it was a third-party developer who arguably saved the Macintosh in tandem with another product of Apple’s busy engineering staff.

Paul Brainerd was a techie with a background in publishing who had for some time dreamed of finding a way to revolutionize the complicated and expensive process of traditional typesetting — pasteboards, huge industrial printers, and all the rest — through microcomputer technology. He had been stymied by two sore lacks: a computer with a high-resolution graphics display capable of showing what a document would look like on the printed page, pictures and all; and a printer capable of producing said document on paper. When he saw the Mac for the first time, he recognized that one of these needs had been met at last. When he reached out to Apple, they let him in on a secret: they had a solution for the other in the works as well, in the form of the LaserWriter, an affordable — in publishing terms; it would cost about $7000 — laser printer. The combination of the Mac, the LaserWriter, and the software Brainerd would eventually produce to make use of them, Aldus PageMaker, would invent the field of desktop publishing and change everything for the Mac and for Apple.

Like so much else about the Mac, it wasn’t an entirely original concept. Way back in circa 1975, Ginn & Co., a textbook publisher and Xerox subsidiary out of Boston, were gifted by the researchers at PARC with some Altos and a custom interface to hook them up to a big Dover laser printer. Ginn became the first all-digital publisher in the world. “Initially the reaction to the concept was, ‘You’re going to have to drag me kicking and screaming,'” said Tim Mott, one of the PARC people chiefly responsible for the project. “But everyone who sat in front of that system and used it, to a person, was a convert within an hour.” It was in fact Ginn’s editors who coined the ubiquitous terms “cut” and “paste,” a reference to the old manual process of cutting out manuscripts and photographs and pasting them onto pasteboard for typesetting. Now, a decade later, the rest of the world would finally get the opportunity to follow Ginn’s lead. The Mac had its killer app for business at last.

In retrospect it should have been obvious. It had been obvious to Xerox, hardly a company revered for vision; their big attempt to package PARC’s innovations into commercial form had come with the Xerox Star, a “document-processing workstation” that was essentially a sneak preview of desktop publishing before the term existed. But Apple, and especially Jobs, had been so focused on the Macintosh as a revolutionary force of nature in all aspects of the human condition that they’d had trouble thinking in terms of the concrete, practical applications that made corporations buy computers.

Publishers loved PageMaker. It turned what had been an all-night, all-hands-on-deck process, a hot, dirty nightmare of paste and print and paper for countless small periodicals and corporate publishing departments into something almost painless, something downright fun. Apple came to call PageMaker and its competitors, which were soon springing up like toadstools after a rain, their Trojan Horses. A brave purchasing manager would buy a couple of Macs and a LaserWriter as an experiment, and six months later the same company would be coming back for fifty or a hundred more. Publishing would become the first of several creative niche industries that the Mac would absolutely own, even as IBM continued to dominate the mainstream of business. It wasn’t quite the grand head-to-head challenge that Jobs had dreamed of, but, combined with sales of the Apple II that would remain on the descendent but surprisingly strong for the rest of the decade, it was a pretty good living.

Apple had been very, very lucky; they and the Mac had blundered through somehow. David Bunnell, longtime publisher of MacWorld magazine, summarized the Mac’s formative years bluntly:

To hold up the Macintosh experience as an example of how to create a great product, launch an industry, or spark a revolution is a cruel joke. Anyone who models their business startup on the Macintosh startup is doomed to failure. Miracles like the Macintosh can only happen once.

If the bargain with practicality represented by the Macintosh as desktop-publishing specialist seems disheartening, consider how genuinely empowering just this application was to countless people. For it wasn’t just big or medium-sized companies who bought Macs for this purpose. Especially as the prices of software and hardware came down, the small printers, the neighborhood associations, the church groups could also get in on the act. It’s astonishing how ugly the average fanzine or newsletter of 1980 is compared to that of 1995. The difference is almost entirely down to the Macintosh, which let people get their messages out there in a form of which no one need be embarrassed. Many, like a young man named Eliot Cohen who used his Mac to start a popular newsletter focusing on his obsession of New York Mets baseball and soon found himself in the locker room interviewing his heroes as the slick magazines called to beg for his insights, credited the Mac with literally changing their lives. This democratizing of the means of production is one of the most inspiring outcomes of the PC revolution and, much as I’m ambivalent about some aspects of the platform and its parent company, of the Mac itself. Indeed, I have a special reason for giving credit where it’s due: the logical successors to the Mac-enabled fanzines that were everywhere by the early 1990s are blogs like this one. We’re still riding that same continuum of change.

Consider also how immense was the Mac’s soft power. People — even people who rejected the Mac itself as an overpriced boondoggle — somehow recognized that this was the way computers really ought to work. It became an ideal, striven for if seldom reached for years. No matter; other computers were better for the striving. Even machines like the lowly Commodore 64 soon housed their own valiant attempts at replicating MacOS. To really get the scope of the changes wrought by the Mac, one need only compare the average Commodore 64 or Apple II game of, say, 1983 and 1986. A friendly GUI interface, of the sort which felt revolutionary when it appeared in the landmark Pinball Construction Set in 1983, was practically the baseline norm by 1986. The hardware hadn’t changed a whit; the vision of what could be done with it had. So, the Macintosh really did end up changing the world. Steve Jobs, wrong about so many nitpicky things, was breathtakingly right about that.

(The Macintosh story has been told so often and by so many that the biggest problem in writing an article like this one is sorting through it all and trying to inject some grounding into the more evangelistic accounts. My primary book sources were Insanely Great by Steven Levy; West of Eden by Frank Rose; Apple Confidential by Owen Linzmayer; and Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik. Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org is also a goldmine. The Byte quote given above is from the February 1984 issue, part of a series of features greeting the Mac’s arrival. Various episodes of Computer Chronicles, archived by the dedicated folks at archive.org, also informed the article. See in particular “Mainframes to Minis to Micros”; “Integrated Software”; “Printers”; “Computer Ergonomics”; “The Macintosh Computer”; “Computer Graphics”; “Slowdown in the Silicon Valley” Parts One and Two; “Printers and Business Graphics”; and “Desktop Publishing” Parts One and Two. The photos sprinkled through the article are from Apple Confidential, except for the picture of the original Mac keyboard, which was taken from the aforementioned issue of Byte.)

Comments
25 Responses

- Keith Palmer

February 20, 2014 at 11:02 pm

When I noticed what seemed an elision in your “American hardware in 1984” piece, I got to musing how to begin using a Macintosh (as my own family did at the end of 1992, when it was pretty clear our Tandy Color Computer had reached a certain end of the line) is in some ways to detach one’s self from the main current of computer gaming. (However, it may be that very detachment that keeps me interested in the history of it.) Then, though, I did begin to think of all the ways I knew a piece on the early Macintosh could be made skeptical and critical (with the certain possibility of extending that all the way to now), perhaps especially so in the context of having written about Apple II and Commodore 64 games with a book about the Amiga in the mix too…

However, as loaded as words like “balanced” and “even” might be made to sound, after I’d read my way through this piece I want to say they do seem to apply. I was particularly struck by your portrayal of Jef Raskin’s project (for which, perhaps, the initial idea of a 6809 processor does make think of the Color Computer and makes me want to know more about how its software would have worked, even if I haven’t done an awful lot of actual looking for that information) and the brief note about how Steve Jobs’s usurpation of it might have been seen from afar as sort of like Steve Wozniak’s own career arc at Apple.

This does feel unfortunately like a somewhat grisly correction to suggest, but in seeing Raskin’s later opinions of Jobs described in the present tense I remembered how I’d heard he had died in 2005. It also seems part of the folklore that the price of the Macintosh rising to $2500 was to pay for an advertising blitz, a much more minor note perhaps. (In letting that thought shape my own impressions of “little things getting to be big problems later,” though, I was surprised when I managed a little while ago to buy some early issues of Macworld magazine for a new perspective and noticed the “128K” price was cut back to $2000 when the Macintosh 512K was introduced… although there, of course, the impression might have been the more expensive model was still the only one actually usable.)

- Jimmy Maher

February 21, 2014 at 7:46 am

You’re certainly right that the Mac was never a big mainstream gaming machine, but it’s nevertheless a fascinating platform for anyone interested in creative computing in that a ton of groundbreaking software appeared there which had a huge impact on mainstream (and non-mainstream) gaming and ludic narrative on other platforms. Stuff like StorySpace, HyperCard, The Fool’s Errand, and of course Myst…

Also earlier stuff in the more immediate wake of the launch, which I’ll be talking about in my next article and so won’t mention here so as to preserve the suspense. ;)

- Lubo

April 11, 2015 at 10:26 pm

Props for the references to software that changed “everything”. Especially Hypercard and Fool’s Errand!

Several more to add:

Quicktime 1.0 (circa 1991?) Before then it was audio OR video (.wav, .au, .snd OR mpg1) Not until DVDs and mpg2 did anyone seriously combine them. But in 1991, DVD was not mainstream, VHS and Beta were, with a smattering of the stillborn Laserdisc (the size of records!) Enter Quicktime. How many failed intel/microsoft video codecs were abandoned when windows quicktime appeared? A lot I think.

Several awesome games: Silicon Beach Airborne, Dark Castle, Wizardry 1 (light-years ahead of the ugly PC ports, thanks to the Mac GUI), Archon (again GUI!) Firefox. Even ten years later when Civilization 1 was finally ported to the Mac, having been on the PC first, it looked better than the “refreshed and updated” PC port. Not until Civ 2 did they achieve anything close to parity.

- Ian

February 23, 2014 at 8:39 pm

Raskin’s “original Macintosh” concept surfaced most fully-formed in the form of the little-known Canon Cat, although even that shipped with a 68000.

He also was responsible for the SwyftCard, which you plugged into an Apple IIe and took it completely over, making it look and feel very much like a cut-down version of the Cat.

- Keith Palmer

February 25, 2014 at 2:58 am

I did know about Jef Raskin creating the Swyftcard and Canon Cat, but not the specifics of how they worked. A trivial search just now, though, turned up the site http://www.canoncat.net, which has contemporary manuals and documents for both.

- ZUrlocker

February 20, 2014 at 11:37 pm

Great post. I bought a 512k “fat mac” as soon as they became available. But it was still limiting to have a single floppy drive. So I bought an internally installed GCC HyperDrive hard disk that gave me a whopping 10mb of storage. I thought I’d never fill that up! It was a great machine but programming for the Mac was not an easy thing, even with great tools like Lightspeed Pascal.

BTW, you misspelled Alan Kay’s name with an “e” a couple of times.

- Jimmy Maher

February 21, 2014 at 6:37 am

Thanks!

- Scott

February 21, 2014 at 1:18 am

Loved this post – I’m just coming to the tail end of Jobs’ biography so to see these events in video rather than just text was great.

And I don’t mind the Lemmings commercial, I thought it was quite clever :)

- Alex Smith

February 21, 2014 at 4:12 am

Great stuff as always. One minor point though: saying Raskin has never forgiven Jobs to this day implies he is still living. Sadly, Jef Rakin died in 2005.

- Jimmy Maher

February 21, 2014 at 6:32 am

Thanks (you also, Keith). I missed the blinding fact that he’d died in the midst of all the more nitty-gritty stuff.

- chris

February 21, 2014 at 4:31 am

I’m a little skeptical of some of your background.

He rejected an internal hard drive because it would require that most hated of all pieces of technology, a noisy fan.

Do you recall what hard drives cost, back in 1982-1984? It would have driven the price through the roof. They were trying to keep it under $2000 (and they didn’t manage to succeed).

He rejected a second internal floppy drive because there wouldn’t be room in Jerry Manock’s sleekly elegant case, plus bloat and all that.

Cost is a likely issue here, too. These things are commodities now. Not then. This paragraph seems unfairly dismissive of what were probably more than aesthetic concerns.

He tried to kill the Apple LaserWriter, a product that would prove almost as significant for the company as the Mac itself and without which the Mac may very well have not survived beyond its first couple of years

Where did you find that information? I’ve always heard that he championed the LaserWriter. I’m willing to believe that I’ve been given revisionist history, but I’ve read all the books you cite as references, and more (some longer ago than others, so maybe I’ve forgotten?).

- Jimmy Maher

February 21, 2014 at 7:32 am

Jobs’s initial opposition to the LaserWriter is mentioned on page 211 of Steven Levy’s Insanely Great, where it’s stated that he “adamantly opposed” the project at first but had come around by late 1983.

Yes, there was no way Apple was going to be able to sell a $2500 Mac with a hard drive, although Apple’s insistence on high profit margins do also enter into play here. When books like Levy’s discuss how hard the Mac team worked to reduce costs, there always the trailing qualifier about Apple’s insistence on preserving the highest profit margins in the industry even on this supposedly “inexpensive” machine. I’m not making value judgments; Apple often put those profits to good use via innovative R&D no one else in the industry would have attempted. But it’s also important to be aware of in any discussion of early Mac pricing.

Anyway, high profit margins or no hard-drive prices were coming down quickly. Within months you could buy an external 10 MB hard drive for the Mac from others for $1500; an internal hard drive sourced in quantity by Apple and without the need for an external enclosure would have cost them substantially less, although certainly not enough less as to get the price for the whole package anywhere near $2500.

What I think Jobs’s team would have preferred was simply the *option* to configure a Mac with one, something Jobs vehemently opposed in his determination to make every Mac the same. This approach obviously proved impractical very quickly, as witnessed by the 512 K Mac which appeared within a year and the slots which soon appeared on the models released after Jobs’s departure. (Possibly I should have discussed this more thoroughly in the article.) On the whole it was a favoring of ideology at the expense of practicality, something young people are prone to — Jobs was not yet thirty — and Jobs much more so than most. I feel pretty confident in my assertion that it very nearly sunk the Mac.

Those people who went out and bought the original Mac certainly had reason to be annoyed when Apple charged them $1000 to upgrade to the 512 K version; the only way to do it was to solder new memory chips onto the motherboards. (It soon emerged that the hardware itself required to do so couldn’t have cost more than $500 and probably a lot less than that to a company with Apple’s clout, leading to a lot of in my opinion justifiable criticism in the computer press. Surely they could have rewarded their earliest adopters by giving them the upgrade at cost…)

- Ian

February 23, 2014 at 8:43 pm

Related: the lack of a fan, while a popular story, has been debunked as the cause of failure of the Apple ///. It was traced to an experimental PCB manufacturing process where adjacent traces would sometimes intermittently short out; revised boards made on the tried-and-true Apple II process worked just fine in the same cases with no fan.

- Jimmy Maher

February 24, 2014 at 8:44 am

Can you point to a source on that? I’m always happy to revise and love to debunk myths, but I have seemingly very credible books on my bookshelf which describe the many of the problems as being down to inadequate cooling. Would just like to be certain of the alternative story before I revise…

From Apple Confidential:

“When the first volume shipments began in March 1981, it became apparent that dropping the clock chip was just a finger in the dike. Approximately 20 percent of all Apple IIIs were dead on arrival primarily because chips fell out of loose sockets during shipping. Those that did work initially often failed after minimal use thanks to Jobs’ insistence that the Apple III not have a fan (a design demand he would make again on the Mac). He reasoned that in addition to reducing radio-frequency interference emissions (a severe problem with the Apple II), the internal aluminum chassis would conduct heat and keep the delicate components cool. He was wrong.

Compounding the problem was that Jobs dictated the size and shape of the case without concern for the demands of the electrical engineers, who were then forced to cram boards into small spaces with little or no ventilation. As the computer was used, its chips got hot, expanded slightly, and slowly worked their way out of their sockets, at which point the computer simply died. Apple’s solution was to recommend lifting the front of the computer six inches off the desktop, then letting it drop with the hope that the chips would reseat themselves!

The problems with loose chips were exacerbated by short cables between internal components, non-gold connectors, and the circuit board manufacturer’s change in the flux washing process that led to latent corrosion.”

The last part of this sounds like the issue to which you’re referring, but it also sounds like inadequate cooling was a major factor…

- Anonymous

February 25, 2014 at 2:06 am

Well, in Steven Weyhrich’s recently (finally) published “Sophistication & Simplicity: The Life and Times of the Apple II Computer” (he’s the guy behind apple2history.org and has clearly done a lot of research) there is the following footnote on p. 195:

An apocryphal story that I have for years included in this history on my web site was that a problem with the Apple III was heat production, which caused chips on the motherboard to come lose, requiring the computer be lifted a few inches and dropped to resolve. However, in an unpublished interview Mike Maginnis conducted with Wendel Sander in 2012, the actual problem was simply the memory board connector. Replacing this connector was the solution to the computer’s problems. However, picking up and dropping the computer probably also likely temporarily resolved the memory connector problem.

- Jimmy Maher

February 25, 2014 at 6:53 am

Thanks! I don’t doubt Steven Weyhrich’s authority for a moment, but I still wish I had a stronger citation, especially as the claim of the failures being down to a “memory connector” would appear to be either different from or a simplification of Ian’s claim that they were down to a more general problem with the motherboard manufacturing process. For now anyway, edited the article to state definitively that this is all currently quite undefinitive.

- Anonymous

February 25, 2014 at 10:49 am

The AppleLogic website also looks into the cause of the problems, and it looks as though they found it to be problems with the manufacturing process too.

http://www.applelogic.org/AIIIDesignBugs.html

I don’t know; I’ve never used a III and only rarely seen them.

- Anonymous

February 21, 2014 at 12:32 pm

You’ve misspelled Jobs’ name as “Job’s” at least once. Also McIntosh isn’t a brand of apple, it’s a variety or a type. A brand of apple would be a name that a particular grower (or group) used for their specific crop of a variety with a more generic name, kind of like how there are Levi’s-brand blue jeans.

Also, I wouldn’t say that the Mac was the first machine to use a 68000 chip — the Lisa is an obvious predecessor, and it had been around and in use for a few years. The first Sun workstations used it too. And draggable overlapping windows were first seen (at least first shipped) on the Xerox Star years before the Mac came out, IIRC. (I don’t remember if it had drop down menus, it tended to use buttons and dialogs a lot) People usually forget about the Star because it was not as legendary as the Alto and was rarely encountered unlike the Mac, but it did ship and was astoundingly advanced. There are some good videos of Star demos on YouTube which are worth taking a look at.

Also you mention the dreaded disk swap tango. It was a bug (apparently a very long-lasting one) for which Steve Capps takes the blame, here: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Disk_Swappers_Elbow.txt

- Jimmy Maher

February 21, 2014 at 12:56 pm

Thanks!

I’ve definitely seen overlapping windows in the Star demonstrations I’ve seen, but never saw one actually being dragged. Nor does their look tend to imply a drag bar. Totally happy to revise that if you or anyone else can point to some definite evidence for windows as draggable entities on the Star, however. For obvious reasons, I’ve never actually used one. :)

As far as 68000-based machines go, those you mentioned were all workstation-class machines costing $10,000 or more. The Mac, while not exactly cheap, was a consumer-grade computer marketed to individuals as well as businesses. That really puts it in a different class with different concerns and priorities and gives it excellent claim to the title of first 68000-based *PC* in my opinion.

- Anonymous

February 22, 2014 at 2:43 pm

Jimmy–
Okay, I have been refreshing my memory by checking out a Star demo as I too have not had the good fortune to use one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXGz3iCinCc

Turns out the Star did have pull down menus (at about 10:00 and 16:30), and double clicking (at about 11:00) but I’ve yet to see draggable windows. I’ll keep an eye out for it.

- Jimmy Maher

February 22, 2014 at 9:55 pm

Thanks for this. Steven Levy strong implies at least that credit for the double-click should go to to Apple in Insanely Great, something that’s obviously incorrect in light of the demo:

“The word processing program at Xerox had used double-clicks to select words, but the Lisa group used that function for other things as well, particularly for launching applications, and it was further refined on Macintosh.”

The “pull-down” menus in the demo to which you linked are a bit more of a borderline case in my opinion. They’re really pop-up menus stuck up in the corners of the windows, without the neat headings to which we’re accustomed today. Definitely not as refined; I’d call them a step on the road to what we saw with Macintosh, but not quite far enough along to receive full credit.

There’s a tremendous amount of confusion on this topic of just who did what in inventing the modern GUI, which is strange when you consider how exhaustively the work at Xerox and Apple has been written about. There’s also a lot of agendas flying around, with Apple zealots eager to credit every possible innovation to Apple and Apple haters just as eager to pronounce the Mac nothing but a rip-off of the Alto and/or Star.

I would love to sit down in a room with an Alto, a Star, a Lisa, and a first-generation Mac and sort all of this out once and for all. I’m not sure anyone has ever actually done that…

- IPadCary

February 24, 2014 at 9:49 pm

YAYYYY!
*rubs hands gleefully*
NOW we get to the heart of the matter, because, after all,
the Golden Age Of Gaming is, of course, the 16-bit era & it’s first computer is, of course, the Macintosh & it’s first game is, of course, “Alice”.
For somebody who’s not at all an Apple guy, you sure did good on this article.
Brrravissimo!

- Brandon Campbell

November 11, 2014 at 1:44 am

One of the earlier comments mentioned HyperCard… I’d love to see an article about that! I didn’t have a Mac when it came out, but remember reading about it in magazines and getting really excited about it, only to find it had fallen by the wayside by the time I finally got my first Mac (actually one of the short-lived Power Computing clones, which I’ll never forgive Steve Jobs for pulling the plug on a couple years later) in 1995.

- Jimmy Maher

November 11, 2014 at 7:04 am

HyperCard is a very important step on the road to HTML and the World Wide Web. So, yes, it will get its due when the time comes…

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Macware
February 28, 2014

In the Macintosh software artists confronted that rarest of things, a completely new canvas. It wasn’t just a case of the Mac being better than the PCs that had come before; they’d had plenty of experience already dealing with that. No, the Mac was not so much better as fundamentally different. For all the possibilities opened up by the Mac’s mouse, its toolbox of GUI widgets accessible by any program, its crisp high-resolution screen, and its ability to make practical use of sampled sound recorded from the real world, there were also lots of caveats and restrictions. The black-and-white display and the lack of handy joysticks, not to mention the lack of obvious ways to get out of the windows-and-mouse paradigm, meant that many or most existing games would make little sense on the Mac. All Mac software, games included, would have to not just build on the stuff that was already out there but strike off in entirely new directions. That, of course, was very much how Steve Jobs and company had intended things to be on their paradigm-shifting creation. The original Mac team has mentioned almost to a person how excited they were at the launch to see what people would make with Macintosh, what they could do with this new set of tools. Game programmers were as eager as anyone to take up the challenge.

Some of them were to be found right there at Apple. Indeed, the Mac’s first great game far predates the launch. Like so much else on the Mac, it was born on the Lisa.

Through the Looking Glass, née Alice

At some point in the middle stages of the Lisa’s long gestation, a programmer specializing in printer interfacing named Steve Capps started tinkering in his spare time with Alice, a game inspired by the chess motif running through Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. The player moved a piece representing Alice in real time around a chess board which was laid out in a striking 3D perspective, trying to stomp on all of the opposing pieces before they stomped on her. It was a simple concept, but, what with the player being subject to the normal movement rules of whatever chess piece she chose to play as in the beginning, one admitting of surprising depth. None other than the Lisa team’s head of systems programming, Bruce Daniels, introduced the Mac people to Alice. With the affable Daniels acting as intermediary, Capps soon received a Mac prototype along with the Mac team’s heartfelt request that he port Alice to it, a request to which he quickly acceded. It made a better fit to the Lisa’s more playful younger brother anyway, and, thanks to the Mac’s 3 extra MHz of clock speed, even ran more smoothly.

Alice became an obsession of the Mac team, with marketer Joanna Hoffman a particular devotee. She complained constantly that the game was too easy, prompting the obliging Capps to tweak it to increase the challenge. As Capps himself has since acknowledged, this probably wasn’t all to the good; the game that would eventually see commercial release is extremely challenging indeed. Other suggestions, like the one from Steve Wozniak that the mouse cursor should also shrink as it moved “deeper” into the board to emphasize the 3D perspective, were perhaps more productive. Steve Jobs, meanwhile, showed little interest in the game itself (one of the many constants running through his career is an almost complete disinterest in games), but was very interested by the programming talent it demonstrated. Alice became Capps’s ticket to the Mac team in January of 1983, where he did stellar work on the Finder and other critical parts of the first version of MacOS.

As the big launch approached, Capps was understandably eager to explore the commercial potential of this game that had entranced so many of his colleagues. Trip Hawkins, who had continued to stay in touch with goings-on inside Apple even after resigning from the Lisa team, was sniffing around with proposals to release Alice under the Electronic Arts aegis, with whose accessible-but-arty early lineup it would have made an excellent fit. Steve Jobs, however, had other ideas. Feeling that the game should come out under Apple’s own imprint, he delivered a classically Jobsian carrot — that Apple would do an excellent job packaging and promoting the game — and stick — that, since Alice had been created by an Apple employee on the Apple campus using prototype Apple hardware and proprietary Apple software, it was far from clear that the game belonged to said employee in the first place. And so Capps agreed to allow his game to become the first and only one that Apple themselves would ever release for the Mac.

The Through the Looking Glass package

Jobs delivered on the first part of his promise at least, although the discovery of a database application already trading under the name of “Alice” necessitated a name change to the less satisfactory Through the Looking Glass. The game was packaged to look like an original edition of the novel that had inspired it (albeit one sporting a hidden Dead Kennedys logo, a tribute to Capps’s favorite band). It was beautiful and perfect; EA couldn’t have done any better. The marketing, though, was another story. Through the Looking Glass became a victim of Apple’s determination in the wake of the Lisa’s failure to reposition the Mac as their serious business computer, to shove the fun aspects of the machine under the carpet as something shameful and dangerous. Thus Capps’s game got nary a mention in Apple’s voluminous advertising that first year, and mostly languished as a dusty curiosity on dealers’ shelves. The game has gone on to become something of a cult classic as well as a treasured piece of Macintosh lore, but Trip Hawkins would doubtless have done a much better job of actually selling the thing.

Others also had good reason to be frustrated with Apple’s fear of fun. Infocom received a visit from Guy Kawasaki, today the most famous of all Apple’s early “Mac evangelists,” well before the Mac’s launch. In the words of Dan Horn, head of Infocom’s Micro Group, Kawasaki “begged” Infocom to get their games onto the Mac, and delivered several prototypes to make it happen. It turned out to be unexpectedly challenging. The pre-release version of MacOS that Infocom received with the prototypes was so buggy that they finally decided to throw it out altogether. They wrote their own simple window and menu manager instead, packaging it onto self-booting disks that dumped the player straight into the game. When the Mac debuted, Infocom’s catalog of ten games represented something like 50% of the machine’s extant software base. But by now the winds of change had blown at Apple, and Infocom couldn’t get Kawasaki or anyone else to even return their phone calls. No matter; Mac early adopters were a more accepting lot than much of Apple’s executive wing. Infocom did quite well on the Macintosh, especially in those earliest days when, Through the Looking Glass and a bare few others excepted, their games were the only ones in town.

Ultima III on the Mac

Still, Infocom were hardly the only gaming veterans to jump to the Mac, some more successfully than others. Sierra and Origin Systems demonstrated how pointless it could be to try to force old paradigms into new via their ports of, respectively, Ultima II and III to the Mac. The latter is a particular lowlight, with Ultima‘s traditional alphabet soup of single-letter commands just jumbled into a couple of long menus helpfully labeled “A-M” and “N-Z.” Thankfully, most either did original work or took a lot more care to make their ports feel like native-born citizens of the Macintosh.

Sargon III on the Mac

Dan and Kathleen Spracklin, creators of the long-lived Sargon line of chess programs, ported the latest iteration Sargon III to the Mac complete with a new mouse-based interface and absolutely loads of learning aids and convenience features hanging from its menus. None other than Bill Atkinson, architect of QuickDraw and MacPaint, paused to note how the Mac version of Sargon III changed his very concept of what a chess program was, from an opponent to be cowed to something more positive and friendly, like the Mac itself.

I have to set Sargon III on the easy level. The challenge used to be seeing if the computer could beat you. The challenge now is for the computer to teach you, by leading you, giving you hints, letting you take back moves.

Bill Budge ported Pinball Construction Set, the program whose GUI interface presaged a largely Mac-inspired revolution in games when it appeared on the Apple II, to the Mac itself. As he himself noted, however, what was revolutionary on the Apple II was “just another program” on the Mac. Still, the Mac Pinball Construction Set did let you load your MacPaint pictures in as fodder for your custom pinball tables, a demonstration of one of the less immediately obvious parts of the new Mac Way: its emphasis on crafting applications that cooperate and complement rather than compete with one another.

Bill Atkinson’s MacPaint

Bill Budge’s MousePaint

Budge also went the other way, creating what amounted to an Apple II port of MacPaint called MousePaint that copied the original right down to the little Apple logo in the upper left of the menu bar. Packaged with Apple’s first mouse for the II line, MousePaint is one of the more obvious examples of the impact the Mac was already having on more modest platforms. (Budge also claimed to be working on a space simulation, but, like his vaunted Construction Set Construction Set and so much else during these his years in the wilderness, it would never see the light of day.)

Much other early Mac entertainment also evinced the Pinball Construction Set approach of giving you ways to make your own fun, an ethos very much in keeping with that of the machine itself. MasterPieces, for instance, let you carve your MacPaint drawings up into jigsaw puzzles, while MacMatch let you use them to create matched-pair puzzles like the old game show Concentration. Still other programs weren’t technically games at all, but no less entertaining for it: things like Animation Toolkit; MusicWorks, which made the first spectacular use of the Mac’s four-voice sound capabilities; HumanForms, which let you make people, Mr. Potato Head-style, out of assorted body parts. Defender clones may have been in short supply on the Mac, but this heady, intellectual stripe of playfulness was everywhere by the time the machine entered its troubled second year. Thus Balance of Power felt like a perfect fit when it arrived that summer.

A magazine-published screenshot of the lost original Balance of Power

A creation of programmer, designer, writer, theorist, and industry gadfly Chris Crawford, Balance of Power is an ambitious geopolitical simulation of the contemporary world circa 1985. Its original incarnation on the Macintosh appears to be lost, meaning we must piece together how it worked by reading reviews and playing a later port to an early version of Microsoft Windows. Fortunately, contemporaneous reviews of that Windows version all mention how similar it is to the Mac original.

Balance of Power places you in charge of either the United States or the Soviet Union, seeking to extend your sphere of influence over as many as possible of the sixty other countries in the game in a high-stakes game of Cold War brinksmanship. It’s a grandiose concept indeed, and becomes even more so when you consider the sheer amount of information Crawford has packed in — stuff such as number of physicians per million people, average daily caloric intake, and average school enrollment for each country. Not only would earlier machines have drowned under such a tsunami of data, but making it accessible and relatable would also have been nearly impossible. In Balance of Power, it’s all organized into neat menus and windows, as fine an example of the Mac’s ability to make information visually immediate and relevant as anything that came out those first couple of years. Before too long all grand strategy games would be like this.

Significant as it is as a waystation on the road to Civilization, Balance of Power is also a huge landmark of the serious-games movement. Simply put, this game has a rhetorical agenda. Boy, does it have an agenda. Pushing your opponent too far results in nuclear war, and the most famous piece of text Crawford has ever written.

You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure.

It’s as powerful a statement now as then on not only the foolishness of jingoist brinksmanship but also on the seemingly perpetual adolescence of much of the mainstream games industry. Yet, and speaking here as someone who is quite sympathetic to Crawford’s agenda on both counts, it’s also kind of disingenuous and unfair and, well, just kind of cheap.

The problem here is that the game simply assumes bad faith on my part, that I’ve touched off a nuclear war so I can see body parts and mushroom clouds. In actuality, however, the body-parts-and-mushroom-clouds crowd is highly unlikely to have ever gotten this far with the cerebral exercise that is Balance of Power. It’s more likely that I’ve tried to play the game within the rules Crawford has given me and simply failed, simply pushed a bit too hard. It’s important to note here that playing within Crawford’s rules requires that I engage in brinksmanship; I can win only by pushing my luck, aggressively trying to spread my political agenda through as much of the world as possible at my fellow superpower’s expense so that I can end up with more “prestige points” than them. There is neither a reward nor any real mechanism for engendering détente and with it a safer world. Given that vacuum, I don’t really like being scolded for playing the game the only way that gives me any hope of success on the game’s own terms. To compound the problem, it’s often all but impossible to figure out what how close your opponent actually is to the proverbial big red button, hard to know whether, say, Indonesia is really considered worth going to war over or not. Nuclear war, when it comes, can seem almost random, arising from a seemingly innocuous exchange after half a dozen computerized Cuban Missile Crises have passed harmlessly. There may arguably be a certain amount of rhetorical truth to that, but it hardly makes for a satisfying game. Perhaps more attention paid to presenting a real picture of the state of mind of your opponent and less to that mountain of 95% useless statistics could have helped — an ironic complaint to make about a game by Chris Crawford, coiner of the term “process intensity” and perpetual complainer about the prevalence of static data as opposed to interactive code in modern games.

I don’t want to belabor this too much more lest our real purpose here get entirely derailed, but will just note that Balance of Power falls into the trap of too many serious games to come as well as too many of Crawford’s own games in simply being not much fun to play. Crawford would doubtless simultaneously agree with and dismiss my complaints as a product of a body-parts-and-mushroom-clouds sensibility while noting that he aspires to something higher than mere fun. Which is fair enough, but I tend to feel that for a game to achieve any other rhetorical goal it must be engrossing in a way that Balance of Power just isn’t. Anyway, everything of ultimate note that it has to tell us about geopolitics is contained in the quote above. If like in the movie War Games the only way to win is not to play, why charge people $50 for the non-experience? Suffice to say that, like plenty of other works I’ve written about on this blog, Balance of Power garners historical importance and even a certain nobility simply for existing when it did and trying the things it did.

I want to end this little survey today with a less rarefied game that’s of at least equal historical importance. It’s the product of a small Chicago-area company called ICOM Simulations which had already been kicking around the industry for a few years under the name of TMQ Software. Formed by Tod Zipnick in 1981, TMQ’s most ambitious pre-Mac product had been File-Fax, a database manager for the Apple II that garnered a positive review or two but few sales. Other than that, they’d mostly specialized in doing action-game ports to various platforms for the likes of Atarisoft, Coleco, and even EA. When the Mac arrived, they figured their odds of making a splash with original games in that new ecosystem were far better than they were on the congested likes of the Apple II.

Déjà Vu. Note the multiple layers of containment.

ICOM’s big idea was to translate the traditional parser-driven adventure game into the new visual paradigm of the Mac. The goal was essentially to do for the adventure what MacOS had done for the command-line-driven operating systems that preceded it, in pretty much exactly the same ways. The underlying world model of the MacVenture engine is that of a text adventure, divided into discrete interconnected rooms which can contain other objects with their own unique properties, including the one representing you the player. In a MacVenture, however, you interact with objects not by typing sentences but by constructing them visually, tapping one of eight verbs and an object to go with it — whether something in the room that you see represented graphically before you, something in your inventory (also represented as a set of draggable pictographs), an exit, or just your “Self.” You can add an indirect object by “OPERATING” one object (first click) on another (second click). You can pick up an object in the room just by dragging it to your inventory; drop it by dragging it back into the room. Objects can and often do contain other objects: you can “OPEN” the trench coat in your inventory to open a window showing you what’s in its pockets, “OPEN” the wallet you find there to open still another window with its contents, and so on down the hierarchy tree.

In the fall of 1985, when the first MacVenture debuted in the form of a two-fisted private-eye caper called Déjà Vu, it was an absolute stunner, the sort of thing that could stop people in their tracks when they stumbled across it running on an in-store computer. And it’s still a fine interface, very intuitive and, a few quibbles about clutter resulting from the small screens of its era aside, very practical and enjoyable today.

It’s all too typical in the industry for a game with the shiny technical innovations of Déjà Vu to coast on them, for the actual design inside the engine to be little more than a tech demo. Nor is ICOM’s pedigree as a collection of hardcore programmer’s programmers all that comforting. I thus didn’t expect to think too much of Déjà Vu as a game when I played it for this article. I must say, though, that ICOM surprised me there.

Déjà Vu begins on December 7, 1941(!), when you wake up in a bathroom stall inside a deserted bar with no memory of who you are or how you got there or who or what you emptied three shots from your revolver into or why you seem to have a veritable cocktail of drugs flowing through your veins. Yes, amnesia is a cliché premise in adventure games, not least because it’s so damn convenient for a genre that’s really good at exploration and backstory but usually not so good at here-and-now plotting. Yet it can also be a compelling premise, in mystery fiction as well as games, and it works here. The mystery of who you are and how you got to that bathroom stall is intriguing, its unraveling compelling, with complications like the dead mobster that you soon also find in the bar (with three of your bullets in him, naturally) coming thick and fast. In contrast to so many games of its era, Déjà Vu is also pretty solvable. Oh, it’s very old school, with an unforgiving time limit — the drugs in your system will eventually kill you if you can’t find the antidote — and the occasional random death. You’ll need to save early and often and plan your forays carefully. Yet if you’re willing to do that you’ll find you can probably crack the case pretty much unassisted, and have a pretty good time doing it.

Déjà Vu doesn’t take itself all that seriously, but it doesn’t treat its whole premise as just a breeding ground for jokes either. As a relatively coherent work of fiction, it stands amongst the top tier of 1980s adventure games. The jokes that are there mostly fit to the setting and are, shocker of shockers, genuinely funny as often as not. Much of the humor pokes fun at the protagonist, hardly unusual for early adventure games, but it doesn’t feel so personally insulting here because the game does a good enough job with characterization that you actually feel it to be sneering at the character you’re playing rather than you personally. About the only unfortunate aspect is an ugly series of juvenile jokes about an overweight woman, the sort of thing that can trigger a mild epiphany today about just how much certain social mores have changed — and, mind you, very much for the better — in the last thirty years.

Credit for Déjà Vu‘s surprisingly satisfying design largely goes to Craig Erickson. The story behind it was written by Kurt Nelson, Mark Waterman did the visuals, and Darin Adler, Steve Hays, and Todd Squires were the technical architects of the engine itself. Like Balance of Power, Déjà Vu was published by Mindscape, a company dating like EA from the big second wave of publishers and which, also like EA, was publishing some of the most interesting and audacious games in the industry during the mid-1980s. (That said, ICOM fell in with Mindscape largely out of convenience, because they were literally right down the road in an adjacent suburb of Chicago.) And also like Balance of Power, Déjà Vu was a hit by the modest standards of the early Macintosh software market, the big breakthrough that ICOM had been seeking for years. Tod Zipnick soon put his programmers to good use porting the MacVenture engine to other platforms, including not only the Mac’s mice-and-windows-and-68000-based competitors the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga but also the likes of the IBM PC, the Commodore 64, eventually even (in ports done by the Japanese company Kemco) the Nintendo Entertainment System — yet another sign of the importance of the Mac not just as a platform but as a concept and an engine of innovation.

ICOM has tended to be overlooked in histories of the graphic adventure, which mostly dwell on Sierra (whose King’s Quest debuted the year before Déjà Vu) and LucasArts (whose Maniac Mansion debuted two years after). In truth, however, the MacVenture engine is at least as important as Sierra’s AGI or LucasArts’s SCUMM engines. While King’s Quest is a deserved landmark simply for mixing interactive graphics with adventure at all, the AGI engine is also something of an evolutionary dead end with some fairly intractable problems, most notably that of trying to translate the objects you see graphically on the screen into words the parser will understand. LucasArts’s innovations, meanwhile, are more formal than technical, a declaration that it is possible to write challenging, enjoyable graphic adventures without random deaths, unforeseeable dead ends, and incomprehensible puzzles. The actual interface mechanics of the early LucasArts games are essentially a hybrid of AGI and MacVenture that is more playable than the former but not quite so slick as the latter. Déjà Vu gave its players in 1985 a preview of what virtually all commercial adventure games would be like in five or seven years. For a fan of prose and parsers like me and presumably many of you, that makes its debut something of a bittersweet moment, representing as it does one more huge nail in the slowly building coffin of the commercial text adventure. But such is progress.

Three more MacVenture games followed Déjà Vu, one of them a direct sequel. We’ll revisit ICOM at some future date to talk more about them, as we also will the ongoing cottage industry that was Mac software in general. In the meantime, you can play Déjà Vu and all of the other MacVentures online courtesy of Sean Kasun.

Their days may be numbered, but there’s still plenty to be written about the prose-and-parser people as well. We’ll take up that thread again next time, when we start to look at yet another of Infocom’s would-be challengers.

(Significant magazine sources: Electronic Games of March 1985; Byte of March 1986; Family Computing of April 1986. Jason Scott’s interviews with Steve Meretzky and Dan Horn for Get Lamp were invaluable as always; thanks, Jason! See a retrospective by Tom Chick for another take on Balance of Power. The picture that opens this article was taken from the March 1985 Electronic Games, whom I wish had lasted longer; in addition to great art that I love to steal, the magazine had an unusually thoughtful editorial voice.)

Comments
13 Responses

- David Kinder

February 28, 2014 at 8:45 pm

The Amiga version of Balance of Power is available on the Internet, which is likely to give a better flavour of the Mac original than the PC version.

On the Amiga it’s still a better idea than it is a game, though …

- Jimmy Maher

March 1, 2014 at 8:32 am

I chose the PC version simply because it was the first, coming about a year after the Mac original, and thus the least likely to manifest feature creep. The Amiga version came about a year after that.

But yeah, the Amiga’s more flexible windowing system may very well make it more similar, and the Amiga version is certainly easier to get going than the PC, which requires not only DOSBox but a vintage version of Windows…

- Felix

February 28, 2014 at 9:51 pm

Perhaps more attention paid to presenting a real picture of the state of mind of your opponent and less to that mountain of 95% useless statistics could have helped — an ironic complaint to make about a game by Chris Crawford

Not if you consider how hard it really is to turn theory into practice. The more sophisticated the theory, the more it will clash with real life….

- Stan Kaufman

February 28, 2014 at 11:41 pm

Glad you’re covering ICOM’s great games! In your next installment, I hope you’ll discuss Uninvited, which was great fun. David Griffith has recently done a fine remake of Uninvited including even the game’s remarkable Easter egg.

- Lisa H.

March 1, 2014 at 5:01 am

Budge also claimed to be working on a space simulation, but, like his vaunted Construction Set Construction Set

…Construction Set Construction Set? (echo… echo… echo…)

When it comes to Mac gaming I have vague, demos-in-stores memories only… as a household we went from C64 to PC XT and onward. We’re nowhere near The Magic Candle in history, are we?

- Jimmy Maher

March 1, 2014 at 8:12 am

No, that wasn’t a typo… :)

Magic Candle came out in 1989 I believe, while we’re just crossing into 1985 on the blog. So, a couple of years of blog time away…

That said, I can’t guarantee I’ll be giving lots of time to Magic Candle and other monster CRPGs unless they do something really thematically or technically interesting. I enjoy the occasional dungeon crawl as much as the next guy, but they’re a) hugely time-consuming and b) already being covered in exhaustive detail by The CRPG Addict (http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com).

- matt w

March 1, 2014 at 12:44 pm

In defense of Crawford’s famous message, in my only experience with Balance of Power (I think I was just a spectator) a guy looked through a few menus, idly moved a huge army into something next to Russia, went all the way to DEFCON 2 and started a nuclear war in five minutes. So it was quite possible to get to a nuclear war because you were just screwing around.

- Wade

March 1, 2014 at 2:07 pm

My first experience of the Mac was playing an action game called Airborne. This would’ve been in 1985-86, I’m guessing, but the game is dated 1984. My friend, who spent most afternoons at my house playing Apple 2 games with me, suddenly had access to a Mac when his dad bought one. He showed me this black and white game that started off with an orchestra playing (which was both weird and jaw dropping-making) then the game itself was filled with the brooding of helicopters and the screams of jets. So it was the sound that shocked me the most — and the black on white graphics.

Airborne: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G7R9lV9eVY

- Iggy Drougge

April 15, 2014 at 12:30 am

Balance of Power shouldn’t be separated from its manual – which carries on the simulation aspect of the game itself by delving very deeply not only into the game mechanics and its features, but also by having a bibliography section at the end.

- Brian Bagnall

June 29, 2014 at 9:37 pm

I’m happy to see you covered Deja Vu! That game, along with Dark Castle (an action platformer) both struck me as very special games that came to other platforms like the C64 but carried their unique Mac qualities over. Deja Vu especially seemed like it was going to revolutionize adventures, and I would consider it a very early representation of a Myst style game, albeit with a larger focus on inventory items. I still recall spending days and nights on my c64 plugging away until that magical moment when it was solved.

- Roger Nelson

May 6, 2015 at 11:18 pm

It would be highly appreciated if the person who wrote the story, Kurt Nelson, received credit, along with the visual designer, Mark Waterman.
Many thanks.

- Jimmy Maher

May 8, 2015 at 9:25 am

Done!

- Craig Erickson

June 9, 2015 at 4:51 pm

Thanks Roger, Kurt’s writing was simply perfect.

Also, Jay Zipnick needs mention as his logic helped to create the filter engine. (Yes, Jay was related to the late Tod Zipnick)

To note, both Jay and Darrin are still current employees of Apple Inc.

Mindwheel (or, The Poet and the Hackers)
March 10, 2014

Excepting only Adventure and a handful of works by Infocom, Robert Pinsky’s Mindwheel has received far more academic attention than any other work of interactive fiction’s commercial era. If you’re of a practical — not to say cynical — turn, you can posit a pretty good theory as to why that should be without ever looking to the game itself. Pinsky, you see, is by far the most respectable and respected literary figure ever to turn his hand to the humble text adventure. His resume is impressive to say the least: United States Poet Laureate from 1997 to 2000; author of nineteen books, nine of them full of poems; translator of Dante; professor of literature at Berkeley and Boston University amongst other places; editor of literary magazines and anthologies; scholar of the Biblical David and Shakespeare. For any graduate student looking to justify a thesis or article about interactive fiction, Pinsky is a riposte to die for when colleagues and advisers ask whether text adventures are really all that significant as literary works. If they were good enough for Pinsky, they should be good enough for anyone.

Mindwheel is the product of a strange historical moment; it’s hard to imagine it appearing more than a year before or after its February 1985 release date. This was the era of bookware, when interactive fiction was seen as the future of the book and the future of computerized entertainment all rolled into one; when action games were seen as relics of the recently passed age of the Atari VCS; when a company called Synapse Software, known already as the makers of some of the slickest and most graphically impressive action games on the Atari 8-bit line, could decide to stake much of their future on textual interactive fiction not out of some suicidal artistic impulse but because doing so seemed a perfectly reasonable commercial calculation. Strange, strange times.

Ihor Wolosenko

The story of Synapse Software is largely the story of Ihor Wolosenko, whose family had immigrated to the United States from Ukraine when he was still a toddler and who had filled the nearly forty years that elapsed in his life before Synapse with a bewildering array of activities and avocations. He had studied drama at the City University of New York; been a professional photographer; worked as a physical therapist; counseled and conducted personal workshops using a combination of Tibetan Buddhism and the controversial branch of psychology known as neuro-linguistic programming; delved deeply into linguistics and hypnosis. By 1980, the year he bought an Atari 800, he had ended up like so many other drifting dreamers in Berkeley, California. He chose the Atari because it could play Star Raiders and the Apple II couldn’t.

Wolosenko soon made a more technical friend, a vice president in charge of data processing at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank named Ken Grant who had been toying with an Atari 800 database application in his spare time. The two worked on it together for nearly a year, then founded Synapse out of Wolosenko’s apartment to release it in August of 1981. It wasn’t an auspicious start; the first hundred or so copies of FileManager 800 that they shipped were so buggy that they had to recall the whole production run. But by the end of the year Synapse was truly up and running at last, with not just FileManager but a game or two as well.

Wolosenko was already putting together the team of crack programmers whose games would make Synapse’s reputation. Games like Shamus, Blue Max, The Pharaoh’s Curse, and their most beloved title of all Alley Cat mixed superb graphics with addictive playability and a welcome sense of whimsy. Little extra touches distinguished Synapse’s games from the competition. In Alley Cat, for instance, if you don’t do anything for a few seconds your avatar will start to move around on his own and meow impatiently to you, decades before such “juicy” touches would become a widely accepted requirement for casual games.

It wouldn’t be out of line to compare Synapse’s mystique in North America with that of Ultimate Play the Game in Britain. Both developed all of their games in-house, insuring that they all shared a similar look and design sensibility. Both were absolute masters of their chosen platforms (the Spectrum for Ultimate, the Atari 8-bits for Synapse) and consistently delivered games that were far slicker than virtually anything the competition had to offer. Synapse, like Ultimate, did write for other platforms, but their core competency and core loyalty remained with the Atari machines. Atari users in turn loved them. Because Synapse’s games were born on Ataris, they could take full advantage of the best graphics and sound in the industry, capabilities matched only (and if you listen to Atari loyalists only arguably) by those of the Commodore 64.

While Wolosenko usually refused formal credit on his programmers’ designs, much of the character of Synapse’s games was down to him. His company may have been making relatively simple action games, but he nevertheless thought seriously about the nature of the medium, the relationship between player and avatar, the standard approach of graduated difficulty levels (bad) and the alternative of adaptive gameplay (good). He shepherded every game and every programmer through the process of development, giving a little nudge here, a little tweak there to make the end result that much better. Synapse programmer Steve Hales called Wolosenko the Steve Jobs of games: “Every product that Synapse produced had Ihor’s touch. I believe that because of Ihor our quality was better, the designs were more unique, and I was pushed beyond what I thought was possible.”

According to Hales, it was he and another of Wolosenko’s favorite programmers, William Mataga, who planted the idea of doing adventure games in Wolosenko’s head in late 1983. (William Mataga had a sex change some years ago and now lives as Cathryn Mataga. I refer to her by her previous name and gender in this article only to avoid historical anachronisms.) Hales and Mataga believed that Infocom had “old technology,” and Synapse could do better. Wolosenko didn’t take much convincing. Showing his usual enthusiasm, he laid out an ambitious if not entirely cogent manifesto for Synapse’s engine, which would be the work largely of Mataga.

The problem with these adventure games thus far, even the more interactive ones, is that you have the feeling of being in a corral. You go this way and someone says, “You can’t go that way.” If I say, “Toss something,” and it says, “I don’t understand that word,” when it just used that word in a description it drives me up the wall. It totally stops the experience for me. We’re going to have to work with some of those obstructions until we can solve some of the problems: not processing time, just putting the computer’s power to better use.

The most intricate puzzle is not a Rubic’s Cube, it’s a person. And it’s a character that changes. When you read bad fiction, the character comes in, he interacts with a lot of people, and he goes out exactly the way he came in. When you read a Tolstoy novel, the character is totally different at the end of the novel than when he came in at the beginning. And that’s what we’re trying to do. There is no reason why you have to be the same person during a game either. You could have a changeling-type game, where you’re a person at one point, you’re a dog at another, a bat at another.

Mataga dubbed his system BTZ — “Better than Zork” — to keep the end goal inescapable for everyone. Crucially, the vision was for pure text from the outset. Whereas rivals like Telarium sought to one-up Infocom by adding graphics and sound and even occasional action games to the mix to hopefully distract from their less than Infocom-quality parsers, prose, and world models, Synapse would go against them head to head, strength against strength. The games themselves Wolosenko first wanted to call “Microworlds” in light of the freedom and sense of realism they would offer. That soon changed, however, when he had his next brain storm: to hire the best outside writers he could find — real writers — to craft the worlds and write the text. His Microworlds thus became Electronic Novels.

There is some evidence that the poet Robert Pinsky was far from Wolosenko’s first choice to craft the first Electronic Novel. In an interview published in the February 1984 issue of Ahoy! magazine, he claimed that, while the contracts were not yet all signed, Synapse hoped to be employing the services of “top, top novelists [emphasis mine].” But Telarium and many others, some with pockets and connections much deeper than Synapse’s, were already trolling these waters. Wolosenko apparently soon decided that, if he couldn’t sign “top” writers in terms of sales and commercial appeal, he could hire the most prestigious, thereby underscoring the literary credibility of Synapse’s line. Somehow he jumped to the inspired choice of targeting not novelists but poets; perhaps he figured that, what with the term “popular poet” having been largely an oxymoron for decades already, they’d be more likely to jump at the chance for any sort of recognition. Surveying the possibilities, he came across the name of Robert Pinsky, who was teaching at UC Berkeley and thus an easy mark logistically. The resume of Pinsky, then about the same age as Wolosenko, was nowhere near as impressive as it is today, but he nevertheless had a burgeoning literary reputation, with two well-received books of poetry already published and a third in the galley stage. (Wolosenko would soon also tap another respected young poet, Jim Paul, for another game in the line.)

Robert Pinsky

One day as Pinsky was sitting in his office in Berkeley’s English department having spent the last several hours dealing with some of the more tedious administrative details that come with being a professor, his phone rang. It was Ihor Wolosenko on the line.

He said, “Are you familiar with computer text adventures?”

I said, “No.”

He asked whether I owned a computer.

I said, “No.”

Had I ever heard of Zork?

“No.”

Would I be interested in writing the text for an interactive computer work?

I said, “Yes, I might be.”

Pinsky drove out to visit Synapse’s offices. Wolosenko introduced him to some of his programmers and also to the concept of text adventures.

I liked it. My romantic idea was that it was like those first guys figuring out what movies were going to be on Long Island — playing with movie cameras. I didn’t see any reason that you couldn’t make a work of art. Art is alternate realities — realities that are in some ways like the realty we experience and in some ways quite unlike it. This was that. And it was clear to me from my small experience of adventures — the description of Zork, the stuff I saw on those monochrome monitors — that this was largely about the quest plot, one of the basic plots of great works. The Gilgamesh epic is a quest for the nature of immortality — or the nature of death, the nature of mortality. “KILL DWARF,” “GET SWORD,” etc., was completely in that line. Indeed, the imagery was very traditional.

It was agreed that Pinsky would come up with five or six ideas for possible games. Then Synapse would decide which one might be the most intriguing and realizable. The one that Pinsky himself considered the “silliest” sent the player on a journey through four minds: an assassinated rock star with a messiah complex, clearly modeled on John Lennon; a bloody dictator inspired by Hitler and Stalin and the rest of the twentieth century’s sad litany; a brilliant scientist reminiscent of Marie Curie; and a poet, a nod to the game’s creator himself. Much to Pinsky’s surprise, this treatment was the one that Wolosenko and company opted for.

One of the loveliest aspects of the Mindwheel project is the genuinely warm, respectful relationship that developed between Pinsky and the young hackers at Synapse, these men who normally inhabited what might as well have been separate planets. Pinsky worked most closely with Steve Hales, who did the actual coding for the game in Mataga’s BTZ language. Hales, who had never voluntarily read a line of verse in his life, slowly discovered through the soft-spoken, thoughtful Pinsky a new respect for the written word and the power of literature: “He changed the way I read and write words forever.” For his part, Pinsky found the youthful can-do spirit at Synapse a relief from the “oppressive” corridors of academia; he was soon “making up excuses” to visit Synapse and “hang out.” Hales endeared himself to Pinsky from his first words: “I’d like to talk to you about your world,” a turn of phrase Pinsky found almost inexpressibly fresh and exciting. He took to using — and often charmingly misusing — the fascinating jargon, a delight to his poet’s soul, that was always flying through the air at Synapse. He accepted what he wryly refers to as his “assignments” from Hales and company with cheerful equanimity: write a “dialog table” for a given character for queries involving a given set of topics; write responses in which each of these fifty verbs is used successfully and unsuccessfully. The terms attached to even the framework of the game took a poetic turn under Pinsky’s influence, with “drivel” coming to mean amusing incidental messages that were essentially random, not germane to the plot or puzzles, and “weather” those that were.

While the experience of actually developing Mindwheel was by everyone’s account an almost entirely positive one, its story is also one of crossed purposes between Pinsky and Wolosenko. Wolosenko clearly wanted to create a work of art that transcended the notion of a mere computer game. Thus the involvement of Pinsky in the first place, as well as the term “Computer Novel” and his plan to package each title in the line inside a hardcover book of at least a hundred pages. (This latter was also, of course, a challenge to Infocom’s superb packaging, yet another reflection of a determination to do “everything that Infocom does, plus one.”) Pinsky, meanwhile, took the project as a chance to let his hair down and maybe reach the sort of popular readership that had inevitably eluded him thus far despite his stellar reputation inside the ivory tower. He was teaching a class about Shakespeare at the time, and thinking a lot about how the Bard had become the greatest writer in the history of the English language not by appealing to the highbrows but by writing popular entertainments for the masses. (Pinsky still remains admirably free of literary snobbery today, listing for example South Park as one of the “tremendous works of our time,” its creators amongst our “leading moralizers.”)

The idea of making the package for Mindwheel into a hardcover book was very much Ihor Wolosenko’s idea. I didn’t like it; I resisted it. I happened to refer to what we were doing as “the game.” To me, that was fresh and exciting. The guys at Synapse who were promoting it wanted to call it an “Electronic Novel,” because from their viewpoint that was fresh and interesting.

I was disappointed that the package would be a book. They wanted me to write the stuff for the book. I declined. It was produced by committee; I wounded up sort of editing it. The book was the least interesting part for me. I’ve written books; I’ve published lots of books; I wasn’t particularly excited by the romance of having a book. Ihor’s marketing idea was that this would be somehow “highbrow.” I liked the idea that it was an entertainment, that it was a game. I wanted to get away from the “literary” genre. I wanted to write a really exciting, artistic game.

Pinsky noted in a contemporary interview that he didn’t particularly care if Mindwheel got a writeup in The Partisan Review because his name had already appeared there many times. Wolosenko, of course, would have killed for such a marker of literary status.

The book, which is credited to BTZ project manager Richard Stanford, is a rather labored piece; it’s quite clear that Synapse struggled to come up with material to fill its pages, resorting to leaving dozens of pages entirely blank in the name of an “Adventurer’s Diary” for note taking. Those pages which are filled strain to set up a believable science-fictional reason for the mind-delving you do in the game proper. It seems that the social order on Earth is about to collapse thanks to humankind’s ongoing irresponsibility and the sheer inertia of thousands of years of petty human history. The only hope for salvation rests, for reasons poorly defined at best, in the science of “neuro-electronic matrix research” (the terminological similarly to Wolosenko’s personal interest of neuro-linguistic programming is interesting), which will allow a traveler to visit “four minds of unusual power” whose echoes still persist in the very atmosphere — shades of Carl Jung’s ideas about a collective unconscious. The four minds will eventually lead you to the “Cave Master,” “the mysterious prehistoric, apelike being who apparently invented the lever, the flint blade, cave paintings, and the rhythmical group chant” and who holds the “Wheel of Wisdom” that can save humankind. The winning passage of Mindwheel, after the Wheel has been retrieved, indicates about how seriously Pinsky took this earnest frame.

"This formula," says Virgil through happy tears, "can disable every weapon of mass destruction on the planet! And that is only the first benefit. Your courage and brains have given us a glorious new chance!

"Already, the planet's magnetic field is changed, so that any politician who lies on television will be afflicted with instant, debilitating diarrhea, and immediate, spectacular skin blemishes!"

He beams and detaches your electrodes.

Exalted but a little drained, you wish only to rest a while, and then unwind, maybe by playing some harmless game.

No, Mindwheel is more electronic poem than electronic novel. The world of the four minds is a surrealistic, impressionistic riot of emotional imagery. The premise and that very description raise immediate warning flags to a jaded old IFer like me; the history of amateur interactive fiction is strewn with surrealistic explorations of the inner consciousness, generally from younger writers with a wide streak of overwrought self-indulgence. They’re almost uniformly awful. But — to state the obvious — the authors of these works are (presumably) not future Poet Laureates. Pinsky’s prose is bracing, his imagery consistently surprising and consistently as right as it is bizarre. To play Mindwheel is an overwhelming sensory experience — even as all of its sensations are evoked through pure text.

The first mind you enter is that of Bobby Clemons, the rock star.

You stand on an immense stage. In front of you, a crowd roars like thunder. Someone has thrown a rose and a Baby Ruth candy bar onto the stage. High overhead, a huge video screen displays, over and over, the film of Bobby Clemon's assassination. In tight, sequined costumes, a chorus of singers writhes, imitating the gestures of the fatally wounded figure on the screen.

A ramp juts south into the crowd that pleads for you to come forward. A keyboard is on the east part of the stage, while to the west, some thugs seem about to overpower your bodyguard. They have clubs, and you hold only your harmonica; your pockets are empty. While the crowd screams for more, one of the singers beckons you to come offstage by the door northward behind you.

The scene is vaguely hilarious and vaguely disturbing. As you stalk the stage panties are flying, dancers are grinding, bodyguards and thugs are brawling, and the crowd is baying for your love or your blood, or more likely both. It’s rock and roll in all its Dionysian danger and splendor. The other minds are only slightly less crowded and just as evocative: the poet’s full of more wistful imagery of sex and love and life and death; the dictator’s, a barren, ugly place of stunted growth and pathetic posturing; the scientist’s, an immense chess board of cool, classical beauty.

The obvious literary antecedent of the whole endeavor is Dante’s The Divine Comedy, particularly its first part The Inferno. Pinsky makes his homage about as explicit as homages can be by naming the scientist who sends you on your journey into the minds Doctor Virgil, a reference to the Roman poet who served as Dante’s guide to humanity in all its facets. Other more subtle references are sprinkled throughout Mindwheel. More importantly, the feel of the environment is similar. Dante has been a long-term fixation of Pinsky, resulting most notably in the popular translation of The Inferno which he published a decade after Mindwheel, and which has led Nick Montfort to cheekily note Mindwheel as “the first work of interactive fiction to have influenced The Inferno.”

Like The Divine Comedy, Mindwheel manages to be personal as well as epic. Amidst all the other imagery you’ll find within it a brief homage to Pinsky’s early mentor, the iconoclastic poet Yvor Winters, as well as a more extended one to the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s, those “boys of summer” who are the subject of the best book ever written about baseball. Indeed, the final puzzle of the game is a technically unfair one which requires you to do a bit of outside research into the only Brooklyn team to win the World Series. But go ahead and do the research; it’s good for you, and it’s trivial in the age of the Internet. Pinsky, who grew up in neighboring New Jersey, obviously followed the Brooklyn Bums and loved them dearly, obviously was as heartbroken as the rest of their fans when the team upped and moved to Los Angeles.

But the most personal of all parts of Mindwheel is, as you might expect, your excursion into the mind of the poet. Pinsky has since noted that one of the few sources of occasional tension between him and Hales stemmed from the former’s desire to just keep piling on more crazy world to explore while the latter insisted that there needed to be puzzles, pacing, the structure that would result in a real game with a score of sorts — presented as a summarized list of your achievements rather than a numerical value — and the possibility for victory. (Yes, this would seem to suddenly put Pinsky and Synapse on the opposite sides of the positions they had already staked in the novel/game dialectic. What can I say, other than that few philosophical positions survive contact with practicality.) Still, and for all that they were apparently a somewhat grudging addition on Pinsky’s part, Mindwheel‘s puzzles are mostly pretty good, managing to serve the themes with an emphasis on poetics, dialog, and symbolism rather than a bunch of mechanistic operations. Occasionally they’re more than pretty good, as in the case of the most intricate, rewarding, and personal puzzle of all: the completion of a sonnet using words gathered from the environment around you. The sonnet in question originated with the Renaissance poet Fulke Greville. The lines were, however, too long to fit on the 40-column screens used by many of Synapse’s customers, so Pinsky converted the poem from pentameter to tetrameter. The puzzle is brilliant because it so perfectly connects with the daily labors of the mind you’re exploring. You’re counting beats, looking at the rhyme scheme, seeking that word that fits mechanically and also just, well, fits. Pinsky, who labored always to find ways to make poetry relevant in people’s lives, was delighted when he saw a group of playtesting high-school kids “just trying to figure them [the sonnet and some other poetry-related puzzles] out because they’re having fun and want to do it.”

The central image of the Mindwheel itself is one that also appears in “The Figured Wheel,” a poem Pinsky published almost contemporaneously with the game. It’s another element that has continued to recur in Pinsky’s later work.

Imagine a wheel — a colossal, rotating wheel into which is drawn all of the images of a culture: every experience, every event, every object, every person’s mind and body. This wheel is a vortex which you must try to manipulate and understand.

It involves the idea of striving for control and mastery, and the world being so complicated that every time you strive you’re creating another system that becomes part of this big whirling thing which is everything everybody’s ever known or thought or dreamed up to amuse themselves. Jokes and technologies and mythologies and religions and roads and… just everything.

Such heady concepts aside, the question of what Mindwheel ultimately all means is a fraught one. There’s a telling moment near the end of the game where in order to progress you have to cold-bloodedly sacrifice a certain frog who’s been your loyal companion through most of the game. Trinity, Brian Moriarty’s masterpiece which we’ll be getting to in a future article, has a similar moment which is among its most moving and important, serving as a critique of the whole atomic doctrine of mutually assured destruction and the idea of sacrificing the few for the needs of the many which led to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Before you rush to comment, do know that the decision to drop those bombs is one with which I must unhappily agree.) But then Trinity is a work with some very clear messages to impart. In Mindwheel the sacrifice is played almost for laughs; the frog returns in the finale as a happy zombie.

Does this make Mindwheel a lesser work than Trinity? Well, it certainly takes itself less seriously, but we need not condemn it for that. There was a time when poets would compete to do their patrons proud by taking a well-known vignette out of the Bible or mythology and embellishing it over hundreds or thousands of lines of verse, adding layer after layer of pathos and sensuality and imaginative gilding, like a literary version of a guitar-shredding contest; see Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece” for spectacular examples of the genre. There’s some of that same spirit to Mindwheel. Pinsky is having fun here. Poetry should be, whatever else it is, fun.

Pinsky was never more delighted by Mindwheel than when it managed to surprise him, which it did more often than you might expect thanks to the rather loosy-goosy and free-association-inclined BTZ parser.

I was playing the game with my fifteen-year-old son, and we got up a tree. There was a lizard at the base of the tree that would repeatedly kill us. I knew that it was random, but we were on a bad run. We also had our friend the frog with us in the tree. So we gave the disk to the frog and said, “Frog, go down and kill the lizard.” By God, he did it. And the message appeared that the lizard died spewing blood and pus. The creators of the game didn’t know what was going to happen.

One of his favorite anecdotes is that of the beautiful lady to which a friend typed, “You look like my mother.” “I will look the way you want me to” was her alleged reply. (Unfortunately, the published version of the game yields the far less satisfying “Okay, I’ll look.” The problem with a parser like Synapse’s is that it might deliver something unexpected and brilliant from time to time in response to some unusual input, but nine times out of ten it just delivers gibberish or takes your command as meaning something that you really, really didn’t want to do.)

The period of Mindwheel‘s development was a happy and fulfilling one for Pinsky, but a difficult one for Synapse. In addition to the Electronic Novel line, the company had just launched another bold new initiative: to develop a line of business applications — SynFile, SynCalc, and SynTrend — to be marketed and distributed by Atari themselves. In July of 1984, however, Jack Tramiel bought Atari (a story we’ll be getting to in detail in a future article), and promptly told Synapse that he didn’t want their applications and didn’t intend to pay for them. Synapse, who had invested heavily in the work, became just the latest of a long line of Tramiel suppliers to be double-crossed and financially destroyed by the old business warrior. Meanwhile the rest of the Atari 8-bit market, still Synapse’s bread and butter, was in increasingly dire straits, being pummeled by the Commodore 64. Flying high barely six months before, Synapse suddenly faced bankruptcy before they could release a single one of the Electronic Novels that they hoped would stake out for them a new place in the industry. A savior appeared in the form of Brøderbund, who agreed to buy Synapse and take them under their wing in October. The Carlstons knew and liked Wolosenko and the rest of the Synapse folks, and wanted their expertise in action-game programming as well as the promising Electronic Novel line; it was still the era of bookware, after all, with Infocom’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the talk of the industry.

The release date for Mindwheel slipped a bit amidst all the chaos, from the planned late 1984 to February of 1985. It generated the last big wave of the already dying bookware storm, with some images that can seem as surreal today as anything in the game proper: Pinsky blinking amidst the strobe lights at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show; Pinsky waxing philosophical in those noted literary magazines Compute!’s Gazette and A.N.A.L.O.G. (“The #1 Magazine for Atari Computer Owners!”). It’s questionable, though, to what degree the press buzz translated into sales, although Mindwheel undoubtedly became by far the best selling of the Electronic Novel line as a whole — not, alas, a high bar to clear.

I’ve long since made my peace with the fact that traditional parser-driven interactive fiction is, due to various irresistible forces, just an intriguing blip in the histories of literature and/or gaming (take your pick) that will quite likely die entirely with my generation. In general, I think that’s fine; Shakespeare is still as beautiful and relevant as ever despite the fact that modern theater has as little in common with the Elizabethan stage as does textual interactive fiction with a modern graphical game. Certainly elaborate counter-factuals, whether in life or in history, are seldom all that productive. Yet it’s hard not to feel just a little bit wistful reading those old interviews with Pinsky where he throws out ideas of what he’d like to try in his next game whenever someone “asks me to do another of these”; wistful for that world, widely accepted as inevitable for a brief instant in the mid-1980s, when major writers — good writers — would be routinely asked whether their next work would be interactive or non-interactive.

Ah, well, at least we have Mindwheel. The Apple II version I’m providing for download here is probably your best bet, being very playable and also quite easy to get up and running in any number of slick Apple II emulators like AppleWin; be sure to answer “yes” to 80 columns and to turn on faster disk-drive emulation. It’s worth the effort. (Edit: Steve Hales has now made a web page that hosts Mindwheel for play online in a browser. You unfortunately can’t save, but this is by far the easiest way to get a taste of the experience.) Whatever the reasons for Mindwheel‘s academic reputation today, it’s definitely not undeserved.

(This article draws heavily from Jason Scott’s interview with the ever thoughtful and articulate Robert Pinsky for Get Lamp. Magazine sources this time were: A.N.T.I.C. of April 1983, November 1984, and July 1985; Ahoy! of February 1984; Compute!’s Gazette of June 1985; Analog of December 1985; QuestBusters of March 1985. There’s an interesting discussion of Mindwheel in Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages and also in an article Pinsky himself wrote for the Autumn 1987 New England Review. Finally, Steve Hales’s brief recollections of working with Pinsky can be found in two places online.)

Comments
30 Responses

- IPadCary

March 10, 2014 at 2:38 pm

Hey, Jimmy!
Reading this “Mindwheel” article got me thinking ….
When this blog reaches it’s conclusion, will you turn it’s
entirety into an ebook or something like that?
I think you should, because even though I came to DA late,
I’ve read back to the first article & am now caught up and current.
Never ptheless, if DA came out as an ebook, I’d still buy it
anyway just to peruse randomly: like watching a movie you love millions of times over again.

- Jimmy Maher

March 10, 2014 at 3:31 pm

Yeah, I do intend to do something with this material at some point to make sure that it’s preserved in a more permanent way, hopefully to outlive me. Sorry I can’t be much more specific than that right now. My big priority and big passion now is to continue moving forward with the history, but yeah, when the times comes it will become a book… or something.

- IPadCary

March 10, 2014 at 4:18 pm

Sounds good!
Keep up the excellent work!

- Alan DeNiro

March 10, 2014 at 3:58 pm

This is great. In terms of this statement: “Pinsky, you see, is by far the most respectable and respected literary figure ever to turn his hand to the humble text adventure.”

I think Thomas Disch comes pretty close? Though in literary circles at that time he was probably just as well known for his poetry and poetry criticism than his science fiction.

- Jimmy Maher

March 10, 2014 at 4:42 pm

If we’re talking about the times in which their respective games were published, it may be a close thing, but if we’re talking about their literary reputations as they stand today I can’t see it as much of a contest. Pinsky’s star just continued to rise post-Mindwheel, while Disch fell into obscurity and despair — a very sad story and ultimately a sad end for one hell of a writer.

- The Other MattW

March 10, 2014 at 5:42 pm

Not that I love to nitpick about the spelling of names again, but you seem to be overcompensating whdn it comes to German names (as you did with Goethe who became Göthe): Jung’s first name is Carl, not Karl.

Aside from that minir quibble, great article; makes me glad I clicked the Donate button a while back. Thank you for all the effort you put into this blog.

- Jimmy Maher

March 11, 2014 at 8:01 am

You have a good memory. :) Thanks!

- george

March 10, 2014 at 5:58 pm

Another great post Jimmy!

- Alex Smith

March 10, 2014 at 6:17 pm

Fascinating article and an enjoyable read. This may be a bit pedantic, but the Brooklyn Dodgers only ever won a single World Series. Saying “last Brooklyn team” implies they had done it more than once.

- Jimmy Maher

March 11, 2014 at 8:02 am

Thanks. I thought there must have been teams that won it all pre-World War II, but obviously didn’t bother to check…

- Lisa

March 10, 2014 at 8:02 pm

Your link to the Broderbund post is broken – there are some extra characters at the end of the URL.

- Jimmy Maher

March 11, 2014 at 8:04 am

Thanks!

- Keith Palmer

March 10, 2014 at 10:10 pm

I think I first heard about Mindwheel through a brief but approving mention in one of the last issues of Creative Computing (already several years old by the time I found it), and Graham Nelson also complimented it in the Inform Designer’s Manual, which continued to pique my interest. Now, of course, I’ve got a chance to play it (although I’ll try my luck at “fast disk speed” with a different emulator).

Alluding ahead to “Tramiel’s Atari” and Trinity piques my interest, even if I know we’ll get to that when we get to that and no sooner. The comment about how “action games were seen as relics of the recently passed age of the Atari VCS” also intrigued me, but does leave me wondering what else could be quoted to support it; I’ve had the impression home computers such as the Commodore 64 didn’t lack for games of that sort.

- Jimmy Maher

March 11, 2014 at 8:10 am

There were always lots of pure action games around, but there was a period of a year or so when they were regarded as a bit passe, relics of the Atari VCS era from which home-computer boosters were eager to disassociate themselves. Soon the home-computer boom also collapsed and the whole point became moot. Of course, the kids playing on their Commodore 64s mostly never even realized the debate, such as it was, had even occurred…

- Scott

March 11, 2014 at 12:34 am

Great read, this. Fascinating stuff, and I’ll always look back at 80’s gaming wistfully because almost everything was so new.

And there’s a typo: ‘The lines were, however, too long to fit on the 40-column screens used by many of Synapse’s customers, so Pensky converted the poem from pentameter to tetrameter.’

- Jimmy Maher

March 11, 2014 at 8:04 am

Thanks!

- Carl Grace

March 11, 2014 at 4:40 am

I hate to point out typos but the city in California is Berkeley, not Berkley (you make this typo consistently).

Very interesting post!

- Jimmy Maher

March 11, 2014 at 8:06 am

Not at all… I appreciate it. Thanks!

- Scott M. Bruner

March 12, 2014 at 1:03 am

While I absolutely love The Boys of Summer (and the 50’s Dodgers), the best baseball book of all-time is Jim Bouton’s Ball Four.

Thanks for not just the article – but the link to play it, I’ve been planning on playing through Mindwheel for a while, but I wanted to hunt down a physical copy first, although now I guess I now know that the accompanying book isn’t necessarily essential.

- Jimmy Maher

March 12, 2014 at 10:26 am

Just the opposite here, I’m afraid. Ball Four is a fascinating inside look at the game, but The Boys of Summer manages to transcend its genre to reach for the mantle of, dare we say it, literature. Put another way, I could imagine someone who doesn’t care a bit about or even understand baseball enjoying The Boys of Summer. Ball Four… eh, not quite so much.

Not that you can go wrong with either…

- namekuseijin

March 17, 2014 at 12:50 am

Yeah, formidable time. Too bad reading and writing is considered an antique and linear clicking and shooting is the wave of the future.

It’s like music to me: I simply refuse to listen to anything post-Brahms. Why should I? We’re living in the information age and Brahms is just a click away from me as the mindless noises of today…

- Peter Piers

November 10, 2015 at 5:36 pm

Speaking as someone who appreciates Verdi, Puccini, Debussy, the BeeGees, Queen and the Cranberries… you’re missing out.

- Ben

March 31, 2014 at 11:07 am

Hi Jimmy – superb storytelling, thank you for the enormous work you put into this blog. Every article is a gem. I’d like to point out a small typo in the phrase “…were already trolling these waters”: “Trolling” ought to be “trawling”.

- Jimmy Maher

March 31, 2014 at 11:22 am

Thanks, Ben.

While “trawling” would also work, “trolling” does apply in this case I believe: “To fish for or in with a moving line, working the line up or down with a rod, as in fishing for pike, or trailing the line behind a slow-moving boat.”

- Olivier Guinart

June 16, 2014 at 10:34 pm

I’ve read this story from start to end, and to prove it :):
“it creators amongst our “leading moralizers.”? Its?

Now I want to play Mindwheel!

- Jimmy Maher

June 17, 2014 at 8:14 am

Thank you!

- Steffen Luik

November 21, 2014 at 9:02 am

it was a great game, played it on my C64, one oft the best adventures ever

- Steve Hales

June 12, 2015 at 11:56 pm

Hi all,

Through a feat of magic, I’ve conjured Mindwheel into a website. Completely playable.

http://www.mindwheelgame.com

Press return for the security questions, and you’re there with Doctor Virgil.

Steve

- Jimmy Maher

June 13, 2015 at 7:25 am

That’s great, especially since this game is a bit more daunting to get up and running otherwise than the likes of Infocom. Thanks!

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but similar pages for the other Electronic Novels would also be wonderful to see…

- Robert Pinsky

June 14, 2015 at 5:46 pm

Thank you for this– among other things, it led to an email reunion with Steve Hales, and discovery of the online emulator. Nick Montfort’s “the only electronic game to influence Dante’s _Inferno_ is true about the translation. It also influenced my opera libretto Death and the Powers and a lot of other things.

Essex and Brimstone
March 17, 2014

The next two entrants in the Electronic Novel line trickled out of Synapse/Brøderbund some eight months after Mindwheel and with vastly less fanfare. Both are flawed efforts that together serve to take a lot of the shine off Synapse’s boldly literary take on the text adventure.

The premise of Essex is The Love Boat meets Star Trek. You play one of an array of disparate passengers who come together for a cruise on the Essex, the sleekest and most luxurious star liner in the galaxy. Before all is said and done, you’ll have unmasked one of your fellow travelers as a spy and another as a thief, rescued a “Klangorn” warrior from unjust captivity, beamed down to a planet to collect some fresh “trilithum crystals” to power the Essex, and — the real crux of the matter — rescued from another unjust captivity on another planet the only scientist capable of closing an inter-dimensional wormhole and thus preventing an alien invasion. Whew! Whatever else you can say about it, Essex doesn’t lack for ambition.

Unlike the other Electronic Novels, for which Synapse turned to outside writers, Essex author Bill Darrah was also a programmer at Synapse. He doesn’t manage to transcend his other calling; we’re back pretty firmly in the realm of programmer writing here, which comes as a particular letdown after the likes of Mindwheel. Like many unpracticed writers straining to sound “literary,” Darrah frequently confuses elegant language with stilted language. Tortured passive-voice constructions abound: “A newspaper is picked up and pocketed,” the game tells us after we “GET NEWSPAPER” as our first command of the game. More fundamentally, Essex doesn’t seem to know exactly what it wants to be, staking out some shaky territory somewhere between Star Trek parody and homage, with a bit of Douglas Adams at his “zaniest” and least compelling, without ever really committing to anything. So we end up with a fairly serious space-adventure premise which nevertheless has the aforementioned “Klangorn” and “trilithium crystals” along with a Chief Engineer McKinley who hangs pictures of the Highlands in his office and speaks in a bizarre faux-Scottish diction that suggests that the only Scottish accent Darrah has ever heard is James Doohan’s. Even more bizarre combinations of drama and comedy have worked in the hands of talented writers, but suffice to say that Darrah is not one of these writers.

Taken as a game — or, if you like, a system — Essex is more interesting. In fact, it’s by far the most complex piece of programming of all the Electronic Novels. If we take classic adventures as almost all formed in the Adventure mold (the vast majority), being relatively static environments that change only at the prompting of you the player, or the Deadline mold, being dynamic, living story systems in which not just what but also when becomes a factor, Essex is firmly in the dynamic camp. Life is happening around you constantly. Not only does the Essex itself suffer a series of crises, but a cast of a dozen or so others is all constantly moving about, pursuing their own agendas and (ideally) reacting to your own actions in believable ways. It’s impressive — except when it doesn’t quite work right, which is often. Making a believable world/simulation of this sort is still one of the hardest things to do in an adventure game, which does much to explain the form’s still-strong love for deserted environments and straitjacketed, linear plotting. In Essex mimesis is constantly shattered. You can beat one of your fellow passengers to a pulp in front of others while they just continue chatting about the vacation they’re having; use an energy bomb to free a dangerous prisoner from the brig while the guard just yawns and looks on. At points the various daemons controlling plot developments seem to get out of whack, so that a landing party can beam down to a planet before the ship has actually arrived there. Essex needed a lot more testing than it apparently received, serving as yet another example of how the process at Infocom just as much as the vision of their writers led to their own unrivaled catalog of games. This was something that Synapse like so many others, whatever vows they may have made about doing “everything Infocom does plus one,” couldn’t duplicate.

Another thing was Infocom’s parser. Synapse made much out of the BTZ parser, bragging about its ability to understand some 1500 words, over twice that of a typical Infocom game. But word counts alone aren’t enough; ever-present concerns about disk and memory usage aside, they are in fact the easy part of the problem. It’s the grammatical patterns used to deduce meaning from those words that are the hard part. Here Synapse took the same wrong-headed approach as Telarium and many others, doing simple pattern matching as often as real parsing and trying to guess at the meanings of commands which couldn’t be interpreted by more rigorous methods. The BTZ parser is a “lying parser,” in other words, which tries to pretend it knows more than it does. Mindwheel had of course used the same parser, but there it oddly seemed to work at least some of the time, aided by that game’s surreal atmosphere and general disinterest in grubby materialism; witness the Oedipal interaction that so delighted Robert Pinsky. In Essex, full of more traditional object-oriented puzzles, it’s much less successful. Conversations are particularly prone to to non sequiturs: asking another crewman, “WHERE IS CAPTAIN DEE?” results in, “At the same time Dee was building the Essex, the economies of three major planets collapsed.” Good to know… I guess. Infuriatingly, solving Essex requires beating your head against the conversation system; one or two other people on the ship have essential information that you can gather only by asking about random things until you stumble across it.

Indeed, Essex is a very difficult game, requiring like so many others of its dynamic stripe many restarts and restores to solve. In the end, I must admit I judged it not worth the effort. Which was a particular disappointment because the big hardcover book, while still having a surfeit of blank pages, is actually used pretty well here to introduce your fellow passengers and set everything up. Thanks to it, I was actually excited to get started. Alas, that initial excitement wasn’t enough to sustain me.

Even more initially promising is Brimstone: The Dream of Gawain, written by another up-and-coming poet living in the San Francisco area named James Paul, who wouldn’t go on to quite the same heights as Robert Pinsky but has continued to write poetry and prose and teach creative writing at Hunter College. In Brimstone you take the role of Sir Gawain, a Knight of the Round Table best known as the main character of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a recurrent tale of the Arthurian mythos that is most often read today in its translation by J.R.R. Tolkien (it also likely had a little something to do with inspiring one of the more beloved set-pieces in Monty Python and the Holy Grail). The game is in fact exactly what its subtitle says it is: as it begins Gawain is drifting off to sleep after a day of relaxation at Camelot. Brimstone is what he experience within the nocturnal, infernal landscape of his dream.

Paul, owner of a PhD in Medieval English literature, isn’t much interested in the King Arthur of flashing swords and chivalric derring-do. He rather connects with the murkier, more mystical aspects of the tradition which you can practically breathe in with the mists during an autumn walk around Glastonbury. Nor does he restrict himself to the Arthurian mythos. Brimstone owes much to — where have we heard this before? — Dante. Like Mindwheel, there’s little in the way of straightforward plotting or concrete theme here, but lots of evocative suggestions and a whole pile of deftly rendered references that hover on the edge of the unconscious — not only to Dante and King Arthur but also to the Book of Genesis, to The Pilgrim’s Progress, to the Greek myths (Charon makes an inevitable cameo), even to Kafka (Morgan La Fay is the star witness in an absurdist trial in which Gawain is the accused). Presiding over much of the affair as Paul’s version of Dante’s Virgil is none other than William Blake. There’s also an homage to a more modern celebrated work by another Medievalist (among many other things), Umberto Eco, whose The Name of the Rose had reached American shores in translation just the year before Paul set to work on Brimstone. The frame story of Brimstone, as presented in the accompanying hardcover, is a dead ringer for that of The Name of the Rose: fussily pretentious academic discovers a heretofore unknown manuscript behind the Iron Curtain. It’s pretty funny — the academic in question has the perfect name of “Jeremy Diddler” — if not quite as drolly perfect as Eco’s.

Much of the imagery in Brimstone proper concerns sin and redemption; much also Greatness versus Goodness. Here’s a bit I particularly like, a forest of frozen hypocrites:

The knight found himself at the northern end of the Vale of the Titans. To the south, Gawain saw what appeared to be figures of men, standing still in the ice.

The figures were men, or their shapes, in any case. Here a multitude of statues of ice crowded a small valley to the south of the knight. Each statue was twice as large as Gawain, each was intricately carved, and each wore what seemed at first to be expressions of virtue, dignity, honesty and courage. Here the track turned, running north and west.

> s

Each figure was labeled with a name: Agamemnon, Bonaparte, Bowdler, Burr, and so on. The knight's heart sank as he walked on. Alphabetical orders always weighed heavily upon him. It was a cold place, and the hills bristled with statues.

> s

The knight felt worse and worse as he walked through this forest of hypocrites. He could look at the statues no longer, though they ran on and on, both men and women, most of whom the knight did not know. The knight came to a marshy area.

Here the ground oozed a gray substance, and wide-leafed plants burst through the mud, their leaves bearing white designs like those the knight had seen on the backs of spiders. A single firm path bore many tracks of a single creature east, and a path also ran south. What next? thought the knight, noting the sign.

> read sign

There in the rock above the well were some words, written by hand. "Expect poison from standing water," it read.

The excerpt above, of course, also shows the most immediately striking aspect of Brimstone: all of its text is rendered in the third-person past tense. Given the sheer quantity of text adventures that precede it, I wouldn’t want to claim absolutely that it’s the first to experiment with this alternative. It is, however, the first of which I’m aware; virtually all previous games had used either the first-person present (as popularized by Scott Adams) or the second-person present (as popularized by Adventure and later Infocom). In the hands of a lesser writer, it might comes off as just a gimmick, but here it suits Paul’s oft-lovely prose and the somewhat removed, dreamlike temper of the whole experience perfectly.

I wish I could leave it at that, leave Brimstone as a piece of interactive poetry almost the equal of Mindwheel. But sadly, commercial considerations do much to undo the experience. Until quite late in the day, Brimstone seems like a kind game which is not puzzleless but not all that interested in its puzzles either, using them largely to provide direction and impetus to explore its enchanted dreamscape. Some of the puzzles are actually pretty good: there’s a free-association exercise that’s almost the equal of any of Mindwheel‘s poetic puzzles. But this version of Brimstone would have been a lovely experience lasting perhaps two or three hours — unacceptable for a game that people would be spending $30 or more on. So, you’ll eventually come to the realization that, starting in the mid-game, Brimstone had begun layering on increasingly obscure puzzles, many of which you probably never recognized as puzzles at all. The ultimate goal turns out to be to collect five magic words needed to defeat Gawain’s nemesis the Green Knight. At least three of these are extremely difficult to find; you’re all but guaranteed to end the game having been locked out of victory long ago. The most absurd word-acquisition strategy of all requires you to start talking to a flower who’s given no prior sign of sentience. To make matters worse, once you collect the words you have to figure out their correct order largely by trial and error and type them really, really fast thanks to one of the more pointless innovations of the BTZ system: the games play in a sort of pseudo-real time, with turns passing as if in response to a “WAIT” command if you don’t type something quickly enough. Mostly that’s just an occasional annoyance, but here it’s enough to make you want to pull out the (virtual) disk and throw it across the room. So, having ended my last article with an elegiac to the dream of a commercial marketplace for literary interactive fiction, let me end this one by noting how wonderful it is that many later experiments with interactive literature were allowed to be their best selves without such dull metrics as dollars spent and hours of gameplay provided getting in the way.

It’s unfortunately a bit more complicated to play Essex and Brimstone today than it is to play Mindwheel. All of the Apple II disk images of both that I could find floating around the Internet have corruptions that, cruelly, don’t show up until well into the game. Your best bet for a decent — read, 80-column — experience is to go for the MS-DOS versions, which you can run through DOSBox. I’m providing a download of each of them here; each zip also contains the manual and a configuration file for DOSBox that should work for you. There’s just one tricky thing you need to know: when you enter the name of a file to save or restore, you need to hit CTRL-ENTER to conclude your input. While Essex is probably best left to the truly hardcore, I’m tempted to recommend Brimstone in spite of its issues. Just keep a walkthrough handy, and don’t be ashamed to use it.

There was one final Electronic Novel, but we’ll save that for later. Instead we’ll pull the camera back next time to take a wider view of the American software industry in 1985 — one hell of a year, as Synapse amongst many others would agree.

Comments
7 Responses

- matt w

March 20, 2014 at 3:09 am

Since this post isn’t getting any love, I just wanted to say thanks for the pointer to two games I’d never heard of.

I wonder if there’s any point to trying to play Brimstone and pretend it doesn’t have an endgame?

- Jimmy Maher

March 20, 2014 at 11:25 am

I’d say yes. It’s really not very hard at all to progress to the last stage of the game. It’s just that you realize once you get there that you’re missing things you need to actually win. So, just play until you come to the part with the giant orchids and the River Styx, then call it a day. The prose is often quite good, and the environment interesting enough to be worth it.

- matt w

March 21, 2014 at 11:22 am

I’ll put it on my list, then!

And I realized my first comment might sound a bit flip — it was a very interesting post and I’m grateful for more than just the pointer.

- David Boddie

March 20, 2014 at 12:53 pm

You need to include typos to give us obsessive types something to correct. ;-)

Is there an indication why the starship in the first game is called the Essex? Was there an historical precedent for it – a ship, perhaps?

- Jimmy Maher

March 20, 2014 at 1:24 pm

Nothing that I can immediately recall from the game or the manual. My guess would be that it’s another very roundabout (and possibly unconscious) Star Trek call-out. The famed World War II aircraft carrier Enterprise had more than a little influence on the original show’s choice of that name for the starring ship. (I remember as a kid my love for Star Trek led me to the World War II vessel, which in turn led me to read The Big E by Edward Stafford — a great book.) The Essex was the first of a long line of carriers that were built slightly later in the war.

That’s all I got, anyway…

- ZUrlocker

March 21, 2014 at 3:12 am

Even though I was not familiar with these particular games, I found it a great story.

- Rob

March 26, 2014 at 3:34 am

Fantastic story! I stumbled upon this while looking for more information about Brimstone, the last of the Synapse/Broderbund games missing from my Atari 800 collection.

This Tormented Business, Part 3
March 28, 2014

In the June 1985 issue of Compute! magazine, in an otherwise innocuous editorial about font sizes and page layouts and column lengths, Richard Mansfield casually dropped a bombshell: that the number of companies in the PC industry had shrunk by 80% over the past year. Now, the reality was not quite so apocalyptic as that number (not to mention lots of fevered pundits) would make it seem. Many of the people and companies included within it were doubtless dabblers, who saw a chance to jump on a hot new trend, then saw the money wasn’t going to come so easily after all and walked away again. But still… 80%. Let’s look at some more numbers to try to unpack what that figure means.

The chart above shows the numbers of actively used computers in American homes between 1978 and 1982. The first big spike came in the latter year, when cheap machines like the Commodore VIC-20, the Texas Instruments 99/4A, and the Timex Sinclair came online in a big way just as the videogame console market began to go soft. Home computers, the pundits said, were the logical successors to that fad, and consumers seemed to agree by almost quintupling their numbers in the space of a single year.

The chart above shows the actual and forecasted installed base of active home-computer users between 1982 and 1987. As you can see, things continued to go swimmingly through 1983 — the peak of the home-computer wars, Jack Tramiel and Commodore’s year of triumph. By year’s end, following the most spectacular Christmas of the 1980s for the home-computer industry, the number of computers in American homes was over 250% of what it had been at the beginning of the year. With millions upon millions of American homes still unconverted, everyone assumed that this was only the beginning of the beginning, that growth by leaps and bounds was inevitable until the end of the decade at least.

Things didn’t work out that way. Not only did 1984 fall short of projections by more than 50%, but sales to first-time buyers weren’t even sufficient to make up for those who got bored with their balky toys from the previous year or two and relegated them to closets, first step on their long, gradual journeys to the dumpster. (One research firm would later estimate that consumers threw out 1.5 million home computers in 1985 alone.) I’ve talked in earlier articles about the many perfectly good, sensible reasons that consumers grew so quickly disillusioned with their purchases, a list which includes a complete lack of killer apps — beyond games, that is — for the average household, the pain of actually using these primitive machines, and hidden costs in the form of all of the extra hardware and software needed to do much of anything with one of them. Home computers just didn’t live up to the hype; at least the old Atari VCS really was cheap and simple and fun, exactly as advertised. Most Americans found home computers to be none of these things. Their experience of 1982 and 1983 was bad enough to sour many of them on computers for a decade or more.

As bad as the chart above looks, it took a surprising amount of time for the industry to realize just how far off-track things had gone. 1984 was a paradoxical year of mixed messages in many respects, one that saw for instance the Apple II and Infocom both enjoy their biggest sales years ever. It wasn’t until 1984 became 1985, and the industry counted its dollars and woke up to the realization that the Christmas just past had been a deeply disappointing one, that the full scale of the problems set in and the dying-home-computer-industry became as big a media meme as the home-computer-as-social-revolution had been just a year or two before.

Still, some knew long before that something was very, very wrong. The bellweather of virtually any consumer-facing industry has always been — prior, at least, to the Internet age — its magazines. A healthy, growing industry means lots of readers buying at newsstands and signing up for subscriptions, as well as lots of vigorous new companies eager to advertise, to tell the public about all the new stuff they have to sell them. Conversely, when interest and sales begin to flag the newsstands start to reduce their magazine selection to make more room for other subjects, subscriptions are allowed to lapse, and advertising budgets are the quickest and least immediately painful things to cut. And as the first companies start to fold, those with whom they’ve signed advertising contracts tend to be about the last creditors to get paid. Woe betide the magazine that’s let itself go too far out on a limb — like, you know, one assuming it’s a part of an industry likely to grow almost exponentially for years to come — when that happens. The carnage in the magazines, those engines of excitement and advice and community, was appalling during the eighteen months between mid-1984 and the end of 1985.

The period was bookended by two particularly painful losses. Softalk, the de facto voice of the Apple II community, simply never appeared again after an apparently business-as-usual August 1984 issue. An even sadder loss was that of Creative Computing, which at least got to say goodbye in a last editorial (“Great While It Lasted”) in its last issue in December of 1985. The first newsstand magazine devoted to personal and, well, creative computing, it had been founded by David Ahl, a visionary if ever there was one, in October of 1974, months before the Altair. Ahl sold the magazine to the big conglomerate Ziff-Davis in 1982, but remained on as editor-in-chief right through to that last editorial. Throughout its run Creative Computing remained relentlessly idealistic about the potential for personal computing, always thinking about next year and of what the products they reviewed meant in the context of the ongoing PC revolution as a whole. Just to take one example: in response to the arrival of the first prototype laser-disc players in 1976, the magazine laid out a manifesto for what would come to be known as multimedia computing well over ten years later.

David H. Ahl

Creative Computing also published books, the best selling, most important, and most beloved of which was titled simply BASIC Computer Games, a compendium of type-in listings first published in 1978 and featuring games that in most cases had been making the rounds of The People’s Computer Company and the pages of Creative Computing itself for years. BASIC Computer Games sold a staggering one-million copies in English and in translations to French and German, years before any pre-packaged computer game would come close to such a feat. Many a young hacker pecked out its listings and then started to experiment by changing a variable here or a statement there, learning in the process the wonderful quality that separates computers from game consoles and just about every other form of electronic entertainment: that you can use the same device you play games on to also make games, or just about anything else you want. Creative computing indeed. The voice of Ahl, every bit as much a pioneer as a Steve Wozniak or Steve Jobs, would be sorely missed in the years to come. Ironically, his magazine’s end came just as machines like the Macintosh and Amiga were arriving to begin to bring to fruition some of his more expansive predictions of earlier years. (One of Creative Computing‘s last issues featured a gushing review of the Amiga which called it nothing less than “a new medium of expression.”) It’s a sign of the immense respect with which Ahl and his magazine were still viewed in the industry that several competing magazines took the time to remark the loss of Creative Computing and offer a warm eulogy — an act of graciousness unusual indeed in the increasingly cutthroat world of computer publishing. As Info magazine noted, “There could be no better history of personal computing than a complete collection of Creatives.”

In 1985 the pain spread in earnest to the software industry. Many pioneering companies, including some we’ve met in earlier articles on this blog, collapsed during the year. Any company that hadn’t shed its old crufty hacker’s skin and learned to start behaving like professionals was doomed, as were many who had listened a bit too much to the professionals and pundits and over-expanded and over-borrowed in the expectation of the perpetually-exploding industry that had been promised them. Also doomed was anyone whose creations just weren’t good enough; those users who had chosen to stick with this computer thing were far savvier and more demanding than the neophytes of earlier years. Muse Software of Castle Wolfenstein fame was amongst the victims, as was our more recent acquaintance Synapse Software, who were shuttered by Brøderbund barely a year after they acquired them. The Carlstons may have been nice folks, but their company didn’t survive by throwing good money after bad, and neither of Synapse’s principal assets — their expertise with the fading Atari 8-bit line and their Electronic Novel line — were worth much of anything in the evolving industry order.

Indeed, adventure-game makers were if anything hit even harder than the rest of the industry. By mid-1985 it was becoming clear that bookware had been a blind alley; virtually nothing in the category, excepting only Infocom’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, did much of anything commercially. Companies like Spinnaker (owner of the Telarium and Windham Classics brands) and Brøderbund now began to divest themselves of their bookware assets almost as eagerly as they had acquired them. So much for the dream of a new interactive literature. Other expectations were also dramatically tempered. Trip Hawkins, for instance, was finally forced to give up on his dream of game designers as the rock stars of the 1980s and a shelf of games joining a shelf of records inside every hip living room. Electronic Arts now retrenched and refocused on becoming a big, highly respected fish in the relatively tiny pond of hardcore gaming (the only kind of gaming there was in this window between the Atari VCS’s collapse and the arrival of Nintendo). Yes, computer games were just computer games again.

Almost unremarked amidst all of the bankruptcies and retractions and cancellations was the collapse of Scott Adams’s Adventure International, one of the oldest of all the companies we’ve met on this site. Whether due to stubbornness or lack of funds or failure of vision or simple loyalty to what had brung’em, Adams had refused for years to upgrade his core technology, continuing to sell the same little 16 K, two-word-parser games he had started writing back in 1978. Their revamp into the SAGA line added crude graphics to the equation, but little else. Thus Infocom had long since stolen Adams’s crown as the king of adventure-gaming, not so much by besting him as by Adams not even trying to compete. Adams instead fed — and, for a time, quite well — on the ultra-low-end market, those machines like the Commodore VIC-20 and Texas Instruments 99/4A that weren’t a whole lot more capable than the original TRS-80 on which he’d first written Adventureland. These machines, unfortunately, were exactly the ones which found their way into closets and attics with the most frequency after the home-computer boom passed its heyday. Therein lay the root of AI’s troubles.

By 1984 much or most of Adventure International’s revenue was coming from Britain, thus belatedly justifying the company’s name, chosen in a fit of optimism when Adams and his wife were still making packaging out of baby-bottle liners and struggling to grasp the vagaries of wholesale pricing; expansion across an ocean must have seemed far-fetched indeed at that time. With their more modest cassette-based computers, their absolute mania for adventures, and their accompanying willingness to forgive faults and limitations Americans no longer were, Britons offered Adams a more hospitable market all around. An independent quasi-subsidiary, Adventure International UK, offered not just the classic dozen original Scott Adams games and the OtherVentures titles, but also many more games written in Britain by British authors like the prolific Brian Howarth using Adams’s engine. Adams himself was a celebrity amongst British adventurers. Everyone knew him for his crazy Afro that made him easy to spot across a crowded trade-show floor, and the magazines jostled for quotes and interviews and the fans for autographs whenever he made one of his occasional trips across the pond.

Scott Adams hams it up for the British press

In late 1983 or early 1984 a tremendous opportunity to improve Adventure International’s standing on both continents virtually fell into Adams’s lap. Joe Calamari, an executive vice president with Marvel Comics, called Adams out of the blue to propose that Marvel and AI collaborate on a line of games and accompanying comic books starring the Marvel superheroes. While it would take many years for Marvel to catch up to their perpetual arch-rivals DC Comics in bringing their brand to the masses via the multiplexes, Marvel at this time was making a modest but in its way innovative push into trans-media storytelling via deals like this one and the one they inked around the same with TSR of Dungeons and Dragons fame to do a Marvel tabletop RPG. Their choice of Adventure International for the computer-game license could be read as surprising; AI was hardly at the cutting edge of the game industry, and given the huge demographic overlap between gamers and comics readers the Marvel license would certainly have been appealing to other, slicker publishers. Perhaps AI’s support for the cheap low-end machines, not to mention their games’ typical price of $12 or so as opposed to $30 or more, led Marvel to consider them a better fit for their generally younger readers. (As with science fiction, the golden age for superheroes is about twelve.) As possible evidence of exactly this thought process, consider that Commodore, who may have suggested AI to Marvel and apparently did play some sort of intermediary role in the negotiations, had been doing very well with cartridge versions of the first five Scott Adams adventures on the VIC-20 throughout the peak years of the home-computer boom.

It’s hard not to compare this early, crude experiment in trans-media storytelling with the Marvel of today, whose characters feature in cinematic extravaganzas costing hundreds of millions to produce. We’ve certainly come a long way. (Whether it’s a change for the better is of course in the eye of the beholder.) It’s also yet another sign of just how huge text adventures were for a few years there that Marvel chose this format for the games at all. The cerebral pleasures of text and puzzles hardly feel like an obvious fit for the “Wham! Bam! Pow!” action of a superhero comic — not that this marks the strangest mismatch between form and content of the bookware era.

Adams signed a deal to make a dozen games with Marvel, one that gave him a crazy amount of creative freedom. He gave the series its truly awful name, the uncomfortably medicinal-sounding QuestProbe. (It’s choices like this that distinguish companies like AI, who couldn’t afford PR firms and image advisers or just couldn’t be bothered, from companies like Infocom who could. As for Marvel, who knows what they were thinking…) He also got a pleasure that would turn any superhero-loving kid — and more than a few superhero-loving adults — a Hulk-like green with envy: he outlined a story to accompany each game, then gave it to Marvel to be turned into a full-blown comic book to be sold as part of a “Scott Adams/Marvel Comic Limited Series.”

Alas, the Marvel deal, AI’s last, best chance to live and possibly even prosper, turned into an opportunity squandered. The QuestProbe games are painfully, shamefully bad by just about every criterion. The graphics are crude and ugly, the prose strangled, the situations all but incomprehensible (especially if you aren’t lucky enough to have the accompanying comic to hand), and the puzzles a hopeless mix of the inane and the inscrutable. They are, in other words, pretty much like all the other Scott Adams games after the first half-dozen or so, and that just wasn’t good enough anymore, even for the patience of twelve-year-olds. After the first game, which featured the Hulk, was roundly panned even by the forgiving gaming press (the making of a game bad enough to achieve that was something of a feat in itself), Adams did begin to include some modest innovations: the next game, featuring Spider-Man, debuted at last a parser capable of understanding more than two words (not that it was otherwise up to much); and the third and as it turned out final game, featuring the Human Torch and the Thing, had you controlling both characters, able to switch between them at will — an interesting idea badly executed. By the time that third game trickled out in mid-1985, AI was already collapsing.

Adams today notes the immediate cause of AI’s failure, no doubt accurately, as a rash of returned product from distributors who had over-ordered in anticipation of a big Christmas rush that never materialized. AI, which had never attracted the injections of venture capital and the accompanying professional financial oversight of fellow pioneers like Sierra, found themselves unable to pay back their distributors. With no one willing to extend them credit given conditions in the industry as a whole, there was no viable recourse but bankruptcy. Yet the deeper cause was Adams’s inability or unwillingness to change his games with the times. He’s stated many times in interviews that he virtually never looked at any of the games produced by his rivals; for instance, he never played an Infocom game after Zork. His logic was that he didn’t want to have his designs “polluted” by ideas and puzzles of others. This is, at best, an odd stance to take; try to imagine a novelist who refuses to read books, or a musician who doesn’t listen to music. It perhaps does much to explain the time-warp quality of the QuestProbe games. It’s strange that the man who had the vision and the technical chops to get viable adventures working on 16 K microcomputers in the first place should prove so unable to further iterate on that first masterful leap, but there you have it. Adams went on with his professional life as a programmer outside of the game industry, and Adventure International passed quietly into history.

Nigel Bamford, Michael Woodroffe, and Patricia Woodroffe of Adventure International UK

One part of the brief-lived AI empire did survive. Mike Woodroffe, head of the still-viable Adventure International UK, disentangled that organization from its erstwhile namesake and renamed it Adventure Soft. The company would go on to a long if only sporadically active life as a developer of graphic adventures, whose biggest games became the Simon the Sorcerer series, The Feeble Files, and two Elvira-themed pseudo-CRPGs. Adventure Soft continues as an at least nominally going concern today, although their website is little more than a storefront for sometimes decades-old titles.

All told, then, 1985 was a brutal year in American software and particularly games software, one that weeded out the weak sisters like Adventure International, Muse, Synapse, and countless others without remorse — not to mention the casualties in publishing and hardware and still other, ancillary areas. Old timers who had grown up as hackers with many of the year’s casualties can be forgiven for seeing it in terms as apocalyptic as did the more hyperbole-prone members of the media. David Ahl, from his final Creative Computing editorial:

The personal-computing industry is largely composed of adolescent companies and inexperienced managers being forced to grow up much too fast by market forces that they themselves created. The big guys are sailing in with battleships, and the friendly competition of a few years ago has become all-out war with no holds barred. The media smells blood and death, which makes for interesting reading (and sales). Their alarmist disaster stories have simply exacerbated the situation.

Still, if we’re seeking silver linings they aren’t that hard to come by. Just to take the obvious: another look at the chart above will show that, if the home-computer user base wasn’t growing much, it also — that one brief blip in 1984 aside — wasn’t shrinking either. There was still a very viable, even vibrant market there. It was just a market that had reached an equilibrium far, far sooner than anyone had anticipated. The pain of 1985 was the pain of adjusting expectations to match that reality — the reality that numbers of computers in homes wouldn’t increase in big jumps again until the arrival of the Internet and cheap multimedia PCs in the early 1990s gave everyone a good reason to own one. The generation of microcomputers sandwiched between those and the old 8-bits — the Apple Macintosh, the Atari ST, the Commodore Amiga, the Tandy 1000 and a rash of other ever cheaper and more capable MS-DOS-based machines — would seldom be sold to complete neophytes. They would rather go to people looking to upgrade their old Apple IIs, Commodore 64s, Atari 800s, and TRS-80s. A tempering of expectations, especially for hardware makers, would be necessary. Not everyone would upgrade, after all, meaning home-computer sales wouldn’t come close to their 1983 peak for many years to come. As David Thornburg noted in a perceptive article for Compute! magazine, computers were and would for years remain a hobby, not an everyday home appliance.

If you go to someone’s house and see a computer sitting in the den, I’ll bet you say, “Hey, I see you’re into computers. How about that!”

Have you ever gone into someone’s house and said, “Hey! I see you’re into refrigerators. Wow! Automatic ice-cube maker too! I was going to get one of those myself — thought I’d get a 16-cube model, but then I heard that the 32-cubers were going to come out soon.”

If the home computer was an appliance, we would talk about it like one.

David Ahl offered another comparison to explain why the home computer hadn’t yet achieved appliance status and wasn’t likely to for some time to come.

People who don’t have computers are looking for user friendliness of a sort that just isn’t available today. You can rent a car virtually anywhere in the world and in a minute or two be familiar enough with the vehicle and local traffic laws to drive off with a reasonable degree of confidence. When it is that easy to use a computer, then manufacturers can legitimately speak of user friendliness. We are a long way from that point today.

When a reeling software industry proved unable to fill the space allocated for it at the 1985 Summer Consumer Electronics Show, a big chunk was instead given over to pornographic videos, an industry that was thriving on the back of booming VCR sales in exactly the way the software industry wasn’t on lukewarm home-computer sales. Game consoles and home computers may come and go, but some interests are eternal.

If you were a committed gamer in for the long haul, however, the outcome of all this chaos was arguably at least as positive as it was negative. With computer owners an ever savvier and more experienced lot unwilling to suffer bad or even mediocre games anymore, with publishers all competing frantically for a big enough slice of a fixed pie to keep them alive, games in general just kept getting better at a prodigious rate. By 1986 developers would be taking the Commodore 64 in particular to places that would have been simply unimaginable when the machine debuted back in 1982. And as for the next-generation machines… well, even more splendid work was in the offing there. Everything was improving: not just graphics and sound but also the craft of design.

But before we can revel too much in the positives we have more pain to address. Next time we’ll look at Infocom’s disastrous 1985, the year that came within a whisker of cutting off the most beloved canon in interactive fiction at the halfway mark.

(My huge thanks to C. Davis Seuss, former CEO of Spinnaker Software, who answered my questions about this era, pointed me to a useful Harvard Business School Case Study, and provided the charts shown above and other documents. The usual thanks also to Jason Scott, whose interview with Scott Adams for Get Lamp was also invaluable. Useful magazine sources this time included: Compute! of March 1985, June 1985, and January 1986; Your Computer of November 1985; Creative Computing of December 1985; Computer Gaming World of January 1985; Computer and Video Games of May 1986; Info of December 1985/January 1986. Finally, if you don’t believe me that the QuestProbe games are really, really bad, feel free to download them in their Commodore 64 incarnations and see for yourself.)

Comments
16 Responses

- Andrew Plotkin

March 28, 2014 at 9:27 pm

“Their experience of 1982 and 1983 was bad enough to sorrow many of them on computers for a decade or more.” …I bet you meant “sour”.

“There could be no better history of personal computing than a complete collection of Creatives.” …which, of course, we can now all share: https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing

What’s weird is that the industry crash, like the videogame crash of a couple years earlier, was practically invisible to me as a teenager. I have an excuse re 1983 — I never had an Atari device and I wasn’t paying that much attention to arcades.

But for computers in 1984-5… well, I remember a couple of magazines disappearing, but the notion that *home computers* were in any sense disappointing people never crossed my radar. Shows you how obsessed a teenager can be, I guess.

(In contrast, I remember being *very* nervous about Infocom’s acquisition. “What can Activision do with them?” I asked my father. “Anything they want,” he said.)

- Jimmy Maher

March 28, 2014 at 9:43 pm

Yep, thanks.

I was the same way. I saw the articles in the magazines saying that the industry was having problems and that Commodore (I had a 64) wasn’t doing all that well, but I can’t say I ever saw them as any sort of existential threat. My local Babbage’s still had tons of shiny games on the shelf that I desperately wanted — more than ever in fact. (Whatever else you can say about the crash, it didn’t keep games from continuing to get better and better.) Nor did I ever really think much about where the games came from or the idea that people needed them to make money. They were just all these amazing worlds I wanted to play in, which might as well have dropped out of heaven. Kind of a beautiful innocence really, not knowing how the sausages are made.

I don’t think I had my first inkling that Infocom might not be around forever until even after you, when the packaging suddenly got noticeably cheaper in 1987.

- Atari Mike

March 31, 2014 at 9:46 pm

I certainly noticed it. IBM and later Apple with the Macintosh was sucking all the oxygen out of the room. Computer stores were either closing or becoming IBM PC shops. The shelf space for 8 bit books at bookstores and libraries were dwindling. 8 bit computer magazines were getting thinner or disappearing, and general computing magazines started focusing on “business computing” instead. Even old Creative Computing was not immune. It stunk. I felt the whole home computer movement fading away with overpriced, often limited (in the case of the PC) machines with the only option left–a choice few of us could afford. IBM was overpriced and the machines really stunk for anything interesting. The apple Mac was cool, but no home could realistically afford one.The Amigas and Atari ST’s were great machines that could have filled the home computer void, but they cost 3-4 times as much as the old 8-bits and priced themselves out of the home, too. The decline was definitely noticeable. By 1985, the entire microcomputer ecosystem had all but vanished, Commodore and Atari along with them. No one was left. :-(

- Sniffnoy

March 28, 2014 at 9:41 pm

Sorry, just some typo-pointing-out: In “shamefully bad by just about every criteria”, “criteria” should be “criterion”.

- Jimmy Maher

March 28, 2014 at 9:50 pm

Thanks!

- Keith Palmer

March 28, 2014 at 10:43 pm

Remembering your post “A Computer For Every Home?”, I saw this post as an expansion of some ideas introduced in it. The pause in the growth of computer ownership in the home never quite registered on me until you pointed it out (after all, we had our own computer in the home at the time), but now I can sort of see it as having its own effect on “where all the old platforms went.”

With the point briefly made in your previous post about some well-respected computer magazines folding in 1984 and 1985, I was surprised to see a full tribute to Creative Computing here, but quite glad too. When my family moved at the beginning of the 1990s, our old computer magazines turned up in the basement, including the last fourteen issues of Creative Computing (which our subscription had been transferred to after Ziff-Davis’s “The Color Computer Magazine” had folded). Around the same time, I found “The Best of Creative Computing volume 1” and assorted other issues in a classroom at high school, and found something about the magazine particularly appealing; that might have been where my whole interest in the topic of “old computers” comes from. I’ve seen a number of those period editorial notices on its passing you mention, but I’m afraid not all of them were full tributes; I keep remembering the comment from 80 Micro editor Eric Maloney in March 1986, who said “Creative Computing never appealed to me; it felt too much like a comic book.” However, in noticing Info’s warmer tribute I also noticed that magazine pointing out some months later that David Ahl and a few other people from his magazine had found work at the “house organ” Atari Explorer; their years there weren’t quite the same wide-angle view on the topic, but did still keep some of the old spirit.

- Jimmy Maher

March 28, 2014 at 10:59 pm

I didn’t know Ahl wrote for Atari Explorer. He’s something of a hero of mine, so I’ll have to check it out.

I was moved to write more about Ahl and Creative Computing when an email inquirer mentioned him as just “the programmer” of an old BASIC game about which she was inquiring. I realized that was my fault for never fully explaining his role and legacy…

- Keith Palmer

March 29, 2014 at 1:53 am

The chance to say more came not too late, anyway. I realised myself I forgot to mention being amused by the link to the Rambo text adventure, having seen it negatively reviewed in the back of another issue of 80 Micro; despite adding some coverage of Tandy’s MS-DOS systems in an increasingly uneasy blend with features for the remaining Tandy Z-80 system users, they hardly ever reviewed games by 1986. To say any more about that, though, I’ll have to wait and see if you mention Moonmist…

- Steve McCrea

March 28, 2014 at 10:46 pm

Yeah, those QuestProbe games are shameful.

I don’t think you can rely so much on the forecast installed base graph since it’s just a single forecast without attribution. However I don’t doubt the general trend was the conventional wisdom…

Typo: causalities instead of casualties (2x).

Interesting article as usual, thanks!

- Jimmy Maher

March 28, 2014 at 10:57 pm

Thanks!

These numbers are sourced from Spinnaker Software’s internal forecasts of the period. Being one of the more “professional,” VC-backed software firms of the period, I feel pretty confident that they represent the general industry’s best guess about where things were headed.

- Wade

March 29, 2014 at 9:14 am

Same story for me as several folks above. I read some talk of the computer industry crash in Electronic Games magazine around 83, 84 (so I was 8-ish and flush with our Apple II) but didn’t notice or feel anything then or later, and I was too little to understand what these articles were talking about.

We had heaps of Creative Computings and both the Ahl Computer Games books. The latter two are on a shelf less than a metre behind my head as I type this. They helped me get going in programming games.

I was shocked when one day my dad bought a Creative Computing home after a bit of a gap, and it was this super slim thing that barely resembled the older ones. I guess that would have been nearer the magazine’s end. I remember it had a Dicky Tracy watch on the cover. I kept my favourite issues and I’ve still got them. If I’d been older when I did the cull and had more space, I expect I’d have kept them all.

- Dehumanizer

March 31, 2014 at 8:27 pm

As always, a great read. Just a few thoughts:

– this is one of your longer posts, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fascinating subject to me (computers + games + history + my own childhood memories) and a joy to read, but you talk about several relatively unrelated topics that could, perhaps, deserve separate posts (e.g. the QuestProbe games and the end of AI, the Creative Computing magazine, etc.).

– you seem a bit dismissive of superhero comics, another of my “loves”, as entertainment fit just for 12-year-olds (something people also often say about computer games, and we all know they’re wrong :) ), but maybe I’m reading too much into it. :)

– like others, I didn’t notice any kind of “crash” at the time, though, come to think of it, the many 8-bit computers common in 1983-4 (Oric, etc.) weren’t around anymore just a couple of years later. But then I lived (and live) in Portugal, and here the Spectrum and later the Amiga ruled the universe, until the rise of the multimedia PC in the early 90s.

– there was a Rambo text adventure? I hadn’t followed the link until I read the comments, as I thought it was about the Commando-like C64 / Spectrum action game, which wasn’t really that weird a match…

– the QuestProbe games had, IMO, decent graphics… in the Atari 800XL disk versions. The ones you show are from the Apple II, right? I remember them being even worse than these on the Spectrum, which was where I played them at the time.

- Jimmy Maher

April 1, 2014 at 6:28 am

I’m fairly neutral on superheroes in general. I read them for a few years around the age of twelve, as it happened. :) But I was more repeating conventional wisdom in the article than trying to be dismissive. I will say that I hugely prefer the funkier, scruffier Marvel of the 1980s to the soulless Marvel films of today. But I’m really not qualified to say much more.

Funny story: shortly after my wife and I got together, my dad found and gave me a stack of comics from my aforementioned comics heyday. Dorte started reading them, and developed an addiction to Captain America — doubly strange because all the strident flag-waving is one of the things that drives her crazy about America. I spent quite some time scouring comics shops for more old Captain Americas. Later she graduated to Watchmen and other more modern graphic novels. So she’s really the comics expert and fan in our house…

Graphics shown above are from the Commodore 64 version of Human Torch and the Thing.

- Eddie in Miss

April 2, 2014 at 10:28 pm

Hi Jimmy, there were only five Scott Adams cartridges created for the Vic-20, The Count being the last one.

Thank you for your excellent web site.

- Jimmy Maher

April 3, 2014 at 7:34 am

Thanks, correction made.

- David Boddie

April 3, 2014 at 8:37 pm

According to Merlin in his June 1986 edition of his column in Electron User, Adventure International UK ceased trading at around that time, though it seems it was only a trading name of Adventure Soft.

Down From the Top
April 3, 2014

Infocom’s display at the 1985 Winter CES.

Infocom entered 1985 filled with ebullient optimism. They had just released their fastest-selling game ever, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; hosted two splashy Manhattan press conferences, just like the big boys, the first to announce Hitchhiker’s and the second to announce their debut business product, the Cornerstone database; signed a lease to leave the cramped environs of their offices on Wheeler Street and take over an entire floor of a modern, stylish office complex on CambridgePark Drive that had an atrium for God’s sake. That January’s Consumer Electronics Show saw Infocom put out the most lavish (and expensive) trade-show effort they would ever tackle, including a big show-floor display for the games as well as the soon-to-be-released Cornerstone and a memorable murder-mystery party with a cast of thousands to promote their latest game, Dave Lebling’s Suspect.

It was a heady time indeed. Infocom, who had been successful at everything they’d attempted thus far, were going to continue to pioneer a whole new form of interactive literature at the same time that they became the next Lotus-style sensation in business software. They were a smart bunch of people, and every decision they’d made so far had proved to be the correct one. Why should that change now?

Well, it was about to change in a hurry. By year’s end Infocom would be a shell of the company it had been less than twelve months before, in financial free fall and willing to give up all of their higher hopes of January in return for simple survival. It was, to say the least, a humbling experience, as suddenly this bunch who had never known failure seemed to experience little but. To understand that crazy year, understand how Infocom got from here to there, we have to step back again to 1984. Having already told the story of Infocom the Interactive-Fiction Pioneer in 1984, it’s time to tell the shadow history of Infocom the Would-Be Business-Software Company.

Brian Berkowitz shows off his baby at Winter CES.

I’ve described already in an earlier article how Cornerstone — known until quite late in the game as the InfoBase — was first proposed by Brian Berkowitz and Richard Ilson, a pair of programmers the Imps knew well from MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, when Infocom was enjoying the first rush of popular success that followed the Zork games and Deadline. I also told how the InfoBase graduated from research project to major strategic initiative during 1983. In January of 1984 Al Vezza took the title of CEO from Joel Berez, and started planning how to spend the $2 million loan he had just secured from the Bank of Boston to make the InfoBase, still just a bunch of ideas and code and prototypes, a real commercial product.

Vezza was determined to get only the best for his pet project. In March, he hired as head of Business Products John Brackett, yet another MIT alum who had already spent more than twenty years working in the computer industry. Brackett had a technical and, if you like, a philosophical background that seemed perfect for Infocom. His previous company SofTech had been, along with Apple, a licensee of the University of California San Diego’s Pascal-driven P-Machine, inspiration for Infocom’s own Z-Machine. SofTech and Bracket had done good business for several years selling and supporting the P-Machine to application developers, until the arrival of the IBM PC established MS-DOS as the standard for business computing and made cross-platform portability, at least for the time being, less of a priority there.

The InfoBase itself was being built using an expanded version of Infocom’s core Z-Machine technology. Like the game developers, InfoBase developers did their coding and initial testing on the company’s big DECSystem-20 minicomputer. Only occasionally would the code be moved to microcomputers for testing on the new interpreters that were also being developed. When it became clear that the DEC was getting overtaxed by so many users, Vezza signed a lease to bring in a complete new DECSystem-20 in May for the exclusive use of Business Products, a commitment of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile he and Brackett kept hiring; soon Business Products people outnumbered Consumer Products (i.e., games) people, and the inevitable resentments started to fester in earnest.

The games people — even those who actively opposed or just weren’t much interested in the InfoBase itself — had few or no problems with the technical people who worked in Business Products. Those folks were largely in the mold of Berkowitz and Ilson, a couple of MIT hackers with much the same values and working habits as the Imps themselves; if things had gone slightly differently, people like Marc Blank and Dave Lebling must have realized, they could have been writing the database while the database people wrote the games. Both projects were, at their core, just Interesting Coding Projects, every hacker’s lifeblood. No, it was the suits who started to arrive en masse as the InfoBase got closer to release who really stirred up ire. Included in this group were the office managers and the HR directors and the financial planners and no fewer than fourteen well-scrubbed business-marketing experts. “They weren’t even on the same planet,” said Tim Anderson later. “These guys were showing up at work at nine in suits.” Steve Meretkzy became a ringleader of an ongoing subversion of Vezza and Brackett’s attempts to transform Infocom into just another buttoned-down corporation like their role models and everyone’s favorite business-software success story, Lotus. “Memo hacking” was one of his favorite strategies.

A certain HR manager, hired from DEC, arrived with a binder full of “memo templates” to be used for all intra-office communication. She loved memos so much that people were soon just calling her “Memos.” When she sent out a memo instructing everyone on the proper care of their office plants, Mereztky decided enough was enough. He and a few co-conspirators surreptitiously replaced the original memo in everyone’s in-box with another, which said that the company was now offering a service to take care of employees’ house plants; it seemed there was concern in management that, what with the long hours everyone was working, said plants were being neglected. An included multi-page questionnaire asked for the location of each plant as well as such essential information as the song it preferred to have sung to it while being watered. Some people took it seriously, mostly — and much to the Meretzky and company’s delight — the poor humorless souls in business marketing and the other more buttoned-down wings of the company. HR rushed around to put a cover sheet on each memo saying it was not to be taken seriously, whereupon Meretzky and company added a cover sheet of their own saying the cover sheet saying not to take the memo seriously should itself not be taken seriously. “Immense confusion” followed.

Not learning her lesson, Memos was soon distributing a “Flowers and Fruit Basket Request Form,” for sending out condolences to employees’ families who were experiencing a bereavement. Meretzky did her one better, creating a “Flowers and Fruit Basket Request Form Form”; the idea would later show up in Stationfall as the “Request for Stellar Patrol Issue Regulations Black Form Binders Request Form Form.”

Al Vezza

While Memos took her lumps, Public Enemy #1 for much of Consumer Products was Al Vezza himself. The humor at Infocom was always irreverent but almost never cruel or crude. That related to Vezza, however, was often an exception; some of the more popular Vezza epithets, which we shan’t get into here, were both. One former employee, normally a model of good temper and equanimity, still says of Vezza today, “There are very few people in my life that I’ve really disliked — and Al is definitely one of them.”

I find with most who engender such negativity that, while it’s hard to argue that it’s not their fault, there’s also something a bit sad about the person in question. Vezza’s professional character was defined by a number of toxic combinations. He was a thoroughly conventional thinker, of the sort who sourced all of his wisdom from business self-help books, yet nevertheless believed himself to be a bold innovator. He was arrogant and dismissive of opinions of others, particularly of those younger than him, yet also deeply insecure. At risk of playing pop psychologist, I’ll posit that some of his attitudes may stem from his experience at the MIT AI Lab. Despite having no advanced degree himself, he had parlayed a role as essentially J.C.R. Licklider’s administrative assistant into one of considerable power and influence, even serving as an undergraduate thesis adviser. Perhaps he learned there that he had to in some sense fake surety and authority despite continuing to feel intimidated by his often brilliant charges. His insecurity manifested itself in a tendency to micromanage that drove everyone around him crazy, while the lack of faith in his people that it implied destroyed morale and created storms of negative feelings. For Vezza the business was all too personal. Infocom was “his” company, first proposed and organized by him, his way to make his mark on the world. He seemed to regard the games and the company’s current reputation, which had been built with little input from him, as a sort of hijacking of something rightfully his. Now he was determined to reclaim his original vision for Infocom.

He also seemed determined that his means to that end should be the original company he had founded in 1979, and under its original name. The Board had held serious debates already during the spring and summer of 1983 about whether it made sense to create both games and business applications under the Infocom banner. In one of his rare Board meeting appearances, even Licklider offered support for making the budding Business Products division a company unto itself. That way, “employees might feel they’re contributing to their own company rather than engaged in rivalry with the other division.” Marc Blank was still more ominously prescient: he was “afraid that [Business Products] division might sink the company unless it’s made more separate.” Vezza, however, was resistant, and the Board seemed reluctant to directly challenge him on this as on many other subjects.

Immediately after Vezza’s ascendancy, Mike Dornbrook paid him a visit in his office to try again:

“Al, I really think it’s a mistake to have this product and the games business all under one umbrella,” I said. “I would honestly not put that out as Infocom. I think Infocom now means adventure games, and it will confuse the people who are buying adventure games as to what we’re all about. And I think it will actually be a detriment to any business product, that it’s coming from a games company.

“You can have the same shareholders. Just divide the company into two entities. We can share the building. We can share computers. But have two separate legal entities, and raise money for the business entity separately, and keep the [Business Products] books separately from the gaming business.”

His response to me was, “You don’t understand finance.” So I walked out of the room thinking, oh well, I tried.

Weeks later, with Brackett installed as head of Business Products and a whole associated bureaucracy falling into place, it would be too late to change course even had Vezza had a change of heart. The decision to do the InfoBase under the Infocom banner would prove to be perhaps the worst of many unwise choices made during Vezza’s reign. Dave Lebling describes the problems that resulted:

When they [Vezza and the Board] went out to look for capital to build [the InfoBase] into a real product or to continue to build the games into an even “realer” product or to move them forward, what they found was that investors who were interested in the business product would look at the other part of the ledger sheet and say, “Why are these games here? What is this about? Are you guys insane?” And the people who were looking at the games part would say, “Oh, wow! Cool ideas! You guys got a great business going here. But what is this stupid business thing?”

In retrospect, with that wonderful 20/20 hindsight we all have, it would have been better to have two companies.

Due to the issues Lebling describes as well as a general closing of the financial spigots in a maturing industry, Vezza and company found venture capitalists much less positively disposed to give Infocom their money than they had anticipated. In the end they would manage to secure only $500,000 in free-and-clear capital, from the state-run Massachusetts Capital Resource Company. Despite the Board’s having given lip service to maintaining at least a modicum of a financial firewall between Business Products and Consumer Products, the former ended up sucking up virtually all of the profits of the latter, leaving precious little funding for a whole range of projects that Blank and Berez felt were essential for Infocom to maintain their position as leading lights in games. Projects to expand the size and complexity of the stories they could tell; to dramatically improve their already industry-leading parser; to build a cross-platform graphics system that would let them add pictures to their games; to experiment with multi-player networked interactive fiction; to expand into entirely new genres beyond adventure gaming — all were starved for funds, forced to be dramatically scaled back or cancelled entirely. Seeing this essential work go so neglected, Berez and particularly Blank argued with the other, business-centric members of the Board with less and less civility, all but paralyzing the company as a whole at times. The newest Board member, Ray Stata, threw his hands up in despair at the June 6, 1984 meeting: “I won’t be polite anymore — company management is terrible!”

When there was no more money lying around for them in Consumer Products, the ever-expanding Business Products division — full-time employees at Infocom would peak at 110 by June of 1985, up from 20 two years before — began financing itself through a series of loans, putting the whole company under a cloud of increasingly dangerous financial obligations and further raising the ire of Berez and Blank.

The InfoBase, now called Cornerstone, shipped at last on January 31, 1985, at a suggested retail price of $500. For all the culture clashes it had engendered, there was more than a little of the Infocom game DNA in its presentation and packaging as well as the DEC-authored, Z-Machine-derived software on the disks themselves. Infocom, with the aid of the invaluable folks at G/R Copy, was really good at putting their best foot forward in presenting their products, and Cornerstone was no exception; just the name alone was a great, classy choice. The packaging was an elaborate affair, a glossy slipcover over a solid plastic box that popped open accordion-style to reveal no fewer than three spiral-bound, 200-plus-page manuals. There was even a feelie, a “Don’t Panic!” button that varied only in color from the one found in the Hitchhiker’s package.

Having never seriously used a relational database in my life, I’m eminently unqualified to offer a through review of Cornerstone from personal experience here. However, I feel confident in saying based on my dabblings and the reviews it received in the contemporary press that it’s a somewhat peculiar mixture of the innovative and the misguided, sometimes in combination with one another. Cornerstone’s mantra, claim to fame, and primary selling point was to be “the database system for the non-programmer.” This rhetoric was quite clearly directed against the leading PC database of the era, Ashton-Tate’s dBase III, an application so quirky and fiddly that it can come off almost like a satire of user-hostile DOS-era application software. Doing virtually anything with dBase III required learning its esoteric, proprietary command language, a process as complicated as that of learning to program in any other language. While it had been in development just a bit too long to embrace the new paradigm of the full-fledged mouse-driven GUI, Cornerstone nevertheless strained to be a friendlier experience than dBase III, with features like automatic command completion, extensive in-program help, menus, even a system of what would later come to be called “Wizards” to walk users through common tasks via prompts and questions.

A certain sort of user fell in love with Cornerstone, in some cases continuing to use it for years after it went out of print. Marc Blank has told of going to his dentist well after his tenure with Infocom finished and realizing that the receptionist was using it to take down his billing information. Andrew Kaluzniacki, who worked in Infocom’s Micro Group during Cornerstone’s development, noticed four years after leaving that his aunt, a veterinarian, was running it in her office. She said “she loved it. It was easy and she was able to do the database work herself without ever really knowing she was using a database.”

Yet for other sorts of users Cornerstone had at least two huge failings. The first was a byproduct of Infocom’s decision to make it an interpreted product, running through a Z-Machine-like interpreter, rather than writing native code. It was a decision that had made a certain amount of sense back when the project had first been conceived in 1982, when the business-computing market was still comparatively wide open, a mixture of CP/M machines and the new IBM PCs and even still a fair number of Apple IIs, Radio Shack TRS-80s, and Commodore PETs. By 1985, however, that had all changed; much as Apple might have liked to see the young Macintosh as a viable challenger, the business market was owned by IBM PCs and clones running MS-DOS. Anyone serious enough about a database to be willing to spend $500 on it was virtually guaranteed to have this setup. On these machines, especially the many lower-end models still using the original 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU, Cornerstone ran noticeably slowly in comparison to the competition. Sometimes more than noticeably: a PC Magazine reviewer simply gave up trying to run their longest benchmark test when their next-to-longest took 3.5 hours to complete. John Brackett had left his previous company SofTech precisely because demand for their own portable P-Machine system had flagged due to the IBM PC’s adoption as the universal business standard. That no one at Infocom, including Brackett himself, made the obvious connection here almost beggars belief. The DECSystem-20 and virtual machines seemed to be so ingrained in Infocom’s culture that no one could imagine an alternative. In the end Cornerstone was never released for a single platform other than the IBM PC. All that money spent on the DEC, all that programming time and energy sunk into designing the virtual machine and writing its interpreters, all that speed lost in the final product — all were for naught. Cornerstone wasn’t poorly designed on a technical level; most everyone involved with Infocom agrees that it was technically rather brilliant. But much of that brilliance was unnecessary, costly brilliance.

Cornerstone’s other crippling flaw was, ironically given its tagline, its lack of programmability. Ease of use is a wonderful thing, but there comes a time when you need to just write a script to get something more complicated done. In Cornerstone, this was impossible. Just months after its release a company called Ansa Software debuted Paradox, a database which for $700 offered similar ease of use along with a built-in programming language for more complicated tasks and the speed benefits of native execution. If there was a final nail in Cornerstone’s coffin, this was it.

Given Cornerstone’s strengths and weaknesses, Infocom might have done much better to position it as a consumer-level application, sort of a “database for the rest of us” for lighter users like the aforementioned dentist and veterinarian, and even for home users who just wanted to keep track of a stamp or record collection. With the home market still divided among at least half a dozen commercially viable but incompatible platforms, its cross-platform portability could have been a real asset here. Infocom did make a last desperate gesture in that direction long after it became clear that Cornerstone would not be challenging dBase III, reducing the price to $100 and promoting it in The New Zork Times as a way for writers to keep track of their sources, for a church to keep track of its congregation (pull out all single members aged between 21 and 30 and invite them to a Young Singles dance!), for a softball league to keep track of its schedule and teams and players — or, yes, for a stamp collector to keep tabs on her collection. As Infocom at last admitted, “Many of the people who would most benefit from Cornerstone just couldn’t afford it [at the original price].” But by then Vezza and the rest of Business Products was gone, Infocom just trying to get something — anything — out of a failed product. To the list of Vezza’s mistakes must be added his lack of flexibility and his determination to compete only head-to-head with the big boys rather than seeking out the cracks and seams in the market.

Another one for the list: Infocom signed the lease for their new digs on CambridgePark Drive, which carried with them a rent of more than $600,000 per year, six weeks before releasing Cornerstone, and months before they’d have any clear idea of how much of a success it would be. As the Smiths once sang, “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby.” They were simply assuming it would be a hit, and, what with the rent and all the debt, essentially betting the company on that assumption.

125 CambridgePark Drive today. Infocom occupied much of the fifth floor.

For most of the old timers, those days in March of 1985 when Infocom packed up everything inside the Wheeler Street offices and moved it all to CambridgePark Drive were sad ones indeed, in their way even sadder than the final closure of Infocom more than four years later (the latter came almost as a relief for many). Wheeler Street had been a “funky” place that felt right for a small creative company, full of interesting little nooks and crannies and a sense of “artisanship.” It even had a pool, where many office parties ended up. The adjectives the former employees use to describe CambridgePark, however, are all of a very different kind. “Soulless” comes up a lot; “buttoned-down”; “light, but not in a good way”; “colorless”; “not as fun.” Infocom lost something with the move that they would never regain.

Infocom’s expansion and contraction happened so quickly that the two actually intersect with one another. Already within weeks of the move to CambridgePark disappointing sales forced the adoption of what Consumer Products came to cheekily label the “InfoAusterity Program,” which first meant only the loss of such perks as the $400-per-week office-party budget. If those of you working in offices today aren’t exactly bubbling over with sympathy for such a loss, never fear; it would get much, much worse.

Infocom was still hiring as the InfoAusterity measures were put in place, bringing in a last few programmers to work on Cornerstone interpreters for other platforms. Mike Morton, the last person hired by Infocom — ever — started in June of 1985 as a 68000-programming expert, tasked with bringing Cornerstone to platforms like the Macintosh and the new Atari ST. The day before his first day of work, he got a phone call from HR: “We’re all taking a 15% pay deferral for the next six months. Do you still want to start tomorrow?” Morton came in anyway, to work for a bare few months before the 68000 project and all other Cornerstone-related work was cancelled amidst three waves of layoffs that wracked the company through the fall. (An Atari ST version of Cornerstone was apparently largely completed, and was sneaked out of the company by persons unknown to wind up on pirate BBSs. However, it was never officially sold and doesn’t appear to have survived to the present day.) In three months Infocom’s employee rolls went from 110 to 40. To all the other objections about CambridgePark was now added another: the place was suddenly, depressingly half empty. It would remain that way — in fact, increasingly emptier — for the rest of Infocom’s life.

Softball, summer 1985. In six months six of the eight people here would be gone.

As most anyone who’s been through the experience can attest, layoffs are an incredibly painful thing for a company — especially a small, closely knit company like Infocom — to go through. Yes, it was mostly Cornerstone people rather than games people who were let go, but even some of them, like the original parents of Cornerstone Berkowitz and Ilson themselves, had been around for literally years and were liked by everyone. As Marc Blank puts it, there’s “nothing worse, nothing more horrible” inside a company than a layoff. Andrew Kaluzniacki:

At the point you start talking about who isn’t going to make it, who do we really need to succeed… that takes a lot of the fun out of it. There wasn’t anybody at Infocom that I didn’t want to have around. These were all great people.

John Brackett made his exit during this period when the whole Business Products division was essentially shuttered. But the most jarring loss of all was that of Marc Blank, the man who had arguably done more than anyone else to make Infocom what it was by implementing the company’s legendary parser, co-designing Zork and the Z-Machine, writing the landmark Deadline that changed all the rules about what a text adventure could do and be, and, articulate and personable fellow that he was, serving as Infocom’s de facto spokesman and face to the world.

Blank wasn’t actually the first of the old guard to leave. Early in the year Mike Berlyn had quit. It seems he desperately wanted to work with his wife Muffy as his official co-designer, but was prevented from doing so by Infocom’s bar against employing spouses or family. When management refused to bend the rules, he and Muffy decided to start their own design studio, Brainwave Creations. In a sense it was perfect timing; Berlyn got to experience most of the happiest days at Infocom with none of the later, more painful ones. From the standpoint of Infocom’s fans, it may also have been a good move. Berlyn, who could be difficult and stubborn whilst still remaining well-liked, had approached the final two of his three interactive-fiction projects at Infocom with less than complete enthusiasm, and the results had sometimes shown it. His departure opened up opportunities for others who were more excited about the work, while giving Berlyn the chance to do interesting work in his own right with other approaches to adventure games.

Blank’s departure, however, carried with it no hidden blessings for anyone other than Blank himself. As things had gone increasingly sideways over the course of 1985, he had made himself more and more of a gadfly at the Board meetings.

I’d been very unhappy there for a while. I was on the Board of Directors. At the meetings the Business Products people would say, “Well, things are turning around, but we’re still spending a lot of money.”

I would say, “When does it hit a wall? When do we shut it down so that we don’t lose the rest of the company?” No one wanted to discuss it. We needed money for games; we couldn’t be cutting things this close. The response was always to ignore the problem. I got more and more frustrated, saying, “What’s the plan? We’re spending this much money, we’re down to this much cash…” No one really wanted to deal with it.

So I started taking more time off. I started getting into flying more; I’d had a pilot’s license for years.

[My fiancée and I] decided we’d take a trip to Europe. I hadn’t had a real vacation in a while. We went to different places: Switzerland, Germany, Italy. We happened to be in Sardinia at this very nice resort when I got a call.

The caller said that there’d been a layoff, and all these people who’d worked for me had been laid off. And someone else was now VP of Product Development [Blank’s official title at Infocom].

I said, “Okay… what’s my job now?”

“Well… you don’t have a job now.”

I said, “So you’re calling me on vacation to fire me?”

He said, “Well, yeah. It’s too bad, but, you know, things are bad…”

I said, “I’ll come right back!”

He said, “No, no… enjoy your vacation!”

In my experience, when a company is having a lot of trouble and going down people act in very different ways. Some people act very badly; some people do very well; some people try to fight; some people say, “Who cares? Move on!” There was all sorts of that. There were Business Products people who wanted to quit; talks of mutinies and various things. Nobody really knows what to say or do.

But, you know, my head was already out of there. I wasn’t being listened to at the Board level, so it was really frustrating being there. The Business Products people, the managers were… just incompetent. I don’t know what else to say. The business people knew nothing about business, and the marketing guy didn’t know anything about marketing. They were academics trying to run a business.

Realistically, they did me a favor. I didn’t really want to be there. I’ve seen this happen in other places. If you’re a founder of a company, it’s hard to quit. You’re giving up. Nobody wants to walk away from their own thing. What happens in a lot of cases is that people who are ready to go kind of telegraph it. Then they’re done a favor by being fired.

I’d arranged for it to happen. It was for the best under those circumstances.

As Cornerstone-focused as this article has so far been, it’s important at this point to explain that Infocom’s financial problems did not all arise from that failure. Infocom had sold 725,000 games worth $10 million in 1984. They judged that their game sales were likely to continue to steadily increase, especially with the unprecedented new exposure Hitchhiker’s was bringing them. They therefore budgeted for a 30% increase in game sales, to $13 million. For all the talk of Cornerstone as the company’s real future, for all the alleged rumblings in some quarters about giving games up entirely if it succeeded, they budgeted for first-year sales in Business Products of a (they thought) relatively modest $5 million.

Cornerstone missed that goal by more than $3 million. Still, for all the bad decisions and enormous waste it has justifiably come to represent, Cornerstone may have been a survivable lesson learned for Infocom but for one thing: their games sales also fell off dramatically in 1985. Infocom sold about 511,000 games that year, a decline of almost 30% rather than the expected rise.

The sales breakdown for the year makes interesting reading. It actually imparts a surprising lesson: it could have been even worse but for a few big titles. Zork I, while its sales finally began to decline relative to previous years, nevertheless sold over 63,000 copies, while Hitchhiker’s all but carried the rest of the catalog on its back with sales of 166,000. If 1985 looks ugly now, just imagine what it would have looked like had Infocom not managed that high-profile deal. Throw in Wishbringer, by far the most successful of Infocom’s three new works of interactive fiction for 1985, and you’ve accounted for half of the company’s sales right there. The other games from earlier years fell off a veritable cliff, to the extent that the classic, hugely influential Deadline barely broke four digits. This was an ominous sign for a company that had always been defined by strong catalog sales, by games that just sold and sold and sold. It was a sign that the sales base was being whittled down to dabbling stragglers who bought Zork and Hitchhiker’s and (to a lesser extent) the introductory-level Wishbringer alongside a hardcore of perhaps a few tens of thousands who already had the old games and so just bought the new. Infocom, in other words, was no longer growing its loyal customer base. This was in its way as dangerous to the company’s future as the whole Cornerstone fiasco.

The natural thing to do at this point is to ask why this was happening. Much can be explained by the general downturn with which everyone in the industry was struggling. Consumers seemed to be particularly losing interest in text-adventure games, if the performances of bookware lines like Telarium and the Synapse Electronic Novels are any guide. Infocom had seemed virtually immune to trends during previous years, but that was clearly no longer the case now. With graphics and sound getting better and better even on some platforms like the Commodore 64 that had been around quite a while, with new approaches and whole new genres appearing, the subtle pleasures of text were getting harder and harder to sell. It wasn’t as if no one at Infocom had been aware of these changes; Marc Blank in particular had battled desperately to get the Board to properly fund new initiatives that could keep the company competitive. Thus we come around again to Cornerstone, which we should recognize as being most significant not for the money it cost Infocom but for the money it prevented Infocom from using for other things (not that these two interpretations aren’t ultimately largely two sides of the same coin).

Infocom fell a good $7 million short of what they’d expected to earn in 1985 even in a worst-case scenario. By year’s end losses were projected to be in the neighborhood of $4 to $5 million, many times more than the company had made over the course of its entire lifetime. The Bank of Boston suddenly cut their line of credit, forcing some of the founders to mortgage their homes to keep the doors open. As the layoffs went on, Vezza and the Board were forced to start looking desperately for a buyer to save them.

It was a humiliating process. So full of hope and hubris just a year before, now they were forced to go hat-in-hand looking for a lifeline. Still nurturing the dream that Cornerstone could be turned around with a proper injection of capital, Vezza went to his heroes at Lotus, a company that had once been neighbors with Infocom inside the Wheeler Street office complex. They weren’t interested. He went to Simon & Schuster, whose CEO had wined and dined them in his penthouse suite just a year before and tendered an offer they’d kill to receive now. The bookware boom being dead and buried, he wasn’t interested anymore either. Infocom — what was left of it — spent the Christmas of 1985 once again thinking about what the next year would bring. Only now instead of visions of success and prosperity their heads were filled with futile-feeling scheming about how they might somehow survive to see another Christmas. Forget changing the world of literature or the world of business software; at this point, mere survival would feel like a dream come true.

As much of a downer as this article has inevitably been, I do want to conclude by noting that Infocom’s unique culture, this playground for smart, creative people, proved remarkably… well, if not impervious to all the pain and chaos, at least able to rise above it more often than not. No truer sign of that can we find than by looking at Infocom’s games of the year. While reduced — one odd board/computer game hybrid which I’ll also be covering aside — to just three games thanks to all the distractions, each of those three games is an interactive-fiction landmark in its own way. We’ll get into the much happier story of Infocom’s actual games of 1985 next time.

(My two golden geese for this article were my usual two for everything Infocom related: Jason Scott’s Get Lamp interviews and, particularly valuable this time out, Down From the Top of Its Game. Also useful, sometimes in a reading-between-the-lines sense, were contemporary issues of Infocom’s newsletter The New Zork Times.)

Comments
20 Responses

- Rowan Lipkovits

April 3, 2014 at 8:09 pm

if the performances of bookware lines like Telarium and the Synapse Electronic Novels are any guide

Oh no, are we going to leave the bookware boom behind without hitting I, Damiano?

- Jimmy Maher

April 4, 2014 at 8:04 am

Sorry, no, I won’t be covering that one. I understand that these decisions are sometimes difficult — to me as much as you, believe me! — but my intention for the blog as a whole is to write a well-researched and readable history rather than an encyclopedia. Maintaining reasonable forward momentum requires, alas, painful choices which will likely only get more painful and controversial as the field of computer games just expands and expands…

- Keith Palmer

April 3, 2014 at 10:49 pm

Cornerstone was being promoted (at its lower price) at the back of “Passport to the United Products of Infocom,” the catalog that piqued my interest and got me daydreaming about the adventure games other than “Hitchhiker’s Guide.” It seems that from the very moment I started searching out information about Infocom, though, (and definitely from when I read “Down From the Top of its Game”) the database was “the obvious mistake things would have been different (and no doubt better) without” in this particular case… I therefore might have been interested in the possibility of new insights here. Pointing out how it was “the business executives” who “came in at nine in suits” might have qualified there. Having heard about Steve Meretzky’s “memo hacking” before, it was nice to see some examples (connected to “Stationfall,” no less…)

I’d read before about the “new game technologies” that were never developed before, but perhaps there I just resort to contemplating the arc Sierra’s graphic adventures took, still not familiar enough with the “illustrated text adventures” of the late 1980s (one linked to in this post itself). I’m forced to admit it may prickle at me as a “minority platform user” to face how the cross-platform underpinnings of Cornerstone were a blow against it, but there I do contemplate what “8088 versus 6502” arguments I have an impression of existing to consider whether the program “got slower in development” or might indeed have done better as a “low-end database”, and wonder what reception the text-based interface would have got on the 68000 platforms. I hadn’t heard before there was an Atari ST bootleg, though; hearing that amused me.

- Jimmy Maher

April 4, 2014 at 8:10 am

In reference to your comment about “Sierra’s arc”:

Had Infocom been able to invest in the technologies advocated by Blank and Berez while the financial times were good, we may ironically have ended up with fewer works of textual interactive fiction from them, not more. It’s important to recognize that Infocom was never as wedded to the idea of “Infocom as a purely IF company” as most of their fans are today. Thus we really need to pull apart the two questions of “Was there a way for Infocom to survive?” (yes!) and “Was there a way for commercial textual IF to survive?” (without major other counterfactuals in the market as a whole, almost certainly not). None of which means, of course, that they needed to become Sierra to survive.

- Jonathan Blask

April 5, 2014 at 9:12 pm

Last year, when I finally got around to playing Spellcasting 101 (I had played some other Legend Entertainment games years ago), it occurred to me how much the Legend Entertainment format was a continuation of the z6 ideal (of course, the engine was partly designed by Bob Bates, the author of one of the last-known never-finished z6 games at Activision’s Infocom).

If I had the chance to talk to the Imps again, I definitely would like to know if they feel they would have made some of the same decisions Legend Entertainment made (like not using a virtual machine and hardcoding into executables) or if they would have not given up on some of those portability ideals. On one hand, the Legend Entertainment interface is very fun and nice (I particularly like how configurable it is), but I still have to wonder if Infocom had stayed around, would they have done the same thing but *better*?

- Peter Piers

November 17, 2015 at 7:42 pm

I personally see Legend Entertainment as “Infocom after Infocom”.

- Jason Scott

April 4, 2014 at 1:37 am

To bring things full circle, I was actually inspired to research adventure games and Infocom as a result of reading “Down from the Top of Its Game”.

- Andrew

April 4, 2014 at 11:53 am

The memos sequence made me belly laugh!

- ZUrlocker

April 4, 2014 at 7:50 pm

Great story. Definitely weird that someone coming with experience of the UCSD P-code performance issues wouldn’t understand the implications in a business app context. But with better management I think Infocom could have withstood that mistake. The hard part is having mistake upon mistake piled on. And clearly rank and file employees as well as co-founders had ideas on how to limit risk. If only the CEO had listened. Tragic.

- John Elliott

April 4, 2014 at 10:34 pm

I had a go at working out the format of the Cornerstone bytecode, way back in 2002, with the vague idea of writing the equivalent of a Z-Machine abuse for it. Never got that far, but I’ve still got the notes I made at the time.

- Jimmy Maher

April 5, 2014 at 9:16 am

Cool. Let us know if you ever get back to it. I’m also quite curious about the internals of Fooblitzky, but not quite curious enough to spend weeks trying to figure it out…

- John Elliott

April 17, 2014 at 12:01 am

I’ve tidied up my notes and the disassembler I’d half-written; here they are.

- Jimmy Maher

April 17, 2014 at 7:32 am

Thanks for this. I’m surprised (but probably shouldn’t have been) about how much the Cornerstone VM departs from the Z-Machine. There’s not a whole lot of Z-Machine DNA left there except the concept itself.

Tried applying your notes to Foobliztky as well, but again I can’t see much kinship between the formats…

- John Elliott

April 17, 2014 at 9:48 pm

A quick look at the Fooblitzky interpreter suggests that it’s closer to Z-Code — for example, the interpreter messages refer to opcodes being 0-ops, 1-ops, 2-ops or X-ops, and instruction operands are encoded the same way as Z-code (0=top of stack, 01-0F=locals, 10-FF=globals).

The opcode numbering scheme looks completely different, though; 00-7F are 2-ops, with bits 5 and 6 giving the type of the arguments, and bits 4-0 giving the opcode.

- Duncan Stevens

April 8, 2014 at 2:13 pm

I love the “memo hacking” story. (Though, not to be pedantic, shouldn’t it have been the “Flowers and Fruit Basket Request Form Request Form”?)

- Jimmy Maher

April 8, 2014 at 2:40 pm

I dunno. Too much recursion just makes my head hurt in human as well as computer languages. :)

- matt k

April 17, 2014 at 12:52 am

Thank you for the thoughtful and consistently excellent posts/articles.

I can’t remember how or why I got my hands on “The Witness” but it drove me to be an obsessive Infocom fan as a kid.. I talked/forced my dad into finding their office on Wheeler St. and taking me there. It was a pretty strange experience; we walked in to the reception/lobby area, they had all their games displayed on a shelf, and my dad and I just stood there for a few minutes and then left. The receptionist smiled at us, I wonder if they got a lot of wide eyed kids wandering in to gawk…

To me, I was so amazed that this building was where these stories and games were created, I don’t know what my dad thought of it, but it was nice of him to play along.

- Rich Shealer

May 2, 2014 at 2:23 am

I remember when Cornerstone was released. I worked in a computer store at the time and I was confused. Why would a game company make business software? I thought at first that it was an elaborate joke and it was really a game.

- Olivier Guinart

June 17, 2014 at 10:18 pm

Still playing catch up. I don’t have anything to add to the topic (I wasn’t exposed to Infocom games), except I enjoyed the story. Thank you for it.

Note: dup “to to” in ” Board seemed reluctant to to directly challenge him on this “

- Jimmy Maher

June 18, 2014 at 9:51 am

Thank you!

Wishbringer
April 10, 2014

Brian Moriarty, 1985

Brian Moriarty was the first of a second wave of Infocom authors from very different and more diverse backgrounds than the original Imps. Their fresh perspectives would be a welcome addition during the latter half of the company’s history. Some of the second wave all but stumbled through the doors of Infocom, but not Moriarty — not at all Moriarty. His arrival as an Imp in September of 1984 marked the fruition of a calculated “assault on Infocom” — his words, not mine — that had taken over two years to bring off.

Moriarty’s personal history is perfect for an Imp, being marked by a mix of technical and literary interests right from his grade-school years. After taking a degree in English Literature from Southeastern Massachusetts University in 1978, he found a job in a Radio Shack store, where he spent hours many days playing with the TRS-80s. He didn’t buy a computer of his own, however, until after he had become a technical writer at Bose Corporation in Framingham, Massachusetts. It was there in 1981 that a colleague brought in his new Atari 800 to show off. Moriarty succumbed to the greatest Atari marketing weapon ever devised: the classic game Star Raiders. He soon headed out to buy an Atari system of his own.

Along with the computer and Star Raiders, Moriarty also brought home a copy of Scott Adams’s Strange Odyssey. He played it and the other Scott Adams games obsessively, thinking all the while of all the ways they could be better. Then one day he spotted Infocom’s Deadline on the shelf of his local Atari dealer. From its dossier-like packaging to its remarkable parser and its comparative reams of luxurious text, it did pretty much everything he had been dreaming about. Moriarty knew in an instant what he wanted to do, and where he wanted to do it. How great to learn that Infocom was located right there in the Boston area; that, anyway, was one problem less to deal with. Still, Infocom was a tiny, insular company at this point, and weren’t exactly accepting resumes from eager Atari enthusiasts who’d never designed an actual game before.

So Moriarty put Infocom in his long-range planning folder and went for the time being somewhere almost as cool. Back at Radio Shack, he’d worked with a fellow named Lee Papas, whom he’d been surprised to rediscover behind the counter of the local Atari dealer when he’d gone to buy his 800 system. Pappas and a friend had by then already started a little newsletter, A.N.A.L.O.G. (“Atari Newsletter and Lots of Games”). By the end of 1982 it had turned into a full-fledged glossy magazine. Pappas asked Moriarty, who’d already been a regular contributor for some months, if he’d like to come work full-time for him. Moriarty said yes, leaving his safe, comfortable job at Bose behind; it was “the best career move I ever made.”

A.N.A.L.O.G. was a special place, a beloved institution within and chronicler of the Atari 8-bit community in much the same way that Softalk was of the Apple II scene. Their articles were just a little bit more thoughtful, their type-in programs a little bit better, their reviews a little bit more honest than was the norm at other magazines. Moriarty, a graceful writer as well as a superb Atari hacker, contributed to all those aspects by writing articles and reviews and programs. Life there was pretty good: “It was a small group of nerdy guys in their 20s who loved computer games, ate the same junk foods, and went to see the same science-fiction movies together.”

Still, Moriarty didn’t forget his ultimate goal. Having advanced one step by getting himself employed in the same general industry as Infocom, he set about writing his first adventure game to prove his mettle to anyone — Infocom, perhaps? — who might be paying attention. Adventure in the Fifth Dimension appeared in A.N.A.L.O.G.‘s April/May 1983 issue. A necessarily primitive effort written mostly in BASIC and running in 16 K, it nevertheless demonstrated some traits of Moriarty’s later work by mixing a real place, Washington D.C., with fantastic and surreal elements: a group of aliens have stolen the Declaration of Independence, and it’s up to you to track down an entrance to their alternate universe and get it back. A year later, Moriarty continued his campaign with another, more refined adventure written entirely in assembly language. Crash Dive! pits the player against a mutineer aboard a nuclear submarine, a scenario much more complex and plot-heavy than the typical magazine-type-in treasure hunt. It even included a set of Infocom-style feelies, albeit only via a photograph in the magazine.

With two games under his belt, Moriarty applied for a position as a game designer at Infocom, but his resume came right back to him. Then a colleague showed him a posting he’d spotted on the online service CompuServe. It was from Dan Horn, manager of Infocom’s Micro Group, looking for an expert 6502 hacker to work on Z-Machine interpreters. It took Moriarty about “45 seconds” to answer. Horn liked what he saw of Moriarty, and in early 1984 the latter started working for the former in the building where the magic happened. His first project involved, as chance would have it, another submarine-themed game: he modified the Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, and Apple II interpreters to support the sonar display in Seastalker. Later he wrote complete new interpreters for the Radio Shack Color Computer and the ill-fated Commodore Plus/4.

He was tantalizingly close to his goal. Having broken through the outer gates, he just needed to find a way into the inner keep of the Imps themselves. He took to telling Berlyn, Blank, Lebling, and the rest about his ambition every chance he got, while also sharing with them his big idea for a game: a grand “historical fantasy” that would deal with no less weighty a subject than the history of atomic weapons and their implications for humanity. It seemed the perfect subject for the zeitgeist of 1984, when the Cold War was going through its last really dangerous phase and millions of schoolchildren were still walking around with souls seared by the previous year’s broadcast of The Day After.

Moriarty got his shot at the inner circle when a certain pop-science writer whom Infocom had hired to write a game was allegedly found curled up beneath his desk in a little ball of misery, undone by the thorny syntax of ZIL. This moment marks the end of Marc Blank’s dream of being able to hire professional writers off the street, set them down with a terminal and a stack of manuals, and wait for the games to come gushing forth. From now on the games would be written by people already immersed in Infocom’s technology; the few outside collaborations to come would be just that, collaborations, with established programmers inside Infocom doing the actual coding.

That new philosophy was great news for a fellow like Brian Moriarty, skilled coder that he was. The Imps decided to reward his persistence and passion and give him a shot. Only thing was, they weren’t so sure about the big historical fantasy, at least not for a first game. What they really had in mind was a made-to-order game to fill a glaring gap in their product matrix: a gentle, modestly sized game to introduce newcomers to interactive fiction — an “Introductory”-level work. And it should preferably be a Zorkian fantasy, because that’s what sold best and what most people still thought of when they thought of Infocom. None of the current Imps were all that excited about such a project. Would Moriarty be interested? He wasn’t about to split hairs over theme or genre or anything else after dreaming of reaching this point for so long; he answered with a resounding “Absolutely!” And so Brian Moriarty became an Imp at last — to no small consternation from Dan Horn, who’d thought Moriarty had come to Infocom to do “great work for me.”

It’s kind of surprising that it took Infocom this long to perceive the need for a game like the one that Moriarty would now be taking on as his first assignment. Their original matrix had offered only games for children — “Interactive Fiction Junior” — below the “Standard” level. Considering that even the hard-as-nails Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was labelled “Standard,” the leap from “Junior” to “Standard” could be a daunting one indeed. Clearly there was room for a work more suitable for adult novices, one that didn’t condescend in the way that Seastalker, solid as it is on its own terms, might be perceived to do. Infocom had now decided to make just such a game at last — although, oddly, the problematic conflations continued. Rather than simply add a fifth difficulty level to the matrix, they decided to dispense with the “Junior” category entirely, relabeling Seastalker an “Introductory” game. This might have made existing print materials easier to modify, but it lost track entirely of Seastalker‘s original target demographic. Infocom claimed in The New Zork Times that “adults didn’t want a kid’s game; in fact, kids didn’t want a kid’s game.” Which rather belied the claim in the same article that Seastalker had been a “success,” but there you go.

Moriarty was a thoughtful guy with a bit of a bookish demeanor, so much so that his inevitable nickname of “Professor” actually suited him really well. Now he started thinking about how he could make an introductory game that wouldn’t be too condescending or trivial to the Infocom faithful who would hopefully also buy it. He soon hit upon the idea of including a magic MacGuffin which would allow alternate, simpler solutions to many puzzles at a cost to the score — literally a Wishbringer. The hardcore could eschew its use from the start and have a pretty satisfying experience; beginners could, after the satisfaction and affirmation of solving the game the easy way, go back and play again the hard way to try to get a better score. It was brilliant, as was the choice not to make using the Wishbringer just a “solve this puzzle” button but rather an intriguing little puzzle nexus in its own right. First the player would have to find it; then she would have to apply it correctly by wishing for “rain,” “advice,” “flight,” “darkness,” “foresight,” “luck,” or “freedom” whilst having the proper material components for the spell on hand, a perfect primer for the spellcasting system in the Enchanter trilogy. The wishes would, like in any good fairy tale, be limited to one of each type. So, even this route to victory would be easier but still in its own way a challenge.

At first Moriarty thought of making Wishbringer a magic ring, but what with The Lord of the Rings and a thousand knock-offs thereof that felt too clichéd. Anyway, he wanted to include it in the box as a feelie, and, cost concerns being what they were, that meant the ring would have to be a gaudy plastic thing like those ones bubble-gum machines sometimes dispensed in lieu of a gumball. Then he hit upon the idea of making Wishbringer a stone — “The Magick Stone of Dreams.” Maybe they could make the one in the package glow in the dark to give it that proper aura and distract from its plasticness? Marketing said it was feasible, and so the die (or stone) was cast. Thus did Wishbringer become the first and only Infocom game to be literally designed around a feelie. Moriarty spent some nine months — amidst all of the Hitchhiker’s and Cornerstone excitement, the high-water mark that was Christmas 1984, an office move, and the dawning of the realization that the company was suddenly in big, big trouble — learning the vagaries of ZIL and writing Wishbringer.

For all that it’s a much subtler work lacking the “Gee whiz!” quality of Seastalker, Wishbringer does feel like a classic piece of children’s literature. It casts you as a postal carrier in the quietly idyllic village of Festeron, which is apparently located in the same world as Zork and shares with that series an anachronistic mixing of modernity with fantasy. (I’m sure someone has figured out a detailed historical timeline for Wishbringer‘s relation to Zork as well as geography and all the rest, but as usual with that sort of thing I just can’t be bothered.) You dream of adventure — in fact, you’re interrupted in the middle of such a daydream as the game begins — but you’re just a mail carrier with a demanding boss. Said boss, Mr. Crisp, gives you a letter to deliver to the old woman who is proprietor of Ye Olde Magick Shoppe up in the hills north of town. On your way there you should explore the town and enjoy the lovely scenery, because once you make the delivery everything changes. The letter turns out to be a ransom note for the old woman from “The Evil One,” demanding Wishbringer itself in return for the safe return of her cat: “And now, now it claims my only companion.”

"It's getting Dark outside," the old woman remarks, and you can almost hear the capital D. "Maybe you should be getting back to town."

The old woman hobbles over to the Magick Shoppe door and opens it. A concealed bell tinkles merrily.

"Keep a sharp eye out for my cat, won't you?" She speaks the words slowly and distinctly. "Bring her to me if you find her. She's black as night from head to tail, except for one little white spot... right HERE."

The old woman touches the middle of your forehead with her finger. The light outside dims suddenly, like a cloud passing over the sun.

So, Wishbringer is ultimately just a hunt for a lost cat, a quest I can heartily get behind. But as soon as you step outside you realize that everything has changed. The scenery becomes a darker, more surreal riot reminiscent in places of Mindwheel. Mailboxes have become sentient (and sometimes carnivorous); Mr. Crisp has turned into the town’s petty dictator; a pet poodle has turned into a vicious hellhound. The game flirts with vaguely fascistic imagery, as with the giant Boot Patrols that march around the town enforcing its nightly curfew. (This does lead to one glaring continuity flaw: why is the cinema still open if the whole city is under curfew?) There’s a creepy dread and a creepy allure to exploring the changed town, a reminder that, as the Brothers Grimm taught us long ago, ostensible children’s literature doesn’t necessarily mean all sunshine and lollypops.

Like so much of Roberta Williams’s work, Wishbringer plays with fairy-tale tropes. But Moriarty is a much better, more original writer than Williams, not to mention a more controlled one. (Witness the way that the opening text of Wishbringer foreshadows the climax, a literary technique unlikely to even occur to Williams.) Rather than appropriate characters and situations whole cloth, he nails the feeling, balancing sweetness and whimsy with an undercurrent of darkness and menace that soon becomes an overcurrent when day turns to night and the big Change happens. The closest analogue I can offer for the world of Wishbringer is indeed the Brothers Grimm — but perhaps also, crazy as this is going to sound, Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Wishbringer has that same mixing of playfulness with a certain gravitas. There’s even some talking platypuses, one of very few examples of direct borrowing from Moriarty’s inspirations.

The other examples almost all come from Zork, including a great cameo from the good old white house and mailbox. And of course every Zork game has to have grues somewhere. The grues’ refrigerator light is my favorite gag in the whole game; it still makes me chuckle every time I think about it.

You have stumbled into the nesting place of a family of grues. Congratulations. Few indeed are the adventurers who have entered a grue's nest and lived as long as you have.

Everything is littered with rusty swords of elvish workmanship, piles of bones and other debris. A closed refrigerator stands in one corner of the nest, and something... a small, dangerous-looking little beast... is curled up in the other corner.

The only exit is to the west. Hope you survive long enough to use it.

Snoring fitfully, the little beast turns away from the light of the small stone and faces the wall.

>open refrigerator
A light inside the refrigerator goes out as you open it.

Opening the refrigerator reveals a bottle and an earthworm.

The little beast is stirring restlessly. It looks as if it's about to wake up!

>close refrigerator
A light inside the refrigerator comes on as you close it.

Indeed, while Moriarty is generally thought of as Infocom’s “serious” author on the exclusive basis of his second game Trinity, Wishbringer is full of such funny bits.

Wishbringer is very solvable, but doing so is not trivial even if you let yourself use the stone; this is of course just as Moriarty intended it. You may not even find the stone until a good third or more of the way through the game, and it definitely won’t help you with everything thereafter. Played without using the stone, I’m not sure that Wishbringer is really all that much easier than the average mid-period Infocom game at all. The most objectionable aspects for the modern player as well as the most surprising to find in an “Introductory” game are the hard time limits; you’re almost certain to need to restart a few times to fully explore Festeron before the Change and still deliver the letter in time, and you may need a few restores to get everything you need to done after the Change. An inventory limit also sometimes complicates matters; Infocom had been slowly losing interest in this sort of purely logistical problem for years, but Wishbringer demonstrates that even in an introductory game they weren’t quite there yet. Still, those are designs sins worth forgiving in light of Wishbringer‘s charms — assuming you think them sins at all. Like the determination to make you work a bit for a solution even if you use the stone, they could be seen as a good thing. Wishbringer, we should remember, was meant to serve as an introduction to Infocom’s catalog as a whole, in which players would find plenty of other timers and inventory limits and puzzles that refuse to just disappear in a poof of magic. Wishbringer‘s refusal to trivialize its purpose is really quite admirable; there’s even a (thankfully painless) pseudo-maze.

Wishbringer was released in June of 1985, eight full months after Infocom’s previous game Suspect. That gap would turn out to be by far the longest of Infocom’s productive middle years, and had left many fans worried about the company’s future and whether Cornerstone meant the end of games. Infocom’s idea that there were people potentially interested in interactive fiction but eager for a gentler version of the form turned out to be correct. Wishbringer turned into one of Infocom’s last genuine hits; Billboard software charts from the second half of 1985 show it and Hitchhiker’s regularly ensconced together inside the Top 20 or even Top 10, marking the last time Infocom would have a significant presence there. It sold almost 75,000 copies in its first six months, with a lifetime total perhaps as high as 150,000. To the best of my reckoning it stands as about Infocom’s fifth best-selling game overall.

Sales figures aside, Wishbringer‘s “Introductory” tag and its gentle, unassuming personality can make it an easy game amongst the Infocom canon to dismiss or overlook. That would be a shame to do, however; it’s one of the most likeable games Infocom ever did. While not one of Infocom’s more thematically or formally groundbreaking games and thus not one of their more discussed, it continues to be enjoyed by just about everyone who plays it. It’s the sort of game that may not come up that often when you ask people about their very favorites from Infocom, but mention it to any Infocom fan and you’ll almost always get back an “Oh, yes. I really liked that one.” Rather than bury its light charm under yet more leaden pontification, I’ll just suggest you play it if you haven’t already.

(Jason Scott’s interviews for Get Lamp informed much of this article. Interviews with Moriarty of various vintages can be found online at The IF Archive, 8bitfiles.net, Adventura CIA, Electron Dance, and Halcyon Days. Also useful was Moriarty’s “self-interview” in the January/February 1986 AmigaWorld; his picture above comes from that article. Adventure in the Fifth Dimension was published in the April/May 1983 A.N.A.L.O.G.; Crash Dive! in the May 1984 A.N.A.L.O.G., the last to which Moriarty contributed.)

Comments
23 Responses

- Howard Lewis Ship

April 10, 2014 at 2:37 pm

Bose is located “Framingham, MA” (not “Farmingham”). I’m originally from those parts, used to drive by Bose every day during my commute.

- Jimmy Maher

April 10, 2014 at 2:47 pm

Woops! Should be A.N.A.L.O.G. all the way through (I always have trouble with those two), and should indeed be Framingham. Thanks!

- Howard Lewis Ship

April 10, 2014 at 2:39 pm

So you talk about A.N.A.L.O.G. and then switch to A.N.T.I.C. without explanation …

- Duncan Stevens

April 10, 2014 at 3:23 pm

One other design choice that was just a touch harsh for an “introductory” game is to have a wish option (“flight”) that is never useful and loses the game if you do use it (in the tower), and another (“foresight”) that gives you a rather misleading “vision.”

My favorite bit: if you try to take the candle in the pre-transformation chapel, you get: “A voice from above solemnly proclaims, ‘Thou shalt not steal.'” If you try again post-transformation:

A voice from above begins to proclaim something, but a burst of static drowns out the solemn words. Looking up, you notice a speaker in the ceiling emitting sparks.

- Alan

April 10, 2014 at 3:45 pm

I still have my Magick Wishing Stone…

As a teenager, I actually wrote to Infocom about Wishbringer. They published my letter in Volume VII, Number 1 of “The Status Line”

- Jimmy Maher

April 11, 2014 at 6:51 am

Wow! Although Richard Garriott might have had more appreciation for your teenage Dungeon Master Ultima-speak. :)

I think that the Wishbringer stone may just be the most commonly preserved of all the feelies. Maybe because it was a bit more durable than most…

- Duncan Stevens

April 10, 2014 at 5:10 pm

Oh, and I also like this line:

A happy hellhound is thumping its tail nearby.

- iPadCary

April 10, 2014 at 7:18 pm

I dearly love & miss those gentle, New Age themed Infocom games.
Wishbringer, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Trinity ….
Moriarty, Meretzky, Lebling; geniuses all.

Another great piece, Jimmy!

- iPadCary

April 10, 2014 at 7:26 pm

@Alan
I just read your letter here:
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/NZT+TSL/TSL71.pdf

Want more?
Okey-dokey: http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXNZT+TSL.html

- Lisa

April 10, 2014 at 7:39 pm

The grues’ refrigerator is one of my favorite bits too. I guess it’s in the Invisiclues that there was a remark about the milk itself, that it had to be “kept in a warm, well-lighted place to stay spoiled,” or something like that.

- Felix

April 10, 2014 at 8:09 pm

Speaking of darkness in children’s literature and possible sources of inspiration for Wishbringer, I just so happen to have recently read So You Want To Be A Wizard by Diane Duane, and your description of the game immediately reminded me of the book, with its parallel universe version of Manhattan. Interestingly enough, the book was first published in 1983… just in time for Brian Moriarty to have read it during pre-production. Too much of a deduction leap?

- Jimmy Maher

April 11, 2014 at 6:57 am

I’ve never read the book you mention, but this concept of good/evil mirror worlds crops up again and again in children’s literature as well as fantasy and science fiction (see the classic Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror” for just one example; Infocom’s very next game A Mind Forever Voyaging for something rather similar). So, yeah, maybe a bit of a leap. ;)

- Mark Ricard

April 23, 2014 at 4:18 pm

Funny you mention Star Trek. Diane Duane has written a number of Star Trek novels as well. Many of them receiving praise from fans. Most of them are well worth reading. I have not read her wizard series.

- Victor Gijsbers

April 10, 2014 at 9:31 pm

To think of the fairy tales collected by the brothers Grimm as children’s literature is probably rather anachronistic.

I should play this game some time!

- matt w

April 11, 2014 at 2:17 am

Perhaps in that the phrase “children’s literature” did not exist at the time, but given that their famous collection was called “Children’s and Household Tales” it seems like a fair characterization. (And they were apparently criticized at the time for being unsuitable for children, though this was by a rival also named Grimm who was promoting his own book of fairy tales.)

- Keith Palmer

April 10, 2014 at 10:50 pm

Wishbringer was in “The Lost Treasures of Infocom 2,” which means I would have first played it without hints, but I have the strong impression I completed it all the same; that does mean a fair bit to me. It is a charming game, but I’m a little concerned about admitting that bits of the writing early on somehow leave me with an impression of Brian Moriarty still “writing down to his audience,” just a little…

In any case, learning Moriarty wrote the Z-Machine interpreter for the Color Computer (taking a step from the 6502 to the 6809) means I owe him a specific debt. Knowing he wrote for A.N.A.L.O.G., I’ve started looking into that magazine, but haven’t got to the adventures he contributed to it yet.

- Jimmy Maher

April 11, 2014 at 6:58 am

I knew you’d like that anecdote… :)

- Rowan Lipkovits

April 11, 2014 at 4:36 am

My introduction to Wishbringer was the novelization, which must likely stand as a high-water mark for the wretched Infocom novel line. (Well no, that would be The Zork Chronicles. The rest can safely be ignored.)

- Brian Moriarty

April 11, 2014 at 11:09 pm

Thanks for the kind article. Seems like a million years ago now.

- Sven

May 8, 2014 at 1:05 pm

Having just finished Wishbringer an hour ago (and for the first time), I have to say I am a bit disappointed by many aspects of the game. I still don´t really understand the story behind the game, it just doesn´t make a lot of sense to me… why did the town suddenly transform? what did the evil sister really want? where did the good sister get the voilet note from (at the end of the game)? and a lot more questions that made no sense. i only enjoyed killing the princess by pushing the lever in the castle (instead of pulling to free her). but this had no real consequences, too…

- Jimmy Maher

May 8, 2014 at 1:31 pm

Well, realistic plotting isn’t really Brian Moriarty’s forte. Most of his work deals more in — hoping I won’t sound too pretentious here — mythic archetypes and perhaps the collective unconscious. Asking questions about what really went on in Festeron is to me a bit like asking why the big bad wolf was so fixated on eating Little Red Riding Hood or how the Greeks managed to build that big old horse without the Trojans noticing on the middle of a battlefield and then fit an army into it. I think to approach Wishbringer as you would a modern fantasy novel is to kind of miss what Moriarty is all about — which doesn’t mean that what he does has to please you like it does me, of course.

And yes, I do hold something like Wishbringer to a very different — hopefully not lower, but different — standard than something like A Mind Forever Voyaging, which does present itself as a realistic work of hard science fiction.

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- Peter Piers

November 18, 2015 at 8:06 pm

I find it curious that you don’t mention something I hear a lot about the game – if you abuse the wishes, you’ll skip some parts of the game and therefore can easily render the game unwinnable.

Hardly fair for the main gimmick of an introductory game.

Apart from that – an excellent gem of a game. I’ve a soft spot for it. Moriarty is one of my personal favourites – yes, hippo puzzle in BZ notwithstanding!

Fooblitzky
April 23, 2014

Games were everywhere at Infocom. By that I mean all sorts of games, not just interactive fiction — although even the latter existed in more varieties than you might expect, such as an interactive live-action play where the audience shouted out instructions to the actors, to be filtered through and interpreted by a “parser” played by one Dave Lebling. Readers of The New Zork Times thrilled to the exploits of Infocom’s softball team in a league that also included such software stars as Lotus and Spinnaker. There were the hermit-crab races held at “Drink’em Downs” right there at CambridgePark Drive. (I had a Lance Armstrong-like moment of disillusionment in scouring Jason Scott’s Get Lamp tapes for these articles when habitual winner Mike Dornbrook revealed the sordid secret to his success: he had in fact been juicing his crabs all along by running hot water over his little cold-blooded entrants before races.) And of course every reader of The New Zork Times was also familiar with Infocom’s collective love for puzzles — word, logic, trivia, or uncategorizable — removed from any semblance of fiction interactive or otherwise. And then there was the collective passion for traditional board and card games of all stripes, often played with a downright disconcerting intensity. Innocent office Uno matches soon turned into “bloody” tournaments. One cold Boston winter a Diplomacy campaign got so serious and sparked such discord amongst the cabin-fever-addled participants that the normally equanimous Jon Palace finally stepped in and banned the game from the premises. Perhaps the most perennial of all the games was a networked multiplayer version of Boggle that much of the office played almost every day at close of business. Steve Meretzky got so good, and could type so fast, that he could enter a word and win a round before the other players had even begun to mentally process the letters before them.

Given this love for games as well as the creativity of so many at Infocom, it was inevitable that they would also start making up their own games that had nothing to do with prose or parsers. Indeed, little home-grown ludic experiments were everywhere, appropriating whatever materials were to hand; Andrew Kaluzniacki recalls Meretzky once making up a game on the fly that used only a stack of business cards lying on the desk before him. Most of these creations lived and died inside the Infocom offices, but an interesting congruence of circumstances allowed one of them to escape to the outside world as Fooblitzky, Infocom’s one game that definitely can’t be labelled an interactive fiction or adventure game and thus (along with, if you like, Cornerstone) the great anomaly in their catalog.

We’ve already seen many times that technology often dictates design. That’s even truer in the case of Fooblitzky than in most. Its origins date back to early 1984, when Mike Berlyn, fresh off of Infidel, was put in charge of one of Infocom’s several big technology initiatives for the year: a cross-platform system for writing and delivering graphical games to stand along the one already in place for text adventures and in development for business products.

It was by far the thorniest proposition of the three, one that had already been rejected in favor of pure text adventures and an iconic anti-graphics advertising campaign more than a year earlier when Infocom had walked away from a potential partnership with Penguin Software, “The Graphics People.” As I described in an earlier article, Infocom’s development methodology, built as it was around their DEC minicomputer, was just not well suited to graphics. It’s not quite accurate to say, however, that the DEC terminals necessarily could only display text. By now DEC had begun selling terminals like the VT125 with bitmap graphics capabilities, which could be programmed using a library called ReGIS. This, it seemed, might just open a window of possibility for coding graphical games on the DEC.

Still, the DEC represented only one end of the pipeline; they also needed to deliver the finished product on microcomputers. Trying to create a graphical Z-Machine would, again, be much more complicated than its text-only equivalent. To run an Infocom text adventure, a computer needed only be capable of displaying text for output and of accepting text for input. Excepting only a few ultra-low-end models, virtually any disk-drive-equipped computer available for purchase in 1984 could do the job; some might display more text onscreen, or do it more or less attractively or quickly, but all of them could do it. Yet the same computers differed enormously in their graphics capabilities. Some, like the old TRS-80, had virtually none to speak of; some, like the IBM PC and the Apple II, were fairly rudimentary in this area; some, like the Atari 800 and the Commodore 64 and even the IBM PCjr, could do surprisingly impressive things in the hands of a skilled programmer. All of these machines ran at different screen resolutions, with different color palettes, with different sets of fiddly restrictions on what color any given pixel could be. Infocom would be forced to choose a lowest common denominator to target, then sacrifice yet more speed and capability to the need to run any would-be game through an interpreter. Suffice to say that such a system wasn’t likely to challenge, say, Epyx when it came to slick and beautiful action games. But then maybe that was just as well: even the DEC graphical terminals hadn’t been designed with videogames in mind but rather static “business graphics” — i.e., charts and graphs and the like — and weren’t likely to reveal heretofore unknown abilities for running something like Summer Games.

But in spite of it all some thought that Infocom might be able to do certain types of games tolerably well with such a system. Andrew Kaluzniacki, a major technical contributor to the cross-platform graphics project:

It was pretty obvious pretty quickly that we couldn’t do complicated real-time graphics like you might see in an arcade game. But you could do a board game. You could lay the board out in a way that would look sufficiently similar across platforms, that would look acceptable.

Thus was the multiplayer board/computer game hybrid Foobliztky born almost as a proof of concept — or perhaps a justification for the work that had already been put into the cross-platform graphics system.

Fooblitzky and the graphics system itself, both operating as essentially a single project under Mike Berlyn, soon monopolized the time of several people amongst the minority of the staff not working on Cornerstone. Kaluzniacki, a new hire in Dan Horn’s Micro Group, wrote a graphics editor for the Apple II which was used by a pair of artists, Brian Cody and Paula Maxwell, to draw the pictures. These were then transferred to the DEC for incorporation into the game; the technology on that side was the usual joint effort by the old guard of DEC-centric Imps. The mastermind on the interpreter side was another of Horn’s stars, Poh C. Lim, almost universally known as “Magic” Lim due to his fondness for inscrutable “magic numbers” in his code marked off with a big “Don’t touch this!” Berlyn, with considerable assistance from Marc Blank, took the role of principal game designer as well as project manager.

Fooblitzky may have been born as largely “something to do with our graphics system,” but Infocom wasn’t given to doing anything halfway. Berlyn worked long and hard on the design, putting far more passion into it than he had into either of his last two interactive-fiction works. The artists also worked to make the game as pleasing and charming as it could be given the restrictions under which they labored. And finally the whole was given that most essential prerequisite to any good game of any type: seemingly endless rounds of play-testing and tweaking. Fooblitzky tournaments became a fixture of life at Infocom for a time, often pitting the divisions of the company against one another. (Business Products surprisingly proved very competitive with Consumer Products; poor Jon Palace “set the record for playing Fooblitzky more times and losing more times than anyone else in the universe.”) When the time came to create the packaging, Infocom did their usual superlative, hyper-creative job. Fooblitzky came with a set of markers and little dry-erase boards, one for each of the up to four players, for taking notes and making plans, along with not one but two manuals — the full rules and a “Bare Essentials” quick-start guide, the presence of which makes the game sound much more complicated than it actually is — and the inevitable feelie, which as in the Cornerstone package here took the form of a button.

Fooblitzky is a game of deduction, one more entry in a long and ongoing tradition in board and casual gaming. At the beginning of a game, each player secretly chooses one of a possible eighteen items. If fewer than four are playing — two to four players are possible — the computer then randomly (and secretly) picks enough items to round out the total to four. Players then take turns moving about a game board representing the town of Fooblitzky, trying to deduce what the three initially unidentified items are and gather a full set together. The first to bring all four items back to a “check point” wins.

Items start out in stores which are scattered about the board. Also present are pawn shops in which items can be sold and bought; restaurants in which you can work to earn money if you deplete your initial store; crosswalks which can randomly lead to unintended contact with traffic and an expensive stay in the hospital; phone booths for calling distant stores and checking stock; storage lockers for stashing items (you can only carry four with you, a brutal inventory limit indeed); even a subway that can whisk you around the board quickly — for, as with most things in Fooblitzky, a price. Adding a layer of chaos over the proceedings is the Chance Man, who appears randomly from time to time to do something good, like giving you a free item, or bad, like dropping a piano on your head and sending you to the hospital. By making use of all of the above and more, while also watching everything everyone else does, players try to figure out the correct items and get them collected and delivered before their rivals; thus the need for the note-taking boards.

Once you get the hang of the game, which doesn’t take long, a lot of possibilities open up for strategy and even a little devious psychology. Bluffing becomes a viable option: cast off that correct item in a pawn shop as if it’s incorrect, then watch your opponents race off down the wrong track while you do the rest of what you need to do before you buy it back, carry it to the check point, and win. If you prefer to be less passive aggressive and more, well, active aggressive, you can just run into an opponent in the street to scatter her items everywhere and try to grab what you need.

It can all be a lot of fun, although I’m not sure I can label Fooblitzky a classic. There just seems to be something missing — what, I can’t quite put my finger on — for me to go that far. One problem is that some games are much more interesting than others — granted, a complaint that could be applied to just about any game, but the variation seems much more pronounced here than it ought to. By far the best game of Fooblitzky I’ve ever played was one involving just my wife Dorte and me. By chance three of the four needed items turned out to be the same, leading to a mad, confused scramble that lasted at least twice as long as a normal game, as we each thought we’d figured out the solution several times only to get our collection rejected. (Dorte finally won in the end, as usual.) That game was really exciting. By contrast, however, the more typical game in which all four items are distinct can start to seem almost rote after just a few sessions in quick succession; even deviousness can only add so much to the equation. If Fooblitzky was a board game, I tend to think it’d be one you’d dust off once or twice a year, not a game-night perennial.

That said, Fooblitzky‘s presentation is every bit as whimsical and cute as it wants to be. Each player’s avatar is a little dog because, well, why not? My favorite bit of all is the dish-washing graphic.

Washing dishes Fooblitzky-style

On the way to the hospital after getting hit by a car

Cute as it is, Fooblitzky and the cross-platform project which spawned it weren’t universally loved within Infocom. Far from it. Mike Berlyn characterizes the debate over just what to do with Fooblitzky as a “bitter battle.” Mike Dornbrook’s marketing department, already dealing with the confusion over just why Infocom was releasing something like Cornerstone, was deeply concerned about further “brand dilution” if this erstwhile interactive-fiction company now suddenly released something like Fooblitzky.

The obvious riposte to such concerns would have been to make Fooblitzky so compelling, such an obvious moneyspinner, that it simply had to be released and promoted heavily. But in truth Fooblitzky was far from that. Its very description — that of a light social game — made it an horrifically hard sell in the 1980s, as evidenced by the relative commercial failure of even better games like my beloved M.U.L.E. Like much of Electronic Arts’s early catalog, it was targeted at a certain demographic of more relaxed, casual computer gaming that never quite emerged in sufficient numbers from the home-computing boom and bust. And Fooblitzky‘s graphics, while perhaps better than what anyone had any right to expect, are still slow and limited. A few luddites at Infocom may have been wedded to the notion of the company as a maker of only pure-text games, but for many more the problem was not that Fooblitzky had graphics but rather that the graphics just weren’t good enough for the Infocom stamp of quality. They would have preferred to find a way to do cross-platform graphics right, but there was no money for such a project in the wake of Cornerstone. Fooblitzky‘s graphics had been produced on a relative shoestring, and unfortunately they kind of looked it. Some naysayers pointedly suggest that if it wasn’t possible to do a computerized Fooblitzky right they should just remove the computer from the equation entirely and make a pure board game out of it (the branding confusion that would have resulted from that would have truly given Dornbrook and company nightmares!).

And so Fooblitzky languished for months even after Mike Berlyn left the company and the cross-platform-graphics project as a whole fell victim to the InfoAusterity program. Interpreters were only created for the IBM PC, Apple II, and Atari 8-bit line, notably leaving the biggest game machine in the world, the Commodore 64, unsupported. At last in September of 1985 Infocom started selling it exclusively via mail order to members of the established family — i.e., readers of The New Zork Times. Marketing finally relented and started shipping the game to stores the following spring where, what with their virtually nonexistent efforts at promotion, it sold in predictably tiny quantities: well under 10,000 copies in total.

The whole Fooblitzky saga is the story of a confused company with muddled priorities creating something that didn’t quite fit anywhere and never really had a chance. Like Cornerstone’s complicated virtual machine, the cross-platform graphics initiative ended up being technically masterful but more damaging than useful to the finished product. Infocom could have had a much slicker game for much less money had they simply written the thing on a microcomputer and then ported it to the two or three other really popular and graphically viable platforms by hand. Infocom’s old “We hate micros!” slogan, their determination to funnel everything through the big DEC, was becoming increasingly damaging to them in a rapidly changing computing world, their biggest traditional strength threatening to become a huge liability. Even by 1984 the big DECSystem-20 was starting to look a bit antiquated to those who knew where computing was going. In just a few more years, when Infocom would junk the DEC at last, it would literally be junked: the big fleet of red refrigerators, worth a cool million dollars when it came to Infocom in 1982, was effectively worthless barely five years later, a relic of a bygone era.

Because Fooblitzky is such an oddity with none of the name recognition or lingering commercial value of the more traditional Infocom games, I’m going to break my usual pattern and offer it for download here in its Atari 8-bit configuration. It’s still good for an evening or two’s scavenging fun with friends or family. Next time we’ll get back to interactive fiction proper and dig into one of the most important games Infocom ever released.

(Just the usual suspects as sources this time around: Jason Scott’s Get Lamp interviews and my collection of New Zork Times issues.)

Comments
2 Responses

- Jason Scott

April 23, 2014 at 4:06 pm

I have the moment where Dornbrook reveals the juiced crabs cheat to Dave Lebling and Stu Galley on video. It’s a precious moment.

- Andrew Schultz

April 23, 2014 at 7:40 pm

Poh C. Lim, almost universally known as “Magic” Lim due to his fondness for inscrutable “magic numbers” in his code

This line made me laugh, which is hard to do. I never considered the nickname ‘Magic’ could be ironic.

I’ve never really played Foobilitzky–since it requires >1 person to be really fun, so I’m glad to read this.

A Mind Forever Voyaging, Part 1: Steve Meretzky’s Interiors
April 27, 2014

Steve Meretzky earned the right to write A Mind Forever Voyaging. That, anyway, is one way to look at it, and one with which I believe many staffers at Infocom tacitly agreed. After his first game, Planetfall, his next two games had been works created to specifications with cheerful equanimity and breathtaking efficiency and not a trace of artistic angst. First there had been Sorcerer, the necessary second installment in the Enchanter trilogy that freed up Marc Blank to work on technology and Dave Lebling to write Suspect. And then of course there was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which fell into Meretzky’s lap because he was the only available Imp willing to play the subordinate role in a creative partnership with Douglas Adams. That game’s huge sales were almost certainly the only thing that allowed Infocom to survive (after a fashion) their disastrous 1985, thus making Meretzky in some sense the savior of everyone still employed there. Throw in the four contract-fulfilling Zork gamebooks he cranked out betwixt and between the computer games, plus all the help he gave to others with their designs, plus the way he just kept everyone insanely sane during all of the trials of the Cornerstone era with his parties and games and antics… yeah, Mereztky deserved a carte blanche to make his next game exactly what he wanted it to be.

As funny a guy as he was, Meretzky was interested in being more than just Infocom’s go-to wacky comedy writer. Indeed, and even setting aside Floyd, anyone really looking at Planetfall can’t help but see an attention to science-fictional realism, even a certain amount of earnest worldbuilding, that its oft-cited similarity to Douglas Adams’s just-in-it-for-the-jokes settings and characters belies. Had he had his druthers, Meretzky’s follow-up to Planetfall may very well have been a carefully researched and very sober historical piece taking place aboard the Titanic. “Meretzky’s Titanic game” hung about Infocom so long and was proposed by him so many times that it became a running joke in itself. The rest of the company never warmed to the idea, feeling it lacked commercial potential — an extraordinary judgment call indeed in light of a certain movie from the following decade. Then again, Meretzky didn’t have Leonardo DiCaprio.

But in the immediate aftermath of Hitchhiker’s in late 1984, with complete carte blanche for the first and only time during his tenure with Infocom, Meretzky decided to go in another direction entirely. Even as he was basking in the glow of Hitchhiker’s huge initial sales and publicity, Ronald Reagan was defeating Walter Mondale in one of the biggest routs in American electoral history; Mondale carried exactly 1 state to Reagan’s 49.

The impetus to start working on it was Reagan’s reelection. I was appalled that he was not only reelected but reelected in a landslide. Everyone was talking about what an absorbing medium computer games in general and particularly interactive fiction was because even when you weren’t playing you were spending all your time thinking about it. You were always working on puzzles. When you were playing you were absorbed in it 100 percent, and when you weren’t playing part of your brain was still working on it, thinking about it.

I thought about how other media were constantly trying to get messages across, change people’s thinking. It seemed to me that interactive fiction could be an even more powerful medium for doing that. So that was my mission. I wanted to show people what a war-mongering, Christian-Right-pandering, environment-trashing, rights-trampling asshole Reagan was.

And of course the game was so successful that we’ve never had another President like that!

The question of just how to convey that message within the context of an interesting, playable work of interactive fiction was rather more fraught than the above description might imply. Could interactive fiction change hearts and minds the way that Art does it, not by offering reasoned arguments but by making the player really see and feel? Whatever else you can say about them, adventure games — even Infocom’s interactive fiction — hadn’t exactly been doing a lot of that sort of thing. They’d been more than content to work within safe, established, inoffensive genre boundaries, a defensible enough choice at a time when just offering, say, a reasonably good interactive facsimile of a forgettable mystery novel could be rightly greeted as an amazing achievement. There had been glimpses of potential to do and be more, like Floyd’s death in Planetfall or Infidel‘s shocking ending. But could something like that be maintained over the course of an entire work? Sure, Meretzky could craft a broad satire in which Reagan would stand in for Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive, but he wanted to do something more thoughtful, more expressive.

Interactive fiction is an almost perversely limited medium from the perspective of a writer of static fiction. There are many, many things that it just can’t do well, and any sort of direct facsimile of literary fiction, even literary science fiction, is one of them. Such works invariably end up being either fundamentally un-interactive, the proverbial railroaded novel separated by the occasional command prompt, or impossible to implement; the grand bargains and life choices that are the stuff of literature represent a combinatorial explosion with which interactive fiction is utterly unequipped to deal. This doesn’t mean that interactive fiction can’t move and change us. It does, however, mean that its authors must approach their goals in different, more oblique ways than conventional authors.

Steve Meretzky, about to craft the first largely puzzleless work of interactive fiction ever to be released by a publisher, somehow intuitively grasped this reality that has eluded many would-be “literary” interactive-fiction authors since. The central premise of the game that would become A Mind Forever Voyaging came to him one day at his breakfast table. It was an idea that played perfectly to his medium’s strengths. Interactive fiction does setting incredibly well, perhaps better than it does anything else. Intricate plotting it does painfully and reluctantly and usually clunkily. Therefore why not make the player not so much a participant in the plot as an observer? Yes, he would make the player’s avatar a “self-aware computer” observing the effects of Republican policies over a span of decades inside a simulation. There would still be room for player agency, secrets to be found and hidden corners to be investigated. But the larger-scale machinery of the simulation could grind on largely unaffected by this. A cop out? Perhaps, but also a brilliant one. The rest of the story — about the computer, named PRISM, and how he came to be — now began to flow.

Cop out or not, Meretzky’s idea was still hugely ambitious. He wanted to do nothing less than create a whole city in software not once but five times — the same place over a span of five decades. And woven around this central simulation would have to be a lot more material relating to PRISM’s operation and his exploratory mission. The scale of the whole was out of line with anything Infocom had attempted since the original PDP-10 Zork — you know, the one they’d had to chop into pieces to get onto microcomputers. Thankfully, Meretzky had a trump card in the form of yet another new technology that had been born at Infocom during 1984.

The system would be known to the world as Interactive Fiction Plus, and internally as either the version 4 Z-Machine or just EZIP. (“Extended Z-Machine Interpreter”; ordinary interpreters were customarily called “ZIPs,” a name which has nothing to do with the compression format of the same name.) The Imps had been growing increasingly frustrated with the Z-Machine, with its sharp limitations of 128 K of total code and data (allowing at best a short novella’s worth of text), its maximum of 256 objects (a much more restrictive number than it might appear at first glance when you consider that objects included not only items in the game but also rooms, your avatar and other people and animals, and even various abstractions like compass directions), its support for nothing more elaborate in the way of onscreen formatting than a fixed status line and a scrolling stream of text. They were aching to push their worlds and their parsers further than the cramped Z-Machine could allow.

Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn, who made a surprising but enduring pair of running buddies, worked toward a next-generation technology for interactive fiction even as Berlyn was also heading the cross-platforms graphics initiative and designing Fooblitzky and also writing Cutthroats. They dreamed of a parser capable of understanding “kinds and qualities,” capable of facilitating real conversations with other characters. Blank:

We worked on it for quite a while before we realized it just wasn’t getting anywhere. It was too open-ended; it was hard to know where to go with it and what was going to be the interesting part of it. Or were you turning it into a simulation, where you build a big world you can wander around in but not much happens? We kind of hit a wall.

It of course didn’t help that Cornerstone was continuing to suck more and more oxygen away from such blue-sky initiatives, nor that Blank himself was getting more and more distracted and embroiled in his disputes with Al Vezza and the rest of the Board. Berlyn and Blank’s grander plans never saw the light of day. However, the more plebian technological foundation Blank had laid to support them did as Interactive Fiction Plus.

EZIP extended the basic Z-Machine in a fairly elegant, straightforward way. Maximum story size doubled to 256 K. The maximum number of objects expanded to a number big enough that nobody would ever, ever — even in the modern era — need to think about it again. A modest new set of opcodes building on work that had been begun to facilitate Seastalker‘s sonar display gave some new options for text layout and screen formatting. And that was about it really. Still, it should be just enough to let Meretzky build his city.

The luxuries of EZIP didn’t come without a steep price tag. Getting EZIP onto many of the target machines stretched the considerable talents of Dan Horn’s Micro Group to the limit. Andrew Kaluzniacki, for instance, had to invent a new filesystem for the Apple II to increase the capacity of a single disk side from 144 K to about 168 K. Even with such wizardry the new system was simply too much for a huge swathe of the many machines Infocom supported with the standard Z-Machine, like the Commodore 64, the Atari 8-bit line, and the many extant Apple IIs with less than 128 K of memory. The lowest common denominator for EZIP would have to be a machine with 128 K and an 80-column text display.

That looked like a dangerous move, especially in 1984 before the arrival of many of the more powerful consumer-focused machines of the latter 1980s like the Commodore 128 and Amiga and the Atari ST. But even then it wasn’t completely unprecedented. Sierra had elected to make 128 K a requirement for King’s Quest and its sequels, and had done quite well commercially by it. In fact, that game seemed to have discovered an audience of players with higher-speced machines who bought it because it required 128 K and thus was presumably more advanced than others on the market. Perhaps a similar touch of snobbery would rub off on Interactive Fiction Plus.

It was just one more way in which Meretzky’s project was an iffy proposition. Yet he got remarkably little pushback from marketing or anyone else about his game. He had gotten it off the ground at the perfect time, just before the disasters of 1985 would make such a risky project look crazy indeed to the embattled company. By the time the full horror of their financial situation started to become clear around mid-year, the game was far too far along to stop even had anyone seriously wanted to. But it’s far from clear that anyone did. Even Dave Lebling, the most conservative of the Imps and thus the most likely to find Meretzky’s game objectionable, declared that he was fine with the game, that it was a point of view which Meretzky had every right to express.

It was “Hollywood” Dave Anderson, a key tester who would later become an Implementor in his own right, who first gave the project its enduring label inside Infocom: “Steve Meretzky’s Interiors.” Interiors, for those of you who aren’t Woody Allen fans, was Allen’s 1978 follow-up to the Best Picture-winning Annie Hall. All of Allen’s previous films had been comedies, if funny in increasingly nuanced ways. Interiors, however, was a complete departure, a somber Bergman-esque character study that begins with a separation and ends with a suicide, with nary a laugh in between. Allen later incorporated the reaction of many of his fans into Stardust Memories, whose filmmaker protagonist is constantly being asked when he’s going to get back to making “funny” movies again. Anderson’s epithet knowingly or unknowingly foreshadowed the similar reaction many of Infocom’s fans would soon have to Meretzky’s great artistic experiment.

Meretzky found a particularly great supporter and boaster in Jon Palace, who still names the game today as by far his favorite. Palace, who when hired at the beginning of 1984 has not even known what interactive fiction was, had become one of the foremost proponents within Infocom of the medium’s potential to be meaningful and relevant and beautiful — to be Art. Many of the more experimental games of Infocom’s second half, beginning with A Mind Forever Voyaging, owe Palace an enormous debt for his dedication to the proposition of Infocom interactive fiction as something more than endless Zork rehashes even as times got leaner and commercial pressures mounted. Palace:

I really tried to emphasize the storytelling aspect rather than the puzzle aspect just because that’s what I liked. AMFV started as a story without puzzles, and even though puzzles went back in AMFV was about the story. It wasn’t about the puzzles. I was very, very pleased with that one.

At the same time, its reception was definitely mixed. A lot of the rabid puzzle-loving fans did not like it. They might have liked the politics — or maybe they didn’t like the politics — but some people did not like the lack of puzzles. But for me it was, like, “Great! Look, we can really elicit an emotional response!” — an emotional response which isn’t trite. That for me was the best.

Meretzky hugely valued Palace’s unstinting “advice and support” as he ventured into these uncharted waters, thanking him lastly and most prominently in the acknowledgements of the finished game.

Called simply PRISM through most of its development, A Mind Forever Voyaging‘s final name is lifted from a passage in William Wordsworth’s lifetime endeavor, the epic narrative poem The Prelude. There it’s applied to Isaac Newton, a statue of whom stood near the “nook obscure” where the young Wordsworth slept at Cambridge:

And from my pillow, looking forth by light
Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The antechapel where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

The original Apple Computer logo

It’s a passage that already had a place in hacker lore long before Meretzky stumbled upon it in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. The first logo deployed by the nascent Apple Computer, created by the company’s forgotten third founder Ronald Gerald Wayne using pen and ink, consisted of a picture of Newton leaning against a tree, with the end of the passage quoted above running along the border. The very un-Apple-like logo didn’t last long; neither did Wayne, who sold his share back to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak for $800 less than two weeks later.

While the strong political message remained, A Mind Forever Voyaging gradually evolved into a scenario much more complicated than Meretzky’s initial determination to just out Reagan as an “asshole” might imply. Drawing doubtless upon the knowledge of artificial-intelligence theory which the collection of refugees from MIT’s Lab for Computer Science surrounding him possessed in spades, he created a detailed backstory for Perry Simm — i.e., PRISM — as an entity who has unknowingly lived his first two decades inside a computer simulation before suddenly being jerked out of his simulated reality and into the real world, to be assigned the mission of investigating the likely effects of one Senator Richard Ryder’s Plan for Renewed National Purpose on his home town, the fictional Rockvil, South Dakota, ten years in the future. The “present” in the game’s world is 2031, with simulated futures eventually reaching as far as 2081, making A Mind Forever Voyaging one more entry in science fiction’s huge catalog of works that are ostensibly about the future but really about the here and now. The implications and philosophical questions that surround Perry’s simulated version of existence, many of which the game doesn’t directly address and sometimes seems oddly oblivious of, end up being at least as intriguing as its more straightforward political message.

A Mind Forever Voyaging isn’t the unblemished masterpiece many fans accuse it of being. The writing is compelling in many places, cursory in other places, gawky and awkward in yet others — sometimes endearingly so and sometimes just, well, awkwardly so. The sprawling city of Rockvil itself, impressive as it is as by far the largest contiguous space ever to appear in an Infocom game, is also often only sketchily implemented and described. (Much of this is certainly down to the space limitations of even the version 4 Z-Machine; the final game file reportedly has about ten bytes to spare, not enough for even a single extra sentence.) The dystopia that gradually emerges as you progress further into the simulation is, to say the least, rather derivative of Nineteen Eight-Four; even some of the vocabulary, like “lustfilm” and “hatefilm,” seems lifted straight from a Newspeak dictionary. And as political commentary it’s at best simplistic and heavy-handed.

Yet A Mind Forever Voyaging manages the neat trick of being interesting because of its flaws rather than despite them. It’s a big, messy piece of work that tries to do a lot of things with mixed success even as it sort of accidentally does other things that I’m not entirely sure its maker was even aware of. Its nooks and crannies offer a downright bewildering number of things to talk about, seemingly endless philosophical tangents to wander down. While I can’t promise we’ll get to all of them, we are going to take our time here, not only because it’s one of the most significant games in interactive-fiction history but also because — and more so, really — the ideas it contains are just so interesting to think about. Thus the “Part 1” in this article’s title. With its history and technical logistics behind us, we’ll be ready next time to delve into the game itself.

(This and the following articles are drawn from, in addition to the game itself, my usual Infocom source of Jason Scott’s Get Lamp interview archives. Also useful was the Steve Meretzky interview in Richard Rouse III’s Game Design: Theory and Practice.)

Comments
17 Responses

- Sniffnoy

April 27, 2014 at 8:34 pm

Huh; when you mentioned a Titanic adventure game, I thought of Titanic: Adventure Out of Time. Doesn’t seem offhand that there’s any relation though.

- Victor Gijsbers

April 28, 2014 at 7:55 am

Interestingly, Douglas Adams _did_ get to make a Titanic game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Titanic

- Keith Palmer

April 27, 2014 at 9:51 pm

“Meretzky’s Titanic” also got my attention, although when you mentioned “a certain movie from the following decade” my reaction was that people in the mid-1980s might have thought of Raise the Titanic, a 1980 movie more notable for not making back its own then-large budget. (“It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic!”) That did get me thinking further about how the wreck of the ship was discovered in September of 1985, though, and of the possibility that if Meretzky had completed that other game in the time he’d spent working on A Mind Forever Voyaging it might have been the beneficiary of a lucky coincidence bringing it to the attention of more people, as much as I do understand the ultimate futility of speculating on counterfactuals…

- Jimmy Maher

April 28, 2014 at 5:27 am

I never thought about that film, even though I mention it in an earlier article on this very blog. Yes, that may have affected the way the project was perceived within Infocom…

- Odkin

April 28, 2014 at 4:43 am

Oh, well… another idol self-destructs with a bitter ignorant liberal rant, full of hate and falsehoods.

- GeoX

April 28, 2014 at 7:54 am

You sound fun.

- Dehumanizer

April 28, 2014 at 2:42 pm

“Bitter ignorant […] rant, full of hate and falsehoods”, and HE’s the one full of hate?

- Odkin

May 1, 2014 at 5:17 am

Unlike liberals, I don’t hate people. I hate despicable poisonous rhetoric like “war-mongering, Christian-Right-pandering, environment-trashing, rights-trampling asshole Reagan”. I know liberals have such protection from the media that they cannot understand when they are criticized, but that quote IS hateful.

- GeoX

May 1, 2014 at 3:14 pm

No, really. I’m sure you’re a blast at parties. Otherwise, how would you have come up with something as hilarious as “unlike liberals, I don’t hate people?”

- Victor Gijsbers

April 28, 2014 at 8:21 pm

What more noble and virtuous action could an idol take than to self-destruct? Surely it shouldn’t just passively allow others to stain themselves with the sin of idolatry!

- Jason Scott

April 28, 2014 at 4:54 pm

I have access to materials Jimmy doesn’t have access to (yet) – the full documentation and notebooks of Steve Meretzky’s design work for Infocom (and Boffo too, actually).

What I hope doesn’t get lost in all this is how much harder Steve worked on A Mind Forever Voyaging than any of the previous games he did – the notebook for AMFV is easily twice the size of any other design book, and these things are pretty sizeable numbers. He duplicated academic works on the life of cities, he pulls down information on the psychological experience of “happiness” – he even polls his co-workers and testers on what represents quality of life issues. (For example, he defines a scale of “local theater shows pristine copy of Casablanca” to “local cineplex shows spliced, broken copy of Casablanca”.) The amount of work done just to figure out the full extent of the city and what that represents is huge. There’s also some great work on portraying “the future” – my favorite quote is (roughly) “You can’t just call a bus a ‘space bus’ and be done with it.” It was obvious this was a big, big deal to Steve, and he put his considerable amount of talent and heart into the worldbuilding.

Similarly, too, the notes show the debate underway of making a “political” game and what the pros and cons would be. Again, as Jimmy has indicated elsewhere and as the interviews bear out, the company truly thought of interactive fiction as being the descendant of the book itself… so why not have all the same genres books do? The thought was that while this game might have a liberal slant, future games might have a conservative slant, or be educational, or whatever else – the sky was the limit.

It also helps to remember that the political environment of 1984 is not the same level of toxicity currently rampant online, where apparently a user who hears that Steve Meretzky had political leanings that were in a different sphere would declare him lost and fallen. (Steve’s been pretty consistent politically for all his life – certainly post MIT.) My interviews with him covered a lot of ground (there are hours of them), including the motivations for why do a game like that – which are the quotes Jimmy pulled from for this article. Steve doesn’t turn all conversations political at the drop of a hat (although he does care about issues if you discuss them with him).

But, as I’m sure Jimmy will cover, the resulting non-success of AMFV means that the next two games out of Steve for Infocom are notably safe: A PG-rated sex romp (Leather Goddesses) and a sequel (Stationfall). I wanted to see Steve given more chances to work even more in this medium – he still has some great works in him of this level, but he has to follow the money and the drive for smaller amounts of puzzles or smaller development times in years hence.

- Andrew

April 28, 2014 at 9:17 pm

Fascinating insight adding to a fascinating post, and a beautifully sculpted slapdown of that gun nut. Thanks, Jason!

- John G

April 29, 2014 at 5:37 pm

Any plans to publish excerpts of these notebooks? I’ve always found the conception of the game fascinating.

- iPadCary

April 29, 2014 at 5:51 pm

One of the best computer games EVER made.
And I’ll brook no argument.

- Steve Meretzky

April 30, 2014 at 7:10 pm

Thanks … amazing level of research and accuracy. Just a few corrections:
1) Marrying the Titanic game to the theft of the Mona Lisa wasn’t an idea that came up until brainstorming at Boffo Games in the mid-90s. During Infocom days, it was a straight “survive the sinking of the Titanic” concept.
2) The Apple logo wasn’t how I became aware of the Wordsworth quote … I didn’t even know about the quote on the Apple logo until a few years ago. I just came across the quote while perusing my well-worn Bartlett’s Quotations.
3) The founders of Infocom came out of MIT’s Lab for Computer Science; the AI Lab was a different entity.

- Jimmy Maher

May 1, 2014 at 5:49 am

Thanks so much, Steve. Made appropriate edits in the article.

- iPadCary

May 3, 2014 at 12:13 am

Jeez Louise, the Mæstro himself was drawn to this article!
Well DONE, Jimmy!! 8^ ]

A Mind Forever Voyaging, Part 2: Don’t Go Back to Rockvil
April 29, 2014

Our theme song for today is the inevitable.

During the mid-1980s American liberalism was arguably at its lowest ebb of the century. This was the era of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” when liberalism was viewed as the cause of the economic doldrums of the previous decade and the social unrest of the decade before that, when the de facto voice of the Democratic party for many people was still Jimmy Carter’s handwringing “malaise” speech. While Carter told the people that they needed to fundamentally change their ways of life, to carpool and conserve energy, Ronald Reagan told them the country’s only problem was that they weren’t being American enough. After a somewhat rocky first few years in office, by 1984 the economy was booming as it hadn’t in almost two decades, and Reagan soared to reelection that year. Oddly for an ideology so rooted in tradition and fixated on a mythical America of the past, conservatism felt fresh and vigorous and new, like the future, as the “Greed is Good!” 1980s got rolling at last in earnest. To stand in opposition to Reaganomics was to blow into the face of a hurricane; even counterculture icons like Neil Young were making noises about supporting Reagan. Yet it was at this moment, before the Iran-Contra scandal began to at least reopen a window for debate in the American body politic, that Steve Meretzky penned A Mind Forever Voyaging. Whatever else you can say about it, it was one hell of a brave piece of work.

Meretzky’s stand-in for Reagan — with a bit of Joseph McCarthy thrown in for good measure — is a charismatic senator named Richard Ryder (subtle Meretzky ain’t). It’s 2031, and the United States of North America is once again gripped by economic malaise. Ryder is promoting something called The Plan for Renewed National Purpose to fix all that. I might complain that the name is rather too fascistic-sounding, except that I’m not really sure it sounds any more ominous than The Patriot Act. I might complain that the specifics of the Plan hew a bit too closely to the Republican agenda of 1985, except that the Republican agenda of 1985 is largely still the Republican agenda of today. So why not 2031 as well?

* cut tax rates by fifty percent
* vigorous prosecution of tax evasion
* decentralization of federal responsibilities
* deregulation of all major industries
* reinstatement of the military draft
* emphasis on fundamentals and traditional values in education
* mandatory conscription for troublemakers and criminals
* a strict "USNA First" trade policy
* termination of aid to nations not pro-USNA
* cutbacks on all types of bureaucracy, e.g. registering cars, guns
* termination of government subsidies to outmoded industries

A Mind Forever Voyaging‘s criticism of these policies and the mindset that spawned them will grow increasingly strident, as befits a muckraking work meant to shake the people and get them to wake up! But the criticism builds slowly. When we first enter the future Rockvil, in 2041, it seems a pretty nice place.

As Jason Scott noted in his comment to my previous article, Rockvil itself is a major achievement not just for its sheer size but also, more so, for what a believable place it is. Rockvil is a prosperous mid-sized town perhaps about the size and character of a real-world place I once lived, Olympia, Washington. It’s laid out in a way that just feels intuitively right. There’s a tourist district in the north with a zoo, a sports stadium, parkland, concert halls and theaters; a bustling downtown at the city’s center, with residences for city-dwelling hipsters (Perry Simm among them) along its edges; a university in the west surrounded by the expected student hangouts like a bar and a cheap Chinese joint; the obligatory shopping mall and cineplex to the east. Traveling south takes one across “the proverbial railroad tracks” — every city has them — to the less photogenic parts of town: the power station, the skycar factory (“the last surviving smokestack industry in the area”), the city dump, liquor stores and laundromats and gun shops and tenements and reminders of a more industrial past in the form of shuttered factories and warehouses. Surrounding the whole, but beyond “the boundary of this simulation,” are the suburbs.

We spend the majority of the game wandering about Rockvil, and we come to care for the place almost as if we really had grown up there. In 2041 it’s largely a happy, welcoming place for a (presumably) successful young writer like Perry, with just a few ominous signs, if you’re inclined to view them as such, like the growing underclass on the other side of the tracks and the population of Rockvil Reformatory: “From what you’ve heard, the prison is overcrowded, because today’s stricter law enforcement and mandatory sentencing regulations are putting people into the penal system even faster than the military draft can remove them.” The city’s slow decline is horrifying, as the place becomes a nightmare version of itself like Festeron in Wishbringer but without a trace of that game’s whimsy. (It’s funny to think that Infocom released two games back to back that relied on such a similar mechanic, another of a number of odd confluences in their history.) A weird cult-like religion rises and finally takes over the government; infrastructure crumbles and publicly-funded museums close or fall into horrid neglect; the criminals and police both get ever more brutal; the films showing at the local cineplex get baser and uglier, as does the graffiti on the streets; racism becomes institutionalized and celebrated; the credit card in your wallet is replaced with a ration card. There’s much here that’s disturbing and/or heartrending, like the “monkey torturing” that becomes the zoo’s main draw or the eventual use to which the stadium is put: “Execution Matches.” The last version of Rockvil, from 2081, is an apparent post-nuclear wasteland inhabited by roving bands of possibly mutated, certainly cannibalistic savages. We don’t last long there.

There’s a message to this progression that’s as relevant now as it was in 1985: what seems expedient in the short term can be profoundly destructive in the long term. And, and without putting too fine a point on it, I can’t help but note a certain extra layer of ominous prescience for those of us playing the game thirty years after it was written. Many of the government’s worst abuses are initially justified in the name of preventing terrorism. The apartment Perry shares with his wife and son is subject to unannounced raids by the “Border Security Force” — Homeland Security, anyone? — even in 2041. A sign in the airport soon reads, “All international travellers must pass through strip-search. No exceptions!”

The apartment is a special nexus of interest in each version of Rockvil. While Perry gets a lengthy backstory in the game’s manual, his wife Jill and son Mitchell are the only people we meet with whom he has a personal relationship. Not that we learn much about either in the bare handful of substantial paragraphs that relate to Perry’s home life: Mitchell is just an average little boy; Jill is a painter who is addicted to trashy romance novels and madly loved by and in love with Perry (perhaps relevantly, Meretzky himself got married just after finishing A Mind Forever Voyaging). But it’s enough to make their final appearance in 2071 the most harrowing scene in the game:

Six or eight heavily armed Church police storm into the apartment. You see a look of horror come over Jill, as she covers her mouth with the back of her hand, as though stifling some silent scream. You follow her gaze, and -- a shock of recognition -- sauntering in behind the police...

The ten years since you last saw him have left scant change on the face of your son. "Mitchell!" you yell, and take a step toward him, but a blow from one of the cops sends your frail, old body flying against the wall.

"She is the one." The voice is Mitchell's, but the tone is cold, unrecognizable, sending shivers through you. He raises a fur-clad arm, pointing at his mother without a hint of emotion. "She spake against the Church; she tried to poison the mind of a child too young to know the Truth." The thugs grab Jill, who reaches toward Mitchell, tears of terror streaming down her face. Totally unresponsive, he turns and walks calmly out of the apartment.

As Jill is dragged, screaming and crying, through the front door, you try to follow, but a cop pummels you in the stomach with his club. You fall to the floor, retching, as the apartment door slams closed, shutting you off forever from the son you cannot understand and the wife you will never see again.

Now, one could argue with some justification that this is rather emotionally manipulative, that the game hasn’t characterized anyone involved well enough to really earn our pathos. But like Floyd’s death, it’s unforgettable and affecting in spite of it all — more so, really, because it fits in so well with the tone of the game around it rather than coming out of nowhere as an aberration in the middle of a science-fiction comedy.

There’s a lot to quibble about in Rockvil. As believable as the city in general is, the writing is sometimes frustratingly perfunctory. Meretzky has a tendency to just tell us what something is in the manner of a tourist guidebook or government brochure rather than give a real physical sense of place. So, we learn that “Rockvil Municipal Stadium is a multipurpose sporting event facility, home of both baseball’s Rockvil Bobcats and soccer’s Rockvil Rockets.” Okay, but what’s it like there? Where am I standing inside? What do I see and smell and hear and feel? This mode of description gets particularly confusing as we go deeper into the future. The game always acts as if Perry knows this place intimately. Yet the whole ostensible purpose of visiting these future Rockvils is to find out what the (simulated) future holds. If I have full access already to the simulated memories of the Perry of the future, why do I need to go there to access them? But here we’re getting into the more problematic if also philosophically interesting parts of the game, which I’m going to reserve for the next article…

I also wish the implementation was less sketchy. There are lots of interesting little Easter eggs, but they’re hard to find because most of the time the game doesn’t much reward actions other than just wandering around and reading the room descriptions. And even when you do stumble upon them they sometimes leave you wanting more. When I played the game before writing these articles, I found in 2041 a delightful little book store where I bought The Wizard of Oz, a favorite from Perry’s childhood. Given the tradition of bookstores in dystopian literature as seats of resistance and beacons of freedom, I went back there in every later time: to see how it had changed, to see how the “kindly” proprietor was doing, to hopefully buy more books that would tell me more about Perry’s state of mind amidst the societal decline. But there was nothing new to see or do, until the place was closed completely and that was that. I of course understand that many of these complaints can be laid directly at the feet of technical limitations. Still, I can’t help but think about how A Mind Forever Voyaging could be even better with better writing and a deeper world to explore.

The other obvious complaint to make is thematic: that A Mind Forever Voyaging isn’t exactly the fairest of political critiques. At risk of sounding too inflammatory, I will say that the game puts its finger on a certain authoritarian impulse that strikes me as a bothersome undercurrent to so much Republican political thought. But still, the game’s message that we’re all going to wind up food for roving cannibalistic mutants if we vote Republican is a bit farther than I’m willing to go. In the last act of the game we meet Richard Ryder himself at last. Consistent with Meretzky’s view of Reagan as an “asshole,” he’s content to just make Ryder a mustache-twirling villain, guilty not only of bad policy but of fundamentally bad faith. There’s literally no division in the game’s universe between a Reagan Republican and a full-blown fascist.

"Now let's get a few ground rules straight, Perelman. Nothing is stopping the Plan. Even if I didn't think your damn tapes were faked, I wouldn't give a damn. A helluva lot of people have a helluva lot at stake in this thing, and so what if a lot of creeps who can't take care of themselves get a little hurt." "I'm very frightened, Senator," says Perelman, his voice laced with sarcasm. "Shut up," Ryder shouts back. "I said that I'm doing the talking here!

"And let me tell you another thing, Perelman. Don't think that just because you've been on the news and been a big hot shot around here, you're gonna get some special consideration, because all that doesn't mean diddly-squat in the kind of power circles I'm talking about!"

Ryder is getting really worked up; his normal, fatherly demeanor is completely gone. "Perelman, you're an even bigger idiot than I imagined if you think we'd let some two-bit egghead scientist and some high-tech whiz bang computer stand in our way! Remember this -- if you were to have some unforeseen accident, you wouldn't be the first person who's gotten crushed by standing in the way of the Plan!" Perelman, with a quick glance in your direction, says, "Quite an oration, Senator. Vintage thug. I wish I could save it for posterity. Would you be willing to go on the record with that statement?" Ryder becomes even more livid. "A real jokester, huh? Lemme tell you this, Perelman -- you'd better stop joking and start listening to my advice, or you're not going to be around to care about posterity, understand?

"So, here's the bottom line, Perelman. My men are going to stay here and keep the lid shut tight on you troublemakers, until the Plan is the law of this land. Nobody leaves, no communications at all, and don't worry about visitors; we'll take care of that. And if I get any trouble out of you, I swear to God I'll personally pull the plug on that goddam wonder machine of yours. Got it?" He stomps out without waiting for a reply, leaving Perelman sputtering in anger. A few seconds later, National Guardsmen enter and escort Perelman away.

Again, and while righteous anger certainly has a power of its own, I sometimes wish A Mind Forever Voyaging had a little more nuance about it.

After we prevent Ryder from pulling PRISM’s plug and thwart his Plan, a sequence which contains the only significant puzzles in the game, we come to the lengthy and justifiably oft-remarked epilogue in a Rockvil of the 2091 of a different timeline, a veritable liberal utopia.

The headline story is about a newly released study which indicates that the average life expectancy for both sexes has now passed one hundred years, and success in the development of regeneratives should send that figure even higher. Despite the dropping mortality rate, global population remains stable at just under two billion, with offworlding now running at a staggering seven million people annually.

To celebrate next month's special twentieth anniversary Disarmament Day, the World Council has passed a bill authorizing fireworks displays in each of the former capital cities of the twenty-two former nuclear powers. The fireworks displays, by Aerialist designer Jean M'gomo, will feature disarmament themes, and will be the largest display of pyrotechnic art in this century.

A story on an inside page catches your eye: "Perry Simm, Noted Author, To Join Crew of Silver Dove," reads the headline. "Perry Simm, author and poet, recipient of the 2089 Mexicana Prize, has been selected from nearly a thousand applicants to be the resident author aboard the Silver Dove, the space colony that is currently being equipped for mankind's first interstellar journey, a trip expected to last a dozen generations."

The epilogue, of which the above newspaper is only a modest part, goes on to show Perry reunited with a healthy and happy Jill and with a clean, prosperous, and peaceful Rockvil in which everyone has excellent health care, access to higher education, support when they need it, and freedom to do and be whatever they wish. And you know what? Having lived for almost five years now in two of the three happiest countries in the world, I have to say that that’s just a better way to run a country. Oh, sure, the epilogue is over the top, so much so that it’s almost hard to take entirely at face value. Yet Meretzky clearly, profoundly cares. In this era of irony and antiheroes and cool detachment, the gawky sentimentally of A Mind Forever Voyaging‘s epilogue comes across as brave and inspiring and kind of beautiful. Really, what is so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

Infocom saw A Mind Forever Voyaging as likely to prompt discussion and controversy, just as a similarly strident book-borne critique of Reaganomics would. Far from running from it, they positively courted such a response, a remarkable fact indeed when one considers that they were still desperately trying to sell Cornerstone to a corporate America who thought Reagan was pretty great. The back of the package announced A Mind Forever Voyaging as a “major departure for Infocom,” and the game was announced at a press conference held at the New York Public Library to emphasize its literary qualities. In light of all this, the game’s reception was perhaps the most dismaying possible: nobody seemed to have much of anything substantive to say about it. Astonishingly given how unsubtle it is, many or most reviewers didn’t realize the political critique existed at all — or, if they did, knew better (or their editors did) than to touch on it even in passing. A Mind Forever Voyaging attracted none of the buzz of Chris Crawford’s contemporaneous Balance of Power. The mainstream press was moving on from bookware and with it moving on from Infocom, and everyone inside the industry took it as just another adventure game, albeit one with a weird shortage of puzzles. Sales amounted to no more than 30,000 or so, making A Mind Forever Voyaging Infocom’s least successful game to date (excepting the oddball Fooblitzky). Infocom took this as a rejection of the whole idea of puzzleless interactive fiction, even though their final game of 1985, the much more traditional Spellbreaker, wouldn’t sell much better despite being available on many more platforms. Neither Meretzky nor Infocom would ever attempt anything quite like A Mind Forever Voyaging again.

We, however, aren’t yet done with the game. There’s a whole additional set of ideas here which are if anything even more interesting than the more straightforward political allegory. We’ll get to them next time.

Comments
26 Responses

- Felix

April 29, 2014 at 4:58 pm

I have a couple of gripes with your article. First, if you think neoliberalism is significantly different from fascism, remember what’s been going on in Greece last year, or in Romania the year before, or in the UK not long before that. Today, the riot police will beat you up if you dare protest against austerity policies in the streets. Tomorrow… are you feeling safe at home? Rewatch V for Vendetta one of these days.

Second, I’m tired of hearing social and political messages being criticized as strident. That sounds dangerously like “stop yelling! people will notice I’m raping and killing you”. Subtlety doesn’t work, especially in new media, and certain messages absolutely need to be heard.

In retrospect, what worries me the most is that so few people predicted what a disaster neoliberal policies were going to be; almost everyone used to acclaim Thatcher and Reagan, and look where we are now…

For that alone, Meretzky deserves praise. And history vindicated his message as well as his game design.

- Jimmy Maher

April 30, 2014 at 6:21 am

1. I think you need to be careful not to commit the logical fallacy of stuffing a whole lot of disparate things into a box labelled “Neoliberalism” and declaring that these things are all the same. While there may be a common thread linking the events you mention, lumping them together with the Republican agenda of today, much less thirty years ago, is problematic. Conservatism in America is a different beast from conservatism in Europe: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/04/future-right. We should try to understand each thing on its own terms first, then look for commonalities. For the record, yes, I do think a Reagan Republican is significantly different from a fascist.

2. There’s a place in art for pure cries of rage and frustration, especially in more visceral forms like music (remember Bono yelling “Fuck the revolution!” in the Rattle and Hum version of “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” the last time he seemed like he really cared instead of a rock star playing someone who really cared) and poetry and perhaps even painting. However, if your purpose is to *convince* such an approach is rarely productive. At its worst it just leads to a sort of self-satisfied solipsism, an echo chamber that makes the teller/artist feel better but changes nothing in the world at large. If you want an example of such a message at the extreme, read one of the comments to the article before this one. Did it convince you of anything? If everyone is always shouting, we’re just, well, all shouting at each other.

- Felix

April 30, 2014 at 6:57 am

“Help! They’re beating me to death!”

“Calm down and politely explain what’s bothering you. People will think you’re overreacting.”

“Aaargh! Glg glg!”

“I give up. There’s no way to have a coherent dialogue with you.”

*bleeds to death on the sidewalk*

“And clean up your own messes.”

- R Flowers

July 31, 2014 at 7:05 pm

For the record, yes, I do think a Reagan Republican is significantly different from a fascist.

Uh, thanks… I guess?

- Duncan Stevens

April 29, 2014 at 5:41 pm

Somehow I had never made a connection to the song before. REM released “Reckoning” in April 1984, so it might not be a coincidence. (It was not exactly a chart-topper, but perhaps Meretzky, just a few years removed from MIT, was still listening to college rock.)

You may be getting to this next time, but: it’s made clear, around the edges, that Perelman does not exactly have an open mind about all this. The backstory explicitly says that the PerrySimm project was developed “to deter Senator Ryder and his plan.” Perelman develops the simulation, you go in and record what he wants you to record, and you’re done when you’ve assembled enough “evidence.” In that sense, whether deliberately or not, AMFV is less about the consequences of a certain political program than about the (theoretical) ability of a very determined opponent with good tools to come up with ways to stop that program. (Like, say, an interactive fiction author.)

The sample transcript is an interesting tell. It’s the same sort of thing as the game itself, but in the sample, you’re looking at what will happen if the President’s proposed “Population Control Package,” contents undescribed, which various religious groups are fighting, isn’t passed. It turns out everything becomes terrible, people starve, etc. Now, it’s possible that a “Population Control Package” could be nothing that you or I would find objectionable, but the historical precedents for this sort of initiative aren’t particularly heartening. So there’s an implication that this sort of argument-by-simulation is not entirely free of problems.

- Keith Palmer

April 29, 2014 at 8:52 pm

I’ve noticed before what might be called a “subversive reading” or two of the game to the effect of implying Perry Simm was “set up” by Perelman and company to support the status quo, and in amusing myself with the thought it would be a trivial matter to tweak the game’s structure and create a “conservative AMFV” (although I wonder a little if their own “forecasts of doom” are measured enough to allow even the first flush of apparent prosperity that makes what follows stand out so much) I do just sort of come back to supposing that all authors of fiction have their own advantages when it comes to supporting their points of view.

In seeing the discussion go this particular way, though, I am reflecting on how I first played the game around 1993 or 1994 (before I’d been “prompted” by the discussions of anyone else on how to see it), and wonder if I managed to sort of miss the political statement. I thought it was interesting to be able to just poke around and not have to be always “unlocking doors” (by that point, I suppose I’d come to think I just wasn’t very good at solving the puzzles in Infocom games), and the slow decay that started setting in surprised me and troubled me, such that I just thought “it’s a problem I have to solve!”… except that once I’d managed to warn Perelman, I couldn’t figure out how to stay switched on and set the game aside until I first went on the Internet in 1995 and started looking for information on the Infocom games. (With the discussion of earlier adventures, I suppose now the game was similar to Deadline and the other mysteries in that you had to wait in likely places.)

In any case, while I’ve been amused by the way AMFV’s stature seems to have risen over time with the way perspectives towards interactive fiction have changed and I may sort of “forgive” its “broad puddle” model of implementation as a demonstration that minimalism has its own certain advantages, I may see it myself as much a game that’s “easy to play through” as anything else more profound, because I don’t need to draw a map (or have one ready to hand, beyond perhaps the one in the documentation) or have to remember a whole series of solutions (as I can with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by this point) to finish it.

(Just as a footnote, my understanding of the bookstore is that buying The Wizard of Oz there means that book is mentioned as being torn up with gleeful maliciousness in a Border Security Force raid later on in the simulation.)

- Jimmy Maher

April 30, 2014 at 5:42 am

Your last paragraph does sort of illustrate one of problems I alluded to in the article. The police can only tear the book up if you leave it lying around in your apartment, which most players probably aren’t all that likely to do. So this scene, while perhaps effective, is awfully hard to come by; I only found it by looking through the disassembled game file.

- Torbjörn Andersson

April 30, 2014 at 7:14 am

Isn’t it enough to just buy the book during an earlier simulation? I don’t remember having to do anything more than than when I accidentally stumbled over that book tearing scene.

- Jimmy Maher

April 30, 2014 at 7:27 am

I definitely bought the book during my last playthrough and never saw the book-tearing scene. Something else must need to happen to trigger it. I’d assumed from the text the book would have to be lying in the apartment, but maybe it’s something else…

- Jimmy Maher

April 30, 2014 at 5:52 am

These arguments for a more subversive reading are certainly fascinating, but I don’t think Meretzky had anything like them in mind. Based on Jason Scott’s interviews as well as everything else I’ve ever seen Meretzky say or write about the game, it’s pretty clear that his primary, very straightforward agenda was to offer a forceful critique of Republican policies of the mid-1980s. The fact that the game can support so many other readings, raises so many other issues that have nothing to do with politics, seems almost accidental. Which could easily lead to whole new discussion about schools of literary criticism and the Role of the Author of the Work and eventually lead us, as so many things do, to smack against deconstructionism. But maybe another time… :)

- matt w

April 29, 2014 at 6:28 pm

While we’re talking politics, “vigorous prosecution of tax evasion” can’t be said to be part of today’s Republican agenda; kneecapping the IRA has been a priority for the GOP since the Roth hearings at least.

- Andrew Dalke

April 29, 2014 at 8:18 pm

While I can’t say that it’s a particularly Republican agenda, there have been vigorous prosecutions of overseas tax evasion during the last few years. Caught in the cross-fire are Americans living overseas like me and our host, who are subject to increased reporting requirements, like FACTA, and higher penalties.

- Jimmy Maher

April 30, 2014 at 5:38 am

I assume you mean IRS, not IRA — although I’m sure many Republicans would love to kneecap the IRA too. :)

But “vigorous prosecution of tax evasion” has been a part of the Republican public agenda to the extent that they use it as a (fundamentally unserious) answer to the question of where the money’s going to come from if they implement all of the tax cuts they say they will. Mitt Romney during the last Presidential campaign, for instance, could offer only “close loopholes and catch cheaters” in the way of clear answers to this question.

- Duncan Stevens

April 30, 2014 at 1:40 pm

Well, yes and no. Republicans tend to be very gung-ho on tax evasion when it pertains to the EITC:

http://www.urban.org/publications/900641.html

But less so on corporate taxes and upper-income taxpayers:

http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/jonathan-chait/why-republicans-love-tax-cheats

Pinpointing the source of these different approaches is left as an exercise for the reader.

- Evan Miller

April 29, 2014 at 9:18 pm

Of course, coming across this game for the first time in 2011, without being told beforehand that it was even political – I came to the conclusion that it was critical of both religion and “Big Government”.

And that Big Government was almost certainly liberal – whether I concluded this due to echoes of 1984’s anti-communism, or just my own views on which party has made (slightly) more progress in turning America into a dystopian wasteland, I cannot say.

Sorry, Meretzky. If it’s any consolation to you, I was able to explain to a friend yesterday that Vonnegut wasn’t serious about the Harrison Bergeron thing.

- John G

April 30, 2014 at 7:16 am

Richard Ryder does seem like a bit of a stock, on-the-nose villain, doesn’t he? Especially after the wonderful characterization of Perry Simm in “Dakota magazine.” It sounds like a draft written to meet a deadline and that there was no time to give Ryder a little more nuance.

Ryder reminds me of the bad guy from “The Dead Zone.”

- X

April 30, 2014 at 6:17 pm

Well…. The problem with peace, love and understanding is that it assumes that you’re working with another party who will bargain in good faith. You can lay all the peace and love you want on somebody like Vladimir Putin, and he’ll still snap up Crimea when he feels like it. You can lay down your arms and let the North Koreans take over the whole of Korea and you’ll wind up with millions more people subject to the mess that North Korea is. Sometimes, you have to accept evils (war) for the greater good (defending against tyrants).

Or to paraphrase our greatest philosopher, Mel Brooks: “Evil will always triumph [when] good is dumb.”

Anyway, to bring this back around to gaming, I would say that the ultimate realization of the vision of this game is in Sim City. You really have a place that works like the simulation in aMFV. And you have to follow pretty much the “right” political philosophy to make your city thrive: cleaning up pollution, building schools and libraries, adding mass transit. It kind of makes me wonder why there’s no gaming in the niche between Sim City and Civilization: where you can manage the priorities of a nation but not necessarily try to take over the world.

- Jimmy Maher

May 1, 2014 at 5:52 am

I was actually thinking that maybe if and when I get around to writing about SimCity I should try to recreate Rockvil therein…

- X

May 1, 2014 at 5:03 pm

I guess it just wouldn’t be the same without the social-engineering aspects. You can get some of that in Alpha Centauri (SMAC), where you have the option of declaring your society to be a Police State whose highest value is Will to Power and whose future tech is designed to allow Thought Control. And if the people rise up in opposition to your draconian rule, you can always have them Nerve Stapled.

Actually, now that I think about it, SMAC has some design philosophy in common with text adventures. As you progress through the game, the quotes and videos reveal the story of Planet. You have to read a bit between the lines, but there’s some fascinating stuff there. And as long as you’re going to accept a style of play like aMFV where you’re doing more exploration than puzzle-solving, the lack of puzzle-play in SMAC is no detriment. The addition of a fantastic 4X game is just a bonus!

- Andrew H

May 1, 2014 at 11:32 pm

You might enjoy Shadow President and Hidden Agenda then.

SimCity seems to come from a more conservative mind set than this game, since the main effect on growth rate comes from property taxes. Sims will happily live in a polluted town with no jobs, no services and no water… as long as you don’t try to raise taxes above 0%.

- Jimmy Maher

May 2, 2014 at 5:58 am

Sounds like a Republican paradise! (Sorry, couldn’t resist…)

- iPadCary

May 2, 2014 at 7:44 pm

Jimmy, I swear on all that is Holy & Goode that this was playing as I reread this article…..

http://tinypic.com/r/33w05jo/8

- Jimmy Maher

May 6, 2014 at 5:31 am

A very good choice for any occasion…

- Jon

May 5, 2014 at 7:36 pm

Fate of the World is an interesting game that sort of bridges the political tone of SimCity while having a broader world-view like Civilization.

- G Grobbelaar

August 29, 2015 at 2:44 pm

How the World is so Different Yet the Same, astounds me! (Brings a Moody Blues song to mind)!
I didn’t really wanted to comment on AMFV till part 3, but I decided to post anyway!
AMFV is so “Realistic” in the sense here in SA that it makes “salt water well up in my eyes” I grew up in those years when I thought everything was bliss, but very young I was given the brutal truth of what “Racism” is and how it effects lives! I had my grandfather to thank for it as he taught me the One and Only Truth about Humans: as brutal and loving as the human race can be, its the individual that counts, Thus a Person IS a Person until THAT Person proves You wrong!
This is where SM’s AMFV hit me when I played it! Now I live in a country where the legacy is not about the individual, but a nation! SM’s world is my “Reality” where I have to live on a knifes edge as being a “White” person that is part of the nation that is a whole not an individual!
As for Bono! I wil never have his music as he is the “ashole” here! He said he will gladly sing “Kill a Boer” with a politician that is prominent here!

- G Grobbelaar

August 29, 2015 at 3:13 pm

One last thing: Why is it the Rats goes first when the ship sinks? And those left behind must keep it afloat?

A Mind Forever Voyaging, Part 3: Through Strange Seas of Thought, Alone
May 8, 2014

Let’s begin today with the ending of A Mind Forever Voyaging, with that lengthy epilogue which we discussed last time. Not only does it present a glorious public future modeled on liberal notions of good governance, but an equally glorious personal future for Perry Simm. He and Jill remain blissfully in love, about to head off into space for their last and grandest adventure as members of the first of a dozen generations that will live out their lives aboard the colony ship Silver Dove, “mankind’s first interstellar journey.” Their son Mitchell, in this timeline a marine biologist rather than a fascist, calls to wish them bon voyage with grandchildren and great-grandchildren and in-laws arrayed behind him — a touching scene, even if it is a bit strange that neither Mitchell nor anyone else could be bothered to actually come to Rockvil to take advantage of the last chance they will ever have to see Perry and Jill in person. (I suspect old Mitchell is still a bad seed at heart.) It would all be pretty heartwarming stuff, except for one mantra I can’t seem to excise from my head when I play through it: none of this is real! What are we supposed to make of all this in that light?

The PRISM program that spawned Perry — the name it shares with the recent American mass-survelliance program is presumably coincedental, if ironic in light of the dangers about which Steve Meretzky was so desperate to warn us — is described by its founder and leading researcher, Abraham Perelman, in the edition of Dakota Online included with the game. Earlier attempts at creating artificial intelligence by laboriously coding self-awareness into a machine, he notes, all failed miserably.

“If you recall, the previous attempts had failed not because of the design of their machines, but because of their methods of inputting data.” The Vice-President nodded. “The theory behind our process was to make the programming of the machine as similar to the ‘programming’ of the human mind as possible. We would simulate EXACTLY the life experiences of a human being from the very first day of its life.

“Naturally, it was easier said than done. We had to design inputs that would precisely simulate every human sense. A cluster of five computers, each one nearly as large as PRISM itself, would be needed simply to monitor and control the simulation. Here’s an example of how this soliptic programming process works:

“It’s the earliest stage of the process, and the simulation cluster is feeding PRISM all the impressions of a six-month-old human infant. The visual is providing an image of a set of keys dangling in front of him. The aural is providing the jangling sounds. In response to this stimulus, PRISM decides to grab the keys with what his senses tell him is his tiny fist. The visual shows the tiny fist moving into view toward the keys, and then the tactile begins sending the hard, smooth, and jagged feel of the keys. Just one of a million examples that make up a single day’s worth of experiences.

“With the help of a Williams-Mennon grant, we began building PRISM and the simulation cluster in 2020, and the programming process began a year later.”

As the story opens, Perry has “lived” his first twenty years inside the simulated reality Perelman and his colleagues have so painstakingly prepared for him.

The basic idea here is one that’s been batted around AI circles for decades. It arises from an insight transcendently described by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid a few years before A Mind Forever Voyaging‘s release and given a more practical application to AI by Marvin Minsky in The Society of Mind a few years after: that incredibly complex systems, even what we call consciousness, can emerge from the most primitive of building blocks, like a bunch of tiny neurons that can each be either on or off — or a bunch of electrical bits inside a computer that can each be in one of the same two states. We may not be able to program intelligence, but we should be able to grow it like a baby by exposing a sufficiently powerful computer to stimulus.

Or maybe not. With all due apologies to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, it must be said that a human baby is not a tabula rasa. She comes into the world with her pump already well primed, with lots of, if you like, programming already in place. A good example is the process of language acquisition. As Noam Chomsky has persuasively argued, babies emerge from the womb with intellects keenly honed, with lots of programming already in place, for picking up language. This ability then atrophies as early as age five. This explains why we never quite know any language as well as our mother tongue; why it’s the only one we can speak without a trace of an accent; why people like my wife who grew up with two (or more) languages are so unbelievably fortunate; why people like me who need to learn new languages later in life and aren’t preternatural linguistic geniuses like, say, James Joyce often find it to be a lifelong struggle that they can never entirely win. What equivalent can a would-be intelligent computer muster to this biological firmware? And without this nature to prime the pump, how can nurture do its thing? This is just one of the unresolved (unresolvable?) problems that PRISM presents to we who are dutifully trying to take A Mind Forever Voyaging at face value.

There’s a seemingly fanciful idea that some physicists have been discussing for some time now: that we are all actually Perry Simms, entities living inside an inconceivably huge and sophisticated simulation. When you get down to the subatomic level, our rich analog universe does seem oddly digital, ultimately made up of tiny indivisible particles (even if we’re not quite sure yet that we’ve found this tiniest and most basic building block). Less facetiously, philosopher Nick Bostrom has set forth an argument that, as such grandly conceptual arguments go, seems fairly air tight. Moore’s Law being what it is, he says, any race of intelligent beings given enough time must eventually develop the ability to simulate a universe as complex as ours inside a machine. Therefore one of three possibilities must hold true: all intelligent races somehow go extinct before they reach that point; all intelligent races decide for some reason not to continue to obsess over virtual realities the way that we humans do today; or the “real” universe, wherever and whatever it may be, is filled with countless simulated universes — very likely simulations nested within simulations nested within simulations — and our universe is almost certainly one of them.

Now let’s think about that idea within the frame of A Mind Forever Voyaging. One thing on which Bostrom and his hard-science colleagues agree is that we won’t have the computing power to even begin to contemplate such a simulation for many, many generations to come. Yet Perelman has apparently done it in 2020, using a hardware setup that sounds suspiciously like the fleet of red DEC refrigerators that powered Infocom’s development efforts. You might argue that he’s actually only simulating one mid-sized town — luckily for everyone, it seems Perry never developed a yen for travel — but, well, butterflies do flap their wings outside the borders of Rockvil, and that has its effects within the town’s borders. And of course that problematic epilogue busts those boundaries wide open by sending Perry on a journey to the stars. The simulation runs not just in real time, but in better than real time; Perry’s first twenty years required only eleven in the world outside the simulation. For the PRISM project to succeed in its goal of raising a human with all the affect and intuitive knowledge of you and me, the simulated reality must be of absolute fidelity. No crude abstractions will serve the purpose, even if they do offer a tempting excuse for the sometimes sketchy implementation of the Rockvil we encounter through our screens and keyboards. Certainly Perry never remarks that the real world of Perelman and Senator Rider and the rest that he encounters after his “awakening” is any richer or more believable than the one he knew before, nor that its inhabitants feel any more real.

Let’s think about that last for a moment. Perry has lived for twenty years surrounded by fellow humans who apparently see and feel and talk and live and love just as he does. Here we come to the biggest paradox of all: in order to raise Perry in such realistic surroundings, in order to create the affective construct AI researchers have been dreaming of since before Colossus sprang to life, Perelman would need to be able to create not just an affective AI construct but a whole city — universe? — full of them. It’s the chicken or the egg writ large, an eternal golden braid indeed.

Given that he’s managed to create this magnificent simulated universe hundreds or thousands of years ahead of schedule, why is Perelman so obsessed with one simulated inhabitant named Perry Simm? What distinguishes Perry from anyone else being simulated, other than Perelman’s inexplicable regard? Why does Perelman need Perry to go into his own pocket universe and tell him what’s going on in there? Wouldn’t an impartial researcher be able to view the data more effectively and scientifically from outside the bubble? Did Perelman and his programmers really forget to build a user interface for their program? If so, what have they been doing in the eleven years since they started it running? For that matter, just why does everyone trust this simulation so absolutely that they’re willing to let it decide the fate of the nation by telling them what the likely outcome of Richard Ryder’s plan will be?

As Duncan Stevens noted in a comment to my last article, the most charitable reading you can give to A Mind Forever Voyaging as the piece of hard science fiction it seems to want to be is that PRISM is an elaborate scam concocted by Perelman, who’s exactly the sort of unscrupulous and devious liberal megalomaniac that partisan Republicans are accustomed to seeing behind every bush. No other reading makes any sense at all.

Things don’t make a whole lot more sense if we forget the bigger picture and just look at things from the perspective of Perry. Dakota Online mentions the “shock” and “terror” you would feel upon waking up to realize that you’re nothing but a simulated construct, but in truth Perry seems to experience very little of either. It’s all well and good to talk about a Nietzschean will to power and the forging of one’s own meaning for existence out of whole cloth if necessary, but it’s a lot easier to do that when there’s at least some degree of doubt about the fundamental nature of the universe. Confronted with the unassailable fact that the bogeyman in the closet of centuries of philosophy is in fact real, that the existence and the people I thought I knew and loved are all shams, I think I’d be a quivering mass of existential jelly for quite some years at the least. Perry just shrugs and heads off for the World News Network Feed to watch some TV.

When Perry returns to a Rockvil that he’s now well aware to be a computer simulation this knowledge doesn’t seem to affect his experience at all. When Jill is ripped from his arms by Church thugs to be dispatched to a concentration camp, he never seeks refuge in the thought that at least none of this is really happening. Much of this cognitive dissonance is perhaps down to a persistent confusion about which version of Perry we’re inhabiting — a confusion which dogs all of our experiences in Rockvil. As I noted in my last article, the Perry we control inside the simulation often possesses knowledge that the Perry from the outside world wouldn’t.

And then of course comes that epilogue, in which Perry sails off into the sunset with Jill, blissfully untroubled by the knowledge that he’s devoting the rest of his life to playing the world’s most elaborate and immersive computer game. Ironically, the same scenario has a place in A Mind Forever Voyaging‘s earlier stages. The world of 2031 is dogged by a certain amount of low-level controversy about virtual-reality entertainment systems known as “joybooths,” where a disturbing number of people are spending a disturbing amount of time. Joybooths allow them to “escape their worries, even to the point of abandoning their lives.” “Joybooth suicides” are a major thing, claiming nearly 40,000 lives every year. In the first simulated version of Rockvil that we can enter, that of 2041, Perry can experience a joybooth for himself in the local mall. He emerges with “an almost physical longing to return to your fantasy.” The game paints joybooths as a Bad Thing, one of a number of troubling portents hidden by the general economic prosperity of the early post-Plan years. Lest you doubt, consider that Richard Ryder is supported by a pro-joybooth advocacy group called The Joybooth Manufacturers of North America; anything Ryder approves of in A Mind Forever Voyaging is pretty much guaranteed to be wrong and/or evil. Yet what else does Perry do at game’s end but commit the most elaborate and expensive joybooth suicide in history? Poor Dr. Perelman and his colleagues will have to maintain the PRISM computers for decades to come so Perry can enjoy his fantasy. Or maybe not: maybe they pull the plug just as the game ends…

Now, you might say that this article descended into pointless nitpicking quite some paragraphs ago, that a certain amount of handwaving and blasé acceptance is needed to appreciate the larger message of A Mind Forever Voyaging. You might even say that A Mind Forever Voyaging is really a fable or an allegory, not a piece of realistic fiction. But it doesn’t feel like it wants to be a Pilgrim’s Progress for the modern political age. It feels like it wants to be a piece of credible, thoughtful hard science fiction. Why else include all of the backstory about the PRISM project and Perry’s origins, all of those details about AI theory?

Lest I be accused of doing nothing but carp, let me note that there are ways to fix at least some of A Mind Forever Voyaging‘s more seemingly intractable problems. Meretzky might have eliminated the whole “Perry Simm waking up to reality” angle and just cast the player as a real-world researcher experiencing the near future through the eyes of an unabashedly simulated Perry qualitatively no different from any of the other inhabitants of Rockvil. This might have cost the game some of the pathos evoked in us by poor Perry’s plight as an AI construct, but would have led to a much more coherent work of fiction. As it is, A Mind Forever Voyaging is, like these last two articles, bifurcated in intent, trying to offer both a compelling and impassioned political argument and a more thoughtful and philosophical exploration of the ramifications of virtual realities and strong AI. It succeeds to a limited extent at the former; it collapses into contradiction and nonsensicality when it comes to the latter. Perhaps because Meretzky knew he would likely get few such carte-blanche opportunities in the future, A Mind Forever Voyaging tries to do far, far too much.

But then again that very overstuffed quality is a big part of its appeal. If a proverbial Great Work is one that gets us thinking and talking and even obsessing over ramifications — even if only in reaction against much of what the work seems to be saying — then judging from the amount of virtual ink I’ve spilled on it A Mind Forever Voyaging would seem to qualify. If we’re feeling extremely kind, we might even postulate that the game is aware of all of its ironies and internal contradictions: that the juxtaposition of the joybooth-suicide plague with the epilogue, for instance, is intentional; even that it’s well aware of a possible subversive reading of Perry’s voyages into the simulated future as a conspiracy spawned by Perelman to put paid to Ryder and his Plan. This would make it a work of stunning subtlety. However, judging from everything I’ve ever heard anyone involved say about the game (which is quite a lot), I’m not buying that argument. The next question, then, is whether self-awareness or lack thereof matters. Does authorial intent trump all, or is a work of art that accidentally does what it does, even one that undermines the very arguments its author wants to make, legitimate on its own terms? Many contemporary scholars would claim the latter, and for what it’s worth I think they might be right in this case at least.

Its artistic merits aside, A Mind Forever Voyaging‘s historical importance is unimpeachable, not only as the first predominately puzzleless adventure game but as the first attempt to emphatically use the medium for something more than escapism, to say something important and immediate and real about the world around us. If we can call it a masterpiece only by grading it on a curve as steep as Mount Rushmore, well, so be it. These were early days for ludic narrative still in 1985, and it would have been a bit unrealistic to expect Steve Meretzky to crank out an Anna Karenina. That he had an A Mind Forever Voyaging in him is more than remarkable enough.

Comments
29 Responses

- Jason Dyer

May 8, 2014 at 12:53 pm

Why does Perelman need Perry to go into his own pocket universe and tell him what’s going on in there? Wouldn’t an impartial researcher be able to view the data more effectively and scientifically from outside the bubble?

To search a universe you need a search engine, and Perry is the search engine.

I could easily imagine other reasons why the system requires a hard AI to do any processing. We’re talking about sci-fi technology here; I find plot-hole poking as if we’re not to be kind of unconvincing.

- Duncan Stevens

May 8, 2014 at 3:11 pm

But Perry isn’t acting as a search engine. He’s wandering more or less at random around the simulation. In effect, he’s gathering anecdotes from (presumably) a large amount of data already compiled and put into the sim. It doesn’t make sense to present the anecdotes when you have the data. “The crime rate in Rockvil in 2061 will be X” seems more salient than “an AI in our 2061 simulation got mugged”…

…but you might well take the latter course for propaganda purposes, and if you don’t think the assumptions that underlie your data are going to stand up to scrutiny. Whether intended or not, that’s the picture of Perelman that emerges.

- Jason Dyer

May 9, 2014 at 2:31 am

he’s gathering anecdotes from (presumably) a large amount of data already compiled

How obvious is this data, though? You’re assuming the data is just like a large textual stream, but for hard AI to exist in the first place the environment needs to be super-exponentially more rich. It might require “the next level” of storage (perhaps a quantum computing-related thing) where it may just not be possible to easily pull out random texts.

- Andrew Plotkin

May 8, 2014 at 7:41 pm

This was also my hedge, and I remember ad-hoccing it as I played the game for the first time. The simulated universe must be running as an opaque blob of data, which Perelman’s computers can iterate on but not analyze. They can only peek into the viewpoint of the “focal character”, Perry. Thus your missions.

It’s only a partial handwave, sure. It commits to the notion that Perry is the only self-aware entity in Rockvil, which brings up all the other happy-ending issues that you mention.

Well, I don’t think we have to draw a boundary between “allegory” and “thoughtful hard science fiction”. The hardest SF has handwavy assumptions. (AI is often the handwaviest.) How metaphorical the setting is is more a matter of the reader’s expertise than of the author’s intent.

- Duncan Stevens

May 8, 2014 at 9:24 pm

I had a similar handwave thought at the time: “our models have generated all this data, but we have no way to look at it except through you wandering around a simulation.” It makes more sense to me, upon reflection, that the models generate perfectly readable data that was plugged into a simulation, and the simulation was used to dramatize the effects of the arguments that Perelman and others were making by more conventional means (evidently with little success).

I can live with the handwave, but the latter hangs together better.

As for how Perry processes all of this, it’s not clear that Perry in the simulations has all of the memories of 2031 “real world” Perry. 2041 Perry could, in this view, simply have another ten years of living in Rockvil in his head, not the experience of “waking up.” That would make the experiences in the simulations real, for him. In effect, a separate copy of the AI was made at the time of “wakeup.” Another handwave, admitedly.

- Anonymous

May 8, 2014 at 9:38 pm

Thanks for jogging my memory; the description of the game (I haven’t played it) reminded me of the movie “Deja Vu” in which some scientists claim to have a machine that can display a recreation of events from the recent past (just a matter of hours), but only from a specific point of view located in close proximity to the machine’s later location. The point of view can be moved so long as it doesn’t stray further away, but the recreation cannot be paused or rewound to allow for multiple run throughs. Of course that’s an obvious lie, and the truth about the machine comes out later.

- Jason Dyer

May 9, 2014 at 2:37 am

I think a good comparison is the recent D-Wave controversy about if there’s even quantum effects going on the first place. It seems like it’d be easy to “look at the stream” but the whole point of qbits is they can exist in multiple states simultaneously making that sort of thing only work indirectly.

Hard AI would require such a giant technological advance that we can’t depend on any of the metaphors/methods that we use for current technology.

- Duncan Stevens

May 8, 2014 at 4:05 pm

As to joybooths, I never found that as troubling. Perry is an AI; he *can’t* live in the real world in any meaningful way. The nonsimulated existence he has in 2031 is limited to controlling a few systems in a dedicated project that, presumably, outlived its purpose when Ryder was defeated. I guess, in theory, he could have been wrenched out of PRISM and put into some other system, but it never bothered me that he was allowed to live on in a simulated existence. It seemed like the only alternative was pulling the plug outright, and that didn’t really feel better.

- Jimmy Maher

May 9, 2014 at 5:42 am

But is that really the only alternative? When Perry is first “awoken,” he’s told that validating or invalidating the Plan will be his “first” project. Imagine what a being who combines the intuition and affective qualities of we humans with the number-crunching power of a supercomputer could accomplish and contribute right here in the real world. Instead Perry chooses to float off into a fantasy.

- Matt Wigdahl

May 12, 2014 at 3:47 pm

Are you claiming that Perry is such an entity? I don’t see anything in the game that indicates that he has such capabilities. He can access library information and interface with external systems, but at about the level that a human can using Google or a good home-automation setup.

Perry seems pretty clearly the closest thing Perelman could come to a simulated _human_ mind, and one that operates at pretty close to normal speed at that (not even a 2:1 acceleration factor). Heck, he even needs to sleep! He may have had the type of superhuman potential you imply, but it certainly wasn’t strongly hinted at in the course of the game.

The virtual world he retired to was, to him, the real world, with real relationships and connections that he didn’t at all have in our reality. If I were pulled away from my life and family into a “higher” world and told that my new job was to watch as the home I knew and the people I loved were used as lab rats to prove points in a political spat, I can’t say I’d be thrilled.

The larger issue to me is that no satisfying resolution for Perry seems possible given the frame. He knows he has no privacy; the entire simulation machinery is designed to shape and access his every thought and action. His world and everything he cares about are simulated constructions with (one assumes) no self-awareness. He himself exists at the sufferance of the Simulation Controller and he can never know whether he’s being observed or experimented upon.

Whether he decided to “retire” or not, after Perelman woke him for the first time Perry is damned — truly and forever voyaging on strange seas of thought, alone.

- Peter Piers

November 23, 2015 at 8:53 pm

+1

There were a few things running through my mind as I read this article, and Matt Wigdahl has put them very eloquently.

- Duncan Stevens

May 13, 2014 at 2:28 am

It’s unclear to me that Perry does have the “intuition and affective qualities of we humans” when taken out of Rockvil. His “consciousness” was grown there, but whether he could pass as human outside that setting is a different question. Maybe it could; we’re talking about quantum leaps in AI here, so maybe we should assume one more quantum leap.

Even so…what *does* one do with an AI that has those powers? I can think of useful or interesting tasks it could carry out, but an AI that is capable of boredom and loneliness is likely, to my mind, to spend its life bored and lonely. Letting Perry end his days in the simulation seems kinder.

- Felix

May 8, 2014 at 5:35 pm

In all honesty, Star Trek: The Next Generation has tackled similar themes with the character of Professor Moriarty, and didn’t fare much better; the conclusion of episode Ship in a Bottle is morally dubious at best. I can’t blame them, either. It’s a big and delicate issue even if Meretzky didn’t have a political message to convey at the same time, and that was quite obviously what he really cared about.

As for why Perelman and company needed Perry, it’s because they wanted to truly understand those simulated future worlds, and for that they needed a personal perspective — a bird’s eye view simply isn’t enough. This is wonderfully expressed in another TNG episode, The Inner Light, where Picard is made to experience a (simulated) lifetime in an alien civilization, thus getting to understand those long-dead people and their accomplishments infinitely better than entire libraries of scientific treatises would have allowed. We do that in the real world too, when we try to do things they way (we think) Romans used to: such simulations often yield surprising revelations.

Last but not least, maybe I would find the concept of joybooths to be on about the same level of discourse as the suicide booths in Futurama if there weren’t recorded cases of people who died of playing MMORPGs for 30 hours without a break…

- X

May 8, 2014 at 7:58 pm

If you handwave that gently, you’ll never be able to fly. Perry is different because he’s a simulation of an entire human mind from birth to the present. The rest of the universe is simulated at low fidelity. The people are hyper-advanced Sims, but they don’t have total human brains, just the algorithms that simulate humanity to the level required by the simulation.

Why Perry seems unconcerned about Jill being a lo-fi human, I’m not so sure. Perhaps her simulation is more detailed, since Perry interacts with her at a much greater level. A simulation advanced enough to fool a person into thinking it was real would probably add resolution as needed rather than trying to run everything at a fixed level.

Does the game address Perry’s response to being trapped in the simulation of a dystopia? It seems like a natural response would be to condemn the creator for allowing such a thing to exist. How much interaction does he have with the guys running the simulation later in the game?

- Jimmy Maher

May 9, 2014 at 6:06 am

Perry has a very positive relationship throughout the game with the project’s founder and lead researcher, Perelman. No, he never expresses any real resentment toward the people who made him.

The idea of this being a lower-fidelity universe just doesn’t work for me. If Perry is surrounded by Sim-like beings, even advanced ones, he should be the smartest guy in Rockvil, qualitatively different from everyone around him, but he’s not — just an average fellow. When he comes out of the simulation he should notice that the people “outside” are so much more affective, more vibrant than the ones he knew — but he doesn’t. If the world around him is not being entirely simulated all the time, he should notice occasional glitches and limitations, but he doesn’t. (An example, and another plot hole I didn’t get to in the main article: when we try to leave Rockvil in the game we’re told we’ve reached the “boundary of the simulation.” Did Perry, a curious and somewhat adventurous 20-year-old, never ever try to leave the single mid-sized town in which he was born in his entire life prior to his awakening?) And finally, would a simulated world so focused on Perry’s subjective experience that it goes metaphorically dark in the places he doesn’t inhabit at any given moment also be useful as a more global simulation of the social and economic effects of the Plan? I can’t see how these two things are compatible…

- Keith Palmer

May 8, 2014 at 8:53 pm

After reading “Let’s Tell A Story Together” I did begin to mull over these interpretations of AMFV rather more than I might have before, although they do seem couched a little more benevolently here. The real punch of ambiguity does seem to be packed into the epilogue, and there, as was said, I can see it as “unintended consequences” of trying to suggest the future can be better. I’ve also contemplated a somewhat different conclusion that might carry the same intended message but avoid the ambiguities, but there I do have to admit how seeing other people tossing out “I’d have done it this way” comments just sometimes seems to me to feed dissatisfaction without really accomplishing anything…

The latest time I played through the game, though, I was paying attention to the “joybooth” sequences, and wound up inclined to think the comments that they’re “reading the mind” and generating a rush of pleasant illusion do seem a bit different than the “simulations” to me. I can also imagine the objection that we’re born with “neural programming” in place being answered by saying that it’s easy enough to imagine “mapping the brain” being separated from “programming it through experience.” Nevertheless, the whole “the ‘people’ around Perry are good enough to live with” issue is something that can prey on you…

- Sniffnoy

May 8, 2014 at 10:15 pm

One note — Nick Bostrom is a philosopher, not a physicist.

- Jimmy Maher

May 9, 2014 at 6:13 am

Thanks! That does maybe explain a possible flaw (in a sense) I see with Bostrom’s argument from the point of view of physics: any simulation of enough fidelity to perfectly simulate a given universe would need as much matter/energy as is contained in that universe to form its bits. Therefore, it seems to me, any simulation we made of (for example) our universe would necessarily have to be of lower fidelity. And therefore, if we’re living in a simulation it’s probably a cruder version of someone else’s incomparably more vibrant and vital universe — a slightly disconcerting thought.

- Peter Pears

May 9, 2014 at 10:41 am

Re Perry being deeply affected by Jill’s predicament though he knows it’s not real, and re the epilogue not being real:

a) Having no reason to doubt the accuracy of the simulation, he knows it would be real eventually;

b) The simulation all around him is what nurtured him from his birth, formative years, and early adulthood. He may know it’s not real, on an intelectual level, but on an emotional level – the one we have to accept exists in the SciFI context of this story – it’s THE real world, it’s the one he lived in. The Jill in these simulations are exactly the same woman he fell in love with. The epilogue is, for Perry, decidedly real, and the most real thing in the world for Perry-the-person; Perry-the-machine doesn’t really exist inside the smulations.

c) Even if you know it’s not real, living through an experience like that will not leave you unphased. Ask any method actor, especially early in their careers.

- Peter Piers

November 23, 2015 at 8:58 pm

It’s very weird to re-read stuff you’ve written! a) doesn’t even make much sense!

As for b) and c), the point’s been made – much better! – by Matt Wigdahl some comments above.

- iPadCary

May 9, 2014 at 4:02 pm

Wow!
ONE game, not a topic, gets THREE parts!
Like I say, one of THE greatest games ever made.

- Andrea

May 9, 2014 at 5:23 pm

It is strange that no mention to “Simulacron-3” by Daniel F. Galouye (a novel of 1964), an the varius movie adaptations from it, has been made….

- Hanon Ondricek

May 11, 2014 at 3:29 pm

In other Infocom articles it was mentioned that many of their authors were coders writing fiction instead of authors writing code. Apparently their ideal would have been to be able to seat an established author in front of a computer with their code and have them crank out an interactive fiction. Imagine how much different their output would have been if they’d had access to Graham Nelson and Inform 7!!

- Peter Pears

May 13, 2014 at 9:27 am

You might be interested in earlier posts of this ongoing history, as Maher has covered that ground pretty well, from Infocom’s aborted attempts to Mindwheel and BTZ.

- John G

May 12, 2014 at 9:18 pm

To paraphrase Film Crit Hulk’s seminal take on these kinds of “plot holes,” it’s because “otherwise there would be no game.”

http://badassdigest.com/2012/10/30/film-crit-hulk-smash-hulk-vs.-plot-holes-and-movie-logic/

AMFV is an emotional journey. It works because it uses the “Suspended” conceit of being trapped behind a screen to make you feel the loneliness of being Perry Simm. I think that’s more important than all the plot sleight of hand needed to make you experience the tragedy of Perry: His painful discovery of who he is, his obsession with saving the people he cares about from Richard Ryder. Finally, like the cowboy at the end of a Western, he is fated never to live in the civilization he helped save but to wander strange seas of thought, no longer reachable through the Communications Interface.

- Dehumanizer

May 13, 2014 at 6:03 pm

The question of PRISM caring about Jill and others in a universe that he knows is a simulation reminds me of a quote by one of my favorite fictional “philosophers”, Conan the Barbarian:

“Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”

- Nate

May 18, 2014 at 5:44 am

I remember reading the AMFV grey box in the shop in the late 80s and imediately going ‘Wait, so this guy thinks he’s human but isn’t? Eeeagh that’s creepy and I’m going to have nightmares about that for years.’ And then playing the game in the 90s (Lost Treasures era) and being a bit sad that nothing was ever said about the whole Matrix-like existential crisis at the root of the story. And also noticing how one-sided and heavy-handed the political commentary was; but still loving it.

Side note: Being brought up outside the US, it took me years – until the 2000s, really – before I really understood that in the USA, US political alignments like the Republican trinity of God, guns and greed really existed and weren’t just literary strawmen. This mix really was so alien to my experience; in New Zealand in 1984, for example, the generation-defining election was between a ‘conservative’ incumbent who wanted to build large public works, centrally manage the economy, control imports, support the US military, and use police to ban protests — versus a ‘Labour socialist’ challenger who wanted to privatise state assets, deregulate industry, reduce taxes on the rich, gut the welfare state, legalise homosexuality, return state lands to Maori, and break our military ties to the USA. The political alignments this represents don’t exist anywhere on the US spectrum either in the 1980s or now; it would be like, um. A Libertarian-Democratic coalition vs Republican-Communists.

So you can imagine my confusion at the strange collection of ideas ‘Senator Ryder’ was putting together in his platform, and why AMFV’s author was so passionate about opposing this odd mixture. I kept wondering why he was attacking such an obvious, weird, strawman who held viewpoints nobody I knew supported. Especially since I was playing it during the Clinton years, and all the chatter on the budding Internet seemed to be from atheist-libertarian types, who again, didn’t fit in the Reagan Republican cluster.

And then came Bush W, and *finally* I understood what AMFV had been about, and that yes, that political alignment _really did_ exist. To be honest it actually shocked me.

- Jimmy Maher

May 18, 2014 at 10:17 am

Yeah. AMFV’s most fundamental flaw, which is if corrected would leave me much less inclined to plot-hole poke, is that it brings up so many important questions — about free will, about reality vs. simulation, about sentience and the limits of sentience, about ethics — and utterly fails to address any of them. I’m always a bit nonplussed when I see people talk about how “moved” they are by Perry’s tragic plight, etc., because nothing in the game so much as hints that we’re supposed to feel that way or that it’s even aware of the *possibility* of reading the story that way. I really believe that problematic epilogue is intended to be unambiguously joyous. If I was Perry, I would at the very least be angry at Perelman for having stolen fifty years of my life. (We did just jump from 2031 to 2081, after all. Why not just jump to Perry’s deathbed and save everyone even more time?) It’s frustrating because these unexamined universalities are really much more interesting than the topical, context-specific political arguments.

And yeah, as I noted in a comment to the previous article, conservatives and liberals do not universally have the same priorities or even agree on the same things from country to country. Here in Denmark the farthest right party is actually for much *more* social assistance and government involvement in people’s lives, especially those of the less educated working-class folks who constitute most of their support. But they want these programs only for “real” Danes, and would like to further limit (it’s already pretty limited except for the highly sought after professionals who bring immediate, tangible economic benefits for Danish companies) or entirely halt immigration into Denmark to keep Denmark for the Danes and all that.

- Nate

May 19, 2014 at 12:26 am

For me – even with my initial misgivings about Perry’s existential crisis – the epilogue _did_ play out as unambiguously joyous, and one of the most moving endings I’ve ever played in any interactive media. I’m not sure quite why. I think it was because I’d come to empathise with ‘simuated Perry’ much more than ‘real PRISM’, and after seeing his world and family collapse into misery, it was a necessary counterpoint to see that a beautiful, humane personal future was still possible. Without that, the game would have felt unremititngly bleak – and bleak dystopic futures were the norm in 1980s SF, and still are today. (What was the last unambigously celebratory future setting you saw in a science-fiction movie or TV? Probably Star Trek, and not the recent war-driven remakes.)

I think I parsed it mentally as that when Perry enters Simulation Mode, it’s almost exactly like he dreams. He ‘knows’ in the back of his mind that the ‘waking’ world exists, and that he has a goal to achieve in the dream – but his simulation world feels totally real. And as in our dreams, he enters the simulation with the memories and backstory of the simulated years, so he naturally feels much more at home there.

I always wished though that I could communicate much more meaningfully with Jill, and tell her the truth about my reality. The ‘if this bank of computers is required just to simuate Perry, how can it simulate everyone else?’ problem did bug me; I think I could handwave it that somehow the AI technology is holistic, like a VM cluster that massively shares files, so it can simulate an entire city for the same cost as simulating just one mind (‘it takes a village to raise an AI’). Which explains how come the PRISM project allowed a city-simulation almost as a spinoff. In which case, really ‘Perry’ and ‘Jill’ and everyone in Rockvil are just equal sub-aspects of PRISM’s multifaceted personality, and neither is less real than the other, meaning they can in fact have a real relationship as equals. (There is a recurring strain in real-world philosophy – Huxley’s ‘perennial tradition’ – that suggests that human consciousness might function similarly as a gestalt entity.) And that idea might be a very interesting direction to take a spiritual sequel, I think. But also, I’d love to know how the mere existence of AIs like PRISM might reshape the world of 2031 – and how an abandoned ‘museum piece’ AI, effectively the father of a new lifeform, might react to seeing what his ‘children’ have evolved into in the real world. I guess for symmetry, it would have to be a ‘liberal dystopia’… (A little like Christopher Priest’s ‘The Space Machine’, which is awesome.)

Sidebar: I can’t wait to see what you write about 1986’sPortal, one of the underappreciated gems of the era, and like AMFV, an experiment that didn’t completely succeed, but I still find massively inspiring for what it attempted.

Spellbreaker
May 16, 2014

As Infocom settled into their middle and latter period, their game releases also settled into a fairly predictable pattern that tried to balance innovation with traditionalism. Steve Meretzky:

The hardcore gamers, the people who liked Zork and just wanted more like Zork from Infocom, they were always made unhappy by [games like] A Mind Forever Voyaging or Plundered Hearts or Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It. Anything that we did that was moving in a different direction or in any way experimental, they would always squawk. So the company’s plan was basically to try to do some of each, to always do a game or two every year that would be the “red meat” for those original hardcore players, and then to try to innovate with some of the other games each year.

Our subject for today, Spellbreaker, was the long-awaited third game in the Enchanter trilogy as well as Infocom’s most blatant of all bits of pandering to these traditionalists, who made up a much larger percentage of the company’s fan base than Infocom’s modern reputation for relentless innovation and dedication to the literary aspects of the humble text adventure might seem to imply. An “Expert” level game, it was explicitly created by Dave Lebling as a response to the carping of the hardcore of the hardcore that Infocom’s games had been getting much too easy since the days of Zork. “You want a diamond-hard, traditional puzzlefest?” Infocom asked. “Fine, we’ll give you a diamond-hard, traditional puzzlefest!” Coming out just weeks after the radical departure that was A Mind Forever Voyaging, Spellbreaker could almost be read as an apology to the hardcore for that namby-pamby, touchy-feely effort.

That said, it should also be noted that the concerns about creeping easiness, engendered by an ever more thorough testing process and the thoroughgoing sense of fair play that was always one of Infocom’s noblest traits, were not confined to fans outside the company. Meretzky himself, the perpetrator of A Mind Forever Voyaging, has noted that he also felt concerned as time wore on that at least certain types of Infocom games were losing some of their core appeal, that the struggle and sweat of the Zork games, the compulsion to jump out of bed in the middle of the night to test out some crazy action that just might solve a heretofore intractable puzzle, was the very thing that drew many people to them. Spellbreaker would be Infocom’s attempt to rekindle the masochistic joy of Zork.

There’s always a tendency in all forms of criticism to fetishize innovation over virtually everything else; music critics, for instance, will always favor the Clash, who morphed and relentlessly experimented and soon collapsed under the sheer weight of their artistic ambitions, over their punk-era counterparts Stiff Little Fingers, who have just continued to do what they’re good at for decades. It’s an understandable and even defensible impulse, but I also have to confess that, just as I’m more likely to pull out Stiff Little Fingers’s Go For It! than any Clash album, if you asked me which game among A Mind Forever Voyaging and Spellbreaker I most enjoy just playing every five to ten years, I’d have to name Spellbreaker. Spellbreaker is as constrained a design as A Mind Forever Voyaging is boundary-shattering: constrained by its need to please the puzzle-hungry hardcore, by its need to fit in with the two previous games of the Enchanter trilogy and continue with their spell-based puzzle mechanics and Zorkian fantasy premises. But it’s also an absolutely brilliant specimen of traditionalist adventure gaming, one of the best, tightest examples of pure game design Infocom ever crafted.

As old school as its sensibilities may appear in comparison to its immediate predecessor, Spellbreaker is not devoid of theoretical or historical interest. Far from it. In its quiet way, it asserts a profoundly important idea for the craft of adventure-game design: that fairness and difficulty are two independent scales. If virtually any of Infocom’s contemporaries decided to make a self-consciously difficult game like Spellbreaker, they would have simply filled it with punishing mazes and riddles and guess-the-verb problems and inscrutable puzzles dependent on unmotivated actions. We know this because that’s exactly what they did, over and over again. (For instance, have a look at Scott Adams’s two-part alleged brain-burner Savage Island for everything not to do in an adventure game in one convenient place). Certain designers never could seem to separate fairness from difficulty in their minds. (I can’t help but think of Anita Sinclair, who pronounced on the eve of Magnetic Scrolls’s second release Guild of Thieves that this would be an “easier” game. Actually, no, it turned out to be a very hard game — just one that wasn’t blatantly, repeatedly unfair like its predecessor The Pawn.) Many fans still have trouble with the concept today; I get occasional emails in response to my coverage of notable offenders like Roberta Williams’s The Wizard and the Princess and Time Zone asking why I’m so hard on “difficult” games, forcing me to respond that, no, I’m actually only hard on unfair games. One could advance a fairly compelling argument that the failure of the adventure-game industry at large to grasp this distinction played a big part in the commercial death of the text adventure — how many veteran gamers still remember the form largely for mazes, guess-the-verb, and illogical puzzles? — as well as the longstanding commercial doldrums of graphical adventures, what with their pixel hunts and click-everywhere-and-use-everything-on-everything-else-until-something-happens model of game design.

Spellbreaker is very tough, but it’s also downright noble in its commitment to fairness. There is, if you’ll pardon me, no bullshit here, none of the cheap tricks, designed and implemented in less time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee, that designers have so often used to artificially lengthen games and make players pull their hair out. You don’t even need to draw a map to play Spellbreaker — but never fear, you will likely want pen and paper to sketch and plan and diagram a long series of tantalizing puzzles that have been lovingly crafted over days and weeks. In my book, that’s the way a game like this ought to be. Spellbreaker is a veritable capsule history of adventure-game puzzles (the good ones, that is): intricate pure spatial and mathematical puzzles like those so common in the Phoenix games; clever object-application puzzles; logistical puzzles requiring long-term planning; the best and most satisfying application yet of the spell system invented for Enchanter; the latest and greatest and most intricate in an ongoing series of Infocom time-travel puzzles; even a social-interaction puzzle to keep you on your toes. And there are lots and lots of them. While it runs under the standard 128 K Z-Machine, Spellbreaker stuffs it right to its limit, and will take quite some hours to complete. There are one or two puzzles that I might wish had been a bit less difficult — most notably a certain puzzle that takes place in a lava field and hinges on a property of a certain little box that you’re unlikely to discover until you really have exhausted every possibility for experimentation — but none that I can label truly unfair if we’re willing to give the game a free pass on Graham Nelson’s prohibitions against the occasional need for knowledge of future events and knowledge gained from dying. The key thing is that you can trust Spellbreaker as you try to beat it, can trust that the solution to the puzzle on which you’re currently working can be arrived at through observation and deduction rather than being some random phrase to be typed or senseless action to perform. I can’t emphasize enough what a difference this trust — or, perhaps better said, its absence in so many other games — makes for the player’s experience.

The plot is obviously not the first priority for either player or writer of a game like this, but Spellbreaker‘s is in some ways more interesting than it ought to be. Having averted two previous disasters in Enchanter and Sorcerer, you’ve been elevated to head of the Circle of Enchanters. But now suddenly magic itself has begun to fail throughout the realm. The game opens at a conclave of Guildmasters that has been called to address the problem. Lebling was along with Brian Moriarty and perhaps Jeff O’Neall the best crafter of prose amongst all the Imps, and his writing is particularly good here, sparkling with subtle wit.

Sneffle of the Guild of Bakers is addressing the gathering. "Do you know what this is doing to our business? Do you know how difficult it is to make those yummy butter pastries by hand? When a simple 'gloth' spell would fold the dough 83 times it was possible to make a profit, but now 'gloth' hardly works, and when it does, it usually folds the dough too often and the butter melts, or it doesn't come out the right size, or..." He stops, apparently overwhelmed by the prospect of a world where the pastries have to be hand-made. "Can't you do anything about this? You're supposed to know all about magic!"

Hoobly of the Guild of Brewers stands, gesturing at the floury baker. "You don't know what trouble is! Lately, what comes out of the vats, like as not, is cherry flavored or worse. The last vat, I swear it, tasted as if grues had been bathing in it. It takes magic to turn weird vegetables and water into good Borphee beer. Well, without magic, there isn't going to be any beer!" This statement has a profound effect on portions of the crowd. You can hear rumblings from the back concerning Enchanters. The word "traitors" rises out of nowhere. Your fellow Enchanters are looking at one another nervously.

Then everyone except for you is abruptly turned into some variety of small amphibian, and your adventure truly begins. Ah, well, what did a committee hearing ever accomplish anyway?

You find yourself pursuing a mysterious antagonist — obviously the source of the magical disruptions — through a whole series of interlinked scenic vignettes, most no more than a few rooms in size (thus the lack of the need for mapping), which you reach by casting the Blorple spell (“explore an object’s mystic connections”) on a series of magical cubes you find. The acquisition of more of these cubes, representing as each does the next waypoint in a grand chase across time and space, turns out to be the main goal of most of the scenes you visit.

While certain aspects of Spellbreaker, like a group of wandering boulders on which you have to hitch a ride at one point, suggest that Lebling may have been reading Roger Zelazny’s Amber novels (as it happens, a subject we’ll get to very soon in another article), the most marked literary influence is Ursula Le Guin’s classic fantasy A Wizard of Earthsea, a great favorite of Lebling’s. Like the young wizard Ged, the protagonist of Spellbreaker realizes at the story’s climax that the shadowy being against whom he has been struggling is in fact a shadow of himself. The discovery is followed by Spellbreaker‘s ambiguously profound coda.

The shadow, now as solid as a real person, performs a back flip into the tesseract. "No!" It screams. "Stop! Fool, you've destroyed me! You've destroyed magic itself! All my lovely plans!" Now glowing as brightly as the construction it made, the figure approaches the center. It grows smaller and smaller, and just before it disappears, the hypercube vanishes with a pop, and the "magic" cube melts in your hand like an ice cube.

You find yourself back in Belwit Square, all the Guildmasters and even Belboz crowding around you. "A new age begins today," says Belboz after hearing your story. "The age of magic is ended, as it must, for as magic can confer absolute power, so it can also produce absolute evil. We may defeat this evil when it appears, but if wizardry builds it anew, we can never ultimately win. The new world will be strange, but in time it will serve us better."

Your score is 600 of a possible 600, in 835 moves. This puts you in the class of Scientist.

As with so much of Brian Moriarty’s best work, Spellbreaker‘s ending makes more mythic than literal sense. It seems our efforts have only led to the end of the Age of Magic and the beginning of the Age of Science. You can read this in many ways — personal and public, negative and positive. You can cast it as the proverbial setting aside of childish things (while hopefully still leaving space for the occasional computer game), marching into a future of adulthood and responsibility with clear eyes. You can cast it in a melancholy light, as the loss of, well, magic in a modern world where everything is already explored and mapped and monitored. Or you can, as I prefer, cast it as the dawning of a better age free of the prejudices and superstitious dependencies of the past. Any way you cast it, to my mind this textual Rorschach test is one of the strongest endings in the Infocom canon; the contrast of “Scientist” with your penultimate title of “Archimage” is bracing and surprising in all the right ways.

That, then, is Spellbreaker, and a thoroughly admirable effort it is. But I couldn’t conclude this article without also describing the great Spellbreaker vs. Mage feud of 1985, an internal struggle so pitched that it still prompts sheepish half-grins and slight discomfort amongst the principal antagonists, Mike Dornbrook and Dave Lebling, today.

Almost from the point he first accepted the assignment to finish out the Enchanter trilogy, Lebling had planned to call his game Mage. It not only gave the names in the trilogy a nice consonance, what with all being synonyms for a wizard or magic user, but also implied a progression of increasing magical potency. When Dornbrook’s marketing people did some impromptu person-on-the-street questioning, however, they discovered a dismaying fact: most people had never heard the word “mage” and had no idea how to pronounce it. Most opted for either something that rhymed with “badge” or a vaguely French pronunciation, like the second syllable in “garage.” The package designers were also concerned that the name was just too short and bland-looking, that it wouldn’t “pop” like it needed to on a store shelf. So Dornbrook went back to Lebling to tell him that the name just wasn’t going to work; they’d have to come up with another.

This in itself wasn’t all that unusual; games like Wishbringer, which had the perfect name almost from the beginning and kept it until release, were more the exception than the rule at Infocom. Most of the time the Imp responsible realized that his title was less than ideal and was willing to accept alternatives. That, however, was not the case this time. Lebling got his back up, determined that his game would be Mage and only Mage. Dornbrook got his up in response, and a lengthy struggle ensued. The other Imps and the other marketers fell in behind their respective standard bearers, leaving poor Jon Palace caught in the middle trying to broker some sort of compromise for a situation which didn’t really seem to allow for one; after all, in the end the game would either be called Mage or it wouldn’t.

From the perspective of today, the most interesting thing about this whole situation is the fact that so many people didn’t know the word “mage” in the first place. It really serves to highlight how much fantasy (nerd?) culture has penetrated the mainstream in this post-Peter Jackson, post-Harry Potter, post-World of Warcraft world in which we live. In 1985 Lebling’s strongest argument against marketing’s findings, one which strikes me as entirely reasonable, was that Dornbrook and company had simply been polling the wrong people. While the average person on the street may not have known the word “mage,” those likely to be interested in the third game of a fantasy trilogy explicitly pitched toward Infocom’s most hardcore fans almost certainly did. As for the aforementioned person on the street, she wasn’t likely to buy the game no matter what it was called.

As usual with such spats inside any relationship, there was actually a lot going on here beyond the ostensible bone of contention. Dornbrook had been frustrated for years already by what he saw as the Imps’ refusal to properly leverage the most valuable marketing tool at their disposal, the name Zork itself. Back in the company’s earliest days, when he had founded the Zork Users Group, he had simply assumed that Infocom would stamp the Zork brand on everything that would hold still for long enough.

It [the game that became Deadline] would have been Zork: The Mystery, etc. I thought that made sense at the time. We had this incredibly strong brand name. To me they were just going to be Zorks. We were going to own a word like “aspirin.” The name for a text adventure was going to be a Zork, and we were going to own that. But a decision was made while I was in business school and not contributing to the decision-making that we didn’t want to go down that path.

Dornbrook’s frustrations were made worse by 1983’s Enchanter, which everyone had assumed would be Zork IV until very shortly before its release, when Lebling and his coauthor Marc Blank suddenly announced that they didn’t want to be “typecast” by forever doing Zorks. Dornbrook tried fruitlessly to explain that, while it might not make sense that people would buy a game if it was called Zork but not if it was called Enchanter, that was just the way that branding worked. Observing how each game in the new trilogy sold fewer copies than the Zork games had and, even more dismayingly, fewer copies than its immediate predecessor, Dornbrook was soon convinced that the company had sacrificed tens or even hundreds of thousands of sales to the Imps’ effete artistic sensibilities.

I felt that marketing needed to be a little more respected, and if we had a strong feeling about something they [the Imps] shouldn’t just… I mean, the game developers, I got along very well and respected them, but there was a bit of, um… they were a little too full of themselves. A little too self-important. A little too, at times, megalomaniacal. Okay, that’s too strong a word… but it was frustrating sometimes from just a business standpoint. They kind of positioned themselves as, “We’re above all that! We’re artists!” Sometimes it seemed a little too precious.

As the 1980s wore on, Dornbrook couldn’t help but compare Infocom to competitors like Origin Systems and Sierra, who unabashedly milked their flagship brands — Ultima and King’s Quest respectively — for all they were worth via an open-ended series of numbered sequels, and, not coincidentally he believed, by mid-decade and beyond were selling far more games than Infocom. Dornbrook now saw a convenient opportunity to force through a mid-course correction of sorts. He thought about how Enchanter still had the internal inventory code of “Z4” at Infocom, Sorcerer and Lebling’s new game “Z5” and “Z6” respectively.

There was a time later on when I came back and seriously suggested, when there was the big fight over Mage vs. Spellbreaker, why don’t we just call it Zork VI? “You can’t do that! What about Zork IV and V?” I said, “Won’t that create a whole bunch of great questions? Maybe it will help sell Enchanter and Sorcerer if they finally realize, oh, those were Zork IV and V.” I never won that argument.

So Dornbrook still didn’t get his Zork; Lebling, who admits he was “terribly exercised” over the whole situation, wasn’t going to allow him that satisfaction, although he does concede it to have been an interesting idea worth considering today. But Lebling didn’t get his Mage either. The game shipped as another suggestion of Dornbrook’s people, Spellbreaker — not a half-bad name in my book, for what it’s worth. Lebling, however, wasn’t pleased at all, and indulged in an uncharacteristic final bit of sour-grapesmanship by sneaking a new routine into the final version that caused it to call itself Mage in the title line about one time out of every hundred.

The worrisome downward sales trend that Dornbrook had spotted wasn’t halted by Spellbreaker. Like its predecessor A Mind Forever Voyaging, it sold only about 30,000 copies, making these latest games the two least successful Infocom had so far released. There were obvious reasons for the low sales of each attributable to it specifically rather than Infocom’s position in the market as a whole — A Mind Forever Voyaging was highly experimental and required a fairly powerful computer to run, while Spellbreaker was unlikely to appeal to anyone who wasn’t already a hardcore Infocom fan who had already played Enchanter and Sorcerer — but, well, let’s just say that Dornbrook and everyone else had good reason to be worried.

But such external concerns needn’t distract us from playing and enjoying Spellbreaker today. It’s certainly not the place to start with Infocom, but when you’re ready for it it will be there waiting for you. It really is a masterful piece of game design, and even offers some lovely writing as well. It just might be Dave Lebling’s finest hour — and considering that Lebling also co-wrote Enchanter (and considering how much this critic loves that game as well) that’s really saying something.

(Most of the information here is, again, drawn from Jason Scott’s Get Lamp interview archives. The insight about A Wizard of Earthsea‘s influence on Spellbreaker I owe to an eight-year-old email exchange with Graham Nelson — to whom I also owe thanks just for getting me to read that book.)

Comments
25 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

May 16, 2014 at 5:56 pm

If you haven’t read all the way to the end of the Earthsea trilogy, do so. You will find a lot of resonances with Spellbreaker in the third book–and while the second doesn’t share any notable similarities, it’s the best of the three, in my view.

- Jimmy Maher

May 16, 2014 at 6:59 pm

Thanks! Been on my to-read list for a long time. Maybe this will bump them up a notch or two in priority.

- Duncan Stevens

May 16, 2014 at 6:02 pm

Also, on the gold box puzzle, I agree that this was under-clued. It would have been somewhat fairer if

(spoilers, I guess)

the game had somehow hinted at a connection between the box and the unusable exit. One way to do this might have been, if you’re holding the box when you’re “inside” the cube (and thus you still can’t use the exit), to say that you can’t force your way through the exit but vary the message somehow. Maybe say the exit “flashes gold” if you try to go through it.

- Rotonoto

June 2, 2014 at 10:26 pm

The reason I always thought the outcropping puzzle was unfair was that you had to drop the box to solve it. Now the only reasons to drop an item in an IF game are (a) if it’s useless – but the box is useful – and (b) if you’re carrying too much – but you can carry everything in the zipper. I got through Enchanter, Sorcerer and most of Spellbreaker without hints, but that puzzle sent me to the Invisiclues.

- Andrew Plotkin

May 16, 2014 at 6:24 pm

Yes, I came up with the same fix for the unusable exit.

While Spellbreaker is my favorite Infocom game on the puzzle axis, I do have to ding it a few points for including the cube-weighing puzzle. That was an old chestnut in the 80s and Infocom’s version didn’t add anything. It didn’t even feel consistent with the rest of the game’s magic, exactly.

(Contrast the rock-riding puzzle: that’s an example of a well-known *class* of puzzle, but it was distinctive, smoothly integrated, and added some fun dialogue.)

- Jimmy Maher

May 16, 2014 at 7:05 pm

I don’t have a big problem with the cube-“weighing” puzzle, although I have heard others make similar complaints before. I thought making you measure their magic potency instead of weight was a clever twist, and — similar to your impression of the rock-riding puzzle, I guess — the urgency of the time limit and all really added something for me. (Even saving is disabled inside the vault!) I’m always almost fist pumping after solving it.

I think Infocom went back to this well yet again in Zork Zero, by which time it *was* starting to feel a bit lazy, but I might be misremembering.

The rock-riding puzzle, for what it’s worth, is virtually a clone of a similar puzzle in Kingdom of Hamil, but, true to the Phoenix games’ reputation, there it’s much more cruel — deadly in fact if you screw up. I doubt this is a case of direct lifting (I don’t think anyone at Infocom was aware of the Phoenix games at the time) as both designers just having a similar library of old-chestnut puzzle books.

- Duncan Stevens

May 16, 2014 at 7:59 pm

No coin-weighing in Zork Zero, but they did use virtually every other puzzle in the canon, including the measuring-out-liquids-with-two-odd-sized-containers one–maybe you’re thinking of that.

- Andrew Plotkin

May 16, 2014 at 10:21 pm

I could have railed against the design cowardice of Zork Zero, but I figured I’d wait until the blog post about it. Which will undoubtedly cover it all in detail even before the comments start. :)

- Duncan Stevens

May 16, 2014 at 7:56 pm

Same view of the cube-weighing puzzle. It would have been better if (a) it didn’t pretty much require knowledge of the canonical puzzle–without that, you could spend forever wondering what you’re supposed to be doing with this pile of cubes, and (b) if it hadn’t illogically upped the ante by having the right cube glow either more or less than the others when you cast the magic-detection spell. Why should the only magic object glow *less* than the non-magic objects?

Also agree that this didn’t exactly fit the game–it didn’t feel organic. Most of the puzzles felt like they could have arisen out of circumstance; this one just felt like a soup-can “the villain chooses needlessly complicated ways of thwarting you” puzzle. (I guess the compass-rose puzzle isn’t particularly organic either.)

- TsuDhoNimh

May 16, 2014 at 7:07 pm

I loved Spellbreaker, but hated its copy protection. By the time I finally got past some of the most difficult (for me) puzzles in the game (The chess puzzle and the vault), I ended up being defeated by the copy protection, which kicks in if you answer Belboz’s question incorrectly. Belboz happened to ask me about the one card in the feelies that I’d lost, so I was out of luck without knowing it for most of the game. I never finished the game, nor had the desire to replay it, after that.

- Alan

May 16, 2014 at 10:07 pm

A few years ago I replayed all of the King’s Quest games and wrote up reviews. They were, on the whole, not positive. That was when I discovered that there are even fanboys and fangirls for 20 year old games, people who argued “it’s not for you“, or who insisted that I hold them to lesser standard because that’s how games were, ignoring that far less cruel Enchanter predated the entire King’s Quest series.

- Jimmy Maher

May 17, 2014 at 7:28 am

Yeah, it’s always shocking to me the sheer amount of abuse hardcore Sierra fans accept and even seem to relish. Roberta Williams’s occasional tin-eared comments about how gamers were more intelligent back in her day don’t help the situation. I’m not sure I can equate a willingness to be egregiously mistreated over and over again with intelligence…

- S. John Ross

May 16, 2014 at 10:59 pm

On the matter of conflating difficulty and fairness … I think it’s just as common to see conflation of “innovation” with “novelty” when it comes to that fetishizing of innovation you mention. That’s tangential here, of course … but always just around the corner from so many game-design topics, I find.

- Jimmy Maher

May 17, 2014 at 6:52 am

That’s a very good point, actually, and germane to some of Infocom’s less successful later “innovations” just for the sake of it, like the real-time play in Border Zone.

- Sniffnoy

May 16, 2014 at 11:10 pm

Observing how each game in the new trilogy sold fewer copies than the Zork games had and, even more dismayingly, fewer copies than its immediate successor,

I’m guessing you mean “predecessor” here?

- Jimmy Maher

May 17, 2014 at 6:50 am

Woops! Thanks!

- Keith Palmer

May 17, 2014 at 12:19 am

When I saw the “Extremely Challenging” stamp for Spellbreaker in the Infocom catalog I would flip through and daydream about, my innocent impression was that the difficulty was just a matter of a ferocious time limit before your magic powers vanished altogether. (Later, in a “I wonder if this could be implemented even though I don’t know how” mood, I pondered a game where you can solve the puzzles in any order, but the solution needed for any puzzle gets harder to find the longer you put it off…) As I recall, that was one wrinkle not in the game. I’ve got to admit, though, that by the time I got to Spellbreaker among The Lost Treasures of Infocom, my scruples against turning to the hint book had vanished altogether, so I more just focused on the journey and the story…

I’m afraid my own reaction to knowing about Dave Lebling’s dismay over “Spellbreaker” being selected by marketing is similar to my reaction to knowing about Charles M. Schulz’s over “Peanuts” being selected by the syndicate: I feel sorry for him, but as that wasn’t the first title I was familiar with… The allusion to the conclusions of Brian Moriarty’s work did get my attention, but I know it’ll be a while yet before we’re next talking about that.

- Duncan Stevens

May 17, 2014 at 3:26 am

Most of the puzzles aren’t that difficult, in my view–it’s only the last 20% of the game or so when things get really hair-pullingly hard. (I’m thinking of the outcropping puzzle, the outer vault, the sand room puzzle, and the endgame.) The outcropping puzzle isn’t as well clued as it could be and the vault puzzle only works if you intuit what canonical puzzle was on the author’s mind, but the sand room is as good as it gets: it plays fair, it’s organic to the game, and there’s a real “aha!” feel when you figure out what’s going on. (It’s all the better because–spoiler, I guess–it requires you to take a really counterintuitive step by giving up your spellbook. And that, of course, prefigures the solution to the endgame puzzle. The elegance of those two puzzles is something to behold.)

One other bit about Spellbreaker that I’m very fond of is the way the failure of magic gradually disappears (for you, anyway) as you accumulate cubes; each cube makes one type or another of spell more likely to work properly. And when you get the last cube–wow, all this power! It makes the ending initially counterintuitive but ultimately logical: all this power concentrated in one person isn’t such a hot idea.

- Nathan

May 17, 2014 at 5:06 am

“the compulsion to jump out of bed in the middle of the night to test out some crazy action that just might solve a heretofore intractable puzzle.”

That’s what hooked me on IF! It’s why I still play today.

- ZUrlocker

May 17, 2014 at 1:04 pm

This is off topic, but since you brought it up. I like The Clash and never really got into SLF. I think a lot of The Clash’s material still holds up very well 30 years later, particularly London Calling and the somewhat underrated second album Give ‘Em Enough Rope.

- matt w

May 17, 2014 at 5:44 pm

All the Clash’s material (well, up till Jones left) still holds up for me — OK, not all the dub on Sandinista. (Bankrobber Dub, though, yes.) Even the crazy art-damaged parts of Combat Rock.

Kind of seems like SLF/The Clash might have a bit of the Terry Pratchett/Douglas Adams or Ross Macdonald/Raymond Chandler dynamic I’ve talked about here before — one is more innovative and iconic, the other has a lot more staying power.

- Jimmy Maher

May 18, 2014 at 9:32 am

I actually like the Clash’s later material (pre-Cut the Crap, of course; nobody likes that album) best, mostly because I never found them all that convincing as a really great straightforward rock band. Stiff Little Fingers, who could spark up some great guitar interplay especially live by the time of Go For It!, I enjoy much more on those terms. The Clash album I’m most likely to play these days, more so than any of the proper albums, is actually Super Black Market Clash; I really like all of the dub- and dance-inflected stuff in its second half especially. And Combat Rock is indeed very good; I’m an especial fan of “Straight to Hell.”

- Jason Dyer

May 17, 2014 at 2:34 pm

Have there been any “difficult but fair” graphical adventures within the last ten years? All the well-respected ones I’ve tried have tended to the very easy.

- Jimmy Maher

May 18, 2014 at 9:25 am

I’m far from the best person to ask, but I think the Rhem games, of which I believe there have been some in the past ten years, would qualify.

But yes, the general trend (again, from this mostly bystander’s impression) has been away from the Myst-type puzzle-heavy games and more toward casual, story-focused games. Which is fine in my book. I think it’s ultimately very hard to avoid unfairness in making a difficult graphic adventure, even more so than a text adventure, especially with the ultra-streamlined interfaces that are the norm now; the scope of possibility for such an interface just doesn’t allow for a lot of intricate but fair puzzles beyond the typical sliding-blocks and so on that we’ve all seen a million times by now. I mostly play these games, when I do, for the story and atmosphere more than the puzzles. My wife and I are actually having a really good time right now with the new Tex Murphy game, but the only things that are remotely difficult about it are the hidden-object “puzzles”: i.e., find 9 baseball cards hidden in nooks and crannies inside this house. That sort of thing ceased being interesting for me at least twenty years ago, so we just play in casual mode with the cursor that sparkles over hotspots.

- Brandon Campbell

November 10, 2014 at 9:44 am

Thanks for the SLF recommendation, they rock!

Perry Mason: The Case of the Mandarin Murder
June 5, 2014

When they announced the first Telarium games to considerable press fanfare in 1984, Spinnaker Software promised that they would represent not just a new line of adventure games but a whole new approach to interactive fiction that would take the form beyond what even Infocom had so far achieved. The new Telarium philosophy was expressed in interviews by PR mastermind Seth Godin:

The adventure-game market has been pretty much the same since 1976, when the first adventure game came out. That is, they’ve been puzzle-based games, be they text or graphics — they’ve always been based on a series of logic puzzles.

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.

In short, Telarium promised to “replace puzzles with character-oriented situations.”

Anyone who had been working with adventure games for a while and thus knew what a difficult proposition that was had their skepticism amply justified when the first slate of Telarium games actually appeared near the end of the year. Rendezvous with Rama was, predictably enough given its almost bizarrely adventure-game-like source novel, exactly the “collection of logic puzzles” set in a deserted landscape that Godin had said Telarium wasn’t interested in making. Fahrenheit 451, Dragonworld, and Amazon all played out in more populated worlds, but used their non-player characters as window dressing or, at best, puzzle solutions and password vending machines. And thanks largely to a parser that was truculent even by the standards of the era, Fahrenheit 451 in particular was full of exactly the sort of opportunities to get infuriatingly “stuck on frame 50” that Godin had promised wouldn’t be there. The games just didn’t live up to the hype.

All of which made the next two releases in the line, which trickled out almost a year after that initial glut, doubly surprising. Both Perry Mason: The Case of the Mandarin Murder and Nine Princes in Amber try much more earnestly to do the sorts of things that Godin had been talking about all along. Indeed, their character-interaction ambitions and determination to turn the adventure game into genuine interactive fiction exceed even Infocom’s farthest voyages into those fraught realms. Mind you, their ambitions don’t reach anything close to fulfillment, and can be read as an object lesson in the reasons that Infocom chose to shy away from similar projects in the name of crafting playable games. Still, their determination to push the boundaries make them if nothing else some of the most interesting games of their era.

These games can also serve as an object lesson in just how quickly the times can change. By the time they appeared ominous warning signs had turned into a full-blown home-computer-industry slump from which nothing suffered more than the nascent phenomenon of bookware. Perhaps due to the disappointing sales of that initial slate of games (from which, only and oddly, Michael Crichton’s Amazon was excepted), Byron Preiss and his team of talented young writers and illustrators had parted company with Spinnaker, taking with them an apparently all but complete game based on Robert Heinlein’s Starman Jones as well as deals in the works with the likes of Philip José Farmer and Alfred Bester. Undaunted, Spinnaker took creative as well as technical ownership of Perry Mason and Nine Princes in Amber in-house; both games are products of committees, including in the case of Perry Mason no fewer than four people — among them the irrepressible Mr. Godin — writing the “scripts.” Whatever the usual merits of such an approach, in this case it results in no noticeable drop-off in quality or ambition. Whatever else you can say about them, these games are no camels.

The original creator of Perry Mason, Erle Stanley Gardner, can stand proudly alongside Dennis Wheatley as one of the great bad writers of the twentieth century, his life story a monument to sheer dogged persistence more so than any innate talent. A rather abrasive personality cut in the classic can-do American mold, he passed the bar and became a lawyer in 1911 without ever darkening the door of a law school. He turned to writing action, adventure, detective, and science fiction with the arrival of the pulps in the 1920s. Showing the commitment with which he approached everything he attempted, he forced himself to churn out 4000 words per night, 1.2 million per year. He was unashamed of his motivations: “I write to make money, and I write to give the reader sheer fun.” When questioned why his heroes always seemed to finish off the bad guy at last with the last bullet in their guns, Gardner said, “At three cents a word, every time I say ‘Bang’ in the story I get three cents. If you think I’m going to finish the gun battle while my hero still has fifteen cents worth of unexploded ammunition in his gun, you’re nuts.”

Once his finances allowed, Gardner further refined his approach to writing, hiring as many as six secretaries to whom he dictated outlines of his stories for completion and polishing; this literary assembly line earned him the sobriquet “the Henry Ford of detective fiction.” By the time of his death in 1970 his oeuvre was so huge and published in such diverse and often ephemeral places as to be virtually uncatalogable. It includes at least 150 novels, at least 500 short stories, a significant body of nonfiction writing (largely on travel and history) for the glossy magazines, radio and television scripts. His sales in his heyday were equally enormous: at one time the Guinness Book of World’s Records could name him nothing less than the best selling writer of all time.

For all that productivity, Gardner would be regarded, like Wheatley, as little more than an historical curiosity today were it not for a single member of his large stable of lawyers, private eyes, and adventurers: Perry Mason. The redoubtable lawyer first appeared in 1933 as the star of the novel The Case of the Velvet Claws. That version of Mason was created in the hard-boiled image of Sam Spade: a two-fisted brawler who’s all about the money his services will earn him and isn’t afraid to resort to blackmail to achieve his ends. But as time passed and Gardner and Mason made the transition from the rough-and-tumble world of the pulps to the more genteel environs of the Saturday Evening Post, Gardner’s Mason gradually softened into something in at least the same zip code as the glibly savvy do-gooder soon to become a fixture of American television.

In the years before that star-making turn by Raymond Burr, Perry Mason was adapted many times into other media, including a string of low-budget movies and a long-running radio serial. Like the novels themselves, all are largely forgotten today, along with the many actors who portrayed Mason in them. But when Gardner saw Burr audition for the television version in 1957, he just knew he’d found his man at last: “Raymond Burr is Perry Mason!” he declared. Aside from a brief, ill-considered stab at the role by Monte Markham in 1973, no one but Burr would ever dare play Perry Mason again.

Burr’s Mason became one of the most enduring characters in the history of television, lasting through not only the original series’s staggering 9-year, 271-episode run (they cranked ’em out quick in those days) but also a series of 26 well-received television specials broadcast between 1985 and Burr’s death in 1993. He remains a fixture of daytime syndication schedules today, his theme song still immediately identifiable as soon as it comes over the airwaves (or cable line, or Internet…). The televised version of Mason came to entirely supersede his print counterpart, to the extent that even many loyal viewers of the television series then and now don’t realize that there ever was a Perry Mason before Raymond Burr.

Which brings us back to Telarium’s adaptation. Telarium was of course supposed to be a line of book adaptations. Spinnaker had already demonstrated what contortions they would go through to uphold the bookware concept with Shadowkeep, for which they hired Alan Dean Foster to write an inconveniently absent source novel. Still, no one in 1985 was interested in playing a game based on Gardner’s Perry Mason novels, which had largely fallen out of print and into obscurity following his death in 1970. So what we have is a hybrid that dully plays homage to the bookware concept by featuring the name of Erle Stanley Gardner prominently on the cover along with a nice “about the author” blurb to describe him, but which is otherwise an unabashed re-creation of the television version. This Mason is clearly Burr’s Mason. Not only does he feature on the package cover, but his colleagues and opponents in the in-game illustrations are perfect likenesses of the actors who portrayed them on television. The game even opens with a computerized rendering of that iconic theme song.

For obvious reasons, the polite fiction that the authors of the Telarium source materials were all intimately involved with their adaptations is here quietly but definitively dispensed with. This is a licensing deal, pure and simple, with the Gardner estate’s Paisano Productions holding company also getting its name on the box, albeit in the copyright fine print. The timing must have seemed perfect to both Spinnaker and Paisano: Perry Mason’s star was suddenly rising in the wider culture, thanks to the first of that series of television revivals that brought him back to prime time for the first time in many years just as the game was being published.

The game’s case could have fit easily into either the television show or one of Gardner’s books. Your client, one Laura Kapp, was apprehended by the police in an insentient state in her apartment with a gun lying just a few feet away — the same gun, in fact, that killed her husband Victor, who was found lying across the room. It seems that Laura was just released from a mental hospital and was extremely jealous as well as unstable, and for good reason: it appears that Victor was conducting at least one affair in her absence. Open-and-shut case, right? Anyone who says yes has never seen an episode of Perry Mason; the fellow amassed a final record of 268 to 3 (with one defeat later overturned on appeal) on television getting clients out of equally tough spots.

But if The Case of the Mandarin Murder is a fairly typical episode of Perry Mason, it’s a very atypical adventure game, minimizing or dispensing entirely with some of the most established conventions of the genre, among them object-oriented puzzles, mapping and (geographical) exploration, even compass directions. The first part of the game, during which you search the Kapp apartment for clues under the watchful eyes of the police, is the most traditional. But that is only a prelude to the real meat of the experience, which plays out as a series of examinations and cross-examinations in the courtroom. Just as in the television show, you’ll need to direct your faithful colleagues Paul Drake and Della Street to follow up the leads that emerge in the apartment and over the course of the trial; they’ll often be running in to give you vital information in the very nick of time. Also present are Mason’s usual long-suffering foils, Police Lieutenant Arthur Tragg and District Attorney Hamilton Burger (one can’t help but wonder, given his record against Mason alone in the most open-and-shut of cases, how the latter in particular manages to keep his job). And then there are of course this episode’s guest stars and potential suspects, in the form of Laura herself along with the mysterious femme fatale with whom Victor was supposedly conducting his affair, Victor’s business partner and said partner’s wife, a restaurant critic with a grudge, and a doorman with a shady past. The trial can go in many different directions, with various final outcomes possible. It’s not that hard to amass enough evidence and cast doubt on enough testimony to gain a hung jury or even an acquittal for Laura. But to unmask the real culprit and force a patented Perry Mason confession amidst a hail of tears and recriminations… aye, there’s the rub, for both the right and the wrong reasons.

If you read my articles about the earlier Telarium games (or, better yet, if you’ve played any of them), you may be wondering how Telarium’s problematic parser fares in a production as dependent on character interaction as this one. The answer is, slightly better than you might think, but still nowhere near well enough. It’s not that the folks at Spinnaker, perhaps still stinging from criticisms of the parsing in those earlier games, weren’t aware of the challenge. Why else would they include in the package an elaborate and really quite clever “Mandarin Menu” which includes not only a vocabulary list but also a sentence-building chart for phrasing your interrogations?

Still, it doesn’t work out all that well. Many queries, including plenty that seem to comply perfectly well with the chart, fall flat. It’s just way too hard to figure out how the game wants you to phrase things, what keywords — and remember we’re dealing here with lots of abstract subjects like feelings and affairs and alibis — it wants from you to trigger a response in a witness. Combine that with the stubborn lack of feedback typical of the Telarium parser, and you end up with a feeling all too common in interactive fiction, that of never being sure whether a given line of questioning is really unproductive or whether you’re just not phrasing things correctly. In other words, is this witness shaking his head at you for diegetic reasons, because his answer is really no, or is he doing it because the extra-diegetic parser doesn’t understand you? To further complicate matters, you’re constantly being graded by the jury on your competence, confidence and flair for courtroom drama. As soon as you start to bumble and stumble around up there the game is up. Thus playing becomes a matter of experimenting on each witness to figure out what she can understand and what you can get from her, then restoring to play the polished and all but omniscient Mr. Mason we know from television.

Another problem is more subtle than the war with the parser. The solution to the case, when it finally emerges, is convoluted and, well, pretty much ridiculous — hardly an anomaly in the world of Perry Mason. The problem in the context of a Perry Mason game, however, is that it’s effectively impossible for you to ever arrive at it until the guilty party breaks down and confesses. With no real hard evidence pointing to that guilty party, you’re largely left to just hammer on everyone until somebody finally cracks. You’re rather left in the position of the would-be know-it-all detective in Simon Christiansen’s modern interactive fiction Death Off the Cuff. Yet whereas that game knows what it’s doing and, indeed, is meant as a send-up of absurdly omniscent detectives just like Perry Mason, this game is not so knowing. Believe me when I say that the solution totally comes out of left field — and is totally stupid at that.

Another thing about the case, not so much annoying as just strange: while Victor was a prominent restauranter, nothing “Mandarin” has any real bearing on the case. The subtitle is apparently a reference to the restaurant Victor was planning to open next, but said restaurant isn’t germane to much of anything about the actual murder. About the best thing you can say about it is that it allows for that neat “Mandarin Menu” of sentence composition, a sort of backdoor homage to the hacker’s traditional love for Chinese food. (The subtitle could also be taken as an advertent or inadvertent homage to Gardner himself, who built his early law practice defending the rights of Chinese immigrants. He remained fascinated by China throughout his life, visiting the country several times and allegedly building up a passable proficiency in Cantonese, no mean feat for a Westerner.)

So, no, The Case of the Mandarin Murder doesn’t entirely work as game or as courtroom drama. Yet it’s nonetheless kind of fascinating for what it tries to do as well as for the way it tries to do it. Although it sprawls across the four disk sides typical of all the Telarium games, a single playthrough is unlikely to take much more than two hours (or maybe three if you play the Commodore 64 version I’m making available for download here, what with that machine’s painfully slow disk access). It’s implemented in depth rather than breadth, loaded with details to be uncovered and secrets to be discovered. Sure, some of the Easter eggs are just silly; the dumbest plays on the fact that one of the characters is named Julian, same as a character in Telarium’s contemporanous Nine Princes in Amber game.

But that sort of silliness is more the exception than the norm. Better are the moments here and there when the parser does understand you for a few turns at a stretch and you really do feel like Perry Mason up there jabbing and feinting at the witness and playing it up for the jury. Those moments, if not quite enough to make it worthy of an unabashed recommendation, are more than enough to make me toast its ludic dreams and ambitions nobly striven after if ultimately unfulfilled.

(Sorry for the long delay between posts, as well as this site’s going offline for a day or two recently. My mother suddenly and unexpectedly died, which led to lots of emotional turbulence and a frenzied trip back to America. In the midst of all that I neglected to renew my domain registration. Things will hopefully now be settling back into a normal rhythm.

Sources on Telarium this time out were pretty much the usual referenced in previous articles, especially the December 1984 Compute!’s Gazette and the June/July 1985 Commodore Power Play. A couple of interesting summaries among many of Erle Stanley Gardner’s life and career can be found at Thrilling Detective and at the website of his long-term home town of Temecula, California. And thanks as always to C. David Seuss for sharing some of his memories and some valuable resources from the glory days of Spinnaker Software.)

Comments
24 Responses

- Marshal Tenner Winter

June 5, 2014 at 11:45 am

I played the hell outta this game when I was a kid.

- matt w

June 5, 2014 at 12:07 pm

I’m sorry for your loss, Jimmy.

- Ken Rutsky

June 5, 2014 at 6:07 pm

Condolences on your loss.

- X

June 5, 2014 at 9:46 pm

Of course, most Chinese immigrants from that era spoke Cantonese. In fact, Gardner took lessons in Cantonese from Lei Jieqiong at USC and supposedly dedicated two books to her.

PS: Sorry to hear about your mother. :-(

- Jimmy Maher

June 6, 2014 at 5:28 am

Thanks. Edit made.

I confess I don’t have much understanding of how Cantonese and Mandarin relate to one another, or how they relate to Chinese, which is still apparently a thing and a superset of the whole.

- Andrew

June 6, 2014 at 11:54 am

I’m not sure if it’s a good comparison but think about High German and Swiss German. HG is what everyone thinks German is, but an important chunk of people in the south have their own language. (Mandarin = High Chinese)

You (probably) mean irrepressible about Godin.

- Jimmy Maher

June 6, 2014 at 12:19 pm

Thanks!

And yes, languages and dialects can be tricky things motivated as much by politics as linguistics, and I’m not sure how it all breaks down in the case of China. Here in my neck of the woods, for instance, Norwegian (at least the Bokmål variant) should probably be considered a dialect of Danish; although the sound of the two is very different, either is effortlessly readable by a speaker of the other. Meanwhile Low German (Plattdeutsch) is far more different from High German than Norwegian is from Danish, yet is considered only a dialect.

- X

June 6, 2014 at 5:21 pm

Well, they’re pretty different. Think the difference between German and English. You can kinda sorta tell that they are from the same language family. When I think “dialect”, I think mutually intelligible, like when you have to ask your waitress in Savannah, Georgia, USA to repeat something a couple times. That’s not going to work for Cantonese.

It’s somewhat confused by the way many East Asian languages have adopted Chinese characters for their writing. This lends written intelligibility in some cases. But that’s also true (to some extent) between Chinese and Japanese, which are clearly different languages (not even the same family). Cantonese, Japanese and Mandarin speakers could all read the same text and understand what it means; when asked to read it aloud, they would produce totally different sounds.

Here’s a fun article on the topic from Language Log: English is a Dialect of Germanic

- Anthony Hope

June 5, 2014 at 9:59 pm

My condolences.

- Carl

June 6, 2014 at 12:23 am

I’m very sorry to hear about you mother, Jimmy. Hang in there.

- ZUrlocker

June 6, 2014 at 12:34 am

Nice write up. I found it very interesting.

Sorry to hear about your mother’s death. It’s a weird thing because it happens to almost everyone, but there is nothing that can prepare you for it.

- Jonathan Blask

June 6, 2014 at 1:15 am

Condolences.

- Duncan Stevens

June 6, 2014 at 3:12 am

Very sorry to hear about your mother, Jimmy.

- Jimmy Maher

June 6, 2014 at 5:31 am

Thanks so much to everyone for your condolences. It is difficult, but I’ll be fine.

- Matthew Waller

June 6, 2014 at 12:21 pm

My condolences. Thanks for writing this site – loads of fantastic articles.

- Dehumanizer

June 6, 2014 at 4:00 pm

Sorry about your loss. :(

- GeoX

June 7, 2014 at 8:37 am

My condolences as well. The idea that you would feel the need, under the circumstances, to *apologize* for the delay between posts…my gosh.

- DANoWAR

June 8, 2014 at 11:33 am

Hello, first of all, my condolences to you.

Damn, this feels wrong somehow to ask right now, but feel free to ignore my question for now if its too much:

Apart from reading your blog on the PC I use my smartphone for it. Now the default (?) wordpress configuration makes the blog very hard to consume on my phone, so is there something you could do to provide a mobile variant for the blog?

I’ve read a bit about it, and it seems that the WPTouch plugin would solve this issue. I think you can use it for free, but I’m not sure…

Thanks in advance anyway.

- Jimmy Maher

June 8, 2014 at 11:49 am

No problem. No immediate promises, but I’ll have a look as time allows.

- Dehumanizer

June 9, 2014 at 9:41 am

Some mobile browsers provide an option to use a proxy (maintained by the browser’s maker) to compress traffic (especially images) before downloading. You lose image quality, but typically you save a lot of bandwidth AND browse faster. Usually it’s just a question of enabling one option in the settings. I suggest Opera Mobile, but I think most mobile browsers these days have an option like this (though they tend to name it differently – on Opera it’s called “off-road mode”).

- Pingback: Perry Mason and Philosophy | Episyllogism

- Brian

June 13, 2014 at 2:25 pm

So sorry for your loss.

- kmbr

June 18, 2014 at 10:15 pm

Condolences for your lost, Jimmy.

- iPadCary

June 23, 2014 at 6:47 pm

Very, very sorry for your loss, Jimmy.

Nine Princes in Amber
June 13, 2014

Technological futurists and the people who love them have been talking for some time now about something called the Singularity, that moment in the (near?) future when computing technology will reach some critical mass and change everything forever in ways we can hardly begin to imagine. I’m not so interested in discussing the merits of the idea here, but I do want to say that singularities can take many forms, and to note that the sort of singularities one sees are perhaps more emblematic of one’s own personal hobby horses than some might like to admit. In that spirit, I’d like to propose a singularity of my own, albeit one recently passed rather than oncoming. It landed right about the middle of the 1960s.

To see what I’m talking about, watch a movie or listen to a hit song from 1960 followed by one from 1970. While it may be extreme and rather narcisstic and certainly horridly Western-centric to divide all recent history into pre-1960s and post-1960s, it’s nevertheless hard for me to come up with another instant when everything changed so completely. Films and songs are of course only signifiers of the deeper changes in the culture: changes in gender roles and responsibilities, in race relations, in attitudes toward war and peace and government and the rights and responsibilities of the citizen. The 1960s changed the way people talked, the way they dressed, they way they thought in a way far more profound than the mere vicissitudes of fashion. Perhaps most of all, they changed what is still for so many the most uncomfortable of uncomfortable subjects, sex, forever. We’re still dealing with the fallout every day: in the United States, at least, your decision of which party to vote for still has a great deal to do with whether you think all of these changes were in general a good or a bad thing.

Even written science fiction, that literary ghetto which had hitherto marched along blissfully ignoring and being ignored by changes in the larger world of arts and letters, wasn’t insulated from these winds of change. A New Wave of writers poured into — the old guard might, and sometimes did, say “invaded” — the stolid old halls that the pulps had built. These new writers were very different from the old holy trinity of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. They replaced an absolute faith in objectivity and rationalism with a tolerance for ambiguity and an honest curiosity about spirituality, particularly (this being the 1960s) of the Eastern variety. They replaced adventures in outer space with explorations (this again being the 1960s, when psychedelics were everywhere) of inner space. They replaced workmanlike (not to say clunky) prose with literary flights of fancy and experimental structures showing the influence of folks like James Joyce and William S. Burroughs; a surprising number of the New Wave stars were poets in addition to short-story writers or novelists, for God’s sake. They replaced characters that served primarily as grist for the mill of Plot and Idea with real, three-dimensional humans whose subjective experiences were the point of the works in which they featured. American science fiction, like seemingly every other institution in the country, went to war with itself for a time, with John W. Campbell opining on behalf of the Old Guard in the pages of Analog that the Kent State protestors had gotten what they deserved while Michael Moorcock preached anarchism and feminism from his soapbox as editor of New Worlds.

Roger Zelazny

One of the biggest stars of the New Wave is our real subject for today: the man with the perfect science-fiction writer’s name of Roger Zelazny. He burst onto the scene in the mid-1960s with a series of dazzling short stories and a short novel, This Immortal, which took place on a post-apocalyptic Earth populated by creatures and minor gods from a sort of fever dream of Greek mythology. Then in 1967 he delivered Lord of Light, an audacious transplantation of the Hindu pantheon — if you haven’t realized it already, Zelazny was big on myth — to an interstellar milieu. The structure was as intricate as many a Modernist novel, the language gorgeous. The central character, Mahasamatman (he “called himself Sam”), reminds one in his rebellion against the rest of the pantheon of no one so much as the Satan of Paradise Lost.

Lord of Light deservedly swept science fiction’s two biggest prizes, the Hugo and the Nebula Awards, for its year. Along with a groundbreaking collection of short stories of the same year edited by Harlan Ellison and to which Zelazny also contributed, Dangerous Visions, it’s gone on to stand as perhaps the perfect exemplar of New Wave science fiction and why it mattered — this even though Zelazny himself rejected the label. There was a moment there when Roger Zelazny was accorded the honor amongst a ridiculously strong field of fellow up-and-comers of being just possibly the most promising young writer in science fiction. Lord of Light was great, but, what with Zelazny still so young, many predicted even better things from him once he matured a bit, got beyond just dazzling with the sheer high-wire virtuosity of his language and plots and began to really dig into his worlds and themes.

But somehow that never quite happened. Oh, he continued to be astonishingly prolific, releasing for instance three novels in 1969 alone. His books remained readable; Zelazny was too professional to deliver anything else. Yet, while the reputation of contemporaries like Ursula Le Guin have only soared higher in the years since the heyday of the New Wave, Zelazny gradually found himself banished to the mid-lists, just another competent and salable genre writer. Much of his later work felt kind of forgettable, at its worst even kind of facile. Maybe it was down to an unwillingness to go to the hard places. Certainly it’s hard not to feel that this writer, who throughout his career cranked out novels at the rate of one or two every year along with a steady stream of short stories, might have benefited from just slowing down a bit, from applying all of his enormous energy to a single book for a while.

On the other hand, lots of readers — more than had enjoyed the likes of Lord of Light, actually — liked the later Zelazny, liked his readable, fast-paced novels that weren’t too demanding on either their reader or their writer. Zelazny, for his part, always rejected aspirations to literature in interviews, making it clear that he considered himself simply a working writer whose first consideration must be the financial. Even Lord of Light, he eventually revealed, had some commercial calculation at its base: he made it straddle the line between science fiction and fantasy in order to maximize its readership. Lovers of Zelazny’s early work could at least console themselves that even his most pedestrian novels still showed flashes of the old brilliance. Anyway, there was still plenty of time for him to buckle down and deliver another masterpiece. Until suddenly there wasn’t: he died of colorectal cancer at age 58 in 1995.

The flash point for lovers and haters of newer Zelazny is a series of ten fantasy novels set in a world called Amber. Drawing upon Zelazny’s usual mythical archetypes as well as Platonic philosophy, the Amber series postulates a perfect shining city on a hill, Amber itself, of which all other reality — or realities; infinite alternate universes worth of them — are but imperfect shadows. As one travels outward from Amber the shadows become steadily wilder and stranger, until one arrives at last at Amber’s polar opposite, the Courts of Chaos. The elemental forces of Order and Chaos which Amber and the Courts respectively represent exist in an uneasy symbiotic state — which doesn’t prevent them from constantly trying to get the upper hand on one another. Within Amber lives a royal family of superhumans and apparent immortals. They can communicate with one another and instantly jump to one another’s locations in Amber or in shadow via a set of magical cards, the family Trumps. They can also, albeit more laboriously, visit anywhere in shadow by simply walking — or driving, or riding — there, slowly manipulating and adjusting the reality around them as they go until they arrive at just the place they were looking for. (The early books dwell for some time on the intriguing philosophical question of whether they are visiting lands that always existed in shadow or creating them in their mind’s eye; like much else, however, this question is forgotten in the later books, by which time Amber is conducting trade negotiations with lands in shadow.) Amber’s royal family, consisting of an inconveniently absent father along with nine brothers and four sisters, is riven with far more strife and suspicion than one might expect from a family supposedly representing Order. Upon their various plots rest most of the series’s most compelling plots.

The first five Amber books, later to become known as the “Corwin Cycle,” were published between 1970 and 1978. They tell of the struggles of Prince Corwin of Amber, first against his hated brother Eric for the throne and later against the forces of Chaos who threaten Amber and the very fabric of reality itself. The books proved to be very popular, by far the most popular thing Zelazny had ever written. And so he wrote another five books, the “Merlin Cycle” describing the adventures of Corwin’s son, between 1985 and 1991. Most critics will tell you that the series declines in quality almost linearly, a half-step or so at a time starting right from the second book. The first book, Nine Princes in Amber, while much more straightforwardly written and plotted than the likes of Lord of Light, breathes the old Zelazny magic as we learn about this grandly mysterious multiverse and are introduced one by one to the family of Amber and their Shakespearian intrigues and rivalries. But as the books go on with strangely little differentiation from one to another — it really does feel as if Zelazny would just write the story until he had the 225 pages that was his publisher’s ideal length, then stop for a while — it begins to feel like just a series of long, anecdotal meanderings, particularly by the time we get to the much inferior Merlin Cycle. It’s pretty clear after a certain point in the latter that he’s making it up as he goes along, and apparently forgetting in the process a good part of what he’s already written. As Amber turns from a magical perfection to a mundane place that doesn’t seem all that qualitatively different from any of the shadows, as characters reverse themselves or change personalities entirely to suit Zelazny’s newest plotting whims, as ultimately pointless digressions come to occupy entire books worth of story, the later books manage to retroactively spoil much of what came before. By the time the whole thing sputters to a halt with the most anti-climactic of endings in which Merlin does exactly what he spent the previous several books saying he didn’t want to do, much of the allure of Nine Princes in Amber has long since been ground into dust.

That, anyway, is my attitude today. I should note that 25 years ago when I first read the Amber books I thought they were magnificent, Corwin and even Merlin the most dashing and cool heroes imaginable. Now they seem as often as not like smug, smirking jerks who are nowhere near as clever as they think they are. Merlin in particular, I’ve gradually come to realize, is actually as dumb as a box of rocks; he spends most of his time like the player’s character in a videogame, being manipulated and led by the nose through his foreordained plot by other characters in the story. Still, Amber remains readable even at its worst, even when you know that none of this is really going anywhere in particular; Zelazny knew how to craft a page turner. My wife and I used my omnibus Chronicles of Amber as bedtime reading for several months. By the end we were spending a lot of time making fun of its endless, exhaustively detailed fight scenes, the occasional stabs at free-verse poetry that misfire horribly, the creepy Mary Sue quality to Corwin and Merlin (like them, we weren’t surprised to learn, Zelazny was a fencing aficionado, but presumably beautiful women didn’t all fall swooning before him the way they did for them), and the sheer stupidity of the hapless Merlin, but we did finish all ten books. I suppose that says something. Thomas M. Wagner summed up the Amber series about as charitably as one can on his reviews site: “There’s no point in pretending this is great literature any more than, say, Edgar Rice Burroughs, but it captures the quintessence of pulp escapism with just about as much purity. It’s fast-paced, gobs of fun, and requires about as many brain cells as an old Johnny Weismuller movie.” That should be good enough. Or it would be if Zelazny hadn’t proved himself capable of so much more. I’ll leave you to come down on whichever side you prefer.

Given its intriguing if not exactly rigorous fantasy milieu as well as the politicking that can make it seem like a fantasical version of Diplomacy, not to mention its considerable popularity at one time, Amber made a compelling setting for ludic narrative. In 1991, Erick Wujcik published the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, one of several streamlined tabletop RPG systems that appeared around that time with an emphasis on story and texture and, most of all, character interaction; this in contrast to older games like Dungeons and Dragons with their obsession with minutiae and tactical combat. Each player in the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game takes the role of a member of the royal family. If everyone is in the proper Amber spirit, the gamemaster need not say much beyond that; the intrigues and betrayals all blossom naturally. Although it never gained the commercial prominence of fellow second-generation RPGs like White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade, Amber attracted a cult of loyal players who still keep it alive today.

But long before The Diceless Roleplaying Game there was another ludic Amber, this one produced by Telarium for the computer. Like the simultaneously released Perry Mason game, Nine Princes in Amber appeared just as its source material was getting a boost in the form of new installments after a fallow period of some years. In the case of Amber, this material took the form of Trumps of Doom, the first volume in the Merlin Cycle and first Amber novel since the Corwin Cycle had concluded seven years before. Roger Zelazny was happy to cash Telarium’s checks, but otherwise contributed even less to the project than had Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury to their respective games. He did graciously sign his name to a suitable back-of-the-box blurb: “I’m thrilled to see my Amber books become a challenging computer adventure. For anyone interested in exploring contingent paths through my tale, the possibilities here are almost endless.” The actual game, however, is a product of the same committee approach that yielded Perry Mason.

As such things go, it’s at least a very relevant blurb. Like Perry Mason, Nine Princes in Amber is a crazily unusual and ambitious work of interactive fiction. There’s a modest slate of object-oriented puzzles to deal with as well as an elaborate and frustrating fencing simulation that has all the problems typical of randomized combat in text adventures. There’s also a graphics-based mini-game that is, unlike the horrid arcade sequences in earlier Telarium games, actually quite fun to play. Yet the main focus is once again on character interaction. The included verb list is even more far-ranging than that of Perry Mason, including some entrants that have quite possibly never featured in another work of interactive fiction before or since: verbs like “placate,” “flatter,” “mention,” “bluff,” and “stall.” The heart of the game is a series of tense encounters with your various siblings in which you’ll have the opportunity to try out those and many more.

That said, Nine Princes in Amber can at first seem underwhelming. The game seems to play out as a linear series of Reader’s Digest condensed scenes from the first two books, with most of the texture — like, inevitably, that provided by Corwin’s occasional amorous encounters — painfully absent. Do in any given scene what Corwin did in the book, and you get to continue to the next; do something else, and you get killed and see one of the “forty possible final endings” the box copy trumpets. As Jason Compton put it in a review on Lemon 64, gameplay can seem to devolve into, “All right, dammit, I know what Corwin did in the book, so how can I express it in terms the parser will understand?” In comparison to, say, Fahrenheit 451, which used its source novel as a springboard for something entirely new, this can seem depressingly unambitious, not to mention unchallenging for those who have read the books and impossible for those who haven’t.

But then, when you blunder your way at last to the end by trying to recreate the events of the novels as faithfully as possible, you get a shock: the ending you get is not a particularly good one. And so you begin to reexamine and reevaluate, and discover that Nine Princes in Amber is doing — or at at least trying to do — something very audacious. It really is possible to forge your own path through the story, to end up with a set of allies and enemies radically different from those the novel’s Corwin ended up with in his own quest for the kingship of Amber. The claim of forty endings may be a stretch, but it’s possible to reach and win the climactic battle and still see the story branch at least four ways depending on your actions earlier in the game and your relationships with your siblings.

While the Corwin of the novels eventually thinks better of his own ambition to be king, this remains the goal of the Corwin of the game. The game’s universe is even more amoral than that of the novels; not for nothing do you find a copy of The Prince in your sister Flora’s study early in the story. I found I could be most successful by going into full Harry Flashman mode, lying and backstabbing and wheedling my way through events.

There are several choke points through which the narrative will always funnel, whether the player is trying to diverge from the novel or follow its plot exactly. Veterans of the books will recognize them immediately: the Pattern walk in Rebma, the time in the dungeon of Amber, the encounter with Benedict near Avalon, the final battle at the foot of Mount Kolvir. In between, the narrative can branch off in many directions. (This certain amount of linearity is necessary not least because the game is distributed on four disk sides for the Apple II and Commodore 64; the amount of disk flipping required would otherwise be horrendous.) Impressively, the reasons you arrive at the various choke points can be very different, and the relationships you’ve built or failed to build are preserved as you pass through them. In this sense of making all the pieces fit while preserving the player’s freedom, Nine Princes in Amber is one hell of an intricate piece of design.

Indeed, the game is in its way an amazing achievement. I know of no other text adventure from its era — and, come to think of it, possibly of any other — that offers this level of choice over not just the beats of the story or the order in which puzzles are solved but of the very direction of such a grand narrative. Yet it’s also often a pain to play, thanks as usual to that problematic Telarium parser. It’s nice that the game offers verbs like “placate,” but most of the time, even in conversations, most of these clever verbs do nothing; worse, it’s often hard to figure out whether any given verb is doing anything or not. Nine Princes in Amber has, in other words, all of the same problems as Perry Mason. If anything, they’re even more pronounced here.

After thinking about it a bit, I began to feel that even if its parser was much better something would still be off about the game. Many commands that do work are absurdly wide in scope and open to interpretation, sometimes causing hours or weeks to pass in the story: “walk in shadow,” “go to Brand,” “attack Amber.” Then it struck me: Nine Princes in Amber is really a choice-based narrative that’s been saddled with the wrong interface. Parsers are very good for complex but granular manipulations. Parser-based games are excellent tools for exploring geographical spaces and manipulating their contents, but not so good for exploring story spaces, for manipulating the narrative itself as does the player of Nine Princes in Amber. As Sam Kabo Ashwell wrote in his great series of articles about Choose Your Own Adventure books and other gamebooks (many of a vintage similar to this game), “CYOA is where you go when you want to prioritise free-flowing, bigger-scale narrative over deep or difficult interaction.” These are indeed the priorities of Nine Princes in Amber. The parser in this context only obfuscates what should be a delightful garden of forking paths. It leaves you constantly poking at unrewarding blind alleys that don’t work simply because that’s not one of the ways the plot is allowed to branch right now.

But imagine Nine Princes in Amber as a hypertext narrative with some limited state tracking and it all falls into place. One could create a node diagram like those Ashwell created for his articles if one was willing to spend enough time plumbing the game’s depths. This isn’t the first time I’ve observed such a disconnect between interface and content; I once went so far as to re-implement one of Robert Lafore’s pioneering experiments in ludic narrative as a choice-based game to prove a similar point. I won’t do the same here, although it is tempting; copyright concerns as well as the vastly greater complexity of the Telarium game prevent me. You’ll have to accept my word that this game would work perfectly well in any of the several viable modern hypertext-narrative engines.

So, chalk up Nine Princes in Amber as — stop me if you’ve heard this before — one more noble Telarium experiment that doesn’t really work as a playable game. Still, like Perry Mason, it’s worth some of your time just to marvel at its ambitions. Failures are after all often more instructive than successes. To experience Nine Princes in Amber, an interesting blend of both, feel free to download the Commodore 64 version here.

Comments
11 Responses

- Felix

June 13, 2014 at 8:28 pm

At last, I find someone else besides me who thinks singularities don’t have to be technological, and that they can take many forms. I once pointed out in an essay that we’ve already been through a couple, caused by agriculture and print, respectively. (And that now we’re going through a third, which is enabled by computer networks but in fact is social in nature.)

As for New Wave literature, things are complicated. Sure, the break with the past was necessary, and the current yielded some of sci-fi’s greatest masterpieces; Le Guin and Moorcock are two of my favorite classic authors. But it all fizzled very quickly, and how many other authors from the era are still remembered with something else than scorn?

Frankly, I liked the Amber saga precisely because it’s not/em> some finely crafted arch-story about saving the world from cosmic threat #4217. Because it’s about ordinary people bumbling along exactly like any of us, even though they are superpowered immortals. Because just like in real life, not every little thing has a purpose, yet they’re nice and have their place nevertheless. Because events aren’t pre-ordained and don’t converge towards a grand finale.

And I know exactly what you mean about parser games that want to be choice-based games. I ran across one of them, and found the dissonance striking, but found it impossible to make the author understand what I meant. Then again, that was back before the recent revival of choice-based games. Just five years ago, actually, a parser was THE interface for a text adventure.

Funny, however, how fixated people were on the parser interface back when game genres weren’t nearly as well crystallized as they are today. Oh well.

- Andrew Plotkin

June 13, 2014 at 9:59 pm

My usual line on singularities is that we’re up to at least five by now (language, agriculture, writing, industrial revolution, Internet, …?) Of course a hardcore Singularitarian would point out the exponentially decreasing intervals in that sequence.

“…back when game genres weren’t nearly as well crystallized as they are today.” I’d say the opposite: game genres have become *more fluid* over time. Everything hybridizes and mutates these days. The most rigid time in a genre’s life cycle is its beginning, when the genre consists of “imitate that one successful game!” without any widespread understanding of what made it successful.

- Jimmy Maher

June 14, 2014 at 7:54 am

I think the New Wave science fiction movement is actually very typical of disruptive movements within the arts, not at all different from, say, punk rock or French New Wave cinema. As a separate thing it may not have lasted long, but its ideas were subsumed within the mainstream, changing the face of science fiction forever. So suddenly Isaac Asimov, just to pick one example of a hoary old nuts-and-bolts writer, is experimenting with alternative structures in The God Themselves. And everyone had to up their games a bit, to just learn to *write* and *characterize* a little better. And the scope of what science fiction could be about expanded enormously.

Meanwhile most of the New Wave writers lost some of their avant garde edge and became more accepting of traditional story structures. This, again, is hardly unusual. (In music, Hüsker Dü and the Replacements only got really good *after* they started blending their hardcore energy with melody and more traditional song structures.) Some might say, however, that Roger Zelazny when a little *too* far down this path…

- Matt

June 13, 2014 at 8:50 pm

I really loved the Amber books, but I never did get my hands on this game when it came out. I’ll have to give it a try.

As for their literary merit, all I can say is that I still go back and re-read the whole Amber series every once in a while, whereas I never go back to Lord of Light. I have to agree, though, that I don’t enjoy the Merlin books as much as the Corwin ones. The one “authorized” sequel that I read which was written by someone else (Greg Bear?) after Zelazny’s death was even worse.

- Wade

June 14, 2014 at 4:20 am

My dad says that much of the 60s were still the 50s, then the end of the 60s was basically the 70s.

- matt w

June 14, 2014 at 4:54 pm

This game sounds a lot like what Blood and Laurels sounds like!

- Andrew Plotkin

June 16, 2014 at 2:35 pm

Not everybody may know this: in his last years, Zelazny wrote a few fragments (not really complete stories) that started setting up a third group of Amber books. They’ve been published in some posthumous small-press collections.

- Olivier Guinart

June 16, 2014 at 8:40 pm

I like how you went first and mostly into the writing and the books, and then the game (I need to read your next post now :)).

I think I fell in love with Zelazny’s work with “Eye of cat”, and I like everything I’ve read from him so far, even though I’m like MattMadison, and go back more easily to the Amber cycle.

FYI, double here: “but it’s possible to to reach”

- Jimmy Maher

June 17, 2014 at 8:13 am

Thanks!

- James

January 20, 2015 at 10:30 pm

I suspect we have reached another technological singularity: One where everybody born will be born into a world with ubiquitous, always available, near Natural Born Right access to an Internet connection. As someone born in the 80’s watching myself and my peers grow up, as it were, with the Internet itself, I’m really curious about my friend’s children, who, at the age of three or less, can pull up youtube and find some of their favorite videos. Where this will take the world, I’m not quite brave enough to guess… but hopefully closer to utopia than otherwise.

- Jubal

July 12, 2015 at 8:09 pm

For me, the best demonstration of the huge shift that happened in the sixties is, of all things, Back to the Future. As I write this, the film is now thirty years old, as far back as Marty himself travels. And yet the film’s 1985 is far more recognisable as the world we have today than its 1955 is. Sure, the differences are stereotyped and exaggerated for humour and to make a better story, but I still think something fundamental comes across.

It’s very hard to imagine a film with a modern teenager finding themselves so bewildered and out of their depth in 1985, and not even the internet has driven in that sort of a wedge yet.

An Alternate Chronicle of Amber
June 16, 2014

Those of you who’ve read the books will probably most appreciate this alternative version of them, as facilitated by Telarium.

I escape the hospital.

I convince Flora to let me stay with her.

Random arrives, and Flora and I help him to dispatch his pursuers.

Random and I begin the journey to Amber.

Julian runs us down.

But we turn the tables on him.

We rescue Deirdre from Eric’s men.

We part ways with Deirdre and march straight into Amber. A bit of groveling convinces Eric that I accept him as king.

I Trump to Deirdre in Rebma and walk the Pattern (via a surprisingly entertaining mini-game).

I use the Pattern to transport myself back to Amber.

I Trump Bleys to me, and together we murder Eric.

But now Bleys turns on me! This will really take some groveling…

I locate Brand in shadow via his Trump, and rescue him from his imprisonment of Bleys’s making.

We stumble across Benedict. Brand makes overtures which I reject, then leaves.

I get a call from Bleys and Brand’s former co-conspirator Fiona. We cut a deal of our own.

Amber is under attack! I agree to march with Benedict to her defense.

Back in Amber I reveal Bleys and Brand’s nefarious schemes, leaving Fiona out of it. After I lead the forces of Amber to victory (doubtless from safely in the rear), most everyone except Bleys and Brand thinks I’m a pretty swell guy. I become king of Amber!

Comprehend
June 20, 2014

Inside Penguin Software, circa early 1983. From left: Mary Beth Pelczarski, Mark and Trish Glenn, Cheryl and Mark Pelczarski, Ron Schmitt, and (at right front) Larry Weber.

It’s been quite some time since we’ve checked in with Penguin Software and its founder Mark Pelczarski, so let’s be about that today. The Penguin story is not only interesting in its own right but also a good illustration of what it was like for a small publisher trying to navigate the home-computer boom and bust.

On the heels of the considerable commercial success of Transylvania in 1982, Penguin was naturally eager to continue to work the games market. An old associate from Mark’s days at SoftSide magazine, Dave Albert, essentially took over that side of the company. Over the next couple of years he shepherded to completion a mixed bag of titles from outside contributors, including a number of action games, three more “hi-res adventures” in the mold of Transylvania, and even a couple of RPGs, one crazily original and one more typical of its genre. Most earned back their investment but were not major moneyspinners; only one of the action games, Spy’s Demise, and one of the adventures, The Quest, managed anything close to the numbers that Transylvania moved.

Penguin’s core product remained The Graphics Magician. Now with ports to the Commodore 64, Atari 8-bits, IBM PC and PCjr, and eventually even the new Apple Macintosh as well as the Apple II original, it was the closest thing the games industry had to a standard graphics tool in those wild early days, to be superseded only in the second half of the decade by Electronic Arts’s Deluxe Paint line. For a considerable period of time a considerable percentage of the games on the market employed it, as did countless amateur artists and programmers. Its ubiquity could bring its author into some surprising company.

There was, for instance, a period when Penguin kept getting calls from a kid named Conan O’Brien, editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The name was so crazy that it became a regular part of Penguin’s intra-office schtick: “Conan called again!” someone would shout almost every day. Mark finally agreed to come by Harvard on a business trip. Conan showed him around the campus, and also showed him a basketball “simulation” he and his buddies had developed with the aid of The Graphics Magician. In it the Boston Celtics took on a classical ballet troupe, to hilarious effect. Electronic Arts’s One-on-One, the spiritual father of the modern EA Sports line which pits Julius Erving against Larry Bird, was one of the most popular games in the country at the time; thus Conan’s little creation, whatever else it was, also qualified as satire of a sort. Conan claimed to have gotten a contract with EA to publish the game, but the project never made it to fruition. Had it done so, we might be talking today about Conan O’Brien the game developer rather than Conan O’Brien the talk-show host. (It’s also possible, of course, that “I have a contract” in this context meant “I’ve signed an agreement to quit publishing derivative works of EA intellectual property in exchange for not getting sued.”) For his part, Mark forgot about it — until he opened Newsweek a decade later to read that Conan O’Brien was replacing David Letterman in NBC’s late-night time slot.

The fury and frenzy of the home-computer boom was soon swirling around Penguin, bringing with it dramatic changes in the way that software was sold and marketed. Mark, a sober and grounded sort, wisely steered Penguin clear of the worst excesses of many of their competitors. Penguin didn’t flood the market with cheap cartridge-based titles (“it really didn’t match what we felt we were best at”); didn’t hire a big-name celebrity spokesperson; didn’t let the venture capitalists take control; didn’t mortgage their future via dangerous bank loans. Yet, as wise as those choices would soon prove to be, it became ever harder for a small company to get noticed amidst the glut of product being pumped into stores by 1984.

That year, concerned about the changes in the industry and increasingly nervous about relying so heavily for their sustenance upon a single product, Penguin formulated a three-pronged strategy for the future. They would devote about one third of their resources to continuing to support and improve The Graphics Magician. One third would go to a new line of edutainment software of which we’ll have occasion to hear more in a future article. And one third would go for a renewed and much more focused push into games. With Dave Albert about to leave Penguin to join Origin Systems, it seemed a good time for a change in strategy in this area. (Albert, incidentally, took with him to Origin Greg Malone and his oriental RPG Moebius amongst other projects in progress).

Henceforth Penguin would concentrate on adventure games, the genre which had been most successful for them and for which they were best known. Their previous adventures had all been essentially one-offs submitted by outside authors and programmed in whatever combination of assembly language and BASIC happened to seem most handy. All had originated on the Apple II, and porting them to the other popular platforms of the day had been tedious and expensive if it happened at all. Nor did their home-grown parsers acquit themselves all that well in this the heyday of Infocom’s reign. The answer to all these problems was to be Comprehend, a cross-platform adventure-game engine that should let Penguin put out more sophisticated adventures more quickly and on more platforms, and all in a consistent house style that players could come to know and intuitively understand like that of Infocom. In a collaboration he describes today as still “one of the most interesting and fun I’ve had writing and programming,” Mark designed Comprehend from whole cloth in front of a whiteboard over the summer of 1984 with a student from the nearby Northern Illinois University, Jeffrey Jay. They paid particular attention to the parser, which they put through a series of challenges posed to them by the folks at Infocom — pronoun handling, accurate handling of compound sentences, etc. — that most rival parsers definitively failed. What they ended up with didn’t come close to matching that magnificent Infocom parser, but it was several steps above the likes of the Telarium model.

Text adventures with graphics can be divided into two categories. First there are those, like the Telarium games, for which the graphics are static and ancillary to the text, there only for atmosphere — like, say, the occasional illustrations in an original-edition Dickens novel. Then there are those — counterintuitively, this is the older category, pioneered by Sierra’s original Hi-Res Adventure line — which make the graphics an integral part of the experience, using them to convey essential information about the game world that isn’t in the (generally much sparser) text and varying them with changes in its state: drawing dropped inventory objects and other characters that happen to be present into the scene, etc. This style had rather fallen out of fashion by 1984 as publishers rushed to jump onto the bookware bandwagon that posited adventure games as essentially literary experiences. Comprehend, however, bucked the trend by hewing to the older style that Sierra themselves had abandoned with the advent of AGI and King’s Quest. This could make Comprehend seem like a bit of a throwback even in its heyday. Still, the graphics possibilities were, as one might expect from “The Graphics People,” considerable, with the system even capable of some spot animation and other flourishes. The system also ran blazingly fast in comparison to the likes of Telarium’s SAL engine. Comprehend was, in short, a perfectly serviceable old-school adventure engine if hardly a technological game-changer. Now Penguin just needed some Comprehend games.

Antonio Antiochia, the teenage author of Transylvania, had been enjoying the fruits of that game’s success in the form of the royalty checks, insanely large by a high-school kid’s standard, that he found in his mailbox each month. Mark duly suggested to his young software star that he save his money for university, but Antonio did exactly what most of us would have done in his place: went out and bought a shiny new Mazda RX-7, which may or may not have contributed to his getting his “first bona fide girlfriend” late in his senior year. With such distractions on offer, it took Antonio some time to buckle down again to adventure writing. When he did, he decided he’d like to make a sequel to Transylvania, something that Penguin, in light of the success of the first game, was hardly likely to discourage. Antonio started drafting his game using a BASIC-based framework that another of Penguin’s outside authors, The Quest and Ring Quest author Dallas Snell, had developed, once again doing not only all the writing and programming but also drawing all of the pictures himself. (This incomplete early version leaked into pirating circles through the cracking group the Corsairs, and can still be found in some Apple II software archives today.) Later, when Comprehend was ready, Antonio dutifully learned its nuances and ported his work to the new system. After completing the sequel, dubbed The Crimson Crown, he returned to the original, crafting a new version for Comprehend with more text, locations, and puzzles. Together these became the first two Comprehend releases from Penguin in the fall of 1985. The Apple II versions of both games were reworked and re-released yet again early the following year, to use the “double-hi-res” graphics mode available on certain IIe setups and all models of the IIc. This welcome hardware enhancement let Penguin mostly if not entirely eliminate the color distortions that normally plagued Apple II graphics.

The Crimson Crown is a much bigger game than the original Transylvania. In fact, it’s really two adventure games, one on each side of its disk. Stealing a trick that was quite common in the British software market where sharply limited cassette-based machines were still the norm, The Crimson Crown arranges to funnel you through a bottleneck at its mid-point in which you lose your inventory and are moved to an entirely new piece of geography. In other words, everyone who gets this far is forced into the same state before continuing the game — or, I should say, before beginning the second game that occupies that second disk side.

Following, like just about everyone else in the industry, the lead of Infocom, Penguin upped their packaging game considerably for the Comprehend line. The Crimson Crown shipped with not only an instruction manual but a separate journal setting the stage, a sealed letter to be opened at a certain point in the game, a map of Wallachia and Moldavia, and even a poster to hang on your wall. The Transylvania connection was oddly minimized, relegated to a subheading — “Further Adventures in Transylvania” — below the much larger Crimson Crown title. Mark Pelczarski notes today that such decisions point to a certain ongoing naivete at Penguin even in an increasingly cutthroat market, a determination to emphasize “fun and art” over “the monetary aspect.”

The mysterious tree stump of the original makes a return appearance.

You play the hero of the first game, rescuer of the Princess Sabrina. The vampire who abducted her has turned out to be not as dead as everyone — you most of all — thought. (Well, I suppose he is technically dead, but you get the idea…) He’s murdered the king of your land of Wallachia and stolen the Crimson Crown that gives the king supernatural powers. And so it’s back into action, accompanied this time not only by Sabrina, who has gotten sick of playing the damsel in distress and scored one for female empowerment by learning the art of sorcery, but also her brother, the king-to-be Erik, more the earnest sword-wielding type. You’ll guide this three-headed monster through the entirety of the adventure, mostly doing things yourself but occasionally needing to call upon Sabrina or Erik’s prowess by giving them instructions.

You must contend this time with a zombie, sign of a more modern horror sensibility.

The sequel has most of the same qualities going for it that made the original Transylvania such an old-school favorite of mine. Some of the delicious B-horror-movie atmosphere is absent, with the game this time having a bit more of a conventional fantasy feel; in addition to the vampire, there’s a zombie, a troll, a centaur, and a dragon to contend with this time instead of the werewolf of the original, and much of the second game takes place in what amounts to a typical fantasy dungeon rather than the Gothic landscape of the original. Indeed, Antonio seems to have been playing quite some Dungeons and Dragons at this point in his life; you and your companions are repeatedly referred to as “the party.” And the sequel is in general a bit trickier to solve. But, aside from one horrible choice which we’ll get to momentarily, The Crimson Crown is quite fair and even progressive in its design sensibilities, being notably free of mazes, uselessly empty geography, sudden random deaths, and most other things modern adventurers have come to hate. It even has a handy carry-all to make the inventory limit less onerous, and a “sage” who pops up from time to time to offer little nudges for some of the puzzles and strategic guidance for the game as a whole. Like its predecessor, it smartly works within its technological limitations. The parser, for instance, while not quite state of the art, doesn’t have to be because the game never tries to push it to places it isn’t capable of going — a marked contrast with Telarium, whose games made a habit of being too big for their parser’s britches. Despite these signs of maturity, The Crimson Crown retains its predecessor’s giddy teenage enthusiasm, which remains a big part of its charm. Solving this one is both possible and very, very enjoyable.

One of the occasional graphical flourishes, complete with some delightfully purple prose.

Except, that is, for the riddles. The Crimson Crown resoundingly fails to put its best foot forward by hitting you almost at the very beginning with four riddles. We’re talking absurdly abstract stuff like this:

I am, I’m not. I visit young and old,
Some I make timid and some I make bold,
Unwise is the one who pokes fun at me.
Beware, for I am a shadow of thee.

(Spoiler: “windmill,” “fear,” and “cloud.”)The Crimson Crown immediately because three more just like it await your powers. As for the rest of you, I actually recommend that you play as well, but don’t spare a moment of thought to the riddles. Here are the other answers: download The Crimson Crown in its double-hi-res Apple II incarnation from this very site if you like.

We’ll continue the story of Penguin and of Comprehend in later articles, but next we’re going to turn away from text adventures for a while to look at developments in other genres over this period in North America.

(My thanks to Mark Pelczarski and Antonio Antiochia, whose memories informed this article.)

Comments
9 Responses

- Marshal Tenner Winter

June 20, 2014 at 2:16 pm

It’s like you’ve stepped into my childhood and started explaining the games I played. Thank you!

- Lisa H.

June 20, 2014 at 6:35 pm

Funny, the answer to that sample riddle; the second of the other three answers you gave was actually what I thought of first.

- Jimmy Maher

June 21, 2014 at 8:11 am

For what it’s worth, that verse is:

Hands I do not have, yet I grasp so tight.
I love darkness, my enemy is light.
Both the mighty and low know me well,
For in the hearts of men do I dwell!

- Lisa H.

June 21, 2014 at 5:41 pm

I might have gotten that after a while.

- matt w

June 20, 2014 at 6:46 pm

Huh. I got the riddle, but I don’t know why.

…yes, this is pretty much pure boasting.

- matt w

June 20, 2014 at 6:47 pm

Except that I would probably have tried the plural and thus screwed myself over.

- Wade

June 21, 2014 at 11:49 am

This is a pretty lame comment on your article which was not about Moebius, but Moebius is definitely one of my favourite games of all time. Even if most concrete observations that crpaddict chap made about it while abusing it were true, I love it. The atmosphere of it was all-encompassing to me.Later in life I realised that Greg Malone also programmed the agonisingly tense action game ‘Minit Man’ for the Apple II via Penguin.

- Narsham

November 30, 2014 at 3:05 pm

“but it was several steps about the likes of the Telarium model.” About should be above.

Really enjoying these trips to the past!

- Jimmy Maher

November 30, 2014 at 3:12 pm

Thanks!

Of Wizards and Bards
June 25, 2014

After debuting within a few months of one another in 1981, the Ultima and Wizardry franchises proceeded to dominate the CRPG genre for the next several years to such an extent that there seemed to be very little oxygen for anyone else; their serious competition during this period was largely limited to one another. Otherwise there were only experiments that usually didn’t work all that well, like the Wizardry-meets-Zork hybrid Shadowkeep, along with workmanlike derivatives that all but advertised themselves as “games to play while you wait for the next Ultima or Wizardry.” One of these latter, SSI’s first CRPG Questron, so blatantly cloned the Ultima approach that it prompted outraged protest and an implied threat of legal action from Origin Systems. SSI President Joel Billings ended up giving Origin a percentage of the game’s royalties and some fine print on the back of the box: “Game structure and style used under license of Richard Garriott.” It’s highly debatable whether Origin really had a legal leg to stand on here, but these were days when Atari in particular was aggressively threatening publishers with similar “look and feel” lawsuits, sending lots of them running scared. Faced with the choice between a protracted legal battle and lots of industry bad will, neither of which his small company could well afford, or just throwing Origin some cash, Billings opted, probably wisely, for the latter.

In the competition between the two 800-pound gorillas of the industry, Wizardry won the first round with both the critics and the public. Compared to Ultima I, Wizardry I garnered more attention and more superlative reviews, and engendered a more dedicated cult of players — and outsold its rival by at least a two to one margin. Wizardry‘s victory wasn’t undeserved; with its attention to balance and polish, its sophisticated technical underpinnings, and its extensive testing, Wizardry felt like a game created by and for grown-ups, in contrast to the admittedly charming-in-its-own-way Ultima, which felt like the improvised ramblings of a teenager. (A very bright teenager and one hell of a rambler, mind you, but still…) The first Wizardry sold over 200,000 copies in its first three years, an achievement made even more remarkable when we consider that almost all of those were sold for a single platform, the Apple II, along with a smattering of IBM PC sales. While Infocom’s Zork may have managed similar numbers, it had the luxury of running on virtually every computer in the industry.

As early as 1982, however, the tables were beginning to turn. Richard Garriott continued to push Ultima forward, making games that were not just bigger but richer, prettier, and gradually more accessible, reaping critical praise and commercial rewards. As for Wizardry… well, therein lies a tale of misplaced priorities and missed opportunities and plain old mismanagement sufficient to make an MBA weep. While Ultima turned outward to welcome ever more new players to its ranks, Wizardry turned inward to the players who had bought its first iteration, sticking obstinately to its roots and offering bigger and ever more difficult games, but otherwise hardly changing at all through its first four sequels. You can probably guess which approach ended up being the more artistically and commercially satisfying. One could say that Ultima did not so much win this competition as Wizardry forfeited somewhere around the third round. Robert Woodhead, Andrew Greenberg, and Sir-Tech did just about everything right through the release of the first two games; after that they did everything just as thoroughly wrong.

As I wrote earlier, the second Wizardry, Knight of Diamonds, was an acceptable effort, if little more than a modest expansion pack to the original. It let players advance their characters to just about the point where they were too powerful to really be fun to play anymore, while giving them six more devious dungeon levels to explore, complete with new monsters and new tactical challenges. However, when the next game in the series, 1983’s Legacy of Llylgamyn, again felt like a not terribly inspired expansion pack, the franchise really began to go off the rails. Greenberg and Woodhead hadn’t even bothered to design this one themselves, outsourcing it instead to the Wizardry Adventurers Research Group, apparently code for “some of Greenberg’s college buddies.” Llylgamyn had the player starting over again with level 1 characters. Yet, incredibly, it still required that she purchase the first game to create characters; they could then be transferred into the third game as the “descendents” of her Wizardry I party. It’s hard to even account for this as anything other than a suicidal impulse, or (only slightly more charitably) a congenital inability to get beyond the Dungeons and Dragons model of buying a base set and then additional adventure modules to play with it. As Richard Garriott has occasionally pointed out over the years, in hewing to these policies Sir-Tech was effectively guaranteeing that each game in their series would sell fewer copies than the previous, would be played only by a subset of those who had played the one before. We see here all too clearly an unpleasant pedantry that was always Wizardry‘s worst personality trait: “You will start at the beginning and play properly!” It must have been about this time that the first masses of players began to just sigh and go elsewhere.

Speaking of pedantry: as I also described in an earlier article, a variety of player aids and character editors began to appear within months of the first Wizardry itself. Woodhead and Greenberg stridently denounced these products, pronouncing them “sleazy” in interviews and inserting a condescending letter to players in their game boxes stating their use would “interfere with the subtle balance” of the game and “substantially reduce their playing pleasure.” This is made particularly rich because, while Woodhead and Greenberg deserve credit for attempting to balance the game at all, the “subtle balance” of their first Wizardry was, in some pretty fundamental ways, broken; thus the tweaks they instituted for Knight of Diamonds. Did they really think players should ignore these issues and agree to spend dozens or hundreds of hours laboriously rebuilding countless lost parties, all because they told them to? Would players with so little capability for independent thought be able to complete the game in the first place? All the scolding did was put a sour face on the Wizardry franchise, giving it a No Fun Allowed personality in contrast to the more welcoming Ultima and, soon, plenty of other games. Players are perfectly capable of deciding what way of playing is most fun for them, as shown by the increasing numbers who began to decide that they could have more fun playing some other CRPG.

Meanwhile the Apple II’s importance as a gaming platform was steadily fading in the face of the cheaper and more audiovisually capable Commodore 64 in particular. Yet Sir-Tech made no effort for literally years to port Wizardry beyond the Apple II and the even less gaming-centric IBM PC. Their disinterest is particularly flabbergasting when we remember that the game ran under the UCSD Pascal P-Machine, whose whole purpose was to facilitate running the same code on multiple platforms. When asked about the subject, Woodhead stated that ports to the Commodore and Atari machines were “not technically possible” because neither ran any version of the UCSD Pascal language and because their disk systems were inadequate — too small in the case of the Atari and too slow in the case of the Commodore. Countless other companies would have and, indeed, did solve such problems by writing their own UCSD Pascal run-times — the system’s specifications were open and well-understood — and finding ways around the disk problems by using data compression and fast-load drivers. Sir-Tech was content to sit on their hands and wait for someone else to provide them with the tools they claimed they needed.

And then came the fiasco of Wizardry IV, a game which embodies all of the worst tendencies of the Wizardry series and old-school adventure gaming in general. This time Greenberg and Woodhead turned the design over to Roe R. Adams, III, a fount of adventure-game enthusiasm who broke into the industry as a reviewer for Softalk magazine, made his reputation as the alleged first person in the world to solve Sierra’s heartless Time Zone, and thereafter seemed to be everywhere: amassing “27 national gaming titles,” writing columns and reviews for seemingly every magazine on the newsstand, testing for every publisher who would have him, writing manuals for Ultima games, and, yes, designing Wizardry IV. Subtitled The Return of Werdna, Wizardry IV casts you as the arch-villain of the first Wizardry. To complete the inversion, you start at the bottom of a dungeon and must make your way up and out to reclaim the Amulet that was stolen from you by those pesky adventurers of the first game.

Wizardry IV doesn’t require you to import characters from the earlier games, but that’s its only saving grace. Adams wanted to write a Wizardry for people just as hardcore as he was. Robert Sirotek, one of the few people at Sir-Tech who seemed aware of just how wrong-headed the whole project was, had this to say about it in a recent interview with Matt Barton:

It was insanely difficult to win that game. I had such issues with that. I felt that it went way beyond what was necessary in terms of complexity, but the people that developed it felt strongly to leave a mark in the industry that they had the hardest game to play — period, bar none. That’s fine if you’re not worried about catering to a customer and making sales.

Return of Werdna was the worst-selling product we ever launched. People would buy it, and it was unplayable. So they’d put it down, and word spread around. There were other hard-core players in the market that loved it. They said, “Ah, why doesn’t everybody do this?” Well, we don’t because you guys are a minority. If you’re a glutton for punishment, you’re going to have to get your pleasure somewhere else because nobody can survive catering to such a small number of people.

So, it was controversial in that way. In the end, I think I was proven correct that making crazy impossible products in terms of difficulty was not the way forward.

But insane difficulty is only part of the tale of Wizardry IV. It has another dubious honor, that of being one of the first notable specimens of a species that gamers would get all too familiar with in the years to come: that hot game of the perpetually “just around the corner!” variety. Sir-Tech originally planned to release Wizardry IV for the 1984 holiday season, just about a year after Legacy of Llylgamyn and thus right on schedule by the standard of the time. They felt so confident of this that, what with the lengthy lead times of print journalism, they told inCider magazine to just announce the title as already available in their November 1984 issue. It didn’t make it. In fact it took a staggering three more years, until late 1987, for Wizardry IV to finally appear, at which time inCider dutifully reported that Sir-Tech had spent all that time “polishing” the game. Those expecting a mirror shine must have been disappointed to see the same old engine with the same old wire-frame graphics. In addition to being unspeakably difficult, it was also ugly, an anachronism from a different era. Any remaining claim that the Wizardry franchise might have had to standing shoulder to shoulder with Ultima either commercially or artistically was killed dead by The Return of Werdna. Beginning with Wizardry V and especially VI, Sir-Tech would repair some of the damage with the help of a new designer, D.W. Bradley, but the franchise would never again be as preeminent in North America as it had in those salad days of 1981 and 1982.

Wizardry I, 1981

Wizardry IV, 1987. Not much has changed…

Those remaining fans who were underwhelmed by Wizardry IV were left asking just what Sir-Tech had been up to for all those years during the middle of the decade. Robert Woodhead at least hadn’t been completely idle. With Wizardry III Sir-Tech debuted a new interface they called “Window Wizardry,” which joined the likes of Pinball Construction Set in being among the first games to bring some of the lessons of Xerox PARC home to Apple II users even before the Macintosh’s debut; both earlier Wizardry games were also retrofitted to use the new system. In 1984 Woodhead improved the engine yet again, to take advantage of the new Apple II mouse should the player be lucky enough to have one. And a few months after that his port to the Macintosh arrived.

A Japanese edition of the first two Wizardry games, published by ASCII Corporation.

But Woodhead’s biggest distraction — and soon his greatest passion, one that would change his life forever — was Japan. After first marketing Wizardry in Japan through Starcraft, a Japanese company that specialized in localizing American software for the Japanese market and vice versa, Sir-Tech signed a blockbuster of a deal with another pioneering company, ASCII Corporation, publishers of the magazine Monthly ASCII that can be justifiably called the Japanese Byte and Creative Computing all rolled into one. Increasingly as the 1980s wore on, ASCII also became a very important software publisher. With Woodhead’s close support, ASCII turned Wizardry into a veritable phenomenon in Japan, huge even in comparison to the height of its popularity Stateside. By the latter half of the decade there were entire conventions in Japan dedicated to the franchise; when Woodhead visited them he was mobbed like a rock star. In the face of such profits and fame, he began to spend more and more of his time in Japan. After leaving Sir-Tech in 1988 he lived there full-time for a number of years, married a Japanese woman, and eventually founded a company with his old buddy Roe Adams which is dedicated to translating Japanese anime and other cinema into English and importing it to the West; it’s still going strong today. The Japanese Wizardry line also eventually spun off completely from Sir-Tech to go its own way; games are still being made today, and now far outnumber the eight Sir-Tech Wizardry games.

That explains what Woodhead was doing, but it doesn’t do much to otherwise explain Sir-Tech’s Stateside sloth until we consider this: incomprehensibly, Sir-Tech clung to Woodhead as their only technical architect, placing their entire future in the hands of this one idiosyncratic, mercurial hacker. (Greenberg filled mostly a designer’s as opposed to programmer’s role, and never worked full-time on Wizardry; after the second game his role was largely limited to that of an occasional consultant.) So, Woodhead was fascinated by the potential of the GUI and thought the Macintosh pretty neat; thus those projects got done. But he was dismissive of the cheap machines from Commodore and Atari, so those markets, many times the size of the Mac’s when it came to entertainment software, were roundly ignored. Only in 1987, with Woodhead all but emigrated to Japan, did Sir-Tech finally begin to look beyond him, funding a Commodore 64 port at last. But by then it was far too late.

Wizardry comes to the Commodore 64 at last. Predictably, not much has changed.

For the reason why, we have to rewind to 1984, and move our wandering eyes from Sir-Tech’s Ogdensburg, New York, offices to a struggling little development company in the heart of Silicon Valley who called themselves Interplay. Interplay already had a couple of modestly successful illustrated adventure games to their credit when a friend of founder Brian Fargo named Michael Cranford suggested that he’d like to make a sort of next-generation Wizardry game in cooperation with them. They were all big fans of Wizardry and Dungeons and Dragons — Cranford had been Dungeon Master for Fargo’s D&D group back in high school — so everyone jumped aboard with enthusiasm. There’s been some controversy over the years as to exactly who did what on the game that would eventually become known as The Bard’s Tale, but it seems pretty clear that Cranford, who had already authored a proto-CRPG called Maze Master that was restricted in scope by its need to fit onto a 16 K cartridge, was the main driver. The most important other contributor was Bill “Burger” Heineman, who helped Cranford with some of the programming and did much of the work involved in porting the game to systems beyond its initial home on the Apple II. (Bill Heineman later had a sex change, and now lives as Rebecca Heineman. As per my usual editorial policy on these matters, I refer to her as “he” and by her original name only to avoid historical anachronisms and to stay true to the context of the times.) After Cranford parted ways with Interplay following The Bard’s Tale II, Heineman would take over his role of main programmer and designer for The Bard’s Tale III.

The Bard’s Tale on the Commodore 64. Note that this predates the screenshot immediately above by two full years.

In retrospect, the most surprising thing about the first Bard’s Tale, which was published through Electronic Arts in late 1985, is that nobody did it sooner. It was certainly no paragon of original design. If anything, it was even more derivative of Wizardry than Questron had been of Ultima, evincing not just the Wizardry template of play but almost the exact same screen layout and even most of the same command keys, right down to a bunch of spells that were cast by entering their four-letter codes found only in the manual (a useful form of copy protection). But Wizardry, thanks to Sir-Tech’s neglect, was vulnerable in ways that Ultima was not. Interplay did the commonsense upgrades to the Wizardry formula that Sir-Tech should have been doing, filling the game with colorful graphics, occasional dashes of spot animation, a bigger variety of monsters to fight, more equipment and spells and classes to experiment with. And, most importantly of all to its commercial success, they made sure a Commodore 64 version came out simultaneously with the Apple II. In the years that followed they funded loving ports to an almost Infocom-like variety of platforms, giving it further graphical facelifts for next-generation machines that the early Wizardry games would never reach, like the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, and Apple IIGS.

The Bard’s Tale‘s original touches, while by no means entirely absent, tinker with the Wizardry formula more than revamp it. Instead of doing everything outside of the dungeons via a simple textual menu system, you now have an entire town with a serious monster infestation of its own to explore. In the town of Skara Brae you can find not only equipment shops and temples and all the other stops typical of the errand-running adventurer but also the entrances to the dungeons themselves — five of them, with a total of 16 levels between them, as opposed to the original Wizardry‘s single dungeon of 10 slightly smaller and generally simpler levels. But the most obvious way that The Bard’s Tale asserts its individuality is in the whimsical character class of the bard himself, who can perform magic by playing songs; you actually hear his songs playing on your computer, another flourish The Bard’s Tale has over its inspiration. More importantly, he lends the game some of his lovably roguish personality: “When the going gets tough, the bard goes drinking,” ran the headline of EA’s advertisements. The official name of the game is actually Tales of the Unknown, Volume 1: The Bard’s Tale; the rather white-bread Tales of the Unknown, in other words, was originally intended as the franchise’s name, The Bard’s Tale as the mere subtitle of this installment. Interplay originally planned to call the next game The Archmage’s Tale, next stop in a presumed cycling through many fantasy character archetypes. The bard proved so popular, however, such an indelible part of the game’s personality and public image, that those plans were quickly set aside. The next game was released as The Bard’s Tale II: The Destiny Knight, the Tales of the Unknown moniker quietly retired.

Commodore 64 owners especially, starved as they had been of the Wizardry experience for years, set upon The Bard’s Tale like a horde of the mad dogs who are some of the first monsters you encounter in its labyrinths. Combined with EA’s usual slick marketing, their pent-up desire was more than enough to make it a massive, massive success, the first CRPG not named Wizardry to be able to challenge the Ultima franchise head to head in terms of sales, if not quite critical respect (it was hard for even the forgiving gaming press of the 1980s to completely overlook just how derivative a game it was). The Bard’s Tale is the game that made Interplay a force to be reckoned with. They would remain one of the major creative forces in gaming for the next decade and a half; we’ll have occasion to visit their story again and in more detail in future articles.

There is, however, a certain whiff of poetic justice to the way that Interplay allowed this particular franchise to go stale in much the same way that Sir-Tech had Wizardry. The Bard’s Tale II (1986) and III (1988) were each successful enough on their own terms, but a story all too familiar to Sir-Tech played out as each installment sold worse than the one before. The series then faded away quietly after The Bard’s Tale Construction Set (1991), for which Interplay polished up some of their internal authoring tools for public consumption. By then The Bard’s Tale was already long past its heyday, its position of yin to Ultima‘s yang taken up by yet another franchise, the officially licensed Advanced Dungeons and Dragons games from SSI. (At least two attempts at a Bard’s Tale IV never came to fruition, doomed by the IP Hell that resulted from Interplay parting company with EA; EA owned the name of the franchise, Interplay most of the content. Interplay’s attempt at a Bard’s Tale IV did eventually come to market as Dragon Wars, actually a far more ambitious game than any of its predecessors but one that was markedly unsuccessful commercially.)

The sequels did add some wrinkles to the formula. The Bard’s Tale II deployed a strangely grid-oriented wilderness to explore in addition to towns — six of them this time — and dungeons, and added range as a consideration to the combat engine. The Bard’s Tale III: The Thief of Fate offered more welcome improvements to the core engine, including a simple auto-mapping feature and, at long last, the ability to save the game even inside a dungeon. But mostly the sequels fell into a trap all too typical of CRPGs, of offering not so much new things to do as just ever larger amounts of the same interchangeably generic content to slog through and laboriously map; over the course of the trilogy we go from 16 to 25 to an absurd 84 dungeon levels. This despite the fact that there just aren’t that many permutations allowed by this simple dungeon-delving engine and its spinners, magical darknesses, teleporters, and traps. Long before the end of the first Bard’s Tale it’s starting to get a bit tedious; by the time you get to the sequels it’s just exhausting. It’s not hard to understand Interplay’s motivation for making the games ever huger. Gamers have always loved the idea of big games that give them more for their money, and by the third game Interplay’s in-house tools were sophisticated enough to allow them to slap together a gnarly dungeon level in probably much less time than it would take the average player to struggle through it. Still, the early Wizardry games stand up better as holistic designs today. The first Wizardry‘s ten modest dungeon levels were enough to consume quite some hours, but not too many; the game is over right about the time it threatens to get boring, a mark the latter Bard’s Tales in particular quite resoundingly overshoot.

So, I’m quite ambivalent about The Bard’s Tale franchise as a whole, as I admittedly am about many old-school CRPGs. To my mind, there are some time-consuming games, like Civilization or Master of Orion, that appeal to our better, more creative natures by offering endless possibilities to explore, endless interesting choices to make. They genuinely fascinate, tempting us to immerse ourselves in their mysteries for all the right reasons. And then there are some, like The Bard’s Tale or for that matter FarmVille, that somehow manage to worm their ways into our psyches and activate some perversely compulsive sense of puritanical duty. Does anyone really enjoy mapping her twentieth — not to mention eightieth! — dungeon inside a Bard’s Tale, wrestling all the while with spinners and teleporters and darkness squares that have long since gone from being intellectually challenging to just incredibly, endlessly annoying? The evidence of The Bard’s Tale‘s lingering fandom would seem to suggest that people do, but it’s a bit hard for me to understand why. Oh, I suppose one can enjoy the result, of having ultra-powerful characters or seeing chaos held at bay for another day via another page of graph paper neatly filled in, but is the process really that entertaining? And if not, why do so many of us feel so compelled to continue with it? Is there ultimately much point to a game that rewards not so much good play as just a willingness to put in lots and lots of time? I want to say yes, if the game has something to say to me or even just an interesting narrative to convey, but The Bard’s Tale, alas, has nothing of the sort. Ah, well… maybe it’s just down to my distaste for level grinding as an end in itself as opposed to as a byproduct of the interesting adventures you’re otherwise having — a distaste everyone obviously doesn’t share.

It can be oddly difficult to find a “clean” copy of this hugely popular game in its most popular incarnation, the Commodore 64 version. Most versions floating around on the Internet are played on, hacked, and/or, all too often, corrupted. If you want to experience The Bard’s Tale, a commercial and historical landmark of its genre despite any misgivings I may have about it, you may therefore want to download a virgin copy from this site. Alternately, all three games are included as a free bonus with a 2004 game of the same name that otherwise has very little to do with its predecessors. That’s available for various platforms from GOG.com, Steam, Google Play, and iTunes. Next time we’ll turn to a CRPG that does have something important to say, arguably the first of all too few examples of same in the history of the genre.

(Matt Barton has posted interviews with some of the folks I write about in this article on his YouTube channel: Rebecca Heineman, Brian Fargo, and Robert Sirotek. Interviews with Michael Cranford can be found on Lemon 64 and the RPG Codex. The Bard’s Tale Compendium has some background on the games and the people who made them. Now Gamer’s history of SSI includes details of the Questron tension with Origin Systems. The inCider magazine articles referenced above are in the November 1984 and November 1987 issues. See the August 1988 Computer Play for more on the Wizardry phenomenon in Japan, and the October 1983 Family Computing for Greenberg at his hectoring worst on the subject of third-party player aids and the necessity of playing Wizardry the “right” way.)

Comments
20 Responses

- Dawid

June 26, 2014 at 12:02 pm

After two months of laborious reading all of your posts on this blog from the beginning, I managed to complete the last one. Seriously, like 5 minutes ago.

Sigh. Relief.

Switch to RSS reader, refresh, and there it is. Another post by Digital Antiquarian.

Well, back to reading then…

Seriously, though, thank you for this blog, for all these wonderful articles, for making this history such exciting experience!

- Jimmy Maher

June 26, 2014 at 12:16 pm

Thanks! When you finish this one, you should at least have a week or so to rest before the next. ;)

- Pope Amole

June 26, 2014 at 4:22 pm

Good article. It’s kinda disappointing to see that the fabled game-developers of golden yore suffered from the same maladies as their modern kin, but then, I wasn’t really expecting anything else from them. Maybe hoping a little, but that’s it.

- Keith Palmer

June 27, 2014 at 12:02 am

I’m a bit less connected to “CRPGs” than to regular adventure games, but this instalment in their own tale was interesting even before one small note caught a particular, unrelated interest of mine. I’d heard the name Robert Woodhead connected to Animeigo before (although I know it’s “still going strong today” through releasing live-action Japanese movies rather than new anime titles), but never made the further connection to Wizardry. What followed after the small note was interesting, too.

- Odkin

June 27, 2014 at 3:43 am

Back in 1980 or 1981 when I fir got my Apple II+, I though long and hard at the Computerland about my first games. I picked Beer Run as my arcade game, and remember looking at their sales list for my “adventure game”. Wizardry was ranked #1, and Ultima was ranked #2. Having my “save the best for last” OCD, I chose Ultima, knowing that if I liked it, Wizardry could only be better! Anyway, I loved Ultima and after winning I picked up Wizardry… and thought it was boring as hell.

- Wade

June 27, 2014 at 8:49 am

Re: Bard’s Tales. Whether or not Bard’s Tale III shifted fewer units than I or II, I think it was a really pleasing and worthy jump up on the quality, not just more of the same. The graphics (even on the same platforms) got bigger and more varied. The automap was a huge help. You no longer had to go through the tedium of buying equipment for a new party – they came pre-equipped. It had multiple worlds with different aesthetics. All in all, it reached a level where the whole thing was suddenly a lot more accessible; still pretty ‘hardcore’ compared to today, but I remember I really felt the development when I played it.

- Charles

June 27, 2014 at 8:41 pm

Thanks for a great article! Lots of history but… I can’t help but wonder why New World Computing doesn’t find its way in there. Were they not considered players because the first Might and Magic came out too late? Was it because of its lower production value compared to Bard’s Tale (compensated by many other things though)? Lack of available information? I’m not criticizing, just wondering.

- Jimmy Maher

June 28, 2014 at 7:33 am

The Might and Magic games were successful, but they were always a tier below — commercially, not artistically, mind you — the likes of Ultima, Wizardry in its early days, Bard’s Tale, and later the AD&D games from SSI. Like many other worthy games, I didn’t mention them in this article for that reason; it dealt with the blockbusters, so to speak, of the genre. Hopefully I’ll be able to give them their due at some point in the future.

- Ice Cream Jonsey

June 28, 2014 at 1:02 am

I think the mapping and the grinding was a product of its time, but it was a pretty special time! (For Bard’s Tale, I mean. Look, Wizardry looked and looks terrible. I’m appreciative of what they brought to computer games, but that’s artwork a baby could do.)

I think that people fall into a couple categories:

1) You love mapping games

2) You will map ONE game.

I fell into group two. My brother and I spent a summer mapping the first Bard’s Tale. We would use the same party — half of the characters in the group were “his”, half were mine. It would dole out new graphics at just the perfect rate to keep us playing, though we also didn’t have a lot of games to play with the PCjr or XT.

I think a lot of Bard’s Tale is only grinding “afterwards” — there was so much crazy stuff in those dungeons that we had no idea about that there was a lot of build up just to be able to go exploring.

- Jimmy Maher

June 29, 2014 at 7:39 am

There’s also of course a third group that consists of most of the population: people who aren’t interested in ever mapping at all. ;)

That said, I probably fall into your group 2. I remember being fascinated by The Bard’s Tale as a kid, although I never came close to finishing it. There was always the expectation that something amazing could be down there on one of those squares. As a jaded adult not so much: now I understand all too well the limitations of the engine, and can see all too clearly that most dungeon levels contain at most one really significant encounter. Certain people seem to find just the act of filling in the dungeon on graph paper a Zen-like experience. Me, not so much, or at least not anymore. I just keep thinking of all the other ways I could be spending my time… again, not really something a kid does.

- Nate

September 5, 2015 at 10:19 pm

My friends and I got lost in Bard’s Tale III one summer. The trick was that we were all playing it at close to the same level, so the four of us would each try to get past the puzzles and then tell the others how we did it.

I believe the enjoyment was much more about this camaraderie than the game itself. Our conversations were peppered with bard-isms as well, such as EAMA (earth maw – wanting the earth to swallow up an unpleasant person in front of you).

Anyway, I agree with your criticism that this is not a great game, but I think it’s a good one. We felt real sadness about Skara Brae by BT III, and the upper levels where time travel comes into play really had an epic feel at the time.

I suspect that when I’m old and can no longer move around much, the enjoyment from graphing out a dungeon will be like doing the crossword puzzle every day. Boring to an outsider, but a welcome and predictable routine for someone too old for action games. :-)

- Gnoman

June 28, 2014 at 5:39 am

Not certain if you intended to go into it or not, but there is at least one other footnote to the Wizardry story. Right around the time the game was ported to Japan, a pair by the names of Yuji Horii and Koichi Nakamura, employees of the Japanese developer Enix, came across it at a Mac expo. Horii, who had previously worked on a few very story-heavy games, had the bright idea to combine this with Wizardry. The result was Dragon Warrior, the very first jRPG. Wizardry was also a heavy influence on the later Final Fantasy, so the two great branches of the RPG market can both be traced to that one game.

- Jimmy Maher

June 28, 2014 at 7:36 am

Thanks for that! I knew that Wizardry was alleged to be very influential on the jRPG, but didn’t have enough hard details to make any concrete claims and didn’t want to overreach and get it wrong. I unfortunately can’t do the sort of research into Japanese gaming that I can into Western because all the good primary sources are in a language I don’t know…

- Kate Willaert

July 9, 2014 at 6:22 pm

I’ve come across a few sources that state Yuji Horii came across Wizardry before it was officially ported to Japan in the US (which I think was around 1985 or so?). I guess he won an Enix-sponsored programming contest that awarded him a trip to AppleFest ’83, which is where he first encountered Wizardry. This would be why there’s a subtle reference to Wizardry in his 1983 adventure game Portopia Serial Murder Case.

Horii’s later game Dragon Quest wasn’t the first RPG created in Japan, but it was the one that popularized the genre there thanks to a brilliant marketing campaign that Nintendo Of America didn’t come close to replicating until Pokemon.

- Jimmy Maher

July 10, 2014 at 5:49 am

1985 sounds right for the ASCII Wizardry. The apparently less refined Starcraft version may have appeared by 1983 or so.

- Alan

July 2, 2014 at 4:16 pm

Thank you for this fascinating article! I played a lot of these games as a kid but had no idea about their history. As for the appeal of them, my brother and I played a lot of Bard’s Tale II on our IIgs. We never graphed anything. It was all about building up characters and wandering around exploring. We played Ultima IV in a similar way. I’m sure we would’ve progressed further in the game if we drew a map or two, but that wasn’t “fun” for us.

- Duncan Stevens

July 4, 2014 at 12:33 pm

Interesting. My brother and I played through Wizardry IV, and we enjoyed the challenge. In retrospect, parts of it were unfair, sure, but the gameplay is more about solving puzzles than building up a party’s strength, and there were some pretty cleverly designed puzzles. I didn’t play many non-Wizardry CRPGs, but I’m guessing that Wizardry IV had some of the best *puzzles* (i.e., not riddles, not find-the-key-and-unlock-the-door) in CRPG history. (It probably had some of the worst ones, too, of course.) It’s not exactly a CRPG-IF hybrid, but it’s notable in its way.

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- Zeke

August 1, 2014 at 1:45 pm

I had played a little Bard’s Tale, but the first CRPG I got at home was Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge for my dad’s mac. I played the heck out of it, for years to the point both my instruction manual (which had all the spell lists and character stats) and the hint book I eventually bought were both thoroughly bent, crinkled and dog-eared. Spent an eternity waiting for the sequel to come out (now that was a wait!) So I picked up Wizardry 1 to play in the meantime. There was no bigger “WHUT” in the world than childhood me stumbling around that primitive landscape. To this day I’ve never managed to make any progress in the 1-5 games even though 6-8 are some of my favorites. What a dichotomy!

- Brandon Campbell

November 10, 2014 at 1:38 am

I was a Commodore 64 kid so I never heard much about Wizardry until later on, but I am a big fan of anime and have a lot of respect for AnimEigo, so that was crazy to find out how the same guy was involved in both! He has had a fascinating life and I am very happy for him.

Also very interesting to hear that the Bard’s Tale is actually derivative of Wizardry even though (again being a Commodore kid) I heard of Bard’s Tale first. I never got around to trying it back in the day, but definitely plan on checking out Bard’s Tale soon.

The Road to IV
July 7, 2014

Late in the fall of 1983, when it was clear that Ultima III was turning into a huge success and thus that their new company Origin Systems was going to be a viable operation, Robert Garriott came to his little brother Richard with a forlorn plea. Robert, you may remember, had for months been commuting via his private Cessna between the Garriotts’ family home in Houston, whose garage served as Origin’s development studio and assembly line, and North Andover, Massachusetts, where his wife Marcy worked for Bell Labs. It wasn’t, to say the least, an ideal way to run a marriage. Would Richard and the rest of the fledgling company agree to move to North Andover for three years? After that Marcy expected a promotion that should make it much easier for she and Robert to move, and, assuming the company was still alive, they’d then move wherever Richard and the rest liked. Young, unattached, and ready for adventure as they were, just about everyone agreed. They packed their cars with their personal possessions and rented two trucks to fill with supplies, computers, and other equipment — most notably the precious shrink-wrap machine — and headed northeast just weeks later.

That winter was a bad one, with some of the worst storms of the decade. They hit major snow before they got out of Arkansas. Anyone who’s ever seen a Texan trying to drive on snow and ice can perhaps attest to what a miracle it was that they got to North Andover at all. Once there, the snow and bitter cold just continued for months. That first winter wasn’t the best introduction to the place that Richard still calls “the frozen wastes of New England.” He totaled his car on the icy streets within days; his house right next door to his brother Robert’s, which he rented with Chuck Bueche and Mary Fenton, was burglarized not once but twice, resulting in the loss of thousands of dollars worth of computers and home electronics; he and his buddies couldn’t seem to connect with any of the locals, who viewed their Texas accents and strange business of making computer games with suspicion. Things wouldn’t get much better; Richard in particular remained a hopeless fish out of water throughout his time in New England.

The only thing to do was to throw himself into life inside the Origin bubble. He made his own fun, instituting a daily five o’clock ritual called “Rubbaser war,” using $75 graphite-and-steel guns that could shoot rubber bands at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour; they hit with such force that the combatants had to wear helmets. He also continued to celebrate his favorite holiday with elaborate Halloween parties, even if the number of people around him eager to attend them had rather dwindled since the move. The moment when the locals decided once and for all that they wanted nothing to do with him may well have been the first of these: Richard, who was great at preparing for such big events but not so great at cleaning up after himself, left unnervingly realistic-looking bloody body parts strewn across his lawn through much of the following winter.

With Chuck Bueche’s action game Caverns of Callisto having failed to set the industry on fire, Origin now concentrated on, as their tagline would eventually have it, “creating worlds” in the form of big, ambitious games. Soon after the move to New England, they hired Dave Albert away from Penguin Software. Albert, who had majored in journalism at university and served as editor and writer for SoftSide magazine before coming to Penguin, would help Robert Garriott to put a professional face to this collection of young hackers. Albert also brought with him Greg Malone and his game in progress, the very original if polarizing oriental CRPG Moebius. Before releasing their next slate of games after Ultima III and Caverns of Callisto, Origin signed a distribution deal with Electronic Arts, becoming one of the first of what would eventually be quite a number of EA “Affiliated Labels.” This gave the still tiny Origin a badly needed presence in mass-market chains like Toys “R” Us and Sears.

Origin stretched out its tendrils in many intriguing directions during these early days. They entered into a contract with Steve Jackson Games — Steve Jackson was a friend of Richard’s from his Austin SCA troupe — to adapt that company’s popular board game Car Wars for the computer. They also agreed to make a computer game to accompany a planned film version of Morgan Llywelyn’s novel Lion of Ireland; Richard would get to spend two weeks on the set in southern Ireland soaking up the ambiance in the name of research. Richard also made tentative plans with none other than Andrew Greenberg of Wizardry fame to collaborate on “the ultimate fantasy role-playing game.” Most of this came to naught: the movie’s financing fell through and it never got made; the ultimate collaboration remained nothing more than talk. Only the Car Wars project survived, and only after a fashion: Chuck Bueche turned the turn-based board game into the real-time CRPG Autoduel over the considerable misgivings of Steve Jackson.

Meanwhile and preeminently, there was Ultima IV, the game that would change everything for Ultima and for Origin. As was his routine by now, Richard started working on it almost from the moment that Ultima III shipped, starting once again from the previous game’s code base and once again designing and coding virtually everything himself on his trusty Apple II. But, like the fourth Wizardry game that was its obvious competitor, it took much longer to complete than anyone had anticipated. Originally slated for Christmas 1984, it took a final desperate dash just to get it out in time for Christmas 1985.

Anticipation grew all the while. For a game to remain in active, continuous development for two years at that time was virtually unprecedented. Truly Richard Garriott must be doing something amazing. The hints and tidbits that he let drop during interviews certainly sounded good: Ultima IV‘s world map would consist of 256 X 256 tiles, 16 times the size of Ultima III‘s 64 X 64-tile world; there would be a full parser-based conversation engine for talking with others; spells would now require reagents to cast, with the finding of their recipes and ingredients a mini-game within the game; dungeons would now contain “rooms” that opened into a tactical map. Yet the thing that Richard kept bringing up most was none of these incremental improvements, but something he insisted marked a change in the very nature of the game. There would be, he said, no evil character to defeat. Instead the player must become a better person, an “Avatar of Virtue.” What was that all about?

Richard Garriott has told many times the story of how Ultima IV came to be. Akalabeth, Ultima I, and Ultima II had, he says, existed for him in a vacuum — or, maybe better said, an echo chamber. Any fan mail or other feedback from players of those games had never reached him because neither California Pacific nor Sierra had bothered to forward it to him. Once Ultima III came out under his own company’s aegis, however, he started getting a flood of letters telling him how fans really played his games. This generally entailed lots of murdering, stealing, and all-around reprehensible behavior. Now, it’s perhaps a bit surprising that this should come as such a shock to Richard, since those early games essentially forced this behavior on the player if she wished to succeed. Still, the letters set it out all out in unmistakeable black and white, as it were. And then there were the truly crazy letters from religious fundamentalists and anti-Dungeons and Dragons activists, which included such lovely epithets as “Satanic perverter of America’s youth.”

The first few of those letters that I got at the age of 22 really bothered me. You sit back and go, “Gosh, I know I’m not a wicked individual, I know I’m not teaching Satan worship, I know I’m not doing any of these things.” But the fact that someone would think so bothered me. It made me want to call the person up and say, “Look, you’re wrong, you just misinterpreted it.” But of course it would do no good to do so.

“People,” Richard said in another interview, “read things into my games that were simply statistical anomalies in the programming. They thought I was putting messages into the game.” To his mind, those first four games were all simply “here’s some money, here’s some weapons, here’s some monsters, go kill them and you win.” Like the Beatles a generation earlier, he now decided to give those who wanted hidden messages something that actually, you know, existed to think about it. Less facetiously, all of this feedback did make him begin to think seriously for the first time about the sorts of messages his games were delivering, to begin to understand they were not “just games,” that they could and did say something about the world. He began to understand that every creative work says something, whether its creator intends it to do so or not. It says something about the person who created it, the culture he came from, the audience to which it’s expected to appeal. Richard wasn’t sure he liked what his games were saying — albeit all but unbeknownst to their creator — so he decided to take conscious control of his message with Ultima IV.

It makes for kind of a beautiful story about a young man discovering himself as an artist, discovering that the work he puts into the world really does matter. And there’s no reason to believe it isn’t true in the large strokes. That said, there are indications that the full story may be at least a bit more complicated than the glib summary that Richard has given in almost thirty years worth of interviews.

In the November 1983 issue of Softline magazine is an interview with Richard in which he describes his plans for the nascent Ultima IV. Already at this stage the player’s goal was to be to become an enlightened avatar by acquiring sixteen attributes — twice as many as in the finished game.

Fifteen attributes represent powers over forces of nature and life, and the final attribute is clairvoyance. The first fifteen attributes may be obtained through certain great deeds in the physical world: areas like those portrayed by all the previous Ultima games. For the final attribute, the adventurer must make a quest into the ninth plane of Hell (presumably through all the lesser planes as well).

The article goes on to state that the resolutely non-bookish Richard had read Dante’s Inferno by way of preparation, “so we can expect the depictions of the planes to be vivid and graphic.”

This is fascinating stuff on a couple of levels. It’s of course always interesting to see how a major work like Ultima IV evolved (if you didn’t find it so, I assume you wouldn’t be reading this blog). It’s interesting that sixteen “attributes” — a word that positively reeks of Dungeons and Dragons — became a more manageable eight virtues. It’s interesting to note how Dante’s Hell turned into the more abstract Stygian Abyss of the final game, doubtless a very wise decision in light of the easily outraged folks already convinced that fantasy role-playing in general and Ultima in particular were the work of Satan. It’s interesting just to note the influence Dante had on Ultima IV, an influence which, for all the words that have been spilled about the game since its release, appears to have gone completely unremarked in all of them.

But perhaps most interesting of all is the timeline of all this. Given magazine lead times, the interview that led to this article must have been done bare weeks or days after Ultima III‘s release — hardly enough time to let Richard receive lots of fan mail and other feedback on the game, internalize it all, and proceed so far down the road to a response in the form of Ultima IV. If we take that as a given, it leaves open just two alternative possibilities: that Sierra at least had in fact been forwarding to Richard his fan mail (this wouldn’t hugely surprise me; demonizing those first two publishers who did so much to give him his start has unfortunately become one of Richard’s less noble hobbies in recent years), or that this feedback, when it arrived, would be a contributory factor to Ultima IV but not quite the prime motivator it’s become in Richard’s telling. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the other factors that may have been at play here.

It seems likely that the real point of genesis of Ultima IV was not a fan letter but rather a television documentary about the Dead Sea Scrolls. This program, mentioned by Richard in interviews but which I unfortunately haven’t been able to identify more specifically, apparently mentioned in passing the belief held by some Christians and Hindus that Jesus Christ visited India during the so-called “unknown years” of his life, that period between about age twelve and thirty which is not described in the New Testament or any other accepted record. Some such folks believe that Jesus was a Hindu “avatar,” a god descended to earth in human form. Richard was captivated by the concept. He wasn’t the first bright young person to seek in the religions of the East a spiritual alternative to the dogmatic rigidity of the Christianity that he saw around him in his daily life. His august company includes the likes of Roger Zelazny, Steve Jobs, and of course a certain four lads from Liverpool. “I am not a religious individual,” he once said, “but I do have difficulty with the scare tactics that religions use to teach ethics, saying you must be good or something bad will happen to you.”

But what was the religious history of the “not religious” Richard? He described it at greatest length to Shay Addams for The Official Book of Ultima:

My family did go to church when I was very young, but by the time I was in my teens we really didn’t. So I went to Sunday school at an interdenominational church, which was a very interesting upbringing because it was extremely interdenominational. I mean, all sorts of different sects of Christianity as well as Judaism and who knows what else — I was too young to know what else might have been there. But it was very interesting the way Sunday school was taught in this church, which I really believe was an amazingly responsible thing to do: they would read a Biblical story that had a moral to it, and they would tell you why this means achieved this end, and then say, “This is a story put in the Bible to teach this lesson.” Christians believe it because it was recorded in this way, and so on, and they would explain it to you not as “this is fact” but as “this is a story that exists for this purpose.”

Although I was a child, I accepted it as fact, literally, but they didn’t tell me this was fact — that you must believe or you are going to Hell. As an adult, I could reflect upon it and say, “I don’t have to believe that. I understand why it was told, and why it was recorded. But it is my choice as to whether I believe it or not.” My eldest brother is religious; myself and Robert are not. We had a choice, though, which is the point. That is why I find it amazingly responsible, the way they brought us up. My father, for instance, was not religious and my mother only somewhat religious, but they believed it was important that their children have that upbringing as a knowledge base, and they found a place where they could get it. So, we all got to make those choices as adults. I thought that was very responsible on my parents’ part and pretty rare.

The factors that made the notion of an interdenominational church so appealing to the pragmatic Richard were likely the same that drew him to the story of Jesus as Hindu avatar: an emphasis on shared spirituality and shared ethics over the niceties of religious dogma. He became fascinated with Hinduism and in particular with Hindu Yoga. Their influence would be all over that first conception of Ultima IV he outlined for Softline, and internalized somewhat more subtly into the finished game.

They have a belief that there are sixteen ways you could purify yourself. In one of these sixteen ways you would get some sort of power, spiritual power, based on that. Some Yogis can kind of like stop their heart and other bodily functions and things of this nature, and I believe these people can literally do those physical things. I’m not saying why they can do them, but apparently the biggest, most powerful Yogis can even do things like teleport themselves to other places on the planet, which I have never seen personally and am somewhat skeptical of, but you never know. But it’s a very interesting thing that the Hindus believe Christ was a very powerful Yogi who, when he studied with them, attained the most powerful level, the avatar. The culmination of Yogis is to become an avatar, and the definition of an avatar is someone who has purified themselves in all sixteen of these ways.

There are five ways of purifying your physical body, for example, and five ways of purifying your spirit, and so on, and the last one, the sixteenth way, was to become one with God Himself. Interestingly enough, to this day Hindus say there have been two avatars in existence throughout history: one was a woman who predates written history, and the second one was Christ.

Garriott’s conception of Hinduism and Yoga is, shall we say, a somewhat idiosyncratic and confused one, steeped at least as much in Dungeons and Dragons and his work-hard-and-achieve upbringing as Hindu or Biblical scripture; this was after all still the kid who had named the villain in Ultima III “Exodus” just because it sounded cool. Thus we have Christ “leveling up” until he becomes an avatar — a word which itself means something different in Hinduism from what Richard seems to think it means — at level 16. Still, what Richard learned or thought he learned about Hinduism and Yoga would remain a critical piece of Ultima IV.

If we postulate a new concern with the messages that his games were sending and a renewed interest in religion — particularly Hinduism — as two legs of the three-legged stool on which rests Ultima IV, the last must be something even more universal: the simple life experience of growing up. Richard had, truth be told, lived a pretty sheltered existence to this point in the bosom of his family and NASA and his Dungeons and Dragons buddies and later of the University of Texas and his SCA troupe. Escapism, whether into fantasy or just the well-scrubbed safety of high-school science fairs, is an obvious running theme. By Richard’s own admission, he was if anything quite immature for his age when Origin decamped for New England. But now he was suddenly living in a house he and his friends were renting for themselves, far from home in the “frozen wastes” of Massachusetts. He was becoming an adult at last, with adult responsibilities.

Lord British in leather

Richard started to feel his oats a bit during this period. He found his rather mild rebellious streak later than do many of us, but this did give him the luxury of something teenage rebels mostly lack: money. And so he replaced the practical car he had totaled in the snow with a new Mitsubishi Starion painted a striking jet black. He took to dressing in black leather pants and jacket, with studded bracelets around his wrists. He grew a single strand of hair into a long, braided pony tail that stretched beyond his shoulder blades. His relationship with his “extraordinarily conservative” brother and next-door neighbor Robert became decidedly strained; it seems Robert was usually more inclined to agree with his other neighbors than Richard regarding the latter’s parties and other antics. Warren Spector, a game designer who would become an important contributor to later Ultimas, was working as an assistant editor at Steve Jackson Games in Austin at this time. He describes the version of Richard that he glimpsed for the first time during one of the latter’s occasional return visits to Austin thus: “In drove this rock star in his Mitsubishi, all black. Got out, all black, bling everywhere. I was thinking, okay, I’m in the wrong line of work, I’ve got to find a way to work with this guy!”

The changes were not just external. Richard went through something of a minor existential crisis: “I wasn’t sure I knew what I was doing anymore. I tried to figure out who I was and what I was going to do next.” Trivial as it may sound, when Robert Garriott shook his head in embarrassment and the neighbors scowled at the body parts strewn across his lawn after Halloween or the empty trash cans that remained unretrieved at roadside for days on end, he was learning that actions — or, as the case may be, inaction — has consequences. All of these factors led Richard, like so many idealistically-inclined young men before him, to try to develop a philosophy of life that made sense to him. Richard was unique, however, in that he planned to put it all into a computer game — indeed, he saw doing so almost as a duty. He was well aware that the audience for his games was a pretty young and impressionable one, the most common demographic category being an adolescent boy.

If someone spends 100 hours playing my game, I have 100 hours of the input that makes that person what they are. With that comes, in my mind, a sense of responsibility regarding the content of what I’m going to pipeline into that individual for 100 hours. That was really the kernel thought that started what has now really changed Ultima henceforth and probably forever.

He set himself no less a task than the development of a complete code of ethics, a set of rules for living. As interesting as he found Hinduism and other religious traditions, it was very important to him that his rules for living must be explicitly divorced from any sort of supernatural agency. Some of the most brilliant thinkers in history, a list including Plato, Kant, and Nietzsche just for starters, devoted their lives to wrestling with the same task. Now the 22-year-old college drop-out Richard Garriott hung up a whiteboard, bought a stack of books, and prepared to do the same. The biggest issues he’d wrestled with for previous Ultimas were how many hit points this or that monster should have or how many experience points it should take to raise a character’s level. Now he was trying to devise a complete, internally consistent system of moral philosophy. It was a heady change indeed. Rather typically, Richard found the basic building blocks of the system of ethics he would finally include in Ultima IV not in any of the aforementioned highbrow philosophers but in The Wizard of Oz.

And that makes a pretty good place to stop for today. Next time we’ll look more closely at the ethical system he devised, along with much else in the finished game. Before I let you go, though, I do want to ask you to think about just what a remarkable conceptual leap Richard Garriott was making here, a leap made all the more remarkable by the fact that he did it all on its own, in a vacuum that still contained barely a whiff of our contemporary notions of serious games or ludic rhetoric, and in the genre of the CRPG that had heretofore been about little more than killing monsters and taking their stuff, with none of the higher-toned literary aspirations that Infocom and their competitors had brought to the text adventure.

Above all, it was — and I think this is a very important point with which to close — a tremendously brave choice. Richard was desperately worried about how it would be received by a public who expected just a bigger version of Ultima III. Should enough of those players accustomed to “kill, kill, kill” reject the game, it could bring down his company and put most of his closest friends out of work. The stress actually caused him to suffer the occasional panic attack while he programmed; his stomach would suddenly cramp up and he would have to lie down, willing himself to just breathe. “To succeed in this game,” he notes, “you had to radically change the way you’d ever played a game before.” This was the leap that the creators of Wizardry were unable to make, the one that transformed Ultima forevermore into something just a little bit nobler, a little bit more important, a little bit better than competing franchises. The fact that Richard was willing to make that leap, and that — yes, I’m sparing you the suspense — his public responded to it in huge numbers, makes it in its way as inspiring a story as any you’ll find in gaming history. Robert Gregg’s comments in Dungeons and Dreamers, describing the revelation that Ultima IV was to him when he first encountered it, offer the perfect closing thoughts: “The game was commenting on society, and on the observer himself, just like other forms of art. That was the most exciting part to me — watching the emergence of a new form of art, coming right off the computer.” You and me both, Robert.

(Sources for this article and the next include the books The Official Book of Ultima by Shay Addams, Dungeons and Dreamers by Brad King and John Borland, and Ultima: The Avatar Adventures by Rusel DeMaria and Caroline Spector; the Computer Gaming World issues of September/October 1984, November/December 1985, and March 1986; the Questbusters of August 1985; the Softline of November/December 1983; and the Commodore Power Play of August/September 1985. Also useful were Warren Spector’s video interview with Richard Garriott, and Matt Barton’s with Richard Garriott and with Chuck Bueche.)

Comments
14 Responses

- Jayle Enn

July 8, 2014 at 3:05 am

This is really eye-opening. I’ve always been an Ultima fan; one of my earliest computing memories is of beating U1 over the course of a weekend, and I remember seeing that picture or a very similar one of Garriott in a then-current issue of InCider Magazine, with a description of Rubaser Wars that’s stuck with me since.
I never knew about the adventure the Origin crew had undertaken, not that I would have understood it, being maybe ten years old at the time. Now, rather a while later, it’s fascinating to get a glimpse of the processes behind the games that strongly shaped my childhood.

- Brad King

July 8, 2014 at 3:21 am

John and I loved writing our book, and spending time with Richard talking about his design process. It’s important that people read about these so they realize that the game designers are many times thinking about more than just hacking and slashing.

- Steve McCrea

July 8, 2014 at 4:26 am

There’s an interesting discussion of the Ultima philosophy in the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast #105, with Richard Garriott.

- Ken Rutsky

July 8, 2014 at 6:33 pm

Not much to add, just wanted to compliment you on a great entry, here.

- George Albanis

July 8, 2014 at 7:23 pm

Fantastic read.

- Kevin in USA

July 8, 2014 at 11:13 pm

Ok Ive never played U4. What does Wizard of Oz have to do with the game?

- Captain Rufus

July 9, 2014 at 9:05 am

The 3 core tenets that form the 8 virtues are Truth, Love, and Courage. The Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Lion.

Also Ultima 4 while not my favorite of the series (5 is), is possibly one of the most amazing concepts in RPGs. One that has basically been ignored by nearly everyone since.

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- Narsham

December 1, 2014 at 4:18 am

“actions — or, as the case may be, inaction — has consequences. ” You mean actions have consequences, right?

I’m going to have to think about the U4 Dante conntection. Fascinating!

- Jimmy Maher

December 1, 2014 at 5:55 pm

If you’re referring to “has/have,” that’s a little of a grammatical gray zone I believe, with different style guides offering different answers. I usually make the verb agree with the closest substantive, as I did here.

Ultima IV
July 11, 2014

There’s lots of somethings to be said for sheer audacity in art, for a willingness to stick your neck out and give your audience something they never, ever expected from you. I think sometimes about how the first folks who listened to Revolver must have felt when the erstwhile cuddly Fab Four unleashed the otherworldly chaos of “Tomorrow Never Knows”; how the first buyers of Achtung, Baby must have felt when they hit the play button and heard not the expected soaring anthem but the grinding industrial murk of “Zoo Station”; how, to choose something I’ve already written a bit about here on this blog, viewers who tuned into The Prisoner‘s “Living in Harmony” episode must have felt when instead of a spy drama they got a Western that refused to reveal itself as a dream sequence but instead just kept going and going right through the show’s running time. Lots and lots of people run screaming from these sorts of switcheroos. As for me, though… they always send a thrill up my spine. A willingness to rip it up and start again is pretty high on the list of things likely to draw me to a creator.

I get some of that thrill when I think about those first people who booted up Ultima IV expecting to create a party via the usual min/maxing routine, only to be greeted with a simple story with the gravitas of a parable — a parable about, well, you.

The day is warm, yet there is a cooling breeze. The latest in a series of personal crises seems insurmountable. You are being pulled apart in all directions.

Yet this afternoon walk in the countryside slowly brings relaxation to your harried mind. The soil and stain of modern high-tech living begins to wash off in layers. That willow tree near the stream looks comfortable and inviting.

The buzz of dragonflies and the whisper of the willow’s swaying branches bring a deep peace. Searching inward for tranquility and happiness, you close your eyes.

A high-pitched cascading sound like crystal wind chimes impinges on your floating awareness. As you open your eyes, you see a shimmering blueness rise from the ground. The sound seems to be emanating from this glowing portal.

There’s the echo of another spiritual journey’s beginning, that undertaken by the narrator of Dante’s Inferno: “In this the midway of our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray, gone from the path direct.”

Ultima IV‘s opening parable culminates in a mysterious gypsy fortune teller who poses a series of ethical dilemmas designed to determine not what class or race you’d like to play but what kind of person you are. Of the eight noble virtues of Compassion, Honesty, Honor, Humility, Justice, Sacrifice, Spirituality, and Valor, which ones matter most to you?

By 1985 gaming had already seen its fair share of debates about who the player’s character in a role-playing game or interactive fiction really was. The very term “role-playing” would seem to imply that the player was not just playing herself thrust into another world, that she was playing a role there, performing as one of Gary Gygax’s idealized Shakespearian thespians. Infocom also had tried to sell their players, to decidedly mixed success and occasional howls of outrage, on seeing interactive fiction through the eyes of people who weren’t necessarily the same as them. For the grand experiment of Ultima IV to succeed it was critical that the opposite point of view prevail, that the player feel it to really be her in the game. Richard Garriott: “Since this is a game about the player’s personal virtues, it is very important that one always identifies with the character and feels responsible for the character’s deeds.”

In a computer game if you roll random dice, you’re just going to sit there and go roll, roll, roll. You get all maxed-out numbers and it’s, “Okay, I’ll take that one.” If you don’t let them roll out and you let them choose numbers, well, it’s kind of a fixed equation. Once they know the map and the game, they can make the perfect decision as to exactly what their stats should be if they are aware that the equations are internal. So I don’t want to give you either of those.

Ultima IV I wanted to be a very personal experience. The reason is because in most of these games you are the puppeteer running this puppet around the world. If this puppet is doing bad things it’s not you, it’s the puppet. You can detach. And I wanted this game to be about personal and social responsibility. It is very important that this be you in the world of Britannia, not something you’ve rolled up. If I’m the computer nerd at home wanting to be a big barbarian going around crushing things, I still want to be a computer nerd down there, in nice clothing. The essence of that character is really the essence of you as an individual.

The gypsy’s questions were designed to tease out the player’s real beliefs and place her in the role in the game that best suited her own personality — to whatever extent seven questions determining the most important to her of eight abstract virtues could manage such a feat, of course. Richard again:

We worked on the phrasing of those questions. Unfortunately, there’s no really perfect way to ask those questions that we’ve yet discovered. Here’s something else that’s interesting. When we were working on this system, I said, “Here’s what I want to do for character development.” I went around to everyone in the office, saying, “Here’s these eight virtues along with a short description as to what I mean by them. Give me your ranking, one to eight, as to how important you think they are.” And then about a week later, after we generated those questions, we went back to the same people and said, “Answer these questions.” Although our company was only about twenty people large, everybody except two people had the exact same outcome to the questions as they did to the judgment. And those two who were wrong only had two transposed in the list. And so it turns out you get the exact same responses as you do to an intellectual discussion of it.

For the record, every time I answer the questions Compassion trumps everything else, and thus I end up a bard starting just outside Lord British’s castle. I don’t know whether this necessarily represents the person I always am, but it’s certainly a good approximation of the person I’d most like to be. So, at least for me, the system does indeed seem to work pretty well.

After that radical opening, the screen which greets the player after the gypsy has passed her final judgment must have struck many as comforting in its familiarity.

Yes, we’re back to our familiar view with our familiar alphabet soup of single-letter commands to explore the world. That world is now named Britannia rather than Sosaria; it was so renamed after Lord British united the land under his rule following the passing of the Three Ages of Darkness represented by Ultima I, II, and III. The fact that the geography is completely different from that of the previous game is similarly handwaved away, attributed to a great upheaval — must have been one hell of an upheaval — following the destruction of Exodus in Ultima III. The fact that Ultima II inexplicably took place on our Earth is, as per developing Ultima tradition, completely ignored; there are limits to what even the most dedicated ret-conner can accomplish. Also simply ignored is the last of the stupid attempts at anachronistic cleverness that dogged the early Ultimas, the big reveal at the end of Ultima III that Exodus was really a giant computer; in the Ultima IV manual’s version he was just your everyday world-domination-bent evil wizard.

Importantly, this new world of Britannia that you enter is not under attack from yet another evil wizard, or an evil anything else for that matter. This is one of the few CRPGs ever made, and almost certainly the first, to neither have an evil wizard nor to take place in some melodramatic Age of Darkness. Richard has drawn parallels between the Britannia of Ultima IV and Renaissance Italy — or, even better, King’s Arthur’s Britain at the height of the golden age of Camelot; between the player’s quest to become an Avatar of Virtue and the similarly spiritual quest for the Holy Grail. This quest is necessary not despite the land being peaceful and prosperous but because of it, because times of peace and prosperity are the only ones that allow the luxury of pondering a philosophy for living.

That said, becoming an Avatar of Virtue actually represents only the first step of the two-step process of solving Ultima IV. The second step requires you to descend into the Stygian Abyss, a remnant of the Dante-inspired Hell that was the centerpiece of Richard’s first conception for the game, and recover something called the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom. The final dungeon serves to hammer home the game’s rhetorical message via a series of puzzles which require you to apply what you’ve learned about the system of virtues, but everything that happens after you become an Avatar is otherwise much less interesting than what happens before. Just as what the Holy Grail represents to Lancelot is far more important to the legend than Galahad’s eventual drinking from it, the recovery of the physical Codex comes as something of an anticlimax to your achievement of Avatarhood. Richard Garriott himself said as much in later interviews, calling the Codex “largely irrelevant” to the real message of Ultima IV, even admitting that he had trouble remembering where or what the Codex actually was. Mostly it just allows Ultima IV a bit more of a traditional CRPG structure, serving as a stand-in for the usual evil wizard’s Whatchamacallit of Infinite Power that can be recovered only by defeating him at the bottom of the last and cruelest dungeon.

Let’s talk, then, about that first, more interesting stage of the game. Becoming an Avatar of Virtue requires that you demonstrate your dedication to each of the eight virtues through your deeds over many hours of adventuring in Britannia. When you have proved yourself worthy of “ascension” in a particular virtue, and have collected a necessary entry rune and a mantra, you can visit a shrine to that virtue and meditate to achieve one-eighth of your eventual Avatarhood. Ultima IV boldly applies these sorts of mystical trappings to an ethical philosophy which carefully avoids the subject of God in favor of simple practicality. Richard Garriott: “If I beat you up, you are going to be angry at me and will be on my back. If I’m nice to you, you are likely to be nice back. It makes good rational sense.” This has been expressed more rigorously by philosophers for millennia now as the idea of enlightened self-interest: you do best for yourself by doing well by others. Parsing a distinction which admittedly really exists only in his mind, Richard claims to ignore morals, which to him represent decisions about right and wrong based on feelings or spiritual beliefs, in favor of ethics, which are grounded in simple, rational common sense. A similar determination to remove the supernatural from the fantastic is everywhere in Ultima, perhaps as a byproduct of Richard being the son of a scientist who would probably have become one himself had Dungeons and Dragons and computers not stepped in. Richard saw Ultima IV‘s magic system, for instance, not as something mystical and mysterious but as merely the natural science of a world that just happens to have different natural laws than our own.

In developing Ultima IV‘s system of ethics, Richard began with a long jumble of possible virtues. Among them were three rather extreme abstractions on this list of abstractions: Truth, Love, and Courage. Watching The Wizard of Oz one day, it struck him that L. Frank Baum may have started with a similar list: “I thought of the Scarecrow looking for a brain, which was Truth; the Tin Man looking for a heart, Love; and the Cowardly Lion, looking for Courage.” It then occurred to his scientist’s mind that these three could be seen as core principles which could be combined to form most of the other items on his list. Honesty is Truth alone; Compassion is Love alone; Valor is Courage alone; Truth tempered by Love is Justice; Love and Courage are Sacrifice; Courage and Truth are Honor; Truth and Love and Courage all together become Spirituality; the absence of all three is Humility. Richard, who loved his symbols, devised a cool-looking diagram to represent the relationships, which ended up inadvertently — or at least subconsciously — resembling Judaism’s Star of David.

The symbol of Ultima IV’s system of virtues. The three traditional primary colors represent the core principles: blue is Truth, red Courage, yellow Compassion. They combine to form the eight virtues (including Humility, which contains none of the three and is thus the black border).

A more readable if less ornate diagram of the virtues.

As a system of belief, it’s perhaps not exactly compelling for an adult (although, hey, cults have been founded on less). As an ethical philosophy… well, let’s just say that Richard Garriott is unlikely to ever rival Kant in university philosophy curricula. There are plenty of points to quibble about: Honesty, Compassion, and Valor are, at least in this formulation, really just synonyms for the core principles that supposedly compose them; the idea that Spirituality is made up of all the virtues lumped together seems kind of strange, as does its presence at all given Richard’s determinedly materialist worldview; the idea of Humility as literally an ethical vacuum seems truly bizarre. (Richard later clarified in interviews that he would have preferred this latter to be Pride, but, “Pride not being a virtue, we have to use Humility”; make of that what you will.) And of course the names of the virtues themselves are rather painfully redolent of the life of a Dungeons and Dragons-obsessed teenager. But poking holes in the system is really missing the point. Ultima IV gave its audience permission to think about these things, laid out in a cool if only superficially logical way. The fact that these ethics still speak the language of Dungeons and Dragons was a good thing, because that’s the language most of Ultima IV‘s audience spoke. Richard himself didn’t claim any mystical truth for the system, freely admitting in interviews that it was essentially arbitrary, that dozens of other formulations could have served his purposes just as well. The one real overriding concern I have with the system is that it can lead to a possibly dangerous ethical absolutism; the only place where Ultima IV does even lip service to the idea that there can be conflicts between its virtues, debate about their merits, is in those questions that open the game. (To his credit, Richard Garriott also spotted the danger, and, indeed, dedicated Ultima V, in many ways an even more thoughtful work than its more heralded predecessor, to exploring the danger of ethical absolutism. Richard characterized that game as, “Now that you’ve shown everybody Avatarhood, let’s show everybody why it’s bad.”)

The way that you build (or lose) mastery of the various virtues is by far the most interesting mechanic in the game, the core thing that makes Ultima IV Ultima IV and the core reason for the game’s stellar reputation today. As you go about your business in its world, Ultima IV is quietly monitoring your actions. If you cheat the blind magic-store proprietor by sneakily paying her less than you should, you lose Honesty; if you’re square with her, you gain it. Running away from enemies costs you Valor; standing and fighting gains it. Giving blood to the healer gains you Sacrifice; refusing costs it. Giving money to beggars gains you Compassion; refusing them… well, you get the picture. Unsurprisingly, the idea has its roots in an admittedly not-widely-used rule in Dungeons and Dragons, which recommends that Dungeon Masters monitor and chart the actions of their players in relation to their professed alignment — “lawful evil,” “chaotic good,” etc. Drift enough and the Dungeon Master could actually impose a new alignment on you, possibly with drastic consequences if, say, your god demanded a certain alignment. In Ultima IV, your progress in the virtues is, inevitably, nothing more than a system of numerical attributes not fundamentally unlike other character attributes — Strength, Experience, Gold, etc. Still, just as Ultima IV tries to make character creation more than a series of dice rolls, it strains mightily to make the virtues an honest reflection of your attitudes and behaviors rather than just a system to be optimized. It hides all of the numbers from you. The only way to learn of your progress in the virtues is to visit the Seer Hawkwind in Lord British’s castle, and even then he just describes your progress in vague generalities. Especially in this day and age, when all of the virtue system’s mechanics have been meticulously documented, we understand all too well that it’s possible to, say, raise Compassion to Avatar level just by giving over and over to the same beggar in the same town. But back in the day particularly, when the system’s underpinnings were not so well understood, it really did feel organic.

The other mechanics of solving Ultima IV — the minutiae of classes and equipment and monsters and leveling up, the puzzles and quests and how to solve them, the locations of towns and dungeons and shrines and artifacts, the seven companions (each representing one of the seven virtues you didn’t choose as most important to you at the beginning of the game) you must eventually round up to complete your adventuring party, etc., etc. — have likewise already been documented as extensively as those of any videogame ever produced. In addition to the countless FAQs, blogs, and web sites generated by the franchise’s many still-rabid fans, at least half a dozen entire books have been published with detailed descriptions of exactly how to best play and solve the game. Most of the nuts and bolts of Ultima IV‘s engine merely extend the technology that Richard had already built through Ultima III in fairly commonsense ways; Richard has often stated that Akalabeth through Ultima III were mostly about improving his technology, Ultima IV about applying his technology at long last to a really worthwhile design. So, I’m not going to talk about most of that in a great deal of depth here; there’s little or nothing I could add to the mountain of practical data at every web surfer’s fingertips, and few fundamental changes to note in the mechanics I described in earlier articles about the franchise. You’ve got a (larger) world map to traverse along with cities, towns, castles, and dungeons; you’ve got horses, ships, and other vehicles to acquire; you’ve got food and equipment to manage (along with, this time, spell reagents, and for a party that will eventually number eight rather than the four of Ultima III); you’ve got lots of people to talk to (this time with a keyword-based pseudo-parser to deepen the interactive possibilities); and of course you’ve got monsters to fight. By now you know the drill.

At this point I probably should confess something: I’m far from sold on Ultima IV as a holistic, playable game. Oh, the concept of the virtues that overlays and underlies the whole is as brilliant and inspiring as I and so many others have already said it is. But you don’t spent all that large a percentage of your time in Ultima IV directly engaging with that concept. You rather spend a whole lot of time, easily hundreds of hours worth if you play the game “straight,” without walkthroughs or spoilers, on lots of things that are often less than compelling at best, dull at average, horrifically, unfairly cruel at worst. Take (please!) the much-vaunted new magic system, in which you have to prepare every single spell you cast by buying its reagents and mixing them together one at a time, a process absolutely devoid of interest after you figure out a given spell’s recipe, one that entails about half a dozen key presses for every single spell you prepare; you can easily spend ten minutes just getting the spells ready for a major dungeon expedition. Combat, never a strong point for Ultima, is more infuriating here than ever; you now have to micromanage up to eight characters through the busywork of taking out the endless hordes of uninteresting monsters that constantly attack when you just want to, you know, walk to the next damn town already. (The number of monsters in each attacking group is actually keyed to the number of characters in your party. In an interesting example of unintended consequences, this means that just about all guides to the game recommend keeping to a party of one as long as possible to try to stave off some of the soul-killing boredom of combat for as long as possible.)

Ultima IV itself doesn’t do a very good job of evincing virtues like Compassion, Justice, even Honor. This is a staggeringly difficult game, a fact that gets rather obscured by the fact that most people playing the game and/or writing about it today are mostly replaying it, and usually with the benefit of that aforementioned copius store of FAQs and walkthroughs. Taken without all that, the way a kid who found it under the tree at Christmas 1985 would have had to approach it, it’s honestly hard to imagine anyone solving it unaided. The design is a spiderweb of all but invisible strands; fail to trace any one of them and you won’t win. Most of the cities in the game are marked on the cloth map that came in the package, but just enough are left unmarked that you’ll need to to scour the whole map square by tedious square to find everything. One village sits at the center of a huge inland lake, its existence impossible to detect unless you happen to meet a pirate ship on the lake — a vanishingly unusual occurrence — fight it, steal it, and take it for a sail. Or you can find the village if you manifest an apparent death wish and sail a ship on the open ocean directly into a whirlpool. Many of the towns and castles contain critical secret doors that are distinguished by the presence of one extra pixel amidst the grainy graphics.

See that single white dot above the character that looks kind of like a graphics artifact of some sort? That’s a game-critical secret door.

Conversations can be another nightmare. Every character in the game responds to three keywords given in the manual: “Name,” “Job,” and “Health” (no, I don’t know how Richard settled on that particular inexplicable trio). You’re expected to find other keywords by asking about things the character mentions in those three generic openers, in addition to following up on clues gained in other places of the “Ask XX about YY” variety. But, inevitably, the vast majority of promising-looking words any character mentions are actually not keywords at all. Conversations quickly devolve into a rote entering of every noun or active verb a character uses, with 90 percent of them resulting in “That, I cannot help thee with.” Miss one critical word in a conversation out of sloth or negligence, and that’s a clue overlooked, a thread untraced, and your chance for victory forsworn. Each town or castle, which number sixteen in total, is populated with dozens of individuals. Miss that critical fellow hiding out in a visually impenetrable glade at the extreme edge of the map, and you’re screwed. Miss the single pixel representing a secret door, and you’re screwed. When you finally get to very bottom of the Stygian Abyss and stand before the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom, if you fail to answer correctly an out-of-left-field question whose answer requires the ability to read Richard Garriott’s mind, you’re screwed — teleported back to the surface to battle your way down through eight levels of the fiercest creatures in the game and try again. If you were playing in 1985, without the benefit of emulator save states, you would get to do this again and again until you gave up or, as many people finally did, called Origin’s hint line for the answer. If none of what I’ve just described sounds like all that much fun, that’s because for all but the most dogged of players of today it’s really not. Like so many old-school adventure designs, it rewards not cleverness but sheer persistence, a willingness to lawnmower through map after conversation after battle no matter how boring it is.

That, then, is the flip side to Ultima IV the transcendent masterwork: Ultima IV the fiddly, borderline unplayable, tedious mishmash. It’s absurdly easy to make any adventure game impossible, which is one of the many reasons that a designer needs playtesters, and lots of them. Richard Garriott, however, had basically no feedback on many parts of his design. In an interview for Computer Gaming World published shortly after the game, he let drop the bombshell that he was the only person who had managed to complete the game when Origin put it in a box and unleashed it on the world.

A few years ago Michael Abbott, academic and “Brainy Gamer,” sparked quite some conversation with a blog post telling how his students had rejected Ultima IV as “boring.” Predictable outrage toward those kids today followed in the comments and the heaps of reaction posts from other bloggers. Yet my own reaction is to side with Dr. Abbot’s students; Ultima IV is, most of the time, pretty boring. Good on them for recognizing this, I say, for refusing to get sucked into doing boring things for the sake of it. I think kids today are at a minimum every bit as smart as those of my generation were when Ultima IV first hit store shelves, thoroughly capable of deciding that a game is mostly just wasting their time. We shouldn’t begrudge them that freedom if more refined entertainments make their verdict an uncomfortable one for us. Ultima IV stands for me as a hugely important work in the history of its medium, but also one that hasn’t stood the test of time all that well. I love to think about it, love the fact that it exists, that Richard Garriott had the courage to make it — but just thinking about playing it makes me tired. Like a work of conceptual art, to some extent the real power of Ultima IV today is just the fact of its existence.

Of course I’m well aware as a digital historian that my modern take on Ultima IV is a fundamentally anachronistic one. In 1985, the game represented an all but unrivaled gateway to imagination. Solving an Ultima wasn’t really the point; these were worlds to explore, to revisit over a period of months or years until the next Ultima came out (Ultima V would be almost three years in arriving). Everything about Ultima IV — packaged in its big, grandiose box with two big, ornate manuals, with its die-cast ankh that countless boys stuck on a chain and wore to school around their necks, with its big cloth map — marked it as something special, something to be cherished and savored.

The ankh would join the Silver Serpent as one of the enduring symbols of Ultima, a supposed visual representation of the Way of the Avatar to stand alongside the diagram of the virtues. It was yet another bit of pop-culture detritus that made its way into Ultima: Richard first saw it in the movie Logan’s Run, where it served as the symbol of an underground resistance movement, thought it looked cool and “positive,” and stuck it in the game. When he learned that it meant “life and rebirth” to ancient Egyptians, that just made it that much cooler.

When you discovered a new village tucked away in some corner of the map you didn’t complain about the unfairness of it all, you rejoiced at having uncovered another corner of this fantastic world. Actually solving the game was something that few managed, but it didn’t really matter that much anyway. The point was the journey. Even the price contributed: showing an instinct for manipulating perception through pricing that would have done Apple proud, Origin’s suggested list price gave the game a street price of $50 to $55, about $20 more than the typical title. Far from cutting into its sales, the high price just made the game all the more desirable, all the more special. This experience of Ultima IV was absolutely specific to its time and place, not something we can recapture today no matter how much we blog or commentate or notate. Yes, the magic of Ultima IV was ephemeral, but in its day it was very, very powerful.

By way of illustration, let me tell you about Brian. Brian was one of my best friends in middle and high school, his attitudes fairly typical of the cracking and pirating underground in which he was quite thoroughly immersed. Like most of his friends in the scene, Brian didn’t so much play games as collect them. He had hundreds, maybe thousands of Commodore 64 floppies containing virtually every remotely notable game released for the platform in North America or Europe. Most got booted once or twice, to see what the graphics were like; a few action games would grab his attention in a bigger way for a while, but were soon set aside in favor of haunting the pirate BBS network and enjoying the social dramas of the cracking scene (let me tell you, teenage girls had nothing on this crew). Ultima IV, though, was different. It’s the only game I can ever remember Brian actually buying, the only one more complicated than Boulderdash for which he read the manual, into which he put a real effort. Like a hundred thousand other kids, he hung the map on his bedroom wall, wore the ankh to school. Oh, I’m pretty sure he never came close to finishing it. He probably played it much less, all told, than most similar kids who didn’t have the same embarrassment of gaming riches from which to choose. But the fact that his teenage heavy-metal nihilism went away when he talked about the virtues, that it awoke some other — better? — part of him that was impervious to every other game… I’ve always remembered that. Ultima, and Ultima IV in particular, was just like that.

Chester Bolingbroke, better known as the CRPG Addict, was another Brian.

I wrote each [virtue] with its definition on an index card and every morning I shuffled the cards and chose one at random. That one, I did my best to practice for the day. If honesty came up, I was careful to tell no lies throughout the day. If it was sacrifice, I looked for ways to do something charitable.

Not many, I suspect, would admit to deriving what amounts to their religion from a computer game. But I had rejected conventional religion even as a pre-teen. I balked at Judeo-Christian doctrines that seemed both haphazard and arbitrary: meticulous rules about food and dress, but none about the need to actively seek out and destroy evil (my interpretation of “valor”); commandments against adultery and sabbath-breaking, but none against assault and slavery. Ultima IV, on the other hand, offered a comprehensive and completely nondenominational — secular, even — system of virtue. It fit me like a glove.

There were hundreds of thousands of kids just like Brian and Chester. Ultima IV caused its players to set aside their angst and their irony and try to improve themselves in school lunch rooms and family dinner tables across the land. It was far from the first game with artistic aspirations, far from the first to want to be about something more than escapism; 1985 alone also brought Mindwheel, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and Balance of Power. But those admittedly more philosophically sophisticated efforts appealed mostly to a different, older audience; the average age of the average Infocom buyer was north of thirty, while very few kids indeed had the wherewithal to corner a Macintosh long enough to play Balance of Power even had they been interested in the vagaries of geopolitics. Part of the magic of Ultima IV was that it had been created by a kid just like the ones who mostly played it, raised on Dungeons and Dragons and Star Wars, more comfortable with a movie than a novel. Richard Garriott spoke their language, came from the same place they were coming from. Ultima IV, the last of the one-man-band Ultimas, still stands as the most personal expression he would ever create. When he said that ethics matter, that we have the power to choose our values and to live according to them, it resonated because it reflected, as art should, his own lived experience. Yes, many of its players would outgrow Ultima IV‘s simplistic take on ethics, just as many would outgrow the game itself. But hopefully few of that small minority who completed it ever forgot its closing exhortation, delivered as it was in Richard Garriott’s best teenage-Dungeon-Master diction:

Thou must know that the quest to become an Avatar is the endless quest of a lifetime. Avatarhood is a living gift. It must always and forever be nurtured to flourish. For if thou dost stray from the paths of virtue, thy way may be lost forever. Return now unto thine own world. Live there as an example to thy people, as our memory of thy gallant deeds serves us.

(You can download Ultima IV for free from GOG.com. Sources for this article are the same as for the last. I borrowed the diagram of the virtues from Eliott Wall.)

Comments
49 Responses

- Lindsey Simon

July 11, 2014 at 5:37 pm

I spent SO much time playing Ultima IV as a kid. The depth of imagination and my connection to the game were really profound. It was unlike any game I ever played, and yes it was often infuriating. But it was also rewarding. Did you ever try turning one of the floppies upside down and playing? That was like magic. I’m 40 now and I still remember my first fireball from the fireball wand. The begging slaves, trying to get my boat to land on the square where the whirlpool was. It was haunting, and amazing.

- Jason Dyer

July 11, 2014 at 5:51 pm

Just for fun I tried the test myself (giving the answers I would give rather than shooting for a particular class). Ended up with Honesty/Mage. (I didn’t have the Honesty – Compassion shootout like your screenshot, though; might’ve gone for compassion on that one.)

- Jason Dyer

July 11, 2014 at 5:56 pm

Oh, I should also point out Ultima IV by itself can be had from GOG.com for free:

http://www.gog.com/game/ultima_4

- Jimmy Maher

July 12, 2014 at 7:33 am

I didn’t realize that. Updated the link at the end of the article to point to the free version. Thanks!

- matt w

July 11, 2014 at 6:23 pm

I’m glad to read your assessment of the gameplay; I picked it up from GOG and while I kind of like scouring the villages (it doesn’t take that long to pick up on where Garriott likes to hide stuff) I have grown to hate poison traps with a passion. Seems like you need gold to progress… but opening a chest gives you a random chance of a trap that doesn’t even have the decency to kill you outright but sends you on a most likely futile foot slog back to the nearest healer, if you even know where that is. You could take care of this by stocking up on heal spells… if most towns had herb shops. How can towns not have herb shops? After a TPK entirely due to poison traps I had some choice words for Lord British but he wast unable to help me with any of them.

I got Tinker/Sacrifice which seems kind of odd.

There is a scenario where the virtues do seem to conflict — it seems as though you can gain some virtue (sacrifice?) by being the last one to run away, though presumably you lose valor for it.

By the way the phrase “enlightened self-interest” seems to come from de Tocqueville, though the expression of the thought perhaps goes back at least to the argument in the Apology that no man would willingly make his neighbors worse.

- Jimmy Maher

July 12, 2014 at 8:44 am

I think the tinker is actually one of the better characters to start with from a purely min/maxing point of view, so there’s that…

I would draw a distinction between virtues that conflict intentionally to make rhetorical points and those that perhaps conflict due to an accident of mechanics. I think the few conflicts you’ll find in Ultima IV are more examples of the latter.

- Andrew Schultz

July 23, 2014 at 2:39 pm

Mages 4 Eva!

There’s one super powerful item you can get that sends things out of whack. Information is power in the game–when I replay it once a year, I know how to start quickly, so I can get up to level 8.

One ironic thing about choosing a mage is that I am probably dishonest in my starting class choices in order to choose the honesty class.

- Andrew Plotkin

July 11, 2014 at 6:35 pm

I played the thing, back in the day, and I solved it up to that last one-word riddle. Failed at that twice, gave up.

But I don’t remember the game as *hard*. Hard is the wrong word. It was an exercise in detail-oriented patience. You *can* see that extra pixel if you look for it *every time*, and if you don’t — well, you’re playing the wrong game. Similarly, every NPC has something to tell you, and you plumb their stupid conversation keywords until you find it. If you haven’t seen the other side of a lake or mountain range, you’re not done with it. And so on.

Tedious, yes. In all the ways you cite above and more. Not *hard*.

On the other hand, my reaction to the virtue system was essentially the same as my reaction today. “Clever idea, props for trying, but this is a set of simplistic game mechanics for me to exploit.”

- Jimmy Maher

July 12, 2014 at 8:50 am

Horse for courses, I suppose. :) I would more characterize Ultima IV as “hard, but for all the wrong reasons.”

I’ve just learned from a private email, by the way, that the answer to the final riddle was supposed to have been given — or at least strongly hinted at — by Smith the talking horse in Paws. But Richard forgot to put it in in the rushed run-up to release, and since, as I noted in the article, much of the game was never really tested *at all*… well, mark it down as yet another example of the need for play-testing.

- Dehumanizer

July 12, 2014 at 11:06 am

Which is why they made it a running gag in the sequels, where Smith always gives a vital clue for the previous game. :)

- Andrew Schultz

July 23, 2014 at 2:42 pm

I remember seeing this in Ultima V and thinking “Gee, thanks for saying it now. Maybe I’ll get around to it…”

…and then getting absorbed in U5.

Of course, years later, when I sat down to replay, I roughly remembered how everything was done, I looked for the animal that gave you the clue for the final puzzle in Ultima 4, wondering where it could be. Cove? Vesper?

- cim

December 31, 2014 at 5:01 pm

There was another clue to it – when you successfully meditate to get an eighth at a shrine, you see a vision of a rune. Translating the runes gives you the answer to the final riddle. (And there is someone in one of the towns who hints that all eight virtues combined makes “one”, too)

So I had the answer well ahead of time, and kept asking people in towns about it to no avail. It was somewhat of an anti-climax when the time came to finally use it.

Not impossible to work out in-game, but certainly by far one of the more severe of the “you have to pay attention to absolutely everything” moments.

Anyway, a fascinating pair of articles – thanks for writing them.

- jrodman

June 22, 2015 at 6:35 am

When I played this on the C64 in 1987 or so, I figured out the answer to the final puzzle based on information in the game. There are several things that point to it, even though the answer is, to me, still less than satisfying.

Playing it again a year ago or so from the GOG.com version (which I believe is a PC release), there was a very strong indication of the answer in Cove.

- Alex Smith

July 11, 2014 at 6:56 pm

Your Ultima IV posts are some of your best work so (which is a high compliment considering your work is uniformly excellent). Truly interesting to peel away the layers of Garriott’s canned interview responses to arrive at the true inspirations for the game.

One small typo. Unless there are more drugs involved in becoming the Avatar than I remember, we should “meditate” at the shrines rather than “medicate.”

- Jimmy Maher

July 12, 2014 at 8:51 am

:) Thanks!

- matt w

July 11, 2014 at 6:56 pm

I did have an experience with my personal virtuous code. I bugged Vorpal the prisoner too much and he attacked me, so I ran away without fighting — because even if he’s a bad guy you’re not allowed to kill prisoners. Then he was gone from the map. I suspect I took some hits on the virtues for that but I still think I did the right thing.

- Andrew Schultz

July 23, 2014 at 2:46 pm

In case you’re wondering, the game doesn’t subtract for enemies who attack you. It gives you compassion if you don’t kill a fleeing serpent or other non-evil animals in combat.

I don’t think you lose virtues for fleeing from non-evil enemies, but I don’t know if the prisoner qualifies. The game’s a bit vague, and it’s really frustrating to be in a moral dilemma in a town after you’re unable to save a while.

You’re right, though. Attacking in a town loses all kinds of virtues. Even someone about to attack you. And especially that stupid mage in the Jhelom towers who can outright block your path to find an important item.

- Victor Gijsbers

July 11, 2014 at 9:32 pm

Another great article. But let me take issue with this:

“It’s just the Golden Rule we all learned in kindergarten, which has been expressed more rigorously by philosophers for millennia now as the idea of enlightened self-interest: you do best for yourself by doing well by others.”

I really don’t think that counselling people to pursue their enlightened self-interest by being nice to others is a more rigorous way of stating the Golden Rule. If the Golden Rule is to be taken as a serious ethical principle, than surely it should be unconditional. Treat others as you would like them to treat you — regardless of whether this will bring you gain! If you know you can mistreat someone without consequences, or gain something by mistreating people, you still should not do that.

If I treat you well because I assume that this will bring me personal gain, I am in fact breaking Kant’s central moral principle: “Do not treat other people merely as means to ends.”

- Jimmy Maher

July 12, 2014 at 8:56 am

And that’s why it’s good to have at least a couple of you professional philosophers reading this blog. :) You’re right, of course. Edit made.

- Wade

July 12, 2014 at 1:54 pm

Kant never had a computer game yelling “THOU HAST LOST AN EIGHTH!” at him.

- nik

July 12, 2014 at 3:49 am

Thanks for that article. I remember 13 year old me playing this game way back when, and I remember exactly how it felt – I was kind of thrilled the game would allow me to make my own moral choices and guide me along that path.
As I recall it the game seemed to encourage one to “act as if it were you in real life” though. That’s what I did. And then I found it kind of disappointing that that was not what was required to complete the game.
I had a choice to make: Either stick with my own decisions as I would make them in any given situation in the game. Essentially the choice to stay true to myself. Or do what the game wants you to do to collect all the virtues and become an avatar.
My choice was to stay true to myself of course, as the game encouraged one to do. I gave up on becoming an avatar and continued running around in the world for a bit longer before getting bored.

The fact that a game compels a teenager to make that kind of choice is in itself amazing. Legendary, even if I never even came close to finishing it. Reading the above, I am actually glad I never tried, there’s no way I’d have been able to.

- Jimmy Maher

July 12, 2014 at 8:57 am

That’s a really interesting take on the game, one I don’t think I’ve seen before.

- Al-Khwarizmi

July 12, 2014 at 9:11 am

While I agree the game is really hard by modern standards, it wasn’t that hard in its context. It was on the level of other contemporary CRPG’s like the Might & Magic series. I finished it when I was a kid (and a non-native English speaker) with almost no spoilers.

The secret door pixel actually stuck out like a sore thumb once you had figured out what it meant. Your sight was trained to spot it so it became as obvious as if the wall had been colored bright pink. The combat wasn’t so boring if you had time, and I have fond memories of cool naval battles. The “name, health, job” thing I figured out soon, and if a 10 or 12-year-old kid with mediocre English could, any player worth their name can. After all, the game prompt was asking you something equivalent “What would you like to ask about?” and those are standard things you would ask a stranger about, it’s a quite common-sense thing. Just not fitting the current standards where there are tutorials for everything.

The reagent mixing… yes, that *was* very boring. If a remake were done today, I’d ask for better graphics and a better UI for that, the rest I would leave as it is.

- Joel Webber

July 12, 2014 at 1:59 pm

I think this is a pretty accurate take on the difficulty of Ultima IV. It was a long, hard slog, full of details that you couldn’t miss. It also required that you take copious notes, and do a fair amount of mapping, as was not uncommon for games of the time, but almost unheard of today.

I remember playing the game for many months (probably pushing a year, on and off) when I was a kid, and did eventually finish it. At the time, I think I just assumed that I was slower than other gamers — I had no idea it was rare for people to actually finish the game. I also have no idea how I figured out the answer to the last question — IIRC, I played through the Abyss several times before guessing it, which seems implausible now, but I must have, because I didn’t know anyone else who could have given it to me.

Looking back, I find myself incredibly nostalgic for the time when games required this much investment of time and effort — especially all the note-taking, map-making, and thinking-about-puzzles-until-4am. Even as my adult self could never imagine finding enough free time to make it through such a game. But I suspect that’s a style that’s now firmly in the past.

- matt w

July 15, 2014 at 5:22 pm

Actually “name, health, job” is in the manual (at least, the one that they included with the GOG version).

- Thomas Prewitt

July 12, 2014 at 9:25 pm

You claim “There were hundreds of thousands of kids just like Brian and Chester. Ultima IV caused its players to set aside their angst and their irony and try to improve themselves in school lunch rooms and family dinner tables across the land.”

Really now? You believe hundreds of thousands of kids tried to improve themselves because of this?

- Jimmy Maher

July 13, 2014 at 7:10 am

Yes.

- KenHR

July 14, 2014 at 12:51 am

Great entry yet again.

I remember playing this in my teens and being really impressed by the moral/ethical slant of the game. I never really played it to win, though; I just enjoyed exploring the world more than trying to fulfill the quest.

- Gilles Duchesne

July 14, 2014 at 6:25 pm

One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet is how, in those pre-internet days, knowledge about the game would get shared among gamers.

I remember how, along with (cough cough) copied disks and photocopied cloth maps, I also got my hands on very thorough dungeon maps, documents (like a virtue/companion/town/color/rune/mantra table) and notes.

So even though searching for “that hidden NPC” or for some obscure hidden passage was tedious in itself, it became part of this meta-game of sorts, where discovering a clue – any clue – would be proudly share with several other players. I guess that could also be said about many adventure games, but Ultima IV is certainly one where I personally experience it.

Nonetheless, the tedium did get to me. After spending an entire evening looking for the “Wheel of the HMS Cape”, an heartquake made us lose power right as I found it. After that, I pretty much gave up.

- Gilles Duchesne

July 14, 2014 at 7:47 pm

Another anecdote I just remembered: around the same time I played, in high school, we had a class on the 8 Beatitudes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatitudes), and I remember how I tried connecting them to the 8 Virtues.

(Yes, some of them require a bit of a stretch, but then again, hardly worse than the kind of creative thinking Mr. Garriott was known for back then.)

- Iggy Drougge

July 15, 2014 at 1:50 am

Reading the previous installments about Ultima, I was thinking Garriot was just a stupid kid. Ultima IV makes him seem more like an idiot savant.

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- Hitfan

July 16, 2014 at 1:55 am

Great article. But I have one caveat: in most modern reviews and retrospectives of Ultima IV, there is barely a mention of the music that plays throughout the game. The music provides atmosphere and dramatic tension.

The freeware download of U4 plays in DOS, and plays no music at all. (At least by default).

I’d recommend that newcomers seek out the Commodore 64 version just to see the difference.

- Jimmy Maher

July 16, 2014 at 6:47 am

Yes, good point. The music — the only substantial thing in the game that Richard *didn’t* do himself — is very impressive, and does add a lot to the atmosphere, although I must confess that even it does become grating for me, and I always turn it off after an hour or two. (But I’m not a big background music person; I’m an active listener, so if I really like something I want to just, you know, sit and listen to it.) Since the music is impressive but not necessarily *more* impressive than that of Ultima III, I just lumped it into “ways in which Ultima IV is technologically very similar to Ultima III.”

But yeah, that’s one more part of the original Ultima experience that someone who downloads the game from Gog.com today and dives in is missing.

- Dehumanizer

July 16, 2014 at 2:25 pm

There are patches for Ultimas 3 to 5 adding MIDI music (converted from the C64 / Apple II versions, I guess) to the DOS versions. The games certainly become a lot more playable with them.

Links (on the Ultima wiki): Ultima III Ultima IV Ultima V. A patch for Ultima II also exists, adding EGA graphics, but not music (since the game doesn’t have any).

- RushJet1

September 17, 2014 at 12:27 pm

I made a Famicom cover of the dungeon theme from this game if you’re interested… actually two, the first is really close to the original and the second one adds 2 tracks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1Z-KOOCWrk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9DhD-w2Fq8

- Hitfan

July 16, 2014 at 2:04 am

U4 was the very first computer RPG I ever played. I was so inspired by it, that me and a friend in high school attempted to make our own computer RPGs. We spent many of our after-school afternoons trying to accomplish this.

Recently, I did revisit the 25+ year old code of these previous endeavours and finally assembled a fully working CRPG from all those disjointed pieces like Brian Wilson did decades after the original ambitious SMiLE sessions were recorded and abandoned.

You can read more about it here:

Ultimate Quest

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- Ron Newcomb

July 20, 2014 at 4:12 pm

I remember playing this to completion, but I played the NES version, which was far more playable than any PC version. Also had good music. I remember I kept getting the Bard for my character class but wanting a Ranger.

I remember the Venn diagram of virtues as cute and it’s application by a videogame as really interesting, but I never took it out into the real world anymore than I did Dungeons & Dragon’s alignment system.

I don’t know how many things are different in the NES version, but the game there played a lot like typical NES games of the time, so I imagine it’s pretty different.

- Andrew Schultz

July 23, 2014 at 2:37 pm

I remember getting into an argument with the frenemy who showed me U4 on his Commodore over one conversation. One person asks if you are the avatar. I figured I didn’t want to lose an eighth in Honesty, so, yes.

“Thou has lost an eighth!” Bye bye, humility.

At the time I had no clue how far this would make me fall (hint: not very) but I hadn’t saved the game for a while, I didn’t want to visit that shrine, and I got mad.

That said, I love how the game blends the principles, and even though I now know Garriott didn’t see it as hard and fast moral advice, it still feels right and useful to me.

- Keith Armonaitis

July 28, 2014 at 4:51 am

I remember well when I picked up Ultima IV back in the day. Ultima I had taken me a couple of months to finish, II a month, III I remember finishing in a little over a week. I remember thinking if IV didn’t take me longer I was’t buying anymore of his games. I actually thought that I knew how Garriott thought – boy was I wrong.

The fact that IV took me a couple of months to complete is no small feat. Somewhere I probably still have all of my notes from that game, the maps, the clues given in game, everything. I was meticulous and probably a little OCD about game playing back then. But I did get through it, and it pretty much cured me off of Ultima after that. Until Ultima Online broke my heart of course, but that is a tale for another day.

PS- And thanks for all of the great articles. Of course I am getting nothing done since I have been reading your site, but it has been a fantastic trip down memory lane. How you have the ability to be so prolific with your articles with so much that has to be researched astounds me. Keep up the great work.

- Brandon Campbell

November 9, 2014 at 1:39 pm

I have desperately wanted and tried to like this game and some of the other Ultimas, but so far haven’t had the patience for exactly all the reasons you have explained so well in this article.

- Nathaniel Olsson

February 5, 2015 at 10:06 pm

I loved the game as a teen very similar to “Brian” in the article. I never finished Ultima IV until I played as an adult. The Exult simulator makes many of the annoying spell mixing and other interface quirks more tolerable, and with it I have been able to finish the game in under 10,000 turns. I have seen a number of speedruns on YouTube, but nowhere have I seen anyone crowing about finishing in the fewest turns (as opposed to fastest time), so I’ve just done it here. ;-)

- Nathaniel Olsson

February 7, 2015 at 6:19 am

Correction: Exult is a simulator for Ultima 7. xu4 is the humbler Ultima IV simulator that improves the gameplay and limits the frustration quite a bit.

- Steven Bishop

May 3, 2015 at 11:08 am

I championed Ultima IV again recently as a sort of reconnect with my youthful passion. I decided to play Shepherd. I love the story opening, being transported into the immediate world of mystery on the barren island of Magincia, discovering the ruin, feeling the rush of seeing the living daemon, and reestablishing contact with the moon gate.
This time around I noticed saving for magic weapons was no where near as important to me. As a kid, I remember suiting everyone up and arming to the hilt, only to sell off everything for max gems, ingredients and food for the Abyss.
Now it was more about preparing my fellows with as much dexterity I could find. Intellegence second, Strength not as important in my maturity.
I never, I mean ever, got into flaming oils? And I planned heavily this time for two characters to wield halberds, but they just always seem to miss!
When I was a kid, I was so engulfed in this game. My father bought me an Apple II C. I was 11 carting that around to sleepovers. LOL. Dad wanted me to learn programming, but I had to save the world first! I always named my character British, because Lord British was a sort of my alternative dad.

- Phil Fortier

October 3, 2015 at 6:27 am

Just ran across this article, good read. Admittedly, I find these old games are never quite as fun as they were when I was a kid – I guess I remember them through rose-tinted glasses.

But I find a few of your complaints strange; in the sense that you’re complaining about elements of the game that I really enjoyed. I probably had a lot more patience back then than I do now :-)

“Most of the cities in the game are marked on the cloth map that came in the package, but just enough are left unmarked that you’ll need to to scour the whole map square by tedious square to find everything”

I never found exploring the Ultima worlds tedious. I played a pirated version of Ultima IV, so I never had the cloth map. When I put down hard-earned cash to purchase Ultima V, I was kind of disappointed that it came with a map! Everything was exposed, and some of the sense of exploration was gone. Luckily there was an underworld…

“One village sits at the center of a huge inland lake, its existence impossible to detect unless you happen to meet a pirate ship on the lake — a vanishingly unusual occurrence — fight it, steal it, and take it for a sail. Or you can find the village if you manifest an apparent death wish and sail a ship on the open ocean directly into a whirlpool. ”

The rareness of pirate ships was kind of annoying (being prone to chance). You do mention the alternative though. And this kind of stuff made the world feel like it was full of mystery. Hidden places that you had to work to get to. No hand-holding. It evoked a sense of exploration that is lacking in many modern games.

“Many of the towns and castles contain critical secret doors that are distinguished by the presence of one extra pixel amidst the grainy graphics.”

That’s a reasonable complaint, although it never bothered me too much.

“Each town or castle, which number sixteen in total, is populated with dozens of individuals. Miss that critical fellow hiding out in a visually impenetrable glade at the extreme edge of the map, and you’re screwed. Miss the single pixel representing a secret door, and you’re screwed.”

Well, the world wasn’t *that* big, it really wasn’t hard to explore it all. And unlike other RPGs of today that are filled with “drone” characters that have nothing interesting to say (and are just there to fill up the world), *everyone* in Ultima IV was important (except for the easily recognizable guards). Everyone had something interesting to say to further the plot along or help you find an item. To me, that encouraged you to explore everything, because you were bound to find something/someone useful. Of course, going back to the same places over and over just to “re-explore” could get tedious.

“In an interview for Computer Gaming World published shortly after the game, he let drop the bombshell that he was the only person who had managed to complete the game when Origin put it in a box and unleashed it on the world.”

Only person where? I didn’t have any help playing it (other than the fact that I played it with a friend). It did take a long time to finish, but we did complete the game without any hints/cheats.

- Jimmy Maher

October 3, 2015 at 6:35 am

Garriott was the only person to complete the game during the testing process, which was severely curtailed by the need to get it out for Christmas 1985.

- Alex Freeman

October 6, 2015 at 11:53 pm

I discovered this article while looking for mentions of Ultima IV on your site and originally thought of not asking since it’s been more than a year since you wrote, but since you’re still answering comments on it…

“Ultima IV boldly applies these sorts of mystical trappings to an ethical philosophy which carefully avoids the subject of God in favor of simple practicality… This has been expressed more rigorously by philosophers for millennia now as the idea of enlightened self-interest: you do best for yourself by doing well by others.”
Interesting, but I find that the game fails on its own terms in that case. Take these questions for instance:
Thee and thy friends have been routed and ordered to retreat. In defiance of thy orders, dost thou
A) stop in Compassion to aid a wounded
companion; or
B) Sacrifice thyself to slow the pursuing enemy, so others can escape?
If you sacrifice yourself, how is that in your own rational self interest? It’s not as if you’ll be around later to reap the rewards. Likewise:
Sacrifice vs. Humility:
Thou art an elderly, wealthy eccentric. Thy end is near. Dost thou
A) donate all thy wealth to feed hundreds of starving children, and receive public adulation; or
B) Humbly live out thy life, willing thy fortune to thy heirs?
If your end is near, how are you supposed to benefit from willing your fortune to your heirs? It seems only the first choice gives any kind of benefit.

“Parsing a distinction which admittedly really exists only in his mind, Richard claims to ignore morals, which to him represent decisions about right and wrong based on feelings or spiritual beliefs, in favor of ethics, which are grounded in simple, rational common sense.”
So what’s your take on meta-ethics? Moral realist? Moral relativist? Moral nihilist? Ideal observer theorist? Other? Not sure?

- Jimmy Maher

October 7, 2015 at 9:36 am

That sort of romantic self-sacrifice has a lot of appeal to people, especially to many young people who so often tend to feel eternally misunderstood and unappreciated. Throw in Garriott’s ideals of chivalry inherited from the SCA, and it’s not hard to imagine how questions like these got in there, however they conflict with his own professed ethical framework.

Yes, there are plenty of flaws in Ultima IV’s system of ethics, others of which I tried to point out in the article. I think it’s important to remember that Ultima IV was written by a 23-year-old self-professed non-reader with a rather sheltered upbringing who was drawing largely from D&D, the SCA, and television documentaries. I don’t mean that to sound as dismissive as it may — Garriott was a *very* bright and in many ways a surprisingly thoughtful young man — but I think looking to Ultima IV for a completely air-tight ethical framework is asking far, far too much from it. (One might even say it was only Garriott’s naivete that allowed him to think he could formulate such a thing in the first place, after generations immemorial of philosophers and theologians had to one degree or another failed, for his nerdy game about killing monsters.) The most important thing was that it got so many kids thinking about these things in between killing monsters and collecting loot. Many doubtless pointed to the same discrepancies you just did — and that’s a very *good* thing.

I’d have to think long and hard to respond properly to your last question, as I’ve never really tried to fit myself into an ethical box before. I guess I’d call myself a moral realist when it comes to anything that hurts another (murder is absolutely wrong, as is more indirect harm like knowingly polluting the environment unnecessarily), a moral relativist on the many smaller issues (to be sexually promiscuous feels subjectively wrong to me personally, but I try to live and let live others who choose that lifestyle even as I’m unlikely to choose them as my close friends). Yes, I know such a system is no more air-tight than any other, but my years do perhaps give me an advantage over Garriott — at the time he wrote Ultima IV, that is — in that I know how messy it all really is. It’s going to be interesting to watch him come to that realization in Ultima V, an article I haven’t yet written.

I’m always a bard in Ultimas, if it helps. Compassion rules, other virtues drool! ;)

Human Engineered Software (or, The Software Icarus)
July 15, 2014

Jay Balakrishnan

Narayana Pillai Balakrishnan was a native of Cherthala, India, who, after traveling the world for years as a player of traditional Indian music, came to Hollywood in the early 1950s to teach the trendy new practice of Hatha Yoga to the stars. The software company founded by Jay — an Americanized shortening of “Sanjay” — Balakrishnan, the son he and his American wife raised there, would evince through its short, chaotic life a similar blending of idealism with commercialism.

Like many American children of Indian parents, Jay Balakrishnan kept one foot planted in each culture, spending much of his childhood and adolescence in schools in India’s Kerala region. During a summer break from the University of Southern Florida, he discovered computers while working at the Naval Electronics System Command in Charleston; he describes the discovery as a “religious experience.” When he went back to university, he “loaded up on computer-science courses.” After graduation, he worked as a programmer for GTE and later Hughes Helicopter. Meanwhile, in 1978 he bought his first Commodore PET, intending to use it only to do calculations for a course in piloting. But he soon found the PET every bit as entrancing as the big machines he worked with on his day job. He wrote an assembler, initially planning to submit to a magazine as a type-in-listing. However, his friends told him it was good enough to sell commercially, and so Balakrishnan founded Human Engineered Software (HES, or HESWare), out of his apartment on his 25th birthday in June of 1980.

Unlike the other early software companies I’ve profiled on this blog, HES got its start on the relatively unpopular — in North America, that is — Commodore PET. Otherwise, though, this story begins similarly. Balakrishnan wrote all of the early software himself, packaged it himself, shipped it himself when orders came in from the tiny advertisements he took out in magazines and newsletters like Kilobaud, Compute!, and The Midnite Software Gazette. Running on a PET with as little as 8 K of memory, those early products were, like the assembler that got the ball rolling — literally; he named it HESBal — mostly programming tools: a file editor called HESEdit, a BASIC program lister called HESLister.

HES was soon doing well enough for Balakrishnan to quit his job at Hughes. Still, running a one-man software company got exhausting quickly. He had elected to offer the ultimate in customer support in the form of a 24-hour help line; this kept him captive in his apartment waiting for the next ring, his sleep interrupted constantly. Thus when a manufacturer of monitors and other hardware called Universal Supply came to him with an offer to buy the company but let him continue to manage it, he was receptive. Balakrishnan and HESWare moved north to Brisbane, California, where he found a partner in running the operation in the form of an ex-Xerox manager named Ted Morgan. He also now had the funding to reach out to other platforms and other authors. Seeing Britain as a potential untapped source of software for the briefly but hugely popular Commodore VIC-20, he traveled to London to attend a computer show and do some networking in June of 1982. It was here that he met the man whose games would dramatically raise HES’s profile and enrich its bank account: Jeff Minter.

I could easily write several feature articles on Minter and the surrealistic action games which he continues to write to this very day; his distinctive style and psychedelic flair make him both one of gaming’s first auteurs and its most long-lived. But, at least for today, we’ll confine ourselves to his connection with HES. When Balakrishnan met him, he had just founded his long-lived British software house, Llamasoft, on the strength of a Defender clone called Andes Attack. It lacked the skewed originality of Minter’s later games, but Balakrishnan was nevertheless impressed with the fast graphics. He worked out a licensing deal, renamed it Aggressor, and moved it from cassette to a VIC-20 cartridge for the American market. Later that year came the much more original Gridrunner, Minter’s — and HES’s — first big hit. More lovably bizarre VIC-20 and Commodore 64 hits poured out of Minter at the rate of a new game every few months, many showing an odd fixation on ruminants: Attack of the Mutant Camels (probably his best-remembered game), Revenge of the Mutant Camels, Advance of the Megacamel, Metagalactic Llamas: Battle at the Edge of Time. HES’s sales jumped from $1.4 million to $13 million between 1982 and 1983, largely on the strength of cheap and cheerful VIC-20 and 64 cartridges — although Balakrishnan did try to keep his hand in other fields as well, releasing hardware expansions for the VIC-20 and a word processor called, inevitably, HESWriter for the 64.

That year the HES story took another unexpected twist. Parent company Universal Supply had been building equipment largely for Atari and Mattel. That suddenly became a very bad business to be in as the Great Videogame Crash of 1983 became a reality. Balakrishnan and Morgan managed to extricate HES from the collapsing Universal Supply, reincorporating it as an independent entity once again. With stars in their eyes, with everyone telling them their industry represented the next big wave in home entertainment, they now embarked on one of the most spectacular boom-and-busts of the home-computer era.

The first step in any good software flameout is to collect lots and lots of investment capital from folks as entranced as you are by the hype about your industry, but who are nevertheless guaranteed to want their money back when the hype doesn’t pan out. HES accepted huge cash injections from the major Silicon Valley venture-capitalist Tech Venture and from a company called Action Industries, a manufacturer of household knickknacks (!) based in Pennsylvania. Most interestingly, Microsoft also came on board. Their participation led to HES releasing a Commodore 64 version of Multiplan, Microsoft’s first attempt at a spreadsheet program in those years before the Office hegemony. Multiplan represents the only piece of software Microsoft would ever develop for the 64.

The next step is to overextend your distribution network. HES aggressively pushed their software into mass merchandisers like K-Mart and Toys “R” Us, opening the way for other publishers to do the same but paying dearly for the privilege of being first. By 1984 Balakrishan estimated that HES’s games were available through 8000 different outlets, while most competitors were only in 3000. This was good in its way, perhaps, but also meant that HES had to make a lot of copies right from the launch of each new title to have it available in so many places. And that in turn meant that when a new title turned out to be a flop — as did for example HESGames, an Olympic-themed effort that was roundly pummeled in the marketplace by Epyx’s Summer Games — they were left stuck with huge amounts of unsold inventory.

Jay Balakrishnan with Leonard Nimoy

Finally, you have to spend hugely on advertising and promotion in comparison to the amount you spend on actually, you know, writing software. The remade HES made their first big promotional splash at Steve Wozniak’s second (and final) US Festival on Memorial Day Weekend 1983, where they had a big spread inside the tech expo. (At a press conference there HES’s spokesman inexplicably spilled the beans at considerable length about IBM’s still-secret PCjr project, to which HES, like a number of software companies, was privy. IBM was, needless to say, livid. An insider with whom I’m in occasional contact who was there claims the spokesman “might have been stoned — there were lots of drugs at that concert.”) They then rented a sort of permanent floating software exhibition on the retired aircraft carrier and newly minted museum ship Intrepid on Manhattan’s West Side. In early 1984 they made their biggest splash when they acquired the services of Leonard Nimoy as spokesman; if Commodore had used Captain Kirk to make the VIC-20 a raging success, they would use Mr. Spock to do the same for HES. Unfortunately, Nimoy seemed to know even less about computers than William Shatner; when asked what kind of computer he had at home, he said he didn’t know. (Nimoy was making a lot of strange career choices at this time, including driving a car for the Bangles in an incomprehensible music video for an admittedly pretty great song and plugging “erasable programmable logic devices” — Mr. Spock! get it? — something he presumably knew even less about than home computers, for Altera Corporation. InfoWorld magazine shruggingly concluded that he was maybe just “hard up for cash.”)

The somewhat, well, intellectual thrust of these promotional efforts, of using Mr. Spock as spokesman and hawking wares inside a museum, points to an interesting dichotomy about HES. They may have been rushing to hit the center of the mass market, but at the same time they weren’t dumbing down their products to do it. Far from it. HES was pushing hard to define themselves as a maker primarily of “edutainment” products. In a 1984 interview with InfoWorld, Balakrishnan describes an intriguing mix of upcoming high-concept titles, most of which would never see the light of day.

We’ve got a game called Cell Defense, in which you are in charge of your body’s immunological system, and viruses attack you. There are various levels. These affect how fast your cells reproduce and whether you are a sick or healthy organism. You are learning a lot about the body as you play the game.

Then we have another game called Reflections, that’s based on physics, with all kinds of lights and bouncing reflections. Then there’s Life Force, in which you essentially learn about genes and genetics. It has eight levels. In the first one, you create an amoeba, then you get into multi-celled organisms. Man is the seventh level. The eighth is the mystery one in which you create an unknown organism by taking ribosomes and nuclei and putting them together.

Our fourth game is called Ocean Quest, in which you go and look for sunken treasure. As you do that, you learn about undersea life. There are different scenarios that affect the game, such as whether you are in the Pacific or the Atlantic. Of course, undersea life and fish differ according to the region.

Following the videogame crash and burn, conventional wisdom held that the simple action games which had defined digital entertainment for the masses prior to that point were now passé — dangerously so, in fact. Tellingly, in that same InfoWorld interview Balakrishnan manages to never mention Jeff Minter or his games in describing HES’s rise to prominence. HES’s 1984 portfolio, like the bookware phenomenon, can be read as a sign of a home-computer software industry wanting to differentiate itself from videogames for very practical commercial reasons. Yet, just as most of the people producing bookware really, deeply believed in it as a potential revolution in reading, HES had plenty of idealism to accompany their excess. If they oversold how much the computers for which they produced software could actually do, well, that was down at least as much to their own dreamy technological utopianism as a simple need to move product. It was a strange, heady time in computer games.

Of course, it also couldn’t last, and for the overextended, over-expanded HES least of all. As these things so often do, the downfall came amazingly quickly. Leonard Nimoy debuted as HES’s spokesman in March of 1984. InfoWorld published the aforequoted ebullient profile of HES and Balakrishnan in their September 3, 1984, issue. Six weeks later the same magazine announced that “HES nears bankruptcy,” that they were casting about desperately for a buyer from amidst their erstwhile competitors while the investors bayed in outrage and flatly refused to throw good money after bad and the axe fell on two-thirds of their 90-person workforce. Days later they filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. When asked what had happened, Morgan didn’t have a whole of insight to offer: “People stopped buying products.”

The remnants of HES were eventually acquired by Avant-Garde Publishing of Eugene, Oregon, a company which dated from the same year as HES and had its own fleet of eager venture capitalists behind it. Avant-Garde kept the HES name alive for a while; the original plan for the merger had the HES name being used for lower-end, mass-market software, the Avant-Garde name for higher-end IBM and Apple software to be sold through dealers. But, while Avant-Garde did keep a number of older HES titles in circulation for a time, they released just one new one under the label. Within a couple of years Avant-Garde too would be gone, justifiably so in light of cheesy efforts like Joe Theismann’s Pro Football, Dave Winfield’s Batter Up!, and Slugfest: Chris Evert-Lloyd Tennis, which purported to teach you or your kids how to play their respective sports with the help of their respective athlete endorsers.

Jay Balakrishnan continued undeterred as a serial entrepreneur. By the January 1985 Consumer Electronics Show he had already started a new outfit called Solid State Software to develop a new line of productivity software for the trusty old Commodore 64. The circumstance were, mind you, quite a bit different from the glory days of HES. At the January 1984 CES you couldn’t get behind the facade of HES’s grandiose exhibit to see him unless you were a VIP. In January 1985 Info magazine found him sitting behind “a card table in an 8′ X 8′ booth with a stack of 2-color brochures. How times change.”

(Print sources include: the January 1985 Creative Computing; the May 19 1983 Popular Computing Weekly; the September 3 1984, October 15 1984, October 29 1984, and November 19 1984 InfoWorld; Info #6; the October 11 1985 MicroTimes; the February 1981 and April 1986 Compute!. Online sources include articles in The New Indian Express and Rick Melick’s site. The photographs come from InfoWorld. And my anonymous source for the US Festival anecdote shall remain anonymous…)

Comments
6 Responses

- Wade

July 16, 2014 at 4:46 am

Jeff Minter’s camel fixation seemed strangely incomprehensible to me when I was younger. I mean it seems strange to me now that I couldn’t comprehend it, or perhaps ‘accept it at face value’ is a better phrase. I didn’t think: ‘Here’s this guy who keeps making use of camels in these games’. I just thought: ‘This is weird. These are weird. I don’t understand.’ Just one of those growing up things, I suppose. Mind you, I’m not saying it’s important that a person accept Jeff Minter’s 8-bit takes on camels before they can say they’ve become an adult.

- Keith Palmer

July 17, 2014 at 9:45 pm

“Edutainment” products in a mid-1980s context always makes me think of The Learning Company’s “Robot Odyssey,” although that was a graphic adventure (if one that was actually ported to the Radio Shack Color Computer, such that I made my best effort to solve it in my formative years…) My impression from the description of HES’s announcements was they’d amount to action games where the sprites were supposed to be teachable concepts.

- Jimmy Maher

July 18, 2014 at 5:58 am

Trip Hawkins has always claimed to have invented that phrase for Seven Cities of Gold. If so, it spread *very* quickly, as Jay Balakrishnan in the September 3 1984 InfoWorld, only about three months after the release of Seven Cities.

- Brian Bagnall

July 18, 2014 at 4:28 am

HES Games was probably the most memorable game for me from HES back then. I recall the very large sprites and varied sports (weight lifting and archery come to mind), but you are correct it was quickly overshadowed by Epyx Summer Games. Super Zaxon is probably the second. What inspired you to write about this short-lived company?

- Jimmy Maher

July 18, 2014 at 5:55 am

Partly HES is another illustration of the home-computer bubble through the eyes of one of the players. And partly… well, next article will make that reason clear. ;)

- Sheldon White

September 13, 2014 at 5:06 am

I worked at HESWare in those days (my first programming job) , and I wrote Cell Defense before the company went belly up. I actually met Mr Nimoy when he toured our development office in Berkeley.
Lot of water under the bridge since then…

Project: Space Station, Part 1: The Reality
July 24, 2014

It was hard for a space-obsessed kid growing up in the 1980s not to feel just a little bit envious of the previous generation. The late 1960s had marked the climax of one of the most glorious adventures in human history, and the first one that, thanks to the miracle of mass media, everyone could share in in real time. Even the most non-technical and non-scientific among us could understand the clear progression that climaxed in that “giant leap for mankind”: Apollo 7 tested the Apollo capsule in Earth orbit; Apollo 8 voyaged to the Moon and circled it; Apollo 9 tested the lunar lander in Earth orbit; Apollo 10 was the dress rehearsal; Apollo 11 was the big one, July 20, 1969, the day that changed everything forever for humanity. Or so it must have seemed at the time. By the early 1980s it could feel hard to believe the Moon landing had actually happened. In place of Apollo we got the space shuttle, NASA’s glorified space truck. In place of the clear milestones of Apollo we got a space program whose strategy seemed akin to the missions of the shuttles themselves: go up, circle around for a while doing some things people weren’t really too clear about, then come back down. Oh, we dutifully put together our shuttle model kits and dreamed of seeing an actual launch, but something was missing.

The program to make a reusable space plane was first conceived even before that first Moon landing, when 2001: A Space Odyssey was in cinemas showing a vision of the near future in which a flight into Earth orbit was as routine as a flight for the opposite coast. To achieve such a vision, clearly something would have to change. An Apollo Moon rocket weighed slightly over 450,000 pounds without fuel, of which 12,250 pounds — less than 3 percent of the total — would make its way back to Earth at the end of a mission in the form of the non-reusable command module. The rest was cast away at various stages of the mission, making Apollo 11’s trip to the Moon, if one of — perhaps the — most inspiring voyages in human history, also one uniquely wasteful and completely unsustainable as a model for a future of routine space flight. After all, while NASA had been enjoying effectively blank checks from Congress through the Space Race, it didn’t take a Nostradamus to realize that that was likely to change in a hurry as soon as the Moon was achieved and American pride satisfied.

The budget cuts, when they came, were even more draconian than anticipated, costing NASA three of their planned ten Moon landings — another, Apollo 13, never made it there for other reasons — and forcing them to similarly scale back Skylab, the United States’s first (and to date, outside of the International Space Station, only) space station. The space shuttle survived only by making a series of painful compromises and an unholy alliance with the Air Force that would see it used for classified military missions — basically, to launch a new generation of bigger and heavier spy satellites — about 30 percent of the time. It was a partnership that neither NASA nor the Air Force really wanted. Robert Seamans, a former NASA administrator who had become Secretary of the Air Force by the time the deal was made, thought it was “asinine” to try to coordinate with a civilian agency and put astronauts lives at risk instead of just building a cheaper, simpler unmanned rocket for the purpose. But his and other practical voices were overwhelmed by those of the bureaucrats and the politicians.

An early space-shuttle concept which used short, straight wings and a different reentry profile to reduce heat buildup.

The Air Force partnership had tragic consequences for the shuttle. In order to carry the big spy satellites the Air Force anticipated launching, the shuttle’s cargo bay had to be bigger and wider than it might otherwise have been, giving the shuttle its distinctively chunky, less than aerodynamically ideal shape. While occasionally useful, much of that space went empty much of the time. In case the Cold War should ever turn hot, the Air Force also demanded that it be possible to launch the shuttle from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, deploy a satellite, and land again back in California within one orbit without ever flying over Soviet territory, thus minimizing its exposure to space-borne or terrestrial weaponry. In aeronautics jargon, this necessitated that the shuttle have a considerable “downrange” or “crossrange” capability to glide off its normal orbital path, which in turn necessitated the shuttle’s delta-shaped wings that made it less than a pilot’s delight. John Young, the first man to pilot a shuttle to Earth from space, compared it to trying to fly a brick. Other pilots would call landing the shuttle a “controlled plummet,” while passengers compared it to a “dive-bomber run.” Worse, the final design generated far more heat on reentry than would have NASA’s earlier concepts, heat which engineers could combat only through the use of heavy, cludgy thermal-protection tiles that were a constant worry and labor sink throughout the program’s history. Each of the 35,000 tiles on the shuttle was a one-off piece that had to be custom manufactured, and every single one of them had to be carefully inspected by hand after every single launch in the hopes of averting disaster on the next mission. In spite of NASA’s best efforts, the disaster that was perhaps inevitable finally came on February 1, 2003, when the Columbia burned up on reentry. A more elegant shuttle could have minimized or even eliminated the tiles altogether, and saved the lives of seven astronauts.

Well before the Columbia and even the Challenger disasters, a feeling dogged engineers and astronauts alike that the shuttle just wasn’t as safe as it should be in still other ways. This was largely down to yet more concessions and compromises to budgetary realities. In place of a reusable booster section which would have blasted the shuttle into space and then glided — possibly with the aid of a human pilot — back down to a soft runway landing, the shuttle got a massive external fuel tank that would just be cast away, Apollo-style, and a pair of solid-fuel booster rockets that floated back via parachute to drop into the ocean. Essentially little more than hollow metal cylinders filled with propellant, the boosters could be reused, but were problematic in other ways. The shuttle was the first manned space vehicle ever to use solid rockets as a primary means of propulsion; they had heretofore been considered too dangerous because they can neither be throttled nor shut down entirely if something should go wrong during a burn. And, unlike earlier spacecraft, the shuttle was equipped with no emergency escape mechanism whatsoever for launches. Just as the heat tiles’ failings cost the last crew of the Columbia their lives, this lack may have cost the last crew of the Challenger, who appear to have been alive and conscious for at least some portion of their fatal fall back to Earth.

I don’t mean to say that the space shuttle wasn’t a crazily magnificent feat, nor to cast aspersions on the engineers who made it (usually) work in the face of all the cutbacks and compromises, nor to say that I wouldn’t have jumped at the chance to fly in it, safety questions and all. The shuttle certainly made for a cool sort of spacecraft, and an almost unbelievably comfortable one. If hardly the lap of luxury by earthbound standards, it was ridiculously roomy by comparison with the American spacecraft that preceded it and those (if any) that appear likely to follow it. Certainly the earliest astronauts in their “Spam in a can” capsules, who had to fight just to get a window, would have loved this craft that an astronaut got to actually fly.

Yet it’s hard for even the most generous observer to avoid noting just how massively the space-shuttle program overpromised and underdelivered. Originally projected as capable of launching again just one week after returning to Earth, the timetable was revised by the time of the Columbia‘s maiden flight in 1981 to one month. No shuttle ever came close to meeting even this timeframe. What with all of the repairs and inspections that were needed — not least to those pesky tiles — a shuttle that launched three times in a year was doing very well for itself. Nor did the huge savings supposedly enabled by this reusable spacecraft ever really materialize. The cost of each launch averaged over the the life of the program ends up in the $1.3 billion to $1.5 billion range, at least ten times what it costs the Russians to put a three-man crew into space via their trusty old Soyuz space capsule and a conventional expendable rocket — and, while fourteen people died aboard the Challenger and Columbia, the Russians haven’t lost a cosmonaut since 1971. The shuttle lacked the romance of the Apollo program, but that was rather implicit in its purpose all along. More damningly, it failed in its goal of making spaceflight a safe matter of (relatively) inexpensive routine.

For much of the shuttle’s lifetime, NASA had trouble answering a fairly fundamental question: just what was it really good for? In the optimistic early days of the program they floated the idea that the shuttle might be a viable commercial proposition, an actual moneymaker for the agency. Other countries as well as private companies would pay NASA to truck their satellites into space. But this never materialized in any significant way; the shuttle was far, far too expensive to launch, not to mention too prone to unexpected delays and other problems, to compete with cheap, reliable unmanned rockets for commercial satellite launches. Twice West Germany paid NASA to launch the shuttle and give them free use of a Spacelab laboratory module installed in the cargo bay, but that was about as good as it would ever get for the shuttle as a commercial entity.

The shuttle also failed to live up to expectations as a tool for the military. Work on the planned alternative launch site for military missions at Vandenberg fell far behind schedule, and was finally abandoned in the wake of the Challenger disaster after over $4 billion had been spent. Of 27 military personnel recruited and trained to serve as astronauts on the shuttle, only 2 ever made it into space due to disorganization, turf wars, and poor inter-agency communication. Instead the military had to content itself with essentially sub-contracting its payloads out to NASA; the missions launched from the Kennedy Space Center and featured the usual rotating crew of civilian astronauts. These so-called “Department of Defense” missions, which numbered nine between 1985 and 1992, always felt a bit farcical. Their satellite payloads, despite usually being officially considered “classified,” were an open secret at best around the Kennedy Space Center; during the run-up to the second of these launches, to put a Defense Satellite Communications System into orbit in October of 1985, even reporters were walking around in “DSCS” tee-shirts. Never happy about being bound to the shuttle in the first place, the military started working in earnest to find an alternative following the Challenger disaster and the subsequent thirty-month hiatus in launches. That alternative turned out to be, inevitably, a cheaper and simpler unmanned rocket in the form of the Titan IV, latest in a venerable line of military and civilian workhorse launchers.

Lots of good science was done aboard the shuttle betwixt and between all these dashed expectations. Yet it was hard for even a space-loving kid, much less the general public, to get all that excited about experiments in applied plasma physics or materials science. After the novelty of the first few flights which proved the crazy contraption actually worked, it was just hard to get excited about the space shuttle in general. Only one tantalizing prospect seemed like it had a chance of changing all that: a permanent station in space, to be built, supplied, and maintained by the shuttle.

Artist’s conception of the shuttle servicing an American space station.

This idea of a space station had been bound up with that of the shuttle itself right from the beginning. After all, that inspiring 2001 future had featured both, hadn’t it? Without a space station, where was the space shuttle to actually go? (“Nowhere,” some would soon be saying.) In this, NASA’s original vision for the post-Apollo future, the space shuttle was to be just that, the shuttle bus ferrying people, materials, and equipments up to where the real action was happening. The shuttle wasn’t supposed to be exciting in itself. The real excitement would be happening up there, as a permanent settlement in space grew and developed and just maybe started thinking about building its own spacecraft right there in orbit to visit the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, perhaps Halley’s Comet (which was conveniently due for a visit in 1986). NASA anticipated building both parts of the program — the station and the ancillary shuttle to service it — in tandem. It was only when the budget cuts started to bite that they had to make the hard decision to go ahead with the space shuttle alone as a necessary precursor to the station. If the shuttle without the space station felt like a spacecraft without a purpose, that’s because it largely was.

And so NASA continually tried to find a way to get the space-station project out of stasis. During the mid-1970s some planners floated the intriguing idea that it might be possible to reuse the recently abandoned Skylab as the core of a more permanent station. Plans were mooted to send an early shuttle mission to Skylab with a rocket pack that could be used to push it out of its decaying orbit. Later missions would then have refurbished, repaired, and reactivated the station for habitation. Such plans were doomed, however, by delays in the shuttle program and by heavy sunspot activity that caused Skylab’s orbit to decay more quickly than anticipated. On July 11, 1979, Skylab crashed to Earth, raining debris down on Western Australia and causing NASA considerable embarrassment almost two more years before the eventual maiden flight of the Columbia.

The space-station project remained alive after that as a theoretically real thing, but generated little more than sketches and plans for which NASA could never seem to amass more than a fraction of the necessary funding. In his January 1984 State of the Union Address, President Reagan gave the project a badly needed shot in the arm via a would-be Kennedy-esque pronouncement.

Our next frontier [is] space. Nowhere do we so effectively demonstrate our technological leadership and ability to make life better on Earth. The Space Age is barely a quarter of a century old. But already we’ve pushed civilization forward with our advances in science and technology. Opportunities and jobs will multiply as we cross new thresholds of knowledge and reach deeper into the unknown.

Our progress in space — taking giant steps for all mankind — is a tribute to American teamwork and excellence. Our finest minds in government, industry, and academia have all pulled together. And we can be proud to say: We are first; we are the best; and we are so because we’re free.

America has always been greatest when we dared to be great. We can reach for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful economic and scientific gain. Tonight, I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade.

A space station will permit quantum leaps in our research in science, in communications, in metals, and in lifesaving medicines which could be manufactured only in space. We want our friends to help us meet these challenges and share in their benefits. NASA will invite other countries to participate so we can strengthen peace, build prosperity, and expand freedom for all who share our goals.

Couched in empty political tautologies as it is (“America has always been greatest when we dared to be great?”), that declaration did lead to some action: an official Space Station Program Office was established at the Johnson Space Center, strategic plans and blueprints were created with more enthusiasm. Any momentum was abruptly dissipated, however, by the Challenger disaster of January 28, 1986, an event which stopped American manned spaceflight in its tracks for two and half years of investigating and soul-searching. The shuttle program would never quite be the same again, while hopes for the space station were all but dashed. Reagan’s successor George Bush gave NASA another apparent boost in a major speech on July 20, 1989, refloating the old idea of the station, now to be named Freedom, as a base for launching future missions to the Moon and Mars. But that speech was just another in an emerging tradition of Presidents making grand pronouncements about space exploration that come to nothing. Just as had happened with the space shuttle, project Freedom was steadily scaled back and compromised in the face of dwindling budgets. In 1993, NASA’s independent Freedom was finally folded into the International Space Station, itself only a shadow of what NASA had originally planned for the station to be.

Even at that, though, the ISS finally provided the space shuttle with a purpose for which it seemed eminently suited. Beginning with the first ISS building block which the Endeavor carried into orbit in 1998, the aging shuttle fleet got from the station a new lease on life and a new sense of purpose; this was what the shuttle had been designed to do all those years ago. But then came the Columbia disaster of 2003, and all the old doubts resurfaced. It was almost with a sense of relief that NASA retired the shuttle at last in 2011, before any more lives were lost, even if doing so left them with no way to get people into space at all for what looks to be, at best, some years to come. It was hard to escape the feeling as the shuttle fleet was parceled out to museums that something had gone horribly wrong in the aftermath of Apollo, that a brilliant beginning had been squandered.

(A very good short summary of the shuttle program and its discontents is found in The Final Countdown by Pat Duggins. For more on the shuttle as a military vehicle, see this article at Smithsonian Air and Space. For more on the drawbacks of the shuttle’s design and the alternative once proposed by Max Faget, see this article at The Space Review.)

Comments
17 Responses

- Anonymous

July 24, 2014 at 3:03 pm

Yeah, the Shuttle was really not such a great idea, and the actual implementation (due largely to the politics involved to get the money for it) just made things worse. Things are looking up though, with the work SpaceX has been doing with capsules to carry people, and reusable rocket stages.

It’s not online, but if you’re interested in perhaps the single best book on the Shuttle program, you’ll want to read “Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System” by Dennis Jenkins. Of course, everyone’s still awaiting the 4th and final edition of the book. (The 3d ed. gets through 2001, so it’s missing the fate of Columbia, among other things)

Also, you misspelled Halley’s Comet; it has two ‘l’s.

Anyway, great read, and I loved Project Space Station in my Apple II days, so I’m looking forward to seeing the next part. Have you tried out Kerbal Space Program at all?

- Jimmy Maher

July 25, 2014 at 6:29 am

Thanks for the correction, and thanks for pointing me to both book and game; I wasn’t aware of either. Too bad both look like huge timesinks I can ill afford. :)

- Ken Rutsky

July 24, 2014 at 3:51 pm

Great writeup! Looking forward to part 2…

- ZUrlocker

July 24, 2014 at 4:59 pm

Somehow I didn’t get the IF connection here.

- Ken Rutsky

July 24, 2014 at 5:56 pm

Groundwork for this HESWare game, I imagine:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Space_Station

- Jason Dyer

July 24, 2014 at 6:11 pm

Hey, I had this! I remember crashing a lot.

- dr. no

July 25, 2014 at 12:49 am

Tell me about it. I bought a space shuttle designed by Jack Tramiel. It turned out to be a bean burrito and a box of matches. :(

- Felix

July 24, 2014 at 5:17 pm

An excellent story as usual, replete with details I didn’t even know. It’s enough to make me even more furious. That, my friend, is what happens when people don’t listen to engineers. And they never do. I would add that the American space program at least has never been a money sink — on the contrary, it made lots of money, directly and indirectly. Even if it hadn’t, the cost of any war in the 20th century dwarfs that of sending all those people and satellites into space.

And now? Now America’s hope for going back into space is a private company that designed its own rocket and space capsule… based on designs abandoned by NASA for not being sexy enough. In fact I hear the next Dragon space capsule will actually match the capacity of the Space Shuttle while being cheaper, safer and truly reusable for a change.

For that matter, a bunch of Romanians managed to achieve suborbital flight (unmanned) just on sponsorships obtained through an NGO. What more proof do we need that it’s mostly just a matter of will?

- Jimmy Maher

July 25, 2014 at 6:57 am

I’m just a bit skeptical about both the notion that a space program can be justified entirely on economic grounds and that private industry can step in and replace NASA.

In the case of the former: there’s a lot of funny accounting going on with some of those studies. As always, it’s wise to look at where the study is getting its funding and take that into account. In the case of the shuttle in particular, I’m not sure the U.S. ever got direct, immediate economic benefits out of it to the tune of $1.3 to $1.5 billion *per launch*. This doesn’t mean a space program isn’t worth funding. On the contrary, I wish that NASA’s budget had somehow, through some historical accident, become sacrosanct the way the Pentagon’s absurd budget has. If NASA had continued to receive its 1960s funding, we could very well be living in the future shown in 2001 today — and *that* would, in the long-term, have made not only a huge economic difference but also led to a better world in all sorts of other ways in my opinion.

In the case of the latter: I understand the need for private industry to begin to develop space, but the really grand, imagination-stretching projects cost so much and, again, bring such questionable (at best) immediate economic returns that the only organizations on the planet really able to fund them are governments. Democracies, particularly disfunctional ones like the current one in the U.S., are ironically maybe not the best equipped to carry out long-term space development. It’s hard to plan decades in advance when your funding is always dependent on the next election cycle. It wouldn’t surprise me if China — an increasingly prosperous nation with an authoritarian government very accustomed to planning things decades into the future and a strong desire for the national validation and prestige that would come with a pioneering space program — took the lead in this century, and made it first to Mars amongst who knows what else.

- Lex Spoon

July 24, 2014 at 8:02 pm

It’s so true–80s kids got the short end of the stick with the space shuttle, compared to Apollo. Anyone remember all the Tang commercials?

With all due respect, I believe the reusability argument is slightly misleading in this article. It was not engineers arguing for reusability, but the public. It was a major part of the shuttle’s mission to make a *reusable* space craft. Engineers, as you have pointed out, often judged that it was better to use something cheap, mass-produced, identical, and disposable.

The thermal tiles are a good example of that. If you ask an engineer, they would likely say that it’s better to use an ablative heat shield and to reapply it before each launch. The public wanted reusable, though, so NASA spent a fortune developing the wonky ceramic-tiles approach.

As a more down to earth example, it is both cheaper and better to use a disposable klenex than a reusable one.

- Andrew Plotkin

July 24, 2014 at 9:16 pm

There was a lot of public enthusiasm for a reusable spacecraft but I doubt it influenced the engineering down at the “design the tiles” level! There were enough political constraints on the thing without assuming that kind of fluff.

The engineering argument for reusability is obvious, and continues to be pursued today (by SpaceX and Virgin, e.g.). The Shuttle program didn’t have a stupid goal. Although I don’t know if there was ever a realistic possibility of “Shuttle without the military screwing it up”, so maybe it wasn’t a *practical* goal.

- Jimmy Maher

July 25, 2014 at 7:08 am

Yeah, I haven’t seen any evidence that engineers were opposed to the *concept* of a reusable space shuttle, just to this specific implementation. For example, many were very bothered by the kludgy, wasteful external fuel tank.

Virtually all of the blue-sky proposals for spaceflight of the future during the Apollo era called for vehicles that were *more* reusable than the shuttle we eventually got, not less. One popular proposal, which I mentioned in the article, was for a two-part design consisting of the actual spacecraft and a booster stage — also winged — that would launch the shuttle toward orbit and then glide back down to a runway landing to be refueled and used again.

Of course, in hindsight, if they had known that NASA’s budgets would be cut as sharply as they would and that building the shuttle would effectively prevent them from ever doing much of anything else in manned spaceflight, they may very well have chosen to stay with cheap and simple disposable rockets and space capsules to save money for other things…

- Carl

July 24, 2014 at 11:35 pm

An interesting take on the Challenger disaster is that it may at some level be due to the requirement that the boosters be reuseable. Everyone knows the o-ring leaking caused the explosion but the only reason they needed o-rings was that they were too big to be returned for refurbishing. If they had been disposable they could have been sealed and while this wouldn’t have made the Space Shuttle safe by any stretch it would have at least eliminate that failure mode.

- Anonymous

July 25, 2014 at 2:23 pm

Carl–
Well, it’s not so much that the SRBs were to be recovered and reused, as much as other logistical problems. SRBs are ‘pre-fueled’ at the factory, long in advance of when they’re actually used. And since the propellant is highly volatile solid rocket fuel, they’re inherently dangerous objects. The casting (they’re poured like concrete) has to be perfect, because the burn rate is governed in large part by the surface area available. The SRBs had a void running down the length of them in an 11 point star shape, tuned to be just the right size and shape to fit the requirements. Less surface area means it burns slower and performs worse. More means it goes faster. But if a crack develops in the fuel, when the flame reached it, the whole thing might explode! (Though not like Challenger — the Morton Thiokol engineers immediately recognized that the SRBs did not explode then, as evidenced by the two smoke trails as the boosters flew away) A segmented booster made pouring, inspection, and if necessary, disposal of defective segments, easier.

Also, since the SRBs are pre-fueled at the factory, they weigh a staggering amount. Most of the weight of a rocket is always going to be rocket fuel, with the structure being as lightweight as possible. With liquid fuel, a rocket can be fueled on the pad, and is thus lightweight enough that until size is an issue, parts can be transported easily by air. For example, an ordinary passenger 747 is carrying nearly twice as much weight as the NASA 747s that had Space Shuttle Orbiters on their backs. But the SRBs weighed almost 600 metric tons each! And the factory was in landlocked Utah. (As opposed to the barge-accessible factories for most rocket stages too large for air transport) This meant that rail was the only way to get the SRB to the launch sites, and if they had been a single piece, they would’ve been too long for the curves in the tracks.

Disposable SRBs would still have been segmented, unless the contractor was obligated to move the factory to somewhere on the coast. It would’ve been better to just have liquid fueled boosters instead. Or better yet, to not have a one size fits all approach.

- arb

July 25, 2014 at 5:23 am

This post reminded me of a piece I read several years ago on the Shuttle: A Rocket To Nowhere. As a kid I loved the whole idea (and the look) of the shuttle, but it could never have lived up to the expectations placed on it.

- Jimmy Maher

July 25, 2014 at 2:50 pm

Love the description of the SRBs as “the equivalent of two giant firecrackers.” :)

- Keith Palmer

July 25, 2014 at 10:46 pm

The space shuttle program being forever stuck behind the Sisyphean 8-ball of its early publicity mostly seems to evoke a strange, “getting upset won’t do any good” sympathy in me. I work in an industry that has our own early publicity quoted back to us with contempt on a regular basis and our own share of “if only we’d been smarter…” disasters to try and learn from, but that may not be all of it. I don’t think I was too “envious of the previous generation” in the first half of the 1980s; that “whatever you can do doesn’t impress me” attitude seems a matter of later decades. Anyway, I found the sudden burst of resolve in 2010 to go to Florida and see one of the final space shuttle launches in person, and had the luck that it launched on the day it was scheduled to. Even there, though, there might have been that “what if this time” feeling…

Project: Space Station, Part 2: The Dream
July 28, 2014

As long as there has been a space program, there have been space-program boosters. With budgets dwindling and interest waning after Apollo 11, however, NASA suddenly needed them as never before. Various people started various organizations to educate, to advocate, to lobby, sometimes even to agitate the case for space. Briefly among the more prominent of these folks during the early 1980s was Stan Kent, a precocious English rocket scientist still in his mid-twenties.

Growing up working class in the industrial city of Wolverhampton in the West Midlands, Kent wrote to NASA asking for more information about the Titan rocket used to hoist the Gemini space capsules into orbit. Much to his family’s surprise, they sent it, cementing a passionate love affair with space and with NASA. (NASA was notably wonderful about this sort of thing in their 1960s heyday; many a starry-eyed kid all over the world received a similar thick envelope filled with pictures and articles for no charge but the cost to mail a letter to Houston.) At age 15, he demonstrated for the first time what would prove to be a lifelong knack for self-promotion. Determined to find a way to come to the United States to study rocket science, he entered a contest to design a functioning powered aircraft which won him national attention inside his home country and was enough to recommend him to a wealthy philanthropist in Santa Clara, California, named Austen Warburton. With Warburton’s assistance, he came to the United State to attend university at the age of 17, and graduated from Stanford with a Masters in aerospace engineering in 1978 at the age of 22, winning the prestigious Herman Oberth Gold Medal in the process for his paper on “The Space Shuttle External Tank as a Reentry Module.” He was soon working for Boeing and later Lockheed, and doing consulting jobs for NASA itself.

Kent’s public space advocacy began in 1979, when he got wind of proposals within NASA to stop monitoring the two Viking probes that had landed on Mars three years before simply because they couldn’t afford to continue to pay people to do it. He organized a Viking “charity” which presented NASA administrator Robert A. Frosch with a check for $60,000 to go toward continued monitoring on January 7, 1981. The sum would increase to over $100,000 in the months to come, then increase dramatically again when he organized with former astronaut and Moon-walker Pete Conrad to sell off recovered pieces from the old Skylab space station by way of further fundraising. (By that time Viking 2 had already gone offline due to a failed battery. Viking 1 would continue to transmit — and, yes, to be monitored — until a botched software update took it offline on November 11, 1982.)

Under the aegis of Delta Vee, the nonprofit corporation he set up with the assistance of Warburton and some aerospace colleagues, Kent stumped the country on behalf of space, appearing on television, on radio, in Omni magazine (with whom he did much of his advocacy in partnership), and in countless newspaper articles. He worked to set up a nationwide network of “neighborhood space centers” — “the McDonald’s of space” — and gave speeches to anyone who would have him. Far from your stereotypical rocket scientist, Kent made space cool in what the L.A. Times described as his “new-wave haircut, beige suit, purple shirt, and bright red tie”; he looked like “he might be a member of a rock band.” In September of 1981 he testified before the Congressional Subcommittee on Space Science and Applications at the age of just 25. His pitch emphasized a new, more pragmatic take on space very much in keeping with the dawning hyper-capitalism of the 1980s. The NASA that Kent described was fundamentally a practical enterprise whose work would bring scientific and technological breakthroughs to make life better for ordinary Americans, along with economic benefits to the country; Kent was fond of citing such dubious surveys as the one done in 1972 by Chase Econometrics, which claimed that every $1 spent on the space industry injected $10 to $15 back into the economy within five to seven years.

In that spirit, he and his partners soon set up a second, for-profit corporation they named AstroSpace. Its initial purpose was to research and hopefully to exploit a pet idea Kent called SOLARES: “Space Orbiting Light Augmentation Reflector Energy System,” a way to beam concentrated sunlight down to Earth for use as energy. In the meantime, though, the home-computer boom was happening. Soon Kent hit upon a more earthbound project for his company: to create a computer game that simulated the building and operation of the permanent space station that he and so many others felt represented the next logical steppingstone to Mars and beyond. By 1983 he had sold the idea to Jay Balakrishnan of Human Engineered Software, who loved big, high-concept edutainment titles.

Project: Space Station was certainly that. The game that Kent and Balakrishnan described (separately) to InfoWorld magazine in 1984 — it was quite obviously the HES product that the latter was most excited to discuss — filled nine disk sides. Balakrishnan:

It’s an absolute simulation. First of all, to start you have to go to Congress to requisition a budget. You have to choose your scientific team that will comprise the space mission. There’s a book, almost like a story, with different fictitious characters that you can select your team from. There’s a whole page of biographical data on each person — where they went to school, whom they married, whether they’re stable individuals or not, and so on. Then you must decide on what kind of industry you’re going to develop in space — for example, if you want to make ball bearings or crystals or whatever.

Then you design your space station. Each one is a different module. You might build a plant area, living quarters, etc. Then you run a simulation. Now the plant starts working, giving oxygen and life, and the industry starts working. You see that it’s a viable operation. Finally, after you have overseen everything, you resign your post. You were the director of a successful space industry, so you get your gold watch at the end. Of course, during the game all kinds of random things can occur. Maybe you’ve gone over budget. So you go back to Washington, D.C., and appeal for a higher requisition to keep the business going.

Together Kent and Balakrishnan organized an “advisory” board for the project that consisted of Kent’s colleagues in the aerospace industry along with the high-school students who would be the game’s most obvious target market, all “overseen” by the hapless, computer-illiterate Leonard Nimoy (who must have been wondering by this point why he’d signed on with HES at all).

I find this original conception of Project: Space Station fascinating as an early example of a computer game with an explicit real-world rhetorical goal. One could call it without hyperbole propaganda, a political advertisement for a NASA space station. The justifications it makes for such a project are the same as those Kent was making in his speeches, and, indeed, those that Ronald Reagan more obliquely referred to in his State of the Union address of 1984. In Project: Space Station, players would enjoy success not so much in the form of exploratory firsts or pure scientific breakthroughs but rather that of crop surveys that would make American agriculture more efficient, new semiconductors that would make American computers more powerful, lasers that would revolutionize American manufacturing, even the proverbial cure for cancer. If it wasn’t always entirely clear why some of these research projects had to be done by people in space, well, that was a problem Project: Space Station shared with some of Kent’s speeches.

This huge game being developed by a bunch of aerospace people with no experience in game development was of course all but doomed to failure. Kent and company did manage to get far enough to produce some intriguing screenshots that, as published in the April 16, 1984, issue of InfoWorld, stand today as the only tangible artifacts left to us from this version of Project: Space Station. The whole thing collapsed by the end of that year, with HES going bankrupt and being absorbed by Avant-Garde Publishing and AstroSpace coming to an abrupt end along with Kent’s time as a space advocate. He made an extreme and kind of bizarre change in life direction, opening back in Santa Clara a night club called One Step Beyond that became a regular stop on the college-rock touring circuit for some years. Today he writes erotica, hosts naughty events at a sex shop, and is something of a fixture of the Southern California nightlife scene while apparently still keeping his hand in from time to time as a rocket scientist. In 2012 he consulted on the perfect combination of all his interests: a proposed Playboy space station.

(Stan Kent’s space advocacy is chronicled in the August 3 1980 Washington Post, the January 8 1981 and November 12 1982 New York Times, and the July 22 1982 L.A. Times. The two InfoWorld articles that describe Kent’s original vision for Project: Space Station are in the April 16 1984 and September 3 1984 issues. A transcript of his testimony before Congress is contained in the government publication “Future Space Programs, 1981: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Space Science and Applications of the Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, First Session, September, 21, 22, 23, 1981.” The space-advocacy movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the place of a space station within are treated at length in Reaching for the High Frontier by Michael A. G. Michaud, available online from The National Space Society.)

Comments
16 Responses

- ZUrlocker

July 28, 2014 at 10:56 pm

A minor editing mistake: “Stan Kent, a English rocket science” should probably be “English rocket scientist.”

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2014 at 8:03 am

Mmm, I’m seeing “Stan Kent, a *precocious* English rocket scientist…”

- Victor Gijsbers

July 29, 2014 at 9:35 am

It still says “science”, not “scientist”.

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2014 at 10:14 am

Oh, okay. Thought you folks were trying to point out something else entirely: an “a/an” error. Don’t ask me how I jumped to that conclusion. Fixed now.

- Nate

July 29, 2014 at 5:25 am

That particular flavour of space activism seemed to haunt most of the early-80s microcomputer scene. Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor, the anchor column of Byte Magazine, seemed to split equally between reviewing the latest hardware/software, and advocating loudly for a private commercial space industry. The same techno-utopianism that pitched 8-bit micros as ‘preparing your children for the future’ also visualised that future as having, for sure, orbiting O’Neill cylinders, equatorial spaceports in North Africa and Peru, and solar power satellites crewed by spacesuited construction gangs.

And since I was a pre-teen at the time, I lapped it all up. I had more more of an orientation toward hard science than fantasy; it didn’t cross my mind to think that the lecturing, professorial ‘hard science’ visions about space in magazines like Scientific American and Aerospace Age were just as much an id-driven marketing fantasy as the ads for expensive watches on the back covers.

It seems, looking back, that 1984 was probably the high water mark of the techno-utopians both in space activism and microcomputing. After that, the business crowd led by IBM and Microsoft took over, and personal computing became much more professional, but somehow lost the brightest, strangest part of its soul.

It took me well into the 90s before the realisation finally set in that the manned space future, like the Cold War, had been pretty much entirely a propaganda construct, and that the arguments for building Space Shuttles were just like the arguments for building ICBMs: flimsy, cynical and not really plausible even to their most passionate advocates. And that, like the rest of the Reagan era, it was ultimately all a waste of time and resources, and one we were very lucky to survive.

I’ve never really forgiven the space boosters for that deep childhood sense of betrayal. Even as I’d really, really love to go back to that bright innocent time in the very early 80s when Space Shuttles and microcomputers really were magic.

It was, after all, a time when you could listen completely unironically to this Rush song and cheer.

- Jimmy Maher

July 29, 2014 at 8:19 am

Thanks for this!

I’m not quite so cynical about the whole thing as you. Yes, there was a certain amount of disingenuousness in the pitch of people like Stan Kent, but that’s because they were trying to find a practical, economic way to justify — this being the hyper-capitalist 1980s — something that couldn’t really be justified on practical, economic grounds. But there is a larger argument that humanity *needs* to be pushing Out There, needs to slip the bonds of Earth at some point or we’re all going to go stir crazy and eventually kill each other off completely on this crowded little planet. Feeling unable to make this argument without being laughed at and dismissed as science-fiction dreamers, activists fell back on this idea that everything, absolutely everything could be done better in space. Weightlessness was going to be the magical ingredient that would let us cure cancer and invent inconceivably strong and flexible new materials; manned observatories floating in space were going to make our farmers more productive; astronauts were going to build a huge power station in space to capture energy from the Sun and beam it to Earth in the form of microwaves. Name any long-sought scientific or technical advance, append “by people in space” to the end of it, and it suddenly became possible and, indeed, all but guaranteed.

- Nate

July 31, 2014 at 10:29 am

Oh, I’m not entirely cynical about space. I’m a huge fan of our robot probes, for instance; that we’re running rovers on Mars and orbiters around Saturn is something that makes my inner 12-year-old squee with delight.

But I am tired of hearing false arguments for space colonisation constantly repeated – in tech forums, by intelligent people who ought to know better, and could, at the cost of a few hours of honest research. And these are usually people who claim to be rational fact-lovers.

“But there is a larger argument that humanity *needs* to be pushing Out There, needs to slip the bonds of Earth at some point or we’re all going to go stir crazy and eventually kill each other off completely on this crowded little planet.”

Yes, that’s the argument right there, and unfortunately, though it’s beautiful and wondrous, it’s false. As you note, it’s not rational; it appeals to the pre-rational imagination. And it bothers me that there exists an organised movement (somewhat less organised, but still passionate) that takes it as a tenet of faith. Because almost every part of it is not only wrong, but dangerous to believe. It exists in diametric opposition to a sane awareness of ecology, limits to growth, and the global viewpoint that’s the only way we’re going to survive the pressures of the next few centuries.

Space as science now understands it – at least within the next few centuries, barring discovery of warp drive physics – is only ever going to be a tiny outpost of scientific resarch for a privileged few. Yes, it’s cool that we have a space station. It’s okay to do it because it’s cool. Whales are cool too! But we’re simply never going to “move off Earth” in any numbers that will matter for Earth’s population. No disaster we can imagine will ever make space more livable than Earth. Not within the solar system, at any rate. Mars is our best shot, and it will never be more habitable than Antarctica and the Sahara after a massive nuclear exchange.

Neither will setting up (tiny and fragile and cramped) off-world colonies help prevent war. It’s going to accelerate it. In fact, the launchers for space evolved as a byproduct of the ICBMs which represent humanity’s darkest self-destructive urges. Getting space access means you also have the ability to toss rockets at your enemies; developing commercial asteroid mining is also going to mean developing the ability to precisely target and de-orbit rocks of a size that killed the dinosaurs. This technology is not going to make us more peaceful; it is, however, going to allow us to create species-extinction events on Earth.

Finally – again, unless someone overturns Einstein tomrrow – our best science says we’re not going to get to the stars except through the tiny choke-point of establishing self-sustaining ecosystems on space stations and starships that can endure for thousands of years. And those are going to suffer *far* more from the ‘cramped, stir-crazy, kill everyone’ problem

I love the space colony dream; it affected me deeply as a child. But it’s deeply, deeply irrational, and we’re long past the point were we had any excuse for holding it. And worse, the “we gota get off this rock” atitude gets in the way of solving the problems we need to solve.

We have to learn to live together on this Earth for the next 1,000 years without an escape hatch. Is making that thought transition, after the accelerando of the last century, psychologically dificult? Yes. But we don’t have the luxury of self-deception. The last 50 years of the space program have reinforced in huge glowing neon signs that Earth really, really is unique in human-accessible space. And yet we’re destroying it, and “old Earth got used up, so we went into space” is the lie we tell ourselves as we watch.

Sorry. I’m passionate about this, because I’m afraid of what the whiplash will do to us when we finally realise that space was a mirage. Will irrational optimism turn into hatred for ecologists who say “no, there are limits”? Well, that’s already surfacing in the climate-change denial movement.

But, yeah. Space is still cool, and I wish the maned spaceflight boosters had been right. I just wish we had a vision equally as powerful on a gutlevel, to inspire a generation about what we could do here on Earth.

- Jimmy Maher

July 31, 2014 at 12:53 pm

Thanks, Nate. There’s a lot here, some of which I actually agree with. As for the things I don’t, I can only speak for myself. But since you’ve pronounced my argument “the argument” for space, hopefully I’ll do. ;)

“It [the argument] exists in diametric opposition to a sane awareness of ecology, limits to growth, and the global viewpoint that’s the only way we’re going to survive the pressures of the next few centuries.”

“Diametric opposition?” Really? This sounds like a classic zero-sum-game fallacy. One can be supportive of space travel without being opposed to — indeed, while being passionately supportive of — all of those things. One could argue that the two go hand in hand; many astronauts have talked about the new appreciation they gained for the Earth as a precious, fragile cradle of life when they first viewed it from space.

“Space as science now understands it – at least within the next few centuries, barring discovery of warp drive physics – is only ever going to be a tiny outpost of scientific resarch for a privileged few.”

First, let’s take interstellar travel off the table, as it’s at best a useless distraction and at worst a straw man. It may indeed be effectively impossible by any other means than generation ships. If not, it probably is going to involve wormholes and manipulations of inconceivable amounts of energy and properties of physics about which we’re clueless. Let’s agree that if it happens at all we’re likely talking millennia before it does. So what? The solar system strikes me as a pretty huge and interesting place in its own right.

Significant numbers of practical, permanent outposts in the solar system may indeed also require “a few centuries.” Again, so what? The solar system isn’t going anywhere, and with luck neither are we. I don’t expect to see a 2001 future in my lifetime. But I’d like to see us get started on it.

“Neither will setting up (tiny and fragile and cramped) off-world colonies help prevent war. It’s going to accelerate it.”

First of all, I never said it would. But let’s talk about it anyway, because this is a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot lately for a future article.

I would ask you to think back to the conclusions many reached in the immediate aftermath of the first atomic bombings. Many very smart people reached the apparently logical conclusion that a global nuclear catastrophe was inevitable, that we were staring down the barrel of the end of history (the bad kind, not the good kind embarrassingly advocated by Francis Fukuyama back in those halcyon days of the early 1990s). There had never before been any weapon, they reasoned, that, once invented, hadn’t been used and used extensively until superseded by something more destructive. Why should the atomic bomb be any different?

Well, for some reason the atomic bomb was different — at least for the time being; the jury will always unfortunately be out with the final verdict. It was different in spite of leaders on both sides of the Cold War who weren’t always models of enlightenment. There really was a time when it was *conventional wisdom* that the Earth would be a smoking radioactive pile by now. Hasn’t happened, which is cause for hope. Just as significantly, the technology to make an atomic bomb is practically off-the-shelf stuff by now. The only tricky part remains the materials. If apocalyptic levels of destruction are what you’re after, are you going to go with trying to develop a suitcase-sized bomb and setting up a few terrorist cells or trying to engineer a massive project to move an asteroid out of its orbit? I know which sounds easier to me… the latter sounds like a good project for a James Bond villain.

Another historical counterexample, closer to home: weapons in space, period. There was a time when it was simply assumed by both sides in the Cold War that conflict would eventually move into space. This assumption is all over the shuttle’s flawed design. The Pentagon actually had plans to send the shuttle up to meet enemy missile silos in space and destroy them. The fact that space has never been weaponized, with the exception of reconnaissance satellites, is *amazing* and, again, contrary to all the conventional wisdom about humanity’s fundamentally violent nature and the like. Nobody wanted to be the first to start down that road in earnest, so it never happened.

For all its problems, the world is now a less violent place than it’s ever been. Most countries, starting at different levels and moving at different rates as they may be, are slowly getting saner and more peaceful. Fear of some terrorist boogeyman in space dropping an asteroid on our heads strikes me as a *terrible* reason to avoid going there.

“We have to learn to live together on this Earth for the next 1,000 years without an escape hatch.”

Of course, give or take some centuries. We should absolutely take care of the Earth like it’s our only home, because for the foreseeable future it is. But we can always lay the groundwork for venturing out there, and let the other portion of humanity, otherwise absorbed as they should be in the equally important activities of preserving our animals and plants and ocean and atmosphere, enjoy a grand adventure, one that might just do us all good spiritually — or, if you like psychologically. We have more than enough resources for both, and these ideas are not mutually exclusive.

I actually find your portrayal of space boosterism as somehow *dangerous* kind of bizarre. Is *anyone* who opposes sane environmental legislation seriously using a justification of “doesn’t matter, because we’ll all be on Mars soon?” These ideas have *no* traction even with the hardcore Republican base. Newt Gingrich was nearly laughed out of the last Republican primaries because of all of his crazy plans for space. Similarly, if you’re compiling reasons that people oppose environmental regulations or any other sane, necessary policy, “because space exploration would be cooler and is worthier of the money” would come in at about slot 10,000, corresponding to about .0000000001% of the people in question.

- Nate

August 1, 2014 at 6:00 am

These are good counterarguments you present, especially the “spiritual” benefit of space exploration; I do think that a good case can be made that the presence of humans in orbit and on the Moon has had an impact on the human spirit (the ‘blue marble’ picture comes to mind) far out of proportion to the military, commercial or scientific spinoffs.

” Is *anyone* who opposes sane environmental legislation seriously using a justification of “doesn’t matter, because we’ll all be on Mars soon?” These ideas have *no* traction even with the hardcore Republican base.”

In the hardcore Republican base? I don’t know. I seem to see this idea more in the right-wing libertarian technology blogosphere; among young people whose formative years were during the exponential-growth Internet tech boom of the 90, who are now fretting at anything they see as restraints to growth (and who they often visualise as ‘science-hating environmentalists’). I don’t see it held by people who have poltiical power – who tend to be older – but it feels to me to be common among the young, idealistic, and technologically inclined.

It’s certainly not a well-worked-out vision for the future . It just seems to be more of a deep unexamined belief that “… but we really don’t have to worry about resource depletion, because there’s plenty more in space”.

But on the other hand, it’s good to think that I’m way overestimating both how prevalent this argument is, and how influential the people are who make it.

And after all, maybe miracles can happen: take this NASA announcement, for instance

- Jimmy Maher

August 1, 2014 at 7:25 am

I wouldn’t worry about the techno-libertarians too much. These are just immature young men with limited life experience who’ve been deluded by the magic of the Internet into thinking the individual is omnipotent. In reality, that omnipotence of course depends on a huge, intricate network of technology and communication that is only made possible by the *collective* order. Without it, these young men are just pasty nerds with few practical life skills. Most of them will realize that around the point that they get married and/or become fathers if not before; the rest don’t exist in significant enough numbers to matter.

- dr. no

July 30, 2014 at 7:59 pm

Let’s be fair. To a person back in 1980, something like the Internet or Siri would have seemed just as plausible as orbital solar power satellites or a permanent colony on the moon. The fact that the former became reality and the latter did not is “obvious” only because we lived through it.

As Einstein said, we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them. The techno-utopians at least had the courage to dream of something big that would make a difference. Sometimes it seems like all the mainstream press can talk about is 1% changes in unemployment or what some celebrity said on twitter.

- Nate

July 31, 2014 at 10:48 am

“To a person back in 1980, something like the Internet or Siri would have seemed just as plausible as orbital solar power satellites or a permanent colony on the moon. The fact that the former became reality and the latter did not is “obvious” only because we lived through it.”

True. It is interesting to think about what might have happened (could still happen?) if there were a big push for space solar. It’s about the only halfway plausible economic driver for near-future orbital habitation I can think of.

The 1979 James P Hogan SF novel “The Two Faces of Tomorrow” is intriguing because it suggests a (then-plausible) extrapolation from both 1970s space and 1970s Internet research, which has now become a very alien past. A global computer network coordinating huge work projects on the Moon is given access to an O’Neill colony (which are being built at a rapid rate) and an experimental AI upgrade. Completely missing from this universe is any sense of commercial cost-benefit calculations (any private enterprise at all, really; it’s all government-funded Big Science) or the kinds of infrastructure and resource limits which started to hit us in the 1980s.

I do miss the technocratic spirit that built the scienc megaprojects of the 50s and 60s; I guess Reaganism pretty much dismantled and killed that dead. We seem to have such tiny ambitions now. On the other hand, the USSR also demonstrated that giving unlimited power to huge development projects doesn’t necessarily work out for the best. Would be nice to have an alternative, if there is one.

- Nate

July 29, 2014 at 5:29 am

Let me try that link again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5vPrrnb6tw

- John G

July 30, 2014 at 3:26 pm

Totally amazing work you are doing here. I think I had this game but had no idea it was created by a real life Buckaroo Banzai character.

- Grunion Guy

November 30, 2014 at 7:47 am

As a person that spent the first twenty-five years of my life in Santa Clara, California, I was fascinated to learn the history behind the man that opened One Step Beyond. I only ever took in a few shows there back in the day but I had several friends who thought of that club as their second home.

- Dgl

October 29, 2015 at 12:15 am

Stan opened one step beyond in 1986 Halloween and destroyed it and all of us who designed cleaned and got it opened and tried to keep it openall the the money went upnhis nose as a cocaine addict, he destroyed one step beyond,didn’t pay theState taxes On employee payroll accounts and escaped to L A To write erotic books about women’s shoes,have no respect forStan Kent he destroyed a lot of lives!

Project: Space Station, Part 3: The Game
July 30, 2014

Stan Kent and his company AstroSpace may have exited the stage, but Avant-Garde Publishing, the new owners of HES, weren’t ready to give up on Project: Space Station. They reached out to Larry Holland to finish the game.

Holland shares with Stan Kent some impressive academic credentials, but he’s otherwise his polar opposite: a quiet just-get-the-job-done sort who has always avoided interviews and public exposure as much as possible. After earning a Bachelors in anthropology and archeaology from Cornell in 1979, he spent two years out in the field, working on digs in Africa, Europe, and India, before starting on a PhD at Berkeley. He settled there near Silicon Valley just as home computers were beginning to take off. He bought himself one of the first Commodore 64s, learned to program it, and was hired by HES in early 1983 to port action games like Super Zaxxon to it. He proved himself clever and reliable at the work, enough so that it was decided to dump Project: Space Station in his lap. It was just the chance Holland needed to show what he could really do. He pared down and refined AstroSpace’s shaggy mixture of advocacy and simulation, synthesizing a bunch of disparate pieces that looked more like engineering tools than pieces of a game into something that fit on a single disk side and was actually fun — and all without sacrificing the spirit of the original concept.

Project: Space Station starts you out on July 1, 1985, with two space shuttles, $10 billion(!), and high hopes. You’ll have to plan and build your station module by module, while also, this being the new era of space exploration, earning enough from commercial satellite launches and the results of the experiments you run up there to keep the project going. From the perspective of today especially, Project: Space Station is a simulation of an alternate history in which the American space station not only got funded and built in the 1980s but all of NASA’s manned-space initiatives — most notably the shuttle — lived up to all of their plans and hopes. In this timeline shuttle launches are truly routine. You can assign a couple of astronauts to a shuttle, launch it, bring them down a few days later after having delivered their payload, then launch them again a week later like the space truckers they are. In a small concession to reality, every ten launches or so the shuttle might lose some thermal tiles, thus needing an extra ten days or so for repairs, but the thing blessedly never blows up or burns up. You even have clients asking you to hoist satellites for them for $40 million to $70 million a shot, and the shuttle is cheap enough to operate that you can turn a profit on that; pack several satellites into the cargo bay and send ‘er up before your arch-rival, the European Space Agency with their boring unmanned rockets, steals the job from you.

The first thing you notice when you first start Project: Space Station is how friendly it strains to be. I’ve made it a point to mention in the past how the innovations of the Lisa and Macintosh trickled down to cheaper machines in a way that gave the Apple computers influence far out of proportion to their actual sales numbers. That influence is all over Project: Space Station; this program simply couldn’t have existed a couple of year earlier. Everything is presented via icons and menus, navigable with the trusty joystick, while the space-station design screen has you sketching out your station by pulling modules into place with a “mouse” pointer. There’s even a — get this — context-sensitive help system to guide you through the game along with some canned tutorials to get you started. Hardware limitations inevitably restrict all of this in practice, but Project: Space Station feels like it was looking ahead about ten years into the future of software — or just looking very carefully at what was happening on the Mac, which largely amounted to the same thing.

The other obviously extraordinary thing about Project: Space Station is the fact that it runs entirely in real time. There were plenty of grand strategy games already available for machines like the Commodore 64; SSI alone had published dozens of them by 1985. But, true to that company’s roots in cardboard wargaming, most of these felt like tabletop rules sets that had been translated to the computer. Project: Space Station, however, is undeniably a born-and-bred computer game. There are no turns here. As you navigate through its screens the clock is constantly ticking, sometimes much to your consternation, as when you find yourself with research projects that need to be tweaked, a shuttle costing you money in space that needs to be landed ASAP, a precious satellite contract about to be awarded to those pesky Europeans, and another shuttle on the launch pad about to begin its countdown. Where do you begin? This game does nothing if not teach how to prioritize and how to manage your time. It also does a great job of not making you feel like you’re just tinkering with a dry spreadsheet, a syndrome that afflicted many other contemporary strategy games, a genre not exactly known for its graphics at a time when graphics in general were, shall we say, somewhat limited in comparison to today. Project: Space Station‘s graphics are actually quite nice for the era and the machine. But more importantly, you get to do such a variety of stuff in this game that it stays fresh and interesting for a surprisingly long time. When you’re tired of budgeting, there’s a shuttle to land via a real-time action game; when you’re tired of tweaking research projects, there’s that new laboratory module to move into place via an EVA.

So, let me walk you quickly through the different sections of the game, each of which is represented by and always accessible via its icon at the top of the screen.

The Plan section is the expected spreadsheet portion of the game, where you allocate funds to your different departments; buy the actual pieces of the station which you’ll be assembling, erector-set-like, in orbit; hire and fire astronauts; and provision and schedule shuttle launches. The most interesting and surprising part of this section is the astronaut-selection process. Each of the 32 possible astronauts has not only a professional specialty but also a personality. You have to consider whom you put together, because personality clashes can and will result if you put, say, a control freak together with a more laissez-faire kind of fellow. You’ll grow attached to some of these folks, and you’ll feel awful if you kill one or more of them by stranding a shuttle in orbit or botching an EVA.

Shuttle launches are affected by the weather; you’ll want to watch it carefully, and delay the launch if conditions are too unfavorable. Occasional mechanical snafus will also cause delays. Once the candle is lit, you take control, guiding the shuttle into orbit via a little action game that doubtless would have horrified the original Project: Space Station team with its lack of realism but is nevertheless a nice, not-too-difficult break from the strategic side of the game. If you stray too far off course, the shuttle will end up parked in orbit far from your station, making any EVA operations to expand or repair it much more time consuming and hazardous.

Shuttle landings also involve a simple action game. Rough landings can result in damage to the shuttle and extra repair time before it can fly again.

The Station section is there mainly to let you transfer astronauts between a shuttle in orbit, which can hold up to six people, and the station, whose capacity depends on how many crew modules you’ve bought, flown into orbit, and linked up, along with how much additional station infrastructure you’ve built to support the crew: power modules, radiator modules to disperse heat from the power modules, emergency modules to protect the astronauts from the occasional solar flares. And of course there’s not much point in having people at the station without something for them to do — meaning research projects, which require laboratory modules, which require yet more power modules, which… you get the picture.

The EVA section is the most fanciful part of the game. You venture outside shuttle and station using worker pods that have everything to do with 2001: A Space Odyssey and nothing to do with anything NASA was likely to come up with in the mid-1980s. You use the pods to construct the station, clear occasional debris that’s made its way into the station’s orbit, and launch commercial satellites; in the screenshot above, I’ve just attached a Payload Assist Module to a satellite to boost it into geosynchronous orbit. It’s very easy to run out of fuel or damage a pod so badly that it’s no longer functional. When that happens, you’d best have a backup pod that you can use to rescue the first before oxygen runs out. Once you’ve experienced a single time the excruciation of waiting for an astronaut to die from oxygen deprivation, unable to do anything about it, you’ll make sure you always do, believe me.

Finally there’s the real heart of the game, the R & D section; after all, it does bill itself on the box as a “science simulation in space.” You can have up to four research projects running at once, assuming you have a station that can support them. While you receive a generous initial budget which you can supplement with satellite launches, your research should eventually become the heart of your revenue stream, as it is the heart of the game’s rhetorical argument for a space station as a fundamentally practical, commercial proposition that will eventually pay for itself and then some. Some projects can also yield practical improvements that will make your station run more efficiently. There are 40 impressively specific projects to choose from, divided into 9 categories: Agriculture, Astronomy, Bio Medical, Earth Watch, Geology, Materials Science, Meteorology, Physics, and Space Technology. It’s a big thrill when one yields a major breakthrough, enough so that you’ll probably be willing to ignore questions like why it’s necessary for people in space to examine the satellite imagery used to make a crop survey.

I don’t want to overstate the case for Project: Space Station. While thoroughly entertaining in its early stages, it does have a litany of little problems that are very likely to turn you off eventually. Many involve research. If you don’t happen to be watching an R & D project when a milestone is completed, it’s very easy to miss it; once replaced by something else, each R & D notification from each project is lost forever whether you’ve actually read it or not. That’s a very bad thing because each project yields exactly three milestones, after which it continues to suck money from your budget but doesn’t earn you much of anything. You’re thus often left uncertain whether a given project has run its course or a big windfall might be just around the corner. Even more infuriating is when a project starts saying a “key scientist” is needed for research to continue, without telling you whom or even what type of scientist you should be looking for. Gameplay then devolves into a tedious — and expensive — ferrying up of shuttleloads of possibilities and swapping them in one at a time, whilst you wonder what the hell sort of a research team would just tell you they feel the need for someone else but not whom or what for.

There are a number of other areas like this where the game’s ambitions outrun the capabilities of an 8-bit 64 K computer with a blocky low-resolution screen, where you feel like the game just isn’t telling you things you really ought to be able to know. Which research projects are expected to yield the most immediate returns for the early days of your station? When can you expect the next injection of financial assistance from Congress, and how much will it be? If a research team is suffering personality clashes, who exactly is having a problem with whom? And then there’s the goal problem, in the sense that there really isn’t one. The whole affair must presumably spin down into entropy at some point, when you’ve done all of the research projects and can no longer sustain your station, although it seems that can take a very long time; on his now-defunct blog dedicated to the game, Geof F. Morris posted screenshots of a station that lasted into 2007 in game years. I would venture to guess that Larry Holland was not so much unaware of these problems as just unable to push the hardware any further to correct them. Project: Space Station‘s sensibility is so modern that it can lead us to expect more from it than a Commodore 64 can deliver even under the control of a great programmer.

The game didn’t have much commercial luck. It was released at last in late 1985, some three years after Stan Kent had first conceived it and just a few months before the Challenger, which features as one of the two shuttles in the game, blew up on its way to orbit and suddenly made Project: Space Station‘s sunny optimism about a future in space feel tragically anachronistic. Avant-Garde Publishing went under shortly thereafter, marking the final end of the HES label. Yet Project: Space Station wasn’t dead yet. It ended up in the hands of Accolade, who rereleased it in 1987 as a member of their Advantage line of budget games, with some small but important changes: the Challenger was replaced by the Discovery, and the starting date was moved up to 1987. It made no great impact then either, and faded away quietly into commercial oblivion at last.

Surprisingly given its (lack of) commercial performance, Project: Space Station spawned a modest, oddly specific sub-genre of space-station-building games that also included Electronic Arts’s Earth Orbit Stations as well as Space MAX from the perfectly named Final Frontier Software and the more fanciful E.S.S. Mega from Coktel Visions, which replaced American with European boosterism. Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space, a management simulation of the Moon race, might also be considered something of a spiritual heir. All except that last share with the space shuttle itself today a certain melancholia. Thoroughly of their time as they are, they can be a bit disconcerting to us in ours, showing as they do ambitions never fulfilled, grand adventures never quite undertaken.

Project: Space Station is even more fascinating as a piece of history than many of the titles I write about, being a document of our sunniest expectations for a future in space prior to the Challenger explosion that changed everything. But even taken as just a game, it’s impressive and noble enough that I’d recommend you play it for a little while in spite of its issues. You can download the original Commodore 64 version from here if you like, or find its ports to the Apple II and IBM PC on other sites. Most games — even the equally-noble-in-its-own-way Ultima IV — treat life so cheaply, sending you off to slaughter in the name of becoming a hero. It’s nice to play a game that’s all about preserving the precious lives of your astronauts, that shows that a game can be absolutely without violence and still be riveting, that shows that heroism need not come with a body count. Would that ludic history had many more like it.

(Larry Holland — who in later years tended to be billed as Lawrence Holland — has generally managed to avoid talking much about his personal life and background as well as his early career. The best print source is a profile in the spring 1992 issue of LucasArts’s newsletter The Adventurer. While I generally try to avoid wikis or overly fannish sources, his page on Wookiepedia is also very complete and appears to collect just about everything we know about him, scanty though it may be.)

Comments
One Response

- Andrew Plotkin

July 31, 2014 at 12:15 am

Allow me to take up your precious comments space to say… wow, I remember playing this. I wasn’t sure until I saw the screenshots. But “Suggested: Agronomist, Environmentalist, Geologist, Gen Res Pac”. That takes me back.

It was a pirated copy, of course.

I didn’t stick with it very long. I remember having a lot of trouble getting the research projects to go anywhere. Shoving a satellite into geosync orbit — I could handle that.

Apple, Carmen Sandiego, and the Rise of Edutainment
August 7, 2014

If there was any one application that was the favorite amongst early boosters of personal computing, it was education. Indeed, it could sometimes be difficult to find one of those digital utopianists who was willing to prioritize anything else — unsurprisingly, given that so much early PC culture grew out of places like The People’s Computer Company, who made “knowledge is power” their de facto mantra and talked of teaching people about computers and using computers to teach with equal countercultural fervor. Creative Computing, the first monthly magazine dedicated to personal computing, grew out of that idealistic milieu, founded by an educational consultant who filled a big chunk of its pages with plans, schemes, and dreams for computers as tools for democratizing, improving, and just making schooling more fun. A few years later, when Apple started selling the II, they pushed it hard as the learning computer, making deals with the influential likes of the Minnesota Educational Consortium (MECC) of Oregon Trail fame that gave the machine a luster none of its competitors could touch. For much of the adult public, who may have had their first exposure to a PC when they visited a child’s classroom, the Apple II became synonymous with the PC, which was in turn almost synonymous with education in the days before IBM turned it into a business machine. We can still see the effect today: when journalists and advertisers look for an easy story of innovation to which to compare some new gadget, it’s always the Apple II they choose, not the TRS-80 or Commodore PET. And the iconic image of an Apple II in the public’s imagination remains a group of children gathered around it in a classroom.

For all that, though, most of the early educational software really wasn’t so compelling. The works of Edu-Ware, the first publisher to make education their main focus, were fairly typical. Most were created or co-created by Edu-Ware co-founder Sherwin Steffin, who brought with him a professional background of more than twenty years in education and education theory. He carefully outlined his philosophy of computerized instruction, backed as it was by all the latest research into the psychology of learning, in long-winded, somewhat pedantic essays for Softalk and Softline magazines, standard bearers of the burgeoning Apple II community. Steffin’s software may or may not have correctly applied the latest pedagogical research, but it mostly failed at making children want to learn with it. The programs were generally pretty boring exercises in drill and practice, lacking even proper titles. Fractions, Arithmetic Skills, or Compu-Read they said on their boxes, and fractions, arithmetic, or (compu-)reading was what you got, a series of dry drills to work through without a trace of wit, whimsy, or fun.

The other notable strand of early PC-based education was the incestuous practice of using the computer to teach kids about computers. The belief that being able to harness the power of the computer through BASIC would somehow become a force for social democratization and liberation is an old one, dating back to even before the first issues of Creative Computing — to the People’s Computer Club and, indeed, to the very researchers at Dartmouth University who created BASIC in the 1960s. As BASIC’s shortcomings became more and more evident, other instructional languages and courses based on them kept popping up in the early 1980s: PILOT, Logo, COMAL, etc. This craze for “computer literacy,” which all but insisted that every kid who didn’t learn to program was going to end up washing dishes or mowing lawns for a living, peaked along with the would-be home-computer revolution in about 1983. Advocating for programming as a universal life skill was like suggesting in 1908 that everyone needed to learn to take a car apart and put it back together to prepare for the new world that was about to arrive with the Model T — which, in an example of how some things never really change, was exactly what many people in 1908 were in fact suggesting. Joseph Weizenbaum of Eliza fame, always good for a sober corrective to the more ebullient dreams of his colleagues, offered a take on the real computerized future that was shockingly prescient by comparing the computer to the electric motor.

There are undoubtedly many more electric motors in the United States than there are people, and almost everybody owns a lot of electric motors without thinking about it. They are everywhere, in automobiles, food mixers, vacuum cleaners, even watches and pencil sharpeners. Yet, it doesn’t require any sort of electric-motor literacy to get on with the world, or, more importantly, to be able to use these gadgets.

Another important point about electric motors is that they’re invisible. If you question someone using a vacuum cleaner, of course they know that there is an electric motor inside. But nobody says, “Well, I think I’ll use an electric motor programmed to be a vacuum cleaner to vacuum the floor.”

The computer will also become largely invisible, as it already is to a large extent in the consumer market. I believe that the more pervasive the computer becomes, the more invisible it will become. We talk about it a lot now because it is new, but as we get used to the computer it will retreat into the background. How much hands-on computer experience will students need? The answer, of course, is not very much. The student and the practicing professional will operate special-purpose instruments that happen to have computers as components.

The pressure to make of every kid a programmer gradually faded as the 1980s wore on, leaving programming to those of us who found it genuinely fascinating. Today even the term “computer literacy,” always a strange linguistic choice anyway, feels more and more like a relic of history as this once-disruptive and scary new force has become as everyday as, well, the electric motor.

As for those other educational programs, they — at least some of them — got better by mid-decade. Programs like Number Munchers, Math Blaster, and Reader Rabbit added a bit more audiovisual sugar to their educational vegetables along with a more gamelike framework to their repetitive drills, and proved better able to hold children’s interest. For all the early rhetoric about computers and education, one could argue that the real golden age of the Apple II as an educational computer didn’t begin until about 1983 or 1984.

By that time a new category of educational software, partly a marketing construct but partly a genuinely new thing, was becoming more and more prominent: edutainment. Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts, has often claimed to have invented the portmanteau for EA’s 1984 title Seven Cities of Gold, but this is incorrect; a company called Milliken Publishing was already using the label for their programs for the Atari 8-bit line in late 1982, and it was already passing into common usage by the end of 1983. Edutainment dispensed with the old drill-and-practice model in preference to more open, playful forms of interactions that nevertheless promised, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, to teach. The skills they taught, meanwhile, were generally not the rigid, disembodied stuff of standardized tests but rather embedded organically into living virtual worlds. It’s all but impossible to name any particular game as the definitive first example of such a nebulous genre, but a good starting point might be Tom Snyder and Spinnaker Software.

Tom Snyder, 1984

Snyder had himself barely made it through high school. He came to blame his own failings as a student on his inability to relate to exactly the notions of arbitrary, contextless education that marked the early era of PC educational software: “Here, learn this set of facts. Write this paper. This is what you must know. This is what’s important.” When he became a fifth-grade teacher years later, he made it a point to ground his lessons always in the real world, to tell his students why it was useful to know the things he taught them and how it all related to the world around them. He often used self-designed games, first done with pencil and paper and cardboard and later done on computers, to let his students explore knowledge and its ramifications. In 1980 he founded a groundbreaking development company, Tom Snyder Productions, to commercialize some of those efforts. One of them became Snooper Troops, published as one of Spinnaker’s first titles in 1982; it had kids wandering around a small town trying to solve a mystery by compiling clues and using their powers of deduction. The next year’s In Search of the Most Amazing Thing, still a beloved memory of many of those who played it, combined clue-gathering with elements of economics and even diplomacy in a vast open world. Unlike so much other children’s software, Snyder’s games never talked down to their audience; children are after all just as capable of sensing when they’re being condescended to as anyone else. They differed most dramatically from the drill-and-practice software that preceded them in always making the educational elements an organic part of their worlds. One of Snyder’s favorite mantras applies to educational software as much as it does to any other creative endeavor and, indeed, to life: “Don’t be boring.” The many games of Tom Snyder Productions, most of which were not actually designed by Snyder himself, were often crude and slow, written as often as not in BASIC. But, at least at the conceptual level, they were seldom boring.

It’s of course true that a plain old game that requires a degree of thoughtfulness and a full-on work of edutainment can be very hard to disentangle from one another. Like so much else in life, the boundaries here can be nebulous at best, and often had as much to do with marketing, with the way a title was positioned by its owner, as with any intrinsic qualities of the title itself. When we go looking for those intrinsics, we can come up with only a grab bag of qualities of which any given edutainment title was likely to share a subset: being based on real history or being a simulation of some real aspect of science or technology; being relatively nonviolent; emphasizing thinking and logical problem-solving rather than fast reflexes. Like pornography, edutainment is something that many people seemed to just know when they saw it.

That said, there were plenty of titles that straddled the border between entertainment and edutainment. Spinnaker’s Telarium line of adventure games is a good example. Text-based games that were themselves based on books, published by a company that had heretofore specialized in education and edutainment… it wasn’t hard to grasp why parents might be expected to find them appealing, even if they were never explicitly marketed as anything other than games. Spinnaker’s other line of adventures, Windham Classics, blurred the lines even more by being based on acknowledged literary classics of the sort kids might be assigned to read in school rather than popular science fiction and fantasy, and by being directly pitched at adolescents of about ten to fourteen years of age. Tellingly, Tom Synder Productions wrote one of the Windham Classics games; Dale Disharoon, previously a developer of Spinnaker educational software like Alphabet Zoo, wrote two more.

A certain amount of edutational luster clung to the text adventure in general, was implicit in much of the talk about interactive fiction as a new form of literature that was so prevalent during the brief bookware boom. One could even say it clung to the home computer itself, in the form of notions about “good screens” and “bad screens.” The family television was the bad screen, locus of those passive and mindless broadcasts that have set parents and educators fretting almost from the moment the medium was invented, and now the home of videogames, the popularity of which caused a reactionary near-hysteria in some circles; they would inure children to violence (if they thought Space Invaders was bad, imagine what they’d say about the games of today!) and almost literally rot their brains, making of them mindless slack-jawed zombies. The computer monitor, on the other hand, was the good screen, home of more thoughtful and creative forms of interaction and entertainment. What parent wouldn’t prefer to see her kid playing, say, Project: Space Station rather than Space Invaders? Home-computer makers and software publishers — at least the ones who weren’t making Space Invaders clones — caught on to this dynamic early and rode it hard.

As toy manufacturers had realized decades before, there are essentially two ways to market children’s entertainment. One way is to appeal to the children themselves, to make them want your product and nag Mom and Dad until they relent. The other is to appeal directly to Mom and Dad, to convince them that what you’re offering will be an improving experience for their child, perhaps with a few well-placed innuendoes if you can manage them about how said child will be left behind if she doesn’t have your product. With that in mind, it can be an interesting experiment to look at the box copy from software of the early home-computer era whilst asking yourself whether it’s written for the kids who were most likely to play it or the parents who were most likely to pay for it — or whether it hedges its bets by offering a little for both. Whatever else it was, emphasizing the educational qualities of your game was just good marketing; a 1984 survey found that 46 percent of computers in homes had been purchased by parents with the primary goal of improving their children’s education. It was the perfect market for the title that would come to stand alongside The Oregon Trail as one of the two classic examples of 1980s edutainment software.

Doug, Cathy, and Gary Carlston, 1983

The origins of the game that would become known as Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? are confused, with lots of oft-contradictory memories and claims flying around. However, the most consistent story has it beginning with an idea by Gary Carlston of Brøderbund Software in 1983. He and his brother Doug had been fascinated by their family’s almanac as children: “We used to lie there and ask each other questions out of the almanac.” This evolved into impromptu quiz games in bed after the lights went out. Gary now proposed a game or, better yet, a series of games which would have players running down a series of clues about geography and history, answerable via a trusty almanac or other reference work to be included along with the game disk right there in the box.

Brøderbund didn’t actually develop much software in-house, preferring to publish the work of outside developers on a contract basis. While they did have a small staff of programmers and even artists, they were there mainly to assist outside developers by helping with difficult technical problems, porting code to other machines, and polishing in-game art rather than working up projects from scratch. But this idea just seemed to have too much potential to ignore or outsource. Gary was therefore soon installed in Brøderbund’s “rubber room” — so-called because it was the place where people went to bounce ideas off one another — along with Lauren Elliott, the company’s only salaried game designer; Gene Portwood, Elliott’s best friend, manager of Brøderbund’s programming team, and a pretty good artist; Ed Bernstein, head of Brøderbund’s art department; and programmer Dane Bigham, who would be expected to write not so much a game as a cross-platform database-driven engine that could power many ports and sequels beyond the Apple II original.

Gary’s first idea was to name the game Six Crowns of Henry VIII, and to make it a scavenger hunt for the eponymous crowns through Britain. However, the team soon turned that into something wider-scoped and more appealing to the emerging American edutainment market. You would be chasing an international criminal ring through cities located all over the world, trying to recover a series of stolen cultural artifacts, like a jade goddess from Singapore, an Inca mask from Peru, or a gargoyle from Notre Dame Cathedral (wonder how the thieves managed that one). It’s not entirely clear who came up with the idea for making the leader of the ring, whose capture would become the game’s ultimate goal, a woman named Carmen Sandiego, but Elliott believes the credit most likely belongs to Portwood. Regardless, everyone immediately liked the idea. “There were enough male bad guys,” said Elliott later, and “girls [could] be just as bad.” (Later, when the character became famous, Brøderbund would take some heat from Hispanic groups who claimed that the game associated a Hispanic surname with criminality. Gary replied with a tongue-in-cheek letter explaining that “Sandiego” was actually Carmen’s married name, that her maiden name was “Sondberg” and she was actually Swedish.) When development started in earnest, the Carmen team was pared down to a core trio of Eliott, who broadly speaking put together the game’s database of clues and cities; Portwood, who drew the graphics; and Bigham, who wrote the code. But, as Eliott later said, “A lot of what we did just happened. We didn’t think much about it.”

To play that first Carmen Sandiego game today can be just a bit of an underwhelming experience; there’s just not that much really to it. Each of a series of crimes and the clues that lead you to the perpetrator are randomly generated from the game’s database of 10 possible suspects, 30 cities, and 1000 or so clues. Starting in the home city of the stolen treasure in question, you have about five days to track down each suspect. Assuming you’re on the right track, you’ll get clues in each city as to the suspect’s next destination among the several possibilities represented by the airline connections from that city: perhaps he “wanted to know the price of tweed” or “wanted to sail on the Severn.” (Both of these clues would point you to Britain, more specifically to London.) If you make the right deductions each step of the way you’ll apprehend the suspect in plenty of time. You’ll know you’ve made the wrong choice if you wind up at a dead-end city with no further clues on offer. Your only choice then is to backtrack, wasting precious time in the process. The tenth and final suspect to track down is always Carmen Sandiego herself, who for all of her subsequent fame is barely characterized at all in this first installment. Capture her, and you retire to the “Detective Hall of Fame.” There’s a little bit more to it, like the way that you must also compile details of the suspect’s appearance as you travel so you can eventually fill out an arrest warrant, but not a whole lot. Any modern player with Wikipedia open in an adjacent window can easily finish all ten cases and win the game in a matter of a few hours at most. By the time you do, the game’s sharply limited arsenal of clues, cities, and stolen treasures is already starting to feel repetitive.

Which is not to say that Carmen Sandiego is entirely bereft of modern appeal. When my wife and I played it over the course of a few evenings recently, we learned a few interesting things we hadn’t known before and even discovered a new country that I at least had never realized existed: the microstate of San Marino, beloved by stamp and coin collectors and both the oldest and the smallest constitutional republic in the world. My wife is now determined that we should make a holiday there.

Still, properly appreciating Carmen Sandiego‘s contemporary appeal requires of us a little more work. The logical place to start is with that huge World Almanac and Books of Facts that made the game’s box the heaviest on the shelves. It can be a bit hard even for those of us old enough to have grown up before the World Wide Web to recover the mindset of an era before we had the world in our living rooms — or, better said in this age of mobile computing, in our pockets. Back in those days when you had to go to a library to do research, when your choices of recreation of an evening were between whatever shows the dozen or so television stations were showing and whatever books you had in the house, an almanac was magic to any kid with a healthy curiosity about the world and a little imagination, what with its thousand or more pages filled with exotic lands along with records of deeds, buildings, cities, people, animals, and geography whose very lack of context only made them more alluring. The whole world — and then some; there were star charts and the like for budding astronomers — seemed to have been stuffed within its covers.

In that spirit, one could almost call the Carmen Sandiego game disk ancillary to the almanac rather than the other way around. Who knew what you delights you might stumble over while you tried to figure out, say, in which country the python made its home? The World Almanac continues to come out every year, and seems to have done surprisingly well, all things considered, surviving the forces that have killed dead typical companions on reference shelves like the encyclopedia. But of course it’s lost much of its old magic in these days of information glut. While we can still recapture a little of the old feeling by playing Carmen Sandiego with a web browser open, our search engines have just gotten too good; it’s harder to stumble across the same sorts of crazy facts and alluring diversions.

Carmen Sandiego captured so many kids because it tempted them to discover knowledge for themselves rather than attempting to drill it into them, and all whilst never talking down to them. Gary Carlston said of Brøderbund’s edutainment philosophy, “If we would’ve enjoyed it at age 12, and if we still it enjoy it now, then it’s what we want. Whether it’s pedagogically correct is not relevant.” Carmen Sandiego did indeed attract criticism from earnest educational theorists armed with studies showing how it failed to live up to the latest research on learning; this low-level drumbeat of criticism continues to this day. Some of it may very well be correct and relevant; I’m hardly qualified to judge. What I do see, though, is that Carmen Sandiego offers a remarkably progressive view of knowledge and education for its time. At a time when schools were still teaching many subjects through rote memorization of facts and dates, when math courses were largely “take this set of numbers and manipulate them to become this other set of numbers” without ever explaining why, Carmen Sandiego grasped that success in the coming world of cheap and ubiquitous data would require not a head stuffed with facts but the ability to extract relevant information from the flood of information that surrounds us, to synthesize it into conclusions, and to apply it to a problem at hand. While drill-and-practice software taught kids to perform specific tasks, Carmen Sandiego, like all the best edutainment software, taught them how to think. Just as importantly, it taught them how much fun doing so could be.

Brøderbund may not have been all that concerned about making Carmen Sandiego “pedagogically correct,” but they were hardly blind to the game’s educational value, nor to the marketing potential therein. The back cover alone of Carmen Sandiego is a classic example of edutainment marketing, emphasizing the adventure aspects for the kids while also giving parents a picture of children beaming over an almanac and telling how they will be “introduced to world geography” — and all whilst carefully avoiding the E-word; telling any kid that something is “educational” was and is all but guaranteed to turn her off it completely.

For all that, though, the game proved to be a slow burner rather than an out-of-the-gates hit upon its release in late 1985. It was hardly a flop; sales were strong enough that Brøderbund released the first of many sequels, Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?, the following year. Yet year by year the game just got more popular, especially when Brøderbund started to reach out more seriously to educators, releasing special editions for schools and sending lots of free swag to those who agreed to host “Carmen Days,” for which students and teachers dressed up as Carmen or her henchmen or the detectives on their trail, and could call in to the “Acme Detective Agency” at Brøderbund itself to talk with Portwood or Elliott playing the role of “the Chief.” The combination of official school approval, the game’s natural appeal to both parents and children, and lots of savvy marketing proved to be a potent symbiosis indeed. Total sales of Carmen Sandiego games passed 1 million in 1989, 2 million in 1991, by which time the series included not only Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego? but also Where in Europe is Carmen Sandiego?, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?, Where in America’s Past is Carmen Sandiego?, and the strangely specific Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego?, prototype for a proposed series of state-level games that never got any further; Where in Space is Carmen Sandiego? would soon go in the opposite direction, rounding out the original series of reference-work-based titles on a cosmic scale. In 1991 Carmen also became a full-fledged media star, the first to be spawned by a computer game, when Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? debuted as a children’s game show on PBS.

A Print Shop banner: an artifact as redolent of its era as Hula Hoops or bellbottoms are of theirs.

Through the early 1980s, Brøderbund had been a successful software publisher, but not outrageously so in comparison to their peers. At mid-decade, though, the company’s fortunes suddenly began to soar just as many of those peers were, shall we say, trending in the opposite direction. Brøderbund’s success was largely down to two breakout products which each succeeded in identifying a real, compelling use for home computers at a time when that was proving far more difficult than the boosters and venture capitalists had predicted. One was of course the Carmen Sandiego line. The other was a little something called The Print Shop, which let users design and print out signs and banners using a variety of fonts and clip art. How such a simple, straightforward application could become so beloved may seem hard to understand today, but beloved The Print Shop most definitely became. For the rest of the decade and beyond its distinctive banners, enabled by the fan-fold paper used by the dot-matrix printers of the day, could be seen everywhere that people without a budget for professional signage gathered: at church socials, at amateur sporting events, inside school hallways and classrooms. Like the first desktop-publishing programs that were appearing on the Macintosh contemporaneously, The Print Shop was one more way in which computers were beginning to democratize creative production, a process, as disruptive and fraught as it is inspiring, that’s still ongoing today.

In having struck two such chords with the public in the form of The Print Shop and Carmen Sandiego, Brøderbund was far ahead of virtually all of their competitors who failed to find even one. Brøderbund lived something of a charmed existence for years, defying most of the hard-won conventional wisdom about consumer software being a niche product at best and the real money being in business software. If the Carlstons hadn’t been so gosh-darn nice, one might be tempted to begrudge them their success. (Once when the Carlstons briefly considered a merger with Electronic Arts, whose internal culture was much more ruthless and competitive, a writer said it would be a case of the Walton family moving in with the Manson family.) One could almost say that for Brøderbund alone the promises of the home-computer revolution really did materialize, with consumers rushing to buy from them not just games but practical software as well. Tellingly — and assuming we agree to label Carmen Sandiego as an educational product rather than a game — Brøderbund’s top-selling title was never a game during any given year between 1985 and the arrival of the company’s juggernaut of an adventure game Myst in 1993, despite their publication of hits like the Jordan Mechner games Karateka and Prince of Persia. Carmen Sandiego averaged 25 to 30 percent of Brøderbund’s sales during those years, behind only The Print Shop. The two lines together accounted for well over half of yearly revenues that were pushing past $50 million by decade’s end — still puny by the standards of business software but very impressive indeed by that of consumer software.

For the larger software market, Carmen Sandiego — and, for that matter, The Print Shop — were signs that, if the home computer hadn’t quite taken off as expected, it also wasn’t going to disappear or be relegated strictly to the role of niche game machine either, a clear sign that there were or at least with a bit more technological ripening could be good reasons to own one. The same year that Brøderbund pushed into edutainment with Carmen Sandiego, MECC, who had reconstituted themselves as the for-profit (albeit still state-owned) publisher Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation in 1984, released the definitive, graphically enhanced version of that old chestnut The Oregon Trail, a title which shared with Carmen Sandiego an easygoing, progressive, experiential approach to learning. Together Oregon and Carmen became the twin icons of 1980s edutainment, still today an inescapable shared memory for virtually everyone who darkened a grade or middle school door in the United States between about 1985 and 1995.

The consequences of Carmen and Oregon and the many other programs they pulled along in their wake were particularly pronounced for the one remaining viable member of the old trinity of 1977: the Apple II. Lots of people both outside and inside Apple had been expecting the II market to finally collapse for several years already, but so far that had refused to happen. Apple, whose official corporate attitude toward the II had for some time now been vacillating between benevolent condescension and enlightened disinterest, did grant II loyalists some huge final favors now. One was the late 1986 release of the Apple IIGS, a radically updated version produced on a comparative shoestring by the company’s dwindling II engineering team with assistance from Steve Wozniak himself. The IIGS used a 16-bit Western Design Center 65C816 CPU that was capable of emulating the old 8-bit 6502 when necessary but was several times as powerful. Just as significantly, the older IIs’ antiquated graphics and sound were finally given a major overhaul that now made them amongst the best in the industry, just a tier or two below those of the current gold standard, Commodore’s new 68000-based Amiga. The IIGS turned out to be a significant if fairly brief-lived hit, outselling the Macintosh and all other II models by a considerable margin in its first year.

But arguably much more important for the Apple II’s long-term future was a series of special educational offers Apple made during 1986 and 1987. In January of the former year, they announced a rebate program wherein schools could send them old computers made by Apple or any of their competitors in return for substantial rebates on new Apple IIs. In April of that year, they announced major rebates for educators wishing to purchase Apple IIs for home use. Finally, in March of 1987, Apple created two somethings called the Apple Unified School System and the Apple Education Purchase Program, which together represented a major, institutionalized outreach and support effort designed to get even more Apple IIs into schools (and, not incidentally, more Macs into universities). The Apple II had been the school computer of choice virtually from the moment that schools started buying PCs at all, but these steps along with software like Carmen Sandiego and The Oregon Trail cemented and further extended its dominance, to an extent that many schools and families simply refused to let go. The bread-and-butter Apple II model, the IIe, remained in production until November of 1993, by which time this sturdy old machine, thoroughly obsolete already by 1985, was selling almost exclusively to educators and Apple regarded its continued presence in their product catalogs like that of the faintly embarrassing old uncle who just keeps showing up for every Thanksgiving dinner.

Even after the inevitable if long-delayed passing of the Apple II as a fixture in schools, Carmen and Oregon lived on. Both received the requisite CD-ROM upgrades, although it’s perhaps debatable in both instances how much the new multimedia flash really added to the experience. The television Carmen Sandiego game shows also continued to air in various incarnation through the end of the decade. Carmen Choose Your Own Adventure-style gamebooks, conventional young-adult novels, comic books, and a board game were also soon on offer, along with yet more computerized creations like Carmen Sandiego Word Detective. Only with the millennium did Carmen — always a bit milquetoast as a character and hardly the real source of the original games’ appeal — along with The Oregon Trail see their stars finally start to fade. Both retain a certain commercial viability today, but more as kitschy artifacts and nostalgia magnets than serious endeavors in either learning or entertainment. Educational software has finally moved on.

Perhaps not enough, though: it remains about 10 percent inspired, 10 percent acceptable in a workmanlike way, and 80 percent boredom stemming sometimes from well-meaning cluelessness and sometimes from a cynical desire to exploit parents, teachers, and children. Those looking to enter this notoriously underachieving field today could do worse than to hearken back to the simple charms of Carmen Sandiego, created as it was without guile and without reams of pedagogical research to back it up, out of the simple conviction that geography could actually be fun. All learning can be fun. You just have to do it right.

(See Engineering Play by Mizuko Ito for a fairly thorough survey of educational and edutational software from an academic perspective. Gamers at Work by Morgan Ramsay has an interview with Doug and Gary Carlston which dwells on Carmen Sandiego at some length. Matt Waddell wrote a superb history of Carmen Sandiego for a class at Stanford University in 2001. A piece on Brøderbund on the eve of the first Carmen Sandiego game’s release was published in the September 1985 issue of MicroTimes. A summary of the state of Brøderbund circa mid-1991 appeared in the July 9, 1991, New York Times. Joseph Weizenbaum’s comments appeared in the July 1984 issue of Byte. The first use of the term “edutainment” that I could locate appeared in a Milliken Publishing advertisement in the January 1983 issue of Creative Computing. Articles involving Spinnaker and Tom Snyder appeared in the June 1984 Ahoy! and the October 1984 and December 1985 Compute!’s Gazette. And if you got through all that and would like to experience the original Apple II Carmen Sandiego for yourself, feel free to download the disk images and manual — but no almanac I’m afraid — from right here.)

Comments
35 Responses

- Felix

August 8, 2014 at 8:14 am

Ah, computer-based education, the dread of teachers everywhere. Because, you see, when children learn by themselves — by doing, as Jean Piaget postulated before WW2 and Seymour Papert demonstrated with Logo — they don’t necessarily learn what you want them to. Which is likely why constructivism was never applied in schools, and teaching is still done like in 1850 apart from a few bells and whistles. Not to mention that when children learn by themselves, the teacher is afraid of becoming useless. Never mind that everyone needs guidance sometimes from someone more knowledgeable, and so teachers will always be needed; but for centuries they’ve grown used of being revered demigods, and loss of status always hurts.

About computers becoming invisible, that prediction couldn’t be more wrong. Sure, we have them buried in our cars and TVs and coffee filters (which makes us helpless when they inevitably break), but we also have them on our desks and in our pockets. All of us do, and most of us have no idea how to use them properly. So we suffer from malware, and spam, and countless hours of tech support that could have went into making the world better instead, if only people were properly educated when it comes to computers.

As for your car analogy, young people between the wars did all learn how to fix cars, and that’s been named as a big factor in America’s technological superiority in WW2. Even as late as 1989, in Romania you had to know how to make basic repairs on your car in order to get a driving license. And I could see for myself how drivers became more superficial after that requirement was lifted…

- Jimmy Maher

August 8, 2014 at 8:32 am

It’s a matter of perspective, but I’d say those “computers in our pockets” just prove Weizenbaum’s point. I don’t get the impression that most people think of their mobile phones as computers the way they do those machines on their desk. Yes, as Weizenbaum notes, they’re aware when it comes down to it that they *are* technically computers, but mostly they’re just their phones. See also tablets, e-readers, etc., which are gradually making desktop PCs necessary only for programmers and people who otherwise need to get real computerized work done.

I’d otherwise caution you to be just a little bit careful that you don’t make the skills and talents you happen to possess universal arbiters of human worth. Before condemning others for the things you can do but they cannot, it might be wise to consider all the things that you (I presume) cannot do: research new medical breakthroughs, write and perform wonderful music, even, yes, teach children. Similarly, it’s important to remember that there are many kinds of intelligence, and empathy is as important as logic. Personally, I’m happy for folks with talents I don’t possess to use them in ways that end up enriching my life rather than wanting everyone to muck around with cars or programming like I grew up doing. I’m even happy to clean up their computers for them from time to time…

- Felix

August 8, 2014 at 1:36 pm

Oh, I’ll be the first to say that not everyone should have to know how to use a computer. That nowadays we do everything with computers, forcing everyone to use them, is a big mistake, in several ways. For one thing, as you pointed out, people have more important things to do with their time, such as healing the sick for instance. (Ever noticed how doctors typically avoid computers? I only know a couple of exceptions.) Second, we’re making ourselves overly dependent on one particular technology, and one that holds together with duct tape at that.

But fact is, nowadays we DO all need to know how to use a computer. And those who don’t learn to do it properly are a drag and a danger to everyone around them.

- Jimmy Maher

August 9, 2014 at 7:10 am

This sounds rather like the old IBM “priesthood” model of computing: “These machines are too powerful and complicated for you laypeople, leave them to we who know how to operate them!” I’m afraid that’s anti-ethical not only to my own beliefs but to those of the people who built the PC revolution, to hacker culture, and indeed to the entire thrust of recent technological history.

- Felix

August 11, 2014 at 3:55 pm

Hackers prove every day that they can indeed use a computer well. I never said not to give people a chance. I just say that if they want to reap the advantages, they’d better take on the responsibilities as well. Something people are increasingly unwilling to do about everything. Even driving cars.

- Felix

August 11, 2014 at 4:24 pm

Come to think of it, someone who always burns the food will be told sooner or later to get out of the kitchen and leave cooking to someone who knows what they’re doing. Somehow, that’s not considered elitist. But when it comes to computers, no blunder is bad enough. The only accepted reaction is a pat on the head and a commiserating “it’s all right, computers are complicated”. Even though a lot of people are perfectly able to use them well. Yes, even doctors and lawyers and other professionals who have better things to do with their time than learn how to use computers on top of everything else. Yet somehow, some of them manage.

But we don’t see those. We only see the n00bs. And we keep trying to help them by making computers ever easier to use, which just makes them less useful for expert users, while the n00bs can’t even use an ATM. Presumably they’d need a computer who can guess what they want, ’cause they don’t seem to know themselves. Oh wait, all kinds of software is already trying to guess what I was “actually” trying to do…. and always, ALWAYS, getting it wrong.

And I’m being called an elitist for expecting people to put in a little bit of effort, or else leave things to someone else. Silly me, expecting the world to be fair.

- GeoX

August 12, 2014 at 5:25 pm

I must admit, I can’t even begin to understand what you’re so angry about.

- matt w

August 9, 2014 at 2:19 am

“teachers will always be needed; but for centuries they’ve grown used of being revered demigods, and loss of status always hurts.”

This is not an accurate reflection of the way teachers are treated in the US at least.

- Felix

August 9, 2014 at 5:57 am

Well, I’m from Romania, and you wouldn’t believe how much teachers — and everyone associated with teaching — are complaining that nobody respects them anymore, when they stopped earning respect decades ago.

- Felix

August 8, 2014 at 2:00 pm

I think I know why The Print Shop was so popular. It’s for the same reason people use virtual greeting card generators. The same reason why Word, with its easy UI to fonts, colors and so on, became popular over more capable but less playful alternatives. Or Power Point. Have you ever seen the kind of pretty-picture slideshows people pass around over e-mail? People like to express themselves, and these are “virtual crafts” anyone can pick easily and cheaply as long as they must have a computer on their desk anyway.

Speaking of which, a lot has been written about tablets being the only computer most people need, and it’s just not happening. It’s not just programmers, or graphic designers. Want to type a paper? You need a large-ish screen and a proper keyboard. Got a data entry job? A numeric keypad is a must. Copy-pasting a few dozen pictures into a slideshow? Yeah, you just try that on a tiny mobile device. Even copy-pasting a brief quote is a chore on Android. Mobile devices are plain useless for anything beyond watching a movie, browsing the web or at most poking at colored balls in Same Game. And anyone with any interest at all in computers will, at some point, want to use them for something at least marginally creative.

Which, I believe, it’s why the tablet market is imploding (if the rumors are true). People have started catching on to how useless they are. Having the same functionality built into the phone you own anyway is one thing; but spending extra for a big, delicate, expensive toy?

- Jimmy Maher

August 9, 2014 at 7:20 am

There’s no need to listen to “rumors” if you want to know the current state of the tablet market. Most of the folks making them are publicly traded corporations, meaning they disclose the state of their businesses and sales in quite exhaustive detail four times per year.

The latest quarterly reports reveal that tablet sales are indeed less than they were a year ago, likely for many reasons: tablets are not subsidized by carriers like mobile phones, so the non-bleeding-edge adopter has to shoulder much more of the cost herself; there’s rather a lack of good reasons to upgrade a tablet if you already have one, as an iPad 2 for instance will do 99% of what an iPad 3 will do; tablets are transitioning from a shiny new technology to just another gadget you may or may not have a use for; etc. However, it shouldn’t be lost in all of this that there are more tablets being used by consumers each month than there were the month before, pretty much the opposite of “imploding.” We should be careful not to confuse short-term market vagaries with the long-term trends Weizenbaum pointed out.

But then a tablet vs. PC debate really is amongst the most tedious you can have, isn’t it? :) So maybe we should leave it there.

- Nate

August 11, 2014 at 8:25 am

” tablet sales are indeed less than they were a year ago”
” there are more tablets being used by consumers each month than there were the month before”

So… tablets sales are slowing, but that still means people are buying?

It’s interesting how the consumer device market news focuses on sales (and sales growth at that) rather than total usage.

It does rather suggest that to that particular industry, consumers aren’t so much ongoing users of a product, to be nurtured and developed and built into an ongoing collaborative ecosystem, as briefly gaping disposable voids into which product units must be flung and abandoned as fast and as cheaply as they come out of a chute. And then the chute chopped up and burned with fire, because you really don’t want to get that stuff on you.

Oh look another startup! Wheeeeeeeee aaaand it’s gone.

I miss the days when an Apple II could be sold and seviced for an entire decade, is what I’m trying to say.

- Jimmy Maher

August 11, 2014 at 9:00 am

Yeah, it kind of reminds me of the conversations about the budget deficit in America. Politicians talk about how they’re “cutting” the debt, when what they really mean is that the government is going to borrow less this year than the last — meaning the debt is still growing, just more slowly.

- Keith Palmer

August 8, 2014 at 10:06 pm

I admit my own reaction to the comment about “learning to fix a car in 1908” was to think that, so far as I know, you really would have been well served by knowing how to repair your own automobile back then… Perhaps, though, my perspective on the subject is shaped in part by having read through 80 Micro magazine with its articles and comments on patching programs using debuggers, loading drivers to stop keybounce, cleaning the cheap edge-card connector to the TRS-80 Model I’s disk drives using pink erasers, cleaning and recalibrating those disk drives yourself, and installing green-phosophor picture tubes… In reflecting on how all we can do is add up what’s been gained and what’s been lost and strike our own balance on that, though, I did remember comments I’ve seen to the effect of “now that kids are playing video games instead of kicking a ball/swinging a bat, where are soccer/baseball players going to come from?”

Anyway, I can suppose right off “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” must have been a considerable success because it was ported to the Tandy Color Computer 3. While the schools in my province seemed to settle on an educational computer system in the form of a networked UNIX-like system, the Unisys Icon, I do remember a single Apple IIgs in my elementary school library that I used the Choose Your Own Adventure generator “Story Tree” on.

- Wade

August 9, 2014 at 11:00 am

It looks like Super Story Tree wasn’t a 16-bit IIGS specific program, though there was a version of it which ran off a 3.5-inch floppy. Or possibly it only came on a 3.5-inch floppy. Either way, I just tried running it on an Apple IIe off the 3.5-inch disk image and it worked fine.

http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/super-story-tree

- Keith Palmer

August 9, 2014 at 11:41 am

I do remember comments the IIgs was used in some instances where the previous generation of Apple IIs would have worked just as well; some of the discussion about that computer does have a bitter yet somehow familiar aftertaste of “it was pushed out the door deliberately underpowered and left all by itself, bereft of a sufficient quantity of software” (although I’ve seen comments like that about the Color Computer 3, introduced the same year, too…) If I’m remembering right, I might have even have been using the previous, non-“Super” version of the program. It’s far enough back that it might all be an inaccurate reconstruction anyway.

- Jimmy Maher

August 9, 2014 at 12:08 pm

Although there was some good IIGS software produced, the machine sort of got one leg stuck in the trap that absolutely swallowed the Commodore 128: many publishers found it easier to just make one program for all Apple IIs than to make a custom separate version for the IIGS and another for all the other IIs. Compatibility can be a double-edged sword in that way.

The other problem was that the IIGS was just ludicrously overpriced. Apple has always been able to get away with charging more, much to their competitors’ chagrin, but there are limits even for the Apple mojo, and the IIGS found them. At over $2000 still in 1988, a IIGS system cost about twice what an Atari ST or Amiga 500 system did, even though those machines were much more powerful and had even more impressive audiovisual capabilities. At half or even two-thirds the price — which should have been a perfectly manageable price point for Apple — the machine could have been *huge*. (Of course, Apple II conspiracy theorists will say Apple never really *wanted* it to be successful…)

- Wade

August 10, 2014 at 2:27 am

Re: audiovisual power. The IIGS had no graphics coprocessor and a low clock speed compared to the Atari and Amiga, so it was definitely the weakest there. On the other hand, the 15 voice Ensoniq sound chip gave it the strongest audio capabilities of the 3. Though to get stereo out, you needed a card, due to the Apple Records hobbling clause.

I don’t think the idea Apple didn’t want it to be successful is in the realm of conspiracy anymore. There’s abundant documentation of it in a book like Steven Weyhrich’s Sophistication & Simplicity”. From what I read here, It’s more that they didn’t want it to outshine the Mac in any department. Various things like having a colour Finder on the IIGS before Macs got one were already contentious. So their push became “Make sure all the Apple IIs are seen as education environment only products and put the Mac in the front for everything else.” This push was very apparent in Apple magazines at the time.

- Jimmy Maher

August 10, 2014 at 7:15 am

Not to quibble too much here, as the Ensoniq chip really was magnificent, but it did depend to a large extent on what *kind* of sound you wanted to make. The Ensoniq was a great sound *synthesizer*. The Mac, the ST, and especially the Amiga had the memory and throughput to make practical use of sampled real-world sounds, which would increasingly be the future of computer audio (even a modern sound card has fairly modest synthesis capabilities, and even they are rarely used).

- Ian Schmidt

August 23, 2014 at 8:53 pm

It was entirely possible to stream arbitrary length samples through the Ensoniq; an API to do so shipped in the IIgs ROM. I personally wrote a program that was capable of playing MOD files with up to 8 channels from the Amiga and PC, with no sample size limitations other than available RAM. So the IIgs had all the sample playback power of the Mac and Amiga plus much more sophisticated synthesis.

One practical example: Cinemaware’s “Rocket Ranger” score was composed for the IIgs’ 15 channels and stripped way down for the Amiga. The Amiga version has much better animation, though.

- Anthony

August 10, 2014 at 4:44 pm

Well, over in the UK it was the BBC — doubtless inspired by the then-still-cherished ideals of their founding father, Lord Reith, and his fervent mission to “Educate, Inform and Entertain” — who took it upon themselves to teach the nation about these newfangled computer thingies by launching an ambitious educational project that began with a contract being put out to tender for the production of a BBC-branded 8-bit home microcomputer (the BBC Micro, or “the Beeb”) and later encompassed several strands of programming on the BBC’s nationwide television and radio channels. Thus was the BBC Computer Literacy Project born.

The practical upshot of all this was that schools and colleges throughout the land were flooded with BBC Micros, and nary an Apple was to be seen. So we never got to play Carmen Sandiego.

Instead, we had our own home-grown edutainment software to contend with, the primary example, which most people of a certain age seem to remember, was Granny’s Garden by 4Mation Software. 4Mation are hilariously still insisting on enforcing the copyright to the Beeb versions of their games, and therefore it naturally MUST have been legitimately purchased versions of the 4Mation games that this reviewer played before writing his accurate and very funny retrospective.

I personally missed out on the pleasures and terrors of Granny’s Garden. Instead, my formative edutational influence was L – A Mathemagical Adventure, a mathematics-ridden text-adventure game for the Beeb written by the UK Association Of Teachers Of Mathematics, who continue to sell a Windows port of the game to this day.

I have fond memories of the playing L with a group of classmates back in the day. In fact, you could say I’m slightly obsessed with the game — so much so that I recently made a very long and exhaustive video-playthrough of it, which I submit here not merely as an act of blatant self-promotion but also in the hope that it adds some transatlantic colour (with a “U”) to another triumphant blogpost from the Digital Antiquarian.

- Jimmy Maher

August 10, 2014 at 5:09 pm

Even after all these years and all this research, people still point me to interesting games I’d never heard of. Thanks!

As you may know, I have written about the story with which you open your comment: http://www.filfre.net/2012/10/the-bbc-micro.

- Victor Gijsbers

August 9, 2014 at 6:47 pm

Another nice article. Perhaps you should make the fact that you’re writing from a US-centered perspective a bit more explicit? Phrases like “an inescapable shared memory for virtually everyone who darkened a schoolhouse door between about 1985 and 1995” made me blink my eyes a couple of times until I realised there was an implicit “in the U.S.” in there.

- matt w

August 10, 2014 at 4:34 am

You might also want to quantify which grades — I was in high school in the US from 1984 to 1988 and never got anywhere near either of those programs.

- Jimmy Maher

August 10, 2014 at 7:03 am

Yes, you’re right. I’ll try to do a better job of that.

Brøderbund was dismissive of the European market during the 1980s, oddly so in that Gary Carlston at least felt a fairly deep connection with Sweden.

“I think Canada is our largest [foreign] market, Japan is second, Australia is third, and Europe a distant last.

“They’re not buying the same quantities of machines; it’s a very fragmented market; and it’s a cassette market. They haven’t got disk drives, and most of our software is designed for disk drives and printers and things like that. It’s still a very primitive market. It’s changing, but it hasn’t changed yet.”

Of the assertions that open the previous paragraph, only the third is really true. Computer sales in some European countries, especially Britain, were equalling or outstripping those in the U.S. on a per capita basis. And, while the market in Europe was fragmented between a number of platforms, it was really no more so than the U.S.

- Nate

August 11, 2014 at 8:43 am

“it’s a cassette market. They haven’t got disk drives”

In New Zealand in the early 80s, I remember this being very true. Computers were expensive, and long in coming; we only got a magazine (Bits & Bytes, yay!) in late 1982 and even the IBM PC didn’t arrive here until 1983. If you were lucky enough to have an 8-bit machine at all, you certainly weren’t likely to have peripherals. It was C-30 tapes all the way. (C-60s tended to break; C-120s were guaranted to turn into plastic spaghetti after much use).

Disk drives were what we stared at in American magazines and wondered what it must be like to be so rich.

- GeoX

August 10, 2014 at 4:41 am

Ah, Carmen Sandiego! Great memories of old school daze. Yes, it fairly quickly got to the point where I just knew all the clues and could buzz through it with no effort, but what the hey. Those VILE henchmen just NEVER got old.

- AndreaP

August 10, 2014 at 1:15 pm

If you’re interested, there is an in-depth interview with Tom Snyder also on Computer Games vol. 3 no. 4, which can be found on Archive.org.

- Brian Bagnall

August 15, 2014 at 3:11 pm

My impression is that the Carmen Sandiego series only had two popular hits: USA and World. This is based solely on the fact that I have both games for my Commodore 64, and at school those were the only two games that I had access to, and further I inherited an Apple II disc collection recently that had those two. I think the concept was played out by the time game number three rolled around. Anyway, interesting read as usual.

- MarcoM

August 17, 2014 at 11:23 am

I read your post while in Faetano in San Marino, at my wife’s parent home, and I think you and your wife should definitely come to visit this little state. It’s a medieval “comune” that remained intact through the centuries and now it’s something unique.
But make sure to stay here for a while because this is one of the most beautiful part of Italy. Romagna is full of beautiful places, from Rimini (which is not only sea and beaches, but one of the richest towns in Italy for art and history) to Ravenna, to San Leo and the beautiful Marecchia valley.
I’ve been reading your blog for more than an year, remembering my happy times with a C64 (very common in Italy thanks to scarcely legal software) and I’d be very glad to help should you come to San Marino.

- Jimmy Maher

August 18, 2014 at 8:59 am

Thank you so much! We’ll definitely keep San Marino — and your kind offer — in mind when we plan our holidays for next year.

- Bill Loguidice

August 28, 2014 at 8:31 pm

Penguing Software’s Mark Pelczarsk has an interesting take on the Carmen series that is well worth checking out: http://graphicsmagician.com/polarware/spyadv.htm

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- James

January 29, 2015 at 4:15 pm

“Fractions, Arithmetic Skills, or Compu-Read they said on their boxes, and fractions, arithmetic, or (compu-)reading was what you got, a series of dry drills to work through without a trace of whit, whimsy, or fun”

Whit should be wit :)

- Jimmy Maher

January 29, 2015 at 5:21 pm

Thanks!