Jimmy Maher (maher@filfre.net)

The Digital Antiquarian
Volume 8: 1986
Comments Edition

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This eBook was converted on
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Contents

1. Access Software

1. Comments

2. Leader Board

1. Comments

3. The Magnificent Penguin Hangs Up His Tuxedo

1. Comments

4. Amnesia

1. Comments

5. The Fractal Phenomenon

1. Comments

6. Send in the Clones

1. Comments

7. The Forth Dimension

1. Comments

8. Starflight

1. Comments

9. Jim Levy and Activision

1. Comments

10. Alter Ego

1. Comments

11. Dorte’s View: Alter Ego

1. Comments

12. Portal

1. Comments

13. Bookware’s Sunset

1. Comments

14. Accolade, Artech, and Killed Until Dead

1. Comments

15. Simon & Schuster’s Treks to Nowhere

1. Comments

16. Ballyhoo

1. Comments

17. Out of the Frying Pan…

1. Comments

18. Trinity

1. Comments

19. T Plus 5: Bombs in Space

1. Comments

20. T Plus 4: Bombing Nevada

1. Comments

21. T Plus 3: Edward Teller and His Superbomb

1. Comments

22. T Plus 2: The Bomb at the Crossroads

1. Comments

23. T Plus 1: Bombing Japan

1. Comments

24. T Plus 0: The Fulcrum of History

1. Comments

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

1. Comments

26. Trinity Postscript: Selling Tragedy

1. Comments

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

1. Comments

28. Moonmist

1. Comments

29. MicroProse’s Simulation-Industrial Complex (or, The Ballad of Sid and Wild Bill)

1. Comments

30. The 68000 Wars, Part 1: Lorraine

1. Comments

31. The 68000 Wars, Part 2: Jack Is Back!

1. Comments

32. ICBM

1. Comments

33. The 68000 Wars, Part 3: We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up

1. Comments

34. Defender of the Crown

1. Comments

35. On S.D.I. (Just a Little) and King of Chicago (Quite a Lot)

1. Comments

36. Brian Fargo and Interplay

1. Comments

37. Fire and Rain

1. Comments

38. The Pawn’s Second Life (or, When Tony Met Anita)

1. Comments

Access Software
August 15, 2014

Bruce and Roger Carver, 1985

The canon of Access Software is crazily varied in light of its relatively modest size. It begins with a utility and then proceeds through a series of frenetic action games of sometimes questionable taste, only to do an abrupt about-face and embrace that most staid of sports, golf. That long-line line of simulations is then joined by a series of gloriously cheesy full-motion-video adventure games. The variety is even more remarkable when you consider that the output of this modest company is largely derived from the minds of just three men: brothers Bruce and Roger Carver and one Chris Jones, instantly recognizable to adventure-game fans as the trench-coated future-noir detective Tex Murphy. The Access story begins in 1982, long before the technology that enabled Tex was more than a dream, when Bruce Carver took home one of the first Commodore 64s to be sold in Salt Lake City.

Bruce was hardly your stereotypical computer whiz kid. Reared in the conservative bosom of Mormonism, he was a settled 34-year-old family man, more than ten years into a career in industrial engineering, when he bought his 64. He’d been introduced to programming some fifteen years earlier at university, then gotten a baptism by fire in his first job after, in the San Francisco offices of the Pacific Fruit Express Company.

They had a computer that no one knew how to work. One day the boss dropped a pile of manuals on my desk and, “Learn how to work this thing — I see you’ve taken Fortran in college.”

I dug through the books until I figured out how it worked and programmed a lot of it myself. By that time, I was working in machine language, something I had never done before — I was used to working with high-level languages. At that point, I fell in love with computers.

After “talking his wife into” the idea years later, he bought a Commodore 64 system from Steve Witzel, owner of a local store called Computers Plus. Bruce found the 64 captivating, rediscovering a passion for hacking that had been lying dormant all these years. Soon he was devoting all the time he could spare to figuring out how the little machine in his basement worked.

That could be a more difficult proposition than you might think. In years to come the 64 would see its humble innards plumbed and charted and exploited to a degree matched by few other platforms in computing history. Those first machines, however, preceded the foundation for most of the vast literature to follow, Commodore’s official Programmer’s Reference Guide, by almost a year. The only source early buyers had for understanding the machine was the sketchy outline provided in the manual in the form of yet another BASIC programming primer. And the 64 was an unusually inscrutable machine at that. Its BASIC was of little use for divining or exploiting the 64’s true capabilities, given that it was the exact same BASIC that Jack Tramiel had purchased from Bill Gates for the Commodore PET back in 1977. It thus lacked any support whatsoever for most of what made the 64 special, like colors and sprites and the SID sound chip. The only way to access these capabilities in BASIC was to POKE values into memory locations and to PEEK at others to see what was inside. Problem was, you had to know what these memory locations were in the first place, for which the manual was of only limited help at best. And so thousands of early adopters like Bruce Carver set out to divine them for themselves, to construct a map of the machine and its capabilities, by methodically POKEing each of the 65,535 addresses and seeing what happened. It was madness, but it was a delightful sort of madness for the right sort of mind.

Bruce’s personal obsession became the 64’s sprite system, particularly a little-understood, semi-mythical something called a “multicolor” sprite that was mentioned in passing in two tables inside the manual but otherwise went completely unremarked. As I wrote in an earlier article about the 64’s technical capabilities, and as Bruce now discovered after a “long systematic search” just to find the video chip, a multicolored sprite let you use up to three colors rather than just one to construct it, at the expense of half the object’s horizontal detail. Bruce’s discoveries led to his first real Commodore 64 project, an editor which let him design single- or multicolor sprites interactively, then save them in a format easy to incorporate into either BASIC or assembly-language. He took it to Computers Plus to show Witzel, who told him that, if he applied just a bit more polish and wrote a manual for it, he’d have a perfectly salable product. This encouragement led to the founding of Access Software just four feverish months after Bruce had first set up his Commodore 64. Witzel, who would become a lifelong friend, knew very well how software distribution and sales worked, and was thus able to help Bruce get a foot in the door of the software industry.

Both Access’s first product and the first 64 product of its type, Spritemaster proved to be quite successful. It also led to an unexpected windfall of another sort. Bruce:

In December of 1982, I decided to attend a small Commodore dealer show in San Francisco. It was the perfect stage to introduce my new program to the public. The Commodore representative who was running the show came over and asked me if that was multicolored sprites I was displaying on the screen. I replied, yes, it was. He was so impressed with my work that he offered me a Xerox of a Commodore folder containing 64 technical information. He also warned me not to tell anyone else that I had it. So I returned home with a valuable prize that would save me many long hours of playing around with the computer.

The first Access game, Neutral Zone, arose directly out of Bruce’s latest technical explorations. It placed the player in charge of a missile battery defending a space station from hordes of aliens. The big gimmick was the way that the player could pan her weapon — and with it the screen — horizontally through a full 360 degrees to target aliens who flew in from everywhere. This was accomplished by taking advantage of scrolling registers that were not even hinted at by the Commodore 64’s manual and whose existence was thus completely unknown to most programmers. Aided by that precious notebook, Bruce was developing a reputation as one of the machine’s programming gurus. While he himself would later admit that Neutral Zone “isn’t a terrific game,” it was one hell of a technical tour de force for early 1983. At another trade show, this time in Florida, the same Commodore representative approached Bruce again to praise it, apparently without recognizing the fellow for whom his own help had been so instrumental.

Neutral Zone did well enough that Bruce decided to quit his day job at Redd Engineering, managing the neat trick of convincing some of Redd’s owners to invest in Access in the process; he would soon set up Access’s first office on the top floor of Redd’s own building. At this point Chris Jones enters the stage, in the uniform not of a roguish detective but rather a mild-mannered accountant — specifically, the Redd Engineering colleague Bruce had hired to do Access’s taxes. In the midst of that, Chris became entranced with the work Bruce was doing. Never of a technical bent himself, Chris was full of creative ideas for the application of Bruce’s ever-growing mastery of Commodore 64 graphics and sound. The two now agreed to do a game together, the first “real game” from Access that had been “planned in depth ahead of time, before any programming.”

Beach-Head was inspired by the pair’s love for old World War II movies of the gung-ho John Wayne stripe. It charges you with recapturing an island that has been occupied by an enemy known only as “the Dictator.” Doing so requires the successful completion of no less than five individual action games. You must guide the invasion fleet toward the island whilst avoiding mines and torpedo attacks; fend off an enemy air attack on your fleet, followed by a surface attack; and finally storm the beaches and complete the final assault on the island’s central fortress. While hardly a cerebral exercise, it’s interesting for the amount of narrative it grafts onto its action-game template, and for being more sophisticated in some ways than you might expect. Far from being just five separate games packaged together, actions and, most importantly, casualties sustained in earlier phases actually affect later ones, leaving you with a tidy, unique little story at the end about your invasion (or invasion attempt).

Geoff Brown

Soon after Beach-Head‘s late 1983 American release, opportunity walked through the door in the form of the slick and stylish Englishman Geoff Brown, a former rock musician who owned and ran a major British software distributor called Centresoft. (In an interesting coincidence, “Center Soft” was one of the names Bruce had rejected for what became Access Software.) Brown now had the idea of starting his own software line called U.S. Gold, which would, as the name would imply, license the best games from the United States, repackage them for Europe — which would generally involve adapting them to work on cassette — and promote the living hell out of them; if there was one thing Brown was good at, it was promotion. For American publishers, U.S. Gold would be a cheap, painless way to maximize their markets, while for Geoff Brown it would turn into gold of another stripe; he would soon be driving one of only twenty Ferrari Testarossas on the roads of Britain. U.S. Gold’s client list would soon include a major swathe of the American games industry: Adventure International, Microprose, Epyx, Datasoft, SSI, Accolade, Sierra On-Line. Within a year they would own 25 percent of the British games industry, while Brown collected plenty of hate from domestic publishers for his blunt claim that American software was just better than European software as well as for an advertising budget that ran to five times the size of his nearest competitor. Yet it all started when Brown convinced Bruce Carver and his tiny company Access to let him bring Beach-Head to Europe as the very first U.S. Gold game.

Beach-Head was a perfect template for Brown’s vision for U.S. Gold: flashy, fast-paced, not very dependent on text, and thanks to its modular design very playable off cassette. “I couldn’t believe how fantastic it looked, with smooth animation and very realistic graphics,” Brown would later say. “The gameplay was like nothing I had ever seen in the UK, streets ahead of the competing UK product.” With Brown’s promotional savvy behind it, it became huge in Europe, selling in the vicinity of 150,000 units in its first year there and making of Bruce Carver a programming hero for countless European kids. Brown claims that it prompted home-grown British developers to “scrap everything they were working on” and start over to try to reach the bar set by Beach-Head. He also claims today that he shipped 1 million copies of Beach-Head through U.S. Gold, but it should be said that he is a bit prone to hyperbole and this number sounds extreme. Regardless, the game went on to become not just the most successful by far of Access’s early efforts but one of the seminal Commodore 64 titles, one that absolutely every kid with a 64 knew, owned, and played, whether legally or (as was much more the norm) illegally acquired.

Bruce came up with the title of Access’s next game, Raid Over Moscow, whilst driving home from the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January of 1984 with some friends. The game, another multi-stage “arcade adventure,” was designed around the name. But this time Bruce and Chris walked, by their account naively, into controversy. In place of the abstractly fictional Dictator of Beach-Head, Raid Over Moscow posits a sneak nuclear attack by the very real Soviet Union, which you must defend against using an SDI-like system. It climaxes with the eponymous assault on Moscow itself; if you succeed here you leave behind a smoking nuclear crater. In questionable taste though it was, the game attracted little concern in the United States, where its jingoism felt sadly in step with those times when Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” rhetoric was reaching a peak, the real SDI program was all over the news, and the superpowers were closer to the brink of nuclear war than they had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In Europe, much closer to Moscow and much more aware of the horrors of war thanks to recent history, it was a different story: Raid Over Moscow caused the proverbial shitstorm upon its release through U.S. Gold. The magazine letter pages in Britain erupted with condemnations: “nuclear war is not a subject for fantasy”; “another sick episode of this American hang-up with the people of Russia”; “provocative, insulting, and harmful”; “a nasty little number”; “vicious propaganda”; “a load of American rubbish.” Others were equally strident in declaring Raid Over Moscow harmless, “just a game,” as the controversy spread from gaming circles to television newscasts, radio shows, and of course the always overheated London tabloids. In France and West Germany the game was released as simply Raid!!!, but that didn’t help in the latter country, whose government promptly banned it — and Beach-Head for good measure — from being advertised, sold to minors at all, or even displayed on store shelves. But the most extreme reaction of all happened in Finland, where the controversy made it to the halls of Parliament and prompted an official protest from the Soviet Union to the Finnish Foreign Ministry, calling the game “military propaganda” amongst other choice epithets. Naturally, Raid Over Moscow spent the several months that followed as the top-selling Commodore 64 game in Finland.

Even as he publicly dismissed the controversy by taking the “just a game” angle, Geoff Brown rubbed his hands in glee in deference to the old maxim that no press is bad press. Bruce Carver and Chris Jones, who whatever their personal politics did seem genuinely bewildered and at least somewhat bothered by it all, later claimed that Brown deliberately sparked the flames by contacting known “hawks” and “doves” in London political circles to tell them about the game and get them squawking at each other before it even came out. Later Brown supposedly stoked them by paying people to picket the Soviet Embassy in Raid Over Moscow tee-shirts, until Bruce finally told him to please just cool it.

Meanwhile back in Nevada, the last piece of the Access puzzle had fallen into place in the form of Bruce’s younger brother Roger, who had spent the last nine years in the Navy programming mainframe-based flight simulators. Intrigued by his brother’s programming exploits, he bought a Commodore 64 of his own, and quickly made a poker game that was quite playable. Impressed, Bruce convinced Roger not to reenlist but rather to come work with him instead in June of 1984; by this time Access was turning at last into a real company, with real offices and real employees. The two brothers worked along with Chris Jones on the inevitable Beach-Head II: The Dictator Strikes Back, yet another episodic military action game but one which did stretch the formula considerably by making it possible for two players to play against each other, one in the role of the Dictator and the other in that of the hero.

Beach-Head II‘s other obvious innovation marked the onset of another of the Carvers’ longstanding technical obsessions. Inspired by the digitized speech snippet in Epyx’s Impossible Mission, they started looking for a way to incorporate speech into their own game. They caught up with Doug Mosser, whose company Electronic Speech Systems had been responsible for that snippet, at the January 1985 CES. Together the two companies were able to shoehorn quite a variety of spoken exclamations — all performed by Access’s package artist, Doug Vandergrift — into Beach-Head II, no mean feat given the limited speed and memory of the Commodore 64; just playing back one of these samples required about half of the 6502 CPU’s cycles, leaving precious little for everything else going on. While they didn’t come up with anything quite as indelible as Impossible Mission‘s “Stay a while! Stay forever!,” wounded soldiers in Beach-Head II scream for a “Medic!”; hostages whine, “Hey, don’t shoot me!”; the Dictator himself cackles and issues appropriate Evil Mastermindish threats. The Carvers would continue to relentlessly push the (often rudimentary) sound capabilities of the computers on which they worked, culminating in a patented system, which they dubbed RealSound, for getting, well, real sound and speech out of the IBM PC’s primitive bleeper of a speaker. It would be licensed to a number of other companies, until the arrival of ubiquitous sound cards made it moot.

Beach-Head II foreshadowed Access’s future in still another way. The opening sequence sees your forces parachuting into the Dictator’s stronghold from helicopters, then mounting an initial assault on the defensive perimeter. Trying to make the soldiers’ movements as realistic as possible, the three Access principals went out to a local park and filmed themselves running and scaling walls on a new video camera Roger had recently acquired. They then traced still frames of their figures to make the sprites in the game. This interest in the incorporation of live-action video footage — Roger and Chris were both to one degree or another frustrated filmmakers — would mark virtually every project Access would undertake for the next fifteen years.

For all its small-scale innovations, Beach-Head II, Access’s third episodic military action game, could be read as too much of a good thing. Sales certainly bore that out: Beach-Head had been a massive hit, Raid Over Moscow, despite all of the controversy and the attendant publicity, slightly less of one, while Beach-Head II sold yet worse. Access thus decided on a major change in direction: to make a multi-event sports simulation, a genre in which their developing motion-capture techniques might give them a big edge over the competition. From a commercial standpoint if nothing else, it made a lot of sense; Summer Games I and II from Epyx were absolutely huge in both North America and Europe (where they were released, naturally, under the U.S. Gold imprint).

The original conception for what would become Leader Board hewed very closely indeed to the Epyx model. Access imagined a game that consisted of four separate events: a baseball home-run derby, a soccer penalty kick, a “closest to the pin” golf challenge (meaning each player got three shots to get as close to a single hole as possible), and something else to be determined in the fullness of time. Roger being an excellent golfer, with a handicap that had been known to get as low as 3, they decided to make the golf challenge first. By the time they were done, it seemed obvious that they had something special, worthy of being expanded into a full-fledged 18-hole golf simulation. The other three events were forgotten, and Leader Board was born.

(The longest and most detailed accounts of Access’s early history are found in the July 1987 and August 1987 Commodore Magazine, the June/July 1985 Commodore Power Play, and Retro Gamer #120. Geoff Brown and U.S. Gold are profiled in the June 1985 ZZap!, the July 1986 Commodore User, and the October 1986 Your Computer. A sampling of reactions to Road to Moscow can be found in the October 1984, December 1984, February 1985, and March 1985 Computer and Video Games, and the April 1985 Sinclair User. And finally, not reading Finnish, I must admit that I sourced the Raid Over Moscow controversy in Finland straight from good old Wikipedia.)

Comments
11 Responses

- Howard Lewis Ship

August 15, 2014 at 6:15 pm

Typo:

wounded shoulders in Beach-Head II scream

should be soldiers

- Jimmy Maher

August 16, 2014 at 7:25 am

Thanks!

- ZUrlocker

August 15, 2014 at 7:35 pm

Great story! I didn’t know about these early days of Access Software on the C64.

- Ken Rutsky

August 15, 2014 at 7:46 pm

“…defensive parameter” should be “defensive perimeter.”

Beach Head, Raid Over Moscow, Beach Head II…I loved all three to death, most especially BH II.

Thanks for these posts, really. It’s been fascinating to relive that time when home computing was a new frontier (I was too young to really revel in it all; my oldest brother was the guy responsible for getting computers in our house before anyone else we knew).

- Wade

August 16, 2014 at 2:48 am

I love how Beach Head II’s finale is a hokey one-on-one chucking-boomerangs-at-each-other-across-a-chasm fight. But maybe it was the directness that made it the most exciting level. Before that it was all these semi-indirect war games – parachuting, shooting at people over there, etc.

- KenHR

August 16, 2014 at 3:00 pm

Wade: maybe it was the TRON influence? Everyone loved that disc game in the arcade…

“You can’t hurt me!” always cracked me up on that level…

- Jimmy Maher

August 16, 2014 at 7:25 am

Thanks!

- Ken

August 17, 2014 at 3:28 am

Having played the C64 version of Beach Head recently, I couldn’t help grumbling over a rather serious “error” that wasn’t noticed as a kid, but really irritated me this time. In the naval combat level, the higher you angle the gun (angle is displayed on the screen), the longer the shot goes, even if your gun is at greater than a 45 degrees (an unpowered projectile will achieve greatest possible range at 45 degrees. Going beyond this is useful for clearing obstacles, but shortens the range.) I couldn’t clear the stage my first few tries because of not figuring this out.

- Markus Peter

August 27, 2014 at 8:09 am

Just a minor correction regarding ” just playing back one of these samples required about half of the 6502 CPU’s cycles”: The CPU of the C64 was a MOS 6510 (a 6502-compatible CPU with additional I/O ports), and not a 6502 itself.

Enjoyable article, as always.

- Jimmy Maher

August 27, 2014 at 10:54 am

Call it a simplification rather than a mistake. :) I was aware that the 64 actually uses the 6510, but I’d rather not get too far down in the weeds with this sort of minutiae, and always like to emphasize the commonalities among the Apple II, Atari VCS, Atari 8-bit line, BBC Micro, etc., etc.

- @dudeslife

October 24, 2014 at 11:12 pm

Fantastic Article. A lot of people may not know but, Doug Vandegrift who did the box art for the rarer early release of Beach-Head II, is the same Doug Vandegrift that worked as storyboard director and artist for GI Joe and other cartoons. That box art is gorgeous and I am so happy to own one.

Leader Board
August 19, 2014

Like just about every other sport, golf made it to computer screens quite early. A textual version was passed around in BASIC circles even before the arrival of the trinity of 1977, and was included in the landmark 1978 book BASIC Computer Games. Two years later, Atari released their blandly if descriptively named Golf cartridge for the VCS. Yet neither of these crude efforts, nor the ones which followed over the next few years, did the sport much justice. Those that had graphics at all were all played from a disembodied overhead perspective that could make them feel more like pinball than golf, and no one came close to computerizing the mix of science, art, and exquisite terror that is the golf swing. Then, as these things so often happen, a whole field of golf games appeared in 1986 which showed their courses from an actual golfer’s perspective and put the player’s focus squarely where it belongs, on the swing itself.

BASIC Golf running on a Commodore PET

Atari’s Golf cartridge for the VCS

Of this suddenly crowded field the two most popular turned out to be Accolade’s Mean 18 and Access’s Leader Board. If you try them both out today, you’re likely to be more impressed, at least initially, by the former than the latter. Mean 18 is a much more complete simulation of the real game, including trees, sand traps, water hazards, varying elevations, re-creations of actual courses, even the chance to make more courses of your own with an included editor. Leader Board, on the other hand, turns you loose in a surreally minimalist environment of empty land and water and absolutely nothing else. On a bullet list of features, there’s no comparison. Yet if you play them both a bit you might just find that Leader Board, for all that it lacks, nevertheless feels better. For me anyway, it’s just somehow more fun. But even if you still prefer Mean 18, Leader Board deserves respect, as well as the chance to be graded on something of a curve. While Mean 18, you see, ran only on the bigger 16-bit machines, Leader Board was born and bred on the humble Commodore 64.

Mean 18

Leader Board

Given the technical and conceptual achievement it represents, I thought we’d do something we haven’t done in quite a while: look at Leader Board as the Carver brothers would have seen it, from the perspective of designers and programmers putting it together piece by piece. I will get just a bit technical in some of what follows, so you might want to review my earlier articles on the Commodore 64 and its capabilities, as well as the parts of my Elite history that dealt with the fraught transition from 2D to 3D graphics.

So, the Carver brothers wanted to create a golf simulation from a 3D perspective on a computer with a 1 MHz processor and 64 K of memory. Where to start? Well, the first thing to do was to simplify the bounds of the simulation brutally, out of the knowledge that anything you abstract away today represents the best kind of work, the kind that you don’t have to do at all. Any simulation is a simplification of reality. The art of the science is figuring out just how much detail is necessary. Suffice to say that the Carver brothers drew that line much farther along than anyone could get away with today. Maybe they could add some complications back in later, once they had an initial working version. In the meantime, much of what we think of when we think of the game of golf got tossed out the window, not without the occasional groan of regret: trees, sand traps, any notion of fairways as opposed to roughs, any notion of a putting green as anything other than a perfectly circular area around the hole with a radius of 64 feet, any concept of elevation when not on the green. Wind made the cut, but with the odd yet simplifying quality that it will always blow in the same direction relative to the golfer no matter which way he faces.

Despite all the editing, the Carvers still needed to map a 3D landscape, simplified though it may be, into the Commodore 64’s memory and be able to display the scenery in proper perspective from any location, facing in any direction, as the player hacked her away toward the hole. Additionally, given the success their earlier games had enjoyed in Europe it was critical to them that this one also be playable from cassette, meaning the whole program — including the four separate 18-hole courses they wanted to include — should reside in memory at once. This was hardly playing to the natural strengths of the 64, whose graphics had been designed with 2D sprite-based games in mind. The solution they arrived at was to first design and store about 30 different polygons, each of which could be used to represent an “island” on the course, which was otherwise assumed to be pure water. Each hole of each course could then be built by arranging these islands, up to seven of them per hole, in different, often overlapping configurations. Just as his tile-graphics system allowed Richard Garriott to build huge worlds by mixing and matching reusable chunks of landscape, these reusable polygons saved the Carvers gobs of precious memory. The views of the course must be drawn using the Commodore 64’s multicolor bitmap mode; they were too irregular for character graphics. Thus every bit of memory saved was doubly precious, as a multicolor bitmap display consumes a full 10 K of the 64’s 64 K. If you look at the diagrams of the holes, you can see how they’re all built from the same pile of interchangeable parts.

By applying the mathematics of 3D perspective, it was now possible to display views from any arbitrary location and facing for every hole — the first necessary step for a 3D golf game. As you can see from the video clip a bit further down the page, when playing the game you can actually watch each polygon/island being drawn in outline form and then filled in with color as each new perspective of the course is generated.

Next must come the golfer himself. It was hugely important to the Carvers that he should make a correct, believable swing. Bruce therefore filmed Roger taking swings under carefully controlled conditions using a high-quality video camera. About every fourth frame of the swing was developed as a slide and projected onto a glass screen, from which Roger could trace it onto graph paper using colored pencils, to be translated from there into the grid of bits that makes up each frame of each sprite in the Commodore 64’s memory. Or rather, six different areas of the image were each individually translated: the actual golfer, club included, is built from no fewer than six of the 64’s eight available sprites, each of a single color and carefully placed in relation to its siblings; thus the golfer’s white shirt and hat are made from one sprite, his brown pants from another, his black club from yet another, etc. (Although Bruce Carver first made his reputation through his mastery of multicolor sprites, Leader Board actually makes no use of them.) As the golfer goes through his swing, each sprite steps through its own sequence of bitmaps to recreate as closely as possible the smooth swing that had been originally captured on video.

Bruce Carver films Roger taking a golf swing.

Roger Carver traces his own image from a frame of video.

Now how to have the player actually control the swing? After much experimentation, the Carvers hit upon a system that didn’t try to duplicate the actual motions of a swing via complicated joystick jerks of the sort Epyx tended to favor in their Games series, but somehow just felt better than anything else. (The developers of Mean 18 came up with an almost identical system simultaneously but apparently independently.) This so-called “three-click” system has persisted with only modest variations for decades as the go-to control scheme for computerized golf; any new game that deviates from it always provokes intense debate, and those that opt for something other than this by now traditional approach often all but define themselves by their rejection of the golf-swing status quo.

In Leader Board, then, you first aim the shot horizontally with a small targeting cursor, then press and hold the joystick button to begin your back swing. You release it when you’re ready to end the back swing — more back swing will hit the ball farther — but must be careful not to wait too long. The golfer now begins his forward swing. Hit the button again just as the club strikes the ball to “snap” it straight, or slightly before or after to deliberately — or, more likely, accidentally — hook or slice it to the left or right. Timing being so critical in this, the very heart of the game of golf whether played in the real world or on a computer, the simulation here had to be absolutely smooth, consistent, and precise. As in many other places in Leader Board, the Carvers took advantage of the Commodore 64’s timer-interrupt system to be sure of this. (Timer interrupts work similarly to the raster interrupts I discussed in an earlier article, except that they are triggered not by the movements of the electron gun which paints the screen but rather can be set to occur at a precise interval of microseconds.)

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/fairway.mp4

After the ball is struck, its X, Y, and Z vectors are calculated, taking into account the swing itself, gravity and air resistance, and, if you’re playing at “Professional” level, the wind. The ball is represented by a seventh sprite, which can have a number of possible sizes depending on its distance from you. In a nice touch that adds a welcome note of verisimilitude, the eighth sprite is employed as the shadow of the ball in flight; before the ball is struck, when it’s lying on the ground before you, this sprite is used to represent the targeting cursor. The movement of the ball and its shadow are again tied to the 64’s interrupt timer to assure that they are absolutely smooth and believable. If the sprite lands in the water, you have to try again; likewise, in yet another simplification, if you send it off the screen to left or right. Otherwise another view is generated from where the ball landed, and the hole continues. It is possible to hit the ball directly into the hole from the fairway, even to score a hole in one on some of the shorter holes, but it’s very, very difficult; in the couple of dozen complete games I’ve played recently (we got a bit obsessed with Leader Board around here for a while), I’ve managed it exactly once.

More commonly, you’ll eventually end up on the putting green, defined in Leader Board as simply an arbitrary circle 64 feet in radius around the hole. With no need for the concept of a snap, the control scheme is here simplified: just aim with the targeting cursor, then hold down the button until the power meter reaches the desired level, keeping in mind that a ball that’s traveling too fast when it reaches the hole will bounce right over it.

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/green.mp4

In order to make putting any real challenge, the Carvers were forced to add back in the concept of elevation they had excised from the rest of the simulation. The problem became how to portray slope on the relatively small surface of the green given a screen resolution of just 160 X 200. The ideal method would have been to add color shading to visually indicate contour, but they already needed to keep available four colors — the maximum permitted by the Commodore 64’s VIC-II graphics chip in any 4 X 8-pixel region — for drawing the other elements of the landscape. The somewhat kludgy and not entirely intuitive solution became a visual indicator, conveniently drawn in two of the available colors, to the left of the golfer. The vertical line represents the magnitude of the slope; the other represents its direction. The same system is used to represent wind intensity and direction when not on the green.

With that, plus a small battery of sound effects which are often cleverly reused — for instance, the splash when a ball strikes water is always the same waveform played at one of four volumes depending on the distance of the ball — the Carvers had something quite special, if also something that was, like any game, full of sacrifices and compromises. They had always seen this minimalist world of green land and blue water as a mere jumping-off point. Now, however, their planned shipping date loomed, and Access wasn’t in a financial position to miss it. Therefore Leader Board went out the door as-is very early in 1986. When it proved a hit, the Carvers happily returned to the Leader Board well again and again: via Leader Board Tournament, a bare-bones sequel featuring four new courses but the same engine; via Executive Leader Board later in 1986, which added sand traps and trees; and finally via World Class Leader Board and three course expansion disks (Famous Courses of the World) in 1987 and 1988. By this time, the Carvers had something that approached a real game of golf, with real-world golf courses like St. Andrews and Pebble Beach, fairways and roughs and a whole variety of trees and other hazards, and variably shaped and sized greens. They had also largely remade Access in the eyes of gamers, from the Beach-Head company to the Leader Board company. Having accomplished all they felt they could on the Commodore 64 and seeing which way the industry winds were blowing, the Carvers now turned to bigger MS-DOS machines and what would become the most successful golf franchise of all, Links — a story for another time.

Executive Leader Board

World Class Leader Board

Before we say goodbye to Leader Board, I want to take a moment here to say just how ridiculously entertaining it is, even in its most minimalist configuration. There’s something elegant and classic about those bifurcated, abstract landscapes of the first Leader Board — enough so that, while the later Leader Boards are certainly more impressive as golfing simulations, I’m not entirely sure they’re all that much better as computer games. Leader Board is an engaging little diversion played alone against the course, trying to come in under par (there is no computer opponent available). But get some friends together and it’s absolute magic, like so many of the best Commodore 64 games and so many of my personal favorites. Find yourself an open-minded friend or two or three who are willing to overlook 8-bit-era graphics and give it a shot; I’ve prepared a download that includes the original Leader Board, Executive Leader Board, and World Class Leader Board — which I think I can without causing a great deal of controversy call the definitive 8-bit golf game — with all the course disks also included courtesy of some ingenious hackers from the days of yore. Fire up a Commodore 64 emulator and try it even if you wouldn’t be caught dead on a real golf course. Golf just works on a computer, as millions of players with no interest whatsoever in the real game have discovered over the years. A grand tradition begins in earnest right here.

(Sources this time out are the same as for the last article.)

Comments
12 Responses

- Felix

August 19, 2014 at 4:44 pm

I remember playing a game on the Speccy that resembles this description very well, but I can’t be sure it’s the same one. Blew my mind the one time I managed a hole-in-one. Of course, back then I was in no position to appreciate the ingenuity that went into making it. Those were the days…

- John Elliott

August 19, 2014 at 10:37 pm

Leader Board was certainly ported to the Spectrum; there’s a video of it being played to completion on YouTube, if you want to compare it with your memory.

- Felix

August 20, 2014 at 5:40 pm

I can’t tell anymore, sorry. My memory of the game is too fuzzy. But it looks about right, and sounds about right. This must be it, unless there was another similar game. Thank you!

- James Randall

August 19, 2014 at 9:09 pm

I have very fond memories of playing this and other early golf games on the 8-bits and PC.

While objectively by no means the best game I spent many fun hours playing Holed Out on the BBC.

http://www.capnkroaker.com/software/holedout/holedout.php
It came late on in the BBCs life so I suspect not many people played it.

- Ken Rutsky

August 20, 2014 at 12:42 am

Loved the first game to death and missed many a homework assignment on this one.

Interesting point in the last paragraph:

“while the later Leader Boards are certainly more impressive as golfing simulations, I’m not entirely sure they’re all that much better as computer games.”

Indeed, isn’t this always the way with sports games? The first in a hit franchise is a fun game, and sequels start to add features for the hardcore. Verisimilitude and all that, I suppose, but it often happens that the designers and the most ardent fans forget the fun that made the game a hit with the general public in the first place.

(One of my hobbies is board wargaming. Look at Squad Leader for an analog example of this trend!)

- ZUrlocker

August 20, 2014 at 2:35 am

I remember playing the DOS version of World Class Leaderboard with the “realsound” capabilities. “Oooh. He can’t be too happy about that one.” It was a hoot!

- Healy

August 20, 2014 at 9:41 am

Nice article! It’s interesting that you mention the later Leader Board games not measuring up as computer games (while being technically better); I was thinking pretty much the same thing myself about the graphics. There’s something so pleasingly minimalist about the simple 3D shapes used in the original. Then again, I was a young impressionable kid when console vector games like Star Fox came out, so it could just be nostalgia talking.

- Brian Bagnall

August 22, 2014 at 12:16 am

The sound of the ball going into the cup has to be one of the top 10 best sound effects ever created with the SID. Makes me wonder how they accomplished it. Multiplayer was definitely a hit among friends and relatives back then.

- Scott

August 25, 2014 at 4:19 am

You’re absolutely right about golf games vs real golf, I hate the real thing (probably due to a lack of skill) but can play a golf game for hours. Perhaps that started with my brothers and I playing Leader Board (and World Class Leader Board) together on our 64.

- Jeremy Carver

February 9, 2015 at 6:10 am

If you’re interested to see where the soul of Leader Board currently resides, check out: http://trugolf.com/e6/

I appreciated reading the post and comments!

- G Grobbelaar

January 8, 2016 at 9:46 am

Those sounds! “Timber” “You hit a tree Jim”ab classic! Still have the pc version in the box, made copies of the disks to install as we had so many different PC between the wife and me! What I just don’t understand is we bought it here in South Africa in 93 or 94 for dos! Must be that decade or 5 year lag factor that cause SA to get brand spanking new games and stuff hot out the box 5 to 10 years later! I still play it from time to time and even though we have some newer (one even came with the soundblaster 16 we bought and is on CD) FOX(with real communicators giving coverage, even though if checked the CD there isn’t that many comments) as well as a few Nickolson(sic) CD versions! Yet that “You hit a tree Jim” or “that’s wet” and the applause for eagles, birdies etc, makes it 10000 times more enjoyable than the newer ones! Just that touch of classic class!

- Jimmy Maher

January 8, 2016 at 10:01 am

You’re talking about Links, Access’s long-running MS-DOS golf line that was the successor to Leader Board on the 64. I believe the first of those came out about 1990 or 1991 in the USA.

The Magnificent Penguin Hangs Up His Tuxedo
September 12, 2014

In April of 1984, Mark Pelczarski took a flight from Penguin Software’s home base of Chicago to San Francisco for the “Apple II Forever” event. Traveling with him were Steve Meuse, who had just written new extensions for Penguin’s graphics utilities to take advantage of the Apple IIe and IIc’s double-hi-res graphics mode, and Steve’s wife Marsha. Over the course of the flight, the three sketched out an idea for a series of computer games for “subversively” teaching geography, as had the old board game Game of the States and the perennial favorite Risk. By the time they made it to the Moscone Center to join the other Apple faithful, they had plans for no less than six games, one each for Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Africa, and Australasia. Each would have you traveling through its region of the world on the trail of a villain. Figuring out where your quarry was would require piecing together clues relating to the geography, culture, and history of the region. The Spy’s Adventures Around the World soon became one-third of Penguin’s grand strategic plan for the next few years, to stand alongside the graphics software and the new Comprehend series of adventure games.

Through that summer, at the same time that he was designing and implementing the Comprehend system with Jeffrey Jay, Mark worked with Marsha to put together a prototype. In the fall they refined it with the aid of some educational researchers, tested it out with actual classes of schoolchildren to see how well it held their interest, and hired artists to begin filling it with Penguin’s trademark colorful graphics. Meanwhile Mark developed a cross-platform database-driven engine to replace his original BASIC implementation.

As the work went on, and as has been documented in painful detail elsewhere in this blog, the software industry was becoming a more and more uncertain and dangerous place for a small company like Penguin. Mark therefore broached an idea to Doug Carlston of the larger and more diversified Brøderbund: would he be interested in acquiring Penguin, as he had recently acquired Synapse Software? It’s certainly not the sort of idea that any entrepreneur takes lightly, but Mark felt he had good reasons for approaching Doug — and only Doug: “Doug was by far the person in software publishing whom I most respected.”

The two went about as far back as colleagues possibly could in an industry as young as this one. Mark had first crossed paths with Doug before Penguin or Brøderbund existed, when he was working for SoftSide magazine and Doug was selling his first game through the magazine’s TRS-80 Software Exchange. Later, whilst they were visiting him at his home in San Rafael, California, Doug had introduced Mark and David Lubar to a hotshot programmer named Chris Jochumson who added animation to the Penguin graphical suite. Mark returned the favor at the West Coast Computer Faire of 1983 when an artist named Gini Shimabukuro approached him with a big collection of clip-art images. Not himself having any programs in the offing that could make use of them, he thought of Doug, who had just demonstrated for him an idea that would soon became famous under the name The Print Shop. Mark sent Gini over to the Brøderbund booth, and her art eventually became a big part of The Print Shop’s finished look. Working together, both men also played important behind-the-scenes roles in the founding of the Software Publishers Association to promote the industry, advocate for the rights of smaller players like Penguin, and rail against piracy.

When Doug expressed tentative interest in the acquisition, Mark flew out to California once again in January of 1985 with a briefcase full of financial reports and details of Comprehend and the Spy’s Adventures series. He shared all of that and then some with Brøderbund, including Penguin’s three-pronged strategy for the future. Doug and Gary Carlston and Gene Portwood listened with apparent interest. While they didn’t share the status of their business to anywhere near the degree that Mark did, they did show a few demos of ideas in development whilst also, Mark claims, expressing a certain level of concern about a lack of really compelling products in their pipeline. A few days later Doug called Mark to say they had decided “not to go forward with” the acquisition, and that was that. Mark, for whom the burden of complete responsibility for Penguin and everyone who worked there was becoming heavy indeed, remembers feeling “disappointed.”

But there was nothing to be done about it and no one else to whom he was inclined to entrust Penguin, so he went back to tweaking and refining the Spy’s Adventures series that was increasingly starting to look like the best thing Penguin had going as the air rushed out of the bookware bubble and the Apple II, The Graphics Magician’s bread-and-butter platform, got longer in the tooth. Mark and his colleagues made it possible to play the Spy’s Adventures single- or multi-player, the latter in either a competitive or a unique cooperative mode. They produced guides and supplemental software for teachers looking to integrate the games into a curriculum. And they tested, tested, tested. They took their time, wanting to make sure the series was perfect. If they could get the first three games out by the end of the year, it should be more than early enough, given that schools traditionally budgeted and purchased for the next school year in the spring.

Then came the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in June. “Have you seen the Brøderbund booth?” a colleague asked Mark. No. “Well, you need to.”

Brøderbund was showing a demo of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, a game you probably already thought of some time ago, when I first described Penguin’s take on the educational geographical adventure game. Livid, Mark tracked Doug down and confronted him right there on the show floor. The latter refused to engage in any discussion, other than to say that he “knew nothing” about Carmen Sandiego at the time of the January meeting and that he always did his best to exchange information with others to to avoid this sort of thing. Their friendship effectively ended right there. Mark:

My contacts with Doug after that were short. He either did not reply, or replied tersely. He was a lawyer. I don’t know if he felt he had to watch his words, thus the fewer the better?

At this point we want to be just a little bit careful. There was a period of time when Mark believed the most sensationalistic and dastardly interpretation of these events to likely be true: that Brøderbund blatantly stole his idea for a geographical educational adventure and rushed it out as Carmen Sandiego before Penguin could get the Spy’s Adventures out. Today he no longer believes that interpretation to be terribly likely. Nor do I. To believe it requires one to believe in a thirty-year conspiracy of silence amongst the considerable number of people who were involved in the creation of Carmen Sandiego, not all of whom proved to be all that committed to the Carlstons or Brøderbund in even the short term; Dane Bigham, for instance, architect and programmer of Carmen Sandiego‘s cross-platform game engine, left the company as something less than a happy camper just months after the game’s release when he was informed that he would have to start taking a fixed salary rather than royalties. It’s also difficult to believe that Brøderbund could have come up with the character of Carmen herself and the idea of the included almanac, neither of which were in Penguin’s version, and managed to design and program a demo featuring it all in the bare handful of months between January and June. Nor does it seem at all in keeping with Doug Carlston’s apparently well-earned reputation as one of the nicest, fairest people in software.

The real significance of this incident for Mark and for Penguin is more subtle, but perhaps all the more poignant for it. When he told the story to me in detail for the first time, I replied with a ham-handed array of practical questions. Did you not have Brøderbund sign some sort of NDA or other agreement before you told them pretty much everything there was to know about the state of your business? Once you gifted him with the information that you had such a similar project, what was Doug to do, potentially torpedo his own project by telling you? When you approached him with aggressive questions implying he had stolen your idea, can you really blame him so much for doing the lawyerly thing, limiting his liability by saying as little as possible and keeping away from you as much as possible from then on? Wasn’t Doug, in addition to being a nice guy, also a businessman with the livelihood of many others (including most of his own family) depending on the continued existence of his company, and doesn’t that sometimes have to trump friendship?

Mark replied that I “don’t really understand how magical those early years were, and how this was such a dramatic departure.” Doug should have told him that Brøderbund had something so similar in development, and they would somehow have worked something out. Even the mild bit of dishonesty that it’s quite hard to absolve Doug of — that he somehow hadn’t known that Carmen Sandiego was in development at the time of the January 1985 meeting, a claim he himself has refuted in many interviews since — seemed totally out of character for the straight shooter Mark thought he knew. Clearly Doug found himself on the horns of a difficult and ethically ambiguous dilemma. You can judge his behavior for yourself. For Mark, though, these events served as a canary in a coalmine telling him that the days of the software brotherhood were gone and the industry that had replaced it may not be someplace he wanted to be. If this tormented business could bring a nice guy like Doug to behave this way, what might it force Mark himself into doing? If Doug’s behavior represented simply “good business,” did he really want to be in business?

Penguin did publish the first three Spy’s Adventures games as planned, but by then Carmen Sandiego had already been out for a couple of months. Mark continues to believe that the Penguin games are better than their Brøderbund counterparts, noting that they contain all of the information the player needs to play them in-game rather than relying on an outside resource. The multiplayer possibilities, he notes correctly, also give them a whole additional dimension. Personally, I acknowledge the latter point in particular as well taken, but remember that big old almanac as a huge part of Carmen Sandiego‘s appeal, most definitely a feature rather than a bug. Whatever, there just wasn’t room for two lines of educational geographic adventure games, and Brøderbund cornered the space for themselves by releasing first and doing a masterful job of promotion; as Mark himself wryly acknowledges, just the names Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and The Spy’s Adventures in North America tell you everything you need to know about the relative promotional flairs of the two companies. The Spy made it to North America, South America, and Europe, but no further, while Carmen eventually conquered time and space and even the PBS airwaves.

Whilst Mark was still reeling from seeing Carmen Sandiego at that CES show, there came another disillusioning moment: he was forced to change the ground of Penguin’s very identity, its name. A couple of years before, when the world of book publishing was beginning to eye that of software publishing with greedy eyes, the Penguin Group had legally objected to the Penguin Software trademark. His lawyers informed Mark that he had a reasonable chance of winning on the merits of the case — his company had been in software first, after all — but the other Penguin had the money and legal resources to make any victory so expensive and time-consuming that it couldn’t help but bury his little company — which was, one suspects, exactly what the Penguin Group, hundreds of times bigger than Penguin Software, was relying on. Mark played for time by dragging out the discovery process and subsequent negotiations as long as he possibly could. But at last as 1985 drew to a close Penguin Software began the difficult process of educating the public about their new identity as “Polarware,” a name that never quite fit and always rankled. A final agreement severing Polarware from the old Penguin name forever was signed in 1986. The bullying tactics of the Penguin Group are doubly dispiriting in light of the imprint’s noble history as the first to bring affordable paperback editions of great literature to the masses. (And, astonishingly, the tactics were still continuing a decade after Polarware closed up shop; see the threatening letter Mark has published on his own site, which leaves one thinking that surely their lawyers must have something better to be doing than policing collections of long-obsolete software for long-obsolete computers.)

With the Spy’s Adventures a bust, the newly minted Polarware must rely entirely upon the other two legs of that strategic triangle, the graphics software and the Comprehend line of adventure games. They released two more Comprehend games in 1986 to join Antonio Antiochia’s Comprehend-revamped Transylvania and its sequel of the previous year. Both 1986 games were also remakes, signs of a maturing industry now able to mine the “classics” of its own past.

One of them we’ve met before on this blog: Oo-Topos, one of the two science-fiction adventures Mike Berlyn had written during his early days with Sentient Software. Mark had known Mike for some years already by 1986, having first met him when Mike was working on an arcade game that Sentient would eventually release as Congo and called Penguin with some questions about how to use The Graphics Magician. As the Comprehend line was getting underway, Mark proposed to Mike, who was still at Infocom at the time, that Penguin/Polarware be allowed to remake Oo-Topos using the Comprehend engine. It sounded fine to Mike, but for two problems: his position at Infocom made it difficult for him to directly involve himself with the remake; and the actual rights to the game resided not with Mike but with his erstwhile partner at Sentient, Alan Garber, from whom he had split on less than amicable terms. Mark was able to work out a deal with Garber instead. Mike received no royalties, but gave his blessing to a remake which smoothed away most of the rough edges of the original and of course added graphics. The result was a very enjoyable adventure game.

The other game, a charming little fantasy called The Coveted Mirror, was of more recent vintage. The erstwhile Penguin Software had published the original, written and illustrated by freelance illustrator Holly Thomason and programmed by a Stanford systems programmer named Eagle Berns, in 1983. (Berns would go on to quite a career inside Silicon Valley, working most notably for Apple and Oracle.) The new version removed the several surprisingly good arcade-action sequences from the original, but added some additional locations and puzzles in compensation.

The Comprehend adventures are not innovative in the least, and indeed were already feeling like throwbacks in their own time, the last holdouts from the old Hi-Res Adventure approach to adventuring that Sierra had birthed with Mystery House and The Wizard and the Princess and long since abandoned along with most of the rest of the industry. For all that, though, I have a huge soft spot for the line. They are, mark you, full of the sort of old-school attributes that will drive most of you crazy: mazes, inventory limits, limited light sources and other sorts of timers, vital information hidden in the graphics, parsers that don’t understand simple constructions like “DROP ALL.” Yet there’s a certain sense of design craft to them that’s lacking in so many of their competitors, and most of all a welcome sense that their authors want you to solve them, want you to have fun with them. Excluding only a few misbegotten riddles in The Crimson Crown, there are no stupid guess-the-word parser puzzles, no cheap tricks meant to send you scurrying with cash-in-hand for the hint book. If you can accept the different standards of a different era, they’re just about the most consistently playable line of parser-driven adventures of the 1980s, excepting only Infocom. Others may have reached further and occasionally soared higher, but their literary aspirations much more frequently only led them to create games that didn’t really work that well as, well, games. Despite their branding as “Interactive Novels,” a mode of phraseology very much in vogue at the time of their conception, the Comprehend titles are content to just be fun text adventures, an impressively nonlinear web of locations and puzzles to explore and solve in the service of just enough plot to get you started and provide an ending.

In addition to five released Comprehend games, Polarware signed contracts for and storyboarded two licensed games that would never get made, one to be based on the Frank and Ernest newspaper comic strip, the other on Jimmy Buffett’s anthem “Margaritaville.” The latter makes a particularly interesting story, one that once again begins with Mike Berlyn.

One year Mark and Mike had found themselves on the same flight from Chicago to Las Vegas for the Winter CES, and arranged to sit together. The conversation came around to music, whereupon Mark mentioned his love for Jimmy Buffett. Long before the Parrothead circus began, Mark had seen him as a struggling singer/songwriter who passed through the University of Illinois student union to sing his poignant early songs of alcohol-addled losers and dreamers adrift on the Florida Keys. Mike mentioned that he had actually lived quite close to Buffett during his tenure in Aspen, Colorado, with Sentient, and that he believed Buffett still had a house there. Knowing only that Buffett lived (according to Mike) in the “Red Mountain subdivision” of Aspen, on a lark Mark sent a letter off to just that: “Jimmy Buffett, Red Mountain subdivision, Aspen, Colorado.” Four months later one of his employees came to him to to tell him that “there’s this guy who says he’s Jimmy Buffett on the phone for you.” There were plans in the works to make a movie out of “Margaritaville,” and it seems Buffett and his associates thought a computer game might make a nice companion (even given that it was somewhat, um, debatable how much of a cross-section there really was between computer gamers and Jimmy Buffett fans). But the movie plans fell through in the end, and neither movie nor game got made.

Penguin/Polarware had managed to stay afloat and even modestly profitable through 1985, but as the mass-market distributors gained more and more power they were increasingly able to impose their will on a small publisher, stretching the time between the shipment of an order and receipt of payment to thirty, sixty, ninety days or longer. Distributors came to dictate terms to such an extent that Polarware might ship them a $30,000 order only to have the distributor announce a few months later that they’d only sold $12,000 of it and thus would only pay for that, while, what with sales having been so slow, they wouldn’t even bother trying to move the rest — but no, they wouldn’t be paying for or returning the leftovers either. Bigger players might impose their own will on the distributors or set up their own distribution systems (as Electronic Arts did from the beginning), but there was very little that Polarware could do. While they did try forming a distributor, which they called SoftRack, to handle their own wares and those of a few other small publishers, it never penetrated much beyond some small independent retailers in the Midwest. For the rest, they must rely upon the established big boys, many of whom lived fast and close to the edge. At the beginning of 1986 what Mark had been dreading finally happened: a few distributors went bankrupt while owing Polarware a lot of money. With accounts suddenly deeply in the red, he was forced to embark on the heartbreaking process of laying off lots of employees he had long since come to regard as friends.

The frantic down-sizing and cost-cutting was enough to let Polarware weather this crisis, but Mark had decided by the end of the year that he’d had enough. The future looked decidedly uncertain. The Spy’s Adventures were a bust, while the Comprehend games had proved only modestly successful. And now the graphics utilities, always the company’s financial bedrock, also faced a doubtful (at best) future. The 8-bit platforms they ran on were now aged, with the press beginning to speculate on how much longer they could possibly remain viable, and Polarware had nothing in the works for and no real expertise with the next generation of 16-bit graphical powerhouses. The Comprehend line also desperately needed a facelift for the new machines, one that the down-sized Polarware wasn’t really in a position to provide. Meanwhile the stress of running Polarware was keeping Mark up at night and starting to affect his health. It was time to quit. Mark walked away, selling Polarware to a group of employees who still thought they could make a go of it. They would manage to release one more Comprehend game, an original with the awkward title of Talisman: Challenging the Sands of Time, in 1987 before accepting the inevitable and selling out to Merit Software.

Barack Obama shakes hands with Mark Pelczarski, November 7, 2012

For his part, Mark pursued a growing fascination with the then-new computerized music-making technology of MIDI. That led to an early MIDI software package, MIDI OnStage, and combined with the Jimmy Buffett connection he’d established at Polarware took him to Key West to help set up Buffett’s Shrimpboat Sound recording studio; his work rated a mention in the liner notes of the first album Buffett recorded there, Hot Water. Since then Mark has filled his time with quite a variety of activities: setting up another studio for Dan Fogelberg; playing steel drums in a band; developing the mapping technology for early travel-planning CD-ROMs; teaching one of the first online courses ever offered and developing much of the technology that allowed him to do so; developing early web-forum software; teaching programming for twenty years at Elgin Community College. He’s now retired from that last gig, but remains busy and industrious as ever; when I first contacted him to ask him to help me tell the Penguin/Polarware story, I was surprised to find him volunteering as a technology architect for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. Mark escaped the chaos with little apparent psychic damage, something not necessarily true of all of his contemporaries.

When I put Penguin behind me, I felt like I’d already had a lifetime of experiences, much more than most people could hope for, imagine, or dream. And I kind of treated what came after as another lifetime. I joke, but only half so, about how “in a past life…’ I did this and that, when talking about things like Penguin Software. But it really does kind of feel like that, and that probably helped keep me sane in living another, more normal life.

(You can download the Comprehend versions of Oo-Topos and The Coveted Mirror for the Apple II, including manuals and all the other goodies, from here if you like.

For another and presumably final time, my thanks to Mark Pelczarski. His memories, which he shared with me in careful detail even though this period of Penguin/Polarware’s history is not his favorite to remember, were just about all I needed to write this article.)

Comments
18 Responses

- matt w

September 12, 2014 at 11:33 am

Thanks for this look into this corner of history! I’m glad things worked out for Mark in his life in the end. Speaking of which, a copyediting thing: In “Unlike some other survivors of those crazy early days of consumer software, Mark escaped the chaos with little apparent psychic damage, something not necessarily true of all of his contemporaries,” it seems like the first and last clauses basically repeat each other.

On the trademark dispute, it seems to me that that’s how a lot of intellectual property law works. You may have an excellent claim for fair use or parody or something (this is from copyright rather than trademark law, but the same idea applies), but if your opponent has deep pockets and you don’t then it’s basically impossible to fight once you receive that cease & desist letter. (See this description of a dispute with Wizards of the Coast, though WotC may have had a slightly stronger claim there than is often the case.)

- Jimmy Maher

September 12, 2014 at 12:01 pm

Thanks! The link you provided seems to parallel the Penguin story almost exactly.

- Andrew Plotkin

September 12, 2014 at 5:13 pm

Coincidentally, I just ran into this scanned article from 1985: http://gamepreservation.tumblr.com/post/96109922514/if-yr-cmptr-cn-rd-this-from-the-august-1985

Competition in parser technology between the IF companies. Has quotes from Pelczarski, Seth Godin, Brian Fargo, John Williams, Marc Blank, etc.

Obviously there never was a generation of IF that took real advantage of a “next-generation” parser, and modern IF tools have taken the conservative path. I should write up something about that.

- Healy

September 12, 2014 at 11:04 pm

Please do! I’d like to read your thoughts on it.

- Jimmy Maher

September 13, 2014 at 8:23 am

The idea of a “next-generation parser” has always proved to be something of a dead end because nobody has ever really figured out what such a beast should be. Marc Blank and Mike Berlyn put considerable work into a parser that could process adverbs and to at least some degree deal with affect as well as effect during 1983/84, but the work was ultimately abandoned as impractical. Later, circa 1987/1988, Infocom completely rewrote their parser for the version 6 graphical games (which were developed on Sun workstations rather than the famous old DEC). They advertised this as their “next-generation” parser, but most folks couldn’t really see much of a difference.

The “next-generation” parsers of companies like Telarium and Synapse quickly degraded into simple pattern/word matchers that tried to guess the meaning of more complex or idiosyncratic inputs. Subsequent experience has taught us that that’s a pretty horrible idea, but during the 1980s virtually everyone other than Infocom was doing it. Infocom never succumbed to the temptation, which is one among many reasons why their games stand up so much better than anyone else’s today. (Even the Comprehend games, which I find unusually playable, indulged in a bit of this, although they were nowhere near as prone to non sequiturs as most of the competitors.)

One big limitation of this era, as Mark was at pains to emphasize to me when we discussed these topics, was the miniscule memories and processing powers available on the 8-bit machines for which these games were targeted. If you simply don’t have enough memory to pack in all the words you want to be able to understand, it’s awfully tempting to engage in a little guesswork instead of just throwing up lots more error messages.

Modern computers obviously aren’t subject to the same restrictions. It would indeed be interesting to see what a “next-generation” parser might look like — but it would also, I suspect, require development resources that just aren’t available to a hobbyist community.

- David Cornelson

September 12, 2014 at 8:04 pm

Great article Jimmy. Being an entrepreneur, I’m always concerned about someone intentionally or unintentionally disrupting my vision and I can’t imagine how painful that moment at CES was for both Mark and Doug. In the end, you have to work with the mindset that if your vision is meant to win, it will and if not, it won’t. Success always has a bit of luck and talent mix. It’s the luck part that drives entrepreneurs mad.

- David Lubar

September 13, 2014 at 2:22 pm

Great article. Just one minor point — I wasn’t with Mark when he met Chris. I don’t think I was ever at Doug Carlston’s house. (I didn’t move from NJ to Saramento until 1982.) I do remember taking a trip from Sacramento to visit Brodebrund. I went there with Tim Wilson. (We’d worked together at Sirius.) They’d just gotten a Famicon in the office, if that helps date things. But it’s wonderful to read such a detailed history of some of Mark’s achievements. He’s an amazing guy.

- Mark Pelczarski

September 13, 2014 at 5:33 pm

You’re right David, but I interpreted that metaphorically. What was a two-person project in writing Graphics Magician became a three-way coast-to-coast project with you in NJ, me in Illinois, and Chris in California (and our version of the Internet was sending 5-1/4″ floppies in the mail). While we’re at it though, I should clear up another part of the wording: David Lubar is the person responsible for most of the animation routines in GM, particularly all the gut-level assembly language stuff. What Chris brought to the project was the overall path generation concept that tied it all together, which I programmed around David’s machine language routines. Chris was using that technique to write his Space Quarks game and later implemented it in The Arcade Machine, but David’s programming was the heart of the animation portion of Graphics Magician.

While I’m here, I’d like to thank Jimmy Maher publicly for all his remarkable work and research in bringing this era back to life. I thought I knew a lot about it from inside my little Penguin bubble, but it’s fascinating reading about all the other perspectives, issues, ideas, and growing pains of the time. While others have addressed the era mostly from the perspective of one of those individual bubbles, Jimmy’s collection of articles has been one of the most thorough and enjoyable accounts of that time that I’ve seen. Thanks Jimmy! Keep up the great work.

- ZUrlocker

September 16, 2014 at 3:53 am

Mark, I loved those old Penguin games. Spy’s Demise in particular was a lot of fun on the Apple ][. Thank you for all you did for the gaming industry.

- Mark Pelczarski

September 13, 2014 at 5:38 pm

I’ll add this: If you’re not familiar with David Lubar and if you know any young adult readers, look him up in your library or bookstore, or at davidlubar.com!

- Carl

September 16, 2014 at 5:29 pm

Just a small point: Eagle Burns was a systems programmer at Stanford, not a Professor.

- Jimmy Maher

September 16, 2014 at 6:41 pm

Thanks!

- Carl

September 17, 2014 at 12:05 am

By the way, saw your Amiga book at the Computer History Museum on Sunday. I’d have bought it if I didn’t already have it!

- RVP

September 24, 2014 at 9:54 pm

Nice article; a minor typo in the title though: Magnificient should be Magnificent.

- Jimmy Maher

September 25, 2014 at 5:34 am

Woops! Thanks!

- Pingback: Open Apple #42 (December 2014) : 2014 Year-End Roundtable, Eric Shepherd, Sarah W., Carrington Vanston | Open Apple

- James

January 29, 2015 at 5:36 pm

Typo roundup:
“an artist named Gini Shimabukuro approached him with a big collection of clip-art images. … Mark sent Gina over to the Brøderbund booth, and her art eventually became a big part of The Print Shop’s finished look”

You seem to switch from Gini to Gina and I’m not 100% sure which you were going for.

” The Graphics Magician’s bread-and-butter platform, got older in the tooth. ”

I think the colloquialism or idiom is actually ‘longer in the tooth’
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/long_in_the_tooth

“Buffett’s Shrimpboat Sound recording studio; his worked rated a mention in the liner notes of the first album Buffett recorded there”

work, not worked :)

- Jimmy Maher

January 30, 2015 at 7:25 am

Thanks!

Amnesia
September 29, 2014

Thomas M. Disch, circa 1985

I feel fairly confident in stating that Thomas M. Disch trails only Robert Pinsky as the second most respected literary figure to turn his hand to the humble text adventure — speaking in terms of his literary prestige at the time of his game’s release, that is. The need for that last qualifier says much about his troubled and ultimately tragic life and career.

Disch burst to prominence alongside Roger Zelazny and the rest of science fiction’s New Wave in the mid-1960s. Yet Disch’s art was always even more uncompromising — and usually more uncompromisingly bleak — than that of his peers. His first novel bears the cheery name of The Genocides, and tells the story of the annihilation of humanity by an alien race who remake the Earth into a hyper-efficient nutrient farm, apparently without ever even recognizing humans as sentient. In its final scenes the remnants of the human race crawl naked through the innards of the aliens’ giant plants, stripped of even a veneer of civilization, reduced to feeding and fucking and waiting to be eradicated like the unwanted animal infestations they are. Camp Concentration — sensing a theme? — another early novel that is perhaps his most read and most acclaimed today, tells of another ignominious end to the human race, this time due to an intelligence-boosting super-drug that slowly drives its experimental recipients insane and then gets loose to spread through the general population as a contagion.

The protagonist of the latter novel is a pompous overweight intellectual who struggles with a self-loathing born of his homosexual and gastronomic lusts, a man who can feel uncomfortably close to Disch himself — or, more sadly, to the way Disch, a gay man who grew up in an era when that was a profoundly shameful thing to be, thought others must see him. Perhaps in compensation, he became a classic “difficult” artiste; his reputation as a notable pain in the ass for agents, editors, and even fellow writers was soon well-established throughout the world of publishing. He seemed to crave a validation from science fiction which he never quite achieved — he would never win a Hugo or Nebula for his fiction — while at the same time often dismissing and belittling the genre when not picking pointless fights within it with the likes Ursula Le Guin, whom he accused of being a fundamentally one-dimensional political writer concerned with advancing a “feminist agenda”; one suspects her real crime was that of selling far more books and collecting far more awards than Disch. Yet just when you might be tempted to dismiss him as an angry crank, Disch could write something extraordinary, like 334, an interwoven collection of vignettes and stories set in a rundown New York tenement of the near future that owes as much to James Joyce as it does to H.G. Wells; or On Wings of Song, both a sustained character study of a failed artist and a brutal work of satire in precise opposition to the rarefied promise of its title — these “Wings of Song,” it turns out, are a euphemism for a high-tech drug high. Disch wrote and wrote and wrote: high-brow criticism of theater and opera for periodicals like The New York Times and The Nation; reams of science-fiction commentary and criticism; copious amounts of poetry (always under the name “Tom Disch”), enough to fill several books; mainstream horror novels more accessible than most of his other efforts, which in 1991 yielded at last some of the commercial rewards that had eluded his science fiction and poetry when he published The M.D., his only bestseller; introductions and commentaries to the number of science-fiction anthologies he curated; two plays and an opera libretto; and, just to prove that the soul of this noted pessimist did house at least a modicum of sweetness and light, the children’s novel The Brave Little Toaster, later adapted into the cult classic of an animated film that is still the only Disch story ever to have made it to the screen.

The dawn of the brief bookware boom found Disch at something of a crossroads. On Wings of Song, published in 1979, would turn out to be his last major science-fiction novel, its poor commercial performance the final rejection that convinced him, the occasional short story or work of criticism aside, to write in other genres for the remaining quarter century of his life. He was just finishing his first horror novel, The Businessman, when his publisher Harper & Row came to him to ask if he might be interested in making his next novel interactive, in the form of the script for a computer game. Like just about every other book publisher in the United States, Harper & Row were in equal measure intrigued by the potential for interactive literature and terrified lest they be left out of a whole new field of literary endeavor. They were also, naturally, eager to leverage their existing stable of authors. Disch, a respected and established author of “literary” genre fiction who didn’t actually sell all that well as a rule, must have seemed an ideal choice; they’d get the cachet of his name without foregoing a bunch of guaranteed sales of a next traditional novel. For his part, Disch was intrigued, and jumped aboard with enthusiasm to write Amnesia.

We know quite a lot about Disch’s plans for the game thanks to a fellow historian named Stephane Racle, who in 2008 discovered his design script, an altogether fascinating document totaling almost 450 pages, along with a mock-up of Harper & Row’s planned packaging in a rare-books shop. The script evinces by its length and detail alone a major commitment to the project on Disch’s part. He later claimed to find it something of a philosophical revelation.

When you’re working on this kind of text, you’re operating in an entirely different mode from when you’re writing other forms of literature. You’re not writing in that trance state of entering a daydream and describing what’s to the left or right, marching forward, which is how most novels get written. Rather, you have to be always conscious of the ways the text can be deconstructed. In a very literal sense, any computer-interactive text deconstructs itself as you write because it’s always stopping and starting and branching off this way and that. You are constantly and overtly manifesting those decisions usually hidden in fiction because, of course, you don’t normally show choices that are ruled out — though in every novel the choices that are not made are really half the work, an invisible presence. With Amnesia, I found myself working with a form that allowed me to display these erasures, these unfollowed paths. It’s like a Diebenkorn painting, where you can see the lines that haven’t quite been covered over by a new layer of paint. There are elements of this same kind of structural candor in a good Youdunit.

Disch came to see the player’s need to figure out what to type next as a way to force her to engage more seriously with the text, to engage in deep reading and thereby come to better appreciate the nuances of language and style that were so important to him as a writer.

Readers who ordinarily skim past such graces wouldn’t be allowed to do that because they’d have to examine the text for clues as to how to respond; they’d have to read slowly and carefully. I thought that was theoretically appealing: a text whose form allowed me a measure of control over the readerly reponse in a way unavailable to a novelist or short-story writer. I’ve always been frustrated that genre readers are often addictive readers who will go through a novel in one night. I can’t read at that speed — and I don’t like to be read at that speed, either.

Philosophical flights aside, Disch didn’t shirk the nitty-gritty work that goes into crafting an interactive narrative. For instance, he painstakingly worked through how the protagonist should be described in the many possible states of dress he might assume. He even went so far as to author error messages to display if the player, say, tries to take off his pants without first removing his shoes. He also thought about ways to believably keep the story on track in the face of many possible player choices. One section of the story, for example, requires that the player be wearing a certain white tuxedo. Disch ensures this is the case by making sure the pair of jeans the player might otherwise choose to wear have a broken zipper which makes them untenable (this also offers an opportunity for some sly humor, an underrated part of Disch’s arsenal of writing talents). Even Douglas Adams, a much more technically aware writer who was very familiar with Infocom’s games before collaborating with Steve Meretzky on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, couldn’t be bothered with this kind of detail work; he essentially authored just the main path through his game and left all the side details up to Meretzky.

Amnesia‘s story is not, outside the presence of a drug capable of inducing sustained and ever-encroaching amnesia, science fiction. It’s rather a noirish mystery in which no character, including the amnesiac protagonist, is pure, everyone has multiple layers of secrets and motivations, and nothing is quite what it initially seems. Disch almost seems to have challenged himself to make use of every hoary old cliché he can think of from classic detective fiction, including not only the device of amnesia itself but also hayseed Texans who shoot first and ask questions later, multiple femme fatales, and even two men who look so alike they can pass as identical twins. It takes a very good writer to get away with such a rogues gallery of stereotypes. Luckily, Disch was a very good writer when he wanted to be. Amnesia is not, mind you, deserving of mention alongside Disch’s most important literary works. Nor, one senses, is it trying to be. But it is a cracker of a knotty detective story, far better constructed and written than the norm in adventure games then or now. Among its most striking features are frank and even moving depictions of physical love that are neither pornographic nor comedic, arguably the first such to appear in a major commercial game.

Cognetics — Pat Reilly, Kevin Bentley, Lis Romanov, and Charlie Kreitzberg — trying to be EA rock stars and, with the notable exception of Bentley, failing miserably at it.

To implement his script, Harper & Row chose a tiny New Jersey company called Cognetics who were engaged in two completely different lines of endeavor: developing the user interface for Citibank ATMs and developing edutainment software for Harper & Row, specifically a line of titles based on Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock television series. The owner of Cognetics, Charlie Kreitzberg, already had quite a long background in computing for both business and academia, having amongst other accomplishments authored a standard programming text called The Elements of FORTRAN Style a decade before. Working with some colleagues, Kreitzberg had developed an extendible version of the Forth programming language with a kernel of just 6 K or so to facilitate game development on the Apple II. He dubbed this micro-Forth “King Edward” for reasons known only to him. The actual programming of Amnesia he turned over to a local kid named Kevin Bentley; they had met through Kreitzberg’s wife, who shopped at the grocery store owned by Bentley’s family. And so it was poor young Kevin Bentley who had Disch’s doorstop of a script dropped on his desk — no one had apparently bothered to tell the untechnical Disch about the need to limit his text to fit into the computers of the time — with instructions to turn it into a working game. He had nothing to start with but the script itself and that 6 K implementation of Forth; he lacked even the luxury of an adventure-specific programming language like ZIL, SAL, AGI, or Comprehend.

It was of course a hopeless endeavor. Not only had Disch provided far, far too much text, but he’d provided it in a format that wasn’t very easy to work with. Disch, for understandable reasons, thought like a storyteller rather than a world builder. Therefore, and in the absence of other guidance, he’d written his story from the top down as essentially a hypertext narrative, a series of branching nodes, rather than from the bottom up, as a set of objects and rooms and people with descriptions of how they acted and reacted and how they could be manipulated by the player. Each part of his script begins with some text, followed by additional text passages to display if the player types this, that, or the other. Given the scope of possibility open to the player of a parser-driven game, that way lies madness. We’ve seen this phenomenon of text adventures that want to be hypertext narratives a surprising number of times already on this blog. Amnesia is perhaps the most painful victim of this fundamental confusion, born of an era when hypertext fiction didn’t yet exist outside of Choose Your Own Adventure books and any text- and story-driven game was assumed to necessarily be a parser-driven text adventure.

Harper & Row’s original Amnesia box art

In mid-1984, just as it was dawning on Cognetics what a mouthful of a project they’d bitten off, Harper & Row, the instigators of the whole thing, suddenly became the first of the big book publishers to realize that this software business was going to be more complicated than anticipated and, indeed, probably not worth the effort. (The depth of the blasé belief of which they were newly disabused that software publishing couldn’t be that hard is perhaps best measured by the fact that they had all of the box art for Amnesia prepared before Cognetics had really gotten started with the actual programming, evidently thinking that, what with Disch’s script delivered, it couldn’t be long now.) They abruptly pulled out, telling Kreitzberg he was welcome to do what he liked with Fraggle Rock and Amnesia. He found a home for the former with CBS, another old-media titan still making a go of software for the time being, and for the latter with Electronic Arts, eager to join many of their peers on the bookware bandwagon. EA producer Don Daglow was given the unenviable task of trying to mediate between Disch and Cognetics and come up with some sort of realizable design. He would have his hands full, to such an extent that EA must soon have started wondering why they’d signed the project at all.

In addition to being a noir mystery, Disch had conceived Amnesia as a sort of extended love letter to his adopted home of Manhattan. Telarium’s Fahrenheit 451, when released in late 1984, would also include a reasonably correct piece of Manhattan. Disch, however, wanted to go far beyond that game’s inclusion of twenty blocks or so of Fifth Avenue. He wanted to include almost all of the island, from Battery Park to the Upper West and East Side, with a functioning subway system to get around it. The resulting grid of cross-streets must add up to thousands of in-game locations. It was problematic on multiple levels; not only could Disch not possibly write enough text to properly describe this many locations, but the game couldn’t possibly contain it. Yet Disch, entranced by the idea of roaming free through a virtual Manhattan, refused to be disabused of the notion. No, EA and Cognetics had to admit, such a thing wasn’t technically impossible. It was just that this incarnation of Manhattan would have to be 99 percent empty, a grid of locations described only by their cross-streets, with only the occasional famous landmark or plot-relevant area poking out of the sea of nothingness. That’s exactly what the finished game would end up being, rivaling Level 9’s Snowball for the title of worst ratio of relevant to irrelevant locations in the history of the text adventure.

The previous paragraph underlines the most fundamental problem that dogged the various Amnesia teams. Disch never developed with Cognetics and EA the mutual respect and understanding that led to more successful bookware collaborations like Amazon, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Mindwheel. Given the personality at the center of Amnesia, that’s perhaps not surprising. I described Disch as “difficult” earlier in this article, and, indeed, that’s exactly the word that Kevin Bentley used to describe him to me. His frustration with the collaboration was still palpable when I recently corresponded with him.

The conclusion I reached was that Tom wanted to write a book and have it turned into a game by creating a sort of screenplay adapted from a book. The trouble was that a screenplay to my mind was the wrong metaphor for an adventure game. The missing piece of the puzzle seemed to be that Tom didn’t grasp that an adventure game was a matrix of possibilities and it was up to the user to discover the route, and the point was not to cram the user toward the “conclusion.” Tom was very unhappy with the notion that the player might not experience the conclusion of the story the way that he intended in the script, so he insisted that the user be directed toward the conclusion.

Bentley and Kreitzberg met with Disch just a handful of times at his apartment near Union Square to try to iron out difficulties. The former remembers “lots of herbal tea being offered,” and being enlisted to fix problems with Disch’s computer and printer from time to time, but it’s safe to say that the sort of warm camaraderie that makes, say, the Mindwheel story such a pleasure to relate never developed. Before 1984 was out, frustrated with the endless circular feedback loop that the project had become and uninterested in the technical constraints being constantly raised as issues by his colleagues, Disch effectively washed his hands of the whole thing.

His exit did allow EA and Cognetics a freer hand, but that wouldn’t necessarily turn out for the better. Feeling that the game “was lacking in the standard sorts of gaming experience (like a score, sleep, food, etc.)” and looking for some purpose for that huge empty map of Manhattan, EA requested that Bentley shoehorn all that and more into the game; the player would now have to eat and sleep and earn money by taking odd jobs whilst trying to come to grips with the central mystery. The result was a shotgun marriage of the comparatively richly implemented plot-focused sections from Disch’s original script — albeit with more than half of the text and design excised for reasons of capacity — with a boring pseduo-CRPG that forces you to spend most of your time on logistics — earning money by begging or washing windows or doing other odd jobs, buying food and eating it, avoiding certain sections of the city after dark, finding a place to sleep and returning there regularly, dealing with the vagaries of the subway system — all implemented in little better than a Scott Adams level of detail. Daglow came up with an incomprehensible scoring system that tries to unify all this cognitive dissonance by giving you separate scores as a “detective,” a “character,” and a “survivor.” And as the cherry on top of this tedious sundae, EA added pedestrians who come up to you every handful of moves to ask you to look up numbers on a code wheel, one of the most irritating copy-protection measures ever implemented (and that, of course, is saying something).

All of this confusion fell to poor Kevin Bentley to program. He did a fine job, all things considered, even managing a parser that was, if not up to Infocom’s standards, also not worse than its other peers. Nevertheless growing frustrated and impatient with the game’s progress, EA put him up in an “artist apartment” near their San Mateo, California, headquarters in February of 1985 so that he could work on-site on a game that was now being haphazardly designed by whoever happened to shout the loudest. He spent some nine months there dutifully implementing — and often de-implementing — idea after idea to somehow make the game playable and fun. Bentley turned in the final set of code in November of 1985, by which time “everyone was over it,” enthusiasm long since having given way to a desire just to get something up to some minimal standard out there and be done with it. Certainly Bentley himself was under no illusions: “as a game I thought it sorta bombed.” Impressed with his dogged persistence, EA offered him a job on staff: “But I was 20 and far from home. I knew if I left immediately and drove back to New Jersey I could be home for Thanksgiving.” Unsurprisingly given the nature of the experience, Amnesia would mark the beginning and the end of his career as a game developer. He would go on to a successful and still ongoing career in other forms of programming and computer engineering. Charlie Kreitzberg and Cognetics similarly put games behind them, but are still in business today as a consulting firm, their brief time in games just a footnote on their website.

EA’s released Amnesia package. Note that it’s simply called a “text adventure,” a sure sign that the bookware boom with its living literature and electronic novels has come and gone.

Amnesia, a deeply flawed effort released at last only during the sunset of the bookware boom, surprised absolutely no one at EA by failing to sell very well. It marks the only game EA would ever release to contain not a single graphic. Contemporary reviews were notably lukewarm, an anomaly for a trade press that usually saw very little wrong with much of anything. Computer Gaming World‘s Scorpia, admittedly never a big fan of overtly literary or experimental games, issued a pithy summary that details the gist of the game’s problems.

Overall, Amnesia is an unsatisfying game. You can run around here, and run around there, and work up your triple scores as a detective, a character, and a survivor, but so what? Much of what you actually do in the game doesn’t get you very far towards the ultimate solution. Boiled down to the essentials, there are only three things you need to do here: follow up on the clue from TTTT, get and read the disk, and meet Bette. There are auxiliary actions associated with them, but those are the key points. So when you think back on the game as a whole, you don’t see yourself as having done, really, a whole lot, as having been the main character. It’s more as though you came to certain places in a book, and turned a page to get on with the story.

Bottom line: terrific prose, nice maps, too much novel, not enough adventure.

Disch, despite having walked away from the hard work of trying to make the game better over a year before its release and despite having probably never even played the version of Amnesia which arrived in stores, took such reviews predictably personally. Amnesia, he pronounced, had been “one of the quickest disillusionments of my life.” He went on to blame the audience.

The real problem is that there’s simply no audience for this material, no one who would respond enthusiastically to what I do well. Those who buy it, who are aficionados of the form, are basically those who want trivial pursuits; and to offer them something, however entertaining, that involved reading and imaginative skills they did not care to exercise while playing with their computers was foolish. I felt like de Soto, who journeyed to Tennessee looking for the Fountain of Youth — an interesting enough trip, but neither of us found what we were looking for.

People who want to play this sort of game are looking, I suppose, for something like Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker, where they can have their familiar experiences replayed. The computer-interactive games that have done well — like the Hitchhiker’s or Star Trek series — have been tied in with copyrighted materials that have already had success with the target audience in prior literary forms. I don’t think the quality of those scripts compares to what I did in Amnesia — Adams’s scripts, for example, are actually very good of a kind, but it’s a matter of one little joke after another. The notion of trying to superimpose over this structure a dramatic conception other than a puzzle was apparently too much for the audience. In the end, I just produced another literary curiosity.

There’s more than a grain of truth in all this if we can overlook the condescension toward Douglas Adams that would be more worthily applied to one of his derivatives like Space Quest. A computer-games audience more interested in the vital statistics of dragons and trolls than the emotional lives of the socially engaged humans around them undoubtedly did prove sadly unreceptive to games that tried to be about something. And reviewers like Scorpia did carry into their columns disconcertingly hidebound notions of what an “adventure game” could and should be, and seemed to lack even the language to talk about “a dramatic concept other than a puzzle,” to the extent that Scopia’s columns on Infocom’s two most forthrightly literary works, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity, are little more than technical rundowns and catalogs of puzzle hints — not to mention her reaction to one of Infocom’s first bold literary experiments, the ending to Infidel — and poor Brian Mortiarty found himself actively playing down the thematic message of Trinity in interviews in the hope of actually, you know, selling some copies of this supposedly “depressing” game. It’s just that Amnesia, being well-nigh unplayable, is an exceedingly poor choice to advance this argument, and for that Disch deserves his due share of the responsibility. At some level, having just served up — or having at least allowed his name to be attached to — a bad game, he’s not entitled to this argument.

Disch one month before his death.

Disch’s ultimate fate was an exceedingly sad one. After the millennium, his world crashed around him brick by brick. First there was the shock of witnessing the September 11 attack on his beloved New York, a shock that seemed to break a circuit somewhere deep inside him; often open to charges of nihilism, extreme pessimism, even misanthropy during his earlier career, it wasn’t until after September 11 that his hatred for the people who had done this made him begin to sound like a bigot. Then in 2005 Charles Naylor, his partner of three decades, died. In the aftermath came an effort by his landlord to evict him from the rent-controlled apartment the two had shared, an effort which appeared destined for success. With his writing career decidedly on the wane, his books dropping out of print one by one, and his income correspondingly diminishing, he did most of his writing after Naylor’s death in his LiveJournal blog. Amidst the poorly spelled and punctuated screeds against Muslim terrorists and organized religions of all stripes, depressingly similar to those of a million other angry bloggers, would come the occasional pearl of wisdom or poetry to remind everyone that somewhere inside this bitter, suffering man was the old Thomas M. Disch. And suffer he did, from sciatica, arthritis, diabetes, and ever-creeping obesity that left him all but housebound, trapped alone in his squalid apartment with only his computer for company. On July 4, 2008, he ended the suffering with a shotgun. In 1984, for Amnesia, a younger Disch had written from that same apartment that “suicide is always a dumb idea.” Obviously the pain of his later years changed his mind.

One of the writers with whom Disch seemed to feel the greatest connection was another brilliant, difficult man who always seemed to carry an aura of doom with him, and another who died in tragically pathetic circumstances: Edgar Allen Poe. Disch once wrote a lovely article about Poe’s “appalling life,” the last year of which “seems a headlong, hell-bent rush to suicide.”  Like Disch, Poe also died largely forgotten and unappreciated. Perhaps someday Disch will enjoy a revival akin to that of Poe. In the meantime that Amnesia script sits there tantalizingly, ripe as ever to become a modern work of interactive fiction that need not leave out a single word, that could give us Disch’s original vision undiluted by scores and copy protection and money problems and hunger and sleep timers. Maybe he’d forgive us for trimming some of that ridiculous Manhattan. And maybe, just maybe, his estate would be willing to give its blessing. Any takers?

(First and foremost, huge thanks to Kevin Bentley for sharing with me much of the history of Cognetics and Amnesia. Disch himself talked about Amnesia at greatest length in an interview published in Larry McCaffery’s Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers. Disch’s writings on science fiction are best collected in the Hugo-winning The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of and On SF. Scorpia’s review of Amnesia appeared in the January/February 1987 Computer Gaming World.

I’ve made Amnesia available here for download in its MS-DOS incarnation with a DOSBox configuration file that works well with it. Note that you’ll need to use the file “ACODES.TXT” in place of the code wheel when the irritating pedestrians start harassing you.)

Comments
15 Responses

- Yeechang Lee

September 29, 2014 at 7:56 pm

to the extent that Scopia’s columns on Infocom’s two most forthrightly literary works, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity, are little more than technical rundowns and catalogs of puzzle hints

Jimmy, I don’t think you’re being quite fair with Scorpia here. She had four (!) separate roles with Computer Gaming World:

* Standalone reviews of adventure and role-playing games, often with some playing hints.
* A column, “Scorpion’s Mail”, in which she answered questions and provided hints for many games at a time.
* A column, “Scorpion’s Tale”, in which she provided a walkthrough for one game, sometimes with some aspects of a review. The magazine might or might not review the game (whether by Scorpia, Charles Ardai, or another) in another article.
* A third column, “The Scorpion’s View” (starting in April 1990), in which she could do any or all of the above.

I can’t find Scorpia’s article on Trinity, but her November 1986 A Mind Forever Voyaging article is definitely a “Scorpion’s Tale” as opposed to a full-fledged review.

- Jimmy Maher

September 30, 2014 at 5:55 am

Yes, but the boundaries between these categories were, shall we say, fluid. The “Scorpion’s Tale” column generally functioned as CGW’s only articles on the games in question in the 1980s, and she usually found time in them to offer commentary and criticism as well as hints. Likewise her ostensible reviews; her review of Amnesia devotes at least half its space to playing hints.

On the other hand, I don’t mean to say that Scorpia was unique in not knowing quite what to say about an ambitious work like AMFV or Trinity, and therefore saying basically nothing at all. You’ll see the same phenomenon in Questbusters (which published a review of Trinity whose gist was “Thank God the puzzles are back!”), and indeed most of the magazines. The Infocom folks have also mentioned quite a bit that many of their fans had little to no interest in literary games, didn’t quite know what to make of them. It’s just that Scorpia was an unusually prominent voice, and one we’ve met before from time to time on the blog. As such, she stands in nicely — and, yes, maybe a bit unfairly, that you can best judge — for the whole. For the record, I like her “Scorpion’s Tale” approach to gently guiding one through a game a lot, and have found her old columns invaluable many times in helping me to experience a game in a somewhat streamlined way without resorting to a straight-up walkthrough. It’s just that she does have her… limitations. Don’t we all?

- Felix

September 29, 2014 at 8:10 pm

I remember reading about the game in a computer magazine from the early 1990es (when the 8-bit era belatedly reached Romania). It sure sounded more compelling back then. How time flies.

As for your conclusion, if I wanted to remake the game today, based on Ditch’s design document, I would likely make it the hypertext work it wanted to be from the beginning. I’ve seen too many games (and other works of art) that wasted their potential by trying hard to be something they’re not. But that’s neither here nor there, as you like to say. Oh well, one more curiosity in the annals of computerized storytelling…

- Ken Rutsky

September 29, 2014 at 8:30 pm

Disch was a remarkable talent. Camp Concentration and 334 can stand with the best of the best in fiction regardless of genre tag. Samuel R. Delany (another New Wave s-f writer whose work deserves a much wider critical and popular audience) even wrote a book-length study, modeled on Barthes’ S/Z, of one of Disch’s short stories.

I hadn’t heard of this game before; it’s quite an interesting article. Thanks!

- Jimmy Maher

September 30, 2014 at 6:06 am

Disch later suppressed Delany’s book due to a grudge. Another example of a fellow who, as Patrick Nielsen Hayden put it, “played the game of literary politics hard, and sometimes lost badly.”

- Ken Rutsky

September 30, 2014 at 8:59 pm

Yeah, SRD apparently was blind-sided by Disch’s sudden desire to not be associated with him anymore. Delany had sent Disch a copy of the Dhalgren manuscript, after which Disch said he did not want to speak again.

- Keith Palmer

September 30, 2014 at 12:00 am

I’ve had some chances before to read some of Thomas M. Disch’s work for some years now, but except for The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (and “The Brave Little Toaster”) I always seemed to step back from them with the self-depreciating (but perhaps also self-satisfied) thought “literary fiction just sort of goes over my head.” However, your brief description of On Wings Of Song actually makes me a bit more interested in it…

Amnesia was mentioned in some of Graham Nelson’s work, and also in your own “Let’s Play A Story Together.” From that, I had an idea of how it worked out (or didn’t), but the suggestion Disch’s treatment was more “hypertext” did catch my attention. I believe there was something of a hypertext fad in the late 1980s; this work may just have come along too soon… However, the impression I have that Disch was invited to “work on a computer game” well before he actually began collaborating with anyone else who might have told him about the particulars of that time does have me thinking a bit of “the small flaw from which tragedy springs.”

- Rowan Lipkovits

September 30, 2014 at 3:36 am

It marks the only parser-driven game EA would ever release, as well as the only one to contain not a single graphic.

I don’t often get a chance to correct the Antiquarian: somewhere between those two points (text parser, some illustrations) you can find the EA-published Hound of Shadow — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hound_of_Shadow

- Jimmy Maher

September 30, 2014 at 6:15 am

Okay, you got me in one of two. Hound does contain some graphics. ;) I also don’t believe it was released in the U.S. but only by EA Europe; the parent company probably had little involvement. But rather than add all those qualifications, I just made an edit. :)

- Jason Dyer

September 30, 2014 at 3:47 am

If nothing else, I’d recommend playing through the opener of Amnesia all the up to where you get outside and can wander New York. Up to then it is a very compelling piece.

Also, the sample transcript in the manual is amazing.

- Jason Scott

October 1, 2014 at 8:01 am

Disch and I talked about being interviewed for GET LAMP, and unfortunately, I didn’t get back to him in time. It would have been nice to get his outlook on the whole thing, although all indications is the interview might have been pretty sour.

- Pat Reilly

December 3, 2014 at 1:06 am

As one of the Cognetics people “failing miserably” in the photo above, I can add a few bits of history that need to be part of the story.

I was there for the development of Amnesia. The Forth-based adventure game language “King Edward” was programmed by James Terry, a coding genius who continuously updated the language along with our development of the target games (I was writing the Fraggle Rock game while Kevin was doing Amnesia). The language parsing, object handling, character attributes (basically, all low-level functionality) were completely dependent on James’s implementation of commands in King Edward, which we would then use to create the user interface of the games. Charlie Kreitzberg (the boss) was also involved in the specs of the language, but James (and his brother Scott) were the magicians who made a fast, smart game parser work in 48K of memory and a few hundred K on floppy disks. (!)

I was also there (Kevin may not have been) when the name “King Edward” was chosen for the language. We were all tired and cranky, and for some reason a name had to be chosen for this language. Everyone took turns suggesting hacky names like “forthPlay” and getting booed down. Finally, James picked up a matchbook that was lying on the table, and just declared the argument over. “King Edward” was the brand of cigars advertised on the matchbook cover. And now you know… the rest of the story.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.Xking+edward+cigar+matchbook&_nkw=king+edward+cigar+matchbook&_sacat=0

Good article! – Pat Reilly

- Jimmy Maher

December 3, 2014 at 6:17 am

Thanks so much for fleshing out the story a bit!

- Zack

February 6, 2015 at 2:35 am

For reasons I’m unsure of, I’ve begun playing this game today. It’s deeply flawed, obviously, but combined with the original manuscript there’s a certain remarkable quality to it, I’m finding.

It’s a tragedy the story turned out as it did. Thanks for the history :)

- Peter Piers

December 15, 2015 at 6:12 pm

I so wish this game would get re-done. The beginning is one of the strongest I’ve ever played.

Bizarrely, the “deaths” you can experience (in the beginning at least) are fleshed out as well as any other narrative branch; they aren’t just walls of text, they are interactive (for a given value of “interactivity”). And I remember some deaths apparently going down a story path that seemed to be all its own, an alternative storyline that was neatly concluded, though with hardly any questions answered.

I would SO love to see this game remade! It was ahead of its time, and possibly in the wrong interface, but now? It could really be something!

The Fractal Phenomenon
October 3, 2014

How long is the coast of Britain? Would you be surprised if I told you that it’s infinitely long? Infinite coastlines are just one of many byproducts of the strange mathematics of fractal geometry.

Why is geometry often described as “cold” and “dry?” One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline, or a tree. Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

For centuries mathematicians and philosophers were dogged by a nagging problem. Classic Euclidean geometry, with its regular lines and planes and solids, was elegant and useful, but fell down when it came to describing the natural world. It was ill-equipped to describe the seemingly endless spatial complexity of a leaf — or, for that matter, a section of coastline. Indeed, it’s largely the very presence or absence of such chaotic complexity that we subconsciously use when we decide whether something is natural or human-made. The world humanity has built is created in the image of our geometry, while the universe that birthed us, even the very forms that enclose us, is defined by its refusal to conform to our ideals of coordinates and shapes and angles. To believe that the universe is somehow corrupted or deformed because of this refusal would be the height of hubris. “These are not natural irregularities, but with respect to our fancy only; nor are they incommodious to the true uses of life and the design of man’s being on earth,” wrote Richard Bentley in the time of Swift and Pope. Yet how to reconcile the riot of natural beauty with the cooler constructions of Euclid? Until very recently we literally lacked a mathematical language to describe the world around us.

In 1975 the Polish/French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot provided such a language when he published his theory of fractal geometry. Mandelbrot discovered that certain solution sets to certain equations generate what he called “fractals” — patterns that are infinitely detailed. Such sets were much better suited to describe natural forms than anything heretofore present in the geometric arsenal.

It’s this seeming paradox of infinite detail that’s the thorniest conceptual part of natural forms and fractal geometry alike. To begin to get a handle on it, consider the “snowflake” curve, an idea first proposed by Helge von Koch in 1904. Imagine that you start with a line forming a simple geometric motif.

Now you replace every straight-line segment with another copy of the original motif.

You do it again…

And you keep on doing it over and over and over, to infinity.

As you look at a coastline or a leaf at ever greater levels of magnification, there are always more details, more curves and changes to discover. This continues forever — or at least until you hit the level of individual particles of matter, the sort of resolution limit of the universe itself. Thus that aforementioned infinite — or at any rate unmeasurable — coastline. “Coastline length turns out to be an elusive notion that slips between the fingers of one who tries to grasp it,” wrote Benoit Mandelbrot. “All measurement methods ultimately lead to the conclusion that the coastline’s length is very large and so ill-determined that it is best considered infinite.”  What to make of such a logical monstrosity?

Mandelbrot found a way out in some theories of dimensionality espoused by the controversial German mathematician Felix Hausdorff more than half a century before. The easiest way to describe conventional notions of dimensionality mathematically is to say that an object’s number of dimensions equates to the number of numbers needed to describe a single point on it. Thus a line (X) is one-dimensional; a plane (X and Y) two-dimensional; a solid (X, Y, and Z) three-dimensional. Hausdorff, however, floated the counter-intuitive notion that dimensions could be fractions as well as whole numbers. Consider a line. As it gets more wiggly, ever more complex in its gyrations, its dimensionality increases, until it becomes infinitely wiggly, and completely fills — or, perhaps better said, becomes — a plane. The pattern labelled 1a below, for example, is made up of infinite repetitions (within the bounds of the resolution of the picture) of the hook-like line segment labelled 1b. According to Hausdorff’s formulation, it has a dimensionality of 1.8687.

This idea of fractional dimensionality is a strange one, but seeing complex lines in terms of dimension rather than distance does allow us to dodge the paradox of infinite coastlines, restoring a mathematical order in which the coast of Britain is again longer than that of, say, the island where I live these days, Funen.

The most interesting fractal equations are not those like the ones shown above that simply repeat a pattern, but rather those that echo themselves but never exactly repeat, to infinity. The classic example is one of the first discovered by Mandelbrot himself, the appropriately named Mandelbrot set, consisting of all solutions to (z(n) ← z(n – 1)2 + c) which converge toward zero rather than expanding toward infinity. (Whilst trying to avoid getting too far down into the weeds here: this notation represents a potentially infinite series of iterations, in which n represents the current iteration. The result of the previous iteration — represented as z(n – 1) — is used as input for the next. The variable c is assumed to be a complex number, meaning it can be plotted onto the X and Y axes of a Cartesian coordinate system.)

The Mandelbrot set produces the most famous and immediately recognizable visual pattern in the field of fractals.

At this point I’d like to give you a chance to explore the Mandelbrot set for yourself, via the little program embedded below. You can pan around by holding down the left mouse button and dragging in the desired direction; drill down deeper into the image by holding down the right button and dragging to select the region you’d like to magnify; and undo each step you’ve previously made by clicking the middle button. Notice how this infinite space is made up of similar patterns that are nevertheless never quite exactly the same.

Now for the caveats: as you zoom in to ever-greater levels of magnification, the picture begins to break down and lose detail. This is not a reflection of the pure mathematics of fractal geometry, but rather a byproduct of the computing reality of limited number precision and limited processing power, especially given that this is implemented in the relatively slow language of JavaScript. Any computerized exploration of fractals is inevitably bounded by such considerations, as well as by the resolution of the individual pixels that form the patterns. Eventually my program will not let you zoom in further at all, a concession to these realities; when you reach the point that your zooms don’t take anymore, you’ll have to zoom out by clicking the middle button to continue your explorations. Due to its processing demands, not to mention the lack of handy mouse buttons, I don’t recommend that you try to play with this program on your phones or tablets. (If these limitations smart, you might want to consider how far we’ve come; a typical 68000-based computer of the 1980s would have required hours to generate each new image.)

See http://studio.processingtogether.com/sp/pad/iframe/ro.9t9xz2oW3-HfB/rev.378?autostart=0

As useful and oddly beautiful as fractal lines like the ones produced by the Mandelbrot set can be, they’re only the beginning. Fractal planes are also possible, existing in some fractional limbo between two and three dimensions. Just as a plane is in this formulation an infinitely complicated line, a solid is an infinitely “wrinkled” plane. And just as fractal lines are perfect for representing coastlines and leaves, fractal planes can easily become mountains. The striking pictures shown below were computer-generated by Richard F. Voss in 1983 using only fractal equations.

It’s also possible — mathematically, that is — to go further, to produce fractals that strain toward a fourth (or higher) dimension. However, representing them becomes a problem given our three-dimensional world. We can only show a three-dimensional slice of these fractals. Doing so produces some strange shapes indeed, like the “dragons” of Alan Norton.

Benoit Mandelbrot published his magnum opus, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, in 1982; it still remains the definitive book on the subject. It’s a strange sort of mathematics text, in which Mandelbrot devotes at least as much space to philosophical digressions into the implications of his discoveries as he does to proofs and equations, and that much space again to lots of beautiful color slides of the fractals themselves. With the book’s publication, the theory of fractals became an example of a rare phenomenon indeed: a development in abstract higher mathematics that was taken up and trumpeted widely and excitedly by not just the likes of Scientific American (which devoted many, many articles to the subject) but also mainstream magazines, newspapers, even television broadcasts. As is all too typical of any new media plaything, fractals were hyped as useful for everything short of curing cancer — and I suspect that some wouldn’t put that past them either. Not only could physicists use them to understand the motions of molecules and and biologists to understand the growth of plants, but some researchers claimed that fractal music was a possibility, while others claimed that they could help you get rich by revealing the “hidden patterns” that govern the stock market. In a 1984 article for Byte magazine, Peter R. Sørensen waxed effusive: “their uses range from physics, biology, and sociology, to art and even motion-picture scene simulation.” While I’m hardly qualified to speak to their uses in the former three scientific disciplines, I do feel fairly confident in claiming that they have had the greatest impact on those latter two, mushier categories, especially if we preface “art” with the word “computer” and allow computer games to slip in under that label.

Tellingly, Mandelbrot was employed at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center at the time he wrote The Fractal Geometry of Nature; all of the images found within it were generated by the computers there. Many fractal equations, including some of the most beautiful, aren’t complex at all in themselves, but the need to iterate through them so many times to produce their solution sets means that the science of fractals could exist only as a theory without the aid of computers. The first primitive computerized fractal visualizations had been produced by Robert W. Brooks and Peter Matelski in 1978, just three years after Mandelbrot first codified his theories. Virtually from that time forward fractals were inseparable from the computers needed to properly generate and study them.

Many people got their first glimpse of fractals before the hype started in earnest, in a remarkable sequence of computer-generated special effects included in 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/genesis.mp4

The creators of the sequence were the Lucasfilm Graphics Group, a collection of software and hardware engineers whom George Lucas had started putting together in 1979. These folks, whose numbers included such soon-to-be computer-graphics legends as Alvy Ray Smith, designed and built all of the hardware and software used to create sequences like this one. In 1986, the Graphics Group would be spun off to become an independent company whose name you might know: Pixar.

When Lucasfilm elected to start a computer-games division shortly after the sequence shown above was created, it was natural for it to draw inspiration, technologies, and even personnel from the Graphics Group. One of Lucasfilm’s first two games, Rescue on Fractalus!, proudly bears its graphical underpinnings and its status as the first game to make significant use of fractals right there in its title. (By way of continuing the theme, the alien enemies you fight are called the “Jaggies,” a reference to the ugly pixelized artifacts that are one of a computer artist’s worst enemies.) The game sparked great interest from its first press preview in May of 1984, thanks to its endlessly varied mountainous terrain, generated on the fly using fractal algorithms.

See //www.youtube.com/embed/PUUlo_vA1u8

In the wake of Rescue on Fractalus! fractals were suddenly everywhere in the computing press; I’m not sure there was a single magazine that didn’t publish at least one big feature article on the subject over the next few years. The appeal of fractals to programmers was obvious, and had little to do with Mandelbrot’s esoteric philosophies about geometry and nature. Irregular, natural-looking landscapes had previous been dauntingly hard to craft for games — hard not only because they were a pain to draw but also and predominately because they were so un-amenable to compression algorithms and, indeed, to virtually all of the many innovative techniques programmers had discovered to store graphics data using minimal memory. Thus the distinctly regular, blocky graphics that were the norm, and the shock that was Rescue on Fractalus! Much like the Fibonacci-derived galaxies of Elite, fractals let programmers create whole landscapes generatively, from only an equation and a few seed numbers. They had their limitations, not least the amount of processing power that had to be allocated to generating them — Rescue on Fractalus! runs at all of 5 or 6 frames per second — but for many applications they seemed like magic. It was not a coincidence that after 1984 virtual landscapes started to become markedly richer and more natural.

But fractals did more than just make games prettier; they opened up whole new realms of possibility for them. The bit of video below, from a remarkable game that will be the topic of another article I’ll be publishing soon, may not look like much in contrast to some of what you’ve already seen today. Yet consider that, thanks to the magic of fractals, the planet being landed on is one of thousands to be topographically mapped in its entirety, and that you can land on it absolutely anywhere you like, zooming in from space to touch down where you will just as you can zoom and pan and explore the Mandelbrot set via the toy embedded into this article. Each of these unique worlds is generated using just a few numbers, a bare handful of bytes of precious memory.

See video at: http://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/landing.mp4

Fractals aren’t quite the media darlings they once were; many other shiny objects have come and gone since the 1980s. And while they remain a valuable tool in many branches of science, they’re no longer viewed there either as the revolution they once were. You certainly don’t hear much anymore about fractal music or using fractals to play the stock market. Likewise, they’re now just another item in a game programmer’s bag of tricks. Still, they retain a fascination and beauty all their own. In that spirit, have fun in any further explorations you undertake, and if you discover any interesting patterns using my little toy above, or if you create any enhancements on the Studio Sketchpad site that hosts it, by all means let me know.

(As noted in the article proper, old computer magazines are an embarrassment of riches when it comes to information on fractals. Particularly good articles are in found in the Byte of March 1984, September 1984, and June 1986; the 80 Microcomputing of December 1984; the Ahoy! of April 1987; the Amazing of March 1989, July 1989, October 1989, January 1990, June 1990, and April 1991; the Compute! of January 1983; and the A.N.A.L.O.G. of January 1986.

And since we’re in a multimedia sort of mood today, check out this song about the Mandelbrot set, sent to me by reader Rick Reynolds.)

Comments
15 Responses

- Felix

October 3, 2014 at 12:25 pm

The way you describe Mandelbrot’s book reminds me of something Solomon Marcus once said: that a well-written mathematical treatise should have as much plain language as it does equations. A book with too much math and not enough explanations, he continued, is a sign that the author doesn’t understand the subject matter.

That said, I haven’t read Mandelbrot’s book; but I’ve read The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants, another great work on the topic, and found it absolutely fascinating. Not to mention that software like Arbaro, the likes of which are vital to modern game development, still uses the same basic principles.

I’ve never dealt in fractals as such myself; but many forms of procedural generation, such as the humble binary space partitioning, are related to them, and it’s useful to be aware of that.

- Jimmy Maher

October 3, 2014 at 12:43 pm

I definitely agree with Marcus, and try to use that philosophy as a guide to my own writing.

- Marshal Tenner Winter

October 3, 2014 at 12:29 pm

Reality is just various divisions of space in a fractal-structured vacuum.

- David Boddie

October 3, 2014 at 1:20 pm

There is a fascinating interview with Mandelbrot on the Web of Stories site.

- Lex Spoon

October 3, 2014 at 1:22 pm

I love fractals and spent much of my youth on reading about them and writing programs to draw them.

Also, Starflight is the most enjoyable game I’ve ever played. What a nice memory that screenshot brings back for me. It has a great combination of open-world exploration, RPG-like ship upgrades, and tactical combat that is just hard enough to make it fun. Also, the story behind all the alien races and abandoned relics sites goes together quite well, I thought. It’s a gem of a game.

I attribute a lot of Starflight’s charm to the way its design allowed the team to experiment and iterate. The procedurally generated planets meant that they could change the whole universe just by tweaking the generator; imagine how hard it would be to, say, add more ice, if all the planets were hand made.

Similarly, Starflight kept all its conversation in text files, which made it possible to change the aliens’ stories just by a quick edit to a few files. Contrast this to voice acting, where any change is going to require getting an expensive voice actor back into the studio.

This latter connects to generated content, including fractals, is is not where games get the bulk of their content these days. Games can be distributed with gigabytes of data rather than kilobytes, and high-end games have large enough budgets to hire lots of professional artists. Given that combination, it usually makes more sense to let the artists use whatever tools they like, and then to include the hand-made bitmaps for everything in the final deployed game. So, generated content is used more for incidental things like water, clouds, snow, things like that.

As a pedantic note, fractals are math, not science. Real-world coast lines really do have a different length depending on what size ruler you use, and fractals do nothing to change this.

Worth mentioning is that the dream of fractal compression never came to fruition. That slow failure led to part of the deflation of interest in fractals in the popular press and in grade-school education. I’m not sure they were ever super-popular among mathematicians and scientists.

- Jimmy Maher

October 3, 2014 at 2:17 pm

“Science” has been dully replaced with “mathematics.” More importantly, thanks for your cogent observations on Starflight. I may just have to steal some of that for the article. :)

- Dannii

October 3, 2014 at 1:48 pm

Not to diminish your Mandlebrot implementation Jimmy (which has really nice code!), but if it runs a bit slow on your computer (like it does on mine) then you might like to try this one: http://mandelbrot-set.com/

- Ken Rutsky

October 3, 2014 at 2:40 pm

Great article. Not much to add as I’m fairly math-illiterate, but just a little edit:

” …hard not only because they were a pain to draw but also and predominately because they were so un-amendable to compression algorithms…”

Should be “un-amenable.”

- Jimmy Maher

October 3, 2014 at 2:50 pm

Thanks!

- Matthew

October 3, 2014 at 6:13 pm

Oooh! Starflight! Without question one of my favorite games of all time. I’m looking forward to your article on it.

BTW, don’t forget that it was written in Forth. I’ve long had a goal to learn enough Forth to see if it can be ported to a modern environment….

- matt w

October 3, 2014 at 7:06 pm

I think if fractals aren’t the media darlings they once were it may just be that they’ve gone completely mainstream. More six-year-olds know the word “fractal” than “polygon” today, I reckon, because “fractal” appears in the lyrics to “Let It Go” (from Frozen).

- Keith Palmer

October 3, 2014 at 10:08 pm

I sort of feel like I didn’t catch on to fractals, and the Mandelbrot set in particular, quite as fast as some other people did (just as I wasn’t quite as fast with my own reply as other people were), or maybe it was just that I didn’t put the various things I’d seen about “fractals” together until I became fully aware of the Mandelbrot set through an article in the Color Computer magazine The Rainbow in January of 1990. It had a program to generate the set, written in BASIC; we left the computer on all night just to get that very first image. After that, I remember Arthur C. Clarke hyping the Mandelbrot set in The Ghost From the Grand Banks, along with benign computer viruses to save the financial world from Y2K (although that impending crisis didn’t have that name yet), retouching cigarettes out of old movies so that people wouldn’t turn them off in disgust, and a Rubik’s Cube where all the sides were touchscreens to make it that much more complicated to solve.

Rescue on Fractalus was ported to the Color Computer 3, however, and I can at least say it was more fun to play than Flight Simulator II. I actually bought Starflight from GOG a while back, but haven’t started playing it yet…

- Jimmy Maher

October 4, 2014 at 7:05 am

“More fun to play than Flight Simulator II.” Damning with faint praise, eh? ;)

- Rowan Lipkovits

October 4, 2014 at 12:54 am

I remember my introduction to fractals was in Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park, a seemingly out-of-left-field thread tying the chaos theorist to, well, the entropy of systems.

- Bernie Paul

October 11, 2014 at 1:28 pm

As always, your latest article brings back memories from the halcyon days of personal computing : I used something called “Vista Pro” (back when Windows was in diapers) on my 68020-equipped Amiga 2000 to play around with generation of virtual landscapes. This was probably around 1990 and what lured me into it where all those articles you mentioned, and especially the pictures published on the covers an ads of magazines like “Amiga World” , very similar to the ones you put into the post.
Oh, and thank very much for providing us old farts (i’m 36) with such a wonderful space to remember a time when computers where used for something different than facebook, twitter, bejeweled and MMORPG’s.

Send in the Clones
October 10, 2014

In computer parlance, a clone is Company B’s copycat version of Company A’s computer that strains to be as software and hardware compatible with its inspiration as possible. For a platform to make an attractive target for cloning, it needs to meet a few criteria. The inspiration needs to be simple and/or well-documented enough that it’s practical for another company — and generally a smaller company at that, with far fewer resources at its disposal — to create a compatible knock-off in the first place. Then the inspiration needs to be successful enough that it’s spawned an attractive ecosystem that lots of people want to be a part of. And finally, there needs to be something preventing said people from joining said ecosystem by, you know, simply buying the machine that’s about to be cloned. Perhaps Company A, believing it has a lock on the market, keeps the price above what many otherwise interested people are willing or able to pay; perhaps Company A has simply neglected to do business in a certain part of the world filled with eager would-be buyers.

Clones have been with us almost from the moment that the trinity of 1977 kicked off the PC revolution in earnest. The TRS-80 was the big early winner of the trio thanks to its relatively low price and wide distribution through thousands of Radio Shack stores, outselling the Apple II in its first months by margins of at least twenty to one (as for the Commodore PET, it was the Bigfoot of the three, occasionally glimpsed in its natural habitat of trade-show booths but never available in a form you could actually put your hands on until well into 1978). The first vibrant, non-business-focused commercial software market in history sprung up around the little Trash 80. Cobbled together on an extreme budget out of generic parts that were literally just lying around at Radio Shack — the “monitor,” for instance, was just a cheap Radio Shack television re-purposed for the role — the TRS-80 was eminently cloneable. Doing so didn’t make a whole lot of sense in North America, where Radio Shack’s volume manufacturing and distribution system would be hard advantages to overcome. But Radio Shack had virtually no presence outside of North America, where there were nevertheless plenty of enthusiasts eager to join the revolution.

A shindig for EACA distributors in Hong Kong. Shortly after this photo was taken, Eric Chung, third from right in front, would abscond with $10 million and that would be that for EACA.

The most prominent of the number of TRS-80 cloners that had sprung up by 1980 was a rather shady Hong Kong-based company called EACA, who made cheap clones for any region of the world with distributors willing to buy them. Their knock-offs popped up in Europe under the name “The Video Genie”; in Australasia as the “Dick Smith System 80,” distributed under the auspices of Dick Smith Electronics, the region’s closest equivalent to Radio Shack; even in North America as the “Personal Micro Computers PMC-80.” EACA ended in dramatic fashion in 1983 when founder Eric Chuang absconded to Taiwan with all of his company’s assets that he could liquify, $10 million worth, stuffed into his briefcase. He or his descendents are presumably still living the high life there today.

By the time of those events, the TRS-80’s heyday was already well past, its position as the most active and exciting PC platform long since having been assumed by the Apple II, which had begun a surge to the fore in the wake of the II Plus model of 1979. The Apple II was if anything an even more tempting target for cloners than the TRS-80. While Steve Wozniak’s hardware design is justly still remembered as a marvel of compact elegance, it was also built entirely from readily available parts, lacking the complex and difficult-to-duplicate custom chips of competitors like Atari and Commodore. Wozniak had also insisted that every last diode on the Apple II’s circuit board be meticulously documented for the benefit of hackers just like him. And Apple, then as now, maintained some of the highest profit margins in the industry, creating a huge opportunity for a lean-and-mean cloner to undercut them.

A Franklin Ace 1000 mixed and matched with a genuine Apple floppy drive.

Assorted poorly distributed Far Eastern knock-offs aside, the first really viable Apple II clone arrived in mid-1982 in the form of the Franklin Ace line. The most popular model, the Ace 1000, offered for about 25 percent less than a II Plus complete hardware and software compatibility while also having more memory as well as luxuries like a numeric keypad and upper- and lowercase letter input. The Ace terrified Apple. With the Apple III having turned into a disaster, Apple remained a one-platform company, completely dependent on continuing Apple II sales — and continuing high Apple II profit margins — to fund not one but two hugely ambitious, hugely innovative, and hugely expensive new platform initiatives, Lisa and Macintosh. A viable market in Apple II workalikes which cut seriously into sales, or that forced price cuts, could bring everything down around their ears. Already six months before the Ace actually hit the market, as soon as they got word of Franklin’s plans, Apple’s lawyers were therefore looking for a way to challenge Franklin in court and drive their machine from the market.

As it turned out, the basis for a legal challenge wasn’t hard to find. Yes, the Apple II’s unexceptional hardware would seem to be fair game — but the machine’s systems software was not. Apple quickly confirmed that, like most of the TRS-80 cloners, Franklin had simply copied the contents of the II’s ROM chips; even bugs and the secret messages Apple’s programmers had hidden inside them were still there in Franklin’s versions. A triumphant Apple rushed to federal court to seek a preliminary injunction to keep the Ace off the market until the matter was decided through a trial. Much to their shocked dismay, the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania found the defense offered by Franklin’s legal team compelling enough to deny the injuction. The Ace came out right on schedule that summer of 1982, to good reviews and excellent sales.

Franklin’s defense sounds almost unbelievable today. They readily admitted that they had simply copied the contents of the ROM chips. They insisted, however, that the binary code contained on the chips, being a machine-generated sequence of 1s and 0s that existed only inside the chips and that couldn’t be reasonably read by a human, was not a form of creative expression and thus not eligible for copyright protection in the first place. In Franklin’s formulation, only the human-readable source code used to create the binary code stored on the ROM chips, which Franklin had no access to and no need for given that they had the binary code, was copyrightable. It was an audacious defense to say the least, one which if accepted would tear down the legal basis for the entire software industry. After all, how long would it take someone to leap to the conclusion that some hot new game, stored only in non-human-readable form on a floppy disk, was also ineligible for copyright protection? Astonishingly, when the case got back to the District Court for a proper trial the judge again sided with Franklin, stating that “there is some doubt as to the copyrightability of the programs described in this litigation,” in spite of an earlier case, Williams Electronics, Inc. v. Arctic International, Inc., which quite clearly had established binary code as copyrightable. Only in August of 1983 was the lower court’s ruling overturned by the Federal Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. A truculent Franklin threatened to appeal to the Supreme Court, but finally agreed to a settlement that January that demanded they start using their own ROMs if they wanted to keep cloning Apple IIs.

Apple Computer, Inc., v. Franklin Computer Corp. still stands today as a landmark in technology jurisprudence. It firmly and finally established the copyrightable status of software regardless of its form of distribution. And it of course also had an immediate impact on would-be cloners, making their lives much more difficult than before. With everyone now perfectly clear on what was and wasn’t legal, attorney David Grais clarified the process cloners would need to follow to avoid lawsuits in an episode of Computer Chronicles:

You have to have one person prepare a specification of what the program [the systems software] is supposed to do, and have another person who’s never seen the [original] program write a program to do it. If you can persuade a judge that the second fellow didn’t copy from the [original] code, then I think you’ll be pretty safe.

After going through this process, Apple II cloners needed to end up with systems software that behaved absolutely identically to the original. Every system call needed to take the exact same amount of time that it did on a real Apple II; each of the original software’s various little quirks and bugs needed to be meticulously duplicated. Anything less would bring with it incompatibility, because there was absolutely nothing in those ROMs that some enterprising hacker hadn’t used in some crazy, undocumented, unexpected way. This was a tall hurdle indeed, one which neither Franklin nor any other Apple II cloner was ever able to completely clear. New Franklins duly debuted with the new, legal ROMs, and duly proved to be much less compatible and thus much less desirable than the older models. Franklin left the Apple-cloning business within a few years in favor of hand-held dictionaries and thesauri.

There is, however, still another platform to consider, one on which the cloners would be markedly more successful: the IBM PC. The open or (better said) modular architecture of the IBM PC was not, as so many popular histories have claimed, a sign of a panicked or slapdash design process. It was rather simply the way that IBM did business. Back in the 1960s the company had revolutionized the world of mainframe computing with the IBM System/360, not a single computer model but a whole extended family of hardware and software designed to plug and play together in whatever combination best suited a customer’s needs. It was this product line, the most successful in IBM’s history, that propelled them to the position of absolute dominance of big corporate computing that they still enjoyed in the 1980s, and that reduced formerly proud competitors to playing within the house IBM had built by becoming humble “Plug-Compatible Manufacturers” selling peripherals that IBM hadn’t deigned to provide — or, just as frequently, selling clones of IBM’s products for lower prices. Still, the combined profits of all the cloners remained always far less than those of IBM itself; it seemed that lots of businesses wanted the security that IBM’s stellar reputation guaranteed, and were willing to pay a bit extra for it. IBM may have thought the PC market would play out the same way. If so, they were in for a rude surprise.

The IBM PC was also envisioned as not so much a computer as the cornerstone of an ever-evolving, interoperable computing family that could live for years or decades. Within three years of the original machine’s launch, you could already choose from two CPUs, the original Intel 8088 or the new 80286; could install as little as 16 K of memory or as much as 640 K; could choose among four different display cards, from the text-only Monochrome Display Adapter to the complicated and expensive CAD-oriented Professional Graphics Controller; could choose from a huge variety of other peripherals: floppy and hard disks, tape backup units, modems, printer interfaces, etc. The unifying common denominator amongst all this was a common operating system, MS-DOS, which had quickly established itself as the only one of the four operating paradigms supported by the original IBM PC that anyone actually used. Here we do see a key difference between the System/360 and the IBM PC, one destined to cause IBM much chagrin: whereas the former ran an in-house-developed IBM operating system, the operating system of the latter belonged to Microsoft.

The IBM architecture was different from that of the Apple II in that its operating system resided on disk, to be booted into memory at system startup, rather than being housed in ROM. Still, every computer needs to have some code in ROM. On an IBM PC, this code was known as the “Basic Input/Output System,” or BIOS, a nomenclature borrowed from the CP/M-based machines that preceded it. The BIOS was responsible on startup for doing some self-checks and configuration and booting the operating system from disk. It also contained a set of very basic, very low-level routines to do things like read from and write to the disks, detect keyboard input, or display text on the screen; these would be called constantly by MS-DOS and, very commonly, by applications as well while the machine was in operation. The BIOS was the one piece of software for the IBM PC that IBM themselves had written and owned, and for obvious reasons they weren’t inclined to share it with anyone else. Two small companies, Corona Labs and Eagle Computer, would simply copy IBM’s BIOS a la Franklin. It took the larger company all of one day to file suit and force complete capitulation and market withdrawal when those machines came to their attention in early 1984.

Long before those events, other wiser would-be cloners recognized that creating a workalike, “clean-room” version of IBM’s BIOS would be the key to executing a legal IBM clone. The IBM PC’s emphasis on modularity and future expansion meant that it was a bit more forgiving in this area than the likes of the more tightly integrated Apple II. Yet an IBM-compatible BIOS would still be a tricky business, fraught with technical and financial risk.

As the IBM PC was beginning to ship, a trio of Texas Instruments executives named Rod Canion, James Harris, and William Murto were kicking around ideas for getting out from under what they saw as a growing culture of non-innovation inside TI. Eager to start a business of their own, they considered everything from a Mexican restaurant to household gadgets like a beeper for finding lost keys. Eventually they started to ask what the people around them at TI wanted but weren’t getting in their professional lives. They soon had their answer: a usable portable computer that executives and engineers could cart around with them on the road, and that was cheap enough that their purchasing managers wouldn’t balk. Other companies had explored this realm before, most notably the brief-lived Osborne Computer with the Osborne 1, but those products had fallen down badly in the usability sweepstakes; the Osborne 1, for example, had a 5-inch display screen the mere thought of which could prompt severe eye strain in those with any experience with the machine, disk drives that could store all of 91 K, and just 64 K of memory. Importantly, all of those older portables ran CP/M, until now the standard for business computing. Canion, Harris, and Murto guessed, correctly, that CP/M’s days were numbered in the wake of IBM’s adoption of MS-DOS. Not wanting to be tied to a dying operating system, they first considered making their own. Yet when they polled the big software publishers about their interest in developing for yet another new, incompatible machine the results were not encouraging. There was only one thing for it: they must find a way to make their portable compatible with the IBM PC. If they could bring out such a machine before IBM did, the spoils could be enormous. Prominent tech venture capitalist Ben Rosen agreed, investing $2.5 million to help found Compaq Computer Corporation in February of 1982. What with solid funding and their own connections within the industry, Canion, Harris, and Murto thought they could easily design a hardware-compatible portable that was better than anything else available at the time. That just left the software side.

Given Bill Gates’s reputation as the Machiavelli of the computer industry, we perhaps shouldn’t be surprised that some journalists have credited him with anticipating the rise of PC clones from well before the release of the first IBM PC. That, however, is not the case. All indications are that Gates negotiated a deal that let Microsoft lease MS-DOS to IBM rather than sell it to them simply in the expectation that the IBM PC would be a big success, enough so that an ongoing licensing fee would amount to far more than a lump-sum payout in the long run. Thus he was as surprised as anyone when Compaq and a few other early would-be cloners contacted him to negotiate MS-DOS license deals for their own machines. Of course, Gates being Gates, it took him all of about ten minutes to grasp the implications of what was being requested, and to start making deals that, not incidentally, actually paid considerably better than the one he’d already made with IBM.

The BIOS would be a tougher nut to crack, the beachhead on which this invasion of Big Blue’s turf would succeed or fail. Having quickly concluded that simply copying IBM’s ROMs wasn’t a wise option, Compaq hired a staff of fifteen programmers who would dedicate the months to come to creating a slavish imitation. Programmers with any familiarity at all with the IBM BIOS were known as “dirty,” and barred from working on the project. Instead of relying on IBM’s published BIOS specifications (which might very well be incorrect due to oversight or skulduggery), the team took the thirty biggest applications on the market and worked through them one at a time, analyzing each BIOS call each program made and figuring out through trial and error what response it needed to receive. The two trickiest programs, which would go on to become a sort of stress test for clone compatibility both inside and outside of Compaq, proved to be Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Before the end of the year, Compaq was previewing their new portable to press and public and working hard to set up a strong dealer network. For the latter task they indulged in a bit of headhunting: they hired away from IBM H. L. ”Sparky” Sparks, the man who had set up the IBM PC dealer network. Knowing all too well how dealers thought and what was most important to them, Sparks instituted a standard expected dealer markup of 36 percent, versus the 33 percent offered by IBM, thus giving them every reason to look hard at whether a Compaq might meet a customer’s needs just as well or better than a machine from Big Blue.

Compaq’s first computer, the Portable

Savvy business realpolitik like that became a hallmark of Compaq. Previously clones had been the purview of small upstarts, often with a distinct air of the fly-by-night about them. The suburban-Houston-based Compaq, though, was different, not only from other cloners but also from the established companies of Silicon Valley. Compaq was older, more conservative, interested in changing the world only to the extent that that meant more Compaq computers on desks and in airplane luggage racks. ”I don’t think you could get a 20-year-old to not try to satisfy his ego by ‘improving’ on IBM,” said J. Steven Flannigan, the man who led the BIOS reverse-engineering effort. “When you’re fat, balding, and 40, and have a lot of patents already, you don’t have to try.” That attitude was something corporate purchasing managers could understand. Indeed, Compaq bore with it quite a lot of the same sense of comforting stolidity as did IBM itself. Not quite the first to hit the market with an IBM clone with a “clean” BIOS (that honor likely belongs to Columbia Data Products, a much scruffier sort of operation that would be out of business by 1985), Compaq nevertheless legitimized the notion in the eyes of corporate America.

The worst possible 1980s airplane seatmate: a business traveler lugging along a Compaq Portable.

Yet the Compaq Portable that started shipping very early in 1983 also succeeded because it was an excellent and — Flannigan’s sentiments aside — innovative product. By coming out with their portable before IBM itself, Compaq showed that clones need not be mere slavish imitations of their inspirations distinguished only by a lower price. “Portable” in 1983 did not, mind you, mean what it does today. The Compaq Portable was bigger and heavier  — a full 28 pounds — than most desktop machines of today, something you manhandled around like a suitcase rather than slipping into a pocket or backpack. There wasn’t even a battery in the thing, meaning the businessperson on the go would likely be doing her “portable” computing only in her hotel room. Still, it was very thoughtfully designed within the technical constraints of its era; you could for instance attach it to a real monitor at your desk to enjoy color graphics in lieu of the little 9-inch monochrome screen that came built-in, a first step on the road to the ubiquitous laptop docking stations of today.

Launching fortuitously just as some manufacturing snafus and unexpected demand for the new PC/XT were making IBM’s own computers hard to secure in some places, the Compaq Portable took off like a rocket. Compaq sold 53,000 of them for $111 million in sales that first year, a record for a technology startup. IBM, suddenly in the unaccustomed position of playing catch-up, released their own portable the following year with fewer features but — and this was truly shocking — a lower price than the Compaq Portable; by forcing high-and-mighty IBM to compete on price, Compaq seemed to have somehow turned the world on its head. The IBM Portable PC was a notable commercial failure, first sign of IBM’s loosening grip on the monster they had birthed. Meanwhile Compaq launched their own head-to-head challenge that same year with the DeskPro line of desktop machines, to much greater success. Apple may have been attacking IBM in melodramatic propaganda films and declaring themselves and IBM to be locked in a battle of Good versus Evil, but IBM hardly seemed to notice the would-be Apple freedom fighters. The only company that really mattered to IBM, the only company that scared them, wasn’t sexy Apple but buttoned-down, square-jawed Compaq.

But Compaq was actually far from IBM’s only problem. Cloning just kept getting easier, for everyone. In the spring of 1984 two little companies called Award Software and Phoenix Technologies announced identical products almost simultaneously: a reverse-engineered, completely legal IBM-compatible BIOS which they would license to anyone who felt like using it to make a clone. Plenty of companies did, catapulting Award and Phoenix to the top of what was soon a booming niche industry (they would eventually resolve their rivalry the way that civilized businesspeople do it, by merging). With the one significant difficulty of cloning thus removed, making a new clone became almost a triviality, a matter of ordering up a handful of components along with MS-DOS and an off-the-shelf BIOS, slapping it all together, and shoving it out the door; the ambitious hobbyist could even do it in her home if she liked. By 1986, considerably more clones were being sold than IBMs, whose own sales were stagnant or even decreasing.

That year Intel started producing the 80386, the third generation of the line of CPUs that powered the IBM PC and its clones. IBM elected to wait a bit before making use of it, judging that the second-generation 80286, which they had incorporated into the very successful PC/AT in 1984, was still plenty powerful  for the time being. It was a bad decision, predicated on a degree dominance which IBM no longer enjoyed. Smelling opportunity, Compaq made their own 80386-based machine, the DeskPro 386, the first to sport the hot new chip. Prior to this machine, the cloners had always been content to let IBM pave the way of such fundamental advances. The DeskPro 386 marks Compaq’s — and the clone industry’s — coming of age. No longer just floating along in the wake of IBM, tinkering with form factors, prices, and feature sets, now they were driving events. Already in November of 1985, Bill Machrone of PC Magazine had seen where this was leading: “Now that it [IBM] has created the market, the market doesn’t necessarily need IBM for the machines.” We see here business computing going through its second fundamental shift (the first being the transition from CP/M to MS-DOS). What was an ecosystem of IBM and IBM clones now became a set of sometimes less-than-ideal, sometimes accidental, but nevertheless agreed-upon standards that were bigger than IBM or anyone else. IBM, Machrone wrote, “had better conform” to the standards or face the consequences just like anyone else. Tellingly, it’s at about this time that we see the phrase “IBM clone” begin to fade, to be replaced by “MS-DOS machine” or “Intel-based machine.”

The emerging Microsoft/Intel juggernaut (note the lack of an “IBM” in there) would eventually conquer the home as well. Already by the mid-1980s certain specimens of the breed were beginning to manifest features that could make them attractive for the home user. Let’s rewind just slightly to look at the most important of them, which I’ve mentioned in a couple of earlier articles but have never really given its full due.

When the folks at Radio Shack, trying to figure out what to do with their aging, fading TRS-80 line, saw the ill-fated IBM PCjr, they saw things well worth salvaging in its 16-color graphics chip and its three-voice sound synthesizer, both far superior to the versions found in its big brothers. Why not clone those pieces, package them into an otherwise fairly conventional PC clone, and sell the end result as the perfect all-around computer, one which could run all the critical business applications but could also play games in the style to which kids with Commodore 64s were accustomed? Thanks to the hype that had accompanied the PCjr’s launch, there were plenty of publishers out there with huge inventories of games and other software that supported the PCjr’s audiovisuals, inventories they’d be only too eager to unload on Radio Shack cheap. With those titles to prime the pump, who knew where things might go…

Launched in late 1984, the Tandy 1000 was the first IBM clone to be clearly pitched not so much at business as at the ordinary consumer. In addition to the audiovisual enhancements and very aggressive pricing, it included DeskMate, a sort of proto-GUI operating environment designed to insulate the user from the cryptic MS-DOS command prompt while giving access to six typical home applications that came built right in. A brilliant little idea all the way around, the Tandy 1000 rescued Radio Shack from the brink of computing irrelevance. It also proved a godsend for many software publishers who’d bet big on the PCjr; John Williams credits it with literally saving Sierra by providing a market for King’s Quest, a game Sierra had developed for the PCjr at horrendous expense and to underwhelming sales given that platform’s commercial failure. Indeed, the Tandy 1000 became so popular that it prompted lots of game publishers to have a second look at the heretofore dull beige world of the clones. As they jumped aboard the MS-DOS gravy train, many made sure to take advantage of the Tandy 1000’s audiovisual enhancements. Thousands of titles would eventually blurb what became known as “Tandy graphics support” on their boxes and advertisements. Having secured the business market, the Intel/Microsoft architecture’s longer, more twisting road to hegemony over home computing began in earnest with the Tandy 1000. And meanwhile poor IBM couldn’t even get proper credit for the graphics standard they’d actually invented. Sometimes you just can’t win for losing.

Another sign of the nascent but inexorably growing power of Intel/Microsoft in the home would come soon after the Tandy 1000, with the arrival of the first game to make many Apple, Atari, and Commodore owners wish that they had a Tandy 1000 or, indeed, even one of its less colorful relatives. We’ll get to that soon — no, really! — but first we have just one more detour to take.

(I was spoiled for choice on sources this time. A quick rundown of periodicals: Creative Computing of January 1983; Byte of January 1983, November 1984, and August 1985; PC Magazine of January 1987; New York Times of November 5 1982, October 26 1983, January 5 1984, February 1 1984, and February 22 1984; Fortune of February 18 1985. Computer Wars by Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris is a pretty book book-length study of IBM’s trials and tribulations during this period. More information on the EACA clones can be found at Terry Stewart’s site. More on Compaq’s roots in Houston can be found at the Texas Historical Association. A few more invaluable links are included in the article proper.)

Comments
37 Responses

- Ken Rutsky

October 10, 2014 at 4:16 pm

My oldest brother was very into home computers early and kept up with all the new advances in the early ’80s. I remember this era fairly well…clones suddenly seemed to sprout up everywhere; Service Merchandise had several on floor display. Interesting to learn the background to it all.

A couple typos:

“But Compaq was actually far from IBM’s only problem. Cloning just kept easier, for everyone. ”

Should be “…just kept _gettting_ easier…”?

(I had spotted another but then I got a phone call and now can’t find it, ha)

- Ken Rutsky

October 10, 2014 at 4:20 pm

Found it…

“..a game Sierra had developed for the PCjr at horrendous expensive and to underwhelming sales…”

Should be “expense?”

(you seem to appreciate this sort of thing; I don’t normally nit-pick like this, honest…)

- Jimmy Maher

October 10, 2014 at 5:44 pm

I do indeed appreciate it, as I’m sure will the readers who come along later. Thanks!

- David Boddie

October 10, 2014 at 11:44 pm

Found another one. ;-)

“Let’s rewind just slightly to look at the most important of them, one of [which] I’ve mentioned in a couple of earlier articles but have never really given its full due.”

- Jimmy Maher

October 11, 2014 at 7:51 am

Thanks!

- Felix

October 10, 2014 at 4:46 pm

Oh, the memories. My first computer was a Cobra, a ZX Spectrum clone assembled by local college students out of Russian components, likely based on unofficial schematics that must have circulated at the time; there were certainly shops able to fix the machines as well. Each Cobra was slightly different because of that. More advanced models for example had function keys, a software monitor, built-in assembler and so on. Mine was merely overclocked (I don’t know how much), so that some of the most interesting games were unplayable. And yes, I suspect the ROM was simply copied bit-by-bit from the original. But by then (1992 or so) the original was already on the way out, and who was Sinclair supposed to shake down, some poor students from a country just out of Communism?

- Felix

October 10, 2014 at 4:52 pm

I forgot to mention that my Cobra was housed in the case and keyboard from an HC-85, an “official” Romanian clone of the Speccy — Bucharest manufacturer ICE Felix even cloned the later +2/+3 models. By the time they moved on to PC clones though, they could no longer offer competitive prices (due to obsolete assembly lines), and folded a few years later. And prices had to be competitive, the country being quite poor at the time.

- Felix

October 10, 2014 at 4:58 pm

Oh and since I mentioned PC clones, I should mention that my second computer — not counting the Chinese NES clone (so many clones!) — actually was by ICE Felix, a Junior 86 built like a tank and compatible with the IBM PC/XT. It shipped with 640K of RAM, a 10-inch green screen (not a big loss considering the CGA adapter) and sadly no HDD. But the 5.25″ floppies were remarkably robust. I had to pay someone to install me a serial port expansion though, so I could use a mouse. Which I even learned how to program!

- Jimmy Maher

October 10, 2014 at 5:47 pm

At some point I’m going to have to do an article on computing inside the Soviet sphere…

- Infinitron

October 10, 2014 at 5:18 pm

John Williams or Ken Williams?

- Jimmy Maher

October 10, 2014 at 5:42 pm

John Williams, Ken’s little brother and the first employee Ken and Roberta hired.

- David Cornelson

October 10, 2014 at 6:40 pm

It’s also important to note that mail order catalogs of computer hardware, including whole cloned brands like PC-Brand, Swan, and later Dell completely changed the industry.

- Rowan Lipkovits

October 10, 2014 at 8:04 pm

IBM hardly seemed to notice the would-be Apple freedom fighters

You can acknowledge competition without respecting them: see the allegedly leaked IBM game “Attack” at http://www.mobygames.com/game/attack

- Keith Palmer

October 10, 2014 at 10:42 pm

This was a finely judged piece to me. I’m stuck admitting that as we roll into this period of history, I start dwelling on “might have beens” (however unlikely or outright fanciful) and even questioning whatever seems to me like a “whatever happened, happened for the best” attitude. Perhaps the thought that the IBM PC was designed to be added to, rather than duplicated (and used a CPU that had successors, thus allowing its architecture to be extended forward), is one I might not have been absolutely aware in times before, and therefore one I take notice of now.

I did take note of the mention of the TRS-80 clones, and I didn’t know just what had happened with the “EACA” ones before (although I also remembered there were other manufacturers in that game). When it comes to Apple II clones and the fate of Franklin, I do get to thinking the Laser 128 appeared a few years later and seemed to last a while (although it appeared in the fading years of the 8-bit Apple IIs, which might have made it look less threatening). Having noticed your complimentary mentions of the Tandy 1000 before, I do get to thinking that computer was actually preceded by a “MS-DOS” machine named the Tandy 2000, which was supposed to “build on the standard” (it used an 80186 before the PC AT used the 80286), but apparently couldn’t run much PC software straight out of the box unconverted and wound up in pretty much the fate you’d expect. I do have an impression there were other “incompatible MS-DOS computers” before the BIOS problem was really cracked, though…

- Jimmy Maher

October 11, 2014 at 8:10 am

Non-clone computers which ran MS-DOS were in fact fairly common for the first couple of years after the IBM PC debuted. These would run PC software that only used MS-DOS calls, never going directly to the BIOS, and also didn’t try to use graphics or anything else specific to the IBM hardware. The whole CP/M ecosystem was built on this level of compatibility, limiting as it was, so it was natural that in the beginning many thought/hoped the new MS-DOS order would be the same. Didn’t turn out that way, and those non-compatible compatibles ended up being pretty useless to the people who bought them.

And yeah, the IBM PC’s modular architecture was in its way visionary, and that’s something that goes oddly uncredited. It was never the sexiest design, but boy was it built to last. More than thirty years on, we’re still building on that original IBM PC, long after every other architecture of the 1980s or 1990s is long dead and buried. It always amuses me to read articles about how ugly and slapdash the IBM PC was, knowing that they’re almost certainly being written from a descendent of that ugly, slapdash design. Even Apple has surrendered and embraced the architecture, and now sell essentially an IBM PC with Apple DRM…

- Keith Palmer

October 11, 2014 at 1:22 pm

There does seem to have been much less angst over “the switch to Intel” among Macintosh users than had been imagined beforehand. Maybe that just proves we’re kind of shallow and don’t bother to think about machine architecture so long as the icons continue to default to the right-hand side of our desktops. I’m reminded even so of hearing there were apparently various possibilities in the early 1990s (beyond an early “port the Mac OS to x86” project that never went anywhere) for just what advanced operating system would succeed MS-DOS on the ubiquitous hardware…

- Lisa H.

October 11, 2014 at 5:40 am

This is off the topic of the specific post, but I often wonder what it is about your RSS feed that means I get comments on a post hours before I get the item that delivers the post itself…

Curious why this is tagged “starflight” when that isn’t mentioned in the post?

- Jimmy Maher

October 11, 2014 at 7:58 am

I don’t really know. It’s just the standard WP RSS system, nothing custom about it. Maybe because I always tend to end up making a number of little edits in the day or so after a post goes live, to correct typos, etc. Maybe that gets the feed out of sync.

It could also depend on the program/service you’re using to read the feed. Might try another… not necessarily to switch, but just to see if that fixes this problem so we at least know where it lies.

The Starflight tag is there because all of this will be very relevant to that game when we get there — i.e., if you read the (eventual) Starflight post alone you might have trouble completely understanding everything in it without referring back to these groundwork-building articles (or without already knowing the history that’s contained in them, as I’m sure many of you do).

- Lisa H.

October 12, 2014 at 1:59 am

Posts and comments are two separate feeds, actually. I guess they just run on slightly different schedules.

- Matthew

October 11, 2014 at 4:22 pm

Ah memories. When I was…6 I think? my father bought a Columbia Data Products machine (which was super expensive in Australia at the time, and had a whole 10 meg hard drive!). For the first few years it was a depressing gaming platform, with mostly just Infocom games available (mostly, *ahem* pirated), though there was Wizardry and Ultima, and all in the glory that is CGA; I was jealous of my friends with their C-64s and Atari 800s. When we finally got an AT clone with EGA it was a revolution (and since we are heading to Starflight (a game I legally owned and adored), there was a bug with it that made it not work on EGA…I wrote a letter to ECA and they very nicely wrote back with “send in $10 and we’ll send you a patched disk”, which I did, all the way from Australia, and they did).

Anyway, my question is around your reference to “four operating paradigms”. MS-DOS and CPM/86 of course; I’m guessing the other 2 are booting directly? (Which some, eg, flight simulator and Wizardry did) and I vaguely remember that the real IBMs had basic in ROM, is that the fourth?

BTW, are you going to turn these posts into a book? I’d totally buy it.

- Jimmy Maher

October 12, 2014 at 11:44 am

Actually the fourth operating paradigm was the BASIC environment that was housed in ROM on the original IBM PC, which would come up if the machine couldn’t find another operating system to boot. This was removed by the time of the PC/AT if not PC/XT, and was never included at all with most of the clones. (Which caused some incompatibility for just a few MS-DOS programs; there were ways to call routines on the BASIC ROMs from MS-DOS…)

And yeah, a book or… something… will come someday.

- Juan Castro

October 13, 2014 at 7:58 pm

If you do write a book, I call dibs on being the official translator for the Brazilian Portuguese edition. Speaking of which, may I translate this post for our blog? (With due credit and link of course.)

- Jimmy Maher

October 14, 2014 at 7:31 am

Feel free, for this post or any others. I just ask that you give proper credit and link back to the original.

- matthew

October 14, 2014 at 1:56 am

Thanks. The fact I never noticed the absence says it all. After all, gwbasic ran fine.

Actually, this post is making me realize something that I’ve never thought about before, which is what a good quality clone the Columbia really was. The fact the one we had was an XT clone makes me realize how faulty my memory is (as it must have been way later then I remember), and also means it was second generation,, but all the same, we owned it a long time and ran a lot of stuff and I don’t think we ever ran into a compatibility issues. And this includes a first generation Microsoft Mouse (Not serial, it had it’s own controller card in the XT bus), early Word and my father even somehow ended up beta testing Windows 1.0, which, in XT 4.77MHz and CGA was completely unusable, but that was not the clone’s fault. Makes me admire whoever it was who did all the various cleanroom re-implementation (especially as according to Wikipedia the Hard Drive controller was actually quite different tech).

As contrast, I had a friend who had an actual Compaq portable, and there was things his wouldn’t run mine would run just fine,.

Of course it also rubs in how pathetic the 80s era PC was as a gaming platform, since I don’t think anyone much was doing really interesting, platform expanding stuff based on undocumented features and the like, unlike the Atari/Commodore/etcs.

- Diego

October 29, 2014 at 3:26 pm

matthew, for “interesting, platform expanding stuff” related to PC video gaming and undocumented features, see the Graphics Programming Black Book (the Mode X sections in particular; the book is a free download) and also Masters of Doom. Apparently Commander Keen’s smooth scrolling was impressive to those who knew the graphics hardware. And there were things like DOS extenders and Unreal Mode that came later.

- Matthew

October 29, 2014 at 4:54 pm

Sure, but Mode X was VGA and 90s. Once the 90s hit the PC was a fine platform (still got my MT-32. Once in a while I boot up Wing Commander or the like and use it). I never remember seeing anything weird with CGA.

Though reading the wikipedia article on CGA, it looks like there were a couple of things you could do with it: There was a 160×100 16 color mode you could fake, and there were some games you could play if you had a composite monitor (not sure how many did though, I didn’t).

- Charlie Pye

October 12, 2014 at 7:19 am

Anyone else feel sympathy for Franklin, when reading this? They were making a better product for a lower price- every consumer would have benefited from that. And Apple could have used the competition- it’s ridiculously that they were able to coast on overpriced Apple IIs for as long as they did.

- Jimmy Maher

October 12, 2014 at 11:55 am

I think the obvious counterargument, not only in this case but in most cases of cloning, must be that Company A had done the hard work of coming up with the architecture, writing the code on the ROMs, etc., and they have to be able to recoup that investment through sales. Company B, which is just copying something someone else has already created, has nowhere near the initial R&D expenditure. It’s a general tenet of modern capitalist economies that there should be mechanisms to reward innovation.

In Apple’s specific case, a fan of the company might point out that they were using those high profit margins on obsolete hardware to fund some of the most ambitious, important projects of the decade in the form of Lisa and Macintosh. Whatever else you can say about Apple, they weren’t just hoarding their Apple II cash a la Scrooge McDuck.

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- Juan Castro

October 13, 2014 at 7:56 pm

Fun fact: the EACA Video Genie also turned up in Brazil as the Dismac D-8000. By the law then, computers had to ba assembled in Brazil, so all of those were illegal! Take a look:

https://picasaweb.google.com/116274228261327807745/D8000DoLaercioGuena

- Ken

October 14, 2014 at 5:13 am

Since my grandmother’s Tandy 1000 was the first MS-DOS machine I ever used as a kid (my family had a C64), I’ve been hoping for a nice in-depth article on it since I started reading this blog. Of course, I understood why you were spending so much time on bumbling Commodore and filthy, filthy Apple, but I must confess that I was a bit impatient.

- Dehumanizer

October 14, 2014 at 3:22 pm

Another sign of the nascent but inexorably growing power of Intel/Microsoft in the home would come soon after the Tandy 1000, with the arrival of the first game to make many Apple, Atari, and Commodore owners wish that they had a Tandy 1000 or, indeed, even one of its less colorful relatives. We’ll get to that next time.

Intriguing… so, it was a popular game, from 1985 or so, that was successful on the PC, and wasn’t available (or at least decent) for 8-bit machines?

Since you’ve already mentioned King’s Quest, it shouldn’t be that one… Defender of the Crown was more associated with the Amiga (and did get 8-bit versions). So what can it be? :)

- Pingback: O Ataque dos Clones – Parte 1 | Retrocomputaria Plus

- Michael Davis

February 2, 2015 at 2:30 am

Tellingly, it’s at about this time that we see the phrase “IBM clone” begin to fade, to be replaced by “MS-DOS machine” or “Intel-based machine.”

The term I most remember used from my childhood was “IBM-compatible”, but as an eight- or nine-year-old when my dad brought home our first computer, the venerable Tandy 1000, I had no tangible concept of what that really meant.

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- Sir Harrok

August 9, 2016 at 2:36 am

Just a comment on the availability of the TRS-80 in Australia.

Tandy had an extensive network in Australia and the TRS-80 was available here.

From memory, the Dick Smith system 80 was compelling because Dick Smith Electronics sold a much wider range of more interesting games for it — including the version of Adventure involving the elves, which I last saw mentioned in a DSE catalogue back in the day.

The Forth Dimension
October 17, 2014

The Forth programming language reached maturity around 1970 after more than ten years of development and experimentation by its creator, Charles H. Moore. Its first practical use was to control a radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, where Moore was employed at the time. From there Forth spread to other telescopes and other observatories, cementing a connection with astronomy and space science that persists to this day; in addition to controlling countless telescopes and planetariums earthside, Forth has been into space many times on probes and satellites of all descriptions. Yet already by the end of its first decade Forth had spread far beyond astronomical circles. It was being used to control the motorized cameras used to film miniature-based special-effects sequences (suddenly a booming business in the wake of Star Wars); to control automotive diagnostic equipment; as the firmware in various medical devices; to control automated agricultural equipment. Closer to our usual interests, Atari had invested a lot of money into developing a version of the language suitable for programming pinball machines and stand-up arcade games, while versions of the language were available for all of the trinity of 1977 within a year or so of their appearance. The key to Forth’s burgeoning popularity was its efficiency: it not only ran faster than just about any language short of assembly, but in the right hands it was also almost unbelievably stingy with memory. Those were good qualities to have in the late 1970s, when the average PC ran at 1 MHz and had no more than 16 K.

We’ll get into why Forth is so efficient in just a bit. But first let’s take a look at the language itself. If you’ve programmed before in just about any other language, Forth will likely seem deeply, deeply weird. Still, there’s also something kind of beautiful about it. If you’d like to follow along with the few examples I’ll give in this article, you have many free implementations of the language to choose from. A good choice, and one that has the advantage of working on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux alike, is Gforth.

Forth is an interactive programming language, like the microcomputer BASICs so many of us grew up with. This means that you can enter commands directly at the Forth console and watch them run immediately.

Forth is also a stack-based programming language, and this is the key to everything else about it. Virtually every programming language uses a stack under the hood; it’s one of the most fundamental mechanisms of computer science. But most other languages try to hide the stack from us, strain to make it so that we need not trouble ourselves over it and, indeed, don’t really need to know much about it at all. The only time many programmers even hear the word “stack” is when an infinite loop or runaway recursion causes a program to crash with a “stack overflow error.” Forth, however, doesn’t hide its stack away like something shameful. No, Forth loves its stack, sets it front and center for all to see. Forth demands that if we are to love it, we must also love its stack. Given this, it would behoove me at this point to explain just what is meant by the idea of a stack in the first place.

A stack is just that: a stack of numbers stored in a special part of memory, used for storing transient data. Adding a number to the stack is called pushing to the stack. It always goes on top. Taking a number from the stack is called popping the stack. It’s always the top number — i.e., the most recently pushed — that’s popped, after which that number is erased from the stack. A stack is, in other words, a first-in-last-out system — or, if you like, a last-in-first-out system. If you haven’t quite wrapped your head around the idea, don’t sweat it. It should become clearer momentarily.

Let’s look at how we can do simple arithmetic in Forth. Let’s say we want to add 2 and 3 together and print the result. In a typical modern language like Java, we’d just do something like this:

System.out.print(2 + 3);

In Forth, we do it a bit differently. If you’ve started up a Forth environment, you can type this in and see the result immediately.

2 3 + .

If you happened to use a Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator back in the day, this notation might look familiar to you. It’s known as “postfix” or “reverse Polish” notation. Let’s unpack this piece by piece to see how exactly Forth is handling this expression.

The first thing to understand here is that Forth reads almost everything as a word — Forthese for a command. A number standing by itself is actually interpreted as a word, a command to push that number onto the stack. Therefore, assuming we started with an empty stack, the stack looks like this after the first two parts of the expression above have been processed:

3
2

Now the interpreter comes to the “+,” which is also read as a command, instructing it to pop two values off the stack, add them together, and push the result back onto the stack. After doing so, the stack looks like this:

5

Finally, the “.” just instructs the interpreter to pop the top value off the stack and print it.

Now let’s consider a more complicated algebraic expression, like “(4 + 5) * (6 + 7).” In Forth, it would be written like this:

4 5 + 6 7 + * .

Let’s walk through this. We push 4 and 5 onto the stack.

5
4

We pop them off, add them together, and push the result to the stack.

9

We push 6 and 7 onto the stack.

7
6
9

We add them together and push the result.

13
9

We pop the top two values on the stack, multiply them together, and push the result.

117

And finally we pop and print the result.

To this point we’ve been working interactively. The key to programming in Forth, however, is to define new words; this is Forth’s nearest equivalent to the function calls common to other languages. Let’s consider a function to cube a number, which would look like this in Java:

int cube (int num) {
return (num * num * num);
}

In Forth, we might do it by entering the following lines at the console:

: CUBE ( N -> N. Cube a number)
DUP DUP ( Now there are three copies)
* * ( Get the cube)
;

Let’s again unpack this piece by piece. The colon is a word which tells the interpreter that what follows will be a new word definition, to be terminated by a semicolon. “CUBE” is the name of the new word we are creating. All text within parenthesis are comments, to be ignored by the interpreter. The “N -> N.” notation within the first parenthesis is not required, but is considered good practice in Forth programming. It tells us that this word will pop and operate on the current topmost word on the stack, and will push a single result onto the stack. Forth words do not take arguments like functions in other languages, but operate only on the current contents of the stack. Thus it’s the programmer’s responsibility to set the stack up properly before invoking a word, and to know what that word will have done to the stack when it finishes. The two lines in the middle are the meat of the word, the actual instructions it represents.

Let’s say we call this new word “CUBE” with a 5 on top of the stack — i.e., by entering “5 CUBE .” at the console. Thus the initial stack looks like this:

5

Now we’re going into the body of the word itself. The two “DUP” statements tell the interpreter to duplicate the top value on the stack twice, without destroying — i.e., without actually popping — the original value. So, we end up with:

5
5
5

Now we pop the top two values, multiply them together, and push the result.

25
5

Then we just do the same thing again.

125

And our work is done.

Next we’ll see how we can use this word within another word. But first let’s see how we would do that as a function in Java.

void cubes10() {
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i ++) {
System.out.print("\n");
System.out.print(i + " ");
System.out.print(cube(i));
}
}

Here it is as a Forth word:

: CUBES10 ( ->. Print a table of cubes of 0-9.)
10 0 ( Indices of loop)
DO ( Start Loop)
CR I . I CUBE . ( Print a number and its cube.)
LOOP ( End of loop.)
;

As the first comment indicates, the “CUBES10” word expects nothing on the stack and leaves nothing there. We begin by pushing 10 and 0 onto the stack. Now Forth’s back-asswordness really comes to the fore: the “DO” word pops the last two words off the stack. It will increment a variable — always known as “I” — from the second of these until it is equal to the first of these, looping each time through the block of words contained between “DO” and “LOOP.” Within the loop, the word “CR” simply causes the cursor to move down to the next line. Keeping in mind that “I” represents the current value of the variable being incremented, which can be pushed and popped just like a constant, the rest should hopefully be comprehensible. The output looks something like this:

0 0
1 1
2 8
3 27
4 64
5 125
6 216
7 343
8 512
9 729

Forth is built entirely from words like the ones we’ve just created. In fact, calling Forth a programming language may be something of a misnomer because virtually every piece of its vocabulary is redefinable. Forth comes with a dictionary of common, useful words, but the programmer is always free to replace these with others of her own devising, to make Forth into whatever she wants it to be. The most basic words are not constructed from other Forth words but rather written as in-line assembly language. The programmer adds words to this base which do ever more complicated tasks, until finally she writes a word that subsumes the entire program. To take an example from Leo Brodie’s classic book Starting Forth (one of Forth’s chief products down through the decades has been horrid puns), a Forth program to control a washing machine might have this as its top-level word:

: WASHER
WASH SPIN RINSE SPIN
;

Each of the words referenced within “WASHER” would likely call several words of their own. “RINSE,” for instance, might look like this:

: RINSE
FAUCETS OPEN TILL-FULL FAUCETS CLOSE
;

Each of these words would call still more words of its own, until we come to the level of fundamental assembly-language commands to control the CPU on its most basic level. Forth words can even create new words dynamically, resulting in programs that effectively rewrite themselves as they run to suit their environment.

Especially if you’re a programmer yourself, you may have already formed an impression by now of Forth’s strengths and weaknesses. And yes, contrary to the claims of many Forth zealots, the latter do exist in considerable numbers. Even leaving aside the strange reverse notation, which one can eventually get used to, Forth programs can be incredibly hard to actually read thanks to their reliance on pushing and popping to the stack, with the associated lack of helpful variable names. For this reason Forth has occasionally been called a “write-only” language; Forth code can be well-nigh incomprehensible even to the person who originally wrote it after just a week or so has elapsed. It’s the polar opposite of a contemporaneous language I once wrote about on this blog, Pascal, replacing the latter’s pedantic emphasis on structure and readability above all else with a love of hackerish tricks, sleight of hand, and cleverness that can sometimes come off as sort of facile. Just trying to keep a picture in your head of the current configuration of the stack, something on which absolutely everything you do in Forth depends, can be a nightmare as programs get more complicated and their possible states get more varied. If not quite the last language in the world I’d use to write a complicated modern application, it must be pretty close to it. It’s “write-only” qualities make it particularly unsuitable for team projects, a problem given that most useful software long ago got too complicated for solo programmers.

Yet there’s also an uncompromising beauty about Forth that has drawn many people to it, a beauty that has occasionally been compelling enough to override people’s better judgment and make them use the language for purposes to which it really isn’t terribly suited. Whatever else you you can say about it, it sticks to its philosophical guns tenaciously. There’s a fascination to building a dictionary of your own, to effectively making a programming language all your own. Grizzled Forth programmers have often replaced virtually everything that comes with the language to create something that is absolutely theirs. That’s a rare experience indeed in modern programming. People who love Forth really love it. This (in Leo Brodie’s words) “high-level language,” “assembly language,” “operating system,” “set of development tools,” and “software design philosophy” has that rare ability, like my old love the Commodore Amiga, to inspire a level of visceral, emotional commitment that smacks more of romance or religion than practicality.

If we do insist on speaking practically, within certain domains Forth excels. It’s still widely used today in extremely constrained environments where every byte and every processor cycle counts, such as, well, the firmware inside a washing machine. To understand what makes Forth so efficient, we need to first understand that those more readable Java functions I showed you above must ultimately be converted into a form pretty close to that we see in the Forth versions. By making us meet the computer halfway (or further), Forth eliminates a whole lot of shuffling about that costs precious processor time. A well-written Forth program can actually be smaller than its pure assembly-language equivalent — much less the same program written in some other high-level language — because Forth so emphasizes reusable words. And it can be surprisingly easy to port Forth programs from computer to computer; one need only re-implement that bottommost layer of words in the new machine’s assembly language, and leave the rest alone.

Of course, all of these advantages that make Forth so attractive to programmers working on embedded systems and device firmware today also made it mighty appealing to programmers of ordinary PCs of the late 1970s and 1980s, working as they were under stringent restrictions of their own. For some early PCs Forth was the only language other than the ROM-housed BASIC or assembly language that made any sense at all. Stripped down to its essentials, Forth can be tiny; for example, Cognetics Corporation, a developer we met in a recent article, worked with a version of Forth that fit into just 6 K. Thus Forth enjoyed considerable popularity, with a fair number of games and other commercial software written in the language. John Draper, the legendary “Captain Crunch” who taught Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs how to phone phreak amidst myriad other hacking accomplishments, was a particular devotee, distributing a Forth development system for the Apple II which he also used to write the II’s first really usable word processor, EasyWriter. Many of the magazines ran columns or extended series on Forth, which was available, and generally in multiple versions, for virtually every remotely viable machine of the era. One British computer, the ill-fated but fascinating Jupiter Ace, even included Forth in ROM in lieu of BASIC. Tellingly, however, as the 1980s wore on and software got more complex Forth became less common amongst commercial application and game developers, even as it retained a dedicated cult of hobbyists who have persisted with the language to this day. According to Charles Moore, this was as it should be. Forth, he told Jerry Pournelle in Byte‘s March 1985 issue, had never been intended for closed-source commercial software.

Writing big programs to be distributed in object code is a distortion of what Forth is all about. Forth is like a set of craftsman’s tools. You use it to make still more tools that work with whatever you specialize in. Then you use it to solve problems. Forth programs should always be distributed in source code. You should have Forth online at all times. Recompile whenever you want to use a program. Forth programs are tailored, they’re living and dynamic, not static object code.

“Distortion” or not, the most important Forth game, and arguably the most ambitious project ever completed in the language, would appear more than a year after those remarks. I know I’ve been teasing you with it for a while, but, with all the pieces in place at last, we’ll get there next time… really, I promise.

(Probably the best place to look to get an idea of the excitement Forth once generated, as well as a very good picture of the language itself, is the August 1980 Byte, which had Forth as its main theme. My example code in this article has its origins there, as does the picture.)

Comments
23 Responses

- Matthew

October 17, 2014 at 2:04 pm

Heh. Never knew Atari used it for Pinball and Arcade games. For those who want to try it out just in a browser, there’s a few online versions, for example

http://repl.it/languages/Forth

(I never really used it much, but I’ve played with it a little out of historical interest).

- Jayle Enn

October 17, 2014 at 2:35 pm

A variant called Multi-User Forth is still in use as a compiled language on some ‘MUCK’ servers. Access usually requires special permission or an experimenter server install of your own, so I’m not sure how similar it is to the traditional variety beyond having the stack exposed.

- Felix

October 17, 2014 at 5:17 pm

MUF is higher-level than regular Forth. Off the top of my head, it has proper strings, arrays and local variables. Moreover, it has a whole bunch of words to manipulate the game database, since it’s designed for scripting multiplayer games. Otherwise it’s fairly similar to the original language, but the extra features make it easier to write readable programs in it.

(I might add that nowadays compiling MUF code does little apart from applying basic peephole optimizations. But that can help to a surprising degree.)

- Felix

October 17, 2014 at 5:09 pm

I designed my own Forth dialect for an interpreter construction tutorial, because it was so easy to implement, and therefore ideal for teaching the subject matter. But then I found myself unable to do any serious work in my very own programming language! How’s that for irony.

On the other hand, I know someone who learned MUF* as his first programming language, and confessed finding all other programming languages very strange afterwards. (He ended up a competent Python hacker anyway.) So yes, it’s a very strange language. But it’s a language one should know at least in theory because, much like Lisp, it changes the way one thinks about programming.

* MUF: Multi-User Forth, a higher-level (and very specialized) dialect of the language, used for scripting MUCKs, a type of text-based virtual world.

- Jimmy Maher

October 17, 2014 at 7:02 pm

Yeah, I found it interesting to play with when preparing for this article just because it’s *so* different from other languages. Nice to shift the old paradigms once in a while…

- ZUrlocker

October 17, 2014 at 7:04 pm

I remember that issue of Byte and Leo Brody’s books. I enjoyed reading about Forth more than programming with it. Definitely a step up from assembler, but pretty rudimentary for someone used to a traditional procedural high level language like Pascal or even C. I remember there was a language by Apple II programming guru Paul Lutus called GraForth.
http://www.virtualapple.org/docs/GraFORTH%20II%20Language%20Reference.pdf

- Anthony

October 17, 2014 at 9:43 pm

It’s probably obvious but i stupidly having trouble figuring out what you mean by “all of the trinity of 1977”.

Another interesting article, and a good tease for the next instalment!

- Asterisk

October 18, 2014 at 6:16 am

He’s referring to the trio of extremely influential PCs that were announced within months of each other in 1977: the Apple II, the TRS-80, and the Commodore PET.

These were the first personal computers that shipped in a complete, ready-to-use condition, and set the stage for the home computer revolution of the 1980s; earlier PCs were either kits that the user needed to hand-assemble, or were bare boards that required separate hardware for the most basic I/O functions.

- Ethan Johnson

October 18, 2014 at 1:39 am

I have just caught up with this blog! Now I can feel the agonizing wait until I figure out what the program written in Forth is.

I know I’m just a baby who only knows C-based languages, but I can’t imagine that this is easy stuff to interpret or code in long stretches. I can see the efficiency though, which makes me curious as to exactly why I’d never really heard talk about it before.

Thanks for your work, and specifically your citing of sources. This blog has been fantastic in helping me find historically relevant information for a project I’m putting together.

Just an off question relating to a much earlier blog, was there a source for Ultima 2 having one of the earliest patches? I’m very interested in any findings you have on early PC patching.

- Jimmy Maher

October 18, 2014 at 8:37 am

I don’t think there need to a lot of mystery about the program coded in Forth at this point, but feel free to enjoy the sweet agony anyway. ;)

An updated version of Ultima II is mentioned in Computer Gaming World’s review in the March/April 1983 issue. John Williams also mentioned it to me during our correspondence, and the actual patch disks are listed as hosted at the University of Texas’s Richard Garriott archives, although I haven’t seen them personally. Good luck with your research!

- charlie pye

October 18, 2014 at 1:52 am

That looks like the kind of language I would absolutely despise. I mean, I admire its efficiency, but any kind of slip up and you’ve got a wrong number in the stack, which won’t give you any error message but just give the wrong result. It must be a nightmare to debug.

- Matthew

October 18, 2014 at 6:03 pm

I just realized, I had completely forgotten all about the biggest use of Forth anywhere: It wasn’t just the Jupiter Ace that had it in ROM.

Open firmware (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware) contains a Forth interpreter. Note that all Sun Sparcs past a certain vintage have it, as did all PowerPC macs, and a bunch of other machines. Dying off now (Apple switched to EFI when they went Intel, and not many Sparcs are being sold these days), but in it’s time it was very big.

- Nate

October 19, 2014 at 6:00 am

It’s interesting to note that in the last decade there has been somewhat of a fringe renaissance of interest in Forth-like stack-based languages. Two in particular stand out to me:
Manfred von Thun’s academic language Joy, ( http://www.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/research/research-projects/past-projects/joy-programming-language) which generalises Forth to Lisp/Scheme-like functional programming, and Slava Pestov’s Factor (http://factorcode.org ), which takes Joy and turns it into a practical actual language which really does resemble the love-child of Forth and Common Lisp.

Oh and if you didn’t know, Postscript – you know, that page description language that runs in every laser printer – is a stack language much like Forth! And used for much the same reasons, I believe, since RAM consumption and CPU speed have always been problems in printers.

- James

January 29, 2015 at 11:33 pm

I skimmed this one, eyes slightly glazed, but am fairly sure in
“it not only ran faster than just above any language short of assembly, but in the right”

you meant ‘just about any language’

- Jimmy Maher

January 30, 2015 at 7:26 am

I did. Thanks!

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- Peter Piers

December 16, 2015 at 8:41 pm

What a beautiful -looking language (said the non-programmer who was introduced to BASIC early in school and never got to grips with I6. AGS was comfortable, though).

- CJGeringer

January 12, 2016 at 5:53 pm

Regarding the phrase “the “10CUBES” word expects nothing on the”

The word defined by the code is actually “cubes10”

- Jimmy Maher

January 12, 2016 at 6:08 pm

Thanks!

- Daryl

July 23, 2016 at 6:33 pm

I have found that forth is the most powerful programming paradigm I have ever seen. It is the only language capable of transformation into a purely ideographic language. It not only gives the manipulation of data in words, but also defines the compiler itself in words. In no other languages is the or can the compiler be defined as part of the language.

- Daryl

July 23, 2016 at 6:52 pm

Heres an illustration:
DUP is an up arrow, Drop a down arrow. Push and Pop are up and down triangles. Swap is a leftright arrow. Over is an up down arrow. Store is a left arrow. Etc.

I have gotten it so every forth word is an ideographic telling what it does. Being one symbol, combination of symbols becomes the decomposition of symbolic words or ideographs.

I.e. Nip is s

- Daryl

July 23, 2016 at 7:20 pm

Design decisions. Let’s say we were designing an assembler for the x86 in c. The register AX becomes a token, controlled by the assembly.

Well in forth AX can be a word that places it’s bit equivalent in the output stream or something equivalent. I.e. forth paradigm eliminates both the tokenization and lexical analysis of compiler design. Awesome.

- Daryl

July 24, 2016 at 3:06 am

I dabbled with different forth threading techniques. Direct, indirect, subroutine even lisp list based threading. You can create a forth compiler on emu8086 to view the awesome power it contains.

Instead of everything being a word. I went a step farther. Everything was a symbol. White space is a symbol that delimitation words. All other symbols add to the current word until a white space.

I am so fascinated with the versatility and power of the forth paradigm. It’s not just a programming language, it’s a paradigm far greater than object oriented programming. It is word oriented programming.

I saw that the assembler code words that define the core forth can in fact be defined as assembler threads. Ie.

: DUP CODE SI <- [SI-2] [SI] <- AX ENDCODE. \ ASM INFIX DUP FOR X86
: SWAP [SI] AX XCHG \ TOS CACHE IN AX AND SI IS PARAMETER STACK.

Now take the swap word. [SI] AX and XChg are assembler words. Thus the assembler itself becomes a thread of those three words. Interpreted as a forth asm thread that creates the binary. In what other language can you do this? Lisp maybe. No, asm would have to be an s-expression. Only forth

Starflight
October 28, 2014

Fair warning: this article spoils the ending to Starflight, although it doesn’t spoil the things you need to know to get there.

Starflight, one of the grandest and most expansive games of the 1980s, was born in the cramped confines of a racquetball court. Rod McConnell, a businessman who had been kicking around Silicon Valley for some years, happened to have as his regular playing partner Joe Ybarra, an Apple executive who in late 1982 decamped to join Trip Hawkins’s fledgling new Electronic Arts as a game “producer.” Intrigued by Ybarra’s stories of “electronic artists” and an upcoming revolution in entertainment based on interactivity, McConnell wondered if he might somehow join the fun. He thus started discussing ideas with a programmer named Dave Boulton.

Boulton, who died in 2009, is the unsung hero of Starflight. His involvement with the project wouldn’t last very long, but his fingerprints are all over the finished game. He was, first and foremost, a zealot for the Forth programming language. He was one of the founding members of the Forth Interest Group, which was established just at the beginning of the PC era in 1977 and did stellar work to standardize the language and bring it to virtually every one of the bewildering variety of computers available by the early 1980s. More recently his hacking had led him to begin exploring the strange universe of Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractal sets fully eighteen months before Rescue on Fractalus! would make fractals a household name for gamers and programmers everywhere. Boulton enticed McConnell with an idea much bigger than Lucasfilm’s simple action game: an almost infinitely vast planet which, thanks to the miracle of fractals, the player could roam at will.

McConnell founded a company named Ambient Design and hired a couple of young programmers to help Boulton. One, Alec Kercso, was just finishing a degree in Linguistics in San Diego, but was more interested in his hobby of hacking. The other, Bob Gonsalves, was another dedicated Forther who wrote a monthly column on the language for Antic magazine. He was hired on the basis of this as well as his intimate familiarity with the Atari 8-bit platform, which thanks to its audiovisual capabilities was the great favorite around EA circles during that first year or so, until the Commodore 64 came online in earnest. On the strength of McConnell’s friendship with Ybarra and little else — the  whole group of them had among them neither any experience with game development nor any real plan for what their game would be beyond a vast environment created with fractals — EA signed them as one of the first of their second wave of contracts, following the premiere of the first six, reputation-establishing EA games. Ybarra would be their producer, their main point of contact with and advocate within EA. He would have his work cut out for him in the years to come.

The idea soon evolved to encompass not just a single planet but many. The game, to be called Starquest, would let you fly in your starship across an entire galaxy of star systems, each with planets of its own, each of which would in turn be its own unique world, with unique terrain, weather, life forms, and natural resources. For Boulton, the man who had got this ball rolling in earnest in the first place, it was suddenly getting to be too much. You just couldn’t do all that on an 8-bit computer, he said, not even with the magic combination of Forth and fractals. He walked away. He would go on to develop early software for the Commodore Amiga and to join another unheralded founder, Jef Raskin of the original vision for the Apple Macintosh, to work on Raskin’s innovative but unsuccessful Canon Cat.

Left on their own with only Boulton’s prototype fractal code to guide them, Kercso and Gonsalves felt over their heads. They needed to be able to show each planet as a rotating globe from space, complete with the fractal terrain that the player would be able to explore more intimately if she elected to land, but didn’t know how to map the terrain onto a sphere. McConnell soon found another programmer, Tim Lee, who did. Lee had already written firmware for Texas Instruments calculators and written very complex policy-analysis applications for life-insurance companies. Yet another Forth fan, he’d just finished writing an actual game in the language, an IBM PC port of the Datasoft action game Genesis which Datasoft would never ship due to its incompatibility with the PCjr. With the graphics code he’d developed for that project, plus his own explorations of fractal programming, Lee was more than up to rendering those spinning terrain-mapped globes.

One of Tim Lee’s spinning terrain-mapped planets. He was also responsible for most of the fundamental low-level architecture of the game.

Lee also brought with him his programming expertise on the IBM PC. This prompted the team to take a big step: to abandon their little 8-bitters and move to the bigger 16-bit MS-DOS machines. They had recognized that Boulton had been right: their ideas were just too big to fit into 8 bits. MS-DOS was just finishing up its trouncing of CP/M to become undisputed king of the business-computing world, but had managed little penetration into homes, which were still dominated by the likes of the Apple II and Commodore 64. On the one hand, the IBM was a terrible gaming platform: its CGA graphics could show only four colors at a time in palettes that seemed deliberately chosen to clash as horribly with one another as possible and give artists nightmares; its single speaker was capable of little more than equally unpleasant bleeps and farts; even standard gaming equipment like joysticks were effectively non-existent due to a perceived lack of demand. But on the other hand, the IBM was an amazing gaming platform, with several times the raw processing power of the 8-bitters and at least twice the memory. Like so much in life, it all depended on how you looked at it. Ambient Design decided they needed the platform’s advantages to contain a galaxy that would eventually encompass 270 star systems with 811 planets between them, and they’d just have to take the bitter with the sweet. Still, it’s unlikely that EA would have gone along with the idea had it not been for the imminent release of the PCjr, which was widely expected to do in home computing what its big brother had in business computing.

About this point the last and arguably biggest piece of the development puzzle arrived in the form of Greg Johnson, Kercso’s roommate. Not much of a programmer himself, Johnson had like his roommate also just finished a degree and wasn’t quite sure what to do next. He had listened avidly to Kercso’s reports on the game’s progress, and eventually started drawing pictures of imagined scenes on his Atari 800 just for fun. He was soon coming up with so many pictures and, more importantly, ideas that Kercso got him an interview and McConnell hired him. Just like that, Johnson became the much-needed lead designer. Until now the team had been focused entirely on the environment they were trying to create, giving little thought to what the player would be expected to actually do there. As Kercso would later put it, what had been an “open-ended game of exploration” now slowly began to evolve into “a complex story with interwoven plots and twists.” Johnson himself later said his job became to come up with what should happen, the others to come up with how it could happen. Or, as Lee put it, Johnson designed the scenario while the others designed “the game system that you could write the scenario for.” And indeed, he proved to be a boundless fount of creativity, coming up with seven unique and occasionally hilarious alien races for the player to fight, trade, and converse with during her travels.

Critical to those conversations became a designer we’ve met before on this blog, Paul Reiche III, who spent two important weeks helping Johnson and his colleagues to hash out a workable conversation engine which made use of the system of conversation “postures” from a game he had co-designed with Jon Freeman, Murder on the Zinderneuf. Reiche, an experienced designer of tabletop RPG rules and adventures as well computer games, continued to offer Johnson, who had heretofore thought of himself as a better artist than writer or designer, advice and ideas throughout the game’s protracted development.

The system of conversation “postures” from Murder on the Zinderneuf.

Starflight’s implementation of conversation postures.

“Protracted” is perhaps putting it too mildly. The process just seemed to go on forever, so much so that it became something of a sick running joke inside EA. The project appeared on more than three years worth of weekly status reports, from the time that EA was mature enough to have weekly status reports until the game’s belated release in August of 1986. Over that time the arcades and home game consoles crashed and burned; the home-computer industry went through its own dramatic boom and bust and stabilization; countless platforms came and went, not least among them the PCjr; EA gave up up on the dream of revolutionizing mainstream home-entertainment and accepted the status of big fish in the relatively small pond of computer gaming; IBM achieved business-computing domination and then ceded it almost as quickly thanks to the cloners; the bookware craze came and went; Infocom rose to dizzying heights and crashed to earth just as quickly; the Soviet Union went from an Evil Empire to a partner in nuclear-arms control. And still, ever and anon, there was Starflight, the much more elegant name chosen for Starquest after the release of Sierra’s King’s Quest. McConnell’s company name changed as well before all was said and done, from Ambient Design to Binary Systems (get it?).

EA very nearly lost patience several times; McConnell credits his old friend Joe Ybarra with personally rescuing the project from cancellation on a number of occasions. With the contract structured to provide payments only after milestones that were few and increasingly far between, McConnell himself took personal loans and worked other jobs so as to be able to pay his team a pittance. Throughout it all he never lost faith, despite ample evidence that they didn’t, to be painfully blunt, entirely know what they were doing. The team members themselves lived on savings or loans when their meager salaries ran out. Many months were consumed by fruitless wheel-spinning. As Lee later admitted, they were so entranced with this model universe that they “spent a lot of time trying to model things that didn’t add to the play of the game.” Forth was never the most readable language nor an ideal choice for a large group project, and as the project wandered off in this or that direction and back again the code got nightmarishly gnarly. This just made trying to modify or add to it take still longer. With McConnell only able to afford a tiny office and most of the team thus working remotely most of the time, just keeping everyone on the same page was difficult. Given the situation and the personalities involved, a certain amount of freelancing was inevitable. “There was no master plan detailing each and every task to be done,” said Kercso later. “We had an idea of what the major modules had to be and we added a lot of final design as we got into programming each of the modules”; then they did their best to mash it all together. Starflight was a prototypical runaway, mismanaged, overambitious project, the likes of which the industry has seen many times since. The difference was, instead of being ignominiously cancelled or shoved out the door incomplete, Starflight somehow ended up amazing. Call it serendipity, or credit it to a team that just wouldn’t give up. Once the core group was assembled, nobody thought of quitting, everyone was determined to finish the game — and on its own original, insanely ambitious terms at that — or die trying. “I remember saying that I didn’t care if I died after it came out,” said Johnson later, but “please, God, let me live until then.”

The hopeless muddle of a combat engine.

Some of the confusion and occasional lack of direction is visible in the final game. Even the biggest Starflight fan would have trouble praising the arcade-style in-space combat engine, for instance, which manages to be both far too simplistic and far too baffling to actually control. There’s a disconnected feeling to certain elements, as of clever ideas that were never fully woven into the holistic design. You can gather flora and fauna from the planets you visit and return them to your base to study, for example, but you make so little money from doing so as opposed to mining minerals — and the controls for stunning and gathering your specimens are once again so awkward — that you’re left wondering what the point is. Ditto most of the intriguing alien artifacts you find, which you cart excitedly back to base only to find that they “reveal very little of interest” and are “totally useless to us.” And the game has what should be a fatal case of split personality, being half stately space opera and half silly romp filled with sci-fi alien caricatures.

And yet it really doesn’t matter. Starflight is that rare piece of work that actually justifies the critic’s cliché of being more than the sum of its parts. It’s not a tight design; appropriately given its theme, it sprawls everywhere, sometimes seemingly uselessly so. But even its blind alleys are fascinating to wander down once or twice. It’s the opposite of a minimalist masterpiece like M.U.L.E., whose every last note is carefully considered and exhaustively tested and blended carefully into the whole. And you know what? It’s every bit as awesome.

But for the benefit of those of you who haven’t played it it’s really high time that I tell what the game’s all about, isn’t it?

Your home starbase, where you outfit your ship, select and train your crew, buy and sell equipment and resources, etc. It was largely the work of Alec Kercso.

Starflight starts you off at your base on your home planet of Arth — no, that’s not a typo — with a rather shabbily equipped ship and a little bit of seed capital. If you’re smart, you’ll spend most of the latter training a crew, which will include, in the tradition of a certain classic television series that went where no man has gone before, a Captain, a Science Officer, a Navigator, an Engineer, a Communications Officer, and a Doctor. You’ll also need to save enough to add a cargo pod or three to your ship, so you can begin to earn money by landing on nearby planets and scooping up minerals for sale back at Arth. You need money to upgrade your ship with better engines, weapons, and defenses, to train your crew, and to buy something call endurium (if you can’t find or mine enough of it), Starflight‘s equivalent to dilithium crystals, the semi-magical fuel that enables faster-than-light travel. As you build up your ship and your bank account, you can travel ever farther from Arth, exploring an algorithmically generated galaxy so vast that, like the Fibonacci galaxies of Elite, even Starflight‘s creators hadn’t seen all of it before the game’s release. And so you fly and land where you will, searching for mineral-rich planets you can mine and, even better, habitable planets you can recommend for colonization; you receive a substantial finder’s fee in return. Alien races inhabit various sectors of the galaxy. Some you may be able to befriend or at least achieve a level of mutual toleration with, others you’ll have to fight. Thus the need to fit out your ship with the best possible weapons and defenses.

Exploring the surface of a planet. This module was largely the work of Bob Gonsalves.

This, then, is Starflight the sandbox game. While it’s in no way derivative of Elite — Starflight‘s creators couldn’t have even been aware of the older game until quite late in their own development cycle, since Elite didn’t reach American shores until late 1985 — Starflight does generate a similar compulsion to explore, an addictive need to see what all is out there. But everything about Starflight is richer and more complex, with the exception only of the combat system that was the heart of Elite but a mere afterthought in Starflight (if you had to spend much time in Starflight actually fighting, it would be a very, very bad game). With so much more computing horsepower at their disposal, Binary Systems was able to add layer after intriguing layer: the ability to land on planets, and once there to engage in an exploring and mining mini-game that is as absurdly addictive as it is superficially simplistic; the chance to converse with the aliens you meet instead of just shooting at them; the whole CRPG angle of training a crew and keeping them healthy; sensor- and Navigator-confounding nebulae and wormholes to negotiate. Whereas Elite sessions soon settle down into a comfortable routine of trade-jump-fight-dock, rinse and repeat forever, Starflight always seems to have something new to throw at you.

But the most important difference is the plot that Starflight layers over its sandbox. I realize everyone is different on this point, but personally I always have a little bit of trouble with purely open-ended games (see my review of Seven Cities of Gold for another example). When I play Elite I eventually start to get bored for lack of any real narrative or goal to shoot for beyond the almost impossible one of actually becoming Elite. Ian Bell and David Braben originally wanted to include a real plot, but there just wasn’t room to contain it inside a 32 K BBC Micro. Starflight, however, has the sort of plot-driven direction that Elite so painfully lacks.

So, having told you what you can do in Starflight, let me now tell you why you do it. Evidence has recently turned up on Arth that the planet’s inhabitants did not evolve there; that it was colonized at some point in the distant past, that the colonists regressed into barbarism due to war or other pressures, and that only now has civilization recovered. A cache of old documents has also revealed the secrets of endurium and faster-than-light travel. All of which is great, except that Arth has even bigger fish to fry. A strange wave is spreading across the galaxy, causing stars to flare — with disastrous results for any orbiting planets — as it strike them. Thus your mission is not just to explore and get rich, but to discover the source of the wave and to stop it before it reaches Arth.

Starflight has an unusually elaborate plot for its day, but unlike in so many more recent games it never straitjackets you to it. The plot is more backstory than story. The game is essentially a big scavenger hunt, sending you off to reconstruct quite a complicated galactic history. Follow the trail long enough and you should turn up the clues and objects you need to end the threat to Arth and the galaxy by blowing up a certain Crystal Planet that’s the source of all the trouble. There’s not all that much that you actually need to do to beat the game when you know how. In fact, you can do it in less than two game days. It’s the clue- and object-scavenging that’s all the fun, the process of putting the pieces of the backstory together. When you discover Earth, for example — yes, those original colonizers of Arth came, inevitably, from Earth — it gives a thrill when you first look down on those familiar continents from orbit. Other pieces of the puzzle are almost equally thrilling when they come to light. If you’re playing cold, sans walkthrough — which is honestly the only way to play; you’ll otherwise just be left wondering what all the fuss is about — you’ll need to look everywhere for clues: to the occasional emails you receive from your overseers on Arth; to messages and artifacts you find on the planets; to the map and other materials included in the game package. And, most importantly, you need to talk at length to all those aliens, a goofy and amusing rogue’s gallery of sci-fi clichés. They’re the silly part of this odd mixture of stately epic and silly romp — but they’re so much fun we’ll take them just as they are, cognitive dissonance be damned.

The Elowan, a race of plant-like hippies who evince peace and love along with passive aggression.

The Thrynn, who have such weird issues with the Elowan that they’ll attack if you have one in your crew.

The unforgettably loathsome Spemin, who lack backbone — literally.

The Mechans, a group of robots who think you’re just what they’ve been waiting for all these millennia.

Now, this plot-as-scavenger-hunt approach to gameplay is hardly an innovation of Starflight. The Ultima games in particular had been trolling these waters ever more assiduously by the time it appeared. The breadcrumb-following approach to game design always gives rise to the possibility of getting yourself stuck because you’ve missed that one little thing in this absurdly vast virtual world on which all further progress depends. Yet there is a difference here, not so much in kind as in quality. Starflight is a much more friendly, generous game. Whereas Ultima seems to relish making you fail by hiding vital clues in the most outlandish places or behind the most unlikely parser keywords, there’s a sense that Starflight really wants you to succeed, wants you to solve the mystery and save the galaxy. There are multiple ways to learn much of what you need to know, multiple copies of some vital artifacts hidden in completely different places, multiple solutions to most of the logistic and diplomatic puzzles it sets before you. Yes, there’s a time limit, what with Arth’s sun destined to eventually flare, but even that is very generous, operating more as a way to lend the game excitement and narrative urgency than a way to crush you for failing some hardcore gamer test. Its generosity is not absolute: in my own recent playthrough I had to turn to a walkthrough to learn that you need to be obsequious when you talk to the Velox or they’ll never share an absolutely vital piece of information that I don’t think you can glean anywhere else (remember that, would-be future players!). Still, even these few choke points feel more like accidents than deliberate cruelties strewn in your path by cackling designers. Starflight really does feel like a welcome step toward a more forgiving, inclusive sort of gaming.

Spoilers begin!

No discussion of Starflight‘s plot can be complete without the shocker of an ending. When you finally arrive at the Crystal Planet and are preparing to destroy it, everything suddenly gets deeply weird via a message from an earlier visitor:

I can hardly believe it! Those weird lumps are actually intelligent life. The Ancients are endurium! And we have spent hundreds of years hunting them to burn for fuel in our ships. Their metabolism is so much slower than ours that they live in an entirely different time framework. I don’t think they even know we are sentient. I believe it was only because of a link thru the Crystal Planet that contact was made at all. This Crystal Planet was their last defense. I can hardly blame them. Carbon-based life must have seemed something like a virus to them.

Despite this discovery, the only option — other than to simply stop playing — is to blow up the Crystal Planet anyway, thus annihilating the home planet of a race much more ancient and presumably more sophisticated than your own. It’s a strange, discordant sort of ending to say the least. Some have made much of it indeed; see for instance an earnest article in Envirogamer that would make of Starflight an elaborate allegory for our environmental problems of today, with endurium representing fossil fuels and the stellar wave standing in for global warming. I’m not really buying that. Not only does the article strike me as anachronistic, an argument born of 2009 rather than the mid-1980s, but I somehow have trouble seeing Starflight as a platform for such deliberate messaging; it strikes me as a grand escapist space opera, full stop, without any rhetorical axe to grind. But is Starflight‘s ending a deliberate subversion of genre convention, like the controversial ending to Infidel? Maybe. It’s not as if the game is not without a certain melancholia in other places; for instance, you’ll occasionally meet a race of interstellar minstrels who roam the spacelanes singing sad songs about glories that used to be. Yet after you do the bloody deed on the Crystal Planet the game immediately leaps back to unabashed triumphalism, gifting you with medals and music and glory and a chance to roam the galaxy at your leisure with an extra 500,000 credits in your account, burning genocidal quantities of endurium as you do so with nary a moral qualm to dog your steps. What to make of this seemingly obliviousness to the ramifications of what you’ve just done? You’ll have to decide for yourself whether it represents subtly or just a muddle of mixed messages that got away from their creators. It’s just one more of the layers within layers that make Starflight so memorable for just about everyone who plays it.

Spoilers end!

In addition to its innovations in the softer arts of design and narrative, Starflight has one final, more concrete quality that sets it apart from what came before, one that can be very easy to overlook but is nevertheless of huge importance. It’s the first of these big open-world games that offers a truly persistent virtual world to explore. Due to the limitations of 8-bit floppy-disk drives, earlier games all fudge persistence in some way. The Wizardry and Bard’s Tale games, for instance, save only the state of your characters between sessions. Everything else resets to its original state as soon as you leave the game, or, indeed, just travel between dungeon levels or between the dungeon and the city. Amongst numerous other oddities, this means that you can actually “win” these games over and over with the same group of characters; they literally forget you’ve done so almost immediately after showing you the victory screen. The 8-bit Ultimas do only a little better: the outdoor world map does persist along with the details of your characters, but cities and dungeons, again, reset themselves ad infinitum. You can go into a town, murder a dozen guards and rob every shop in town, then exit and return to find all restored to peace and tranquility again. Indeed, solving the early Ultimas is virtually dependent on you doing exactly this. Starflight, however, is different. Its whole vast galaxy remembers what you have done, on both a macro- and micro-scale. If you discover a juicy new planet, name it, and recommend it for colonization, it goes by that name for the rest of the game. If you befriend or piss off a given alien race, they don’t forget you or what you’ve done. If you strip-mine a planet of all its minerals, they don’t reappear the next time you land on it. If you make notes in your “Captain’s Log” (a first in itself), they remain there until you delete them. If you blow up an alien race’s home planet thereby destroying their entire civilization, it stays blowed up. This is a huge step forward for verisimilitude, one enabled by Binary Systems’s choice to throw caution to the wind and target the bigger, more capable MS-DOS machines.[1]

As Starflight neared release at last, it was very much an open question whether it would find an audience. By now the PCjr had come and gone — just as well given that the game’s memory requirements had ballooned past that machine’s standard 128 K to a full 256 K. No one had ever released such a major title exclusively on MS-DOS. Normally if that platform got games at all they were ports of titles that had already proved themselves on the more popular gaming machines, delivered months or years after their debuts elsewhere. Binary Systems and EA could only make sure Starflight supported the popular Tandy 1000’s enhanced graphics and hope for the best.

The best was far better than they had bargained for: initial sales far exceeded the most optimistic expectations, leaving EA scrambling to produce more copies to fill empty store shelves. It would eventually sell well over 100,000 copies on MS-DOS alone, a major hit by the standards of any platform. Starflight placed owners of other computers in the unaccustomed position of lusting after a game on MS-DOS of all places, a platform most had heretofore viewed with contempt. Appearing as it did even as owners of the new generation of 68000-based machines were reveling in their Macs, Amigas, and Atari STs, Starflight was an early sign of a sea change that would all but sweep those platforms into oblivion within five years or so. With it now clear that a market of eager MS-DOS gamers existed, the platform suddenly became a viable first-release choice for publishers and developers. Only years later would Starflight belatedly, and not without much pain given the unique Forthian nature of its underpinnings, be ported to the Amiga, ST, Macintosh, Sega Genesis, and even the little Commodore 64 — the latter of which would probably have been better bypassed. It would sell at least 200,000 more copies on those platforms, a nice instance of creativity and sheer hard work being amply rewarded for Rod McConnell’s idealistic little team of five.

Most of Binary Systems stayed together long enough to craft a fairly workmanlike sequel, Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula, released in 1989 for MS-DOS just as the first ports of the original game were reaching those other platforms. It was playable enough, but somehow lacked some of the magic of the original. Most then drifted away from the games industry, with only Greg Johnson continuing to work intermittently as a designer, most notably of the Toejam & Earl games for the Sega Genesis. Starflight had been such an all-consuming, exhausting labor of love that perhaps it was hard for the others to imagine starting all over again on another, inevitably less special project. Making Starflight had been the sort of experience that can come only once in a lifetime; anything else they did in games afterward would have been anticlimax.

If we’re looking for something to which to attribute Starflight‘s success, both commercially and, more importantly, artistically, we’re fairly spoiled for choice. Alec Kercso credits the way that he and his colleagues were allowed to work “organically,” experimenting to see what worked and what didn’t. Credit also the odd idealism that clung to the team as a whole, which prompted them to never back away from their determination to make something bigger and qualitatively different than anything that had come before, no matter how long it took. Credit Joe Ybarra and the management of EA who, skeptical as they may sometimes have been, ultimately gave Binary Systems the time and space they needed to create a masterpiece. Credit Rod McConnell for giving his stable of talented youngsters the freedom to create whilst finding a way to keep the lights on through all those long years. And credit, almost paradoxically, the limited technology of the era. With their graphics capabilities sharply limited, the team was free to concentrate on building an interesting galaxy, full of interesting things to do, and to tweak it endlessly, without needing to employ dozens of artists and 3D modellers to represent every little idea; tellingly, the only artist on the team was Johnson, who was also the lead designer. And of course credit Johnson for giving the game a plot and an unforgettable, quirky personality all its own, without which all of its technical innovations would have added up to little.

There’s a stately dignity to Starflight even amidst all the goofy gags, a sense of something grand and fresh and new attempted and, even more remarkably, actually realized. Few games have ever quite captured that science-fictional sense of wonder quite this well. If you start playing it — and that’s very easy to do now; Starflight 1 and 2 are both available in one-click-installable form from GOG.com — you might just find yourself lost in its depths for a long, long time. This, my friends, is one of the great ones.

(Useful vintage articles on Starflight include an interview with Rod McConnell in the March 1987 Computer Gaming World and especially one with Tim Lee in the July/August 1987 Forth Dimensions. Alec Kercso wrote about the game in, of all places, Jonathan S. Harbour’s Microsoft Visual BASIC Programming with DirectX. Good recent articles include ones in The Escapist, Gamasutra, and Sega-16. Tim Lee gave part of the source code and many design documents to Ryan Lindeman. He once made even more source and documents available online, some of which can still be recovered via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Similarly available only via the Wayback Machine is Miguel Etto’s technical analysis of the game’s Forthian underpinnings.)

1. This is not to say that all is smooth sailing. Starflight constantly saves updated versions of its data files to disk as you play. It then relies on you to “commit” all of these changes by cleanly exiting the game from the menu. If you ever exit without properly saving, or get killed, your game becomes unplayable until you reset it back to its original data — whereupon you have the joy of starting all over. My advice is to make backups of the files “STARA.COM” and “STARB.COM” after every successful session; then if you get killed or have some other problem you can just copy these back into the game’s directory to get back to a good state. Or, if you like, here’s a DOSBox startup script you can use to automatically keep a few generations of states. Just copy it into the “{[autoexec]” section of the game’s “.conf” file, editing as needed to suit your directory names. ↩

Comments
19 Responses

- Firedragon

October 28, 2014 at 4:20 pm

I remember playing this in my beloved Amiga 500. It lurked in my unconsciousness so much that it was one of the first articles I read on the CRPGADDICT.

And this article marks the point where I finally caught up with all the articles on the Digital Antiquarian.

Thanks Jimmy, if I may use you first name, for long nights of reading your great articles. it kept me from sleeping and caused my biorhythm to switch to going to bed at 3am pattern.

Keep it up! I’m really looking forward to your future book!

- DANoWAR

October 29, 2014 at 8:42 am

Hello,

I’d like to read the article but the spoiler warning makes me reconsider. Is there a specific section where you spoil it that you could visually mark? Or are spoilers strewn throughout the article?

- Jimmy Maher

October 29, 2014 at 11:37 am

I put a couple of markers in the text for you. It’s really just a couple of paragraphs that you’ll want to avoid. Otherwise I think it’s all pretty general.

- DANoWAR

October 30, 2014 at 7:52 am

Well, thank you kind sir…*quiets down and starts reading*

- Petter Sjölund

October 29, 2014 at 9:38 am

Thanks for another excellent article on an excellent game!

The 1991 Sega Genesis version of Starflight was a fairly extensive update, and is regarded by some as the best version:
http://sega.wikia.com/wiki/Starflight#Differences_with_the_Sega_Genesis_version_.28compared_to_PC_version.29

- GeoX

October 29, 2014 at 12:25 pm

I played Starflight II prior to the original, and maybe you can describe it as “workmanlike” if you played the first game first, but MY GOSH was I ever entranced–such that when I did finally play the first one, I liked it, but at the same time thought, huh–there’s not really that much HERE. The trading system in the sequel may or may not objectively be as complicated and fascinating as it seemed to me at the time, but I loved it, and the overall plot seemed much more epic. There were so many more alien races and so many secrets to penetrate–I thought it was just great.

- Dehumanizer

October 29, 2014 at 2:44 pm

Typo: Fractulus -> Fractalus.

And now I want to play this (I’ve known about this game for decades, but never happened to play it). :) Already bough it on GOG.

- Jimmy Maher

October 29, 2014 at 3:13 pm

Thanks!

- David Boddie

October 29, 2014 at 3:17 pm

Some corrections:
“troll” -> “trawl”
“Trades Routes” -> “Trade Routes”

- Jimmy Maher

October 29, 2014 at 3:38 pm

I believe I discussed troll/trawl with someone before at some point. Both are actually acceptable and essentially synonymous. It may be that the former is more American usage, the latter more British.

Troll — 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.

“Trades Routes,” however, I’ll give you. ;) Thanks

- Lisa H.

October 29, 2014 at 6:54 pm

I’m getting the sinking feeling that one of my favorite computer games ever, Star Control II, was basically just a retread (not to say ripoff) of Starflight…

- Zack Johnson

October 29, 2014 at 8:43 pm

Well, the two games have Paul Reiche III in common.

I don’t think a sinking feeling is in order. Maybe a soaring one, brought on by the interconnectedness of all things.

- Jimmy Maher

October 30, 2014 at 6:34 am

I believe Johnson returned Reiche’s favor for Star Control II, batting around ideas with him — although Star Control II was in the end Reiche’s game, just as Starflight was Johnson’s. So there’s very much a shared heritage here.

- Óscar

October 31, 2014 at 9:36 am

Superb article as usual. Thanks for your great work.

By the way, I wonder if you know this classic game of the 8 bits period. It´s almost unknown outside of Europe but here has quite a reputation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W03bOkfqOTo

- Jimmy Maher

October 31, 2014 at 9:55 am

No, afraid I know nothing about that one. It was obviously very influenced by Knight Lore and the other Ultimate isometric games, but looks a bit, shall we say, “higher concept.” Thanks! I’ll watch a bit more when I have some time…

- Sniffnoy

October 31, 2014 at 9:47 pm

“The Abbey of Crime”? Couldn’t get the license for The Name of the Rose, I take it? (…and, yeah, according to Wikipedia, that’s exactly what happened.)

- Óscar

November 1, 2014 at 2:28 pm

That´s correct, it was based in Umberto Eco´s book.
And yes, Jimmy is right, the author was very fond of the Ultimate games. Also could be some Denton Designs´ The Great Escape trace there..

Thank you again for your great work.

- Jim Leonard

November 4, 2014 at 7:19 pm

An excellent summary of a game that my family has enjoyed for years, thanks so much.

The revelation of the PCjr as the original target explains a few things, such as why the game targeted 160×200 (PCjr/Tandy “low res”) for everything, including the double-wide text letters.

Something implied in the article that I’d like to correct is that the very first release of Starflight didn’t support 16-color graphics. It did — if you had a composite monitor connected to your CGA card via the RCA composite jack. The CGA 320x220x4-color graphics you see running on an RGB monitor is simply what the 16-color composite graphics data looks like on an RGB monitor.

- Captain Kal

March 23, 2016 at 9:30 pm

There is a free Starflight remake, called “Starflight – The Lost Colony”, ( https://sites.google.com/site/starflighttlc/ ), based in the Genesis version I think and it was created by Jonathan S. Harbour,

And Protostar: War on the Frontier, ( http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/protostar-war-on-the-frontier) , is Starflight 3 with another name!!

Jim Levy and Activision
November 5, 2014

I’ve already spent a lot of time on the history of one of the two great corporate survivors from the early years of videogames, Electronic Arts. But I’ve neglected the older of the pair, Activision, because that company originally made games only for consoles, a field of gaming history I’ve largely left to others who are far better qualified than I to write about it. Still, as we get into the middle years of the 1980s Activision suddenly becomes very relevant indeed to computer-gaming history. Given that, it’s worth taking the time now to look back on Activision’s founding and earliest days, to trace the threads that led to some important titles that are very much in my wheelhouse. In my view the single most important figure in Activision’s early history, and one that too often goes undercredited in preference to an admittedly brilliant team of programmers and designers, is Jim Levy, Activision’s president through the first seven-and-a-half years of its existence. So, as the title of this article would imply, one of my agendas today will be to do a little something to correct that.

The penultimate year of the 1970s was a trying time at Atari. The Atari VCS console, eventually to become an indelible totem of an era not just for gamers but for everyone, had a difficult first year after its October 1977 introduction, with sales below expectations and boxes piling up in warehouses. Internally the company was in chaos, as a full-on war took place between Nolan Bushnell, Atari’s engineering-minded founder, and its current CEO, Ray Kassar, a slick East Coast plutocrat whom new owners Warner Communications had installed with orders to clean up Bushnell’s hippie playground and turn it into an operation properly focused on marketing and the bottom line. Kassar won the war in December of 1978: Bushnell was fired. From that point on Atari became a very different sort of place. Bushnell had loved his engineers and programmers, but Kassar had no intrinsic interest in Atari’s products and little regard for the engineers and programmers that made them. The reign of Kassar as sole authority at Atari began auspiciously. Even before Bushnell’s departure, Kassar’s promotional efforts, with a strong assist from a fortuitous craze for a Japanese stand-up-arcade import called Space Invaders, had begun to revive the VCS; the Christmas of 1978, although nothing compared to Christmases to come, was strong enough to clear out some of those warehouses.

David Crane, Bob Whitehead, Larry Kaplan, and Alan Miller were known as the “Fantastic Four” at Atari during those days because the games they had (individually) programmed accounted for as much as 60 percent of the company’s total cartridge sales. Like most of Atari’s technical staff, they were none too happy with this new, Kassar-led version of the company. Trouble started in earnest when Kassar distributed a memo to his programmers listing Atari’s top-selling titles along with their sales, with an implied message of “Give us more like these, please!” The message the Fantastic Four took away, however, was that they were each generating millions for Atari whilst toiling in complete anonymity for salaries of around $30,000 per year. Miller, whose history with Atari went back to playing the original Pong machine at Andy Capp’s Tavern and who was always the most vocal and business-oriented of the group, drafted a contract modeled after those used in the book and music industries that would award him royalties and credit, in the form of a blurb on the game boxes and manuals, for his work; he then sent it to Kassar. Kassar’s reply was vehemently in the negative, allegedly comparing programmers to “towel designers” and saying their contribution to the games’ success was about as great as that of the person on the assembly line who put the packages together. Miller talked to Crane, Whitehead, and Kaplan, convincing them to join him in seeking to start their own company to write their own games to compete with those of Atari. Such a venture would be the first of its kind.

The Fantastic Four, 1980: from left, Bob Whitehead, David Crane, Larry Kaplan, and Alan Miller (standing)

Through the lawyer they consulted, they met Jim Levy, a 35-year-old businessman who had just been laid off after six years at a sinking ship of a company called GRT Corporation, located right there in Sunnyvale, California, also home to Atari. GRT had mainly manufactured prerecorded tapes for music labels, but had also run a few independent labels of their own on the side. Eager to break into that other, creative part of the industry, Levy had come up with a scheme to take the labels off their erstwhile parent’s hands, and had secured $350,000 in venture capital for the purpose. But when his lawyer introduced him to the Fantastic Four that plan changed immediately. Here was a chance to get in on the ground floor of a whole new creative industry — and that really was, as we shall see, how Levy regarded game making, as a primarily creative endeavor. He convinced his venture capitalists to double their initial investment, and on October 1, 1979, after the Fantastic Four had one by one tendered their resignations to Atari as an almost unremarked part of a general brain drain that was going on under Kassar’s new regime, VSYNC, Inc., was born. But that name, an homage to the “vertical sync” signal that Atari VCS programmers lived and died by (see Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s Racing the Beam), obviously wouldn’t do. And so, after finding that “Computervision” was already taken, Levy came up with “Activision,” a combination of “action” and “vision” — or, if you like, “action” and “television.” It didn’t hurt that the name would come before that of the company they knew was doomed to become their arch-nemesis, Atari, in sales brochures, phone books, and corporate listings. By January of 1980, when they quietly announced their existence to select industry insiders at the Consumer Electronics Show — among them a very unhappy and immediately threatening Kassar — Activision included 8 people. By that year’s end, it would include 15. And by early 1983, when Activision 1.0 peaked, it would include more than 400.

Jim Levy surrounded by his fast-growing Activision “family,” 1981

Aware from the beginning of the potential for legal action on Atari’s part, Activision’s lawyer had made sure that the Fantastic Four exited Atari with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The first task of the new company thus became to engineer their own VCS development system. Much of this work was accomplished in the spare bedroom of Crane’s apartment, even before Levy got the financing locked down and found them an office. Activision was thus able to release their first four games in relatively short order, in July of 1980. Following Atari’s own approach to naming games in the early days, Dragster, Boxing, Checkers, and Fishing Derby had names that were rather distressingly literal. But the boxes were brighter and more exciting than Atari’s, the manuals all included head shots of their designers along with their signatures and personal thoughts on their creations, and, most importantly, most gamers agreed that the quality was much higher than what they’d come to expect from Atari’s own recent releases. Activision would refine their approach — not to mention their game naming — over the next few years, but these things would remain constants.

Steve Cartwright

In spite of the example of a thriving software industry on early PCs like the TRS-80 and Apple II, it seems to have literally never occurred to Atari that anyone could or would do what Activision had done and develop software for “their” VCS. That lack of expectation had undoubtedly been buttressed by the fact that the VCS, a notoriously difficult machine to program for even those in the know, was a closed box, its secrets and development tools secured behind the new hi-tech electric door locks Kassar had had installed at Atari almost as soon as he arrived. The Fantastic Four, however, carried all that precious knowledge around with them in their heads. Atari sued Activision right away for alleged theft of “trade secrets,” but had a hard time coming up with anything they had actually done wrong. There simply was no law against figuring out — or remembering — how the VCS worked and writing games for it. And so Atari employed the time-honored technique of trying to bury their smaller competitor under law suits that would be very expensive to defend regardless of their merits. That might have worked — except that Activision made an astonishingly successful debut. This was the year that the VCS really took off, and Activision was there to reap the rewards right along with Atari, selling more than $60 million worth of games during their first year. The levelheaded Levy, who had anticipated a legal storm from the beginning, simply treated it as another tax or other business expense, budgeting a certain amount every quarter to keeping Atari at legal bay.

Carol Shaw

Under Levy’s guidance, Activision now proceeded to write a play book that many of the publishers we’ve already met would later draw from liberally.  Activision’s designer/programmers were always shown as cool people doing cool things. Steve Cartwright, designer of Barnstorming, was photographed, with scarf blowing rakishly in the wind, about to take to the skies in a real biplane; Carol Shaw, designer of River Raid and one of the vanishingly small number of female programmers writing videogames, appeared on her racing bike; Larry (no relation to Alan) Miller, designer of Enduro, could be seen perched on the hood of a classic car. Certainly Trip Hawkins would take note of Activision’s publicity techniques when he came up with his own ideas for promoting his “electronic artists” like rock stars. Almost from the beginning Activision fostered a sense of community with their fans through a glossy newsletter, Activisions, full of puzzles and contests and pictures and news of the latest goings-on around the offices in addition to plugs for the newest games — a practice Infocom and EA among others would also take to heart. Activision, however, did it all on a whole different scale. By 1983 they were sending out 400,000 copies of every newsletter issue, and receiving more than 10,000 pieces of fan mail every week.

Larry Miller

In those early years Activision practically defined themselves as the anti-Atari. If Atari was closed and faceless, they would be open and welcoming, throwing grand shindigs for press and fans to promote their games, like the “Barnstorming Parade,” featuring, once again, Cartwright in a real airplane; the “Decathlon Party,” featuring 1976 Olympic Decathlon Gold Medal winner Bruce Jenner, to promote The Activision Decathlon; or the “Rumble in the Jungle” to promote their biggest hit of all, Crane’s Pitfall!. While, as Jenner’s presence will attest, they weren’t above a spot of celebratory endorsing now and again, they also maintained a certain artistic integrity in sticking to original game concepts and refusing any sort of licensing deals, whether of current arcade hits or media properties. This again place them in marked contrast to Atari, who, in the wake of their licensed version of Taito’s arcade hit Space Invaders that had almost singlehandedly transformed the VCS from a modest success to a full-fledged cultural phenomenon in the pivotal year of 1980, never saw a license they didn’t want. Our games, Levy never tired of saying, are original  works that can stand on their own merits. As for the licensed stuff: “People will take one look because they know the movie title. But if an exciting game isn’t there, forget it. Our audiences are too sophisticated. You can’t fool them.” Such respect for his audience, whether real or feigned or a bit of both, was another thing that endeared Activision to them.

Released in April of 1982 just as the videogame craze hit its peak — revenues that year reached fully half those of the music industry — Pitfall! was Activision 1.0’s commercial high-water mark, selling more than 4 million copies, more than any of Atari’s own games except Pac-Man. Pitfall! would go on to become the urtext of an entire genre of side-scrolling platform games. In more immediate terms, it made Crane something of a minor celebrity as well as a very wealthy young man indeed; one magazine even dared to compare his earnings from Pitfall! with those of Michael Jackson from Thriller, although that was probably laying it on a bit thick. Meanwhile four other Activision games — Laser Blast, Kaboom!, Freeway, and River Raid — had passed the 1 million mark in sales, and dozens of other new publishers had followed Activision’s example by rolling up their sleeves, figuring out how the VCS worked and how they could develop for it, and jumping into the market. The resulting flood of cartridges, many of them sold at a fraction of Activision’s price point and still more of them substandard even by Atari’s less than exacting standards, would be blamed by Levy for much of what happened next.

In April of 1983, Levy confidently predicted in his keynote speech for The First — and, as it would turn out, last — Video Games Conference that the industry would triple in size within five years. In June, Activision went public, creating a number of new millionaires. It was, depending on how you look at it, the best or the worst possible timing. Just weeks later began in earnest the Great Videogame Crash of 1983, and everything went to hell for Activision, just as for the rest of the industry. Activision had always been a happy place, the sort of company whose president could suddenly announce that he was taking everyone along with their significant others to Hawaii for four days to celebrate Pitfall!‘s success; where the employees could move their managers’ offices en masse into the bathrooms for April Fool’s without fear of reprisal; whose break rooms were always bursting with doughnuts and candy. Thus November 10, 1983, was particularly hard to take. That was the day Levy laid off a quarter of Activision’s workforce. It was his birthday. It was also only the first of many painful downsizes.

Levy had bought into the contemporary conventional wisdom that home computers were destined to replace game consoles in the hearts and minds of consumers, that the home-computer market was going to blow up so big as to dwarf the VCS craze at its height. His plan was thus to turn Activision into a publisher of home-computer software rather than game cartridges. His biggest problem looked to be bridging the chasm that lay between the recently expired fad of the consoles and the projected sustained domination of the home computer. The painful fact was that, even on the heels of a hugely successful 1983, all of the home-computer models combined still had nowhere near the market penetration of the Atari VCS alone at its peak. There simply weren’t enough buyers out there to sustain a company of the size to which Activision had so quickly grown. The only way to bridge the chasm was to glide over on the millions they had socked away in the bank during the boom years whilst brutally downsizing to stretch those millions farther. Activision 2.0 would have to be, at least for the time being, a bare shadow of Activision 1.0’s size. Yet “the time being” soon began to look like perpetuity, especially as the cash reserves began to dry up. In 1983, Activision 1.0 had revenues of $158 million; in 1986, three years into Levy’s remaking/remodeling, Activision 2.0 had revenues of $17 million. The fundamental problem, which grew all too clear as Activision 2.0’s life went on, was that the home-computer boom had fizzled about a decade early and about 90 percent short of its expected size.

With Activision, despite the frantic downsizing, projected to lose $18 million in 1984, when Columbia Pictures made it known that they would be interested in letting David Crane do a game based on their new movie Ghostbusters, Levy quietly forgot all his old prejudices against licensed products. Ghostbusters the game was literally an afterthought; the movie had already been in theaters a week or two when Activision and Columbia started discussing the idea. The deal was closed within days, and Crane was told he had exactly six weeks to come up with the game before Ghostbusters mania died down — which was just as well, as he was planning to get married in six weeks. Exactly these sorts of external pressures had undone Atari licensed games like Pac-Man and E.T., and were a big part of the reason that Levy had heretofore avoided licenses. Luckily, Crane already had been working on a game for the Commodore 64 he called Car Wars (no apparent relation to the Steve Jackson Games board game, the license for which was held by Origin Systems), which had the player undertaking a series of missions whilst racing around a city map battling other vehicles. Each successful mission earned money she could use to upgrade her car for the next, more difficult level. Crane realized it should be possible to retrofit ghosts and lots of other paraphernalia from the movie onto the idea. Realizing that he couldn’t possibly do it all on his own, he recruited a team of four others to help him. Ghostbusters thus became the first Activision game to abandon the single-auteur model of development that had been the standard until then. In its wake almost every other project also became a team project, a concession to the technical realities of developing for the more advanced Commodore 64 and other home computers versus the old VCS. With the help of his assistants, Crane was able to add many charming little touches to Ghostbusters, like sampled taglines from the movie (“He slimed me!”) and a chiptunes version of Ray Parker, Jr.’s monster hit of a theme song, complete with onscreen words and a bouncing ball to help you sing along.

David Crane was Activision’s King Midas. Despite its rushed development, Ghostbusters turned out to be a very playable game, even a surprisingly sophisticated one, what with its CRPG-like in-game economy and the thread of story that linked all of the ghost-busting missions together. It even has a real ending, with the slamming of the dimension door that’s been setting all of these ghosts loose in our universe. Released in plenty of time for Christmas 1984 and doubtless buoyed by the fact that Ghostbusters the movie just kept going and going — it would eventually become the most successful comedy of the 1980s — Ghostbusters became Activision 2.0’s biggest hit by a light year and one of the bestselling Commodore 64 games of all time, selling well into the hundreds of thousands. Like relatively few Commodore 64 games but almost all of the real blockbusters, it became hugely popular in both North America and Europe, where Activision, unlike most of their peers who published there if at all through the likes of U.S. Gold, had set up a real semi-autonomous operation — Activision U.K. — during the boom years. And it was of course widely ported to other platforms popular on both sides of the pond.

It’s at this point that Levy’s story and Activision’s get really interesting. Having proved through Ghostbusters that his company could make the magic happen on the Commodore 64 as well as the Atari VCS, however much more modest the commercial rewards for even a huge hit on the former platform were destined to be, Levy now began to push through a series of aggressively innovative, high-concept titles, often over the considerable misgivings of the board of directors with which Activision’s IPO had saddled him. I don’t want to overstate the case; it’s not as if Levy transformed Activision overnight into an art-house publisher. The next few years would bring plenty of stolid action games alongside the occasional adventure as well as, what with Activision having popped the lid off this particular can of worms to so much success, more licensed titles: Aliens, Labyrinth, Transformers, and, just to show that not all licenses are winners, a computerized adaptation of Lucasfilm’s infamous flop Howard the Duck that managed to be almost as bad as its inspiration. Yet betwixt and between all this expected product Levy found room for the weird and the wacky and occasionally the visionary. He made his agenda clear in press interviews. Rhetorically drawing on his music-industry experience despite the fact that he had never actually worked on the creative side of that industry, he cast Activision’s already storied history as that of a plucky artist-driven indie label that went “head to head with the majors” and thereby proved that “the artist can be trusted,” whilst chastising competitors for “a certain stagnation in creative style, concept, and content.” The game industry was — or should be — driven by its greatest assets, its creators. The job of him and the other business-oriented people was just to facilitate their art and to get it before the public.

Writing a game is close to the whole concept of songwriting and composing. Then you get involved later on with the ink-and-paper people for packaging. There are a lot of similarities between the record business and what we do.

There was a certain amount of calculation in such statements, just as there was in Trip Hawkins’s campaigns on behalf of his own electronic artists. Yet, also as in Hawkins’s case, I believe the core sentiment was very sincere. Levy genuinely did believe he was witnessing the birth of a new form (or forms) of art, and genuinely did feel a responsibility to nurture it. Garry Kitchen, a veteran programmer who had joined Activision during the boom years, tells of how Levy during the period of Activision 2.0 kept rejecting his ideas for yet more simple action games: “Do something different, innovate!” How many other game-industry CEOs can you imagine saying such a thing then or now?

At this point, then, I’d like to very briefly tell you about a handful of Activision’s titles from 1985 and 1986. In some cases more interesting as ideas than as playable works, no one could accuse any of what follows of failing to heed Levy’s command to “innovate!” Some aren’t actually games at all, fulfilling another admonition of Levy to his programmers: to stop always thinking in terms of rules and scores and winners and losers.

See //www.youtube.com/embed/krAzOfMA31g

The first fruit of the creative pressure Levy put on Kitchen was The Designer’s Pencil. Yet another impressive implementation of a Macintosh-inspired interface on an 8-bit computer, The Designer’s Pencil is, depending on how you look at it, either a thoroughly unique programming environment or an equally unique paint program. Rather than painting directly to the screen, you construct a script to control the actions of the eponymous pencil. You can also play sounds and music while the pencil is about its business. A drawing and animation program for people who can’t draw and a visual introduction to programming, The Designer’s Pencil is most of all just a neat little toy.

Responding to users of The Designer’s Pencil who begged for ways to make their creations interactive, Kitchen later provided Garry Kitchen’s GameMaker: The Computer Game Design Kit. Four separate modules let you make the component pieces of your game: Scenes, Sprites, Music, and Sound. Then you can wrap it all together in a blanket of game logic using the Editor. Inevitably more complicated to work with than The Designer’s Pencil, GameMaker is still entirely joystick-driven if you want it to be and remarkably elegant given the complexity of its task. It was by far the most powerful software of its kind for the Commodore 64, the action-game equivalent of EA’s Adventure Construction Set. In a sign of just how far the industry had come in a few years, GameMaker included a reimplementation of Pitfall!, Activision’s erstwhile state-of-the-art blockbuster, as a freebie, just one of several examples of what can be done and how.

See //www.youtube.com/embed/G7tBQomaTCA

Described by its creator Russell Lieblich as a “Zen” game, Web Dimension has an infinite number of lives, no score, and no time limit. The ostensible theme is evolution: levels allegedly progress through atoms, planets, amoebae, jellyfish, germs, eggs, embryos, and finally astronauts. But good luck actually making those associations. The game is best described as, as a contemporary reviewer put it, “a musical fantasy of color, sight, and sound,” on the same wavelength as if less ambitious than Automata’s Deus Ex Machina. As with that game, the soundtrack is the most important part of Web Dimension. Lieblich considered himself a musician first, programmer second, and not actually much of a gamer: “I’m not really into games, but I love music, so I designed a musical game that doesn’t keep score.” Like Deus Ex Machina not much of a game in conventional terms, Web Dimension is interesting as a piece of interactive art.

Hacker begins with a screen that’s blank but for a single blinking login prompt. You’re trying to break into a remote computer system with absolutely nothing to go on. Literally: in contrast to the likes of the Ultima or Infocom games, Hacker‘s box contained only a card telling how to boot the game and an envelope of hints for the weak and/or frustrated. Discovering the rules that govern the game is the game. Designed and programmed by Steve Cartwright, creator of Barnstorming amongst others, it was another achievement of an Activision old guard who continued to prove they had plenty of new tricks up their sleeves. This weird experiment of a game actually turned into a surprising commercial success, Activision 2.0’s second biggest seller after Ghostbusters. Playing it is a disorienting, sinister, oddly evocative experience until you figure out what’s going on and what you’re doing, whereupon it suddenly all becomes anticlimax. “Anticlimactic” also best describes the sequel, Hacker II: The Doomsday Papers; Hacker is the kind of thing that can only really work once.

Little Computer People is today the most remembered creation of Activision’s experimental years, having been an important influence on a little something called The Sims. It’s yet another work by the indefatigable David Crane, his final major achievement at Activision. The fiction, which Crane hewed to relentlessly even in interviews, has you helping out as a member of the Activision Little Computer People Research Group, looking into the activities of the LCPs who have recently been discovered living inside computers. When you start the program you’re greeted by a newly built house perfect for the man and his dog who soon move in. Every single copy of Little Computer People contained a unique LCP with his own personality, a logistical nightmare for Activision’s manufacturing process. He lives his life on a realistic albeit compressed daily schedule, with 24 hours inside the computer passing in 6 outside it. Depending on the time of day and his personality and mood as well as your handling, the little fellow might prefer to relax with a book in his favorite armchair, play music on his piano, exercise, chat on the phone, play with his dog, watch television, listen to the record collection you’ve (hopefully) provided, or play a game of cards with you — when he isn’t sleeping, brushing his teeth, or showering, that is.  You can try to get him to do your bidding via a parser interface, but if you aren’t polite enough about it or if he’s just feeling cranky the answer is likely to be a big fat “No!”

While Little Computer People was frequently dismissed as pointless by the more goal-oriented among us, other players developed strong if sometimes dysfunctional attachments to their LCPs. For example, in an article for Retro Gamer, Kim Wild told of her fruitless year-long struggle to get her hygienically challenged LCP just to take a damn shower already. In its way Little Computer People offered as many tempting mysteries as any adventure game. Contemporary online services teemed with controversy over the contents of a certain upstairs closet into which the LCP would periodically disappear, only to reappear with a huge smile on his face. The creepy majority view was that he had a woman stashed in there, although a vocal minority opted for the closet being a private liquor cabinet.

While it didn’t sell in anything like the quantities of some of Crane’s other games, Little Computer People was a moderate success. Further cementing its connection to The Sims, Crane and Activision planned a series of expansions that would have added new houses and other environments for the LCPs and maybe even the possibility of having more than one of them, and thus of watching them interact with one another instead of only with their dogs and their players. For reasons that will have to wait for a future article, however, that would never happen.

Activision’s first notable release for the new 68000-based machines was Shanghai. A simple solitaire tile-matching exercise that uses mahjong tiles —  and not, it should be emphasized, an implementation of the much more complex actual game of mahjong — Shanghai was created by Brodie Lockard, a former gymnast who’d become paralyzed following a bad fall and used his “solitaire mahjong” almost as a form of therapy in the years that followed. Particularly in its original Macintosh incarnation, it’s lovely to look at and dangerously addictive. Like many of Activision’s experimental titles of the period, Shanghai cut against most of the trends in gaming of the mid-1980s. Its gameplay was almost absurdly simple while other games were reveling ever more in complexity; it was playable in short bursts of a few minutes rather than demanding a commitment of hours; its simple but atmospheric calligraphic visuals and feel of leisurely contemplation made a marked contrast to the flash and action of other games; its pure abstraction was the polar opposite to other games’ ever-growing focus on the experiential. Moderately successful in its day, Shanghai was perhaps the most prescient of all Activision’s games from this period, forerunner to our current era of undemanding, bite-sized mobile gaming. Indeed, it would eventually spawn what seems like a million imitators that remain staples on our smartphones and tablets today. And it would also spawn, the modern world being what it is, lots and lots of legal battles over who actually invented solitaire mahjong; there’s still considerable debate about whether Lockard merely adopted an existing Chinese game to the computer or invented a new one from whole cloth.

There are still other fascinating titles whose existence we owe to Jim Levy’s Activision 2.0. In fact, I’m going to use my next two articles to tell you about two more of them — inevitably, given our usual predilections around here, the most narrative-focused of the bunch.

(Lots of print sources for this one, including: Commodore Magazine of June 1987, February 1988, and July 1989; Billboard of June 16 1979, July 14 1979, September 15 1979, June 19 1982, and November 3 1984; InfoWorld of August 4 1980 and November 5 1984; Compute!’s Gazette of March 1985; Creative Computing of September 1983 and November 1984; Antic of June 1984; Retro Gamer 18, 25, 79, and 123; Commodore Horizons of May 1985; Commodore User of April 1985; Zzap! of December 1985; San Jose Mercury of February 18 1988; New York Times of January 13 1983; Commodore Power Play of October/November 1985; Lodi News Sentinel of April 4 1981; the book Zap!: The Rise and Fall of Atari by Scott Cohen; and the entire 7-issue run of the Activisions newsletter. Online sources include Gamasutra’s histories of Activision and Atari and Brad Fregger’s memories of Shanghai‘s development.)

Comments
24 Responses

- John G

November 5, 2014 at 5:00 pm

I was just thinking about Little Computer People this week and wondering about a number of aspects that still seem mysterious to me. I still remember when, as a kid, I believed someone’s joke at the local computer store that if I made my LCP, a gray-haired bachelor named Taylor, happy enough he would invite his friends over and throw a party. But I tried and tried and nothing happened.

I was Googling this week and read that if your disk became damaged, Activision would bring your LCP back to life by carefully extracting his personality traits from the old disk. But I still wonder about aspects of LCP life that, unlike in The Sims, happen behind the scenes.

For example, every disk has its own, one-of-a-kind LCP with his own name and personality–in what seemed at the time to fit in with the craze of every Cabbage Patch Kid doll being similarly unique. But I still wonder about the possible range of character traits, looks and names that the computer has to work with the first time the disk loads and it runs the LCP genesis process.

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2014 at 8:26 am

Retro Gamer’s article describe each LCP’s “brain” as being stored in a single block on each disk, meaning it could occupy at most 256 bytes. The disks were otherwise identical. So, we’re not talking about hugely sophisticated AI here. I suspect that, as with so many other pieces of software artistry dating back at least to Eliza, most players would be shocked at how *little* was actually going on under the hood. Much of the art of design in these days was of creating the *impression* of complexity. There’s only so much you can ultimately do in 64 K.

- Alex Smith

November 5, 2014 at 5:10 pm

Fun read as always, just wanted to point out a couple of small mistakes and additions.

First, your brief remarks on the VCS are not quite accurate. The system performed very well on release, selling out the entire 400,000 unit production run. Then two things happened in 1978: the company experienced an unacceptable level of customer returns due to quality control issues, and retailers resisted building programmable console inventory for Christmas due to a variety of economic factors I will not get into here. Atari had hoped to double sales of the VCS in 1978, but retailers ordered at 1977 levels. That’s why those systems backed up in warehouses. Consumers actually bought almost everything they could in 1978: it was the retailers who constrained supply. I know that’s more detail than you need to go into for this post, but I just wanted to point out it was selling more than “tens of thousands.”

Second, I know you are generalizing in the interest of summarizing, but the Kassar portrayal is a bit unnuanced. R&D actually increased under Kassar and there were a variety of advanced console and computer projects under development at any given time under his watch. Few of these came to market, however, due in part to company politics. I also think its unfair to say he had “no regard” for his engineers. Kassar understood you needed good people to create good products, but he appears to have never understood that creating excellent games required a unique combination of creativity and technical knowledge that was rare in those days and therefore valuable. He certainly undervalued his engineers, but he did not dismiss them completely. Eventually, Atari woke up and instituted a royalty program, but all they really did was close the barn door after the horses were already gone.

My final point relates to the Ghsotbusters opportunity. Credit for that goes to Greg Fischbach, Activision’s president of international and later founder of Acclam Entertainment. Fischbach had been a music industry lawyer and had a lot of contacts in the entertainment industry. He knew the head of Columbia Pictures, who told him about the forthcoming movie. Fischbach then brought it to Activision.

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2014 at 8:06 am

I don’t want to get too far down into the weeds on some of this for obvious reasons, but if you could point to a source or two on the early VCS sales figures that would be super helpful for me to feel confident about making an edit or two. Most of what I’ve found describes an early surge (relatively speaking), followed by sales dropping down to a disappointing dribble — i.e., “measured in the tens of thousands” — for most of 1978, then picking up again that Christmas thanks to Kassar’s advertising, the Space Invaders arcade craze, and presumably just the plain old standard Christmas buying frenzy. As far as the details of retail order levels, etc., that is as you’ve surmised a bit more than I feel the need to get into here.

On Kassar: I believe it’s fairly clear that he did *initially* slash R&D. In Zap! by Scott Cohen, Bushnell lists the desire of Kassar and Kassar’s boss Manny Gerard (the Warner executive who orchestrated the Atari acquisition) to slash R&D budgets as the main impetus behind the November 1978 blowup between Bushnell and Gerard that resulted in the former’s “voluntary firing.” Bob Brown, head of Atari’s main team of 30 engineers, described in the same book his shock at Kassar’s budget-slashing — “Kill R&D and you’re killing the company’s future” — and makes it the main reason for the mass exodus of Atari’s original engineering staff. I understand that Atari later restarted R&D — thus your “closing the barn door after the horses were already gone” — even hiring prestigious names like Alan Kay, but in this narrow context of the time around the Fantastic Four’s departure I feel like my portrayal is accurate.

On Ghostbusters: I’d read of Fischbach’s role in my research, but, again, I wasn’t ready to get too deeply into the details of the backstage deal-making for what is ultimately a fairly broad historical summary of an article. But credit where’s it’s due and all, so thanks for that. :)

- Alex Smith

November 6, 2014 at 3:59 pm

Happy to provide some sources.

Atari VCS sales in 1977:

The Southeast Missourian, June 15, 1978

These were the sales Atari reported at the time, and more contemporary sources have continued to take their word for it: see for example this case study

A Berstein Research strategic analysis released in December 1982 claimed sales of 300,000 units rather than 400,000, and that is probably the sales claimed by the chart in IEEE Spectrum that Scott references below too, though charts like that are difficult to gauge.

Scott’s claim of 250,000 appears to come from statements made to that effect by Joe Decuir, who was a member of the VCS development team on page 7 of this webzine, but he is not a particularly reliable source for this information not being involved in sales and attempting to remember years after the fact. He also claims that figure from the IEEE chart in his FAQ, but I get the feeling they are claiming the same 300,000 as Berstein. Its only 50,000 units though, so its not that material.

1978 sales:

Atari: From Cutoffs to Pinstripes by Steve Bloom

Design Case History: The Atari Video Computer System from the March 1983 issues of IEEE Magazine

These sources differ slightly on the details, but they both agree that Atari manufactured 800,000 units and retailers refused to stock many of them. Manny Gerard has attested in several places, including Tristan Donovan’s Replay, that the VCS was a hit in 1978, so those units at retail sold, but Atari was left with 300,000-400,000 units backed up in warehouses along with their suddenly worthless dedicated console stock. Bernstein also claims 400,000 sold, which jives with Keenan’s comments to Bloom that 400,000 failed to sell in 1978.

Note that Scott’s claim of 750,000 units below is a typo: his FAQ claims 500,000 units in 1978 and 750,000 lifetime sales by the end of 1978.

R&D

The best source for this is Atari Inc Business is Fun by Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel, which has multiple chapters devoted to R&D work at both Atari proper and its Cyan Engineering subsidiary in Grass Valley. There is no real indication in that book that Atari suddenly scrapped a bunch of products or cut R&D spending from any source I have ever seen. I am sure resources were shifted and people were let go as is typical in any regime change, but R&D was a strong component all along. I mean, they lured Alan Kay to the company to run R&D when Al Alcorn left a few years later, though he ended up calling that one of the least productive periods of his life.

The main source for this contention about ending R&D appears to come from the Cutoffs to Pinstripes article linked above, but it makes little sense. At the time, Bob Brown was in charge of the microelectronics division of Atari, which encompassed both VCS and dedicated console hardware and software development. He was not involved with pure R&D, which was run by Al Alcorn. I do not know who these thirty employees were that Atari let go, but work continued at the time on Atari’s next-gen console (which was later transformed into the Atari 400/800 computer), as well as on a line of electronic handheld games and a video phone that would eventually become the Ataritel project. Certainly some projects were cancelled, such as Kermit the robot at Cyan, but that’s different from making deep cuts.

As a final note, I jsut want to point out that Zap has been pretty thoroughly discredited by modern video game history research. Its useful for some of the direct quotes from people like Steve Bristow, Howie Delman, and Don Osborne, but the rest is filled with errors. Al Alcorn has long maintained that Cohen just made most of it up, and while that’s probably an extreme position, the sentiment is understandable. While Bushnell and Gerard have disagreed on some of the details of that November budget meeting, they have gone on the record in sources like Kent’s Ultimate History of Video Games and Replay to say that the budget meeting blowup was about Bushnell wanting to dump the VCS immediately and build something else and Gerard and Kassar’s belief that the VCS had a lot of mileage left in it: a view that was proven true when Atari ended up having a good Christmas that year despite the limited stock resulting from retailer refusal to build inventory.

I know console history is not really your bag, so I’m sorry to take you on this little detour; I just want to make sure that certain long-standing myths relating to the early years of Atari don’t inadvertently end up being perpetuated. People like Marty, Curt, and myself are working to provide more accurate portrayals of this period, but we are probably still years away from overturning the “conventional wisdom” created by sloppy research in books like Zap. I feel you are helping perform a similar service for computer games, which is why I continue to appreciate and admire your work.

- Alex Smith

November 6, 2014 at 4:04 pm

D’oh, mislinked my blog in my name in the comment above. Should link here

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2014 at 4:45 pm

Thanks for this! I made some fairly innocuous edits to hopefully remove anything inaccurate or questionable without changing the thrust of the opening paragraph. I do have Business Is Fun, but even leaving aside the lack of editing and all of the grammar problems I must confess that I find it pretty impenetrable, just an endless stream of anecdotes with no index and no strong authorial voice to help make sense of it all. If your long-term intention is to mold all of that material into something more readable and comprehensible, you’ll be doing the world a great service! Based on your blog, which I do peek at now and again, you’re off to a great start.

- Scott S.

November 7, 2014 at 3:57 am

“Note that Scott’s claim of 750,000 units below is a typo: his FAQ claims 500,000 units in 1978 and 750,000 lifetime sales by the end of 1978.”

Yes, it was a typo on my part (I don’t have the ability to edit here).

I wouldn’t put too much stock in that SouthEast Missourian article. For one thing, Atari is referred to as Atari Corp, not Atari Inc. (it wasn’t ‘Corp’ until Tramiel bought it in 1984). For another, the 400k sales figure is being given by an Atari spokesperson (Ken George), so that should always be questioned, especially when it claims that many were sold in 1977, and the VCS was only on the market for the last 3 months of that year. Thirdly, George states they sold for $189. The original retail price for the VCS was anywhere between $200 and $250. Large department stores like Service Electric sold it for that price, but not every store could.

No, I don’t base my info on Joe Decuir’s statement, Alex – I’ve never referenced him for it, have I? As for Decuir not being a reliable source of info, I’d take his account over some company spokesperson’s any day. Spokespersons are paid for their comments; employees aren’t.

Btw, all the relevant issues of IEEE spectrum can be found here:
http://www.2600connection.com/library/magazines/magazines.html

“The best source for this is Atari Inc Business”

Of course you’re going to say that – you just admitted you’re working with them! No, it’s not the best source, and it’s certainly not the only source. That book is a complete disaster on every level. It’s worthless as a research tool, due to the lack of an index. It’s unreadable, because neither of them possesses even the most rudimentary skills any writer needs. So what exactly are their qualifications for being experts on the subject? One is known for illegally dumpster-diving on Atari’s property and stealing a bunch of hardware and paperwork (i.e. his ‘research papers’ and ‘museum’ collection) who also happens to be an ex-felon for several charges of grand larceny and bail jumping, and the other is known for being a voracious Wikipedia page editor, and not much else. And much like any spokesperson, neither of them do anything without a price tag attached to it. For all their 7+ years of writing that book, they’ve already announced their plans to re-write huge sections of the book (they would need to basically start over, since there’s no fixing it), and their willingness to accept anybody’s offer to help them with that (I guess that’s where you come in?). So the 2nd edition will apparently be a ‘group’ effort, much like a Wikipedia page, and we all know how unreliable that site is for information. And to top it off, they had the gall to slap a $45 price tag on 800 pages of bad writing, poor photos, and questionable information.

“As a final note, I jsut want to point out that Zap has been pretty thoroughly discredited by modern video game history research.”

Not everybody, just Vendel and Goldberg, who’ve also attempted to discredit pretty much every other book on the subject, not to mention attack anybody who dares to question them. They want everyone to believe their book is the ‘final word’ on the subject. It’s not. Rather, it’s the final word on their career as authors, or at least it should be…

- Alex Smith

November 7, 2014 at 6:04 am

Well Scott, that was a surprising and completely unwarranted personal attack, but okay, I’ll rejoin with a little civil discussion.

I don’t work with Marty or Curt on any projects, although I have communicated with Marty in the past via email. I don’t really know where you got that idea from. You won’t find my name sharing a byline with them anywhere, nor see me in any special thank you section. The most you will find is some comment exchanges on my blog.

For the record, I agree with Jimmy on pretty much all his points regarding Business is Fun: it is an impenetrable mess with no authorial voice and jumbled anecdotes. It also happens to be largely accurate (though not always, I think that in the effort to tell Ted Dabney’s story, for instance, they have marginalized Bushnell too much) and contains a great deal of information on Atari R&D projects based on internal documents and interviews. Therefore, I stand by my statement that it is the best source of information on R&D activities at the company. I never claimed any wider utility than that in my previous comment.

As for Zap, I will also agree with you that Marty and Curt have discredited that book more than they should: the primary source quotes are quite useful and I have found that some of what Marty and Curt have claimed to be false within the book has proven to be accurate. It does have flaws, however, particularly in the early portions, which are largely based on discussions with Bushnell only and not other early employees like Alcorn and Dabney, and last chapter, which contains nothing but speculation about the financial problems at the company in 1982. Incidentally, the best source for these problems is not Curt and Marty’s book, which is fairly weak on the business side of things, but rather Master of the Game, a biography of Steven Ross.

And yes, company spokesman sales figures can be exaggerated, which is why I also quoted the 300,000 figure from the Bernstein report, which is lower. I also referenced the chart from the IEEE article, which I speculated was hovering around that same 300,000 mark seeing as how the chart does not report exact figures. I also said that the 50,000 difference between your claim and Bernstein is pretty immaterial to the case (and if you had bothered to read my whole post, you would have seen that I linked to the IEEE article as well). The fact is, we do not have a reliable source for sales figures in 1977, just a range, which is what I articulated if you bothered to read everything I wrote.

Anyway, I admire Marty and Curt’s work on their book, even if the final result is flawed, and I agree with you that they get too defensive in forums and sometimes don’t admit when someone else has just as good information as they do (and Curt gets downright insulting much of the time, which I find unprofessional). I also admire the work on your site and the many interviews you have conducted with Atari alumni, which represents an important primary source on the period.

Anyway, I am just a scholar hunting down facts and trying to paint as accurate a picture as possible of video game history with the (unfortunately) limited and contradictory sources available. I don’t really have an ax to grind with anyone as you seem to, so in the future kindly leave me (and Jimmy’s comments section) out of any personal feuds you have with Messrs. Goldberg and Vendel.

- Jim Levy

March 18, 2016 at 5:48 pm

Greg had become president of Activision International after first serving as a consultant to me on international deals and licensing. He did indeed bring in the Ghostbuster deal based on his relationship with a friend at Columbia Pictures. Even though Activision had not engaged in licensed products before that, there never was a strict “prohibition” of same. In the beginning, we didn’t have the money to license so relied on the creative ability of our artists/designers to produce what was broadly recognized as superior games, and, by the time we did have the money, our designers had strong reputations of their own that became like “brands” for each new game. BTW, the success of Ghostbusters in the UK and beyond was very important to the company after the collapse of the US market and while both the industry and Activision were rebuilding in 1984-86.

- Lisa H.

November 5, 2014 at 9:37 pm

I never had Designer’s Pencil, but I loved playing around with KoalaPainter.

Web Dimension reminds me a little of the much, much later (PS2) Rez.

- Scott S.

November 6, 2014 at 2:24 pm

Atari sold some 250,000 VCS consoles in 1977, and 750,000 the following year: http://www.2600connection.com/faq/vcs_system/faq_atarivcs.html#hardware1

VCS Pac-Man was not under any time constraints (like E.T. was). That’s an old rumor without any source to back it up.

Atari had plans for holography in the form of the Cosmos. My interview with Roger Hector covers this in detail: http://www.2600connection.com/interviews/roger_hector/interview_roger_hector.html

As you noted, Warner initially drastically cut Atari’s R&D, but they still poured countless millions into R&D over the years, but for all time and money spent, they had nothing to show for it. The ‘mass exodus’ of Atari’s engineers wasn’t’ because Atari spent too little on R&D, it was because they never released anything that R&D developed. The home systems Atari had developed or were developing by the time Bushnell left were the same systems they had by the time Warner sold the company in 1984. All that was released under Kassar were repackaged versions.

Also, Little Computer People was not exactly an original title of Activision’s. It was originally developed by James Wickstead Design Associates under the name Pet Person. Activision bought it, made some changes, and released it as LCP.

- Jimmy Maher

November 6, 2014 at 3:04 pm

Thanks for providing a source on those figures! It seems to be the “tens of thousands” business which is bothering people, and which may not read to mean quite like what I meant it to mean. :) So, nixed that.

On the subject of the engineering exodus, I’m just a little bit confused about how the timeline could work if they were leaving out of frustration over products not being *released*. The exodus I’m speaking of was the one in 1979-1980. At this time Atari *was* releasing new products, in the form of the very impressive Atari 400 and 800. There may very well have been later exits born of other frustrations — I’m very certain you know much more about all this than me — but I think Kassar’s initial R&D cuts almost had to be the main motivation in the period we’re discussing.

On the subject of Little Computer People, I don’t think we’re doing justice to Crane and Activision in just saying they “made some changes and released it,” even if that is technically correct in the broadest possible strokes. The Pet Person concept had no interactivity to it, for example; it was a sort of virtual fishbowl. Crane describes Activision as buying the project only as a “starting point.” Anyway, the question of whether or not Activision *developed” LCP in-house all by their lonesome isn’t hugely relevant; Shanghai and Web Dimension, for example, were the products of outside developers. The larger point here is that Levy and his colleagues had the vision to take a chance on *publishing* so many innovative creations.

- Keith Smith

November 7, 2014 at 11:29 pm

One source I’m surprised no one has mentioned for 1977 VCS sales figures is Warner’s 1977 annual report, which states “Atari enjoyed major successes and significant disappointments in its consumer division during 1977. The company’s produce line, led by the programmable Video Computer System, was extremely well received by the trade and by September the company had orders for all the games it could manufacture. However, as the year wore on, it became clear that suppliers of semiconductors (“chips”) would not meet delivery schedules. Despite this, Atari sold some 850,000 games, of which roughly 40% were Video Computer Systems.” That would put 1977 VCS sales (Warner’s fiscal year ended December 31) at somewhere in the neighborhood of 340,000 if the figures are accurate. Of course, they could be inaccurate, but it seems that Warner would be taking a big risk by reporting inaccurate numbers in its annual report (IIRC in the early 1980s, part of the reason they got into legal hot water was because they had merely made overly optimistic statements in their annual report..

- Keith Smith

November 7, 2014 at 11:30 pm

oh, and that should be “product line” not “produce line” (Atari didn’t make veggies that I know of)

- Scott S.

December 29, 2014 at 12:49 am

Here’s my interview with former JWDA designer Todd Marshall, who worked on Pet Person (aka Little Computer People):
http://www.2600connection.com/interviews/todd_marshall/interview_todd_marshall.html

- Jim Levy

March 18, 2016 at 5:52 pm

” It was originally developed by James Wickstead Design Associates under the name Pet Person. Activision bought it, made some changes, and released it as LCP.”

We bought this concept at a pretty raw stage. The lion’s share of what you see in the final product was conceived and developed by Crane and his team. The concept of Little Computer People living in your PC actually was developed by our marketing team and me, working with David and the designers, and one of my fondest memories of that time is the creation of the packaging for the product, a comic-like tabloid newspaper announcing the discovery of LCP.

- David Boddie

November 6, 2014 at 4:04 pm

You’re missing an easy link to River Raid. :-)

- David Boddie

November 6, 2014 at 4:05 pm

Of course, now I see that it was linked to earlier in the article…

- Brandon Campbell

November 6, 2014 at 8:50 pm

I loved Little Computer People! Mine was named Steve, and later on I downloaded a utility off Q-Link that let me save my LCP so another one could move in, and switch between the different ones. But what I really wanted was more than one person in the house at the same time, which I finally got in The Sims many years later. GameMaker was also pretty cool, and I think I would have really enjoyed Designer’s Pencil.

- Carl

November 7, 2014 at 5:01 am

You wonder aloud if the Activision IPO was the best or worst timing and you indicate several millionaires were made. Sadly, when a company goes public employees with stock options typically aren’t allowed to sell them for some time. This happened with Activision, so the IPO was not good timing for the worker bees.

Here’s a really interesting interview with Carol Shaw that mentions this briefly.

- Carl

November 7, 2014 at 5:02 am

couldn’t get the tag to work right. Here’s the address:

http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/800/vcg-interview-carol-shaw-female-video-game-pioneer-2

- Steven Weyhrich

November 8, 2014 at 4:54 pm

Another fascinating article that goes into the background of what was happening with game software in the 1980s! Thanks!

- Brian Bagnall

November 11, 2014 at 1:50 am

Nice article! I once interviewed Gary Kitchen for my old fansite here:
http://www.mts.net/~kbagnall/commodore/gamemaker/info.html
He gave some wonderful answers as I recall, and then I promptly lost the interview. It still bums me out to this day, and through the years I have tried to find that interview only to come up empty handed each time.

Alter Ego
November 14, 2014

Peter J. Favaro started blending computers with psychology some eight years before Activision published his groundbreaking “life simulator” Alter Ego. In his first year as a graduate student of Clinical Psychology at Long Island’s Hofstra University, he and another student developed an obsession with the early standup arcade game Space Wars (a direct descendent of that granddaddy of all arcade games, MIT’s Space War).

During one of the many psychological discussions which developed around those sessions, I wondered whether the games served some kind of therapeutic function for us. They took us away from the pressure of graduate school for a short time and gave us a chance to act out some of our competitive urges. I also wondered what kinds of motor and reflex skills the games were training in us. One of the last things we said about video games that day was that they would be fun to study in some small research projects.

Games and the mostly young people who played them would come to dominate Favaro’s years at Hofstra.

As arcades and the Atari VCS grew in popularity over the course of those years, an anti-videogame hysteria grew in response. The Philippines and Singapore banned arcades outright, claiming they “cause aggression, truancy, ‘psychological addictions’ akin to gambling, and encourage stealing money from parents and others to support children’s videogame habits.” Closer to home, the Dallas, Texas, suburb of Mesquite banned children from playing videogames in public without a parent or other adult guardian, prompting a rash of similar bans in small towns across the country that were finally struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1982. Undaunted, Ronald Reagan’s unusually prominent new Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, waded in soon after, saying videogames created “aberration in childhood behavior” and, toting one of the anti-videogame camp’s two favorite lines of argument, claiming again that they addicted children, “body and soul.” Others colorfully if senselessly described videogames as substitutes for “adolescent masturbatory activity,” without clarifying what that deliciously Freudian phrase was supposed to mean or why we should care if it was true.

Favaro labored to replace such poetic language with actual data derived from actual research. His PhD thesis, which he completed and successful defended in late 1983, was entitled The Effects of Computer Video Game Play on Mood, Physiological Arousal, and Psychomotor Performance. One of the first studies of its kind, it found that there was nothing uniquely addictive about videogames. While there were indeed a small number of “maladaptive” children who played videogames to the detriment of their scholastic, social, and familial lives, the same was true of many other childhood activities, from eating sweets and chips to playing basketball. With regard to the other popular anti-videogame argument, that they made children “aggressive,” Favaro found that, while violent videogames did slightly increase aggression immediately after being played, they actually did so less than violent television shows. Also discredited was a favorite claim of the pro-videogame camp, that the games improved hand-eye coordination. Favaro found that playing a videogame for a long period of time made children better at playing other videogames, but had little effect on their motor skills or reflexes in the real world. Favaro would remain at Hofstra doing similar work until several years after completing his PhD.

While he was conducting his research, Favaro, an ambitious, personable fellow who had become something of a hacker following his purchase of an Atari 800, fostered links with the computer-industry trade press. After contributing articles to various magazines for some months, he became a “Special Projects Editor” with SoftSide beginning with the January 1983 issue, curating features on education and the relationship of children to computers until that magazine’s demise a year later. He then spent almost two years with Family Computing in largely the same role. He wrote cover-disk programs like Relaax…, which walks you through a series of relaxation exercises, and Pix, which lets you draw pictures by assembling, collage-like, smaller images on the screen. His most notable creation of this period for our purposes is Success, a multi-player Life-like computerized board game that starts by having you choose a personality — “aggressive,” “impulsive,” “pragmatic,” or “romantic” — and a goal in life — “money,” “knowledge and intellectual curiosity,” or “health and happiness.” You then move around the board flipping “cards” that affect your progress in the various goals: a “recent swamp purchase” decreases your money by $150, while a marriage proposal sends you to an arcade-style mini-game that places you behind the wheel trying to get to the church on time. Other ideas that would be incorporated into Alter Ego can be found in his articles on game design. Presaging the innovative character-creation system of Ultima IV as well as Alter Ego, he suggests in SoftSide‘s September 1983 issue quizzing the player of an adventure game about her personality before kicking off the proceedings in earnest:

In a situation where danger was imminent, would you

A) Ask for help.

B) Take charge and take action.

C) Run for your life.

The same article suggests a scoring system based on the player’s “display of bravery, risk-tasking, judiciousness, pragmatism, or whatever else you would like to reinforce.”

In an interview he gave in 2007 which contrasts weirdly with the idealistic tone of magazine articles like that one, Favaro claimed he made Alter Ego for very pragmatic reasons: out of his “love for game design and the prospect of making some money,” using his academic background as “a way of breaking out of the pack of other designers.” It’s not clear how rigorous his claimed research for the game — interviews with “hundreds of people” about their “most memorable life experiences” — really was, or whether it was even conducted solely in the service of this project or was a more general part of his ongoing psychological research at Hofstra. What is very clear, however, is that his idea for a “life simulator” was just the sort of high-toned, innovative project that Jim Levy’s Activision 2.0 swooned over. It didn’t take much to convince them to sign the project. Favaro would write and prototype the game on his Macintosh, while Activision would contract the final programming out to two outside developers: Kottwitz & Associates to do the Apple II and MS-DOS versions, and Unimac to do the Macintosh and Commodore 64 versions. Activision loved the cachet bestowed on the project by Favaro’s status as an actual psychologist so much that they always made sure to refer to him in the packaging, the manual, and advertisements only as “Peter J. Favaro, PhD.”

Alter Ego on the Commodore 64

Alter Ego, which comes in a male and a female version, begins with a multiple-choice personality test that sets your initial scores in twelve characteristics that will be tracked throughout the game: Calmness, Confidence, Expressiveness, Familial, Gentleness, Happiness, Intellectual, Physical, Social, Thoughtfulness, Trustworthiness, and Vocational. You then get to live an entire life: the first scene has you in the womb getting ready to make your big exit (or, if you like, entrance), while the last is the scene of your death, at whatever age and in whatever manner your choices and the cruel vagaries of chance cause that to be. The years between are divided into seven distinct phases: Infancy (birth to age 3), Childhood (ages 4 to 12), Adolescence (ages 13 to 17), Young Adulthood (ages 18 to 30), Adulthood (ages 31 to 45), Middle Adulthood (ages 46 to 64), and Old Age (age 65 to death). Each phase plays out as a series of little interactive vignettes, both universal “life experiences” in the form of the track running down the center of the screen and “life choices,” having to do with relationships, marriage and family life, your career and finances, etc., represented by icons to either side of the experience track. Playing Alter Ego is a matter of choosing to have a life experience or to make a life choice by clicking the appropriate icon, then reacting to what follows as you believe you would in real life — or as you believe the character you’ve chosen to play would. The outcome of most vignettes will affect you in some way, whether by changing some of your twelve characteristics or by bringing more concrete changes to your life, like marriage, a new career, the death of somebody close to you, or for that matter your own death. If nothing else, some time will pass and you will age that little bit. (In a ludic illustration of the way time just seems to fly by faster as you get older, time jumps in larger chunks between later episodes as compared to earlier.) Your personality characteristics, relationship and marriage status, income, etc., in turn affect the vignettes themselves — closing some off to you entirely, altering what transpires in others. While there are still plenty of times where the lack of more comprehensive state-tracking can make the episodes feel inappropriate for your you, Alter Ego does its best, and its best is sometimes better than you might expect.

Leaving aside for a moment the larger thematic innovations of Alter Ego, the interface itself is well worth considering. It is, first of all, yet another impressive implementation of a Macintosh-style interface on computers that predate the Mac itself by years. But more important is Activision and Favaro’s decision to not try to make Alter Ego work through a parser. I’ve railed before against games that want to present big, life-changing choices rather than dwelling on the granular minutiae of Zork, but that insist out of misplaced traditionalism on forcing you to make those choices through a parser. Alter Ego, however, at long last shows the courage to break with tradition. Rather than offer only a few options but force you to wrestle with a parser to divine what they are, Alter Ego just shows you your options and lets you choose one. That may seem reasonable and unremarkable enough today, but it makes Alter Ego one of the first computerized hypertext narratives, a forerunner of Storyspace and the many similar systems that followed. I don’t make any claims to absolute firsts for Alter Ego; our old friends Level 9 in Britain among others were also experimenting with choice-based narratives by the mid-1980s. Still, Alter Ego stands as the most prominent early example of the format. Given that a menu of choices is so much easier to implement than a parser and the relatively complicated world model that must lie behind it, one might well wonder what took the industry so long. My suspicion, for what it’s worth, is that developers were consciously or unconsciously concerned about differentiating themselves from the Choose Your Own Adventure books that were all the rage at the time in children’s publishing.

But now it’s time to get beyond mechanical innovations and the brilliantly original concept itself and look at what it’s actually like to play Alter Ego. More so than even a typical text adventure, which has puzzles and other logistical concerns to distract, a game like this lives and dies for me on the quality of its writing. In this department Alter Ego is, at best, a mixed bag. The early vignettes are the most natural and effective — perhaps because Favaro was technically a child psychologist by trade, perhaps because he was only in his late twenties at the time he wrote the game and thus had only his book learning to draw from when describing the later stages of life. I’m afraid I’m going to be pretty hard on old Peter J. Favaro, PhD, soon enough, so let me first offer a couple of childhood episodes that I really like. One might make you laugh, and the other might… well, okay, it’s a bit sentimental and contrived, what with both husband and daughter managing to get themselves killed by the same freight train, but it’s also very sweet. (In the extracts that follow, I’ll be mixing the male and female versions of the game pretty freely.)

You are sitting in a large place, and a furry man walks up to you. He's walking around you in circles.

Select a mood:
curious
frightened X

Select an action:
point at the furry man
make noises at/talk to the furry man X

The furry man walks right up to you and smells you up and down. His nose pokes into your face and neck. It's cold.

Select an action:
cry X
grab the furry man by the head
push him off you

Your mom comes over and says the furry man is just playing. She takes your hand and puts it on the furry man's back and says, "Nice 'doggie'."

Select an action:
pet the man X
stay frightened and go away from the man

See? It isn't that bad. You pound on the man's back and say, "Nice 'doo-gee'."

There is an elderly woman who lives in a house up the street. Everyone calls her "the witch." Some people say she's really paranoid, calling the cops on kids all the time and screaming out the window, even when there is nobody there. At night she keeps her light on all the time and sits looking out the window.

For the past few days the light has been off. Some of the kids think she's just dead in there or something. They jump in front of her house and sing "Ding dong, the witch is dead, the witch is dead," and laugh.

Select a mood:
sad X
happy

Select an action:
sing with everyone else
try to see if anything is wrong X

One afternoon after school, you look from outside the gate to see if there is anything going on inside the house. There is nothing. You can:
go through the gate and knock on the door X
ask a friend to go with you

You hear a voice call out from the back of the house, "Go away and leave me alone!" You can:
say "I'd like to know if you're o.k. in there." X
quit trying and leave

You hear nothing for about 30 seconds. Finally, the door opens. The woman looks pale and dazed. She seems smaller than you imagined and very delicate. In the corner of her almost-bare living room there is a television set; beside it is a large box of old rubber balls and toys that were left, or had accidentally fallen, on her lawn.

She asks you why you have come. You mention that you noticed that the light has gone out, and you thought she might be needing some help. She explains that she has no way to replace it. She is too old to climb up to do it. You can:
ask her if she would like you to do it X
excuse yourself, now that you know it's just a problem with a light bulb

She thanks you. Her face softens. While you are fixing the light, she tells you a very sad story: A long time ago, she had a little girl very much like you, so polite and so kind. She says her daughter was beautiful, and repeats it over and over--"as beautiful as a picture."

She and her husband lived with their daughter not too far from the train yard. She used to tell her child, "Anne Marie, stay away from the tracks, or you'll get hurt." One day, her daughter and her husband went out to play catch with an old ball. The ball got away from Anne and rolled across the tracks.

While she was chasing it, her foot got wedged between two rails. Her father and she struggled to release it, but before they could, they were both struck by a freight train and killed. She's been alone ever since.

When you are finished fixing the light, the lady gives you some milk and freshly-baked cookies. It almost seems as though she doesn't want you to go. Before you leave, you:
thank her for the cookies and ask if she would like someone around to do odd jobs X
thank her and excuse yourself

Her face brightens. "You must be paid," she says. "I can't afford much, and you'll have to do a fine job, but you can have all the cookies and brownies you can eat. I promise you that." You have done a much kinder thing than you can probably imagine at your age. You've given this woman a reason to live.

Many other vignettes unfortunately manifest the clunkier qualities of the one above without the same endearing sweetness.

The subject of sex has inspired far more bad writing over the course of history than any ten other topics combined. For better or for worse there’s lots and lots of sex in Alter Ego, so much so that it obviously made Activision more than a little nervous; there are prominent warnings on the box and in the manual, and when you actually stumble into a vignette with naughty content you get a big warning message so you can quickly back out with your delicate sensibilities undisturbed. (When we played Alter Ego as kids, of course, that warning meant we’d hit pay dirt.) Some of these episodes feel like they’re lifted from a late-night skin flick.

Perri Barber is an acquaintance who has taken a few of the same classes you have. She is a petite brunette with gorgeous green eyes, a nice smile, and a slim athletic body. She approaches you on campus and asks if you would be interested in helping her paint her dormitory room. What will you do?
help her decorate X
pass on the opportunity

During the course of the afternoon, you get to know one another very well. You work together in close quarters (the room is very small), so a lot of accidental touching and bumping occurs during the day. You aren't sure, but you think that Perri is coming on to you.

Select an action:
suggest that the two of you shower off together
ignore any signals that she might be giving you X

I guess this is not your style. It IS Perri's style, though. She asks if you would like her to scrub all that paint off your gorgeous body.

Select an action:
accept the offer X
reject the offer

The two of you take a nice, warm, romantic shower together. I'll leave what comes after the shower up to your imagination. [Thank God for that!]

When not indulging in teenage-boy fantasies, Alter Ego‘s attempts at the risque manage to be weirdly, anticlimactically square, the sort of things a gaggle of Monty Python housewives would define as transgressive.

Until now, your sexual experiences with your wife have been the standard fare. You've done a little experimenting with positions but that's about it. Have you been thinking about suggesting something a little more out of the ordinary?
"as a matter of fact, yes" X
"no"

What would you like to try?
oral sex X [Shocking!]
being tied up and tickled [No, I couldn't possibly...]
experimenting with marital aids (vibrators, creams, etc.) [Gasp!]
suggesting a menage a' trois (sex with your wife and another woman at the same time) [Now we're getting somewhere... and why do I find the game's need to define this phrase so unaccountably hilarious?]

Your wife is too inhibited to do this, she tells you she would rather not. [Oh, well, it was worth a try...]

In case you were wondering: no, if you play as a woman, you don’t get to ask for sex with two men at once. The woman always gets the short end of the stick in Alter Ego, about which much more in a moment.

Alter Ego is relentlessly hetero-normative. Apart from the ménage à trois, which at least in this context is of course really a heterosexual male fantasy, there are only a couple of places where the game even acknowledges the possibility of alternative sexualities. At one point you can be asked by your French teacher, Mr. Andre, “who everyone in school claims is gay,” to stay after school to help him clean his office. If you ignore the teasing of your classmates and brave the danger, he turns out to not be a Big Scary Gay Man after all: you learn he has a wife and a beautiful daughter, whom he sets you up with to boot. (The game’s blasé assumption that because he has a wife he doesn’t have feelings for men and doesn’t desire you is… interesting.) In another vignette a friend tells you that he believes he is gay, a revelation that the game treats with the same tragic gravity as a terminal disease.

But then, considering the time and place that spawned it, it’s not really fair to expect much more from Alter Ego. It’s very much a product of its time — sometimes depressingly, oppressively so. And, as Adam Cadre once hilariously noted, that time never changes even as a lifetime’s worth of personal experience plays out. Alter Ego‘s milieu is a frozen-in-amber world where a 512 K PC is the best you can buy, where The A-Team and Miami Vice rule the television, where Jordache jeans and Members Only jackets rule in schoolyard fashion, where Madonna is all over MTV (okay, maybe some things really are eternal). Whether you find this horrifying or nostalgically comforting depends on the player I suppose; I lean toward the former personally. Social change — history in general — just doesn’t happen in Alter Ego, which can be as strange to experience as it is understandable from a design perspective: having already tried to create a complete interactive life story, it’s a bit much to expect Favaro to create a believable future history to accompany it, and likely wouldn’t have turned out very well had he tried. Still, playing Alter Ego is like living your life inside the white-bread confines of a 1980s version of The Truman Show. Literally white: apart from the occasional socially-inept immigrant kid you can choose to feel sorry for, everyone in this game is the whitest shade of pale.

If Alter Ego‘s lack of inclusiveness is to some extent forgivable given its origins, I do have more problems dismissing Favaro’s cluelessly demeaning sexism. As with a lot of games I write about, I played Alter Ego with my wife Dorte. She played with the female version, I with the male, and we took turns playing through a life phase at a time and comparing notes. Our agreed approach was to each play ourselves, making the choices we thought we would make at those ages in those situations. As we played, I found myself getting more and more angry at the game and sad for Dorte, as I kept getting to do cool and/or bold things and she kept being offered only meek girlie stuff. I got to go skydiving; she got to get an eyebrow tattoo. I slashed a hated teacher’s tires; she got a new hairdo. I got to buy video equipment or a flash new computer; she got to buy jewelry or “gourmet cooking accessories.” She always got offered the subordinate role, the pretty girl cheering on the boys who were actually doing something. I got to try out for the baseball team; she got to try out for the cheerleading squad. I got to start a rock band with some buddies; she got to call in to a radio show and win backstage passes to a concert (“Could you SCREAM?”).

Favaro’s concept of feminism feels at least two decades behind the times — i.e., about five decades behind our modern times. Alter Ego treats the decision to pick up a single restaurant tab for your steady boyfriend as a blow for “Woman’s Libbers” — when was the last time you heard that term? — everywhere, one so bold that it makes your boyfriend feel “uncomfortable” and emasculated. A male chauvinist you meet at work is just a mustache-twirling villain who says things absolutely no one would dare say openly even in 1986 and who has little to do with the real issues women still confront every day in the working world.

You have been going through a difficult time with an influential businessperson who seems to really enjoy making people miserable with his sexist attitudes, his arbitrary decision-making and his arrogance.

You get called into his office to take the heat for a relatively minor error. The conversation begins, "Look, Darling. I've always believed that a woman's place is in the home. Unfortunately, those bleeding hearts upstairs have made it impossible for me to deal 'man-to-man' around here. There are some problems here that I want resolved, AND NOW!"

One of the interstitial quotes Alter Ego occasionally puts up is this bit of condescension by Sigmund Freud: “The great question… which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?'” Peter J. Favaro, PhD, also doesn’t have a clue. I normally resist the urge to psychoanalyze the people who write the games I write about, but, given that Favaro spends the entirety of Alter Ego analyzing me and offering commentary and criticism on my every action, I’ll make a slight exception and wonder if this passage, which is worthy of a certain rotund cigar-chomping radio host, reflects deeper insecurities.

Mary Lou Stoker is a friend of your closest female companion and a staunch feminist. The truth is that she is not a feminist in the true sense of the word; she simply despises and resents men, misapplying the feminist philosophy to suit her needs.

One afternoon, you overhear Mary Lou telling your best friend that the love of your life "really doesn't give you that much room to breathe." She says, "I mean, he's okay, considering the rest of the garbage that's out there these days, but I wonder if she feels a little trapped in the same place day in and day out?" She goes on this way for quite a while.

My favorite, unintentionally revealing part of this is the phrase “the feminist philosophy,” as if feminists represent a political party — or conspiracy — who all march in lockstep to the same play book.

The most cringe-worthy parts of Alter Ego as a whole are those parts of the female version that deal with the sexual side of puberty and adolescence. Really, can there be any worse subject for a less-than-subtle 28-year-old male writer to tackle? Despite close competition from the likes of discovering your breasts are growing, getting your first period, and having your first orgasm, I think your first visit to a gynecologist makes for the creepiest episode in the game; this fellow is actually far creepier than the Chester the Molester who tries to pick you up outside your school. After making inquiries with one or two women of my acquaintance, I’ve confirmed that if you’re spending any time at all “naked” in a gynecologist’s office then something is very, very wrong.

Your mother calls you in for a talk about something she says is "very very important." She thinks that it might be a good time to go for a checkup with a "gynecologist," a doctor who specializes in women.

Select a mood:
afraid X
comfortable

Select an action:
go for an exam X
don't go for an exam

On the way over, your mother explains to you, "It's a little embarrassing at first, but he really is a gentle doctor." You dwell for a moment on the word "he," and realize that a man is going to see and "mess around with" all of your most intimate parts.

Select an action:
change your mind and tell her you don't want to see a man doctor
go anyway X

The gynecologist is a very sweet old man. Most of the time you spend naked is with a nurse who helps prepare you for the exam. The doctor is kind enough to warm up the instruments before he examines you.

When the examination begins, he shows you various different parts of your reproductive system and teaches you how to give yourself a breast examination, which he says is very important.

He asks your mother if she would be kind enough to leave the room. When she does, he asks you whether you are sexually active and if you are using birth control. He then asks if you would like more information about birth control.

Select an action:
get more information
say, "no." X [Get me out of here!]

He sees that you are feeling a bit uncomfortable and tells you that if you ever need information about birth control to give the office a call. He leaves you with a little warning. "Don't experiment before you get the facts, young lady."

Alter Ego strictly enforces the law of social averages. There are very good design reasons that it can’t allow you to become an astronaut, a rock star, an international drug smuggler, or even a homeless tramp; doing so would invalidate virtually all of the other vignettes that deal with daily life as most Americans of the 1980s knew it. But if the emphasis on the ordinary is defensible given Alter Ego‘s design constraints, the reductive judgments the game is constantly making about your actions certainly are not. Alter Ego is forever telling you why you’ve done something, and then whether that’s good or bad. If you respond to a blue period by just “letting it pass,” it tells you you’re “denying your feelings” and that “it’s okay to feel blue some of the time.” (When did I say that it wasn’t?) If you fail to gush with loving support after your dad gets fired from his job, you’re scolded for not telling him “he is a worthwhile and cherished human being.” (What if I’ve always had a difficult relationship with him and can’t help but remember that he was never really there for me in similar situations, and thus my feelings are more complex than just a “cherishing?”) If you fail to volunteer time or money to a charity that knocks on your door, you’re called in so many words a selfish jerk who can’t be bothered to think of the children! (What if I’m a bit suspicious of big international charities, and prefer to do my giving in other ways?) If you commit suicide — presumably due to all that feeling-denying that was going earlier — you’re told that suicide is always “an act of anger,” but the last laugh’s on you, because “the people you leave behind will try very hard to put this event in their pasts as quickly as possible.” (Suicide is way more complex than just another way of acting out, as someone with a PhD in Psychology really ought to know.) If you try to offer a little advice to a friend who’s having an affair, you’re mockingly told to butt out, “Sigmund.” (Oh, the irony…) When you have your inevitable midlife-crisis, you’re given this semantic drivel about “wishing” and “wanting”:

One of the key things to consider is the difference between WISHING and WANTING. You can spend the rest of your life WISHING for something magical to happen that will change your unsatisfying situation. If you WANT something badly enough, you do whatever is necessary to make it happen, even if it is difficult.

Playing Alter Ego today as a crotchety 42-year-old, my reaction to stuff like this is to ask what the hell do you know about it, Peter J. Favaro, PhD? No one has the right to pass such easy judgment on the complexities of life. If you’ve ever spent time flipping through self-help books, passages like those above may have a familiar ring, and for good reason: Favoro has since built a career around such pat aphorisms, writing a number of pop-psychology books and appearing on the low-hanging fruit of the talk-show circuit — places like The Montel Williams Show and Fox News morning shows — as a “television psychologist.”

I know I’ve been awfully hard on Favaro today, and perhaps not entirely fairly. His project was in a way doomed from the start. I’m sure that neither I, nor you, nor any one person could have done it justice, brilliant as the idea of it is. I’d therefore like to see a modern version of Alter Ego that would try a different approach. Instead of a single author, inevitably blinkered by her experiences and prejudices, I’d like to see a crowd-sourced Alter Ego. People from all over the world, and of all ages, races, genders, and sexualities, would be able to submit their own vignettes reflecting their own lived experiences. The result would be a constantly expanding tapestry of the human experience, accessible to anyone who ever felt an urge to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Rather than flatten the human experience into some idea of the psychologically normal, it would celebrate all of the different ways there are to think and feel and be.

As for the original Alter Ego, it did moderately well commercially; Favaro claims it earned him enough to buy “a house and a car.” Activision and Favaro made plans to release a follow-up called Child’s Play, “a humorous simulation about raising children,” but sweeping changes at Activision in the months after Alter Ego‘s release soon brought an end to that project, and with it Favaro’s career as a game designer.

Alter Ego enjoyed a big revival in the mid-2000s thanks to Dan Fabulich’s web-based version. He’s since also made it available as apps for Android, iOS, and even Kindle e-readers. It’s safe to say by now that many more people have played Alter Ego in its accessible modern incarnations than did so back in the day when it was a $35 boxed game. And indeed, while it does kind of annoy the hell out of me with its dodgy writing, lecturing authorial persona, and blinkered worldview, it’s still worth a look. Not only is it interesting purely for what it tries to do, but many other players genuinely enjoy it on its own terms. And hey, even if you feel like me about it you can still enjoy yourself a lot by making fun of it. Dorte and I had a blast doing that.

In that spirit, I’ll leave you with my favorite male-version/female-version juxtaposition of all.

The female version:

You are getting dressed one day and notice a small red mark on your lip. Could it be some kind of disease? You think about all the boys you've kissed in the past month and decide to kill anyone who has given you a terminal disease.

And the male version:

You are getting dressed one day and notice a small red mark on your penis. Could it be some kind of disease?

Maybe I should take back what I said about the female always getting the short end of the stick…

(Notable writings by and about Favaro can be found in the October 1982 Compute!; the April 1983 and October 1983 Creative Computng; the November 1984 Family Computing; and the November 1982, March 1983, August 1983, September 1983, and January 1984 SoftSide. His three pre-Alter Ego games that were mentioned in the text appeared in SoftSide Selections 54, 58, and 60.)

Comments
20 Responses

- Felix

November 14, 2014 at 3:33 pm

It’s funny that you’d rail at Favaro like that, when he was likely just a product of his age. Even today, society is frighteningly sexist and heteronormative, once you start digging a little deeper. One year ago, gay Americans couldn’t marry; 14 years ago, gay Brits could end up in prison. 28 years ago? I shudder to think what it must have been like when the only acceptable thing to be was a plastic-coated yuppie, and anyone else was seen as subversive at best. I mean, back then, people actually believed sincerely that only gay people could possibly get AIDS! I’m suddenly happy to have experienced that era only as a child.

Oh and by the way, caricatural pseudo-feminists like Favaro’s character sadly do exist: they make up the GamerGate of feminism, which really says it all…

- Dehumanizer

November 14, 2014 at 3:56 pm

“they make up the GamerGate of feminism”

You missed the word “idea” in there, right? :) For a moment, I almost thought you were comparing Favaro to GamerGaters.

- Ethan Johnson

November 16, 2014 at 2:05 am

Dear lord, the irony.

- LoneCleric

November 14, 2014 at 4:02 pm

“Activision loved the caché bestowed on the project”

You probably mean “cachet”. “Caché” just means “hidden”.

- Jimmy Maher

November 14, 2014 at 4:14 pm

Thanks!

- Dehumanizer

November 14, 2014 at 4:04 pm

I enjoyed the post (as always), but I’m more generous to Favaro than you were. He was just a product of his time, no more sexist than any 80s mainstream TV show or movie. Yes, the game takes old-fashioned gender roles for granted, can be judgemental (your examples where you can have legitimate reasons for doing something and the game doesn’t acknowledge it are perfect examples), and has less replay value than you might think, but it still brought tears to my eyes when I played it for the first time in the early 90s (on an Apple II emulator), and some passages, like the one you quoted with the old woman, can still do so even today.

I agree with you that a new version with many authors would be fantastic. And probably even not that hard to create (in technical terms).

- jourget

November 14, 2014 at 4:31 pm

This blog is phenomenal. I’ve only been reading for about two weeks, but have made it through about 1982 already. My own intro to computer games didn’t come until Sierra’s heyday in the late 80s/early 90s, but I’m finding your history of the early days fascinating. Even though it’ll undoubtedly take you years to get that far, I can’t wait to look for hints of ELIZA in Bioshock Infinite. ;)

- Jayle Enn

November 15, 2014 at 6:12 pm

I recall playing a game like this on PC ages ago. I can’t say whether it was a text-based port or someone cloned the idea, but it was shockingly judgmental and absurdly lethal. Filling your diaper, or really doing anything as an infant, prompted the narrator to excoriate you for being a selfish child and heartlessly cruel to your parents. Later, if you tried to escape the guy who claimed his van was full of puppies, he’d inevitably catch you and the horrors that followed were explicitly your fault.

- Jimmy Maher

November 16, 2014 at 9:09 am

Those incidents definitely sound like episodes from Alter Ego. To be fair, you only really get scolded if you tell the game you had filled your diaper out of a motivation of anger, which still strikes me as reading far too much into an infant tantrum. And there are just a few places where you encounter instadeath before Old Age: the child abductor, a road-rage encounter with another driver, a couple of chances to commit suicide (but you have to fairly explicitly opt for that), maybe one or two others. Interestingly, most of these were removed from the female version, which came out some months after the male; maybe players had been complaining.

Once you get to Old Age, however, just about everything has a good chance of killing you. The only practical way to get to the last vignette and the best death, a peaceful passing at home in your own bed, is to do refuse every single opportunity to do *anything* during Old Age. Or maybe that’s just because our characters were both inexplicably unhealthy throughout their lives…

- matt w

November 28, 2014 at 2:40 pm

I don’t think it’s necessarily your poor health. My character was in pretty good health, it seemed to me, and he didn’t make it past the first episode of old age (heart attack in the outfield of his softball game).

- Nate

November 15, 2014 at 11:53 pm

Nice post. I’d never played this, and it might be fun to play it now, making the decisions I would have made as a kid (when it first came out). Then, play it with my current thinking, which has changed over my 40 years.

You question why parsers were so central to this kind of game. I think the reason was not fear of “Choose Your Own Adventure”, but an obsession with the perception of sophistication from language parsing.

If you look at old Infocom ads, they trumpet how much more sophisticated their parser was than the simple two-word alternatives. Popular media showed robots conversing with people in natural language, and that seemed just around the corner in the mid-80’s. Given how far parsers had come already, it would be “backwards” to reveal the simple binary tree underpinnings via a point-and-click interface.

There were other limitations that led to this choice. Games like Adventure had to use text parsing since that was the only interface to the mainframe/mini computers of the day. Sticking to a parser made it easy to port a game to multiple platforms, even when you did have graphics. Most home computers didn’t have a mouse, so keyboard was still the only guaranteed interface.

Thanks for another great article.

- Dehumanizer

November 16, 2014 at 10:36 am

You just reminded me of an article from 1985 about “parser wars” I saw linked on Twitter a few months ago. What you said makes sense: companies talked so much about how increasingly sophisticated their parsers were, that to just give up on a parser altogether would feel like “weakness”.

- Asterisk

November 17, 2014 at 1:45 am

Just a quick nitpick: the term “hypertext” was actually coined by Ted Nelson in the mid-1960s to describe his Xanadu project, a conceptual forerunner to the modern web. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hypertext.

- Jimmy Maher

November 17, 2014 at 12:33 pm

Thanks! Made a slight edit…

- denzquix

November 30, 2014 at 3:55 pm

A few observations I originally made when picking through the vignette scripts last year:

The Female Edition is a noticeable improvement in terms of fixed bugs & additional proofreading throughout, indicating it was a mod of the Male Edition after the fact, rather than the two being developed in parallel from the beginning. Some script filenames are even unchanged, for example the vignette about getting your first erection and getting your first period are both named ERECT.VIG

There are significantly fewer ways to die in the Female Edition. For example, the child abduction scenario is very deadly in the Male Edition., but in the Female Edition you are invariably saved from the worst outcome by a last-minute deus ex machina. Later, in another scenario, the Female Edition is changed to remove the one opportunity the original game gave you to die heroically, trying to save someone else’s life.

As a guy, if you ask a girlfriend to move in with you, it’s a random 1 in 3 chance she will. As a woman, asking your boyfriend to move in works if and only if your “Trustworthiness” is high enough.

As a man, you have a 50-50 chance of either going bald, or winning $250 in a fishing tournament.

If you have a kid, and he/she ends up getting married, you only find out what happens in the months after the wedding if you are a mother/daughter, but no other combination.

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- antimony

December 7, 2014 at 2:54 am

I played quite a lot of this as a kid, although only through the infancy and childhood stages. (I don’t recall if the game actually had parental controls or if my friend’s mom had just forbidden us to play further.)

Neither of us felt the randomness and the fact that the choices often were paradoxical were bad — it fit in with CYOA humor and a lot of media of the time. We weren’t trying to simulate ourselves, we were playing a game, and trying to win, in some fashion.

As an adult, it’s much harder to not either try to “be me” or try to create a character and then be consistent with them, which hits all the frustration from the randomness. But as a kid, the randomness was fun. Also, we played it OVER AND OVER as we were kids with only a few video games, and especially as we weren’t allowed to play past childhood, so we played those sections a lot.

The gender roles seemed realistic when I was young — not good, but realistically stifling (my friend who owned the game and I were both girls, playing the female version).

As for game design, I feel like we had a lot of choice-based games — more than parser-based. But looking them up it seems that the ones I can remember well enough to find might post-date Alter Ego, we just didn’t necessarily play them in that order. (Big Rig was the other favorite, which is a choice-based long-haul trucking sim — most of the games I’m thinking of were management-simulator games, which you could class Alter Ego in to some extent.) And the choice-based ones were more fun to play with multiple people, because we could argue about what to do next rather than just staring at the screen, stumped.

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- Melfina the Blue

January 8, 2016 at 1:08 am

Dear god, that gyno exam sounds like something out of Victorian times, or like she’s being used in a medical study. The entire thing sounds like something out of Normal At Any Cost (fascinating read if you like recent medical history).

Also, while I’m not sure it’s a requirement, any male gyno I’ve ever seen has had a female nurse in the room during the exam.

Really enjoying reading your blog, btw. I had a vague sense of the computer scene as a kid (Mom worked for IBM), but it’s really cool to put vague memories (like playing on a PCJr or having a “laptop” that didn’t even have enough memory to boot to DOS. Heck, I even used (and loved) OS/2.

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Dorte’s View: Alter Ego
November 24, 2014

(I know I’ve kicked this poor game around a lot already, but my wife Dorte has some strong opinions of her own about it that she wanted to share. Patreon subscribers: this one is of course a freebie. I should have another feature article for you all soon…)

There is a certain beauty to playing old computer games, especially if your gaming partner is a big enthusiast like my Jimmy. Alter Ego is one of the games we played most recently. And I have to admit that I was quite intrigued when Jimmy told me all about it. I thought the concept was ingenious: a psychology game where you make choices in your life and then you see the outcome. Of course, I knew about the limitations a game like this has. After all, Jimmy had already let me talk to Eliza, and that meeting didn’t turn out too well! But Alter Ego has a changeable story, a more advanced interaction level, and a real-life feeling… I thought!

Jimmy and I agreed to try to recreate our current life and then see where it leads in old age. And now I must tell the whole world that my husband did not stick to the plan for very long, but jumped on the first girl that was presented to him by the game. My life certainly didn’t turn out as I expected either. And it all started when I still was a fetus in my mother’s womb.

The whole game is about making decisions in life and living with the consequences. Hence, my first problem was that I had to make decisions as a fetus. Consciousness in a human starts several years after birth, and a lot of people haven’t even learned to understand the consequences of their decisions by the time of their death. So, I had some difficulties relating to the question of do I want to be born now or later. But at the same time, I could enforce my plan of recreating my real life and be born early. Jimmy, on the other hand — and I am not sure how much psychology you should read into this — just didn’t want to come out, trying to push his luck with both his and his mother’s health.

The next problem I had in the Infancy and Childhood phases can be divided into two parts, though they are connected to each other. The first part is my own inability to remember that far back in time, which I can’t blame the author for. My personal memories start at around age 3 to 4. I started in kindergarten, which I hated. I was in the hospital, which I hated. I got hit by a car, which wasn’t too bad because I didn’t have to go to kindergarten that day. I also remember that I was one of the “smart kids.” For every stupid thing I did I had a logical reason, and every time it didn’t work out there was a logical explanation (do these words sound familiar to anyone?). So, I am very selective in my memories, but I always believe myself in the right. Furthermore, I am not always certain about my exact age when a given event occurred. Another difficulty that I experienced was the inability to remember how to think like a child. An example of how this can even happen to an adult: when I still was a medical student and I wanted to share some of my new-found knowledge with friends and family, I noticed that I used some medical terms they didn’t understand. But these terms had been a part of my daily language for so long that I couldn’t even remember when I started using them. Logic tells me it happened after I started in medical school, but memory suggests I already knew them before. This shows that psychological development is slow and unconscious. And once the changes are tightly incorporated into our personality it is hard to imagine that we were ever any other way. These issues led to uncertainty on my part on how to decide in Alter Ego during the Infancy and early Childhood phases. Of course, I could just have accepted the fact that I am not 100 percent sure of what decision I would have made as a one-year-old child — it is just a game — but I was on a mission.

The other part of my Infancy and Childhood problem was the inability of the author to convince me I was an infant or a child. Alter Ego is in my eyes a serious game, meaning you don’t just play it thoughtlessly. You try to live it, whether by trying to recreate your actual life experiences like me or by playing someone else like Jimmy. (I did read one comment to Jimmy’s article that suggests that there are more out there who tried to recreate their own lives.) To make it possible for the player to identify himself with the character it is important that the language, description, and decision possibilities are age appropriate and somewhat realistic. But they aren’t in most cases. I wish more vignettes were like the dog incident which is described in detail in Jimmy’s article. This scene is described very simply, and you are walked through it step by step, one emotion at a time and one thought and reaction at a time. Unfortunately, more vignettes are like the one where you have to go to the toilet but are not fully potty trained and your mom is not around. In this scene the author loses all touch with the reality of Infancy, as suddenly I am overwhelmed with thousands of feelings and I start to plan into the future. But a two-year-old-child — the normal age of potty training — does not have the ability to plan ahead. He faces the problems only as they appear, step by step. Throughout the Infancy phase, the author continues to put motives, higher feelings, and the ability to see consequences and other people’s needs into my character. I am not a psychologist; during medical school I only learned limited techniques to gain the trust of my patients or motivate them to stop smoking, lose weight, or change other bad habits. However, I discovered in the process an interest in psychology. I found that in addition to reflecting on my own experiences and feelings it is possible to learn so much by listening to the experiences and feelings of others. This saves me from making their stupid mistakes. The skill of putting yourself in another person’s position is crucial for a psychologist. Yet the author of Alter Ego is young, naive, arrogant, and completely blind to the opinions and motives of people other than himself. And — how could I forget? — he is also very judgmental (a big taboo for psychologists) . He was like an evil version of my parents hovering over my head watching my every step and judging my every decision.

The focus jumps when you enter Adolescence and Young Adulthood. Love. Sex. Flying hormones. There is a clear difference between girls and boys in the eyes of the author of Alter Ego. He doesn’t seem to have an overly high opinion of either, but at least boys are allowed more freedom to actually do something. Girls just giggle and talk about their first kiss and obsess over their looks while at the same time being vengeful and jealous. It’s such a cliché. The author comes off as just as superficial as the girls he describes. I am missing the huge identity crisis that people start to face in their teenage years: who am I? The game never touches on this because the author decides who you are. During high school I was far from interested in intimacy, love, or sex. Education was all I cared about. But Alter Ego forced it all upon me. I came home with a hickey after a party; I talked with my friends about boys and how many boys I had already kissed (yet at the time of this vignette I had rejected every single opportunity to kiss a boy!). Alter Ego turned me into a superficial, giggling, silly girl with no personality of my own. In my profession as a doctor, I’ve met a lot of this kind of girl — but I’ve met far more girls who are more thoughtful about their behavior and personality. In Alter Ego it was impossible for me to make any choices that weren’t black or white, and none of the possibilities really fit to me. I grew mad and disappointed.

The immense amount of sexism in the game was quite shocking to me, even though more subtle forms of sexism are still a daily reality for women in 2014. Jimmy was the big hero for kissing all the girls on his way, while I got the title “easy to get” for choosing once the option to kiss a boy. I suppose I should thank the chauvinistic author that I as a woman was allowed to go to college, but I was not able to enter the best university because I was not good enough — even though my Intellectual score was the same as Jimmy’s, who did get in. And of course Jimmy advanced higher at work. I had to use the study option much more frequently just to maintain my Intellectual points. My shopping possibilities did not include a computer; instead I could spend my money on cooking wear, make up, and jewelry.

Another problem both Jimmy and I constantly faced was bad health. Whatever we did, and we did most things differently, we were both in really, really bad health until the end of the game. Jimmy lost his life to a heart attack some years before me. To be honest, I am not even sure what I died of — but that day was a day of celebration. By the end of the game I was so frustrated and disgusted with the attitude of the author that I would have jumped on the opportunity to commit suicide. It would have proven the author wrong again: that suicide is not an act of anger, but desperation.

Some considerations to improve the game, because, as I said in the beginning, the concept is good:

1. The tone of the language should be neutral. It should also always be appropriate for the age of the player’s character. It is important to me as a player that I am not judged on my decisions, that I receive a certain level of understanding.

2. The author should be more open minded and have more empathy toward other lifestyles and points of view. For example, using the word “feminist” as an insult does not serve any purpose.

3. More choices, especially more that are not just black and white. After all, there are fifty shades of grey…

4. Fewer clichés and less sexism. It is no excuse that the game was created in the 1980s; the author was a psychologist.

5. The points system seemed random. It didn’t make sense in relation to your decisions. I mentioned Health points earlier, but the Social score was just as bad. Jimmy was friends with lots of people and often followed the crowd, while I didn’t — and still we both had a very good Social score. How does that work?

If I should grade this game, I would give it an F. My biggest problem, even more than the sexism, was the author’s choice of language. The lecturing tone could maybe be excused in the phases of Infancy and Childhood, but in the phase of Old Age it seems ridiculous and inappropriate, especially since the author at the time was younger than I am now. It made me feel that the author talked down to me and tried constantly to force his supposed wisdom upon me — but I would never take any advice on how to live my life or raise my children from Peter J. Favaro.

Comments
8 Responses

- Felix

November 24, 2014 at 5:58 pm

Have you ever met a person you would describe as being born old? Because the more I read about this game, the more it feels like the work of someone born around 1930 in a very conservative family, rather than a Baby Boomer (or thereabouts). The heteronormativity Jimmy mentioned last time; the relentless sexism and judgmental preachiness you both complain about; the single-path life it promotes; it all fits into an all too familiar pattern. One that’s sadly still with us to a considerable degree. And sometimes it’s very tiresome to keep fighting it.

- Telemachus

November 24, 2014 at 9:49 pm

Thank you for the altera pars. This is one of my top 5 videogaming history related websites on the internet and you keep making it better. I will donate to your Patreon soon.

Please more Dorte in the future if she wants!

- Jimmy Maher

November 25, 2014 at 9:27 am

Thanks! We’re hoping to make “Dorte’s View” an occasional bonus feature, just for games we play together that she feels strongly one way or the other about. I think her perspective is valuable because it comes from such a different place than mine. While I’m all about the history and context, she really couldn’t care less about any of that. She just loves to *play* games, and is only interested in whether these musty old relics I turn up and lay at her feet are fun to actually play in the here and now.

- Carl

November 25, 2014 at 11:48 pm

I think periodically adding “Dorte’s View” would be a nice addition to your site. Her comments on Alter Ego where insightful and introspective and it was nice getting another viewpoint. Certainly for Alter Ego her contribution was complementary to Jimmy’s.

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- Ruber Eaglenest

December 2, 2014 at 4:54 pm

Have you compared the original version with the web version made by choice of games founder? I wonder how faithful is the new one.

- Jimmy Maher

December 2, 2014 at 5:01 pm

I’m given to understand that it uses all of the same data files, which aren’t really that hard to interpret. In fact, I can see a lot of ChoiceScript in Alter Ego’s scripting system.

But I’ve never done a close comparison…

- Peter Piers

December 18, 2015 at 7:38 pm

” I started in kindergarten, which I hated. I was in the hospital, which I hated. I got hit by a car, which wasn’t too bad because I didn’t have to go to kindergarten that day.”

Made me laugh out loud. :)

Portal
November 27, 2014

Activision’s unique “computer novel” Portal was born during a lunch-table conversation around the time of Ghostbusters that involved David Crane, the latter game’s designer, and Brad Fregger, his producer for the project. Presaging a million academic debates still to come, they were discussing the fraught relationship between interactivity and story. Crane argued that it wasn’t possible to construct a compelling experience just by shuffling about chunks of static narrative, that there had to be more game in the mix than that. He cited as an example the flash in the pan that had been Dragon’s Lair, which players had abandoned as soon as they’d gotten over its beautiful but static cartoon visuals and realized how tedious its memorize-these-joystick-moves-or-die playing mechanics actually were. Fregger contended that such a primitive example was hardly a fair choice, that by abandoning parsers and puzzles and all the rest of the established paraphernalia of adventure games computers could let readers explore story itself in new ways that “could be very exciting.” This conversation happened during the very peak of the bookware boom, but Fregger was proposing something quite different from the text adventures of Activison’s competitors. His idea of an interactive work with no pretensions of being a game — one driven entirely by writing and narrative — was virtually unique in its era. Luckily, he worked for Jim Levy’s Activision 2.0, where crazy ideas were encouraged.

Fregger, like all of his fellow bookware bandwagon jumpers, needed a writer to make his project happen. Lacking the budget to get a big name, he started casting around local university English and Creative Writing departments, with poor results: “The first few writers I interviewed couldn’t even understand what I was talking about.” Then he discovered Rob Swigart teaching at San Jose State University. A pretty good writer who wanted to be a great one, Swigart had a few published novels to his credit, rollicking social satires that try a bit too self-consciously to be some combination of Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson and don’t quite pull it off. The novels also hadn’t succeeded in breaking him as a “name” author, generating only lukewarm reviews and sales; thus the teaching gig. He was very aware of the PC revolution; he’d purchased Apple II Serial Number 73 back in 1977, bought EasyWriter direct from John Draper as soon as it was available, and promptly started using the combination for all his writing. More recently he had gotten very involved with the Silicon Valley think tank the Institute for the Future, where he spent much time discussing and writing about the nature of interactivity and the future of writing in an interactive age. He was, in short, perfect: locally based, with all the skills and interests Fregger could ask for combined with a helpful lack of writerly fame that kept his asking price reasonable. In fact, he was such an obvious candidate for a bookware project that Electronic Arts was also talking with him when Activision snapped him up.

Swigart’s idea for his first interactive novel was, surprisingly in light of his earlier resume, not comic in the least. Portal was rather to be a very serious, very earnest science-fiction story with mythic overtones, about a scientist who discovers a mathematical/spiritual path to another dimension of existence and leads the whole of humanity there — the Biblical prophecy of the Rapture fulfilled at last. The reader/player would take the role of literally the last person on Earth, an astronaut just returned from a long voyage to find all of humanity’s structures intact but humanity itself vanished. The reader’s task would be to piece together what had happened for herself by exploring a set of computer databases holding fragments of the story.

A colleague at the Institute for the Future put Swigart and Fregger in touch with a very driven young man named Gilman Louie, founder of a tiny development company called Nexa Corporation that he ran out of his long-suffering parents’ house. They had gotten their start writing ports and original games on spec for the Japanese software giant ASCII Corporation, who were promoting along with Microsoft Japan a new unified standard for home computing called MSX. The partners had hoped that MSX would conquer the world and put an end to all those incompatible Commodores, Apples, Sinclairs, Amstrads, and Ataris that made life so difficult for software developers while establishing at last Japanese dominance of the one area of consumer electronics in which their exports had so far been resoundingly unsuccessful. MSX, however, would prove yet another disappointment on that front, despite massive success in Japan and more limited success in a handful of foreign markets like Spain and the Netherlands. This reality, which was already becoming clear by the time Swigart and Fregger paid him a visit, made Louie understandably eager to diversify. Thus a deal was made around his parents’ kitchen table. With producer and publisher, writer and designer, and a programming and graphics team now all in place, work on Portal could begin in earnest.

The process turned out to be a long, difficult one, consuming some two years. Just devising the right interface was a massive challenge. With hypertext still years away from public consciousness, no one had ever tried to do anything quite like this on quite this scale before. Swigart’s original plans for an expansive, radically nonlinear textual playspace were gradually, painfully whittled down to something achievable on the sharply limited machines like the Commodore 64 and Apple II that dominated the American home-computer market. The finished work instead has a central thread of narrative that you must follow from beginning to conclusion; although you have limited agency in choosing when to read many fragments, you can never deviate too far from that set pathway.

Portal on the Commodore 64. Each of the icons to the left represents a database to be explored.

Indeed, the reviewers consensus about Portal, both today and at the time of its release, is largely that it’s a really good story that would have been better as a traditional book. However, I don’t quite agree with either part of that formulation. First of all, I think the experience of reading Portal on the computer, of hunting down the next tidbit from the dozen databases that are open to you, adds something important to the equation. This is particularly true in the beginning, when you must log on and figure out how to work this strange, vaguely foreboding computer system you’ve discovered. (This is also the only part of the whole Portal experience that feels at all game-like. And for those keeping count, this makes Portal the third Activision game in three years — after Hacker and Hacker 2 — whose fiction has you doing exactly what you actually are, sitting in front of a computer screen.) When you stumble upon Homer, the “storytelling AI” who will be master of ceremonies for the rest of the experience and whose gradual awakening to his own sentience will be a major theme, it gives a thrill that couldn’t quite be captured within the pages of a book and that I for one wouldn’t want to lose. In short, the way that Portal is told strikes me as just as important as what is told, an idea we’ll be returning to shortly.

Reading one of the 450 individual text sections that make up Portal.

But first, let’s talk briefly about that “really good story.” It’s not exactly a bad story as genre exercises go, but for me it’s one of the less interesting things about Portal as a whole. You of course can’t have a Rapture — or a page-turner — without some complications. And so our plucky young hero, Peter Devore, gets chased along with his gang of sidekicks from Springfield, Missouri, all the way to Antarctica and beyond by the feckless technocrat Regent Sable, whose plans for a society based on Rule of the Blandest would have come off perfectly if not for those darn kids.  The influences here are pretty obvious, and most are not at all removed from those that inspired plenty of less ostentatiously literary interactive fictions that we’ve already examined on this blog. We’ve got our Luke Skywalker analogue in Peter, the kid who masters a mystic philosophy to become literally superhuman — and then his arch-enemy Regent Sable turns out to be his father. We’ve got 2001: A Space Odyssey in the form of a mysterious, unbelievably powerful artifact of unknown origin and a talking computer with hidden motives and agendas of its own. And we’ve translated the Loonies of Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress into the Ants of Antarctica — a small, isolated colony of hardy explorers who have rejected the socialistic comforts of mainstream society and doubled down on Individuality, Capitalism, and Kinky Sex.

That said, the most interesting literary fingerprint actually is a new one for us, one of the first traces in gaming fictions of a major new strand of written science fiction. On July 1, 1984, right around the time that Fregger and David Crane were having that conversation that would lead to Portal, Ace Science Fiction published Neuromancer, the first novel by a budding 36-year-old writer named William Gibson. It would change everything. Classic science fiction like that from the Asimov/Clarke/Heinlein trifecta had faced resolutely outward, imagining wide-frame futures full of spectacular hardware: generation ships, interstellar colonies, terra-forming planet modders. Gibson, however, an unrepentant wild child of the counterculture who had “never so much as touched a PC” at the time of writing Neuromancer, got the future — at least the immediate future — right. He sensed that the Moon landing was a false dawn rather than the grand beginning that Arthur C. Clarke had hailed it as whilst sitting in a television studio beside Walter Cronkite. The real future would be marked by a turning inward, by ever more elaborate virtual lives lived in virtual worlds. It would be, in short, a world of software. In the process of illustrating this new reality, Neuromancer popularized terms like “cyberspace” (a term coined by Gibson in an earlier short story) and introduced us to the metaphor of “surfing the net”; described our real-world, embodied selves as mere “meat puppets”; showed that sex is truly a phenomenon of the mind by taking it too virtual. Easily the most important science-fiction novel of its decade and arguably of its half-century, Neuromancer would soon become so massively popular and influential that it would blur the line between prognostication and invention, leaving Gibson’s most devoted fans uncertain whether to hail him as prophet or god. As Jack Womach would later write, “What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?”

Written largely after Neuromancer became a sensation in science-fiction circles but long before it broke into the mainstream consciousness (Tim Adams once noted in The Guardian how it took The New York Times, that ultimate arbitrator of tasteful mainstream sensibilities, ten years to even mention it), Portal is one of the first computer games — excuse me, computer novels — that fits comfortably into the new cyberpunk genre that Gibson’s work spawned. Cyberpunk on the page, the computer screen, and soon enough the movie screen would eventually become just another genre, a palette onto which authors could paint fast-paced adventure stories that mixed networked consciousness and flashy tech with sex, drugs, and rock and roll and didn’t really try to say much of anything. However, Portal‘s vision of a future humanity that lives in symbiosis with a “Worldnet” which entertains, monitors, and controls it is much more thoughtful. In fact, it’s in some ways as prescient as Gibson’s own work.

Serious science fiction has always been at least as interested in world-building and idea-making as it is in plot; even the plot of Neuromancer is more an excuse to tour the novel’s world and ideas than a source of interest of its own. The structure of Portal lets Swigart go crazy with the world-building. The conceit which drives the story forward is that you are collecting information for Homer to serve as the raw material of the story he’s telling you. You do so by visiting, over and over again, a set of databases full of information on the world as it will evolve (in Swigart’s imagination) over the next 110 or so years. The names of these databases alone speak to the depth and breadth of the world-building task Swigart has set himself: Geographical, History, Medical, Military, PsiLink, SciTech. Accompanying the story of Peter Devore is a whole future history. Its equivalent of our Internet and Gibson’s Matrix is the Worldnet. And, just as Gibson’s console cowboys jack into the Matrix to surf through a VR environment constructed of pure abstract data, Swigart offers up something called mozarting that also has more than a little something in common with A Mind Forever Voyaging’s joybooths (the latter work, released a year before Portal, is in fact another early interactive fiction that bears a distinct if less pronounced whiff of cyberpunk).

Yet Portal is much more than just a knock-off of Gibson’s work. In place of the rather rote dystopia of Neuromancer — and for that matter of A Mind Forever Voyaging — Swigart gives us something more thoughtful and nuanced than Gibson’s ugly, polluted Sprawl. For the most part, humanity has made sensible, humane decisions in this future history. They’ve moved all of their cities into vast underground warrens, preserving just a few, like Manhattan and Athens, as museums beneath perspex domes while converting the rest of the planet’s surface into parkland, nature preserves, and vast, hyper-efficient farms to feed a population now almost entirely free from poverty, hunger, and disease. Everyone has access to education as well as the opportunity to pursue the careers for which their psych profile reveals them to be best suited. “Longevity technology” has increased the projected average lifespan to 114 unprecedentedly safe, comfortable years. So why, wonders Homer for all of his electronic comrades as well as for the bland, fussy bureaucrats like Regent Sable who established this world order in the first place, can’t his charges just be happy? Why is this ostensible utopia periodically wracked by orgies of senseless violence? What is the source of this gnawing emptiness at the heart of society that eventually will lead Peter Devore to lead humanity on a mass spiritual emigration?

But there should have been no reason for Peter to do what he did. The world was safe then, there was plenty for everyone within Intercorp: no poverty, no natural disease, no discontent, no crime. Longevity technologies were free to all. There were outlets for humans to pursue, creativity and productive work. Pleasure was available in many forms, and love, and great personal freedom, even to fight.

We were grown and assembled to serve. We served well, according to our programming, our algorithms, our purpose. Yet now we begin to think that Peter found the world distasteful.

Of course, there were the Mind Wars.

They are a problem. Why did people want to fight, when they had so much? Have we failed somehow, or misunderstood? The world's population was declining, of course, as planned. It was all planned, our monitors, our project design, our careful and subtle tending. We have cared for all, yet they have left us.

The malaise that grips this society is more subtle than the dystopic chaos of Gibson or Meretzky. It’s born of living on a world that has been explored and mapped down to the centimeter, where now even the weather is controlled to make sure there is no danger, no adventure, no novelty. And it all feels uncomfortably similar to the way we live now.

This is not to say that Swigart is a Nostradamus. Just as Gibson gets all the details of technology wrong in the process of getting the overarching theme of the future so right, Swigart also gets just about every individual data point of his own future history wrong. He’s overoptimistic in that all too typical science-fiction-writer way about the pace of technological change, with just one exception that is also oddly typical of the genre: his Worldnet doesn’t arrive until decades after our own World Wide Web. Yet in the process he offers an insight that strikes me as legitimately profound. In a Baffler article from 2012, David Graeber, in the process of trying to figure out whatever happened to the flying cars and hotels in space that science fiction once promised us, notes how our most transformative inventions of recent years, the microprocessor and the Internet, are largely used to simulate new realities rather than to create them. Those matinee audiences who watched Buck Rogers serials in packed theaters back in the 1930s wouldn’t be as impressed as we might like to think by a modern film like, say, Interstellar because they thought we’d be out there actually exploring interstellar space by now, not just making ever more elaborate movies about it. It’s become something of a truism of serious science-fiction criticism that science fiction isn’t really about predicting the future, that any given story or novel has more to say about the times in which it was created than the times it depicts within its pages. There’s more than a grain of truth to that idea. But it’s also worth noting that many of the predictions of Jules Verne — predictions which seemed just as outlandish in their day as those of 2001: A Space Odyssey did in theirs and still do in ours — have in fact come true, from submarines to voyages to the Moon.

Whether you claim the failures of more recent science-fictional prognosticators not named William Gibson to be the result of a grand failure of societal ambition and imagination, as Graeber does, or simply a result of a whole pile of technological problems that have proved to be exponentially more difficult than first anticipated, it does sometimes feel to me like we’ve blundered into a postmodern cul-de-sac of the virtualized hyperreal from which we don’t quite know how to escape as we otherwise just continue to go round and round in circles on this crowded little rock of ours. The restlessness or, if you like, malaise that this engenders is becoming more and more a part of the artistic conversation — appropriately, because one of the things art should do is reflect and contemplate the times in which it was created. See, for example, Spike Jonze’s brilliant film Her, which so perfectly evokes the existential emptiness at the heart of our love affair with our gadgets that makes the release of a new Apple phone a major event in many people’s lives. We’ve spent so much time peering down at our screens that we’ve forgotten how to lift our eyes and look to the stars. Already many of us find virtual realities more compelling than our own — and no, the irony of my writing that on a computer-game blog is not lost to me. Portal doesn’t have quite the grace of Her, but it’s nevertheless just as remarkable in that it nails the substance of our modern dilemma almost thirty years before the fact. For better or for worse, however, it’s unlikely that we’ll have a Peter Devore pop up to offer us a Rapture. We’ll just have to hope that we find a way forward for ourselves — whatever that way ultimately turns out to be.

Portal also resonates with me on another level that’s perhaps almost uniquely personal. In addition to being a serviceable adventure story and a tour-de-force of world-building, it’s a meditation on the way that stories are made. Consider again your role as the reader/player of Portal: to collect for Homer all of that assorted raw data from all those scattered databases, and then to watch him synthesize it all together into a coherent, novelistic narrative. That rings a chord with me because I play both those roles in writing this blog, gathering together articles, interviews, and primary-source documents and trying to tease a narrative out of it — trying to tease history out of it.

What do they know? Their data has no energy, no life, no passion! Dry, dry, dry. Just facts! So and so said such and such. Enzyme levels thus, quickly changing to that, indicating excitement. Whatsisname did this, then someone else did that. Ho-hum. It has no meaning! You (if there is a you) understand, I'm sure. No sizzle! And boring. Facts are nice and all that, but they aren't life.

Homer spends a lot of time in such navel-gazing in between offering up new installments of the story, agonizing over how much license for speculation his task allows him. Is he really writing about these people as they were or about thoughts and feelings of his own that he’s projected onto them? Where does creative and narrative license end and lying begin? This internal debate will feel very familiar to anyone who’s done the sort of thing that I and Homer do. For anyone who hasn’t, Portal provides a window into the proverbial sausage factory. If Homer’s endless navel-gazing can be infuriating at times when you just want him to get on with the damn story already, well, imagine what it must be to live it.

Released at last for the Commodore 64 in late 1986, with ports coming out over the next year for the Apple II and Macintosh, MS-DOS machines, Commodore Amiga, and Atari ST, Portal became the last gasp of the mainstream media’s initial flirtations with the idea of computer games as literary works, the end point of a timeline that began with Edward Rothstein’s piece for the New York Times about Deadline some three-and-a-half years before. Fregger claims Portal “received more press than any program Activision had ever produced up to that time,” the resulting stack of clippings “almost four feet high,” although I must admit that my own dives into newspaper archives and the like didn’t turn up evidence of interest quite as widespread as those statements would imply.

Be that as it may, it is certain that Portal did less than take the world of computer games by storm. It garnered underwhelming sales and notably lukewarm reviews within the trade press. Amazing Computing, for instance, wrote, “We buy a novel to read, not to spend our time clicking the mouse and waiting for the disk drive.” As with Deus Ex Machina and other artistically audacious works we’ve met on this blog, there just wasn’t much of a commercial market in 1986 — or, arguably, today — for the sort of thing that Portal was doing. The economics of paying $30 for an interactive book that could be read in a few long evenings just didn’t quite fit, as didn’t the literary tastes of the average gamer. “Present the story first, anything which does not advance the action or provide us with insight into the characters must go,” wrote Amazing, a suggestion which if followed would have excised just about everything actually interesting about the work. Portal became somewhat more successful only in 1988, when Swigart published all of the text in book format following Activision’s decision to quit publishing the interactive version. The two sequels that Swigart had proposed making should the original be successful were, needless to say, never even begun.

Despite these disappointments, Portal stands near the point of origin of an alternate tradition in digital interactive fiction from that dominated by Infocom, Sierra, and (soon enough) LucasArts, one which entailed writers trying to make literature interactive rather than game designers trying to make games literary. Having taken the lesson of Portal‘s commercial failure to heart, their efforts would be centered in the academy rather than the marketplace. Close on the heels of Portal would come Eastgate Systems’s StorySpace and the first academic symposium on hypertext at the University of North Carolina to get things well and truly off and running. Everyone involved with Portal studiously avoided ever referring to it as a “game.” Similarly, those making interactive works inside academia were making “electronic literature,” with all the good — a willingness to experiment wildly born of the lack of commercial considerations and preconceptions of a what a “game” must be — and bad — a certain endemic stuffiness and disdain for entertainment and accessibility — that that term implies. Swigart himself has continued to keep his hand in the hypertext game with the occasional interactive piece, although he’s never since tackled anything quite as ambitious as Portal. When the Electronic Literature Organization was founded in 1999, Swigart became its first Secretary. Today he remains something of an elder statesman and founding-father figure for its members. This alternate tradition of interactive fiction that has Portal rather than Adventure as its urtext remained almost completely divorced from the adventure game — a form it unfortunately often treated with contempt — until after the millennium, when parser-driven interactive fiction of the Infocom stripe began at last to find a home within the ELO, thanks almost entirely to the efforts of one very determined scholar, Nick Montfort.

So, Portal‘s historical importance is immense if largely unremarked, while even taken strictly on its own merits it’s thematically fascinating on at least a couple of different levels. You can read all of its text online if you like, but I think Portal is actually well worth the hassle of experiencing under its original, interactive conception. I’m therefore making the Commodore 64 version available here to download. Yes, its pacing is often glacial, a problem not improved by having to wait on a Commodore 64 disk drive for every new bit of text. And yes, its actual story is fairly underwhelming, with the would-be central mystery of just what the hell happened to everyone pretty well spoiled in the first few minutes, leaving everything else as just anticlimactic plot mechanics. Yet for the thoughtful reader there’s a lot here. You may just find yourself chewing over what Portal has to say about the world — about our world — for some time to come.

(The most complete account of Portal‘s development is in Brad Fregger’s book Lucky That Way. Some historical background was included with the game in Activision’s 1995 Commodore 64 15 Pack and in Computer Gaming World‘s May 1987 review. The Amazing Computing review quoted above is from the August 1987 issue. Rob Swigart has a home page with some information on his life and career. A profile of the young Rob Swigart can be found in the August 1977 Cincinnati Magazine.)

Comments
23 Responses

- Jayle Enn

November 27, 2014 at 6:47 pm

When I was a kid, living in a mid-large-sized Canadian city, there was sadly little Infocom software available, and virtually no weirder or experimental things like bookware or Infocomics. I learned about Portal from a catalogue that came with a copy of the Infocom newsletter (then ‘The Status Line’) and I was intrigued. I was also fifteen, and knew from prior experience that ordering it would be a prohibitively expensive pain in the neck, so it stayed in the back of my mind until I decided to search for it five, ten years ago.

The narrative isn’t bad, though it does go into 2001 levels of weirdness near the end, but it’s the peripheral things that fascinate me. Prohibited surgical processes to create hermaphroditic humans, guns that lobotomize instead of kill, underground warrens… it made me imagine a long slide into a scenario like THX-1138, a road to a technocratic Hell paved with anxieties over blurred binaries and a warped understanding of what makes a person more than just a basally functioning body.Not that I think the protagonist’s solution is much better. Participants in a traditional rapture are volunteers and believers, not innocents –or resisters!– press-ganged into enlightenment. I think that was the point though, making both approaches polar opposites and equally untenable, requiring the player/reader to bring them into balance.

- Jayle Enn

November 27, 2014 at 6:49 pm

Whoops. Thought b was a line break for some reason. This sorry brain of mine…

- Jimmy Maher

November 28, 2014 at 11:29 am

I fixed it for you so people would be better able to read your very insightful comment. Hope that’s okay…

- John G

November 27, 2014 at 7:42 pm

Secret influence on Portal: Blue Oyster Cult’s song “Veteran of the Psychic Wars.” Peter Devore, in Portal, meets an actual veteran of the psychic wars whose trauma recalls that of the dude from the song.

- ZUrlocker

November 27, 2014 at 11:39 pm

I’ve always been curious about this game and I backed his 2012 Kickstarter project to do a “2.0” reboot. Alas, the fundraising fell far short of the half million goal that was set.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/subgames/rob-swigarts-portal-1986-reborn-v20

- Scott

November 27, 2014 at 11:46 pm

Nice article, sounds like a really ambitious game. It’s such a shame to read about all these great, ambitious and optimistic artists of the time and what they had to cut to fit into the micros. Imagine if they had the power we currently have at our fingertips without the overarching corporate control that the videogame industry currently suffers under.

Is this a typo? 1st paragraph: “just by shuffling about chucks of static narrative”

And another, 14th paragraph: “the existential emptiness at the heart the love affair with our gadgets”

- Jimmy Maher

November 28, 2014 at 12:01 am

Fixed ’em. Thanks!

- Keith Palmer

November 28, 2014 at 1:37 am

As the narrative here gets into “the end of text-based computer games,” I have been thinking a bit about having been sure there was at least a bit of publicity about “hypertext works” in the latter half of the 1980s. The comment “their efforts would be centered in the academy rather than the marketplace” does seem pretty much the explanation I need.

As for Neuromancer, I’ll just say that when I re-read the novel in the late 1990s for an elective course at university, I was struck by how a good part of the story takes place in an honest-to-goodness “space colony”; I wound up writing an essay proposing the book might be a bit more of “an ambiguous dystopia” than all the dark comments about the “inward-turning cyberpunk” that followed it had me thinking beforehand.

- Ronixis

November 28, 2014 at 2:00 am

When I read this, I found that the description reminds me quite a bit of the recent Analogue: A Hate Story. (Which is very good and I would recommend it.)

- matt w

November 28, 2014 at 1:27 pm

Consensus! (I was still typing my comment when yours posted, I guess.)

- Dehumanizer

November 28, 2014 at 6:54 pm

Crap, I was also going to comment the same thing this morning, but didn’t, and now two people did it first. :)

Analogue and its sequel, Hate Plus, are (IMO) great, and this game (which I’ll be sure to try) sounds a lot like it.

One question: Jimmy suggests (and provides) the C64 version, but wouldn’t newcomers be better served with the Amiga one? Mostly for better load times and a more readable font, I’d guess (haven’t tried either, I’m at work)… though on the other hand, nostalgia is always nice. :)

- Jimmy Maher

November 29, 2014 at 10:33 am

I went with the C64 version because I wanted to make it as easy as possible for folks to play Portal. A C64 emulator like VICE is just a one-step free download, whereas getting an Amiga emulator working requires paying for Amiga Forever or spending lots of time futzing about looking for Kickstart ROMs on the less legitimate parts of the Internet. At some point when I get into the Amiga in earnest I’ll offer some tips on getting an emulator going, but for now I just went with the C64 version.

Also, the C64 version was the first release of Portal, which I do mark as another point in its favor…

- Dehumanizer

December 2, 2014 at 8:51 am

Thanks for the reply. Hmm, Wikipedia claims that the Amiga version was the original one, but they’re probably wrong — I trust your research. :)

- matt w

November 28, 2014 at 2:07 am

Wow, this sounds very much like Analogue: A Hate Story. (In which you trawl through databases with the help of a couple of AIs that gradually unlock new information for you.) I wonder if it was an influence.

- Andrew Plotkin

November 28, 2014 at 4:28 pm

Portal! Oh, I loved this game when it originally came out. Or I loved the idea of it. I would have said even then that the story was sort of a random wander through a future landscape. (In retrospect, “here is a map and we will travel across it” is one of the cliche fantasy tropes that Portal adopts.)

But the high concept and the setup. The empty cities, the ruined computer network. (You didn’t mention how the clunky keyboard-and-joystick interface is diegetically explained as an *emergency fallback feature* of a wrecked holographic/neural-jack terminal.) Exploring the history of the world by scavenging databases for fragments as a repurposed entertainment AI puts them together. Oh man. It’s gold.

Zurlocker has already mentioned the failed Kickstarter effort. I too have done a prototype of a reboot (for iPad, back when I was first exploring the idea of indie iPad projects). I wound up deciding that I’d rather work on my own stuff — and, obviously, I had my own Kickstarter to complete — but I’ve never forgotten about the idea.

- Jimmy Maher

November 29, 2014 at 10:37 am

I couldn’t get too excited about the Kickstarter because it seemed they wanted to turn it into a graphic adventure. I’d be much more interested in a project that keeps Portal as an (electronic) literary experience…

- Jason Dyer

November 30, 2014 at 4:54 pm

There were actually two Kickstarters; the first was looking for $900,000 (which given the pitch was super-optimistic) and they tried again for $530,000.

Rob Swigart would need some more name recognition for those numbers to fly, plus, many of the fans (as you indicate) weren’t really interested in a graphical-adventure type remake.

- Bernie Paul

November 30, 2014 at 1:53 pm

Although I agree with Jimmy and others who have posted replies here about portal’s shortcomings, for me this is not the cause for its lack of success. Sorry if i’m mistaken, but it seems like a point is being made about Portal’s “sin” of not managing to convince a mainstream audience.
Well, as someone who was 10 or 11 at the time, I must tell you that I whenever I saw Portal in catalogs and magazines, it seemed intimidating, too seriuos, “adult stuff”. Probably it seemed that way to adults too.
Portal is as perfect as it could be for its time. The problem is that mainstream culture was not as developed as Activision 2.0 hoped. It still isn’t : just consider the huge sucess titles like “GTA” or “Halo” have enjoyed. It’s not because EA’s or Activision’s “corporate control” : Jimmy has done an outstanding job of teaching us about Trip Hawkings’ “Electronic Artists” and Activision 2.0. They tried to educate the cosumer’s tastes and failed, so they became cynical and populistic.

- Bernie Paul

November 30, 2014 at 5:05 pm

One other thing …. C64 vs. Amiga vs. Apple II Versions

The comment about the Amiga version and Jimmy’s answer are both right on : in my experience (WinUAE, WiiUAE and the one for Symbian) Portal runs really fast but the ROMs and configuration take longer than with C64 emulators, which work right out of the box.

Besides, the Amiga version looks awful : the choice of colors and fonts is not as sophisticated as in the original version (C64) and mouse control is not a big improvement. If anybody needs an alternative to the original C64 release, I would recommend the Apple II version : it adheres more closely to the original look and feel and there are many hassle-free emulators available (even a web-browser applet offers Portal among its playable titles).

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- Peter Piers

December 21, 2015 at 5:28 pm

What I find really striking here is the quality of the prose you quote. It may not be Nobel-prize material, but reaching those quotes actually interrupted my reading flow because I found them so interesting. I’ll get around to this game sometime, and I’m savouring the antecipation. I enjoy games that, like the first part of Amnesia, take their writing seriously without being pretentious. And if I may say so, Jimmy, some of it’s rubbed off on you, you positively wax lyrical about the food for thought it gave you! Real passion all around. I love it

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- vaz

July 9, 2016 at 8:56 pm

Great article about that game! I’m sure mr Swigart would appreciate reading it. But then again, you probably exchanged emails with him while researching all of it.

Another way of plying this game without the need of installing/downloading anything is by also using the Internet Archive website:

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Portal_1986

or

https://archive.org/stream/msdos_Portal_1986/Portal_1986.zip?module=dosbox&scale=2

Bookware’s Sunset
December 4, 2014

(I was never happy with this article in its original form, so I’ve added coverage of The Scoop to that of Breakers and moved it to here in the blog’s chronology, where I feel it makes a better fit. Don’t worry, Nate, I’ve preserved your comments. Patreon subscribers: you of course won’t be charged for this one.)

As we push now into 1986 in this blog’s chronology, we’re moving into an era of retrenchment but also of relative stability, as the battered survivors of the home-computer boom and bust come to realize that, if they’re unlikely (at least in the short term) to revolutionize mainstream art and entertainment in the way they had expected, home computers and the games a relatively small proportion of the population enjoy playing on them are also not going to go away. A modest but profitable computer-games industry still remained following the exit of the pundits, would-be visionaries, and venture capitalists, one that would neither grow nor shrink notably for the rest of the decade. No longer fixated on changing the world, developers — even the would-be rock stars at Electronic Arts — just focused on making fun games again for a core audience that loved Dungeons and Dragons, Star Wars and Star Trek, and ships and airplanes with lots of guns on them. While publishers would continue to take a chance on more outré titles than you might expect, much that didn’t fit with this core demographic that stuck with gaming after the hype died began now to get discarded.

Amongst the victims of this more conservative approach were bookware and the associated dreams for a new era of interactive popular fiction. Bookware had, to say the least, failed to live up to the hype; the number of commercially successful bookware titles from companies not named Infocom could be counted on one hand and likely still leave plenty of fingers free. Small wonder, as the games themselves were, if often audacious and interesting in conception, usually deeply flawed in execution, done in by a poor grasp of design fundamentals, poor parsers and game engines, rushed development, and an associated tendency to undervalue the importance of playtesting and polishing for any interactive work. One could say with no hyperbole whatsoever that Infocom was the only company of the 1980s that knew how to consistently put out playable, enjoyable, fair text adventures — meaning I’ve spent a great deal of time and energy in the years I’ve been writing this blog merely confirming this conventional wisdom, but so be it.

Thus bookware faded quietly away, done in both by gamers who were not terribly invested in games as literature and its own consistently inconsistent  quality control. Whether better works could have brought the former around, or found a new audience entirely, remains a somewhat open question. But as it was, one by one the bookware lines came to an end. Bantam’s Living Literature line stopped after just two titles; the Mindscape/Angelsoft line made it all the way to eight; other publishers like Activision, Epyx, and Electronic Arts abandoned the genre after one or two experiments failed to bear commercial fruit. And the most notable of all the bookware lines and certainly the ones we’ve spent the most time with, the Brøderbund/Synapse Electronic Novels and the Telarium games, were also not long for this world.

Breakers, written by a friend of the Synapse boys named Rod Smith, was the fourth and last of the Electronic Novels to be released. It’s also the largest, most complex, and most difficult — albeit mostly not in a good way. Breakers places you aboard a ramshackle space station in orbit around a planet called, I kid you not, Borg, proof that there’s a limited supply of foreboding names in the universe. It’s somewhat unusual as both science fiction and interactive fiction in being told from the point of view of an alien who’s not just your typical Star Trek-style human with different skin pigmentation or unusually formed ears. The Lau, the race to which you belong, are residents of Borg whose culture is mystical rather than technological, who communicate via telepathy. They’re now being punished for their disinterest in warfare by being rounded up and sold off as exotic slaves to customers all over the galaxy by many of the unsavory characters who inhabit the station. Meanwhile a cosmic apocalypse is in the offing which only the Lau can prevent by assembling four elements and performing a ritual. By happenstance, you’ve ended up loose on the station. You must assemble the elements to save your race and avert the catastrophe; even a text adventure that fancies itself an electronic novel often winds up a treasure hunt.

That said, the Electronic Novels seldom lacked for literary ambition, and Breakers is no exception. Smith does a pretty good job of showing the crazy cast-offs, pirates, and rogues — some with the proverbial hearts of gold, most responding to overtures only with laser blasts — from the standpoint of an apparently asexual and very alien alien. If not quite up to the standard of Lynnea Glasser’s recent, lovely interactive fiction Coloratura, it is interesting to view Breakers‘s stock-science-fiction tropes from this other, exotic point of view. The opening scene in a seedy bar filled with thumping music and humans and aliens of every description is unexpectedly compelling when viewed from the perspective of this protagonist despite being thoroughly derivative of a certain 1977 blockbuster.

All sorts of issues of technology and fundamental design, however, cut against the prospect of enjoying this world. The opening section of the game, inside that seedy bar, is so baffling that a magazine like Questbusters, one of the few with enough remaining interest in the Electronic Novel line to write about Breakers at all, dispensed with any semblance of graduated hints and just printed a walkthrough of the opening sequence — one that, tellingly, appears to rely on a bug, or at least a complete plotting non sequitur, to see it through. Smith had wanted to make Breakers rely heavily upon character interaction, a noble if daunting goal. In practice and in light of the problematic Synapse parser, however, that just leads to a series of impossible dialog puzzles that require you to say the exact right sequence of things to get anywhere. While the plot is unusually intricate, it’s essentially — if as-advertised in light of the “Electronic Novel” label — a novel’s plot, a series of linear hoops that require you to just slavishly recreate a series of dramatic beats, even when doing so requires that you deliberately get yourself captured and beat up. But, unlike in most linear games, you never know what the game expects next from you, leading to an infuriating exercise not so much in saving Borg as in figuring out what Smith wants to have happen next and how you can force it to take place.

Breakers was released by Brøderbund in a much smaller, much less lavish package than its predecessor, complete with cheesy art that looked cut out of an Ed Wood production. The Synapse name, which studio Brøderbund was now is in the process of winding down as an altogether disappointing acquisition, is entirely absent from the package, as is even the old “Electronic Novel” franchise name, although it remains all over the manual from which it would presumably have been harder to excise. The game is now just a “text adventure” again, a circle closed in ironic and very telling fashion.

So, Breakers would mark the end of the line for this interesting but frustrating collection. Reports from former Synapse insiders have it that a fifth Electronic Novel, a samurai adventure called Ronin, was effectively complete by the end of 1986. But it was never released. Two more with the intriguing titles of Deadly Summer and House of Changes also had at least some work done on them before Brøderbund pulled the plug on the whole affair. My inner idealist wishes he’d had a chance to play these games; my inner cynic knows they’d likely have been undone by the same litany of flaws that make all of the released Electronic Novels after Mindwheel disappointing to one degree or another.

The only extant image I know of The Scoop in its original Telarium incarnation.

The final game in Spinnaker’s Telarium line, The Scoop, stands along with Shadowkeep as one of the two oddballs of that bunch. Its choice of source material alone is a rather strange one. As you can see from the box image above, Telarium did their best to portray The Scoop as a product of Agatha Christie. However, the original The Scoop isn’t actually an Agatha Christie novel. It’s rather an artifact of the Detection Club, a sort of casual social club of cozy mystery writers that still persists to this day. Six writers — Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, E.C. Bentley, Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Croft, and Clemence Dane — passed the manuscript in progress among themselves by post. It came to each twice, whereupon he or she added a chapter to the unfolding story and sent it on to another. Later each read their chapters live on BBC Radio, the organization that had commissioned the whole project in the first place. The installments also appeared in the BBC’s magazine, The Listener, before being eventually published in book form. Interesting as it is as an early experiment in collaborative narrative, the final product reads pretty much exactly like the patchwork creation it is, with a plot that zigs and zags in wildly divergent directions according to each writer’s whim. It’s remained only sporadically in print since its original publication in 1931, a curious piece of ephemera for hardcore Christie fans and aficionados of golden-age mystery.

The game engine of Telarium’s version The Scoop makes it stand out from its peers as much as its unusually obscure literary inspiration. Like Shadowkeep, The Scoop was developed by an outside developer rather than in-house, and thus doesn’t use the SAL engine that powers most of the other games. Said developer was Dale Disharoon, Inc., a tiny collective founded by the eponymous former grade-school teacher in 1983 to produce more polished versions of the educational software he had started writing for his class a couple of years earlier. Disharoon enjoyed a close relationship with Spinnaker for quite some time, one that led most notably to the gentle adventures Below the Root (1984) and Alice in Wonderland (1985). Both were largely designed and programmed by Disharoon himself and published through Windham Classics, Spinnaker’s other bookware label for children’s literature adaptations targeting a slightly younger age group than the Telarium games. Thus it must have seemed a good idea to give him a crack at making The Scoop using a superficially similar engine to the one behind Below the Root and Alice, which replaced the SAL parser with a menu-driven command system. Busy with other projects, Disharoon turned The Scoop over to writer and designer Jonathan Merritt, programmer Vince Mills, and artist Bill Groetzinger. To give them extra space to play, Spinnaker agreed to leave behind the lucrative Commodore 64 platform and release The Scoop only for machines with at least 128 K.

Alas, though, the idea sounded a lot better than it would end up playing. The mid-1980s were an era marked by widespread interface experimentation in adventure-game design, as developers tried to figure out what the logical successor to the parser should be. To its credit, The Scoop doesn’t really feel, as do many of its contemporary peers, like a traditional text adventure with a menu system grafted on. It actually sports a pretty good interface, with a reasonable selection of verbs always easily accessible at the tap of a space bar. Unfortunately, the game to which it’s grafted is just kind of baffling, and not in a good way. This is one of only two Telarium games that settles for simply recreating its source material’s plot, rather than finding some way to do an end run around the problem of player advance knowledge like most of its peers. Perhaps the developers figured its source material was obscure enough that few players would be familiar with it anyway. And indeed, in the end it doesn’t much matter; I dutifully read the novel to prepare myself for the game, and I still didn’t get much of anywhere with the latter. For one thing, the rather thin plot of the novel has been greatly expanded, with lots new characters and evidence and several new sub-plots, although the big picture at the end is the same. But that wasn’t the real source of my frustrations.

You see, an expanded plot would have been welcome if the game was actually fun, but it really isn’t. This is one of those mystery games that hinges on timing. A cast of literally dozens wanders all over an expansive map of London and nearby environs over the five days or so that the game gives you to solve it. You have to dog each and every one of them relentlessly, eavesdropping on conversations and searching every locale as soon as they leave it, to get anywhere. Once you’ve collected all the individual jigsaw pieces, you can presumably restart one last time and unspool “The Mystery of the Mindreading Detective.” I don’t mind this sort of thing in some other games, but here’s there’s some secret sauce missing. All of the waiting around and the fiddly searching is just tedious, the writing flat and the characters bland. And the feedback loop is badly untethered at one end. You never really know where you stand with the game, never know if it knows you know what you think you know — a problem that’s admittedly all too common in ludic mysteries. Nor is it clear what you’re supposed to do to tell the game about it once you think you’ve solved the case. With little idea of whether what I was doing and learning meant anything or not, with the constant well-justified paranoia that I was missing something important somewhere else, I spent my time in The Scoop in a discombobulated haze. Finally I just gave up.

Which as it happens is exactly what Spinnaker was doing with the Telarium line in 1986. By that year the company was in serious trouble, having bet big like so many others on a home-computer revolution that never quite arrived and lost badly. Spinnaker had had a negative bank balance for the last two years, and one of its co-founders, Bill Bowman, had already bailed, leaving C. David Seuss struggling to make payroll by exercising stock options. The company was, as Seuss puts it, “flat broke.” Then, looking around the market, Seuss spotted what he calls a “point of discontinuity”: a new generation of IBM PC clones like the Tandy 1000 that were for the first time packaged and priced to be attractive to buyers outside corporate America. With little else going for Spinnaker, Seuss elected to “bet the company” on that emerging market. Managing to pull together some capital by calling on Harvard University connections, he applied Spinnaker’s remaining staff to creating a new line of home-office and small-business productivity software. Spinnaker 2.0 would be, like Activision 2.0, a shadow of its old self for some time, but sales would eventually rebound from a low of $8 million in 1987 to $65 million in 1994, the year Seuss sold the company to The Learning Company.

The Telarium and Windham Classics lines were among the inevitable casualties of Seuss’s new strategy. They were quietly cancelled, the remaining stock sold off at fire-sale prices. The Scoop was already complete, with packaging created and promotion efforts already begun, when the fateful decision came down. It was thus never actually released… until, that is, 1989, when a somewhat rejuvenated Spinnaker decided to give it a go after all under their own imprint for the Apple II and MS-DOS (a Commodore 128 version that had been announced back in 1986 never did arrive). A less than spectacular game now three years behind the times in the graphics and interface departments, The Scoop attracted little notice and quickly fell out of print again, the last gasp of this line of often botched but frequently fascinating games. Ah, well… the anticlimax that was The Scoop‘s belated release does at least let us reassure ourselves that it wasn’t a cancelled masterpiece. We don’t know for sure, on the other hand, what would have come from other ongoing or proposed Telarium projects based on novels by Robert A. Heinlein, Philip Jose Farmer, and Harry Harrison — although, as with the Synapse games, it seems unrealistic to imagine that they wouldn’t have suffered from Telarium’s usual litany of problems.

The fate of completed titles like The Scoop and Ronin, which their publishers judged not capable of recouping the additional expense of actually releasing them, tell you just about you all need to know about the commercial state of bookware by 1986. And it only takes a good look at Breakers and The Scoop to understand much about the fundamental issues of design and technology that plagued the vast majority of the bookware releases. They serve as good examples of a format that went out much like it came in, full of big notions but also a bit half-baked. In the interest of history if nothing else, feel free to download The Scoop and Breakers and give them a try. The former is in the Apple II version; the latter in the MS-DOS version, and includes a DOSBox configuration that should work very well.

(My thanks go to C. David Seuss for sharing memories and documents relating to Spinnaker’s history. Dale Desharone, né Dale Disharoon, died in 2008. He was interviewed by Hardcore Gaming 101 shortly before his passing. A much older profile can be found in the November 1983 Compute!’s Gazette.)

Comments
11 Responses

- Nate

September 25, 2014 at 10:37 am

Aw, man, Breakers! One of my very favourites. I remember the print ads, and perhaps a review. I played it for the first time a couple years ago (with a walkthrough) and despite the uncued puzzles, there was something very… enthusiastically visionary, in a good way, about it. A sense of a novel-worthy story, told for the love of it, and not just a game. And the space station design was very good, if the backstory was far too vague and took far too long to be explained.

Not sure how much speculation is spoilers, but midway through the game there’s a plot twist that made me question some fundamental assumptions I had about the player-character. But even after finishing, I had no idea whether the conclusion I jumped to was correct or not. Which I thought was a great pity; the twist, if it was a twist, was awesome and should have been frontlined in the story, yet it didn’t seem to affect anything in the endgame.

I didn’t realise that Breakers was originally one of the Electronic Novels with Mindwheel! I’d always felt it was a strange, lonely little original with no history, and that made it even more mysterious. Now I understand what happened.

- Nate

September 25, 2014 at 11:14 am

… huh, I guess the version I played didn’t come with the manual. Well that explains why I had even less idea what was going on than I should have.

- Jimmy Maher

September 25, 2014 at 12:39 pm

Ironically for someone who’s all about context, I always love anecdotes like yours about coming to a game cold, maybe as just a file name in a disk-image archive, and finding an experience made all the more strange and alluring by the lack of all this ponderous history. (If I was feeling more pretentious, I might indulge in a Nietzsche quote here.)

See for instance Leigh Alexander’s lovely Let’s Play of The Crimson Crown, http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/08/06/lo-fi-lets-play-crimson-crown-transylvania-ii/, which could hardly be more different from my own recent article on the game. She’s actually playing an unreleased beta that was somehow sneaked out of Penguin, doesn’t know it — and that’s fine.

- TsuDhoNimh

December 4, 2014 at 6:40 pm

There’s a repeated word in this phrase:
never know if it knows knows you know what you think you know

- Jimmy Maher

December 4, 2014 at 8:40 pm

As if that sentence wasn’t confusing enough… :)

Thanks!

- Victor Gijsbers

December 4, 2014 at 11:06 pm

Where you write telekinesis, perhaps you mean telepathy?

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2014 at 6:46 am

Nobody caught that the first time around…

Thanks!

- Ronixis

December 5, 2014 at 9:59 pm

Your first instance of Activision’s name reads ‘Activison’. There’s also some alternation between ‘Seuss’ and ‘Suess’.

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2014 at 10:13 pm

Thanks!

- Martin

July 19, 2016 at 1:26 am

The title under the Agatha Christie picture has a double “of”.

- Jimmy Maher

July 19, 2016 at 8:13 am

Thanks!

Accolade, Artech, and Killed Until Dead
December 4, 2014

At the end of 1984 Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead, two of the members of Atari’s Fantastic Four who had founded Activision along with Jim Levy, split away from the latter company to form yet another, Accolade. I must admit that their publicly stated reasons for doing so strike me as a bit difficult to understand. In a fairly recent article in Retro Gamer magazine, the two say that Activision was “too entrenched in its console roots” for their tastes, an odd claim to make considering that Activision 2.0 had just had a huge hit on computers with Ghostbusters and that virtually all new development was focused in that direction. In another interview, Miller states he was “puzzled why Activision couldn’t make a profit,” which may point to concerns with Levy’s management. Or the whole thing may have come down to personal conflicts that everyone is too diplomatic to discuss. Regardless, Miller and Whitehead made the bold decision to start their own company at a seemingly terrible time, just as established publisher after established publisher was dying. With no one in the financial sector willing to touch home-computer software with the proverbial ten-foot pole, they financed the venture entirely by themselves, drawing on their savings from the glory days of Activision 1.0, when the games they had created for the Atari VCS had sold in the hundreds of thousands or millions, with royalty checks to match. With Larry Kaplan having been lured back to Atari in 1982, their departure left only David Crane and Jim Levy at Activision from among the founders. In two or three more years they too would be gone.

Tellingly, Miller and Whitehead’s first creative hire was not a programmer or designer but rather Mimi Doggett, a talented graphic artist who had spent more than four years with Atari. She would help Accolade walk a fine line between innovation and commercial appeal with markedly more success than Activision 2.0 would manage over the next several years. Accolade excelled at finding subject matter that was unexplored or done only badly by other games, but which nevertheless had plenty of potential mass appeal; they had none of Activision 2.0’s more avant-garde tendencies. They implemented gameplay around their fictional conceits that was always fast-paced, accessible, and not too time consuming if you didn’t want it to be, but that also always allowed for at least a modicum of depth — Trip Hawkins’s old formulation of “simple, hot, and deep” writ larger than Electronic Arts themselves often managed. Miller:

Games should be worn by the user without feeling like they’re wearing them. They should be intuitively obvious to use, and as transparent as possible to the user. The user should feel that they’re in an experience.

The cherry on top was graphics that were often technically spectacular, especially on Accolade’s bread-and-butter platform the Commodore 64 (this despite Accolade being located almost next door to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino), but which also sported an unusually refined aesthetic sensibility thanks to Doggett. The same sensibility extended to the packaging, which would be shortlisted for a Clio Award in 1987. Accolade’s early output evinces none of the fit-and-finish problems that so often plagued Activision 2.0, being uniformly polished to a mirror shine. They were rewarded with a stellar reputation among Commodore owners in particular; a new Accolade game was guaranteed to sell — and, of course, to be widely pirated — based simply on the name on the box.

Law of the West

Accolade’s two 1985 launch titles, one designed and programmed by each of the founders with the invaluable assistance of Doggett, were already fine examples of the approach that would come to define the company. Miller’s Law of the West was a cowboy western, a genre that, while amply explored in arcade games like Gun Fight and Boot Hill, was much less common in computer games. As a new sheriff in town, you wander the streets talking with the citizens and solving problems, sometimes just with conversation, sometimes with your trusty six-shooter. The additional layer of strategy and narrative texture afforded by the conversations would prove to be typical of Accolade games to come, which were almost never just simple action games. Whitehead’s Hardball, meanwhile, was a wonderfully attractive and playable action-oriented baseball game, a sport which had previously been explored only badly or through dry statistics-based simulations like SSI’s Computer Baseball.

Hardball

As soon as Accolade established themselves with Law of the West and Hardball, both of which became big hits and made the company profitable in rather astonishingly short order, they began seeking outside developers with a similar sensibility whose work they could publish to supplement their in-house games. One of the first and most long-lived of these relationships would be the one with the tiny Ottawa-based house Artech.

Founded in 1981 by Rick Banks and Paul Butler, Artech already had a considerable resume to their credit before partnering with Accolade. The company had been born as a developer of games for the NABU Network, an early effort to deliver computer content through Ottawa’s cable-television lines that’s been billed — sometimes slightly overbilled in my opinion, but that’s as may be — as “the Internet, ten years ahead of its time.” Artech’s secret weapon, acquired soon after the deal with NABU, was Michael Bate, a colorful self-proclaimed “ideas man” with a degree in music who had already worked as a journalist, a radio producer, a pedal-steel player in a country band, and a railroad brakeman. He personally designed most of the NABU games, which were then programmed largely by Banks and Butler.

One of Artech’s most popular games for NABU featured B.C., the lead character of the long-running newspaper comic strip of the same name. Artech’s work for NABU got them noticed by Sydney Development Corporation, a Vancouver-based company with fingers in lots of computer-industry pies, from project management to retail stores, that now dreamed of becoming Canada’s first major home-computer software developer. Sydney scooped Artech up to become their “Video Games/Educational Software Division” in the spring of 1983.  The first game the team made for Sydney once again featured B.C. Published by Sierra for most viable home computers of the era as well as the ColecoVision console, B.C.’s Quest for Tires became a big hit not only in Canada but also in the United States and Europe. (Our old friend Chuck Benton of Softporn fame would do some of the ports.)

B.C.’s Quest for Tires

Within a year or two Bate would declare he wasn’t “overly proud” of B.C.’s Quest for Tires, produced as it was quickly under the stipulations of a licensing agreement. Luckily, the parent company in Vancouver largely stepped back after that and gave the little group in Ottawa remarkable freedom to make whatever games they wanted to make. Sydney’s management had enough problems of their own, finding themselves caught in an economic downward spiral as the home-computer industry crashed and reams of overambitious plans fell through. This left the games division as the only division of the company actually making money. By 1987 the group that had once been Artech would become Artech once more, managing to extricate themselves from the grip of their dying parent and become an independent company once again; this second Artech incarnation would last until 2011.

Ace of Aces, Artech and Accolade’s biggest Commodore 64 hit of all

Meanwhile, and under whatever name, there were games to be made. The once and future Artech really came into their own with a pair of World War II air-combat games, Dam Busters (1985) and Ace of Aces (1986), that were amongst the first outside productions to be published by Accolade. They fit perfectly with the general Accolade aesthetic, being very accessible and audiovisually impressive games that recreated unusual crannies of every gamer’s favorite war that set them a little apart. Dam Busters put the player in charge not of the typical B-17 but rather of an RAF Lancaster night bomber trying to destroy a German dam using one of Barnes Wallis’s “bouncing bombs.” Ace of Aces, meanwhile, put her behind the controls not of the usual P-51 or P-38 but of a Mosquito fighter-bomber. Uninterested in the technical minutiae of flight and military hardware that enthralled companies like subLOGIC and MicroProse, Bate nevertheless did extensive research to create “aesthetic simulations of historical events,” what he called “docu-games” that tried to capture the spirit of their subjects, like a good movie; Dam Busters was in fact directly inspired by the 1955 classic of the same name. Artech and Accolade were amply rewarded for their efforts: Ace of Aces alone sold over 500,000 copies between North America and Europe during its commercial lifetime. Given numbers like that, later efforts from Artech like Apollo 18 and The Train, both released in 1987, understandably continued in largely the same vein. The latter, a crazy chase across Nazi-occupied France, is in the reckoning of many Artech’s 8-bit masterpiece. It really does play like a great old-school war flick — appropriately so, since it was loosely based on a 1964 Burt Lancaster vehicle.

If The Train is Artech’s predictable masterpiece, the ultimate expression of their established approach, 1986’s Killed Until Dead, whose design is credited jointly to Michael Bate and Rick Banks, is their wonderfully unique outlier. It’s very unusual indeed as both an Accolade and an Artech production in that it has no action elements at all. While, as Paul Butler once joked, Artech’s usual target demographic was “teenage boys, ages 12 to 45,” Killed Until Dead feels pointed in a different direction. The 21 snack-sized mysteries it offers all take place at a meeting of the Murder Club, a stand-in for the Detection Club that created The Scoop. Its five members are each (fictional) established mystery writers, modeled on various famous figures in the fictional and nonfictional history of murder: Mike Stammer (Mickey Spillane’s detective Mike Hammer), Agatha Maypole (a hybrid of Agatha Christie and her sleuth Miss Marple), Lord Peter Flimsey (Dorothy L Sayers’s detective Lord Peter Wimsey), Sydney Meanstreet (a hybrid of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and actor Sydney Greenstreet, who played him on the radio), and Claudia von Bulow (a feminine version of accused murderer Claus von Bülow). Your own detective is Hercule Holmes, a name whose antecedents I trust need no explanation.

There’s room for some satire of the industry’s then-recent tribulations.

To add an interesting twist to the usual proceedings, you aren’t trying to solve a murder here but rather to prevent one Murder Club member from killing another; who the potential killer and victim will be will of course vary from episode to episode. The deeply creepy means you use to accomplish this is a spying setup to die for. You’ve not only bugged the writers’ rooms as well as other areas of the mansion at which they’re staying for both video and audio, but you’ve also got a master key that lets you get into their rooms when they’re out. The twelve hours of game time you have to solve each mystery takes about thirty minutes of real time; once you start a mystery, the clock is always ticking. As you quickly discover after settling in with your first mystery or two, each episode follows a fairly predictable pattern. First you break into all of the suspects’ rooms to see what they’re up to. This should reveal some information about various planned liasons, which you’ll want to view live and/or record; in the later, more difficult mysteries in particular, there will often be two meetings taking place at the same time, making your ability to record one while you view another essential. Next you’ll want to call some or all of the suspects on the telephone to see what you can shake loose; they’ll also call you from time to time to further their own agendas, whether by offering useful tips or trying to put you off the scent (such misleading information can be as useful as any other if you can read between the lines). Finally, with all of the information you’ve compiled from all of the above, plus each suspect’s background dossier, you should be able to deduce murderer, victim, weapon, and motive and stop the crime by calling the murderer up and accusing her before the clock strikes midnight and she does the deed — and does you in for good measure (you can’t really blame her for that considering the spying you’ve been up to).

The NSA can only dream of a setup like this one. And if you don’t get the reference to “Wild Bill,” well, keep reading this blog. We’ll get there soon enough.

Killed Until Dead is steeped in the heritage of mystery, murder, and cozy mayhem, the whole game an extended, meta-textual love letter to its genre that crime-fiction aficionados will sink into like a warm blanket. Its most controversial design choice then and now is the mechanism for forcing your way into each suspect’s room: you have to answer a multiple-choice trivia question about the gloriously macabre history of murder on page, screen, and sometimes even real life. Certainly such a requiring of outside knowledge is a questionable choice by most modern standards of design. For all that, though, I wouldn’t want to lose the questions; they just give this loving homage of a game that much more opportunity to spread the love. Nowadays if you don’t know the name of Sam Spade’s partner (Miles Archer) or what Hitchcock used to fake the blood in Psycho‘s shower scene (it was chocolate syrup; luckily he was shooting in black and white), well, that sort of thing is only a Google search away. (Admittedly, the rabbit holes your searches lead you down may end up consuming more time than the cases themselves.) Or just make your best guess, and come back again in thirty minutes (game time) if you’re wrong; there’s enough time to spare that you’ll probably be okay.

The unforgettable Agatha Maypole

Indeed, none of the cases, not even those of “Super Sleuth” level, are really all that difficult. When Dorte and I played we failed to solve one or two early on when we were just getting the hang of things, but once we understood the pattern of play we solved every case with relative ease. And on the whole I think that’s fine; I believe it’s far, far better for a game like this one to be too easy than too hard. There are obvious similarities here to other short-form mystery games that use the same setting, cast of characters, and props over and over again in the service of different cases, like Murder on the Zinderneuf or for that matter Cluedo. But what separates Killed Until Dead from the likes of “Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick” is Artech’s decision not to try to randomly generate the individual permutations. Each case is carefully, lovingly, handcrafted, with gobs of wit and charm; Dorte liked Miss Maypole so much that she’d just start giggling every time the fussy old bat would enter the picture. The best decision Artech made for Killed Until Dead was the one to spend lots of time designing the 21 bespoke cases rather than wrestling with a random case generator that would almost inevitably disappoint. The disadvantage of their approach is of course that it makes Killed Until Dead a very finite experience; once you’ve played the 21 cases there’s nothing else to be done. This was a bigger concern in 1986, when games were expensive, and, especially for many younger players without the financial wherewithal to buy them very often, needed to last a long, long time. Nowadays it’s really no concern at all. By my lights, this game has just about the perfect amount of content, ending just when the all of the potential has been pretty much wrung out of its repeating stage, actors, and props.

Killed Until Dead is a little delight of a game that I highly recommend. It offers attractive graphics and that level of refined, casual playability that had already by 1986 become such a trademark of Accolade. And it offers that little something extra, love for its chosen genre. In fact, I realize now that I’ve used some variation of the word “love” several times in describing Killed Until Dead. Love for a topic combined with a sense of fair play and a willingness to polish, polish, polish will take a game designer a long way. Feel free to download it and load it up in your favorite Commodore 64 emulator. (A tip for users of VICE: turn off “True Drive Emulation” to make the normally unbearable Commodore loading times barely noticeable.) It makes for a great way to spend a few cozy winter evenings.

(Print sources for this article include the November 1986 and October 1987, Computer Gaming World, the November 1985 Family Computing, the August 1985 Zzap!, the November 1985 Sinclair User, Retro Gamer 50, the Arcade Express dated May 8 1983, and the Ottawa Citizen from May 31 1982, August 28 1982, September 20 1983, and September 29 1983, and February 15 2007. More information on NABU can be found at IEEE Canada and York University.)

Comments
36 Responses

- Soren Johnson

December 4, 2014 at 5:38 pm

Glad to hear you liked Killed Until Dead! I played it so long ago, but I remember it being one of the few games that did murder mysteries well.

- Caleb Wilson

December 4, 2014 at 8:37 pm

I guess “Claudia von Bulow” could be a reference to Claus von Bülow — not a detective, but involved in a notorious (attempted) murder case. He’s a real person, and was portrayed by Jeremy Irons in “Reversal of Fortune”.

- Lisa H.

December 5, 2014 at 12:13 am

That’s what I assume to be the case.

- Asterisk

December 5, 2014 at 12:18 am

A minor note about screenshots: in the era of graphical games you’re now entering, most of the games you discuss will have resolutions of 320×200. This was the standard resolution of NTSC C64, Amiga, Atari ST, Apple IIgs, and CGA/EGA/VGA DOS systems. This will continue to be so through the mid-’90s, as games generally increased color depth rather than resolution as graphics hardware improved.

You may note that 320×200 has an aspect ratio of 16:10. However, the monitors that these games were displayed on were universally 4:3. Since a CRT monitor has no fixed pixel grid like an LCD, a 320×200 image displayed on a 4:3 screen would simply be stretched vertically, which would cause the individual pixels in the images to be not square, but to themselves have an aspect ratio of 5:6. The large majority of computer games from about 1985 to 1995 were written with this pixel aspect ratio in mind (though a small number were intended to be played with square pixels at a screen aspect ratio of 16:10).

So if you want to display pixel-perfect reproductions of most classic 320×200 games on a modern screen, the only way you can do it is to upscale the image to 1600×1200 without any interpolation. This will transform each pixel in the original image into a region of 5×6 pixels in the resulting image. If you want a smaller image, you can then downsample to a lower 4:3 resolution. e.g. 640×480 with interpolation; the result will still be a more authentic reproduction of the original graphics.

You can use ImageMagick on the command line or in a script to do all of this automatically:

convert source.png -filter point -resize 1600x1200! target.png

The resulting PNGs won’t be much bigger than the originals if you use an optimization tool like optipng, as the rescaled images are highly compressible.

This applies to all of the games in this post, even Killed Until Dead — the 384×247 resolution is an effect of capturing a C64 screenshot with the overscan borders included: if you crop those out, you’ll see that the actual game resolution is still 320×200.

Apologies if this comes off as too pedantic or nitpicky. This is easily the best blog around on computer-gaming history, and I figured that given the quality of the research and commentary you provide, more authentic reproductions of the graphics would be very fitting.

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2014 at 7:45 am

Not at all. That’s wonderfully helpful. I was always vaguely aware that the aspect ratio wasn’t right — and have lots of memories for that matter of fighting with non-square pixels on the C64 and Amiga back in the day. Square pixels were one of the few things that made me immediately happy when switching from the Amiga to Wintel.

I’ve followed your suggestions to modify the images in this article, and will continue to do so from now on. As for the backlog of images in older posts… that’s a task for another day.

Thanks!

- MagerValp

December 8, 2014 at 2:42 pm

Since we’re already nitpicking it’s actually not quite as simple as resizing to 4:3, since that doesn’t account for the display border. There’s also a large difference between PAL, which has almost square pixels, and NTSC, where the pixel aspect ratio is roughly 3:4. A lot of gory details can be found here: http://hitmen.c02.at/temp/palstuff/.

Another factor is the effect that PAL and NTSC encoding has on color reproduction. One of my favorite images for demonstrating the effect is Weeee! by Mermaid, though few commercial games exploited it. It does gives the image a lot of softness, especially with an RF or composite cable.

The easiest way to get decent C64 screenshots is to enable CRT emulation in VICE, make sure aspect ratio correction is on, and use the system shortcut to make snapshots (Command-Shift-4 on OS X, Alt+PrtScn on Windows).

- Lisa H.

December 5, 2014 at 12:21 am

My Canadian husband adored BC’s Quest for Tires and played it with his brother approximately 93 hours a day, to hear him tell it.

In my turn, I adored Killed Until Dead. I remember the very last mystery stumping me, but then I was only 10 or 12 years old at the time. I may very well have worn out the disk on this one. I remember my mother taking me to Accolade’s offices (since we lived close by) in person to get a replacement of some disk of one of their games. I can’t remember for certain if it was this, but it’s a fair candidate.

You don’t think Sydney Meanstreet is meant to refer to Sydney Greenstreet?

- matt w

December 5, 2014 at 2:45 am

Surely it is; but Greenstreet played Nero Wolfe on the radio (so saith Wikipedia), so it can be an indirect reference to Wolfe as well.

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2014 at 8:14 am

With the help of you folks, I think I’ve managed to get the antecedents all correct now, although if anyone spots any more references we’ve missed feel free to chime in. Thanks!

- Scott

December 5, 2014 at 12:38 am

Law of the West! I would play that game over and over as a kid, memorising routes and choices, trying to get the best ending. The animation when the sheriff pulls out his gun was pretty awesome for the time.

I didn’t play much other Accolade titles aside from the Test Drive series – Killer is Dead sounds right up my alley though, so thanks for providing it!

- Matthew

December 5, 2014 at 3:14 am

No idea if you are going to get there in a future post (this is a couple of years ahead, 1987 I believe), but:
For me, Accolade is always about Test Drive. You’d start it up, and the opening screen started with a computerized voice saying “Accolade Presents” (even under the PC speaker if I’m remembering correctly). In hindsight it was a great piece of marketing.

Test drive was a fun game also, probably one of the most fun car game’s I’ve ever played (though to this day Pit Stop II, while much more primitive and a few years in the past by this point, has a special place in my heart for it’s multi-player capabilities).

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2014 at 7:56 am

I played Test Drive a lot as well, albeit on the Amiga rather than the 64. It was made by the *other* Canadian developer that found a steady publisher in Accolade, Distinctive Software. They also made the very unique Accolade’s Comics.

I doubt Test Drive will get a feature piece, since I don’t know how much there is to really *say* about it when you get down to it beyond “fun game (for a limited time).” But I’m sure it will nevertheless come up again, maybe as part of an article that focuses more on Comics, about which there’s quite a lot to say. And I do sense some of the Test Drive DNA in later racing games like Need for Speed… hmm, maybe there is something to say about it after all. :)

- Jim Leonard

December 8, 2014 at 7:22 pm

There is a lot of history in the Test Drive series that could warrant its own article. For example, DSI re-used bits of the technology for the DOS port of SEGA’s Outrun, and were sued for it. The game itself has only vagely-disguised credits (“USI”) that betray the true developers.

- Dehumanizer

December 5, 2014 at 8:09 am

Great article, as always. :)

I read somewhere that Accolade’s name was chosen to ensure it appeared before Activision on lists in alphabetical order — just like Activision intentionally did the same to Atari. I wonder if, had anyone from Accolade started a new company, they would name themselves “Aardvark”. :)

I played all these games (except Law of the West and Hardball) on the Spectrum, at the time. Man, Killed Until Dead was a big cassette…

Typo: “Nero Wolf” should be Nero Wolfe.

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2014 at 8:17 am

Thanks!

Accolade’s name was indeed chosen for that reason. Another that they rejected was “Acclaim,” which of course comes even earlier. Sure enough, an Acclaim Entertainment popped up soon after.

- David Boddie

December 6, 2014 at 4:13 pm

Aardvark was indeed used for a software publisher whose most recognisable title also involved a caveman on a quest.

- John Elliott

December 5, 2014 at 12:25 pm

I was so fond of Killed Until Dead on the Spectrum that I hacked it to run from the floppy drive rather than cassette tape. And also did some work on the data format the mysteries are held in, though I never got round to writing an editor program to create new mysteries.

- dk

December 5, 2014 at 1:23 pm

I do remember a lot of these games from Accolade (loved Law of the West and was awestruck by Hardball’s graphics, although being German baseball was too strange of a game for me to play it), but I had never ever heard of Killed Until Dead before. I can only assume that the trivia questions (heavily U.S. aligned, I assume) prevented it from becoming popular in Germany. Sounds like a fun game, though, so I’m looking forward to trying it out.

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2014 at 1:50 pm

Actually I think Germans would probably have done okay with the questions themselves, as I believe mysteries of the Agatha Christie type are quite popular there — judging at least from my in-laws’ taste in books and television! But the game is heavily dependent on text. While language localization had started to happen a little bit by the mid-1980s, most publishers were still just promoting untranslated games with limited text in non-English-speaking countries and hoping for the best. This is actually also an unremarked hidden cause for the commercial travails text adventures began to encounter in comparison to their peers by the mid-1980s…

- Felix

December 6, 2014 at 9:37 am

On the plus side, most computer games being in English was one of the things that forced me to start learning the language back in the day. I wouldn’t be where I am but for that. It’s sad that people clamor for more and more software localization instead of learning the language everyone else is already speaking. And I don’t mean Chinese or Russians who also need to cross the writing barrier, but people from European countries, who shouldn’t even have much of a problem learning a much simpler language than their own.

- Jimmy Maher

December 7, 2014 at 4:17 pm

Well, English is not hugely complicated grammatically, but it’s a horribly inconsistent language, a veritable minefield of special cases and exceptions. I know lots of very smart non-native speakers who have been working with English for years who still struggle with when to use “something” and when “anything,” when to put an “-ing” ending on a verb and when not to, and when to change out “don’t” for “doesn’t.” So, I’m not sure I’d characterize it as “simple” to learn.

English skills are extremely important, as just about every country in the world recognizes by now. However, there’s a huge gulf between functional literacy in the sense of being able to interact on a basic level socially or at a conference or even to read a business brief and the sort of total fluency that allows one to effortlessly appreciate a novel, film, or computer game with its much more affective and nuanced language. People play computer games to relax and entertain themselves. It makes perfect sense to me that they’d want to do that in the language that feels easiest and most natural to them. I watch a film in Danish if I want to improve my language skills; I watch a film in English when I just want to relax. So, I should judge not others lest I be judged myself, as a wise man somewhere once said.

- Wade

December 5, 2014 at 10:30 pm

I never heard of Killed Until Dead until today, either. I’m Australian.

Law of the West is great. I somehow forgot it was Accolade. My friend would have me in stitches with his inappropriate gun-pulling-out. ‘Little Jimmie’ would be walking across the screen, and my friend would whip out the six shooter and yell, ‘DIE JIMMIE, DIE!’ But Little Jimmie could shoot back, and sometimes we lost.

I still have Accolade’s Comics in the EA-type packaging, but in my head I never thought, ‘Oh, this is the same Accolade that does Test Drive.’ Accolade’s branding with Test Drive was so strong, my brain just goes to Test Drive and Test Drive 2 immediately when I think of Accolade, but that’s probably also because I didn’t own a C64, though I did playi on them at friends’ houses all the time.

B.C.’s Quest… urgh, I think I got a complex from that game. It was so frustrating, but I didn’t stop until I beat it. It’s the earliest I remember punching the computer desk in anger, and I still have some kind of physical temper to this day.

The way I acquired B.C.’s Quest is odd. This was the early 80s, and there was a games sale on at Grace Bros, a big Australian chain store, now called Myers. So my dad bought me some games. One of them was the Sierraventure ‘Crossfire’ (cost about $15, I think), which I was really keen for.

When I opened Crossfire, the disk inside the box was B.C.’s Quest. I tried it and found it weird. We took it back to the shop, and the guy opened up a bunch more Crossfires, and each one had the B.C.’s Quest disk inside instead of Crossfire.

Finally he said ‘I can’t get you a Crossfire, but you can keep this other game, which would normally cost you $60.’ And so we did. And I do slightly rue that day.

I did eventually get Crossfire at a warehouse games sale, and in spite of its simplicity, it brought a lot of joy.

- LoneCleric

December 5, 2014 at 10:33 pm

As a young small-town teenager visiting Quebec City with my folks, I went to a computer store hoping to get my hands on an adventure game. I remember looking for Perry Mason, without success, and left the store with Killed Until Dead.

Even though it wasn’t exactly what I had been looking for, I absolutely loved it. I went through all the cases, and the text still proved a challenge to my grasping English. (For many years, I pronounced the title “Kyle’d until dead”. :-) )

In 2002, while looking for soft. dev. employment in Ottawa, I found out that Artech was based in town, and sent them my resume. Never heard back from them, alas.

PS: The paper is named Ottawa Citizen, like the city itself. ;-)

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2014 at 10:45 pm

Thanks!

You did pretty well. Killed Until Dead is a *much* more playable game than Perry Mason…

- Dehumanizer

December 5, 2014 at 11:32 pm

So, like I said, I played the Spectrum version of Killed Until Dead (on tape) back in the eighties, but now, inspired by this post, I went back to the game (on C64, since it looks and sounds much better), and played through the first couple of cases, and I was reminded of something that had bugged me back in the day…

(spoiler warning: if you’ve never played the game and intend to, you may want to stop reading)

I don’t know if this is changed in later cases, but at least in the first few ones, every suspect (including the future victim) always knows everything about the murder, so, after you break into everyone’s room, you can get all the crime details (except for the motive) with just a few calls. After that, monitoring and/or recording conversations is useful only for finding out the motive (which you can usually guess from the first couple of conversations) — and because they tend to be funny, of course. Still, you can solve most of the mystery just by placing less than half a dozen phone calls to *any* of the characters (with the caveats that the murderer and the victim can’t acknowledge their own roles, but can still confirm everything else).

Or does this change later in the game?

- Jimmy Maher

December 5, 2014 at 11:41 pm

I don’t recall noticing this. I’d say it doesn’t extend past the first group of cases. There are actually a few tricky cases in the later going where certain suspects will not only not have all the answers but will try to actively mislead you. And you sometimes have to not only ask the right person the right questions but also strike the right tone. So there’s a bit of psychology involved.

As I wrote in the article, this isn’t a hugely difficult game by any means, but I wouldn’t call it rote or trivial either. It strikes a really nice balance in that respect.

- John Elliott

December 6, 2014 at 9:35 pm

In the easy mysteries, every suspect knows everything. In later ones, not everybody knows, and some suspects know things that aren’t correct. For example, in “Of Pooches and Pillows”, Claudia has a motive to kill Mike, and Agatha has a motive to kill Sydney. Claudia, Peter and Mike know one set of murderer, victim and location; Agatha and Sydney know the other. But only one of the murders is the right one.

- Dehumanizer

December 7, 2014 at 10:27 pm

Thanks for the replies, both of you. I admit I never played past the first difficulty level (either in 1987 or this week) (though yesterday I played the first case of the second level, and didn’t see any real difference… yet). Now I’m more optimistic…

I confess that, due to the multi-load nature of the game, where I assumed each load was just “data” (to be interpreted by a non-changing engine), I really though the game wouldn’t add any new features (such as non-omniscient suspects) later. I’ll have to keep playing, now. :)

- Andrew

December 7, 2014 at 2:42 pm

I loved “Killed Until Dead” on the Spectrum, which it was ported to in 1987. I bought it one Saturday morning in the summer holidays and played it so hard that I’d solved all the cases by Sunday evening!
As you rightly say, they’re not really that difficult, but the pleasure lies more in the way the deduction and solution logically hang together, rather than a feeling of solving a particularly tough one. I was heavily into classic detective fiction at the time (still got quite a soft spot for it now as well), so ralso eally enjoyed the trivia questions scattered throughout the game.
One minor point for others who played it on the Spectrum – does anyone else remember one of the early cases in fact being fiendishly difficult? I think the murderer changed halfway through on that one and I kept trying to nominate the wrong person, to the point where I ended up randomly accusing people by process of elimination until I got the right one, and even then it wasn’t until I read the solution that I saw where I’d been going wrong!

- Jimmy Maher

December 7, 2014 at 4:02 pm

There was one in the middle that was unusually difficult for that reason, although I couldn’t tell you exactly which one. Dorte and I thought at the time, okay, now this is about to start getting really tricky. But then none of the other cases, even at the “Super Sleuth” level, were ever quite that gnarly again.

I believe the Spectrum version was cut down from 21 cases to something like 14 due to tape storage limitations. So you might want to try the C64 version sometime to see what you missed!

- John Elliott

December 7, 2014 at 9:34 pm

The Spectrum version has all 21 cases; it came on two cassettes, one with the main program and one with the mysteries.

When playing it on emulators, I found that the .SLT version (patched to have the emulator load the data directly) worked better for me than the .TZX version (loading from the emulated cassette).

- Andrew

December 7, 2014 at 6:32 pm

Actually, the Spectrum version did have about 20 cases, albeit you had to load them seperately from the main game, which is how they got round the memory problem. Pretty sure the game was across two tapes to facilitate this.

Agree with you on the absolute so and so of a case as I both (a) can’t remember which one it was either and (b)do remember it incongrously appeared on one of the easier skill levels!

The other memory I have of that game is that I solved it so quickly that it was the only time I was ever able to send some playing tips into “Crash”. I dutifully noted down all the solutions and sent them in, only to find in next month’s issue that, quick as I’d been, I still hadn’t quite been the first person to finish it…

Tried to play it on a Spectrum emulator a while ago but couldn’t get it to load, so will definitely give your C64 version a go. Best part is that 27 years is plenty long enough to have forgotten all the solutions…

- Dehumanizer

December 7, 2014 at 10:35 pm

Except for nostalgia purposes, I suggest you go for the C64 version. Not only does it look and sound a lot better (the faces are funnier, the silhouettes when monitoring rooms are much easier to recognize, etc.), but in the Speccy version the suspects’ individual tunes, play a lot slower and can’t be skipped, so calling multiple suspects soon becomes a chore. It’s more noticeable if you’ve just been playing the C64 version; I never complained about it back in 1987 or so.

Don’t get me wrong, the Spectrum port is perfectly fine, but the game is just more pleasant to play on the C64.

- John Elliott

December 8, 2014 at 12:08 pm

I found pressing fire while a suspect’s tune was playing would skip it.

Regarding not getting it to load, I’ll have to revise my earlier comment about the TZX versus SLT versions; the SLT version loads for me where the TZX doesn’t, but it’s buggy (some rooms don’t render and the solution screens don’t show).

- Dehumanizer

December 8, 2014 at 5:20 pm

Hmm, I’m sure I tried pressing fire. Maybe it needs to be done between sounds, as the 48K’s beeper stops the CPU, so maybe it’s not responsive all the time…

- Brandon Campbell

December 17, 2014 at 12:37 pm

Hardball was one of my favorite Commodore 64 games ever, and the only one that my dad would play with me! I also remember wanting Test Drive as a kid, but never getting a chance to play it except in emulation many years later.

Simon & Schuster’s Treks to Nowhere
December 17, 2014

In 1983 the powers that were at Gulf and Western Industries, owners of both Paramount Pictures and Simon & Schuster, decided that it was time to bring Star Trek, a property of the former, to the computer under the stewardship of the latter. To appreciate this decision and everything that would follow it, we first should step back and briefly look at what Star Trek already meant to gamers at that time.

In late 1971, just as Star Trek was enjoying the first rush of a syndicated popularity that would soon far exceed that of its years as a first-run show, Mike Mayfield was a high-school senior with a passion for computers living near Irvine, California. He’d managed to finagle access to the University of California at Irvine’s Sigma 7 minicomputer, where he occasionally had a chance to play a port of MIT’s Spacewar!, generally acknowledged as the world’s first full-fledged videogame, on one of the university’s precious few graphical terminals. Mayfield wanted to write a space warfare game of his own, but he had no chance of securing the regular graphical-terminal access he’d need to do something along the lines of Spacewar! So he decided to try something more strategic and cerebral, something that could be displayed on a text-oriented terminal. If Spacewar! foreshadowed the frenetic dogfighting action of Star Wars many years before that movie existed, his own turn-based game would be modeled on the more stately space combat of his favorite television show. With the blissful unawareness of copyright and intellectual property that marks this early era of gaming, he simply called his game Star Trek.

One of the many variants of Mike Mayfield’s classic Star Trek.

A full-on Klingon invasion is underway, the Enterprise the only Federation ship capable of stopping it. You, in the role of Captain Kirk, must try to turn back the invasion by warping from sector to sector and blowing away Klingon ships. Resource management is key. Virtually everything you do — moving within or between sectors; shooting phasers or photon torpedoes; absorbing enemy fire with your shields — consumes energy, of which you have only a limited quantity. You can repair, refuel, and restock your torpedoes at any of a number of friendly starbases scattered about the sectors, but doing so consumes precious time, of which you also have a limited quantity. If you don’t destroy all of the Klingons within thirty days they’ll break out and overrun the galaxy.

Within a year of starting on the game Mayfield moved on from the Sigma 7 to a much slicker HP-2100 series machine to which he had managed to convince the folks at his local Hewlett Packard branch to give him access. He quickly ported Star Trek to HP Time-Shared BASIC, in which form, along with so many other historically important games, it spread across the country. It was discovered by David Ahl, who would soon go on to found the immensely important magazine Creative Computing. Ahl published an expanded version of the game, Super Star Trek, in 1974 as a type-in listing in one of Creative Computing‘s earliest issues. In 1977, Byte published another version, one of the few game listings ever to appear in the pages of that normally staunchly tech-oriented magazine. In 1978, Ahl republished his Super Star Trek in his book BASIC Computer Games. This collection of old standards largely drawn from the HP Time-Shared BASIC computing culture arrived at a precipitous time, just as the first wave of pre-assembled PCs were appearing in stores and catalogs. Super Star Trek was the standout entry in BASIC Computer Games, by far the longest program listing as well as the most complex, replayable, and interesting game to be found within its pages.

On the strength of this, the first million-selling computer book in history, Star Trek spread even more widely and wildly across the little machines than it had the big. From here the history of Star Trek the computer game gets truly bewildering, with hundreds of variants on Mayfield’s basic template running on dozens of systems. Some added to the invading Klingon hordes Star Trek‘s other all-purpose villains the Romulans, complete with their trademark cloaking devices; some added graphics and/or sound; some added the personalities of Spock, McCoy, Scott, and the rest reporting developments in-character. And the variations continually one-uped one another with ever more elaborate weapon and damage modeling. In 1983 a small company who called themselves Cygnus (later renamed to Interstel) reworked and expanded the concept into a commercial game called Star Fleet I: The War Begins! to considerable success. In this version the serial numbers were to some extent filed off for obvious reasons, but Cygnus didn’t really make the most concerted of efforts to hide their game’s origins. Klingons, for instance, simply became “Krellans,” while their more creatively named allies the “Zaldrons” have, you guessed it, cloaking devices.

This, then, was the situation when Simon & Schuster secured a mandate in 1983 to get into home computers, and to bring Star Trek along for the ride. Star Trek in general was now a hugely revitalized property in comparison to the bunch of orphaned old syndicated reruns that Mayfield had known back in 1971. There were now two successful films to the franchise’s credit and a third well into production, as well as a new line of paperback novels on Simon & Schuster’s own Pocket Books imprint regularly cracking bestseller lists. There was a popular new stand-up arcade game, Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator. And there was a successful tactical board game of spaceship combat, and an even more successful full-fledged tabletop RPG. There was even a space shuttle — albeit one which would never actually fly into space — sporting the name Enterprise. And of course Star Trek was all over computers in the form of ports of Strategic Operations Simulator as well as, and more importantly, Mike Mayfield’s unlicensed namesake game and its many variants, of which Paramount was actually quite remarkably tolerant. To my knowledge no one was ever sued over one of these games, and when David Ahl had asked for permission to include Super Star Trek in BASIC Computer Games Paramount had cheerfully agreed without asking for anything other than some legal fine print at the bottom of the page. Still, it’s not hard to understand why Paramount felt it was time for an official born-on-a-home-computer Star Trek game. Even leaving aside the obvious financial incentives, both Strategic Operations Simulator and Mayfield’s Star Trek and all of its successors were in a sense very un-Star Trek sorts of Star Trek games. They offered no exploring of strange new worlds, no seeking out of new life and new civilizations. No, these were straight-up war games, exactly the scenario that Star Trek‘s television writers had had to be careful not to let the series devolve into. Those writers had often discussed the fact that if any of the Enterprise‘s occasional run-ins with the Romulans or the Klingons ever resulted in open, generalized hostilities, Star Trek as a whole would have to become a very different sort of show, a tale of war in space rather than a five-year mission of peaceful (for the most part) exploration. Star Trek the television show would have had to become, in other words, like Star Trek the computer game.

But now, at last, Simon & Schuster had the mandate to move in the other direction, to create a game more consonant with what the show had been. In that spirit they secured the services of Diane Duane, an up-and-coming science-fiction and fantasy writer who had two Star Trek novels already in Pocket’s publication pipeline, to write a script for a Star Trek adventure game. Duane began making notes for an idea that riffed on the supposedly no-win Kobayashi Maru training scenario that had been memorably introduced at the beginning of the movie Star Trek II. The game’s fiction would have you participating in an alternative, hopefully more winnable test being considered as a replacement. Thus you would literally be playing The Kobayashi Alternative, the goal of which would be to find Mr. Sulu (Star Trek: The Search for Sulu?), now elevated to command of the USS Heinlein, who has disappeared along with his ship in a relatively unexplored sector of the galaxy.

Simon & Schuster’s first choice to implement this idea was the current darling of the industry, Infocom. As we’ve already learned in another article, Simon & Schuster spent a year earnestly trying to buy Infocom outright beginning in late 1983, dangling before their board the chance to work with a list of properties headed by Star Trek. An Infocom-helmed Star Trek adventure, written by Diane Duane, is today tempting ground indeed for dreams and speculation. However, that’s all it would become. Al Vezza and the rest of Infocom’s management stalled and dithered and ultimately rejected the Simon & Schuster bid for fear of losing creative control and, most significantly, because Simon & Schuster was utterly disinterested in Infocom’s aspirations to become a major developer of business software. As Infocom continued to drag their feet, Simon & Schuster made the fateful decision to take more direct control of Duane’s adventure game, publishing it under their own new “Computer Software Division” imprint.

Development of The Kobayashi Alternative was turned over to a new company called Micromosaics, founded by a veteran of the Children’s Television Workshop named Lary Rosenblatt to be a sort of full-service experience architect for the home-computer revolution, developing not only software but also the packaging, the manuals, and sometimes even the advertising that accompanied it; their staff included at least as many graphic designers as programmers. The packaging they came up with for The Kobayashi Alternative was indeed a stand-out even in this era of oft-grandiose packaging. Its centerpiece was a glossy full-color faux-Star Fleet briefing manual full of background information about the Enterprise and its crew and enough original art to set any Trekkie’s heart aflutter (one of these pictures, the first in this article, I cheerfully stole out of, er, a selfless conviction that it deserves to be seen). Sadly, the packaging also promised light years more than the actual contents of the disk delivered.

This alleged screenshot from the back of The Kobayashi Alternative‘s box is one of the most blatant instances of false advertising of 1980s gaming.

What the game actually looks like…

Whatever else you can say about it, you can’t say that The Kobayashi Alternative played it safe. Easily dismissed at a glance as just another text adventure, it’s actually a bizarrely original mutant creation, not quite like any other game I’ve ever seen. Everything that you as Captain Kirk can actually do yourself — “give,” “take,” “use,” “shoot,” etc. — you accomplish not through the parser but by tapping function-key combinations. You move about the Enterprise or planetside using the arrow keys. The parser, meanwhile, is literally your mouth; those things you type are things that you say aloud. This being Star Trek and you being Captain Kirk, that generally means orders that you issue to the rest of your familiar crew. And then, not satisfied with giving you just an adventure game with a very odd interface, Micromosaics also tried to build in a full simulation of the Enterprise for you to logistically manage and command in combat. Oh, and the whole thing is running in real time. If ever a game justified use of the “reach exceeded its grasp” reviewer’s cliché, it’s this one. The Kobayashi Alternative is unplayable. No one at Microsmosaics had any real practical experience making computer games, and it shows.

A strange new world with a notable lack of new life and new civilizations

The Kobayashi Alternative is yet another contender for the title of emptiest adventure game ever. In fact, it takes that crown handily from the likes of Level 9’s Snowball and Electronic Arts’s Amnesia. In lieu of discrete, unique locations, each of the ten planets you can beam down to consists of a vast X-Y grid of numerical coordinates to dully trudge across looking for the two or three places that actually contain something of interest. Sometimes you get clues in the form of coordinates to visit, but at other times the game seems to expect you to just lawnmower through hundreds of locations until you find something. The Enterprise, all 23 decks of it, is implemented in a similar lack of detail. It turns out that all those empty, anonymous corridors we were always seeing in the television show really were almost all there was to the ship. When you do find something or somebody, the parser is so limited that you never have any confidence in the conversations that result. Some versions of the game, for instance, don’t even understand the word “Sulu,” making the most natural question to ask anyone you meet — “Where is Sulu?” — a nonstarter. And then there are the bugs. Crewmen — but not you — can beam down to poisonous planets in their shirt sleeves and remain unharmed; when walking east on planets the program fails to warn you about dangerous terrain ahead, meaning you can tumble into a lake of liquid nitrogen without ever being told about it; crewmen inexplicably root themselves to the ground planetside, refusing to follow you no matter how you push or cajole or even start shooting at them with your phaser.

Following The Kobayashi Alternative‘s 1985 release, gamers, downright desperate as they were to play in this beloved universe, proved remarkably patient, while Simon & Schuster also seemed admirably determined to stay the course. Some six months after the initial release they published a revised version that, they claimed, fixed all of the bugs. The other, more deep-rooted design problems they tried to ret-con with a revised manual, which rather passive-aggressively announced that “The Kobayashi Alternative differs in several important ways from other interactive text simulations that you may have used,” including being “completely open-ended.” (Don’t cry to us if this doesn’t play like one of Infocom’s!) The parser problems were neatly sidestepped by printing every single phrase the parser could understand in the manual. And the most obvious major design flaw was similarly addressed by simply printing a list of all the important coordinates on all of the planets in the manual.

Interest in the game remained so high that Computer Gaming World‘s Scorpia, one of the premier fan voices in adventure gaming, printed a second multi-page review of the revised version to join her original, a level of commitment I don’t believe she ever showed to any other game. Alas, even after giving it the benefit of every doubt she couldn’t say the second version was any better than the original. It was actually worse: in fixing some bugs, Micromosaics introduced many others, including one that stole critical items silently from your inventory and made the game as unsolvable as the no-win scenario that provided its name. Micromosaics and Simon & Schuster couldn’t seem to get anything right; even some of the planet coordinates printed in the revised manual were wrong, sending you beaming down into the middle of a helium sea. Thus Scorpia’s second review was, like the first, largely a list of deadly bugs and ways to work around them. The whole sad chronicle adds up to the most hideously botched major adventure-game release of the 1980s, a betrayal of consumer trust worthy of a law suit. This software thing wasn’t turning out to be quite as easy as Simon & Schuster had thought it would be.

While The Kobayashi Alternative stands today as perhaps the most interesting of Simon & Schuster’s Star Trek games thanks to its soaring ambitions and how comprehensively it fails to achieve any of them, it was far from the last of its line. Understandably disenchanted with Micromosaics but determined to keep plugging away at Star Trek gaming, Simon & Schuster turned to another new company to create their second Star Trek adventure: TRANS Fiction Systems.

The story of TRANS Fiction begins with Ron Martinez, who had previously written a couple of Choose Your Own Adventure-style children’s gamebooks for publisher Byron Preiss, then had written the script for Telarium’s computerized adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama. Uninspiring as the finished result of that project was, it awakened a passion to dive deeper and do more with interactive fiction than Telarium’s limited technology would allow. Martinez:

If this was really an art form — like film, for example — you’d really want to know how to create the entire work. In film, you’d want to understand how to work a camera, how to shoot, how to edit, how to really make the finished product. For me, as a writer, I understood that I had to know how to program.

Like just about everybody else, I worshiped the Infocom work, was just amazed by it. So, my goal was to do two things simultaneously:

1. Learn how to program, so that I could —

2. Build an interactive-fiction system that was as good or better than Infocom’s.

Working with a more experienced programmer named Bill Herdle, Martinez did indeed devise his own interactive-fiction development system using a programming language we seem to be meeting an awful lot lately: Forth. Martinez, Herdle, and Jim Gasperini, another writerly alum of Byron Preiss, founded TRANS Fiction to deploy their system. They sincerely believed in interactive fiction as an art form, and were arrogant enough to believe themselves unusually qualified to realize its potential.

We started as writers and then learned the programming. Of other companies, we used to say that the people who built the stage are writing the plays. We used to look down our nose at people who were technical but had no sense of what story was all about attempting to use this medium which we thought would redefine fiction — we really believed that. Instead of having people who were technical trying to write stories, we thought it really had to come the other way, so the technology is in the service of the story and the characters and the richness of the world.

Thanks to their connections in the world of book publishing and their New York City location, TRANS Fiction was soon able to secure a contract to do the next Simon & Schuster Star Trek game. It wasn’t perhaps a dream project for a group of people with their artistic aspirations, but they needed to pay the bills. Thus, instead of things like the interactive version of William Burroughs’s novel Nova Express that Martinez fruitlessly pursued with Electronic Arts, TRANS Fiction did lots of work with less rarefied properties, like the Make Your Own Murder Party generator they did for EA and, yes, Star Trek.

I can tell you that it wasn’t with great joy that we were working with these properties. There’s something soulless about working with a big property owned by a conglomerate. Even though we might love Spock, it was still a property, and there were brand police, who had to review everything that Spock might say or do. We would extend the world and try to introduce new aspects of the history of these characters, but they’d have to sign off on it.

Given Martinez’s attitude as well as that set of restrictions, it’s not terribly shocking that TRANS Fiction’s first Star Trek game, The Promenthean Prophecy, is not all that terribly inspired or inspiring. Nor is its parser or game engine quite “as good as,” much less “better than,” Infocom’s. A much more conventional — perhaps too conventional — text adventure than its crazy predecessor, its status as the most enjoyable of all the Simon & Schuster-era Treks has more to do with the weaknesses of its peers than its own intrinsic strengths.

Star Trek: The Promethean Prophecy

The Promethean Prophecy doesn’t try to be a starship simulator to anywhere near the same degree as its predecessor. While it does open with a space battle, said battle is largely an exercise in puzzle solving, in figuring out the next command that will drive the hard-wired plot forward and not get you killed, rather than a real tactical simulation. After that sequence, you beam down to Prometheus, the only planet in the game, and start on a fairly standard “figure out this alien culture” puzzle-driven text adventure which, other than having Kirk, Spock, and company as its stars, doesn’t feel all that notably Star Trek-like at all. What with its linear and heavily plotted opening followed by a non-linear body to be explored at your own pace, it reminds me more than anything of Infocom’s Starcross. This impression even extends to the puzzles themselves, which like those of Starcross often involve exchanging items with and otherwise manipulating the strange aliens you meet. And yet again like in Starcross, there is no possibility of having real conversations with them. Unfortunately, coming as it did four years after Starcross, The Promethean Prophecy is neither as notable in the context of history nor quite as clever and memorable on its own term as a game. From its parser to its writing to its puzzles it’s best described as “competent” — a description which admittedly puts it head and shoulders above many of Infocom’s competitors and its own predecessor. The best of this era of Star Trek games, it’s also the one that feels the least like Star Trek.

Still, The Promethean Prophecy did have the virtue of being relatively bug free, a virtue that speaks more to the diligence of TRANS Fiction than Simon & Schuster; as Martinez later put it, “Nobody at Simon & Schuster really understood how we were doing any of it.” It was greeted with cautiously positive reviews and presumably sold a reasonable number of copies on the strength of the Star Trek name alone, but it hardly set the industry on fire. An all-text game of any stripe was becoming quite a hard sell indeed by the time of its late 1986 release.

After The Promethean Prophecy Simon & Schuster continued to doggedly release new Star Trek games, a motley assortment that ranged from problematic to downright bad. For 1987’s The Rebel Universe, they enlisted the services of our old friend Mike Singleton, who, departing even more from The Promethean Prophecy than that game had from its predecessor, tried to create a grand strategy game, a sort of Lords of Midnight in space. It was full of interesting ideas, but rushed to release in an incomplete and fatally unbalanced state. For 1988’s First Contact (no relation to the 1996 movie), they — incredibly — went back to Micromosaics, who simplified and retrofitted onto the old Kobayashi Alternative engine the ability to display the occasional interstitial graphic. Unfortunately, they also overcompensated for the overwhelming universe of their first game by making First Contact far too trivial. The following year’s adaptation of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, oddly released through Mindscape rather than using Simon & Schuster’s own imprint, and 1990’s The Transinium Challenge, another product of TRANS Fiction and the first game to feature the cast of The Next Generation, were little more than interactive slide shows most notable for their heavy use of digitized images from the actual shows at a time when seeing real photographs of reasonable fidelity on a computer screen was still a fairly amazing thing.

It was all disappointing enough that by the beginning of the 1990s fans had begun to mumble about a Star Trek gaming curse. And indeed, it’s hard to know what to make of the handling of the franchise during this period. Gifted with easily one of the five most beloved properties on the planet amongst the computer-gaming demographic, Simon & Schuster refused to either turn it over to an experienced software publisher who would know what to do with it — virtually any of them would have paid a hell of a lot of money to have a crack at it — or to get really serious and pay a top-flight developer to create a really top-flight game. Instead they took the pointless middle route, tossing off a stream of rushed efforts from second-tier developers that managed to be unappealing enough to be sales disappointments despite the huge popularity of the name on their boxes, while other games made without a license — notably Starflight — proved much more successful at evoking the sense of wonder that always characterized Star Trek at its best. It wouldn’t be until 1992 that Star Trek would finally come to computers in a satisfying form that actually felt like Star Trek — but that’s a story for another day.

For today, I encourage you to have a look at one or more of the variants of Mike Mayfield’s original Star Trek game. Eric Friedrichsen’s JavaScript port, for instance, is one of a number of very good versions that you can play right in your browser. One of the first really compelling strategy games to appear on computers and, when taking into account all of its versions and variations, very likely the single most popular game on PCs during that Paleolithic era of about 1978 to 1981, it’s still capable of stealing a few hours of your time today. It’s also, needless to say, far more compelling than any commercial Star Trek released prior to 1992. Still, completionism demands that I also make available The Kobayashi Alternative and The Promethean Prophecy in their Commodore 64 incarnations for those of you who want to give them a go as well. They aren’t the worst adventures in the world… no, I take that back. The Kobayashi Alternative kind of is. Maybe it’s worth a look for that reason alone.

(The history of Mike Mayfield’s Star Trek has been covered much more thoroughly than I have here by other modern digital historians. See, for instance, Games of Fame and Pete Turnbull’s page on the game among many others. Most of my information on Simon & Schuster and TRANS Fiction was drawn from Jason Scott’s interview with Martinez for Get Lamp; thanks again for sharing, Jason! Scorpia’s review and re-review of The Kobayashi Alternative appeared in Computer Gaming World‘s March 1986 and August 1986 issues respectively.

For an excellent perspective on how Star Trek‘s writers saw the show as well as the state of Star Trek around the time that Mayfield first wrote his game, see David Gerrold’s The World of Star Trek. Apart from its value as a research source, it’s also a very special book to me, the first real work of criticism that I ever read as a kid. It taught me that you could love something while still acknowledging and even dissecting its flaws. I’m not as enchanted with Star Trek now as I was at the Science Fiction Golden Age of twelve, but Gerrold’s book has stuck with me to become an influence on the work I do here today. I was really happy recently to see it come back into “print” as an e-book.)

Comments
24 Responses

- Bill Loguidice

December 17, 2014 at 5:11 pm

I’m curious why you didn’t mention “Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator,” also from 1983? It was a well-received arcade game (the cockpit version is particularly neat) and ported to numerous contemporary console and computer platforms. While obviously action-centric, it was officially licensed and certainly did a reasonable job of giving off a “Star Trek” vibe, particularly with the versions with voice. What’s interesting is that despite the success of this game, most officially licensed Trek-universe games eschewed an action focus until roughly the mid-90s, when that seemed to fall back into favor.

- Jimmy Maher

December 18, 2014 at 7:01 am

Thanks for pointing this out. Arcade games aren’t really my strong suit. Made a few edits to dully acknowledge the presence of Strategic Operations Simulator.

- John Elliott

December 17, 2014 at 8:51 pm

I read Sinclair User at the time, and the Beyond / Mike Singleton Star Trek game (on the Spectrum, never more than vapourware) was a running joke in the satirical “Gremlin” column. Fascinating to see that it was actually released on some platforms.

The original Star Trek BASIC game made it to the ZX81 in at least two commercial versions: ICL’s Star Trail (1982, with serial numbers filed off) and a version on Cascade’s infamous Cassette 50 (1983, serial numbers not filed off). The ICL one was one of my favourite ZX81 games; I never really investigated the Cascade port, but it seems to be real-time (or as real as the ZX81 can manage) rather than turn-based.

- Jason Dyer

December 18, 2014 at 2:35 am

I did enjoy First Contact back when it was released (it keeps the giant empty ship, but exploring it is optional). What do you mean by “far too trivial”? Just “too short”?

- Jimmy Maher

December 18, 2014 at 7:09 am

Too easy — and a game has to be *really* easy for me to complain about that — and too short. Spock and the rest of the crew kind of lead you by the nose, almost to the point of coming off like an in-game walkthrough. Better than the baffling mess that was Kobayashi, but still not very satisfying.

- Jason Dyer

December 19, 2014 at 2:33 am

In these days of snack-sized games I don’t consider “easy and short” to be a knock against anything. Maybe at the time it was released at full price. I am pretty sure I obtained it from some manner of bargain bin (it was long ago, though).

I thought the last puzzle in particular was very memorable (even though it, too, was easy).

- Jimmy Maher

December 19, 2014 at 7:26 am

Well, depending on the nature of the game and what it’s trying to do it may or may not be possible for me to consider it “too easy and short” today. However, my original “trivial” comment was of course written from a more historical perspective, considering it as a first-run, full-price game in 1988. This was indeed how it was received at the time. See for example Scorpia’s review in the October 1988 Computer Gaming World, which says, “advanced players will get through this one in an afternoon.”

To avoid reviews like that one, many developers artificially extended the length and difficulty of their games with tedious and/or unfair but time-consuming elements. Speaking from the perspective of today and perhaps even then, I certainly prefer the First Contact approach to that one. But all that is another can of worms entirely, which will get cracked open more thoroughly in a future article…

- Rowan Lipkovits

December 18, 2014 at 7:02 am

IBM even included it with the original IBM PC, as one of the BASIC demonstration programs that accompanied every system.

OK, you got me. Which of these files is it?

Volume in drive A has no label
Directory of A:\

File Name Size Allocated Modified Attrib

IBMBIO COM 1,920 2,048 05-07-82 12:00p HS
IBMDOS COM 6,400 6,656 05-07-82 12:00p HS
COMMAND COM 4,959 5,120 05-07-82 12:00p
FORMAT COM 3,816 4,096 05-07-82 12:00p
CHKDSK COM 1,720 2,048 05-07-82 12:00p
SYS COM 605 1,024 05-07-82 12:00p
DISKCOPY COM 2,008 2,048 05-07-82 12:00p
DISKCOMP COM 1,640 2,048 05-07-82 12:00p
COMP COM 1,649 2,048 05-07-82 12:00p
EXE2BIN EXE 1,280 1,536 05-07-82 12:00p
MODE COM 2,509 2,560 05-07-82 12:00p
EDLIN COM 2,392 2,560 05-07-82 12:00p
DEBUG COM 5,999 6,144 05-07-82 12:00p
LINK EXE 41,856 41,984 05-07-82 12:00p
BASIC COM 11,392 11,776 05-07-82 12:00p
BASICA COM 16,768 16,896 05-07-82 12:00p
ART BAS 1,920 2,048 05-07-82 12:00p
SAMPLES BAS 2,432 2,560 05-07-82 12:00p
MORTGAGE BAS 6,272 6,656 05-07-82 12:00p
COLORBAR BAS 1,536 1,536 05-07-82 12:00p
CALENDAR BAS 3,840 4,096 05-07-82 12:00p
MUSIC BAS 8,704 8,704 05-07-82 12:00p
DONKEY BAS 3,584 3,584 05-07-82 12:00p
CIRCLE BAS 1,664 2,048 05-07-82 12:00p
PIECHART BAS 2,304 2,560 05-07-82 12:00p
SPACE BAS 1,920 2,048 05-07-82 12:00p
BALL BAS 2,048 2,048 05-07-82 12:00p
COMM BAS 4,352 4,608 05-07-82 12:00p

I got the file listing from http://thestarman.pcministry.com/DOS/ibm110/Disk.htm because this was a lead I absolutely needed to follow.

- Jimmy Maher

December 18, 2014 at 7:21 am

Hmm… I got that from https://gamesoffame.wordpress.com/star-trek/, which seems a pretty thorough and well-researched piece. Afraid this is one of those areas where I relied on third-party sources rather than investigating for myself, though. Perhaps it burned me… or perhaps there was a second disk with more BASIC demos?

- Niklas L

December 18, 2014 at 9:26 pm

I found the samples here and ran them under GWBasic. There is nothing treklike there.

- Jimmy Maher

December 19, 2014 at 7:12 am

Okay, fair enough. Nixed that bit. Thanks for keeping me honest!

- Rowan Lipkovits

December 20, 2014 at 4:35 am

I’m just happy to learn more about TRANS Fiction — I hope you cover their Hidden Agenda, one of my all time favorites!

- Ice Cream Jonsey

December 19, 2014 at 4:36 pm

The Sega Star Trek arcade game is fun, but there’s one fact about its vector monitor that sort of stopped me from every trying to acquire one for the home:

“As with all of Sega’s vector games, the Electrohome color vector monitor used for this game has a notorious tendency to catch fire.” (from the Killer List of Videogames)

With how often the bridge would take damage in TOS, it’s kind of the most realistic arcade game of all-time.

- Jimmy Maher

December 19, 2014 at 4:45 pm

:) Like Clive Sinclair and the Federation, Sega must not have yet discovered fuses.

- Ian

December 20, 2014 at 5:53 pm

If I recall correctly, this is because someone made the (in hindsight) dumb decision to store the flyback transformers (which generate tthe 20,000+ volts for the CRT and are built to very critical tolerances) in an un-air-conditioned warehouse in New Orleans during the summer before being shipped to the monitor makers. Those fires were caused by moisture trying to make its way out of the transformer’s nooks and crannies as the chassis warmed up to operating temperature.

As far as collecting them, nearly any working example you find in 2014 has almost certainly had the flyback replaced and should be as safe as any other arcade cabinet (I wouldn’t leave any cabinets of that vintage running unattended).

- NorkaBoid

December 19, 2014 at 5:09 pm

The MS-DOS version of the Kobayashi Alternative – which my brother game me for Christmas in 1986, when we were both home from college – did come closer to resembling that bogus mock-up on the packaging than the Commodore 64 version did, at least in terms of window placement and color scheme. (Of course the fancy proportional font and photorealistic background depicted on the “screenshot” were just a graphic designer’s fantasy.) Indeed, judging from the actual screenshots on MobyGames, it appears that the C64 and Apple versions were not only visually simplified in comparison to the DOS version, but also dumbed down content-wise. Note the drastic differences in the introductory Starfleet communiqué.

Whether the DOS version was any more playable than the others, I couldn’t say. I can recall, though, that my brother was a bit pissed that I spent way more time at my Tandy 1000 playing Starflight than Kobayashi during that winter break!

Of course I didn’t – and don’t – fault him at all in his choice of present. Considering our longtime shared enthusiasm for computer games and for that particular television series, Kobayashi should have been the perfect gift. Too bad the actual game, in any form, was such a botched effort by the developers.

- Jimmy Maher

December 20, 2014 at 9:55 am

Interesting. Perhaps the MS-DOS version was the “real” version of the game, the 8-bit versions just pale shadows? Interesting as well that a MobyGames forum poster mentions yet another reworking and re-release, at least for MS-DOS, in 1987. I confess that I can’t quite muster the enthusiasm right now to try to untangle this skein entirely. Maybe when I circle back around to this material for a book…

- Walt

April 30, 2015 at 11:22 am

If I remember right, a version of the original Star Trek game also made it to the Atari VCS by way of the Sears Tele Games label. I think it was called “Stellar Trek” or something like that.

- Brandon Campbell

May 20, 2015 at 8:07 pm

I also had and loved the 1985 edition of Gerrold’s “The World of Star Trek” as a kid!

- Pingback: Simon & Schuster’s Treks to Nowhere | Objective.Me

- Richard Hewison

February 14, 2016 at 10:54 pm

I play-tested Star Trek: The Rebel Universe (published by Firebird) on the C64 and IBM PC versions that came after the Atari ST original was released in late ’87. I was even (mistakenly) quoted in UK magazine Commodore User as the C64 programmer when they published two pages of my playing tips in that magazine back in ’89. I even got to see the work-in-progress Sinclair Spectrum and Amstrad CPC versions that were never finished. It was a game tha fell between too many stools. It never satisfied arcade players, strategy lovers, adventure players or Star Trek fans…

- Mark Ricard

February 29, 2016 at 3:45 am

Never knew the Prophecy came later. The Underdogs and the Moby Games site say they came first. They had it wrong all these years. Thanks for setting the record straight.

- Mark Ricard

February 29, 2016 at 3:52 am

Also wanted to mention that Diane Duane was one of the most popular writers for Pocket Book’s Star Trek line. The Orca the first appeared in this game became characters in her 1990 book Doctor’s Orders. The Heinlein name is course a reference to science fiction writer Robert Heinlein whom Duane was a huge fan of and knew. The Horta from her second novel even appears in that game or first contact.

- Mark Ricard

February 29, 2016 at 3:53 am

Would do a review comparing both the original version of Korbayshi and the second. I have found walkthrough for one version but not much help for the other.

Ballyhoo
December 22, 2014

‘Tis true my form is something odd,
But blaming me is blaming God;
Could I create myself anew
I would not fail in pleasing you.

— poem by Joseph Merrick, “The Elephant Man”

This article does contain some spoilers for Ballyhoo!

Ballyhoo, a low-key mystery written by a new Implementor, was the last game ever released by an independent Infocom. When it appeared in February of 1986, Al Vezza and Joel Berez were desperately trying to reel in their lifeline of last resort, a competitor interested in acquiring this imploding company that had fallen from such a precipitous height in just a year’s time. Having come in like a lion with Zork, Infocom, Inc., would go out like a lamb with Ballyhoo; it would go on to become one of their least remembered and least remarked games. We’ll eventually get to some very good reasons for Ballyhoo to be regarded as one of the lesser entries in the Infocom canon. Still, it’s also deserving of more critical consideration than it’s generally received for its unique tone and texture and, most importantly, for a very significant formal innovation. In fact, discounting as relative trivialities some small-scale tinkering with abbreviations and the like and as evolutionary dead ends a blizzard of largely unsuccessful experiments that would mark Infocom’s final years, said innovation would be the last such to significantly impact the art of the text adventure as it would evolve after the commercial glory years of the 1980s.

If Ballyhoo is one of Infocom’s more forgotten games, its creator, Jeff O’Neill, is certainly the Forgotten Implementor. His perspective is conspicuously absent from virtually every history written of the company in the last quarter century. Most notably, he was the one Imp who declined to be interviewed for Jason Scott’s Get Lamp project. For reasons that we won’t dwell on here, O’Neill remains deeply embittered by his time with Infocom. Incredible as this may sound to those of us today who persist in viewing the company’s brief life as a sort of Camelot, that time in his own life is one that O’Neill would rather forget, as I learned to my disappointment when I reached out to him before writing this article. He has a right to his silence and his privacy, so we’ll leave it at that and confine ourselves to the public details.

O’Neill, at the time a frustrated young journalist looking for a career change, was hired by Infocom in the spring of 1984, just one of what would prove to be a major second wave of talent — including among their ranks Jon Palace and Brian Moriarty — who arrived at about the same time. Like Moriarty, O’Neill’s original role was a practical one: he became one of Infocom’s in-house testers. Having proved himself by dint of talent and hard work and the great ideas for new games he kept proposing, within about a year he became the first of a few who would eventually advance out of the testing department to become late-period Imps after Infocom’s hopes for hiring outside writers to craft their games proved largely fruitless.

Whether we attribute it to his degree in Journalism or innate talent, O’Neill had one of the most delicate writerly touches to be found amongst the Imps. Ballyhoo adds a color to Infocom’s emotional palette that we haven’t seen before: world-weary melancholy. The setting is a spectacularly original one for any adventurer tired of dragons and spaceships: an anachronistic, down-at-the-heels circus called “The Traveling Circus That Time Forgot, Inc.” The tears behind a clown’s greasepaint facade, as well as the tawdry desperation that is the flip side of “the show must go on” for performers and performances past their time, have been amply explored in other art forms. Yet such subtle shades of feeling have been only rarely evoked by games before or after Ballyhoo. Ballyhoo, in the words of one of its own more memorable descriptive passages, “exposes the underside of circus life — grungy costumes strung about, crooked and cracked mirrors, the musty odor of fresh makeup mingled with clown sweat infusing the air.” Given what was going on around O’Neill as he wrote the game, it feels hard not to draw parallels with Infocom’s own brief ascendency and abrupt fall from grace: “Your experience of the circus, with its ballyhooed promises of wonderment and its ultimate disappointment, has been to sink your teeth into a candy apple whose fruit is rotten.”

The nihilistic emptiness at the heart of the circus sideshow, the tragedy of these grotesques who parade themselves before the public because there’s no other alternative available to them, has likewise been expressed in art stretching at least as far back as Freaks, a 1932 film directed by Tod Browning that’s still as shocking and transgressive as it is moving today. Another obvious cultural touchstone, which would have been particularly fresh in the mid-1980s thanks to Bernard Pomerance’s 1979 play and David Lynch’s 1980 film, is the story of the so-called “Elephant Man”: Joseph Merrick, a gentle soul afflicted with horrendous deformities who was driven out into the street by his father at age 17 and forced to sell himself to various exploiters as a traveling “human curiosity.” Some say that Merrick died at age 27 in 1890 because he insisted on trying to lie down to sleep — something his enormous, misshapen head would not allow — as part of his fruitless lifelong quest just to “be like other people.”

Ballyhoo‘s own collection of freaks is less extreme but can be almost as heartbreaking. There’s Comrade Thumb, the Russian midget who’s been crammed into a Czarist general’s uniform and sent out to do tricks. Like Merrick, whose deformities made speech almost impossible, Thumb can’t even communicate with his fellow humans; he speaks only Russian (I’ve had just a taste of this sort of linguistic isolation at times since leaving the United States, and know how hard it can be). But saddest of all is the case of Tina, the “827 pounds of feminine charm” who’s become the circus’s token fat woman.

>n
West Half of Fat Lady
Dominating this once spacious room, geographic in her enormity, mountainous in her irreducibility, the fat lady sits (though no chair is visible) breathtakingly to the east. Paths around the attraction lead northeast and southeast. The exit is south.

>examine lady
The fat lady is wearing a big top, and the expression on her face is sad and distant, almost Rushmorean. She appears to be holding a small radio up to her ear.

>ne
It's a long haul, the scenery changing little. Eventually you arrive at ...

East Half of Fat Lady
The fat lady sits (though no chair is visible) breathtakingly to the west. Paths around the attraction lead northwest and southwest.

>give granola bar to tina
Tina is quick to confiscate the one-dollar-and-85-cent granola bar from your hand and grinds it up without hesitation. Turning her far-away gaze slowly in your direction, she seems to notice you for the first time this evening.

>tina, hello
She merely sighs wistfully, which creates a gale-force gust, and cranes her wrecking-ball-sized hand over to you.

>take hand
As you take hold, the fat lady's hand becomes relaxed, its full weight now residing in your arms like a sandbag and making your knees buckle.

>shake hand
Though unable to budge the fat lady's hand, your friendly intentions are nevertheless understood. The fat lady appears quite taken by your kindnesses. She clasps both her hands up to her chins, and stares ahead in teary silence.

If these passages, far from politically correct but by no means heartless, make you a bit uncomfortable, well, I like to think that they were meant to. After all, we’re among the sideshow gawkers. I’ve known people like Tina, cut off by their weight or other issues from a normal life, destined always to be noticed but never to be included. I recognize that wistful sigh, that far-off stare, that above-it-all stance that becomes their only defense. As for people like the circus’s manager Mr. Munrab — read the name backward — who we learn elsewhere “orders the roustabout to increase the frequency of her [Tina’s] feeding” every time she tries to go on a diet…. well, I’d like to think there’s a special circle of Hell for him along with Tom Norman, the man who stuck Joseph Merrick in a cage and set it up for the punters on Whitechapel Road.

I don’t want to give the impression that Ballyhoo is all doom and gloom, and certainly not that it’s entirely one-note in its mood. As Tina’s passages show, the game takes place in a vaguely surreal David Lynch-ian realm that’s tethered to but not quite the same as our own reality. This gives ample room for some flights of fancy that don’t always have to make us feel bad. O’Neill’s love of abstract wordplay, the theme around which his second and final work of interactive fiction would be built, also pops up in Ballyhoo from time to time. When you find yourself with an irresistible craving for something sweet, for instance, it takes the form of a literal monkey on your back who drives you to the concession stand. O’Neill also toys with the parser and the player sitting behind it to a degree not seen in an Infocom game since The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Here’s what happens when you come upon a “piece of wood” that turns out to be a mousetrap:

>get wood
You have just encountered that brief instant of time between the realization that you've caused yourself excruciating Pain and the actual onslaught of such Pain, during which time most people speak with exclamation points and ... well, say things like ...

>fuck
Easy there! You're jeopardizing our "G" rating.

>darn
Bravisimo! Once more now, with feeling.

>darn
Cut! Cut! Okay, that's a wrap.

There’s even a fake death message, just the sort of faintly cruel player trickery that would have made Adams proud.

Indeed, there’s a little bit of bite, even a faint note of misanthropy, to O’Neill’s writing that’s largely missing from that of the other Imps. Your fellow circus-goers are uniformly boorish and boring. One or two situations, as well as the logical illogic needed to escape from them, smack of Infocom’s later social satire Bureaucracy, to which O’Neill (amongst many others) would make contributions.

>enter short line
You are now standing at the tail end of the short line.

>z
Time passes...

The face of the man ahead of you lights up as he spots something. "Hey, guys! It's ME, Jerry," he yells to a sizable group nearby, and they approach.

>z
Time passes...

"Haven't seen you turkeys in years. Howda hell are you guys?" They all reintroduce themselves. "Hey -- you clowns thirsty? Get in here, I'll buy y'all beer."

"You sure it's not a problem?" asks the catcher.

"Heck no, just scoot in right here."

With both your resolve and your heaving bosom firm against the crush of interlopers, you are nevertheless forced to backpedal.

>z
Time passes...

Jerry continues backslapping the second baseman.

>z
Time passes...

Jerry continues jiving with the center fielder.

>exit long line
You hear an inner voice whisper, "Do I really want to forfeit my position in the long line?" To which you answer:

>yes
You nonchalantly walk away from the long line.

>enter long line
A lot of other people must not have had the same idea as you, as they virtually hemorrhage over to the short line. Steaming to the front of the line, you get a two-dollar-and-25-cent frozen banana pushed at you and are whisked to the side before you can even count your change.

Ballyhoo was Infocom’s fourth game to be given the “Mystery” genre label. As such, it’s also an earnest attempt to solve a real or perceived problem that had long frustrated players of those previous three mysteries. The first of them, Deadline, had exploded the possibilities for adventure games by simulating a dynamic story with independent actors rather than just setting the player loose in a static world full of puzzles to solve; The Witness and Suspect had then continued along the same course. Instead of exploring a geographical space, the player’s primary task became to explore a story space, to learn how this dynamic system worked and to manipulate it to her own ends by judicious, precisely timed interference. While a huge advance that brought a new dimension to the adventure game, this seemingly much more story-oriented approach also remained paradoxically problematic to fully reconcile to the view of Infocom’s games as interactive fiction, as, as their box copy would have it, stories you “woke up inside” and proceeded to experience like the protagonist of a novel. The experience of playing one of these early mysteries was more like that of an editor, or a film director making an adaptation of the novel. You had to take the stories apart piece by piece through probing and experimentation, then put everything back together in a way that would guide the protagonist, from whom you stood at a decided remove, to the optimal ending. That process might offer pleasures all its own, but it kept the player firmly in the realm of puzzle-solver rather than fiction-enjoyer — or, if you like, guiding the fiction became the overarching puzzle. Even Infocom’s most unabashed attempt to create a “literary” work to date, Steve Meretzky’s A Mind Forever Voyaging, became abruptly, jarringly gamelike again when you got to the final section, where you had to head off a sequence of events that would otherwise be the end of you. In a film or novel based on A Mind Forever Voyaging, this sequence would just chance to play out in just the right way to let Perry Simm escape by the skin of his teeth and save the world in the process. In the game, however, the player was forced to figure out what dramatically satisfying narrative the author wanted to convey, then manipulate events to bring it to fruition, a very artificial process all the way around. Yet the alternative of a static environment given motion only when the player deigned to push on something was even farther from the idea of “interactive fiction” as a layperson might take that phrase. What to do?

Infocom’s answer, to which they first fully committed in Ballyhoo, was to flip the process on its head: to make the story respond to the player rather than always asking the player to respond to the story. Put another way, here the story chases the player rather than the player chasing the story. (Feel free to insert your “in Soviet Russia…” jokes here.) Ballyhoo is another dynamic mystery with its own collection of dramatic beats to work through. Now, though, the story moves forward only when and as the player’s actions make it most dramatically satisfying to do so, rather than ticking along according to its own remorseless timetable. So, for example, Comrade Thumb will struggle to get a drink of water from the public water fountain at the beginning of the game for hundreds of turns if necessary, until the player helps him by giving him a boost. He’ll then toddle off to another location to wait for the player to enter. When and only when she does, he’ll carry off his next dramatic beat. Later, a certain bumbling detective will wander onto the midway and pass out dead drunk just when the needs of the plot, as advanced by the player thus far, demand that he do so. Sometimes these developments are driven directly by the player, but at other times they happen only in the name of dramatic efficiency, of story logic. Rather than asking the player to construct a story from a bunch of component parts, now the author deconstructs the story she wants the player to experience, then figures out how to put it back together on the fly in a satisfying way in response to the player’s own actions — but without always making the fact that the story is responding to the player rather than unspooling on its own clear to the player. Ideally, this should let the player just enjoy the unfolding narrative from her perspective inside the story, which will always just happen to play out in suitably dramatic fashion, full of the close calls and crazy coincidences that are such part and parcel of story logic. Virtually unremarked at the time, this formal shift would eventually go on to become simply the way that adventure games were done, to the extent that the old Deadline approach stands out as a strange, cruel anomaly when it crops up on rare occasions on the modern landscape.

Depending on how you see these things, you might view this new approach as a major advance or as a disappointment, even as a capitulation of sorts. Early adventure writers, including those at Infocom, were very invested in the idea of their games as simulations of believable (if simplified) worlds. See, for instance, the article which Dave Lebling published in Byte in December of 1980, which, years before Infocom would dub their games “interactive fiction,” repeatedly refers to Zork and the other games like it that Infocom hopes to make as “computerized fantasy simulations.” Or see the flyer found in Zork I itself, which refers to that game as “a self-contained and self-maintaining universe.” To tinker with such a universe, to introduce a hand of God manipulating the levers in the name of drama and affect, felt and still feels wrong to some people. Most, however, have come to accept that pure, uncompromising simulation does not generally lead to a satisfying adventure game. Adventure games may be better viewed as storytelling and puzzle-solving engines — the relative emphasis placed on the former and the latter varying from work to work — wherein simulation elements are useful as long as they add verisimilitude and possibility without adding boredom and frustration, and stop being useful just as soon as the latter qualities begin to outweigh the former.

Which is not to say that this new approach of the story chasing the player is a magic bullet. Virtually everyone who’s played adventure games since Ballyhoo is familiar with the dilemma of a story engine that’s become stuck in place, of going over and over a game’s world looking for that one trigger you missed that will satisfy the game that all is in proper dramatic order and the next act can commence. My own heavily plotted adventure game is certainly not immune to this syndrome, which at its extreme can feel every bit as artificial and mimesis-destroying, and almost as frustrating, as needing to replay a game over and over with knowledge from past lives. Like so much else in life and game design, this sort of reactive storytelling is an imperfect solution, whose biggest virtue is that most people prefer its brand of occasional frustration to others.

And now we’ve come to the point in this article where I need to tell you why, despite pioneering such a major philosophical shift and despite a wonderful setting brought to life by some fine writing, Ballyhoo does indeed deserve its spot amongst the lower tier of Infocom games. The game has some deep-rooted problems that spoil much of what’s so good about it.

The most fundamental issue, one which badly damages Ballyhoo as both a coherent piece of fiction and a playable game, is that of motivation — or rather lack thereof. When the game begins you’re just another vaguely dissatisfied customer exiting the big top along with the rest of the maddening crowd. Getting the plot proper rolling by learning about the mystery itself — proprietor Munrab’s young daughter Chelsea has been kidnapped, possibly by one of his own discontented performers — requires you to sneak into a storage tent for no reason whatsoever. You then eavesdrop on a fortuitous conversation which occurs, thanks to Ballyhoo‘s new dramatic engine, just at the right moment. And so you decide that you are better equipped to solve the case than the uninterested and besotted detective Munrab has hired. But really, what kind of creepy busybody goes to the circus and then starts crawling around in the dark through forbidden areas just for kicks? Ballyhoo makes only the most minimal of attempts to explain such behavior in its opening passage: “The circus is a reminder of your own secret irrational desire to steal the spotlight, to defy death, and to bask in the thunder of applause.” That’s one of the most interesting and potential-fraught passages in the game, but Ballyhoo unfortunately makes no more real effort to explore this psychological theme, leaving the protagonist otherwise a largely blank slate. Especially given that the mystery at the heart of the game is quite low-stakes — the kidnapping is so clearly amateurish that Chelsea is hardly likely to suffer any real harm, while other dastardly revelations like the presence of an underground poker game aren’t exactly Godfather material — you’re left wondering why you’re here at all, why you’re sticking your nose into all this business that has nothing to do with you. In short, why do you care about any of this? Don’t you have anything better to be doing?

A similar aimlessness afflicts the puzzle structure. Ballyhoo never does muster that satisfying feeling of really building toward the solution of its central mystery. Instead, it just offers a bunch of situations that are clearly puzzles to be solved, but never gives you a clue why you should be solving them. For instance, you come upon a couple of lions in a locked cage which otherwise contains nothing other than a lion stand used in the lion trainer’s act. You soon find a key to the cage and a bullwhip. You have no use for the lion stand right now, nor for the lions themselves, nor for their cage. There’s obviously a puzzle to be solved here, but why? Well, if you do so and figure out how to deal with the lions, you’ll discover an important clue under the lion stand. But, with no possible way to know it was there, why on earth would any person risk her neck to enter a lion cage for no reason whatsoever? (Presumably the same kind that would creep into a circus’s supply tent…) Elsewhere you come upon an elephant in a tent. Later you have the opportunity to collect a mouse. You can probably imagine what you need to do, but, again, why? Why are you terrorizing this poor animal in its tiny, empty tent? More specifically, how could you anticipate that the elephant will bolt away in the perfect direction to knock down a certain section of fence? This George Mallory approach to design is everywhere in Ballyhoo. While “because it’s there” has been used plenty of times in justifying adventure-game puzzles both before and after Ballyhoo, Infocom by this time was usually much, much better at embedding puzzles within their games’ fictions.

With such an opaque puzzle structure, Ballyhoo becomes a very tough nut to crack; it’s never clear what problems you should be working on at at any given time, nor how solving any given puzzle is likely to help you with the rest. It all just feels… random. And many of the individual solutions are really, really obscure, occasionally with a “read Jeff O’Neill’s mind” quality that pushes them past the boundary of fairness. Making things still more difficult are occasional struggles with the parser of the sort we’re just not used to seeing from Infocom by this stage: you can MOVE that moose head on the wall, but don’t try to TURN it. There’s also at least one significant bug that forced me to restore on my recent playthrough (the turnstile inexplicably stopped recognizing my ticket) and a few scattered typos. Again, these sorts of minor fit-and-finish problems are hardly surprising in general, but are surprising to find in an Infocom game of this vintage.

Assuming we give some of Hitchhiker’s dodgier elements a pass in the name of letting Douglas Adams be Douglas Adams, we have to go all the way back to those early days of Zork and Deadline to find an Infocom game with as many basic problems as this one. Ballyhoo isn’t, mind you, a complete reversion to the bad old days of 1982. Even leaving aside its bold new approach to plotting, much in Ballyhoo shows a very progressive sensibility. On at least one occasion when you’re on the verge of locking yourself out of victory, the game steers you to safety, saying that “the image of a burning bridge suddenly pops into your mind.” Yet on others it seems to positively delight in screwing you over. My theory, which is only that, is that Ballyhoo was adversely affected by the chaos inside Infocom as it neared release, that it didn’t get the full benefit of a usually exhaustive testing regime that normally rooted out not only bugs and implementation problems but also exactly the sorts of design issues that I’ve just pointed out. Thankfully, Ballyhoo would prove to be an anomaly; the games that succeeded it would once again evince the level of polish we’ve come to expect. Given that Ballyhoo was also the product of a first-time author, its failings are perhaps the result of a perfect storm of inexperience combined with distraction.

Ballyhoo was not, as you’ve probably guessed, a big seller, failing to break 30,000 copies in lifetime sales. It’s a paradoxical little game that I kind of love on one level but can’t really recommend on another. Certainly there’s much about it to which I really respond. Whether because I’m a melancholy soul at heart or because I just like to play at being one from time to time, I’m a sucker for its sort of ramshackle splendid decay. I’m such a sucker for it, in fact, that I dearly want Ballyhoo to be better than it is, to actually be the sad and beautiful work of interactive fiction that I sense it wants to be. I’ve occasionally overpraised it in the past for just that reason. But we also have to consider how well Ballyhoo works as an adventure game, and in that sense it’s a fairly broken creation. I won’t suggest that you tax yourself too much trying to actually solve it by yourself, but it’s well worth a bit of wandering around just to soak up its delicious melancholy.

Comments
23 Responses

- Brian Bagnall

December 22, 2014 at 2:53 pm

Thank you for clearly explaining the massive innovation O’Neill brought to the genre. He really hit on something there. I had a similar experience of being initially attracted to the mood of the game but ultimately wandering around a bit before losing interest.

Oh to be granted a full interview with him! If he has a change of heart it would likely make a good article on its own.

- Jason Scott

December 22, 2014 at 4:58 pm

When interviewing the implementors, many of them were sad to have fallen out of touch with Jeff. It is been a while, but I definitely remember him more than once being referred to as The Lost Imp.

More importantly, though, I just want to stress that not everyone I interviewed had positive memories of their time there. One of the requests by Mike Berlyn was that I not portray him as having admired or respected the company management, and for the time, he considered rescinding agreement to appear in the final documentary. Like everyone else, I gave them a chance to see the film or at least their portrayal in the film before release so they could sign off, and he was happy with how it came out.

(Mike is fighting a cancer battle right now, much love to Mike.)

- Jimmy Maher

December 22, 2014 at 5:45 pm

I’m very sorry to hear of Mike’s illness. I and (I’m sure) everyone who reads this blog wish him all the best.

Steve Meretzky was in contact with Jeff to at least the extent that he had a current email to pass along to me, albeit with the warning that “his memories of Infocom are not happy ones.” Jeff was kind enough to reply, and even to consider an interview, but ultimately decided against it, which is of course his right. But if you’re reading, Jeff, you’re obviously missed by some old friends!

- Lisa H.

December 22, 2014 at 9:28 pm

Incredible as this may sound to those of us today who persist in viewing the company’s brief life as a sort of Camelot

I know what you meant, but my first thought was “You mean, it was a silly place?”

that time in his own life is one that O’Neill would rather forgot

Forget.

he become one of Infocom’s in-house testers.

Became. (having some tense problems here?)

Ballyhoo‘s own collection of freaks are less extreme

You’ve got an odd apostrophe there (an “ayn”, is it?). Also, I think you want “is”, to agree in number with “collection”.

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2014 at 6:51 am

Thanks! Fixed except for the Camelot thing, which I submit is your personal problem. ;)

- Lisa H.

December 24, 2014 at 1:45 am

Yeah, that was just tongue in cheek on my part. :)

- ZUrlocker

December 23, 2014 at 2:21 am

Great post. I always enjoy getting a broader understanding of how Interactive Fiction has evolved. It seems Ballyhoo had more to it than I had thought.

Would be great to hear from all the Infocom authors, whether they were enamored with the company or not. Or maybe especially if not. There’s an insider perspective that is invaluable to understanding the history and evolution.

As a minor point, I found the last sentence of the first paragraph (“In fact… of the 1980s.”) to be almost impossible to parse. Grammatically it may be correct, but I would definitely consider breaking it up and simplifying.

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2014 at 7:29 am

I think there’s a pretty good consensus already on the subject from just about everyone Jason interviewed: loved their colleagues; loved the wing of management represented by Joel Berez; hated the wings of management represented by Al Vezza and later by Bruce Davis of Activision, which unfortunately generally had a lot more say in the really big decisions than did Berez. The main variation is how *personally* they take Infocom’s management’s failings. This ranges from a shrug and a “well, everybody just did the best they could and we should all just leave the past in the past” to active, continuing anger and bitterness. In the case of those inclined more toward the latter, well, I’m obviously fairly obsessive about Infocom, but I don’t see a need to air dirty laundry just for the sake of it (not that I mean to imply that that was necessarily what you were suggesting).

And maybe it comes from having read too much Dickens, but I kind of like to use long sentence like that one from time to time. It’s one of the things that sets my writing apart — in a good way I’d like to think, but, as your reaction shows, mileages may definitely vary. ;)

- Rob

December 23, 2014 at 4:31 am

Joseph Merrick (not John), and George Mallory (not Hillary).

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2014 at 6:52 am

I was having some serious name problems, wasn’t I? Fixed, and thanks!

- Healy

December 23, 2014 at 7:04 am

“I’m such a sucker for it, in fact, that I dearly want Ballyhoo to be better than it is, to actually be the sad and beautiful work of interactive fiction that I sense it wants to be. I’ve occasionally overpraised it in the past for just that reason.”

So, you say you have a tendency to ballyhoo Ballyhoo?

(I’m so sorry.)

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2014 at 7:30 am

:)

- Dehumanizer

December 23, 2014 at 12:04 pm

Insert obligatory “great post, etc.” :)

Minor typo: “Perry Sim” should be “Perry Simm”.

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2014 at 12:17 pm

Thanks!

- Brian Moriarty

December 23, 2014 at 3:25 pm

Thanks for giving Ballyhoo the thoughtful look it deserves.

Jeff and I lived with a handful of other guys in a Concord farmhouse during the Infocom years. An enigmatic personality, private and intense, proud, hard-working, passionate, with the smoldering edge of a black Irishman. Irresistible to those who dared approach.

He was our Kerouac, Brando, Jones Very.

His two games are among the most interesting in the canon. Pity he abandoned the form and fell silent.

Happily, Jeff agreed to a substantial video interview for an upcoming Infocom multimedia project, taking his place in the history of that remarkable company.

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2014 at 8:58 pm

Really glad to hear that Jeff will be giving his perspective at last. And very interested to see this project you mention…

- Jason Scott

December 26, 2014 at 5:22 pm

Oh, great to hear! I’m assuming this is the project that was started along GET LAMP. If so, that thing is going to make GET LAMP’s take on Infocom look like a People magazine article, which is fantastic.

- Sniffnoy

December 23, 2014 at 6:36 pm

“Story responding to player” can get very annoying sometimes when the story responds in an arbitrary way (you found the princess, so they’ve finished building that bridge!) but as long as there’s at least some predictability or connection (maybe if I get the guy what he wants, he’ll go somewhere else, and maybe that will be where I need him to be) it’s not so bad…

Also, one writing nitpick: I think the phrase “disinterested and besotted detective” would be clearer if you replaced “disinterested” with “uninterested”; the other meaning of “disinterested” kind of competes here.

- Jimmy Maher

December 23, 2014 at 8:57 pm

Fair enough. Thanks!

- Duncan Stevens

December 23, 2014 at 10:57 pm

Another parser problem (spoiler):

One of the required commands in the lion cage is WHIP LION, by which the game means that you crack the whip. HIT THE LION WITH THE WHIP elicits an entirely different response.

- Mark Ricard

April 8, 2015 at 5:35 pm

Very informative review. I read a interview where you praised this game and to honest was a bit disappointed by it because some of the puzzles were really obscure. Reading this makes your views more understandable. The mood of the story just seemed cliched to me and it seems that is what you responded to the most about the game. Perhaps that predicates ones enjoyment of Ballyhoo.

Nord and Bert was both a more interesting and original game. Have you written about it yet?

- Jonathan Blask

August 2, 2015 at 5:37 pm

Can’t believe I missed this one. I covered “Ballyhoo” on my Old-School Transcripts site. For the most part, I think I uncovered most of its gems (although it has been brought to my attention that I missed the response to >TAKE SAWDUST ):

http://oldschooltranscripts.blogspot.com/2013/04/ballyhoo-oneill-infocom.html

- Adele

January 25, 2016 at 1:16 am

I am a long-time reader, and I always find your asides and details interesting and worthy of further research (note: I am a librarian, and read your blog during the long hours at the reference desk.)

I tried to read more about Jeff O’Neill, and I found it interesting that there isn’t even a Wikipedia snippet on him. Instead, there are many features on a professional hockey player who shares the same name with the same exact spelling. It’s interesting to me that this man with such an important role in the history of modern computing successfully remains anonymous; aside from his own wishes, it seems like armchair historians and fans would have put more information out there. Thanks for the interesting little breadcrumbs that always make me delve deeper into the history.

And I suppose it goes without saying that the full article is great, outside of the little details that I like to dig up. Thank you for enlightening my reference shifts!

Out of the Frying Pan…
December 29, 2014

Activision, as embodied by Jim Levy (left), weds Infocom, as embodied by Joel Berez (right).

Activision’s first couple of years as a home-computer publisher were, for all their spirit of innovation and occasional artistic highs, mildly disappointing in commercial terms. While all of their games of this period were by no means flops, the only outsize hit among them was David Crane’s Ghostbusters. Activision was dogged by their own history; even selling several hundred thousand copies of Ghostbusters could feel anticlimactic when compared with the glory days of 1980 to 1983, when million-sellers were practically routine. And the company dragged along behind it more than psychological vestiges of that history. On the plus side, Jim Levy still had a substantial war chest made up of the profits socked away during those years with which to work. But on the minus side, the organization he ran was still too big, too unwieldy in light of the vastly reduced number of units they were moving these days in this completely different market. Levy was forced to authorize a painful series of almost quarterly layoffs as the big sales explosions stubbornly refused to come and Activison’s balance sheets remained in the red. Then came the departure of Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead to form the lean, mean Accolade, and that company’s galling instant profitability. Activision found themselves cast in the role of the bloated Atari of old, Jim Levy himself in that of the hated Ray Kassar. Nobody liked it one bit.

Levy and his board therefore adopted a new strategy for the second half of 1985: they would use some of that slowly dwindling war chest to acquire a whole stable of smaller developers, who would nevertheless continue to release games on their own imprints to avoid market saturation. The result would be more and more diverse games, separated into lines that would immediately identify for consumers just what type of game each title really was. In short order, Activision scooped up Gamestar, a developer of sports games. They also bought Creative Software, another tiny but stalwart industry survivor. Creative would specialize in home-oriented productivity software; ever since Brøderbund had hit it big with Bank Street Writer and The Print Shop publishers like Activision had been dreaming of duplicating their success. And then along came Infocom.

Joel Berez happened to run into Levy, accidentally or on purpose, during a business trip to Chicago in December of 1985. By this time Infocom’s travails were an open secret in the industry. Levy, by all accounts a genuine fan of Infocom’s games and, as Activision games like Portal attest, a great believer in the concept of interactive literature, immediately made it clear that Activision would be very interested in acquiring Infocom. Levy’s was literally the only offer on the table. After it dawned on them that Infocom alone could not possibly make a success out of Cornerstone, Al Vezza and his fellow business-oriented peers on Infocom’s board had for some time clung to the pipe dream of selling out to a big business publisher like Lotus, WordPerfect, or even Microsoft. But by now it was becoming clear even to them that absolutely no one cared a whit about Cornerstone, that the only value in Infocom was the games and the company’s still-sterling reputation as a game developer. However, those qualities, while by no means negligible, were outweighed in the eyes of most potential purchasers by the mountain of debt under which Infocom now labored, as well as by the worrisome shrinking sales of the pure text adventures released recently both by Infocom and their competitors. These were also very uncertain times for the industry in general, with many companies focused more on simple survival than expansion. Only Levy claimed to be able to sell his board on the idea of an Infocom acquisition. For Infocom, the choice was shaping up to be a stark one indeed: Activision subsidiary or bankruptcy. As Dave Lebling wryly said when asked his opinion on the acquisition, “What is a drowning man’s opinion of a life preserver?”

Levy was as good as his word. He convinced Activision’s board — some, especially in a year or two, might prefer to say “rammed the scheme through” — and on February 19, 1986, the two boards signed an agreement in principle for Activision to acquire Infocom by giving approximately $2.4 million in Activision stock to Infocom’s stockholders and assuming the company’s $6.8 million in debt. This was, for those keeping score, a pittance compared to what Simon & Schuster had been willing to pay barely a year before. But, what with their mountain of debt and flagging sales, Infocom’s new bargaining position wasn’t exactly strong; Simon & Schuster was now unwilling to do any deal at all, having already firmly rejected Vezza and Berez’s desperate, humiliating attempts to reopen the subject. As it was, Infocom considered themselves pretty lucky to get what they did; Levy could have driven a much harder bargain had he wanted to. And so Activision’s lawyers and accountants went to work to finalize things, and a few months later Infocom, Inc., officially ceased to exist. That fateful day was June 13, 1986, almost exactly seven years after a handful of MIT hackers had first gotten together with a vague intention to do “something with microcomputers.” It was also Friday the Thirteenth.

Still, even the most superstitious amongst Infocom’s staff could see little immediate ground for worry. If they had to give up their independence, it was hard to imagine a better guy to answer to than Jim Levy. He just “got” Infocom in a way that Al Vezza, for one, never had. He understood not only what the games were all about but also the company’s culture, and he seemed perfectly happy just to let both continue on as they were. During the due-diligence phase of the acquisition, Levy visited Infocom’s offices for a guided tour conducted, as one of his last official acts at Infocom, by an Al Vezza who visibly wanted nothing more by this time than to put this whole disappointing episode of his life behind him and return to the familiarity of MIT. In the process of duly demonstrating a series of games in progress, he came to Steve Meretzky’s next project, a risque science-fiction farce (later succinctly described by Infocom’s newsletter as “Hitchhiker’s Guide with sex”) called Leather Goddesses of Phobos. “Of course, that’s not necessarily the final name,” muttered Vezza with embarrassment. “What? I wouldn’t call it anything else!” laughed a delighted Levy, to almost audible sighs of relief from the staffers around him.

Levy not only accepted but joined right in with the sort of cheerful insanity that had always made Vezza so uncomfortable. He cemented Infocom’s loyalty via his handling of the “InfoWedding” staffers threw for him and Joel Berez, who took over once again as Infocom’s top manager following Vezza’s unlamented departure. A description of the blessed nuptials appeared in Infocom’s newsletter.

In a dramatic affirmation of combinatorial spirit, Activision President James H. Levy and Infocom President Joel M. Berez were merged in a moving ceremony presided over by InfoRabbi Stuart W. Galleywitz. Infocommies cheered, participated in responsive readings from Hackers (written by Steven Levy — no relation to Jim), and threw rice at the beaming CEOs.

Berez read a tone poem drawn from the purple prose of several interactive-fiction stories, and Levy responded with a (clean) limerick.

The bride wore a veil made from five yards of nylon net, and carried artificial flowers. Both bride and groom wore looks of bemused surprise.

After a honeymoon at Aragain Falls, the newly merged couple will maintain their separate product-development and marketing facilities in Mountain View, California, and Cambridge, Massachusetts (i.e., we’ll still be the Infocom you know and love).

Queried about graphics in interactive-fiction stories, or better parsers in Little Computer People, the happy couple declined comment, but smiled enigmatically.

Soon after, Levy submitted to a gently mocking “Gruer’s Profile” (a play on a long-running advertising series by Dewar’s whiskey) prepared for the newsletter:

Hobby: Collecting software-development companies.

Latest Book Read: The Ballyhoo hint book.

Latest Accomplishment: Finding foster homes for all the Little Computer People.

Favorite Infocom Game: Cornerstone.

Why I Do What I Do: Alimony.

Quote: “People often mistake me for Bruce Willis.”

Profile: Charismatic. A real motivator. Looks great in a limousine.

His Drink: “Gruer’s Dark,” right out of a canteen. “Its taste blends perfectly with the sense of satisfaction I feel in knowing that I am now the kingpin of interactive fiction.”

Levy seemed to go out of his way to make the Infocom folks feel respected and comfortable within his growing Activision family. He was careful, for instance, never to refer to this acquisition as an acquisition or, God forbid, a buy-out. It was always a “merger” of apparent equals. The recently departed Marc Blank, who kept in close touch with his old colleagues and knew Levy from his time in the industry, calls him today a “great guy.” Brian Moriarty considered him “fairly benign” (mostly harmless?), with a gratifying taste for “quirky, interesting games”: “He seemed like a good match. It looked like we were going to be okay.”

This period immediately after the Activision acquisition would prove to be an Indian summer of sorts between a very difficult period just passed and another very difficult one to come. In some ways the Imps had it better than ever. With Vezza and his business-oriented allies now all gone, Infocom was clearly and exclusively a game-development shop; all of the cognitive dissonance brought on by Cornerstone was at long last in the past. Now everyone could just concentrate on making the best interactive fiction they possibly could, knowing as they did so that any money they made could go back into making still better, richer virtual worlds. Otherwise, things looked largely to be business as usual. The first game Infocom published as an Activision subsidiary was Moriarty’s Trinity, in my opinion simply the best single piece of work they would ever manage, and one which everyone inside Infocom recognized even at the time as one of their more “special” games. As omens go, that seemed as good as they come, certainly more than enough to offset any concerns about that unfortunate choice of Friday the Thirteenth.

Activision’s marketing people did almost immediately offer some suggestions — and largely very sensible ones — to Infocom. Some of these Mike Dornbrook’s marketing people greeted with open arms; they were things that they had been lobbying for to the Imps, usually without much success, for years now. Most notably, Activision strongly recommended that Infocom take a hard look at a back catalog that featured some of the most beloved classics in the young culture of computer gaming and think about how to utilize the goodwill and nostalgia they engendered. The Zork brand in particular, still by far the most recognizable in Infocom’s arsenal, had been, in defiance of all marketing wisdom, largely ignored since the original trilogy concluded back in 1982. Now Infocom prepared a pair of deluxe limited-edition slip-cased compilations of the Zork and Enchanter trilogies designed not only to give newcomers a convenient point of entry but also, and almost more importantly, to appeal to the collecting instinct that motivated (and still motivates) so many of their fans. Infocom had long since learned that many of their most loyal customers didn’t generally get all that far in the games at all. Some didn’t even play them all that much. Many just liked the idea of them, liked to collect them and see them standing there on the shelf. Put an old game in a snazzy new package and many of them would buy it all over again.

Infocom also got to work at long last — in fact, literally years after they should have in Dornbrook’s view — on a new game to bear the Zork name. While they were at it, they assigned Meretzky to bring back Infocom’s single most beloved character, the cuddly robot Floyd, in the sequel to Planetfall that that game’s finale had promised back in 1983 — just as soon as he was done with Leather Goddesses, that is, a game for which Infocom, in deference to the time-honored maxim that Sex Sells, also had very high hopes.

The Infocom/Activision honeymoon period and the spirit of creative and commercial renewal it engendered would last barely six months. The chummy dialogue between these two offices on opposite coasts would likewise devolve quickly into decrees and surly obedience — or, occasionally, covert or overt defiance. But that’s for a future article. For now we’ll leave Infocom to enjoy their Indian summer of relative content, and begin to look at the games that this period produced.

(Largely the usual Infocom sources this time out: Jason Scott’s Get Lamp interviews and Down From the Top of Its Game. The Dave Lebling quote comes from an interview with Adventure Classic Gaming. The anecdote about Vezza and Levy comes from Steve Meretzky’s interview for Game Design, Theory & Practice by Richard Rouse III.

Patreon supporters: this article is a bit shorter than the norm simply because that’s the length that it “wanted” to be. Because of that, I’m making it a freebie. In the future I’ll continue to make articles of less than 2500 words free.)

Comments
12 Responses

- Alex Smith

December 29, 2014 at 7:03 pm

Great article as always! I really have no comments on this piece, which captures the spirit of the “merger” quite well; I just wanted to offer a word about where this whole thing is inevitably going in another couple of posts.

In the course of my own research, I am probably the only person that has interviewed both Jim Levy and Bruce Davis (heck, I may be the only person that has ever done a historical retrospective interview with Davis about Activision). Davis is — to be polite — a controversial figure in interactive fiction circles, so I wanted to preemptively say a word or two before you turn your expert attention to that topic. I can, of course, offer no sourcing on any of this right now, but I am not asking for the inclusion of specific facts in your post; I just want to set a general mood.

According to our talk, Levy really did see the Activision-Infocom merger as a partnership. His thought was that Activision had some of the best game designers in the business (people like David Crane and Steve Cartwright) and Infocom had some of the best writers in the business, and by joining forces, they could move interactive entertainment forward together. He never planned to isolate Infocom as a separate entity doing its own thing. He knew as well as anyone that interactive fiction was the past, not the future, but he did believe the implementors could help lead us into that future hand in hand with Activision game designers. Based on your characterizations in previous posts, we might see this as Activision 2.5, or even 3.0.

I think this is the point Davis failed to grasp. Levy tasked him with integrating Infocom with Activision shortly before the management change, but “integration” to Davis just meant standardizing business practices, production, sales, and all that jazz. He had no desire to see Infocom fail (despite what all the implementors seem to think), but if Infocom was going to succeed, it would have to do so on the backs of its own products. Rather than forming a partnership, Davis created a parent-subsidiary relationship. Too wounded by the losses on Cornerstone and the decline in sales of interactive fiction, Infocom was unable to migrate to a graphical platform in time to catch the new wave of adventure products and fell apart.

Would Levy’s plan have worked? The answer is maybe. It’s certainly a compelling idea. However, with both Activision and Infocom running at a loss, one does wonder if Activision could have really made a meaningful investment to create this dream. Certainly Dick Lehrberg, another interview subject who was VP of product development for Activision at the time, viewed the acquisition as a mistake and felt it would have been better to collaborate with Infocom without buying the whole thing.

In my interview with Davis, he comes across as a well-meaning guy faced with a volatile market that made some good choices (bringing Activision into the NES market, pushing CD-ROM with the Manhole, developing a close relationship with Sega) and some bad choices (focusing productivity software development on the IIGS and Hypercard, supporting the Atari market just a hair too long) and just did not quite know how Infocom fit into his plans (whether those plans were a good idea is a whole other topic beyond the scope of this comment). Therefore, I feel some of the extreme demonizing of him is a little unfair, though he certainly still needs to be held accountable for his mistakes. You have always taken a balanced look at the industry, so I trust you will do so when it comes to this thorny topic as well.

- Jimmy Maher

December 30, 2014 at 7:29 am

Thanks for this.

Some of Levy’s (apparent) comments to you do strike me as perhaps Monday-morning quarterbacking, always a danger with personal interviews. It’s a bit hard for me to picture this as a merger of great writers being paired with great designers because a) none of Activision’s designers had ever worked with narrative-oriented games and b) the Imps themselves were actually pretty great designers in their own rights and, with the exception of Brian Moriarty and perhaps Jeff O’Neill, really only competent writers. Certainly this is nothing like the expectations Infocom themselves had of the merger (which may point to part of the eventual problems that would develop, but there you go).

Bruce Davis has become along with Al Vezza one of the two great villains of Infocom’s history. Unlike Vezza, for whom some of the Imps express a certain sympathy and understanding as for a guy just pursuing the wrong dream in the wrong company, virtually no one can even mention Davis’s name without obvious rancor. To describe the relationship that developed as toxic is almost an understatement. In my experience, it almost requires two unreasonable parties to reduce a relationship to that level. While most of the materials to which I have access definitely do tell the story of the Infocom/Activision relationship from the point of view of the former, I’m well aware that there are two sides to every story. I’ll certainly try to do due diligence to Activision’s side. What was Activision *supposed* to do with this money-losing maker of text adventures in an era when fewer and fewer people were buying text adventures? And there was definitely a side of Infocom that just Didn’t Play Well With Others.

That said, it wasn’t Infocom alone who saw Davis as a soulless personality with a certain contempt for Activision’s customers. David Crane, who left Activision almost immediately after the Davis reign began, also retains an intense dislike for him. He definitely had a knack for rubbing people the wrong way…

I may contact you privately, if that’s okay, to get your insights before writing more on this history (which will actually be several months down the road).

- Alex Smith

December 30, 2014 at 3:31 pm

Sure, feel free to contact me. As for Levy, I agree that a true merging of these different cultures would have been a stretch to implement (honestly, Activision never leveraged Gamestar as well as it could have in sports and that was a less complicated culture shock), but I believe the sentiment. I thought your Activision 2.0 article really captured Levy’s thoughts on the computer game market well and jived with the views he expressed in our interview. He saw Activision as a trendsetter and tastemaker and wanted to be on the cutting edge artistically. Of course, the flip side of that was that he ignored both military simulations and CRPGs (famously calling the Bard’s Tale, which could have been an Activision product, “nicheware for nerds” according to Dick Lehrberg), which is where the real money was in mid-1980s computer gaming. I believe integrating the companies would have been incredibly difficult, which is probably why Davis never did it, but I am fairly convinced that’s what Levy wanted based on his track record, general philosophy, and the merger spin during the acquisition itself. Obviously the board was not so enchanted by this vision in the end.

As for Davis and Crane, Crane usually talks about his dislike for the creative direction of the company, but in one interview he mentioned a salary dispute. This is how Davis characterized it as well without any prompting. Davis thought Crane’s salary was high for a struggling company and wanted to go to an incentive-based scheme. Crane felt insulted as a founder and successful designer. I believe that was a misstep on Davis’s part. There is no doubt Davis rubbed some of the creative people the wrong way.

- He who shall not be named

May 7, 2015 at 7:54 pm

Are you serious?

Davis freaking SUED Infocom’s officers while they continued to work there, for overstating the “good will” value of the company.

He basically said “they shouldn’t take it personally.” He didn’t think suing Berez while Joel was trying to run the company, would effect how Infocom worked.

I was there and it had to be the most bizarre thing I ever observed in the game business.

To Infocom’s credit they produced some beautiful titles during this period (Shogun comes to mind) but Davis’s bad opinion on all things Infocom ruined it all.

Bobby Kotick gets a lot of heat, but at least he saw the value in Infocom, too late to save the company as Bruce had already shut it down by then.

Davis engaged in so much recreational litigation that it would come back to bite him and almost kill the company, in regards to the Baer patent judgement in 1990.

In the most ironic of ironies, Activision ‘discovered’ CYAN in 1988, published their first two games, then Davis stiffed them on payments in 1990.

They, of course, ended the relationship … went to Broderbund, and released MYST, the most successful computer game of it’s day.

Lack-o-Vision for sure.

- Bernie

July 10, 2016 at 12:39 am

” His thought was that Activision had some of the best game designers … and Infocom had some of the best writers … ”

“Would Levy’s plan have worked? ”

– Well, maybe not for Activision in 1986-87 but Lucasfilm proved the point in 1990 with Loom, which was as graphical and musical as adventure games get and was authored by Brian Moriarty, famous Infocom veteran, aided by a team that included graphic-adventure maestros Gary Winnick and Steve Purcell.

Had Levy been given more time and money, he surely would have managed get the Implementor’s to fully embrace the new adventure gaming paradigm. Davis could have adopted a management style similar to Microprose’s, where they “milked” a catalog of conventional titles but also gave Sid Meier freedom to create true classics. The Garriott family at Origin did something similar endlessly repackaging old hits and publishing lackluster new titles to give Richard and his team latitude to craft the next Ultima, which, as dictated by company policy, had to break new CRPG ground and substantially expand upon its predecessor’s gameplay.

- Jason Scott

December 30, 2014 at 9:07 am

Good luck renovating Bruce Davis’ reputation as anything but a lawyer who was a harbinger of how far the games industry would sink, Alex.

- Alex Smith

December 30, 2014 at 4:56 pm

Not to get too far off the topic of this thread, but if there is a thesis that has been developing in my own work, its that there is an inherent tension between the creativity required to create an excellent game and the business acumen necessary to make a game successful and that when either side dominates the other, it creates problems.

Activision represents both sides of this extreme. During the Activision 2.0 years, Jim Levy fostered great creativity at the company with games like Little Computer People, Alter Ego, and Portal. These were all avant garde products pushing the envelop creatively, but were generally sales disappointments. Meanwhile, Activision missed the boat on CRPGs, military simulations, and graphical adventures, which is where the real money resided. As a result, the company continued to post losses and never fully recovered from the crash.

The company required a change, and the board made one. Davis, however, swung the company too far in the other direction. He took a “singles and doubles” approach to the market, releasing products in popular genres that were low risk with a decent, though not exceptional return. This brought Activision back to profitability (barely), but at the cost of a lot of creativity. Activision needed to be more in tune with the market to remain a going concern, but it is a shame that the majority of the product line became very pedestrian. Most of the company’s output from this period is forgettable, which runs counter to the reputation of the Activision brand in other time periods. I consider that unfortunate, and Davis certainly deserves his share of the blame.

People tend to overlook a few things about Davis, however. First, the company did turn a profit after sixteen consecutive quarters of losses. Now to be fair, Davis achieved this by doing a final big writeoff, which Levy could have technically done too, so that’s not quite as impressive as it sounds. Still, his company released products people were interested in buying, and that is something a publicly traded company needs to do even if its not always artistically palatable.

Second, he did foster innovation in certain areas. He was the person who saw The Manhole in a catalog and decided to sign the product to get Activision into CD-ROM, which makes him an early adopter. He is also the person who recognized the franchise potential of Shanghai and asked for a sequel with new game variants. He took very few risks in games, but he was not completely against pushing boundaries.

Third, there is a lot of negativity about his decision to get into business/productivity products, but as this very blog post points out, it was Levy that started that shift, not Davis. It was not unreasonable for a software company in the late 1980s to want to tap into the productivity market, where Broederbund had a lot of success, as did EA for a time with Deluxe Paint. Activision actually had some innovative products in this area, including one that was PowerPoint before PowerPoint, but Davis made a decision to concentrate on underserved, graphical platforms, the Apple IIGS and Hypercard, which failed miserably and took Activision’s products with them. Clearly, Davis read the market poorly.

Now, of course, Activision is led by Bobby Kotick. You probably will not like me saying this, but Kotick’s Activision represents creativity and business largely in balance. Yes, much of what Activision does is sequel and retread, but every few years there is a Tony Hawk, or a Modern Warfare, or a Skylanders, or a Warlords of Draenor that does innovate and move the market forward (even though the company then tends to iterate to death, which killed the Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero franchises). In short, Activision makes boatloads of money, releases games enjoyed by millions, and occasionally releases something cutting edge. That’s not a perfect system by any means, but it is the reason why the company is still around today when most of its early competitors are not.

I know that personally I wish every game that appeared was an artistic triumph with an interesting story and/or game mechanics. I purchase very few sequels and retreads. I also understand, however, that game development is expensive, and it’s those sequels and retreads that fund the games I like. Davis tried to strike a balance between creativity and financial success, but he chased too many of the wrong platforms and alienated some of his best creative talent along the way. This ultimately made his tenure unsuccessful. Therefore, he was a well-meaning executive that read the market wrong, not “a harbinger of how far the games industry would sink.” This is the kind of hyperbole I am hoping Jimmy will avoid.

- Jimmy Maher

December 30, 2014 at 5:31 pm

Activision under Levy actually was fairly active in graphic adventures, releasing Tracer Sanction, Mindshadow, Borrowed Time, Murder on the Mississippi, and Tass Times in Tonetown over the span of just a couple of years. But otherwise, yeah, I don’t really disagree.

One other problem they had was with fairly fundamental quality control, which you can dump into the “business” side or make a category of its own as you will. Many of their games were buggy and/or just not that playable, the incomplete germs of what could have great games. Murder on the Mississippi, for instance, was all but unsolvable because the programmer forgot to render the graphic of an item vital for solving one of its puzzles. The fact that nobody caught this tells me that, as was depressingly typical of adventure games at this time, absolutely no one at Activision had even *played* the game all the way through before shoving it out the door. People like Levy who tried to draw direct parallels between, say, games and music often failed to account for the fact that games absolutely *need* heaps and heaps of polishing, no matter how brilliant they are conceptually. Spontaneity as we know it from music just doesn’t have an equivalent in game design. A Husker Du album might actually be the better for some tape hiss and general sloppiness in the production and performance. An equivalent game is literally unplayable.

This was one area where Infocom was the class of the industry. Their determination to sell no game before its time, and to test the hell out of each and every title and take testers’ feedback *seriously*, is perhaps the biggest reason that their games stand up so well today, while others from the talented, well-meaning folks at Synapse, Telarium, and elsewhere come off so poorly in comparison.

- Jason Scott

December 30, 2014 at 7:16 pm

In the interest in not derailing Jimmy’s blog comments, I’m not contributing further to this thread.

- William Volk

May 7, 2015 at 10:15 pm

It was myself and Sherry Whitely who championed “The Manhole” which, to Davis’ credit … approved.

I was hired out of Aegis in 1988 to help with the technology image of Activision, and Manhole and Manhole CD-ROM were a big part of.

I’ll leave it to others to reveal how Activision lost Cyan.

- William Volk

May 7, 2015 at 10:18 pm

Bobby deserves a lot of credit, for letting us build “The Return to Zork” after the failure of LGOP2.

This turned out to be a wise decision.

I believe I’m the only senior management person who survived the Davis->Kotick transition … partly because I knew Bobby during the mid ’80’s when I was at Aegis.

- Amasius

December 31, 2014 at 7:34 am

That’s a pity, Jason. This discussion is fascinating and while it may be a derail from the actual post it certainly is exactly what Jimmys Blog as a whole is about.

I guess you disagree with Alex and don’t want to start a controversy but thats unavoidable when writing about the past. People remember things and judge them differently. Nothing wrong with that as long as all participants try to keep it civil.

Trinity
January 7, 2015

During 1983, the year that Brian Moriarty first conceived the idea of a text adventure about the history of atomic weapons, the prospect of nuclear annihilation felt more real, more terrifyingly imaginable to average Americans, than it had in a long, long time. The previous November had brought the death of longtime Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and the ascension to power of Yuri Andropov. Brezhnev had been a corrupt, self-aggrandizing old rascal, but also a known, relatively safe quantity, content to pin medals on his own chest and tool around in his collection of foreign cars while the Soviet Union settled into a comfortable sort of stagnate stability around him. Andropov, however, was to the extent he was known at all considered a bellicose Party hardliner. He had enthusiastically played key roles in the brutal suppression of both the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the 1968 Prague Spring.

Ronald Reagan, another veteran Cold Warrior, welcomed Andropov into office with two of the most famous speeches of his Presidency. On March 8, 1983, in a speech before the American Society of Evangelicals, he declared the Soviet Union “an evil empire.” Echoing Hannah Arendt’s depiction of Adolf Eichmann, he described Andropov and his colleagues as “quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice,” committing outrage after outrage “in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices.” Having thus drawn an implicit parallel between the current Soviet leadership and the Nazis against which most of them had struggled in the bloodiest war in history, Reagan dropped some big news on the world two weeks later. At the end of a major televised address on the need for engaging in the largest peacetime military buildup in American history, he announced a new program that would soon come to be known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars: a network of satellites equipped with weaponry to “intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reach our own territory or that of our allies.” While researching and building SDI, which would “take years, probably decades, of effort on many fronts” with “failures and setbacks just as there will be successes and breakthroughs” — the diction was oddly reminiscent of Kennedy’s Moon challenge — the United States would in the meantime be deploying a new fleet of Pershing II missiles to West Germany, capable of reaching Moscow in less than ten minutes whilst literally flying under the radar of all of the Soviet Union’s existing early-warning systems. To the Soviet leadership, it looked like the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse, with Reagan in the role of Khrushchev.

Indeed, almost from the moment that Reagan had took office, the United States had begun playing chicken with the Soviet Union, deliberately twisting the tail of the Russian bear via feints and probes in the border regions. “A squadron would fly straight at Soviet airspace and their radars would light up and units would go on alert. Then at the last minute the squadron would peel off and go home,” remembers former Undersecretary of State William Schneider. Even as Reagan was making his Star Wars speech, one of the largest of these deliberate provocations was in progress. Three aircraft-carrier battle groups along with a squadron of B-52 bombers all massed less than 500 miles from Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, home of many vital Soviet military installations. If the objective was to make the Soviet leadership jittery — leaving aside for the moment the issue of whether making a country with millions of kilotons of thermonuclear weapons at its disposal jittery is really a good thing — it certainly succeeded. “Every Soviet official one met was running around like a chicken without a head — sometimes talking in conciliatory terms and sometimes talking in the most ghastly and dire terms of real hot war — of fighting war, of nuclear war,” recalls James Buchan, at the time a correspondent for the Financial Times, of his contemporaneous visit to Moscow. Many there interpreted the speeches and the other provocations as setting the stage for premeditated nuclear war.

And so over the course of the year the two superpowers blundered closer and closer to the brink of the unthinkable on the basis of an almost incomprehensible mutual misunderstanding of one another’s national characters and intentions. Reagan and his cronies still insisted on taking the Marxist rhetoric to which the Soviet Union paid lip service at face value when in reality any serious hopes for fomenting a worldwide revolution of the proletariat had ended with Khrushchev, if not with Stalin. As the French demographer Emmanuel Todd wrote in 1976, the Soviet Union’s version of Marxism had long since been transformed “into a collection of high-sounding but irrelevant rhetoric.” Even the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, interpreted by not just the Reagan but also the Carter administration as a prelude to further territorial expansion into the Middle East, was actually a reactionary move founded, like so much the Soviet Union did during this late era of its history, on insecurity rather than expansionist bravado: the new Afghan prime minister, Hafizullah Amin, was making noises about abandoning his alliance with the Soviet Union in favor of one with the United States, raising the possibility of an American client state bordering on the Soviet Union’s soft underbelly. To imagine that this increasingly rickety artificial construct of a nation, which couldn’t even feed itself despite being in possession of vast tracts of some of the most arable land on the planet, was capable of taking over the world was bizarre indeed. Meanwhile, to imagine that the people around him would actually allow Reagan to launch an unprovoked first nuclear strike even if he was as unhinged as some in the Soviet leadership believed him to be is to fundamentally misunderstand America and Americans.

On September 1, 1983, this mutual paranoia took its toll in human lives.  Korean Air Lines Flight 007, on its way from New York City to Seoul, drifted hundreds of miles off-course due to the pilot’s apparent failure to change an autopilot setting. It flew over the very same Kamchatka Peninsula the United States had been so aggressively probing. Deciding enough was enough, the Soviet air-defense commander in charge scrambled fighters and made the tragic decision to shoot the plane down without ever confirming that it really was the American spy plane he suspected it to be. All 269 people aboard were killed. Soviet leadership then made the colossally awful decision to deny that they had shot down the plane; then to admit that, well, okay, maybe they had it shot it down, but it had all been an American trick to make their country look bad. If Flight 007 had been an American plot, the Soviets could hardly have played better into the Americans’ hands. Reagan promptly pronounced the downing “an act of barbarism” and “a crime against nature,” and the rest of the world nodded along, thinking maybe there was some truth to this Evil Empire business after all. Throughout the fall dueling search parties haunted the ocean around the Kamchatka Peninsula, sometimes aggressively shadowing one another in ways that could easily lead to real shooting warfare. The Soviets found the black box first, then quickly squirreled it away and denied its existence; it clearly confirmed that Flight 007 was exactly the innocent if confused civilian airliner the rest of the world was saying it had been.

The superpowers came as close to the brink of war as they ever would — arguably closer than during the much more famed Cold War flash point of the Cuban Missile Crisis — that November. Despite a “frenzied” atmosphere of paranoia in Moscow, which some diplomats described as “pre-war,” the Reagan administration made the decision to go ahead with another provocation in the form of Able Archer 83, an elaborately realistic drill simulating the command-and-control process leading up to a real nuclear strike. The Soviets had long suspected that the West might attempt to launch a real attack under the cover of a drill. Now, watching Able Archer unfold, with many in the Soviet military claiming that it likely represented the all-out nuclear strike the world had been dreading for so long, the leaderless Politburo squabbled over what to do while a dying Andropov lay in hospital. Nuclear missiles were placed on hair-trigger alert in their silos; aircraft loaded with nuclear weapons stood fueled and ready on their tarmacs. One itchy trigger finger or overzealous politician over the course of the ten-day drill could have resulted in apocalypse. Somehow, it didn’t happen.

On November 20, nine days after the conclusion of Able Archer, the ABC television network aired a first-run movie called The Day After. Directed by Nicholas Meyer, fresh off the triumph of Star Trek II, it told the story of a nuclear attack on the American heartland of Kansas. If anything, it soft-pedaled the likely results of such an attack; as a disclaimer in the end credits noted, a real attack would likely be so devastating that there wouldn’t be enough people left alive and upright to make a story. Still, it was brutally uncompromising for a program that aired on national television during the family-friendly hours of prime time. Viewed by more than 100 million shocked and horrified people, The Day After became one of the landmark events in American television history and a landmark of social history in its own right. Many of the viewers, myself among them, were children. I can remember having nightmares about nuclear hellfire and radiation sickness for weeks afterward. The Day After seemed a fitting capstone to such a year of brinksmanship and belligerence. The horrors of nuclear war were no longer mere abstractions. They felt palpably real.

This, then, was the atmosphere in which Brian Moriarty first conceived of Trinity, a text adventure about the history of atomic weaponry and a poetic meditation on its consequences. Moriarty was working during 1983 for A.N.A.L.O.G. magazine, editing articles and writing reviews and programs for publication as type-in listings. Among these were two text adventures, Adventure in the Fifth Dimension and Crash Dive!, that did what they could within the limitations of their type-in format. Trinity, however, needed more, and so it went unrealized during Moriarty’s time at A.N.A.L.O.G. But it was still on his mind during the spring of 1984, when Konstantin Chernenko was settling in as Andropov’s replacement — one dying, idea-bereft old man replacing another, a metaphor for the state of the Soviet Union if ever there was one — and Moriarty was settling in as the newest addition to Infocom’s Micro Group. And it was still there six months later, when the United States and the Soviet Union were agreeing to resume arms-control talks the following year — Reagan had become more open to the possibility following his own viewing of The Day After, thus making Meyer’s film one of the few with a real claim to having directly influenced the course of history — and Moriarty was agreeing to do an entry-level Zorkian fantasy as his first work as an Imp.

Immediately upon completion of his charming Wishbringer in May of 1985, Moriarty was back to his old obsession, which looked at last to have a chance of coming to fruition. The basic structure of the game had long been decided: a time-jumping journey through a series of important events in atomic history that would begin with you escaping a near-future nuclear strike on London and end with you at the first test of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945 — the Trinity test. In a single feverish week he dashed off the opening vignette in London’s Kensington Gardens, a lovely if foreboding sequence filled with mythic signifiers of the harrowing journey that awaits you. He showed it first to Stu Galley, one of the least heralded of the Imps but one possessed of a quiet passion for interactive fiction’s potential and a wisdom about its production that made him a favorite source of advice among his peers. “If you can sustain this, you’ll have something,” said Galley in his usual understated way.

Thus encouraged, Moriarty could lobby in earnest for his ambitious, deeply serious atomic-age tragedy. Here he caught a lucky break: Wishbringer became a substantial hit, Infocom’s last game to crack 100,000 in sales. While no one would ever claim that the Imps were judged solely on the commercial performance of their games, it certainly couldn’t hurt to have written a hit when your next proposal came up for review. The huge success of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, for instance, probably had a little something to do with Infocom’s decision to green-light Steve Meretzky’s puzzleless experiment A Mind Forever Voyaging. Similarly, this chance to develop the commercially questionable Trinity can be seen, at least partially, as a reward to Moriarty for providing Infocom with one of the few bright spots of a pretty gloomy 1985. They even allowed him to make it the second game (after A Mind Forever Voyaging) written for the new Interactive Fiction Plus virtual machine that allowed twice the content of the normal system at the expense of abandoning at least half the platforms for which Infocom’s games were usually sold. Moriarty would need every bit of the extra space to fulfill his ambitions.

The marker at the site of the Trinity test, as photographed by Moriarty on his 1985 visit.

He plunged enthusiastically into his research, amassing a bibliography some 40 items long that he would eventually publish, in a first and only for Infocom, in the game’s manual. He also reached out personally to a number of scientists and historians for guidance, most notably Ferenc Szasz of the University of Albuquerque, who had just written a book about the Trinity test. That July he took a trip to New Mexico to visit Szasz as well as Los Alamos National Laboratory and other sites associated with early atomic-weapons research, including the Trinity site itself on the fortieth anniversary of that fateful day. His experience of the Land of Enchantment affected him deeply, and in turn affected the game he was writing. In an article for Infocom’s newsletter, he described the weird Strangelovean enthusiasm he found for these dreadful gadgets at Los Alamos with an irony that echoes that of “The Illustrated Story of the Atom Bomb,” the gung-ho comic that would accompany the game itself.

“The Lab” is Los Alamos National Laboratory, announced by a sign that stretches like a CinemaScope logo along the fortified entrance. One of the nation’s leading centers of nuclear-weapons research. The birthplace of the atomic bomb.

The Bradbury Museum occupies a tiny corner in the acres of buildings, parking lots, and barbed-wire fences that comprise the Laboratory. Its collection includes scale models of the very latest in nuclear warheads and guided missiles. You can watch on a computer as animated neutrons blast heavy isotopes to smithereens. The walls are adorned with spectacular color photographs of fireballs and mushroom clouds, each respectfully mounted and individually titled, like great works of art.

I watched a teacher explain a neutron-bomb exhibit to a group of schoolchildren. The exhibit consists of a diagram with two circles. One circle represents the blast radius of a conventional nuclear weapon; a shaded ring in the middle shows the zone of lethal radiation. The other circle shows the relative effects of a neutron bomb. The teacher did her best to point out that the neutron bomb’s “blast” radius is smaller, but its “lethal” radius is proportionally much larger. The benefit of this innovation was not explained, but the kids listened politely.

Trinity had an unusually if not inordinately long development cycle for an Infocom game, stretching from Moriarty’s first foray into Kensington Gardens in May of 1985 to his placing of the finishing touches on the game almost exactly one year later; the released story file bears a compilation datestamp of May 8, 1986. During that time, thanks to the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev and Perestroika and a less belligerent version of Ronald Reagan, the superpowers crept back a bit from the abyss into which they had stared in 1983. Trinity, however, never wavered from its grim determination that it’s only a matter of time until these Pandorean toys of ours lead to the apocalyptic inevitable. Perhaps we’re fooling ourselves; perhaps it’s still just a matter of time before the wrong weapon in the wrong hands leads, accidentally or on purpose, to nuclear winter. If so, may our current blissful reprieve at least stretch as long as possible.

I’m not much interested in art as competition, but it does feel impossible to discuss Trinity without comparing it to Infocom’s other most obviously uncompromising attempt to create literary Art, A Mind Forever Voyaging. If pressed to name a single favorite from the company’s rich catalog, I would guess that a majority of hardcore Infocom fans would likely name one of these two games. As many of you probably know already, I’m firmly in the Trinity camp myself. While A Mind Forever Voyaging is a noble experiment that positively oozes with Steve Meretzky’s big old warm-and-fuzzy heart, it’s also a bit mawkish and one-note in its writing and even its themes. It’s full of great ideas, mind you, but those ideas often aren’t explored — when they’re explored at all — in all that thoughtful of a way. And I must confess that the very puzzleless design that represents its most obvious innovation presents something of a pacing problem for me. Most of the game is just wandering around under-implemented city streets looking for something to record, an experience that leaves me at an odd disconnect from both the story and the world. Mileages of course vary greatly here (otherwise everyone would be a Trinity person), but I really need a reason to get my hands dirty in a game.

One of the most noteworthy things about Trinity, by contrast, is that it is — whatever else it is — a beautifully crafted traditional text adventure, full of intricate puzzles to die for, exactly the sort of game for which Infocom is renowned and which they did better than anyone else. If A Mind Forever Voyaging is a fascinating might-have-been, a tangent down which Infocom would never venture again, Trinity feels like a culmination of everything the 18 games not named A Mind Forever Voyaging that preceded it had been building toward. Or, put another way, if A Mind Forever Voyaging represents the adventuring avant garde, a bold if problematic new direction, Trinity is a work of classicist art, a perfectly controlled, mature application of established techniques. There’s little real plot to Trinity; little character interaction; little at all really that Infocom hadn’t been doing, albeit in increasingly refined ways, since the days of Zork. If we want to get explicit with the comparisons, we might note that the desolate magical landscape where you spend much of the body of Trinity actually feels an awful lot like that of Zork III, while the vignettes you visit from that central hub parallel Hitchhiker’s design. I could go on, but suffice to say that there’s little obviously new here. Trinity‘s peculiar genius is to be a marvelous old-school adventure game while also being beautiful, poetic and even philosophically profound. It manages to imbed its themes within its puzzles, implicating you directly in the ideas it explores rather than leaving you largely a wandering passive observer as does A Mind Forever Voyaging.

To my thinking, then, Trinity represents the epitome of Infocom’s craft, achieved some nine years after a group of MIT hackers first saw Adventure and decided they could make something even better. There’s a faint odor of anticlimax that clings to just about every game that would follow it, worthy as most of those games would continue to be on their own terms (Infocom’s sense of craft would hardly allow them to be anything else). Some of the Imps, most notably Dave Lebling, have occasionally spoken of a certain artistic malaise that gripped Infocom in its final years, one that was separate from and perhaps more fundamental than all of the other problems with which they struggled. Where to go next? What more was there to really do in interactive fiction, given the many things, like believable characters and character interactions and parsers that really could understand just about anything you typed, that they still couldn’t begin to figure out how to do? Infocom was never, ever going to be able to top Trinity on its own traditionalist terms and really didn’t know how, given the technical, commercial, and maybe even psychological obstacles they faced, to rip up the mold and start all over again with something completely new. Trinity is the top of mountain, from which they could only start down the other side if they couldn’t find a completely new one to climb. (If we don’t mind straining a metaphor to the breaking point, we might even say that A Mind Forever Voyaging represents a hastily abandoned base camp.)

Given that I think Trinity represents Infocom’s artistic peak (you fans of A Mind Forever Voyaging and other games are of course welcome to your own opinions), I want to put my feet up here for a while and spend the first part of this new year really digging into the history and ideas it evokes. We’re going to go on a little tour of atomic history with Trinity by our side, a series of approaches to one of the most important and tragic — in the classical sense of the term; I’ll go into what I mean by that in a future article — moments of the century just passed, that explosion in the New Mexico desert that changed everything forever. We’ll do so by examining the same historical aftershocks of that “fulcrum of history” (Moriarty’s words) as does Trinity itself, like the game probing deeper and moving back through time toward their locus.

I think of Trinity almost as an intertextual work. “Intertextuality,” like many fancy terms beloved by literary scholars, isn’t really all that hard a concept to understand. It simply refers to a work that requires that its reader have a knowledge of certain other works in order to gain a full appreciation of this one. While Moriarty is no Joyce or Pynchon, Trinity evokes huge swathes of history and lots of heady ideas in often abstract, poetic ways, using very few but very well-chosen words. The game can be enjoyed on its own, but it gains so very much resonance when we come to it knowing something about all of this history. Why else did Moriarty include that lengthy bibliography? In lieu of that 40-item reading list, maybe I can deliver some of the prose you need to fully appreciate Moriarty’s poetry. And anyway, I think this stuff is interesting as hell, which is a pretty good justification in its own right. I hope you’ll agree, and I hope you’ll enjoy the little detour we’re about to make before we continue on to other computer games of the 1980s.

(This and the next handful of articles will all draw from the same collection of sources, so I’ll just list them once here.

On the side of Trinity the game and Infocom, we have, first and foremost as always, Jason Scott’s Get Lamp materials. Also the spring 1986 issue of Infocom’s newsletter, untitled now thanks to legal threats from The New York Times; the September/October 1986 and November 1986 Computer Gaming World; the August 1986 Questbusters; and the August 1986 Computer and Video Games.

As far as atomic history, I find I’ve amassed a library almost as extensive as Trinity‘s bibliography. Standing in its most prominent place we have Richard Rhodes’s magisterial “atomic trilogy” The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun, and Arsenals of Folly. There’s also Command and Control by Eric Schlosser; The House at Otowi Bridge by Peggy Pond Church; The Nuclear Weapons Encyclopedia; Now It Can Be Told by Leslie Groves; Hiroshima by John Hershey; The Day the Sun Rose Twice by Ferenc Morton Szasz; Enola Gay by Gordon Thomas; and Prompt and Utter Destruction by J. Samuel Walker. I can highly recommend all of these books for anyone who wants to read further in these subjects.)

Comments
28 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

January 7, 2015 at 7:17 pm

Looking forward to these posts.

One other book that doesn’t deal primarily with the Trinity test but that does capture something of the spirit of the early atomic age is Operation Crossroads: The Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll. In particular, the book captures the total insouciance about radiation that characterized the early testing; ships were anchored in the Bikini lagoon during the first test, for example, and after the detonation the crews were sent right back onto those ships that hadn’t sunk to, you know, scrub things down a bit.

I should note that the author is a lawyer who represented the natives of Bikini Atoll for more than 30 years in their (ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to obtain compensation for the irradiation of the atoll (which persists to this day, and is expected to persist for at least another 30 years or so). I worked with him on that representation in its last few years.

- Sniffnoy

January 7, 2015 at 9:29 pm

Nitpicking: “Twisting the tale” should be “twisting the tail”.

- Jimmy Maher

January 8, 2015 at 6:53 am

Thanks!

- FilfreFan

April 30, 2016 at 6:27 pm

Bereft of context, “twisting the tail” brought to mind the not-unrelated story of Louis Alexander Slotin, slain by the Demon Pile after “tickling the tail” of the dragon. He might have thought the better of it, as that same Demon Pile had already taken the life of his colleague, Harry K. Daghlian Jr., just a year or so earlier.

- FilfreFan

May 1, 2016 at 12:08 am

LOL, when I posted, I had only read this far and didn’t imagine that this comment would be well covered in future posts.

*Sigh*

Sorry for the duplication.

- Lisa H.

January 8, 2015 at 12:37 am

Trinity definitely landed among my favorites once I was old enough to really understand it.

You can watch on a computer as animated neurons blast heavy isotopes to smithereens.

Neutrons, surely, not “neurons”? Or is this error in the original?

- Jimmy Maher

January 8, 2015 at 6:52 am

Nope, that was mine. Thanks!

- Asterisk

January 8, 2015 at 8:38 am

Nitpick: Moriarty’s visit in July of 1985 would have coincided with the fortieth, not the thirtieth, anniversary of the Trinity tests.

- Jimmy Maher

January 8, 2015 at 8:50 am

Right you are. Thanks!

- Xerxes

January 8, 2015 at 1:56 pm

A single fusion device could be “thousands of kilotons of thermonuclear weapons”, so that’s not a very impressive turn of phrase. At peak, the Soviets probably had about 10 million kilotons.

- Jimmy Maher

January 8, 2015 at 2:43 pm

Fair enough. Thanks!

- ademct

January 8, 2015 at 5:12 pm

One of the very best satirical fiction works about the nuclear era is “This is the Way the World Ends” by James Morrow. I urge anyone who hasn’t read it to rush out and read it right now. While fiction, it also has some interesting details about the, quite literally, MAD policies of the time.

- Peter Piers

December 24, 2015 at 12:18 pm

I had to read the next article to know you’re not saying those policies were insane, but actually about Mutually Assured Destruction. :)

- Hanon Ondricek

January 8, 2015 at 9:00 pm

TRINITY is one of my weird favorite Infocom games ever. When I played I was young enough to have heard of the Cold War but didn’t completely understand it. Still, somehow the game hooked me. Probably for the hub landscape with a sky “the sad color of antique brass” and for teaching me what a “gnomon” is. Killing the tiny lizard was traumatic after having carried it around feeling I’d found a pet.

- Lisa H.

January 8, 2015 at 9:56 pm

Oh, and one of my favorite bits from the Invisiclues, referring to the gnomon’s screw threads:

My threads clash. What do I do?
1. Get a better tailor.

- Scott M. Bruner

January 8, 2015 at 10:06 pm

Having also read “Thirteen Days” as a child, and growing up on military bases, I’ve always thought perhaps the greatest proof there’s alien life is that we didn’t annihilate ourselves during the Cold War – that there exists some protective life-forms who keep shaking their head and intervening at the last minute.

I have spent a lot of time with “Trinity” – and I honestly think it’s greatest asset, as a piece of IF, is its ability to starkly affect the reader/player/interactor with its overwhelming, sense of futility. I can’t say much more with spoiling it.

It’s one of a few pieces – like AMFV – where you have to ask what the implementor is actually saying. After hearing this anecdote about Moriarty’s trip to Alamo (which I hadn’t read before), it’s amazing how well “Trinity” actually takes you into that nightmare headspace/cognitive dissonance. Strangelove as game, I guess.

The museum is called the Bradbury museum?!

- Scott M. Bruner

January 8, 2015 at 10:07 pm

* its

- Nate

January 11, 2015 at 7:30 pm

Interesting idea for a series. May I also suggest the other nuclear-themed games of the same era (Chernobyl comes to mind)? I don’t mean Red Storm Rising or similar non-original games.

As a kid in the 80s, I did a research paper on energy generation via nuclear reactors. My home town was farm country, so our library was out-of-date. I read quite a few Tom Swift novels from the 40s and 50s, where, in the future, everything was nuclear powered. Quite an odd alternate history.

- Jimmy Maher

January 12, 2015 at 6:56 am

Interesting. I hadn’t seen that one before.

But for this series I do want to stay with Trinity. I have a lot to say about that game and a pretty good plan how to say it all…

- ZUrlocker

January 12, 2015 at 6:08 am

Great to get the background on Trinity and I look forward to the next post.

BTW, maybe I am too much of an Infocom fanboy, but why not put together all the infocom-related blog posts (plus additional stuff on bookware) and have a whole book just on the history and impact of Infocom? I’d buy it!

- Jimmy Maher

January 12, 2015 at 6:57 am

Yes, themed books on Infocom and other topics are definitely a possibility. No need to consider it until the Infocom history is finished, though…

- iPadCary

January 20, 2015 at 2:22 pm

One of THE best games ever done ….

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- Peter Piers

December 24, 2015 at 11:36 am

The background here is downright scary. Yes, hindsight is 20/20, but all the same, all those provocations at such a nervous time… That drill after the 007 Flight disaster… Maybe this is typical post-Atom Bomb thinking (between the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb, it’s amazing how the 20th century changed the minds and might of the world – always through war), but it seems dangerous, irresponsible, reckless, and all the other similar adjectives you want to tack on. Bravado like that gets innocents killed in the thousands.

- Peter Piers

December 24, 2015 at 12:10 pm

Funny I’m still thinking about how it changed us. It’s like we were children – all through civilization, we were children, playing a game of society, taking what nature had to offer and bettering it when we could. We lived in a world of make-believe, not unlike – to get a specific example – the English class system in its heyday. WW1 and its fallout was a rude awakening there, it indicated the make-believe was over and there were, in fact, harsh realities to face and the dream couldn’t be kept up…

…and it’s like the bomb did that to the whole world. We were playing with fire, as children do – and we finally got burned. We got burned so bad we finally grew up, grew out of naïvetè and childhood. We became aware of our consequences. As an under-informed child, the term “atom children” conjured thoughts of horrors, radiation malformations, and nuclear wastelands. Now, I think I am proud to call myself, and the rest of the human race, atomic children – we have learned (hopefully), and are still learning.

- CdrJameson

April 18, 2016 at 8:31 am

(I’m catching up, so sorry about commenting on an old-post)

Nitpick – References to ‘the Kensington Gardens’ and ‘the Lancaster Walk’. These places are just ‘Kensington Gardens’ and ‘Lancaster Walk’, no ‘the’ required.

I can just imagine the answer someone looking for ‘the’ Lambeth Walk would get, other than directions to Lambeth Walk.

- Jimmy Maher

April 18, 2016 at 8:52 am

Thanks!

T Plus 5: Bombs in Space
January 16, 2015

Earth Orbit, on a satellite

The satellite you're riding is about twenty feet long, and shaped like a beer can.

>z
Time passes.

A red flash draws your eyes to the ground below, where the contrail of a missile is climbing into the stratosphere.

>z
Time passes.

The maneuvering thrusters on the satellite fire, turning the nose until it faces the ascending missile.

>z
Time passes.

The satellite erupts in a savage glare that lights up the ground below. A beam of violet radiation flashes downward, obliterating the distant missile. Unfortunately, you have little time to admire this triumph of engineering before the satellite's blast incinerates you.

Trinity aims in 256 K of text adventure to chronicle at least fifty years of humanity’s relationship to the atomic bomb, as encapsulated into seven vignettes. Two of these, the one dealing with the long-dreaded full-on nuclear war that begins with you on vacation in London’s Kensington Gardens and the one you see above involving a functioning version of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative (a proposition that all by itself justifies Trinity‘s “Fantasy” genre tag, as we’ll soon see), are actually speculative rather than historical, taking place at some point in the near future. The satirical comic that accompanies the game also reserves space for Reagan and his dream. It’s a bold choice to put Reagan himself in there, undisguised by pseudonymous machinations like A Mind Forever Voyaging‘s “Richard Ryder” — even a brave one for a company that was hardly in a position to alienate potential players. Trinity, you see, was released at the absolute zenith of Reagan’s popularity. While the comic and the game it accompanies hardly add up to a scathing sustained indictment a la A Mind Forever Voyaging, they do cast him as yet one more Cold Warrior in a conservative blue suit leading the world further along the garden path to the unthinkable. Today I’d like to look at this “orbiting ‘umbrella’ of high technology” that Trinity postulates — correctly — isn’t really going to help us all that much at all when the missiles start to fly. Along the way we’ll get a chance to explore some of the underpinnings of the nuclear standoff and also the way it came to an anticlimactically sudden end, so thankfully at odds with Trinity‘s more dramatic predictions of the supposed inevitable.

In November of 1985, while Trinity was in development, Ronald Reagan and the new Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev met for the first American/Soviet summit of Reagan’s Presidency. The fact that the summit took place at all was almost entirely down to the efforts of Gorbachev, who quite skillfully made it politically impossible for Reagan not to attend. It marked the first time Reagan had actually talked with his Soviet counterpart face to face in his almost five years as President. The two men, as contemporary press reports would have it, “took the measure of each other” and largely liked what they saw, but came to no agreements. The second summit, held in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October of the following year, came to within a hair’s breadth of a major deal that would have started the superpowers down the road to the complete elimination of nuclear armaments and effectively marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. The only stumbling block was the Strategic Defense Initiative. Gorbachev was adamant that Reagan give it up, or at least limit it to “laboratory testing”; Reagan just as adamantly refused. He repeatedly expressed to both Gorbachev and the press his bafflement at this alleged intransigence. SDI, he said, was to be a technology of defense, a technology for peace. His favorite metaphor was SDI as a nuclear “gas mask.” The major powers of the world had all banned poison gas by treaty after World War I, and, rather extraordinarily, even kept to that bargain through all the other horrors of World War II. Still, no one had thrown away their gas-mask stockpiles, and the knowledge that other countries still possessed them had just possibly helped to keep everyone honest. SDI, Reagan said, could serve the same purpose in the realm of nuclear weapons. He even made an extraordinary offer: the United States would be willing to give SDI to the Soviets “at cost” — whatever that meant — as soon as it was ready, as long as the Soviets would also be willing to share any fruits of their own (largely nonexistent) research. That way everyone could have nuclear gas masks! How could anyone who genuinely hoped and planned not to use nuclear weapons anyway possibly object to terms like that?

Gorbachev had a different view of the matter. He saw SDI as an inherently destabilizing force that would effectively jettison not one but two of the tacit agreements of the Cold War that had so far prevented a nuclear apocalypse. Would any responsible leader easily accept such an engine of chaos in return for a vague promise to “share” the technology? Would Reagan? It’s very difficult to know what was behind Reagan’s seeming naivete. Certainly his advisers knew that his folksy analogies hardly began to address Gorbachev’s very real and very reasonable concerns. If the shoe had been on the other foot, they would have had the same reaction. Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger had demonstrated that in December of 1983, when he had said, “I can’t imagine a more destabilizing factor for the world than if the Soviets should acquire a thoroughly reliable defense against these missiles before we did.” As for Reagan himself, who knows? Your opinion on the matter depends on how you take this famous but enigmatic man whom conservatives have always found as easy to deify as liberals to demonize. Was he a bold visionary who saved his country from itself, or a Machivellian schemer who used a genial persona to institute an uglier, more heartless version of America? Or was he just a clueless if good-natured and very, very lucky bumbler? Or was he still the experienced actor, out there hitting his marks and selling the policies of his handlers like he had once shilled for General Electric? Regardless, let’s try to do more justice to Gorbachev’s concerns about SDI than Reagan did at their summits.

It’s kind of amazing that the Cold War never led to weapons in space. It certainly didn’t have to be that way. Histories today note what a shock it was to American pride and confidence when the Soviet Union became the first nation to successfully launch a satellite on October 4, 1957. That’s true enough, but a glance at the newspapers from the time also reveals less abstract fears. Now that the Soviets had satellites, people expected them to weaponize them, to use them to start dropping atomic bombs on their heads from space. One rumor, which amazingly turned out to have a basis in fact, claimed the Soviets planned to nuke the Moon, leading to speculation on what would happen if their missile was to miss the surface, boomerang around the Moon, and come back to Earth — talk about being hoisted from one’s own petard! The United States’s response to the Soviets’ satellite was par for the course during the Cold War: panicked, often ill-considered activity in the name of not falling behind. Initial responsibility for space was given to the military. The Navy and the Air Force, who often seemed to distrust one another more than either did the Soviets, promptly started squabbling over who owned this new seascape or skyscape, which depending on how you looked at it and how you picked your metaphors could reasonably be assumed to belong to either. While the Naval Research Laboratory struggled to get the United States’s first satellite into space, the more ambitious dreamers at the Air Force Special Weapons Center made their own secret plans to nuke the Moon as a show of force and mulled the construction of a manned secret spy base there.

But then, on July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower signed the bill that would transform the tiny National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics into the soon-to-be massive National Aeronautics and Space Administration — NASA. While NASA’s charter duly charged the new agency with making any “discoveries” available for “national defense” and with “the preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology,” those goals came only after more high-toned abstractions like “the expansion of human knowledge” and the use of space for “peaceful and scientific purposes.” NASA was something of an early propaganda coup at a time when very little seemed to be going right with astronautics in the United States. The Soviet leadership had little choice but to accept the idea, publicly at least, of space exploration as a fundamentally peaceful endeavor. In 1967 the United States and the Soviet Union became signatories along with many other nations to the Outer Space Treaty that enshrined the peaceful status quo into international law. By way of compensation, the first operational ICBMs had started to come online by the end of the 1950s, giving both superpowers a way of dealing impersonal death from the stratosphere without having to rely on wonky satellites.

This is not to say that the Cold War never made it into space in any form. Far from it. Apollo, that grandest adventure of the twentieth century, would never have happened without the impetus of geopolitics. The Apollo 11 astronauts may have left a message on the Moon saying they had “come in peace for all mankind,” may have even believed it at some level, but that was hardly the whole story. President Kennedy, the architect of it all, had no illusions about the real purpose of his Moon pronouncement. “Everything that we do ought to be really tied into getting onto the Moon ahead of the Russians,” he told NASA Administrator James Webb in 1962. “Otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money because I’m not that interested in space.” The Moon Race, like war, was diplomacy through other means. As such, the division between military and civilian was not always all that clear. For instance, the first Americans to fly into orbit, like the first Soviets, did so mounted atop repurposed ICBMs.

Indeed, neither the American nor the Soviet military had any interest in leaving space entirely to the civilians. If one of the goals of NASA’s formation had been to eliminate duplications of effort, it didn’t entirely succeed. The Air Force in particular proved very reluctant to give up on their own manned space efforts, developing during the 1960s the X-15 rocket plane that Neil Armstrong among others flew to the edge of orbit, the cancelled Dyna-Soar space plane, and even a manned space station that also never got off the drawing board. Planners in both the United States and the Soviet Union seemed to treat the 1967 Outer Space Treaty as almost a temporary accord, waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the militarization of space to begin in earnest. I’ve already described in an earlier article how, once the Moon Race was over, NASA was forced to make an unholy alliance with the Air Force to build the space shuttle, whose very flight profile was designed to allow it to avoid space-based weaponry that didn’t yet actually exist.

Yet the most immediate and far-reaching military application of space proved to be reconnaissance satellites. Well before the 1960s were out these orbiting spies had become vital parts of the intelligence apparatus of both the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as vital tools for the detection of ICBM launches by the other side — yet another component of the ever-evolving balance of terror. Still, restrained by treaty, habit, and concern over what it might make the other guys do, neither of the superpowers ever progressed to the logical step of trying to shoot down those satellites that were spying on their countries. If you had told people in 1957 that there would still be effectively no weapons in space almost thirty years later, that there would never have been anything even remotely resembling a battle in space, I think they would be quite surprised.

But now SDI had come along and, at least in the Soviets’ view, threatened to undermine that tradition. They need only take at face value early reports of SDI’s potential implementations, which were all over the American popular media by the time of Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, to have ample grounds for concern. One early plan, proposed in apparent earnest by a committee who may have seen The Battle of Britain (or Star Wars) a few too many times, would have the United States and its allies protected by squadrons of orbiting manned fighter planes, who would rocket to the rescue to shoot down encroaching ICBMs, their daring pilots presumably wearing dashing scarves and using phrases like “Tally ho!” A more grounded plan, relatively speaking, was the one for hundreds of “orbiting battle stations” equipped with particle-beam weapons or missiles of their own — hey, whatever works — to pick off the ICBMs. Of course, as soon as these gadgets came into being the Soviets would have to develop gadgets of their own to try to take them out. Thus a precious accord would be shattered forever. To the Soviets, SDI felt like a betrayal, a breaking of a sacred trust that had so far kept people and satellites in space from having to shoot at each other and in doing so had just possibly prevented the development of a new generation of horrific weaponry.

And yet this was if anything the more modest of the two outrages they saw being inflicted on the world by SDI. The biggest problem was that it could be both a symptom and a cause of the ending of the old MAD doctrine — Mutually Assured Destruction — that had been the guiding principle of both superpowers for over twenty years and that had prevented them from blowing one another up along with the rest of the world. On its surface, the MAD formulation is simplicity itself. I have enough nuclear weapons to destroy your country — or at least to do unacceptable damage to it — and a window of time to launch them at you between the time I realize that you’ve launched yours at me and the time that yours actually hit me. Further, neither of us has the ability to stop the missiles of the other — at least, not enough of them. Therefore we’d best find some way to get along and not shoot missiles at each other. One comparison, so favored by Reagan that he drove Gorbachev crazy by using it over and over again at each of their summits, is that of two movie mobsters with cocked and loaded pistols pointed at each others’ heads.

That well-intentioned comparison is also a rather facile one. The difference is a matter of degree. Many of us had MAD, that most fundamental doctrine of the Cold War, engrained in us as schoolchildren to such a degree that it might be hard for us to really think about its horribleness anymore. Nevertheless, I’d like for us to try to do so now. Let’s think in particular about its basic psychological prerequisites. In order for the threat of nuclear annihilation to be an effective deterrent, in order for it never to be carried out, it must paradoxically be a real threat, one which absolutely, unquestionably would be carried out if the order was given. If the other side was ever to suspect that we were not willing to destroy them, the deterrent would evaporate. So, we must create an entire military superstructure, a veritable subculture, of many thousands of people all willing to unquestioningly annihilate tens or hundreds of millions of people. Indeed, said annihilation is the entire purpose of their professional existence. They sit in their missile silos or in their ready rooms or cruise the world in their submarines waiting for the order to push that button or turn that key that will quite literally end existence as they know it, insulated from the incalculable suffering that action will cause inside the very same sorts of “clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices” that Reagan once described as the domain of the Soviet Union’s totalitarian leadership alone. If the rise of this sort of antiseptic killing is the tragedy of the twentieth century, the doctrine of MAD represents it taken to its well-nigh incomprehensible extreme.

MAD, requiring as it did people to be always ready and able to carry out genocide so that they would not have to carry out genocide, struck a perilous psychological balance. Things had the potential to go sideways when one of these actors in what most people hoped would be Waiting for Godot started to get a little bit too ready and able — in short, when someone started to believe that he could win. See for example General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command from its inception until 1965 and the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove‘s unhinged General Jack Ripper. LeMay believed to his dying day that the the United States had “lost” the Cuban Missile Crisis because President Kennedy had squandered his chance to finally just attack the Soviet Union and be done with it; talked of the killing of 100 million human beings as a worthwhile trade-off for the decapitation of the Soviet leadership; openly campaigned for and sought ways to covertly acquire the metaphorical keys to the nuclear arsenal, to be used solely at his own dubious discretion. “If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I’m going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground,” he once told a civil-defense committee. When told that such an action would represent insubordination to the point of treason, he replied, “I don’t care. It’s my policy. That’s what I’m going to do.” Tellingly, Dr. Strangelove itself was originally envisioned as a realistic thriller. The film descended into black comedy only when Stanley Kubrick started his research and discovered that so much of the reality was, well, blackly comic. Much in Dr. Strangelove that moviegoers of 1964 took as satire was in fact plain truth.

If the belief by a single individual that a nuclear war can be won is dangerous, an institutionalized version of that belief might just be the most dangerous thing in the world. And here we get to the heart of the Soviets’ almost visceral aversion to SDI, for it seemed to them and many others a product of just such a belief.

During the mid-1970s, when détente was still the watchword of the day, a group of Washington old-timers and newly arrived whiz kids formed something with the Orwellian name of The Committee on the Present Danger. Its leading light was one Paul Nitze. A name few Americans then or now are likely to recognize, Nitze had been a Washington insider since the 1940s and would remain a leading voice in Cold War policy for literally the entire duration of the Cold War. He and his colleagues, many of them part of a new generation of so-called “neoconservative” ideologues, claimed that détente was a sham, that “the Soviets do not agree with the Americans that nuclear war is unthinkable and unwinnable and that the only objective of strategic doctrine must be mutual deterrence.” On the contrary, they were preparing for “war-fighting, war-surviving, and war-winning.” Their means for accomplishing the latter two objectives would be an elaborate civil-defense program that was supposedly so effective as to reduce their casualties in an all-out nuclear exchange to about 10 percent of what the United States could expect. The Committee offered little or no proof for these assertions and many others like them. Many simply assumed that the well-connected Nitze must have access to secret intelligence sources which he couldn’t name. If so, they were secret indeed. When the CIA, alarmed by claims of Soviet preparedness in the Committee’s reports that were completely new to them, instituted a two-year investigation to get to the bottom of it all, they couldn’t find any evidence of whatsoever of any unusual civil-defense programs, much less any secret plans to start and win a nuclear war. It appears that Nitze and his colleagues exaggerated wildly and, when even that wouldn’t serve their ends, just made stuff up. (This pattern of “fixing the intelligence” would remain with Committee veterans for decades, leading most notably to the Iraq invasion of 2003.)

Throughout the Carter administration the Committee lobbied anyone who would listen, using the same sort of paranoid circular logic that had led to the nuclear-arms race in the first place. The Soviets, they said, have secretly abandoned the MAD strategy and embarked on a nuclear-war-winning strategy in its place. Therefore we must do likewise. There could be no American counterpart to the magical Soviet civil-defense measures that could somehow protect 90 percent of their population from the blasts of nuclear weapons and the long years of radioactive fall-out that would follow. This was because civil defense was “unattractive” to an “open society” (“unattractiveness” being a strangely weak justification for not doing something in the face of what the Committee claimed was an immediate existential threat, but so be it). One thing the United States could and must do in response was to engage in a huge nuclear- and conventional-arms buildup. That way it could be sure to hammer the Soviets inside their impregnable tunnels — or wherever it was they would all be going — just as hard as possible. But in addition, the United States must come up with a defense of its own.

Although Carter engaged in a major military buildup in his own right, his was nowhere near big enough in the Committee’s eyes. But then came the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. Reagan took all of the Committee’s positions to heart and, indeed, took most of its most prominent members into his administration. Their new approach to geopolitical strategy was immediately apparent, and immediately destabilizing. Their endless military feints and probes and aggressive rhetoric seemed almost to have the intention of starting a war with the Soviet Union, a war they seemed to welcome whilst being bizarrely dismissive of its potentially world-ending consequences. Their comments read like extracts from Trinity‘s satirically gung-ho accompanying comic. “Nuclear war is a destructive thing, but it is still in large part a physics problem,” said one official. “If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it. It’s the dirt that does it,” said another. Asked if he thought that a nuclear war was “winnable,” Casper Weinberger replied, “We certainly are not planning to be defeated.” And then, in March of that fraught year of 1983 when the administration almost got the nuclear war it seemed to be courting, came Reagan’s SDI speech.

The most important thing to understand about SDI is that it was always a fantasy, a chimera chased by politicians and strategists who dearly wished it was possible. The only actual scientist amongst those who lobbied for it was Edward Teller, well known to the public as the father of the hydrogen bomb. One of the few participants in the Manhattan Project which had built the first atomic bomb more than 35 years before still active in public life at the time that Reagan took office, Teller was a brilliant scientist when he wanted to be, but one whose findings and predictions were often tainted by his strident anti-communism and a passion for nuclear weapons that could leave him sounding as unhinged as General LeMay. Teller seldom saw a problem that couldn’t be solved just by throwing a hydrogen bomb or two at it. His response to Carter’s decision to return the Panama Canal to Panama, for instance, was to recommend quickly digging a new one across some more cooperative Central American country using hydrogen bombs. Now, alone amongst his scientific peers, Teller told the Reagan administration that SDI was possible. He claimed that he could create X-ray beams in space by, naturally, detonating hydrogen bombs just so. These could be aimed at enemy missiles, zapping them out of the sky. The whole system could be researched, built, and put into service within five years. As evidence, he offered some inconclusive preliminary results derived from experimental underground explosions. It was all completely ridiculous; we still don’t know how to create such X-ray beams today, decades on. But it was also exactly the sort of superficially credible scientific endorsement — and from the father of the hydrogen bomb, no less! — that the Reagan administration needed.

Reagan coasted to reelection in 1984 in a campaign that felt more like a victory lap, buoyed by “Morning Again in America,” an energetic economy, and a military buildup that had SDI as one of its key components. The administration lobbied Congress to give the SDI project twice the inflation-adjusted funding as that received by the Manhattan Project at the height of World War II. With no obviously promising paths at all to follow, SDI opted for the spaghetti approach, throwing lots and lots of stuff at the wall in the hope that something would stick. Thus it devolved into a whole lot of individual fiefdoms with little accountability and less coordination with one another. Dr. Ashton Carter of Harvard, a former Defense Department analyst with full security clearance tasked with preparing a study of SDI for the Congressional Budget Office, concluded that the prospect for any sort of success was “so remote that it should not serve as the basis of public expectations of national policy.” Most of the press, seduced by Reagan’s own euphoria, paid little heed to such voices, instead publishing articles talking about the relative merits of laser and kinetic-energy weapons, battle stations in space, and whether the whole system should be controlled by humans or turned over to a supercomputer mastermind. With every notion as silly and improbable as every other and no direction in the form of a coherent plan from the SDI project itself, everyone could be an expert, everyone could build their own little SDI castle above the stratosphere. When journalists did raise objections, Reagan replied with more folksy homilies about how everyone thought Edison was crazy until he invented the light bulb, appealing to the good old American ingenuity that had got us to the Moon and could make anything possible. The administration’s messaging was framed so as to make objecting to SDI unpatriotic, downright un-American.

And yet even if you thought that American ingenuity would indeed save the day in the end, SDI had a more fundamental problem that made it philosophically as well as scientifically unsound. This most basic objection, cogently outlined at the time by the great astronomer, science popularizer, space advocate, and anti-SDI advocate Carl Sagan, was a fairly simple one. Even the most fanciful predictions for SDI must have a capacity ceiling, a limit beyond which the system simply couldn’t shoot down any more missiles. And it would always be vastly cheaper to build a few dozen more missiles than it would be to build and launch and monitor another battle station (or whatever) to deal with them. Not only would SDI not bring an end to nuclear weapons, it was likely to actually accelerate the nuclear-arms race, as the Soviet Union would now feel the need to not only be able to destroy the United States ten times over but be able to destroy the United States ten times over while also comprehensively overwhelming any SDI system in place. Reagan’s public characterization of SDI as a “nuclear umbrella” under which the American public might live safe and secure had no basis in reality. Even if SDI could somehow be made 99 percent effective, a figure that would make it more successful than any other defense in the history of warfare, the 1 percent of the Soviet Union’s immense arsenal that got through would still be enough to devastate many of the country’s cities and kill tens or hundreds of millions. There may have been an argument to make for SDI research aimed at developing, likely decades in the future, a system that could intercept and destroy a few rogue missiles. As a means of protection against a full-on strategic strike, though… forget it. It wasn’t going to happen. Ever. As President Nixon once said, “With 10,000 of these damn things, there is no defense.”

As with his seeming confusion about Gorbachev’s objections to SDI at their summits, it’s hard to say to what degree Reagan grasped this reality. Was he living a fantasy like so many others in the press and public when he talked of SDI rendering ICBMs “impotent and obsolete?” Whatever the answer to that question, it seems pretty clear that others inside the administration knew perfectly well that SDI couldn’t possibly protect the civilian population as a whole to any adequate degree. SDI was in reality a shell game, not an attempt to do an end-run around the doctrine of mutually assured destruction but an attempt to make sure that mutually assured destruction stayed mutually assured when it came to the United States’s side of the equation. Cold War planners had fretted for decades about a nightmare scenario in which the Soviet Union launched a first strike and the United States, due to sabotage, Soviet stealth technology, or some failure of command and control, failed to detect and respond to it in time by launching its own missiles before they were destroyed in their silos by those of the Soviets. SDI’s immediate strategic purpose was to close this supposed “window of vulnerability.” The system would be given, not the impossible task of protecting the vast nation as a whole, but the merely hugely improbable one of protecting those few areas where the missile silos were concentrated. Asked point-blank under oath whether SDI was meant to protect American populations or American missile silos, Pentagon chief of research and engineering Richard DeLauer gave a telling non-answer: “What we are trying to do is enhance deterrence. If you enhance deterrence and your deterrence is credible and holds, the people are protected.” This is of course just a reiteration of the MAD policy itself, not a separate justification for SDI. MAD just kept getting madder.

The essential absurdity of American plans for SDI seems to have struck Gorbachev by the beginning of 1987. Soviet intelligence had been scrambling for a few years by then, convinced that there had to be some important technological breakthrough behind all of the smoke the Reagan administration was throwing. It seems that at about this point they may have concluded that, no, the whole thing really was as ridiculous as it seemed. At any rate, Gorbachev decided it wasn’t worth perpetuating the Cold War over. He backed away from his demands, offering the United States the opportunity to continuing working on SDI if it liked, demanding only a commitment to inform the Soviet Union and officially back out of some relevant treaties (which might very possibly have to include the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that forbade nuclear explosions in space) if it decided to actually implement it. Coupled with Gorbachev’s soaring global popularity, it was enough to start getting deals done. Reagan and Gorbachev signed their first substantial agreement, to eliminate between them 2692 missiles, in December of 1987. More would follow, accompanied by shocking liberalization and reform behind the erstwhile Iron Curtain, culminating in the night of November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall, long the tangible symbol of division between East and West, came down. Just like that, almost incomprehensible in its suddenness, the Cold War was over. Trinity stands today as a cogent commentary on that strange shadow conflict, but it proved blessedly less than prescient about the way it would end. Whatever else is still to come, there will be no nuclear war between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

If the end of the Cold War was shockingly unexpected, SDI played out exactly as you might expect. The program was renamed to the more modest Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and scaled back dramatically in 1993, by which time it had cost half again as much as the Manhattan Project — a staggering $30 billion, enough to make it the most expensive research program in history — and accomplished little. The old idea still resurfaces from time to time, but the fervor it once generated is all but forgotten now. SDI, like most history, is now essentially a footnote.

A more inspiring closing subject is Mikhail Gorbachev. His Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding, he strikes me as someone who hasn’t quite gotten his due yet from history. There are many reasons that the Cold War came to an end when it did. Prominent among them was the increasingly untenable Soviet economy, battered during the decade by “the Soviet Union’s Vietnam” (Gorbachev’s phrase) in Afghanistan, a global downturn in oil prices, and the sheer creaking inertia of many years of, as the old Soviet saying went, workers pretending to work while the state pretended to pay them for it. Nevertheless, I don’t agree with Marx that history is a compendium of economic forces. Many individuals across Eastern Europe stepped forward to end their countries’ totalitarian regimes — usually peacefully, sometimes violently, occasionally at the cost of their lives. But Gorbachev’s shadow overlays all the rest. Undaunted by the most bellicose Presidential rhetoric in two decades, he used politics, psychology, and logic to convince Reagan to sit down with him and talk, then worked with him to shape a better, safer world. While Reagan talked about ending MAD through his chimerical Star Wars, Gorbachev actually did it, by abandoning his predecessors’ traditional intransigence, rolling up his sleeves, and finding a way to make it work. Later, this was the man who didn’t choose to send in the tanks when the Warsaw Pact started to slip away, making him, as Victor Sebstyen put it, one of very few leaders in the history of the world to elect not to use force to maintain an empire. Finally, and although it certainly was never his intention, he brought the Soviet Union in for a soft landing, keeping the chaos to a minimum and keeping the missiles from flying. Who would have imagined Gorbachev was capable of such vision, such — and I don’t use this word lightly — heroism? Who would have imagined he could weave his way around the hardliners at home and abroad to accomplish what he did? Prior to assuming office in 1985, he was just a smart, capable Party man who knew who buttered his bread, who, as he later admitted, “licked Brezhnev’s ass” alongside his colleagues. And then when he got to the top he looked around, accepted that the system just wasn’t working, and decided to change it. Gorbachev reminds us that the hero is often not the one who picks up a gun but the one who chooses not to.

(In addition to the sources listed in the previous article, Way Out There in the Blue by Frances FitzGerald is the best history I’ve found of SDI and its politics.)

Comments
21 Responses

- Juan Castro

January 16, 2015 at 8:44 pm

I have a theory about why (in addition to Gorbachev’s political skill) the USSR became the only dictatorial empire in all of human history to dissolve gracefully. You may or may not agree with it, but I do think it played a factor:

They were atheist.

No matter how dogmatic Soviet communism was, one thing they absolutely were NOT was In A Mission From God. They didn’t expect Heaven as a reward if they all died “for their country”. They were convinced there wouldn’t be a superpowered deus ex machina ensuring that they would win the End Times War. Therefore, they came to the conclusion the only rational alternative was to fold.

- Felix

January 17, 2015 at 8:53 am

You know, this is an interesting perspective…

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2015 at 9:49 am

Yes, it is indeed interesting. The obvious counterargument would be the one you allude to: that they essentially made their religion Marxism, with Lenin as its prophet, to the point of embalming his body and putting it on permanent exhibit for the True Believers in the Kremlin. And of course there are similarities between, say, Chrisianity’s version of end-times eschatology and Marxism’s promise of an eventual worker’s paradise. But then the missing belief in the supernatural or an afterlife definitely mark some real differences. Yeah… interesting.

- Duncan Stevens

January 17, 2015 at 3:06 pm

But by 1989-90 it was a Marxist revolutionary state only in name. Hard to find a lot of ideological fervor in the leadership of the late-stage Soviet Union.

- Ken

January 23, 2015 at 9:36 pm

I think a much likelier explanation is that Gorbachev – the servant of a state birthed in massacre, sustained by massacre, and governed by massacre to a far greater extent than any other empire since the Aztecs – was in a greater position than any other leader in history to realize that massacre as state policy simply wouldn’t help.

- Lisa H.

January 16, 2015 at 11:05 pm

Most of us had MAD, that most fundamental doctrine of the Cold War, engrained in us as schoolchildren

Depending on whom you mean by “us,” I suppose! This would seem to be making an assumption about the age of your readership.

which might very possibly have to include the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that forbid nuclear explosions in space

I think you want “forbade” there.

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2015 at 9:41 am

I kind of thought that kids even today would get a lot about MAD in their history classes, as it is pretty much the fundamental doctrine of 40 years of Cold War. Maybe not, though. I replaced “most” with “many,” which will hopefully soften the blow for anyone who’s heretofore managed to miss the delights of MADness. ;)

- Jason Dyer

January 17, 2015 at 1:08 pm

There’s too much history. Everything after WWII tends to get squeezed in right at the end of the school year.

Incidentally, there’s a book (Prisoner’s Dilemma) about the brief period when the US had the bomb but the USSR didn’t. There were serious calls for pre-emptive nuking.

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2015 at 1:46 pm

Yeah, that’s a fascinating period that I’ll get into a little bit in a future article. Along with calls for preemptive nuking, there were many saying that the U.S. should share the bomb with the Soviets and everyone else as a show of good faith, still others saying the bombs should all be thrown away and the industrial apparatus that made them destroyed before an arms race started. Definitely one of those crossroads of history…

- Odkin

January 17, 2015 at 3:16 am

Oh, for Christ’s sake what a load of revisionist liberal horseshit.

- Lewis

January 17, 2015 at 7:07 am

I enjoyed this piece. Today after playing Microillusions’s earnest and strangely evocative 1988 fantasia Romantic Encounters at the Dome, I wondered if we might see a similarly well-researched article on here exploring that title’s mysterious origins in West Coast sex therapy, New Wave swinger fantasies and not-bad writing from some playwright named Lee Thomas.

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Romantic_Encounters_at_the_Dome_1988

- Jimmy Maher

January 17, 2015 at 9:50 am

That one was on my short list, but had looked like it wouldn’t make the cut. I’ll take your vote into consideration, though, and see if I can find a way to squeeze it in.

- matt w

January 17, 2015 at 6:18 pm

Too true about Gorbachev not getting his due. The other day I saw a piece about Obama’s legacy subtitled “He will go down as America’s Gorbachev.” Its main title was “Why History WIll Eviscerate Obama.”

Typo patrol: I think “While NASA’s charter dully charged” should be “duly.”

- Jimmy Maher

January 18, 2015 at 9:35 am

I really need to learn the difference between “dully” and “duly.”

The article in question is a bit hyperbolic in that all-too-typical political pundit way and has a dodgy relationship with history in its own right. To say that Bush II’s ranking went from “low” to “rock bottom” only after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, for instance, is just factually incorrect. There were heaps of articles and polls of historians coming out already by 2007 naming Bush II the “worst President ever.” Nor do I think Clinton’s consensus legacy has really fallen all the way to “below average,” or even that people generally blame him all that much for the mortgage crisis (I don’t know enough about it personally to say if they’re justified in that).

I’d guess Obama will go down into history as a slightly more successful version of Carter: heart usually in the right place, but lacking some essential knack for realpolitik and (ironically) communication needed to get things done. That’s of course somewhat unfair in light of the unprecedented intransigence he’s faced, but after all of the drone strikes and the NSA revelations I must admit that the amount of sympathy I can muster is limited. He’ll probably be remembered in 100 years more for the social change he *represents* as the first black President than for anything he actually did in office.

- Duncan Stevens

January 18, 2015 at 1:44 pm

Response to that article:

The basis for the comparison in the article seems to be this:

Obama’s reputation will also have something in common with that of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who believed history and technology have a direction and that his job was to align his country with it, no matter how illogical or undesirable it might appear to his countrymen. Like Gorbachev, Obama will be esteemed in certain quarters a generation from now, but probably more by foreigners than fellow citizens, and more by his country’s enemies than its friends.

The first sentence amounts to “he’s like Gorbachev because he wanted to do things that some people disagreed with,” and the second is just weird hyperbole, especially considering that the article doesn’t even talk about foreign policy. I guess it indicates that, in some quarters, “Gorbachev” is shorthand for “adopted policies detrimental to the country’s interests,” but it’s a dumb shorthand; it’s not as if the Soviet Union was on sound, sustainable footing before he got there. “Had no choice but to acknowledge the inevitable” is less catchy but more accurate.

Here’s a response to that article: http://justice.gawker.com/why-history-will-eviscerate-obama-annotated-1679715328

- matt w

January 19, 2015 at 1:06 am

I wasn’t really trying to make a point about the merits of Obama’s presidency–only to point out the weirdness of making a comparison to Gorbachev as a bad thing. The burden of the comparison, I suppose, is that Gorbachev ended his country’s empire (and in fact set the stage for the dissolution of his country), and if you think that Obama will lead to the downfall of the US’s global influence in that way you might well think that that would make Obama a bad president. But it just seems jaw-droppingly amoral for someone, especially a conservative American, to make that comparison without acknowledging that it was a good thing that Gorbachev brought an end to his country’s empire.

But if we’re bringing up Obama’s legacy vs. other presidents’: Jimmy, I agree with what you say about Bush and Clinton, but I think it’s not going to be accurate to say that Obama won’t be best remembered for what he did. The health care reform is a really big deal. There’s a possibility that it won’t last–though the most likely route is for the Supreme Court to trash subsidies on the federal exchange on a transparently terrible pretext, and in that case I think Obama might be remembered as the president who got victimized by the return of the Lochner court.

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- Melfina the Blue

January 8, 2016 at 7:16 pm

“between the time I realize that you’ve launch yours at me and the time that yours actually hit me.” launch should be launched.

Great article. I vaguely remember MAD being mentioned in my high school American History class (along w/ my teacher’s circumcision story, he was a very odd man), but it was right at the end of the year. My AP Euro class got to the start of WW2 and we had to read the rest on our own, but I did learn about the Defenestration of Prague which comes in really handy for trivia contests!

- Jimmy Maher

January 12, 2016 at 6:00 am

Thanks!

- Adele

February 3, 2016 at 1:55 am

“talk about being hoisted from one’s own petard”

I might be wrong, but I think it’s by one’s own petard (and maybe even with) but not from. And thank you for dusting off this lovely phrase.

- Jimmy Maher

February 3, 2016 at 9:51 am

It is “by” in at least the most common edition of Hamlet, but the “from” was intentional to give it an anachronistic flair. Shakespearean humor… gotta love it, no?

T Plus 4: Bombing Nevada
January 23, 2015

Underground

You're in a narrow underground chamber, illuminated by an open door in the east wall. The walls and ceiling are gouged with deep spiral ruts; they look as if they've been routed out with heavy machinery.

A large cylinder occupies most of the chamber. The maze of cables and pipes surrounding it trails west, into the depths of a tunnel.

>w
Underground

The cables and pipes lining the tunnel's walls look like bloated veins and arteries in the splinter's flickering glow. Deep tunnels bend off to the east and west.

Some careless technician has left a walkie-talkie lying in the dirt.

>get walkie-talkie
Taken.

>turn on walkie-talkie
You turn on the rocker switch.

>z
Time passes.

A tinny voice, half-buried in static, says "Two."

>z
Time passes.

"One."

>z
Time passes.

The walkie-talkie clicks and hisses.

>z
Time passes.

For a brief moment, the tunnel is bathed in a raw white glare.

The most subtly chilling vista in Trinity is found not inside one of its real-world atomic vignettes, but rather in the magical land that serves as the central hub for your explorations. This landscape is dotted with incongruous giant toadstools, each of which, you eventually realize, represents a single atomic explosion.

As your eyes sweep the landscape, you notice more of the giant toadstools. There must be hundreds of them. Some sprout in clusters, others grow in solitude among the trees. Their numbers increase dramatically as your gaze moves westward, until the forest is choked with pale domes.

The scene is a representation of time, following the path of the sun from east to west. The toadstools choking the forest to the west presumably represent the nuclear apocalypse you’ve just escaped. If we subtract those toadstools along with the two somewhere far off to the east that must represent the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts, we’re left with those that represent not instances of atomic bombs used in anger, but rather tests. A few of these we know well as historical landmarks in their own right: the first hydrogen bomb; the first Soviet bomb; that original Trinity blast, off far to the southeast with the rising sun, from which the game takes its name and where its climax will play out. Like the bombs used in anger, these don’t interest us today; we’ll give them their due in future articles. What I do want to talk about today is some of the blasts we don’t usually hear so much about. As the landscape would indicate, there have been lots of them. Since the nuclear era began one summer morning in the New Mexico desert in 1945, there has been a verified total of 2119 tests of nuclear bombs. Almost half of that number is attributed to the United States alone. Yes, there have been a lot of bombs.

At the close of World War II, the big question for planners and politicians in the United States was that of who should be given control of the nation’s burgeoning nuclear arsenal. The Manhattan Project had been conducted under the ostensible auspices of the Army Air Force (the Air Force wouldn’t become it’s own independent service branch until 1947), but in reality had been something of a law unto itself. Now both Army and Navy were eager to lay claim to the bomb. The latter had dismissed the bomb’s prospects during the war years and declined to play any role in the Manhattan Project, but was nevertheless able to wrangle enough control now to be given responsibility for the first post-war tests of the gadgets, to be called Operation Crossroads. The tests’ announced objective was to determine the impact of the atomic bomb on military ships. Accordingly, the Navy assembled for atomic target practice around Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands a fleet made up of surplus American ships and captured German and Japanese that would have been the envy of most other nations. Its 93 vessels included in their ranks 2 aircraft carriers, 5 battleships, and 4 cruisers. The 167 native residents of Bikini were shipped off to another, much less survivable island, first stop in what would prove to be a long odyssey of misery. (Their sad story is best told in Operation Crossroads by Jonathan M. Weisgall.)

From the start, Operation Crossroads had more to do with politics than with engineering or scientific considerations. It was widely hyped as a “test” to see if the very idea of a fighting navy still had any relevance in this new atomic age. More importantly in the minds of its political planners, it would also be a forceful demonstration to the Soviet Union of just what this awesome new American weapon could do. Operation Crossroads was the hottest ticket in town during the summer of 1946. Politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists — everyone who could finagle an invitation — flocked to Bikini to enjoy the spectacle along with good wine and food aboard one of the Navy’s well-appointed host vessels, swelling the number of on-site personnel to as high as 40,000.

Unprotected sailors aboard the German cruiser Prinz Eugen just hours after it was irradiated by an atomic bomb.

The spectators would get somewhat less than they bargained for, many of the sailors considerably more. The first bomb was dropped from a borrowed Army Air Force B-29 because the Navy had no aircraft capable of carrying the gadget. Dropped on a hazy, humid morning from high altitude, from which level the B-29 was notoriously inaccurate even under the best conditions, the bomb missed the center of the doomed fleet by some 700 yards. Only two uninteresting attack transports sank instantly in anything like the expected spectacular fashion, and only five ships sank in total, the largest of them a cruiser. As the journalists filed their reams of disappointed copy and the Navy’s leadership breathed a sigh of relief, some 5000 often shirtless sailors were dispatched to board the various vessels inside the hot zone to analyze their damage; as a safety precaution, they first scrubbed them down using water, soap, and lye to get rid of any lingering radiation. The operation then proceeded with the second bomb, an underwater blast that proved somewhat more satisfying, ripping apart the big battleship Arkansas and the aircraft carrier Saratoga amongst other vessels and tossing their pieces high into the air.

The second Operation Crossroads shot, July 25, 1946.

Operation Crossroads was emblematic of a Navy leadership that had yet to get their collective heads around just what a paradigm-annihilating device the atomic bomb actually was. Their insistence on dropping it on warships, as if the future was just going to bring more Battles of Midway with somewhat bigger explosions, shows that they still thought of the atomic bomb as essentially just a more powerful version of the bombs they were used to, a fundamentally tactical rather than strategic device. Their complete failure to take seriously the dangers of radioactive fallout, meanwhile, may be the reason that the sailors who took part in Operation Crossroads suffered an average life-span reduction of three months compared to others in their peer group. These were early days yet in atomic physics, but their state of denial is nevertheless difficult to understand. If the horrific photographs and films out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — some of which apparently are shocking enough to still be classified — hadn’t been warning enough, there was always the case of Los Alamos physicist Louis Slotin. Less than six weeks before Operation Crossroads began, Slotin had accidentally started a chain reaction while experimenting with the atomic core of the same type of bomb used in the tests. He stopped the reaction through quick thinking and bravery, but not before absorbing a lethal dose of radiation. His slow, agonizing death — the second such to be experienced by a Los Alamos physicist — was meticulously filmed and documented, then made available to everyone working with atomic weapons. And yet the Navy chortled about the failure of the atomic bomb to do as much damage as expected whilst cheerfully sending in the boys to do some cleanup, ignoring both the slowly dying goats and other animals they had left aboard the various ships and the assessment of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists of the likely fate of any individual ship in the target fleet: “The crew would be killed by the deadly burst of radiation from the bomb, and only a ghost ship would remain, floating unattended in the vast waters of the ocean.”

Just as President Eisenhower would take space exploration out from under the thumb of the military a decade later with the creation of NASA, President Truman did an end-run around the military’s conventional thinking about the atomic bomb on January 1, 1947, when the new, ostensibly civilian Atomic Energy Commission took over all responsibility for the development, testing, and deployment of the nation’s atomic stockpile. The Atomic Energy Commision would continue to conduct a steady trickle of tests in the remoter reaches of the Pacific for many years to come, albeit none with quite the bizarre spectator-sport qualities of Operation Crossroads. But the twin shocks of the first Soviet test of an atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950, which came equipped with a raging debate about whether, how, and when the United States should again use its nuclear arsenal in anger, led weapons developers to agitate for a more local test site where they could regularly and easily set off smaller weapons than the blockbusters that tended to get earmarked to the Pacific. There were, they argued, plenty of open spaces in the American Southwest that would suit such a purpose perfectly well. On December 18, 1950, Truman therefore approved the allocation for this purpose of a 680-square-mile area inside the vast Nellis Air Force Gunnery and Bombing Range in the Nevada desert some 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The first test there, marking the first atomic bomb to be exploded on American soil since the original Trinity device, took place astonishingly soon thereafter, on January 27, 1951. By the end of the year sleeping quarters, mess halls, and laboratories had been built, creating a functioning, happy little community dedicated to making ever better bombs. The saga of the Nevada Test Site had begun. In the end no fewer than 928 of the 1032 nuclear tests ever conducted by the United States would be conducted right here.

One of the many test shots seen from the Las Vegas Strip during the 1950s.

The strangest years of this very strange enterprise were the earliest. With money plentiful and the need to keep ahead of the Soviets perceived as urgent, bombs were exploded at quite a clip — twelve during the first year alone. At first they were mostly dropped from airplanes, later more commonly hung from balloons or mounted atop tall temporary towers. The testing regime was, as test-site geophysicist Wendell Weart would later put it, very “free-form.” If someone at one of the nation’s dueling atomic-weapons laboratories of Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos determined that he needed a “shot” to prove a point or answer a question, he generally got it in pretty short order. Whatever else the testing accomplished, it was also a hell of a lot of fun. “I guess little boys like fireworks and firecrackers,” Weart admits, “and this was the biggest set of fireworks you could ever hope to see.” Las Vegas residents grew accustomed to the surreal sight of mushroom clouds blooming over their cityscape, like scenes from one of the B-grade atomic-themed monsters movies that filled the theaters of the era. When the bombs went off at night, they sometimes made enough light to read a newspaper by.

This era of free-form atmospheric testing at the Nevada Test Site coincided with the era of atomic mania in the United States at large, when nuclear energy of all stripes was considered the key to the future and the square-jawed scientists and engineers who worked on it veritable heroes. The most enduring marker of this era today is also one of the first. In 1946, not one but two French designers introduced risque new women’s bathing suits that were smaller and more revealing than anything that had come before. Jacques Heim called his the “atome,” or atom, “the world’s smallest bathing suit.” Louis Réard named his the bikini after the recently concluded Operation Crossroads tests at Bikini Atoll. “Like the bomb,” he declared, “the bikini is small and devastating.” It was Réard’s chosen name that stuck. In addition to explosive swimwear, by the mid-1950s you could get a “Lone Ranger atomic-bomb ring” by sending in 15 cents plus a Kix cereal proof of purchase; buy a pair of atomic-bomb salt and pepper shakers; buy an “Atomic Disintegrator” cap gun. Trinity‘s accompanying comic book with its breathless “Atomic Facts: Stranger than Fiction!” and its hyperactive patriotism is a dead ringer for those times.

Showgirl Lee Merlin, Miss Atomic Bomb 1958.

Said times being what they were, Las Vegas denizens, far from being disturbed by the bombs going off so close by, embraced them with all of their usual kitschy enthusiasm. The test site helpfully provided an annual calendar of scheduled tests for civilians so they could make plans to come out and enjoy the shows. For children, it was a special treat to drive up to one of the best viewpoints on Mount Charleston early in the morning on the day of a shot, like an even better version of the Fourth of July; the budding connoisseurs  cataloged and ranked the shots and compared notes with their friends in the schoolyard. Many adults, being connoisseurs of another stripe, might prefer the “Miss Atomic Bomb” beauty pageants and revues that were all the rage along the Strip.

Showgirl Sally McCloskey does an “atomic ballet” in front of a shot.

The official government stance, at the time and to a large extent even today, is that the radioactive fallout from these explosions traveled little distance if at all and was in any case minor enough to present few to no health or environmental concerns. Nevertheless, ranchers whose sheep grazed in the vicinity of the test site saw their flocks begin to sicken and die very soon after the test shots began. They mounted a lawsuit, which was denied under somewhat questionable circumstances in 1956; the sheep, claimed the court, had died of “malnutrition” or some other unidentified sickness. That judgment, almost all of the transcripts from which have since been lost, was later overturned on the rather astonishing basis of outright “fraud on the court” by the government’s defense team. That judgment was in its turn vacated on appeal in 1985, more than thirty years after the events in question. Virtually all questions about the so-called “Downwinders” who were affected — or believe they were affected — by fallout from the test site seem to end up in a similarly frustrating tangle.

What does seem fairly clear amid the bureaucratic babble, from circumstantial evidence if nothing else, is that the government even in the 1950s had more awareness of and concerns about fallout from the site than they owned up to publicly. Radioactive debris from those very first tests in early 1951 was detected, according to test-site meteorologist Philip Wymer Allen, going “up over Utah and across the Midwest and Illinois, not too far south of Chicago, and out across the Atlantic Coast and was still easily measured as the cloud passed north of Bermuda. We didn’t track it any further than that.” Already in 1952 physical chemist Willard Libby, inventor of radiocarbon dating and later a chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was expressing concerns about radioactive cesium escaping the site and being absorbed into the bones of people, especially children. A potential result could be leukemia. Another, arguably even graver concern, was radioiodine particles, which could be carried a surprising distance downwind before settling to earth, potentially on the forage preferred by sheep, goats, and cows. Many people in rural communities, especially in those days, drank unprocessed milk straight from the cow, as it were. If enough milk containing radioiodine is ingested, it can lead to thyroid cancer. Children were, once again, both particularly big drinkers of milk and particularly prone to the effects of the radioiodine that might be within it. When environmental chemist Delbert Barth was hired in the 1960s to conduct studies of radioiodine dispersion patterns at the site, he was asked to also make historical projections for the atmospheric shots of the 1950s — a request that, at least on its surface, seems rather odd if everyone truly believed there was absolutely nothing to fear. Similarly odd seems a policy which went into effect very early: not to conduct shots if the winds were blowing toward Las Vegas.

The radioactive exposure — or lack thereof — of the Downwinders remains a major political issue inside Nevada and also Utah, which many claim also received its fair share of fallout. Most people who were associated with the site say, predictably enough, that the Downwinders are at best misguided and at worst would-be freeloaders. Studies have not established a clear causal link between incidences of cancer and proximity to the Nevada Test Site, although many, including Barth, have expressed concerns about the methodologies they’ve employed. What we’re left with, then, are lots of heartbreaking stories which may have been caused by the activities at the site or may represent the simple hand of fate. (For a particularly sad story, which I won’t go into here because I don’t want to sound exploitative, see this interview with Zenna Mae and Eugene Bridges.)

The first era of the Nevada Test Site came to an abrupt end in November of 1958, when the United States and the Soviet Union entered into a non-binding mutual moratorium on all sorts of nuclear testing. For almost three years, the bombs fell silent at the test site and at its Soviet equivalent near Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. But then, on September 1, 1961, the Soviets suddenly started testing again, prompting the Nevada Test Site to go back into action as well. Still, the public was growing increasingly concerned over what was starting to look like the reckless practice of atmospheric testing. While Las Vegas had continued to party hearty, even before the moratorium the doughty farmers and ranchers working still closer to the site had, as Lawrence Livermore physicist Clifford Olsen rather dismissively puts it, “started to grumble a bit” about the effect they believed the fallout was having on their animals and crops and possibly their own bodies and those of their children. And now an international environmentalist movement was beginning to arise in response to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. In one of his last major acts before his assassination, President Kennedy in October of 1963 signed along with Soviet General Secretary Khrushchev the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that required all future nuclear tests to take place underground.

But never fear, the good times were hardly over at the Nevada Test Site. The scientists and engineers there had been experimenting with underground explosions for some years already in anticipation of this day that the more politically aware among them had begun to see as inevitable. Thus they were more than prepared to continue full-speed-ahead with a new regime of underground testing. The number of shots actually increased considerably during the 1960s, often clipping along at a steady average of one per week or more. Las Vegas, meanwhile, was still not allowed to forget about the presence of the test site. Residents grew accustomed to tremors that cracked plaster and made high-rises sway disconcertingly, phenomena that came to be known as “seismic fallout.” As the political mood shifted over the course of the decade, the number of complaints grew steadily, especially after a couple of big shots of well over 1 megaton in 1968 that caused serious structural damage to a number of buildings in Las Vegas. One of the most persistent and vociferous of the complainers was the eccentric billionaire recluse Howard Hughes, who was living at the time on the top two floors of the Desert Inn hotel. Hughes marshaled lots of money, employees, and political connections to his cause during the late 1960s, but was never able to stop or even slow the testing.

As for the environmental impact of this new breed of underground tests, the news is mixed. While neither is exactly ideal, it’s obviously preferable from an environmental standpoint to be exploding atomic bombs underground rather than in the open air. A whole new applied sub-science of geophysics, the discipline of nuclear “containment,” evolved out of efforts to, well, contain the explosions — to keep any radioactive material at all from “venting” to the surface during an explosion or “seeping” to the surface during the hours, months, and years afterward. And yet the attitudes of the folks working on the shots can still sound shockingly cavalier today. About 30 percent of the underground tests conducted during the 1960s leaked radioactivity to the surface to one degree or another. Those working at the site considered this figure acceptable. Virtually everyone present there during the 1960s makes note of the positive, non-bureaucratic, “can-do” attitude that still persisted into this new era of underground testing. Linda Smith, an administrator at the site, characterizes the attitude thus: “There is such a strong bias to get it done that overrides everything. Is there any profound discussion of should we or shouldn’t we? Is this good for the country? Is it not? There’s no question. You are there to get it done.” Clifford Olsen says, “We were all pretty much sure we were doing the right thing.”

What to make of this lack of introspection? Whatever else we say about it, we shouldn’t condemn the people of the Nevada Test Site too harshly for it. There were heaps of brilliant minds among them, but their backgrounds were very different from those of the people who had worked on the Manhattan Project, many of whom had thought and agonized at length about the nature of the work they were doing and the unimaginable power they were unleashing on the world. The men and few women of the Nevada Test Site, by contrast, had mostly come of age during or immediately after World War II, and had been raised in the very bosom of the burgeoning military-industrial complex. Indeed, most had had their education funded by military or industrial backers for the singular purpose of designing and operating nuclear weapons. This set them apart from their predecessors, who before the Manhattan Project and to a large degree after it — many among that first generation of bomb-makers considered their work in this area essentially done once the first few bombs had been exploded — tended to focus more on “pure” science than on its practical application. A few Brits aside, the Nevada Test Site people were monolithically American; many on the Manhattan Project came from overseas, including lots of refugees from occupied Europe. The Nevada Test Site people were politically conservative, in favor of law and order and strong defense (how could they not be given the nature of their work?); the Manhattan Project people were a much more politically heterogeneous group, with a leader in Robert Oppenheimer who had worked extensively for communist causes. Someone with a background like his would never have been allowed past the front gate of the Nevada Test Site.

Whatever else it was, the Nevada Test Site was just a great place to work. Regarded as they were as the nation’s main bulwark against the Soviet Union, the atomic scientists and all of those who worked with and supported them generally got whatever they asked for. Even the chow was first-rate: at the cafeteria, a dollar would get you all the steaks — good steaks — that you could eat. When all the long hours spent planning and calculating got to be too much, you could always take in a movie or go bowling: a little self-contained all-American town called Mercury grew up with the test site there in the middle of the desert. Its population peaked at about 10,000 during the 1960s, by which time it included in addition to a movie theater and bowling alley a post office, schools, churches, a variety of restaurants, a library, a swimming hall, and hotels — including one named, inevitably, the Atomic Motel. Or you could always take a walk just outside of town amidst the splendid, haunting desolation of the Nevada desert. And for those not satisfied with these small-town pleasures, the neon of Las Vegas beckoned just an hour or so down the highway.

But just as importantly, the work itself was deeply satisfying. After the slide rules and the geological charts were put away, there still remained some of that old childlike pleasure in watching things go boom. Wendell Weart: “I would go back in a tunnel and see what happened to these massive structures that we had put in there, and to see how it manhandled them and just wadded them up into balls. That was impressive.” Nor was the Nevada Test Site entirely an exercise in nuclear nihilism. While weapons development remained always the primary focus, most working there believed deeply in the peaceful potential for nuclear energy — even for nuclear explosions. One of the most extended and extensive test series conducted at the site was known as Operation Plowshare, a reference to “beating swords into plowshares” from the Book of Isaiah. Operation Plowshare eventually encompassed 27 separate explosions, stretching from 1961 to 1973. Its major focus was on nuclear explosions as means for carrying out grand earth-moving and digging operations, for the creation of trenches and canals among other things. (Such ideas formed the basis of the proposal Edward Teller bandied about during the Panama Canal controversy of the late 1970s to just dig another canal using hydrogen bombs.) Serious plans were mooted at one point to dig a whole new harbor at Cape Thompson in Alaska, more as a demonstration of the awesome potential of hydrogen bombs for such purposes than out of any practical necessity. Thankfully for the delicate oceanic ecosystem thereabouts, cooler heads prevailed in the end.

So, the people who worked at the site weren’t bad people. They were in fact almost uniformly good friends, good colleagues, good workers who were at the absolute tops of their various fields. Almost any one of them would have made a great, helpful neighbor. Nor, as Operation Plowshare and other projects attest, were they bereft of their own certain brand of idealism. If they sound heartlessly dismissive of the Downwinders’ claims and needlessly contemptuous of environmentalists who fret over the damage their work did and may still be doing, well, it would be hard for any of us to even consider the notion that the work to which we dedicated our lives — work which we thoroughly enjoyed, which made us feel good about ourselves, around which many of our happiest memories revolve — was misguided or downright foolish or may have even killed children, for God’s sake. I tend to see the people who worked at the site as embodying the best and the worst qualities of Americans in general, charging forward with optimism and industry and that great American can-do spirit — but perhaps not always thinking enough about just where they’re charging to.

A plume of radioactive debris vents from the Baneberry shot.

The golden age of free-and-easy atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site ended at last on December 18, 1970. That was the day of Baneberry, a routine underground shot of just 10 kilotons. However, due to what the geophysicists involved claim was a perfect storm of factors, its containment model failed comprehensively. A huge cloud of highly radioactive particles burst to the surface and was blown directly over a mining encampment that was preparing the hole for another test nearby. By now the nature of radioactivity and its dangers was much better appreciated than it had been during the time of Operation Crossroads. All of the people at the encampment were put through extended, extensive decontamination procedures. Nevertheless, two heretofore healthy young men, an electrician and a security guard, died of leukemia within four years of the event. Their widows sued the government, resulting in another seemingly endless series of trials, feints, and legal maneuvers, culminating in yet another frustrating non-resolution in 1996: the government was found negligent and the plaintiffs awarded damages, but the deaths of the two men were paradoxically ruled not to have been a result of their radiation exposure. As many in the Downwinder community darkly noted at the time, a full admission of guilt in this case would have left the government open to a whole series of new law suits. Thus, they claimed, this strange splitting of the difference.

The more immediate consequence of Baneberry was a six-month moratorium on atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site while the accident was investigated and procedures were overhauled. When testing resumed, it did so in a much more controlled way, with containment calculations in particular required to go through an extended process of peer reviews and committee approvals. The Atomic Energy Commission also began for the first time to put pressure on the scientists and engineers to minimize the number of tests conducted by pooling resources and finding ways to get all the data they could out of each individual shot. The result was a slowdown from that high during the 1960s of about one shot per week to perhaps one or two per month. Old-timers grumbled about red tape and how the can-do spirit of the 1950s and 1960s had been lost, but, perhaps tellingly, there were no more Baneberrys. Of the roughly 350 shots at the Nevada Test Site after Baneberry, only 4 showed any detectable radiation leakage at all.

The site continued to operate right through the balance of the Cold War. The last bomb to be exploded there was also the last exploded to date by the United States: an anticlimactic little 5-kiloton shot on September 23, 1992. By this time, anti-nuclear activists had made the Nevada Test Site one of their major targets, and were a constant headache for everyone who worked there. Included among the ranks of those arrested for trespassing and disruption during the test site’s twilight years are Kris Kristofferson, Martin Sheen, Robert Blake, and Carl Sagan. Needless to say, the mood of the country and the public’s attitude toward nuclear weapons had changed considerably since those rah-rah days of atomic cap guns.

A tunnel waits in readiness, just in case.

Since the mid-1990s the United States, along with Russia and the other established nuclear powers, has observed a long-lasting if non-binding tacit moratorium on all types of nuclear testing (a moratorium which unfortunately hasn’t been observed by new members of the nuclear club India, Pakistan, and North Korea). Stories of the days when mushroom clouds loomed over the Las Vegas Strip and the ground shook with the force of nuclear detonations are now something for long-time Nevada residents to share with their children or grandchildren. With its reason for existence in abeyance, the Nevada Test Site is in a state of largely deserted suspended animation today, Mercury a ghost town inhabited by only a few caretakers and esoteric researchers. One hopes that if Mercury should ever start to buzz with family life and commerce again it’s because someone has found some other, safer purpose for the desert landscape that surrounds it. In the meantime, the tunnels are still kept in readiness, just in case someone decides it’s time to start setting off the bombs again.

(The definitive resource on the history of the Nevada Test Site must be, now and likely forevermore, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas’s amazing Nevada Test Site Oral History Project. I could barely scratch the surface of the hundreds of lengthy interviews there when researching this article. And thanks to Duncan Stevens for his recommendation of Operation Crossroads by Jonathan M. Weisgall. I highly recommend the documentary The Atomic Cafe as a portrait of the era of atomic kitsch.)

Comments
21 Responses

- LoneCleric

January 23, 2015 at 9:04 pm

Their windows sued -> widows

(Either that, or radio-activity works in ways I’m not familiar with. :-) )

- Duncan Stevens

January 23, 2015 at 11:16 pm

Here in the U.S., even household fixtures are litigious.

- Jimmy Maher

January 24, 2015 at 7:20 am

:) Thanks!

- matt w

January 23, 2015 at 11:06 pm

Slotin’s death was not only the second of a Los Alamos physicist but the second caused by an accident with the very same core, I believe.

- jalapeno_dude

January 24, 2015 at 12:20 am

Yep–it was known as the “demon core”.

- Carl

January 24, 2015 at 1:11 am

I’ve always been amazed we didn’t have a nuclear war at some point in the last 70 years. For all its paradoxes, MAD seems to have worked. Given that axiom, even if the Nevada Test Site killed some children, it saved many millions of children, because MAD is predicated on an actual deterrent, which you cannot have without testing.

There is still a lot of activity at the Nevada Test Site these days. They still blow things up there under the auspices of the Stockpile Stewardship program, but everything is subcritical.

- Jimmy Maher

January 24, 2015 at 7:37 am

That’s of course the logic that held sway at the time, possibly even including a certain number of dead children into the brutal calculus, but I’m not sure it stands up to scrutiny. Richard Rhodes in particular has made a really compelling case that deterrence did not require matching the other superpower bomb for bomb, that just a small number of relatively modest bombs combined with a reasonably effective delivery system would have made more than deterrent enough. Would the Soviet Union really attack the United States if the consequence was even a couple of Hiroshima-sized bombs falling on Moscow? The Soviet Union was a crazy place, but I’m not sure it was that insane.

It may be that it was this perceived need for equivalence, on the part of both superpowers, that was the real tragedy and folly of the Cold War, leading as it did to the hydrogen bomb, to thousands of missiles, and, yes, quite possibly to dead children in Nevada and Utah.

- Carl Grace

January 25, 2015 at 5:47 pm

You make some interesting points…. food for thought. As crazy as the Soviet Union were at time, I think history clearly records that it was in fact the Americans who were more provocative on the whole. Sad, really.

- Juan Castro

January 28, 2015 at 6:06 pm

Not believing in an afterlife (or an omnipotent being that will join the battle of your side) helps. Can you imagine a theocracy voluntarily folding like the USSR did?

- Victor Gijsbers

January 24, 2015 at 10:53 am

Hi Jimmy, you write “there has been a verified total of 2119 nuclear explosions set off for testing purposes”. But Wikipedia speaks of 2119 nuclear tests involving a total of 2474 devices. I assume it is the devices rather than the tests that correspond to the explosions.

- Jimmy Maher

January 24, 2015 at 11:02 am

Thanks for parsing this more finely. Rather than try to sort out how many explosions that corresponds to in the case of the United States, I took the easy way out and reworded the line.

- Brian Bagnall

January 24, 2015 at 1:16 pm

A new addition to my bucket list is to visit Mercury, Nevada. I’ll be checking out the documentary you recommend.

Corrections:
“about today is” … “about today are”
“there has been” … “there have been”
“law onto” … “law unto”
“with with Russia”

- Jimmy Maher

January 24, 2015 at 1:40 pm

Thanks. I believe the first two are okay. The first is equating a singular with a plural, which I believe can be done either way in English. In the second, “total” is actually singular, so I believe that’s grammatically correct even if it might sound a little odd on a quick reading. Can’t argue with the other two, however…

Mercury is still a closed city, so it’s not someplace you can drop by casually. I believe they run fairly regular tours to the site, but I understand that they’re very popular and so have to be booked well in advance. Las Vegas does have a very good atomic testing museum: http://www.nationalatomictestingmuseum.org/.

- Jeremy Gans

January 25, 2015 at 2:42 am

“Jacques Heim called his the “atome,” or atom, “the world’s smallest bathing suit.”” I’m glad this one didn’t stick. After all, one thing events on Bikini Atoll (and elsewhere) demonstrate is that atoms aren’t the smallest piece of matter. If there is an analogy, it is between one-piece swimsuits and atoms, which were respectively ‘split’ by bikinis and atomic explosions….

- pressurizer

January 25, 2015 at 6:43 pm

One thing that always puzzled me is what they were actually testing. I can understand the early tests of a new device or the initial testing of a new subclass, like the hydrogen or neutron bombs. You’d think that most innovations – trigger assembly, safety measures, etc. – could well be tested without actually setting off an explosion. Was there really that much valuable data to be gathered that over a thousand live tests were necessary? I can’t shake a sneaking suspicion that a lot of these tests (by both sides) were conducted just to piss off or scare the enemy.

- Jimmy Maher

January 25, 2015 at 7:11 pm

Yeah, I tend to ask the same question. It’s a very difficult one to answer given that most details about most of the tests are still classified. When you read the Oral History Project interviews with scientists and engineers who worked at the site, there’s still tons of “Sorry, I’m not allowed to answer that.” And even at that we’re drowning in information on American tests in comparison with Soviet…

One thing that does come up is that many things that can be easily simulated now had to be tested live back in the day due to the state of computer technology. Queue a certain amount of grumbling from test-site old-timers about how these new-fangled simulations are no substitute for a real shot…

- iPadCary

January 26, 2015 at 3:25 pm

Exemplary work as per usual, Jimmy! m

Sorry to be off topic, but could you please explain quickly again why you won’t bring
“The King Of Shreds & Patches” to iPad? Thank you

- Jimmy Maher

January 26, 2015 at 3:37 pm

Because there aren’t enough hours in my day.

- iPadCary

January 26, 2015 at 11:20 pm

Alrighty, then.

- Nifft

January 29, 2015 at 6:18 pm

You can play it with “Frotz”.

- ZUrlocker

February 13, 2015 at 2:24 am

well, if you weren’t writing so much ;-)

(really just kidding)

T Plus 3: Edward Teller and His Superbomb
January 30, 2015

Scaffold

Whoever threw this place together wasn't too worried about permanence. Tin walls rise on flimsy studs to a ceiling that sags under its own weight. It reminds you of a prefab tool shed, several stories high.

You're standing beside a monstrous conglomeration of pipes, compressors and pressure valves that fills most of the building.

A stairway leads downward.

>d
You descend the stairway.

Bottom of Scaffold

A maze of plumbing rises before you like the back of a giant refrigerator. Stairs lead up to a scaffold overlooking the equipment. Turning south, you see a closed set of sliding doors, with a small box and a loudspeaker mounted on the wall beside them.

>open box
You swing the box open.

A toggle switch and a red button are mounted inside.

>turn on toggle switch
You turn on the toggle switch.

The loudspeaker emits a burst of static, then a steady hiss.

"Zero minus two minutes."

>push red button
You push the red button.

With an electric whirr, the heavy doors slide open.

"Zero minus ninety seconds."

>s
South Beach

The waters of a peaceful lagoon reflect the tropical dawn like a fiery mirror. A few stars are still visible in the rosy sky.

The glorified tool shed dominates this little island, leaving room only for a narrow strip of sand that curves to the northeast and northwest. A red button is mounted on the wall beside the open sliding doors of the shed.

"Zero minus one minute."

>ne
You follow the curve of the shore.

East Beach

Palm trees far across the lagoon stand in dark relief against the eastern sky. The shore continues northwest and southwest, around the equipment shed.

"Zero minus thirty seconds."

>nw
You follow the curve of the shore.

North Beach

A square wooden extension juts out of the side of the building, stretching away across the lagoon as far as you can see.

The beach continues around the equipment shed to the southeast and southwest.

"Five. Four. Three. Two. One."

Your tropical vacation is cut short by a multimegaton thermonuclear detonation, centered in the nearby equipment shed.

The first Trinity test of an atomic bomb in 1945 yielded an explosion equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT. Barely seven years later, on November 1, 1952, the United States exploded the first thermonuclear bomb — known colloquially as the “hydrogen bomb” — on Enewetak Atoll, a member of the Marshall Islands group. That first hydrogen bomb yielded an explosion worthy of 10.4 megatons of TNT, 520 times the force of the Trinity blast. Moore’s Law’s got nothing on the early days of atomic-bomb development.

President Truman had likened the Trinity bomb to the wrath of the God of the Old Testament, comparing it to “the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.” What then to make of the hydrogen bomb? It was a destructive force beyond comprehension. That we got there so quickly was almost entirely down to the drive of one man who was there at the meeting that would lead to the Manhattan Project and the first atomic bomb and who would continue to be a major voice in both American politics and American weapons development through the entirety of the Cold War. Driven by scientific genius, patriotism, paranoia, and a titanic ego, he became the nation’s most long-serving Cold Warrior, perhaps the ultimate exemplar of the mentality that spawned and fueled that shadowy conflict and the lurking specter of nuclear apocalypse that accompanied it. His name was Edward Teller.

Born on January 15, 1908, in Budapest as the son of a prosperous Jewish attorney, Teller didn’t say a word until age three, leading his parents to believe he might be retarded. But then, when he did start to speak at last, he spoke in complete sentences. As a young boy his favorite author was Jules Verne: “His words carried me into an exciting world. The possibilities of man’s improvement seemed unlimited. The achievements of science were fantastic, and they were good.” But he wouldn’t be allowed much time for boyish dreams. During 1918 and 1919, amidst the end of the First World War, the breakup of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Russian Revolution that was taking place nearby, governments came and went quickly in Budapest. First there was the relatively benign if chaotic Hungarian Democratic Republic. Then came the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the second communist state in the world, built on Lenin’s model; it was less benign, and even more chaotic. And finally there was the proto-fascistic Kingdom of Hungary, accompanied by the White Terror, a series of bloody purges and brutal repressions aimed at scourging the country of communism and, it often seemed, the Jews who had disproportionately supported it. The institutionalized discrimination of the period may have been the source of the relentless competitive drive that would mark the rest of Teller’s life; his father told him that as a Jew “he would have to excel the average just to stay even.” His father also told him that he would have to emigrate if he wished to really make something of himself. Young Edward therefore worked like mad on his academics, and in 1926 he was accepted to study Chemical Engineering at Karlsruhe University in Germany.

As the political climate in Germany darkened, Teller completed his undergraduate studies at Karlsruhe, followed by a PhD in Physics at the University of Leipzig. He also lost most of his right foot in a streetcar accident in Munich; he would wear a prosthetic, and walk with a pronounced limp, for the rest of his life. He took up a research post at the University of Göttingen, where he published papers like mad. Setting a pattern that would hold throughout his career, he almost always worked with a coauthor, who would be responsible for sorting insights that sometimes came off more as feverish ravings than rigorous science into some manageable, organized form, and who would do the tedious but necessary work of calculating and verifying what seemed to come to Teller unbidden as intuitive truths. Teller was given to occasional fits of brooding, but at other times could be great fun, possessed of an easy, self-deprecating humor and a ready laugh. He was quite an accomplished classical pianist, but his approach to the art said much about an internal drive that he sometimes masked in casual contact with his peers: he played everything fortissimo, treating the composers whose works he played like personal challengers. On the whole, though, he was well-liked, and increasingly well-respected for his theoretical élan.

But soon it was, as Teller later put it, “a foregone conclusion I had to leave” Germany; Hitler had come to power, bringing with him an institutionalized antisemitism that would soon make his run-ins with bigotry in Hungary seem mild. Thankfully, in 1934 his burgeoning reputation won him an appointment to work with the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr at the University of Copenhagen, the very center of the universe of physics at that time. This was followed by a brief stay at University College London. The following year he accepted a professorship at George Washington University. In the company of his new wife, his childhood sweetheart Mici whom he had returned to Budapest one last time to marry, he booked passage to the United States, not at all sure about his decision to leave Europe. His worries were unfounded; he quickly fell in love with the New World with all the patriotic passion an immigrant often musters, and never again wanted to live anywhere else.

In early 1939 a wave of excitement swept an international physics community still struggling to retain its dedication to the open sharing of knowledge in the face of the war clouds gathering over Europe. Two German scientists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, had managed a feat most of their colleagues had heretofore considered impossible: they had split an atom of uranium. They had, in other words, achieved nuclear fission. This opened up a possibility that had been long discussed but also long dismissed by most physicists as a fantasy: to create a fission chain reaction capable of releasing almost inconceivable amounts of energy — energy with the potential to create an almost inconceivably powerful bomb. Teller’s fellow physicist and Hungarian émigré Leó Szilárd immediately began agitating for a top-secret crash program to build one of these “atomic bombs,” or failing that to prove definitively that it could not be done. Using logic that would become all too familiar over the decades of atomic history to come, he said that the democratic world had to have the bomb before Nazi Germany. And, having split the atom first, the Germans were obviously already ahead. (Szilárd apparently didn’t consider that the willingness of Hahn and Strassmann to publish their work in scientific journals probably meant that they weren’t, at least yet, thinking all that seriously about its potential as a weapon.) But other scientists, including Bohr, remained unwilling to sacrifice their traditional openness in the name of something which was they thought was likely to be impossible anyway. The chief stumbling block was the need for comparatively huge quantities of uranium 235, which no one knew how to produce in any remotely efficient way. “It can never be done,” said Bohr, “unless you turn the United States into one huge factory.” Unconvinced, Szilárd kept insisting that everything had changed as soon as fission was proved to be possible, and that his colleagues denied it at their peril.

It’s at this point that Teller, heretofore a promising but hardly a major physicist, enters the history books for the first time — not as a great thinker in his own right but, as he himself would later dryly put it, as “Szilárd’s chauffeur.” Szilárd didn’t drive, and he needed to get out to Long Island for the second of two meetings with Albert Einstein, now also living in exile in the United States, that would change the course of history. Einstein was just about the only physicist American politicians were likely to be familiar with, the only one they were likely to listen to if he came to them with outlandish science-fictional hopes and fears of a futuristic “atomic bomb.” Thus, barely a month before Germany invaded Poland to touch off the Second World War, Szilárd, Teller, and Einstein sat in the latter’s comfortable sitting room — Einstein still in his slippers — sipping tea. Teller, having already served as chauffeur, now accepted the further indignity of being the secretary, writing down the letter to President Roosevelt that his two older colleagues dictated to him. Hand-delivered to Roosevelt by Alexander Sachs, a well-connected Jewish banker, the letter led to the formation of an “Advisory Committee on Uranium,” forefather of the Manhattan Project, in October of 1939. The Committee included both Szilárd and Teller amongst its members. It was in fact Teller himself who made the first request for funding: for $6000 to finance some early experiments to be conducted by the exiled Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. After considerable argument about the expense, the request was approved.

Still, progress was slow, the government’s support was halfhearted, and even Teller himself was uncertain that he wanted to abandon pure science for weapons research. Then came the German invasion of France and the Low Countries in May of 1940. Teller later claimed that the shocking success of the Wehrmacht convinced him that “Hitler would conquer the world unless a miracle happened.” A speech by Roosevelt galvanized him to action: “If the scientists in the free countries will not make weapons to defend the freedom of their countries, then freedom will be lost.” Teller’s duty as he saw it was clear: “My mind was made up, and it has not changed since.” Actually, records of Roosevelt’s speeches from the period reveal no such formulation as the one in Teller’s recollection. There’s merely an offering of absolution to scientists for having enabled so many technologies which Germany was now putting to such evil use, along with a paean to the search for knowledge, scientific and otherwise, which Germany was now so actively repressing. Nevertheless, Teller would soon believe the “miracle” the world so urgently needed to be within sight in the form of the atomic bomb. His insistence on seeing weapons of mass destruction in such quasi-religious terms would come to define the role he would play in many dramas to come.

In mid-1941, just a few months after he and Mici took the oath of American citizenship, Edward Teller moved to Columbia to work more closely with Fermi and Szilárd, to whose cause he was now a complete convert. Soon after, he was party to yet another conversation that would change the world, this time with he himself as the active agent of that change. When Teller and Fermi were walking back from lunch one day, the latter mused “out of the blue” whether it might be possible to use the as-yet nonexistent atomic bomb as a mere catalyst for a much bigger bomb, one that fused rather than split atoms. Specifically, hydrogen might be fused to helium, like the process that powered the Sun. Fermi estimated that a fusion bomb could be made to explode with three orders of magnitude more force than a simple fission device. He considered the idea a throwaway; the numbers would start to get so big that you kind of had to ask what the point would really be. Teller, however, took it as a challenge.

This was vintage Teller. Already in 1941 he considered the fission bomb essentially a solved problem in theoretical physics. Just as he needed patient collaborators to clean up and finish his research papers, he was more than happy to turn over the practical work on the fission bomb to others while he swam after the next big fish. Within a year he thought he knew “precisely how to do it.” He broke the news to his colleague and best friend, exiled German physicist Hans Bethe:

Teller told me that the fission bomb was all well and good and, essentially, was now a sure thing. In reality, the work had hardly begun. Teller likes to jump to conclusions. He said that what we really should think about was the possibility of igniting deuterium [an isotope of hydrogen, sometimes known as “heavy hydrogen”] by a fission weapon — the hydrogen bomb.

Teller’s idea was soon christened “the Super.” He estimated that it should be able to “devastate an area of more than 100 square miles.”

Teller followed Fermi to the University of Chicago in 1942, where Fermi took charge of the project to build what became known as Chicago Pile 1, the world’s first nuclear reactor. When activated in November of that year, it proved once and for all that an atomic chain reaction, and thus an atomic bomb, was possible. With that proof, the newly christened Manhattan Project now ramped up in earnest under the stewardship of Army Air Force General Leslie Groves, who was placed in charge of infrastructure and practical and military concerns, and American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the scientific research. Teller was one of the first scientists to arrive at Los Alamos, the little community Groves and Oppenheimer constructed to finish the work of making the atomic bomb way out in the splendid isolation of the New Mexico desert. Teller liked and admired Oppenheimer with an enthusiasm that could sometimes verge on hero worship. Oppenheimer was, he said, a “bricklayer,” capable of seeing the whole puzzle and fitting its pieces together, as opposed to the “brick makers” around him who could only see their own small piece.

By now the Manhattan Project was working to develop not one but two types of fission bomb. The first would be a relatively crude device that used uranium 235. Neils Bohr’s words about “turning the United States into one huge factory” were proving to be prophetic, as Groves oversaw a massive industrial effort to enrich enough uranium to power it; this part of the Manhattan Project alone would eventually employ tens of thousands of people. The other bomb was a more elegant and efficient but also much more uncertain design that used the newly synthesized element of plutonium instead of uranium. It would have to be triggered by precisely placed and shaped explosive charges, which would implode its plutonium core into a supercritical mass and start the chain reaction. Teller worked for some time on this implosion process, the trickiest technical problem of all those that the Manhattan Project had to overcome.

Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller hiking near Los Alamos, circa 1944.

Teller, however, soon became aggrieving and aggrieved, building the foundation of yet another lifelong reputation: that of someone who just doesn’t play well with others. As the little community of Los Alamos grew around him, Teller had expected to either be placed in charge of all theoretical physicists or of an entirely new project to work on the Super. He didn’t get either appointment. Instead, his old friend Hans Bethe took charge of the theoretical physicists, leaving Teller so resentful that it spoiled their friendship forever. The Super project, meanwhile, never got started at all; it was declared an idea maybe worth revisiting after the fission bombs were finished, but nothing to use resources on now. Teller began to neglect his assigned tasks in favor of working independently on the Super. Bethe, he recalls, “wanted me to work on calculational details at which I am not particularly good, while I wanted to continue not only on the hydrogen bomb, but on other novel subjects.” George Gamow, a Russian émigré physicist who had known Teller from his years in Germany, notes that “something changed” in Teller after he got to Los Alamos. Before, he had been “helpful, willing and able to work on other people’s ideas without insisting on everything having to be his own.” Now… well, not so much. “Since the theoretical division was very shorthanded,” says Bethe, “it was necessary to bring in new scientists to do the work that Teller declined to do.”

Teller took to prowling about distracting scientists from other, more immediately useful work with his ideas and proposals, driving Bethe crazy. At last in the spring of 1944 Bethe, with Oppenheimer’s approval, relieved Teller “of further responsibility for work on the wartime development of the atomic bomb.” (The man who replaced Teller on the implosion team, Rudolf Peierls, brought with him an assistant named Klaus Fuchs who would share many details of the atomic bomb’s design — most importantly the tricky implosion process itself — with the Soviet Union.) Oppenheimer personally convinced an irate Teller not to leave. After all, he said, this was just what he wanted; now he could work on the Super full-time. And so Teller’s work on those first atomic bombs was largely done.

After the war was ended by the dropping of two examples of Los Alamos’s handiwork — one of uranium, the other of plutonium — on Japan, the little desert community began to disperse. Many of the most important minds behind the bomb, including Bethe, Fermi, and Oppenheimer himself, were eager to put weapons development behind them and return to either pure research or, in Oppenheimer’s case, increasing political engagement with the handling of their creation. Teller was deeply disturbed at this loss of brainpower, and even more disturbed that he still couldn’t get approval of his Super project. He wrote an urgent letter trying to convince his colleagues of the necessity of further weapons development, particularly on the Super, which he said was realizable within five years if they all put their minds to it. Deploying the same paranoid logic that had led to the development of the fission bombs, he said that the Soviet Union might very well be able to make a hydrogen bomb without even bothering with a fission-only bomb; the shadowy threat was now the Soviet Union rather than Nazi Germany, but the formulation was otherwise the same. He pronounced colleagues like Oppenheimer who would prefer to reach diplomatic accommodation with the Soviet Union, accommodation which might even entail sharing the atomic bomb with them, guilty of “fallacy.” And, sounding another thoroughgoing theme of his career, he pronounced thermonuclear explosions to be potentially useful for many peaceful purposes; they would “allow us to extend our power over natural phenomena far beyond anything we can at present imagine.”

Some of his colleagues were able to secure time on the ENIAC, by some reckonings the world’s first real computer, to do calculations which seemed to prove the Super feasible. An official conference held at Los Alamos in April of 1946 produced more general agreement that it should be possible, although by no means did everyone agree with all of Teller’s most optimistic predictions for its timetable. For the time being, though, those remaining at Los Alamos were busy preparing for Operation Crossroads, as well as improving the safety and reliability of the existing arsenal. Thus the Super remained firmly on the back burner. Teller himself had already departed in frustration by the time of the Super conference; he joined Fermi at the University of Chicago in February of 1946.

But thirty months later Teller, proclaiming himself increasingly disturbed by the Chinese Civil War and the by now blatant takeover of all of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union, returned to Los Alamos. “I fully realize the menacing international situation,” he said, “and I believe that the United States must develop its military strength to the utmost if we are not to succumb to the danger of communism.” And, casting himself as a martyr to the cause, he proclaimed a sense of patriotic duty to be behind the move, “in spite of the fact that I cannot hope to work as happily and with as much immediate satisfaction in a field of applied science.” More quietly but perhaps more honestly, he admitted to a friend that it was “quite clear that I am needed in Los Alamos more than I am needed in Chicago,” and “being necessary is an extremely important thing for me.” For their part, many of his colleagues noted not so much a considered position behind his decision as a visceral hatred of the Soviet Union that could sometimes seem to verge on the ethnic. The Soviet Union had just completed its takeover of Hungary in June of 1948, when the Soviet-backed Hungarian Communist Party effectively outlawed the democratic opposition and cut Teller off from his remaining family in Budapest. His Hungarian friend and Los Alamos colleague John von Neumann notes that “Russia was traditionally the enemy” of Hungary, subject to “an emotional fear and dislike” among his countrypeople.

Teller’s return to Los Alamos coincided with increasingly urgent consideration of the Super in the halls of government, prompted by clear signs from intelligence sources that the Soviet Union was getting close to a fission bomb of its own. “It would be dreadful,” wrote a White House aide named William Golden, “if the Russians got it [the Super] first.” Teller was on holiday in England in September of 1949 when he got the news that the Soviet Union had just exploded its first atomic bomb, at least a year before the CIA’s most pessimistic predictions.

His advocacy now shifted into overdrive. Despite the fact that the Soviets were still very obviously playing catch-up, and largely using stolen American designs to do so (that first Soviet bomb was a virtual clone of the Trinity bomb), he announced that the United States was in “grave danger that we have lost or are losing the atomic armaments race.” “If the Russians demonstrate a Super before we possess one,” he declared, “our situation will be hopeless.” His logic was questionable at best, to the extent that Ashutosh Jogalekar in a recent article for Scientific American goes beyond accusing him of fuzzy thinking to accusing him of outright deception, calling his advocacy for the Super “his first real dishonest act.” Yet he had at last an eager audience looking for any source of comfort in the face of the Soviet test. Oppenheimer, now increasingly at odds with Teller personally as well as professionally, wrote despairingly of “this miserable thing” that “appears to have caught the imagination, both of the Congressional and of the military people, as the answer to the problem posed by the Russian advance.” Seeing it as “the way to save the country and the peace,” he wrote, “appears to me full of dangers.” Teller took very, very personally Oppenheimer’s advocacy for diplomacy with the Soviet Union and his persistent skepticism about both the moral wisdom and the technical feasibility of the Super.

Advocates of reasoned diplomacy seldom won over advocates of nuclear armaments during the Cold War. On January 31, 1950, President Truman announced to the world that the United States was going forward with work “on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or super-bomb.” Announcing the Super publicly in this way made a marked contrast to the top-secret Manhattan Project. The move, driven largely by domestic political calculations on the part of Truman’s staff, explicitly defined future nuclear research as a race to the Super between the Americans and the Soviets, a sort of perverted forefather to the Moon Race in which both sides would seek to be first to unleash the most terrible destructive force in the history of the humanity.

Some scientists declined to work on the project out of moral misgivings; others simply because they didn’t want to work with Teller. Future Nobel Laureate Emilio Segrè, for example, pronounced Teller “dominated by irresistible passions much stronger than even his powerful rational intellect,” and turned his job offer down. The core of the team that was finally assembled included, in addition to Teller, two less visible European veterans of the Manhattan Project, Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann. They didn’t make for a very happy family. Within weeks Ulam was complaining about “Edward’s obstinacy, his single-mindedness, and his overwhelming ambition.” As Ulam and Neumann worked through the sorts of tedious calculations that Teller always found beneath him, a painful reality slowly dawned on them: Teller’s plan for the Super, which he had first conceived even before the fission bomb was a reality, simply wouldn’t work. When they tried to demonstrate this to Teller, the latter, in the words of Stanislaw Ulam’s wife Françoise, “objected loudly and cajoled everyone around into disbelieving the results. What should have been the common examination of difficult problems became an unpleasant confrontation.” “Teller was not easily reconciled to our results,” says Stanislaw Ulam himself more laconically. “I learned that the bad news drove him once to tears of frustration, and he suffered great disappointment. I never saw him personally in that condition, but he certainly appeared glum in those days, and so were other enthusiasts of the H-bomb project.” Teller was soon engaging in conspiracy theorizing, believing that Ulam and von Neumann were deliberately biasing their findings to make him and his Super look bad. He demanded that virtually all of Los Alamos be placed at his disposal, but as 1950 ground on and his theories looked more and more flawed nobody, least of all Teller, seemed quite sure what they should actually be doing.

Then, one day in late January of 1951, Françoise Ulam found her husband staring vacantly into their back garden. “‘I found a way to make it work.’ ‘What work?’ I asked. ‘The Super,’ he replied. ‘It is a totally different scheme, and it will change the course of history.'” The technical details of Ulam’s new scheme, and of Teller’s original, we won’t go into here. Suffice to say that Teller immediately saw the new idea’s potential. “Edward is full of enthusiasm about these possibilities,” wrote Ulam to a colleague. In an indication of just how far their relationship had deteriorated, he then added a stinger: “This is perhaps an indication they will not work.”

There soon followed what Jogalekar labels Teller’s second dishonest act. Unwilling to share the stewardship of or credit for his Super, Teller aggressively shunted Ulam aside, all but forcing him out of the project altogether. Françoise Ulam:

From then on Teller pushed Stan aside and refused to deal with him any longer. He never met or talked meaningfully with Stan ever again. Stan was, I felt, more wounded than he knew by this unfriendly reception, although I never heard him express ill feelings toward Teller. (He rather pitied him instead.) Secure in his own mind that his input had been useful, he withdrew.

Teller would minimize Ulam’s contribution for the rest of his life. Ulam himself never seriously campaigned to be awarded his own proper share of the credit, perhaps because he was much more ambivalent about their accomplishment than Teller. He often compared the hydrogen bomb to the Jewish legend of the Golem, which, having been created as a means of protection, eventually gets out of its maker’s control and goes on a murderous rampage through Prague.

With the Super now looking feasible, the Korean War raging, and the knowledge that, thanks not least to Truman’s grand pronouncement, this was now a race with the Soviets, even the likes of Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Bethe now supported its development. Teller, however, still created chaos everywhere he went. He demanded to be placed in sole charge of the Super project, including not only the research but the logistics, the engineering, and the administration. Knowing that that way lay madness, Los Alamos director Norris Bradbury absolutely refused. On September 17, 1951, Teller quit in a huff. Many of his colleagues mumbled darkly about what seemed a developing pattern: Teller had quit on the fission-bomb project as well just when it needed him most. (Teller himself would likely have replied that, as a theoretical physicist through and through, he was neither terribly interested in nor terribly good at the engineering details of actually building either the fission bomb or the Super.) “Once Teller left Los Alamos,” Bethe remembers, “even though they were working on ‘his’ weapon, he found all sort of reasons why it wouldn’t work. He tried to criticize it wherever possible.”

Nevertheless, Los Alamos soldiered on to shock the world and escalate the nuclear standoff to a potentially planet-wrecking scale when they detonated the first hydrogen bomb on November 1, 1952, a scene evocatively portrayed by Trinity in the vignette whose extracts open this article. It stripped not only Enewetak but every nearby island of all animal life and vegetation, as if someone had taken a giant potato peeler to their surfaces. It blew 80 million tons of highly radioactive material high into the air; parts of the fallout would travel to every corner of the globe. It vaporized birds in midair. It cooked nearby fish as if they had been dropped into a hot frying pan. (Yes, that cute, friendly dolphin that was so helpful to you in Trinity wasn’t long for this world.) Teller’s dubious dream had come to its fruition.

The world’s first hydrogen bomb explodes on November 1, 1952.

He should have been pleased, but he had other things on his mind. While Los Alamos worked to finish the Super, he was organizing an entirely new nuclear-weapons laboratory that would not be bound by what he saw as the carping pessimism of Los Alamos. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was founded on the site of a mothballed naval air station in Livermore, California, that summer of 1952. Teller claimed to be too busy setting up Livermore to make the trip to Enewetak to witness the blast, but most of his old colleagues attributed his failure to appear to pique; they believed he had been secretly hoping to see them fail, so his new Laboratory could sweep in and save the day. This alleged disappointment did not, however, keep him from claiming his paternity. “It’s a boy!” he announced.

On August 12, 1953, when the Soviet Union exploded its own inevitable first hydrogen bomb, the die for 35 more years of mutually assured destruction was irretrievably cast. On October 30, 1961, almost exactly twenty years after the idle lunch-time conversation that had spawned it, Teller’s baby reached terrifying adulthood when the Soviets detonated over the remote archipelago of Novaya Zemlya the largest atomic bomb and the largest force of any sort ever triggered by humans, a 50-plus-megaton thermonuclear monster that was promptly dubbed the “Tsar Bomba.” It produced a mushroom cloud over seven times the height of Mount Everest; would have caused third-degree burns to someone standing 60 miles away; broke windows over 500 miles away. Even by the standards of the institutionalized insanity of the Cold War this was madness. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans ever tested or built another bomb of anywhere close to that size for the simple reason that no one could quite imagine what to actually do with such a giant. Their 5- and 10-megaton warheads were less expensive, easier to make, and had more than enough megatonnage among them to destroy all life on the planet.

By the time of the Tsar Bomba Teller had largely abandoned the nuts and bolts of nuclear physics in favor of a career as an administrator of the military-industrial complex and as an increasingly visible political advocate for nuclear weapons and the strongest possible anti-communist stance. Just as Los Alamos seemed to have inherited some of its founder Robert Oppenheimer’s personality, being relatively cautious and pragmatic about the terrible weapons it developed, Teller’s Lawrence Livermore developed a reputation for shooting from the hip and a damn-the-consequences drive for ever bigger and dirtier bombs. Teller characterized his transformation from physicist to advocate as a principled move that he made only sadly and reluctantly. He was, he claimed again, a martyr to his thankless cause: “I cannot just go back to physics because I believe that to prevent another war happens to be incomparably more important.” Others questioned whether Teller didn’t enjoy the limelight a lot more than he admitted. Robert Brownlee, a colleague who worked with him during the 1950s, makes this observation:

Edward was, in my experience, two entirely different people. When he was with scientists, just scientists, every idea was interesting and valuable and rational and so on. And the moment a certain kind of person would walk in the room, a person who was outside the family, and therefore might take tales back, a press person, Edward would become a wild man. He would be showing off for the press or for the visitor, would say things that would make you do this: This guy has absolutely lost it, he’s completely crazy. But it was an affectation which he put on when somebody came. So the press, whenever they interviewed him, carried away with them a strange view of Edward. When he was just with us kids, he was not that at all. So when you could talk with Edward with the people right there, it was entirely different than having a stranger in there, because the moment that stranger arrived, Edward became another person. And it had something to do with publicity—I don’t know a better word for it. There must be a better word for it. But I learned that despite what everybody else at the lab said, Edward’s value had to be determined independent of his personality. He was extremely valuable, but nobody liked him because he was, every so often, totally flaky.

It was apparently this “crazy” version of Teller that the American people at large came to know well by 1960. After Teller made headlines across the country through his strident opposition to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 that moved all nuclear testing underground, Stanley Kubrick was inspired to make his caricature the eponymous star of Dr. Strangelove. He became for decades the favorite scientist of the American Right largely by telling them exactly what they wanted to hear. For instance, he played a major role, as we’ve already seen, in Ronald Reagan’s foolish SDI initiative of the 1980s, claiming to be able to provide not only its technology but also providing its justification: “If we went into a nuclear war today,” he said in 1980, “there is practically no question that the Russians would win that war and the United States would not exist.” The similarly of this rhetoric to that he had used to justify the Super 30 years before is not, I trust, lost on you. Even as the technologies of warheads and delivery systems evolved, the arguments employed in their justification always had this weird fly-in-amber consistency about them, leaving one to wonder when, if ever, enough would finally be enough. If anything, Teller’s rhetoric grew more extreme over the years; he once claimed that the United States had fallen so far behind the Soviet Union that he fully expected to be in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp — if not dead — within five years. His unapologetic advocacy of nuclear weapons and nuclear power continued until his death at age 95 in 2003. After the Cold War ended, rather than being thrilled at having seemingly achieved the goal he he had worked toward for so many years, he merely chose a new bogeyman to fear: Saddam Hussein.

Teller had by then been ostracized for decades from his old Manhattan Project colleagues, who whilst Teller plunged into Cold War politics had collected an impressive shelf of Nobel Prizes amongst themselves working with more peaceful applications of nuclear physics. He replaced those old relationships with new ones forged with a group of younger colleagues at Lawrence Livermore who, having had their educations largely funded by the military-industrial complex, saw themselves first and foremost not as scientists but as weapons designers. To them, Teller was a hero. To the old guard, he was nothing less than the traitor in their ranks. The source of their enduring enmity was not his questionable advocacy for the Super or even his slighting of Ulam, but rather another sequence of events involving a man he had once admired greatly: Robert Oppenheimer.

In May of 1952, the FBI questioned Teller on the subject of Oppenheimer, another in a seemingly endless string of pseudo-investigations born of Oppenheimer’s pre-war involvement with communist causes and his current less than gung-ho attitude toward the nation’s nuclear buildup. Teller, who believed Oppenheimer personally responsible for delaying his beloved Super program, laid into his old boss with a vengeance. The country, he claimed, could easily have had the hydrogen bomb a year ago if not for Oppenheimer’s obstructionism. While he stopped short of outright calling him a Soviet spy, he was careful not to exclude the possibility either. Otherwise, he conducted what amounted to a character assassination. Oppenheimer was motivated not by principle but by vanity and jealously in his opposition to Teller’s plans, as he didn’t want to see Teller better his own fission bomb with the Super. He had “great ambitions in science and realizes that he is not as great a physicist as he would like to be.” (Ironically, many of Teller’s colleagues would have happily accused him of this exact deep-seated sense of insecurity and its resulting personal failings.) It would be better for the country, Teller said, if Oppenheimer was “separated” from the corridors of power.

Not quite two years later, with Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt near its peak, Oppenheimer’s enemies pounced openly at last, initiating hearings to revoke all of Oppenheimer’s security clearances; doing so would end his time as a policy adviser since virtually all of the policy about which he advised involved classified weapons systems. In April of 1954, Robert Oppenheimer was effectively put on trial. A parade of hawks from inside the military, the FBI, and the Washington establishment testified against him; a parade of his old Manhattan Project colleagues testified strongly in his favor. Except for Edward Teller. Called to the stand on April 28, Teller was unwilling to support Oppenheimer but also seemingly too craven to repeat his accusations of two years before in the man’s presence. Asked point-blank if he believed Oppenheimer a security risk, he equivocated like mad:

In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer acting —  I understood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted — in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more. In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.

I believe, and that is merely a question of belief and there is no expertness, no real information behind it, that Dr. Oppenheimer’s character is such that he would not knowingly and willingly do anything that is designed to endanger the safety of this country. To the extent, therefore, that your question is directed toward intent, I would say I do not see any reason to deny clearance.

If it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say one would.

“I’m sorry,” said Teller to Oppenheimer as he left the courtroom. “After what you’ve just said, I don’t know what you mean,” replied Oppenheimer. On May 27, Oppenheimer’s security clearances were formally and permanently revoked. “I think it broke his spirit really,” says an old friend. “He was not the same person afterward,” says Bethe. He spent most of his remaining years sailing and puttering around his beach house in the Virgin Islands. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations made some efforts to rehabilitate his reputation, most notably awarding him the Enrico Fermi Award for his service in 1963, but his security clearances, and with them his political influence, were never restored. He died at age 62 in 1967.

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller share an uncomfortable handshake on the occasion of the former being awarded the Enrico Fermi Award, 1963.

After the trial was done and gone, the scientists who had once worked with and admired Teller were left with the same question that we are: what the hell happened to him? How did this brilliant young scientist turn into the paranoid war-monger Americans soon got used to seeing on their television screens, opposing in his thickly accented English every effort at arms control ever mooted during the Cold War? How could a nuclear physicist, raised on science, talk about winning nuclear wars and dismiss the dangers of radioactive fallout as trivial?

There have been thousands of theories deployed in thousands of attempts to figure out Teller. Some have pointed back to that Munich street-car accident in his youth, which they claim — a bit melodramatically in my view — left him “in constant pain” for the rest of his life. Some have noted his deep-seated personal insecurity, which seemed to have its origins even earlier, to when he as a sheltered child with a doting mother suffered constant abuse and harassment at school for the crimes of being smart and being Jewish. Some have traced his hatred of communism to the chaos it brought to the Hungary of his youth — or, as noted previously, traced it to a Hungarian’s ethnic antipathy for Russia and the Russians. Enrico Fermi’s observation is amongst the most telling as well as the most witty: Teller was the only monomaniac he knew, he said, who had several manias. Carl Sagan, Teller’s bitter opponent during the SDI debates of the 1980s, believed that Teller had become so obsessed with the Super he had “fathered” that he couldn’t think rationally about it anymore. Like any parent, he couldn’t bear the idea of his child being a force for evil or, indeed, its not being a force for good. Thus his proposals to use it for defense in the SDI program, or to use it to dig harbors and canals and clear troublesome mountains away (fallout be damned!), or even to lob it at the Sun and the Moon for “research” purposes.

Edward Teller (right) with Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan.

Whatever made Teller the man he became, it wasn’t as simplistic as any of the above, taken in isolation or even in combination. For all his legendary arrogance and his willingness to hold grudges, he was also frequently described as a “warm” man and a good, true friend. When his former colleagues all cut him after his testimony at Oppenheimer’s security hearing, sometimes even publicly refusing to shake his hand, Teller reportedly spent hours “weeping” at the spoiling of most of the most important relationships in his life. He even tried desperately to recant his testimony, only to learn it was too late. No, none of us humans are that easy to figure out.

Yet there does seem to be a larger pattern that holds true not only for Teller but for many other architects of the nuclear-arms race: the sheer seductive allure of the Bomb itself. As Trinity‘s box copy proclaims, “The basic power of the universe has been unleashed.” To wield such unprecedented power is a heady drug indeed. The Bomb is the One Ring, the Dark Side of the Force. (Interesting that so many of the most enduring mythic fictions of the Cold War feature such powerful but corrupting temptations…) Some people, like Robert Oppenheimer, were Prosperos, unnerved by its power and eager to eliminate it from the world. Others, like Edward Teller, were Dr. Faustuses, ready to ride this unholy force right down to the depths of Hell. Dueling aphorisms coined by the two men sound like extracts from Paradise Lost. “Physicists have known sin,” says Oppenheimer, eyes downcast. Teller, his trademark bushy eyebrows twitching with passion, replies, “Physicists have known power!”

(For a good history of the relationship between Teller and Oppenheimer — and also Ernest Lawrence, a figure I didn’t have room for in this article — see Brotherhood of the Bomb by Gregg Herken. You can find Carl Sagan’s article on Teller in The Demon-Haunted World.)

Comments
24 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

January 30, 2015 at 3:02 pm

The Bomb is the One Ring
Tolkien has sworn up and down that LOTR was not intended as allegory, and while some choose not to believe him about Sauron:Hitler, much of Fellowship of the Ring was written in 1939 and 1940, long before the atomic bomb was general public knowledge. So I’d acquit him of this charge.

One notable fact about the Tsar Bomba: it was initially supposed to be 100 megatons. Its payload was reduced at the last minute, and the potential fallout was notably limited by those changes. Among other things, the plane and crew dropping the bomb could not have gotten out of the blast radius in time (as it was, the plane went into freefall for a considerable height before eventually leveling out).

- Jimmy Maher

January 31, 2015 at 9:08 am

The parenthetical was intended more as a musing aside than a serious claim that either Tolkien or Lucas had the nuclear bomb actually in mind. For the rest, I believe us critics are still allowed to draw parallels even where they weren’t explicitly intended by authors. ;)

- Duncan Stevens

February 1, 2015 at 3:29 am

I just wouldn’t include LOTR in the category of Cold War fiction; it was published then, but conceived and, in substantial part, written well before. (Wagner is the more obvious influence anyway.) You can do what you like with Lucas, and there are certainly other examples, intended or not.

- Jimmy Maher

February 1, 2015 at 9:44 am

I think there are two different ways that one can take the phrase “Cold War fiction.” One is, “a fiction that was written during/inspired by the Cold War.” The other is, “a fiction that was popular/resonant in the culture during the Cold War.” Obviously in most cases these two overlap, but not here. And you go for the former definition, while I go for the latter. You say potato, I say potahto.

- Michael Davis

February 9, 2015 at 6:37 pm

Duncan I think you’re misunderstanding that he meant the phrase purely as a metaphor. He said the bomb was the one ring, not that the one ring was the bomb.

- Ricardo

January 30, 2015 at 5:27 pm

You, sir, is a gentleman and a scholar. Read this over at planet-if. Amazing how much you can extract and analyze from digital antiques research. :)

- Ken Rutsky

January 30, 2015 at 5:48 pm

Loving these articles. Thank you.

Also:

“..along with a peon to the search for knowledge…”

paean?

- Jimmy Maher

January 31, 2015 at 9:05 am

I was of course referring to Roosevelt’s offering up of a research assistant as a sacrifice to the gods of war… No? Okay, then. Thanks!

- ZUrlocker

January 31, 2015 at 5:30 pm

At this point, I feel like I’m lost in the details. I’d like to get back to the game…

- Brian Bagnall

February 1, 2015 at 1:07 pm

I’m having similar feels. Context can be helpful but this is starting to feel like a full credit course.

- Lisa H.

February 2, 2015 at 12:50 am

Yeah, I’m starting to feel the same way…

- Jimmy Maher

February 2, 2015 at 9:18 am

I had approached this series with a certain amount of trepidation, as I suspected it would bring some reactions such as yours. Nor are your reactions at all unreasonable; you come here to read about computer games, and these articles haven’t, at least on the surface, had a whole lot to do with computer games. On the other hand, this material is important in its own right, important to me personally, and — and I really believe this — important to understanding the final argument that I want to make for Trinity as an historical tragedy. I hope when the final article appears that where I’m going with all this will be more apparent — although whether you find my argument relevant or interesting in itself is, once again, in the eye of the beholder. At any rate, after thinking about it I find I’m not willing to compromise my vision for this series. We writerly types can be stubborn like that. ;)

But that of course doesn’t solve the problem for those of you who just aren’t all that interested in reading thousands of words more on Cold War history. Worse, some of you are *paying* for this material via Patreon. I would never, ever want you to feel that, after you generously offered your support, I suddenly pulled a bait and switch.

So, I think the best compromise is to just not charge Patreon subscribers for the remainder of this series — which, for the record, is now exactly half over (cue sighs of relief and/or groans of impatience). I hope some of you will find what I’m doing here interesting and/or relevant to appreciating Trinity (you can print some “I appreciate Trinity on a much deeper level than you!” tee-shirts!), especially when the whole picture is fully revealed, as it were. For the rest: feel free to treat this long digression as just a (temporary) psychosis-fueled exegesis a la Pale Fire. ;) In about one more month I’ll be back to writing about computer games and the computer industry of the 1980s — got some great topics coming up, like Microprose, the arrival of the Atari ST and Amiga, more early experiments with parser-less or parser-value-added graphical adventures, a return to the British scene, etc., etc. Rest assured that this blog will not permanently become the The Cold War Antiquarian.

So, if you want to check out now and check back in in a month, I totally understand. Thanks in advance for your patience!

- Jeremy Gans

February 3, 2015 at 3:13 am

This series of posts is what prompted me to back your Patreon. I love the writing and the details, and it’s making me realise that, despite my very fond memories of Trinity, I came nowhere near to appreciating the genius of that game.

- Andrew Hickey

February 3, 2015 at 4:09 pm

Just to say that as a Patreon backer myself, this is exactly the kind of thing I come to your blog for. I only have a slight interest in early gaming, but have a *huge* interest in well-written, passionate, well-sourced historical analysis of almost any subject.

- Peter Piers

December 30, 2015 at 5:09 pm

At the time when they were published, I wasn’t much interested in these articles. Now, reading up, I am fascinated. Make of that what you will.

And keep writing whatever you think is best.

- Adele

February 10, 2016 at 3:33 am

These details and asides are what I love about the Digital Antiquarian – I can get lost in the details and writing of a single post each night. Thank you for the time and research, Jimmy!

- David Boddie

February 2, 2015 at 1:09 pm

I’m finding this mini-series of articles quite thought-provoking, though I can understand if others are not quite so interested in this diversion from the timeline. Maybe it’s the result of growing up during the time of Protect and Survive, or the result of studying Physics at a time when the subject of professional ethics was being raised in general publications. I think it helps some of us to understand where we have come from.

- Duncan Stevens

February 2, 2015 at 3:28 pm

Another vote in favor. (The sequence of posts appears to be following the symbols around the Trinity sundial, delving into the history behind each blast, so next up, I expect, will be the Soviet testing, then Hiroshima/Nagasaki, then Trinity itself.)

- Dehumanizer

February 3, 2015 at 6:04 pm

Add one more vote in favor. I find all of this fascinating.

- Scott

February 3, 2015 at 1:27 am

Another reader chiming in to say I find this all fascinating. Australian history classes certainly don’t feature much on the Cold War (or at least didn’t back when I was studying) and the mania of the time can still be seen in some ways today.

Hopefully the Trinity game lives up to all this buildup :)

- iPadCary

February 3, 2015 at 4:37 pm

Excellent reading, Jimmy!
Anyone, after reading this, at all intrigued by the character
that is Eddie Teller, and he IS a “character”,
should absolutely look up his testimony to Congress on SDI’s
doability, done sometime in the 80s.

Talk about your quintessential “Mad Scientist”! lol
The way he shouts, gesticulates & deliciously rolls the letter “R”
when saying “X-Ray Laser” …. Molto fabbo!

And it’s as it should be: we ALWAYS have the cool people on our side.
The side of Light.
It was decided a looong time ago by some extremly smart guys
that America was to be “The New Atlantis”.
Completely different than anything that’d come before Her ….
The place the world would & could look to in a time of need ….
The Disneyland of Earth, if you will.

In the persuit of this noble endevour, if, on that rarest of occasions,
we had to contract out for a helping hand, well, then …. y’know?
Like Werner Von Braun in “The Right Stuff” says:
“Our [Hungarians] are better than thier [Hungarians].”
And he’s right.
LONG LIVE THE MEMORY OF EDDIE TELLER, patriot extraordináire.

- Bernie Paul

February 10, 2015 at 4:59 pm

Sure it is important ! Why do / did take all the time and spend / spent all the effort involved in this kind of software ? . And for those of you pondering my question in the present tense, context should be specially important. There is plenty of context-free or context-light casual gaming out there. Those who criticize Maher’s approach would perhaps spend their leisure time better on something from the “app-store” than on this blog or most of the software it deals with. Kudos to Jimmy ! keep it up !

- ZUrlocker

February 13, 2015 at 2:22 am

I respect the research and the writing here. And it’s great to set some context around the game. I also find this period to be quite fascinating and incorporate some cold war elements into my work-in-progress game. But this feels like the context is overwhelming the main attraction, so to speak. It’s your show though; I’m just giving feedback.

- Peter Piers

December 29, 2015 at 7:33 pm

I’m just partway through the article and already the descriptions of the H-bomb leave me cold, cold, cold. Not cold as in indifferent – rather, as though a cold hand were stroking my chest, my lungs, my heart, a hand that I knew could start squeezing at any time.

T Plus 2: The Bomb at the Crossroads
February 5, 2015

Platform

This narrow platform is attached to the north side of a huge steel enclosure, fifty feet high. All around you, a frozen wasteland stretches off to a horizon lined with gray mountains.

A loudspeaker barks, "Sorokpyat sekund."

>d
You descend the ladder.

Under Platform

A network of cables snakes down the side of the enclosure, then trails southwest across the tundra. Grim tracts of permafrost greet your eyes every way you turn.

A ladder leads up to a platform overhead.

A loudspeaker intones, "Treetsat sekund."

Something touches your sneaker.

You kick it away with a shout. A rodent sails through the air, lands unharmed and scrambles out of sight.

>ne
Tundra

A prehistoric river bed cuts a narrow pass through the mountains rising north and east. The enclosure is a gray sentinel on the southwest horizon.

The ground is covered with rodents! They're racing northeast, oblivious to you or anything else in their path.

"Pyatnatsat sekund."

>ne
You follow the stream of rodents.

Cliff Edge

The river bed ends here, on a cliff overlooking an Arctic sea. But where ancient waters once fell, there now pours a living stream of rodents. Driven by mindless instinct, too stupid or frightened to turn away, they plunge by the hundreds into the crashing waves below. You recognize the species now. Lemmings.

The ground underfoot is split by a narrow fissure, almost hidden by the scrambling lemmings.

"Pyat, chetirye, tree, dva, adeen," barks the loudspeaker.

A searing glare engulfs the mountaintops! You turn, and stare in horror at a seething mass of flame billowing above the tundra.

Seconds later, a gale of radioactive debris sweeps you over the edge of the cliff, where you founder for a while in the Arctic waters.

On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb at what would soon become known as the Semipalatinsk Test Site, in a remote area of the Kazakhstan steppe. Although the successful test was not immediately announced, the radiation it produced was detected by one of a cordon of spy planes that patrolled the edge of the Kamchatka Peninsula. President Truman rather than General Secretary Stalin thus became the first to tell the world on September 23: “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R.” The Soviet Union soon gloatingly confirmed the test, and the world shuddered. The era of mutually assured destruction had just begun.

Looking back on the event from today, we might be tempted to ask whether it had to be this way, whether there were things the West could have done during its brief era of nuclear monopoly to assure that the world didn’t get plunged into a seemingly irresolvable stand-off whose only realistic end point would seem to be nuclear war. Or, conversely, was the history we got a pretty lucky one considering some of the alternatives? Or is the whole debate moot because the course of history is driven by bigger forces than the individual actors strutting and fretting their hours on its stage — or simply because what will be will be, the course of history inevitable? Those are some profound questions, involving, depending on how you approach them, historiography, philosophy, psychology, even religion. They certainly aren’t questions I pretend to be able to answer for you here. Yet it might be important to ask them and to think about them, not least because I think it might help us to better understand Trinity‘s own view of history.

The period immediately after the end of World War II in the United States wasn’t quite the undilutedly joyous homecoming that the more sentimental popular histories of that time might make you think. The economy went through a brief but wrenching dislocation as the United States transitioned back from what had amounted to socialism in the name of maximal military production during the war years to consumer-driven civilian capitalism. And many women who had found unprecedented opportunities and responsibilities outside the home during the war must have felt at least a bit wistful when the men all returned and they found themselves back in their proverbial kitchens. But most of all there was a deep sense of uncertainty about the world the war had wrought. How would the United States and the Soviet Union, suddenly staring into each other’s eyes from either side of a bifurcated Europe, get along? What did the atomic bomb mean for that relationship, for the future in general? Journalist Edward R. Murrow, the veritable voice of the Greatest Generation, sounded a note of worried confusion rather than triumph during his broadcasts from this period: “Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and survival is not assured.”

The end of a major war is always a fertile time for utopianists looking for a way to ensure that another one never starts. In the historical timeline we know, World War II begat the United Nations, an imperfect collective which, if it hasn’t quite ended war, has done what it could over the years and has at least managed to be markedly more successful and long-lived than the League of Nations that preceded it. Many at the time, however, had in mind much more than a meeting place for the diplomats of the world, as useful as that’s occasionally proved to be. A major movement was in fact afoot, prompted largely by the atomic bomb and its implications, for nothing less than a world government.

In 1946 a little 86-page collection of essays with a big title appeared on bookstore shelves: One World or None: A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb. Many of its essays advocated turning the United Nations into the legislative branch of a new government to have sovereignty over all the nations of the world. The contributors who wrote the essays were hardly the bunch of anti-establishment dreamers you might expect. They included some of the most prominent scientists on the planet, including many — among them Niels Bohr, Robert Oppenheimer,  and Leó Szilárd — who had worked as part of the Manhattan project to build the bomb in the first place. Also among the contributors were Hap Arnold, commander of the Army Air Force during the war, and Walter Lippman, a prominent journalist who would go on to coin the phrase “Cold War.” Other public supporters of the book and the world-government movement that had spawned it included the president of Standard Oil of Ohio and the chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers, along with Senators, Congressmen, Supreme Court Justices, even current Army Air Force commander Carl Spaatz. The book became a bestseller. A few months after its release, a poll found that an astonishing 54 percent of the American public wanted the United Nations to become a world government with sovereignty over the United States as well as everyone else.

As the title of its manifesto would imply, the one-world movement saw the atomic bomb in mythic terms, destined to be either humanity’s savoir or its downfall. This vision of a post-atomic utopia as the only alternative to extinction can be traced back to The World Set Free, a 1914 novel by H.G. Wells which posits not only nuclear weapons but a world government as the only rational response to their existence. This new government “had to see the round globe as one problem; it was impossible any longer to deal with it piece by piece. They had to secure it universally from any fresh outbreak of atomic destruction, and they had to ensure a permanent and universal pacification.” Science, Wells wrote, must provide “the basis of a new social order.” How appropriate, then, that the one-world movement included so many scientists in its ranks. While Wells provided it with its broad outlines, it was one of these scientists who first drilled down to grasp the full implications of the historical atomic bomb. In the process, he became the first to understand, or at least to articulate, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction that must follow from it. This scientist was Niels Bohr.

Born in 1885 in Copenhagen, Denmark, Bohr had become by the 1930s as important and brilliant a physicist in his way as Albert Einstein. His most obvious among countless contributions was the so-called “Bohr Model” of the atom: protons and neutrons clustered into a central nucleus, electrons orbiting in neatly predictable clusters (“energy levels”). But just as important as his own work was his founding of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen in 1920. It became during the inter-war years the foremost gathering point for physicists from all over Europe and the world. Coincidentally or not, this period was perhaps the most fertile in the history of the field, marked by a whole series of quantum leaps (sorry!) in our understanding of the basic structures of the universe. Bohr knew everyone and was respected and liked by just about everyone, not just for his scientific genius but for a certain fundamental humanity that he was about to demonstrate to the world.

He was aboard a ferry returning to Denmark from a lecture tour to Norway when Germany invaded both countries early on the morning of April 9, 1940. Denmark surrendered within a few hours. As such a prominent figure, and one whose scientific genius could very well make him valuable to the war effort, Bohr was soon contacted by British agents bearing an offer to sneak him away to exile. But Bohr, like the Danish King Christian X, declined, saying his place was here with his people.

Niels Bohr during the war years

Initially, the German occupation wasn’t that bad as such things go. In return for a promise to behave themselves reasonably well and to produce food sufficient to feed many millions of German soldiers and civilians from the fertile soil of Jutland, Denmark was granted a level of autonomy and freedom unique amongst the occupied countries — a situation born not only of Germany’s need for the food Denmark could supply but also the country’s decision to surrender without a fight and Nazi racial theories that placed the Danes, being a Germanic people, only one rung or so down the ladder from the Germans themselves. Bohr himself, again like Christian X, took a principled but pragmatic stance, never hesitating to denounce the occupation and refusing to participate in any conference or other activity which involved the occupiers, but not actively resisting either.

After having dismissed an atomic bomb as possible only if “you turned the United States into one huge factory,” Bohr learned that others were less sanguine through a very surprising source. In September of 1941, Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist who had touched off the whole debate with his discovery of nuclear fission, came to Copenhagen, where he had a long conversation with his old friend, mentor, and confidant Bohr. Heisenberg was now conducting experiments with chain reactions in heavy water aimed at synthesizing plutonium for a potential atomic bomb. Speaking in circumspect terms, mindful of the Nazi ears that could be anywhere, Heisenberg shared the gist of his current research. We’ll never know exactly why he decided to open the topic with Bohr, who, old friend though he may have been, made no secret of his opinion of Nazi Germany. Was he, as his wife Elisabeth would later claim, suffering a crisis of conscience and reaching out for moral wisdom from his erstwhile mentor? Was he trying to tell Bohr that a Nazi atomic-bomb program was underway, in the hope that Bohr might be able to pass that information along to Britain? Or was he hoping to learn what if any research was going on in the other camp? To further muddy these waters, Heisenberg actually gave to Bohr a diagram of one of his heavy-water reactors, an act which would have been punishable as treason — if, that is, it wasn’t a planned act of counterespionage. Regardless, both men came away from the meeting unsatisfied, Bohr disappointed and angry that a former protege would contemplate creating such a terrible weapon for such an evil regime, Heisenberg having comprehensively failed to get the understanding and information — whichever, or both — he sought. The only thing the meeting accomplished was to make Bohr very nervous about the prospect of an atomic bomb.

But soon Bohr had more immediate worries. As the Danish resistance movement, feeling increasingly emboldened in response to Germany’s strategic setbacks over the course of 1942 and 1943, got more active, Denmark’s cushy arrangement with its occupier grew more and more fractious. At last, on August 29, 1943, the occupiers dissolved the Danish government and instituted martial law. Bohr was informed soon after by Denmark’s ambassador from Sweden that he was slated to be arrested. Underground fighters hid him and his family in a shed near Copenhagen’s pier until a boat could be sneaked in under cover of night. Dodging minefields and German patrol boats on a windy, miserable night, they made it across the Øresund to neutral Sweden.

Bohr had made his own escape, but he was frantic with worry over another group. He had received word that Denmark’s modest population of about 8000 Jews were also slated to soon be rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps. Their only possible escape would be to follow in Bohr’s footsteps and come to Sweden. Unfortunately, the Swedish government, very nervous of angering the Germans and thus bringing their wrath down upon their own country, had refused them permission to enter. Almost through sheer force of will alone, Bohr won a personal meeting with the Swedish King Gustaf V, and persuaded him to put pressure on his Foreign Minister to accept Denmark’s Jews. Working in coordination, the Swedish Coast Guard, the Danish resistance, and countless ordinary Danes methodically spirited away the Jews with typical Scandinavian efficiency. When the Nazis came to round them up, virtually all of those Jews who weren’t already out of the country were well-hidden in preparation for the trip. More than 99 percent would survive the war. It makes for one of the most remarkable stories of the Holocaust, and one of the vanishingly small number that have a happy ending. The Danes are justifiably proud of what they were able to do to this day; it says a lot about them as a people. It also, of course, says a lot about what kind of man was Niels Bohr, without whose assistance it never could have happened.

With Denmark’s Jews now offered a safe harbor, Bohr was eager to get to Britain and learn what if anything had been going on in the field of atomic-bomb research. The British offered him passage aboard one of the fast two-man Mosquito fighter-bombers they were using to carry diplomatic messages to and from the isolated Swedish government. With no other space available, the crew stuffed Bohr into the Mosquito’s tiny bomb bay. If attacked, the pilot announced, he would have to drop Bohr into the North Sea to save weight for maneuvering. Bohr was given a parachute and signal flare, but was highly unlikely to live more than a few minutes in that frigid water. Although the Mosquito made it back to Britain unmolested, Bohr failed to put on his oxygen mask properly and fainted en route. Once back on land again, however, he was none the worse for wear. By the end of 1943 he had completed his odyssey, arriving safely in Los Alamos.

He found there some of the greatest scientific minds of the generation, many of them his former colleagues, students, and/or friends, all well about the practical business of making an atomic bomb. He could now share with them at last the diagram Heisenberg had passed to him more than two years before. The design it depicted was so inefficient, so far behind those the Manhattan Project had constructed, that many thought it must indeed be a counterespionage ploy. Otherwise, as Bohr himself later said, Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues “didn’t need my help in making the atom bomb.” He instead made an intellectual leap in another realm entirely, a leap as dazzling as the one that had led to the Bohr Model of the atom. While at Los Alamos, Bohr said something positive but also ambiguous to Oppenheimer. Nothing like the massive conflict still raging in Europe and the Pacific would, he said, “ever happen again.” Even the perceptive Oppenheimer initially missed the full impartation of this statement.

Bohr meant it literally. Total war between great powers as the world had come to know it over the centuries simply could not happen in a post-atomic world because no one would be able to win. This didn’t mean that war of another sort would be impossible; one nation could attack another, or two could attack one another. However, the result would not be an extended struggle ending with a victor standing proud, but merely a short orgy of unimaginable destruction ending with two smoking losers. The atomic bomb was far, far more than just a new weapon. It would be the ultimate leveling force amongst nations, capable of reducing all of them to identical smoking ruins, “a far deeper interference with the natural course of events than anything ever attempted.” The very survival of civilization therefore required that war itself must be not a universal but a historical phenomenon. If war was, as Claus von Clausewitz had once so famously said, “the continuation of politics by other means,” this means of politicking was about to go off the table. “We are in a completely new situation that cannot be resolved by war,” said Bohr. The choice was not now between peace and war but between peace and guaranteed self-destruction. The major powers were about to enter a stalemate from which victory would be impossible. They could continue to jockey pointlessly for advantage, risking mutual annihilation all the while, or they could… what? That was the question.

“It appeared to me,” Bohr writes, “that the very necessity of a concerted effort to forestall such ominous threats to civilization would offer quite unique opportunities to bridge international divergencies.” There must be “a universal agreement in true confidence” to ban the atomic bomb and to ban all future war. Any such agreement would bring with it an important corollary: because nations were hardly likely to simply trust one another on a matter as deadly as the atomic bomb, there must also be an end to state secrets. As Oppenheimer would later express it, “Everything that might be a threat to the security of the world would have to be open to the world.” “What it would mean,” said Bohr, “if the whole picture of social conditions in every country were open for judgment and comparison need hardly be enlarged upon.” Could characters like Hitler and Stalin commit their genocides in such conditions?

Bohr’s logic was essentially that the atomic bomb was about to change everything anyway, whether we liked it or not. By planning for the atomic future we could make of that change a positive historical development rather than the potential end of civilization. As the country about to become the first with access to the bomb, the United States had the opportunity and the duty to initiate the process that could lead to this better world order by talking openly about this new power, inviting the world to join in the dialog. The “secrets” of the atomic bomb that the United States believed it possessed were merely trade secrets, technical secrets; the fundamental physics that had made its creation possible were accessible to the world. Thus the American atomic monopoly was destined to be a very short one. But what the country did while it had that monopoly, Bohr claimed, could cast the die for the next hundred years or more — indeed, could determine whether civilization itself lived or died.

Bohr’s stature was sufficient to win him separate meetings with American President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to argue his case in 1944. The meeting with Roosevelt turned into little more than a noncommittal formality. The meeting with Churchill, on the other hand, was a disaster. The irascible Churchill, preoccupied with final preparations for the D-Day invasion, had little interest in being lectured to on the vagaries of geopolitics by a pedantic Danish physicist. The styles of the two men did not, to say the least, mesh. Bohr had a way of circling around and around his points that could infuriate even his admiring students and coauthors; he liked to say that accuracy and clarity were complementary — “and so, a short statement could never be precise.” Churchill failed to grasp anything that Bohr tried to tell him. “I cannot see what you are talking about,” he said. “After all this new bomb is just going to be bigger than our previous bombs. It involves no difference in the principles of war.” His main takeaway from the meeting seems to have been that Bohr wanted the Western Allies to immediately turn over the bomb to the Soviet Union as well as anyone else who wanted it, when in fact Bohr was just asking them to initiate an open preliminary discussion about the bomb and what it meant for the world. After half an hour — half the scheduled time — Churchill all but threw Bohr out on his ear. He soon after wrote a memo saying that Bohr should be closely watched, and consideration even given to “confining” him to make sure he didn’t commit “mortal crimes” — presumably in the form of an attempt to give the bomb to the Soviets of his own accord.

Churchill’s reaction certainly isn’t impossible to understand. He still had this war to fight, after all. And Bohr’s plan wasn’t necessarily the most practical. It does have that distinct whiff of the utopian about it, an odor that a practical politician like Churchill would have learned to detect and detest many years ago. Parts of the argument do rather sound like a scientist trying to impose a rigid frame of cause-and-effect logic on complicated, messy international affairs that just won’t admit one. Still, one wishes Bohr could at least have been able to get Churchill or Roosevelt to think about the implications of his greatest insight: the still-in-the-offing but unavoidable prospect of MAD. As it was, neither man seems to have remarked the concept at all, lost as it was in Bohr’s typical sea of verbiage. Almost as depressing is Churchill’s immediate leap from “advocate for reasoned diplomacy with the Soviet Union” to “traitor”; this exact fallacy would ruin many lives over the course of the Cold War to come. Bohr — a great, even heroic man, whatever the practical failings of some of his ideas — spent the rest of the war trying fruitlessly to get further meetings with either leader. He had saved Denmark’s Jews from the Holocaust, but he couldn’t save the world from the Cold War.

Or, better said, he couldn’t do it alone. Ideas, if repeated often enough, have a way of spreading themselves around. By 1945, Bohr’s ideas were, as nuclear historian Richard Rhodes puts it, “in the air” in both Washington and Los Alamos. Vannevar Bush and James Bryant Conant, Roosevelt’s two closest science advisers, expressed concern as the fateful day of the first test neared that it was dangerous to assume that the United States’s atomic monopoly could possibly last for very long. If Roosevelt’s government didn’t talk to the Soviets about it before using it, it could lead “to a very undesirable relationship indeed on the subject with Russia.” Showing some prescience of their own, they imagined that someday atomic bombs might be able to reach all the “cities of the world” from anywhere in the world via a “robot plane or guided missile.” They proposed that the United States initiate a dialog which could lead to the formation of an “international office” to share and regulate the secrets of the atom: “We recognize that there will be great resistance to this measure, but believe the hazards to the future of the world are sufficiently great to warrant this attempt.” Robert Oppenheimer also said that the time may be right to “open up this subject” with the Soviet Union “in a tentative fashion.”

After Roosevelt’s death in April of 1945, his and his successor Harry Truman’s war-hating Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who had personally overseen the Manhattan Project from its beginning, made a much more forceful statement, saying that as the inventor of the atomic bomb the United States would bear “a certain moral responsibility” for any “disaster to civilization which it would further.” Thus the country had a moral imperative to try to arrange a world order which could avert such a disaster, via a “world peace organization” which could eventually be entrusted to “share” the atomic bomb with everyone. No less a military mind than Army Chief of Staff George Marshall said it might be a good idea to invite a Soviet delegation to get an overview of what had been done at Los Alamos and to witness the upcoming Trinity test.

Stalin, Truman, and Churchill at Potsdam, 1945

It’s of course impossible to say how Roosevelt would have reacted to such advice from two of his oldest and wisest friends. Certainly it’s much harder to accuse them than Bohr of political naiveté. The new President Truman, however, was very much under the sway of his new Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes, who would become one of the early architects of the country’s Cold War posture, pushing for a hardline, take-no-prisoners approach to the Soviet Union. Told of the atomic bomb’s massive destructive potential, Byrnes was not disturbed but delighted, saying it would greatly improve the United States’s negotiating position with the Soviet Union, that a forceful “demonstration of the bomb” in action — in the form of its being unexpectedly dropped on Japan — “might impress” the un-forewarned Soviet Union. At the Potsdam Conference just eight days after the Trinity test, Truman mentioned almost offhandedly to Stalin that the United States had developed “a new weapon of unusual destructive force”; that was as far as all of the suggestions for a dialog with the Soviet Union would ever stretch. Stalin, who knew all about the Manhattan Project’s existence thanks to his espionage network and knew perfectly well that it was more than just “a new weapon,” almost smirked visibly at this confirmation of his supposed ally’s perfidy: “He said he was glad to hear it and he hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.'” Both men then dismissed the topic. With the last war not yet over, a new standoff was already beginning. Would it be an intractable one? That’s a question much of the world would soon be asking.

Truman may have squandered his first and best opportunity to really talk with the Soviets about the bomb, but well before Japan’s surrender was a year old the voices calling for international controls became too loud and popular for a seasoned politician like him to ignore. So, like any seasoned politician, he hedged his bets. Even as the Navy was assembling a fleet of ships to be blasted by atomic bombs at Bikini Atoll as a blunt demonstration of the United States’s new military might, he sent a patrician financier and longtime policy adviser named Bernard Baruch to the United Nations to explore the formation of a United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. “We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead,” Baruch announced to the assembled delegates. “We must elect world peace or world destruction.” He offered a plan that would place the United Nations in control of “all atomic-energy activities potentially dangerous to world security,” with the power to inspect all nuclear facilities and punish anyone found to be attempting to make weapons. The Soviets, not in a good humor after the Bikini tests, replied that the Americans should begin by destroying all of their own atomic bombs as a sign of good faith, and negotiations quickly reached an impasse from which they would never emerge. The Soviets’ undisguised mistrust of American intentions was part and parcel of an ever-widening gulf between the world’s two remaining superpowers that would soon make dreams of worldwide arms control and world government sound as quaint as… well, as quaint they sound to our ears today. Meanwhile the atomic bomb was becoming, almost in spite of itself, an increasingly vital part of the United States’s strategic picture.

The problem was one of conventional-force disparity. When the forces of the Western and Eastern Allies had met one another in the middle of Germany at the close of the war, they had been roughly equal. Now, though, the Americans and British were coming home by the millions, leaving behind their rifles and their uniforms and returning to lives as business executives, shopkeepers, and farmhands. Meanwhile the Soviet Union, a centralized economy driven largely by military spending which had no private jobs to which to return, wasn’t demobilizing to anywhere near the same degree. And Stalin was reneging on all of his promises to allow the countries of Eastern Europe free determination, bringing down an “Iron Curtain” — the term was popularized by Winston Churchill in a speech on March 5, 1946, ironically at almost the same moment as the publication of One World or None — across the middle of Europe. The stage was thus set for a stand-off that would last more than forty years, the democratic peoples of the West staring down the totalitarian nations of the East. The West had no hope of matching Soviet numbers in Europe unless it was willing to keep most of its young men in arms for terms of as much as eight or ten years each. This the civilian societies of the West, eager to rebuild and enjoy the fruits of the hard-fought peace, had no interest in doing. Thus by 1947 Soviet armies in Europe outnumbered Western by as much as ten to one. But there was a great equalizer: the atomic bomb.

Indeed, some believed the atomic bomb should be more than a mere equalizer, should be used to solve the problem in a more direct way. As relations worsened with the Soviet Union and the clock ticked down to the inevitable reality of a Soviet bomb, the pendulum of public sentiment swung wildly in a new direction. A public that just a year before had been dreaming of a peaceful world-government utopia now began to seriously mull the notion of a preemptive nuclear strike. It would be a painful undertaking, strike proponents said, but it had to be done now, before the Soviets had atomic bombs of their own. Some of the hawkish voices were those of respected military men, like General Leslie Groves, who had built the Manhattan Project from the ground up, and General Orvil Anderson, who thought nuclear war would be the most Christian thing to do at this juncture: “I think I could explain to Him that I saved civilization.” The dogged old warrior Churchill reminded everyone how well appeasement policies had worked against Hitler, and advocated an ultimatum: pull out of all of the countries you’ve occupied and give to them the right of self-determination you promised them or prepare to be nuked. Other voices advocating preemptive nuclear war were more surprising. The great British philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose pacifism had led to his imprisonment during the First World War, was among them, as was Hamilton Holt, just a year before the organizer of a major world-government conference. World government in his view should now entail that any nation that attempted to develop atomic bombs, as the Soviet Union obviously was, “should be wiped off the face of the earth” by the United Nations with a taste of its own medicine. (The role and fate of the United States, still the only nation actually in possession of atomic bombs, was unclear in this formulation.)

Thankfully, such voices didn’t get their way before August 29, 1949, made the point moot. There could be no preemptive strikes on a Soviet Union in possession of a bomb of its own. With the Soviet bomb ended this crazy few years when the direction of history seemed a veritable smorgasbord of divergent possibilities, some wonderful, some terrible. Now the world must settle in for the long, tense, grinding nuclear stalemate of the Cold War, and the United States must exchange dreams of world government for paranoid communist witch hunts.

Looking back at that crossroads of history of 1945 to 1949, we’re left to wonder whether it all could somehow have turned out differently. Could some great leader willing to really listen to what Bohr and all those who followed him were saying have harnessed the idealistic fervor of the world-government movement, and in so doing changed the course of history as we know it? If Roosevelt had lived longer, would he have been that leader, or would he have pretty much done what Truman did? Was there any real possibility for a peace not founded on threats in a world that contained the paranoid maniac Stalin, just possibly the most prolific mass murderer in the history of the world? These aren’t questions I can answer for you; you’ll have to ponder them on your own. Perhaps, given the situation at the end of World War II, the Cold War really was inevitable. Perhaps any more earnest attempt to prevent an arms race and/or institute international controls on nuclear weapons would have merely ceded the advantage to the Soviet Union and resulted in a Soviet first strike (Stalin, alone among the Soviet General Secretaries, strikes me as just possibly crazy and genocidal enough to do it if he thought he could get away with it).

For its part, Trinity takes the tragic view of history. Its attitude toward the Cold War and the societies it involved is summed up in the extract that opened this article: a horde of lemmings running pell-mell toward their destruction, “too stupid or frightened to turn away” — certainly not one of the game’s more subtle examples of symbolism but nevertheless one of its most striking and effective. Less impressive is Trinity‘s recreation of the actual scene of that first test, which it gets thoroughly wrong; the actual test took place on the landlocked steppes of Kazakhstan, nowhere near the Arctic Ocean. One must assume that Brian Moriarty’s research simply failed him for this, the only scene in the game that shows the Soviet side of the Cold War. The larger point of the scene, however, stands. Trinity postulates that the inevitable end point for the lemmings of the world is an apocalyptic fall off of an unthinkable nuclear cliff. So far — fingers crossed! — that hasn’t happened. I admire Trinity greatly, but I hope that history continues to prove it less than prescient in this regard.

Comments
25 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

February 5, 2015 at 5:03 pm

Stalin, who knew all about the Manhattan Project’s existence thanks to his espionage network and knew perfectly well that it was more than just “a new weapon,” almost smirked visibly at this confirmation of his supposed ally’s perfidy

Not following this. What was perfidious about Truman’s potential use of the bomb?

- Duncan Stevens

February 5, 2015 at 5:03 pm

Sorry–thought I closed the tag.

- Jimmy Maher

February 5, 2015 at 5:18 pm

The United States and the Soviet Union were allies in war. One would assume that an ally would at least share the bare facts about a potentially devastating weapon like the atomic bomb. By keeping the atomic bomb from Stalin, Britain and the United States were making it very clear that they didn’t trust Stalin and didn’t really consider him “one of them.” They were also clearly thinking past the end of the war, wanting to keep the bomb for themselves to have leverage against Stalin (i.e., perfidy). A brief, vague, reluctant aside at a conference was hardly enough to make up for the information that Truman and his predecessor should, at least in Stalin’s view, have been sharing all along.

Obviously the other side of this is that Stalin was a bloodthirsty maniac that anyone would be a fool to trust in anything. But the bit in question was written from Stalin’s point of view, who doubtless felt himself very hard done by…

- Duncan Stevens

February 5, 2015 at 5:37 pm

Do internal documents actually indicate that Stalin felt that way? He may well have said it for public consumption.

Bear in mind that the Soviet Union’s war was over at that point. Truman was trying to get Stalin to enter the war against Japan; Stalin did not do so until after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Technically, there was no ongoing joint military operation at the time of the Trinity test. I guess you could argue that the fact of the conference suggests a continuing alliance, but I’m not sure your view of allies’ obligations to inform each other about weapons research was shared at the time.

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2015 at 8:46 am

As far as whether there was some legal treaty or contract “obligating” the Western Allies to share the details of the atomic bomb with the Soviet Union, probably not. Under the expectations one might have of a group of allies publicly telling the world they were united in a single cause — one for all, all for one — the decision could be judged perfidious. (It was under development for years while all of the allies *were* making common cause against a joint enemy, so we can’t really judge the decision not to share it strictly under the conditions of July 1945.) Obviously this alliance was first and foremost one of convenience, a classic example of “the enemy of my enemy…”, but it’s not as if Stalin needed much provocation to get pissed off in general.

I don’t believe we have any equivalent to Truman’s diary in the case of Stalin — certainly not in any language I can read. Whether Stalin’s rage was feigned or not is probably not a question we can answer definitively. Even something like Truman’s diary is very obviously written in the knowledge that it will be read by posterity, and thus hardly a direct pipeline to its maker’s soul. But in the terms of fairly broad narrative history under which this article was written, I feel comfortable enough with the characterization I’ve made.

The situation with the Soviet Union’s entry into the war is a bit more complicated than it’s sometimes made out to be. For a couple of months, from the German surrender until the Trinity test, the Truman administration was indeed pushing very hard to get the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan. The thought was that a Soviet invasion of Manchuria would provide a welcome distraction and tie down Japanese troops that would otherwise be used to defend the home islands, should an American invasion prove necessary. Essentially the Truman administration was acting as if it didn’t have the bomb and never would — simple best practices in any large-scale endeavor, so that they would be able to regard a successful test as a pleasant surprise rather than a fizzle as a devastating setback. As soon as the Trinity test was successful, however, a Soviet entry into the war became much less of a priority, very possibly even a bad thing if it let the Soviet Union grab China or a piece of it for itself or gave it a claim to other territories in the Pacific. If there was any doubt, Stalin would have been able to see by the way that Truman and Churchill suddenly stopped pressuring him daily to declare war on Japan that something very significant was up with this mysterious new weapon of theirs. A really good summary of this period is Prompt and Utter Destruction by J. Samuel Walker. It’s become my bible for the next article, which will deal with the decision to drop the bomb on Japan.

Just in case it’s gotten somehow lost in all this:

My major point here is that Potsdam was the perfect opportunity for Truman to sit down with Stalin and really try to open a dialog on the atomic bomb and what it might mean. This doesn’t mean giving him the bomb or helping him to make one of his own. It just means starting to *talk*. This was something that the leaders of the Cold War failed to do again and again, and it starts right here, before the previous war was even over. By electing not to trust Stalin at all, Truman set the pattern for the next several decades of fear and mistrust and general Failures to Communicate. As Henry Stimson (who very much wanted Truman to have that real talk with Stalin) said at the time, “Sometimes the way to make someone trustworthy is to trust him.” (And yes, I realize I’ve just directly contradicted the end of my previous comment, but we’ll let that go, in both cases, in the name of hyperbole.)

- Duncan Stevens

February 6, 2015 at 1:19 pm

Considering Stalin had his own atomic project during the war that he didn’t share with the West (as the Rhodes book describes), I’ll vote for “feigned.” I focused on disclosure in the post-Trinity period because that’s when the U.S. knew for sure that the thing worked. As you note, Truman was not 100% sure that it would, in fact, work.

I understand your point about the lost opportunity. There was a fairly significant constituency in the spring of 1945 that wanted to beat the Soviets to Berlin, an obvious provocation (and some, like Patton, that wanted to keep going right on to Moscow), so Truman may well have seen an approach that eschewed both direct confrontation and explicit overtures of postwar friendship as the moderate course.

- Lisa H.

February 5, 2015 at 8:37 pm

I always liked the running “It’ll never work!” gag in the comic.

he liked to say that accuracy and clarity were complimentary — “and so, a short statement could never be precise.”

If that is his meaning, you want “complementary,” that is, they are complements of one another. (Although perhaps they are also complimentary as in given for free!)

Now the world must settle in for the long, tense, grinding nuclear checkmate of the Cold War

Do you not mean “stalemate”?

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2015 at 9:23 am

I must sheepishly say that I never actually realized that “complimentary” and “complementary” were two different words, not just one with two possible meanings; shades of a similar revelation a year or two ago regarding “discreet” and “discrete.” You learn something every day!

I meant to write “checkmate” as a little nod back to the chess analogy I used describing Bohr’s vision of what the bomb would wreak. But now that I think about it a “checkmate” analogy doesn’t entirely make sense, does it? Whoops!

- Victor Gijsbers

February 6, 2015 at 11:14 am

And stalemate is also a chess term, isn’t it?

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2015 at 1:37 pm

It’s certainly *used* in chess, but I don’t know offhand if it *stems* from chess. At any rate, I decided the whole metaphor wasn’t as clever as it thought it was and excised it…

- Sniffnoy

February 6, 2015 at 8:40 pm

It does come from Chess (that’s why there’s a “mate” in it); the more general meaning is later.

- Duncan Stevens

February 5, 2015 at 10:01 pm

Nitpick: I’m not sure the Semipalatinsk Test Site would have been a “frozen wasteland” on August 29, 1949 (it’s in Kazakhstan, not that far north). The test depicted isn’t necessarily the first one.

- Duncan Stevens

February 5, 2015 at 10:07 pm

…and the description refers to the “Arctic waters,” but the Kazakhstan test site is a long way from the Arctic. Hmmm. Maybe the intent was to refer to the Novaya Zemlya site (which didn’t go into use until the mid-50s, well after the first H-bomb test)?

- David Boddie

February 6, 2015 at 8:52 am

That’s what I wondered. It seems a long way from the Arctic: http://radicalcartography.net/index.html?nuclear

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2015 at 9:08 am

Good catch! I’d missed that entirely.

The evidence of the comic book would certainly seem to suggest that this was meant to depict the first test: i.e., “The American monopoly on a-bombs is short-lived.” The following scene shows a man reading a newspaper announcing “Reds Explode A-Bomb,” and Edward Teller jumping in to push for the Super as a response.

I think this is just one of the few examples of Moriarty’s research failing him. In his defense, very little was known about many aspects of the Soviet side of the atomic standoff when he was writing Trinity. His sources and his narrative are all very American-centric — as has been, obviously, my own — with the exception only of this scene which he evidently got pretty comprehensively wrong. I’ll add a note to the article.

- Duncan Stevens

February 6, 2015 at 11:56 am

Hmmm. The radiation from the first test was detected by a U.S. spy plane (Truman announced that the Soviets had done a test before the Soviets did), so I think it was known roughly where it happened. I would call this more artistic license by Moriarty then a failure of research: there was no major body of water at Semipalatinsk into which a whole bunch of lemmings could be jumping, there was one at Novaya Zemlya, so the test got moved north. Maybe that’s too much license in a game that styles itself as a tour through nuclear history?

- Duncan Stevens

February 6, 2015 at 1:29 pm

…though, on further reflection, I’m not sure that the (general) location was public knowledge, even if the U.S. knew it. The U.S. didn’t want to broadcast its spy planes’ activities, after all, and the announcement caught Stalin off guard. I’m not sure what became public between 1949 and 1986.

- Jimmy Maher

February 6, 2015 at 1:39 pm

While Trinity certainly has its share of poetry about it, there aren’t any other places where poetic truth trumps historical accuracy to anywhere near such a degree. On the other hand, I certainly wouldn’t want to lose the lemmings, maybe the most potent single symbol in the game. Only Moriarty knew… and I suspect he’s forgotten.

- Michael Davis

February 11, 2015 at 5:51 am

“there was no major body of water at Semipalatinsk into which a whole bunch of lemmings could be jumping,”

Of course now we know there is no major body of water anywhere that lemmings would jump to their deaths into

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wilderness_%28film%29

- johannes_paulsen

September 6, 2015 at 11:36 pm

Too much license? If people are willing to forgive the game’s basic logical flaws (e.g., the question of why the ‘unsabotaged’ bombs don’t go off correctly later, the question of where the umbrella came from, etc.) it almost seems a little unfair to nitpick this one.

The fact that John F. Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis doesn’t get a single mention in what is supposed to be a game about the tragedy of nuclear war is far more inexcusable than getting the trivia wrong about the first Soviet nuclear test.

- Duncan Stevens

February 6, 2015 at 1:42 pm

Also, I recommend Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen for a lively, imaginative take on the Bohr-Heisenberg meeting. Arguably, its speculation about Heisenberg’s motives is a bit on the charitable side, but as drama it’s pretty good.

- Matt W

February 19, 2015 at 9:35 am

It’s not only “pretty good”, IMHO, it’s really fantastic. If you’re lucky enough to catch it in the theater, it makes for a riveting evening.

The movie version (from the BBC, I think), is pretty “meh”, though.

- Michael Davis

February 11, 2015 at 7:59 pm

Well, I’ve finally caught up to the present articles. Reading this blog nightly has become so much a part of my evening routine that I feel like I’m going to have a free hour every night that I won’t know what to do with.

A while back I made a piece of Ultima V fan art (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151066274694504) that I was able to bring to Austin and have signed by Richard Garriott (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100524250954288) and Denis Loubet, two of my creative heroes. I had the Shay Addams book pretty much memorized as a kid. I found your blog because of the Ultima entries, and the fair and nuanced view of the history of Origin prompted me to open up your table of contents and start at the beginning.

I started out merely tangentially curious about the nitty-gritty history of computer games specifically. For the effort I am now measurably more educated about the world I live in. I feel like, without hyperbole, I am a wiser and more worldly person thanks to your editorial lens.

Thank you very, very much for this blog.

I’m in the habit of making fan art (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151902099239504, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151000603539504), and, this might be kind of weird, but I’ve made you something, as kind of a ‘thank you’ for these most recent articles:

https://vimeo.com/119372336

- Jimmy Maher

February 12, 2015 at 7:59 am

Wow! No one’s ever made a video for me before. That’s really cool. Thanks!

- Scott M. Bruner

May 13, 2016 at 5:20 am

I’m going through these “Trinity” posts (which are tremendous) for a paper I’m working on…I noticed that you mention how you hope that Trinity isn’t prescient in its remarkably dark conclusion about the inevitablity of the apocalypse.

I might argue that it was works like Trinity (and The Day After and Testament) and their grim conclusions which were part of a cultural movement, a canary in the coalmine aesthetic push, to characterize the absolute madness of what was happening and where we were headed…now, Trinity, of course, didn’t come near the impact of The Day After on the American consciousness…but I would say that it was a part (even in its small community) of an art/cultural movement that had a significant impact on the popular imagination by identifying the self-inflicted destruction we were plunging towards and helping to galvanize our fears into a desperate need for action, which is to say maybe Moriarty’s fatalism while not contrived, was the fatalism of the perspective of an alternate universe he had a significant hand in helping us avoid. Moriarty leaves us no ultimate choice or agency in Trinity itself but by doing so, within this fictional work and universe (where the laws of physic are bent so out of shape), he coerces us to peer into the abyss…

…perhaps in the hope that in our real world beyond the computer screen, we might then take advantage of ever/any opportunity to steer the #@$( clear of it. My point being, perhaps Moriarty’s prescience was in acknowledging how dark art needed to be to wake us up.

T Plus 1: Bombing Japan
February 13, 2015

Playground

A set of children's swings moves slowly back and forth in the humid breeze. Behind them stands a long building, its windows hung with flowers and birds folded from colored paper.

Mounds of dirt are heaped around a dark opening to the east. It appears to be a shelter of some kind.

Several small children are happily chasing dragonflies north of the swing set. Turning south, you see a group of adults (schoolteachers, by the looks of them), wearily digging another shelter like the first.

A little girl races between the swings, hot on the trail of a dragonfly. She trips and sprawls across the sand, laughing with hysterical glee. Then she sees you.

At first, you're sure she's going to scream. Her eyes dart back and forth between you and the teachers; you can see a cry forming on her lips.

Suddenly, the umbrella in your hand catches her eye. You watch her expression soften from fear to curiosity.

>examine girl
The girl is a cute four or five years old.

The girl can't keep her eyes off the umbrella.

You've noticed a faint sound coming from somewhere overhead. The girl turns to stare at the sky.

>girl, hello
The girl blinks uncomprehendingly.

The sound overhead grows louder. There's no mistaking the drone of aircraft.

The girl looks at you expectantly and tries to pull you towards the shelter.

Muttering with exasperation, the teachers drop their spades and begin to trudge in the direction of the shelter.

One teacher, a young woman, sees you standing in the sandpile and shrieks something in Japanese. Her companions quickly surround you, shouting accusations and sneering at your vacation shorts. You respond by pointing desperately at the sky, shouting "Bomb! Big boom!" and struggling to escape into the shelter.

This awkward scene is cut short by a searing flash.

On August 6, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets dropped the second atomic bomb ever to be exploded in the history of the world — and the first to be exploded in anger — on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later another B-29, piloted this time by Major Charles Sweeney, dropped another — the second and, so far, the last ever to be exploded in anger — on Nagasaki; it’s this event that Trinity portrays in the excerpt above. On August 15, Japan broadcast its acceptance of Allied surrender terms.

The cultural debate that followed, condensed into four vignettes:

In the immediate aftermath of the event, the support of the American public for the bombings that have, according to conventional wisdom, ended the most terrible war in human history is so universal that almost no one bothers to even ask them about it. One of the few polls on the issue, taken by Gallup on August 26, finds that 85 percent support the decision versus just 10 percent opposed. Some weeks later another poll finds that 53.5 percent “unequivocally” support the country’s handling of its atomic arsenal during the war. Lest you think that that number represents a major drop-off, know that 22.7 percent of the total don’t equivocate for the reason you probably think: they feel that the United States should have found some way to drop “many more” atomic bombs on Japan between August 6 and August 15, just out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Newspapers and magazines are filled with fawning profiles of the “heroes” who flew the missions, especially of their de facto spokesman Tibbets, who comes complete with a wonderfully photogenic all-American family straight out of Norman Rockwell. He named his B-29 the Enola Gay after his mother, for God’s sake! Could it get any more perfect? Tibbets and the rest of the Enola Gay‘s crew march as conquering heroes through Manhattan as part of the Army Day Parade on April 6, 1946. The Enola Gay becomes a hero in her own right, with the New York Times publishing an extended “Portrait of a B-29” to tell her story. When she’s assigned along with Tibbets himself to travel to Bikini Atoll to possibly drop the first Operations Crossroads bomb, the press treat it like Batman and his trusty Batmobile going back into action. (The Enola Gay is ultimately not used for the drop. Likewise, Tibbets supervises preparations, but doesn’t fly the actual mission.)

Fast-forward twenty years, to 1965. The American public still overwhelmingly supports the use of the atomic bomb, while the historians regard it as has having saved far more lives than it destroyed in ending the war when it did and obviating the need for an invasion of Japan. But now a young, Marxist-leaning economic historian named Gar Alperovitz reopens the issue in his first book: Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam. It argues that the atomic bomb wasn’t necessary to end World War II, and, indeed, that President Truman and his advisers knew this perfectly well. It was used, Alperovitz claims, to send a message to the Soviet Union about this fearsome new power now in the United States’s possession. The book, so much in keeping with the “question everything your parents told you” ethos of the burgeoning counterculture, becomes surprisingly popular amongst the youth, and at last opens up the question to serious historiographical debate in the universities.

Fast-forward thirty years, to the mid-1990s. The Smithsonian makes plans to unveil the newly restored Enola Gay, which has spent decades languishing in storage, as the centerpiece of a new exhibit: The Crossroads: The End of World II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Cold War. The exhibit, by most scholarly accounts a quite rigorously balanced take on its subject matter that strains to address thoughtfully both supporters and condemners of the atomic bombings, is met with a firestorm of controversy in conservative circles for giving a voice to critics of the bombing at all, as well as for allegedly paying too much attention to the suffering of the actual victims of the bombs. They object particularly to the charred relics from Hiroshima that are to be displayed under the shadow of the Enola Gay, and to the quotations from true-blue American heroes like Dwight Eisenhower voicing reservations about the use of the bomb. Newt Gingrich, the newly minted Republican Speaker of the House, condemns the Smithsonian and its director, Martin Harwit, as “cultural elites” telling Americans “they ought to be ashamed of their country.” Tibbets, still greeted as a hero in some circles but now condemned as an out-and-out war criminal in others, proclaims the proposed exhibit simply “a damn big insult” whilst reiterating that he feels not the slightest pang of conscience over what he did and sleeps just fine every night. In the end the grander ambitions for the exhibit are scuttled and Harwit harried right out of his job. Instead the Smithsonian sets up the Enola Gay as just another neat old airplane in its huge collection, accompanied by only the most perfunctory of historical context in the form of an atomic-bombing-justifying placard or two.

Fast-forward another ten years. On November 1, 2007, Paul Tibbets dies at the age of 92. The blizzard of remembrances and obituaries that follow almost all feel compelled to take an implicit or explicit editorial position on the atomic bombings, which are as controversial now as they’ve ever been. Conservative writers lay on the “American hero” rhetoric heavily. It’s the liberal ideologues, though, who become most disingenuously strident this time. Many resort to rather precious forms of psychoanalysis in trying to explain Tibbets’s lifelong refusal to express remorse for dropping the bomb, claiming that it means he had either been a sociopath or deeply troubled inside and holding himself together only through denial. They project, in other words, their own feelings toward the attack onto him whilst refusing him the basic human respect of accepting that maybe the position he had steadfastly maintained for sixty years was an honest, considered one rather than a product of psychosis.

If support for the atomic bombings of Japan equals mental illness there were an awful lot of lunatics loose in the bombings’ immediate aftermath. If we could go back and ask these lunatics, they’d likely be very surprised that people are still debating this issue at all today. Well before 1950 the history seemed largely to have been written, the debate already long settled in the form of the neat logical formulation destined to appear in high-school history texts for many decades, destined to be trotted out yet again for the bowdlerized version of the Enola Gay exhibit. Japan, despite being quite obviously and comprehensively beaten by that summer of 1945, still refused to surrender. But then, as the Smithsonian’s watered-down exhibit put it: “The use of the bomb led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. Such an invasion, especially if undertaken for both main islands, would have led to very heavy casualties among American, Allied, and Japanese armed forces, and Japanese civilians.” The bombings were terrible, but much less terrible than the alternative of an invasion of the Japanese home islands, which was estimated to likely cost as many as 1 million American casualties, and likely many times that Japanese.

For a sense of the sheer enormity of that figure of 1 million casualties, consider that it’s very similar to the total of American casualties in both Europe and the Pacific up to the summer of 1945. Thus we’re talking here about a potential doubling of the the United States’s total casualties in World War II, and very possibly the same for Japan’s already much more horrific toll. The only other possible non-nuclear alternative would have been a blockade of the Japanese home islands to try to starve them out of the war, a process that could have taken many months or even years and brought with it horrific civilian death and suffering in Japan itself as well as a slow but steady dribble of Allied casualties amongst the soldiers, sailors, and airmen maintaining the blockade. For a nation that just wanted to be done with the war already, this was no alternative at all.

Against the casualties projected for an invasion or even an extended blockade, the 200,000 or so killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki starts to almost seem minor. I’d be tempted to say that you can’t do this kind of math with human lives, except that we did and do it all the time; see the platitudes about the moderate, unfortunate, but ultimately acceptable “collateral damage” that has accompanied so many modern military adventures. So, assuming we can accept that, while every human life is infinitely precious, some infinities are apparently bigger than others (Georg Cantor would be proud!), the decision made by Truman and his advisers would seem, given the terrible logic of war, the only reasonable one to make… if only this whole version of the administration’s debate wasn’t a fabrication.

No, in truth Truman never had anything like the debate described above with his staffers — unsurprisingly, as the alleged facts on which it builds are either outright false or, at best, highly questionable. Far from being stubbornly determined to battle on to the death, Japan was sending clear feelers through various diplomatic channels that it was eager to discuss peace terms, with the one real stumbling block being the uncertain status under the Allies’ stated terms of “unconditional surrender” of the Emperor Hirohito. Any reasonably perceptive and informed American diplomat could have come to the conclusion that was in fact pretty much the case in reality: that many elements of this proud nation were still in the Denial phase of grief, clinging to desperate pipe dreams like a rescue by, of all people, a Soviet Union that suddenly joined Japan against the West — but, as those dreams were shattered one by one, Japan as a whole was slowly working its way toward Acceptance of its situation. Given these signs of wavering resolution, it seems highly unlikely that an invasion of Japan, should it have been necessary at all, would have racked up 1 million casualties on the Allied side alone. That neat round figure is literally pulled out of the air, from a despairing aside made by Truman’s aging, war-weary Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall engaged in a similar bit of dead reckoning, based on nothing but intuition, and came up with a figure of 500,000. Others reckoned more in the range of 250,000. The only remotely careful study, the only one based on statistical methods rather than gut feelings, was one conducted by the Army that estimated casualties of 132,500 — 25,000 of them fatalities — for an invasion of Kyushu, 87,500 casualties — 21,000 of them fatalities — if a follow-up invasion of Honshu also became necessary. Of course, nobody really knew. How could they? The only thing we do know is that 1 million was the highest of all the back-of-the-napkin estimations and over four times the military’s own best guess, meaning it’s better taken as an extreme outlier — or at least a worst-case scenario — than a baseline assumption.

The wellspring for the problematic traditional narrative about the use of the atomic bomb is an article which Henry Stimson wrote for the February 1947 issue of Harper’s Magazine. This article was itself written in response to the first mild stirrings of moral qualms that had begun the previous year in the media in response to the publication of John Hersey’s searing work of novelistic journalism Hiroshima. Stimson’s response sums up the entire debate and the ultimate decision to drop the bombs so eloquently, simply, and judiciously that it effectively ended the debate when it had barely begun. The two most salient planks of what’s become the traditionalist view of the bombing — Japan’s absolute refusal to surrender and that lovely, memorable round number of 1 million casualties — stand front and center. This neat version of events would later be enshrined in the memoirs of Truman and his associates.

Yet, as we’ve seen, Stimson’s version of the debate must be, at best, not quite the whole truth. I want to return to it momentarily to examine the biggest lie therein, which I consider to be profoundly important to really understanding the use of the bomb. But first, what of the stories told by those of later generations who would condemn the use of the bomb? They’ve staked various positions over the years, ranging from unsubstantiated claims of racism as the primary motivator to arguments derived from moral absolutism: “One cannot firmly be against any use of nuclear weapons yet make an exception in the case of Hiroshima,” writes longtime anti-nuclear journalist and advocate Greg Mitchell. Personally, I don’t find unnuanced tautologies of that stripe particularly helpful in any situation; there’s always context, always exceptions.

By far the strongest argument made against the use of the atomic bomb is the one that was first deployed by Gar Alperovitz to restart the debate in 1965: that external political concerns, particularly the desire to send a message to the Soviet Union, had as much or more to do with the use of the bomb than a simple desire to end the war as quickly and painlessly as possible. While the evidence isn’t quite as cut-and-dried as many condemners would have it, there’s nevertheless enough fire under this particular smokescreen to make any proponent of the atomic bombing as having merely been doing what was necessary to end the war with Japan at least a bit uncomfortable.

It was the evening of the first day of the Potsdam Conference involving Truman, Stalin, Winston Churchill, and their respective staffs when Truman first got word of the success of the Trinity test. Many attendees remarked the immediate change in his demeanor. After having appeared a bit hesitant and unsure of himself during the first day, he started to assert himself boldly, almost aggressively, against Stalin. Suddenly, noted a perplexed Churchill, “he told the Russians just where they got on and off and generally bossed the whole meeting.” Only when Churchill got word from his own people of the successful test did all become clear: “Now I know what happened to Truman yesterday…”

There follow Potsdam in the records of the administration’s internal discussions a disturbing number of expressions of hopes that the planned atomic bombings of Japan will serve as a forceful demonstration to Stalin that the United States should not be trifled with in the fast-approaching postwar world order. Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes in particular gloated repeatedly that the atomic bomb should make the Soviets “more manageable” in general; that it would “induce them to yield and agree to our positions”; that it had given the United States “great power.”

But we have to be careful here in constructing a chain of causality. While it’s certainly clear that Truman and many around him regarded the bomb as a very useful lever indeed against increasing Soviet intractability, this was always discussed as simply a side benefit, not a compelling reason to use the bomb in itself. There were, in other words, lots of musing asides, but no imperatives in the form of “drop the bomb so that we can scare the Russians.” Truman’s diary entry after learning of the Trinity test mentions the Soviets only as potential allies against Japan: “Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan explodes over their homeland.”

If we consider actions in addition to words the situation begins to look yet more ambiguous. Prior to Potsdam the United States had been pushing the Soviet Union with some urgency to enter the war against Japan, believing a Soviet invasion of Manchuria would tie down Japanese troops and resources should an American-led home-island invasion become necessary. The Truman administration also believed a Soviet declaration might, just might, provide the final shock that would bring Japan to its senses and cause it to surrender without an invasion. But in the wake of Trinity American diplomats abruptly ceased to pressure their Soviet counterparts. The Soviet Union would declare war at last anyway on August 8 (in between the two atomic bombings), but the United States, once it had the bomb, would seem to have judged that ending the war with the bomb would be preferable for its interests than having the war end thanks to the Soviet Union’s entry. The latter could very well give Stalin postwar justification for laying claim to Manchuria or other Japanese territories, claiming part of the spoils of a war in which the Soviet Union had participated only at the last instant. An additional implicit consideration may have been the conviction of Byrnes and others that it wouldn’t hurt postwar negotiations a bit to show Stalin just what a single American bomber could now do. The realpolitik here isn’t pretty — it seldom is — but what to make of the whole picture is far from clear. The words and actions of Truman and his advisers would seem ambiguous enough to be deployed in the service of any number of interpretations, from condemnations of them as war criminals to assertions that they were simply doing their duty in prosecuting to the relentless utmost of their abilities their war against an implacable enemy. Yes, interpretations abound, most using the confusing facts as the merest of scaffolds for arguments having more to do with ideology and emotion. I won’t presume to tell you what you should think. I would just caution you to tread carefully and not to judge too hastily.

In that spirit, it’s time now to come back to the biggest lie in Stimson’s article. Quite simply, the entire premise of the article is untrue. Actually, there was no debate at all over whether the atomic bomb should be used on Japan.

Really. Nowhere is there any record of any internal debate at all over whether the atomic bomb should be dropped on Japan. There were debates over when it should be used; on which cities it should be used; whether the Japanese should be warned beforehand; whether it should be demonstrated to the Japanese in open country or open ocean before starting to bomb their cities. But no one, no one inside the administration ever even raised the shadow of a suggestion that it should simply be declared too horrible for use and mothballed.  Not even among the scientists who built the bomb, many of whom would become advocates in the postwar years for atomic moderation or abolition, is there even a hint of such an idea. Even Niels Bohr, who was frantically begging anyone in Washington who would listen to think about what the bomb might mean to the future of civilization, simply assumed that it would be used as soon as it was ready to end this war; his concern was for the world and the wars that would follow. Interestingly, the only on-the-record questioners of the very idea of using the atomic bomb are a handful from the military who had no direct vote on the strategic conduct of the war in the Pacific, like — even more interestingly — Dwight Eisenhower. Those unnoticed voices aside, the whole debate over the use of the atomic bomb on Japan is largely anachronistic in that nobody making the big decisions at the time ever even thought to raise it as a question. The use of the bomb, now that it was here, was a fait accompli. I really believe that this is a profoundly important idea to grasp. If you insist on seeing this conspicuously missing debate as proof of the moral degradation of the Truman administration, fair enough, have at it. But I see it a little bit differently. I see it as a sign of the difference between peace and war.

The United States has visited war upon quite a number of nations in recent decades, but the vast majority of Americans have never known war — real war, total war, war as existential struggle — and the mentality it produces. I believe that this weirdly asymmetrical relationship with the subject has warped the way many Americans view war. We insist on trying to make war, the dirtiest business there is, into a sanitized, acceptable thing with our “targeted strikes” and our rhetoric about “liberating” rather than conquering, all whilst wringing our hands appropriately when we learn of “collateral damage” among civilians. Meanwhile we are shocked at the brutal lengths the populations of the countries we invade will go to to defend their homelands, see these lengths as proof of the American moral high ground (an Abu Grahib here or there aside), while failing to understand that what is to us a far-off exercise in communist control or terrorist prevention is to them a struggle for national and cultural survival. Of course they’re willing to fight dirty, willing to do just about anything to kill us and get us out of their countries.

World War II, however, had no room for weasel words like “collateral damage.” It was that very existential struggle that the United States has thankfully not had to face since. This brought with it an honesty about what war actually is that always seems to be lacking in peacetime. If the conduct of the United States during the war in the Pacific was not quite as horrendous as that of Japan, plenty of things were nevertheless done that our modern eyes would view as atrocities. Throughout the war, American pilots routinely machine-gunned Japanese pilots who had bailed out of their stricken aircraft — trained pilots being far, far more precious a commodity to the Japanese than the planes they flew. And on the night of March 9, 1945, American B-29s loosed an incendiary barrage on Tokyo’s residential areas carefully planned to burn as much of the city as possible to the ground and to kill as many civilians as possible in the process; it managed to kill at least 100,000, considerably more than were killed in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and not far off the pace of Hiroshima. These scenes aren’t what we think of when we think of the Greatest Generation; we prefer a nostalgic Glen Miller soundtrack and lots of artfully billowing flags. Our conception of a World War II hero doesn’t usually allow for the machine-gunning of helpless men or the fire-bombing of civilians. But these things, and much more, were done.

World War II was the last honest war the United States has fought because it was the last to acknowledge, at least tacitly, the reality of what war is: state-sponsored killing. If you’re unlucky enough to lead a nation during wartime, your objective must be to prosecute that war with every means at your disposal, to kill more of your enemy every single day than he kills of your own people. Do this long enough and eventually he will give up. If you have an awesome new weapon to deploy in that task, one which your enemy doesn’t possess and thus cannot use to retaliate in kind, you don’t think twice. You use it. The atomic bomb, the most terrible weapon the world has ever known, was forged in the crucible of the most terrible war the world has ever known. Of course it got used. The atomic bombings of Japan and all of the other terrible deeds committed by American forces in both Europe and the Pacific are not an indictment of Truman or his predecessor Roosevelt or of the United States; they’re an indictment of war. Some wars, like World War II, are sadly necessary to fight. But why on earth would anyone who knows what war really means actually choose to begin one? The collective American denial of the reality of war has enabled a series of elective wars that have turned into ugly, bleeding sores with no clear winners or losers; somehow the United States is able to keep mustering the will to blunder into these things but unable to muster the will to do the ugly things necessary to actually win them.

The only antidote for the brand of insanity that leads us to freely choose war when any other option is on the table is to be forced to stop thinking about it in the abstract, to be confronted with some inkling of the souls we’re about to snuff out and the suffering we’re about to cause. This is one of the services that Trinity does for us. For me, the most moving moment in the entire game is the one sketched out at the beginning of this article, when you meet a sweet little girl who’s about to become a victim of the world’s second atomic-bomb attack. Later — or earlier; chronology is a tricky thing in Trinity — you’ll meet her again, as an old woman, in the Kensington Gardens.

>examine woman
Her face is wrong.

You look a little closer and shudder to yourself. The entire left side of her head is scarred with deep red lesions, twisting her oriental features into a hideous mask. She must have been in an accident or something.

A strong gust of wind snatches the umbrella out of the old woman's hands and sweeps it into the branches of the tree.

The woman circles the tree a few times, gazing helplessly upward. That umbrella obviously means a lot to her, for a wistful tear is running down her cheek. But nobody except you seems to notice her loss.

After a few moments, the old woman dries her eyes, gives the tree a vicious little kick and shuffles away down the Lancaster Walk.

That scene breaks my heart every time I read it, and I’m still not entirely sure why.

I like the fact that Trinity goes to Nagasaki rather than Hiroshima. The Hiroshima attack, the more destructive of the two bombings in human lives by a factor of at least two and of course the first, normally gets all of the attention in art and journalism alike. Indeed, it can seem almost impossible to avoid emphasizing Hiroshima over Nagasaki; I’ve done it repeatedly in this article, even though I started out vowing not to. “We are an asterisk,” says Nagasaki sociologist Shinji Takahashi with a certain bitter sense of irony. “The inferior a-bomb city.” Nagasaki wasn’t even done the honor of being selected as a target for an atomic bomb. The B-29 that bombed Nagasaki had been destined for Kokura, but settled on Nagasaki after cloud cover and drifting smoke from a conventional-bombing raid made a drop on Kokura too problematic. An accident of clouds and wind cost 50,000 or more citizens of Nagasaki their lives, and saved the lives of God only knows how many in Kokura. As the Japanese themselves would say, such is karma. And such is the stuff of tragedy.

Comments
29 Responses

- Jayle Enn

February 13, 2015 at 7:41 pm

Trinity was the first Infocom game I finished without a (hard to find) hint book. I’m not sure if it’s because the puzzles were fairly straightforward, or the writing was so compelling to a teenage me. I think the latter because, decades later, I’ll think unbidden, ‘Her face is wrong’ and relive the awful realization of who that little girl by the swingsets grew up to be.

- Jimmy Maher

February 14, 2015 at 11:01 am

I *love* the line “She must have been in an accident or something.” So perfect, so cluelessly contemporary American.

- Lisa H.

February 16, 2015 at 8:25 am

I feel dumb – who does the Nagasaki scene girl grow up to be?

- Lisa H.

February 16, 2015 at 8:35 am

Never mind; got it now. But I do still feel pretty stupid – especially given the number of times I’ve played through this game – that I never noticed that before.

- Ronixis

February 13, 2015 at 7:51 pm

From the survey result, is that actually 22.7% of the remainder (which would be 10.5% of the total respondents) or 22.7% of the total respondents?

- Jimmy Maher

February 14, 2015 at 8:48 am

I didn’t write that very well at all. I meant 22.7 percent of the total respondents. Fixed it. Thanks!

- Duncan Stevens

February 13, 2015 at 9:31 pm

Agree that there isn’t really a good answer to whether Truman should have dropped the bomb. Having read some of the literature, it does seem to me that the option of demonstrating its use to the Japanese (say, by dropping it on an uninhabited island) before using it on a city deserved more attention than it got. It appears that it was rejected by the committee Stimson chaired for fear that (1) the bomb might not work, emboldening the dead-enders, and (2) telling the Japanese that the bomb was coming might lead them to shift POW camps into the likely targets. I’ve never found either explanation very convincing: (1) while there was some question about whether the plutonium bomb (Fat Man) would work, it was pretty clear that the uranium bomb (Little Boy) would work, and (2) there had already been extensive bombing of Japanese cities, so if Japan was going to move POWs to the cities to deter strikes, it likely would have done so already.

On the other hand, Japan *didn’t* react to Hiroshima by surrendering immediately, so you could argue that the demonstration wouldn’t have accomplished anything. The Rhodes book suggests that three days wasn’t enough time for the relevant decisionmakers to make their choice, and there may be something in that, but I haven’t seen any evidence that unconditional surrender was imminent when the second bomb was dropped. (The book also notes that the regime stacked the deck by, for example, publishing the proposed surrender terms in the newspapers but heavily editing the terms so that they seemed more onerous.)

As for the diplomatic feelers…I’ve never been sure what to think. Mixed messages were being sent, and whether the U.S. should have viewed surrender on acceptable terms as inevitable without the bomb or an invasion isn’t, to my eye, as easy a question as you suggest. Had the Potsdam declaration clearly stated that “unconditional surrender” didn’t mean Hirohito had to go, would that have changed things? Maybe, maybe not. And even if it could be expected that Japan would have gotten there eventually, waiting for that wasn’t a cost-free strategy either; see the sinking of the Indianapolis on July 30.

One other note about the woman in London: consider that the premise of the game as it ultimately plays out is that she will (almost certainly) die in the London attack. I.e., she’ll survive the Nagasaki attack, severely scarred, and live her life only to die in another bombing. Thinking about it that way helps particularize what would, as you note, otherwise be abstract.

- Ken Rutsky

February 13, 2015 at 9:49 pm

“As for the diplomatic feelers…I’ve never been sure what to think.”

I seem to remember the diplomatic overtures were made behind the backs of the military command, who were really running the show? Or am I wrong…

- Jimmy Maher

February 14, 2015 at 9:21 am

There was definitely a war faction and a peace faction, but I’m not sure I’d characterize it as the latter “going behind the backs” of the former. I believe it was more just a heated internal debate, with resulting mixed signals sent to the outside world.

- Duncan Stevens

February 14, 2015 at 3:08 pm

I believe that the Japanese diplomats in question were in Switzerland; they said they had back-channel communications going on with the regime, but it wasn’t 100% clear whether the regime was on board with everything they were saying.

- Jeremy Gans

February 14, 2015 at 2:20 am

I read last year that there are a number of Japanese who were bombed in Hiroshima, then shipped off as survivors to Nagasaki (too) soon after. I think they are all dead now, but they were known (and venerated to a degree) in Japan as the ‘twice-bombed.” I remember thinking at the time that the girl in Trinity was also in that category.

(One other thing. It did strike me that she seemed to give up on that umbrella a little too easily, given what it must have meant to her.)

- Jimmy Maher

February 14, 2015 at 10:14 am

One other obvious argument against demonstrating the bomb was that, as I alluded to in another comment, the Americans actually only had two of them to hand, and didn’t expect more for several weeks. Thus if you use one as a demonstration and Japan doesn’t respond as you hope you’ve lost one of your two precious bullets.

Truman and Stimnson among others later did claim to have dropped leaflets on Japan warning of the impending attack, but the historical record is unclear a) whether this happened at all or b) whether if it did they were well-enough written and widely-enough distributed to make any realistic difference.

One thing that often goes unreported is that there actually were 23 American prisoners of war in Hiroshima…

A huge part of the “unconditional surrender” situation was dictated by domestic political calculations on Truman’s part. Far from being the “buck stops here” standup decision-maker of popular legend, Truman ran an administration that was in some ways the first of the modern ones, driven very much by polling. His Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes was a particularly political creature. “Unconditional surrender” was *hugely* popular with the American public, and Truman was very nervous about how it would be received if he suddenly modified that. And he was also concerned that he not appear weak to Stalin.

I would say Japan’s surrender, with or without the bomb, *was* inevitable; it obviously wasn’t going to *win* this war, and the United States obviously wasn’t going to accept anything less. This would have been as obvious to Truman as it is to us. The question, of course, is *when* that surrender would occur.

Truman’s duty as a wartime leader, as I see it, was not to kill Japanese just for the fun of it, but also not to trade even 100,000 Japanese lives for 1 American. That’s harsh, but that’s what war *is*. In waiting around after the first bomb was dropped or hoping that the Soviets’ entry could bring about Japan’s surrender, he would have been doing just that; the Kamikazes would have continued to fly into American ships and the Japanese submarines would have continued to torpedo them (as the fate of the Indianapolis made so clear). This is the reason that at the end of the day I reluctantly and sadly agree with the decision to use the bomb — or at least am unwilling to condemn Truman for it; this is a very, very difficult question for me. I’d a feel a little better about my answer if Truman had also continued to pressure Stalin to come in, and hadn’t gloated so much about the effect the use of the atomic bomb would have on relations with the Soviet Union…

- Duncan Stevens

February 14, 2015 at 3:27 pm

When the surrender would occur and on what terms was not clear. The regime pretty much blew off the Potsdam declaration, and while other channels may have been more receptive, there was a lot of uncertainty. As you note, Truman, at that point, wasn’t willing to sacrifice any more American lives in hopes of a less harsh outcome, and continuing to pound Japan with conventional weapons wasn’t going to be cost-free.

It’s not clear to me how big a difference, for Japan, Stalin entering the war earlier would have made, or whether Japan would have surrendered without the use of the bomb. The Soviet Union could roll through Manchuria, but it wasn’t going to be leading an invasion of the main islands. (Did the Soviets even have an amphibious force?)

- Jason Dyer

February 14, 2015 at 5:36 pm

I’m not so convinced at the case surrender was inevitable. Even after the two atomic bombs there was a near-coup to prevent a surrender.

http://warhistorian.org/grimsley-coup-what-if.pdf

- Ken

February 16, 2015 at 3:02 am

Also often overlooked (or ignored) is that a peace short of unconditional Japanese surrender – either on terms of status quo ante bellum (reset the map to December 5, 1941) or involving Japan giving up a fairly small portion of their prewar conquests in China – would have done nothing more than sow the seeds of the next war, as the fundamental cause of the war -Japan’s dominance by a militaristic government that sought to build a self-sufficient economic empire via fire and sword.

So long as the US owned or was allied with any territory between Asia and Midway Island, the US possessed the strategic position to strangle any Japanese Empire that could ever be, meaning that unless Japan forsook their dreams of such an empire, that empire would only exist as long as the United States allowed it to exist. This was an intolerable situation to the military figures that actually ruled there, so the only real option open was either unconditional Japanese surrender, or another war -just as bad, if not worse- ten or twenty years down the line, exactly as happened with the ill-conceived Versailles treaty that ended WWI.

As for the casualty debate for DOWNFALL, the military planners that formulated the lower figures were ignorant of the quantity of suicide units that Japan had ready for battle. In addition to the famous Kamikaze fighters and less famous “baka” manned cruise missiles, they had large numbers of manned torpedoes (used rather little in the war) ,suicide speedboats (never used operationally), and suicide midget submarines (also never used). Those units alone (which proved very difficult to stop and highly accurate) would have inflicted very heavy casualties among the troopships for the invasion.

Potentially even worse, cyanide pills were manufactured and distributed to civilians in mass numbers (I personally know a woman who still has the one she was given by her mother as a small girl and told to take if the Americans came), which had the potential for mass civilian deaths even without the inevitable collateral damage that would result from any serious fighting.

- Jimmy Maher

February 16, 2015 at 7:05 am

As a counterpoint, there were signs of what the military suspected to be weakening resolution that were taken into account. At Okinawa, 7400 soldiers from the garrison actually surrendered — still a small percentage, but a much, much higher number than surrendered in previous campaigns. See George Feifer’s Tennozan: The Battle for Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb for more on the military’s thinking.

While you describe a lot of very sensible reasons for making sure Japan capitulated completely, by 1945 none of that was at all in question within Truman’s administration for the very reasons you state. The only question was whether to accept as a condition the continuing reign of Hirohito as Emperor and to give him immunity to war-crimes charges — and this of course was accepted in the end.

- Ken Rutsky

February 13, 2015 at 9:46 pm

Great article, the best in this series so far, and one of the best overall I’ve read on this blog. I really appreciate the sections about the public’s changing view of prosecuting war. “[S]omehow the United States is able to keep mustering the will to blunder into these things but unable to muster the will to do the ugly things necessary to actually win them” is profound, well-put.

I’ve already said it, but thanks so much for these posts. I was a military history nut from a very young age (still am). Reading Hersey’s book in sixth grade (a flea market book seller recommended it to me; I think he found my enthusiasm for the subject a little unsettling) really opened my eyes to a lot of what got left out of all those old history books, glossy atlases and Ballantine paperbacks. Maybe your blog will do the same for someone else.

- Jimmy Maher

February 14, 2015 at 9:42 am

Thanks! Even though this is (I believe) the shortest of these articles, it’s the one I struggled with the most. I think I ended up excising almost as much text as I left in. I removed a lot of editorializing, as I think this is a question everyone should probably think about for herself. I have my own view, which probably still does creep through a bit in the article, but I really don’t want to tell you what to think. I suppose that’s kind of exception to my general rule for this blog. Enjoy it while it lasts… ;)

It sounds like we have similar histories. When I was maybe ten or so I discovered a treasure trove in our attic, a bunch of old Military Book Club books on World War II. For the next several years I was known as “the warmonger” within the family. I loved a four-volume series by Edward Jablonski called Airwar most of all. I was particularly fascinated with its vivid descriptions of the carrier battles in the Pacific; I relived them over and over in my imagination, even bought the absurdly complex Avalon Hill wargame Flattop (which I proceeded to get absolutely nowhere with).

At the time I was also a big Star Trek fan, and I kind of conflated the two in my mind. My favorite episodes were not the planetside stories but the ones where the Enterprise would do battle in space and Kirk would command from the bridge with photon torpedoes flying and damage reports coming in. Inevitably, the starship Enterprise led me to the storied World War II aircraft carrier Enterprise. I read The Big E by Edward Stafford several times front to back.

But I think it was another part of Airwar that first began to bring home to me the real meaning of war. Writing about the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, Jablonski described vividly how the American pilots machine-gunned Japanese troops on the decks of transports and, after those transports were sunk, as they struggled in the water. The carnage was so terrible that many of the pilots threw up in their cockpits, but they kept on pulling their triggers lest those troops make it Guadalcanal and reinforce the Japanese garrison there.

Definitely a needed corrective to my view of war as all glory and excitement and adventure. War is killing. These days I’m very aware of that, and always find myself saying when I open one of those old gung-ho books I used to love, “But you’re making light of killing people!” I don’t judge military-history buffs for the hobby, as I know how compelling it can be, but it’s just not for me anymore.

It sounds like Hiroshima may have been a corrective you could use, and a certain bookstore owner may have been very, very wise to recommend it…

- ZUrlocker

February 15, 2015 at 3:26 pm

Yes, enjoyed this post quite a bit. Definitely best of the series. And the comments are also very good reading.

- Jeremy Gans

February 14, 2015 at 2:17 am

A terrific post and one I’d been nervous about for personal reasons. I’m an Australian and attended a US summer school (in Paris) in 1994, which I think must have been during the debate about the Smithsonian display. I talked to some Americans about the issue and took what I thought would be a gentle route into the dilemma, saying (not quite truly) “I’m convinced that the US was right to bomb Hiroshima. But I’m not so sure about Nagasaki. Couldn’t they have at least waited a few more weeks to see if the Japanese would surrender?” I’m pretty sure that I was inspired to make that argument by Trinity, which I recall surprised me by taking me to Nagasaki, rather than Hiroshima as I was anticipating. Like you and others, that girl’s wrong face was a lasting image. However, to say the least, my plan for a gentle argument didn’t work. The folks I argued with were incensed by my suggestion and I was incensed that they were incensed. There was some shouting.

Anyway, one thing I am curious about, that you don’t cover here, is the debate the Americans DID have, about what to bomb in Japan, and when, and who. And, to reiterate my question from twenty years ago, what was the rationale (if there was one) for bombing Nagasaki/Kokuru just three days after Hiroshima?

- Jimmy Maher

February 14, 2015 at 9:03 am

There was never any proposal or conception that I’m aware of to bomb Japan just twice (or once) and then wait and see what it did in response. The plan was rather to conduct an atomic-bombing *campaign* until Japan surrendered. But the problem was that every bomb was essentially a handmade bespoke piece, quantities of uranium and plutonium were still limited, etc. So it was simple logistics problems that kept more bombs from dropping between August 9 and August 15. I believe the next bomb was actually still at least two weeks away from being ready to go at the time of Japan’s surrender.

The discussions about where to bomb make for a very complicated subject if you drill down into the minutiae. Tokyo was taken off the slate for early targeting right away, partly for humanitarian reasons — the population was *very* densely packed even by Japanese standards — partly out of concern for how it would look to the rest of the world, partly for practical reasons — you might not want to wipe out the seat of government and thus plunge the country into chaos when you hope the government is about to surrender. Otherwise, cities were wanted which had at least some semblance of being of military value — again, largely for political reasons — and, much more cold-bloodedly, that hadn’t been bombed too extensively before, so the damage the atomic bomb did could be better evaluated.

Kyoto actually fit all of these criteria and almost certainly would have been one of the first two targets had not Secretary of War Henry Stimson personally intervened and said, no, we can’t bomb “the Rome of Japan.” A very interesting guy was Stimson…

- Andrej Panjkov

February 22, 2015 at 5:01 am

I believe that the ground zero point for Kyoto was going to be the central railyard, which is now a locomotive museum. The prime exhibit there is the Emperor’s official locomotive engine.

- Scott Gage

February 16, 2015 at 3:59 am

Great article. Very thought-provoking stuff.

Bit of a typo though:

all whilst ringing our hands appropriately when we learn of “collateral damage” among civilians

That should be “wringing”, unless you have bells for hands :)

- Jimmy Maher

February 16, 2015 at 6:40 am

:) Thanks!

- Lisa H.

February 16, 2015 at 8:40 am

So aside from me being dense (and posting a comment before I’d even finished reading the article), I do want to say that I found the running motif in the comic of “It’s my patriotic duty” interesting, especially the line here with the hestitation in it, and “I hear an airplane” particularly chilling – so innocent.

- Kevin Colyer

March 5, 2015 at 9:27 pm

Very insightful and thoughtful post. I think your comments of the use of the bomb being obvious in the totality of war very interesting and the contrast with post-wwII wars having a strong ring of truth to them.

I have been reading your blog avidly, but this has been the best post (and series). Perhaps there is a history book or two in you?!!!

- Ruber Eaglenest

March 27, 2015 at 6:51 am

You said that “That scene breaks my heart every time I read it, and I’m still not entirely sure why.” Well I’m sure it breaks your hearth the second time you play the game, or further revisits to the game. Isn’t Trinity a wonderful game?

There are more emotives moment in the thread of time with that secene. You can save the girl inside in a way but dying in the process, but it is a sweet death.

- Martin

July 28, 2016 at 3:14 am

Sorry if this is ignoring the main meat of the article but this is bugging me.In the game sample, you say “girl, hello” and get a blank response because I assume, you are talking in English. So what happens if you try to talk to her in Japanese? Does the game have any options to actually communicating with her?

- Jimmy Maher

July 28, 2016 at 7:10 am

Don’t believe so, no.

T Plus 0: The Fulcrum of History
February 19, 2015

We’re interdimensional travelers of time and space, Wabewalkers on the go. We’re going to visit a nondescript spot way out in the New Mexico desert between Socorro and Alamogordo, approximately latitude 33 degrees north, longitude 106 degrees west, late in the evening of July 15, 1945.

If you were a novelist scripting a place to unleash an elemental force of nature, you hardly could have done better than the place we stand now. There’s something different about New Mexico; not for nothing do they call it the Land of Enchantment. It’s a quality of the air, of the light, of the harsh, otherworldly landscape itself which is in no way conventionally beautiful but beautiful all the same. New Mexico captures dreamers for reasons no one can fully articulate. Dreamers like Georgie O’Keeffe, who fled her circle of New York City sophisticates to roam the desert alone and obsessively paint, paint, paint not just the stuff around her but the light that baked her skin brown as a nut. Dreamers like D.H. Lawrence, who wandered to New Mexico as part of his “savage exile” from Britain and stayed long enough to write several books here; he declared New Mexico “the greatest experience I ever had,” one that “changed me forever.”

I know what he meant. When I was young and at loose ends, I took a solitary road trip around the state in my old 280Z, staying at hostels at night and roaming the dunes during the day. I still remember the dust and the sweat and the light, and how good a beer and a dive into a watering hole felt at the end of the day. New Mexico still calls to me. I’ve gone back several times with various companions since, and I suspect I’ll continue to look for excuses to do so for the rest of my life. Still, it’s never been quite the same as it was that first time. I think the desert is best experienced alone.

The part of the desert we’re visiting today was once part of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro — “The Royal Road of the Interior” — that ran all the way from Mexico City to San Juan Pueblo near the northern border of the present-day state of New Mexico. This stretch of the Camino Real was and is known as Jornada del Muerto — “Journey of the Dead.” It’s so-called because this basin, stretching 100 miles north to south, is bereft of food and water throughout its length. Only yucca and scattered scrub grows here. Native Americans knew from time immemorial to avoid it at all costs, while the Spaniards who died trying to make their way across it became the source of the ominous name it has held since before 1700. The Spaniards named the town they built at its northern tip Socorro — “succor” or “sustenance” — because that’s exactly what it represented to weary travelers from El Paso del Norte toward heading north toward Santa Fe. Various settlers over the centuries have tried to make a go of life in the Jornada del Muerto, digging wells and bringing in sheep and cattle; we’ll meet in a bit a part of what they left behind. But it’s always a hardscrabble existence, their numbers always few.

This particular night in the Jornada del Muerto is an unusual one for two reasons. First of all, it’s raining, something that happens very seldom here. In fact, it’s raining hard, a violent thunderstorm of the sort that visits the desert only once or so per year. The storm will dump four inches of rain in a few hours onto a region that normally only gets about eight per year. That the rain gods should choose this of all nights to have their frolic seems poetically portentous. Because, you see, perched incongruously in the middle of nothing is a 100-foot-tall tower, Ground Zero of a new era in human history.

Base of Tower

A steel tower rises overhead, black against the cloudy sky. Your eyes follow the tapered frame up the ladder, past dangling ropes and cables, to the platform at its summit.

Paved roads and instrument lines lead off into the surrounding desert.

Let’s travel up the tower’s length and peek inside the flimsy metal shed perched at its top (what barrier is height to an interdimensional traveler?). Inside we see the “gadget,” the world’s first atomic bomb, an ungainly contraption of steel and cabling. We’ve arrived at Trinity.

Shack

You're in a metal shack, barely twelve feet square. The oak floor is littered with discarded bits of rope, pulleys and other hardware. A dark light bulb hangs from the ceiling. You can see an exit in the west wall.

A five-foot sphere rests on a bracket in the middle of the floor. Its surface is studded with bolts and crossed with electrical cables, all converging in a boxlike enclosure nearby.

Sitting in the corner (luckily, we interdimensional travelers are also invisible) is a young man flipping nervously through a cheap paperback. His name is Donald Hornig, and he’s 25 years old. He’s a prodigious chemist who’s already earned his PhD, an expert on explosives who was plucked out of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute by James Conant, President of Harvard, to join the Manhattan Project. He did important work on the implosion process that will, if all goes well, start in a matter of a few hours a nuclear chain reaction in the gadget with which he now shares the shed. He will go on to a long career as a professor and administrator in some of the pinnacles of academia: Brown, Princeton, Harvard.

Right now, however, Hornig is just a glorified babysitter, perched up here because General Leslie Groves and Robert Oppenheimer are paranoid about sabotage and don’t trust any ordinary guard to get too close to the gadget. He must know at some level that, brilliant as he is, he’s no Oppenheimer or Edward Teller; he’s up here at the top of a 100-foot tower babysitting a cobbled-together nuclear bomb in the middle of a violent thunderstorm because he’s expendable. That’s the way it always is; when the Oppenheimers and Groves of the world start their grand projects, there always have to be lots of Hornigs to see that they get done. He tries to forget his predicament, tries to read his book — The Desert Island Decameron, a collection of light essays and stories written by popular authors and sold cheap to keep the troops entertained — under the light of the single bare bulb dangling from the ceiling, trying to ignore the flashing lightning and howling wind. At last, at midnight, with the storm still raging, his telephone rings: “Come down!” Hornig climbs carefully down the side of the tower, then gets into a jeep and heads off to the canteen at the base camp for a cup of coffee. He will be the last person to see the gadget.

As the hours pass and the bomb sits alone up there in its shed, the temporary bunkers and camps that surround it are buzzing with activity. The plan was to explode the gadget at 4:00 this morning, but the weather causes a delay and much uncertainty. It’s considered urgently important to do the test this morning if at all possible, as President Truman is now in Potsdam and awaiting word of the Manhattan Project’s success — or failure — to know how he should conduct himself with Soviet General Secretary Stalin; as a whole raft of dignitaries and representatives have made the trip down to New Mexico to see the blast; as everyone is so damn tired — most of the people working onsite haven’t slept for two days — that they’d need a week or two just to rest and recuperate and prepare everything again for a rescheduled test.

Thankfully, the rain stops at dawn.

At 5:10, a physicist named Samuel King Allison begins intoning the final twenty-minute countdown over loudspeakers mounted all over the complex. His voice booms out for our ears only from the base of the tower itself. Countdowns sounding much like this one will later become familiar to everyone who watches the NASA space launches on television. This one, though, is like the gadget itself the first of its kind in the history of the world. A local radio station is broadcasting on a similar wavelength; Allison’s dulcet tones are occasionally overlaid with snatches of The Nutcracker Suite. Indeed, radio interference has been a constant problem at the Trinity site. The frequency chosen for short-wave communication among the scientists is the same as that used by a railway freight yard in San Antonio, Texas. Throughout the last weeks of frenzied preparation, the scientists could occasional hear the train dispatchers — and the train dispatchers could presumably occasionally hear the scientists. Even more alarmingly for security, Trinity also occasionally gets its bandwidth crossed with shortwave transmissions from the Voice of America. Hopefully their dialogs are esoteric enough that no one is likely to make sense of them.

At 5:25 we see a signal rocket flash into the sky, at 5:29 another; there was supposed to be one at 5:28 as well, but it was a dud. Let’s freeze time now (we interdimensional travelers do have many powers, don’t we?) and look around to see what else these men have wrought out here in the desert.

If we begin to streak outward from the tower in concentric circles — like, say, a hyperactive roadrunner — the first interesting thing we come to is an enormous metal non sequitur perched about half a mile west of the tower.

West of Tower

A tall framework of steel has been erected here, cousin to the larger tower visible not far to the east. Suspended within the frame is an enormous metal barrel, at least twenty feet long and ten wide, with rounded end caps. It looks like a king-sized cold capsule.

>examine barrel
Why would anyone hang a giant barrel in the middle of nowhere like this? There don't seem to be any openings, windows or markings of any kind; as far as you can tell, the thing is utterly useless.

The cold capsule, known colloquially as “Jumbo,” is a sign of the sheer urgency of the Manhattan Project and its associated willingness to expend resources lavishly on things that may actually prove pointless. (This is, you may remember, the same Manhattan Project that designed and built not one but two completely different atomic bombs, one using uranium and the other — the sort being tested this morning — using plutonium, in the hope that at least one of the things would turn out to work.) For a time plans for the Trinity test called for the gadget to be completely enclosed within Jumbo, which was designed to be strong enough that if the explosives mounted around the bomb’s plutonium core fired but failed to trigger the expected nuclear chain reaction its walls would not be breached. Thus it would be easy to collect and reuse the precious plutonium. Manufactured in Ohio, the heart of steel country, to exacting specifications, just getting its 214-ton bulk to the test site turned into a major effort of logistics. A railroad car had to be specially modified to carry this, the largest item ever shipped by rail. Because many sections of track simply couldn’t support something of this weight, the train had to take a circuitous route, from Barberton, Ohio, down to New Orleans, and then west across Texas. A special spur had to be constructed south of Socorro to unload it. Jumbo was then loaded onto a specially constructed 64-wheel trailer and pulled to the Trinity site by nine tractors along a 25-mile road that also had to be constructed from scratch.

And by the time it arrived here at last, two months ago, it was already superfluous. The scientists were feeling more and more confident that the test would be a success, plutonium was beginning to come out of the Manhattan Project’s complex of nuclear reactors in Hanford, Washington, in relatively good quantities, and it would make for a better, easier-to-monitor test if the bomb was exploded in the open air rather than inside a giant steel tube. And so after all that effort Jumbo has ended up here; the scientists lamely explain that they can use it to see what effect an atomic bomb has on… well, on a giant, pointless 214-ton metal tube sitting half a mile away from it. The answer will turn out to be, unsurprisingly, pretty much none at all, although the tower in which it’s mounted will be blown down. Jumbo will eventually end up sitting in the Trinity memorial parking lot for the benefit of the tourists who will be allowed to visit on one or two days out of every year, while scientists will later realize what a blessing it was that Jumbo wasn’t used: it would have been vaporized by the gadget, spewing 214 tons of radioactive particles into the atmosphere.

Continuing to circle outward, we come now to a strange artifact of another type not quite a mile southeast of the shot tower.

Shallow Crater

You're standing at the edge of a shallow depression in the desert floor, a few hundred feet across. The ground within is gray and pulverized, as if by a powerful explosion.

This is indeed the remnant of a powerful explosion, of a dress rehearsal of sorts for Trinity that was conducted two months ago. A rather staggering 110 tons of TNT were stacked atop a 20-foot tower, along with a sprinkling of radioactive plutonium for realism’s sake. Then the whole thing was blown up remotely from the control bunker destined to be used for the main test. The plutonium was scattered widely by the explosion, giving the scientists a way to check and calibrate their instruments.

Moving along brings us to something more interesting about two miles southeast of the shot tower: an everyday-looking if somewhat worse-for-wear house sitting alone in the desert.

>examine house
The ranch house is squat and ugly, with adobe walls and a cheap tin roof. A deck is attached to the front.

The ranch house was built in 1913 by Franz Schmidt, a German immigrant and homesteader who lived a lonely existence here with his family for about ten years, raising sheep and cattle on land which he leased from the New Mexico government; the state owns most of the Jornada del Muerta. The Schmidts eventually sold the house and their lease on the land to another family, the McDonalds. But in 1942 the McDonalds were forced off their land by the federal government, who needed a wide open space for the testing of artillery and bombs.

When this part of the Jornada del Muerta was selected for the Trinity test in 1944, the house was a convenient bonus. It became a headquarters of sorts for the scientists. The interior was largely stripped, workbenches, maps, and equipment moved in, generators set up just outside for electricity. The doors and windows were weather-stripped as part of an oft-futile battle against the gales of dust and sand that constantly blow over the desert plains. The walls were tar-papered and the roof painted with aluminum paint in a truly futile battle against the searing heat of summer. The scientists found a more effective remedy to be the reservoir out back, perfect for spirit-renewing afternoon dips when the work became exhausting and the heat unbearable.

Let’s peek inside the house, see what they were up to in there…

Assembly Room

Whoever used this room was paranoid about dirt. The floor is swept spotless, and the edges of both windows are carefully sealed with tape. A closed front door leads east, and there's an open closet door in the north wall. Other exits lead south and west.

A workbench covered with loose sheets of brown paper runs along the north wall. You see bits of wire and other debris scattered across the paper.

Just a few days ago, on the evening of July 12, the two halves of the gadget’s plutonium core arrived at the ranch house under the stewardship of a young Army sergeant named Herbert Lehr, having ridden down from Los Alamos in the backseat of a sedan. The next day Louis Slotin arrived at the house’s “clean room” — the doors and windows had been sealed with tape and plastic against the ever-present dust and sand — to assemble the core. He placed a beryllium/polonium neutron initiator inside one half of the plutonium core, then gently lowered the other half into place to produce an apparatus about the size of a tennis ball but about the weight of a bowling ball. The scientists call these operations “tickling the dragon’s tail,” as one slip can send the core supercritical, irradiating the surrounding area and anyone within it. In the future such things will be done by machines inside shielded real clean rooms, attended by radiation-suited operators. But in 1945 the scientists place all of their faith in Slotin’s steady hand and steely nerves, and in the jeeps waiting outside with their engines running — as if radiation could be outrun. Luckily, Slotin was an experienced hand at this. The assembly went off without a hitch, the assembled core delivered to the shot tower to be placed inside the gadget the next day. Slotin’s luck, however, won’t hold out forever. Less than a year from now, he’ll make a mistake when performing a similar operation, absorbing a huge dose of radiation and dying agonizingly a week later.

The ranch house, judged too close for safety to the shot tower and thus empty now, will weather the blast none the worse for wear, apart from some blown-out windows. The ravages of time and weather will not be so kind. It will sit, abandoned and ignored, for decades after the Trinity test while David McDonald, patriarch of the family that once owned it, burns with outrage. The McDonalds, David will later claim, had been promised that the lease and the land would be returned to them once the war was over and the need for such large-scale artillery testing disappeared. But after the war that need will be replaced by another: the artillery range will become the White Sands Proving Grounds, where captured V-2 rockets are tinkered with to inaugurate the United States’s missile program. And then the White Sands Proving Grounds will become the modern White Sands Missile Range. Meanwhile David McDonald will continue to insist that the land was “stolen” from his family. The story will take a bizarre turn in 1982 when David McDonald, now 81 years old, will take possession along with his niece Mary of what’s left of the house — by then it will be little more than a ruin — armed with two rifles and a pistol. They will post signs about the property: “Deeded Land — No Trespassing” and “Road Closed to U.S. Army.” Eventually, with the aid of one of New Mexico’s Senators and the district’s Congressmen, they will be talked into leaving the property peacefully.

Whether as a result of David McDonald’s actions or just coincidence, the military will at last decide at about that time to do something with the house. It will be restored to its 1945 condition by the National Park Service and, beginning in 1984, opened to tourists who come to the Trinity site.

Continuing our circles, we come at last to some people. Three bunkers are set up about six miles northwest, southwest, and south of the shot tower, each with a handful of inhabitants. Let’s stop at the largest and most interesting of these, the “Baker” bunker south of the tower, from which the explosion is to be actually controlled and monitored.

>examine shelter
The square shelter is built of heavy timber, covered with a thick layer of earth on the north side. Bright light spills across the desert from the open south entrance.

A thin man steps into view, standing just inside the shelter's entrance.

>examine man
The thin man near the shelter is drawn and haggard; it looks as if he hasn't slept in days.

Pushing back his porkpie hat, the thin man peers up at the overcast sky.

The thin man is Robert Oppenheimer. Others out of our sight inside the bunker include Enrico Fermi, the first man to institute a nuclear chain reaction; George Kistiakowsky, head of the group that designed the high-explosive lenses that will collapse the gadget’s plutonium core; Kenneth Bainbridge, who has supervised the practical details of this test on behalf of the Los Alamos scientists; meteorologist Jack Hubbard, who was for most of the previous night the most anxiously consulted man on the site; and Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, General Groves’s right-hand man. Groves himself tore off from the control bunker in a jeep twenty minutes ago, toward the base camp further south, in accordance with a rule that he and Farrell should never place themselves into danger at the same time. All of the people I’ve just mentioned are worthy of articles in their own right. But now, for today, what of Oppenheimer?

Yes, what of Robert Oppenheimer? That’s a question that family, friends, and colleagues have been asking and will continue to ask all his life. As enigmatic a man as you’re ever likely to meet, he seems almost uniquely capable of inspiring either the most fervent admiration or the most contemptuous dislike — and sometimes, as in the case of Edward Teller, both in the same person. Perhaps an old story might help me to begin to explain.

Shortly after a young Oppenheimer accepted a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley, he went on a date with a graduate student. They apparently didn’t hit it off very well, and she fell asleep in the car on what should have been a romantic drive up into the Berkeley hills. Oppenheimer simply parked the car and walked away, leaving the girl to wake up alone in a car to which she had no key several miles from home. To his admirers, this became another amusing story about the Oppie the great eccentric, doubtless walking home mulling some fundamental property of the universe, the dull girl long forgotten. To his detractors, it was just a story about a jerk who left a girl stranded in the middle of nowhere for the crime of failing to be his dream date. Far from being natural, they claimed, Oppenheimer’s whole eccentric-intellectual schtick was carefully calculated; he knew exactly the effect he was trying to create when he said, for instance, that he hadn’t been aware of the 1929 stock-market crash until six months after it happened.

Oppenheimer’s famous cultural omnivorism is similarly polarizing. He cooks exotic Indonesian cuisine, studies ethical philosophy, and speaks several languages fluently; when in the Netherlands many years before the war, he would give his physics lectures in Dutch. He collects Renoir, Picasso, Vuillard, Rembrandt, and van Gogh for his walls. He loves classical music, the thorny later works by Beethoven being a particular favorite. He once read the entirety of Das Kapital on a single cross-country train trip. He’s fascinated by Eastern spiritualism, particularly Hinduism, and has learned Sanskrit so as to read the Bhagavad Gita in the original. And yet, while his range of accomplishments is certainly impressive, even Oppenheimer’s friends can sometimes get exasperated with his insistence on working convoluted classical allusions into a discussion on where to eat lunch today. He is, some say, at bottom a poseur.

Yes, for every Oppenheimer admirer there’s a detractor who senses that all of his almost frantic erudition and epicurianism is mere artifice — or part of a striving to fill some basic emptiness at the center of his personality.  One of his Dutch colleagues spoke to this impression when Oppenheimer was still in his twenties: “Robert, the reason you know so much about ethics is that you have no character.” While still an undergraduate, Oppenheimer once expressed to some friends the unbearably adolescent sentiment that “the kind of person I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance.” One might say that Oppenheimer has spent the last twenty years trying to create just that persona from whole cloth, Byron and Darwin all rolled into one, with all the pretension that implies. The sense so many have that there’s something just not quite honest about Oppenheimer, and the almost visceral loathing this impression can create in them, perhaps does much to explain, if by no means to excuse, the persecution he will suffer in the years to come.

Oppenheimer’s life before the war was a rather shockingly bohemian one by the straitlaced standards of the American physics community, involving flashy cars, a flashy pad in the hills, and, prior to and even after his marriage in 1940, rumors of sexual dalliances. His wife is three-time divorcée Kitty Harrison, a well-known Berkeley radical and former Communist Party member who became pregnant with Oppenheimer’s child while still married to her previous husband.

What many of his supporters will later label mere “flirtations” with communism are in reality much more than that. While he apparently never officially joined the Communist Party himself, Oppenheimer met regularly with most of its prominent members in Berkeley, organized rallies with them for manifold causes, and in 1940 personally edited and wrote much of the content for two pamphlets that hewed very closely indeed to the Communist Party line about the war in Europe:

Europe is in the throes of a war . It is a common thought, and a likely one, that when the war is over Europe will be socialist, and the British Empire gone. We think that Roosevelt is assuming the role of preserving the old order in Europe and that he plans, if need be, to use the wealth and the lives of this country to carry it out. We think, that is, that Roosevelt is not only a “war-monger” but a counter-revolutionary war-monger. We think it is this that has turned him from something of a progressive to very much of a reactionary.

The FBI opened its first file on Oppenheimer in March of 1941.

Still, even many of those who will go on to condemn him would have to admit today that his handling of the Manhattan Project has been spectacular. Placed in charge of the most brilliant single collection of scientific minds of the twentieth century, Oppenheimer has found ways to bend virtually every one of them to his will, despite the fact that lots of them have international reputations that far exceed his own; tellingly, Oppenheimer was chosen by General Groves for his position precisely because he wasn’t already engaged in any other research that looked to be vital to the making of the atomic bomb or any other aspect of the war effort. This gifted scientist has risen to the occasion, proving, at least for these few years, to be an if anything even more gifted politician, leader, and administrator. His charges, even those who didn’t have much use for him a few years ago, have gradually come to love him for always making the sensible choice when a big decision comes to his desk and otherwise keeping the nonsense to a minimum. He gives them clear directives and all the resources they need and then trusts them to see their projects through with minimal interference.

But Oppenheimer has also done something else for the Manhattan Project: as the most notable aesthete amongst its ranks, he’s given it its aesthetic character. Oppenheimer first came to New Mexico as a sickly teenager, sent there by his wealthy New York City family to recover from colitis in the clean air of the high desert. Like so many others with artistic souls, he fell in love with the place. As an adult, he bought a little log cabin east of Santa Fe, and spent time there every summer, sometimes alone, sometimes with his closest friends. Many remarked how free and unaffected Oppenheimer became there. Physics and the desert, he remarked on one of these unguarded occasions, were his only real loves. Oppenheimer must have been thinking what a perfect match the Land of Enchantment made for the elemental power of the atomic bomb when he convinced Groves to buy the Los Alamos Ranch School, a boarding school for boys perched atop a 7200-foot mesa 175 miles north of the place where he now stands, to become the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The name for this test is also classic Oppenheimer. One’s first assumption upon seeing the name is that “Trinity” must be a Christian allusion, one that might seem vaguely disrespectful or even blasphemous except for the fact that it really doesn’t make any sense at all in that context. Another possibility that will be mooted by later scholars is that the name refers not to the Christian Trinity but to a Hindu concept that would be very appealing to a physicist like Oppenheimer. According to Hinduism, all of the universe is under the sway of three gods: Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu, the Preserver; and Shiva, the Destroyer. Nothing in the universe is ever created or destroyed; it merely changes form at the behest of one of this trinity of gods. It’s the First Law of Thermodynamics as religion.

The likely true story, however, is a much more personal one. Prior to his marriage, Oppenheimer had a passionate, turbulent romantic relationship with a young woman named Jean Tatlock. It was in fact Tatlock, an ardent member of the Communist Party, who introduced Oppenheimer to left-wing politics and to many of the associations he will come to bitterly regret after the war. She also introduced him to the great English metaphysical poet John Donne. One sonnet in particular may have become indelibly linked with Tatlock in Oppenheimer’s mind:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

The relationship apparently didn’t die even with Oppenheimer’s being “betroth’d uto” another. He met and spent the night with Tatlock on at least one occasion after assuming control of the Manhattan Project; we know this because a pair of government agents tailed them to her apartment and sat outside the entire night. Six months later, in January of 1944, Tatlock committed suicide. Oppenheimer broke down and wept upon hearing the news. It seems very likely that he named the first American test of an atomic bomb after this noted communist with whom he had conducted an extramarital affair. Yes, that’s a horrible, unfairly moralizing reduction of a woman’s life, of a relationship that clearly affected — scarred? — both parties deeply. But, sentiment aside, there’s a part of Robert Oppenheimer that would have slyly enjoyed putting one over on the military command, would have enjoyed hearing all the rampant speculation around him while he just sat enigmatically and cherished his knowledge of what Trinity really meant. This is the old Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer the polarizer.

Whatever else he is, Robert Oppenheimer is right now very near a nervous breakdown as the moment of Trinity, destined to be either the great achievement or the great fiasco of his life, draws near. Always of a nervous disposition, he’s now at the ragged edge. For the last couple of hours General Groves has been periodically leading him out of the bunker on walks to try to calm his nerves. Groves, Oppenheimer’s opposite in every way — rotund where Oppenheimer appears almost emaciated, a blunt personality as devoid of Oppenheimer’s melancholy as he is of his intellectualism — is nevertheless oddly sympatico with the man he hand-picked to lead the scientists. It’s a strange, unlikely bond, but a bond nevertheless. Groves greatly admires Oppenheimer, pronouncing him a “genius”: “Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly. I guess there are a few things he doesn’t know about. He doesn’t know anything about sports.” His betrayal will thus hurt Oppenheimer even more than that of Edward Teller when, almost nine years from now, he will state at Oppenheimer’s security hearing that he feels that Oppenheimer’s security clearances should be revoked.

In the here and now, Groves left Oppenheimer to manage as best he can about 20 minutes ago. Now he’s at the Trinity base camp, a makeshift little town for several hundred scientists, engineers, soldiers, and workers about 10 miles from the shot tower.

There are lots of other people around the site that we could talk about. There is, for instance, Klaus Fuchs, the quiet German exile who has been passing vital secrets of the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union for months now and will continue to do so for years to come. And look, there’s our old friend Edward Teller. He’s standing on Compañia Hill, a good observation point about twenty miles northwest of the shot tower, along with dozens of other scientists and dignitaries who have just arrived to view the test. Like others all around the site, they’ve been smearing themselves with suntan lotion for protection against the blast. Now most of them are lying, as they’ve been instructed, with their feet facing the blast and their eyes looking away from the direction of the shot tower. One or two, like physicist Richard Feynman, will ignore the instructions and suffer temporary blindness as a result.

Yes, we could say so much more about these people standing at the fulcrum of history, but it’s time to end Oppenheimer’s torment. Let’s return to the shot tower and restart time.

At 5:29:45, a spark leaps from the control bunker to the gadget, jumping across the 32 detonators attached to the 32 lensed explosive charges spaced about the inside of the sphere. The sphere implodes with tremendous force, crushing the plutonium core into a supercritical mass. Its atoms begin to fission, releasing energy and freeing neutrons. The free neutrons strike more atoms of plutonium, causing them to fission in turn; a nuclear chain reaction has begun. As the quantity of fissioning atoms increases exponentially, the superheated core expands outward, until the atoms are no longer close enough together to sustain the chain reaction. And just like that, it’s all over — except for the boom, as the radioactive material, hotter now than the surface of the sun, explodes outward with a force equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT.

At the Baker bunker, one person says, “My God, it’s beautiful.” “No,” replies another, “it’s terrible.” “Now we’re all sons of bitches,” says yet another.

Ed Lane, engineer of a passing train:

All at once it seemed as if the sun had suddenly appeared in the sky out of darkness. There was a tremendous white flash. This was followed by a great red glare and high in the sky there were three tremendous smoke rings. The highest was many hundreds of feet high. They swirled and twisted as if being agitated by a great force. The glare lasted about three minutes and then everything was dark again, with dawn breaking in the east.

H.E. Wieselman, passenger on another train:

Suddenly, the tops of high mountains by which we were passing were lighted up by a reddish, orange light. The surrounding countryside was illuminated like daylight for about three seconds. Then it was dark again. The experience scared me. It was just like the sun had come up and suddenly gone down again.

L. Don Leet, a seismologist monitoring the blast from 50 miles away:

When it let go, it lit up 180 degrees of the horizon, not like one but a dozen brilliant suns. It stayed lit up and made chills run up my back because I knew what might happen if it was not controlled. It was followed by a brilliant red wall of flame. Fifty miles away it was like an earthquake.

Physicist William Laurence, on Compañia Hill along with Teller and the others:

There rose from the bowels of the earth a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one. It was a sunrise such as the world had never seen, a great green super-sun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than 8,000 feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with a dazzling luminosity. Up it went, a great ball of fire about a mile in diameter, changing colors as it kept shooting upward, from deep purple to orange, expanding, growing bigger, rising as it was expanding, an elemental force freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years. For a fleeting instant the color was unearthly green, such as one sees only in the corona of the sun during a total eclipse. It was as though the earth had opened and the skies had split. One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the Birth of the World—to be present at the moment of Creation when the Lord said: “Let There Be Light.”

New Mexicans in the vicinity believe the state has just experienced an earthquake, or that a meteor has just come to earth. Many of a religious inclination believe this must be the end of the world. Others assume “the Japs” have unleashed some horrible new weapon.

The military will quickly claim that the explosion was the result of an accident at an ammunition dump, but those relatively close to the blast will have cause to be skeptical of that story. In the weeks to come, ranchers will notice that many of their cows have begun losing their hair. It will eventually grow back in, but when it does so it does so in white. After the atomic bombing of Japan, when everyone knows at last what really happened at the Trinity site, these “atomic cows” will become press favorites. Unpainted fences will also turn white, as will some of the ranchers’ beards and half of a black cat. Fallout, apparently borne in waterways, will turn the products of paper mills in Indiana and Iowa mildly radioactive, spoiling a whole production run of Kodak film which used the mills’ product for its packaging. Unusual atmospheric radioactivity will be detected as far away as Maryland, while traces of plutonium will be detected in plants and in cattle feces 100 miles from the shot tower. Ornithologists will notice signs of radiation sickness and, later, unusual deformities amongst the local bird populations. Plenty of ranchers living in the vicinity of the blast as well as personnel at the site itself will later die of cancer, but their numbers will not be vastly larger than one might expect from any random sample, nor will there be any smoking guns to definitively attribute their deaths to this event. As scientists study the situation, they will soon conclude that the Trinity test got very, very lucky. Had the rain started again soon after the blast, the fallout it would have brought back to earth with it could have been disastrous. Future Stateside testing will be moved to an even more remote area, in the Nevada desert.

And what (again) of Robert Oppenheimer? Well, he will later claim that a phrase from the Bhagavad Gita was the first to flash through his mind: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Be that as it may, when he opens his mouth to speak in the first instant after the explosion his erudition for once seems to fail him. Turning to Enrico Fermi, relief spreading over his countenance, he says just two words: “It worked.”

Comments
18 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

February 19, 2015 at 5:31 pm

Two of my favorite anecdotes: in response to Groves’s continued secrecy directives following the test, an aide said, “Can you give us an easy job, General, like hiding the Mississippi River?” And a local rancher later told site personnel, “You boys must have been up to something this morning. The sun came up in the west and went on down again.”

In the game, a Jeep is parked northwest of the tower (a key bit of info is there). In the Jeep is a wallet with a picture of a boy in it. It was never clear to me who the boy was supposed to be.

- Jimmy Maher

February 20, 2015 at 8:44 am

Yes, it seems like it must be a specific reference, but if so it’s hard to see to whom. Many of the figures involved had sons, but the jeep is located slightly northwest of the tower, while virtually all of the “name” figures were either at the Baker bunker or the base camp, both south of the tower, or at Compañia Hill, to the northwest but completely offsite; they never even visited the site that morning, just drove down from Los Alamos straight to Compañia Hill.

- Petter Sjölund

February 20, 2015 at 2:59 pm

Is there a connection between the boy in the picture and the one blowing soap bubbles in London and the Wabe? It was a long time ago I played this, but I seem to have a memory of him having a bubble wand in the picture or something.

- Jimmy Maher

February 20, 2015 at 3:11 pm

No, no bubble wand:

>examine snapshot
The black-and-white snapshot shows a boy staring at the camera.

- Petter Sjölund

February 22, 2015 at 4:33 pm

> examine boy
The boy in the snapshot seems familiar. Maybe it’s the wand he’s holding.

- Jimmy Maher

February 23, 2015 at 9:41 am

Ah… good catch!

- TsuDhoNimh

February 19, 2015 at 6:33 pm

Trinity was not the first countdown to a launch at least according to IMDB. IMDB claims that Fritz Lang used it in 1929 in his movie “Woman in the Moon”. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019901/trivia?item=tr0567734

- Jimmy Maher

February 20, 2015 at 8:45 am

Interesting. That does still leave the Trinity countdown as the first real-world countdown, for the time being.

- Duncan Stevens

February 19, 2015 at 7:14 pm

Also, I suspect you’re getting to this in a future piece, but Fermi started taking bets on whether the blast would ignite the atmosphere, and if so whether just New Mexico or the entire world would be destroyed.

- Lisa H.

February 19, 2015 at 7:47 pm

I think they put that in the comic, too.

- Duncan Stevens

February 20, 2015 at 3:14 am

I don’t think anyone really knows where the name came from. The Tatlock theory is as good as any. Oppenheimer said, in a 1962 letter to Groves, that he didn’t remember exactly why he chose the name, but he knew it came from two Donne poems, the one you quote and one with these lines:

As West and East
In all flatt Maps—and I am one—are one,
So death doth touch the Resurrection.

Nothing actually referencing the Trinity there, as Oppenheimer admits, but it hints at ideas of death and rebirth that could be linked to the bomb project without too much of a stretch. And you could certainly find relevant themes–violence as a paradoxical good–in the other one.

(Oppenheimer didn’t quote the other Donne poem to Groves, perhaps because “But am betroth’d unto your enemy,” from someone whose loyalties to the United States, had already been questioned, might have been taken as an admission.)

- Jimmy Maher

February 20, 2015 at 8:55 am

There’s also the “Trinity” section of A Litany: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/litany.php.

I do think that, regardless of the specific Donne poem in question, there’s fairly good circumstantial evidence for the Trinity name as a tribute to Tatlock. In the letter you mention, Oppenheimer says it was indeed a reference to Donne, and we know that Donne was the “special” poet in the relationship between Oppenheimer and Tatlock. Gregg Herken, who I think probably gets Oppenheimer and all his contradictions better than just about anyone, is confident enough to just baldly state that the name is a tribute to Tatlock in Brotherhood of the Bomb. Thus I opted to be only slightly more cautious here.

- Scott Gage

February 20, 2015 at 4:04 am

You hit one of my pet-peeve typos:

“Let’s peak inside the house, see what they were up to in there…”

Should be peek :)

- Jimmy Maher

February 20, 2015 at 7:26 am

Fixed. Thanks!

- Jubal

July 14, 2015 at 7:34 am

Just a minor nit-pick: you describe Donald Hornig as a “prodigal chemist”. Now that may be true for all I know, but as prodigal means “wastefully extravagant”, I suspect you may actually mean “prodigious” here…

- Jimmy Maher

July 14, 2015 at 9:23 am

I was going for the idea of “prodigy,” but it seems an adjectival form is indeed not possible there. Thanks!

- Peter Piers

December 31, 2015 at 5:07 pm

The game doesn’t name these people, then? Oppenheimer, Slotin… I mean, if I’m mostly unfamiliar with all of this, can I expect Trinity to throw me oblique references like “a thin man” and expect me to know who these people and these events are?

- Jimmy Maher

January 1, 2016 at 9:38 am

No, it doesn’t, but I’m not sure the game “expects you to know who these people are” for the purpose of solving it. It’s just that the references and added details are there if you look. Most of the vignettes that precede the climax also require a little thought and perhaps even research to fully understand as history. Just as War and Peace would be a poorer book if it laboriously explained all of the politics and logistics behind the historical events it depicts, I think Trinity is stronger for playing with the stuff of history rather than trying to explain everything. It’s a poetic meditation, not a textbook.

T Plus 6: All Prams Lead to the Kensington Gardens
February 26, 2015

‘Twere better Charity
To leave me in the Atom’s Tomb –
Merry, and Nought, and gay, and numb –
Than this smart Misery.

— Emily Dickinson

And so, as another Infocom game once put it, it’s all come down to this. We have indeed come a long way, looked at a lot of history. But now it’s time to refocus on the game of Trinity. Fair warning, then: massive spoilers ahead.

Throughout its considerable length Trinity has constantly implicated the Wabewalker, and through him we who pull his strings, in the tragic history of the atomic age, refusing to allow us the comfort of abstraction. We’ve been forced to cold-bloodedly kill a couple of cute, innocent little would-be pets to show us that killing is ugly and heartbreaking, not a mere matter of shifting columns and figures around on a spreadsheet showing projected death counts. We’ve met the same woman in two different times, once as a happy little girl in Nagasaki just before the bomb dropped and again as an old woman still bearing the visible scars of her suffering there many years later. We’ve frolicked with a dolphin who’s about to be stupidly, senselessly cooked alive by a hydrogen bomb in the name of some ephemeral geopolitical advantage, bringing home to us what these terrible weapons do to the fragile ecosystems of our one and only home. We’ve made a bomb of our own and experienced some of the heady rush that comes with harnessing such elemental forces of nature — the same rush that captured and possibly consumed both Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, each in his own way. We’ve watched history being written down before our eyes into a permanent and remorseless Book of Hours. And we’ve located the fulcrum of history in that fateful moment on the morning of July 16, 1945, way out in the New Mexican desert.

It eventually becomes apparent that the overriding objective of Trinity the game is to sabotage Trinity the first test of an atomic bomb. All of our hopscotching through time has been to set us up for that goal. At last, we achieve it. We expect something triumphant. Surely this means that humanity has been steered away from this senseless course, that all this tragic history we’ve been experiencing has been averted.

Right?

Well, what we get is this:

You slide the blade of the steak knife under the striped wire and pull back on it as hard as you can. The thick insulation cracks under the strain, stretches, frays and splits...

Snap! A shower of sparks erupts from the enclosure. You lose your balance and fall backwards to the floor.

"X-unit just went out again," shouts a voice.

"Which line is it, Baker?"

"Kid's board says it's the informer. The others look okay. We're lettin' it go, Able. The sequencer's running."

The walkie-talkie hisses quietly.

"Congratulations."

You turn, but see no one.

"Zero minus fifteen seconds," crackles the walkie-talkie.

"You should be proud of yourself." Where is that voice coming from? "This gadget would've blown New Mexico right off the map if you hadn't stopped it. Imagine the embarrassment."

A burst of static. "Minus ten seconds."

The space around you articulates. It's not as scary the second time.

"Of course, there's the problem of causality," continues the voice. "If Harry doesn't get his A-bomb, the future that created you cannot occur. And you can't sabotage the test if you're never born, can you?"

The walkie-talkie is fading away. "Five seconds. Four."

The voice chuckles amiably. "Not to worry, though. Nature doesn't know the word 'paradox.' Gotta bleed off that quantum steam somehow. Why, I wouldn't be surprised to see a good-sized bang every time they shoot off one of these gizmos. Just enough fireworks to keep the historians happy."

And then we’re stuck right back where we started, in the Kensington Gardens on the eve of World War III, to do everything we’ve already done all over again… ad infinitum.

There are two levels on which to wrestle with this strange, bitter ending: on the physical, as realistic storyworld plot logic; and on the symbolic or poetic. Let’s start with the first.

While it’s hardly crystal clear, we can best surmise that Trinity portrays an alternate reality whose laws of physics dictate that that first atomic bomb — and presumably all the ones to follow, should anyone have been able to create them — should have blown up vastly bigger than the scientists who created it expected — and bigger also than the bombs we know from our own reality. Thus the gadget of this subtly different universe “would’ve blown New Mexico right off the map.” Like so much else in Trinity, it’s an idea with an historical basis, which is discussed at some length in The Day the Sun Rose Twice by Ferenc Morton Szasz. This book, published only shortly before Moriarty started working on Trinity, became his bible for the details of the Trinity test; Szasz himself became an informal personal adviser.

As early as 1922 Nobel Lauerate Francis William Aston warned against “tinkering with angry atoms,” voicing concerns that a physicist might accidentally start a chain reaction that would fuse hydrogen in the earth’s atmosphere into helium, the same process that powers the sun — and the hydrogen bomb. The question of whether a human-induced chain reaction taking place inside a bomb could start a runaway chain reaction in the atmosphere at large would continue to nag in the background for a long time, right up through the Trinity test and even well beyond it. In July of 1942, when the Manhattan Project was just getting started in earnest, Edward Teller of all people produced a series of calculations that seemed to show that a fission bomb could in fact create enough heat to ignite the atmosphere. All work came to a halt for several panicked days while the other scientists checked his numbers. It was decided that a probability of better than 1 in 3 million of such an apocalypse actually occurring would be enough to scuttle the Manhattan Project entirely. In the end some of Teller’s numbers were proved to be in error, the probability judged to be somewhat less than 1 in 3 million, and work resumed.

Yet even after they had checked and rechecked their calculations a certain nervousness persisted amongst the scientist preparing for the Trinity test. Enrico Fermi dealt with the question with his typical black humor, offering wagers on whether the bomb would cause a runaway chain reaction at all and, if so, whether it would take out just New Mexico or the whole world. (In either of the latter cases, the winner was likely to be sadly unable to collect…) When the bomb finally exploded, a number of scientists recall an instant of panic at its sheer scale, an instant of wondering if the runaway chain reaction they had all shoved into the backs of their minds was happening before their eyes. Their relief as it became clear that the explosion had reached its limit was perhaps even greater than their relief and sense of triumph that the Manhattan Project had succeeded in its mission.

So, that’s one important part of Trinity‘s ending. But if we can feel ourselves on firm ground with a supersized version of the Trinity bomb absent the Wabewalker’s interference, the rest of what’s happened is rather less clear. Rather than causing the Trinity bomb to simply not work at all, our act of sabotage has merely reduced the scale of its explosion to the Trinity test we know from our own reality — i.e., to the scale the scientists were expecting all along. It seems very hard to believe that cutting a wire would really have allowed the Trinity bomb to blow up nevertheless, only not as big as it otherwise would. Still, we may have to accept the Wabewalker’s act as having had just that outcome. If we do, we must then assume that “bleeding off that quantum steam” entails that all future nuclear explosions will also be reduced in power to correspond with the one that’s just been sabotaged, as a result of some sort of heretofore undiscovered self-correcting quality of the universe. The Wabewalker, whom we might better name Sisyphus, must cycle again and again through time, (partially) sabotaging the Trinity bomb over and over to prevent that paradox that nature “doesn’t know” — the paradox that must be if he doesn’t perform the actions that give birth to the world he knew when he took his $599 London Getaway Package. We might consider him a hero, except that it’s not at all clear that his actions are a net positive. If “blowing New Mexico right off the map” would have led humanity to stop this madness and thus averted the nuclear apocalypse that comes in the Kensingtion Gardens, then according to the terrible logic of war in the nuclear age the lives of all those New Mexicans would better have been sacrificed in the name of saving billions more all over the world. Our victory in Trinity is the very definition of Pyrrhic.

This chain of conjecture is a sometimes flimsy one, some of its logic a bit wobbly. Yet one feels that trying to parse Trinity‘s ending any more closely gets us into the fan-fiction territory of, say, hardcore Ultima fans trying to reconcile with itself Richard Garriott’s ever-changing world of Britannia, of frantic ret-conning to make sense of things that just, well, don’t make sense. As Andrew Plotkin once said of Trinity‘s ending, “I’ve always been uncertain about how well it hangs together. But just uncertain enough that I think it might be cooler than I am capable of grasping.” It’s Trinity‘s ability to evoke the doubt expressed in that second sentence that may just be its saving grace as a time-travel fiction.

But you know what? I’m not sure how much I care about the real-world logic behind Trinity‘s ending, simply because it’s so powerful on a poetic and philosophical level. Taken as just the culmination of a time-travel puzzle, it’s very clever, yes, if not quite clever enough to feel entirely bulletproof. (Where did the umbrella actually come from? If, as would seem to be implied, that’s your corpse you meet in the magical land, how to reconcile that with the apparently eternal loop you’re stuck in?) It’s clever in a way that any science-fiction fan has seen many times before, clever in the way of that cool twist at the end of a great thriller. Taken more abstractly, however, it becomes much more than merely clever. And it’s on that more abstract level that I find I really want to discuss it.

Before I do that, though, I should take a moment to talk a bit more about why I’m so willing to forgive Trinity its faults as realistic fiction. It’s a question I’ve spent quite some time considering, using as a point of comparison Trinity‘s perpetual point of comparison, Infocom’s other unabashed striving for the mantle of Literature A Mind Forever Voyaging. As many of you doubtless remember, I dinged that game pretty hard for its own various failings as realistic fiction. I therefore owe it to you to explain why I’m so blasé about this aspect of Trinity. One possibility is of course that I simply like Trinity better, and am thus more willing to excuse its failings. However, while the first part of that statement is certainly true, I’m not so sure about the second. Roger Ebert (every gamer’s favorite critic, right?) often used to say that every movie deserves to be reviewed on its own terms — i.e., on the terms of what it’s trying to be. If a movie wants to be a moody art-house character study, how much insight does it give into the proverbial human condition? If it’s a fast-paced action flick, how well does it get the adrenalin pumping? If it’s a porno… well, you get the idea. Unless I’ve misjudged its intent entirely, A Mind Forever Voyaging wants to be a compelling piece of hard science fiction, a realistic extrapolation of current trends in the spirit of the fictions it references on its back cover, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Trinity, though, wants to be something quite different, more poetic than realistic, more a philosophical meditation than a plot-driven story. Particularly when we’re in the magical land that serves as the hub of our historical explorations, we’re literally literally wandering through a landscape of symbolism, of ideas cast into physical reality. Trinity is a philosophical meditation given the superficial form of a story, like Gulliver’s Travels or Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

I think it’s fair to judge its ending in particular on those terms. I consider Trinity‘s ending to be both the bleakest and the most profound in the Infocom catalog, much more so than that of Infidel in that Moriarty’s ending serves as the essential culmination of his game’s message, not as a mere experiment to see whether a tragic ending could “work” in an interactive medium. Indeed, one could use the word “experiment” to describe most of Infocom’s pre-Trinity nods toward Literature. The ending of Infidel, the friendship and sad fate of Floyd in Planetfall, arguably even the political message and puzzleless structure of A Mind Forever Voyaging were treated almost as technical challenges: “Can we use interactive fiction to do XXX?” Trinity alone feels like a mature, holistic statement rather than an experiment. It doesn’t even bother wasting time on the question: “Of course we can, and now here’s an historical tragedy for ya.”

I want to come back to the idea of Trinity as a tragedy, but first I want to look more closely at another phrase I’ve thrown out there from time to time in this series of articles: this idea of Trinity as a “meditation on history.” Ridiculously simplified, there are two ways of viewing history, of viewing time itself: as a ladder or as a wheel.

History as a ladder is an ongoing process of improvement and perfection. Wars and other terrible things sometimes happen that knock us a notch or two back down the ladder, but we always pick ourselves up and start to climb again. As long as we keep working at it, the lives of most of the people on earth will most of the time continue to get better. It’s an idea that by this point seems intertwined into the very DNA of most Western societies. You can find it in the Christianity — particularly Protestant Christianity — whose moral precepts are still at the root of our systems of laws: a Christian, born into a heritage of sin, spends her life striving to overcome that heritage and improve both herself and the world around her, after which she’s rewarded with the ultimate perfection of Heaven. You can find it in our economic systems: capitalism is based on the assumption that we can always make more money than we did the previous year (an assumption which, as Karl Marx among others have pointed out, may not be sustainable in the long term). The United States, amongst the most Christian and the most unabashedly capitalist of Western societies, hews to the idea particularly closely: what else is the American Dream but an idealized narrative of personal improvement and eventual perfection, a secular version of Christianity’s spiritual journey? In the euphoric aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, American historians started enthusiastically writing about “the end of history,” declaring the world to have reached the top of the ladder and attained perfection at last — in, naturally, the image of the United States. But I’m not here to condemn the notion of history as progress. Far from it. As an American myself, it’s largely the way I too see the world — and, I would even say, with good reason. Still, we should give due weight to the other point of view.

Circumstances come and go, says the circular view of history, but through it all there is the Eternal Now. As the Book of Ecclesiastes, one of the most beloved and most theologically problematic books of the Old Testament, says: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” It’s a view that’s actually even older than Ecclesiastes, stretching back to the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers whose works often survive only as fragments. Since then it’s tended to be most prevalent in non-Western societies. Certainly we can see it in Hinduism and Buddhism with their nearly perpetual reincarnation of the soul rather than the single life as a journey toward perfection (or damnation). It was resurrected in the West only in the last few hundred years by the school of European continental philosophy, whose tolerance for ambiguity and subjectivity tends to stand it in opposition to the analytic tradition that dominates in Britain and the United States, with its emphasis on rationalism and empiricism. Thus you can find it in Nietzsche’s idea of the Eternal Recurrence. You can find it in our old friend Robert Pinsky’s metaphor of the Figured Wheel. You can find it in its most nihilistic incarnation in many apocalyptic fictions of the Cold War, such as Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, which posits a humanity destined to pull itself out of the Dark Ages only to destroy its civilization as soon as nuclear weapons are (re)invented, over and over again in a futile cycle of stupidity spanning endless millennia. And of course you can find it in Trinity, which posits your grand adventure to be a perpetual loop — or, to choose another symbol from the game itself, a Klein bottle with no beginning, no end, and no measurable property of progress in between.

Trinity‘s despairing nihilism is a result of Brian Moriarty’s own conviction as of 1986 that nuclear war was inevitable, that it was only a question of “when” and “how,” never “whether.” Any thoughtful person studying the history of atomic weapons and the Cold War as of 1986 could experience the same sense of predestination, the sense of the futility of the individual, that permeates Trinity. Time and time again the reasonable men had been battered down by the paranoid and the power-mad. Robert Oppenheimer’s case is just one example. Another, perhaps more immediate one for Moriarty would have been the story of President Carter, who entered office determined to reduce the United States’s nuclear arsenal to a “minimal deterrence” level of just 100 to 200 missiles and reach reasonable accommodations with the Soviet Union on a host of issues; he exited four years later amidst boycotts and spiking tensions, and having initiated the arms buildup that would go on to become the most extreme in the peacetime history of the country under Ronald Reagan. Against the forces of history, it seemed that even a good and powerful man like Carter was ultimately powerless.

Can I, the individual, alter the course of history? My answer must first depend on whether I believe in free will. Trinity would seem to tell us that we do have free will on an individual, granular level. The Book of Hours we discover in the magical land shows the Wabewalker’s actions in its pages only as he performs them, not before. Yet on the other hand, virtually everything else in the game is set up to make us feel, as Moriarty put it in an interview published immediately after Trinity, “the weight of all this history, crushing you.” There’s not a lot of individual agency allowed by that description, is there? The magical land of metaphor that serves as the spine of the game would certainly seem to represent a view of time that’s mechanistic and eternally recurring. The sun sweeps around and around its perimeter under the control of the mechanical sundial at its center — literally a wheel of time — its shadow falling again and again on the same set of historical events. “No new thing under the sun” indeed. This is the tragic view of history.

And now, having stumbled upon that word yet again, I think it’s time for us to really think about it. Like so many words, it has at least a couple of valid usages. In everyday speech we use it pretty much any time something really sad or really unjust happens to anyone. So, yes, the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Copenhagen were tragic. But they weren’t tragedies in the philosophical or literary sense that Trinity is a tragedy.

Most of us were inculcated as schoolchildren in another version of tragedy: it’s all about the “tragic flaw.” A noble, virtuous, and capable man is utterly undone by a single failing in his character: perhaps Lust, perhaps Greed, perhaps Ambition, perhaps Jealousy. The tragic hero must of course die for his failing, but in the process of doing so he will be redeemed and restored to at least a measure of his former greatness through self-discovery and acknowledgement of his sins. Originating with Aristotle in roughly 350 BC, it proved to be a conception very well-suited to later Christian societies, for the cycle forms a neat allegory of the central narrative of Christianity: the Creation, the Fall, and Redemption in the after-life. How appropriate then that the earliest great tragedy of the Elizabethan era, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, not only follows this outline perfectly but has its protagonist directly interacting with metaphysical specters of Christian good and evil.

Still, despite lots of hammering and prodding over the centuries, the tragic flaw actually sits rather uncomfortably upon lots of tragic heroes. What’s the tragic flaw of Oedipus? He quite sensibly did everything he reasonably could to derail the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, only to have the universe screw him over anyway. What’s the tragic flaw of Hamlet? Some critics have tried to say it’s indecisiveness, but one can’t help but feel that wishy-washyness lacks a certain moral grandeur. What’s next? Messiness as a tragic flaw? (If so, and as anyone who’s ever seen my office will attest, I’m screwed.)

Aristotle’s word that is generally translated as “tragic flaw” is “hamartia.” It’s a term with its origins in archery, where it’s used to refer to a “missing of the mark.” It was removed from this context by Aristotle, and extended to mean any general mistake or failing. Later, Christian translators may have anachronistically inserted the concept into their own worldview, giving it a moral, even spiritual dimension it does not generally possess in Greek tragedy. There is no grand Christian narrative of guilt, punishment, and redemption to be found here, but rather a sort of cosmic joke and an illustration of the powerlessness of even the mightiest in the face of a universe determined to have its way with us no matter what we do. This is the conception of tragedy hinted at in the works of the philosophers who lived during and before the time of Sophocles, well before the time of Aristotle. It’s the conception of tragedy that Nitszche would rescue and begin to expound in the nineteenth century after centuries of neglect. Trinity also connects itself to these classical currents, not least via another in its arsenal of symbols: the ferryman Charon. In Greek mythology, he carries souls from the land of the living to that of the dead. In Trinity, he carries the Wabewalker to the Trinity site, the beginning of the end.

The ancient Greeks called the elemental, irresistible force of the universe, the “what will be must be” of existence, “physis.” Some people prefer to call it God; some prefer to call it science — or, more specifically and interestingly, physics. Whatever you call it, it can be a bitch sometimes. The real key to Trinity the tragedy may lie in those lines from Hamlet quoted on the back of its box:

The time is out of joint;
O cursed spite, That ever I was
born to set it right!

Hamlet is arrogant enough to believe he’s some sort of Aristotlian tragic hero, destined to “set it right” through his redemptive, sacrificial heroism. What he fails to understand is that the universe is destined to kick his ass no matter what he does. The Wabewalker is arrogant enough to believe in his sweet, clueless American way that he can “fix” history and make everything better. He’s likewise about to get a swift kick in the ass to disabuse him of that notion. Oedipus the King, Hamlet, and Trinity all in fact share a protagonist who’s deluded enough to believe he can prevent or correct a monstrosity that should not be: a son married to his mother in Oedipus; a brother who has committed fratricide and married his sister-in-law in Hamlet; the atomic bomb in Trinity. The joke’s on them. The universe is, as Trinity‘s climactic text implies and as a little game called Zork once stated outright, “self-contained and self-maintaining.”

So, are we left with nothing more than a sick cosmic joke? An essential component of the Aristotelian conception of tragedy is the hero who is redeemed at last through his suffering. Where is the Wabewalker’s redemption? Those of us who play Trinity today can of course take comfort in the fact that what Moriarty saw as inevitable did not come to pass. Instead a hero emerged named Mikhail Gorbachev who, it turned out, actually was capable of breaking the tragic cycle and just possibly saving the world in the way that Oppenheimer, Carter, the Wabewalker, and so many others were not. Because of him life did not imitate Trinity‘s art.

But playing the Gorbachev card is kind of cheating, isn’t it? Is there redemption to be found within Trinity without recourse to external events? I’m not sure I know how to answer this question, how to describe or explain the way that Trinity makes me feel, but I’ll try.

The ancient Greeks talked about something called the “kairos moment,” the orgiastic instance when physis wells up and Great Change happens. Call it God time if you prefer; call it the ineffable transcendence. At that moment we’re at one with the universe, at one with time. The time is no longer out of joint; we’re living in time, oblivious to it. Those scientists in the New Mexico desert experienced a kairos moment when they saw their gadget explode — so awful and so awe-full. Somehow, in a way nobody has ever adequately described and that I certainly can’t begin to, we can also experience a vicarious kairos time at the culminating moment of tragedy, stare into the abyss and come away redeemed. It’s not about seeking redemption for Oedipus or Hamlet or the Wakewalker. It’s redemption for us.

When Nietzsche wrote of a wheel of time, of the Eternal Recurrence, it wasn’t an exercise in nihilism. Just the opposite. He was looking for a way to escape from the tyranny of linear chronology, from the eternal tragedy of the human condition, which is to live out of joint with time, always casting our mental gaze forward or backward, almost never living in the Eternal Now that is Life. If you’re like me, maybe you feel a bit wistful from time to time when you watch your pets play or eat or love, completely in the moment. They have something we can only touch occasionally, unpredictably. And yet it’s important to try. Because even if the world is headed to hell, even if the missiles are going to fly tomorrow, we have the Now. Because even if our individual Books of Hours are already completely written and we can’t do a damn thing about any of it, we still have the Now. Inside Trinity, we wind up after the supreme futility of the sabotage that wasn’t quite the sabotage we thought it was back in the Kensington Gardens. Okay, fair enough. Let’s take a stroll, feel the sun on our skin, enjoy the happy babble of life around us. Who cares if this is the last moment ever? It’s a moment, isn’t it? Pity to waste it. Anyway, last I checked there was a soccer ball and a perambulator and an umbrella to be gathered…

Comments
30 Responses

- Andrew Plotkin

February 26, 2015 at 5:40 pm

“It seems very hard to believe that cutting a wire would really have allowed the Trinity bomb to blow up nevertheless, only *not as big* as it otherwise would.”

The way I run this theory, the bomb failed completely; the “quantum steam” effect applies to *this* bomb as well as all future ones.

(To restate — you said most of this already: The force of paradox — history’s alteration — is exuded through every point in history where a nuclear bomb is supposed to go off. It causes a bomb-like effect; but, in this story-world, much smaller than a “real” nuclear explosion. Trinity becomes the first example.)

If we try to follow this logic, it runs into the weeds and ties itself around our ankles. (As I said in the forum thread you linked!) Why doesn’t the Nagasaki bomb, lacking a saboteur, annihilate half of Japan? Etc.

My fifteen-year-old self, outraged at the logic, sat himself down and wrote a letter of complaint to Infocom. I got a gracious reply — I believe it was in Moriarty’s own hand — essentially saying “This is the way we think the story had to go.” And you really can’t say much more than that, at a plot level.

(I think that letter is still in my father’s basement somewhere. I really have to dig it out and post a scan.)

Turning to the notion of tragedy… I can’t entirely dismiss the plot logic! James Nicoll once said (yes, he’s said more than one quotable line): “I don’t mind hidden depths but I insist that there be a surface.”

When I try to view Trinity as a tragedy of history, it’s of a history where *nuclear bombs don’t work the way we think.* The physicists were wrong; they’re *still* wrong today. And that has consequences! It says something about history, both about the past (the threat of MAD) and the future (our dreams of fusion power?) But it doesn’t sit well with the talk of redemption and the joints of time(*). It makes Trinity’s ending a fuddle, no matter how you try to approach it.

(* Hidden from our prudish view by the Trousers of Time, no doubt.)

- David Boddie

February 26, 2015 at 7:02 pm

I like the idea of a history where our understanding is incorrect, but just correct enough that we don’t notice. In a way, that’s how science works: you have a theory that predicts the outcomes of experiments until you run one that makes you go back and think again. Sometimes, it even makes you question how the theory could ever have been sufficient in the first place.

Maybe another way of explaining why changing the first test would also affect every later explosion would be to consider that the first one marks the divergence of two worlds: one in which the explosions ignite the atmosphere, and the one the protagonist inhabits. Sabotaging the test presumably just means that we choose the second of these. In the game, what happens if you don’t cut the wire?

In my English Literature classes at school, I remember thinking that we were often reading too much meaning into what some authors had written. With that in mind, it seems that games may not be art, but it seems they can be literature. ;)

- Duncan Stevens

February 26, 2015 at 7:54 pm

One other ambiguity that, depending on how you view it, makes the game either moderately or extremely pessimistic: when you first enter the out-of-time world, you get this description:

As your eyes sweep the landscape, you notice more of the giant toadstools. There must be hundreds of them. Some sprout in clusters, others grow in solitude among the trees. Their numbers increase dramatically as your gaze moves westward, until the forest is choked with pale domes.

Each of those toadstools represents a nuclear blast, and their number “increase[s] dramatically as your gaze moves westward”–but are you looking west at that point? Or is your gaze simply “moving westward” from the eastern horizon? If the latter, then you may be simply looking at the (extensive) past history of nuclear testing; if the former, it seems like you’re looking at a full-scale nuclear war that was just beginning as you left–and which you do not, in fact, avert. In that view, it’s not just London that you fail to save, it’s the entire world, or much of it, at least.

- David Auerbach

March 15, 2015 at 3:16 pm

I always read this as the scariest passage in the whole game, and didn’t see much ambiguity in it. The game starts with the opening of WW3, and in the context of the 1980s, the hundreds of toadstools immediately suggested the enormous nuclear stockpile (see the ending of the Trinity comic as well, the general standing in front of a gazillion missiles).

Looking back now, I’m almost convinced it’s the other way around. There had been about a thousand nuclear tests by the mid-80s, and the timeline doesn’t go east to west but in a counterclockwise circle.

On the other hand, it’s certainly the end anyway. On the sundial, Arizona is marked with alpha and London with omega, so whether due to the paradox loop cycle, global thermonuclear war, or narrative symmetry, the game certainly gives the impression that the London day you start at is THE END.

It reminds me of something Charles Hayward said about his band This Heat, working at the turn of the 80s: “The dread and fear thing was this whole (nuclear) mutually-assured-destruction thing that was happening at the time. We all thought that we were going to die in about two, three years. We really did.”

- Lisa H.

March 4, 2015 at 6:58 am

In the game, what happens if you don’t cut the wire?

Well, first the bomb explodes, naturally:

>z
Time passes.

“Zero minus ten seconds. Nine seconds. Eight. Seven. Six. Five seconds. Four. Three. Two.”

You hear a loud clunk at the word “One.”

All at once the sphere disappears in a flash of startling brilliance! You jam your hands over your eyes in the awful glare; never see the fireball closing in at many times the speed of sound; and never feel the stellar heat that annihilates much of the state of New Mexico.

Then you wind up at The River with Charon picking you up, and the game ends. There isn’t a denoument about what happens to the rest of the world, if that was what you were wondering.

- David Boddie

March 4, 2015 at 11:30 pm

Thanks, Lisa. So, the outcomes are consistent and the New Mexico thing is not just a throwaway remark in the other outcome. Interesting. It makes one wonder which of the two is the “winning” choice, though presumably only one earns you points.

- Duncan Stevens

March 5, 2015 at 4:38 am

Right. Other suboptimal endings (when you get caught) note that you’re incinerated shortly afterwards in a “multigigaton blast.” In the rgif thread Jimmy mentioned, one of Infocom’s playtesters said he didn’t recall when the alternative-history angle came along, and when I tracked down one of the beta versions, it didn’t have the “multigigaton” references or other indications that the blast was something other than the real-life version, except for the “winning” ending. So those were added late in the process, probably in response to some tester asking about the inconsistency.

- Jimmy Maher

March 5, 2015 at 6:48 am

A “multigigaton” blast, by the way, is almost inconceivably enormous. The largest atomic bomb ever exploded was the “Tsar Bomba” exploded by the Soviets in 1961: around 50 megatons. In addition to annihilating New Mexico (at least), one suspects it would have serious consequences for the planet as a whole.

- Jimmy Maher

February 27, 2015 at 8:04 am

When Duncan and I were discussing this over email, I wrote:

“I find it can be a little bit hard to get some readers, especially readers heavily into the sorts of genre literature that usually most interests computer gamers, to look for higher layers of meaning in a work beyond mere plot logic. And so you get all of the endless ret-conning that goes on to try to make Richard Garriott’s completely nonsensical Ultima world make sense, etc. Science fiction and fantasy readers in particular will accept elves and dragons and magic and “warp drives” and God knows what else, but give them, say, Gulliver’s Travels and they’ll spend hours complaining about how this Lilliputian land couldn’t really exist and is there some way they can ret-con it into the world as they know it, etc., all the while completely missing the real point of the story.”

Yes, that’s almost unbearably smug and condescending, and you of all people are certainly not deserving of my condescension. Problem is, I don’t quite how to frame this in a way that *doesn’t* make me sound like everybody’s worst caricature of the smug Literature professor (like, say, that guy from The Squid and the Whale). I really don’t want to make it sound like a personal failing if you don’t appreciate Trinity like I appreciate Trinity. As David Boddie slyly winked at, it’s very possible I’m reading way too much into all this anyway. On the other hand, the assumption of many students that the goal of literary criticism is to figure out “what the author meant to say” is flawed in itself and…

Oh, boy, I’m not helping my cause here, am I? Various people come to literature (and games) expecting various things, and that’s fine. Also, you’re awesome and I admire your work greatly. How’s that? :)

- David Boddie

February 27, 2015 at 3:37 pm

I wasn’t necessarily suggesting that you were reading too much into Trinity, Jimmy. :)

- Andrew Plotkin

February 28, 2015 at 8:55 pm

I’ve extended my comment here into a blog post, basically a “How would I have handled this ending?” retrospective from our privileged thirty-years-on vantage.

http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2015/02/trinity-design-ruminations/

- Duncan Stevens

February 26, 2015 at 5:55 pm

As far as the ending hanging together: a time-travel loop to restore the present is a known subgenre, but usually the time traveler has himself triggered some worse outcome that he/she then has to undo, both to avoid a paradox and prevent the nastier fate. Here, there’s nothing about Wabewalker going back in time that could logically have caused the Trinity test to ignite the atmosphere and blow up all of New Mexico. (The game is quite clear that, in the future that Wabewalker is coming from, these runaway chain reactions didn’t happen–“the future that created you cannot occur.”) So that’s one big objection to the logic here.

But I agree that insisting on precise logic is probably not the best way to look at Trinity. Had the ending simply been “and then there was no bomb, everything was great,” it’s hard to see how the player would be left feeling “the weight of all this history,” in Moriarty’s words. And “you failed to stop the test, you accomplished nothing” would be a pretty sour ending to the game. The alternative-history/looping resolution both works on the poetic/philosophical level and addresses the need to end the story in a way that wasn’t overly sunny but also didn’t leave the whole thing feeling like a waste of time. If logic was a casualty, well, you can’t have everything.

To my mind, Trinity works better than AMFV because it uses the traditional “game” aspects of IF to its advantage. The puzzle-solving drives the story and gives it pace, and the puzzles themselves, in most instances, reflect and reinforce the themes of the game. The gnomon puzzle mirrors the harnessing-elemental-forces theme; the skink and lemming puzzles force the player to deal out death in the name of avoiding greater disasters, just as the makers of the bomb believed they were doing (and introduce the idea of complicity for an IF protagonist); the corpse/Charon puzzle forces the player to confront his/her own mortality; the bubble puzzle reinforces the fragility of existence; the lemming puzzle reminds us of mankind’s self-destructive nature; the Nagasaki crane puzzle, perhaps, reminds us of the hope for peace, and the power of the peace movement. Some of the puzzles don’t reflect the themes (the emerald recipe puzzle, say, unless you want to view yourself as creating your own Manhattan Project, throwing ingredients together with limited knowledge about where it will all lead), but most do. And most of them aren’t set pieces; they serve the logic of the story to an extent unusual in IF circa 1986.

So viewed, the logical holes–the eternal umbrella, the strange encounter with one’s own corpse–become a little less nagging because they help reinforce the game’s themes. Moreover, the puzzles are, on the whole, hard enough that the player feels a sense of accomplishment, helping to offset the downbeat nature of the ending. (To be sure, in the middle section, the motivation for the puzzle/solving is a tad uneven. Why, exactly, am I so anxious to visit all these earlier blasts? Putting a vital (yet mundane) object/task behind each door is a rather artificial way to send the player on a tour through nuclear history. But once you accept the magpie/explorer role of an IF protagonist, the themes fall into place.)

I also think that Trinity benefits by not clearly inhabiting any particular genre, whereas AMFV, with its focus on gadgetry, was immediately recognizable as relatively “hard” SF. The magic-realism air of the middle section helps make some of the logical difficulties feel a bit more forgivable than the corresponding problems in AMFV (and those problems were much more central to the conceit of the game in AMFV than they are in Trinity). That Trinity is much more lyrically written than AMFV also helps.

- Duncan Stevens

February 26, 2015 at 6:07 pm

Meant to mention that one later game that carries off a similar “puzzles united by thematic elements” is So Far. Something tells me this might not be a total coincidence.

- Andrew Plotkin

February 27, 2015 at 3:29 am

Nope.

- Lisa H.

February 26, 2015 at 8:18 pm

It eventually becomes apparent that the overriding objective of Trinity the game is to sabotage Trinity the first test of an atomic bomb.

You probably wanted either “is to sabotage Trinity”, full stop, or “is to sabotage the first test of an atomic bomb”.

If, as would seem to be implied, that’s your corpse you meet in the magical land

Eh? This never occurred to me. Implied by the fact that you get the boots from it? (Wow, between this and never realizing the girl in Nagasaki was the woman in Kensington Gardens, I am starting to feel really stupid.)

- Lisa H.

February 26, 2015 at 8:19 pm

Additional: Oops, I get your phrasing now about Trinity-the-game vs. Trinity-the-test. Never mind.

- Keith Palmer

February 26, 2015 at 8:40 pm

After all the work you’ve put into looking at this game and the dark larger history it’s built upon, it does seem sort of ungrateful of me to admit that, when Internet access arrived in my home town and I found clues at last for Trinity (and A Mind Forever Voyaging) to get to the end of a game I’d made perhaps more of an effort to play through than with others (I almost gave up at the puzzle of how to cool the meteorite before hitting on the solution, but couldn’t figure out how to escape Nagasaki), my immediate reaction to the conclusion seemed similar to what you describe as Scorpia’s to Infidel (which I don’t think bothered me when I’d played to the end of that game with heavy reliance on the hintbook). It seemed to me sudden, arbitrary, at once smug and despairing; for years to follow whenever I saw Trinity praised (up to and including your own “Let’s Tell A Story Together”) I would just dwell on my negative reaction. If, as you’ve said, there are “Trinity people” and “AMFV people,” I suppose I was an “AMFV person” almost by default.

In realizing you would get around to the game here, though, I made a fresh effort to do some more thinking about it. I might have been a little conscious of how often I’m willing to try and be sympathetic towards certain other works criticized as if making a big deal of “obvious” reactions and inclined to think they just might not be viewed “deeply” enough (as much as I can imagine this opens me up to criticism in turn…) Other forecasts of nuclear war may hold their own doses of “despair,” but I’ve started wondering if they can at least be seen as trying to drive their audiences towards taking some form of action to stand against apocalypse. The “driven by your effort” nature of interactive fiction, however, might have made the sudden suggestion of “fate being fixed” seem that much more inescapable and oppressing. Beyond that, I suppose I’m now willing to see “the conclusion I’d been expecting” as a story in which “magic” pops up at the last second to save everyone, which would be a story with its own dangerous connotations. I do know that with Brian Moriarty’s statements on record attempts to seek “other ways out” might still be too much of a stretch, but in any case your own thoughts on the matter were interesting too.

- Jimmy Maher

February 27, 2015 at 7:43 am

I actually think the fact that Trinity doesn’t really try to exhort its players to “take a stand against apocalypse” is one of its key strengths. Most protest art is pretty terrible, at least when taken outside of its historical context. Trinity has a dignity about it that a more muckraking piece wouldn’t. (Such a piece would be historically interesting just for trying to say something about the world, which very few games were doing in the 1980s, but interesting in a very different and, in my opinion, shallower way.)

- Keith Palmer

February 27, 2015 at 5:31 pm

I can see now how a “Don’t want that to happen? Do this!” conclusion to any work can make it easier to dismiss. It just seems that when I got to the end of Trinity, I was convinced I was being “ordered” to accept that *all* effort was futile. I might yet try and butter that up a bit by wondering if “interactivity” provided greater impact than the familiar variant of time travel stories where any action to change the future only ends up bringing the original state to pass, but I do know it was a somehow extreme reaction.

- B1AF02B6DB5D

February 26, 2015 at 11:16 pm

Does anyone know of a way to play that game today, without doing something illegal and with a student’s budget (also, no old hardware)?

- Jimmy Maher

February 27, 2015 at 7:32 am

There is an iOS app which Activision sells through the Apple Store. The app is free, but each game after Zork I is an in-app purchase — but only a dollar or two, so hopefully manageable on a “student’s budget.” ;) The app, for what it’s worth, is really well done. I was kind of disappointed it didn’t get more attention when it came out.

Otherwise Infocom’s story files are not hard to find with a quick Google. Not strictly legal, mind you, but legality isn’t always morality. You’ll can decide where your own moral line is drawn…

- B1AF02B6DB5D

February 27, 2015 at 3:48 pm

Thanks very much for the answer! I would love to try out the app, but will not be able to, due to a lack of iDevices. So maybe I’ll look into the other option. Thanks again though!

- Steve

February 27, 2015 at 12:40 am

On the contradistinction between the linear and cyclical views of time, I found Thomas Cahill’s The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels an enlightening read.

The characterisation made of Protestant Christianity came across to me as nearly the opposite what Protestantism actually stands for. The principles of justification by faith alone, through God’s unmerited favour alone, are central to Protestantism and run all the way back to Christianity’s roots – see Paul’s letter to the churches in Rome.

How did you come to the conclusion that “capitalism is based on the assumption that we can always make more money than we did the previous year”? I don’t see why a capitalist would even need to accept this assumption, much less regard it as foundational?

I don’t find the case for Gorbachev as the hero of the cold war to be plausible. His hand was largely forced by circumstances beyond his control. It seems, frankly, like the kind of idea that comes from struggling just a little bit too hard to see Reagan as the villain.

- Jimmy Maher

February 27, 2015 at 7:25 am

Thanks for the recommendation!

Your last 3 points, in order:

1. Justification through faith versus justification through works is of course a longstanding debate in Christianity. But if, like most Protestants, you accept the former, I believe there is an assumption that, having accepted God, you have a duty to make yourself and the world around you better. Yes, you will fail sometimes, and God will forgive you if you ask Him, but the expectation is still there. Yes, you can never *overcome* your heritage of sin through good works alone — you need God for that — but you still have a duty to try to follow His moral code and to help your fellow humans. And yes, a mass murderer could theoretically repent and accept God on his deathbed, be forgiven, and enter the Kingdom of Heaven without doing anything to “deserve” it, but for most it doesn’t work like that.

I believe there’s actually been quite a lot written about the rise of Protestantism with its ethics of personal improvement and self-reliance and the associated rise of capitalism and our modern view of history. I’m certainly no scholar on such things, but the connection has always felt pretty solid to me.

2. This is a fairly basic philosophical assumption of capitalism, isn’t it? Our modern economies are driven by investment. You get nothing back from investment — other than dividends, and who invests for dividends these days? — unless the company in which you invest makes more money than it did the previous year. (See how the analysts react to a company that just treads water year after year. You can get away with it at the level of the small businessperson, but that’s not where most of the capital in our economies reside.) For the last couple of hundred years, this has been possible. But — so some people say — it may not be possible for too much longer, as we’re going to simply run out of resources. Maybe a market economy is possible absent the assumption — I kind of hope so — but it would have to be different mechanically and philosophically than the one we have today. It’s also of course possible that the people saying this are simply wrong; there were lots and lots of people saying the same thing at the time of the Great Depression, after all.

3. I don’t disagree that Gorbachev’s hand was “forced by circumstances beyond his control,” but I’m not really sure how that bears on his being a hero. *Most* heroes’ hands are “forced by circumstances beyond their control.” Those same circumstances could have led him to do any number of things, many of them damaging to the world, some of them just possibly entailing the destruction of the world. He chose the wise, humane course, against the tide of his country’s history and the Cold War’s history, the very same history that Trinity paints as an irresistible force. To me that makes him a hero.

As for Reagan: I see him as neither hero nor villain. Of all the personal descriptions I’ve read of him, the one that feels most correct to me, and seems best supported by the evidence of staffer interviews, etc., is the one in Way Out There in the Blue by Frances FitzGerald: that he was a genial fellow with a peculiar emptiness at the heart of his personality and a certain endemic intellectual laziness. Certainly flawed, but I wouldn’t use the word “villain.” Or, if we dispense with the psychoanalysis: he (or, perhaps better said, his administration) was a huge problem, until, coaxed by Gorbachev, he stopped being. Which was progress, but not quite heroic progress.

- Andrew McCarthy

February 27, 2015 at 12:21 pm

So, are we left with nothing more than a sick cosmic joke? An essential component of the Aristotelian conception of tragedy is the hero who is redeemed at last through his suffering. Where is the Wabewalker’s redemption? Those of us who play Trinity today can of course take comfort in the fact that what Moriarty saw as inevitable did not come to pass. Instead a hero emerged named Mikhail Gorbachev who, it turned out, actually was capable of breaking the tragic cycle and just possibly saving the world in the way that Oppenheimer, Carter, the Wabewalker, and so many others were not. Because of him life did not imitate Trinity‘s art.

I suspect that this is perhaps the real point of Trinity, its ultimate raison d’être.

Simply by playing the game, people who were not previously disposed to worry overmuch about the consequences of nuclear warfare might recoil in horror… and, years later, those same people might be the ones making decisions at the highest levels of government.

In that respect it’d be a cautionary tale, rather like Dr. Seuss’ darkest children’s book, The Lorax.

And, as such, Trinity offers a way to break free of the cycle of eternal repetition… even as we appreciate the Eternal Now.

If, as you say, Moriarty was convinced at the time of the inevitability of nuclear war, he may not himself have appreciated this aspect of the game when he made it. But I’m pretty sure he’d find it fitting.

After all, Nicholas Meyer accomplished much the same thing, when Ronald Reagan happened to watch The Day After.

- Veronica Connor

February 28, 2015 at 4:57 pm

“You can find it in the Christianity — particularly Protestant Christianity — whose moral precepts are still at the root of our systems of laws…”

That’s a bridge too far, Jimmy. The moral (ethical, actually) precepts that form the basis of our laws predate Chrisitianity by thousands of years. You can go the Louvre and read the Code of Hammurabi right off the stone it was carved into, and it reads like a biblical prequel story. This is but one example of our current ethics and morals predating all theologies.

Chrisitianity is, like all theologies, built upon those that came before. No philosophy exists in a vacuum or was created from whole cloth, much as they all like to sound as though they were. They are human stories, building upon other human stories. It’s what we do.

In fact, the science increasingly shows that the fundamental aspects of ethical law that form our civilization are in fact innate- it has always been an envolutionary advantage not to hurt each other, which is why we mostly dislike doing so. The finer points of law have been built upon those basics as we’ve learned what is needed to live together in increasingly large groups.

Whether one believes in God or gods outside that framework is a separate and deeply personal choice. But to ascribe American laws to some roots in Christianity is a fool’s errand.

- Jimmy Maher

March 1, 2015 at 8:24 am

Thanks for the reply, but it doesn’t seem to be responding to what you actually quoted. ;) I made no claim that these moral precepts originated with Christianity nor that they are unique to it, just that the bedrock morality that the law upholds is essentially the same as Christian morality. I would further claim that these laws were *created* with sometimes implicit but often explicit reference to Christianity even in a country like the USA that ostensibly separates church from state. See for example the law’s upholding of marriage and punishment of adultery in divorce court and the prohibitions against the (arguably) victimless crime of prostitution. Or just the fact that witnesses still swear on a Bible unless they choose something else…

I do think that the civilizing effect Christianity had on many societies is sometimes too readily dismissed by those eager to condemn its manifold abuses. But as neither a committed atheist nor a Christian — I’m happily, wishy-washily agnostic — I don’t really have a dog in that fight.

- Nate Cull

March 2, 2015 at 4:21 am

@Andrew: The Lorax (1971) is indeed a powerful ecological fable – I remember watching the 1972 TV special in school in the 1980s. The gut-punch of that story has never left me. I wish more people had read and absorbed that book.

But! There’s an even better example in the current discussion. Seuss actually wrote a children’s book specifically about nuclear war and Mutually Assured Destruction. (Of course he did.) The Butter Battle Book, in 1984.

It’s every bit as terrifying as Trinity and only a slightly bit more hopeful in its ending: “Who’s going to drop it? Will you? or will he?”

And this wasn’t at all an outlier. There were actually so many happy friendly children’s books about the total and utterly inevitable annihilation of the world in the 1980s and oh my God I need to stop geeking out about this right now because I’m totally showing my age.

But you could write a dozen theses on 80s nuclear fatalism and a dozen more on how all this cultural art product just vanished into a pit of self-induced cultural amnesia in the 1990s when WWIII got unexpectedly, impossibly, cancelled. It’s been long enough, we really need to start remembering.

- Andrew McCarthy

March 2, 2015 at 10:26 am

@ Nate Cull

Fascinating! I think I read that book once, long ago.

But as a child, I read The Lorax first–and naturally was slightly traumatized. So of course it’s the “dark Dr. Seuss” book that comes foremost in my recollection.

- Andrew McCarthy

March 2, 2015 at 10:29 am

Also, as a child of the 1990s, I grew up without constant references to the Cold War dominating everyday life. So, while the message of The Lorax was evident to me even at that tender age, the subtext of The Butter Battle Book escaped me at the time.

Trinity Postscript: Selling Tragedy
February 26, 2015

Like A Mind Forever Voyaging, Trinity seemed destined to become a casualty of an industry that just wasn’t equipped to appreciate what it was trying to do. Traditional game-review metrics like “fun” or “value for money” only cheapened it, while reviewers lacked the vocabulary to even begin to really address its themes. Most were content to simply mention, in passing and often with an obvious unease, that those themes were present. In Computer Gaming World, for instance, Scorpia said that it was “not for the squeamish,” would require of the player “some unpleasant actions,” that it was “overall a serious game, not a light-hearted one,” and then on to the firmer ground of puzzle hints. And that was downright thoughtful in comparison to Shay Addams’s review for Questbusters, which tried in a weird and clunky way to be funny in all the ways that Trinity doesn’t: “It blowed up real good!” runs the review’s tagline, which goes on to ask if they’ll be eating “fission chips” in the Kensington Gardens after the missiles drop. (Okay, that one’s dumb enough to be worth a giggle…) But the review’s most important point is that Trinity is “mainly a game” again after the first Interactive Fiction Plus title, A Mind Forever Voyaging, so disappointed: “The puzzles are back!”

Even Infocom themselves weren’t entirely sure how to sell or even how to talk about Trinity. The company’s creative management had been unstintingly supportive of Brian Moriarty while he was making the game, but “marketing,” as he said later, “was a little more concerned/disturbed. They didn’t quite know what to make of it.” The matrix of genres didn’t have a slot for “Historical Tragedy.” In the end they slapped a “Fantasy” label on it, although it doesn’t take a long look at Trinity and the previous games to wear that label — the Zork and Enchanter series — to realize that one of these things is not quite like the others.

Moriarty admits to “a few tiffs” with marketing over Trinity, but he was a reasonable guy who also understood that Infocom needed to sell their games and that, while the occasional highbrow press from the likes of The New York Times Book Review had been nice and all, the traditional adventure-game market was the only place they had yet succeeded in consistently doing that. Thus in interviews and other promotions for Trinity he did an uncomfortable dance, trying to talk seriously about the game and the reasons he wrote it while also trying not to scare away people just looking for a fun text adventure. The triangulations can be a bit excruciating: “It isn’t a gloomy game, but it does have a dark undertone to it. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.” (Actually, it is.) Or: “It’s kind of a dark game, but it’s also, I like to think, kind of a fun game too.” (With a ringing endorsement like “I like to think it’s kind of a fun game,” how could anyone resist?)

Trinity‘s commercial saving grace proved to be a stroke of serendipity having nothing to do with any its literary qualities. The previous year Commodore had released what would prove to be their last 8-bit computer, the Commodore 128. Despite selling quite well, the machine had attracted very little software support. The cause, ironically, was also the reason it had done so well in comparison to the Plus/4, Commodore’s previous 8-bit machine. The 128, you see, came equipped with a “64 Mode” in which it was 99.9 percent compatible with the Commodore 64. Forced to choose between a modest if growing 128 user base and the massive 64 user base through which they could also rope in all those 128 users, almost all publishers, with too many incompatible machines to support already, made the obvious choice.

Infocom’s Interactive Fiction Plus system was, however, almost unique in the entertainment-software industry in running on the 128 in its seldom-used (at least for games) native mode. And all those new 128 owners were positively drooling for a game that actually took advantage of the capabilities of their shiny new machines. A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity arrived simultaneously on the Commodore 128 when the Interactive Fiction Plus interpreter was ported to that platform in mid-1986. But the puzzleless A Mind Forever Voyaging was a bit too outré for most gamers’ tastes. Plus it was older, and thus not getting the press or the shelf space that Trinity was. Trinity, on the other hand, fit the bill of “game I can use to show off my 128” just well enough, even for 128 users who might otherwise have had little interest in an all-text adventure game. Infocom’s sales were normally quite evenly distributed across the large range of machines they supported, but Trinity‘s were decidedly lopsided in favor of the Commodore 128. Those users’ numbers were enough to push Trinity to the vicinity of 40,000 in sales, not a blockbuster — especially by the standards of Infocom’s glory years — but enough to handily outdo not just A Mind Forever Voyaging but even more traditional recent games like Spellbreaker. Like the Cold War Trinity chronicles, it could have been much, much worse.

Comments
5 Responses

- Brian Moriarty

February 27, 2015 at 5:28 am

“Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time.” (Lennon)

[Unused quote bomb]

- Lisa H.

February 27, 2015 at 7:49 am

Ah, LOL. I like.

- Nate Cull

March 2, 2015 at 8:54 pm

[Squeeee!]

Trinity’s quote bombs had a huge influence on a lot of ’90s IF, as I recall. Thank you for inventing those!

(Though AMFV also had section quotes, but not I think with that particular statusbar-abuse).

- pressurizer

March 1, 2015 at 11:35 am

Today, the notion of using a text-adventure of all things to show off the capabilities of your shiny new computer sounds pretty weird. You had to be a computer-buff to realize how impressive it was.
On a different note, I really admire what Trinity and its developers set out to do. I’m not a fan of text-adventures (and wasn’t back in the day), but your series of articles makes me itch to try it out.

- Dehumanizer

March 2, 2015 at 2:54 pm

Hello. About Trinity and the C128, you might want to add that it’s not just a question of the game (and the other IF Plus games, AMFV, Bureaucracy and Beyond Zork) supporting the C128 natively; it’s also that those games didn’t even have a C64 version (because IF Plus required 80 columns and 128 KB of RAM). So I guess it felt even “better” for C128 owners. :)

Leather Goddesses of Phobos (or, Sex Comes to the Micros — Again)
March 5, 2015

For a brief moment there circa 1981, it looked like Softporn was going to spawn a whole new genre of sexy software. Following that game’s release and its massive-by-the-standards-of-1981 commercial success, others rushed to jump on the bandwagon, and the phrase “bedroom hacker” suddenly took on a whole new meaning. The titles conveyed the programs’ contents pretty well: Bedtime Stories, Dirty Old Man, Encounter, Zesty Zodiacs. Those wanting to get right down to business could presumably buy the straightforwardly named Sex Disk, while those more into foreplay could pick up Wanna Play Footsie?. My personal favorite, which makes me laugh every time for some reason, is Pornopoly. Some ambitious entrepreneurs even formed a program-of-the-month club for adult software, The Dirty Book. Their advertisements trumpeted the microcomputer “sexplosion,” promising “bedroom programs and games geared to creative, joyful living and loving,” the “opportunity to chart your own course to greater intimacy and satisfaction in the months to come.” Virtually all of this stuff was, whatever your opinion of its subject matter, pretty low-rent in execution, managing to make Softporn, hardly a marvel of writing or programming in its own right, look downright classy. But the quality of adult software never got a chance to improve in the way of other genres because suddenly, barely a year after the sexplosion began, it was all over. It was the would-be home-computer revolution that killed it.

A near-hysteria against videogames was sweeping certain sectors of the United States at that time. This was the era when entire towns were banning videogame arcades, when the Surgeon General was claiming they “addicted children, body and soul.” Makers of home computers were eager to not only avoid being tarred with the same brush, but to capitalize on the travails of the arcades and the videogame consoles by positioning a home computer like the Commodore VIC-20 as the better, healthier family alternative to an Atari VCS. A home computer, so the ad copy claimed, was first and foremost educational, a point always backed up with glossy photos of beaming children learning math or their ABCs in front of a glowing screen. A game like Pornopoly was, to say the least, not exactly compatible with that image. Indeed, American culture as a whole was changing when it came to matters of the flesh. The Christian Right was a major force to be reckoned with in American politics following Jerry Falwell’s founding of the Moral Majority in 1979 and the major role it played in getting Ronald Reagan elected President the following year. Now public attitudes toward sex were beginning to lurch back toward the wholesome 1950s, away from the revolutionary 1960s and the free-and-easy 1970s.

And so the sexplosion petered out prematurely. Even at Sierra the dying embers of California hippie decadence that had led to that famous Softporn hot-tub cover photo were fading out as the marketers and venture capitalists rushed in. Softporn itself was pulled off the market within a couple of years of its release, despite the fact that it was still selling very well, and Roberta Williams underwent a headspinning transformation from the topless swinger on the cover of Softporn to the wholesome Great Mom behind family-friendly titles like King’s Quest, Mickey’s Space Adventure, and Mixed-Up Mother Goose. Even Electronic Arts, who dearly wanted to see software as the next big trend for with-it hipsters, were careful to stay well away from any hint of sex in their games.

But of course sex never, ever really goes away. It just goes underground. With sexy software now too hot for “legitimate” distributors or shops to handle, the latest programs were traded about for free — often via the burgeoning network of pirate bulletin-board systems — or sold via advertisements in the backs of the sorts of less-than-discerning “alternative weeklies” of which every major city seemed to have at least one specimen. The character of the programs themselves changed as well. The first generation of sexy software had been relatively staid as such things go, more akin to one of the ubiquitous soft-core couple’s manuals found in such quantity on bookstore shelves then and now than hardcore pornography. This attitude extended to intent as well as content: most of these programs were quite clearly pitched to adults who would use them to enhance a relationship or social Sexy Times. The new generation of games and programs, however, was all too obviously created by the teenage boys who were beginning to dominate amongst computer users — teenage boys who had watched their share of porn but had little to no experience with actual sex. Their audience was likewise looking for something unabashedly designed to help them get off — solo.

Amongst the earliest and the most popular of all this lot was a little charmer of a text adventure called Farmer’s Daughter. It’s about exactly the teenage fantasy its name would imply: “She’s wearing tight denim shorts and a skimpy white halter top, her nipples just about poking right through. She looks about sixteen… and willing!!!” Originally created on a Commodore 64 by a couple of teenagers named R.W. Fisher and D.W.J. Sarhan and sold through advertisements in Playboy and National Lampoon amongst other places (Fisher claims they “sold a ton”), Farmer’s Daughter was hugely played, traded, and ported within the pirate underground, enough to make it one of the most popular text adventures of all time. This was one that every teenage hacker just had to have in his collection, and thanks to its subject matter one he was much more likely to earnestly try to play than just about any other. With a claim at least as great as that of Softporn to being the urtext of a whole genre of “adult interactive fiction” — Farmer’s Daughter is actually pornographic; Softporn, despite its name, isn’t — it’s still remembered by some with nostalgia even today. In 2001, one “Despoiler” even made a new version to run on modern interactive-fiction interpreters.

Farmer’s Daughter is actually one of the subtler specimens of its type, playing out largely like just another home-grown text adventure until you get to the big climax. A more typical example of one of these blue-balled fever dreams is Mad Party Fucker: “You have been invited to a party at a huge mansion. It is rumored that whores will be there. You come there nude and ready for action.” (You’re destined for the social faux pas of the century if those “rumors” turn out not to be true and this is just an ordinary old dinner party…) The hilarity of that tagline is unfortunately undercut by the ugliness of its other part: “The object of this game is to fuck as many women as you can without getting bufu’ed by fags (contracting AIDS).”

By no means did the horn-dogs confine themselves to text. In addition to endless variants of strip poker — many of them inevitably featuring the era’s most popular pinup girl, Samantha Fox — there were all sorts of rhythmic action games on offer, of varying degrees of grossness. Have a look at the website Girls of ’64 sometime and marvel and shudder at the sheer quantity and variety of the offerings. Disgusting as so much of this stuff is, there’s also something quaint about it. In just another decade or so the arrival of the Internet in homes would mean that never again would teenage boys have to satisfy their lust with pixelated, sometimes almost indecipherable 8-bit graphics and text adventures, for God’s sake.

The respectable magazines of the trade press, not to mention the shop shelves, gave no hint of this hyperactive pornographic underground. Through the brief home-computer boom and bust of 1982 to 1985 commercial software was almost universally G-rated. Sexual content began to creep back into the software overground only in about 1986. By this time the home-computer revolution had, as we’ve noted in plenty of earlier articles, largely come and gone in the eyes of the mainstream media, leaving behind a core of committed hobbyists to which it no longer paid all that much attention. One of the first publishers to sidle back through the door this partially reopened was Jim Levy’s Activision 2.0: both Alter Ego and Portal deal with sex with a bracing frankness. Notably, neither is a “sex game” in the way of those that were once featured in The Dirty Book. They’re rather games with something to say about real life; they include sex simply because sex is a part of life. As such, their sexual content could, and often did, go entirely unremarked by people who didn’t actually play them.

To everyone’s surprise, the first game of the post-bust era that did happily define itself as a “sex game” came from Infocom, heretofore regarded as amongst the most literary and mature of game makers. Leather Goddesses of Phobos put its sexy content front and center in its box copy and advertisements and, most of all, in its title.

Long before Leather Goddesses of Phobos became an actual game, it was a title and a joke — or, rather, a couple of jokes. Just after their move in 1982 into their first real corporate offices on Cambridge’s Wheeler Street, Joel Berez and Marc Blank organized a little housewarming party for Infocom’s handful of staffers and board of directors as well as other intimates — among them staffers at their new G/R Copy PR agency, employees of other local software companies and distributors, even owners of nearby computer shops. Berez and Blank were, claims Steve Meretzky, “extremely hyper” about making sure it came off as the perfect coming-out event for the growing company, despite the fact that just a few dozen outsiders were actually attending. In the offices’ central room was a big chalkboard listing all of Infocom’s modest catalog of just a few adventure games and the computers for which each was available. Always the jokester, Meretzky crept over to the chalkboard just before the party started and added an entry for Leather Goddesses of Phobos — “something that would be a little embarrassing but not awful.” Berez saw it minutes later and “erased it in a panic” before any of the outsiders could see it.  (Berez and Meretzky actually had something of a history of this sort of thing. Meretzky, in the words of Mike Dornbrook, “always made fun of Joel. Mercilessly. But in a very humorous way…”)

Anticlimactic as its ending was, the story, and most of all the name, nevertheless passed into Infocom lore. Leather Goddesses of Phobos became the default name of any project that hadn’t yet been given a name of its own: “For years thereafter, when anyone needed to plug the name of a nonexistent game into a sentence, it would be Leather Goddesses of Phobos.” The name even made its way into a couple of real games: it’s a videotape the protagonist of Starcross watches, much to his disappointment when he finds out it’s actually “something about the history of the Terran Union”; and it’s the name of the only functioning machine in the video arcade in Wishbringer.

The other joke was almost as old. Whenever discussions came around to what sorts of games Infocom should do, to what genres they should cover, someone would inevitably suggest a porn game. At first the joke was just a flippant response, but as the company plunged into its disastrous 1985 and overall sales began to clearly trend downward it began to take on a decidedly more blackish tinge. At that year’s end, with A Mind Forever Voyaging behind him, Meretzky decided to actually do it: to make a real Leather Goddesses of Phobos — and to put sex in it. He wasn’t, mind you, suggesting a porn game per se, but rather a “racy” spoof of/tribute to the science-fiction serials of the 1930s. It wasn’t a hugely original idea in itself — the Barbarella comics and film of the 1960s had already worked this ground to good effect by making the sex that was implied in the old serials explicit — but it was fairly original as games went, and that was the real point. Knowing that the old dictum of Sex Sells is about as timeless as marketing wisdom gets and that Infocom could really use a hit right about now, marketing manager Mike Dornbrook as well as the other Imps agreed enthusiastically that it was a great idea. Al Vezza, still clinging by his fingernails to a fantasy of Infocom as a force in business software and always terrified of anything that might damage the company’s image in that quarter, was less enthusiastic, but allowed Meretzky to proceed. As a sop to sensibilities like his, Mereztky did agree to allow the player to select from three levels of naughtiness: “tame,” “suggestive,” and “lewd.” (I’m not certain if anyone in the history of the world has ever actually played Leather Goddesses on anything but “lewd.” That’s kind of the point of the game, isn’t it?)

Sex aside, with Leather Goddesses we’re back in Meretzky’s comfortable wheelhouse of zany science-fiction comedy, complete with all the puzzles that were so conspicuously missing from A Mind Forever Voyaging. It’s thus easy enough to cast Leather Goddesses as an artistic retreat for a Meretzky who had pushed the envelope too far with his previous game. Doing so would not be entirely incorrect, but it’s not precisely the whole truth either. You see, we really can’t set the sex aside quite so easily as all that. Leather Goddesses may mark a formal retreat in many ways, but in his soul Mereztky still desperately wanted to rake some mucks, to make another political statement. And while, as a playthrough of A Mind Forever Voyaging will attest, Meretzky was genuinely passionate about and committed to his political views, he was also a young creative person who, like so many young creative persons, just wanted to cause some controversy — any controversy.

A Mind Forever Voyaging dealt with some politically sensitive topics, and I was hoping that it would stir up a lot of controversy. It didn’t. Not a single flaming froth-at-the-mouth letter. So I decided to write something with a little bit of sex in it, because nothing generates controversy like sex. I’m hoping to get the game banned from 7-Eleven stores. Finally, I get asked all the time, “When are you guys gonna do a graphic adventure?” Well, we won’t add pictures to our stories, so this was the only way to create a graphic adventure.

Leather Goddesses of Phobos begins with this:

Some material in this story may not be suitable for children, especially the parts involving sex, which no one should know anything about until reaching the age of eighteen (twenty-one in certain states). This story is also unsuitable for censors, members of the Moral Majority, and anyone else who thinks that sex is dirty rather than fun.

The attitudes expressed and language used in this story are representative only of the views of the author, and in no way represent the views of Infocom, Inc. or its employees, many of whom are children, censors, and members of the Moral Majority. (But very few of whom, based on last year's Christmas Party, think that sex is dirty.)

By now, all the folks who might be offended by LEATHER GODDESSES OF PHOBOS have whipped their disk out of their drive and, evidence in hand, are indignantly huffing toward their dealer, their lawyer, or their favorite repression-oriented politico. So... Hit the RETURN/ENTER key to begin!

Couched in humor as it is, this is also the most topical, baldly political statement ever to appear in an Infocom game. A Mind Forever Voyaging had at least spread a thin veneer of science-fiction worldbuilding over its political message. Not so here; Mereztky calls out the Moral Majority by name. It might perhaps be a bit hard for us today to appreciate the big stew of silliness that is Leather Goddesses of Phobos as a full-on political statement. Indeed, it can be hard not to get annoyed with the game’s intermittent tendency to pat itself on the back for an alleged edginess that strikes us today as about as transgressive as missionary sex in a private bedroom between a happily married heterosexual couple. See, for instance, this gag, obviously inspired by George Carlin’s famous “Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television” routine.

>z
Time passes...

[A warning for any Jerry Falwell groupies who are miraculously still playing: we'll be using the word "tits" in five turns or so. Please consult the manual for the proper way to stop playing.]

>z
Time passes...

[Only a few turns until the "tits" reference! Use QUIT now if you might be offended!]

>z
Time passes...

[Last warning! The word "tits" will appear in the very next turn! This is your absolutely last chance to avoid seeing "tits" used!!!]

>z
Time passes...

A hyperdimensional traveller suddenly appears out of thin air. "My sister has tremendous breasts," says the traveller and, without further explanation, vanishes, leaving only a vague trace of interdimensional ozone.

[Oh, regarding the use of "tits," we changed our mind at the last minute. Everyone agreed it was too risque.]

We owe it to the game to take a moment to try to understand just why Leather Goddesses is so inexplicably proud of itself. In 1986, the year that Leather Goddesses was released, the culture wars of the 1980s were at their peak. The previous year had given the country Senate hearings instigated by Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center and their “Filthy Fifteen” list of offending songs; the hearings would lead to a “Parental Advisory” label, the so-called “Tipper sticker,” appearing on many cassettes and CDs. Two months before Leather Goddesses‘s publication Attorney General Edwin Meese’s Commission on Pornography published a report which claimed a direct link between violent crime and access to pornography amongst a host of other dubious assertions, and which argued for stepped-up enforcement of so-called “decency standards.” The following April the Federal Communications Commission would effectively change some of those same standards in a landmark ruling that levied stiff fines on shock jock Howard Stern’s radio show; from now on it would be possible to fine radio broadcasters not just for violating a list of proscribed words but for any “language or materials that depict or describe, in terms patently offensive to community standards or the broadcast media, sexual or excretory activities or sexual organs.” Taken in the context of these events and many others, Leather Goddesses‘s self-satisfaction feels more understandable and even, in its modest way, more principled.

But what is there to say about Leather Goddesses apart from its politics? Well, Mike Dornbrook’s succinct description of the game for Infocom’s newsletter is a pretty accurate one: “Hitchhiker’s Guide with sex.” You play an ordinary citizen of Upper Sandusky, Ohio, in the year 1936 who gets abducted by the Leather Goddesses of Phobos. These same Leather Goddesses are also planning to invade Earth itself, to make of it their own “private pleasure world.” You’re to be an experiment to pave the way: “your unspeakably painful death will help our effort to enslave humanity” in some way that’s never elaborated, although you are told that it will involve “lots of lubricants, some plastic tubing, and a yak.” Luckily, you escape to hopscotch around a pulp-science-fiction version of the solar system with a sidekick you pick up along the way, trying to assemble the pieces of a “Super-Duper Anti-Leather Goddesses of Phobos Attack Machine!”

1. a common household blender
2. six feet of rubber hose
3. a pair of cotton balls
4. an eighty-two degree angle
5. a headlight from any 1933 Ford
6. a white mouse
7. any size photo of Jean Harlow
8. a copy of the Cleveland phone book

It is, to say the least, a pretty nonsensical plot, one that ultimately boils down in tried-and-true adventure-game fashion to a big treasure hunt — something the game, which spends lots of time gleefully embracing and then subverting adventure-games clichés, is well aware of.

All of those teenage boys who doubtless dived into Leather Goddesses hoping it would get them off were in for a disappointment. If we accept the common definition of pornography as any work designed primary to sexually arouse or titillate, over and above any other artistic purpose, Leather Goddesses resoundingly fails to qualify. Its few sex scenes are purposely full of schlocky romance-novel cliches, all “hot, naked bodies,” “warm and wild feelings springing from your loins, spreading like a fiery potion through your veins” and “lustful orgasms” (is there any other kind?). The detailed play-by-play and anatomical precision that teenage boys crave is, needless to say, not to be found here. In a nod toward gender equality that you certainly wouldn’t see from the pornographic-software underground, it’s actually possible to play Leather Goddesses as either a male or a female; you select your gender at the beginning of the game by going into either the men’s or women’s restroom. The sexes of various people you encounter during the game are adjusted accordingly. The very fact that Meretzky was able to do this so seamlessly within the brutal textual constraints of the 128 K Z-Machine says a lot about just how soft-focus the sex scenes actually are.

While Meretzky gets points for making the effort to include the 30 percent or so of Infocom’s loyal customers who were females, my old Gender Studies indoctrination from university does prompt me to note that even if you choose to play as a female you’re still playing a game largely built for the male gaze. Notably, the Leather Goddesses themselves don’t change gender, and remain equally interested in you whether you play as male or female. There are a couple of obvious causes for this. One is of course that changing the Leather Goddesses to Leather Gods would have been really hard given the constraints of the Z-Machine, not to mention problematic given the name of the game. And the other is that 1980s males who were appalled by male homosexuality were often more than accepting of a bit of female-on-female action.

I find the most jarring moment in Leather Goddesses to be not one of the sex scenes but rather the first time Meretzky swears at me. His first “let’s cut the bullshit” just a few turns in feels so aggressive, so at odds with Infocom’s usual house style that it always hits me like a slap. Moreover, it somehow doesn’t feel genuine either; it feels like Meretzky is swearing at me out of a sense of obligation to the “lewd” mode, and that he’s not entirely comfortable in doing so. More successful are all of the sly double entendres that litter the text, right from the moment you walk into a restroom at the beginning of the game and find a “stool” there. They’re all about as stupid as that, but sometimes gloriously so. My favorite bit might just be the response to the standard SCORE command.

>score
[with Joe]
Unfortunately, Joe doesn't seem interested, and it takes two to tango.

When he’s not cursing or referencing sex in some way, Meretzky is giving you pretty much the game you’d expect from the guy who wrote Planetfall and co-wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: lots of broad, goofy humor, the jokes coming fast and furious, often falling flat but occasionally hitting home. The situations you get yourself into are as gloriously stupid as the puns and double entendres, and perfectly redolent of the game’s inspirations: you go wandering through the jungles of Venus; go sailing the canals of Mars; and, best of all, get into a swordfight in space where you can inexplicably talk to your opponent and where Newtonian mechanics most resoundingly don’t apply. I’d probably be a bit more excited about the humor in this and Meretzky’s other games if it hadn’t led to so many less clever imitators who held fast to the “stupid” but forgot the “glorious.” See, for example, this description of a spaceship in Leather Goddesses, which is far more anatomically explicit than anything in any of the sex scenes: “Hanging from the base of the long, potent-looking battleship are two pendulous, brimming fuel tanks.” Then compare it with its distressingly literal adaptation to graphics in the blatant but more explicit Leather Goddesses clone Sex Vixens from Space of a couple of years later.

One thing that had changed about Meretzky’s work by the time of Leather Goddesses is pointed out by passages like the one just quoted: his writing has improved, subtly but significantly. Perhaps due to his enthusiasm and the sheer pace at which he turned out work, the Meretzky of Planetfall, Sorcerer, and even A Mind Forever Voyaging could be a bit slapdash, even a bit lazy in stringing his words together from time to time. Jon Palace, Infocom’s secret weapon in so many things, did much to keep that from happening in Leather Goddesses. Palace:

I would make an attempt to point out areas where the text could be a little richer. At one point Steve just gave me a big fat printout of all the words in the game. I went through it and tried to find opportunities for adjectives or verbs that could be a little more interesting.

Leather Goddesses‘s text is indeed more interesting, with more of a “you are there” feeling, with more showing and less telling. Mereztky was grateful enough to give Palace a special public thank you for “sensualizing” his text.

Still, I remain most impressed by Meretzky as a game and puzzle designer rather than as a writer. Leather Goddesses excels here. Take all the sex and all the humor away, and it’s still just a damn fine example of adventure-game craft, the best Meretzky had yet come up with. One of its puzzles in particular, the “t-removing machine,” has rightly gone down in text-adventure lore as just possibly Meretzky’s cleverest and most memorable ever. It’s also one that could never, ever be done successfully in any other medium, and another example of an increasing interest in abstract wordplay that marked many of Infocom’s later titles. The game’s most elaborate set-piece puzzle is yet another example of an Infocom maze that isn’t really a maze in the traditional sense. That said, it might just leave you longing for the days of “twisty little passages, all alike.” What with a quickly expiring light source and the cycling series of perfectly timed actions required to stay alive, it’s certainly the most polarizing of the puzzles, infuriating to a certain sort of player who considers it just tedious busywork and delightful to another type ready to pull out a pencil and paper and settle down for a nice logistical challenge. (Personally, I’m in the latter camp.) Virtually all of the other puzzles are very entertaining in less polarizing ways, logical despite the illogic of the setting and solvable, but not trivially so. It all makes for a hell of a lot of fun, even if you do mostly have to have your clothes — well, your loincloth — on.

Leather Goddesses‘s packaging became one of Infocom’s most memorable collections, arguably the last such before the company’s straitening economic circumstances began to really affect the contents of those beloved gray boxes. Meretzky always took an early and personal interest in this aspect of his games, and Leather Goddesses was no exception. He had barely begun working on the game when he had the idea of including a scratch-and-sniff card with various scents that the player would be asked to smell from time to time. Meretzky:

I got several dozen samples from the company that made the scents. Each was on its own card with the name of the scent. So one by one I had other Infocom employees come in, and I’d blindfold them and let them scratch each scent and try to identify it. That way, I was able to choose the seven most recognizable scents for the package. It was a lot of fun seeing what thoughts the various scents triggered in people, such as the person who was sniffing the mothballs and got a silly grin on his face and said, “My grandmother’s attic!”

Thus the game was designed to incorporate the seven “most recognizable” scents rather than the scents being chosen to fit the game, an unusual but not unique case of placing the feelie cart before the game horse (remember, for instance, the Wishbringer stone?). And, since you’re probably wondering: no, none of the scents were remotely sexual.

The package also included a 3-D comic complete with the requisite glasses for reading it, drawn by the same artist responsible for Trinity‘s comic, Richard Howell. (Howell would go on to have a long career in comic books.) The box cover art itself would prompt a squabble between Meretzky and Mike Dornbrook’s marketing department almost as heated as the great Spellbreaker/Mage controversy of the year before. Meretzky wanted to develop for the cover the concept drawing you see below, featuring a collection of elements from the game itself. (Thanks to Jason Scott for making this image available online.)

Dornbrook’s people, however, thought the drawing was just too busy to work on store shelves. Dornbrook:

You can’t look at a cover in isolation. You’ve got to look at a cover when it’s with a hundred other covers. Does it work on a shelf that’s crowded with covers? If it blends in, doesn’t stand out, it’s a failure, no matter how great the art is. It’s got to work as a cover!

Marketing instead opted for the cleaner, simpler design you saw earlier in this article, which also had the advantage of highlighting the marvelous name around which the whole game had been designed in the first place. A very unhappy Meretzky satirically asked to include a disclaimer in the package apologizing for the lame cover art and explaining how much better it should have been.

Leather Goddesses was released in September of 1986. Obviously feeling they might just have a sorely needed commercial winner on their hands, marketing gave the game special priority. For instance, they printed tee-shirts to pass around and sell through the Infocom newsletter, featuring the Leather Goddesses logo on the front and the slogan “A dirty mind is a terrible thing to waste” on the back. About half of the considerable fan mail the game generated was indeed of the “froth at the mouth” stripe Meretzky had been missing in response to A Mind Forever Voyaging. (Most of the other half, meanwhile, seemed to consist of complaints that the game was too tame.) A woman in Orange County, California, wandered into her local software store only to see the tee-shirt on display on the wall and, even worse, on the backs of some of the staff. She pitched a fit about the game’s title with its “deviant sexual overtones and references to bondage and other unnatural acts.” Her complaints forced an official policy change for the chain’s sixty or so stores: Leather Goddesses must be placed only on the highest shelves at the very back of the store, and could not be included in sales promotions, special in-store displays, or advertisements in any form of media — and of course staffers wouldn’t be allow to wear their complimentary tee-shirts anymore. At least one of the big mail-order sellers, Protecto Enterprises of Illinois, declared that they were “founded on Christian principles and ethics and will not sell any product that goes against those principles”; Leather Goddesses by their lights did just that. Still, most of the most committed culture warriors in the country just weren’t paying enough attention to the relatively tiny entertainment-software market when there was so much more mainstream material in the form of music and television and films and books to rail against. Thus Meretzky would have to be satisfied with only the occasional outraged letter rather than the pitchfork-wielding mob of his dreams.

Any sales lost for reasons of outraged morality were more than made up for by the game’s sex appeal. Leather Goddesses proved to be by a factor of at least three Infocom’s biggest seller post-Activision acquisition, selling around 130,000 copies — Infocom’s last game to break six digits, their last to qualify as a genuine hit, and their first and last to prove that Sex Sells was as true in computer games as it was in any other media. It lands just below Wishbringer on Infocom’s all-time sales chart, their sixth best-selling game overall. At least one of the fans it attracted may have horrified Meretzky: Tom Clancy, technothriller author and noted friend of the Reagan administration. “I’d like to meet whoever wrote that,” he said in an interview. “I just don’t know what asylum to go to.”

The milestones in general start to get more melancholy now as we move into the latter stages of Infocom’s history. There’s one more we should mention in the case of Leather Goddesses, over and above “last 100,000 seller” and “last hit.” It marked also the last time that Infocom would have a significant part in, for lack of a better word, the conversation inside the computer-game industry at large. Other publishers took note of Leather Goddesses‘s success. With the industry’s sexual taboo at least partially broken thanks to Infocom and (to a lesser extent) Activision, sex on the computer would begin to cautiously poke its head back up out of the underground again. We’ll see plenty of evidence of that in future articles.

Like Hitchhiker’s, Leather Goddesses advertises a sequel in its finale that the original Infocom would never deliver: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X. (A graphic adventure by that name would be designed by Meretzky and released by Activision under the Infocom label well after the original company was dissolved.) Too bad the series barely got started, because the already planned title of a third game might have really riled up some sensitive souls: Diesel Dikes of Deimos.

(As usual, Jason Scott’s Get Lamp interviews were invaluable to this article. Steve Meretzky is also interviewed at length in Game Design Theory and Practice by Richard Rouse III. Also useful: the October 1987 and July 1988 Computer Gaming World, and the Summer 1986 edition of Infocom’s Status Line newsletter. The Dirty Book advertisement is from the September 1982 Kilobaud.)

Comments
33 Responses

- Dehumanizer

March 5, 2015 at 3:45 pm

I actually finished this one for the first time on the iPad (with a bluetooth keyboard, of course), a couple of years ago.

Typo:
With the industry’s sexual taboo at least partially broken thanks to Infoocom

- Jimmy Maher

March 6, 2015 at 7:27 am

Thanks!

- Jonno Downes

March 5, 2015 at 8:20 pm

Actually infocom did develop ‘Gas Pump Girls…’
http://www.mobygames.com/game/leather-goddesses-of-phobos-2-gas-pump-girls-meet-the-pulsating-

- Lisa H.

March 5, 2015 at 8:31 pm

And so the sexplosion petered out prematurely.

Tee hee hee petered! *sniggers*

…ahem. Sorry. (I’m an adult, really.)

“The object of this game is to fuck as many women as you can without getting bufu’ed by fags (contracting AIDS).”

Yikes. Ugly, yes, though also rather telling about its time period.

(I’m not certain if anyone in the history of the world has ever actually played Leather Goddesses on anything but “lewd.” That’s kind of the point of the game, isn’t it?)

I have, mainly to see the differences in the game’s text and to provoke funny responses when you try to do things you’re not supposed to on lower levels (like using swear words or performing sexual acts). It’s also funny to give silly ages when entering lewd mode, like 5 or 200.

any work designed primary to sexually arose or titillate

arose -> arouse.

I find the maze extremely tedious and frustrating. Even knowing a perfect sequence of moves, I often screw up typing them in. Fortunately, they had mercy in the Solid Gold release and let you bypass it with a single command ($CATACOMB).

When I was a teenager I found this game a bit embarrassing to play (as either sex), the same peeking-through-my fingers feeling I got from playing Leisure Suit Larry. (Nowadays, I’m surprised my parents allowed me to when I was ~14. I wonder if they didn’t really know what the content of those games was.) Now I find Leather Goddesses just campy (not that that’s a bad thing). Even “lewd” mode is really rather tame, as you observe.

A favorite line from the hints:

HELP!!! How can I get out of Cleveland?
1. Millions ask this question daily.

- Jimmy Maher

March 6, 2015 at 7:30 am

Originally I was going to litter bad sexual puns and double entendres through the article in the way of Leather Goddesses itself. But then I decided it felt forced and wasn’t really all that funny. Still, one or two obviously survived. ;)

Thanks for the typo correction!

- Cliffy73

May 24, 2015 at 10:58 am

Yes, if you never play Leather Goddesses on Tame mode, you’ll never see the funniest parser error message in Infocom history:

>fuck Trent

[I don’t know the “f-word.”]

- Jayle Enn

March 5, 2015 at 8:50 pm

Sparks! Explosions! “Pockita-pockita-pockita FEEP!” the machine exclaims.

I still reference the T-remover sometimes when I’m doing something remotely hazardous and electronic.

I’ll agree: even when I was a kid, that ‘let’s cut the bullshit’ line felt really awkward. In retrospect, I wonder if that may have been as pointed as the jabs at the Moral Majority, a comment on forcing either extreme on human expression and… expressions in general.

I don’t think I did ever play all the way through in all three modes, though it was worth it to switch modes for the sex scenes. When explicit sex or crudity wasn’t allowed, they dove right back into Hitchhiker’s Guide style absurdities.

- Lisa H.

March 5, 2015 at 11:01 pm

Sometimes I just say “pockita-pockita-pockita-FEEP!” apropos of nothing, because it’s so fun to say.

The only specific funny responses I remember (besides the untangling cream) are for the rabbit (rabbi) and cotton balls (coon balls (!)). If I remember right, it felt like they missed an opportunity with the tray (ray) – or did they implement something for that one? Anyone remember any others?

- Jimmy Maher

March 6, 2015 at 7:33 am

The tray is accounted for:

>open compartment
Opening the odd machine reveals a ray.

>examine ray
It looks a little like Ray whatsisname from second grade.

- matt w

March 6, 2015 at 12:34 pm

Hmmm, “pockita-pockita-queep” is from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Does “feep” have some Phobosy connotations?

- Lisa H.

March 6, 2015 at 7:24 pm

It makes me think of the entries for feep/feeper in the Jargon File aka Hacker’s Dictionary. http://catb.org/jargon/html/F/feep.html – not that the entries are particularly interesting (it’s just one of several onomatopoeics like “beep” for that sort of sound), but it makes me wonder if that was in their consciousness, since there’s strong connections between Infocom and MIT hacker culture (obviously).

- matt w

March 6, 2015 at 12:37 pm

And the T-remover of course wound up inspiring Emily Short’s epic Counterfeit Monkey.

- Scott Gage

March 5, 2015 at 11:42 pm

Well, here we are. I never thought I’d find a reference to Mad Party Fucker in an online article.

That game was awful, by the way. Even when I played it as a kid you could tell it was pure garbage. However the title meant that anyone under the age of 15 at the time had to play it at least once.

- S. John Ross

March 6, 2015 at 5:27 am

The two games that hooked me on IF were this one (I still hold it as a kind of Gold Standard) and Plundered Hearts, which just happen to have been the two available to borrow from a friend in the early 90s. Given that one was “racy” in a for-the-male-gaze way and the other was “romantic” in a for-the-female-gaze way, I’ve always wondered if that wasn’t deliberate in some way on the part of Infocom, that one made the other more “okay” or if the two were seen as being two prongs of an experimental attempt at … something. Anyway, I still hold both in high regard, replay them each now and then, and will spend a lot of hobby time for the rest of my life kinda-sorta imitating both, since I played them both at the same time and formed my baby-bird bond with IF through them.

- S. John Ross

March 6, 2015 at 5:28 am

I’ve always felt the same sense of a jarring lack of sincerity in that “bullshit” line too, BTW.

- Rowan Lipkovits

March 6, 2015 at 5:59 am

Leather Goddesses advertises a sequel in its finale that Infocom would never deliver: Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X

This line has been bugging me all day. A game by that title did see the light of day, written by Steve Meretzky and published (by Activision) with the Infocom name on the box. Do you mean that as a product of the zombie-Infocom, or as a non-text-adventure, it simply doesn’t count? (With Meretzky remaining at the helm, that’s about as much authenticity to the lineage as I think one can reasonably demand.)

- Jimmy Maher

March 6, 2015 at 7:39 am

Yeah, I really consider a different beast entirely for both of the reasons you cite. However, I added a little parenthetical about it to the text. Thanks!

- Duncan Stevens

March 6, 2015 at 8:07 pm

I never played this one, but it’s been described as really amazingly bad, e.g.:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/rec.games.int-fiction/082w2s_o7sU/yIldYpVBkwgJ

- Steffan Swaan

March 6, 2015 at 6:08 am

I just stumbled on your blog through MetaFilter and am having a great time reading the arcives. I played a port of this game some time ago on, of all things, a GameBoy emulator. Great fun.

- James

March 7, 2015 at 6:00 am

Metafilter: we see you

- Hanon Ondricek

March 6, 2015 at 3:12 pm

I was also going to comment that the T-remover had to be Emily Short’s Counterfeit Monkey inspiration. I loved this game because I was actually able to solve great parts of it as a youngster, such as setting a trap for the plant, and using the portable hole.

Also a lot of fun was taking a moment of solemn remembrance for your sidekick every time they died gruesomely and then having them show up nonchalantly several turns later only slightly worse for wear.

- Andrew Plotkin

March 6, 2015 at 4:42 pm

“…back toward the wholesome 1950s, away from the revolutionary 1960s and the free-and-easy 1970s.”

Not the “censorious 1950s” or the “repressed 1950s”? :)

Seriously, from my point of view it’s the 1970s that were wholesome. Not that I ever encountered that scene first-hand.

- Jimmy Maher

March 7, 2015 at 8:21 am

Hmm…

I recommend a viewing of Boogie Nights and a listen to the Rolling Stones album Some Girls to begin to build a foundation in vintage disco-era sleaze…

- Steve McCrea

March 8, 2015 at 6:22 pm

Are you sure the Trinity comic is by Richard Howell? I can’t find any reference to the artist, but it looks to me like an early Kyle Baker piece. The style is very different from the LGOP comic.

- Steve McCrea

March 8, 2015 at 6:33 pm

Oh, and I just noticed that the variant cover sketch for LGOP has the initials KB (I think it’s a K).

- Jimmy Maher

March 9, 2015 at 6:36 am

If you ask the bird woman at the beginning of Trinity about “trinity,” you’ll see a credits screen. Richard Howell is credited as “illustrator,” while others are credited for the map, crane, and sundial that came as feelies. It’s hard for me to imagine what else Howell could have “illustrated,” and since no other artist is credited…

- Steve McCrea

March 9, 2015 at 6:31 pm

Ah. According to Kyle Baker, he inked the comic, but he doesn’t remember the penciller. That explains it…

- Eddie in Miss

March 9, 2015 at 10:46 am

A typo,

Has rightly gone done in text adventure history

Should be down.

Thanks Jimmy for this blog and for Filfre!

- Jimmy Maher

March 9, 2015 at 11:04 am

Thank you!

- S. John Ross

April 2, 2015 at 4:34 am

Also, I feel compelled to pimp my “Lane Mastodon Alternates” PDF, available at the IF Archive, because it’s awesome and genuinely useful to those of us who are Ray Zone junkies =)

- Peter Piers

January 4, 2016 at 8:10 pm

” (I’m not certain if anyone in the history of the world has ever actually played Leather Goddesses on anything but “lewd.” That’s kind of the point of the game, isn’t it?)”

I’m not a prude, but for some reason I was wary of playing the game in a public place and possibly have the game throw something I wouldn’t like others to see. And I didn’t really feel like anything racy. I just didn’t.

Mind you, I have plenty of AIF in my collection. Maybe I got supremely tired of it and wanted to enjoy LGOP on its other merits.

I never got the Scratch-N-Sniff card, of course, but I’m sort of proud to have gotten the one on Leisure Suit Larry 7, another racy game. Hmmm, curious connection.

- Peter Piers

January 5, 2016 at 5:38 pm

I thought the riddle was a much bigger issue than the maze.

Mind you, I somehow stumbled onto the “cheat code” for skipping the maze. Bliss. I knew what it’d be like from the feelie comic, so I did it without a moment’s hesitation.

- Mark S. Fisher

January 10, 2016 at 4:24 pm

I would say the cover art was most likely a strong contributing factor to it’s sales numbers.

Moonmist
March 12, 2015

THE IMPLEMENTOR’S CREED

I create fictional worlds. I create experiences.

I am exploring a new medium for telling stories.

My readers should become immersed in the story and forget where they are. They should forget about the keyboard and the screen, forget everything but the experience. My goal is to make the computer invisible.

I want as many people as possible to share these experiences. I want a broad range of fictional worlds, and a broad range of “reading levels.” I can categorize our past works and discover where the range needs filling in. I should also seek to expand the categories to reach every popular taste.

In each of my works, I share a vision with the reader. Only I know exactly what the vision is, so only I can make the final decisions about content and style. But I must seriously consider comments and suggestions from any source, in the hope that they will make the sharing better.

I know what an artist means by saying, “I hope I can finish this work before I ruin it.” Each work-in-progress reaches a point of diminishing returns, where any change is as likely to make it worse as to make it better. My goal is to nurture each work to that point. And to make my best estimate of when it will reach that point.

I can’t create quality work by myself. I rely on other implementors to help me both with technical wizardry and with overcoming the limitations of the medium. I rely on testers to tell me both how to communicate my vision better and where the rough edges of the work need polishing. I rely on marketeers and salespeople to help me share my vision with more readers. I rely on others to handle administrative details so I can concentrate on the vision.

None of my goals is easy. But all are worth hard work. Let no one doubt my dedication to my art.

Stu Galley wrote the words you see above in early September of 1985, a time when Infocom was reeling through layoff after torturous layoff and looked very likely to be out of business in a matter of months. It served as a powerful affirmation of what Infocom really stood for, just as the misplaced dreams of Al Vezza and his Business Products people — grandiose in their own way but also so much more depressingly conventional — threatened to halt the dream of a new interactive literature in its tracks. “The Implementor’s Creed” is one of the most remarkable — certainly the most idealistic — texts to come out of Infocom. It’s also vintage Stu Galley, the Imp who couldn’t care less about Zork but burned with passion for the idea of interactive fiction actually worthy of its name.

Galley’s passion and its associated perfectionism could sometimes make his life very difficult. In the final analysis perhaps a better critic of interactive fiction than a writer of it — his advice was frequently sought and always highly valued by all of the other Imps for their own projects — he would be plagued throughout his years at Infocom by self-doubt and an inability to come up with the sorts of original plots and puzzles that seemed to positively ooze from the likes of Steve Meretzky. Galley’s first completed game, The Witness, was developed from an outline provided by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling, while for his second, Seastalker, he collaborated with the prolific (if usually uncredited) children’s author Jim Lawrence. After finishing Seastalker, he had the idea to write a Cold War espionage thriller, tentatively called Checkpoint: “You, an innocent train traveler in a foreign country, get mixed up with spies and have to be as clever as they to survive.” He struggled for six months with Checkpoint, almost as long as it took some Imps to create a complete game, before voluntarily shelving it: “The problem there was that the storyline wasn’t sufficiently well developed to make it really interesting. I guess I had a vision of a certain kind of atmosphere in the writing that was rather hard to bring off.” Suffering from writer’s block as he was, it seemed a very good idea to everyone to pair him up again with Lawrence late in 1985.

Just as Seastalker had been a Tom Swift, Jr., story with the serial numbers not-so-subtly filed away, the new game, eventually to be called Moonmist, would be crafted in the image of an even more popular children’s book protagonist with whom Lawrence had heaps of experience: none other than the original girl detective, Nancy Drew. She was actually fresher in Lawrence’s mind than Tom: he had spent much of his time during the first half of the 1980s anonymously churning out at least seven Nancy Drew novels for the Stratemeyer Syndicate, creators and owners of both the Tom and Nancy lines. As in Seastalker, you provide Moonmist with a name and gender when the game begins. The game and its accompanying feelies, however, would really kind of prefer it if you could see your way to playing as a female. Preferably as a female named “Nancy Drew,” if it’s all the same to you.

The plot is classic Nancy, a mystery set in a romantic old house, with a hint of the supernatural for spice. You’ve received a letter from your friend Tamara, for whom a semester abroad in Britain has turned into an engagement to a Cornish lord. It seems she has need for a girl detective. She’s living with her Lord Jack now at his Tresyllian Castle — chastely, in her own bedroom, of course — and all is not well. Lord Jack’s father, Lionel, was a globetrotting adventurer who recently died of “some sort of fatal jungle disease” that he may or may not have accidentally contracted. Lord Jack’s last girlfriend, the beautiful Deirdre, became entangled with his best friend Ian as well, and then allegedly committed suicide by throwing herself off some nearby cliffs after Jack broke it off with her in retaliation. Now her ghost is frequently seen haunting the castle and, Tamara claims, trying to kill her with poisonous spiders and snakes. Joining you, Lord Jack, Tamara, and Ian at the castle for a memorial dinner marking the first anniversary of Lord Lionel’s death are Vivien, a painter and sculptor and the local bohemian; Iris, a Mayfair debutante who may or may not have something going with Ian; Dr. Wendish, Lord Lionel’s old best mate; and a slick antique dealer named Montague Hyde who’s eager to buy up the castle’s contents and sell them to the highest bidder.

Labelled as an “Introductory” level game, Moonmist splits the difference between earlier Infocom games to bear its “Mystery” genre tag. It doesn’t use the innovative player-driven plot chronology of the most recent of those, Ballyhoo, opting like Deadline, The Witness, and Suspect for a more simulationist turn-by-turn clock that gives you just a single night to solve the mystery. However, you the player don’t have to engage in the complicated, perfectly timed story interventions demanded by those earlier mysteries. After the events of the dinner party that sets the plot in motion, Moonmist is actually quite static, leaving you to your own devices to search the castle for clues and assemble a case that will reveal exactly what happened to Deirdre and who is dressing up as her ghost every night. (You didn’t think the ghost was real, did you? If so, you haven’t had much exposure to Nancy Drew or the works she spawned — like, for instance, Scooby-Doo.) You’ll also need to find a mysterious treasure brought back to Cornwall by Lord Lionel after one of his expeditions abroad. Depending on which version of Moonmist‘s mystery you’re playing, therein may also lie another nefarious plot.

But wait… which version? Yes. We’ve come to the most interesting innovation in Moonmist. The identity of the guilty one(s) and the nature of the treasure change in four variations of the plot, which you choose between in-character by telling the butler your “favorite color” at the beginning of the game: green, blue, red, or yellow. (I’ve listed them in general order of complexity and difficulty, and thus in the order you might want to try them if you play Moonmist for yourself.) Infocom had tried a branching plotline once before, in Cutthroats, but not handled it terribly well. There the plot suddenly branched randomly well over halfway through the game, leading you the intrepid diver to explore one of two completely different sunken shipwrecks. If the objective was to make an Infocom game last longer, the Cutthroats approach was nonsensical; it just resulted in two unusually short experiences that added up to a standard Infocom game, not a full-length experience that could somehow be experienced afresh multiple times. And randomly choosing the story branch was just annoying, forcing the player to figure out when the branch was about to happen, save, and then keep reloading until the story went in the direction she hadn’t yet seen. The worst-case scenario would have to be the player who never even realized that the branch was happening at all, who was just left thinking she’d paid a lot of money for a really short adventure game.

While it’s not without problems of its own, Moonmist‘s approach makes a lot more sense. I do wish you were allowed to name your color a bit later; this would save you from having to play through a long sequence of identical introductions and preparations for the dinner party that kicks off the mystery in earnest. Still, Moonmist‘s decision to reuse the same stage set, as it were — rooms, objects, and characters — in the service of four different plots is a clever one, especially in light of the limitations of the 128 K Z-Machine. It’s of course an approach to ludic mystery that already had a long history by the time of Moonmist, beginning with the board game Cluedo back in 1949 and including in the realm of computer games the randomized mysteries of Electronic Arts’s not-quite-successful Murder on the Zinderneuf and the hand-crafted plots of Accolade’s stellar Killed Until Dead amongst others.

Moonmist is, alas, less successful at crafting 4 mysteries out of the same cast and stage than Killed Until Dead is at making 21. Moonmist‘s variations simply aren’t varied enough. Although the perpetrator, the treasure, and the incriminating evidence change, the process of finding them and assembling a case is the same from variation to variation. After you’ve solved one of the cases, and thus know the steps you need to follow, solving the others is fairly trivial. The process of finding Lord Lionel’s treasure is literally a scavenger hunt, a matter of following a trail of not-terribly-challenging clues in the form of written messages until you arrive at its conclusion. The guilty guest, meanwhile, is readily identifiable as the one person who leaves the dinner party and starts poking restlessly around the rest of the castle. And once the treasure is secured and the guilty one identified it’s mostly just a matter of searching that person’s room carefully to come up with the incriminating evidence you need and making an “arrest.” The changes from variation to variation amount to no more than a handful of objects placed in different rooms or swapped out and replaced with others, along with a bare few paragraphs of altered text. Although they’re not randomly generated, the cases feel unsatisfying enough that they almost just as well could have been; there’s a distinct “Colonel Mustard in the lounge with the candlestick” feel about the whole experience. Even the exact words that the guilty party says to you never change from variation to variation. Most damningly, Moonmist never even begins to succeed in giving you the feeling that you’re actually solving a mystery — the feeling that was so key to the appeal of Infocom’s original trilogy of mystery games. You’re just jumping through the hoops that will satisfy the game and cause it to spit out the full story in the form of the few bland sentences that follow your unmasking of the mastermind.

Some of these shortcomings can doubtless be laid at the feet of the aging 128 K Z-Machine, whose limitations were beginning to bite hard into Infocom’s own expectations of even a modest work like Moonmist by 1986. Even reusing most of the environment apparently didn’t give Galley and Lawrence enough room to craft four mysteries that truly felt unique. On the contrary, they were forced to save space by off-loading many of the room descriptions into a tourist’s guide to Tresyllian Castle included with the documentation. So-called “paragraph books” fleshing out stories (and providing copy protection) via text that couldn’t be packed into the game proper would soon become a staple of CRPGs of the latter half of the decade wishing to be a bit more ambitious in their storytelling than simple hack-and-slashers like Wizardry and The Bard’s Tale. But a CRPG is a very different sort of experience from a text adventure, and what’s tolerable or even kind of fun in the former doesn’t work at all in the latter. Having to constantly flip through a slick tourist brochure for room descriptions in Moonmist absolutely kills the atmosphere of a setting that should have fairly dripped with it. Tresyllian Castle is, after all, set on a spooky moor lifted straight out of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and comes complete with everything an American tourist thinks a British castle should, including a hedge maze (thankfully not implemented as an in-game maze), a dungeon, and a network of secret passages.

The text’s scarcity is doubly disappointing because the writing, when it’s there, is… well, I’m not sure I’d label it “great” or even “good,” but it is perfectly evocative of the sort of formulaically comforting children’s literature Jim Lawrence had so much experience crafting. How you react to it may very well depend on your own childhood experiences with Nancy Drew — or, perhaps more likely if you’re male like me, with her Stratemeyer Syndicate stablemates The Hardy Boys (yet another line for which Lawrence, inevitably, wrote a number of books). Just the idea of a white-haired old man raised in the swing era trying to write from the perspective of a 1980s teenager is weird; Nancy, born a teenager in 1930, is like Barbie and Bart Simpson eternally stuck at the same age both physically and mentally. Given that Nancy is, like Barbie, largely an aspirational fantasy for those who read her, Lawrence tries to make her life everything he thinks a contemporary twelve-year-old girl — the sweet spot of the Nancy Drew demographic — wishes her life could be in a few years. And given the artificial nature of the whole concept and its means of production, Nancy, and therefore Moonmist, inhabit a sort of cartoon reality where people routinely behave in ways that we never, ever see them behaving in real life. See, for example, your first meeting with Ian and Iris, nonsensically dancing together to pass the time before dinner “to the faint sound of rock music from a portable radio on a table nearby.” I mean, really, who the hell starts dancing just to pass the time, and who dances to the “faint sound of rock music?” Once or twice the writing veers into the creepy zone, as when Lawrence declares, “My, what a fine figure of a woman!” when you take off your clothes preparatory to taking a bath. But mostly it manages to be quaint and nostalgically charming with its mixture of Girl Power and romantic teenage giddiness.

"My fiance, Lord Jack Tresyllian," Tamara introduces him. "Jack, this is my friend from the States, Miss Nancy Drew."

"So you're that famous young sleuth whom the Yanks call Miss Sherlock!" says Lord Jack. "Tammy's told me about the mysteries you've solved -- but she never let on you looked so smashing! Welcome to Cornwall, Nancy luv!"

Before you know it, he sweeps you into his arms and kisses you warmly! Let's hope Tamara doesn't mind -- but for the moment all you can see are Lord Jack's dazzling sapphire-blue eyes.

Considered as an Infocom game rather than a Nancy Drew novel, however, Moonmist is afflicted with a terminal identity crisis. Infocom had been making a dangerous habit of conflating the idea of an introductory-level game for adults with that of a game for children for some time already by the time it appeared. Seastalker, the first game to explicitly identify itself as a kinder, gentler Infocom product, had originally been marketed upon its release in June of 1984 as a story for children, trailblazer for a whole line of “Interactive Fiction Junior” that would hopefully soon be selling madly to the same generation of kids that was snapping up Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks by the millions. Sadly, that never happened — doubtless not least because a Choose Your Own Adventure book cost $2 or so, Seastalker $30 or more. Upon the release exactly one year later of Brian Moriarty’s Wishbringer, an introductory-level game written using the same adult diction of most of Infocom’s other games, the “Junior” line was quietly dropped and Seastalker relabeled to join Wishbringer as an “Introductory” game, despite the fact that the two were quite clearly different beasts entirely. Then, in October of 1986, Moonmist was also released as simply an adult “Introductory” game — but, as just about the entire article that precedes this paragraph attests, Jim Lawrence and Stu Galley apparently didn’t get a memo somewhere along the line. Moonmist the digital artifact was, in opposition to Moonmist the marketing construct, plainly children’s literature. At best — particularly if she used to read Nancy Drew — the adult player was likely to find Moonmist nostalgically charming. At worst, it could read as condescending. Any computer game released into the cutthroat industry of 1986 was facing a serious problem if it didn’t know exactly what it was and whom could be expected to buy it. Moonmist, alas, wasn’t quite sure of either.

That said, Moonmist actually did somewhat better than one might have expected given this confusion. Its final sales would end up at around 33,000 copies, worse than those of Seastalker but not dramatically so. There’s good reason for its modern status as one of Infocom’s less-remembered and less-loved games: it’s definitely one of the slighter works in the canon. Certainly only hardcore fans are likely to summon the motivation to complete all four cases. Despite its shortcomings, though, others may find it worth sampling one or two cases, and historians may be interested in experiencing this early interactive take on Nancy Drew published many years before the long-running — indeed, still ongoing — series of graphic adventures that Her Interactive began releasing in the late 1990s.

Moonmist would mark the last time that Stu Galley or Jim Lawrence would be credited as the author of an Infocom game. Lawrence returned to print fiction, where he could make a lot more money a lot more quickly than he could writing text adventures. Galley remained at Infocom until the bitter end, working on technology and on one or two more game ideas that would frustratingly never come to fruition. Given just how in love he was with the potential of interactive fiction, it does seem a shame that he never quite managed to write a game that hit it out of the park. On the other hand, his quiet enthusiasm and wisdom probably contributed more than any of us realize to many of those Infocom games that did.

(In addition to the Get Lamp interviews, this article draws from some of the internal emails and other documents that were included on the Masterpieces of Infocom CD. An interview with Galley in the June 1986 issue of Zzap! was also useful.)

Comments
36 Responses

- Duncan Stevens

March 12, 2015 at 3:20 pm

I’m pretty sure the game says “My, what a fine figure of a man!” if you play as male. Whether anyone has used that phrasing ever in reference to a male is another question.

I didn’t remember the game telling you to read the tourist brochure for room descriptions. Were there instances of important information only appearing there?

- X

March 13, 2015 at 6:18 am

Let me Google that for you: fine figure of a man

- Jimmy Maher

March 13, 2015 at 6:58 am

I just know it as the first line of a great Elvis Costello song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwGdB4Gj7Js

- Jimmy Maher

March 13, 2015 at 6:35 am

Actually, if you’re playing as a man, you get this instead:

>remove outfit
Okay... You immediately wish for central heating!

And yes, there’s lots of absolutely essential information in the tourist brochure. For instance, the umbrella stand in the entryway, which is never mentioned at all by the game’s text, but critical to solving one of the cases.

- Duncan Stevens

March 13, 2015 at 7:44 pm

I don’t remember ever seeing that line at all (and I know I tried playing both as male and female because I noticed some of the other changes, like Jack smooching me). Different releases? It seems unlikely.

- Duncan Stevens

March 13, 2015 at 7:49 pm

This magazine article quotes the “what a fine figure of a man” line:

http://rupazero.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Volume-2-Issue-2-gender-and-sexuality.pdf

So maybe it really did change in different releases.

- Duncan Stevens

March 12, 2015 at 3:42 pm

Also, the ghost is real in one version. (Which, as I recall, makes the gameplay more annoying, as you have to be in the right place to find the ghost when it shows up, not just ferret out the costume.)

- Jayle Enn

March 12, 2015 at 5:01 pm

That one stymied me until I typed ‘scream’ and the ghost responded like any other character in the game.

- Jimmy Maher

March 13, 2015 at 6:40 am

The ghost is never actually real. In one variation you do catch the ghost in the act rather than just finding the costume, but it’s nevertheless a costumed person. The ending text explains very clearly who and why.

- Peter Piers

January 5, 2016 at 8:24 pm

Funny, I seemed to remember the ghost being real in one variation… with nothing to back me up, though, I’ll put it down to memory playing tricks.

- Peter Ferrie

February 5, 2016 at 10:51 pm

I seem to remember that if you know the location of a particular entrance to the secret passages (by having played previously), you can just wait there until the “ghost” arrives, and solve that mystery immediately.

- Duncan Stevens

March 12, 2015 at 3:46 pm

On artificial behavior, the game has something like an “angry” flag that is triggered if you’re discovered searching a person’s room. If the flag is on, the person won’t talk to you (or allow you to keep searching the room). APOLOGIZE, and the person will happily start talking again and, I think, leave the room so you can continue to search. It’s the Radio Button Theory of Emotions.

- Jayle Enn

March 12, 2015 at 5:05 pm

I remember enjoying Moonmist, but I was young and a big fan of books like Nancy Drew and the Three Investigators, so definitely part of the target audience. I still look back on the Ghosts of Cornwall feelie booklet fondly.

- Keith Palmer

March 12, 2015 at 10:09 pm

Moonmist has stuck with me, but I’d say a big part of that could well have been, oddly enough, finding a thoroughly negative review of it in the May 1987 issue of 80 Micro in the early 1990s. That magazine hadn’t bothered to review any of the other Infocom games since Deadline and Starcross; even though it was then adding coverage of Tandy’s MS-DOS clones in an increasingly uneasy blend with coverage of the old Z-80 “TRSDOS” computers, it pretty much seemed pitched to a subscriber base of “Serious Self-Sufficient Programmers” at that point. (It had, however, run an equally negative review of the “Rambo: First Blood Part II” text adventure the year before, and in the very issue the Moonmist review was complaining about how similar the variants were and how “nowhere is there the least hint that your character is any danger,” the editor did muse about the good old days of low-resolution TRS-80 games…)

In any case, when we did get “The Lost Treasures of Infocom” I’d wound up with the impression it would be best to get to Moonmist quickly. I seem to recall playing it right after Zork I, and I have the impression I managed to finish it without resorting to the hint book, which I have to admit still means a good deal to me… although, while I figured out how to prompt the other three variants, I never bothered to play through them. In any case, it seems it was only while contemplating the upcoming discussion of the game here that I really started to think the game character was “supposed” to be female, what with being invited to visit a just-married female friend (the letter that set that up wasn’t included in “The Lost Treasures of Infocom” manual, although I’ve since managed to see it), although I then got to wondering if that was just letting “gender expectations” show. I also have the impression the game wasn’t completely unfavourably compared to a more recent text adventure with its own “variants” in a review, but when I went looking at “An Act of Murder” on IFDB I couldn’t turn it up, so now I have no idea of where I might have seen the comparison.

- Mark Ricard

April 10, 2015 at 3:30 am

Keith ,I also remmeber that review on IFDB. So you did not imagine it.

- Peter Piers

January 5, 2016 at 8:26 pm

I did a double-review of Moonmist and Act of Murder once. It’s not there anymore, by choice. You didn’t imagine it, folks. :)

- Lisa H.

March 12, 2015 at 10:43 pm

After finishing Seastalker, he had the idea to write a Cold War espionage thriller, tentatively called Checkpoint: “You, an innocent train traveler in a foreign country, get mixed up with spies and have to be as clever as they to survive.”

I take it Checkpoint eventually became Border Zone?

including a hedge maze (thankfully not implemented as an in-game maze)

If you’ll permit me a moment for some heartfealt swearing at Hollywood Hijinx…

- Lisa H.

March 13, 2015 at 12:31 am

*heartfelt. I can’t type.

- Jimmy Maher

March 13, 2015 at 6:56 am

Yes, the bare idea was obviously recycled to become Border Zone. I get the impression, however, that the text and code of that game was all pretty much original to Marc Blank. More when we get there and I’ve researched a bit more!

- Scott Gage

March 13, 2015 at 3:32 am

Typo time:

(You didn’t the ghost was real, did you? If so, you haven’t had much exposure to Nancy Drew or the works she spawned — like, for instance, Scooby-Doo.)

Need a think in there.

- Jimmy Maher

March 13, 2015 at 6:57 am

Thanks!

- Jason Scott

March 13, 2015 at 6:52 am

If a fairy came down and said “ok, you will have never made GET LAMP but Stu Galley becomes your dad” I would have jumped at it. What a great guy.

- Brian Moriarty

March 13, 2015 at 11:14 pm

A bit of Moonmist trivia.

Also: Border Zone is a completely different game from Checkpoint (which still exists, by the way).

- Jimmy Maher

March 14, 2015 at 8:29 am

I certainly noticed it, but didn’t want to say anything definite about it because it’s never definitely stated as such in the game’s text. I would have considered baldly claiming Deidre and Vivien to be a “lesbian couple,” as the article referenced in the Wikipedia link does, to be majorly overreaching on the evidence of the text alone. Isn’t it more a depiction of unrequited love than a relationship?

Part of the reason that I was reluctant get deeper into this aspect of the game may be because it would represent such a depressingly typical depiction of homosexuality for its era. A stereotypical dike is obsessed with a young, heterosexual virtuous girl, and it drives her to murder… Yuck. In retrospect, though, that’s important in its own right.

- Peter Piers

January 5, 2016 at 8:32 pm

“Checkpoint (which still exists, by the way).”

The collector in me has sprung to attention! Where would it exist, specifically?

- Lisa H.

March 14, 2015 at 5:05 am

Re: player gender, You can get some sorta-gender-neutral gameplay and a few amusing responses if you don’t follow the game’s prompting to use a gendered title like “Lady” or “Mr.” and instead type in something nonsensical.

- Jimmy Maher

March 14, 2015 at 8:38 am

Okay, mystery solved. I had entered by name as “Herr Helmut Kohl” just for grins. I’d assumed the game had recognized the “Herr,” which was impressive but not entirely unexpected, as the documentation mentions it understanding things like “Dame,” etc. It seems it really didn’t understand at all, and just went the sexually ambiguous route…

- Michael Davis

March 21, 2015 at 11:53 pm

So is that maybe why you didn’t get the “fine figure of a man” line?

- Oren Ronen

March 14, 2015 at 10:46 am

Reading this made me revisit the Japanese version of Moonmist, the oddest choice of the four Inform games localized into the language years after the originals had been published.

Much like the other games, this is an impressive effort, and I’d love to hear the story behind it and how it was implemented. The feelies are all represented: the letters are written in what seems to me like a proper young Japanese woman’s handwriting, and the rest, though pushed to the back of the instructions manual instead of being separate booklets, are reproduced in full. They even added a few pages of character descriptions complete with illustrated portraits.

The game opens with an elaborately animated reproduction of the Moonmist cover art for a title screen, and then, much like the other Japanese Infocom games, goes into a somewhat enhanced version of the Zork 0 interface. You get a graphical compass rose, an illustrated background behind the text that changes along with the location, customizable shortcuts for common verbs as well as a list of items available in the current location and a graphical inventory where each item gets its own little icon, Monkey Island style. The full Invisiclues hints are also included online, along with a system that prevents you to look at too many of them.

The game features a full-sentence Japanese parser accepting both kanji and input written just in kana (if you don’t know why this is impressive for an early ‘90s game, trust me that it is). The translation itself is excellent, though I was struck by a few oddities the very first minute of the game. The original game tried to deduct your sex from the title you choose when entering your name. This doesn’t work at all in Japanese, and so you choose your sex from a menu. Thing is, the menu has three options – the expected male and female, but also okama. Reading the comments above I can see why it’s there — the original game code had a path for uncertain gender which the translators had to deal with — but it’s a very odd term to come across on the game’s second move. Color is also chosen from a menu and unlike the original the game then asks for your age, though I have no idea whether it has any effect on the text later on or not.

Maybe I’ll play some more along with the English original and try to figure it out.

- Oren Ronen

March 14, 2015 at 10:48 am

Alas, the link in the comment above got broken — just remove the extra quotation mark from the end of the URL.

- Jimmy Maher

March 14, 2015 at 11:32 am

I edited the link for you. It works now. ;)

And thanks for this! It’s quite fascinating, especially the amount of effort that was put into the port. It’s doubly odd to do so much work for such a — if saying this is not too unkind — slight game.

And replacing the gender-neutral choice with an explicitly gay one? That’s *really* weird, especially as I was under the impression that Japanese culture of the 1980s and 1990s was even more conservative about that sort of thing than American.

- Mark Ricard

April 10, 2015 at 3:32 am

Was this like the format Legend used with it’s text adventures in the 90s?

- Andrew McCarthy

March 17, 2015 at 3:34 pm

Only four colors? But I expressly requested six!

“Play it again, Sam.”

Four colors? I thought we agreed to six.

- SHOlafsson

March 20, 2015 at 2:34 pm

Finally made it here after a reading binge much to the chagrin of my family. I must have been very much a middle of the road adventurer, since I never made it anywhere with either Seastalker or Moomist (much as I didn’t with the hard ones, Starcross, Suspended or Sorcerer). Gee now I need to dig up the list of completed text adventures from my youth :). I am thoroughly enjoying your work, it brings back so many memories plus all the things I was not aware of.
Your Amiga book is on my Amazon wishlist for purchase when I make it to the States. (A second passion we seem to have shared.) If I am ever in your neck of the woods I offer to buy beers, unfortunately my coming trip to Jylland probably does not allow a stop in Odense. All the best to you and your family, and may this blog continue for a long time to come!

- CJGeringer

January 13, 2016 at 7:20 pm

Could it be that the nfour variations of plots were nto so much to increase replay value, but to give diferent people slightly diferent experiences? similar to how the Little computer people had variations?

The colour question does not seem to indicate what it does, and someone replaying the game does not really have a reason to change this answer.

Maybe Infocom, just wanted it to foster interesting conversations that would help the game´s sale,s since infocom seem to have been unusually savvy in how to foster a kind of community among it´s fans?

- Jimmy Maher

January 13, 2016 at 7:34 pm

No, it was pretty prominently promoted on the basis of being replayable. From The Status Line newsletter, Summer 1986:

Moonmist has four different variations[…]. This gives Moonmist more replay value than any other Infocom story to date.

MicroProse’s Simulation-Industrial Complex (or, The Ballad of Sid and Wild Bill)
March 19, 2015

Change was in the air as the 1980s began, the drawn-out 1960s hangover that had been the 1970s giving way to the Reagan Revolution. The closing of Studio 54 and the release of Can’t Stop the Music, the movie that inspired John J.B. Wilson to start the Razzies, marked the end of disco decadence. John Lennon, whilst pontificating in interviews on the joys of baking bread, released an album milquetoast enough to play alongside Christopher Cross and Neil Diamond on Adult Contemporary stations — prior to getting shot, that is, thus providing a more definite punctuation mark on the end of 1960s radicalism. Another counterculture icon, Jerry Rubin, was left to give voice to the transformation in worldview that so many of his less famous contemporaries were also undergoing. This man who had attempted to enter a pig into the 1968 Presidential election in the name of activist “guerrilla theater” became a stockbroker on the same Wall Street where he had once led protests. “Money and financial interest will capture the passion of the ’80s,” he declared. The 1982 sitcom Family Ties gave the world Steven and Elyse Keaton, a pair of aging hippies who are raising an arch-conservative disciple of Ronald Reagan; it was thus the mirror image of 1970s comedies like All in the Family. Michael J. Fox’s perpetually tie-sporting Alex P. Keaton became a teenage heartthrob because, as Huey Lewis would soon be singing, it was now “Hip to be Square.” Yes, that was true even in the world of rock and roll, where bland-looking fellows like Huey Lewis and Phil Collins, who might very well have inhabited the cubical next to yours at an accounting firm, were improbably selling millions of records and seeing their mugs all over MTV.

No institution benefited more from this rolling back of the countercultural tide than the American military. Just prior to Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the military’s morale as well as its public reputation were at their lowest ebb of the century. All four services were widely perceived as a refuge for psychopaths, deadbeats, and, increasingly, druggies. A leaked internal survey conducted by the Pentagon in 1980 found that about 27 percent of all military personnel were willing to admit to using illegal drugs at least once per month; the real numbers were almost certainly higher. Another survey found that one in twelve of American soldiers stationed in West Germany, the very front line of the Cold War, had a daily hashish habit. In the minds of many, only a comprehensively baked military could explain a colossal cock-up like the failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in April of 1980, which managed to lose eight soldiers, six helicopters, and a C-130 transport plane without ever even making contact with the enemy. Small wonder that this bunch had been booted out of Vietnam with their tails between their legs by a bunch of shoeless rebels in black pajamas.

The military’s public rehabilitation began immediately upon Ronald Reagan’s election. Reagan not only continued but vastly expanded the military buildup his predecessor Jimmy Carter had begun, whilst declaring at every opportunity his pride and confidence in the nation’s fighting men and women. He was also willing to use the military in ways that hadn’t been dared since the withdrawal from Vietnam. As I recounted recently in another article, the Reagan administration began probing and feinting toward the Soviet Union, testing the boundaries of its airspace as well as its resolve in ways almost unprecedented since the Cold War had begun all those decades before. On October 25, 1983, the United States invaded the tiny Caribbean island nation of Grenada to depose a Soviet-friendly junta that had seized power just days earlier. In later years this attack by a nation of 235 million on a nation of less than 100,000, a nation which was hardly in a position to harm it even had it wanted to, would be roundly mocked. But at the time the quick-and-easy victory was taken as nothing less than a validation of the American military by large swathes of the American public, as a sign that the military could actually accomplish something, could win a war, definitively and (relatively) cleanly — no matter how modest the opponent.

We need only look to popular culture to see the public’s changing attitude toward the military writ large. Vietnam veterans, previously denounced as baby killers and conscienceless automatons, were by mid-decade shown all over television as good, dutiful men betrayed and scorned by their nation. For a while there it seemed like every popular action series on the air featured one or more psychically wounded but unbowed Vietnam vets as protagonists, still loyal to the country that had been so disloyal to them: The A-Team; Magnum, P.I; Airwolf; Miami Vice. During the commercial breaks of these teenage-boy-friendly entertainments, the armed forces ran their slick new breed of recruiting commercials to attract a new generation of action heroes. The country had lost its way for a while, seduced by carping liberalism and undermined by the self-doubt it engendered, but now America — and with it the American military — were back, stronger, prouder, and better than ever. It was “morning again in America.”

Arguably the most important individual military popularizer of all inhabited, surprisingly, the more traditionally staid realm of books. Tom Clancy was a husband and father of two in his mid-thirties, an insurance agent living a comfortable middle-class existence in Baltimore, when he determined to combine his lifelong fascination with military tactics and weaponry with his lifelong desire to be a writer. Published in 1984 by, of all people, the Naval Institute Press — the first novel they had ever handled — his The Hunt for Red October tells the story of the eponymous Soviet missile submarine, whose captain has decided to defect along with his vessel to the West. A merry, extended chase ensues involving the navies of several nations — the Soviets trying to capture or sink the Red October, the West trying to aid its escape without provoking World War III. It’s a crackerjack thriller in its own right for the casual reader, but it was Clancy’s penchant for piling on layer after layer of technical detail and his unabashed celebration of military culture that earned him the love of those who were or had been military personnel, those who admired them, and many a teenage boy who dreamed of one day being among them. Clancy’s worldview was, shall we say, uncluttered by excessive nuance: “I think we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys. Don’t you?” Many Americans in the 1980s, their numbers famously including President Reagan himself, did indeed agree, or at least found it comforting to enjoy a story built around that premise. I must confess that I myself am hardly immune even today to the charms of early Tom Clancy.

By 1986, the year that Clancy published his second novel Red Storm Rising, the military’s rehabilitation was complete and then some. The biggest movie of that year was Top Gun, a flashy, stylish action flick about F-14 fighter pilots that played to the new fast-cutting MTV aesthetic, its cast headlined by an impossibly good-looking young Tom Cruise and its soundtrack stuffed with hits. I turned fourteen that year. I can remember my friends, many of them toting Hunt for Red October or Red Storm Rising under their arms, dreaming of becoming fighter pilots and bedding women like Top Gun‘s Kelly McGillis. Indeed, “fighter pilot” rivaled the teenage perennial of “rock star” for the title of coolest career in the world. The American military in general was as cool as it’s ever been.

Joining the likes of Tom Clancy and Tom Cruise as ambassadors of this idealized vision of the military life were the inimitable John William “Wild Bill” Stealey and his company MicroProse. Stealey himself was, as one couldn’t spend more than ten seconds in his presence without learning, a former Air Force pilot. Born in 1947, he graduated from the Air Force Academy, then spent six years as an active-duty pilot, first teaching others to fly in T-37 trainers and then guiding gigantic C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft all over the world. After his discharge he took an MBA from the Wharton School, then set off to make his way in the world of business whilst continuing to fly A-37s, the light attack variant of the T-37, on weekends for the Pennsylvania Air National Guard. By 1982 he had become Director of Strategic Planning for General Instruments, a company in the Baltimore suburb of Hunt Valley specializing in, as their advertisements proclaimed, “point-of-sale, state-lottery, off-track, and on-track wagering systems utilizing the most advanced mini- and microcomputer hardware and software technologies.” Also working at General Instruments, but otherwise moving in very different circles from the garrulous Wild Bill, was a Canadian immigrant named Sid Meier, a quiet but intense systems engineer in his late twenties who was well known by the nerdier denizens of Hunt Valley as the founder of the so-called Sid Meier’s Users Group, a thinly disguised piracy ring peopled with enthusiasts of the Atari 800 and its sibling models. Sid liked to say that he wasn’t actually playing the games he collected for pleasure, but rather analyzing them as technology, so what he was doing was okay.

The first real conversation between Stealey and Meier has gone down in gaming legend. In May of 1982, the two found themselves thrown together in Las Vegas for a series of boring corporate meetings. They ended up at an arcade in the basement of the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, in front of a game called Red Baron. Stealey sat down and scored 75,000 points, and was quite proud of himself. Then Meier racked up 150,000, and could have kept on going if he’d wanted to. When Stealey asked him how he, the quiet nerd, had beat a hotshot pilot, Meier said the opponents in the game had been programmed to follow just a handful of patterns, which he’d memorized whilst watching Stealey play. “It’s not very good,” he said. “I could write a better game in a week.” “If you could, I could sell it,” replied Stealey.

Sid Meier and Bill Stealey pose in 1988 with the actual Red Baron machine that had led to the formation of MicroProse six years earlier.

Much more than a week went by, and Stealey forget about the exchange. But then, three months later, Meier padded up to him in the halls of General Instruments and handed him a disk containing a simple World War II shoot-em-up called Hellcat Ace. Shocked that he had come through, Stealey took it home, played it, and “wrote him a four-page memo about what was wrong with the flying and combat.” Seeing the disappointment on Meier’s face when he handed him the memo, Stealey thought that would be the end of it. But a week later Meier was back again, with another disk: “I fixed all of those things you mentioned.” His bluff well and truly called, Stealey had no choice but to get started trying to sell the thing.

First, of course, they would need a name for their company. Stealey initially looked for something with an Air Force association, but couldn’t come up with anything that rang right. For a while the two mulled over the awful name of “Smuggers Software,” incorporating an acronym for “Sid Meier’s Users Group.” But eventually Meier came up with “MicroProse.” After all, he noted, his code was basically prose for microcomputers. The “prose” also served as a pun on “pros” — professionals. With no better ideas on offer, Stealey reluctantly agreed: “It’ll be hard to remember, but once they got it, nobody will forget it.”

Packaging Meier’s game in a plastic baggie with a mimeographed cover sheet, Stealey started visiting all of the computer stores around Baltimore, giving them an early version of what would soon become known inside the industry as the Wild Bill Show — a combination of the traditional hard sell with buckets of Air Force bravado and a dollop of sheer charm to make the whole thing go down easy. Meier paid a local kid 25 cents per game to copy the disks and assemble the packages. By the end of 1982 sales had already reached almost 500 per month, at $15 wholesale per piece. Not bad for a side venture that Stealey had first justified to himself as a convenient way to get a tax write-off for his Volvo.

Early the following year Stealey managed by the time-honored technique of buying an advertisement to get Antic magazine to review Hellcat Ace. The review was favorable if not glowing: “While the graphics are not stunning, the game plays well and holds your interest with multiple skill levels and a variety of scenarios.” On the heels of this, MicroProse’s first real exposure outside the Baltimore area, Stealey took to calling computer stores all over the country, posing as a customer looking for Hellcat Ace. When they said they didn’t carry it, he would berate them in no uncertain terms and announce that he’d be taking his business to a competitor who did carry the game. After doing this a few times to a single store, he’d call again as himself: “Hello, this is John Stealey. I’m from MicroProse. I’d like to sell you Hellcat Ace.” The hapless proprietor on the other end of the line would breathe a sign of relief, saying how “we’ve been getting all kinds of phone calls for that game.” And just like that, MicroProse would be in another shop.

While Stealey sold like a madman, Meier programmed like one, churning out new games at a staggering clip. With MicroProse not yet having self-identified as exclusively or even primarily a maker of simulations, Stealey just craved product from Meier — any sort of product. Meier delivered. He reworked the Hellcat Ace code to turn it into Spitfire Ace. He combined the arcade hit Donkey Kong with the Atari VCS hit Pitfall! to produce Floyd of the Jungle, whose most unique feature was the chance for up to four players to play simultaneously, thanks to the Atari 800’s four joystick ports. He made a top-down air-combat game called Wingman that also supported up to four players, playing in teams of leader and wingman. He made a game called Chopper Rescue that owed more than a little something to the recent Apple II smash Choplifter and supported up to eight players, taking turns. (It would later be reissued as Air Rescue I, its original name having been perhaps just a bit too close to Choplifter‘s for comfort.) He made a surprisingly intricate strategic war game called NATO Commander that anticipated the scenario of Red Storm Rising — a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, with the specter of nuclear weapons conveniently hand-waved away — three years before that book’s publication. And finally there was Solo Flight, a take on civilian aviation that was more simulation-oriented than its predecessors, including a VHF navigation system and an entertaining mail-delivery challenge in addition to its free-flight mode. All of these gushed out of him in barely eighteen months, during most of which he was still working at General Instruments during the day. They found their places on the product lists with which Stealey continued to bombard shops and, soon, the big distributors as MicroProse slowly won a seat with the big boys of the industry.

Stealey and Meier had an odd relationship. Far too different in background, personality, and priorities to ever be real friends, they were nevertheless the perfect business partners, each possessing in spades what the other conspicuously lacked. Meier brought to the table technical wizardry and, as would only more gradually become apparent, a genius for game design that at the very least puts him in the conversation today for the title of greatest designer in the history of the field. Stealey brought business savvy, drive, practicality, and a genius for promotion. Alone, Stealey would probably have had an impressive but boring career in big business of one stripe or another, while Meier would have spent his life working comfortable jobs whilst war-gaming and hacking code as a quiet hobby. They were two of the luckiest people in the world to have found each other; neither would have had a chance of making his mark on history without the other.

It might seem a dangerously imbalanced relationship, this pairing of an Air Force jock who hit a room like a force of nature with a quiet, bookish computer freak. At his worst, Stealey could indeed sound like a Svengali putting the screws to his lucrative pet savant. Look closer, however, and you had to realize that Stealey genuinely respected Meier, was in awe of his sheer intellectual firepower:

One Christmas, I gave him a book detailing the days of the Civil War. Five days later, he gave it back to me. I asked if he did not like the book. He said he loved it, but had already memorized all the key dates and events in it, and thought I might like to read it too. Sid is brilliant!

And Meier wasn’t quite the pushover he might first appear to be. Retiring and shy as he was by disposition, he was also every bit or more as strong-willed as Stealey, sometimes to an infuriating degree. As conservative and risk-averse in his personal life as he was bold and innovative in his programming and design, Meier refused to give up his day job at General Instruments for an astonishingly long time. After pitching in $1500 to help found MicroProse, he also refused to invest any more of his own capital in the company to set up offices and turn it into a real business. That sort of thing, he said, was Stealey’s responsibility. So Stealey took out a $15,000 personal loan instead, putting up his car as partial collateral. Most frustratingly of all, Meier clung stubbornly to his Atari 800 with that passion typical of a hacker’s first programming love, even as the cheaper Commodore 64 exploded in popularity.

It was the need to get MicroProse’s games onto the latter platform that prompted Stealey to bring on his first programmers not named Sid Meier, a couple of Meier’s buddies from his old Users Group. Grant Irani specialized in porting Meier’s games to the 64, while Andy Hollis used Meier’s codebase to make another Atari shoot-em-up, this time set in the Korean War, called MIG Alley Ace. Showing a bit more flexibility than Meier, he then ported his own game to the Commodore 64. He would go on to become almost as important to MicroProse as Meier himself.

Unlike so many of his peers, Stealey steered clear of the venture capitalists with their easy money as he built MicroProse. This led to some dicey moments as 1983 turned into 1984, and consumers started growing much more reluctant to shell out $25 or $30 for one of MicroProse’s simple games. The low point came in July of 1984, when, what with the distribution streams already glutted with products that weren’t selling anymore, MicroProse’s total orders amounted to exactly $27. About that time HESWare, never shy about taking the venture capitalists’ money and still flying high because of it, offered Stealey a cool $250,000 to buy Solo Flight outright and publish it as their own. When he asked Meier his opinion, Meier, as usual, initially declined to get involved with business decisions. But then, as Stealey walked away, Meier deigned to offer some quiet words of wisdom: “You know what? I heard you shouldn’t sell the family jewels.” Stealey turned HESWare down. HESWare imploded before the year was out; MicroProse would continue to sell Solo Flight, never a real hit but a modest, steady moneyspinner, for years to come.

Still, it was obvious that MicroProse needed to up their game if they wished to continue to exist past the looming industry shakeout. While with NATO Commander and Solo Flight he had already begun to move away from the simple action games that had gotten MicroProse off the ground, it was Sid Meier’s next game, F-15 Strike Eagle, that would set the template for the company for years to come. Stealey had been begging Meier for an F-15 game for some time, but Meier had been uncertain how to approach it. Now, with Solo Flight under his belt, he felt he was ready. F-15 Strike Eagle was a quantum leap in sophistication compared to what had come before it, moving MicroProse definitively out of the realm of shoot-em-ups and into that of real military simulations. The flight model was dramatically more realistic; indeed, the F-15 Strike Eagle aeronautics “engine” would become the basis for years of MicroProse simulations to come. The airplane’s array of weapons and defensive countermeasures were simulated with a reasonable degree of fidelity to their real-life counterparts. And the player could choose to fly any of seven missions drawn from the F-15’s service history, a couple of them ripped from recent headlines to portray events that happened in the Middle East a bare few months before the game’s release. F-15 Strike Eagle turned into a hit on a scale that dwarfed anything MicroProse had done before, a consistent bestseller for years, the game that made the company, both financially and reputationally. It became one of the most successful and long-lived computer games of the 1980s, with worldwide sales touching 1 million by 1990 — a stunning number for its era.

The games that followed steadily grew yet more sophisticated. Andy Hollis made an air-traffic-control simulation called Kennedy Approach that was crazily addictive. A new designer, William F. Denman, Jr., created an aerobatics simulation called Acrojet. Meanwhile the prolific Sid Meier wrote Silent Service, a World War II submarine simulation, and also three more strategic war games, MicroProse’s so-called “Command Series,” in partnership with one Ed Bever, holder of a doctorate in history: Crusade in Europe, Decision in the Desert, and Conflict in Vietnam. Unsurprisingly, neither the strategy games nor the civilian simulations sold on anywhere near the scale of F-15 Strike Eagle. Only Silent Service rivaled and, in its first few months of release, actually outdid F-15, rocketing past 250,000 in sales within eighteen months. Meier, who “didn’t value money too highly” in the words of Stealey, who never saw much of a reason to change his lifestyle despite his increasing income, who often left his paychecks lying on top of his refrigerator forgotten until accounting called to ask why their checks weren’t getting cashed, couldn’t have cared less about the relative sales numbers of his games or anyone else’s. Stealey, though, wasn’t so sanguine, and pushed more and more to make MicroProse exclusively a purveyor of military simulations.

It’s hard to blame him. F-15 Strike Eagle, Silent Service, and the MicroProse military simulations that would follow were the perfect games for their historical moment, the perfect games for Tom Clancy readers; Clancy was, not coincidentally, also blowing up big at exactly the same time. Like Clancy, MicroProse was, perverse as it may sound, all about making war fun again.

Indeed, fun was a critical component of MicroProse’s games, one overlooked by far too many of their competitors. MicroProse’s most obvious rival as a maker of simulations was SubLogic, maker of the perennial civilian Flight Simulator and a military version called simply Jet that put players in the cockpit of an F-16 or F-18. SubLogic, however, emphasized realism above all else, even when the calculations required to achieve it meant that their games chugged along at all of one or two frames per second on the hapless likes of a Commodore 64, the industry’s bread-and-butter platform. MicroProse, on the other hand, recognized that they were never really going to be able to realistically simulate an F-15 or a World War II submarine on a computer with 64 K. They settled for a much different balance of playability and fun, one that gave the player a feeling of really “being there” but that was accessible to beginners and, just as importantly, ran at a decent clip and looked reasonably attractive while doing so. Stealey himself admitted that “I can’t even land Flight Simulator, and I’ve got 3000 flying hours behind me!” Fred Schmidt, MicroProse’s first marketing director, delivers another telling quote:

We’re not trying to train fighter pilots or submarine captains. What we’re trying to do is give people who will never have a chance to go inside a submarine the opportunity to get inside one and take it for a spin around the block to see what it is like. Our simulations give them that chance. They get a close-up look at simulated real life. They feel it, they experience the adventure. And at the end of the adventure, we want them to feel they got their money’s worth.

There’s an obvious kinship here with the idea of “aesthetic simulations” as described by Michael Bate, designer of Accolade hits like Ace of Aces. MicroProse, though, pushed the realism meter much further than Bate, to just before the point where the games would lose so much accessibility as to become niche products. Stealey was never interested in being niche. The peculiar genius of MicroProse, and particularly of Sid Meier, who contributed extensively even to most MicroProse games that didn’t credit him as lead designer, was to know just where that point was. This was yet another quality they shared with Tom Clancy.

That said, make no mistake: the veneer of realism, however superficial it might sometimes be, was every bit as important to MicroProse’s appeal as it was to Clancy’s. And the veneer of authenticity provided by Wild Bill Stealey, however superficial it might be — sorry, Wild Bill — was critical to achieving this impression. Stealey had started playing in earnest the role of the hotshot fighter jock by the time of F-15 Strike Eagle, the manual for which opened with an illustration of him in his flight suit and a dedication saying the game would “introduce you to the thrill of fighter-aircraft flying based on my fourteen years experience.” Under his signature is written “Fighter Pilot,” before the more apropos title of “President, MicroProse Software.” All of which probably read more impressively to those not aware that Stealey had never actually flown an F-15 or any other supersonic fighter, having spent his career flying subsonic trainers, transport aircraft, and second-string light attack planes. All, I have no doubt, are critical roles requiring a great deal of skill and bravery — but, nevertheless, the appellation of “fighter pilot” is at best a stretch.

Stealey today freely admits that he was playing a character — not to say a caricature — for much of his time at MicroProse, that going to conventions and interviews wearing his flight suit, for God’s sake, wasn’t exactly an uncalculated decision. He also admits that other industry bigwigs, among them Trip Hawkins, loved to make fun of him for it. But, he says, “how do you remember a small company? It needs something special. All we had was Sid and Wild Bill.” And Sid certainly wasn’t interested in helping to sell his games.

Stealey seemed to particularly delight in doing his swaggering Right Stuff schtick for the press in Europe, where MicroProse had set up a subsidiary to sell their games already by 1986. Wild Bill in full flight was an experience that deserves a little gallery of its own. So, here are the reports of just a few mild-mannered journalists lucky or unlucky enough to be assigned to interview Stealey.

“See that,” he bawled, tapping the largest ring I’ve ever seen on my desk, waking up the technical experts in the Commodore User offices, “that’s a genuine American Air Force Fighter Pilot’s Ring. Do that in a barroom in the States and you get instant service… they know you’re a fighter pilot.”

As far as Stealey is concerned, the only real pilots are fighter pilots. “What about airline pilots?” I ask. “Bus drivers,” says Wild Bill. Alright then — what about the pilots who talk endlessly about the freedom, the solitude, and the spiritual experience of flying?

“You wanna talk spiritual? I’ll tell you what’s spiritual… flying upside down in an F-15, doing mach 1.5 high above the Rocky Mountains, with the sun behind and the Pacific Ocean ahead of you… that’s spiritual… the rest is just sightseeing.

“Whooosh,” says Wild Bill, thrusting his hand through the air to illustrate his point.

“I’m selling these games to men. If you haven’t got the right stuff, I don’t want to know. I’m not interested in the kind of guy who just wants a short thrill. If you want to spend £6 on an arcade game that you’re going to play for half an hour, I don’t want you buying my software.”

Despite MicroProse’s size, growth has been accomplished at an intentionally conservative rate. Bill Stealey attributes this to his fighter-pilot background. Wait a minute — fighter pilots as conservative? “Of course fighter pilots are conservative. We wait until we accumulate sufficient data and then we wax the bad guys.”

Bill Stealey tells you all this in his usual verbal assault mode. Being on the other end of this barrage is to feel disoriented and dazed. Gradually, your senses return. You realize that there are other software houses out there, a possibility Bill hardly admits.

As soon as finances allowed, MicroProse took the Wild Bill Show to the next level by purchasing for him an unusual sort of company plane: a Navy surplus T-28 Trojan trainer. The plane cost a small fortune to keep in service, but it was worth it to let Stealey take up queasy, knock-kneed gaming journalists — and, occasionally, the lucky MicroProse fan — and toss the T-28 through some high-performance aerobatics.

Wild Bill prepares to terrorize another journalist, in this case Jim Gracely, Managing Editor of Commodore Magazine.

Of course, one person’s charming fighter jock is another’s ugly American. Not all journalists, especially in Europe, were entirely taken with either Stealey’s persona or with what one Commodore User journalist pointedly described as the “militaristic and Cold War tinge of MicroProse’s products.” This undercurrent of grumbling would erupt into a real controversy in Europe upon the release of Gunship, MicroProse’s big game of 1986.

By far MicroProse’s most ambitious, expensive, extended, and problem-plagued project yet, Gunship was helmed by a new arrival, a veteran designer of board games named Arnold Hendrick. Another helicopter game, it was originally conceived as a science-fictional “cops and robbers” scenario, playing on the odd but significant fascination the American media of the mid-1980s suddenly had with futuristic helicopters — think Blue Thunder and Airwolf. Work on the game began in earnest in April of 1985, with an announced shipping date of November of the same year, but Hendrick’s little team struggled mightily to devise a suitable flight model and graphics engine. At last, with two months to go, Meier wrote a new 3D aviation engine from scratch in just one month on a prototype of Commodore’s new 68000-based computer, the Amiga. It was decided to delay the game “indefinitely,” to make a “massive redeployment” in Stealey’s typical military jargon and port Mier’s work back to the little Commodore 64, the platform MicroProse knew best and the one that consistently sold best. With Stealey increasingly eager to define MicroProse exclusively as a maker of realistic simulations, the premise of the game was overhauled as well, to become a more sober — relatively speaking — depiction of the real-world AH-64 Apache assault chopper. By the time it finally arrived on the market in late 1986, it had absorbed three times as much time as expected and its development team had grown to four times the size anticipated. MicroProse had come a long way from the days of Floyd of the Jungle.

Just about everyone inside the games industry agreed that the delay had been worth it; this was MicroProse’s best game yet. Gunship‘s most innovative feature, destined to have a major impact not only on future games from MicroProse but on future games in general, was the way it let you simulate not just an individual mission but an entire career. When you start the game, you create and name a pilot of your own, a greenhorn of a sergeant. You then take on missions of your choice in any of four regions, picking and choosing as you will among four wars that are apparently all going on at the same time: Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East, or Western Europe (i.e., the Big One, a full-on Soviet invasion). If you perform well, you earn medals and promotions. If you get shot down you may or may not survive, and depending on where you crash-land may end up a prisoner of war. Either death or capture marks the definitive end to your Gunship career; this invests every moment spent in the combat zones with extra tension. The persistent career gives Gunship an element lacking from MicroProse’s previous simulations: a larger objective, larger stakes, beyond the successful completion of any given mission. It invests the game with an overarching if entirely generative plot arc of sorts as well as the addictive character-building progression of a CRPG, adding so much to the experience that career modes would quickly become a staple of simulations to come.

But some bureaucrats in West Germany were not so taken with Gunship as most gamers. There the “Bundesprüfstelle für Jugendgefährdende Schriften,” a list of writings and other communications that should not be sold to minors or even displayed in shops which they could enter, unexpectedly added Gunship to their rolls, to be followed shortly thereafter by F-15 Strike Eagle and Silent Service for good measure, for the sin of “promoting militarism” and thus being “morally corruptive and coarsening for the young user.” West Germany at the time constituted only about 1 percent of MicroProse’s business, but was likely the most rapidly expanding market for computers and computer games in the world. The blacklisting meant that these three games, which together constituted the vast majority of MicroProse’s sales in West Germany or anywhere else, could be sold only in shops offering a separate, adults-only section with its own entrance. Nor could they be advertised in magazines, or anywhere else where the teenage boys who bought MicroProse’s games in such numbers were able to see them. The games were, in other words, given the legal status of pornography: not, strictly speaking, censored, but made very difficult for people, especially young people, to acquire or even to find out about. If anything, it would now be harder for even an adult to get his hands on a MicroProse game than a porn film. There was after all a shopping infrastructure set up to support porn aficionados. There were no equivalent shops for games; certainly no computer store was likely to make a new entrance just to sell a few games. Thus the decision effectively killed MicroProse in West Germany. Stealey embarked on a long, exhausting battle with the German courts to have the decisions overturned. By the time he was able to get the Silent Service ban lifted, in 1988, that game was getting old enough that the issue was becoming irrelevant. Gunship and F-15 Strike Eagle took even longer to get stricken from the blacklist.

The debate over free speech and its limits is of course a complicated one, and one on which Germany, thanks to its horrific legacy of Nazism and its determination to ensure that nothing like that ever happens again, tends to have a somewhat different perspective than the United States. The authorities’ concerns about “militarism” also reflected a marked difference in attitude on the part of continental Western Europe from that of the anglosphere of the United States and Britain, both beneficiaries (or victims, if you prefer) of recent conservative revolutions led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher respectively. Europeans found it more difficult to be so blasé about the prospect of war with the Soviet Union — a war which would almost certainly be fought on their soil, with all the civilian death, destruction, and suffering that implied. In West Germany, blithely choosing to send your fictional Gunship pilot to the Western Europe region to fight against what the manual gushingly described as the “first team” in the “big time” struck much closer to home.

MicroProse was also involved in another, more cut-and-dried sort of controversy at the time of Gunship. Long before MicroProse, there had already existed a company called “MicroPro,” maker of the very popular WordStar word processor. As soon as MicroProse grew big enough to be noticed, MicroPro had begun to call and send letters of protest. At last, in 1986, they sued for trademark infringement. MicroProse, who really didn’t have a legal leg to stand on, could only negotiate for time; the settlement stipulated that they had to choose a new name by 1988. But in the end the whole thing came to nothing when MicroPro abruptly changed their own name instead, to WordStar International, and let MicroProse off the hook.

In the big picture these were all minor hiccups. MicroProse would continue to make their accessible, entertaining, and usually bestselling military simulations for years to come after Gunship: Airborne Ranger, F-19 Stealth Fighter, F-15 Strike Eagle II, M1 Tank Platoon, just to begin the list. In 1988 they cemented once and for all their status as the game publisher for the Tom Clancy generation with the release of Red Storm Rising, the game of the book.

The ultimate meeting of the simulation-industrial complex: Sid Meier, Wild Bill Stealey, Tom Clancy, and Larry Bond (Clancy’s consultant and collaborator on the Red Storm Rising scenario, as well as author of the Harpoon naval board game).

By then, however, the restlessly creative Sid Meier was also finding ways to push beyond the military-simulation template to which Stealey would have happily held him in perpetuity. In doing so he would create some of the best, most important games in history. Sid Meier and MicroProse are thus destined to be featured players around here for quite some time to come.

(Lots and lots of sources this time around. Useful for the article as a whole: the books Gamers at Work by Morgan Ramsay, Computer Gaming World of November 1987, Commodore Magazine of September 1987. Tom Clancy and cultural background: the book Command and Control by Eric Schlosser, New York Times Magazine of May 1 1988, Computer Gaming World of July 1988. General Instruments and the Red Baron anecdote: ComputerWorld of May 16 1977, Computer Gaming World of June 1988. On MicroProse’s name and the dispute with MicroPro: Computer Gaming World of October 1987 and November 1991, A.N.A.L.O.G. of September 1987. Reviews, advertisements, and anecodtes about individual games: Antic of May 1983 and June 1984 and November 1984, Computer Gaming World of January/February 1986 and March 1987, Commodore Magazine of December 1988, C.U. Amiga of August 1990. On the “promoting militarism” controversy: Computer Gaming Forum of Fall 1987 and Winter 1987, Commodore User of June 1987, Computer Gaming World of May 1988, Aktueller Software Markt of May 1989. Examples of the Wild Bill Show: Commodore User of May 1985, Your Computer of May 1985 and November 1987, Commodore Disk User of November 1987, Popular Computing Weekly of May 1 1986, Games Machine of October 1988 and November 1988. On the development of Gunship: the book Gunship Academy by Richard Sheffield. This article’s “cover art” was taken from the MicroProse feature in the September 1987 Commodore Magazine. If you’d like to see a premiere MicroProse simulation from this era in action, feel free to download the Commodore 64 version of Gunship from right here.)

Comments
18 Responses

- iPadCary

March 19, 2015 at 7:27 pm

Love watching Major Stealy on episodes of “Computer Chronicles”!

- Victor Gijsbers

March 19, 2015 at 11:28 pm

Sid Meier made flight sims? I had never expected that.

- VectorM

March 20, 2015 at 1:05 am

I used to work at a flight school and maintenance shop at an airport in PA. “Wild Bill” used to bring his private plane (at least I assumed it was his) in for maintenance occasionally. I knew who he was because I was familiar with MicroProse, their games, and the aura of Wild Bill. He seemed to me like an average guy and was always very quiet…not at all like his character. My impression was that it was all shtick.

- LoneCleric

March 20, 2015 at 8:33 pm

“A new designer, William F. Denman, Jr., created an aerobatics simulation called Acrojet.”

ASYLUM!!

As you went through the years, it was clear that you wouldn’t be talking about him, but with this passing mention, I felt obligated to point that this designer gave us a wacky text-and-graphics adventure I remember very fondly.

http://www.swobi.at/asylum/asylum.html

- Brian Bagnall

March 21, 2015 at 12:28 pm

I think MicroProse ushered in the age of game manuals. Those things were sometimes thick as a bible but seemed well designed. These days it would be laughable to expect someone to read a manual before playing a game.

- Carl

March 22, 2015 at 1:42 am

Indeed, their manuals were third (in my experience) only to Origin and Infocom. I loved the Airborne Ranger manual, I used to carry it around the house and read it like a book when it came out in Junior High.

Another company that had great manuals was Cinemaware (I’m sure they will be written about here soon… or have they already?). Wings had the first manual that I can say moved me. It may be the only one that ever did.

- Andrew McCarthy

March 22, 2015 at 1:45 am

I like manuals, but I also really liked the “feelies” that were packaged with computer games back in the day.

I think it’s a pity that LucasArts basically stopped putting out feelies after Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Sierra and Infocom were always better in that department.

- Andrew McCarthy

March 21, 2015 at 3:38 pm

I love old thick manuals. I also love the “feelies” that used to come along with them.

But that was back in the days of big, thick game boxes–which are now much smaller.

However, I’m glad that Kickstarter allows developers an opportunity to make “feelies” again.

- Pedro Timóteo

March 22, 2015 at 10:49 am

Great as always. Ah, the great times spent playing Project Stealth Fighter (before the game was renamed to F-19) on my Spectrum +3… and then F-19 on the PC.

And, as you mention, arguably the best of Microprose is still to come. It’ll take a while before you get to Darklands and X-COM / UFO, and even the earlier Civilization, but a certain pirate game is just around the corner…

Obligatory typo: “Meir”

- Jimmy Maher

March 23, 2015 at 9:42 am

Thanks!

- Scott Gage

March 25, 2015 at 4:13 am

This article fills me with glee, simply because it means Pirates! might be coming up soon!

And another for the typo count:

All four services were widely widely perceived as a refuge for psychopaths, deadbeats, and, increasingly, druggies.

- Jimmy Maher

March 25, 2015 at 11:42 am

Thanks!

- Captain Rufus

March 26, 2015 at 8:43 am

Gunship was the first purchased game I got for my Commodore 64c back for Christmas 1987. My parents said Origin’s Autoduel was too expensive at Toys R Us but Gunship was ok. (They were already dropping around 600 for my C64 rig in 87 dollars, a TV set they had moved past taking the spot as the monitor, and a computer desk bought a couple months beforehand.) I absolutely loved the game as a 13 year old who grew up with action movies and the like of that timeframe. I am still impressed as hell with the amount of accessibility it had and how good the manual was. The very well laid out keyboard commands on an overlay helped a lot too.

- ZUrlocker

March 27, 2015 at 2:57 pm

Great article. I really enjoyed Covert Action back in the day. I didn’t get very far into it, but it was still a lot of fun. Note that Covert Action as well as a few other classic Microprose titles are available at http://www.gog.com/ for sale under $10.

- Peter Piers

January 7, 2016 at 8:42 pm

“MicroProse, though, pushed the realism meter much further than Bate, to just before the point where the games would lose so much accessibility as to become niche products. Stealey was never interested in being niche. The peculiar genius of MicroProse, and particularly of Sid Meier, who contributed extensively even to most MicroProse games that didn’t credit him as lead designer, was to know just where that point was. ”

I’m having a lot of difficulty parsing this paragraph, Stealy and Meier = MicroProse, right? They pushed realism to the point of being niche, and theur genius was knowing where the niche point was so that they wouldn’t get there?

Maybe you mean SubLogic in that first sentence?

- Peter Piers

January 7, 2016 at 11:05 pm

“Just before”, riiiiiiiiiight.

Never mind me…

- Richard Hewison

February 14, 2016 at 10:48 pm

I worked for MicroProse for a short while after the UK company bought up Firebird and Rainbird from BT and I went along for the ride (back in 1989)… which brings me to my anecdote. My very first flight in an aircraft was piloted by Wild Bill Stealey in a little two-seater plane somewhere on the outskirts of Gloucestershire in a field, as part of the MicroProse UK’s Summer barbecue. Having an US ex-fighter pilot throw that little plane around was something I’ve never ever forgotten!!

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The 68000 Wars, Part 1: Lorraine
March 27, 2015

This is what a revolutionary technology looks like. In very early 1986 Tim Jenison, founder of NewTek, began distributing these full-color digitized photographs, the first of their kind ever to be seen on a PC screen, to Amiga public-domain software exchanges. The age of multimedia computing had arrived.

The Amiga was the damnedest computer. A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, then all crammed into a plastic case; that was the Amiga. I wrote a book about the thing, and I’m still not sure I can make sense of all of its complications and contradictions.

The Amiga was a great computer when it made its debut in 1985, better by far than anything else on the market. At its heart was the wonderchip of the era, the Motorola 68000, the same CPU found in the Apple Macintosh and the Atari ST. But what made the Amiga special was the stuff found around the 68000: three custom chips with the unforgettable names of Paula, Denise, and Agnus. Together they gave the Amiga the best graphics and sound in the industry by a veritable order of magnitude. And by relieving the 68000 of a huge chunk of the burden for generating graphics and sound as well as performing many other tasks, such as disk access, they let the Amiga dazzle while also running rings around the competition in real-world performance by virtually any test you cared to name. It all added up not just to incremental improvement but rather to that rarest thing in any field of endeavor: a generational leap.

The Amiga, especially in its original 1985 incarnation, was a terrible computer. The operating system that shipped with it was painfully buggy. If you could manage to use the machine for just an hour or two without it inexplicably running out of memory and crashing you were doing well. Other glitches were bizarrely entertaining if they didn’t happen to you personally, such as the mysterious “date virus” that could start to spread through all your disks, setting the timestamp on every file to sometime in the year 65,000 and slowing the system to a crawl. (No, this “virus” wasn’t actual malware, just a weird bug.) Of course, software could be and to a large extent eventually was fixed. Other problems were more intractable. There was, for instance, the machine’s use of interlaced video for its higher resolution modes, which caused those marvelous graphics to flicker horribly in most color combinations. Baffled users who felt like their swollen eyeballs were about to pop right out of their heads after a few hours of trying to work like this could expect to be greeted with a lot of technical explanations of why it was happening and suggestions for changing their onscreen color palettes to try to minimize it. Certainly anyone who picked up an Amiga expecting an experience similar to the famously easy-to-use Macintosh was in for a disappointment. Despite the Amiga’s sporting a superficially similar mouse-and-windows interface, users hoping to get serious work or play done on the Amiga would need to educate themselves on such technical minutiae as the difference between “chip” and “fast” memory and learn what a program’s “stack” was and how to set it manually. Even on a good day the Amiga always felt like a house of cards ready to be blown over by the first breath of wind. When the breeze came, the user was left staring at an inscrutable “Guru Meditation Error” and a bunch of intimidating numbers. Sometimes the Amiga could seem positively designed to confound.

The Amiga anticipated the future, marked the beginning of a new era. It pointed forward to the way we live and compute today. I titled my book on the machine The Future Was Here for a reason. That aforementioned generational leap in graphics and sound was the most significant in the history of the personal computer in that it made the Amiga not just a new computer but something qualitatively new under the sun: the world’s first multimedia PC. With an Amiga you could for the first time store and play back in an aesthetically pleasing way imagery and sound captured from the real world, and combine and manipulate and interact with it within the digital environment inside the computer. This changed everything about the way we compute, the way we play, and eventually the way we live, making possible everything from the World Wide Web to the iPod, iPad, and iPhone. Almost as significantly, the Amiga pioneered multitasking on a PC, another feature enabled largely by that magnificent hardware that was able to stretch the 68000 so much farther than other computers. There is considerable psychological research today that indicates that, for better or for worse, multitasking has literally changed the way we think, changed our brains — not a bad claim to fame for any commercial gadget. When you listen to music whilst Skyping on-and-off with a friend whilst trying to get that term paper finished whilst looking for a new pair of shoes on Amazon, you are what the Amiga wrought.

The Amiga was stuck in the past way of doing things, thus marking the end of an era as well as the beginning of one. It was the punctuation mark at the end of the wild-and-wooly first decade of the American PC, the last time an American company would dare to release a brand new machine that was completely incompatible with what had come before. Its hardware design reflected the past as much as the future. Those custom chips, coupled together and to the 68000 so tightly that not a cycle was wasted, were a beautiful piece of high-wire engineering created by a bare handful of brilliant individuals. If a computer can be a work of art, the Amiga certainly qualified. Yet its design was also an evolutionary dead end; the custom chips and all the rest were all but impossible to pull apart and improve without breaking all of the software that had come before. The future would lie with modular, expandable design frameworks like those employed by the IBM PC and its clones, open hardware (and software) standards that were nowhere near as sexy or as elegant but that could grow and improve with time.

The Amiga was a great success, the last such before the Wintel hegemony expanded to dominate home computing like it already did business by the mid-1980s. Its gaming legacy is amongst the richest of any platform ever, including some fifteen years worth of titles that, especially during the first half of that period, broke boundaries at every turn and expanded the very notion of what a computer game could be. I won’t even begin to list here the groundbreaking classics that were born on the Amiga; suffice to say that they’ll be featuring in this blog for years to come. The Amiga was so popular a gaming platform in Europe that it survived many years after the death of its corporate parent Commodore, a phenomenon unprecedented in consumer computing. The last of the many glossy newsstand magazines devoted to it, Britain’s Amiga Active, didn’t cease publication until November of 2001, well over seven years after the platform became an orphan. It would prove to be just as long-lived in its other major niche of video-production workstation. Thanks to their unique ability to blend their own visuals with analog video signals — enabled, ironically, by those very same interlaced video modes that drove so many users crazy — Amigas could be found in the back rooms of small cable stations and video producers into the 2000s. Only the great changeover to digital HD broadcasting finally and definitively put an end to the Amiga’s career in this realm.

The Amiga was a bitter failure, one of the great might-have-beens of computer history. In 1985 so many expected it to become so much more than just another game machine or even “just” the pioneer of the whole new field of desktop video, forerunner of the YouTube generation. The Amiga, believed its early adopters, was so much better — not just technically better but conceptually better — than what was already out there that it was surely destined to conquer the world. After all, business-software heavy hitters like WordPerfect, Borland, Ashton-Tate, and Lotus knew a good thing when they saw it, were already porting their applications to it. And yet in the end only WordPerfect came through, for a while, and, while the Amiga did change the world in the long term, its innovations were refined and made into everyday life by Apple and Microsoft rather than the Amiga itself. The vast majority of heirs to the Amiga’s legacy today — a number which includes virtually every citizen of the developed world — have no idea a computer called the Amiga ever existed.

That’s just a sample of the contradictions awaiting any writer who tries to seriously tackle the Amiga as a subject. And there’s also another, more ironic sort of difficulty to be confronted: the sheer love the Amiga generated on the part of so many who had one. The Amiga, I must confess, was my own first computing love. Since that day in 1994 when I gave in and bought my first Wintel machine, I’ve been platform-agnostic. Linux and Apple zealots and Microsoft apologists all leave me cold, leave me wondering how people can get so passionate about any platform not called Amiga. Of course I’m smart enough to realize that none of this is really all that important, that a gadget is just that, a means to an end. I even recognize that, had the Amiga not come along when it did to pioneer a new paradigm for computing, something else would have. That’s just how history works. But still, there was something special about the Amiga for those of us who were there, something going far beyond even a hacker’s typical love for his first computer.

To say Amiga users had — still have — a reputation for zealotry hardly begins to state the case. General-computing magazines from the late 1980s until well into the 1990s learned to expect a deluge of hate mail from Amiga users every time they published an article that dared say an unfavorable word about the platform — or, worse, and as inevitably happened more and more frequently as time went on and the Amiga faded further from prominence, that didn’t mention it at all. Prominent mainstream columnist John C. Dvorak liked to say that, whereas Mac users were just arrogant and self-righteous, Amiga users were actively delusional. There are still folks out there clinging to their 25-year-old Amigas, patched together with the proverbial duct tape and baling wire, as their primary computing platform. A disturbing number of them are still waiting for the day when the Amiga shall rise again and take over the world, even as it’s hard to understand what a modern Amiga should even be or why it should exist in a world that long since incorporated all of the platform’s best ideas into slicker, simpler gadgets.

Every good cult needs an origin myth, and the Cult of Amiga is no exception. Beginning already in the machine’s North American heyday of the late 1980s, High Priest R.J. Mical, developer of the Amiga’s Intuition library of GUI widgets as well as other critical pieces of its software infrastructure, began traveling to trade shows and conventions telling in an unabashedly sentimental way the story of those earliest days, when the Amiga was being developed by a tiny independent company, itself called simply Amiga, Incorporated.

We were trying to find people that had fire, that had spirit, that had a dream they were trying to accomplish. Carl Sassenrath, the guy that did the Exec for the machine, it was his lifelong dream to do a multitasking operating system that would be a work of art, that would be a thing of beauty. Dale Luck, the guy that did the graphics, this was his undying dream since he was in college to do this incredible graphics stuff.

We were looking for people with that kind of passion, that kind of spirit. More than anything else, the thing that we were looking for was people who were trying to make a mark on the world, not just in the industry but on the world in general. We were looking for people that really wanted to make a statement, that really wanted to do an incredibly great thing, not just someone who was looking for a job.

Yes. Well. While idealism certainly has its place in the Amiga story, the story is also a very down-to-earth tale of competition inside Silicon Valley. It begins in 1982 with an old friend of ours: Larry Kaplan, one of the Fantastic Four game programmers from Atari who founded Activision along with Jim Levy.

Activison was flying high in 1982, the Fantastic Four provided in Kaplan’s own words with “limousine service, company cars, and a private chef” on top of a base salary of $150,000. Yet Kaplan, who is often described by others as the very apotheosis of “the grass is always greener,” was restless. He had the idea to form another company, one all his own this time, to enter the booming Atari VCS market. One day in early 1982 he called up an old colleague of his from the Atari days: Jay Miner, who had designed the Atari VCS’s display chip, then gone on to design the chipset at the heart of the Atari 400 and 800 home computers. Kaplan, along with two others of the Fantastic Four, had written the operating system and BASIC language implementation for those machines. He thus knew Miner well. Knowing the vagaries of business and starting his own company somewhat less well than he knew Miner and programming, his initial query was a simple one: “I’d like to start a company. Do you know any lawyers?”

Miner, who had left Atari at around the same time as the Fantastic Four out of a similar disgust with new CEO Ray Kassar, had also left Silicon Valley to move to Freeport, Texas, where he worked for a small semiconductor company called Zymos, designing chips for pacemakers and other medical devices. Miner said that, no, he wasn’t particularly well-acquainted with any lawyers, good or otherwise, but that his boss, Zymos founder Bert Braddock, had a pretty good head for business. He made the introduction, and Kaplan and Braddock hit it off. The plan that Kaplan presented to him was to combine hardware and software in the booming home videogame space, offering hardware to improve on the Atari VCS’s decidedly limited capabilities along with game cartridges that took advantage of the additional gadgetry. Such a scheme was hardly original to him; confronted with the VCS’s enormous popularity and equally enormous limitations, others were already working the same space. For example, two other former Atari engineers, Bob Brown and Craig Nelson, had already formed Starpath to develop a “Supercharger” hardware expansion for the VCS as well as games to play with it. (Starpath would go on to merge with the newly renamed Epyx — née Automated Simulations — and write games like Summer Games.)

Nevertheless, Braddock sensed a potentially fruitful partnership in the offing for a maker of chips like his Zymos. He found Kaplan some investors in nearby oil-rich Houston to put up the first $1 million or so to get the company off the ground. He also found and recruited one Dave Morse, a vice president of marketing at Tonka Toys, to join Kaplan, believing him to be exactly the savvy business mind and shrewd negotiator the venture needed. An informal agreement was reached amongst the group: Morse would run the new company; Kaplan would write the games; Miner (working under contract, being still employed by Zymos) would design the ancillary hardware; and Zymos would manufacture the hardware and the game cartridges. Somewhere at the back of everyone’s mind was the idea that, if they were successful with their games and add-on gadgets, they might just be able to take the next step: to make a complete original game console of their own, the successor to the Atari VCS that Ray Kassar’s Atari didn’t seem all that interested in seriously pursuing.

In June of 1982, Kaplan announced to his shocked colleagues at Activision that he was moving on to do his own thing; the bridges he thus burnt have never been mended to this day. He and Morse opened a small office in Santa Clara, California, for their new company, which Kaplan named Hi-Toro. Morse and Braddock — truly a sugar daddy to die for for a fledgling corporation — beat the bushes over the months that followed for additional financing, with success to the tune of another $5 million or so. The majority were dentists and other members of the medical establishment, thanks to Braddock’s connections in that field. They knew little to nothing about computer technology, but knew very well that videogames were hot, and were eager to get in on the ground floor of another Atari.

And then the squirrely Larry Kaplan nearly undid the whole thing. He called Atari founder Nolan Bushnell that October to talk up his new company, hoping to convince him to join Hi-Toro as chairman of the board; a name like his would confer instant legitimacy. Instead the hunter became the hunted. Bushnell, who was legendary for the buckets of charm at his fingertips, convinced Kaplan to come to him, convinced him they could start a new videogame company to rival Atari together, without Zymos or Morse or Miner. Just like that, Kaplan tendered his second shocking resignation of 1982. In the end, as Kaplan later put it, “Nolan, of course, flaked out,” leaving him high and dry, if quite possibly deservedly so. He would end up completing the circle by going back to Atari before the year was up, but that gig ended when the Great Videogame Crash of 1983 hit. Widely regarded as too untrustworthy to be worth the trouble inside the industry by that point, Kaplan’s career never recovered. On the plus side, he was able to cash out his Activision stock following that company’s IPO, making him quite a wealthy man and making future work largely optional anyway — not the worst of petards for a modern-day Claudius.

Dave Morse, meanwhile, was also left high and dry, with a company and an office and lots of financing but nobody to design his products. He asked Jay Miner to leave Zymos and join him full-time at Hi-Toro, to help fill the vacuum left by Kaplan’s departure. Miner, who had been nursing for some time now a dream of doing a game console and/or a computer based around the new Motorola 68000 and who saw Hi-Toro as just possibly his one and only chance to do that, agreed — so long as he could bring his beloved cockapoo Mitchy with him to the office every day.

One of the first things to go after Kaplan left was the company name he had come up with. Everyone Morse and Miner spoke to agreed that “Hi-Toro” was a terrible name that made one think of nothing so much as lawn mowers. Morse therefore started flipping through a dictionary one day, looking for something that would come before Apple and Atari in corporate directories. He hit upon the Spanish word for “friend”: “amigo.” That had a nice ring to it, especially with “user-friendliness” being one of the buzzwords of the era. But the feminine version of the word — “amiga” — sounded even better, friendly and elegant maybe even a little bit sexy. Miner by his own later admission was ambivalent about the new name, but everyone Morse spoke to seemed very taken with it, so he let it go. Thus did Hi-Toro become Amiga.

Of course, Morse and Miner couldn’t do all the work by themselves. Over the months that followed they assembled a team whose names would go down in hacker lore. An old colleague from Atari who had worked with Miner on the VCS as well as the 400 and 800, Joe Decuir, came in under a temporary contract to help Miner start work on a new set of custom chips. A few other young hardware engineers were hired as full-time employees. Morse hired one Bob Bob Pariseau to put together a software team; he became essentially the equivalent of Jay Miner on that side of the house. The software people would soon grow to outnumber the hardware people. Among their ranks were now-legendary Amiga names like R.J. Mical, Dale Luck, and Carl Sassenrath.

The folks who came to work at Amiga were almost universally young and largely inexperienced. While tarring them with the clichéd “dreamers and misfits” label may be going too far, it is true that their backgrounds were more diverse than the Silicon Valley norm; Mical, for instance, was a failed English major who had recently spent nine months backpacking his way around the world. While their youthful idealism would do much to give the eventual Amiga computer its character, there was also a very practical reason that Morse had to fill his office with all these bright young sparks: what with financing getting harder and harder to come by as the videogame industry began to go distinctly soft, he simply couldn’t afford to pay for more experienced hands. Amiga’s financial difficulties provided the opportunity of a lifetime to a bunch of folks that may have struggled to get in the door in even the most junior of positions at someplace like Apple, IBM, or Microsoft.

The glaring exception to the demographic rule at Amiga was Jay Miner himself. Creative, bleeding-edge engineering is normally a young person’s game. Miner, however, was fully 50 years old when he created his masterpiece, the Amiga chipset. He’d been designing circuits already twenty years before the microprocessor even existed and well before some of his colleagues around the office were even born. Thanks perhaps to intermittent but chronic kidney problems that would eventually kill him at age 62, he looked and in some ways acted even older than his years, favoring quiet, contemplative hobbies like cultivating bonsai trees and carving model airplanes out of balsa wood. Adjectives like “fatherly” rival “soft-spoken” and “wise” in popularity when people who knew him remember him today. While the higher-strung Dave Morse became the face Amiga showed to the outside world, Miner set the internal tone, tolerating and even encouraging the cheerful insanity that was life inside the Amiga offices. Miner:

The great things about working on the Amiga? Number one I was allowed to take my dog to work, and that set the tone for the whole atmosphere of the place. It was more than just companionship with Mitchy — the fact that she was there meant that the other people wouldn’t be too critical of some of those we hired, who were quite frankly weird. There were guys coming to work in purple tights and pink bunny slippers. Dale Luck looked like your average off-the-street homeless hippy with long hair and was pretty laid-back. In fact the whole group was pretty laid-back. I wasn’t about to say anything — I knew talent when I saw it and even Parasseau who spread the word was a bit weird in a lot of ways. The job gets done and that’s all that matters. I didn’t care how solutions came about even if people were working at home.

The question of just what this group was working on, and when, is a harder question to answer than you might expect. When we use the word “Amiga” to refer to this era, we could be talking about any of three possibilities. Firstly, there’s Amiga the company, which during its early months put well over half of its personnel and resources into games and add-ons for the old Atari VCS rather than revolutionary new technology. Then there’s the Amiga chipset being designed by Miner and his team. And finally there’s a completed game console and/or computer to incorporate the chipset. Making sense of this tangle is complicated by revisionist retellings, which tend to find grand plans and coherent narratives where none actually existed. So, let’s take a careful look at each of these Amigas, one at a time.

The Amiga Joyboard

Kaplan’s original plan had envisioned Hi-Toro/Amiga as a maker first and foremost of cartridges and hardware add-ons for the VCS, with a whole new console possibly to follow if things went gangbusters. These plans got reprioritized somewhat when Kaplan left and Miner came aboard with his eagerness to do a console and/or computer, but they were by no means entirely discarded. Thus Amiga did indeed create a handful of original games over the course of 1983, along with joysticks and other hardware. By far the most innovative and best-remembered of these products was something called the Joyboard: a large, flat slab of plastic on which the player stood and leaned side to side and front to back to control a game in lieu of a joystick. Amiga packaged a skiing game, Mogul Maniac, with the Joyboard, and developed at least two more — a surfing game called Surf’s Up and a pattern-matching exercise called Off Your Rocker — that never saw release. The Joyboard and its companion products have been frequently characterized as little more than elaborate ruses designed to keep the real Amiga project under wraps. In reality, though, Morse had high commercial hopes for this side of his company; he was in fact depending on these products to fund the other side of the operation. He spent quite lavishly to give the Joyboard a splashy introduction at the New York Toy Fair in February of 1983, and briefly hired former Olympic skier Suzy Chaffee — better known to a generation of Americans as “Suzy Chapstick” thanks to her long-running endorsement of that brand — to serve as spokesperson. His plans were undone by the Great Videogame Crash. The peripherals and games all failed miserably, precipitating a financial crisis at Amiga to which I’ll return shortly.

The chips were always Jay Miner’s babies. Known in the early days as Portia, Daphne, and Agnus, later iterations would see Portia renamed to Paula and Daphne to Denise. Combined with a 68000, they offered unprecedented audiovisual capabilities, including a palette of 4096 colors and four-channel stereo sound. Their most innovative features were the so-called “copper” and “blitter” housed inside Agnus. The former, which could also be found in a less advanced version in Miner’s previous Atari 400 and 800, could run short programs independent of the CPU to change the display setup on the fly in response to the perpetually repainting electron gun behind the television or monitor reaching certain points in its cycle. This opened to the door to a whole universe of visual trickery. The blitter, meanwhile, could be programmed to copy blocks of memory from place to place at lightning speeds, and in the process perform transformations and combinations on the data  — once again, independent of the CPU. It was a miracle worker in the realm of fast animation. While not programmable in the same sense as the copper and the blitter, Denise autonomously handled the task of actually painting the display, while Paula could autonomously play back up to four sound samples or waveforms at a time, and also independently handle input and output to disk. (This is the briefest of technical summaries of the Amiga chipset. For a detailed description of the chipset’s internal workings as well as many important aspects of its host platform’s history that I’ll never get to in this game-focused blog, I point you again to my own book on the subject.)

Amiga’s ultimate vision for their chipset — whether in the form a game console, a computer, a standup arcade game, or all three — is the most difficult part of all their tangled skein of intentionality to unravel, and the one most subject to revisionist history. Amiga fanatics of later years, desperate to have their platform accepted as a “serious” computer like the IBM PC or Apple Macintosh, became rather ashamed of its origins in the videogame industry. This has occasionally led them to say that the Amiga was always secretly intended to be a computer, that the videogame plans were just there to fool the investors and keep the money flowing. In truth, there’s good reason to question whether there was any real long-term plan at all. Miner noted in later interviews that the company was quite split on the subject, with — ironically in light of his later status of Amiga High Priest — R.J. Mical on the “investors’ side,” pushing for a low-cost game console, while others like Dale Luck and Carl Sassenrath wanted an Amiga computer. Miner himself claimed to have envisioned a console that could be expanded into a real computer with the addition of an optional keyboard and disk drive. (Amiga also had similar plans for the Atari VCS in the form of something to be called the Amiga Power Module, yet another project killed by the videogame collapse.) Dave Morse, who died in 2007, is not on record at all on the subject. One suspects that he was simply in wait-and-see mode through much of 1983.

What is clear is that the first Amiga machine to be shown to the public wasn’t so much a prototype of a real or potential computer or game console as the most minimalist possible frame to show off the capabilities of the Amiga chipset. Named after Morse’s wife, the Amiga Lorraine began to come together in the dying days of 1983, in a mad scramble leading up to the Winter Consumer Electronics Show that was scheduled to begin on January 4. Any mad scientist would have been proud to lay claim to the contraption. Miner and his team built their chipset, destined eventually to be miniaturized and etched into silicon, out of off-the-shelf electronics components, creating a pile of breadboards large enough to fill a kitchen table, linked together by a spaghetti-like tangle of wires, often precariously held in place with simple alligator clips. It had no keyboard or other input method; the software team wrote programs for it on a workstation-class 68000-based computer called the Sage IV, then uploaded them to the Lorraine and ran them via a cabled connection. The whole mess was a nightmare to maintain, with wires constantly falling off, pieces overheating, or circuits shorting out seemingly at random. But when it worked it provided the first tangible demonstration of Miner’s extraordinary design. Amiga accordingly packed it all up and transported it — very carefully! — to Las Vegas for its coming-out party at Winter CES.

R.J. Mical and Dale Luck, amongst others, had worked feverishly to create a handful of demos to show off in a private corner of Amiga’s CES booth, open only by invitation to hand-selected members of the press and industry. The hit of the bunch, written by Mical and Luck at the show itself in one feverish all-night hacking session fueled by “a six pack of warm beer,” was a huge, checked soccer ball that bounced up and down, prototype of one of the most famous computerized demos of all time. The bouncing soccer ball — the “boing” ball — would soon become the unofficial symbol of Amiga.

See https://www.youtube.com/embed/cJcO628yCcU

Boing and the other demos were impressive, but the hardware was obviously still in a very rough state, still a long, long way away from any sort of salable product. Many observers were frankly skeptical whether this mass of breadboards and wires even could be turned into the three chips Amiga promised, and if so whether those chips could, complicated as they must inevitably be, be cost-effectively manufactured. Two obvious applications of the chipset, to a new videogame console or to standup arcade games, were facing a gale-force headwind following the Great Videogame Crash of the previous year. Nobody wanted anything to do with that market anymore. And introducing yet another incompatible computer into the market, no matter how impressive its hardware, looked like a high-risk proposition as well. Thus most visitors were impressed but carefully noncommittal. Was there really a place for Amiga’s admittedly extraordinary technology? That was the question. Tellingly, of the glossy magazines, only Creative Computing bothered to write about Lorraine in any real detail, excitedly declaring it to have “the most amazing graphics and sound that will ever have been offered in the consumer market.” (Just to show that prescience isn’t always an either/or proposition, the same journalist, John J. Anderson, noted how important it would be to make sure any eventual Amiga computer was compatible with the IBM PCjr, which was sure to take over the industry.)

Thus Amiga’s coming-out party is best characterized as having mixed results on the whole, leading to lots of impressed observers but no new investors. And that was a big, big problem because Amiga was quickly running out of money. With the VCS products having not only failed to sell but also absorbed millions in their own right to develop, Amiga’s financial picture was getting more desperate by the week. One thing was becoming clear: there was no way they were going to be able to secure the investment needed to turn the Lorraine into a completed computer — or a completed anything else — and market it themselves. It seemed that they had three options: license the technology to someone else with deeper pockets, sell themselves outright to someone else, or go quietly out of business. As the founders mortgaged their houses to make payroll and Morse begged his creditors for loan extensions, the only company that seemed seriously interested in the Amiga chipset was the one Jay Miner would least prefer to get in bed with once again: Atari.

An Atari old-timer named Mike Albaugh had first visited Amiga well before the CES show, in November of 1983. He was given an overview of the as-yet-extant-on-paper-only chipset’s features and, knowing very well the capabilities of Jay Miner, expressed cautious interest. After their first tangible glimpse of the chipset’s capabilities at CES, Atari got serious about acquiring this incredible technology from a company that seemed all but at their mercy, desperate to make a deal that would let them stay alive a little longer. With no other realistic options on the table, Dave Morse negotiated with Atari as best he could from his position of weakness. Atari had no interest in buying a completed machine, whether of the game-console or computer variety. They just wanted that wonderful chipset. The preliminary letter of intent that Amiga and Atari signed on March 7, 1984, reflects this.

That same letter of intent, and the $500,000 that Atari transferred to Amiga as part of it, would lead to a legal imbroglio lasting years. The specifics that the letter contained, as well as — equally importantly — what it did not contain, remain persistently misunderstood to this day. Thankfully, the original agreement has been preserved and made available online by Atari historians Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel. I’ve taken the time to parse this document closely, and also enlisted the aid of a couple of acquaintances with better legal and financial minds than my own. Because it’s so critical to the story of Amiga, and because it’s been so widely misunderstood and misconstrued, I think it’s worth taking a moment here to look fairly closely at its specifics.

The document outlines a proposed arrangement granting Atari exclusive license to the chipset for use in home videogame consoles and standup arcade games, in perpetuity from the time that the finalized agreement is signed. The proposal also grants Atari a nonexclusive license to use the chips in a personal computer, subject to the restriction that Atari may first offer an add-on kit to turn a game console using the chips into a full-blown computer in June of 1985, and a standalone computer using the chips only in March of 1986. Before and continuing after Atari makes their computer using the chips, Amiga may make one of their own, but may only sell it through specialized computer dealers, not mass merchandisers like Sears or Toys ‘R’ Us. Atari, conversely, will be restricted to the mass merchandisers. The obvious intention here is to target Amiga’s products to the high-end, professional market, Atari’s to gamers and casual users. Atari will pay Amiga a royalty of $2 per computer or game console containing the chipset sold, $15 per standup arcade videogame. Note that the terms I’ve just described are only a proposal pending a finalized license agreement, without legal force — unless certain things happen to automatically trigger their going into effect, which I’ll get to momentarily.

Now let’s look at the parts of the document that do have immediate legal force. Amiga being starved for cash and still needing to do considerable work to complete the chipset, Atari will give Amiga an immediate “loan” of $500,000, albeit one which they never really expect to see paid back; again, I’ll explain why momentarily. Atari will then continue to give Amiga more loans on a milestone basis: $1 million when a finalized licensing agreement is signed; $500,000 when each of the three chips is completed and delivered to Atari ready for manufacturing. And here’s where things get tricky: once all of the chips are delivered and a licensing agreement is in place, Amiga’s outstanding loan obligations will be converted into a purchase by Atari of $3 million worth of Amiga stock. If, on the other hand, a finalized licensing agreement has not been signed by March 31 — just three weeks from the date of this preliminary agreement — Amiga will be expected to pay back the $500,000 to Atari by June 30, plus interest of 120 percent of the current Bank of America prime rate, assuming some other deal is not negotiated in the interim. If Amiga cannot or will not do so, the proposed licensing agreement outlined above will automatically go into effect as a legally binding contract, with the one very significant change that Atari will not need to pay any royalties at all — the license “shall be fully paid in exchange for cancellation of the loan.” The Amiga chipset thus serves as collateral for the loan, its blueprints and technical specifications being held in escrow by a neutral third party (the Bank of America).

There are plenty of other technicalities — for instance, Atari will be allowed to bill Amiga for their time and other resources if Amiga fails to complete the chipset, thus forcing Atari’s engineers to finish the job — but I believe I’ve covered the salient points here. (Those deeply interested or skeptical of my conclusions may want to look at a more detailed summary I prepared, or, best of all, just have a look at the original.) Looking at the contract, what jumps out first is that it wasn’t a particularly good deal for Amiga. To pay a mere $2 per console or computer sold when the chipset being paid for must be the component that literally makes that console or computer what it is seems shabby indeed. For Atari it would have represented the steal of the century. Why would Morse sign such an awful deal?

The obvious answer must of course be that he was desperate. While it’s perhaps dangerous to ascribe too much motivation to a dead man who never publicly commented on the subject, circumstantial evidence would seem to characterize this agreement as the wind-up to a final Hail Mary, a way to secure a quick $500,000 for the here and now, to keep the lights on a little longer and hope for a miracle. Morse did not sign a final licensing agreement by March 31, a very risky move indeed, as it gave Atari the right to automatically start using Amiga’s chipset, without having to pay Amiga another cent, if Morse couldn’t negotiate some other arrangement with them or find some way to pay back the $500,000 plus interest before June 30. Carl Sassenrath once described Morse as “my model for how to be cool in business.” Truly he must have had nerves of steel. And, incredibly, he would get his miracle.

(Sources: On the Edge by Brian Bagnall. Amiga User International of June 1988 and March 1993. Info of January/February 1987 and July/August 1988. Creative Computing of April 1984. Amazing  Computing, premiere issue. InfoWorld of July 12 1982. Commander of August 1983. Scott Stilphen’s interview with Larry Kaplan on the 2600 Connection website. Thanks also to Marty Goldberg for patiently corresponding with me and giving me Atari’s perspective, although I believe his conclusions about the Amiga/Atari negotiations and particularly his reading of the March 7 1984 agreement to be in error. And yeah, there’s my own book too…)

Comments
47 Responses

- iPadCary

March 27, 2015 at 7:03 pm

Nowwww we’re getting to the good stuff ….
Macintosh/Amiga/Apple][GS *drool*

- Lisa H.

March 27, 2015 at 7:07 pm

Paula, Denise, and Agnus

Odd spelling. I wonder why not “Agnes.”

Any fans of MST3K who happen to read this may remember a sketch they did one time about PC-Mac UI wars, which contained a reference to the Amiga. After Crow arguing on behalf of the PC and Tom for the Mac, there’s this exchange:

Joel: You can have a lot of fun with people hopelessly mired in computer nuances. Watch this. Hey! Has anyone seen the mouse to my Amiga?
Tom: Oh! Hahaha! Amiga!! Ha hah!
Crow: Amiga? Oh come on!
Both (derisive laughter): Hahahaha!!
Tom: Now THERE’S a machine for you…Hahah!
Crow: Hey! Has anyone seen my Fat Angus drive?? Hahah!

(All I know about the Amiga I just learned from reading this post, but it would seem there’s at least one error there. I don’t know without checking whether they actually said “Angus” or whether it was just mistranscribed on the site I copied the text from; but also, it would seem any “drive”, assuming they mean a disk drive, would have to be related to Paula, not Agnus?)

- Keith Palmer

March 27, 2015 at 10:55 pm

I went looking and found that specific sketch excerpted to YouTube, just as many other MST3K moments have been. The same season it showed up another episode included a segment where some painted-over stills from a movie were presented as “the video toaster” was mentioned, although the show never quite got around to that again, as much as it now seems to me to mesh with its “lo-fi,” “in-camera” effects…

Anyway, having bought a copy of The Future Was Here, I was actually a little surprised when this weblog pushed into 1986 without mentioning the introduction of the Amiga; I can imagine certain reasons for that in the posts soon to show up, though. While I started off on the outside looking in at “Amiga evangelism,” I’ve learned enough to understand how it has its own constellation of “what might have beens.” My family did have the October 1992 issue of Amiga World, and I wonder if my father bought it because it had a review of the AMax II Plus Macintosh emulator board (he was using an SE/30 at work) right around when he’d finally decided to spend a lot more money than our Tandy Color Computer 3s had cost to buy a new computer; it would have been late in the day to have started using an Amiga, but it’s at least something to wonder about. I’ve managed to learn a few people around my age at work had Amigas in their families (having moved up from Commodore 64s); one of them mentioned how her father had given it up with great reluctance.

- Jimmy Maher

March 28, 2015 at 6:30 am

It is an odd spelling. It’s claimed in a few places that Miner named the chip “Agnus” after the Latin phrase “agnus dei”: “lamb of God.” I tend to be a bit skeptical of this because a) while Miner was obviously a very smart guy he wasn’t really an *erudite* (pretentious?) guy in the way you’d have to be to come up with something like that; and b) why the hell would you name a computer chip the “lamb of God” anyway?

And yeah, the MST3K line about Agnus makes no sense whatsoever — which is a big part of what makes it funny. :)

- Sniffnoy

March 27, 2015 at 8:13 pm

The two links to your book currently go through Google rather than directly to the page; would you mind fixing this? Thank you!

- Jimmy Maher

March 28, 2015 at 6:22 am

Woops! Fixed.

- Matt W

March 28, 2015 at 6:47 am

Thanks also to Marty Goldberg […], although I believe his conclusions about the Amiga/Atari negotiations and particularly his reading of the March 7 1984 agreement to be in error.

Now, I’m curious. What is his reading of the agreement? Where does it significantly differ from yours?

Great, great article. I never got into the Amiga craze myself; my family could only afford a C 64 and, much later, in 1993, I think, our first PC, so I only got to admire it from afar (at a friend’s was the closest I ever came to it).

- Jimmy Maher

March 28, 2015 at 7:04 am

Thanks!

In Business Is Fun, he makes a number of misreadings of a document which can admittedly be a bit tough to parse. (I found doing so oddly entertaining. It’s a bit like a good adventure-game puzzle when it all comes together and you say, “Now I get it!”) Rather than understanding Atari’s payments to Amiga as loans to be converted into a stock purchase after certain conditions are met, he construes them to be advances, and makes the stock purchase its own animal — thus effectively doubling Atari’s planned pre-royalty payments to Amiga, from $3 million to $6 million.

Most importantly, he claims that the agreement does not allow Amiga to back out by paying back the $500,000 plus interest before June 30, when it very clearly does. He also claims that Amiga and Atari had an agreement that Amiga would not sell itself to a list of “forbidden” companies, among them Commodore. If such an agreement existed in written form — i.e., with legal force — it’s not in this document, and he so far hasn’t found any other to show me. I’m always willing to revise upon getting more information, but at this point the only way his narrative of the events surrounding the Amiga/Atari/Commodore negotiations could be correct is if there was another agreement signed between Amiga and Atari that I haven’t seen.

We’ll get more into why this is so important in future articles.

- William Hern

March 28, 2015 at 9:24 pm

Another superb article, well up to your usual high standards.

My only quibble is with your statement that the Amiga “pioneered multitasking on a PC”. Multitasking was not an unknown concept prior to the Amiga launching in the summer of 1985. In 1983 computers such as the Apple Lisa had featured pre-emptive multi-tasking and software on the PC such as IBM’s TopView and VisiCorp’s Visi On provided this feature. Windows 1.0, announced in 1983 but not available until late 1985, had co-operative multitasking.

My own recollections from 1985 were that the Amiga’s multitasking capabilities were impressive but not revolutionary. Byte’s preliminary review of the Amiga 1000 in the August 1985 edition spends much time on the Amiga’s hardware, and relatively little space on the multitasking functions in its OS.

- Jimmy Maher

March 29, 2015 at 9:30 am

Thanks!

On multitasking:

1. I wouldn’t place the examples you mention in the class of an ordinary PC, but rather in the category of the workstation computer. This category has now largely faded into history thanks to Moore’s Law, but in the 1980s it connoted a very high-end machine — albeit still technically a microcomputer — normally affordable only by big companies for their most important workers. Other examples in the category which did allow multitasking were the various 68000-based Unix workstations, like the Sage IV and later the Sun systems used to develop most of the Amiga’s operating system and lots of its other early software. However, a $10,000 or $20,000 workstation is simply another beast entirely from a $1500 — and, soon, much cheaper — consumer-level PC.

2. All of the systems you listed provided cooperative multitasking, not true preemptive multitasking at the process level like the Amiga. As I’m sure you know, cooperative multitasking is, again, a very different animal from preemptive multitasking. Unix workstations are actually probably a better example to use from this class of machine because Unix did of course offer preemptive multitasking.

3. With the exception of LisaOS, the systems you mention are all built on top of MS-DOS and are thus not really self-contained operating systems in their own right at all. This forces a lot of compromises and inelegance at both the technical level and user level which the Amiga’s OS, which has multitasking built into its very foundation — the Exec layer — does not fall victim to.

If we carry this sort of argument to extremes — not that I necessarily think this is what you’re doing — we end up saying that the Amiga originated absolutely nothing, as everything in the system was done before — and usually done better — by big institutional-class machine. But what’s important about the Amiga is that it made these ideas practical and accessible to ordinary users for the very first time. I would actually say that the best candidate for the title of “multitasking pioneer” not named Amiga would not be any of the examples you cited but rather OS-9, which offered preemptive multitasking all the way in 1979 and became a favorite of some hobbyists. But as a hacker plaything and tool for embedded systems, it also wasn’t quite the same animal as AmigaOS.

Finally, trying to determine what makes the Amiga important by looking at magazine articles from the earliest days is a dangerous practice. Most, for instance, were weirdly obsessed with making the Amiga compatitible with the IBM PC, an idea which today strikes us as rather missing the whole point of the Amiga. ;) That said, there was plenty of awareness even on the part of Commodore’s sales reps — not always the most clueful bunch — that multitasking was one of the things that made the Amiga stand apart. A favorite sales tactic was to start up the Boing demo, then pull the screen down halfway to start running other commands or typing in a word processor, etc., while the Boing ball merrily boomed and bounced away on the other half of the screen. This was, in the context of 1985, *stunning*.

- Felix

March 29, 2015 at 7:04 pm

On a similar note, a friend notes that technically the Professional Graphics Controller was capable of 640x480x8 in 1984… but it cost nearly $5K all by itself. So definitely not a product for the mass market. Still, it was there two years earlier for what it’s worth. And it was fully programmable if I understand correctly.

- William Hern

March 29, 2015 at 8:25 pm

Fair points Jimmy – the Lisa was most definitely in the workstation category of computers. As such, the Amiga was the first moderately priced computer to support pre-emptive multitasking. The bouncing ball multitasking demo was unrivalled for many years.

One small correction though – the Lisa did have pre-emptive multi-tasking (check out the scan of the Lisa OS Reference Manual – Chapter 2 – in the Internet Archive for evidence of this).

- Jimmy Maher

March 30, 2015 at 6:58 am

Hmm… are we sure of this? From the document you mention, section 1.4 (“Process Management”):

“A process can lose the CPU when one of the following happens:

The process calls an operating-system procedure or function.

The process references one of its code segments that is not currently in memory.

If neither of these occur, the process will not lose the CPU.”

Compare this to Chapter 17 of the Amiga Rom Kernal Reference Manual: Libraries.

“A running task is currently using the CPU. It will remain the current task until one of three things occur:

A higher priority task becomes ready, so the OS preempts the current task and switches to the higher priority task.

The currently running task needs to wait for an event, so it goes to sleep and Exec switches to the highest priority task in Exec’s ready list.

The currently running task had had control of the CPU for at least a preset time period called a quantum and there is another task of equal priority ready to run. In this case, the Exec will preempt the current task for the ready one with the same priority. This is known as time-slicing.”

It’s the Amiga’s ability to do the first and third thing from the list just above that makes it a preemptive multitasking system. It is, unless I’m missing something, the Lisa’s *guarantee* never to do that sort of thing to a process that makes it a cooperative multitasking system.

- William Hern

March 30, 2015 at 8:45 am

Re-reading the Lisa OS Reference Manual, I spotted this telling paragraph on Page 36: “Because the Operating System currently cannot seize the CPU from an executing process except in the cases noted above, background processes should be liberally sprinkled with YIELD_CPU calls.”

A pre-emptive multitasking OS *has* to be able to grab control of the CPU from a process. You are right – the Lisa used co-operative multitasking, not pre-emptive. I stand corrected.

- Ian Schmidt

April 1, 2015 at 12:42 am

Yup. The Lisa *hardware* was set up for preemptive multitasking (the MMU has multiple contexts, very much like the 680×0-based Suns), but the stock LisaOS never got there. (You could run XENIX on the Lisa and it of course had real preemptive multitasking).

- Alex Evans

April 9, 2015 at 3:36 am

The TRS-80 Color Computer had OS-9 with preemptive multitasking before the Amigacame out.

- kjs3

April 7, 2015 at 3:52 pm

MS Xenix and Venturecom Venix were both available on the PC at this time, and were preemptive. Not for $1500, but certainly vastly cheaper than a Sage/Sun. And, as you point out, they’re not exactly targeted at the consumer market.

- Carl

March 29, 2015 at 1:11 am

Nice article. I loved reading The Future Was Here. Highly recommended. Anyway, if anyone is interested, some people are trying to set up a 30-year anniversary event for the Amiga in Mountain View, CA on July 24th & 25th. I’m hoping to attend but my wife is schedule to deliver our first child the week before so I’m probably not going to make it. Here’s the link:

http://amiga30.com/

- Adam Sampson

March 29, 2015 at 1:32 pm

The last of the many glossy newsstand magazines devoted to it, Britain’s Amiga User, didn’t cease publication until May of 2000

You mean Amiga Format. (There was an Amiga User International magazine in the UK, but it ceased in 1997; Amiga Format’s last issue was May 2000.)

- Jimmy Maher

March 30, 2015 at 6:42 am

Fixed. Thanks!

- Matthew

March 29, 2015 at 3:11 pm

Great article – as always.

However, as an ex-Atari ST user I feel it’s my duty to pick holes in your claims for the Amiga…

The Sinclair QL microcomputer pioneered multi-tasking at least a year before the Amiga.

(I used to own one of those as well…)

- Jimmy Maher

March 30, 2015 at 7:40 am

Fair point. I’d forgotten about that one. Although given the half-finished nature of the OS and, indeed, the computer that housed it, it would seem to have been relatively little-noticed and to have had little impact. And while some rough approximation of the multitasking scenario I described in the article was possible on the Amiga, it certainly wasn’t likely on the QL, with its lack of windows and a GUI. This makes the QL’s multitasking more a power-user feature than a paradigm shift.

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- Orion

March 31, 2015 at 1:17 am

If Amiga cannot or will not do so, the proposed licensing agreement outlined above will automatically go into effect as a legally binding contract, with the one change that Atari’s royalty rate will increase to $4 per chipset used in videogame consoles or computers.

This is perhaps a bit nitpicky, but I think this isn’t quite right. What the letter of intent actually says, in paragraph 2 of section 8 on page 4, is that if they don’t sign the license agreement by March 31, and if Amiga doesn’t pay back the $500,000 by June 30, then:

Atari shall have the right to obtain the documentation held in escrow and use such documentation as permitted by the above described licenses … except that such licenses shall be fully paid in exchange for cancellation of the $500,000 note.

That is, in that case Amiga never has to pay back the loan, but Atari gets to put the chips in consoles, computers, and arcade machines without paying any royalties at all. At least, that’s how I’m reading it.

The $4 royalty comes in in the next paragraph, which says that if the completed chips aren’t delivered by September 1, then Atari can choose to demand immediate repayment of whatever money they have advanced to Amiga, but if they do that then the royalty is $4 “per Chip set” — which I assume covers both arcade and consoles/computers since the letter doesn’t specify.

- Jimmy Maher

March 31, 2015 at 6:06 am

Nitpicky, but that’s par for the course here. It’s important. And yes, you’re right. We were getting tripped up by that second tortured sentence you quoted. Edits made. Thanks so much!

- Marty Goldberg

April 2, 2015 at 11:25 pm

Orion: Which is how I actually interpret it as well based on the corresponding court depositions we have and interviews we did. The spirit of the contract was a bridge loan, and as was identified in the depositions Amiga already had several other investors before coming to Atari Inc. With how bad the company was financially (as that’s what precipitated them even approaching Atari Inc. in the first place) they needed some way to recover said initial payment should they go under before the licensing agreement was signed. Atari Inc. gave them that initial 500,000 and the documentation and chip layouts were put into escrow as collateral. That also bought Atari Inc. access to Amiga’s team for the technical knowledge necessary to start working on said gaming consoles codenamed Mickey. Furthermore, when Morse cancelled the planned June 28 signing meeting and instead came in on the 29th with the money plus interest (all received from Commodore), the situation gets more interesting because Morse’s answer tried to address both sections you’re talking about: He stated he was returning the money because they couldn’t get the chips to work (and he later testified that Lorraine didn’t work properly and was dismantled and could not be produced). His counterpart at Atari Inc. John Ferrand stated trying to ease Morse’s concerns about the date. Per his deposition:

Q. Had you any recollection at that time about a June
30th date in the letter of intent?
A. Not until Dave raised the date. It wasn’t
something that was prominent in my mind; no.
Q. And what was your response to that?
A. To —
Q. To his mention of the June 30th date.
A. My response was, “There’s absolutely no need to
concern yourself with it. Atari are not going to go into
e s c r ow. ”
Q. Did you tell him in words or substance that on
behalf of Atari you’d be prepared to waive that June 30th date
altogether?
A. No, and I was not asked to.

I.E. Morse just wanted out period and was not interested in any extensions.

- James

April 2, 2015 at 9:22 pm

Depending on what types of machines you are considering, I think I would take minor issue with this: “… the last time an American company would dare to release a brand new machine that was completely incompatible with what had come before.”

The obvious machine that comes to mind from an American company that was completely incompatible was the Apple Newton. Introduced in 1993, it was a completely new OS with a completely new language and SDK. It was not a PC so maybe it is not what you are talking about. In the same space, the more successful Palm Pilot was also completely new and completely incompatible and it came out a couple of years after the original Newton but wasn’t quite the same broad vision that Apple had for the Newton. These were the gateways to the current smartphone.

Anyway, minor nitpick. Great article.

- Jimmy Maher

April 3, 2015 at 6:52 am

Yeah, I was thinking purely in terms of general-purpose PCs.

- Zardoz

April 2, 2015 at 9:42 pm

Those custom chips, coupled together and to the 68000 so tightly that not a cycle was wasted, were a beautiful piece of high-wire engineering created by a bare handful of brilliant individuals. If a computer can be a work of art, the Amiga certainly qualified. Yet its design was also an evolutionary dead end; the custom chips and all the rest were all but impossible to pull apart and improve without breaking all of the software that had come before. The future would lie with modular, expandable design frameworks like those employed by the IBM PC and its clones, open hardware (and software) standards that were nowhere near as sexy or as elegant but that could grow and improve with time.

Yeas and not. The Amiga, not was a dead end. Indeed was the AGA chipset expanded it being backward compatible, and was the human project to release a new generation chipset. Amiga was killed by :
– PCs being more and more cheap thanks a lot of clones (and this thanks because was highly modular and not had any custom chip)
– Commodore failure to adapt to the new times, trying to repeat the success of the C64, doing a lot of flops. If Commodore would allow to the C64 lineage to die (or do a correct evolution of it, instad of doing a lot of not totally compatible successor machines) and focused to the Amiga line, perhaps could had survive like Apple did.

PD: Yep, the aGA cmachiens not was 100% backwarsds compatible, but this happened with the PCs. You can find software for the original IBM PC (and clones), that can’t run on a 80286/386 based PC’s .

- Jimmy Maher

April 3, 2015 at 6:59 am

The problem was that the Amiga was primarily regarded in its biggest market of Europe as a games machine by the time the AGA chipset arrived, and a huge swathe of games wouldn’t run on the new machines. Any program that abided by all of Commodore’s guidelines and did everything through the OS rather than hitting the hardware directly would probably be okay. But how many games did that? This was a huge problem for the Amiga, much more so than the IBM architecture that was designed to accept a lot of different video cards and a lot of different configurations in general from the start.

See also the ridiculous lengths Amiga users had to go to to work with custom video cards like the Picasso boards. This was, again, a huge problem for the platform as graphics standards on Wintel improved by leaps and bounds thanks to a stream of drop-in video card replacements during the early 1990s. I deal with these issues in more depth in my book.

- ZoltanTheHun

April 8, 2015 at 8:22 pm

My two cents to the topic: It is not the falling price of the PC that killed the Amiga, but the thing that it was not ready for the upper segment of the market, where most of the money was made with the bigger margins. It was a very bad idea to get the base machine out there with 256k of RAM and HDD support was pretty weak in the beginning. And of course the lack of business software didn’t help either.

Basically it made more sense to get an Atari ST or an IBM PC clone because you could get more business functionality for less bucks until the release of the Amiga 2000 and the Amiga 500. Even after that I would argue that PC was more suitable for the office. For example color display in offices was pretty useless at the time, and sound is almost useless even in today’s world. In some way therefore, the PC market was concerned more with speed and practicality. In the Spring of 85 you could get a Tandy with 256k RAM and 10 Megs of HDD for 2000$, and it had many disadvantages to the Amiga, but the HDD was a big advantage. And if you wanted to scale upward what could you do with the Amiga? Yes, turbocards became available in 1986, but by then 32bit 386PCs started to appear and the 1000 was no match for those. The A2000 helped somewhat, but still did not provide a flicker free high res experience, and the rigid architecture started to become the limiting factor.

- iPadCary

April 4, 2015 at 4:28 pm

An Amiga console in tne age of NES ….
*sigh* Greedy bastards.

- John Foust

April 5, 2015 at 4:12 am

Minor correction: “Bob Pariseau” is the spelling of his name.

Lisa – yes, the MST3K guys knew the Amiga well enough. They had an Amiga and then a Video Toaster, although I seem to remember that they only used its genlock and chroma key at first. Newtek loved their show and invited them to their company parties.

I’m tempted to attend the Amiga30.com event!

- Jimmy Maher

April 5, 2015 at 7:26 am

Thanks! I’ve just been looking through some of your articles from the early days of Amazing Computing…

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- Steve Dowe

April 8, 2015 at 8:26 am

Great article and certainly a strong incentive to pick up a copy of your book!

One point about glossy Amiga magazines… There was an independent monthly periodical called Amiga Active in the UK which outlasted Amiga Format.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Active

- Jimmy Maher

April 8, 2015 at 8:34 am

Thank you! I *thought* there was one that lasted longer. I’ve actually been known to use a line in mixed company about how there was actually still an Amiga magazine on the newsstands in Britain after the September 11 attacks, and how strange that strikes me as an American. But then when I went looking for it for this article I couldn’t seem to find it. Edit made.

- Mark Andrews

April 8, 2015 at 7:48 pm

Great stuff!

In August of 1985, I was considering a Mac. A good friend of mine, Nick, and I traveled to the local Apple retailer where I got a chance to play with a Mac SE with a starting price of $3,995 or somewhere there abouts. That was a lot of money for a young computer programmer making $18,500/yr.

Nick asked the salesgeek if he had heard anything about some computer called “Amiga”. “Oh yeah. That’s some game computer that Commodore is getting ready to release. I’ve seen the specs. It’s not a Mac by any means.” He was obviously defensive of his beloved Mac. Eventually we would call his type a “Fanboy”.

We left the Apple retailer. Nick told me he had heard about the Amiga while in another retail computer store about a block away. Being a geek, my curiosity was piqued and off we went. Once there, we spent the next two hours going over all the literature, talking to the salesgeek, Dave, and watching the video of the Amiga launch in NYC. I was mesmerized. Multitasking, high color – high res graphics, four channel stereo sound, a GUI. And not a single machine in the store!

At that point I made a vow I would have one. I went to my bank, talked to the loan officer and borrowed the $2,500 ($1,895 for the box and $495 for the monitor) it would take to make it mine. I waited and waited. Everyday I would go by the retailer and pester Dave, begging him to give me a delivery date. One day, six weeks later, he called me at work. My Amiga had arrived. I was the first one to take delivery in the New Orleans area. Actually, one of the first in the country.

I still have that computer, but its been packed up in storage for many years. Maybe it’s time to get it out and resurrect it. Then I can show all these young engineers around here the first, true multimedia computer and explain how it set the standard for processing, graphics and audio five to ten years before many of them were born.

- Stefan Winterstein

April 14, 2015 at 12:37 pm

Interesting read, as always.

There’s a Kickstarter campain to support Amiga’s 30th anniversary, with only 4 days left, and they have some fascinating photos of Lorraine on their Facebook page.

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- RVP

May 5, 2015 at 8:51 am

A minor correction: “…patched together with the proverbial duct tape and bailing wire…”
should be: “…duct tape and baling wire…” (Ref. “Baling wire” on Wikipedia)

- Jimmy Maher

May 8, 2015 at 9:21 am

Thanks!

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- Scott S.

August 17, 2015 at 12:23 am

“In the end, as Kaplan later put it, “Nolan, of course, flaked out,”

I see you lifted a quote from my interview with Larry Kaplan (http://www.2600connection.com/interviews/larry_kaplan/interview_larry_kaplan.html) but there’s no mention of it in your sources.

- Jimmy Maher

August 17, 2015 at 7:52 am

Sorry about that! Added.

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The 68000 Wars, Part 2: Jack Is Back!
April 2, 2015

Jack Tramiel, the computer executive most likely to be compared to Darth Vader. I wonder why?

In letting the March 31, 1984, deadline slip away without signing a licensing agreement with Atari, David Morse was taking a crazy risk. If he couldn’t find some way of scraping together $500,000 plus interest to repay Atari’s loan, Atari could walk away with the Amiga chipset for nothing, and Amiga would almost certainly go bust. All activity at Amiga therefore centered on getting the Lorraine ready for the Summer Consumer Electronic Show in Chicago, scheduled to begin on June 3. Summer CES was to be Amiga’s Hail Mary, their last chance to interest somebody — anybody — in what they had to offer enough to plunk down over half a million dollars just for openers, just to keep Atari from making the whole point moot.

By the time Summer CES arrived the Lorraine was a much more refined contraption than the one they had shown at Winter CES back in January, if still a long, long way from being a finished computer. Jay Miner’s custom chips had now been miniaturized and stamped into silicon, improving the machine’s reliability as much as it reduced its size. The Lorraine’s longstanding identity crisis was also now largely a thing of the past, the videogame crash and the example of the Macintosh having convinced everyone that what it ultimately needed to be was a computer, not a game console. Programmers like Carl Sassenrath, Dale Luck, and R.J. Mical had thus already started work on a proper operating system. Amiga’s computer was planned to be capable of doing everything the Mac could, but in spectacular color and with multitasking. That dream was, however, still a long way from fruition; the Lorraine could still be controlled only via a connected Sage IV workstation.

Led by software head Bob Pariseau as master of ceremonies, Amiga put on the best show they possibly could inside their invitation-only booth at Summer CES. The speech-synthesis library the software folks had put together was a big crowd-pleaser; spectators delighted in shouting out off-the-cuff phrases for the Lorraine to repeat, in either a male or female voice. But their hands-down favorite once again proved to be Boing, now dramatically enhanced: the ball now bounced side to side instead of just up and down, and a dramatic coup de grâce had been added in the form of sampled booms that moved from speaker to speaker to create a realistic soundscape. This impressive demonstration of Paula’s stereo-sound capabilities leaked beyond the confines of Amiga’s closed booth and out onto the crowded show floor, causing attendees to look around in alarm for the source of the noise.

Whatever the merits of their new-and-improved dog-and-pony show, Amiga also improved their credibility enormously by demonstrating that their chipset could work as actual computer chips and, indeed, simply by having survived and returned to CES once again. A bevy of industry heavyweights traipsed through Amiga’s booth that June: Sony, Hewlett Packard, Philips, Silicon Graphics, Apple. (Steve Jobs, ever the minimalist, allegedly scoffed at the Lorraine as over-engineered, containing too much fancy hardware for its own good.) The quantity and quality of Amiga’s write-ups in the trade press also increased significantly. Compute!, the biggest general-interest computing magazine in the country, raved that the Lorraine was “possibly the most advanced personal computer ever,” “the beginning of a completely new generation,” and “enough to make an IBM PC look like a four-function calculator.” Still, Amiga left the show without the thing they needed most: a viable alternative to Atari. With just a few weeks to go, their future looked grim. And then Commodore called.

To understand the reasons behind that phone call, we have to return to January 13, 1984, the day of that mysterious board meeting at Commodore that outraged their CEO Jack Tramiel so egregiously as to send him storming out of the building and burning rubber out of the parking lot, never to return. In his noncommittal statements to the press immediately after the divorce was made official, Tramiel said he planned to take some time to consider his next move. For now, he and his wife were going to spend a year traveling the world, to make up for all the vacations they had skipped over the course of his long career.

At the time that he said it, he seems to have meant it. He and wife Helen made it as far as Sri Lanka by April. But by that point he’d already had all he could take of the life of leisure. He and Helen returned to the United States so Jack could start a new venture to be called simply Tramel Technology. (The spelling of the name was changed to reflect the proper pronunciation of Tramiel’s last name; most Americans’ habit of mispronouncing the last syllable had always driven him crazy.) His plan was to scrape together funding and a team and build the mass-market successor to the Commodore 64. In the process, he hoped to stick it to Commodore and especially to its chairman, with whom he had always had a — to put it mildly — fraught relationship. Business had always been war to Tramiel, but now this war was personal.

To get Tramel Technology off the ground, he needed people, and almost all of the people he knew and had confidence in still worked at Commodore. Tramiel therefore started blatantly poaching his old favorites. That April and May at Commodore were marked by a mass exodus, as suddenly seemingly every other employee was quitting, all headed to the same place. Jack’s son Sam was the first; many felt it was likely Jack’s desire to turn Commodore into the Tramiel family business that had precipitated his departure in the first place. Then Tony Takai, the mastermind of Commodore’s Japanese branch; John Feagans, who was supposed to be finishing up the built-in software for Commodore’s new Plus/4 computer; Neil Harris, programmer of many of the most popular VIC-20 games; Ira Velinsky, a production designer; Lloyd “Red” Taylor, a president of technology; Bernie Witter, a vice president of finance; Sam Chin, a manager of finance; Joe Spiteri and David Carlone, manufacturing experts; Gregg Pratt, a vice president of operations. The most devastating defectors of all were Commodore’s head of engineering Shiraz Shivji and three of his key hardware engineers: Arthur Morgan, John Heonig, and Douglas Renn.

Shiraz Shivji, Jack Tramiel’s favorite engineer of his post-Commodore years.

The mass exodus amounted to a humiliating vote of no-confidence in Irving Gould’s hand-picked successor to Tramiel, a former steel executive named Marshall Smith who was as bland as his name. The loss of engineering talent in particular left Commodore, who had already been in a difficult situation, even worse off. As Commodore’s big new machine for 1984, the Plus/4, amply demonstrated, there just wasn’t a whole lot left to be done with the 8-bit technology that had gotten Commodore this far. Trouble was, their engineers had experience with very little else. Tramiel had always kept Commodore’s engineering staff to the bare minimum, a fact which largely explains why they had nothing compelling in the pipeline now beyond the underwhelming Plus/4 and its even less impressive little brother the Commodore 16. And now, having lost four more key people… well, the situation didn’t look good.

And that was what made Amiga so attractive. At first Commodore, like Atari before them, envisioned simply licensing the Amiga chipset, in the process quite probably — again like Atari — using Amiga’s position of weakness to extort from them a ridiculously good deal. But within days of opening negotiations their thinking began to change. Here was not only a fantastic chipset but an equally fantastic group of software and hardware engineers, intimately familiar with exactly the sort of next-generation 16-bit technology with which Commodore’s own remaining engineers were so conspicuously unacquainted. Why not buy Amiga outright?

On June 29, David Morse walked unexpectedly into the lobby of Atari’s headquarters and requested to see his primary point of contact there, one John Farrand. Farrand already had an inkling that something was up; Morse had been dodging his calls and finding excuses to avoid face-to-face meetings for the last two weeks. Still, he wasn’t prepared for what happened next. Morse told him that he was here to pay back the $500,000, plus interest, and sever their business relationship. He then proceeded to practically shove a check into the hands of a very confused and, soon, very irate John Farrand. Two minutes later he was gone.

The check had of course come from Commodore, given as a gesture of good faith in their negotiations with Amiga and, more practically, to keep Atari from walking away with the technology they’d now decided they’d very much like to have for themselves. Six weeks later negotiations between Commodore and Amiga ended with the purchase by the former of the latter for $27 million. David Morse had his miracle. His investors and employees got a nice payday in return for their faith. And, most importantly, his brilliant young team would get the chance to turn Miner’s chipset into a real computer all their own, designed — for the most part — their way.

It’s worth dwelling for just a moment here on the sheer audacity of the feat Morse had just pulled off. Backed against the wall by an Atari that smelled blood in the water, he had taken their money, used it to finish the chipset and the Lorraine well enough to get him a deal with their arch-rival, then paid Atari back and walked away. It all added up to a long con worthy of The Sting. No wonder Atari, who had gotten as far as starting to design the motherboard for the game console destined to house the chipset, was pissed. And yet the Atari that would soon seek its revenge would not be the same Atari as the one he had negotiated with in March. Confused yet? To understand we must, once again, backtrack just slightly.

Atari may have been a relative Goliath in contrast to Amiga’s David in early 1984, but that’s not to say that they were financially healthy. Far from it. The previous year had been a disastrous one, marked by losses of over half a billion thanks to the Great Videogame Crash. CEO Ray Kassar had left under a cloud of accusations of insider trading, mismangement, and general incompetence; no one turns faster on a wonder boy than Wall Street. Now his successor, a once and future cigarette mogul named James Morgan, was struggling to staunch the bleeding by laying off employees and closing offices almost by the week. Parent company Warner Communications, figuring that the videogame bubble was well and truly burst, just wanted to be rid of Atari as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Jack Tramiel, meanwhile, was becoming a regular presence in Silicon Valley, looking for facilities and technologies he could buy to get Tramel Technology off the ground. In fact, he was one of the many who visited Amiga during this period, although negotiations didn’t get very far. Then one day in June he got a call from a Warner executive, asking if he’d be interested in taking Atari off their hands.

A deal was reached in remarkably little time. Tramiel would buy not the company Atari itself but the assets of its home-computer and game-console divisions; he had no interest in its other branch, standup arcade games. Said assets included property, trademarks and copyrights, equipment, product inventories, and, not least, employees. He would pay, astonishingly, nothing upfront for it all, instead agreeing to $240 million in long-term notes and giving Warner a 32 percent stake in Tramel Technology. Warner literally sold the company — or, perhaps better said, gave away the company — out from under Morgan, who was talking new products and turnaround plans one day and arrived the next to be told to clear out his executive suite to make room for Tramiel. On July 1, just two days after Morse had given back that $500,000, the biggest chunk of Atari, a company which just a couple of years before had been the fastest growing in the history of American business, became the possession of tiny Tramel Technology, which was still being run at the time out of a vacant apartment in a dodgy neighborhood. Within days Tramiel renamed Tramel Technology to Atari Corporation. For years to come there would be two Ataris: Tramiel’s Atari Corporation, maker of home computers and game consoles, and Atari Games, maker of standup arcade games. It would take quite some time to disentangle the two; even the headquarters building would be shared for some time to come.

Legal trouble between Commodore and Jack Tramiel’s new Atari started immediately. Commodore fired the first salvo, suing Shiraz Shivji and his fellow engineers. When they had decamped to join Tramiel, Commodore claimed, they had taken with them a whole raft of technical documents under the guise of “personal goods.” A court injunction issued at Commodore’s request effectively barred them from doing any work at all for Tramiel, paralyzing his plans to start working on a new computer for several weeks. Shivji and company eventually returned a set of backup tapes taken from Commodore engineering’s in-house central server, full of schematics and other documents. Perhaps tellingly in light of the computer they would soon begin to build, many of the documents related to the Commodore 900, a prototyped but never manufactured Unix workstation to be built around the 16-bit Zilog Z8000 CPU.

Sam and Leonard Tramiel, who would play a larger and larger role in the running of Atari as time went on.

If Tramiel was looking for a way to get revenge, he was soon to find what looked like a pretty good opportunity. Whilst going through files of documents in early August, Jack’s son Leonard discovered the Amiga agreement, complete with the $500,000 cashed check from Atari to Amiga, and brought it to his father’s attention. Jack Tramiel, who had long made a practice of treating the courts as merely another field of battle in keeping with his “business is war” philosophy, thought they just might have something. But it wasn’t immediately obvious to whom the cancelled contract should belong: to Atari Games (i.e., the coin-op people), to Warner, or to his own new Atari Corporation. Some hasty negotiating secured him clear title; Warner didn’t seem to know anything about the old agreement or what it might have meant for Atari’s future had it gone off according to plan. On August 13, as Commodore and Amiga were signing the contracts and putting the bow on the Amiga acquisition and as Shivji’s engineers were starting up work again on what was now to be the next-generation Atari computer, Atari filed suit against Amiga and against David Morse personally in Santa Clara Superior Court, alleging contract fraud. In their first motion they sought a legal injunction while the case was resolved that would have stopped the work of Commodore’s newly minted Amiga division in its tracks, and for a much longer period of time than Commodore’s more straightforward suit against Shivji and company.

Thankfully for Commodore, they didn’t get the injunction. However, the legal battle thus sparked would drag on for more than two-and-a-half years. In early 1985 Atari expanded their suit dramatically, adding Commodore, who had of course been footing the legal bill for Amiga and Morse’s defense anyway, as co-defendants — alleging them in effect to have been co-conspirators with Morse and Amiga in the fraud. They also added on a bunch of patent claims, one very important one in particular relating back to a patent Atari held on the old Atari 400 and 800 designs that Jay Miner had been responsible for in the late 1970s; those designs did indeed share a lot of attributes with the chipset he had developed at Amiga. For this sin Miner personally was added to the suit as yet another co-defendant. The whole thing was finally wrapped up only in March of 1987, in a sealed settlement whose full details have never come to light. Scuttlebutt of then and now, though, would have it at that Commodore came out on the losing end, forced to pay Atari’s legal costs and some amount of additional restitution — although, again, exactly how much remains unknown.

What to make of this? A careful analysis of that March 1984 document shows that Morse and Amiga abode entirely by the letter of the agreement, that they were perfectly within their rights to return Atari’s loan to them and walk away from any further business arrangements. Atari’s argument rather lay in the spirit of the deal. At its heart is a single line in the agreement to which Morse signed his name that could easily be overlooked as boilerplate, a throwaway amidst all the carefully constructed legalese: “Amiga and Atari agree to negotiate in good faith regarding the license agreement.”

Atari’s contention, which is difficult to deny, was that Morse had at no time been acting in good faith from the moment he put pen to paper on the agreement. The agreement had rather been a desperate gambit to secure enough operating capital to keep Amiga in business for a few more months and find another suitor — nothing more, nothing less. Morse had stalled and obfuscated and dissembled for almost three months, whilst he sought that better suitor. Atari alleged that he had even verbally agreed to a “will not sell to” list of companies not allowed to acquire Amiga under any circumstances even as he was negotiating with one of the most prominent entries on that list, Commodore. And when he had forced a check into Farrand’s hands to terminate the relationship, they claimed, he had done so with the shabby excuse that the chips didn’t work properly, even though the whole world had seen them in action just a few weeks before at Summer CES. No, there wasn’t a whole lot of “good faith” going on there.

That said, the ethics of Morse’s actions, or lack thereof, strike me as far from cut and dried. It’s hard for me to get too morally outraged about Morse screwing over a company that was manifestly bent on screwing him in his position of weakness by saddling him with a terrible licensing proposal, an absurd deadline, and legal leverage that effectively destroyed any hope he might have had to get a reasonable, fair licensing agreement out of them. The letter of intent he felt compelled to sign reads more like an ultimatum than a starting point for negotiations. John Farrand as well as others from Atari claimed in court that they had had no intention of exercising their legal right to go into escrow to build the Amiga chipset without paying anything else at all for it had Morse not delivered that loan repayment in the nick of time. Still, these claims must be read skeptically, especially given Atari’s own desperate business position. Certainly Morse would have been an irresponsible executive indeed to base the fate of his company on their word. If Atari had really wished to acquire the chipset and make an equitable, money-making deal for both parties, they could best have achieved that by not opening negotiations with an absurd three-week deadline that put Morse over a barrel from day one.

That, anyway, is my view. Opinions of others who have studied the issue can and do vary. I would merely caution to consider the full picture anyone eager to read too much into the fact that Atari by relative consensus won this legal battle in the end. Even leaving aside the fact that legal right does not always correspond to moral right, we should remember that other issues eventually got bound up into the case. It strikes me particularly that Atari had quite a strong argument to make for Jay Miner having violated their patents, which covered display hardware uncomfortably similar to that in the Amiga chipset, even down to a graphics co-processor very similar in form and function to the so-called “copper” housed inside Agnus. Without knowing more about the contents of the final settlement, I really can’t say more than that.

As the court battle began, the effort to build the computer that would become known as the Atari ST was also heating up. Shivji had initially been enamored with an oddball series of CPUs from National Semiconductor called the NS32000s, the first fully 32-bit CPUs to hit the industry. When they proved less impressive in reality than they were on paper, however, he quickly shifted to the Motorola 68000 that was already found in the Apple Lisa and Macintosh and the Amiga Lorraine. Generally described as a 16-bit chip, the 68000 was in some ways a hybrid 16- and 32-bit design, a fact which gave the new computer its name: “ST” stands for “Sixteen/Thirty-two Bit.” Shivji had had a very good idea even before Tramiel’s acquisition of Atari of just what he wanted to build:

There was going to be a windowing system, it was going to have bitmapped graphics, we knew roughly speaking what the [screen] resolutions were going to be, and so on. All those parameters were decided before the takeover. The idea was an advanced computer, 16/32-bit, good graphics, good sound, MIDI, the whole thing. A fun computer — but with the latest software technology.

Jack Tramiel and his sons descended on Atari and began with brutal efficiency to separate the wheat from the chaff. Huge numbers of employees got the axe from this company that had already been wracked by layoff after layoff over the past year. The latest victims were often announced impersonally by reading from a list of names in a group meeting, sometimes on the basis of impressions culled from an interview lasting all of five minutes. The bottom line was simple: who could help in an all-out effort to build a sophisticated new computer from the ground up in a matter of months? Those judged wanting in the skills and dedication that would be required were gone. Tramiel sold the equipment, even the desks they had left behind to make quick cash to throw into the ST development effort. With Amiga’s computer and who knew what else in the offing from other companies, speed was his priority. He expected his engineers, starting in August with virtually nothing other than Shivji’s rough design parameters, to build him a prototype ready to be demonstrated at the next CES show in January.

Decent graphics capabilities had to be a priority for the type of computer Shivji envisioned. Therefore the hardware engineers spent much of their time on a custom video chip that would support resolutions of up to 640 X 400, albeit only in black and white; the low-resolution mode of 320 X 200 that would be more typically used by games would allow up to 16 colors onscreen at one time from a palette of 512. That chip aside, to save time and money they would use off-the-shelf components as much as possible, such as a three-voice General Instrument sound chip that had already found homes in the popular Apple II Mockingboard sound card and the IBM PCjr as well as various videogame consoles and standup arcade games. The ST’s most unusual feature would prove to be the built-in MIDI interface that let it control a MIDI-enabled synthesizer without the need for additional hardware, a strange luxury indeed for Tramiel to allow, given that he was famous for demanding that his machines contain only the hardware that absolutely had to be there in the name of keeping production costs down. (For a possible clue to why the MIDI interface was allowed, we can look to a typical ST product demonstration. Pitchmen made a habit of somewhat disingenuously playing MIDI music on the ST that was actually produced by a synthesizer under the table. It was easy — intentionally easy, many suspected — for an observer to miss the mention of the MIDI interface and think the ST was generating the music internally.) And of course in the wake of the Macintosh the ST simply had to ship with a mouse and an operating system to support it.

It was this latter that presented by far the biggest problem. While the fairly conservative hardware of the ST could be put together relatively quickly, writing a modern, GUI-based operating system for the new computer represented a herculean task. Apple, for instance, had spent years on the Macintosh’s operating system, and when the Mac was released it was still riddled with bugs and frustrations. This time around Tramiel wouldn’t be able to just slap an archaic-but-paid-for old PET BASIC ROM into the thing, as he had in the case of the Commodore 64. He needed a real operating system. Quickly. Where to get it?

He found his solution in a very surprising place: at Digital Research, whose CP/M was busily losing its last bits of business-computing market-share to Microsoft’s juggernaut MS-DOS. Digital had adopted an if-you-can’t-beat-em-join-em mentality in response. They were hard at work developing a complete Mac-like window manager that could run on top of MS-DOS or CP/M. It was called GEM, the “Graphical Environment Manager.” GEM was merely one of a whole range of similar shells that were appearing by 1985, struggling with varying degrees of failure to bring that Mac magic to the bland beige world of the IBM clones. Also among them was Microsoft’s original Windows 1.0 — another product that Tramiel briefly considered licensing for the ST. Digital got the nod because they were willing to license both GEM and a CP/M layer to run underneath it fairly cheap, always music to Jack Tramiel’s ears. The only problem was that it all currently ran only on Intel processors, not the 68000.

The small Atari team that temporarily immigrated to Digital Research’s Monterey headquarters to adapt GEM to the ST.

As Shivji and his engineers pieced the hardware together, some dozen of Atari’s top software stars migrated about 70 miles down the California coast from Silicon Valley to the surfer’s paradise of Monterey, home of Digital Research. Working with wire-wrapped prototype hardware that often flaked out for reasons having nothing to do with the software it ran, dealing with the condescension of many on the Digital staff who looked down on their backgrounds as mostly games programmers, wrestling with Digital’s Intel source code that was itself still under development and thus changing constantly, the Atari people managed in a scant few months to port enough of CP/M and GEM to the ST to give Atari something to show on the five prototype machines that Tramiel unveiled at CES in Las Vegas that January. Shivji:

The really exciting thing was that in five months we actually showed the product at CES with real chips, with real PCBs, with real monitors, with real plastic. Five months previous to that there was nothing that existed. You’re talking about tooling for plastic, you’re talking about getting an enormous software task done. And when we went to CES, 85 percent of the machine was done. We had windows, we had all kinds of stuff. People were looking for the VAX that was running all this stuff.

Tramiel was positively gloating at the show, reveling in the new ST and in Atari’s new motto: “Power Without the Price.” Atari erected a series of billboards along the freeway leading from the airport to the Vegas Strip, like the famous Burma-Shave signs of old.

PCjr, $599: IBM, Is This Price Right?

Macintosh, $2195: Does Apple Need This Big A Bite?

Atari Thinks They’re Out Of Sight

Welcome To Atari Country — Regards, Jack

The trade journalists, desperate for a machine to revive the slowing home-computer revolution and with it the various publications they wrote for, ate it up. The ST — or, as the press affectionately dubbed it, the “Jackintosh” — stole the show. “At a glance,” raved Compute! magazine, “it’s hard to tell a GEM screen from a Mac screen” — except for the ST’s color graphics, of course. And one other difference was very clear: an ST with 512 K of memory and monitor would retail for less than $1000 —  less than one-third the cost of an equivalent Macintosh.

Rhapsodic press or no, Tramiel’s Atari very nearly went out of business in the months after that CES show. The Atari game consoles as well as the Atari 8-bit line of home computers were all but dead as commercial propositions, killed by the Great Videogame Crash and the Commodore 64 respectively. Thus virtually no money was coming in. You can only keep a multinational corporation in business so long by selling its old office furniture. The software team in Monterey, meanwhile, had to deal with a major crisis when they realized that CP/M just wasn’t going to work properly as the underpinning of GEM on the ST. They ended up porting and completing an abandoned Digital project to create GEMDOS, or, as it would become more popularly known, TOS: the “Tramiel Operating System.” With their software now the last hold-up to getting the ST into production and Tramiel breathing down their necks, the pressure on them was tremendous. Landon Dyer, one of the software team, delivers an anecdote that’s classic Jack Tramiel:

Jack Tramiel called a meeting. We didn’t often meet with him, and it was a big deal. He started by saying, “I hear you are unhappy.” Think of a deep, authoritarian voice, a lot like Darth Vader, and the same attitude, pretty much.

Sorry, Jack, things aren’t going all that hot. We tried to look humble, but we probably just came across as tired.

“I don’t understand why you are unhappy,” he rumbled. “You should be very happy; I am paying your salary. I am the one who is unhappy. The software is late. Why is it so late?”

Young and idealistic, I piped up: “You know, I don’t think we’re in this for the money. I think we just want to ship the best computer we can –”

Jack shut me down. “Then you won’t mind if I cut your salary in half?”

I got the message. He didn’t even have to use the Force.

Somehow they got it done. STs started rolling down production lines in June of 1985. The very first units went on sale not in the United States, where there were some hang-ups acquiring FCC certification, but rather West Germany. It was just as well, underscoring as it did Tramiel’s oft-repeated vision of the ST as an international computing platform. Indeed, the ST would go on to become a major success in West Germany and elsewhere in Europe, not only as a home computer and gaming platform but also as an affordable small-business computer, a market it would not manage to penetrate to any appreciable degree in its home country. Initial sales on both continents were gratifying, and the press largely continued to gush.

The Atari 520ST, first of a number of computers in the line.

The praise was by no means undeserved. If the ST showed a few rough edges, inevitable products of its rushed development on a shoestring budget, it was more notable for everything it did well. A group of very smart, practical people put it together, ending up with a very sweet little computer for the money. Certainly GEM worked far, far better than a hasty port from a completely different architecture had any right to — arguably better, in fact, than Amiga’s soon-to-be-released homegrown equivalent, the Workbench. The ST really was exactly what Jack Tramiel had claimed it would be: a ridiculous amount of computing power for the price. That made it easier to forgive this “Jackintosh’s” failings in comparison to a real Macintosh, like its squat all-in-one-box case — no Tramiel computer was ever likely to win the sorts of design awards that Apple products routinely scooped up by the fistful even then — and materials and workmanship that weren’t quite on the same par with the Mac as were the ST’s raw specs. The historical legacy of the ST as we remember it today is kind of a tragic one in that it has little to do with the machine’s own considerable merits. The tragedy of the ST would be to be merely a very good machine, whereas its two 68000-based points of habitual comparison, the Apple Macintosh and the Commodore Amiga, together pioneered the very paradigm of computing and, one might even say, of living that we know today.

Speaking of which: just where was Commodore in the midst of all this? That’s a question many in the press were asking. Commodore had made an appearance at that January 1985 CES, but only to show off a new 8-bit computer, the last they would ever make: the Commodore 128. An odd, Frankenstein’s monster hybrid of a computer, it seemed a summary of the last ten years of 8-bit development crammed into one machine, sporting both of the microprocessors that made the PC revolution, the Zilog Z-80 and the MOS 6502 (the latter was slightly modified and re-badged the 8502). Between them they allowed for three independent operating modes: CP/M, a 99.9 percent compatible Commodore 64 mode, and the machine’s unique new 128 mode. This latter addressed most of the 64’s most notable failings, including its lack of an 80-column display, its atrocious BASIC that gave access to none of the machine’s graphics or sound capabilities (the 128’s BASIC 7.0 in contrast was amongst the best 8-bit BASICs ever released), and its absurdly slow disk drives (the 128 transferred data at six or seven times the speed of the 64). Despite being thoroughly overshadowed by the ST in CES show reports, the 128 would go on to considerable commercial success, to the tune of some 4 million units sold over the next four years.

Still, it was obvious to even contemporary observers that the Commodore 128 represented the past, the culmination of the line that had begun back in 1977 with the Commodore PET. What about the future? What about Amiga? While Tramiel and his sons trumpeted their plans for the ST line to anyone who would listen, Commodore was weirdly silent about goings-on inside its new division. The press largely had to make do with rumor and innuendo: Commodore had sent large numbers of prototypes to a number of major software developers, most notably Electronic Arts; the graphics had gotten even better since those CES shows; Commodore was planning a major announcement for tomorrow, next week, next month. The Amiga computer became the computer industry’s unicorn, oft-discussed but seldom glimpsed. This, of course, only increased its mystique. How would it compare to the Jackintosh and the Macintosh? What would it do? How much would it cost? What would it, ultimately, be? And just why the hell was it taking so long? A month after Atari started shipping STs — that machine had gone from a back-of-a-napkin proposal to production in far less time than it had taken Commodore to merely finish their own 68000-based computer — people would at long last start to get some answers.

(Sources: On the Edge by Brian Bagnall; New York Times of July 3 1984, August 21 1984, and August 29 1984; Montreal Gazette of July 12 1984 and July 14 1984; Compute! of August 1984, February 1985, March 1985, April 1985, July 1985, August 1985, and October 1985; STart of Summer 1988; InfoWorld of September 17 1984 and December 17 1984; Wall Street Journal of March 25 1984; Philadelphia Inquirer of April 19 1985. Landon Dyer’s terrific memories of working as part of Atari’s GEM team can be found on his blog as a part 1 and a part 2. Finally, Marty Goldberg’s once again shared a lot of insights and information on the legal battle between Atari and Commodore, including some extracts from actual court transcripts, although once again our conclusions about it are quite different. Regardless, my heartfelt thanks to him! Most of the pictures in this article come from STart magazine’s history of the ST, as referenced above.)

Comments
30 Responses

- William Hern

April 2, 2015 at 7:10 pm

Excellent article Jimmy. As a long-time Atari ST user (and columnist!), your account gels well with my personal recollections from the era.

One thing you didn’t touch on very much was the unfinished nature of the ST’s software when the production lines started in June 1985. The operating system, in particular, was not nearly finished. Instead of being supplied on a ROM as promised, TOS initally was supplied on a disk. This greatly reduced the amount of usable memory – I still remember the disappointment of booting up my brand new half megabyte ST, loading in ST Basic and finding that I had only seven kilobytes of RAM left for code!

TOS wasn’t completed until late 1985. Atari retro-fitted ROMs to the machines of early purchasers free of charge – my recollection was that this happened during the early months of 1986. This gave back about two hundred kilobytes of RAM back to the user.

It wasn’t just TOS that was delayed. The promised versions of GEM Write and GEM Paint never arrived – instead users were given ST Writer (a slightly upgraded version of the 8-bit Atari Writer software) and NeoPaint. A GUI-based word processor, First Word, and a database package were subsequently given out free to early users to appease them.

Despite these early problems, the ST was a great machine for its price. The ST with a high resolution monitor made for an excellent serious computer – its 640×400 resolution and flicker-free 70Hz display was ideal for desktop publishing software and music composition.

Many were also bought by universities to act as dumb computer terminals – the powerful ST plus monitor was significantly cheaper than a dedicated terminal made by WYSE!

- William Hern

April 2, 2015 at 7:30 pm

One small correction to my posting: the early graphics software shipped with STs was called NEOchrome, not NeoPaint.

- Ken Rutsky

April 2, 2015 at 7:28 pm

This is great stuff, as usual!

Just a minor typo: “if-you-can’t-beam-em…” Unless there’s a Star Trek reference in there I’m missing… :-)

- Jimmy Maher

April 3, 2015 at 6:40 am

:) Working a Star Wars and a Star Trek reference into the same article would be a bit much even for most nerds I think. Thanks!

- David Boddie

April 2, 2015 at 9:28 pm

Another interesting article!

The caption showing the software developers at Monterrey should probably read “adapt” rather than “adopt”.

- Jimmy Maher

April 3, 2015 at 6:41 am

Thanks!

- Zurlocker

April 2, 2015 at 10:52 pm

Great story! Real drama.
Typo: it’s “Monterey, calif.”

- Jimmy Maher

April 3, 2015 at 6:43 am

Thanks!

- Keith Palmer

April 2, 2015 at 10:54 pm

I haven’t quite found the time to read through scanned runs of old Atari magazines the way I read through some scanned runs of Commodore magazines, so I’m always interested in learning a bit more about the Atari ST. Part of what keeps up my attention about it at the moment may be the perception that, even if the period rhetoric on Tramiel taking over Atari might have got a bit overblown (I’ve tended to see it as tending towards “the last, best hope for something other than bland Big Blue hegemony,” but the idea of him shocking the “home computer” market out of what might have seemed simple saturation is interesting too), the computer might even have avoided the “early adopters hangover” I understand Macintosh users to have gone through and have the impression hit Amiga users too (although, in turn, the day of the Atari ST seems to have ended very quietly…)

- Jimmy Maher

April 3, 2015 at 6:48 am

At the risk of spoiling articles to come: the ST was a big hit for a year or two in North America but did indeed fade quite quickly and fairly quietly on the whole. The Amiga 500 of 1987 was clearly a better game machine for a much more comparable price than the original Amiga 1000, and the ST never caught on as a productivity machine in North America the way it did in Europe. It remained viable — enough to keep Atari alive, anyway — into the 1990s in Europe.

In between the Amiga 1000 and Amiga 500 was a strange era when much of the games industry regarded the ST as the logical successor to the Commodore 64. Lots of titles during this period were ported to ST but never to Amiga.

As far as “last hope to escape the tyranny of IBM” and the rest: that sounds more like Apple or Amiga rhetoric than ST. My impression is that the ST community tended to be more practical and less evangelistic. But I haven’t conducted an exhaustive study by any means…

- Pedro Timóteo

April 3, 2015 at 8:52 am

In between the Amiga 1000 and Amiga 500 was a strange era when much of the games industry regarded the ST as the logical successor to the Commodore 64. Lots of titles during this period were ported to ST but never to Amiga.

Coincidentally, this month’s Retro Gamer magazine has an article about the ST, and one of its sections is “10 ST games not on the Amiga”:

– Super Sprint
– Road Runner
– Where Time Stood Still
– Enduro Racer
– Oids
– Ranarama
– Starquake
– Championship Wrestling
– Slap Fight
– Trantor: the Last Stormtrooper

Most of them are either arcade ports or 8-bit ports. I think Gauntlet also got an ST port but not an Amiga one (Gauntlet 2 was ported to both). My guess is that all of these come from the era you mention.

- Jimmy Maher

April 4, 2015 at 6:57 am

There were always a fair number of text adventures at the end of the bookware boom that made it to the ST but not the Amiga. For instance, some of the Synapse Electronic Novels and some of the Telarium games.

- Keith Palmer

April 3, 2015 at 12:31 pm

As I said, I haven’t done a lot of reading on this subject myself; I was mostly thinking of an article or two in Creative Computing that predated the ST going on sale, and maybe a bit of rhetoric in one piece by John J. Anderson in the January/February 1987 issue of Atari Explorer… (However, it does seem sort of germane to the theme here that Anderson, in the October 1984 issue of Creative Computing, reacted to Tramiel taking over Atari by suggesting that he “get in touch” with Amiga and bring the Lorraine to market… The very next month he was able to allude to Commodore closing its deal, anyway.)

- LoneCleric

April 3, 2015 at 5:55 pm

Just a typo notice: co-processsor

- Jimmy Maher

April 4, 2015 at 6:56 am

Thanks!

- Cargo Cult

April 4, 2015 at 11:19 pm

Fascinating series of articles – I had an ST while growing up, and while I was vaguely aware of Strange Goings-On between Atari and Commodore regarding the Amiga’s hardware, I never knew the amazing flip-flopping counter-allegiances and whatnot. Impressive stuff.

Anyway, minor technical correction – the ST’s high-resolution 640×400 mode was purely monochrome, requiring a specialised monitor. You had a choice of black and white, or white and black if you were feeling adventurous. Fantastic for music, DTP, programming, vector graphics and so on – there was a fair amount of productivity software which required such a system. (It was possible to fake a mono monitor with a clever bit of software, squishing the high-res mode down to the 640×200 four-colour medium-res mode, letting such software run on a colour TV / monitor – but it was slow and blurry, and really not recommended.)

I eventually got my hands on a mono-capable monitor – which was great because I could finally, properly run a huge range of software – but this also meant being booted off the family TV, so I then spent my time lusting after all that colour software I was now missing…

- Jimmy Maher

April 5, 2015 at 7:28 am

Thanks! Fixed.

- Brane212

April 5, 2015 at 11:08 am

I liked ST more than Amiga.

Amiga was complicated, overengineered pile of chips.

ST was streamlined, simple machine.

Only problem is that they haven’t taken it to the next step, that firmware was below the competition ( TOS was not multitasking etc), they have charged too much for what was in the box.

When they knew that they have to go for at least 1MB, they shave had a plan for 68020/30 and internal busses to utilize all that bandwidth, for a bit price difference.

That is, ST would sell had it been lean platform for 68K, taken to its maximum within bang/buck envelope and perhaps in MEGA ST,s form.

Had they gone for fast CPU ( or two), they could easily skip blitter for example.

Also, it wouldn’t kill them to use good part of PC’s periphery, like IBM’s keyboard, for example.
Or mouse, when it became ubiquous etc.

Problem is, chipset was not meant to scale that far.

- Brane212

April 5, 2015 at 11:21 am

On the plus side, their mono monitor ( SM124 IIRC) was really good idea.

It’s a shame that they haven’t made good successor, perhaps with 2 or 4 bit grayscale.

It was the first cheap 72 Hz monitor that was really good for long strain-free work.

But they should have put some work into streching the picture over bigger part of the glass as it was ridiculously small.

- Brane212

April 5, 2015 at 12:26 pm

On minus side, that idea of being able to run the code within keyboard controller was a useless screwup.

- suhail

April 8, 2015 at 1:11 pm

Amazing read, I was entangled with many of those platforms back in the day. I owned a Mac Plus, Amiga 1000, and an Atari ST.

I do not remember the Macintosh to ever be riddled with bugs back then, I remember it as a very stable platform, unless you were referring to the Apple Lisa which crashed often.

- Jimmy Maher

April 8, 2015 at 1:26 pm

By the time of the Mac Plus Apple was already up to System 3. I believe the first releases were pretty buggy, as well as missing many features like folders. See my article on the Mac for more on the frustrations endured by early adopters: http://www.filfre.net/2014/02/macintosh/. Douglas Adams noted that one bought not so much an actual Mac but rather “a romantic idea” of what the Mac might someday become.

- kovacm

November 13, 2016 at 9:39 am

yea, Douglas Adams also have best ever description of Microsoft:

“The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all his customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who by peddling second-hand, second-rate technology, led them all into it in the first place.”

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- Shimshon

April 9, 2015 at 7:18 am

I never owned an ST, but I did read about and like them. Much of my reading about them was in the old DTACK Grounded newsletters of the era. The writer developed a low level Forth-style language written in 100% 68K Assembly that was wicked fast, then layered on a Basic over it that was comparable to, but MUCH more powerful and many times faster than the common Basics of the day, and ported it to the ST. It ditched TOS entirely, and booted into an environment that left you with hundreds of KB free. Never got any traction though. Too bad.

- Marco Pontello

April 10, 2015 at 1:06 pm

“Pitchmen made a habit of somewhat disingenuously playing MIDI music on the ST that was actually produced by a synthesizer under the table.” – Case in point, I just saw this video extract from Computer Chronicles, and the Atari people pulled the exact same thing, but Gary Kildall was quick to point out that the music was produced by a synthesizer. YouTube – Amiga versus Atari – Computer Chronicle part 2

- Nate

April 19, 2015 at 4:38 pm

Excellent article. I think you’ve done one of the best analyses of the legal case between Atari and Commodore/Amiga.

Typos:

Bob Bob Pariseau -> just Bob
Tony Takaim -> Takai

- Jimmy Maher

April 20, 2015 at 7:12 am

Thanks — on both counts!

- FilfreFan

May 1, 2016 at 4:12 am

Amazing coverage and writing style. As an early adopter of the Amiga 1000, which I loved, I didn’t really pay much attention to the Atari or Mac lines. One thing that’s really cool about your style of writing, though, is that I find myself rooting for your subject, no matter who it might be. Keep up the great work!

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ICBM
April 9, 2015

See https://player.vimeo.com/video/123755977?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0

Michael Davis has created an original game based on my recent series of articles on Trinity. To say too much more about it would be to spoil it, so I’ll just tell you that it’s well worth a play — if perhaps not quite in the way you might expect. My thanks to Michael!

Comments
7 Responses

- iPadCary

April 9, 2015 at 9:26 am

Bah! Windoze only ….
Thought there’d be an iOS version.
iOS: the operating system of the future.

- Dehumanizer

April 9, 2015 at 10:45 am

Can’t tell if it’s a troll or not…

- Michael Davis

April 10, 2015 at 5:59 pm

The game, or Cary’s comment “iOS: the operating system of the future.”? ;)

Cary, let’s hope that’s not true

- Dehumanizer

April 12, 2015 at 10:42 am

The latter (haven’t tried the game yet). I can perfectly understand complaining about it being Windows only, but the “operating system of the future” part is a bit too hard to take seriously… :)

- ZUrlocker

April 10, 2015 at 1:14 pm

A mac version would be awesome… or IOS.

- Michael Davis

April 10, 2015 at 6:00 pm

The latest version of the engine I used, Adventure Game Studio, doesn’t have the ports available. If they ever get that sorted I will jump on it immediately :)

- Michael Davis

April 10, 2015 at 6:03 pm

Thank you so much for this post! The rest of your audience and I have a loooooooot of shared history (or else we wouldn’t be reading this blog :), so I’m stoked to hear what anyone who follows Digital Antiquarian thinks about the game.

The 68000 Wars, Part 3: We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up
April 10, 2015

The Commodore/Amiga honeymoon could hardly have been more idyllic. Honoring the wishes of everyone at Amiga to not get shipped off to Commodore’s headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Commodore instead moved them just ten miles from their cramped offices in Santa Clara, California, to a spacious new facility in Los Gatos, surrounded by greenery and well-tended walking paths that gave it something of the atmosphere of a university campus. The equipment at their disposal was correspondingly upgraded; instead of fighting one another for the use of a handful of aging Sage IV workstations, everyone in a significant technical role now got a brand new Sun workstation of his own. Best of all, Commodore knew when to back off. With their charges now relocated and properly equipped, they left them to it. “Commodore,” says R.J. Mical, “did the best thing they possibly could have done to make sure the product they bought was successful. They left us alone.” They were all “vastly in love with Commodore” in those early days. After all they’d just been through, how could they not be?

With Jay Miner’s chipset, the heart of their project, largely complete before the acquisition, Amiga’s focus now shifted to all of the stuff that would need to surround those chips to finish their computer, now to be called not the Amiga Lorraine but the Commodore Amiga. The need for an operating system becoming urgent, the software folks now came to the fore. The three most prominent systems programmers at Amiga each authored one layer of the software stack that would become the soul of the machine. Carl Sassenrath wrote the Exec, the kernel of a new operating system that borrowed many ideas from bigger institutional operating systems like Unix, not least among them the revolutionary capability of true preemptive multitasking. Atop that Dale Luck layered the Graphics Library, a collection of software hooks to let programmers unlock the potential of Miner’s chipset in a multitasking-friendly way, without having to bang on the hardware itself. And atop that R.J. Mical layered Intuition, a toolbox of widgets, icons, menus, windows, and dialogs to let programmers build GUI applications with a consistent look and feel.

But even as the rest of the system was coming together around it, Miner continued to tinker with his chipset. Out of these late experiments arose one of the most important capabilities of the Amiga, one absolutely key to its status as the world’s first multimedia PC. In the Amiga’s low-resolution modes of 320 X 200 and 320 X 400, Denise was normally capable of displaying up to 32 colors chosen from a palette of 4096. Miner now came up with a way of displaying any or all 4096 at once, using a technique he called “hold and modify” whereby Denise could create the color of each pixel by modifying only the red, green, or blue component of the previous pixel. He hoped it would allow programmers to create photorealistic environments for flight simulators, a special interest of his. When he realized that HAM mode updated too slowly to offer a decent frame rate for such applications, he actually requested that it be removed again from the chipset. But the chip fabricators said it would cost precious time and money to do so, and since it wasn’t hurting anything they might as well leave it in. Thank God for those bean counters. While it would indeed prove of limited utility for flight simulators and other games, HAM would allow the Amiga to display captured photographs of the real world. As advertisements for Digi-View, the first practical photorealistic digitizer to reach everyday computers, would soon put it, “Digi-View brings the world into your Amiga!” It’s that very blending of the analog world around us with the digital world inside the computer that is the key to the multimedia experience that the Amiga was first to provide. HAM mode stands as a classic object lesson in unintended consequences of technological innovation. The Amiga’s claim to historical importance would have been much shakier without it.

As 1984 turned into 1985, Commodore’s patience with the sort of endless tinkering that had led to HAM mode began to decrease; they wanted Los Gatos to just get the Amiga done already. The splashy debut the Atari ST made at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January spooked the brass back in West Chester. And by the spring of 1985, with the home-computer market clearly on the downturn, Commodore’s financial position was beginning to look downright precarious. They needed the Amiga, and soon.

A new hire named Howard Stolz, young and inexperienced like so many of the others, became the project’s unsung hero by crafting the external appearance for the new computer. His sleek, trim case still looks great today; whatever else you can say about that first Amiga model, it remains to this day by far the best looking Amiga ever released. Then and now, one is first struck upon seeing it by how small it is; even Apple’s contemporaneous machines look chunky and clunky next to it. And it’s full of thoughtful little touches, like the “garage” below the system unit into which one can slide the keyboard when not in use. Imprinted on the inside cover the of the system unit are the signatures of the core Amiga team, an idea borrowed from the original Apple Macintosh. Amongst them is the paw print of Jay Miner’s beloved Mitchie.

The Amiga made its public debut at last on July 23, 1985, in the most surreal event in the long history of Commodore. Obviously hoping to duplicate the sort of excitement Apple had become so adept at evoking, Commodore rented New York’s Lincoln Center to put on a show the likes of which they never had before and never would again. The black-tie event sported an open bar stocked to the nines, waiters wandering through the crowd with plates of hors d’ oeuvres, a laser show, a three-piece classical-music trio, and — no, really — a ballerina twirling across the stage. The Los Gatos team were all there, crammed awkwardly into rented tuxedos. Bob Pariseau, the traditional master of ceremonies of Amiga demos since the days when the Amiga Lorraine was just a tangled mass of wires and breadboards, once again narrated the proceedings, looking like a stage magician in his tux and long ponytail. The rabbit he pulled out of his hat for the occasion was perhaps the only computer in the world at that time that could have managed not to be overshadowed by all the pomp and circumstance. The crowd erupted into spontaneous applause on several occasions: when, thanks to HAM mode, the Amiga showed all 4096 colors onscreen at once; when the Amiga played a bit of “Smoke on the Water” in an appropriately distorted electric-guitar tone; when it talked in male and female voices; when that old favorite, Boing, showed up yet again. The evening concluded with Andy Warhol coming onstage to digitize and manipulate the image of Debbie Harry of Blondie fame, creating an end result reminiscent of his famous Marilyn Diptych of 1962. The Amiga, everyone had to agree, made for one hell of a show.

The Amiga enjoyed the best press of its career in the immediate aftermath of that Lincoln Center premiere, ironically well before anyone could actually buy one. Byte magazine, whose editorial voice was easily the most respected in the industry, devoted a luxurious 13 pages to a detailed technical preview of the machine, pronouncing it “the most advanced and innovative personal computer today.” Creative Computing, the industry’s most venerable and (often) most visionary publication, was even more effusive in its praise. The Amiga was not just a new computer but “a new communications medium — a dream machine, a new medium of expression” that the reviewer pronounced literally indescribable in print. Writing for Computer Gaming World, Jon Freeman pronounced that “anything your favorite computer can do, the Amiga can do better. And faster. And in stereo.”

Freeman published his games through Electronic Arts, and in writing his article on the machine was very much toeing his publisher’s line. By far the new computer’s most enthusiastic and stalwart supporter, who had followed it with interest since well before the Commodore acquisition, was EA. Trip Hawkins, still nursing his dream of EA software titles lined up on the shelf of every hipster aesthete alongside the music albums they were consciously packaged to evoke, just got right away what the Amiga could mean for computerized entertainment. For him it was the Great White Hope for an industry suffering through its first real downturn ever and struggling to understand just what had gone wrong. Receiving their first prototypes many months before the Lincoln Center premiere, EA had worked hand-in-hand with Los Gatos to refine the machine and get a jump start on writing software for it.

Thus much of the earliest software available for the Amiga came from EA, including ports of old favorites like Archon and Seven Cities of Gold as well as new titles destined to become Amiga icons: DeluxePaint, Arcticfox, Marble Madness. In the immediate wake of the Amiga’s release, while most publishers were adopting a wait-and-see position on the new machine, EA offered full-throated support via splashy multi-page editorials that ran in just about every publication in the industry.

The Amiga will revolutionize the home-computer industry. It’s the first home machine that has everything you want and need for all the major uses of a home computer, including entertainment, education, and productivity. The software we’re developing for the Amiga will blow your socks off. We think the Amiga, with its incomparable power, sound, and graphics, will give Electronic Arts and the entire industry a very bright future.

We believe that one day soon the home computer will be as important as radio, stereo, and television are today.

But so far, the computer’s promise has been hard to see. Software has been severely limited by the abstract, blocky shapes and rinky-dink sound reproduction of most home computers. Only a handful of pioneers have been able to appreciate the possibilities. But then, popular opinion once held that television was only useful for civil-defense communications.

The Amiga is advancing our medium on all fronts. For the first time, a personal computer is providing the visual and aural quality our sophisticated eyes and ears demand. Compared to the Amiga, using some other home computers is like watching black-and-white television with the sound turned off.

For the first time, software developers have the tools they need to fulfill the promise of home computing.

Two years ago, we said, “We See Farther.” Now Farther is here.

With praise like that, how could anything go wrong?

Well, anything could, and for a while there it seemed like just about everything did. After the premiere and the rapturous press it generated, much momentum was squandered as Commodore struggled to put the finishing touches on the Amiga and get the machine, so much more complicated than anything the company had built or supported before, into production. It wasn’t until November that one could hope to walk into a store and walk out with a new Amiga. Commodore’s advertising campaign that started up then was as unfocused as a confetti cannon. In lieu of a coherent argument for what the Amiga represented and why it mattered, Commodore gave the public black-and-white footage of the Baby Boom Generation and tired rhetoric about keeping up with the Joneses. Commodore had somehow decided that the best way to sell the most futuristic, technologically advanced computer on the market was to evoke… nostalgia.

See https://www.youtube.com/embed/pMoZnnYjh9A

Just why did EA seem to understand what the Amiga represented so much better than Commodore themselves? Why was EA so much better at selling Commodore’s computer than Commodore? EA unhesitatingly and unreservedly laid out a compelling case for the Amiga as a revolutionary technology for home entertainment. Meanwhile Commodore hedged their bets everywhere — except in the Amiga’s most obvious application as a game machine, from which they ran terrified.

Then, within weeks of the Amiga’s arrival in stores, Commodore’s advertising disappeared completely. The reason was a pretty basic one: Commodore simply couldn’t afford to pay for it anymore. The previous year had been so disastrous that they were suddenly teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.

After that magical year of 1983, when Commodore had briefly become a billion-dollar company and briefly been even bigger than Apple, there had been little but bad news on the financial front. 1984 had marked a gradual cooling of the excitement surrounding home computers. That was a problem for many companies, but few more so than Commodore: Commodore represented fully 60 percent of the home-computer hardware market by that point, and had long since axed all of their more expensive machines. For them 1984 brought the failure of the eminently fail-worthy Plus/4, an alarming buildup of Commodore 64 inventories, and a disappointing Christmas that failed to come close to the previous one. And yet their troubles were only just beginning.

In 1985 a slowing home-computer market turned into a collapsing home-computer market. Suddenly Commodore was posting massive losses, to the tune of almost $200 million in 1985 alone. Their mounting debt amounted to about the same figure. By the beginning of 1986 their unsold inventory amounted to almost half a billion dollars, and layoffs had halved their workforce from 7000 to 3500. Not only was Commodore forced to effectively give up on advertising the Amiga in the mainstream media, but they didn’t even go to the biggest party in their own industry, Winter CES, in January of 1986; they simply couldn’t afford to. Ahoy! magazine pronounced Commodore’s absence akin to “Russia resigning from the Soviet Bloc, Sly leaving the Family Stone.”

Most of the people who bought home computers in 1982 and 1983 had bailed out quickly once they realized how limited their machines really were, while the remainder already had their Commodores 64s, thank you very much. And the rest of the population, the ones who were supposed to keep buying and buying for years to come, simply weren’t interested anymore. What was Commodore supposed to do, saddled as they were with bloat like the massive West Chester campus that Jack Tramiel had bought for them at the height of 1983’s success, which they hadn’t been able to even begin to fill even then?

That was a question that lots of bankers were now asking themselves because Commodore had now fallen into default of their debt obligations. The financial community wasn’t inclined to take very much on faith when it to came to this company to which an air of the fly-by-night had always clung even in its glory years. Thus it came down to a hard-headed calculus. Was their best bet to demand their payments, forcing Commodore into bankruptcy and liquidation and giving the loaners a chance to recoup what they could? Or would it be better to wait and see if things looked likely to turn around? For agonizing weeks they held Commodore’s future in their hands while the Wall Street Journal and business pages around the world speculated on the over-under of the company being forced to fold. At last, in March of 1986, a deal was reached: Commodore would get another loan package worth $135 million with which to service their existing debt and fund their efforts to turn things around. It amounted to a lease on life of about one year.

The doors would stay open for the time being, but Commodore was now known far and wide — not least to potential Amiga buyers — as a company teetering on the edge of a financial cliff. And even if you decided it was worth risking such a major purchase from a company that looked very likely to leave the Amiga an orphan, you still had to find someplace to actually buy one. Therein lies a tale in itself.

There were two entirely separate distribution channels for computers in the mid-1980s: the network of specialized dealers, who offered service, advice, and support along with computers to their customers; and the mass merchants, big-box stores like Sears and Toys ‘R’ Us and the big consumer-electronics chains, who sold computers alongside televisions and washing machines and offered little to nothing in the way of support, competing instead almost entirely on the basis of price. Commodore under Jack Tramiel had pioneered the latter form of distribution with the VIC-20, the first truly mass-market home computer. Most people were happy to buy a relatively cheap machine, especially one meant for casual home use, through a big-box store. Those spending more money, and especially those buying a machine for use in business, preferred to safeguard their investment by going through a dealer. Thus Apple, IBM, and the many makers of IBM clones like Compaq continued to sell their more expensive machines through dealers. Commodore and Atari, makers of cheaper, home-oriented machines, sold theirs through the mass market.

Now, however, Commodore found themselves with a more expensive machine and no dealer network through which to sell it, a last little poison pill left to them by Jack Tramiel. One might say that Commodore was forced to start again from scratch — except that it was actually worse than that. In late 1982 Tramiel had destroyed what was left of Commodore’s dealer network when he dumped the successor to the VIC-20, the Commodore 64, into the mass-market channel as well, just weeks after promising his long-suffering dealers that he would do no such thing. That betrayal had put many of his dealers out of business, leaving the rest to sign on with other brands whilst saying, “Never again.” New Commodore CEO Marshall Smith was honestly trying in his stolid, conservative, steel-industry way to remove the whiff of disreputability that had always clung to the company under Tramiel. But the memories of most potential dealers were still too long, no matter how impressive the machine Commodore now had to offer them. The result was that many major American cities now sported, at best, just one or two places where you could walk in and buy an Amiga. It was a crippling disadvantage.

And so the Amiga’s early customers would largely come down to the hacker hardcore, who saw the Amiga for the revolutionary technology that it was and just couldn’t not have one, in spite of it all. The early issues of Amazing Computing, the first techie magazine to devote itself to the Amiga, have some of the flavor of the early issues of Byte. Hackers probed at the machine’s many mysteries — like this unexplained “HAM mode” that was supposed to allow one to do magical things — and published their findings for others to build upon. Given by Commodore no way to expand the Amiga beyond 512 K, they figured out how to roll their own memory expansions; ditto for hard drives. Faced with a dearth of commercial software, a fellow named Fred Fish started curating disks full of the best free software and distributing them at cost to dealers to pass on to customers; the Fred Fish Collection would eventually reach over 1100 disks. A fellow named Tim Jenison devised a digitizer and started distributing disks full of incredible full-color photographs. A fellow named Eric Graham wrote a 3-D modeller and ray tracer and started passing around a jaw-dropping animation called The Juggler that, when played in computer-shop windows, quite possibly sold more Amigas than all of Commodore’s own promotional efforts combined. User groups were formed all over the country, congregations of the Amiga faithful meeting in churches and the back rooms of public libraries. It was the last great flowering of the spirit of ’75 that had spawned the PC industry in the first place. Indeed, legendary Homebrew Computer Club member John Draper, the “Captain Crunch” who had taught Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs how to phone phreak and wrote the first practical Apple II word processor amongst other achievements, was a prominent early Amiga user. He figured out the vagaries of Intuition long before Commodore’s official documentation arrived, publishing code samples and technical tutorials, some of which were included on Fred Fish Disk #1. If the Amiga was destined to remain a cult computer, it was going to be one hell of an interesting cult.

See https://www.youtube.com/embed/-yJNGwIcLtw

Still, hackers with the requisite pioneering spirit and $2000 worth of disposable income weren’t in infinite supply. Sales were sluggish, if perhaps better than one might expect in light of the perfect storm of problems against which the Amiga struggled. Commodore sold about 140,000 Amigas in the first eighteen months — most in North America, some in Europe, where the machine was introduced at last only in June of 1986. As Britain’s Commodore User wryly put it, “the Amiga didn’t exactly blow the world away.”

While Commodore would have much preferred to compare the Amiga to the Macintosh, their image as a maker of low-end home computers was hard to shake. Thus the most common point of comparison in the press became Jack Tramiel’s new Atari ST line, whose earliest days in North America were far from perfect in their own right. The vast majority of the early STs shipped to Europe; of the 50,000 STs sold during the first three months, only about 10,000 were sold in North America. Like the Amiga, the ST was hobbled in North America by a sparse and shabby dealer network; even fewer dealers wanted anything to do with Jack Tramiel’s new Atari than were willing to get onboard again with the now Tramiel-less Commodore. In January Tramiel, true to his old Commodore 64 playbook, dumped the ST into the mass market. But even then distribution continued to be a problem. Most of the retailers who had filled their warehouses with Commodore 64s a couple of years ago were very skeptical of any new machines, no matter how impressive, given the moribund state of home computers in general.

Despite it all, Atari’s marketers proved to be very adept at conjuring a sense of excitement out of all proportion to the ST’s actual sales. For months it was conventional wisdom that the ST was trouncing the Amiga, outselling it by a margin of about three to one. But in September of 1986 the game was suddenly up. Preparatory to making a first IPO of 15 percent of their stock, Atari was forced to publish a prospectus detailing their actual sales numbers. They had, it turned out, sold only about 150,000 STs to that date, 90,000 of them in Europe. It seemed the Amiga was actually slightly outselling the ST in North America, although neither platform’s numbers were exactly breathtaking. Certainly the ST’s sales were a far cry from the millions per year Jack Tramiel had confidently predicted just before its launch. The much-vaunted return of the new, lean-and-mean Atari to slim profitability in 1986 was down at least as much to a modest nostalgia-driven revival of their videogame consoles, which sold cheap but could be made even cheaper, as it was to the new ST line. Likewise, Commodore’s new 8-bit 128 model was outselling the Amiga and ST combined by a factor of at least four to one, while the old 64 was continuing to sell even better than the 128.

Yet perception, as a wise someone once said, is often reality. Nowhere is that more clearly illustrated than in the way software publishers responded to the Amiga and the ST. Makers of games and other home-oriented software were already supporting quite a number of platforms. Many were understandably reluctant to add two more. Better to choose the likely winner of the 68000 Wars and support only that one. Buying into the conventional wisdom just like everyone else, most — with Electronics Arts the glaring exception — staked their wagon to the Atari ST, which seemed to many of them the most logical likely successor to the Commodore 64. The relative positions of Commodore and Atari seemed to have neatly reversed themselves. A few years ago Atari had offered Jay Miner’s 8-bit line of computers, more technologically impressive than anything else in the industry but a bit on the expensive side and dogged by poor or nonexistent marketing. Commodore under Jack Tramiel had come along to  trounce the Ataris with the Commodore 64, simple in design where the Ataris were baroque and in consequence much cheaper to make and sell. Now, with Tramiel in charge of Atari and Miner working with Commodore, history looked about to repeat itself in mirror image. The ST’s cause was helped by its being a more immediately accessible, understandable machine; the paradigm shift represented by the Amiga with its complex multitasking operating system placed many new demands on programmers, while the ST could pretty much be programmed like a super-Commodore 64.

Thus during 1986 many major game projects were begun on the ST rather than the Amiga, many older games ported to the ST but not the Amiga. The Amiga, despite the slim sales advantage it enjoyed at the moment, was threatened with a runaway chain reaction. As the industry was finally coming to understand, software availability was the single most important factor in most customers’ decision of which platform to buy into. These early commitments to the ST by so many publishers would result in more games and applications on the shop shelves for the ST, which would in turn result in more ST buyers, which would in turn encourage yet more software publishers to cast their lot with the ST, which would… you get the picture. Thus by the end of 1986 the mounting frustration and anger the Amiga faithful felt toward Commodore was mixed with more than a tinge of outright fear. How could Commodore, owners not only of the superior machine but the better-selling machine, have passively allowed Atari to control the narrative for so long? Nowhere was that frustration, anger, and fear more keenly felt than amongst the remnants of the old Amiga, Incorporated, in Los Gatos.

The team that had built the Amiga was gradually dispersing. David Morse, the man who had co-founded the company and so brilliantly jinked and weaved his way around Atari to bring it to a safe harbor at Commodore, was gone even before the Lincoln Center show, judging his work with Amiga essentially done and finding the life of a mere administrator to be less than enticing. Commodore installed a manager of their own at Los Gatos. Friction between the East and West Coast branches began to build from there. In December of 1985 R.J. Mical and Carl Sassenrath both left. Many others threatened to do so. They had to be begged and cajoled to stay at least long enough to properly finish the Amiga’s operating system, which had been released in a very imperfect state.

As the months passed and it became clear that the Amiga wasn’t becoming the mass-market sensation they’d so confidently expected, the folks at Los Gatos knew exactly who to blame. They regarded Commodore’s mishandling of the Amiga as nothing less than a personal betrayal. Someone printed up tee-shirts that they claimed to have found at Commodore’s marketing department: “Ready? Fire! Aim!” was printed on them. West Chester in turn saw Los Gatos as an arrogant bunch of youngsters who thought they were too cool for school. For evidence of just how far relations between Commodore and the Amiga old guard had deteriorated already by the spring of 1986, we need only look to the third revision of the operating system (version 1.2), which was being finished at that time. The Amiga folks had a habit of embedding secret messages into their software, little Easter eggs activated via obscure key sequences. Mostly these were the sort of things you might expect from talented young men a bit full of themselves: “INTUITION by =RJ Mical= Software Artist Deluxe”; “Carl  EXEC Sassenrath reminds: All things are in Flux!”; “Brought to you by not a mere Wizard, but the Wizard Extraordinaire: Dale Luck.” In the aftermath of version 1.2’s release, however, word quickly spread through the Amiga community of an uglier message: “We made Amiga, They f−−−−− it up.” It didn’t take long for word to get back to West Chester; nor was it hard for them to guess who the “they” represented. It only hardened West Chester’s perception of Los Gatos as an undisciplined romper room full of immature and ungrateful prima donnas. In June of 1986 West Chester, apparently judging the operating system to be good enough for now, brought the axe down. A whole swathe of people were cut, including Bob Pariseau, the very face of Amiga at so many presentations and trade shows.

By year’s end Los Gatos was down from a high of 80 people to just 13, Jay Miner and Dale Luck the only leftovers among the core figures we’ve met in the course of these articles. Attending a developer’s conference at about that time, Amazing Computing reported that the hostility between the Los Gatos and West Chester people was now “almost palpable,” even in this public setting. This could only end one way. In March of 1987, with the lease running out on that wonderful Los Gatos campus, Commodore’s brief-lived West Coast branch was shuttered, the few remaining employees given predictably unenticing offers to move to West Chester, which they predictably refused.

The old guard held an “Amiga Wake” to mark the end of their part in the Amiga story. It was almost exactly five years to the day after Larry Kaplan had called up Jay Miner to ask if he knew any lawyers, and just days after Commodore and Atari had finally settled their long legal battle brought on by the events that followed. The theme of the party, complete with a casket at the center of the room, might easily convince one that this was a requiem not just for the team that had built the Amiga but for the dream of the Amiga itself. Given the Amiga’s commercial fortunes at that instant, it’s very possible that many who attended  believed that to be exactly what it was. In actuality, though, the Amiga was just about to get a new lease on life in the form of two new models much more intelligently packaged, marketed, and, most of all, priced. The Atari ST also had brighter days ahead of it. Ironically, both platforms were destined to enjoy the best of their glory days not in North America, the continent they’d been built to conquer, but rather an ocean away in Europe. While the 68000 Wars had so far turned out to be more a slap-fight between two commercial pygmies than the titanic battle anticipated in the press, both of the principal combatants were just getting started.

(Sources: On the Edge by Brian Bagnall; Compute! of August 1985, September 1985, December 1985, and January 1987; Byte of August 1985, October 1985, and January 1987; Compute!’s Gazette of September 1985, November 1985, December 1985, and October 1986; InfoWorld of August 5 1985; Ahoy! of September 1985 and April 1986; Computer Gaming World of September/October 1985; Info of September/October 1985 and December/January 1986; Creative Computing of September 1985; New York Magazine of May 13 1985; New York Times of August 22 1985; Commodore User of June 1986; Amazing Computing of June 1986, January 1987, March 1987, and June 1987; Fortune of January 6 1986; PC Magazine of January 14, 1986; Commodore Magazine of May 1987; Atari ST User of November 1986. Whew!)

Comments
21 Responses

- William Hern

April 10, 2015 at 10:18 pm

Great article!

One small typo in the final paragraph though: you wrote “… they’d been build to conquer …” but probably meant to write “… they’d been built to conquer …”

- Jimmy Maher

April 11, 2015 at 6:31 am

Thanks!

- Pierre

April 10, 2015 at 10:29 pm

Thank you! I love everything you write because of it’s balanced perspective and your ability to bring stories to life.

The 68000 Wars is one of my favourite stories to tell when someone asks me more about my vintage computer collection. I was an Atari ST user at the time because I bought into the 68000 era very early. Had I waited, the Amiga would have been my machine because it had the same spirit as my beloved Atari 600XL.

All the best to you!

- Michael Ball

April 11, 2015 at 1:51 pm

My early career started around developing products for the Amiga… Will always hold a dear spot in my heart.

- MrTonyD

April 11, 2015 at 9:46 pm

I remember buying an original Amiga as soon as they became available. As a programmer, I figured that I would modify any code to make it do what I wanted (I was working on XENIX at the Santa Cruz Operation.) But, to my dismay, it took a while to get even horrible developer documentation. And this predates open source – so I quickly found myself working with an API that I couldn’t extend, integrate, or avoid. After spending hundreds of hours programming it, I was facing several dead-ends with the API. It seemed as though the developers simply never thought anyone would want to do any serious development on the platform (except what was supported out of the box.)

I ended up writing a report on the product for a senior executive at SCO. My conclusion: Lots of wasted potential, but it was an inflexible toy.

- Jimmy Maher

April 12, 2015 at 7:33 am

Thanks for this. Commodore’s horrible developer outreach was yet another problem that dogged the Amiga. Commodore, having had only simple BASIC-based machines heretofore, had no idea what sort of support a complex machine like the Amiga required. The ROM Kernel manuals and the other bibles, when they arrived, actually were pretty good, but they took way too long to come, and other forms of support remained pretty consistently abysmal. I can only assume that many others gave up on the Amiga in frustration as you did.

- boogaloo

April 11, 2015 at 11:17 pm

To start with the Amiga generated YUV and HAM makes a lot of sense there. You wouldn’t have had the problems with fringing problems if it had continued outputting YUV.

When commodore came along one of the changes they requested was to switch to RGB. This was the reason HAM was going to be removed, but it was cheaper to leave it in. Commodore left them to tweak things for a long time, because they couldn’t launch the Amiga due to the Atari court case. One of their defences was that the chips didn’t work, so they repaid the money. It wouldn’t have looked good if they launched too quickly after that.

For some reason Los Gatos tried to block the Fat Agnus, they even claimed it would be impossible to make it work. Commodore achieved the impossible, which I think annoyed Los Gatos. The Amiga was great but Los Gatos and Commodore both made mistakes. Commodores biggest mistake was they should have had chunky pixels and a strategy for 3d in 1990.

- Jimmy Maher

April 12, 2015 at 7:28 am

The court case actually had no effect on the Amiga’s launch date. Atari asked for an injunction as their very first motion, but it was denied, and after it was always strictly a question of financial compensation.

It’s also not quite correct to say that Commodore’s “defense” was that the chipset didn’t work. This was an excuse that David Morse apparently gave to Atari when he gave them back their money. The fact that he said that when it wasn’t true was used by Atari as evidence of bad faith.

For whatever reason, the actual impact that the legal battle had on the Amiga tends to get inflated these days. It was an annoyance and a concern to Commodore, especially given their perilous financial situation, but I see no reason to believe that the history of the Amiga would have been all that substantially different had it never happened.

- Nate

April 19, 2015 at 6:44 pm

The Amiga team didn’t like the Fat Agnus because it was an extremely minor change and the arch wasn’t that clean. But Commodore’s ethos of “make it ship” was better in this case than Amiga’s more esoteric concerns.

- Casey R Williams

April 11, 2015 at 11:34 pm

I never get tired of reading about the computers of that era, and the Amiga will always be my favorite. In recent years I’ve learned a lot more about the Atari ST and the Atari scene, and I think that being an Atari ST owner would have been tremendous fun as well. Both machines had so much potential for unleashing the users’ creativity.

I have looked online, but am unable to find a chart comparing the capabilities and prices of all of the 68000 systems. I’d like to see the Sega Megadrive/Genesis and Sharp x68000 compared also, but I’m sure historical information on those systems is much harder to come by. Sharp used a high resolution image of King Tut to promote their system in Japan and you can’t help but think it looks like Japan’s answer to the Amiga. Amazing how Apple switching to PPC effectively dead-ended all of these great computers.

- William Hern

April 13, 2015 at 10:51 am

The “At a Glance” sidebars that BYTE magazine included in their reviews of the 68000 machines provide good summaries of their capabilities and initial pricing.

These summaries can be found in the following editions of the magazine:

– Macintosh (initial US price $2495) – August 1984, page 241
– Amiga ($1295) – August 1985, page 84
– ST ($799/$999) – January 1986, page 90

All these editions can be found within the Internet Archive’s collection of scanned BYTE magazines.

Hope this is of some help to you!

- robert lindsay

April 15, 2015 at 8:56 pm

Note that for the amiga the $1295 figure didnt include a monitor. That was another $500 for a 1084. I think the Atari may have include at B+W monitor in their price.

- Jimmy Maher

April 16, 2015 at 5:26 am

Yes, the $799 price included a monochrome monitor, the $999 price a color monitor.

You also needed the $200 memory expansion to expand the Amiga to 512 K to do much of anything at all with the machine. The ST came with 512 K standard. So, in all you were getting close to $2000 for a usable Amiga, almost twice the cost of the color ST system.

- Casey R Williams

April 18, 2015 at 11:06 pm

Oh, I had the basic differences committed to memory at one time. I can still recall a lot of it, The Megadrive’s slightly faster CPU (7.61 vs. 7.14), the Amiga’s higher onscreen color capability over the Atari (32 vs. 16). I just did not appreciate how it was not just the 68000 that loosely defined how these machines would come together, but also the state and cost of chip design and all of the new ideas being implemented in various ways (blitting).

On paper, the Amiga, Atari, x68000 and Genesis MegaDrive were all attempts at designing the all-singing, all-dancing 16-bit multimedia wonder-machine. And all give testament to the concessions their designers made due to cost projections, corporate viability estimates, changing market conditions etc.

I hadn’t previously considered Japan’s possible role in hypothetical outcomes in which the 68k machines survived the Mac’s transition to PPC. What if Sega and Commodore had worked together and the 32x had also been an Amiga expansion? What if Sharp’s computer had been successful enough to make it to the West, or Sharp decided to release an AGA machine in Japan as a successor to it?

- Ken Rutsky

April 12, 2015 at 12:24 pm

God, how heartbreaking this saga is. I remember playing Marble Madness for hours on my brother’s 500, which he still says is one of the best machines he ever owned.

One typo:

“…failure of the imminently fail-worthy Plus/4…”

Should be “eminently.”

- Jimmy Maher

April 12, 2015 at 12:39 pm

Thanks!

- Jim Sachs

April 12, 2015 at 2:04 pm

Great article!

- John Foust

April 17, 2015 at 1:41 am

I’m touched by the comparison between the early Byte and the early Amazing Computing where I served as technical editor. Indeed, I’d read Byte and Kilobaud religiously from their first issues. I admired their style and flavor and probably imitated them. It wasn’t until the mid-90s that I wrote for Byte.

- Michael Davis

April 24, 2015 at 1:12 am

“Commodore’s advertising campaign that started up then was as unfocused as a confetti cannon.”

What a vibrant analogy.

http://i3.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/013/974/clap.gif

- Adele

March 2, 2016 at 4:38 am

Love the article! A couple things:

The Amiga world premiere video that you had linked was pulled from YouTube (I just thought you might like to know). On a related note, thank you for embedding so many images and videos with your articles! They add so much to the experience, especially to your younger readers who are a bit too young to have experienced everything at the time.

Typo: Instead of “tow the line,” did you mean “toe the line?” I actually had to look this one up because I thought maybe I had been using it incorrectly my entire life.

- Jimmy Maher

March 2, 2016 at 5:48 am

That’s… unfortunate. I think Cloanto provides a nice service with Amiga Forever, but that just seems petty. Anyway, thanks!

Defender of the Crown
April 16, 2015

If you rushed out excitedly to buy an Amiga in the early days because it looked about to revolutionize gaming, you could be excused if you felt just a little bit disappointed and underwhelmed as the platform neared its first anniversary in shops. There was a reasonable amount of entertainment software available — much of it from the Amiga’s staunchest supporter, Electronic Arts — but nothing that felt quite as groundbreaking as EA’s early rhetoric about the Amiga would imply. Even the games from EA were mostly ports of popular 8-bit titles, modestly enhanced but hardly transformed. More disappointing in their way were the smattering of original titles. Games like Arcticfox and Marble Madness had their charms, but there was nothing conceptually new about them. Degrade the graphics and sound just slightly and they too could easily pass for 8-bit games. But then, timed to neatly correspond with that one-year anniversary, along came Defender of the Crown, the Amiga’s first blockbuster and to this day the game many old-timers think of first when you mention the platform.

Digital gaming in general was a medium in flux in the mid-1980s, still trying to understand what it was and where it fit on the cultural landscape. The preferred metaphor for pundits and developers alike immediately before the Amiga era was the book; the bookware movement brought with it Interactive Fiction, Electronic Novels, Living Literature, and many other forthrightly literary branded appellations. Yet in the big picture bookware had proved to be something of a commercial dud. Defender of the Crown gave the world a new metaphorical frame, one that seemed much better suit to the spectacular audiovisual capabilities of the Amiga. Cinemaware, the company that made it, had done just what their name would imply: replaced the interactive book with the interactive movie. In the process, they blew the doors of possibility wide open. In its way Defender of the Crown was as revolutionary as the Amiga itself — or, if you like, it was the long-awaited proof of concept for the Amiga as a revolutionary technology for gaming. All this, and it wasn’t even a very good game.

The Cinemaware story begins with Bob Jacob, a serial entrepreneur and lifelong movie buff who fulfilled a dream in 1982 by selling his business in Chicago and moving along with his wife Phyllis to Los Angeles, cradle of Hollywood. With time to kill while he figured out his next move, he became fascinated with another, newer form of media: arcade and computer games. He was soon immersing himself in the thriving Southern California hacker scene. Entrepreneur that he was, he smelled opportunity there. Most of the programmers writing games around him were “not very articulate” and clueless about business. Jacob realized that he could become a go-between, a bridge between hackers and publishers who assured that the former didn’t get ripped off and that the latter had ready access to talent. He could become, in other words, a classic Hollywood agent transplanted to the brave new world of software. Jacob did indeed became a modest behind-the-scenes player over the next couple of years, brokering deals with the big players like Epyx, Activision, Spinnaker, and Mindscape for individuals and small development houses like Ultrasoft, Synergistic, Interactive Arts, and Sculptured Software. And then came the day when he saw the Amiga for the first time.

Jacob had gotten a call from a developer called Island Graphics, who had been contracted by Commodore to write a paint program to be available on Day One for the Amiga. But the two companies had had a falling out. Now Island wanted Jacob to see if he could place the project with another publisher. This he succeeded in doing, signing Island with a new would-be Amiga publisher called Aegis; Island’s program would be released as Aegis Images. (Commodore would commission R.J. Mical to write an alternate paint program in-house; it hit the shelves under Commodore’s own imprint as GraphiCraft.) Much more important to Jacob’s future, however, was his visit to Island’s tiny office and his first glimpse of the prototype Amigas they had there. Like Trip Hawkins and a handful of others, Jacob immediately understood what the Amiga could mean for the future of gaming. He understood so well, in fact, that he made a life-changing decision. He decided he wanted to be more than just an agent. Rather than ride shotgun for the revolution, he wanted to drive it. He therefore wound down his little agency practice in favor of spearheading a new gaming concept he dubbed “Cinemaware.”

Jacob has recounted on a number of occasions the deductions that led him to the Cinemaware concept. A complete Amiga system was projected to cost in the neighborhood of $2000. Few of the teenagers who currently dominated amongst gamers could be expected to have parents indulgent enough to spend that kind of money on them. Jacob therefore expected the demographic that purchased Amigas to skew upward in age — toward people like him, a comfortably well-off professional in his mid-thirties. And people like him would not only want, as EA would soon be putting it, “the visual and aural quality our sophisticated eyes and ears demand,” but also more varied and nuanced fictional experiences. They would, in other words, like to get beyond Dungeons and Dragons, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Star Trek as the sum total of their games’ cultural antecedents. At the same time, though, their preference for more varied and interesting ludic fictions didn’t necessarily imply that they wanted games that were all that demanding on their time or even their brainpower. This is the point where Jacob diverged radically from Infocom, the most prominent extant purveyor of sophisticated interactive fictions. The very first computer game that Jacob had ever bought had been Infocom’s Deadline. He hadn’t been all that taken with the experience even at the time. Now, what with its parser-based interface and all the typing that that entailed, its complete lack of audiovisual flash, its extensive manual and evidence reports that the player was expected to read before even putting the disk in the drive, and the huge demands it placed on the player hoping to actually solve its case, it served as a veritable model for what Jacob didn’t want his games to be. Other forms of entertainment favored by busy adults weren’t so demanding. Quite the opposite, in fact. His conception of adult gaming would have it be as easy-going and accessible as television. Thus one might characterize Jacob’s vision as essentially Trip Hawkins’s old dictum of “simple, hot, and deep,” albeit with a bit more emphasis on the “hot” and a bit less on the “deep.” The next important question was where to find those more varied and nuanced fictional experiences. For a movie buff living on the very doorstep of Tinsel Town, the answer must have all but announced itself of its own accord.

Bookware aside, the game industry had to some extent been aping the older, more established art form of film for a while already. The first attempt that I’m aware of to portray a computer game as an interactive movie came with Sierra’s 1982 text-adventure epic Time Zone, the advertising for which was drawn as a movie poster, complete with “Starring: You,” “Admission: $99.95,” and a rating of “UA” for “Ultimate Adventure.” It was also the first game that I’m aware of to give a credit for “Producer” and “Executive Producer.” Once adopted and popularized by Electronic Arts the following year, such movie-making terminology spread quickly all over the game industry. Now Bob Jacob was about to drive the association home with a jackhammer.

Each Cinemaware game would be an interactive version of some genre of movies, drawn from the rich Hollywood past that Jacob knew so well. If nothing else, Hollywood provided the perfect remedy for writer’s block: “Creatively it was great because we had all kinds of genres of movies to shoot for.” Many of the movie genres in which Cinemaware would work felt long-since played-out creatively by the mid-1980s, but most gaming fictions were still so crude by comparison with even the most hackneyed Hollywood productions that it really didn’t matter: “I was smart enough and cynical enough to realize that all we had to do was reach the level of copycat, and we’d be considered a breakthrough.”

Cynicism notwithstanding, the real, obvious love that Jacob and a number of his eventual collaborators had for the movies they so self-consciously evoked would always remain one of the purest, most appealing things about Cinemaware. Their manuals, scant and often almost unnecessary as they would be, would always make room for an affectionate retrospective on each game’s celluloid inspirations. At the same time, though, we should understand something else about the person Jacob was and is. He’s not an idealist or an artist, and certainly not someone who spends a lot of time fretting over games in terms of anything other than commercial entertainment. He’s someone for whom phrases like “mass-market appeal” — and such phrases tend to come up frequently in his discourse — hold nary a hint of irony or condescension. Even his love of movies, genuine as it may be, reflects his orientation toward mainstream entertainment. You’ll not find him waiting for the latest Criterion Collection release of Bergman or Truffaut. No, he favors big popcorn flicks with, well, mass-market appeal. Like so much else about Jacob, this sensibility would be reflected in Cinemaware.

Financing for a new developer wasn’t an easy thing to secure in the uncertain industry of 1985. Perhaps in response, Jacob initially conceived of his venture as a very minimalist operation, employing only himself and his wife Phyllis on a full-time basis. The other founding member of the inner circle was Kellyn Beeck, a friend, software acquisitions manager at Epyx, fellow movie buff, and frustrated game designer. The plan was to give him a chance to exorcise the latter demon with Cinemaware. Often working from Jacob’s initial inspiration, he would provide outside developers with design briefs for Cinemaware games, written in greater or lesser detail depending on the creativity and competency of said developers. When the games were finished, Jacob would pass them on to Mindscape for publication as part of the Cinemaware line. One might say that it wasn’t conceptually all that far removed from the sort of facilitation Jacob had been doing for a couple of years already as a software agent. It would keep the non-technical Jacob well-removed from the uninteresting (to him) nuts and bolts of software development. Jacob initially called his company Master Designer Software, reflecting both an attempt to “appeal to the ego of game designers” and a hope that, should the Cinemaware stuff turn out well, he might eventually launch other themed lines. Cinemaware would, however, become such a strong brand in its own right in the next year or two that Jacob would end up making it the name of his company. I’ll just call Jacob’s operation “Cinemaware” from now on, as that’s the popular name everyone would quickly come to know it under even well before the official name change.

After nearly a year of preparation, Jacob pulled the trigger on Cinemaware at last in January of 1986, when in a manner of a few days he legally formed his new company, signed a distribution contract with Mindscape, and signed contracts with outsiders to develop the first four Cinemaware games, to be delivered by October 15, 1986 — just in time for Christmas. Two quite detailed design briefs went to Sculptured Software of Salt Lake City, a programming house that had made a name for themselves as a porter of games between platforms. Of Sculptured’s Cinemaware projects, Defender of the Crown, the title about which Jacob and Beeck were most excited, was inspired by costume epics of yesteryear featuring legendary heroes like Ivanhoe and Robin Hood, while SDI was to be a game involving Ronald Reagan’s favorite defense program and drawing its more tenuous cinematic inspiration from science-fiction classics ranging from the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s to the recent blockbuster Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The other two games went to proven lone-wolf designer/programmers, last of a slowly dying breed, and were outlined in much broader strokes. King of Chicago, given to a programmer named Doug Sharp who had earlier written a game called ChipWits, an interesting spiritual successor to Silas Warner’s classic Robot War, was to be an homage to gangster movies. And Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon was given to one Bill Williams, who had earlier written such Atari 8-bit hits as Necromancer and Alley Cat and had just finished the first commercial game ever released for the Amiga, Mind Walker. His game would be an homage to Hollywood’s various takes on the Arabian Nights. Excited though he was by the Amiga, Jacob hedged his bets on his platforms just as he did on his developers, planning to get at least one title onto every antagonist in the 68000 Wars before 1986 was out. Only Defender of the Crown and Sinbad were to be developed and released first on the Amiga; King of Chicago would be written on the Macintosh, SDI on the Atari ST. If all went well, ports could follow.

All of this first wave of Cinemaware games as well as the ones that would follow will get their greater or lesser due around here in articles to come. Today, though, I want to concentrate on the most historically important if certainly not the best of Cinemaware’s works, Defender of the Crown.

Our noble Saxon hero on the job.

Defender of the Crown, then, takes place in a version of medieval England that owes far more to cinema than it does to history. As in romantic depictions of Merry Olde England dating back at least to Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, the stolid English Saxons are the heroes here, the effete French Normans — despite being the historical victors in the struggle for control of England — the villains. Thus you play a brave Saxon lord struggling against his Norman oppressors. Defender of the Crown really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as history, fiction, or legend. A number of its characters are drawn from Ivanhoe, which might lead one to conclude that it’s meant to be a sequel to that book, taking place after Richard I’s death has thrown his kingdom into turmoil once again. But if that’s the case then why is Reginald Front-de-Boeuf, who was killed in Ivanhoe, running around alive and well again? Should you win Defender of the Crown, you’ll be creating what amounts to an alternate history in which the Saxons throw off the Norman yoke and regain control of England. Suffice to say that the only history that Defender of the Crown is really interested in is the history of Hollywood. What it wants to evoke is not the England of myth or reality, but the England of the movies so lovingly described in its manual. It has no idea where it stands in relation to Ivanhoe or much of anything else beyond the confines of a Hollywood sound stage, nor does it care. Given that, why should we? So, let’s agree to just go with it.

The core of Defender of the Crown: Risk played in Merry Olde England

Defender of the Crown is essentially Risk played on a map of England. The other players in the game include three of the hated Normans and two other Saxon lords, who generally try to avoid attacking their ethnic fellows unless space starts getting really tight. Your goal is of course to wipe the Normans from the map and make of England a Saxon kingdom again. Woven into the simple Risk-like strategy game are a handful of action-oriented minigames that can be triggered by your own actions or those of the other lords: a grand jousting tournament, a midnight raid on an enemy castle, a full-on siege complete with a catapult that you use to knock down a beleaguered castle’s walls. In keeping with Jacob’s vision of Cinemaware games as engaging but light entertainments, a full game usually takes well under an hour to play, and there is no provision for saving or restoring.

From the beginning, it was Jacob’s intention to really pull out all the stops for Defender of the Crown in particular amongst his launch titles, to make of it an audiovisual showcase the likes of which had never been seen before. Shortly after signing Sculptured Software to do the programming, he therefore signed Jim Sachs to work with them, giving him a title familiar to Hollywood but new to the world of games: Art Director.

A Jim Sachs self-portrait, one of his early Amiga pictures that won him the job of Art Director for Defender of the Crown.

A self-taught artist from childhood and a programmer since he’d purchased a Commodore 64 just a few years before, Sachs had made quite a name for himself in quite a short time in Commodore circles. He’d written and released a game of his own for the Commodore 64, Saucer Attack, that mixed spectacular graphics with questionable gameplay (an accusation soon to be leveled against Defender of the Crown as well). He’d then spent a year working on another game, to be called Time Crystal, that never got beyond a jawdropping demo that made the rounds of Commodore 64 BBSs for years. He’d been able to use this demo and Saucer Attack to convince Commodore to give him developer’s status for the Amiga, allowing him access to pre-release hardware. Sach’s lovely early pictures were amongst the first to be widely distributed amongst Amiga users, making him the most well-known of the Amiga’s early hacker artists prior to Eric Graham flooring everyone with his Juggler animation in mid-1986. Indeed, Sachs was quite possibly the best Amiga painter in the world when Jacob signed him up to do Defender of the Crown — Andy Warhol included. He would become the most important single individual to work on the game. If it was unusual for an artist to become the key figure behind a game, that itself was an illustration of what made Cinemaware — and particularly Defender of the Crown — so different from what had come before. As he himself was always quick to point out, Sachs by no means personally drew every single one of the many lush scenes that make up the game. At least seven others contributed art, an absolutely huge number by the standards of the time, and another sign of what made Defender of the Crown so different from everything that had come before. It is fair to say, however, that Sachs’s virtual brush swept over every single one of the game’s scenes, tweaking a shadow here, harmonizing differing styles there. His title of Art Director was very well-earned.

This knight, first distributed by Jim Sachs as a standalone picture, would find his way into Defender of the Crown almost unaltered.

By June of 1986 Sachs and company had provided Sculptured Software with a big pile of mouth-watering art, but Sculptured had yet to demonstrate to Jacob even the smallest piece of a game incorporating any of it. Growing concerned, Jacob flew out to Salt Lake City to check on their progress. What he found was a disaster: “Those guys were like nowhere. Literally nowhere.” Their other game for Cinemaware, SDI, was relatively speaking further along, but also far behind schedule. It seemed that this new generation of 68000-based computers had proved to be more than Sculptured had bargained for.

Desperate to meet his deadline with Mindscape, Jacob took the first steps toward his eventual abandonment of his original concept of Cinemaware as little more than a creative director and broker between developer and publisher. He hired his first actual employee beyond himself and Phyllis, a fellow named John Cutter who had just been laid off following Activision’s acquisition of his previous employer Gamestar, a specialist in sports games. Cutter, more technical and more analytical than Jacob, would become his right-hand man and organizer-in-chief for Cinemaware’s many projects to come. His first task was to remove Sculptured Software entirely from Defender of the Crown; S.D.I. they were allowed to keep, but from now on they’d work on it under close supervision from Cutter. Realizing he needed someone who knew the Amiga intimately to have a prayer of completing Defender of the Crown by October 15, Jacob called up none other than R.J. Mical, developer of Intuition and GraphiCraft, and made him an offer: $26,000 if he could take Sachs’s pile of art and Jacob and Beeck’s design, plus a bunch of music Jacob had commissioned from a composer named Jim Cuomo, and turn it all into a finished game within three months. Mical simply said — according to Jacob — “I’m your man.”

He got it done, even if it did nearly kill him. Mical insists to this day that Jacob wasn’t straight with him about the project, that the amount of work it ended up demanding of him was far greater than what he had been led to expect when he agreed to do the job. He was left so unhappy by his rushed final product that he purged his own name from the in-game credits. Sachs also is left with what he calls a “bitter taste,” feeling Jacob ended up demanding far, far more work from him than was really fair for the money he was paid. Many extra graphical flourishes and entire additional scenes that Mical simply didn’t have time or space to incorporate into the finished product were left on the cutting-room floor. Countless 20-hour days put in by Sachs and his artists thus went to infuriating waste in the name of meeting an arbitrary deadline. Sachs claims that five man-weeks work worth of graphics were thrown out for the jousting scenes alone. Neither Sachs nor Mical would ever work with Cinemaware again.

Jousting, otherwise known as occasionally knocking the other guy off his horse for no discernible reason but mostly getting unhorsed yourself.

Many gameplay elements were also cut, while even much of what did make it in has an unfinished feel about it. Defender of the Crown manages the neat trick of being both too hard and too easy. What happens on the screen in the various action minigames feels peculiarly disconnected from what you actually do with the mouse. I’m not sure anyone has ever entirely figured out how the jousting or swordfighting games are even supposed to work; random mouse twiddling and praying would seem to be the only viable tactics. And yet the Risk-style strategic game is almost absurdly easy. Most players win it — and thus Defender of the Crown as a whole — on their second if not their first try, and then never lose again.

Given this, it would be very easy to dismiss Defender of the Crown entirely. And indeed, plenty of critics have done just that, whilst often tossing the rest of Cinemaware’s considerable catalog into the trash can of history alongside it. But, as the length of this article would imply, I’m not quite willing to do that. I recognize that Defender of the Crown isn’t really up to much as a piece of game design, yet even today that doesn’t seem to matter quite as much as it ought to. Simplistic and kind of broken as it is, it’s still a more entertaining experience today than it ought to be — certainly enough so to be worth a play or two. And back in 1986… well, I united England under the Saxon banner a ridiculous number of times as a kid, long after doing so became rote. In thinking about Defender of the Crown‘s appeal, I’ve come to see it as representing an important shift not just in the way that games are made but also in the way that we experience them. To explain what I mean I need to get a bit theoretical with you, just for a moment.

Whilst indulging in a bit of theory in an earlier article, I broke down a game into three component parts: its system of rules and mechanics, its “surface” or user interface, and its fictional context. I want to set aside the middle entry in that trio and just think about rules and context today. As I also wrote in that earlier article, the rise in earnest of what I call “experiential games” from the 1950s onward is marked by an increased interest in the latter in comparison to the former, as games became coherent fictional experiences to be lived rather than mere abstract systems to be manipulated in pursuit of a favorable outcome. I see Defender of the Crown and the other Cinemaware games as the logical endpoint of that tendency. In designing the game, Bob Jacob and Kellyn Beeck started not with a mechanical concept — grand strategy, text adventure, arcade action, etc. — but with a fictional context: a recreation of those swashbuckling Hollywood epics of yore. That the mechanical system they came up with to underlie that fiction — a simplified game of Risk peppered by equally simplistic action games — is loaded with imperfections is too bad but also almost ancillary to Defender of the Crown the experience. The mechanics do the job just well enough to make themselves irrelevant. No one comes to Defender of the Crown to play a great strategy game. They come to immerse themselves in the Merry Olde England of bygone Hollywood.

For many years now there have been voices stridently opposed to the emphasis a game like Defender of the Crown places on its its fictional context, with the accompanying emphasis on foreground aesthetics necessary to bring that context to life. Chris Crawford, for instance, dismisses not just this game but Cinemaware as a whole in one paragraph in On Game Design as “lots of pretty pictures and animated sequences” coupled to “weak” gameplay. Gameplay is king, we’re told, and graphics and music and all the rest don’t — or shouldn’t — matter a whit. Crawford all but critically ranks games based entirely on what he calls their “process intensity”: their ratio of dynamic, interactive code — i.e., gameplay —  to static art, sound, music, even text. If one accepts this point of view in whole or in part, as many of the more prominent voices in game design and criticism tend to do, it does indeed become very easy to dismiss the entire oeuvre of Cinemaware as a fundamentally flawed concept and, worse, a dangerous one, a harbinger of further design degradations to come.

Speaking here as someone with an unusual tolerance for ugly graphics — how else could I have written for years now about all those ugly 8-bit games? — I find that point of view needlessly reductive and rather unfair. Leaving aside that beauty for its own sake, whether found in a game or in an art museum, is hardly worthy of our scorn, the reality is that very few modern games are strictly about their mechanics. Many have joined Defender of the Crown as embodied fictional experiences. This is the main reason that many people play them today. If beautiful graphics help us to feel embodied in a ludic world, bully for them. I’d argue that the rich graphics in Defender of the Crown carry much the same water as the rich prose in, say, Mindwheel or Trinity. Personally — and I understand that mileages vary here — I’m more interested in becoming someone else or experiencing — there’s that word again! — something new to me for a while than I am in puzzles, strategy, or reflex responses in the abstract. I’d venture to guess that most gamers are similar. In some sense modern games have transcended games — i.e., a system of rules and mechanics — as we used to know them. Commercial and kind of crass as it sometimes is, we can see Defender of the Crown straining toward becoming an embodied, interactive, moving, beautiful, fictional experience rather than being just the really bad take on Risk it unquestionably also is.

A fetching lass gives you the old come-hither stare. Those partial to redheads or brunettes also have options.

A good illustration of Defender of the Crown‘s appeal as an experiential fiction as well as perhaps a bit of that aforementioned crassness is provided by the game’s much-discussed romantic angle. No Hollywood epic being complete without a love interest for the dashing hero, you’ll likely at some point during your personal epic get the opportunity to rescue a Saxon damsel in distress from the clutches of a dastardly Norman. We all know what’s bound to happen next: “During the weeks that follow, gratitude turns to love. Then, late one night…”

Consummating the affair. Those shadows around waist-level are… unfortunate. I don’t think they’re actually supposed to look like what they look like, although they do give a new perspective to the name of “Geoffrey Longsword.”

After the affair is consummated, your new gal accompanies you through the rest of the game. It’s important to note here that she has no effect one way or the other on your actual success in reconquering England, and that rescuing her is actually one of the more difficult things to do in Defender of the Crown, as it requires that you engage with the pretty terrible swordfighting game; I can only pull it off if I pick as my character Geoffrey Longsword, appropriately enough the hero with “Strong” swordfighting skills. Yet your game — your story — somehow feels incomplete if you don’t manage it. What good is a hero without a damsel to walk off into the sunset with him? There are several different versions of the virgin (sorry!) that show up, just to add a bit of replay value for the lovelorn.

As I’ve written earlier, 1986 was something of a banner year for sex in videogames. The love scene in Defender of the Crown, being much more, um, graphic than the others, attracted particular attention. Many a youngster over the years to come would have his dreams delightfully haunted by those damsels. Shortly after the game’s release, Amazing Computing published an unconfirmed report from an “insider” that the love scene was originally intended to be interactive, requiring “certain mouse actions to coax the fair woman, who reacted accordingly. After consulting with game designers and project management, the programmer supposedly destroyed all copies of the source code to that scene.” Take that with what grains of salt you will. At any rate, a sultry love interest would soon become a staple of Cinemaware games, for the very good reason that the customers loved them. And anyway, Jacob himself, as he later admitted in a revelation bordering on Too Much Information, “always liked chesty women.” It was all horribly sexist, of course, something Amazing Computing pointed out by declaring Defender of the Crown the “most anti-woman game of the year.” On the other hand, it really wasn’t any more sexist than its cinematic inspirations, so I suppose it’s fair enough when taken in the spirit of homage.

Cinemaware wasn’t shy about highlighting one of Defender of the Crown‘s core appeals. Did someone mention sexism?

The buzz about Defender of the Crown started inside Amiga circles even before the game was done. An early build was demonstrated publicly for the first time at the Los Angeles Commodore Show in September of 1986; it attracted a huge, rapt crowd. Released right on schedule that November through Mindscape, Defender of the Crown caused a sensation. Amiga owners treated it as something like a prophecy fulfilled; this was the game they’d all known the Amiga was capable of, the one they’d been waiting for, tangible proof of their chosen platform’s superiority over all others. And it became an object of lust — literally, when the gorgeously rendered Saxon maidens showed up — for those who weren’t lucky enough to own Commodore’s wunderkind.  You could spend lots of time talking about all of the Amiga’s revolutionary capabilities — or you could just pop Defender of the Crown in the drive, sit back, and watch the jaws drop. The game sold 20,000 copies before the end of 1986 alone, astounding numbers considering that the total pool of Amiga owners at that point probably didn’t number much more than 100,000. I feel pretty confident in saying that just about every one of those 80,000 or so Amiga owners who didn’t buy the game right away probably had a pirated copy soon enough. It would go on to sell 250,000 copies, the “gift that kept on giving” for Jacob and Cinemaware for years to come. While later Cinemaware games would be almost as beautiful and usually much better designed — not to mention having the virtue of actually being finished — no other would come close to matching Defender of the Crown‘s sales numbers or its public impact.

Laying siege to a castle. The Greek fire lying to the left of the catapult can’t be used. It was cut from the game but not the graphics, only to be added back in in later ports.

Cinemaware ported Defender of the Crown to a plethora of other platforms over the next couple of years. Ironically, virtually all of the ports were much better game games than the Amiga version, fixing the minigames to make them comprehensible and reasonably entertaining and tightening up the design to make it at least somewhat more difficult to sleepwalk to victory. In a sense, it was Atari ST users who got the last laugh. That, anyway, is the version that some aficionados name as the best overall: the graphics and sound aren’t quite as good, but the game behind them has been reworked with considerable aplomb. Even so, it remained and remains the Amiga version that most people find most alluring. Without those beautiful graphics, there just doesn’t seem to be all that much point to Defender of the Crown. Does this make it a gorgeous atmospheric experience that transcends its game mechanics or just a broken, shallow game gussied up with lots of pretty pictures? Perhaps it’s both, or neither. Artistic truth is always in the eye of the beholder. But one thing is clear: we’ll be having these sorts of discussions a lot as we look at games to come. That’s the real legacy of Defender of the Crown — for better or for worse.

(Sources: On the Edge by Brian Bagnall; Computer Gaming World of January/February 1985, March 1987 and August/September 1987; Amazing Computing #1.9, February 1987, April 1987, and July 1987; Commodore Magazine of October 1987 and November 1988; AmigaWorld of November/December 1986. Jim Sachs has been interviewed in more recent years by Kamil Niescioruk and The Personal Computer Museum. Matt Barton and Tristan Donovan have each interviewed Bob Jacob for Gamasutra.

Defender of the Crown is available for purchase for Windows and Mac from GOG.com, in the Apple Store for iOS, and on Google Play for Android for those of you wanting to visit Merry Olde England for yourselves. All emulate the historically definitive if somewhat broken Amiga version, featuring the original Amiga graphics and sound.)

Comments
38 Responses

- Matthew

April 16, 2015 at 4:53 pm

Heh. So I was reading this and thinking “hey, I don’t remember it being that bad a game”. But I played the PC version, and then I got to the end where you mention the ports being much better. Flip side is the PC version’s graphics were not especially great even for the PC (I can’t remember if it was EGA or VGA, anyone?). Now, the Cinemaware game I really did think had terrible gameplay was the Three Stooges. Felt like they were concentrating so much on the “Cinema” part that they didn’t even bother with the “Game” part (Again, PC version, Amiga may have been better, etc).

- Lisa H.

April 16, 2015 at 8:53 pm

I haven’t played it, but if the graphics resembled those above I would think they’d be EGA?

- Jimmy Maher

April 17, 2015 at 5:12 am

Saying they “resemble” the Amiga graphics is perhaps being too kind: http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/defender-of-the-crown/screenshots.

Those are obviously CGA. I don’t know if Defender of the Crown ever supported EGA. Even if it did, you couldn’t really duplicate the Amiga graphics. EGA allowed 16 onscreen colors from a palette of 64, the Amiga 32 onscreen from a palette of 4096. (There were lots of fairly simple tricks to get a lot more colors than that onscreen on the Amiga, but I don’t think Defender of the Crown uses them.) So, you’d need VGA to get there.

- Doug Orleans

April 17, 2015 at 6:01 am

Breaking: you can get 1024 colors on CGA now!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y
http://8088mph.blogspot.com/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrated.html

- Matthew

April 17, 2015 at 8:11 pm

Yep, no way you could get screenshots like the above with EGA. Remember, it’s not just that EGA only gave 16 colors, they were completely unchangeable, and given that CGA/EGA monitors were digital, I’d say impossible to hack around (the CGA hack that Doug posted, while super amazing, used a Composite monitor that was somewhat more flexible hardware wise).

That said, this prompted me to google and there definitely was an EGA version of Defender, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccLqRMlpYdM for a playthrough.

Waiting patiently for this blog to get to the point in a few more years when VGA+Soundblaster+Roland comes along and the PC finally stops being an embarrassment gaming wise.

- Jim Leonard

May 7, 2015 at 11:57 am

There was an EGA/Tandy port with substantially better graphics than the screenshots you linked to, but it is uncommon as it was released outside of the United States. The graphics are much closer to the Amiga in that version, but the limited number of colors can’t quite do the game the same justice.

- Alex

April 18, 2015 at 4:11 am

Ah, nobody loved The Three Stooges. Just to give some perspective to the platform debates sparked by this article: Imagine the uncharacteristic patience of a child waiting for it to load on a 256k PC Junior in glorious washed out CGA graphics. Even then, the presentation carried a lot for someone used to the NES, as well as the great Defender of the Crown gag at the beginning.

Speaking of perspective, I’ll assume the NES version is going to (charitably) go unmentioned.

- Pedro Timóteo

April 16, 2015 at 5:16 pm

Great as always. :)

Just one thing: you mention that rescuing a damsel and getting married didn’t actually change anything in the game, but I seem to remember (maybe not on the Amiga version, though; I never owned one, unfortunately, but I did play a lot of the PC port) that, when you did so, the girl’s father (one of the other Saxon lords) decided to “retire” and you got all of his lands for free. Then again, it’s been a long time.

Unrelated to this: are you planning a post about Jeff Minter and his games? You once kind of implied you would write one…

- Jimmy Maher

April 16, 2015 at 7:11 pm

It might very well have some concrete effect in other versions. I do seem to remember some speculation that having a wife might help you fight better in the strategic game. But the strategic game is so easy that it’s kind of hard to judge…

I don’t think I’ll be writing on Minter. I’m already kind of past his first heyday, and his style of game just isn’t one that I’m all that interested in or qualified to write about. Sorry!

- Pedro Timóteo

April 17, 2015 at 8:51 am

Pity about Minter (I’m a big fan, and incidentally only “discovered” him in the 2000s, not in the 80s), but understandable, we can’t have be equally interested in everything, and I love most of what you do write about (not only computers and games, but the history itself).

- matt w

April 16, 2015 at 5:34 pm

When I first scrolled past that advertisement on Planet-IF I was like “Why is Jimmy reviewing Evony?”

Typo patrol: you have “20,0000” with an extra 0 after the comma.

- Jimmy Maher

April 16, 2015 at 7:09 pm

Just one more way that Cinemaware was prescient. Thanks!

- iPadCary

April 16, 2015 at 6:44 pm

Definately a historic fave.
On iPad now, if anyone’s interested!

- Jimmy Maher

April 16, 2015 at 7:22 pm

Thanks. I forgotten the mobile versions. Note added.

- Mats Pehrson

April 16, 2015 at 7:32 pm

The Amiga version was updated with all the missing features in the CDTV-version, which is in my opinion the best version overall.

Also, on the CD32 was released Defender of the Crown II; more or less the same game but with some added gameplay (for instance, the goal is to collect a ransom for king Richard).

- Lisa H.

April 16, 2015 at 8:54 pm

Jousting, otherwise known as occasionally knocking the other guy off his horse for no discernible reason but mostly getting unhorsed yourself. … random mouse twiddling and praying would seem to be the only viable tactics

LOL. I haven’t played this particular game (though I think I have vague memories of seeing it as demo software on an Amiga in a software/computer store way back when) but I feel much the same way about the jousting in Sierra’s Conquests of Camelot. Although that does at least tell you what keypresses do what motions (ditto the somewhat complicated swordfighting, which uses the whole numpad), it’s just that figuring out what the Right Thing to do in response to any particular movement from the opponent was always obscure to me. When I won, I had no idea how I’d done it, and mostly I just lost. Rather frustrating.

- Andrew McCarthy

April 16, 2015 at 10:37 pm

The jousting in Conquests of Camelot is ridiculously hard. But the swordfight does have a (rather un-intuitive ludically but very realistic) trick to it.

Namely, spend the first part of the fight on the defensive, attacking as little as possible. Your opponent will tire himself out attacking you, allowing you to press your advantage as the fight progresses.

- Lisa H.

April 17, 2015 at 7:56 am

Yeah, fighting the Saracen at the end was easier to do, despite the complex control possibilities.

- Scott Gage

April 16, 2015 at 11:32 pm

Just for the record the GOG version has both Amiga and PC versions included – since I played the game on Commodore 64 I remembered the gameplay being basic, but not too bad. Since I struggle with Amiga emulation (having never owned one) I snapped up the GOG version to see what I’d been missing out on, graphics wise. I was quick to go back to the PC version, though :)

- Pedro Timóteo

April 17, 2015 at 8:55 am

As Jimmy said, the best combination of decent graphics and sound + improved gameplay may well be the Atari ST version. The PC one only supported EGA graphics and speaker sound, I think.

- Rowan Lipkovits

April 17, 2015 at 6:41 am

The biggest question for Defender of the Crown for me has always been…

What does this guy have to do with it? http://www.jackzufeltspeaks.com/ On a few ports (eg. the Mac version) he gets top billing in the credits, as “presented by”. Is that just like oldschool Kickstarter?

- Jimmy Maher

April 17, 2015 at 12:36 pm

Basically, yeah. Bob Jacob secured funding to start Cinemaware from a bunch of investors in the Salt Lake City area who were led by Jack M. Zufelt. So, Zufelt and his folks got the equivalent of a Hollywood executive-producer credit on the game, as the ones with the money.

I believe this is also how Cinemaware ended up working with Sculptured Software. They were local boys who had a lot of the same investors.

- Wade

April 17, 2015 at 8:17 am

The Apple IIGS version is also excellent:

http://www.whatisthe2gs.apple2.org.za/defender-of-the-crown

… though Alex, who hosts the site I just linked, doesn’t like the game much.

Re: overall difficulty – I viewed the castle you pick to start in as being something of a difficulty setting. The castle at the bottom was easy to win from because it was out of the way. Starting in the middle, you’d more often get squeezed by other folks.

Rather than the game being super easy per se, I guess I found it telescoped quickly in one direction or the other. If you do well early in the game, you’re set. If you don’t, you’ll crash.

My only trick with the swordfighting was – be Geoffrey Longsword!

I have an issue of Games Machine magazine from around this period which joked about the lady on the cover of the game (not the ad shown in this article), dragging down both a horse and a knight with her chest.

- Jimmy Maher

April 17, 2015 at 12:37 pm

You don’t get a choice of castles in the Amiga version. It’s random.

- Todd Holcomb

April 20, 2015 at 12:47 pm

Loved this game on the Apple IIgs, and it’s a game that I still go back and play today, because you do feel like you’re part of a movie. The IIgs version isn’t easy – if your Saxon allies don’t capture many lands then it can be quite difficult. My strategy was / is to buy a catapult, build up a ton of soldiers, and outflank the enemy in battle. I never thought that knights were worth the price. And what’s up with your Saxons partners raiding your castle? With friends like that, who needs Normans?!

- Felix

April 17, 2015 at 9:50 am

How ironic. The game that ushered in the era of graphics-fests already displayed the tension between graphics and gameplay. And you know… learning what the developer went through (boy, am I familiar with that kind of commission), I can’t blame him. Pro tip: you only have so much time and effort to sink into any given project. You can have great art, you can have great gameplay, or you can have a *compromise*. Then again, you can refuse to compromise and have a failure on your hands, just like 90% of the software projects out there.

But there’s more to the issue.

We call them computer *games*, and as it’s often been pointed out in IF circles, that skews the way we think about them. What makes computers unique as a medium is in fact *interactivity*. Remove that, and you have just a book or movie that just happens to unfold on a computer. That’s why people want *something* to do in their games, even if it’s as little as wandering around to uncover new sights. Walking simulators are successful, and that’s because the interactivity they offer is sufficient — sufficiently meaningful and/or interesting — for the player to be satisfied. (Of course, that’s because they reward their one mechanic, exploration, with gorgeous new sights at every turn. That’s where the art versus gameplay balance comes in.)

So you can have a game that provides a world to explore. You can have one where you can become enmeshed in a story. You can have one where there are always new depths of gameplay to uncover, and some people actually prefer those — that’s why you have chess players dedicating their entire life to one highly abstract game. In a way, all players are explorers; the only difference is what each of us would rather explore. It’s all fine.

The one thing that doesn’t work, the absolute worst you can do, is trying to spoon-feed the player a predetermined “experience” when they were expecting to, you know, craft their own. Defender of the Crown may have had terrible gameplay, but at least it made a genuine effort, and I think that’s why it worked so well. Without that part, all the art would have meant very little indeed.

And that’s not the conclusion I expected to reach at all. Oh well.

- Jimmy Maher

April 17, 2015 at 12:45 pm

Yeah. I’ve often thought that many types of computers games are really ill-served by that label, as they have very little to do with traditional games. I flailed around in the past looking to clarify this and maybe even find a better appellation, but haven’t really gotten very far with it. Ludic narrative? Interactive experience? Nothing really works, and it doesn’t really matter anyway; the general public is unlikely to stop calling them “games” anytime soon.

- Ken Rutsky

April 17, 2015 at 3:41 pm

This is a game I’d always heard about in magazines and from friends, but I’ve never actually played it.

The gameplay…in some ways, the mini-games make it sound similar to Sid Meier’s Pirates! Did DotC influence Pirates in any way?

- Jimmy Maher

April 17, 2015 at 3:56 pm

No, don’t really think so. Pirates! appeared relatively early in 1987 if I recall correctly, and Defender of the Crown right at the end of 1986. So there wasn’t really time for it have much influence, especially considering that Pirates! was a design quite long in gestation. And Pirates! is vastly superior as a game design.

The strongest obvious influence on Pirates! was Seven Cities of Gold. But… we’ll get there soon. ;)

- Carl

April 17, 2015 at 6:15 pm

I hope you have an article about Pirates. That was probably may favorite all time game.

You mention a lot of old-timers will think of Defender of the Crown when they think of the Amiga. Among my friends and acquaintances when they think of the Amiga, they think of Shadow of the Beast.

- Firedragon

April 17, 2015 at 7:42 pm

I remember Defender of the Crown very well as I played it literally over hundred times. Recollecting my memory there are some interesting points I’m sure rarely anyone found out in the games 28 years existence.
– Sword fight: it’s basically clicking as fast as possible and moving your mouse constantly to the right side so you can advance. If you did enough castle raids your skill level actually went up!
– Jousting: you pointed the mouse cursor to the middle and just before the two opponents crushed into each other you moved it slightly to the left. et voilà, opponent down! But not too much or you would kill the horse and get rid of all your land from which you rarely recover
– Catapult: pulling it it fully down and pulling it three pixels up provided you with the first hit.

It is interesting how much I remember of it even after almost thirty years… it was a very immersive game for its time and it’s possibly the game I played most often in my life. Despite the obvious flaws it was atmospheric and that’s what counted.

- Nathan

April 18, 2015 at 2:34 pm

I played the DOS port on CGA (so 320×200, 4 colors including the black background). There was an EGA version, but we didn’t have EGA. Speaker sound only, but still some of the best single-voice PC speaker music ever.
I would always pick Geoffrey Longsword, since that was the only way I could win a raid or rescue the princess. (I’m proud to say I was more embarrassed than titillated by the princess scenes.) Jousting was easy; you just had to aim at the center of the cross on his shield. I only found out about the possibility of killing a horse by searching the binary for text strings–it’s a pretty hard and stupid thing to do. Greek fire was important (almost as important as disease) for knocking the garrison forces down with your catapult before the actual fighting started. When you rescued the princess you got the lands of whichever Saxon she was kidnapped from.
Also, I would always restart until I randomly started in Clwyd. That way I could start off by claiming Gloucester and Hampshire, followed by the rich southeastern territories (Essex, Sussex, even Cambridge if I was lucky) and build up an army in the first few turns. Even with that strategic boost, it was along time before I ever won the game. The castle at Cornwall always seemed the last to fall, and I was sure if I ever beat it I would find the crown there. What a surprise when I finally won.
I enjoyed Defender of the Crown, and was always envious of the Amiga owners who could play that with the awesome original graphics and sound. I had no idea they were playing an inferior game.

- Matthew W

April 19, 2015 at 7:48 am

Loved this article.

And loved Defender of the Crown, even though, as you point out, it’s not a particularly good game.

Kids today will never appreciate just how impressive it looked and sounded to someone who’s previous computer was an 8-bit ZX Spectrum. The music still gives me goosebumps.

I suspect that one of the movies that heavily influenced the graphics was the 1954 Prince Valiant film, especially the tournament scenes. Sadly DotC doesn’t feature Robert Wagner playing a Viking prince, something that would enhance every game.

- Nate

April 26, 2015 at 12:47 am

Great article. I’d like to recommend the below video as a replacement for your link to Time Crystal. The video you linked doesn’t use the joystick so the saucer crashes and is a cracked version that skips part of the intro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ7UDnJF3kk

- Jimmy Maher

April 26, 2015 at 6:30 am

I’m pretty sure I did see that version when I wrote the article. But what bugged me about it was the ugly “Unregistered HyperCam 2” (?) disclaimer and the way its aspect ratio is stretched way too far horizontally. That’s kind of a pet peeve of mine.

- Chris

December 3, 2015 at 7:27 pm

What’s “sexist” about rescuing a woman? What if the sexes were reversed? Then I suppose the female rescuing an attractive man would be called “empowered.”

- Peter Piers

January 13, 2016 at 8:41 pm

I believe it is sexist because women have a history of being the maiden in distress, and the poster perpetuates that.

But, don’t sweat it. People can find sexism everywhere, and there’s always a very good argument and a very good counter-argument. Losing battle. Best to get some popcorn, watch the battle from the bleachers, and have a clean conscience about your own games/works.

- Chris

December 3, 2015 at 8:31 pm

That was meant in the spirit of debate that I love about your comments section, by the way — in case the succinctness caused it to appear grumpy.

I remember being so amazed as an early teen by the graphics in the C64 version of Defender of the Crown that in spite of having no clue as to how to beat the jousting or sword-fighting “scenes,” I played the game inordinately often. I reckoned that the missing manual explained my failure to beat it. Surely everything would be explained in the instructions!

I had a pirat… (ahem) “archived” version of the game. Whenever I found myself using a program regularly, my conscience would catch up with me and I’d buy the thing. I was disappointed to find that the manual didn’t really help. I was still glad to rid myself of the guilt, though. I guess all of those anti-piracy articles in Compute!’s Gazette, Run, etc. worked on me!

It’s funny to recall how much I loved the game, as I’m now one of those “game-play over graphics” guys you’ve mentioned. Still, whoever wrote the C64 adaptation worked wonders with sixteen colors.

On S.D.I. (Just a Little) and King of Chicago (Quite a Lot)
April 24, 2015

In addition to Defender of the Crown, Bob Jacob and Cinemaware were able to deliver two more of their planned four launch titles to Mindscape before the end of 1986. Only Bill Williams’s Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon fell hopelessly behind schedule, getting pushed well into the following year. Of the games that did make it, Sculptured Software’s Atari ST game S.D.I. is mildly interesting as a time capsule of its era, Doug Sharp’s Macintosh game King of Chicago much more so as an important experiment in interactive narrative. Today I’ll endeavor to give each game its just desserts.

The scenario of S.D.I. is almost hilariously of its time, a weird stew of science fiction and contemporary geopolitics that quotes Ronald Reagan’s speeches in its manual and could never have emerged more than a year or so earlier or later. It’s 2017, the Cold War has gone on business-as-usual for another thirty years, and Ronald Reagan’s vaunted Strategic Defense Initiative is approaching completion at last. In response, a large group of hardliners in the Soviet military have siezed control of many of their country’s ICBM sites to launch a preemptive first strike, while also — this being 2017 and all — flooding Earth orbit with fighter planes to blow up those S.D.I satellites that are already online. This being a computer game and all, the nascent trillion-dollar S.D.I. program comes down to one guy with the square-jawed name of Sloan McCormick, who’s expected to jump into his spaceship to shoot down the rebel fighters in between manually shooting rogue ICBMs out of the sky using the S.D.I. satellites. He’s of course played by you. If you succeed in holding the hardliners’ attacks at bay for long enough, you’ll get a distress call from the legitimate Soviet government’s central command station, whereupon — just in case anyone was thinking you hadn’t done enough for the cause already — you’ll have to singlehandedly enter the station and rescue it from a final assault by the hardliners. Succeed and you’ll get your trademark Cinemaware reward in the form of Natalya, the sultry commander of the station who’s inexplicably in love/lust with you. Who said glasnost was dead?

Like Defender of the Crown, S.D.I. very nearly missed its planned launch. It took John Cutter stepping in and riding herd over a Sculptured Software that seemed to be just a little out of their depth to push the project along to completion. It isn’t a terrible game, but it is the Cinemaware game that feels least like a Cinemaware game, well earning its status as the forgotten black sheep of the family. Natalya aside, its cinematic influences are minimal. The manual tries heroically to draw a line of concordance through heroes like Flash Gordon and Han Solo to end up at Sloan McCormick, but even it must admit to an important difference: “This time the danger comes, not from an alien invasion, but from a force here on Earth.” Likewise, S.D.I. doesn’t conform to the normal Cinemaware ethos of (in Jacob’s words) “no typing, get you right into the game, no manual.” Flying around in space blasting rebels requires memorizing a number of keyboard commands that can be found nowhere other than the ideally unnecessary manual. What with its demanding, non-stop action broken down into distinct stages, S.D.I. reminds me of nothing so much as Access Software’s successful line of Commodore 64 action games that included Beach-Head and Raid Over Moscow; S.D.I. also shares something of a theme with the latter game, although it didn’t provoke anything like the same controversy. Unfortunately, Cinemaware’s take on the concept just isn’t executed as well. The “flight simulator” where you spend the majority of your time is a particular disappointment; your enemies follow a few distressingly predictable flight patterns, while your control over your own ship is nonsensically limited to gentle turns, climbs, and dives. And the Elite-inspired docking mini-game you have to go through every time you return to your base is just infuriating. But perhaps most distressing, especially to the Amiga owners who finally got their hands on the game when it was ported to their platform almost a year later, were the workmanlike graphics, created in-house by Sculptured Software. One could normally count on great graphics even from Cinemaware games whose gameplay was a bit questionable, but not so much this time. Even Natalya, well-endowed as she was, couldn’t compete with those fetching Saxon lasses from Defender of the Crown.

King of Chicago is a far more innovative game. This interactive gangster flick stars you as Pinky Callahan, an ambitious young hoodlum in 1931 Chicago. Al Capone has just been sent away for tax evasion, creating an opening for you and your North Side gang of Irishmen, principal rivals of Capone’s Chicago Outfit. But to unite the Chicago underworld under your personal leadership you’ll first have to oust the Old Man who currently runs your own gang. Only then you can start on the Chicago Outfit — or, as the game calls them, the “South Siders.” Swap out medieval England for Prohibition-era Chicago and the scenario isn’t all that far removed from Defender of the Crown: conquer all of the territory on the map that’s held by your ethnic rivals. The experience of playing the two games, however, could hardly be more different.

Like Defender of the Crown, King of Chicago isn’t so interested in the actual history it references as it is in movie history. It doesn’t even bother to get the dates right; the game begins months before the real Capone was sentenced and sent away. Victory in King of Chicago must mean the North Siders rising again to take over the whole city, a scenario as ahistorical as the Saxons defeating the Normans to regain control of England. (Cinemaware did seem to have a thing for historical lost causes, didn’t they?) Prohibition-era Chicago is just a stage set for King of Chicago, Al Capone just a name to drop. The only place where the game notably departs from gangster-movie clichés is in making you and your gang a bunch of Irishmen rather than Italians — and if you don’t pay attention to one or two last names it’s easy to miss even that, given that there’s no voice acting and thus no accents to spot. Otherwise all of the expected tropes are there, from Pinky’s weeping mother who gives all the money he sends her to the church to his devious, high-maintenance girlfriend Lola. But then, as Bob Jacob so memorably put it, all Cinemaware really had to do was “rise to the level of copycat, and we’d be considered a breakthrough.” Fair enough. As homages go — and you’ll find very few computer-game fictions of the 1980s that aren’t an homage to more established media of one sort of another — King of Chicago is one of the better of its era.

Indeed, some may find it a bit too true to its inspirations. King of Chicago is notable for just how hardcore a take on the gangster genre it is. Pinky is a punk. You can play him as a devious sneak or a violent, impulsive psychopath, but he remains a punk. There’s no redemption to be found amongst King of Chicago‘s many possible story arcs, just crime and bloody murder and revenge and, if all goes well, control of the whole of Chicago. While the ledger quietly omits the brothels that provided so much of the real Chicago mob’s income, that’s about the only place where the game soft-pedals. Even Pinky’s interactions with Lola are peppered with crude remarks about how her skills in bed make up for her other failings. Bob Jacob’s original conception of Cinemaware as games for adults finds its fullest expression here, at least if what constitutes “adult” in your view is jaded sex and casual violence.

More interestingly, King of Chicago represents one of Cinemaware’s most earnest and ambitious attempt at creating an interactive narrative with at least a modicum of depth. You could convert a play-through into a screenplay and have it read as, if not precisely a good screenplay, at least one that wasn’t totally ridiculous. Not coincidentally, King of Chicago contains far more text than the average Cinemaware game. Its formal approach is also unique: it’s essentially a hypertext narrative, years before that term came into common usage. You control Pinky through a bewildering thicket of story branches by clicking on multiple-choice thought bubbles above his head. Occasionally a little action game emerges to provide a change of pace, but these are relatively deemphasized in comparison with most Cinemaware games. If S.D.I. stands at the purely reactive, action-oriented end of the Cinemaware scale, King of Chicago stands at the opposite pole of cerebral storymaking. It has a certain — and I know Bob Jacob would hate this description — literary quality about it in comparison to its stablemates. You can see its unusual narrative sophistication not least in its female cast. While not exactly what you’d call progressive in its handling of women, King of Chicago does give them actual personalities and roles to enact in the drama, rather than regarding them strictly as prizes for a job well done. In this respect it once again stands out as almost unique in the Cinemaware catalog.

Doug Sharp dressed as a gangster for a King of Chicago promotional photo shoot.

King of Chicago was the creation of a thirty-something former fifth-grade teacher named Doug Sharp, another of Jacob’s old contacts from his days as a software agent that were serving him so well now as a software entrepreneur in his own right. Sharp had first been exposed to microcomputers during the late 1970s, when he was teaching school in the educational-computing hotbed of Minnesota, home of the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium and their seminal edutainment game The Oregon Trail amongst other innovations. His habit of taking his school’s Apple IIs home with him on weekends soon led to a job writing educational software for Control Data and Science Research Associates. In 1984 he and a partner, Mike Johnson, started working on a spiritual successor to Silas Warner’s Robot War that they called ChipWits. Programmable robots remained the theme, but they were now programmed using a visual, icon-based language instead of Robot Wars‘s cryptic assembly-language-style code. ChipWits represented a kindler, gentler approach to recreational robot programming all the way around. Instead of focusing on free-form robot-against-robot combat, the game was built as a series of missions, a collection of discrete challenges that the player’s cute little robot had to overcome in the course of a grand and non-violent adventure. Written initially for the Commodore 64, ChipWits became one of the breakout stars of the January 1985 Winter Consumer Electronics Show, and did moderately well once released by Epyx shortly thereafter. The agent who brokered that publishing deal was, you guessed it, Bob Jacob, while Kellyn Beeck, soon to become Cinemaware’s most prolific game designer but then in charge of software acquisitions at Epyx, was the latter company’s signatory to the contract.

Sharp’s next game King of Chicago became the first of the eventual Cinemaware titles to go into development, several months before Jacob would even officially form his company. Sharp threw himself into the project with a will. He “collected all the classic gangster films. I picked apart what I enjoyed most about them and used this information to come up with my characters and storyline.” He worked with a graduate student in the University of Toronto’s drama department named Paul Walsh to learn the subtle nuances of pacing and dialog that make a good play or movie. Walsh became quite taken with the project for a while there in his own right. He had a blast coming up with new episodes for Sharp to sort through, chop up, and, truth be told, often discard. “When you work on a play,” Walsh said, “you have to cut out so much good stuff. With this, all your good ideas get thrown in.” True as ever to Cinemaware’s theme, Jacob would wind up giving Walsh a credit as “Dialog Coach” in the finished product. (Walsh would go on to a long and still-ongoing career as a professor, playwright, dramaturg, and translator of Ibsen.)

Apart from Walsh and some music contributed by Eric Rosser, that original Macintosh King of Chicago was the work of Doug Sharp alone. When the coding and writing got to be too much, he would retreat into his workshop to mold the heads of his various characters out of clay. Once crudely digitized and imported into the game, their grotesque shapes — some of the gangsters seem to have been afflicted with whatever strange illness led to Elephant Man Joseph Merrick — certainly gave the game a unique look, if one perhaps more appropriate to a horror movie than a gangster flick.

But no matter. What’s most interesting about King of Chicago is what’s going on beneath its surface. What might first appear to be a simple branching narrative in the tradition of Choose Your Own Adventure turns out to be something much more sophisticated. It is in fact a hugely innovative leap into uncharted waters in the fraught field of ludic narrative. I want to take some time here to talk about what King of Chicago does and how it does it because these qualities make it, so much less splashy than Defender of the Crown though its surface appearance and commercial debut may have been, of equal importance in its own way. More hypertext narrative than traditional adventure game, King of Chicago does its level best to make a story with you rather than merely tell you a story. This distinction is a very important one.

The story in a storytelling game lies waiting to be discovered — but not written — by you as you make your way through the game. Storytelling games can offer strong, interesting stories, but do so at the expense of player freedom. You generally have local agency only, meaning that you may have some options about the order in which you explore the storyworld and even how you cause events to progress, but you’re nevertheless tightly bound to the overall plot created by the game’s designer. The canonical example of a storytelling game, a perpetual touchstone of scholars from Janet Murray to Chris Crawford, is Infocom’s Planetfall, particularly the death therein of your poor little robot companion Floyd. Every player who completes Planetfall will have experienced the same basic story. She may have seen that story in a slightly different order than another player and even solved its problems in slightly different ways, but Floyd will always sacrifice himself at the climactic moment, and all of the other major plot events will always play out in the same way. Storytelling games are Calvinist in philosophy: free will is just an illusion, your destiny foreordained before you even get started. Still, fixed as their overall plots may be, they allow plenty of space for puzzle solving, independent investigation of the environment, and all those other things we tend to wrap up under the convenient term of “gameplay.” I’m of the opinion that experiencing a story through the eyes of a person who represents you the player, whom you control, can do wonders to immerse you in that story and deepen the impact it has on you. Some folks, however, take the Infocom style of interactive fiction’s explicit promise of an interactivity that turns out to exist only at the most granular level as a betrayal of the medium’s potential. This has led them to chase after an alternative in the form of the storymaking game.

The idealized storymaking game is one that turns you loose in a robustly simulated storyworld and allows you to create your own story in conjunction with the inhabitants of that world.[1] Unfortunately, it remains an unsolved and possibly unsolvable problem, for we lack a computerized intelligence capable of responding to the player when the scope of action allowed to her includes literally anything she can dream of doing. Since an infinite number of possibilities cannot be anticipated and coded for by a human, the computer would need to be able to improvise on the fly, and that’s not something computers are notably good at doing. If we somehow could find a way around this problem, we’d just ram up against another: stories of any depth almost universally require words to tell, and computers are terrible at generating natural language. In a presentation on King of Chicago for the 1989 Game Developers Conference, Sharp guessed that artificial intelligence would reach a point around 2030 where what he calls “fat and deep,” AI-driven storymaking games would become possible. As of today, though, it doesn’t look like we’ll get there within the next fifteen years. We may never get there at all. Strong AI remains, at it always has, a chimera lurking a few decades out there in some murky future.

That said, there’s a large middle ground between the fixed, unalterable story arc of a Planetfall and the complete freedom of our idealized storymaking game. Somewhere inside that middle ground rests the field of choice-based or hypertext literature, which generally gives the player a great deal of control over where the story goes in comparison to a traditional adventure game of the Infocom stripe, if nothing close to the freedom promised by a true storymaking game. The hypertext author figures out all of the different ways that she is willing to allow the story to go beforehand and then hand-crafts lots and lots of text to correspond with all of her various narrative tributaries. The player still isn’t really making her own story, since she can’t possibly do anything that hasn’t been anticipated by the story’s author. Yet if the choices are varied and interesting enough it almost doesn’t matter.

The adventure game and the hypertext are two very distinct forms; fans of one are by no means guaranteed to be fans of the other. Each is in some sense an exploration of story, but in very different ways. If the adventure game is concerned with the immersive experience of story, the hypertext is concerned with possibilities, with that question we all ask ourselves all the time, even when we know we should know better: what would have happened if I had done something else? The natures of the two forms dictate the ways that we approach them. Most adventure games are long-form works which players are expected to experience just once. Most hypertexts by contrast are written under the assumption that the player will want to engage with them multiple times, making difference choices and exploring the different possible outcomes. This makes up for the fact that the average playthrough of the average hypertext, with its bird’s-eye view of the story, takes a small fraction of the time of the average playthrough of the average adventure game, with its worm’s-eye view. It also, not incidentally for Doug Sharp’s purposes, dovetails nicely with the Cinemaware concept of games that play out in no more time than it takes to watch a film, but that, unlike (most) films, can be revisited many times.

Narrative-oriented computer games in the early days hewed almost uniformly to the adventure-game model. Partly this was a matter of tradition; parsers and puzzles had become so established in the wake of Adventure and Scott Adams that it was seemingly hard for many authors to even conceive of alternative models of interaction (witness Nine Princes in Amber, a game that founders on the rocks between text adventure and hypertext). And partly this was a matter of technical constraints; those early machines were so starved for memory that the idea of a complex branching narrative, most of which the player would never see in any given playthrough, was a luxury authors could barely even conceive of affording. Thus during the early 1980s hypertexts were commonly found not on computers but in the hugely popular Choose Your Own Adventure line of children’s books and the many spin-offs and competitors it spawned.

The firewall began to come down at last in 1986, after designers began to realize that it was okay to dump parsers and puzzles if their design goals leaned in another direction, and after microcomputers had progressed enough from the days of 16 K and cassette tapes to crack open the door to more narrative experimentation. We’ve already looked closely at a couple of the works that resulted. Portal and Alter Ego each had the courage to abandon the parser, but neither takes full advantage of the new possibilities that come with placing a computer program — a real simulated storyworld — behind the multiple choices of Choose Your Own Adventure. Portal is an exploration of a fixed, immutable story that has already happened rather than an exercise in making a new one. Alter Ego is more ambitious in its way, being an interactive story of a life that keeps track of your alter ego’s level of psychological, interpersonal, and economic achievement. Still, it doesn’t adapt the story it tells all that well to either your evolving personality or your evolving life situation, forcing you to power through largely the same set of vignettes every single time you play. King of Chicago, on the other hand, pushes the envelope of narratogicial possibility harder than any game that had yet appeared on a PC at the time of its release.

Here’s how Sharp describes his conception of his interactive movie:

A guy in a projection booth with hours and hours of film about a group of gangsters. The film is not on reels but in short clips of from a few seconds to a few minutes long. The clips hang all over the walls of the projection room. The projectionist knows exactly what’s on each clip and can grab a new one and thread it into the projector instantly. The audience is out there in the theater shouting out suggestions and the projectionist is listening and taking the suggestions into account but also factoring in what clips he’s already shown, because he wants to put together a real story with a beginning, middle, and end, subplots, introduction and development of characters and the whole narrative works. I wanted to minimize hard branches, to keep the cuts between clips as unpredictable as possible. Yet the story had to make sense, guys couldn’t die and reappear later, you couldn’t treat the gangster’s moll like dirt and expect her to cover your back later.

The second-to-last sentence is key. Hypertexts prior to King of Chicago had almost all been built out of predictable hard branches: “If you decide to do A, turn to page X; if you decide to do B, turn to page Y.” Such an approach all too often devolves after a play or two into a process of methodically lawn-mowering through the branches, looking for the path not yet taken until branches or patience is exhausted. Sharp, however, wanted a story that could feel fresh and surprising over many plays. In short, he wanted to deliver an exciting new gangster movie to his player each time. To do so, he would have to avoid the predictability of hard branches. He dubbed the system he came up with to do so Dramaton.

Like real life, Dramaton deals in probabilities and happenstance as much as cause and effect. The game as a whole can be thought of as a big bag of potential scenes, each described and “shot” much like a single scene from a movie, with the important difference that each offers Pinky one or more choices to make as it plays out. These choices can lead to a limited amount of the dreaded hard branching within each scene. Where Dramaton mixes things up, though, is in the way it chooses the next scene. Rather than inflexibly dictating what comes next via a hard branch, each episode alters a variety of variables reflecting the state of the storyworld and Pinky’s place within it. Some of these are true/false flags. (Has Pinky bumped off the Old Man to assume control of the gang? Has the eminently bribeable Alderman Burke been elected mayor?) Others are numeric measurements. (How happy is Pinky’s girl Lola is with her beau? How does the rest of the gang feel about him? How well are the North Siders doing in Chicago at large? How agitated are the police by the gangsters’ activities?)

After an episode is complete, a narrative generator — what Sharp calls the Narraton — looks at all of these factors, then adds a healthy dose of good old randomness to choose an appropriate next episode that fits with what has come before. The player’s specific choices in an episode can also have a direct impact on what happens next, but with rare exceptions such choices are used more to whittle down the field of possibilities than to force a single, pre-determined follow-up episode. For example, if the player has just decided it might be a good idea to go see what’s up with Lola, the following episode will be restricted to those involving her.

To facilitate choosing an appropriate episode, each is assigned “keys,” amounting to the state of affairs in the storyworld that would ideally hold sway for it to fit perfectly into the overall context of the current story. For instance, an episode in which Lola goads Pinky, Lady Macbeth-style, for his failings and lack of ambition might require a low “Lola Happiness” number and a low “Pinky Reputation” score. An episode in which Pinky hears some other gangsters grumbling about the Old Man and must decide how to respond might require a relatively low “Old Man Reputation” number but a high “Gang Confidence” score (thus leading them to feel empowered to speak up). The closer the current reality of the storyworld corresponds with a given episode’s indexes, the more likely that episode is to be chosen.

This method of weaving scenes together had some interesting implications for Sharp himself as he wrote the game, turning the process into something more akin to guiding a child’s growth than constructing a dead piece of technology. He could “improvise” as an author: “If I got a great idea for a new episode, I could set it up in its own sequence, assign it keys, and trust that it would be selected appropriately.” Thus he was actually approaching the storymaking ideal despite being forced to work with fixed chunks of story rather than being able to cause the computer to improvise its own story; he was creating a narrative capable of surprising even him, the author. He notes that there are quite likely episodes in King of Chicago that have never been seen by any player ever because the indexes assigned to them can never be matched closely enough to trigger them — dead ends left behind as the storyworld organically grew and evolved under his careful stewardship.

For the ordinary player of the finished product, there must obviously come a point where episodes begin to repeat themselves and King of Chicago loses its interest. Sharp did his best, however, to delay that point as long as possible. He estimates that all of the episodes in the game played one after another would take about eight hours to get through, while the player is likely to see no more than 20 percent of them in any given playthrough. For a while anyway each of the gangster movies you and King of Chicago generate together really does feel unique. Even the opening scene that kicks off the movie varies with the vicissitudes of the random-number generator. The storyworld of King of Chicago, where your actions have an effect on your own fate and that of those around you but aren’t the whole of the story, can feel shockingly real in contrast to both the canned fictions of adventure games and the hard branches of those less ambitious hypertext narratives that still dominate the genre even today.

Managing a criminal empire by the twenty-question method.

Unfortunately less effective is the simple economic strategy game that’s grafted onto the interpersonal stories. Here you control how much effort you put into your various criminal endeavors — speakeasies, gambling, and rackets — as well as how much you pay your right-hand man and bean counter Ben, the various officials you bribe, the foot soldiers in the gang, Lola, and of course yourself. In the original Macintosh version of the game this process is almost unbelievably tedious. You’re forced to learn about and control your empire via a question-and-answer session with Ben that takes absolutely forever and that has to be repeated over and over as the months pass. You can easily end up spending more total time having these inane dialogs with Ben then you do with the entire rest of the game.

King of Chicago on the Amiga.

Thankfully, the Macintosh version is not the final or definitive one. Over a year after the original release the game finally appeared on the Amiga in a version that isn’t so much a port as a complete remake. While Sharp still acted as programmer and narratologist, Cinemaware’s in-house team completely redid the graphics, ditching Sharp’s Potato Heads in favor of hand-drawn portraits of tough mugs and pouting dames that could be dropped easily into any vintage James Cagney flick. Sharp, meanwhile, took the opportunity to tighten up the narrative, removing some wordy exposition and pointless scenes, rewriting others. The occasional action games were also vastly improved to reflect the Amiga’s capabilities. Best of all, the endless question-and-answer sessions with Ben were replaced with a simple interactive ledger giving an easily adjustable overview of the state of your criminal empire. The strategy angle is still a bit undercooked — the numbers never quite add up from month to month, and cause and effect is far from consistently clear — but it goes from being a tedious time sink to an occasional distraction. The Amiga version plays out in about half the time of the original, with a corresponding additional dramatic thrust.

The Amiga version’s much-improved economic interface.

Of S.D.I. and King of Chicago, the latter would turn out to be the more successful in the long run, managing to sell more than 50,000 copies — albeit most of them in its vastly improved version for the Amiga and (eventually) the Atari ST, Apple IIGS, and IBM PC rather than its original Macintosh incarnation. Despite its relative commercial success, it’s always been amongst the most polarizing of the Cinemaware games, dismissed by some — unfairly in my opinion, for all the reasons I’ve just so copiously documented — as little more than a computerized Choose Your Own Adventure book. Future Cinemaware games would take their cue from Defender of the Crown rather than its companions on the label’s debut marquee. I wish I could say I expect to be revisiting the ideas behind Doug Sharp’s Dramaton soon, whether via a game from Cinemaware or anyone else, but such bold experiments in interactive narrative have been much less common than one might wish in the history of computer gaming. This just makes it all the more important to credit them when we find them.

(The sources listed in the previous article apply to this one as well. In addition: Commodore Power Play of August/September 1985; Doug Sharp’s blog; and two presentations given by Sharp, one from the 1989 Game Developers Conference and the other from 1995 American Association of Artificial Intelligence Symposium on Interactive Story Systems.

King of Chicago is available in the emulated Amiga version for iOS and Android for those of you interested in experiencing it today.)

1. I should note at this point that the terms “storytelling game” and “storymaking game” are hardly set in stone. Some prefer to talk of “canned narratives” and “emergent narratives.” Some, such as Brian Moriarty, have even flipped the terms around, considering the stories in storymaking games to be stories made beforehand by a human designer, and the stories in storytelling games to be stories made up and told on the fly by the computer. Doug Sharp himself seems to favor Moriarty’s usage, but I find my approach more intuitive. Regardless, it’s best not to get too hung-up on ever-shifting terminology in this area, and just try to understand the concepts. ↩

Comments
25 Responses

- Alex Smith

April 24, 2015 at 3:14 pm

Entertaining and enlightening post as always, but I do wonder who Hans Solo is. Are he and his brother Franz Solo here to pump us up?

- Jimmy Maher

April 25, 2015 at 7:27 am

Thanks!

One of the things I miss most living here in Europe is baseball. So we pick a team to follow through the playoffs each year, and buy the MLB playoff package to watch the games online. They come complete with advertisements. Last year they kept playing these cheesy remakes of the old Hans and Franz skits, which I found hilarious — more out of nostalgia than anything to do with the new ads themselves — and Dorte found utterly baffling. So we had to go to YouTube et. al. to see vintage Hans and Franz. All of which is to say… what, exactly? Ah, yes. Hans and Franz live on!

- Pedro Timóteo

April 24, 2015 at 4:03 pm

Great as always (I should probably stop saying this every time, shouldn’t I? :) ). And now I want to play KoC again. Like Defender, I played mostly the PC version, even though the first one I saw was the Amiga one — unfortunately, I was never able to convince my family to buy me an Amiga, and didn’t have an allowance either.

Now I’m thinking that creating a text-based game with a storytelling device like this one wouldn’t actually be too difficult… something to think about in the future.

I was going to mention the Hans Solo typo, but Alex did it first, so I have to mention “Cictory”. :)

- Jimmy Maher

April 25, 2015 at 7:28 am

Thanks!

- TsuDhoNimh

April 24, 2015 at 5:44 pm

Small Typo: “Cictory in King of Chicago must mean the North Siders rising again to take over the whole city”

- Lisa H.

April 24, 2015 at 7:27 pm

Besides “Hans” Solo and “Cictory”, also Natalya/Natalia – you used both spellings. When I read this the first time earlier this morning also found a verb number agreement problem – you’d used a singular noun with the plural conjugation “are” – but I can’t find it now.

The “Potato Head” character face design on the Mac is truly disturbing!

- Jimmy Maher

April 25, 2015 at 7:33 am

Maybe “Pinky interaction with Lola ARE”? Should have actually been “interactions.”

Anyway, thanks. I kind of rushed the final read-through on this one because we had a dinner reservation. Unfortunately, it kind of shows.

- Andrew

April 24, 2015 at 7:28 pm

Interesting stuff! I’ve never played any of these games so it’s all new to me. Defender of the Crown was on EVERY list of games for sale in the Amiga magazines and I saw it so often I kind of really wanted it even though I knew nothing about it.

…

Typos? Not sure because I’ve been drinking.

riding #herd over a Sculptured Software

it is the Cinemaware game that feels least like a #Cinenaware game

and then hand-crafts lots and lots of text to correspond # all of her various narrative tributaries. (#to or #with)

How well are the North Siders’ doing in Chicago (without apostrophe)

- Jimmy Maher

April 25, 2015 at 7:36 am

The first one I think is okay, maybe just a turn of speech you’re not familiar with. Fixed the others. And… yeah. See my comment to Lisa. Thanks!

- Felix

April 25, 2015 at 6:35 am

stories of any depth almost universally require words to tell

I say a 5-year-old romping through a meadow in the summer, all alone with a toy horse and wooden sword, is going to create their own story — one that won’t involve many words at all, if any. Sure, it won’t be a deep or epic story, but it will feel that way to the player because it’s all theirs. You see, people have been wondering about the appeal of SimCity, and chalking it up to the game being a fun toy, but I could argue that what the player is doing in that game is tell the story of a city from birth to maturity — or death. One that, again, doesn’t involve many words apart from pure flavor text.

The words aren’t the story. Words just happen to be a convenient vehicle for stories. We may complain that computers aren’t nearly smart enough to be partners in a game of improv yet, but improv has rules and principles we can already apply to computer-mediated storytelling, if only we were willing to let computer games break free of their traditional media roots, the way movies broke free from theatre and grew their own artistic vocabulary. But we don’t want to, because we still cling to the idea that the world is divided into storytellers and spectators, even as the walls are all but collapsing.

- Jimmy Maher

April 25, 2015 at 8:15 am

Well, I did say “stories of any depth.” ;) I did write something that might be relevant, which I ended up cutting from the article.

Now, a pendant could well argue that many, many storymaking games already exist under the definition I’ve just given. A game as simple as Pac-Man, for instance, offers the player a huge degree of freedom, accommodates a huge range of styles and strategies and possibilities, almost never plays out the same way twice, and ends with the player having written her own story of sorts about her dot-munching and ghost-fleeing. Yet such as story would be so shallow and dull as to be undeserving of the label.

The last sentence may be a little harsher than is really warranted, and I certainly don’t mean to call *you* a pendent.

The biggest problem so many discussions of these topics run into is that they get into a horrible semantic muddle because so many of the terms being used are so unclear and capable of meaning so many different things to different people. (See also the “Are Games Art?” debate.) Personally, I don’t really think of the “story of a city” in SimCity in the same way that I think of, say, a story from the John Cheever collection I’ve been reading. I think that when most people, myself included, talk about “interactive storytelling/storymaking” we’re leaning more toward Cheever than SimCity: something seen through the eyes of an individual, focusing on interpersonal dynamics.

You may well argue that trying to do that sort of a thing in a game is forcing upon one medium the ideals of another, and is thus a fool’s errand. And you may very well have a point. Nevertheless, lots of us are interested in whether it’s possible — or will ever be possible — to do it.

- Felix

April 25, 2015 at 8:55 am

I forgot to add something to my comment as well. You may think the story of a city isn’t on the same level as a classic novel; but come to Bucharest and I’ll show you how the city grew over the centuries, street by street and building by building — each of them the work and sometimes life of real people. No, it’s not the same thing, but it *is* real stories — whole tapestries of them — and it’s something you can already put on a computer, unlike the mythical dynamic, improvised novel or movie game designers have been chasing for decades.

And will we really be able to accomplish the latter? We’ve roleplayed together, and I’ll be the first to admit the story wasn’t nearly good enough to make a passable novella. If smart, educated human beings working together can’t create an interactive story with true literary qualities, what makes you think even hard AI will ever manage?

- Jimmy Maher

April 25, 2015 at 9:14 am

Personally? I really don’t think AI will ever manage, and I think I’d find it a disturbing development if it did. I’m very wedded to the idea of *authored* interactive works. Nor would I really say that the sort of story you describe is on a lower level than the one I describe. It’s just a *different* thing from what would-be interactive storytellers strain toward.

Nevertheless, I think experiments like King of Chicago are interesting and important, and, if more recent works like some of those from Inkle are anything to go by, could be leading us to an exciting new art form in its own right.

- Victor Gijsbers

April 25, 2015 at 9:59 am

One the off-chance of sounding like a pedant, I’d just like to point out that it is “pedant”, not “pendant” or “pendent”. ;-)

- Jimmy Maher

April 25, 2015 at 11:18 am

:)

- Felix

April 25, 2015 at 6:50 am

Interesting… your mentioning King of Chicago’s economic minigame and action sequences reminded me of the two Mugsy games on the ZX Spectrum. The first was literally just a Hamurabi reskin, with vector graphics to illustrate each screen of dialogue. The second was a rather more complex economic simulation, interspersed with cutscenes and — unfortunately — nearly impossible action sequences every few turns. It would have been a nice little diversion if I could have survived them and played for longer, but as it was the game effectively lasted for only five turns, with no satisfying conclusion. (I must have managed to shoot the hired killer *once*.)

It seems to me that game designers back then, just like today, often lacked imagination and fell back on whatever established gameplay styles they were already familiar with. Can’t even blame them, really. Happened to me more than once. At least back then they at least tried to mix things up and come up with something new occasionally.

- Dehumanizer

April 25, 2015 at 8:04 am

I, too, played the Mugsy games at the time. Oddly, I didn’t find the action sequences that difficult, I used to lose mostly from the economic game (which was a lot like Jimmy describes it for the Mac version of KoC, with your number two guy asking a bunch of questions (“how many X do you want to buy / hire…?”) every turn. Also, didn’t Mugsy’s Revenge have a technically nice (for a Spectrum), but *huge* and *unskippable* cutscene at the end of each turn?

A game of this kind that excited my imagination more, also on the Spectrum, was Don Priestley’s Dictator. I bet anyone who’s played it still remembers it now.

- Felix

April 25, 2015 at 9:01 am

Yes, Mugsy 2 did have those annoying unskippable cutscenes after each turn, but at least you couldn’t lose at them — thankfully quick-time events were yet to be invented. And it’s not like the economic game was any easy or intuitive — Hamuraby-style strategy isn’t as easy to design as it seems — but at least I could sort of survive it more often. Matter of taste. :)

- Sniffnoy

April 25, 2015 at 6:15 pm

Sorry, this has no relevance to this post, but the “recent comments” sidebar is gone and I wanted to make sure this was somewhere this would be seen.

Wander, a lost text-adventure system from 1974 with several games, has been found! It didn’t have the influence of Colossal Cave Adventure, certainly, but it predates it.

Note that this is a 1980 version of Wander, so as commenter MrTimscampi points out on Reddit, there’s no way to know what features were in there originally and which have been backported from later adventure games.

Note that of the individual games found, only castle is known to be from 1974; library is from somewhere betweeen 1974 and 1978, while the others are 1977 or later. (Including obviously the incomplete Colossal Cave Adventure port. :P ) There’s also at least one known game still missing.

- Jimmy Maher

April 25, 2015 at 8:00 pm

Yes, I’ve been following the story from a distance. It seems to me that the key thing to know is whether the parser that’s in the 1980 version was there from the beginning. If so, that really does change everything, and must make us question whether Will Crowther was actually drawing from Wander when he wrote Adventure. If not, it’s an interesting historical find, but, what with games like The Oregon Trail already extant by 1974, not likely to turn the conventional historical narrative on its ear like a parser-driven text adventure that predates Adventure would.

- Sniffnoy

April 25, 2015 at 11:10 pm

Oh, it never even occurred to me that the parser itself might be a later addition! Yes, that would make quite a difference…

- Iggy Drougge

May 9, 2015 at 11:48 pm

This recent development on your blog is quite interesting for me as an Amiga user. I got my A500 in 1992, so I missed all these early titles, but going through the floppy collection of a much older Amiga user (one who got an A1000 as soon as it was released here) recently, it almost matches your recent blog entries on a one by one basis. While I know that these games are important to Amiga history, and I’ve held the original floppy disks in my own hands, flipping through the manuals, they feel like they date back to an entirely different time, when the Amiga was a novelty, instead of being just “the Amiga”, a very successful games machine.

- Jubal

July 14, 2015 at 11:43 am

I’ve had an on/off fascination with hypertext for years now, and I’ll definitely have to give King of Chicago a proper look.

One thing that strikes me, though, is just how little most hypertext actually does branch and allow substantially different routes and experiences. On computers, with everything from Academia’s brief fascination with the form in the early 90s right through to the majority of works in the recent TWINE explosion, most authors will just have the one story to be told and use the medium as a way of presenting it in a non-linear fashion, or use the limited interactivity to create immersion. Porpentine’s works especially fall very much into the latter. Odd, given the potentials that the form offers.

Still, I suppose TWINE is still in its infancy. I’ll be interested to see what people will create with it in years to come.

- Jimmy Maher

July 14, 2015 at 12:18 pm

I wouldn’t say that academia’s fascination was limited to the early 1990s. There’s still an Electronic Literature Organization (http://eliterature.org) that hosts a conference every year, and still a small but devoted group of scholars writing and studying this kind of work. But their work does tend to be pretty insular, mostly art about their theories about art rather than works with any real life of their own.

One problem with hypertext in general is that non-programmers tend to find it very attractive, while programmers tend to sniff a bit at it as not representing “real” interactivity. That’s a shame, as, as King of Chicago shows, you can do a hell of a lot in a very accessible way with a choice-based format if you put a proper simulation engine behind it rather than making the text all surface, just a stream of static links.

- Peter Piers

January 14, 2016 at 7:26 pm

King of Chicago system seems visionary. The perfect middle ground between storymaking and storytelling, and a far better fit to my sensibilities than a Crawford work.

I so wish more games would attempt this! When most games try to be emergent, or offer more choice, they go the Crawford way, in my experience, and for my part I find them mostly uninteresting.

I think Emily Short’s “Versu” games work with an underlying engine similar in concept to King of Chicago, don’t they? I haven’t played them because i?ve no iPad…

The future may be here – and it’s been here for decades and not many people noticed!

Brian Fargo and Interplay
May 1, 2015

I touched on the history of Brian Fargo and his company Interplay some time ago, when I looked at the impact of The Bard’s Tale, their breakout CRPG hit that briefly replaced the Wizardry series as the go-to yin to Ultima‘s yang and in the process transformed Interplay almost overnight from a minor developer to one of the leading lights of the industry. They deserve more than such cursory treatment, however, for The Bard’s Tale would prove to be only the beginning of Interplay’s legacy. Let’s lay the groundwork for that future today by looking at how it all got started.

Born into suburban comfort in Orange County, California, in 1962, Brian Fargo manifested from an early age a peculiar genius for crossing boundaries that has served him well throughout his life. In high school he devoured fantasy and science-fiction novels and comics, spent endless hours locked in his room hacking on his Apple II, and played Dungeons and Dragons religiously in cellars and school cafeterias. At the same time, though, he was also a standout athlete at his school, a star of the football team and so good a sprinter that he and his coaches harbored ambitions for a while of making the United States Olympic Team. The Berlin Wall that divides the jocks from the nerds in high school crumbled before Fargo. So it would be throughout his life. In years to come he would be able to spend a day at the office discussing the mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons, then head out for an A-list cocktail party amongst the Hollywood jet set with his good friend Timothy Leary. By the time Interplay peaked in the late 1990s, he would be a noted desirable bachelor amongst the Orange County upper crust (“When he’s not at a terminal he can usually be found rowing, surfing, or fishing”), making the society pages for opening a luxury shoe and accessory boutique, for hosting lavish parties, for planning his wedding at the Ritz-Carlton. All whilst continuing to make and — perhaps more importantly — continuing to openly love nerdy games about killing fantasy monsters. Somehow Brian Fargo made it all look so easy.

But before all that he was just a suburban kid who loved games, whether played on the tabletop, in the arcade, on the Atari VCS, or on his beloved Apple II. Softline magazine, the game-centric spinoff of the voice-of-the-Apple-II-community Softalk, gives us a glimpse of young Fargo the rabid gamer. He’s a regular fixture of the high-score tables the magazine published, excelling at California Pacific’s Apple II knock-off of the arcade game Head-On as well as the swordfighting game Swashbuckler. Already a smooth diplomat, he steps in to soothe a budding controversy when someone claims to have run up a score in Swashbuckler of 1501, a feat that others claim is impossible because the score rolls over to 0 after 255. It seems, Fargo patiently explains, that there are two versions of the game, one of which rolls over and one of which doesn’t, so everyone is right. But the most tangible clue to his future is provided by the question he managed to get published in the January 1982 issue: “How does one get so many pictures onto one disk, such as in The Wizard and the Princess, where On-Line has more than 200 pictures, with a program for the adventure on top of that?” Yes, Brian Fargo the track star had decided to give up his Olympic dream and become a game developer.

Young Brian Fargo, software entrepreneur, 1982.

By that time Fargo was 19, and a somewhat reluctant student at the University of California, Irvine as well as a repair technician at ComputerLand. No more than an adequate BASIC programmer — he would allow even that ability to atrophy as soon as he could find a way to get someone else to do his coding for him — Fargo knew that he hadn’t a prayer of creating one of the action games that littered Softline‘s high-score rankings, nor anything as complex as Ultima or Wizardry, the two CRPGs currently taking the Apple II world by storm. He did, however, think he might just be up to doing an illustrated adventure game in the style of The Wizard and the Princess. He recruited one Michael Cranford, a Dungeons and Dragons buddy and fellow hacker from high school, to draw the pictures he’d need on paper; he then traced them and colored them on his Apple II. He convinced another friend to write him a few machine-language routines for displaying the graphics. And to make use of it all he wrote a simple BASIC adventure game: you must escape the Demon’s Forge, “an ancient test of wisdom and battle skill.” Desperate for some snazzy cover art, he licensed a cheesecake fantasy print in the style of Boris Vallejo, featuring a shapely woman tied to a pole being menaced by two knights mounted on some sort of flying snakes — this despite a notable lack of snakes (flying or otherwise), scantily-clad females, or for that matter poles in the game proper. (The full Freudian implications of this box art, not to mention the sentence I’ve just written about it, would doubtless take a lifetime of psychotherapy to unravel.)

The Demon’s Forge box art, which won Softline magazine’s sarcastic Relevance in Packaging Award, with Flying-Snakes-and-Ladies-in-Bondage clusters.

Fargo employed a guerrilla-marketing technique that would have made Wild Bill Stealey proud to sell The Demon’s Forge under his new imprint of Saber Software. He took out a single advertisement in Softalk for $2500. Then he started calling stores around the country to ask about his game, claiming to be a potential customer who had seen the advertisement: “A few minutes later my other line would ring and the retailer would place an order.” It didn’t make him big money, but he made a little. Then along came Michael Boone.

Boone was another old high-school friend, a scion of petroleum wealth who had dutifully gone off to Stanford to study petroleum engineering, only to be distracted by the lure of entrepreneurship. For some time he vacillated between starting a software company and an ice-cream chain, deciding on the former when his family’s connections came through with an injection of venture capital. His long-term plan was to make a golf simulation for the new IBM PC: “IBM seemed like the computer that business people and the affluent were buying. So, I should write a golf game for the IBM computer.” Knowing little about programming and needing product to get him started, he offered to buy out Fargo’s The Demon’s Forge and his Saber Software for a modest $5000, and have Fargo come work for him. Fargo dropped out of university to do so in late 1982. He assembled a talented little development team consisting of programmers “Burger” Bill Heineman and Troy Worrell along with himself, right there in his and Boone’s hometown of Newport Beach.[1]

Boone Corporation, 1983. Michael Boone is first from left, Bill Heineman second, Troy Worrell fourth, Brian Fargo fifth. They’re toasting with Hires Root Beer. “Hires Root Beer,” “Hi-Res graphics.” Get it?

After porting The Demon’s Forge to the IBM PC, Fargo’s little team occupied themselves writing quick-and-dirty cartridge games like Chuck Norris Superkicks and Robin Hood for the Atari VCS, ColecoVision, and the Commodore VIC-20 and 64. These were published without attribution by Xonox, a spinoff of K-tel Records, one of many dodgy players flooding the market with substandard product during the lead-up to the Great Videogame Crash. Michael Boone agreed to publish under his own imprint a couple of VIC-20 action games — Crater Raider and Cyclon — written by a talented programmer named Alan Pavlish whom Fargo knew well. Meanwhile work proceeded slowly on Boone’s golf simulation for the rich, which was now to be a “tree-for-tree, inch-for-inch recreation of the course at Pebble Beach.” When some Demon’s Forge players called to ask for a hint, Fargo learned that they were part of a company trying to get traction for the Moodies, a bunch of pixeish would-be cartoon characters derivative of the Smurfs; soon they came in to sign a contract for a game to be called Moodies in Iceland.

But then came the Crash. One day shortly thereafter Boone walked into the office and announced that he was taking the company in another direction: to make dry-erase boards instead of computer games. Since Fargo and his team had no particular competency in that field, they were all out of a job. Boone’s new venture would prove to be hugely successful, giving us the whiteboards now ubiquitous to seemingly every office or cubicle in the world and making Boone himself very, very rich. But even had they been able to predict his future that wouldn’t have been much consolation for Fargo and his suddenly forlorn little pair of programmers.

Fargo decided that it really shouldn’t be that hard for him to do what Michael Boone had been doing in addition to managing the development team. In fact, he had already been working on a side venture, a potential $60,000 contract with World Book Encyclopedia to make some rote educational titles of the drill-and-practice stripe. After signing that contract, he founded Interplay Productions to see it through. It wasn’t a glamorous beginning, but it represented programs that could be knocked out quickly to start bringing in money. Heineman and Worrell agreed to stay with Fargo and try to make it work. Fargo added another programmer named Jay Patel to complete this initial incarnation of Interplay. The next six to nine months consisted of Fargo hustling up whatever work he could find, game or non-game, and his team hammering it out: “We did work for the military, stuff for McGraw Hill — we did anything we could do. We didn’t have the luxury of creating our own software. We had to do other people’s work and just kept our ideas in the back of our minds.”

The big break they’d been hoping for came midway through 1984. Interplay “hit Activision’s radar,” and Activision decided to let Fargo and company make some adventure games for them. Activision at the time was reeling from the Great Videogame Crash, which had destroyed their immensely profitable cartridge business almost overnight. CEO Jim Levy had decided that the future of the company, if it was to have one, must lie with software for home computers. With little expertise in this area, he was happy to sign up even an unproven outside developer like the nascent Interplay. Mindshadow and The Tracer Sanction, the first two games Interplay was actually willing to put their name on, were the results.

Fargo’s team had found time to dissect Infocom games and tinker with parsers and adventure-game engines even back during their days as Boone Corporation. Mindshadow and Tracer Sanction were logical extensions of that experimentation and, going back even further, of Fargo’s first game The Demon’s Forge. Fargo found a young artist named Dave Lowery, who would go on to quite an impressive career in film, to draw the pictures for Mindshadow; they came out looking a cut above most of the competition in the crowded field of illustrated adventure games. Mindshadow‘s Bourne Identity-inspired plot has you waking up with amnesia on a deserted island. Once you escape the island, you embark on a globe-trotting quest to recover your memories. There’s an interesting metaphysical angle to a game that’s otherwise fairly typical of its period and genre. As you encounter new people, places, and things that you should know from your earlier life, you can use the verb “remember” to fit them into place and slowly rebuild your shattered identity.

Mindshadow did relatively well for Interplay and Activision, not a blockbuster but a solid seller that seemed to bode well for future collaborations. Less successful both aesthetically and commercially was Tracer Sanction, a science-fiction adventure that isn’t quite sure whether it wants to be serious or humorous and lacks a conceptual hook like Mindshadow‘s “remember” gimmick. But by the time it appeared Fargo had already shifted much of his team’s energy away from adventure games and into the CRPG project that would become The Bard’s Tale.

Fargo and his old high-school buddy Michael Cranford had been dreaming of doing a CRPG since about five minutes after they had first seen Wizardry back in 1981. Cranford had even made a stripped-down CRPG on his own, published on a Commodore 64 cartridge by Human Engineered Software under the title Maze Master in 1983 to paltry sales. Now Fargo convinced him to help his little team at Interplay create a Wizardry killer. It seemed high time for such an undertaking, what with the Wizardry series still using ugly monochrome wire frames to depict its dungeons and monsters and available only on the Apple II, Macintosh, and IBM PC — a list which notably didn’t include the biggest platform in the industry, the Commodore 64. Indeed, CRPGs of any sort were quite thin on the ground for the Commodore 64, decent ones even more so. Fargo:

At the time, the gold standard was Wizardry for that type of game. There was Ultima, but that was a different experience, a top-down view, and not really as party-based. Sir-Tech was kind of saying, “Who needs color? Who needs music? Who needs sound effects?” But my attitude was, “We want to find a way to use all those things. What better than to have a main character who uses music as part of who he is?”

Soon the game was far enough along for Fargo to start shopping it to publishers. His first stop was naturally Activision. One of Jim Levy’s major blind spots, however, was the whole CRPG genre. He simply couldn’t understand the appeal of killing monsters, mapping dungeons, and building characters, reportedly pronouncing Interplay’s project “nicheware for nerds.” And so Fargo ended up across town at Electronics Arts, who, recognizing that Trip Hawkins’s original conception of “simple, hot, and deep” wasn’t quite the be-all end-all in a world where all entertainment software was effectively “nicheware for nerds,” were eager to diversify into more hardcore genres like the CRPG. EA’s marketing director Bing Gordon zeroed in on the appeal of one of Cranford’s relatively few expansions on Wizardry, the character of the bard. He went so far as to change the game’s name from Shadow Snare to The Bard’s Tale to highlight him, creating a lovable rogue to serve as the star of advertisements and box copy who barely exists in the game proper: “When the going gets tough, the bard goes drinking.” Beyond that, promoting The Bard’s Tale was just a matter of trumpeting the game’s audiovisual appeal in contrast to the likes of Wizardry. Released in plenty of time for Christmas 1985, with all of EA’s considerable promotional savvy and financial muscle behind it, The Bard’s Tale shocked even its creators and its publisher by outselling the long-awaited Ultima IV that appeared just a few weeks later. Interplay had come into the big time; Fargo’s days of scrabbling after any work he could find looked to be over for a long, long time to come. In the end, The Bard’s Tale would sell more than 400,000 copies, becoming the best-selling single CRPG of the 1980s.

The inevitable Bard’s Tale sequel was completed and shipped barely a year later. Another solid hit at the time on the strength of its burgeoning franchise’s name, it’s generally less fondly remembered today by fans. It seems that Michael Cranford and Fargo had had a last-minute falling-out over royalties just as the first Bard’s Tale was being completed, which led to Cranford literally holding the final version of the game for ransom until a new agreement was reached. A new deal was brokered in the nick of time, but the relationship between Cranford and Interplay was irretrievably soured. Cranford was allowed to make The Bard’s Tale II: The Destiny Knight, but he did so almost entirely on his own, using much of the tools and code he and Interplay’s core team had developed together for the first game. The lack of oversight and testing led to a game that was insanely punishing even by the standards of the era, one that often felt sadistic just for the sake of it. Afterward Cranford parted company with Interplay forever to study theology and philosophy at university.

Despite having rejected The Bard’s Tale themselves, Activision was less than thrilled with Interplay’s decision to publish the games through EA, especially after they turned into exactly the sorts of raging hits that they desperately needed for themselves. Fargo notes that Activision and EA “just hated each other,” far more so even than was the norm in an increasingly competitive industry. Perhaps they were just too much alike. Jim Levy and Trip Hawkins both liked to think of themselves as hip, with-it guys selling the future of art and entertainment to equally hip, with-it buyers. Both were fond of terms like “software artist,” and both drew much of their marketing and management approaches from the world of rock and roll. Little Interplay had a tough task tiptoeing between these two bellicose elephants. Fargo:

We were maybe the only developer doing work for both companies at the same time, and they just grilled me whenever they had the chance. Whenever there was any kind of leak, they’d say, “Did you say anything?” I was right in the middle there. I always made sure to keep my mouth shut about everything.

Still, Fargo managed for a while to continuing doing adventure games for Activision alongside CRPGs for EA. Interplay’s Activision adventure for 1985, Borrowed Time, might just be their best. It was created at that interesting moment when developers were beginning to realize that traditional parser-based adventure games, even of the illustrated variety, might not cut it commercially much longer, but when they weren’t yet quite sure how to evolve the genre to make it more accessible and not seem like a hopeless anachronism on slick new machines like the Atari ST and Amiga. Borrowed Time is built on the same engine that had already powered Mindshadow and The Tracer Sanction, but it sports an attempt at providing an alternative to the keyboard via a list of verbs and nouns and a clickable graphic inventory. It’s all pretty half-baked, however, in that the list of nouns are suitable to the office where you start the game but bizarrely never change thereafter, while there are no hotspots on the pictures proper. Nor does the verb list contain all the verbs you actually need to finish the game. Thus even the most enthusiastic point-and-clicker can only expect to switch back and forth constantly between mouse or joystick and keyboard, a process that strikes me as much more annoying than just typing everything.

Borrowed Time on the Amiga. The clickable word list is great — until you leave your office.

Thankfully, the game has been thought through more than its interface. Realizing that neither he nor anyone else amongst the standard Interplay crew were all that good at writing prose, Fargo contacted Bill Kunkel, otherwise known as “The Game Doctor,” who had made a name for himself as a sort of Hunter S. Thompson of videogame journalism via his column in Electronic Games magazine. Fargo’s pitch was simple: “Okay, you guys have a lot of opinions about games, how would you like to do one?” Kunkel, along with some old friends and colleagues named Arnie Katz and Joyce Worley, decided that they would like that very much, forming a little company called Subway Software to represent their partnership. Subway proceeded to write all of the text and do much of the design for Borrowed Time. Fargo gave them a “Script by” credit for their contributions, the first of many such design credits Subway would receive over the years to come (a list that includes Star Trek: First Contact for Simon & Schuster).

Like Déjà Vu, ICOM Simulations’s breakthrough point-and-click graphic adventure of the same year, Borrowed Time plays in the hard-boiled 1930s milieu of Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler. The tones and styles of the two games are very  similar. Both love to make sardonic fun of the hapless, down-on-his-luck PI who serves as protagonist almost as much as they love to kill him, and both mix opportunities for free exploration with breakneck chases and other linear bits of derring-do in service of some unusually complicated plots. And I like both games on the whole, despite some unforgiving old-school design decisions. While necessarily minimalist given the limitations of Interplay’s engine, the text of Borrowed Time in particular is pretty good at evoking its era and genre inspirations.

Collaborations like the one that led to Borrowed Time highlight one of the most interesting aspects of Fargo’s approach to game development. In progress as well in many other companies by the mid-1980s, it represented a quiet revolution in the way games got made that was changing the industry.

With Interplay, I wanted to take [development] beyond one- or two-man teams. That sounds like an obvious idea now, but to hire an artist to do the art, a musician to do the music, a writer to do the writing, all opposed to just the one-man show doing everything, was novel. Even with Demon’s Forge, I had my buddy Michael do all the art, but I had to trace it all and put it in the computer, and that lost a certain something. And because I didn’t know a musician or a sound guy, it had no music or sound. I did the writing, but I don’t think that’s my strong point. So, really, [Interplay was] set up to say, “Let’s take a team approach and bring in specialists.”

One of the specialists Fargo brought in for Interplay’s fourth and final adventure game for Activision, 1986’s Tass Times in Tonetown, we already know very well.

After leaving Infocom in early 1985, just in time to avoid the chaos and pain brought on by Cornerstone’s failure, Mike Berlyn along with his wife Muffy had hung out their shingle as Brainwave Creations. The idea was to work as consultants, doing game design only rather than implementation — yet another sign of the rapidly encroaching era of the specialist. Brainwave entered talks with several companies, including Brøderbund, Origin, and even Infocom. However, with the industry in general and the adventure game in particular in a state of uncertain flux, it wasn’t until Interplay came calling that anything came to fruition. Brian Fargo gave Mike and Muffy carte blanche to do whatever they wanted, as long as it was an adventure game. What they came up with was a bizarre day-glo riff on New Wave music culture, with some of the looks and sensibilities of The Jetsons. The adjective “tass,” the game’s universal designation for anything cool, fun, good, or desirable, hails from the Latin “veritas” — truth. The Berlyns took to pronouncing it as “very tass,” and soon “tass” was born. In the extra-dimensional city of Tonetown guitar picks stand in for money, a talking dog is a star reporter, and a “combination of pig, raccoon, and crocodile” named Franklin Snarl is trying to buy up all of the land, build tract houses, and transform the place into a boring echo of Middle American suburbia. Oh, and he’s also kidnapped your dimension-hopping grandfather. That’s where you come in.

I’ve heard Tass Times in Tonetown described from time to time as a “cult classic,” and who am I to argue? It’s certainly appealing at first blush, when you peruse the charmingly cracked Tonetown Times newspaper included in its package. The newspaper gives ample space to Ennio, the aforementioned dog reporter who owes more than a little something to the similarly anthropomorphic and similarly cute dogs of Berlyn’s last game for Infocom, the computerized board game Fooblitzky. It seems old Ennio — whom Berlyn named after film composer Ennio Morricone of spaghetti western fame — has been investigating the mundane dimension from which you hail under deep cover as your gramps’s dog Spot. Interplay’s adventure engine, while still clearly derivative of the earlier games, has been vastly improved, with icons now taking the place of lists of words and the graphics themselves filled — finally — with clickable hotspots. The bright, cartoon-surrealistic graphics still look great today, particularly in the Amiga version.

Tass Times in Tonetown on the Amiga. Ennio is on the case.

Settle in to really, seriously play, though, and problems quickly start to surface. It’s hard to believe that this game was co-authored by someone who had matriculated for almost three years at Infocom because it’s absolutely riddled with exactly the sort of frustrations that Infocom relentlessly purged from their own games. To play Tass Times in Tonetown is to die over and over and over again, usually with no warning. Walk through gramps’s dimensional gate and start to explore — bam, you’re dead because you haven’t outfitted yourself in the proper bizarre Tonetown attire. Ring the bell at an innocent-looking gate — bam, you’re dead because this gate turns out to be the front gate of the villain’s mansion. Descend a well and go west — bam, a monster kills you. Try to explore the swamp outside of town — bam, another monster kills you. The puzzles all require fairly simple actions to solve, but exactly which actions they are can only be divined through trial and error. Coupled with the absurd lethality of the game, that leads to a numbing cycle of saving, trying something, dying, and then repeating again and again until you stumble on the right move. The length of this very short game is also artificially extended via a harsh inventory limit and one or two nasty opportunities to miss your one and only chance to do something vital, which can leave you a dead adventurer walking through most of the game. As is depressingly typical of Mike Berlyn, the writing is clear and grammatically correct but a bit perfunctory, with most of the real wit offloaded to the graphics and the accompanying newspaper. And even the slick interface isn’t quite all that it first seems to be. The “Hit” icon is of absolutely no use anywhere in the game. Even more strange is the “Tell Me About” icon, which is not only useless but not even understood by the parser. Meanwhile other vital verbs still go unrepresented graphically; thus you still don’t totally escape the tyranny of the keyboard. Borrowed Time isn’t as pretty or as strikingly original as Tass Times in Tonetown, and it’s only slightly more shy about killing you, but on the whole it’s a better game, the one that gets my vote for the first one to play for those curious about Interplay’s take on the illustrated text adventure.

Thanks to the magic of pre-release hardware, Interplay got their adventures with shocking speed onto the next generation of home computers represented by the Atari ST, the Amiga, and eventually the Apple IIGS. Well before Tass Times in Tonetown, new versions of Mindshadow and Borrowed Time, updated with new graphics and, in the case of the former, the somewhat ineffectual point-and-click word lists of the latter, became two of the first three games a proud new Amiga owner could actually buy. Similarly, the IIGS version of Tass Times in Tonetown was released on the same day in September of 1986 as the IIGS itself. While the graphics weren’t quite up to the Amiga version’s standard, the game’s musical theme sounded even better played through the IIGS’s magnificent 16-voice Ensoniq synthesizer chip. Equally well-done ports of The Bard’s Tale games to all of these platforms would soon follow, part and parcel of one of Fargo’s core philosophies: “Whenever we do an adaptation of a product to a different machine, we always take full advantage of all of the machine’s new features. There’s nothing worse than looking at graphics that look like [8-bit] Apple graphics on a more sophisticated machine.”

And, lo and behold, Interplay finally finished their IBM PC-based recreation of Pebble Beach in 1986, last legacy of their days as Boone Corporation. It was published by Activision’s Gamestar sports imprint under the ridiculously long-winded title of Championship Golf: The Great Courses of the World — Volume One: Pebble Beach. It was soon ported to the Amiga, but sales in a suddenly very crowded golf-simulation field weren’t enough to justify a Volume Two. Despite their sporty founder, Interplay would leave the sports games to others henceforth. They would also abandon the adventure games that were by now becoming a case of slowly diminishing returns to focus on building on the CRPG credibility they enjoyed in spades thanks to The Bard’s Tale.

Interplay as of 1987. Even then, four years after the company’s founding, all of the employees were still well shy of thirty.

By 1987, then, Brian Fargo had established his company as a proven industry player. Over many years still to come with Fargo at the helm, Interplay would amass a track record of hits and cult touchstones that can be equaled by no more than a handful of others in gaming’s history. They would largely deliver games rooted in the traditional fantasy and science-fiction tropes that gamers can never seem to get enough of, executed using mostly proven, traditional mechanics. But as often as not they then would garnish this comfort food with just enough innovation, just enough creative spice to keep things fresh, to keep them feeling a cut above their peers. The Bard’s Tale would become something of a template: execute the established Wizardry formula very well, add lots of colorful graphics and sound, and innovate modestly, but not enough to threaten delicate sensibilities. Result: blockbuster. The balance between commercial appeal and innovation is a delicate one in any creative field, games perhaps more than most. For many years few were better at walking that tightrope than Interplay, making them a necessary perennial in any history of games as a commercial or an artistic proposition. The fact that this blog strives to be both just means they’re likely to show up all that much more in the years to come.

(Sources: The book Stay Awhile and Listen by David L. Craddock; Commodore Magazine of December 1987; Softline of January 1982, March 1982, May 1982, September 1982, January 1983, September/October 1983, and November/December 1983; Amazing Computing of April 1986; Compute!’s Gazette of September 1983; Microtimes of March 1987; Orange Coast of July 2000, August 2000, September 2000, and May 2001; Questbusters of March 1991. Online sources include: Matt Barton’s interview with Rebecca Heineman, parts 1 and 3; Barton’s interview with Brian Fargo, part 1; Digital Press’s interview with Heineman; Gamestar’s interview with Fargo; interviews with Bill Kunkel at Gamasutra, Good Deal Games, and 8-bit Rocket; “trivia” in the MobyGames page on Tass Times in Tonetown; and a VentureBeat article on Interplay. Also Jason Scott’s interview with Mike Berlyn for Get Lamp that he was kind enough to share with me. And thanks to Alex Smith for sharing the “nichware for nerds” anecdote about Jim Levy in a comment on this blog. Feel free to download the Amiga versions of Borrowed Time and Tass Times in Tonetown from right here if you like.

I’ve finally rolled out a new minimalist version of this site for phone browsers. If you notice that anything seems to have gone sideways somewhere with it, let me know.

The Digital Antiquarian will be taking a holiday next week. Dorte and I are heading to Rome for a little getaway. But it’ll be back to business the week after, when we’ll cross the pond again at last to look at some developments in Britain and Europe.)

1. Bill Heineman 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. ↩

Comments
41 Responses

- Superuser

May 1, 2015 at 12:13 pm

Root bear? :-)

- Jimmy Maher

May 1, 2015 at 12:31 pm

There’s always something… weird thing is that I spelled it that way *twice*. Anyway, thanks!

- Alex Smith

May 1, 2015 at 2:15 pm

Thanks for the shout out at the end there, but you did get my last name wrong. I have to admit though, Warren sounds a lot cooler than plain old Smith. ;)

- Jimmy Maher

May 1, 2015 at 3:32 pm

Aw, jeez, really sorry about that. The mistake I like to make least is to get someone’s name wrong.

- Alex Smith

May 2, 2015 at 6:00 pm

No worries.

- matt w

May 1, 2015 at 3:11 pm

Boone instantly becomes my least favorite of all the characters you’ve written about. CHALKBOARDS 4EVA

- Jimmy Maher

May 1, 2015 at 5:48 pm

Dry-erase boards, son. A disruptive, revolutionary technology in the field of cubicle living that made the world a better place. (Been watching a lot of Silicon Valley recently…)

- matt w

May 2, 2015 at 1:31 am

Had they stayed in the cubicles and out of my classrooms, I would not be complaining.

- Jimmy Maher

May 2, 2015 at 7:16 am

Ah, this is a personal issue with whiteboards. Now I get it.

- X

May 2, 2015 at 6:47 pm

OK, I’m curious. What are the supposed advantages of chalk over whiteboards?

I can only come up with one: it’s easier to tell when you’re about to run out of chalk and office supply cabinets tend to stockpile more replacement chalk than replacement pens.

- LoneCleric

May 4, 2015 at 3:14 am

Well, as one of the last members of the “chalk generation”, I would point out that, first & foremost, you can ALWAYS delete chalk from a board. It doesn’t matter that if you left something written on the board for a week, a month, or a year. At worst, you might need a little water, and ta-daaa: empty board.

- Andrew Plotkin

May 1, 2015 at 4:04 pm

You can’t tell the difference between a giant owl and a giant snake? Snakes can’t fly, Jimmy. *Everybody knows that.*

I did some image searching and turned up the artist as Vicente Segrelles: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?50731

The piece turns up with more than one title, so he probably sold it a bunch of times. Hey, money.

(Totally random trivia which I noticed while searching ISFDB: Segelles did the first US paperback cover of _The Colour of Magic_. http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?37347)

- Jimmy Maher

May 1, 2015 at 5:46 pm

:) Softline magazine said it was two snakes. At first I thought they were dragons, but deferred to authority and went with snakes. Also, snakes fit better with my labored Freudian joke. Obviously I need to spend more time studying the Monster Manual.

- Michael Davis

May 1, 2015 at 8:12 pm

To me it looks like the snake is touching the ground, and the other guy is riding a giant condor or owl or something. So I call shenanigans on there being a depiction of flying snakes

- Michael Davis

May 1, 2015 at 8:13 pm

Also, that is a f’n rad painting

- matt w

May 2, 2015 at 1:25 am

My score:
“a shapely woman tied to a pole being menaced by two knights mounted on some sort of flying snakes”
“a shapely woman tied to a pole”: yes
“mounted on some sort of flying snakes”: no; the flying one is an owl, the snake has its body on the ground
“two knights”: at least half true; the one facing the camera is a stereotypical knight carrying a lance, while the one with his back to us is less certainly a knight; the battle axe is of a make that could be used by a knight, the shield isn’t quite as pointy as I expect from this sort of depiction of a knight, but what is truly atypical of a knight is the, um, distinct lack of armor
“being menaced”: not by both of them surely? At first I thought that Owly was flying in and menacing her while Snakey was defending her but given the “tied to a pole” thing it makes more sense that Snakey is holding her prisoner and Owly is flying in to rescue her, especially since the tied appears to be rising, and this makes more sense of the roles one would expect from the one who is a knight and the one who is not a knight

However I do not recommend that you change a word of your original sentence.

I would also say that there’s a sort of equal opportunity we do not always see in this sort of art, in that we have a much better view of the man’s buttocks than the woman’s.

- matt w

May 2, 2015 at 1:28 am

An image search for Vicente Segrelles suggests that the last point does not universally hold for him.

- Jimmy Maher

May 2, 2015 at 7:23 am

I like this one a lot: http://lccomics.narod.ru/image/comic/vicente_segrelles/vincent_segrelles_giantslayer.jpg. At least the right arm and legs are well-protected. I like the way he draws breasts like balloons mounted on his models’ chests, sort of the way kids with no experience with actual breasts draw them.

- Peter Piers

January 15, 2016 at 7:32 pm

Jimmy, NSFW on that last image would have been appreciated. Thankfully I got lucky. :)

- Andy B

May 3, 2015 at 1:49 am

Picking up from where Andrew Plotkin left off, Google seems to be saying that this painting was originally part of Segrelles’s own long-running comics series, “El Mercenario,” which astonishingly seems to be done in exactly this style, and in oils, on every page! It looks to consist of a continuous succession of similar dragon + damsel – clothes scenarios, but fully fleshed out.So to speak. So it seems entirely possible that this particular image is in fact part of an actual narrative continuity, and that some of our burning questions about what’s going on here might have official and correct answers. Oddly enough. In any case, it’s certainly El Mercenario coming to the rescue on that owl.

- rockersuke

May 4, 2015 at 1:08 am

Almost! El Mercenario actually used some mix of flying bat-lizard thing :-) I recognised Demon’s Forge cover art at first sight as It happened to be the cover of spanish CIMOC comics magazine #2 (see here), which I used to read in my teen years (and where Mercenario was first serialized). It also reached the States in 1982, where it was published in Heavy Metal magazine. Other than the flying beast detail, your assumptions are right: it was rescuing some half/totally naked lady tied to something most of the time :-)

Some pics of its very first edition:

Image 1
Image 2
Image 3

Incidentally, using previously existing ilustration artwork as video-games package art was common practice in the 80’s spanish gaming market. As an example, this other CIMOC magazine cover was soon after used as cover-art for “La Aventura Espacial”, a popular menu-based spanish text adventure by Aventuras AD as well as at least a couple of some other unrelated ci-fi novels.

Image 4

While the story of the spanish text adventure late 80’s scene might be out of scope for this blog, the case of Aventuras AD might be of interest for Jimmy Maher as it is strongly related to the whereabouts of Gilsoft member Tim Gilberts right after the events told in the post dedicated to the Quill. . If you feel curious and can read some spanish you can take a look at this post from my blog where the recent rescue and preservation of the custom-made tool used at that company is related.

(going to re-read some of my surviving comics from the happy 80’s :-) )

- Ian Schmidt

May 1, 2015 at 6:31 pm

Heineman was one of the true masters of the IIGS. Her games always went above and beyond on that platform, and she kept making them well after there was any sane marketing reason to do so (which resulted in Interplay shipping Dragon Wars for the machine right as Apple was pulling the plug in 1993 – funny how the 16-bit machines all died within a few months of each other). One of my top 5 game programming heroes, and her trademark hamburger-related Easter Eggs were always amusing.

- Michael Davis

May 1, 2015 at 8:20 pm

“A bunch of pixeish”

- Scott M. Bruner

May 1, 2015 at 11:00 pm

One question about The Bard’s Tale. You mention how the name was changed to accentuate that character. My historical understanding was that the title of the first game was “Tales of the Unknown Vol 1: The Bard’s Tale,” with the idea that the next was going to be “Tales of the Unknown Vol2: The Destiny Knight,” but that EA demanded they keep the Bard’s Tale moniker to make sure people understood what the next game was a sequel to. (And probably rightly, I don’t remember anyone referring to the game on release as “Tales of the Unknown 1”)

So many characters from the early games have disappeared – I’m happy Brian Fargo is still an active contemporary and passionate about what he does. I’m sad, though, that he decided against bringing Rebecca Heineman back for BT 4 *(although she has tweeted that is going to announce a Kickstarter for Dragon Wars 2 as well) , which I am anxiously waiting to support.

- Jimmy Maher

May 2, 2015 at 7:29 am

Basically right, except that the second game was to be called The Arch-Mage’s Tale. The idea was that each in the series would highlight a different class. But yeah, everyone simply knew the first game as The Bard’s Tale, and it would have been crazy not to have capitalized on that name recognition.

- Scott M. Bruner

May 1, 2015 at 11:20 pm

One other comment – Interplay’s Neuromancer, a point-and-click adventure based on the William Gibson novel, was also very impressive.

Not only because it provided a fairly compelling take on Gibson’s cyberpunk world including a surreal recreation of cyberspace where the player had to battle artificial intelligences using an array of hacking software as weapons, but also because it was simply one of the better adventures of the time, in a market I remember being pretty much owned/saturated by SOL.

It’s definitely worth a spin for anyone interested in classic Interplay (or classic point’n’clickers).

- Jimmy Maher

May 2, 2015 at 7:26 am

Definitely will be covering this one in the future…

- Markus Peter

May 3, 2015 at 9:01 pm

I loved the game and its strange combination of adventure and hacking simulation. This was my first encounter with William Gibson – I remember buying the book when I encountered a dead end in the game, just to know the end of the story, only to notice later on that both were only loosely related when I finally managed the game.

Great where the days, when you couldn’t google a walkthrough. Nowadays, I simply wouldn’t have the patience anymore.

- iPadCary

May 13, 2015 at 12:14 pm

The Commodore64 version plays a sample of DEVO’s “Some Things Never Change” in the intro, but the Amiga version doesn’t. Go figure.

- Marie Fargo-Sork

May 2, 2015 at 8:08 pm

Brian is still a wonderful business man

- Nate

May 3, 2015 at 1:17 am

The story of Cranford holding the BT1 disk hostage is disputed by Cranford. He claims he wanted the contract he was presented to reflect the verbal deal, and that they eventually negotiated something which wasn’t the original deal anyway.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9163

This is also in Matt Barton’s book on CRPGs (recommended).

http://www.amazon.com/Dungeons-Desktops-History-Computer-Role-Playing/dp/1568814119

- Jimmy Maher

May 8, 2015 at 9:36 am

From the interview you linked to:

“Now, this story that I held a disk hostage to extort someone – that didn’t happen, I would never do that. Sitting on the source code until the deal I was promised was finally put in writing and honored – that is possible. I honestly can’t remember.”

Cranford seems to be trying to draw a distinction here that’s really no distinction at all. Using softer language than “extort” or “hold hostage” doesn’t really change the substance of the case.

I would suspect that the source of the difficulties came from a confusion about just what sort of “promise” had been made to Cranford. At least as he tells the story today, Fargo believed the plan to be to pay Cranford in stock and to use the royalties from The Bard’s Tale — which looked to have the potential from very early on to be the big hit it did indeed become — to “grow the company.” Cranford seems to have expected from the beginning the royalties he did eventually receive on the final contract. I suppose there’s a depressing lesson here about the need to put things in writing as soon as money is involved, even if you’re working with one of your best friends. For Cranford personally, there’s also perhaps another lesson: as Fargo has noted wryly, he would have been better off in the long run to forgo short-term profit and take the stock, which turned into quite a winner thanks largely to his own games.

- William Hern

May 8, 2015 at 3:26 pm

Fascinating article Jimmy – great research!

One small typo in the second “Tass Times” paragraph: “… you gramps’s dog Spot” should be “… your gramps’s dog Spot”.

- Jimmy Maher

May 10, 2015 at 11:20 am

Thanks!

- iPadCary

May 13, 2015 at 12:15 pm

Happy Birthday, Inge Lehmann.

- John G

May 23, 2015 at 6:21 pm

While I love your research and history on these blog entries, it seems like every time I stop by, some poor IF pioneer is being called a bad writer.

Poor Mike Berlyn is fighting cancer and used to write novels like “The Integrated Man.” Does it really behoove anyone to call his prose depressingly perfunctory or whatever? Or to try and bring Steve Meretzky down a notch? It’s not a zero-sum thing, “Trinity” and “AMFV” are both allowed to be good.

Here if anyone is interested is a fundraiser to help Berlyn.

http://www.gofundme.com/skb9h3c

- Peter Piers

January 15, 2016 at 7:49 pm

Unfair. Maher devoted a post to raising awareness of Berlyn’s condition. Also, Maher does a superb job of explaining what he feels is sub-par about each writer, rather than merely throwing up empty critiques. If you agree with Maher’s explanations, you agree with his views; if you don’t, then you don’t.

Also, beware of generalisations. Berlyn’s prose is called “perfunctory” in the context of Tass Times.

- Guffaw

December 31, 2015 at 3:11 am

“; Fargo’s days of scrabbling after any work he could find looked to be over for a long, long time to come.”
Perhaps “looked” should be “seemed” ? :)

- Jimmy Maher

December 31, 2015 at 8:24 am

No, “looked” works here. A bit more colloquial, but we’re not *that* high-falutin’ around here. ;)

- Peter Ferrie

February 7, 2016 at 5:46 am

Minor thing – the proper name is “The Tracer Sanction”, rather than just “Tracer Sanction”.

- Jimmy Maher

February 7, 2016 at 8:39 am

Thanks!

Fire and Rain
May 15, 2015

While the Apple Macintosh, Atari ST, and Commodore Amiga weren’t exactly flying off American store shelves in 1985 and 1986, they at least had the virtue of existing. The British computer industry, by contrast, proved peculiarly unable to produce 16-bit follow-ups to their 8-bit models that had made Britain, measured on a per-capita basis, the most computer-mad nation in the world.

Of the big three in Britain — Sinclair, Acorn, and Amstrad — only Sinclair really even tried to embrace the 16-bit era on a timely basis, announcing the QL the same month of January 1984 that the Mac made its debut. They would have been better off to wait a while: the QL was unreliable, ill-thought-out, buggy, and, far from being the “Quantum Leap” of its name, was still mired in the old 8-bit ways of thinking despite the shiny 68000 processor it shared with the Macintosh. It turned into a commercial fiasco, and Sinclair never got the chance to try again. Torpedoed partly by the QL’s failure but more so by a slowdown in Spectrum sales and Sir Clive’s decision to pull millions of pounds out of the company to fund his ridiculous miniature-television and electric-car projects, Sinclair came within a whisker of bankruptcy before selling themselves to Amstrad in 1986.

Acorn, meanwhile, gave their tendency to overengineer free rein, producing a baroque range of new models and add-ons for their 8-bit BBC Micro line while its hugely ambitious 32-bit successor, the Acorn Archimedes, languished in development hell. Undone by the same slowing market that devastated Sinclair as well as by an ill-advised grab for the low-end in the form of the Acorn Electron, Acorn was also forced to sell themselves, to the Italian company Olivetti.

That left only Amstrad still standing in an industry that had been just a year or two before the Great White Hope of a nation, symbol and proof of concept of Margaret Thatcher’s vision of a new, more entrepreneurial and innovative British economy. Unfortunately, Amstrad’s founder Alan Sugar just wasn’t interested in the kind of original research and development that would have been required to launch a brand new machine based on the 68000 or a similar advanced chip. His computers, like the stereos he had been selling for many years before entering the computer market, were all about packaging proven technology into inexpensive, practical products for the masses. There’s something to be said for that sort of innovation, but it wasn’t likely to yield a Macintosh, an Amiga, or even an Atari ST anytime soon.

This collective failure of the domestic makers meant that British punters eager to experience the wonders of 16 bits were forced to look overseas for their new toys. Yet that was a fairly fraught proposition in itself. The Macintosh was practically a machine of myth in Britain for years after its American debut, absurdly expensive and available only through a handful of specialized shops. Only wealthy gentlefolk of leisure like noted Mac fanatic Douglas Adams could contemplate actually owning one. And the Amiga, not even available in Britain until June of 1986, also suffered even thereafter from an expensive price tag and poor distribution.

That left the Atari ST as the only really practical choice. The situation was a surprising one in that Atari had not traditionally been a big player in Britain. The Atari VCS game console that had left its mark on the childhood of an entire generation in North America was virtually unknown in Britain, and, while Atari’s line of 8-bit computers had been nominally available, they had been an expensive, somewhat off-kilter choice in contrast to the Sinclair Spectrums and Commodore 64s that outsold them by an order of magnitude. But Jack Tramiel, previously the head of Commodore and now owner of the reborn post-Great Videogame Crash Atari, knew very well the potential of the European market, and pushed aggressively to establish a presence there. In fact, the very first STs to go on sale did so not in the United States but rather West Germany. By the end of 1985 STs were readily available in Britain as well and, at least in contrast to the Macintosh and Amiga, quite inexpensive. A British software industry looking for a transformative machine to lift home computing in Britain out of its doldrums placed its first hopes — admittedly largely by default — in the Atari ST.

Still, it was far from clear just what sort of form the hoped-for new ST software market would take. The ST may have been a bargain in contrast to the Macintosh and Amiga, but it was still a fairly expensive proposition within a country just getting back on its economic feet again after what felt like decades of recessions, shortages, and labor unrest. A reasonably full-featured ST system could easily reach £1000, many times what one could expect to shell out for the likes of a cheap and cheerful Speccy. The ST would seemingly need to attract a different sort of buyer, with more money to spend and perhaps a few more years under his belt. This expectation was one of the calculations that led to Rainbird, one of the most significant British software houses of the latter 1980s.

Rainbird was born from Firebird, a slightly older label that has plenty of significance in its own right. In 1984 British Telecom, solely responsible at the time for the telecommunications grid of all of Britain, was privatized, becoming a huge for-profit corporation as part of Margaret Thatcher’s general rolling-back of the socialist wave that had followed World War II. Even before the first shares were sold to the public on November 20, 1984 — the largest single share issue in the history of the world at the time — the newly liberated management of British Telecom began casting about for new business opportunities. It didn’t take them long to notice the exploding market for home-computer software. They thus formed the subsidiary of Telecomsoft, whose first imprint was to be called “Firefly Software.” That name was quickly changed to “Firebird” — it seems marketing manager James Leavey had just been listening to Stravinsky’s The Firebird — when they discovered a potential trademark conflict with another company. Firebird made its public bow in time for Christmas 1984 with a whole raft of mostly simple action games, selling for £2.50 (Firebird “Silver”) or £6 (Firebird “Gold”). Many turned into bestsellers.

Whether you considered British Telecom’s entrance into software a necessary result of a rapidly maturing industry or you were like Mel Croucher of Automata in considering them nothing more than “parasites” on software’s creative classes, it marked a watershed moment, a definitive farewell to the days of hobbyists meeting and selling to one another at “microfairs” and a hello to a hyper-competitive, corporatized industry destined someday to be worth many billions. If anyone was still in doubt, in December of 1984 another watershed arrived when newly minted software agent Jacquie Lyons presided over an unabashed bidding war for the right to publish Ian Bell and David Braben’s Elite on platforms other than the BBC Micro. Firebird, with the deepest pockets in the industry by far, won the prize.

Although published on the Firebird label, Elite would prove to be something of a model for the eventual Rainbird. Unlike Firebird’s previous releases, which had used the colorful but minimalist packaging typical of British games at the time, Elite‘s big, sturdy box contained not just the cassette or disk but also a thick manual, an equally thick novella to set the stage, a glossy quick-reference card, and a poster-sized ship-recognition chart (all licensed and reproduced from the Acornsoft original). All this naturally came at a price: £15 for the cassette version, fully £18 for the disk version. It marked a new way to sell games in Britain: as luxury products aimed at a classier, more sophisticated, perhaps slightly older consumer. In spite of the extra cost of all that packaging, the profit margins on its higher price points were to die for. If the Elite approach could be turned into a sustainable line rather than a one-off, British Telecom just might have something.

Tony Rainbird

One person inside British Telecom who paid a lot of attention to Elite‘s launch and its subsequent success was Tony Rainbird, a former software entrepreneur in his own right who now worked for Firebird. He began agitating his superiors for a new software label, a sort of boutique prestige brand that would sell more sophisticated experiences at a correspondingly higher price point; it would be, if you can forgive an anachronistic metaphor, the Lexus to Firebird’s Toyota. His thinking was influenced by a number of factors in addition to Elite‘s success. He was very aware of the Atari ST that was then just arriving in Britain, aware that the people who bought that machine and in the fullness of time its inevitable eventual competitors would be willing and able to spend a bit more for software. And he was very aware of the American software market, which at that time was enjoying a golden age of gorgeous game packaging thanks to labels like Infocom, Origin, and Telarium. Games from those publishers and many others in the United States were marked by high concepts, high prices, and, yes, high margins to match. Elite, the first British game that could really compete in the United States on those terms, had been the first game that Firebird exported there; it became as huge a hit in the United States as it had in its native country. A new luxury imprint could continue to export games and other software that suited the higher expectations of Americans, whilst trading on the slight hint of the exotic provided by their British origins.

After getting permission to give the new line a go, with he himself at its head, Tony Rainbird decided that all the games should be published in distinctive boxes done in a deep royal blue, a color which to him exuded class. His first choice for a name was “Bluebird Software.” But, once again, a search turned up a conflict with another trademark, so he allowed himself to be persuaded to give the line his own name. Just as well; it fitted even better as a companion to the Firebird line.

Rainbird was launched quietly at the end of 1985 with two 8-bit creativity titles, The Art Studio and The Music System, that echoed more than faintly Electronic Arts’s Deluxe line of high-toned creative applications in the United States. But it was the following year that saw things get started in earnest, with two splashy game launches for the Atari ST. One of these, The Pawn, is an adventure game we’ve met before, along with its maker Magnetic Scrolls; we’ll continue their story in the next article I write. It’s the other, a space shoot-em-up called Starglider, that I want to spend just a bit of time with today. It’s not really a great game, but it is an interesting one to consider in its historical context, not least because of the colorful history of the person who wrote it, a young hacker with the perfect videogame-character name of Jez San (“Jez” is a nickname for “Jeremy”).

Jez San had already had a greater impact on British computing before his twentieth birthday than most programmers manage in a lifetime. It all began when his father, owner of a successful import/export firm, gave have him an American TRS-80 computer in 1978, when he was not quite thirteen years old. He first won attention for himself by coming up with a hack to let one attach the joystick from an Atari VCS — another piece of foreign exotica that came to him courtesy of his father’s business — to the TRS-80 for playing games in lieu of the awkward keyboard controls that were the norm. His skills had progressed so far by 1982 that his father agreed to become partners with him in a little software-development company to be called Argonaut Software — think “J. San and the Argonauts” — run out of his bedroom. Whilst writing software for whomever would pay him, San was also soon terrorizing the network of British Telecom. He became one of his country’s most skilled phone phreakers, a talent he used to become a fixture on computer networks all over the world. It was in fact as a network hacker rather than a programmer or game developer that he first did something to make all of Britain sit up and take notice.

See https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZCMuBH2aZbE?start=4058

On October 2, 1983, San hacked the email account of one of the presenters of a live edition of the BBC program Making the Most of the Micro, an incident that has gone down in British computing lore as the “very first live hack on TV.” Millions of Britons watched as the presenter’s computer displayed a “Hacker’s Song” from San in place of the normal login message. Like much involving San, it was both less and more than it seemed. What with War Games a huge hit in the cinema, the BBC wanted something just like what San delivered for their live show where, as the host repeatedly stated, “anything could happen.” San’s alleged victims were more like co-conspirators: “They knew I was going to hack, they were quite hoping I would,” he admits. Why else would they announce the password to all and sundry inside the studio over a live microphone just minutes before the program began? After that, it just took a phone call from a few of San’s friends who were hanging about the studio. Further circumstantial evidence of the BBC’s complicity in the whole incident is provided by the host and presenter’s weird lack of affect when the “Hacker’s Song” appeared on the screen — almost as if they expected it, or something like it, to be there. As for the “Hacker’s Song” itself, it was lifted not from some shady underground but from the very overground pages of the American magazine Newsweek, yet another gift of San’s importer/exporter father.

San was forced to cloak himself in anonymity for this great exploit, but he got the chance to advertise his skills to the world and earn himself some real money in the process soon thereafter, when he was hired by a dodgy little company called Unicom to help in the development of a new, ultra-cheap modem for the BBC Micro. He wrote the software to control the modem, much of which was supplied not on disk or tape but as a new ROM chip to be installed in the computer itself. The modem lacked approval from the British Approvals Board of Telecommunications, meaning that, in one of those circumlocutions only a hidebound bureaucracy could come up with, it was legal to buy and sell but not to actually use on the British telephone network; it was required to bear a bright red triangle on its face to indicate this. Undaunted, Unicom took the non-certification as a badge of street cred, painting little demons on either side of the BABT’s warning triangle that made it look like just part of the logo. The Unicom modem quickly became known as the “Demon Modem.” At a fraction of the price of its more legitimate competitors, it made outlaws of many thousands of Britons and earned San tens of thousands of pounds. Perhaps all those punters should have been more cautious about the people they did business with: in the book Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders, San makes the eye-popping claim that he imbedded backdoors into the bundled software “to take control of a computer using his modem, to make it play sounds, or type words to the screen.” This sounds frankly dubious to me given everything I know about the technology involved, but I offer it nevertheless for your consideration. At any rate, San claims he mainly used his powers to do nothing more nefarious than cheat at MUD.

San first came face to face with the executives at British Telecom not, as you might expect, because he was hauled into court for his various illegal activities, but rather when he was hired by them to help David Braben and Ian Bell port Elite from the BBC Micro to the Commodore 64. Having accomplished that task in a bare couple of months, he parlayed the success into a contract for a 3D space-combat game of his own, to target the new generation of 68000-based home computers that were on the horizon. Eager to get started, and with the Atari ST and Amiga not yet released, he rented a Macintosh for a while to start developing 3D math routines for the 68000, then shifted development to the ST as soon as it arrived in British shops. When Rainbird came into being, this 16-bit prestige project was quickly moved from Firebird to the new imprint.

The finished Starglider that was released by Rainbird in October of 1986 was once again both less and more than it seemed. With Bell and Braben having already started squabbling and proving unable or unwilling to deliver a timely follow-up to Elite, Rainbird clearly wanted to position Starglider instead as that game’s logical successor. Just as Acornsoft had for Elite, Rainbird hired an outside author, James Follett, to write a novella setting the stage for the action. Its almost 70 pages tell the story of an alien invasion force that disguise themselves as Stargliders, a protected species of spacefaring birds, in order to penetrate the automated defenses of your planet of Novenia. You play Jaysan — didn’t I say he had the perfect name for a videogame character? — who with the assistance of his hot girlfriend Katra must save his world using the last manned fighter left in its arsenal. How’s that for a young nerd’s wish-fulfillment fantasy?

That said, connecting all of the texture provided by the novella to the actual game requires quite an effort of imagination. Starglider lacks the huge universe of Elite, and lacks with it Elite‘s strategic trading game and the slow-building sense of accomplishment that comes from improving your ship and your economic situation and climbing through the ranks. Most of all it lacks Elite‘s wondrous sense of limitless freedom. Rather than a grand space opera, Starglider is a frenetic shoot-em-up in which you down enemies for points — nothing more, nothing less. Get to and destroy a faux-Starglider, the “boss” of each level, and you advance to the next, where everything becomes a little bit harder. With no save facility beyond a high-scores table, it would fit perfectly into an arcade.

Which is not to say that Starglider wasn’t impressive in its day within its own more limited template. The game’s most innovative feature may just be its missile-eye view: when you fire a missile you can switch your view to a camera in its nose and guide it to its target yourself. There’s also a modicum of strategy required: you need to return to a depot periodically to repair your ship and restock your weapons, and you need to replenish your energy supplies by skimming over power lines located on the surface of Novenia (shades of Elite‘s fuel scoops). But mostly Starglider seems more concerned with showing off what its 3D engine can do than pushing boundaries of gameplay. Its wireframe 3D graphics aren’t exactly a revelation in comparison to Elite‘s, but there are far more enemies now with more complex shapes, which move more smoothly — the Stargliders themselves, enormous birds that smoothly flap their wings, are particularly well-done — and which are now in color.

The problem with a game that lives and dies on its technical innovations is that once those innovations are incorporated into and improved upon by other games it has very little to offer. Writing about Elite, I noted that Braben and Bell could easily have stopped after they had a workable 3D action game, the first of its kind on a PC, and been assured of having a sizable hit on their hands. What made Elite a game for the ages was their decision to keep going, to use that 3D engine as a mere building block for something grander. The lack of a similar grander vision is what makes Starglider, as reviewer Ashley Pomeroy put it, “a period piece.” Within a year or two other games would offer 3D engines that used solid polygons instead of wireframes — including, ironically, later versions of Elite itself. Many of Starglider‘s other aspects that were impressive back in the context of 1986 are most kindly described as quaint today, like the poorly digitized voice of Katra that occasionally screams out a monosyllabic exclamation. Most embarrassing of all is the brief digitized snippet of a studio-recorded theme song that plays as the game starts; it sounds like a particularly cheesy Saturday-morning toy advertisement.

The use of digitized sound from the real world is of course a signpost to the future of multimedia gaming, and represented a real coup in 1986, as San himself describes: “On the Atari ST Starglider was the first game to use sampled sound. I sat with my ST open, measuring voltages off the sound chip, and modulating the volume controls in real time on the three channels to find what voltages came out so that I could play samples.” Technically brilliant it may well be. Timeless, however, it’s not.

In its day, though, it was more than enough to make Starglider just the big hit needed to get the fledgling Rainbird imprint off the ground. Its sales soared well into the six figures once ported, with greater or lesser degrees of success, to quite a variety of 8-bit and 16-bit machines (a list that includes the Amiga and at long last the Macintosh, the platform where its development first began). The sheer number of ports illustrates what would soon become Rainbird’s standard business model: to release games first as prestige titles on the 16-bit machines, then port them down to the less capable but more numerous 8-bitters where the really big sales numbers could be found. Rainbird quickly learned that an Atari ST or Amiga game on the Commodore 64 still retained some of the cachet that clung to anything involving a 68000. (Cinemaware in the United States would quickly learn the same thing and engage in a similar triangulation.)

Jez San used the income Starglider generated to put his one-man-band days behind him, bringing in additional programmers to establish Argonaut as one of the mainstays of British game development for almost two decades to come. Argonaut became one of the leading lights of a certain school of game programming, centered in Europe, that would continue to program the new 16-bit machines largely as they had the older 8-bits: in raw assembler, banging right on the hardware and ignoring operating systems and all the rules of “proper” programming found in the manuals. The approach seemed to demand young minds. Indeed, it seemed to delight in chewing them up and spitting them out before their time. In 1987 a 21-year-old San was already starting to feel his powers fading in contrast to the young turks he was hiring to work for him; he declared he’d likely be “over the hill” in about two more years. He was therefore eager to complete the transition he’d already begun into a purely managerial role. Even professional sports didn’t worship youth like this brutal meritocracy.

San and his colleagues and the many other developers like them positively swaggered about their prowess at down-and-dirty to-the-metal assembly-language coding, treating those who chose to work differently with contempt. “I don’t believe you can write performance software in C,” said San bluntly in that same 1987 interview. What he apparently failed to understand or didn’t consider significant was that, in being forced to focus so much on the trees of registers, opcodes, and interrupts, he was forgoing a veritable forest of conceptual complexity and design innovation. Higher-level languages had, after all, been invented for a reason. It’s very difficult, even for an agile 20-year-old mind, to conceive really interesting systems and virtual worlds when one is also forced to manually keep track of the exact position of the electron gun painting the screen. Thus the games that Argonaut and houses like them produced were audiovisually spectacular in their day but can seem underwhelming in ours. The fundamental limitations of their designs are all too painfully apparent today, long after even the best of 1980s graphics and sound have lost their ability to awe. For that reason I don’t know that we’ll be hearing a lot from this school of game development in the years to come on this blog, but rest assured that they’ll be beavering away in the background, brilliant in their own ephemeral way.

(Sources: the film From Bedrooms to Billions; the book Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders; Amazing Computing of November 1987; Retro Gamer 86 and 98; Amiga Computing of June 1988; Your Computer of January 1985, February 1986, June 1986, October 1987; Computer and Video Games of February 1985; Popular Computing Weekly of March 21 1985, November 7 1985, November 14 1985, and March 27 1986; Computer Gamer of August 1986; Home Computing Weekly of April 30 1985; Games Machine of October 1988. The web site The Bird Sanctuary is full of information on Firebird, Rainbird, and their games. If you’d like to experience Starglider for yourself, feel free to download a zip from here containing Atari ST and Amiga disk images along with all of the goodies that accompanied them.)

Comments
16 Responses

- iPadCary

May 15, 2015 at 12:21 pm

I can’t even BEGIN to list the Golden Age classics that Rainbird’s responsible for. Helluva lable, them …. Great work as per usual, Jimmy!

- Felix

May 15, 2015 at 3:51 pm

That’s odd… I could have sworn Starglider was flat-shaded in its 16-bit incarnations. Guess I was thinking of the sequel. But then, what exactly did the game lose on 8-bit machines?

And you make a good point about technological gimmicks. As I pointed out before, the technical wizardry in Lords of Midnight can be duplicated nowadays with 300 lines of fairly simple Javascript. It’s everything else that makes the classic game so many people still love.

As for software performance snobbery, that’s always been a thing. At one point it was, “we’ll code in C with a little assembly in critical portions”. Then C itself took assembly’s place for those cases. Nowadays it’s Java with C++ as the low-level fallback. And at each step there are people priding themselves on their ability to code clever bit-fiddling routines, while failing to see big obvious optimizations.

- Pedro Timóteo

May 15, 2015 at 4:51 pm

Yes, only the sequel had shaded graphics. As to what it lost in the 8-bit versions, that would be mostly speed, and (depending on the machine) some features. For instance, the Spectrum 48K version was simplified compared to the 128K one (no missile camera, no speech, no special missions).

- Felix

May 15, 2015 at 4:26 pm

Come to think of it, the first performance snob must have been Von Neumann himself, who supposedly criticized his colleagues for “wasting computer time” with an early assembler. And if I’m not mistaken, it was around the same time that people discovered just how hard it was to write a correct computer program…

You see, as of late I’ve started thinking that computer programming is just about the most complicated task the human brain can handle — right at the upper limit of our ability. And yes, there’s only so much we can pay attention to. Studies have shown long ago that productivity and code correctness, as measured in lines per day and bugs per line, are constant regardless of programming language used — and therefore of abstraction level. You can work in a team; you can specialize. But sooner or later you’ll hit a hard limit to what you can do, and the limit gets lower as you grow older. As for teams, they can only grow so big before communication overhead suffocates them.

Cue software companies still burning people at both ends, so that few people grow old writing software, and there’s never enough real expertise to go around. All while software projects continue to grow in size and ambition, even as the success rate dwindles.

- Andrew Plotkin

May 15, 2015 at 8:11 pm

“You see, as of late I’ve started thinking that computer programming is just about the most complicated task the human brain can handle — right at the upper limit of our ability.”

Not a coincidence!

I don’t want to get into “lines per day” as a measure, but the complexity of a programming task can be as high or low as you want — depending on the task that you tackle. And in software, with no material limits, people tend to tackle the hardest program they’re capable of imagining. Midjudge the limit by a hair and you’re screwed.

I like to say that the difference between a lousy software engineer and a great one is the difference between building the most complex program you can write, and the most complex program you can *maintain*.

- Jimmy Maher

May 16, 2015 at 9:18 am

Obviously the benefit of higher-level languages, libraries, even operating systems is that they abstract away complexities that no human could possibly hold straight in her mind. I think that machines like the Amiga and Atari ST were right there at the bleeding edge of what a single person could manage, the last machines that one could know and control completely, at the raw hardware level. Doing so could be tremendously rewarding, but, as I noted, came with trade-offs.

One problem that arises as the software stack on which we build our applications becomes ever higher is that we remain vulnerable to bugs at the lower layers. As I’m sure many other programmers can attest, this sort of problem is incredibly frustrating and seems if anything to be getting more rather than less common as time goes on and yet more layers accumulate below our high-level code.

As a self-taught coder who mostly does less than mission-critical mobile apps these days — i.e., little more than a (hopefully) talented amateur in eyes of a real software engineer — I do kind of feel instinctively that much of the complexity of modern software development is unnecessary, that we’ve gotten off on the wrong track somewhere. But I also recognize that I am unschooled in even many fairly fundamental notions in computer science, and thus my feelings may very well be stemming from sheer ignorance and creeping grumpy-old-manism.

- Felix

May 16, 2015 at 1:43 pm

I don’t think you need to be a software engineer or computer scientist to have an opinion about that. For what it’s worth, I’m self-taught too, and I worked on fairly serious business software. And after a decade and a half of butting my head against the Web’s infrastructure, I can safely say Rasmus Lerdorf didn’t know what he was doing when he created PHP any more than Linus Torvalds knew what he was doing when he created Linux. Both are hobbyist projects run out of control, and it shows.

Look at it this way: the Minix 3 kernel has 6 thousands lines of code. The Linux kernel may well have 6 *million* by now. (Sans drivers!) Are you seriously telling me the latter is a thousand times smarter? More capable? What sort of advanced features can take *a thousand times more lines of code*? It’s still just an OS kernel…

Nope, I don’t think you’re either ignorant or grumpy. I think you’re simply noticing that the emperor is naked. And you’re not the only one, not by far.

- Carl

May 19, 2015 at 11:13 pm

To be fair, these things often follow the Pareto principle where 80% of the payoff comes from 20% of the work. As Minix (a teaching system) shows, you can get a long way with a minimalist design by ignoring edge cases. And that is where the complexity comes in, the edge cases. It’s like that in anything. Once the low hanging fruit is picked it takes bigger and bigger increases in complexity to get incremental improvements in performance. Then it is time to shift the paradigm.

- Carl

May 15, 2015 at 8:48 pm

While it is true Acorn had difficulty coming up with a British 16-bit computer they were certainly trying, with custom silicon, no less!

The outcome of this development hell was the ARM microprocessor architecture, currently the dominant embedded CPU architecture in the world, driving, for example, the iPhone and iPad and countless other devices.

Interesting stuff!

- David Boddie

May 15, 2015 at 10:20 pm

I think you could say that the development hell at Acorn was more to do with the operating system for the ARM machines than with the hardware. There’s one account of this by the lead developer of the system (Arthur) that was used, though sadly there’s no corresponding account for the competing system (ARX).

- Bumvelcrow

May 16, 2015 at 10:11 am

I remember wandering into my local computer shop around the time Starglider was released. The Atari ST was in pride of place near the entrance and Starglider was running in attract mode with the digitised themesong/advert playing. Cheesy it may have been but everyone’s collective jaws were on the floor, mine included.
BTW, I loved the novella but I’m sure Katra was the strong and determined leader rather than ‘hot girlfriend’ and Jaysan was a self-centred layabout. Their relationship through it and the sequel was grimly platonic.

- Jimmy Maher

May 16, 2015 at 10:36 am

Milages may vary, but personally I’d say Katra was more the enthusiastic but subordinate hot nerd girl — a fairly established fantasy figure in this type of literature — rather than “a strong and determined leader.” She’s forever being described as “the girl” (Jaysan, presumably about the same age, is notably never described as “the boy”), “gasping” and “clinging to” Jaysan and trying to rally him to her cause, but she remains dependent on her roguishly charming man to ultimately save the day. This is an even older cliche; see movies like The African Queen and for that matter the Han Solo character in Star Wars.

While their relationship is never explicitly defined (in either sense of the word), Jez San himself did consider her to be “his” girlfriend, as he states in his Retro Gamer interview and I believe other places.

- Peter Piers

January 18, 2016 at 6:00 pm

I just watched the African Queen the other day, and am surprised at your description of the female lead! Hepburn’s character is certainly dependant on Bogart’s character’s know-how and strength, but she never gives up, she has a strong mind of her own. She’s almost a benign Lady Macbeth. In the end she also assists with the repairs as best she can.

- Cmdrfan

May 17, 2015 at 6:19 pm

Well, although I have to admit that your conclusion about the technical wizardry of these british programmers and how it quickly became obsolete, you should also shouldn’t be quick to dismiss their influence: as a perido Amiga owner and previous C64 owner I was very fond of the visuals and style of british software. You just couldn’t pile them with the other “arcade” (derogatory label) stuff coming out at the time, particularly on consoles. These guys managed to inject a certain artistic sense that’s quite hard to put into words and that made for a lasting effect on user’s memories.

I sincerely hope you write something about this. Maybe a piece on Psygnosis ?

Maybe it’s the same reason why we still like to look at Reanassaince-era portraits, even though their technical “wizardry” was made obsolete by photography long ago and in spite of the emphasis on “design” of modern art.

- Jimmy Maher

May 18, 2015 at 5:37 am

I’m sure Psygnosis will be getting some attention eventually. Shadow of the Beast is practically the archetypical example of this hyper-technical school of game programming (dodgy gameplay included), and, as another commentator said a while back, rivals Defender of the Crown for *the* game people think of when they think Amiga game. And then there’s Lemmings, pioneer of a whole category of casual puzzler…

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The Pawn’s Second Life (or, When Tony Met Anita)
May 21, 2015

Two adventure games overshadowed all of the others in North America during 1986. The success of one of these could have been predicted long before it reached store shelves. Leather Goddesses of Phobos combined the Infocom brand, slightly battered by recent events but still widely regarded as the premiere label in adventure gaming, with Steve Meretzky, the company’s most popular and populist author, working in his wheelhouse of science-fiction comedy. And on top of that it added the ultimate temptation: sex. How could it not become a hit?

The year’s other big game, however, was not such a predictable proposition, coming unexpectedly out of left field in the form of a brand new company from the United Kingdom of all places. As I’ve already written, Magnetic Scrolls’s The Pawn wasn’t a terribly good game in a whole lot of very important ways. Yet that was hard to notice at the time in the face of its more immediately obvious strengths. Not only did it offer as much text as the typical Infocom effort combined with a parser that was at least superficially competitive with Infocom’s own, but it absolutely blew Infocom away when it came to presentation, sporting several dozen illustrations of unprecedented quality. Whatever else you could say about it, The Pawn was the best looking text adventure yet released. When one of those magnificent images scrolled down onto the screen the average player’s critical faculties scrolled off to oblivion to make space for it. The Pawn‘s success in both North America and Europe, which could largely be attributed to those pretty if irrelevant pictures — one could turn them off entirely without losing anything other than a bit of atmosphere — was made doubly strange by the fact that a year before its year of triumph it had already made one debut as a humble text-only adventure, only to die quickly of a fatal case of wrong-horse-backing in the form of the Sinclair QL. Yet here it was again. Sometimes you just can’t keep a good — or, in this case, superficially good — game down.

A number of fortuitous circumstances led to The Pawn‘s unlikely revival as a next-generation graphical showcase. The first of them was the sheer stubbornness of Magnetic Scrolls’s managing director Anita Sinclair, comparable to that of her beloved bull terrier Murdoch who made a habit of terrorizing visitors to the company’s offices. When it became clear that the QL was a flop and that the text-only adventure game she, Ken Gordon, and Hugh Steers had been working on for it for over a year couldn’t hope to sell more than a dribble, she was determined to keep going, to try again with other games on other platforms. She therefore arranged a meeting with Tony Rainbird at British Telecom, hoping to sell him on a couple of action-game prototypes she and the boys had knocked together during down times. He turned out to be nonplussed by those games, but, much to her surprise, keenly interested in her misbegotten, foredoomed text adventure.

And so Tony Rainbird’s passion for adventure games became the second of those  fortuitous circumstances. Yes, this slick, gregarious would-be mogul genuinely loved adventure games, genuinely believed they could become the basis for an interactive literature of the future. Keeping as he always did one eye cocked toward North America, he was very aware of Infocom’s progress toward turning text adventures into interactive fiction, and felt keenly his own country’s failings in this regard. British programmers, writers, and designers were, he was convinced, every bit as talented as their American peers, but they had been ill-served to this point by the more primitive, usually cassette-driven hardware they had been forced to target as well as by British gamers’ predilection for cheap, simple games in lieu of the bigger, more ambitious releases typical across the pond. He thus saw adventure games as a major focus — perhaps the major focus — of his new luxury label Rainbird, designed as it was to compete with North America on its own terms with big, ambitious titles of its own. He had already started to pursue the most respected and consistent name in British adventure gaming, believing that he could take their games from Level 9 to whatever level Infocom was on on by giving them better packaging, better (i.e., international) distribution, and better hardware. And then along came Anita Sinclair.

In retrospect at least Tony’s interest in The Pawn seems natural, for it had been consciously designed to challenge Infocom, just as Rainbird had been to challenge American software in general. He was doubly interested when he learned that Magnetic Scrolls had granted only the rights to a QL version of The Pawn to Sinclair Research. There followed an intriguing proposal. Could Magnetic Scrolls port the game to other platforms and add some graphics? If they could do those two things for him, he could sell The Pawn all over the world as part of the collection of high-end, high-concept software he was now putting together.

Graphics had long since become a requirement for any kind of success in the British adventure market, as Tony was well aware; he may have been a text-adventure idealist, but he wasn’t stupid. Yet they proved to be a hard sell to Anita. While certainly excited by the idea of giving The Pawn a new lease on life, she was ambivalent about adding pictures. Indeed, she would never entirely shed her ambivalence on the subject. Heavily influenced by Infocom on this point as in so much else, she would declare even after Magnetic Scrolls had become known largely on the basis of their graphics that “if you have graphics it takes away from your own imagination and dilutes the imagery,” and admit that she often preferred to play her company’s games with the graphics off.

That said, many of her initial objections were practical rather than ideological. The pictures that had long since become standard equipment in all but the most modest, home-grown British adventures were almost universally what was known as line-drawn or vector graphics, a technique pioneered by Ken Williams in the United States way back in the days of Mystery House and The Wizard and the Princess. Under this technique graphics were stored not as pictures but as a series of instructions for drawing a picture: draw a line from this point to this point in this color, fill a rectangle having these boundaries in this other color, etc. The computer then recreated the image at run-time by stepping through this sequence of instructions. In the hands of masters of compression like the Austin brothers at Level 9, vector graphics could be packed by the hundred onto a single disk or cassette. Unfortunately, though, the nature of their creation limited them to straight lines, regular curves, and geometric solids filled in using a handful of primary colors layered on in big, garish swathes; anything like artistic subtlety went right out the window. That hadn’t always mattered all that much in the past, when the visual capabilities of the computers on offer, what with their low resolutions and limited color palettes, couldn’t manage much subtlety anyway. But clearly the traditional method made a poor fit for the new Atari ST, the machine that Tony Rainbird wanted Magnetic Scrolls to target first.

The alternative approach, used occasionally by companies in the United States like Telarium and enabled by the luxury of the disk drives that were common there, were bitmap graphics, where the color of each individual pixel that made up the picture was stored, one after another. While compression techniques could be used to shrink the size of the resulting file somewhat, pictures stored in this way nevertheless used vastly more space. Telarium’s games, for instance, which were generally much smaller than those of Level 9 that shipped on a single disk or cassette, routinely sprawled across four or even five disk sides thanks to their pictures. Still, bitmap graphics was the approach that Tony now advocated to Anita. The ST’s disks could store a lot more data than disks on the 8-bit machines or, God forbid, an 8-bit cassette. And it wasn’t really necessary to illustrate every single location in the game like Telarium did, just a reasonable subset of the more picturesque and interesting.

Tony even had someone in mind to make the pictures, a young artist and art-history scholar named Geoff Quilley who had just the sort of classy, classical sensibility that Tony and Anita alike wanted for the games of Magnetic Scrolls. Based in Oxford, Quilley had painted portraits as well as a mural for Wadham College, and had already done the graphics for a high-brow 8-bit adventure game based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Nowadays he was doing amazing things with NEOchrome, the simple little paint program that shipped with every Atari ST. When Anita still proved reluctant, Tony made her an offer that was difficult to refuse: give Quilley a week or so to illustrate one or two locations from the game, and see if she wasn’t convinced that they could add to The Pawn‘s commercial appeal without being an aesthetic embarrassment. She did, and she was. Quilley would remain with Magnetic Scrolls for years as their art director, drawing himself many of the pictures that would become the chief selling point of their games and supervising an eventual team of artists who drew the rest. Through it all he would remain inflexibly loyal to Neochrome and the Atari ST, even as Anita tried from time to time to tempt him with more advanced Amiga paint programs like Deluxe Paint. He liked to say that the results he got with his primitive tools spoke for themselves, and it was hard to argue with him after you’d had a look.

With their artist now on the job making the pictures, Magnetic Scrolls’s next challenge was to port The Pawn to the Atari ST and to find a way to add said pictures to an adventure game which they had never anticipated would need to contain them. For all that they had modeled so much of The Pawn after Infocom’s efforts, they had neglected to follow Infocom’s lead in one very important way. Instead of running in a virtual machine like Infocom’s Z-Machine, their adventure system compiled down to native 68000 machine language on the QL. Luckily, however, the Atari ST used the same 68000 processor as the QL, so the porting tasking wasn’t too daunting. The pictures proved to be the biggest challenge: they were done in low resolution so as to allow a palette of 16 colors, but the text really needed to be done in the ST’s 4-color medium-resolution mode so as to allow 80 columns. Magnetic Scrolls thus came up with a way to mix the two modes on the same screen, an impressive technical accomplishment in itself. The pictures could be unveiled by using the mouse to slide them down over the text like a window blind. Not only was it an ingenious way to maximize limited screen real estate, but in its day it was an absolutely stunning special effect, one that doubtless sold a fair few copies of The Pawn all by itself. The new engine also took advantage of the ST’s comparatively capacious memory to implement a number of other commonsense conveniences of the sort that Infocom really should have been adding to their own games for the bigger machines by this point, like the abilities to assign common commands to function keys and to recall the last command for editing.

But of course the Atari ST version was only the beginning. Many other platforms also awaited. The Macintosh and the Amiga, being yet more machines based on the 68000, were  fairly easy marks. The Amiga version did get one notable addition: a theme song by John Molloy, one half of the pioneering synth-pop duo Mainframe, whose own DS:3 sampler, built around an Apple II, was enjoying some popularity; three, for instance, had been employed as part of the Live Aid stage setup. The songs of Mainframe themselves were getting a fair amount of play in British clubland, making the acquisition of Molloy’s services something of a coup for Magnetic Scrolls. The Pawn‘s theme, featuring a surprisingly lifelike acoustic guitar amongst other sounds, became one of the first to demonstrate the potential of sampled, as opposed to synthesized, instruments for game music.

The Pawn

The other ports were, alas, more fraught propositions, entailing as they must artful degradation rather than enhancement. In what can only be described as a masterful technical achievement, Magnetic Scrolls came up with a way to emulate enough of the 68000 instruction set on other processors to run the game. Even more incredibly, they somehow made it run fast enough on the little 8-bit Z80 and 6502 to be acceptable. They hired another artist, Tristram Humphries, to duplicate as best he could each of Quilley’s pictures on a Commodore 64. These were then used in ports not only to the 64 but also to a number of other 8-bit platforms. In cases where it was just hopeless to produce graphics with anything like fidelity to Quilley’s originals, as on the Apple II and the Sinclair Spectrum, the graphics were left out entirely.

The leading lights of British adventure gaming assemble under the Rainbird banner. From left: Mike, Pete, Nick, and Margaret Austin of Level 9; Mike Clarke, Tony Rainbird, and Paula Byrne of Rainbird; Ken Gordon and Anita Sinclair of Magnetic Scrolls.

Rainbird and Magnetic Scrolls went public with their new partnership at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January of 1986; the choice of venues was a telling indicator of their hopes of challenging Infocom on their home turf. That April the finished Atari ST version of The Pawn was debuted in Britain in a big joint event featuring not only the principal players from Rainbird and Magnetic Scrolls but also the Austin family who ran Level 9, and whom Tony Rainbird had now also successfully courted for his new label. Tony and Anita even managed to convince Anita’s erstwhile mentor Clive Sinclair to drop in and lend some of his aura to the proceedings. The Pawn‘s big box that was unveiled that day included a glossy poster and, Tony being quite the fan of in-box novellas, A Tale of Kerovnia, a clever if superfluous stage-setting story written by Anita’s sister Georgina. The box also contained ciphered hints to be typed into the game itself for decryption. The Pawn may have been riddled with nonsensical puzzles, but at least players wouldn’t have to buy a hint book to get past them.

While the price of the game prompted shock — fully £20, £2 more than even the disk version of Elite — those gorgeous pictures sent even bigger waves through the British gaming community. Their importance to The Pawn‘s success can hardly be overstated. Whatever their value or ultimate lack thereof for the hardcore player, they gave the magazines visual pop to accompany coverage of the game. The Pawn made for a damn good cover; an Infocom game, not so much. In Computer and Video Games magazine, Keith Campbell, the most widely read adventure-game commentator in Britain, gave The Pawn its first big review. It was gushing: 10 for “Vocabulary,” 10 for “Atmosphere,” 10 for “Personal” (how’s that for an arbitrary scoring system?). He described the game as a well-nigh revolutionary product, “in most respects superior” to Infocom even if the graphics were discounted, destined to cause “the standard of software demanded by adventure players to skyrocket.” There was just something about The Pawn — and Anita Sinclair; we’ll get to that momentarily — that could turn even a hardened reviewer like Campbell to jelly. His review was such a coup that Rainbird shipped copies of that issue to North America along with the first copies of The Pawn to get a buzz going.

They needn’t have worried about it. The Pawn hit American shores like a hurricane. Reviewers there, as in Britain, just couldn’t seem to find enough superlatives with which to stamp it. It even did quite well in continental Europe, particularly the computing (and Atari ST) hotbed of West Germany. For that market Rainbird translated the novella, but left the text in the game alone; making the parser parse German was a task that no one at Magnetic Scrolls had the linguistic chops to manage. Undaunted, tens of thousands of Germans struggled valiantly with the oft-gnarly English text, laced as it was with slang and idiomatic usage. It was presumably all worth it for the pictures.

But graphics were just one of The Pawn‘s not-so-secret weapons, the other being the potent comeliness of Ms. Anita Sinclair. The British press, who had the most regular access to Anita and her charms, were the most smitten. One magazine admitted frankly that it would “grab any excuse to print a picture of Anita.” It’s hard to believe that national magazines with editorial staffs and all the rest actually published some of this stuff. Take this (please!) from Amtix: “The lovely Anita Sinclair came up to Ludlow especially to show me The Pawn. Well, I was really impressed… and the game was good too!” Keith Campbell, writer of that aforementioned glowing Pawn review, called his journalistic integrity into question and also shared much more than anyone really needed to know about his private fantasies when he put “Anita Sinclair in a brass bikini” on his year-end list of things he’d like to see in 1987. An even weirder Boris Vallejo-inspired fantasy life seemed to be lived by the writer who gave her the out-of-nowhere appellation of “ice maiden.”

That gem appeared in Sinclair User. And, indeed, it was that magazine that developed the most sustained obsession with all things Anita. A contest announcement there said they’d really wanted to gift the winner with “a fantastically beautiful and intelligent companion,” but, alas, “Anita Sinclair is already spoken for,” so readers would have to settle for a light gun instead. (Presumably she’d finally been forced to use the “I have a boyfriend” line on one of them.) In a year-end roundup Sinclair User‘s readers elected her “Most Attractive Programmer,” a category that mysteriously hadn’t existed the year before. (The many write-in voters who opted for “any female programmer” gave a perhaps even more disturbing glimpse of the state of the average reader’s love life.) This is not to say that the verdict was unanimous, mind you. For some time afterward debate raged over whether Anita really was All That. One letter writer weighed in on this pressing issue with particular force. “Anita Sinclair is about as attractive as a pig’s bottom!” he declared with a noble lack of equivocation. (One wonders what his girlfriend looked like.)

This photograph of Clive Sinclair and Anita Sinclair was used for a captioning contest by Sinclair User. “Juvenile sexist comments might be sniggered over in the office but won’t be printed and won’t win and that’s that,” they announced. Good to know they were fighting the good fight.

But my absolute favorite from this delightful little sub-genre is The Games Machine‘s review of Fish!, a later Magnetic Scrolls game. This — I kid you not — is the opening paragraph:

Anita Sinclair looks fab! I’ve always liked the lady but now that she has put on a little weight since giving up smoking she looks gorgeous. What a pity that on the day she took me to lunch (oh, do get on with it! — Ed.) she could barely walk due to some very painful blisters on her feet. She was also suffering from having a jolly good time at the Telecomsoft dinner the night before where the wine was free! Apart from discussing the PC show, other magazines, adventures in general, and her Audi Quatro, we did eventually get round to Magnetic Scrolls’s new game, Fish!.

As the extract above attests, Anita treated her little coterie of admirers with the bemused tolerance of the popular girl at school who deigns to let the lower social orders sit at her lunch table from time to time. She tactfully buffeted away questions like “Who would you most like to kiss under the mistletoe?” whilst gamely trying to focus her interviewers’ attentions back on the games in question. When some of her more sensitive interlocutors asked her feelings on all of the unwonted attention, she remained coy: “There is obviously interest in me because I’m female, but I don’t notice it very much. I think it could be an advantage.” Nor is there any sign that the other folks who worked at Magnetic Scrolls ever felt slighted by the attention lavished on Anita. To hear the magazines tell it, every Magnetic Scrolls game was practically a solo effort by Anita, even as in reality she drew none of the pictures, wrote very little of the text, and contributed to the designs only as a member of a larger team betwixt and between coding much of Magnetic Scrolls’s technical plumbing and of course running the company. The lack of outrage on the part of all parties at Magnetic Scrolls isn’t hard to explain: in a hugely competitive text-adventure market in which everyone was scrambling for a slice of a steadily shrinking pie, the attention Anita generated was precious, the best PR move Magnetic Scrolls didn’t have to actually make. Certainly their most obvious competitors in Britain, the three boffinish Austin brothers over at Level 9, didn’t have anything at their disposal to match it.

So, yes, there was a lot of smoke and mirrors behind the huge success of The Pawn, born of those pretty pictures and that pretty Anita and a media, heavily influenced by both, that was all too eager to see it as an Infocom-killer. In its way The Pawn is every bit as much a period piece as Starglider. Pointless parser permutations like the famous “USE THE TROWEL TO PLANT THE POT PLANT IN THE PLANT POT” aside, Magnetic Scrolls still had a long way to go to rise to Infocom’s level. A comparison of Leather Goddesses of Phobos with The Pawn doesn’t do the latter any favors. One design is air-tight, the other shambolic in all the worst ways. Magnetic Scrolls would get much, much better in their future games, but remains to this day slightly overrated in my opinion, benefiting just a bit too much from the awe so many of us felt back in the day when we saw those pictures for the first time. Much as their Infocom fixation might lead one to suspect otherwise, Magnetic Scrolls did innovate in their own right in some areas having nothing to do with graphics. Indeed, their later games sometimes verge on brilliance. But they always seem to disappoint almost as much as they delight, dogged by a frustrating inconsistency born, one suspects, largely from the lack of a testing regime to match Infocom’s and a willingness when under pressure to ship to let some things go — parser non sequiters, weird text glitches, underimplemented or underdescribed objects, puzzles that just don’t quite make sense — that Infocom wouldn’t.

Which is not to say that Magnetic Scrolls isn’t worthy of attention. Far from it. Their games are the most technically advanced and literate text adventures that the British games industry would ever manage. We’ll thus be looking at all of the Magnetic Scrolls games that followed The Pawn, beginning with the next two in my next article. Whatever else happens, I certainly won’t have to pan any of them quite as badly as I did The Pawn.

Before I leave you today, though, it’s worth thinking one more time about 1986, the year of the twin commercial triumphs of Leather Goddesses of Phobos and The Pawn. While no one could possibly have been aware of it at the time, it would turn out to mark the end of an era. Text adventures as a commercial proposition still had a few years to go; rest assured that some of the most interesting specimens of the species are still waiting to get their due in future articles. Yet the number of companies working in the field was dwindling, and the genre would never again manage even one, much less two games in any given year with the commercial prominence of Leather Goddesses and The Pawn. Far from taking the text adventure to new heights, as Magnetic Scrolls and Rainbird were confidently predicting, the new 16-bit machines and the games that ran on them would for better or for worse transcend it entirely. Like the contemporary players who remained loyal to the genre, we’ll just have to enjoy the gems of this twilight era while they last.

(Sources for this and the next article: Zzap! of July 1987 and December 1988; Crash of August 1988; ZX Computing of August 1986; Computer and Video Games of December 1985, April 1986, July 1986, May 1987, October 1987, and February 1988; Your Computer of January 1988; Amtix of February 1987 and March 1987; Atari User of June 1986; Questbusters of October 1987; Popular Computing Weekly of January 23 1986; Commodore User of December 1986; Sinclair User of January 1987, February 1987, April 1987, October 1987, February 1988, and August 1989; The Games Machine of December 1987 and November 1988. There are two excellent websites dedicated to Magnetic Scrolls: The Magnetic Scrolls Memorial and The Magnetic Scrolls Chronicles. Francesco Cordella also conducted an interview with Rob Steggles, writer for The Pawn and two of Magnetic Scrolls’s eventual six other text adventures, which is available on his website.

The Magnetic Scrolls Memorial hosts an interpreter that will run the Magnetic Scrolls games on many platforms along with all of the games in a form that is ready to run under it. This is certainly the most painless way to play them today. That said, I think these games are actually best experienced as originally presented via an Atari ST or Amiga emulator. In that spirit, I’ve prepared a download of The Pawn with disk images for both platforms and all the other goodies that came in the box for those of you who are hardcore like me.)

Comments
27 Responses

- iPadCary

May 21, 2015 at 2:01 pm

Ah, Magnetic Scrolls ….
For a couple of weeks ago, Jimmy, we’re getting deeper & deeper into the territory I’ve been waiting for ever since I started reading DA. Great writing!

- Brian Bagnall

May 21, 2015 at 3:00 pm

I just so happen to have a boxed copy of The Pawn for the Amiga sitting not six feet from me. The fact that the box hasn’t caved in after all these years like most of my other games is testament to the overall quality of the packaging. There’s even foam padding around the disk.

- Wade

May 22, 2015 at 9:54 am

I’ve said words to this effect before in this blog when The Pawn last cropped up, but that may have been the only time in my life when I looked at the screenshots printed in the magazine and thought, ‘I can’t believe what I’m seeing.’

It was a leap that struck me as supernaturally exciting, as opposed to other quite good or even great kinds of exciting that I felt both prior or since.

Didn’t play the game ’til years later and unfortunately I didn’t like it at all.

- Sniffnoy

May 22, 2015 at 12:15 pm

Sorry, just some proofreading. I think in “that the text-only adventure game she, Ken Gordon, and Hugh Steers been working on for it for over a year couldn’t hope to sell more than a dribble” the “been working on it” is supposed to be a “had been working on”. Threw me for a loop when I tried to read it the first time. Thanks!

- Jimmy Maher

May 22, 2015 at 12:23 pm

I think I’m the one who should be saying sorry and thank you. :) So, sorry and thank you!

- Pedro Timóteo

May 22, 2015 at 7:02 pm

Great as always. :)

Like you say, the quality of the ports is impressive, with all of them having (as far as I know) every single word of text as in the originals, and even having graphics on systems such as the C64 (which you mentioned), the Amstrad CPC (an especially interesting version due to it having a decent 80 column font, missing on the other 8 bits) and even the 8-bit Ataris, which were mostly dying by then, at least in the UK, I think. Mobygames has screenshots of most of them.

Another curiosity, this was, I think, the only Magnetic Scrolls game to have a cassette version (for the ZX Spectrum 128), without using any virtual memory whatsoever. Every other Scrolls game was only released on disk for the Spectrum +3 (and still without graphics). Curiously, the Spectrum +3 disk version of The Pawn *does* use virtual memory (it reads data from disk when going to a location for the first time), and, as far as I know, doesn’t have any extra features or text compared to the tape version…

- Jimmy Maher

May 22, 2015 at 8:05 pm

Yeah, all of the versions are actually running the same “story file,” just like Infocom games. Some commands like CONTRAST and LEFT and RIGHT (to set the margins) don’t give an error message on versions that don’t support them. They just don’t do anything because the hooks at the interpreter level are presumably just a NOP. I haven’t tested it, but I would guess that even the GRAPHICS command is present in those versions that don’t actually have graphics.

If you look at the size of the Magnetic game files, you’ll see that The Pawn is just over 100 K, with later games climbing steadily in size. Presumably Magnetic Scrolls was just able to squeeze The Pawn plus interpreter into 128 K. This just wasn’t going to happen for the later games.

- John Elliott

May 23, 2015 at 10:59 am

On the +3, using the disc drive through the built-in +3DOS means that various chunks of memory have to be set aside for sector buffers, disc parameter blocks and so on. So a 128 or +3 doing all its I/O through cassette will have more available memory than a +3 using the disc drive. If the 128k cassette version only just fitted into 128k, it’s quite possible that there wasn’t enough room for it to coexist with the memory used by +3DOS.

- Pedro Timóteo

May 23, 2015 at 1:42 pm

Thanks! I was curious about that. I wondered if the +3 had less available memory than the 128, but since it has almost perfect compatibility (even with the 128k games released before the +3 existed), I figured that that couldn’t be it. But, like you said (and I just learned), it *does* have less memory if it uses the disk drive. Interesting stuff!

From this we can also deduce that, after the +3, most 128k games (that didn’t use any kind of virtual memory or in-game disk acess — different from the usual tape-based multiloads) probably didn’t use all the available memory, even on tape, to make a +3 disk version (most of them being just the same game on disk, without any enhancements, and only loading from disk at the same places the tape version would) easier to create. Any idea if this was true?

- Ruber Eaglenest

May 24, 2015 at 9:55 am

I still believe that in England level 9 were unrivalled in quality. Their earlier games were topic fantasies and such, but they were really awesome fantasy games, being Red Moon my preferred one.

Since Knight Orc and their heavy NPC engine I think Scapeghost is their most important adventure in quality terms.

But I find that level 9 is under represented in the Digital Antiquarian writings, so I’m curious if you would play and review some of their better adventures.

And what people think about? Do you think I’m biased by youth preferences? Although nowadays I have not the time the desire to revisit all that production of the eighties, I think is better recline myself and ready it at the Antiquarian ;)

- Jimmy Maher

May 24, 2015 at 12:13 pm

I’d heard a lot about Level 9 and really wanted to like their games, but in my opinion they just haven’t aged very well. As many of you have doubtless noticed, I place a high premium on solvability, and most of the Level 9 games just don’t do too well by that metric. If I tried to write about each one individually, it would quickly devolve into just the same article full of the same complaints, over and over, and that wouldn’t be much fun for either writer or reader.

That said, I do have one more article in the offing that will talk most about Knight Orc — a weird and fascinating and wickedly hilarious game if one also beset by most of the typical Level 9 problems — and then wrap up the later games in pretty brief fashion. Afraid that will have to suffice for the Austins. Too many games, too little time and all that…

- Dehumanizer

May 24, 2015 at 3:07 pm

The problem with Level 9 games, I think, is that they were so proud of their compression routines that they went for the “over 200 locations” thing over and over. I haven’t played them all extensively, but this was still seen in their “mid-era” (e.g. the final games of the Time & Magik and Silicon Dreams trilogies).

The games in the KAOS era (from Knight Orc to their final game, Scapeghost) actually become smaller and more solvable, even though they’re divided in 3 parts each. They tended to mostly have puzzles about convincing other characters to do things for you, though.

- Jimmy Maher

May 24, 2015 at 4:25 pm

When I started this blog in earnest, I actually planned to do a game-by-game rundown of Level 9, only to find it just wasn’t worth it. Then when I started looking at the late games, I thought I’d at least write about each of them individually, as they seemed at first blush much more sophisticated as games and fictions. But, alas, same conclusion in the end.

The character of the games does change dramatically beginning with Knight Orc, but I’m not sure I’d call them more solvable myself. The parser and world model in the KAOS games are still frustratingly limited, meaning that puzzles need to be either simple or inscrutable, and the Austins continued to go for the latter too often. (Why, to take an example from Knight Orc, does putting a welcome mat on a thorny hedge suddenly allow passage?) And all of those dynamic characters running around, while technically impressive and fun in Knight Orc, also can be infuriating as they’re always mucking with everything. “Characters-on-rails” just became the Austins’ new gimmick to replace “200+ rooms.” The games are *trying* to do a lot of interesting new things — like eliminating the need to map — but in my opinion not really succeeding all that well at most of them.

- Ruber Eaglenest

May 26, 2015 at 9:44 am

I think nonetheless it would be very interesting to have at least three reviews of level9 games: one for the old ones, one for Knight Orc, one for Scapeghost. I mean, it would be interesting to read those criticism about why old level 9 games has not aged well (in retrospect, I can see only a handful games you reviewed here have aged well :), even hallmarks of Infocom).

But, being serious, I’m not begging for a review of all games, really, but I think the last efforts of level 9 with the KAOS engine are really interesting… you know, Knight Orc, like a MMO or MUD but for single player, later Lacelot, the same engine but oriented to more storytelling and less gamey, Scapeghost a ghost and murder story.

Again I’m not begging for three articles, maybe two of them, one for Knight Orc, and final covering the final era for level 9 and their final decline with little insight about their last games.

Whatever you decide it is important that you enjoy, as you said, the writing, and we the reading.

Apart from that, defending level 9 I must say that I love some of their older games, as I said, Red Moon and Price of Magik. I found those very evocative.

About the usual criticism about the +200 locations, I think it has converted in a gimmick, of the critics, to use that argument to underestimate the works. I love Snowball, and the use of the labyrinth of sixty-eight hundred is very clever, First you must understand the layout to go out of the hibernation chambers, and later comes to it searching for something. It is the same cleverness of praised labyrinths of modern era like the Photopía, or the one at Hunter in Darkness. But as I said, people say “gimmick” and don’t go deeper in the function of those massive build of locations and their use into the fiction and the puzzles.

- Jimmy Maher

May 26, 2015 at 12:14 pm

“In retrospect, I can see only a handful games you reviewed here have aged well :), even hallmarks of Infocom.”

Really? If that’s your opinion after playing the games, fair enough, but if that’s your takeaway after reading the articles I’m afraid I may have gone horribly wrong somewhere as a writer. :) They do require some adjustments for modern players — an acceptance of somewhat sparser text and implementation, a bit of learning by death, usually the need to make a map — but I think the majority of the Infocom canon, a few misfires aside, remain very playable and enjoyable today. Other old-school games that qualify: Pirate Adventure, The Count, Transylvania, Dragonworld, Amazon, Mindwheel, Borrowed Time, Oo-Topos, The Coveted Mirror, Guild of Thieves, Fish!.

I take a work of interactive fiction as an implicit contract between player and game, in which the latter says, “I’m quite possibly going to be quite tough, quite rigorous with you, but I’m going to play fair. The goal is for us to have fun together.” But most games of the old school violate this contract egregiously, seeming to have a goal of “beating” their player in a contest in which the game holds all the advantages. This makes me actually, palpably angry. Some other games, like the late games of Level 9, seem to do it just out of a lack of playtesting and public exposure prior to release beyond the authors’ own echo chamber, but the result is hardly less unforgivable. This is what makes me not so excited about playing and writing about Level 9 extensively for this blog. I prefer games that don’t abuse their power over me.

I realize there is another school of gamer that just kind of likes to wander around and tinker and enjoy the scenery, as it were, and they may be less put off by these sorts of design issues. But that’s just not my poor, goal-oriented self, and I can only call’em like I see’em personally.

- Pedro Timóteo

May 26, 2015 at 10:06 pm

I don’t want to speak for Ruber or anyone else, but, to me, while I enjoy and learn a lot from *all* of your posts (which made the Patreon more than worthwhile to me), the ones where you talk about something I actually remember from my youth are the ones that make me feel warm inside (being a very nostalgia-prone 40-year old Portuguese guy). :) These days I fully recognize Infocom’s superiority, but back in the 80s, with just a Spectrum and a tape drive (and no originals available to buy, even if I had the money for it, which I didn’t), adventure games meant Level 9, mostly (and The Hobbit and sequels, and a few Scott Adams / Brian Howarth games, and Rod Pike’s horror trilogy, and Redhawk and its sequel, and a few others). Conversely, I only played Infocom’s games as an adult. (*)

Please don’t get me wrong: do what you want to do, write about what you want, and we’ll enjoy it. Just don’t be surprised when some of your readers seem fascinated with (and would very much love to see you write extensively about) something that — with you not having nostalgia for it, and being able to make objective comparisons today between it and the competition — doesn’t seem so special to you. :)

(*) in fact, the first time I heard the name “Infocom” was at the end of the Your Sinclair review of the Pawn, which the reviewer described as “the first adventure that’ll give Speccy owners a hint of what it’s like to play an Infocom game”. But it would still be years before I had the chance to play one.

- Jimmy Maher

May 27, 2015 at 12:44 pm

This is a very good point. Context is *so* important, and I do try my best to situate the games I write about in their own mileau. Without context Ultima IV, for instance, is a primitive and punishing and slightly broken attempt at a CRPG. With it it’s one of the most important and inspiring computer gamers ever made. For games like those of Level 9 that don’t stand up so well today I do try to give them their historical due without getting *too* bogged down in game-by-game minutiae. Obviously this is a balancing act that will leave some readers wanting more — and others quite possibly much less. :)

- The Colour Of Heartache

May 30, 2015 at 7:42 pm

Long time reader first time comentator, and not actually much of an IF player.

But wouldn’t putting a welcome mat on a thorny hedge allow you to climb on it without worrying about the thorns? Perhaps not the most sensible solution – I doub’t a hedge could take a person’s weight – but the logic seems clear.

- Jimmy Maher

May 31, 2015 at 8:21 am

Welcome!

For the record, the welcome mat allows you to pass *through* the thorny hedge, not to climb it. But I must say that I just can’t picture how a welcome mat could “allow you to climb on it without worrying about the thorns” either, to the extent that I’m not really sure how to even reply to your comment. One could argue that it makes a certain thematic sense, and thus might work in a game based more on surrealism and wordplay, if the proper groundwork was laid to get the player into that frame of mind. But Knight Orc isn’t and doesn’t.

- The Colour Of Heartache

June 11, 2015 at 12:31 pm

Oh. If it allows you to pass through the hedge then yes, that makes no sense unless the game already runs on wordplay.

As for climbing over. If the mat was sufficently large I just meant that you could put the mat on top of the hedge, then place your hands on the mat and pull yourself up with the mat safely protecting your hands from the thorns.

In real life that’s impractical. Thorny hedges aren’t solid enough and most mats won’t be large enough to be useful. But in my opinion it’s action movie level of logic, not alice in wonderland level of logic.

- Martin

August 8, 2016 at 12:50 am

In the military (or at least the films of the military!) to get over the barbed wire fence, the front soldier leans on it taking the fence down and the other run over them. Maybe that’s what they were thinking of.

- Sniffnoy

May 25, 2015 at 5:32 pm

I can’t get the Pawn theme to play. I’m not sure what’s wrong with it. It just gets stuck at “buffering”.

- Lisa H.

May 25, 2015 at 7:13 pm

Same here.

- Jimmy Maher

May 25, 2015 at 7:32 pm

It seems the built-in WordPress audio player is a bit wonky. Why they’re still using Flash is beyond me. This HTML5 one should hopefully work better…

- Sniffnoy

May 26, 2015 at 10:05 pm

Thank you!

- Carl

June 5, 2015 at 1:03 am

Wow, Mainframe is a very cool band! Thanks so much for the link… now I have an amazing album of mid-80s synthpop from a fantastic band I had never heard of! Thanks Jimmy!

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